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

by Cullen Murphy

  Galileo is only the most prominent person to have been caught up in what is now called the Roman Inquisition. The successor to the Medieval Inquisition, and separate from the Spanish Inquisition, it was created at a moment of crisis—an existential emergency for the Church. Its purpose was to blunt the rise of Protestantism and to spearhead the Counter-Reformation, and it was run in a coordinated way directly from Rome. Eventually it would expand the range of its targets—to heretics and freethinkers of various kinds, to magic and superstition, to aspects of science and rationalism. Of course, it always had an eye on the Jews.

  The Roman Inquisition was established in 1542, by Pope Paul III. Paul himself was more of a humanist than a prosecutor. He was painted by Raphael when young and by Titian when old. He issued a bull confirming that the Indians of North America were human beings. The true architect of the Roman Inquisition was Giovanni Pietro Carafa, who as a cardinal pressed for its creation, and who in 1555 was elevated to the papacy as Pope Paul IV. In many of its procedures, the Roman Inquisition resembled the medieval one, but it was centralized and bureaucratized as never before. Its inquisitors were not itinerant agents but functionaries of an apparat. They answered to a committee of cardinals overseen by an inquisitor general. The Roman Inquisition established permanent offices in cities throughout Italy.

  The accomplishments of Paul IV, the sternest of the Inquisition popes, were from his perspective considerable. He created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the Index of Forbidden Books. He sent hundreds of convicted heretics to the stake, placing the idea of due process, as one historian writes, “under an almost unbearable strain.” He forced the Jews of Rome to wear distinctive clothing and confine themselves to a ghetto. Nor did he neglect the arts. Paul IV discontinued Michelangelo’s pension and ordered that the nude figures in The Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel, be draped in veils and loincloths. The painted garments, the work of Daniele da Volterra—known ever afterward as Il Braghettone, “the breeches-maker”—are still there to be seen. They were unaffected by the restorations of the 1980s and 1990s.

  The historian Leopold von Ranke rendered his own last judgment on Paul IV, directing attention to Paul’s sense of utter certainty: “From time to time characters like that of Paul re-appear on the theater of the world. Their conceptions of the world and of life are formed from a single point of view; their individual bent of mind is so strong that their opinions are absolutely governed by it.” Ranke went on:

  He favoured, above all other institutions, the inquisition, which indeed he had himself reestablished. He often let the days pass by which were set apart for the segnatura and the consistory; but he never missed the meetings of the congregation of the inquisition, which took place every Thursday. He wished its powers to be exercised in the severest manner.

  At Paul’s death, in 1559, a Roman mob sacked the original headquarters of the Inquisition, which had been located on the banks of the Tiber, near the Mausoleum of Augustus. They set free more than seventy prisoners and then put the place to the torch, destroying most of the Inquisition’s books and files. The mob then moved on, threatening to burn down Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Atop the Campidoglio, the old Roman capitol, they attacked a marble statue of the late pope, dragging its head through the streets and then throwing it into the river.

  With the Inquisition’s palazzo in ashes, the new pope, Pius V, set about building an even more imposing central headquarters. This work was deemed so urgent that every other task took a lower priority. Rome at the time was still a half-dead city. Islands of Renaissance grandeur rose from among sprawling slums and malarial marshes. Over the centuries, only one of the eleven ancient aqueducts had functioned continuously. The Basilica of St. Peter’s was as yet unfinished—the circular drum that now supports the dome was not complete—but the pope pulled away the stonecutters and masons for the Inquisition project. The cannons at Castel Sant’Angelo saluted as the first stone was laid. A diplomat reported to the Holy Roman Emperor that the work was proceeding gagliardamente—“spiritedly.” An inscription would be placed over the main entrance, declaring that the palazzo had been erected as a “bulwark” in the war against the “adherents of heretical depravity.”

  The new headquarters was a vast, fortresslike structure, with high barred windows and stout towers on the corners. Prisoners were held in the eastern wing. Slits for muskets bracketed an iron door. A renovation and a calmer ocher façade would one day soften the palazzo’s appearance, but not until the 1920s. “In the interior of the building,” a nineteenth-century British visitor reported, “is a lofty hall with gloomy frescoes of Dominican saints, and many terrible dungeons and cells, in which the visitor is unable to stand upright, having their vaulted ceilings lined with reeds to deaden sound.” An American visitor, a few years later, described a “gloomy and forbidding pile of massive masonry” with “deaf stone ears and voiceless walls.” In his own moral taxonomy, this visitor placed the palace within “the Rome of Caligula and Nero and the Borgias.”

  As for Paul IV, you can find him in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. An imposing statue sits above his remains in a side chapel off the nave. Paul glowers at the world, tiara upon his head, an arm raised imperiously. The funeral monument lies in deep shadow, but a few coins in a meter will buy a moment of illumination. The lights click on with a sharp metallic sound, and with the same sound, seconds later, they are abruptly extinguished.

  What Do You Mean by This?

  That the story of the Roman Inquisition can be known at all in many of its details is something of a historical accident. The documents that tell the story are lodged in a number of locations. Some can be found here and there in the Vatican’s Archivio Segreto. A portion of this archive occupies a complex of elaborately frescoed rooms adjacent to the Vatican Library. The rest spills over onto fifty miles of shelves in the Vatican bunker. These are the day-to-day papers of the popes and the papal bureaucracy, and they run back to the end of the eighth century, dwindling in volume as they recede in time. Henry VIII’s request for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon can be found in these files, the wax seals of the king’s legion of co-petitioners hanging from the document on red ribbons. Papal absolution for the Knights Templar—too late to help their cause—can also be found here, and original works by Galileo.

  A second group of documents make up the Inquisition archives per se—minutes of meetings, official correspondence, the personal papers of the inquisitors, and much else. These are preserved at the headquarters of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the Inquisition’s old palazzo.

  A third group lies outside the Vatican: Inquisition records can be found in the archives of Bologna and Modena, Venice and Naples and other places where intense Inquisition activity took place. The documents in these locations include the records of thousands of trials.

  In 1809, Napoleon, whose armies controlled most of continental Europe, and who had effectively annexed the Papal States, gave the order to transport as many documents as possible from the first two groups—that is, everything at the Vatican—to Paris. The pope himself, Pius VII, was already in French custody. The Vatican had not been singled out for special treatment: Napoleon was taking control of archives everywhere, and planned to create a vast pan-European repository in his imperial capital. Over a period of three years, at enormous expense, more than 3,000 chests of papal documents were hauled by wagon across the Alps. Along the way, some disappeared forever, sliding by accident into rivers and canals. At last they arrived at the Palais Soubise, where the French national archives are kept even today. The Palais Soubise holds the records of the trial of Joan of Arc. In the margin of one page is a sketch of Joan, apparently drawn not long after her death.

  No sooner had the last of the archives arrived in Paris than Napoleon fell from power; the archives could now be returned. But the French government wouldn’t pay for shipment, and the pope was nearly penniless. Gone were the days when a Renaissance pontiff like Sixtus IV could spen
d a third of the papacy’s annual income on a coronation tiara. To reduce the cost of transportation—and perhaps also to get rid of unwelcome evidence pertaining to the Inquisition—the Holy See ordered its commissioners in Paris to destroy many of the documents. Some were shredded and sold as pulp for cardboard. Some were bought by victuallers and other merchants for use as wrapping paper, the individual sheets inadvertently becoming public fodder, brandished by propagandists of anticlerical bent. (A monograph should be written on the role of food vendors in the transmission or destruction of historical evidence.) Some documents were stolen or quietly acquired by private parties, in transactions that remain shrouded. A substantial trove of records somehow made its way to Trinity College, Dublin, where it remains to this day. Smaller caches turned up here and there—at the Royal Library in Belgium, for instance. Until the end of the twentieth century, these stray collections were the only Inquisition records originating in the Vatican itself that scholars could consult.

  In the end, only about two thirds of what had gone to Paris made its way back to Rome. Among the documents destroyed were many that concerned the trial and suppression of the Knights Templar, and all the arguments for the defense in the case of Giordano Bruno. The records of the trial of Galileo were lost for decades, inspiring dark theories, but they eventually surfaced in Prague and found their way back to Rome.

  For a long time, the archives just sat there. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII agreed to open the Archivio Segreto to a few outside scholars, most notably the historian Ludwig von Pastor. The Inquisition archives, however, would remain sealed for another century. In 1979, Carlo Ginzburg sent his letter to Pope John Paul II, and the Vatican’s resistance began to erode. By all accounts, the man who argued most forcefully that the archives should be opened, and eventually saw to it that they were, was Cardinal Ratzinger. In the five years after Ratzinger became pope, more attention was lavished on his sartorial choices—the designer sunglasses, the red Prada shoes—than on his scholarly credentials. Ratzinger is not a liberal, but he is indeed an intellectual, and the values of the academy exercise a gravitational pull on some important part of him. Even before the Inquisition archives were officially opened, in 1998, Ratzinger had begun allowing a handful of scholars to burrow in the stacks, under careful supervision.

  One of those scholars was Peter Godman, a New Zealand–born historian who now teaches at the University of Rome, and who for many years divided his time between archival work at the Vatican and a professorship at the University of Tübingen. Tübingen is also the home of the liberal theologian Hans Küng, who for fifty years has played mongoose to the Vatican’s cobra (or, depending on one’s perspective, the other way around). Küng and Ratzinger were once like-minded colleagues in their role as periti, or advisors, at the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s. In those early days, Küng in fact gave Ratzinger a job at Tübingen. Personally and theologically, the two men drifted apart. In 1979, Ratzinger played a role in stripping Küng of his missio canonica—his permission to teach as a Catholic theologian.

  Peter Godman looks boyish for his fifty-five years. He has been haunting the Inquisition archives for a decade and a half. He knows the various sixteenth-century secretaries by their handwriting and speaks about the cardinal-inquisitors in the present tense, as if they were about to walk down the hall. He has a particular feeling for Giulio Antonio Santori, the inquisitor general who oversaw the condemnation of Giordano Bruno. Sometimes he uses the word “we” to refer to the blended world of historical Inquisition and modern archive, a locution that I am not sure he notices.

  One afternoon, he led the way up the spiral staircase in the reading room and into the tight furrows among the shelves. “You never know what you’re going to find,” he explained. “In this manuscript here”—he pulled down a volume—“I found the deliberations regarding the censorship of Descartes.” (His Meditations and his Metaphysics, along with some other works, were placed on the Index in 1663.) Godman moved along and pulled down another volume. “In this one are the preparations for the Syllabus of Errors”—a compendium of theologically noxious ideas, issued by Pope Pius IX in 1864. “The collections were formed arbitrarily—there was a system which was invariably chaotic. The system can be geographic. It can be thematic. Here you have things about animal magnetism and hypnotism.” His fingers lightly traced the spines.

  Godman drew another register off the shelf. “Here’s an English case. Grately. Edmund Grately. We had him in prison here, upstairs. He claimed he was an ecumenical, trying to mediate between Roman and Anglican. They thought, of course, that he was a heretic. They found him with a considerable amount of money, and weapons, and also these bizarre writings in English. The inquisitors had the writings translated into Latin—very unusual for them to take the time to do that. Grately, it turned out, was a spy for Elizabeth I. And here—look—here is the sentence: life imprisonment. In practice, that typically means three years. The sentence is written out in the hand of Cardinal Santori—the grand inquisitor himself.”

  We moved on a little farther. Godman opened one last register, from 1574. He said, “This case is of great interest because the accused—his name was Filippo Mocenigo—was an archbishop, in Cyprus. He was an important figure. What he didn’t know was that he’d been on trial for heresy for thirteen years—he had been denounced for remarks he had made about free will while on the journey to the Council of Trent.” This was the great reforming council that ushered in the Counter-Reformation and set Catholicism’s course for centuries. “Nor did he know,” said Godman, “that it would last for another nine. The proceedings go on and on. One of the main charges against him was that he wrote a book that no one’s ever heard of, because there was only one copy—and it’s here. It’s a work of simple and very stupid piety, written in Italian and intended for Mocenigo’s sister, who was a nun. It was never published. Two or three inquisitors are on the job.” They eventually brought Mocenigo in for questioning: What do you mean by this? What do you mean by that? At one place in the interrogation transcript is Mocenigo’s plaintive assessment: “It seems to me that laboramus in equivocis”—that is, “we labor in equivocation.” And the archbishop’s fate? “In the end,” said Godman, “he was found innocent. But the book itself was condemned. Which is why it’s here. The only copy.”

  The Gutenberg Challenge

  The words “only copy” have a whiff of the medieval about them, a scent of the candle. They recall a time when every book was a unique object made with pen and ink and parchment, in a monastic scriptorium or the secretaries’ office at a university—and when every additional copy was indeed literally copied, letter by letter, laboriously and by hand. The Inquisition archive itself has a medieval flavor, in part because up until the modern period, all the record-keeping had to be done by notaries, who were priests. Their handwriting is beautiful to look at, and has aged wonderfully on the page.

  But the medieval flavor is misleading. If the Roman Inquisition is about anything, it’s about the revolution ushered in by the printing press. The Medieval Inquisition and, in its earliest stages, the Spanish Inquisition were directed chiefly at people—that is, at the physical corpora of sentient beings. They were directed at heretics who inhabited a mainly oral culture. Word of mouth can be a powerful force, especially when growing networks of communication allow ideas to spread from valley to valley and port to port, but the personal physicality involved kept the inquisitorial focus on actual people. In Spain, of course, that focus was even more intense. Certain classes of people were the target—not just what they believed or the ideas they spread but who they were: Jews and Moors. The Roman Inquisition went after people too; it put a good number of them to death. But it was just as much about the published word.

  Books in the codex form we know them had existed for a millennium, but most people couldn’t read, and in any case the making of books was a time-consuming process. Books were also expensive. Someone who had a “big” library had
at most a few hundred volumes. Petrarch, who first applied the term “Dark Ages” to what we now think of as the medieval era, was one of the great book collectors of his age. He was in his library when he died, in 1374. Petrarch donated his books to the Republic of Venice—a collection numbering only about two hundred volumes. Seventy years later, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, began distributing his library to Oxford; the gift, which became the basis for the university library, numbered only about three hundred volumes. If heresy was thought of as a contagion, the most worrisome means of transmission was certainly not books.

  The printing press, developed in the mid fifteenth century, changed all that—very suddenly, and by an order of magnitude. To give some idea, here’s a single example from very early in the history of printing: it concerns the Ripoli Press, an establishment in Florence that had added a printing press to its traditional scriptorium. The press was operated by nuns. Albinia de la Mare, one of the foremost authorities on the book trade, did the math: “In 1483, the Ripoli Press charged three florins per quinterno for setting up and printing Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Dialogues. A scribe might have charged one florin per quinterno for duplicating the same work. The Ripoli Press produced 1,025 copies; the scribe would have turned out one.” (A quinterno was a unit of paper that, if folded and printed on both sides, yielded sixteen book-sized pages.) It is estimated that scribes copied out some 2.7 million books over the course of the entire fourteenth century; printers produced more than that number in the single year 1550. Thanks to the revolution in typography wrought by the printer and publisher Aldus Manutius, more words could be squeezed onto smaller pages and yet still be read without difficulty; books became easier to carry (and easier to conceal). Any town or city of any ambition had a printing shop. The printer’s establishment—which also served as publisher, marketer, and defender of copyright—was as central to the civic space as churches and markets.