Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  Torture and Confessions

  Because some disbelievers had been trained to conceal their real beliefs and others were just unschooled, people who were no match for the highly skilled inquisitors, the “confession” became central to the entire justification of the Inquisition, both to the inquisitors themselves and to their ability to promote their office and its duties to the general public. Lea says, “confession of heresy thus became a matter of vital importance, and no effort was deemed too great, no means too repulsive, to secure it. This became the center of the inquisitional process, and it is deserving of detailed consideration, not only because it formed the basis of procedure in the Holy Office but also because of the vast and deplorable influence which it exercised for five centuries on the whole judicial system of continental Europe.”262

  The inquisitors utilized endless methods of interrogation, always with the intent of confession. They used threats of death, threats against family or friends, used spies in prison and used fatigue, starvation and disorientation of the accused to alter normal consciousness and effect confessions to their suggestions of crimes committed. In the event that interrogation failed and no confession was forthcoming, nothing useful for arresting important locals, then the inquisitors proceeded to the next step: torture.

  Since the accused were already held in prison, it was a simple process to have them transferred to the place of torture. The mildest form of torture was the torture of delay for those who refused to confess. They were sent to their cells to wait in the solitary darkness where weeks became months and months lengthened into years. Because the accused had no civil rights, neither family nor attorney were permitted to intercede, on penalty of being accused themselves. Records have come to light detailing the delay of three, five, ten or even twenty years between the first appearance of the accused in court and the final conviction. Meanwhile, the persons confined were existing on a diet of only bread and water, for which they or family members had to pay!

  The next level of torture was severe imprisonment: “durus career et arcta vita,” which means chains and starvation. Lea says that the inquisitors considered starvation the most efficient means of bringing confessions from the unwilling.263 With the exception of the ancient Visigoths, Europe had been free of the judicial use of physical torture until the Inquisition reintroduced it in the 1200’s. At first the church prohibited the inquisitors from participating, once again giving that job to the secular employees. But in 1256, Pope Alexander IV authorized “inquisitors to absolve one another and mutually grant dispensations for “irregularities.”264 Irregularities were those acts which put blood on the hands of the churchmen and rendered them unfit to perform sacred duties, until purified. This decree removed perhaps the last impediment for the use of torture for both the accused and witnesses by the inquisitors themselves.

  While documents preserved by the Holy Office say little about torture, the secular records have much documentation on public reaction and abhorrence. In fact, inquisitors’ records state that confessions were free and spontaneous, without pressure of force and not from torture. Confessions under torture had to be reconfirmed by the accused in court. There was also no mention of public flagellation, but it was so general a feature of penance and punishment that it is frequently taken for granted in prescribing pilgrimages and attendance at church where the penitent were whipped outside the church doors every Sunday.265 As yet, the secular courts did not resort to torture, so references to it are to those methods used by the Inquisition.

  With regard to the handbooks written for the inquisitors, the Women’s Encyclopedia is more specific: “Torture was called ‘the question.’ The handbooks recommended light torturing at first and gave as a for instance the woman of Constance, who confessed to raising a hailstorm after she “had first been exposed to the very gentlest questions, being suspended hardly clear of the floor by her thumbs.”266

  Other methods of torture included

  The Rack: The accused was strapped onto the rack which was then raised or elongated to stretch the entire body until limbs become broken or disjointed.

  Thumbscrew and bootscrew

  Whips: Different kinds were used for flagellation and scourging.

  Hot pincers used for twisting off pieces of human flesh.

  Ropes are wound around the arms and legs until blood spurted from under the nails.

  Hoist or Strappedo: A pulley was used to raise the person into the air by arms bound behind their back, then jerking up and down until shoulders were dislocated and neck whip-lashed.

  Water torture: Gallons of water were forced through a funnel inserted into the throat, then the torturers paddled the victim’s extended belly with sticks.

  Boiling fat: The feet or hands were covered with boiling fat and then forced to roast over a fire.

  The extent of sadism was dependent entirely on the desire of the inquisitor, as he sat nearby, next to a notary who wrote down the details. The inquisitor offered suggestions to the victim as to what might be confessed in order to have the torture stop. Technically, according to the handbooks, torture was only supposed to be used once, but in the event the confession was not sufficient, the accused could be brought back, not for a “second” round of torture but for a “continuation” of torture. Those who died as a direct result of the torture were said to have been “strangled by the Devil,” and so it was actually written in the records but was not indicated as a death statistic by neither the Inquisition nor by the state. Once again, there is no way to know how many thousands died as a result of physical torture or because of the torture of being imprisoned in chains. The records are silent. The wholesale confiscations were another form of torture-by-misery. As Lea says,

  It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the evil which they entailed upon all classes in the business of daily life. All safeguards were withdrawn from every transaction. No creditor or purchaser could be sure of the orthodoxy of him with whom he was dealing; and even more than the principle that ownership was forfeited as soon as heresy had been committed by the living, the practice of proceeding against the memory of the dead after an interval virtually unlimited, rendered it impossible for any man to feel secure in the possession of property, whether it descended in his family for generations, or had been acquired within an ordinary lifetime.267

  For the women and children completely dependent on the family property, life became true misery: They were left destitute, without assistance and unable to help their own loved ones. Orphans and increased prostitution were the result across the continent of Europe.

  In addition to confiscation of property from the dead, there was also prosecution of the dead, and upon conviction, their bones were exhumed and burnt at the auto de fee. On this subject the venerable Henry Lea becomes highly critical, writing that prosecution of the dead “was a mockery in which virtually defense was impossible.”268 As an example Lea cites a noble man of Florence, a consul of the city, who was accused of heresy on his deathbed in 1250. Sixty-three years later, in 1313, a new inquisitor in Florence successfully brought a sentence against his memory, and as a result four of his sons and seven grandchildren were disinherited and subjected to the prohibitions against children of heretics to hold any public office. For them, though no other charges were brought, there was no recourse.269 By contrast, English law was severe in its punishment of felony, which the crime of heresy was deemed to be, but an English felon had to be convicted in his lifetime; otherwise, his death before conviction prevented confiscation.270

  Lea then makes the larger point that the processes of the Inquisition were an impediment to the advancement of commercial opportunities, through their interference with the conduct of everyday business:

  It will be evident how much distrust must have been thrown upon every bargain, and every sale in the commonest transaction of life – the blighting influence of this upon the development of commerce and industry can be readily perceived, coming as it did at the time when the commercial and industria
l movement of Europe was beginning to usher in the dawn of modern culture. It was not merely the spiritual striving of the 13th century that was repressed by the Inquisition; the progress of material improvement was seriously retarded. It was this, among other incidents of persecution, which arrested the promising civilization of the south of France (Occitania) and transferred to England and the Netherlands, where the Inquisition was comparatively unknown, the predominance in commerce and industry which brought freedom and wealth and power and progress in its train.271

  Seeing what was happening on the continent, the Italian commonwealths, merchant city states much closer to Rome, quickly tried to enact laws against confiscation, or sought to retain some control. Florence enacted real estate laws against usurpation of power by Rome and to protect transactions. Venice took all the profits from confiscation but paid the inquisitors, ensuring local control. Naples paid to maintain prisoners, paid inquisitors and their servants’ salaries but were reimbursed by taxes on iron, tar and salt. And in France, Alfonse de Poitiers offered to give the inquisitors a large castle in which they could increase their prison population if they promised to remove themselves from his region, freeing him from the responsibility of funding their lavish lifestyles.

  It was recognized by Lea and others that the policy of confiscation, the resulting wealth transfer from the private sector to the Church of Rome, was at the very foundation of the Inquisition:

  It was this which supplied the fuel to keep up the fires of zeal, and when it was lacking the business of defending the faith languished lamentably. When Catharism disappeared under the brilliant aggressiveness of Bernard Gui, the culminating point of the Inquisition was passed, and thenceforth it steadily declined, although there were still occasional confiscated estates over which king, prelate and noble quarreled for some years to come.272

  While that may have been partially true for France, particularly in the former Occitania, confiscation on a massive scale was yet to begin in either Germany or Spain. And when, in 1369, the Inquisition moved into Germany as a permanent institution, the houses of orthodox and inoffensive Beghards and Beguines were confiscated in order to provide residences for the inquisitors and prisons for their courts, while cities were urged to participate in the spoils of confiscation in order to foster complicity and counteract the unpopular measures.

  Portugal at this time was a poorer country, and the Inquisition saw little of worth there yet. About one hundred years later, during the age of exploration when Portuguese navigators were successful locating treasures in the New World, wealth poured in and so did the inquisitors. Lea concludes his writing on the issue of confiscation stating, “By confiscation the heretics were forced to furnish the means for their own destruction. Avarice joined hands with fanaticism, and between them they supplied motive power for hundreds of years of fierce, unremitting, unrelenting persecution.”273

  The Death Penalty – Burned at the Stake

  When the inquisitor Bernard Gui became pope he is quoted as saying, “The object of the Inquisition is the destruction of heresy. Heresy cannot be destroyed unless heretics are destroyed. Heretics cannot be destroyed unless their defenders and fautors are destroyed, and this is affected in two ways, viz, when they are converted to the true Catholic faith or when, on being abandoned to the secular arm, they are corporally burned.”274 Thomas Aquinas wrote that it was self-evident that the secular power could not escape the duty of putting the heretic to death. Moreover, “the laws of all the states of Europe prescribed concremation (burning alive) as the appropriate penalty for heresy and even the free commonwealth of Italy recognized the Inquisition as a judge whose sentences were to be blindly executed.”275

  Eventually, what began as the policy of the Church of Rome and was then transformed into secular criminal law also became incorporated into the educational system. So that “the continuous teachings of the Church led its best men to regard no act as more self-evidently just than the burning of the heretic, and no heresy less defensible than the demand for toleration … the fact is, the Church not only defined the guilt and forced its punishment, but created the crime itself.”276

  Recounting hundreds of years of Inquisition does not even begin to tell the story of its legacy nor of the impact on Western civilization. Mindful of this Lea concludes,

  Of all the curses which the Inquisition brought in its train this, perhaps is greater part of Europe, the inquisitional process, as developed for the destruction of heresy, became the customary method of dealing with all who were under accusation, that the accused was treated as one having no rights, whose guilt was assumed in advance, and from whom confession was to be exhorted by guile or force. Even witnesses were treated in the same fashion … It would be impossible to compute the amount of misery and wrong, inflicted on the defenseless up to present century (1800’s) which may be traced to the arbitrary and unrestricted methods introduced by the Inquisition and adopted by jurists who fashioned the criminal justice system of the Continent (of Europe).277

  These burnings added a new slang word to the vocabulary of the modern age. In France where the stakes proliferated, bundles of sticks were gathered and placed at the bottom to be lit when the condemned person had been securely tied in place. In the earlier days of the European Inquisition many men, including clerics, who had been convicted of sodomy were given the death penalty, and it specified burning at the stake. The French word for the bundles of sticks used to build the fires is fagot or faggot. The word eventually became a pejorative slang term which meant a male homosexual.

  Perhaps one may believe this is all that could possibly be said about the phenomenon, but it is not. At this point, the Inquisition has only progressed to about half its length.

  JOAN OF ARC

  She was called “Joan of the Bow, La Pucelle, The Maid.”278 Her name is Jeanne d’Arc, or Joan of Arc, and she is a shining tribute to WomanSpirit past and present, although she only lived to be nineteen years old and died being burned alive at the stake. Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) wrote his Joan of Arc in 1896, under a pseudonym. He had spent twelve years of his later years researching her life, visiting France and viewing the official records of the trials and rehabilitation, which are still in the French archives in their entirety. It is from his work that some of her story is recalled.

  Joan was born in approximately 1412, to a peasant family in the small, ancient village of Domreny, France. She was one of five children, three brothers and two girls, Joan and her sister Catherine. Her mother Isabel Romee kept her own mother’s family name (which was customary for people of the Old Religion and their matrilineal heritage) even though she married Jacques d’Arc. As was sometimes the case during these years, Isabel Romee practiced the old religion but also attended the Catholic Church on Sundays. Joan herself used both family names interchangeably, as was also customary in those days, where ancient traditions went undisturbed for centuries, despite the advent of plagues, wars and occupations by the inquisitors.

  The Hundred Years War between France and England had begun in 1337, and the Black Death plague had ravaged the cities since 1351. But the ancient village of Domremy was so remote, so poor, surviving through agricultural hard work and not much else, that it went unaffected through both these calamities.

  Remarkably, the children of the village had their own spiritual tradition, which was reportedly carried on from generation to generation for centuries. Outside the village on a hill, there was an oak grove, beyond that a forest, beyond that a majestic beech tree which grew near a spring, which produced fresh water all year. Around this grand old tree, the village children held hands, forming a circle, and then danced joyously around the tree for hours, taking time out only to drink at the refreshing spring. Joan was among the dancers from her earliest years. The children also made wreaths of flowers and hung them around the tree to decorate it and honor the fairy spirits who lived there. The children and these spirits interacted easily: The children decorated, sang and danced to please t
he spirits; the spirits helped the children, mourned when a child died, placing an “immortal” memorial of black flowers in that child’s place beneath the tree; warning of death, some said, giving two warnings to older people so that they could make amends before being called to the beyond.279 Joan grew up in this mixed tradition, in her mother’s tradition, in the ancient ways of the people of the land, those peasants and their intimate connections with the earth, the spirits, the sacred trees and the eternal mother, but Joan would also consider herself a part of the church religion as taught by the local priest in his sermons and prayers.

  Young Joan was known early in her life for remarkable skills of leadership, first among the children and then among the villagers. She grew into a prophetess, being able to foretell events very accurately. When asked, she said that the voices of the tree spirits communicated with her, and then later she said that she spoke with angels daily.280 Although still a child, Joan would have been accepted by her people as both a prophetess from the old religion and as a mystic from the traditions of several hundred years emanating from women of the Roman Church such as Hildegard of Bingen. It is unlikely that the people of the village knew the names of the Christian mystical women or of their widespread acceptance by the church itself, other than to know it was not prohibited practice.

  As childhood retreated, Joan matured into a young woman. At fourteen it would have been customary for her to be married. But everyone in the village agreed that no one was a suitable match for her, and she continued to be able to live with her mother, content with her life of service to family, friends and neighbors as a maid, an unmarried woman. Then at the age of sixteen years, Joan’s visions or voices instructed her to go to the Commandant of Vaucouleurs and demand an escort of soldiers. She told the astonished commandant that she had orders from God to march forth, help the uncrowned king of France and set the crown upon his head. Because to the military man, Joan was just a peasant child with neither training, nor horsemanship, he sent her away numerous times. Months later, he acquiesced, giving her his own sword and the military assistance she had requested. She did indeed go to the king, receive his permission; then she traveled to the University of Poitiers, where she was required to prove to the churchmen that she was sent by God and not Satan, and she was questioned by them for nearly three weeks. They finally agreed, and at seventeen years old, Joan d’Arc was made Commander in Chief with royalty, veteran generals as subordinates, and in command of the first army of knights and soldiers she had ever seen in her entire life.281 She dressed in a white tunic, wearing pants and armor, riding a spirited war horse as though she had been born to battle. Suddenly she was no longer the slender young peasant girl, but the personification of the ancient warrior maiden, the warrior prophetess/priestess, the French Goddess Epona, so sacred to the hearts of the indigenous Celtic Gauls of this ancient land.