Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  In his work Inquisition and Medieval Society, historian James B. Givens primarily focuses on the social/psychological consequences of the Inquisition in the Languedoc after the Albigensian Crusade. There is little said about the Knights Templar until toward the end of the work, but it is so significant to our understanding of the process of the Inquisition and so material to the psychological impact on the people that it is included here. Professor Givens writes that the inquisitors “investigative techniques allowed them to create their own tailor-made truth. Through their interrogation procedures (including torture) the inquisitors could make concrete the ideas, fears and fantasies that resided only in their own minds. In a sense they could make these phantasms objectively real.”222 He cites two cases. First, the persecution of lepers based on the wholly phantastic notion that they intended to poison wells and streams all over France: calling this “one of the darkest episodes in early-fourteenth-century history.” Second, the most famous case – the destruction of the Knights Templar and the “way in which inquisitional techniques could be used to bend truth to fit the needs of authority.”223

  Under the use of torture, first by the king’s royal agents and then by the Dominican General Inquisitor of France, who was also an employee of the king as his personal confessor, the Knights “confessed” to monstrous untruths, including denial of the church and its sacraments, worship of demons, homosexual practices. Some of them later denied these confessions, but, in the eyes of the inquisitors, that denial made them “relapsed heretics” and as a consequence, they were burned at the stake.

  The psychological implications are serious. Given writes,

  The inquisitors had perfected techniques by which the very fabric of reality itself could be altered. By the mid-thirteenth century the creation of various fantasies and their projection onto certain out-groups, such as the widespread belief that Jews indulged in ritual murder, had become an integral feature of Western European culture. The inquisitors had devised methods of using power and coercion to give such fantasies a legally validated and socially accepted reality.224

  It could be argued that there was less “social acceptance” of the ideas than there was rampant intimidation, terrorization and brainwashing, which combined to bend even the fair-minded into compliance. During this time there was nowhere to go that would effectively ensure escape from the Inquisition.

  Projection of the fears and fantasies were placed upon the persons rejected and or despised by the church/state elite, and through the application of torture these persons were made to admit to charges formulated by the fantasy and then required to “suffer the terrible consequences of being guilty of behavior that existed only in the imaginings of their persecutors.”225 In fact, the inquisitors wrote the script, made the accused play out the roles, and led them straight to their death.

  Givens concludes that

  This capacity to bend the very fabric of reality and to force acceptance of that new shape was a radically new development in the political history of medieval Europe. With the inquisitors of medieval Languedoc, we are squarely on the road that will lead to some of the more reprehensible episodes of European history, including the persecution of Jews and Muslims in Spain and the great witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.226

  It must always be remembered that the purpose of the Papal Inquisition was repression. Repressive tactics were carried out against all those perceived as having belief systems (Cathars, Waldenses, Knights Templar, Gnostics, women) differing from the Church of Rome or were part of ethnic groups, minorities or out-groups that were targeted through either racism, sexual discrimination or outright jealousy, envy or greed (Jews and Muslims), or through fear and need to protect their negative fantasies (women, homosexuals). In targeting people belonging to such a wide variety of groups for so many differing reasons, the Inquisition and its parent organization, the Roman Papacy, first encouraged and then mandated intolerance for any human diversity as an integral part of their shame-based repressions.

  Professor Givens reiterates,

  Inquisitional methods were designed to root out dangerous (to the church) ideological tendencies; they were intended to eradicate opposition, not to activate and mobilize support … (they were) designed to break existing social relations among men and women … to work on individuals … the inquisitors incapacitated individuals by cutting them out of the social networks in which they were imbedded. By processing people through their penitential system, they could alter this conduct.227

  The Inquisition finally achieved its goals through marginalizing large groups of people until there were no groups anymore – only isolated individuals who were powerless by themselves. Society then was based entirely on family ties and group cohesiveness. Elaborate systems of alliances were formed through business ties and marriages. Everyone initially belonged somewhere. There is some evidence that in marginalizing men, stripping them of the social fabric into which they were born, contributed to the increasing violence in the cities. Ostracized from their villages, without wives, children or parents, they became the ready recruits for secular military, further destabilizing the continent.

  Marginalizing women initially took longer, because of their innate ties with children and with other women, but it eventually would lead to the madness called the “witch hunts.” There can be little doubt, however, that this was a conscious process: first for the Church of Rome through the Inquisition and secondly for the secular rulers who perceived it as useful for their own purposes.

  Givens, citing R.I. Moore, writes,

  The successful stigmatization of individuals as social outcasts was an integral aspect of the struggle for power and influence among those who sought to lodge themselves in the structures of the new governing organizations that took shape from the twelfth century on. In the new court of Europe, accusations of sodomy and witchcraft were freely traded among contestants for power. Clerics on the make also endeavored to exclude Jews, whose cultural attainments in the twelfth century were equal to, if not superior to those of Christians.228

  Lea states plainly, “As the twelfth century drew to a close, the Church was approaching a crisis in its career.”229 Precisely because of contact made through the crusades with Jewish and Arab literature, an intellectual awakening took place, as seen in Occitania. It accelerated the rise in freedom of thought among people. And, this freedom of thought terrified the Church of Rome because it led to challenges to its authority. To counteract this unwelcome movement, the Church created the new crime of heresy, believed to be hiding in the minds of the people. “When the existence of hidden crime is suspected there are three stages in the process of its suppression – the discovery of the criminal, the proof of his guilt, and finally his punishment.”230

  It was challenging to church authorities at first to uncover and then to prove guilt. In the early years, bishops relied on gossip to identify culprits. With little or no evidence and without confessions of guilt, there was little hope of conviction. Official torture was not yet practiced, but the ecclesiastics relied on something called “the Ordeal,” This was a practice using hot irons and hot pincers on the naked body of the accused in hopes of producing confession. The ordeal is to be differentiated from torture, but the churchmen never explained the differences. St. Bernard approved of its use–the same man who helped found the Templars. In 1157, the Council of Reims (France) “prescribed it as a rule in all cases of heresy.”231 The Second Crusade had begun nine years before. Lea gives the example of a woman accused of being a Cathar who was first left to die of hunger in prison, and when that did not work, she was burned with hot irons and finally burned entirely at the stake.231

  In 1212, the Council of Latern “formally prohibited all ecclesiastics from taking part in the administration of ordeals of any kind.”232 But the ecclesiastical courts had much more power than the feudal or secular courts. They required that their lawyers (clerics also) study Roman law, after the mid twelfth century. The Episcopal judge, ca
lled the Official or Ordinary, was a doctor of laws, both civil and canon, and formed the first of the modern legal professions.233 In these courts those “who refused to swear an oath through superstition (or belief) were condemned and punished as heretics ipso facto. Obstinate heretics, refusing to abjure (confess) and return to the Church with due penance, and those who after abjuration relapsed (went back to their previous traditions or beliefs), were to be abandoned to the secular arm for fitting punishment.”234

  The Council of Narbonne in 1227 “imperatively commanded all bishops to institute in every parish testes synodales who should investigate heresy and other offenses and report them to the Episcopal officials.”235 While the intent was clear, the mechanism for wholesale efficient persecution and killing wasn’t. Most of the accused, region by region, knew one another and had pledged secrecy which made it difficult to penetrate, obtaining admissions of guilt. Because there was rarely evidence of overt criminal behavior, the process continually bogged down.

  It is said repeatedly that the ruling classes of Europe were in accord with the Inquisition. But, that may be less true in its heart than on its face. For instance, the nobility of Southern France initially protected Cathars particularly because some were members themselves. But when the church enticed the king of a divided France to declare civil war on his Southern brethren, killing the lords and confiscating their property with the full blessings of the Church, conditions changed, sending a powerful message to other rulers throughout the continent, as the church increased pressure in order to achieve its objectives. In addition, early on, there were numerous public uprisings against the Inquisition that many historians seem not to recognize, leaving the impression that the people being affected were of one accord with regard to this process. So, the Church had to increase pressure in order to achieve its goals.

  The first new step was the Pope’s creation of two mendicant orders: the Dominican and the Franciscan. These orders would answer only to Papal authority and not to either local or regional bishops. They were to preside over the courts of the Inquisition, separate and distinct from the existing ecclesiastical courts. Lea states that they were “wholly free from the local jealousies and enmities which might tend to the prejudice of the innocent, or local favoritism which might connive at the escape of the guilty.”236 These new men, foreigners to the local people, prided themselves on their education, their vow of poverty, their rejection of worldly pleasure. And they were devoted only to the Papacy so that “they made the Inquisition a powerful instrument to extend the influence of Rome and destroy what little independence was left to the local churches.”237 The second factor Lea attributes to the success of the Inquisition was secular legislation against heresy. Sporadically, laws were adopted and then abandoned in Milan, Germany, France, Florence and elsewhere. There is good reason to believe that without the Inquisition there was not enough public sentiment to enforce them, and they fell into disuse by popular demand.

  But that exercise of local autonomy was put to an end by Frederick II. Remembering that it was now the right of the Papacy to crown emperors, Frederick needed Pope Honorius III for his own coronation in 1220. When charges of heresy were voiced against him Frederick turned the tables and enacted a brutal, pitiless series of laws between 1220 and 1239, based on the Church’s own Lateran Council canon law of 1212. A summary is as follows:

  –Those who were merely suspected of heresy were required to purge themselves at command of the Church, under penalty of being deprived of civil rights and placed imperial ban.

  –If they remained in this condition for one year, they were condemned as heretics.

  –Heretics of all sects were outlawed.

  –When condemned as such by the Church they were delivered to the secular arm to be burned.

  –If through fear, they recanted (i.e. renounced their previous beliefs) they were put in prison for life to perform penance.

  –If they relapsed, showing that their conversion had been fictitious, they were put to death by burning.

  –All property of the person so accused was confiscated and heirs disinherited.

  –Children of the accused, to the second generation, were ineligible to hold any position of government or offices of dignity, unless they betrayed their parents or some other heretic.

  –Anyone (defender, aid, believer, lawyer) who assisted a heretic was banished forever; their property confiscated, and their descendents subjected to penalties identical to those of heretics.

  –Those who defended them were treated as they were.

  –The houses of heretics and their receivers were to be destroyed and never rebuilt.

  –Although evidence given in court by a heretic was not acceptable, they may testify against another claiming they were heretics.

  As for those in charge of secular courts, who are now no more than rubber stamps, they did the dirty work of the Inquisition:

  –All rulers or magistrates, present or future, were required to swear to exterminate all whom the church designated as heretics, under pain of forfeiture of office.

  –Lands of any temporal lord who neglected, for a year after summons by the church, to clear them (the estates) of heresy, were exposed to the occupancy of any Catholics who, after getting rid of the accused, could then take over the estate.238

  In 1232 when the Papal Inquisition formally began, Frederick finally placed all of the machinery of the state at the command of the inquisitors, with the state paying for the officials. After the church finished their condemnation, the state was required to do the burning. Pope Honorius sent the coronation edict to the University of Bologna:

  To be read and taught as a part of practical law. It was consequently embodied in the authoritative compilation of feudal customs, and its most stringent enactments were incorporated in the Civil Code. The whole series of edits was subsequently promulgated by successive Popes in repeated bulls, commanding all states and cities to inscribe these laws irrevocably in their local statute-books. It became the duty of the inquisitors to see that this was done, to swear all magistrates and officials to enforce them, and to compel their obedience by free use of excommunication.239

  The geographical area thus covered extended from Sicily to the North Sea. Finally, these edicts, now secular law, were incorporated into the Corpus Juris as part of canon law, and may yet be there.

  In a precursor to the Spanish Inquisition, which was not to be formalized for another 200 years, Don Jayme I of Aragon in 1226 prohibited all accused from entering his dominions for fear of migrations from the Cathar persecution in Languedoc on the other side of the mountains. Two years later, he prohibited distribution of the Bible, either Old or New Testaments, translated into the vernacular from Latin. This is the first of many such controversies resulting in the translations being burned by the bishops. With the exception of the Basque people of Northern Spain (thought to be direct descendants of Old Europeans and who retained their matriarchal traditions) and the Scandinavians of the far northern peninsula who had come to accept Christianity only recently and still maintained much of their original cultural beliefs intact, the “state was rendered completely subservient to the Church at the great task of exterminating heresy … and enforcing of this legislation was the peculiar privilege of the inquisitors, whose ceaseless vigilance and unlimited powers gave full assurance that it would be relentlessly carried into effect.”240

  After the death of Frederick in 1250, the Inquisition was strengthened in Italy. In 1252 Pope Innocent IV issued his famous Ad extirpanda, which established “systematic persecution as an integral part of the social edifice in every city and every state.”241 This is summarized as: All rulers were ordered in public assembly to put heretics to the ban as though they were sorcerers (This is a new charge). Anyone finding a heretic could seize them and take possession of their goods. Every public official, within three days of election, was to appoint (with nominations of bishops and mendicant orders) twelve good Catholics with two notaries and two or more
servitors whose sole business was to arrest heretics, seize their goods and deliver them to the bishops or vicars. The wages and expenses were to be paid by the state, evidence was receivable without oaths, and no testimony was good against the testimony of any three of them. Their term of office was six months (renewable) and they were entitled to one- third of the proceeds of all fines and confiscations inflicted on accused heretics. They were exempt of public duties, and nothing was to interfere with their mandate. The local lord/ruler would send his assessor or knight to assist them and every inhabitant was obliged to aid them under heavy penalty for refusing. Rather than sit in one central location, the Inquisitors were directed to travel throughout their regions, proactively seeking those to accuse. As they entered a new territory, the local ruler sent a deputy to accompany them. This deputy summoned three men of good repute under oath to reveal any heretics of their knowledge, or the property of such, or any persons holding meetings in private, or differing in life or manners from Catholics.

  The state was now bound to arrest all those who were being accused, imprison them, deliver them and execute them within fifteen days from the time judgment was pronounced against them. Additionally, the local ruler (the state) was required when requested to inflict torture on those who would not confess or betray all of their acquaintance. Nor did the community at large go unchallenged by inquisitors, and there were additional penalties for refusal to cooperate or for noncompliance. If there were resistance to arrest, the community was liable for enormous monetary fines, if it did not betray and hand over the accused.

  The local ruler was to have four lists of all defamed or banned. These lists were to be read in public three times a year. One copy was to be given to the bishop, one to Dominicans, and another to Franciscans. Within ten days, the local authority was to destroy the houses of the accused, and within three months exact fines from the condemned, throwing in prison those who could not pay. The proceeds of the fines, commutations (bribes) and confiscations, were divided into three parts: one to the city, one to those concerned in the business, such as the secular enforcers, and one to the bishop and inquisitors to continue the persecutions.242 These three major events, the coronation of Frederick II, the church council of Narbonne and after the Albigensian crusade, the Treaty of Paris, formalized the church/state persecution of anyone in Europe who was not prepared to be a believer according to the doctrines of the Church of Rome. “How completely the papacy regarded the Inquisition as an instrumentality for furthering its schemes of self-aggrandizements is seen, when, on the outbreak of the Great Schism, inquisitors were required to take a formal feudal oath of fidelity to the pope appointing him and his successors.”243