The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (10 page)

Whether the papal dream came true in all of its Kafkaesque detail is still debated by revisionist historians, but we can glimpse the vision of the Inquisition that danced in the heads of sleeping popes by consulting the papal bulls, episcopal canons, and inquisitor’s manuals that prescribed the standard operating procedures for flesh-and-blood inquisitors for more than six hundred years. It was first known by the fearful title of
Holy Office of Inquisition
into Heretical Depravity (
Inquisitio haereticae Pravitatis sanctum Officium
), a phrase that betrays the fear and loathing that the first inquisitors felt for their victims. The same institution, however, has carried other official designations over the centuries, including one that captures the near-delusional arrogance of the Church in undertaking the inquisitorial project: Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. Even today the same office exists under a rather more modest moniker, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Inquisition did not spring fully formed from the heads that wore the papal crown, nor was the Holy Office of Inquisition the first or only apparatus for the persecution of heresy in the long history of Christianity. The early Christian church was continually bedeviled by the problem of sorting out which beliefs and practices were orthodox and which were heretical, and the unfortunates who found themselves on the wrong side of the line had always been the victims of arrest, torture, imprisonment, and execution. In that sense, the Inquisition was not an act of pure invention; rather, it was assembled and fine-tuned after centuries of tinkering, “moulded step by step out of the materials which lay nearest at hand.”
²

The history of the Inquisition is classically divided into three periods. The medieval Inquisition began in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade in the mid–thirteenth century and continued to operate in France, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe for another couple of hundred years, persecuting first the Cathars and Waldensians and then miscellaneous other victims, including the Knights Templar, renegade Franciscan priests, men accused of alchemy and sorcery, and women accused of witchcraft. The so-called Roman Inquisition, a phenomenon of the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century, directed most of its efforts against Protestants and various humanists and freethinkers in Italy. And the Spanish Inquisition, the last-surviving and most famous branch operation of the Inquisition, was created in 1478 to search out Jewish converts to Christianity whose conversions were suspected of being insincere, and remained in formal existence until 1834.

Yet these convenient markers fail to convey the vastness and strangeness of the Inquisition, which took on many other guises and configurations over the centuries and across the globe. So grandiose were the ambitions of the Inquisition that inquisitors were authorized and sometimes even appointed for places where the pope and the Church enjoyed little or no authority, including such distant and exotic locales as Abyssinia, Armenia, Egypt, Georgia, Greece, Nubia, Russia, Syria, Tartary, Tunis, and Wallachia. The papal legate in Jerusalem was instructed to put the Inquisition into operation in the Holy Land in 1290, but the so-called Syrian Inquisition was stillborn when the crusaders were evicted from their little kingdom by a Muslim army in the following year. By 1500, the Spanish Inquisition was burning heretics in Mexico and South America, and the Portuguese version of the Inquisition was doing the same in the colony of Goa on the Indian subcontinent. “An inquisitor,” notes Henry Charles Lea, “seems to have been regarded as a necessary portion of the missionary outfit.”
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Nor did the Vatican invariably serve as the command center of the Inquisition. Again, the Spanish Inquisition is only the most famous example of the commandeering of the machinery of persecution by a secular government. After Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain petitioned the pope for an Inquisition of their own, the king of Portugal decided that he needed one, too. The king of France, when he sought to replenish the royal treasury by looting the Knights Templar, called on the Inquisition to sanctify the destruction of the old crusading order on trumped-up charges of homosexuality and heresy. Even when a municipal or provincial branch of the Inquisition remained under the nominal authority of the pope, it might take on its own style and set its own priorities. An inquisitor in the thriving commercial center of Venice, for example, conducted an auction at which the goods seized from twenty-two convicted heretics were sold and the money added to his own coffers.

Yet it is also true that the men who invented and operated the Inquisition always aspired toward uniformity, continuity, and ubiquity. Nothing else captures the inner meaning of the Inquisition quite like the manuals and handbooks composed by the earliest inquisitors and circulated among those who followed in their footsteps. From the lawyer-popes, to the princes of the Church, to the hooded friar-inquisitor at work in the torture chamber, all of them sought to impose a Mad Hatter’s vision of law and order on the bloody enterprise of persecution. Thus, for example, the inquisitors were supplied with lists of questions to ask a suspect under interrogation, scripts to recite when consigning an accused man or woman to prison or to burning at the stake, forms to fill out when requesting the return of an escaped prisoner, and even a writ that could be copied out when an accused heretic was found to be not guilty—a form that was seldom, if ever, actually used.

Precisely because the inquisitors were guided in their work by the canons, decrees, formbooks, and handbooks that were preserved and consulted over the centuries, the Inquisition achieved a remarkable degree of standardization. To be sure, some of the practices and procedures varied from place to place and changed over time. The burning of Cathars in Languedoc by the medieval Inquisition, for example, was a much cruder affair than the great spectacle offered in the public square of Madrid when the Spanish Inquisition mounted an auto-da-fé. Then, too, the very first inquisitors faced open resistance from their outraged victims, a phenomenon that would diminish and then disappear as the Inquisition grew in size, scope, and sheer shelf-confidence. Even so, the workings of the Inquisition did not fundamentally change over its six-hundred-year history. The Inquisition was a machine with interchangeable parts, just as its inventors had intended, and its victims in every venue and every age suffered a similar and terrible fate.

How far back we must look to find the roots of the Inquisition remains an open question. The core idea—and the word itself—was borrowed from the jurisprudence of pagan Rome, the original persecutor of Christianity, and only later imported into the canon law of the Roman Catholic church. Unlike the Roman legal procedures called
accusatio
and
denunciatio,
in which a private citizen or a public prosecutor presented evidence of wrongdoing to a judge, the form of criminal prosecution called
inquisitio
permitted a single man to perform the roles of investigator, prosecutor, and judge—a notion that offends the fundamental notion of fairness in English and American law. Yet, at least one historian insists that the “time-honored system of the grand-jury” in Anglo-Saxon tradition ought to be regarded as “a prototype of the incipient papal Inquisition”—an ironic observation in light of the fact that England was one place in Europe where the Inquisition did
not
operate.
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Inquisition into heresy had long been carried out by Catholic bishops on their own initiative and authority. The trial of the gnostic cultists at Orléans in 1022 was conducted by a panel of French bishops, and the so-called episcopal inquisition—a term that is used to refer collectively to the inquisitions conducted by bishops—coexisted (and sometimes competed) with the Inquisition even after the popes arrogated to themselves the leading role in the enterprise of finding and punishing heretics. Thus, for example, the celebrated medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–ca. 1327) was tried twice for heresy, once by a tribunal of bishops in Germany, which acquitted him, and later by the Inquisition, which convicted him posthumously. Indeed, the episcopal inquisition proved to be insufficiently fierce for the papal war on heresy that began in earnest in the thirteenth century—one reason that the Inquisition was called into existence in the first place.

A tale told about the bishop of Besançon illustrates how benighted an otherwise pious cleric might turn out to be. Troubled by rumors of a small band of wonder-workers said to be capable of performing authentic miracles, the bishop felt obliged to determine whether they had acquired their powers from God or Satan. And so, remarkably, he called on the services of a clerk reputed to be a practitioner of the black arts, apparently overlooking the fact that sorcery, too, was an act of heresy and thus punishable by death. “The cunning clerk deceived the devil into a confidential mood and learned that the strangers were his servants,” reports Henry Charles Lea with tongue in cheek. “[T]hey were deprived of the satanic amulets which were their protection, and the populace, which had previously sustained them, cast them pitilessly into the flames.”
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On other occasions, even the most pious bishops and popes were so flummoxed by the mere sight of flesh-and-blood heretics that they simply did not know what to do with them. When a few Cathars were rounded up in Flanders in 1162, the archbishop of Reims shipped them off to Pope Alexander III (ca. 1105–1181) for punishment, and the pope promptly shipped them back to the archbishop with the admonition that “it was better to pardon the guilty than to take the lives of the innocent.” Such bleeding-heart liberalism seems quaint and even poignant when compared with the bloody-mindedness that would soon characterize the Inquisition, and it helps to explain why a corps of inquisitors was later called into existence.
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When Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216) resolved to root out Catharism once and for all in the opening years of the thirteenth century, he was not willing to rely on the bishops scattered across Europe, many of whom he regarded as corrupt, or inept, or too comfortable with their Cathar neighbors, and sometimes all three at once. Instead, he started by recruiting a few churchmen of his own choosing to serve as his personal emissaries (or “legates”). They became a kind of flying squad of heretic hunters, and various popes dispatched them to hotspots all over Europe where the smoke and fire of heresy had been detected. Here begins the so-called legatine inquisition, an early phase of the war on heresy and the first stirrings of
the
Inquisition.

The very first man to carry the official title of
Inquisitor haereticae Pravitatis
(inquisitor into heretical depravity) was Conrad of Marburg (ca. 1180–1233), a legatine inquisitor who was sent first to Languedoc by Pope Innocent III and later to the Rhineland by Pope Gregory IX. A rabid ascetic and an apparent sadist, Conrad is also credited with slapping the label of “Luciferanism” on the Waldensians, whom he wrongly regarded as Devil worshipers rather than Christian rigorists, and tantalizing his superiors with near-pornographic tales of their imagined sexual and theological excesses.

Conrad is a good example of the kind of human being who is temperamentally suited for the career of a professional persecutor. An aristocrat by birth and the beneficiary of a university education at Paris, he cultivated a reputation for piety and self-denial, and he fasted himself into pallor and emaciation. At the height of his fame, he rode from place to place on a donkey in imitation of Jesus, attracting adoring crowds who welcomed him with candles and incense. Once charged by the pope with the task of burning heretics, he allied himself with a couple of “self-appointed inquisitors”—a “one-eyed, one-armed rogue” named Johannes and a Dominican lay friar called Hans Torso—and the three of them set up operations “on papal license.” They shaved the heads of the accused to mark them as suspected heretics and questioned them so brutally that the archbishop of Mainz complained to the pope about the false confessions that were being extracted from innocent men and women under the threat of the stake.
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“We would gladly burn a hundred,” boasted an unapologetic Conrad, “if just one among them were guilty.”
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Conrad sought victims among the gentry as well as among the common folk, perhaps because of his zeal in the pursuit of heresy or perhaps because the wealth of a convicted heretic was subject to confiscation. In 1233 his eye fell on Count Henry II of Seyn, a wealthy nobleman who had demonstrated his own Christian piety by endowing churches and monasteries and even going on crusade. Conrad produced a witness who claimed to have seen Henry riding on a monstrous crab on his way to a sex orgy. But Henry, unlike Conrad’s humbler victims, was not cowed into confession. Rather, the count insisted on confronting the inquisitor and putting him to his proof.

Conrad’s fate provides a cautionary example of both the excesses of the legatine inquisitors and the defiant response that a papal legate might encounter from local clergy and gentry. Count Henry demanded a trial before a tribunal consisting of the king, the archbishop, and various other clergymen. Questioned in the presence of these judges, Conrad’s witnesses revealed that they had given evidence only to spare themselves from the stake, and the tribunal refused to convict Count Henry. When Conrad fled the city of Mainz, frustrated and disgusted, he was tracked by a hit squad whose orders were to put an end to both Conrad and his little crew. Set upon and slain on the road to Marburg five days after the acquittal of their last victim, they thus suffered the same fate as that of another papal legate, Peter of Castelnau, whose confrontation with Count Raymond at Toulouse had sparked the Albigensian Crusade.