Fist a couple of points of clarification. The Inquisition set up in the Languedoc was not the first Inquisition set up by the Roman Church. Bishops' Inquisitions had existed for centuries, but being local, never had the impact of later Papal Inquisitions. The Inquisition which is the subject of this page was the Medieval Inquisition, established informally by Pope Innocent III in the early thirteenth century and formalised by later popes.
The
more widely known Spanish Inquisition was set up around
two centuries later by Ferdinand (of Aragon) and Isabella
(of Castile). In later centuries another Papal Inquisition
would be created to exterminate Protestant ideas in Southern
Europe. It too would follow the practices of the original
medieval Inquisition in the Languedoc - the one we are talking
about here.
The express purpose of this original medieval Inquisition was to discover and eliminate any vestiges of Cathar belief left after the Cathar Crusades. During the crusades, ordinances had been passed which imposed new penalties for heresy. After the death of Innocent III in 1216 Honorius sanctioned Dominic Guzmán's new religious order, popularly known as the Dominicans after him. The Dominicans in turn spawned the first formal Inquisition. In 1233 the next pope, Gregory IX, charged the Dominican Inquisition with the final solution: the absolute extirpation of the Cathars. Soon the Franciscans would join in too, but it is Dominic Guzmán (St Dominic) and his followers who have left the legacy of hatred and bitterness that endures in the Languedoc into the third millennium.
By
the end of the fourteenth century Catharism had been virtually
extirpated. Before the crusade the Languedoc, under
the Counts
of Toulouse, had been the most civilised land in Europe.
People here had preferred simple asceticism to venality
and corruption. Learning had been highly valued.
Literacy had been widespread, and popular literature had
developed earlier than anywhere else in Europe. Religious
tolerance had been widely practised. Jews
enjoyed ordinary civil rights. The Languedoc had been
the home of courtly love, poetry, romance, chivalry and
the troubadours.
All this was swept away by the Albigensian
Crusade and St Dominic's Inquisition.
The
Inquisition worked by ignoring all rules of natural justice.
Guilt was assumed from the start. The accused had
no right to see the evidence against them, or their accusers.
They were not even told what the charges were against them.
They had no right to legal counsel, and if exceptionally
they were allowed a legal representative then the representative
risked being arrested for heresy as well.
People
were charged on the say-so of hostile neighbours, known
enemies and professional informers who were paid on commission.
False accusations, if exposed, were excused if they were
the result of "zeal for the Faith". Guilty verdicts
were assured - especially since, in addition to their punishment,
half of a guilty person's property was seized by the Church.
The Dominicans soon hit on the idea of digging up and trying
dead people, so that they could seize property from their
heirs.
Techniques of obtaining confessions included threats of procedures against other family members, promises of leniency in exchange for a confession, trick questions, sleep deprivation, indefinite imprisonment in a cold dark cell on a diet of bread and water, and of course a wide range of even more ghastly techniques.
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Torture was a favourite method
of extracting confessions for offences both real and
fabricated. Its use was explicitly sanctioned
by Pope Innocent IV in 1252 in his bull ad extirpanda
though it had been procticed from the earliest days.
Inquisitors and their assistants were permitted to
absolve one another for applying torture. Instruments
of torture, like crusaders' weapons, were routinely
blessed with holy water.
Torture was applied to obtain whatever confessions were required, and sometimes just to punish people that the Church authorities did not like - people could be and were tortured even after they had confessed. From time to time attempts were made to regulate procedures in response to complaints from municipal councils. In theory, only one session of torture was permitted, but this restraint could be ignored - repeated torture was regarded as as the continuation of a single session, or the rule was regarded as applying separately to each charge, so that all the inquisitors needed to do was generate as many charges as they needed. Other nominal constraints on the shedding of blood, endangering life and torturing minors were routinely ignored - no one was in a position to enforce them. |
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Together, these techniques were responsible for the first police state in Europe, where the only thoughts and actions permitted were those approved of by the Roman Church, where no-one could be trusted, and where duty to the totalitarian authority took precedence over all other duties, whether those duties were to one's sovereign, family, friends, religious beliefs, conscience, or simply to the truth.
Many of the techniques developed by the Medieval Inquision were picked up and used by later totalitarian regimes and police states. Among them are the creation of racial and religious ghettos; the forcible wearing of "badges of shame"; formalised propaganda and forgery; spying; seizure of property, threats, false promisses, intimidation and torture; and diregard for what has long been regarded as natural justice.
It is difficult to find any technique of modern totalitarianism that was not pioneered by the Medieval Inquisition, right down to the good cop / bad cop routine; physical restraint; the separation of families; sexual humiliation; the use of agents provocateurs and listening tubes; false promisses of lenency; and softening up new victims using psychological techniques such as leaving them for weeks, cold and hungry, isolated in cells within hearing distance of the torture chamber. Inquisitors even charged people for the equipment used to execute members of their families - just as the very worst twentieth century totalitarian states did.
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