The most dramatic weapon in the church's armoury was crusade, wielded first against Islam in the East, but also, from the thirteenth century, within Europe against heretical regions. The attempts to subdue Languedoc between 1209 and 1229, and the crusades called against the Hussites in fifteenth-century Bohemia, were brutal attempts at repression, involving the crudest use of force and intermittently fed by feverish religious zealotry. But crusade was a blunt implement. It bludgeoned Languedoc into the loss of its political liberty (the region passing into French rule after the death of Raymond VII of Toulouse); heresy, however, was not eradicated by such measures, only displaced from the courts and towns to the woods and mountains. After the years of crusade, the Cathars drew upon their supporters in the lay population for immediate sustenance, and their loose institutional connections with Italy for spiritual support. It took the more subtle tool of inquisition to eradicate the heresy - in the main by the middle of the century, but with some remnants hanging on well into the fourteenth century (the Waldensian heresy also endured in southern Europe up to the Reformation).685
What inquisition did that crusade did not was to fray and eventually rend the social fabric that supported the heretical sect. When they entered an area, inquisitors preached to the people and offered them a choice: come forward of your own free will in the next fortnight, seek forgiveness for your heretical sins, and your punishment will be a light penance. But wait longer - to be cited or arrested by the inquisitors - and the punishment would be that much stronger. And when one appeared before an inquisitor, one had to name names. In stark contrast to the annual confession that Christians were enjoined to make to their parish priests, inquisitorial confession pointed outward as well as inward. Admitting one's own guilt was insufficient: the actions of others must be noted, enumerated, detailed. Such a system undermines the trust upon which community depends, particularly when that community is attempting to evade detection. Quite quickly, in the mid-thirteenth century, we find moments in the inquisitorial record of neighbours threatening or beseeching other neighbours to keep quiet about their joint activities. There is later evidence that some people used the presence of inquisitors to settle feuds, informing (whether truly or falsely) on their neighbouring enemies. Through this subtle mixture of threats and entreaties, inquisition corroded the solidarity of heretical support. On occasions, spies were used, and by the fourteenth century, inquisitors had become adept at coercing and tricking confessions from suspects. Inquisition, from the mid-thirteenth century, turned its archive of confessions into a powerful weapon that could be collated, cross-referenced and consulted by different inquisitors over decades, using the inscription of a past transgression to catch people out many years later.686
What must also be noted about both crusade and inquisition, however, is their limited nature. A crusade was essentially a war, and wars must at some point end. The Albigensian Crusade itself did not comprise twenty years of continuous violence, but a string of vicious conflicts spread unevenly over those two decades. Inquisition, as noted above, was not a permanent tribunal, but a particular task for a certain time and place. In the mid-thirteenth century, its reach was broad, covering much of southern France and elsewhere, and over the space of just a few years brought at least 8,000 people, and perhaps five times that many, to interrogation and sentence. But later inquisitions encompassed much smaller numbers - in the hundreds rather than the thousands - and inquisitors always operated for specific periods of time. When English bishops employed inquisitio against heresy in fifteenth-century England, the numbers questioned were still lower, and its use even more sporadic. Both weapons of repression also depended very much upon secular support for their effective operation - and such support was not always forthcoming. The French monarchy refused to involve itself in the crusade against the south until the final years of that conflict, and much of the legislation passed immediately following the Treaty of Paris (1229) was directed towards trying to force the nobility to act against heretics they had previously ignored or supported. In theory, inquisitors enjoyed wide-ranging and extraordinary powers, but in practice, without local secular support, their task was at least rendered difficult, and in the worst cases they themselves were endangered. We have seen above the fate of Conrad and his assistants; they were not the only inquisitors murdered by opponents, the same outcome befalling Guillaume Arnaud in 1242 and Peter of Verona in 1252. Lower-level intimidation, harassment and collective resistances were experienced by inquisitors in France, Italy and Germany at various times.
With regard to the fight against heresy, one might say that we can identify a persecuting society at certain times and in certain places - mid-thirteenth-century Languedoc and the Italian city states slightly later that century (eradicating Catharism), parts of Germany in the fourteenth century (primarily against Waldensians and supposed 'Free Spirits'), England somewhat intermittently in the fifteenth century (against Lollardy). One could say similarly of anti-semitic repression: intermittent periods of violence (to mention just a few: Germany and elsewhere in 1095-6, England sporadically in the mid-to-late twelfth century, Germany in the 1290s, France in 1320-1, Spain in the 1390s, Germany once again in the early fifteenth century) stitched together by a slew of anti-Jewish ecclesiastical legislation passed across Europe, particularly in the thirteenth century but reiterated cyclically thereafter. Recent studies have however emphasised less the constant and pathological nature of anti-Judaism and more the ways in which repressive violence against Jews was used as a political tool by various groups, from the barons struggling with the English crown in the thirteenth century (leading up to the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290) to popular political protest against taxation in fourteenth-century France.687 It is notable also that anti-Jewish attitudes continued to perform some kind of cultural 'work' in late medieval England - in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for example, and in various mystery plays - when the putative targets of this hatred had been absent from those shores for over a century. Such hatred, disconnected from its supposed target, was clearly being used for particular purposes. For most of our period, the same point could be made ofwitchcraft prosecutions: rare in any case in the earlier centuries, many cases were linked to plots against powerful figures, and were essentially part of a particular political struggle, even by the fifteenth century when the famous Malleus maleficarum was composed.688 Indeed, the Malleus itself was written by Heinrich Institoris not as an embodiment of current attitudes and policy towards witchcraft, but in an attempt to reshape them - Heinrich having earlier been laughed out of court by the authorities at Innsbruck when he tried to persuade the authorities to prosecute the many witches he believed lurked there.689
Thus our opening example of repression at Mainz is, in one sense, more representative than I initially suggested: Conrad terrorised a particular area for a period of time, but the repression was conducted in politically fraught circumstances that eventually curtailed activities. There were ways in which people, individually or collectively, could resist such powers. Those interrogated by inquisitors sometimes attempted, for example, to name as accomplices only those who were already dead. Early in the years of inquisitorial deployment, various towns briefly succeeded in expelling the inquisitors from their walls. On several occasions, groups tried to steal or destroy inquisitors' documentary records. By the early fourteenth century, Cathar supporters tended to want to meet with the perfecti only in twos or threes, in the hope that a limited number of potential witnesses could be shrugged off more easily
Should the inquisitors come calling. The Franciscan preacher Bernard Delicieux famously led a popular and legal revolt against inquisition in southern France. He was admittedly unsuccessful - and later sentenced for witchcraft - but the fact that he was able to attempt it, and with some degree of support, illustrates that inquisitors did not possess absolute power. Thus in various ways the mechanisms of repression were prey to the vicissitudes of local politics and attitudes. One might say that the ideology was willing, but the state apparatus was, if not weak, then at best unstable. The exercise of power in these modes never possessed sufficient material resources and political support to become truly institutional or regularised. Secular opinion could be mobilised to create and expel 'outsiders' at certain times and places, but not continuously, and not always to the point of prompting violent or legal actions against them. Repression was always located, not endemic.
What, then, of the more subtle tools of repression? One could make some similar points about preaching. The most pointedly effective sermon campaigns against 'outsiders' - the anti-Jewish propaganda preached by Vincent Ferrer (c. 1350-1419) in late fourteenth-century Spain for example, or Bernardino da Siena's (1380-1444) denunciations of sodomy and witchcraft (among other things) in fifteenth-century Italian cities - were once again specific and located, notable precisely because they were not being repeated identically across Europe, and because the individual preachers were remarkably effective at rousing their audiences. And as much as the rhetorics of repression tended to link together the supposed enemies of Christendom into one collective threat, this did not mean that every attitude was similarly channelled. One finds, for example, at Basel in the first decade of the fifteenth century a Dominican theologian called Heinrich of Rheinfelden playing a key role in persecuting the beguine communities in that city (who were themselves defended, unsuccessfully, by the local Franciscans). The same Heinrich was, in 1416, investigated by city authorities for making 'sodomitic' advances to lay workers at the Dominican monastery. He was, however, successfully defended by his order.690 Heresy and sodomy come together in these events, but far from in the expected mode of concatenation. The rhetoric of the 'many-headed beast' was a useful amplification of any individual threat, but it did not mean that all medieval clerics - let alone the laity - thought that Jews, heretics, lepers, homosexuals and others were continuously plotting in concert. If they had, they would scarcely have allowed any Jewish communities to live alongside them at any point, and would certainly not have given alms to the many leper houses that developed in the later Middle Ages. Even heretics could be seen in a different light, and preachers' denunciations of their crimes questioned by a lay audience. One finds, for example, various occasions of lay people, not notably connected to the Waldensian 'sect', nonetheless decrying the execution of a Waldensian preacher, believing such a figure to be clearly living a holy life and undeserving of this fate.691
So the church's more lurid propaganda did not always have a direct effect. Lay audiences, both popular and elite, could sometimes be swayed into repressive action by a zealous preacher, but were also capable of ignoring or even rejecting such a message. Nor did every cleric preach from the same script: the church hierarchy sought a unified Christendom in doctrine and attitudes, but in practice Christianity varied quite widely across Europe, and different strands of Christianity embodied divergent attitudes. That the Franciscans in Basel attempted to defend the beguine community from Dominican attack provides just one example among many of the tensions that could arise between different modes of Christian life, and the diversity such tension could foster. Such diversity was not, however, unlimited; and noting that the house of the medieval church had many mansions does not imply that the main edifice did not exist. It did, and it took power and authority to construct it. The cruder efforts at repression, however, do not represent in full the complex nature of those powers.
World History
