The Church must receive whatever credit may be due for its kindly intentions, though they sometimes worked out strangely. Almost always the heretic came off disastrously, but there were episodes of mildness for which it is not easy to account. When, at the end of the thirteenth century, an Inquisitor was murdered, the man who hired the assassins was merely ordered to present himself to the Pope and receive penance. Even his neglect to do this was visited by nothing worse than a mild order to arrest him if he could be found. We shall meet with more of this unaccountable clemency.
The light penances imposed by the Inquisition were Prayers, Churchgoing, Discipline, Fasting, Pilgrimages, and Fines. As punishments these penances do not sound excessive, but, as interpreted by the elastic discretion of the Holy Office, they could make a penitent extremely ill at ease, and when several were combined in one sentence life became a heavy burden. During a long pilgrimage a man’s family might starve. In 1322 pilgrimages were imposed on three men who nearly twenty years before had seen some Waldenses in their father’s house without knowing that they were heretics. Fines naturally gave opportunities for extortion which only exceptional men were able to refrain from using. As already mentioned, the Inquisition appropriated the property of all persons sentenced for heresy. A man who died in 1252, before completing a five years’ pilgrimage, left an estate of twenty livres, and the Inquisitors promptly claimed the whole of this immense sum. Bail was simply another word for bribery, and extortion became a system exploited to the utmost by men who were sleeplessly on the look-out for plunder.
The second grade of penance was the compulsory wearing of yellow crosses, sewn on to the clothing as an indication that the wearer had been condemned for heresy. This badge, which corresponded to the san benito commonly used in Spain, was so great a disgrace that efforts were constantly made to avoid it; but though, for special reasons, permission was sometimes given to dispense with it, usually it was insisted upon, and escape from the vigilant eye of the Inquisition was impossible.
Penance became far more severe in the third grade, which was imprisonment for life. A comprehensive penalty of this character was incurred by every one who did not come forward within the time specified by the Edict of Grace, confess his own sins, and denounce those of others. The Inquisition of Toulouse, between 1246 and 1248, records 192 cases, of which 127 were of perpetual imprisonment, 6 for ten years, 16 for an indefinite term in the discretion of the Church, and the remaining 43 were of absentees. The Council of Narbonne, in 1244, made the sentence invariably for life. The confinement was solitary; the diet consisted of bread and water, and in the harsher sentence the penitent was chained by the feet, sometimes by the hands as well, and, in extreme cases, to the wall of a dark, noisome dungeon. It is not surprising that prisoners did not attain a green old age.
The Inquisition reserved the right, in the exercise of its discretion, to mitigate or re-impose its penalties. This right was frequently used, especially in regard to the wearing of crosses; but seldom did the prisoner find his punishment any the lighter. If he had the unusual good fortune to be released, he might, for the slightest lapse, be punished again, and this time without mercy and without the formality of a fresh trial. Every victim relinquished by the Holy Office was a ticket-of-leave man, liable at any moment to utter ruin. He could never feel sure that something might not be discovered, perhaps a youthful indiscretion of his grandfather’s, which would require his appearance before the dread Tribunal, or that for some unguarded act or expression he might not bring himself under the most effective of all excommunications—that of the Holy Inquisition.
Confiscation.
By decree of Innocent III in 1215 and the Bull of Innocent IV in 1252, confiscation of the property of heretics and their children was made a necessary penalty, and all temporal rulers were required to enforce it. Of the proceeds one-third was to go to the State, one-third to the Papacy, and one-third to the Inquisition. Each party, as a matter of course, tried to cheat the others; but the wily Inquisitors almost invariably obtained the lion’s share of the spoil, which was, nominally at any rate, devoted to the furtherance of their own method of propagating the Gospel. Between them the victim had as much chance of escape as a mouse in a trap. The Church had some difficulty in getting confiscation sanctioned by the State, but it succeeded.
The heretic was not permitted to dispose of his property, but if he did succeed in doing so the transaction was void; and, even though the property had passed through several hands, the last possessor was cheerfully deprived of it. As debts due to heretics and securities for loans by them were also void, business became almost impossible. Numerous complaints of the Inquisition’s rapacity show that no possessor of property felt safe. It is not easy to understand how society could continue to hold together when a stimulus was thus deliberately given to fraud, jealousy, quarrelling, litigation, commercial anarchy, and domestic misery. Possibly religious zeal was the original motive of the folly, but when persecution is made a paying concern the reins are given to greed and injustice of every conceivable kind.
Venice made a stand against ecclesiastical corruption, and in 1289 enacted that the whole proceeds of confiscation should go to the State; and in the latter part of the fifteenth century Piedmont adopted a similar course, allowing the Inquisition only its expenses.
A further abuse was that, from the beginning of its career, the Inquisition frequently made confiscations before the accused had been convicted, sometimes before he confessed. In 1319 sentence was passed in southern France on a man who had been charged in 1284, yet in 1301 the officials were quarrelling over his estate. These legal robberies were carried out with relentless severity, everything being seized to the last penny. On arrest for suspicion of heresy, the Holy Office took possession of a person’s property, promising that if the charge was not proven (a rare event) some of it would be returned for the support of his family. In the meantime the family were turned into the streets to starve, or to live on such charity as they could get. The case of one secret heretic, Gherardo, a rich noble of Florence and consul of the city, was a bad one. Between sixty and seventy years after his death the Inquisitor of the city started a successful persecution against his memory, and eleven of his descendants, who were not heretics, were included in the condemnation, and presumably reduced to penury.