Along with “the Witch Craze” and “the Crusades”, the violence and oppression of “the Inquisition” is part of a triumvirate of historical atrocities that is usually invoked by anti-theists as proof of the wickedness of Christianity in particular and religion in general. “Everyone knows” these things were evil, even though what most people know about each of these things is largely wrong. This is perhaps most the case with “the Inquisition”; given that there was never a single institution by that name and most people’s conception of inquisitions are cartoonish clichés based on popular media which are in turn based on centuries of deliberate distortion and propaganda. By modern standards, the various historical inquisitions were certainly oppressive, often deadly, and their aims and many of their methods are, to us, repugnant. But anti-religious polemicists tend to be largely uninterested in the facts of this complex historical subject, relying entirely on their own inadequate conception of “the Inquisition” and basing arguments on these erroneous ideas.

The meme above has been circulating on Twitter and elsewhere among atheist activists in recent months. It is an adaptation from an earlier version which claimed this torture device was used by “the Church” to punish people with “greedy hands”. This newer version is more expansive, listing heretical “scientists, artists, painters [and] sculptors” as its intended victims. It is usually accompanied by a chorus of comments about how this is evidence of the evils of Christianity, the oppression of scientists and artists by priests and the general wickedness of religion.

Properly sceptical sceptics would be careful to verify that this is, in fact, a genuine fifteenth century torture device. Even moderate sleuthing would find good reason to doubt this claim. To begin with, pretty much all such alleged “medieval torture machines” are fakes: lurid inventions created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to put in titillating “museums of torture”. These fakes are either fantasy inventions of the fakers or based on sectarian propaganda from earlier centuries. Despite coffee table books and online articles breathlessly assuring their readers of the barbaric horrors of medieval torture, the use of items like “the Iron Maiden“, “the Pear of Anguish” and “the Spiked Chair” in torture cannot actually be found in records from the relevant periods.

A little more investigation would discover that the specific device pictured in the meme is of highly dubious provenance and is most likely also a modern fake. A fact-checking article on this item found the image originally appeared in an auction catalogue from 2012. The auction was to be of items from the collection of one Fernand Meyssonnier, billed as “France’s last executioner”. Meyssonnier had been an executioner in French-ruled Algeria and apparently carried out 198 executions between 1957 and 1962. He certainly had a taste for the macabre and collected items associated with execution and torture which he proposed to sell via auction. The intended auction was called off when it caused an outcry from the Algerian government and human rights groups, but the news stories about this also brought attention to the auction catalogue and it was then that the image of this alleged hand-crushing device began to circulate on social media, along with a variety of captions and claims about it. The catalogue said Meyssonnier’s collection included items “dating back over 300 years”, which does not really get us close to the fifteenth century. And fakers of these items had weird collectors like Meyssonnier in mind – the idea that the Church would add a cross to the top of their torture device to helpfully remind its users who they worked for seems a little far fetched, though it is the kind of thing a faker would do to hook a gullible buyer. The item is almost certainly a fake.

But the commentary on it tells us how torture in Christian history is seen in the popular imagination. And torture in the Middle Ages is usually associated with something referred to as “the Inquisition”. Popular movies, TV shows and even many documentaries often include references to or depictions of a medieval institution called “the Inquisition”. This is a kind of Church Gestapo that lurks ready to pounce on anyone who steps out of line, says anything rational or sceptical or comes up with anything remotely scientific or technologically innovative. This “Inquisition” is apparently all-powerful, unrestrained by any laws and can torture anyone it chooses into confessing, whereupon these unfortunates are inevitably condemned to be burned at the stake. These cartoon villains and the largely-mythical institution to which they belong have a long pedigree in Western cultural history and only occasionally intersect with anything actually historical. But this does not stop many people from making grand and confident pronouncements about the horrors of “the Inquisition” or, sometimes more specifically, “the Spanish Inquisition”, and basing arguments about religion on them.

Prominent New Atheist authors generally simply gesture toward this thing they call “the Inquisition”, assuming they have no need to elaborate on what it was and trusting their readers’ understanding. So Christopher Hitchens refers to it in passing, listing it among religions’ famously terrible episodes: “the Inquisition and the witch trials and the Crusades and the Islamic imperial conquests and the horrors of the Old Testament” (God Is Not Great, p. 79). In his The New Atheism (Prometheus, 2009) the physicist and polemicist Victor Stenger goes into a little more detail. In section titled “Historical Horrors”, Stenger gives a catalogue of religions’ historical crimes, including:

The Albigensian heresy led Pope Innocent IV to establish the Inquisition. Dominican priests devised fiendish machines of torture that were used on thousands in France and Spain.

This is followed directly by another entry:

In the 1400s the Inquisition changed its focus to witchcraft and thousands of women were tortured into confessing and then burned or hanged. Witch hysteria raged for three centuries with estimates of the number executed ranging from a hundred thousand to two million.

Sam Harris is even less restrained. Most of the third chapter of his The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (Norton, 2004) is dedicated to a version of history depicting this “Inquisition”. It opens with the following terrifying vignette:

Without warning you are seized and brought before a judge. Did you create a thunderstorm and destroy the village harvest ? Did you kill your neighbor with the evil eye? Do you doubt that Christ is bodily present in the Eucharist? You will soon learn that questions of this sort admit of no exculpatory reply.
You are not told the names of your accusers. But their identities are of little account, for even if, at this late hour, they were to recant their charges against you, they would merely be punished as false witnesses, while their original accusations would retain their full weight as evidence of your guilt. …. But you have a choice, of sorts: you can concede your guilt and name your accomplices. Yes, you must have had accomplices. No confession will be accepted unless other men and women can be implicated in your crimes. Perhaps you and three acquaintances of your choosing did change into hares and consort with the devil himself. The sight of iron boots designed to crush your feet seems to refresh your memory. Yes, Friedrich, Arthur, and Otto are sorcerers too. Their wives? Witches all.

(Harris, p. 80)

This dramatic and allegedly historically-accurate depiction of “the Inquisition” contains most of the elements of the mythic version of the story: the institution is wholly irrational, all-powerful, systematically unjust, violent and murderous. And Harris throws in a torture device (“iron boots designed to crush your feet”) and apparently the focus is mainly on witches though heresy is alluded to (“doubt that Christ is bodily present in the Eucharist”). Harris then spends over a page lovingly detailing various tortures that his “Inquisition” would be likely to inflict:

You may be imprisoned in total darkness for months or years at a time, repeatedly beaten and starved, or stretched upon the rack. Thumbscrews may be applied, or toe screws, or a pear-shaped vise may be inserted into your mouth, vagina, or anus, and forced open until your misery admits of no possible increase. You may be hoisted to the ceiling on a strappado …. dislocating your shoulders …. you may be placed in the “Spanish chair”: a throne of iron, complete with iron stocks to secure your neck and limbs. In the interest of saving your soul, a coal brazier will be placed beneath your bare feet, slowly roasting them. Because the stain of heresy runs deep, your flesh will be continually larded with fat to keep it from burning too quickly. Or you may be bound to a bench, with a cauldron filled with mice placed upside-down upon your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the iron, the mice will begin to burrow into your belly in search of an exit.

(Harris, p. 81)

Readers who wonder where Harris is getting all this horrible detail could follow his footnotes and, perhaps, be a little bothered to find that it does not depend on any historian’s careful research, but a book called The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber by one “J. Swain” and dating to 1931. Swain was writing in a genre still to be found today: lurid titillation lightly disguised as history. And he was less than scrupulous about checking the accuracy of the accounts he drew on. Harris is similarly cavalier about whether his antiquated and amateurish source is telling the truth. He clearly does not actually care.

This carelessness and tendency to draw from any source, however dated, amateurish, biased or dubious, so long as it supports their agenda is typical of anti-theistic ideologues, like Harris, Hitchens and Stenger et. al. It is not that they have engaged deeply with current historical work on these subjects and are presenting and defending a position that favours their conclusions. It is far worse. They appear to have no knowledge of or detailed understanding of any of the modern historical analysis on these topics and to have no interest in accessing one. They simply find anything that seems to fit their agenda and rely on it without scrutiny or critical analysis. And these people present themselves as “rationalists”.

From Folk Tradition to Legalism

One irony of the contrast between the myths about “the Inquisition” and actual history is the origin of the process of inquisitorio comes not from a rejection of reason and its replacement with superstition, but in fact the exact opposite. According to the simple version of church history favoured by Harris and his fellow polemicists, “the Inquisition” arose as just one manifestation of the kind of murderous persecution that was fundamentally inherent in Christianity and so, they warn, this lurks dangerously beneath the surface of its more benign-seeming modern manifestations. So A.C. Grayling notes the execution of Priscillian of Avila in 385 as marking the ominous end of the early church’s “brief honeymoon of tolerance” and the beginning of deadly persecution of dissenters:

There followed a rapid proliferation of laws against heresy, imposing punishments of exile, fines, confiscation of property, disqualification from inheritance, and very soon the death penalty.

(Grayling, Towards the Light: The Story Of The Struggles For Liberty And Rights That Made The Modern West, Bloomsbury, 2011, p. 24)

Grayling does note that Pricillian’s execution was opposed and condemned by “no fewer than three saints: Ambrose, Leo and Martin of Tours” and also refers to John Chrysostom’s condemnation of executing heretics and his recommendation they be simply condemned to silence. But he is also quick to note that these “kinder views” gave way to deadly ones. Augustine did not mean for his analogy of the gardener who cuts a rotten branch off to save the tree to be taken literally, but Grayling observes grimly that “his successors thought otherwise.” He goes on:

By the tenth century AD executing heretics, typically by strangling and burning, was a commonplace.

(Grayling, p.24)

More observant readers will notice a rather dramatic leap of 600 years between the unfortunate Pricillian and the “by the tenth century” in Grayling’s next paragraph. If the reluctance regarding executing heretics was merely a “brief honeymoon” before Christianity got down to its inherent vicious intolerance and it turned to executing heretics “very soon” after 385, that six century gap does not make much sense. But Grayling does not bother to explain it. If he, along with Harris and the rest of their anti-religious cohort, had bothered to actually look at the work of historians on the matter, they would find possible explanations. And ones that do not quite fit with their simplistic view of what history tells us.

In his ground-breaking 1987 study The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250 (Blackwell, 1987, 2nd ed. 2006), R.I. Moore also refers to the execution of Pricillian, but unlike Grayling he is sensible to the yawning gap between it and anything similar for many centuries. He notes:

[Pricillian] remained not only the first Western European to be burned as a heretic …. but the only one before [fourteen clergy] of Orleans were burned at the order of King Robert I [sic – it was Robert II] of France in 1022 … a period as long as that which separates the reign of Elizabeth I from the present day.

(Moore, pp. 12-13)

So Grayling’s mighty vault of many centuries needs an explanation. If Medieval Christianity was as viciously intolerant as Grayling, Harris and others suppose, why this gap? Clearly something changed significantly. Moore and others have shown that this change was conceptual, institutional and bureaucratic.

Earlier western medieval Christianity was not the tightly controlled, highly institutionalised and legalistic theocracy of popular imagining – this is projecting much later (or even wholly imaginary) developments back onto the earlier period. For the first five centuries of the Middle Ages, the Church tried to exert influence with varying degrees of success. But there was not yet the huge network of parish churches that would develop later; large central diocesan churches in key locations and as the seats of bishops were more the norm. There was also not yet any coherent body of canon law and what did exist was scattered, often local, and regularly contradictory. Popes, bishops or local synods could issue declarations, but the Europe-wide bureaucracy that could enforce them or even make them widely known barely existed. Religion was a very local, highly communal and often rather secular affair. Many clergy married, more than a few had other concerns on the side and most were appointed by a local lord rather than any ecclesiastical authority. Since many were from noble families and appointed by their relatives, these often pursued highly secular activities, including marrying, keeping concubines, and riding to war. The appointment of bishops and abbots on the whim of a secular lord was sometimes railed against, but it remained the norm.

In this context, the conception of “heresy” was vague, ill-defined generally not a major issue in this earlier period. As Edward Peters writes of the use of the term haeresis (heresy) in the period before the twelfth century:

Throughout most of this period, the term haeresis had acquired a loose and – to us – casual meaning. It was used for extremely abstract disputes among clerical scholars, to describe political differences, and even to indicate simple intellectual errors.

(Peters, Inquisition, The Free Press, 1988, p. 41)

This means that while a general conception of possible doctrinal or theological error did exist, it was broad, often not well-defined and it was dealt with via counter-argument, preaching and persuasion, not legalism and persecution. A bishop or synod might censure a person or condemn a writing, but there was no systematic, coordinated action and executions – as Grayling’s gap of 600 years shows – were basically unheard of.

So what changed? The answer is “most things”. From the tenth century onward we find an increase in the expansion of formerly centralised power into the margins, a greater sophistication in legal frameworks and infrastructure, a rise in systematic framing in many aspects of life, and a rapid growth in bureaucracy. This happened across Europe, though in some places faster than others, and we see it first in secular governance and then, increasingly, in ecclesiastical sphere. Communal, village-based systems of keeping order founded on folk traditions gave way to larger scale networks of law and authority centred on a ruling power which was often far away, but administered through officers, delegates or proxies. Formerly local folk-bonds of oath and honour were subsumed into much wider networks of vassalage and obligation, all reinforced by new laws and more bureaucracy. The world of medieval Europe was getting richer and was expanding outward and with this came greater systematisation, institutionalism and new administrative infrastructure. All this happened within the Church as rapidly as in the rest of society, if not more so.

This is because these changes were driven, in no small part, by a revival in learning and a rediscovery of lost Roman texts. Back in the late eighth century Charlemagne had recognised that his huge territory needed an administrative bureaucracy and established schools and sponsored scholars to help establish this. His bureaucracy formed the template for the later, wider and more extensive ones that arose in later medieval polities and his schools, mainly centred on cathedrals and larger diocesan churches, were the beginning of a revival and expansion in learning. The scholars these schools produced travelled far and wide to seek out lost works of Greek and Roman learning and among the works they rediscovered were collations of Roman law. In particular, the rediscovery of the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian in Italy in the later eleventh century had a major impact on the development of legal systems and frameworks, both in the secular sphere and within the Church.

Around the same time the Church was being reordered by a series of sweeping reform movements, beginning with the Cluniac Reforms of monastic life in the tenth century and then spilling into the wider Church, with its culmination in the Gregorian Reforms, where the reformers took control of the Papacy and undertook a campaign to radically reshape the Church. The reformers targeted practices they felt had corrupted the Church, especially lay investiture (the appointment of bishops, abbots and senior clergy by secular lords), simony (the purchase of Church positions) and, increasingly, clerical marriage and the keeping of concubines by priests. Those who drove this “Medieval Reformation” were largely successful in reordering the medieval Church and, through doing so, sought to reorder the world.

This they strove to achieve, in substantial part, through law. The Gregorian Reforms saw churchmen study and adopt the principles of Roman law via the Corpus Juris Civilis and the codification and rationalisation of canon law. By the early twelfth century the formerly scattered and often contradictory body of Church laws, decretals, synodal statements and bulls had been pulled together into a more coherent collection modelled, in part, on Justinian’s Corpus, and eventually the Decretum Gratiani formed the core of a wider codified body of Canon Law, that in effect governs the Catholic Church to this day.

The result of all this centralisation and legalism is the folk traditions that had previously dominated medieval law, secular or religious, were gradually supplanted and replaced by a more centralised, bureaucratic and documented law based on the dialectic of the schools and the study of Roman law. Traditional forms of trial which appealed to the judgement of God, such as “trial by combat” and “trial by ordeal”, gave way to Roman-style trials by tribunal or jury, based on evidence, examination, critical analysis and reason. The old ways were seen as superstitious and the new ones as based on logic.

And so one result of this process of legalism, bureaucratisation and systematisation of previously loosely regulated or unregulated areas of life was a defining of what was and was not correct doctrine, belief and practice. “Heresy” ceased to be a loosely defined and largely rhetorical label and became increasingly carefully defined and systematically delineated set of wrong beliefs. It was not long, therefore, that this newly reformed, freshly vigorous and far more legalistic Church looked at the faith of many of its lower clergy and of common believers, measured it against their new legal definitions of orthodoxy and heresy and, unsurprisingly, found a hell of a lot of “heretics” out there.

And here is the explanation for the centuries-long gap in Grayling’s account of how Christianity turned deadly against dissenters. Contrary to Grayling’s depiction, it was when the early medieval reliance on legal processes that allowed God to show his favour or disfavour gave way to rational inquiry, logical analysis and structured critical inquiry that the Church’s new legalism began to find heretics. And, having found them, began to kill some of them. Ironically, it was the rejection of superstition for reason that lead to the Inquisition.

Heretics and “Inquisitio”

It should be noted that there was never a single institution called “the Inquisition”. There were later, more local and permanent institutions such as the Roman Inquisition or the Spanish Inquisition of the Early Modern Period. But in the Middle Ages, “inquisition” was a process – inquisitio – rather than a permanent body. And it took some time to take its full form.

The systematisation and legalism process noted above meant that the newly reformed Church of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries saw bishops working to amend the level of pastoral care in their dioceses: more preaching, better doctrinal instruction and more correction of bad practices and erroneous ideas among both clergy and laity. In doing so, the emphasis was strongly on persuasio – persuasion rather than coercion. As time went on, however, it was clear there were some who were not persuaded and who actively resisted persuasion. There were forms of Christian belief that did not conform to the newly systematised doctrines being imposed by an increasingly legalistic hierarchy, and these recalcitrant expressions tended to have a local flavour, recognised leaders or spokespeople and – often – great popular support.

The new systematic perspective on orthodoxy and heresy identified these expressions of dissent as organised heresies: complete with a hierarchy of leadership, systematic beliefs, creeds and sacraments. To the Church hierarchy they were, in effect, rival churches: heretical mirror images of the true Church and organised threats to it. Searching the literature of the early Church Fathers, the custodians of orthodoxy found parallels to the beliefs – real and assumed – of these dissenters and so saw these heretics as newly sprung manifestations of old errors. The groups in southern France centred around the town of Albi – called Albigensians or Cathars – were seen as equivalent of the Manicheans that Augustine had disputed in the fifth century: theological dualists who preached a good God and an evil one as equal or almost equal opponents in the cosmos. Or the dissenters originally known as “the Poor of Lyon” who became popular in south-eastern France, the Cottian Alps and north-western Italy, were associated with earlier heretics who rejected clerical hierarchy, disputed the Incarnation and preached radical asceticism. These Waldensians were, like the Cathars, seen as representing an organised, structured and dangerously heretical alternative to the “true” Church.

The traditional historical narrative has long been that this perception was more or less accurate. The accepted belief was that these “Great Heresies” really did arise and take hold in the eleventh to twelfth centuries and that the Church responded to them in the later twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in a number of ways, including the imposition of “inquisitions” to root out the heretics. More recently this whole idea has been seriously questioned. R.I. Moore’s ground-breaking work on the rise of legalism and systematisation noted and summarised above has since led a new generation of scholars who have questioned how organised, structured and cohesive these heresies actually were and how much this impression was actually the custodians of orthodoxy projecting themselves onto their opponents.

Some have gone much further, questioning whether there were ever any “Cathars” or “Waldensians” at all and concluding these categories were largely in the imagination of the heresy-fighters, imposed artificially on a loose collection of dissidents or simply people who did not fit into the new, neat, legal categories of “correct” belief or practice. It could be, these scholars argue, that having created legalistic categories of belief and unbelief, the orthodoxy enthusiasts began to cram those who did not fit neatly into the former into carefully defined versions of the latter. So, the revisionists argue, things like the “inquisitions” were not so much responses to the rise of these heresies, but actually in effect created them where they did not actually exist. For a useful summary of the arguments here, see Nathan Johnstone, The New Atheism Myth and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 64-7). For more detail see Mark Pegg, “On Cathars, Albigenses, and Good Men of Languedoc”, Journal of Medieval History, 27, 2001, pp.181-195.

The debate about the nature or the reality of these “Great Heresies” is far from over, but most modern historians would regard the traditional narrative as, at least, substantially modified by these new perspectives. Whether they responded to these groups or imagined and created them, the orthodox authorities increasingly moved from persuasio to forms of coercion, including inquisitio.

The eleventh century reformers saw heresy as a symptom of the problems they sought to eradicate and largely advised instruction, toleration and patience in response. Excommunication was generally the most severe penalty for recalcitrant unorthodox clergy and believers in this period, along with various lesser penances. As the struggle for the new, more rigorously-defined orthodoxy increased in the twelfth century, a rapprochement between the post-Gregorian Reforms papacy and its secular antagonists saw a greater alignment between the reformers’ legalism in matters of belief and secular law. Heresy increasingly became seen as a form of treason and so its suppression and correction was now often supported by secular rulers.

So in 1184 the decretal Ad abolendam was issued by Pope Lucius III with the approval of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Babarossa. Often called “the founding charter of the inquisition”, this bull listed various heresies and their differences from the defined doctrines of the Church. It condemned heretics for their “contumacia” – their arrogant defiance – and targeted those who openly taught heretical ideas in particular. In a way, Ad abolendam can be seen as a new stage in the orthodox war on heresy: a more specific targeting of those who rejected the earlier, softer approach based on persuadio and “persisted” in their unorthodox views. This bull also laid the foundations of the idea that the orthodox experts of the Church were to identify the heretics, while the secular powers were to punish them. Finally, a process of investigation was laid out whereby bishops were instructed to visit communities where heresy was suspected and take an oath from community leaders that they will point out any heretics to the visiting prelate. The major elements of later inquisitorial practice had thus been established.

In 1199 the vigorously anti-heretical Pope Innocent III issued Vergentis in senium, which restated and reinforced Ad abolendam, but made explicit the link between heresy and treason (“laesa majestatis“) as stated in Roman law. It also prescribed the confiscation of goods and property as punishment for heresy. While Innocent still advocated persuasion as the key to defeating heresy, and sponsored the new preaching orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans for this end, secular lords who were not co-operative in the fight against the Cathars in southern France led him to declare a crusade against the heretics and their noble protectors there. The Albigensian Crusade saw notorious incidents of slaughter and destruction and quickly evolved into a land grab by northern French lords and an excuse for the king of France to bring his independent southern vassals to heel.

The aftermath of the Crusade largely saw an end of heretical preachers openly operating in defiance of the newly vigilant and militant Church hierarchy. Some communities continued to shelter and honour unorthodox teachers and believers, so new tactics designed to uncover these hidden heretics and their supporters evolved. Led by the Franciscans and, particularly, the Dominicans, specialists in questioning witnesses on fine points of theology and detecting evasion by unorthodox believers adverse to lying but also not keen on being discovered developed a systematic approach to investigating heresy. This was the beginning of the inquisition proper.

Medieval Inquisition in Practice

Most people’s conception of how a “Medieval inquisition” operated would be something like Sam Harris’ lurid depiction quoted above: innocent victims seized without warning, accused by unnamed persons, tortured into confession and then cruelly executed in a wild and irrational travesty of justice. In the popular imagination, this was something that could occur to anyone, anywhere in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and is the epitome of what makes this period “a dark age”. As already detailed, however, inquisitions did not exist at all until the thirteenth century and operated mainly in southern France, northern Italy and parts of western Germany. Most of the medieval period had no inquisitions and, prior to the eleventh century, essentially no executions for heresy either. Even after the thirteenth century, large areas of Medieval Europe saw no inquisitions in operation. So, contrary to the fevered imaginings of many medieval movies, England was inquisition-free, with its only major heresy trials – against the Lollards in the fifteenth century – being prosecuted under secular law.

There certainly were some incidences where hysteria about heresy led to wild accusations and effective lynchings without any form of due process. In the 1220s there was a surge of anti-heretical activity in the Rhineland characterised by mob violence led by fanatical individual, self-appointed heresy hunters like Conrad Dorso and the appropriately-named John the One-eyed. The Bishop of Mainz gave licence to Konrad von Marburg to join these two entrepreneurs and find to subdue heretics and, convinced by Konrad’s reports of alleged Satanists in the region, Pope Gregory IX sanctioned his activity and supported it with the bull Vox in Rama in 1233. These three disregarded any proceedure and their method consisted largely of accusing whoever they liked and using the support of mobs they stirred up with their preaching to force the secular authorities to execute whoever they accused. Inevitably this led to complaints to the pope, who soon began to question his support of Konrad. When Konrad accused Count Henry of Sayn of participation in Satanic orgies, the count appealed to an assembly of bishops and in the course of the dispute that followed, Konrad was ambushed and killed by a group of knights. Conrad Dorso and the One-eyed John were murdered not long afterward, bringing the Satanic panic to an end.

Clearly this kind of hysteria was not what the legalist reformers of the Church wanted at all. So, by the later thirteenth century, structured sets of legal procedures developed for the orderly and far more rational, evidence-based investigation of reports of heresy.

Manuals for inquisitors, various papal and episcopal letters and the records of the proceedings of inquisitional investigations give us a reasonably good idea of how these tribunals were run from around the mid-thirteenth century. Usually a letter of commission was issued, perhaps by the pope or by a bishop or a provincial of one of the two mendicant orders, identifying the region to be investigated. Those commissioned – again, usually Domincans or Franciscans, though also theologically educated members of other orders or clergy – then chose a suitable central base of operations and set up their inquiry. This began with a sermon preached to the assembled people and clergy of the area, citing the authority of their commission and urging the congregation to identify heretics, with a grace period declared for voluntary confessions without fear of any punishment. The inquisitors then compiled a list of possible suspects, with a strong emphasis on those who seemed likely to be heretics according to publica fama – or accepted local reputation and agreement. As strange as this may seem to us as a basis for an accusation, in close-knit and carefully interconnected communities, someone’s repuation among “well-regarded persons” counted a great deal. Privacy and personal, private views were no common in this world.

Suspects were then summoned, with local secular or ecclesiastical authorities serving and enforcing these summonses. The names of witnesses who identified the accused were concealed, to try to prevent local retaliation in close-knit communities. The accused were questioned carefully, including regarding anyone in the community who might have some gievance or grudge against them. Just as small communities may see retaliation against accusers and witnesses, petty disputes could also give rise to false accusations. If the accusers were those the accused identified as biased against them, the tribunal was to disregard their testimony. The accused was to be given a written account of the accusations made against them and had the right to legal representation (unlike in many secular courts) and to appeal to a higher authority (a bishop or even the pope) at any point in the process.

Conviction could only be made on the basis of established proofs. These could be “full proof” such as the sworn testimony of two eye-witnesses, being caught in the act or a confession. Partial proofs were used to justify further inquiry but could not be used to convict on their own. It was here that sometimes torture was used, though it had rules about its application – far more, in fact, than was the case for secular courts.

Contrary to the lurid imaginings of Sam Harris and those who get excited about modern fake “medieval torture devices”, torture, when used, was limited to whipping, beating or sometimes the strappado. Various restrictions on the use of torture not only included the type but also those who could be subjected to it, the duration and its severity. As Peters notes:

The proceedure of torture was guarded by a number of protocols and protections for the defendant, and its place in due process was rigorously defined by the jurists. A confession made after torture had to be freely repeated the next day or it would have been considered invalid. Technically, therefore, torture was strictly a means of obtaining the only full proof available (and absolutely necessary in a capital crime) when a great mass of partial proofs existed and no other full proof was available.

(Peters, p. 65)

So the idea that torture was used routinely and unrestricted, that it involved elaborate and macabre equipment and techniques and that testimony extracted under it was immediately admissible and acted on is all a serious distortion of the facts. In the overwhelming majority of cases “full proof” was established or insufficient “partial proofs” existed and the accused was acquited. Torture was relatively rare.

Of course, all these principles and checks could be ignored or breached and we do have evidence of abuses with inquisitions as can be found with any tribunal even today. For the evidence of the parameters of inquisitorial practice and also of how they were sometimes corrupted or ignored, see Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Inquisition and the Prosecution of Heresy: Misconceptions and Abuses”, Church History, 58, 4, 1989, pp. 439-51.

Overall, the objective of the inquisitors was not the one imagined by modern commentators like Harris: torturing and executing whoever was unfortunate enough to fall into the their evil clutches. On the contrary, they sought to actually identify people who believed things these jurists considered “heretical” to give them the chance to abjure and come back into the fold. As a result, executions were very rare and reserved for those found to be “relapsed heretics” or those who refused to abandon their unorthodox views. Most people questioned by an inquisition were not accused. Most of those accused were acquitted. Most of those convicted were given penances of varying degrees of severity, from public reproofs (very common) or wearing a cross for a defined period to being ordered to go on a pilgrimage or, in severe cases, imprisonment. Actual executions formed a very small fraction of those convicted.

Evidence of this can be found in some of the well-documented inquistors of the early fourteenth century. Specialists in inquisition into likely regions with heretical believers had developed by this stage, usually among the theologically and legally trained members of the mendicant orders. Among these was the French Dominican friar Bernardo Gui (c. 1261-1330). Gui was one of the more zealous inquistorial specialists, focused on suppressing what was left of the unorthodox believers and leaders in southern France. He has been made famous in popular culture by his fictional portrayal in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980). Eco’s version of Gui is a knowing and deliberate contrtast to the novel’s hero, William of Baskerville, though his scenery-chewing portrayals by F. Murray Abraham in its rather slight 1986 film adaptation, and by Rupert Everett in the truly awful 2019 TV series are embodiments of every cliche and caricature of a Medieval inquisitor imaginable. The historical Gui was a zealot, but not a bloodthirsty psychopath. James B. Given gives a breakdown of the punishments Gui imposed over his ten year career in Inquisition and Medieval Society Power Discipline and Resistance in Languedoc (Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 69):

So out of 907 sentences 6.5% were executed with a further 0.5% sentenced to death but died before sentence or execution. Few reading the hysterical accounts of the horrors of Medieval inquisitions would think that only 7% of those convicted were executed, and this is the record of an inquistor who is judged by Karen Sullivan to have been more interested in protecting communities from those he considered heretics than saving heretics from the flames (see Sullivan, The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors, University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. 126).

So the historical reality is very different to the cartoonish caricatures assumed by Harris, Grayling and most of the anti-theists who invoke “the Inquisition of the Middle Ages” in their polemic. Most of the Middle Ages saw no inquistions at all and those that did exist bear little resemblance to the popular conception of them that the polemicists uncritically assume are accurate.

The Early Modern Inquisitions: Spain and Italy

Most of the popular conception of and misconceptions about “the Inquisition” is based on a garbled cultural memory of Protestant reactions to the Spanish Inquisition. These ideas – mostly caricatures derived from Post-Reformation propaganda and eighteenth and nineteenth century gothic novels – are then projected back onto an ill-defined version of “the Middle Ages”, which is a kind of conceptual dumping ground for anything weird, disgusting or violent that happened in the past. This tangle of misconceived and misundertood ideas is further conflated with the largely-unconnected Early Modern Witch Craze into a melange of things which everyone knows of, few know anything substantial about and, despite this, everyone agrees was uniformly bad.

Modern historians have done substantial work to untangle this mess and debunk centuries of myths about the Inquisitions of the Early Modern Period. Unlike the inquisitions of the Middle Ages, these actually were permanent institutions, with officers, rules, archives and permanent bases. So thanks to the work of historians like Henry Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition A Historical Revision, Yale, 1988) and Edward Peters (Inquisition, 1988, cited above) we have a far more accurate understanding of these tribunals, their aims, methods and victims.

So, once again, the reality bears little resemblance to the myths. The Spanish Inquisition used most of the methods and inherited the rules of its medieval predecessors. But it was primarily an instrument of royal power and an expression of a national church, rather than (contra the classic Monty Python sketch) an institution controlled by the Papacy. After centuries of Reconquista, Spain was brought wholly under Catholic control with the fall of the last outpost of Islamic rule in 1492. With most of the Iberian Peninsula under the rule of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage and joint rule marked the de facto unification of Spain, the “Catholic Monarchs” and their successors set about consolidating power and bringing the formerly disparate and varied groups in their kingdom under tighter control.

Anti-Semitic sentiments had been rising in Spain since the later fourteenth century and pogroms and oppression caused most Jews to either flee the region or undergo reluctant conversion. These Conversos and their descendants were the first targets of the new unified monarchy and its instrument for enforcing conformity, the “Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition”. Conversos suspected of relapsing and secretly practicing their Jewish faith were scrutinised, with the Inquisition charged with investigating these allegations and punishing the convicted.

With the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517, the Inquisition gained a new target. For a range of economic and political reasons, Protestantism never gained a solid foothold in Spain, but this did not prevent a high degree of paranoia about it doing so. Foreigners suspected of being Protestant agents provocatuers or generally subverting Catholic orthodoxy were the main targets here. The other target for the Spanish Inquisition’s activities, particularly in the early sixteenth century, were Muslims and their descendants, the Moriscos. Much as with the Conversos, this focus was based on a paranoia that the Moriscos were secret Muslims. Finally, especially as the panics over Conversos, Moriscos and Protestants subsided in the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, the Inquisition was a general instrument for censorship and social conformity in a highly conservative area of Europe.

The Roman Inquisition, which had branches in other Italian cities, performed a similar function. Unlike its Spanish counterpart and its Portugese equivalent, it was primarily a Papal instrument and a tool for the imposition of the Counter-Reformation. In reaction to the Protestant Schism, the Papacy worked to impose and enforce tighter controls on orthodox in Catholic Europe, with the Italian Inquisition on guard against Protestantism in particular and doctrinal novelties generally. Working with the the “Sacred Congregation of the Index”, the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition” policed bans on books and ideas and investigated reports of unorthodox beliefs.

As with their medieval predecessors, the horrors of these institutions are wildly exaggerated, thanks to centuries of wild and often completely fabricated stories about them circulated first by Protestant propagandists, then by Enlightenment polemicists and finally by novelists, who made inquisitors into convenient cartoon villains. Most of the fanciful claims about elaborate torture devices came from these sources, with these being illustrated and exaggerated further by coffee table books and tourist trap “dungeons” to this day. The welter of myths and misconceptions about the Galileo Affair are another rich source of misunderstanding about the Roman Inquisition.

The Roman Inquisition used torture rarely and was even more constrained by rules regarding its application than the medieval inquisitors. As with the latter, penances and custodial sentences were vastly more common than executions. There has been some debate among historians about the Spanish Inquisitions’ application of torture, with indications that it was more common that with its Italian counterpart. But, again, it was limited to technques like the strappado and the rack.

Contrary to some of the crazy claims made in popular literature, the Spanish Inquisition was not responsible for the deaths of millions or even hundreds of thousands of executed victims. While there is extensive documentation, it is not complete and nor has it been fully analysed. So estimates of executions by the Spanish Inquisition from c. 1500-1700 range from 3,000 to 5,000. Compared to the number of victims of the Witch Craze in other parts of Europe in the same period – an estimated 40,000-60,000, mostly at the hands of secular tribunals – this is small and certainly much smaller than the figures of popular imagination. Also contrary to the popular conception, neither the Spanish nor the Roman Inquisitions had much interest in witchcraft. Despite the fantastical imagining of Sam Harris above, the witch hyteria had little to do with any inquisitions and more to do with the fault lines of the Reformation and the insecurities of hardline, mainly Protestant communities.

Of course, the very idea that anyone was investigated for what they may have believed, questioned about heresy or being a Converso, a Morisco or a Protestant and forced to submit to orthdoxy is repugnant to us moderns. That even some of them were totured in the course of this process, even without the fantasy devices imagined by some, is even more repulsive to us. And that a proportion of anyone found guilty by these tribunals were executed for what they believed or were imagined to believe is horrific. It should not need to be said, but it is not the purpose of this article to present any kind of apologia for these things.

But the fact is that if anyone wants to invoke history while making an argument, they need to get the history right. How much the actual, historical activities of the various inquisitions can be blamed on the Catholic Church, Christianity overall or religon generally is something that others can discuss. But the point here is that much or even most of what is invoked regarding “the Inquisition” by anti-religious polemicists exists in imagination, not in history.

The inquisitions of the Middle Ages were not what most people imagine. For most of the Medieval Period there simply were no inquisitions, and even after their emergence in the thirteenth century they were unknown across much of the continent. They were not the wild and irrational hysterical pogroms of popular imagining, nor were they as violent or as deadly as most assume. Contrary to A.C. Grayling’s claims, they were not an inevitable outgrowth of Christianity’s inherent irrational nature, but actually developed out of a new obsession with legalism and rationality and a rejection of folk beliefs. Similarly, the institutional Inquisitions of the Early Modern Era were as much about national politics as religion and also not as muderous as has long been made out. They were also not very interested in alleged witches.

“What about the Inquisition?” is such a common element in anti-religious discourse that it is effectively a rhetorical question – the asker does not expect an answer because they assume everyone knows about “the Inquisiton”. But, as is so often the case when polemicists try to invoke history, what everyone “knows” about it is almost entirely wrong.

Further Reading

James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society Power Discipline and Resistance in Languedoc (Cornell University Press, 2001)

Nathan Johnstone, The New Atheism Myth and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, (Yale, 1988, 2014)

Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Inquisition and the Prosecution of Heresy: Misconceptions and Abuses”, Church History, 58, 4, 1989, pp. 439-51

Thomas F. Mayer, The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250 (Blackwell, 1987, 2nd ed. 2006)

Edward Peters, Inquisition, (The Free Press, 1988)