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To the last, Gilles de Rais professed the strength of his faith. The one charge that he refused to admit to was devil worship, and he broke down in a fit of sobbing when he was told that he would be excommunicated and denied the right of confession. Yet such flashes of conscience had done nothing to stop his campaign of sadism, murder and what he called “carnal delight.”

JOAN OF ARC

c. 1412–1431

I have been sent here by God, the King of Heaven, to drive you, an eye for an eye, from the whole of France.

Joan of Arc, in a letter to the English forces besieging Orléans (March 22, 1429)

France’s national heroine, Joan of Arc, was a simple peasant girl who became a soldier, a martyr, and finally a saint. Convinced that God had told her to free France, she showed remarkable moral and military leadership and inspired the French to fight on against the English in the Hundred Years’ War. Dressed in men’s clothes, Joan defied convention, and the objections of both statesmen and churchmen, and in the end embraced death in her pursuit of salvation.

Joan was just fourteen when she first heard the “voices” of Saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret calling her to save France from the English. After half a century of war, the French seemed on the verge of losing the contest for their crown. Five years after the death of the Valois king Charles VI, his son, the Dauphin Charles, had still not been crowned, and the city of Orléans, the key to central France, seemed about to fall to the English.

Joan traveled across war-torn enemy territory to seek an audience with Charles, driven on by the persistent voices of the saints. Her quiet unbending determination gained her access to the Dauphin and persuaded him that he must reinvigorate the campaign against the English, and that it was God’s will that he should be crowned at Rheims. She never disclosed what she had whispered to him that day, but Charles and the French leadership were either convinced that she had divine guidance or that this peasant girl would be useful to the French cause, probably a little of both.

Clad in white armor and wielding a battle-ax, Joan rode at the head of Charles’s army to relieve the besieged city of Orléans. The English were routed, and other victories followed—as Joan was somehow sure they would. Hailed by the French as their savior, and accused by the English of being a witch, it seemed that the Maid of Orléans must have some supernatural power, as the myth of English invincibility that had sprung up since Agincourt was conclusively shattered. In July 1429 the Dauphin was crowned as Charles VII at Rheims, with Joan in attendance.

Indefatigable, Joan urged the vacillating Charles on to push his advantage and press on to Paris. When Valois forces finally attacked the capital, Joan stood high on the earthworks, calling to the city’s inhabitants to surrender to their rightful king. Undaunted by wounds received in the fight, she refused to leave the field—although the attempt to take Paris was not successful.

Captured by the English allies, the Burgundians, as she rushed to help the besieged town of Compiègne, Joan was sold to the English and tried as a heretic in Rouen, the seat of English power in France. Charles, eager for a truce with Burgundy and reluctant to be associated with a witch, was nowhere to be seen. At her trial the peasant girl faced up to France’s leading theologians, confident of her divine mission, while avoiding being tricked into criticizing the Church. Joan was so impervious to the threat of torture that her interrogators decided that it would be useless to try.

But when the Church threatened to hand her over to the secular courts, Joan—petrified and ill—confessed to heresy and agreed to put on women’s clothes, choosing life imprisonment over a painful death. Within days of recanting, however, Joan changed back into men’s clothes, saying the voices had censured her treacherous abjuration. Handed over to the secular authorities, the young woman barely out of her teens—who had always had a premonition of an early death—was burned at the stake as a witch.

Joan’s conviction was unwavering. Allowed to make her confession and receive communion, she died gazing at a cross held up by a priest, who, acceding to her request, shouted out assurances of salvation so that she could hear him over the fire’s roar. So anxious were the English that no relic of her should remain to keep her legend alive, they burned her body three times, then scattered her dust in the River Seine.

Twenty years later, safely installed on his throne, Charles VII ordered an inquiry into the trial. Joan’s conviction was overturned. Five hundred years later, on May 16, 1920, she was made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

TORQUEMADA

1420–98

If anyone possesses a certain amount of learning, he is found to be full of heresies, errors, traces of Judaism. Thus they have imposed silence on men of letters; those who have pursued learning have come to feel, as you say, a great terror.

Don Rodrigo Manrique, son of the inquisitor general, letter to Luis Vives, 1533

The very name of Tomás de Torquemada, the first inquisitor general in Spain, was enough to induce a tremor of fear among even the most hardened of his contemporaries. Since then, Torquemada—the persecutor of Jews, Moors and other supposed heretics under the intolerant and repressive rule of Ferdinand and Isabella—has become a byword for religious fanaticism and persecuting zeal.

Little is known of his early life, other than the fact that the man who would become the bane of Spain’s Jews was himself of Jewish descent: his grandmother was a converso—a Jewish convert to Catholicism. During his youth Torquemada joined the Dominican religious order, and in 1452 he was appointed prior of a monastery in Santa Cruz. Though he continued to occupy that post for the next two decades, he also became a confessor and adviser to King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, whose marriage in 1479 effectively united the two principal Spanish kingdoms. Under their dual monarchy, a renewed effort was made to complete the Reconquista (the re-conquest of Spain from Muslim rule) that had stalled some two centuries earlier. This endeavor ended in success in 1492 with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim outpost in Spain.

In the meantime, Torquemada had convinced the government that the continued presence in Spain of Jews, Muslims and even recent converts to Christianity from those faiths represented a dangerous corruption of the true Catholic faith. As a result of Torquemada’s urging, repressive laws had been passed aimed at forcing the expulsion of Spain’s non-Christian minorities.

The Spanish Inquisition was established on November 1, 1478 by Pope Sixtus IV. Its job was to root out deviance and heresy from within the Church, and every girl over the age of twelve and every boy over the age of fourteen was subject to its power. It was not the first time such an entity had been created—an inquisition had temporarily existed in 13th-century France, to deal with the remnants of the Cathar heretics in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade. This new Inquisition, however, was to be far more enduring and methodical in its operation.

The first two inquisitors were appointed in 1480, and the first burnings followed a few months later, in February 1481, when six people were executed as heretics. Thereafter the pace of killing picked up, and in February 1482, to cope with the increasing workload, a further seven inquisitors—including Torquemada—were appointed by the pope. Within a decade, the hearings of the Inquisition were operating in eight major cities across Spain.

Inquisitors would arrive in a town and convene a special Mass, which all were obliged to attend. There they would preach a sermon before calling on those guilty of heresy to come forward and confess. Suspected transgressors were given a period of thirty to forty days to turn themselves in. Those who complied were liable to be “rewarded” with a less severe penalty than those who proved recalcitrant. Nevertheless, all who did confess were also required to identify other heretics who had not complied. Denunciation was thus as integral to the working of the inquisition as confession. In consequence, the inquisition quickly became an opportunity to settle old scores.