The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (52 page)
Read The Grand Inquisitor's Manual Online
Authors: Jonathan Kirsch
Tags: #Inquisition, #Religious aspects, #Christianity, #Terror, #Persecution, #World, #History
Toulouse, France, 45–46, 50–51, 69, 78, 90–91, 119, 145
Trachtenberg, Joshua, 168, 171
Treatise Against the Invokers of Demons
(Eymerich), 145
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 150
Trial, The
(Kafka), 16, 82
Trotsky, Leon, 229, 229n, 231
troubadours and courtly love, 25–26
Trumbo, Dalton, 250, 254
Two New Science
(Galileo), 165
Ugolini, Zanghino, 79
Ulpian, 101
United States: Abu Ghraib and Guantánmo, 4, 8–9, 256; CIA’s “extraordinary rendition,” 9, 256; euphemisms for repressive measures in, 257; euphemisms for torture, 239, 256;
inquisitio generalis
in, 255; inquisition, first American, 242–43; Inquisition and, 16; Japanese internment, 3, 247, 255; McCarthyism and, 3, 8, 248–54; Patriot Act, 255, 255n, 257; prosecution of Muslims, 255; Puritan persecution of Quakers, 243; Salem witch trials, 3, 243–47; September 11 terrorist attack and crusade against terror, 254–58; waterboarding, 239, 256
Urban VIII, Pope, 163
Valdes, Peter, 29–30
Valencia, Spain, 189
van der Lubbe, Marinus, 228n
Venice, Italy, 55, 86–87, 173; trial of Paolo Veronese, 160–61, 163–64
Verden, Bishop of, 13
Veronese, Paolo, 160–66
via apostolica
, 28, 29
Vishinsky, Andrei, 230, 231–32
vita apostilica
, 52
Voltaire, 154
Wakefield, W. L., 26, 39, 73
Waldensians, 30, 47, 54, 58, 121, 134, 138, 176
William of Pelhisson, 87, 88
Wills, Gary, 250
witches/witchcraft, 5; accusations of, 152–53; bishop burned, 145; black Sabbath, 149–50; burning of, 132, 144–45, 148, 152, 155, 242; Carmelite monk tried, 145; death toll, 154, 246; Devil and, 145, 148, 149–50, 151, 153; English persecution of, 242; familiars, 149; feminism and, 151–52; first burning of, 145, 214; iconography of, 149; Joan of Arc and, 154–59; Latin term,
maleficium
, 149; men vs. women, 153; persecutions, medieval Inquisition, 54; Salem witch trials, 3, 243–47; sexual slander and, 12, 150; in Spain, 188; torture of witches, 153–54; Witch Craze, 144–54, 210
women: Beguines, 137–38; burned as witches, 132, 144–45, 148, 152; Cathars, 39; confessions under torture, 11; death toll, 154; defamation, 12, 148; Fraticelli, 137; healers, 152; victimized by Spanish Inquisition, 202; witchcraft, 5, 10, 12, 54, 132, 144–54
Yagoda, Genrikh, 234
Zachary, Pope, 144
Zinoviev, Grigory, 229
Zoroastrianism, 31
JONATHAN KIRSCH
is the author of ten books, including the national bestseller
The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible,
and his most recent work, the
Los Angeles Times
bestseller
A History of the End of the World.
Kirsch is also a book columnist for the
Los Angeles Times,
a broadcaster for NPR affiliates KCRW-FM and KPCC-FM in Southern California, an Adjunct Professor on the faculty of New York University, and an attorney specializing in publishing law and intellectual property in Los Angeles. Kirsch is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a three-time past president of PEN Center USA West.
Visit the author online at www.jonathankirsch.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
THE GRAND INQUISITOR’S MANUAL:
A History of Terror in the Name of God
. Copyright © 2008 by Jonathan Kirsch. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader August 2008 ISBN 978-0-06-170188-7
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*
“The Church,” as the phrase is used here, refers to what is generally called the Roman Catholic church, which regarded itself as the sole and absolute religious authority in Christendom. As we shall see, the Eastern Orthodox church, too, claimed to be the sole source of religious truth, and the two churches regarded each other as heretical.
*
One victim of the Spanish Inquisition, a professor on the faculty of the University of Salamanca, managed to identify his secret accusers by simply naming all his fellow faculty members as personal enemies on the assumption that academic politics might have moved them to denounce him. He guessed correctly.
*
The modern value of medieval currency is difficult to calculate. By custom if not in actual practice, a medieval livre was equal in value to a pound of silver. Twelve deniers were equal to one sou (also called a sol), and twenty sous equaled one livre. To give a rough idea of the purchasing power of medieval currency, a chicken could be purchased in Paris at the end of the fourteenth century for 12 deniers and a pig cost 4 sous. However, the actual value of the currency varied greatly from place to place and over time.
*
The Cathars are gone but not forgotten. The self-invented “neo-Cathar” movement styles itself after the medieval sect, and sightseers in the Pyrenees are encouraged to visit the ruins of Montségur and other castles where the real-life Cathars took refuge in their final days.
*
In 2007, the Vatican released copies of documents that recorded the trials of accused Templars conducted in Rome between 1307 and 1312. According to the long-suppressed records, Pope Clement acquitted the Templars of heresy although he convicted some defendants on charges of sexual immorality.
*
Strictly speaking,
converso
and
cristiano nuevo
(New Christian) were terms applied to any convert to Christianity, whether from Judaism or Islam, and his or her descendants. Marrano referred specifically to a
converso
of Jewish origin, and Morisco referred to a
converso
of Muslim origin.
*
Or so Disraeli boasted. Descent from Spanish Jewry (known as
Sephardim
after the Hebrew word for Spain,
Sepharad
) came to be regarded as a mark of distinction in Jewish circles, and Disraeli appears to have embellished or invented some of the details of his Sephardic roots.
*
Charles (1500–1558) reigned as king of Spain and archduke of Austria under the name Charles I. He is better known as Charles V, the title he carried as Holy Roman emperor.
*
When considering the three crimes that are “amongst us punished with fire”—witchcraft, heresy, and sodomy—Montesquieu observed how odd it was that “the first might easily be proved not to exist; the second to be susceptible of an infinite number of distinctions, interpretations and limitations [and] the third to be often obscure and uncertain.” Quoted in Moore,
The Formation of a Persecuting Society,
1.
*
The Edict of Grace offered the opportunity to avoid the worst punishments by voluntarily confessing. At some times and places, the inquisitors resorted to the so-called Edict of Faith, which omitted the promise of milder punishment in exchange for confession. Both forms of the inquisitorial edict, however, required the betrayal of others.
*
Some Spanish historians have argued that Christopher Columbus was a Marrano and have suggested that it was more than mere coincidence that he sailed from Spain in 1492, the year of the Jewish expulsion. The historical evidence supports no such claim, but some flesh-and-blood
conversos
did sail with Columbus, including one Luis de Torres who was formally converted to Christianity on the day before the voyage began.
*
The only notable exception was the trial of Marinus van der Lubbe (1909–1934), the young man who was convicted at a show trial and then beheaded on charges of setting fire to the Reichstag, a crime that provided the Nazis with a pretext for doing away with the last vestiges of democracy in Germany in 1933. Whether van der Lubbe acted alone—and whether his co-conspirators, if any, were Nazis or Communists—is still debated. His codefendants, all Communists from Bulgaria, were acquitted, a fact that prompted Hitler to create the Nazi tribunal known as the People’s Court to ensure the conviction of those few victims whom the regime decided to offer a trial.
*
Leon Trotsky was in exile from the Soviet Union during the Great Terror, but the “cloven hoof of Trotsky” was detected by the prosecutors in the various conspiracies that figured in the Moscow show trials. Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov, were declared by the Soviet judges in 1936 to be “convicted by the evidence” and “subject, in the event of their being discovered on the territory of the U.S.S.R., to immediate arrest and trial.” Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940. Quoted in People’s Commissariat, 130, 180.
*
Wordplay in the war on terror extends to the Patriot Act, whose formal title reduces to the acronym USA-PATRIOT: “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” Congressman Bob Barr observed that “he hoped the bill’s supporters spent as much time on the bill itself as they did coining the acronym.” Quoted in Bovard, 89.
Table of Contents
Photographic Insert
Acknowledgments
Notes
References Consulted
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher