One of the most extraordinary cases in history is that of Gilles de Retz (or Rais), who in 1440 was accused of sacrilege, child murder, intercourse with demons, and other offences savouring of heresy. Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France, was a rich and powerful baron of Brittany, whose extravagance involved him in many difficulties. He was pious, as far as the observances of religion went, a man of unusual culture, with a passion for expensive books, paintings, music, the drama, and other forms of art. A dabbler in the occult, he sought perseveringly for the Philosopher’s Stone, by which he believed unlimited wealth would be gained, enabling him to keep up his lavish display and prodigality. But there was a very much darker side to his character. He was accustomed to employ agents, women as well as men, to entice children from their parents, by whom they were never seen again. These disappearances became so numerous that suspicion was aroused, and de Rais was at last arrested and tried before the Bishop of Nantes and the Vice-Inquisitor of the diocese. He was found guilty, but no sentence was pronounced. Immediately afterwards he was tried in a secular court, and sentenced to be hanged and burnt, with two servants who had been accomplices in his ghastly crimes. Making allowance for popular exaggeration, which attributed countless victims to him, there is reason to believe that 140 children were outraged and murdered, their bodies being thrown into pits. It is said that “so depraved became his appetite that he found his chief enjoyment in the death agonies of his victims, over whose sufferings he gloated as he skilfully mangled them and protracted their torture. When dead he would criticize their beauties with his confidential servitors, would compare one with another, and would kiss with rapture the heads which pleased him most.�[38] Yet this monster died with words of godly exhortation on his lips and confident of salvation. Under the threat of torture he freely confessed to crimes enough to put 10,000 men to death. He was taken into church and granted absolution, and the execution was carried out on the following day. The extraordinary wickedness of this man made a deep impression on the superstitious people of Brittany, where he became, in later ages, identified with the Bluebeard of Perrault’s nursery story, of which some writers maintain that he furnished the original, possibly because he is said to have had seven wives, though he possessed only one. It is something to the credit of the Holy Office that it had a share in bringing this fiend to justice.
The growing belief in witchcraft and demonology in the fifteenth century gave additional strength to the long arm of the Inquisition, for witches were of necessity heretics. They were at first treated with comparative mildness, the secular courts being apparently the first to inflict the penalty of burning in such cases. But the Inquisition soon equalled this severity, and gave the accused fewer chances of escape. Venice, however, was less energetic in this matter than most States, for in 1486 and 1521 it incurred the wrath of the Papacy by refusing to burn some witches condemned by the Inquisition. In 1474 several women were burnt in Piedmont for witchcraft, but two others, who were able to employ counsel of their own, had their case transferred to Turin, and presumably secured acquittals—a fact which seems to show the prudence of the Inquisitors in choosing the advocate for the defence, and excommunicating him if he was successful.
Of the Vaudois, or witches of Arras, several persons after being cruelly tortured, were burnt in 1460, a hermit being the first to suffer at Langres; and seven persons were put to death in one auto de fé in July of that year. Many of the leading and wealthiest men of Arras were arrested; confessions, some of them afterwards withdrawn, were wrung from them by torture, and twelve persons in all were burnt out of the thirty-four apprehended. The epidemic of credulity died away after a time, and the Inquisition stopped further prosecutions; but the prosperous city of Arras suffered enormous loss by the confiscations imposed and the panic which dislocated its trade. The return to sanity was chiefly due to the son of one of the victims succeeding in an appeal to the Parliament of Paris (previous appeals had been suppressed), which, after a brief inquiry lasting thirty years, issued a decree rehabilitating some of the accused, and caused the promoters of the prosecutions to be heavily fined. It was decreed that torture should be for the future prohibited. This is “probably the only case on record in which an Inquisitor was brought before a law court to answer for his official actions.�[39] Thus a healthy scepticism was beginning to enter the public mind. Several persons were charged before the Bishop of Amiens, who acquitted them; another was acquitted by the Archbishop of Besançon; while a third was tried by a tribunal consisting of the Archbishop of Rheims, the Bishop of Paris, the Inquisitor of France, and some theological experts. He was not only acquitted, but authorized to prosecute his accusers for reparation and damages. A poor man who went mad on the subject of witchcraft was burnt in August, 1460.
In its early stages the belief in witchcraft was artificially stimulated by the Church, and flourished in an atmosphere of ignorance and dread of the unseen. “Had the Church resolutely repressed the growing superstition in place of stimulating it with all the authority of the Holy See, infinite bloodshed and misery might have been spared to Christendom.â€�[40] Every Inquisitor was an agent for the spread of the belief, and the Church industriously taught it. An Italian Inquisitor in 1485 burnt forty-one people for witchcraft in one district in the Grisons—an exploit which gratified the historian Sprenger; and Innocent’s Bull of 1484 gave a perceptible impulse to the superstition, forty-eight persons being burnt in one small German town in five years by order of Sprenger and a fellow Inquisitor. To doubt the reality of the crime was to dispute the authority of the Church; to aid an accused person was to impede the Inquisition. A woman charged with witchcraft had little chance of escape, for if her defence made a favourable impression on the judges they also were considered to have been bewitched, and few of them cared to run that risk. Confessions made under severe torture were, of course, numerous, and were afterwards used as proving the reality of the crime. The small amount of incredulity which existed vanished before Sprenger’s Malleus Malficarum, which Lea terms “the most portentous monument of superstition which the world has produced.â€� With perfect good faith and absolute belief in the truth of demoniacal possession, Sprenger brought forward an overwhelming mass of evidence, which no one in those times was able to rebut or dared to dispute. This terrible book, which remained the recognized authority on the subject for more than a century, immensely stimulated a belief which, as Lea remarks, is “ a process of purely natural evolution from the principles which the Church had succeeded in establishing.â€�[41] For 200 years the Church had done all it could to promote this belief. Pope Calixtus, in 1457, ordered the repression of witchcraft, and towards the end of the century Alexander VI urged the Inquisitor of Lombardy to show greater zeal in his work. Early in the sixteenth century Julius II defined the powers of the Inquisitors, and issued to their helpers indulgences similar to those given to Crusaders. Thus persecution produced its natural effect in a great revival of superstition in Northern Italy. The Inquisitors burnt 140 persons at Brescia in 1510, and 300 at Como four years later.
The Witch Sabbaths were a well-known institution in the Middle Ages, and it is reported that more than 25,000 persons were sometimes present at these weird gatherings. In view of the danger incurred, such popularity seems unaccountable enough to suggest that the narratives spring from sheer delusion. In the district of Valcamonica an Inquisitor burnt seventy witches and sent as many more to prison, while those suspected or accused numbered 5,000, about one-fourth of the population of the valleys. The Venetian Senate thought this was going too far, but its protest only brought strong remonstrances from the Pope, Leo X, and fresh orders for persecution. The Senate replied by a dignified and rational document, laying it down that the accused were to have a fair trial with legal safeguards, that torture must be discontinued, that the Inquisition’s expenses were to be kept within moderate bounds, that greed for money was not to be the reason for prosecution, and that the excesses alleged against Inquisitors would have to be investigated. This document, “a monument of considerate wisdom and common-sense,â€� was ignored, and Christendom abandoned itself to a senseless, delirious orgy of superstition and cruelty. Between the madness of the Catholic and the madness of the Protestant there was little to choose. On one point at least they were in accord, and it is significant that Calvin used the arguments of the Inquisitors to justify persecution. In Geneva 500 persons are said to have been burnt within three months, at Toulouse 400 on a single occasion (some say 1,500), at Bamberg 600, at Wurzburg 900 in one year—all in the sixteenth century. The Senate of Savoy condemned 800 at one time. That a cold spring in 1586 was caused by witchcraft was proved by the confessions of the guilty parties, and for this crime 118 women and two men were burnt by the Archbishop of Treves. This city seems to have exceeded all others in its atrocities. According to Lecky, 7,000 persons were burnt there for sorcery, but he does not state over what period these figures extend. The Inquisitor Paramo, who wrote in the sixteenth century, boasts that since 1404 the Holy Office burnt as many as 30,000 persons, who, if let alone, would have “brought the whole world to destruction.â€�[42] This Paramo defended the secrecy of the Inquisition on the ground that God was the first Inquisitor, and that in secret Adam and Eve had been tried.
Intellect and Faith.
A religion which imagined that it was the repository of a full and final revelation, that it possessed the keys of the invisible world, and which regarded every doubt as a heresy born of the devil, naturally became in practice a vast machine for persecution. When mental activity was thus a crime, and any attempt to increase knowledge an act of rebellion against God, it was clear that human progress was brought to a standstill. No one can tell what progress would have been made had the Inquisition not existed; that it kept Europe for hundreds of years in mental torpor, and did what it could to make the reign of stupidity eternal, does not admit of question. What the magnificent brain of Roger Bacon could have achieved is matter for speculation. It has been disputed, but seems to be true, that he was imprisoned for his advanced opinions, and died a captive; but, however that may be, it is certain that the Church succeeded in preventing mankind from benefiting by his researches. Anything like modern Freethought was out of the question, but distinct approaches to it were made in the twelfth century by Averrhoes, whose particular tenets were that matter is uncreated and eternal, that the soul dies with the body, only collective humanity being immortal, and that all religions are of human origin and, though useful incentives to virtue, contain only relative truth. These doctrines, which were looked upon as deadly heresies, surprisingly anticipate some of the speculations of our own times. It is remarkable that under the rigorous conditions which prevailed Averrhoism should have spread so rapidly as it did, but it could have been only among the scholarly few; and in the thirteenth century, which was in certain respects more advanced than the fifteenth, these opinions made some slight impression on the popular mind. Had the impression been deeper, the results might have been in some respects more disastrous. The general ignorance was so great that a premature abandonment of the orthodox faith might have been made the occasion of even more flagrant moral licence than actually existed, and so have strengthened the hands of the persecutors. A system which held all religions to be untrue, especially the religion of the Christians, who daily ate their God, would naturally enough be thought to emanate from the bottomless pit, and it is an astonishing circumstance that for a long time the Inquisition left Averrhoism alone. Herman of Ryswick, the most famous successor of Peter of Abano, after being sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, continued to propagate his errors, and in 1512 was burnt at the Hague by order of the Inquisition. It is evident that at times considerable freedom of speech existed, or Laurentius Valla would scarcely have been able, in the middle of the fifteenth century, to assail the “Donation of Constantine,â€� or to declare that the Papacy should be deprived of its temporal power. Valla got off cheaply by a simple declaration that he believed as Mother Church believed, though Mother Church, he added, knew nothing about it. Ultimately this restless disputant obtained a clerical sinecure in Rome, and died in peace. Several other unbelievers escaped the customary doom of mental independence. It is one of the anomalies of ecclesiastical history prior to the Reformation that, while the most trifling variations from orthodoxy were relentlessly crushed, a philosophical humanism hardly distinguishable from downright Atheism was fashionable among the intellectual classes, even those in clerical orders, and frequently went unpunished. The writings of the famous Raymond Lully—perhaps the most voluminous author on record, for he is credited with 321 volumes—brought him into conflict with the Inquisition; and long after his death in 1315 Eymeric, the Inquisitor of Aragon, sought to have his memory condemned. This was partially done in 1620, though the main object of Lully had been to suppress the heresy of Averrhoism, and many miracles wrought by his remains had evidenced his saintliness. Not many figures of the Middle Ages have had the doubtful honour of being both heretic and saint.
In 1331 Pope John XXII had imprisoned an English priest who maintained that the saints after death are at once admitted to the presence of God. This doctrine, known as the “Beatific Vision,� had aroused the Pope’s anger, but he was subsequently compelled by the strength of the general opinion in its favour to accept it, after a controversy which nearly cost him his tiara. Years of bitter dispute ensued on a subject about which no human being knew anything whatever, and it even became a question of grave political consequence, for the monarchs of the time ventured to differ from the Papal opinion. The Inquisition espoused the popular view, and made questions on the subject an important part of the interrogatories addressed to the unlucky persons brought before its tribunals.
About the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a purely dogmatic development, a further mass of superstition spread, and gave rise to bitter controversies, the Franciscans and Dominicans quarrelling so fiercely that in 1482 popular tumults broke out in Italy on this mysterious topic, of which everybody was supposed to know something. The theory that the Virgin Mary never from the moment of her conception shared the sinful tendencies of ordinary mortals was something of a novelty, and the Dominicans who rejected it had tradition in their favour, but they were overborne by the increasing power of the new superstition. An Italian priest who in 1504 maintained that Christ was conceived in the Virgin’s heart was seized by the Inquisition, and had a narrow escape from death by fire. A special appearance of the Virgin herself, who expressed her annoyance at the doctrine, caused an immense sensation until it was discovered that the manifestation was a trick got up by the Dominicans, and four of the culprits were burnt. Not until 1854, after five centuries of struggle, was the doctrine officially proclaimed as a formal act of faith, when the Dominicans obediently began to find reasons in its favour. It would seem to be a logical sequence that the reputed father of the Virgin was no more concerned in her birth than Joseph was supposed to be in that of Jesus, but for maintaining this thesis a man was condemned so recently as 1876.