The Perfect Heresy (27 page)

Pope Gregory IX appointing the Dominicans to lead the Inquisition

(Biblioteca Marciana, Venice)

Like his late kinsman Innocent, Gregory IX wanted results, and on a continent-wide scale. Special papal legates were granted wide prosecutorial power and sent out all over Europe to put down heresy. Some of the men chosen for these posts, unfortunately, soon proved themselves to be overzealous sociopaths. Robert le Bougre (the “bugger”—an epithet that suggests conversion from Catharism) sowed terror in hitherto peaceable northern France. In the Rhineland, the job was given to the sinister Conrad of Marburg. Everywhere Conrad turned, it seemed, hordes of unsuspected heretics lay hidden—in church and castle, commune and manor, convent and city. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were sent to the stake, often on the same day that they were first accused. As if consciously playing the role of malignant madman, Conrad rode his mule about the Rhineland with a retinue of two: a dour fanatic named Dorso, and a one-handed, one-eyed layman called John. The threesome’s appearance only added to their capacity to appall. On July 30, 1233, an exasperated Franciscan friar intercepted the grim trio and murdered Conrad. Instead of provoking a crusade, as was the case for Peter of Castelnau in 1208, this killing of a pope’s man merely elicited a disingenuous letter from Gregory to the archbishops of Trier and Cologne on the excesses of his special
envoy: “We marvel that you allowed legal proceedings of this unprecedented nature to continue for so long among you without acquainting us of what was happening. It is our wish that such things should no longer be tolerated, and we declare these proceedings null and void. We cannot permit such misery as you have described.”

In Languedoc, where there were, indeed, heretics by the hundreds, Gregory showed fewer scruples. He and Cardinal Romano had been careful to staff the episcopal palaces of the south with such heartless prelates as Bishop Raymond du Fauga. A cash bounty was offered to anyone who betrayed a heretic, to be paid from the already overtaxed treasury of Count Raymond. Confiscated property was divided among the informer, the Church, and the Crown. The lure of blood money might have induced the servant of the dying woman in Toulouse to turn his mistress over to her wretched end.

Yet the Church could not count solely on the spontaneous baseness of human nature to finish the job the crusade had begun. An activist pope, Gregory did not wait for a trickle of betrayals to become a torrent. He envisioned a well-organized administration, answerable only to the pope and rigorous in the execution of its investigative tasks. For that, men of unreproachable probity and devotion were needed. A generation earlier, Innocent had looked at Languedoc and called on the Cistercians. His nephew, judging the monks of Cîteaux a spent force, turned to the Dominicans. Innocent’s men went to debate and to convert; Gregory’s, to prosecute and punish. In the spring of 1233, papal inquisitors were appointed in Toulouse, Albi, and Carcassonne. They would have successors in different parts of Europe and Latin America for more than 600 years.

The accused shall be asked if he has anywhere seen or been acquainted with one or more heretics, knowing or believing them to be such by name or repute: where he has seen them, on how many occasions, with whom, and when … whether he has had any familiar intercourse with them, when and how, and by whom introduced … whether he has received in his own home one or more heretics; if so, who and what they were; who brought them; how many times they stayed with the accused; what visitors they had; who escorted them thence; and where they went … whether he did adoration before them, or saw other persons adore them or do them reverence after the heretical manner … whether he greeted them, or saw any other person greet them, after the heretical fashion … whether he was present at the initiation of any amongst them; if so, what was the manner of the initiation; what was the name of the heretic or heretics; who were present at the ceremony, and where was the house in which the sick person lay … whether the person initiated made any bequest to the heretics, and if so what and how much, and who drew up the deed; whether adoration was done before the heretic who performed the intitiation; whether the person succumbed to his illness, and if so where he was buried; who brought the heretic or heretics thither, and conducted them thence.

The excerpt above, from a much lengthier interrogation checklist, attests to the numbing thoroughness of the Inquisition established expressly to destroy the Cathars. Scores, then hundreds of people were summoned to testify before inquisitors and their
clerks. The questions were repetitive, designed to plant doubt in the mind of the person being interrogated as to what exactly the inquisitor knew, and who had told him. A person suspected of Cathar sympathies was not always informed of the charges hanging over his head; if apprised of the danger, he had no right to know who his accusers were; and if he dared seek outside legal help, his unfortunate lawyer was then charged with abetting heresy. Whatever the verdict of the inquisitor—who combined the functions of prosecutor, judge, and jury—no appeal was allowed. Even before judgment was handed down, anyone could be held indefinitely in prison for further questioning, without explanation. It was not so much a court system as a machine to create anxiety.

The
inquisitor hereticae pravitatis
(inquisitor of heretical depravity) tore apart the bonds of trust that hold civil society together. Informing on one’s neighbor became not only a duty but also a survival strategy. For 100 years beginning in 1233, the inquisitor was a dreadful fact of Languedoc life, his arrival in the villages and towns the occasion for demeaning displays of moral collapse. In theory, no one could be punished if no one talked—the inquisitor was powerless to act without denunciations. In practice, no community, especially not a rivalry-ridden medieval town, possessed the seamless cohesion needed to combat the power of a secretive tribunal.

The inquisitor arrived in town and consulted with the local clergy. All males over the age of fourteen and females over twelve were required to give a profession of orthodox faith; those who didn’t would be the first to be questioned. In his keynote sermon, the inquisitor invited the people of the area to think hard about their activities past and present and to come forward in the following week to give confidential depositions.
After this seven-day period of grace, those sinners who hadn’t denounced themselves would be issued summons. The reticent ran the risk of grave punishment, from the loss of property to the loss of life. Aside from the immediate capital crime of being one of the Perfect, offenses included sheltering the Perfect, “adoring” them (performing the melioramentum greeting), witnessing a “heretication” (the consolamentum), and simply failing to report instances of heresy to the Church. Proof of genuine abjuration of error lay in the number of people the repentant sinner was willing to betray. The Inquisition was interested in names—in compiling an inventory of the network of Catharism that had survived the crusade.

Naturally, the unscrupulous immediately came forward to inform against their personal enemies, whether they were credentes or not. This initial list, if nothing else, served the inquisitor with a basis for installing a climate of fear. The denounced were called, sometimes imprisoned, always bullied into giving more names. The inquiry widened, pulling in Cathar and Catholic alike—and only the inquisitor knew which charges had any corroboration. To convict an individual who denied any affiliation with heresy, the inquisitor needed the testimony of at least two witnesses.

Often, people threw themselves on the mercy of the court, admitting to minor transgressions—for example, giving a Perfect a loaf of bread—in a distant past, in the hope that more recent heretical acts would somehow be obscured. When pressed, as ever, to name names, the craftier credentes gave a long list of the deceased, thereby fulfilling their obligation to finger as many people as possible while sparing the living the perils of punishment.

The inquisitors had an answer to this tactic. They dug up
and burned the dead. To the stupefaction of friends and family, cemeteries were turned upside down and decomposing corpses carted through the streets to the burning ground as priests cried, “Qui aytal fara, aytal pendra” (Whoso does the like, will suffer a like fate). These macabre bonfires were just the beginning. If the flaming cadaver had been notorious for lodging a Perfect, his house was razed, regardless of who happened to be occupying it. Depending on the gravity of the postmortem sentence, some descendants of the condemned were disinherited, their property and chattels confiscated by the inquisitor to fund his investigations. Others were imprisoned, or made to sew large yellow crosses on their clothing, as a sign of their familial infamy, or forced to undertake grueling penances. And some talked, although still grieving over the indignities visited on the bodies and souls of their late relatives. The names of the living began filling the Inquisition registers.

The Dominicans were hated. In Albi, the inquisitor Arnold Cathala was beaten to within an inch of his life when he began disinterring bodies. The bishop’s armed men had to step in to prevent the burghers from tossing him unconscious into the River Tarn. In nearby Cordes, a fortified settlement founded by Raymond VII in 1222, legend holds that the enraged villagers threw two agents of the inquisitor to their deaths down a well. At Moissac, a pilgrimage center on the Garonne, where the inquisitors Peter Seila and William Arnald nonetheless managed to burn 210 of the living, heretics were hidden by compassionate Cistercian monks. Even though there papal courts adhered to the merciless legal practices of their day, they were viewed as something new and malevolent, something that aimed at transforming a weary Languedoc into a land of turncoats and quislings. No one was safe unless he did harm to his neighbors.

O
NE DAY IN
1233, a working man named John Textor, according to the chronicle of William Pelhisson, yelled out into a street of Toulouse as he was being questioned by the Inquisition: “Gentlemen, listen to me! I am not a heretic, for I have a wife and sleep with her. I have sons, I eat meat, I lie and swear, and I am a faithful Christian. So don’t let them say these things about me, for I truly believe in God. They can accuse you as well as me. Look out for yourselves, for these wicked men want to ruin the town and honest men and take the town away from its lord.”

People stopped to listen, laughed, then applauded. The foolhardy laborer was braying aloud what most of the city was whispering privately. Brothers Peter Seila and William Arnald failed to see the humor. They called their men-at-arms, and soon John Textor lay in chains in their prison.

Not that anyone expected the chief inquisitors of Toulouse
to show mercy to a critic, no matter how humble. Seila, before becoming one of the first companions of Dominic, had been a rich burgher and a supporter of the detested Fulk. In 1215, the Seila family had given the very first bequest to the dirt-poor Dominicans: a large townhouse in the heart of Toulouse. Seila’s younger colleague, William Arnald, was a zealous brother from the city of Montpellier. When the Inquisition eventually got around to that stronghold of Catholic orthodoxy in 1234, one of its first acts concerned neither Cathars nor other heretics. At the behest of the city’s conservative Jews, the Dominicans threw the works of the great Sevillan thinker Moses Maimonides onto a large bonfire of proscribed books.

Seila and Arnald wasted no time in making enemies. On receiving their papal commission in 1233, they had immediately targeted one of the most prominent Perfect in Toulouse, Vigoros of Bacone. Before his many allies and friends could rally to his defense, Vigoros was tried, convicted, and burned. There followed an unseemly two-year binge of body exhuming, coupled with sweeping imprisonments. To do the actual physical work of arresting, jailing, and executing, the two friars had to force the secular authority of Toulouse to do their bidding, by threatening prosecution of all who dared defy them. Refusing to obey the Inquisition was, according to Rome, as much a spiritual crime as heresy. Therefore it fell within the jurisdiction of Church, not secular, courts. The successful inquisitor used the full panoply of clerical intimidation—threat of excommunication, interdict, dispossession—to obtain the armed men necessary to do his job.