Recommended for Writers: A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea

We all think we know what the Inquisition was, but for most of us, our knowledge of that period of history is hazy at best…and it comes entirely from second-hand and third-hand sources. Maybe a half-remembered high school year book or college course, but more like, some Hollywood riff or musical spoof.

If you’re a writer, or just a human being, and you want some insight into real evil, however, you should study history. Real history, not a watered down textbook, and definitely not Hollywood spin.

Current academnic books can be intimidating, and, well, expensive. Publishers often price the ebooks the same as the hard cover. I’ve seen some history ebooks that cost over $100, which is just crazy. However, don’t despair.One of the great things about the age of the ebook is that so many excellent older histories available for free or dirt cheap, since they are out of copyright. Often these older books are actually more legible and enjoyable to read than some of the postmodern bilge that sometimes emerges from modern academia.

A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea is one such work that is well worth the read. I bought my print version a long time ago, and it cost me a pretty penny, but I’ve noticed that you can now buy all three volumes for a buck. If you want a fascinating overview of how folk in the Middle Ages embarked on the frenzied hunt of witches, demons and heretics, this is a marvelous three-volume set.

As interesting as the persecutions are in and of themselves, it’s also worth noting that people of the Middle Ages, illiterate and isolated though they might have been, were not as stupid or credulous as we often assume. They did not necessarily rush into the persecutions as a blind mob; they had to be goaded there by centuries of propaganda and show trials. This makes reading about the Inquisition interesting to compare to thoroughly modern phenomena, such as the conquest of Eastern Europe by the Soviets. (So be sure and check out tomorrow’s Recommended books for writers as well.)

First of all, the Inquisition started much earlier than the Spanish Inquisition, and lasted centuries longer than most people realize. The incredible combination of pure evil and utter hypocrisy they exhibited during their reign of terror over a millennium of European history is impossible to exaggerate in even the most outrageous of fantasy villains. The Inquisition had roving targets: pagans, heretics, witches, Jews, Protestants, scientists and artists, but the methodology of terror transferred century by century from one persecution to another.

Henry Charles Lea describes the late medieval witch craze, in the third volume of his oeuvre A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages:

No one can read the evidence adduced at a witch-trial, or the confessions of the accused, without seeing how every accident and every misfortune and every case of sickness or death which had occurred in the vicinage for years was thus explained, and how the circle of suspicion widened so that every conviction brought new victims; burnings multiplied, and the terrified community was ready to believe that a half or more of its members were slaves of Satan, and that it would never be free from their malignant vengeance until they should all be exterminated. For more than two centuries this craze was perpetually breaking out in one part of Europe or another, carefully nursed and stimulated by popes and Inquisitors, Bernard of Como and Bishop Binsfeld, and the amount of human misery thence arising is simply incomputable. (p.509)

The Monty Python spoofs of how witches were tried was not exaggerated, but rather softened. Otherwise the joke would have been too horrid to laugh about. It wasn’t a matter of whether a witch floated like a duck, but whether she (or he) broke down and confessed during torture.

“The inquisitor was formally instructed never to declare him [the witch] innocent.” (p. 513) The names of witnesses were suppressed; if the accused was given counsel, that person was appointed by the Inquisition and threatened with being accused of a witch as well if he actually defended his client; the Inquisitor was allowed to falsely promise clemency if the accused publically confessed, but after confessing, the accused was duly burned anyway.

It wasn’t just a matter of guilty until proven innocent, as in secular law at the time: There was no innocent.  

Formally endurance of torture might be regarded as an evidence of innocence, now it was only an additional proof of guilt, for it showed that Satan was endeavoring to save his servitor… 

One new infallible sign was the inability of the witch to shed tears during torture and before the judges, though she could do so freely elsewhere. ….Still with the usual logic of the demonologist, if she did weep it was a device of the devil and was not to be reckoned in  her favor.

…Equally frivolous was the pretense that the punishment of burning was merely for the injuries wrought by the witch, for we shall see that in the case of the Vaudois of Arras the convicts were burned as a matter of course, although attendance upon the Sabbat was the only crime with which most of the sufferers were charged. (p. 514. 516)

Henry Charles Lea’s work covers three volumes, about five hundred pages each, describing case after case of maniacal persecution for charges so ludicrous that even people at the time could not believe most of them. To the modern mind, that is sometimes what strikes us most: that the punishment was so brutal though the crime was completely imaginary.

On the other hand, for a fantasy writer, the amazing powers attributed to witches, demons, werewolves and so on are tempting material to mine for magic systems. And that gives us an opportunity which more prosaic minds seldom ask: suppose witchcraft were real—would that have justified the excess, the lies, the confiscation of property that paid for it all, the ongoing tortures and genocides of the Inquisition?

Of course not.

That is exactly why I think some form of Bad Guys in White are an important component of Epic Fantasy. Their presence reminds us that self-righteousness is not the same as being right.

Also read The Bad Guys in White, Part II.

Learn more about A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea.