250. Theory of persecution. The public opinion of the ruling classes of Europe demanded that heresy should be exterminated at whatever cost, and yet with the suppression of open resistance the desired end seemed as far off as ever.... Trained experts were needed, whose sole business it should be to unearth the offenders and extort a confession of their guilt.... Thus to the public of the thirteenth century the organization of the Inquisition and its commitment to the children of Saint Dominic and Saint Francis appeared a perfectly natural or rather inevitable development arising from the admitted necessities of the time and the instrumentalities at hand.[568]

251. Duties laid on the civil authority. The secular authority accepted the functions allotted to it out of the spirit of the age. To fall into disfavor at Rome was, for a prince, to risk the loyalty of his subjects, with whom it was a point of high importance to belong to a "Christian" state, that is, one on good terms with the church. "We are not to imagine, however, from these reduplicated commands that the secular power, as a rule, showed itself in the slightest degree disinclined to perform the duty. The teachings of the church had made too profound an impression for any doubt in the premises to exist. As has been seen above, the laws of all the states of Europe prescribed concremation as the appropriate penalty for heresy, and even the free commonwealths of Italy recognized the Inquisition as the judge whose sentences were to be blindly executed."[569]

252. "The practice of burning the heretic alive was thus not the creature of positive law, but arose generally and spontaneously, and its adoption by the legislator was only the recognition of a popular custom."[570] "Confession of heresy became a matter of vital importance, and no effort was deemed too great, no means too repulsive, to secure it. This became the center of the inquisitorial process, and it is deserving of detailed consideration, not only because it formed the basis of procedure in the Holy Office, but also because of the vast and deplorable influence which it exercised for five centuries on the whole judicial system of continental Europe."[571] In the second half of the twelfth century burning had become, by custom, the usual punishment for heretics. The purpose was universally regarded as right and pious, and the means was thought wise and correct. Therefore the whole procedure went forward on a course of direct and consistent development.[572] It was first decreed in positive law in the code of Pedro II, of Aragon, in 1197. In the laws of Frederick II, in 1224, the punishment was death by burning or loss of the tongue. In 1231, in Sicily, burning was made absolute. In 1238 the stake was made the law of the empire against heresy. In 1270 Louis IX made it the law of France.[573] "Dominic and Francis, Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas, Innocent III and St. Louis, were types, in their several ways, of which humanity, in any age, might well feel proud, and yet they were as unsparing of the heretic as Ezzelino da Romano was of his enemies. With such men it was not hope of gain or lust of blood or pride of opinion or wanton exercise of power, but sense of duty, and they but represented public opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century."[574] That is to say, that the virtues of the individuals were overruled by the vices of the mores of the age.

[253.] The shares of the church and the masses. The steps of the process by which the Christian church was made an organization to enforce uniformity of confession by bodily pain, that is, in fact, by murder, demand careful attention. Back of all the popular demands for persecution there was the teaching of the church in antecedent periods and a crude popular logic of detestation and destruction. Then the outbreak of persecution appears as a popular act with lynching executions. At this point the church, by virtue of its teaching and leading functions, ought to have repressed excessive zeal and guided the popular frenzy. It did not do so. It took the lead of the popular movement and encouraged it. This was its greatest crime, but it must be fairly understood that it acted with public opinion and was fully supported by the masses and by the culture classes. The Inquisition was not unpopular and was not disapproved. It was thought to be the proper and necessary means to deal with heresy, just as we now think police courts necessary to deal with petty crimes (see sec. 247). The system of persecution went on to extravagances. The masses disapproved. They could not be held to any responsibility. They turned against the ecclesiastical authorities and threw all the blame on them.

254. The church uses the power for selfish aggrandizement. Things now advanced, therefore, to the second stage. The church authorities accepted the executive duty in respect to the defense of the church and society against heresy. The popular idea was that heresy would bring down the wrath of God on all Christendom, or on the whole of the small group in which it occurred.[575] The church authorities formulated doctrines, planned programmes, and appointed administrative officers. To them the commission laid upon them meant more social power, and they turned it into a measure of selfish aggrandizement. This alienated first all competent judges, and at last the masses.

255. The Inquisition took shape slowly. The Inquisition took shape very gradually through the first half of the thirteenth century. "In the proceedings of this period the rudimentary character of the Inquisition is evident." The mendicant orders furnished the first agents. They were admired and honored by the masses. Gregory IX, in his first bulls (1233), making the Dominicans the official inquisitors, seemed to be uncertain as to the probable attitude which the bishops would adopt to this invasion of their jurisdiction, "while the character of his instructions shows that he had no conception of what the innovation was to lead to." "As yet there was no idea of superseding the episcopal functions." In fact, the mendicant orders supplanted the military orders as papal militia, just as they were later supplanted by the Jesuits, and they very greatly assisted the reorganization of the church into an absolute monarchy under the pope.[576] Frederick II died in 1250. He was the first modern man on a throne. He had aimed to rule all Christendom by despotic methods which he perhaps learned from the Mohammedans. He would have made a monarchy if he had succeeded, which would have anticipated that of Charles V or Philip II by three hundred years.[577] It was the mores of the age which decided between him and the pope. His court was a center of Arabic culture and of religious indifference. There were eunuchs, a harem, astrologers from Bagdad, and Jews richly pensioned by the emperor to translate Arabic works. "All these things were transmuted, in popular belief, into relations with Ashtaroth and Beelzebub."[578] The saying that there had been three great impostors—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—was attributed to him, and it appears that his contemporaries generally believed that he first used the statement. The only thing which he left behind was the code of laws which he had made, by way of concession and attempt to buy peace from the popes, by which all civil authorities were made constables and hangmen of the church, to which all dissenters were sacrificed.

256. Formative legislation. In 1252 Innocent IV issued a bull "which should establish machinery for systematic persecution as an integral part of the social edifice in every city and every state." He authorized the torture of witnesses. "These provisions are not the wild imaginings of a nightmare, but sober, matter-of-fact legislation, shrewdly and carefully devised to accomplish a settled policy, and it affords us a valuable insight into the public opinion of the day to find that there was no effective resistance to its acceptance." There is evidence, twenty years later, that the Inquisition "had not been universally accepted with alacrity, but the few instances which we find recorded of refusal show how generally it was submitted to." The institution was in full vigor in Italy, but not beyond the Alps, "yet this was scarce necessary so long as public law and the conservative spirit of the ruling class everywhere rendered it the highest duty of the citizen of every degree to aid in every way the business of the inquisitor, and pious monarchs hastened to enforce the obligations of their subjects." "It was not the fault of the church if a bold monarch like Philip the Fair occasionally ventured to incur divine vengeance by protecting his subjects."[579]

257. Dungeons. It is evident that the lust of blood was educated into the mores by public executions with torture, by obscene adjuncts, by inhuman sports, and by public shows. Cruelty and inhumanity in civil cases were as great as under the Inquisition. A person apprehended on any charge was imprisoned in a frightful dungeon, damp, infested by rats and vermin, generally in chains, and he was often forced to lie in a constrained position. This was a part of the policy which prevailed in the administration of justice. It was intended to break the spirit and courage of the accused. Confinement was solitary, and various circumstances besides pain and hunger were brought to bear on the imagination. It was the rule that every accused person must fast for eight or ten hours before torture. The dungeons were often ingenious means of torture. There was one in the Bastille at Paris, the floor of which was conical, with the point downwards so that it was impossible to sit, or lie, or stand in it. In another, in the Châtelet, the floor was all the time covered by water, in which the prisoners must stand.[580]

258. The yellow crosses. One of the penalties inflicted by the Inquisition causes astonishment and at the same time shows how thoroughly the mass of the population were on the side of the Inquisition until the fifteenth century. Persons convicted of heresy, but coerced to penitence, were forced to wear crosses of cloth, generally yellow, three spans long and two wide, sewed on their garments. Thus the symbol of Christian devotion was turned into a badge of shame.[581] It pointed out the wearer as an outcast. However, it depended on the mass of the population to say what it should mean. How did they treat persons thus marked? They boycotted them. The wearers of crosses could not find employment, or human intercourse, or husbands, or wives. They were actually unable to get the relations with other men and women which are essential to existence.[582] If the people had pitied them, or sympathized with them, they would have shown it by kindness, in spite of ecclesiastical orders. In fact, the cross was a badge of infamy and was enforced as such by public action. "The unfortunate penitent was exposed to the ridicule and derision of all whom he met, and was heavily handicapped in every effort to earn a livelihood."[583] It is evident that the way in which the general public treated the cross-wearers can alone account for the weight which those under this penalty attached to it. "It was always considered very shameful." At Augsburg, in 1393, for seventy gold gulden, the wearing of crosses could be escaped.[584]

259. Confiscation. Another penalty of frightful effect was confiscation. As soon as a man was arrested for heresy, his property was sequestrated and inventoried. His family was thrown on the street. It was out of the Roman law that "pope and king drew the weapons which rendered the pursuit of heresy attractive and profitable." "The church cannot escape the responsibility of naturalizing this penalty in European law as a punishment for spiritual transgressions."[585] "It would be difficult to estimate the amount of human misery arising from this source alone." "The threats of coercion which at first were necessary to induce the temporal princes to confiscate the property of their heretical subjects soon became superfluous, and history has few displays of man's eagerness to profit by his fellow's misfortunes more deplorable than that of the vultures which followed in the wake of the Inquisition to batten on the ruin which it wrought." In Italy the confiscated property was divided into three parts by the pope's order. One part went to the Inquisition for its expenses, one part to the papal camera, and one part to the civil authority. Later, the civil authority generally got nothing. About 1335 a Franciscan bishop of Silva "reproached those of his brethren who act as inquisitors with their abuse of the funds accruing to the Holy Office.... The inquisitors monopolized the whole, spent it on themselves, or enriched their kindred at their pleasure." "Avarice joined hands with fanaticism, and between them they supplied motive power for a hundred years of fierce, unremitting, unrelenting persecution which, in the end, accomplished its main purpose." The confiscations did not concern the populace. They furnished the motive of the great to support the administration of the Inquisition.[586] "Persecution, as a steady and continuous policy, rested, after all, upon confiscation. It was this which supplied the fuel to keep up the fires of zeal, and when it was lacking the business of defending the faith languished lamentably. When katharism disappeared under the brilliant aggressiveness of Bernard Gui, the culminating point of the Inquisition was passed, and thenceforth it steadily declined, although still there were occasional confiscated estates over which king, prelate, and noble quarreled for some years to come."[587] "The earnest endeavors of the inquisitors were directed much more to obtaining conversions with confiscations and betrayal of friends than to provoking martyrdoms.... The really effective weapons of the Holy Office, the real curses with which it afflicted the people, can be looked for in its dungeons and its confiscations, in the humiliating penances of the saffron crosses, and in the invisible police with which it benumbed the heart and soul of every man who had once fallen into its hands."[588] It is evident that these means of tormenting and coercing dissenters went much further to cause them to disappear than autos-de-fe and other executions. The selection of those who submitted, or played the hypocrite, was accomplished in the fifteenth century.