At the hands of inquisition apologists, God received the same treatment. In one of the more unusual roles assigned to Jesus Christ by his flock, the protean preacher of peace in the New Testament came garbed in the robes of an avenger. He had arrived on earth to persecute. Much use was made of the many violent, vengeful passages in the Old Testament, with their far fewer counterparts in the Christian scriptures also deployed for full homiletic effect. And God was not only cruel, he was sadistic. The greatest torment of Hell was not the boundless and eternal physical agony but the sound of God’s spiteful mockery and malicious cackling at the sight of such suffering.
A radical Dominican thinker of the mid-thirteenth century, Moneta of Cremona, went so far as to say that a true way to imitate God was to kill. His logic, based on the behavior of God in the Old Testament, ran something like this: God does not sin, God kills, therefore killing is not a sin. In some ways, this bald reversal of the sixth of the Ten Commandments was nothing new, for churchmen throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the heyday of the Crusades—had meandered far into sophistry in their attempt to reconcile their savior’s message of nonviolence and the notion of holy war. The great twelfth-century Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux had famously opined that the killing of an infidel was not the killing of a man but the killing of evil. What was new in Moneta’s formulation was that God, far from forgiving the regrettably necessary recourse to violence, instead stood cheering on the sidelines, seeing his own image in the torturers and killers. Just as the medieval Hell fantasy speaks volumes about human psychology, so too does the worldview espoused by Moneta of Cremona and his followers, proving that at all times and in all places, sincere people will always find a way to justify whatever action they believe consonant with their duty, no matter how nakedly reprehensible that action is. Moneta’s inquisitor differs from Dostoevsky’s, whose Grand Inquisitor has no need of—indeed, despises—Jesus Christ; but the Dominican’s may be more pernicious in that Jesus is fully in favor of persecution. The poor wretch moldering in the dank cell of an inquisition prison thus had no higher authority to implore for succor. He was utterly alone, damned by a God who was laughing at him.
Thus the inquisitor visiting a village in Languedoc went to work armed with a clear conscience, a good deal of practical advice from his predecessors, and the certitude that he was performing a sacred duty. After days, perhaps weeks, of taking depositions from all and sundry, those fingered as heretics would be haled before him for detailed and robust questioning.
By the middle of the thirteenth century, the use of torture had been papally approved. Torture in its many forms, what today’s boosters of the practice call “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what their medieval counterparts called “putting the question,” began to play a greater role in eliciting information from those under a cloud of suspicion. Partly thanks to the availability of the torturer’s services, the focus of inquisition gradually came to center on obtaining a confession from the accused. Expediency was not the sole explanation for this change: the certainties of older customary law, with the god-given verdict delivered in a trial by ordeal, had been replaced by the nuances of Roman law, with its apparatus of partial proofs, imperfect witnesses, and, most important, reliance on human rather than divine judgment. The lawyers were hoist on their own petard—only a full confession constituted grounds for absolute certainty. For this reason, it was termed the regina probationum, or “queen of proofs.”
No longer was establishing guilt on the basis of two or more credible accusations satisfactory. These would kick off the proceedings, but the prisoner had to be forced—tortured—into admitting his errors. If he was smart, he could then recant them and beg forgiveness. For those unable to be tortured—the dead—ghoulish ingenuity came into play: their bodies were dug up, carted through the streets, and burned in the public square. If the corpse had been a heretic, or simply a sometime host of a heretic, his or her dwelling would then be demolished and the resulting vacant lot transformed into a dung pit. As early as 1207, Pope Innocent III had decreed: “The house, however, in which a heretic had been received shall be altogether destroyed, nor shall anyone presume to rebuild it; but let that which was a den of iniquity become a receptacle of filth.” For good measure, all of the deceased’s worldly goods and wealth were confiscated from his or her heirs, leaving them destitute.
The inquisitor rarely tarried in the locales he was investigating. When he repaired to his headquarters in Carcassonne or Toulouse, more police work was done, summons issued, testimonies compared, conclusions drawn. Those villagers who had given unsatisfactory accounts of their beliefs and activities would accompany the inquisitor back to the city to be thrown in prison. Incarceration was a technique used to focus minds, and it usually did. The Wall in Carcassonne had two types of prisoners: those subjected to the murus strictus, or harsh confinement, shackled and manacled in solitary confinement, with little food, light, and air, and those confined in the murus largus, a more relaxed imprisonment, perhaps in an expansive collective holding room, or in cells surrounding a courtyard, with rights to roam the grounds and receive visitors. In both instances, prisoners had to pay room and board to the warden. Although that last detail might seem strange, one historian points out that the entire strategy of incarceration was novel: “What the inquisitors had done, and they may have been the first in medieval Europe to have done so, was to create a socially delimited space, in which they could isolate individuals from the outer world and subject them without interruption to an enforced and forcible persuasion. Such a planned and active use of imprisonment for behavior modification was possibly without parallel in medieval Europe.”
When, after several months of diligent investigation, the inquisitor had readied his sentences, he would return to the village to mete out punishment. The people were assembled to watch their fellows pay for their spiritual impertinence. The inquisitor took the opportunity to deliver a stern sermo generalis, a public homily and sentencing, in which he would attempt to edify the common folk on the nature of divine justice and the perils of straying from the right path, the ceremony serving as a spectacle to nudge the people toward salvation. The sermo was the culmination of the entire inquisitorial enterprise: the tares would be separated from the wheat, the wolves from the sheep, the depraved from the decent. It was also the only public moment of the entire proceeding, the trials and questioning having been conducted in secrecy. Thus its importance to the inquisitor’s redemptive mission can hardly be overstated.
The inquisitor had considerable leeway in determining the appropriate type of punishment. The most benign was a command to go on a pilgrimage. Those who had admitted and abjured minor heretical activity could be given two large yellow crosses made of cloth, to be sewn on the front and back of their tunics and to be worn at all times for a period that stretched from months to years. However harmless that sounds, it was in fact a badge of obloquy, guaranteeing a substantial loss of livelihood and standing. The cross wearer was henceforth a pariah, or at the very least a dangerous person to be seen with. To sharpen the sting, the convicted individual had to appear in this apparel every Sunday at mass, bearing with him some strong rods, so that the priest could flog him in front of the congregation. The same shameful humiliation awaited him on every important feast day, of which there were many in the medieval calendar, during which he was energetically flogged in religious processions.
A painfully similar fate was assigned to those found guilty of giving false testimony to the inquisition. To their clothes would be attached a red cloth in the shape of a tongue, and frequent public whippings constituted a further penance. Penance had to be public and ongoing, as a continual reminder to the faithful about who was in charge of their relationship with God. Those who had been convicted earlier but had not kept up with their penitential obligations—those who had taken off the crosses or avoided the floggings, for example—were given a more severe punishment this time: imprisonment and confiscation of all materi
al goods.
The Wall at Carcassonne and a similar establishment in Toulouse also housed those deemed unsuitable for further social intercourse with the faithful. The length and harshness of their sentences depended on the temperament of the inquisitor. Many died incarcerated, their disinherited and wholly innocent sons and daughters reduced to begging in the streets or selling themselves in the alehouses. Ruining lives was of no concern to the inquisitor, this collateral damage of heresy’s being, in fact, yet another instructive lesson for the Christian to take to heart. The spiritual infraction occasioning the ruin of a family might seem, to less zealous eyes, fairly trivial. Many in the Wall were held because of actions taken decades earlier, when Catharism was out in the open. A common crime was to have performed the melioramentum, a ritual show of respect performed when passing a Good Man or Good Woman in the street. It involved a brief genuflection and an utterance asking to be guaranteed of a “good end” to life. In the long-gone Languedoc of coexisting Christianities, this homage was a fairly common courtesy, akin to tipping your fedora in the presence of a lady. To the inquisition, however, it constituted “adoring” a heretic and was punishable by imprisonment and dispossession.
The most serious condemnation the inquisitor could hand down was death, by burning at the stake. It was the marquee attraction of the sermo generalis, and little insight is required to imagine the mixed feelings of the onlookers, whether despair at seeing a loved one perish or delight at seeing an enemy or rival get his comeuppance. All, however, bore witness to the blunt power of the Church.
Technically, the inquisition did not do the burning. The prisoner was, as the phrase had it, “relaxed to the secular arm,” handed over to the civil authorities to be executed. To claim, as some defensive Catholics have done over the centuries, that this eleventh-hour switch somehow means that the Church had no blood on its hands must be called out for what it is: a lie. To the crowd assembled around the stake, it was clear whose show this was. The inquisitor, delivering his sermon in the company of his chanting fellows, may not have lowered the burning brand to the straw, but all aspects of the ghastly public ceremony had been carefully orchestrated by him, after months of secret interrogation and torture. If an adept of Moneta of Cremona, he would have realized that this killing made him not only an instrument but also an imitation of God. Sincere in his persecutorial and prosecutorial conduct, the good inquisitor might permit himself a flush of pride if high-profile heretics were among those perishing in the flames.
This meant the Good Men and Good Women, if caught up in the inquisitorial dragnet, were almost always sent to the stake, whether or not they abjured their beliefs. Some did, under torture, only to take it back when recovered from the torment. Some adopted the Cathar tactic known as endura, a form of hunger strike ending in death. To the inquisitor, such resistance only spurred him to bring the prisoner to the stake before death cheated him of a more public victory. Prominent Cathars, however, were comprehensively tortured before being consigned to the flames, to obtain the names of those who had helped and believed in them over the years.
Some of these believers, called credentes, also perished by fire. Either their association to the heresy had been too long or too deep or they stoutly refused to recant, preferring death to disavowal. In cases where their recantation seemed tinged with insincerity, the inquisitor decided whether to imprison or to impose punishing penance. Here is where the wisdom of the Dominican was most tested.
But when he had been demonstrably fooled by a heretic, that is, by one whose recantation had been followed by a return to his original faith, the inquisitor was pitiless. The relapsed heretic was a finger in the inquisitor’s eye, as the change in faith called into question his competence as a judge of men. At least the unrepentant Good Men and Good Women were clearly, honestly damnable. The double apostate—–Cathar to Catholic to Cathar—represented a rebuke to the rightness of the cause, to the irrefutable, infallible argumentation laid out by the inquisitor in his sermons. The Holy Father had encouraged his servants to construct a system of uncommon ugliness, dependent on deceit, betrayal, secrecy, pain, and punishment—the dirty work of the Holy Office carried out by the holy men of the brotherhood was proof enough of the seriousness, the sacredness, of the Church’s message. The relapsed heretic was thus tied to the stake, his tormentor readying a homely phrase from Proverbs 26:11. The heretic had gone back to his errors, the inquisitor shouted to the villagers over the roar of the fire and the shrieks of the dying, “like a dog returning to his vomit!”
* The mill, known as the King’s Mill, was an important source of royal revenue.
* Regensburg is a Bavarian city on the Danube near Munich. The current pope, Benedict XVI, taught theology at the University of Regensburg from 1969 to 1977.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE UNHOLY RESISTANCE
WILY DEPONENTS OR RELAPSED heretics could muddy the spotless dream of the inquisitor, where investigation was scrupulously conducted and culprits unmasked and undone, but he nonetheless operated with an ideal in mind, no matter how warped or worthwhile others might deem it. Some of the rage against the inquisition did indeed lie in opposition to its mission, its ideal. “The development of [the] inquisitorial mentality,” a historian notes, “was a heated dialogue, not a monologue.” But much of the resistance also arose from its misfires, from the all too human lapses in the functioning of a system whose only blueprint lay in the individual inquisitor’s mind, not in any statutory document recognized by all.
A gap existed between the ideal and the real. The inquisitor was dependent on the secular authorities. If they did not provide the funds and the men, and if they were reluctant, in the face of popular pressure, to make the arrests, haul in the suspects, and eventually carry out their sentences, the inquisitor could do nothing except appeal to Rome to intervene. And that intervention was not always forthcoming. As a major political figure, the pope sometimes needed to cement shifting alliances to meet his larger goals. Hence, for a time in the 1240s, the inquisition in Languedoc lay in tatters, checked by a hostile populace and bereft of support from a pope who needed the backing of Christendom’s great lords, including the count of Toulouse, in his struggle against Stupor Mundi, Emperor Frederick II. After the latter died, in 1250, the Languedoc inquisition eventually got its second wind.
On a less exalted level, there was the problem of the milieu in which the inquisitor worked. An enterprise reliant on delation and treachery did not attract the best elements of society, nor did it bring out the best in people. The informant and the turncoat were morally compromised at the outset. Some went on to work for the inquisition, their interest in long-term employment having less to do with the inquisitor’s ideal than with the dictates of self-preservation and the possibilities of self-enrichment. A shady demimonde of abjured heretics grew up around the inquisition, and instances of corruption—blackmail, kickbacks, and the like—occurred not infrequently. Add to that the looseness, the importance of personalities, and the improvisation necessary in developing medieval institutions, traits that tend to be forgotten when talking of the period from the viewpoint of the professionalized present day, and the ample latitude for abuse becomes apparent. At the Wall of Carcassonne, the crown jewel of the repressive apparatus, the warden in the 1280s was found to be spectacularly corrupt, trading favors for cash, in ways diametrically opposed to the penitential and persuasive purpose of incarceration as conceived of by the inquisitor.
Most important was the inquisitor himself. He had to be a man of discerning probity and great integrity, given the power invested in him to ruin lives. Most were honest; a few were not; none was perfect. The belief that an inquisitor acted out of malice or dishonesty, beliefs that gripped Carcassonne in the time of Bernard Délicieux, completely undermined his legitimacy.
This is not to suggest that the enterprise was a fraud, a nest of extortion and spite hiding behind the robes of sanctimony. Inquisitors sometimes scored remarkable successes. In Toulouse in 1240,
one Raymond Gros, a prominent Cathar Good Man, defected to the side of orthodoxy, giving up a trove of names that would, through careful police work, eventually eviscerate the remnants of heresy in that city. In Italy, even greater strides were made: two Cathars, Raynier Sacconi and Peter of Verona, not only betrayed their coreligionists but themselves became inquisitors. Peter was murdered for his pains in 1252 (thereby becoming St. Peter Martyr), but not before his and Sacconi’s understanding of heretical beliefs strengthened the hand of other inquisitors in the entrapment of suspects.
Peter’s assassination, which helped lead a scandalized Pope Innocent IV to authorize torture, underscored the dangers run by inquisitors, especially in the early days. In Languedoc, utter exhaustion, induced by the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade, turned to incredulity when the first inquisitors arrived on the scene, as if adding insult to injury. In Albi, in the spring of 1234, inquisitor Arnaud Cathala escaped within an inch of his life when a mob attacked him as he attempted to disinter and burn a dead heretic. In a war-weary land finally free of violence and the mass bonfires of the type seen at Lavaur, the grotesque spectacle of digging up the dead and burning them violated not only the newfound peace, but also a taboo that had nothing specific to medieval France. In most human societies, whatever the burial or crematory customs that obtain, a modicum of respect is accorded the deceased; this new activity seemed as diabolical and indecent as the so-called heresy the inquisitor so loudly denounced.
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