The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (14 page)

At the end of every interrogation, the notary attested to the accuracy of the record, thus “giving at least a color of impartiality.”
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Testimony was supposed to be taken in the presence of two impartial witnesses who would join the notary in signing the transcript to verify its accuracy. But the witnesses were always selected by the inquisitors, who preferred “discreet and religious men” and, whenever possible, Dominicans or other clerics whose loyalties and duty of obedience were directed to the Church. To ensure the absolute control of the Inquisition over its own workings, all witnesses were required to take an oath never to reveal what they had observed during the secret proceedings.
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The transcripts may have been voluminous and tedious, but they were not merely filed away and forgotten. Rather, they were copied out and exchanged by inquisitors across Europe in a “fearful multiplication of papers” that served at least a couple of urgent concerns of the Inquisition. First, the inquisitors were careful to create and maintain duplicate records in case the originals were misplaced or destroyed, whether by accidental fire or flood or by the willful act of men and women seeking to hinder the work of the Inquisition. The destruction of records, as we shall see, was a favorite tactic of the courageous individuals who set themselves against the Inquisition in its early years. Second, the records were exchanged and actively consulted by various inquisitors in making cases against accused heretics across vast distances of miles and years.
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The notaries and scriveners who assembled and preserved the records of the Inquisition bestowed a useful and terrible tool on the friar-inquisitors. They enjoyed access to the names, whereabouts, friendships, family relations, assets, and business dealings of the accused heretics. “With such data at his disposal,” observes Malcolm Lambert, “a medieval inquisitor had resources comparable to that of a modern police officer, ever ready to check and cross-check information.” The fact that the Inquisition enjoyed both international jurisdiction and an institutional memory in the form of shared documents checkmated those who dared to hide or flee and guaranteed that the mere passage of time provided no protection for dissident Christians who might have escaped the attention of a particular inquisitor.
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An elderly woman in Toulouse was convicted and punished for heresy by the Inquisition on the basis of musty records dating back some fifty years. She had been allowed to rejoin the Church after confessing to heresy in 1268, but when she was charged a second time in 1316, a new generation of inquisitors consulted the archives that had been assembled before they were born and discovered the prior conviction. Relapse into heresy, as we shall see, was regarded as an even more heinous crime than the original act, and a repeat offender was subject to the most severe penalties available to the inquisitor. So the old woman of Toulouse was condemned to “perpetual imprisonment in chains” as a repeat offender, “perhaps even having forgotten the incident of nearly a half-century before.”
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Entirely apart from their practical utility in tracking down concealed or escaped suspects, the archives can be seen to serve a metaphysical function in the history of the Inquisition. Since the heretical acts and beliefs that so obsessed the inquisitors often existed only in their own overheated imaginations, the scratching of a notary’s goose-quill pen on a leaf of laid paper somehow turned fantasy into reality and created what passed for documentary evidence. The alchemy of ink and paper would work the same magic in centuries to come, not only for the Inquisition but for every new generation of persecutors responding to the inquisitorial impulse.

Above all, the Inquisition relied on secrecy and the terror that secrecy inspired. All testimony—whether from the accused, his or her accusers, or others implicated in the accusations and confessions—was taken in examinations conducted by the inquisitors and their various servitors behind closed doors. The names of accusers and witnesses, and the testimony or other evidence they offered, were withheld from the person under investigation. As a result, the victims of the Inquisition were never given an opportunity to confront or cross-examine those who denounced them.

Indeed, the accused would not even know the particulars of the charges against them unless they were able to discern them from the questions put by the inquisitor. When a desperate defendant begged the inquisitor James Fournier (later Pope Benedict XXII) to reveal the supposed offense for which he was being tried, for example, the inquisitor consented to tell him “
de gratia,
” that is, “as a favor.” Less fortunate victims were reduced to guessing what particular false belief they were accused of embracing and which nameless accusers—embittered friends or relations, a spiteful neighbor, a rival in business—had slipped their names to the Inquisition.
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A man or woman accused of heresy was theoretically entitled to mount a defense to the charges, at least according to the rulings of a few popes and church councils over the centuries. But various papal decrees encouraged the inquisitors to proceed “simply and plainly and without the uproar and form of lawyers,” and the bull of 1229 titled
Excommunicamus
formally denied the assistance of legal counsel to defendants in proceedings of the Inquisition. Even at the times and places where attorneys were permitted in theory, the accused heretic who could afford to hire one was hard-pressed to find an advocate who would take his or her case.

When a Franciscan friar named Bernard Délicieux was ordered by his own superior to “defend the memory” of a dead man accused of heresy before the Inquisition in 1300, not a single notary in the city of Carcassonne was willing to assist him in drawing up legal documents to be presented to the inquisitor. The good friar was forced to send to a distant city for a more courageous notary because the local ones remembered how the inquisitor had previously arrested and imprisoned the notary who had foolishly rendered legal services in the appeal that a group of citizens had lodged against the Inquisition with the king of France a few years earlier.
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The Inquisition itself, on the other hand, was well supplied with expert legal advice. Starting in 1300, as we have noted, the preferred candidates for the job of inquisitor were men who had earned a doctorate of law at a university. However, most inquisitors were “utterly ignorant of the law,” according to the fourteenth-century commentator Zanghino Ugolini, and they “were chosen rather with regard to zeal than learning.” As a result, the grand inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich (ca. 1320–1399) recommended in his own manual of instruction that an inquisitor “should always associate himself with some discreet lawyer to save him from mistakes,” not only the kind of mistakes that might allow a victim to escape punishment but, even more crucially, the blunders that might cause the inquisitor to be dismissed from his job by his superiors. Eventually, some tribunals of the Inquisition routinely employed an attorney with the official title of Counselor as a member of the paid inquisitorial staff.
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Every legal procedure of the Inquisition, in fact, was designed for the convenience of the inquisitors alone. Confessed or convicted heretics, common criminals, and even children—all of whom were ordinarily excluded as witnesses in both church and civil courts—were permitted to give evidence before the Inquisition, but only if they testified against the accused. (If their testimony tended to exculpate an accused heretic, the customary exclusions were applied.) By contrast, the standard legal procedure known as
purgatorio canonica,
which permitted the accused to call on friends and acquaintances to formally support his oath of innocence, was ultimately rendered useless because to do so constituted an admission of one’s own guilt as a fautor.

Although a defendant was entitled in theory to discredit the witnesses against him by showing them to be motivated by ill will—the “mortal enmity” of an accuser toward the accused was the
only
grounds for disqualification of a witness who gave testimony before the Inquisition—the legal tactic was rarely available because of the secrecy that applied to the workings of the Inquisition. After all, the defendant did not know the identity of the accuser or the witnesses, the nature of the evidence against him, or even the specific charge on which he was being tried. On rare occasions, an alert and canny defendant might be able to discern a few helpful details about the case against him from the questions put to him by the interrogator, and only then would he be able to come up with the name of an ill-willed accuser in a desperate act of self-defense.
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A rare and colorful example of an accused heretic who guessed the identity of his accuser is found in the records of the Inquisition at Carcassonne. A man named Bernard Pons, charged as a heretic in 1254, discerned that his own wife had denounced him to the Inquisition and persuaded three of his friends to testify that she held a grudge against him. All three attested that she was “a woman of loose character.” One testified that Pons had caught her in an act of adultery; another testified that Pons had given his wife a beating; and the third testified that “she wished her husband dead that she might marry a certain Pug Oler, and that she would willingly become a leper if that would bring it about.” Yet the weight of evidence against the accuser did not persuade the inquisitor that the unfaithful wife had acted out of ill will, and the cuckolded husband was convicted on her disputed testimony.
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So the man or woman who faced the Inquisition did so utterly alone. The inquisitors were armed with information extracted under torture from other suspects, or provided by spies and informers, friendly witnesses and confessed heretics—all of them nameless—or culled from the archives of the Inquisition, and they were attended and supported by clerks, notaries, scriveners, attorneys, and other servitors. By contrast, the defendant was frightened, disoriented, usually deprived of food and rest after a long stay in a cell, bereft of advice or assistance, and wholly ignorant of the charges, evidence, and witnesses arrayed against him.

The inquisitorial apparatus in its entirety can be understood, then, as a machine designed to extract a confession from the accused heretic. The use of torture represented the last desperate effort of the friar-inquisitors to terrorize their victims into confessing their supposed crimes and sparing the inquisitors the burden of actually weighing the evidence, such as it was. Only if an accused heretic refused to confess during interrogation was the inquisitor compelled to conduct a hearing at which the evidence was presented, the guilt or innocence of the victim considered, and a verdict rendered.

The trial, too, was conducted in absolute secrecy. Before the proceeding began, the defendant was “required to swear that he would never divulge the details of his ‘trial.’” Afterward, he was compelled to acknowledge that he had been offered an opportunity to present a defense and “had not availed himself of it.” The trial itself was a mere formality, an opportunity for the inquisitors to reprise the evidence of heresy, formally interrogate the suspect one last time, and afford him a final opportunity to confess before they passed sentence. By that point, no real question remained in anyone’s mind about the verdict. Indeed, a trial before the Inquisition anticipates the imaginary tribunal that sits in judgment in Franz Kafka’s
The Trial.
“You can’t defend yourself against this court, all you can do is confess,” observes one of his fictional characters.
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Such was the quality of “legal justice” afforded to the victims of the Inquisition. “When the Inquisition once laid hands upon a man it never released its hold,” insists Henry Charles Lea. “No verdict of acquittal was ever issued.” Yet the elaborate framework of rules and regulations erected around the machinery of persecution was one of the great innovations of the Inquisition, often invoked by its defenders and much copied by its imitators in future years.
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At last, the friar-inquisitors were ready to announce the sentence—or, as the Inquisition preferred to put it, the “penance”—that the Inquisition would impose on the convicted heretic. Bernard Gui’s handbook includes a formula for pardoning a convicted heretic, but Gui himself cautions his readers that “it is never, or most rarely, to be used.” If pardoned, the heretic was formally admonished that “the slightest cause of suspicion would lead him to be punished without mercy,” and the Inquisition reserved the right “to incarcerate him again without the formality of a fresh trial or sentence if the interest of the faith required.” Once the trial was concluded and the guilt of the accused heretic was confirmed, the Inquisition now proceeded to its single most important function, the one for which it was designed and the one in which the inquisitors took the greatest pride and pleasure—the punishment of the convicted heretic.
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Apologists for the Inquisition have argued that it was based on sound legal procedure, and they point to the voluminous body of canon law that accumulated over the centuries in the library of the Vatican. “No one could be legally convicted of a crime without adequate proof,” insists Henry Ansgar Kelly. If a man or woman was falsely accused of heresy by the Inquisition, or terrorized into a confession, or punished without cause, he argues, it was only because some renegade inquisitor had violated the body of law that governed its operations. “The abusive practices that came to prevail in the special heresy tribunals do not merit the name of inquisition,” insists Kelly, “but rather should be identified as a perversion of the inquisitorial process caused by overzealous and underscrupulous judges.”
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