The Friar of Carcassonne (9 page)

Thus the time was propitious for inquisition, which is not at all to say that papal fiat could make it arise full-blown. A late twelfth-century pope issued a bull enjoining bishops to become inquisitors, but many lacked the expertise, willingness, revenue, or stomach to launch open-throated campaigns of heretic elimination. Further, the idea was a novelty, so it could hardly be expected that these episcopal inquisitions could suddenly Christianize what was a practice from antiquity. Time was needed to make the adjustment, to lay the sacerdotal groundwork, to find the necessary rationalizations.

Some of these last arose from the belief in the pope's firm hand on the tiller of Christendom. In the first fifteen years of the thirteenth century, with the pontificate of Innocent III, a brilliant man imbued with a sense of papal supremacy and capable of organization on a grand scale—as shown in the legislative overdrive of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215—heresy at first proved resistant to argument. The Church's second rejoinder came as a brutal recourse to arms, as the unfortunates of Lavaur and other Languedoc towns were to learn to their sorrow. Innocent approved of the innovative founders of the mendicant orders: he dreamed Francis would rejuvenate the Church, and he appointed Dominic to debate the Cathars prior to launching the Albigensian Crusade. While the latter's mission bore little fruit in the short term, the long-term bequest of Dominic's actions provided the Church, and future popes, with a cadre of Dominican friars ideally suited to undertake the third, and final, response to heresy: systematic, painstaking inquisition. It was from the Dominicans rather than the Franciscans that the greater number of inquisitors came. Through them and their police work the Church would prevail. The word had been tried first, then the sword—it was now the turn of the law.

The Dominican mendicant friars, unlike earlier monastic movements, chose to live in the world, amidst the laity. Thus they were already, in a sense, walking the beat. And while the impulse to live among the people might at first blush seem laudable, there was a flip side to the notion: by shunning the unworldly, isolated monastery of the past, the Dominicans had decided to make the world their monastery. The laity became members of that monastery, with their consequential obligations and obediences clearly delineated. This view of spiritual discipline dovetailed nicely with the job of hunting heretics. While other churchmen might cite scripture about heretics being “foxes in the vineyard of the Lord,” claim heresy to be lèsemajesté toward the pope, or put forward any other of a number of arguments to justify persecuting dissident Christians, the Dominicans could see heresy as an affront and a danger to their monastic community, which englobed all men and women and stretched into the afterlife. And as the Dominican order itself, in the narrower sense, practiced robust corporal punishment and incarceration of backsliding friars—most convents had a jail—importing such tactics into the
inquisitio hereticae pravitatis
, inquisition of heretical depravity, was but a small step to take.

The Dominicans were the Order of Friars Preachers, and they melded that vocation into their new assignment as inquisitors. At the outset of an
inquisitio generalis
(or fact-finding inquisition) in the early days after Gregory IX's letter, the inquisitor and his scribes, notaries, and servants would leave the Cité of Carcassonne and descend on a village they had targeted. First a sermon would be delivered to the assembled populace, in which the inquisitor took care to explain through the use of
exempla
—parables about animals were a medieval favorite—why Cathars were wolves in sheep's clothing, why heresy was the worst crime of all, and how tolerating heretics of any description, whether Cathars or Waldenses, in the midst of a community endangered everyone's eternal soul. For the problem, explicitly recognized in Dominican literature, lay precisely in perception. The people of Languedoc, whether orthodox or not, could plainly perceive that the Cathar clergy, the ascetic, gentle, pacific Good Men and Good Women (or perfected heretics—the Perfect, as they were termed by their enemies) had all the trappings of holiness. The preacher/inquisitor faced an uphill battle in what amounted to convincing people
not
to believe what they could see with their own eyes. He had to establish the idea of a counterfeit holiness, condemning all who tolerated it to the fire and brimstone that often came as the stem-winding finale of his initial sermon.

The villagers were informed that they enjoyed a grace period of a few days before a formal summons to appear before the inquisitor might be served upon them. If, before that time, they came of their own accord and owned up to their depravity, a certain measure of clemency would be shown. They had to tell the inquisitor if they or any of their neighbors, kinsmen, or other acquaintances had ever given material or spiritual support of any kind whatsoever to the Good Men and Women. It was a crime to withhold any information germane to the eradication of heresy. And if they, or any people they knew, were Cathar believers, they had to recant their heresy and endure a penance before being welcomed back in the bosom of the Church. Depositions were taken confidentially—no one but the inquisitor ever knew who said what about whom. Further, should the inquisitor receive at least two credible depositions about someone believing in, supporting, or giving comfort to the Good Men and Women, charges could be laid. That created the
mala fama
, the infamy necessary for investigation. Derived from old Rome, the notion held that a person's own reputation (
fama
) functioned as his accuser, exempting him from normal legal protection. A powerful and pliable tool of coercion, inquisitors came to use just general public notoriety, rather than denunciations or confessions, to start a proceeding against someone. In all cases, the accused never knew who his accusers were.

One can imagine how the sermon's listeners felt on returning home for whispered discussions over whether to cooperate. Would they be denounced, and by whom? By one of their enemies, with whom they had had a land or livestock dispute years back? If innocent, would they be falsely accused? Should they settle old scores by accusing someone falsely before he accused them? Did they really have to squeal on heretical neighbors and kin whom they liked? The inquisitor's sermon, in short, contained a recipe for tearing village life apart, the customary friction of antipathy and affinity within a living community giving way to a deadening, dread-filled atmosphere of revenge and betrayal. This indeed was a Christianity of fear, in practice as well as in theory.

The inquisitor, for his part, gauged if the town was going to be a tough nut to crack. The first collaborators might arrive quickly, perhaps under cover of night to avoid neighborly scrutiny; or they might not—some brave villages observed an
omertà
that took years to grind down. Further on in the thirteenth century, the inquisitor was able to examine records of past inquisitions held in the locality. These were carefully guarded in bound registers, containing scores of transcripts of interrogations and sentences handed down. Fairly uncharacteristically for document-keeping practices of the era, the registers were systematically organized, cross-referencing individuals and allowing archival retrieval of damning detail that might otherwise have been lost or forgotten. They were, in essence, a collective database designed for a sole user—many a time an inquisitor confounded individuals with contradictory testimony they had given years earlier. Not unsurprisingly, an inquisition register first brought
la rage carcassonnaise
to a boil.

Further reading for the visiting Dominican investigator were materials concerning heresy itself. At the Council of Tarragona in 1242, the assembled prelates spelled out an entire taxonomy of dissent, yet another testament to psychology, this time to the mind's capability to create neat hierarchical mountains out of complex human molehills. One can almost see the lips of the novice inquisitor mouthing the different categories as he rehearsed the Tarragona checklist: “heretics,” “believers,” “suspects”—acting “simply,” “vehemently
,
” or “most vehemently”
—
along with “concealers,” “hiders,” “receivers,” “defenders,” and “favorers.”

The Dominican likely also would have possessed an example of a supremely peculiar self-help genre, the inquisitor's manual. The first was written in Carcassonne in 1248. These manuals compiled admonitions, tip sheets, descriptions of different forms of heresy, and tactics of interrogation. Years of questioning people with something to hide had given the authors of these manuals insights into the dodging and weaving tactics developed by heretics and their sympathizers. Nicolas Eymerich, a Dominican of the fourteenth century, listed ten different techniques of evasiveness that the exasperated inquisitor should be on the lookout for when questioning heretics. They ranged from artful casuistry to blatant excuse-making:

The third way of evading a question or misleading a questioner is through redirecting the question. For example, if it is asked: “Do you believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son?” he replies, “And what do you believe?” And when he is told, “We believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son,” he replies, “Thus I believe,” meaning, “I believe that you believe this, but I do not.” . . .

The eighth way of evading a question is through feigned illness. For example, if someone is interrogated concerning his faith, and the questions having multiplied to the point that he perceives he cannot avoid being caught out in his heresy and error, he says: “I am very weak in the head, and I cannot endure any more. In the name of God, please let me go now.” Or he says, “Pain has overcome me. Please, for the sake of God, let me lie down.” And going to his bed, he lies down. And thus he escapes questioning for a time, and meanwhile thinks over how he will reply, and how craftily he will conduct himself. Thus they conduct themselves with respect to other feigned illnesses. They frequently use this mode of conduct when they see that they are to be tortured, saying that they are sick, and that they will die if they are tortured, and women frequently say that they are suffering from their female troubles, so that they can escape torture for a time.

There were heretical Christians, particularly the Waldenses, who believed that capital punishment was prohibited under any circumstance, no matter what the claim of legitimacy might be. Any qualms that Dominican inquisitors, as followers of Jesus Christ, might feel in condemning people to death were countered in Dominican literature. The Order's saintly founder, Dominic, came to be seen above all else as an inquisitor, even though he died a full decade before Gregory IX declared judicial war on heresy.

Many saints, particularly those who founded orders, were subject to what might be termed sedimentary hagiography—layers of successive biographies ascribing miracles or modes of exemplary conduct to the subject long after his or her death. These were often added with a specific agenda in mind. The technique was by no means confined to Christianity: for instance, the hadith, or tales of Muhammad's life appearing nowhere in the Qur'an, have guided and shaped Islamic piety and practice for centuries. The astute Dominic is reputed to have said on his deathbed that he would be far more useful to the brothers dead than alive.

Dominic's transformation from compassionate preacher to merciless inquisitor was effected within a few generations of his death in 1221. The Miracle of Fire at Fanjeaux became in later biographies a judicial proceeding in a neighboring town called Montréal, and, in this telling, the document that refused to burn was in all probability an inquisition register. The humane and flawed holy man that Dominic must have been in reality (his first biographer had him admitting to preferring the conversation of younger women to that of older ones) became idealized as a persecutor.

At the hands of inquisition apologists, God received the same treatment. In one of the more unusual roles assigned to Jesus Christ by his flock, the protean preacher of peace in the New Testament came garbed in the robes of an avenger. He had arrived on earth to persecute. Much use was made of the many violent, vengeful passages in the Old Testament, with their far fewer counterparts in the Christian scriptures also deployed for full homiletic effect. And God was not only cruel, he was sadistic. The greatest torment of Hell was not the boundless and eternal physical agony but the sound of God's spiteful mockery and malicious cackling at the sight of such suffering.

A radical Dominican thinker of the mid-thirteenth century, Moneta of Cremona, went so far as to say that a true way to imitate God was to kill. His logic, based on the behavior of God in the Old Testament, ran something like this: God does not sin, God kills, therefore killing is not a sin. In some ways, this bald reversal of the sixth of the Ten Commandments was nothing new, for churchmen throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the heyday of the Crusades—had meandered far into sophistry in their attempt to reconcile their savior's message of nonviolence and the notion of holy war. The great twelfth-century Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux had famously opined that the killing of an infidel was not the killing of a man but the killing of evil. What was new in Moneta's formulation was that God, far from forgiving the regrettably necessary recourse to violence, instead stood cheering on the sidelines, seeing his own image in the torturers and killers. Just as the medieval Hell fantasy speaks volumes about human psychology, so too does the worldview espoused by Moneta of Cremona and his followers, proving that at all times and in all places, sincere people will always find a way to justify whatever action they believe consonant with their duty, no matter how nakedly reprehensible that action is. Moneta's inquisitor differs from Dostoevsky's, whose Grand Inquisitor has no need of—indeed, despises—Jesus Christ; but the Dominican's may be more pernicious in that Jesus is fully in favor of persecution. The poor wretch moldering in the dank cell of an inquisition prison thus had no higher authority to implore for succor. He was utterly alone, damned by a God who was laughing at him.