§ 2 The Inquisition
Though all the heresy hunts of the ancient Church had implied an inquisitorial ideal, nothing in the nature of a “Holy Office” had existed in the Church till the second quarter of the thirteenth century. It was felt that the faithful could as a rule be trusted to raise the cry of heresy wherever it could be scented. Such prompt action we have seen taken in the cases of Jovinian, Pelagius, Gottschalk, and Berengar. But in the twelfth century the spirit of militant orthodoxy, as seen in zealots like St. Bernard, had reached a strength which pointed to some systematic action on the part of the now much aggrandized papacy. St. Bernard’s attitude to Abailard is that of the true Inquisitor: he suspects, to begin with, the accursed spirit of independent thought, and he is straightway determined to make an example of the upstart who dares to reason on all doctrines for himself. But even St. Bernard, eager as he was for the blood of Moslems, could hardly have anticipated the spirit in which the papacy acted from the Albigensian crusade onwards. Coincident with that crusade was the digging up of Amalrich’s bones, the burning of his followers, and the veto on the study of Aristotle at Paris. Intolerance had entered on a new era.
The first steps towards a systematic and centralized Inquisition were taken about 1178, when, under Pope Alexander III, the Church began moving against the “Manichean” heretics of Languedoc. A papal legate at that time forced from the Count of Toulouse and his nobles a promise on oath to resist heresy; and in a council of the following year orthodox princes in general were invited to use force for the purpose. The pope proceeded not only to excommunicate the heretics and their backers but to declare, in the fashion already consecrated by the Crusades, that no one need keep faith with them; further offering indulgences for two years to all who should make war on them, and calling on their lords to reduce them to slavery. As a result, a crusade was made in 1181, so little marked by bloodshed as to be insignificant in comparison with those of the next generation, but sufficient to force an abjuration of heresy from the lords concerned. Thereafter, in 1184, a Council held at Verona prescribed with a new precision and emphasis a systematic search for heresy by all bishops, and called upon the nobles to lend their support in the way of the necessary violence. Innocent III had thus had the way marked out for him, alike in suppression and in prevention; and the Inquisition as such dates from the close of his crusade against the Albigenses, when Pope Gregory IX took from the bishops the business of heresy-hunting and made it a special task of the Dominican order (1233). After “Manichæism” had been stamped out there was a lull in persecution as in heresy; but the institution remained, to prevent new growths.
The broad outcome of its work was that whereas the twelfth century had been one of intellectual dawn, and the thirteenth, despite its murderous beginning, one of diffusion of light, the fourteenth was on the whole one of stationary knowledge, save in Italy itself, where the growing energies of the Renaissance for the time eluded repression. Indeed the Church cared little about mere unbelief, as distinct from anti-clerical heresy, where its political rule was not thereby affected; and in Italy, when anti-clericalism was once put down, its wealth made it secure. Even in Italy the literary life of the fourteenth century was rather artistic than intellectual, science and serious thought making little progress; while in northern Europe they were visibly arrested. It was in the outlying States, where heresy might mean a cessation of papal revenue, that the Dominicans were specially hounded on to their work. In England, in the latter part of the thirteenth century, the great spirit of Roger Bacon was cabined and confined by inquisitorial enmities; and in France in the fourteenth there was a signal suspension of intellectual life, in the face of the activities of original thinkers such as William of Occam. The throttling of the civilization of the south had reacted on the north. Doubtless the desperate wars to which crusading experience had given a new incitement counted for much, and the constant political intrigues of the papacy for more, in arresting mental growth. “When a city for any political proceeding had given offence to its political head, emperor or king, or had irritated a Roman bishop by opposition, the usual punishment, by command or interdict, was to inhibit its professors from teaching, and to disperse its scholars.” All the political causes wrought together for the hindrance of human advancement. The immense destruction of population by the Black Death, finally, was a great incitement to superstition.
The main effect of the Inquisition is seen in Spain, which in the Saracen period had been one of the great sources of new thought and knowledge. There, despite the element of intellectual curiosity set up in the period of Moorish supremacy, when the Christians were in general treated with tolerance, the spirit of fanaticism was in some measure ingrained by the long struggle between Christians and Moslems for the land, though there were also contrary developments; and an inquisitorial war on Jewish and Moorish ideas was part of the Christian campaign. As the Christians gained ground, ecclesiasticism gained with them; yet when the Inquisition, not yet a permanent Spanish tribunal, was set up in Spain in 1236, it was received by a large part of the population with fear and dislike. It is an error to suppose that there was something in “Spanish character” specially prone to the methods of the Inquisition. Spanish orthodoxy is a manufactured product, and represents the triumph, under special conditions, of the fanatical element which belongs to every nation. Not only did many eminent Spaniards detest and denounce the Inquisition in its first and imperfectly destructive form: the common people rioted against it when, in its permanent and more murderous form, it was constituted in 1478–83, and put under Torquemada. That memorable persecutor long felt his life to be in danger from the people, both in Aragon and in Castile; and the first inquisitor-general of Aragon was actually killed by them.
Yet even the “ancient” Inquisition had been fatally successful. In the two centuries from its establishment, while Averroism was rife in Italy and France, Christian Spain must have been well nigh rid of the other forms of heretical thought; and the first step of Ferdinand and Isabella after their crowning triumph was to expel all Jews who would not apostatize. On the remaining Moors the New Inquisition went to work in a similar spirit, persecuting them, baptizing them by force, burning their books, and driving them repeatedly to revolts, which were always murderously put down. Finally, after the failure of the great Armada against England, the Inquisitors decided that the cause of the divine wrath was their undue toleration of heresy, and a million of nonconforming Moriscoes were miserably driven out of Spain, as a hundred and sixty thousand Jews had been a century before.
As all civilization lives by the play of intellectual variation, Spain was now stripped of a large part of her mental as well as her material resources; and the continued work of the Inquisition at length clinched the arrest of her brilliant literature for centuries, keeping her devoid of science while the rest of Europe was gathering it. In introducing the Inquisition the Church had destroyed the specific civilization of southern France, thereby laming that of northern France; and in thereafter applying the machine to the civilization of Spain she reduced that to inanition.
It should be remembered that the Inquisition’s purpose was to destroy books no less than men; and until printing overpowered the effort, the check thus put on the spread of rational thought bade fair to be fatal. In a single auto-da-fé (“act of faith”) at Salamanca, near the end of the fifteenth century, six thousand volumes were burned, on the pretence that they contained Judaic errors, or were concerned with magic and witchcraft. It is certain that many of them were of another character. Elsewhere the work of destruction was less ostentatiously done, but it was constant.
In the matter of torture and slaughter, however, the work of the Inquisition has become a proverb; and after all corrections have been made on the earlier estimates by Llorente and other historians, the figures remain frightful. In “a few years” the New Inquisition burned alive, in Castile alone, nearly two thousand persons, and variously penalized some twenty thousand more. At this rate, many thousands must have been burned in a generation; and the statement that nearly two hundred thousand passed through the Spanish Inquisition’s hands in thirty-six years is sadly credible. Its methods were the negation of every principle of justice. Any evidence, including that of criminals, children, and even idiots, was valid against an accused person, while only that of the most unimpeachable kind was heard in his favour; all proceedings were strictly private; false informers were almost never punished; and the general principle was that anyone who was tried must be somehow guilty, the Inquisition being like the pope infallible. Thus, if a man could not be convicted of real heresy, he could be punished for an error in the repetition of a prayer or a creed. But the torture-chamber can seldom have failed to yield whatever proof was sought for. No such reign of terror and horror has occurred in any other period of European history; and only in the practices of witch-finders among savages can its systematic atrocity be anywhere paralleled.