[3] Eymeric, Directorium, 3a pars, p. 481.
Torture was not to be employed until the judge had been convinced that gentle means were of no avail.[1] Even in the torture chamber, while the prisoner was being stripped of his garments and was being bound, the Inquisitor kept urging him to confess his guilt. On his refusal, the vexatio began with slight tortures. If these proved ineffectual, others were applied with gradually increased severity; at the very beginning, the victim was shown all the various instruments of torture, in order that the mere sight of them might terrify him into yielding.[2]
[1] A grave suspicion against the prisoner was required before he could be tortured.
[2] Eymeric, Directorium, 3a pars, p. 481, col. 1.
The Inquisitors realized so well that such forced confessions were valueless, that they required the prisoner to confirm them after he had left the torture chamber. The torture was not to exceed a half hour. "Usually," writes Lea, "the procedure appears to be that the torture was continued until the accuser signified his readiness to confess, when he was unbound and carried into another room where his confession was made. If, however, the confession was extracted during the torture, it was read over subsequently to the prisoner, and he was asked if it were true…. In any case, the record was carefully made that the confession was free and spontaneous, without the pressure of force or fear."[1]
[1] Lea, op. cit., vol. i. p. 427.
"It is a noteworthy fact, however, that in the fragmentary documents of inquisitorial proceedings which have reached us, the references to torture are singularly few…. In the six hundred and thirty-six sentences borne upon the register of Toulouse from 1309 to 1323, the only allusion to torture is in the recital of the case of Calvarie, but there are numerous instances in which the information wrung from the convicts who had no hope of escape, could scarce have been procured in any other manner. Bernard Gui, who conducted the Inquisition of Toulouse during this period, has too emphatically expressed his sense of the utility of torture on both principals and witnesses for us to doubt his readiness in its employment."[1]
[1] Lea, op. cit., p. 424.
Besides, the investigation which Clement V ordered into the iniquities of the Inquisition of Carcassonne, proves clearly that the accused were frequently subjected to torture.[1] That we rarely find reference to torture in the records of the Inquisition need not surprise us. For in the beginning, torture was inflicted by civil executioners outside of the tribunal of the Inquisition; and even later on, when the Inquisitors were allowed to take part in it, it was considered merely a means of making the prisoner declare his willingness to confess afterwards. A confession made under torture had no force in law; the second confession only was considered valid. That is why it alone, as a rule, is recorded.
[1] Clement V required the consent of the Inquisitor and the local Bishop before a heretic could be tortured, vel tormentis exponere illis. Decretal Multorum querela, in Eymeric, Directorium, 2a pars, p. 112.