Inquisition

File:Galileo before the Holy Office - Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, 1847.png

A 19th-century depiction of Galileo Galilei before the Holy Office, by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

An inquisition was a Catholic judicial procedure in which ecclesiastical judges could initiate, investigate and try cases in their jurisdiction. Popularly, the Inquisition became the name for various medieval and Reformation-era state-organized tribunals whose aim was to combat heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and customs considered to be deviant, using this judicial procedure. Violence, isolation, certain torture or the threat of its application, have been used by inquisitions to extract confessions and denunciations. Inquisitions with the aim of combatting religious sedition (e.g. apostasy or heresy) had their start in the 12th-century Kingdom of France, particularly among the Cathars and the Waldensians. The inquisitorial courts from this time until the mid-15th century are together known as the Medieval Inquisition. Other banned groups investigated by medieval inquisitions, which primarily took place in France and Italy, include the Spiritual Franciscans, the Hussites, and the Beguines. Beginning in the 1250s, inquisitors were generally chosen from members of the Dominican Order, replacing the earlier practice of using local clergy as judges.

Inquisitions also expanded to other European countries, resulting in the Spanish Inquisition and the Portuguese Inquisition. The Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions often focused on the New Christians or Conversos (former Jews who converted to Christianity to avoid antisemitic regulations and persecution), the Marranos (people who were forced to abandon Judaism against their will by violence and threats of expulsion), and on the Moriscos (Muslims who had been forced to convert to Catholicism), as a result of suspicions that they had secretly maintained or reverted to their previous religions, as well as the fear of possible rebellions, as had occurred in previous times (such as the First and Second Morisco Rebellions). Spain and Portugal also operated inquisitorial courts not only in Europe, but also throughout their empires: the Goa Inquisition, the Peruvian Inquisition, and the Mexican Inquisition, among others. Inquisitions conducted in the Papal States were known as the Roman Inquisition.

The scope of the inquisitions grew significantly in response to the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In 1542, a putative governing institution, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition was created. With the exception of the Papal States, ecclessiastical inquisition courts were abolished in the early 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the Spanish American wars of independence in the Americas. The papal institution survived as part of the Roman Curia, although it underwent a series of name and focus changes, now part of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Legal background

In the high medieval period, various forms of ad hoc or non-evidence-based trials occurred: trial by ordeal (trial by combat, trial by fire, trial by water, etc.), and compurgation (character witnesses), especially in teutonic cultures. In tenth and eleventh centuries, attempts were made to re-establish safer aspects of Roman and Hebrew law following the discovery of major ancient Roman legal texts. By the late tenth century, the new University of Bologna was training lawyers in Roman legal jurisprudence, and other universities followed. An inquisitorial procedure was adopted for capital crimes, first in ecclesiastical courts run by clergy as mandated by the Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215), and then progressively also in secular courts as well. Many countries still retain an inquisitorial legal system, as distinct from e.g., an adversarial or arbitrated one.

In the revived legal system, for capital crimes, circumstantial evidence was not enough to convict: the testimony of two or more witnesses was now necessary, which increased the necessity of obtaining a confession. This in turn promoted the uptake of threats and application of torture, akin to the "enhanced interrogation techniques" or the illegal third degree police techniques, to collaborate information for investigations for both secular and ecclesiastical courts.

Secular and ecclesiastical legal theorists of the Late Middle Ages developed a variety of rules concerning when torture was used, how much, what it was unsafe for, who was allowed to do it, what medical supervision was necessary, etc. Because it belonged to the investigation phase, it was frequently not documented outside the Inquisition. Historian Henry A. Kelly concludes that inquisition was "a brilliant and much-needed innovation in trial procedure, instituted by the greatest lawyer-pope of the Middle Ages" and that later "abusive practices" should be identified as a perversion of the original inquisitorial process.

Terminology

Inquisition

The term "inquisition" comes from the Medieval Latin word inquisitio, which described a court process based on Roman law, which came back into use during the Late Middle Ages. It was a new and less arbitrary form of trial that replaced the denunciatio and accussatio process, which required a denouncer or used an adversarial process, the most unjust being trial by ordeal and the secular Germanic trial by combat. Since that time, the English term "Inquisition" is popularly applied to any one of the regional tribunals or later national institutions that worked against heretics or other offenders against the canon law of the Catholic Church. Although the term "Inquisition" is usually applied to ecclesiastical courts of the Catholic Church, in the Middle Ages it properly referred to an organized judicial process.

Inquisitor

Inquisitors 'were called such because they applied a judicial technique known as inquisitio, which could be translated as "inquiry" or "inquest".

"In this process, which was already widely used by secular rulers (Henry II used it extensively in England in the 12th century), an official inquirer called for information on a specific subject from anyone who felt he or she had something to offer."

— Inquisition: Introduction, David Burr

"The Inquisition" usually refers to specific regional tribunals authorized to concern themselves with the heretical behaviour of Catholic adherents or converts (including forced converts). As with sedition inquisitions, heresy inquisitions were supposed to use the standard inquisition procedures: these included that the defendant must be informed of the charges, has a right to a lawyer, and a right of appeal (to the Pope). The inquisitor could only start a heresy proceeding if there was some broad public opinion of the "infamy" of the defendant (rather than a formal denunciation or accusation) to prevent fishing, or charging for private opinions; however, such inquisitions could proceed with minimal distraction by lawyers, the identities of witnesses were protected, tainted witnesses were allowed, and once found guilty of heresy there was no right to a lawyer. Inquisitors did not all follow these rules scrupulously, notably from the late 1300s: many inquisitors had theological, not legal, training.^{: 448}

Scope

Theoretically, inquisitions, as a church court, had no jurisdiction over Muslims and Jews as such. Despite several exceptions, like the infamous example of the Holy Child of La Guardia, the Inquisition was concerned mainly with the heretical behaviour of Catholic adherents or converts (including forced converts).

Controversy and revisionism

The opening of Spanish and Roman archives over the last 50 years has caused some historians to revise their understanding of the Inquisition, some to the extent of viewing previous views as "a body of legends and myths". It has also been suggested that some instruments of torture, like "the pear of anguish," were not invented until the 16th century or later. Some of these revisions from scholars may be due to their own subjective religion, the historic erasure of crimes committed by the church, or erasure of minority lives and voices. Many of the sources that discredit or undermine the torture are written by practicing Catholics. One example is Reverend Brian Van Hove, S.J., who suggests that the inquisition is overblown in popular imagination. Van Hove writes

"...secular historians now tend to speak of how fair the system actually was. They observe how many people were released because of technicalities in the law which withstood whim and abuse. They note how many opportunities the accused persons had to avoid further prosecution."

This perspective fails to address that the majority of inquisitions led to torture, mass excommunications, and burnings which incited fear and submission in the general population, creating lasting effects on Europe. The majority of historical scholars continue to see the inquisition as an example of extremist religious leaders enforcing order and rooting out paganism through false accusations and inordinate violence.

Sentences

When a suspect was convicted of "wilful, unrepentant" heresy, canon law required the inquisitorial tribunal to hand the person over to secular authorities for final sentencing. A secular magistrate, the "secular arm", would then determine the penalty based on local law. Those local laws included proscriptions against certain religious crimes, and the punishments included death by burning in regions where the secular law equated persistent heresy with sedition. Thus the inquisitors generally knew the expected fate of anyone so remanded. The "secular arm" didn't have access to the trial record of the defendants, only declared and executed the sentences and was obliged to do so on pain of heresy and excommunication.

While the notional purpose of the trial itself was for the salvation of the individual soul, allegedly by persuasion, according to the 1578 edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum (a standard manual for inquisitions) the penalties themselves were preventative not retributive, thought to spread an example by terror: "... for punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit".

Statistics

Beginning in the 19th century, historians have gradually compiled statistics drawn from the surviving court records, from which estimates have been calculated by adjusting the recorded number of convictions by the average rate of document loss for each time period. Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras studied the records of the Spanish Inquisition, which list 44,674 cases of which 826 resulted in executions in person and 778 in effigy (i.e., a straw dummy was burned in place of the person). William Monter estimated there were 1,000 executions in Spain between 1530 and 1630, and 250 between 1630 and 1730. Jean-Pierre Dedieu studied the records of Toledo's tribunal, which put 12,000 people on trial. For the period prior to 1530, Henry Kamen estimated there were about 2,000 executions in all of Spain's tribunals.

Origin

Before the 12th century, the Catholic Church suppressed what they believed to be heresy, usually through a system of ecclesiastical proscription or imprisonment, but without using torture, and seldom resorting to executions. Punishments of the latter sort were opposed by a number of clergymen and theologians, although some countries punished heresy with the death penalty. Pope Siricius, Ambrose of Milan, and Martin of Tours protested against the execution of Priscillian, largely as an undue interference in ecclesiastical discipline by a civil tribunal. Though widely viewed as a heretic, Priscillian was executed as a sorcerer. Ambrose refused to give any recognition to Ithacius of Ossonuba, "not wishing to have anything to do with bishops who had sent heretics to their death".

In the 12th century, to counter the spread of Catharism and other heresies, prosecution of heretics became more frequent. The Church charged councils composed of bishops and archbishops with establishing inquisitions (the Episcopal Inquisition). Pope Lucius III issued the bull Ad Abolendam (1184), which condemned heresy as contumacy toward ecclesiastical authority. The bull Vergentis in Senium in 1199 stipulated that heresy would be considered, in terms of punishment, equal to treason (Lèse-majesté), and the punishment would be imposed also on the descendants of the condemned.

The first Inquisition was temporarily established in Languedoc (south of France) in 1184. The murder of Pope Innocent III's papal legate Pierre de Castelnau by Cathars in 1208 sparked the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229). The Inquisition was permanently established in 1229 (Council of Toulouse), run largely by the Dominicans in Rome and later at Carcassonne in Languedoc. In 1252, the Papal Bull Ad extirpanda, following another assassination by Cathars, charged the head of state with funding and selecting inquisitors from monastic orders; this caused friction by establishing a competitive court to the Bishop's courts.

Medieval Inquisitions

Historians use the term "Medieval Inquisition" to describe the various inquisitions that started around 1184, including the Episcopal Inquisitions (1184–1230s) and later the Papal Inquisitions (1230s). These inquisitions responded to large popular movements throughout Europe considered apostate or heretical to Christianity, in particular the Cathars in southern France and the Waldensians in both southern France and northern Italy. Other inquisitions followed after these first inquisition movements. The legal basis for some inquisitorial activity came from Pope Innocent IV's papal bull Ad extirpanda of 1252, which authorized the use of tortures in certain circumstances by inquisitors for eliciting confessions and denunciations from heretics. By 1256 Alexander IV's rescripts Ut negotium allowed certain anti-Cathar inquisitors to absolve each other if the torture (accidentally) resulted in shedding of blood, forbidden to priests.

In the 13th century, Pope Gregory IX (reigned 1227–1241) assigned the duty of carrying out inquisitions to the Dominican Order and Franciscan Order. By the end of the Middle Ages, England and Castile were the only large western nations without a papal inquisition. Most inquisitors were friars who taught theology and/or law in the universities. They used inquisitorial procedures, a common legal practice adapted from the earlier Ancient Roman court procedures. They judged heresy along with bishops and groups of "assessors" (clergy serving in a role that was roughly analogous to a jury or legal advisers), using the local authorities to establish a tribunal and to prosecute heretics. After 1200, a Grand Inquisitor headed but did not control each regional Inquisition. Grand Inquisitions persisted until the mid 19th century.

Inquisitions in Medieval Italy

Only fragmentary data is available for the period before the Roman Inquisition of 1542. In 1276, some 170 Cathars were captured in Sirmione, who were then imprisoned in Verona, and there, after a two-year trial, on 13 February from 1278, more than a hundred of them were burned. In Orvieto, at the end of 1268/1269, 85 heretics were sentenced, none of whom were executed, but in 18 cases the sentence concerned people who had already died. In Tuscany, the inquisitor Ruggiero burned at least 11 people in about a year (1244/1245). Excluding the executions of the heretics at Sirmione in 1278, 36 Inquisition executions are documented in the March of Treviso between 1260 and 1308. Ten people were executed in Bologna between 1291 and 1310. In Piedmont, 22 heretics (mainly Waldensians) were burned in the years 1312–1395 out of 213 convicted. 22 Waldensians were burned in Cuneo around 1440 and another five in the Marquisate of Saluzzo in 1510.

There are also fragmentary records of a good number of executions of people suspected of witchcraft in northern Italy in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Wolfgang Behringer estimates that there could have been as many as two thousand executions. This large number of witches executed was probably because some inquisitors took the view that the crime of witchcraft was exceptional, which meant that the usual rules for heresy trials did not apply to its perpetrators. Many alleged witches were executed even though they were first tried and pleaded guilty, which under normal rules would have meant only canonical sanctions, not death sentences. The episcopal inquisition was also active in suppressing alleged witches: in 1518, judges delegated by the Bishop of Brescia, Paolo Zane, sent some 70 witches from Val Camonica to the stake.

Inquisitions in Medieval France

The Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) a crusade proclaimed by the Catholic Church against heresy, mainly Catharism, with many thousands of victims (men, women and children, some of them Catholics), had already paved the way for the later Inquisition. France has the best preserved archives of medieval inquisitions (13th–14th centuries), although they are still very incomplete. The activity of the inquisition in this country was very diverse, both in terms of time and territory. In the first period (1233 to c. 1330), the courts of Languedoc (Toulouse, Carcassonne) are the most active. After 1330 the center of the persecution of heretics shifted to the Alpine regions, while in Languedoc they ceased almost entirely. In northern France, the activity of the inquisitors was irregular throughout this period and, except for the first few years, it was not very intense.

France's first Dominican inquisitor, Robert le Bougre, working in the years 1233–1244, earned a particularly grim reputation. In 1236, Robert burned about 50 people in the area of Champagne and Flanders, and on 13 May 1239, in Montwimer, he burned 183 Cathars. Following Robert's removal from office, Inquisition activity in northern France remained very low. One of the largest trials in the area took place in 1459–1460 at Arras; 34 people were then accused of witchcraft and Satanism, 12 of them were burned at the stake.

The main center of the medieval inquisition was undoubtedly the Languedoc. The first inquisitors were appointed there in 1233, but due to strong resistance from local communities in the early years, most sentences concerned dead heretics, whose bodies were exhumed and burned. Actual executions occurred sporadically and, until the fall of the fortress of Montsegur (1244), probably accounted for no more than 1% of all sentences. In addition to the cremation of the remains of the dead, a large percentage were also sentences in absentia and penances imposed on heretics who voluntarily confessed their faults (for example, in the years 1241–1242 the inquisitor Pierre Ceila reconciled 724 heretics with the Church). Inquisitor Ferrier of Catalonia, investigating Montauban between 1242 and 1244, questioned about 800 people, of whom he sentenced 6 to death and 20 to prison. Between 1243 and 1245, Bernard de Caux handed down 25 sentences of imprisonment and confiscation of property in Agen and Cahors. After the fall of Montsegur and the seizure of power in Toulouse by Count Alfonso de Poitiers, the percentage of death sentences increased to around 7% and remained at this level until the end of the Languedoc Inquisition around from 1330.

Between 1245 and 1246, the inquisitor Bernard de Caux carried out a large-scale investigation in the area of Lauragais and Lavaur. He covered 39 villages, and probably all the adult inhabitants (5,471 people) were questioned, of whom 207 were found guilty of heresy. Of these 207, no one was sentenced to death, 23 were sentenced to prison and 184 to penance. Between 1246 and 1248, the inquisitors Bernard de Caux and Jean de Saint-Pierre handed down 192 sentences in Toulouse, of which 43 were sentences in absentia and 149 were prison sentences.

In Pamiers in 1246/1247 there were 7 prison sentences [201] and in Limoux in the county of Foix 156 people were sentenced to carry crosses. Between 1249 and 1257, in Toulouse, the inquisitors handed down 306 sentences, without counting the penitential sentences imposed during "times of grace". 21 people were sentenced to death, 239 to prison, in addition, 30 people were sentenced in absentia and 11 posthumously; In another five cases the type of sanction is unknown, but since they all involve repeat offenders, only prison or burning at stake. Between 1237 and 1279, at least 507 convictions were passed in Toulouse (most in absentia or posthumously) resulting in the confiscation of property; in Albi between 1240 and 1252 there were 60 sentences of this type.

The activities of Bernard Gui, inquisitor of Toulouse from 1307 to 1323, are better documented, as a complete record of his trials has been preserved. During the entire period of his inquisitorial activity, he handed down 633 sentences against 602 people (31 repeat offenders), including:

• 41 death sentences,
• 40 convictions of fugitive heretics (in absentia),
• 20 sentences against people who died before the end of the trial (3 of them Bernardo considered unrepentant, and his remains were burned at the stake),
• 69 exhumation orders for the remains of dead heretics (66 of whom were subsequently burned),
• 308 prison sentences, with confiscation of property,
• 136 orders to carry crosses,
• 18 mandates to make a pilgrimage (17) or participate in a crusade (1),
• in one case, sentencing was postponed.

In addition, Bernard Gui issued 274 more sentences involving the mitigation of sentences already served to convicted heretics; in 139 cases he exchanged prison for carrying crosses, and in 135 cases, carrying crosses for pilgrimage. To the full statistics, there are 22 orders to demolish houses used by heretics as meeting places and one condemnation and burning of Jewish writings (including commentaries on the Torah). The episcopal inquisition was also active in Languedoc. In the years 1232–1234, the Bishop of Toulouse, Raymond, sentenced several dozen Cathars to death. In turn, Bishop Jacques Fournier of Pamiers (he was later Pope Benedict XII) in the years 1318–1325 conducted an investigation against 89 people, of whom 64 were found guilty and 5 were sentenced to death.

After 1330, the center of activity of the French inquisitions moved east, to the Alpine regions, where there were numerous Waldensian communities. The repression against them was not continuous and was very ineffective. Data on sentences issued by inquisitors are fragmentary. In 1348, 12 Waldensians were burned in Embrun, and in 1353/1354 as many as 168 received penances. In general, however, few Waldensians fell into the hands of the inquisitors, for they took refuge in hard-to-reach mountainous regions, where they formed close-knit communities. Inquisitors operating in this region, in order to be able to conduct trials, often had to resort to the armed assistance of local secular authorities (e.g. military expeditions in 1338–1339 and 1366). In the years 1375–1393 (with some breaks), the Dauphiné was the scene of the activities of the inquisitor Francois Borel, who gained an extremely gloomy reputation among the locals. It is known that on 1 July 1380, he pronounced death sentences in absentia against 169 people, including 108 from the Valpute valley, 32 from Argentiere and 29 from Freyssiniere. It is not known how many of them were actually carried out, only six people captured in 1382 are confirmed to be executed.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, major trials took place only sporadically, e.g. against the Waldensians in Delphinate in 1430–1432 (no numerical data) and 1532–1533 (7 executed out of about 150 tried) or the aforementioned trial in Arras 1459–1460. In the 16th century, the jurisdiction of the inquisitors in the kingdom of France was effectively limited to clergymen, while local parliaments took over the jurisdiction of the laity. Between 1500 and 1560, 62 people were burned for heresy in the Languedoc, all of whom were convicted by the Parliament of Toulouse.

Inquisitions in Medieval Germany

The Rhineland and Thuringia in the years 1231–1233 were the field of activity of the notorious inquisitor Konrad of Marburg. Unfortunately, the documentation of his trials has not been preserved, making it impossible to determine the number of his victims. The chronicles only mention "many" heretics that he burned. The only concrete information is about the burning of four people in Erfurt in May 1232. After the murder of Konrad of Marburg, burning at the stake in Germany was virtually unknown for the next 80 years. It was not until the early fourteenth century that stronger measures were taken against heretics, largely at the initiative of bishops. In the years 1311–1315, numerous trials were held against the Waldensians in Austria, resulting in the burning of at least 39 people, according to incomplete records. In 1336, in Angermünde, in the diocese of Brandenburg, another 14 heretics were burned.

The number of those convicted by the papal inquisitors was smaller. Walter Kerlinger burned 10 begards in Erfurt and Nordhausen in 1368–1369. In turn, Eylard Schöneveld burned a total of four people in various Baltic cities in 1402–1403. In the last decade of the 14th century, episcopal inquisitors carried out large-scale operations against heretics in eastern Germany, Pomerania, Austria, and Hungary. In Pomerania, of 443 sentenced in the years 1392–1394 by the inquisitor Peter Zwicker, the provincial of the Celestinians, none went to the stake, because they all submitted to the Church. Bloodier were the trials of the Waldensians in Austria in 1397, where more than a hundred Waldensians were burned at the stake; however, it seems that in these trials the death sentences represented only a small percentage of all the sentences, because according to the account of one of the inquisitors involved in these repressions, the number of heretics reconciled with the Church from Thuringia to Hungary amounted to about 2,000.

In 1414, the inquisitor Heinrich von Schöneveld arrested 84 flagellants in Sangerhausen, of whom he burned 3 leaders, and imposed penitential sentences on the rest. Since this sect was associated with the peasant revolts in Thuringia from 1412, after the departure of the inquisitor, the local authorities organized a mass hunt for flagellants and, regardless of their previous verdicts, sent at least 168 to the stake (possibly up to 300) people. Inquisitor Friedrich Müller (d. 1460) sentenced to death 12 of the 13 heretics he had tried in 1446 at Nordhausen. In 1453 the same inquisitor burned 2 heretics in Göttingen. Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum, in his own words, sentenced 48 people to the stake in five years (1481–1486). Jacob Hoogstraten, inquisitor of Cologne from 1508 to 1527, sentenced four people to be burned at the stake. A notable former inquisitor, Jesuit Friedrich Spee, published a book Cautio Criminalis (1631) which helped end witch-hunting and the reliance on torture, highly regarded in Catholic and Protestant circles.

Inquisition in Hungary and the Balkans

Very little is known about the activities of inquisitors in Hungary and the countries under its influence (Bosnia, Croatia), as there are few sources about this activity. Numerous conversions and executions of Bosnian Cathars are known to have taken place around 1239/40, and in 1268 the Dominican inquisitor Andrew reconciled many heretics with the Church in the town of Skradin, but precise figures are unknown. The border areas with Bohemia and Austria were under major inquisitorial action against the Waldensians in the early 15th century. In addition, in the years 1436–1440 in the Kingdom of Hungary, the Franciscan Jacobo de la Marcha acted as an inquisitor... his mission was mixed, preaching and inquisitorial. The correspondence preserved between James, his collaborators, the Hungarian bishops and Pope Eugene IV shows that he reconciled up to 25,000 people with the Church. This correspondence also shows that he punished recalcitrant heretics with death, and in 1437 numerous executions were carried out in the diocese of Sirmium, although the number of those executed is also unknown.

Inquisitions in the Czech lands and Poland

In Bohemia and Poland, the inquisition was established permanently in 1318, although anti-heretical repressions were carried out as early as 1315 in the episcopal inquisition, when more than 50 Waldensians were burned in various Silesian cities. The fragmentary surviving protocols of the investigations carried out by the Prague inquisitor Gallus de Neuhaus in the years 1335 to around 1353 mention 14 heretics burned out of almost 300 interrogated, but it is estimated that the actual number executed could have been even more than 200, and the entire process was covered to varying degrees by some 4,400 people. In the lands belonging to the Kingdom of Poland, little is known of the activities of the Inquisition until the appearance of the Hussite heresy in the 15th century. Polish courts of the inquisition in the fight against this heresy issued at least 8 death sentences for some 200 trials carried out. There are 558 court cases finished with conviction researched in Poland from the 15th to 18th centuries.

Inquisition in Medieval Spain

Portugal and Spain in the late Middle Ages consisted largely of multicultural territories of Muslim and Jewish influence, reconquered from Islamic control, and the new Christian authorities could not assume that all their subjects would suddenly become and remain orthodox Catholics. So the Inquisition in Iberia, in the lands of the Reconquista counties and kingdoms like León, Castile, and Aragon, had a special socio-political basis as well as more fundamental religious motives. In some parts of Spain towards the end of the 14th century, there was a wave of violent anti-Judaism, encouraged by the preaching of Ferrand Martínez, Archdeacon of Écija. In the massacre of 1391 in Seville, hundreds of Jews were killed, and the synagogue was completely destroyed. The number of people killed was also high in other cities, such as Córdoba, Valencia, and Barcelona.

One of the consequences of these pogroms was the mass conversion of thousands of surviving Jews. Forced baptism was contrary to the law of the Catholic Church, and theoretically anybody who had been forcibly baptized could legally return to Judaism; however, this was very narrowly interpreted. Legal definitions of the time theoretically acknowledged that a forced baptism was not a valid sacrament, but confined this to cases where it was literally administered by physical force. A person who had consented to baptism under threat of death or serious injury was still regarded as a voluntary convert, and accordingly forbidden to revert to Judaism. After the public violence, many of the converted "felt it safer to remain in their new religion". Thus, after 1391, a new social group appeared and were referred to as conversos or New Christians.

Early modern European history

With the sharpening of debate and of conflict between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Protestant societies came to see/use the Inquisition as a terrifying "other", while staunch Catholics regarded the Holy Office as a necessary bulwark against the spread of reprehensible heresies. Since the beginning of the most serious heretic groups, like the Cathars or the Waldensians, they were soon accused of the most fantastic behavior, like having wild sexual orgies, eating babies, copulating with demons, worshipping the Devil.

Spanish Inquisition

King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile established the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 to be overseen by 14 local Tribunals. In contrast to the previous inquisitions, it operated completely under royal Christian authority, though staffed by clergy and orders, and independently of the Holy See. It operated first in Spain, then in Portugal, and eventually in most Spanish colonies and territories, which included the Canary Islands, the Kingdom of Sicily, and all Spanish possessions in North, Central, and South America. It primarily focused upon forced converts from Islam (Moriscos, conversos, and "secret Moors") and from Judaism (conversos, Crypto-Jews, and Marranos)—both groups which continued to reside in Spain and who came under suspicion of either continuing to adhere to their old religion or of having fallen back into it.

Under the Alhambra Decree of 1492, all Jews who had not converted were expelled from Spain in 1492. Tomás de Torquemada was chosen to be the first Grand Inquisitor, to oversee the Inquisition; and it is estimated that up to 2,000 Jews were burned at the stake during the reign of Queen Isabella. All Muslims were ordered to convert in different stages starting in 1507 and culminating in 1614, when Muslims who had previously converted were now expelled. Those who converted or simply remained after the relevant edict became nominally and legally Catholics, and thus subject to the Inquisition.

Inquisition in the Spanish overseas empire

In 1569, King Philip II of Spain set up three tribunals in the Americas (each formally titled Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición): one in Mexico, one in Cartagena de Indias (in modern-day Colombia), and one in Peru. The Mexican office administered Mexico (central and southeastern Mexico), Nueva Galicia (northern and western Mexico), the Audiencias of Guatemala (Guatemala, Chiapas, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica), and the Spanish East Indies. The Peruvian Inquisition, based in Lima, administered all the Spanish territories in South America and Panama. The Spanish Inquisition was formerly ended by proclamation on 15 July 1834 by Maria Cristina de Bourbon, then queen regent of Spain, also known as Maria Cristina of Naples and Sicily.

Portuguese Inquisition

The Portuguese Inquisition formally started in Portugal in 1536 at the request of King João III. Manuel I had asked Pope Leo X for the installation of the Inquisition in 1515, but only after his death in 1521 did Pope Paul III acquiesce. At its head stood a Grande Inquisidor, or General Inquisitor, named by the Pope but selected by the Crown, and always from within the royal family. Jews who fled Spain and the Spanish Inquisition now found themselves subject to the Inquisition in Portugal. The Portuguese Inquisition principally focused upon the Jews from Spain, the Sephardi Jews, who had fled or whom the state had forced to convert to Christianity. The Portuguese Inquisition held its first auto-da-fé in 1540. The Portuguese inquisitors mostly focused upon the Jewish New Christians (i.e. conversos or marranos). The Portuguese Inquisition expanded its scope of operations from Portugal to its colonial possessions, including Brazil, Cape Verde, and Goa. In the colonies, it continued as a religious court, investigating and trying cases of breaches of the tenets of orthodox Catholicism until 1821. King João III (reigned 1521–57) extended the activity of the courts to cover censorship, divination, witchcraft, and bigamy. Originally oriented for a religious action, the Inquisition exerted an influence over almost every aspect of Portuguese society: political, cultural, and social. According to Henry Charles Lea, between 1540 and 1794, tribunals in Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra, and Évora resulted in the burning of 1,175 persons, the burning of another 633 in effigy, and the penancing of 29,590. Documentation of 15 out of 689 autos-da-fé has disappeared, so these numbers may slightly understate the activity.

Inquisition in the Portuguese overseas empire

Goa Inquisition

The Goa Inquisition began in 1560 at the order of John III of Portugal. It had originally been requested in a letter in the 1540s by Jesuit priest Francis Xavier, because of the New Christians who had arrived in Goa and then reverted to Judaism. The Goa Inquisition also focused upon Catholic converts from Hinduism or Islam who were thought to have returned to their original ways. In addition, this inquisition prosecuted non-converts who broke prohibitions against the public observance of Hindu or Muslim rites or interfered with Portuguese attempts to convert non-Christians to Catholicism. Aleixo Dias Falcão and Francisco Marques set it up in the palace of the Sabaio Adil Khan.

Brazilian Inquisition

The inquisition was active in colonial Brazil. The religious mystic and formerly enslaved prostitute, Rosa Egipcíaca was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned, both in the colony and in Lisbon. Egipcíaca was the first black woman in Brazil to write a book – this work detailed her visions and was entitled Sagrada Teologia do Amor Divino das Almas Peregrinas.

Roman Inquisition

With the Protestant Reformation, Catholic authorities became much more ready to suspect heresy in any new ideas, including those of Renaissance humanism, previously strongly supported by many at the top of the Church hierarchy. The extirpation of heretics became a much broader and more complex enterprise, complicated by the politics of territorial Protestant powers, especially in northern Europe. The Catholic Church could no longer exercise direct influence in the politics and justice-systems of lands that officially adopted Protestantism. As a result, war (the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years' War), massacre (the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre), and the missional, as well as propaganda work, such as Sacra congregatio de propaganda fide, of the Catholic Counter-Reformation came to play larger roles in these circumstances, and the Roman law type of a "judicial" approach to heresy represented by the Inquisition became less important overall. In 1542 Pope Paul III established the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition as a permanent congregation staffed with cardinals and other officials. It had the tasks of maintaining and defending the integrity of the faith and of examining and proscribing errors and false doctrines; it thus became the supervisory body of local Inquisitions. A famous case tried by the Roman Inquisition was that of Galileo Galilei in 1633.

The penances and sentences for those who confessed or were found guilty were pronounced together in a public ceremony at the end of all the processes. This was the sermo generalis or auto-da-fé. Penances (not matters for the civil authorities) might consist of pilgrimages, a public scourging, a fine, or the wearing of a cross. The wearing of two tongues of red or other brightly colored cloth, sewn onto an outer garment in an "X" pattern, marked those who were under investigation. The penalties in serious cases were confiscation of property by the Inquisition or imprisonment. This led to the possibility of false charges to enable confiscation being made against those over a certain income, particularly rich marranos. Following the French invasion of 1798, the new authorities sent 3,000 chests containing over 100,000 Inquisition documents to France from Rome.

In France

Between 1657 and 1659, twenty-two alleged witches were burned on the orders of the inquisitor Pierre Symard in the province of Franche-Comté, then part of the Empire. The inquisitorial tribunal in papally-ruled Avignon, established in 1541, passed 855 death sentences, almost all of them (818) in the years 1566–1574, but the vast majority of them were pronounced in absentia.

Witch-hunts

The fierce denunciation and persecution of supposed sorceresses that characterized the cruel witchhunts of a later age were not generally found in the first thirteen hundred years of the Christian era. While belief in witchcraft, and persecutions directed at or excused by it, were widespread in pre-Christian Europe, and reflected in old Germanic law, the growing influence of the Church in the early medieval era in pagan areas resulted in the revocation of these laws in many places, bringing an end to the traditional witch hunts. Throughout the medieval era, mainstream Christian teaching had disputed the existence of witches and denied any power to witchcraft, condemning it as pagan superstition.

Black magic practitioners were generally dealt with through confession, repentance, and charitable work assigned as penance. In 1258, Pope Alexander IV ruled that inquisitors should limit their involvement to those cases in which there was some clear presumption of heretical belief but slowly this vision changed. The prosecution of witchcraft generally became more prominent in the late medieval and Renaissance era, perhaps driven partly by the upheavals of the era – the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and a gradual cooling of the climate that modern scientists call the Little Ice Age (between about the 15th and 19th centuries). Witches were sometimes blamed. Since the years of most intense witch-hunting largely coincide with the age of the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation, some historians point to the influence of the Reformation on the European witch-hunt; however, witch-hunting began almost one hundred years before Luther's ninety-five theses.

Manuals for Inquisitors

Over the centuries that it lasted, several procedure manuals for inquisitors were produced for dealing with different types of heresy. The primordial text was Pope Innocent IV's bull, Ad Extirpanda, from 1252, which in its thirty-eight laws details in detail what must be done and authorizes the limited use of non-bloody, non-maiming torture to corroborate certain evidence. Of the various manuals produced later, some stand out: by Nicholas Eymerich, Directorium Inquisitorum, written in 1376; by Bernardo Gui, Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, written between 1319 and 1323. Witches were not forgotten: the controversial book Malleus Maleficarum ("the witches' hammer"), written in 1486, by ex-inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, deals with the subject.

In Portugal, several "Regimentos" (four) were written for the use of the inquisitors, the first in 1552 at the behest of the inquisitor Cardinal D. Henrique and the last in 1774, this sponsored by the Marquis of Pombal, himself a familiar of the inquisition. The Portuguese 1640 Regiment determined that each court of the Holy Office should have a Bible, a compendium of canon and civil law, Eymerich's Directorium Inquisitorum, and Diego de Simancas' Catholicis institutionibus. In 1484, Spanish inquisitor Torquemada, based in Nicholas Eymerich's Directorium Inquisitorum, wrote his twenty eight articles code, Compilación de las instrucciones del oficio de la Santa Inquisición (i.e. Compilation of the instructions of the office of the Holy Inquisition). Later additions would be made, based on experience, many by the canonist Francisco Peña.

Malleus Maleficarum

Dominican priest Heinrich Kramer was assistant to the Archbishop of Salzburg, a sensational preacher, and an appointed local inquisitor. Historian Malcolm Gaskill calls Kramer a "superstitious psychopath". In 1484, Kramer requested that Pope Innocent VIII clarify his authority to conduct inquisitions into witchcraft throughout Germany, where he had been refused assistance by the local ecclesiastical authorities. They maintained that Kramer could not legally function in their areas. Despite some support from Pope Innocent VIII, he was expelled from the city of Innsbruck by the local bishop, George Golzer, who ordered Kramer to stop making false accusations.

Golzer described Kramer as senile in letters written shortly after the incident. This rebuke led Kramer to write a justification of his views on witchcraft in his 1486 book Malleus Maleficarum ("Hammer against witches"). The book distinguishes itself from other demonologies by its obsessive hate of women and sex, seemingly reflecting the twisted psyche of the author. Historian Brian Levack calls it "scholastic pornography". Despite Kramer's claim that the book gained acceptance from the clergy at the University of Cologne, it was in fact condemned by the clergy at Cologne for advocating views that violated Catholic doctrine and standard inquisitorial procedure. In 1538 the Spanish Inquisition cautioned its members not to believe everything the Malleus said. Despite this, Heinrich Kramer was never excommunicated and even enjoyed considerable prestige till his death.

Inquisition Proceedings

Denunciations

The usual procedure began with the visitation by the inquisitors in a chosen location. The so-called heretics were then asked to be present and denounce themselves and others; it was not enough to denounce himself as a heretic. Many confessed alleged heresies for fear that a friend or neighbor might do so later. The terror of the Inquisition provoked chain reactions and denunciations even of spouses, children and friends. If they confessed within a "grace period" — usually 30 days — they could be accepted back into the church without punishment. In general, the benefits proposed by the "edicts of grace" to those who presented themselves spontaneously were the forgiveness of the death penalty or life imprisonment and the forgiveness of the penalty of confiscation of property.

Anyone suspected of knowing about another's heresy and who did not make the obligatory denunciation would be excommunicated and then subject to prosecution as a "promoter of heresy." If the denouncer named other potential heretics, they would also be summoned. All types of complaints were accepted by the Inquisition, regardless of the reputation or position of the complainant. Rumors, mere suppositions, and even anonymous letters were accepted as denunciations, "if the case were of such a nature that such action seemed appropriate to the service of God and the good of the Faith". It was foreseen that prison guards themselves could report and be witnesses against the accused.

This strategy transformed everyone into an Inquisition agent, reminding them that a simple word or deed could bring them before the tribunal. Denunciation was elevated to the status of a superior religious duty, filling the nation with spies and making every individual suspicious of his neighbor, family members, and any strangers he might met. There were various rules, not always followed, on evidence: an enemy could not be a witness against the accused, more than one witness was required, torture —of the accused, denouncer, or witnesses— (which had widespread ad hoc use in secular proceedings) could only be used to corroborate suspect testimony, etc.

Methods of torture used

The primary method of torture was psychological: solitary confinement and indefinite incarceration. The real prevalence or extent of torture is disputed. Some defend that victims were interrogated under physical torture only in extreme cases; however, that there was a wide range of views and practices in different times and locations can be seen from the regulations and manuals for inquisitions. The view of historian Ron E. Hassner is that "inquisitors knew that information obtained through torture often was not reliable. [So] They built their cases patiently, gathering information from a variety of sources, using a variety of methods. With any given subject, they used torture only intermittently, in sessions sometimes months apart. Their main goal was not to compel a confession or a profession of faith, but to extract factual information that would confirm or corroborate information already in hand."

The summary of the Directorium Inquisitorum, by Nicolás Aymerich, made by Marchena, notes a comment by the Aragonese inquisitor: Quaestiones sunt fallaces et inefficaces ("The interrogations are misleading and useless"). In spite of this, Eymerich strongly recommends the use of torture and describes in detail the rules to be followed in order to recommend its use, which he considers very praiseworthy. Defendants were punished if found guilty, with their property being confiscated to cover legal and prison costs and to maintain the heavy machinery of persecution. The victims could also repent of their accusation and receive reconciliation with the Church. The execution of the tortures was attended by the inquisitor, the doctor, the secretary and the torturer, applying them on the nearly naked prisoner. In the year 1252, the bull Ad extirpanda allowed torture, but always with a doctor involved to avoid endangering life, and limited its use to non-bloody methods that did not break bones:

• Strappado: the victim was lifted to the ceiling with his arms tied behind his back, and then dropped violently, but without touching the ground. This usually meant the dislocation of the victim's arms.
• Rack or potro: the prisoner was tied to a frame and the executioner pressed, but stopping before or if the meat was pierced or blood flowed. In another version, the victim was stretched on a sort of table, usually with serious impact in later life. Many inquisitors believed the rack was not allowed.
• Water cure, now known as water boarding: the prisoner was tied, a cloth was inserted through his mouth down to his throat, and one liter jugs of water were poured in to his mouth. The victim had the sensation of drowning, and the stomach swelled until near bursting.

According to Catholic apologists, the method of torture (which was socially accepted in the context of the time) was adopted only in exceptional cases, and the inquisitorial procedure was meticulously regulated in interrogation practices.

• Torture could not endanger the subject's life.
  • At times, torture was allowed when guilt was "half proven" or even not proven, or there existed a "presumption of guilt", or confession was considered incomplete, as stated in Article XV of Torquemada's instruciones and in Eymerich's directions or Portuguese Regimentos.
• Torture could not cause the subject to lose a limb.
  • At times, the defendant was informed that if he died, broke any limbs or lose consciousness during torment, it would be his fault, and not theirs, the inquisitors, because with "such impudence" he put himself in danger of life and health.
• Torture could only be applied once, and only if the subject appeared to be lying.
  • In practice, torture was repeated or "continued". The Portuguese instructions (Regimentos) stipulate that defendants may not appear at autos de fé showing marks of torture, so did not recommend using torture other than potro in the previous fortnight.

It is clear that after the proceedings the tortured were left in a sorry state. Some perished as a result. Despite the loss of thousands of documents over the years, many of the meticulous records of torture sessions have survived.

Fake instruments of torture

Despite what is popularly believed, the cases in which torture was used during the inquisitorial processes were rare, since it was considered (according to some authors) to be ineffective in obtaining evidence. Before torture, some inquisitors may have displayed the instruments mainly on the purpose of intimidation of the accused, so he could understand what to expect. If he wished to avoid punishment, he should only confess his faults.

In the words of historian Helen Mary Carrel: "the common view of the medieval justice system as cruel and based on torture and execution is often unfair and inaccurate." As the historian Nigel Townson wrote: "The sinister torture chambers equipped with cogwheels, bone crushing contraptions, shackles, and other terrifying mechanisms only existed in the imagination of their detractors."

In fact, it seems likely that the inquisitors favoured simpler and "cleaner" methods, which left few apparent marks. Aymerich points out that canon law does not prescribe either this or that particular torture, so judges can use whatever they see fit, as long as it's not an unusual torture. Many types of torments have been chosen, but Eymerich think they seem more like the inventions of executioners than the works of theologians. "It is true that it is a very praiseworthy practice to subject the accused to torture, but no less reprehensible are those bloodthirsty judges who base their vain glory on the invention of crude and exquisite torments" – he adds. Also, Rafael Sabatini notes that the available records do not show these uncommon inventions. It seems that the inquisitors must have been satisfied with the devices already in use, or a limited number of the most efficient.

Many torture instruments were designed by late 18th and early 19th century pranksters, entertainers, and con artists who wanted to profit from people's morbid interest in the Dark Age myth by charging them to witness such instruments in Victorian-era circuses; however, several torture instruments are accurately described in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, including but not limited to the dry pan. Some of the instruments that "the Inquisition" never used, but that are erroneously registered in various inquisition museums:

• The troublemaker's flute: Created in the 17th century. Its first mention comes from the years 1680–90 of the Republic of Venice used against deserters from the war between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice.
• Head crusher: Created in the 14th century. Its first mention comes from 1340 in Germany. It was not used by the Inquisition but by the German courts against the enemies of some prince-electors.
• Judas's cradle: Created in the fifteenth century. Its first mention comes from 1450 to 1480 in France. Used by the parlement and not by the Inquisition, it was abolished in 1430.
• The Spanish donkey: Created in the 16th century. The name connects the instrument to the Spanish Inquisition, although it was only used in certain regions, which were not primarily Spain nor as part of the Inquisition, but by Central European civil authorities (most notably Reformed Germany and the Bohemian Crown), New France, the Netherlands Antilles, the British Empire, and the United States. It is unclear exactly who invented this device, and it is likely that it was ascribed to Spain as "Black Legend" propaganda.
• The Spanish tickle: Created in 2005 as a false rumor on Wikipedia.
• The Thumbscrew: Created in the 16th century. It was used for the persecution of Catholics by William Cecil in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. It was not used by the Inquisition, but by the English courts against dissidents to the Protestant Reformation, later also for the torture of slaves.
• The saw: Created in the fifteenth century. Its first mention comes from 1450 to 1470. Used by the Hungarian court against Muslims in the context of the war between the Ottoman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary.
• Pear of anguish: Created in the fifteenth century. Its first mention comes from 1450. Used by the French parlement and not by the Inquisition, it was abolished in 1430. The historian Chris Bishop came to postulate that it could have actually been a sock stretcher, since it has been proven that it was too weak to open into a body orifice.
• The Spanish Boot: Created in the 14th century. Its first mentions come from Scotland with the buskin. Used by the authorities in England to persecute Catholics in Ireland. Later the civil authorities of France and Venice would use it, but not by the Spanish Inquisition.
• The "Cloak of Infamy". Created in the 17th century. It was first mentioned by Johann Philipp Siebenkees in 1790, and was used by the Nuremberg parliament (Protestant) against thieves and prostitutes.
• The Iron Maiden. The use of iron maidens in judicial proceedings or executions is doubted. Several replicas of the Iron Maiden existed, and the one of Nuremberg Castle was destroyed in 1944 as a result of bombing during World War II. It was probably based on the 17th century Cloak of Infamy.
• The Breast ripper. Created at the end of the 16th century. The first reference dates back to Bavaria (Germany) in 1599 and presumably it would have been used in France and Holy Roman Empire by civil authorities and not by the Inquisition; however, there are no reliable first-hand historical sources on the use of the devices, so, like the Iron Maiden, there is a possibility that the devices shown in the images are fakes of a later manufacture (such as from the 17th century) or assembled from small fragments that may have been parts of another device. Most likely, it was often mentioned to frighten and force the accused to confess, rather than such dubiously existent torture being inflicted on them.
• The Stocks. Created in the Middle Ages and used by the civil authorities of London, not the Inquisition, in order to publicly shame criminals, but not physically harm them or take life.
• The bronze bull. Created in the Ancient Age and never used in medieval Europe, much less in the Inquisition. In fact, there is a chance that it never existed at all and was just a popular legend of Greco-Latin culture.
• The Scold's bridle. Created in the 16th century. It was never legalized and was only used unofficially by some civilians in Scotland and England, not by the Inquisition.
• The dungeon of rats. Created in the 16th century, its main reference is from John Lothrop Motley about some anecdotes of torture against the "papists" during the Dutch war of independence. It is also said that Catholics who resisted the Church of England under Elizabeth I were tortured in the Tower of London. Used by some Protestant governments and not by the Inquisition.
• Heretic's Fork, Boots, Cat's Paw, and Iron Cage. Created in the 15th–16th century. Used by the French parlement and not by the Inquisition.

Trials

The Inquisition's trials were secret and there was no possibility of appealing the decisions. The defendant was pressured to confess to the "crimes" assigned to him. The Inquisitors kept the accusations made and evidence they possessed hidden, to achieve a confession without announcing the accusation. The main goal was to make the defendant confess. When a lawyer was assigned to him, he was an employee of the Inquisition and worked for it, not in the defense of the accused. Each court had its own staff (lawyers, prosecutors, notaries, etc.) and prison. The guards who served the inquisition spied the accused in their cells; if they refused to eat for example, this could be considered a fast, a Jewish custom.

In many cases, it was common for false accusations to be made against New Christians and it was difficult to prove their innocence. It was therefore more convenient for many to make a false confession to the inquisitors, including a list of imaginary accomplices, in the hope that they would not receive extreme penalties, such as the death penalty, but only the confiscation of property or lesser penalties. There was no trial in the modern sense of the term, but an interrogation; the prisoner was usually not told about the reasons for his arrest — often for months or years. There was no precise accusation and therefore little chance of a plausible defence. The prisoner was advised "to search his conscience, confess the truth, and trust to the mercy of the tribunal'". Eventually, the prisoner was informed of the charges against him — but omitting the names of the witnesses. After the interrogations, hearings and waiting periods came to an end, the sentence could be pronounced.

Walter Ullmann, a historian, summarises his evaluation of the trials: "There is hardly one item in the whole Inquisitorial procedure that could be squared with the demands of justice; on the contrary, every one of its items is the denial of justice or a hideous caricature of it... its principles are the very denial of the demands made by the most primitive concepts of natural justice... This kind of proceeding has no longer any semblance to a judicial trial but is rather its systematic and methodical perversion." Portuguese author A. José Saraiva points out the analogy of the trials with the absurdity of the Kafka's novel The Trial or the show trials of Stalin's era.

Punishments

The Inquisition's sentences could be simple penances, for example private devotions, or heavy punishments. One of the Inquisition's punishments was the forced wearing of distinctive clothing or signs such as the sambenito, sometimes for an entire life. Other punishments were exile, compulsory pilgrimages, fines, the galleys, life imprisonment (in fact prison for some years) and in addition the confiscation of goods and property. The bull Ad Extirpanda determined that the houses of heretics should be completely razed to the ground. Furthermore, the impact of the Inquisition's activity on the fabric of society was not limited to these penances or punishments. As under the terror of the Inquisition entire families denounced each other, they were soon reduced to misery, completed by the confiscation of property, public humiliation and ostracism. Even dead people could be accused, and sentenced up to forty years after the death. When inquisitors considered proven that the deceased were heretics in their lifetime, their corpses were exhumed and burned, their property confiscated and the heirs disinherited.

Legitimation by the texts

The Inquisition always referred to biblical passages, as well as to Church Fathers, like Augustine of Hippo, to legitimise his actuation. The New Testament contains some sentences that the church could interpret for dealing with heretics. The excommunication of a deviant from the faith was equivalent to handing him over to the Devil: "When you have gathered together, and my spirit with you, in the power of our Lord Jesus, hand this man over to Satan for destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord" (Pauline letters: 1 Corinthians, B. Incest in Corinth, 5:4 and 5:5). The sentence of Paul could also be understood in this way: he handed over to the Devil those "who have suffered shipwreck in the faith... so that they may be taught not to be blasphemous" (Pastoral epistles: 1 Timothy – The first letter from Paul to Timothy—Timothy's responsibility: 1:19 and 1:20). Paul's view reflects less the idea of punishment than the idea of isolation when he says: "After a first and second warning have nothing to do with a disputatious person, since you may be sure that such a person is warped and is self-condemned as a sinner" (Pastoral epistles: Titus – The letter from Paul to Titus—3:10 and 3:11).

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the apostates in a parable, "I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in that person, bears fruit in plenty; for apart from me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me is thrown away like a branch and withers. These branches are collected, thrown on the fire and burnt." This parable can be interpreted as the burning of stubborn heretics at the stake (the Gospel according to John: the true vine—15:5 and 15:6).

The celebrated theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) supplied the theoretical foundation for the medieval Inquisition in his Summa theologica II 2. 11. A heretic who repents, the first time, should be allowed penance and their life safeguarded by the church from the punishment of the secular authorities (who treated pernicious and public heresy as a kind of sedition). A subsequent lapse into heresy would show insincerity that called for excommunication, leaving them to the secular authorities who could impose the death penalty on unprotected heretics: "Accipere fidem est voluntatis, sed tenere fidem iam acceptam est necessitatis", meaning "The acceptance of faith is voluntary, maintaining the accepted faith is necessary. So heretics should be compelled to keep the faith."

Luis de Páramo, theologian and Inquisitor of then Spanish-ruled Sicily from 1584 to 1605, asserted that Jesus Christ was "the first Inquisitor under the Evangelical law" and that John the Baptist and the apostles were also inquisitors; however, another traditional stream of Catholic thought, for example championed by Erasmus, was that the Parable of the wheat and tares forbade any premature culling of heretics. Saint Augustine (354–430) led a debate in Africa with the Donatist community, which had split from the Roman Church. In his works, he called for moderate severity or measures by secular power, including the death penalty, against heretics, however he did not consider it desirable: "Corrigi eos volumus, non necari, nec disciplinam circa eos negligi volumus, nec suppliciis quibus digni sunt exerci", meaning "We would like them to be improved, not killed; we desire the triumph of church discipline, not the death they deserve".

Opposition and resistance

In many regions and times, there was opposition to the Inquisition.

Assassinations

In some cases, heretics and other targets did not hesitate to attempt to murder the inquisitors, or destroy its voluminous archives, because they had much to lose in the face of an inquisitorial investigation: their freedom, their property, their lives. The much hated Inquisitor Konrad von Marburg, who also initiated inquisition trials against nobles, was murdered in 1233 by six mounted men on an open country road on the way to Marburg. In 1242, a Cathar group armed with axes entered the castle of the town of Avignonet (southern France) and murdered the inquisitors Guillaume Arnaud and Étienne de Saint-Thibéry. In 1252, the inquisitor Peter of Verona was killed by Cathars. Eleven months after his assassination, he was made a Catholic saint, the quickest canonization in history. As Christine Caldwell Ames writes, "Inquisition changed what it meant to be a martyr, to be holy, and to be an imitator of Christ." In 1395 near Steyr, where the inquisitor Petrus Zwicker was quartered with associates, an assassination attempt on him failed: someone had tried to set fire to the place and burn him alive.

Clergy opposition

Opposition to Inquisition power and abuses sometimes came from within the clergy: including friars, priests and bishops. During French Inquisition, a Franciscan friar, Bernard Délicieux, opposed the actions of the Inquisition in Languedoc. The infamous Bernard Gui presented him as the commander-in-chief of the "iniquitous army" against the Dominicans and the Inquisition. Délicieux alleged the Inquisitiors were pursuing innocent Catholics for heresy, trying to destroy their towns. He stated that the methods of the inquisition would have condemned even Peter and Paul as heretics if they appeared before the inquisitors. Délicieux later became one more victim of the Inquisition for his criticism. In 1317, Pope John XXII called him and other Franciscan Spirituals to Avignon, and he was arrested, questioned, and tortured by the Inquisition. In 1319, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Fragile and old, he died shortly thereafter.

In Spain, several bishops contended with inquisitorial tribunals. In 1532, the Archbishop of Toledo Alonso III Fonseca had to ransom converso Juan de Vergara (Cisneros' Latin secretary) from Spanish inquisitors. Fonseca had previously rescued Ignatius of Loyola from them.^{: 80} Far from being a monolithic institution, sometimes the tribunals threatened individuals protected by the Inquisitor-General, such as with the Inquisitor General Alonso Manrique de Lara and Erasmus.

In Portugal, Father António Vieira (1608–1697), himself a Jesuit, philosopher, writer and orator, was one of the most important opponents of the Inquisition. Arrested by the Inquisition for "heretical, reckless, ill-sounding and scandalous propositions" in October 1665, was imprisoned until December 1667. Under the Inquisitorial sentence, he was forbidden to teach, write or preach. Only perhaps Vieira's prestige, his intelligence and his support among members of the royal family saved him from greater consequences. Father Vieira led an anti-inquisition movement in Rome, where he spent six years. In addition to his humanitarian objections, he also had others: he realised that a mercantile middle class was being attacked that would be sorely missed in the country's economic development. He is believed to have been the author of the anonymous writing Notícias Recônditas do Modo de Proceder a Inquisição de Portugal com os seus Presos, which reveals a great deal about the inner workings of the Inquisitorial mechanism and which he delivered to Pope Clement X in favour of the cause of the persecuted of the Inquisition. The Inquisition was suspended by Clement X between 1674 and 1681.

Ending of the Inquisition in the 19th and 20th centuries

By decree of Napoleon's government in 1797, the Inquisition in Venice was abolished in 1806. In Portugal, in the wake of the Liberal Revolution of 1820, the "General Extraordinary and Constituent Courts of the Portuguese Nation" abolished the Portuguese Inquisition in 1821. The wars of independence of the former Spanish colonies in the Americas concluded with the abolition of the Inquisition in every quarter of Hispanic America between 1813 and 1825. The last execution of the Inquisition was in Spain in 1826. This was the execution by garroting of the Catalan school teacher Gaietà Ripoll for purportedly teaching Deism in his school. In Spain the practices of the Inquisition were finally outlawed in 1834.

In Italy, the restoration of the Pope as the ruler of the Papal States in 1814 brought the Inquisition back to the Papal States. It remained active there until the late-19th century, notably in the well-publicised Mortara affair (1858–1870). A putative governing institution, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition was created in 1542 in the Vatican. This office survives to this day as part of the Roman Curia, although it underwent a series of name changes. In 1908, it was renamed the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. In 1965, it became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 2022, this office was renamed the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, as retained to the present day.

Current position of the Catholic Church

Reflection on the inquisitorial activity of the Catholic Church began to be seriously undertaken in the period of preparation for the Great Jubilee of 2000, on the initiative of John Paul II, who called for repentance for "examples of thought and action that are in fact a source of anti-witness and scandal". On 12 March 2000, during the celebration of the Jubilee, the Pope, on behalf of the entire Catholic Church and all Christians, apologized for these acts and in general for many others. The Pope asked for forgiveness for seven categories of sins: general sins; sins "in the service of truth"; sins against Christian unity; sins against the Jews; against respect for love, peace and cultures; sins against the dignity of women and minorities; and against human rights. Some theologians were of the opinion that this unprecedented apology would undermine the authority of the Church. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave an apology on behalf of his office, the successor to the Roman Inquisition: "Even men of the church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel."

John Paul II's apology was considered imperfect by several critics, including Jewish figures, who among other points raised the issue of the beatification, at the same time, of Pope Pius IX, known for his anti-Judaism and his approval of the abduction of Edgardo Mortara as the then six-year-old child had been forcibly taken from his Jewish family by Papal States police, under orders of the Inquisitor of Bologna, and was eventually raised in the papal household. Several inquisitors are considered saints by the Catholic Church, such as Peter of Verona, Pedro de Arbués, or John of Capistrano; some were even Popes, such as Michele Ghislieri, who would later become Pope Pius V, and Jacques Fournier—later Pope Benedict XII. Raymond of Penyafort, author of one of the first manuals for use by inquisitors—the Directorium inquisitoriale (1242) -- is also a Catholic saint.

See also

• Auto-da-fé
• Black Legend (Spain)
• Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition
• Cathars
• Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith
• List of people executed in the Papal States
• List of Protestant martyrs of the English Reformation
• Historical revision of the Inquisition
• Witch-cult hypothesis
• Witch trials in the early modern period

Documents and works

• Directorium Inquisitorum
• Histoire de l'Inquisition en France
• Malleus Maleficarum

Notable inquisitors

• Grand Inquisitor
• Konrad von Marburg
• Tomás de Torquemada
• Bernard Gui

Notable cases

• Galileo affair
• Execution of Giordano Bruno
• Trial of Joan of Arc
• Edgardo Mortara
• Basque witch trials
• Caterina Tarongí
• Rosa Egipcíaca

Repentance

• List of apologies made by Pope John Paul II

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Inquisition — (Lat. inquirere, to look to).

By this term is usually meant a special ecclesiastical institutional for combating or suppressing heresy. Its characteristic mark seems to be the bestowal on special judges of judicial powers in matters of faith, and this by supreme ecclesiastical authority, not temporal or for individual cases, but as a universal and permanent office. Moderns experience difficulty in understanding this institution, because they have, to no small extent, lost sight of two facts.

On the one hand they have ceased to grasp religious belief as something objective, as the gift of God, and therefore outside the realm of free private judgment; on the other they no longer see in the Church a society perfect and sovereign, based substantially on a pure and authentic Revelation, whose first most important duty must naturally be to retain unsullied this original deposit of faith. Before the religious revolution of the sixteenth century these views were still common to all Christians; that orthodoxy should be maintained at any cost seemed self-evident.

However, while the positive suppression of heresy by ecclesiastical and civil authority in Christian society is as old as the Church, the Inquisition as a distinct ecclesiastical tribunal is of much later origin. Historically it is a phase in the growth of ecclesiastical legislation, whose distinctive traits can be fully understood only by a careful study of the conditions amid which it grew up. Our subject may, therefore, be conveniently treated as follows:

I. The Suppression of Heresy during the first twelve Christian centuries; II. The Suppression of Heresy by the Institution known as the Inquisition under its several forms: (A) The Inquisition of the Middle Ages; (B) The Inquisition in Spain; (C) The Holy Office at Rome.

I. The Suppression of Heresy during the first twelve Christian centuries

(1) Though the Apostles were deeply imbued with the conviction that they must transmit the deposit of the Faith to posterity undefiled, and that any teaching at variance with their own, even if proclaimed by an angel of Heaven, would be a culpable offense, yet St. Paul did not, in the case of the heretics Alexander and Hymeneus, go back to the Old Covenant penalties of death or scourging (Deut., xiii, 6 sqq.; xvii, 1 sqq.), but deemed exclusion from the communion of the Church sufficient (1 Tim., i, 20; Tit., iii, 10). In fact to the Christians of the first three centuries it could scarcely have occurred to assume any other attitude towards those who erred in matters of faith. Tertullian (Ad. Scapulam, c. ii) lays down the rule:

Humani iuris et naturalis potestatis, unicuique quod putaverit colere, nec alii obest aut prodest alterius religio. Sed nec religionis est religionem colere, quae sponte suscipi debeat, non vi.

In other words, he tells us that the natural law authorized man to follow only the voice of individual conscience in the practice of religion, since the acceptance of religion was a matter of free will, not of compulsion. Replying to the accusation of Celsus, based on the Old Testament, that the Christians persecuted dissidents with death, burning, and torture, Origen (C. Cels., VII, 26) is satisfied with explaining that one must distinguish between the law which the Jews received from Moses and that given to the Christians by Jesus; the former was binding on the Jews, the latter on the Christians. Jewish Christians, if sincere, could no longer conform to all of the Mosaic law; hence they were no longer at liberty to kill their enemies or to burn and stone violators of the Christian Law. St. Cyprian of Carthage, surrounded as he was by countless schismatics and undutiful Christians, also put aside the material sanction of the Old Testament, which punished with death rebellion against priesthood and the Judges. "Nunc autem, quia circumcisio spiritalis esse apud fideles servos Dei coepit, spiritali gladio superbi et contumaces necantur, dum de Ecclesia ejiciuntur" (Ep. lxxii, ad Pompon., n. 4) religion being now spiritual, its sanctions take on the same character, and excommunication replaces the death of the body. Lactantius was yet smarting under the scourge of bloody persecutions, when he wrote this in A.D. 308. Naturally, therefore, he stood for the most absolute freedom of religion. He writes:

Religion being a matter of the will, it cannot be forced on anyone; in this matter it is better to employ words than blows [verbis melius quam verberibus res agenda est]. Of what use is cruelty? What has the rack to do with piety? Surely there is no connection between truth and violence, between justice and cruelty.... It is true that nothing is so important as religion, and one must defend it at any cost [summâ vi]... It is true that it must be protected, but by dying for it, not by killing others; by long-suffering, not by violence; by faith, not by crime. If you attempt to defend religion with bloodshed and torture, what you do is not defense, but desecration and insult. For nothing is so intrinsically a matter of free will as religion. V:20)

The Christian teachers of the first three centuries insisted, as was natural for them, on complete religious liberty; furthermore, they not only urged the principle that religion could not be forced on others — a principle always adhered to by the Church in her dealings with the unbaptised — but, when comparing the Mosaic Law and the Christian religion, they taught that the latter was content with a, spiritual punishment of heretics (i.e. with excommunication), while Judaism necessarily proceeded against its dissidents with torture and death. (2) However, the imperial successors of Constantine soon began to see in themselves Divinely appointed "bishops of the exterior", i.e. masters of the temporal and material conditions of the Church. At the same time they retained the traditional authority of "Pontifex Maximus", and in this way the civil authority inclined, frequently in league with prelates of Arian tendencies, to persecute the orthodox bishops by imprisonment and exile. But the latter, particularly St. Hilary of Poltiers (Liber contra Auxentium, c. iv), protested vigorously against any use of force in the province of religion, whether for the spread of Christianity or for preservation of the Faith. They repeatedly urged that in this respect the severe decrees of the Old Testament were abrogated by the mild and gentle laws of Christ. However, the successors of Constantine were ever persuaded that the first concern of imperial authority (Theodosius II, "Novellae", tit. III, A.D. 438) was the protection of religion and so, with terrible regularity, issued many penal edicts against heretics. In the space of fifty seven years sixty-eight enactments were thus promulgated. All manner of heretics were affected by this legislation, and in various ways, by exile, confiscation of property, or death. A law of 407, aimed at the traitorous Donatists, asserts for the first time that these heretics ought to be put on the same plane as transgressors against the sacred majesty of the emperor, a concept to which was reserved in later times a very momentous role. The death penalty however, was only imposed for certain kinds of heresy; in their persecution of heretics the Christian emperors fell far short of the severity of Diocletian, who in 287 sentenced to the stake the leaders of the Manichaeans, and inflicted on their followers partly the death penalty by beheading, and partly forced labor in the government mines.

So far we have been dealing with the legislation of the Christianized State. In the attitude of the representatives of the Church towards this legislation some uncertainty is already noticeable. At the close of the forth century, and during the fifth, Manichaeism, Donatism, and Priscillianism were the heresies most in view. Expelled from Rome and Milan, the Manichaeism sought refuge in Africa. Though they were found guilty of abominable teachings and misdeeds (St. Augustine, De haeresibus", no. 46), the Church refused to invoke the civil power against them; indeed, the great Bishop of Hippo explicitly rejected the use force. He sought their return only through public and private acts of submission, and his efforts seem to have met with success. Indeed, we learn from him that the Donatists themselves were the first to appeal to the civil power for protection against the Church. However, they fared like Daniels accusers: the lions turned upon them. State intervention not answering to their wishes, and the violent excesses of the Circumcellions being condignly punished, the Donatists complained bitterly of administrative cruelty. St. Optatus of Mileve defended the civil authority (De Schismate Donntistarum, III, cc. 6-7) as follows:

... as though it were not permitted to come forward as avengers of God, and to pronounce sentence of death!... But, say you, the State cannot punish in the name of God. Yet was it not in the name of God that Moses and Phineas consigned to death the worshippers of the Golden calf and those who despised the true religion?

This was the first time that a Catholic bishop championed a decisive cooperation of the State in religious questions, and its right to inflict death on heretics. For the first time, also, the Old Testament was appealed to, though such appeals had been previously rejected by Christian teachers. St. Augustine, on the contrary, was still opposed to the use of force, and tried to lead back the erring by means of instruction; at most he admitted the imposition of a moderate fine for refractory persons. Finally, however, he changed his views, whether moved thereto by the incredible excesses of the Circumcellions or by the good results achieved by the use of force, or favoring force through the persuasions of other bishops. Apropos of his apparent inconsistency it is well to note carefully whom he is addressing. He appears to speak in one way to government officials, who wanted the existing laws carried out to their fullest extent, and in another to the Donntists, who denied to the State any right of punishing dissenters. In his correspondence with state officials he dwells on Christian charity and toleration, and represents the heretics as straying lambs, to be sought out and perhaps, if recalcitrant chastised with rods and frightened with threats of severer but not to be driven back to the fold by means of rack and sword. On the other hand, in his writings against the Donatists he upholds the rights of the State: sometimes, he says, a salutary severity would be to the interest of the erring ones themselves and likewise protective of true believers and the community at large (Vacandard, 1. c., pp. 17-26)

As to Priscillianism, not a few points remain yet obscure, despite recent valuable researches. It seems certain, however, that Priscillian, Bishop of Avilia in Spain, was accused of heresy and sorcery, and found guilty by several councils. St. Ambrose at Milanand St. Damascus at Rome seem to have refused him a hearing. At length he appealed to Emperor Maximus at Trier, but to his detriment, for he was there condemned to death. Priscillian himself, no doubt in full consciousness of his own innocence, had formerly called for repression of the Manichaeans by the sword. But the foremost Christian teachers did not share these sentiments, and his own execution gave them occasion for a solemn protest against the cruel treatment meted out to him by the imperial government. St. Martin of Tours, then at Trier, exerted himself to obtain from the ecclesiastical authority the abandonment of the accusation, and induced the emperor to promise that on no account would he shed the blood of Priscillian, since ecclesiastical deposition by the bishops would be punishment enough, and bloodshed would be opposed to the Divine Law (Sulp. Serverus "Chron.", II, in P.L., XX, 155 sqq.; and ibid., "Dialogi", III, col.217). After the execution he strongly blamed both the accusers and the emperor, and for a long time refused to hold communion with such bishops as had been in any way responsible for Priscillians death. The great Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, described that execution as a crime.

Priscillianism, however, did not disappear with the death of its originator; on the contrary, it spread with extraordinary rapidly, and, through its open adoption of Manichaeism, became more of a public menace than ever. In this way the severe judgments of St. Augustine and St. Jerome against Priscillianism become intelligible. In 447 Leo the Great had to reproach the Priscillianists with loosening the holy bonds of marriage, treading all decency under foot, and deriding all law, human and Divine. It seemed to him natural that temporal rulers should punish such sacrilegious madness, and should put to death the founder of the sect and some of his followers. He goes on to say that this redounded to the advantage of the Church: "quae etsi sacerdotali contenta iudicio, cruentas refugit ultiones, severis tamen christianorum principum constitutionibus adiuratur, dum ad spiritale recurrunt remedium, qui timent corporale supplicium" -though the Church was content with a spiritual sentence on the part of its bishops and was averse to the shedding of blood, nevertheless it was aided by the imperial severity, inasmuch as the fear of corporal punishment drove the guilty to seek a spiritual remedy (Ep. xv ad Turribium; P. L., LIV, 679 sq.).

The ecclesiastical ideas of the first five centuries may be summarized as follows:

• the Church should for no cause shed blood (St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Leo I, and others);
• other teachers, however, like Optatus of Mileve and Priscillian, believed that the State could pronounce the death penalty on heretics in case the public welfare demanded it;
• the majority held that the death penalty for heresy, when not civilly criminal, was irreconcilable with the spirit of Christianity.

St. Augustine (Ep. c, n. 1), almost in the name of the western Church, says: "Corrigi eos volumus, non necari, nec disciplinam circa eos negligi volumus, nec suppliciis quibus digni sunt exerceri" — we wish them corrected, not put to death; we desire the triumph of (ecclesiastical) discipline, not the death penalties that they deserve. St. John Chrysostom says substantially the same in the name of the Eastern Church (Hom., XLVI, c. i): "To consign a heretic to death is to commit an offence beyond atonement"; and in the next chapter he says that God forbids their execution, even as He forbids us to uproot cockle, but He does not forbid us to repel them, to deprive them of free speech, or to prohibit their assemblies. The help of the "secular arm" was therefore not entirely rejected; on the contrary, as often as the Christian welfare, general or domestic, required it, Christian rulers sought to stem the evil by appropriate measures. As late the seventh century St. Isidore of Seville expresses similar sentiments (Sententiarum, III, iv, nn. 4-6). How little we are to trust the vaunted impartiality of Henry Charles Lea, the American historian of the Inquisition, we may here illustrate by an example. In his "History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages" (New York, 1888, I, 215), He closes this period with these words:

It was only sixty-two years after the slaughter of Priscillian and his followers had excited so much horror, that Leo I, when the heresy seemed to be reviving in 447, not only justified the act, but declared that, if the followers of a heresy so damnable were allowed to live, there would be an end to human and Divine law. The final step had been taken and the church was definitely pledged to the suppression of heresy at any cost. It is impossible not to attribute to ecclesiastical influence the successive edicts by which, from the time of Theodosius the Great, persistence in heresy was punished with death.

In these lines Lee has transferred to the pope words employed by the emperor. Moreover, it is simply the exact opposite of historical truth to assert that the imperial edicts punishing heresy with death were due to ecclesiastical influence, since we have shown that in this period the more influential ecclesiastical authorities declared that the death penalty was contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, and themselves opposed its execution. For centuries this was the ecclesiastical attitude both in theory and in practice. Thus, in keeping with the civil law, some Manichaeans were executed at Ravenna in 556. On the other hand. Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of Urgel, the chiefs of Adoptionism anti Predestinationism, were condemned by and councils, but were otherwise left unmolested. We may note, however, that the monk Gothescalch, after the condemnation of his false doctrine that Christ had not died for all mankind, was by the Synods of Mainz in 848 and Quiercy in 849 sentenced to flogging and imprisonment, punishments then common in monasteries for various infractions of the rule. (3) About the year 1000 Manichaeans from Bulgaria, under various names, spread over Western Europe. They were numerous in Italy, Spain, Gaul and Germany. Christian popular sentiment soon showed itself adverse to these dangerous sectaries, and resulted in occasional local persecutions, naturally in forms expressive of the spirit of the age. In 1122 King Robert the Pious (regis iussu et universae plebis consensu), "because he feared for the safety of the kingdom and the salvation of souls" had thirteen distinguished citizens, ecclesiastic and lay, burnt alive at Orléans. Elsewhere similar acts were due to popular outbursts. A few years later the Bishop of Chalons observed that the sect was spreading in his diocese, and asked of Wazo, Bishop of Liège, advice as to the use of force: "An terrenae potestatis gladio in eos sit animadvertendum necne" ("Vita Wasonis", cc. xxv, xxvi, in P. L., CXLII, 752; "Wazo ad Roger. II, episc. Catalaunens", and "Anselmi Gesta episc. Leod." in "Mon. Germ. SS.", VII, 227 sq.). Wazo replied that this was contrary to the spirit of the Church and the words of its Founder, Who ordained that the tares should be allowed to grow with the wheat until the day of the harvest, lest the wheat be uprooted with the tares; those who today were tares might to-morrow be converted, and turn into wheat; let them therefore live, and let mere excommunication suffice St. Chrysostom, as we have seen, had taught similar doctrine. This principle could not be always followed. Thus at Goslar, in the Christmas season of 1051, and in 1052, several heretics were hanged because Emperor Henry III wanted to prevent the further spread of "the heretical leprosy." A few years later, In 1076 or 1077, a Catharist was condemned to the stake by the Bishop of Cambrai and his chapter. Other Catharists, in spite of the archbishops intervention, were given their choice by the magistrates of Milan between doing homage to the Cross and mounting the pyre. By far the greater number chose the latter. In 1114 the Bishop of Soissons kept sundry heretics in durance in his episcopal city. But while he was gone to Beauvais, to ask advice of the bishops assembled there for a synod the "believing folk, fearing the habitual soft-heartedness of ecclesiatics (clericalem verens mollitiem), stormed the prison took the accused outside of town, and burned them.

The people disliked what to them was the extreme dilatoriness of the clergy in pursuing heretics. In 1144 Adalerbo II of Liège hoped to bring some imprisoned Catharists to better knowledge through the grace of God, but the people, less indulgent, assailed the unhappy creatures and only with the greatest trouble did the bishop succeed in rescuing some of them from death by fire. A like drama was enacted about the same time at Cologne. while the archbishop and the priests earnestly sought to lead the misguided back into the Church, the latter. were violently taken by the mob (a populis nimio zelo abreptis) from the custody of the clergy and burned at the stake. The best-known heresiarchs of that time, Peter of Bruys and Arnold of Brescia, met a similar fate — the first on the pyre as a victim of popular fury, and the latter under the henchmans axe as a victim of his political enemies. In short, no blame attaches to the Church for her behavior towards heresy in those rude days. Among all the bishops of the period, so far as can be ascertained, Theodwin of Liège, successor of the aforesaid Wazo and predecessor of Adalbero II, alone appealed to the civil power for the punishment of heretics, and even he did not call for the death penalty, which was rejected by all. who were more highly respected in the twelfth century than Peter Canter, the most learned man of his time, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux? The former says ("Verbum abbreviatum", c. lxxviii, in P.L., CCV, 231):

Whether they be convicted of error, or freely confess their guilt, Catharists are not to be put to death, at least not when they refrain from armed assaults upon the Church. For although the Apostle said, A man that is a heretic after the third admonition, avoid, he certainly did not say, Kill him. Throw them into prison, if you will, but do not put them to death (cf. Geroch von Reichersberg, "De investigatione Antichristi III", 42).

So far was St. Bernard from agreeing with the methods of the people of Cologne, that he laid down the axiom: Fides suadenda, non imponenda (By persuasion, not by violence, are men to be won to the Faith). And if he censures the carelessness of the princes, who were to blame because little foxes devastated the vineyard, yet he adds that the latter must not be captured by force but by arguments (capiantur non armis, sed argumentis); the obstinate were to be excommunicated, and if necessary kept in confinement for the safety of others (aut corrigendi sunt ne pereant, aut, ne perimant, coercendi). (See Vacandard, 1. c., 53 sqq.) The synods of the period employ substantially the same terms, e.g. the synod at Reims in 1049 under Leo IX, that at Toulouse in 1119, at which Callistus II presided, and finally the Lateran Council of 1139. Hence, the occasional executions of heretics during this period must be ascribed partly to the arbitrary action of individual rulers, partly to the fanatic outbreaks of the overzealous populace, and in no wise to ecclesiastical law or the ecclesiastical authorities. There were already, it is true, canonists who conceded to the Church the right to pronounce sentence of death on heretics; but the question was treated as a purely academic one, and the theory exercised virtually no influence on real life. Excommunication, proscription, imprisonment, etc., were indeed inflicted, being intended rather as forms of atonement than of real punishment, but never the capital sentence. The maxim of Peter Cantor was still adhered to: "Catharists, even though divinely convicted in an ordeal, must not be punished by death." In the second half of the twelfth century, however, heresy in the form of Catharism spread in truly alarming fashion, and not only menaced the Churchs existence, but undermined the very foundations of Christian society. In opposition to this propaganda there grew up a kind of prescriptive law — at least throughout Germany, France, and Spain — which visited heresy with death by the flames. England on the whole remained untainted by heresy. When, in 1166, about thirty sectaries made their way thither, Henry II ordered that they be burnt on their foreheads with red-hot iron, be beaten with rods in the public square, and then driven off. Moreover, he forbade anyone to give them shelter or otherwise assist them, so that they died partly from hunger and partly from the cold of winter. Duke Philip of Flanders, aided by William of the White Hand, Archbishop of Reims, was particularly severe towards heretics. They caused many citizens in their domains, nobles and commoners, clerics, knights, peasants, spinsters, widows, anti married women, to be burnt alive, confiscated their property, and divided it between them. This happened in 1183. Between 1183 and 1206 Bishop Hugo of Auxerre acted similarly towards the neo-Mainchaeans. Some he despoiled; the others he either exiled or sent to the stake. King Philip Augustus of France had eight Catharists burnt at Troyes in 1200 one at Nevers in 1201, several at Braisne-sur-Vesle in 1204, and many at Paris — "priests, clerics, laymen, and women belonging to the sect". Raymund V of Toulouse (1148-94) promulgated a law which punished with death the followers of the sect and their favourers. Simon de Montfort's men-at-arms believed in 1211 that they were carrying out this law when they boasted how they had burned alive many, and would continue to do so (unde multos combussimus et adhuc cum invenimus idem facere non cessamus). In 1197 Peter II, King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, issued an edict in obedience to which the Waldensians and all other schismatics were expelled from the land; whoever of this sect was still found in his kingdom or his county after Palm Sunday of the next year was to suffer death by fire, also confiscation of goods.

Ecclesiastical legislation was far from this severity. Alexander III at the Lateran Council of 1179 renewed the decisions already made as to schismatics in Southern France, and requested secular sovereigns to silence those disturbers of public order if necessary by force, to achieve which object they were at liberty to imprison the guilty (servituti subicere, subdere) and to appropriate their possessions, According to the agreement made by Lucius III and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at Verona (1148), the heretics of every community were to be sought out, brought before the episcopal court, excommunicated, and given up to the civil power to he suitably punished (debita animadversione puniendus). The suitable punishment (debita animadversio, ultio) did not, however, as yet mean capital punishment, hut the proscriptive ban, though even this, it is true, entailed exile, expropriation, destruction of the culprits dwelling, infamy, debarment from public office, and the like. The "Continuatio Zwellensis altera, ad ann. 1184" (Mon. Germ. Hist.: SS., IX, 542) accurately describes the condition of heretics at this time when it says that the pope excommunicated them, and the emperor put them under the civil ban, while he confiscated their goods (papa eos excomunicavit imperator vero tam res quam personas ipsorum imperiali banno subiecit). Under Innocent III nothing was done to intensify or add to the extant statutes against heresy, though this pope gave them a wider range by the action of his legates and through the Forth Lateran Council (1215). But this act was indeed a relative service to the heretics, for the regular canonical procedure thus introduced did much to abrogate the arbitrariness, passion, and injustice of the Civil courts in Spain, France and Germany. In so far as, and so long as, his prescriptions remained in force, no summary condemnations or executions en masse occurred, neither stake nor rack were set up; and, if, on one occasion during the first year of his pontificate, to justify confiscation, he appealed to the Roman Law and its penalties for crimes against the sovereign power, yet he did not draw the extreme conclusion that heretics deserved to be burnt. His reign affords many examples showing how much of the vigour he took away in practice from the existing penal code.

II. The Suppression of Heresy by the Institution known as the Inquisition

A. The Inquisition of The Middle Ages

(1) Origin

During the first three decades of the thirteenth century the Inquisition, as the institution, did not exist. But eventually Christian Europe was so endangered by heresy, and penal legislation concerning Catharism had gone so far, that the Inquisition seemed to be a political necessity. That these sects were a menace to Christian society had been long recognized by the Byzantine rulers. As early as the tenth century Empress Theodora had put to death a multitude of Paulicians, and in 1118 Emperor Alexius Comnenus treated the Bogomili with equal severity, but this did not prevent them from pouring over all Western Europe. Moreover these sects were in the highest degree aggressive, hostile to Christianity itself, to the Mass, the sacraments, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and organization; hostile also to feudal government by their attitude towards oaths, which they declared under no circumstances allowable. Nor were their views less fatal to the continuance of human society, for on the one hand they forbade marriage and the propagation of the human race. and on the other hand they made a duty of suicide through the institution of the Endura (see CATHARI). It has been said that more perished through the Endura (the Catharist suicide code) than through the Inquisition. It was, therefore, natural enough for the custodians of the existing order in Europe, especially of the Christian religion, to adopt repressive measures against such revolutionary teachings.

In France Louis VIII decreed in 1226 that persons excommunicated by the diocesan bishop, or his delegate, should receive "meet punishment" (debita animadversio). In 1249 Louis IX ordered barons to deal with heretics according to the dictates of duty (de ipsis faciant quod debebant). A decree of the Council of Toulouse (1229) makes it appear probable that in France death at the stake was already comprehended as in keeping with the aforesaid debita animadversio. To seek to trace in these measures the influence of imperial or papal ordinances is vain, since the burning of heretics had already come to be regarded as prescriptive. It is said in the "Etablissements de St. Louis et coutumes de Beauvaisis", ch. cxiii (Ordonnances des Roys de France, I, 211): "Quand le juge [ecclésiastique] laurait examiné [le suspect] se il trouvait, quil feust bougres, si le devrait faire envoier à la justice laie, et la justice laie le dolt fere ardoir. "The "Coutumes de Beauvaisis" correspond to the German "Sachsenspiegel", or "Mirror of Saxon Laws", compiled about 1235, which also embodies as a law sanctioned by custom the execution of unbelievers at the stake (sal man uf der hurt burnen). In Italy Emperor Frederick II, as early as 22 November, 1220 (Mon. Germ., II, 243), issued a rescript against heretics, conceived, however quite in the spirit of Innocent III, and Honorius III commissioned his legates to see to the enforcement in Italian cities of both the canonical decrees of 1215 and the imperial legislation of 1220. From the foregoing it cannot be doubted that up to 1224 there was no imperial law ordering, or presupposing as legal, the burning of heretics. The rescript for Lombardy of 1224 (Mon. Germ., II, 252; cf. ibid., 288) is accordingly the first law in which death by fire is contemplated (cf. Ficker, op. cit., 196). That Honorius III was in any way concerned in the drafting of this ordinance cannot be maintained; indeed the emperor was all the less in need of papal inspiration as the burning of heretics in Germany was then no longer rare; his legists, moreover, would certainly have directed the emperors attention to the ancient Roman Law that punished high treason with death, and Manichaeism in particular with the stake. The imperial rescripts of 1220 and 1224 were adopted into ecclesiastical criminal law in 1231, and were soon applied at Rome. It was then that the Inquisition of the Middle Ages came into being.

What was the immediate provocation? Contemporary sources afford no positive answer. Bishop Douais, who perhaps commands the original contemporary material better than anyone, has attempted in his latest work (LInquisition. Ses Origines. Sa Procedure, Paris, 1906) to explain its appearance by a supposed anxiety of Gregory IX to forestall the encroachments of Frederick II in the strictly ecclesiastical province of doctrine. For this purpose it would seem necessary for the pope to establish a distinct and specifically ecclesiastical court. From this point of view, though the hypothesis cannot be fully proved, much is intelligible that otherwise remains obscure. There was doubtless reason to fear such imperial encroachments in an age yet filled with the angry contentions of the Imperium and the Sacerdotium. We need only recall the trickery of the emperor and his Pretended eagerness for the purity of the Faith, his Increasingly rigorous legislation against heretics, the numerous executions of his personal rivals on the pretext of heresy, the hereditary passion of the Hohenstaufen for supreme control over Church and State, their claim of God-given authority over both, of responsibility in both domains to God and God only etc. What was more natural than that the Church should strictly reserve to herself her own sphere, while at the same time endeavouring to avoid giving offence to the emperor? A purely spiritual or papal religious tribunal would secure ecclesiastical liberty and authority for this court could be confided to men of expert knowledge and blameless reputation, and above all to independent men in whose hands the Church could safely trust the decision as to the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of a given teaching. On the other hand, to meet the emperors wishes as far as allowable, the penal code of the empire could be taken over as it stood (cf. Audray, "Regist. de Grégoire IX", n. 535).

(2) The New Tribunal

(a) Its essential characteristic

The pope did not establish the Inquisition as a distinct and separate tribunal; what he did was to appoint special but permanent judges, who executed their doctrinal functions In the name of the pope. Where they sat, there was the Inquisition. It must he carefully noted that the characteristic feature of the Inquisition was not its peculiar procedure, nor the secret examination of witnesses and consequent official indictment: this procedure was common to all courts from the time of Innocent III. Nor was it the pursuit of heretics in all places: this had been the rule since the Imperial Synod of Verona under Lucius III and Frederick Barbarossa. Nor again was it the torture, which was not prescribed or even allowed for decades after the beginning of the Inquisition, nor, finally, the various sanctions, imprisonment, confiscation, the stake, etc., all of which punishments were usual long before the Inquisition. The Inquisitor, strictly speaking, was a special but permanent judge, acting in the name of the pope and clothed by him with the right and the duty to deal legally with offences against the Faith; he had, however, to adhere to the established rules of canonical procedure and pronounce the customary penalties.

Many regarded it, as providential that just at this time sprang up two new orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, whose members, by their superior theological training and other characteristics, seemed eminently fitted to perform the inquisitorial task with entire success. It was safe to assume that they were not merely endowed with the requisite knowledge, but that they would also, quite unselfishly and uninfluenced by worldly motives, do solely what seemed their duty for the Good of the Church. In addition, there was reason to hope that, because of their great popularity, they would not encounter too much opposition. It seems, therefore, not unnatural that the inquisitors should have been chosen by the popes prevailingly from these orders, especially from that of the Dominicans. It is to he noted, however, that the inquisitors were not chosen exclusively from the mendicant orders, though the Senator of Rome no doubt meant such when in his oath of office (1231) he spoke of inquisitores datos ab ecclesia. In his decree of 1232 Frederick II calls them inquisitores ab apostolica sede datos. The Dominican Alberic, in November of 1232, went through Lombardy as inquisitor haereticae pravitatis. The prior and sub-prior of the Dominicans at Friesbach were given a similar commission as early as 27 November, 1231; on 2 December, 1232, the convent of Strasburg, and a little later the convents of Würzburg, Ratisbon, and Bremen, also received the commission. In 1233 a rescript of Gregory IX, touching these matters, was sent simultaneously to the bishops of Southern France and to the priors of the Dominican Order. We know that Dominicans were sent as inquisitors in 1232 to Germany along the Rhine, to the Diocese of Tarragona in Spain and to Lombardy; in 1233 to France, to the territory of Auxerre, the ecclesiastical provinces of Bourges, Bordeaux, Narbonne, and Auch, and to Burgundy; in 1235 to the ecclesiastical province of Sens. In fine, about 1255 we find the Inquisition in full activity in all the countries of Central and Western Europe in the county of Toulouse, in Sicily, Aragon, Lombardy, France, Burgundy, Brabant, and Germany (cf. Douais, op. cit., p. 36, and Fredericq, "Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae, 1025-1520", 2 vols., Ghent, 1884-96).

That Gregory IX, through his appointment of Dominicans and Franciscans as inquisitors, withdrew the suppression of heresy from the proper courts (i.e. from the bishops), is a reproach that in so general a form cannot be sustained. So little did he think of displacing episcopal authority that, on the contrary he provided explicitly that no inquisitional tribunal was to work anywhere without the diocesan bishops co-operation. And if, on the strength of their papal jurisdiction, inquisitors occasionally manifested too great an inclination to act independently of episcopal authority it was precisely the popes who kept them within right bounds. As early as 1254 Innocent IV prohibited anew perpetual imprisonment or death at the stake without the episcopal consent. Similar orders were issued by Urban IV in 1262, Clement IV in 1265, and Gregory X in 1273, until at last Boniface VIII and Clement V solemnly declared null and void all judgments issued in trials concerning faith, unless delivered with the approval anti co-operation of the bishops. The popes always upheld with earnestness the episcopal authority, and sought to free the inquisitional tribunals from every kind of arbitrariness and caprice.

It was a heavy burden of responsibility — almost too heavy for a common mortal — which fell upon the shoulders of an inquisitor, who was obliged, at least indirectly, to decide between life and death. The Church was bound to insist that he should possess, in a pre-eminant degree, the qualities of a good judge; that he should be animated with a glowing zeal for the Faith, the salvation of souls, and the extirpation of heresy; that amid all difficulties and dangers he should never yield to anger or passion; that he should meet hostility fearlessly, but should not court it; that he should yield to no inducement or threat, and yet not be heartless; that, when circumstances permitted, he should observe mercy in allotting penalties; that he should listen to the counsel of others, and not trust too much to his own opinion or to appearances, since often the probable is untrue, and the truth improbable. Somewhat thus did Bernard Gui (or Guldonis) and Eymeric, both of them inquisitors for years, describe the ideal inquisitor. Of such an inquisitor also was Gregory IX doubtlessly thinking when he urged Conrad of Marburg: "ut puniatur sic temeritas perversorum quod innocentiae puritas non laedatur" — i.e., "not to punish the wicked so as to hurt the innocent". History shows us how far the inquisitors answered to this ideal. Far from being inhuman, they were, as a rule, men of spotless character and sometimes of truly admirable sanctity, and not a few of them have been canonized by the Church. There is absolutely no reason to look on the medieval ecclesiastical judge as intellectually and morally inferior to the modern judge. No one would deny that the judges of today, despite occasional harsh decisions and the errors of a, few, pursue a highly honourable profession. Similarly, the medieval inquisitors should be judged as a whole Moreover, history does not justify the hypothesis that the medieval heretics were prodigies of virtue, deserving our sympathy in advance.

(b) Procedure

This regularly began with a months "term of grace", proclaimed by the inquisitor whenever he came to a heresy-ridden district. The inhabitants mere summoned to appear before the inquisitor. On those who confessed of their own accord a suitable penance (e.g. a pilgrimage) was imposed, but never a severe punishment like incarceration or surrender to the civil power. However, these relations with the residents of a, place often furnished important indications, pointed out the proper quarter for investigation, and sometimes much evidence was thus obtained against individuals. These mere then cited before the judges — usually by the parish priest, although occasionally by the secular authorities — and the trial began. If the accused at once made full and free confession, the affair was soon concluded, and not to the disadvantage of the accused. But in most instances the accused entered denial even after swearing on the Four Gospels, and this denial was stubborn in the measure that the testimony was incriminating. David of Augsburg (cf. Preger, "Der Traktat des David von Augshurg uber die Waldenser", Munich, 1878 pp. 43 sqq.) pointed out to the inquisitor four methods of extracting open acknowledgment:

• fear of death, i.e. by giving the accused to understand that the stake awaited him if he would not confess;
• more or less close confinement, possibly emphasized by curtailment of food;
• visits of tried men, who would attempt to induce free confession through friendly persuasion;
• torture, which will be discussed below.

(c) The Witnesses

When no voluntary admission was made, evidence was adduced. Legally, there had to be at least two witnesses, although conscientious judges rarely contended themselves with that number. The principle had hitherto been held by the Church that the testimony of a heretic, an excommunicated person, a perjurer, in short, of an "infamous", was worthless before the courts. But in its destination of unbelief the Church took the further step of abolishing this long established practice, and of accepting a heretics evidence at nearly full value in trials concerning faith. This appears as early as the twelfth century in the "Decretum Gratiani". While Frederick II readily assented to this new departure, the inquisitors seemed at first uncertain as to the value of the evidence of an "infamous" person. It was only in 1261, after Alexander IV had silenced their scruples, that the new principle was generally adopted both in theory and in practice. This grave modification seems to have been defended on the ground that the heretical conventicles took place secretly, and were shrouded in great obscurity, so that reliable information could be obtained from none but themselves. Even prior to the establishment of the Inquisition the names of the witnesses were sometimes withheld from the accused person, and this usage was legalized by Gregory IX, Innocent IV, and Alexander IV. Boniface VIII, however, set it aside by his Bull "Ut commissi vobis officii" (Sext. Decret., 1. V, tit. ii ); and commanded that at all trials, even inquisitorial, the witnesses must be named to the accused. There was no personal confrontation of witnesses, neither was there any cross-examination. Witnesses for the defence hardly ever appeared, as they would almost infallibly be suspected of being heretics or favourable to heresy. For the same reason those impeached rarely secured legal advisers, and mere therefore obliged to make personal response to the main points of a charge. This, however, was also no innovation, for in 1205 Innocent III, by the Bull "Si adversus vos" forbade any legal help for heretics: "We strictly prohibit you, lawyers and notaries, from assisting in any way, by council or support, all heretics and such as believe In them, adhere to them, render them any assistance or defend them in any way. But this severity soon relaxed, and even in Eymerics day it seems to have been the universal custom to grant heretics a legal adviser, who, however, had to be in every way beyond suspicion, "upright, of undoubted loyalty, skilled in civil and canon law, and zealous for the faith."

Meanwhile, even in those hard times, such legal severities were felt to be excessive, and attempts were made to mitigate them in various ways, so as to protect the natural rights of the accused. First he could make known to the judge the names of his enemies: should the charge originate with them, they would be quashed without further ado. Furthermore, it was undoubtedly to the advantage of the accused that false witnesses were punished without mercy. The aforesaid inquisitor, Bernard Gui, relates an instance of a father falsely accusing his son of heresy. The sons innocence quickly coming to light, the false accuser was apprehended, and sentenced to prison for life (solam vitam ei ex misericordia relinquentes). In addition he was pilloried for five consecutive Sundays before the church during service, with bare head and bound hands. Perjury in those days was accounted an enormous offence, particularly when committed by a false witness. Moreover, the accused had a considerable advantage in the fact that the inquisitor had to conduct the trial in co-operation with the diocesan bishop or his representatives, to whom all documents relating to the trial had to he remitted. Both together, inquisitor and bishop, were also made to summon and consult a number of upright and experienced men (boni viri), and to decide in agreement with their decision (vota). Innocent IV (11 July. 1254), Alexander IV (15 April, 1255, and 27 April, 1260), and Urban IV (2 August, 1264) strictly prescribed this institution of the boni viri — i.e. the consultation in difficult cases of experienced men, well versed in theology and canon law, and in every way irreproachable. The documents of the trial were either in their entirety handed to them, or a least an abstract drawn up by a public notary was furnished; they were also made acquainted with the witnesses names, and their first duty was to decide whether or not the witnesses were credible.

The boni viri were very frequently called on. Thirty, fifty, eighty, or more persons — laymen and priests; secular and regular — would be summoned, all highly respected and independent men, and singly sworn to give verdict upon the cases before them accordingly to the best of their knowledge and belief. Substantially they were always called upon to decide two questions: whether and what guilt lay at hand, and what punishment was to be inflicted. That they might be influenced by no personal considerations, the case would be submitted to them somewhat in the abstract, i.e., the name of the person inculpated was not given. Although, strictly speaking, the boni viri were entitled only to an advisory vote, the final ruling was usually in accordance with their views, and, whether their decision was revised, it was always in the direction of clemency, the mitigation of the findings being indeed of frequent occurrence. The judges were also assisted by a consilium permanens, or standing council, composed of other sworn judges. In these dispositions surely lay the most valuable guarantees for all objective, impartial, and just operation of the inquisition courts. Apart from the conduct of his own defence the accused disposed of other legal means for safeguarding his rights: he could reject a judge who had shown prejudice, and at any stage of the trial could appeal to Rome. Eymeric leads one to infer that in Aragon appeals to the Holy See were not rare. He himself as inquisitor had on one occasion to go to Rome to defend in person his own position, but he advises other inquisitors against that step, as it simply meant the loss of much time and money; it were wiser, he says, to try a case in such a manner that no fault could be found. In the event of an appeal the documents of the case were to be sent to Rome under seal, and Rome not only scrutinized them, but itself gave the final verdict. Seemingly, appeals to Rome were in great favour; a milder sentence, it was hoped, would be forthcoming, or at least some time would be gained.

(d) Punishments

The present writer can find nothing to suggest that the accused were imprisoned during the period of inquiry. It was certainly customary to grant the accused person his freedom until the sermo generalis, were he ever so strongly inculpated through witnesses or confession; he was not yet supposed guilty, though he was compelled to promise under oath always to be ready to come before the inquisitor, and in the end to accept with good grace his sentence, whatever its tenor. The oath was assuredly a terrible weapon in the hands of the medieval judge. If the accused person kept it, the judge was favourably inclined; on the other hand, if the accused violated it, his credit grew worse. Many sects, it was known, repudiated oaths on principle; hence the violation of an oath caused the guilty party easily to incur suspicion of heresy. Besides the oath, the inquisitor might secure himself by demanding a sum of money as bail, or reliable bondsmen who would stand surety for the accused. It happened, too, that bondsmen undertook upon oath to deliver the accused "dead or alive" It was perhaps unpleasant to live under the burden of such an obligation, but, at any rate, it was more endurable than to await a final verdict in rigid confinement for months or longer.

Curiously enough torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth. It was not of ecclesiastical origin, and was long prohibited in the ecclesiastical courts. Nor was it originally an important factor in the inquisitional procedure, being unauthorized until twenty years after the Inquisition had begun. It was first authorized by Innocent IV in his Bull "Ad exstirpanda" of 15 May, 1252, which was confirmed by Alexander IV on 30 November, 1259, and by Clement IV on 3 November, 1265. The limit placed upon torture was citra membri diminutionem et mortis periculum — i.e, it was not to cause the loss of life or limb or imperil life. Torture was to applied only once, and not then unless the accused were uncertain in his statements, and seemed already virtually convicted by manifold and weighty proofs. In general, this violent testimony (quaestio) was to be deferred as long as possible, and recourse to it was permitted in only when all other expedients were exhausted. Conscientiousness and sensible judges quite properly attached no great importance to confessions extracted by torture. After long experience Eymeric declared: Quaestiones sunt fallaces et inefficaces — i.e the torture is deceptive and ineffectual.

Had this papal legislation been adhered to in practice, the historian of the Inquisition would have fewer difficulties to satisfy. In the beginning, torture was held to be so odious that clerics were forbidden to be present under pain of irregularity. Sometimes it had to be interrupted so as to enable the inquisitor to continue his examination, which, of course, was attended by numerous inconveniences. Therefore on 27 April, 1260, Alexander IV authorized inquisitors to absolve one another of this irregularity. Urban IV on 2 August, 1262, renewed the permission, and this was soon interpreted as formal licence to continue the examination in the torture chamber itself. The inquisitors manuals faithfully noted and approved this usage. The general rule ran that torture was to be resorted to only once. But this was sometimes circumvented — first, by assuming that with every new piece of evidence the rack could be utilized afresh, and secondly, by imposing fresh torments on the poor victim (often on different days), not by way of repetition, but as a continuation (non ad modum iterationis sed continuationis), as defended by Eymeric; "quia, iterari non debent [tormenta], nisi novis supervenitibus indiciis, continuari non prohibentur." But what was to be done when the accused, released from the rack, denied what he had just confessed? Some held with Eymeric that the accused should be set at liberty; others, however, like the author of the "Sacro Arsenale" held that the torture should be continued. because the accused had too seriously incriminated himself by his previous confession. When Clement V formulated his regulations for the employment of torture, he never imagined that eventually even witnesses would be put on the rack, although not their guilt, but that of the accused, was in question. From the popes silence it was concluded that a witness might be put upon the rack at the discretion of the inquisitor. Moreover, if the accused was convicted through witnesses, or had pleaded guilty, the torture might still he used to compel him to testify against his friends and fellow-culprits. It would be opposed to all Divine and human equity — so one reads in the "SacroArsenale, ovvero Pratica dell Officio della Santa Inquisizione" (Bologna, 1665) — to inflict torture unless the judge were personally persuaded of the guilt of the accused.

But one of the difficulties of the procedure is why torture was used as a means of learning the truth. On the one hand, the torture was continued until the accused confessed or intimated that he was willing to confess, On the other hand, it was not desired, as in fact it was not possible, to regard as freely made a confession wrung by torture.

It is at once apparent how little reliance may be placed upon the assertion so often repeated in the minutes of trials, "confessionem esse veram, non factam vi tormentorum" (the confession was true and free), even though one had not occasionally read in the preceding pages that, after being taken down from the rack (postquam depositus fuit de tormento), he freely confessed this or that. However, it is not of greater importance to say that torture is seldom mentioned in the records of inquisition trials — but once, for example in 636 condemnations between 1309 and 1323; this does not prove that torture was rarely applied. Since torture was originally inflicted outside the court room by lay officials, and since only the voluntary confession was valid before the judges, there was no occasion to mention in the records the fact of torture. On the other hand it, is historically true that the popes not only always held that torture must not imperil life or but also tried to abolish particularly grievous abuses, when such became known to them. Thus Clement V ordained that inquisitors should not apply the torture without the consent of the diocesan bishop. From the middle of the thirteenth century, they did not disavow the principle itself, and, as their restrictions to its use were not always heeded, its severity, though of tell exaggerated, was in many cases extreme.

The consuls of Carcassonne in 1286 complained to the pope, the King of France, and the vicars of the local bishop against the inquisitor Jean Garland, whom they charged with inflicting torture in an absolutely inhuman manner, and this charge was no isolated one. The case of Savonarola has never been altogether cleared up in this respect. The official report says he had to suffer three and a half tratti da fune (a sort of strappado). When Alexander VI showed discontent with the delays of the trial, the Florentine government excused itself by urging that Savonarola was a man of extraordinary sturdiness and endurance, and that he had been vigorously tortured on many days (assidua quaestione multis diebus, the papal prothonotary, Burchard, says seven times) but with little effect. It is to be noted that torture was most cruelly used, where the inquisitors were most exposed to the pressure of civil authority. Frederick II, though always boasting of his zeal for the purity of the Faith, abused both rack and Inquisition to put out of the way his personal enemies. The tragical ruin of the Templars is ascribed to the abuse of torture by Philip the Fair and his henchmen. At Paris, for instance, thirty-six, and at Sens twenty-five, Templars died as the result of torture. Blessed Joan of Are could not have been sent to the stake as a heretic and a recalcitrant, if her judges had not been tools of English policy. And the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition are largely due to the fact that in its administration civil purposes overshadowed the ecclesiastical. Every reader of the "Cautio criminalis" of the Jesuit Father Friedrich Spee knows to whose account chiefly must be set down the horrors of the witchcraft trials. Most of the punishments that were properly speaking inquisitional were not inhuman, either by their nature or by the manner of their infliction. Most frequently certain good works were ordered, e.g. the building of a church, the visitation of a church, a pilgrimage more or less distant, the offering of a candle or a chalice, participation in a crusade, and the like. Other works partook more of the character of real and to some extent degrading punishments, e.g. fines, whose proceeds were devoted to such public purposes as church-building, road-making, and the like; whipping with rods during religious service; the pillory; the wearing of coloured crosses, and so on.

The hardest penalties were imprisonment in its various degrees exclusion from the communion of the Church, and the usually consequent surrender to the civil power. "Cum ecclesia" ran the regular expression, "ultra non habeat quod faciat pro suis demeritis contra ipsum, idcirco, eundum reliquimus brachio et iudicio saeculari" — i.e. since the Church can no farther punish his misdeeds, she leaves him to the civil authority. Naturally enough, punishment as a legal sanction is always a hard and painful thing, whether decreed by civil of ecclesiastical justice. There is, however, always an essential distinction between civil and ecclesiastical punishment. While chastisement inflicted by secular authority aims chiefly at punishment violation of the law, the Church seeks primarily the correction of the delinquent; indeed his spiritual welfare frequently so much in view that the element of punishment is almost entirely lost sight of. Commands to hear Holy Mass on Sundays and holidays, to frequent religious services, to abstain from manual labour, to receive Communion at the chief festivals of the year, to forbear from soothsaying and usury, etc., can efficacious as helps toward the fulfillment of Christian duties. It being furthermore incumbent on the inquisitor to consider not merely the external sanction, but also the inner change of heart, his sentence lost the quasi-mechanical stiffness so often characteristic of civil condemnation. Moreover, the penalties incurred were on numberless occasions remitted, mitigated, or commuted. In the records of the Inquisition we very frequently read that because of old age, sickness, or poverty in the family, the in the family, the due punishment was materially reduced owing to the inquisitor sheer pity, or the petition of a good Catholic. Imprisonment for life was altered to a fine, and this to an alms; participation in a crusade was commuted into a pilgrimage, while a distant and costly pilgrimage became a visit to a neighboring shrine or church, and so on. If the inquisitors leniency were abused, he was authorized to revive in full the original punishment. On the whole, the Inquisition was humanely conducted. Thus we read that a son obtained his fathers release by merely asking for it, without putting forward any special reasons. Licence to leave risen for three weeks, three months, or an unlimited period-say until the recovery or decease of sick parents was not infrequent. Rome itself censured inquisitioners or deposed them because they were too harsh, but never because they mere too merciful.

Imprisonment was not always accounted punishment in the proper sense: it was rather looked on as an opportunity for repentance, a preventive against backsliding or the infection of others. It was known as immuration (from the Latin murus, a wall), or incarceration, and was inflicted for a definite time or for life. Immuration for life was the lot of those who had failed to profit by the aforesaid term of grace, or had perhaps recanted only from fear of death, or had once before abjured heresy. The murus strictus seu arctus, or carcer strictissimus, implied close and solitary confinement, occasionally aggravated by fasting or chains. In practice, however, these regulations were not always enforced literally. We read of immured persons receiving visits rather freely, playing games, or dining with their jailors. On the other hand, solitary confinement was at times deemed insufficient, and then the immured were put in irons or chained to the prison wall. Members of a religious order, when condemned for life, were immured in their own convent nor ever allowed to speak with any of their fraternity. The dungeon or cell was euphemistically called "In Pace" it was, indeed, the tomb of a man buried alive. It was looked upon as a remarkable favour when, in 1330, through the good offices of the Archbishop of Toulouse, the French king permitted a dignitary of a certain order to visit the "In Pace" twice a month and comfort his imprisoned brethren, against which favour the Dominicans lodged with Clement VI a fruitless protest. Though the prison cells were directed to be kept in such a way as to endanger neither the life nor the health of occupants, their true condition was sometimes deplorable, as we see from a document published by J. B. Vidal (Annales de St-Louis des Francais, 1905 P. 362):

In some cells the unfortunates were bound in stocks or chains, unable to move about, and forced to sleep on the ground.... There was little regard for cleanliness. In some cases there was no light or ventilation, and the food was meagre and very poor.

Occasionally the popes had to put an end through their legates to similarly atrocious conditions. After inspecting the Carcassonne and Albi prisons in 1306, the legates Pierre de la Chapelle and Béranger de Frédol dismissed the warden, removed the chains from the captives, and rescued some from their underground dungeons. The local bishop was expected to provide food from the confiscated property of the prisoner. For those doomed to close confinement, it was meagre enough, scarcely more than bread and water. It was, not long, however, before prisoners were allowed other victuals, wine and money also from outside, and this was soon generally tolerated. Officially it was not the Church that sentenced unrepenting heretics to death, more particularly to the stake. As legate of the Roman Church even Gregory IV never went further than the penal ordinances of Innocent III required, nor ever inflicted a punishment more severe than excommunication. Not until four years after the commencement of his pontificate did he admit the opinion, then prevalent among legists, that heresy should be punished with death, seeing that it was confessedly no less serious an offence than high treason. Nevertheless he continued to insist on the exclusive right of the Church to decide in authentic manner in matters of heresy; at the same time it was not her office to pronounce sentence of death. The Church, thenceforth, expelled from her bosom the impenitent heretic, whereupon the state took over the duty of his temporal punishment. Frederick II was of the same opinion; in his Constitution of 1224 he says that heretics convicted by an ecclesiastical court shall, on imperial authority, suffer death by fire (auctoritate nostra ignis iudicio concremandos), and similarly in 1233 "praesentis nostrae legis edicto damnatos mortem pati decernimus." In this way Gregory IX may be regarded as having had no share either directly or indirectly in the death of condemned heretics. Not so the succeeding popes. In the Bull "Ad exstirpanda" (1252) Innocent IV says:

When those adjudged guilty of heresy have been given up to the civil power by the bishop or his representative, or the Inquisition, the podestà or chief magistrate of the city shall take them at once, and shall, within five days at the most, execute the laws made against them.

Moreover, he directs that this Bull and the corresponding regulations of Frederick II be entered in every city among the municipal statutes under pain of excommunication, which was also visited on those who failed to execute both the papal and the imperial decrees. Nor could any doubt remain as to what civil regulations were meant, for the passages which ordered the burning of impenitent heretics were inserted in the papal decretals from the imperial constitutions "Commissis nobis" and "Inconsutibilem tunicam". The aforesaid Bull "Ad exstirpanda" remained thenceforth a fundamental document of the Inquisition, renewed or reinforced by several popes, Alexander IV (1254-61), Clement IV (1265-68), Nicholas IV (1288-02), Boniface VIII (1294-1303), and others. The civil authorities, therefore, were enjoined by the popes, under pain of excommunication to execute the legal sentences that condemned impenitent heretics to the stake. It is to he noted that excommunication itself was no trifle, for, if the person excommunicated did not free himself from excommunication within a year, he was held by the legislation of that period to be a heretic, and incurred all the penalties that affected heresy.

The Number of Victims.

How many victims were handed over to the civil power cannot be stated with even approximate accuracy. We have nevertheless some valuable information about a few of the Inquisition tribunals, and their statistics are not without interest. At Pamiers, from 1318 to 1324, out of twenty-four persons convicted but five were delivered to the civil power, and at Toulouse from 1308 to 1323, only forty-two out of nine hundred and thirty bear the ominous note "relictus culiae saeculari". Thus, at Pamiers one in thirteen, and at Toulouse one in forty-two seem to have been burnt for heresy although these places were hotbeds of heresy and therefore principal centres of the Inquisition. We may add, also, that this was the most active period of the institution. These data and others of the same nature bear out the assertion that the Inquisition marks a substantial advance in the contemporary administration of justice, and therefore in the general civilization of mankind. A more terrible fate awaited the heretic when judged by a secular court. In 1249 Count Raylmund VII of Toulouse caused eighty confessed heretics to be burned in his presence without permitting them to recant. It is impossible to imagine any such trials before the Inquisition courts. The large numbers of burnings detailed in various histories are completely unauthenticated, and are either the deliberate invention of pamphleteers, or are based on materials that pertain to the Spanish Inquisition of later times or the German witchcraft trials (Vacandard, op. cit., 237 sqq.).

Once the Roman Law touching the crimen laesae majestatis had been made to cover the case of heresy, it was only natural that the royal or imperial treasury should imitate the Roman fiscus, and lay claim to the property of persons condemned. was fortunate, though inconsistent and certainly not strict justice, that this penalty did not affect every condemned person, but only those sentenced to perpetual confinement or the stake. Even so, this circumstance added not a little to the penalty, especially as in this respect innocent people, the culprits wife and children, were the chief sufferers. Confiscation was also decreed against persons deceased, and there is a relatively high number of such judgments. Of the six hundred and thirty-six cases that came before the inquisitor Bernard Gui, eighty-eight pertained to dead people.

(e) The Final Verdict

The ultimate decision was usually pronounced with solemn ceremonial at the sermo generalis — or auto-da-fé (act of faith), as it was later called. One or two days prior to this sermo everyone concerned had the charges read to him again briefly, and in the vernacular; the evening before he was told where and when to appear to hear the verdict. The sermo, a short discourse or exhortation, began very early in the morning; then followed the swearing in of the secular officials, who were made to vow obedience to the inquisitor in all things pertaining to the suppression of heresy. Then regularly followed the so-called "decrees of mercy" (i.e. commutations, mitigations, and remission of previously imposed penalties), and finally due punishments were assigned to the guilty, after their offences had been again enumerated. This announcement began with the minor punishments, and went on to the most severe, i.e., perpetual imprisonment or death. Thereupon the guilty were turned over to the civil power, and with this act the sermo generalis closed, and the inquisitional proceedings were at an end.

(3) The chief scene of the Inquisitions activity was Central and Southern Europe. The Scandinavian countries were spared altogether. It appears in England only on the occasion of the trial of the Templars, nor was it known in Castile and Portugal until the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was introduced into the Netherlands with the Spanish domination, while in Northern France it was relatively little known. On the other hand, the Inquisition, whether because of the particularly perilous sectarianism there prevalent or of the greater severity of ecclesiastical and civil rulers, weighed heavily on Italy (especially Lombardy), on Southern France (in particular the country of Toulouse and on Languedoc) and finally on the Kingdom of Aragon and on Germany. Honorius IV (1285-87) introduced it into Sardinia, and in the fifteenth century it displayed excessive zeal in Flanders and Bohemia. The inquisitors were, as a rule, irreproachable, not merely in personal conduct, but in the administration of their office. Some, however, like Robert le Bougre, a Bulgarian (Catharist) convert to Christianity and subsequently a Dominican, seem to have yielded to a blind fanaticism and deliberately to have provoked executions en masse. On 29 May, 1239, at Montwimer in Champagne, Robert consigned to the flames at one time about a hundred and eighty persons, whose trial had begun and ended within one week. Later, when Rome found that the complaints against him were justified, he was first deposed and then incarcerated for life.

(4) How are we to explain the Inquisition in the light of its own period? For the true office of the historian is not to defend facts and conditions, but to study and understand them in their natural course and connection. It is indisputable that in the past scarcely any community or nation vouchsafed perfect toleration to those who set up a creed different from that of the generality. A kind of iron law would seem to dispose mankind to religious intolerance. Even long before the Roman State tried to check with violence the rapid encroachments of Christianity, Plate had declared it one of the supreme duties of the governmental authority in his ideal state to show no toleration towards the "godless" — that is, towards those who denied the state religion — even though they were content to live quietly and without proselytizing; their very example, he said would be dangerous. They were to be kept in custody; "in a place where one grew wise" (sophronisterion), as the place of incarceration was euphemistically called; they should be relegated thither for five years, and during this time listen to religious instruction every day. The more active and proselytizing opponents of the state religion were to be imprisoned for life in dreadful dungeons, and after death to be deprived of burial. It is thus evident what little justification there is for regarding intolerance as a product of the Middle Ages. Everywhere and always in the past men believed that nothing disturbed the common weal and public peace so much as religious dissensions and conflicts, and that, on the other hand, a uniform public faith was the surest guarantee for the States stability and prosperity. The more thoroughly religion had become part of the national life, and the stronger the general conviction of its inviolability and Divine origin, the more disposed would men be to consider every attack on it as an intolerable crime against the Deity and a highly criminal menace to the public peace. The first Christian emperors believed that one of the chief duties of an imperial ruler was to place his sword at the service of the Church and orthodoxy, especially as their titles of "Pontifex Maximus" and "Bishop of the Exterior" seemed to argue in them Divinely appointed agents of Heaven.

Nevertheless the principal teachers of the Church held back for centuries from accepting in these matters the practice of the civil rulers; they shrank particularly from such stern measures against heresy as punishment, both of which they deemed inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. But, in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Faith became alone dominant, and the welfare of the Commonwealth came to be closely bound up with the cause of religious unity. King Peter of Aragon, therefore, but voiced the universal conviction when he said: "The enemies of the Cross of Christ and violators of the Christian law are likewise our enemies and the enemies of our kingdom, and ought therefore to be dealt with as such." Emperor Frederick II emphasized this view more vigorously than any other prince, and enforced it in his Draconian enactments against heretics. The representative of the Church were also children of their own time, and in their conflict with heresy accepted the help that their age freely offered them, and indeed often forced upon them. Theologians and canonists, the highest and the saintliest, stood by the code of their day, and sought to explain and to justify it. The learned and holy Raymund of Pennafort, highly esteemed by Gregory IX, was content with the penalties that dated from Innocent III, viz. the ban of the empire, confiscation of property-, confinement in prison, etc. But before the end of the century, St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theol., II-II:11:3 and II-II:11:4>) already advocated capital punishment for heresy though it cannot be said that his arguments altogether compel conviction. The Angelic Doctor, however speaks only in a general way of punishment by death, and does not specify more nearly the manner of its infliction. This the jurists did in a positive way that was truly terrible. The celebrated Henry of Segusia (Susa), named Hostiensis after his episcopal See of Ostia (d. 1271), and the no less eminent Joannes Andreae (d. 1345), when interpreting the Decree "Ad abolendam" of Lucius III, take debita animadversio (due punishment) as synonymous with ignis crematio (death by fire), a meaning which certainly did not attach to the original expression of 1184. Theologians and jurists based their attitude to some extent on the similarity between heresy and high treason (crimen laesae maiestatis), a suggestion that they owed to the Law of Ancient Rome. They argued, moreover, that if the death penalty could be rightly inflicted on thieves and forgers, who rob us only of worldly goods, how much more righteously on those who cheat us out of supernatural goods — out of faith, the sacraments, the life of the soul. In the severe legislation of the Old Testament (Deut., xiii, 6-9; xvii, 1-6) they found another argument. And lest some should urge that those ordinances were abrogated by Christianity, the words of Christ were recalled: "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill" (Matt., v. 17); also His other saying (John, xv 6): "If any one abide not in me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" (in ignem mittent, et ardet).

It is well known that belief in the justice of punishing heresy with death was so common among the sixteenth century reformers — Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and their adherents — that we may say their toleration began where their power ended. The Reformed theologian, Hieronymus Zanchi, declared in a lecture delivered at the University of Heidlelberg:

We do not now ask if the authorities may pronounce sentence of death upon heretics; of that there can be no doubt, and all learned and right-minded men acknowledge it. The only question is whether the authorities are bound to perform this duty.

And Zanchi answers this second question in the affirmative, especially on the authority of "all pious and learned men who have written on the subject in our day" [Historisch-politische Blatter, CXL, (1907), p. 364]. It may be that in modern times men judge more leniency the views of others, but does this forthwith make their opinions objectively more correct than those of their predecessors? Is there no longer any inclination to persecution? As late as 1871 Professor Friedberg wrote in Holtzendorffs "Jahrbuch fur Gesetzebung": "If a new religious society were to be established today with such principles as those which, according to the Vatican Council, the Catholic Church declares a matter of faith, we would undoubtedly consider it a duty of the state to suppress, destroy, and uproot it by force" (Kölnische Volkszeitung, no. 782, 15 Sept., 1909). Do these sentiments indicate an ability to appraise justly the institutions and opinions of former centuries, not according to modern feelings, but to the standards of their age? In forming an estimate of the Inquisition, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between principles and historical fact on the one hand, and on the other those exaggerations or rhetorical descriptions which reveal bins and an obvious determination to injure Catholicism, rather than to encourage the spirit of tolerance and further its exercise. It is also essential to note that the Inquisition, in its establishment and procedure, pertained not to the sphere of belief, but to that of discipline. The dogmatic teaching of the Church is in no way affected by the question as to whether the Inquisition was justified in its scope, or wise in its methods, or extreme in its practice. The Church established by Christ, as a perfect society, is empowered to make laws and inflict penalties for their violation. Heresy not only violates her law but strikes at her very life, unity of belief; and from the beginning the heretic had incurred all the penalties of the ecclesiastical courts. When Christianity became the religion of the Empire, and still more when the peoples of Northern Europe became Christian nations, the close alliance of Church and State made unity of faith essential not only to the ecclesiastical organization, but also to civil society. Heresy, in consequence, was & crime which secular rulers were bound in duty to punish. It was regarded as worse than any other crime, even that of high treason; it was for society in those times what we call anarchy. Hence the severity with which heretics were treated by the secular power long before the Inquisition was established.

As regards the character of these punishments, it should be considered that they were the natural expression not only of the legislative power, but also of the popular hatred for heresy in an age that dealt both vigorously and roughly with criminals of every type. The heretic, in a word, was simply an outlaw whose offence, in the popular mind, deserved and sometimes received a punishment as summary as that which is often dealt out in our own day by an infuriated populace to the authors of justly detested crimes. That such intolerance was not peculiar to Catholicism, but was the natural accompaniment of deep religious conviction in those, also, who abandoned the Church, is evident from the measures taken by some of the Reformers against those who differed from them in matters of belief. As the learned Dr. Schaff declares in his "History of the Christian Church" (vol. V, New York, 1907, p. 524),

To the great humiliation of the Protestant churches, religious intolerance and even persecution unto death were continued long alter the Reformation. In Geneva the pernicious theory was put into practice by state and church, even to the use of torture and the admission of the testimony of children against their parents, and with the sanction of Calvin. Bullinger, in the second Helvetic Confession, announced the principle that heresy could be punished like murder or treason.

Moreover, the whole history of the Penal Laws against Catholics in England and Ireland, and the spirit of intolerance prevalent in many of the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be cited in proof thereof. It would obviously be absurd to make the Protestant religion as such responsible for these practices. But having set up the principle of private judgment, which, logically applied, made heresy impossible, the early Reformers proceeded to treat dissidents as the medieval heretics had been treated. To suggest that this was inconsistent is trivial in view of the deeper insight it affords into the meaning of a tolerance which is often only theoretical and the source of that intolerance which men rightly show towards error, and which they naturally though not rightly, transfer to the erring.

B. The Inquisition in Spain

(1) Historical Facts

Religious conditions similar to those in Southern France occasioned the establishment of the Inquisition in the neighboring Kingdom of Aragon. As early as 1226 King James I had forbidden the Catharists his kingdom, and in 1228 had outlawed both them and their friends. A little later, on the advice of his confessor, Raymond of Pennafort, he asked Gregory IX to establish the Inquisition in Aragon. By the Bull "Declinante jam mundi" of 26 May, 1232, Archbishop Esparrago and his suffragans were instructed to search, either personally or by enlisting the services of the Dominicans or other suitable agents, and condignly punish the heretics in their dioceses. At the Council of Lérida in 1237 the Inquisition was formally confided to the Dominicans and the Franciscans. At the Synod of Tarragona in 1242, Raymund of Pennafort defined the terms haereticus, receptor, fautor, defensor, etc., and outlined the penalties to be inflicted. Although the ordinances of Innocent IV, Urban IV, and Clement VI were also adopted and executed with strictness by the Dominican Order, no striking success resulted. The Inquisitor Fray Pence de Planes was poisoned, and Bernardo Travasser earned the crown of martyrdom at the hands of the heretics. Aragons best-known inquisitor is the Dominican Nicolas Eymeric (Quétif-Echard, "Scriptores Ord. Pr.", I, 709 sqq.). His "Directorium Inquisitionis" (written in Aragon 1376; printed at Rome 1587, Venice 1595 and 1607), based on forty-four years experience, is an original source and a document of the highest historical value.

The Spanish Inquisition, however, properly begins with the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic and Isabella. The Catholic faith was then endangered by pseudo converts from Judaism (Marranos) and Mohammedanism (Moriscos). On 1 November, 1478, Sixtus IV empowered the Catholic sovereigns to set up the Inquisition. The judges were to be at least forty years old, of unimpeachable reputation, distinguished for virtue and wisdom, masters of theology, or doctors or licentiates of canon law, and they must follow the usual ecclesiastical rules and regulations. On 17 September, 1480, Their Catholic Majesties appointed, at first for Seville, the two Dominicans Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martin as inquisitors, with two of the secular clergy assistants. Before long complaints of grievous abuses reached Rome, and were only too well founded. In a Brief of Sixtus IV of 29 January 1482, they were blamed for having, upon the alleged authority of papal Briefs, unjustly imprisoned many people, subjected them to cruel tortures, declared them false believers, and sequestrated the property of the executed. They were at first admonished to act only in conjunction with, the bishops, and finally were threatened with deposition, and would indeed have been deposed had not Their Majesties interceded for them. Fray Tomás Torquemada (b. at Valladolid In 1420, d. at Avila, 16 September, 1498) was the true organizer of the Spanish Inquisition. At the solicitation of their Spanish Majesties (Paramo, II, tit. ii, c, iii, n. 9) Sixtus IV bestowed on Torquemada the office of grand inquisitor, the institution of which indicates a decided advance in the development of the Spanish Inquisition. Innocent VIII approved the act of his predecessor, and under date of 11 February, 1486, and 6 February, 1487, Torquemada was given dignity of grand inquisitor for the kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, Valencia, etc. The institution speedily ramified from Seville to Cordova, Jaen, Villareal, and Toledo, About 1538 there were nineteen courts, to which three were afterwards added in Spanish America (Mexico, Lima, and Cartagena). Attempts at introducing it into Italy failed, and the efforts to establish it in the Netherlands entailed disastrous consequences for the mother country. In Spain, however, it remained operative into the nineteenth century. Originally called into being against secret Judaism and secret Islam, it served to repel Protestantism in the sixteenth century, but was unable to expel French Rationalism and immorality of the eighteenth. King Joseph Bonaparte abrogated it in 1808, but it was reintroduced by Ferdinand VII in 1814 and approved by Pius VII on certain conditions, among others the abolition of torture. It was definitely abolished by the Revolution of 1820.

(2) Organization

At the head of the Inquisition, known as the Holy Office, stood the grand inquisitor, nominated by the king and confirmed by the pope. By virtue of his papal credentials he enjoyed authority to delegate his powers to other suitable persons, and to receive appeals from all Spanish courts. He was aided by a High Council (Consejo Supremo) consisting of five members — the so-called Apostolic inquisitors, two secretaries, two relatores, one advocatus fiscalis — and several consulters and qualificators. The officials of the supreme tribunal were appointed by the grand inquisitor after consultation with the king. The former could also freely appoint, transfer, remove from office, visit, and inspect or call to account all inquisitors and officials of the lower courts. Philip III, on 16 December, 1618, gave the Dominicans the privilege of having one of their order permanently a member of the Consejo Supremo. All power was really concentrated in this supreme tribunal. It decided important or disputed questions, and heard appeals; without its approval no priest, knight, or noble could be imprisoned, and no auto-da-fé held; an annual report was made to it concerning the entire Inquisition, and once a month a financial report. Everyone was subject to it, not excepting priests, bishops, or even the sovereign. The Spanish Inquisition is distinguished from the medieval its monarchical constitution and and a greater consequent centralization, as also by the constant and legally provided-for influence of the crown on all official appointments and the progress of trials.

(3) Procedure

The procedure, on the other hand, was substantially the same as that already described. Here, too, a "term of grace" of thirty to forty days was invariably granted, and was often prolonged. Imprisonment resulted only when unanimity had been arrived at, or the offence had been proved. Examination of the accused could take place only in the presence of two disinterested priests, whose obligation it was to restrain any arbitrary act in their presence the protocol had to be read out twice to the accused. The defence lay always in the hands of a lawyer. The witnesses although unknown to the accused, were sworn, and very severe punishment, even death, awaited false witnesses, (cf. Brief of Leo X of 14 December, 1518). Torture was applied only too frequently and to cruelly, but certainly not more cruelly than under Charles V's system of judicial torture in Germany.

(4) Historical Analysis

The Spanish Inquisition deserves neither the exaggerated praise nor the equally exaggerated vilification often bestowed on it. The number of victims cannot be calculated with even approximate accuracy; the much maligned autos-da-fé were in reality but a religious ceremony (actus fidei); the San Benito has its counterpart in similar garbs elsewhere; the cruelty of St. Peter Arbues, to whom not a single sentence of death can be traced with certainty, belongs to the realms of fable. However, the predominant ecclesiastical nature of the institution can hardly be doubted. The Holy See sanctioned the institution, accorded to the grand inquisitor canonical installation and therewith judicial authority concerning matters of faith, while from the grand inquisitor jurisdiction passed down to the subsidiary tribunals under his control. Joseph de Maistre introduced the thesis that the Spanish Inquisition was mostly a civil tribunal; formerly, however, theologians never questioned its ecclesiastical nature. Only thus, indeed, can one explain how the Popes always admitted appeals from it to the Holy See, called to themselves entire trials and that at any stage of the proceedings, exempted whole classes of believers from its jurisdiction, intervened in the legislation, deposed grand inquisitors, and so on. (See TOMÁS DE TORQUEMADA.)

C. The Holy Office at Rome

The great apostasy of the sixteenth century, the filtration of heresy into Catholic lands, and the progress of heterodox teachings everywhere, prompted Paul III to establish the "Sacra Congregatio Romanae et universalis Inquisitionis seu sancti officii" by the Constitution "Licet ab initio" of 21 July, 1542. This inquisitional tribunal, composed of six cardinals, was to be at once the final court of appeal for trials concerning faith, and the court of first instance for cases reserved to the pope. The succeeding popes — especially Pius IV (by the Constitutions "Pastoralis Oficii " of 14 October, 1562, "Romanus Pontifex" of 7 April, 1563, "Cum nos per" of 1564, "Cum inter crimina" of 27 August, 1562) and Pius V (by a Decree of 1566, the Constitution "Inter multiplices" of 21 December, 1566, and "Cum felicis record." of 1566) — made further provision for the procedure and competency of this court. By his Constitution "Immensa aeterni" of 23 January, 1587, Sixtus V became the real organizer, or rather reorganizer of this congregation.

The Holy Office is first among the Roman congregations. Its personnel includes judges, officials, consulters, and qualificators. The real judges are cardinals nominated by the pope, whose original number of six was raised by Pius IV to eight and by Sixtus V to thirteen. Their actual number depends on the reigning pope (Benedict XIV, Const. "Sollicita et Provida", 1733). This congregation differs from the others, inasmuch as it has no cardinal-prefect: the pope always presides in person when momentous decisions are to be announced (coram Sanctissimo). The solemn plenary session on Thursdays is always preceded by a session of the cardinals on Wednesdays, at the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and a meeting of the consultors on Mondays at the palace of the Holy Office. The highest official is the commissarius sancti oficii, a Dominican of the Lombard province, to whom two coadjutors are given from the same order. He acts as the proper judge throughout the whole case until the plenary session exclusive, thus conducting it up to the verdict. The assessor sancti officii, always one of the secular clergy, presides at the plenary sessions. The promotor fiscalis is at once prosecutor and fiscal representative, while the advocatus reorum undertakes the defence of the accused. The duty of the consultors is to afford the cardinals expert advice. They may come from the secular clergy or the religious orders, but the General of the Dominicans, the magister sacri palatii, and a third member of the same order are always ex-officio consultors (consultores nati). The qualificators are appointed for life, but give their opinions only when called upon. The Holy Office has jurisdiction over all Christians and, according to Pius IV, even over cardinals. In practice, however, the latter are held exempt. For its authority, see the aforesaid Constitution of Sixtus V "Immensa aeterni" (see ROMAN CONGREGATIONS).

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External links

• The book Directorium Inquisitorum (1587 edition) in Latin
• Malleus Maleficarum (a 1928 edition) in English and Latin – Publisher J. Rodker
• Frequently Asked Questions About the Inquisition by James Hannam
• Jewish Virtual Library on the Spanish Inquisition