The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Read online

  How far back we must look to find the roots of the Inquisition remains an open question. The core idea—and the word itself—was borrowed from the jurisprudence of pagan Rome, the original persecutor of Christianity, and only later imported into the canon law of the Roman Catholic church. Unlike the Roman legal procedures called accusatio and denunciatio, in which a private citizen or a public prosecutor presented evidence of wrongdoing to a judge, the form of criminal prosecution called inquisitio permitted a single man to perform the roles of investigator, prosecutor, and judge—a notion that offends the fundamental notion of fairness in English and American law. Yet, at least one historian insists that the “time-honored system of the grand-jury” in Anglo-Saxon tradition ought to be regarded as “a prototype of the incipient papal Inquisition”—an ironic observation in light of the fact that England was one place in Europe where the Inquisition did not operate.4

  Inquisition into heresy had long been carried out by Catholic bishops on their own initiative and authority. The trial of the gnostic cultists at Orléans in 1022 was conducted by a panel of French bishops, and the so-called episcopal inquisition—a term that is used to refer collectively to the inquisitions conducted by bishops—coexisted (and sometimes competed) with the Inquisition even after the popes arrogated to themselves the leading role in the enterprise of finding and punishing heretics. Thus, for example, the celebrated medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–ca. 1327) was tried twice for heresy, once by a tribunal of bishops in Germany, which acquitted him, and later by the Inquisition, which convicted him posthumously. Indeed, the episcopal inquisition proved to be insufficiently fierce for the papal war on heresy that began in earnest in the thirteenth century—one reason that the Inquisition was called into existence in the first place.

  A tale told about the bishop of Besançon illustrates how benighted an otherwise pious cleric might turn out to be. Troubled by rumors of a small band of wonder-workers said to be capable of performing authentic miracles, the bishop felt obliged to determine whether they had acquired their powers from God or Satan. And so, remarkably, he called on the services of a clerk reputed to be a practitioner of the black arts, apparently overlooking the fact that sorcery, too, was an act of heresy and thus punishable by death. “The cunning clerk deceived the devil into a confidential mood and learned that the strangers were his servants,” reports Henry Charles Lea with tongue in cheek. “[T]hey were deprived of the satanic amulets which were their protection, and the populace, which had previously sustained them, cast them pitilessly into the flames.”5

  On other occasions, even the most pious bishops and popes were so flummoxed by the mere sight of flesh-and-blood heretics that they simply did not know what to do with them. When a few Cathars were rounded up in Flanders in 1162, the archbishop of Reims shipped them off to Pope Alexander III (ca. 1105–1181) for punishment, and the pope promptly shipped them back to the archbishop with the admonition that “it was better to pardon the guilty than to take the lives of the innocent.” Such bleeding-heart liberalism seems quaint and even poignant when compared with the bloody-mindedness that would soon characterize the Inquisition, and it helps to explain why a corps of inquisitors was later called into existence.6

  When Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216) resolved to root out Catharism once and for all in the opening years of the thirteenth century, he was not willing to rely on the bishops scattered across Europe, many of whom he regarded as corrupt, or inept, or too comfortable with their Cathar neighbors, and sometimes all three at once. Instead, he started by recruiting a few churchmen of his own choosing to serve as his personal emissaries (or “legates”). They became a kind of flying squad of heretic hunters, and various popes dispatched them to hotspots all over Europe where the smoke and fire of heresy had been detected. Here begins the so-called legatine inquisition, an early phase of the war on heresy and the first stirrings of the Inquisition.

  The very first man to carry the official title of Inquisitor haereticae Pravitatis (inquisitor into heretical depravity) was Conrad of Marburg (ca. 1180–1233), a legatine inquisitor who was sent first to Languedoc by Pope Innocent III and later to the Rhineland by Pope Gregory IX. A rabid ascetic and an apparent sadist, Conrad is also credited with slapping the label of “Luciferanism” on the Waldensians, whom he wrongly regarded as Devil worshipers rather than Christian rigorists, and tantalizing his superiors with near-pornographic tales of their imagined sexual and theological excesses.

  Conrad is a good example of the kind of human being who is temperamentally suited for the career of a professional persecutor. An aristocrat by birth and the beneficiary of a university education at Paris, he cultivated a reputation for piety and self-denial, and he fasted himself into pallor and emaciation. At the height of his fame, he rode from place to place on a donkey in imitation of Jesus, attracting adoring crowds who welcomed him with candles and incense. Once charged by the pope with the task of burning heretics, he allied himself with a couple of “self-appointed inquisitors”—a “one-eyed, one-armed rogue” named Johannes and a Dominican lay friar called Hans Torso—and the three of them set up operations “on papal license.” They shaved the heads of the accused to mark them as suspected heretics and questioned them so brutally that the archbishop of Mainz complained to the pope about the false confessions that were being extracted from innocent men and women under the threat of the stake.7 “We would gladly burn a hundred,” boasted an unapologetic Conrad, “if just one among them were guilty.”8

  Conrad sought victims among the gentry as well as among the common folk, perhaps because of his zeal in the pursuit of heresy or perhaps because the wealth of a convicted heretic was subject to confiscation. In 1233 his eye fell on Count Henry II of Seyn, a wealthy nobleman who had demonstrated his own Christian piety by endowing churches and monasteries and even going on crusade. Conrad produced a witness who claimed to have seen Henry riding on a monstrous crab on his way to a sex orgy. But Henry, unlike Conrad’s humbler victims, was not cowed into confession. Rather, the count insisted on confronting the inquisitor and putting him to his proof.

  Conrad’s fate provides a cautionary example of both the excesses of the legatine inquisitors and the defiant response that a papal legate might encounter from local clergy and gentry. Count Henry demanded a trial before a tribunal consisting of the king, the archbishop, and various other clergymen. Questioned in the presence of these judges, Conrad’s witnesses revealed that they had given evidence only to spare themselves from the stake, and the tribunal refused to convict Count Henry. When Conrad fled the city of Mainz, frustrated and disgusted, he was tracked by a hit squad whose orders were to put an end to both Conrad and his little crew. Set upon and slain on the road to Marburg five days after the acquittal of their last victim, they thus suffered the same fate as that of another papal legate, Peter of Castelnau, whose confrontation with Count Raymond at Toulouse had sparked the Albigensian Crusade.

  Yet another inquisitor was dead, but his ominous title and function survived for another six centuries. When it came to heresy hunting, the weakness of the legatine inquisitors, as far as the papacy was concerned, was their inefficiency rather than their brutality. “Conrad’s lack of scruple over evidence may well have brought as many innocent as guilty to the fire,” observes historian Malcolm Lambert, “and still let the heretics, Cathar or Waldensian, escape.” But Conrad’s wild-eyed sexual slanders were wholly plausible to Pope Gregory IX, who imported them into an influential papal bull titled Vox in rama (A voice on high) and thus “gave Conrad’s poisonous stories a vogue they might not otherwise have had.” The inquisitor himself may have suffered a sudden and violent death, but his leering notion that heresy is invariably and inevitably wedded to sorcery and sexual excess enjoyed a much longer life.9

  Still, a practical lesson had been learned. Neither the episcopal inquisition nor the legatine inquisition was sufficient to the task of achieving a final solution to the problem of religious diversity within the realm of
the Roman Catholic church. A kind of perfect storm of zeal, paranoia, and hubris inspired the Church to design a wholly new weapon for deployment in the war on heresy. The ancient Roman legal procedure of inquisitio would be entrusted to an army of friar-inquisitors recruited from the ranks of the mendicant orders, and they would be charged by the pope with the task of cleansing Christendom of every kind of heresy. Once called upon to live in imitation of Christ, the friar-inquisitors were recruited to serve in a corps of persecutors whose instruments of torture were identical to those that had been used in pagan Rome.

  The irony was apparent to Dostoevsky, whose Grand Inquisitor is ready to burn Jesus Christ himself as a heretic, but it was wholly lost on the flesh-and-blood inquisitors who murdered their victims by the countless thousands. For them, the work of the torturer and the executioner was always for the greater glory of God and the Church, or so they succeeded in convincing themselves.

  The creation of the Inquisition as an arm of the Church has been tracked by historians through a series of papal decrees and church councils starting as early as 1184. But the man who is generally credited with (or blamed for) bringing the Inquisition into formal existence is Pope Innocent III, a brilliant and accomplished canon lawyer who ascended to the papal throne in 1198 and remained there for eighteen tumultuous years. Innocent, as we have already seen, is the man who first sent the Dominicans and Franciscans into Languedoc to call the Cathars back into the Church. When preaching failed, he charged the king and nobles of France to go on crusade in their own country against the Cathars who refused to be converted. And when the Albigensian Crusade failed in its mission of exterminating the Cathars, it was Pope Innocent III who resolved to root out heresy once and for all by entrusting the task to a corps of papal inquisitors, the charter members of the Inquisition.

  Innocent, the most celebrated of the lawyer-popes of the medieval Church, sought to drape the machinery of persecution with the mantle of law and theology. On November 1, 1215, he convened an assembly of more than four hundred bishops, eight hundred abbots, and various emissaries from the kings and princes of western Europe, all of them gathered in the Lateran Palace in Rome. At the end of their deliberations, the so-called Fourth Lateran Council voted to approve a new set of ecclesiastical laws (or “canons”) that were intended to dictate the beliefs and practices of obedient Christians—and to punish the disobedient ones. The document in which the work of the Fourth Lateran Council is recorded has been called “the first sketch of the Inquisition,” but it also provided a useful precedent for lawmakers in Spain in the fifteenth century and Nazi Germany in the twentieth century.10

  Many of the canons appear to be unrelated to the persecution of heresy, but the whole document hums with the urgent concern of the Roman Catholic church to assert its absolute authority over Christendom. The clergy and congregants of the Eastern Orthodox church, for example, were warned to “conform themselves like obedient sons to the holy Roman church, their mother, so that there may be one flock and one shepherd”—or else “be struck with the sword of excommunication.” Because it was sometimes impossible to tell Jews and “Saracens” (that is, Muslims) from Christians—and “thus it happens at times that through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews and Saracens with Christian women”—they were ordered to wear garments of a kind that would set them apart from Christians. And a new crusade “to liberate the Holy Land from the hands of the ungodly” was ordered to depart on June 1, 1217.11

  Even the canons that do not seem to refer to heresy can be understood as a stern caution against even the slightest innovation or variation in matters of faith. The very first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council, for example, asserts the theological monopoly of the Roman Catholic church, which is declared to be “one Universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there is absolutely no salvation.” Dualism of the kind embraced by the Cathars is implicitly condemned—“We believe and openly confess there is only one true God”—although the credo goes on to allow that God actually comprises “three Persons indeed but one essence,” that is, “Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” The affirmation of baptism in water and the doctrine of transubstantiation—the belief that the bread of the Eucharist is miraculously “changed (transsubstantio) by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood” of Jesus Christ—can be understood as an oblique repudiation of the Cathars, who rejected both items of Catholic dogma.12

  Only the third canon directly addresses the goal of ridding Christendom of what the clerics called “heretical filth.” But it amounts to a declaration of total war on heresy of all kinds and, at the same time, a general conscription of all Christians to serve on the front lines. “We condemn all heretics, whatever names they may go under,” the council resolved. “They have different faces indeed but their tails are tied together inasmuch as they are alike in their pride.” Any Christians “who receive, defend or support heretics” were themselves to be excommunicated. Anyone in a position of authority was under a solemn obligation to the Church to persecute heresy: “Thus whenever anyone is promoted to spiritual or temporal authority,” the third canon states, “he shall be obliged to confirm this article with an oath.”13

  Bishops were sternly reminded of their duty to “force the faithful to denounce any heretics known to them,” and any bishop who failed to do so was to forfeit his office in favor of “a suitable person who both wishes and is able to overthrow the evil of heresy”—a pointed reminder of the failings of the episcopal inquisition. The secular lords of Christendom, too, were admonished not to tolerate the presence of heretics within their realms. The goal of the Church, in other words, was to require all officers of Church and state—and, later, the population at large—to serve as spies and informers in the war on heresy. If they failed to turn in a suspected heretic, they were guilty of “fautorship”—that is, the crime of aiding or abetting a heretic—and faced punishment no less severe than that imposed on the heretics themselves.

  Some of the well-established penalties for heresy were reaffirmed—confiscation and forfeiture of property, removal from public office, and excommunication for heretics who recanted and then reverted to their old beliefs. New and ominous penalties were added. Once detected and condemned, for example, an unrepentant heretic was to be “abandoned” by the Church and “handed over to the secular rulers to be punished with due justice,” a formula that later came to serve as a sanctimonious euphemism for death by burning at the stake.14 Significantly, the war on heresy in western Europe was declared to be the moral equivalent of the Crusades in the far-off Holy Land. “Catholics who take the cross and gird themselves up for the expulsion of heretics,” the third canon affirmed, “shall enjoy the same indulgence, and be strengthened by the same holy privilege, as is granted to those who go to the aid of the holy Land.”15

  Innocent III did not live long enough to see the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council put into full operation. “At his death in 1216,” concedes historian Edward Burman, “the Inquisition did not yet exist.” But it is also true that Innocent’s long, bloody campaign against religious liberty and diversity, culminating in the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, would “lead irrevocably to the creation of the Inquisition.” He was the author of the very idea of a war on heresy, which expressed itself in the Albigensian Crusade as well as in the burning of heretics by the legatine inquisitors. He was the first pope to recognize the usefulness of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the persecution of heretics. And he convened the council whose enactments of church law would serve as the constitution of the Inquisition, thus dignifying what was essentially a program of Church-and state-sponsored terrorism.16 Once the blueprints of the Inquisition were available, men in power did not hesitate to put them to use.

  Still, it was left to Innocent’s successors to assemble the various parts into the elaborate contraption that came to be called the Inquisition. The Council of Toulouse in 1229, for example, endorsed the notion of the Inquisition as
a permanent fixture of the Church rather than a series of ad hoc tribunals. The papal decree titled Excommunicamus, issued in 1231 by Pope Gregory IX, expanded upon the antiheretical canons of the Fourth Lateran Council. By April 20, 1233, when Pope Gregory IX formally charged the friars of the Dominican order with the duty of serving as inquisitors, the Inquisition was fully deployed. Once in place, it would not pause in its work for six hundred years, when the last victim of the Inquisition was put to death as a heretic.17

  By a certain Orwellian logic, the Inquisition always fancied itself to be the spiritual benefactor of the men and women whom it arrested, tortured, and killed. Pope Innocent III encouraged the inquisitors to regard the persecution of heresy as strong medicine intended to restore the spiritual health of the heretics even if it meant afflicting their bodies or even ending their mortal lives. Pope Gregory IX, too, saw the Inquisition as “an integral part of pastoral care.” Thus did the inquisitors come to justify the prosecution of accused heretics as “an act of love” and “profound Christian charity” toward errant Christians who had put their souls at risk by straying from the benign embrace of the Mother Church. The same rationale has been invoked by apologists down through the ages when they piously insist that the Inquisition imposed only “penances” and deferred to the civil authorities when it came to torture and execution.18

  For that reason, too, it made sense for the Church to recruit inquisitors from the ranks of its own clergy. But the popes who called the Inquisition into existence declined to entrust the task to a motley crew of ordinary priests. Rather, they chose the friars of the newly chartered Dominican and Franciscan orders to serve as the shock troops of the war on heresy. Thus were friars of the so-called mendicant orders called away from their work as wandering preachers and charged with the new mission of finding and punishing heretics of all kinds. And that is why the uniform of the inquisitor—a hooded robe like the one worn by Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498)—consisted of nothing more than the ordinary habit of his order.19