The Medieval Inquisition 6

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

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.

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James F Byrnes, US Secretary of State, tried to explain to Molotov the American idea of democracy. "It´s like this. I can go to Washington and enter White House and no one will stop me. I can say to the President, ‘Harry Truman, you´re a damned fool´ and no one will shoot me. That´s democracy. Molotov was unimpressed. "It´s just the same in the Soviet Union. I can go to Moscow and enter the Kremlin and no one will stop me. I can say, ‘Comrade Stalin, Harry Truman is a damned fool´, and no one will shoot me.

Colin Bingham, Men and Affairs