The very first inquisitor to arrive in Toulouse was a Dominican friar-inquisitor called William Arnold. According to the eyewitness testimony of William of Pelhisson, the town fathers marched the inquisitor out of town, “manhandling as they did so,” although they allowed that he could stay “if he would give up the Inquisition.” At the same time, they issued a proclamation by means of the town herald that “no one was to give, sell, or lend anything whatever or to give assistance in any form to the Friars Preachers,” as the Dominicans were called. As it turned out, however, the inquisitors who remained behind the walls of the Dominican convent were determined to stay in town and on task, if only under straitened circumstances.70 As William of Pelhisson wrote in his memoir of the early days of the Inquisition:
We friars did have the essentials in sufficient supply from friends and Catholics who, despite the danger, handed us bread, cheese, and eggs over the garden walls and by every other possible means. When the consuls of the town learned of this, they set their guards at our gates and also on the garden, watching the house day and night to prevent any necessities being brought in. They even cut us off completely from the water of the Garonne. This was a more serious blow to us, because we were unable to cook our vegetables in water.71
Other acts of resistance were far more intimate—and far more violent. When a wine seller named Arnold Dominic was charged with heresy, he was threatened with the death penalty unless he recanted and, as required by the standard operating procedure of the Inquisition, betrayed his fellow heretics. He was perfectly willing to save his life by naming names, and he gave the inquisitors eleven of them. Unfortunately for Arnold, however, only seven were captured, and the others managed to escape with the assistance of sympathetic peasants. The inquisitor was satisfied, but at least a few of the men whom Arnold had betrayed were intent on revenge. “The aforesaid Arnold Dominic made his confession and was released,” wrote William of Pelhisson, “but afterward he was murdered one night in his bed.”72
Photographic Insert
PLATE 1. Pope Innocent III excommunicates the Cathars, the very first victims of the Inquisition; Catharism was one of the few heresies to be wholly eradicated by the Church.
PLATE 2. A fanciful view of the mountain stronghold at Montségur, where the last Cathar holdouts were finally seized and burned alive in 1244.
PLATE 3. From the inquisitor’s manuals of the Middle Ages to a “letter of apology” published in 1789—and even today—the Inquisition has always found its pious defenders.
PLATE 4. The torture chambers of the Inquisition, like the medieval version depicted here, changed little in appearance or equipment over six hundred years of active operation.
PLATE 5. Men and women accused of heresy were sometimes silenced with iron masks fitted with spikes or gags, like the “scold’s bridle” shown here, a grim example of the torturer’s art.
PLATE 6. Torquemada, clad in the cowled robe of the Dominican order and shown here in the company of Pope Sixtus IV, was the iconic grand inquisitor.
PLATE 7. “As if he were an entrepreneur offering a show,” the grand inquisitor did not neglect the production values of an auto da fé like the one in Madrid in 1683.
PLATE 8. Palaces and fortresses, such as the Alcázar at Córdoba, were commonly put at the disposal of the friar-inquisitors by compliant kings.
PLATE 9. The peaked headpiece known as a coroza, shown in a drawing by Goya, was a theatrical touch invented by the Spanish Inquisition to humiliate its victims.
PLATE 10. Critics of the Inquisition delighted in showing the sexual sadism of the friar-inquisitors, but the fact remains that the victims were stripped to facilitate the work of the torturer.
PLATE 11. The Spanish Inquisition turned heresy from a thought-crime into a blood crime, a deadly innovation embraced by Nazi Germany in the notorious Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
PLATE 12. The show trials of Stalinist Russia in the 1930s, like the Inquisition itself, demonstrated how innocent men and women could be reduced to abject confession by the threat and use of torture.
PLATE 13. Just as the Inquisition compelled its victims to wear cloth crosses, Nazi Germany revived the medieval “Jew badge” to identify and isolate the targets of the Final Solution.
PLATE 14. Like Galileo before the friar-inquisitors of the Roman Inquisition, Bertolt Brecht was subjected to interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.
PLATE 15. By 1981 the Inquisition had entered Western popular culture as a harmless subject of ridicule in Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part 1.
PLATE 16. The coroza, the dungeon cell, and the ordeal by water—now known as waterboarding—were borrowed from the Inquisition and put to use at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
A special target of the early resisters was the meticulous records that the Inquisition began to accumulate from the outset of its operations. These archives, as we have seen, constituted the institutional memory of the Inquisition and, as such, were a terrible threat to every dissident. At Narbonne in 1235, for example, the citizens who participated in an uprising against the Inquisition seized and destroyed its books and records, and in 1248 a pair of officials who were carrying a set of records were slain and the records burned. So threatening were these attacks on the archives of the Inquisition that a church council in Albi in 1254 ordered that all its records be duplicated and the copies placed in a secure location so that future attacks would not slow down or stop the inquisitors’ work.
One incident in particular prompted an especially punishing response with far-reaching effects. The triggering event took place when a man called Peter of Verona (ca. 1205–1252)—a child of Cathar parents who grew up to join the Dominican order and then the Inquisition—was sent to Florence to serve as inquisitor. He recruited Catholic noblemen to join a newly created militia whose members were sworn to protect the Inquisition in its work, and so the war against heresy was literally taken to the streets as “Catholic gangs” and their rivals battled each other. During one such skirmish, Peter himself was fatally wounded by an ax blow but lived long enough to leave a final message written in his own blood on the pavement: “I believe in God.” Or so goes the hagiography that came to be attached to the dead inquisitor.73
Peter was promptly canonized as the patron saint of inquisitors by Pope Innocent IV, and his violent death inspired the pope to issue “perhaps the most terrible of all Bulls in the history of the Inquisition,” a papal decree of 1252 known as Ad extirpanda (To extirpate). Torture of accused heretics under the authority of the Inquisition was officially sanctioned for the first time, burning at the stake was openly mandated as the punishment for relapsed heretics, and an armed constabulary was created and provided to the Inquisition for its own use. None of these measures was wholly new, but now they were solemnly encoded in canon law and carried the imprimatur of the pope himself. The machinery of repression and persecution would be replicated across Europe and beyond, always in the name of the Inquisition and its war on heresy. “Men armed with these tremendous powers, and animated with this resolute spirit, were not lightly to be meddled with,” writes Lea. “[The inquisitor’s] jurisdiction, in fact, was almost unlimited, for the dread of suspicion of heresy brought, with few exceptions, all mankind to a common level.”74
When viewed in the full light of history, opposition to the Inquisition in its early days seems heartbreakingly naïve. Successive popes bestowed upon the inquisitors such powers and privileges—and equipped them with such vast resources—that the Inquisition eventually overawed even the most courageous of its adversaries. Once the inquisitors had mastered their own arsenal of weapons, the population under their authority came to realize that no one was beyond the reach of the Inquisition. Eventually, the paranoia that the inquisitors sought to inspire acted as a deterrent not only to acts of open resistance but also to any word or deed that might catch the attention of the Inquisition. The war on heresy turned into a long reign of terror in which fear itself was the
most effective weapon.
The inquisitorial archives preserve the evidence of a few isolated efforts at evasion, like the man who is reported to have “spirited away the body of his condemned father before it could be burned,” and the desperate entreaties of its abject victims, such as a couple of widows who appealed to the pope for mercy after they were ordered to enter a convent, not as punishment for their own heretical beliefs but only because their dead husbands had been Cathars. For eight years, a rich man from Toulouse named Alaman simply ignored an order to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; when the authorities finally got around to excommunicating him in 1237, he managed to stay out of prison for ten more years. But there is another way of looking at the same facts. The Inquisition did not forgive or forget, and a man or woman might face trial and punishment years or even decades after the alleged crime of heresy had taken place.75
A few accused heretics managed to save themselves by going into hiding or by fleeing to places beyond the reach of the Inquisition. Some fled before arrest and trial, some while the proceedings were in progress, and a few succeeded in the rare and daring feat of breaking out of prison while in the custody of the Inquisition. A study of the archives of the Inquisition in the diocese of Toulouse for the period 1249–1257 suggests that twenty-six victims were sentenced to death but an even greater number—thirty in all—were listed as fugitives.76 Indeed, as we have seen, the trial of an accused heretic so commonly resulted in conviction that, as a practical matter, flight was the only way a victim might escape punishment.
The backwaters of Christendom might afford a sanctuary for an accused or convicted heretic in hiding or on the run. Cathars from Milan and Florence, for example, were able to find a safe haven in the distant and isolated stretches of Calabria and Abruzzi. Remarkably, the first Protestant missionaries to reach Italy during the Reformation discovered that a few Waldensian communities—the forerunners of reformed Christianity—had managed to avoid the Inquisition for more than three hundred years in the remote mountain valleys of Lombardy. As late as 1733, the pope deemed it necessary to order the director-general of the Franciscans to station an inquisitor on Corsica permanently because the distant and isolated island was supposedly “infested with heretics.”77
The Inquisition was eventually so pervasive, so well staffed and well informed, that it became increasingly difficult for a dissident Christian to find any safe place in western Europe. To locate a suspected heretic and gather evidence against him or her, an inquisitor in one locality was able to consult the archives of other inquisitors across Europe. Indeed, the reach of the Inquisition sometimes resulted in two inquisitors seeking to prosecute the same victim, and the Council of Narbonne established the rule of “first come, first served” to ensure that the first inquisitor to lodge formal charges against a suspected heretic enjoyed the right to claim him or her. For this reason the Inquisition has been called “the first international law-keeping force,” a phrase that sums up its vast reach even as it obscures the fact that the Inquisition enforced only the law that criminalized an act of conscience.78
One measure of the police power of the Inquisition was its right to maintain its own armed constabulary. At a time when Bologna permitted only knights and doctors to bear arms—and Paris forbade all citizens from carrying “pointed knives, swords, bucklers, or other similar weapons”—an inquisitor was permitted to “arm anyone he pleased, and invest him with the privileges and immunities of the Holy Office.” Indeed, some inquisitors found it profitable to license the right to bear arms to anyone willing to pay a fee, thus creating a source of revenue to fund the Inquisition’s operations; the inquisitor at Florence, for example, enjoyed an annual income of a thousand gold florins from the arms trade. Pope John XXII himself characterized some of the inquisitorial henchmen as “armed familiars of depraved character and perverse habits, who committed murders and other outrages.” But if a troublesome lord or magistrate sought to disarm them, the inquisitor had a ready response.79 “[A]ny secular ruler who endeavors to prevent the familiars of the Holy Office from bearing arms,” decreed the inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich, “is impeding the Inquisition and is a fautor of heresy.”80
The same sanctimony was invoked to justify every atrocity and excess of the Inquisition. The inquisitor’s handbooks, as we have noted, prescribe the precise formula to be used by one inquisitor in addressing a request to another inquisitor for the return of a person who has managed to escape from an inquisitorial prison, and the escapee is described as “one insanely led to reject the salutary medicine offered for his cure, and to spurn the wine and oil which were soothing his wounds.” Thus we are reminded that the Church insisted on presenting itself not as a persecutor and a punisher but as “a loving mother unwillingly inflicting wholesome chastisement on her unruly children.”81
While popes and grand inquisitors continued to utter their pious words of self-justification, however, the real work of the Inquisition was being carried out in the dungeons where the victims were questioned under the threat and application of torture. Here, of course, is the enduring legacy of the Inquisition. Its rituals and protocols, the legalisms and euphemisms, are now preserved only in archives and libraries, but the day-to-day skills and tools of the inquisitors are still in use. Like the remarkable machine for torture and execution imagined by Franz Kafka, the history of the Inquisition was carved into human flesh.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
The keys would jangle again; and the first scream of the next victim often came even before they had touched him, at the mere sight of the men in the doorway.
ARTHUR KOESTLER,
Darkness at Noon
“The third degree” is a commonplace of hardboiled detective fiction, and nowadays the phrase calls to mind a ham-fisted cop at work on a suspect under a swinging lamp in the backroom of a police station. In truth, however, the third degree is yet another distant but distinct echo of the Inquisition. Like so much else in the lore of the Inquisition, the phrase itself allows us to glimpse the obsessive concern with order that governed the imaginations of the inquisitors.
The inquisitor, according to the meticulous rules that governed the work of the Inquisition, was empowered to subject an accused heretic to questioning under torture according to a scale that measured five degrees of severity. The first degree consisted of stripping off the victim’s clothing and then displaying the instruments of torture to the naked victim, which was sometimes enough to bring “weak and timorous persons” to confession. The second degree called for the application of torture to be sustained for a period no longer than it took for the inquisitor to recite a single Ave Maria or Paternoster, that is, less than a minute. The notorious third degree permitted the torturer to torment his victim in earnest and without the shorter if also prayerful time limits. The fourth degree permitted the torturer to increase the agony of the victim by, for example, jerking the rope from which he or she was hanging. By the fifth degree, the stubborn victim was likely to be suffering from shattered bones, severe loss of blood, and perhaps even a limb torn from his or her body.1
The Inquisition, of course, did not invent torture. Ironically, the tools found in a well-equipped inquisitorial dungeon were identical to those that pagan magistrates had used on the bodies of the first Christians during the ten periods of persecution in ancient Rome. But it is also true that the carnage of the torture chamber—a scene that resembled a nightmarish conflation of the abattoir, the blacksmith’s shop, and the operating room—was a commonplace of the Inquisition and an emblem of its terrible power. From 1252, as we have noted, the use of torture in the “extirpation of heresy” was officially sanctioned by the pope. Indeed, the inquisitorial reign of terror depended as much on the torture chamber as it did on the hooded inquisitor or the stake at which unrepentant heretics were burned alive.2
“The official should obtain from all heretics he has captured a confession by torture without injuring the body or causing the danger of death,” Pope Innocent IV decree
d in Ad extirpanda. “They should confess to their own errors and accuse other heretics whom they know, as well as their accomplices, fellow-believers, receivers, and defenders.”3
As with everything else, of course, the Inquisition elevated the use of torture to a lofty theological plane, draping the torturer with pieties and legalisms that were meant to sanctify the burning, cutting, tearing, and pounding of human flesh and bone. The affliction of heretics was regarded by their persecutors as “delectable to the Holy Trinity and the Virgin”—a phrase that allows us to imagine the inquisitor literally licking his lips in anticipation of the next torture session—and the elaborate formulas that the handbooks recommended for consigning a victim to the torture chamber always began with the phrase: “By the grace of God…”4
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Page 12