The Friar of Carcassonne by Stephen O’Shea Read Free Book Online Page B

flames.
    This meant the Good Men and Good Women, if caught up in the inquisitorial dragnet, were almost always sent to the stake, whether or not they abjured their beliefs. Some did, under torture, only to take it back when recovered from the torment. Some adopted the Cathar tactic known as endura , a form of hunger strike ending in death. To the inquisitor, such resistance only spurred him to bring the prisoner to the stake before death cheated him of a more public victory. Prominent Cathars, however, were comprehensively tortured before being consigned to the flames, to obtain the names of those who had helped and believed in them over the years.
    Some of these believers, called credentes , also perished by fire. Either their association to the heresy had been too long or too deep or they stoutly refused to recant, preferring death to disavowal. In cases where their recantation seemed tinged with insincerity, the inquisitor decided whether to imprison or to impose punishing penance. Here is where the wisdom of the Dominican was most tested.
    But when he had been demonstrably fooled by a heretic, that is, by one whose recantation had been followed by a return to his original faith, the inquisitor was pitiless. The relapsed heretic was a finger in the inquisitor’s eye, as the change in faith called into question his competence as a judge of men. At least the unrepentant Good Men and Good Women were clearly, honestly damnable. The double apostate—–Cathar to Catholic to Cathar—represented a rebuke to the rightness of the cause, to the irrefutable, infallible argumentation laid out by the inquisitor in his sermons. The Holy Father had encouraged his servants to construct a system of uncommon ugliness, dependent on deceit, betrayal, secrecy, pain, and punishment—the dirty work of the Holy Office carried out by the holy men of the brotherhood was proof enough of the seriousness, the sacredness, of the Church’s message. The relapsed heretic was thus tied to the stake, his tormentor readying a homely phrase from Proverbs 26:11. The heretic had gone back to his errors, the inquisitor shouted to the villagers over the roar of the fire and the shrieks of the dying, “like a dog returning to his vomit!”
    * The mill, known as the King’s Mill, was an important source of royal revenue.
    * Regensburg is a Bavarian city on the Danube near Munich. The current pope, Benedict XVI, taught theology at the University of Regensburg from 1969 to 1977.

CHAPTER FOUR
    THE UNHOLY RESISTANCE

    W ILY DEPONENTS OR RELAPSED heretics could muddy the spotless dream of the inquisitor, where investigation was scrupulously conducted and culprits unmasked and undone, but he nonetheless operated with an ideal in mind, no matter how warped or worthwhile others might deem it. Some of the rage against the inquisition did indeed lie in opposition to its mission, its ideal. “The development of [the] inquisitorial mentality,” a historian notes, “was a heated dialogue, not a monologue.” But much of the resistance also arose from its misfires, from the all too human lapses in the functioning of a system whose only blueprint lay in the individual inquisitor’s mind, not in any statutory document recognized by all.
    A gap existed between the ideal and the real. The inquisitor was dependent on the secular authorities. If they did not provide the funds and the men, and if they were reluctant, in the face of popular pressure, to make the arrests, haul in the suspects, and eventually carry out their sentences, the inquisitor could do nothing except appeal to Rome to intervene. And that intervention was not always forthcoming. As a major political figure, the pope sometimes needed to cement shifting alliances to meet his larger goals. Hence, for a time in the 1240s, the inquisition in Languedoc lay in tatters, checked by a hostile populace and bereft of support from a pope who needed the backing of