Inquisition
An inquisition was a Catholic judicial procedure in which ecclesiastical judges could initiate, investigate and try cases in their jurisdiction. Popularly the Inquisition became the name for various medieval and reformation-era state-organized tribunals whose aim was to combat heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and customs considered to be deviant, using this judicial procedure. Violence, isolation, certain torture or the threat of its application, have been used by inquisitions to extract confessions and denunciations.
Inquisitions with the aim of combatting religious sedition had their start in the 12th-century Kingdom of France, particularly among the Cathars and the Waldensians. The inquisitorial courts from this time until the mid-15th century are together known as the Medieval Inquisition. Other banned groups investigated by medieval inquisitions, which primarily took place in France and Italy, include the Spiritual Franciscans, the Hussites, and the Beguines. Beginning in the 1250s, inquisitors were generally chosen from members of the Dominican Order, replacing the earlier practice of using local clergy as judges.
Inquisitions also expanded to other European countries, resulting in the Spanish Inquisition and the Portuguese Inquisition. The Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions often focused on the New Christians or Conversos, the Marranos, and on the Moriscos, as a result of suspicions that they had secretly maintained or reverted to their previous religions, as well as the fear of possible rebellions, as had occurred in previous times. Spain and Portugal also operated inquisitorial courts not only in Europe, but also throughout their empires: the Goa Inquisition, the Peruvian Inquisition, and the Mexican Inquisition, among others. Inquisitions conducted in the Papal States were known as the Roman Inquisition.
The scope of the inquisitions grew significantly in response to the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In 1542, a putative governing institution, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition was created. With the exception of the Papal States, ecclessiastical inquisition courts were abolished in the early 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the Spanish American wars of independence in the Americas. The papal institution survived as part of the Roman Curia, although it underwent a series of name and focus changes, now part of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Legal Background
In the high medieval period, various forms of ad hoc or non-evidence-based trials occurred: trial by ordeal, and compurgation, especially in teutonic cultures. In tenth and eleventh centuries, attempts were made to re-establish safer aspects of Roman and Hebrew law following the discovery of major ancient Roman legal texts. By the late tenth century, the new University of Bologna was training lawyers in Roman legal jurisprudence, and other universities followed.An inquisitorial procedure was adopted for capital crimes, first in ecclesiastical courts run by clergy as mandated by the Fourth Council of the Lateran, and then progressively also in secular courts as well.
In the revived legal system, for capital crimes, circumstantial evidence was not enough to convict: the testimony of two or more witnesses was now necessary, which increased the necessity of obtaining a confession. This in turn promoted the uptake of threats and application of torture, akin to the "enhanced interrogation techniques" or the illegal third degree police techniques, to collaborate information for investigations for both secular and ecclesiastical courts.
Secular and ecclesiastical legal theorists of the Late Middle Ages developed a variety of rules concerning when torture was used, how much, what it was unsafe for, who was allowed to do it, what medical supervision was necessary, etc. Because it belonged to the investigation phase, it was frequently not documented outside the Inquisition.
Historian Henry A. Kelly concludes that inquisition was "a brilliant and much-needed innovation in trial procedure, instituted by the greatest lawyer-pope of the Middle Ages" and that later "abusive practices" should be identified as a perversion of the original inquisitorial process.
Terminology
Inquisition
The term "inquisition" comes from the Medieval Latin word inquisitio, which described a court process based on Roman law, which came back into use during the Late Middle Ages. It was a new, less arbitrary form of trial that replaced the denunciatio and accussatio process which required a denouncer or used an adversarial process, the most unjust being trial by ordeal and the secular Germanic trial by combat.Today, the English term "Inquisition" is popularly applied to any one of the regional tribunals or later national institutions that worked against heretics or other offenders against the canon law of the Catholic Church. Although the term "Inquisition" is usually applied to ecclesiastical courts of the Catholic Church, in the Middle Ages it properly referred to an organized judicial process.
Inquisitor
Inquisitors 'were called such because they applied a judicial technique known as inquisitio, which could be translated as "inquiry" or "inquest"."The Inquisition" usually refers to specific regional tribunals authorized to concern themselves with the heretical behaviour of Catholic adherents or converts.
As with sedition inquisitions, heresy inquisitions were supposed to use the standard inquisition procedures: these included that the defendant must be informed of the charges, has a right to a lawyer, and a right of appeal. The inquisitor could only start a heresy proceeding if there was some broad public opinion of the "infamy" of the defendant to prevent fishing, or charging for private opinions. However, such inquisitions could proceed with minimal distraction by lawyers, the identities of witnesses were protected, tainted witnesses were allowed, and once found guilty of heresy there was no right to a lawyer. Inquisitors did not all follow these rules scrupulously, notably from the late 1300s: many inquisitors had theological, not legal, training.
Scope
Theoretically, inquisitions, as a church court, had no jurisdiction over Muslims and Jews as such. Despite several exceptions, like the infamous example of the Holy Child of La Guardia, the Inquisition was concerned mainly with the heretical behaviour of Catholic adherents or converts.Controversy and revisionism
The opening of Spanish and Roman archives over the last 50 years has caused some historians to revise their understanding of the Inquisition, some to the extent of viewing previous views as "a body of legends and myths". It has also been suggested that some instruments of torture, like "the pear of anguish," were not invented until the 16th century or later. Some of these revisions from scholars may be due to their own subjective religion, the historic erasure of crimes committed by the church, or erasure of minority lives and voices. Many of the sources that discredit or undermine the torture are written by practicing Catholics. One example is Reverend Brian Van Hove, S.J., who suggests that the inquisition is overblown in popular imagination. Van Hove writesHowever, this perspective fails to address that the majority of inquisitions led to torture, mass excommunications, and burnings which incited fear and submission in the general population, creating lasting effects on Europe. The majority of historical scholars continue to see the inquisition as an example of extremist religious leaders enforcing order and rooting out paganism through false accusations and inordinate violence.
Sentences
When a suspect was convicted of "wilful, unrepentant" heresy, canon law required the inquisitorial tribunal to hand the person over to secular authorities for final sentencing. A secular magistrate, the "secular arm", would then determine the penalty based on local law. Those local laws included proscriptions against certain religious crimes, and the punishments included death by burning in regions where the secular law equated persistent heresy with sedition. Thus the inquisitors generally knew the expected fate of anyone so remanded. The "secular arm" didn't have access to the trial record of the defendants, only declared and executed the sentences and was obliged to do so on pain of heresy and excommunication.While the notional purpose of the trial itself was for the salvation of the individual soul, allegedly by persuasion, according to the 1578 edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum the penalties themselves were preventative not retributive, thought to spread an example by terror: "... for punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit".
Statistics
Beginning in the 19th century, historians have gradually compiled statistics drawn from the surviving court records, from which estimates have been calculated by adjusting the recorded number of convictions by the average rate of document loss for each time period. Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras studied the records of the Spanish Inquisition, which list 44,674 cases of which 826 resulted in executions in person and 778 in effigy. William Monter estimated there were 1,000 executions in Spain between 1530 and 1630, and 250 between 1630 and 1730. Jean-Pierre Dedieu studied the records of Toledo's tribunal, which put 12,000 people on trial. For the period prior to 1530, Henry Kamen estimated there were about 2,000 executions in all of Spain's tribunals.Origin
Before the 12th century, the Catholic Church suppressed what they believed to be heresy, usually through a system of ecclesiastical proscription or imprisonment, but without using torture, and seldom resorting to executions. Punishments of the latter sort were opposed by a number of clergymen and theologians, although some countries punished heresy with the death penalty. Pope Siricius, Ambrose of Milan, and Martin of Tours protested against the execution of Priscillian, largely as an undue interference in ecclesiastical discipline by a civil tribunal. Though widely viewed as a heretic, Priscillian was executed as a sorcerer. Ambrose refused to give any recognition to Ithacius of Ossonuba, "not wishing to have anything to do with bishops who had sent heretics to their death".In the 12th century, to counter the spread of Catharism and other heresies, prosecution of heretics became more frequent. The Church charged councils composed of bishops and archbishops with establishing inquisitions. Pope Lucius III issued the bull Ad Abolendam, which condemned heresy as contumacy toward ecclesiastical authority. The bull Vergentis in Senium in 1199 stipulated that heresy would be considered, in terms of punishment, equal to treason , and the punishment would be imposed also on the descendants of the condemned.
The first Inquisition was temporarily established in Languedoc in 1184. The murder of Pope Innocent III's papal legate Pierre de Castelnau by Cathars in 1208 sparked the Albigensian Crusade. The Inquisition was permanently established in 1229, run largely by the Dominicans in Rome and later at Carcassonne in Languedoc.
In 1252, the Papal Bull Ad extirpanda'', following another assassination by Cathars, charged the head of state with funding and selecting inquisitors from monastic orders; this caused friction by establishing a competitive court to the Bishop's courts.