THE INQUISITION

Michael Baigent was born in New Zealand in 1948 and obtained a degree in psychology from Canterbury University, Christchurch. Since 1976 he has lived in England. His most recent book was Ancient Traces, published in 1998. He has recently completed an MA in mysticism and religious experience at the University of Kent.

Richard Leigh pursued his BA at Tufts University, Boston, his MA at the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. at the State University of New York. With Michael Baigent he has co-authored a number of books, including the international bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (with Henry Lincoln), The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception and, more recently, The Elixir and the Stone. Despite these works, he regards himself as primarily a novelist and writer of short stories. He lives in London.

THE INQUISITION

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Acknowledgements

As ever, we should like to thank Ann Evans and Jonathan Clowes, not only for being our agents, but also for being consultants, managers, counsellors, intercessors, advocates, pagan Cistercians and friends, through whom the puissance of Sainte Quittière is enabled to cast its protection over us.

For their help and support in a diverse spectrum of ways, we should also like to thank Sacha Abercorn, John Ashby, Jane Baigent, Brie Burkeman, Bela Cunha, Helen Fraser, Margaret Hill, Tony Lacey, Alan McClymont, Andrew Nurnberg, Peter Ostacchini, David Peabody, John Saul, Yuri Stoyanov and Lisa Whadcock.

Again, too, our debt to libraries is immense. We should like to thank the staffs of the British Library, St Pancras, the Library of the United Grand Lodge of England, Covent Garden, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Dedication

Introduction

As the fifteenth century gave way to the sixteenth, Jesus returned. He reappeared in Spain, on the streets of Seville. There were no fanfares attending his advent, no choirs of angels or supernatural spectaculars, no extravagant meteorological phenomena. On the contrary, he arrived ‘softly’ and ‘unobserved’. And yet the passers-by quickly recognised him, were irresistibly drawn to him, surrounded him, flocked about him, followed him. He moved modestly among them with a gentle smile of ‘ineffable compassion’, held out his hands to them, conferred his blessings upon them; and an old man among the crowd, blind from childhood, miraculously regained the faculty of sight. The multitude wept and kissed the earth at his feet while children tossed flowers before him, sang and lifted their voices in hosannas.

At the steps of the cathedral, weeping mourners were carrying inside a small open white coffin. Within it, almost hidden by flowers, lay a child of seven, the only daughter of a distinguished citizen. Urged on by the crowd, the bereft mother turned to the newcomer and beseeched him to restore the dead girl to life. The procession halted and the coffin was set down at his feet on the cathedral steps. ‘Maiden, arise!’ he commanded softly, and the girl immediately sat upright, looking about, smiling, with wide wondering eyes, still holding the cluster of white roses that had been placed in her hands.

This miracle was witnessed, as he passed with his entourage of bodyguards, by the city's cardinal and Grand Inquisitor – ‘an aged man, almost ninety, tall and upright in stature, with a shrivelled face and deeply recessed eyes, in which, however, there still burned a gleam of light’. Such was the terror he inspired that the crowd, despite the extraordinary circumstances, deferentially fell silent, parted and made way for him. Neither did anyone dare to interfere when, at the old prelate's behest, the newcomer was summarily arrested by his bodyguards and led off to prison.

Such is the opening of Fyodor Dostoevsky's ‘Parable of the Grand Inquisitor’, a more or less self-contained twenty-five-page narrative embedded in the 800 or so pages of The Brothers Karamazov, first published by instalments in a Moscow magazine during 1879 and 1880. The parable's real significance resides in what follows the dramatic prelude. For the reader expects, of course, that the Grand Inquisitor will be appropriately horrified when he learns the true identity of his new prisoner. That, however, is not to be the case.

When the Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus's cell, it is clear that he knows only too well whom the prisoner is; but the knowledge does not deter him. During the prolonged philosophical and theological debate that ensues, the old man remains adamant in his position. In scripture, Jesus is tempted by the devil in the wilderness with the prospect of power, of earthly authority, of secular or temporal dominion over the world. Now, a millennium and a half later, he is confronted by precisely the same temptations. When he resists them, the Grand Inquisitor consigns him to the stake.

Jesus responds only by conferring on the old man a kiss of forgiveness. Shuddering, the kiss ‘glowing in his heart’, the old man opens the door to the cell. ‘Go,’ he commands, ‘and come no more… Come not at all, never, never!’ Released into the darkness, the prisoner disappears, never to be seen again. And the Grand Inquisitor, in full consciousness of what has just transpired, continues to adhere to his principles, continues to enforce his reign of terror, continues to sentence other victims – often self-evidently innocent – to the flames.

As can be seen from this perhaps oversimplified summary, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is no fool. On the contrary, he knows all too well what he is doing. He knows that he carries an onerous and debilitating responsibility on his aged shoulders – to maintain civic order, to uphold the status of the Church founded in the name of the man he has just been prepared to sentence to execution. He knows the Church founded in the man's name is ultimately incompatible with the teachings of the man himself. He knows that the Church has become autonomous, the proverbial law unto itself, no longer rendering unto Caesar but usurping Caesar, presiding over its own imperium. He knows that he has been entrusted with the role of custodian and ‘enforcer’ of this imperium. He knows that the edicts and acts he promulgates in that capacity will undoubtedly entail what his own theology forecasts will be his eternal damnation. He knows, in short, that he is martyring himself to evil. Because he knows that in functioning as the representative of secular and temporal power, and in tempting Jesus with such power, he is equating himself with the devil.

Since The Brothers Karamazov was first published and translated, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor has seared itself into our collective consciousness as the definitive image and embodiment of the Inquisition. We may appreciate the old prelate's agonising dilemma. We may admire the complexity of his character. We may even respect him for the personal martyrdom he is prepared to incur, his self-condemnation to perdition on behalf of an institution he deems greater than himself. We may also respect his secular realism and the brutally cynical understanding behind it, the worldly wisdom that recognises the mechanics and dynamics of mundane power. Some of us may well wonder whether – were we in his position and entrusted with his responsibilities – we might be impelled to act as he does. But for all the tolerance, the appreciation, perhaps the sympathy and forgiveness we might muster for him, we cannot escape the awareness that he is, by any honest moral standards, intrinsically evil – and that the institution he represents is culpable of a monstrous hypocrisy.

How accurate, how representative, is Dostoevsky's portrait? To what extent does the figure in the parable fairly reflect the actual historical institution? And if the Inquisition, as personified by Dostoevsky's aged prelate, can indeed be equated with the devil, to what degree can that equation be extended to the Church as a whole?

For most people today, any mention of the Inquisition suggests the Inquisition in Spain. In seeking an institution that reflects the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, Dostoevsky, too, invokes the Inquisition in Spain. But the Inquisition, as it existed in Spain and Portugal, was unique to those countries – and was accountable, in fact, at least as much to the Crown as it was to the Church.

This is not to suggest that the Inquisition did not exist and operate elsewhere. It did. But the Papal or Roman Inquisition – as it was known at first informally, then officially – differed from the Inquisition of the Iberian peninsula. Unlike its Iberian counterparts, the Papal or Roman Inquisition was not accountable to any secular potentate. Operating throughout most of the rest of Europe, its allegiance was solely to the Church. Created in the early thirteenth century, it predated the Spanish Inquisition by some 250 years. It has also outlasted its Iberian counterparts. While the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal was extinct by the third decade of the nineteenth century, the Papal or Roman Inquisition survived. It exists and continues to function actively even today. It does so, however, under a new, less emotive and less stigmatised name. Under its present sanitised title of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith it still plays a salient role in the lives of millions of Catholics across the globe.

It would be a mistake, however, to identify the Inquisition with the Church as a whole. They are not the same institution. Important though the Inquisition has been, and continues to be, in the world of Roman Catholicism, it remains only one aspect of the Church. There have been, and there still are, many other aspects, not all of which warrant the same opprobrium. This book is about the Inquisition in its various forms; as it existed in the past and as it exists today. If it emerges in a dubious light, that light need not necessarily extend to the Church in general.

At its inception, the Inquisition was the product of a brutal, insensitive and ignorant world. Not surprisingly, it was itself in consequence brutal, insensitive and ignorant. It was no more so, however, than numerous other institutions of its time, both spiritual and temporal. As much as those other institutions, it is part of our collective heritage. We cannot, therefore, simply repudiate it and dismiss it. We must confront it, acknowledge it, try to understand it in all its excesses and prejudice, then integrate it in a new totality. Merely to wash our hands of it is tantamount to denying something in ourselves, in our evolution and development as a civilisation – a form, in effect, of self-mutilation. We cannot presume to pass judgement on the past by the criteria of contemporary political correctness. If we attempt to do so, the whole of the past will be found wanting. We will then be left solely with the present as a basis for our hierarchies of value; and whatever the values we embrace, few of us would be foolish enough to extol the present as any sort of ultimate ideal. Many of the past's worst excesses were caused by individuals acting with what, according to the knowledge and morality of their time, they deemed the best and worthiest of intentions. We would be rash to imagine our own worthy intentions as being infallible. We would be rash to fancy those intentions incapable of producing consequences as disastrous as those for which we condemn our predecessors.

The Inquisition – sometimes cynical and venal, sometimes maniacally fanatical in its supposed laudable intentions – may indeed have been as brutal as the age that spawned it. It must be repeated, however, that the Inquisition cannot be equated with the Church as a whole. And even during the periods of its most rabid ferocity, the Inquisition was obliged to contend with other, more humane faces of the Church – with the more enlightened of the monastic orders, with orders of friars such as the Franciscans, with thousands of individual priests, abbots, bishops and prelates of even higher rank who sincerely endeavoured to practise the virtues traditionally associated with Christianity. Nor must one forget the creative energy the Church inspired – in music, painting, sculpture and architecture – which represents a counterpoint to the Inquisition's bonfires and torture chambers.

During the latter third of the nineteenth century, the Church was compelled to relinquish the last vestiges of its former secular and political power. To compensate for this loss, it sought to consolidate its spiritual and psychological grip, to exercise a more rigorous control over the hearts and minds of the faithful. In consequence, the Papacy became increasingly centralised; and the Inquisition increasingly became the definitive voice of the Papacy. It is in this capacity that the Inquisition – ‘rebranded’ as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – functions today. Yet even now, the Inquisition does not have things entirely its own way. Indeed, its position is becoming ever more beleaguered as Catholics across the world acquire the knowledge, the sophistication and the courage to question the authority of its inflexible pronouncements.

There have certainly been – and, it might well be argued, still are – Inquisitors of whom Dostoevsky's parable offers an accurate portrait. In certain places and at certain periods, such individuals may indeed have been representative of the Inquisition as an institution. That does not, however, necessarily make them an indictment of the Christian doctrine they sought in their zeal to propagate. As for the Inquisition itself, readers of this book may well find it to have been an institution at once better and worse than the one depicted in Dostoevsky's parable.

A Fiery Zeal for the Faith

Inspired by Saint Paul's dextrous salesmanship, Christianity has always offered shortcuts to paradise. Thus did it recruit adherents, even before its emergence as a recognisable religion. Through martyrdom, through self-mortification, through meditation and contemplation, through solitude, through ritual, through penance, through communion, through the sacraments – through all those avenues, the doors to the Kingdom of Heaven were reputedly opened to believers. Some of these access routes may have incorporated elements of pathology, but they were for the most part peaceable. And even when Christians of the first millennium fought – as they did, for instance, under Charles Martel and then Charlemagne – they did so primarily in self-defence.

In 1095, however, a new route to God's domain was officially and publicly made available. On Tuesday, 27 November of that year, Pope Urban II climbed on to a platform erected in a field beyond the east gate of the French city of Clermont. From this eminence, he proceeded to preach a crusade, a war conducted on behalf of the Cross. In such a war, according to the Pope, one could obtain God's favour, and a seat at His throne, by killing.

Not, of course, that the Pope was indiscriminate. On the contrary, he exhorted Christians to desist from their deplorable, if long established, practice of killing each other. He urged them instead to direct their murderous energies towards the Islamic infidels, who occupied the sacred city of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, supposed site of Jesus's burial. In order to reclaim for Christendom the city and the tomb, European fighting men were encouraged to embark on a righteous war under the direct guidance of God.

But killing was only one component of an attractive ‘package deal’. In addition to a licence to kill, the good Christian could obtain remission from whatever time he might already have been sentenced to serve in Purgatory and from penances to be performed while still on earth. Should he perish in his holy endeavour, he was promised automatic absolution from all his sins. Should he survive, he would be protected against temporal punishment for any sins he might commit. Like the monk or the priest, the crusader was rendered independent of secular justice and subject only to spiritual jurisdiction. Were he to be found guilty of any crime whatever, he would simply have his crusader's red cross removed or confiscated and would then be ‘punished with the same leniency as ecclesiastics’. In the years to come, the same benefits were to be made available on a broader scale. In order to partake of them, one did not even have to embark on a crusade oneself. It was sufficient simply to donate money to a crusade.

Quite apart from the spiritual and moral benefits, there were numerous perks to be enjoyed by the crusader on his way through this world, even before he passed through the heavenly gates. He could lay claim to goods, lands, women and titles in the territory he conquered. He could amass as much booty and plunder as he wished. Whatever his status at home – as a landless younger son, for instance – he could establish himself as an august secular potentate, with a court, a harem and a substantial terrestrial estate. Such was the bounty to be reaped simply by embarking on crusade. It was a package whose allure and marketability might well be envied by the insurance salesmen of today.

Thus the crusades ensued. In 1099, the First Crusade established the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem – the first instance in history of what would be perceived centuries later as Western imperialism and colonialism. The Second Crusade occurred in 1147, the Third in 1189, the Fourth in 1202. Altogether, there were seven crusades. In between the full-scale campaigns organised and financed from Europe, periods of fighting between Christians and Muslims alternated with lulls of uneasy peace, during which trade – in ideas as well as goods – prospered.

‘Outremer’, the ‘land across the sea’ as it was also known, came to comprise a self-contained European principality in the heart of the Islamic Middle East, sustained and supported by European arms and manpower from almost every European kingdom. The city of Jerusalem itself was to be recaptured by the Saracens in 1187. As an outpost of European Christendom, however, Outremer would survive for another century. Only in May 1291 was Acre, the sole remaining fortress, overrun, its last tower collapsing in a cascade of stone, rubble and flame that buried both attackers and defenders.

Whether the insurance salesmen of the time were able to honour their spiritual guarantees – of estates in heaven and a seat by God's side – we do not, of course, know. Fulfilment of temporal promises is easier to monitor. Like a great many package deals and bargain schemes, this one proved a windfall for a few, a disappointment for most. A staggeringly large number of European nobles, knights, men-at-arms, merchants, entrepreneurs, craftsmen and others, including women and children, perished to no purpose whatever, often after bitter ordeals and in gruesome conditions, sometimes eaten by their starving companions. But there were enough who prospered, who obtained land, titles, booty, wealth and other tangible rewards; and they served to provide an inducement for others. If nothing else, one could acquire expertise in arms, in the techniques and technologies of warfare, in fighting and killing; and if the Holy Land failed to offer adequate recompense for a man's newly acquired aptitudes, he could always bring them back to Europe and turn them to account there.

Holy Fratricide

In 1208, while the crusades in the Holy Land were still in progress and the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem was fighting for survival, a new crusade was launched by Pope Innocent III. The enemy this time was not to be the Islamic infidel across the Mediterranean, but the adherents of a heresy in the south of France. The heretics in question were sometimes referred to as ‘Cathari’, denoting ‘the purified’ or ‘the perfected’. By others, including their enemies, they were called ‘Albigensian’ or ‘Albigenses’, a designation derived from an early centre for their activities, the southern French town of Albi.

The Cathars are much in vogue today, made topical by current interests in comparative mysticism and by general millennial fever. They have come to be mantled with the romanticism, the poetry and the sympathy often associated with tragically lost causes. But if they do not quite warrant the more extravagant idealisations recently conferred upon them, they must still rank among history's most poignant victims, and they deserve to be recognised as being among the earliest targets of organised and systematic genocide in the evolution of Western civilisation.

Although they might in a loose sense be called Christian (they did ascribe a theological significance to Jesus), the Cathars were adamantly opposed to Rome and the Roman Church. As later Protestant denominations were to do, they saw in Rome the embodiment of evil, the biblical ‘Whore of Babylon’. Among established Christian congregations at the time, they were closer in some of their teachings to the Byzantine or Greek Orthodox Church. In certain respects – their belief in reincarnation, for instance – they had elements in common with traditions from even further east, such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Ultimately, however, and despite the sympathy accorded them by recent commentators, the Cathars subscribed to a number of tenets which few people in the West today would find altogether congenial – and which more than a few might well find morbidly unbalanced. Essentially the Cathars were dualist. In other words, they regarded all material creation as intrinsically evil, the work of a lesser and inferior deity. All flesh, all matter, all substance was ultimately to be repudiated and transcended in favour of an exclusively spiritual reality; and it was only in the realm of the spirit that true divinity resided.

To this extent, the Cathars represented a late development of a tradition long established on the perimeters of the Christianised West. They had much in common with the heretical Bogomils of the Balkans, from whom a number of their beliefs derived. They echoed the older third-century heresy of Manichaeanism, promulgated by the teacher Mani in Persia. And they incorporated many elements of the Gnostic dualism which had flourished in Alexandria and elsewhere during the first two centuries of the Christian era, and which probably originated in ancient Zoroastrian thought.

Like the Bogomils, the Manichaeans and the Gnostic dualists, the Cathars emphasised the importance of direct contact with, and knowledge of, the divine. This contact was deemed to constitute ‘gnosis’, which means ‘knowledge’ – knowledge of a specifically sacred kind. And by insisting on such direct and first-hand experience of the sacred, the Cathars, like their predecessors, effectively preempted the need for a priesthood, for an ecclesiastical hierarchy. If the greatest virtue was one's own individual and experiential apprehension of the spiritual, the priest became superfluous as custodian and interpreter of spirituality; and theological dogma became irrelevant, a mere intellectual construct which issued from man's arrogant mind, not from any higher or numinous source. Such a position implied a flagrant challenge not only to the teachings, but to the very structure of the Roman Church.

Ultimately, of course, Christianity is itself implicitly dualist, extolling the spirit, repudiating the flesh and the whole of ‘unregenerate nature’. The Cathars preached what might be seen as an extreme form of Christian theology – or as an attempt to pursue Christian theology to its logical conclusions. They themselves saw their teachings as being closer to what Jesus himself and his apostles were alleged to have taught. Certainly it was closer than what was being promulgated by Rome. And in their simplicity and repudiation of worldly luxury, the Cathars were closer than the Roman priesthood to the lifestyle embraced by Jesus and his followers in the Gospels.

In practice, of course, the Cathars lived in the physical world and had perforce to avail themselves of its resources. Thus, for example, they were forbidden to do violence to the corporeal, to seek a shortcut out of the realm of matter by suicide. Like previous dualist sects, they, too, procreated and propagated, tilled the soil, practised crafts and trades and – despite their nominal pacifism – when necessary resorted to arms. Their rituals and training, however, taught them to regard such activity as a testing ground, an arena in which they could pit themselves against the challenge of evil and, if successful, overcome it. There must obviously have been ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Cathars, just as there have always been rigorous and lax adherents of any creed. But on the whole, and regardless of their beliefs, the Cathars were generally perceived by their contemporaries as conspicuously virtuous. In many respects they were regarded as the Quakers would later be regarded. Their qualities earned them considerable respect and made the Roman priesthood all the less attractive by comparison. According to a deposition now in the Vatican's library, a man described how, when he was young, two associates came up to him and said:

The good Christians have come into this land; they follow the path of Saint Peter, Saint Paul and the other Apostles; they follow the Lord; they do not lie; they do not do to others what they would not have others do to them.¹

The same witness also reports being told that the Cathars

are the only ones to walk in the ways of justice and truth which the Apostles followed. They do not lie. They do not take what belongs to others. Even if they found gold or silver lying in their path, they would not ‘lift’ it unless someone made them a present of it. Salvation is better achieved in the faith of these men called heretics than in any other faith.²

By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Catharism had begun threatening to supplant Catholicism in the south of France, and itinerant Cathar preachers, travelling on foot through the countryside, constantly garnered new converts. These preachers did not bully, did not extort, did not traffic in guilt or emotional blackmail, did not tyrannise or terrorise with dire threats of damnation, did not demand payment or bribes at every opportunity. They were noted, like the Quakers after them, for their ‘gentle persuasion’.

It is doubtful that all professed converts to Catharism became practising believers. Many, one suspects, took their new faith no more seriously than other Christians of the time took their Catholicism. But Catharism unquestionably exercised an allure. For knights, nobles, tradesmen, merchants and peasants in the south of France, it seemed to offer a congenial alternative to Rome – a flexibility, a tolerance, a generosity, an honesty not readily to be found in the established ecclesiastical hierarchy. More practically, it offered an escape from Rome's ubiquitous clergy, from clerical arrogance and from the abuses of a corrupt Church, whose extortions were becoming increasingly insufferable.

There is no question that the Church at the time was shamelessly corrupt. In the early thirteenth century, the Pope described his own priests as ‘worse than beasts wallowing in their dung’.³ According to the greatest German lyric poet of the Middle Ages, Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170–c. 1230):

How long wilt thou in slumber lie, O Lord?… Thy treasurer steals the wealth that thou hast stored. Thy ministers rob here and murder there, And o‘er thy sheep a wolf has shepherd's care.⁴

Bishops of the period were described by a contemporary as ‘fishers for money and not for souls, with a thousand frauds to empty the pockets of the poor’.⁵ The Papal legate in Germany complained that clergy in his jurisdiction revelled in luxury and gluttony, failed to observe fasts, hunted, hawked, gambled and engaged in commercial transactions. The opportunities for corruption were immense, and few priests made any serious effort to withstand temptation. Many demanded fees even for the performance of their official duties. Weddings and funerals could not proceed until money had been paid in advance. Communion would be refused until a donation was received. Last rites were even withheld from the dying until a sum of money had been extorted. The power to grant indulgences, remission for penances due in expiation of sin, raised immense additional revenue.

In the south of France, such corruption was particularly rife. There were churches, for example, in which no Mass had been said for more than thirty years. Many priests ignored their parishioners and conducted commercial businesses or maintained large estates. The Archbishop of Tours, a notorious homosexual who had been his predecessor's lover, demanded that the vacant bishopric of Orléans be conferred on his own lover. The Archbishop of Narbonne never actually visited the city or his diocese. Many other ecclesiastics feasted, took mistresses, travelled in opulent coaches, employed enormous retinues of servants and maintained lifestyles worthy of the highest nobility, while the souls entrusted to their care were tyrannised and squeezed into ever deeper squalor and poverty.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a substantial portion of the region's population, quite apart from any question of spiritual welfare, turned their backs on Rome and embraced Catharism. Nor is it surprising that Rome, confronted with such defections and a noticeable drop in revenues, began to feel progressively more threatened. Such anxiety was not unjustified. There was a very real prospect of Catharism displacing Catholicism as the predominant religion in the south of France – and from here it could easily spread elsewhere.

In November 1207, Pope Innocent III wrote to the King of France and a number of high-ranking French nobles, urging them to suppress the heretics in their domains by military force. In return, they would be granted rewards of confiscated property and the same indulgences as those conferred on crusaders in the Holy Land. These incentives do not seem to have provided much spur to action, especially in the south. The Count of Toulouse, for example, promised to exterminate all heretics in his fiefdom, but did nothing to implement his promise. Deeming his bloodlust insufficiently enthusiastic, the Papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, demanded a meeting with him. The meeting quickly degenerated into a furious row, with Pierre accusing the count of supporting the Cathars, and summarily excommunicating him. The count, who may himself have been a Cathar, responded predictably with threats of his own.

On the morning of 14 January 1208, as Pierre was preparing to make his way across the river Rhône, a knight in the count's service accosted him and stabbed him to death. The Pope was enraged and immediately issued a Bull to all nobles of southern France, accusing the count of instigating the murder and renewing his excommunication. The pontiff further demanded that the count be publicly condemned in all churches and authorised any Catholic to hunt him down, as well as to occupy and confiscate his lands.

Nor was that all. The Pope also wrote to the King of France demanding that a ‘sacred war’ be undertaken to exterminate the Cathar heretics, who were described as worse than the Muslim infidel. All who participated in this campaign were to be placed under the immediate protection of the Papacy. They were to be freed from the payment of all interest on their debts. They were to be exempt from the jurisdiction of secular courts. They were to be granted full absolution for their sins and vices, provided they served a minimum of forty days.

Thus did Pope Innocent III preach the undertaking subsequently known as the Albigensian Crusade. It was the first crusade ever to be launched in a Christian country, against other Christians (heretical though they might be). In addition to its explicit benefits, it offered, of course, an implicit licence to loot, pillage, plunder and expropriate property. And it offered other advantages as well. The crusader who took up arms against the Cathars did not, for example, have to cross the sea. He was spared the complications and expenses of transport. He was spared, too, the strain of campaigning in the desert and the oppressive climate of the Middle East. If things did not go well, he would not be left isolated in an alien and hostile milieu. On the contrary, he could make his way back to safety easily enough, or even disappear into the local populace.

By late June of 1209, an army of between fifteen and twenty thousand northern nobles, knights, men-at-arms, servitors, adventurers and camp followers had gathered on the Rhône. A minor French baron, Simon de Montfort, was to emerge as their military commander. Their spiritual leader was the Papal legate Arnald-Amaury – a fanatic, a Cistercian and, at the time, Abbot of Cîteaux.

By 22 July, the army had arrived at the strategic city of Béziers, whose population included a substantial number of Cathars. In the ensuing sack and pillage of the town, Arnald-Amaury was asked how to distinguish heretics from loyal and devout Catholics. The Papal legate replied with one of the most infamous statements in the whole of Church history: ‘Kill them all. God will recognise His own.’⁶ In the massacre that followed, some 15,000 men, women and children perished. With a triumphalism verging on ecstatic glee, Arnald-Amaury wrote to the Pope that ‘neither age, nor sex, nor status had been spared’.⁷

The sack of Béziers terrified the whole of southern France. Even as the crusaders attempted to regroup amid the smoking ruins, a deputation arrived from Narbonne, offering to surrender all their town's Cathars and Jews (who had also by now become ‘legitimate targets‘), as well as to supply the army with food and money. The inhabitants of other towns and villages abandoned their homes, fleeing to the mountains and forests. But the crusaders were not just intent on restoring the supremacy of Rome. They were also bent on complete extermination of all heretics, as well as on everything they could plunder. In consequence, the campaign dragged on.

On 15 August, after a short siege, Carcassonne surrendered and Simon de Montfort became Viscount of Carcassonne. Throughout the south, heretics were being burned by the score, and anyone else who attempted opposition was hanged. Nevertheless, the Cathars – supported by many southern nobles who sought to resist the depredations visited upon them – struck back, and many towns and castles changed hands repeatedly. The bitterness and the scale of the slaughter increased. In 1213, the King of Aragón attempted to intervene on behalf of the Cathars and southern nobles; but his army was defeated by the crusaders at the Battle of Muret, and he himself was killed. In the autumn of 1217, the crusaders descended on Toulouse, and a siege of nine months ensued. On 25 June 1218, Simon de Montfort himself perished at the city walls, struck by a chunk of masonry which a woman among the defenders had catapulted from a trebuchet.

With Simon's death, the crusaders’ army began to melt away and an uneasy peace descended on the ravaged region. It did not last long. In 1224, a new crusade against the south was launched, with King Louis VIII as military commander and the veteran fanatic Arnald-Amaury still presiding as ecclesiastical leader. Despite the French king's death in 1226, the campaign continued until, by 1229, the whole of the Languedoc had effectively been annexed by the French Crown. Further Cathar revolts against this new authority occurred in 1240 and 1242. On 16 March 1244, Montségur, the most important remaining Cathar stronghold, fell after a sustained siege, and more than 200 heretics were immolated on a pyre at the foot of the mountain on which the castle stood.

Quéribus, the last Cathar fortress, fell eleven years later, in 1255. Only then did organised Cathar resistance finally cease. By this time, great numbers of surviving heretics had fled to Catalonia and Lombardy, where they established new communities. Even in the south of France, however, Catharism did not altogether die out. Many heretics simply blended into the local population and continued to embrace their creed and practise their rituals clandestinely. They remained active in the region for at least another half century, and during the first two decades of the fourteenth century there was a Cathar resurgence around the village of Montaillou in the French Pyrenees. By this time, however, an institution as sinister as any crusading army had been established to deal with the heretics.

Origins of the Inquisition

While the military campaigns proceeded against Cathar fortresses and towns with large Cathar populations, another development was in progress. Though less obviously spectacular, less dramatic, less epic, it was to be of even greater importance to the history of Christendom, far transcending the immediate context of southern France in the thirteenth century. Its influence was to radiate out across the whole of the Christian world, to shape substantial aspects of Western history and culture, and to endure up to the present day.

In the summer of 1206, a year and a halfbefore the Albigensian Crusade was first preached, the Bishop of Osma in northeastern Spain was passing through southern France on his way back from a visit to Rome. He was accompanied in his journey by one Dominic de Guzmán, sub-prior to the monks attached to the cathedral at Osma. The son of a minor Castilian noble, Dominic was some thirty-six years of age at the time. He had trained for ten years at the University of Palencia and was noted for his rhetorical skills, his aptitude in debate and disputation. Three years earlier, in 1203, he had made his first journey to France, and the threat posed by the Cathar heresy there had spurred him to righteous indignation.

His indignation was intensified by his second visit. At Montpellier, he and his bishop met with the local Papal legates, who complained at length about the heresy ‘infecting’ the region. To combat the ‘infection’, Dominic and the bishop conceived an ambitious scheme. The bishop, however, was to die within the year, and the scheme was to be implemented by Dominic alone. If ‘credit’ is the appropriate word, he was to reap the credit for it.

The Cathars successfully recruited their congregations in large part through itinerant preachers, who commanded respect through their learning, eloquence and theological knowledge. But they also commanded respect through their comportment – their obvious poverty and simplicity, their integrity and probity, their rigorous adherence to the kind of austerity traditionally associated with Jesus himself and his disciples. The Church could not compete in these recognised ‘Christian’ virtues. The upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy led lives whose opulence, luxury, sybaritic self-indulgence and shameless extravagance hardly conformed to any established Christian precedent. Local priests, on the other hand, although poor enough, were also appallingly ignorant and uneducated, capable of little more than performing Mass, and certainly unequipped to engage in theological debate. Monks remained restricted to their monasteries, where they engaged primarily in manual labour, religious offices or meditation. The few of them who did possess any aptitude for scholarship had no opportunity to transmit it to the world beyond their cloisters.

Dominic undertook to rectify this situation and, as he conceived it, beat the Cathars at their own game. He proceeded to establish a proliferating network of itinerant monks, or friars – men who were not sequestered in abbey or monastery, but who wandered the roads and villages of the countryside. In contrast to Church dignitaries, Dominic's friars would travel barefoot and live simply and frugally, thus exemplifying the austerity and asceticism ascribed to the early Christians and the original Church fathers. What was more, Dominic's men would be educated, adept at scholarly debate, capable of engaging Cathar preachers or any others in ‘theological tournaments’. Their clothes might be plain and their feet bare, but they carried books with them. In the past, other clerical figures had advocated scholarship for its own sake, or for the preservation and monopolisation of knowledge by Rome. Dominic became the first individual in Church history to advocate scholarship as an integral aid and tool for preaching.

During the canonisation process following his death, depositions were taken and compiled from those who had known him personally or witnessed him in action. From these, something of a portrait emerges. Dominic is described as a slender man who prayed almost incessantly through the night, often weeping as he did so. During the day, he would organise public events which enabled him to preach against the Cathars, and he would often burst into tears during a sermon. He hurled himself into the ascetic life and self-mortification with zest. When praying, he would often flail himself with an iron chain, which he wore around his legs. Day and night he lived in the same garb, a rough and coarse hair-shirt which was heavily patched. He never slept in a bed, only on the ground or on a board.

At the same time, he was not without his own unique species of vanity. He seems to have been acutely conscious of his image as an ascetic, and was not above reinforcing it by some all-too-human, if rather unsaintly, prevarications and deceptions. On approaching an inn or roadside hostel where he proposed to spend the night, for example, he would pause first at a nearby spring or stream and drink his fill in private. Once inside the premises, he would augment his reputation for frugality and austerity by drinking almost nothing.

As early as 1206 – during his journey through France with the Bishop of Osma and two years before the Albigensian Crusade was first preached – Dominic had founded a hospice at Prouille. Among the Papal legates he came to know was Pierre de Castelnau, whose murder in 1208 was to precipitate the crusade. A speech at Prouille ascribed to Dominic shortly after the outbreak of hostilities offers some indication of his mentality:

There are few specific details about Dominic's personal activities during the campaign against the Cathars. It seems clear, however, that he moved with the spearhead of the crusaders' army, operating with a warrant from the equally fanatical Papal legate Arnald-Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, who ordered the extermination of the entire population of Béziers on the grounds that ‘God will recognise His own’. Even the most apologetic of Dominic's biographers concede that he was often required to pass judgement on suspected Cathars, to convert them to the Church or – if the attempt to do so failed – consign them to the flames. He witnessed the burning of numerous heretics, and appears to have accommodated his conscience easily enough to their deaths.

Not surprisingly, Dominic became a close personal friend, confidant and adviser of the crusade's ruthless military commander, Simon de Montfort, and accompanied him on his trail of carnage and destruction. During part of 1213, when Simon was in residence at Carcassonne, Dominic served as assistant to the city's bishop. He is also believed to have attended the army at the Battle of Muret, where his preaching helped inspire Simon's soldiery to their defeat of the King of Aragón. In 1214, Simon conferred on Dominic the income from at least one freshly conquered town. Dominic also baptised Simon's daughter and officiated at the marriage of his elder son to a granddaughter of the King of France.

By that time, Dominic's activities and his association with Simon had made him something of a celebrity among the crusaders. Thus, in 1214, wealthy Catholic citizens of Toulouse bestowed three houses (one of which still stands) on him and his embryonic order of friars. A year later, he abandoned his original intention of establishing his order at Carcassonne, apparently because of too much adverse, even overtly hostile criticism. Instead, he moved to Toulouse; and it was in the premises donated to him that the Dominican Order was founded, if only as yet unofficially.

Later in 1215, Dominic travelled to Rome and attended the Fourth Lateran Council. At this council, Pope Innocent III echoed Dominic's insistence on the importance of theological study in any preaching of the faith. The Pope also endorsed the official establishment of the Dominican Order, but died before this could be implemented. In December of 1216, the Dominicans were formally established by the new pontiff, Honorius III.

By 1217, the original Dominicans in Toulouse had provoked so much animosity that they were obliged to disperse. In doing so, they proceeded to install themselves in houses as far afield as Paris, Bologna and various localities in Spain. Teachers were now being actively recruited into the Order, and regulations were issued concerning study and the careful handling of books. Every Dominican house had its own teacher, at whose lectures attendance was compulsory. At the same time, the Dominicans pursued the activities that had so alienated them from the citizens of Carcassonne and then Toulouse – spying, denunciation and general intelligence gathering. In such activities as these, the Dominicans demonstrated their worth to the Church. Networks of itinerant friars, wandering the roads of the countryside, were uniquely suited to the gathering of information.

In 1221, Dominic died of a fever at Bologna. He was just over fifty years of age and seems to have burned himself out through sheer expenditure of fanatical energy. The work he had inaugurated, however, continued apace. At the time of his death, there were already some twenty Dominican houses in France and Spain. Members of the Order were known not only for preaching, but for the active and aggressive study of theology. By 1224, at least 120 Dominicans were studying theology in Paris. By 1227, the Pope was beginning to call on them for aid in ‘the business of faith’. On specific commission of the pontiff, they became increasingly engaged in the ferreting out and hunting down of heretics, and their zeal in such activities made them ever more indispensable to the Church.

In 1234, with what today might appear unseemly haste, Dominic was officially canonised. Few saints can have had so much blood on their hands. By the time Dominic ‘went to his reward’, whatever that may have been, his Order numbered nearly a hundred houses. The Dominicans functioned with

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE INQUISITION

THE INQUISITION

Contents

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Introduction

1

A Fiery Zeal for the Faith

Holy Fratricide

2

Origins of the Inquisition