(cid:1) the (cid:2) Grand Inquisitor’s Manual A History of Terror in the Name of God jonathan kirsch for Ann Benjamin Kirsch, Jennifer Rachel Kirsch, and Adam, Remy and Charles Ezra Kirsch, and Heather Kirsch and Joshua, Jennifer and Hazel Kirsch Remember us in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life. I was torn in pieces by the devils that rack the brains of unhappy men. Do God’s eyes not reach to the prisons of the Inquisition? carcel, goldsmith of Seville, a victim of the Spanish Inquisition TABLE OF CONTENTS Epigraph iii 1 The Pietà and the Pear 1 2 The Cathar Kiss 19 3 The Hammer of Heretics 53 Photographic Insert 4 Crime and Punishment 93 5 The Inquisitor’s Manual 133 6 Purity of Blood 167 7 The Eternal Inquisitor 207 8 American Inquisition 241 Acknowledgments 259 Notes 261 References Consulted 279 Index 285 About the Author Cover Copyright About the Publisher 1. THE PIETÀ AND THE PEAR Christendom seemed to have grown delirious and Satan might well smile at the tribute to his power in the endless smoke of the holocaust which bore witness to the triumph of the Almighty. henry charles lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages Let us imagine a traveler arriving in the city of Rome when the Renais- sance was in full flower, a pilgrim or a merchant or a diplomat. He seeks out the chapel near St. Peter’s Basilica where the Pietà of Michelangelo is now on display, and he spends a few moments admiring the sublime depiction of the body of the slain Jesus in the lap of his griev- ing mother. Pietà means “pity,” and the scene is rendered with exquisite tenderness and profound compassion. Like Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the nearby Sistine Chapel—the finger of a very fleshy God touch- ing the finger of an equally fl eshy Adam—the Pietà celebrates the beauty, dignity, and grace of the human body and the most exalted emotions of the human heart. At the very same moment, however, and not far away, hooded men in dungeons lit only by torches—henchmen of what would come to be called 1 the grand inquisitor’s manual the Roman and Universal Inquisition—are applying instruments of torture to the naked bodies of men and women whose only crime is to have en- tertained some thought that the Church regarded as heretical. The victims’ cries, faint and distant, reach the ears of the traveler who gazes in prayer- ful silence at the Pietà, or so we might permit ourselves to imagine. Yet the torturers are wholly without pity, and they work in the sure conviction that the odor of the charred flesh of heretics is “delectable to the Holy Trinity and the Virgin.”1 The scene allows us to see the Renaissance and the Inquisition as a pair of opposites, the highest aspirations of human civilization coexisting with its darkest and most destructive impulses at the same time and place. Trag- ically, the genius that Michelangelo applied to the celebration of the hu- man body is matched by the ingenuity of the grand inquisitors in their crusade to degrade and destroy their fellow human beings. Consider, for example, the contrivance known simply and even charmingly as La Pera— the Pear. Fashioned out of bronze, richly and fancifully decorated, and cunningly engineered to open and close by the operation of an iron key-and-screw device, the Pear was the handiwork of a skilled artist and craftsman with a vivid imagination and a certain measure of wit. The first examples of the Pear date back to roughly the same era as the Pietà. But unlike the scene depicted in Michelangelo’s statuary, the diabolical faces and demonic fi g- ures that embellish La Pera are the stuff of nightmares, and the object it- self was designed as an instrument of torture to afflict the bodies of accused heretics who refused to confess, whether because they were wholly inno- cent of the accusation or because they were true believers in their own for- bidden faith. Exactly how the Pear was used to insult and injure its victims is a grue- some topic that we will be compelled to examine in greater detail a bit later. For now, let La Pera serve as a symbol of the willingness, even the eager- ness of one human being to infl ict pain on a fellow human being. None of us should be surprised, of course, that otherwise ordinary men and women have always been capable of heart-shaking and heartbreaking atrocities, but the fact that a man with the soul of an artist and the hands of a craftsman should apply his gifts to the creation of something as fiendish as the Pear 2