of friar-inquisitors recruited from the ranks of the mendicant orders, and they would be charged by the pope with the task of cleansing Christendom of every kind of heresy. Once called upon to live in imitation of Christ, the friar-inquisitors were recruited to serve in a corps of persecutors whose instruments of torture were identical to those that had been used in pagan Rome.
The irony was apparent to Dostoevsky, whose Grand Inquisitor is ready to burn Jesus Christ himself as a heretic, but it was wholly lost on the flesh-and-blood inquisitors who murdered their victims by the countless thousands. For them, the work of the torturer and the executioner was always for the greater glory of God and the Church, or so they succeeded in convincing themselves.
The creation of the Inquisition as an arm of the Church has been tracked by historians through a series of papal decrees and church councils starting as early as 1184. But the man who is generally credited with (or blamed for) bringing the Inquisition into formal existence is Pope Innocent III, a brilliant and accomplished canon lawyer who ascended to the papal throne in 1198 and remained there for eighteen tumultuous years. Innocent, as we have already seen, is the man who first sent the Dominicans and Franciscans into Languedoc to call the Cathars back into the Church. When preaching failed, he charged the king and nobles of France to go on crusade in their own country against the Cathars who refused to be converted. And when the Albigensian Crusade failed in its mission of exterminating the Cathars, it was Pope Innocent III who resolved to root out heresy once and for all by entrusting the task to a corps of papal inquisitors, the charter members of the Inquisition.
Innocent, the most celebrated of the lawyer-popes of the medieval Church, sought to drape the machinery of persecution with the mantle of law and theology. On November 1, 1215, he convened an assembly of more than four hundred bishops, eight hundred abbots, and various emissaries from the kings and princes of western Europe, all of them gathered in the Lateran Palace in Rome. At the end of their deliberations, the so-called Fourth Lateran Council voted to approve a new set of ecclesiastical laws (or “canons”) that were intended to dictate the beliefs and practices of obedient Christians—and to punish the disobedient ones. The document in which the work of the Fourth Lateran Council is recorded has been called “the first sketch of the Inquisition,” but it also provided a useful precedent for lawmakers in Spain in the fifteenth century and Nazi Germany in the twentieth century. 10
Many of the canons appear to be unrelated to the persecution of heresy, but the whole document hums with the urgent concern of the Roman Catholic church to assert its absolute authority over Christendom. The clergy and congregants of the Eastern Orthodox church, for example, were warned to “conform themselves like obedient sons to the holy Roman church, their mother, so that there may be one flock and one shepherd”—or else “be struck with the sword of excommunication.” Because it was sometimes impossible to tell Jews and “Saracens” (that is, Muslims) from Christians—and “thus it happens at times that through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews and Saracens with Christian women”—they were ordered to wear garments of a kind that would set them apart from Christians. And a new crusade “to liberate the Holy Land from the hands of the ungodly” was ordered to depart on June 1, 1217. 11
Even the canons that do not seem to refer to heresy can be understood as a stern caution against even the slightest innovation or variation in matters of faith. The very first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council, for example, asserts the theological monopoly of the Roman Catholic church, which is declared to be “one Universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there
The irony was apparent to Dostoevsky, whose Grand Inquisitor is ready to burn Jesus Christ himself as a heretic, but it was wholly lost on the flesh-and-blood inquisitors who murdered their victims by the countless thousands. For them, the work of the torturer and the executioner was always for the greater glory of God and the Church, or so they succeeded in convincing themselves.
The creation of the Inquisition as an arm of the Church has been tracked by historians through a series of papal decrees and church councils starting as early as 1184. But the man who is generally credited with (or blamed for) bringing the Inquisition into formal existence is Pope Innocent III, a brilliant and accomplished canon lawyer who ascended to the papal throne in 1198 and remained there for eighteen tumultuous years. Innocent, as we have already seen, is the man who first sent the Dominicans and Franciscans into Languedoc to call the Cathars back into the Church. When preaching failed, he charged the king and nobles of France to go on crusade in their own country against the Cathars who refused to be converted. And when the Albigensian Crusade failed in its mission of exterminating the Cathars, it was Pope Innocent III who resolved to root out heresy once and for all by entrusting the task to a corps of papal inquisitors, the charter members of the Inquisition.
Innocent, the most celebrated of the lawyer-popes of the medieval Church, sought to drape the machinery of persecution with the mantle of law and theology. On November 1, 1215, he convened an assembly of more than four hundred bishops, eight hundred abbots, and various emissaries from the kings and princes of western Europe, all of them gathered in the Lateran Palace in Rome. At the end of their deliberations, the so-called Fourth Lateran Council voted to approve a new set of ecclesiastical laws (or “canons”) that were intended to dictate the beliefs and practices of obedient Christians—and to punish the disobedient ones. The document in which the work of the Fourth Lateran Council is recorded has been called “the first sketch of the Inquisition,” but it also provided a useful precedent for lawmakers in Spain in the fifteenth century and Nazi Germany in the twentieth century. 10
Many of the canons appear to be unrelated to the persecution of heresy, but the whole document hums with the urgent concern of the Roman Catholic church to assert its absolute authority over Christendom. The clergy and congregants of the Eastern Orthodox church, for example, were warned to “conform themselves like obedient sons to the holy Roman church, their mother, so that there may be one flock and one shepherd”—or else “be struck with the sword of excommunication.” Because it was sometimes impossible to tell Jews and “Saracens” (that is, Muslims) from Christians—and “thus it happens at times that through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews and Saracens with Christian women”—they were ordered to wear garments of a kind that would set them apart from Christians. And a new crusade “to liberate the Holy Land from the hands of the ungodly” was ordered to depart on June 1, 1217. 11
Even the canons that do not seem to refer to heresy can be understood as a stern caution against even the slightest innovation or variation in matters of faith. The very first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council, for example, asserts the theological monopoly of the Roman Catholic church, which is declared to be “one Universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there
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