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Title: The medieval Inquisition: A study in religious persecution
Author: Gorman, Charles
Language: English
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INQUISITION ***
THE MEDIEVAL INQUISITION
THE MEDIEVAL INQUISITION
A STUDY IN RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
BY
CHARLES T. GORHAM,
_Author of “The Spanish Inquisition,” etc._
ISSUED FOR THE NATIONALIST ASSOCIATION, LIMITED
LONDON:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.4
1918
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE MORAL CONDITION OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH
PAGE
Simony 7
Clerical Celibacy 12
CHAPTER II
A CRUSADE AGAINST CHRISTIANS
Religious Persecution 27
CHAPTER III
THE FOUNDING, CONSTITUTION, AND PRACTICE OF
THE INQUISITION
The Inquisitorial Method 37
Evidence 39
The Defence 41
Sentence 42
Confiscation 45
Relaxation and the Stake 47
CHAPTER IV
HOW THE INQUISITION OVERRAN EUROPE
The South of France 49
Northern France 54
Aragon and Castile 57
Italy 58
Bosnia 63
Germany 64
Bohemia 68
The Netherlands 70
The Spiritual Franciscans 78
CHAPTER V
MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES
Political Heresy 82
The Templars 83
Joan of Arc 85
Sorcery and Magic 86
Intellect and Faith 94
Censorship of Books 97
The Greek Church 98
Indulgences and Simony 99
CHAPTER VI
THE GENTLE ART OF WHITEWASHING
Bibliography 121
THE MEDIEVAL INQUISITION
CHAPTER I
THE MORAL CONDITION OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH
Although it has been said of human nature that the more it changes the
more it is the same thing, it is yet true that at different epochs it is
actuated by widely different ideas. The underlying passions are the
same, but the forces evoking them vary so greatly that sometimes, as in
considering the history of the Middle Ages, we seem to be concerned with
beings from another planet. One of the most powerful of these forces is
religion; and, though religion in the abstract is assumed to bring out
all that is best in human nature, it has in the past only too frequently
appealed to and stimulated its baser elements. The evil is due partly to
erroneous religious teaching, but probably still more to the obstinate
imperfection of the material on which religion has to work. The vast
majority of human beings are even now incapable of appreciating and
practising an absolutely pure religion, and probably no such religion
has ever yet had a fair trial. Dogmatic systems there have been in
abundance, but these are not to be identified with religion. It has been
one of the most serious drawbacks to the claims of historic Christianity
that, disregarding the spirit of its own moral precepts, it has treated
religion as a mere system of belief and ceremonial observance, which has
defeated the object it was intended to promote.
In two respects organized Christianity has been a huge mistake. It has
misunderstood the nature of the salvation it proffered, representing it
as rescue from endless physical torment in another state of existence
instead of moral victory in this. It has made an assumed correctness of
intellectual belief instead of right conduct the condition of this
salvation, with the inevitable consequence that ceremony has usurped the
place of virtue, and religion has become a matter of externals. And its
claim to Divine inspiration and support led naturally to a demand for
obedience so complete that no room was left for liberty of opinion and
mental expansion. The claim to Divine inspiration involved the existence
of a spiritual hierarchy with ever-growing demands and ever-increasing
power. Refusal to obey these demands necessarily implied disbelief in
the doctrines underlying them, of which doctrines the hierarchy was the
sole expositor. Thus every opinion which deviated from the authorized
view became heretical, and, heresy being an impious opposition to the
Divine will and to all that was good and true, deserved the severest
repression. From this dogmatic standard, which the ignorant were unable
to question, arose that terrible system of religious persecution which
has covered organized Christianity with indelible shame. The present
inquiry is not concerned with the truth or falsehood of the Church’s
theological basis, but only with its effects. The general conditions of
the Middle Ages being what they were, those effects were in a sense
inevitable, and the moral condemnation which must be visited upon the
medieval Church applies less to individuals than to the system which
produced them--a system which was incompatible not only with the rights
of individuals, but with the progress of humanity in civilization and
happiness.
What, then, was the moral condition during the Middle Ages of the
organization which made these extravagant claims to supremacy? To us who
live in the twentieth century it may appear very plain that priestly
domination could not be favourable to improvement in morals or in
knowledge. Prevent people from thinking, and you prevent them from
improving. They lose the desire to improve; they become incapable of
improvement; they neither know nor care for the pleasures of knowledge;
they relapse into a state resembling that of animals. Can it be supposed
that this has no effect upon their morals? And the class which puts
forward the claims in question becomes equally debased. Selfishness,
ignorance, and cruelty become as marked in the shepherds as in the
flocks they are supposed to lead, with the additional vice of a
tyrannical arrogance born of class privilege and the claim to superhuman
authority.
The religious extortion that went on impoverished the people and
demoralized the clergy. After King John’s surrender to the Pope, England
was bled for the benefit of foreign ecclesiastics to the extent of
thrice the income of the Crown. Throughout Europe the administration of
justice was shockingly corrupt, and was not improved by the Papal
practice of granting letters authorizing the exercise of judicial
functions by any one who could pay the fees. Not only were these letters
frequently forged, but it was easy for unprincipled persons to pretend
that they possessed them, and such was the danger of raising objections
that few of the victims dared to dispute their validity. In Rome itself
there was a factory for the production of these interesting forgeries;
but, though it was suppressed by Innocent III, the practice continued,
and to the people the consequences were the same whether the letters
were genuine or false. With such a system it is not surprising that the
Bishops fleeced their own flocks with little scruple.
Excommunication was imposed for trifling offences; but, however
unjustly, the victim had to pay for being reconciled to holy Church. The
magnificent abbeys and cathedrals which are the glories of architecture
were to some extent an expression of religious faith, but even more of
the clerical pride which reared them with money exacted from the poor.
Preaching was almost wholly neglected, and this was one of the reasons
why heresy became formidable. Parish priests could not preach without
special licence from the Bishops whose prerogative preaching was, and by
whom it was neglected because they were engrossed with worldly cares and
pleasures and warlike duties. The Lord Bishop was first and foremost a
man of war, especially in the thirteenth century. A story is told about
the Bishop of Beauvais, one of the most ruthless of these warriors for
Christ, who, when captured by the English, complained to the Pope that
his privileges as a Churchman had been violated. In reply to the
remonstrance of His Holiness, Richard I sent him the coat of mail in
which the Bishop had been captured, with the Scriptural inquiry: “Know
whether it be thy son’s coat or no.” Benefices were openly sold, or
bestowed upon children, seven years being the minimum age fixed by some
Popes for the clerical function. The abuses that grew out of the system
of pluralities, the exactions connected with tithes, confessions,
absolutions, marriages, funerals, were endless, a large part of the
Church’s wealth being derived from legacies which the fear of hell
prompted the dying to leave at death or frequently to hand over during
life.
In 1170 a Papal decree was issued that wills were invalid unless made in
the presence of a parish priest, and notaries were sometimes
excommunicated for failure to comply with this condition. Nor did the
dead escape the clerical maw. It was customary to leave money to the
Church for masses for the repose of the soul, and to present oblations
at the funeral. The corpse was the property of the parish, but the
priest was often deprived of his privileges by a neighbouring monastery
having induced the dying man to bequeath to it his remains. Hence arose
the most unseemly squabbles for possession of the body--a rivalry
further complicated by the rise of the Mendicant Orders and their bitter
struggles for fees.
Even greater social evils resulted from the immunities from secular law
which the clergy succeeded in gaining. The first of these was that
worthless men were attracted to the Church, and did as they pleased
under the shelter of its privileges. Malefactors habitually pleaded
clerical rights; the Church, in a spirit of comradeship worthy of a
better cause, as regularly took up their defence. Crime flourished, and
the community suffered. Innocent III reinstated a Bishop of
exceptionally bad character who had been imprisoned for rebellion
against the King of Denmark, and decided that priests could not be
arrested by laymen and brought before the episcopal court even when
detected in gross crime. Under these conditions it was almost impossible
for laymen to obtain justice, whether in regard to offences against
person or offences against property. And, the clergy being the only
educated class, their opportunities for exploiting the popular ignorance
were abundant and fully utilized.
Monasteries were the fruit of good intentions, but, in spite of
occasional examples to the contrary, soon became degraded to an
extraordinary degree. Rome could easily be bribed to grant exemption
from the jurisdiction of the Bishops, and the liberty of monks and nuns
degenerated into the foulest licence. The abodes of religion were
feudal castles, in which the monks lived as riotously as the barons, and
waged private war with equal ferocity. As for the nunneries, many of
them were notoriously no better than brothels. With these varied
attractions, it is not surprising that the lawless found in the monastic
life a congenial refuge; and many a robber baron and many a criminal
temporarily weary of crime discovered a safe and easy way of gratifying
his untamed passions. So little were the obligations of honesty observed
that within the monasteries themselves the inmates had to take special
precautions against theft by their fellows, each monk having to keep a
wary eye on his own spoons, dishes, and bedclothes. The holy tramps who
wandered about selling false relics and working false miracles became so
great a nuisance that they were sometimes killed without mercy when
detected in their frequent crimes.
The system of indulgences so carefully worked out by the Church produced
the most various results throughout Europe. A death-bed gift to the
Church atoned for an evil life; trifling religious observances were
thought to secure not only remission of the pangs of Purgatory, but
forgiveness of all sins committed after baptism. In short, all sin was
condoned on the most favourable terms, and eternal salvation purchased
for the price of a pair of boots. The bones or the dead bodies of saints
were held to protect believers from all ills, and to ensure prosperity;
even a single glance at the image of St. Christopher preserving one from
disease or sudden death for the rest of the day. Some of the beliefs
connected with the worship of the sacred wafer reveal a credulity which
only carefully-fostered ignorance could render possible. A specimen
wafer placed in a beehive to check disease among the bees was so highly
appreciated by those intelligent insects that they built a little
chapel around it, with windows, roof, and bell-tower all complete, and
an altar inside, on which they reverently placed the wafer. A woman who
crumbled a wafer over her cabbages to protect them from caterpillars was
at once punished by incurable paralysis.
_Simony._
The scandals connected with the sale of indulgences are too well known
to need description, but the universal prevalence of simony is less
generally realized. Simony is defined as “giving or receiving, or
intending to give or receive, anything temporal for anything
spiritual.”[1] The term is derived from Simon Magus, who is stated in
_Acts_ viii, 18, 19, to have offered St. Peter money for the privilege
of communicating the Holy Ghost. This abuse formed one of the great
scandals in the Church, especially in the thirteenth century, and was so
deeply rooted that the efforts of reforming Pontiffs like Gregory VII
produced little result. Less conscientious Popes were such notorious
offenders that the venality of the Papal court became a byword, and some
vicars of Christ amassed enormous private fortunes by this dubious
means.
Simony was a heresy which came under the jurisdiction of the
Inquisition, and could not long have flourished had that efficient body
determined to stamp it out. There is no record that the Inquisition ever
even undertook a prosecution for simony; it was too profitable to the
Roman Curia. From the highest to the lowest the Church was infected with
this vice: there was scarcely a church in Christendom free from it, and
Pope John XXII drew up a regular scale of absolutions for the most
moderate fees. In order to pay the expenses of his soldiers and of his
building operations, Boniface XI once dismissed suddenly all the
prelates at his Court and many others, and then sold their places to the
highest bidders, with the result that some of the ejected Bishops
wandered about in a state of starvation. Newly appointed prelates were
bled freely, and if the demands were not met they became simple priests
once more. Boniface appointed as Bishops the men who were willing to pay
the most liberally, archbishoprics commanding the high figure of 60,000
to 80,000 florins. Yet one of the great questions debated in the
thirteenth century was the question whether it was possible for the Pope
to commit simony! Every one knew that many Popes actually did commit an
offence of which the evil effects were far reaching. If the love of
money is not the root of all evil, it is the root of much, and its
effects in the sphere of religion are peculiarly deplorable. The Papal
Court was filled with a swarm of ecclesiastics greedy for preferment by
any means whatever. When they obtained it they at once set to work to
recoup themselves for the time spent and the bribes they had to give, by
extorting money from their flocks, to the complete neglect of their
spiritual duties. In the administration of justice ecclesiastics
acquitted the guilty for bribes, and trumped up charges against the
innocent, which had to be compounded for cash. A bishop who resided in
his diocese was the exception that proved the rule. Men preferred to
live under the tyranny of the baron rather than under the dangerous
protection of the Church.
Money being the real qualification for the ministry of the Gospel, the
priests were generally as illiterate as they were immoral. “They haunt
the taverns and brothels, consuming time and substance in eating,
drinking, and gambling; they quarrel, fight, and blaspheme, and hasten
to the altar from the embraces of their concubines.”[2] The higher
clergy, who could readily purchase exemptions, considered themselves
free to indulge in every kind of excess; the monks were licentious and
unruly vagabonds, who carefully avoided keeping their vows; the
mendicants, who pretended to greater strictness, gave themselves up to
every kind of fleshly indulgence; the morals of nunneries were such that
to join one was the same thing as becoming a public prostitute. A Jew is
said to have become convinced that Christianity must be of God, since it
continued to exist in spite of the wickedness of the clergy. The visions
of St. Birgitta and the vehement warnings of St. Catherine of Siena were
fruitless to stem the torrent of iniquity. Nearly the whole Church being
in this condition, reform from within was hopeless, as indeed was stated
in 1437 by a Dominican bishop. Exaggeration may be suspected, but that
it was not easy to exaggerate the following incident will show. “In 1459
there died at Arras at the age of eighty Nicaise le Vasseur, canon and
head of the Chapter of Arras. He not only had daughters and committed
incest with them, but also with a granddaughter whom he had by one of
them. Yet so blunted was the moral sense of Church and people that, as
we are told, this monster officiated _très honorablement_ in Divine
service on all feasts and holidays, and the only comment of the
chronicler is that he did it most becomingly. When in 1474 news of the
death of Sixtus IV was received in Rome with a pæan of joy, people
commented not so much upon his selling benefices to the highest bidder
and his other devices for extorting money as upon the manner in which he
rewarded the boys who served his unnatural lusts by granting to them
rich bishoprics and archbishoprics.”[3] When Pope Alexander VI was
reproached with Papal connivance with crime, he is said to have made the
cynical reply: “God does not desire the death of a sinner, but that he
should pay, and live.”[4]
That the Church should have made its principal aim correctness of belief
(or rather obedience to its authority), and purity of life a secondary
consideration, involved the policy of religious persecution
systematically followed by the Inquisition. Except as a source of
revenue, crime was of little consequence. Virtuous heretics were
exterminated, and the guilty orthodox absolved from the worst crimes, in
the name of Christ. A Flemish chronicler relates in 1379 “that it would
be impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries,
blasphemies, adulteries, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thieving,
robbery, whoredom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the poor,
drunkenness, and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with
the fact that in the territory of Ghent within the space of ten months
there occurred no less than 1,400 murders committed in bagnios,
brothels, gambling houses, taverns, and other similar places.”[5] In the
Italian Church there was no devotion, in the laity neither faith nor
morals. Factions filled the streets with blood, the roads were closed by
robbers, the seas swarmed with pirates. “Parents slew with rejoicing
their children who chanced to be of the opposite faction.”[6] Æneas
Sylvius wrote in 1453: “Whether I look upon the deeds of princes or of
prelates I find that all have sunk, all are worthless.... Execration and
falsehood and slaughter and theft and adultery are spread among you, and
you add blood to blood..... There is no shame in crime, for you sin so
openly and shamelessly that you seem to take delight in it.”[7]
The flagrant immorality of many of the Bishops, and the frequency with
which they took part in war, were even in rude times deemed unbecoming
to their profession; but the difficulty of getting them punished by any
ecclesiastical court was so great that in most cases the offenders could
continue to tread the primrose path of dalliance without fear of
retribution. About the worst of these clerical rakes was the Archbishop
of Besançon, who in 1198 was accused of perjury, simony, and incest. He
was formally indicted by his Chapter, but the Pope, on the authority of
the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery, charitably dismissed
the charge with a caution. The hardened old sinner continued his gay
career for sixteen years, but was at length driven from his see by the
townspeople. It took ten years to get rid of another prelate, a Bishop
of Toul, and a few years later he was killed by his uncle in revenge for
a murder. This gentleman’s favourite mistress was a daughter of his own,
the mother being a nun.
Whatever were the causes of this appalling state of things, it is
difficult to reconcile it with the claim that the Christian Church is a
Divine institution. Yet it would not be true to say that no virtue
existed. Even in the Church there were good and sincere men who strove
earnestly to check the tide of iniquity. And those whom the Church
hounded to death far surpassed it in purity of life. The poor persecuted
heretics were noted for their blameless conduct, their singular
industry, their self-sacrifice and endurance, which formed a lesson to
the orthodox. “Ignorant and toiling men and women--peasants, mechanics,
and the like--dimly conscious that the system of society was wrong,
that the commands of God were perverted or neglected, that humanity was
capable of higher development if it could but find and follow the Divine
Will; striving, each in his humble sphere, to solve the inscrutable and
awful problems of existence, to secure in tribulation his own salvation,
and to help his fellows in the arduous task--these forgotten martyrs of
the truth drew from themselves alone the strength which enabled them to
dare and to endure martyrdom.”[8] The earnest and devoted ministers of
the Church, the virtuous and humble believers among the laity, were as
drops in the ocean of evil; and it was popularly believed that
Antichrist was ruling in the world, and that the awful Day of Judgment
was at hand.
_Clerical Celibacy._
The great question whether priests should or should not be permitted to
marry caused the deepest agitation in the Church for many hundreds of
years. As early as the fourth and fifth centuries the Church decided it
in the negative, but this and many later prohibitions were nullified by
the liberty which it allowed in practice. The early Church had so great
a horror of the matrimonial state that some theologians seriously
doubted whether the salvation of married persons came within the
possibilities of the Divine scheme.
During the eleventh century the Church succeeded, after long and violent
struggles, in enforcing upon its priesthood at least a nominal celibacy,
but it did not succeed in improving the ecclesiastical morals. As the
celibate party were the more fanatical, and usually applied to priests’
wives the term “concubines,” it was not easy to distinguish lawful or
_quasi_-lawful unions from illicit connections. Anyhow, when priests
found they could not marry, they generally had no hesitation in taking
to themselves concubines, or sometimes a succession of paramours--a
custom so commonly recognized that a layman confessing an illicit amour
was forbidden to name his erring partner because it would give the
priest an opportunity to exploit her frailty. Thus illicit connections
on the part of priests were winked at, while marriage was forbidden--an
excellent example of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. This
eccentric notion of morality led to horrible abuses. Pope Alexander II
declined, in 1064, to deprive of communion a priest who had committed
adultery with the wife of his father, and a little later reduced the
penance imposed on another priest found guilty of incestuous relations
with his own mother. The institution of matrimony afforded to the
priesthood perpetual opportunities for exacting money. The remotest
degree of blood relationship was found to be perilous, but ingenuity and
cash overcame the difficulty. Bishops did not scruple to receive a
tribute known as the “cullagium,” which enabled a “celibate” priest to
solace his holy duties with wife or concubine. The difficulty remained
acute until the fifteenth century, human nature having proved as
rebellious as ever. It was only in 1414 that it was finally settled by
the Council of Constance, the rigid moralists who formed that conclave
being accompanied by an army of prostitutes. The attempt to enforce
clerical celibacy, or, rather, the rule which required its observance,
was a chief contributing cause of the scandalous state of ecclesiastical
morals in the Middle Ages, as, indeed, is expressly stated by Alain
Chartier, a French chronicler of the early fifteenth century.
In those Anglo-Saxon times, in which romancers have discovered a wealth
of simple virtue, clerical chastity had many chinks in its armour. A
Saxon chronicler of the eleventh century attributes the ruin of the
kingdom to the vices of the clergy having drawn upon it the wrath of
God. It was a common practice for priests to put away their wives, and
live in open adultery with other women. A century later no improvement
was perceptible, many of the clergy having two wives, and changing them
at pleasure. An instance is recorded of the Abbess of Avesbury, whose
recklessness in having three children procured her a life-pension, but
was surpassed by the laxity of her nuns, who were dismissed from their
“abode of love.” Giraldus Cambrensis relates that nearly all parish
priests in England and Wales had companions who were indifferently
regarded as wives or concubines. In Ireland matters were equally bad,
the chief blame being naturally visited on the less guilty women. The
condition of Scotland may be imagined from a single instance in the
sixteenth century. A certain Prior--afterwards Bishop of Moray--once had
a pleasant conversation with his gentlemen regarding the number of their
mistresses, and chuckled in glee over the fact that, though the youngest
man present, he had outdone them all. He rejoiced in twelve mistresses,
of whom seven were the wives of other men. His achievement paled before
that of Cardinal Pier-Leone, who used to make his visitations as Papal
Legate accompanied by a concubine and by his children--who were also his
sister’s.
Horrors like these were, it may be hoped, exceptional, but there is a
vast mass of evidence proving that society as a whole, and the clerical
element in particular, was morally in a condition that can scarcely be
matched in history. A French writer of the nineteenth century, Abbé
Helsen, alludes to the “ordinary custom” that when a priest’s servant
“becomes pregnant and cannot be saved by a prudent absence he dismisses
her, and takes another, perhaps younger and more attractive.”[9] In
many convents the nuns abandoned themselves “to the most hideous
licentiousness--those who were good-looking prostituting themselves for
hire; those who were not so fortunate hiring men to gratify their
passions, while the older ones acted as procuresses.”[10] In Spain,
according to Pelayo, a fourteenth-century writer, the illegitimate
children of priests were almost as numerous as those of the laity. Of
Avignon, Petrarch says that “chastity was a reproach and licentiousness
a virtue.” The aged priests were fouler in their wickedness than the
younger, while with the Pontiff the vilest crimes were pastimes. And
Petrarch claims to tell only part of the truth. Of all European
countries the same story is told. Details concerning the French clergy
of the eighth century are “unfit for publication” in the twentieth. In
nunneries infanticide was common, and priests had to be forbidden to
have mothers, aunts, or sisters living in their houses. The Archdeacon
of Salzburg in 1175 lamented bitterly his complete failure to reform the
clergy or prevent the ordination of priests who continued to live in
adultery with the wives of other men; while four centuries later the
German prelates were vigorously assailed for allowing such foulness as
still existed in the Church. They excused themselves by pointing to the
example set by the Pope. A specially culpable Spanish priest was charged
in 1535 with blasphemy, theft, cheating, seduction, brothel-haunting,
and other offences. He did not go unpunished. He was fined two ducats,
the costs of his trial, and thirty days’ seclusion! A protest was made
by the Senate of Rome in 1538 against the reforming efforts of Pius V on
the ground that the compulsory celibacy of priests would make it
impossible for the citizens to preserve the virtue of their wives and
daughters. Peter Cantor and others in the twelfth century deplored the
moral superiority of the laity; the same thing had been said in England
as far back as the times of St. Dunstan; and the Beggars’ Petition of
1535 showed that the anomaly still existed more than four hundred years
later.
It has been hinted that the Church made earnest efforts to reform its
own members. But this is true only so far as its reputable heads were
concerned. Marriage at its best had a taint of sin; its violation was a
trifle; but the fulfilment of religious vows and observances was an
obligation to which everything else must yield. To St. Peter Damiani
marriage was a “frivolous and unmeaning ceremony”; an irregular
celebration of Mass was a “horrible crime.” Sexual licence was a
necessary evil, of much less importance than an infraction of
ecclesiastical laws. Virtue indeed was dangerous when women were
occasionally burnt because they refused to become the victims of
priestly lust.[11] So late as 1801 it was argued in a tract published at
Warsaw that marriage is incestuous and schismatic, and therefore worse
than simple licentiousness.[12] Six centuries earlier the German Church
had been described by Pope Gregory as “abandoned to lasciviousness,
gluttony, and all manner of filthy living,” the clergy “committing
habitually wickedness which laymen would abhor.”[13]
But the Church did its utmost to stamp out the evil! It did nothing of
the kind. Its attempts to reform its servants were occasional,
mischievously lenient, and sometimes insincere. Priests, being human
beings, were not naturally worse than other human beings. But they
formed part of a system which heaped upon them every kind of privilege
and exposed them to every variety of temptation. A Bishop of Lausanne
who in the thirteenth century tried his hand at reform had to flee for
his life; another Bishop in Rome was murdered. In fifteenth-century
Germany the Bishop of Paderborn strove desperately for seven years to
purify the monasteries. After various attempts had been made to poison
him, he was compelled to give up a task which the example of the Vicar
of Christ made hopeless. Similar efforts made by St. Charles Borromeo in
Milan ended in his failure and narrow escape from martyrdom. In England
Cardinal Wolsey’s attempt to enforce a reforming Bull from Rome was
frustrated by the notoriety of his own vices. The clergy in the public
estimation were given over to a reprobate mind; not only were they
immoral, but they squeezed from the people the money which the Pope
exacted from them. In 1529 a bill was passed in the House of Lords for
the reformation of the clergy, who showed their appreciation of it by a
determined opposition.
According to Dean Milman, clerical depravity was general in the
thirteenth century throughout all the principal European countries. A
remarkable number of ecclesiastics were accused at the visitation of the
Archbishop of Rouen in 1248 and 1249, but the tenderness of the Church
was satisfied with light punishments, or no punishment at all, for
serious crimes, while the imaginary sins of the heretic were visited
with the most painful of all forms of death. Nor did the Archbishop’s
rigour extend to the worst offences of the lower clergy. Milman refers
to the case of the Bishop of Liège, who at a public banquet boasted that
in less than two years he had had fourteen children.[14] It is related
that when it was decreed that priests should dismiss their concubines
Pope Innocent ordered the command to be withdrawn, as there was no sin
in doing what was done by all priests.[15] In the thirteenth century the
Council of Ratisbon lamented the scarcity of priests who led good lives,
and so late as 1832 the Archbishop of Malines found it necessary to make
a similar complaint.[16]
Not only were the Church’s thunders ineffective because the higher
clergy could escape them, but the reasons for them failed, even in the
Middle Ages, to command universal assent. Sin was condemned rather
because it violated an ordinance than because it broke a Divine law, or
because it injured society. Some canons of 1476 protested against
crimes, not because of their wickedness, but because they might deprive
the clergy of the privilege of exemption from the Bishops’ jurisdiction.
A scuffle between three priests over a harlot that took place in a house
of ill-fame was reprehended, not because of its disgraceful nature, but
because it occurred on Ash Wednesday. The solicitation by priests of
female penitents was a serious matter for the holy men if committed
during the actual confession, otherwise it was a trifle. It was more
convenient to punish the women. As late as 1707 the Sorbonne decided
that if a woman insisted on denouncing a guilty priest she committed a
mortal sin. Usually the Church contended that the personal character of
the priest had nothing to do with the sanctity of his office--a doctrine
of which unscrupulous men took full advantage. Thus was evolved a
standard of morality which bore no relation to moral truth, and readily
lent itself to perversion.
For many hundreds of years the Church was an open sore, which made
thought a crime, purity an eccentricity, and progress a dream. From this
festering mass heresy was born, crucified, and rose again.
CHAPTER II
A CRUSADE AGAINST CHRISTIANS
Heresy in the Middle Ages differed in some respects from the heresy of
the earlier years of Christianity. It was less confined to scholars and
theologians; it originated among the people, who--poor, oppressed, and
helpless--turned in vain to the Church for assistance. And, instead of
being concerned with subtle points of theology, it was inspired mainly
by the iniquities of the ecclesiastical order. Simple men felt, by a
wholesome instinct, that an immoral life was inconsistent with the
function of leading them in the way of righteousness, and some of these
simple men began to inquire whether everything taught by the priesthood
was really true. This was one of the reasons why the lives of heretics
were generally purer than the lives of their oppressors. The mighty of
this world persecuted the heretic; the secular courts were severe, the
ecclesiastical tribunals were severer still; the main stream of public
opinion ran strongly against all innovation in religion. It is not,
therefore, to be supposed that the heretic became a voluntary outcast
from a love of danger, or for the sake of enjoying the pleasures of sin
for a season. The highest authorities in the Church admitted that heresy
was caused, though not justified, by the scandalous lives of her
ministers. When slaying heretics the Church should have remembered that
the chief culprit was herself.
Sharp controversies as to the efficacy of the Mass arose about the
middle of the eleventh century, and on this subject the Church showed
some vacillation. Its official doctrine was that the virtue of the
sacrament did not depend upon that of the ministrant. The contrary was,
however, asserted by Pope Nicholas II, and the Synod of Rome adopted a
canon forbidding any one to be present at a mass celebrated by a priest
known to be of loose morals. Gregory VII’s revival of this canon
produced great confusion, for virtuous priests were rare exceptions.
Against the official views the heretics consistently protested, but
hundreds of years elapsed before the professions and the conduct of the
clergy were brought into something like agreement.
In the South of France heresy, mainly of a Manichean or dualistic type,
took firm hold, probably because the great progress which had there been
made in civilization favoured independence of thought and a certain
indifference to the claims of sacerdotalism. St. Bernard (1060-1153)
may, like some other writers, have exaggerated the evil condition of the
Church, but it must have been under a cloud when he could write thus of
the Toulouse district: “The churches are without people, the people
without priests, the priests without the reverence due to them, and
Christians without Christ.... Men die in their sins, and their souls are
hurried to the dread tribunal neither reconciled by penance nor
fortified by the Holy Communion. The little ones of Christ are debarred
from life, since baptism is denied them. The voice of a single heretic
silences all those Apostolic and prophetic voices which have united in
calling all the nations into the Church of Christ.”[17] Heretics
appeared, founded sects, flourished for a time, and were ultimately
silenced. Henry of Lausanne, Arnold of Brescia, and the far more
influential Peter Waldo of Lyons, from whom the famous sect of
Waldenses took its rise, asserted that the power of absolution belonged
alone to good men, that the ministrations of sinful priests were
invalid, that the sacrament of penance was not the prerogative of the
clergy. They rejected indulgences and transubstantiation, forbade all
oaths and all means of self-defence, and held that every lie was a
mortal sin. These principles would have reduced the Church to poverty
and purity, both equally unwelcome. Most of the heretical sects held
such strict views of sexual relationships that there is probably very
little foundation for the charges of immorality which were freely
brought against them. In an extremely loose age they doubtless fell
something short of the moral ideal, but they were at least considerably
nearer to it than their persecutors. In the following terms an
Inquisitor testifies to their good conduct: “Heretics are recognizable
by their customs and speech, for they are modest and well-regulated.
They take no pride in their garments, which are neither costly nor vile.
They do not engage in trade, so as to avoid lies and oaths and frauds,
but live by their labour as mechanics--their teachers are cobblers. They
do not accumulate wealth, but are content with necessaries. They are
just, and temperate in meat and drink. They do not frequent taverns, or
dances, or other vanities. They restrain themselves from anger. They are
always at work; they teach and learn, and consequently pray but
little.”[18] This remarkable purity of life brought upon these poor
people the full fury of persecution. Virtue was an indication of heresy,
and one priest whose exhortations had weaned women from vain adornments
ran a serious risk of being burnt as a heretic.
The system of dualism known as Manichæism, a peculiar mixture of
Oriental and Christian elements, became popular through the influence of
the Cathari (“the pure”), who, even according to the testimony of their
enemy St. Bernard, lived a good and harmless life. The Church, however,
recognized no religion as true but its own, and the rapid growth of
Catharism stirred it to action of the most rigorous kind. All over
Europe the heretics were becoming numerous and influential, but it was
in the South of France, especially in the territories of the Counts of
Toulouse, that the smouldering embers burst into flame.
In 1178 Pope Alexander III proclaimed the first crusade against
Christians, which resulted in failure. Early in the thirteenth century
matters came to a climax. In an address to the Lateran Council Innocent
III had plainly asserted that “the corruption of the people has its
chief source in the clergy”; but, fearless as he was, he hesitated to
attempt the cleansing of the Augean stable, and adopted the simpler
method of trying to rid Christendom of the heretics who troubled its
serenity. Despite their active missionary labours, they lived with their
orthodox neighbours in a tolerant and friendly spirit, of which the
Church bitterly disapproved as being fatal to its exclusive claims.
Papal emissaries succeeded in getting the civil authorities, and
afterwards the Count of Toulouse, to promise the expulsion of heretics;
but the promises remained usually a dead letter, and the strength of the
heretics was shown by the fact that the tables were turned on the Bishop
of Carcassonne, who was expelled from the city for reprimanding his
heretical flock. A threatened crusade and vigorous mission work having
also failed, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, one of the most powerful
princes in Europe, was excommunicated. He made peace, and the curse was
lifted; but he failed to see the importance of the Papal point of view,
and obeyed it as little as possible. Unfortunately, the murder, in
January, 1208, of the Papal Legate, Peter of Castlenau, by a gentleman
of Raymond’s court, gave the Pope a pretext for sterner action. Raymond
was accused of being party to the crime (he was probably innocent), and
was excommunicated with greater solemnity than before. He submitted,
and, after being soundly flogged, was absolved.
This murder formed one of the principal reasons for the great crusade
which the Church was determined to go on with, though the Count’s
submission had deprived it of the official excuse. The passions of the
bigoted and the mercenary were successfully appealed to, and the most
appalling campaign in history was begun under the furious stimulation of
the Papal Legates. It was proposed to the inhabitants of Bezier that if
the chief heretics were expelled or given up the town would be spared.
To the special honour of the Catholic inhabitants, who lived in entire
peace with their heretical fellow townsmen, the two parties made common
cause and refused the terms, whereupon the town was stormed in July,
1209, and about 20,000 of the people massacred. In August Carcassonne, a
fortress of immense strength, was surrendered to the crusading army
commanded by the elder Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. By the end
of the autumn 500 towns and castles had been wrested from the grasp of
the heretics; and, considering their task almost completed, several of
the leaders withdrew, and the army was reduced to a small force obliged
to maintain itself by partizan fighting.
In the spring de Montfort was reinforced and captured many more towns,
the inhabitants being offered the choice of submission to Rome or the
stake. Hundreds of obscure enthusiasts embraced the heroic alternative,
often cheerfully leaping into the flames of their own accord. At Lavaur
in May, 1211, as many as 400 heretics are said to have been burnt in one
vast pyre, and the moral sensibilities of the age may be estimated from
the statement that this dreadful spectacle caused great rejoicing among
the Crusaders. The slackness of Count Raymond in persecuting his
subjects was not pleasing to the Church, and he was summoned to purge
himself from the suspicion of favouring heresy, and to submit
unreservedly to the Pope’s demands. He presented himself in the Church
of St. Gilles, Toulouse, with his guarantees in the confident hope of
full reconciliation, and was then told that, having neglected to fulfil
his promises to extirpate heresy, his submission could not be received.
The facts that the promises had been forced from him, and that it was
beyond his power to give them full effect, were not taken into account.
Raymond’s bitter tears, instead of arousing pity, were regarded as
further proof of his depravity, and renewed abasement led only to the
infliction of harsher terms. His capital city, Toulouse, was besieged in
1211, but offered so vigorous a resistance that the Crusaders received a
serious check, and a fresh excommunication was hurled at the unfortunate
Raymond for “persecuting” the soldiers of the Cross. The military
abilities of de Montfort, however, won so many successes as to arouse
the alarm of Pedro, King of Aragon; and the Pope, remembering that
Raymond had never been tried and condemned, began to suspect that there
might, after all, be some injustice in depriving him of nearly the whole
of his territory. His promise that the Count (who was an independent
Prince) should receive a fair trial was broken, in consequence of
innumerable letters written by Bishops enlarging on the benefits which
had already resulted from the Crusade, and urging its vigorous
prosecution. Pedro at length declared war against de Montfort, advanced
to the support of Raymond and his friends, and laid siege to Muret, ten
miles from Toulouse. Here a battle took place, with disastrous results
to the better cause. Pedro’s army was utterly routed, with a loss of
from 15,000 to 20,000 men, that of de Montfort’s forces being only
twenty. If these figures are correct, this must have been one of the
most remarkable victories on record. The Crusaders saw in their triumph
a visible mark of God’s approval of their cause, the prosperity of which
increased daily. Fresh hordes of Crusaders, greedy for plunder, swarmed
into the fair provinces of the south; their conquest was completed in
1213; Raymond was deposed, and de Montfort made lord of the land, the
territories in the Rhône district of South Eastern France being held by
the Church for the benefit of the younger Raymond. The youth, then only
eighteen years of age, went thither in 1216, and was received with
acclamations. All the south of France rose in revolt, and while de
Montfort was engaged in successfully subduing it he was suddenly
recalled West by tidings that Toulouse was again in rebellion. He began
the second siege with his usual vigour, but one summer day in 1218 was
killed by a stone hurled from a mangonel worked, it is said, by women.
His conquests went to pieces in the hands of his incapable son Amauri,
who, six years after his father’s death, assigned all his rights to the
King of France, and Raymond was confronted with another powerful enemy.
With the Pope he made terms that amounted to complete submission. Even
this did not seem to the Church sufficient compensation for his lack of
zeal in the prosecution of heresy, and in 1226 another crusade on a
great scale was organized, ostensibly for religious, but still more for
political, reasons. King Louis VIII marched to the south with a large
and splendid army, and laid siege to Avignon. Surprised by the strength
of its resistance and ill provided with food, he was about to abandon
the siege when the city surrendered. Louis’s march on Toulouse was
broken off for reasons not fully known, and he retired from the
campaign, dying of sickness in November, 1226, when on his way home.
In the following year the war went on with varying fortunes, and towards
its close both sides were anxious to terminate a conflict which had
lasted for nearly twenty years. Two years later Raymond agreed to hard
and humiliating terms, which involved the loss of two-thirds of his
great dominions, their reversion to the King of France, and an oath to
persecute heresy to the utmost of his power--concessions wrung from him
by the distracted condition of his realm and of his unfortunate people.
The way was left open to the Church to reap the fruits of victory, and
the Inquisition was set to work among the people who for so long had
bidden it defiance.
_Religious Persecution._
To what extent the spirit of persecution is sanctioned by the New
Testament is not very easy to determine. Giving all due weight to its
gentler precepts, it is unhappily true that passages which reflect more
than a tinge of the temper of intolerance are to be found with some
frequency in the New Testament, and very many injunctions to extreme
severity in the Old. It was inevitable that in rude ages the latter
should exert a more potent influence on human conduct than the former,
because they harmonized more completely with the existing tendencies of
human nature.
Until Christianity became the State religion of the Roman Empire the
persecuting spirit wrought comparatively little harm. When the Church
was weak it perceived the blessings of toleration; when the Church grew
powerful it held toleration to be sinful. Even Constantine’s severe
edicts do not appear to have resulted in much actual persecution, the
few cases which occurred in the fourth century being looked upon as
horrifying novelties. After that, however, the systematic repression of
heretical opinions became general, and was warmly advocated by even the
holiest doctors of the Church. Chrysostom and Augustine taught that
heresy must be suppressed, but did not recommend the infliction of
death. Jerome heartily approved the heretic being made to suffer
corporal death in order to secure the eternal welfare of his soul, and
the harsh laws of Theodosius doubtless represented a public opinion
which was ever becoming more rigid and dangerous. It is somewhat curious
that outrages upon the heterodox were, until the twelfth century,
committed more frequently by “orthodox” mobs than by the ecclesiastical
authorities--a fact which does not indicate a very effective teaching
influence on the part of the Church. When, at Cologne in 1145, some
Cathari were burnt despite the opposition of the clergy, St. Bernard,
though arguing that they should have been won over by reason, quoted,
with some inconsistency, St. Paul’s dictum that the monarch was the
instrument of God’s wrath upon him that doeth evil.
The duty of the Church remained uncertain till about the close of the
twelfth century. The incalculable mischief caused by certain passages in
a book believed to be Divine is exemplified by the decree of Lucius III
in 1184, which ordered heretics to be delivered to the secular arm for
punishment, and expressly quoted John xv, 6, as authority for the
infliction of death by fire. It “commanded that all potentates should
take an oath before their bishops to enforce the ecclesiastical laws
against heresy fully and efficaciously. Any refusal or neglect was to be
punished by excommunication, deprivation of rank, and incapacity to
hold other station, while in the case of cities they were to be
segregated and debarred from all commerce with other places. The Church
thus undertook to coerce the sovereign to persecution. It would not
listen to mercy, it would not hear of expediency. The monarch held his
crown by the tenure of extirpating heresy, of seeing that the laws were
sharp and were pitilessly enforced. Any hesitation was visited with
excommunication, and if this proved inefficacious his dominions were
thrown open to the first hardy adventurer, whom the Church would supply
with an army for his overthrow.”[19]
Burning alive was first legalized in 1197, but it was the Albigensian
Crusade which afforded the earliest opportunity on a great scale for the
working out of the principle of religious persecution. This principle
was gradually embodied first in the canon law and then in the secular
law of Europe. The Inquisition codified and collated the various
enactments into a logical system, which, having behind it the united
authority of Church and State, became an irresistible engine of
terrorism and tyranny.[20] The suppression of heresy was, indeed, the
paramount duty of every Christian to the full extent of his power. No
matter who was the guilty party--father, son, husband, wife, or
sister--each must be denounced for concealing heresy; there could be no
excuse. “It was an absolute rule that faith was not to be kept with
heretics. As Innocent III emphatically phrased it, ‘According to the
canons, faith is not to be kept with him who keeps not faith with God.’
No oath of secrecy, therefore, was binding in the matter of heresy, for
if one is faithful to a heretic he is unfaithful to God.”[21]
With teaching of this sort drilled into an ignorant and obedient people,
it is not surprising that the popular prejudice against religious
innovations was strong enough to make life in general very unpleasant
for any one who had a taste for independent thought. In our own day all
Reformed Churches unite in disclaiming the idea of persecution, but the
Church of Rome still accepts as its greatest authority St. Thomas
Aquinas, whose language on the subject is clear. To him heresy was the
greatest of all sins, and its repression was more than defensible--it
was a duty. To corrupt the faith is a greater wickedness than to debase
the coinage, and if coiners are executed much more should heretics be.
In its great charity the Church pardons the repentant heretic once, or
perhaps twice; but if he sins again he is not to be released from the
penalty of death. This became the settled policy and the unalterable
practice of the Church. Even the dead heretic was not allowed Christian
burial, and, if he had been favoured with it by mistake, the body was
dug up and burned, and the grave remained for ever an accursed spot. In
times of ignorance this sort of thing paralyses people with terror, and
renders them an easy prey to the most absurd and debasing superstitions.
This universal dread of the unseen was ably and thoroughly exploited by
the Church of Christ.
CHAPTER III
THE FOUNDING, CONSTITUTION, AND PRACTICE OF THE INQUISITION
It is extremely doubtful whether Dominic actually founded the
Inquisition, for as an organization it did not exist till ten years
after his death. He was, however, an Inquisitor in all but the
possession of full judicial powers. There was, in fact, no formal
founding of the Holy Office; it simply grew by degrees out of the social
and religious conditions of the early thirteenth century. Nor was it
exclusively confided to the Dominican Order, but, as that was the most
intolerant and the most zealous in heresy-hunting, its members were,
from the outset, more closely associated with that occupation.[22]
Commissions were frequently entrusted to the Franciscans also, but most
of the early Inquisitors were Dominican monks. The jealousies and
quarrels between the two Orders which their holy labours occasioned were
so frequent as to be a source of scandals in the Church, which
threatened to last for ever.
Under ecclesiastical tuition the people of Europe had, during the
twelfth century, developed, in what passed for religion, a spirit of
rancour that went beyond even the cruel legislation of the time. Heresy
had previously been detected mainly by means of ordeals, but these were
found to be somewhat unreliable in the matter of results. The Bishops,
under the authority of the State, had usually controlled the
proceedings, but they had now grown sluggish and lax, and their
machinery had become rusty. Pope Alexander III, in 1179, “invited
sovereigns to employ force of arms and protect Christian people from the
violence [!] of the Cathari,” and “offered indulgences to those who
should accomplish this work of piety.”[23] The decrees of Lucius III in
1184 might, had they been put into effective operation, have resulted in
an episcopal instead of a Papal Inquisition. Not only were rulers bound
by oath to assist the Church in rooting out heresy, but all prelates
were compelled to visit towns and villages, to call the people together,
and take evidence as to the existence of suspected heretics. The Bishops
were, indeed, by virtue of their office, Inquisitors also,[24] but of so
lukewarm a description that a sterner organization was deemed necessary.
Thus the ancient civil and canon law furnished the basis of the
Inquisitorial procedure, and the first detectors of heresy were the
laymen of each locality, with whom priests were afterwards associated.
For various reasons the Bishops, as a body, proved unequal to their
task; trained experts were needed, and the Church was impelled to action
both by the force of public opinion and by the logic of its dogmas. The
hands of the Church were strengthened by a secular legislation which
recognized a gigantic evil, but failed to combat it with vigour and
uniformity. Under the presidency of Pope Innocent III, the Lateran
Council of 1215 framed a number of severe regulations, but did not
succeed in getting them consistently enforced. From 1220 to 1239,
therefore, Rome elaborated a series of enactments, based on the Lateran
regulations, which amounted to a complete system of persecution. The
chief of these enactments was Gregory IX’s Bull of 1231, under which
suspected persons were required to prove their innocence or lose their
civil rights. Very trivial circumstances, even such as a pale face, were
enough to arouse suspicion. Heretics were to be outlawed, and, when
condemned, to be burnt, all their property being in that case
confiscated and their heirs disinherited. Their houses were to be
destroyed, and never rebuilt. The evidence of a heretic was not to be
received in a court of justice _except against another heretic_. All
rulers and magistrates had to swear, not that they would do justice, but
that they would exterminate all heretics. The lands of nobles who
favoured the unorthodox were to be forfeited. Every thinker was in a
permanently tight corner. Refusal to submit to ecclesiastical authority
was the greatest of sins. The Papal zeal for reform took a peculiar
shape when it established the Inquisition.
The whole Church hailed these savage laws with joy, and they soon became
a terrible reality. The fact that secular Inquisitions were established
in Sicily during the same year shows that public opinion was too strong
for even a royal Freethinker like Frederick II to resist, though he was
reproached with occasionally burning Catholics instead of heretics--not
a very common miscarriage of justice. A commission issued in 1227 may be
taken as giving the Inquisition a start. Its tone and its provisions are
somewhat indefinite, but it led in a short time to the selection of
suitable priests to undertake the duty of detecting and examining
heretics, and this remained a permanent feature of the Inquisitorial
system. The round holes were provided with round pegs.
At the time, however, there seems to have been little thought of a
permanent system which should take the place of the Bishops’
jurisdiction. The basis of the persecuting body was more thoroughly
settled at the Council of Narbonne in 1244, when the control of heresy
was surrendered by the Bishops to the Inquisition, with the prudent
proviso that the prelates reserved to themselves the pecuniary results.
This transfer was not everywhere made complete, for even after that date
many Inquisitors recognized the authority of episcopal tribunals, and in
1273 Gregory X also admitted their supremacy. Evidently the Holy Office
was long regarded as a temporary expedient, and every Pope had renewed
its charter.
In May, 1252, Innocent IV issued his famous Bull _Ad Extirpanda_, which
was a complete exposition of the laws against heresy, and set up the
machinery for its detection. In addition to all the known regulations,
it laid down further provisions binding all rulers to outlaw heretics
and empowering any one to seize suspected persons and take possession of
their goods (being thereby entitled to a share of the proceeds). This
vigilance was rewarded by exemption from public services and by freedom
of personal action. Every one, including all State officials, was bound
to give assistance; men of good repute had to be sworn to reveal
anything they knew, or suspected, of any person in their district. The
State was responsible for the seizure of heretics; it was commanded to
execute judgment against them and to torture those who would not confess
and betray their accomplices. Lists of suspected persons were to be made
out and read in public three times a year, and copies given to the
Bishops, the Dominicans, and the Franciscans.
The provisions of this Bull were strictly enforced, and it is
significant of the state of public opinion that it aroused no effective
resistance. By a later Bull of 1265, Pope Urban IV confirmed its
instructions, and made the Inquisition supreme in all countries. It
became a maxim of law that all statutes which interfered with the
Inquisition were void and their authors punishable. The Holy Office had
a free hand, and was not liable to excommunication in the discharge of
its sacred duties, or to suspicion by even a Papal Legate. Nicholas IV
gave a finishing touch by making the Inquisitors’ commissions perpetual.
Bishops were not liable to be judged by Inquisitors, but nevertheless
had to obey them, and, though at times they tried cases of heresy in
their own courts, they were compelled to allow an Inquisitor to take
part in the sentence.
Popular feeling, it is true, occasionally revolted against this tyranny;
but, as any one who in any way opposed the Inquisition was thereby
excommunicated, the resistance was easily and remorselessly crushed. The
tenacious memory and sleepless vigilance of the Inquisition hunted out
persons who years before had said a kind word to a heretic, or sent a
copper to a sick person under suspicion. Public confidence was destroyed
by the general dread that a careless word might ruin a man; that stories
might, unknown to him, be circulated about him and come to the
Inquisitors’ ears; that an enemy might secretly and safely gratify an
old grudge, until at last poor wretches would inform against others
rather than be themselves betrayed.
It was a rule of the Inquisition that all testimony should be taken down
in the presence of two impartial persons unconnected with the
institution, but sworn to absolute secrecy. This precautionary act of
justice was soon disregarded, and the bulky documents of the Inquisition
were generally held to be unworthy of trust. In some of the revolts
against its tyranny the populace were careful to destroy the records,
for it was well known that the Inquisitors had an unpleasant habit of
discovering among them facts damaging to those whom they desired to
injure.
As if the Inquisitors themselves were not dangerous enough, they were
allowed to employ a swarm of hangers-on known as Familiars (by a
pleasing fiction they became part of the family), who were permitted to
carry the arms denied to ordinary civilians, and who enjoyed immunities
and powers which they abused with the utmost freedom. For the most part
they were a rabble of unruly ruffians, who squeezed money out of people
under the threat of accusing them of heresy or of impeding the
Inquisition in its beneficent duties. Any restriction in the number of
these rascals was resented as unlawful; but the State did sometimes, as
at Venice in 1450, succeed in reducing their numbers. They were wholly
unnecessary, as the Holy Office could command the services of the State,
as well as the assistance of the clergy and of the civil population.
As a precaution against miscarriages of justice, there was held at
irregular intervals an assembly which finally determined the fate of
accused persons. At these gatherings learned Bishops were supposed to be
present in order to give the Inquisitors the benefit of their advice,
but they were so little zealous for popular rights that it became a
practice for an Inquisitor to represent one or more Bishops. It was
doubtful whether the Inquisition ought to obey the finding of the court,
and the occasion became a mere form, from which the episcopal
co-operation was frequently absent. Sometimes a number of sentenced
persons remained in gaol, and were added to from time to time, so that
the _auto de fe_ could be made more impressive. At one of these
ceremonies held in Toulouse in 1310, out of 108 persons sentenced 18
were burnt alive. In the previous year one unfortunate had hit upon the
expedient of voluntary starvation. The Inquisition had a more effective
retort than forcible feeding; its preparations were hurried on, and the
solitary victim was burnt, a similar case occurring four years later.
Very seldom did any one escape by flight from the clutches of the Holy
Office. Its agents were everywhere, its jurisdiction had no limits, a
complete network of private information existed, and flight was a sure
presumption of guilt. A boy of fifteen, sentenced after two years’
imprisonment to wear the crosses which indicated his punishment, at
length threw them off, and worked as a boatman on the Garonne. He was
discovered, cited to appear, and in default was excommunicated and
condemned as a heretic in an _auto_ of 1319. Two years later he was
arrested, escaped, was recaptured, and finally sentenced to imprisonment
on a diet of bread and water. His original crime was that he, a mere
boy, had “adored” a heretic at the command of his father.
_The Inquisitorial Method._
The duty of the Inquisitor was the detection of heresy--that is, to
ascertain the secret thoughts of the accused. External acts were of
consequence only as they indicated a particular frame of mind. This was
a task possible to omniscience only, but the Inquisitor willingly
undertook it, preferring to sacrifice a hundred innocent persons rather
than let one guilty person escape. The safeguards of justice were
nominal; it was found convenient to assume guilt from the outset. In the
secular courts there were a few provisions which gave an accused some
faint chance of obtaining justice; but these, under the pressure of the
Inquisition, gradually fell into abeyance. Even death was no escape so
far as the culprit’s property was concerned. At Ferrara the Bishop and
the Inquisitor squabbled for thirty-two years over the remains of a
heretic, and in 1313 a Florentine family found themselves the victims
of a prosecution brought against an ancestor who had died sixty-three
years before.
Delation was an indispensable and certainly very useful feature of the
Inquisition’s procedure. A woman of Toulouse in 1254 furnished a list of
169 persons incriminated by her, and all the names, with addresses, were
carefully noted for later use. Each of these persons would be persuaded
to supply further names, and so the Inquisition’s net was constantly
growing larger. To give information against others was the truest sign
of repentance, and the Inquisitors were untiring in their efforts to
secure it. In order to elicit confession every conceivable means were
employed: if kindness seemed to promise the best results, kindness would
be shown; an emissary would visit the prisoner’s cell urging confession
and promising mercy--with the mental reservation that severity was the
truest mercy to a heretic. Sometimes a man’s wife and children were
permitted in his dungeon that they might work upon his feelings. On
occasion protracted delay was used to break the prisoner’s spirit; he
would be tried, receive no definite sentence, and be left in gaol
perhaps for many years. Thus a woman who was imprisoned and confessed in
1297 was not formally sentenced for thirteen years, while at Carcassonne
a man made his confession in 1321 after an imprisonment of thirty years.
If, on the other hand, it was thought desirable to hasten the sinner’s
repentance, the confinement was made so terribly harsh that it
frequently brought about the result desired. Torture had not been
greatly employed in the earlier half of the thirteenth century, but Pope
Innocent’s Bull of 1252 expressly authorized its use by the secular
authorities to discover heresy. The secular courts were slow to adopt
it, but its rapid extension by the Holy Office showed how useful it was.
Although not frequently mentioned in the records, various indications
prove that it was freely employed. Not only accused persons, but
witnesses whose statements appeared doubtful or unsatisfactory, were put
to the torture; and the Inquisition had an ingenious way of
manufacturing witnesses, for a person who had confessed his own offence
would be treated as a witness to the guilt of others, and was tortured
to betray them. Confessions made under torture were subject to
confirmation; if they were not confirmed, but denied, the accused was
treated as an obstinate impenitent and perjurer, and handed over to the
secular arm.
_Evidence._
Lea remarks that “the matter-of-course way in which rules destructive of
every principle of justice are laid down by men presumably correct in
the ordinary affairs of life affords a wholesome lesson as to the power
of fanaticism to warp the intellect of the most acute.”[25] Such rules
as there were for the protection of accused persons were systematically
set aside, and the lives of even devout Catholics hung on the merest
trifles and technicalities. A new crime termed “suspicion of heresy” was
invented, and of this three degrees were formulated--light suspicion,
vehement suspicion, and violent suspicion, all of which offered ample
scope to inquisitorial ingenuity. A merchant found it a dangerous
civility to bow to acquaintances who, unknown to him, were heretics. Two
witnesses were required to prove heresy, but at a pinch one was made to
suffice, and if the one witness revoked testimony in favour of the
accused his revocation annulled the evidence, while if the original
testimony was adverse to the defence it was the revocation that became
void! The minimum age of witnesses was also liable to fluctuation. By
the Italian civil law it was twenty years, but the Holy Office was not
particular to a year or two, and a case is recorded in which the
evidence of a boy of ten was accepted against his own family and
sixty-six other people who had listened to a heretical sermon a year
before. Wives, children, and servants could not testify in favour of an
accused; against him their evidence was readily accepted. The only thing
that disabled a witness was proof that he was actuated by mortal enmity
against the accused; but, as the accused was kept in ignorance of the
witness’s identity, proof of this sort was made practically impossible.
Witnesses seldom refused to testify. If they did, the torture chamber
generally induced them to reconsider the matter; in fact, an unlucky
witness ran as great a risk as the defendant of an acquaintance with the
rack or the pulleys. Nor was the secrecy of the confessional of much
avail, for all priests were instructed to use every means in their power
to induce confessions of heresy, and the results were conveyed to the
tribunals in a judiciously indirect manner.
All these precautions, thorough and effective as they were, were not
thought sufficient, and were supplemented by instructions to the
Inquisitors that less evidence was needed to prove heresy than to prove
any other crime. The crowning infamy of keeping secret the names of
witnesses was a peculiarity of the ecclesiastical procedure, of which
its administrators were a little ashamed; but the feeble protests of one
or two councils were ignored. As a slight concession to justice the
accused was, though rarely, shown a list of names, but without being
told which of them applied to his own case; and also a witness would
sometimes be sworn in the presence of the accused, but _examined apart_.
On occasion the whole of the evidence was withheld from the knowledge
of the accused, and if a witness retracted his testimony the fact was
not revealed to the interested party. In practice it was found best to
leave all these details to the Inquisitors’ discretion.
The field which all this secrecy opened to malice, slander, and perjury
may be faintly imagined. Serious abuses in connection with the handling
of evidence were exposed in the fourteenth century by conscientious
Inquisitors themselves, and the fact suggests that an appalling amount
of injustice remained undiscovered. The extraordinary rule by which a
perjured witness was to be punished, but his testimony was to hold good,
was a development that might have been expected from an organization
bent on the manufacture of criminals. And, because it was fairly safe,
perjury by witnesses for the prosecution was by no means uncommon.
_The Defence._
The whole tendency of the Inquisitorial procedure was to afford as few
opportunities as possible for an effective answer to a charge of heresy.
Inquisitors were expressly ordered not to worry about legal forms, but
to extract confessions. In the early part of the thirteenth century the
accused was gratuitously allowed an advocate, but, as the lawyer
entrusted with this delicate duty rendered himself liable to a charge of
heresy if he showed zeal on behalf of his client, the office became
little sought after, and the benefit inappreciable. In time the practice
was more honoured in the breach than in the observance; and, as the
Inquisition could deprive an advocate of his papers and put him in the
dangerous position of a witness, it is doubtful whether his services
were of much value, or, indeed, whether, in many cases, they were
rendered at all. It was sometimes impossible to secure advocates, and
instances are known in which prisoners, in despair, declined to exercise
their right to call for copies of the evidence against them. The
Inquisitors then placed on record that the privilege had been offered
and refused, without superfluous detail as to reasons. Denial of the
accusation of heresy, or refusal to plead, rendered the person charged
liable to torture or the stake. If the Inquisitors did happen to break
the rules and expose themselves to appeal against their judgments, there
were manuals available in which they were instructed in the numerous
devices and deceptions by which they could escape responsibility. An
acquittal never took place; the Inquisitors were expressly authorized to
pronounce no one innocent, as it was always desirable to leave a
loophole for future proceedings. The rare verdict, “Not proven,” was the
utmost length to which the mercy of the Holy Office would extend.
_Sentence._
Strange though it may appear, what the Inquisition really wanted was the
salvation of the sinner’s soul, the appropriation of his goods being
quite a secondary consideration. Its penalties were benevolently
designed to wash away the stain of mortal guilt, and thus prepare him
for a future state of bliss. Assuming the reality of this state, its
enjoyments would certainly be enhanced by contrast with the heretic’s
earthly experiences. The exact condition of the soul, however, being
difficult to ascertain, the chastisement of the body was believed to
afford the most efficacious means of purification. Accordingly the
Church, in its tenderness, did not condemn to death; it merely withdrew
its protection from the unrepentant. It did not confiscate his property;
all it did was to declare him guilty of a crime which rendered him
incapable of holding property. If it imposed a fine, it was because the
proceeds were to be employed in works of charity, which, of course,
included the upkeep of its own organization. The ultimate disposal of
the condemned heretic could safely be left in the hands of the obedient
civil power.
The Church must receive whatever credit may be due for its kindly
intentions, though they sometimes worked out strangely. Almost always
the heretic came off disastrously, but there were episodes of mildness
for which it is not easy to account. When, at the end of the thirteenth
century, an Inquisitor was murdered, the man who hired the assassins was
merely ordered to present himself to the Pope and receive penance. Even
his neglect to do this was visited by nothing worse than a mild order to
arrest him if he could be found. We shall meet with more of this
unaccountable clemency.
The light penances imposed by the Inquisition were Prayers, Churchgoing,
Discipline, Fasting, Pilgrimages, and Fines. As punishments these
penances do not sound excessive, but, as interpreted by the elastic
discretion of the Holy Office, they could make a penitent extremely ill
at ease, and when several were combined in one sentence life became a
heavy burden. During a long pilgrimage a man’s family might starve. In
1322 pilgrimages were imposed on three men who nearly twenty years
before had seen some Waldenses in their father’s house without knowing
that they were heretics. Fines naturally gave opportunities for
extortion which only exceptional men were able to refrain from using. As
already mentioned, the Inquisition appropriated the property of all
persons sentenced for heresy. A man who died in 1252, before completing
a five years’ pilgrimage, left an estate of twenty livres, and the
Inquisitors promptly claimed the whole of this immense sum. Bail was
simply another word for bribery, and extortion became a system
exploited to the utmost by men who were sleeplessly on the look-out for
plunder.
The second grade of penance was the compulsory wearing of yellow
crosses, sewn on to the clothing as an indication that the wearer had
been condemned for heresy. This badge, which corresponded to the _san
benito_ commonly used in Spain, was so great a disgrace that efforts
were constantly made to avoid it; but though, for special reasons,
permission was sometimes given to dispense with it, usually it was
insisted upon, and escape from the vigilant eye of the Inquisition was
impossible.
Penance became far more severe in the third grade, which was
imprisonment for life. A comprehensive penalty of this character was
incurred by every one who did not come forward within the time specified
by the Edict of Grace, confess his own sins, and denounce those of
others. The Inquisition of Toulouse, between 1246 and 1248, records 192
cases, of which 127 were of perpetual imprisonment, 6 for ten years, 16
for an indefinite term in the discretion of the Church, and the
remaining 43 were of absentees. The Council of Narbonne, in 1244, made
the sentence invariably for life. The confinement was solitary; the diet
consisted of bread and water, and in the harsher sentence the penitent
was chained by the feet, sometimes by the hands as well, and, in extreme
cases, to the wall of a dark, noisome dungeon. It is not surprising that
prisoners did not attain a green old age.
The Inquisition reserved the right, in the exercise of its discretion,
to mitigate or re-impose its penalties. This right was frequently used,
especially in regard to the wearing of crosses; but seldom did the
prisoner find his punishment any the lighter. If he had the unusual good
fortune to be released, he might, for the slightest lapse, be punished
again, and this time without mercy and without the formality of a fresh
trial. Every victim relinquished by the Holy Office was a
ticket-of-leave man, liable at any moment to utter ruin. He could never
feel sure that something might not be discovered, perhaps a youthful
indiscretion of his grandfather’s, which would require his appearance
before the dread Tribunal, or that for some unguarded act or expression
he might not bring himself under the most effective of all
excommunications--that of the Holy Inquisition.
_Confiscation._
By decree of Innocent III in 1215 and the Bull of Innocent IV in 1252,
confiscation of the property of heretics and their children was made a
necessary penalty, and all temporal rulers were required to enforce it.
Of the proceeds one-third was to go to the State, one-third to the
Papacy, and one-third to the Inquisition. Each party, as a matter of
course, tried to cheat the others; but the wily Inquisitors almost
invariably obtained the lion’s share of the spoil, which was, nominally
at any rate, devoted to the furtherance of their own method of
propagating the Gospel. Between them the victim had as much chance of
escape as a mouse in a trap. The Church had some difficulty in getting
confiscation sanctioned by the State, but it succeeded.
The heretic was not permitted to dispose of his property, but if he did
succeed in doing so the transaction was void; and, even though the
property had passed through several hands, the last possessor was
cheerfully deprived of it. As debts due to heretics and securities for
loans by them were also void, business became almost impossible.
Numerous complaints of the Inquisition’s rapacity show that no possessor
of property felt safe. It is not easy to understand how society could
continue to hold together when a stimulus was thus deliberately given
to fraud, jealousy, quarrelling, litigation, commercial anarchy, and
domestic misery. Possibly religious zeal was the original motive of the
folly, but when persecution is made a paying concern the reins are given
to greed and injustice of every conceivable kind.
Venice made a stand against ecclesiastical corruption, and in 1289
enacted that the whole proceeds of confiscation should go to the State;
and in the latter part of the fifteenth century Piedmont adopted a
similar course, allowing the Inquisition only its expenses.
A further abuse was that, from the beginning of its career, the
Inquisition frequently made confiscations before the accused had been
convicted, sometimes before he confessed. In 1319 sentence was passed in
southern France on a man who had been charged in 1284, yet in 1301 the
officials were quarrelling over his estate. These legal robberies were
carried out with relentless severity, everything being seized to the
last penny. On arrest for suspicion of heresy, the Holy Office took
possession of a person’s property, promising that if the charge was not
proven (a rare event) some of it would be returned for the support of
his family. In the meantime the family were turned into the streets to
starve, or to live on such charity as they could get. The case of one
secret heretic, Gherardo, a rich noble of Florence and consul of the
city, was a bad one. Between sixty and seventy years after his death the
Inquisitor of the city started a successful persecution against his
memory, and eleven of his descendants, who were not heretics, were
included in the condemnation, and presumably reduced to penury.
It was confiscation that kept alive religious persecution, because the
heretics were ingeniously made to furnish the means for their own
destruction, and when all the heretics had been disposed of the
languishing state of the Holy Office began to arouse real concern on the
part of those who made good livings out of it. Confiscation of property
for an assumed crime was one of the most effectual agencies for the
destruction of civilization, and it is strange that Rome did not see the
error of its ways when countries that had no Inquisition were increasing
in prosperity and happiness.
_Relaxation and the Stake._
It might be supposed that relaxation meant either release from custody
or mitigation of punishment. The Holy Office, however, rose superior to
verbal conventionalities, and defined the term to mean that the accused
person should, after condemnation, be handed over to the civil power. It
was equally well understood that the duty of the civil power was to burn
him alive. The condemned was delivered to the magistrates with an appeal
for mercy, which every one knew to be a transparent piece of hypocrisy.
The Church was mainly responsible for these ferocious laws, and insisted
on their being carried out, salving its conscience by giving out
publicly that it had nothing more to do with the matter. Pope Boniface
VIII embodied in the Canon Law rigid instructions for the punishment of
those condemned by the Inquisition, and all magistrates who failed to
carry out those instructions were cautioned to speak only in a general
way of punishment, though the only penalty for obstinate heresy
recognized by the Church was death by fire. Usually the civil
authorities carried out willingly enough the behests of the Church, but
they made occasional protests, and relaxation was not always treated as
equivalent to death. Several of these protests are on record, but they
were overruled, and the magistrates did their duty. Under the teaching
of the Church the best men of the time regarded heresy as a manifest
crime and the burning of heretics as an act of righteousness.
Sham and enforced conversions were numerous, and resulted in a large
number of relapses, which were punished mercilessly, though not always
by burning. The definition of relapse became more and more difficult,
and some Inquisitors were not disposed to bring every trifle under that
category. Bernard de Caux and his successor, Jean de St. Pierre, usually
condemned to imprisonment, and the latter frequently protested against
the indiscriminate burnings inflicted by the civil authorities of
Toulouse. It is indeed remarkable that burnings were not more numerous.
Thus Bernard Gui, the celebrated Inquisitor of Toulouse, is said to have
declared that between 1308 and 1328 he had put to death 637 heretics. It
appears, however, from the records that this figure represents the total
number of sentences passed by him; of these only 40 were of
condemnations to the stake of living persons, and 67 more were of
persons already dead and therefore not personally interested in the
proceedings. Evidently the chief efforts of the Inquisitors were
directed to the exaction of confessions, with, of course, confiscation
of goods, rather than to create a host of martyrs, an occasional
cremation being merely a salutary example. The Church was not slow to
profit by the experience of the Inquisition, and its spiritual courts
rapidly extended the use of torture and other methods of persuasion.
Probably an even more disastrous effect was produced upon the civil law
of Europe, the increased severity and flagrant injustice of which are
largely traceable to the influence of the Holy Office.
CHAPTER IV
HOW THE INQUISITION OVERRAN EUROPE
_The South of France._
The Inquisition had uphill work before it in the South of France. There
was plenty of heresy, but also plenty of popular sympathy with it. The
Church’s repressive powers were not fully organized, the clergy were
unpopular, the Bishops looked with a jealous eye on the Inquisition, and
the Papal commands to assist the Inquisitors were frequently disobeyed.
The Dominican priesthood, however, was burning with zeal, and succeeded
in so far inflaming the popular feeling as to be able to commit serious
acts of persecution without episcopal protest. The notorious Inquisition
of Toulouse was set up in 1233, and, although for some years the Bishops
maintained their superior jurisdiction, the Inquisitors seized every
opportunity to disregard it and act independently. A revolting case
occurred in 1234, when a dying woman confessed her heresy to the Bishop
of Toulouse under the impression that he was a heretic Bishop. She was
carried off on her bed and burnt, and the Bishop was able to go back to
an interrupted dinner and return thanks to God for his achievement.
The popular sentiment vented itself many times in risings and tumults,
especially at Albi and Toulouse, but with only temporary effect, though
in 1234 a civil war broke out in Narbonne which lasted for three years.
Count Raymond of Toulouse (the seventh of his name) was, like his
predecessor, placed in a very difficult position between a persecuting
Church and an angry people. His indifference to religion exposed him to
the accusation of heresy, and, life being unbearable with the Church at
constant enmity, he was compelled to persecute his own people, and his
natural slackness in that unpleasant task kept him plentifully supplied
with trouble. Bigotry was at that time less tinctured with financial
greed than it afterwards became; the persecutors were mostly good men,
whose sincerity brings into stronger relief the appalling results of
their actions.
By about 1237 the Inquisition had established a definite supremacy over
the Bishops, and reduced the terror-stricken people to obedience--a
result to which the conversion of Raymond Gros, one of the heretical
leaders, strikingly contributed. By the execution, two years later, of
180 Cathari at Montwimer, the heretical sect received a blow from which
it never recovered. Count Raymond, however, actually succeeded in
getting the Inquisition suspended in his dominions for three years,
during which time his people were at least able to breathe; but by 1241
the Inquisitors, knowing the negligence of the Bishops and emphasizing
to Rome the growing power of heresy, were able to resume active
persecution. In that year occurred the death of Pope Gregory IX, one of
the principal founders of the Inquisition, and for two years the Papal
throne was virtually vacant. But the Inquisition had sufficient
authority to proceed with vigour, and that it did so is shown by the
large number of sentences and the speed with which the criminal list was
got through. At the small town of Montauban, in one week of May, 1242,
no fewer than 252 persons were sentenced for heresy--a plain indication
that the infection was general. The punishments were mostly penances,
but some of them involved real hardship. Three pilgrimages--one of 500
miles--for eating at the same table with heretics was a severe return
for a friendly action, and showed the need of carefully choosing one’s
company. These harsh penalties became so frequent that some localities
were almost depopulated.
The massacre of a whole tribunal of Inquisitors and their Familiars in
1242, at a castle in the neighbourhood of Toulouse, was followed by war,
in which Count Raymond was defeated; and his reconciliation with the
Church marked the triumph of the Inquisition. A determined band of
heretics threw themselves into the strong castle of Mont Ségur, and held
out till 1244, when the place was captured by treachery and 205 men and
women were cast into the flames. The energetic labours of the
Inquisitors extended over half Languedoc, and some thousands of heresy
cases were dealt with in the space of two years. Count Raymond, who had,
in the latter part of his life, become a vigorous persecutor, died in
1249, and the Inquisition, relieved of its doubtful ally, had a halcyon
time for the next twenty years. A more troublous period followed, for
with the diminution of the power of great nobles, such as the Counts of
Toulouse and Foix, that of the Crown became consolidated, and men began
to turn to it for relief from the insufferable tyranny of the
Inquisition. Opposition to its secret and arbitrary influence arose, not
from heretics only, but also from good Catholics, who perceived that the
land was being ruined, and whose humanity was outraged by the constant
use of torture. With its superior concentration of purpose, the
Inquisition fully held its own until, in 1291, Philippe le Bel, the King
of France, ordered his officials to disobey the commands of the
Inquisitors, except in the case of confessed heresy. Under threat of
excommunication Philippe came to an understanding with the Pope which
lasted for two years, when the quarrel broke out afresh, and the
Carcassonne Inquisition had to suspend operations for three months.
A case occurred in 1300 which illustrates the power of the Inquisition.
The Pope, Boniface VIII, had sworn to burn all the inhabitants of
Carcassonne, because one of its citizens had declined to bribe a Papal
Cardinal when proffering complaints. Gastel Fabre, the man’s father, who
had died in 1278, was declared a heretic (the documents are believed to
be forgeries); an ineffectual appeal was made, but the man’s estates
were confiscated, and so long after as 1329 the bones of his wife were
exhumed by the vengeful Inquisition. The sharp quarrels which arose
early in the century between the Franciscans and the Dominicans led to
the powers of the Inquisition being in some respects curtailed, and thus
brought about a slackening of persecution, which proved to be only
temporary. A more decided check was experienced in 1308, when Pope
Clement V and his Cardinals gave a judgment against the Holy Office,
which was considered responsible for the evil condition of the South of
France.
Certain reforms were outlined by the Council of Vienne in 1312,
particularly in regard to the use of torture, the improvement of the
loathsome dungeons of the Inquisition, and the conduct of its officials;
but the restrictions imposed were evaded with the customary ingenuity,
and soon became a dead letter. With the accession of John XXII to the
Papal chair matters became easier for the Inquisition. In 1319 the
esteemed Franciscan, Bernard Delicieux, the only man who had dared to
offer consistent opposition to the Holy Office, was tried on numerous
charges, tortured in spite of his advanced age, and condemned to
degradation from Holy orders and life-long imprisonment in chains, with
a diet of bread and water, in the prison at Carcassonne. Under these
severities his death in a few months relieved the Inquisition of a
formidable enemy.
The reaction went on rapidly. The cities which had struggled against the
Inquisition were reduced to subjection and public repentance in 1319,
and the persecutors were at length free to reap the fruits of their
victory. The Catharist leaders were sent to the stake, and the heresy
became practically extinct. Its fate was not entirely unmerited, but the
agency that brought it about must be wholly condemned. It had propagated
a queer medley of doctrines, the anti-social effect of which was not
fully perceived by their advocates, though the Church understood from
the first how its privileges would fare if liberty of thought were
allowed to the people.
In that beautiful, sunny land of Languedoc a civilization of splendid
promise, reaching out far in advance of the age into civic activities,
industry, art, and science, had been developed by an energetic and
patriotic people. Unfortunately for them, their civilization was not of
the ecclesiastical type, and the Church felt that it had a legitimate
grievance. The Inquisition left Languedoc in ruins; it found a garden,
and made it a wilderness. It descended upon happy homes, and left them
in desolation and mourning. External unity of faith was achieved, but
with it the moral debasement of the Church. By the unscrupulous,
systematic, and long-continued abuse of power it gained a triumph for
the evil effects of which no repentance can atone.
The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
The only good result of the Inquisition’s activities was one which it
never intended. In its greed for money it forgot an equally greedy and
much more deserving rival. The Crown, seeing how profitable persecution
had become, at length exercised the right, when it possessed the power,
to take the proceeds, and seized for more useful purposes the
confiscations of heretic property. The estates of a ruined nobility were
taken over by the king’s officers, and the Holy Office unwittingly aided
the consolidation of a secular power which in the end reduced it to a
nullity.
_Northern France._
In the year 1233 a relentless Dominican bigot named Friar Robert was
appointed Inquisitor for Western Burgundy. This crazy fanatic raged
through the north of France, burning large numbers of people. So
notorious became his excesses that after some years his commission was
withdrawn, and he spent the rest of his days in prison. Persecution was
not greatly checked, for the intensity of the general feeling against
heresy was such that even the saintly Louis IX declared that the only
argument to use with a heretic was to thrust him through with a sword up
to the hilt. In the hands of the Dominicans persecution went on
vigorously all over France, then a much smaller country than now, and
the zeal of the orthodox was frequently stimulated by Papal Bulls urging
greater vigour. Milman relates a terrible occurrence in 1239, but does
not state that it took place by order of the Inquisition. In the
presence of the Archbishop of Rheims, seventeen bishops, and 100,000
persons, no fewer than 183 Manichæans were burnt outside the city of
Rheims, and all of them perished without fear.[26] The right of asylum
in churches was withdrawn from heretics in 1281 by Pope Martin IV.
Not until 1310, however, did the first formal burning alive by the
Inquisition take place in France. The Manichean holocaust, formal
enough in a practical sense, appears to have been an irregularity. On
May 30 of that year a woman who had advocated free love and other
heresies died at the stake with such devotion that the spectators were
moved to tears. The sect to which she belonged, the Brethren of the Free
Spirit, furnished a good many victims in the course of the next few
years, when the Inquisition reached the height of its power. But with
the growth and consolidation of the authority of the Crown the
Inquisition was absorbed by the secular courts till it became little
more than a department of the State. Its comparative impotence was made
more perceptible by the removal of the Holy See from Rome to Avignon,
and by the Great Schism (1378-1447) which shook the Papacy to its
foundations. The wars with the English, which were then so frequent and
prolonged, also made conditions unfavourable to the Inquisition by
causing the withdrawal of the royal stipend; and the University of Paris
to a large extent took its place as an investigator of heresy cases.
When the wars were over an attempt was made by Pope Nicholas V in 1451
to revive and increase the activity of persecution, but with no
permanent success. So far had the Holy Office become out of touch with
the spirit of the times that the roving commissions which were
frequently granted to special Inquisitors also failed to re-establish
the authority of the institution. The people of Lyons in 1458 were even
bold enough to throw their Inquisitor into prison, and it was only with
difficulty that he was released. A few years later Jean Laillier, a
priest in Paris, spoke his mind freely about the clergy, and the
Inquisition did not feel strong enough to burn him. Two other priests,
who at mass threw the Host on the floor and trampled on it, committed an
unpardonable crime, and duly suffered at the stake.
In the south of France the Waldensians remained powerful in the
fourteenth century, even after the terrible persecutions through which
they had gone. The most obnoxious of their tenets appears to have been
the not unreasonable proposition that the sacraments were valueless when
administered by sinful priests. To stamp out this peculiar heresy
vigorous efforts were made by Pope Gregory XI in 1375, and a little
later great hauls of heretics were made, and many burnings resulted. Men
and women were torn from their homes to rot in the overcrowded prisons,
yet still the remorseless pontiff reproached the Inquisitors with their
slackness, and spurred them to greater energy. One ecclesiastic, St.
Vincent Ferrer, hit upon a daring novelty, and tried the effect of
kindness; but, although he made many converts, who were content to lose
some of their property to save the rest, the Church was dubious about
such experiments, and went on methodically with its burnings. In 1393
Inquisitor Borel of Grenoble is credited with having brought to the
stake 150 persons in one day. This exceptional achievement was followed
by a prolonged lull, and in 1478 Louis XI issued an ordinance limiting
the powers of Inquisitors and clearly establishing the supremacy of the
State. Five years later the king’s death gave the Church another
opportunity, which was quickly utilized. Innocent VIII determined to
suppress the Waldensian heresy once for all. He ordered a crusade
against the heretics, and after stubborn resistance they submitted. In
one valley many of them took refuge in a remote cave, but were
discovered and suffocated by the smoke of fires built at its mouth.
Relief was once more gained when Louis XII came to the throne of France,
and the Waldenses secured a certain liberty of worship until, in the
times of the Reformation, they became absorbed in the Calvinist body. So
hated by the Roman Church was the grim faith of Calvin that in 1538 a
Grand Inquisitor was burnt for embracing it.[27] A few years later Pius
V ordered the Catholics to slay every Huguenot who fell into their
hands.
_Aragon and Castile._
The Inquisition was established in Aragon in 1238, but a long time
elapsed before it was organized with anything like efficiency. A nest of
Catharans had been rooted out in 1237, but the records are scanty, the
principal incident being the stoning to death of an Inquisitor by the
inhabitants of Urgel, the chief centre of heresy. Greater vigour was
shown at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and Pope Clement VI
urged the kings of Aragon and Navarre to track down the many Waldenses
who had fled from Toulouse. About the middle of the century the
Inquisition was concerned in a heated dispute which arose between the
Dominican and Franciscan Orders regarding one of those fatuously futile
subjects on which men were roused to the extremity of passion in the
Middle Ages. The Franciscans maintained that the blood of Christ after
his death remained on earth--a proposition which filled the Pope and the
Dominicans with horror. After this interesting question had been
wrangled over for 122 years a great debate took place at Rome, when the
warmth of the disputants was not moderated by the bitterly cold weather.
Neither party could prove its case, but neither would give way, and as
the Pope at last forbade further discussion the vital question of what
became of Christ’s blood remains to this day unsolved. In Aragon neither
the Crown nor the bishops supported the Inquisition with any particular
ardour; the burning of heretics was an occasional luxury, confiscations
were few, and the Inquisitors had failed to gain the popular sympathy.
Not until about 1481, when the Spanish Inquisition was established on a
sound commercial basis, did the persecutors show great activity or
inspire profound terror.
Castile also was little troubled by the Inquisition until the latter
part of the fifteenth century. In 1401 Pope Boniface issued a Bull for
the repression of heresy, but only a slight effect was produced. It is
worth noting that the heresy was not that of daring to think for one’s
self (such boldness was then rare in Spain), but the idolatrous worship
of plants, trees, and stones--the relics of pagan practices which the
Church had incautiously permitted to survive. Aversion to the Papal
Inquisition continued until the energetic measures of Ferdinand and
Isabella rendered its manifestation dangerous, and smoothed the path of
the orthodox.
_Italy._
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Italy was in such a state of
anarchy, due to the constant wars between its petty States, that heresy
found a congenial soil, though the work of the Inquisition was not made
easier. Catharism flourished in Lombardy, and propagated itself all over
Europe. Its openly taught doctrines were soon met by violent repression.
The Waldensian refugees from the south of France settled in the Cottian
Alps, where they supported themselves only by the most remarkable
industry. The freethinking emperor, Frederick II, did not respond warmly
to the urgent appeals made by the Popes to suppress the heretics, for he
knew the value of an increasing body of well-conducted and hard-working
citizens.
In 1224, however, Pope Honorius appointed two Bishops with special
powers, which they at once proceeded to exercise. The first result was
an insurrection at Brescia, in which several churches were burnt. These
disturbances were repressed and the ringleaders lightly punished by
fines, and it was not until Gregory IX placed the matter in the hands of
the Dominicans that satisfactory progress was made. The power of the
episcopate had waned, and the Inquisition was free to use its new
authority almost as it pleased. It was not welcomed by the people, and
its officials were at times roughly handled; but its grip was gradually
tightened, largely owing to the zeal and eloquence of the Dominican
Giovanni da Vicenza, who performed innumerable miracles, including the
raising to life of ten dead persons. This man, whose burning of heretics
did not imperil his great reputation as a peacemaker, was appointed
Perpetual Inquisitor in 1247, and is believed to have perished in 1265
in a crusade against Manfred, King of Naples. The death in 1250 of
Frederick II deprived the heretics of a certain measure of protection,
and removed a powerful obstacle to the Inquisition’s activity. The power
of bigotry to stifle humane feeling is exhibited by Fra Giovanni Schio,
who, though personally one of the gentlest of men, could, after
preaching a beautiful sermon on love, calmly have sixty people burnt
alive.[28] A still more remarkable figure is that of Peter of Verona,
commonly known as St. Peter Martyr, who was one of the most renowned of
all Inquisitors. His great gifts of preaching and his wonder-working
powers were employed in the suppression of heresy, then rapidly growing
in the northern and central parts of Italy. At Milan, and later at
Florence, he carried on the holy work of burning, headed an army of the
faithful, and in two deadly battles broke the strength of heresy, and
with it that of the Ghibelline party, which was opposed to the Papacy.
It is said that Peter never broke his fast before sunset, and passed
most of the night in prayer--habits which may have had something to do
with his persecuting zeal. The murder of this godly man in 1252 by a
band of heretics whom he had driven to extremities did not, strangely
enough, result in any barbarous vengeance being inflicted on the
assassins, who escaped very lightly. One of the perpetrators, after due
repentance, was allowed to die peacefully as a _beato_ of the Dominican
Order. He even figures among the saints in the church erected to the
memory of the man he helped to murder. None of the guilty men appears to
have been executed; and one of them, though a notorious heretic, was
only imprisoned after a lapse of forty-three years. In this the Church
probably acted shrewdly, for the martyr’s halo and the saint’s wonderful
miracles redounded to its credit in a striking degree, and one of the
first results was the formation of a society, the Crocesegnati, or
Knights of the Cross, by persons of station, who swore on the holy cross
to devote their lives to the extermination of heresy and heretics. This
society, which had branches in most of the Italian cities, greatly aided
the Inquisition, and remained in existence until the nineteenth century.
Another energetic bigot, Rainerio Saccone, formerly a Catharian,
extended the power of the Holy Office, supported by repeated Papal Bulls
and the appointment of fresh Inquisitors. These efforts were impeded by
Ezzelin da Romano, whose evil reputation has been, perhaps, somewhat
exaggerated, and who, as a ruler, possessed at least one good
quality--that he would permit no religious persecution. In 1241 he was
condemned as a heretic--an operation several times repeated without
result, until at length, in accordance with time-honoured custom, a
crusade was organized against him, one of the Papal Bulls containing a
provision that persons found in possession of stolen property might
receive absolution if they applied it to the purposes of the Crusade. At
the outset victorious, Ezzelin was at last defeated, and received wounds
from which, refusing all aid, he died. The victor, Pallavicino, was,
however, no friend of the Inquisition, and, being irritated by the
Pope’s ungrateful treatment of him, he used every opportunity to prevent
the Inquisitors from carrying on their work. Pallavicino was summoned to
the Papal presence to answer for his heresy, and, disregarding the
summons, became involved in war, and died in 1268, when besieged in one
of his castles.
In spite of occasional but determined opposition, the Inquisition was by
this time supreme all over the Peninsula; the temporal power of the
Church grew with its triumph, and heretics were burnt in considerable
numbers. It was hardly possible, says an Italian writer, for a man to be
a Christian and die in his bed.[29] At one small town seventy persons,
and at Piacenza, it is said, twenty-eight wagon loads of human beings,
were thus put to death. It is curious that of one man who secretly
propagated heretical opinions, while professing to be a devout Catholic,
many miracles were recorded after his death. When the evidence of his
heterodoxy was found to be conclusive, they ceased, and the quarrel
which arose about his sanctity lasted for thirty-two years, until the
Pope decreed that the charge of heresy was proved, that his bones should
be burnt, all his property confiscated, and all sales or transfers of it
declared void.
In the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, Charles of Anjou, whose ambition to
dominate Italy had been fostered by the Papacy, established the
Inquisition about 1268 or 1269. It looked sharply after the financial
results, but, although its operations were at first carried on with
vigour, it did not assume the compact and effective form which it
possessed in the South of France. Heretics were occasionally burnt, but
numbers remained unmolested--a fact which implies some inefficiency on
the part of the Inquisitors. At Venice the success of the persecutors
was still more meagre, for the Republic jealously kept them in
subordination. Its lack of persecuting zeal aroused the ire of the Pope,
but his peremptory orders were complied with only in such a way as to
leave the supremacy of the State unimpaired. Reserving the right to
control confiscations, it undertook only to defray the Inquisitors’
expenses. The Inquisition was becoming no longer a paying concern, and
its decay in Italy, as in France, went on steadily during the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. Catharism had been virtually stamped out, but
the Waldenses remained obstinate, strong in their simple faith and
hopefulness, their incessant industry, and hardy virtues. In spite of
the burning of some of their number in 1312, they flourished in their
remote villages until a pitiless persecution by Gregory XI, in 1375,
thinned their ranks and avenged the murder of two Inquisitors. About the
middle of the fifteenth century a zealous priest in one raid burned
twenty-two relapsed heretics, whose property was confiscated. A respite
then ensued, but persecution was shortly recommenced, in the form of a
crusade. On one occasion five heretics were sentenced to be burnt, but
managed to escape. Determined not to be baulked of his prey, the
Inquisitor burnt in their stead three other persons whose confessions
had secured their pardon. The Waldenses fought bravely, and once nearly
annihilated the crusading army, but in the end they were overpowered.
Many emigrated to more peaceful districts, where they maintained a
precarious existence till 1530, when, like their brethren in France,
they were merged in the Calvinist body.
In the Sicilies the Jews were the chief objects of the Inquisition’s
activities, but its power, although stimulated in the middle of the
fifteenth century by an impudent forgery of the Inquisitor of Palermo,
was not equal to its ambitions; its judgments continued to be subject to
revision by the State, and were largely nullified by the opposition of
the people until the Reformation gave a fresh impetus to the sacred duty
of persecution.
_Bosnia._
The strength and persistence of the Catharan heresy determined Innocent
III to convert the nominal allegiance of the Slav race in the south-east
of Europe into a definite submission to the rule of Rome. Driven from
the Adriatic shore, the Cathari of Italy went to Bosnia, where a
considerable number of their faith already flourished. Although the
sword supplemented the love of God, the efforts of the Church resulted
in only a temporary obedience. Under the relentless pressure of Rome,
Dominican Inquisitors arrived in Bosnia by instalments during the
thirteenth century, and the martyrdom of some of them only inflamed the
zeal of the rest. Holy crusaders ravaged the country, repeating the
horrors of the Albigensian wars. Time after time heresy was to all
appearance extirpated, but it raised its head again as soon as the
pressure was removed. More than a century of hopeless confusion and
strife between Dominicans and Franciscans, as well as between them and
heretics, followed, and in 1331 it was found that the worship of trees
and fountains still prevailed among the “Christian” population. The
progress of heresy may be estimated from the fact that early in the
fifteenth century Catharism became the State religion of Bosnia.
Matters were complicated by the invasion of the Turks, to whose Sultan,
Mohammed II, the King rendered allegiance on the fall of Constantinople
in 1453, not because of any admiration for Islam, but because he could
obtain military assistance from Christendom only on terms of complete
submission to Rome, which meant a free hand for the Inquisition. Under
another King, who refused payment of the agreed tribute to the Turkish
Sultan, the country was conquered, almost without a struggle, by the
Ottomans. Most of the Cathari embraced the Moslem faith, and thus a sect
which had existed for more than a thousand years became extinct. The
majority of the orthodox left the country rather than practise their
religion under Moslem tolerance.
_Germany._
It was discovered in 1209 that the diocese of Strassburg was gravely
infected with heresy, and a large number of unfortunate persons perished
at the stake. On one day in that city the episcopal authorities caused
to be burnt eighty persons who had failed to pass successfully through
the ordeal of the red-hot iron. Catharism was little known in Germany,
and the heretics were mainly Waldenses. A body allied to them, known as
the Ortlibenses, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, founded by one Ortlieb,
of Strassburg, held that God was the essence of all creatures, and
invisible except through them. From this it followed, or was believed to
follow, that man, being an embodiment of the spirit of God, was
incapable of sin. This doctrine swept away, not merely the entire
apparatus of theology, but the whole system of observances which
constituted the religion of the Church and the source of its wealth. And
as it was broad enough to include the Prince of Darkness himself in the
possibility of redemption, its advocates became known as Luciferans, a
designation which gave rise to many scandalous reports. The tenets of
the Ortlibenses were doubtless capable of being abused, though there is
little evidence to show that they were so to any serious extent. Spurred
on by Gregory, the cruel fanatic, Conrad of Marburg--whom he had
appointed first Inquisitor of Germany--carried on the work of
persecution to the utmost of his power, but his success failed to
satisfy the merciless Pontiff. Transparently-invented confessions,
detailing hideous and absurd orgies of devil-worship, which Conrad
extracted from the Luciferans and forwarded to the Pope, drove him
almost insane with wrath, and persecution was carried on with such
frantic intensity that even the Bishops protested against its excesses.
Conrad was greatly mortified by the acquittal of a powerful noble, Count
Sayn, who had been accused of the deadly crime of riding on a crab!
During this reign of terror the Ortlibenses were suppressed, with the
burning of ten of their leaders, who met their fate with calmness; and a
few years afterwards, on July 31, 1233, Conrad was murdered. In this
case, also, a singular leniency on the part of the Church towards
serious crime was observed, the guilty parties being punished merely
with excommunication. Strangely enough, the Church has not manufactured
a saint out of Conrad of Marburg, whether because of his brutal
treatment of St. Elizabeth of Thuringia, or because of the unpopularity
caused by his excessive zeal, history does not record. It is to the
credit of the German Bishops that they declined to give any public
approval of his actions. Another persecuting Conrad, who had much to do
with the troubles, was slain, and his assistant hanged. The number of
these men’s victims is not known, but that it must have been large is
shown by the profound impression produced in Germany by the persecution.
It should be mentioned that the secular code and episcopal laws of
Germany made ample provision for the suppression of heresy without
reference to the Inquisition.
The doctrines of the Ortlibenses embodied a mixture of ascetic and
pantheistic tendencies which, though at first pure, were afterwards so
developed as to be made a cloak for immoral practices. The original
ideal seems to have been fairly well maintained, and it is doubtful
whether there was any foundation for the charges made by some Italian
ecclesiastics, that the ideas of sinlessness and of bodily nakedness as
a state of grace were deliberately employed for the corruption of women.
Another notorious sect, calling themselves the Friends of God, held the
daring conception that it was possible for Jews and Moslems to obtain
salvation, and refused to denounce heretics as long as God tolerated
them.
The episcopal Inquisition was not organized in Germany until 1317, and
was directed mainly against the Beghards (known also as the Lollards),
who originated in the Netherlands and taught that poverty was the
greatest virtue. Upon these inoffensive people the Archbishop of Cologne
had opened war a few years earlier. The female heretics, known as
Beguines, were severely persecuted, though not to death; and it is said
that on his death-bed Pope Clement V bitterly regretted authorizing the
proceedings against them. Walter the Lollard, the most dangerous heretic
of the Rhine provinces, was terribly tortured in 1322, and, on the
special instructions of the Pope, he and many of his followers perished
in the flames, meeting their fate with undaunted cheerfulness. In 1353
renewed attempts were made to establish the Inquisition in Germany, but
without success. The well-known mania of the Flagellants was persecuted
as heresy, and many people were burnt, while many others were left to
rot in underground dungeons. Another sect, called the “Friends of God,”
furnished more victims, and during the great plague the murder of Jews
was thought to be pleasing to God. In 1369 the Emperor Charles IV took
the Inquisition under State protection, and it was organized for work,
five Inquisitors being appointed, though it still lacked houses and
prisons. The unfortunate Beghards and Beguines were turned out of their
houses, which were appropriated by the Inquisitors, of course without
paying compensation, and not without opposition from the Bishops, who
saw their own prerogatives threatened. The Beghards had been allowed to
make their opinions public by means of tracts written in the vernacular;
the censorship vested in the Holy Office rectified the oversight. Both
the Bishops and the civil authorities objected to indiscriminate
persecution, and even succeeded in obtaining from Gregory XI authority
to restrict the Inquisitors’ activity in regard to the Beghards and
Beguines. Being almost unmolested for a time, the Waldensian heretics
again came into prominence, and from 1393 to 1397 suffered severely from
persecution. At Steyer, in the latter year, more than a hundred
Waldenses of both sexes were burnt. Of the followers of Conrad Schmidt,
of Thuringia, many were discovered in 1414, and ninety-one were burnt in
one town, forty-four in another, and many more in the villages of that
province. A still more horrible case occurred two years later, when 300
of the Flagellants, penitent as well as impenitent, suffered at the
stake in one day.
The superiority of the episcopate over the Inquisition was asserted by a
Bull of Eugenius IV in 1431, which had the novel effect of rendering the
Inquisitors liable to excommunication if they interfered with the
Bishops. Persecution went on, however, until, in the time of the
Reformation, most of the heretical bodies lost their identity in the
spread of Lutheranism. One of the precursors of that great movement was
Gregory of Heimburg, who for twenty-five years boldly wrote and preached
against the Papacy and the abuse by the Church of its power. A similar
campaign was carried on by Hans of Niklaushausen, who proclaimed that
the wickedness of the clergy was bringing about the destruction of the
world. He was seized by the episcopal tribunal of Wurzburg, and silenced
in the customary manner. In spite of intermittent activity and a large
number of burnings in Germany, the Inquisition never obtained a firm
foothold in that country; while in Bavaria it was not formally
established till 1599, and did not retain power for long. Had it been as
strong and efficient as it proved in Spain, the career of Martin Luther
would have been a brief one, and the Reformation would have been
postponed indefinitely.
_Bohemia._
In 1257, owing to a request by the King of Bohemia for aid in
suppressing heresy, the Inquisition was, under episcopal sanction,
established in his dominions, and two Inquisitors were appointed. The
people evidently thought them more than sufficient, for when, in 1341,
another ecclesiastic was empowered to act he was speedily slain by the
angry populace. Bohemia was in the fourteenth century one of the most
prosperous countries in Europe; but the state of its morals was far from
satisfactory, the clergy in particular being worldly and depraved, and
almost universally practising concubinage. The privileges of the Church
were habitually sold for cash, and the land was full of vagrants, whose
clerical immunities enabled them to gamble, brawl, drink, and rob at
their pleasure. The demand of Innocent VI in 1354 for a tenth of the
ecclesiastical revenues of the Empire to enable him to carry on his
Italian wars threw Germany into an uproar. The scandalous moral laxity
of the clergy passed almost unreproved, but an attack on the Church’s
money bags was a much more serious matter. The clergy sheared their
flocks without mercy, but they had the strongest objection to being
shorn. Eighteen years elapsed before the Papal Inquisition was set up in
Bohemia by Bull of Gregory XI, and it was then confined to five of the
more important provinces, Prague being omitted. Many forerunners of the
reformer John Huss appeared in Bohemia, and the general dissatisfaction
with the Church had given rise to a powerful movement on behalf of
liberty--a movement stimulated by the influence of John Wycliffe, whose
writings were greatly esteemed in Prague. Wycliffe and his followers
boldly taught that the Pope was Antichrist, and that excommunications
might be disregarded. The clergy were vicars of Satan, their churches
dens of thieves and habitations of fiends. It is curious that the
Inquisition, relentless in its persecution of the Waldenses, appears to
have seen nothing specially objectionable in the doctrines of Huss. At
any rate, it took no official part in his trial, which, however, was
modelled on the familiar Inquisitorial procedure. The controversy
between orthodoxy and heresy now centred on points of doctrine rather
than on the purification of the Church. The reformers contended that the
Papal claim to the power of the keys was either essential to salvation
or a cunning lie to gratify power and self-interest. Huss was
excommunicated; and, although victorious in argument, his injudicious
reliance on the Emperor’s honour led to his terrible end in 1415.
Sigismund’s violation of his safe conduct was expressly recommended and
defended by the clergy, on the ground that, under the law, a heretic
could neither expect nor receive protection, and that the word of a
king could not be allowed to prejudice the Catholic faith. Technically
the contention was sound, for the law was largely an ecclesiastical
creation, which reversed the accepted ideas of morality, and a word from
Rome could absolve men from the most sacred obligations. The Council of
Constance, having rid the world of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, began
to apply the methods of the Inquisition to the whole kingdom of Bohemia,
while making no attempt to check the corruption which had been the chief
cause of the growth of heresy. A Bull of Martin V in 1418 urged prelates
and Inquisitors to track out the heretics and deliver them to justice,
and all secular rulers were commanded to aid the work. In the following
year rebellion broke out, and the hardy zealots rivalled the persecutors
in atrocities of cruelty. After ten years of struggle peace was
restored. The more moderate among the reformers accepted the dogmas of
the Church, while the extremists held firmly to their anti-sacerdotal
opinions. They were met by another revival of bigotry. An energetic
Inquisitor appointed by the Pope in 1436 persecuted throughout Hungary
and Austria with extreme severity, but no detailed record of his victims
remains. From the rude and miserably poor Hussites arose the sect of
Moravian Brethren, which has existed for 400 years to the present day,
preserving amid sore trials and persecutions the simplicity and purity
of its faith.
_The Netherlands._
In the middle of the sixteenth century the most prosperous portion of
Europe was the Netherlands or Low Countries, which comprised the
provinces now forming the kingdoms of Holland and Belgium. Many large
towns adorned these fertile plains, inhabited by an energetic and
hard-working people, whose vast commerce extended to every quarter of
the globe. Antwerp, the banking centre of Europe, contained nearly as
many people as then inhabited London; and splendid public buildings
testified to the taste, wealth, and civic spirit of its citizens. The
municipal institutions of the country were in advance of those of any
other, and even the poorer classes lived in something like comfort,
while education was so diffused that there was scarcely a peasant who
was unable to read and write. As in the south of France 300 years
earlier, a rich and progressive civilization had been developed by a
self-reliant and independent people, and had created a predisposition to
heresy--that is, it stimulated men’s minds in every department of life,
and in none more powerfully than in that of religion. The Church had
succeeded in destroying the civilization of Languedoc. It joined
zealously in a similar attempt in the Netherlands. But it had to do with
a different people.
In 1520 the Emperor Charles V, of whose dominions the seventeen
Provinces of the Netherlands formed part, issued the first of his nine
Edicts for the purpose of enforcing religious uniformity. These made up
a complete system of persecution, and included the introduction of the
Inquisition, not after the Spanish model with which Charles was
familiar, but in the somewhat less efficient and imposing form
instituted by the Papacy in the thirteenth century, and perfected by
long experience. Certain safeguards were insisted upon by the
Netherlands, such as the vesting of inquisitorial powers in laymen, and
confirmation of sentences by members of provincial councils. The Emperor
appointed a supreme Inquisitor for the whole country, and the Edicts
were so efficiently carried out as to render the Spanish organization
superfluous. These “placards,” as they were termed, were directed
against Protestantism, which had made remarkable progress among a people
to whose temperament it strongly appealed, and had not been repressed by
the local tribunals of the episcopal Inquisition. Under Charles’s Edicts
great numbers of persons were put to death for such enormous offences as
reading the Bible, ridiculing the sacred wafer, or even casting a
disapproving glance on a graven image. Motley states that in 1546 the
number of victims had been estimated by the Venetian Envoy at 30,000,
and it is accepted by most historians as true that during Charles’s
reign from 50,000 to 100,000 persons suffered death for their religious
opinions, and that his son Philip caused at least half as many to be
executed.
These figures are in all probability exaggerated, but they at least
indicate very severe and prolonged persecution. The mere terms of the
Edict of 1550 compel this conclusion. They provide that the crimes of
printing, copying, possessing, or circulating the works of the
Protestant Reformers, image breaking, unauthorized worship or discussion
whether in public or in private, disputes upon or exposition of the
Scriptures, or preaching openly or secretly, were to be punished by
death; “the men with the sword and the women to be buried alive, if they
do not persist in their errors; if they do persist in them, then they
are to be executed with fire; all their property in both cases being
confiscated to the Crown.”[30] The Edict also forbade any aid or favour
of suspected heretics, and provided that persons who failed to denounce
them became thereby liable to the same punishments as the heretics
themselves. In order to forestall any softening of the hearts of the
judges, they were forbidden, under the threat of severe penalties, to
grant or request pardons, or to relax the severity of their
instructions.
This barbarous Edict, which merely completed previous enactments of
almost equal ferocity, was renewed and confirmed by Philip II when, in
1555, he assumed the reins of power on the Emperor’s abdication. Though
egregiously in error in yielding to the counsels of his spiritual
advisers, Charles was an able and prudent ruler, who persecuted only for
supposed reasons of State, and did not scruple to employ Protestants in
his service, provided they were fit men. His appointment of an
Inquisitor-General for the Netherlands was confirmed by Pope Adrian VI
in 1522, thus establishing the Papal Inquisition; but, the official
being dismissed for forgery, fresh Inquisitors were nominated to see
that the Edicts were obeyed. “They were empowered,” says Motley, “to
inquire, proceed against, and chastise all heretics, all persons
suspected of heresy--and their protectors. Accompanied by a notary, they
were to collect written information concerning every person in the
provinces ‘infected or vehemently suspected.’ They were authorized to
summon all subjects of his Majesty, whatever their rank, quality, or
station, and to compel them to give evidence, or to communicate
suspicions. They were to punish all who pertinaciously refused such
depositions with death. The Emperor commanded his presidents, judges,
sheriffs, and all other judicial and executive officers to render all
‘assistance to the Inquisitors and their familiars in their holy and
pious Inquisition, whenever required so to do,’ on pain of being
punished as encouragers of heresy--that is to say, with death. Whenever
the Inquisitors should be satisfied as to the heresy of any individual,
they were to order his arrest and detention by the judge of the place,
or by others arbitrarily to be selected by them.... In conclusion, the
Emperor ordered the ‘Inquisitors to make it known that they were not
doing their own work, but that of Christ, and to persuade all persons of
this fact.’”[31]
The strangely perverted vision which could thus see the work of Christ
in the merciless cruelty of the Inquisition need not be analysed. The
mean-souled bigot Philip made the most desperate efforts to break the
will and enforce the submission of a high-spirited and resolute people,
among whom the tenets of Protestantism had made remarkable progress. For
details of the appalling and well-nigh incredible horrors perpetrated by
the Inquisitors, the monster Titelmann in particular, the reader is
referred to Motley’s great work.
The persecutions produced the effects which might have been foreseen.
They caused the immortal revolt of the Netherlands. “Nothing was talked
of but the Edicts and the Inquisition. Nothing else entered into the
minds of men. In the streets, in the shops, in the taverns, in the
fields; at market, at church, at funerals, at weddings; in the noble’s
castle, at the farmer’s fireside, in the mechanic’s garret, upon the
merchants’ exchange, there was but one perpetual subject of shuddering
conversation. It was better, men began to whisper to each other, to die
at once than to live in perpetual slavery. It was better to fall with
arms in hand than to be tortured and butchered by the Inquisition.”[32]
Eminent men inveighed against the tyranny of the Government, and several
of the nobles refused to obey the Edicts. At first it was debated
whether Philip would be mad enough to enforce them, but all doubt as to
his intentions was removed by the Inquisition being formally proclaimed
in every town and village throughout the country. The Netherlanders
steeled their hearts, and prepared to resist to the death. As Motley
remarks: “They knew that the obligation of a King to his vassals was as
sacred as the duties of the subjects to the sovereign.” Philip was not
unaware of the peril, but, like the wooden-headed bigot that he was,
considered the danger of discrediting the Inquisition greater than any
inconveniences that were likely to result from its rigour. The general
indignation became so pronounced that Philip was urged to modify his
instructions in some important particulars, the chief of which were the
repeal of the Edicts and the abolition of the Inquisition. Very
reluctantly he agreed to make certain concessions, but the sincerity of
his compliance may be estimated from the facts that he withdrew the
Papal but maintained the Episcopal Inquisition, stimulating the latter
to fresh exertions, and that he agreed to relax the penalty of death for
heresy, though, considering the promise extorted from him, he declined
to be bound by it. He wrote to his envoy at Rome that this was, perhaps,
the best arrangement, “since the abolition would have no force unless
the Pope, by whom the institution had been established, consented to its
suspension. This matter, however, was to be kept a profound secret....
The Papal institution, notwithstanding the official letters, was to
exist, unless the Pope chose to destroy it; and his Holiness had sent
the Archbishop of Sorrento, a few weeks before, to Brussels, for the
purpose of concerting secret measures for strengthening the Holy Office
in the Provinces.”[33] The severity of the Edicts Philip declined to
mitigate; his secret resolve was not only to keep them in full force,
but so efficiently to support the Inquisition that all his heretic
subjects could be exterminated, even if it cost him his realm and his
life.
All this time persecution was going on, and men and women were being
daily tortured, beheaded, strangled, and burnt alive. Did the Church of
Christ utter one word of protest? Let the Archbishop of Cambrai answer.
An intercepted letter written by him to Cardinal Granvelle in 1565
contained these words: “Since the pot is uncovered and the whole cookery
known, we had best push forward and make an end of all the principal
heretics, whether rich or poor, without regarding whether the city will
be entirely ruined by such a course. Such an opinion I should declare
openly were it not that we of the ecclesiastical profession are accused
of always crying out for blood.”[34]
An even more precise indication of the general feeling in the Church is
found in the resolution passed at a great meeting of the rulers and
nobility in the same year. The question debated was whether any change
should be made in the treatment of heretics. The lay doctors present
were all in favour of the death penalty being abolished. All the
ecclesiastics stoutly maintained the opposite opinion, and unanimously
resolved that no attempt should be made to improve a system which had
hitherto worked so well, and that heretics were to be rigorously
chastised, as before. That Philip shared to the full their truculent
zeal is shown by his fury when he learnt that in May, 1567, a decree of
slightly mitigated ferocity had been issued by his representative, the
Duchess of Parma. He ordered its immediate revocation, on the ground
that its excessive clemency was indecent and contrary to the Christian
religion. The clemency consisted in permitting heretics to be hanged
instead of being burnt alive. This royal fanatic personally commended
the outrageous Titelmann for his persecuting energy.
When the Prince of Orange, who had earnestly defended the cause of
freedom, left the Netherlands for Germany in 1567, the country, says
Motley, “was absolutely helpless, the popular heart cold with
apprehension. All persons at all implicated in the late troubles, or
suspected of heresy, fled from their homes. Fugitive soldiers were
hunted into rivers, cut to pieces in the fields, hanged, burned, or
drowned, like dogs, without quarter and without remorse. The most
industrious and valuable part of the population left the land in droves.
The tide swept outwards with such rapidity that the Netherlands seemed
fast becoming the desolate waste they had been before the Christian era.
Throughout the country those Reformers who were unable to effect their
escape betook themselves to their old lurking-places. The new religion
was banished from the cities, every conventicle was broken up by armed
men, the preachers and leading men were hanged, their disciples beaten
with rods, reduced to beggary, or imprisoned, even if they sometimes
escaped the scaffold. An incredible number, however, were executed for
religious causes. Hardly a village so small, says the Antwerp
chronicler, but that it could furnish one, two, or three hundred victims
to the executioner. The new churches were levelled to the ground, and
out of their timber gallows were constructed. It was thought an
ingenious pleasantry to hang the Reformers upon the beams under which
they had hoped to worship God.”[35]
The troubles became more and more serious, and at length culminated in
open revolt. In 1567 the Duke of Alva arrived in Brussels with a
well-appointed army of Spanish veterans, and at once began his career of
blood and cruelty. When he left the country, six years later, a baffled
man, he is said to have boasted that he had caused 18,600 persons to be
executed during that period. On the 16th February, 1568, the Inquisition
framed the most comprehensive death-warrant ever issued, and ten days
later Philip confirmed it; the whole of the inhabitants of the
Netherlands were regarded as heretics and condemned to death, a few
persons only being excepted by name. Motley appears to have no doubt as
to the authenticity of this appalling document, but Prescott states that
he can find no Spanish record of it, and that it is related by only two
Dutch historians. In 1568 the rebellion broke out in earnest, and led to
that great and glorious war which lasted, with intervals, for eighty
years, with the result that the Low Countries were delivered from the
oppressor, and one of the noblest of nations secured its independence
and religious freedom.
_The Spiritual Franciscans._
A section of the Mendicant Order founded by Francis of Assisi became
known as the Spiritual Franciscans, whose adherence to their vows of
poverty and purity was disapproved, as reflecting on the luxury and the
moral apathy which prevailed in the Order generally. The Inquisition
took up the task of showing the folly of being righteous overmuch, and
in the fourteenth century the Spiritual Franciscans were very firmly
handled. Twenty-five of them were severely tortured in 1318, and four
were burnt at Marseilles for the criminal inconsistency of wearing
flowing garments and having granaries and cellars. The lawfulness of
possessing property was then one of the great questions that distracted
the Church, and people ran the risk of being burnt whichever opinion
they held. Encouraged by their success, the Inquisitors proceeded with
increased vigour. At Narbonne the bishops tried to protect some accused
persons, but were cowed by Inquisitorial threats. Three victims went to
the stake in 1319, seventeen during the Lent of 1321, and several in the
following year. At Lunel seventeen were burnt, at Beziers nine, and at
Carcassonne 113 persons were executed between 1318 and 1350. All these
fell victims to the Dominicans, but the orthodox Franciscans rivalled
them in zeal, 114 persons being burnt by them in the year 1323. Having
departed from their original moderation, the Franciscans had become
energetic persecutors, who even went the length of burning a man for
persistently refusing to break his vows of poverty and chastity.
In the latter part of the thirteenth century great unrest in religious
matters prevailed throughout Europe, and credulity took strange forms.
The expectation that the era of the Holy Ghost was about to begin was a
common and harmless delusion which the orthodox felt in duty bound to
extirpate. With little difficulty and by comparatively lenient methods
and the use of a moderate amount of torture, the Inquisition put an end
to a small sect called the Guillemites, named after a woman who was
worshipped as an incarnation of the Holy Ghost, and whose resurrection
after death was confidently looked for. Other eccentric modes of piety
were suppressed with only a few burnings, but the episode of Dolcino in
1300 was a much more serious matter.
Apparently a man of commanding personality but holding a curious medley
of religious opinions, Dolcino was soon recognized as the spiritual head
of a community numbering several thousand persons, who called themselves
the Apostles. The success of his mission being dangerous to the Church,
the Pope Clement V proclaimed a crusade against him. He and his
followers camped on a bleak mountain summit in the province of Vercelli,
supporting themselves by raids for food into the neighbouring valleys.
Three crusades failed, but a fourth was successful; and after terrible
sufferings, cannibalism being resorted to by the besieged, the mountain
was captured with merciless slaughter on both sides, the fanatics were
broken up, and their leaders handed over to the secular arm and punished
with the utmost barbarity. The beautiful Margarita, Dolcino’s “sister in
Christ,” refusing pardon and offers of marriage, was slowly roasted
alive before his eyes, and Dolcino himself was taken on a cart through
the district on a hot summer day, and gradually torn to pieces with
red-hot pincers. Such was the man’s resolution that he bore this
frightful treatment without even a change of countenance. Strange as
were some of the tenets of these enthusiasts, they were harmless enough
in a moral sense, their chief crimes being their protests against the
evil lives of the clergy, their success in making converts, and their
contention that Christ had forsaken the Church of Rome because of its
wickedness. Believing purity of life to be the first essential to
salvation, they scorned the formalities of priestly religion, and
dedicated themselves to poverty, chastity, and humility.
In the fourteenth century the great question which divided the Church
was that of the poverty of its founder, and to this all other questions
had to give way. The Franciscans ventured to say that Jesus was very
poor in worldly goods. The Dominicans, on the other hand, were confident
that he possessed some property, though they could not say exactly how
much. On this momentous question the good old Church was rent almost in
twain. Regardless of Scripture, the Dominicans even hung on the walls of
their monasteries pictures representing Jesus on the Cross, with one
hand nailed and the other putting money in his pouch. The latter Order
was favoured by the Pope, who persecuted the Franciscans with great
persistency, and men were burnt for holding heretical opinions on a
subject of which no one possessed the smallest fragment of knowledge.
With the death of the chief defenders of comparative sanity in
religion--Marsilio of Padua, William of Ockham, and others--the
Spiritual Franciscans again underwent severe persecution, and
controversy centred round the rights and privileges of the Church and
the moral condition of the clergy. The well-known sect of the
Fratricelli maintained that the real heretic was the Church, which by
its evil conduct had created the heresies that it punished, and by its
doctrines perverted the minds of simple believers. Popular sympathy in
their favour was powerless to prevent punishment. The Popes commanded
the Inquisitors to persecute, and about the middle of the century
several persons were burnt in Italy and France, a number apparently in
the presence of Pope Nicholas V. One of the leaders was burnt by
instalments, and lingered for three days before death freed him from his
torturers. Under this vigorous repression the Fratricelli became extinct
towards the end of the fifteenth century.
CHAPTER V
MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES
_Political Heresy._
The charge of heresy, being easy to make and hard to disprove, furnished
a useful and efficacious means of attacking political enemies,
especially as there was no other offence for which the penalty was so
severe. Crusades against heretics were common. Prior to the great
Albigensian war there were several crusades against the Stedingers of
north-western Germany, a harmless sect of Waldensian tendencies, who
were finally suppressed in the twelfth century. During the three
following centuries the Papacy started or sanctioned crusades against
Viterbo, Aix la Chapelle, Aragon, Ezzelin da Romano, Manfred of Sicily,
Ferrara, Venice, the Visconti of Milan, the Hussites, the Maffredi, and
others. During this period Italy was a scene of almost chronic disorder,
turbulence, and war of the most ruthless character. At the capture at
Cesena in 1376 the Papal Legate ordered that all the inhabitants should
be put to the sword, “without distinction of age or sex, after they had
admitted him and his bandits into the city under his solemn oath that no
injury would be inflicted on them. The number of the slain was estimated
at 5,000.”[36] In the early part of the fourteenth century many noble
Italian families had sentences of heresy pronounced against them by the
Inquisition.
The earnest efforts of Savonarola to purify the Church and the freedom
of his preaching induced the Papacy to proceed against him, though, as
usual, political considerations also were influential. He was tried
under a Papal commission and in accordance with the formulas of the
Inquisition, though it does not appear that the proceedings were
officially held by that body. At any rate, he was burnt in 1498, and
after his death it was discovered that his writings contained no
definitely heretical opinions.
_The Templars._
A very important case in the fourteenth century was the trial of the
Templars, which dragged on for over six years. Some of the accusations
were of a trivial and ridiculous character, others implied traces of the
Catharist heresy and dark practices at the initiation of neophytes, none
of which could be proved, and the whole proceedings were a mockery of
justice. The real motive was the desire of the King of France to seize
the immense wealth of the Order, and grossly exaggerated charges were
made with a view of giving a suitable colour to the course of “justice.”
The Inquisition set to work, and secured many confessions, of course by
the liberal use of torture; and that it was of a rigorous kind is shown
by the fact that in Paris alone thirty-six Templars perished under their
torments, at Sens twenty-five, and many more elsewhere. So untrustworthy
and contradictory is the recorded evidence that there is little reason
to doubt the innocence of the accused. Special Inquisitors were
appointed all over Europe; the slow process of ecclesiastical law, which
then sanctioned abuses from which the secular power shrank, was
expedited by the Pope, the bishops were compliant, the State was
greedy. The king and the Pope entered into an agreement defining the
disposition of the victims’ property. In the clutches of the Inquisition
the Order of the Temple was doomed. After a prolonged series of trials
it was condemned, and its property confiscated. On May 12, 1310,
fifty-four Templars were burnt in Paris, four more a few days later, and
about twenty at other places. In Lorraine many of the Order suffered at
the stake, while in Germany the victims were comparatively few, some in
the diocese of Maintz being fortunate enough to secure an acquittal--a
verdict highly displeasing to the Pope. In England the prosecution was
greatly hampered by that peculiarity of English law which made torture
illegal. The difficulty was got over by the express instructions of the
Pope; but, in spite of a certain temporary success in that method of
extracting evidence, no Templars were put to death, and the Inquisition
failed to establish itself in this country. Results hardly more
satisfactory attended its operations in Italy. The Templars were few;
they strenuously avouched their innocence, and produced evidence highly
favourable to their plea. They were, nevertheless, imprisoned, their
property was confiscated, and the Pope in 1311 gave urgent instructions
to have them tortured, but with what result is not known. In Castile and
Aragon the Templars, notwithstanding another Papal command for their
torture and the presence of special Inquisitors sent for the purpose,
were declared innocent of the crimes attributed to them; but their Order
was dissolved, and its property in Aragon handed over to the
Hospitallers, who were burdened with their support. All over Europe
repeated and urgent orders were received from Rome that the Templars
were to be tortured, and the historian justly remarks that these Papal
Bulls were “perhaps the most disgraceful that ever proceeded from a
vicegerent of God.”[37]
The magnitude of the proceedings against the Templars may be estimated
from the fact that when the Papal archives were by order of Napoleon
transferred to Paris in 1810 the boxes of documents relating to the
trial numbered 3,239; and many further records were, it is said, sold by
Papal agents to grocers as waste paper. At the Council of Vienne
convened in 1312, mainly to consider the case of the Templars, the Pope
did his utmost to get them condemned without a hearing; and, though
unsuccessful in this, the Order was formally abolished at his
instigation, and the bulk of its property, as in Aragon, transferred to
the Hospitallers, who did not relish the duty of supporting their
unfortunate rivals. The rest of the booty was divided among the royal
and other thieves who had long lusted for it. Many of the principal
Templars were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, in the course of
which they rotted to death. The two chiefs, De Molay and De Charny, were
slowly burned to death in Paris in March, 1314, as relapsed heretics, on
the day after their declaration that they had confessed merely to save
their lives. It would have been impossible thus to destroy the
wealthiest and most powerful Order in Europe without the agency of the
Holy Office.
_Joan of Arc._
When Joan of Arc was captured by John of Luxemburg in May, 1430, she was
sold by him for 10,000 livres to the English, who desired to have her
tried before the Inquisition. She was bitterly hated by them, and the
University of Paris heartily joined in their ferocious pursuit of the
heroic maid. Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, another of her
opponents, presided at the trial, which opened in February, 1431; and,
as it was assumed that the proceedings would be invalid without the
presence of an Inquisitor, though Cauchon himself was nominally one,
Jean le Maitre, Vicar for Rouen, acted (reluctantly, be it said to his
credit) as representative of the Inquisitor for France. The trial was a
monstrously unjust one; evidence in Joan’s favour was suppressed, and a
number of skilled lawyers and theologians worked hard to entrap her into
confession. It is one of the marvels of history that this untaught
peasant girl time after time baffled her persecutors by her simple and
truthful answers to their cunningly framed questions. Worn out at last
by their tireless persistence, she abjured, and received the customary
sentence of perpetual imprisonment. The English were furious, and made
desperate efforts to secure her death. It was not easy to find a
pretext, but one was discovered in her change of clothing. Joan was
tempted by having her usual man’s dress placed within her reach. She
donned it; advantage was taken of her imprudence to treat it as a formal
relapse into heresy, and two days later the noble and innocent deliverer
of her country was burnt alive in the market place of Rouen, to the
everlasting shame of France and England.
_Sorcery and Magic._
It is impossible to understand the life of the Middle Ages unless it is
borne in mind that men and women everywhere held an implicit belief in
the reality of the supernatural and of evil spirits, who were for ever
tempting them to wrong. The idea of natural law being unknown, it was
not perceived that this belief conflicted with the notion of an
intelligible cosmos, or that it violated the idea of human
responsibility by assuming that man’s actions are attributable, not to
himself, but to either good spirits or demons. It was man, however, who
received the punishment. The air was believed to be thick with spirits;
they might be seen as dust, as motes in the sunbeam, or in the falling
rain. The sounds of the wind, of any clashing objects, of running
streams and roaring cataracts, were the voices of spirits. From
Scriptural texts, such as Genesis vi, 5, Luke iv, 7, and others, the
logical deduction was drawn that intercourse between angelic and human
beings was not merely possible, but continually took place.
At first the Inquisition neither had nor claimed jurisdiction over
dealings with evil spirits. The Church, indeed, was sometimes more
rational than the people, for in 1279 an Alsatian nun would have been
burnt by the peasantry for sorcery had she not been rescued by some
friars. The question of repressing this crime had been raised in 1257,
and before many years elapsed it was generally recognized that the
Inquisition had some sort of jurisdiction over it. Astrology soon
attracted its attention, and was ranked as heresy. Peter of Abano seems
to have been the first to be prosecuted, and he would have been burnt as
a relapsed heretic had he not taken the precaution to die in the
ordinary way first. In 1324 the astrologer, Cecco d’Ascoli, was forced
to abjure, but, being imprudent enough to relapse, was burnt three years
later. Several people were excommunicated for sorcery early in the
fourteenth century, and the growing belief in the reality and gravity of
the offence was greatly stimulated by Pope John XXII.
In Ireland a zealous Franciscan worked up a case against Lady Alice
Kyteler, alleged to be one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world;
and, though the lady escaped to England, her maid was mercilessly
scourged until she confessed a tissue of absurdities, after which she
was burnt. Persecution diminished when, in 1330, the Pope withdrew
sorcery from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but the popular belief
continued and extended, and the secular courts were sufficiently
rigorous in their treatment of offenders. In 1390 two women, after being
severely tortured two or three times without result, finally confessed
to a charge of making a love-philtre, and were burnt. The early trials
for sorcery in England were held in the civil courts, the leniency of
which was disapproved by the Church; in 1407, therefore, Henry IV placed
the offence under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which naturally made the
most of it, and prepared a congenial soil for the witchcraft delusion.
One of the most extraordinary cases in history is that of Gilles de Retz
(or Rais), who in 1440 was accused of sacrilege, child murder,
intercourse with demons, and other offences savouring of heresy. Gilles
de Rais, Marshal of France, was a rich and powerful baron of Brittany,
whose extravagance involved him in many difficulties. He was pious, as
far as the observances of religion went, a man of unusual culture, with
a passion for expensive books, paintings, music, the drama, and other
forms of art. A dabbler in the occult, he sought perseveringly for the
Philosopher’s Stone, by which he believed unlimited wealth would be
gained, enabling him to keep up his lavish display and prodigality. But
there was a very much darker side to his character. He was accustomed to
employ agents, women as well as men, to entice children from their
parents, by whom they were never seen again. These disappearances became
so numerous that suspicion was aroused, and de Rais was at last arrested
and tried before the Bishop of Nantes and the Vice-Inquisitor of the
diocese. He was found guilty, but no sentence was pronounced.
Immediately afterwards he was tried in a secular court, and sentenced to
be hanged and burnt, with two servants who had been accomplices in his
ghastly crimes. Making allowance for popular exaggeration, which
attributed countless victims to him, there is reason to believe that 140
children were outraged and murdered, their bodies being thrown into
pits. It is said that “so depraved became his appetite that he found his
chief enjoyment in the death agonies of his victims, over whose
sufferings he gloated as he skilfully mangled them and protracted their
torture. When dead he would criticize their beauties with his
confidential servitors, would compare one with another, and would kiss
with rapture the heads which pleased him most.”[38] Yet this monster
died with words of godly exhortation on his lips and confident of
salvation. Under the threat of torture he freely confessed to crimes
enough to put 10,000 men to death. He was taken into church and granted
absolution, and the execution was carried out on the following day. The
extraordinary wickedness of this man made a deep impression on the
superstitious people of Brittany, where he became, in later ages,
identified with the Bluebeard of Perrault’s nursery story, of which some
writers maintain that he furnished the original, possibly because he is
said to have had seven wives, though he possessed only one. It is
something to the credit of the Holy Office that it had a share in
bringing this fiend to justice.
The growing belief in witchcraft and demonology in the fifteenth century
gave additional strength to the long arm of the Inquisition, for witches
were of necessity heretics. They were at first treated with comparative
mildness, the secular courts being apparently the first to inflict the
penalty of burning in such cases. But the Inquisition soon equalled this
severity, and gave the accused fewer chances of escape. Venice,
however, was less energetic in this matter than most States, for in 1486
and 1521 it incurred the wrath of the Papacy by refusing to burn some
witches condemned by the Inquisition. In 1474 several women were burnt
in Piedmont for witchcraft, but two others, who were able to employ
counsel of their own, had their case transferred to Turin, and
presumably secured acquittals--a fact which seems to show the prudence
of the Inquisitors in choosing the advocate for the defence, and
excommunicating him if he was successful.
Of the Vaudois, or witches of Arras, several persons after being cruelly
tortured, were burnt in 1460, a hermit being the first to suffer at
Langres; and seven persons were put to death in one _auto de fé_ in July
of that year. Many of the leading and wealthiest men of Arras were
arrested; confessions, some of them afterwards withdrawn, were wrung
from them by torture, and twelve persons in all were burnt out of the
thirty-four apprehended. The epidemic of credulity died away after a
time, and the Inquisition stopped further prosecutions; but the
prosperous city of Arras suffered enormous loss by the confiscations
imposed and the panic which dislocated its trade. The return to sanity
was chiefly due to the son of one of the victims succeeding in an appeal
to the Parliament of Paris (previous appeals had been suppressed),
which, after a brief inquiry lasting thirty years, issued a decree
rehabilitating some of the accused, and caused the promoters of the
prosecutions to be heavily fined. It was decreed that torture should be
for the future prohibited. This is “probably the only case on record in
which an Inquisitor was brought before a law court to answer for his
official actions.”[39] Thus a healthy scepticism was beginning to enter
the public mind. Several persons were charged before the Bishop of
Amiens, who acquitted them; another was acquitted by the Archbishop of
Besançon; while a third was tried by a tribunal consisting of the
Archbishop of Rheims, the Bishop of Paris, the Inquisitor of France, and
some theological experts. He was not only acquitted, but authorized to
prosecute his accusers for reparation and damages. A poor man who went
mad on the subject of witchcraft was burnt in August, 1460.
In its early stages the belief in witchcraft was artificially stimulated
by the Church, and flourished in an atmosphere of ignorance and dread of
the unseen. “Had the Church resolutely repressed the growing
superstition in place of stimulating it with all the authority of the
Holy See, infinite bloodshed and misery might have been spared to
Christendom.”[40] Every Inquisitor was an agent for the spread of the
belief, and the Church industriously taught it. An Italian Inquisitor in
1485 burnt forty-one people for witchcraft in one district in the
Grisons--an exploit which gratified the historian Sprenger; and
Innocent’s Bull of 1484 gave a perceptible impulse to the superstition,
forty-eight persons being burnt in one small German town in five years
by order of Sprenger and a fellow Inquisitor. To doubt the reality of
the crime was to dispute the authority of the Church; to aid an accused
person was to impede the Inquisition. A woman charged with witchcraft
had little chance of escape, for if her defence made a favourable
impression on the judges they also were considered to have been
bewitched, and few of them cared to run that risk. Confessions made
under severe torture were, of course, numerous, and were afterwards used
as proving the reality of the crime. The small amount of incredulity
which existed vanished before Sprenger’s _Malleus Malficarum_, which Lea
terms “the most portentous monument of superstition which the world has
produced.” With perfect good faith and absolute belief in the truth of
demoniacal possession, Sprenger brought forward an overwhelming mass of
evidence, which no one in those times was able to rebut or dared to
dispute. This terrible book, which remained the recognized authority on
the subject for more than a century, immensely stimulated a belief
which, as Lea remarks, is “ a process of purely natural evolution from
the principles which the Church had succeeded in establishing.”[41] For
200 years the Church had done all it could to promote this belief. Pope
Calixtus, in 1457, ordered the repression of witchcraft, and towards the
end of the century Alexander VI urged the Inquisitor of Lombardy to show
greater zeal in his work. Early in the sixteenth century Julius II
defined the powers of the Inquisitors, and issued to their helpers
indulgences similar to those given to Crusaders. Thus persecution
produced its natural effect in a great revival of superstition in
Northern Italy. The Inquisitors burnt 140 persons at Brescia in 1510,
and 300 at Como four years later.
The Witch Sabbaths were a well-known institution in the Middle Ages, and
it is reported that more than 25,000 persons were sometimes present at
these weird gatherings. In view of the danger incurred, such popularity
seems unaccountable enough to suggest that the narratives spring from
sheer delusion. In the district of Valcamonica an Inquisitor burnt
seventy witches and sent as many more to prison, while those suspected
or accused numbered 5,000, about one-fourth of the population of the
valleys. The Venetian Senate thought this was going too far, but its
protest only brought strong remonstrances from the Pope, Leo X, and
fresh orders for persecution. The Senate replied by a dignified and
rational document, laying it down that the accused were to have a fair
trial with legal safeguards, that torture must be discontinued, that the
Inquisition’s expenses were to be kept within moderate bounds, that
greed for money was not to be the reason for prosecution, and that the
excesses alleged against Inquisitors would have to be investigated. This
document, “a monument of considerate wisdom and common-sense,” was
ignored, and Christendom abandoned itself to a senseless, delirious orgy
of superstition and cruelty. Between the madness of the Catholic and the
madness of the Protestant there was little to choose. On one point at
least they were in accord, and it is significant that Calvin used the
arguments of the Inquisitors to justify persecution. In Geneva 500
persons are said to have been burnt within three months, at Toulouse 400
on a single occasion (some say 1,500), at Bamberg 600, at Wurzburg 900
in one year--all in the sixteenth century. The Senate of Savoy condemned
800 at one time. That a cold spring in 1586 was caused by witchcraft was
proved by the confessions of the guilty parties, and for this crime 118
women and two men were burnt by the Archbishop of Treves. This city
seems to have exceeded all others in its atrocities. According to Lecky,
7,000 persons were burnt there for sorcery, but he does not state over
what period these figures extend. The Inquisitor Paramo, who wrote in
the sixteenth century, boasts that since 1404 the Holy Office burnt as
many as 30,000 persons, who, if let alone, would have “brought the whole
world to destruction.”[42] This Paramo defended the secrecy of the
Inquisition on the ground that God was the first Inquisitor, and that in
secret Adam and Eve had been tried.
_Intellect and Faith._
A religion which imagined that it was the repository of a full and final
revelation, that it possessed the keys of the invisible world, and which
regarded every doubt as a heresy born of the devil, naturally became in
practice a vast machine for persecution. When mental activity was thus a
crime, and any attempt to increase knowledge an act of rebellion against
God, it was clear that human progress was brought to a standstill. No
one can tell what progress would have been made had the Inquisition not
existed; that it kept Europe for hundreds of years in mental torpor, and
did what it could to make the reign of stupidity eternal, does not admit
of question. What the magnificent brain of Roger Bacon could have
achieved is matter for speculation. It has been disputed, but seems to
be true, that he was imprisoned for his advanced opinions, and died a
captive; but, however that may be, it is certain that the Church
succeeded in preventing mankind from benefiting by his researches.
Anything like modern Freethought was out of the question, but distinct
approaches to it were made in the twelfth century by Averrhoes, whose
particular tenets were that matter is uncreated and eternal, that the
soul dies with the body, only collective humanity being immortal, and
that all religions are of human origin and, though useful incentives to
virtue, contain only relative truth. These doctrines, which were looked
upon as deadly heresies, surprisingly anticipate some of the
speculations of our own times. It is remarkable that under the rigorous
conditions which prevailed Averrhoism should have spread so rapidly as
it did, but it could have been only among the scholarly few; and in the
thirteenth century, which was in certain respects more advanced than the
fifteenth, these opinions made some slight impression on the popular
mind. Had the impression been deeper, the results might have been in
some respects more disastrous. The general ignorance was so great that a
premature abandonment of the orthodox faith might have been made the
occasion of even more flagrant moral licence than actually existed, and
so have strengthened the hands of the persecutors. A system which held
all religions to be untrue, especially the religion of the Christians,
who daily ate their God, would naturally enough be thought to emanate
from the bottomless pit, and it is an astonishing circumstance that for
a long time the Inquisition left Averrhoism alone. Herman of Ryswick,
the most famous successor of Peter of Abano, after being sentenced to
perpetual imprisonment, continued to propagate his errors, and in 1512
was burnt at the Hague by order of the Inquisition. It is evident that
at times considerable freedom of speech existed, or Laurentius Valla
would scarcely have been able, in the middle of the fifteenth century,
to assail the “Donation of Constantine,” or to declare that the Papacy
should be deprived of its temporal power. Valla got off cheaply by a
simple declaration that he believed as Mother Church believed, though
Mother Church, he added, knew nothing about it. Ultimately this restless
disputant obtained a clerical sinecure in Rome, and died in peace.
Several other unbelievers escaped the customary doom of mental
independence. It is one of the anomalies of ecclesiastical history prior
to the Reformation that, while the most trifling variations from
orthodoxy were relentlessly crushed, a philosophical humanism hardly
distinguishable from downright Atheism was fashionable among the
intellectual classes, even those in clerical orders, and frequently
went unpunished. The writings of the famous Raymond Lully--perhaps the
most voluminous author on record, for he is credited with 321
volumes--brought him into conflict with the Inquisition; and long after
his death in 1315 Eymeric, the Inquisitor of Aragon, sought to have his
memory condemned. This was partially done in 1620, though the main
object of Lully had been to suppress the heresy of Averrhoism, and many
miracles wrought by his remains had evidenced his saintliness. Not many
figures of the Middle Ages have had the doubtful honour of being both
heretic and saint.
In 1331 Pope John XXII had imprisoned an English priest who maintained
that the saints after death are at once admitted to the presence of God.
This doctrine, known as the “Beatific Vision,” had aroused the Pope’s
anger, but he was subsequently compelled by the strength of the general
opinion in its favour to accept it, after a controversy which nearly
cost him his tiara. Years of bitter dispute ensued on a subject about
which no human being knew anything whatever, and it even became a
question of grave political consequence, for the monarchs of the time
ventured to differ from the Papal opinion. The Inquisition espoused the
popular view, and made questions on the subject an important part of the
interrogatories addressed to the unlucky persons brought before its
tribunals.
About the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a purely dogmatic
development, a further mass of superstition spread, and gave rise to
bitter controversies, the Franciscans and Dominicans quarrelling so
fiercely that in 1482 popular tumults broke out in Italy on this
mysterious topic, of which everybody was supposed to know something. The
theory that the Virgin Mary never from the moment of her conception
shared the sinful tendencies of ordinary mortals was something of a
novelty, and the Dominicans who rejected it had tradition in their
favour, but they were overborne by the increasing power of the new
superstition. An Italian priest who in 1504 maintained that Christ was
conceived in the Virgin’s heart was seized by the Inquisition, and had a
narrow escape from death by fire. A special appearance of the Virgin
herself, who expressed her annoyance at the doctrine, caused an immense
sensation until it was discovered that the manifestation was a trick got
up by the Dominicans, and four of the culprits were burnt. Not until
1854, after five centuries of struggle, was the doctrine officially
proclaimed as a formal act of faith, when the Dominicans obediently
began to find reasons in its favour. It would seem to be a logical
sequence that the reputed father of the Virgin was no more concerned in
her birth than Joseph was supposed to be in that of Jesus, but for
maintaining this thesis a man was condemned so recently as 1876.
_Censorship of Books._
Notwithstanding the extent to which heresy was propagated by printed
books, it was a long time before the Inquisition was recognized as the
most convenient instrument for their supervision and suppression. The
first Papal deliverance on the subject was a Bull by Gregory XI in 1376,
instructing the Inquisition to examine and condemn suspected writings,
but what were the results is not known. An Archbishop who burnt some
writings of John Wycliffe at Prague was found to have exceeded his
powers, and it was not till the beginning of the sixteenth century that
a regular censorship was organized, and then in Germany only. However,
the Inquisition was willing to undertake additional responsibilities,
and at length made a rule that any one possessing books of doubtful
orthodoxy must within eight days deliver them to the Bishop or
Inquisitor of his district, on pain of being under vehement suspicion of
heresy. That the Church was more anxious to preserve its privileges than
to promote religion may be inferred from the fact that translations into
the vernacular of any parts of the Bible were prohibited. As it was
found before long that books containing heretical doctrines were being
circulated, it was deemed expedient to forbid anything being printed
without previous examination by the Holy Office and the Papal and
episcopal authorities. The religious world, however, became so
disorganized by the Reformation that these precautions were of little
avail, and it was not until the Church had regained much of its power in
the counter Reformation that a really strict censorship could be
established.
_The Greek Church._
Although one Pope, Boniface VIII, issued a Bull decreeing that every
human being, including the members of the Greek Church, was bound to
obey the Roman Pontiff, a prudent and tolerant attitude was usually
maintained towards that unsound but powerful rival. Stray members of the
Greek communion who happened to be found in Western Europe were at times
persecuted as heretics, and in 1351 all Greeks were ordered once a year
to confess and take the sacrament according to the Latin usage. Any
person who after this decree violated it was a relapsed heretic, and
entitled to no mercy. But to coerce effectively a great religious
organization, every member of which was in the eyes of Rome a heretic,
proved too arduous a task for orthodoxy, and the Inquisition failed to
utilize the glorious opportunities for persecution afforded by Eastern
Europe, with its variety of races and religious ideas. The Church was
therefore prudent enough to follow a line of policy as mild and tolerant
as it was novel.
_Indulgences and Simony._
The scandal to the cause of true religion which accompanied the sale of
Indulgences was so notorious all over Europe that it is surprising to
find that this abuse--deeply prejudicial to the Church and to public
morals--was not considered to deserve vigorous repression. It is true
that the practice was sometimes officially denounced, as when Pope
Alexander IV gave the Inquisitors power to deal with the evil. But Lea
asserts that, so far as he can discover, only one man was tried by the
Inquisition for this prevalent offence. He admitted that he had been in
the habit of telling monstrous falsehoods and filling the superstitious
people with absurdities, but it is doubtful whether he was punished--if
at all, it was by nothing more than a light penance. The remarkable
lenity of the Church towards this traffic was, of course, due to the
fact that it furnished a very substantial source of profit; but if the
Popes had expended on the internal reform of the Church a hundredth part
of the energy which they devoted to the suppression of minor differences
of opinion the Reformation might conceivably have been averted. It was
the Reformation that made imperative that moral renewal which prolonged
the influence of the Church and still constitutes one of the chief
elements of its strength.
It is a striking proof of human selfishness and of the extent to which
it blinds mankind to its own failings that the Inquisition was never
instructed to put down simony (which, as heresy, came within its
jurisdiction), and that it never volunteered to do so--a fact which
shows very clearly that, in the view of the Christian Church, morals
were of trifling importance compared with belief. One or two of the
Popes worked with genuine zeal and immense energy to extirpate the
evil, but without avail. The practice being highly profitable
financially to the Church, its disastrous moral effects were ignored,
the laudable desires of some Pontiffs being thwarted by others less
scrupulous. Every clerical office, from the highest to the lowest, was
virtually sold by auction. Pope John XXII even drew up a scale on which
absolutions for simony could be granted at the lowest market rates. The
prevalence of this offence was perhaps the chief of all the causes which
contributed to the degradation of the Christian Church. In this
connection it may be interesting to reproduce here a clever and daring
satire which was popular in the thirteenth century:--
Here beginneth the Gospel according to the silver marks. In those
days the Pope said to the Romans: When the Son of Man shall come to
the throne of our majesty, first say to him: Friend, why comest
thou? And if he continue to knock, giving you nothing, ye shall
cast him into outer darkness. And it came to pass that a certain
poor clerk came to the court of the lord pope, and cried out
saying: Have mercy on me, ye gate-keepers of the pope, for the hand
of poverty hath touched me. I am poor and hungry; I pray you to
help my misery. Then were they wroth and said: Friend, thy poverty
perish with thee; get thee behind me, Satan, for thou knowest not
the odour of money. Verily, verily, I say unto thee that thou shalt
not enter into the joy of thy Lord until thou hast given thy last
farthing.
Then the poor man went away, and sold his cloak and his coat and
all that he had, and gave it to the cardinals and gate-keepers and
chamberlains. But they said: What is this among so many? And they
cast him beyond the gates, and he wept bitterly and could find
naught to comfort him. Then came to the court a rich clerk, fat and
broad and heavy, who in his wrath had slain a man. First he gave
to the gate-keeper, then to the chamberlain, then to the cardinals;
and they thought they were about to receive more. But the lord
pope, hearing that the cardinals and servants had many gifts from
the clerk, fell sick unto death. Then unto him the rich man sent an
electuary of gold and silver, and straightway he was cured. Then
the lord pope called unto him the cardinals and servants, and said
unto them: Brethren, take heed that no one seduce you with empty
words. I set you an example; even as I take so shall ye take.[43]
Avaricious men were enabled by an incredibly bad system to make religion
a public danger. Priests who led women astray on the plea that
intercourse with holy men was not sinful, a depraved laity, religion
severed from morals--these made up a state of society in which
apprehensions existed that the wickedness of the clergy would provoke
the people to rise against them, or perhaps even bring on the world the
final visitation of Divine wrath. Good men asked why God did not
intervene to save his Church from ruin. No intervention came.
CHAPTER VI
THE GENTLE ART OF WHITEWASHING
If the Inquisition really was the beneficent institution which some of
its apologists represent, it is singular that their defences should be
so weak and their admissions so damaging. The line taken is, in the
main, that heresy is a crime against social order, that the Holy Office
embodied the tendencies of the age, that its methods were no worse than
those of the secular powers--were, indeed, an improvement upon them, and
that no special reproach can be directed against the Church on the score
of inhumanity. It is claimed that the practice of the Inquisition,
though rigorous at the outset from the necessities of the case, was
modified by experience in the direction of mildness and mercy, and that
the frequent appeals to Rome implied the certainty of an indulgent
hearing.
Thus the Rev. J. Balmez, a Spanish writer who, in his _European
Civilization_, defends the Inquisition--on the whole in a fairly
judicious and tolerant spirit--alleges that the Inquisitorial “rigour
was the result of extraordinary circumstances--the effect of the spirit
of the nations and the severity of customs in Europe at that time.”[44]
No student of history will deny that there is some truth in this
contention, though he would naturally expect the Christian Church to
have made far greater efforts than it did to mitigate the “severity of
customs.” Its conceptions of social order were incompatible with
personal liberty. And it is curious that when in Southern France the
majority of the people were heretics they showed no tendency to
persecute, though they had the power. All the events, the movements, and
the personages of human history are necessarily the consequences of
their antecedents; but, unless we are to relieve all human beings from
responsibility for their actions, we cannot exonerate the Inquisition
from crimes of the greatest magnitude. It may have been established from
the best and purest motives; yet, though experience made it fully aware
of the terrible evils which resulted from its procedure, it deliberately
increased them. All the actions of virtuous men are not good actions,
and if, in putting into practice particular theories, they are found to
produce mischievous effects, a sacred obligation rests upon the holders
to revise their views in the light of the experience gained. Buckle,
with justice, maintains that moral feelings alone are not equal to the
task of preventing persecution. If the moral feelings are enlisted on
the side of what is erroneously believed to be the truth, the sincerity
of the persecutor only makes him the more dangerous to society. “That
the Inquisitors were remarkable for an undeviating and incorruptible
integrity may be proved in a variety of ways and from different and
independent sources of evidence.”[45] In admitting the general truth of
this remark, it must be borne in mind that the Inquisitorial system
facilitated grave abuses by officials whose integrity was far from
“undeviating.” Buckle adds: “The evidence decisively proves the utter
inability of the moral feelings to diminish religious persecution....
The great antagonist of intolerance is not humanity, but knowledge. It
is to the diffusion of knowledge, and to that alone, that we owe the
comparative cessation of what is unquestionably the greatest evil men
have ever inflicted on their own species. For that religious persecution
is a greater evil than any other is apparent, not so much from the
enormous and almost incredible number of its known victims as from the
fact that the unknown must be far more numerous, and that history gives
no account of those who have been spared in the body in order that they
might suffer in the mind. We hear much of martyrs and confessors--of
those who were slain by the sword or consumed in the fire; but we know
little of that still larger number who, by the mere threat of
persecution, have been driven into an outward abandonment of their real
opinions, and who, thus forced into an apostasy the heart abhors, have
passed the remainder of their lives in the practice of a constant and
humiliating hypocrisy. It is this which is the real curse of religious
persecution. For in this way, men being constrained to mask their
thoughts, there arises a habit of securing safety by falsehood and of
purchasing impunity with deceit. In this way fraud becomes a necessary
of life; insincerity is made a daily custom; the whole tone of public
feeling is vitiated, and the gross amount of vice and of error fearfully
increased. Surely, then, we have reason to say that, compared to this,
all other crimes are of small account; and we may well be thankful for
that increase of intellectual pursuits which has destroyed an evil that
some among us would even now restore.”[46] Notwithstanding the great
improvement in knowledge, however, the main body of the Christian Church
still holds that persecution of erroneous doctrines is not an evil, and
still officially teaches that their propagation should be punished with
death. A Dominican priest in 1782 ferociously argued that “the command
in Deuteronomy xiii, 6-10, to slay without mercy all who entice the
faithful from the true religion, is almost literally the law of the Holy
Inquisition; and proceeded to prove from Scripture that fire is the
peculiar delight of God, and the proper means of purifying the wheat
from the tares.”[47]
It is perhaps going too far to affirm that all the Inquisitors were men
of incorruptible integrity. From the first the motive of religious zeal
was alloyed with the desire of personal or corporate profit, and an
elaborate system of persecution and extortion was invented which
permitted the exercise of both passions, whereby the many suffered to
gratify the few.
Balmez remarks that “the Roman Inquisition has never been known to
pronounce the execution of capital punishment ... the facts show the
difference between the Popes and the Protestants. The Popes, armed with
the tribunal of intolerance, have not spilt a drop of blood; Protestants
and philosophers have shed torrents.”[48] The object of this impudent
lie is simply to score a point against Protestantism. That Protestants
persecuted vigorously when they had the power no one disputes; for a
long time they failed to understand their own principles. But they had
less power and fewer opportunities than the Church of Rome. The precise
degrees of culpability in the two bodies cannot be determined here. No
other Church but that of Rome has ever set up an Inquisition. The
preceding pages will have shown that the Popes many times officially
instituted crusades against Christians who rejected parts of their
teaching; that they expressly commanded human beings to be tortured and
put to death; that all through the Middle Ages the Church exerted a
dominant influence over the State, and, while affecting scruples as to
the actual shedding of blood, insisted on the secular power inflicting
death in a form infinitely more painful than that of the sword. Thus an
educated writer can actually maintain that, because a man does not
murder with his own hand, but induces another to murder for him, he has
no moral responsibility for the crime. What civil code would recognize
such a doctrine? The subterfuge merely adds hypocrisy to cruelty. The
admission will be noticed that the Popes were “armed with the tribunal
of intolerance.” The “facts” show unmistakably who created that
tribunal. They show with equal clearness how it was employed. It will
also be observed that in this passage Balmez suppresses the fact that
the Inquisition had been actively at work for 300 years before
Protestantism was heard of, and that its most frightful excesses were
committed against those whose moral sense was outraged by the conduct of
the clergy.
It is true that the practice of the Inquisition became milder in the
course of time. But to claim this as a merit is to falsify the plain
historical record. There were two principal reasons for the diminished
severity, neither of them reflecting special credit on the persecutors.
In Languedoc and Spain the Inquisition succeeded in exterminating
practically every heretic in the kingdom, so that the field of its
operations became gradually narrowed. The Inquisition ceased to burn
heretics only when there were no more heretics to burn. And a certain
inclination to milder penalties was made inevitable by an improvement in
secular morals which can hardly have been the work of the Church which
had seriously retarded it. In other countries the diffusion of knowledge
led even some ecclesiastics to perceive the futility of persecution, and
when that point was reached they became convinced of its inhumanity.
Balmez might as well have argued that the dying-out of the witchcraft
mania was due to the benevolent spirit of the witch-hunters.
A significant admission made by Balmez may be noticed. “I see,” he
remarks, “that from the earliest times, when the Church began to exert
political influence, heresy began to figure in the codes as a crime; and
I have never been able to discover a period of complete tolerance.”[49]
This means that the spirit of intolerance, so rapidly developed in the
Church, infected the State also. The fact is beyond dispute, but it
simply furnishes an additional testimony to the evils of
ecclesiasticism. Nor will any one deny that the Christian Church has
never yet shown to the world “a period of complete tolerance.”
The further argument of Balmez, that the Inquisition preserved Spain
from the “dangers” of Judaism and Protestantism, may also be admitted as
representing facts, though it is necessary to draw from them conclusions
other than his own. The material prosperity of Spain would have been
incalculably greater if the Jews had been allowed the free exercise of
their business abilities and the practice of their non-aggressive faith;
while, if Protestantism had been permitted the freedom which it secured
elsewhere, the cause of spiritual religion must have been promoted. As
to the Inquisition having averted civil war, if the Church had grasped
the idea of tolerance civil war over religious differences would have
been impossible. But even that serious peril would have been a less evil
than the extinction of liberty, the slow suffocation of the intellectual
life, the neglect of science, and the decay of commerce, which actually
resulted from the Inquisition’s policy. Civil war would have been at
least an indication of life. The Inquisition meant death.
Perhaps the best-known and most thorough-going apologist for the
Inquisition, so far as Spain is concerned, is Count Joseph De Maistre
(1754-1821), a Romanist layman who adopted a strongly ecclesiastical
point of view, and whose great ability was marred by a tendency to
paradox and dogmatism. His _Letters to a Russian Gentleman on the
Spanish Inquisition_ are full of a vivacious special pleading, which
perplexes without enlightening the reader. His main arguments group
themselves round three points: (1) That the Spanish Inquisition was a
purely secular institution; (2) that it did not condemn to death; (3)
that it did not punish the expression of opinion on questions of
religion.
With regard to the first point De Maistre says: “The Inquisition, by
virtue of the Bulls of the Sovereign Pontiff, and the King, by virtue of
his royal prerogative, constitute the authority which regulates, and has
always regulated, the tribunals of the Inquisition--tribunals which are,
at the same time, both royal and ecclesiastical; so that, if either of
the two powers happened to withdraw, the action of the tribunal would
necessarily be suspended” (p. 8). How this explicit admission that the
Spanish Inquisition was both a State and a religious organization is
reconcilable with the assertion that it was “entirely a royal
institution” must be left to the reader’s ingenuity to discover. De
Maistre effectively demolishes his own contention. It is still more
effectively confuted by a later and better authority. Dr. Pastor admits
that the Spanish Inquisition was “a mixed, but primarily ecclesiastical,
institution. The fact that the condemned were handed over to the secular
arm testifies to the correctness of this view. Had the Spanish
Inquisition been a State Inquisition, a royal court of justice, there
would have been no necessity for this. A court which invariably hands
over those whom it finds guilty to the secular arm for punishment
cannot itself be a secular tribunal. It was precisely the ecclesiastical
character of the new Inquisition which made its judges decline to
execute capital sentences and follow the custom always observed by the
ecclesiastical Inquisition, of requesting that the prisoner ‘might be
leniently dealt with’--a formality prescribed by the canon law.”[50] The
formula of mercy, of course, deceived no one. In another place Dr.
Pastor says: “It is important to note, as a significant fact bearing on
the character of this institution, that ‘not only the ecclesiastical
authorization of the first Inquisitors, but also the first regulations
as to the mode of procedure, emanated directly from the Pope.’”[51] Lea
states that the Inquisition even claimed that all civil statutes of
which it disapproved should be abrogated.[52] But if the responsibility
for the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition rests only partially
upon the Popes, there is no question of divided responsibility in the
case of the institution with which the present essay is concerned. That
was established, renewed, and supervised at every turn by the Papacy.
De Maistre’s second contention is that the Inquisition did not pass
sentences of death, but that if it virtually did so it merely followed
the practice of all other tribunals, which necessarily have the power to
inflict death for serious crime. “All tribunals condemn to death,” he
says, adding: “The Church so abhors blood that a priest cannot be a
surgeon, lest his consecrated hand should shed the blood of the patient”
(p. 11). It is sheer superstition to argue that a tribunal notoriously
prone to inflict excessive punishment is relieved of moral
responsibility by omitting a particular form of words, while taking
every possible precaution to ensure the punishment being mercilessly
inflicted. The argument is a dishonest shift, which “strains at a gnat
and swallows a camel.” The “consecrated hand” was too holy to practise
the art of saving life, but not too holy to employ an unconsecrated hand
to destroy it. In this connection De Maistre enlarges on the lenity of
Rome, which frequently protested against the severity of the laws
against heresy. That mildness was occasionally shown is true, but it is
forgotten that Rome itself--as the Papal Bulls ordering torture
prove--was very largely responsible for the severity. That the
tenderness was not due to an excess of humane feeling we may infer from
the savage rigour which in the thirteenth century became a feature of
the canon law. Had that law been a model of gentleness and love,
ecclesiastics would have found no difficulty in making it an engine of
cruelty and persecution, on the plea that concern for the heretic’s soul
made it necessary and wholesome to punish his body. As it was,
injunctions to deal mercifully with him were so systematically set at
naught that very little importance can be attached to their face value.
Inquisitors were seldom reproved for being zealous persecutors. De
Maistre’s verdict that the Inquisition was “mild, tolerant, charitable,
the bearer of consolation in every country of the world,” sounds like
irony, but was probably his sincere conviction. Polemical writers
sometimes empty words of all intelligible meaning.
In his third main argument De Maistre shows the cloven hoof. He
maintains that people are rightly punished if they “strike deadly blows
at the religion of their nation,” that “the propagator of heresy ought
to be classed among the greatest criminals,” and that it is positively
wicked to protest against the punishments of the Inquisition (p. 44). If
these contentions are sound, it is a waste of time to argue that the
Inquisition did not punish the expression of heretical opinions in
religion. It was established for that very purpose.
The following specimen of De Maistre’s reasoning will probably be
sufficient: “God has spoken; it is for us to believe. The religion which
he established is one, even as He is Himself. Truth being essentially
intolerant, to profess religious toleration is to profess scepticism; in
other words, to exclude faith. Woe, a thousand times woe, to the stupid
imprudence which accuses us of damning men. It is only God who damns; He
alone has said to His messengers: _Go, teach all nations! He that
believeth shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned_”
(p. 72). This passage is reproduced merely as a curious example of the
religious reasoning of a century ago. Fortunately for human happiness,
the world has condemned this point of view by abandoning it. The day has
gone by for arguments which seek to justify religious persecution, and
for appeals to supernatural authority in support of irrational dogmas.
In our own time the Inquisition has found a far more reasonable and
fair-minded apologist in the person of Monseigneur Celestin Douais,
Bishop of Beauvais, who published in 1906 a scholarly examination of the
Holy Office. The first sentence of this work is that “The Inquisition
was established by the Papacy, which alone was qualified to do so,” and
that “this fact is universally known and recognized.” The Bishop adds
that the Inquisitor Eymerich expressly lays it down that an Inquisitor
is not a secular judge, but a delegate appointed by the Pope. If, in his
calm and restrained historical exposition, he nowhere condemns the
organized barbarity of the system, he freely exposes its defects, and
only incidentally defends its proceedings. He is a historian rather than
an apologist. The few considerations he urges are of quite minor
importance; if they extenuate the guilt of the Inquisitorial practice,
they by no means disprove the enormous mischief it produced. Thus he
asserts, on the authority of Eymerich, that the names of witnesses were
suppressed because, if mortal enmity to the accused could be proved
against them, they were required to withdraw from the case. In practice
the accused gained no advantage from this provision, for he could only
guess at his possible enemy, and the Inquisitors were ingenious enough,
if they so desired, to prove his guesses wrong. The handicap to the
prisoner remained, and it is possible to assume that one reason for the
extreme secrecy was the determination to render the concession useless.
Monseigneur Douais states that ecclesiastical law was in general milder
than secular law, and that torture was interdicted by the canons until
1252. This may be so, but it was a Pope who in that year insisted on the
employment of torture, and it was again expressly authorized by Innocent
IV, Urban IV, and other Popes. In this, as in other matters, it is
useless to rely on provisions which were habitually set at naught. The
contention that torture was seldom used is perhaps the result of too
implicit a trust in formulas. According to M. Langlois, torture became
so much a part of the ordinary process that it was purposely left
unrecorded.[53] The great thing was to extract confession; it was easy
to preserve a discreet silence as to the means. In the civil records the
same peculiarity is observable.[54] No institution has ever exhibited
greater discrepancies between theory and practice than has the
Inquisition.
That provision was made for the mitigation and even remission of
penalties need not be doubted. But this was done in few and exceptional
cases only; the decision being customarily left to the Inquisitors’
discretion, it became the practice to ignore everything that tended in
favour of the persons accused.
That the co-operation of the Bishop of the diocese was necessary to give
validity to the Inquisitorial sentence is assumed by Monseigneur Douais
to have relieved the Inquisitors of some portion of their
responsibility. Probably it did sometimes make the trial a little less
serious for the accused, for the Bishops did not always share the
inflexibility of the Holy Office. But the argument merely lifts a part
of the responsibility from one department of the Church and places it on
another. Undeniably the Inquisition was set up by the Church of Rome.
The arrangement was, of course, no guarantee that justice would be done,
nor does it disprove the charge that the Inquisition was a serious
menace to civilization.
The point on which Bishop Douais lays most stress is that the delivery
of the heretic to the secular arm was a matter quite distinct from his
subsequent fate, with which neither Inquisition nor Church had any
concern. It was regrettable that people should be burnt alive, but that
was entirely the affair of the civil power. The Church could not carry
out a sentence which it had not delivered; its own sentence was merely a
harmless pronouncement that the heretic was cut off from the Church. And
the Church always took particular care to plead for his gentle and
merciful treatment. Now the formula, “Without shedding of blood,” was
known to be a callous and cruel pretence. The Inquisition was perfectly
aware of the result of its relinquishing the heretic to the secular arm.
If it objected to men being burnt alive, if the civil power exceeded the
intentions and wishes of the Church, why did the Church never raise a
word of protest? What it did was usually to send a secretary to see that
the burning was properly carried out, and if it was not the magistrate
himself was liable to the penalties for heresy.[55]
Finally, Monseigneur Douais claims that the Inquisition, by its wise
conformity with the social justice of the period, succeeded in reducing
heresy, and “separated the secular power from the spiritual domain of
the Church.”[56] Thus an arrangement by which the Church compelled the
State to do its dirty work is termed a “separation.” An ecclesiastic
sees separation where other people would see alliance. This is called
“reconciling the interests of God and Cæsar.” The blasphemy appears to
be quite unconscious.
An article on the Inquisition by a Jesuit priest, Joseph Blötzer, of
Munich, which appears in the _Catholic Encyclopædia_, contains one or
two statements which may be very briefly noticed. The assertion that the
Church was more merciful than the State is true only in comparatively
rare instances; but, considering the claims of the Church to a Divine
origin and also the general spirit of its founder’s teachings, one would
expect the difference to be very much more perceptible.
Heresy is said to have been primarily a political offence. On the
contrary, it was primarily a religious offence, as would naturally be
inferred from the flourishing condition of the Netherlands, the
Albigensian and other heretical communities, the remarkable industry of
whose members made them most valuable citizens. Throughout the shameful
story of religious persecution it was usually the Church which goaded
the sometimes reluctant State to suppress heresy; it was the Church that
nagged and bullied rulers into compliance with its will. They were
fools to comply, but comply they did, frequently under threat of
excommunication. Occasionally the Church and its favourite department,
the Holy Office, did have a fit of compassion, but it was the exception
that proved the rule. And the fit usually came on when there was money
to be made by clemency.
The Church, it is claimed, enjoined excommunication, but not death, as
the punishment of heresy. This is true of particular periods only; as
applied to the whole career of the Inquisition it is part of the
conventional hypocrisy. The Church disliked the term “blood,” but caused
it to be shed freely enough; it seldom used the word “death,” but it
handed over the heretic to the secular power with a perfectly clear
understanding that death was to be the penalty.
According to Father Blötzer, the general lay opinion was that heretics
should be severely punished, and the Church endeavoured to soften this
feeling. If the Church is entitled to the credit of its rare attacks of
tenderness, it must also take the discredit of its general barbarity. It
cannot be allowed to “have it both ways.” And in the Middle Ages it was,
of course, the clerical body that was the fount of lay opinion regarding
heresy. Some doubt as to the softening process is natural enough in view
of the Papal decree of 1184 previously referred to. Peter Cantor was
ordered not to put the Cathari to death immediately after the
ecclesiastical judgment had been delivered, for the significant reason
that the Church might not be compromised. This shows that the Church was
aware of its complicity in the proceedings and in the fate of its
victims. In their language dealing with these matters the apologists of
the Inquisition display no small skill in casuistry. The _Catholic
Encyclopædia_ palliates torture by saying that it was not intended as a
punishment, but as a method of eliciting truth. The person on the rack
failed to appreciate the distinction. As torture usually elicited error,
the Inquisitors cannot be complimented on the rationality of their
methods. Other Inquisitorial terms are juggled with in the same way by
the apologists. Confiscation of a heretic’s goods was simply a mode of
defraying the costs and expenses of his trial. Imprisonment, again, was
not punishment; it was nothing more than a useful discipline which
afforded an opportunity of repentance.
The Jesuit writer concludes that “the Inquisition marks a substantial
advance in the contemporary administration of justice, and therefore in
the general civilization of mankind.” If to prevent the honest
expression of thought is to advance civilization, the claim is just. If
the administration of justice is promoted by torture, when in the
extremity of pain people will confess anything, the correctness of the
assertion must be admitted. If to burn men and women alive is the way to
increase human happiness, the apologist is not audacious. Evidently the
Church has not yet repented of or profited by its own lurid past. It
would not be ashamed to persecute in the twentieth century if it had the
power. That power it still claims, and the right to exercise it even to
death is still maintained by its defenders.[57] In the middle of the
nineteenth century Rome was still able to imprison a vicar of the
Apostolic College who had embraced Protestant opinions.[58] The
Inquisitor-General of Ancona issued in 1843 a severe decree against
Jews, not as relapsed Christians, but simply as Jews.[59]
According to this authoritative _Encyclopædia_, the Inquisition still
preserves its official existence, and ranks as the “first among the
Roman Congregations.” “When momentous decisions are to be announced” the
Pope “always presides in person” over its deliberations; but in these
days the necessity for his attendance cannot frequently arise. The
Inquisition claims jurisdiction over all Christians, and even (as a
matter of theory) over the Cardinals of the Church, though in practice
the Cardinals are, as might be anticipated, exempt from any unwelcome
surveillance.
* * * * *
Readers who have thus far followed this brief account of the Inquisition
will have little difficulty in forming an opinion about it. Is it the
kind of institution they would like to see restored? Grant the
extravagant supposition that all the Inquisitors were men of probity,
kind, well-meaning, and conscientious--what we are chiefly concerned
with are the effects produced by the system of repression which they so
rigidly enforced. We have to judge whether it did or did not make for
human happiness and the advance of civilization. Intellectual freedom is
no less essential to progress than purity of morals. The Inquisition at
least temporarily destroyed the one, and certainly did not promote the
other. Knowledge grows by being shared; one idea leads, by association,
to others; one gleam of truth broadens into clearer light as the dawn
ushers in the day; one discovery affords a clue to another. For ever to
suppress truth is beyond the wit of man, but attempts to suppress it
have cumulative effects in prolonging the reign of ignorance. It is not
from the ignorant that intellectual greatness may be expected, and in
its effect upon public morals sheer ignorance is the mother of more
crime than some persons are willing to admit. Perhaps the Inquisitors
did not realize the evil of stifling thought for centuries; perhaps
they did not know that the assassination of ideas is a crime. But their
twentieth-century apologists cannot plead this ignorance. They enjoy the
blessings of liberty, and defend the persecutor! They profit by the
heroism of those thousands of unknown faithful men and women who died
for religious freedom, and they would hand the world back to
intellectual slavery!
No more summary verdict on the Inquisition can be given than the
concluding words of its chief historian: “It introduced a system of
jurisprudence which infected the criminal law of all the lands subjected
to its influence, and rendered the administration of penal justice a
grim mockery for centuries. It furnished the Holy See with a powerful
weapon in aid of political aggrandizement. It tempted secular sovereigns
to imitate the example, and it prostituted the name, of religion to the
vilest temporal ends. It stimulated the morbid sensitiveness to
doctrinal aberrations until the most trifling dissidence was capable of
arousing insane fury and of convulsing Europe from end to end. On the
other hand, when Atheism became fashionable in high places, its thunders
were mute. Energetic only in evil, when its powers might have been used
on the side of virtue, it held its hand and gave the people to
understand that the only sins demanding reparation were doubt as to the
accuracy of the Church’s knowledge and attendance on the Sabbath. In its
long career of blood and fire the only credit which it can claim is the
suppression of the pernicious dogmas of the Cathari; and in this its
agency may be regarded as superfluous, for those dogmas carried in
themselves the seeds of self-destruction, and higher wisdom might have
trusted to their self-extinction. Thus the judgment of impartial history
must be that the Inquisition was the monstrous offspring of mistaken
zeal, utilized by selfish greed and lust of power to smother the higher
aspirations of humanity and stimulate its baser appetites.”[60]
This is a severe, but perhaps not unjust, verdict. Some allowance,
however, must be made for the customs of an intolerant and
semi-barbarous epoch. Catholic apologists are justified in claiming that
the Inquisition should be judged in relation to the times in which it
flourished. But this does not explain how it was that many men, both in
the Church and out of it, were so much in advance of the Inquisition as
to disapprove of people being put to death for their religious opinions.
If Thomas Aquinas advocated the death penalty for heresy, several
eminent Fathers of the Church deprecated it, holding persuasion to be
the better method. Why was not the milder and more ancient view adopted?
It is suicidal to admit that the Church held back from torture and death
for centuries on the ground that they were inconsistent with the spirit
of Christianity. The assertion clearly implies a recognition of the
incompatibility of the spirit of Christianity with calculated cruelty,
and if this recognition was confined to a few superior minds so much the
worse for the Church which paid no heed to them. There is obvious
insincerity in the plea that the Church adopted only with reluctance the
fatal policy of persecution. It insisted on that policy, often against
the remonstrances of the State. It claimed to be superior to the spirit
of the age, yet, on its own admission, yielded to the inferior
influence. In reality it did more; it actively and spontaneously made
persecution a fine art, and coerced the State to carry out its behests.
When the Church excuses its cruelty by pointing to the equal cruelty of
the medieval State it omits to mention that the State did not persecute
opinion as such. The Christian Church did.
Let it be admitted that the Inquisitors--at least originally--were
well-intentioned men, who sought to promote religion as they understood
it. The question arises, Did they understand religion rightly? To them
religion was a complete and final revelation of a Divine will; the true
faith could be one only as God was one; all who sought to disturb that
faith, however good their intentions might be, were guilty of a sin
worse than temporal rebellion. Have we nothing to learn from their awful
error? If we may judge from the _Catholic Encyclopædia_, the Church of
Rome has not learned much. The attitude of the Inquisitors is not in the
least surprising when in the twentieth century we find persecution
defended as a religious duty. Another of its writers, Father Guiraud,
echoes De Maistre’s contention that the Church of Rome alone possesses
the truth, and therefore has a right to be intolerant.[61] The spirit of
orthodox clericalism unmistakably appears in the tendency common to all
these Romanist apologists to gloss over with a few smooth and
casuistical phrases the most appalling deeds of cold-blooded cruelty
which the world has ever seen. The commonwealth, says Father Guiraud,
“can no more recognize the maxim of unlimited and unbridled religious
freedom than it can adopt the suicidal principle of irreligion.”[62]
This implies that there is no _via media_ between the rejection of all
religion and a blind acceptance of dogmatic authority, and involves a
claim practically identical with that of the Inquisition. If religious
persecution is excusable when the spirit of the age permits it, what are
we to think of those who justify persecution in an age which deems it a
blunder and a crime?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
_Achilli, Dr. G. G._ Dealings with the Inquisition. 1851.
_Addis and Arnold._ A Catholic Dictionary.
_Balmez, Rev. J._ European Civilization. 1868.
_Buckle, H. T._ History of Civilization in England. 3 vols.
_De Maistre, J. M._ Letters to a Russian Gentleman on the
Spanish Inquisition. 1851.
_Douais, C., Bishop of Beauvais._ L’Inquisition. Paris, 1906.
_Draper, J. W._ History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.
_Langlois, C. V._ Histoire de l’Inquisition d’aprés des travaux
récents. Paris, 1902.
_Lea, H. C._ History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. 3 vols. 1906.
---- History of Sacerdotal Celibacy. 2 vols. 1907.
_Lecky, W. E. H._ History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of
Rationalism in Europe.
_Limborch, P. van._ History of the Inquisition. 1816.
_Milman, Rev. H. H._ History of Latin Christianity. 9 vols.
_Motley, J. L._ The Rise of the Dutch Republic.
_Pastor, L._ Lives of the Popes. 12 vols. 1891-1912.
_Prescott, W. H._ History of the Reign of Philip II.
_Puigblanch, A._ The Inquisition Unmasked. 1816.
_Ranke, L. von._ History of the Popes. 3 vols. 1908.
_Rule, W. H._ History of the Inquisition. 2 vols. 1874.
_Tanon, L._ Histoire des Tribunaux de l’Inquisition en
France. Paris, 1893.
_Vacandard, E._ The Inquisition. 1908.
_The Catholic Encyclopædia._
_Encyclopædia Britannica._
_Jewish Encyclopædia._
WATTS AND CO., PRINTERS,
JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET,
LONDON, E. C.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Addis and Arnold, _Catholic Dictionary_, p. 776.
[2] H. C. Lea, _History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages_, vol.
iii, p. 630.
[3] Lea, p. 639.
[4] _Ibid_, p. 642.
[5] _Ibid_, p. 644.
[6] _Ibid_, p. 648.
[7] Lea, p. 643.
[8] Lea, p. 645.
[9] H. C. Lea, _History of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, vol. ii, p. 347.
[10] _Ibid._, p. 319.
[11] L. Tanon, _Histoire des Tribunaux de l’Inquisition en France_
(1893), pp. 290, 306.
[12] Lea, _Inquisition of Middle Ages_, vol. ii, p. 344.
[13] _Ibid._, p. 330.
[14] Milman, _History of Latin Christianity_, vol. ix, p. 36.
[15] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. iii, p. 644.
[16] _Ibid._, vol. ii, p. 346.
[17] Lea, _Inquisition in Middle Ages_, vol. i, p. 70.
[18] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. i, p. 85.
[19] Lea, _Inquisition of Middle Ages_, vol. i, p. 225.
[20] The organization of the Medieval Inquisition was practically the
same as, though less efficient than, that of the Spanish institution,
which is explained in the author’s _Spanish Inquisition_.
[21] Lea, _op. cit.,_ vol. i, p. 228.
[22] At a later date the Dominicans became known as _Domini canes_, or
“dogs of the Lord.”
[23] Hastings, _Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics_; art.
“Inquisition.”
[24] Addis and Arnold, _A Catholic Dictionary_; art. “Inquisition.”
[25] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. i, p. 430.
[26] _History of Latin Christianity_, vol. v, p. 316.
[27] Addis and Arnold, _Catholic Dictionary_, p. 459.
[28] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. i, p. 240.
[29] Ranke, _Lives of the Popes_, vol. i, p. 144.
[30] Motley, _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, part ii, ch. i.
[31] Motley, part ii, ch. iii.
[32] _Ibid_, part ii, ch. v.
[33] Motley, part ii, ch. viii.
[34] Motley, part ii, ch. v.
[35] Motley, part ii, ch. x.
[36] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. iii, p. 204.
[37] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. iii, p. 318.
[38] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. iii, p. 472.
[39] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. iii, p. 530.
[40] Lea, p. 534.
[41] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. iii, p. 544.
[42] _Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism_, vol. i, p. 3.
[43] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. iii, p. 625.
[44] Balmez, _European Civilisation_ (London, 1855), p. 186.
[45] Buckle, _History of Civilisation_, vol. i, p. 187.
[46] Buckle, p. 189.
[47] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. i, p. 228.
[48] Balmez, _European Civilisation_, p. 185.
[49] Balmez, p. 181.
[50] Pastor, _Lives of the Popes_, vol. iv, pp. 403-405.
[51] _Ibid_, p. 402.
[52] _Inquisition_, vol. i, p. 385.
[53] C. Langlois, _L’Inquisition_, p. 65.
[54] L. Tanon, _Histoire des Tribunaux de l’Inquisition en France_, p.
377.
[55] Douais, _L’Inquisition_, p. 265 et seq.
[56] _Ibid_, p. 273.
[57] See _The Popes and their Church_, by J. McCabe, page 211.
[58] See _Dealings with the Inquisition_, by Dr. G. G. Achilli (London,
1851).
[59] _Ibid_, p. 392.
[60] Lea, _Inquisition_, vol. iii, p. 650.
[61] _Catholic Encyclopædia_; art. “Toleration.”
[62] _Ibid._
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