The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “By confiscation the heretics were forced to furnish the means for their own destruction,” writes Lea, whose words apply with equal accuracy to the looting of the victims of later persecutions in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. “Avarice joined hands with fanaticism, and between them they supplied motive power for a hundred years of fierce, unremitting, unrelenting persecution, which in the end accomplished its main purpose.”44

  To be sure, the destruction of a house on the orders of the Inquisition profited no one. Still, the early and more principled inquisitors regarded the house where a perfectus lived—or where the last rite of the consolamentum had been conducted for a dying Cathar—as something so tainted that it could no longer be used by good Christians. That was why, for example, the inquisitor’s decree might prohibit the construction of a new house on the blasted plot of ground where the old house had stood. Even the houses of fautors—those good-hearted souls who did nothing more than shelter a friend or relation who was accused of the crime of heresy—could be reduced to rubble on the orders of the inquisitor. And, according to law, the civil magistrates were commanded by the Church to carry out an order for destruction within ten days after it was handed down by an inquisitor.

  When the inquisitors turned to the practical problem of paying the bills, however, it occurred to them that the property of an accused heretic could be put to better use. The materials from a destroyed house, for example, might be retrieved and recycled for the construction of a worthy structure like a hospital or convent. Or the inquisitors themselves might commandeer the house of a convicted heretic for use as a dormitory or prison. Eventually, the Inquisition came to realize that the house of a convicted heretic was not so hateful that it could not be used to turn a profit. Thus began what Lea calls, in a characteristically colorful turn of phrase, the “saturnalia of plunder” that was the highly profitable by-product of the war on heresy.45

  To increase the cash flow of the Inquisition, some inquisitors offered to commute the harsher sentences in exchange for a cash payment; thus did the inquisitors of Toulouse extract enough money from twelve wealthy heretics to build the cathedral of Lavaur. At other times and places, the inquisitors often behaved more like arbitrageurs and speculators than crusaders against heretical depravity. Lands, houses, money, and other property were seized and inventoried as soon as someone came under suspicion of heresy, to prevent the suspect from hiding or selling the property before a formal order of forfeiture was issued. To protect the interests of Church and state in the plunder, the royal tax collectors in France placed a mortgage against the property of an accused heretic and thus trumped any claims that might be made by his wife and children or a stranger who sought to buy the property from the accused heretic.

  Confiscation and forfeiture by order of the Inquisition created a whole new set of uncertainties in business transactions. Sellers of property in the city of Florence, for example, were obliged to post a bond against the risk that the buyer might take up residence in a house and later find out that it was the subject of a new or long-simmering inquisitorial proceeding. The Inquisition was so pervasive and so unsettling that, Henry Charles Lea insists, it literally changed the history of Europe. Commerce and industry languished in the lands where it operated with the greatest authority, such as Italy, Spain, and southern France, argues Lea, and flourished in places like England and the Netherlands, where it was toothless or nonexistent.

  To make sure that the possessions of a convicted heretic were thoroughly ransacked, the Inquisition also imposed fines on its victims, sometimes as a form of penance and sometimes as the price for buying the commutation of an even harsher punishment. In some precincts, the obligation to wear the crosses of infamy was accompanied by a fine of five or ten florins of pure gold to “defray the expenses of trial.” At first, Pope Innocent IV raised a pious objection to the imposition of fines “to the disgrace of the Holy See and the scandal of the faithful at large,” and he later decreed that fines were forbidden in favor of other forms of penance. But the operating expenses of the Inquisition were so considerable that the popes soon found themselves compelled to approve the imposition of fines for “pious uses,” which included the payment of the inquisitors themselves.46

  Whenever the supply of living heretics with available assets ran low, the Inquisition turned to the prosecution of dead ones. Since a “defunct” defendant was unable to protest—and the passage of time since his death meant that witnesses and evidence were sparse or wholly unavailable—the proceedings “against the memory” of dead heretics required even less evidence and less effort than the trial of a live one. The real motive was plainly the confiscation of the dead heretic’s fortune, and the grisly practice of exhuming and prosecuting corpses, however offensive it might have been to the general populace, presented an opportunity for the Inquisition to turn a risk-free and effortless profit.47

  As we have seen, the Inquisition was permitted to accuse and condemn dead heretics for crimes dating back at least forty years and, in some places, a full century. The period ran not from the date on which the alleged crime was committed but when it was detected, which further extended the inquisitor’s long reach. As a result, anyone who had done business with someone later accused of heresy—and anyone who had inherited property from the dead heretic—was always at risk that the inquisitor would claim money or property that had passed out of the hands of the dead heretic long ago.

  Thus, for example, Fra Grimaldo, the inquisitor of Florence, prosecuted the “memory” of a wealthy and influential Florentine nobleman more than sixty years after the latter’s death, belatedly charging the deceased with having submitted to the consolamentum on his deathbed and then proceeding against his surviving grandchildren. None of the descendants of the dead heretic was actually accused of heresy; indeed, one of his grandchildren was a friar and another served as the prior of a church. But the property that had once belonged to the dead man was seized by the Inquisition, and the grandchildren who served the Church were defrocked on the grounds that the descendants of a heretic down to the second generation were ineligible to hold clerical rank.

  Now and then, some high-minded churchman might address the plain injustice of confiscation and seizure of property. Suppose, for example, that the wife of a condemned heretic was herself a good Catholic; should she be reduced to poverty, too? Under canon law, the dower—a portion of the husband’s property set aside for the support of his widow in the event of his death—was held to be exempt from confiscation, but only if the wife could prove to the satisfaction of the Inquisition that she did not know that her husband was a heretic when they were married. Moreover, if she later learned that her husband held heretical beliefs, she would forfeit the exemption if she had failed to report her spouse to the Inquisition within forty days. Even if the wife was entitled to draw on the dower for her livelihood, the right ended on her own death. The children of a heretic were disinherited, and so the dower was confiscated by the Inquisition on the death of their mother.

  Any concern for widows and orphans that might stir the conscience of a principled inquisitor was usually outweighed by more practical considerations. The Inquisition was a high-overhead operation, and money was always needed for the support of the inquisitors and their servitors, for the building and running of prisons, and even for such incidentals as the yellow cloth for the crosses worn by repentant heretics and the kindling for the fires on which unrepentant heretics were burned alive. As the war on heresy ran out of Cathars and Waldensians, the Inquisition’s restless search for fresh victims came to be driven by sheer greed. “But for the gains to be made out of fines and confiscations, its work would have been much less thorough,” observes Lea. “It would have sunk into comparative insignificance as soon as the first frantic zeal of bigotry had exhausted itself.”48

  The plunder prompted a whole new conflict between Church and state. In theory, the income from fines, commutations, and the sale of confiscated property was to be divided in equal s
hares: one-third to the municipal government of the town where the inquisitors had set up their tribunal, one-third to defray the expenses of the inquisitors who had issued the order of confiscation or imposed the fine, and the rest to the Church for the use of the local bishop and to defray the general operating expenses of the Inquisition. But the actual division of the spoils varied from place to place. In France, the forfeited property of convicted heretics belonged to the king, although he was expected to apportion some of the proceeds to the inquisitors at work in France and to the operating expenses of the inquisitorial prisons in his territories, including rations for the prisoners and wages for their guards. In Italy, by contrast, the Inquisition managed to keep its hands on so many of the spoils that it was self-supporting.

  All these practices were wholly legal under the laws of Church and state. But the opportunity to make money off the workings of the Inquisition was hardly limited to fines and confiscations. An inquisitor might profit by selling the licenses to bear arms that were granted to agents of the Inquisition, as we have already seen, or by embezzling the money and property entrusted to his care. Jacques de Polignac, warden of the inquisitorial prison at Carcassonne, was found to have conspired with other officials to take possession of “a castle, several farms and other lands, vineyards, orchards and movables,” all of which had been seized from the convicted heretics in his custody. Once his crime was discovered, the crooked jailor and his co-conspirators were ordered to return the plunder—not to the victims from whom it had been taken, of course, but to the Inquisition.49

  The mendicant orders had been founded on the principle of poverty, but the high ideals of Saint Dominic and Saint Francis did not prevent the friar-inquisitors from turning the prosecution of heresy into a paying business. The inquisitors in the mercantile center of Venice showed a special genius for commerce that was quite at odds with their original vows; they speculated in real estate and lent out the money in their coffers at interest to produce yet more profits. A few engaged in even more cynical abuses: the Franciscan inquisitor known as Brother Mascar of Padua, for example, succeeded in extorting a fortune over his four decades of service in what can only be called a protection scheme—a payoff to the inquisitor would ensure that the Inquisition looked elsewhere for its victims.

  By far the most common punishment for convicted heretics and their defenders was a term of confinement behind walls and bars. Accused heretics taken from a holding cell to be tried by the Inquisition were likely to be returned to the same place, sometimes for years and sometimes for life under a sentence of “perpetual imprisonment in chains.” Defenders of the Inquisition have pointed out that the inquisitorial jail was no worse than any other medieval prison, both of which were “frightful abodes of misery.” But we should not overlook a basic distinction between the two: the population of an ordinary prison consisted of actual criminals whereas the Inquisition concerned itself with men and women who were guilty only of thinking the wrong thought at the wrong time and place.50

  In service to the legal fiction that the Inquisition imposed only penance and not punishment, the prisons were operated by the civil authorities rather than by the Inquisition. The inquisitor’s formula for sentencing a condemned heretic to prison consisted of yet another elaborate circumlocution. The heretic is “to take himself to the prison prepared for him,” and if he refuses to do so, the secular authorities are ordered to arrest the noncompliant convict and convey him to the place of incarceration. The passive voice in which the sentence was formulated, and the pious relinquishment of the heretic to the secular government, allowed the inquisitor to wash his hands of his victim’s fate.51

  Inquisitorial prisons were of two kinds, the murus largus (wide walls) for suspects and ordinary prisoners, and the murus strictus (narrow walls) reserved for men and women whose confessions had been deemed unsatisfactory by the Inquisition or who had attempted to escape from an ordinary prison. In its architecture the murus largus was patterned after a monastery, with a series of cells along a common passage. The inmates were able to see and speak with others, spouses were allowed to visit on occasion, and a prisoner might be permitted other callers as well, sometimes a courageous friend and sometimes a spy sent into the cell by the Inquisition. We are told that a disguised perfectus might even succeed in calling on a dying Cathar behind bars and administering the consolamentum in secret, although the bribery of a guard was surely necessary to achieve such a daring exploit.

  The murus strictus, by contrast, was essentially a dungeon, and the lost soul who ended up there might not see another human face throughout his confinement. The cells were just large enough for a single prisoner. Even so, the inmate’s hands and feet were chained, and sometimes the chains were affixed to the wall to ensure complete immobility. Here were imprisoned the men and women who had confessed only under torture or threat of burning at the stake; the inquisitors convinced themselves that such heretics were likely to “backslide” into the false beliefs that they had repudiated. For that reason alone, in fact, convicted heretics whose confessions were “imperfect” were generally sent into solitary confinement so that they would be “prevented from corrupting others” after the inevitable relapse into their bad old ways.52

  A third kind of confinement, the murus strictissimus, was maintained for those whom the Inquisition regarded as the worst offenders, including men and women who had been members of Catholic religious orders at the time of their crime or conviction. When a nun called Jeanne de la Tour was convicted on charges of holding both Cathar and Waldensian beliefs, for example, she was placed in a sealed cell with only a single narrow opening through which a meager allotment of food and water, and nothing else, was provided. Confinement in the tomblike cell was the functional equivalent of a death sentence.

  The inmates of all inquisitorial prisons were fed on bread and water only, a practice that was meant not only to punish but also to reduce the prison’s operating expenses. The short rations conferred a secondary benefit: men and women who lived on meager portions of bread and water did not live very long. “[I]f they perished through neglect and starvation,” the jailers calculated, “it was a saving of expense.” Prisoners might improve their lot if they could afford to bribe the jailors and bring in decent rations from outside the prison, or if they could call on someone who was both brave enough and wealthy enough to pay for such amenities. But even the richest convicts were generally impoverished by fines and confiscations before they ended up in prison, and their friends and relations on the outside were seldom willing to risk the charge of fautorship by sending money or provisions to the gates of the inquisitorial prison.53

  The cost of keeping convicted heretics in “perpetual” confinement, even under such mean circumstances, turned out to be a considerable burden. As the Inquisition grew in size and scope—and as its jails filled up with accused and convicted heretics—the real price of persecution began to set the various players at odds with one another. Inquisitors, bishops, lords, and town councilors bickered among themselves over who ought to pay for the building of prisons, the salaries of jailors, and the cost of bread, water, and straw for the inmates. As a general rule, whoever seized the property of an accused heretic was supposed to pay for the costs of his or her imprisonment. As a practical matter, though, some inquisitors found it necessary to threaten prosecution on charges of fautorship against bishops or magistrates who were quick to seize the property of condemned individuals but slow to feed them.54

  Now and then, the Inquisition was capable of an act of genuine mercy. A man named Sabbatier, who had been convicted of heresy and sentenced to prison on the basis of his own belief in Catharism, pointed out to the inquisitor that he was the sole support of his elderly father, “a Catholic and a poor man.” The inquisitor deigned to postpone Sabbatier’s punishment “as long as his father shall live; and meanwhile he shall wear a black mantle and on each garment a cross with two transverse branches, and he shall provide for his father as best he can.” But the q
uality of mercy was somewhat strained. On the death of his father, the original sentence was to be carried out.55

  A few intrepid inmates managed to escape the custody of the Inquisition, as evidenced by the inclusion in the inquisitor’s handbooks of a form to be used in requesting the return of a fugitive. A man named Giuseppe Pignata, serving a sentence in the inquisitorial prison at Rome in 1693, demonstrated the skill, guile, and patience necessary to achieve such a feat. A gifted artist, he sketched a charming portrait of a guard’s lover and traded it for a penknife. Then he persuaded the prison doctor to provide him with a small brazier, pointing out that he had been badly injured during torture and needed a source of heat in his cold cell. He used the brazier as a forge, and turned the penknife into a boring tool that enabled him slowly to dig his way out of the cell. Finally, he resorted to the classic tool of the prison escape—a rope of knotted sheets—to put himself beyond the reach of the Inquisition.

  Such exploits were rare. Far more often, victims remained in their cells, shackled and starved, until the inquisitor who put them there finally consented to release them. If convicted heretics seldom served life sentences, they might nevertheless wait years or even decades before the Inquisition bestirred itself to let them go. Even then, the release from prison might be conditioned on the wearing of crosses, the making of a pilgrimage, or some other lingering penance. And, once released, the man or woman who had once been convicted was now broken, impoverished, and disgraced.

  The ultimate penalty for the crime of heresy—and the iconic scene of the Inquisition—was burning at the stake. The death penalty was reserved for convicted heretics who had refused to confess or who, having offered a confession, then dared to disavow their guilt. Strictly speaking, as we have seen, the inquisitor never sentenced a convicted heretic to death; rather, the victim was excommunicated from the Church and then “abandoned” to the public executioner. Yet again, the formbooks consulted by working inquisitors provided a script for the solemn occasion, a formula that first addressed the victim himself and then the public magistrates into whose custody he was now consigned.