The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (19 page)

While a suspect was in custody, the inquisitors resorted to every manner of coercion, both hard and soft, to induce the prisoner to confess his crimes. After a few weeks or months of confinement, during which a man’s family was likely reduced to poverty or even starvation, the inquisitor might allow a brief visit from his distraught wife and terrified children “in hopes that their tears and pleadings might work on his feelings and overcome his convictions.” Because the property of a heretic was subject to confiscation at the time of arrest, the family might have already found itself homeless and penniless. And because it was a crime in itself to aid or comfort a heretic, the family of the accused heretic would likely be wholly friendless, too. The knowledge that his family was reduced to penury might be enough to provoke a confession.
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Or the accused—lonely and anxious, fatigued and half-starved—might find himself suddenly called upon by an apparently well-meaning visitor, whether an acquaintance or a sympathetic stranger. The caller would be permitted to spend a few quiet moments with the prisoner, uttering words of comfort and compassion. Unbeknownst to the prisoner, however, a notary would be stationed at the door of the cell, out of sight but within earshot, in the hope of recording some unguarded remark that could be useful to the inquisitors. Heretics who had already confessed and converted, of course, were especially willing and effective as agents of the Inquisition, and they were instructed to use every tool of guile and deceit to lead the prisoner into making a jailhouse confession. For example, an
agent provocateur
might tell his cellmate that he had only faked a conversion to Catholicism in order to fool the inquisitors, thus encouraging the cellmate to regard the agent as a secret heretic in whom the prisoner might safely confide.

Sometimes the suspect would be suddenly and inexplicably removed from his or her tomblike cell and placed in a larger one. The rations of bread and water would be supplemented with more generous and nourishing foodstuffs. A cruel jailor would be replaced by a kinder, gentler one who spoke words of comfort and encouragement. If the suspect was not moved to confession by the display of generosity, he or she was thrown back into the dungeon. Toying with the prisoner amounted to a form of psychological torture—an experiment “to see if his resolution would be weakened by alternations of hope and despair,” according to Lea. Its use demonstrates that the good-cop, bad-cop routine, like the third degree, was hardly a modern innovation in the techniques of interrogation.
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If these approaches were unavailing, however, the inquisitor was always ready to use the other tools at hand, including the time-tested techniques of the torturer. In fact, torture was so routine in inquisitorial practice that the handbooks provided a formula for use in consigning victims to the torture chamber: “In order that the truth may be had from your mouth and that you should cease to offend the ears of the judges,” the inquisitor was instructed to say, “we declare, judge and sentence you to undergo torment and torture.” Here the form leaves a blank where the inquisitor is instructed to insert the precise date and place that the torturer’s tools would be unpacked and put to use on the naked body of the prisoner. Thus did the inquisitor, in solemnly reciting the formula from the inquisitor’s manuals, unwittingly confirm that the Inquisition was perfectly willing to forgo the ideal of a pure and spontaneous confession and satisfy itself with one that had been extracted from a prisoner by the use of “torment and torture.”
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A distinction was made during the early years of the Inquisition between common torture—that is, the infliction of pain to extract confession or testimony—and the so-called ordeal, which was the medieval equivalent of the modern lie-detector test. As used in the Middle Ages, the ordeal was regarded as an objective test for truth or falsity, guilt or innocence, and it was used in both civil and criminal jurisprudence as a fact-finding tool. Only later did the Inquisition come to abandon the magical thinking embodied in the ordeal and frankly embrace torture for what it is, the use of fear and pain to make some wretched victim do what the inquisitor wanted him or her to do.

The ordeal by combat, in its original form, pitted two armed litigants against each other, and it was believed that the man who was in the right and deserved to win the case would inevitably prevail in combat. Ordeal by fire called for the application of hot irons to the flesh of an accused criminal; it was supposed that the iron would burn the guilty defendant but leave the innocent one unscarred. Ordeal by water was based on the pious belief that water, as the medium of baptism, would accept the innocent and reject the guilty when the accused was tossed into the drink. To be sure, anyone who was compelled to undergo an ordeal would suffer terribly in the process, but the suffering of the victim was wholly beside the point. According to the beliefs and values of the High Middle Ages—“irrational, primitive, barbarian,” as modern commentators put it—the truth would be miraculously revealed by the invisible of hand of God.
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Torture, by contrast, is the intentional infliction of pain in an effort to compel testimony from an unwilling witness or defendant. “By torture,” wrote the Roman jurist Ulpian in a classic legal definition that dates back to the third century, “we are to understand the torment and suffering of the body in order to elicit the truth.”
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The efficacy of torture was not understood to be based on divine intervention; quite to the contrary, it was founded on the primal fact that human beings are averse to pain and will generally do anything they can to make it stop. For the sober and meticulous legal commentators, both pagan and Christian, however, torture was not a subject of moral outrage; rather, it was a commonplace tool of criminal jurisprudence, ancient and honorable.

The archives of the medieval Inquisition preserve an incident that demonstrates the original and authentic use of the ordeal. A woman charged with the crime of Catharism was “abandoned to die of hunger” in one of the inquisitorial prisons. She insisted that she had always been an observant Catholic, however, and she continued to participate in the rite of confession, during the course of which she piteously insisted to her confessor that she was innocent of the charge of heresy. The priest advised her “to offer the hot-iron ordeal in proof,” that is, to volunteer to subject herself to the application of red-hot irons as proof of her innocence. The fact that she readily agreed to do so is surely the best evidence that she was not a Cathar, but the resulting burns were taken as proof that she was, in fact, guilty as charged. Relying on the results of the ordeal, the Inquisition sent her to the secular authority to be put to death, “with the result of being burned first by the iron,” as Lea puts it, “and then by stake.”
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Belief in the efficacy of the ordeal, however, could not survive the unavoidable fact that the flesh of a human being, whether guilty or innocent, will be burned when exposed to heat. The use of the ordeal as a fact-finding mechanism was eventually banned by Pope Innocent III, but the use of torture was promptly approved by Pope Innocent IV, and so the resort to fire and water took on a subtly different meaning and function as the Inquisition refined its techniques of interrogation. “What followed was,” writes Malise Ruthven, “not so much the introduction of torture as the continuation of the ordeals under a new mode of procedure.”
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So if a suspect accused of heresy refused to confess, or if the confession was deemed “imperfect,” or if a witness was reluctant to betray a friend or relation, he or she might be encouraged by the inquisitors with what was still called the ordeal by water or the ordeal by fire. But these were not ordeals in the old sense. Rather, they were simply and plainly examples of physical torture, designed to inflict so much agony that the suspect or witness would finally consent to say what the inquisitor wanted to hear. Rooted in the crude beliefs of the Dark Ages, the ordeals of fire and water turned out to be durable and effective instruments of torture. They were used throughout the Inquisition by its master torturers and long afterward by those who followed in their footsteps.

The inquisitor’s handbook composed by Nicholas Eymerich, the inquisitor at Aragón in the fourteenth century, was an influential source of instruction on the proper use of torture, one that was reprinted in various annotated editions and consulted throughout the existence of the Inquisition. Torture was supposedly a measure of last resort, not to be used “till other means of discovering the truth have been exhausted,” according to Eymerich. “Good manners, subtlety, the exhortations of well-intentioned persons, even frequent meditation and the discomforts of prison,” Eymerich advised, “are often sufficient to induce the guilty ones to confess.”
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Still, Eymerich provided a helpful and accommodating list of suspects who could and should be tortured, including anyone “with a general reputation for heresy” and anyone whose answers under interrogation struck the inquisitor as “vacillating.” Torture was also mandated for any suspected heretic against whom circumstantial evidence (or “indicia”) of heresy could be found; and since the Inquisition recognized three grades of indicia—“remote,” “vehement,” and “violent”—the inquisitor enjoyed ample discretion to find or fabricate such proofs. Testimony by a witness who claimed to have seen the suspect in a house where a dying Cathar was being given the ritual of
consolamentum,
for example, was a sufficient indicium to justify a session in the torture chamber, but so was the simple gesture of offering a friendly greeting to a man or woman who turned out to be a Cathar
perfectus.
Indeed, the inquisitor was fully empowered to consider “facial expressions, behaviour, apparent nervousness, and so on” as indicia of guilt.
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Terror is the essence of torture, as the Inquisition knew so well, and it began with the inquisitor’s pronouncement of the formulaic order to the victim to “expose you to torture and torment.” From that moment onward, the man or woman condemned to torture was subjected to an unrelenting and steadily escalating series of threats, humiliations, and abuses. The victim was led in solemn procession from cell to dungeon, accompanied by the inquisitors, the armed guards, the notaries who “faithfully recorded every shout, cry and complaint,” sometimes a doctor to revive a victim if he or she passed out, and the man whose job it was to apply the tools of torture—ominously, the task was usually assigned to the public executioner. The long, slow walk to the torture chamber, of course, was an act of torture in itself.
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Still more theatrical touches can be detected in the formalities that attended a torture session, especially as they were conducted by the Spanish Inquisition starting in the fifteenth century. The processional to the torture chamber was conducted by candlelight or torchlight, according to some accounts. At every step along the way, the inquisitor was at the victim’s side, whispering threats and promises to encourage the victim to confess and thus spare himself or herself the ordeal to come. The torturers concealed their heads and faces under high-peaked hoods of the kind later associated with the Ku Klux Klan, revealing only their eyes through holes in the fabric of the hoods. Even the glowing braziers on the dungeon walls “would take on their own terrifying significance,” as victims would discover when they saw the torturers at work on other accused heretics.
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Once inside the torture chamber, the victim was first stripped of his or her clothing, both to facilitate the work of the torturer and his assistants and to further abase, disorient, and terrorize the victim. Then the various instruments would be ritually displayed to the victim, who was warned that he or she “must pass through all of them unless he told the truth.” To the last moment, the inquisitor continued to utter words of enticement and encouragement to the victim; it was not yet too late for the accused heretic to save his or her life by offering the confession that the inquisitor so ardently desired. If no confession was forthcoming, the torturer picked up his tools and set to work.
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The most common instruments of torture, as we have noted, required only the fundamental elements of water and fire. The so-called ordeal by water consisted of binding the victim in a horizontal position and forcing water down his or her throat, sometimes by pouring the fluid through a funnel and sometimes by dripping it slowly through a water-soaked linen or silk rag, thus creating the sensation of drowning. As the torturers gained experience, they learned that holding the nose of the victim greatly enhanced the effect. Once the belly was filled with water and fully distended, the victim would be forced into a head-down position in order to put agonizing pressure on the heart and lungs. Then, to sharpen and prolong the pain, the torturer might beat on the victim’s belly with fists or a bludgeon.

The water ordeal was especially popular with the Inquisition—and would remain a favorite tool of torturers down to our own time—because, unlike other forms of torture, it required no elaborate equipment, created no messes of blood and pulped flesh to clean up, and left no obvious wounds or scars on the victim. Thanks to the detailed records of the Inquisition, we know that an “ordinary” ordeal called for the application of five liters of water, and an “extraordinary” one consisted of ten liters—yet another example of how the inquisitorial enterprise regulated and standardized every particular of its operations so that even the torture of suspected heretics was turned into a kind of industrial activity.
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