The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (13 page)

Another source of information was the medieval equivalent of the jailhouse snitch, whose services were regarded as so valuable by the Inquisition that they outweighed even the vilest crimes on the part of the informer. A Carmelite monk who had been found guilty of “the most infamous sorceries” in 1329, for example, managed to persuade the inquisitors to soften his sentence by going to work on “sundry heretics” among his fellow prisoners, and he dutifully reported to his masters whatever incriminating remarks he extracted by false displays of friendship or perhaps merely invented. When the monk came up for sentencing, his good work as an informant was cited “in extenuation of his black catalogue of guilt.”
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His fate reminds us that the Inquisition apparently regarded the Christian rigorism of Cathars and Waldensians as a greater threat to the Church than the secret practice of sorcery by one of its own monastics.

All reports of “heretical depravity” from the various sources—confessions, denunciations, searches, interrogations—were carefully collected, recorded, organized, and filed away for ready use by the Inquisition. Perhaps the most fearful and enduring feature of the inquisitorial bureaucracy was its relentless collection and preservation of information. The archives of the medieval Inquisition, a vast collection of handwritten and hand-copied documents ranging “from the first summons to the final sentence in every case,” provided the inquisitors with what we would today call a database. And the inquisitors put the database to good use in tracking down men and women who imagined that they had escaped detection and then catching them in inconsistencies once they were put under interrogation.
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Sometimes a man or woman suspected of heresy came to the attention of the Inquisition in a kind of dragnet operation called an
inquisitio generalis,
and sometimes in an
inquisitio specialis
that focused on a single accused heretic whose name had been given up by a friend or relation. Now and then, a victim might attract the attention of the Inquisition merely because he or she was known to be rich. After all, an important source of funding for the bureaucracy was the wealth confiscated from condemned heretics, both money and property, and the fines levied against them and their heirs. But the appetite of the Inquisition was vast and indiscriminate, and its victims were drawn from both genders, all classes, and every rank.

Once a suspected heretic had been denounced to the Inquisition by an informer, a spy, or a self-confessed heretic trying desperately to save himself at the expense of his fellow believers, the inquisitors brought the entire apparatus to bear on the defendant. A formal citation would be sent to the priest of the parish where the suspect resided, and he was obliged to deliver the bad news to the defendant in person and then to the whole congregation, repeating the accusation in church for three consecutive Sundays or feast days. The public charge was a punishment in itself, of course, because the accused heretic would suddenly find himself alone and friendless. Anyone who sheltered or assisted him in any way risked prosecution for the crime of fautorship.

The accused heretic was expected to surrender himself to the inquisitor who had issued the charge against him, but if he refused—or if it was suspected that he might try to flee—the inquisitor’s armed servants would seek him out, place him under arrest, and deliver him to one of the prisons set aside for the confinement of accused and convicted heretics. Either way, the defendant commonly remained in custody while the staff of the Inquisition carried out its long, slow, exacting investigation. Some unfortunate victims might remain in a cell, not yet convicted or even charged, for years or even decades. Meanwhile, confessed heretics, informers, and other witnesses were questioned, transcripts were prepared and signed, evidence was gathered, all in preparation for the secret trial at which guilt or innocence would be decided and punishment handed down.

The inquisitors resorted to old and crude techniques of physical torture to break the will of suspected heretics, a subject that will be explored in detail in the next chapter. They also perfected and used various weapons of what we would call psychological warfare to reduce their victims to a state of isolation, anxiety, and vulnerability. The whole enterprise was styled as the well-ordered workings of canon law based on the ancient Roman legal procedure of
inquisitio,
which empowered the inquisitors to compel testimony from suspects and witnesses alike and to receive as evidence even “a mere
fama,
” that is, a rumor or even a slander uttered in secret against the unwitting suspect.
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Here is the point at which
inquisitio
departed from the other forms of criminal prosecution available in medieval Europe. Under the legal procedure called
accusatio,
the prosecution was initiated on the basis of a charge “laid by an accuser at his own peril if it proved false”; that is, the accuser was required to identify himself, post a bond, and pay the expenses of the accused if he or she was acquitted. Another procedure, called
denunciatio,
was initiated by a magistrate on the basis of evidence secured in an official inquiry. The proceedings took place on the record in open court, and the accused was entitled to be represented by an attorney. It is only in the procedure called
inquisitio
that the prosecutor was empowered to rely on a whispered rumor from a nameless informer in placing the suspect under arrest and interrogating him—alone, in secret, and under oath—“his answers making him, in effect, his own accuser,” as historian Walter L. Wakefield explains.
³⁹

Inquisitio
had been used by the Church to detect and punish the moral lapses of clergy long before it was deployed in the prosecution of heresy. The right of a prosecutor to rely on rumor and to conduct his investigation in secret was useful in penetrating the conspiracy of silence that might otherwise protect a priest suspected of keeping a concubine or a bishop who was trafficking in titles or indulgences for profit, the besetting sin of the medieval Church. Later,
inquisitio
came to be applied in all church courts, ranging from those of “rural archpriests or deans charging rustics with fornication or adultery” to “trials presided over by cardinals on charges brought against kings and queens,” according to Henry Ansgar Kelly, a revisionist historian who insists that the case against the Inquisition has been grossly overstated. Yet it is also true that the Inquisition elevated
inquisitio
into a tool of thought control, used to persecute every manner of religious belief and practice that the inquisitors deemed to be at odds with the Church’s dogma.
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Thus did the Inquisition seek to create the impression that it was omniscient and omnipresent, a power unto itself that operated in strictest secrecy and yet from which no secret could be kept. Its notion of what constituted admissible evidence was so casual—and its definition of the crime of heresy so sweeping—that the distance between accusation and conviction was almost imperceptible. Between these two fixed points, however, was the ordeal of an interrogation by the friar-inquisitors. Even when the instruments of torture were not used, interrogation was a kind of torture in itself.

The inquisitors were offered much practical advice on the art of interrogation in the inquisitor’s handbooks. Bernard Gui, for example, warned that “heretics nowadays try to conceal their errors rather than admit them openly,” and he encouraged the inquisitors to arm themselves for theological combat with an artfully clever enemy: “[Heretics] use a screen of deceitful words and clever tricks,” Gui wrote. “In this way, they can confound learned men, and this makes these boastful heretics all the stronger, being able to escape by means of tortuous, cunning and crafty evasions.”
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Interrogation, in fact, was the highest art of the inquisitor. Whatever else a friar-inquisitor brought to his job or acquired over his years of training and practice, the single most important skill was his ability to question an accused heretic. The best of them were possessed of “acute and subtle minds,” according to Henry Charles Lea, “practiced to read the thoughts of the accused, skilled to lay pitfalls for the incautious, versed in every art to confuse, prompt to detect ambiguities, and quick to take advantage of hesitation or contradiction.” Their victims, by contrast, were generally exhausted, starved, and terrorized after a long stay in the cells and dungeons of the Inquisition. Entirely aside from the special skills and tools of the torturer, the interrogation was an ordeal.
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The interrogations were exhaustive, and any recollection might be used to condemn the suspect or someone else as a heretic. “Questions were of the police-court type,” explains Malcolm Lambert, “concerned with external acts which revealed complicity with heresy.” A ferryman at a river crossing who happened to carry a Cathar
perfectus
as a passenger might himself be convicted on the charge of heresy, for example, and the same fate might befall a servant whose master turned out to be a Waldensian. If a doctor was convicted of heresy, his patients were at risk; the fact that the Waldensians operated clinics and hospitals provided the inquisitors with plenty of new suspects among those who had contacted the Waldensians in search of a cure for illness or the treatment of an injury. Indeed, merely entering a house where a heretic was later proved to be present—or making a polite bow when being introduced to someone who turned out to be a
perfectus
—was enough to place someone under suspicion of heresy in the eyes of the Inquisition.
⁴³
“It is a noteworthy fact that in long series of interrogations,” writes Lea, “there will frequently be not a single question as to the belief of the party making confession.”
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Still, the records of the Inquisition confirm that some victims were, in fact, subjected to close questioning of the “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” variety that was designed to trap them into a confession of heretical beliefs. He or she might be tricked into a fatal concession with a simple question that assumes the guilt of the accused: “How often have you confessed as a heretic?” Or the inquisitor might pose a trick question that simply could not be answered at all without self-crimination: “Does a woman conceive through the act of God or of man?” an inquisitor asks. If the victim answers “Man,” the reply is taken as evidence of heresy because it denies the power of God, but if the same victim answers “God,” then the reply is still regarded as heretical—after all, the suspect was suggesting that “God had carnal relations with women.”
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At moments, an interrogation might begin to sound like an Abbott and Costello routine. According to a line of questioning that appears as an example in Gui’s handbook, the inquisitor opens with an article of faith in Roman Catholic dogma: “Do you believe in Christ born of the Virgin, suffered, risen, and ascended to heaven?”

“And you, sir,” replies the accused, “do you not believe it?”

“I believe it wholly,” says the inquisitor.

“I believe likewise,” affirms the accused.

“You believe that I believe it, which is not what I ask, but whether
you
believe it,” says the frustrated inquisitor.
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Once the inquisitors had rounded up suspects for interrogation in a given town or village, the whole populace was at risk. Starting in 1245, the inquisitor Bernard de Caux carried out an inquisition in two regions of southern France, Lauragais and Lavaur. Almost every adult in these two regions, a total of 5,471 men and women in thirty-nine towns, was summoned and questioned. Interrogation transcripts were compared, and inconsistencies were followed up with a fresh round of questioning. A total of 207 suspects was found guilty and punished—23 were sent to prison, and the rest were sentenced to a variety of lesser punishments, but the otherwise meticulous records do not disclose whether any of the accused heretics in these towns were turned over to the secular authorities for burning at the stake.

Nor did the Inquisition content itself with victims who had reached adulthood. Boys as young as ten and a half, and girls as young as nine and a half, were deemed to be culpable, according to some church councils, and the strictest authorities “reduced the age of responsibility to seven years.” Starting at the age of fourteen, a boy or girl could be lawfully subjected to torture during interrogation, although some jurisdictions insisted that a “curator” be appointed for boys and girls accused of heresy. The curator was a curious sort of legal guardian “under whose shade [the child] could be tortured and condemned,” according to Lea.
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The interrogations yielded a plentiful supply of accusations, most of them compounded of an uncertain blend of truths and half-truths, slander and speculation, and sheer fabrication, all of it extracted from terrified witnesses who were generally anxious to tell their interrogators exactly what they wanted to hear. Since the Inquisition punished not only heresy itself but also the mere suspicion of heresy, whether “light,” “vehement,” or “violent”—and since “hearsay, vague rumors, general impressions, or idle gossip” were all regarded as equally admissible in the proceedings of the Inquisition—the line between accusation and evidence was virtually nonexistent. What the witnesses were willing to say, or what they could be forced to say under the threat or application of torture, the Inquisition was willing to embrace and use.
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Nearly every word spoken by both accuser and accused was taken down by hand by one of the notaries who were present at all proceedings of the Inquisition. Indeed, the notary was fully as important to the workings of the Inquisition as the torturer, the executioner, or the inquisitor himself. If a notary was unavailable—or if he was overburdened by the volume of work—a professional copier of documents, known as a scrivener, would be pressed into service.