oldstudent

The Inquistions were the logical result of the Roman Empire taking over the name of Christ. The Romans wer by that time a bloodthirsty empire that had adopted some tenents of Christianity but retained the rule from the top down 'Ceasar style'.
We also have to remember that much of the population that consisted of the 'church' was no more Christian than an atheist and had no more understanding of His teachings than someone who has never read the Bible.
The Inquisition was a huge stain on the name of Christ in the world and had no more to do with Christ's teachings than those of Barry Lynn.
Jim

Amos

Good point and they did! Catholics were not Christians and those who claimed to be Christians would crash at the foot of the cross where their bundle of brushwood caught on fire and that is what the imagery indicates.

Sven

Classical "No true Scotsman" fallacy.

Bede

Nothing so subtle. I just meant people living in the West as in modern liberal democracies.

B

GakuseiDon

Llorente wrote in the 19th C and is thought to have way overestimated the numbers. A more accurate number is thought to be 2000 (still 2000 too many, of course). http://www.christainhistory.com/shel...quisition.html

This appears to be true (from the same link above).

This happened in 1209, as part of the war against the Cathars (as well as a chance to loot and gather wealth!), and wasn't part of the Inquisitions, which started formally around 1230.

Um, if witches today were eating children and causing plagues, wouldn't that be of concern to secular governments today?

And how many actually died at the hands of the Inquisition?

The problem here is trying to avoid pinning wars and secular activities as activities of the Inquisition.

Bede

Dr Rick's post is short on sources and long on rhetoric. He is misinformed in many cases, relying on anti-Christian sources rather than modern historians. He also includes absolutely everything under the banner of inquisition and so includes completely unrelated topics. I am not sure what his problem is with my FAQ apart from my effort to write a peice of informed history rather than an outraged rant.

Juan Antonio Llorente was secretary general to the Madrid Inquisition from 1789 - 94. However, he was an afrencesado or supporter of Napoleon during the French occupation which explains how he ended up with the archives of the Inquisition during that period. His work was the first effort to produce a critical history but remains highly polemical and unobjective (Peters pages 278 - 282). His estimates have, of course, been superceded by modern scholarship.

The inquisition was famously a stikler for documentation and proper form. It is likely all their victims appeared in their records and were subject to official and formal procedure. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain, and later Portugal, was the policy of the crown and the inquisition neither formulated it, carried it out or inforced it. Its only function in this matter was to ensure that Jews or Moors who converted did not relapse to their old religion.

The inquisiton very rarely used torture. Ordeal by fire was not a torture and not used with the sanction of the church after Lateran III in 1215 when all trials by ordeal were banned. The pear seems to be a modern misidentification as it appears only on the internet.

The inquisition did not use the rack. On the rare occasions torture was applied, it did use other forms of tension torture but was forbidden to cause permenant damage.

Relatively few Protestants were executed by the inquisition. However, both catholics and other protestants attacked anabaptists and the disaster of Munster stands as a blott on European history. The inquisition had nothing to do with this. Also, it was not involved against the Cathars until after the Albigensian crusade. We know that the inquisitor in Toulouse, the heart of Catharism, executed 40 people in ten years. This hardly qualifies as 'slaughter'.

This has nothing to do with the inqusition.

This is mentioned in the FAQ. Interestingly the other highly influential witch craft manual was written by Jean Bodin who was a freethinking deist who also wrote attacks on revealed religion at a time that was a very dangerous thing to do. For some reason his work is not held up as a paradigm of freethought.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

Dr Rick

Torture was introduced into European law by the Church during the Inquisitions and remained in the European law codes for hundreds of years. European common law never justified torture.

"Trial by ordeal" was actively practiced through-out the 13th and 14th centuries even though the Latern council "officially" banned it in 1215.

In 1252, Pope Innocent IV officially sanctioned the use of torture. It's use was outlawed by Saxony, Switzerland and Austria only much later in the 18th century, and later still by England in the 19th century.

"...we are asked to believe that "the people and rulers" did these horrible things, while the gentle Church tried to restrain them. That is an insult to our intelligence. No ruler or people ever moved against heretics without the impulsion of the Church, and at the period we are discussing the Papacy complained every decade that it could not get rulers to apply its own "rigorous measures": exile, infamy, confiscation, and destruction of the heretics home. Innocent III, who, as we shall see in a moment, demanded the death-sentence, launched his ghastly crusade of murder and theft precisely because he could not get "people and rulers" to proceed otherwise.

And the meanest thing of all is that most of your modern Catholic apologists, raise over the bones of those hundreds of thousands of murdered men, women, and children the smug and lying inscription that they were "dangerous to society..."

Heresy was a crime in European law. Exactly, say some of the apologists; it was in those days thought to be a crime against the State and was punished accordingly. What miserable juggling with words! The Church made rulers and peoples regard it as a crime; and what was happening in the thirteenth century, the great age of heresy before the Reformation, shows this very clearly.

The Lateran Council of 1139 violently urged the secular powers to proceed against heresy; and they would not, to any extent. The Lateran Council of 1179 repeated the cry, pleading for the use of force and holding out tempting baits to those who murdered heretics. Pope Lucius II in 1184 made a new departure. He laid down the penalties as exile, confiscation, and infamy (loss of civil rights): threatened unwilling secular rulers with excommunication and interdict; and enacted that whereas under current law a bishop was to try a heretic in open court when a man was charged, the bishop must now seek out heretics. In Latin the search for a thing is an Inquisitio. Still very few secular rulers did more than shrug their shoulders. Heresy did not concern them.

Then came Innocent III, who had a perfect arsenal of anathemas, and who, when a prince ducked with a grin at the hurled anathema, set armies in motion and drenched the man's kingdom with blood (as Gregory VII had done). Innocent formulated the new principle of "persuasion" of heretics. There was a Papal seat at Viterbo, and the Pope was horrified to learn that not only the consuls (magistrates) of the town, but the chamberlain of his own were Cathari! He soon altered that, and he laid down this grim principle:

According to civil law criminals convicted of treason are punished with death and their goods are confiscated. With how much more reason then should they who offend Jesus, Son of the Lord God, by deserting their faith, be cut off from the Christian communion and stripped of their goods.
It is Canon Vacandard who gives us that quotation: a perfectly clear demand that heretics shall be put to death! It was, therefore, not "people and rulers," but the great Pope, who, when there seemed to be some doubt amongst the jurists how far the old law against heresy was still in force, demanded death. St. Bloody would not be a bad title for Innocent III, "the greatest of the Popes."

Moreover Innocent -- what an ironic name! -- Completed the foundations of the Inquisition by reaffirming, with heavier emphasis, that the bishops were not to wait for charges of heresy, but were to seek out heresy, or make an inquisitio, They were to have special officials, or "inquisitors," for this purpose. Innocent drew up explicit instructions for the procedure, and between 1204 and 1213 he issued four decretals ordering such searches in various places.

In 1224 the Constitution of Lombardy formally enacted sentence of death for heresy, and the next Pope, Gregory IX, endorsed this penalty and founded what is commonly called the Inquisition. Heretics were to be handed over to the secular arm for "adequate punishment" -- of which we find the definition in the words I quoted from Innocent III -- and, as bishops had shown themselves very remiss in the nasty work of seeking out heretics, the Pope took the job from them and entrusted it to the tender mercies of the newly founded Dominican and Franciscan friars, who took to it like blood-hounds to a scent. Among the wits of the time the Dominicans were known as the Domini canes, "the hounds of the Lord," a very neat Latin pun on their name.

Thus the Inquisition, which meant originally a search for heretics conducted by the bishops, became a separate institution under the direct control of the Papacy. This was not done at one stroke. Its birth is variously put by historians in 1229, 1231, and 1232. By the latter year, at all events, the Inquisition was established, and the hounds of the Lord felt the bloody rag at their nostrils.

Rome had discovered the solution of its dilemma. It did not want to stain its own fair robes with bloodshed, but it certainly did not want to leave the detection of heretics to secular powers, or few would be detected. Moreover, if heretics were tried by civil law, the law would not move until a charge was laid before it, and there would be a comparatively fair trial, the accuser facing the accused in open court; and again few would be condemned. In fine,these "confiscations" which Innocent III had recommended were becoming a very profitable source of revenue, and the Papacy wanted its share. The sordid scramble for gold amongst the bones of the dead had already begun.

Hence the Inquisition. These monastic agents of the Pope were to have independent courts, of the most monstrous description, and to ensure the condemnation of secret heretics; and they were then to hand them over to the secular arm and keep a sharp eye on any secular prince or official who failed to do his bloody work.

All this modern talk about heresy as "a crime against the State" is loathsome. There were in the thirteenth century few countries in Europe which the Popes did not claim to be fiefs of the Papacy, and few princes who were not held to be, in the literal political sense, vassals of the Pope. Gregory VII and Innocent III and their successors asserted that they were actually the feudal sovereigns of England, France, Spain, and other countries. A crime against the State was what they chose to call a crime against the State. The great majority of the secular rulers hated and thwarted the Inquisition -- it was never admitted to England -- and it was only priest-ridden rulers like Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain or those whose greed was interested, who would carry out the Pope's orders. Christianity was forcibly thrust upon Europe for the second time, as it had been in the fourth century."

Former Franciscan Monk Joseph McCabe

The Albigensian Crusade began in the late 12th century. In 1207 Pope Innocent III enjoined on the French king to annihilate the heretics. When Beziers, a city of between twenty thousand and forty thousand inhabitants was taken and the general asked what to do with the inhabitants of the captured city, the papal legate answered, “Kill them all! God will know his own.” In this manner town after town was taken, pillaged, and burnt; of the inhabitants, the orthodox were chained together, and sent to the slave-markets, while the heretics were massacred and burnt. Nothing was left but a smoking waste.

Innocent III also preached the Fourth Crusade, which gathered-up some twenty-thousand mauraders that conquered Constantinople but never made it to the Holy Land, much to his dismay. He called for another crusade and was answered by children: Beginning in France thousands of children, boys and girls, made off for the Holy Land inspired by a boy's vision that an army of children would retake it. None made it; they all died by hunger, disease, or drowning, or were sold into slavery.

Before he died in 1216, Innocent expressed revulsion and regret at the carnage that he had set in motion.

Gurdur

Um, forgive me for quibbling, but:
I don't think that's strictly correct --- torture was used under Roman law before the Christians came along; in some ways the whole Christian edifice inherited Roman ideas and habits, though of course the Inquisition itself was pretty much a fairly novel idea.
While I agree with you that often the Church did in fact instigate inquisitions, The Inquistion, witch-hunting and antisemitism, I think it's inaccurate to say that rulers "never moved without the impulsion of the Church"; the Cathar/Albigenisian Crusade you refer to was largely at the behest of Northern French nobles hungry for land in the south of France, while the famous trial of Joan Of Arc was done at the behest of the English.
Yes, correct.

Some of that, BTW, was instigated by lone agitators (one famous one using a fake Letter Of Credentials supposedly from the Church --- one of the largest progroms against Jews was directly his creation).
However, of course, the Church is hardly guiltless.

Well, I think the Romans started that bit in Europe (occasionally in response to the wishes of peoples in their provinces), still, the Church later used and developed it.
Well, yes.
Just pointing out that it was often a mixed affair --- greedy nobles or greedy Church.
Yes. Bit of an empty regret, wasn't it ?

Bede

Dr Rick,

Rather than quoting long sections of polemic by a discredited anti-Christian that no academic takes seriously, do you have anything to say about my FAQ? Are there any facts in it you consider wrong? Do you have any alternative academic sources for your views.

You should also be aware that there is no such thing as European common law. There is Roman Law, common to much of Europe, but that certainly allowed torture. There is also English common law where torture could never be used except in cases of treason after application to the privy council. Torture played no part in English heresy or witchcraft trials (except arguably for the practices of Matthew Hopkins who was active in the chaos of the Civil War).

If you just want to rant, please don't do it on a thread that is trying to be measured and deal with the history.

Thanks

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

Gurdur

I really think there's no need for invective on either side here.
Technically correct, and I've already noted myself the use of torture under Roman Law (including ritual rape, BTW); however, to be fair to Dr Rick, IMHO he was referring to the collective body of common laws in Europe, the English one being not the only example by far ---- it was the imposition of the Napoleonic Code that ended many common laws in many places.