The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (26 page)

The confessions extracted from the first victims were scandalous, but they are hardly surprising in light of what we know about the common inquisitorial practice of slandering men and women accused of heresy. The confessions are suspiciously consistent with the accusations that had been made against medieval heretics ever since the trial of the gnostic cultists at Orléans three centuries earlier. Given the preference of the inquisitors for leading questions—and for both the threat and the use of torture—it is not surprising that the warrior-monks were willing to validate even the most outrageous fantasies of their interrogators. Modern historians dismiss the case against the Templars in its entirety as an “extraordinary farrago of nonsense” and “absolutely without foundation,” but it was enough to send the Templars to the stake.
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Once recruited into the order, according to the scenario imagined by their persecutors, the novices submitted to a secret ritual of initiation that required them to “thrice” deny Christ and “thrice” spit on the cross. Then they stripped off their clothing, and the commander of the order kissed each naked novice—first at the base of his spine, then on the navel, and finally on the mouth. The young knights, who had just taken a vow of chastity, were supposedly instructed to submit to any of their fellow Templars who wanted to sodomize them. As the torture of the Templars continued, the victims were prompted by their interrogators to come up with ever more outrageous confessions: the rituals of the Templars supposedly included the worship of an idol, or a black cat, or both; the idol was smeared with “the fat of roasted infants”; the cat was ritually kissed “beneath the tail”; and the novices were required to consume the powdered remains of the burnt bodies of dead Templars “as a magical potion, to make them hold fast to their abominable ways.”
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The confessions betray a certain confusion, which surely indicates that the victims grasped the main points of the story that their tormentors wanted to hear but got the details wrong. Some of them confirmed that the commander offered three “indecent” kisses to the novices, but others insisted that it was the novices who kissed the commander. Sometimes they reported spitting on the cross, sometimes urinating on it, sometimes dragging it around the room. Although they were supposedly required to submit to the homoerotic attentions of their fellow knights, some of the Templars also testified that the rituals featured a bevy of “beautiful young girls” with whom they engaged in orgiastic sexual encounters. The cat was sometimes black and sometimes gray, sometimes red and sometimes mixed in color, and the idol was variously described as an actual human skull “encrusted with jewels” and as a carved wooden simulacrum, sometimes with a single face and sometimes with three faces. One imaginative Templar, surely addled by the attentions of the torturer, insisted that the idol was “a goat endowed with women’s breast and an erect penis.”
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“[T]wo things clearly emerge,” states Norman Cohn in
Europe’s Inner Demons.
“[I]n reality, there was no idol; but in the context of the interrogations and trials it had to exist, as the embodiment of Satanic power.”
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The persecution of the Templars is the first example of the hijacking of the Inquisition by a secular ruler. Pope Clement at first sought to defend the Templars, but King Philip soon “reduced the pope, by a mixture of bullying, cajolery, and trickery, to the position of a mere accomplice,” according to Cohn.
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On a single day in 1308, for example, Clement dispatched a total of 483 papal letters to kings, bishops, and inquisitors across Europe, sanctioning the mass arrest of the Templars and authorizing the deployment of the friar-inquisitors. Thus did the Inquisition come to play a crucial role in a kind of dragnet that operated across Europe. The Franciscan and Dominican inquisitors, whose envy and hatred for the Templars was simmering long before Philip the Fair brought it to a high boil, put themselves in service to the French king and assisted in spreading the false accusations across Europe. Authoritarian governments of the near and distant future, as we shall see, were inspired by what the king of France was able to accomplish with the primitive machinery of persecution available to the medieval state.
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The ordeal of the Templars is also a case study in how the inquisitorial tools and techniques were capable of overmastering even a rich and powerful adversary. The Templars were taken wholly by surprise—the order’s grand master had been invited to serve as a pallbearer at the funeral of the king’s sister-in-law on the day before his arrest—and so they were especially vulnerable to their tormentors, both physically and psychologically, when they suddenly found themselves behind bars. The victims were offered their lives if they confessed, threatened with torture and death if they did not, and told that their fellow Templars had already offered abject confessions.

A few of the Templars tried to satisfy the demands of their torturers while avoiding the full moral weight of their confessions. Yes, they conceded, the novices were subjected to all these outrages, but when
they
were initiated, the ritual had been adjourned before the worst of the atrocities took place “because a horde of Saracens had suddenly appeared on the horizon, or simply because it was time for supper”! Only four of the 138 Templars who were taken in the first round of arrests ultimately refused to confess, and when Philip convened a show trial only two weeks later, some three dozen of them, including the grand master himself, stood up and affirmed the charges against them in public.
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“The brethren are so struck with fear and terror,” wrote one stalwart defender of the Templars, “that it is astonishing not that some have lied, but that any at all have sustained the truth.”
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Remarkably, a total of 120 Templars later insisted on withdrawing the confessions given under torture in Paris, even though they were warned by the inquisitors that doing so would ensure that they would be burned alive as relapsed heretics. Two high officers of the order, including the grand master, joined them in disavowing their confessions and suffered the same fate. The rest of the brethren, however, were not so courageous. One Templar, for example, declared that he “would swear not only that all the accusations against the order were true but also, if required, that he himself had killed Jesus Christ,” if only the inquisitors would spare him from the stake. They were permitted to live out their lives in various monasteries scattered around western Europe, now truly poor for the first time in the glorious history of the order, and both the Knights Templar and their legendary wealth passed into history.
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The invention of printing with movable type in the mid–fifteenth century is sometimes said to have marked the beginning of the end of the Inquisition, but the opposite may be true. The printing press only encouraged the circulation of the inquisitor’s manuals, and the manuals only encouraged the inquisitors in their work. Indeed, the manuals functioned as self-fulfilling prophecies, providing the inquisitors with a scenario of wrongdoing that their victims were tortured into validating. Perhaps the best example can be found in the countless thousands of women who were sent to the stake as witches under the authority of the Inquisition and the civil magistrates who followed its example during the so-called Witch Craze.

Witchcraft had been among the obsessive concerns of both religious and political authorities since antiquity. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” was the command of ancient Jewish law as preserved in the book of Exodus. The law of pagan Rome, too, criminalized some (if not all) practices that came to be called black magic. As early as 724, a church council convened by Pope Zachary banned the practices of “wizardry and sorcery,” which were described as “the very filth of the wicked.” But the medieval Church seemed to possess a certain insight into the workings of a disturbed human mind, and thus cautioned against the burning of women as witches. The
Canon episcopi
of 906, for example, suggests that those women who “believe and openly profess” that they have engaged in acts and practices of black magic may be suffering only from delusions and should be spared the stake even if the Devil himself was the source of the madness.
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Strictly speaking, the crime of sorcery fell outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Once the ancient fear and loathing of witchcraft was alloyed with the newfangled war on heresy, however, the inquisitors found opportunities to prosecute the occasional accused sorcerer or sorceress along with far greater numbers of Cathars and other dissident Christians. For example, a sixty-year-old woman in Toulouse named Angela de la Barthe, accused of engaging in a sexual dalliance with the Devil in 1275, embroidered on the charge against her by telling the inquisitor that Satan thereby fathered a child with the head of a wolf, the tail of a snake, and an alarming appetite for human flesh, which she satisfied by resorting to child murder and the disinterment of corpses. For telling such tales on herself, she was sent to the stake, possibly the first French woman to suffer the death penalty on charges of witchcraft.

The growing panic over sorcerers and sorceresses eventually reached the highest circles of Church and state. Pope John XXII, convinced that an elderly French bishop was trying to murder him by means of black magic, ordered his arrest in 1317 and personally interrogated him on seven occasions. After confessing under torture, the old bishop was burned alive and his ashes dumped into the Rhône. Three years later, the same pope issued a bull by which inquisitors were charged with the authority to persecute the practitioners of ritual magic, and Nicholas Eymerich, author of an early and influential inquisitor’s manual, produced a text titled
Treatise Against the Invokers of Demons
in 1369. (Intriguingly, Eymerich claimed to possess arcane knowledge on the subject because “he had seized and read many books of magic before burning them.”) Strictly speaking, however, these early measures were directed against the stray practitioner of sorcery rather than a secret cult of witches; thus, for example, a Carmelite monk named Pierre Recordi was tried by the Inquisition and sentenced to life in prison on charges of engaging in “love-magic.”
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The Witch Craze did not begin in earnest until 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII issued a new decree, the so-called witch-bull, by which he rescinded the
Canon episcopi
and formally extended the authority of the Inquisition to the “correction, imprisonment and punishment” of witches, that is, men and women who have “abused themselves with devils, incubi and succubi, and by incantations, spells, conjurations and other accursed superstitions and horrid charms, enormities and offences, destroy the offspring of women and the young of cattle.” Like the Cathars and the Waldensians, the practitioners of witchcraft were imagined to belong to “a secret, conspiratorial body organized and headed by Satan.” Since the witch-bull flatly equated witchcraft with heresy—“They blasphemously renounce that faith which they received by the sacrament of baptism,” the pope insisted, “and, at the instigation of the enemy of the human race, they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and excesses to the peril of their souls”—those accused of witchcraft now fell within the ungentle writ of the Inquisition.
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The new reach of the Inquisition put the men and women accused of witchcraft in far greater peril than they had previously faced in the civil courts. The Inquisition, as we have seen, simply ignored the rules of evidence and procedure that afforded some measure of due process in ordinary judicial proceedings. One man who accused a woman of practicing “weather-magic” in a magistrate’s court in the fifteenth century, for example, was called on to substantiate the charge, and when he failed to meet his burden of proof, he was drowned as a punishment for making a false accusation. By contrast, the accuser in an inquisitorial trial was allowed to remain absent and anonymous, and the accusation itself was regarded as admissible evidence.
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To assist the Inquisition in its new responsibilities, the pope commissioned a pair of Dominican inquisitors in Germany and Austria, Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger, to compose a manual on the detection and punishment of witches, the notorious
Malleus maleficarum
or
Hammer of Witches,
a work whose title echoed the honorific that was bestowed on heresy hunters ranging from Robert le Bougre to Cardinal Bellarmine. Unlike Bernard Gui, whose advice on sorcery had required only two or three pages of text, Kramer and Sprenger devoted five years of effort and an entire volume to the latest front in the war on heresy. First published in about 1486,
Hammer of Witches
became a bestseller among inquisitor’s handbooks, available in eight printed editions by the turn of the century and a total of twenty-eight editions by 1600. As a badge of its authority,
Hammer of Witches
included Pope Innocent’s witch-bull as a preface, thus “establish[ing] once and for all that the Inquisition against witches had full papal approval, and thereby open[ing] the door for the bloodbaths of the following century.”
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Hammer of Witches
and the other manuals and treatises on witchcraft—more than two dozen appeared between 1435 and 1486 alone—worked their own powerful magic on the inquisitorial witch-hunters, who now detected abundant evidence of witchcraft where before they had seen none. If diabolical sexual atrocities could be plausibly charged against such pious Christian rigorists as the Waldensians and even the warrior-monks of the Knights Templar, the men and women accused of witchcraft were inevitably suspected of even greater outrages. Sometimes the scenario may have originated with the inquisitor himself, and his questions transmitted both the themes and the details to the victim. Other men and women accused of witchcraft may have been “verbal exhibitionists” or plain lunatics. The availability of formbooks and formularies created a kind of feedback loop in which the inquisitor read out loud a series of leading questions, and the defendant affirmed each one, if only to bring the torture to an end. In that sense, the inquisitor’s manuals could also serve as instruction manuals to would-be witches. And so the Witch Craze came to function as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy on a vast scale.
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