Texts in Context:
An Examination of the Holy Office
By Gabriel Blanchard
The Inquisition might be the single most faultily-understood institution in history; and yet there is a core of truth in all the errors.
The Fire Sermon1
In the year of our Lord one thousand and twenty-two, His Most Christian Majesty, Robert II Capet, the King of France, passed a sentence of death by burning upon a group of about a dozen criminals. The execution took place in the city of Orléans, a little over seventy-five miles south by southwest of Paris.
This in itself was not unusual; capital punishment was normal in medieval Europe. Execution by fire was typically reserved for rare and exceedingly grave crimes, including parricide and lèse-majesté (that is, treason and a handful of other offenses considered injuries to the crown, and thus to the state itself2). Still, rare offenses happen every day. But two things about this event were quite startling. One was that most, seemingly all, of those executed were priests. The other is the particular kind of lèse-majesté of which they were found guilty, an item not generally found under the heading of civil law at all. Their crime was heresy.
Weeds Among the Wheat
Heresy among priests is, again, not as surprising as it may sound. Being the most literate class, they were probably those most often exposed to novel ideas; that need not mean heresy, but could. But punishing heresy with death was, in the eleventh century, almost unprecedented—to do so with death by burning, so far as historians know, appears to have been completely unprecedented. Confiscation of property, excommunication, exile, these were standard (and by most churchmen, preferred) penalties for a heretic who refused to recant. Given the popular mental picture of the medievals, a little unpacking is called for here.
A common misconception about the Middle Ages is that Catholic Europe was theocratic. It is true that the period had no doctrine of “the separation of church and state”; religion was a major unifying force in society and a shaper of culture, especially cultural conscience, so it was felt to be perfectly appropriate for the state to explicitly recognize and endorse the Catholic religion. Nevertheless, some religious minorities—principally Jews—did enjoy rights and protections under the law (albeit limited ones, and usually combined with simultaneous penalties or restrictions). Heresy was a crime only Catholics could commit, but it was at the same time considered a real danger to society in general, in a way that recognized minorities which already had a specific character of their own were not.
More than that, the powers of both state and church were circumscribed. In the Church’s eyes, the ideal way of dealing with heretics was persuading them to return to Catholic orthodoxy. Failing that, the general preference expressed by clergy was that there be some punishment, and also that it not be death. No punishment meant the sinner would carry on uncorrected, in danger himself and a danger to others, but death would eliminate the chance for repentance. Executions for heresy were not totally unknown in 1022, but they were rare; exile was preferred. Moreover, it was felt inappropriate for ministers of the Church to wield instruments of bloodshed (even priests hunting was frowned upon), and when such executions did occur, they sparked controversy and were felt by some clergy to be an illicit encroachment of the state upon their sphere. But be all that as it may, the Catholic hierarchy had no legal authority over King Robert’s judicial decisions: If he wished to treat heresy as a civil crime, there was in 1022 no secular law by which to prevent him doing so. Whatever objections may or may not have been voiced by the clergy who advised him, Robert determined both sentence and verdict. On the 28th of December—the Feast of the Holy Innocents—this group of twelve was burned to death.
What the Inquisition Was
So 1022 was a landmark in the civil punishment of heresy. However, it was not the foundation of the Inquisition; that did not occur for over two hundred years.3 A kind of proto-Inquisition emerged in response to the 1184 bull Ad Abolendam, which specially urged Catholic bishops to take steps against Cathars in their territories. However, this lacked most of the features that distinguish the Inquisition; it was far less powerful, and consisted precisely in local clergy (and was, moreover, concerned chiefly with only one heresy).
When the Inquisition proper finally began in 1231, under the direction of Pope Gregory IX, it did so in the form of papal legates (what are typically called apostolic nuncios today) sent to particular countries or provinces. Their papal commission gave inquisitors a more centralized authority structure than some dioceses possessed; furthermore, unlike bishops, inquisitors were expected to move around, proceeding methodically through the counties or shires of their national assignment and setting up courts to deal with heresy as they found it. This mobility is doubtless why the Inquisition was associated with the mendicant orders, especially the Dominicans, practically from the first; but this was also a strategic move. The poverty of mendicants made them more convincing in disputes with poverty heretics like Waldenses or Fraticelli.
Here perhaps was the first lack of wisdom; here anxiety to defeat the Devil began to grow greater than anxiety to serve God.
Some Things It Wasn’t: Concerned With Magic or Science
Because of later historical developments, it is important to note a few other things about the medieval Inquisition in the strict sense.3 At this early stage, for example, the Inquisition was not concerned with cases of witchcraft (these were not made part of its default jurisdiction until much later). As Charles Williams put it,
The definition of heresy involved an obstinate persistence in a particular opinion against the known authority of the Church. … [D]ealings with devils did not involve such a particular obstinacy. Heretics deliberately refused an intellectual obedience; witches merely disobeyed. There were, no doubt, a number of witches; there were also a number of adulterers, murderers, thieves, and what not. … The Inquisition was supposed only to deal with “the Heretical Evil”; any cases of witchcraft or sorcery remitted to it therefore must have in them an element of intellectual error.4
Speaking of things that were later mixed up with witchcraft, the medieval Inquisition was not an enemy of science, nor was the Church as a whole. On the contrary, the Church produced many eminent medieval scientists, such as St. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Robert Grosseteste (1170-1253), John of Sacrobosco (1195-1256), St. Albert the Great (1200-1280), Roger Bacon (1220-1292), William of Ockham (1285-1350), Guy de Chauliac (1300-1368), Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), and of course, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), to name just nine. Turning to another scholar of the Middle Ages:
The business of the natural philosopher [i.e., scientist] is to construct theories which will “save appearances” … in the sense of getting them all in, doing justice to them. Thus, for example, your phenomena are luminous points in the night sky which exhibit such and such movements … Your astronomical theory will be a supposal such that, if it were true, the apparent motions from the point or points of observation would be those you have actually observed.
… In every age it will be apparent to accurate thinkers that scientific theories, being arrived at in the way I have described, are never statements of fact. That the stars appear to move in such and such ways … [is a statement] of fact. The astronomical … theory can never be more than provisional. … This would, I believe, be recognized by all thoughtful scientists today. … It was certainly recognized in the Middle Ages. “In astronomy,” says Aquinas, “an account is given of eccentrics and epicycles on the ground that if their assumption is made … the sensible appearances as regards celestial motions can be saved. But this is not a strict proof … since for all we know … they could also be saved by some different assumption.”5
Some More Things It Wasn’t: A Medieval KGB
Nor was the medieval Inquisition a “secret police,” setting up networks of spies and informers to look for pretexts on which to torture people. In its earliest phases, it was practically the opposite. Secular authorities, though they had the power to declare heresy a crime, lacked the training to reliably distinguish heresy from orthodoxy; inquisitors, by contrast, were experts—frequently more so than the local clergy.
Moreover, steps were taken from the first to protect the innocent at the expense, if necessary, of catching the guilty. Accusation was not proof in inquisitorial courts, and in fact acquittal (or more precisely, dismissal on grounds of insufficient evidence of heresy) seems to have been by far the most common outcome of examination. In these early years, for instance, the names of those who accused X of heresy were not revealed to the accused, but the accused was invited to name anyone in the region who had a grudge against them; if the accused named a person who had accused them of heresy, standard procedure was not only to immediately dismiss the charge, but to summon said accuser back to the inquisitorial court themselves, where they could face severe penalties for making a malicious accusation.
Nevertheless …
Yet that policy, fair-minded though it may strike us, may also ring a bell—isn’t there something in the Bill of Rights about a right to face your accusers? There is; and, while no one is likely to be shocked that the Inquisition was not guided by the Bill of Rights, that “right of confrontation” goes back to English common law and in fact to Roman law. This is probably not why the Inquisition soured; but sour it did—perhaps, merely as a function of the Catholic Church itself entering a period of anxiety and severity.
It hardly matters, though. In 1252, two hundred and thirty years after the burnings at Orléans, Pope Innocent IV issued the anti-heresy bull Ad Extirpanda; in it, he authorized the use of torture; and that, as they say, is the end of that. Some historians plead that torture was commonplace in secular courts (it was), or that the types of torture that could be used in ecclesiastical courts were milder and of more limited scope, or, or, or. The present author is of the opinion that the principal fact about any variety of torture, is simply that it is torture. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.”6
Finally, there is one additional thing that should be cleared up. The present writer has encountered this error only once, but he is not eager to encounter it a second time. It was not, and is not now, called “the Reconquisition.” Nothing was called that. History promises.
1As readers of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land may recall, “the Fire Sermon” originally referred to an address given by the Buddha, the Ādittapariyāya Sutta. Its message was that all sensory stimulus, and all response to such stimulus, is “burning,” i.e. tends only to create loves and hatreds for material things, delusions about them, and (through this love, hatred, and delusion) all kinds of suffering, which the Buddha’s doctrines deliver from.
2Counterfeiting is a good example of an offense which, while not a form of treason per se, has long also been classified as a variety of lèse-majesté (pronounced lĕz mä-zhĕs-tā). This probably contributes to Dante‘s placing “coiners,” i.e. counterfeiters, in the lowest of the ten ditches of the Eighth Circle of Hell.
3This specificity is called for, because the Inquisition during the Early Modern period (roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) had become quite different. The attendant circumstances of inquisitorial acts had changed, too; in particular, both anti-Semitism and witchcraft hysteria had become far more pronounced than they were in Medieval Europe.
4Williams, Witchcraft, Chapter IV: Witchcraft and Heresy, pp. 84, 89 of the 1969 Meridian Books edition.
5C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, pp. 14-16 of the 2005 reprint of the 1994 Canto edition.
6I John 4:18.
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s inquisitor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, these videos by YouTube essayist Studium Historiæ give excellent summaries of the 1022 heresy trial of Orléans and the general outline of the medieval Inquisition. If you’re just joining us in the Texts in Context series, you can catch up with the Middle Ages via this index of the Early Medieval Period, this introduction to the High Middle Ages, and these posts on Scholasticism and the apostolic poverty movement; or you might like our series on fallacies, with posts on everything from equivocation and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to straw men, slippery slopes, ships of Theseus, and many more.
Published on 7th April, 2025. Page image of L’Agitateur du Languedoc (“The Agitator of Languedoc”), 1887, by Jean-Paul Laurens, now housed in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, France; it depicts Br. Bernard Délicieux, a late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Spiritual Franciscan, confronting the Inquisition in Languedoc in southern France. Painting photographed by Didier Descouens, a.k.a. Wikimedia contributor Archaeodontosaurus. Note the positioning of the figures: though light is streaming in through the window, the inquisitors are facing in the other direction and unable to see it, while the Franciscan friar holds their gaze but points to the light. (Br. Bernard may not have met with the Inquisition in the exact form imagined here, but his opposition to its activities is historical, and in fact he died in prison for his criticisms.)
