The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (24 page)

Still, despite such elaborate precautions, not every public execution was free of bungling. According to an eyewitness to the burning of the proto-Protestant reformer John Huss at Constance in 1415, the victim was bound to the stake with ropes tied tightly at his ankles, knees, groin, waist, and arms, and with a chain around his neck. After Huss had been thus fixed in place and made ready for burning, however, someone noticed that he was facing east, the direction of Jerusalem, and so the solemn moment was delayed while he was unbound, turned away from the sacred city, and tied up again. The scene might strike us as ludicrous and even laughable if it were not so appalling.
⁶¹

Once the victim was properly bound to the stake, additional straw and wood were added to the pyre, sometimes piled up to the prisoner’s neck. The priests ceased their preaching to the condemned man or woman and hastily withdrew to a safe distance, although even then, a cross was sometimes fixed to a long staff and held in front of the victim’s face until the moment of death. By that point, of course, the gesture was intended only to taunt and admonish the victim because it was plainly too late to achieve a conversion. At last, the inquisitor clapped his hands as a signal to the executioner to set a lighted torch to the kindling and thus send the heretic to hell.

Some victims of the Inquisition went courageously to their deaths as true believers and willing martyrs. The most intrepid of them, according to one eyewitness account, “laughed as they were bound to the pyre.” Another contemporary observer reported that some of the condemned men and women “thrust their hands and feet into the flames with the most dauntless fortitude,” as if to make the point that they welcomed martyrdom in the name of their forbidden faith, “and all of them yielded to their fate with such resolution that many of the amazed spectators lamented that such heroic souls had not been more enlightened.” Indeed, the public display of true belief by a dying heretic was the worst fear of the Inquisition and one that the monks sought to avoid at all costs.
⁶²

Modern medical writers have speculated that some victims of the Inquisition, both under torture and at the stake, may have been blessed with “a strange state of exaltation” that resulted from the sudden release of hormones by bodies subjected to stress, shock, and trauma. Yet the fact remains that most of the victims suffered terribly in the flames, and the sound of groans and screams rose above the roar of the fire and the taunts or guffaws of those in the crowd who took pleasure in this horror show. Of course, that is why the Church took such pains to convince its congregants that the victims of the Inquisition were nothing more than “heretical filth” whose disposal was a sacred duty. On the day when the machinery of persecution finally spat out the broken bodies of its victims, they were to be seen as “traitors to God” whose deaths were a victory rather than a tragedy.
⁶³

A well-fueled pyre might burn for hours, roasting the flesh long after the victims were dead. But the human body is not easily burned to ash, and it was always necessary to remove and dispose of the charred remains. The bones were broken up, the viscera and body parts were gathered, and the whole ghastly mess was tossed on a newly kindled fire for the purpose of reducing it still further. When the second fire burned out, the ashes and fragments of bone were collected and dumped on the waste ground along with the dung and garbage. Or, if the inquisitor feared that someone would try to retrieve a splinter of bone or a stray tooth, he might order the remains to be tossed into a river or stream to defeat the relic hunters. Such were the precautions taken for such famous heretics as John Huss and Savonarola, the radical priest of Florence who was burned alive in 1498 in the same square where he had once organized the famous Bonfire of the Vanities.
⁶⁴

So dutiful were the record keepers of the medieval Inquisition that we are able to inspect a kind of expense report for the execution of four heretics at Carcassonne on April 24, 1323. The greatest single expense, at slightly more than 55
sols,
was for “large wood,” and another 23
sols
were spent on vine-branches and straw. Four stakes cost nearly 11
sols,
and the ropes cost another 4
sols
and 7
deniers.
The executioner was paid 20
sols
for each victim. The whole job priced out at exactly 8
livres,
14
sols,
and 7
deniers.
*
The aroma of burning human flesh may have been regarded by the inquisitors as pleasing to God, but even at such sublime moments, the inquisitors kept one eye on the bottom line. Such was the real price of true belief and the victory of God over the Devil and his minions.

How many men, women, and children were victims of the Inquisition? Despite the inquisitorial obsession for record keeping, the answer is mostly a matter of surmise. As it turns out, historians have recovered documents that describe in obsessive detail the work of some inquisitors at certain times and places, but none at all for many other agents of the Inquisition who operated at other times and places during its long history.

Then, too, the master plan as it appears in papal decrees, canon law, and the inquisitor’s manuals is not always corroborated by the notarial transcripts and ledger books that survived the final destruction of the Inquisition in the nineteenth century. To put it another way, we know how the vast machinery of persecution was designed to operate, but we do not know how well it worked in practice—an accident of history that the defenders of the Inquisition have always used to their advantage in arguing that the Inquisition never fulfilled the grandiose dreams of its creators and operators.

Bernard Gui, for example, maintained a register of 930 sentences that he imposed as an inquisitor at Carcassonne from 1308 to 1323. We cannot know with certainty whether the register is accurate or complete, but he reports that he sent only 42 men and women to the stake, and he notes that 3 escaped heretics were to be put to death if captured. By contrast, he sentenced 307 convicted heretics to prison, 143 to the wearing of crosses, and 9 to go on compulsory pilgrimages. A total of 86 “defunct” heretics were sentenced posthumously to burning or imprisonment. The rest suffered penalties that included exile, a spell in the pillory, destruction of houses, and “degradation” of clerical rank. In a few cases, Gui recorded a reduction of sentence; someone sentenced to prison might be permitted to wear crosses instead, and a few were released from the obligation to wear crosses.

Gui might strike the modern reader as a moderate fellow. After all, he apparently sent fewer than fifty men and women to their deaths over a span of fifteen years, and he imposed the death sentence on far more “defunct” heretics than living ones. But even if Gui was wholly accurate in his record keeping, he may not have been a typical inquisitor. Robert le Bougre, for example, put 183 Cathars to the flames at a single auto-da-fé attended by the king of Navarre in 1239 and described by one pleased spectator as a “holocaust, very great and pleasing to God.” Some two hundred Cathars were burned alive when the fortress of Montségur was finally besieged and conquered in 1244. As we shall see, the burning of women accused of witchcraft during the late Middle Ages and the operations of the Spanish Inquisition after 1492 brought the death toll into the tens of thousands.
⁶⁵

Even so, the crimes of the Inquisition cannot be accurately measured by a body count. By both its decrees and its example, the Inquisition was responsible for the erosion of what meager liberties were available to men and women across Europe, the steady expansion of torture and arbitrary imprisonment and the death penalty, the restriction of what was permissible to think and read and know, and the establishment of a reign of terror that endured in one form or another for six centuries. Above all, the Inquisition perfected and preserved a model of authoritarianism that continued to operate long after the ashes of the last nameless heretic to be burned alive were scattered to the winds.

THE INQUISITOR’S MANUAL

POPE
(
Exhausted)
: It is clearly understood: he is not to be tortured. (
Pause
.) At the very most, he may be shown the instruments.

INQUISITOR:
That will be adequate, Your Holiness. Mr. Galilei understands machinery.

BERTOLT BRECHT,
Galileo

T
he Inquisition achieved a victory of genocidal proportions against its first victims, but not before driving the Cathars underground and turning them into fugitives. Instead of wearing the distinctive black robe that indicated their high rank, the
perfecti
now donned blue or dark green mantles and contented themselves with a black girdle worn under their clothing or just a symbolic black thread next to the skin. Male and female
perfecti
traveled in pairs, passing themselves off as married couples and pretending to be peddlers. Sometimes they resorted to deliberately eating meat in roadhouses and taverns to throw off inquisitorial agents on the prowl for people whose pale skin and thin torsos suggested that they were practicing the rigorous self-denial of Catharism.

The
perfecti
sought refuge in a network of safe houses that were maintained here and there across Europe by their fellow Cathars; the hiding place might be an attic or cellar, a dovecote or sometimes just a shallow hole in the ground concealed by a chest. So the ritual of the
consolamentum
was still available to the ever-diminishing number of dedicated Cathars who managed to avoid arrest, torture, imprisonment, and execution. But they were always at risk of detection by spies in service to the Inquisition or betrayal by self-professed Cathars who had agreed to serve as double agents in order to spare their own lives. By 1330, the last Cathar had been burned alive by the Inquisition, and Catharism was extinct.
*

No such victory could be claimed against the other target of the Inquisition in its early years, the Christian rigorists known as the Waldensians. Although they had been lumped with the Cathars and slandered as Devil worshippers, baby killers, and sexual orgiasts—and many of them were, in fact, burned alive by the Inquisition—one group of Waldensians was actually permitted to rejoin the Church under the new name of Poor Catholics, an acknowledgment that the Waldensian beliefs and practices were not quite as diabolical as advertised by their persecutors. A few other Waldensians managed to find sanctuary in remote villages in Italy, where they succeeded in preserving the old faith while the Inquisition busied itself with heretics who were closer at hand. In 1526, when the Protestant Reformation had reached a critical mass, a delegation of surviving Waldensians emerged from hiding to make contact with their kindred spirits in Germany and Switzerland.

“We are in agreement with you in everything,” a Waldensian minister (or
barba
) named George Morel wrote to the Christian reformers who had unwittingly followed in the footsteps of the Waldensians. “From the time of the apostles we have had in essentials an understanding of the faith which is yours.”
¹

So the medieval Inquisition’s original raison d’être—“the most spectacular kinds of heresy,” as historian Edward Peters insists on calling the Cathars and Waldensians—disappeared from sight within a century or so after it was first deployed. But the Church refused to declare victory in its war on heresy. Quite to the contrary, the Inquisition continued to search for new heretics to torture and burn for another five hundred years, and the inquisitors never failed to find them. Indeed, as we shall see, the Inquisition was perfectly capable of conjuring up a new heresy on its own initiative to provide itself with victims.
²

The sheer staying power of the Inquisition may have been its most horrific feature. Like any bureaucracy, the Inquisition did what was necessary to preserve itself. And the men on its payroll—not just the inquisitors but the familiars, notaries, scriveners, attorneys, doctors, bookkeepers, guards, torturers, and executioners—were not its only constituency. Emperors, kings, and popes, too, found the inquisitorial apparatus so useful in acquiring and maintaining their own wealth and power that they were always reluctant to shut it down merely because the friar-inquisitors had been successful against their first victims. Once the machinery of persecution had been assembled, perfected, and put into operation, the temptation to use it was irresistible and perhaps inevitable.

As the last of the Cathars and Waldensians went up in smoke or went into hiding, the Inquisition had already found a new supply of heretics. Remarkably, the next victims of the friar-inquisitors came from within their own ranks.

The so-called
spirituali
(Spirituals) were Franciscan monks who sought to preserve the ideals of Saint Francis even as the pope commanded that members of their order leave the monastery and enter the world as professional persecutors. The inquisitors, as we have seen, were intent on separating heretics from their money, and using the confiscated wealth to build the infrastructure of the Inquisition. The
spirituali,
as their name implies, preferred to engage in purely spiritual pursuits, including the study of apocalyptic texts that prompted them to expect the end of days, and they insisted on wearing the poorest of clothing to symbolize their vows of poverty. Their patched robes marked them as easy targets of the Inquisition.