How to make an inquisitor cry

A friend recently asked me what I do most days. Swear at my computer is the answer.

But every now and then I get a chuckle. Below is a draft excerpt from the book I'm writing. This passage deals with the inquistion in thirteenth-century Languedoc. Not a laff riot, I know, but every now and then a little humanity worms it way out of an old document. Read to the end, to see how.

So here's the set-up. In trying to explain how the inquisition works, I have an inquisitor pay a visit to a small hilltop village. He delivers a fiery sermon to scare the shit out of everyone, and then instructs the congregation that they must come forth to denounce any heretical activities they have seen in their neighbors, kinsmen, etc. Betrayal is the flavor of the month.

So he sits around and waits for the snitches to come to him:

The inquisitor, for his part, would take to his lodgings and try to gauge if the town was going to be a tough nut to crack. The first collaborators might arrive quickly, perhaps under cover of night to avoid neighborly scrutiny; or they might not – some brave villages observed an omertà that took years to grind down. If this was further on in the century, the inquisitor would be able to examine records of past inquisitions held in the locality. These were carefully guarded in bound registers, containing scores of transcripts of interrogations and sentences handed down. Fairly uncharacteristically for document-keeping practices of the era, the registers were systematically organized, cross-referencing individuals and allowing archival retrieval of damning detail that might otherwise have been lost or forgotten. They were, in essence, a collective data-base designed for a sole user – many a time an inquisitor confounded individuals with contradictory testimony they had given years earlier. Not unsurprisingly, it was an inquisition register that brought la rage carcassonnaise to a boil.

Further reading for the visiting Dominican investigator might be an example of a supremely peculiar self-help genre, the inquisitor’s manual. These manuals compiled admonitions, tip sheets, descriptions of different forms of heresy, and tactics of interrogation. Years of questioning people with something to hide had given the authors of these manuals insights into the dodging and weaving tactics developed by heretics and their sympathizers. Nicolas Eymerich, a Dominican of the fourteenth century, listed ten different techniques that the exasperated inquisitor should be on the lookout for when questioning heretics. They range from artful casuistry to blatant excuse-making of the-dog-ate-my-homework variety. An example of each:

“The third way of evading a question or misleading a questioner is through redirecting the question. For example, if it is asked: ‘Do you believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son?,’ he replies, ‘And what do you believe?’ And when he is told, ‘We believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son,’ he replies, ‘Thus I believe,’ meaning, ‘I believe that you believe this, but I do not…’

…“The eighth way of evading a question is through feigned illness. For example, if someone is interrogated concerning his faith, and the questions having multiplied to the point that he perceives he cannot avoid being caught out in his heresy and error, he says: ‘I am very weak in the head, and I cannot endure any more. In the name of God, please let me go now.’ Or he says, ‘Pain has overcome me. Please, for the sake of God, let me lie down.’ And going to his bed, he lies down. And thus he escapes questioning for a time, and meanwhile thinks over how he will reply, and how craftily he will conduct himself. Thus they conduct themselves with respect to other feigned illnesses. They frequently use this mode of conduct when they see that they are to be tortured, saying that they are sick, and that they will die if they are tortured, and women frequently say that they are suffering from their female troubles, so that they can escape torture for a time…”

Don't ask me why, but I love this kind of stuff.