TREATMENT OF HERESY England.—The Inquisition was primarily the instrument for the repression of all kinds of breaches of orthodoxy. Its work in this capacity we will now outline for each of the great countries of mediaeval Christendom. England, whether before or of ter the establishment of the Inquisition, had few trials for heresy and, particularist• in this as in all her religious activity, judged them according to her own discipline, without asking Rome for laws or special judges. But orthodoxy remained almost unimpaired until the time of Wycliffe. Apparently neither the Catharist, Waldensian nor pantheistic heresies gained any footing in Great Britain. The affair of the Templars in France, which was quite political, was repeated in England : Clement V. having ordered their arrest, Edward II., after much hesitation, gave orders to the sheriffs to execute it and then decided that the ecclesiastical law should be applied. The papal inquisitors sent to England met with a bad reception, and the pope was obliged to forbid them to use torture, which was contrary to the laws of the king dom. It was found impossible to establish the Templars' guilt and only canonical penalties were inflicted on them. The rising of the Lollards having alarmed both the church and the state, the article De haeretico comburendo was established by statute in 1401, and gained a melancholy notoriety during the religious struggles of the 16th century; it seems to have been not so much a measure for the safeguarding of dogma as a violent assertion of the secular absolutism. It was not till 1676 that Charles II. caused it to be abrogated, and obtained a decision that in cases of atheism, blasphemy, heresy, schism and other religious offences, the ecclesiastical courts should be confined to the penalties of excommunication, removal from office, degradation and other ecclesiastical means of censure, to the exclusion of the death penalty. Scotland was much later than England in giving up per secution and bloodshed; and so late as 1696 a student of medicine aged eighteen named Aikenhead was accused of heresy and hanged in Edinburgh.
In the north of France the workings of the Inquisition were very intermittent ; for there were fewer heretics there than in the south, and as they were poorer, there was less zeal on the part of the secular arm to persecute them. At its outset, however, the Inquisition in the north of France was marked by a series of melancholy events: the inquisitor Robert le Bougre, formerly a Catharist, spent six years (1233-39) in going through the Niver nais, Burgundy, Flanders and Champagne, burning at the stake in every place unfortunates whom he condemned without a judg ment, supported as he was by the ecclesiastical authorities and by princes such as Theobald of Champagne. The pope was forced to put a check on his zeal, and, after an inquiry, condemned him to imprisonment for life. We know that there were inquisitors settled in Ile de France, Orleanais, Touraine, Lorraine and Bur gundy during the 12th century, but we know next to nothing of what they did. In the i4th century, the Flemish and German heresies of the Free Spirit made their appearance in France, and some executions resulted. But in the 15th century, with the ex ception of a few condemnations aimed against the Hussites, the Inquisition acted but feebly.
From the middle of the i4th century onward, the parlement had taken upon itself the right of hearing appeals from persons sentenced by the Inquisition. And the University again, by its faculty of theology, escaped the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. These two great bodies at the time of the Reformation took the place of the Inquisition in dealing with heresy.
Venice always preserved its autonomy as regards the repression of heresy ; she was perfectly orthodox, but remained independent of Rome; Innocent IV. sent inquisitors there, but the heretics continued actually to be subject to the secular tribunals. In 1288 a compromise was arrived at, and the papal Inquisition was ad mitted into the republic, but only on condition that it should remain under the secular power; thus there was established a mixed regime which survived till the last days of the Venetian state. In Savoy the Inquisition constantly carried on severe measures against the Waldenses of the Alps. During the i4th and 15th centuries there was an uninterrupted succession of trials. As regards the papal states, "it was in the nature of things that, by a confusion of the two personages, the pope should consider all opposition to him qua Italian prince as resistance offered to the head of the church, i.e., to the church" (Langlois). The Colonna had a personal animosity against the Gaetani ; therefore Bonif ace VIII., a Gaetano, declared the Colonna to be heretics. Rienzi was accused of heresy for having questioned the temporal sovereignty of the pope at Rome. The Venetians, who in 1309 opposed the annexation of Ferrara by Clement V. to the detriment of the house of Este, were proclaimed heretics and placed under the ban of Christendom. Savonarola was attacked because he interfered with the policy of Alexander VI. at Florence. It was this same desire for the hegemony of Italy which inspired the attitude of the popes throughout the middle ages, causing them to excommunicate, apparently without reason so far as doctrine was concerned, the Visconti of Milan, the Della Scala of Verona, the Manfredi of Faenza, etc., and prompting them to' lay under an interdict or preach a crusade against certain rebellious great towns (Clement V. against Venice, John XXII. against Milan). Germany.—In Germany heresies, especially of a mystical character, were numerous ; some of them affected the people, and led to religious and social movements of no little importance. The repression of heresy went on by fits and starts, and the Inquisition was never exercised so regularly in the Germanic as in certain of the Latin countries. At the outset of the 13th century persecutions of the Waldenses and Ortlibarii (followers of Ortlieb of Strass burg, c. 1200) took place at Strasbourg; measures were taken locally, until, in 1231, Gregory IX. issued definite instructions to the German prelates with a view to a regular repression of heresy, and gave to Conrad of Marburg full powers to execute them. In Feb. 1234 the Diet of Frankfort decided, in spite of the pope's injunctions, that the destruction of heresy should be entrusted to the ordinary magistrates. Moreover, owing to the struggle be tween the Empire and the papacy, the German prelates always limited the prerogatives of the papal Inquisition. Marsilius of Padua, the theoretical exponent of the imperial rights, attributes to the secular judge the right and obligation to punish heresy, the priest's role being merely advisory. In 1353 Innocent VI. tried to implant the papal Inquisition in Germany once for all; its success was but short, and Urban V.'s attempt in 1362 succeeded little better, in spite of the fact that Charles IV. (edicts of Lucca, June 1369) gave him the support of the secular power. Towards 1372, however, Gregory XI. succeeded in regularizing the exercise of the powers of the papal inquisitors on German soil ; and the latter, notably Kerlinger, Hetstede, etc., set to work to destroy the communities of the Beghards (who had developed with extra ordinary rapidity), to burn their books, to close those beguinages which were under suspicion, and to check mystical epidemics such as those of the "flagellants," "dancers," etc. But these measures provoked protests from the people, the secular magistrates and even the bishops, so that Gregory XI., perceiving that he was face to face with the popular party, invited the bishops to control the inquiries of his own envoys. At the end of the 15th century the two inquisitions were acting concurrently.
Sixtus IV. had wished the papal Inquisition to be established after the form of the middle ages; but Ferdinand, in his desire for centralization wished to establish an inquisition which should be entirely Spanish, and entirely royal. Rome resisted, but at last gave way. Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., Innocent VIII., Julius II. and after them all the popes of the r 6th century, saw in this sec ular attempt a great power in favour of orthodoxy, and approved it when established. The Inquisition took advantage of this to claim an almost complete autonomy. The decisions of the Roman Congregation of the Index were only valid for Spain if the Holy Office of Madrid thought good to countersign them ; consequently there were some books approved at Rome and proscribed in the peninsula, and some which were forbidden at Rome and approved in the peninsula. The Spanish Holy Office perceived long before Rome the dangers of mysticism, and already persecuted the mys tics, especially the Alumbrados and afterwards the Molinists, while Rome still favoured them. There was even a financial dispute between the Inquisition and the papacy. The Roman Penitentiary sold exemptions from penalties (involving loss of civil rights), such as prison, the galleys and wearing the sanbenito, and dispen sations from the crime of Marrania (secret Judaism). The inquisi tors tried to gain control of this sale, and at a much higher price, and were seconded in this by the kings of Spain, who saw that it was to their own interest. The struggle continued throughout the first half of the i6th century, the Curia finally triumphing, thanks to the energy of Paul III. Since, however, the Inquisition con tinued to threaten the holders of papal dispensations, most of them found it prudent to demand a definite rehabilitation, in re turn for payments both to the king and the Inquisition. As a national institution the Inquisition had first of all the advantage of a very strong centralization and very rapid procedure, con sisting as it did of an organization of local tribunals (established in all parts of the country) with a supreme council at Madrid, the Suprema. The grand inquisitor was ex officio president for life of the royal council of the Inquisition.
From the very beginning the papacy strengthened the organi zation by depriving the Spanish metropolitans, by the bull of Sept. 25, 1487, of the right of receiving appeals from the decisions given jointly by the bishops of the various dioceses, their suffragans and the apostolic inquisitors and by investing the inquisitor-general with this right. And, more than this, Torquemada actually took proceedings against bishops ; for example, the accusation of heresy against Don Pedro Aranda, bishop of Calahorra (1498) ; while the inquisitor Lucero prosecuted the first archbishop of Granada, Don Ferdinando de Talavera. Further, when once the Inquisition was closely allied to the crown, no Spaniard, whether clerk or layman, could escape its power. Even the Jesuits, though not till after r 66o, were put under the authority of the Suprema. But the descendants of Moors and Jews, though they were good Christians, or even nobles, were most held in suspicion. A family into which a forced conversion or a mixed marriage had introduced Moorish or Jewish blood was almost entirely deprived of any chance of public office, and was bound, in order to disarm suspicion to fur nish agents or spies to the Holy Office.
The Spaniards were very quick to accept the Inquisition to such an extent as to look upon heresy as a national scourge to be de stroyed at all costs, and they consequently considered it as a powerful and indispensable agent of public protection. As had happened among the Albigenses, commerce and industry were rapidly paralysed in Spain by this odious regime of suspicion, especially as the Conversos, who inherited the industrial and com mercial capacity of the Moors and Jews, represented one of the most active elements of the population. Besides, this system of wholesale confiscations might reduce a family to beggary in a single day, so that all transactions were liable to extraordinary risks. It was in vain that the counsellors of Charles V., and on several occasions the Cortes, demanded that the inquisitors and their countless agents should be appointed on a fixed system by the state ; the state, and above all the Inquisition, refused to make any such change. The Inquisition preferred to draw its revenues from heresy, and this is not surprising if we think of the economic aspect of the Albigensian Inquisition.
The political aspect of the work and character of the Inquisition had been very diversely estimated , it is a serious error to attribute to it as has too of ten been done, extreme ideas of equality, or even to represent it as having favoured centralization and a royal absolutism to the same extent as the Inquisition of the 13th and r4th centuries in Languedoc. "It was a mere coincidence," says H. C. Lea, "that the Inquisition and absolutism developed side by side in Spain." The Suprema did not attack all nobles as nobles ; it attacked certain of them as Conversos, and the Spanish feudal nobles were sure enough of their limpiez˘ to have nothing to fear from it. But it is undeniable that it frequently tended to constitute a state within the state. At the time of their greatest power, the inquisitors paid no taxes, and gave no account of the confiscations effected; they claimed for themselves and their agents the right of bearing arms, and it is well known that their declared adversaries, or even those who blamed them in some respects, were without fail prosecuted for heresy. It was, however, only the Bourbons, who had imbibed Gallican ideas, who by dint of perse verance managed to make the Inquisition subservient to the Crown, and Charles III., "the philosopher king," openly set limits to the privileges of the inquisitors. Napoleon, on his entry into Madrid (Dec. 18o8), at once suppressed the Inquisition, and the extraordinary general Cortes on Feb. 12, 1813 declared it to be incompatible with the constitution, in spite of the protests of Rome. Ferdinand VII. restored it (July 21, r 8 r 4) on his return from exile, but it was impoverished and almost powerless. It was again abolished as a result of the Liberal revolution of 182o, was restored temporarily in 1823 of ter the French military intervention under the duc d'Angouleme, and finally disappeared on July 15, 1834, when Queen Christina allied herself with the Liberals. It was not, however, till May 8, 1869 that the principle of religious liberty was proclaimed in the peninsula ; and even since then it has been limited by the constitution of 1876, which forbids the public celebration of dissident religions (S. Reinach) . In 1816 the pope abolished torture in all the tribunals of the Inquisition. It is a too frequent practice to represent as peculiar to the Spanish In quisition modes of procedure in use for a long time in the inquisi torial tribunals of the rest of Europe. There are no special manuals, or practica, for the inquisitorial procedure in Spain ; but the few distinctive characteristics of this procedure may be mentioned. The Suprema allowed the accused an advocate chosen from among the members or familiars of the Holy Office ; this privilege was ob viously illusory, for the advocate was chosen and paid by the tri bunal, and could only interview the accused in presence of an in quisitor and a secretary. The theological examination was a minute proceeding; the "qualificators of the Holy Office," special func tionaries, whose equivalent can, however, easily be found in the mediaeval Inquisition, charged those books or speeches which had incurred "theological censures," with "slight, severe or violent" suspicion. There was no challenging of witnesses. The torture, to the practice of which the Spanish Inquisition certainly added new refinements, was originally very much objected to by the Span iards, and Alphonso X. prohibited it in Aragon; later, especially in the r 5th, r 6th and r 7 th centuries it was applied quite shamelessly. But by the end of the r8th century, according to Llorente, it had not been employed for a long time ; the fiscal, however, habitually demanded it, and the accused always went in dread of it. The punishment of death by burning was much more often employed by the Spanish than by the mediaeval Inquisition.
With the extension of the Spanish colonial empire the Inquisi tion spread throughout it almost contemporaneously with the Catholic faith. Ferdinand IV. decreed the establishment of the Inquisition in America, and Jimenes in r 5 r 6 appointed Juan Que vedo, bishop of Cuba, inquisitor-general delegate with discretion ary powers. Excesses having been committed by the agents of the Holy Office, Charles V. decreed (Oct. 15, 1538) that only the European colonists should be subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition ; but Philip II. increased the powers of the inquisitors' delegate and, in 1541 established on a permanent basis three new provinces of the Inquisition at Lima, Mexico and Cartagena. The first auto-da- f e took place at Mexico in 1574, the year in which Hernando Cortez died. The Inquisition of Portugal was no less careful to ensure the orthodoxy of the Portuguese colonies. An Inquisition of the East Indies was established at Goa, with juris diction over all the dominions of the king of Portugal beyond the Cape of Good Hope. Finally Philip II. even wished to establish an itinerant Inquisition, and at his request the pope created, by a brief of July 21, 157i, the "Inquisition of the galleys," or "of fleets and armies." During the i6th and 17th centuries the Inquisition in Spain was directed again Protestantism. The inquisitor-general, Fernando de Valdes, archbishop of Seville, asked the pope to condemn the Lutherans to be burnt even if they were not backsliders, or wished to be reconciled, while in 156o three foreign Protestants, two Eng lishmen and a Frenchman were burnt in defiance of international law. But the Reformation never had enough supporters in Spain to occupy the attention of the Inquisition for long. After the Marranes the mystics of all kinds furnished the greatest number of victims. Here again we should not lose sight of the tradition of the mediaeval Inquisition; the mysticism of the Beghards, the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the innumerable pantheist sects had been pitilessly persecuted by the inquisitors of Germany and France during the 14th and 15th centuries. The Illuminati (alum brados), who were very much akin to the mediaeval sectaries, and the mystics of Castile and Aragon were ruthlessly examined, judged and executed. Not even the most famous persons could escape the suspicious zeal of the inquisitors Valdes and Melchior Cano. St. Ignatius de Loyola was twice imprisoned at the begin ning of his career ; St. Theresa was accused of misconduct, and several times denounced ; one of her works, Conceptos del amor divino, was prohibited by the Inquisition, and she was only saved by the influence of Philip II. Countless numbers of obscure vi sionaries were accused of Illuminism and perished. From its ear liest appearance Molinism was persecuted with almost equal rigour. Molinos himself was arrested and condemned to perpetual im prisonment (1685-87), and during the i8th century, till 1781, several Molinists were burnt. The Inquisition also attacked Jan senism, freemasonry (from 1738 onwards ; cf. the bull In emi nenti) and "philosophism," the learned naturalist Jose Clavigo y Faxarcho (173o-18o6), the mathematician Benito Bails (173o 97), the poet Tomas de Iriarte, the ministers Clavigo Ricla, Ar anda and others being prosecuted as "philosophers." Subject also to the tribunal of the Holy Office were bigamists, blasphemers, usurers, sodomites, priests who had married or broken the secrecy of the confessional, laymen who assumed ecclesiastical cos tume, etc.
Two features of the Spanish Inquisition are especially note worthy : the prosecutions for "speeches suspected of heresy" and the censure of books. The great scholar Pedro de Lerma, who after fifty years at Paris (where he was dean of the faculty of theology) had returned to Spain as abbot of Compluto, was called upon in 1537 to abjure eleven "Erasmian" propositions, and was forced to return to Paris to die. Juan de Vergara and his brother were summoned before the Inquisition for favouring Erasmus and his writings, and detained several years before they were acquitted. Fray Alonso de Virues, chaplain to Charles V., was imprisoned on an absurd charge of depreciating the monastic state, and was only released by the pope at the instance of the emperor. Mateo Pas cual, professor of theology at Alcala, who had in a public lecture expressed a doubt as to purgatory, suffered imprisonment and the confiscation of his goods. The censure of books was established in 1502 by Ferdinand and Isabella as a state institution. All books had to pass through the hands of the bishops; in 1521 the Inqui sition took upon itself the examination of books suspected of Lutheran heresy. In 1554 Charles V. divided the responsibility for the censorship between the Royal Council, whose duty it was to grant or refuse the imprimatur to manuscripts and the Inquisi tion, which retained the right of prohibiting books which it judged to be pernicious; but after 1527 it also gave the licence to print. In 1547 the Suprema produced an Index of prohibited books, drawn up in 1546 by the university of Louvain ; it was completed especially as regards Spanish books, in 1551, and several later edi tions were published. Moreover, the revisores de libros might present themselves in the name of the Holy Office in any private library or bookshop and confiscate prohibited books. In 1558 the penalty of death and confiscation of property was decreed against any bookseller or individual who should keep in his possession con demned books. The censure of books was abolished in 1812.