The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual
A History of Terror in the Name of God
Jonathan Kirsch
FOR
Ann Benjamin Kirsch,
Jennifer Rachel Kirsch,
and Adam, Remy and Charles Ezra Kirsch,
AND
Heather Kirsch
and Joshua, Jennifer and Hazel Kirsch
Remember us in life,
and inscribe us in the Book of Life.
I was torn in pieces by the devils that rack the brains of unhappy men. Do God’s eyes not reach to the prisons of the Inquisition?
CARCEL, goldsmith of Seville,
a victim of the Spanish Inquisition
Table of Contents
Epigraph
1 The Pietà and the Pear
2 The Cathar Kiss
3 The Hammer of Heretics
Photographic Insert
4 Crime and Punishment
5 The Inquisitor’s Manual
6 Purity of Blood
7 The Eternal Inquisitor
8 American Inquisition
Acknowledgments
Notes
References Consulted
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE PIETÀ AND THE PEAR
Christendom seemed to have grown delirious and Satan might well smile at the tribute to his power in the endless smoke of the holocaust which bore witness to the triumph of the Almighty.
HENRY CHARLES LEA,
A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages
Let us imagine a traveler arriving in the city of Rome when the Renaissance was in full flower, a pilgrim or a merchant or a diplomat. He seeks out the chapel near St. Peter’s Basilica where the Pietà of Michelangelo is now on display, and he spends a few moments admiring the sublime depiction of the body of the slain Jesus in the lap of his grieving mother. Pietà means “pity,” and the scene is rendered with exquisite tenderness and profound compassion. Like Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the nearby Sistine Chapel—the finger of a very fleshy God touching the finger of an equally fleshy Adam—the Pietà celebrates the beauty, dignity, and grace of the human body and the most exalted emotions of the human heart.
At the very same moment, however, and not far away, hooded men in dungeons lit only by torches—henchmen of what would come to be called the Roman and Universal Inquisition—are applying instruments of torture to the naked bodies of men and women whose only crime is to have entertained some thought that the Church regarded as heretical. The victims’ cries, faint and distant, reach the ears of the traveler who gazes in prayerful silence at the Pietà, or so we might permit ourselves to imagine. Yet the torturers are wholly without pity, and they work in the sure conviction that the odor of the charred flesh of heretics is “delectable to the Holy Trinity and the Virgin.”1
The scene allows us to see the Renaissance and the Inquisition as a pair of opposites, the highest aspirations of human civilization coexisting with its darkest and most destructive impulses at the same time and place. Tragically, the genius that Michelangelo applied to the celebration of the human body is matched by the ingenuity of the grand inquisitors in their crusade to degrade and destroy their fellow human beings. Consider, for example, the contrivance known simply and even charmingly as La Pera— the Pear.
Fashioned out of bronze, richly and fancifully decorated, and cunningly engineered to open and close by the operation of an iron key-and-screw device, the Pear was the handiwork of a skilled artist and craftsman with a vivid imagination and a certain measure of wit. The first examples of the Pear date back to roughly the same era as the Pietà. But unlike the scene depicted in Michelangelo’s statuary, the diabolical faces and demonic figures that embellish La Pera are the stuff of nightmares, and the object itself was designed as an instrument of torture to afflict the bodies of accused heretics who refused to confess, whether because they were wholly innocent of the accusation or because they were true believers in their own forbidden faith.
Exactly how the Pear was used to insult and injure its victims is a gruesome topic that we will be compelled to examine in greater detail a bit later. For now, let La Pera serve as a symbol of the willingness, even the eagerness of one human being to inflict pain on a fellow human being. None of us should be surprised, of course, that otherwise ordinary men and women have always been capable of heart-shaking and heartbreaking atrocities, but the fact that a man with the soul of an artist and the hands of a craftsman should apply his gifts to the creation of something as fiendish as the Pear reveals something dire and disturbing about how we use the gifts we have inherited from our distant art- and toolmaking ancestors.
An even more sinister irony is at work here. What the men in black did to their victims with such tools was not a crime. To the contrary, when they tortured and killed countless thousands of innocent men, women, and children, they were acting in obedience to—and, quite literally, with the blessing of—the most exalted guardians of law and order. Significantly, the official seal of the Inquisition carried the Latin phrase MISERICORDIA ET JUSTITIA (“Mercy and Justice”), and all the atrocities of the friar-inquisitors were similarly veiled in pieties and legalisms.2
Here begins something new in history, an international network of secret police and secret courts in the service of “Throne and Altar,” a bureaucracy whose vast archives amounted to the medieval version of a database, and an army of inquisitors whose sworn duty was to search out anyone and everyone whom a pope or a king regarded as an enemy, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence and sometimes on no evidence at all except the betrayals and confessions that could be extracted under torture and threat of death. The worst excesses of the agents of the Inquisition—priests and monks, scribes and notaries, attorneys and accountants, torturers and executioners—were excused as the pardonable sins of soldiers engaged in war against a treacherous and deadly enemy.
The strange story of the Inquisition begins in the distant past, but it cannot be safely contained in history books. The inquisitorial apparatus that was first invented in the Middle Ages remained in operation for the next six hundred years, and it has never been wholly dismantled. As we shall see, an unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors who set up the rack and the pyre in southern France in the early thirteenth century to the torturers and executioners of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the mid–twentieth century. Nor does the thread stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag; it can be traced through the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
Another instrument of torture, far less ornate but no less effective than La Pera, provides the best evidence that the inquisitor’s tools are still in use today. Among the first and favorite forms of torture used by medieval inquisitors was the so-called ordeal by water, that is, pouring water down a victim’s throat to simulate the sensation of drowning and thereby extract a confession. As far as the Inquisition was concerned, the ordeal by water was an ideal method of interrogation: it required only a bucket of water and a funnel, it left no telltale marks and no bloody mess to clean up, and yet it produced such agony and terror that the victim would readily tell the torturer whatever he wanted to hear. That’s why the ordeal by water was favored not only by the medieval inquisitors but also by their successors in the Gestapo and the Soviet secret police. And the same form of torture is still in use today, although we are asked by its modern users and defenders to call it “waterboarding.”
Nowadays, we tend to regard the Inqui
sition as an object of parody. Indeed, when the Inquisition is recalled at all, it is in the guise of the chorus line of step-kicking Dominicans in Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part 1 or the Monty Python sketches in which the setup line—“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”—is the occasion for sly but bloodless buffoonery. For that reason alone, a glance into the real face of the Inquisition is not merely surprising but shocking.
The first stirrings of the Inquisition can be traced back to a specific time and place in history. Faced with competition from the abundance of new ideas that appeared in western Europe in the aftermath of the Crusades, so rich and so strange, the Roman Catholic church resolved to impose a theological monopoly by fiat and force of arms. The thoroughly human tendency toward diversity in religious belief and practice had troubled Christianity since the first century of the common era—“For there must also be factions among you,” observed Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians—but the so-called lawyer-popes of the Middle Ages resolved to root out heresy once and for all by devising and deploying the new and terrible contraption that came to be known as the Inquisition.3
The first target of the Inquisition was a community of dissident Christians known as the Cathars, who were hunted down, tortured, and burned by the thousands in the thirteenth century. To the modern eye, the Cathars appear to be exotic but inoffensive; the Church, by contrast, slandered them as plague-bearing vermin and servants of the Devil.* The Cathars were soon exterminated, but the Inquisition never ran out of victims. Indeed, as we shall see, the inquisitors were perfectly willing to imagine or invent new heresies where none existed to feed the fires of the auto-da-fé. Thus the Inquisition continued to function in fits and starts over the next six centuries—not only in Europe but also in the New World and a few far-flung outposts in Asia and Africa—and its last victim was not put to death until 1826.
Strictly speaking, a vestige of the Roman Inquisition still exists within the bureaucracy of the Church, although it has been renamed several times over the centuries and is now known as the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Although the ordeal by water is no longer used at the Vatican, the essential function of the Sacred Congregation is the same as it was among its more fearful predecessors: the detection and elimination of what the Church regards as false belief. The cardinal who until recently directed its affairs was elevated to the papal throne as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, but he was hardly the first or only inquisitor who went on to serve as the Supreme Pontiff.
The long history of the Inquisition can be conveniently divided into three phases. The medieval Inquisition, which functioned across western Europe for a couple of hundred years starting in the early thirteenth century, finished off the Cathars and then expanded its scope of operations to include a miscellaneous assortment of accused heretics, ranging from radical Franciscan priests to women accused of witchcraft. The Spanish Inquisition was franchised by the pope in 1478 to detect and punish Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity (known as conversos) who were suspected of secretly clinging to their former faiths, and remained in formal existence through 1834. And the Roman Inquisition, which aspired to universal jurisdiction but operated mostly in Italy, was created in 1542 as the papal weapon of choice in the crusade against the Protestant Reformation as well as the freshening winds of secularism and scientific inquiry that accompanied the Renaissance.
Some figures and episodes in the history of the Inquisition have a special claim on our imaginations. Joan of Arc is surely the most famous victim of the medieval Inquisition, for example, and Galileo was among the last victims of the Roman Inquisition. But the doomed grandeur of imperial Spain has attracted the most attention in both scholarship and arts and letters, which may explain why we are tempted to think of the Spanish Inquisition as the Inquisition. From Goya’s heartrending drawings of inquisitorial victims to Dostoyevsky’s dreamy account of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov—“I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us,” says the imaginary Grand Inquisitor to Jesus Christ, whose second coming at Seville is treated as the ultimate act of heresy—the Inquisition has been made to serve as a symbol of the arrogance, brutality, cynicism, and hypocrisy of an authoritarian regime that drapes itself in the veils of both law and piety.4
The reach and sweep of the Inquisition have discouraged historians from treating it as a single institution. That’s why an overview of the medieval, Spanish, and Roman Inquisitions in a single volume like this one is rare. The fact remains, however, that the inquisitors of every nationality and in every age were deputized under the same body of canon law, inflicted the same tortures and punishments on their victims, and devoted themselves to the same terrible mission—the arrest, torture, and execution of any man, woman, or child whom they regarded as a heretic, a term sufficiently elastic to reach any victim who happened to excite their anxieties or greed. Thus, for example, the manuals and handbooks composed in the Middle Ages to instruct the first inquisitors in their day-to-day work were still being consulted by the last inquisitors six centuries later.
Then, too, the Inquisition seems almost quaint when compared to the industrial-scale carnage of the twentieth century. Far more ink has been expended in chronicling the events that took place in Germany and Russia between 1917 and 1945 than in telling the story of the Inquisition, a saga that spans a period of six hundred years. Yet, ironically, the moral and cultural DNA of the grand inquisitors can be readily detected in Hitler and Stalin and their various accomplices and collaborators, and the inner workings of the Inquisition help us understand the goals and methods of the Great Terror and the Holocaust. The similarities are so striking that when the Jewish historian Cecil Roth published The Spanish Inquisition in 1937, he felt obliged to warn his readers that the book was a work of history and not merely a satire on current events.
As we unpack the inquisitorial toolkit, we will find a set of interlocking ideas, values, and techniques that link all phases of the Inquisition into one great engine of persecution. Moreover, and crucially, we will see how the crimes of the first inquisitors came to be repeated in the twentieth century and even in our own benighted age.
“Fanatic zeal, arbitrary cruelty, and insatiable cupidity rivaled each other in building up a system unspeakably atrocious,” writes Henry Charles Lea (1825–1909) in summing up the verdict of history on the Inquisition, “It was a standing mockery of justice—perhaps the most iniquitous that the arbitrary cruelty of man has ever devised.”5
Henry Charles Lea is to the Inquisition what Edward Gibbon is to the Roman Empire, a self-invented historian who was also a gifted phrasemaker and relentless polemicist. The scion of a Quaker publishing family from Philadelphia, Lea set himself to work on a definitive study of the Inquisition after a breakdown confined him to his home and library. More than a century after Lea wrote a three-volume history of the medieval Inquisition and a four-volume history of the Spanish Inquisition, his vast body of work remains the starting point for any conversation about the meaning and effect of the Inquisition. Today, even as the history of the Inquisition is being revised by a new generation of scholars, Lea is still invoked to remind us why and how the Inquisition came to be regarded as an ineradicable symbol of the crimes that are committed when absolute power works its corruptions.
Revisionist historians, for example, have engaged in lively debate over how many men and women were actually tortured and burned alive by the Inquisition. Even though the precise body count remains undetermined, the hard evidence for the suffering of its victims was created and preserved by the Inquisition itself. We have the manuals, treatises, ledgers, and transcripts in which the inquisitors and their minions recorded every detail of their daily labors. We can read for ourselves the questions they asked, the punishments (or as the Inquisition preferred to call them, the “penances”) that were prescribed for convicted heretics, and even the precise formulas to be spoken aloud by an inquisitor in Rome or Toulouse, Cologne or Madrid, when sending a condemned man or
woman to prison or to the stake.
“The accused are not to be condemned according to ordinary laws, as in other crimes,” explains Bernard Gui (ca. 1261–1331), author of one of the most influential and enduring of the inquisitor’s manuals, “but according to the private laws or privileges conceded to the inquisitors by the Holy See, for there is much that is peculiar to the Inquisition.”6
It reveals something crucial about the inquisitor’s cast of mind that the Inquisition maintained such meticulous and even boastful records. Every word uttered during interrogation, torture, and trial, every gasp and cry of the victim, were dutifully transcribed by a notary. Bookkeepers toted up the income from confiscations and fines as well as the expenditures for ropes, straw, and wood with which to burn those from whom the treasure had been taken. Since the inquisitors were utterly convinced that they were doing God’s work, they collected and preserved the smoking-gun evidence of their own brutality and greed with unmistakable pride as well as an obsessive attention to detail.
The whole point of the Inquisition was to achieve a critical mass of terror by making examples of the men and women who dared to think for themselves, and thereby frightening the rest of the populace into abject compliance. Interrogation, torture, and trial were conducted in strict secrecy, and the inquisitors emerged into daylight only to sentence and punish the victims at the great public spectacle known as an auto-da-fé. But the whispered rumors about what went on in the cells and dungeons of the Inquisition—and the private fears of those whose loved ones had been seized, shackled, and taken away—amounted to a powerful weapon in the war on heresy. “When the Inquisition once laid hands upon a man, it never released its hold,” writes Lea. “The Inquisition had a long arm, a sleepless memory, and we can well understand the mysterious terror inspired by the secrecy of its operations and its almost supernatural vigilance.”7
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