The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (28 page)

Although some men were tried and burned during the Witch Craze, the fact is that “80 percent of the accused and 85 percent of those executed were female.” And although the victims included adolescents and even children, the risk was especially acute for women of a certain age and circumstance. Married women and widows ranging from fifty to seventy years old represented the greatest number of victims. Various physical defects and personality traits were also likely to draw suspicion and, often enough, a formal charge; a woman was more likely to be accused of witchcraft if she were “solitary, eccentric, or bad-tempered,” for example, or “ugly, with red eyes or a squint, or pock-marked skin,” or merely crippled or stooped with age. A woman named Barbara Knopf, accused of crippling and killing her victims by means of sorcery and charged with witchcraft in Lucerne in 1549, insisted to the magistrate that “she had done nothing, only she had a nasty tongue and was an odd person.”
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The victimization of old, lonely, eccentric, and disabled women may help explain why so many confessed to the preposterous charges laid against them by the inquisitors and other witch-hunters. Torture was routinely applied to accused witches: “Because of the great trouble caused by the stubborn silence of witches,” as Kramer and Sprenger put it in
Hammer of Witches,
“torture is not to be neglected.” If the Knights Templar—warrior-monks trained in the art of combat—were so quick to confess to false charges under torture, a frail old woman was unlikely to fare better when the inquisitor reached the third degree. Still, the inquisitors themselves credited their victims with remarkable courage and stamina, although they reasoned that it was the result of supernatural invention, whether divine or diabolical: “Unless God, through a holy Angel, compels the devil to withhold his help from the witch,” they insisted, “she will be so insensible to the pains of torture that she will sooner be torn limb from limb than confess any of the truth.”
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The Inquisition commonly resorted to “sadistic sexual torture,” as we have already seen, but the women accused of witchcraft were subjected to the very worst excesses. All victims of torture were stripped, for example, but a suspected witch might be shaved of her body hair down to the bare skin, if only to facilitate the search for the telltale Devil’s mark. A supernumerary teat—or just a skin blemish—was regarded as evidence of guilt and resulted in a death sentence, often by burning, sometimes by hanging or crushing. At the core of the Witch Craze, argues historian Anne Llewellyn Barstow, we find an institutionalized form of “sexual terror and brutality” whose aim and achievement were the “organized mass murder of women.” To put it another way, Barstow insists that the “witch-hunting” was actually “woman-hunting.”
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How many of these women did the inquisitors and the other witch-hunters send to the stake or the gallows? How many died under torture? The death toll has been “reliably” estimated at between 200,000 and one million, according to Edward Burman, while Norman Cohn dismisses such figures as “fantastic exaggerations.” A feminist writer, Andrea Dworkin, puts the number of women executed as witches at nine million, with Barstow insisting that Dworkin’s estimate “is off by about 8,900,000.” Thus Barstow adopts Voltaire’s estimate of 100,000 victims, first offered by the famous philosopher not long after the end of the Witch Craze in the eighteenth century, but she suggests that twice that number of women were accused of witchcraft. They, too, were victims whose lives were distorted and sometimes destroyed.
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Even if the body count is impossible to fix with certainty, the meticulous records maintained by some witch-hunters confirm that the Witch Craze amounted to mass murder on an appalling scale. According to the archives of a single canton in Switzerland, a total of 3,371 victims were tried on charges on witchcraft during the period 1591–1680, “and all, without exception, were executed.” After the witch trials in the bishopric of Trier in southwestern Germany in 1585, “two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each.” To be sure, a vast, sinister, and deadly conspiracy was at work, just as the Inquisiton had always insisted, but the malefactors were the inquisitors themselves.
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The childhood recollections of a young woman who grew up in the French village of Domrémy in the early fifteenth century provide an intriguing glimpse into the folk traditions that so alarmed the Inquisition. Near the village was an old tree, known by the locals as “The Ladies Tree” and “The Fairies Tree,” and a spring that bubbled up from an artesian source. “And I have heard say,” she recalled, “that those who are sick of fevers drink of that spring and go and fetch its water for health’s sake.”
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The young woman is known to us as Joan of Arc (ca. 1412–1431), and she spoke these words under interrogation during her trial before the Inquisition on charges of heresy and witchcraft. She conceded that some of the old women in the village—“but not of my own family,” she was careful to say—claimed to have seen “Fairy Ladies” in the vicinity of another great tree, a beech, and some boys and girls from the village danced around the beech tree and made garlands from its boughs. As the interrogation continued, Joan struggled desperately to distance herself from these goings-on: “I never saw those fairies at the tree, so far as I know,” she declared. “I do not know whether I have danced by the tree since I came to years of discretion, but I may well have danced there with my companions, and I sang there more often than I danced.”
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Joan of Arc, of course, attracted the attention of powerful men for reasons wholly unrelated to dancing fairies. A farm girl who could neither read nor write, she was also a young woman of extraordinary charisma who presented herself to the French king and persuaded him to put her in command of his army. But it is also true that she provided her enemies with the kind of evidence upon which the Inquisition could and did rely in condemning her as a servant of the Devil. She famously wore the garb of a soldier and carried a sword, both of which were reserved to men alone under biblical law and pious tradition. From the age of thirteen, she claimed to see visions and hear voices; at the age of seventeen, she was serving as a seer in the court of King Charles VII; and by the age of nineteen, she was burned alive at the stake as a witch.

Charles himself was dubious at first, and it was only after the teenager was vetted by the royal theologians that he allowed her to serve in his army. But Joan of Arc’s real offense was purely a matter of politics. Charles VII was engaged in a war for the French crown against an invading English army and its French collaborators. At Orléans, where gnostic cultists had been burned as heretics some three centuries earlier, Joan of Arc succeeded in breaking the English siege, and the so-called Maid of Orléans was an honored participant in the coronation of Charles VII as the rightful king of France.

But the English army remained on French soil, Paris remained under English control, and the fighting continued. Joan continued to lead the army of King Charles until she was wounded in battle and taken prisoner by the English and their French allies, who promptly resolved to put an end to their vexing adversary once and for all. She was imprisoned and interrogated behind the locked door of her cell, and then put on public trial at Rouen for six days in 1431. The charges of heresy and witchcraft were set forth in seventy articles of indictment, including such specific accusations as dressing like a man, entering into a pact with the Devil, and submitting to a ritual of initiation into sorcery while still a child. The “Voice from God” that she claimed to have heard since early adolescence, according to the bill of particulars, was diabolical rather than divine. The deputy inquisitor of France was summoned to participate in the proceedings and thereby place the imprimatur of the Inquisition on what was simply and clearly a show trial.
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The charges against Joan were trumped up to serve the naked political interests of the English and their French allies. Her personal eccentricities were convenient to her persecutors, but their real motive had nothing to do with Joan herself; rather, they sought to defame and discredit King Charles by demonstrating that his now-legendary champion was a witch and a heretic. An oblique clue to the realpolitik behind the trial of Joan of Arc is found in Shakespeare’s
Henry VI, Part I,
in which the Maid of Orléans is addressed as “Thou foul accursed minister of hell!” As seen through English eyes, both in her own lifetime and in Shakespeare’s time, Joan was a dangerous enemy who took up arms against an English king claiming the right to sit on the throne of France. To the French, then and now, she was “a heroine of the French resistance” who opposed the English invaders and their collaborators in a war of national liberation. Although the Inquisition never managed to extend its long reach to England, the English were not reluctant to invoke its jurisdiction and put Joan on trial as a heretic and a witch, thereby ensuring both her death and her disgrace.
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“The King has ordered me to try you,” a French bishop supposedly informed Joan, referring to the English monarch, “and I will do so.”
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The surviving transcripts of the trial of Joan of Arc by the Inquisition allow us to witness for ourselves some of the intimate moments in an actual witch trial. As in any interrogation or trial conducted by the Inquisition, every word uttered in an unguarded moment, every friendship and relationship, was a potential snare for the victim and a weapon in the hands of a skillful inquisitor. When, for example, the interrogator asked whether Joan’s godmother—the woman who claimed to have seen those Fairy Ladies dancing around the old beech tree—“was reputed to be a ‘wise woman,’” Joan understood the thrust of the question. In the parlance of the Inquisition, a “wise woman” was a sorceress. And Joan sought to parry the thrust: “She is held and reputed a good and honest woman,” she insisted, “and no witch or sorceress.”
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Joan, not yet twenty years old and on trial for her life, insisted that she was a good Christian. “I learned my Pater and Ave and Creed from my mother,” she testified. “I confessed once a year to my own parson and, when he was hindered, to another priest by his leave.” When she made garlands from the branches of the beech tree, they were intended not for the Fairy Ladies but “for the image of St. Mary at Domrémy.” When the inquisitor, following the standard line of questioning for accused witches, demanded to know whether Joan knew of “those who went riding with the Fairies”—“riding” was a reference to night flights on a broomstick to attend a gathering of witches—she continued to assert her own innocence. “That I never did nor never knew,” she declared. “I have indeed heard that there was a ride on Thursdays, but I believe not in that which is witchcraft.”
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Joan was cross-examined at length by the inquisitors about the source of her visions. Significantly, neither Joan nor the judges entertained the notion that she had experienced only visual and auditory hallucinations, but they debated over whether she had trafficked with angels or devils. “The Voice comes to me from God,” insisted Joan, who identified her celestial visitors as the archangel Michael and a pair of saints, Catherine and Margaret. The inquisitors insisted that Joan had actually consorted with Satan himself and a couple of demons, Belial and Behemoth. But at least one question and answer reveal the political subtext of the trial and the real reason for her conviction and execution.
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Q
: Does not St. Margaret speak English?

A
: Why should she speak English when she is not on the English side?
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Like so many less famous victims of the Inquisition, Joan was granted a life sentence after she agreed to abjure her supposed heresies. As part of the plea bargain, she assured the inquisitor that she would give up her men’s clothing. For four days after she had signed the document of abjuration, she endured various acts of brutality and sexual abuse at the hands of her English guards, and then she suddenly repudiated her promise to dress like a woman. According to the cruel and inflexible logic of the Inquisition, Joan was now a relapsed heretic and thus unworthy of the mercy of a life sentence. At 7:00 a.m. on May 30, 1431, she was formally excommunicated “and burned as quickly as was decently possible on the same morning.”
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A Dominican monk accompanied her to the pyre, yet another inquisitorial commonplace, and she begged him to hold a crucifix where she could see it until the flames finally extinguished her life. Her only regret was that her mortal remains would not be interred in consecrated ground. “Alas! That my body, whole and entire, which has never been corrupted,” she cried, referring to her self-imposed vow of chastity, “should today be consumed and burned to ashes!”
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The fate of Joan of Arc is only the most notorious example of how the machinery of persecution could be put to political use. The Bogomils of Bulgaria in the tenth century—the early precursors of the Cathars—can also be understood in a political context; the founder of the dissident religious community, according to Malcolm Lambert, “gave a voice to a peasantry oppressed by its Byzantine conquerors, its alien Byzantine priesthood and the Bulgarian aristocracy,” all of whose interests were well served by treating the Bogomils as dangerous heretics. King Frederick II (1194–1250), a constant rival and adversary of the popes, agreed to criminalize heresy in the imperial law codes as a “quid pro quo” for his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Honorius III in 1220. Even the persecution of the Knights Templar by King Philip IV, rightly seen as “a wild orgy of plunder,” also served the strategic goals of a French king who sought to outflank and overmaster the pope and arrogate to himself the useful tool of the Inquisition.
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