Inquisition

• 1. Introduction

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  An inquisition was a Catholic judicial procedure in which ecclesiastical judges could initiate, investigate, and try cases within their jurisdiction. From that dry legal definition grew one of the most feared words in European memory. Popularly, the Inquisition became the name for various medieval and Reformation-era state-organized tribunals. Their aim was to combat heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and customs considered deviant. Some of those tribunals burned heretics by the dozen. Others released defendants on technicalities and assigned charitable work as penance. Both things were true at once, which is part of why the subject remains so contested. Historian Henry A. Kelly calls inquisition a brilliant and much-needed innovation in trial procedure, instituted by the greatest lawyer-pope of the Middle Ages. Other scholars see extremist religious leaders rooting out belief through false accusations and inordinate violence. How did a reform meant to replace trial by combat become a byword for the torture chamber? Where did it begin, who ran it, and how many people actually died? And why are so many of the iron contraptions displayed in its museums fakes invented centuries later?

• 2. From Ordeal To Inquiry

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  Trial by combat, trial by fire, trial by water. In the high medieval period, guilt was often decided by ordeal, alongside compurgation, where character witnesses vouched for the accused. These ad hoc, non-evidence-based methods were especially common in teutonic cultures. The rediscovery of major ancient Roman legal texts changed that. By the late tenth century, the new University of Bologna was training lawyers in Roman legal jurisprudence, and other universities followed. The Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 mandated an inquisitorial procedure for capital crimes, first in ecclesiastical courts run by clergy, then progressively in secular courts. The term itself comes from the Medieval Latin word inquisitio, a court process based on Roman law. It replaced the denunciatio and accusatio process, which required a denouncer or relied on an adversarial contest. An official inquirer called for information on a specific subject from anyone who felt they had something to offer. Henry II of England used the technique extensively in the 12th century. The revived system carried a hidden cost. For capital crimes, circumstantial evidence was no longer enough to convict. The testimony of two or more witnesses became necessary, which sharply increased the need for a confession. That demand for confession is what would later promote the threat and application of torture in both secular and ecclesiastical courts.

• 3. Cathars And The First Tribunals

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  The first Inquisition was temporarily established in Languedoc, in the south of France, in 1184. Inquisitions aimed at combatting religious sedition had their start in the 12th-century Kingdom of France, particularly among the Cathars and the Waldensians. To counter the spread of Catharism and other heresies, prosecution grew more frequent. Pope Lucius III issued the bull Ad Abolendam in 1184, condemning heresy as contumacy toward ecclesiastical authority. The bull Vergentis in Senium in 1199 went further. It stipulated that heresy, in terms of punishment, would be equal to treason, and the punishment would fall also on the descendants of the condemned. The murder of Pope Innocent III's papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, by Cathars in 1208 sparked the Albigensian Crusade, which ran from 1209 to 1229. That crusade, proclaimed against heresy and mainly against Catharism, claimed many thousands of victims, including men, women, children, and some Catholics. In 1229, at the Council of Toulouse, the Inquisition was permanently established. Beginning in the 1250s, inquisitors were generally drawn from the Dominican Order, replacing the earlier practice of using local clergy as judges. Pope Gregory IX, who reigned from 1227 to 1241, assigned the duty of carrying out inquisitions to the Dominican and Franciscan Orders. By the end of the Middle Ages, England and Castile were the only large western nations without a papal inquisition. The inquisitorial courts from this beginning until the mid-15th century are together known as the Medieval Inquisition, and their record survives best in France.

• 4. The Ledger Of Languedoc

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  Bernard de Caux questioned what was probably every adult in 39 villages between 1245 and 1246. Of those 5,471 people in Lauragais and Lavaur, 207 were found guilty of heresy. None were sentenced to death. Twenty-three went to prison, and 184 to penance. The numbers from medieval France resist the popular image of indiscriminate slaughter. Until the fall of the fortress of Montsegur in 1244, actual executions probably accounted for no more than 1 percent of all sentences. Many sentences fell on dead heretics, whose bodies were exhumed and burned, or were handed down in absentia. Pierre Ceila reconciled 724 heretics with the Church in the years 1241 to 1242. After Montsegur fell, the share of death sentences rose to around 7 percent and stayed there until the Languedoc Inquisition wound down around 1330. Bernard Gui left the most complete record, because the full account of his trials survives. As inquisitor of Toulouse from 1307 to 1323, he handed down 633 sentences against 602 people, 31 of them repeat offenders. They included 41 death sentences, 308 prison sentences with confiscation, 136 orders to carry crosses, and 69 exhumation orders for the remains of dead heretics. Not every French inquisitor was so measured. Robert le Bougre, the country's first Dominican inquisitor, working from 1233 to 1244, earned a particularly grim reputation. On the 13th of May 1239, in Montwimer, he burned 183 Cathars in a single act.

• 5. Witches And The Cleaner Methods

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  Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian teaching disputed the existence of witches and denied any power to witchcraft, condemning it as pagan superstition. Black magic practitioners were generally handled through confession, repentance, and charitable work assigned as penance. In 1258, Pope Alexander IV ruled that inquisitors should limit their involvement to cases with some clear presumption of heretical belief. That restraint did not last. The prosecution of witchcraft became more prominent in the late medieval and Renaissance era. Some historians point to the upheavals of the time, including the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the gradual cooling that modern scientists call the Little Ice Age, between roughly the 15th and 19th centuries. Witches were sometimes blamed. Wolfgang Behringer estimates there could have been as many as two thousand witchcraft executions in northern Italy across the 15th and early 16th centuries. Part of the reason was a legal loophole. Some inquisitors took the view that witchcraft was an exceptional crime, so the usual rules for heresy trials did not apply. Many alleged witches were executed even after pleading guilty, which under normal rules would have meant only canonical sanctions. The episcopal inquisition joined in. In 1518, judges delegated by the Bishop of Brescia, Paolo Zane, sent some 70 witches from Val Camonica to the stake. Not every churchman accepted this. Friedrich Spee, a Jesuit and former inquisitor, published Cautio Criminalis in 1631, a book that helped end witch-hunting and the reliance on torture, and that was highly regarded in both Catholic and Protestant circles.

• 6. The Spanish And Portuguese Turn

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  King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile established the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, to be overseen by 14 local tribunals. Unlike earlier inquisitions, it operated completely under royal Christian authority and independently of the Holy See. Iberia in the late Middle Ages was largely multicultural, with Muslim and Jewish influence, reconquered from Islamic control. The new Christian authorities could not assume all their subjects would suddenly become and remain orthodox Catholics. The focus fell on forced converts. The New Christians, or conversos, were former Jews who had converted to avoid antisemitic regulations and persecution. The Marranos had been forced to abandon Judaism by violence and threats of expulsion. The Moriscos were Muslims forced to convert to Catholicism. All came under suspicion of secretly keeping or reverting to their old faiths. Tomas de Torquemada was chosen as the first Grand Inquisitor. Under the Alhambra Decree of 1492, all Jews who had not converted were expelled from Spain. It is estimated that up to 2,000 Jews were burned at the stake during the reign of Queen Isabella. Portugal followed in 1536, at the request of King Joao III, with its General Inquisitor always drawn from within the royal family. Jews who had fled Spain now found themselves subject to the Portuguese Inquisition, which held its first auto-da-fe in 1540. According to Henry Charles Lea, between 1540 and 1794, tribunals in Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra, and Evora burned 1,175 persons, burned another 633 in effigy, and penanced 29,590. Both empires carried these courts overseas, into the Goa, Peruvian, and Mexican tribunals, and that export across the sea is the next chapter.

• 7. Tribunals Across The Empire

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  In 1569, King Philip II of Spain set up three tribunals in the Americas, each formally titled Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion. One sat in Mexico, one in Cartagena de Indias in modern-day Colombia, and one in Peru. The Peruvian Inquisition, based in Lima, administered all the Spanish territories in South America and Panama. The Mexican office reached as far as the Spanish East Indies. The Goa Inquisition began in 1560 at the order of John III of Portugal. It had originally been requested in the 1540s by the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier, because New Christians who had arrived in Goa then reverted to Judaism. Aleixo Dias Falcao and Francisco Marques set it up in the palace of the Sabaio Adil Khan. The Goa Inquisition also pursued Catholic converts from Hinduism or Islam thought to have returned to their original ways, and it prosecuted non-converts who publicly observed Hindu or Muslim rites. Colonial Brazil produced one of the most striking individual cases. Rosa Egipciaca, a religious mystic and formerly enslaved prostitute, was arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned both in the colony and in Lisbon. She was the first black woman in Brazil to write a book, a work detailing her visions, entitled Sagrada Teologia do Amor Divino das Almas Peregrinas. The colonial courts kept investigating breaches of orthodox Catholicism until 1821, the year before the broader Portuguese colonial inquisition closed its work.

• 8. Inside The Proceeding

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  The usual procedure began with a visitation by the inquisitors in a chosen location. Suspected heretics were asked to present themselves and to denounce both themselves and others. If they confessed within a grace period, usually 30 days, they could be accepted back into the church without punishment. Anyone who knew of another's heresy and stayed silent risked excommunication and prosecution as a promoter of heresy. The system turned everyone into an agent. Rumors, mere suppositions, and even anonymous letters were accepted as denunciations. Prison guards could report and serve as witnesses against the accused. The trials themselves were secret, with no possibility of appeal. The inquisitors kept the accusations and evidence hidden, hoping to win a confession without announcing the charge. The prisoner was often not told the reasons for arrest for months or years. Any lawyer assigned was an employee of the Inquisition who worked for it, not for the defense. The primary method of torture was psychological: solitary confinement and indefinite incarceration. The 1252 bull Ad extirpanda allowed physical torture, but always with a doctor present, and limited it to non-bloody methods that did not break bones. The strappado lifted the victim by arms tied behind the back, then dropped him short of the ground, usually dislocating the arms. The rack, or potro, and the water cure, now known as waterboarding, completed the core set. Historian Ron E. Hassner argues inquisitors knew torture often produced unreliable information, so they used it intermittently, sometimes in sessions months apart, mainly to corroborate facts already in hand. Walter Ullmann was blunter. He wrote that there is hardly one item in the whole inquisitorial procedure that could be squared with the demands of justice.

  The Spanish tickle was created in 2005 as a false rumor on a public reference site. It never existed, and it stands as a small modern echo of a much older pattern. Many of the iron contraptions displayed in inquisition museums were never used by any inquisition at all. The head crusher dates to 1340 in Germany, used by German courts against the enemies of certain prince-electors. The thumbscrew was wielded by William Cecil in England against Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth I. The Spanish donkey, despite its name, was used mainly by central European civil authorities, and the name was likely ascribed to Spain as Black Legend propaganda. Many such instruments were designed by late 18th and early 19th century pranksters, entertainers, and con artists. They charged Victorian-era circus crowds to gawk at relics of a Dark Age myth. The pear of anguish, often cited as proof of inquisitorial cruelty, may not have been invented until the 16th century or later. The historian Chris Bishop even suggested it could have been a sock stretcher, since it was too weak to open into a body orifice. The opening of Spanish and Roman archives over the last 50 years has driven some historians to revise their understanding, some so far as to call earlier views a body of legends and myths. The papal institution that supervised it all has not vanished. The Congregation that Pope Paul III established in 1542 survived through a series of name and focus changes, and it endures today as part of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.