The Friar of Carcassonne (36 page)

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The phantasmagoric uppercase “Inquisition”:
To cite all the works propagating this myth over the centuries would require the destruction of too many trees. The best one-volume historical examination, in English, of how
inquisition
became a byword for evil remains Edward Peters,
Inquisition
, Berkeley, 1989.

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leached memorably into popular culture:
The two examples given are television's
Monty Python's Flying Circus
and its 1970 sketch, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” and Umberto Eco,
The Name of the
Rose
, trans. William Weaver, New York, 1983.

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Perusal of this more authoritarian past focused on the
inquisitio
:
Peters,
Inquisition
, pp. 12–17.

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“formation of a persecuting society”:
R. I. Moore,
The Formation of a
Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250
, Oxford, 2007. This is the latest edition of this landmark book in medieval studies.

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“Burdened with the weight of oriental apocalyptic literature”:
Jacques Le Goff,
The Birth of Purgatory
, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago, 1984, p. 205.

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Humbert of Romans . . .
On the Gift of Fear:
Christine Caldwell Ames,
Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity
in the Middle Ages,
Philadelphia, 2009, p. 215.

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A late twelfth-century pope issued a bull:
Lucius III,
Ad abolendam
, 1184.

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the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215:
For an efficient and entertaining account of the momentous and much-studied meeting: Brenda Bolton, “A Show with a Meaning: Innocent III's Approach to the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,”
Medieval History
, 1, 1991, pp. 53–67.

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the Dominicans had decided to make the world their monastery:
Ames,
Righteous Persecution
, p. 146. She develops this point also made by André Vauchez,
The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional
Practices
, ed. Daniel Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider, Notre Dame, 1993, p. 72.

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“foxes in the vineyards”:
Song of Songs, 2:15.

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most convents had a jail:
Ames,
Righteous Persecution
, p. 157.

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descend on a village they had targeted:
Peters,
Inquisition
, pp. 58ff. on the techniques of the early inquisition. The early inquisitor's manuals also give a fairly detailed account of how to proceed.

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wolves in sheep's clothing:
This is an expression we will come across frequently. It was a favorite of ecclesiastical heretic hunters and is taken from scripture: Matthew 7:15.

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counterfeit holiness:
On this notion and the Achilles' heel of the Dominicans—the overt holiness of the Cathar clergy—see Ames,
Righteous
Persecution
, pp. 42–45.

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mala fama
:
On the old Roman notion of infamy, Edward Peters,
Torture
, Philadelphia, 1985, pp. 30–31. On the legal and cultural revolution of the twelfth century, see Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds.,
Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century
, Cambridge, MA, 1982.

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the registers were systematically organized:
For a very clear explanation of the paperwork of the inquisition, see James B. Given,
Inquisition
and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc
, Ithaca, 1997, pp. 25–51.

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the Tarragona checklist:
This is so odd (and informative) that it is quoted in almost all books on the inquisition. Here we go:

Heretics
are those who remain obstinate in error.

Believers
are those who put faith in the errors of heretics and are assimilated to them.

Those suspect of heresy
are those who are present at the preaching of heretics and participate, however little, in their ceremonies.

Those simply suspected
have done such things only once.

Those vehemently suspected
have done this often.

Those most vehemently suspected
have done this frequently.

Concealers
are those who know heretics but do not denounce them.

Hiders
are those who have agreed to prevent heretics being discovered.

Receivers
are those who have twice received heretics on their property.

Defenders
are those who knowingly defend heretics so as to prevent the Church from extirpating heretical depravity.

Favorers
are all of the above to a greater or lesser degree.

Relapsed
are those who return to their former heretical errors after having formally renounced them.

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The first was written in Carcassonne in 1248:
Translated into English and analyzed in Walter Wakefield,
Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in
Southern France, 1100–1250
, Berkeley, 1974. An excerpt of the most famous of the inquisitor's manuals, that of Bernard Gui, was recently published as a trade book in 2006: Bernard Gui,
The Inquisitor's Guide:
A Medieval Manual on Heretics
, trans. Janet Shirley, London, 2006. This is not the first time I have found her work abundantly useful. Fifteen years ago, Dr. Shirley produced a splendid translation of the
Cansó de la
crozada
entitled
The Song of the Cathar Wars, A History of the Albigensian
Crusade, by William of Tudela and an Anonymous Successor
, Aldershot, 1996. One can only hope that perhaps one day she will render the entirety of Bernard Délicieux's trial transcripts into her elegant English.

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“The third way of evading a question”:
Cited in Given,
Inquisition and
Medieval Society
, pp. 93–95.

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There were heretical Christians, particularly the Waldenses, who believed
that capital punishment was prohibited:
Peter Biller, “Medieval Waldensian Abhorrence of Killing Pre-1400,” in W. J. Sheils, ed.,
The
Church and War
, Oxford, 1983.

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Dominic, came to be seen above all else as an inquisitor . . . [through]
layers of successive biographies:
The first life, by Jordan of Saxony (1233), makes no mention of Dominic as an inquisitor. The second (Pedro Ferrando, 1235–39), the third (Constantine of Orvieto, 1236) and especially the fourth and official life (Humbert of Romans, 1260) gradually “inquisitorialized” Dominic, until by Bernard Gui's day the saint had been transformed into a holy persecutor. Ames,
Righteous
Persecution
, pp. 103–104. The Prado in Madrid displays a famous tableau demonstrating Dominic's posthumous transformation into inquisitor, Pedro Berruguete's “St. Dominic Presiding at an Auto-da-fé.” The painting dates from the late fifteenth century. It also, curiously enough, was used as the cover art for Michel Roquebert's
Histoire des
Cathares: Hérésie, Croisade, Inquisition du XIe au XIVe siècle
, Paris 1999, his summation of his five-volume masterwork,
L' épopée cathare
, Toulouse, 1970–98.

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he would be far more useful to the brothers dead than alive:
His first biographer, Jordan of Saxony, makes this clear. Jordan of Saxony,
A
New Life of Saint Dominic, Founder of the Dominican Order
, ed. and trans. Louis Getino and Edmond McEniry, Columbus, 1926, p. 155.

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the document that refused to burn was in all probability an inquisition
register:
Ames,
Righteous Persecution
, p. 103

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preferring the conversation of younger women to that of older ones:
Cited in George Bernanos,
Les prédestinés
, ed. Jean-Loup Bernanos, Paris, 1983
,
p. 77.

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Much use was made of the many violent, vengeful passages in the
Old Testament, with their far fewer counterparts in the Christian
scriptures also deployed for full homiletic effect:
Old Testament: Exodus 22:18, Exodus 32:25–29, Joshua 7:20–26, Judges 15:15–17, Leviticus 20:27, Leviticus 24:16, I Maccabees 2:24–26, Numbers 25:6–1. New Testament: Acts 5:1–11, Acts 12:23, Acts 13:8–11, John 8:3–11. Ames,
Righteous Persecution,
pp. 190–99. To see the ingenious punitive mind at work, consider Moneta of Cremona's exegesis of the last passage cited above, John 8:3–11, which seems to argue against inflicting capital punishment. Professor Ames deserves to be quoted at length:

A dramatic instance is Moneta's exegesis of the woman seized for adultery (John 8:3–11). Moneta's imagined opponents had pointed out that when the scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus whether she should be executed by public stoning, the penalty prescribed by Mosaic law, he had responded that the one without sin should cast the first stone. This, they argued, was an obvious expression of disapproval for her execution and thus condemned any death penalty. Moneta countered that for several reasons, Jesus' statement could not be interpreted either as a denial of her licit execution or as a universal, transhistorical ban of killing malefactors: although he spared her, it does not follow from this that she could not be justly killed. Jesus' words were rather applicable only to this particular case, which failed to meet the requirements of right jurisdiction, authority, and procedure. Jesus knew that he was not a legitimate judge over her and should not determine her punishment; her accusers had fled, crippling a fair trial. He should not judge by himself, but rather through appropriate ministers. The Jews who seized the woman were of equal or greater sin. Moneta responded tantalizingly to his opponents' riposte that Jesus knew very well that no human was “without sin,” and thus prevented anyone—ever— from casting a stone in execution, with a blunt “prove it.” After all, I John (1:7) referred to Christians as “cleansed of sin.” Finally, Moneta argued that Jesus' invitation that the one without sin cast the first stone should be read with striking literalism, its tone stripped of the challenging irony that other readers might supply: “as the lord permits he who is without sin to stone her, it proves that it was not evil.” On the contrary, Jesus wished the “minister of secular judgments” to perform the “good office” of execution (p. 196).

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God does not sin, God kills, therefore killing is not a sin:
Ames,
Righteous
Persecution
, p. 199.

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Bernard of Clairvaux:
In
In Praise of the New Knighthood
, his influential letter extolling the warrior monks of the Temple in crusader Outremer, Bernard claimed that killing an infidel was killing evil, not a man—–
malecide
, not homicide. The relevant passage, from Bernard of Clairvaux (trans. Conradia Greenia),
The Cistercian Fathers Series, XIX, The Works
of Bernard of Clairvaux
, 7, 3, Kalamazoo, 1977: “The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. Neither does he bear his sword in vain, for he is God's minister, for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good. If he kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil.” An extraordinarily bloodthirsty epistle even for the mores of the day,
In Praise of the
New Knighthood
undoubtedly makes Bernard of Clairvaux the patron saint of the armchair chickenhawks who afflict us still.

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Grand Inquisitor:
The brilliant passage from
The Brothers Karamazov
contains the memorable admonition from the Inquisitor to Jesus: “Know that I fear You not. Know that I too have been in the wilderness, I too have lived on roots and locusts, I too blessed the freedom with which You had blessed men, and I too was striving to stand among Your elect, among the strong and powerful, thirsting ‘to make up the number.' But I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those
who have corrected
Your work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of the humble. What I say to You will come to pass, and our dominion will be built up. I repeat, tomorrow You will see that obedient flock who at the first sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on which I will burn You for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is You. Tomorrow I will burn You.
Dixi.
” Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Notes from Underground and The Grand Inquisitor
, trans. Ralph E. Matlaw, New York, 1960, p. 143.

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the use of torture had been papally approved:
Innocent IV,
Ad extir-panda
, 1252. This bull specified that members of the clergy were not allowed to torture, being obligated to work through surrogates. That tiresome inconvenience was eliminated in Pope Alexander IV's
Ut negotium
in 1256.

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the focus of inquisition gradually came to center on obtaining a confession:
My brief discussion of torture and confession and proof, and the changing legal culture surrounding those matters, draws on Peters,
Torture
, pp. 40–73, and Peters,
Inquisition
, pp. 58–67.

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“The house, however, in which a heretic had been received”:
Innocent III,
Cum ex oficii nostri
, 1207. Cited in Peters,
Inquisition
, pp. 49–50.

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“What the inquisitors had done”:
Given,
Inquisition and Medieval Society
, p. 65.

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the appropriate type of punishment:
A masterful discussion of this in Given,
Inquisition and Medieval Society
, pp. 66–90. I rely on Given for the discussion of the sentencing. As for the wearing of crosses, it inspired the title of a superb book of Cathar microhistory, René Weis,
The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars 1290–1329
, London, 2000.