Medieval Inquisition - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Medieval Inquisition is a series of Inquisitions (Catholic Church bodies charged with suppressing heresy

Heresy

Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma. It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one's religion, principles or cause, and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion...

) from around 1184, including the Episcopal Inquisition (1184-1230s) and later the Papal Inquisition (1230s). The Medieval Inquisition was in response to large popular movements throughout Europe considered apostate

Apostasy

Apostasy , 'a defection or revolt', from ἀπό, apo, 'away, apart', στάσις, stasis, 'stand, 'standing') is the formal disaffiliation from or abandonment or renunciation of a religion by a person. One who commits apostasy is known as an apostate. These terms have a pejorative implication in everyday...

or heretical

Christian heresy

Christian heresy refers to non-orthodox practices and beliefs that were deemed to be heretical by one or more of the Christian churches. In Western Christianity, the term "heresy" most commonly refers to those beliefs which were declared to be anathema by the Catholic Church prior to the schism of...

to Christianity

Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

, in particular Catharism and Waldensians

Waldensians

Waldensians, Waldenses or Vaudois are names for a Christian movement of the later Middle Ages, descendants of which still exist in various regions, primarily in North-Western Italy. There is considerable uncertainty about the earlier history of the Waldenses because of a lack of extant source...

in southern France and northern Italy. These were the first inquisition movements of many that would follow.

The Medieval Inquisitions were in response to growing religious movements, in particular the Cathars, first noted in the 1140s in southern France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, and the Waldensians

Waldensians

, starting around 1170 in northern Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. Individual "Heretics", such as Peter of Bruis, had often challenged the Church. However, the Cathars were the first mass heretical organization in the second millennium that posed a serious threat to the authority of the Church. This article covers only these early inquisitions, not the Roman Inquisition

Roman Inquisition

The Roman Inquisition was a system of tribunals developed by the Holy See during the second half of the 16th century, responsible for prosecuting individuals accused of a wide array of crimes related to heresy, including Protestantism, sorcery, immorality, blasphemy, Judaizing and witchcraft, as...

of the 16th century onwards, or the somewhat different phenomenon of the Spanish Inquisition

Spanish Inquisition

The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition , commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition , was a tribunal established in 1480 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms, and to replace the Medieval...

, which was under the control of the Spanish monarchy, though using local clergy. The Portuguese Inquisition

Portuguese Inquisition

The Portuguese Inquisition was formally established in Portugal in 1536 at the request of the King of Portugal, João III. Manuel I had asked for the installation of the Inquisition in 1515 to fulfill the commitment of marriage with Maria of Aragon, but it was only after his death that the Pope...

and various colonial branches followed the same pattern.

History

All major medieval inquisitions were decentralized. Authority rested with local officials based on guidelines from the Holy See, but there was no central top-down authority running the inquisitions, as would be the case in post-medieval inquisitions. Thus there were many different types of inquisitions depending on the location and methods; historians have generally classified them into the episcopal inquisition and the papal inquisition. For example, The Papal Inquisition of 1633 condemned Galileo for stating that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe.

The first medieval inquisition, the episcopal inquisition, was established in the year 1184 by a papal bull

Papal bull

A Papal bull is a particular type of letters patent or charter issued by a Pope of the Catholic Church. It is named after the bulla that was appended to the end in order to authenticate it....

entitled Ad abolendam
Ad abolendam
Ad abolendam was a decretal and bull of Pope Lucius III, written at Verona in November 1184. It was developed after the Council of Verona settled some jurisdictional differences between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa...

, "For the purpose of doing away with." The inquisition was in response to the growing Cathar

Cathar

Catharism was a name given to a Christian religious sect with dualistic and gnostic elements that appeared in the Languedoc region of France and other parts of Europe in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries...

ist heresy in southern France

France

. It is called "episcopal" because it was administered by local bishop

Bishop

A bishop is an ordained or consecrated member of the Christian clergy who is generally entrusted with a position of authority and oversight. Within the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox Churches, in the Assyrian Church of the East, in the Independent Catholic Churches, and in the...

s, which in Latin is episcopus.

In the 1230s, Pope Gregory IX

Pope Gregory IX

Pope Gregory IX, born Ugolino di Conti, was pope from March 19, 1227 to August 22, 1241.The successor of Pope Honorius III , he fully inherited the traditions of Pope Gregory VII and of his uncle Pope Innocent III , and zealously continued their policy of Papal supremacy.-Early life:Ugolino was...

responded to the failures of the episcopal inquisition with a series of papal bulls which became the papal inquisition. The papal inquisition was staffed by professionals, trained specifically for the job. Individuals were chosen from different orders and secular clergy, but primarily they came from the Dominican Order

Dominican Order

The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France...

. The Dominicans were favored for their history of anti-heresy. As mendicant

Mendicant

The term mendicant refers to begging or relying on charitable donations, and is most widely used for religious followers or ascetics who rely exclusively on charity to survive....

s, they were accustomed to travel. Unlike the haphazard episcopal methods, the papal inquisition was thorough and systematic, keeping detailed records. Some documents from the Middle Ages involving first-person speech by medieval peasants come from papal inquisition records.

In northern Europe the Inquisition was somewhat more benign: in the Scandinavian countries it had hardly any impact until the Spanish Inquisition when the Spanish Kings used this to kill many who did not agree with the Spanish crown. The Inquisition existed in the kingdom of Aragon

Aragon

Aragon is a modern autonomous community in Spain, coextensive with the medieval Kingdom of Aragon. Located in northeastern Spain, the Aragonese autonomous community comprises three provinces : Huesca, Zaragoza, and Teruel. Its capital is Zaragoza...

during this period, but not elsewhere in the Iberian peninsula. It was never formally instituted in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

(which instead relied on more discreet individual figures, like the "Witch-Finder General", to lead raids such as the East Anglia

East Anglia

East Anglia is a traditional name for a region of eastern England, named after an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles took their name from their homeland Angeln, in northern Germany. East Anglia initially consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk, but upon the marriage of...

mass witch-hunt of 1644). Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...

carried the Inquisition with him to the New World

New World

The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...

Inquisitions against heretic movements

The spread of heretic movements from the 12th century, can be seen at least in part as a reaction to the increasing moral corruption of the clergy, which included illegal marriages and the possession of extreme wealth.
In the Middle Ages, the Inquisition's main focus was to eradicate these new sects. Thus its range of action was predominantly set in Italy and France, where such sects had settled. The two main heretic movements of the period were the Cathars and the Waldensians

Waldensians

.

The former were mostly in the South of France, in cities like Toulouse

Toulouse

Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...

. They appear to have been originally founded by some soldiers from the Second Crusade

Second Crusade

The Second Crusade was the second major crusade launched from Europe. The Second Crusade was started in response to the fall of the County of Edessa the previous year to the forces of Zengi. The county had been founded during the First Crusade by Baldwin of Boulogne in 1098...

, who, on their way back, were converted by a Bulgarian sect, the Bogomils.
Cathars' main heresy was their belief in dualism: the evil God created the materialistic world and the good God created the spiritual world. Therefore, Cathars preached poverty, chastity, modesty and all those values which in their view helped people to detach themselves from materialism.

The Waldensians were mostly in Germany and North Italy. In contrast with the Cathars and in line with the Church, they believed in only one God, but they did not recognize priesthood nor the veneration (not synonymous with worship) of saints and martyrs, which were part of the Church's orthodoxy.
The complaints of the two main preaching orders of the period, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, against the moral corruption of the Church, to some extent echoed those of the heretical movements, but they were doctrinally conventional, and were enlisted by Pope Innocent III

Pope Innocent III

Pope Innocent III was Pope from 8 January 1198 until his death. His birth name was Lotario dei Conti di Segni, sometimes anglicised to Lothar of Segni....

in the fight against heresy. As a result, many Franciscans and Dominicans became inquisitors. For example, Robert le Bougre, the "Hammer of Heretics" (Malleus Haereticorum), was a Dominican friar who became an inquisitor known for his cruelty and violence. Another example was the case of the province of Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

, which was handed to the Franciscan inquisitors, who quickly became notorious for their frauds against the Church, by enriching themselves with confiscated property from the heretics and the selling of absolutions. Because of their corruption, they were eventually forced by the Pope to suspend their activities in 1302.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, two other movements attracted the attention of the Inquisition, the Knights Templars and the Beguines.

It is not clear if the process against the Templars was initiated by the Inquisition on the basis of suspected heresy or if the Inquisition itself was exploited by the king of France, Philip the Fair

Philip IV of France

Philip the Fair was, as Philip IV, King of France from 1285 until his death. He was the husband of Joan I of Navarre, by virtue of which he was, as Philip I, King of Navarre and Count of Champagne from 1284 to 1305.-Youth:A member of the House of Capet, Philip was born at the Palace of...

, who wanted the knights' wealth. In the search for Templars, two inquisitors were also sent to the British Isles. This is the only instance of inquisitorial action in the British Isles and not a successful one, mainly because the inquisitors could not instigate false confessions through torture, as its use was forbidden by common law.

The Beguines were mainly a women's movement and had previously been recognized by the Church since their foundation in the thirteenth century as mystics. However, with the Council of Vienne

Council of Vienne

The Council of Vienne was the fifteenth Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church that met between 1311 and 1312 in Vienne. Its principal act was to withdraw papal support for the Knights Templar on the instigation of Philip IV of France.-Background:...

in the fourteenth century, they were proclaimed heretics and persecuted, with large numbers being burned at the stake in Narbonne

Narbonne

Narbonne is a commune in southern France in the Languedoc-Roussillon region. It lies from Paris in the Aude department, of which it is a sub-prefecture. Once a prosperous port, it is now located about from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea...

, Toulouse and other French cities. They were also attacked in Germany, the first attempt of the Inquisition to operate in the area.
A possible explanation of this shift is that, after the successful extirpation of the Cathars, the Inquisition needed new heresies to fight against and new revenues to sustain itself. Thus it directed its attention to pseudo-heretic movements.
Another aspect of the medieval Inquisition is that little attention was paid to sorcery. In fact several Popes were suspected of having a strong interest or practicing alchemy and it was only with Pope John XXII

Pope John XXII

Pope John XXII , born Jacques Duèze , was pope from 1316 to 1334. He was the second Pope of the Avignon Papacy , elected by a conclave in Lyon assembled by Philip V of France...

, who was himself suspected of being a magician, that sorcery became another form of heresy and thus liable of persecution by the Inquisition.

Joan of Arc

In 1430 Pierre Cauchon

Pierre Cauchon

Pierre Cauchon , bishop of Beauvais. A strong partisan of English interests in France during the latter years of the Hundred Years' War, his role in arranging Joan of Arc's downfall led most subsequent observers to condemn his extension of secular politics into an ecclesiastical trial...

, the bishop of Beauvais, promoted a trial against Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc

Saint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...

, also known as the "Maid of Orleans", a woman who, since her involvement in 1429 had subverted in fifteen months the course of the war between the English and the French, by liberating Orléans

Orléans

-Prehistory and Roman:Cenabum was a Gallic stronghold, one of the principal towns of the Carnutes tribe where the Druids held their annual assembly. It was conquered and destroyed by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, then rebuilt under the Roman Empire...

and defeating the English invaders on several occasions.

The reasons behind this process were politically motivated. Cauchon aspired to become cardinal, but to obtain this and further recognitions, he needed the support of the King of England

Henry VI of England

Henry VI was King of England from 1422 to 1461 and again from 1470 to 1471, and disputed King of France from 1422 to 1453. Until 1437, his realm was governed by regents. Contemporaneous accounts described him as peaceful and pious, not suited for the violent dynastic civil wars, known as the Wars...

and the Duke of Bedford

John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford

John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford, KG , also known as John Plantagenet, was the third surviving son of King Henry IV of England by Mary de Bohun, and acted as Regent of France for his nephew, King Henry VI....

, who in turn needed to rid themselves of Joan. Furthermore, giving to her victories a diabolic origin would have been a conceivable way to alleviate their men's morale. Thus the decision to involve the Inquisition, which therefore did not instigate the trial and in fact showed a reluctance throughout its duration.
Seventy charges were brought against her, including accusations of witchcraft and dressing as a male. Joan was first condemned to life imprisonment and the deputy-inquisitor, Jean Le Maitre, obtained from her assurances of relinquishing her male clothes. However, after four days, in which she was allegedly tortured by English soldiers and possibly raped, she refused again to wear female clothes, which was seen as a sign of her return to heresy. She was therefore burnt at the stake two days later, on 30 May 1431.

In 1455, by the order of King Charles VII of France

Charles VII of France

Charles VII , called the Victorious or the Well-Served , was King of France from 1422 to his death, though he was initially opposed by Henry VI of England, whose Regent, the Duke of Bedford, ruled much of France including the capital, Paris...

, who Joan had publicly supported, a rehabilitation trial was opened in the Notre Dame de Paris

Notre Dame de Paris

Notre Dame de Paris , also known as Notre Dame Cathedral, is a Gothic, Roman Catholic cathedral on the eastern half of the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris: that is, it is the church that contains the cathedra of...

to investigate the dubious circumstances which led to Joan's execution. The Inquisitor-General of France was put in charge of the trial. After a careful analysis of all the proceedings, including Joan's answers to the allegations, he pronounced null her condemnation. Joan of Arc was eventually canonized in 1920. The rehabilitation of Joan of Arc was also unprecedented in the previous history of the Inquisition, reflecting a clear signal in the decline of the medieval Inquisition in France.

Inquisition procedure

The papal inquisition developed a number of procedures to discover and prosecute heretics.

Investigation

When a papal inquisition arrived at a town it had a set of procedures and rules to identify likely heretics. First, the townspeople would be gathered in a public place. Although attendance was voluntary, those who failed to show would automatically be suspect, so most would come. The inquisitors would provide an opportunity for anyone to step forward and denounce themselves in exchange for easy punishment. As part of this bargain they would need to inform on other heretics. In addition, the inquisitors could simply force people to be interrogated. Once information had been gathered, an inquisitorial trial could begin.

Trial

The inquisitorial trial generally favored the prosecution (the Church). Confessing 'in full' was the best hope of receiving a lighter punishment - but with little hope of escaping at least some punishment. And a 'full' confession was one which implicated others, including other family members. It was acceptable to take testimony from criminals, persons of bad reputation, excommunicated people, and convicted heretics. The inquisitor could keep a defendant in prison for years before the trial to obtain new information, and could return them to prison if he felt that the witness had not fully confessed.

Despite the seeming unfairness of the procedures, the inquisitors did provide some rights

Rights

Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory...

to the defendant. At the beginning of the trial, defendants were invited to name those who had "mortal hatred" against them. If the accusers were among those named, the defendant was set free and the charges dismissed; the accusers would face life imprisonment. This option was meant to keep the inquisition from becoming involved in local grudges. A confession under torture was not admissible in court, although the inquisitor could threaten the accused with torture during the proceedings. Early legal consultations on conducting inquisition stress that it is better that the guilty go free than that the innocent be punished; though in practice, inquisitors had quite a wide sense of what constituted guilt, making innocence a rare commodity.

Torture

Torture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...

could be used after 1252. On May 15, Pope Innocent IV

Pope Innocent IV

Pope Innocent IV , born Sinibaldo Fieschi, was pope from June 25, 1243 until his death in 1254.-Early life:...

issued a papal bull

Papal bull

A Papal bull is a particular type of letters patent or charter issued by a Pope of the Catholic Church. It is named after the bulla that was appended to the end in order to authenticate it....

entitled Ad exstirpanda
Ad exstirpanda
Ad extirpanda was a papal bull, promulgated on Wednesday, May 15, 1252, by Pope Innocent IV, which explicitly authorized the use of torture by the Inquisition for eliciting confessions from heretics.-Content:The bull was issued in the wake of the murder of the papal inquisitor of Lombardy, St...

, which authorized the use of torture by inquisitors. Torture was undoubtedly used in the trial of the Templars, but is in fact not much found in heresy trials until the later fourteenth century. Torture methods that resulted in bloodshed, births, mutilation or death were forbidden. Also, torture could be performed only once. However, it was common practice to consider a second torture session to be a "continuation" of the first. Torture methods included hanging by the wrists, with weights suspended from the ankles; a form of torture known as Strappado

Strappado

Strappado is a form of torture in which the victim's hands are first tied behind their back and suspended in the air by means of a rope attached to wrists, which most likely dislocates both arms...

Punishment

Among the possible punishments were prayer, pilgrimage, wearing a yellow cross for life, banishment, public recantation, or, occasionally, long-term imprisonment. The unrepentant and apostates could be "relaxed" to secular authority, however, opening the convicted to the possibility of various corporal punishments, up to and including being burned at the stake. Execution was neither performed by the Church, nor was it a sentence available to the officials involved in the inquisition, who, as clerics, were forbidden to kill. The accused also faced the possibility that his or her property might be confiscated. In some cases, accusers may have been motivated by a desire to take the property of the accused, though this is a difficult assertion to prove in the majority of areas where the inquisition was active, as the inquisition had several layers of oversight built into its framework in a specific attempt to limit prosecutorial misconduct.

The inquisitors generally preferred not to hand over heretics to the secular arm for execution if they could persuade the heretic to repent: Ecclesia non novit sanguinem. For example, Bernard Gui

Bernard Gui

Bernard Gui , also known as Bernardo Gui or Bernardus Guidonis, was an inquisitor of the Dominican Order in the Late Middle Ages during the Medieval Inquisition, Bishop of Lodève, and one of the most prolific writers of the Middle Ages...

, a famous inquisitor working in the area of Carcassonne

Carcassonne

Carcassonne is a fortified French town in the Aude department, of which it is the prefecture, in the former province of Languedoc.It is divided into the fortified Cité de Carcassonne and the more expansive lower city, the ville basse. Carcassone was founded by the Visigoths in the fifth century,...

(in modern France), executed 42 people out of over 900 guilty verdicts in fifteen years of office. Execution was to admit defeat, that the Church was unable to save a soul from heresy, which was the goal of the inquisition.

Legacy

The inquisitions in combination with the brutal Albigensian Crusade

Albigensian Crusade

The Albigensian Crusade or Cathar Crusade was a 20-year military campaign initiated by the Catholic Church to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc...

were fairly successful in eliminating mass heresy. When they started, the heretical sects were quite strong and growing, but by the 14th century the Waldensians had been driven underground and the Cathars had been slaughtered en masse or forced to recant. Some residents of the Pays Cathare identify themselves as Cathars even today. They claim to be descended from the Cathars of the Middle Ages. However, the delivering of the consolamentum, on which historical Catharism was based, required a linear succession by a bon homme in good standing. It is believed that one of the last known bons hommes, Guillaume Belibaste, was burned in 1321.

External links

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History

Inquisitions against heretic movements

Joan of Arc

Inquisition procedure

Investigation

Trial

Torture

Punishment

Legacy

See also

External links