The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (20 page)

The ordeal of fire consisted of binding the victim with ropes or manacles in front of a well-stoked fire and placing his or her feet in close proximity to the flames. Again, the torturers devised various techniques for controlling the severity of pain to be inflicted on the victim. Smearing the victim’s feet with fat always intensified the pain, but they could fine-tune the process by applying the fat to the whole foot or only on the soles. A firescreen, too, could be used to interrupt the ordeal “for fresh questioning and to provide a respite in case of fainting.” But the torturer no longer pretended that the presence or absence of burned flesh was an indication of guilt or innocence; he merely sought to inflict as much pain as the inquisitor deemed appropriate in the course of an interrogation. “A man might leave the Inquisition without being burned,” according to one witticism, “but he was certain to be singed.”
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Fire and water were all a torturer really needed, but the inquisitors also resorted to ever more elaborate mechanical devices to terrorize and brutalize their victims. The strappado, for example, was a rope-and-pulley mechanism affixed to the ceiling of the torture chamber. The ankles and hands of the victim were bound with ropes or shackles, and iron or stone weights were attached to the feet. The rope dangling from the roof was attached to the victim’s wrists, which were fixed behind his or her back, and the torturer positioned himself at the other end of the rope. Then the inquisitor put his questions to the victim, and if satisfactory answers were not forthcoming, the torturer assisted the interrogator by lifting, dangling, and dropping the victim, a process that resulted in intense pain and injury.

An expert torturer was able to use the strappado to vary the severity of pain at will. If hanging from the ceiling was not enough to bring the victim to confession, he might apply a whip at the same time. Or he might resort to what was called “full strappado,” that is, lifting the victim to the ceiling and then suddenly dropping the victim—sometimes only a few feet and sometimes all the way to the stone floor—thus dislocating joints and breaking bones. The dangling victim was said to “jump” or “dance,” according to the parlance of the professional torturer. “Only a confession or unconsciousness,” writes Edward Burman, “would halt the process.” The strappado was so popular among the inquisitors, in fact, that it came to be “universally recognized as the first torture of the Inquisition”—the “queen of torments,” according to the medieval aphorism.
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Degrees of torture took on specific meanings when calibrated to a particular tool or machine. When the strappado was being used, for example, the third degree called for merely dangling the victim for an extended period of time. If instructed by the inquisitor to apply the fourth degree, however, the torturer would begin to jerk the hanging body of the victim by raising and releasing the ropes that held the body aloft. And in the fifth degree, “weights were attached to the culprit’s feet to increase the agony of the jerking rope,” and the torture was sustained for “the space of one or two Misereres,” which lasted much longer than a simple Ave Maria or Paternoster. Similar specifications were available to the torturer for each chosen instrument of torture.
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Other ancient and familiar instruments of torture were the wheel—a simple wooden wagon wheel to which the accused heretic was bound and then beaten with clubs or hammers as the wheel was turned—and the rack, a rather more elaborate device consisting of a wooden frame with rollers at each end. The victim was laid on the rack, and hands and feet were fixed to the rollers by ropes. As the interrogation proceeded, the torturer turned the handles on the rollers to loosen or tighten the ropes according to signals from the inquisitor. The mounting pressure on the victim’s joints resulted in painful dislocations and, if the victim refused to give the answer that the inquisitor sought, his or her limbs were eventually torn from their sockets.

The last of the standard methods of torture was the
stivaletto.
The victim’s legs were splinted between wooden boards with tight topes, two boards on each leg. Then the torturer inserted wedges fashioned of wood or iron between the leg and the board. By pounding on the wedges with a hammer, the torturer increased the pressure of the ropes and boards against the victim’s flesh and bones, which resulted in ever-mounting pain and eventually the shattering of joints and bones. Later, as the technology of torture improved, the same device was fashioned of metal, and pressure was brought to bear on the victim by tightening a screw that closed the jaws of a metal brace or vice. If the victim persisted in silence or offered only evasive answers, he or she would suffer not only the agony of the torture itself but a lifelong injury that would render the victim unable to walk.

The parade of horribles, however, does not end there. Compelling the suspect to remain awake for a specified period of time was used as a method of torture, then as now: “Forty hours was the common length.” Women and children were singled out for a form of torture that was regarded as suitably mild: cords were tied around their hands and wrists, then tightened and loosened as they were interrogated. Yet an expert torturer was capable of inflicting sustained and excruciating pain with only a simple rope, as a priest accused of heresy in Vienna in the fifteenth century was made to understand. After a tag team of “eminent theologians” failed to persuade him to renounce his beliefs, the priest was tightly bound to a pillar with ropes. “The cords eating into the swelling flesh caused such exquisite torture,” reports Lea, “that when they visited him the next day, he begged piteously to be taken out and burned.”
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Such were the instruments of torture that might be found in any well-equipped inquisitorial dungeon at any time over the six centuries of the Inquisition’s active operations. The simplest of them, as we have seen, required only a supply of water or a well-stoked fire, and the rest of them could be contrived with a few ropes and boards. All of them were effective in inflicting pain and injury on their victims. Yet they did not exhaust the undeniable human genius for devising ever more imaginative ways of terrorizing and punishing another human being. Once granted the liberty and opportunity to do so, the agents of the Inquisition raised the practice of torture to a high art.

Some of the inquisitors—and the torturers who assisted them—were sadists for whom the opportunity to brutalize a fellow human being was the single best reason to join the ranks of the Inquisition. The victims, as we have seen, were stripped down to undergarments or were wholly naked during torture; the display of bare flesh was essential to the work of the torturers while, at the same time, degrading and humiliating the victims, but it is also true that the sight of naked flesh titillated at least some inquisitors and their henchmen as they watched the torturer at work. Indeed, the torture chamber was never a purely functional space like an operating room or a blacksmith’s shop, although it resembled both in its equipage. Rather, it was a theater of pain in which the victim was put on display for the entertainment of his or her persecutors.

Unfortunately, the human genius for both art and invention can be found even in the inquisitorial torture chamber. Of course, the basic tools of the torturer—buckets and funnels, bars and blades, hammers and tongs—required no special skill to make or use. The wheel was something scavenged from a broken-down wagon, and a ladder could be readily used as a rack; the victim’s wrists were tied to the top rung, and weights were tied to the ankles to produce the same effect as a more elaborately constructed version of the same device. Some methods of torture required nothing more than a kitchen pantry: victims might be made to inhale the fumes of onions and sulphur until they retched, or eggs heated in boiling water might be thrust under their armpits. But some inquisitors and their servitors seemed to take real pleasure in devising ever more elaborate instruments of torture or ornamenting the commonplace ones in new and imaginative ways.

“The heretic’s fork,” for example, was a simple but diabolically clever device consisting of a slender iron bar with sharp prongs at both ends; the device was strapped around the neck of the victim in a way that planted one set of prongs deep into the flesh under the chin and the other set of prongs against the sternum. When a victim was thus impaled, “the fork prevented all movement of the head and allowed the victim only to murmur, in a barely audible voice, ‘
abiuro
’ (‘I recant’).” To drive home the point of the device, so to speak, the phrase was inscribed into the metalwork as a reminder of exactly what the inquisitor wanted to hear from the victim thus afflicted.
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Tongs were a commonplace of torture, and they were variously employed to handle hot coals, to pinch the flesh, to close the nose of a victim undergoing the water ordeal, or even to amputate a finger or a tongue, a woman’s nipple or a man’s genitals. But the ironmonger whose client was the Inquisition, whether on his own initiative or at the special request of his employer, might fashion a pair of tongs so that the hinge resembled the grinning head of a monstrous alligator and the jaws were lined with sharp teeth. The result was an implement that was even handier for inflicting pain and, at the same time, pleased the torturer’s twisted sense of humor and struck even greater terror into a victim watching the gaping jaws approach and then close.

Some tinkerers came up with new and ever more nightmarish instruments of torture that served no other purpose than the infliction of pain. One such device, which we briefly glimpsed in the opening pages of this book, was a segmented object of bronze and iron in the shape of a pear that was designed to be inserted into various orifices of the human body. A screw-driven mechanism on the interior of the “pear” allowed it to be slowly expanded as the torturer turned the handle, thus stretching and tearing the tender flesh of the victim from the inside. As a final touch, the artisan who fabricated the pear added an elaborate figure of a leering Satan to please the torturer and taunt the victim in the moments before it disappeared into the interior cavity where it did its work.

Why would an inquisitor go to such lengths when buckets of water and hot irons were so cheap, handy, and effective? “For only one reason,” answers Robert Held, referring not merely to the fanciful hardware but to the “universal and eternal institution” of torture itself. “Because it gives pleasure to the torturer.”
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The same insight, of course, explains why the victim was often stripped naked during torture. Entirely aside from functional considerations—it is easier to torture a naked human being than a clothed one—the undressing of torture victims gratified the twisted appetites of the sexual sadists among the inquisitors and their staff of torturers. The point is made in a vintage engraving of a woman undergoing the ordeal by water at the hands of the Inquisition, an example of the atrocity propaganda favored by the critics of the Inquisition. The illustrator has carefully depicted the victim’s pretty face and wholly naked torso, the torturer bent over her body in apparent pleasure, and the audience of inquisitors and their familiars watching the whole ordeal with the fixed stare of dirty old men at a peep show.

Such scenes were favored in art and letters over several centuries, ranging from the pious tracts of early Protestant reformers to the lurid gothic novels of the nineteenth century to the histories and commentaries of the secular humanists of the twentieth century. Indeed, much of what we think we know about the Inquisition derives from the images and narratives created by propagandists for whom “the cruelty and eroticism of inquisitors” is the emblematic sin of organized religion in general and the Roman Catholic church in particular. And we might suspect that the artist who makes a drawing of a naked woman undergoing torture—as well as those who view his work from a safe distance and perhaps in private—may be secretly sharing some of the darker desires of the torturer himself. Putting such mixed motives aside, however, the fact remains that the depictions of inquisitorial excess are based on fact rather than fancy. Not only did the Inquisition embrace the torturer’s art in its war on heresy, but it also elevated and dignified the use of torture as a legal and even a pious act.
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Jesus of Nazareth, according to the Gospels, was himself the victim of torture. For that reason alone, the Church was always sensitive to the ugly paradox created by the sight of a man in a monk’s cowl, who supposedly lived in imitation of Christ, putting questions to a naked man or woman while the public torturer applied a pair of pincers or a hot iron to the victim’s bare flesh.

Then, too, the Inquisition soon discovered that false confessions were the inevitable result of torture. If an inquisitor was seeking what modern interrogators call “actionable intelligence”—for example, the names and whereabouts of fellow believers or the sympathetic souls who had sheltered the victim from the Inquisition—a confession extracted under torture might turn out to be worthless. Even a cagey defender of torture like Nicholas Eymerich conceded that the rack and the wheel did not always bring the victim to a satisfactory confession. Some men and women, he observed, were ardent true believers who were perfectly willing to endure pain unto death rather than betray their faith or their fellow believers. Others were so terrified by the torturer that they “confessed to everything without making useful distinctions.” And a few of the victims, bloodied and broken and perhaps even comatose, were simply incapable of confessing at all.
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For all these reasons, the Church purported to impose various legal and technical restrictions on the use of torture, a fact that is often cited by apologists for the Inquisition. Torture, as we have seen, was authorized only for suspects who gave evasive answers or against whom indicia of heresy had been secured from other sources. Canon law permitted a victim to be tortured only once on any given indicium of heresy, and only a single torture session could be lawfully conducted. If a confession was secured, the victim was required to affirm in a sworn statement that the admission of guilt had not been coerced under the threat or application of torture. If the inquisitor sought to torture a child, he was required to seek the appointment of a legal guardian and make sure the guardian was present in the torture chamber before the carnage began.