LITMIR.BIZ

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state on oath what they thought might have been alleged against them. Stings and bugging operations were used, with agents provocateurs encouraging malcontents to share their thoughts while hidden scribes jotted down every word. The powers claimed were as hygienic as they were punitive. Heresy was conventionally regarded as a disease, and just as the Book of Leviticus had once prescribed the destruction of buildings that harboured pestilence, the houses in which heretics had met were soon being demolished as a matter of course.

      The effect was to legalize terror, and a whiff of the fear that swept the Languedoc still emanates from a story recounted about Raymond de Fauga, a Dominican appointed to the bishopric of Toulouse in August 1234. Told that the dying matriarch of a leading Cathar family was deliriously calling for a priest to console her, he rose from his lunch and marched to her house. Shocked relatives were pushed aside as he strode to her deathbed, where the feeble woman obliviously recited her beliefs and offered the traditional Cathar prayer that her life come to a good end. On de Fauga’s invitation, she then confirmed her creed – whereupon he rose to his feet, declared her an impenitent heretic and sentenced her to death. She was lashed to her bed, which was carried to a meadow outside the city gates and set ablaze. The Dominican chronicler who recorded the episode – with pride – observed that de Fauga and his companions then returned to their refectory and polished off their interrupted lunch ‘with rejoicing’.

      By the 1240s, inquisitors had reconsolidated Catholic dominance in the cities of the Languedoc, and as their successors spread across the countryside of southern France and northern Italy, Europe’s legal tradition began to undergo permanent change. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV published a bull ‘On Extirpation’ (Ad extirpanda), which authorized the use of torture against ordinary citizens – a practice permitted under Rome’s Emperor Justinian, but seen only exceptionally among barbarian tribes in the seven or so centuries subsequent. A lingering sense that the Church ought not to be in the business of bloodshed led Innocent to stipulate that inquisitors should subcontract interrogations to secular authorities, and major haemorrhages, amputations, and death were to be avoided – but the squeamishness would not last. Over the next decade, papal inquisitors were authorized to conduct their own questioning, and to absolve each other if, in their zeal, it generated too much mess. Their unaccountability increased with their discretion, and by 1262 they were almost literally a power unto themselves – capable even of reversing a bishop’s sentence of excommunication if God’s work so required.

      Secrecy simultaneously entered the trial process for the first time. Whereas Roman law, ordeals, compurgation and canonical law had all regarded openness as essential to justice, the first legal manual for Languedoc’s papal inquisitors, written in 1248, instructed them to ignore the old rule that witnesses’ names be disclosed. Investigators would instead issue blanket summonses to every male over fourteen and female over twelve in a region, who presented themselves for questioning in public, but were questioned in private. As though to compensate for the change, judgment was simultaneously transformed into a magnificent ceremony, usually staged in the square of the largest regional town, at which church officials would broadcast the verdicts reached and penances imposed. Those who had attended a Cathar service might be sent on a pilgrimage, for example, or instructed to sew a large yellow cross onto a pair of overalls and wear it for the rest of their lives. More serious offenders would be told to present themselves to their priest with willow switch in hand and ask for a public flogging. Particularly incorrigible hotheads and proselytizers might be sent to close confinement for a decade or two.

      At the very end of the list would be those who refused to admit their errors – who were, in the scatological language favoured by the Inquisition, to be ‘cut off like an infected limb’ because they had ‘returned to their heresy, like a dog to its vomit’. The rules that prevented clerics from spilling blood would, even in the war on heresy, have to be observed. The bishop or inquisitor would therefore ‘relax’ impenitents into the hands of secular courts and ‘affectionately request’ the court to be ‘moderate’ in its sentence. The double-talk was as psychotic as it sounds. Moderation involved chaining the convicts to stakes while piling logs up to their chins, burning the bodies for hours, and finally smashing the carbonized skulls and torsos with a poker. And although zealous papal inquisitors would, for long centuries, shelter behind the fiction that the Church longed to re-embrace its naughty children while someone else insisted on killing them, they were swift to ensure that no one misunderstood the meaning of relaxation. Anyone who assisted excommunicated heretics – by, for example, arguing that they were innocent – became personally liable to condemnation. According to a compilation of German laws written in the 1230s, any judge who was too moderate towards a relaxed heretic was liable to ‘be judged…as he himself should have judged’ – or, less euphemistically, to be burned to death.

      

      In view of the Church’s institutional psychopathy, it is unsurprising that popular myth, bolstered by several centuries of anti-Catholic propaganda, now recalls the Inquisition as a blood-drenched threshing machine. Uneven record keeping and Vatican secrecy mean that no reliable estimate of its death toll is actually possible, but the total number of certain executions in fact falls no higher than the low thousands. Hundreds of thousands certainly passed through its mill, but it was more insidious than murderous, designed to recover sheep rather than to annihilate them. Anyone who publicly repudiated heresy was given at least one opportunity to return to the fold. Imprisonment was the preferred penalty even for the recalcitrant. At the same time, although it killed relatively few, it released even fewer. Indeed, it barely comprehended the concept of an acquittal. To be suspected of heresy was heretical in itself, and relapse was a capital offence, with the result that arrest was tantamount to a suspended death sentence. Release invariably required a display of repentance, whether the wearing of a cross, the taking of a beating, or departure on an enforced pilgrimage. Even those condemned to death were expected to show their submission. After being compelled to walk to the stake or gallows in a white shift, clutching a candle of penitence, they were offered the last rites – one final opportunity to submit to the Church in whose name they were being killed.

      The Inquisition succeeded in the short term. Orthodoxy was stamped back onto the towns of the Languedoc, and rural communities slowly gave up their heretical ways. Die-hard Cathars melted away into the towns of Germany and the mountains of the Savoy, leaving behind only the crenellated ruins that still litter the region. The repression arguably generated considerably more heresy than it ever destroyed, for the refugees maintained a tradition of dissent that would eventually fuel the Protestant Reformation; but the effect of their departure was to defuse the crisis that had brought the Inquisition into being.

      Its techniques would not come to an end however. A brood of baby inquisitions would now hatch from its belly as the kings and nobles of Europe realized just how useful the machinery devised by Pope Gregory IX and his successors could be. The Spanish Inquisition has entered history as its truest successor, thanks to the cruelty of its fifteenth-century anti-Jewish persecutions and its more recent activities on Monty Python’s Flying Circus; but it was neither the first nor the most influential of the offspring. It was instead in the national courts of France and then Germany that the discomforting procedures pioneered by men like Conrad of Marburg would take deepest root.

      When King Louis IX agreed with Gregory IX to import Dominican inquisitors into his realm, it was not just the battle against heresy that was transformed. At a time when ordeals had just been abandoned, his own officials needed a new way of deciding cases, and they were soon taking great leaves from the books of the Dominican inquisitors. It was not long before witnesses and defendants were forced to answer questions on oath. In 1254, two years after Pope Innocent IV had authorized the use of torture, Louis followed suit in that regard as well. Like the papal tribunals, his courts would always try to strike a happy medium between maximal pain and minimal bloodshed. Water torture, sleep deprivation, and prolonged isolation were always the most popular methods. Some courts preferred to insert hot eggs under suspects’ armpits. The strappado, a rope-and-pulley apparatus used to raise and drop a suspect from the roof, would become ubiquitous.

      But all the cross-fertilization had a paradoxical effect. As lessons derived from the papal Inquisition fortified France’s royal courts the kingdom was becoming one of the most organized states in Europe, but the same process made those courts increasingly likely

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