The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (16 page)

Photographic Insert

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1. Pope Innocent III excommunicates the Cathars, the very first victims of the Inquisition; Catharism was one of the few heresies to be wholly eradicated by the Church.

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2. A fanciful view of the mountain stronghold at Montségur, where the last Cathar holdouts were finally seized and burned alive in 1244.

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3. From the inquisitor’s manuals of the Middle Ages to a “letter of apology” published in 1789—and even today—the Inquisition has always found its pious defenders.

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4. The torture chambers of the Inquisition, like the medieval version depicted here, changed little in appearance or equipment over six hundred years of active operation.

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5. Men and women accused of heresy were sometimes silenced with iron masks fitted with spikes or gags, like the “scold’s bridle” shown here, a grim example of the torturer’s art.

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6. Torquemada, clad in the cowled robe of the Dominican order and shown here in the company of Pope Sixtus IV, was the iconic grand inquisitor.

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7. “As if he were an entrepreneur offering a show,” the grand inquisitor did not neglect the production values of an auto da fé like the one in Madrid in 1683.

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8. Palaces and fortresses, such as the Alcázar at Córdoba, were commonly put at the disposal of the friar-inquisitors by compliant kings.

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9. The peaked headpiece known as a coroza, shown in a drawing by Goya, was a theatrical touch invented by the Spanish Inquisition to humiliate its victims.

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10. Critics of the Inquisition delighted in showing the sexual sadism of the friar-inquisitors, but the fact remains that the victims were stripped to facilitate the work of the torturer.

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11. The Spanish Inquisition turned heresy from a thought-crime into a blood crime, a deadly innovation embraced by Nazi Germany in the notorious Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

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12. The show trials of Stalinist Russia in the 1930s, like the Inquisition itself, demonstrated how innocent men and women could be reduced to abject confession by the threat and use of torture.