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

by Cullen Murphy

  Because so many Inquisition trial records survive in various archives, it is sometimes possible—depending on how the questioning went, and on the fastidiousness of the recording secretary—to get deep inside the heads of particular defendants. One man who has achieved a measure of immortality is Domenico Scandella, known by the nickname Menocchio, a miller in the small northern Italian town of Montereale. If he were to return to his hometown today, he would most likely be taken aback to find a cultural center named for him (the Centro Studi Storici Menocchio) and to learn that his name also graces a small literary magazine (I Quaderni del Menocchio). As Giordano Bruno’s case was making its way toward a conclusion, in the late 1590s, so was Menocchio’s. Like Bruno, Menocchio was a man who could not stop talking, and although he was burned at the stake for heresy in 1599, his words took on a life of their own.

  But not until almost four centuries had elapsed. In the meantime, the transcripts from his trial moldered in the Archivio della Curia Arcivescovile, in Udine, and it was there, in that northern Italian city, that they were discovered by Carlo Ginzburg. Ginzburg is an easy fellow to spot in a crowd, with flaring gray eyebrows and a matching shock of unruly hair—he could be Trotsky’s Italian cousin. In the early 1960s, he was at the beginning of his academic career, a lowly assistente volontario at the University of Rome, who helped make ends meet by translating books from French and English into Italian. A man with Ginzburg’s talents and energy—though not his attitude—would have been a very welcome addition to the staff of the sixteenth-century Congregation of the Index. Of course, the fact that he was Jewish would have posed a problem.

  Ginzburg was not consciously aware of the extent to which this part of his background, together with his father’s torture and death at the hands of the Nazis in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison, had impelled him toward the Inquisition as a subject of study. The realization came only later, as he has admitted. (“How could I have let such an obvious fact escape me?”) He began sifting through Inquisition records wherever he could find them, in towns and cities all over Italy. His intention was to study “the persecuted, not the persecutors.” One day, quite by accident, in the massive state archives of Venice—he was ordering numbered boxes of documents at random, as if prospecting for ore; playing, as he recalls, “Venetian roulette”—Ginzburg suddenly came across references to trials of people known as benandanti, a category of heretic that he had never heard of before, and no one else had heard of either. He was so excited by the discovery that he had to leave the archive and walk up and down outside to restore his composure.

  His investigation eventually led to the Inquisition archives in Udine, in the region of Friuli. The archives were closed to outsiders—even the fact of their existence was not widely known—but Ginzburg enlisted the help of a local monsignor who happened to be a historian. The monsignor, who had never met Ginzburg, nonetheless sent a note to the archivist that read: “Dr. Carlo Ginzburg is a serious scholar and a reliable person.” He was granted access, grudgingly. The archives in Udine hold the records of some 2,000 Inquisition trials, in hulking wooden cabinets, and Ginzburg worked among them in solitude. “No bureaucracy, no employees,” he would remember many years later. “I used to pick up myself the handwritten volumes I needed, since they were stored in the same room where I was working. I was always perfectly alone. I remember that once I was locked in the archive after closing time; somebody came to rescue me after a couple of hours.”

  Ginzburg emerged from the archives of Udine with his first major book, I Benandanti, translated into English as The Night Battles. The word benandanti in fact means “good walkers,” and it refers to people who engaged in nighttime rituals, probably of very ancient provenance, intended to ensure an abundant harvest. From 1580 to 1634, some 850 people in rural northern Italy were hauled in for interrogation because the Inquisition had heard reports of such activities. Ginzburg writes,

  The benandanti spoke, often without being urged to, of the battles for fertility which they fought at night, in the spirit, armed with sprigs of fennel, against witches, male and female, armed with sorghum stalks. All this was incomprehensible to the inquisitors—the very term “benandante” was unknown to them and over fifty years they constantly asked what it meant.

  The villagers and country people had no idea that they were heretics—what they were doing was simply an immemorial aspect of ordinary life. The inquisitors, for their part, struggled to fit the peasants’ behavior into the categories they knew—such as heresy and witchcraft. They were as dismissive of the “mental rubbish of peasant credulity” as many eminent later historians have been. (The phrase comes from H. R. Trevor-Roper, who had little patience for such things.)

  To define the problem can be to create the problem. The commodious encyclopedia of witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, the work of two Dominican inquisitors, was first published in 1486; the title was clearly chosen for its resonance with another book, the Malleus Judeorum, which had appeared earlier in the century. The Malleus Maleficarum bore various marks of official approval. During the next 150 years, thanks to the printing press, it was published throughout Europe in some thirty-five separate editions. Its primary purpose was to refute the notion that there was no such thing as witchcraft, and it certainly succeeded in fostering a conviction that witchcraft was widespread. It also created a standard view of what witchcraft was: a pact with the devil, involving magical conclaves and often sexual relations, whose ultimate purpose was the deployment of sorcery to inflict harm on God’s good world. Here is a typical chapter heading: “Whether the Relations of an Incubus Devil with a Witch are always accompanied by the Injection of Semen.” And the one following: “How, as it were, they Deprive Man of his Virile Member.” The last third of the book is devoted to the techniques, including torture, that inquisitors and others should use to discover and prosecute witchcraft. Much of this advice was taken directly from Nicholas Eymerich’s medieval inquisitors’ manual.

  To a modern sensibility, the Malleus often reads, as the scholar Anthony Grafton once put it, “like a strange amalgam of Monty Python and Mein Kampf.” Nonetheless, the book’s taxonomy of beliefs and practices became standard, and influenced other treatises. Witchcraft had been an off-and-on concern of the Church for centuries—sorcery was among the charges brought against the Knights Templar—but it’s probably no coincidence that the European “witch craze” made its appearance only after the contents of the Malleus became familiar. The witch craze would eventually cross the ocean. The penumbra of the Malleus can be glimpsed around the Salem witch trials, which occurred in 1692. Its ideas peek out from behind the writings of Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and others of the time.

  The benandanti don’t appear in the Malleus, and neither do their practices, but Ginzburg shows how decades of repeated questioning by the Inquisition began to shape the way the benandanti saw themselves, gradually bending their self-perception toward something the inquisitors could recognize. The Inquisitors were simply asking the kinds of questions that made sense to them—over and over again, until, in time, the answers conformed to the picture they expected. Yes, we gather with Satan in dark of night. Yes, the sex is good. As one historian has concluded: “The study of actual interrogations shows that the dealings with the Devil that suspects were eventually compelled to admit to are actually foisted onto them by the investigators.”

  It was in the archives at Udine that Ginzburg came upon the case of Domenico Scandella—page after page of Inquisition transcripts. Ginzburg found that the transcripts were rendered almost like a modern screenplay, recording gesture and tone as well as dialogue. He would recount Scandella’s story in minute detail in a 1976 book called The Cheese and the Worms, one of the most prominent early examples of the genre known as microhistory. What a hundred years ago might have been no more than a glancing reference or intriguing gloss—an unknown individual, a small town, a piece of music, an obscure ritual—becomes the starting point for ingenious narra
tives. A reduction in scale allows, incongruously, for a widening of perspective.

  Menocchio was a man of modest consequence in Montereale. Not only was he a miller, an occupation of some importance, but he had served as mayor of the town. He had fathered eleven children. He played the guitar. And he was literate. He owned a number of books and borrowed others, and according to his testimony in the course of two trials, he had read, among other works, a vernacular Bible, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and an Italian translation of a book that may have been (according to one witness) the Koran. Montereale lies only about seventy miles from Venice, which at the time was the most cosmopolitan city in Europe—a seafaring republic with a significant population of Jews and Muslims, transients from all over, and a lively intellectual life. The city supported a vast book-making industry—it had at least thirty different publishers in Menocchio’s day. In an age before true globalization, Venice was as globalized as a place could be. Menocchio is known to have visited Venice, and to have bought at least one of his books there.

  Ginzburg was struck by Menocchio’s plucky self-defense and eccentric views. “I have an artful mind,” the miller admitted proudly at his first trial for heresy, in 1584. Here is his version of the Creation: “All was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” Menocchio, Ginzburg writes, appropriated “remnants of the thinking of others as he might stones and bricks” to construct his own unique cosmology, held together by a mortar of rural folklore.

  He had been denounced to the Inquisition by the local parish priest, with whom he had quarreled, and from that moment forward the process unfolded in standard inquisitorial fashion. Menocchio was permitted to hire a lawyer; had he not, one would have been appointed for him. He spent the several months between arrest and sentencing in prison, and during that time he was interrogated—at exhausting length—on at least seven occasions. He was not tortured, perhaps because he spoke freely without any prodding at all. A secretary was present at all times. To judge from the transcripts, Menocchio sometimes seemed to take charge of the proceedings. At one point, he was asked whether he believed that the Church represented the one true religion. He said, “I beg you, sir, listen to me”—you can almost see him leaning forward, loud and insistent, and the inquisitors drawing back, wary but curious—and recounted a story he had read in the Decameron, though shaping it to his own purpose:

  There was once a great lord who declared his heir would be the person found to have a certain precious ring of his; and drawing near to his death, he had two other rings similar to the first one made, since he had three sons, and he gave a ring to each son; each one of them thought himself to be the heir and to have the true ring, but because of their similarity it could not be known with certainty. Likewise, God the father has various children whom he loves, such as Christians, Turks, and Jews, and to each of them he has given the will to live by his own law, and we do not know which is the right one.

  In the end, Menocchio formally recanted his views and, as a first-time offender, accepted a relatively modest punishment. Although he was condemned to prison—“where you will remain for the entire duration of your life”—his sentence was commuted after two years, a typical practice. (The reason for such leniency may have been cultural, or even architectural: unlike Spain, Italy had few large prisons.) Menocchio returned to Montereale and resumed his work as a miller, though he had to wear a penitential garment called the habitello, emblazoned with a red cross, and for a time was not permitted to venture outside the town.

  But Menocchio was not the kind of man who would go quietly. He eventually stopped wearing the habitello because it was bad for business: “I was losing many earnings,” he would say when arrested again, years later. And he continued to develop his views and speak his mind. “Can’t you understand,” he would say, “the Inquisitors don’t want us to know what they know.” A neighbor had once said of Menocchio, “He will argue with anyone.” Another man testified, “He said many times, and I heard this from several people, that if he were not afraid of certain persons in this world, he would say things that would astonish.” In his interrogation testimony he comes across like one of those vocal autodidacts so common in New York City, with a two-day stubble and the Daily Worker in a jacket pocket.

  His opinions caught up with him. In 1599, Menocchio found himself standing before a tribunal. This time he was tortured, by means of the strappado—“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh poor me, oh poor me”—and yet this time he refused to recant his views. Because he was found to have relapsed—a far more serious matter than a first offense—Menocchio was condemned to death. There is some evidence that the inquisitors in Friuli were reluctant to carry out the sentence, but word of Menocchio’s case had reached Rome, which proved insistent. The sentence was confirmed by none other than Cardinal Santori, deeply involved in the Bruno matter, who wrote to the local inquisitor, “Your reverence must not fail to proceed in the case of the peasant of the diocese of Concordia. . . . The jurisdiction of the Holy Office over a case of such importance can in no way be doubted. Therefore, manfully perform everything that is required.”

  The case was reviewed personally by Pope Clement VIII. Clement was a man who on some matters could be open-minded. He has been credited, for instance, with promoting the introduction of coffee in Europe; it had widely been considered a Muslim beverage, and therefore intolerable for Christian purposes, but the pope relished the taste and is said to have baptized a cup and pronounced it acceptable. He was not so open-minded when it came to Menocchio. Domenico Scandella was burned at the stake in 1599, at the age of sixty-seven.

  In Montereale today, you will find in the graveyards tombstones that bear the name Scandella. The small white Church of San Rocco, the parish church that Menocchio attended, still stands at the center of town. Menocchio would have been familiar with the Calderari frescoes inside. The fountain outside the Menocchio cultural center is relatively new: water pours from holes in a very large wheel of cheese, fashioned out of concrete. The water is meant to represent the worms of the miller’s imagination. In 1999, on the 400th anniversary of Menocchio’s execution, a symposium of scholars was convened at Montereale. Carlo Ginzburg was made an honorary citizen of the town.

  “There Must Be Some Mistake”

  More than anything else, it was the power of ideas—ideas like “reason” and “freedom of conscience”—that began to limit and then to undermine the Roman Inquisition. One can point to this or that factor—the declining influence of the papacy, the rise of mighty nation-states, the proliferation of new technology, the advance of science—but ultimately the Inquisition was at odds with the spirit of an ascending age. As Francisco Bethencourt has written, “The Inquisition provided the prime example of what European civilization was rejecting.”

  Bethencourt elaborated on this one afternoon in an office overlooking the Inns of Court. He is a professor now at King’s College London, but is Portuguese by birth; he was drawn to the Inquisition as a subject in part by the experience of his native country under authoritarian rule. The point Bethencourt made was a simple one: The Inquisition was a disciplinary institution, operated by an entity—the Church—whose claim to authority was based on values. More than anything else, an organization based on values must beware a challenge made on the very same basis. Ideas have no corporeality. They are slow to take hold. We often discount their significance in our material world. How inefficient they appear to be alongside brute force. But in the long run, they are often the most powerful actors of all. One of those actors was the idea of tolerance. John Locke put it like this in 1689:

  Nobody, therefore, in fine, neither single persons nor churches, nay, nor even commonwealths, have any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon pretence of religion . . . The sum of all we drive at is that every man may enjoy the same rights that are granted to others. />
  “The Inquisition was extinguished,” Bethencourt said, “because it couldn’t cope with the profound change of values in Europe throughout the eighteenth century. It started in Protestant countries, mainly in the Netherlands, then in England. It was in these two countries that the issue of tolerance was raised—not for the first time, but as a new value, a new positive value. Toleration in the sixteenth century had been a negative value—it was something you ‘suffered.’ It was something done to you under certain circumstances. By the late seventeenth century, tolerance had become a positive value in itself, something that you praised and you were proud of. This idea spread. And the Inquisition collapsed.”

  It was a development for which there was no cure—the intellectual equivalent of habitat destruction. The Inquisition carried on, as bureaucracies do. It disciplined priests. It condemned heresies. It issued lists of forbidden books. Occasionally it conducted an execution. In terms of authority over life and limb, its writ eventually extended no farther than the shrinking realm of the Papal States in central Italy. The Inquisition was abolished during the Napoleonic Era, when the Papal States were annexed by France, and then reestablished when sovereignty was restored. The emergence of a unified Kingdom of Italy brought an end to the Papal States altogether. Rome was captured by Italian forces in 1870, and Pope Pius IX took refuge in the enclave that would eventually become a sovereign city-state, his temporal powers henceforward restricted to those few acres.

  But even in its dying days, the Roman Inquisition could act when it thought it must. In 1858, the city of Bologna was still part of the Papal States, and on a summer night that year, under orders from the Inquisition, the police came to the home of a Jewish couple, Salomone (known as Momolo) and Marianna Mortara, and took away one of their children, Edgardo, who was six years old. Like many Jewish families, the Mortaras had employed a Christian girl as a servant, because Christians were able to perform chores on the Sabbath. While in her care one day, young Edgardo had fallen ill, and the servant, fearing for his life, had taken it upon herself to baptize him.