The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  So if a suspect accused of heresy refused to confess, or if the confession was deemed “imperfect,” or if a witness was reluctant to betray a friend or relation, he or she might be encouraged by the inquisitors with what was still called the ordeal by water or the ordeal by fire. But these were not ordeals in the old sense. Rather, they were simply and plainly examples of physical torture, designed to inflict so much agony that the suspect or witness would finally consent to say what the inquisitor wanted to hear. Rooted in the crude beliefs of the Dark Ages, the ordeals of fire and water turned out to be durable and effective instruments of torture. They were used throughout the Inquisition by its master torturers and long afterward by those who followed in their footsteps.

  The inquisitor’s handbook composed by Nicholas Eymerich, the inquisitor at Aragón in the fourteenth century, was an influential source of instruction on the proper use of torture, one that was reprinted in various annotated editions and consulted throughout the existence of the Inquisition. Torture was supposedly a measure of last resort, not to be used “till other means of discovering the truth have been exhausted,” according to Eymerich. “Good manners, subtlety, the exhortations of well-intentioned persons, even frequent meditation and the discomforts of prison,” Eymerich advised, “are often sufficient to induce the guilty ones to confess.”20

  Still, Eymerich provided a helpful and accommodating list of suspects who could and should be tortured, including anyone “with a general reputation for heresy” and anyone whose answers under interrogation struck the inquisitor as “vacillating.” Torture was also mandated for any suspected heretic against whom circumstantial evidence (or “indicia”) of heresy could be found; and since the Inquisition recognized three grades of indicia—“remote,” “vehement,” and “violent”—the inquisitor enjoyed ample discretion to find or fabricate such proofs. Testimony by a witness who claimed to have seen the suspect in a house where a dying Cathar was being given the ritual of consolamentum, for example, was a sufficient indicium to justify a session in the torture chamber, but so was the simple gesture of offering a friendly greeting to a man or woman who turned out to be a Cathar perfectus. Indeed, the inquisitor was fully empowered to consider “facial expressions, behaviour, apparent nervousness, and so on” as indicia of guilt.21

  Terror is the essence of torture, as the Inquisition knew so well, and it began with the inquisitor’s pronouncement of the formulaic order to the victim to “expose you to torture and torment.” From that moment onward, the man or woman condemned to torture was subjected to an unrelenting and steadily escalating series of threats, humiliations, and abuses. The victim was led in solemn procession from cell to dungeon, accompanied by the inquisitors, the armed guards, the notaries who “faithfully recorded every shout, cry and complaint,” sometimes a doctor to revive a victim if he or she passed out, and the man whose job it was to apply the tools of torture—ominously, the task was usually assigned to the public executioner. The long, slow walk to the torture chamber, of course, was an act of torture in itself.22

  Still more theatrical touches can be detected in the formalities that attended a torture session, especially as they were conducted by the Spanish Inquisition starting in the fifteenth century. The processional to the torture chamber was conducted by candlelight or torchlight, according to some accounts. At every step along the way, the inquisitor was at the victim’s side, whispering threats and promises to encourage the victim to confess and thus spare himself or herself the ordeal to come. The torturers concealed their heads and faces under high-peaked hoods of the kind later associated with the Ku Klux Klan, revealing only their eyes through holes in the fabric of the hoods. Even the glowing braziers on the dungeon walls “would take on their own terrifying significance,” as victims would discover when they saw the torturers at work on other accused heretics.23

  Once inside the torture chamber, the victim was first stripped of his or her clothing, both to facilitate the work of the torturer and his assistants and to further abase, disorient, and terrorize the victim. Then the various instruments would be ritually displayed to the victim, who was warned that he or she “must pass through all of them unless he told the truth.” To the last moment, the inquisitor continued to utter words of enticement and encouragement to the victim; it was not yet too late for the accused heretic to save his or her life by offering the confession that the inquisitor so ardently desired. If no confession was forthcoming, the torturer picked up his tools and set to work.24

  The most common instruments of torture, as we have noted, required only the fundamental elements of water and fire. The so-called ordeal by water consisted of binding the victim in a horizontal position and forcing water down his or her throat, sometimes by pouring the fluid through a funnel and sometimes by dripping it slowly through a water-soaked linen or silk rag, thus creating the sensation of drowning. As the torturers gained experience, they learned that holding the nose of the victim greatly enhanced the effect. Once the belly was filled with water and fully distended, the victim would be forced into a head-down position in order to put agonizing pressure on the heart and lungs. Then, to sharpen and prolong the pain, the torturer might beat on the victim’s belly with fists or a bludgeon.

  The water ordeal was especially popular with the Inquisition—and would remain a favorite tool of torturers down to our own time—because, unlike other forms of torture, it required no elaborate equipment, created no messes of blood and pulped flesh to clean up, and left no obvious wounds or scars on the victim. Thanks to the detailed records of the Inquisition, we know that an “ordinary” ordeal called for the application of five liters of water, and an “extraordinary” one consisted of ten liters—yet another example of how the inquisitorial enterprise regulated and standardized every particular of its operations so that even the torture of suspected heretics was turned into a kind of industrial activity.25

  The ordeal of fire consisted of binding the victim with ropes or manacles in front of a well-stoked fire and placing his or her feet in close proximity to the flames. Again, the torturers devised various techniques for controlling the severity of pain to be inflicted on the victim. Smearing the victim’s feet with fat always intensified the pain, but they could fine-tune the process by applying the fat to the whole foot or only on the soles. A firescreen, too, could be used to interrupt the ordeal “for fresh questioning and to provide a respite in case of fainting.” But the torturer no longer pretended that the presence or absence of burned flesh was an indication of guilt or innocence; he merely sought to inflict as much pain as the inquisitor deemed appropriate in the course of an interrogation. “A man might leave the Inquisition without being burned,” according to one witticism, “but he was certain to be singed.”26

  Fire and water were all a torturer really needed, but the inquisitors also resorted to ever more elaborate mechanical devices to terrorize and brutalize their victims. The strappado, for example, was a rope-and-pulley mechanism affixed to the ceiling of the torture chamber. The ankles and hands of the victim were bound with ropes or shackles, and iron or stone weights were attached to the feet. The rope dangling from the roof was attached to the victim’s wrists, which were fixed behind his or her back, and the torturer positioned himself at the other end of the rope. Then the inquisitor put his questions to the victim, and if satisfactory answers were not forthcoming, the torturer assisted the interrogator by lifting, dangling, and dropping the victim, a process that resulted in intense pain and injury.

  An expert torturer was able to use the strappado to vary the severity of pain at will. If hanging from the ceiling was not enough to bring the victim to confession, he might apply a whip at the same time. Or he might resort to what was called “full strappado,” that is, lifting the victim to the ceiling and then suddenly dropping the victim—sometimes only a few feet and sometimes all the way to the stone floor—thus dislocating joints and breaking bones. The dangling victim was said to “jump” or “dance,” according to the parlance o
f the professional torturer. “Only a confession or unconsciousness,” writes Edward Burman, “would halt the process.” The strappado was so popular among the inquisitors, in fact, that it came to be “universally recognized as the first torture of the Inquisition”—the “queen of torments,” according to the medieval aphorism.27

  Degrees of torture took on specific meanings when calibrated to a particular tool or machine. When the strappado was being used, for example, the third degree called for merely dangling the victim for an extended period of time. If instructed by the inquisitor to apply the fourth degree, however, the torturer would begin to jerk the hanging body of the victim by raising and releasing the ropes that held the body aloft. And in the fifth degree, “weights were attached to the culprit’s feet to increase the agony of the jerking rope,” and the torture was sustained for “the space of one or two Misereres,” which lasted much longer than a simple Ave Maria or Paternoster. Similar specifications were available to the torturer for each chosen instrument of torture.28

  Other ancient and familiar instruments of torture were the wheel—a simple wooden wagon wheel to which the accused heretic was bound and then beaten with clubs or hammers as the wheel was turned—and the rack, a rather more elaborate device consisting of a wooden frame with rollers at each end. The victim was laid on the rack, and hands and feet were fixed to the rollers by ropes. As the interrogation proceeded, the torturer turned the handles on the rollers to loosen or tighten the ropes according to signals from the inquisitor. The mounting pressure on the victim’s joints resulted in painful dislocations and, if the victim refused to give the answer that the inquisitor sought, his or her limbs were eventually torn from their sockets.

  The last of the standard methods of torture was the stivaletto. The victim’s legs were splinted between wooden boards with tight topes, two boards on each leg. Then the torturer inserted wedges fashioned of wood or iron between the leg and the board. By pounding on the wedges with a hammer, the torturer increased the pressure of the ropes and boards against the victim’s flesh and bones, which resulted in ever-mounting pain and eventually the shattering of joints and bones. Later, as the technology of torture improved, the same device was fashioned of metal, and pressure was brought to bear on the victim by tightening a screw that closed the jaws of a metal brace or vice. If the victim persisted in silence or offered only evasive answers, he or she would suffer not only the agony of the torture itself but a lifelong injury that would render the victim unable to walk.

  The parade of horribles, however, does not end there. Compelling the suspect to remain awake for a specified period of time was used as a method of torture, then as now: “Forty hours was the common length.” Women and children were singled out for a form of torture that was regarded as suitably mild: cords were tied around their hands and wrists, then tightened and loosened as they were interrogated. Yet an expert torturer was capable of inflicting sustained and excruciating pain with only a simple rope, as a priest accused of heresy in Vienna in the fifteenth century was made to understand. After a tag team of “eminent theologians” failed to persuade him to renounce his beliefs, the priest was tightly bound to a pillar with ropes. “The cords eating into the swelling flesh caused such exquisite torture,” reports Lea, “that when they visited him the next day, he begged piteously to be taken out and burned.”29

  Such were the instruments of torture that might be found in any well-equipped inquisitorial dungeon at any time over the six centuries of the Inquisition’s active operations. The simplest of them, as we have seen, required only a supply of water or a well-stoked fire, and the rest of them could be contrived with a few ropes and boards. All of them were effective in inflicting pain and injury on their victims. Yet they did not exhaust the undeniable human genius for devising ever more imaginative ways of terrorizing and punishing another human being. Once granted the liberty and opportunity to do so, the agents of the Inquisition raised the practice of torture to a high art.

  Some of the inquisitors—and the torturers who assisted them—were sadists for whom the opportunity to brutalize a fellow human being was the single best reason to join the ranks of the Inquisition. The victims, as we have seen, were stripped down to undergarments or were wholly naked during torture; the display of bare flesh was essential to the work of the torturers while, at the same time, degrading and humiliating the victims, but it is also true that the sight of naked flesh titillated at least some inquisitors and their henchmen as they watched the torturer at work. Indeed, the torture chamber was never a purely functional space like an operating room or a blacksmith’s shop, although it resembled both in its equipage. Rather, it was a theater of pain in which the victim was put on display for the entertainment of his or her persecutors.

  Unfortunately, the human genius for both art and invention can be found even in the inquisitorial torture chamber. Of course, the basic tools of the torturer—buckets and funnels, bars and blades, hammers and tongs—required no special skill to make or use. The wheel was something scavenged from a broken-down wagon, and a ladder could be readily used as a rack; the victim’s wrists were tied to the top rung, and weights were tied to the ankles to produce the same effect as a more elaborately constructed version of the same device. Some methods of torture required nothing more than a kitchen pantry: victims might be made to inhale the fumes of onions and sulphur until they retched, or eggs heated in boiling water might be thrust under their armpits. But some inquisitors and their servitors seemed to take real pleasure in devising ever more elaborate instruments of torture or ornamenting the commonplace ones in new and imaginative ways.

  “The heretic’s fork,” for example, was a simple but diabolically clever device consisting of a slender iron bar with sharp prongs at both ends; the device was strapped around the neck of the victim in a way that planted one set of prongs deep into the flesh under the chin and the other set of prongs against the sternum. When a victim was thus impaled, “the fork prevented all movement of the head and allowed the victim only to murmur, in a barely audible voice, ‘abiuro’ (‘I recant’).” To drive home the point of the device, so to speak, the phrase was inscribed into the metalwork as a reminder of exactly what the inquisitor wanted to hear from the victim thus afflicted.30

  Tongs were a commonplace of torture, and they were variously employed to handle hot coals, to pinch the flesh, to close the nose of a victim undergoing the water ordeal, or even to amputate a finger or a tongue, a woman’s nipple or a man’s genitals. But the ironmonger whose client was the Inquisition, whether on his own initiative or at the special request of his employer, might fashion a pair of tongs so that the hinge resembled the grinning head of a monstrous alligator and the jaws were lined with sharp teeth. The result was an implement that was even handier for inflicting pain and, at the same time, pleased the torturer’s twisted sense of humor and struck even greater terror into a victim watching the gaping jaws approach and then close.

  Some tinkerers came up with new and ever more nightmarish instruments of torture that served no other purpose than the infliction of pain. One such device, which we briefly glimpsed in the opening pages of this book, was a segmented object of bronze and iron in the shape of a pear that was designed to be inserted into various orifices of the human body. A screw-driven mechanism on the interior of the “pear” allowed it to be slowly expanded as the torturer turned the handle, thus stretching and tearing the tender flesh of the victim from the inside. As a final touch, the artisan who fabricated the pear added an elaborate figure of a leering Satan to please the torturer and taunt the victim in the moments before it disappeared into the interior cavity where it did its work.

  Why would an inquisitor go to such lengths when buckets of water and hot irons were so cheap, handy, and effective? “For only one reason,” answers Robert Held, referring not merely to the fanciful hardware but to the “universal and eternal institution” of torture itself. “Because it gives pleasure to the torturer.”31

  The same in
sight, of course, explains why the victim was often stripped naked during torture. Entirely aside from functional considerations—it is easier to torture a naked human being than a clothed one—the undressing of torture victims gratified the twisted appetites of the sexual sadists among the inquisitors and their staff of torturers. The point is made in a vintage engraving of a woman undergoing the ordeal by water at the hands of the Inquisition, an example of the atrocity propaganda favored by the critics of the Inquisition. The illustrator has carefully depicted the victim’s pretty face and wholly naked torso, the torturer bent over her body in apparent pleasure, and the audience of inquisitors and their familiars watching the whole ordeal with the fixed stare of dirty old men at a peep show.

  Such scenes were favored in art and letters over several centuries, ranging from the pious tracts of early Protestant reformers to the lurid gothic novels of the nineteenth century to the histories and commentaries of the secular humanists of the twentieth century. Indeed, much of what we think we know about the Inquisition derives from the images and narratives created by propagandists for whom “the cruelty and eroticism of inquisitors” is the emblematic sin of organized religion in general and the Roman Catholic church in particular. And we might suspect that the artist who makes a drawing of a naked woman undergoing torture—as well as those who view his work from a safe distance and perhaps in private—may be secretly sharing some of the darker desires of the torturer himself. Putting such mixed motives aside, however, the fact remains that the depictions of inquisitorial excess are based on fact rather than fancy. Not only did the Inquisition embrace the torturer’s art in its war on heresy, but it also elevated and dignified the use of torture as a legal and even a pious act.32