LITMIR.BIZ

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and condemn themselves’ had led him to encourage a man’s delusions – and then to conclude that they were true.

      The progress of inquisitorial procedures through German-speaking central Europe was more uneven than in France, but they would become just as dominant. The execution of the heir to the Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1268^* saw the region dissolve into a collection of several hundred more or less independent towns and principalities however, and older rituals lingered in many areas long after they had disappeared in others. Some jurisdictions required, for example, that a murder victim’s corpse be borne into court by chanting relatives and assume formal responsibility for prosecuting its killers. A variation on the same theme saw the deceased’s hand severed and given to the defendant who, clad in a loincloth, would have to hold it and assert innocence three times. If the judge detected sufficient signs of discomfort, in either the defendant or the hand, guilt would be established.

      Judgment in Germany also retained some notably eccentric features. Judges took their seats clutching unsheathed swords and, after proceedings had been called to order three times by a bailiff, the defendant would recite a confession or request an acquittal. It made no difference which. The judges were formally required to have already decided their verdict, and they would follow up the plea by unfurling and reciting a previously prepared decision. If they had elected to convict, the senior of them would snap his wand of office, toss it to his feet, and pronounce the condemned person’s doom. ‘Your life is over,’ he would roar, as a muffled church-bell tolled. ‘There is no place on this earth for you any more, and in breaking this wand I also break the tie between you and the human race. Only with God may you still find mercy. Woe upon you here! Woe! Woe!’ The clerk would add three more woes. So too would the bailiff. And when the woeing was over, the prisoner’s theoretical expulsion was made practical, as he or she was staked through the heart, burned on a stake, pulped with the rim of a large cartwheel, or strangled from a gallows.

      The decentralization meant that German courts would be typified by a relatively freewheeling attitude towards legal technicalities. Far from mitigating the harshness of inquisitorial procedure, however, the flexibility generally made it even more deadly. German judges often enjoyed a particularly broad discretion to pursue obsessions, whether their own or those of their political masters, and all manner of blameless defendants would feel their wrath over the years. Some of the worst injustices came from one particularly dark corner of German jurisprudence: the Jewish ritual murder trial.

      The myth that Jews were in the habit of slaughtering young Christians was not born in Germany. The allegation was first recorded in Norwich in 1144, and similar accusations sparked off bloody pogroms in England and France throughout the 1200s. It was only the wholesale expulsion of Jews from both countries (in 1290 and 1306 respectively) that pushed the epicentres of hatred towards Spain and central Europe. But fear and resentment spiralled as the refugees moved and, at a time when the courtroom was becoming the sharp end of political power, Germany’s inquisitors were soon ensuring that both lodged deep within the German body politic.

      Their modus operandi is exemplified by a 1476 case that arose out of the Bishop of Regensburg’s discovery that a tortured Jew in Trent had confessed to murdering a Christian child in his diocese. He turned immediately to the local magistrates and in cahoots with the region’s duke, they swiftly itemized the property of the city’s richest Jews. Seventeen were arrested. Although the supposed victim was identified in only the vaguest terms, the judges then drew up a list of twenty-five questions that included the following:

      Which Jews brought and purchased the child? Who tortured him? How much money did each Jew give to participate? What was the blood used for? How were the needles used? How were the pincers used? Why was a handkerchief tied around the child’s throat? How was the foreskin on the penis cut off and which Jews cut off the penis and what was done with it? Which Jewesses knew about this and what had they said?

      The men, weighed down with stones, were raised and dropped by the rope of a strappado as each question was asked. Within two weeks, six had confessed to the imaginary murder.

      The inquisitorial system could also create not just crimes, but entire superstitions. One of the most chilling cases of all, which is also the earliest to be fully recorded, illustrates the process with graphic clarity. In March 1470, workers restoring the charnel house of the small Black Forest town of Endingen reported the discovery of four skeletons, two of which were missing their skulls. It was just a month before Easter, never a high point for Judaeo–Christian harmony in the Middle Ages, and the presence of stray bones in the ossuary sparked panic. Someone recalled that, eight years before, Elias the Jew had sheltered a destitute family, and he and his two brothers were swiftly arrested and subjected to repeated sessions on the strappado. Within days, all had accepted not only that they had murdered the beggars, but also that they had beheaded two children and bathed in their blood.

      The interrogations were recorded as they took place, and it is that of Mercklin, questioned after both his brothers had given in, which is the most haunting. He began defiantly, asking why he had to say anything at all if his interrogators already knew him to be guilty. They explained that they wanted to hear the truth from his mouth. Torture soon broke him, but after he confessed he was asked why he and his brothers had drained their victims’ blood. It was a question too far. He had no idea what his tormentors wanted him to say, and the desperation in his voice, as he trawled through their prejudices while the strappado was hoisted and released, echoes down the centuries.

      To that he answered in many words, saying at first that Jews need Christian blood because it has great healing power. We would not be satisfied with this answer and told him that he was lying, that we knew why they need it because his brother Eberlin had told us already. To this Mercklin said that Jews need Christian blood for curing epilepsy. But we…would not be satisfied with the answer. Mercklin then said further that Jews need Christian blood for its taste because they themselves stink. But we would not be satisfied with the answer and told him that he was lying, and must tell us the truth, because his brother Eberlin told us a different story; now he must also tell us the truth. To this he answered badly that he wanted to tell us the truth, that he saw it cannot be otherwise…but that Jews need Christian blood [as a holy oil] for circumcision.

      It was, at last, the answer that the magistrates wanted and, as was routine for capital offenders in early modern Germany, the brothers were stripped, wrapped in cowhides, dragged to the stake by their ankles, and burned alive.

      The punishment was – in extremely relative terms – a mild one. A magistrate elsewhere in Germany might have compounded the humiliation by binding them in pigskin. If they had been thieves, they might have been made to wear hats filled with hot pitch before being hanged. One of the most unpleasant penalties was the one recorded in the adjoining woodcut – involving suspension by the heels between two hungry dogs. But even if the inquisitors of Endingen were not quite as brutal as they might have been, the process that had preceded the penalty was certainly inventive. For it did not so much reaffirm an existing superstition as conjure one into existence. Mercklin’s first answers had regurgitated myths that were common by the 1470s. The notion that human blood could cure epilepsy was so widely held that Germans, regardless of religious belief, would line up to drink thimblefuls of it at public beheadings – until well into the 1800s. The foetor judaicus had been troubling Christian nostrils for centuries, and Freiburg’s councillors had cited Jews’ murderous personal hygiene problems as a reason to expel them as far back as 1401. Mercklin’s final explanation seems, however, to have appeared in writing for the very first time at Endingen.

      Quite where it came from is unknown. The focus on foreskins might conceivably have been inspired by Catherine of Siena, recently canonized on the strength of a dream that Christ had given her one, by way of a ring of flesh to wear on her finger.^* Psychohistorians have, as might be imagined, come up with considerably more involved theories. But whatever the myth’s source, it would endure. The brothers’ confessions were quickly transmitted to other towns along the Rhine, and a link between circumcision and bloodlust very soon became part of the canon of German Judaeophobia. Within a month, four Jewish men in nearby Pforzheim were executed after confessing that they too had

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