Thinking like an inquisitor helps decipher the past

Addison Independent, “Ways of Seeing,” February 10, 2011

 Allow me to introduce you to a man named Limoux. He was born in the south of France sometime in the 1260s, and in almost every way, he was entirely inconsequential. But because he was condemned to the stake as an obstinate and pertinacious heretic on September 10, 1329, his life ended in the spotlight:  a summary of his confession was prepared, read aloud at his execution, and preserved in the records of the inquisitors of Carcassonne.

That spotlight is glorious:  without this document, we would never have known about a fourteenth-century free thinker who challenged the Christian sacraments, proposed that Muslims, Jews and Christians were equally saved, and even posited that Jesus died on the cross because he had been an adulterer and murderer in a former life.  Such people are not supposed to exist in what Will and Ariel Durant so famously called “The Age of Faith.”

Historical records – documents – are tricky.  Even as we attempt to understand the present we have documents that give rise to questions (or ought to).  Is that press release accurate, or mere spin?  Does that official know what she is talking about? Is that news story fair and balanced? My students know (because I pound it into them) how important it is to think about any source, its author, and its potential biases:  I call this doing “due diligence.”  Even seemingly empirical sources like financial records can be problematic. In the case of Bernie Madoff, for example, the books were cooked.

We medievalists have it even worse. The sources are in Latin, but people spoke in the vernacular.  The documents were written by the educated but describe those who never learned to write or read.  Since the authors were predominantly churchmen, the laity had little to no voice. Women’s voices are even rarer. How can we penetrate all these layers of potential obfuscation to see what once lay beneath them?  It was nearly 700 years ago, after all, and “they do things differently there.”

The document that describes Limoux’s testimony before the inquisitor is a little under 2,800 words in Latin (about four times the length of this column). It is in the third person (“he said that…”) and is well organized and very concise.  We know who wrote it, when, where, and most importantly, why: to enumerate for witnesses the heretical ideas that had brought Limoux to the stake.

We might suspect that the inquisitor and his scribe were exaggerating the audacity of Limoux’s beliefs in order to make the accusation stick and the execution appear warranted. What was to stop them?  Or we might think that Limoux uttered these crazy ideas under torture: a tortured man will make anything up in order to make the pain stop. What did Torquemada say about why the chicken crossed the road?  “Give me 15 minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.”

But what if I were to tell you that an inquisitor in 1326 (when Limoux was first interrogated) thought of himself as a “doctor of souls”? If he handed a heretic like Limoux over to the secular arm to be burned, he had failed in his job, which was to bring souls back to orthodoxy for their own eternal good.  It was essential to understand and record accurately what Limoux said. Though the use of torture was legal, the inquisitors of Carcassonne hardly ever availed themselves of it.  They did use psychological pressures to induce conversion, but the goal was always conversion, not execution. I may find their tactics repugnant, but if I do not enter the mentality of the inquisitor far enough to be able to see the records he kept with his eyes, I have failed as a historian. Without this due diligence, I cannot judge this document or interpret it.

As a historian, I need to imagine the circumstances in which this document was created, from the moment Limoux was called before the inquisitor to answer questions to the moment when it was read aloud in the cemetery of Carcassonne on that September day in 1329. Seeing through this smoke, or any smoke, may require us to wear uncomfortable spectacles – but without them, we are blind indeed.

Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke:  The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).