The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (21 page)

Such protocols, of course, are exactly what the defenders of the Inquisition point to when they imagine that the friar-inquisitors succeeded in dispensing “legal” justice if not “moral” justice. But the fact remains that the Inquisition did not even follow its own dubious rules, which were paper-thin and easily avoided in practice. Indeed, the inquisitor’s handbooks routinely offered tips and techniques for circumventing the limitations on torture, an awkward fact that demonstrates how little the inquisitors themselves respected the regulations that the popes and bishops had sought to impose on them.

Thus, for example, the inquisitors readily evaded the rule against torturing a victim more than once by announcing that a torture session had been “suspended rather than ended,” and so a fresh round of torture could be resumed at the pleasure or convenience of the inquisitor. The legal fiction that a torture session had been adjourned rather than concluded was commonly entered into the transcripts of interrogations in the inquisitorial archives. “A second or third day may be fixed to terrify him as a continuation of his torture,” explained Eymerich to the readers of his manual.
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Then, too, the inquisitor often resorted to outright lies. The records of the Inquisition routinely report that a confession of heresy was “free and spontaneous” when, in fact, the victim had been brought to confession under torture. To justify the mistruth, the inquisitors allowed a decent interval to pass before the confession was formalized in the presence of a notary at a venue other than the place where the victim had been tortured, usually three days after the torture session but sometimes as little as twenty-four hours later. Thus did they succeed in comforting themselves with the notion that the confession was free of coercion on the day and at the place where it was actually put down on paper, even if the victim had been previously tortured, cruelly and at length.
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New and ever more ingenious legal ploys were manufactured by the Inquisition to evade even the meager rights afforded to accused heretics by canon law. If a victim dared to withdraw a confession on the grounds that it had been extracted under torture, he or she could be lawfully subjected to torture once again because, as the inquisitors saw it, the recanted confession was a new indicium of a crime. Even worse, the new crime now carried the risk of the death penalty because, according to canon law, an accused heretic who confessed and then recanted could be condemned as a relapsed heretic and burned alive—an effective deterrent to any victim who was inclined to complain that he or she had been tortured into a false confession.

Some inquisitors deemed it unnecessary to engage in such quibbles, making instead the now-familiar argument that torture was wholly justified by the threat posed by their enemies in the war on heresy. When Pope John XII sought to impose some gentle restraints on the Inquisition in a papal decree of 1317 by requiring the joint approval of both the inquisitor and a bishop before an accused heretic or a witness was put to torture, Bernard Gui complained that such formalities would “cripple the efficiency of the Inquisition.” At most, Gui suggested, the pope might advise the inquisitors to use torture “with mature and careful deliberation,” and then leave them to continue their work without some fussy bishop looking over their shoulders.
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The Church, in fact, had already embraced these arguments. In 1256, as we have already noted, Pope Alexander IV had eliminated the need for even the most scrupulous inquisitor to restrain or explain himself by decreeing that any inquisitor was empowered to absolve any other inquisitor for “irregularities” in the conduct of an investigation. The friar-preachers understood the rule to mean that they could freely engage in torturing their victims in plain violation of canon law and then routinely absolve one another. Since everything that they did took place behind closed doors—and since they chose and controlled the notaries and scriveners who witnessed and recorded what happened there—it is unlikely that much concern or conversation was wasted on “irregularities” that may have been taken place in the chaotic and messy confines of the torture chamber.
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Given the preference of the Inquisition for confession—and the fact that interrogations were conducted behind locked doors by functionaries who had been sworn to silence—the fact that the inquisitors commonly used torture is hardly surprising and was perhaps even inevitable. Above all, torture was not only tolerated but actively encouraged because the Church regarded the war on heresy as an existential struggle with Satan and his minions on earth; the victims of torture were nothing more than “traitors to God” in the eyes of their persecutors. To the horror and sorrow of countless generations to come, the Inquisition demonstrated that the demonization of one’s adversaries makes it legally and morally acceptable to torture and kill them.
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Strictly speaking, torture was never regarded by the Inquisition as a punishment for the crime of heresy; it was always and only a tool for extracting testimony from unwilling witnesses and confessions from stubborn suspects. Once the inquisitors were finally satisfied with whatever evidence they had extracted from the victim of torture, they would reassemble to pronounce judgment on the accused heretic and announce the sentence that they had decided to impose. The victim may have already endured years of abuse in the inquisitorial prisons and torture chambers, but the punishment began in earnest only when the torture had ended.

Even then, the Inquisition clung to yet another thin legal fiction when it insisted that the convicted heretic was subject only to “penance” and not to punishment. A heretic who finally confessed his crime, renounced his false beliefs, rejoined the Roman Catholic church, and humbly submitted himself to its authority was now regarded as a penitent rather than a criminal. So it was written in the letter that a convicted heretic might be required to carry while performing a penance: “The bearer sinned by the crime of heretical morbidity, as revealed by confession made in proceedings before us, and of his own will returns humbly to the bosom of Holy Church.”
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All self-confessed heretics were required to repudiate publicly the false beliefs that had led them into heresy. The inquisitor’s handbooks prescribed the phrases to be uttered aloud by the repentant heretic: “I, so-and-so, recognize the true, Catholic and Apostolic faith and detest all heresy,” the
forma adjurationis
(form of adjuration) begins, and the confessant proceeds to swear fealty to the pope and the Church, to affirm his or her belief that the wafer and wine of the Eucharist are the literal body and blood of Christ, and to foreswear any further traffic with heretics, all “on pain of eternal damnation.”
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Only then would the inquisitors announce the “penances” that would be imposed on the errant child of the Mother Church.

The severity of the penances handed down by the inquisitor depended on what he regarded as the heretic’s degree of culpability and, even more crucially, on the quality of the heretic’s confession. A man or woman who came forward and confessed without coercion to some accidental or incidental heresy—for example, an unwitting greeting offered to someone who turned out to be a Cathar
perfectus
—would receive one of the lighter penances. Indeed, some inquisitors were willing to overlook even the most outrageous conduct if it was followed by an earnest confession. Pietro Balsamo, one of the assassins of the inquisitor later dubbed Saint Peter the Martyr, was sufficiently repentant to earn not only a pardon for his crime but also the opportunity to join the Dominican order. But accused heretics who compelled the inquisitor to resort to torture before finally offering up a confession might spend the rest of their lives in prison. And those who refused to confess at all were liable to be burned at the stake as unrepentant heretics.

Accused men and women who refused to confess to the crime of heresy—and, even worse, true believers who openly affirmed their forbidden faith—were the only victims of the Inquisition who were said to suffer punishment rather than penance. According to inquisitorial dogma, however, their punishment was never imposed by the Inquisition itself. Rather, as we have seen, unrepentant heretics passed out of the jurisdiction of the Inquisition and were “abandoned” to the authority of the secular government, which then decided whether to sentence them to prison or death.

For that reason, the Inquisition itself and the apologists who came later always insisted that the mortal lives of the abandoned heretics were taken by the civil government rather than by the Church, and their blood was on the hands of the public magistrate and the public executioner rather than the friar-inquisitors. The rest of the victims, by contrast, were permitted to remain within the maternal embrace of the Church as long as they performed the acts of contrition imposed on them by the Inquisition.

Perhaps the lightest penance that the inquisitor could impose was the obligation to make a pilgrimage to one or more holy sites. Even so, the cost of making a compelled pilgrimage amounted to the equivalent of a heavy fine, and the difficulty of travel in the Middles Ages meant that a pilgrimage to multiple shrines—or a single distant one—functioned as a kind of exile, sometimes months or even years in duration, during which one’s family was left without a provider or a protector. Then, too, pilgrimage might be combined with one or more of the other, even harsher penances available to a stern inquisitor.

The shrine of St. James of Compostela in Spain was a favorite destination chosen by the inquisitors, but a penitent might be sent to Canterbury, Cologne, or Rome, and sometimes to all of them; one unfortunate victim of the Inquisition was ordered to make a total of eight pilgrimages. If convicted of consorting with fellow heretics in a particular place, a penitent might be compelled to return to a church near the scene of the crime, where he or she would be scourged by the local priest in the presence of the congregation on a Sunday or a feast day. The penitent might even be ordered to carry a whip and offer it to good Christians along the way who would do him the favor of beating him. And the compulsory pilgrims were required to bring back signed letters from the local clergy at each destination to prove that they had been there.

Still, a pilgrimage was always preferable to a prison sentence, and a few men sentenced to life imprisonment by the Inquisition were able to bargain for their freedom in exchange for joining one of the Crusades, the longest and most dangerous pilgrimage of all. At least one convicted heretic was sentenced to spend twenty years in the Holy Land as an act of penance, which turned the pilgrimage into the functional equivalent of exile. Given the risks of disease, starvation, and shipwreck—and the danger of going into battle against the armies of the Saracens in the Holy Land—the crusade itself might amount to a death sentence.

Next in severity after pilgrimage was the obligation of a convicted heretic to wear “the cross of infamy”—a yellow cross sewn to one’s outer clothing as an unmistakable sign that the wearer had been convicted of the crime of heresy. Sometimes the cross was affixed to the breast only and sometimes to both the front and back of the garment, sometimes for a designated number of years and sometimes for the rest of the penitent’s life. Once the wearing of crosses had been decreed by the inquisitor, however, they were to be worn at all times, both at home and on the street, as an indelible mark of one’s status as a former heretic. So the wearing of crosses reduced the victim to a pariah, just as it was intended to do, and exposed him or her to abuse, isolation, and ridicule.
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Here is yet another example of the attention to detail that characterized all aspects of the Inquisition. Lest the heretic choose a small, obscure cross, the size was specified in the formal sentence pronounced by the inquisitor—“two palms in height and breadth,” for example, and sometimes even larger ones. To make sure the crosses were plainly visible, the inquisitor specified that “the clothing on which he wears the cross shall never be yellow in colour.” The Inquisition issued a supply of cloth to the convicted heretic at the time of sentencing, “but replacing worn-out crosses was the duty of the penitent.” To remove or conceal the cross was regarded as a relapse into heresy, a new and even more heinous crime that was punishable by death.
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A certain iconography came to be attached to the heretic’s crosses. If worn by a convicted perjurer—or by someone released after a life sentence had been commuted—the cross would have a second transverse arm as a mark of special dishonor. If the wearer had achieved the rank of a
perfectus
prior to conviction, a third cross was added. The image of a hammer sewn to the heretic’s clothing indicated that he or she was a prisoner of the Inquisition who had been released on bail. Red tongues were another symbol of perjury, and the addition of a letter to the cross marked the wearer as a forger. Indeed, the heretic’s clothing might be adorned with any manner of symbolic marking depending on the mood or imagination of the inquisitor.

While the wearing of crosses was regarded as among the lesser afflictions imposed on the victims of the Inquisition, the sentence amounted to a social and financial catastrophe. A man or woman compelled to wear the heretic’s crosses would find it hard to secure work or lodging. Even if the family were not reduced to homelessness and hunger, the sons and daughters of convicted heretics made poor prospects for marriage. The whole family might be ostracized by friends and relations who were fearful of being seen to associate with convicted heretics and then finding themselves accused of the same crime. Indeed, the terrible isolation that resulted from the wearing of crosses was the whole point of the penance.