In law, the chief intellectual milestone is the so-called Decretum, compiled around 1140 by a canon lawyer in Bologna named Gratian. Gratian is believed by some to have been a member of the Benedictine Order, but most speculations about his life have been shown to be unreliable. The documentary trail is meager. The record of a trial in Venice, held at the Basilica of San Marco in 1143, refers to the presence of a consulting legal expert named Gratianus, and circumstantial evidence suggests that this could well be Gratian the canon lawyer. If so, it’s the only “live” sighting of the man himself in the documents.
Gratian’s achievement was momentous. The official name of his great work is the Concordia discordantium canonum—the “Concordance of Discordant Canons”—and the title aptly captures the challenge Gratian faced. Over the course of a millennium, the Church had accrued for its use a massive stockpile of theological opinions, conciliar decrees, papal pronouncements, biblical injunctions, and legal rulings—massive, and often contradictory. From this clay Gratian molded a coherent code of canon law. It was a revolutionary accomplishment, and would be built on for centuries to come. Gratian’s work remained in use by the Church until 1917.
Large swaths of Gratian are devoted to heresy—what it is, how it should be dealt with—and over time the Church’s elaborations became more detailed. That the Church had an obligation to prosecute heretics no one doubted—there was biblical sanction in the parable of the wedding banquet, from the Gospel of Luke. In that story, invited guests fail to appear at the appointed hour, so the master sends forth his servant with the command “Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” Augustine had interpreted “compel them to come in” as an injunction to deal with heresy by brute force, if necessary: “Let the heretics be drawn from the hedges, be extracted from the thorns.” At the Council of Tarragona, in 1242, the varieties of heretical behavior were sorted out with zoological precision, as if by a naturalist. Apart from the basic category of hereticus there were three kinds of suspectus and also celatores (people who failed to report heretics), receptatores (people who received heretics into their homes), and other types of transgressors.
In a less sophisticated and more decentralized world, before the hardening of canon law, heresy and deviance could subsist almost unnoticed, as a kind of “local option.” But now, questionable beliefs could be examined against codified standards. Casual remarks could be sorted into pre-existing categories of nonconformity. Groups that might once have represented short-lived eruptions were endowed with a sense of coherence, importance, and menace. To some degree, heresy in its consequential new form was brought into existence by having a definition placed on the table in such a way—here’s how heretics behave, here’s what they say—that even laypeople could recognize the signs. Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined a memorable phrase—“defining deviancy down”—to encapsulate how standards of what is acceptable are gradually eroded. He might also have noted that deviancy can be defined “up”—that the notion of what is acceptable can become more restrictive.
A self-fulfilling dynamic of this kind, set in motion from above, is not unfamiliar. The anticommunist efforts in the United States during the 1950s bore some of the same hallmarks. The Soviet Union certainly posed a security threat, but the Red Scare fostered national paranoia. Popular fears got out of hand, and the government clamped down hard on people deemed subversive. A pamphlet prepared by the U.S. Army in 1955 conceded that “there is no foolproof way of detecting a Communist.” It noted that the typical revolutionary was no longer “bearded” and “coarse,” and warned people to be on the lookout for anyone using the terms “vanguard,” “hootenanny,” “chauvinism,” “progressive,” “hooliganism,” and “ruling class.” The pamphlet observed that “such hobbies as ‘folk dancing’ and ‘folk music’ have been traditionally allied with the Communist movement in the United States.”
In our own time, the war on terror has had similar consequences —some of them darkly comic but symptomatic of how the psychological process works. In the summer of 2009, a Pomona College student named Nicholas George was detained and interrogated at Philadelphia International Airport because he was found to be carrying Arabic flash cards for a language course. Here is a press account published after George filed a lawsuit:
Authorities detained him in the screening area for 30 minutes before he was questioned by a TSA supervisor, the lawsuit states. At one point, the supervisor asked George if he knew who committed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to the lawsuit. George answered, “Osama bin Laden.” “Do you know what language he spoke?” the supervisor asked, according to the document. “Arabic,” George answered. The supervisor then held up the flashcards and said, “Do you see why these cards are suspicious?”
Search Engines
To be effective, any organization must have the capacity to manage information. That capacity is especially urgent for an organization whose purpose is to monitor, to discipline, to control. It is no accident that regimes notable for sustained activities of this kind are also regimes that have created a long paper trail. The Berlin Document Center, which preserves what survives of the bureaucratic product of the Third Reich, contains some 75 million pages of records. The Nazis employed the first generation of IBM punch-card systems in order to count and classify the German population.
Together with the new coherence of canon law there came a revolution in record-keeping as Church chancery clerks developed the art of paperwork—composing in the same legible script, making copies of documents, depositing them in archives, and inventing techniques for retrieving information that had been written down and stored away. They were creating a rudimentary form of something so fundamental to life today—bureaucracy—that we rarely give it a moment’s thought.
The digital era has revolutionized data collection and data retrieval. As the historian James B. Given points out, the late medieval world experienced an information revolution of its own. Haphazard approaches to organizational management were wrestled into something recognizably modern. Inquisitors developed standardized systems for logging cases and preserving the history and outcome of every trial. Church councils discussed the proper way to fill out forms and the importance of making duplicates. To give some idea of the scale and speed of the change: in a typical year—say, 1200—Pope Innocent III would have sent out some three hundred official Church letters; the annual total for Boniface VIII, a century later, was 50,000. No one became more adept at maintaining vast quantities of records—and, just as important, knowing where to find them—than the notaries of the Inquisition. Their new capability extended the reach of the Inquisition and made it durable.
This revolution was in fact a technological one. It may seem odd to think of the way information is organized on paper as a technology, but consider a household item we take for granted—the desk dictionary. It is a codex—a bound volume with pages—rather than a scroll, making it much easier to browse. The words in the dictionary are arranged alphabetically, and the architecture of the typography—catchwords, boldface, italics, capital letters, numbers—presents information in accordance with a clearly defined hierarchy. Getting all this to the point where we don’t even think about it was the work of centuries, going back to Roman times, when the basic shift from scroll to codex occurred.
In the Middle Ages, the courts of England and France—the most developed secular governments—were great compilers of archives. Scholars sifting through them today are grateful for their abundance. But the archives were not all that useful to people at the time, because it was hard to find anything—the equivalent of putting your hands on an old report card or love letter among hundreds of boxes in the attic. England’s King Edward I was certain that documents existed to prove his claim to the overlordship of Scotland. On two occasions—in 1291 and 1300—he ordered a search for them in the royal archives, but to no avail.
The medieval inquisitors were more practical and more inventive. Conducting co
untless interrogations and working constantly, they needed records from the past that they could access quickly. Had some defendant come before the Inquisition previously—even ten or twenty years earlier? Had any immediate family members been identified as heretics—or anyone in the extended family? What about other people in the defendant’s village? All that aside, how had inquisitors dealt with similar cases on other occasions? And regarding the issue in question, what was the nature of the Church’s teaching over the years? Had it hardened? Softened? Information on all these matters was essential, and the inquisitors designed record-keeping procedures to meet their needs. They created, in effect, the equivalent in parchment of search engines.
On the manuscript page, trial transcripts were abstracted into boxed synopses in the margin, for quick scanning. Cases were grouped by location—a sensible approach in a time when people were not as mobile as they are now, and tended to pass their beliefs down through the generations. The compilation of comprehensive indexes allowed for easy cross-referencing. Had a defendant given different testimony to someone else in another place, perhaps decades earlier? If he had, he might well be found out. A man named Guillaume Bonet the elder, of Villeneuve-la-Comptal, swore to inquisitors in 1246, not long after the fall of Montségur, that he had never participated in the Cathar ceremony known as the melioramentum. As it happened, this same Guillaume, during an earlier interrogation by someone else, had admitted to joining in the ceremony; a check of the records made the connection. Guillaume Bonet was caught in a lie. James Given writes, “With tedious frequency one finds at the end of a deponent’s statement the notation that his deposition does not agree with the testimony” that he had given on a different occasion.
The Grand Inquisitor
Flawed and patchwork though it was, the secretarial machinery of the Church represented a degree of bureaucratic infrastructure that hadn’t been seen in Europe since antiquity. Operating this modern machinery required the service of professionals. Today we would call them lawyers or technocrats or information-technology specialists. Those who served the Inquisition were clerics of various kinds, perhaps schooled in canon law, certainly able to read and write—indeed, to write in a common language, Latin, using official styles of calligraphy and abbreviation that their brethren everywhere could easily read. They were trained to the task with the help of instruction manuals that covered everything from definitions of heresy to conditions of confinement. These manuals offered primers, with sample dialogue, on how to conduct interrogations. A cadre of technicians was essential. Without them, no form of inquisitorial activity could sustain itself for very long.
Umberto Eco, in his novel The Name of the Rose, summons to life a dark and compelling character: Bernard Gui, a bishop and papal inquisitor. In the movie, he is played with serpentine menace by F. Murray Abraham. The year is 1327, and Gui has come to a Benedictine abbey in Italy where, as it happens, a murder has just been committed. It falls to Gui to convene a tribunal and examine the suspects. “Bernard Gui took his place at the center of the great walnut table in the chapter hall,” Eco writes. “Beside him a Dominican performed the function of notary, and two prelates of the papal legation sat flanking him, as judges.”
Eco continues, describing the inquisitor’s bearing as the tribunal gets under way:
He did not speak: while all were now expecting him to begin the interrogation, he kept his hands on the papers he had before him, pretending to arrange them, but absently. His gaze was really fixed on the accused, and it was a gaze in which hypocritical indulgence (as if to say: Never fear, you are in the hands of a fraternal assembly that can only want your good) mixed with icy irony (as if to say: You do not yet know what your good is and I will shortly tell you) and merciless severity (as if to say: But in any case I am your judge here, and you are in my power).
Bernard Gui is a historical figure, though few details of his life are known—Eco had a free hand to embellish. A few facts are certain. Gui was born near Limoges, in 1260 or 1261, professed vows as a Dominican about twenty years later, and rose rapidly as prior at a succession of abbeys. In 1307 he was indeed made an inquisitor by Pope Clement V, with responsibility for the Cathar-strewn area around Toulouse. He did not ignore the Jews, however, and ordered copies of the Talmud to be burned in public. Over a period of fifteen years, Gui pronounced some 633 men and women guilty of heresy. We have the disposition of these cases because Gui wrote everything down—the record survives in his Liber Sententiarum, his “Book of Sentences,” which now resides in the British Library.
It is a folio-sized volume, bound in red leather. The writing is tiny and heavily abbreviated, and there are no artistic flourishes. The book is the product of an orderly mind. It begins with a list of the towns and cities Gui visited, and the people sentenced in each place. Then come the details of one case after another. Much of the book consists of model sermons to be delivered, carefully modulated according to transgression and punishment. Some of the accused were given relatively mild punishments—for example, ordered to wear a large yellow cross on their tunics (evoking the yellow badge that medieval Jews were often forced to wear, and that a later age revived). In these instances, Gui’s text is interrupted by the insertion of a little cross. Other people might be ordered to make a pilgrimage or even a crusade. Still others were sentenced to prison in perpetuity, which in practice usually meant several years. A considerable number, already deceased, had their remains exhumed, their bones incinerated, their homes destroyed. Gui sent more than forty of the living to the stake.
Gui was a detail man. Inquisition records can be shockingly mundane. An itemized accounting of expenses for the burning of four heretics in 1323 survives from Carcassonne:
For large wood 55 sols 6 deniers.
For vine-branches 21 sols 3 deniers.
For straw 2 sols 6 deniers.
For four stakes 10 sols 9 deniers.
For ropes to tie the convicts 4 sols 7 deniers.
For the executioner, each 20 sols 80 sols.
In all 8 livres 14 sols 7 deniers.
The Church handled the matter of executions with philosophical elegance. It was inappropriate for ecclesiastical officials to sully their hands with capital punishment, so a process was engineered to allow the inquisitor to have it both ways: he would formally “relax,” or render, the condemned prisoner to the secular authorities, who would carry out the sentence. This sort of moral delicacy has a modern analogue, and it’s not just a linguistic one, in what has come to be called extraordinary rendition, whereby a nation whose conscience recoils at the idea of extracting information by means of torture sends prisoners to be interrogated in countries without such scruples. During the past decade, according to one estimate, the United States has handled 150 suspected terrorists this way. There is the case, for instance, of a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who was arrested in New York in 2002 because his name appeared on a terrorist watch list. Arar was shackled, trundled aboard an executive jet, and flown by a “special removal unit” to Jordan. He was then driven to Syria, where he was relaxed to the local authorities and interrogated and tortured for months. He was eventually released without charge.
Extraordinary rendition typically occurs in the shadows, involving “ghost prisoners” and “black sites.” For the Inquisition, the relaxation of the prisoner to the secular arm occurred in the open, in the course of a ceremonial occasion known as a sermo generalis. The sermo generalis was held most often on a Sunday, when a great platform would be erected at a central place in a church. A throng would gather there—the ecclesiastical authorities, the secular magistrates, the public at large—and the various sentences would be read out by the inquisitor. The recitation of capital crimes came last, and then power over the prisoners passed from the spiritual to the temporal arm. To emphasize that the Church’s hands were clean, the inquisitor would read a pro forma prayer, expressing hope that the condemned might somehow be spared—though there was in fact no hope of that. Those destined for the stake w
ould be led outdoors, where a pyre had been built for the purpose in a public square. In terms of people burned at the stake, Gui’s most productive day was April 5, 1310, when, after a sermo generalis in Toulouse, he condemned seventeen people to death.
Although little is known about Bernard Gui the person, Eco’s characterization gets at something authentic. He was methodical, learned, clever, patient, and relentless—all this can be inferred from the documentary record. Among other things, Gui was a prodigious writer—in his spare time he compiled a history of the bishops of Toulouse, a history of the kings of Gaul, a collection of lives of the saints, a biography of Thomas Aquinas, several theological treatises, and a history of the world up to his own time. More to the point, he wrote a lengthy manual for inquisitors called Practica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, or “Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Depravity.” The manual covered the nature and types of heresy an inquisitor might encounter but also provided advice on everything from conducting an interrogation to pronouncing a sentence of death.
Gui’s manual would be followed by others. Their proliferation seems to have been rooted in something ostensibly far less ominous. In 1215, a special gathering of Church bishops, the Fourth Lateran Council, reinforced the duty of all Christians to go to confession at least once a year. Out of this decree grew a modest confession industry, including manuals instructing priests on how to hear a confession properly—how to classify sins and probe the sinner’s conscience. It was but a short step from these to manuals involving confessions of a graver kind—from people accused of heresy.
God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World Page 5