The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  Torture can be understood as a thoroughly human impulse rather than a godly one, although some torturers might have made the task more agreeable by invoking the authority of a higher power. For others, of course, no such rationale was or is necessary; the job of torturer has always attracted men who plainly take pleasure in their work. But the resort to torture by the Inquisition was motivated by a different and highly ironic motive. The inquisitors were never quite comfortable in convicting an accused heretic on circumstantial evidence or even the direct testimony of a friendly witness. Rather, they always preferred to extract an abject confession of guilt from the accused heretic.

  To make a man or woman confess to the crime of false belief—and especially when it is a crime that he or she did not commit—torture is sometimes a practical necessity. Or so the Inquisition discovered, not only to the sorrow of its victims but also as an object lesson to authoritarian regimes down through the ages.

  To be sure, the inquisitor was perfectly willing to condemn a suspected heretic on whatever meager evidence might be available, even a whispered denunciation or a mere rumor. As we have seen, suspicion of heresy was itself a crime for which the inquisitor might impose punishment when no evidence of actual heresy was available. But the sweetest victory in the war on heresy was always based on what the Inquisition regarded as a sincere and spontaneous admission of wrongdoing by the accused heretic, one who confessed to the crime, repudiated (or “abjured”) his or her former beliefs, and humbly returned to the Church as a convert and a penitent.

  Every aspect of the Inquisition, in fact, was designed to secure a confession. When an inquisitor arrived to set up the operations of the Holy Office in a particular town, as we have seen, he preached a sermon in which all heretics were called upon to come forward and confess their errors of belief, denounce any other heretics known to them, and accept whatever penance the inquisitor deemed appropriate. A week-long period of grace was announced, during which heretics were promised that they would be spared the harsher “penances” that the inquisitor was empowered to inflict upon them. All they had to do was confess their own thought-crimes and condemn any other thought-criminals they could think of. If they failed to do so, they were automatically excommunicated.

  Confession was the “queen of proofs” in the eyes of the Inquisition, according to a medieval legal aphorism. Indeed, the peculiar nature of heresy—a crime “whose locus was in the human brain”—meant that it was “virtually unprovable without confession,” as historian and journalist Malise Ruthven points out. The inquisitors used every method of persuasion that they could devise to extract an admission of guilt, ranging from the promise of a mild penance to a prolonged session in the torture chamber. Here we come upon a kind of Catch-22 in the inner workings of the Inquisition. Confession may have been the ultimate goal of the Inquisition, but confession alone was never enough. The self-confessed heretic was required to convince the inquisitor that his or her confession was earnest, complete, and free of coercion.5

  For that reason, if a confession was thought to be motivated by fear of torture or death, it was deemed “imperfect” and the confessed heretic remained at risk of the worst punishments the Inquisition could inflict. Moreover, the confessions of heretics who were quick to condemn themselves but unwilling to betray the names and whereabouts of their fellow heretics were regarded as even more deeply flawed; indeed, such self-confessed heretics were guilty of fautorship as well as heresy, and the Inquisition deemed it necessary to punish them for both crimes.6

  More than one accused heretic offered the confession that his or her inquisitors wanted only to find that the confession was flawed in some unspecified detail and thus unacceptable. A man named Guillem Salavert, for example, was arrested by the Inquisition on charges on heresy in 1299 and promptly confessed to the crime. But the inquisitor rejected the confession as “unsatisfactory,” and so the man remained in a prison cell, untried and unsentenced, until he made a second and apparently satisfactory confession in 1316. But he was still not formally found guilty of heresy and sentenced for his crime for another three years, fully two decades after his first confession. Only after he had already spent twenty years in prison did his formal “penance” begin.7

  The official records of the Spanish Inquisition capture the heartbreaking dilemma of accused heretics who sought desperately to confess, if only to spare themselves from torture, but found their offers of a confession rejected. One woman who was being interrogated under torture begged the inquisitors to allow her to confess, but they insisted that she recite the particulars of her wrongdoing in order to corroborate the testimony of the witnesses against her. Since testimony was always given in secret and withheld from the accused, she could only guess what accusations had been lodged against her. So the woman was reduced to pleading with the inquisitors to reveal what might amount to an acceptable confession—and the notary dutifully took down every word of her plea.

  “Señores, why will you not tell me what I have to say?” the woman cried. “Have I not said that I did it all? I have said that I did all that the witnesses say. Señores, as I have told you, I do not know for certain. I have admitted that what I have done has brought me to this suffering. Release me, for I do not remember it.”8

  Apologists for the Inquisition insist that the emphasis on confession was actually a measure of the high ideals and good faith of the inquisitors. Bernard Gui, for example, piously insisted that “the mind of the inquisitor was torn with anxious cares” when he was forced to rely on accusation rather than confession, and “his conscience pained him if he punished one who was neither confessed nor convicted.” Yet Gui was honest enough to concede that “he suffered still more, knowing by constant experience the falsity and cunning and malice of these men, if he allowed them to escape to the damage of the faith.” So Gui, like other inquisitors, put aside his scruples and resorted to the instruments of torture when confronted with a person who denied that he or she was a heretic.9

  High ideals, in fact, never prevented the Inquisition from using coercion of all kinds to extract confession from the accused and testimony from unwilling witnesses. Nor was coercion limited to the wheel and the rack, the red-hot iron and the strappado, or the other crude tools of the torturer. The machinery of persecution in its entirety amounted to one vast instrument of torture, and its cutting edge was terror. This is not merely a metaphor; the protocols of the Inquisition, as we have seen, required that victims be shown the instruments of torture before those instruments were used in the hope that fear alone would be effective in bringing them to confession. But it is also true that every aspect of the Inquisition—the locked doors of its proceedings, the nameless accusers and witnesses sworn to silence, even the hood that obscured the human face of the inquisitor—was intended to strike fear into the heart of anyone entertaining any idea that the Church regarded as wrong.

  The Inquisition adopted yet more of its characteristic euphemisms and fictions to resolve the obvious contradiction between extracting a confession under torture and then embracing the confession as having been given without coercion. The use of torture was as obsessively regulated as any other aspect of the Inquisition. The inquisitors insisted, for example, that they decided how many of the five degrees of torture victims would be forced to endure—and what instruments of torture would be used to inflict them—according to their degree of apparent guilt, a Kafkaesque calculation that conveniently overlooks the fact that torture was supposedly applied to confirm whether or not the victims were guilty in the first place.

  The inquisitors were untroubled by such ironies and contradictions. According to the Alice-in-Wonderland rationale of the Inquisition, no one was charged with the crime of heresy in the absence of some evidence of guilt, whether a rumor from a nameless accuser or a guilty look on the face of the accused. Every accused heretic was generously afforded the opportunity to confess to the crime, repudiate his or her false beliefs, serve the penance imposed by the Inquisition, and rejoin th
e Church. Only when the accused heretic stubbornly refused to offer a confession was the Inquisition forced to resort to torture. By the reasoning of the Inquisition, in other words, the victims of torture were the only ones to blame for the necessity of putting them to torture.

  Above all, the Inquisition relied on what it regarded as the extraordinary nature of the crime of heresy to justify every excess and atrocity. The heretics, as we have seen, were “thieves and murderers of souls,” and the war on heresy justified the deployment of every weapon in the inquisitorial arsenal. To accuse someone of heresy and then allow him or her to go unpunished was simply unacceptable, a threat to the authority of the Inquisition and an embarrassment to the power and glory of the Church. After all, the acquittal of even a single accused heretic would surely bleed away some of the dread and terror that were regarded as crucial in deterring others from false belief. Far worse, as the Church saw it, was the spectacle of a true believer in a forbidden faith who was perfectly willing to suffer bravely and die heroically for that faith. This was the real reason that the Inquisition sought to avoid making martyrs of the accused heretics by torturing them into abject confession.

  Like the Grand Inquisitor in Crime and Punishment—“I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us,” he tells Jesus, “for if any one has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou”—the medieval inquisitor felt himself not only empowered but obliged to use any and all means to vindicate the authority of the Inquisition. Guilt or innocence was wholly beside the point.10

  Confinement was the first step in extracting a confession from the accused heretic, and sometimes it was sufficient. The cells in an inquisitorial dungeon were cold, dark, and narrow, and the worst of them amounted to nothing more than a tomblike enclosure of stone or brick into which no ray of light ever penetrated and no other human being ever set foot. If bedding was provided at all, it might consist of nothing more than rags or straw, and the rations were restricted to the proverbial bread and water, or—as Bernard Gui put it—“the bread of suffering and the water of tribulation.” Pope Clement V, after consulting an official report on the work of the Inquisition in Carcassonne in 1306, concluded that “prisoners were habitually constrained to confession by the harshness of prison, the lack of beds, and the deficiency of food, as well as by torture.”11

  Then, too, prisoners of the Inquisition were forced to endure “the slow torture of delay.” Once arrested and imprisoned, the suspects did not know when, if ever, they might again see the light of day; suspects remained in custody until the inquisitor decided (or remembered) that they should be tried and sentenced. Only then did their formal punishment begin. But a suspected heretic might sit in a cell far longer than a convicted one. An attorney named Guillem Garric, accused of participating in a conspiracy to destroy the records of the Inquisition, was arrested in 1285 and locked away in an inquisitorial prison until he was formally sentenced some thirty years later.12

  While a suspect was in custody, the inquisitors resorted to every manner of coercion, both hard and soft, to induce the prisoner to confess his crimes. After a few weeks or months of confinement, during which a man’s family was likely reduced to poverty or even starvation, the inquisitor might allow a brief visit from his distraught wife and terrified children “in hopes that their tears and pleadings might work on his feelings and overcome his convictions.” Because the property of a heretic was subject to confiscation at the time of arrest, the family might have already found itself homeless and penniless. And because it was a crime in itself to aid or comfort a heretic, the family of the accused heretic would likely be wholly friendless, too. The knowledge that his family was reduced to penury might be enough to provoke a confession.13

  Or the accused—lonely and anxious, fatigued and half-starved—might find himself suddenly called upon by an apparently well-meaning visitor, whether an acquaintance or a sympathetic stranger. The caller would be permitted to spend a few quiet moments with the prisoner, uttering words of comfort and compassion. Unbeknownst to the prisoner, however, a notary would be stationed at the door of the cell, out of sight but within earshot, in the hope of recording some unguarded remark that could be useful to the inquisitors. Heretics who had already confessed and converted, of course, were especially willing and effective as agents of the Inquisition, and they were instructed to use every tool of guile and deceit to lead the prisoner into making a jailhouse confession. For example, an agent provocateur might tell his cellmate that he had only faked a conversion to Catholicism in order to fool the inquisitors, thus encouraging the cellmate to regard the agent as a secret heretic in whom the prisoner might safely confide.

  Sometimes the suspect would be suddenly and inexplicably removed from his or her tomblike cell and placed in a larger one. The rations of bread and water would be supplemented with more generous and nourishing foodstuffs. A cruel jailor would be replaced by a kinder, gentler one who spoke words of comfort and encouragement. If the suspect was not moved to confession by the display of generosity, he or she was thrown back into the dungeon. Toying with the prisoner amounted to a form of psychological torture—an experiment “to see if his resolution would be weakened by alternations of hope and despair,” according to Lea. Its use demonstrates that the good-cop, bad-cop routine, like the third degree, was hardly a modern innovation in the techniques of interrogation.14

  If these approaches were unavailing, however, the inquisitor was always ready to use the other tools at hand, including the time-tested techniques of the torturer. In fact, torture was so routine in inquisitorial practice that the handbooks provided a formula for use in consigning victims to the torture chamber: “In order that the truth may be had from your mouth and that you should cease to offend the ears of the judges,” the inquisitor was instructed to say, “we declare, judge and sentence you to undergo torment and torture.” Here the form leaves a blank where the inquisitor is instructed to insert the precise date and place that the torturer’s tools would be unpacked and put to use on the naked body of the prisoner. Thus did the inquisitor, in solemnly reciting the formula from the inquisitor’s manuals, unwittingly confirm that the Inquisition was perfectly willing to forgo the ideal of a pure and spontaneous confession and satisfy itself with one that had been extracted from a prisoner by the use of “torment and torture.” 15

  A distinction was made during the early years of the Inquisition between common torture—that is, the infliction of pain to extract confession or testimony—and the so-called ordeal, which was the medieval equivalent of the modern lie-detector test. As used in the Middle Ages, the ordeal was regarded as an objective test for truth or falsity, guilt or innocence, and it was used in both civil and criminal jurisprudence as a fact-finding tool. Only later did the Inquisition come to abandon the magical thinking embodied in the ordeal and frankly embrace torture for what it is, the use of fear and pain to make some wretched victim do what the inquisitor wanted him or her to do.

  The ordeal by combat, in its original form, pitted two armed litigants against each other, and it was believed that the man who was in the right and deserved to win the case would inevitably prevail in combat. Ordeal by fire called for the application of hot irons to the flesh of an accused criminal; it was supposed that the iron would burn the guilty defendant but leave the innocent one unscarred. Ordeal by water was based on the pious belief that water, as the medium of baptism, would accept the innocent and reject the guilty when the accused was tossed into the drink. To be sure, anyone who was compelled to undergo an ordeal would suffer terribly in the process, but the suffering of the victim was wholly beside the point. According to the beliefs and values of the High Middle Ages—“irrational, primitive, barbarian,” as modern commentators put it—the truth would be miraculously revealed by the invisible of hand of God.16

  Torture, by contrast, is the intentional infliction of pain in an effort to compel testimony from an unwilling witness or defendant. “By torture,” wrote the Roman jurist Ulpian in a classic legal definition that dat
es back to the third century, “we are to understand the torment and suffering of the body in order to elicit the truth.”17 The efficacy of torture was not understood to be based on divine intervention; quite to the contrary, it was founded on the primal fact that human beings are averse to pain and will generally do anything they can to make it stop. For the sober and meticulous legal commentators, both pagan and Christian, however, torture was not a subject of moral outrage; rather, it was a commonplace tool of criminal jurisprudence, ancient and honorable.

  The archives of the medieval Inquisition preserve an incident that demonstrates the original and authentic use of the ordeal. A woman charged with the crime of Catharism was “abandoned to die of hunger” in one of the inquisitorial prisons. She insisted that she had always been an observant Catholic, however, and she continued to participate in the rite of confession, during the course of which she piteously insisted to her confessor that she was innocent of the charge of heresy. The priest advised her “to offer the hot-iron ordeal in proof,” that is, to volunteer to subject herself to the application of red-hot irons as proof of her innocence. The fact that she readily agreed to do so is surely the best evidence that she was not a Cathar, but the resulting burns were taken as proof that she was, in fact, guilty as charged. Relying on the results of the ordeal, the Inquisition sent her to the secular authority to be put to death, “with the result of being burned first by the iron,” as Lea puts it, “and then by stake.”18

  Belief in the efficacy of the ordeal, however, could not survive the unavoidable fact that the flesh of a human being, whether guilty or innocent, will be burned when exposed to heat. The use of the ordeal as a fact-finding mechanism was eventually banned by Pope Innocent III, but the use of torture was promptly approved by Pope Innocent IV, and so the resort to fire and water took on a subtly different meaning and function as the Inquisition refined its techniques of interrogation. “What followed was,” writes Malise Ruthven, “not so much the introduction of torture as the continuation of the ordeals under a new mode of procedure.”19