God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  Just Tell Us Everything

  Not knowing where to stop: that turns out to be a central problem of any inquisition. Bureaucracy is not merely passive—it is an inertial force, sustaining action just as mindlessly as it does inaction. Bureaucracies are composed of individuals who have their own interests, their own will, but interests and will are also shaped by the institution. Like a nervous system, a bureaucracy can flex muscles in the absence of overt instruction. It can persist even when by its own lights there is no longer reason to do so. That aside, what, in the end, is the truth one is looking for? And assuming it is ascertainable, at what point is it in fact ascertained? How does one know? The quest has no clear destination.

  Montaillou is a village in what is now the south of France. In the late thirteenth century it occupied a more nebulous position. It was part of the Comte de Foix, which had once been independent but now owed allegiance to the king of France, and served as a frontier bulwark against the kingdom of Aragon. The 250 or so people of Montaillou spoke not French but Occitan. And they were heretics. By 1300 the Cathars and their faith had been exterminated almost everywhere, but Montaillou remained untouched, a last redoubt.

  Today the village seems as remote as it ever was, in a soft green valley on a road to nowhere. It may in fact be more remote than it used to be: this region of France, below the sharply etched defiles that drain the Pyrenees, is losing its people. The landscape of Montaillou has not greatly changed since the fourteenth century, though only a few silent houses stand there now, together with the village church. A ruined castle occupies a rise. If you know the history, and if there’s a low, late-afternoon sun to bring out the shadows, you can make sense of the indentations here and there in the rolling grass—where the village square used to be, where the women did the washing, where the tracks to Ax and Prades ran, where the outlying fields were cultivated. The place brings on a sensation of deep loneliness. It was once so thick with events, and now is occupied mainly by the wind.

  It holds surprises, though. Stroll around the Gothic church in Montaillou—Notre Dame de Carnesses—and you will see gravestones, some of them quite new, for people who bear the surname Clergue. The sight comes as something of a shock. The Clergues were already living in Montaillou seven hundred years ago, attending this very church. They were the most prominent family in town—part Ambersons, part Corleones, part Simpsons, on a sou-sized stage—and their quarrels and ambitions were inescapable. Some of them were central to the drama that played out in Montaillou when an inquisitor set his eyes on the village.

  The inquisitor was Jacques Fournier, the bishop of Pamiers. His aim was to clean out the last pockets of Cathars from this backwater of his diocese. In 1318, Fournier proceeded to interrogate everyone in Montaillou; its adult population had been arrested and taken to Carcassonne. Over a period of years he probed into the smallest intimacies of their personal lives—not only their beliefs but also their tastes and habits, whom they liked and disliked, their sexual practices, the village gossip. He wanted detail: names, dates, numbers, locations, relationships. To exert control you must nail people down: identify them, count them, keep track of them, put them in context. He was five hundred years ahead of his time.

  It was a celebrated investigation. The fearsome Bernard Gui showed up to watch. Fournier’s scribes made transcriptions that were close to verbatim. And then serendipity intervened. Fournier was elected pope, taking the name Benedict XII, and he took his records with him to Avignon, where the papacy then resided. In the ensuing centuries, war, revolution, and simple neglect would consume many other Inquisition archives. Old parchments were scraped clean by secretaries so that they could be reused. Some were sold as scrap to butchers and grocers, for use as wrapping paper. But because Fournier became pope, his records survived. They are now in the Vatican Library.

  The Fournier Register is the most intimate record that exists of ordinary life in medieval times. The great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wove these Inquisition documents, these searingly personal transcriptions, into a vivid portrait of the village in his book Montaillou, a classic work of social history. He told me once that, as a boy, he had often come across wiretap transcripts in the office of his father, who had been an official of the Vichy government during World War II before joining the Resistance. It was mentioned without irony, and Le Roy Ladurie drew no connection between this fact and his own scholarly interests, or between Fournier and his father. When I ventured a parallel, he gave a Gallic shrug, which could have meant “There you have it” or “Think what you wish.”

  Montaillou became a best-seller both in France and in the United States—one of those rare scholarly works that strike a deep chord. Of course, there was plenty of sex in the book, but Le Roy Ladurie is also a vigorous writer, and his intellectual pedigree is distinguished. He did come in for a certain amount of criticism—should these Inquisition transcripts be taken at face value?—and surely some element of jealousy was involved. The notoriously cranky medievalist Norman Cantor described Le Roy Ladurie as a “rock star” and compared his youthful looks to those of David Bowie. But the fact that Inquisition documents had opened up a new world—something quite unintended by their compilers—was beyond dispute.

  In the years since Montaillou was published, in 1975, the records of the Inquisition have been pressed into service in other parts of the world by historians not much interested in the Inquisition per se. For instance, the only written record of the early Spanish history of New Mexico consists of Inquisition documents that were preserved at the tribunal’s headquarters in Mexico City. (Everything else was destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt, in 1680.) India, Brazil, Angola, Congo, the Philippines—Inquisition documents illuminate hidden history in all these places, simply because the inquisitors were in the business of writing things down and filing them away.

  I have read Montaillou perhaps half a dozen times. It is enthralling in what can only be called its voyeuristic detail. One looks on as women pick lice from the hair of their lovers, and as the fingernails of the dead are clipped for household charms. A girl recalls a night of passion: “With Pierre Clergue I liked it. And so it could not displease God. It was not a sin.” That same Pierre Clergue, a libidinous priest, reveals himself to be a pithily nihilistic philosopher: “Since everything is forbidden,” he observes, “everything is allowed.”

  But beyond all this is what we glimpse between the lines: an inquisitorial process that, once set in motion, did not quite know how to end. All the machinery had been brought to bear: the mandate of heaven, the structure of law, the notaries and scribes with their parchments and quills, the magistrates with their pikes and prisons and pyres, the methods of persuasion that can always take an interrogation one more step, the frightened people who may not know exactly what is being sought but have information—endless reams of information—about one another.

  Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated President Bill Clinton and the circumstances surrounding the Monica Lewinsky scandal, is never going to be pope. If he failed to recognize the name Torquemada, as he indicated, he is unlikely to know the name Fournier. But Starr’s record of his own investigation, published as The Starr Report, may one day achieve the same status as source material for social history—of fin de siècle Washington, D.C.—that the documents behind Montaillou now enjoy.

  Starr, a former federal judge, was a Washington lawyer when the Justice Department named him an independent counsel to look into certain business dealings during the Clinton administration. The investigation eventually broadened to include the question of whether the president had perjured himself when explaining his relationship with an intern, Monica Lewinsky. Although in theory the Justice Department could have halted his inquiry at any time, political realities made such a move impossible, and Starr was able to proceed unfettered, with subpoena power, an unlimited budget, a substantial staff, and no apparent boundaries on the scope of his curiosity. And so the investigation wore on, venturing into
astonishing levels of detail. The Starr Report is in essence a work of microhistory. The suggested comparison of Kenneth Starr to Tomás de Torquemada was never quite right. The real comparison is of Kenneth Starr to Jacques Fournier.

  A parallel reading of The Starr Report and the Fournier Register is instructive. There is the same attention to mundane social interaction:

  Fournier Register: In Lent, toward vespers, I took two sides of salted pork to the house of Guillaume Benet of Montaillou, to have them smoked. There I found Guillemette Benet warming herself by the fire, together with another woman; I put the salted meat in the kitchen and left.

  Starr Report: Ms. Lewinsky called Ms. Currie at home and told her that she wanted to drop off a gift for the President. Ms. Currie invited Ms. Lewinsky to her home, and Ms. Lewinsky gave her the package. The package contained a book called The Presidents of the United States and a love note inspired by the movie Titanic.

  Starr and Fournier took pains to document the precise geography and chronology of illicit relations:

  Fournier: Straight away I made love with her in the antechamber of the ostal, and subsequently I possessed her often. But never at night. Always in the daylight. We used to wait until the girls and the servant were out of the house. And then we used to commit the carnal sin.

  Starr: At the White House, according to Ms. Lewinsky, she told Secret Service Officer Muskett that she needed to deliver papers to the President. Officer Muskett admitted her to the Oval Office, and she and the President proceeded to the private study. . . . About 20 to 25 minutes later, according to Officer Muskett, the telephone outside the Oval Office rang. The operator said that the President had an important call but he was not picking up.

  In both texts the magistrates linger over the use of unusual sexual aids:

  Fournier: When Pierre Clergue wanted to know me carnally, he used to wear this herb wrapped in a piece of linen, about an inch long and wide, or about the size of the first joint of my little finger. And he had a long cord which he used to put round my neck while we made love.

  Starr: She also showed him an email describing the effect of chewing Altoid mints before performing oral sex. Ms. Lewinsky was chewing Altoids at the time, but the President replied that he did not have enough time for oral sex. They kissed, and the President rushed off to a State Dinner with President Zedillo.

  On it goes. The inquisitorial dynamic is one that tends toward perpetual motion. Its only check is exhaustion.

  An End, and a Beginning

  Whether because of sheer exhaustion or sheer effectiveness, the efforts of Jacques Fournier in Montaillou constituted the last important chapter of the Inquisition in southern France. One name that crops up repeatedly in the interrogations preserved by the Fournier Register is that of Guillaume Bélibaste, a wily and eccentric character who is known to history as the last Cathar parfait. It has been said that Bélibaste was more truly an imparfait—the evidence is overwhelming that he failed to live scrupulously according to Cathar standards of diet and celibacy. But a Cathar parfait is what he claimed to be, and as such he was denounced to the Inquisition by a spy. Bélibaste was condemned to death in 1321, becoming the last parfait to be burned at the stake.

  There were victims elsewhere. Papal inquisitors flared into activity on occasion as circumstances demanded—in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, and in other parts of France. Not long before Fournier set about his work in Montaillou, a brutal campaign was waged by the French king, Philip the Fair, against the Knights Templar, whose destruction he sought for political reasons. The Templars were a powerful quasi-religious military order whose origins lay in the Crusades and whose prime was long since past. The pope’s cooperation was needed to suppress the order; because the papacy at the time was lodged at Avignon, under watchful French eyes, it was duly obtained (though later rescinded). In October 1307, some fifteen thousand members of the order, of all ranks, were arrested throughout France in a well-coordinated operation. Several dozen leaders were burned at the stake in 1310, and the final few in 1314, bringing the Templars to an end but giving rise to countless conspiracy theories.

  Papal inquisitors were involved at two stages. The first began after the arrests, when the Templars were interrogated and in many cases tortured. Inquisitors also visited England at one point to gather evidence. They did not have much luck. A special request to the king that torture be permitted in this instance—that the interrogation be allowed to proceed “according to ecclesiastical constitutions,” as the inquisitors euphemistically put it—was eventually granted, but it seems that the inquisitors had some difficulty finding torturers of sufficient caliber. English monarchs were always leery of the Inquisition, and the institution never took hold on English soil.

  But the English showed no compunction about using inquisitorial methods for their own ends—to mount a case against Joan of Arc. The charismatic young warrior was captured on the battlefield at Compiègne, in 1430, and after a period of months was put on trial for heresy. The ecclesiastical proceedings against Joan survive in immense detail, and to a great extent they mimic the proceedings of an Inquisition tribunal. She was never tortured, but there were sharp departures from established practice, and nothing could conceal the fact that the trial’s conclusions were preordained. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431.

  As for Raymond VI of Toulouse, that wily lord at the center of so much conflict in Languedoc: against all odds, he died peacefully in his bed. Some saw his opportunism in a good light, and Raymond has achieved immortality of a sort. He is depicted on the walls of the Minnesota Supreme Court, in a century-old mural called The Adjustment of Conflicting Interests. He is joined on those walls by Moses, Confucius, and Socrates.

  3. Queen of Torments

  The Spanish Inquisition

  The most ardent defenders of justice here consider it

  is better for an innocent man to be condemned than

  for the Inquisition to suffer disgrace.

  —A PAPAL ENVOY IN SPAIN, 1565

  “I wish to interrogate him!” repeated Umbridge

  angrily. . . . “I wish you to provide me with a potion

  that will force him to tell me the truth!”

  —J. K. ROWLING, 2003

  Death in the Afternoon

  THE GREAT SPECTACLE known as the sermo generalis, a public ritual of punishment and humiliation, came to be known by another name when the Inquisition took hold in Spain and Portugal—it was called the auto-da-fé, or “act of faith.” The ritual is depicted in a thousand woodcuts and as many satires. In Voltaire’s Candide, an auto-da-fé is held to ward off earthquakes. In Leonard Bernstein’s version of the story, the chorus sings, “It’s a lovely day for drinking / and for watching people fry.”

  The Spanish Inquisition endured for 350 years. Its first auto-da-fé was held in Seville on February 6, 1481. The event was a shadow of what such occasions became a century or two later, when hundreds of penitents would be led in procession through crowded streets, their sentences pronounced and carried out before an audience of magnates, prelates, and many thousands of onlookers. The king himself might attend. The choreography of the ritual was meant to evoke the Day of Judgment, when all who have ever lived must face the final justice of God. The prisoners parading into the plaza would be followed by carts bearing the exhumed bodies of people convicted posthumously: not even the dead could escape punishment. The living prisoners wore the so-called sanbenito, a gown adorned with a cross, and those condemned to die at the stake also wore the coroza, a tall conical hat like a dunce cap. Goya captured the image vividly during the Inquisition’s final decades.

  But the scene in Seville in 1481, though similar in its essentials, was more muted. The Inquisition was new and the city was beset by plague. Six men and women had been condemned to death. They were all prominent conversos—people who had converted from Judaism to Christianity, or whose ancestors had, almost always under some form of explicit or implied duress. They had been accused and convi
cted of “judaizing”—reverting to their former faith—and of conspiracy against the crown. Their most dogged pursuer was a man named Alonso de Hojeda, a Dominican friar who had pressed ardently for the establishment of an inquisition in Spain. The converso problem was getting worse and worse, he claimed; conversos were judaizing in droves—if, indeed, their conversions had been authentic to begin with. Because conversos had become influential in finance, in the professions, in government service, and even in the Church, the threat had to be taken seriously. Hojeda produced a report, and saw his desire for an inquisition fulfilled.

  Hojeda himself preached the sermon in the cathedral on that February day. When the service was over, the condemned were relaxed to the secular arm—relajado al brazo secular. As in previous inquisitions, the religious authorities would not taint themselves with the grim business of capital punishment. The relajados were led beyond the walls of the city to the quemadero, or place of burning, on the Campo de Tablada, and bound to the stake. Wood and straw were piled high, and the pyre was lit. Alonso de Hojeda did not have long to savor the moment. He himself was soon carried off by plague.

  A heroic equestrian statue of El Cid stands at the quemadero today. There is no indication at the site that this was once an execution ground. In the short story “The Surveyor,” by Henry Roth, an American tourist named Aaron Stigman uses old maps and surveying tools to locate the precise location of the quemadero, and lays a wreath at a certain spot among the flower beds that surround the statue. The act arouses the curiosity of the police. He and his wife are taken in for questioning but released when an understanding lawyer, also Jewish, intuits what Stigman was doing, and why.