There comes a point at which the victim will assent to anything to escape pain, or to get a quick and easy death. Therefore "confessions"

under torture are of no value. Ulpian said of it, "_Res est fragilis et periculosa et quae veritatem fallat_."[546] One of the templars said that if he was tortured further he would confess that he had murdered the Saviour. Another said that he would confess anything if he was tortured further, although he was ready to suffer any death for the Order of Templars. He would confess that he had killed the mother of God.[547] A heretic under torture cried out that Christ, if so treated, would be proved a heretic.[548] Bernard Delicieux declared before King Philip that Peter and Paul could be convicted of heresy by the methods of the inquisitors.[549] Count Frederick von Spee, a Jesuit who opposed the witch persecutions, is quoted as saying, in 1631, "Treat the heads of the church, the judges, or me, as you treat those unhappy ones [accused of witchcraft], subject any of us to the same tortures, and you will discover that we are all sorcerers."[550] He quoted an inquisitor who boasted that if he could get the pope on the rack he would prove him a sorcerer.[551] In the thirteenth century "judges were well convinced of the failure of the procedure with its secret and subjective elements, but they could not in any other way cope with crime."[552]

This means, of course, that by long and manifold suggestion certain selected forms of crime had been stigmatized until the masses regarded them with horror. Then the apparatus of the administration of justice was brought to bear to exterminate all who could be charged with them, and when the process was objected to as horrible, it was defended on grounds of necessity to meet the horrible crime. By this action and reaction a great body of interests was enveloped in a special atmosphere, within which any excess of savagery was possible. The societal selection was prosecuted by murder of all dissenters.

+243. Inquisitorial procedure from Roman law.+ The Roman criminal procedure was, in part, inquisitorial.[553] In the later period of the republic a private accuser, who must be an injured party, started and conducted the prosecution, but the magistrates could proceed on their own motion, upon denunciation, or by inquisitorial process. The last method became the custom under the empire. Prosecutions for treason were thus carried on, and by the end of the empire sorcerers and heretics, as _hostes publici_, like traitors, were thus tried. All citizens were bound to denounce such criminals. This procedure was taken up into the canon law, so that the Christian church inherited a system of procedure as well as the doctrines above stated.[554]

+244. Bishops as inquisitors.+ In the Carolingian period bishops were instructed to seek out heretics and to secure their conversion, but they rarely distinguished themselves by zeal in this matter. The procedure was that of a grand jury set in motion by common report. Lucius III and Barbarossa, acting together in 1184, prepared a decretal in which the duty of bishops was reaffirmed and an attempt was made to give sharper method to their proceedings. They were to seek out heretics, holders of secret conventicles, or any who "in any way differed, in mode of life, from the faithful in general." Those who refused to be disciplined and to conform were to be abandoned to the secular arm for fitting punishment. All civil officers were to swear to enforce laws against heretics. Here we find the fundamental notions of the later Inquisition, but zealous executioners were wanting. If the decretal had been "obeyed strictly and energetically, it would have established an episcopal instead of a papal Inquisition."

+245. Definition of heretic.+ The definition of a heretic just quoted occurs often and is the only one which could be formulated. A person was as liable to be charged with heresy if better than the crowd as if worse. "In fact, amid the license of the Middle Ages ascetic virtue was apt to be regarded as a sign of heresy. About 1220 a clerk of Spire, whose austerity subsequently led him to join the Franciscans, was only saved by the interposition of Conrad, afterwards Bishop of Hildesheim, from being burned as a heretic, because his preaching led certain women to lay aside their vanities of apparel and behave with humility.... I have met with a case, in 1320, in which a poor old woman at Pamiers submitted to the dreadful sentence for heresy simply because she would not take an oath. She answered all interrogations on points of faith in orthodox fashion, but though offered her life if she would swear on the gospels, she refused to burden her soul with the sin, and for this she was condemned as a heretic."[555] "Heretics who were admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins."[556] There could be no definition of a heretic but one who differed in life and conversation from the masses around him. This might mean strange language, dress, manners, or greater restraint in conduct. Pallor of countenance was a mark of a heretic from the fourth century to the twelfth.[557] In the thirteenth century Franciscans were preeminently orthodox, but when John XXII stigmatized as heretical the assertion that Christ and his Apostles never had any property, they became criminals whom civil officers were bound to send to the stake.[558] John was himself a heretic as to the "beatific vision." He thought that the dead would not enter the presence of God until the judgment day.[559] The Franciscans held that the blood shed by Christ in the Passion lost its divinity, was separated from the Logos, and remained on earth. This was heresy.[560] The Dominicans, with Thomas Aquinas, were heretics as to the immaculate conception.[561] All the disputants on all sides of these questions went into the dispute at the risk of burning or being burned, as the tide should run.

+246. The Albigenses.+ For some reason which is not easy to understand, the Manichaean doctrine took deep root in the Christian church from the fourth century on. To us the doctrine seems ethically bad, but that only shows how little religious dogmas make ethics. The enemies of the Albigenses recognized their high purity of life.[562] They called themselves kathari, or puritans. Popular fanaticism commenced persecution against them in the eleventh century. They were in antagonism to the hierarchy and the Catholic system, especially to papal autocracy. "Even with those abhorred sectaries, the church was wonderfully slow to proceed to extremities. It hesitated before the unaccustomed task. It shrank from contradicting its teachings of charity, and was driven forward by popular fanaticism. The persecution of Orleans, in 1017, was the work of King Robert, the Pious. The burning at Milan, soon after, was done by the people against the will of the archbishop.... Even as late as 1144, the church of Liege congratulated itself on having, by the mercy of God, saved the greater part of a number of confessed and convicted kathari from the turbulent mob which strove to burn them.... In 1145 the zealous populace seized the kathari and burned them, despite the resistance of the ecclesiastical authorities."[563] These cases of lynching are the first cases, in the Middle Ages, of burning heretics. They show that the masses in the Christian church thought that the proper treatment of enemies of God, the church, and all men.

+247. Persecution popular.+ Innocent III began war on the Albigenses at the beginning of the thirteenth century, as rebels and heretics. All Catholics approved what he did, and thought that the Albigenses richly deserved all the treatment they received. The age was not religious, but it had intense religiosity, and the whole religiosity was heated to a high pitch by the contest with the Albigenses. The pride, ambition, and arrogance of the hierarchy and the basest greed and love of plunder of the masses were enlisted against them. Lea's statement is therefore fully justified that "the Inquisition was not an organization arbitrarily devised and imposed upon the judicial system of Christendom by the ambition or fanaticism of the church. It was rather a natural--one may almost say an inevitable--evolution of the forces at work in the thirteenth century, and no one can rightly appreciate the process of its development and the results of its activity without a somewhat minute consideration of the factors controlling the minds and souls of men during the ages which laid the foundation of modern civilization."[564] In the mind of the age "there was a universal consensus of opinion that there was nothing to do with a heretic but to burn him." This was one of those wide and popular notions upon which mores grow, because the folkways are adjusted to it in all departments of life as a rule of welfare. The courts of Toulouse at first, not recognizing the forces against the Albigenses, tried to protect their subjects, but "to the public law of the period [Raymond II of Toulouse]

was an outlaw, without even the right of self-defense against the first-comer, for his very self-defense was rated among his crimes. In the popular faith of the age he was an accursed thing, without hope, here or hereafter. The only way of readmission into human fellowship, the only hope of salvation, lay in reconciliation with the church through the removal of the awful ban which had formed half of his inheritance. To obtain this he had repeatedly offered to sacrifice his honor and his subjects, and the offer had been contemptuously spurned.... The battle of toleration against persecution had been fought and lost; nor, with such a warning as the fate of the two Raymonds, was there risk that other potentates would disregard the public opinion of Christendom by ill-advised mercy to the heretic."[565]

+248.+ An annalist of Worms is quoted about Dorso's operations on the upper Rhine in 1231. Dorso burned many persons of the peasant class. The annalist adds, "The people, when they saw this, were favorable to the inquisitors and helped them; and rightly, since those heretics deserved death. Confident in the approval of the masses, they went on to make arrests in towns and villages, as they pleased, and then they said to the judges, without further evidence, 'These are heretics. We withdraw our hands from them.' The judges were thus compelled to burn many. That was not according to the sense of the Holy Scriptures, and the ecclesiastics everywhere were greatly troubled. Since, however, the people took sides with the unjust judges, their will was executed everywhere." "The pitiless and incompetent judges later saw that they could not maintain their conduct without the help of great men, whom they won by saying that they would burn rich people, whose goods the great men should have." "That pleased the great men, who helped them, and called them to their cities and towns." "The people, when they saw this, asked the reason, to which the persecutors answered, 'We would burn a hundred innocent if there was one guilty amongst them.'"[566]

+249.+ It was also true of the persecutions of the philosophers in Mohammedan Spain that they were popular. "The best educated princes allowed themselves to be driven to persecute, in spite of their personal preferences, as a means of winning popularity."[567]

+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 Chatelet, 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.

+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 cooperated 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 mediaeeval 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 Manichaeans, 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.

+269.+ We have distinguished four stages in the story of the attempt to establish religious uniformity under papal control in the Middle Ages.

I. The church taught doctrines and alleged facts about the wickedness of aberrant opinions. II. The masses, accepting these teachings, built deductions upon them, and drew inferences as to the proper treatment of dissenters. They put the inferences in effect by lynching acts. III. The leaders of society accepted the leadership of these popular movements, and the church went on to teach hatred of dissenters and extreme abuse of them. It elevated persecution to a theory of social welfare by the extermination of dissenters, reduced the views and notions of the masses to dogmas, and led in selection by murder. IV. These ideas and practices were then vulgarized by the masses again. Trial by torture, bloody executions, and finally witchcraft persecutions were the results in the next stage. Witchcraft persecutions were not selective. They are well worth study as the greatest illustration of the degree of aberration which the mores may undergo, but they lie aside from the present topic.

In savage life alleged witchcraft is punished with great torture and a painful death,[624] but nothing of the kind is found in any of the great religions except Latin Christianity.

[373] Burckhardt, _Kulturgesch. Griechenlands_, I, 211.

[374] JAI, XI, 44.

[375] Ratzel, _Volkerkunde_, II, 163.

[376] _Britisch Guiana_, II, 428.

[377] Grupp, _Kulturgesch. der Rom. Kaiserzeit_, I, 32.

[378] Scherr, _Kulturgesch._, 109.

[379] Rudeck, _Oeffentl. Sittlichkeit_, 45.

[380] _Deutsches Leben_, 285, 297, 332.

[381] Lippert, _Kulturgesch._, I, 370.