Religion_Christianity_Roman

After the Roman Church had consolidated its power in the early Middle Ages, heretics came to be regarded as enemies of society. The crime of heresy was defined as a deliberate denial of an article of truth of the Catholic faith, and a public and obst inate persistence in that alleged error. At this time, there was a sense of Christian unity among townspeople and rulers alike, and most of them agreed with the Church that heretics seemed to threated society itself.

However, the repression of heresy remained unorganized, and with the large scale heresies in the 11th and 12th centuries, Pope Gregory IX instituted the papal inquisition in 1231 for the apprehension and trial of heretics. The name Inquisition is der ived from the Latin verb inquiro (inquire into). The Inquisitiors did not wait for complaints, but sought out persons accused of heresy. Although the Inquisition was created to combat the heretical Cathari and Waldenses, the Inquisition later extended i ts activity to include witches, diviners, blasphemers, and other sacrilegious persons.

Another reason for Pope Gregory IX's creation of the Inquisition was to bring order and legality to the process of dealing with heresy, since there had been tendencies in the mobs of townspeople to burn alleged heretics without much of a trial. Pope Gregory's original intent for the Inquisition was a court of exception to inquire into and glean the beliefs of those differing from Catholic teaching, and to instruct them in the orthodox doctrine. It was hoped that heretics would see the falsity of the ir opinion and would return to the Roman Catholic Church. If they persisted in their heresy, however, Pope Gregory, finding it necessary to protect the Catholic community from infection would have suspects handed over to civil authorities since these her etics had violated not only Church law but civil law as well. The secular authorities would apply their own brands of punishment for civil disobedience which, at the time, included burning at the stake.

The inquisitiors, or judges of this medieval Inquisition were recruited almost exclusively from the Franscian and Dominican orders. In the early period of the institution, the Inquisitiors rode the circut in search of heretics, but this practice was short lived. The Inquisitors soon acquired the right to summon the suspects from their homes to the Inquisition center. The medieval Inquisition functioned only in a limited way in northern Europe. It was employed most in the south of France and in nor thern Italy.

Throughout the Inquisition's history, it was rivaled by local ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions. No matter how determined, no pope succeeded in establishing complete control of the institution. Medieval kings, princes, bishops, and civil auth orities wavered between acceptance and resistance of the Inquisition. The institution reached its apex in the second half of the 13th century. During this period, the tribunals were almost entirely free from any authority, including that of the pope. T herefore, it was almost impossible to eradicate abuse.

A second variety of the Inquisition was the infamous Spanish Inquisition, authorized by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478. Pope Sixtus tried to establish harmony between the inquisitors and the ordinaries, but was unable to maintain control of the desires of Ki ng Ferdinand V and Queen Isablella. Sixtus agreed to recognize the independence of the Spanish Inquisition. This institution survived to the beginning of the 19th century, and was permanently suppressed by a decree on July 15, 1834.

A third variety of the Inquisition was the Roman Inquisition. Alarmed by the spread of Protestantism and especially by its penetration into Italy, Pope Paul III in 1542 established in Rome the Congregation of the Inquisition. This institution was al so known as the Roman Inquisition and the Holy Office. Six cardinals including Carafa constituted the original inquisition whose powers extended to the whole Church. The "Holy Office" was really a new institution related to the Medieval Inquisition only by vague precedents. More free from episcopal control than its predecessor, it also conceived of its function differently. Some saw its establishment as an attempt to counter-balance the severe Spanish Inquisition at a time when much of Italy was under Spanish rule. Whereas the medieval Inquisition had focused on popular misconceptions which resulted in the disturbance of public order, the Holy Office was concerned with orthodoxy of a more academic nature, especially as it appeared in the writings of theologians. In its first twelve years, the activities of the Roman Inquisition were relatively modest and were restricted almost exclusively to Italy. Cardinal Carafa became Pope Paul IV in 1555 and immediately urged a vigorous pursuit of "suspects." His snare did not exclude bishops or even cardinals of the Church. Pope Paul IV carged the congregation to draw up a list of books which he felt offended faith or morals. This resulted in the first Index of Forbidden Books (1559). Although succeeding popes tempered the zeal of the Roman Inquisition, many viewed the institution as the cutomary instrument of papal government used in the regulation of Church order. This was the institution that would later put Galileo on trial.

The inquisitorial procedure was quite detailed; but, in general terms, it gave a person suspected of heresy time to confess and absolve himself, and, failing this, the accused was haled before the inquisitor and interrogated and tried, with the testimony of witnesses. The use of torture to obtain confessions and the names of other heretics was at first rejected but was authorized in 1252 by Innocent IV. On admission or conviction of guilt, a person could be sentenced publicly to any of a wide variety of penalties, ranging from simple prayer and fasting to confiscation of property and imprisonment, even life imprisonment. Condemned heretics who refused to recant, as well as those who relapsed after condemnation and repentance, were turned over to the secular arm, which alone could impose the death penalty.

The medieval Inquisition functioned only in a limited way in northern Europe; it was most employed in northern Italy and southern France. During the Reconquista in Spain, the Catholic powers used it only occasionally; but, after the Muslims had been driven out, the Catholic monarchs of Aragon and Castile determined to enforce religious and political unity and requested a special institution to combat apostate former Jews and Muslims as well as such heretics as the Alumbrados. Thus in 1478 Pope Sixtus IV authorized the Spanish Inquisition.

The first Spanish inquisitors, operating in Seville, proved so severe that Sixtus IV had to interfere. But the Spanish crown now had in its possession a weapon too precious to give up, and the efforts of the Pope to limit the powers of the Inquisition were without avail. In 1483 he was induced to authorize the naming by the Spanish government of a grand inquisitor for Castile, and during the same year Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia were placed under the power of the Inquisition. The first grand inquisitor was the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, who has become the symbol of the inquisitor who uses torture and confiscation to terrorize his victims. The number of burnings at the stake during his tenure has been exaggerated, but it was probably about 2,000.

In general, the procedure of the Spanish Inquisition was much like the medieval Inquisition. The auto-da-fé, the public ceremony at which sentences were pronounced, became an elaborate celebration. Under the inquisitor general and his supreme council were 14 local tribunals in Spain and several in the colonies, including those in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Inquisition was introduced into Sicily in 1517, but efforts to set it up in Naples and Milan failed. The emperor Charles V in 1522 introduced it into the Netherlands, where its efforts to wipe out Protestantism were unsuccessful. The Inquisition in Spain was suppressed by Joseph Bonaparte in 1808, restored by Ferdinand VII in 1814, suppressed in 1820, restored in 1823, and finally suppressed in 1834.

A third variety of the Inquisition was the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542 by Pope Paul III to combat Protestantism. It was governed by a commission of six cardinals, the Congregation of the Inquisition, which was thoroughly independent and much freer from episcopal control than the medieval Inquisition had been. Its establishment has been seen by some as an attempt to counterbalance the severe Spanish Inquisition at a time when a great part of Italy was under Spanish rule.

Under Paul III (1534-49) and Julius III (1550-55), the action of the Roman Inquisition was not rigorous, and Julius ruled that, although the tribunal had general authority, its action should be limited especially to Italy. The moderation of these popes was imitated by their successors with the exceptions of Paul IV (1555-59) and Pius V (1566-72). Under Paul IV the Inquisition functioned in such a way that it alienated nearly all parties. Although Pius V (a Dominican and himself formerly grand inquisitor) avoided the worst excesses of Paul IV, he nevertheless declared at the beginning of his reign that questions of faith took precedence over all other business and made it clear that his first care would be to see that heresy, false doctrine, and error were suppressed. He took part in many of the activities of the Inquisition.

After Protestantism had been eliminated as a serious danger to Italian religious unity, the Roman Inquisition became more and more an ordinary organ of papal government concerned with maintaining good order and good customs as well as purity of faith among Catholics. In his reorganization of the Roman Curia in 1908, Pius X dropped the word Inquisition, and the congregation charged with maintaining purity of faith came to be known officially as the Holy Office. In 1965 Pope Paul VI reorganized the congregation along more democratic lines and renamed it the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Heresy differs from schism in that the heretic sometimes remains in the church despite his doctrinal errors, whereas the schismatic may be doctrinally orthodox but severs himself from the church. The Greek word hairesis (from which heresy is derived) was originally a neutral term that signified merely the holding of a particular set of philosophical opinions. Once appropriated by Christianity, however, the term heresy began to convey a note of disapproval. This was because the church from the start regarded itself as the custodian of a divinely imparted revelation which it alone was authorized to expound under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Thus, any interpretation that differed from the official one was necessarily "heretical" in the new, pejorative sense of the word.

This attitude of hostility to heresy is evident in the New Testament itself. St. Paul, for instance, insists that his gospel is identical with that of the Twelve Apostles, and in the later books of the New Testament the contrast in attitudes regarding approved doctrines and heretical ones is even more sharply drawn. In the 2nd century the Christian church became increasingly aware of the need to keep its teaching uncontaminated, and it devised criteria to test deviations. The Apostolic Fathers, 2nd-century Christian writers, appealed to the prophets and Apostles as sources of authoritative doctrine, and Irenaeus and Tertullian laid great stress on "the rule of faith," which was a loose summary of essential Christian beliefs handed down from apostolic times. Later, the ecclesiastical and universal church council became the instrument for defining orthodoxy and condemning heresy. Eventually, in the Western church, the doctrinal decision of a council had to be ratified by the pope to be accepted.

A new situation came about in the 16th century with the Reformation, which spelled the breakup of Western Christendom's previous doctrinal unity. The Roman Catholic church, satisfied that it is the true church armed with an infallible authority, has alone remained faithful to the ancient and medieval theory of heresy, and it occasionally denounces doctrines or opinions that it considers heretical. Most of the great Protestant churches similarly started with the assumption that their own particular doctrines embodied the final statement of Christian truth and were thus prepared to denounce as heretics those who differed with them. But with the gradual growth of toleration and the 20th-century ecumenical movement, most Protestant churches have drastically revised the notion of heresy as understood in the pre-Reformation church. It does not now seem to them inconsistent for a person to stoutly maintain the doctrines of his own communion while not regarding as heretics those who hold different views. The Roman Catholic church, too, draws a distinction between those who willfully and persistently adhere to doctrinal error and those who embrace it through no fault of their own, e.g., as a result of upbringing in another tradition. The term heresy also has been used among Jews, although they have not been as intense as Christians in their punishment of heretics. The concept and combating of heresy has historically been less important in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam than in Christianity.

With its large Muslim and Jewish populations, medieval Spain was the only multiracial and multireligious country in western Europe, and much of the development of Spanish civilization in religion, literature, art, and architecture during the later Middle Ages stemmed from this fact. The Jews had served Spain and its monarchs well, providing an active commercial class and an educated elite for many administrative posts. But, inevitably, their wealth created jealousy and their heterodoxy hatred in a population that traditionally saw itself as the defender of Christianity against the infidel. The Catholic Monarchs, ever good tacticians, profited from this feeling. In 1478 they first obtained a papal bull from Sixtus IV setting up the Inquisition to deal with the supposedly evil influence of the Jews and conversos. Since the Spanish Inquisition was constituted as a royal court, all appointments were made by the crown. Too late, Sixtus IV realized the enormous ecclesiastical powers that he had given away and the moral dangers inherent in an institution the proceedings of which were secret and that did not allow appeals to Rome.

With its army of lay familiars, who were exempt from normal jurisdiction and who acted both as bodyguards and as informers of the inquisitors, and with its combination of civil and ecclesiastical powers, the Spanish Inquisition became a formidable weapon in the armoury of royal absolutism. The Supreme Council of the Inquisition (or Suprema) was the only formal institution set up by the Catholic Monarchs for all their kingdoms together. Nevertheless, they thought of it primarily in religious and not in political terms. The Inquisition's secret procedures, its eagerness to accept denunciations, its use of torture, the absence of counsel for the accused, the lack of any right to confront hostile witnesses, and the practice of confiscating the property of those who were condemned and sharing it between the Inquisition, the crown, and the accusers--all this inspired great terror, as indeed it was meant to do. The number of those condemned for heresy was never very large and has often been exaggerated by Protestant writers. But during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs several thousand conversos were condemned and burned for Judaizing practices. The whole family of the philosopher and humanist Juan Luis Vives was wiped out in this way. Many more thousands of conversos escaped similar fates only by fleeing the country. Many Roman Catholics in Spain opposed the introduction of the Inquisition, and the Neapolitans and Milanese (who prided themselves on their Catholicism and who were supported by the popes) later successfully resisted the attempts by their Spanish rulers to impose the Spanish Inquisition on them. Even in Spain itself, it was the sumptuous autos-da-fé, the ceremonial sentencings and executions of heretics, rather than the institution and its members that seem to have been popular. But most Spaniards never seem to have understood the horror and revulsion that this institution aroused in the rest of Europe.

The first inquisitor general, Tomás de Torquemada, himself from a converso family, at once started a propaganda campaign against the Jews. In 1492 he persuaded the Catholic Monarchs to expel all Jews who refused to be baptized. Isabella and most of her contemporaries looked upon this expulsion of about 170,000 of her subjects as a pious duty. At the moment when Spain needed all its economic resources to sustain its new European position and its overseas empire (see below), it was deprived of its economically most active citizens and laid open to exploitation by German and Italian financiers.

The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 did not signify the end of Jewish influence on Spanish history, as was thought until recently. It is not, however, easy to establish a clear-cut direction or pattern of this influence. At the end of the 15th century there may have been up to 300,000 conversos in Spain, and the majority of these remained. They had constituted the educated urban bourgeoisie of Spain, and the richer families had frequently intermarried with the Spanish aristocracy and even transmitted their blood to the royal family itself. After 1492 their position remained precarious. Some reacted by stressing their Christian orthodoxy and denouncing other conversos to the Inquisition for Judaizing practices. Others embraced some form of less conventional, more spiritualized Christianity. Thus the followers of Sister Isabel de la Cruz, a Franciscan, organized the centres of the Illuminists (Alumbrados), mystics who believed that through inner purification their souls should submit to God's will and thus enter into direct communication with him. While they counted some of the high aristocracy among their number, most of the Illuminists seem to have been conversos. Again, it was among the conversos that Erasmianism (after the famous humanist Erasmus), a more intellectual form of spiritualized Christianity, had its greatest successes in Spain. The Erasmians had powerful supporters at court in the early years of Charles I, when, as emperor, his policy was directed toward the healing of the religious schism by a general reform of the church. But in the 1530s and '40s, the enemies of the Erasmians, especially the Dominican order, launched a systematic campaign against them. The Inquisition annihilated them or forced them to flee the country, just as it had done in the case of the Illuminists as early as the 1520s. Nevertheless, the influence of Erasmus did not completely disappear from Spanish intellectual life, and it has been traced into the latter part of the 16th century.

But the majority of the conversos and their descendants probably became and remained orthodox Roman Catholics, playing a prominent part in every aspect of Spanish religious and intellectual life. They ranged from such saints as Teresa of Ávila and St. John of God, one a mystical writer and founder of convents, the other an organizer of care for the sick, to Diego Laínez, a friend of St. Ignatius of Loyola and second general of the Jesuit order. They included Fernando de Rojas, author of La Celestina, the first great literary work of the Spanish Renaissance, and, two generations later, Mateo Alemán, who wrote a picaresque novel, Guzmán de Alfarache; and they could boast Luis de León, a humanist and poet; a Dominican, Francisco de Vitoria, perhaps the greatest jurist of any country in the 16th century; and another famous Dominican, the defender of the American Indians and historian of the Indies, Bartolomé de Las Casas.

These, with Luis Vives, mentioned earlier, are only the most famous among the many distinguished conversos who played such a central and varied role in creating the cultural splendours of Spain's "Golden Century." It is an extraordinary phenomenon that had no parallel anywhere else in Europe before the 19th or even 20th century. Any attempt at an explanation is bound to be speculative, but the following may be suggested. The Spanish Jews and conversos formed a comparatively large section of the relatively small educated elite of Spain who were primarily responsible for the cultural achievements of the period. The conversos, moreover, having deliberately broken with the Jewish tradition of Talmudic scholarship (from the Talmud, the body of Jewish civil and canonical law), found the glittering Renaissance world of Christian Spain ambivalently attractive and repellent but always stimulating. Their response to this stimulus was probably sharpened, their need to excel given a double urgency, by the hostility that they continued to meet from the "old" Christians. For these latter were very much aware of the ubiquity of the conversos, however much these were assimilated, and many resented it bitterly. Religious, racial, and even anti-aristocratic class prejudices combined to create the obsession with "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre), which became characteristic of the Spaniards in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It first crystallized with a statute of limpieza, imposed in 1547 on the cathedral chapter of Toledo, by which purity of ancestry both from the "taint" of converso blood and from any accusations of heresy by the Inquisition was made a condition of all future ecclesiastical appointments. The author of this statute was Juan Martínez Siliceo, archbishop of Toledo, a man of humble and hence, by definition, untainted origins, who had found himself despised by the aristocratic canons, many of whom, however, had converso blood in their veins. In 1556 Philip II gave his royal approval to the statute on the grounds that "all the heresies in Germany, France and Spain have been sown by descendants of Jews." As far as Germany and France were concerned, this remark was sheer fantasy, and it is especially ironic that, just at this time, Pope Paul IV, at war with Spain, described Philip II himself quite correctly as a Marrano, or descendant of Jews.

But statutes of limpieza now spread rapidly over Spain. They helped to perpetuate a set of values, the equation of pure ancestry, orthodoxy, and personal honour, which certainly helped to prevent the spread of heresies in Spain but which in the long run had a blighting effect on Spanish society, the more so as they were linked so closely with the basically corrupt institution of the Inquisition and the encouragement of the inevitably corrupting and divisive practice of spying on and denouncing one's neighbours.

By the middle of the 16th century the Inquisition had largely run out of suspected heretics and Judaizers. Apart from its continued concern with the Moriscos (see below), it now concentrated on censorship of books and on enforcing correct religious beliefs and moral (i.e., mainly sexual) behaviour among the "old" Christians. As religious conflicts in Europe became sharper in the second half of the 16th century, such supervision came to be practiced in Protestant as well as in Catholic countries. It was here that the Spanish Inquisition, spreading its network of courts and familiars from the towns to the countryside, could surpass even the strictest Calvinist-Puritan communities, even though the use of torture was no longer deemed necessary and death sentences had become rare. But, taken together with a royal prohibition against students studying at foreign universities, even Catholic ones, the Inquisition tended to isolate Spanish intellectual life from that of the rest of Europe. On the positive side there was the Inquisition's general unwillingness to join in the widespread European mania of witch hunting. Most Spanish theologians did not believe in the existence of witchcraft and held that spells and sorceries were only female vapourings that could be safely ignored or dealt with by shutting the witch-women up in convents.

The impact of the Muslims on Spanish life and traditions had been rather different from that of the Jews. It was most evident, perhaps, in the position of women in southern Spain, who for long remained semiveiled and in much greater seclusion than elsewhere in Christian Europe. It was evident also where Jewish influence was practically nonexistent, in the visual arts and especially in architecture. Not only did houses in southern Spain for a long time continue to be built facing inward, onto a patio, but a whole style of architecture, the Plateresque, derived from an imaginative fusion of the Moorish (Muslim) and the Christian: classical Renaissance structures were decorated with Gothic or Renaissance motifs but executed in the Moorish manner, as if a carpet had been hung over the outside wall of the building. This charming style, which was invented during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, spread far and wide over Spain and eventually even to the New World.

To Ferdinand and Isabella, the Moorish problem presented itself in the first place in a political and military form, for the Muslims still ruled their independent kingdom of Granada. The Catholic Monarchs had to concentrate all their military resources and call on the enthusiastic support of their Castilian subjects to conquer the kingdom in a long and arduous campaign, which ended with the capture of Granada, the capital, in 1492. In this campaign Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the "Great Captain," developed the tactics, training, and organization that made Spanish infantry almost unbeatable for 150 years. The Muslims were granted generous terms and religious freedom. But, against the advice of the saintly Hernando de Talavera, the converso archbishop of Granada, who was trying to convert the Muslims by precept and education, the queen's confessor, Francisco (later Cardinal) Jiménez de Cisneros, introduced forced mass conversions. The Muslims rebelled (1499-1500) and, after another defeat, were given the choice of conversion or expulsion. Jiménez and Isabella did not regard this new policy as a punishment of the Muslims for rebellion, for Christian baptism could never be that. It was rather that they considered themselves to have been released by the rebellion from their previous guarantees to the Muslims, which they had entered into only with misgivings. Though many Muslims chose conversion, the problem now became virtually insoluble. There were never enough Arab-speaking priests or money for education to make outward conversion a religious reality. The Moriscos remained an alien community, suspicious of and suspect to the "old" Christians. There was with the Moriscos very little of the intermarriage with Christians and of the deliberate acceptance of Spanish Christianity that, in spite of all the statutes of limpieza, allowed the conversos to become such an integral part of Spanish society.

Cardinal Jiménez and other Castilians wanted to follow up the conquest of Granada by that of North Africa. There were religious, strategic, and historical reasons for keeping the two shores of the western end of the Mediterranean under single political control, as indeed they had been since Roman times. But Ferdinand, thinking, like all his contemporary kings, in dynastic and imperial rather than in national terms, chose to concentrate his efforts and Spanish resources on the traditional Aragonese claims against France along the Pyrenees and in Italy.

Aragon still held Sicily and Sardinia from the much more extensive medieval Aragonese empire. French intervention in Italy, from 1494, gave Ferdinand his chance. Charles VIII of France, to secure his southern flank while he led his army into Italy, agreed to return to Ferdinand the counties of Cerdagne and Roussillon (Treaty of Barcelona, 1493), which Louis XI had seized during the Catalan civil wars in 1463. But it was through Ferdinand's own diplomacy and through the generalship of Gonzalo de Córdoba that he acquired the Kingdom of Naples (1503). For the first time the union of Aragon and Castile had shown its strength, and Spain now rivaled France as the most powerful state in Europe. Ferdinand had carefully arranged the marriage of his children to strengthen his diplomatic position against France by alliances with Portugal, England, and Burgundy (which ruled the Netherlands). The unexpected deaths of the two eldest and of their children, however, left the succession of Castile after Isabella's death (1504) to the third, Joan the Mad, and her husband, Philip I (the Handsome) of Castile, ruler of the Burgundian Netherlands. The Netherlands nobility were delighted to see this enormous accretion of power to their ruler and looked forward to the advantages that they might reap from it. They accompanied him to Castile, where a large section of the high nobility, in their turn, were anxious to acclaim him rather than the redoubtable Ferdinand. Ferdinand was therefore forced to recognize Philip's claims; but, when Philip died in 1506, Ferdinand was left as uncontested ruler. His last great success was the annexation of the Spanish part of the kingdom of Navarre in 1512.

While the exploration of the Atlantic coast of Africa had been mainly a Portuguese concern in the 15th century, the Castilians had not been entirely disinterested in such activities and had occupied the Canary Islands (off northwest Africa). In the Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479), when Afonso V of Portugal renounced his claims to the crown of Castile, he also recognized Castilian possession of the Canaries in return for Spanish recognition of Portuguese possession of the Azores (in the Atlantic Ocean west of Portugal), the Cape Verde Islands (off West Africa), and Madeira (north of the Canaries). The conquest of Granada allowed Castile, for the first time, to concentrate major resources and effort on overseas exploration. The support that Christopher Columbus received from Isabella was indicative of this new policy. In 1492 Columbus made his landfall in the West Indies, and over the next half century the Spaniards conquered huge empires in America and made their first settlements in East Asia. From the beginning there were disputes with the Portuguese, who were conquering their own colonial empire. The Catholic Monarchs obtained a series of papal bulls (1493) from the Spanish pope Alexander VI and as a result concluded the Treaty of Tordesillas with Portugal (1494) to settle their respective claims. Everything west of an imaginary line 370 leagues (here, the league was just over three nautical miles) to the west of the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic was assigned to Spain; everything east went to Portugal. The rest of Europe saw no reason to accept the pope's decision, and the result was constant and brutal warfare in the overseas colonies, even when the European governments were officially at peace (see also Latin America).

Unlike the other European colonists of that age, the Spaniards were vitally concerned with the moral problems of conquest, conversion, and government of heathen peoples. If the great majority of conquistadores ruthlessly pursued gold, power, and status, they also took with them Dominican and Franciscan friars who set themselves to convert and educate the American Indians and, sometimes, to protect them from their Spanish masters. The Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas fought long battles to modify at least the greatest evils of colonial exploitation. His debates with a theologian, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, and the writings of Francisco de Vitoria provide the first systematic discussions of the moral and legal problems of conquest and colonial rule. Their importance lay in their effects on Spanish colonial legislation. The Leyes Nuevas ("New Laws of the Indies") of 1542 were based largely on the arguments of Las Casas. While in the colonies these laws were honoured more in the breach than in the observance, yet they provided at least some protection for the Indians, and there was nothing like them in any of the other European overseas colonies of the period. Even Las Casas, however, supported the transatlantic slave trade of black Africans, until, late in his career, he came to recognize its evils.

When medieval people used the word "inquisition," they were referring to a judicial technique, not an organization. There was , in fact, no such thing as "the Inquisition" in the sense of an impersonal organization with a chain of command. Instead there were "inquisitors of heretical depravity," individuals assigned by the pope to inquire into heresy in specific areas. They were called such because they applied a judicial technique known as inquisitio, which could be translated as "inquiry" or "inquest." In this process, which was already widely used by secular rulers (Henry II used it extensively in England in the twelfth century), an official inquirer called for information on a specific subject from anyone who felt he or she had something to offer. This information was treated as confidential. The inquirer, aided by competent consultants, then weighed the evidence and determined whether there was reason for action. This procedure stood in stark contrast to the Roman law practice normally used in ecclesiastical courts, in which, unless the judge could proceed on clear, personal knowledge that the defendant was guilty, judicial process had to be based on an accusation by a third party who was punishable if the accusation was not proved, and in which the defendant could confront witnesses.

By the end of the thirteenth century most areas of continental Europe had been assigned inquisitors. The overwhelming majority were Franciscans or Dominicans, since members of these two orders were seen as pious, educated and highly mobile. Inquisitors worked in cooperation with the local bishops. Sentence was often passed in the name of both . The overwhelming majority of sentences seem to have consisted of penances like wearing a cross sewn on one's clothes, going on pilgrimage, etc. The inqusitor's goal was not primarily to punish the guilty but to identify them, get them to confess their sins and repent, and restore them to the fold. Only around ten percent or less of the cases resulted in execution, a punishment normally reserved for obstinate heretics (those who refused to repent and be reconciled) and lapsed heretics (those who repented and were reconciled at one time but then fell back into error).

New inquisitors needed guidance, and the need was met by a series of manuals written in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries by old hands. The most famous of these is the one by Bernard Gui, a Dominican who spent close to a quarter-century conducting investigations. Born around 1261, probably of lesser nobility, he joined the order in 1279. He received a good education and served as prior in a series of southern French convents before being appointed an inquisitor in 1307. He remained such, with his base of operations at Toulouse, until 1324, when he was rewarded with a bishopric. During that period he passed sentence on 930 people that we know of. The sentences passed on them add up to a total of 394 pages in a very large book.

Gui's manual, actually entitled Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (The Conduct of Inquiry Concerning Heretical Depravity), was finished in 1323 or 1324, but he seems to have worked on it off and on throughout the latter part of his career. It is divided into five parts, the first three of which deal with procedure. The fourth presents a series of documents (papal bulls, etc.) which define the inqusitior's authority. In the fifth and most interesting part Gui takes his readers on a tour of contemporary heresy.

The part translated here deals with the Beguins. In order to understand who they were it is necessary to understand two important aspects of thirteenth-century history. On the one hand, this period witnessed the creation and enormous growth of the Franciscan Order, and a remarkable division in that order between the so-called spirituals, who insisted on observing the strict poverty practiced by Francis of Assisi himself, and what we now call the community, those willing to settle for a more moderate observance which would enable Franciscans to perform the many functions given them by the church. This quarrel was in some ways as old as the order itself, but we find two identifiable factions emerging only in the 1270s. By the late 1270s some Italian spirituals were being imprisoned by leaders of the order. In 1283 the battle claimed its first victim in southern France when Peter John Olivi, a leading spokesman for the spirituals, was censured; 1but by the end of the decade the Italian spirituals had been released from prison and Olivi had been rehabilitated.

Serious trouble occurred in the first decade of the fourteenth century, with large numbers of Italian and southern French spirituals being disciplined by the order. In 1312 Pope Clement V tried to mediate a compromise, but the battle soon heated up again, and the frustrated spirituals eventually tried to solve their problem by forcibly seizing a series of convents and holding them as their own turf. In 1317 the new pope, John XXII, decided to settle the problem by throwing his support entirely behind the community. He told the Spirituals to conform or face the consequences. When some refused, he identified them as heretics and turned the inquisition loose on them. By 1318 recalcitrant spirituals were being sent to the stake.

John's task was made more difficult by the fact that the spirituals had formed close ties with what we now call the beguins, a group of pious priests and laypersons in many southern French towns, and that brings us to the second aspect of thirteenth-century history. It was a period of tremendous religious enthusiasm among the laity, often accompanied by belief that a new age was dawning. Religious movements seemed increasingly self-propelled, moving without any obvious encouragement from (or control by) the ecclesiastical hierarchy. One of them was a group in southern France called beguins. That was rather scary for the church. As the papacy became sensitive to the threat involved in this situation, it raised the stakes by identifying disobedience with heresy and by encouraging drastic remedies against it. As a result, a number of people who had hitherto thought of themselves as loyal sons of the Holy Father found themselves forced to choose between their own deeply felt ideals and obedience to Rome.

The pope's attack on the spiritual Franciscans presented beguins with just such a dilemma, and many solved it by continuing to support the spirituals. These beguins were often members of the Third Order of Saint Francis and they held the poor, disciplined spirituals in special veneration. They worshipped Olivi as a saint, and every year on the anniversary of his death crowds of pilgrims flocked to his grave at Narbonne. When the spirituals were condemned, the beguins found it impossible to accept that decision. By 1319 they themselves were being prosecuted and burned, yet in a remarkable demonstration of what one might term either fanaticism or heroism they continued to harbor fugitive Spirituals and even organized an underground railroad which smuggled them through Majorca to Sicily. Eventually the southern French beguins were crushed, but it took the church two decades to do it.

What gave them the courage to continue? If we could answer that one, we would also be able to explain the tenacity of modern groups like the Branch Davidians. There are some things we can say, though. For one thing, Olivi had provided them with a set of apocalyptic expectations that made perfect sense of what was happening to them. He had seen Saint Francis as the inaugurator of a new , more spiritual age. This new age was opposed by carnal Christians, and the latter would capture the highest positions of leadership in the church. Soon - very soon - the mystical Antichrist would lead the ecclesiastical hierarchy in a desperate attempt to wipe out those poor, spiritual Christians who served as the advanced guard of the new dispensation. The result would be persecution, but it could be endured in the knowledge that eventually the carnal church would be defeated and a new, spiritual church would be born. Thus , like a beleaguered cell of early twentieth-century Marxists ,the beguins could bear their suffering secure in the knowledge that history was on their side.

Of course there was more than religious belief involved. In reading the interrogations of individual beguins, note the case of Alarassi Biasse, a woman on her way to the stake for running what became a collection point on the escape route to Sicily. She lived near the coast, and fugitive Spirituals hid in her home until they could be conveyed by boat to Majorca. In her process she confesses to harboring six, but there were probably more. Why did she do it? Was she motivated by a strong belief? In the process she desperately wants to stay alive, says she repents, and tries to cooperate with the inquisitors as fully as possible. We suddenly discover that, she is Olivi's niece, and of the first two Spirituals to arrive at her door one was her cousin. Suddenly a new set of possibilities emerges. When I first read Alarassi's process, I was reminded of a respectable couple I met not long ago who were embarassed, even appalled by the fact that they had been harboring an illegal alien in their home for over a year. They had been law-abiding people with no strong convictions about Latin American politics, but once faced with a concrete political refugee who needed protection they saw no alternative except to provide it. And once they provided it they began to develop opinions on Latin America. I'm also reminded of what I 've read about Italian peasants who harbored downed Allied airmen during World War II. In many cases they initially acted , not from any allegiance to the Allied cause, but from compassion, a sense that this particular poor, defenseless individual was being pursued by a powerful institution and needed all the help he could get. But what happened when another airman showed up, and then another, and the Germans kept coming to search the barn, upsetting the cows and scaring the children? At what point did they stop thinking of themselves as compassionate neutrals and start thinking of themselves as partisans?

Modern writers do not treat the inquisitors gently - Bernard Gui in the film version of The Name of the Rose is simply a fanatic, and Umberto Eco doesn't treat him much better in the novel - yet their preoccupations are more familiar than we care to admit. They want what interrogators always want in such situations. They could be FBI agents tracking down a ring of domestic terrorists, or CIA agents trying to unravel an international espionage system. They want confessions, but they want a great deal more. They need information. There's a conspiracy out there and they want to know about it. The defendant recognizes that little is gained by simply implicating oneself. Genuine confession involves contrition and cooperation, and that means naming names. Thus we find the defendants doing what defendants do in all ages. They provide the requisite information but try to limit disclosure as much as possible, naming if possible only those accomplices they assume are already known to the authorities. As for themselves, they readily admit to less serious actions and to actions about which they suspect the inquisitor already knows, but are less forthcoming about other matters.

The inquisitors anticipate all this and have prepared a set of questions designed to prevent evasion. These questions serve as the filter through which what we know of the heretics must pass. They represent, not the heresy itself, but the inquisitor's'working assumptions about it. Rarely does the suspect gain enough control of the process to answer questions the inquisitor has not thought to ask. Rarely does the suspect state beliefs in any terms other than those assumed by the inquisitor's question. Thus those who want to know about the Beguins must also learn a great deal about the inquisitors, for they will inevitably be looking at the former through the latter's eyes, and they had better not do so credulously.

In 1611 Galileo came to the attention of the Inquisition for the first time for his Copernican views. Four years later a Dominican friar, Niccolo Lorini, who had earlier criticized Galileo's view in private conversations, files a written complaint with the Inquisition against Galileo's Copernican views. Galileo subsequently writes a long letter defending his views to Monsignor Piero Dini, a well connected official in the Vatican, he then writes his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina arguing for freedom of inquiry and travels to Rome to defend his ideas

In 1616 a committee of consultants declares to the Inquisition that the propositions that the Sun is the center of the universe and that the Earth has an annual motion are absurd in philosophy, at least erroneous in theology, and formally a heresy. On orders of the Pope Paul V, Cardinal Bellarmine calls Galileo to his residence and administers a warning not to hold or defend the Copernican theory; Galileo is also forbidden to discuss the theory orally or in writing. Yet he is reassured by Pope Paul V and by Cardinal Bellarmine that he has not been on trial nor being condemned by the Inquisition.

In 1625 a complaint against Galileo's publication The Assayer is lodged at the Inquisition by a person unknown. The complaint charges that the atomistic theory embraced in this book cannot be reconciled with the official church doctrine regarding the Eucharist, in which bread and wine are ``transubstantiated'' into Christ's flesh and blood. After an investigation by the Inquisition, Galileo is cleared.

In 1630 he completed his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in which the Ptolemaic and Copernican models are discussed and compared and was cleared (conditionally) to publish it by the Vatican. The book was printed in 1632 but Pope Urban VIII, convinced by the arguments of various Church officials, stopped its distribution; the case is referred to the Inquisition and Galileo was summoned to Rome despite his infirmities.