As the last of the Cathars and Waldensians went up in smoke or went into hiding, the Inquisition had already found a new supply of heretics. Remarkably, the next victims of the friar-inquisitors came from within their own ranks.
The so-called spirituali (Spirituals) were Franciscan monks who sought to preserve the ideals of Saint Francis even as the pope commanded that members of their order leave the monastery and enter the world as professional persecutors. The inquisitors, as we have seen, were intent on separating heretics from their money, and using the confiscated wealth to build the infrastructure of the Inquisition. The spirituali, as their name implies, preferred to engage in purely spiritual pursuits, including the study of apocalyptic texts that prompted them to expect the end of days, and they insisted on wearing the poorest of clothing to symbolize their vows of poverty. Their patched robes marked them as easy targets of the Inquisition.
Four of the Spirituals, for example, were arrested and tried by the Inquisition at Marseilles in 1318. Under interrogation, they were asked if they recognized the power of the pope to authorize their superiors to decide “what was poverty in clothing,” but the apparently innocuous question was a theological trap; if the friars answered yes, they would have been called upon to give up the threadbare habits that they insisted on wearing and put themselves under the authority of what they regarded as the corrupted Franciscan order. By answering no, they condemned themselves as heretics, and the four of them were burned alive. The Spirituals continued to provide the Inquisition with “occasional small batches for the pyre,” and their ashes were reportedly gathered by their followers and preserved as relics: “If you are the bones of the saints, help me” was the prayer of a woman named Gagliardi Fardi, or so she confessed when she, too, was tried on charges of heresy.3
The spectacle of poor friars being burned alive by a rich and powerful Church only served to stoke the passions of men and women whose religious imagination—as well as their sense of right and wrong—disposed them toward what they regarded as a purer Christianity. Paradoxically, the workings of the Inquisition seemed to encourage an even greater flowering of religious diversity in Christendom, an upwelling of “mystics, prophets and visionaries” and the yearnful and zealous Christians who embraced their teachings. By comparison with the plump and bejeweled princes of the Church, the “poverty fanatics” who were so often the target of the Inquisition may have seemed to be far more sympathetic figures. The burning of accused heretics, according to Malcolm Lambert, “could and did have the effect sometimes of actually spreading heresy.”4
A whole new vocabulary was coined to identify the apparent proliferation of heresies—the Poor of Lyons, the Poor Lombards, and the Poor Brothers of Penitence of the Third Order of St. Francis, the Humiliati and the Fraticelli, the Beghards and the Beguines, the Arnoldists and the Speronists, the Concorezzenses and the Drugunthians, and many more besides. Some of the labels were used interchangeably to describe the same sect, some were used broadly to describe members of wholly unrelated sects, and some were used to identify heresies that existed only in the fervid minds of the inquisitors themselves. The inquisitors, as it turned out, were so bedazzled and befuddled that they saw heresies where none existed.
The so-called heresy of the Free Spirit, for example, was condemned as “an abominable sect” by the Council of Vienne in 1312. Its members supposedly believed that they had achieved a state of mystical perfection that rendered them incapable of sin and thus free to engage in orgies and other “aberrant sexual practices.” One accused heretic named Johann Hartmann, answering the leading questions of an inquisitor during his interrogation in 1367, affirmed that “the free in spirit could have intercourse with sister or mother, even on the altar.” But Malcolm Lambert insists that Hartmann himself was “probably a verbal exhibitionist,” and the other evidence “sprang from envious gossip, inquisitorial imagination, or distortion of the paradoxical statements of true mystics.” Indeed, the sect of the Free Spirit never really existed at all, although more than one eccentric was burned at the stake on charges that he or she belonged to the imaginary cult.5 “What appeared to have happened,” explains author Edward Burman, “is that papal fears, coupled with inquisitorial zeal, created heresies to satisfy a need for new heresies.”6
Other dissident religious communities were quite real, but they were not the “heretical filth” that the Inquisition imagined them to be. The Beguines, for example, consisted of unmarried or widowed women in the cities of northern Europe who took vows of chastity and lived communally in convent houses, occupied themselves with manual labor and acts of charity, and sought their own spiritual self-improvement through meditation. A Beguine named Marguerite Porete, for example, authored a book titled The Mirror of Simple Souls in which she instructed her pious readers on “the progress of the soul through seven states of grace.” Like the Spirituals, the Beguines studied the more arcane apocalyptic texts in urgent anticipation of the end-times. The Beghards were their male counterparts, thus named because—just like the original Franciscans and Dominicans—they lived as mendicants and relied on charity for their sustenance.
As self-inspired monastics with no formal allegiance to the Church, the Beguines and the Beghards soon fell afoul of the Inquisition. The hot-eyed inquisitors accused them of engaging in both theological and sexual outrages—the old and inevitable charge of the heresy hunters—and Bernard Gui convinced himself that the Beguines were actually the female auxiliary of the heretical sect known as the Fraticelli. Marguerite Porete was arrested and tried on charges of heresy by the grand inquisitor of Paris in 1310, and both the woman and the books she had written were put to the flames by the Inquisition. A great many other Beguines followed her to the stake even though Pope John XXII cautioned the archbishops in France “to enquire into the beliefs of the Beguines, and distinguish between the ‘good’ ones and the ‘bad’ ones.”7
The inquisitors, though, seem to have been more concerned about the autonomy of the Beguines, who did not answer to fathers, husbands, or priests, than about their supposed carnal or diabolical practices. Bernard Gui, for example, complains in his manual that “they often gather on holy days and Sundays with others who live independently” and read aloud from various texts, including the same ones used by the Church. “Like monkeys, they act in imitation,” rants Gui, “although the teaching and preaching of God’s commandments and the articles of faith must be exercised within holy Church by her rectors and pastors.” Among the questions to be put to suspected Beghards and Beguines, according to Gui’s manual, is one that tests their obedience to the pope: “Did he believe that the pope could become a heretic and lose his papal authority if he approved the condemnation of these Beguins as heretics?”8
The Inquisition had its own complicated motives for finding more bodies to torture and burn. A final victory in the war on heresy, of course, would have promptly rendered the Inquisition obsolete and put the inquisitors and their servitors out of work. Then, too, the inquisitors sought to enforce the theological monopoly of the Church as a matter of realpolitik, and the Inquisition objected to the Beguines and the Beghards less because they were dangerous heretics than because they submitted themselves to “no Rule and no authority from the Holy See.” Indeed, The Mirror of Simple Souls continued to circulate as a work of inspirational literature in monasteries and convents long after its author was burned at the stake. “So little obvious was the heresy in it,” observes Lambert, “that hardly any of its readers over the centuries questioned its orthodoxy.”9
Above all, the contraption that had been invented to exterminate the Cathars and the Waldensians achieved a certain forward momentum, and it would have taken a scrupulous and forceful decision by a king or pope to slow it down or stop it. No such order was issued for another five hundred years. Men in power in both Church and state, as we shall see, found the Inquisition to be a practical and powerful tool, one that they preferred to maintain in good working order against the day when they might hav
e occasion to use it for purposes of their own and not merely for the greater glory of God.
King Philip IV of France, known by the fawning title of Philip the Fair, was so distressed by the excesses of the Inquisition on his own soil that he was moved to issue a decree in 1292 by which the royal officer at Carcassonne was ordered to stop arresting and imprisoning citizens of France at the request of the inquisitors unless the suspect had actually confessed to the crime or could be proved a heretic by “the testimony of several trustworthy men.” The decree, as it turns out, did not accomplish much—in fact, the inquisitorial outrages at Carcassonne were so egregious that even Pope Clement V was moved to order a formal investigation.10
Only a few years later, however, King Philip decided that the Inquisition was not so bad after all. The royal treasury was depleted, and the king resolved to enrich himself at the expense of the Knights Templar, an order of pious warrior-monks dating back to the First Crusade. To accomplish the goal of looting the Templars, he invoked all the powers and prerogatives of the inquisitorial apparatus—arrest, imprisonment, torture, and, above all, confiscation—and claimed to be acting “in the name of the Inquisition.” To justify the dispossession and destruction of the Templars, Philip the Fair found it appropriate to slander them as heretics who had committed “a detestable crime, an abominable act, a fearful infamy, a thing altogether inhuman.” On October 13, 1307, every Templar in France was placed under arrest in a single sweep, and the property of the order was confiscated.11
The charge of heresy against the Templars was especially shocking in light of their long and distinguished history. The founders of the order were knights who had answered the Church’s call to go on crusade and take back the Holy Land from its Muslim overlord. After the success of the First Crusade, they remained behind to protect Christian pilgrims en route to Jerusalem from attack by Muslim raiders. By 1120, a handful of these knights had organized themselves into a religious fellowship; no less a celebrity than Bernard of Clairvaux lobbied the pope to sanction them as a new order, and Baldwin II, the crusader-king of Jerusalem, provided them with quarters located on the traditional site of the Temple of Solomon as described in the Bible. Thus did they call themselves the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, and they took the same vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience required of monks under the Benedictine Rule, although their principal duty was to bear arms in service to the Church.
Even after the crusaders were finally driven out of the Holy Land in 1291, the Knights Templar remained a rich, influential, highly visible arm of the Church with estates and enterprises throughout western Europe. Indeed, the prestige of the Templars resulted in the steady accumulation of money and property. According to a much-exploited myth that has inspired medieval poetry such as Parzival, Hollywood movies like National Treasure, and modern best sellers like The Da Vinci Code, the Templars supposedly retrieved the lost treasure of King Solomon and the Holy Grail itself. (Ironically, as we have seen, the Cathars, too, were imagined to possess a secret treasury that included the Grail.) The reality, however, is purely mundane: the Templars started to accumulate wealth by issuing letters of credit for the convenience of pilgrims to the Holy Land and eventually came to function as bankers and financiers.
Indeed, the “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ” showed themselves to be especially gifted at making money. Each knight who joined the Templars was required to surrender his fortune to the order, and wealthy Christian benefactors added to its coffers with charitable donations. Various popes and kings contributed to the treasury by bestowing lands and privileges upon the Templars and relieving them of the obligation to pay taxes. Thus, for example, the headquarters of the Templars was a fortress on the outskirts of Paris—essentially, an “autonomous township” that boasted its own constabulary—and the order functioned as a kind of international banking house.12
No one appreciated the resources of the Templars more than the crowned heads of Europe, including the kings of France. They repeatedly borrowed from the Templars to finance both their wars and their opulent lifestyles; when the daughter of King Philip was betrothed to the heir of the English throne, for example, the Templars advanced the money for her dowry. So trusted were the Templars that the French and English kings even deposited the crown jewels with them for safekeeping, and when a monarch left his own palace, he preferred the comfort and safety of a Templar house. As recently as 1304, King Philip had issued a proclamation in which he praised the Templars “for their piety, their charity, their liberality, their valour,” and he even asked the grand master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, to serve as godfather to his newborn son.13
Two years later, however, the Templars attracted the unfriendly attention of Philip the Fair, perhaps because of the wealth and influence they enjoyed in France and elsewhere in Europe. Philip was “a bit of a religious megalomaniac,” according to Norman Cohn, and he may have succeeded in persuading himself that the Templars were, in fact, secret heretics of the worst kind. But it is just as likely that he resented their privileges, feared their power, and coveted their property. Whatever the reasons, Philip vowed to mount a crusade of his own against the Templars, and he sought an ally in the Inquisition, whose Dominican and Franciscan monks had long resented the warrior-monks of the rival order. The result was a frenzied spasm of greed, violence, and slander that ended only with the utter destruction of the ancient order.14
Guillame Imbert, the Dominican friar who served as inquisitor-general of Paris (and, as it happens, the man who sent Marguerite Porete to the stake), served as confessor to the French king. Philip claimed to have heard the charges against the Knights Templar from his confessor, and he insisted that he was “following the just request of Guillame de Paris” in moving against the order. Within a week of the first arrests, the grand inquisitor himself undertook to interrogate the leading figures in the Knights Templar, including its grand master, and the Inquisition continued to oblige the king by providing friar-inquisitors to conduct interrogations and trials of Knights Templar throughout France and elsewhere in Europe.15
The confessions extracted from the first victims were scandalous, but they are hardly surprising in light of what we know about the common inquisitorial practice of slandering men and women accused of heresy. The confessions are suspiciously consistent with the accusations that had been made against medieval heretics ever since the trial of the gnostic cultists at Orléans three centuries earlier. Given the preference of the inquisitors for leading questions—and for both the threat and the use of torture—it is not surprising that the warrior-monks were willing to validate even the most outrageous fantasies of their interrogators. Modern historians dismiss the case against the Templars in its entirety as an “extraordinary farrago of nonsense” and “absolutely without foundation,” but it was enough to send the Templars to the stake.16
Once recruited into the order, according to the scenario imagined by their persecutors, the novices submitted to a secret ritual of initiation that required them to “thrice” deny Christ and “thrice” spit on the cross. Then they stripped off their clothing, and the commander of the order kissed each naked novice—first at the base of his spine, then on the navel, and finally on the mouth. The young knights, who had just taken a vow of chastity, were supposedly instructed to submit to any of their fellow Templars who wanted to sodomize them. As the torture of the Templars continued, the victims were prompted by their interrogators to come up with ever more outrageous confessions: the rituals of the Templars supposedly included the worship of an idol, or a black cat, or both; the idol was smeared with “the fat of roasted infants”; the cat was ritually kissed “beneath the tail”; and the novices were required to consume the powdered remains of the burnt bodies of dead Templars “as a magical potion, to make them hold fast to their abominable ways.”17
The confessions betray a certain confusion, which surely indicates that the victims grasped the main points of the story that their tormentors wa
nted to hear but got the details wrong. Some of them confirmed that the commander offered three “indecent” kisses to the novices, but others insisted that it was the novices who kissed the commander. Sometimes they reported spitting on the cross, sometimes urinating on it, sometimes dragging it around the room. Although they were supposedly required to submit to the homoerotic attentions of their fellow knights, some of the Templars also testified that the rituals featured a bevy of “beautiful young girls” with whom they engaged in orgiastic sexual encounters. The cat was sometimes black and sometimes gray, sometimes red and sometimes mixed in color, and the idol was variously described as an actual human skull “encrusted with jewels” and as a carved wooden simulacrum, sometimes with a single face and sometimes with three faces. One imaginative Templar, surely addled by the attentions of the torturer, insisted that the idol was “a goat endowed with women’s breast and an erect penis.”18
“[T]wo things clearly emerge,” states Norman Cohn in Europe’s Inner Demons. “[I]n reality, there was no idol; but in the context of the interrogations and trials it had to exist, as the embodiment of Satanic power.”19
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Page 18