Eymeric specifies ten different methods employed by heretics to trick inquisitors. These are not of any real importance, nor do they leave us in the least convinced that any such ruses were actually employed. They are obviously based upon an intimate acquaintance with priestly guile rather than upon any experience of the craftiness of actual heretics. They may, in short, be said to be just such ruses as the inquisitors themselves might employ if they found the tables turned upon themselves and the heretic sitting in the seat of justice.
He urges the inquisitors to meet guile with guile: “ut clavus clavo retundatur.” He justifies recourse to hypocrisy and even to falsehood, telling the inquisitors that thus they will be in a position to say: “Cum essem astutus dolo vos cepi,” and to the ten evasive methods which he asserts are adopted by heretics, he bids their paternities oppose ten specified rules by which to capture and entrap them.
These rules and Pegna’s commentaries upon them are worth attention for the sake of the intimate glimpse they afford us of the mediæval ecclesiastical mind.
The accused is to be compelled by repeated examinations to return clear and precise answers to the questions asked.
If the accused heretic is resolved not to confess his fault, the inquisitor should address him with great sweetness (blande et mansuete), giving him to understand that all is already known to the court, speaking as follows:
“Look now, I pity you who are so deluded in your credulity, and whose soul is being lost; you are at fault, but the greater fault lies with him who has instructed you in these things. Do not, then, take the sin of others upon yourself, and do not make yourself out a master in matters in which you have been no more than a pupil. Confess the truth to me, because, as you see, I already know the whole affair. And so that you may not lose your reputation, and that I may shortly liberate and pardon you and you may go your ways home, tell me who has led you—you who knew no evil—into this error.”
By similar kind words (bona verba), always imperturbable (sine turbatione), let the inquisitor proceed, assuming the main fact to be true and confining his questions to the circumstances.
Pegna adds another formula, which he says was employed by Fr. Ivonet. Thus:
“Do not fear to confess all. You will have thought they were good men who taught you so-and-so; you lent ear to them freely in that belief, etc.... You have behaved with credulous simplicity towards people whom you believed good and of whom you knew no evil. It might very well happen to much wiser men than you to be so mistaken.”[101]
Thus was the wretch coaxed to self-betrayal, caressed and stroked by the velvet glove that muffled and dissembled the iron hand within.