Dan Snow's History Hit - The Inquisition

Episode Date: January 6, 2021

Jessica Dalton joined me on the podcast to talk about the history of the Inquisition. We discussed the Roman Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition, and how religion and politics have clashed and intertwined in Europe since the fifteenth century.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History, talking about the Inquisition on this podcast. You've all heard of the Inquisition.

Have we been listening to the mythology or the reality of the Inquisition? And in fact, did enough of us know that the Inquisition has taken many different forms over its long history? The Spanish Inquisition is just one particular incarnation of that remarkable institution. So here on the podcast, I've got the person who knows all about the Spanish Inquisition.

She is Jessica Dalton. She's brilliant. She's a particular specialist on the Roman Inquisition, but you didn't know about that one, and how Inquisitions were set up in response to the Protestant Reformation. This was a fantastic chat. Hope you enjoy it. If you want to come and watch one of these podcasts, or several, in fact, if you're of that mind, if you want to come and sit in a room where we're not socially distancing, we're socially approximating, then you can come and do that in autumn, fall this year, 2021. Historyhit.com slash tour. Tickets are selling in all the big UK cities. You're going to love it. Please come along and watch the shows go out. If you want to take advantage of January sale, you can do so. History Hit TV. It's like Netflix, but it's all history.

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locked up at home go and enjoy the sales in the meantime everybody enjoy the excellent jessica dalton Jessica Dalton. Jessica, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Pleasure. The Inquisition, it's got a bad reputation. Does it deserve it? That's a difficult but really interesting question. It's been plagued by a bad reputation almost since its inception.

And I think like so many things in history, it's a grey area. It's not a black legend, it's certainly not a white legend and I think maybe one of the first things to clear up is that there were several inquisitions and all of them were different. You have the medieval inquisitions which were founded by Innocent III to deal with the Cathars in the 13th century in the south of France. You have the Spanish Inquisition that was founded not by the popes, but by Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, king and queen of Castile and Aragon in 1478. And you have the Papal Inquisition that was founded in Rome in 1542. And they're all trying to address slightly different problems, which shapes the way that they go about their work and the reputation that they earn, or at least get. And the interesting thing about the Roman Inquisition, the last Inquisition to be set up in 1542, is that it is plagued by the reputation

of the earlier Inquisitions. So the medieval Inquisitions were run by local bishops and were pretty vicious, or at least could be, they were much less regulated. The Spanish Inquisition until the sort of 1530s had a reputation that was so bad that Pope Sixtus IV said he had regrets about allowing them to set it up. And the Roman Inquisition, the Pope's Inquisition, set up to tackle the very specific threat of the Protestant Reformation perhaps spreading into Italy and other Catholic countries, tried to learn from these mistakes and was much more lenient and strict about procedure. So if you were a local inquisitor in Bergamo or Bologna and you wanted to torture your accused in order to get information you'd have to write to Rome because they knew that if you extracted information under torture

you were liable for that person to come back and say well actually I didn't mean that at all you tortured me and then you've got a tough decision on your hands, because you have to decide, do you talk to them again, and get the same response? Or do you let them now go and answer the questions and perhaps give different answers without torture. So I think there's sort of shades of black and grey throughout the different inquisitions. And that by the time you get to the papal inquisition, which is sort of my area of research, they know about this, they're learning from it. But ultimately, the decision is in the hands of the individual inquisitor a lot of the time. And the Roman Inquisition is in fact, plagued by this bad, bad reputation that comes from Spanish counterparts and this medieval reputation. So you mentioned medieval there,

can I just ask a bit about the Baxter? I stupidly didn't realise that Inquisition was something with more of a history than I'd thought. So this was something that the Catholics were using to deal with heresy way back before Martin Luther came along, was it? Absolutely. So in fact, I think that the method, which comes from the Latin word inquisitio, was used by in ancient Rome. So inquisition is a judicial process. It's a way of getting to the truth through questioning and through evidence. So that's what unites all of these bodies. And in the medieval period, this becomes necessary when you have the emergence of quite dangerous heresies.

So a heresy is any kind of belief that doesn't fit with the main belief, which in medieval France and 16th century Italy, 15th century Spain is Catholicism. But it's not just that. It's something much more dangerous. It's being wrong and being stubborn about being wrong. So if you came to me and said, oh, I think the Pope is the Antichrist. And I said to you, no, no, Dan, actually, it is not for all of these reasons. And you agreed with me, you wouldn't be a heretic, because you're not stubborn. You're not pertinacious. You're just wrong. Whereas if you come to me and you say the Pope's a heretic, and I say, no, he's not. And you say, yes, he is. And I'm not listening to you. You're a rebel. And so heresy was something that was very dangerous

for not only popes, but for monarchs, and all kinds of beliefs that weren't Catholic, like Judaism, Islam in Spain were dangerous for the monarchs. So they use this process of inquisition to detect people who not only had wrong belief, but to find out if they were going to stick to them as well. And so this goes as far back to any moment when you have people in your midst who might be rebels, who might question authority and all of these underpinnings of the regime. And so why do we associate? been during the Cathar heresy, or there would have been the Albigensian crusade, there would have been inquisition. But what is it about the Protestant reformation? Is it because it's just the most famous heresy that we suddenly associate with inquisition?

I think so, because as far as I know, the inquisition that was set up to tackle the Cathars after the Albigensian crusade was pretty successful. In Spain, you have the Inquisition set up in 1478, mainly to deal with the issue of Jews who'd converted, but then were suspected to be practicing Judaism secretly. And a couple of decades later, by 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella have ejected all of the Jews from Spain. So that is, to some extent, a problem that is more or less solved from their perspective. I think because of the cataclysmic effects of the Reformation from the point of view of the Catholic Church, and the fact that it has such a long effect on the history of Europe, in terms of splintering Christendom, establishing different confessions, everything has changed after the

Reformation in terms of the way that Europe operates. Martin Luther, I don't know whether he'd like this or not, he's almost become our sort of archetypal heretic, but actually heresy has existed for as long as the Catholic Church has, going right back to the, you know, the very first centuries of Christianity. And we're going to come on to the Roman Inquisition in a sec, but let's start with the more infamous ones. Where were they set up? Talk me through the kind of religious geography of Protestant Europe, and I know that's a tricky one. kind of religious geography of Protestant Europe? And I know that's a tricky one. No, it's fine. We can do some broad brushstrokes, which will kind of set the foundation. So the Reformation more or less begins in the German lands. So we have to remember these sort of neat

little nations that we have now of Italy, Spain, Germany weren't so neat in the early modern period. So Germany is the sort of the German lands, you've got differentors different powers but generally speaking that's where Luther emerges and that's where Luther gets a lot of support Italy is also fractured into separate states it's not unified until the late 19th century so you have Tuscany you have Lucca you have Venice you have Florence and in the middle you've got this swathe of papal states so luther sort of starts his reformation or gains his first followers in northern europe and that is where his ideas sort of remain they spread to scandinavia you also have um the emergence of other leaders who are so challenging cath Catholic teaching, like John Calvin in France,

and then he moves to Switzerland. So most of the sort of, if you're looking from the point of view of an inquisitor, heretical activity is in the kind of north and western parts of Europe. Italy remains Catholic, with some exceptions. So you have older groups of heretics in Italy called the Valdensians. And you also get people who hear about these ideas. You know, the advent of printing in the mid 15th century means that ideas are mobile, which is another aspect to inquisitorial work. And you see the kind of hot spots of worry are in the north of Italy. So where you've got that closer geographical link with the German lands, and also in some hotspots of printing, so like Venice for instance. However, I was thinking

about this the other day, and thinking about how far that perceived threat that pushes Paul III to say in 1542, we need an inquisition, we need to set up a new body to deal with this threat coming from the German lands how far that was actually justified because some historians say that even in a place like Modena or Venice which has seemed to be a real worry point when it came to these dangerous beliefs you would have had maybe 2% of the population maximum who would actually be a card carrying Lutheran or Calvinist or flirt with these ideas. And actually what the inquisitors and other groups who help them like the Jesuits learn when they go to these places, they might go to Corsica with a bull from the Pope saying, let's get the Lutherani.

When they get there, there are no Lutherans. But they find all these people who maybe haven't had a bishop for 60 years, or whose priests don't read and understand Latin well, who can't teach them correct doctrine. Maybe a priest actually has got a concubine and has had five, you know, five other girlfriends. And actually, what they find is the problem of disbelief or unbelief in Italy is not one that's got much to do with Martin Luther at all, and is much more to do with problems in the Catholic Church and problems with teaching and a lack of teaching to both priests and lay people. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Inquisition. Nobody expects that.

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And you mentioned the Jesuits. Well, first of all, so the Inquisitions, are they trying to find heretics, try them and then kill them or change their minds, make them see the error of their ways? the inquisitors when they arrive in town or where they arrive in a new place would put up a poster called an edict of grace saying look if you come forward within 40 days and snitch on your neighbors or tell us about silly things you've been saying down at the tavern then we will be light with you you will have maybe some prayers to say spiritual penances but as long as you admit that you're wrong um then we will not hurt you. And on some of these posters I've seen in the archive, I remember one from, I think it was from Bergamo, which was in the State Archive in Modena. It said, we desire the salvation of souls, not the death of men. So people in the 16th century had the sort of assumptions that you present in that question, that the inquisitors are out to kill people. You also get this even in the early 1540s in Bologna, you get people turning up and going to

other priests and saying, I'm not going to Rome, I've heard what they do there. But the fact is, whilst there are some inquisitors and some cardinals who are running the inquisition, who are super zealous, and who do, I mean, it's quite bonkers things like boil people in oil. That is the exception. And on their part, that is a failure because their aim is to persuade. Their aim is the salvation of souls. They truly believe, the whole premise of the inquisition is that if you do not believe in the orthodox teachings of the Catholic Church, you'll, never mind one death on earth, you'll have eternal death in hell. So to stop you from spreading these dangerous ideas around, we will do whatever it takes. And if that means the

death of one person, then so be it. But that's a last resort. Convincing, persuading, converting is the aim. But then, of course, with humanity, you always get some faults. And some people do take advantage of the system in order to be cruel or in their kind of fear and overzealousness. And that's where the Spanish Inquisition gets its reputation from. Absolutely. As I said earlier, you know, the popes give Ferdinand and Isabella the permission to have this Inquisition to deal with this problem of converted Jews, the conversos, and pretty quickly say, oh, my goodness, this is not what we expected. people are denouncing their neighbors just to get them into trouble inquisitors are using it to extract people's goods and to get their to fund the inquisition and it becomes a bit of a career path as well which is always dangerous you know if you want to be the best inquisitor ever what

are the criteria for that so people are perhaps overzealous and that reputation is established very early in the late 15th century with the Spanish Inquisition. And they do become more concerned with procedure later on. But you also have the very public executions with the Spanish Inquisition, the altar de fe, these acts of faith, which are there in the public eye in front of, and are supposed to edify, warn, frighten. So it's going to take a lot of, you know, how many sort of lenient cases do you need to erase that image in your memory of a heretic burning or heretics being led out wearing these strange garments,

these condemned men. It's a very powerful image. You have written about the Roman Inquisition. I mean, how is that different? Also, I was struck in your article by how the Jesuits, who I've always thought were the stormtroopers of the Counter-Reformation, they kind of tried to play good cop, bad cop. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, as I said, the Roman Inquisition have this bad reputation from their inception because of the Spanish and medieval counterparts and also because of what they're set up to do. Nobody wants to be questioned about their beliefs and to risk their lives over what they think. You know, we're all human and people in the 16th century weren't any less human than we are. So they were frightened about this just as a concept. they were frightened about this just as a concept. The Jesuits appear two years before the Inquisition is founded in 1540 and are founded as a religious order formally at that time. They'd of course been sort of developing before then. And although now we associate them as being sort of the stormtroopers of the Reformation, the Pope's right-hand men, at that point,

of the Reformation, the Pope's right-hand men. At that point, they're just a group of Spaniards and a few others who have travelled through Europe from the University of Paris to Italy. Nobody really knows them. They're of quite sort of noble backgrounds, some of them. Ignatius Loyola, their founder, is a Basque knight. They're highly educated. They all met at the University of Paris and they're doing good works. But when they arrive in They all met at the University of Paris, and they're doing good works. But when they arrive in Rome, they're sort of just as unknown and suspect as the next person. Loyola himself is caught up with the Inquisition twice in Spain before he even leaves, and then later with the Roman Inquisition. And so two people in the Italian states very early on, they're unknown. They don't have a reputation.

They've been to Rome to get approval from the Pope, but everybody has to do that if they want to start a religious order. So this association with the Counter-Reformation and the papacy isn't there. And this makes the Jesuits incredibly valuable collaborators for the Inquisition because they're not associated with religious orders who have traditionally been inquisitors, like the Dominicans and the Franciscans. They're international, Spanish, French, then Italians join their ranks. So they can go to the various courts in Italy and make connections with the people who are running those

courts and with the people. They're not associated with the papacy, so they're not seen as sort of stormtroopers of the Roman Inquisition. And they're simple pastors, they're not judges. And so the Jesuits end up doing quite a lot of work with the Inquisition, which they themselves are very cautious about mentioning in their records, because they're aware of this reputation. And their value is that they're not inquisitors, that they can go in, they can find out about heresy. They can convert people because people aren't frightened of them. And so how long does this go on? I should know this, but does the Inquisition just, the Protestants didn't go away, right?

It didn't, I mean, although did it, I mean, obviously they do manage to staunch the flow of Protestants in places like what is now Belgium, parts of France, Spain. So does the Inquisition kind of work? I think that comes back to what the actual threat was. It certainly worked in stopping the spread of heresy as they would have seen it, Protestantism in Italy. And in the middle decades of the 16th century, that's almost done and dusted. They then changed their targets because this institution has not only now sort of come into existence, and so it's got to have a job, but they've also detected all these other things, like I was saying earlier in Italy. So they start going after blasphemers, they start going after people who are gay,

they start dealing with sexual sins. And so they change their targets, their targets are changing and moving depending on who they're finding. And one of the fascinating things about the papal inquisition or the Roman inquisition is, whereas the other Inquisitions do sort of peter out in the early 19th century for the Spanish Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition actually still exists today. And it still does the same job, but in a very different way. So the Roman Inquisition, I think even if you went to, actually I shouldn't say this, I don't know, even if you went to maybe the Encyclopedia Britannica page or the Wikipedia page or maybe even the Vatican website, I haven't checked. It's the same institution with a different name. It's called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

And it's there today to protect, defend, define Orthodox Catholic teaching. Now, they're not having trials, but it would be used in much the same way i believe that if you for instance were a priest in germany and you got up on a sunday and started preaching something as catholic doctrine that wasn't catholic doctrine technically somebody could write to the congregation for the doctrine of the faith and say this man is deliberately spreading heresy or he might deliberately be maybe he'd be corrected maybe he wouldn't be a heretic but the roman inquisition still exists today whether or not that means it's been unsuccessful i don't know but i

think instead it points to the fact that inquisitions are needed as long as religion exists. If you want to have an orthodoxy, then you've got to deal with heresy. And I think this is why we see heresy and attacks on heresy from the inception of the church and why today they still have a body in order to define and defend the faith. That is extraordinary. There we go. So it's still in operation. How can people find out more about your work? I have a website, jessicadalton.co.uk, and I'm also on Twitter, at Jessica M. Dalt. Brilliant. Well, make sure you go and check that out, everyone. Thank you very much for coming and talking to us about the Inquisition. Pleasure.

Hi everybody, just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast. we can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians.

Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.