Obviously, the idea of punishment as a penance did not apply to those who refused to repent. Therefore the Inquisition itself, being an institution of the Church, could not punish such cases. But it was the root of the whole matter that heresy was a crime not only against the Church but against the State. It was the business of the Inquisition merely to determine whether suspects were or were not heretics. If, after conviction, one repented, the State originally had nothing to say. The Inquisition, acting for the Church, would then impose penance, as we have just seen, as upon any other repentant sinner. With the obstinate heretic the Church could do nothing. Therefore such prisoners were “relaxed,” that is turned over to the secular authorities, with the formula that the justice of God could do nothing more for them, inasmuch as they persisted in rebellion against it, and that, therefore, only the justice of man had power over them. In many of the later sentences the formula goes on, in accordance with the canonical sanctions, to ask the State to impose only such punishment as will not endanger life or limb, or cause the shedding of blood. As a matter of law, the coercive power was recognized as belonging only to the State.
The State, on the other hand, recognized the exclusive power of the Church to determine what was heresy and who was heretical, recognized the inquisitors as experts in such matters, accepted their verdict without question, and promptly proceeded to pass and execute sentence. It was a part of the formula of “relaxation” that heretics should be punished “as they deserved (animadversio debita).” This elastic phrase could be variously interpreted in accordance with the different local laws. Always it meant confiscation of the goods of the condemned. The Popes, from Alexander III, held that to confiscation banishment should be added. Confiscation was part of the penalty for treason which the Holy Roman Empire had copied word for word out of the old Roman law. Therefore, says Pope Innocent III, heretics deserve to have their goods confiscated even more than traitors, inasmuch as they betray the majesty of God Himself who is obviously greater than all earthly sovereigns. The great Pope mentions the fact that, under the Roman law, traitors lost their lives as well as their property, and that heresy involved treason against God, the King of Kings, but did not follow out his premises to their logical conclusion. Not until years after his death is there even a hint that the Church as a whole desired the death of a sinner, even when he was a heretic.
This comparative mildness was never universal in fact and gradually disappeared even from theory. We have noted, in the second chapter, the curious spectacle presented by the eleventh and twelfth century, on the one hand many of the higher clergy mindful of the Christian tradition of mercy, and on the other the laity and lower clergy insisting upon death for the impenitent heretic, and generally death by fire. We have now to note the slow progress by which lynch law became written law. Even before the Albigensian Crusade there had been at least two instances of burning alive formally set down as the penalty for heresy. One was the law enacted in 1194 by Count Raymond V, of Toulouse, at the very storm centre of the trouble. The other was the law of Pedro II, in nearby Aragon in 1197, against the Waldenses. Under Raymond V’s law, the Toulousains later claimed that they had “burnt many.” But even if their claim be accepted as true (whereas it seems doubtful) at any rate the practice was not continued. Pedro of Aragon decreed burning alive only for those Waldensians and other heretics who should fail to leave his dominions by a certain day, so that his reference to the stake was hardly more than a threat intended to enforce the real penalty, that of banishment. De Montfort himself, at the parliament he held in Pamiers in 1212 to consolidate his position in the south, decreed no more than banishment and confiscation as penalties for heresy. More important than any previous law is one enacted for Lombardy in 1224 by the Emperor Frederick II, by which heretics were either to be burnt or to have their tongues cut out, in the discretion of the judge.
It is quite in keeping with what we know of the subject in general that the first ecclesiastical recognition of death as the normal legal penalty for heresy should be an indirect one. A council sitting in Toulouse in 1229, the year of Raymond VII’s final surrender, after remarking as usual that “due punishment” is to be inflicted upon heretics, casually goes on to say that “... heretics, who, through fear of death or any other cause except their own free will, return to the faith, are to be imprisoned by the bishop of the city to do penance, that they may not corrupt others” (Vancandard). After this, examples multiply, under the influence of Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX. It so happens, however, that not until 1252 did any Pope formally insist upon the death penalty for heresy throughout Latin Christendom. This was the act of Innocent IV in the same bull “Ad Extirpanda” which authorized torture. Thenceforward the Inquisition was virtually complete.
The institution spread rapidly throughout Europe. England was an exception, for curiously enough in view of the inveterate eccentricity of the English mind, there were no heretics there until much later. There was not even a provision for burning heretics until, in 1401, Parliament passed the statute “de heretico comburendo.” It is less surprising to find such regions as far off as Scandinavia without heretics, and consequently without inquisitors. In the mountains of Bosnia, Catharistic Manicheanism became the State religion and persisted until the coming of the Turks, when the heretics welcomed the newcomers and went over to Islam. Bosnia had been a backwater in Europe ever since the Roman roads from the Adriatic to the Danube decayed in the Dark Ages—even to-day it has many Mohammedans.
Outside of Bosnia, there was no place in Latin Christendom that harboured heretics where the inquisitors did not make an end of them. The Manicheans were completely uprooted, although their extraordinary hunger for martyrdom would have made them completely victorious if the crude folly of to-day on the subject of “making martyrs” had truth in it. In Languedoc they lingered until the fourteenth century. The Waldensians were reduced so low that the confiscations of their property were not even enough to pay the expenses of the Inquisitors, let alone any surplus for the State. For all practical purposes they too were wiped out.
Resistance never amounted to more than the murder of an inquisitor here and there—which affected the activities of the institution not at all, for new recruits filled every gap. The Inquisition thus completed the task begun by the Albigensian Crusade of preserving the moral unity of Europe. Seriously threatened in the early thirteenth century, that moral unity remained unbroken until the great cataclysm of the sixteenth.
The question posed by the Inquisition to the student is twofold. First, was the moral unity of Europe worth preserving or no, and second, were or were not the means by which the Inquisition helped to preserve it worse than the disease in the long run? Naturally, if it is decided that the end sought was of little value, then it is probable that anyone so deciding will also disapprove of the means used to attain it. But the contrary does not follow. It is by no means impossible that anyone experienced in life may decide in any given case that, although the end proposed was good, nevertheless the means by which it was attained were evil.
On the first point, the answer is prompt. Emphatically, the mediæval world was worth preserving. In fact, with Periclean Greece, the Empire under the Antonines, and possibly the world of the Victorian age, the thirteenth century marks one of the culminating points of human history. It is true that the word “mediæval” is still popularly used in derision. But, on the other hand, such usage is recognized as hasty and superficial by virtually all educated men acquainted with the period. The Middle Ages attract us by the excellence of their arts and handicrafts, by the vividness and picturesqueness of their life, their spontaneity of feeling, their absence of hypocrisy, the order and clarity of their intellectual life, above all by their freedom from serious internal strain. From our world of alternatively drab and garish machine-made ugliness, haphazard and inconsequent thinking, and torment of chronic industrial civil war, we look back upon them with regret. In the literature of the thirteenth century we see the European mind happy and creative ... as it is to-day uncertain and near despair. We see our typical institutions, such as representative government, sounder and more vigorous than they are to-day. Such eager worshippers of the spirit of our own time as H. G. Wells and Henry Adams, to name only two at random, bear their testimony. The confession of the volatile socialist Wells is interesting. In 1914 he casually wrote of “... the finished and enriched normal social life of Western European in the Middle Ages....” I have taken Wells as important merely because (with his human sensitive-plate of a mind capable of so many discordant impressions) he puts the thing so neatly. With such men as Chesterton and Belloc in England and Cram in America the appreciation of mediævalism is the very core of their thinking. It would be easy to weary the reader with examples. The Middle Ages draw us if we but look at them.
The weakness of the Middle Ages lay in four things. First, there was insufficient organization of public powers and of communications, a subject discussed elsewhere in this book. Second, there was very little “natural science,” i.e., detailed knowledge of the properties of the material world. Thus it was ignorance of medicine and sanitation that brought about the great fourteenth century calamity of pestilence, the “Black Death” which gave the mediæval system a shock from which it never fully recovered. Third, there was cruelty, and fourth, there was the contrast between the vast assumptions made by the Church and the shortcomings and weaknesses of man himself—layman and churchman alike. Both cruelty and the claims of the Church are intimately connected with our subject.