The Inquisition | Separating Fact from Fiction

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. (Outside the Church, there is no salvation.)

- St. Cyprian of Carthage, quoted in Unam sanctam by Pope Boniface VIII -

A small chapel in the German town of Erfurt was hardly a proper venue for world-shaping events. Nothing much had happened in this part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Augustinian monk who swept the chapel's floor thought mainly about his lunch. His straw broom pushed dust from the tombs built into the floor before the altar. The monk then lit candles and said a brief prayer. He heard the doors open and turned to see a group of young men walking single-file toward him. The new servants of God were ready to take their vows and be ordained in His Church. Moments later, the bish-op swept into the chapel resplendent in his best clerical garb. He stood before the new priests and led them through their oath to the Almighty. The monk, standing off to the side, was barely listening. He saw his new colleagues kneeling before the altar on the freshly-swept tombs, their feet caked with mud. He thought to himself, "All my work wasted."

Church Challenges

Religious strife has been a sad part of human history for millennia, and medieval Eu-rope was no exception. By the 13th century, the Western Church had broken with its Eastern Orthodox brethren over papal authority and fought barbaric Crusades in the Holy Land. It now confronted rising heresies and broad challenges to its authority in Europe. The greatest new threat was Catharism, a dualistic belief system that taught its followers to reject all matter as evil and to regard the Church as the devil's instrument to oppress mankind. Pope Innocent III had called a crusade against the Cathars and nearly wiped them out, but examples of moral depravity and corruption among the clergy still rankled those in the lower orders of society.

The papacy did not let challenges to its authority go unanswered, and Rome es-tablished the Episcopal Inquisition during the Cathar crisis to push back against the great heresy spreading in medieval France. Pope Lucius III had issued a bull in 1184 that created these religious courts to prosecute Cathars, but these had largely failed and forced Innocent III to wage war against them. Innocent's cousin, Pope Gregory IX, re-placed the episcopal courts with a new Papal Inquisition early in his reign that would direct the Church's anti-heresy campaigns from the Vatican. The Inquisition quickly es-tablished a reputation for fairness and honesty in dealing with nonbelievers, especially after Pope Innocent IV issued Ad extirpanda in 1252 that restricted inquisitors' use of physical force—meaning torture—against heretics. Under this decree, a heretic could be coerced into confessing only if the methods did not cause the loss of life or limb, was used only once, and only if the inquisitor was certain of the accused's guilt.

The early inquisitions were relatively benign compared to what came later, but reformers grew more vocal in the early 14th century as conflicts within the Church be-came more pronounced. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued a statement known as Unam sanctam and decreed that "it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff." This touched off a major conflict be-tween Rome and the King of France, Philip IV, that culminated in what historians call the "Avignon Papacy." French soldiers arrested Boniface and mistreated him so badly that he died in captivity. Philip then put his friend Raymond de Got on the papal throne in Avignon as Clement V. The seventy-year split in the Western Church caused many believers to choose sides and only demonstrated that Christendom was in serious trou-ble.

At the same time, the Catholic monarchs of Castile and Aragon in modern-day Spain were waging a long war to reclaim the Iberian Peninsula from the Islamic Em-pire. This Reconquista instilled a religious fervor in the people of Spain that was un-matched anywhere else in Europe. Spanish society, divided into numerous kingdoms and principalities, was one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse in the Chris-tian world. Iberia had the largest population of non-white Europeans whose ancestry was North African, as well as a significant number of Jews who had migrated there from the Near East. Gradually, Castile and Aragon drove the Islamic armies back to-ward the Strait of Gibraltar, their soldiers' hearts filled with the belief that they were reclaiming their lands for God and their Church.

Rise of the Inquisitors

It is a regrettable trend in history to take the worst examples of humanity and apply them to an entire group of people, and this is certainly true when it comes to the Inqui-sition. This is not meant to diminish the crimes against humanity that many inquisi-tors committed, but it is important to stress that modern research into this period of Church history reveals that much of the Inquisition's work actually saved lives. More on that later. With the Church's blessing on these new religious courts, some political lead-ers saw an opportunity to rid themselves of opponents by denouncing them as heretics. This evil practice either deceived or empowered zealous heretic-hunters, especially in France and the Holy Roman Empire.

In 1233, before Innocent IV had restricted the use of torture by the Inquisition, the Dominican friar Robert le Bougre arrived in southern France where Catharism was still present even after the crusade. From his base at Carcassonne near Toulouse, le Bougre paid informers and tortured innocents to find anyone who still followed this heresy. He traveled across the kingdom looking for Cathars and, whenever he found them, he usually took little time to see if the accused were actually spiritual deviants or just unlucky peasants who had offended a local lord. The records of this period are in-complete, but there is clear evidence that le Bougre burned at least two hundred people at the stake, many of whose guilt was not established by the papal courts. Le Bougre was eventually dismissed from his post and recalled to Rome by Pope Gregory IX, who was disgusted by his crude methods of extracting confessions by pain.

Even more terrifying was Konrad von Marburg, a German nobleman-turned-priest who joined the Inquisition after fighting in Innocent III's crusade against the Cathars. On his return to the Holy Roman Empire, he took a position in its Inquisition court at Mainz and began hunting heretics in central Germany. History records that Konrad believed even the flimsiest accusation of heresy and tended to believe that the accused were guilty until proven innocent. He whipped up mobs in the towns he visited and is said to have laughed as women begged him for mercy and men pleaded for their lives as flames licked at their bodies. His followers promised informers that their lives would be spared if they denounced their fellows as heretics, only to find themselves tied to the stake and burned when the courts carried out their sentences. Pope Gregory IX, who would later reprimand Robert le Bougre for his methods, actually praised Konrad von Marburg and gave him permission to exceed the Inquisition's restrictions on tor-ture. When Konrad was murdered while traveling on a deserted road by some German knights, the pope declared him to have been an upholder of the Christian faith. Howev-er, his actions turned many in the Holy Roman Empire against the Inquisition, and his reputation endured long enough to ensure that the courts' actions were far less vicious in Germany than elsewhere in Europe for the next two centuries.

Reexamining History

In 2000, Pope John Paul II opened Vatican City's archives to religious and secular his-torians so they could examine the Catholic Church's history with a fresh, dispassionate eye. Among the many revelations that came about through their work was a new inter-pretation of the Inquisition. Professor Thomas F. Madden of St. Louis University in Missouri summarized this revisionist approach to the period in a lengthy essay pub-lished in National Review. Among his conclusions was that much of the public's under-standing of the Inquisition was clouded by later events during the Protestant Refor-mation. Madden wrote:

The Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress peo-ple; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions…Heresy was a crime against the state [emphasis in original]…Rulers, whose authority was believed to come from God, had no patience for heretics. Neither did common people, who saw them as dangerous outsiders who would bring down divine wrath. [I]t was not so easy to discern whether the accused was really a heretic. For starters, one needed some basic theological training—something most medie-val lords sorely lacked. The result is that uncounted thousands across Europe were executed by secular authorities without fair trials or a competent as-sessment of the validity of the charge.

Now, this is only one historian's viewpoint when it comes to a dark chapter in Church history, and I take no official position on the matter—we here at 15-Minute His-tory leave it for you to decide. There is also a legal matter that complicates the popular view of the Inquisition. Professor Madden mentioned it in the passage quoted earlier: heresy was a capital offense punished by the state, not the Church. The papal bull that created the first Inquisition courts in 1184 included the statement, "Ecclesia non novit sanguinem," "The Church knows not blood." Thus, at least on paper, the Church did not execute heretics; it handed convicted dissenters over to the state for punishment up to and including execution. Now, this distinction hardly mattered to those burned at the stake, but it is important for students of history who are assigning blame for the many deaths that occurred in those years.

We must remember that the villains of history can often stain those around them with their deeds. Medieval European Christians embraced religious devotion entirely, not just on Sundays, and they feared the wrath of God should their community harbor any dissenters. This was due in part to unbiblical teachings by some corrupt priests and, more generally, a lack of access to the Scriptures themselves. Christ's teachings of charity and "letting him who is without sin cast the first stone" were unknown at a time when few could read and no one outside the clergy had access to the Bible. Once again, this in no way excuses the infamy of inquisitors, but it does perhaps explain why so many well-meaning Christians were willing to accept crimes committed in God's name.

The Spanish Inquisition

Monty Python jokes aside, most people today know of the Inquisition through stories of what happened in Spain in the late 15th century. In 1478, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella asked Pope Sixtus IV to establish an Inquisition court in their kingdom as their war against the Muslims reached its climax. Queen Isabella had spent her youth in the company of a fervent Dominican cleric named Tomás de Torquemada, whose words of warning against heretics then shaped her reign. The pope granted their request and created the Holy Office for the Propagation of the Faith in Madrid, and this large bu-reaucracy came to be known today as the Spanish Inquisition.

Ferdinand and Isabella named Torquemada to lead this office as High Inquisitor in 1482. The Protestant Reformation was still nearly a half-century away in Spain, and Torquemada believed that the greatest threats to Spanish piety were the conversos and moriscos, Jews and Muslims, respectively, who had converted to Christianity. Torque-mada suspected, correctly, that some in these communities had renounced their old faiths to save their lives, and he intended to use the Inquisition to root out these trai-tors to the Church. Antisemitism was rife in Spain with all the blood libels against the Jews common to history, and Islamophobia was natural given the ongoing war be-tween Christians and Muslims in the country. Torquemada spent his early years as High Inquisitor staffing his bureaucracy with priests who shared his suspicion of non-believers and dictating memoranda on how they would be treated. History records that his work was dispassionate; he did not express hatred toward these people but simply believed they ought to be examined and, if guilty of heresy, punished. The Inquisition had already created procedures for the auto-da-fé, or "act of faith," the trial and pun-ishment of heretics, and Torquemada refined them to turn the act into a celebration of religious faith. Or so he claimed.

The reality of the auto-da-fé was far more brutal, at least for some. It began with a Mass, then a grace period of up to forty days for heretics to confess their crimes and be forgiven. Those denounced by Torquemada's army of spies and informers who did not ask for mercy were then arrested, charged with heresy, and examined by the inquis-itors. Those who confessed or whose heresies were considered “minor"—which was a majority of cases according to surviving records—received light sentences that left few scars. Torquemada's men used brutal methods on the unrepentant to extract confes-sions, which were only deemed valid after the accused had endured intense physical pain—whether being whipped in public; having their bodies stretched on the rack; or, in the case of women, being given the "water cure," a form of waterboarding with the ac-cused lying on a bed of smoldering coals. Once all accused heretics had been examined and tortured, the court assembled in a town square to read out the sentences after an all-night prayer vigil. Those who had repented were paraded through the streets in sackcloth to show they had been forgiven, and they then fell at the inquisitors' feet in thanks at being spared. The guilty, who did not know their fate until this moment, were then taken from the crowd, tied to stakes in the center of town, and burned to death as their family and neighbors watched. Cries of mercy and pleas for relief went unan-swered, and accounts record that inquisitors looked on silently as their victims died. Torquemada himself attended several auto-da-fé during his career. He never laughed like a modern villain but simply sat stone-faced as his vision of justice was carried out.

The Spanish Holy Office for the Propagation of the Faith kept detailed records of the charges laid down in its many auto-da-fé, but the total number killed, maimed, or released is unknown. Historians estimate that between three- and ten thousand people, mostly Jewish conversos and Muslim moriscos perished in the Inquisition. Most of the moriscos who survived fled to North Africa or the Middle East, and Ferdinand and Isa-bella expelled the remaining conversos in the Alhambra Decree of 1491. The Inquisi-tion's work then slowed for a generation (during which time Tomás de Torquemada died peacefully in bed at the age of 77). It began again when reforming Protestants ar-rived from France and continued until its dissolution in 1834.

Standing Against Evil

In the early 15th century, years before Torquemada's grisly work began in Spain, the Holy Roman Empire put aside its distaste for the Inquisition and allowed it to prose-cute heretics once again. Its chief targets were reformers clamoring for changes in the-ology and practice. The Czech theologian Jan Hus spent his professional life insisting that the Church's corruption stemmed from the lack of access Christians had to the Bi-ble, and this crime led to his examination by the Inquisition and a sentence of death. On July 6, 1415, he stood before the court and was asked for his final words. Hus, whose name in English is translated as "goose," spoke what some believed to be a prophecy: "You are going to burn a goose, but in one hundred years you will have a swan which you can neither roast nor boil." According to some accounts, the Bishop of Constance who presided over the court replied, "Over my dead body."

Some of those who stood against corruption in the medieval Church believed in false gods. Some were political opponents of kings and princes. And some believed, as do most people of faith today, that God blesses the meek and the pure of heart rather than those who lust for power. These men and women stood against evil, and some paid with their lives. The villains who killed them let evil take root in their hearts even as they thought they were doing God's work. And yet in the end, the Truth prevailed. The return of the Bible into Europeans’ hands allowed them to learn God’s Word and reject its corruption by the Church. Perhaps the greatest enemy of evil is knowledge. One of the early examples of passing this knowledge to others serves as an example. Almost a hundred years after Jan Hus' death, a young monk lay prostrate before the altar in a small chapel in the German town of Erfurt. His heart was already full of doubt at some of the teachings his Church had given him, and he felt compelled to proclaim that salva-tion came by faith and not from any earthly works. His name was Martin Luther. His family coat of arms included the image of a swan. And he lay over the tomb of the Bishop of Constance.