260. Operation of the Inquisition. The Inquisition acted effectively. It kept detailed records and pursued its victims to the third generation.[589] It covered Europe with a network of reports which would rival the most developed modern police systems, "putting the authorities on the alert to search for every stranger who wore the air of one differing in life and conversation from the ordinary run of the faithful." "To human apprehension, the papal Inquisition was well-nigh ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent." Inquisitors were set free from all rules which had been found necessary to save judges from judicial error,[590] and the formularies to guide inquisitors inculcated chicane, terrorism, deception, and brow-beating, and an art of entangling the accused in casuistry and dialectics. A new crime was invented for the cases in which confession could not be obtained: suspicion of heresy, which had three degrees, "light," "vehement," and "violent." Even papal decretals which restrained the effort to destroy the accused could be set aside.[591] Thus the Inquisition coöperated with the criminal law. It operated on the society of Christendom for ten or twelve generations a selection of those who would submit and obey, and an elimination of those who dissented.
261. Success of the Inquisition. That the Inquisition succeeded in its purpose is certain. It forced at least external conformity and silence, especially of the masses. The heterodoxy of the Middle Ages "is divisible into two currents, of which one, called the 'eternal gospel,' includes the mystical and communistic sects which, starting from Joachim de Florus, after having filled the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ... was carried on, in the fourteenth, by the German mystics; the other, summed up in the blasphemy that there had been three great impostors [Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed], represents materialistic infidelity, due to a study of the Arabs, and skulking under the name of Averroes."[592] Of these two schools of heretics the former was the more popular and tenacious. It is not to be understood that the masses ever recognized their own handiwork in the Inquisition, or the popes of the fifteenth century. On the contrary, the sequence goes on to the fourth stage in which the masses, seeing the operation of ambition, venality, and despotism in the officers of the institution created to meet a popular demand, denounce it and turn against it to destroy it.
[262.] Torture in civil and ecclesiastical trials. (See sec. [237] ff.) In the course of its work the Inquisition had introduced torture into the administration of Christian justice and into the mores. The jurists were all corrupted by it. They supposed that, without torture, no crimes could be detected or punished, and this opinion ruled the administration of justice on the continent until the eighteenth century.[593] Lea finds the earliest instances of legal torture in the Veronese Code of 1228, and in the Sicilian Constitutions of 1231;—work of the rationalist emperor, Frederick II, but it was "sparingly and hesitatingly employed." Innocent IV adopted it in 1252, but only secular authorities were to use it. This was to save the sanctity of ecclesiastics. In 1256 Alexander IV, "with characteristic indirection," authorized inquisitors and their associates to absolve each other, and grant dispensations for irregularities. This gave them absolute liberty, and they could inflict or supervise torture.[594] There were other "poses," such as the prohibition to shed blood, i.e. to break the skin, and the rule to ask the civil power, when surrendering the victim to it, not to proceed to extremes, although it was bound to burn the victim. As the system continued in practice its methods were refined and its experts were trained. Any one who was charged must be convicted if possible. The torture produced permanent crippling or maiming. It would not do to release any one so marked with the investigation and then acquitted. Hence more and more frightful measures became necessary. Nevertheless cases occurred in which the accused held out beyond the power of the persecutors.[595] At Bamberg, in 1614, a woman seventy-four years old endured torture up to the third grade. After three quarters of an hour on the "Bock" she fell dead. The verdict was that she had cleared herself, by enduring the torture, of the "evidence" against her, and would have been freed if she had lived. She was to have Christian burial, and a document attesting this finding was to be given to her husband and children. Some jurists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were led to doubt about torture, but they almost all agreed that it was necessary "in some cases." These were the reformers who were careful not to be extremists. We are told that Peter of Ravenna, in 1511, urged the abolition of torture, and that Louis Vivez, a Spaniard, took the same position a little later. Neither won any attention.[596] In the Carolina, Charles V's law book of 1532, which was in general savage in its penalties, torture was to be applied only in cases punishable by death or life imprisonment, and only on strong prima facie evidence of guilt. Confession under torture was to have no weight unless confirmed after an interval. These restrictions were not observed in practice.[597] There are very many cases on record in which it was afterwards proved that many persons had suffered torture and cruel execution, upon confession, who were innocent of all crime.[598]
263. The selection accomplished. Thus the apparatus and devices for putting down dissent and enforcing submission to such authority as the great number were willing to recognize had attained a superficial success. Opposition was silenced. Dissent was made so dangerous that no one dared express it, except here and there a hero, and outward conformity to church discipline was almost universal. The mores also underwent influence from a societal power which was great and pervading. The external and artificial character of the conformity was so well known that a name was given to it,—implicita fides,—and this was discussed as to its nature and value. The mores are gravely affected by implicita fides when it is held by a great number of persons.[599] The selection which had destroyed honest thinkers and sincere churchmen had cultivated a class of smooth hypocrites and submissive cowards. In the fifteenth century the whole of Christendom had accepted the church system with its concepts of welfare and its dictates of duty, and had adopted the ritual means of holiness and salvation which it prescribed. In fact, at no other time were men ever so busy as then with "good works," or so fussy about church ritual. Everybody was anxious not to be a heretic. At the same time the whole mediæeval system was falling to pieces, and the inventions and discoveries were disproving all received and approved ideas about the world and welfare in it. Gross sensuality and carnal lust got possession of society, and the church system was an independent system of balancing accounts with the other world. The theater declined into obscenity and coarseness, and the popular pulpit was hardly better.[600] The learned world was returning to classical paganism. The popes had their children in the Vatican and publicly married them there. Under Sextus IV the courtesans at Rome paid a tax which produced 20,000 ducats per annum. Prelates owned brothels. Innocent VIII tried to stop the scandal. In 1490 his vicar published an edict against all concubinage, but the pope forced him to recall it because all ecclesiastics had concubines. There were 6800 public meretrices at Rome besides private ones and concubines. Concubinage was really tolerated, subject to the payment of an amercement.[601] The proceedings under Alexander VI were only the culmination of the license taken by men who were irresponsible masters of the world, and who showed the insanity of despotism just as the Roman emperors did.[602] The church had broken down under the reaction of its own efforts to rule the world. It had made moral hypocrisy and religious humbug characteristic of Christians, for he who indulges in sensual vice and balances it off by ritual devices is morally subject to the deepest corruption of character. The church system had corrupted the mores by adding casuistry and dialectic smartness to the devices for regulating conduct and satisfying interests. The men of the Renaissance, especially in Italy, acted always from passionate motives and went to great excess. Their only system of conduct was success in what they wanted to do, and so they were often heroes of crime. Yet they all conformed to church ritual and discipline.
264. A great undertaking like the suppression of dissent by force and cruelty cannot be carried out in a great group of states without local differentiation and variation. To close the story, it is worth while to notice these variations in England, Spain, and Venice.
265. Torture in England. The Inquisition cannot be said to have existed in the British Islands or Scandinavia. The laws of Frederick II had no authority there. In England, in 1400, the death penalty for heresy was introduced by the statute de heretico comburendo. In 1414 a mixed tribunal of ecclesiastics and laymen was established to search out heretics and punish them. It was employed to suppress Lollardry. Under Edward VI these laws were repealed; under Mary they were renewed. In the first Parliament of Elizabeth they were repealed again, except the statute of 1400, which was repealed in 1676, when Charles II wanted toleration for Roman Catholics. Then the ecclesiastical courts were restricted to ecclesiastical penalties.[603] Torture was never legal in England. The use of it was pushed to the greatest extreme when Clement V and Philip the Fair were seeking evidence against the templars. Then the pope wrote a fatherly letter of expostulation to Edward of England, because of the lack of this engine in his dominions.[604] Cases of torture no doubt occurred. The star chamber had an inquisitorial process in which the rack seems to have been used. Barbaro, a Venetian ambassador in the sixteenth century, reported the non-use of torture as an interesting fact in English mores. He says the English think that it often forces untrue confession, that it "spoils the body and an innocent life; thinking, moreover, that it is better to release a criminal than to punish an innocent man."[605] From the thirteenth century it was forbidden to keep a prisoner in chains. In other countries this was the rule, and ingenuity was expended to fasten the prisoner in a most uncomfortable position.[606] The last case of the rack in the star chamber was that of Peacham, in 1614.[607] The last execution for heresy in the British Islands was that of a medical student at Edinburgh, eighteen years of age, named Aikenhead, in 1696.[608] The greatest cruelty in England was "pressing" prisoners to compel them to plead because, if they did not plead, the trial could not go on.
It follows that the repressive system of the mediæval church did not produce effects on the mores in England.
266. The Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition is an offshoot and development of that of the mediæval church. The latter was started in Aragon and Navarre in 1238.[609] In the latter half of the fourteenth century Eymerich (author of the Directorium Inquisitorum) conducted an inquisition in Aragon against Jews and Moors. In Castile, in 1400, an inquisition was in activity.[610] None of these efforts produced a permanent establishment. In the reign of Isabella, Cardinal Mendoza organized the Inquisition as a state institution to establish the throne.[611] The king named the inquisitors, who need not be ecclesiastics. The confiscated property of "heretics" fell to the state. Ecclesiastics were subject to the tribunal. The church long withheld approval from this inquisition, because it was political in origin and purpose, and was created outside the church organization and without church authorization. The populace also opposed it. This union of church and populace forced the grandees to support it.[612] The punishments "implied confiscation of property. Thus whole families were orphaned and consigned to penury. Penitence in public carried with it social infamy, loss of civil rights and honors, intolerable conditions of ecclesiastical surveillance, and heavy pecuniary fines. Penitents who had been reconciled returned to society in a far more degraded condition than convicts released on ticket of leave. The stigma attached in perpetuity to the posterity of the condemned, whose names were conspicuously emblazoned upon church walls as foemen to Christ and to the state."[613] When "the Spanish viceroys tried to introduce the Spanish Inquisition at Naples and Milan, the rebellious people received protection and support from the papacy, and the Holy Office, as remodeled in Rome, became a far less awful engine of oppression than that of Seville."[614] The Spanish Inquisition went on to a new form, free from papal and royal control and possessing a "specific organization."[615] "Like the ancient councils of the time of the Goths, the Inquisition is an arm which serves, in the hands of the monarch, to finish the subjugation of the numerous semi-feudal nobles created by the conquest, because before the faith there are no privileged persons, and no one is sheltered from the ire of the terrible tribunal. Its intervention is so absolute, and its dedication to its function so extravagant, that, rendering itself more Catholic than the pope, it usurps his authority and revolts against the orders of the pontiff, giving to the peninsular church the character of a national church, with the king at the head as pontiff, and the inquisitor by his side as chief prelate."[616] The peculiar character of the Spanish Inquisition as a state institution and a civil engine should never be forgotten. It was very different from the papal Inquisition. The creature also ruled its creator, for it controlled the state in the direction of its own institutional character and purposes. The Spanish Inquisition, therefore, offers us the extreme development of the movement which started in the popular tastes, ideas, and wishes of the twelfth century, when it was employed for the selfish purposes of rulers. It presents the extreme case of a positive institution, born from the mores and winning independent power and authority over all interests. It very deeply affected Spanish mores. It had no great effect of societal selection.
267. Inquisition in Venice. The Inquisition in Venice took on a form which was to some extent peculiar. The Venetian political system was secret, suspicious, and despotic. It would not admit any interference from outside. Venice always pretended to hold off church authority. In fact, however, she could not maintain this attitude. The Inquisition won control of many subjects beyond heresy or only constructively heresy.[617] Fra Paolo Sarpi[618] made a collection of Venetian laws which show the jealousy of ecclesiastical interference, or which nullified the ordinances made in Rome. "The position of the republic was indefensible under the public law of the period. It was so administering its own laws as to afford an asylum to a class universally proscribed, and refusing to allow the church to apply the only remedy deemed appropriate to this crying evil. It therefore yielded to the inevitable, but in a manner to preserve its own autonomy and independence."[619] "The truth is that, in regard both to the Holy Office and the index, Venice was never strong enough to maintain the independence which she voted."[620] In 1573 Paolo Veronese was summoned by the Holy Office to explain and justify his picture of the Supper, now in the Louvre. He had put in a man at arms, a greyhound, and other figures which the inquisitors thought irrelevant and unfit. He was ordered to change the picture within three months. He put Magdalen in the place of the greyhound.[621] It is impossible to make a definite statement of the results of the Venetian effort to resist the church system, but that such an effort was made in Italy is an important historical fact.
268. Use of the Inquisition for political and personal purposes. In spite of the religiosity of the age there were princes and factions which cared more for political power than for theological questions. When the power of the Inquisition was established many ecclesiastical and civil persons desired to employ its agency for their personal or party ends. Boniface VIII, in the bull Unam Sanctam, laid down in full force the doctrine of papal supremacy and independence. Any one who resisted the power lodged by God in the church resisted God, unless, like the Manichæans, he believed in two principles, in which case he was a heretic. If the pope errs, he can be judged by God alone. There is no earthly appeal. "We say, declare, define, and pronounce, that it is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subjected to the Roman pontiff." "It was soon perceived that an accusation of heresy was a peculiarly easy and efficient method of attacking a political enemy."[622] John XXII, in his quarrel with Visconti, trumped up charges of heresy which won public opinion away from Visconti, disassociated his friends, and ruined him. Heresy and damnation were used to and fro, as interest dictated, and only for policy.[623] This is the extreme development of the action against dissenters in its third stage, the abuse of power for selfish purposes. "Heretic" became an epithet of immense power in factional quarrels, and the Inquisition was a weapon which any one could use who could seize it. Hence effects on the mores were produced in an age when factions were numerous and their quarrels constant. In these cases, however, the selectional effect was only against the personal enemies of the powerful, and was not a societal effect at all.