INOWRAZLAW, the Polish form of the German Jung-Breslau, by which the place was formerly known, a town in the Prussian province of Posen, situated on an eminence in the most fertile part of the province, 21 m. S.W. of Thorn. Pop. (1900) 26,141. Iron-founding, the manufacture of machinery and chemicals, and an active trade in cattle and country produce are carried on. In the vicinity are important salt works and a sulphur mine, and since 1876 a brine bath has been within the town. Inowrazlaw is mentioned as early as 1185, and in 1772 it passed to Prussia.
INQUEST (O. Fr. enqueste, modern enquête, from Lat. inquisitum, inquirere, to inquire), an inquiry, particularly a formal legal inquiry into facts. The word is now chiefly confined to the inquiry held by a coroner and jury into the causes of certain deaths, in matters of treasure trove, and, in the city of London, in cases of fires (see [Coroner]). Formerly the term was applied to many formal and official inquiries for fixing prices, &c.
INQUISITION, THE (Lat. inquisitio, an inquiry),
the name given to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction dealing both in the middle ages and in modern times with the detection and punishment of heretics and all persons guilty of any Punishment of heresy in the Roman Empire. offence against Catholic orthodoxy. It is incorrect to say that the Inquisition made its appearance in the 13th century complete in all its principles and organs. It was the result of, or rather one step in, a process of evolution, the beginnings of which are to be traced back to the origins of Christianity. St Paul (1 Tim. i. 20) “delivered unto Satan” Hymenaeus and Alexander, “that they might learn not to blaspheme.” The penalty of death by stoning inflicted by the book of Deuteronomy upon those who deserted the true faith (Deut. xiii. 6-9, xvii. 1-6) is thus reduced to a purely spiritual excommunication. During the first three centuries of the Church there is no trace of any persecution, and the earlier Fathers, especially Origen and Lactantius, reject the idea of it. Constantine, by the edict of Milan (313), inaugurated an era of official tolerance, but from the time of Valentinian I. and Theodosius I. onwards, laws against heretics began to appear, and increased with astonishing regularity and rapidity. We can count sixty-eight distributed over fifty-two years; heretics are subjected to exile or confiscation, disqualified from inheriting property, and even, in the case of a few groups of Manichaeans and Donatists, condemned to death; but it should be noticed that these penalties apply only to the outward manifestations of heresy, and not, as in the middle Opinions of the Fathers. ages, to crimes of conscience. Within the Church, St Optatus alone (De schismate Donatistarum, lib. iii. cap. iii.) approved of this violent repression of the Donatist heresy; St Augustine only admitted a temperata severitas, such as scourging, fines or exile, and at the end of the 4th century the condemnation of the Spanish heretic Priscillian, who was put to death in 385 by order of the emperor Maximus, gave rise to a keen controversy. St Martin of Tours, St Ambrose and St Leo vigorously attacked the Spanish bishops who had obtained the condemnation of Priscillian. St John Chrysostom considered that a heretic should be deprived of the liberty of speech and that assemblies organized by heretics should be dissolved, but declared that “to put a heretic to death would be to introduce upon earth an inexpiable crime.” From the 6th to the 9th century the heterodox, with the In the early Middle Ages. exception of the Manichaean sects in certain places, were hardly subjected to persecution. They were, moreover, rare and generally isolated, for groups of sectaries only began to appear to any extent at the time of the earliest appearances of Catharism. However, at the end of the 10th century, the disciples of Vilgard, a heretic of Ravenna, were destroyed in Italy and Sardinia, according to Glaber, ferro et incendio, probably by assimilation to the Manichaeans. Perhaps this was the precedent for the punishment of the thirteen Cathari who were burnt at Orleans in 1022 by order of King Robert, a sentence which has been commonly quoted as the first action of the “secular arm” (or lay power) against heresy in the West during the middle ages. However that may be, after 1022 there were numerous cases of the execution of heretics, either by burning or strangling, in France, Italy, the Empire and England. Up till about 1200 it is not quite easy to determine what part was taken by the Church and its bishops and doctors in this series of executions. At Orleans the people, supported by the Crown, were responsible for the death of the heretics; the historians give only the faintest indications of any direct intervention of the clergy, except perhaps for the examination of doctrine. At Goslar (1051-1052) the proceedings were the same. At Asti (1034) the bishop’s name appears side by side with those of the other lords who attacked the Cathari, but it seems clear that it was not he who had the chief voice in their execution; at Milan, it was again the civil magistrates, and this time against the wish of the archbishop—who gave the heretics the choice between the adoration of the cross and death. At Soissons (1114) the mob, distrusting the weakness of the clergy, took advantage of their bishop’s absence to burn heretics at the stake. It was also the mob who, infuriated at seeing him destroy and burn crosses, burnt the heresiarch Peter of Bruis (c. 1140). At Liége (1144) the bishop saved from the flames certain persons whom the faithful were attempting to burn. At Cologne (1163) the archbishop was less successful, and the mob put the heretics to death without even a trial. The condemnation of Arnold of Brescia was entirely political, though he was denounced as a heretic to the secular arm by Bernard of Clairvaux, and his execution was the act of the prefect of Rome (1155). At Vézelay, on the contrary (1167), the heretics were burnt after ecclesiastical judgment had been pronounced by the abbot and several bishops. From 1183 to 1206 Hugh, bishop of Auxerre, took upon himself the discretionary power of exiling, dispossessing or burning heretics, while about the same time William of the White Hands, archbishop of Reims, in concert with Philip, count of Flanders, stamped out heresy from his diocese by fire. There was a similar unanimity between the lay and ecclesiastical authorities in the famous condemnation of the disciples of Amalric of Bena, who were burnt at Paris in 1209 by order of Philip Augustus after an ecclesiastical inquiry and judgment. The theory in these matters was at first as uncertain as the practice; Conflicting views as to the punishment of heresy. in the 11th century one bishop only, Theodwin of Liége (d. 1075), affirms the necessity for the punishment of heretics by the secular arm (1050). His predecessor, Wazo, bishop of Liége from 1041 to 1044, had expressly condemned any capital punishment and advised the bishop of Chalons to resort to peaceful conversion. In the 12th century Peter the Cantor[1] protested against the death penalty, admitting at the most imprisonment. It was imprisonment again, or exile, but not death, which the German abbot Gerhoh of Reichersperg (1093-1169) demanded in the case of Arnold of Brescia, and in dealing with the heretics of Cologne, St Bernard, who cannot be accused of leniency where heterodoxy was concerned, recommended pacific refutation, followed by excommunication or prison, but never the death penalty (see [Bernard, St], of Clairvaux). In the councils, too, The Church Councils.
Influence of the Canon Law. it is clear that the appeal to the secular arm was equally guarded: at Reims (1049) excommunication alone is decreed against heretics; and when, as at Toulouse (1119) and the Lateran council (1139), it is laid down that heretics, in addition to excommunication, should be dealt with per potestates exteras, or when, as at the council of Reims (1148), the secular princes are forbidden to support or harbour heretics, there is never any suggestion of capital punishment. But it must be noticed that from the opening years of the 12th century date the beginnings of a decided evolution in the canon law, continuing up to the time of Innocent III., which substituted for arbitrary decisions according to circumstances an organized and particularized legislation, in which judgment was given secundum canonicas et legitimas sanctiones. Anselm of Lucca and the Panormia attributed to Ivo of Chartres reproduced word for word under the rubric De edicto imperatorum in dampnationem hoereticorum, law 5 of the title De hereticis of Justinian’s code, which pronounces the sentence of death against the Manichaeans; and we should remember that the Cathari, and in general all heretics in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries were considered by contemporary theologians as Manichaeans. Gratian in the Decretum proclaims the views of St Augustine (exile and fines). Certain of his commentators (2a pars Caus. xxiii.), and notably Rufinus Johannes Teutonicus, and the The Council of Tours, 1163.
Definition of the procedure under Lucius III. and the Emperor Frederick I. anonymous glossator (in Uguccio’s Great Summa of the Decretum) declare that impenitent heretics may, or even should, be punished by death. As early as 1163, the council of Tours suggested to the ecclesiastical authorities definite penalties to be inflicted on heretics, namely, imprisonment and loss of all their property. Pope Alexander III., who had attended the council of Tours of 1163, renewed at the Lateran council (1179) the decisions which had already been made with regard to the heterodox in the south of France, and at Verona in 1184 Pope Lucius III., in concert with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, took still more severe measures: obstinate heretics were to be excommunicated, and then handed over to the secular arm, which would inflict a suitable penalty. The emperor, on his side, laid them under the imperial ban (exile, confiscation, demolition of their houses, infamia, loss of civil rights, disqualification from public offices, &c.). The usage, then, was already quite clear; The death penalty.
Innocent III. but the death penalty had not as yet been demanded or inflicted. Possibly it was Count Raymond V. of Toulouse, in whose territories heretics abounded, who in 1194 enacted a law threatening them with the penalty of death; but the authenticity of this act has been questioned. It was more probably Peter II. of Aragon who was the first to decree, in 1197, the punishment of death by burning against the heretics who should not have left his kingdom within a given time. But it was Innocent III. who gave the most powerful impetus to the anti-heretical movement in the secular world by his frequent exhortations (beginning in 1198) to the secular princes (letters of March 25th, 1199, and September 22nd, 1207). As a jurist he henceforward assimilated the crime of high treason against God to that of high treason against temporal rulers, and admitted all the terrible consequences of this assimilation.
It is therefore incorrect to believe that the Inquisition arose out of, and at the time of, the crusade against the Albigenses. These executions en masse certainly created a definitive precedent for violent repression, but there was still Albigensian Crusade. No regular Inquisition. no regular organization: the council of Toulouse, held in November 1229 by the Roman legate after the treaty of peace, attempted to organize one, and constituted itself the tribunal. But the procedure was still uncertain; in the north, from 1200 to 1222, at Paris (execution of the disciples of Amalric of Bena), at Strassburg, Cambrai, Troyes and Besançon executions took place, after trials in which the bishops were the judges, the exercise of the secular power being based on vague phrases in the decrees of Louis VIII. (that heretics be punished animadversione debita), or in those of Louis IX., ordering his baillis or barons to do to them quod debebunt. The emperor Frederick II. defined his jurisprudence The Emperor Frederick II.
Gregory IX. creates the monastic Inquisition.
The Dominicans. more clearly: from 1220 to 1239, supported by Pope Honorius III., and above all by Gregory IX., he established against the heretics of the Empire in general a legislation in which the penalties of death, banishment and confiscation of property were formulated so clearly as to be henceforth incontestable. Gregory IX. felt his influence, and also that of the Dominican Guala, bishop of Brescia, who had subjected his episcopal town to the full rigour of the imperial laws. The pope no longer hesitated as to the principle or the degree of repression; but introduced new methods of inquiry and judgment: he created out of the material furnished him by the mendicant orders, and especially the Dominicans, who were more disciplined than the rest and better theologians, the monastic inquisition, which was more elastic, more constant in its activities and more numerous than the inquisition by legate, and better disciplined than the episcopal inquisition. In November 1232 the Dominican Alberic went round Lombardy with the title of Inquisitor haereticae pravitatis. In 1231 a similar commission was given to the Dominicans of Friesach and to the terrible Conrad of Marburg, whose zeal in Germany even exceeded the pope’s wishes. In 1233 Gregory IX. addressed a letter to the bishops in the south of France, in which he announced his intention of employing the preaching friars in future for the discovery and repression of heresy.
The inquisition was now regularly instituted, but its jurisprudence was elaborated by successive additions or limitations, by the force of custom and the detailed prescriptions Beginnings of the Inquisition. added by the papal constitutions. The pope’s commissioners “in the matter of heresy” at first travelled from place to place. On arriving in a district they addressed its inhabitants, called upon them to confess, if they were heretics, or to denounce those whom they knew to be heretics: a “time of grace” was opened, during which those who freely confessed were dispensed from all penalties, or only given a secret and very light penance; while those whose heresy had been openly manifested were exempted from the penalties of death and perpetual imprisonment. But this time could not exceed one month. After that began the inquisition. As soon as their mission was at an end, and heresy was considered to be stamped out, the inquisitors left the country. Later, Inquisitorial districts. inquisitorial districts were formed. The seat of the Inquisition in each district was the monastery of the order (Dominican or Franciscan) to which the inquisitors for that part belonged. There was never any special court or prison: the murus (prison) was lent to the Inquisition by the ecclesiastical or secular authorities. The maintenance of the prisoners and the duty of providing the prison fell in principle upon the bishops (council of Toulouse, 1229), but they tried to evade it. The kings of France, and in The Inquisitors and their auxiliaries. particular Louis VIII., granted subsidies to the inquisitors. For each district the inquisitors were chosen by the provincials of their order, approved or rejected by the pope, and removable by him only. Their discretionary powers were absolute. They conducted their interrogations before two persons (laymen or ecclesiastics) and only pronounced their sentence after consultation with leading men in the district (communicato bonorum virorum consilio). This was the only protection for the accused. It was in vain that the civil lawyers tried to prove that the secular authorities had a right to see the documents bearing on the case; the Inquisition always succeeded in setting aside these claims. The share taken in the proceedings by the bishops, the accused or their representatives, though admitted in principle, was as a rule merely illusory. The Inquisition had in addition to these boni viri certain other lay assistant officials, its sworn notaries, messengers and familiars, all of whom were closely bound to it.
Bernard Guy (Bernardus Guidonis),[2] one of the earliest and most complete exponents of the theory of the Inquisition, admits distinctly that in its procedure multa sunt specialia. The procedure was secret and in the Procedure of the Inquisition. highest degree arbitrary, proceeding sine strepitu et figura judicii, its object being to ascertain not so much particular offences as tendencies: the murderers of the inquisitor Peter Martyr[3] were tried, not as assassins, but as guilty of heresy and adversaries of the Inquisition; and on the other hand, external acts of piety and verbal professions of faith were held of no value. Moreover the Inquisition was not bound by the ordinary rules of procedure in its inquiries: the accused was surprised by a sudden summons, and as a rule imprisoned on suspicion. All the accused were presumed to be guilty, the judge being at the same time the accuser. Absence was naturally considered as contumacy, and only increased the presumption of guilt by seeming to admit it. The accused had the right to demand a written account of the offences attributed to him (capitula accusationis), but the names of the witnesses were withheld from him (Innocent IV.; bulls Cum negocium and Licet sicut accepimus), he did not know who had denounced him, nor what weight was attached by the judges to the denunciations made against him. The utmost that was allowed him was the unsatisfactory privilege of the recusationes divinatrices, i.e. at his first examination he was asked for the names of any enemies of whom he knew, and the causes of their enmity. Heretics or persons deprived of civil rights (infames) were admitted as witnesses in cases of heresy. Women, children or slaves could be witnesses for the prosecution, but not for the defence, and cases are even to be found in which the witnesses were only ten years of age. Langhino Ugolini states that a witness who should retract his hostile evidence should be punished for false witness, but that his evidence should be retained, and have its full effect on the sentence. No witness might refuse to give evidence, under pain of being considered guilty of heresy. The prosecution went on in the utmost secrecy. The accused swore that he would tell the whole truth, and was bound to denounce all those who were partners of his heresy, or whom he knew or suspected to be heretics. If he confessed, and denounced his accomplices, relatives or friends, he was “reconciled” with the Church, and had to suffer only the humiliating penalties prescribed by the canon law. If further examination proved necessary, it was continued by various methods. Bernardus Guidonis enumerates Use of torture. many ways of obtaining confessions, sometimes by means of moral subterfuges, but sometimes also by a process of weakening the physical strength. And as a last expedient torture was resorted to. The Church was originally opposed to torture, and the canon law did not admit confessions extorted by that means; but by the bull Ad extirpanda (1252) Innocent IV. approved its use for the discovery of heresy, and Urban IV. confirmed this usage, which had its origin in secular legislation (cf. the Veronese Code of 1228, and Sicilian Constitution of Frederick II. in 1231). In 1312 excessive cruelty had to be suppressed by the council of Vienna. Canonically the torture could only be applied once, but it might be “continued.” The next step was the torture of witnesses, a practice which was left to the discretion of the inquisitors. Moreover, all confessions or depositions extorted in the torture-chamber had subsequently to be “freely” confirmed. The confession was always considered as voluntary. The procedure was of course not litigious; any lawyer defending the accused would have been held guilty of heresy. The inquiry might last a long time, for it was interrupted or resumed according to the discretion of the judges, who disposed matters so as to obtain as many confessions or denunciations as possible. After the different phases of the examination, the accused were divided into two categories: (1) those who had confessed and abjured, (2) those who had not confessed and were consequently convicted of heresy. There was a third class, by no means the least numerous, namely, those who having previously confessed and abjured had relapsed into error. Next came the moment of the sentence: “there was never any case of an acquittal pure and simple” (H. C. Lea). The formula for full and complete acquittal given by Bernardus Guidonis in his Practica, should, he says, never or very rarely be employed. The sentences were solemnly pronounced on a Sunday, in a church or public place, Punishments. in the presence of the inquisitors, their auxiliaries, the bishops, the secular magistrates and the people. This was the sermo generalis (see [Auto da fé]). The accused who had confessed were reconciled, and the penalties were then pronounced; these were, in order of severity, penances, fasting, prayers, pilgrimages (Palestine, St James of Compostella, Canterbury, &c.), public scourging, the compulsory wearing on the breast or back of crosses of yellow felt sewn on to the clothes or sometimes of tongues of red, letters, &c. These were the poenae confusibiles (humiliating). The inquisitors eventually acquired the right of inflicting fines at discretion. In 1244 and 1251 Innocent IV. reproved them for their exactions. All these minor penalties could be commuted for payments in money in the same way as absolution from the crusader’s vow, and the council of Vienna tried to put an end to these extortions. Beyond these minor penalties came the severer ones of imprisonment for a period of time, perpetual imprisonment and imprisonment of various degrees of severity (murus largus, murus strictus vel strictissimus). The murus strictus consisted in the deepest dungeon, with single or double fetters, and “the bread and water of affliction”; but the severity of the prison régime varied very much. The murus largus, especially for a rich prisoner, amounted to a fairly mild imprisonment, but the mortality among those confined in the murus strictus became so high that Clement V. ordered an inquiry to be made into the prison régime in Languedoc, in spite of Bernard Guy’s protest against the investigation as likely to diminish the prestige of the inquisitors. After the sentences had been pronounced, the obstinate heretics and renegades were for the last time called upon to submit and to confess and abjure. If they consented, they were received as penitents, and condemned on the spot to perpetual imprisonment; if they did not consent, they were handed over to the secular arm. When the heretic was handed over to the secular arm, the agents of the secular power were recommended to punish him debita animadversione, and the form of recommending him “Handing over to the secular arm.” to mercy was gone through. But, as M. Vacandard says, “If the secular judges had thought fit to take this formula literally, they would soon have been brought back to a recognition of the true state of affairs by excommunication.” In effect, handing over to the secular arm was equivalent to a sentence of death, and of death by fire. The Dominican Jacob Sprenger, provincial of his order in Germany (1494) and inquisitor, does not hesitate to speak of the victims quas incinerari fecimus (“whom we [the inquisitors] caused to be burnt to ashes”). But we must accept the conclusions of H. C. Lea and Vacandard that comparatively few people suffered at the stake in the medieval Inquisition. Between 1308 and 1323, Bernard Guy, who cannot be accused of inactivity, only handed over to the secular arm 42 persons, out of 930 who were convicted of heresy.
From the point of view of jurisprudence of the Inquisition, the confiscation of the condemned man’s property by the ecclesiastical and secular powers is only the accompaniment Punishment by confiscation of goods. to the more severe penalties of perpetual imprisonment or death; but from the point of view of its economic history the importance of the confiscation is supreme. The practice originated in the Roman law, and all secular princes had already, in their own interest, recognized it as lawful (Frederick Barbarossa, Decree of Verona; Louis VIII., ordinances of 1226, 1229; Louis IX., ordinance of 1234; Raymond VII. of Toulouse, &c.). In the kingdom of France there was a special official, the procureur des encours (confiscation in the matter of heresy), whose duty it was to collect the personal property of the heretics, and to incorporate their landed estates in the royal domain; in Languedoc crying Abuse of the system. abuses arose, especially under the reign of Alphonse of Poitiers. Soon the papacy managed to gain a share of the spoils, even outside the states of the Church, as is shown by the bulls ad extirpanda of Innocent IV. and Alexander IV., and henceforward the inquisitors had, in varying proportions, a direct interest in these spoliations. In Spain this division only applied to the property of the clergy and vassals of the Church, but in France, Italy and Germany, the property of all those convicted of heresy was shared between the lay and ecclesiastical authorities. Venice alone decided that all the receipts of the Holy Office should be handed over in full to the state. Clement V., in his attempted reform and regularization of inquisitorial procedure, endeavoured to reduce the confiscations to a fairly reasonable minimum, and in 1337-1338 a series of papal inquiries was held into this financial aspect of the matter. The Assize of Clarendon, the Constitutions of Frederick II. (1232) and of Count Raymond of Toulouse (1234) had also come to a joint decision with the councils on this question. King Charles V. of France prevailed upon the papacy to abolish this regulation (1378). Confiscation was, indeed, most profitable to the secular princes, and there is no doubt that the hope of considerable gain was what induced many Economic and political importance of the system. princes to uphold the inquisitorial administration, especially in the days of the decay of faith. The resistance of the south of France to the Capetian monarchs was to a large extent broken owing to the decimation of the bourgeoisie by the Inquisition and their impoverishment by the extortions of the encours. The same was the case in certain of the Italian republics; while in districts such as the north of France, where heretics were both poor and few and far between, the Inquisition did not easily take root, nor did it prove very profitable. These confiscations, the importance of which in the political and economic history of the middle ages was first shown fully by H. C. Lea, were a constant source of uncertainty in transactions of all kinds; there was, for instance, always a risk in entering into a contract in a place where the existence of heretics was suspected, since any contract entered into with a heretic was void in itself. Nor was there any more security in the transmission of inheritances for posthumous trials were frequent; the Liber sententiarum inquisitionis of Bernardus Guidonis (1307-1323) records sentences pronounced after death against 89 persons during a period of 15 years. But not only was their property confiscated and their heirs disinherited; they were subject to still further penalties. Frederick II. extended to heresy the application of the Roman law disqualifying from holding office, and even included under its operation the children and grandchildren of the guilty man. Alexander IV. and Boniface VIII. lightened the severity of this law, and removed certain disqualifications, notably in the case of ecclesiastical offices and property.