inquisition

—inquisitional, adj.

/in'kweuh zish"euhn, ing'-/, n.

1. an official investigation, esp. one of a political or religious nature, characterized by lack of regard for individual rights, prejudice on the part of the examiners, and recklessly cruel punishments.

2. any harsh, difficult, or prolonged questioning.

3. the act of inquiring; inquiry; research.

4. an investigation, or process of inquiry.

5. a judicial or official inquiry.

6. the finding of such an inquiry.

7. the document embodying the result of such inquiry.

8. (cap.) Rom. Cath. Ch.

a. a former special tribunal, engaged chiefly in combating and punishing heresy. Cf. Holy Office.

b. See Spanish Inquisition.

[1350-1400; ME inquisicio(u)n < L inquisition- (s. of inquisitio), equiv. to inquisit(us) ptp. of inquirere to INQUIRE + -ion- -ION]

Syn. 5. inquest, hearing.

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In the Middle Ages, a judicial procedure that was used to combat heresy; in early modern times, a formal Roman Catholic judicial institution.

Inquisito, a Latin term meaning investigation or inquest, was a legal procedure that involved the assemblage of evidence and the prosecution of a criminal trial. Use of the procedure against the heresies of the Cathari and Waldenses was approved by Pope Gregory IX in 1231. Suspected heretics were arrested, interrogated, and tried; the use of torture was approved by Innocent IV in 1252. Penalties ranged from prayer and fasting to imprisonment; convicted heretics who refused to recant could be executed by lay authorities. Medieval inquisitors functioned widely in northern Italy and southern France. The Spanish Inquisition was authorized by Sixtus IV in 1478; the pope later tried to limit its powers but was opposed by the Spanish crown. The auto-da-fé, the public ceremony at which sentences were pronounced, was an elaborate celebration, and the grand inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada was responsible for burning about 2,000 heretics at the stake. The Spanish Inquisition was also introduced into Mexico, Peru, Sicily (1517), and the Netherlands (1522), and it was not entirely suppressed in Spain until the early 19th century.

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▪ Roman Catholicism

Introduction

 a judicial procedure and later an institution that was established by the papacy and, sometimes, by secular governments to combat heresy. Derived from the Latin verb inquiro (“inquire into”), the name was applied to commissions in the 13th century and subsequently to similar structures in early modern Europe.

The Middle Ages

History

 In 1184 Pope Lucius III required bishops to make a judicial inquiry, or inquisition, for heresy in their dioceses, a provision renewed by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Episcopal inquisitions, however, proved ineffective because of the regional nature of the bishop's power and because not all bishops introduced inquisitions in their dioceses; the papacy gradually assumed authority over the process, though bishops never lost the right to lead inquisitions. In 1227 Pope Gregory IX appointed the first judges delegate as inquisitors for heretical depravity—many, though not all, of whom were Dominican and Franciscan friars. Papal inquisitors had authority over everyone except bishops and their officials. There was no central authority to coordinate their activities, but after 1248 or 1249, when the first handbook of inquisitorial practice was written, inquisitors adopted common procedures.

      In 1252 Pope Innocent IV licensed inquisitors to allow obdurate heretics to be tortured by lay henchmen. It is difficult to determine how common this practice was in the 13th century, but the inquisition certainly acquiesced in the use of torture in the trial of the Knights Templar, a military-religious order, in 1307. Persecution by the inquisition also contributed to the collapse of Catharism (Cathari), a dualist heresy that had great influence in southern France and northern Italy, by about 1325; although established to defeat that heresy, the inquisition was assisted by the pastoral work of the mendicant orders in its triumph over the Cathars.

      The inquisition declined in importance in the late Middle Ages, though it continued to try cases of heresy—e.g., the Waldenses, the Spiritual Franciscans, and the alleged heresy of the Free Spirit, a supposed sect of mystics who advocated antinomianism—and cases of sorcery. The most vigorous dissenting movements of the 15th century, Lollardy (Lollard) in England and Hussitism (Hussite) in Bohemia, were not subject to its jurisdiction.

Procedures and organization

      When instituting an inquiry in a district, an inquisitor would normally declare a period of grace during which those who voluntarily confessed their own involvement in heresy and that of others would be given only light penances. The inquisitor used these confessions to compile a list of suspects whom he summoned to his tribunal. Failure to appear was considered evidence of guilt. The trial was often a battle of wits between the inquisitor and the accused. The only other people present were a notary, who kept a record of the proceedings, and sworn witnesses, who attested the record's accuracy. No lawyer would defend a suspect for fear of being accused of abetting heresy, and suspects were not normally told what charges had been made against them or by whom. The accused might appeal to the pope before proceedings began, but this involved considerable expense.

      After consulting with canon lawyers, the inquisitor would sentence those found guilty at a sermo generalis, or public homily. Judicial penances were imposed on those who had been convicted of heresy and had recanted. The most common punishments were penitential pilgrimages, the wearing of yellow crosses on clothing (which was feared because it led to ostracism), and imprisonment.

      The inquisition employed two kinds of prisons, both staffed by laymen. One type was the murus largus, or open prison, which consisted of cells built around a courtyard in which the inmates enjoyed considerable freedom. The other type was the murus strictus, a high-security prison, where inmates were kept in solitary confinement, often in chains. Heretics who admitted their errors but refused to recant were handed over to the secular authorities and burned at the stake (burning at the stake). There were usually not many cases of this kind, because the chief aim of the inquisitors was to reconcile heretics to the church. On rare occasions, however, large public executions did take place, as at Verona in 1278, when some 200 Cathars (Cathari) were burned.

      Although heresy was a capital offense in virtually all the states of western Europe, some rulers—for example, the kings of Castile and England—refused to license the inquisition. Even where it did operate—in much of Italy and in kingdoms such as France and Aragon—the inquisition relied entirely on the secular authorities to arrest and execute those whom it named and to defray all its expenses. The money came partly from the sale of the confiscated property of convicted heretics.

      Although some scholars have denied that the medieval inquisition was an institution, others maintain that it is the best way to describe a group of men who enjoyed the same powers, were directly responsible to the pope, employed servants and officials, and had absolute control over a number of large prisons and their inmates. Nevertheless, its power was very limited, and, arguably, it was important chiefly because it established a tradition of religious coercion in the late medieval Western church that was inherited by both Catholics and Protestants (Protestantism) in the 16th century.

Bernard Hamilton

Early modern Europe

History

 From the 15th to the 19th century, inquisitions were permanently established, bureaucratically organized, appointed, and supervised tribunals of clergy (and occasionally laymen). They were charged with the discovery and extirpation of heterodox religious opinion and practice in Christian Europe. The institutional inquisitions were similar to other institutions of government and discipline in early modern Europe. The earliest, largest, and best-known of these was the Spanish Inquisition, established by Pope Sixtus IV at the petition of Ferdinand (Ferdinand II) and Isabella (Isabella I), the rulers of Aragon and Castile, in a papal bull of Nov. 1, 1478. It was eventually extended throughout the Spanish empire in Europe and the Americas through a system of subordinate regional tribunals. It was formally abolished by the Spanish government in 1834. Later institutional inquisitions were established in Portugal in 1540 (abolished in 1821) and in Rome (for the Papal States and some other parts of Italy) in 1542; the latter was erected into the Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, or Holy Office, one of the 15 secretariats into which the administrative reforms of Sixtus V (1585–90) divided papal government. (In 1965 the Holy Office was reorganized by Pope Paul VI (Paul VI) and renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.) In 1547 the government of Venice established a tribunal of laymen, which was converted into a tribunal of clergy by 1551 but closely monitored by the Venetian government. The Venetian inquisition lasted until 1797. Another institutional inquisition, that of the city of Lucca, established in 1545, was also originally staffed by laymen but then clericalized after a few years.

      The Spanish and Portuguese tribunals were departments of state intended initially to detect crypto-Judaism among Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants and later to detect and eradicate Protestant Christianity. The Roman and other inquisitions were also departments of state, designed chiefly to combat Protestantism, which was conceived and defined as heresy in Catholic territories. All inquisitions had the power to supervise and discipline the moral failings of both clergy and laity.

      These institutional inquisitions, some scholars have argued, differed from earlier inquisitorial tribunals established by papal delegation in various parts of western Europe in the 13th century and intermittently thereafter, because the earlier tribunals were either those of individual bishops acting in their ordinary judicial capacity or those of individuals commissioned by the pope to extirpate heresy in specific places or for specific periods. They used similar procedures, sometimes communicating with each other, and were instructed by the same handbooks of doctrine and procedure, but possessed no common organization or other institutional features. Although early inquisitorial practices in some instances moved toward institutionalization, only those of the 16th century displayed full institutional characteristics.

Procedures and organization

      The institutional inquisitions bore a number of common features. Their officials were systematically recruited, appointed, and replaced, and they used well-defined and distinctive legal procedures. The inquisition possessed a vertical command-and-review structure, which required regular reports from subordinate branches, visitations and review of the activities of subordinate and regional branches, operational instructions, and preservation and regular consultation of archives. The inquisitions were also characterized by signs and insignia of membership and autonomous control of institutional finances and public activities (in Spain, the well-known autos-da-fé (auto-da-fé)).

      In some cases the institutional inquisitions themselves exerted considerable control over the prosecution of offenses that other courts treated with less consistency. In 1610 the Spanish inquisitor Alonso Salazar de Frias was sent by his superiors to review the evidence in a series of trials for witchcraft in northern Spain. When Salazar de Frias reported that he found insufficient evidence for conviction, and in spite of protests from two other fellow inquisitors, his program for the reform of witchcraft trials by the Spanish Inquisition was accepted and made official by the Supreme Council in 1614. In this case the institutional structure of the inquisition virtually eliminated accusations of and trials for witchcraft throughout the range of its jurisdiction.

      All of the institutional inquisitions worked in secrecy, except for closely regulated public appearances. Their secrecy permitted those who opposed them to speculate about and often fictionalize dramatically their secret activities, producing many of the myths about inquisitions that are found in European literature from the 16th century to the present.

Edward Peters

Additional Reading

Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, 3 vol. (1887, reissued 1958), is the fullest account, but much of it is outdated. Bernard Hamilton, The Medieval Inquisition (1981); and Albert C. Shannon, The Medieval Inquisition, 2nd ed. (1991), are good introductions. Richard Kieckhefer, “The Office of Inquisition and Medieval Heresy: The Transition from Personal to Institutional Jurisdiction,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46(1):36–61 (January 1995); and James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (1997), challenge the traditional views of the inquisition. Edward Peters, Inquisition (1988), examines the medieval and early modern period and the development of the idea of the inquisition. R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 2nd ed. (2007), examines the growth of intolerance in the Middle Ages, of which the inquisition was one aspect. Useful introductions to medieval heresy include Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages (2000); Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (1998); and Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (1969, reissued 1991).Gustav Henningsen, John Tedeschi, and Charles Amiel (eds.), The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods (1986); and John Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (1991), provide good introductions to the early modern inquisition. Important studies of the Spanish Inquisition include Angel Alcalá (ed.), The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind (1987; originally published in Spanish, 1984); Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (eds.), Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (1991); and Gustav Henningsen, The Witches' Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614 (1980).Bernard Hamilton Edward Peters

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