The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  One might be tempted to believe that a man who had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience out of a zealous desire to live in imitation of Christ would be temperamentally unsuited for the role of persecutor, but the opposite turned out to be true. Indeed, the religious zeal that attracted men to the mendicant orders could be readily turned against the victims of the Inquisition once the friar-inquisitors accepted the idea that those dragged into the torture chamber and burned at the stake were “heretical filth” rather than mortal human beings. So fierce and so faithful were the Dominicans in doing the dirty work of the Inquisition that they came to be described with a fearful pun—Domini canes, “the hounds of God.”

  The friar-inquisitors brought with them certain skills and training that were especially useful in dealing with dissident Christians. The friars’ command of church dogma, for example, came in handy when they were called upon to confront the occasional Cathar perfectus who had been caught up along with the less sophisticated victims of the Inquisition. “How can the fire that burns the houses of the poor and holy be created by God?” a Cathar is shown to taunt his interrogator in the pages of one inquisitorial tract. “How can the God who sends suffering to good men be good himself?” To hear the inquisitors tell it, the investigation of an accused heretic was sometimes the occasion for disputation rather than interrogation, and a working knowledge of Catholic theology was as important as the interrogator’s skill with the techniques of torture.20

  The friars were regarded as suitable candidates for inquisitors for more practical reasons as well. They were available to serve full-time in that role and, if called upon, for the rest of their lives. Because they had taken a vow of poverty, they were thought to be untempted by the bribes that might be offered by wealthy defendants or their families. Perhaps even more important, as far as the masters of the Inquisition were concerned, the Dominicans and Franciscans were deferential to authority, a crucial quality in light of the fact that the proceedings of the Inquisition were to be conducted in the strictest secrecy. All of them had taken vows of obedience when they joined their orders, and a papal bull of 1260 formally redirected their loyalty from their own Dominican and Franciscan superiors to the pope himself. The intimacy of the relationship between the pope and “the Preaching Friars Inquisitors,” as they came to be known, is captured in a canon in which they are addressed as “our cherished and faithful children in Christ.”21

  Among the friars who were available for the work of the Inquisition, “wise and mature men capable of asserting their authority” were preferred. University graduates and especially men with doctorates in law and theology were especially attractive candidates. A church council at Vienna in 1311 set the minimum age of an inquisitor at forty, although the ever-growing manpower demands of the Inquisition eventually forced the Church to accept men as young as thirty. Bernard Gui, perhaps the single most famous medieval inquisitor and the author of the inquisitor’s handbook titled Practica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (Conduct of the inquisition into heretical depravity), offered his own idealized job description.22

  The inquisitor, Gui insisted, should be “diligent and fervent in his zeal for the truth of religion, for the salvation of souls, and for the extirpation of heresy,” but he should never allow himself “to be inflamed with the fury of wrath and indignation.” He is cautioned against slothful habits, “for sloth destroys the vigor of action.” He must walk the middle path, “persisting through danger to death” and yet “neither precipitating peril by audacity nor shrinking from it through timidity.” He ought to resist “the prayers and blandishments of those who seek to influence him,” and yet he must also avoid “hardness of heart.” To hear Gui tell it, the inquisitor was a model of priestly piety and judicial restraint.23 “Let truth and mercy, which should never leave the heart of a judge, shine forth from his countenance,” wrote Gui, “that his decisions may be free from all suspicion of covetousness or cruelty.”24

  Few of Bernard Gui’s fellow inquisitors, however, actually manifested the fine qualities advertised in his inquisitor’s manual. Some were careerists who saw the Inquisition as a way of moving upward in the hierarchy of the Church. (By the sixteenth century, two inquisitors had risen in succession to the rank of Supreme Pontiff as Pope Paul IV and Pope Pius V.) Others, as we have noted, were speculators and profiteers who figured out how to use the inquisitorial system to enrich themselves at the expense of their victims. And the Inquisition surely sheltered more than a few outright sadists for whom the inquisitorial torture chamber was a theater of sick pleasure.

  The opportunities for self-aggrandizement were simply too numerous and too inviting for many of the inquisitors to resist. An inquisitor in Padua found it less profitable to persecute accused heretics than to sell them “clandestine absolutions,” a practice that resulted in what one historian calls “frauds against the Church and the Inquisition itself,” since it robbed the Inquisition of both the victims and their money.25 Other inquisitors yielded to the temptation to use their power and position against their personal enemies, real or imagined. “Old grudges would be satisfied in safety,” writes Lea, who cites the observation of the English jurist Sir John Fortescue, an eyewitness to the operation of the Inquisition in Paris in the fifteenth century: “It placed every man’s life or limb at the mercy of any enemy who could suborn two unknown witnesses to swear against him.”26

  Paradoxically, some of the most zealous inquisitors were themselves former members of the persecuted faiths who turned their insider’s knowledge against their former coreligionists with special fury. The two “self-appointed inquisitors” who had joined ranks with Conrad of Marburg were said to be former heretics. Indeed, a Cathar perfectus who was willing to confess and convert represented a valuable prize for the Inquisition, both as an example to encourage the others and, more concretely, as a willing source of detailed information about unrepentant heretics.

  The sobriquet of the Dominican inquisitor known as Robert le Bougre indicates that he had been a Cathar before he joined the Inquisition—le Bougre (the Bulgar), as we have already seen, refers to the Bulgarian origins of Catharism. He was so effective at extracting confessions that he was said to possess the power to “infatuate” his victims, which helps explain why he was able to send so many to the stake. On a single occasion in 1239, he presided over the burning of 183 Cathars in a single gruesome spectacle that a contemporary chronicler praised as “a holocaust, very great and pleasing to God.” Robert le Bougre is described by Edward Burman as “a homicidal maniac,” but he earned a more admiring nickname from his fellow inquisitors: Malleus Haereticorum, the Hammer of Heretics.27

  The first inquisitors were simply recruited from the ranks and dispatched in pairs to the towns and villages that were the fighting front in the war on heresy. Over the centuries, however, the Inquisition grew into an elaborate and highly formal bureaucracy, with the friar-inquisitors on the bottom rung of a chain of command that reached all the way to a kind of chief executive officer who theoretically answered only to the pope himself. Torquemada, for example, was designated as the grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century. A couple of centuries later, the Inquisition operated under the nominal authority of the Congregation of the Holy Office at the Vatican, and the Congregation’s members were cardinals officially described as “Inquisitors-General throughout the Christian commonwealth against heretical pravity.”28

  The real work of the Inquisition, of course, was always conducted by those humble friars who wore the hooded mantle of the mendicant orders rather than a cardinal’s red hat. And the greatest number of them were probably not sadists or homicidal maniacs; rather, they have been described by Malcolm Lambert as nothing more offensive than “zealous, hard-working bureaucrats” who, not unlike the clerks who devised the railroad schedules for Auschwitz, showed up every day and simply did their jobs. No matter where they stood in the hierarchy, all the inquisitors prided themselves on their hard work in ri
dding Christendom of “heretical filth.” That’s why Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the inquisitor-general who persecuted Galileo for believing that the earth revolves around the sun, earned the very same honorific that had been bestowed four hundred years earlier on Robert le Bougre—the cardinal, too, is hailed as “the Hammer of Heretics” in the official records of the Inquisition.29

  The grim work of the medieval Inquisition always began with a solemn religious ceremony. “When you arrive in a town,” Pope Gregory IX formally instructed the friar-inquisitors in 1231, “you will summon the prelates, clergy and people, and you will preach a solemn sermon.” Only then were the inquisitors to “begin your enquiry into the beliefs of heretics and suspects with diligent care.” Anyone who, after investigation and interrogation by the inquisitors, is “recognized as guilty or suspected of heresy,” Gregory continued, “must promise to obey the orders of the Church absolutely.” But if they do not, “you should proceed against them, following the statutes that we have recently promulgated against the heretics.”30

  The inquisitor’s opening sermon was the occasion for a public display of the terrible power of the Inquisition. To encourage attendance, indulgences were offered to those faithful Christians who assembled to hear the sermon. But the whole populace of a town or village—every male over the age of fourteen and every female over the age of twelve—was required to show up, and anyone who secretly entertained a belief that was forbidden by the Church was expected to come forward and confess to the crime of heresy. One’s absence from the so-called sermo generalis, which might be readily noticed in a small town or village, was essentially a public admission of guilt.

  Clearly, the inquisitor hoped and perhaps even expected that his preachments would move the crowds to acts of spontaneous public confession and thus spare him the work of searching out heretics. Some men and women, in fact, were so inspired—or so terrorized—that they confessed their heretical beliefs then and there, if only because an early and uncoerced confession might persuade the inquisitors to impose only a mild punishment or none at all. But the Inquisition never relied on sermons to induce spontaneous confessions. Indeed, the mission of the Inquisition was to flush out even the most secretive and disciplined dissidents, to break their will to resist, and to turn them into witnesses against their fellow believers. At these tasks, the Inquisition proved to be relentless, merciless, and highly successful.

  The monks who carried the title of Inquisitor into Heretical Depravity enjoyed the ultimate authority to condemn and punish the convicted heretic, but they never acted alone. A vast, powerful, wholly secret bureaucracy was put at their disposal, ranging from auxiliaries, attorneys, bailiffs, clerks, notaries, and scriveners to constables, jailors, torturers, and executioners. The inquisitors, who generally traveled and worked in pairs, were accompanied wherever they went by armed servants, generally known as servientes or familiars, who acted as bodyguards, henchmen, and enforcers. They were served, too, by a network of spies and informers who supplied the Inquisition with whispered denunciations. The whole mechanism was designed to gather data in secret and in bulk, and then use the data to identify suspects, fill the waiting cells, and ultimately feed the flames of the auto-da-fé with human flesh. “What has survived in folk memory and literature of the medieval Inquisition is not so much the zeal of individual inquisitors,” observes Edward Burman, “as the generalized and widespread terror of the Holy Office itself.”31

  The inquisitors and their servitors set up operations in the towns and villages across Europe where heresy was detected or suspected, pressing into use whatever facilities they needed or wanted. Bernard Gui, for example, set up operations in the Dominican convent in Toulouse, a venue he dubbed the “Hôtel de l’Inquisition,” and a Franciscan inquisitor might do the same in a monastery belonging to his own order. Other inquisitors availed themselves of a local church or, in a city that boasted a cathedral, the bishop’s palace. Or, if the inquisitor preferred, he could always commandeer a town hall since, as Lea writes, “the authorities, both lay and clerical, were bound to afford all assistance demanded.” Indeed, any reluctance to cooperate with the inquisitors was treated as evidence of fautorship and might prompt the inquisitors to send the reluctant mayor or abbot into the same dungeon where the other accused heretics were locked away. To emphasize his spiritual authority, the inquisitor was addressed in person as “Most Reverent.”32

  Once established in their working quarters, the inquisitors promptly began to collect the confessions and denunciations that were the raw material of industrial-scale persecution. A medieval version of the secret police was first authorized by the Council of Béziers in 1246—the inquisitors were called upon to select a priest and one or two laymen in each parish “whose duty it should be to search for heretics, examining all houses, inside and out, and especially all secret hiding places.” All parish priests were required to serve as informers, reporting to the Inquisition if any of their congregants failed to perform the penances imposed on them by the Inquisition as punishment for acts of heresy. In fact, all good Christians were under a standing order from the Church to come forward and report any evidence of heresy that might come to their attention, and the failure to comply amounted to the crime of fautorship.33

  A “serving-wench” accused of heresy by the medieval Inquisition, for example, protested her innocence throughout her long interrogation, but when her living quarters were searched, a scorched sliver of bone was supposedly found hidden in a wooden chest—the pitiful remains of a fellow believer who had been burned at the stake, or so it was alleged. To add weight to the fragmentary evidence, the friar-inquisitors secured the testimony of a convicted heretic who swore that she had accompanied the serving-wench when she collected the relic from the ashes of the execution.

  Then, too, a self-confessed heretic was required to name names in order to escape the worst punishments available to the inquisitor. It was not enough for the accused to admit their own heretical beliefs; they must also reveal the identities of their fellow believers—“and the hiding-places and conventicles of darkness” where they gathered to pray—or else the confession would be regarded as halfhearted and unacceptable. The betrayal of others was regarded as “the indispensable evidence of true conversion,” and the refusal to do so exposed the suspect to the additional charge of fautorship. Here was one of the many traps into which a victim of the Inquisition might fall—the accused heretic might imagine that he was saving his own life by confessing to the charges against him, but he would quickly discover that the failure to denounce friends and relations, no matter how principled or compassionate, rendered the confession incomplete, insincere, and “imperfect.” Indeed, a refusal to name the names of other heretics amounted to a crime in itself.34

  The legal obligation of suspects and witnesses to name names provided the Inquisition with an efficient tool for flushing out additional heretics in great numbers. An accused Cathar named Suarine Rigaud, for example, provided the inquisitors with the names and dwelling places of 169 other men and women during her interrogation in 1254. The naming of names achieved much more than filling the prisons of the Inquisition with more bodies to afflict and burn. Fear of betrayal by an accused heretic under interrogation poisoned relations among friends and within families, shattered the congregations of dissident Christians who worshiped together, and reinforced the reign of terror that was the Inquisition’s single most powerful weapon. “A single lucky capture and extorted confession would put the sleuth-hounds on the track of hundreds who deemed themselves secure, and each new victim added his circle of denunciations,” writes Henry Charles Lea. “The heretic lived over a volcano which might burst forth at any moment.”35

  Another source of information was the medieval equivalent of the jailhouse snitch, whose services were regarded as so valuable by the Inquisition that they outweighed even the vilest crimes on the part of the informer. A Carmelite monk who had been found guilty of “the most infamous sorceries” in 1329, for exampl
e, managed to persuade the inquisitors to soften his sentence by going to work on “sundry heretics” among his fellow prisoners, and he dutifully reported to his masters whatever incriminating remarks he extracted by false displays of friendship or perhaps merely invented. When the monk came up for sentencing, his good work as an informant was cited “in extenuation of his black catalogue of guilt.”36 His fate reminds us that the Inquisition apparently regarded the Christian rigorism of Cathars and Waldensians as a greater threat to the Church than the secret practice of sorcery by one of its own monastics.

  All reports of “heretical depravity” from the various sources—confessions, denunciations, searches, interrogations—were carefully collected, recorded, organized, and filed away for ready use by the Inquisition. Perhaps the most fearful and enduring feature of the inquisitorial bureaucracy was its relentless collection and preservation of information. The archives of the medieval Inquisition, a vast collection of handwritten and hand-copied documents ranging “from the first summons to the final sentence in every case,” provided the inquisitors with what we would today call a database. And the inquisitors put the database to good use in tracking down men and women who imagined that they had escaped detection and then catching them in inconsistencies once they were put under interrogation.37

  Sometimes a man or woman suspected of heresy came to the attention of the Inquisition in a kind of dragnet operation called an inquisitio generalis, and sometimes in an inquisitio specialis that focused on a single accused heretic whose name had been given up by a friend or relation. Now and then, a victim might attract the attention of the Inquisition merely because he or she was known to be rich. After all, an important source of funding for the bureaucracy was the wealth confiscated from condemned heretics, both money and property, and the fines levied against them and their heirs. But the appetite of the Inquisition was vast and indiscriminate, and its victims were drawn from both genders, all classes, and every rank.