[1] Aubri des Trois Fontaines, ad ann. 1239, Mon. Germ., SS., vol. xxiii, 944, 945.
Other acts of the Inquisition were no less odious. In 1280 the Consuls of Carcassonne complained to the Pope, the King of France, and the episcopal vicars of the diocese of the cruelty and injustice of Jean Galand in the use of torture. He had inscribed on the walls of the Inquisition these words: dominculas ad torquendum et cruciandum homines diversis generibus tormentorum. Some prisoners had been tortured on the rack, and most of them were so cruelly treated that they lost the use of their arms and legs, ad became altogether helpless. Some even died in great agony of their torments. The complaint continues in this tone, and mentions five or six times the great cruelty of the tortures inflicted.
Philip the Fair, who was noble-hearted occasionally, addressed a letter May 13, 1291, to the seneschal of Carcassonne in which he denounced the Inquisitors for their cruel torturing of innocent men, whereby the living and the dead were fraudulently convicted; and among other abuses he mentions particularly "tortures newly invented." Another letter of his (1301) addressed to Foulques de Saint-Georges, contained a similar denunciation.
In a bull intended for Cardinals Taillefer de la Chappelle and Bérenger de Frédol, March 13, 1306, Clement V mentions the complaints of the citizens of Carcassonne, Albi, and Cordes, regarding the cruelty practiced in the prisons of the Inquisition. Several of these unfortunates "were so weakened by the rigors of their imprisonment, the lack of food, and the severity of their tortures (sevitia tormentorum), that they died."
The facts in Savonarola's case are very hard to determine. The official account of his interrogatory declares that he was subjected to three and a half tratti di fune. This was a form of torture known as the strappado. The Signoria, in answer to the reproaches of Alexander VI at their tardiness, declared that they had to deal with a man of great endurance; that they had assiduously tortured him for many days with slender results.[1] Burchard, the papal prothonotary, states that he was put to the torture seven times. It made very little difference whether these tortures were inflicted per modum continuationis or per modum iterationis, as the casuist of the Inquisition put it. At any rate, it was a crying abuse.[2]
[1] Villari, La storia di Girolamo Savonarola, Firenze, 1887, vol. ii, p. 197.
[2] H. Lucas, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, a Biographical Study. London, Sands, 1905.
We may learn something of the brutality of the Inquisitors from the remorse felt by one of them. He had inflicted the torture of the burning coals upon a sorceress. The unfortunate woman died soon afterwards in prison as a result of her torments. The Inquisitor, knowing he had caused her death, wrote John XXII for dispensation from the irregularity he had thereby incurred.
But the greatest excesses of the Inquisition were due to the political schemes of sovereigns. Such instances were by no means rare. Hardly had the Inquisition been established, when Frederic II tried to use it for political purposes. He was anxious to put the prosecution for heresy in the hands of his royal officers, rather than in the hands of the bishops and the monks. When, therefore, in 1233, he boasted in a letter to Gregory IX that he had put to death a great number of heretics in his kingdom, the Pope answered that he was not at all deceived by this pretended zeal. He knew full well that the Emperor wished simply to get rid of his personal enemies, and that he had put to death many who were not heretics at all.
The personal interests of Philip the Fair were chiefly responsible for the trial and condemnation of the Templars. Clement V himself and the ecclesiastical judges were both unfortunately guilty of truckling in the whole affair. But their unjust condemnation was due chiefly to the king's desire to confiscate their great possessions.[1]