The Medieval Inquisition 5

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

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.

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.

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