The pope’s promise of relief from suffering in purgatory was all the more inviting because it was available without the need to make the dangerous, expensive trek to the Holy Land that was required of other crusaders. But the primary motive of the men who answered the call to crusade was a worldly one. The lords of northern France—the Duke of Burgundy, the Count of Nevers, and the Count of Saint-Pol among them—valued the prospect of taking for themselves the wealth and property of Count Raymond and the other unruly aristocrats of southern France. The war on heresy was only a pretext, and, as we shall see, it often slipped from their minds.
“Crusade was a blunt instrument,” observes historian Malcolm Lambert. “Innocent was not the master of the spirits he had conjured up.”52
The first army to take the field in the Albigensian Crusade was commanded by a papal legate called Arnauld Amalric, abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Cîteaux, and his first objective was the walled city of Béziers, which supposedly sheltered a couple of hundred or so Cathars. When the town fell to the crusaders on the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene in 1209, according to a famous tale told by one medieval chronicler, the men under the abbot’s command sought a clarification of their orders. “Lord, what shall we do?” they asked. “We cannot distinguish the good from the wicked.” The warrior-monk, later raised by the pope to the rank of archbishop, is said to have pronounced a death sentence on all the residents of Béziers, piously echoing the words of Paul in his letter to Timothy. “Kill them all,” said the good abbot. “The Lord knows those who are his own.”53
At least seven thousand men, women, and children were murdered at Béziers—the abbot himself put the death toll at fifteen thousand in his triumphant report to the pope—and the cathedral was pulled down as a symbolic punishment because the local Catholics had failed to exterminate the Cathars among them on their own initiative. The massacre was intended to strike terror in the other cities and towns of Languedoc, and so it did. Indeed, the fact that the crusaders slaughtered the local populace so indiscriminately, killing Catholics and Catharists alike, reveals how little they cared about the announced goal of the Albigensian Crusade. Like so many other military adventures at so many other times and places, the reason for going to war offered by the pope was starkly at odds with the motives of the men who actually fought the war.
The emblematic example is Simon de Montfort (ca. 1165–1218), a minor noble whose family seat was located near Paris. On the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, which set out to liberate the Holy Land and ended up conquering the Christian city of Constantinople, de Montfort had supposedly refused to join his fellow crusaders in the slaughter of Christians. But his scruples did not prevent him from taking command of the Albigensian Crusade, and he was no less willing than Arnauld Amalric to use terror as a weapon of war. After the town of Bram fell to de Montfort, for example, he assembled one hundred of its defenders and ordered his soldiers to blind them and hack off their noses and upper lips. Only one victim was permitted to keep an eye so he could lead the others to the nearest town, where the ghastly procession of blind men would serve to warn against the consequences of taking up arms in self-defense.
As his reward for such brutality, de Montfort was granted the lands and titles of the nobles whom he had defeated in battle or terrorized into submission, including those of the defiant Count Raymond VI, the man whose role in the murder of the papal legate had set the crusade into motion. At the high water mark of his reign, de Montfort claimed to rule over a vast stretch of southern France as count of Toulouse, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, and duke of Narbonne, and he became, if only briefly, one of France’s wealthiest landowners. Remission of sin in the afterlife was perhaps less compelling to Simon de Montfort than the riches he managed to accumulate in the here and now, all because of his ruthlessness as a crusader against his fellow Christians.
Of course, the crusaders did not neglect their duty of murdering Cathars when they were able to single out a few of them from the rest of the population. At the town of Minerve, for example, some 140 perfecti were arrested, bound, and burned alive in the first of several such spectacles that ornamented the Albigensian Crusade. At Lavaur in 1211, de Montfort ordered that the knights who had defended the walled town be hanged from gibbets, and as many as four hundred Good Men were put to the flames in one of the greatest single atrocities of the crusade. Among the victims was the lord of Lavaur, who was hanged along with his knights, and his sister, who was punished for offering sanctuary to Cathar war refugees by being “thrown down a well and stoned to death.”54
The persecution of flesh-and-blood Cathars was never more than a sideshow in the Albigensian Crusade. “Out of the 37 places de Montfort is known to have besieged,” writes historian Sean Martin, “contemporary chroniclers record only three where Perfect were actually known to be.” What mattered more to the king of France was extending his royal sovereignty over the southern provinces, and the northern lords who actually went to war were intent on making themselves the owners and rulers of the counties they conquered. Also in play were the ambitions of Peter of Aragón, whose lands lay across the Pyrenees in what would later become the kingdom of Spain, and who tried to claim a slice of southern France, too. And when the defenders of Languedoc took to the field of battle, they were seeking to preserve their own autonomy against the invading armies from the north rather than protecting the Cathars’ right to practice their faith.55
Surely the realpolitik that was the motive of popes, kings, and counts was not wholly lost on the ordinary men and women of Languedoc, if only because the crusaders took so little care to distinguish Cathars from Catholics in conducting their war on heresy. The invaders engaged in scorched-earth warfare, setting fire to houses and standing crops, poisoning the wells and cutting down the orchards, blackening the skies with smoke from smoldering ruins. Men taken in battle were “mutilated, blinded, dragged at the heels of horses, used for target practice.” The same atrocities were practiced by local gentry who were fighting to protect their own prerogatives. The Albigensian Crusade was, after all, a dirty little war among contesting lords rather than the holy war it was advertised to be, and God was wholly absent from the field of the battle.56
The Albigensian Crusade sputtered on for a couple of decades. Simon de Montfort did not live to see the so-called Peace of Paris, the treaty by which the fighting in southern France was ended in 1229. He was killed during the siege of Toulouse in 1218 when a shot from a catapult inside the walled city struck his helmet. To the defenders of Toulouse, de Montfort was a foreign invader and conqueror, and they took pleasure in the fact that the battery was operated by a detachment of women—“dames and girls and married women”—who had taken the place of the fallen soldiers. But the death of de Montfort did not spare the city from conquest and carnage, and the medieval chroniclers who composed the Chanson de la croisade al-bigeoise seemed to realize that no one could claim victory.57 As the nameless poet who composed the second half of the chronicle put it:
In the field of Montoulieu was planted a garden which every day sprouted and put forth shoots. It was sown with lilies, but the white and red which budded and flowered were of flesh and blood, of weapons and of the brains which were spilled there. Thence went spirits and souls, sinners and redeemed, to people hell and paradise anew.58
The king of France was pleased with the outcome of the Albigensian Crusade. His sovereignty over southern France was assured, and his family was to inherit the ancestral lands of the rebellious Count Raymond. But the Peace of Paris did not bring an end to the war against the Cathars. Ironically and fatefully, the Albigensian Crusade failed in its stated goal: the Cathars may have been burned alive by the hundreds, but they had not been exterminated. Some of them had gone into hiding; others had scattered across Europe from Italy to Bohemia to Poland, where they established new churches and communities or joined existing Cathar settlements in remote villages and mountain valleys. The “monstrous brood,” as Pope Innocent III had phrased it, wa
s still alive and at large.
Only a couple of hundred perfecti remained in Languedoc, where they found refuge in the high-walled fortress at Montségur in the Pyrenees. Well supplied with food and water, and protected by the steep slopes of the thousand-foot-high peak on which the fortress stood, they remained beyond the reach of the crusaders for decades. Not until 1244 was Montségur finally besieged and conquered by a Catholic army, but only after a couple of Good Men had managed to escape with the storied Cathar treasure, probably consisting of a few holy books and perhaps what was left of the coins that had been tithed by faithful believers. The rest of the surviving perfecti, including the Cathar bishops of Toulouse and Razès, were marched under guard to an open field and burned alive. The place is still known as the prat dels crematz—“the field of those who were burned.”
The Church never lost sight of the original cause of war. But a new and different campaign would now be undertaken against the Cathars—and, in a larger sense, against every expression of religious liberty and social diversity—and a wholly new weapon would be deployed. Preaching, even by sainted luminaries like Bernard, Dominic, and Francis, had failed to win the hearts and minds of errant Christians. The crusade against Catharism had sent hundreds to the stake in southern France, but thousands more continued to practice their faith in secret all over Europe. Thus did Pope Innocent III conclude that “ceaseless persecution continued to perpetuity” was the only way to achieve a final solution to the problem of heresy.59
Pope Innocent resolved to recruit, arm, and deploy an army whose sole mission would be to search out, punish, and, if possible, exterminate men and women whose beliefs and practices were seen as heretical by the Church. No longer, however, would he rely on kings and princes to do his bidding. The new inquisitorial army and its elaborate supply chain fell under a vast papal bureaucracy whose formal title was the Holy Office of Inquisition into Heretical Depravity. Ironically, its frontline troops would be supplied by the mendicant (“begging”) orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, whose friars had vowed to live the vita apostolica (“apostolic life”) and whose original mission had been to preach rather than persecute. Starting in the thirteenth century, and continuing for another six hundred years, it came to be known simply as the Inquisition.
THE HAMMER OF HERETICS
Innocent may boast of the two most signal triumphs over sense and humanity, the establishment of transubstantiation and the origin of the inquisition.
EDWARD GIBBON,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The very first inquisitor, according to the apologists of the Inquisition, was God himself. When God interrogates Adam in the Garden of Eden, seeking to extract the truth about the famous case of the forbidden fruit, he is setting the example that was followed by the flesh-and-blood inquisitors who entered history in the thirteenth century. Indeed, the Sicilian inquisitor Luis de Páramo, claimed a lineage that included Moses, King David, John the Baptist, and even Jesus of Nazareth, “in whose precepts and conduct he finds abundant authority for the tribunal.”1
But the Inquisition must be seen as, among other things, an audacious work of the human imagination. The lawyer-popes who presided over the Roman Catholic church during the Middle Ages were the first to dream of creating an institution wholly dedicated to the eradication of heresy throughout Christendom, including a corps of inquisitors drawn from the ranks of the monastic orders; an army of bailiffs, clerks, constables, notaries, and scriveners; a network of spies and informers that every good Christian was expected to join and serve; a labyrinth of dungeons, torture chambers, courts, prisons, and places of execution; and a vast archive in which the transcripts of investigation, trial, and judgment would be preserved for the convenience of future inquisitors.
Whether the papal dream came true in all of its Kafkaesque detail is still debated by revisionist historians, but we can glimpse the vision of the Inquisition that danced in the heads of sleeping popes by consulting the papal bulls, episcopal canons, and inquisitor’s manuals that prescribed the standard operating procedures for flesh-and-blood inquisitors for more than six hundred years. It was first known by the fearful title of Holy Office of Inquisition into Heretical Depravity (Inquisitio haereticae Pravitatis sanctum Officium), a phrase that betrays the fear and loathing that the first inquisitors felt for their victims. The same institution, however, has carried other official designations over the centuries, including one that captures the near-delusional arrogance of the Church in undertaking the inquisitorial project: Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. Even today the same office exists under a rather more modest moniker, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The Inquisition did not spring fully formed from the heads that wore the papal crown, nor was the Holy Office of Inquisition the first or only apparatus for the persecution of heresy in the long history of Christianity. The early Christian church was continually bedeviled by the problem of sorting out which beliefs and practices were orthodox and which were heretical, and the unfortunates who found themselves on the wrong side of the line had always been the victims of arrest, torture, imprisonment, and execution. In that sense, the Inquisition was not an act of pure invention; rather, it was assembled and fine-tuned after centuries of tinkering, “moulded step by step out of the materials which lay nearest at hand.”2
The history of the Inquisition is classically divided into three periods. The medieval Inquisition began in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade in the mid–thirteenth century and continued to operate in France, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe for another couple of hundred years, persecuting first the Cathars and Waldensians and then miscellaneous other victims, including the Knights Templar, renegade Franciscan priests, men accused of alchemy and sorcery, and women accused of witchcraft. The so-called Roman Inquisition, a phenomenon of the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century, directed most of its efforts against Protestants and various humanists and freethinkers in Italy. And the Spanish Inquisition, the last-surviving and most famous branch operation of the Inquisition, was created in 1478 to search out Jewish converts to Christianity whose conversions were suspected of being insincere, and remained in formal existence until 1834.
Yet these convenient markers fail to convey the vastness and strangeness of the Inquisition, which took on many other guises and configurations over the centuries and across the globe. So grandiose were the ambitions of the Inquisition that inquisitors were authorized and sometimes even appointed for places where the pope and the Church enjoyed little or no authority, including such distant and exotic locales as Abyssinia, Armenia, Egypt, Georgia, Greece, Nubia, Russia, Syria, Tartary, Tunis, and Wallachia. The papal legate in Jerusalem was instructed to put the Inquisition into operation in the Holy Land in 1290, but the so-called Syrian Inquisition was stillborn when the crusaders were evicted from their little kingdom by a Muslim army in the following year. By 1500, the Spanish Inquisition was burning heretics in Mexico and South America, and the Portuguese version of the Inquisition was doing the same in the colony of Goa on the Indian subcontinent. “An inquisitor,” notes Henry Charles Lea, “seems to have been regarded as a necessary portion of the missionary outfit.”3
Nor did the Vatican invariably serve as the command center of the Inquisition. Again, the Spanish Inquisition is only the most famous example of the commandeering of the machinery of persecution by a secular government. After Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain petitioned the pope for an Inquisition of their own, the king of Portugal decided that he needed one, too. The king of France, when he sought to replenish the royal treasury by looting the Knights Templar, called on the Inquisition to sanctify the destruction of the old crusading order on trumped-up charges of homosexuality and heresy. Even when a municipal or provincial branch of the Inquisition remained under the nominal authority of the pope, it might take on its own style and set its own priorities. An inquisitor in the thriving commercial center of Venice, for example,
conducted an auction at which the goods seized from twenty-two convicted heretics were sold and the money added to his own coffers.
Yet it is also true that the men who invented and operated the Inquisition always aspired toward uniformity, continuity, and ubiquity. Nothing else captures the inner meaning of the Inquisition quite like the manuals and handbooks composed by the earliest inquisitors and circulated among those who followed in their footsteps. From the lawyer-popes, to the princes of the Church, to the hooded friar-inquisitor at work in the torture chamber, all of them sought to impose a Mad Hatter’s vision of law and order on the bloody enterprise of persecution. Thus, for example, the inquisitors were supplied with lists of questions to ask a suspect under interrogation, scripts to recite when consigning an accused man or woman to prison or to burning at the stake, forms to fill out when requesting the return of an escaped prisoner, and even a writ that could be copied out when an accused heretic was found to be not guilty—a form that was seldom, if ever, actually used.
Precisely because the inquisitors were guided in their work by the canons, decrees, formbooks, and handbooks that were preserved and consulted over the centuries, the Inquisition achieved a remarkable degree of standardization. To be sure, some of the practices and procedures varied from place to place and changed over time. The burning of Cathars in Languedoc by the medieval Inquisition, for example, was a much cruder affair than the great spectacle offered in the public square of Madrid when the Spanish Inquisition mounted an auto-da-fé. Then, too, the very first inquisitors faced open resistance from their outraged victims, a phenomenon that would diminish and then disappear as the Inquisition grew in size, scope, and sheer shelf-confidence. Even so, the workings of the Inquisition did not fundamentally change over its six-hundred-year history. The Inquisition was a machine with interchangeable parts, just as its inventors had intended, and its victims in every venue and every age suffered a similar and terrible fate.
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Page 7