Now, when did sorcery clearly involve heresy? It was not difficult to argue that it invariably did. Sorcery was invoking demons, trafficking with Satan, and to do this a man must surely entertain heretical ideas about Satan and demons. Certainly, if a man dealt in such trafficking, holding it to be not sinful, he was a manifest heretic.195 Again, to seek to acquire knowledge of the future from Satan, the future depending solely on the Almighty, involved heresy. Under the title, sorcery, there came to be included astronomy’s parent, astrology.196 Some men of unquestioned orthodoxy gave their sanction and support to it, notably Cardinal D’Ailly; and it was not apparently definitely forbidden during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in ecclesiastical formularies. But clearly, although there was no question of invoking demons in connection with astrology, on the other hand, the astrologer by maintaining that a man’s destiny was controlled by the conjunction of stars and planets at his birth was denying the freedom of the will, questioning the omnipotence of God, consequently being guilty of manifest blasphemy and heresy. Accordingly, the astrologer was always liable to prosecution by the Inquisition. The best security lay in the fact that belief in astrology was extremely widespread among all classes of society, among clergy as well as laity, of whatever degree of education. In the fourteenth century there was a marked increase in sorcery. This was probably the direct consequence of persecution on the grounds of heresy—such persecution being in a way the highest possible testimony to its genuineness. For the Inquisition never dealt with a reputed magician as a charlatan; it dealt with him as one really in league with Satan. Otherwise there would have been no heresy involved. The attitude of the Church towards sorcery—its attribution of heresy to the magician—actually put a premium upon sorcery. The sorcerer was the more in request because people were more than ever convinced that his claims were well founded, and he was able to make more out of his calling because it had become precarious. For these reasons the extreme zeal of Pope John XXII against all workers of magic failed in its object. In 1317 he satisfied himself, on grounds good or bad, that several persons in his household had been plotting to take his life. Under torture they stated that they had first had recourse to poison, but that that ordinary humdrum method having failed, they had next invoked the assistance of demons to accomplish their purpose. The Pope was roused to thorough and energetic action, and started a resolute campaign against the accursed race of magicians. Dissatisfied with the ambiguous terms of Alexander IV’s directions to the Inquisition in matters of sorcery, he gave it direct authority in such cases and urged it to earnest efforts.197 Ten years later, however, for some reason or other, he withdrew this jurisdiction from the Inquisition; and it is to be gathered that there ensued a period of comparative immunity for sorcery until 1374, when Gregory XI once more entrusted the task of prosecuting magicians to the Holy Office.
The two most remarkable men to fall into the hands of the Inquisition as sorcerers were Peter of Abano and the Maréchal Gilles de Rais.[198] The former, an astrologer, undoubtedly harboured speculations which were flagrantly heretical; but he escaped the stake by dying a natural death before his trial was concluded. The latter—the original of the Blue-beard of the fairy-tale—had been the constant and intimate companion of Jeanne d’Arc during her leadership of the French armies. Of such military distinction as to be made a 198 Marshal of France at the age of twenty-five, he was also a man of culture, of a restless curiosity and an intense love of things brilliant and beautiful, of rich colours and ornaments, of all that was costly, magnificent and ornate. But beneath all the gorgeous external trappings of this æsthete was something much more pernicious than mere vulgar ostentation. A depraved voluptuary, he found that the ordinary modes of satisfying his sensuality soon palled, and they were succeeded by the most horrible unnatural lusts and the slow torture leading to murder of his victims, in the watching of which this monster eventually came to find his chief delight. While he indulged himself in such enormities, de Rais’ other great interest in life was the practice of the necromantic art, by which he hoped eventually to discover the philosopher’s stone, which would place him in command of all the wealth of the world. Notwithstanding the character of his favourite pursuits, the Marshal was at the same time particularly devout, showing an even perfervid faith, and now and again resolving to make atonement for his sins by going on crusade, never doubting that by this means he would wipe out all the stain of his misdeeds and eventually attain to salvation. In spite of all this outward appearance of devotion, it is remarkable that de Rais succeeded in maintaining his abominable way so long without question. But secrecy and immunity could not last indefinitely. Stories came to be bruited about of strange and loathsome happenings within the castle of Tiffanges, of children being slain in order that with their blood the sensualist magician might write a book of necromantic art. Even then, owing to the Marshal’s high position, it was difficult to strike. But eventually the Bishop of Nantes took action, citing de Rais to appear before him on the charges of having gratified his lust on children, whom he had subsequently butchered, of having invoked a familiar spirit with atrocious rites, and of having committed other crimes also suggestive of heresy. The trial that ensued was abnormal in several respects, the most notable being its publicity, public opinion being deliberately called into play, the fathers and mothers of the children, who had been spirited away into the monster’s castle, being allowed to let loose their clamourings against the villain.199 Action was taken in a civil court contemporaneously with the ecclesiastical proceedings before bishop and inquisitors. In the ecclesiastical court he was found guilty on both counts—first, unnatural lust and sacrilege; second, heresy and the invocation of demons; but his death-sentence was pronounced in the civil court. The extraordinary man underwent the final penalty with a contrition, an assurance of salvation and an enthusiasm for God which must have been strangely edifying.200
(ii) Witchcraft
The great witchcraft craze did not seize upon Europe until the beginning of the fifteenth century. It is true that for hundreds of years before this crimes, which became associated with the name of witchcraft, had been known and punished, but until the twelfth century we do not find the precise well-defined conception of the witch as a woman who has entered into an unholy compact with Satan, is in possession of certain miraculous powers and in particular that of transporting herself through the air to the so-called Sabbath, or rather Sabbat, where she and her kind meet together to renew their allegiance to the Prince of Darkness. It is very likely that the idea of the omnipresence of the powerful and maleficent force of Satan took greater hold of western Europe than ever before in the twelfth century, that marvellous period of the earlier Renaissance, when men’s minds were quickened to a new realization of the splendour and beauty of things of the earth, when heresy took a firm root, and doubt and hesitation sometimes usurped the place of a faith which had been childlike and unquestioning, a period of clashing between intellectual aspiration and the inflexibility of dogma, such that the timid and the ignorant were assailed by a vivid consciousness of the dangers pressing around the Ark of the Lord upon every side, of the sinister might of the dark powers arrayed against the Redeemer. In such circumstances more insistent, more clearly defined became the conception of those evil beings going about in the world, who had sold themselves to the Devil and were assisting him in his fell purposes.201
At first the Church refused its sanction to the popular tales about witches, more especially to the tale of the Sabbat and the transportation of witches through the air, often over immense distances. The canonists, Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, dismiss this as a fiction: which to believe is pagan, an error in the faith—in short heresy. But popular credence triumphed over the canonists. The reports of the activities of witches became so numerous, so determined and so circumstantial that it was wellnigh impossible to disbelieve. It became simply a question of how to reconcile well-authenticated facts with the canonists. A way out of the dilemma was discovered in the fifteenth century, at a time when the craze had almost reached its height. The witches meant by the canonists must have been a different order of being from those referred to by a later generation when they spoke of witches. It was merely a matter of nomenclature after all. Those responsible not only for guarding the purity of the faith but also for protecting the faithful from the assaults of the Evil One as delivered by witches could no longer allow their freedom of action to be curtailed, the powers of the Devil actually aggrandized by the misinterpreted ruling that belief in witches was error. Accordingly, when a certain eminent lawyer named Ponzinibio dared to maintain the accuracy of the canonists and to assert that all belief in witchcraft and sorcery was a delusion, the master of the Sacred Palace, Bartholomew de Spina, wrote a vehement and momentous reply, in which he turned the vials of a righteous indignation against Ponzinibio and called upon the Inquisition to proceed against the lawyer as himself a fautor of heretics.202 The attitude of the Church had indeed made a complete reversal. What previously it had been heresy to assert it now became heresy to deny. The divine law was now discovered clearly to prove the existence of witches, and the Scriptures were reinforced by the civil code.203 There no longer remained any room for doubt or equivocation.
Before the end of the century there appeared Sprenger’s celebrated ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ the most authoritative work in existence on witchcraft from the standpoint of credulity.204 Sprenger was an inquisitor, so that in his compendium, as in other similar treatises, we have the conclusions regarding the nature and the practices of witches, as ascertained by the examination of supposedly authentic cases. We learn in the first place the fundamental fact which explains the existence of witches—the inherent inferiority of the female sex to the male. Women are discontented, impatient creatures, who have a natural proclivity to evil. Woman is at the best a necessary evil. St. Chrysostom is quoted with approval on the subject of marriage. ‘Quid est mulier nisi amicitiae inimica, ineffugabilis poena, necessarium malum, naturalis tentatio, desirabilis calamitas, domesticum periculum, delectabile detrimentum?...’205 Everything considered, it was not at all strange that women should be particularly prone to yielding to the corrupt wiles and solicitations of the Devil. Once bought by him, they received the sustenance for their infamous activities in the Sabbat, the great nocturnal assembly of the powers of darkness, held sometimes in the Brocken, sometimes in some unidentified spot east of Jordan, or indeed it might be in any spot chosen by Satan. To the trysting-place, however distant it might be, the witches flew through the air. This aërial transportation to the Sabbat was in the opinion of Sprenger and other first-rate authorities certainly no illusion, it was a reality—only, according to Sprenger, the witch travelled in an aërial body, a vaporous part of herself, which issued out of her mouth and by the existence of which she was enabled to be in two places at one and the same time.206 At the nocturnal assemblage there took place the offering of unqualified allegiance to the Devil, feasting, dancing and sexual intercourse, either with Satan himself or some of his demons.207 Foul details occur in plenty in all the fifteenth-century treatises on witchcraft concerning the sexual abominations practised by ‘incubi’ and ‘succubi’ at the Sabbat. From such horrid intercourse, we are informed by our authors, proceed giants and wizards, such as Merlin, but never an ordinary human being.208
Bartholomew de Spina gives us a variety of circumstantial stories about women who had taken part in the witches’ gathering. One or two may be taken as samples of a large class. A respected burgomaster studied in his youth at Parma. Returning to his lodgings one night late, he knocked in vain at the door. He therefore let himself in by the window and went upstairs, where he found the maid-servant lying prone on the floor, naked and so inert as to appear dead. When she at last came to herself, she acknowledged that she had been to the Sabbat. This case, comments Spina, proves that in the transportation to the Sabbat no corporal transference is involved. The body of the girl had lain all the time on the floor, only her aërial spirit had been absent.209 Again, a man one day finds his wife lying in an outhouse insensible, and on recovery she confesses to having been to the concourse. He is horrified, and, determined to rid himself of his atrocious spouse, gives information against her to the Inquisition, so that she may be burnt. The woman apparently escaped this fate by drowning herself.210 One suspects a somewhat simpler explanation than witchcraft of this tale of conjugal infelicity. Another similar account is of a citizen of Ferrara, whose wife was in the habit of attending the Sabbat. One night he, pretending to be asleep, saw his wife rise, anoint herself and fly out of the window. As soon as she was gone he got up, and apparently succeeded in tracking her to the wine-cellar of a noble of the town, where he found her together with a number of witches. Directly he was seen, they all disappeared. The unfortunate husband, however, could not get away and was there discovered by the servants of the house, who very naturally took him for a burglar. Happily he succeeded in giving satisfactory explanations to the owner of the house. At the earliest possible opportunity he gave information against his wife, whom he handed over to the punishment she had deserved.211 Here again we get the hint that the charge of witchcraft might be a useful weapon in the armoury of a husband, should he desire for one reason or another to separate from his wife—for good. Another tale is of a girl who saw her mother rise out of bed, anoint herself and fly out of the window. The girl did likewise, acquiring apparently the power of flight on the instant, and she found herself transported into her mother’s presence. Then, being frightened, she called upon the names of Jesus and the Virgin, and thereupon found herself back in her bed.212
The witches, who entered into their unholy compact with Satan at the Sabbat, were there invested with various tremendous and abominable powers. Unlike sorcerers and magicians, who occasionally used their black art to good purposes, witches could work nothing else but evil. They were particularly fond of interfering with procreation, where both men and women, because of the connection with original sin, were most vulnerable. They produced sterility in the one sex, impotence in the other.213 Indeed it could be taken practically for certain that these two evils were invariably due to witchcraft. Witches also produced abortion and interfered with the flow of the mother’s milk.214 They sometimes offered up infants at their birth to demons; were vampires and sustained themselves by sucking children’s blood.215 They were able to transform men and women into beasts, to create tempests and thunder-storms.216 Indeed they went about the world doing all manner of noxious damage, ranging in seriousness from the breaking of crucifixes to the destruction of human life. In their peregrinations they were much assisted by their being able to transform themselves into the likeness of animals, particularly of cats, so that it was very difficult to keep them out of any dwelling-house they cared to visit.217 Indeed so powerful and versatile were witches supposed to be, not only by vulgar report, but according to authoritative statement, that it may seem difficult to understand how it could be imagined that any human agency could ever get the better of them.
But something had to be done. The evil tended to grow so disastrously, in this helped as a matter of fact—as in the case of sorcery—by the Church’s decision that the magic arts were no mere delusion but reality, and that while the practiser of them was a heretic, to believe that he or she was no charlatan but genuinely in league with the Devil was sound doctrine. In this way were men and women encouraged, whenever ill-fortune befell them, to find a facile explanation for unmerited calamity in such an intrinsically innocent incident, for example, as that of a sinister-looking old woman with a hooked nose having peered in at their cottage window. The simple fact of being found wandering alone in fields or woods after nightfall constituted legitimate evidence before the Inquisition. Or again, if an old woman said to someone who had injured her, ‘You will repent of this,’ and some misfortune subsequently occurred to the latter, the old woman might easily on such trivial grounds be suspect.218
One of the most interesting and remarkable phenomena of the history of witchcraft is that of the self-confessed witch, the woman who deliberately and of her own accord gave herself out to be possessed of supernatural powers in spite of the terrible peril incurred by such an announcement. The explanation of this is partly economic—the law of supply and demand operating in the case of the occult arts as a marketable commodity, just as in any other—partly psychological. Particularly when there was such unimpeachable authority for the reality and potency of the black arts, there were always people quite anxious to avail themselves of the means of fore-knowledge of, or avenging an injury, or discomfiting a rival, and to pay handsomely for the privilege. The demand existing, there were not wanting those willing to satisfy it, to accept the risk in view of the generosity of the remuneration. Sometimes the reputed witch succeeded in persuading herself that she was one in very deed. Some curious coincidence, the desired object actually occurring after the utterance of spells and incantations, persuaded the superstitious mind, arguing ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc,’ that the spells and incantations held in them a miraculous power. The wretched woman would then with a vain pride or a trembling apprehensive awe perceive in herself a being supernatural.219 But clearly the greater proportion of witchcraft lore is founded upon confessions wrung by means of the rack from the supposed culprit when brought before a civil or inquisitorial tribunal.
We do not know definitely when the Inquisition was first employed against witchcraft; but certainly in 1374 it was determined by the papacy that the Holy Office was competent to try such cases.220 In 1437 Eugenius IV called upon inquisitors everywhere to exert themselves against the evil.221 And there is no question that throughout the fifteenth century the tribunal carried on a crusade against witchcraft with great assiduity. Although Sprenger was moved to confess that the extirpation of the pest seemed an impossibility, being inclined to lay the blame on the carelessness and inactivity of the secular authority,222 nevertheless the number of executions was terrible. We are told that in a single year the Bishop of Bamberg destroyed six hundred witches, the Bishop of Würzburg nine hundred.223 A thousand perished in the same space of time in the diocese of Como.224 The execution of witches, then, both in this century and the next, assumed great proportions, largely owing to the thoroughness of inquisitorial proceedings, though it must be added—despite Sprenger’s animadversions upon its slackness—that actually the civil authority was responsible for many. The Inquisition, therefore, must bear much of the blame for the spread of witchcraft, or rather—for it amounted to the same thing—for the witchcraft craze. Largely in its records were collected the great stores of indisputable evidence of the reality of that heresy which it had become one of the functions of the tribunal to eradicate. By reason of its constitution and its methods of procedure the Inquisition was always a very effective court; but it was especially so in the case of witches, because in dealing with them the inquisitor felt that he was engaged in a personal combat with Satan himself, and that he had to exert all his powers in order to withstand, still more to overcome, so formidable an adversary. Indeed it was very fortunate that he was able to comfort himself with the knowledge that he was impervious to the attacks of witchcraft. Nevertheless it was felt necessary to take special precautions.225
Torture was used thoroughly where witches were concerned, and no doubt the delirium thus occasioned, the victim being willing to put an end to her torments by saying what she knew her judge wanted her to say or imagined he would like to hear, was productive of many of the most marvellous witch stories to be found in inquisitorial archives. But the severity of the torture administered in these cases was due to the extraordinary obduracy frequently shown by the victims. Such obstinacy was taken as proof positive of Satanic assistance afforded to these servants of hell, and the inquisitor was therefore goaded to greater and greater cruelty, because he felt himself put upon his mettle. The silence of the accused thus became positive evidence of guilt, as damning as confession under the pains of rack or pulley—perhaps even more so.226 The gift of taciturnity, it was conjectured, might be due to the wearing of a charm somewhere on the person, so that as a preliminary to the application the alleged witch had to be divested of all her clothing for thorough investigation to be made.227 It was held that a witch was unable to shed tears under torment, whereas—as Sprenger urges sententiously—it is natural for women to weep. It was desirable therefore to adjure the accused to shed tears.228 If this solemn exhortation was successful and the victim did cry and lament under torture, she was not necessarily the better off; for this might well be a device to deceive, a wile of the Devil’s to defeat the ends of justice. The inquisitor, ever on the alert to discover such signs of Satanic intervention, was apt to disbelieve in the genuineness of the witch’s tears accordingly. Thus, whether it produced confession or only obduracy, lamentation or silence, torture was in any event practically certain to be successful. Indeed anyone defamed of witchcraft before the Inquisition became so inextricably enmeshed in the toils that escape from conviction was hardly possible save in the event of being able to prove that the accuser was actuated by mortal enmity.229 And even the most persistent silence must, one imagines, practically always in the end have been overborne. A sufficiently prolonged continuance of torture must have produced the desired result—answers to leading questions about the Sabbat, detailed descriptions culled from the imagination of demon orgies, confessions as to the invocation of evil spirits and malpractices carried on by their help, finally the incrimination of others. So the witchcraft legend grew in substance, in precision, in lurid picturesqueness. From the lips of the witches themselves came the authentic particulars of the Sabbat, the flittings through the air on broomsticks, the blasting of human lives by foul spells, the inculpation of ever-increasing numbers in the guilt and the heresy of witchcraft.
There is a most striking illustration of the astonishing efficacy of inquisitorial methods in effectively defeating their purpose, and actually producing the spread of the witchcraft craze, in the famous case of the Vaudois or witches of Arras in the years 1459-1460, when the arrest of a single alleged witch led to the inculpation of one after another, each new victim in her torments naming others, including many of the wealthiest and most important as well as the humblest citizens, so that at length a positive panic was created.230 Not a single member of the community in Arras could feel himself or herself secure. No one dared leave the city for fear that that innocent act might be seized upon as a confession of guilt, and no one cared to enter for fear of falling into the hands of the tribunal, thus busily engaged in investigating an outburst of heresy of such alarming proportions. To such a pass did things come that the material prosperity of Arras was seriously prejudiced, as people became afraid of having any dealings with the city. One dangerous source of economic disturbance was that all creditors demanded instant payment of their dues, fearing that their debtors might be among those arrested, seeing that conviction involved the confiscation of the victim’s property, and in such a case the creditor was held to have no claim on any part of it.
In producing such results as these the inquisitor was no doubt ever most sincere and disinterested, genuinely aghast at the magnitude of the evil he was charged to suppress, wholly blind to the fact that its magnitude was mainly of his own creation. And in the feeling that there could be no security so long as the witch remained alive, he only shared the popular view. It was simply the universal conviction that the appropriate punishment of witchcraft and the only sure remedy against it was death by fire. Nor was the inquisitor alone in bringing offenders to the stake. The civil courts and the ordinary episcopal courts were no more lenient than the Holy Office. Even in Protestant countries, where there was no Inquisition, the lot of the supposed witch in the sixteenth century was no more tolerable than in those countries where the Inquisition still continued to flourish. The belief in the reality of witchcraft had taken firm root everywhere, and Catholic and Protestant were alike in their literal interpretation of the terrible words of Scripture, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ which seemed to afford all-sufficient sanction for the inexorable judgments of all tribunals, whether clerical or lay. At the same time the part played by the Inquisition forms one of the most important chapters in the history of witchcraft, as it was the most efficient and energetic tribunal engaged in the prosecution of the heresy in its earlier days, inasmuch especially as it contributed so much to the spread of the belief by the convinced fanaticism of its members and those methods of obtaining evidence, which not only led to sure conviction and constant incriminations, but actually provided the raw material of supposed fact on which credulity was based. The voluminous records of the holy tribunal, the learned treatises of its members are the great repositories of the true and indisputable facts concerning the abominable heresies of sorcery and witchcraft.
PART II - THE INQUISITION
CHAPTER I - ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH TOWARDS HERESY PRIOR TO THE INSTITUTION OF THE INQUISITION
The literal and fundamental meaning of the word Heresy is choosing. The heretic is the man who selects certain doctrines, discards others, giving rein to individual preference in the realm of religious belief. Such an attitude is essentially incompatible with the conception that the truth has once and for all been delivered to the saints, that the faith is indivisible and unalterable, to be accepted in its entirety. It is easily understood that eclecticism should be regarded as a danger in the earliest days of a new religion by its adherents. The first proselytes are anxious to define those distinctive features which mark it off from other religions: for all religions have certain elements in common. It was thus in the early stages of Christianity, which shared certain characteristics with such beliefs as Mithraism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism. The idea of man’s need of a mediator with heaven was abroad in the Roman world before the Messiah was proclaimed to it. There thus existed a danger of confusion, that alien shoots of dogma might be grafted upon the pure and original stock of Christianity. The influence of such extraneous sources is apparent in the fourth gospel. Even in the very earliest days when the body of Christian belief consisted of little more than the disciples’ recollections of the sayings and actions of their Founder, when the simplest conception of pure and undefiled religion was being taught,231 even then the faithful were warned to beware of ‘false prophets,’ ‘false teachers’ who ‘privily shall bring in damnable heresies.’232 As the fabric of dogma began to be woven, the note became vehement. St. Paul denounces ‘false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ.’233 In another place he declares, ‘But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.’234 So far, however, even the idea of what constitutes heresy is vague, and the spirit of tolerance and of brotherliness is strong. The offender is not to be counted as an enemy, but admonished as a brother.235 The fact is that the flock is so small and the pagan world outside so powerful that internal dissensions cannot be permitted. But the new faith surviving, doctrine becomes more stereotyped, the feeling of later generations more confident. Polycarp finds the heretic to be antichrist, who belongs to the Devil and is the oldest son of Satan,236 and Tertullian in one passage recommends the employment of compulsion against the heretic.237
Such language is not common among the early Fathers. They are themselves members of a society liable to persecution, and they do not preach coercion. Lactantius urges that the only weapon for Christians to use is their reason; they must defend their faith not by violence, but persuasion.238 The Church in those days had not the opportunity to use force, even if it had wished to: and this fact must be borne in mind in connection with Tertullian’s enunciation of the principle of tolerance, when he declares that the selection of his mode of worship is a man’s natural right, the exercise of which cannot be either harmful or profitable to his neighbour, and that it is not the part of a religion to compel men to embrace it.239 In the (only apparent) contradiction between this ruling and the counsel given regarding the treatment of heretics, Tertullian laid down a principle of momentous consequence for the future, namely, that while force should not be applied to the unbeliever, its use is legitimate in the case of the man who has once accepted the faith and erred in it.
With the accession of Constantine, there dawned a new era for the Christian Church. Till then the Roman state had been neutral, when not actively hostile; from this time onwards, with one brief interval, it was an active supporter. The Church became possessed of all the enormous power of the imperial authority. The civil order is definitely Christian, and one of the prime duties of the Emperor, lord of the world, is the protection of the Church. Constantine speedily showed himself anxious to take a leading part in ecclesiastical matters. He had recourse to torture, confiscation of property, exile and possibly the death penalty also in harrying the Donatists.240
Donatism was a small thing in comparison with Arianism, which shook the Christian Church to its foundations. When the fathers of Nicaea decided the intricate metaphysical question of ‘consubstantial,’ the Emperor proclaimed exile for all who did not accept the Council’s decision. Against this determination to root out their enemies, to establish one interpretation of truth by force, the Fathers made no protest, but accepted the intervention of the secular authority on their behalf. There was no thought of the possible consequence of such a pact in the future.241 The triumph of the orthodox was short-lived. The Arians were victorious later on and in their turn persecuted the Trinitarians. The Christians, said Julian the Apostate, treated each other like wild beasts. The punishments inflicted by one party upon the other included imprisonment, flogging, torture, death. To such a pass had doctrinal differences already brought the adherents of a religion which proclaimed peace and goodwill among men. The tradition of persecution had been thoroughly established. The laws of Theodosius II and Valentinian II enumerate as many as thirty-two different heresies, all punishable, the penalties being such as deprivation of civil rights, exile, corporal punishment and death. But the heresies are carefully differentiated, the severest penalties being reserved for Manichæism, which had been punished by the Roman state in its pagan, polytheistic and tolerant days, because of its anti-social tendencies.242 But now orthodox emperors persecuted Arians, Arian emperors persecuted followers of Athanasius, simply because they had taken sides in a theological controversy.
What view did the Church take of the activities of the lay power? Was it actively approving or disapproving, or passively acquiescent? We find some of the Fathers still preaching the old doctrines of tolerance. Athanasius, himself at the time persecuted, declared that persecution was an invention of the Devil. To Chrysostom heretics are as persons diseased, nearly blind, assuredly to be led, not forced. He comments on the parable of the tares, and urges the necessity of being very careful, lest the godly be destroyed together with heretics.243 Jerome remembers that the Church was founded upon persecutions and martyrdoms and on the whole seems to inculcate lenience in treatment of heretics, though a remark to the effect that Arius, at first only a single spark, not being immediately extinguished, set the whole world on fire, and that corrupted flesh must be cut off, points to a different opinion.244
The most significant of the later Fathers is St. Augustine. In his case there is a notable change of front with regard to the treatment of heretics. By temperament he was an advocate of toleration, and at first, like Chrysostom, he appeals to the parable of the tares in justification of tolerance. Heretics should be allowed the opportunity to correct themselves and to repent. They are to be regarded as lost sheep. He is afraid that persecution might lead to those who were in reality heretics becoming hypocritical Catholics.245 But later on he altered his opinions. He had found that the weapons of persuasion and eloquence were not strong enough to break down the obduracy of his enemies the Donatists. He had been too optimistic. The methods of force employed by the secular power were after all salutary and necessary. ‘He therefore, who refuses to obey the imperial laws, when made against the truth of God, acquires a great reward; he who refuses to obey, when they are made for support of the divine truth, exposes himself to most grievous punishment.’246 He rejoices, therefore, in a Christianized state. The death penalty he indeed strongly reprobates as contrary to Christian charity, but he approves both banishment and confiscation of property.247 These later opinions of St. Augustine were largely accepted after him.
An important episode in the history of the Church’s attitude to heresy is the execution of the Spanish heretic, Priscillian, by the Emperor Maximus. Priscillian’s teachings, akin to Manichæism, were denounced by several bishops, and it was upon their complaint that the Spaniard was brought before the imperial tyrant. The action of the bishops, who had thus involved themselves in the guilt of blood, wittingly or unwittingly, was severely condemned by St. Ambrose and still more by Martin of Tours, who refused to have any communion with them. This happened in 385.248 In 447 it seemed that heresy was reviving in Spain, and Pope Leo I expressly commended the act of Maximus. He feared lest, if such damnable error was not crushed, there should be an end to all human and divine law; and if he did not ask for the death sentence, he was quite willing that the Church should acquiesce in the state’s severity and reap the advantages resulting from it.249 Thus to welcome the results of the shedding of blood in cases of heresy, while refusing to accept the responsibility for it, constituted a most dangerous attitude.
For centuries after the days of Leo I heresy almost ceased to be a problem for the Church at all. Western Christendom entered into the gloom of the Dark Ages, its history the arid record of barbarian invasions and the rivalries of Childerichs and Chilperichs. The human intelligence was dormant: consequently heresy ceased to be a force. When there is no mental activity, no education, no discussion, there may be faith, there can never be heresy. When the darkness lifted a little, heresy once more became a problem. In 1022 thirteen Cathari were burnt by order of, and in the presence of, King Robert II of France. The punishment of heresy by fire was an entire innovation. There was no existing law to sanction it. The stake had been used by Roman emperors to punish parricides, slaves who attempted their masters’ lives, and incendiaries, and it still existed as a punishment for sorcerers and witches. The stake may have been used on this occasion because it was an impressive and theatrical death and, a choice being demanded between abjuration and death, it was considered the latter should be specially terrifying.250 Another execution of Cathari, this time by hanging, took place in 1051 at Goslar in Saxony in the presence of the Emperor Henry III. As in France, so in Germany, the law knew neither the offence nor the punishment. The Emperor was acting simply in the public defence.251
It is important to note the part played in the treatment of heretics at this period by the populace. In both the cases just cited the secular prince had in his action the full approval of the people. It is particularly noticed by the chronicles of the first incident that the deed was ‘regis jussu et universae plebis consensu.’252 And Henry strengthened his position in the absence of any written law by securing the agreement of his subjects.253 Nothing could be better attested than the crowd’s hatred of the heretic in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as far as northern Europe was concerned.254 In the south it was different. There are several instances of the feeling in the north in the late decades of the eleventh and early decades of the twelfth century. For example, in 1076 at Cambrai a Catharan who had been condemned by the bishop as a heretic (no sentence pronounced) was seized upon by the bishop’s officers and the mob, who placed him in some sort of cabin, which they burned with the prisoner inside it. It is said that the recantation of Roscellinus was due to the threat of death at the hands of the populace.255 In 1114 certain heretics having been placed provisionally in prison by the Bishop of Strassburg were in the bishop’s absence forcibly seized upon by the crowd, who, the chronicler states, feared clerical lenience. They were led out of the town and there burnt alive.256 A similar event happened in Cologne in 1143; whilst two years later at Liège the clergy only just succeeded in rescuing the crowd’s victims from its clutches. Lawless violence against heretics continued to evince itself in France into the following century, there being instances of it in Troyes, Nevers, Besançon, Paris, even at a time when the secular power, under Philip Augustus, was active in bringing heretics to the stake.
What was the attitude of the clergy in this period, during which it seems evident that in northern Europe secular princes and public opinion were united in thinking heresy deserving of death, even by burning? There is the evidence of the mob fearing clerical lenience in one case cited, of the clergy actually intervening against the crowd in another. When the heretics were burnt at Cambrai in 1076 Gregory VII protested and ordered the excommunication of the inhabitants.257 And there is a very notable protest against the use of force by Wazon, Bishop of Liège (1042-8), who in answer to a query of the Bishop of Châlons as to whether he should yield up heretics to the secular arm or not, referred to the parable of the tares in support of lenience.258 His successor, Theoduin, on the other hand, is found counselling Henry I of France to mete out punishment to the followers of Berengar of Tours,259 and about the same time we find the Archbishop of Milan giving some supposed Manichæans the choice between abjuration and the stake.260
The fact that most clearly emerges from the consideration of rather conflicting evidence in this period is the absence of any law regarding heretics. The mob, secular princes and clergy are all acting irregularly, taking measures in self-defence in the absence of written rulings. Generally speaking, it would appear that there is a prevailing idea that heresy merits the extreme penalty. At the same time some attempt was made at various ecclesiastical councils to standardize procedure against heresy.
A Council at Rheims in 1049 spoke only of excommunication as a punishment; one at Toulouse in 1119 did the same, but also called upon the secular arm to render aid.261 The middle of the twelfth century saw a great revival of both Roman and Canon law and the publication of the Decree of Gratian. The Decree did not put all uncertainty at an end. It certainly laid down a clear ruling regarding the confiscation of property. The heretic, being outside both human and divine law, could not hold property. But regarding the death penalty there could be no plain direction, because on this subject Gratian’s authorities were contradictory and remained so despite his efforts to reconcile them.262 Further efforts at definition were made by ecclesiastical councils during the century. One sitting at Rheims in 1157 demanded banishment and branding for those who simply professed Catharism, for proselytizers perpetual imprisonment; but it seems to hint at the death penalty in the veiled phrase: ‘carcere perpetuo, nisi gravius aliquid fieri debet visum, recludentur.’263 Another Council at Tours in 1163, presided over by Alexander III, reiterated the demand for incarceration and also ordered the confiscation of goods.264 The second Council of the Lateran of 1179, lamenting the marked spread of heresy, commended the use of force by the secular arm and proclaimed a two years’ indulgence to all who should take up arms against heretics.265
The first secular law in the Middle Ages dealing with heresy is English. In 1166 two Cathari were brought before Henry II at Oxford, whipped and branded with a red key and banished.266 Shortly afterwards in the same year appeared the clause in the Assize of Clarendon, forbidding the sheltering of heretics on the pain of having one’s house destroyed.267 Other severe secular legislation soon appeared in other countries. In 1194 the Emperor Henry VI ordered the confiscation of the property, and the destruction of the houses, of heretics and inforced fines on communities and individuals who neglected to assist, when they had the opportunity, in the arrest of heretics.268 The same year Alfonso II of Aragon, aiming at expelling all Manichæans and Waldenses from his dominions, issued an edict declaring all heretics public enemies and banishing them.269 The ineffectiveness of this edict is demonstrated by the appearance of a severer one three years later issued by Alfonso’s successor, Pedro II, famous as the victor over the Moors at Las Navas de Tolosa, equally notorious for his warlike prowess, his religious zeal, his prodigality and licentiousness. Once again banishment is decreed, but it is added that if any heretics remain in defiance of the edict after a specified date they shall perish at the stake and their effects be confiscated.270
Whatever may have been the case earlier, there seems good evidence of the zeal of the clergy against heretics in the latter part of the twelfth century, which saw so much more precision in the declarations of ecclesiastical councils and secular laws on the subject. In 1167 we find the Abbot of Vézelai, when several heretics were before him, appealing to the people to give sentence, and accepting their demand for a death of torture. Some years later at Rheims we find the Archbishop and clergy in agreement with the nobles that two Catharan women should be burnt.271 Hugh, Bishop of Auxerre (1183-1206), is a busy prosecutor of heretics, causing many to be burnt or exiled. More notable than such isolated instances of clerical activity is the co-operation between Pope and Emperor which led to the important bull entitled Ad abolendam.272 In 1184, Lucius III and Frederick Barbarossa met at Verona, and as the result of their conference this bull was promulgated, which (among other provisions) fixed rules for the prosecution of suspected heretics, the visitation of infected areas and the assistance of all civil authorities. The Emperor for his part placed heretics under the ban of the empire.273 The decree of Henry VI, already referred to, was plainly based on this action of his predecessor’s.
Towards the end of the twelfth century, then, we have clear evidence of secular and ecclesiastical authorities working hand in hand for the suppression of heresy. To the former, heresy seemed equivalent to rebellion; to the latter, equivalent to murder, being the murder of the soul. When Pedro II issued his harsh edict against the Cathari of Aragon, he claimed that he was actuated by zeal for the public welfare and a desire to obey the canons of the Church.274 There was no order in the canons that heretics should be burnt to death; but otherwise, Pedro’s appeal to Canon law was justified: and besides the canons, there were the various edicts of ecclesiastical councils during the century, all of them calling upon the secular authority to use its utmost efforts towards the eradication of heresy.
It has been urged that the attitude adopted by the Church was a most unwilling attitude, forced upon it by influences too powerful to resist, that the main motive power of persecution came not from the Church, but from the lay authority and from public opinion. The theory is advanced that during the period, roughly from 1000 to 1150, when the position of the heretic was a matter of legal uncertainty, the clergy opposed the violence evinced against heretics, and in eventually yielding they submitted to the strength of a custom which constituted a sort of jus non scriptum.275 But there is not much force in this plea. To acquiesce in a jus non scriptum argues either indifference or impotence: and the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was neither indifferent nor impotent. Nor is the opposition of the clergy to mob violence an argument to the point. A dislike for mob law and lynching does not necessarily betoken disapproval of capital punishment.276 It is true—and this is very important—that spontaneously, without any direct incitement from the clergy, the people regarded the heretic with intense abhorrence. We ought probably to add that in the absence of written law on the subject there was a rather vague idea, shared by the mob and their rulers, that not only death, but a particularly terrible kind of death, was an appropriate punishment for the heretic—this idea being perhaps derived from the fact that Roman law had at different times meted out this doom for certain kinds of heretics, particularly Manichæans, and other offenders, such as sorcerers and witches. It is true also that the heretics upon whom the mob turned were generally Manichæan. Yet no one who has any knowledge of the position of the mediæval Church can honestly maintain on these grounds that the Church had no responsibility for the rigour displayed towards the heretic. The heretic was regarded as an offender against society, because it was a Christian society. Heresy, being error in the faith, was investigated and recognized by the Church. The clergy, not the mob, discovered the heresy and the heretic; for such discovery could not be made without theological knowledge, of which the mob were ignorant. And such knowledge as they possessed, were it reasoned understanding or merely half-assimilated fragments of doctrine, was derived solely from clerical instruction. It was difficult for any sort of knowledge to come from any other source. Heresy was regarded as dangerous to the community, because, to begin with, the Church had found it dangerous to itself. The intellectual and spiritual atmosphere with which Christendom was permeated was of the Church’s making. The attempt, therefore, to absolve the Church from responsibility for the measures taken against heresy in these centuries—by whomsoever they were taken—involves a wholly erroneous, indeed an absurd, under-estimate of the authority of the Church.
In 1198 there came to the papal throne perhaps the greatest of the whole pontifical line, Lothario Conti, Innocent III. High in resolve to strengthen Church and Papacy, he at once gave his attention to the problem of heresy. But though zealous, in some respects he showed a commendable moderation. He was anxious that the innocent should not be confounded with the guilty in the impetuosity of the perfervid clerk or the impatience of the mob; and for the first ten years of his pontificate he made trial of a pacific programme.277 But in one part of Christendom the problem of heresy had by this time become acute. In the lands of the Count of Toulouse, Catharism was as rampant as were clerical abuses. The pleasure-loving, prosperous inhabitants of Provence, of Narbonne, of Albi felt the authority of the Church to be an obnoxious incubus upon their worldliness, their careless independence. The clergy were hated and despised. The troubadour made pleasant ridicule of the sacraments and every doctrine of the Church, however sacred. The death-bed repentance scheme of the Catharan system, its denial of a purgatory and a hell, were popular. Still more so was the pretext afforded by its anti-sacerdotal precepts for despoiling the Church.278 So the nobles and the rich bourgeoisie and merchants received heretics into their houses, clothed them and fed them, while they were exempted from taxes. So great was the hold of heresy in his lands, that Count Raymond V of Toulouse declared himself to be wholly unable to resist it.279 His successor, Raymond VI, had no wish to resist it, being of the same stuff as his people and seeing no call to disturb them at the bidding of priests. Thus when a Council at Montpellier in 1195 anathematized all princes failing to enforce the Church’s decrees against heretics, he paid no heed.
A couple of months after his accession Innocent III sent two commissioners into Languedoc, one of them being subsequently entrusted with legatine powers, to tackle a situation so serious that the whole of that country seemed on the point of slipping away from its allegiance to the Catholic faith and communion. They were instructed that obdurate heretics were to be banished, their property confiscated; and the secular authority was to see to it that their measures were carried out under pain of interdict. The efforts of these two commissioners were entirely fruitless. In 1204 their successors were entrusted with increased authority, which gave them a complete dictatorship over the ecclesiastical dignitaries of Languedoc, who were bitterly reviled for their incapacity. Yet neither these measures nor lavish bribes to secular rulers proved efficacious, and even the iron resolution of the commissioners, Pierre de Castelnau and Arnaud of Citeaux, was breaking down beneath the weight of persistent failure, when a certain Spaniard, Diego de Arzevedo, Bishop of Osma, suggested to the legates the scheme of an evangelistic enterprise. This was adopted, and bare-footed missionaries were sent forth to re-convert the erring by simple preaching and exhortation. Among the preachers was St. Dominic himself. This laudable scheme also failed. There is a legend that Dominic, stung by his ill-success, predicted what the upshot of such deplorable obduracy must eventually be. There was a saying in Spain, he quoted, that a beating may work where a blessing won’t. The towers of the cities of the fair land would have to be laid low, its people reduced to servitude.280 The actual signal for a complete reversal of policy was the murder of Pierre de Castelnau in circumstances which recall the murder of Becket. The legate had exasperated the Count of Toulouse; one of the latter’s knights slew the priest. Innocent called for vengeance upon the blood-guilty Count; and the Albigensian Crusade, which Innocent had ere this been preaching in vain to Philip Augustus of France, was the immediate consequence. The first crusading army, an international force, assembled at Lyons in June 1209.281 The ensuing wars are memorable for the men who took part in them—Pedro of Aragon, the zealous Catholic, now intervening on behalf of Count Raymond and perishing on the field of Muret, Simon de Montfort, the ‘athlete of Christ’! Never was there Christian warrior purer in his motives than Simon, more whole-hearted in his enthusiasm, or more utterly inhuman in his fanaticism. These wars are also memorable for their political issues and consequences. From the outset purely political interests were intermixed with the religious. The great nobles who led the forces of the Cross united with their pious zeal an at least equally genuine and powerful hatred and jealousy of the rich and bountiful southern land which harboured a culture so different from their own, more Saracen than European. The wars were wars of the north against the south, of one civilization against another. The astute and calculating Philip Augustus seized with avidity the opportunity of bringing under his direct control a province of France, which had been practically an independent kingdom; and the crusade is, therefore, of first-rate importance as a big contribution to the unification of the French kingdom.
If to many who took part in them the original purpose of these religious wars was altogether subsidiary, that purpose was none the less most horribly accomplished. The peculiar civilization of Languedoc was blotted out, its beauty and fragrance being utterly extinguished by the onslaught of the crusaders. With the civilization went the heresy that it had harboured. Catharism indeed continued to exist in the devastated region, but all its vital power of expansion had been destroyed when the conditions that fostered it vanished. The Albigensian wars were the most successful attempt to extirpate heresy known in history. They were successful because they were utterly ruthless and included wholesale massacres. When the town of Béziers fell, it is said that twenty thousand of its inhabitants were slaughtered. There were good Catholics as well as Cathari among the populace of the place; but the story goes that when Arnaud of Citeaux was asked whether the Catholics were to be spared, in his anxiety lest a single heretic should escape by pretending orthodoxy, he replied, ‘Kill them all, for God knows His own.’282
When the crusaders appeared in Languedoc, toleration vanished out of western Christendom. There was no asylum left where the heretic could feel assured of safety from the persecutor. The power of the Church against the disobedient had been mightily asserted. The ruler who had dared to disregard her order to purify his land of its contaminators had been brought low. From every country the papacy had been able to bring together doughty warriors to uphold the unity of the faith by spilling the blood of the perverse wanderers from the fold. The policy of force had been triumphantly vindicated by the amplitude of its success.
CHAPTER II - THE BEGINNINGS OF THE INQUISITION
Originally jurisdiction over heresy belonged to the ordinary ecclesiastical courts, heresy being classed with such other offences as adultery and breach of contract, which came under ecclesiastical purview.283 The special tribunal of the Inquisition came into being because these courts proved defective for the trial of heresy. In the first place, the new offence became so frequent that the ordinary courts were unable to support the large additional burden without impairing their efficiency in the performance of their original duties.
How, then, did it happen that whereas heresy had become a formidable danger in the twelfth century, the institution of the special tribunal did not take place until the thirteenth? The suggestion appears plausible that there must have been some other cause besides the mere spread of heresy to account for the birth of the Inquisition at that date.284 The answer is that it took time for heresy to be recognized as sufficiently serious to warrant the creation of an entirely new organization, and before the magnitude of the task of repressing religious error was fully apprehended.285 In the second place, the papacy during this period was much preoccupied with more pressing concerns, particularly the investiture question, which involved the supreme issue as to the pre-eminence of secular or spiritual authority in Christendom.
When once attention had been thoroughly arrested by the problem, the deficiencies of the existing spiritual courts for the new work became apparent. Overwork was by no means the only drawback. The character of the judges was at fault. Even after the Hildebrandine reforms, bishops still remained feudal barons with many inevitable secular distractions; archdeacons and other lesser officials were often venal and incapable.286 In any case the very nature of diocesan authority militated against success. It was too purely local to be effective against offenders who could easily migrate from one part of the country to another. Even more serious was the lack on the part of the existing officials of special training and knowledge, especially in theology, which were found necessary, since heretics often evinced diabolical familiarity with the text of Scripture.287 Lacking such special equipment and being badly pressed for time on a diocesan visitation, the bishop was apt to come to a hurried and arbitrary judgment, frequently falling back upon the device of the ordeal when the defendant pleaded ‘not guilty.’ Both the Councils of Rheims of 1157 and of Verona of 1184 ordered that suspects of heresy should be submitted to this test. But the method was never felt to be satisfactory, was strongly condemned by Ivo of Chartres and Alexander III, and so emphatically denounced by the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 that it disappeared from the practice of lay as well as spiritual courts.
Another disadvantage under which the episcopal courts laboured in dealing with heresy was their procedure, that of Roman Law. There were two systems—those of denuntiatio and accusatio. In the former some person in authority—in ecclesiastical cases the archdeacon—brought forward a charge founded upon his own personal knowledge. In the latter the charge was based on information tendered by a private individual to the authorities. Owing to the fact that the archdeacon was a very busy man, the Church was largely dependent on the second method in the prosecution of heresy. But the average person had no inducement to lodge a charge. He was in danger of private vengeance if he did so; equally important, by Roman Law he was expected to prove his case, being in the event of failure liable to the same penalty which he had himself alleged against the accused. Seeing that, should he prove his case, he was entitled to the property of the prisoner either in whole or in part, this stipulation was a salutary and indeed necessary check, not only on malice but cupidity.288 This mode of procedure, which though indicative of its origin in the rudimentary idea of private justice was certainly equitable, did not commend itself to the Church, once it had become determined upon the extirpation of heresy. The difficulty of obtaining convictions greatly increased when, instead of small isolated communities, the Church was faced by a great organization like Catharism, widespread and secret in its movements. It was clear that episcopal jurisdiction must be strengthened. The Edict of Verona was an attempt in this direction. It was resolved to make use for prosecution of common report, the public opinion of the locality. Archbishops and bishops were to visit in person, or through their archdeacons, once or even twice a year every parish in which heresy was supposed to exist, and were to compel men whom they thought of trustworthy character or, if they thought fit, all the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, to denounce those whose manner of living differed from that of good Catholics. Such bad characters were to purge themselves by a solemn oath on the gospels before the bishop (purgatio canonica); if they refused—and Cathari were likely to be unwilling owing to their views regarding oaths—their refusal was to be construed as tantamount to a confession of heresy.289