The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (15 page)

The defenders of the Inquisition, like Kelly, point out that, strictly speaking, an inquisitor was powerless to impose a sentence on a convicted heretic on his own authority. Rather, each proposed sentence was supposedly submitted for review by a committee of “assessors”—that is, jurists and monastics—and then for ratification by a local bishop. But these legal niceties, when they were observed at all, “were perfunctory to the last degree,” according to Lea, “and placed no real check upon the discretion of the inquisitor.” The assessors were chosen by the inquisitor and “sworn on the Gospels to secrecy,” and any bishop who threatened to withhold his approval of a sentence proposed by the inquisitor could be circumvented by an appeal to the pope or pressured into submission with the threat of one.
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The convicted heretic, by contrast, enjoyed little or no opportunity to appeal from an act of the Inquisition, no matter how grossly it may have violated the formal rules and regulations. Some bulls and canons appear flatly to rule out the right of appeal by heretics. In those places and periods of history when an appeal was available in theory, it was to be addressed to the pope in Rome—a long, cumbersome, expensive process—and it could be lodged only before sentence was pronounced. As a practical matter, only a few men and women possessed the opportunity, the means, and the sheer courage to challenge the authority of the Inquisition.

Even then, the innocence of the appellant or the legal defects in the proceedings against him or her were ultimately less important than the quid pro quo offered to the Holy See in exchange for papal intervention. When six confessed heretics were ordered to be released from the Inquisition in 1248, for example, the papal legate who conveyed the order piously noted by way of explanation that they had made “liberal contributions to the cause of the Holy Land.”
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Then, too, the proceedings of the Inquisition were rendered sacrosanct by a sweeping escape clause provided by the Vatican. Pope Innocent IV in 1245 authorized the inquisitors to absolve their servitors for any acts of violence committed in the discharge of their duties, and Pope Alexander IV in 1256 empowered any inquisitor to absolve any other inquisitor from “canonical irregularities occurring in the performance of their duties.” The Inquisition was further insulated from the moral consequences of its work by a rule that protected an inquisitor from excommunication during his lifetime and granted him absolution from sin upon death, at which point he was deemed to be entitled to an indulgence from the period of suffering in purgatory equal to his length of service.
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So the Inquisition was always a closed circle within which the inquisitor might do as he pleased and the victim was at his mercy. The inquisitors were so contemptuous of the rights of their victims that the inquisitor’s manuals frankly discuss the various “devices and deceits” by which they could be frustrated. “They enjoyed the widest latitude of arbitrary procedure with little danger that anyone would dare to complain,” writes Lea. “The inquisitors were a law unto themselves, and disregarded at pleasure the very slender restrictions imposed on them.” Even an apologist like Kelly is forced to concede that “[t]hings had come to a sorry pass when the very substance of the inquisitorial procedure was so routinely ignored that violations were no longer recognized as such.”
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So far, the operations of the Inquisition had taken place behind closed doors and in strict secrecy. Once the inquisitors were ready to impose a punishment on a convicted heretic, however, the doors were thrown open and the public was welcome to watch. Indeed, the sentencing and punishing of heretics was one of the great spectacles of public life over several centuries of European history, ranging from the mass murder of Cathars in medieval Languedoc to the ceremonial incinerations mounted in the
Plaza Mayor
of Madrid with the Spanish king and his court among the enthusiastic spectators. The whole point, of course, was to demonstrate the inevitable fate of any man or woman whose beliefs, whether real or imagined, were deemed heretical by the Inquisition, and thus to strike fear in the hearts of everyone else.

Just as a pious sermon marked the beginning of an
inquisitio generalis,
so too did a sermon serve as the occasion for sentencing heretics who had been detected, captured, tried, and convicted. The Inquisition summoned the citizenry into open court, along with clerics, magistrates, clerks, and lawyers, to hear another sermon before proceeding to the business at hand. Punishment was handed out according to the degree of culpability of the heretic, starting with the mildest punishments and ascending in severity to the death penalty. The ceremony itself was originally called an auto-da-fé (literally, “act of the faith”), a phrase that soon became a euphemism and later a synonym for the cruelest punishment of all, burning at the stake.

The range of punishments available to the Inquisition was limited only by the imagination of the inquisitors, as we shall consider in detail in the next chapter, and some of them showed a genius for improvisation and invention when it came to afflicting the confessed or convicted heretics. The most common “penances” started with the obligation of the convicted heretic to wear a yellow badge as a sign of his or her crime and grew steadily worse—compulsory pilgrimages, expulsion from church and public offices, destruction of houses, confiscation of property, imprisonment under varying degrees of harshness—until the worse offenders were handed to the civil authority to be burned alive.

According to yet another legal fiction embraced by the Inquisition, the inquisitor imposed punishment only on those who confessed to the crime of heresy, recanted their errors, and were welcomed back into the Church. For that reason, the self-confessed heretics were called penitents, and the penalties imposed by the inquisitor were characterized as penance rather than punishment. Those who would not confess and repent—and the ones who had recanted on a previous occasion and later relapsed into heresy—were excommunicated from the Church and turned over to the secular government for the imposition of punishment, whether imprisonment or death. According to the curious euphemism used by the Inquisition, these convicted heretics were said to be “abandoned” or “relaxed” to the civil authority for punishment, as if the Mother Church had loosened its grip and allowed them to fall out of its loving embrace. “With customary verbal dexterity and ambiguity, the Inquisition merely declared the existence of a crime and then handed the victim over to the secular arm,” explains Burman. “It is the formula which has enabled apologists of the Inquisition to maintain that the tribunal never actually punished or burned its prisoners.”
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Over the long history of the Inquisition, the ceremony at which heretics were sentenced grew ever more elaborate, and the burning of heretics en masse achieved its highest expression during the Spanish Inquisition, as we shall see in the next chapter. The public sentencing often took place in the solemn grandeur of a cathedral, but the executions were conducted in the public square, both to accommodate the largest possible audience and to make the point that the Church was not staining its own hands with the blood of the condemned men and women. To encourage attendance, the spectacle was generally mounted on a Sunday, the date was announced in advance from the pulpit at church services, and those in attendance at the auto-da-fé were promised an indulgence by which their souls would be spared forty days of suffering in purgatory.

To heighten the theatrical effect of the ceremony, the cases were allowed to accumulate so that, when the day of judgment finally arrived, the sheer number of victims would demonstrate both the magnitude of the threat to the Church and its power and will to strike back at the “traitors to God.” At a single auto-da-fé conducted by the inquisitor Bernard Gui in 1310, for example, twenty penitents were ordered to go on pilgrimages and to wear the yellow cross that marked them as heretics, another sixty-five were sentenced to “perpetual” imprisonment (and three of them were ordered to serve their sentences in chains), and eighteen unrepentant heretics were “relaxed” to the civil authority and burned alive in the public square. The festivities started on a Sunday, and the last heretic was not put to the flames until the following Thursday.

Now and then, however, an inquisitor might dispense with the high ceremonial of the auto-da-fé in order to prevent a man of conscience from cheating the Inquisition of yet another victim. Immediately upon his arrest in 1309, for example, a Cathar teacher named Amiel de Perles commenced the final rite known as the
endura
and refused all food and drink offered by his captors. Rather than permit the prisoner to starve himself to death, Bernard Gui conducted a hasty trial and arranged for a quick execution. At the auto over which Gui presided, Amiel was the one and only victim. More commonly, though, the burning of heretics was the occasion for the kind of theatrical display that reached its highest expression under the Spanish Inquisition.

Not even the grave offered a safe refuge from the Inquisition. A dead man or woman—and even a long-deceased one—could be charged and tried posthumously, and the remains would be disinterred and burned at the stake. The corpse of a certain Alderigo of Verona, for example, was tried in 1287 on charges dating back a quarter-century, when he had supposedly assisted a victim of the Inquisition to escape from the tribunal in Venice. “The inquisitors had waited such a long time,” according to historian Mariano da Alatri, “because their power of action was then limited by the large number of heretics in the area.” A grisly record for the punishment of “defunct” heretics may have been set by a wealthy burgher of Carcassonne named Castel Faure, who was charged and convicted of heresy some forty-one years after his death in 1278. Faure’s bones were left in the ground, but his wife’s body was exhumed and burned, and his heirs were dispossessed of their inheritance.
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The disinterment and display of rotting bodies by the friar-inquisitors was deeply offensive to the first townspeople who were forced to witness the spectacle, and the earliest efforts of the Inquisition to punish “defunct” heretics prompted protest in the town of Albi. But the burning of dead bodies, like the wearing of yellow crosses or the public scourging of convicted heretics on feast days, was intended to make a point about the reach and power of the Inquisition, its long memory and strong will, and the terrible consequences of daring to entertain any belief that the Church regarded as heretical. If it turned the stomachs of the townsfolk, so much the better. Indeed, the Inquisition was never content to merely punish those whom it regarded as guilty of heresy; rather, it sought to terrify every man, woman, and child in Christendom into obedience by making an example of what would happen to “heretical filth.”
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“Their bones and stinking bodies were dragged through the town,” goes the account of one such posthumous punishment by the medieval inquisitor William of Pelhisson (d. 1268), “their names were proclaimed through the streets by the herald, crying, ‘Who behaves thus shall perish thus,’ and finally they were burned in the count’s meadow, to the honour of God and the Blessed Virgin, His mother, and the Blessed Dominic.”
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William of Pelhisson, as it turns out, allows us to see for ourselves what happened when the first agents of the Inquisition arrived in Languedoc in 1233, the old killing ground of the Albigensian Crusade, and set up their tribunals in the cities and towns of southern France. The Inquisition represented something unfamiliar and untested, and the inquisitors quickly discovered that the spirit of Languedoc was not yet broken. There and elsewhere across Europe, they were met with defiance and even armed resistance from a populace that had not yet taken the measure of the Inquisition. In light of the ubiquitous and unchallengeable authority that it would shortly come to represent, the early resistance offered to the Inquisition is an astonishment.

The very first inquisitor to arrive in Toulouse was a Dominican friar-inquisitor called William Arnold. According to the eyewitness testimony of William of Pelhisson, the town fathers marched the inquisitor out of town, “manhandling as they did so,” although they allowed that he could stay “if he would give up the Inquisition.” At the same time, they issued a proclamation by means of the town herald that “no one was to give, sell, or lend anything whatever or to give assistance in any form to the Friars Preachers,” as the Dominicans were called. As it turned out, however, the inquisitors who remained behind the walls of the Dominican convent were determined to stay in town and on task, if only under straitened circumstances.
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As William of Pelhisson wrote in his memoir of the early days of the Inquisition:

We friars did have the essentials in sufficient supply from friends and Catholics who, despite the danger, handed us bread, cheese, and eggs over the garden walls and by every other possible means. When the consuls of the town learned of this, they set their guards at our gates and also on the garden, watching the house day and night to prevent any necessities being brought in. They even cut us off completely from the water of the Garonne. This was a more serious blow to us, because we were unable to cook our vegetables in water.
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Other acts of resistance were far more intimate—and far more violent. When a wine seller named Arnold Dominic was charged with heresy, he was threatened with the death penalty unless he recanted and, as required by the standard operating procedure of the Inquisition, betrayed his fellow heretics. He was perfectly willing to save his life by naming names, and he gave the inquisitors eleven of them. Unfortunately for Arnold, however, only seven were captured, and the others managed to escape with the assistance of sympathetic peasants. The inquisitor was satisfied, but at least a few of the men whom Arnold had betrayed were intent on revenge. “The aforesaid Arnold Dominic made his confession and was released,” wrote William of Pelhisson, “but afterward he was murdered one night in his bed.”
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