The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  “We relinquish him now to secular judgment and, by the authority which we wield, we not only condemn him as a heretic,” recited the inquisitor, “but also we bind him with the chain of excommunication as fautors, receivers, and defenders of heretics all persons who knowingly henceforth either harbour or defend him or lend him counsel, aid or favour.”56

  The threat against “defenders of heretics” was directed at any public official who might hesitate to carry out the unspoken death sentence. Since the friar-inquisitor, as an ordained cleric, was forbidden by canon law to shed blood, the formula is pointedly silent on what will actually happen to the victim after he or she is abandoned by the Church. Indeed, the inquisitor was supposed to “pray that no death might ensue,” according to historian G. G. Coulton, “even while the utterer of that prayer would have been bound to excommunicate any secular judge who should neglect to inflict death.”57

  The execution of a convicted heretic, like every other aspect of the Inquisition, was designed to inspire terror and horror in the general populace and, especially, in anyone who might be tempted to embrace a forbidden faith, but the grand inquisitor did not neglect the production values, “as if he were an entrepreneur offering a show.” Burnings were scheduled for feast days, both to emphasize the sanctity of the Inquisition and to build the crowd; after all, it was a day off from work for the whole populace, and the spectacle amounted to a highly theatrical if also grisly form of entertainment. To accommodate the greatest number of eager spectators, the preferred venue was the public square outside the cathedral where the formal ceremony of sentencing the heretics would take place.58

  Cardinals and bishops in full regalia, richly dressed nobles and their ladies, even the king and queen were encouraged to attend the burning of condemned heretics as guests of honor. The square would be decorated with flags and banners, and the inquisitorial ranks swelled with priests and soldiers, drummers and trumpeters, heralds and flag bearers. Surely the presence of a crowd would have also attracted food vendors, street musicians, and perhaps more than a few pickpockets. As sheer entertainment, nothing could rival the Inquisition at the moment when its terrible power was on display.

  By contrast, the victims presented a less festive sight. According to a pious tradition, a condemned woman would wash her face and remove any cosmetics “so as not to go painted before God.” If the victims had been recently questioned under torture, their hair would still be cut short or burned off and their wounds would be fresh; one victim, for example, was carried to the stake in a chair because his feet had been burned to the bone during an ordeal by fire. Even if the victim had spent months or years in an inquisitorial prison, he or she might be crippled by the instruments of torture that had been applied to joints and bones. At dawn on the day of judgment, they would be offered a meager last meal, if they still had any appetite as the last hour of their lives approached.59

  Other preparations were made in the days before the spectacle. The pyre was made ready by erecting upright stakes in the public square—one for each victim—and then piling straw, kindling, and faggots of wood around the base of each stake. Some burnings were conducted at ground level or even in pits, especially in the earlier, more primitive years of the Inquisition, but a platform of wood and masonry was more often erected in the square to improve the sightlines for the audience. If royalty, aristocracy, or high clergy were in attendance, they would be provided seats on or near the platform so that they could see and be seen by the crowd. The victims were kept offstage to heighten the suspense in advance of the grand moment when they were presented to the crowd.

  First, the inquisitors and the visiting dignitaries gathered in a church or cathedral, where a mass was conducted and a sermon preached. The self-confessed heretics who had recanted their false beliefs were welcomed back into the Church and then told what penances, light or harsh, they would be required to make as a condition for forgiveness of their sins. At last, the inquisitors and their distinguished guests exited the sacred precincts of the church or cathedral, which were thought to be unsuitable for the pronouncement of the death sentence, and entered the public square in a formal procession.

  Then the condemned men and women, shackled and closely guarded, were escorted to the stake. On hand at all times were friars whose task was not to comfort the victims in the moments leading up to their death but to extract an eleventh-hour confession. Right up to the moment when the straw was set aflame, the friars urged the condemned heretics to save their souls—and possibly their lives, too—by admitting their guilt, recanting their false beliefs, and embracing the Catholic faith. Heretics who confessed in time were likely to spend the rest of their lives in prison, but at least they would not die then and there. By contrast, those who had already confessed to heresy on a previous occasion and had been sentenced to die as relapsed heretics would still be burned alive even if they confessed a second time, but at least—the friars told them—they would save their souls by dying as Catholics.

  An admission of guilt, as we have seen, was always an urgent concern of the Inquisition, and never more so than when it came to capital punishment. Burning an unrepentant heretic posed the risk of presenting his fellow believers with a martyr; if we are to believe the evidence of the Inquisition itself, the bones of a dead heretic might be collected and preserved as relics. A display of courage in the face of death by a true believer in a dissident faith might make the wrong impression on the good Catholics in the crowd. For that reason, too, the condemned heretic was not permitted to speak and, in some cases, he was gagged to prevent him from addressing the crowd with some affirmation of faith before going up in flames.

  One such gagging device, known as the mute’s bridle, consisted of an iron box that was inserted into the victim’s mouth and held in place by a collar around the neck. The gag itself might be used to inflict yet more pain and humiliation on the victim; when the Renaissance scholar and scientist Giordano Bruno was sent to the stake in Rome in 1600, he was wearing an elaborate contraption “so constructed that one long spike pierced his tongue and the floor of his mouth and came out underneath his chin, while another penetrated up through his palate.” Thus was the victim pointedly punished for his previous false utterings and prevented from making any new ones while, at the same time, he was prevented from uttering any screams that might have “interfered with the sacred music,” as Robert Held describes the scene.60

  Still, despite such elaborate precautions, not every public execution was free of bungling. According to an eyewitness to the burning of the proto-Protestant reformer John Huss at Constance in 1415, the victim was bound to the stake with ropes tied tightly at his ankles, knees, groin, waist, and arms, and with a chain around his neck. After Huss had been thus fixed in place and made ready for burning, however, someone noticed that he was facing east, the direction of Jerusalem, and so the solemn moment was delayed while he was unbound, turned away from the sacred city, and tied up again. The scene might strike us as ludicrous and even laughable if it were not so appalling.61

  Once the victim was properly bound to the stake, additional straw and wood were added to the pyre, sometimes piled up to the prisoner’s neck. The priests ceased their preaching to the condemned man or woman and hastily withdrew to a safe distance, although even then, a cross was sometimes fixed to a long staff and held in front of the victim’s face until the moment of death. By that point, of course, the gesture was intended only to taunt and admonish the victim because it was plainly too late to achieve a conversion. At last, the inquisitor clapped his hands as a signal to the executioner to set a lighted torch to the kindling and thus send the heretic to hell.

  Some victims of the Inquisition went courageously to their deaths as true believers and willing martyrs. The most intrepid of them, according to one eyewitness account, “laughed as they were bound to the pyre.” Another contemporary observer reported that some of the condemned men and women “thrust their hands and feet into the flames with the most dauntless fortitu
de,” as if to make the point that they welcomed martyrdom in the name of their forbidden faith, “and all of them yielded to their fate with such resolution that many of the amazed spectators lamented that such heroic souls had not been more enlightened.” Indeed, the public display of true belief by a dying heretic was the worst fear of the Inquisition and one that the monks sought to avoid at all costs.62

  Modern medical writers have speculated that some victims of the Inquisition, both under torture and at the stake, may have been blessed with “a strange state of exaltation” that resulted from the sudden release of hormones by bodies subjected to stress, shock, and trauma. Yet the fact remains that most of the victims suffered terribly in the flames, and the sound of groans and screams rose above the roar of the fire and the taunts or guffaws of those in the crowd who took pleasure in this horror show. Of course, that is why the Church took such pains to convince its congregants that the victims of the Inquisition were nothing more than “heretical filth” whose disposal was a sacred duty. On the day when the machinery of persecution finally spat out the broken bodies of its victims, they were to be seen as “traitors to God” whose deaths were a victory rather than a tragedy.63

  A well-fueled pyre might burn for hours, roasting the flesh long after the victims were dead. But the human body is not easily burned to ash, and it was always necessary to remove and dispose of the charred remains. The bones were broken up, the viscera and body parts were gathered, and the whole ghastly mess was tossed on a newly kindled fire for the purpose of reducing it still further. When the second fire burned out, the ashes and fragments of bone were collected and dumped on the waste ground along with the dung and garbage. Or, if the inquisitor feared that someone would try to retrieve a splinter of bone or a stray tooth, he might order the remains to be tossed into a river or stream to defeat the relic hunters. Such were the precautions taken for such famous heretics as John Huss and Savonarola, the radical priest of Florence who was burned alive in 1498 in the same square where he had once organized the famous Bonfire of the Vanities.64

  So dutiful were the record keepers of the medieval Inquisition that we are able to inspect a kind of expense report for the execution of four heretics at Carcassonne on April 24, 1323. The greatest single expense, at slightly more than 55 sols, was for “large wood,” and another 23 sols were spent on vine-branches and straw. Four stakes cost nearly 11 sols, and the ropes cost another 4 sols and 7 deniers. The executioner was paid 20 sols for each victim. The whole job priced out at exactly 8 livres, 14 sols, and 7 deniers.* The aroma of burning human flesh may have been regarded by the inquisitors as pleasing to God, but even at such sublime moments, the inquisitors kept one eye on the bottom line. Such was the real price of true belief and the victory of God over the Devil and his minions.

  How many men, women, and children were victims of the Inquisition? Despite the inquisitorial obsession for record keeping, the answer is mostly a matter of surmise. As it turns out, historians have recovered documents that describe in obsessive detail the work of some inquisitors at certain times and places, but none at all for many other agents of the Inquisition who operated at other times and places during its long history.

  Then, too, the master plan as it appears in papal decrees, canon law, and the inquisitor’s manuals is not always corroborated by the notarial transcripts and ledger books that survived the final destruction of the Inquisition in the nineteenth century. To put it another way, we know how the vast machinery of persecution was designed to operate, but we do not know how well it worked in practice—an accident of history that the defenders of the Inquisition have always used to their advantage in arguing that the Inquisition never fulfilled the grandiose dreams of its creators and operators.

  Bernard Gui, for example, maintained a register of 930 sentences that he imposed as an inquisitor at Carcassonne from 1308 to 1323. We cannot know with certainty whether the register is accurate or complete, but he reports that he sent only 42 men and women to the stake, and he notes that 3 escaped heretics were to be put to death if captured. By contrast, he sentenced 307 convicted heretics to prison, 143 to the wearing of crosses, and 9 to go on compulsory pilgrimages. A total of 86 “defunct” heretics were sentenced posthumously to burning or imprisonment. The rest suffered penalties that included exile, a spell in the pillory, destruction of houses, and “degradation” of clerical rank. In a few cases, Gui recorded a reduction of sentence; someone sentenced to prison might be permitted to wear crosses instead, and a few were released from the obligation to wear crosses.

  Gui might strike the modern reader as a moderate fellow. After all, he apparently sent fewer than fifty men and women to their deaths over a span of fifteen years, and he imposed the death sentence on far more “defunct” heretics than living ones. But even if Gui was wholly accurate in his record keeping, he may not have been a typical inquisitor. Robert le Bougre, for example, put 183 Cathars to the flames at a single auto-da-fé attended by the king of Navarre in 1239 and described by one pleased spectator as a “holocaust, very great and pleasing to God.” Some two hundred Cathars were burned alive when the fortress of Montségur was finally besieged and conquered in 1244. As we shall see, the burning of women accused of witchcraft during the late Middle Ages and the operations of the Spanish Inquisition after 1492 brought the death toll into the tens of thousands.65

  Even so, the crimes of the Inquisition cannot be accurately measured by a body count. By both its decrees and its example, the Inquisition was responsible for the erosion of what meager liberties were available to men and women across Europe, the steady expansion of torture and arbitrary imprisonment and the death penalty, the restriction of what was permissible to think and read and know, and the establishment of a reign of terror that endured in one form or another for six centuries. Above all, the Inquisition perfected and preserved a model of authoritarianism that continued to operate long after the ashes of the last nameless heretic to be burned alive were scattered to the winds.

  THE INQUISITOR’S MANUAL

  POPE (Exhausted): It is clearly understood: he is not to be tortured. (Pause.) At the very most, he may be shown the instruments.

  INQUISITOR: That will be adequate, Your Holiness. Mr. Galilei understands machinery.

  BERTOLT BRECHT, Galileo

  The Inquisition achieved a victory of genocidal proportions against its first victims, but not before driving the Cathars underground and turning them into fugitives. Instead of wearing the distinctive black robe that indicated their high rank, the perfecti now donned blue or dark green mantles and contented themselves with a black girdle worn under their clothing or just a symbolic black thread next to the skin. Male and female perfecti traveled in pairs, passing themselves off as married couples and pretending to be peddlers. Sometimes they resorted to deliberately eating meat in roadhouses and taverns to throw off inquisitorial agents on the prowl for people whose pale skin and thin torsos suggested that they were practicing the rigorous self-denial of Catharism.

  The perfecti sought refuge in a network of safe houses that were maintained here and there across Europe by their fellow Cathars; the hiding place might be an attic or cellar, a dovecote or sometimes just a shallow hole in the ground concealed by a chest. So the ritual of the consolamentum was still available to the ever-diminishing number of dedicated Cathars who managed to avoid arrest, torture, imprisonment, and execution. But they were always at risk of detection by spies in service to the Inquisition or betrayal by self-professed Cathars who had agreed to serve as double agents in order to spare their own lives. By 1330, the last Cathar had been burned alive by the Inquisition, and Catharism was extinct.*

  No such victory could be claimed against the other target of the Inquisition in its early years, the Christian rigorists known as the Waldensians. Although they had been lumped with the Cathars and slandered as Devil worshippers, baby killers, and sexual orgiasts—and many of them were, in fact, burned alive by the Inquisition—one group of Waldensians was actually p
ermitted to rejoin the Church under the new name of Poor Catholics, an acknowledgment that the Waldensian beliefs and practices were not quite as diabolical as advertised by their persecutors. A few other Waldensians managed to find sanctuary in remote villages in Italy, where they succeeded in preserving the old faith while the Inquisition busied itself with heretics who were closer at hand. In 1526, when the Protestant Reformation had reached a critical mass, a delegation of surviving Waldensians emerged from hiding to make contact with their kindred spirits in Germany and Switzerland.

  “We are in agreement with you in everything,” a Waldensian minister (or barba) named George Morel wrote to the Christian reformers who had unwittingly followed in the footsteps of the Waldensians. “From the time of the apostles we have had in essentials an understanding of the faith which is yours.”1

  So the medieval Inquisition’s original raison d’être—“the most spectacular kinds of heresy,” as historian Edward Peters insists on calling the Cathars and Waldensians—disappeared from sight within a century or so after it was first deployed. But the Church refused to declare victory in its war on heresy. Quite to the contrary, the Inquisition continued to search for new heretics to torture and burn for another five hundred years, and the inquisitors never failed to find them. Indeed, as we shall see, the Inquisition was perfectly capable of conjuring up a new heresy on its own initiative to provide itself with victims.2

  The sheer staying power of the Inquisition may have been its most horrific feature. Like any bureaucracy, the Inquisition did what was necessary to preserve itself. And the men on its payroll—not just the inquisitors but the familiars, notaries, scriveners, attorneys, doctors, bookkeepers, guards, torturers, and executioners—were not its only constituency. Emperors, kings, and popes, too, found the inquisitorial apparatus so useful in acquiring and maintaining their own wealth and power that they were always reluctant to shut it down merely because the friar-inquisitors had been successful against their first victims. Once the machinery of persecution had been assembled, perfected, and put into operation, the temptation to use it was irresistible and perhaps inevitable.