The Medieval Inquisition 1
It is rating one’s conjectures at a very high price to roast a man alive on the strength of them.Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 12 December 2002
Thursday, 01 June 2006
Abstract
The purpose of the Inquisition was terrorism. It was meant to intimidate people into abandoning Catharism. Its terrorist methods were threats, torture, imprisonment and impoverishment, with burning alive the ultimate punishment. If anyone was denounced for heresy to the inquisitors, the best thing they could do was to go at once and declare themselves as heretics and abjure their supposed heresy. Denial meant horrible torture and certain death for those who persisted in it, even if they were telling the truth! Besides those who died at the stake, many died in prison, and their dependents were impoverished. The Inquisition must have fined, imprisoned, tortured, and even slain a large number of honest Christians.
Medieval Roman Inquisition
The Inquisition is irrefutable proof of the wickedness of the religion that created it. This holy court was presided over by the holiest of men, under the direct control of their holinesses the popes. It was the most infamous instrument of injustice and the most terrible indictment of Christian “love” the world has ever seen. Christian popes and scholars perpetrated atrocities in comparison with which the persecutions of early Christians by the Roman authorities is a drop of blood in a barrelful, and which have been exceeded in intensity in the west only by Hitler’s holocaust against Jews, communists, gypsies and homosexuals. No practicer of a Pagan Nature religion could imagine anything on such a horrific scale.
Apologists say the age was cruel. The criminal law shows how pitiless people were. The wheel, the cauldron of boiling oil, burning alive, burying alive, flaying alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the deterrents of crime chosen by the secular arm. An apologist for the Church’s barbarity says this:
There was a severity of the penal code of those days, in which the use of torture and the stake was common… The penalties inflicted by the Inquisition were simply those in current use in their day.
This Christian writer is at pains to tell us that the Church considered:
Faith had come down to them in its original integrity because their ancestors had suffered persecution and death rather than modify it or deny it. It was their duty to safeguard its purity so there would be no departure from the teachings of Christ and His Apostles.
It is impossible for the skeptic to reconcile these two statements. Any “faith” that had noted the suffering of persecution and death, and was concerned with preserving the purity of the teaching of the gospels, which was, on the face of it, gentle and pacific, could not possibly condone the use of torture and death as correctives in society. But the Church had no jurisdiction over secular society, the apologists bleat. Dr John A O’Brien says:
There grew up in Germany, France and Spain a kind of prescriptive law which visited heresy with death at the stake, a form of capital punishment common at that time. Against that action of the Christian state to defend itself the Church did not protest. Indeed, she felt called upon to sanction the severe penalties of the secular authority and to co-operate with the state in their enforcement, for her very existence was likewise threatened.
In the face of a different interpretation of the Christian religion, the Church decided it was opportune to approve of burning alive as a punishment for heretics. It was not, of course, simply a form of capital punishment, although it plainly was that, but the form of it prescribed by the old Christian Roman emperors as the punishment for heresy, considered worse than treason to the king! The Church was never more powerful! Why was it not teaching the gospel? It has no excuse. That is why it supposedly existed and it not only neglected its duty, it became the instrument of Satan itself. The apologist admits:
There existed a moral, spiritual and juridical unity of medieval society wherein Church and State constituted a closely knit polity. Theocratic in structure, the State could not be indifferent about the spiritual welfare of its subjects without being guilty of treason to its supreme Lord and Sovereign—Almighty God. The spiritual authority was inseparably intertwined with the secular in much the same way as the soul is united with the body.
We have no reason to disbelieve him. The secular world was not in a spiritual vacuum. The spokespeople for Christianity are just lying when they pretend the Church had no authority over the secular arm. It is their excuse, and this belies it utterly, as common sense does too.
So, it was a cruel age, the thirteenth century, but Henry Charles Lea notes a general increase in the severity of punishment after it, the only obvious cause being the influence exercised by the Inquisition over the criminal jurisprudence of Europe. The Carolina, or criminal law of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, issued in 1532, is a hideous catalogue of blinding, mutilation, tearing with hot pincers, burning alive, and breaking on the wheel. In Denmark, as late as 1683, blasphemers were beheaded after having their tongue cut out.
Lea is clear that medieval Catholic priests held a remarkable power in a time of turmoil and strife. Their power was psychological. They controlled the souls and consciences of men. All Catholics were abject subjects of the Church. They were so superstitious, believing the things the priests had told them, that they thought there was no hope of avoiding eternal combustion in hell fire, if they did not obey the Church in all things.
Faith therefore determined conduct, allowing the clergy a “spiritual despotism” that made the pope supreme over temporal princes. The pope was more powerful than the strongest king, and could command them. G G Coulton (Ten Medieval Studies ) confirms that popes had the power to make kings and princes. Cardinals and princes were themselves among the grandest princes in their time, and the parish priest had disciplinary rights over every act of his parishioners.
The weakest link in this was the conscientious faith of the heretics who decided the Church itself was evil and should not be believed. This denial of and failure to obey the Church became the sin of sins, for the Catholic clergy, negating all virtue and piety. When this happened, the Church had to resort to more worldly solutions than the interdict and the excommunication—massacre and terror.
The crude and simple-minded Christian dismisses it all because only a few thousand “heretics”, the latest revisers of history say, were executed, proving the fifty million other Europeans were orthodox and docile Christians, bar the few wicked ones. The tribunal’s methods were so barbarous and stupid from the juridical point of view that how many of its “heretics” were genuine cannot be judged. As in Spain, the Inquisition in Languedoc seems to have recorded only a fraction of the cases it handled. Its purpose was terrorism. It was meant to intimidate people into abandoning Catharism. Its terrorist methods were threats, torture, imprisonment and impoverishment, with burning alive the ultimate punishment. If anyone was denounced for heresy to the inquisitors, the best thing they could do was to go at once and declare themselves as heretics and abjure their supposed heresy. Denial meant horrible torture and certain death for those who persisted in it, even if they were telling the truth! Besides those who died at the stake, many died in prison, and their dependents were impoverished. The Inquisition must have fined, imprisoned, tortured, and even slain a large number of honest Christians.
The modern apologists for the Inquisition, who ask us to acquit the Church because only two thousand instead of three hundred thousand were murdered, take the line of proving that the inquisitors tried immensely more prisoners than they executed. The apologists for the church like to cite the carefully anodyne official records of the inquisition. The diaries, memoirs and manuals of the inquisitors themselves were not so anodyne. The Inquisitor, Bernard Gui, had nine hundred and thirty cases in one district between 1308 and 1325, and he handed over “only” forty-two to the secular arm. At Poniers, five out of forty-two accused were put to death. What this really means is that 95 per cent of these men and women charged with heresy confessed that they were heretics and abjured the heresy. There were perhaps ten times as many heretics as those executed. The Inquisition was then a sword of intimidation to end rebellion against Rome.
Books about witches and devils began to appear in 1211, 1220 and 1233, this latter being pope Gregory IX’s endorsement. To speed up the rate of conviction, in 1232, Gregory IX (1227-1241) took the inquiry or “inquisitio” from the local bishops and centralized it in the charge of monks acting directly under Rome. In 1224, Lombardy had formally enacted sentence of death for heresy, and Gregory IX endorsed this penalty. Heretics were to be handed over to the “secular arm”, the corpus of professional torturers appointed to absolve the priesthood of direct involvement in torture, for adequate punishment.
Was it providential that just at this time sprang up two new orders of monks, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, whose theological and ascetic training fitted their members for the hardship of travel and to perform successfully the inquisitorial task? The pope appointed them as permanent judges, who executed their doctrinal functions in his name and dealt legally with offences against the faith. A judge had to adhere to the established rules of canonical procedure and pronounce the customary penalties. Theoretically, the local bishops still had to agree to the Inquisition, but in practice it was out of their hands, and those who objected could find themselves on a charge.
The Inquisition was thus founded as a papal institution, but it was Innocent III, earlier in the century, who had given it a bloody example to follow. When the heretics of the south of France had laughed at the arguments of his legates, he had stooped to the device of appealing to the greed and lust of all the available military adventurers, and had declared the “crusade” which is known in history as the massacre of the Albigensians.
Innocent formulated a new principle of “persuasion” of heretics. There was a Papal seat at Viterbo, and the pope was horrified to learn that not only the consuls or magistrates of the town, but his own chamberlain were Cathars! He soon altered that, and he laid down this grim principle:
According to civil law criminals convicted of treason are punished with death and their goods are confiscated. With how much more reason then should they who offend Jesus, Son of the Lord God, by deserting their faith, be cut off from the Christian communion and stripped of their goods.
When there was some doubt amongst the jurists how far the law against heresy was still in force, the great pope demanded death and confiscation of goods. The Nazi actions against the Jews, in what is deplored as the “Holocaust” used exactly the same principles as those of the Christian Church in the Inquisition. People were accused, murdered and robbed.
Moreover, Innocent, whose name must have been chosen to fool that Christian God upstairs, completed the foundations of the Inquisition by reaffirming, with heavier emphasis, that the bishops were not to wait for charges of heresy, but were to seek it out in an “inquisitio”. They were to have special officials, or “inquisitors”, for this purpose. Innocent drew up explicit instructions for the procedure, and between 1204 and 1213 he issued four decretals, Papal decrees, ordering such searches in various places.
Pope Gregory IX pursued the traditional policy vigorously, establishing a regular inquisitorial office for Italy under the name of the Holy Office, in 1224. The first Holy Office was opened in Toulouse and then one was opened in Aragon in 1238. Gregory’s policy was codified in forty-five articles of the Council of Toulouse, in 1229, making the Inquisition a Church institution, the appointment and superintendence of which was the pope’s prerogative. Even bishops could be cited before the pope’s Inquisition giving him the power of an absolute ruler of the Church. People were encouraged to report their suspicions to the inquisitors and a network of spies was initiated. Soon the least remark might lead to someone being handed over to the Inquisition. Everyone had to betray their friends and relatives to escape the notional eternal torture promised by the popes. Sons betrayed their fathers, infants their mothers. The Church soon realised it was too profitable not to use more widely, and offices were opened, elsewhere, in France, in Holland, Germany, and later in Spain and Portugal.
The excuse for the new procedure was that the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (1212-1250), was a monster who was using heresy to kill off his enemies, and the Church wanted to forestall this by setting up ecclesiatical courts, but still keep in the emperor’s good books by adopting his laws! The Inquisition was then used on other heresies. About 1255, the Inquisition was in full activity in all the countries of Central and Western Europe in the county of Toulouse, in Sicily, Aragon, Lombardy, France, Burgundy, Brabant, and Germany. Pope Innocent VIII used the tribunal against witchcraft and pope Paul III (1468-1549) used it against the Italian Protestants in 1542.
As early as 1254, Innocent IV (1243-1254) again prohibited perpetual imprisonment or death at the stake without the episcopal consent. Similar orders were issued by Urban IV (1261-1264) in 1262, Clement IV (1265-1268) in 1265, and Gregory X (1271-1276) in 1273, until at last Boniface VIII (1294-1303) and Clement V (1305-1314) solemnly declared null and void all judgments issued in trials concerning faith, unless delivered with the approval and co-operation of the bishops. The popes always upheld with earnestness the episcopal authority, and sought to free the inquisitional tribunals from every kind of arbitrariness and caprice. So, the bishops cannot blame the executions and torturing onto an authority they had no control over.
The Inquisition, which meant originally a search for heretics conducted by the bishops, became a separate institution under the direct control of the Papacy. As bishops had shown themselves remiss in the nasty work of seeking out heretics, pope Gregory IX (1227-1241 AD) took the job from them and entrusted it to the tender mercies of the newly founded Dominican and Franciscan friars, who took to it like flies to a corpse. Among the jokes of the time was that the Dominicans were the Domini canes, “the hounds of the Lord”. Its birth is variously put by historians in 1229, 1231, and 1232. By the latter year, at all events, the Inquisition was established, and the Hounds of the Lord smelt the bloody rag at their nostrils.
Rome had discovered the solution of its dilemma. It did not want to stain its own fair robes with bloodshed, but it certainly did not want to leave the detection of heretics to secular powers, or few would be detected. Moreover, if heretics were tried by civil law, the law would not move until a charge was laid before it, and there would be a comparatively fair trial, the accuser facing the accused in open court, and again few would be condemned. The “confiscations” which Innocent III had recommended became a profitable source of revenue, and the Papacy wanted its share. The sordid scramble for the gold teeth of the dead began long before Auschwitz.
The Inquisition, the monastic agents of the pope, were to have independent courts, of the most monstrous description, to ensure the condemnation of secret heretics, and they were then to hand them over to the secular arm and keep a sharp eye on any secular prince or official who failed to do his bloody work.
In the thirteenth century, there were few countries in Europe that the popes did not claim as fiefs of the Papacy, and few princes who were not vassals of the pope. Gregory VII and Innocent III and their successors asserted that they were actually the feudal sovereigns of England, France, Spain and other countries. A crime against the state was whatever they chose to call a crime against the state. The great majority of the secular rulers hated and thwarted the Inquisition—it was never admitted to England—and it was only priest-ridden rulers like Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, or those whose greed was interested, who would carry out the pope’s orders. Christianity was forcibly thrust upon Europe for the second time, as it had been in the fourth century.
While Canon Law did not clearly prescribe the death sentence, an emperor, Frederick II, introduced it. Frederick II was scarcely a Christian, hardly concealing that he thought the Moslem religion superior to the Christian. Clerics induced him, for unclear political reasons, to enact a law which the Papacy had then merely to adopt. The heretic was to be put to death or have his tongue cut out. Such a savage law was not applied before the pope adopted it, and, in his first declaration on the subject in the year 1220, Frederick expressly based his law upon Innocent III’s words. A skeptical monarch borrowing, for political reasons, the words of one blood-thirsty pope to oblige another blood-thirsty pope, is not a good basis for the claim that heresy was regarded as a crime against the state.
Pope Gregory IX had this law inscribed in the papal registry, compelled the secular authorities at Rome and in most of the Italian cities to enforce it, and did his utmost to enforce everywhere the death penalty for heresy. As soon as there was a secular law prescribing the death penalty, the popes, with great delicacy, handed over heretics to the secular arm and tried to get the law adopted everywhere. It was made an imperial law by Frederick in 1237.
Venice almost alone in Italy defied the Papacy. Heretics were burned at Rome and at Milan, and the most fanatical monks were sent by Gregory as inquisitors to other countries. Conrad of Marburg was sent to Germany, where he burned batches of heretics. The king of Aragon, later the king of Castile, was induced to ask the pope for inquisitors. Four inquisitors were appointed by Gregory to various parts of Italy, and others were sent to Bohemia.
Moses and Exodus
