Once a suspected heretic had been denounced to the Inquisition by an informer, a spy, or a self-confessed heretic trying desperately to save himself at the expense of his fellow believers, the inquisitors brought the entire apparatus to bear on the defendant. A formal citation would be sent to the priest of the parish where the suspect resided, and he was obliged to deliver the bad news to the defendant in person and then to the whole congregation, repeating the accusation in church for three consecutive Sundays or feast days. The public charge was a punishment in itself, of course, because the accused heretic would suddenly find himself alone and friendless. Anyone who sheltered or assisted him in any way risked prosecution for the crime of fautorship.
The accused heretic was expected to surrender himself to the inquisitor who had issued the charge against him, but if he refused—or if it was suspected that he might try to flee—the inquisitor’s armed servants would seek him out, place him under arrest, and deliver him to one of the prisons set aside for the confinement of accused and convicted heretics. Either way, the defendant commonly remained in custody while the staff of the Inquisition carried out its long, slow, exacting investigation. Some unfortunate victims might remain in a cell, not yet convicted or even charged, for years or even decades. Meanwhile, confessed heretics, informers, and other witnesses were questioned, transcripts were prepared and signed, evidence was gathered, all in preparation for the secret trial at which guilt or innocence would be decided and punishment handed down.
The inquisitors resorted to old and crude techniques of physical torture to break the will of suspected heretics, a subject that will be explored in detail in the next chapter. They also perfected and used various weapons of what we would call psychological warfare to reduce their victims to a state of isolation, anxiety, and vulnerability. The whole enterprise was styled as the well-ordered workings of canon law based on the ancient Roman legal procedure of inquisitio, which empowered the inquisitors to compel testimony from suspects and witnesses alike and to receive as evidence even “a mere fama,” that is, a rumor or even a slander uttered in secret against the unwitting suspect.38
Here is the point at which inquisitio departed from the other forms of criminal prosecution available in medieval Europe. Under the legal procedure called accusatio, the prosecution was initiated on the basis of a charge “laid by an accuser at his own peril if it proved false”; that is, the accuser was required to identify himself, post a bond, and pay the expenses of the accused if he or she was acquitted. Another procedure, called denunciatio, was initiated by a magistrate on the basis of evidence secured in an official inquiry. The proceedings took place on the record in open court, and the accused was entitled to be represented by an attorney. It is only in the procedure called inquisitio that the prosecutor was empowered to rely on a whispered rumor from a nameless informer in placing the suspect under arrest and interrogating him—alone, in secret, and under oath—“his answers making him, in effect, his own accuser,” as historian Walter L. Wakefield explains.39
Inquisitio had been used by the Church to detect and punish the moral lapses of clergy long before it was deployed in the prosecution of heresy. The right of a prosecutor to rely on rumor and to conduct his investigation in secret was useful in penetrating the conspiracy of silence that might otherwise protect a priest suspected of keeping a concubine or a bishop who was trafficking in titles or indulgences for profit, the besetting sin of the medieval Church. Later, inquisitio came to be applied in all church courts, ranging from those of “rural archpriests or deans charging rustics with fornication or adultery” to “trials presided over by cardinals on charges brought against kings and queens,” according to Henry Ansgar Kelly, a revisionist historian who insists that the case against the Inquisition has been grossly overstated. Yet it is also true that the Inquisition elevated inquisitio into a tool of thought control, used to persecute every manner of religious belief and practice that the inquisitors deemed to be at odds with the Church’s dogma.40
Thus did the Inquisition seek to create the impression that it was omniscient and omnipresent, a power unto itself that operated in strictest secrecy and yet from which no secret could be kept. Its notion of what constituted admissible evidence was so casual—and its definition of the crime of heresy so sweeping—that the distance between accusation and conviction was almost imperceptible. Between these two fixed points, however, was the ordeal of an interrogation by the friar-inquisitors. Even when the instruments of torture were not used, interrogation was a kind of torture in itself.
The inquisitors were offered much practical advice on the art of interrogation in the inquisitor’s handbooks. Bernard Gui, for example, warned that “heretics nowadays try to conceal their errors rather than admit them openly,” and he encouraged the inquisitors to arm themselves for theological combat with an artfully clever enemy: “[Heretics] use a screen of deceitful words and clever tricks,” Gui wrote. “In this way, they can confound learned men, and this makes these boastful heretics all the stronger, being able to escape by means of tortuous, cunning and crafty evasions.”41
Interrogation, in fact, was the highest art of the inquisitor. Whatever else a friar-inquisitor brought to his job or acquired over his years of training and practice, the single most important skill was his ability to question an accused heretic. The best of them were possessed of “acute and subtle minds,” according to Henry Charles Lea, “practiced to read the thoughts of the accused, skilled to lay pitfalls for the incautious, versed in every art to confuse, prompt to detect ambiguities, and quick to take advantage of hesitation or contradiction.” Their victims, by contrast, were generally exhausted, starved, and terrorized after a long stay in the cells and dungeons of the Inquisition. Entirely aside from the special skills and tools of the torturer, the interrogation was an ordeal.42
The interrogations were exhaustive, and any recollection might be used to condemn the suspect or someone else as a heretic. “Questions were of the police-court type,” explains Malcolm Lambert, “concerned with external acts which revealed complicity with heresy.” A ferryman at a river crossing who happened to carry a Cathar perfectus as a passenger might himself be convicted on the charge of heresy, for example, and the same fate might befall a servant whose master turned out to be a Waldensian. If a doctor was convicted of heresy, his patients were at risk; the fact that the Waldensians operated clinics and hospitals provided the inquisitors with plenty of new suspects among those who had contacted the Waldensians in search of a cure for illness or the treatment of an injury. Indeed, merely entering a house where a heretic was later proved to be present—or making a polite bow when being introduced to someone who turned out to be a perfectus—was enough to place someone under suspicion of heresy in the eyes of the Inquisition.43 “It is a noteworthy fact that in long series of interrogations,” writes Lea, “there will frequently be not a single question as to the belief of the party making confession.”44
Still, the records of the Inquisition confirm that some victims were, in fact, subjected to close questioning of the “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” variety that was designed to trap them into a confession of heretical beliefs. He or she might be tricked into a fatal concession with a simple question that assumes the guilt of the accused: “How often have you confessed as a heretic?” Or the inquisitor might pose a trick question that simply could not be answered at all without self-crimination: “Does a woman conceive through the act of God or of man?” an inquisitor asks. If the victim answers “Man,” the reply is taken as evidence of heresy because it denies the power of God, but if the same victim answers “God,” then the reply is still regarded as heretical—after all, the suspect was suggesting that “God had carnal relations with women.”45
At moments, an interrogation might begin to sound like an Abbott and Costello routine. According to a line of questioning that appears as an example in Gui’s handbook, the inquisitor opens with an article of faith in Roman Catholic dogma: “Do you believe in Christ born
of the Virgin, suffered, risen, and ascended to heaven?”
“And you, sir,” replies the accused, “do you not believe it?”
“I believe it wholly,” says the inquisitor.
“I believe likewise,” affirms the accused.
“You believe that I believe it, which is not what I ask, but whether you believe it,” says the frustrated inquisitor.46
Once the inquisitors had rounded up suspects for interrogation in a given town or village, the whole populace was at risk. Starting in 1245, the inquisitor Bernard de Caux carried out an inquisition in two regions of southern France, Lauragais and Lavaur. Almost every adult in these two regions, a total of 5,471 men and women in thirty-nine towns, was summoned and questioned. Interrogation transcripts were compared, and inconsistencies were followed up with a fresh round of questioning. A total of 207 suspects was found guilty and punished—23 were sent to prison, and the rest were sentenced to a variety of lesser punishments, but the otherwise meticulous records do not disclose whether any of the accused heretics in these towns were turned over to the secular authorities for burning at the stake.
Nor did the Inquisition content itself with victims who had reached adulthood. Boys as young as ten and a half, and girls as young as nine and a half, were deemed to be culpable, according to some church councils, and the strictest authorities “reduced the age of responsibility to seven years.” Starting at the age of fourteen, a boy or girl could be lawfully subjected to torture during interrogation, although some jurisdictions insisted that a “curator” be appointed for boys and girls accused of heresy. The curator was a curious sort of legal guardian “under whose shade [the child] could be tortured and condemned,” according to Lea.47
The interrogations yielded a plentiful supply of accusations, most of them compounded of an uncertain blend of truths and half-truths, slander and speculation, and sheer fabrication, all of it extracted from terrified witnesses who were generally anxious to tell their interrogators exactly what they wanted to hear. Since the Inquisition punished not only heresy itself but also the mere suspicion of heresy, whether “light,” “vehement,” or “violent”—and since “hearsay, vague rumors, general impressions, or idle gossip” were all regarded as equally admissible in the proceedings of the Inquisition—the line between accusation and evidence was virtually nonexistent. What the witnesses were willing to say, or what they could be forced to say under the threat or application of torture, the Inquisition was willing to embrace and use.48
Nearly every word spoken by both accuser and accused was taken down by hand by one of the notaries who were present at all proceedings of the Inquisition. Indeed, the notary was fully as important to the workings of the Inquisition as the torturer, the executioner, or the inquisitor himself. If a notary was unavailable—or if he was overburdened by the volume of work—a professional copier of documents, known as a scrivener, would be pressed into service.
At the end of every interrogation, the notary attested to the accuracy of the record, thus “giving at least a color of impartiality.”49 Testimony was supposed to be taken in the presence of two impartial witnesses who would join the notary in signing the transcript to verify its accuracy. But the witnesses were always selected by the inquisitors, who preferred “discreet and religious men” and, whenever possible, Dominicans or other clerics whose loyalties and duty of obedience were directed to the Church. To ensure the absolute control of the Inquisition over its own workings, all witnesses were required to take an oath never to reveal what they had observed during the secret proceedings.50
The transcripts may have been voluminous and tedious, but they were not merely filed away and forgotten. Rather, they were copied out and exchanged by inquisitors across Europe in a “fearful multiplication of papers” that served at least a couple of urgent concerns of the Inquisition. First, the inquisitors were careful to create and maintain duplicate records in case the originals were misplaced or destroyed, whether by accidental fire or flood or by the willful act of men and women seeking to hinder the work of the Inquisition. The destruction of records, as we shall see, was a favorite tactic of the courageous individuals who set themselves against the Inquisition in its early years. Second, the records were exchanged and actively consulted by various inquisitors in making cases against accused heretics across vast distances of miles and years.51
The notaries and scriveners who assembled and preserved the records of the Inquisition bestowed a useful and terrible tool on the friar-inquisitors. They enjoyed access to the names, whereabouts, friendships, family relations, assets, and business dealings of the accused heretics. “With such data at his disposal,” observes Malcolm Lambert, “a medieval inquisitor had resources comparable to that of a modern police officer, ever ready to check and cross-check information.” The fact that the Inquisition enjoyed both international jurisdiction and an institutional memory in the form of shared documents checkmated those who dared to hide or flee and guaranteed that the mere passage of time provided no protection for dissident Christians who might have escaped the attention of a particular inquisitor.52
An elderly woman in Toulouse was convicted and punished for heresy by the Inquisition on the basis of musty records dating back some fifty years. She had been allowed to rejoin the Church after confessing to heresy in 1268, but when she was charged a second time in 1316, a new generation of inquisitors consulted the archives that had been assembled before they were born and discovered the prior conviction. Relapse into heresy, as we shall see, was regarded as an even more heinous crime than the original act, and a repeat offender was subject to the most severe penalties available to the inquisitor. So the old woman of Toulouse was condemned to “perpetual imprisonment in chains” as a repeat offender, “perhaps even having forgotten the incident of nearly a half-century before.”53
Entirely apart from their practical utility in tracking down concealed or escaped suspects, the archives can be seen to serve a metaphysical function in the history of the Inquisition. Since the heretical acts and beliefs that so obsessed the inquisitors often existed only in their own overheated imaginations, the scratching of a notary’s goose-quill pen on a leaf of laid paper somehow turned fantasy into reality and created what passed for documentary evidence. The alchemy of ink and paper would work the same magic in centuries to come, not only for the Inquisition but for every new generation of persecutors responding to the inquisitorial impulse.
Above all, the Inquisition relied on secrecy and the terror that secrecy inspired. All testimony—whether from the accused, his or her accusers, or others implicated in the accusations and confessions—was taken in examinations conducted by the inquisitors and their various servitors behind closed doors. The names of accusers and witnesses, and the testimony or other evidence they offered, were withheld from the person under investigation. As a result, the victims of the Inquisition were never given an opportunity to confront or cross-examine those who denounced them.
Indeed, the accused would not even know the particulars of the charges against them unless they were able to discern them from the questions put by the inquisitor. When a desperate defendant begged the inquisitor James Fournier (later Pope Benedict XXII) to reveal the supposed offense for which he was being tried, for example, the inquisitor consented to tell him “de gratia,” that is, “as a favor.” Less fortunate victims were reduced to guessing what particular false belief they were accused of embracing and which nameless accusers—embittered friends or relations, a spiteful neighbor, a rival in business—had slipped their names to the Inquisition.54
A man or woman accused of heresy was theoretically entitled to mount a defense to the charges, at least according to the rulings of a few popes and church councils over the centuries. But various papal decrees encouraged the inquisitors to proceed “simply and plainly and without the uproar and form of lawyers,” and the bull of 1229 titled Excommunicamus formally denied the assistance of legal counsel to defendants in proceedings of the Inquisition. Even at t
he times and places where attorneys were permitted in theory, the accused heretic who could afford to hire one was hard-pressed to find an advocate who would take his or her case.
When a Franciscan friar named Bernard Délicieux was ordered by his own superior to “defend the memory” of a dead man accused of heresy before the Inquisition in 1300, not a single notary in the city of Carcassonne was willing to assist him in drawing up legal documents to be presented to the inquisitor. The good friar was forced to send to a distant city for a more courageous notary because the local ones remembered how the inquisitor had previously arrested and imprisoned the notary who had foolishly rendered legal services in the appeal that a group of citizens had lodged against the Inquisition with the king of France a few years earlier.55
The Inquisition itself, on the other hand, was well supplied with expert legal advice. Starting in 1300, as we have noted, the preferred candidates for the job of inquisitor were men who had earned a doctorate of law at a university. However, most inquisitors were “utterly ignorant of the law,” according to the fourteenth-century commentator Zanghino Ugolini, and they “were chosen rather with regard to zeal than learning.” As a result, the grand inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich (ca. 1320–1399) recommended in his own manual of instruction that an inquisitor “should always associate himself with some discreet lawyer to save him from mistakes,” not only the kind of mistakes that might allow a victim to escape punishment but, even more crucially, the blunders that might cause the inquisitor to be dismissed from his job by his superiors. Eventually, some tribunals of the Inquisition routinely employed an attorney with the official title of Counselor as a member of the paid inquisitorial staff.56
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Page 10