The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (17 page)

PLATE
13. Just as the Inquisition compelled its victims to wear cloth crosses, Nazi Germany revived the medieval “Jew badge” to identify and isolate the targets of the Final Solution.

PLATE
14. Like Galileo before the friar-inquisitors of the Roman Inquisition, Bertolt Brecht was subjected to interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.

PLATE
15. By 1981 the Inquisition had entered Western popular culture as a harmless subject of ridicule in
Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part 1
.

PLATE
16. The coroza, the dungeon cell, and the ordeal by water—now known as waterboarding—were borrowed from the Inquisition and put to use at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

A special target of the early resisters was the meticulous records that the Inquisition began to accumulate from the outset of its operations. These archives, as we have seen, constituted the institutional memory of the Inquisition and, as such, were a terrible threat to every dissident. At Narbonne in 1235, for example, the citizens who participated in an uprising against the Inquisition seized and destroyed its books and records, and in 1248 a pair of officials who were carrying a set of records were slain and the records burned. So threatening were these attacks on the archives of the Inquisition that a church council in Albi in 1254 ordered that all its records be duplicated and the copies placed in a secure location so that future attacks would not slow down or stop the inquisitors’ work.

One incident in particular prompted an especially punishing response with far-reaching effects. The triggering event took place when a man called Peter of Verona (ca. 1205–1252)—a child of Cathar parents who grew up to join the Dominican order and then the Inquisition—was sent to Florence to serve as inquisitor. He recruited Catholic noblemen to join a newly created militia whose members were sworn to protect the Inquisition in its work, and so the war against heresy was literally taken to the streets as “Catholic gangs” and their rivals battled each other. During one such skirmish, Peter himself was fatally wounded by an ax blow but lived long enough to leave a final message written in his own blood on the pavement: “I believe in God.” Or so goes the hagiography that came to be attached to the dead inquisitor.
⁷³

Peter was promptly canonized as the patron saint of inquisitors by Pope Innocent IV, and his violent death inspired the pope to issue “perhaps the most terrible of all Bulls in the history of the Inquisition,” a papal decree of 1252 known as
Ad extirpanda
(To extirpate). Torture of accused heretics under the authority of the Inquisition was officially sanctioned for the first time, burning at the stake was openly mandated as the punishment for relapsed heretics, and an armed constabulary was created and provided to the Inquisition for its own use. None of these measures was wholly new, but now they were solemnly encoded in canon law and carried the imprimatur of the pope himself. The machinery of repression and persecution would be replicated across Europe and beyond, always in the name of the Inquisition and its war on heresy. “Men armed with these tremendous powers, and animated with this resolute spirit, were not lightly to be meddled with,” writes Lea. “[The inquisitor’s] jurisdiction, in fact, was almost unlimited, for the dread of suspicion of heresy brought, with few exceptions, all mankind to a common level.”
⁷⁴

When viewed in the full light of history, opposition to the Inquisition in its early days seems heartbreakingly naïve. Successive popes bestowed upon the inquisitors such powers and privileges—and equipped them with such vast resources—that the Inquisition eventually overawed even the most courageous of its adversaries. Once the inquisitors had mastered their own arsenal of weapons, the population under their authority came to realize that no one was beyond the reach of the Inquisition. Eventually, the paranoia that the inquisitors sought to inspire acted as a deterrent not only to acts of open resistance but also to any word or deed that might catch the attention of the Inquisition. The war on heresy turned into a long reign of terror in which fear itself was the most effective weapon.

The inquisitorial archives preserve the evidence of a few isolated efforts at evasion, like the man who is reported to have “spirited away the body of his condemned father before it could be burned,” and the desperate entreaties of its abject victims, such as a couple of widows who appealed to the pope for mercy after they were ordered to enter a convent, not as punishment for their own heretical beliefs but only because their dead husbands had been Cathars. For eight years, a rich man from Toulouse named Alaman simply ignored an order to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; when the authorities finally got around to excommunicating him in 1237, he managed to stay out of prison for ten more years. But there is another way of looking at the same facts. The Inquisition did not forgive or forget, and a man or woman might face trial and punishment years or even decades after the alleged crime of heresy had taken place.
⁷⁵

A few accused heretics managed to save themselves by going into hiding or by fleeing to places beyond the reach of the Inquisition. Some fled before arrest and trial, some while the proceedings were in progress, and a few succeeded in the rare and daring feat of breaking out of prison while in the custody of the Inquisition. A study of the archives of the Inquisition in the diocese of Toulouse for the period 1249–1257 suggests that twenty-six victims were sentenced to death but an even greater number—thirty in all—were listed as fugitives.
⁷⁶
Indeed, as we have seen, the trial of an accused heretic so commonly resulted in conviction that, as a practical matter, flight was the only way a victim might escape punishment.

The backwaters of Christendom might afford a sanctuary for an accused or convicted heretic in hiding or on the run. Cathars from Milan and Florence, for example, were able to find a safe haven in the distant and isolated stretches of Calabria and Abruzzi. Remarkably, the first Protestant missionaries to reach Italy during the Reformation discovered that a few Waldensian communities—the forerunners of reformed Christianity—had managed to avoid the Inquisition for more than three hundred years in the remote mountain valleys of Lombardy. As late as 1733, the pope deemed it necessary to order the director-general of the Franciscans to station an inquisitor on Corsica permanently because the distant and isolated island was supposedly “infested with heretics.”
⁷⁷

The Inquisition was eventually so pervasive, so well staffed and well informed, that it became increasingly difficult for a dissident Christian to find any safe place in western Europe. To locate a suspected heretic and gather evidence against him or her, an inquisitor in one locality was able to consult the archives of other inquisitors across Europe. Indeed, the reach of the Inquisition sometimes resulted in two inquisitors seeking to prosecute the same victim, and the Council of Narbonne established the rule of “first come, first served” to ensure that the first inquisitor to lodge formal charges against a suspected heretic enjoyed the right to claim him or her. For this reason the Inquisition has been called “the first international law-keeping force,” a phrase that sums up its vast reach even as it obscures the fact that the Inquisition enforced only the law that criminalized an act of conscience.
⁷⁸

One measure of the police power of the Inquisition was its right to maintain its own armed constabulary. At a time when Bologna permitted only knights and doctors to bear arms—and Paris forbade all citizens from carrying “pointed knives, swords, bucklers, or other similar weapons”—an inquisitor was permitted to “arm anyone he pleased, and invest him with the privileges and immunities of the Holy Office.” Indeed, some inquisitors found it profitable to license the right to bear arms to anyone willing to pay a fee, thus creating a source of revenue to fund the Inquisition’s operations; the inquisitor at Florence, for example, enjoyed an annual income of a thousand gold florins from the arms trade. Pope John XXII himself characterized some of the inquisitorial henchmen as “armed familiars of depraved character and perverse habits, who committed murders and other outrages.” But if a troublesome lord or magistrate sought to disarm them, the inquisitor had a ready response.
⁷⁹
“[A]ny secular ruler who endeavors to prevent the familiars of the Holy Office from bearing arms,” decreed the inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich, “is impeding the Inquisition and is a fautor of heresy.”
⁸⁰

The same sanctimony was invoked to justify every atrocity and excess of the Inquisition. The inquisitor’s handbooks, as we have noted, prescribe the precise formula to be used by one inquisitor in addressing a request to another inquisitor for the return of a person who has managed to escape from an inquisitorial prison, and the escapee is described as “one insanely led to reject the salutary medicine offered for his cure, and to spurn the wine and oil which were soothing his wounds.” Thus we are reminded that the Church insisted on presenting itself not as a persecutor and a punisher but as “a loving mother unwillingly inflicting wholesome chastisement on her unruly children.”
⁸¹

While popes and grand inquisitors continued to utter their pious words of self-justification, however, the real work of the Inquisition was being carried out in the dungeons where the victims were questioned under the threat and application of torture. Here, of course, is the enduring legacy of the Inquisition. Its rituals and protocols, the legalisms and euphemisms, are now preserved only in archives and libraries, but the day-to-day skills and tools of the inquisitors are still in use. Like the remarkable machine for torture and execution imagined by Franz Kafka, the history of the Inquisition was carved into human flesh.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

The keys would jangle again; and the first scream of the next victim often came even before they had touched him, at the mere sight of the men in the doorway.

ARTHUR KOESTLER,
Darkness at Noon

“T
he third degree” is a commonplace of hardboiled detective fiction, and nowadays the phrase calls to mind a ham-fisted cop at work on a suspect under a swinging lamp in the backroom of a police station. In truth, however, the third degree is yet another distant but distinct echo of the Inquisition. Like so much else in the lore of the Inquisition, the phrase itself allows us to glimpse the obsessive concern with order that governed the imaginations of the inquisitors.