An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

Different methods of opposing heresy.

Internal reform.

87. There were several ways of opposing heresy. First, a reform of the character of the clergy and a suppression of the abuses in the Church would have removed a great cause of that discontent to which the writers of the time attributed the rapid growth of heresy. The attempt of Innocent III to improve the conditions in the Church by summoning a great council at Rome in 1215 failed, however, and, according to his successor, matters grew worse rather than better.

Extermination by the sword.

A second plan was to organize an expedition against the rebels and annihilate them by the sword. This policy was only possible if a large number of heretics could be found in a single district. In southern France there were many adherents of both the Albigenses and the Waldensians, especially in the county of Toulouse. At the beginning of the thirteenth century there was in this region an open contempt for the Church and a bold defense of heretical teachings even among the higher classes.

Albigensian crusade.

Against the people of this flourishing land Innocent III preached a crusade in 1208. An army under Simon de Montfort[152] marched from northern France into the doomed region and, after one of the most atrocious and bloody wars upon record, suppressed the heresy by wholesale slaughter. At the same time the war checked the civilization and destroyed the prosperity of the most enlightened portion of France.

The Inquisition.

The third and most permanent defense against heresy was the establishment, under the headship of the pope, of a system of tribunals designed to ferret out secret cases of unbelief and bring the offenders to punishment. These courts of experts, who devoted their whole attention to the discovery and conviction of heresy, constituted the Holy Inquisition, which gradually took form after the Albigensian crusade. We cannot stop to describe these courts, which became especially notorious in Spain some two centuries after their establishment. The unfairness of the trials and the cruel treatment to which those suspected of heresy were subjected, through long imprisonment or torture—inflicted with the hope of forcing them to confess their crime or implicate others—have rendered the name of the Inquisition infamous.

Without by any means attempting to defend the methods employed, it may be remarked that the inquisitors were often earnest and upright men whose feelings were not unlike those of a New England judge presiding at a witch trial in the seventeenth century. The methods of procedure of the Inquisition were not more cruel than those used in the secular courts of the period.