ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As with all of my books, I was sustained on my journey to the Middle Ages and back to the here and now by my cherished wife, Ann Benjamin Kirsch, and our beloved children, Jennifer Rachel Kirsch and Adam Benjamin Kirsch. Along the way, Adam and his wife, Remy, presented Ann and me with our first grandchild, Charles Ezra Kirsch, a history-making moment in our family.
For their roles in inspiring and shaping this book, I express my deepest appreciation to my agent, Laurie Fox; my editor, Gideon Weil, and his colleagues at HarperOne, Michael Maudlin, Mark Tauber, Claudia Boutote, Jan Weed, Terri Leonard, Jim Warner, Laina Adler, Carolyn Allison-Holland, Anne C. Collins, Annette Jarvie, and Kris Ashley.
My colleague and cherished friend, Judy Woo, supports and encourages my work literally every day, always showing the greatest patience and dexterity in dealing with the little mountains of reference material that hinder her way across our offices.
I salute my fellow author and attorney, Leslie S. Klinger, a constant source of camaraderie and inspiration in both of the fields of endeavor that we share.
I affirm my enduring gratitude to Jack Miles and Karen Armstrong, whom I am proud to claim as my mentors, and the other scholars who have extended their generosity and support over the years, including Don Akenson, David Noel Freedman, (who passed away while this book was in press), David Rosenberg, Leonard Shlain, and John M. Barry.
To my friends, family, and colleagues, I once again express my heartfelt appreciation:
My beloved daughter-in-law, Remy Elizabeth Holzer, and her family, Harold, Edith, and Meg Holzer.
Lillian Conrad Heller, Marya and Ron Shiflett, Paul and Caroline Kirsch, Heather Kirsch, and Joshua, Jenny, and Hazel Kirsch.
Eui Sook (Angie) Yoon, Charlie Alexiev, and Stefan Johnson, my friends and colleagues.
Susan Pollyea, Ralph Ehrenpreis, and Harland Braun, my much-admired colleagues in the practice of law.
Dora Levy Mossanen and Nader Mossanen, Candace Barrett Birk and Raye Birk, Maryann Rosenfeld and Shelly Kadish, Pat and Len Solomon, John Rechy and Michael Ewing, Diane Leslie and Fred Huffman, Doug and Penny Dutton, and Jacob Gabay.
K. C. Cole, Janet Fitch, Carolyn See, Bernadette Shih, Rhoda Huffey, and Dolores Sloan.
Linda Chester and her colleagues at the Linda Chester Agency.
David Ulin, Nick Owchar, Orli Low, Kristina Lindgren, Sara Lippincott, Susan Salter Reynolds, and Janice Dawson at the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Doug Brown, Ann Binney, David Nelson, Barbara Morrow, Maret Orliss, and Kristine Erbstoesser at the Los Angeles Times.
Terry Nathan at the Publishers Marketing Association.
Sarah Spitz and Ruth Seymour at KCRW-FM.
Larry Mantle, Patt Morrison, Aimee Machado, Jackie Oclaray, Linda Othenin-Girard, and Polly Sveda at KPCC-FM.
Rob Eshman at The Jewish Journal.
Connie Martinson, host of Connie Martinson Talks Books.
NOTES
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Citations are collected in a single endnote that appears at the end of a paragraph or portion of a paragraph in which material is quoted. I have taken the liberty of omitting brackets and ellipses to mark the minor changes I have made in some (but not all) quoted material, including changes in spelling, capitalization, italicization, punctuation, and omissions that do not materially change the meaning of the quoted text. In every instance where I have done so, however, the quotation is identified as “adapted” in the endnote where the source is cited. Quotations from the Bible are attributed to the specific translation from which they are taken according to the following acronyms: KJV (King James Version), NKJ (New King James Version), and RSV (Revised Standard Version).
1. THE PIETÀ AND THE PEAR
1. Robert Held, Inquisition: A Bilingual Guide to the Exhibition of Torture Instruments from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Era (Florence: Qua d’Arno, 1985), 18 (“delectable to the Holy Trinity…”). The author is referring here to the burning of heretics at the stake.
2. Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), Plate 5 (following p. 90).
3. 1 Cor. 11:19, nkj.
4. Fydor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 270 (adapted).
5. Henry Charles Lea, The Imquisition of the Middle Ages, (New York: Citadel Press, 1961) 60, 97 (adapted).
6. Quoted in Lea, 126 (adapted).
7. Lea, 61, 192 (adapted).
8. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet, 1981) 7.
9. Quoted in Lea, 107 (adapted).
10. G.G. Coulton, The Medieval Village, Manor and Monastery (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 347 (adapted). Emphasis added.
11. Lea, 96 (adapted).
12. Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 17, 20 (adapted).
13. Cohn, 17.
14. Cohn, 49 (“a monstrous, anti-human conspiracy”); Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 151 (“a devoted underground elite”); Edward Burman, The Inquisition: The Hammer of Heresy (New York: Dorset Press, 1992; orig. pub. 1984), quoting Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 150–51 (“called into existence…”); Edward Peters, Torture (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 54 (“traitors to God”), paraphrasing the papal decretal Vergentis in senium, 1199, and 65 (“thieves and murderers…”), paraphrasing Ad extirpanda, 1252.
15. Dietrich von Nieheim, Bishop of Verden, De schismate libri III (1411), quoted in Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 95.
16. Quoted in Burman, 36 (“heretical depravity”); quoted in Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 393 (“gives birth continually” and harmful filth”); Deborah Root, “Speaking Christian: Orthodoxy and Difference in Sixteenth Century Spain,” Representations 23 (Summer 1988): 118–34, at 130 (“evil weeds”).
17. Father Aznar Cordona, Expulsión justificada de los moriscos españoles, quoted in Root, 118.
18. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 131.
19. Quoted in Burman, 66 (“one insanely led to reject…”); quoted in Lambert, 177–88 (“good doctors”).
20. Strictures of the Purity of Blood, 1449, quoted in Armstrong, 460 (“purity of blood”); “The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” in Internet Medieval Sourcebook, ed. Paul Halsall, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.html (“purity of faith”); R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1987), 10 (“machinery of persecution”).
21. Quoted in Lea, 230.
22. Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Inquisition and the Prosecution of Heresy: Misconceptions and Abuses,” Church History 58 (1989): 439.
23. John and Anne Tedeschi, in Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), ix (“legal justice” and “moral justice”) (adapted).
24. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 140, 144, 145, 147, 150 (adapted).
25. Cynthia Ozick, “The Impossibility of Being Kafka,” in Quarrel & Quandary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 53 (quoting The Trial by Franz Kafka) and (“an Alice-in-Wonderland arbitrariness”).
26. G.G. Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 316–17 (adapted).
27. Lea, 126.
28. Quoted in Armstrong, 396–97.
2. THE CATHAR KISS
1. Quoted in Lambert, 10 (adapted).
2. Lambert, 11.
3. Lambert, 11.
4. Quoted in Lambert, 11–12.
5. Quoted in Lambert, 11–12.
6. La
mbert, 11–12.
7. See God Against the Gods: A History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism, (Viking, 2004) by Jonathan Kirsch.
8. Armstrong, 385–86 (adapted).
9. Quoted in Sean Martin, The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 76–77 (adapted).
10. Coulton, 259, quoting Archbishop Peckham (“The ignorance of the priests…”) (adapted) and Bishop Guillaume le Maire of Angers (“contemptible persons…” and “the lay folk hold the priests…”) (adapted).
11. Coulton, quoting author, Dives and Paupers, 273 (adapted).
12. Quoted in Coulton, 266 (adapted).
13. Quoted in Coulton, 263.
14. Burman, 16.
15. Lambert, 29.
16. Luke 9:58; 10:4, 8, rsv.
17. Mary T. Malone, From 1000 to the Reformation, vol. 2 of Women and Christianity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 48.
18. Lambert, 38.
19. Quoted in Walter L. Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1974), 45.
20. Quoted in Wakefield, 45.
21. Lambert, 56.
22. Cohn, 17.
23. Quoted in Cohn, 19 (adapted).
24. Wakefield, 102 (“riff-raff”).
25. Cohn, xii (“exotic and non-Christian”).
26. Lambert, 119. Emphasis added.
27. Lambert, 121.
28. Wakefield, 38.
29. Lambert, 139.
30. Wakefield, 38.
31. Lambert, 107.
32. Everwin of Steinfeld, quoted in Lambert, 56, and alluding to Matt. 10:16.
33. Quoted in Lambert, 109.
34. Lambert, 139.
35. Quoted in Martin, 7.
36. Wakefield, 42 (“Ardent believers married…”).
37. Lambert, 114.
38. Lambert, 114.
39. The derivation of Cathar from cattus is proposed by Alain de Lille in Against the Heretics of His Times, written between 1179 and 1202. Kissing the anus of a cat also is described by Guillaume d’Auvergne, bishop of Paris, in a work written between 1231 and 1236. Cohn, 22.
40. Hos. 4:14, rsv.
41. Lambert, 9, n. 1.
42. Wakefield, 41.
43. Quoted in John R. Sommerfeldt, Bernard of Clairvaux: On the Spirituality of Relationship (Mahwah, NJ: The Newman Press, 2004), 82.
44. Lambert, 15 (“the fictions of carnal men…”); quoted in Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100–1215 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 55 (“The woods and stones will teach you…”).
45. Quoted in Burman, 27.
46. Quoted in Lambert, 59 (“were not bishops and priests but ravening wolves…”) (adapted); quoted in Martin, 128 (“was only good for batting away flies…”); Martin, 128 (“have God in their bowels…”).
47. Quoted in Armstrong, 393.
48. Armstrong, 393.
49. Wakefield, 30.
50. Quoted in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 223, 320–21.
51. Ladurie, 223.
52. Lambert, 98.
53. Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca. 1180–1240), Dialogue on Miracles, quoted in Wakefield, 197. The reference is to 2 Tim. 2:19, rsv (“The Lord knows those who are his.”).
54. Martin, 90.
55. Martin, 96.
56. Wakefield, 120.
57. Wakefield, 121.
58. Quoted in Wakefield, 120.
59. Lea, 65.
3. THE HAMMER OF HERETICS
1. Arthur Griffiths, In Spanish Prisons: The Inquisition at Home and Abroad; Prisons Past and Present (New York: Dorset Press, 1991; orig. pub. 1894), 15.
2. Lea, 24.
3. Lea, 51 (adapted).
4. Lea, 7.
5. Lea, 2.
6. Quoted in Burman, 25.
7. Cohn, 25 (“self-appointed inquisitors…,” etc.); Burman, 35 (“on papal license”).
8. Quoted in Cohn, 26.
9. Lambert, 148–49, 165 (adapted).
10. Burman, 29–30, quoting Achille Luchaire, Innocent III.
11. “Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” Canon 4 (“conform themselves like obedient sons…”), Canon 68 (“thus it happens at times…”), Canon 71 (“to liberate the Holy Land…”), Internet Medieval Sourcebook, www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.html.
12. “Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” Canon 1.
13. “Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” Canon 3.
14. “Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” Canon 3 (adapted).
15. “Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” Canon 3.
16. Burman, 21, 30.
17. “[I]t cannot be disputed that the creation of a permanent tribunal, staffed by Dominican friars who worked from a fixed base in conjunction with the episcopate and were endowed with generous authority, occurred first in Languedoc in 1233–1234….” Wakefield, 140.
18. Burman, 28, 34 (“an integral part…,” “an act of love…,” etc.).
19. Quoted in Kelly, 439, n. 2.
20. Quoted in Burman, 18–19.
21. Quoted in Lea, 27.
22. Burman, 53.
23. Quoted in Lea, 63–64.
24. Quoted in Lea, 63–64.
25. Burman, 81.
26. Lea, 69, 125. The words attributed to Sir John Fortescue are paraphrased by Lea and slightly adapted here.
27. Burman, 37, 38.
28. Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (New York: Time Inc., 1955; orig. pub. Univ. of Chicago Press), 27, n. 2.
29. Lambert, 177 (“zealous, hard-working bureaucrats”).
30. Pope Gregory IX, Ille humani generis, 1231, quoted in Burman, 35–36. Although addressed to Conrad of Marburg, “it provides the first sketch of the procedure that later became standard for inquisitors.”
31. Burman, 55 (adapted).
32. Lea, 69 (“the authorities…”); Bernard Gui, The Inquisitor’s Guide: A Medieval Manual on Heretics, trans. and ed. Janet Shirley (Welwyn Garden City, UK: Ravenhall Books, 2006), 10 (“Most Reverent”).
33. Lea, 82, 83.
34. Lea, 104, 105, 114.
35. Lea, 61.
36. Lea, 113.
37. Lea, 75.
38. Lambert, 98.
39. Wakefield, 133 (adapted).
40. Kelly, 441.
41. Gui, 30.
42. Lea, 106–7.
43. Lambert, 137.
44. Lea, 128.
45. Quoted in Lea, 112 (“How often have you confessed…”); quoted in Wakefield, 151–52, n. 10 (“Does a woman conceive through the act of God…”).
46. Gui, quoted in Lea, 108–9 (adapted).
47. Lea, 99.
48. Lea, 127 (adapted), 153.
49. Lea, 72–73.
50. Quoted in Lea, 72.
51. Lea, 74.
52. Lambert, 101.
53. Burman, 54.
54. Kelly, 448.
55. Lea, 141.
56. Lea, 72, citing Zanghino Ugolini (“utterly ignorant of the law”), and Eymerich (“should always associate himself…”).
57. Lea, 144.
58. Quoted in Ozick, 53.
59. Lea, 192.
60. Quoted in Lea, 192–93.
61. Kelly, 444, 450–51.
62. Lea, 83, 84, 85.
63. Lea, 149 (adapted).
64. Wakefield, 188 (“canonical irregularities…”).
65. Lea, 148 (“devices and deceits,” referring specifically to the rights of appeal), 72, 73 (“The inquisitors were a law unto themselves…”) (adapted); Kelly, 450 (“[t]hings had come to a sorry pass…”).
66. Burman, 46, 66.
67. Burman, 50, paraphrasing Mariano da Alatri.
68. Wakefield, 141�
�42.
69. William of Pelhisson, quoted in Wakefield, 224.
70. William of Pelhisson, quoted in Wakefield, 218–19.
71. William of Pelhisson, quoted in Wakefield, 218–19.
72. William of Pelhisson, quoted in Wakefield, 216–17 (adapted).
73. Burman, 40.
74. Lea, 42, 43 (adapted).
75. Wakefield, 142.
76. Wakefield, 184, citing Yves Dossat. Wakefield reports that twenty-one victims in the diocese of Toulouse were formally sentenced to death and suggests that five additional victims who were recorded as “relapsed” heretics probably suffered capital punishment, too.
77. Burman, 93 (“infested with heretics”).
78. Burman, 54.
79. Lea, 78 (“pointed knives, etc.) and 79 (“armed familiars…”), citing Pope John XXII.
80. Lea, 80, citing Nicholas Eymerich.
81. Quoted in Burman, 66, and paraphrased in Lea, 154, 157.
4. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
1. Quoted in Brian Innes, The History of Torture (Leicester, England: Blitz Editions, 1999), 43. Innes cites the account of a sixteenth-century Florentine attorney called Paulus Grillandus who specifically describes the use of the strappado.
2. Burman, 41.
3. Quoted in Peters, 1985, 65 (adapted).
4. Held, 18 (“delectable to the Holy Trinity…”) (the author is referring here to the burning of heretics at the stake); quoted in Innes, 41 (“By the grace of God…”).
5. Malise Ruthven, Torture: The Grand Conspiracy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), 51 (adapted).
6. Ruthven, 51.
7. Burman, 59.
8. Quoted in Burman, 148 (adapted).
9. Paraphrased in Lea, 104 (adapted).
10. Dostoyevsky, 270 (adapted).
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Page 33