The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  Of Toulouse itself, Guillaume complains that

  in those days Catholics were harassed and in several locations those who searched out heretics were killed… the chief men of the region, together with the greater nobles and the burghers and others, protected and hid the heretics. They beat, wounded, and killed those who pursued them… many wicked things were done in the land to the church and to faithful persons.6

  Guillaume states, in an almost casual, off-hand manner:

  The… friars made inquisition also in Moissac and sentenced the living John of Lagarde, who, fleeing to Montségur, became a perfected heretic and later was burned there with 210 other heretics.7

  In 1234 – the year that, in Guillaume's words, ‘the canonisation of the Blessed Dominic, our father, was proclaimed’8 – the Dominicans of Toulouse arranged a celebration Mass for their founder's feast day. Prior to their meal, the participants were washing when ‘by divine providence’ word came that a woman nearby, dying of fever, had just received the Consolamentum – the Cathar equivalent of the last rites – from certain heretics. Abandoning their ablutions, a number of Dominicans, accompanied by the Bishop of Toulouse, rushed to the sick woman's house and burst into her room.

  The bishop… seating himself beside the invalid, began to talk to her at length about contempt for the world and for earthly things… The lord bishop, with great care, drew from her what she believed on many points and almost all of it was just what the heretics believe… Then said the bishop: ‘Therefore you are a heretic! For what you have confessed is the faith of the heretics, and you may know assuredly that the heresies are manifest and condemned. Renounce them all! Accept what the catholic church believes.’ [The bishop] made these and many like remarks to her in everyone's presence, but he accomplished nothing as far as she was concerned; rather, she persevered all the more in heretical obstinacy. Forthwith, the bishop, who at once summoned the vicar and many other persons, by the virtue of Jesus Christ condemned her as a heretic. Moreover, the vicar had her carried on the bed in which she lay to the count's meadow and burned at once.9

  Thus did the Dominicans of Toulouse crown their celebration of the newly sainted Dominic's feast day with a human sacrifice.

  By 1235, Guillaume reports, hostility to the Dominicans in Toulouse was intensifying. Guillaume appears both mystified and indignant at this attitude, but proudly defiant:

  At that time the bodies of certain deceased persons who had been heredicated… were dragged through the town and burned. The whole town was excited and aroused against the friars because of the Inquisition and appealed to the count. He came to the inquisitors to ask them, out of consideration for him, to call a halt for a time, adducing his trifling reasons. This they refused to do.10

  By November of 1235, all Dominicans, and the Inquisition with them, had been forcibly expelled from Toulouse by the city's consuls. The consuls were duly excommunicated by the Inquisition. Shortly thereafter, the Pope demanded the Inquisitors be allowed to return. Once reestablished, they embarked on an orgy of grisly violence:

  At that time, many heretications of prominent men and others, now deceased… (were revealed and they were)… condemned by sentences, exhumed, and ignominiously were cast out of the cemeteries of the town by the friars in the presence of the vicar and his people. Their bones and stinking bodies were dragged through the town; their names were proclaimed through the streets by the herald, crying, ‘Who behaves thus shall perish thus,’ and finally they were burned in the count's meadow, to the honour of God and the Blessed Virgin, His mother, and the Blessed Dominic, His servant (who)… most happily brought about this work of the Lord.11

  The Legality of Human Sacrifice

  The torture and execution of heretics was nothing new in Christian history. On the contrary, such practices had ample precedent, extending as far back as the fourth century at least. Around AD 385, Priscillian, Bishop of Ávila (381– 5), had incorporated in his teachings certain apocryphal material from the Middle East, and possibly elements of Gnostic dualism. Accused of sorcery and heresy, he was brought before Maximus, the Roman emperor at the time, at Trèves, where he was subjected to sustained torture. Convicted of the charges against him, he was beheaded, along with two other clergy, a wealthy woman disciple and a well-known poet associated with him. Tribunes were dispatched to Spain to conduct a further investigation, which resulted in the execution of two additional heretics and the exile of five. Pope Siricus, who occupied the throne of Saint Peter, protested – not about the executions, but about the fact that the trials had been convened in a secular rather than an ecclesiastical court. Priscillian's body was carried back to Spain for burial, where a shrine soon grew up in homage to him – at the site which is now believed to be Santiago de Compostela.12 The original pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela is said to have derived from the itinerary along which Priscillian's body was transported to its final Iberian resting place.

  In the 900 years between Priscillian's death and the creation of the Inquisition, there had been other executions of heretics. These had not, however, reflected any coherent or centrally organised Papal policy, but had occurred as isolated intense spasms of violence by local ecclesiastics or strenuously pious secular potentates. Thus, for example, in 1022, the King of France had several allegedly heretical monks of Orléans burned at the stake. In 1126, a solitary heretic was burned at St Gilles. Now, however, under the Inquisition, a formal, more or less smoothly functioning machinery was established for the entire process of investigation, indictment, trial, torture and execution.

  Although scant documentation exists to support it, there seems to have been a tradition, dating at least from the ninth century, that Church functionaries were forbidden to shed blood. To draw blood, by lance or sword or dagger, was apparently considered un-Christian. Thus, in Chanson de Roland, for example, the ecclesiastic Turoldus, even on military campaign, refrains from carrying pointed weapons. Instead, he wields a mace. It might have been unacceptable to stab a person, but if blood flowed ‘incidentally’ from a crushed skull, that appears to have been a different and theologically sanctionable matter.

  Perhaps in deference to some such tradition as this, the techniques of the Inquisition seemed designed, at least in theory, to keep actual bloodshed to a minimum. Inquisitors had few compunctions or scruples, of course, about inflicting physical pain in the name of spiritual welfare. To accommodate such licence, Pope Alexander IV (1254–61) authorised Inquisitors to absolve each other for any so-called ‘irregularities’ – the premature death of a victim, for instance. But most forms of torture – such favoured devices as the rack, the thumbscrew, the strappado and water torture – eschewed the deliberate shedding of blood. Devices of this kind would seem to have been contrived to cause maximum pain and minimum mess.

  Whatever the other perverse, ingeniously conceived contrivances for inflicting suffering, the supreme instrument of the Inquisition was fire. Fire derived its legal precedent and sanction from the law of Imperial Rome, which was revived in the twelfth century and became the basis for Europe's judicial systems. According to the Roman legal code, death by fire was the standardised punishment for parricide, sacrilege, arson, sorcery and treason. Herein lay the precedent for dealing with heretics. In 1224, the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II had passed a law in Lombardy which authorised the burning of relapsed heretics. In 1231, this authorisation was incorporated into Sicilian law. During 1238 and 1239, three legal declarations made the Sicilian judicial code applicable throughout the Holy Roman Empire.

  The Emperor Friedrich II was hardly a model Christian himself. He immersed himself in distinctly heterodox teachings. He cultivated an extensive knowledge of Islamic and Judaic thought. He was a practising adept in alchemy, astrology and other aspects of what today would be called ‘esoterica’. He had no love for either the Catholic Church or the Pope, who repeatedly accused him of heresy and twice excommunicated him.

  But if the Church was consistently at odds with Friedrich,
it had no compunction about availing itself of his legal codes, and embraced fire with the rabid zeal of institutionalised pyromania. One of the first actions of the Dominican Inquisition was to exhume the corpses of executed heretics at Albi and to burn them. As has been seen from Guillaume Pelhisson's testimony above, the exhumation and immolation of the dead proved quite as unpopular as the torture and immolation of the living, and such practices often produced a hostile reaction from the local populace, especially in the Languedoc. Many Inquisitors needed armed guards to escort them as they moved about the countryside. A number were assassinated. Such mishaps, however, did not deter their incendiary enthusiasm. The Inquisitor Robert le Petit, for example, burned his way across the whole of northern France. On one occasion in 1239, he presided over the simultaneous death by fire of 180 victims. His excesses were not curbed until two years later, in 1241.

  Under the auspices of such men as this, the ancient pagan practice of ritual human sacrifice was effectively resurrected in the guise of Christian piety. The burning of a heretic became an occasion for celebration, a joyous event. The nature of such events was rendered apparent by the designation subsequently associated with them in Spain. Translated literally, the notorious ‘auto de fe’ – the public trial of which death by fire was the climax – means ‘act of faith’.

  The Techniques of the Inquisition

  The Inquisition quickly developed a methodology of intimidation and control that was impressively effective – so much so that one can see in it a precursor of Stalin's secret police, of the Nazi S S and Gestapo. Sometimes an Inquisitor and his entourage would descend without warning on a city, a town, a university or, as in The Name of the Rose, an abbey. More usually his arrival would be lavishly prepared in advance. It would be proclaimed beforehand in church services. It would be announced in elaborate proclamations on church doors and public noticeboards; and those who could read would speedily inform those who could not. When the Inquisitor arrived, he would do so in a solemn procession, accompanied by his staff of notaries, secretaries, advisers, assistants, doctors and servants – as well, often, as an armed escort. Having thus orchestrated his appearance, he would summon together all residents and local ecclesiastics, to whom he would preach a solemn sermon about his mission and the purpose of his visit. He would then – as if magnanimously proffering invitations to a banquet – invite all people who wished to confess themselves guilty of heresy to come forward.

  Suspected heretics were given a ‘time of grace’ – usually fifteen to thirty days – to denounce themselves. If they did so within this period, they were generally accepted back into the Church with no more severe a penalty than a penance. But they were also obliged to name and furnish detailed information about all other heretics known to them. The Inquisition was ultimately interested in quantity. It was quite prepared to be lenient with one transgressor, even if he were guilty, provided it could cull a dozen or more others, even if they were innocent. As a result of this mentality, the population as a whole, and not just the culpable, was kept in a state of sustained dread conducive to manipulation and control. And everyone, reluctantly or not, was turned into a spy.

  Even the most lenient of punishments, the penance, could be severe. The lightest penalty – imposed on those who voluntarily came forward during the ‘period of grace’ and confessed – was the so-called ‘discipline’. Insofar as decency (and the weather) permitted, the self-confessed heretic would be obliged each Sunday to strip and appear in church carrying a rod. At a specified point during the Mass, the priest would then whip him enthusiastically before the entire assembled congregation – ‘a fitting interlude’, one historian observes drily, ‘in the mysteries of divine service’.13 Punishment did not end there, however. On the first Sunday of every month, the penitent would be compelled to visit every house in which he had ever met with other heretics – and, in each, he would be whipped again. On feast days, moreover, the penitent would be required to accompany every solemn procession through the town and suffer further whippings. These ordeals would be inflicted on the victim for the rest of his life, unless the Inquisitor, who would long since have departed, returned, remembered him and released him from his sentence.

  Another form of penance, deemed equally light and merciful, was the pilgrimage. This had to be made on foot and could often take several years, during which a man's family might well starve. There were two forms of pilgrimage. The ‘lesser’ entailed a trek to nineteen shrines scattered about the whole of France, at each of which the penitent would be whipped. The ‘greater’ pilgrimage involved a longer journey – from the Languedoc to Santiago de Compostela, to Rome, to Cologne, to Canterbury. During the thirteenth century, penitents were sometimes sent on pilgrimage to the Holy Land as crusaders, for anything from two to eight years. If they survived, they were required to bring with them on their return a letter from the Patriarch of Jerusalem or Acre, testifying to their service. At one point, so many heretics were being dispatched on crusade that the Pope forbade the practice, fearing the entire Holy Land might become infected by their thought.

  Confessed heretics might also for the duration of their lives be compelled to wear, inside and out, a large saffron cross sewn to the breast and back of all their garments. The penitent was thus exposed to constant social humiliation, ridicule and derision, as well as to occasional violence. People stigmatised with such crosses were ostracised by others, who would be reluctant to do any kind of business with them. Young women would find it impossible to obtain husbands.

  Finally, penance could take the form of a fine. Such fines quickly became a source of scandal since Inquisitors often extorted large sums of money for themselves. Bribery and corruption soon became rife. In 1251, even the Pope complained and forbade the imposition of fines. The prohibition did not last long, however, and Inquisitors once again ‘won the right to inflict pecuniary penances at discretion’.

  Death afforded no release from a penance. If a man died before completing the penances imposed on him, this was interpreted as divine condemnation – an indication that his sentence had not been sufficiently severe in God's eyes. In such cases, the deceased's bones would be exhumed and publicly burned. His property could be legally confiscated, and his surviving family could become liable for his penances, just as they could for his debts.

  Such were the more lenient punishments, mercifully imposed on those who confessed their sins voluntarily and informed against others. Information obtained from informers was noted down in comprehensive detail. An immense ‘database’ was established, to which later interrogations added further documentation; and all this material was efficiently filed and catalogued for easy retrieval. Suspects could thus be confronted with misdemeanours or felonies committed, or allegedly committed, thirty or forty years earlier. In 1316, for example, one woman was shown to have first been arrested for heresy in 1268. Here was a blueprint for the kind of procedures whereby the modern state monitors its citizens. Here was a prototype for the kind of computerised records kept by modern police forces, whereby a youthful transgression – smoking cannabis, for instance, or attending a demonstration – could be invoked years later to discredit a politician or some other public figure.

  On arriving in a specific locality, Inquisitors installed themselves in one or another temporary headquarters and here began listening to both confessions and denunciations. The system offered an often irresistible opportunity for evening scores, settling old grudges, plunging enemies into trouble. Wives were frequently encouraged to denounce husbands, children to denounce parents. Witnesses were summoned to support initial testimonies and depositions. If an individual was implicated by two other people, an official would present him with a summons to appear before the Inquisition's tribunal. This injunction would be accompanied by a written statement of the evidence against him. The names of his accusers and of witnesses, though, were never cited.

  If the accused attempted to flee, the summons against him was broadcast for three Sundays in succes
sion. If he still failed to appear, he was formally excommunicated and declared an outcast. On pain of their own excommunication, other people were forbidden to provide him with food, shelter or sanctuary.

  If, on the other hand, the accused did respond to the Inquisition's summons, the evidence against him was formally assessed. Should it be deemed sufficient, he was officially placed under arrest and remained, from then on, in the Inquisition's hands. Since no Inquisitor cared to be seen as having erred, every possible subterfuge would be used to extract or extort a confession. Interrogations were often prolonged. According to one functionary, ‘there is no need for haste… for the pains and privations of imprisonment often bring about a change of mind'.14 Suspects were sometimes simply kept in strict confinement until they confessed. Sometimes they were chained and denied visitors. Sometimes they were starved. Not infrequently, they were soothingly cajoled. Not infrequently, too, they were tortured.

  Under civil law, doctors, soldiers, knights and nobles were not subject to torture and enjoyed immunity. The Inquisition undertook to democratise pain and make it readily available to everybody, regardless of age, sex or social station. Inquisitors were initially prohibited from administering physical torture themselves; they could only act as overseers or supervisors, instructing civil or secular functionaries on what to do, observing and making notes of anything the accused said under duress. Then, in 1252, a Bull issued by Pope Innocent IV formally authorised Inquisitors to administer torture themselves – ‘with the restriction that such compulsion should not involve injury to limb or danger of death’.15 Inquisitors quickly found means of circumventing this restriction. They also complained about it so much that in 1260, the new Pope, Alexander IV, allowed them to grant dispensations to one another for any ‘irregularities’ that might occur.