The Medieval Inquisition 4
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
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).
So, a bishop he became, but Catholicism was not yet dead in Britain and Mary I (1553-1558) who was married to Philip II (1556-1598) of Spain came to the throne when her brother Edward died young. Mary was a staunch Catholic, and though there was no Holy Office in the kingdom, she immediately revived the rescinded laws on heresy and had senior clerics like Cranmer and Hooper arrested under them. Both these were burnt alive. Hooper died in 1555 before 7000 spectators and his horrible death is paraphrased here from a description by Henry Moore in a Protestant martyrology of 1809.
The portly bishop who was in his fifties, stripped to the waist and was affixed to the stake by a single iron band, refusing the two others. The hoop was too short and he had to draw in his stomach to allow the band to be fixed. His paunch hung over the top of it. He had a pound of gunpowder in a bladder in his groin and a pound similarly also under each arm. The man laying the reeds for the pyre asked forgiveness and the bishop told him there was no need. It was his duty and God forgave him. The man then continued to throw up the reeds in a pile about the Lord Bishop. Hooper caught bundles of the reeds and put them too under each arm.
The command to light the pyre came but it burned poorly, many of the reeds being green. The day was also cold (it was February) and a brisk wind was blowing the flames flat rather than allowing them to rise. Drier tinder was brought and a fiercer fire built causing the gunpowder to flash. Hooper remained alive. In pain, he now prayed in a loud voice: “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”. He continued to repeat these words, the last he ever spoke. Even when his face had completely blackened, and his tongue had swollen so that he could no longer be heard, his lips could be seen moving until they were shrunk to the gums. He began to knock his breast with his hands, but one of his forearms soon fell off, leaving him pummelling his chest with the other. Fat, water and blood oozed from his finger ends and splashed about with his movements.
More tinder had to be brought as the fire died down. Hooper was losing his strength and he thrust his hand into the iron hoop around his waist. Now the whole of the lower part of his body was burnt away, and then his guts burst out of his paunch, falling over the hoop, and shortly after he keeled over the hoop and fell into the embers, raising a horrified yell from the crowd. It took almost an hour for the bishop to die on the pyre.
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.
At the age of fifteen on a visit she was introduced to one of the inquisitors who took a fancy to her. That same night her house was raided by the Inquisition. Her father was terrified and when he realised it was his daughter they wanted, he readily surrendered her. She was taken off expecting to die, but found herself ushered into an opulent apartment. A maid offered her sweets and cinnamon tea poured from a silver teapot. Asked when she was to die, the maid seemed astonished she should think it, saying she would live like a princess, except that she would not be free to leave the apartment. The maid had been assigned to her and begged her to be kind.
The inquisitor, Don Francisco, sent her elegant clothes and presents. Then she had endearing letters and finally an invitation to dinner, which the maid urged her to accept. Over dinner, the inquisitor told her she had been accused and found guilty of religious infelicities for which the punishment was burning alive in a “dry pan with a gradual fire”, but he had managed to stay the sentence out of regard for her family and pity for her. She could escape death, however!
The maid urged her to agree and took her to see the torture chamber. Within it was an oven lit by a fire, with a large brass pan on it, with a cover and a lock. There was also a large wheel set with razors, and a pit full of poisonous animals. The maid explained that heretics were put naked into the pan and the lid locked. The torturer lit a small fire in the oven, then gradually fed it until it gre bigger and bigger, thus cooking the victim alive. The wheel was to cut into pieces anyone who spoke against the Holy Office of the Inquisition or the pope. The pit was for general disrespect for holy images and the people of the Church. The maid urged her to do as the inquisitor desired or she would be cooked in the pan.
Needless to say, as soon as she was invited, she jumped into bed with the priest, and preserved her life. After a few days living like a queen, she was taken to the cells and met the rest of the seraglio, the oldest of whom was 24. Now she was fed plain food, and learned the stories of the others. The girls were colour coded for the three inquisitors, and dined in the hall from time to time when the priest selected them for the night. When any of them got pregnant, they were cared for by the maids until the child was born, then they never saw it again. Each year about five or six of the girls disappeared, presumed murdered, but the numbers stayed roughly the same because others were admitted. All the girls could do was pray to the Christian God whose agents on earth were causing their misery!
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:
- Complete suppression of a whole book.
- Expurgating objectionable pragraphs or chapters.
- 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.
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