The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  The persecution of the Templars is the first example of the hijacking of the Inquisition by a secular ruler. Pope Clement at first sought to defend the Templars, but King Philip soon “reduced the pope, by a mixture of bullying, cajolery, and trickery, to the position of a mere accomplice,” according to Cohn.* On a single day in 1308, for example, Clement dispatched a total of 483 papal letters to kings, bishops, and inquisitors across Europe, sanctioning the mass arrest of the Templars and authorizing the deployment of the friar-inquisitors. Thus did the Inquisition come to play a crucial role in a kind of dragnet that operated across Europe. The Franciscan and Dominican inquisitors, whose envy and hatred for the Templars was simmering long before Philip the Fair brought it to a high boil, put themselves in service to the French king and assisted in spreading the false accusations across Europe. Authoritarian governments of the near and distant future, as we shall see, were inspired by what the king of France was able to accomplish with the primitive machinery of persecution available to the medieval state.20

  The ordeal of the Templars is also a case study in how the inquisitorial tools and techniques were capable of overmastering even a rich and powerful adversary. The Templars were taken wholly by surprise—the order’s grand master had been invited to serve as a pallbearer at the funeral of the king’s sister-in-law on the day before his arrest—and so they were especially vulnerable to their tormentors, both physically and psychologically, when they suddenly found themselves behind bars. The victims were offered their lives if they confessed, threatened with torture and death if they did not, and told that their fellow Templars had already offered abject confessions.

  A few of the Templars tried to satisfy the demands of their torturers while avoiding the full moral weight of their confessions. Yes, they conceded, the novices were subjected to all these outrages, but when they were initiated, the ritual had been adjourned before the worst of the atrocities took place “because a horde of Saracens had suddenly appeared on the horizon, or simply because it was time for supper”! Only four of the 138 Templars who were taken in the first round of arrests ultimately refused to confess, and when Philip convened a show trial only two weeks later, some three dozen of them, including the grand master himself, stood up and affirmed the charges against them in public.21 “The brethren are so struck with fear and terror,” wrote one stalwart defender of the Templars, “that it is astonishing not that some have lied, but that any at all have sustained the truth.”22

  Remarkably, a total of 120 Templars later insisted on withdrawing the confessions given under torture in Paris, even though they were warned by the inquisitors that doing so would ensure that they would be burned alive as relapsed heretics. Two high officers of the order, including the grand master, joined them in disavowing their confessions and suffered the same fate. The rest of the brethren, however, were not so courageous. One Templar, for example, declared that he “would swear not only that all the accusations against the order were true but also, if required, that he himself had killed Jesus Christ,” if only the inquisitors would spare him from the stake. They were permitted to live out their lives in various monasteries scattered around western Europe, now truly poor for the first time in the glorious history of the order, and both the Knights Templar and their legendary wealth passed into history.23

  The invention of printing with movable type in the mid–fifteenth century is sometimes said to have marked the beginning of the end of the Inquisition, but the opposite may be true. The printing press only encouraged the circulation of the inquisitor’s manuals, and the manuals only encouraged the inquisitors in their work. Indeed, the manuals functioned as self-fulfilling prophecies, providing the inquisitors with a scenario of wrongdoing that their victims were tortured into validating. Perhaps the best example can be found in the countless thousands of women who were sent to the stake as witches under the authority of the Inquisition and the civil magistrates who followed its example during the so-called Witch Craze.

  Witchcraft had been among the obsessive concerns of both religious and political authorities since antiquity. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” was the command of ancient Jewish law as preserved in the book of Exodus. The law of pagan Rome, too, criminalized some (if not all) practices that came to be called black magic. As early as 724, a church council convened by Pope Zachary banned the practices of “wizardry and sorcery,” which were described as “the very filth of the wicked.” But the medieval Church seemed to possess a certain insight into the workings of a disturbed human mind, and thus cautioned against the burning of women as witches. The Canon episcopi of 906, for example, suggests that those women who “believe and openly profess” that they have engaged in acts and practices of black magic may be suffering only from delusions and should be spared the stake even if the Devil himself was the source of the madness.24

  Strictly speaking, the crime of sorcery fell outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Once the ancient fear and loathing of witchcraft was alloyed with the newfangled war on heresy, however, the inquisitors found opportunities to prosecute the occasional accused sorcerer or sorceress along with far greater numbers of Cathars and other dissident Christians. For example, a sixty-year-old woman in Toulouse named Angela de la Barthe, accused of engaging in a sexual dalliance with the Devil in 1275, embroidered on the charge against her by telling the inquisitor that Satan thereby fathered a child with the head of a wolf, the tail of a snake, and an alarming appetite for human flesh, which she satisfied by resorting to child murder and the disinterment of corpses. For telling such tales on herself, she was sent to the stake, possibly the first French woman to suffer the death penalty on charges of witchcraft.

  The growing panic over sorcerers and sorceresses eventually reached the highest circles of Church and state. Pope John XXII, convinced that an elderly French bishop was trying to murder him by means of black magic, ordered his arrest in 1317 and personally interrogated him on seven occasions. After confessing under torture, the old bishop was burned alive and his ashes dumped into the Rhône. Three years later, the same pope issued a bull by which inquisitors were charged with the authority to persecute the practitioners of ritual magic, and Nicholas Eymerich, author of an early and influential inquisitor’s manual, produced a text titled Treatise Against the Invokers of Demons in 1369. (Intriguingly, Eymerich claimed to possess arcane knowledge on the subject because “he had seized and read many books of magic before burning them.”) Strictly speaking, however, these early measures were directed against the stray practitioner of sorcery rather than a secret cult of witches; thus, for example, a Carmelite monk named Pierre Recordi was tried by the Inquisition and sentenced to life in prison on charges of engaging in “love-magic.”25

  The Witch Craze did not begin in earnest until 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII issued a new decree, the so-called witch-bull, by which he rescinded the Canon episcopi and formally extended the authority of the Inquisition to the “correction, imprisonment and punishment” of witches, that is, men and women who have “abused themselves with devils, incubi and succubi, and by incantations, spells, conjurations and other accursed superstitions and horrid charms, enormities and offences, destroy the offspring of women and the young of cattle.” Like the Cathars and the Waldensians, the practitioners of witchcraft were imagined to belong to “a secret, conspiratorial body organized and headed by Satan.” Since the witch-bull flatly equated witchcraft with heresy—“They blasphemously renounce that faith which they received by the sacrament of baptism,” the pope insisted, “and, at the instigation of the enemy of the human race, they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and excesses to the peril of their souls”—those accused of witchcraft now fell within the ungentle writ of the Inquisition.26

  The new reach of the Inquisition put the men and women accused of witchcraft in far greater peril than they had previously faced in the civil courts. The Inquisition, as we have seen, simply ignored the rules of evidence and procedure that
afforded some measure of due process in ordinary judicial proceedings. One man who accused a woman of practicing “weather-magic” in a magistrate’s court in the fifteenth century, for example, was called on to substantiate the charge, and when he failed to meet his burden of proof, he was drowned as a punishment for making a false accusation. By contrast, the accuser in an inquisitorial trial was allowed to remain absent and anonymous, and the accusation itself was regarded as admissible evidence.27

  To assist the Inquisition in its new responsibilities, the pope commissioned a pair of Dominican inquisitors in Germany and Austria, Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger, to compose a manual on the detection and punishment of witches, the notorious Malleus maleficarum or Hammer of Witches, a work whose title echoed the honorific that was bestowed on heresy hunters ranging from Robert le Bougre to Cardinal Bellarmine. Unlike Bernard Gui, whose advice on sorcery had required only two or three pages of text, Kramer and Sprenger devoted five years of effort and an entire volume to the latest front in the war on heresy. First published in about 1486, Hammer of Witches became a bestseller among inquisitor’s handbooks, available in eight printed editions by the turn of the century and a total of twenty-eight editions by 1600. As a badge of its authority, Hammer of Witches included Pope Innocent’s witch-bull as a preface, thus “establish[ing] once and for all that the Inquisition against witches had full papal approval, and thereby open[ing] the door for the bloodbaths of the following century.”28

  Hammer of Witches and the other manuals and treatises on witchcraft—more than two dozen appeared between 1435 and 1486 alone—worked their own powerful magic on the inquisitorial witch-hunters, who now detected abundant evidence of witchcraft where before they had seen none. If diabolical sexual atrocities could be plausibly charged against such pious Christian rigorists as the Waldensians and even the warrior-monks of the Knights Templar, the men and women accused of witchcraft were inevitably suspected of even greater outrages. Sometimes the scenario may have originated with the inquisitor himself, and his questions transmitted both the themes and the details to the victim. Other men and women accused of witchcraft may have been “verbal exhibitionists” or plain lunatics. The availability of formbooks and formularies created a kind of feedback loop in which the inquisitor read out loud a series of leading questions, and the defendant affirmed each one, if only to bring the torture to an end. In that sense, the inquisitor’s manuals could also serve as instruction manuals to would-be witches. And so the Witch Craze came to function as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy on a vast scale.29

  “There were neither witches nor bewitched,” observed one astute Spanish inquisitor, Alonzo Salazar y Frias, who preferred to concentrate on the persecution of Jews and Muslims, “until they were talked about.”30

  Even after the witch-bull, the fact is that witch-hunting was never the exclusive domain of the Inquisition. Kramer and Sprenger, perhaps seeking to lighten the workload of their fellow inquisitors, insisted that the Inquisition needed to concern itself only with those accused witches who were also guilty of heresy. By way of example they pointed out that a witch who cast a communion wafer into the mud “to satisfy the devil, and this by reason of some pact with him,” was not guilty of heresy if she truly believed the wafer to be the body of Christ. No better evidence can be found that heresy was always a thought-crime: “The deeds of witches need involve no error in faith, however great the sin may be,” argue the authors of Hammer of Witches, “in which case they are not liable to the Court of the Inquisition, but are left to their own judges,” that is, the ordinary ecclesiastical and civil courts.31

  Like so many other heresy-hunters, Kramer and Sprenger engaged in hateful and prurient speculation about human sexuality in general and, especially, the sexual excesses of women. “[S]he is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations,” they assert, echoing the biblical distaste for menstruation. “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable,” they continue. “Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lust, they consort even with devils.” Once seduced by the Devil, women are charged by their satanic master to “infect with witchcraft the venereal act” by, among other things, exciting men to sexual passion and then making their genitals disappear or otherwise preventing orgasm and conception, causing infertility in other women, “procuring abortions,” and turning babies and children over to the Devil to satisfy his vile appetites.

  To understand why Hammer of Witches has been called “scholastic pornography” and “an amalgam of Monty Python and Mein Kampf,” we need only pause and consider its meticulous attention to the function (and malfunction) of the male sexual organ.32 “[W]hen the member is in no way stirred, and can never perform the act of coition, this is a sign of frigidity of nature,” Kramer and Sprenger explain, “but when it is stirred and becomes erect, but yet cannot perform, it is a sign of witchcraft.”33

  Armed with such texts, and newly mandated by the pope to seek out heretics who also happened to be witches, the Inquisition put itself in service to the “hunts and panics” that characterized the Witch Craze over the next three centuries. Yet again, the inquisitors veiled their atrocities under the thin drapery of canon law, and they slandered their victims as agents of the Devil who deserved no sympathy from good Christians. The sheer number of women burned as witches far exceeds the body count of the medieval Inquisition, and the scandalous scenes that were conjured up by the witch-hunters to justify the carnage would not be matched until the Marquis de Sade began to put down on paper the inventions of his own disturbed imagination.34

  A standard set of outrages came to be ascribed to the women who were persecuted during the Witch Craze, which continued to flare up in fits and starts from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. They were said to have entered into a pact with the Devil by which they put themselves in his service, sexually and otherwise, in exchange for the power to afflict the good Christians among whom they lived. Thus recruited and initiated, they were imagined to be members of a vast conspiracy of Devil worshippers and magic-workers far worse than the original victims of the Inquisition.

  The sign of the pact was a mark on the flesh, the so-called Devil’s mark, which was supposedly insensitive to pain, and the witch was provided with demonic servants known as familiars, who often took the form of black cats or other black-furred beasts. It was believed that the witches flew by night to some forest clearing or forgotten cemetery or ruined castle where they worshipped the Devil in a ceremony strikingly similar in every detail to the rituals attributed by pagan Rome to the first Christians and by the Inquisition to the Cathars and Waldensians—an “obscene kiss” on the anus or penis, a wild sexual orgy, a feast that featured the tender flesh of murdered babies. From these raw materials emerged the standard iconography of witchcraft that is found today only in Halloween costumes and decorations—and only in an expurgated version that has been rendered safe for children.

  Witches were believed to possess both the ability and the desire to work all kinds of deadly mischief on their adversaries and enemies, all with the active assistance of the Devil and his demons—sterility or impotence, miscarriages and stillbirths, illness or madness, or death. They were believed to be able to change the natural order of things, causing rain out of season or no rain at all, the sickening of cattle, and the blighting of crops. Above all, they were thought to seek the flesh of unbaptized babies for use in making their potions and brews, including one that supposedly enabled the witch to fly and another that empowered her to remain silent under torture. The Latin word commonly used for witchcraft—maleficium—literally means “wrongdoing” and carried the implication that the power to inflict harm on others was derived from the Devil and achieved by resort to black magic.

  The gathering of witches for a worship service—at first called a synagogue, then a sabbat, and only much later a black Sabbath—was portrayed in detail by the inquisitors and their fellow witch-hunters, who seemed to delight to piling atroc
ity upon atrocity and describing every revolting detail. According to the febrile imaginations of the witch-hunters, the Devil manifested as an outsized monster, black in color and crowned with horns, part man, part goat, part bird. The witches kissed him on the left foot, or the anus, or the penis; if the anus was the site of the “obscene kiss,” then the Devil “acknowledged their attentions in a peculiarly noxious manner,” that is, he defecated on their faces and into their mouths. He heard their confessions, and he punished them for their sins, which might include going to church or slacking off on their acts of sorcery. He preached a sermon and received offerings of coins and foodstuffs. He presided over a grotesque version of the Communion, passing out the sole of a shoe in place of the wafer and “a nauseous black liquid” in place of the wine.35

  Then the Devil and his minions turned to feasting. The menu, of course, featured roasted baby flesh, as well as wine “tasting like manure drainings.” Then, at the sound of pipes, drums, and trumpets, the witches would gather for the dancing that served, quite literally, as the climax of the sabbat. One woman bent over until her head touched the ground, and a candle was planted in her anus to illuminate the festivities. The witches would dance in a circle around the inverted woman, faster and faster, until they spun into a “frantic and erotic orgy in which all things, including sodomy and incest, were permitted.” At the climax of the festivities, the Devil would fornicate in various sexual positions with every man, woman, and child in attendance. Only then would the witches return to their homes to do the Devil’s bidding and afflict the good Christians who were their sworn enemies.

  More than one reader of such accounts, of course, found them not only ludicrous but downright laughable.36 “Every night these ill-advised ladies were anointing themselves with ‘devil’s grease,’ made out of the fat of murdered infants, and, thus lubricated, were slipping through cracks and keyholes and up chimneys, mounting on broomsticks or spindles or airborne goats, and flying off on a long and inexpressibly wearisome aerial journey to a diabolical rendezvous, the witches’ sabbat,” writes historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in a kind of summing-up of the obscene and preposterous fairy tales that constituted evidence against the flesh-and-blood victims of the Witch Craze. “In every country there were hundreds of such sabbats, more numerous and more crowded than race-meetings or fairs.”37