The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  The climax of the auto-da-fé, of course, was the execution of condemned heretics. At the auto attended by King Charles II and Marie Louise, the ceremonies began early in the day and it was not until midnight that the burnings began. Still, it was a much-sought-after spectacle. According to the time-honored legal fiction of the Inquisition, the burnings were conducted by the public executioner rather than the inquisitors, and the actual conflagration took place at a site outside the city walls known as the quemadero (place of burning). The victims were conducted from the public square to the quemadero on the backs of donkeys; the friar-inquisitors were close at hand, urging them to recant while it was still possible, and the crowd followed behind. A high scaffold had been erected at the place of execution to improve the sightlines, and the owners of houses overlooking the pyre are said to have sold window seats at a handsome price.

  The victims mounted the platform, followed by the priests who continued to encourage them to confess. At some autos, the victims were made to climb a ladder and seat themselves on a small wooden board affixed at the top of the stake—another effort aimed at improving the view and thus enhancing the pleasure of the crowd. The priests would follow the victims up the ladder, but if the victims still refused to recant, the priests withdrew and the executioners took their place, binding each of the victims to the stake with ropes or chains. Then the priests mounted the ladder again for one last effort at conversion, and if the final plea was rebuffed, “they leave them to the Devil,” wrote one contemporary observer, “who is standing below ready to receive their souls and carry them with him into the flames of hell-fire, as soon as they are out of their bodies.” To taunt the victims—and to encourage a confession before it was too late—some executioners would playfully burn off the beards of the male victims with a torch before touching it to the pyre.68

  If, on the other hand, a condemned heretic offered a satisfactory confession at the last moment, he or she was granted what the inquisitors apparently regarded as a final act of mercy: the victim would be strangled with a garrote before being burned. Sometimes a bag of gunpowder might be hung around the neck of the victim, both as a gesture of mercy—once ignited by the mounting flames, the resulting explosion would bring his ordeal to a quick end and possibly even take off his head—and as a pyrotechnic effect to please the crowd. Then, at last, the executioner put the torch to the brushwood and charcoal that had been neatly arranged around the stakes, igniting the fuel at each of the four corners to ensure that the flames burned evenly on all sides. As a final theatrical touch, the corpses and effigies, also dressed in the sanbenito and the coroza, were burned along with the living victims.

  “To make these holocausts of human beings more ghastly,” wrote one nineteenth-century historian, “artificial dolls and decomposed bodies, with grinning lips and mouldy foreheads, were hauled to the huge bonfire, side by side with living men, women and children.”69

  The sight of men, women, and children being slowly burned to death was apparently a crowd-pleaser, and “the shrieks of dying heretics sounded as sweet music in the ears of blameless adherents of the Church,” according to Cecil Roth’s bitterly sarcastic description of the scene. At the auto in 1680, one of the victims, a girl still in adolescence, is said to have addressed a heartrending plea to Marie Louise as she passed the royal gallery: “Noble Queen! Cannot your royal presence save me from this?” the girl cried out. “I sucked in my religion with my mother’s milk; why must I now die for it!” But the young queen remained silent and aloof. Indeed, the king himself was invited to ignite the torch that was used to kindle the flames, and the girl was burned alive along with the rest of the victims.70

  Not every spectator was quite so cool about the carnage. A private letter written by one of the queen’s attendants, the Marquise de Villars, betrays a degree of compassion that apparently escaped the others: “The cruelties which were witnessed at the death of these poor wretches it is impossible for me to describe.” Yet the writer also confirms the principle of terror that the Inquisition applied not only to its victims but to the populace at large. “It was necessary to put in an appearance from beginning to end, unless one had a medical certificate, for otherwise one would have been considered a heretic,” she reports. “Indeed, people thought very ill of me that I did not seem to enjoy everything that was happening.”71

  As the flames did their grisly work, the victims were incinerated along with their clothing and headgear. If they had been bound to the stakes with ropes rather than chains, the blackened bodies would fall into the flames at the foot of the stake as the ropes burned away. Sometimes a trapdoor was built into the structure so that the charred bodies would drop into a bed of embers. The goal was to burn the bodies to ashes, which were then collected and scattered on waste ground or dumped into a nearby river, all in order to avoid a burial place where the victim might be remembered and honored. The mission of the Spanish Inquisition was not merely to murder but also to obliterate the condemned heretic.

  But the victims of the auto were not entirely forgotten. According to the instrucciones of the Spanish Inquisition issued in 1561, sanbenitos on which the names and crimes of condemned heretics had been written were to be hung like trophies in the churches of the towns where they had once lived. When the old garments had turned brittle and the lettering had faded away, they were to be replaced with fresh ones “in order that there may be perpetual memory of the infamy of the heretics and their descendants.” Thus did the Inquisition unwittingly create and maintain enduring memorials of its own infamy.72

  The death toll of the Spanish Inquisition has been estimated as high as 30,000, with another 17,000 burned in effigy and nearly 300,000 “penanced” in various other ways. Another 40,000 victims were persecuted by the tribunals of the Inquisition in Portugal. Even if the numbers are “suspicious,” as modern historians agree, and even if the mythification of the Inquisition had begun even while the friar-inquisitors were still at work, the fact remains that Spanish Inquisition offers plenty of authentic horrors.73

  Children as young as ten were charged by the tribunal at Toledo in 1659, and a ninety-six-year-old woman named María Bárbara Carillo was sent to the stake at Madrid in 1721. Indeed, it has been suggested that a disproportionate number of women were victimized by the Spanish Inquisition, but the inquisitors were perfectly willing to torture and burn accused heretics of both genders and every age. Although the victims included Muslims and Protestants, mystics and eccentrics, bigamists and homosexuals, the casualties of the Spanish Inquisition were mostly men and women of Jewish ancestry, including a few who were secretly practicing their original faith and many more who remained earnest Christians until their deaths. Of all the victims of the inquisitorial tribunal at Barcelona between 1488 and 1505, for example, more than 99 percent were Jewish conversos.

  The death toll declined slowly but steadily after the Spanish Inquisition reached its zenith in the mid–seventeenth century. At the very moment in history when the Inquisition was held up by progressives in western Europe and North America as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the ancien régime and religious true belief, it was already on its way to irrelevance. A ballad titled “The Loyal Martyrs, or Bloody Inquisitor,” for example, was published in England in 1700 to condemn “the mercenary and inhuman barbarities transacted in the Inquisition of Spain.” At roughly the same moment in history, when a grandson of Louis XIV crossed the border from France to Spain to ascend the Spanish throne as King Philip V in 1701, the new monarch signaled the obsolescence of the Inquisition by pointedly refusing to attend an auto that had been organized in his honor, the very first Spanish monarch to have done so.74

  “There is no need to attribute this to the growth of tolerance,” explains Henry Kamen. “The simple reason was that heretics had been purged out of existence, so depriving the tribunal of combustible material for its fires.”75

  Still, a few dedicated inquisitors in Spain and Portugal continued to send their victims to the stak
e even as the freshening winds of the Enlightenment were stirring elsewhere in Europe, and at least 150 autos were recorded during the first half of the eighteenth century. The Portuguese Inquisition burned its last condemned heretic in 1761. The Spanish Inquisition ran low on Marranos and thereafter contented itself with the occasional religious eccentric or political dissenter, blasphemer, or bigamist. Starting in 1780, however, the events of the French Revolution stirred the Spanish Inquisition into a new spasm of activity as it struggled to preserve the monarchy and the Church from the dangerous new ideas that had toppled the French king. The friar-inquisitors were right to fear the French: the army of Napoleon entered Madrid in 1808, and Napoleon himself issued the decree by which the Inquisition was formally abolished. The Palace of the Inquisition was demolished, and its voluminous records thrown into disorder.

  The story is told that French troops entering the Palace of the Inquisition were greeted by the grand inquisitor himself, who welcomed them to the opulent premises but cagily refused to show them the way to the notorious torture chambers where so much of the inquisitorial business was conducted. An enterprising French soldier poured water on the marble floors and saw where the fluid ran through the cracks of a secret hatchway that led to the dungeons. There the liberators found the bones and corpses of dead victims, a hundred or so naked convicts, and the notorious instruments of torture, which they applied to the skulking inquisitors who were now their prisoners.

  The story, however, is invented, an exercise of the imagination not unlike Edgar Allan Poe’s equally lurid story “The Pit and the Pendulum,” which depicts a victim of the Inquisition who is spared the gruesome (and wholly imaginary) torture described in the title by the timely arrival of the French army. The truth is rather less spectacular. Napoleon’s decree was effective only where French troops were present to enforce it, and the Inquisition continued to operate elsewhere in Spain. After the defeat of Napoleon, Spain suffered a long period of intermittent political upheaval and civil war during which the Spanish parliament, known as the Cortes, would occasionally bestir itself to adopt a resolution by which the Inquisition was abolished, and then the king would annul it. King Ferdinand VII, for example, first abolished the Inquisition, later annulled his own decree, and still later reinstated it. Meanwhile, a few more victims were charged with heresy—a priest turned political insurgent named José María Morelos, for example, was tried and executed in 1815 in Mexico City on charges of being a “Deist, Atheist, Voltairean and Hobbesan”—but not even the most zealous inquisitor dared to convene a public auto.76

  Clearly, the Inquisition was dying a lingering death. The inquisitors were reduced to clerical housekeeping chores, as when one priest in Seville was penanced for the crime of having improperly raised the wafer during Mass. One by one, the inquisitorial tribunals went out of business—first Goa in 1812, then Mexico, Peru, and Cartagena in 1820, and Portugal in 1821. Only in Spain itself did the antique machinery of persecution, just like the contraption depicted in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, continue to grind up the occasional victim. But the apparatus, again as in Kafka’s story, was in disrepair. Vacancies on some tribunals went unfilled, and others no longer operated at all; many of the meticulous and voluminous records dating back to the fifteenth century were scattered; and when the inquisitorial palaces were thrown open to public inspection, they were subjected to “an orgy of destruction.”77

  On July 26, 1826, fully six centuries after the first heretic was burned by the newly created Inquisition, the inquisitors took their last human life. A schoolteacher named Cayetano Ripoll was charged as a heretic because he had professed the principles of Deism, and he was “relaxed” like countless thousands before him. The last of the inquisitors could not bring themselves to burn him alive, and the death sentence was administered by strangling him with a garrote. To affirm their solidarity with the old and enduring traditions of the Inquisition, however, the dead body was stuffed into a wooden barrel decorated with painted red flames and buried in unconsecrated ground—a purely symbolic auto-da-fé but one whose point was not lost on the rest of the world.

  Cayetano Ripoll had committed no greater crime than any of the other men, women, and children who were victimized by the Inquisition simply because, according to the prescribed language of the handbooks, they had supposedly failed “to hold and believe all that the Holy Mother Church of Rome holds, believes and teaches.” But his death marks the last homicide committed by the inquisitors in the name of God. The Spanish Inquisition itself continued to exist, if only on paper, for a few more years after the garishly painted barrel containing Ripoll’s mortal remains was buried. On the death of Ferdinand VII, a child-queen named Isabella II took the throne, and her mother, Cristina, ruled in her name as regent and queen mother. To Cristina belongs the credit for bringing to an end what Pope Innocent III had begun six hundred years before.78 “It is declared,” she decreed on July 15, 1834, “that the Tribunal of the Inquisition is definitely suppressed.”79

  So ended the Inquisition as a fact of history. But the inquisitorial idea, first conceived by the lawyer-popes and then put into operation by the friar-inquisitors, was too powerful and too useful to be wholly abandoned. Indeed, the same deadly idea reached its most ambitious and horrific expression only in the twentieth century and, as we shall see, it is not yet dead and gone.

  THE ETERNAL INQUISITOR

  [W]e must not try to excuse things for which there is no real excuse…. To ignore the question of human responsibility would make all history meaningless.

  G. G. COULTON,

  The Inquisition

  The Inquisition has always been a moving target. Indeed, its history was already being rewritten long before the friar-inquisitors burned their last heretic, and the revisionism shows no sign of ending soon. The Inquisition continues to generate hot fires of controversy among modern commentators who, remarkably, struggle to explain away its worst outrages. But there are dangers in the effort to reverse the verdict of history, if only because the imitators of the Inquisition have shown themselves willing and able to commit ever more outrageous crimes against humanity by embracing the ideology and techniques of the first inquisitors.

  Within twenty years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431, King Charles VII found it politically expedient to convene a posthumous retrial in order to prove that he did not owe his crown to a witch and a heretic. Not surprisingly, the Maid of Orléans was acquitted, and the new verdict “broke the authority of the Inquisition in France.” Only in 1869, however, did the Church tacitly acknowledge the errors of the inquisitors who had burned her alive by commencing the long process of canonization, and not until 1920 was she was finally elevated to sainthood. By then, Saint Joan had been transformed from a troubled adolescent who suffered from spooky aural hallucinations into a stirring icon of French patriotism. Even so, Saint Joan was regarded as a heroine of French resistance to foreign aggression rather than a symbolic victim of the Inquisition.1

  The ghost of Galileo, by contrast, is still awaiting an acquittal or, at least, an apology from the Church for what has been called “the greatest scandal in Christendom.” His books remained on the Index until 1822, and it was not until 1979 that Pope John Paul II appointed a papal commission of historians, scientists, and theologians to reconsider the verdict that had been handed down more than three centuries earlier. When the commissioners finally concluded their work after thirteen years of dilatory effort, they conceded only that the Inquisition had committed a “subjective error of judgment.” The pope himself expressed sympathy with their findings, but the original conviction of Galileo by the Inquisition on charges of heresy has never been formally reversed.2

  The office long known as the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition still exists today, although it was renamed the Congregation of the Holy Office in 1908 and then the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965. Until recently, as we have already noted, the cardinal in charge of t
he office was Joseph Ratzinger (b. 1927), who was elevated to the papal throne as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. Although no one is at risk of torture or imprisonment by the “reformed inquisition,” the office is still charged with the enforcement of church dogma and “canonical discipline.” As recently as 1981, the Sacred Congregation reaffirmed an old decree of excommunication against Catholics who dare to join the Freemasons, the same fraternity that the Spanish Inquisition had found so threatening. So the distinction between permissible and impermissible beliefs—if not the rack and the wheel—survives in the bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic church in the third millennium of the common era.3 “[W]ith its image improved and its name twice changed, the Inquisition still exists and functions today,” concludes Edward Burman, “the heir to a tradition of over seven hundred years.”4

  Remarkably, the verdict on the Inquisition itself is still open. To be sure, a whole literature of outrage was produced by French, English, and American propagandists even while the Inquisition was in active operation, and some of the imaginary atrocities that they conjured up still blur the line between fact and fiction. Henry Charles Lea—“the great denouncer of the Inquisition,” according to Giorgio de Santillana—voted to convict the inquisitors on all counts: “It was a system which might well seem the invention of demons,” writes Lea in one characteristic rhetorical flourish, “and was fitly characterized by Sir John Fortescue as the Road to Hell.”5

  But the academic historians who have studied and debated the Inquisition over the last two hundred years have failed to reach a moral or historical consensus. The events and personalities of the Inquisition have been reconsidered by each new generation of critics and scholars, an enterprise in the rewriting of history that is still going on today. According to some of its apologists, the Inquisition was a well-meaning and mostly lawful if also sometimes flawed institution, and even the revisionists who concede that the Inquisition was a machine of persecution insist that it never operated quite as well as its inventors had hoped.