Abstract

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

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.

Inquisition Procedures

When the friar-inquisitors arrived at a town, they convened a solemn meeting of bishop, clergy, and people and announced that secret heretics were to be reported to them. There would be a “time of grace”, usually a month, and heretics who voluntarily came forward, and confessed and abjured, during that period received only the lighter penances, prayers, fasts, pilgrimages, fines, intended to confirm their faith.

After the period of grace, persons accused of heresy who had not abjured were brought to trial. The inquisitors published the edict of the faith which ordered all Christians, under penalty of excommunication, to denounce the heretics and those who protected them. The Inquisition counted upon the coercion of the Catholic people, acting as an oppressive apparatus of the State. Meantime the inquisitors, who were to “act with the bishop” though he had no power, had to choose an advisory council—twenty to fifty in number—and come to a decision only in conjunction with these. Innocent IV (1254), Alexander IV (1255 and 1260), and Urban IV (1264) prescribed the consultation of boni viri, experienced and irreproachable men, plainly meant to be a mockery of the Boni Homines, the name of the Cathar Parfaits.

A most beneficent provision! The beginning of the jury-system in Europe, say apologists and other types of Jesuits! But who were these men, and what did they do? They were mostly priests and monks, with a few orthodox laymen. In a few places, pious lawyers—the decree stipulated that they must be “zealous for the faith”. So far as the apologist is concerned, they considered the names of the accusers and might thus detect enmity or cupidity, being local men. A prescription is not, though, a rescription. It was a recommendation not an order, so need not be followed.

The leading inquisitors tell us the common practice is to conceal the names of the accusers even from these men, so few of them ever knew the name of the accused or the accuser, or saw all the evidence. They saw a summary of the evidence carefully prepared for them. An abstract case and selected evidence were laid before them. They did not know enough to decide a case, as honest Christians admit. They could give an opinion. This “jury” never hampered the inquisitors, who took up their quarters in a Dominican monastery and received their denunciations secretly. The inquisitors decided.

Before the Inquisition, judicial practice was that the accuser had to make the case against the defendant, there being no prosecuting lawyers, and any that failed to do so were guilty of false accusation and subject to the defendant’s punishment. Under the law of the Inquisition, the accuser no longer had to make the case or suffer the consequences of making false accusations. Clergy, mainly Dominican monks, prosecuted, judged, and convicted the accused, and ordered the extraction of confessions by torture.

Trial

The day the monks of the Inquisition marched with their golden cross into the town, the fear of the population began. The accused were notified and the terror began in earnest. It was not a trial as today. If someone was denounced, they were guilty:

If two witnesses, considered of good repute by the inquisitors, agreed in accusing the prisoner his fate was at once sealed, whether he confessed or not, he was at once declared a heretic.

Trial by the Inquisition did not mean an examination to find out if someone was a heretic. If two secret witnesses said that anyone was, they were, and all the “third degree” and torture was merely to make them confess that they were and abjure their heresy.

Joseph Blötzer in CE, says in most instances the accused denied the charges even after swearing on the four gospels, and this denial was the more stubborn the more the testimony was incriminating. The inquisitors, David of Augsburg pointed out, had four methods of extracting confession.

1. Fear of death. Saying death at the stake awaited anyone who did not confess. If this certain knowledge that victims would die a painful and lingering death unless they came and abjured their, perhaps imaginary, heresy did not move someone, they were confined to their house and harried and weakened in various ways.
2. Imprisonment. Close confinement, and starvation.
3. Persuasion. Visits of tried men, who would attempt to induce free confession.
4. Torture. If the victim still denied heresy, they received the grim summons to the Inquisition.

Plainly, in these recommendations, there was no recognition that the victim might have been innocent by false accusation or error. If someone honest and devout had been falsely or wrongly accused, the more stubborn their denial, the more guilty they were assumed to have been. Common sense says that anyone who had really been pretending to be Christian for ulterior motives, would do whatever was needed to get off with the minimum punishment. That meant that those who denied most vehemently were probably the ones who were innocent.

When no voluntary admission was made, the inquisitor sought evidence. At an early date it was decided by the popes that two accusers sufficed, although more could be called. These are called “witnesses”, but that is a parody of a judicial term. They were secret accusers, and not only were they never confronted with the accused, but their names were concealed. Gregory IX, Innocent IV, and Alexander IV forbade the inquisitors to reveal the names. Christians tell us that Boniface VIII set aside this usage and commanded that at all trials, even inquisitorial, the witnesses must be named to the accused. It is a lie. Boniface said:

Where there is no such danger, the names of accusers and witnesses must be published, as is done in other trials.

Danger? The inquisitors claimed that there was always danger of revenge. So, Boniface’s words never affected the procedure, and witnesses could not be confronted or cross-examined. Apologists tell us that false witnesses were punished without mercy. Bernard Gui tells of a father who falsely accused his son of heresy. The father was sentenced to life imprisonment when it was plain that the son was innocent. That is one case, probably utterly exceptional. How could such false witness be revealed without the right of examination? All that the victims could do was to name their enemies for the boni viri to confirm or deny. If the charge originated with confirmed enemies, it would be quashed, and this occasionally might happen. That, for the apologists makes the Inquisition just!

Once anyone was denounced for secret heresy, they were guilty of it. The only safegurds the accused had was to abjure the charge, conduct their own defence, and notionally reject a judge who had shown prejudice—though it is not hard to see that such an action might be a hostage to fortune. If an inquisitor or any high functionary of the Church had a grudge, woe betide the target. The Church had absolute power and the Inquisition was the way it impressed it. It was easy to fabricate a case because all accusations were taken seriously. even if many more were dismissed than is generally thought, as revisionists make out, it was a frightening experience because the outcome was never a foregone conclusion. Innocence was the hardest case to defend!

A nasty minded high cleric could easily bribe someone to accuse an enemy. The Inquisition, having the authority to torture the accuse, would then normally extract a confession with ease. Even being an exemplary Christian was no defence when someone up there did not like you. It was no use the victim protesting that they had attended mass regularly. Outward conformity did not count. Exemplary behaviour just showed how clever the Devil and his own were at undermining Christianity. No one entered a torture chamber as a prisoner and came out sound in mind and body. The Church was utterly beyong criticism for hundreds of years on pain of torture and death by burning.

By another refinement of clerical procedure, unknown in law, slaves, women, children, and convicted criminals could lodge an accusation. The Church had hitherto maintained that these and the testimony of a heretic, an excommunicated person, or a perjurer was worthless before the courts, but from early in the twelfth century, this old safeguard was ignored and any evidence was accepted in trials concerning faith. Religion alone listened to such witnesses, but then religion is so important, the apologists say. In 1261, Alexander IV (1254-1261) had the new principle formally adopted. Its justification was that only heretics knew what they were up to.

Witnesses for the defence rarely appeared, because they would be suspected of being heretics and be on the list of heretics themselves the next day, but witnesses could be put to the torture to force them to give evidence. If one witness cared to say that the accusation could be supported by so-and-so, they were brought and tortured until they told the desired lie. In practice one witness would suffice and in Spain they got their share of the spoils.

The victim could not in practice bring a lawyer. When lawyers were granted they had to be beyond suspicion, “upright, of undoubted loyalty, skilled in civil and canon law, and zealous for the faith”. No lawyer could meet these criteria and risk his reputation by seriously attempting to defend an accused heretic. That good and great pope, Innocent III, had in 1205 sternly forbidden lawyers to help heretics:

We strictly prohibit you, lawyers and notaries, from assisting in any way, by council or support, all heretics and such as believe in them, adhere to them, render them any assistance or defend them in any way.

Any lawyer who ventured to do so would soon be on trial. A saintly friar in France who defended a rich and pious patron of his order, whose goods the inquisitors wanted and got, ended in prison. Some Christians argue that the rule of excluding lawyers was soon relaxed, and “universal custom” allowed a legal adviser, but this is yet another lie and the truth was quite the opposite. Pope Innocent had meant “confessed” heretics when he said “all”, and at first inquisitors allowed lawyers to those merely suspected or accused, but soon anyone accused was an heretic. After 1254, though the accused had no right to counsel, those found guilty could appeal to the pope. Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) directed that trials must be conducted “simply, without the noise and form of lawyers”.

The oath was a weapon in the hands of the medieval judge. If the accused person kept it, the judge was favourably inclined, if they violated it, they lost credibility. Many sects, it was known, repudiated oaths on principle, hence violating an oath incurred suspicion of heresy in the guilty party. Besides the oath, the inquisitor might secure himself by demanding a sum of money as bail, or reliable bondsmen who would stand surety for the accused. It happened, too, that bondsmen undertook upon oath to deliver the accused “dead or alive”.

The goods of anyone imprisoned for life, or condemned to death were confiscated. Confiscation was of supreme importance for the economics of the Inquisition—it was financed out of confiscated property, so it had a built in reason for conviction. It was a strong motive for using torture to make people confess. Even the dead could be accused of heresy. The grave was no protection from having property confiscated. Corpses were dug up, and dead men and women were convicted of heresy. This allowed the inquisitors to take the property of the heirs of the dead heretics.

Let two unknown witnesses say that a man, even forty years dead, had been a secret heretic, and his children or even grandchildren were ruined. He was an unrepentant heretic—for him how could there be a chance of “repentance?” His bones were dug up, paraded through the street, and burned. His widow and children were robbed of every penny. Bernard Gui had eighty-eight of these posthumous cases in six hundred and thirty-six! In most countries, the money was divided between the inquisitors and the Vatican, but in Spain, the inquisitors usually got all of the money—an injustice, the Vatican thought!

Moreover, the inquisitors within ten years of the establishment of the inquisition got from the popes the right to impose fines, or to commute the lighter sentences for payments of money. If you did not want to wear a yellow cross on your coat for life, to spend three years in jail, to live on bread and water for two years—pay up! Apologists say people could appeal to Rome about the conduct of a trial. For this reason, Eymeric advises inquisitors to try a case in such a way that no fault could be found in its records. This ought to be reason to doubt the frankness of the records kept by the inquisitors. They would have been carefully written so as not to prejudice any such appeals. These same records are now taken at face value by the scholars who choose to ignore what the popes themselves decreed and what the inquisitors themselves often wrote. The Vatican loved this merciful safety valve against injustice—it brought the trial, and the payment of fines, to Rome!

Can any Christian see the Inquisition and therefore their church as anything other than horrific? It was a scramble for gold on a soil red with human blood. Who got the profit? First the secular authority, and that is in most cases the main reason why heresy was “a crime against the state”. That is why the kings of France permitted tens of thousands of their subjects in the south to be imprisoned for life or burned, why Venice dealt with its own heretics, why the popes so readily denounced inquisitors, like the Spanish, who were not under their own control. Secondly, the bishop and the inquisitors got a share. Thirdly, the Papacy got its share. Everybody hated heresy in those godfearing days! The Inquisition was designed to rob the rich to help the rich, as Catholic writers of the time admit. Eventually, the Inquisitor Eymeric bemoaned:

In our days, there are no more rich heretics, so that princes, not seeing much money in prospect, will not put themselves to any expense… it is a pity that so salutary an institution as ours should be so uncertain of its future.

No one could even seem doubtful or miss a mass. Those accused, unless they were of the stuff of martyrs, meekly acknowledged and abjured the heresy. They then had to name their accomplices—denounce others! By thus confessing their heresy and naming others, they merely got a heavy penance—a pilgrimage, to fast for several years, to build a church, to pay a heavy fine or wear a hideous cross sewn on their clothes. If they persisted in denying the heresy or refused to name others, they were tortured.

Christians had to sing the virtues of the Church and the fairness of the Holy Offices whatever they really thought, or discover how right they were! Christian apologists, obviously particularly Catholics, are still trying to justify it or play down its sheer horror and injustice, even still. It is possible to do it because those who escaped with their lives were forbidden to say anything, and rather to avoid a repetition of their suffering, had to say:

They were treated with much goodness and clemency, since their life was preserved to them, which they had justly forfeited.

Dellon 1788

Torture

The trials were conducted secretly in the presence of a representative of the bishop and of the stipulated number of local laymen. Torture of the accused and his witnesses soon became customary and notorious, despite the long-standing papal condemnation of torture by Nicholas I (858-867). Mere suspicion was enough to warrant it. Pope Innocent IV ultimately permitted torture in cases of heresy as even Jesuits admit, but, as if to suggest it was not that serious, they say it was not a means of punishment but a way of getting the truth, and, to exonerate the pope they claim the idea came from the civil courts. They also want to imply it was not often used because it was seldom mentioned in the records.

Papal decree at first forbade a cleric, being of a holy estate, from being present at the torture. It was done outside the court and so was not in the records. Though the popes at first said that clerics must not be present at torture, Alexander IV and Urban IV said they might be present. Thereafter, everywhere the Inquisitor bent over the writhing victim and shrieked his “Do you confess?” It remained a legal recourse of the church for five centuries until it was abolished by pope Pius VII (1800-23) in 1816.

Torture was habitual and appalling. Confessors, who purported to be the friend and defendant of the accused person, urged the victims not to confess even under torture if the accusation was false. Naturally that earned additional torture until the victim broke down. The confessor then urged the victim to withdraw what had been confessed if it was untrue and merely the result of yielding to pain. The poor victim would then withdraw the confession before the judge and earn a fresh period of “continued” of torture.

Apologists claim that the Inquisition was humanely conducted. Doubtless most of the judges were men of principle, such as it existed, and applied the law correctly, as it stood, but the law was wicked, so what were the judges? This is the Church, the body of Christ, as it likes to maintain. How could a holy body allow even one case of torture, and, having allowed it, how can it try to pretend it never happened, or was humane? Are we to suppose with the Christians that the rack, thumbscrews, strappado and burning coals are “humane?” Savonarola, an orthodox and most pious Puritan, was tortured seven times. The witches of Arras were tortured forty times. Thirty-six Knights Templar—tough soldier monks—died under torture at Paris and twenty-five more at Sens.

Even witnesses, if they could not agree, were tortured until they did, so bringing an accusation could be dodgy in itself. When a death sentence was proclaimed, it was often preceded by torture anyway. Flesh might be torn off with red hot pincers or the right hand would be burnt off. The death penalty wss often death by torture. To be broken on the rack, burning alive, and hanging drawing and quartering were all death by torture.

Clerical excuses for torture are that the Church did not start it, that it was not a mode of punishment, but a means of eliciting the truth, it was not allowed for a long time in the ecclesiastical courts, and it was not authorized in the Inquisition until twenty years after it had begun. Innocent IV sanctioned it, in 1252, and Alexander IV confirmed it, in 1259, and Clement IV, in 1265. It was not to cause the loss of life or limb or imperil life. Torture was to applied only once, and not then unless the accused were uncertain in his statements, and seemed already virtually convicted by manifold and weighty proofs. Quaestio was to be deferred as long as possible, and until all other expedients were exhausted. Conscientiousness and sensible judges quite properly attached no great importance to confessions extracted by torture. Ignoring all the evidence that torture was used often, the revisionists cite the experienced inquisitor, Eymeric, who declared: “torture is deceptive and ineffectual”.

In the beginning, torture was held to be so odious that clerics were forbidden to be present under pain of irregularity. In 1260, Alexander IV authorized inquisitors to absolve one another of this irregularity. Urban IV, in 1262, confirmed it, and it was taken as formal licence to examine heretics in the torture chamber, as inquisitors’ manuals noted.

Clement V said that the accused must be tortured only once, but this was circumvented:

1. by assuming that with every new piece of evidence the rack could be utilized afresh,
2. by imposing fresh torments on the victim, often on different days, not repeated but continued.

So, those who retracted a confession given under torture could have it continued, not repeated! All over Christendom the inquisitors found that no one—popes among them—would object if it were “continued”, on the next day and as many days as they thought fit. Did a pope rebuke or check them?

Furthermore, Clement had spoken only of the accused, so the inquisitors concluded they were free to torture witnesses to make them denounce people for as long and as harshly as they liked. A witness might be put upon the rack at the discretion of the inquisitor. Moreover, if the accused was convicted through witnesses, or had pleaded guilty, the torture might still he used to compel him to testify against his friends and fellow-culprits.

It would be opposed to all Divine and human equity to inflict torture unless the judge were personally persuaded of the guilt of the accused.

This shows that the inquisitors had the fate of everyone at their whim. To be “personally persuaded” of someone’s guilt allowed the judge to use whatever means were needed to elicit a confession. Little reliance may be placed upon the assertion so often repeated in the minutes of trials:

The confession was true and free. Sine torturae et extra locum torturae—without torture and outside the torture chamber.

Careless recorders would show it to be false by writing that a victim “freely” confessed after being taken down from the rack. Joseph Blötzer, admits that when torture is not mentioned in the records of a trial, it is not safe to assume it was not used. Since torture was inflicted outside the court room by lay officials, and since only the voluntary confession was valid before the judges, there was no occasion to mention in the records the fact of torture. Clement V ordained that inquisitors should not apply the torture without the consent of the diocesan bishop.

Some Christian apologists try to say that the popes did their best to check the excessive zeal of inquisitors, even though it was the popes themselves who introduced it. From the middle of the thirteenth century, popes ceased to condemn torture itself, but tried to restrict its use. Who would be judging the severity of the torture? Nothing compels the belief that their calls for restriction had any effect. The severity of torture remained in many cases extreme.

The revisionists claim that torture was most cruelly used, where the inquisitors were most exposed to the pressure of civil authority. Frederick II, though always boasting of his zeal for the purity of the faith, abused both rack and Inquisition to put out of the way his personal enemies. The tragical ruin of the Templars is ascribed to the abuse of torture by Philip the Fair and his henchmen. Blessed Joan of Arc could not have been sent to the stake as a heretic and a recalcitrant, if her judges had not been tools of English policy. And the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition are largely due to the fact that in its administration civil purposes overshadowed the ecclesiastical.

Much of this apology is just a refusal to say what a curious expression, often translated literally from medieval Latin, meant.

Since the Church can no farther punish his misdeeds, she leaves him to the civil authority.

Seems like Pontius Pilate washing his hands. The Church just washes its hands of an intransigent sinner. In truth, it was turning the victim over to the civil authorities for them to do what the clerics themselves baulked at, even in those days—murdering the victim. Because the prelates did not dirty their own hands with torture and judicial murder but left it to the secular arm, and because they knew there was no advantage in some cases of age and extreme poverty, and so the punishments were commuted or mitigated, the revisionists boast that:

On the whole, the Inquisition was humanely conducted.

Joseph Blötzer, Catholic Encyclopedia

It leaves a feeling of nausea that anyone today can claim such a criminal and evil institution as the Inquisition could be described as humane. Even if there had not been a single victim of torture in 500 years, the very purpose of it was to terrify whole populations into submission. To do it, it had to have a reputation for cruelty, so it was cruel!

The consuls of Carcassonne in 1286 complained to the pope, the King of France, and the vicars of the local bishop against the inquisitor Jean Garland, whom they charged with inflicting torture in an absolutely inhuman manner, and this charge was no isolated one. The case of Savonarola has never been altogether cleared up in this respect. The official report says he had to suffer the pulley (strappado). When Alexander VI (1492-1503) showed discontent with the delays of the trial, the Florentine government excused itself by urging that Savonarola was a man of extraordinary sturdiness and endurance, and that he had been vigorously tortured on many days—the papal protonotary, Burchard, says seven times—but with little effect.

Officially it was not the Church that sentenced unrepenting heretics to death, more particularly to the stake. The convicted heretic was referred to the civil magistrate with a bogus plea for mercy. If mercy were ever given, the secular magistrate would be brought before the tribunal as a heretic himself.

Four years into his pontificate, Gregory IV gave the opinion, then prevalent among lawyers, that heresy should be punished with death, seeing that it was confessedly no less serious an offence than high treason. The Church had the exclusive right to decide in matters of heresy but it was not her office to pronounce sentence of death. The Church, thenceforth, expelled from her bosom the impenitent heretic, whereupon the state took over the duty of his temporal punishment. Frederick II, in his Constitution of 1224, says that heretics convicted by an ecclesiastical court shall, on imperial authority, suffer death by fire, and similarly in 1233. Gregory IX therefore is considered to have avoided any share either directly or indirectly in the death of condemned heretics. Not so the succeeding popes. In 1252, Innocent IV says:

When those adjudged guilty of heresy have been given up to the civil power by the bishop or his representative, or the Inquisition, the chief magistrate of the city shall take them at once, and shall, within five days at the most, execute the laws made against them.

His bull “Ad Exstirpanda” and the corresponding regulations of Frederick II had to be entered in every city among the municipal statutes under pain of excommunication, which was also visited on those who failed to execute both the papal and the imperial decrees.

This bull remained a fundamental document of the Inquisition, renewed or reinforced by several popes, Alexander IV (1254-61), Clement IV (1265-68), Nicholas IV (1288-02), Boniface VIII (1294-1303), and others. The civil authorities, therefore, were enjoined by the popes, under pain of excommunication to execute the legal sentences that condemned impenitent heretics to the stake. If someone was excommunicated and did not get it lifted within a year, they were legally heretical, and incurred all the penalties that affected heresy.

There was a political reason when popes restrained the local zeal of the Inquisition anywhere. After Gregory IX had succeeded in having the secular authorities adopt the death sentence for heresy everywhere, in face of the horrible death in front of them, many victims now confessed, and they were imprisoned for life.

Revisionists say that imprisonment, immuration or incarceration, was not punishment, but an opportunity for repentance, or to keep people away from the “infection” of heresy. It was inflicted for a definite time or for life. It was quite a humane business on the whole, they say. They often had good cheer, saw their friends, and so on. Immuration for life was the lot of those who had failed to profit by the aforesaid term of grace, or had perhaps recanted only from fear of death, or had once before abjured heresy.

The king of France, who had no tenderness for heretics, forced the pope to interfere with his inquisitors in the south of France for the barbarity of their prisons. Hundreds died in them. The reason was that the common sentence was “most strict prison”—close and solitary confinement on bread and water, in the foulest dungeons conceivable, often in irons or chained to the prison wall. The dungeon or cell was the tomb of a man buried alive. The prison cells were supposed to be kept sufficiently clean and bearable as not to endanger the life nor the health of occupants, but their true condition was often deplorable:

The unfortunates were bound in stocks or chains, unable to move about, and forced to sleep on the ground… There was little regard for cleanliness. In some cases there was no light or ventilation, and the food was meagre and very poor.

People bound in stocks and chains could not get up to go to the lavatory, so the reference to “little regard for cleanliness” meant they were laying in their own excrement. Some were treated better. Money will buy comforts and privileges in most places and rich heretics got less strict conditions, but even they could not buy luxury.

Without trial, on the mere denunciation of two men who might be enemies or tortured witnesses or men bribed to bring about the confiscation of their property, they have, for a “heresy” which they have abjured, if it ever existed, lost all their property, seen wife and children reduced to beggary, and been imprisoned for life.

Methods of Torture

The inquisitors, with great humanity, always showed the man or woman the instruments of torture first. These were usually a scourge for flogging, a rack for pulling the limbs until the joints cracked, a strappado and a brasier of burning coals to be applied to bare feet. The strappado was an arrangement by which the victim was suspended, with their hands tied behind their back, by the wrists from the ceiling, and jerked downward if they refused to admit the charge. As a further inducement heavy weights would be tied to their feet. Strong men died from it.

Burning to Death

Burning at the stake was not considered torture but a judicial death. Fire and heat were used to torture people. They would be clamped in stocks, their feet and lower legs greased, then a fire would be built under them to fry them. Heated boots and frying people in pans were also used.

If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

John 15:6

And if a man take a wife and her mother, it is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire, both he and they; that there be no wickedness among you.

Leviticus 20:14

And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.

Leviticus 21:9

The first Christian emperor, taking his cue from Leviticus not the New Testament, started the long standing Christian fashion for burning people. A slave had had intercourse with a free woman. Constantine ordered him to be burnt alive. Many people in Christendom were subsequently burnt alive, even in Britain (See box).

The torture of the pulley was called the first torture of the Inquisition. The victim was stripped and his hands tied behind his back. A strong rope was fastened to his wrists and passed over a pulley in the ceiling. The torturers pulled on the rope until the victim was raised from the ground, his arms twisting back above his head, causing immense pain and dislocation. He was suspended about six feet from the floor and occasionally the rope was momentarily released to jerk the suspended figure causing more pain and dislocation if it had not happened already. If no confession was forthcoming, about 100 lbs of weights were added to the victim’s legs and the victim allowed to drop from near the ceiling, again the fall being held to jerk the prisoner. The torture was repeated until the victim confessed or fell unconscious. Arms were invariably disjointed, but doctors would set them back in place so that the torture could be “continued” on another occasion.

The rack

It was a wooden structure about three feet from the ground and about eight feet long, looking like a ladder placed on a table or box. This was because there were cross pieces upon which the victim would lay. At each end of the ladder were rollers to which the victim’s wrists and ankles were tied. If the victim did not respond to the Quaestio then the executioners inserted long wooden poles into holes in the rollers and with a lot of leverage turned them to tension the victim’s bonds. The minimum effect was to have wrists and ankles torn by the cords, but refusal to confess led to dislocation of the joints and even to having limbs torn off.

John Coustos in Lisbon was racked several times in different ways by the inquisition in 1743, accused of Freemasonry. His shoulders were dislocated more than once and were set back in place by surgeons. Although tortured several times and between times allowed to recover, he would not confess and was eventually sentenced to four years in the galleys and banishment. Thus he lived to tell his tale.

Plainly the torturers were sadists, but so too were the inquisitors. Human beings were no different then from us now, and they had the same imagination. Those of them who took the chance to free young women to force them to be sex slaves in their own private seraglios (see box) certainly did not lack the imagination to see ahead a little private pleasure. It is absurd to think these people were not aware of the pain they were inflicting.

Victims

Most trials resulted in a guilty verdict, and the church handed the condemned over to the secular authorities for punishment. Each Sunday morning a solemn ceremony closed the weekly work of the inquisitors. They gathered the culprits, the clergy, and the people in some great church or public square, and read out the sentences. The unrepentant were then handed over to the secular authorities with a recommendation to mercy—and a stern assurance, from the pope, that unless those men and women were burned at the stake within five days the magistrate or prince would be excommunicated and the city or kingdom laid under the appalling blight of an interdict. Then the Dominican or Franciscan agents of the pope washed their hands.

Burning at the stake was thought to be the fitting punishment for unrecanted heresy, through analogy with the Roman law on treason, but burning of heretics was not common in the Middle Ages. The punishments were usually penance, fines and imprisonment. A verdict of guilty also meant the confiscation of property by the civil ruler, who might turn over part of it to the church. This practice led to graft, blackmail, and simony and also created suspicion of some of the inquests. Fines and confiscation seem hardly compatible but the inquisitors invented a class of heretics called “defenders”, whose heresy might consist only of a single thoughtless word overheard or spoken. These could be fined for their carelessness.

How many victims were handed over to the civil power cannot be stated with even approximate accuracy. Revisionists like to cite the figures for Pamiers and Toulouse, centers of the Albigenses, and so hotbeds of heresy and therefore centers of the Inquisition. No doubt it was for the neurotic clergy of orthodox Christianity, but these same gentle and loving Christians had already launched a crusade against the Cathars 70 years before these figures were collected. Myriads of Cathars had been slaughtered. So, at Pamiers, from 1318 to 1324, out of twenty-four persons convicted, five, and at Toulouse, from 1308 to 1323, out of nine hundred and thirty, only forty-two, were delivered to the civil power. The claim is that these figures show that the Inquisition was an improvement in justice on what went before, the papal induced Albigensian crusades—merely excuses for uncontrolled bloodshed and robbery of an industrious and civilized people. Joseph Blötzer actually cites the earlier lawless period for comparison. In 1249, Count Raymond VII (1222-1249) of Toulouse caused eighty confessed heretics to be burned in his presence without permitting them to recant. Just a few years earlier, the soldiers instructed by the Inquisition had seized the Cathar citadel at Monségur and cruelly murdered 200 Cathars in one day.

Once the Roman Law touching the crimen laesae majestatis, the law under which Jesus had been crucified, had been made to cover the case of heresy, the same law would be used to claim the property of condemned people. Only those sentenced to perpetual confinement or the stake were subject to it, but since they were in no position to complain, the real victims were their dependents, who were legally innocent. Confiscation was also decreed against already dead people, and there is a relatively high number of such judgments. Of the six hundred and thirty-six cases that came before the inquisitor Bernard Gui, eighty-eight pertained to dead people.

The ultimate decision was usually pronounced with solemn ceremonial at the auto-da-fé. The “sermo generalis” was a discourse which began early in the morning. Then followed the swearing in of the secular officials, who had to vow obedience to the inquisitor in all things pertaining to the suppression of heresy. Then the decrees of mercy—commutations, mitigations, and remission of previously imposed penalties—and finally the offences of the guilty were enumerated, and the perpetrators of them turned over to the civil power and punished. Minor punishments were first and the most severe, burning alive was last.

Centers of the Inquisition

The methods of the Inquisition spread to all countries from Italy in the thirteenth century until by the beginning of the seventeenth century only the Scandinavian countries did not use torture. The chief scene of the Inquisitions activity was Central and Southern Europe—Southern France, North Italy, and Germany. The Scandinavian countries were spared altogether. It appears in England only on the occasion of the trial of the Templars, nor was it known in Castile and Portugal until the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was introduced into the Netherlands with the Spanish domination, while in Northern France it was relatively little known.

The apologists try, as ever, to have their cake and eat it. O’Brien boasts that though the medieval Catholic Church flourished in England, Scandinavia, northern Europe, and eastern Europe, in Ireland and Scotland, the Inquisition never existed in these areas. The Church certainly had religious jurisdiction over these places, but what they often lacked was a compliant secular arm. O’Brien concludes that “the Inquisition does not prove the Church to be false, but only that there are some misguided people within her courtyards”.

The Inquisition weighed heavily on Italy (especially Lombardy), on Southern France (in particular the country of Toulouse and in Languedoc) and in the Kingdom of Aragon and on Germany. Honorius IV (1285-87) introduced it into Sardinia, and in the fifteenth century it displayed excessive zeal in Flanders and Bohemia. Robert le Bougre, a Catharist convert to Christianity and subsequently a Dominican, yielded to a blind fanaticism and provoked unjust executions. But Peter de Rosa, an ex-priest, in Vicars of Christ maintains that inquisitors should not be thought of as being all greedy and psychopathic:

The most frightening of the inquisitors were the incorruptible ones—they tortured purely and simply for the love of God. They had no financial interest… they acted solely for the good of the cause. The very asceticism of most of these pious God-fearing Dominicans made them pathologically harsh. Used to pain themselves, they had a spiritual yearning to inflict pain on others. The screams of their victims were a kind of theological music to their ears, a proof that Satan was taking a pasting. They also rejoiced like children at the pope’s benevolence towards them. He gave them the same indulgences he gave the knights who went to the crusades.

When secular rulers resisted the harsh methods of the Inquisition, popes pressured them by excommunicating the rulers and placing their subjects under interdict. Interdict meant that no religious services or sacraments were allowed, including communion, confession, marriages, and Christian burial. In Italy, the church’s full involvement was exposed by a bull of pope Leo X (1513-21) in 1521. The secular arm of Venice, the Senate, had refused to approve the executions ordered by the Inquisition. The pope wrote to his legate:

We declare and order you to exhort and command the aforesaid Senate of Venice, their Doge and his officials, to intervene no more in this kind of trial, but promptly, without changing or inspecting the sentences made by the ecclesiastical judges, to execute the sentences which they are enjoined to carry out. And if they neglect or refuse, you are to compel them with the Church’s censure and other appropriate legal measures. From this order there is no appeal.

In 1542, Paul III (1534-1549) assigned the medieval Inquisition to the Congregation of the Inquisition, or Holy Office. This institution, which became known as the Roman Inquisition, was intended to combat Protestantism, but it is perhaps best known historically for its condemnation of Galileo. After the Second Vatican Conference, it was replaced (1965) by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith, which governs vigilance in matters of faith.

Speaking a heresy was bad enough but writing it was truly dangerous. In 1545, the Inquisition published an index of prohibited books. The Index included all of the books of the Protestant Reformers, as well as Protestant Bibles. Every book was carefully examined for the slightest supposed contempt of the Church. Censorship was at three levels:

1. Complete suppression of a whole book.
2. Expurgating objectionable pragraphs or chapters.
3. Correction of sentences.

Those who published censored books would at least be imprisoned for life in the Inquisition’s cells. A list of books under each heading was published every years, so no one had the excuse of not knowing what had been placed on the Index. It was heresy to own any book that was banned or unexpurgated. Reading one of these books put Catholics in danger of damnation. In Spain, owning one of these banned books was punishable by death. The list of forbidden books was kept current until pope Paul VI (1963-1978) abolished the Index in 1959.

Effects of the Roman Inquisition

Church historian, Walter Nigg (1962), is reported as saying the Inquisition was not just bad, it was bad, very bad—so bad it could not have been worse.

This was the Roman Inquisition, the tribunal set up by the Roman Church in nearly every country except Spain. England never admitted it, except in one brief episode. The Scandinavian countries, which had few heretics, never had it. It failed also to get a firm foothold in the southeast, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Romania and Hungary, where the heretics were too powerful to let it settle permanently or act considerably. In Bohemia and Poland, it has not a great history. In the former kingdom, where four hundred and fifty nobles signed a protest against the burning of Hus, the Papacy had to use war to murder heresy, and in Poland there was not much to be done.

In Italy itself, rebels against Rome were extraordinarily numerous and strong by the beginning of the thirteenth century. In the specially papal town of Viterbo the pope found that nearly all the authorities and his own chamberlain were Cathars. In Florence, heretics and skeptics were extremely numerous and outspoken. From the time of Frederick II and Gregory IX onward, there was a terrible struggle and large numbers were plundered, imprisoned, or burned. One fierce inquisitor, Peter the Martyr, was assassinated in 1252. Venice kept the profits of the business to itself and defied the popes. In the north, the Waldensians were so numerous that the decimating procedure of the tribunals could not check them. In 1488, the pope flung a force of fifteen thousand soldiers upon them, and the soldiers were beaten. In 1510, the Inquisition moved further armies against them but they survived in great numbers in the valleys of the Alps until the terrible Vaudois massacres of the year 1655 preserved the “unity of the Church”.

Catholics boast that in Rome itself, where the popes directly controlled the tribunal, there was singularly little persecution. One Catholic writer says no man was ever put to death by the Roman Inquisition. Giordano Bruno? Well, besides him! The Papacy has kept the records of the Inquisition in Rome from the profane eye of the historian. When, a hundred years ago, Leo XIII boldly threw open the secret archives of the Vatican, the records of the Inquisition were not there. The pope had removed the documents first!

In any case, Cathari would hardly choose to propagate their gospel under the nose of Gregory IX or Innocent IV, and in a city that had clerics in every second house. But make no mistake about the responsibility of the popes. The Inquisition in Florence, in France, in Germany, or in Belgium was the papal Roman Inquisition, as directly controlled and guided by the popes as was the Inquisition of Rome itself.

In France, notably the south, the activity of the Inquisition was always shameful, sometimes disgusting. Catholic historians agree that Robert le Bougre—supposed to be a convert from Bogomil Christianity—and inquisitors like him “seem to have yielded to a blind fanaticism” and “deliberately to have provoked executions en masse.” On May 29th, 1239, he burned one hundred and eighty heretics, including the bishop, in a small town of the province of Champagne. The “trial” of this immense number did not last a week. The bishops of central and northern France had reported that there was no heresy in their territory, but Robert found it everywhere. After a few years of gross and murderous activity Rome found complaints against him were justified, he was deposed and the pope imprisoned him for life.

Inquisitors were mainly active in the south of France. The fearful massacres of the Albigensians at the beginning of the thirteenth century had by no means extinguished the heresy. In 1241 and 1242, the inquisitors provoked such anger by their conduct that one of them was assassinated. The pope compelled the Count of Toulouse to lead his troops against them, and the war or “crusade” was resumed. They were now not numerous enough to sustain a war. Their last town was taken from them, and thousands were added to the hundreds of thousands of their martyrs. It would be safe to estimate that there were at least a hundred times more Cathars put to death for their religion in the south of France than there had been Christians put to death in three centuries in the early Church. And that is the record of one small area in one half-century.

When the soldiers had made the land safe for Catholic heroes, the inquisitors set to work with redoubled brutality. Their excesses were so great that repeated complaints were sent to the king, Philip the Fair, and it depended entirely on the momentary state of his relations with the pope whether he intervened or not. In 1290, they made a victim of a notoriously pious and charitable friend of the Franciscan friars, Fabri, finding him a heretic when his lips were sealed by death and confiscating his estate. In 1301, the king sent representatives to investigate the charges against the inquisitors, and they found the prisons so foul and deadly, and the procedure so gross and unjust, that the king complained to Rome. Two of the inquisitors were suspended, and their powers were curtailed in France.

Later pope Clement V (1305-1314) got such complaints from Bordeaux and Carcassonne that be had to send two cardinals, and they found a sordid system. Clement had, within the limits of the barbaric ideal of the Inquisition, some feeling of humanity. When he died, the inquisitors resumed their work with more “zeal” than ever and, as a result of more than one hundred years of bloodshed, robbery, and vile treatment, they “persuaded” the southern provinces of France to become orthodox.

Christians seeking to extenuate these crimes say heresy in the Middle Ages was associated with anti-social ideas. The tenets of these heretics of southern France were that the inner circle, the elect or Perfects, of the Albigensians were vowed to celibacy and voluntary poverty—just as the monks were. Most Albigensians however married and held property like all others. Much is made of their teaching the right to commit suicide (endura), which is recognized as true, but the answer of the church was to relieve them of the problem by murdering them first. These southern provinces of France were, after the Mohammedan kingdoms in Spain, the most prosperous and contented in Europe, and they were ruined when the “heresy” was ruined.

In southern and western Germany, pope Gregory IX’s inquisitor, Conrad of Marburg was almost as brutal as Robert le Bougre. An accused person was often ordered to reply simply “yes” or “no” to the charge, and if he did not at once say “yes”, he was condemned and sent to the stake. Otherwise he liberally used water torture, the rack, thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden. The archbishop of Mayence angrily protested against Conrad’s Inquisition in 1233 AD. In his letter he said:

Many Catholics suffered themselves to be burnt rather than confess to such vicious crimes of which they were not guilty.

That same year, the local nobility solved the problem simply by murdering the murderer. Conrad was one of the many inquisitors whom the people assassinated. Pope Gregory did not reply to the archbishop’s epistle, but immediately canonized the inquisitor, so that now the faithful can ask him to intercede whenever they would like someone tortured. When Frederick II died the Inquisition was checked, but later the popes re-imposed it, and large numbers of rebels were put to death.

With the growth of heresy on a large scale, at the Reformation, the Roman Church had to reorganize its Inquisition. What is now called the Holy Office is its reconstructed successor. It was created in 1542 by Paul III with the title of “The Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition”. Its permanent court of six, later eight and eventually thirteen, cardinals was supposed to be the final court of appeal on charges of heresy.

In 1589, a German inquisitional judge, Dietrich Flade, felt revulsion at what he was doing and dared to say openly that the confessions wrung from his victims were false, due only to their agony. His archbishop had Flade arrested and put on the rack himself until he admitted having sold his soul to Satan, then he was burned.

As late as 1766 we still hear of the atrocities of the tribunal. A young nobleman, Chevalier de la Barre, did not take off his hat when a religious procession was going through the streets because it was raining. He was convicted of singing blasphemous songs, sentenced to “torture ordinary and extraordinary”, had his his right hand cut off, his tongue ripped out with pincers, and was sentenced to death by burning alive, but had it commuted to hanging. In the eighteenth century, the Inquisition ran out of money and became largely inactive. The Inquisition in France was suppressed by the secular authorities in 1772.

Two Cases: Joan of Arc and the Templars

Joan of Arc

Two particular incidents—the burning of Joan of Arc in 1431 and the condemnation of the Knights Templars in 1312—fitly illustrate the spirit and procedure of the Roman Inquisition in France. Joan of Arc was burned as a witch by the Church while still in her teens, was rehabilitated 25 years later when the balance of power had changed, and, for political reasons, declared a saint by the same Church in 1920.

George Bernard Shaw wrote a play called Saint Joan and devoted one of his long prefaces to her case. He was, of course, a Bergsonian, and had a disparaging attitude to empirical science, which manifested itself in an excessive romanticizing of the Middle Ages and the Medieval Church, but some of the facts he reveals about the Maid of Orleans need not be read the way he does. Shaw described her as “the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages”. Certainly, the evidence in regard to Joan is puzzling and contradictory. Among her dire sins was dressing as a man, which offended the Catholic Christian way of thinking, in which women were inferior to men, an attitude justified by Jewish and Christian scriptures. Cathars did not think of women as inferior, and they disregarded the Jewish scriptures and much of the Christian New Testament!

Joan was an intact virgin, no blasphemer and no more of an idolater than the pope himself (according to Shaw), she was pious, temperate, and intolerant of foul language and licentious conduct. She also claimed to stand for God, and to have already entered the spirit, while still in the flesh. Time after time when she was asked a question, and when an emphatic negative answer would be expected from any orthodox Christian, she refused to reply or replied evasively. She would not say if she believed fairies to be, as the Church certainly held, evil spirits. She would not explicitly reply when it was said that she had been taught witchcraft and magic. She would not swear on the gospels, and would not repeat the Paternoster except in confession.

Manifest heresy to Catholics, all of this was perfectly acceptable to Cathars and those of the Free Spirit. Indeed, objecting to profanity was regarded by the Church as being a sign of heresy. Nor was she opposed to marriage in general, though she chose virginity, and even defended herself in a breach of promise action brought against her. Joan unhesitantly saw herself as superior to normal people of whatever rank, though her own class was no higher than that of the yeoman, so that the Church accused her of superbity—arrogance or excessive pride.

Thus, she stood out because she was foolish enough, or naïve enough to act openly as a Cathar Perfect when it was dangerous to do so, and her friends were much more circumspect. Someone who had already attained the spiritual realm was obviously a superior being, and, like the Cathar Prefects who earlier had freely gone to their deaths on Catholic pyres, she was sure she could not be harmed. For example, she was a fearless leader, generating admiration and morale among her military followers, and she tried to escape from Beaurevoir castle where she was imprisoned on one occasion by jumping from a 60 feet high wall. To do this she had to be certain she could suffer no harm, or be insane. With her beliefs, she felt free to criticize kings and clerics whom she considered as less than perfect.

Later, her Protestant defenders used all this against the Catholic Church, though much of it was established at her trial and subsequent rehabilitation by the Catholic Christians they despised. Shaw speaks of Joan’s “unconscious Protestantism”. The heretics were indeed the precursors of the Protestants, though by the reformation Protestantism was as much Catholic as it was nonconformist compared with its heretical ancestors.

Joan had visions of S Catherine, S Margaret, and S Michael, a trinity of revered Cathar saints, the prime spirits of the religion. S Michael is none other than Christ himself—whose virtues all Cathars aspired to—in his original guise as one of the two sons of God, the other being Sataniel. The three came to her directly from God in heaven to give her her instructions. She said she had disobeyed the instructions of S Catherine not to leap from the wall of Beaurevoir, explaining why she had been slightly injured. The original Perfects had surely been pacific in their outlook, but years of oppression by Catholic robber barons, and inquisitorial monks, changed their outlook, perhaps explaining Joan’s readiness to join battle.

She had seen “S Michael” with her own eyes, in the shape of a “good man”. She heard the voices of S Margaret and S Catherine, and her “S Catherine” was physically present somehow in her prison. She had seen “God”, in a scarlet cap and long white robe. She spoke throughout of “those of my party”—she had a secret sign on her letters for them—and she sometimes saw her saints, or the sources of her voices, “among Christians”. When she did not mean what she seemed to say in a letter to a friend, she would sign it with a cross! Murray says she spoke of her king and the Voice sent to her by God, but never of “Our Lord” or “Our Saviour”, or even “Christ”. She was evidently not a perfectly orthodox Christian.

Yet, she seemed to have been a pious Catholic, taking solace and pleasure in the confession and communion. But then heretics, for whom refusal to accept the sacraments would have been a sure giveaway, were allowed to go through the motions of accepting Catholic sacramants, it being agreed that they were actually meaningless rituals.

Clever and well read man though he was, Shaw shows his naïve romanticism towards the Medieval Church by saying it should have simply excommunicated her, telling her:

You are not one of us. Go forth and find the religion that suits you, or found one for yourself.

He seems not to have noticed that the Church had been furiously fighting alternative religious views for 250 years, by this time, justifying itself on the grounds that burning heretics saved their immortal souls. But Shaw admits that:

Joan believed the saving of her soul was her own business, and not that of “les gens d’eglise”.

This was precisely the belief of the heretics that the Church was intent on expunging.

The Church which sent her to the stake was led by Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, but he was advised by scores of doctors of divinity. It is hard to imagine that all of these men were monsters. The truth is that it was their unquestioning Christian belief that was monstrous. The Church had tried to get Joan to accept its views, but she had the sense to realise her own were better, so she refused. Christianity is not noted for tolerance, and certainly was not at this time. Besides the crusades, the elimination of the Cathars, the attcks being fomented on witches, many other freethinkers and free spirits had been destroyed, including, most recently, Hus. Wycliffe, not long before, had been hounded, and only escaped being tied to the burning tree by his prior natural death. Even S Francis had fallen out with the Church but he too had died before the Church could save his erroneous soul. Margaret Murray says Joan was a witch, vilely drawn into a death-trap by having the use of male clothing practically forced upon her, and the recantation she signed fraudulently replaced by another.

Joan’s greatest friend in the French army, Gilles de Rais or Retz, became a Marshal at the age of twenty five and he is regarded as “one of the finest intelligences of the time”. But when he left the army to pursue magical studies in his chateau, he fell into scandalous excesses, even killing children for his experiments. He is “Bluebeard”. He confessed to being a witch and he was executed for it. Joan chose him as her special protector in the army, and he was devoted to her.

The Knights Templar

The Knights Templar

Further Reading

• More on the persecution of heretics
• More on documents pertaining to heresy
• More on the Spanish Inquisition
• More on Catholics who still excuse the Spanish Inquisition

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