God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (7 page)

Bernard Gui is a historical figure, though few details of his life are known—Eco had a free hand to embellish. A few facts are certain. Gui was born near Limoges, in 1260 or 1261, professed vows as a Dominican about twenty years later, and rose rapidly as prior at a succession of abbeys. In 1307 he was indeed made an inquisitor by Pope Clement V, with responsibility for the Cathar-strewn area around Toulouse. He did not ignore the Jews, however, and ordered copies of the Talmud to be burned in public.
Over a period of fifteen years, Gui pronounced some 633 men and women guilty of heresy.
We have the disposition of these cases because Gui wrote everything down—the record survives in his
Liber Sententiarum,
his “Book of Sentences,” which now resides in the British Library.

It is a folio-sized volume, bound in red leather. The writing is tiny and heavily abbreviated, and there are no artistic flourishes. The book is the product of an orderly mind. It begins with a list of the towns and cities Gui visited, and the people sentenced in each place. Then come the details of one case after another. Much of the book consists of model sermons to be delivered, carefully modulated according to transgression and punishment.
Some of the accused were given relatively mild punishments—for example, ordered to wear a large yellow cross on their tunics (evoking the yellow badge that medieval Jews were often forced to wear, and that a later age revived). In these instances, Gui’s text is interrupted by the insertion of a little cross. Other people might be ordered to make a pilgrimage or even a crusade. Still others were sentenced to prison in perpetuity, which in practice usually meant several years. A considerable number, already deceased, had their remains exhumed, their bones incinerated, their homes destroyed. Gui sent more than forty of the living to the stake.

Gui was a detail man. Inquisition records can be shockingly mundane. An itemized accounting of expenses for the burning of four heretics in 1323 survives from Carcassonne:

The Church handled the matter of executions with philosophical elegance. It was inappropriate for ecclesiastical officials to sully their hands with capital punishment, so a process was engineered to allow the inquisitor to have it both ways: he would formally “relax,” or render, the condemned prisoner to the secular authorities, who would carry out the sentence. This sort of moral delicacy has a modern analogue, and it’s not just a linguistic one, in what has come to be called extraordinary rendition, whereby a nation whose conscience recoils at the idea of extracting information by means of torture sends prisoners to be interrogated in countries without such scruples. During the past decade, according to one estimate, the United States has handled 150 suspected terrorists this way.
There is the case, for instance, of a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who was arrested in New York in 2002 because his name appeared on a terrorist watch list. Arar was shackled, trundled aboard an executive jet, and flown by a “special removal unit” to Jordan. He was then driven to Syria, where he was relaxed to the local authorities and interrogated and tortured for months. He was eventually released without charge.

Extraordinary rendition typically occurs in the shadows, involving “ghost prisoners” and “black sites.” For the Inquisition, the relaxation of the prisoner to the secular arm occurred in the open, in the course of a ceremonial occasion known as a
sermo generalis.
The
sermo generalis
was held most often on a Sunday, when a great platform would be erected at a central place in a church. A throng would gather there—the ecclesiastical authorities, the secular magistrates, the public at large—and the various sentences would be read out by the inquisitor. The recitation of capital crimes came last, and then power over the prisoners passed from the spiritual to the temporal arm. To emphasize that the Church’s hands were clean, the inquisitor would read a pro forma prayer, expressing hope that the condemned might somehow be spared—though there was in fact no hope of that.
Those destined for the stake would be led outdoors, where a pyre had been built for the purpose in a public square. In terms of people burned at the stake, Gui’s most productive day was April 5, 1310, when, after a
sermo generalis
in Toulouse, he condemned seventeen people to death.

Although little is known about Bernard Gui the person, Eco’s characterization gets at something authentic. He was methodical, learned, clever, patient, and relentless—all this can be inferred from the documentary record. Among other things, Gui was a prodigious writer—in his spare time he compiled a history of the bishops of Toulouse, a history of the kings of Gaul, a collection of lives of the saints, a biography of Thomas Aquinas, several theological treatises, and a history of the world up to his own time.
More to the point, he wrote a lengthy manual for inquisitors called
Practica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis,
or “Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Depravity.” The manual covered the nature and types of heresy an inquisitor might encounter but also provided advice on everything from conducting an interrogation to pronouncing a sentence of death.

Gui’s manual would be followed by others. Their proliferation seems to have been rooted in something ostensibly far less ominous. In 1215, a special gathering of Church bishops, the Fourth Lateran Council, reinforced the duty of all Christians to go to confession at least once a year. Out of this decree grew a modest confession industry, including manuals instructing priests on how to hear a confession properly—how to classify sins and probe the sinner’s conscience. It was but a short step from these to manuals involving confessions of a graver kind—from people accused of heresy.

The notion of a “slippery slope”—the idea that one particular step will set the precedent for a second step, ever onward in an unfortunate downhill cascade—is as commonplace as it is controversial. Much has been written about the subject in journals of philosophy, social science, and the law.
Legalizing assisted suicide will lead to legalized euthanasia.
Legalizing marijuana will lead to the abuse of more-dangerous drugs. The use of surveillance cameras to stop crime will lead to the use of surveillance cameras to monitor personal behavior. One English essayist recalls the suggestion by his rector at Eton that not wearing cuff links would lead to heroin addiction.
Sometimes the examples are silly, but the phenomenon can be very real. In many ways the Inquisition is a cautionary example of the slippery slope at work: how seemingly minor developments in theory and practice open the door to further developments—and on and on.

Bernard Gui would not have put it this way, but his aim in the
Practica
was to create something like a science of interrogation. It depended on an elite who knew the rules, knew the methods, knew the pitfalls. Gui’s order, the Dominicans, provided a core group of operatives. Like the Franciscans, who came into existence at roughly the same time, the Dominicans represented a startling new way of doing Church business. Rather than living in settled monastic communities, which were often rich and complacent, they traveled far and wide as individuals or in small groups, recognizable in their white habits, and depending on donations to meet basic needs. Their authority came directly from the pope. In a largely static society—the typical peasant might spend an entire lifetime within a tight radius around his birthplace—the radical character of these aggressively itinerant agents, wielding transcendent power, proved highly advantageous. The Dominicans preached everywhere, to whatever audiences they could find. And they possessed a common body of knowledge. Dominicans received intensive instruction in moral theology and canon law and, as part of their normal training, very practical guidance on how to ask the hard questions. One thirteenth-century training manual for the order offers succinct commentaries under headings such as “In how many ways is one said to be a heretic?” “How should heretics be examined?” “What are the penalties for heresy, according to the law?”

Innocent III had given the founding of the Dominican Order his provisional approval in 1215, the year before he died, recognizing the role these traveling preachers might play among the Cathars. When the Church needed vigorous investigators—even before the Inquisition was formally established—it was natural to outsource most of the work to this order. As one historian concludes, “The Dominicans were not so much asked to prepare themselves for a new challenge; they were called upon because they were already seen to be in a position to meet it.”
The name of the order gave rise all too easily to a Latin pun: its members came to be known as
Domini canes,
“the hounds of God.”

Bernard Gui’s outlook, as reflected in his manual for inquisitors, was sophisticated. “It must be noted,” he wrote, “that just as all diseases are not treated by one single medicament, but that each disease has its own remedy, so one cannot use the same methods of interrogation, enquiry, and examination with heretics of differing sects, but must employ distinct and appropriate techniques.”
Gui was well aware that interrogation is a transaction between two people—a high-stakes game—and that the person being interrogated, like the person asking the questions, brings an attitude and a method to the process. The accused may be wily and disputatious. Or he may seem humble and accommodating. He may feign insanity. “It must be noted,” Gui warned, “that as the heretics cannot defend themselves against the truth of the faith by strength, reason, or authorities, they quickly resort to sophistries, deceit, and verbal trickery to avoid detection. This double-speak is a clear sign by which heretics can be recognized.”

Gui’s was not the Inquisition’s first interrogation manual, but it was one of the most influential. At a time when “publishing” was a laborious process, it was copied and recopied repeatedly and disseminated across Europe. Nor was it the last interrogation manual. A generation after Gui, another Dominican, Nicholas Eymerich, produced the
Directorium inquisitorum,
which built on the work of his predecessor and achieved even greater renown.

Torture was an integral part of the inquisitorial process, though it was reserved for difficult cases and was technically subject to certain restrictions. Eymerich and others granted wide latitude to inquisitors. For instance, although the accused was supposed to be subjected to a single “cycle” of torture, if he failed to confess or retracted a confession the inquisitors could decide that the cycle had not proceeded sufficiently: the accused, to use the term of art, had not yet been “decently” tortured. The cycle could therefore resume. Half a millennium later, the interrogators of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, employed similar reasoning to expand their options.
Like Gui, Eymerich became a figure in later works of fiction. His inquisitor’s manual turns up, for instance, in the library of the doomed mansion in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Eymerich’s methods, and perhaps his personality, frequently landed him in political trouble, and his career was one of frenetic activity interrupted by sudden bouts of exile. But it was never a torpid exile. During one of these periods, he wrote his
Directorium.

Tricks of the Trade

In modern times, the techniques of interrogation have been refined in theory by batteries of psychologists, criminologists, and intelligence experts, and in practice by soldiers, policemen, and spies. In some quarters, the word “interrogation,” with its inescapable undertones, has been replaced by the sanitized “eduction,” from “educe,” meaning “to lead out.” In 2006, the Intelligence Science Board, a government advisory group, published a thorough overview of current and historical interrogation practices under the anodyne title
Educing Information.
It contains papers with titles such as “Mechanical Detection of Deception: A Short Review” and “Options for Scientific Research on Eduction Practices.” In passing, it mentions the works of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich. Place the medieval techniques alongside those laid out in modern handbooks, such as
Human Intelligence Collector Operations,
the U. S. army interrogation manual, and the inquisitors’ practices seem very up-to-date.

The inquisitors became astute psychologists. Like Gui, Eymerich was well aware that those being interrogated would employ a range of stratagems to deflect questions and disarm the interrogator. In his manual, he lays out ten ways in which heretics seek to “hide their errors.” They include “equivocation,” “redirecting the question,” “feigned astonishment,” “twisting the meaning of words,” “changing the subject,” “feigning illness,” and “feigning stupidity.” For its part, the army interrogation manual provides a “Source and Information Reliability Matrix” to assess the same kinds of behavior. It warns interrogators to be wary of subjects who show signs of “reporting information that is self-serving,” who give “repeated answers with exact wording and details,” and who demonstrate a “failure to answer the question asked.”

But the well-prepared inquisitor had ruses of his own. To confront an unforthcoming prisoner, he might sit with a large stack of documents in front of him, which he would appear to consult as he asked questions or listened to answers, periodically looking up from the pages as if they contradicted the testimony and saying, “It is clear to me that you are hiding the truth.”
The army manual suggests a technique called the “file and dossier approach,” a variant on what it terms the “we know all” approach: