The Inquisitors were commissioned to search out heretics and eradicate them from Christendom. To determine that someone is a heretic, it was necessary to define heresy. Lea writes, "From almost the inception of the Holy Office there was an effort to lay down rules as to what constituted evidence of heresy; but the Council of Narbonne, in 1244, winds up an enumeration of the various indications by saying that it is sufficient if the accused can be shown to have manifested by any word or sign that he had faith or belief in heretics or considered them to be "good men."¹"
            Henry Charles Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, (first edition 1888) [New York: Harbor Press 1955 ] p. 461

Below you will find a very incomplete list of "crimes" which constituted Suspicion of Heresy or Actual Heresy. Neither list is by any means complete.

Suspicion of Heresy

            Suspicion of heresy, as distinguished from heresy, was itself a crime. Heresy was any action, including speech, which conflicted with the teachings of the Catholic church. Suspicion of heresy was any action which could be interpreted to mean that the person held or might some day be persuaded to hold heretical beliefs.

            As an example of the difference between heresy and suspicion of heresy, let us take the case of a man who owns a book which contains unorthodox ideas. The ownership of the book, even if one could not read or write, leads to suspicion of heresy; teaching that the unorthodox ideas in the book are less than completely erroneous and false is heresy.

            Of the three degrees of suspicion of heresy: slight, violent, and vehement, the penalties for slight suspicion of heresy were the lightest and the penalties for vehement suspicion of heresy included all of the penalties of the two lighter cases. If an individual was convicted of vehement suspicion of heresy and was later charged with heresy, he suffered the same penalties as a relapsed heretic - the stake.

            Several categories of crimes which fell under the rubric of Suspicion of Heresy were almost all encompassing. Together with the trial rules that all evidence is interpreted in favor of the church and that all laws are interpreted in favor of the church, almost any one could be convicted of suspicion of heresy at the desire of ecclesiastical authorities. In practice, ecclesiastical abuse of power became so widespread that, for centuries, contemporaries considered the church to be running little more than an extortion racket.

Crimes. which fell in the category of Suspicion of Heresy

Blasphemy: Holding "erroneous opinions of the omniscience or other attributes of the Deity.²" (An all-encompassing category, blasphemy includes disagreement with the Church on any issue from priestly celibacy to who is the keeper of the keys to heaven and the power of the Pope. Blasphemers includes all non-Catholic Christians e.g., Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Protestants, and other smaller denominations and sects.)

Sorcery and divination: Utilizing holy items (eg. holy water, the consecrated host, the oil of extreme unction, relics) or holy sacraments (e.g. baptizing dead people, re-baptizing infants) for discovering the future or in any other sacrilegious endeavor. (If holy items were not used in divining the future, the crime was a secular, not a religious, crime.)³

Invocation of demons. Using the signs, ceremonies, and words of the Catholic religion to worship Satan⁴

Excommunication without seeking absolution: Remaining excommunicated for a year without seeking absolution. No authentic Catholic could remain indifferent to his censure by the church for such a long time⁵.

Schism (without or with heresy): Schism without heresy entailed admitting to all articles of the Catholic faith yet denying the authority of the Pope as the head of the Church and the Vicar of Christ on earth. Schism with heresy entailed individuals, as those in the Greek Orthodox church, who hold the same opinions as the first group but who also differ on points of faith with the church⁶.

Concealers, favorers, and adherents of heretics: assisting heretics which included not reporting any observed heresy or known heretics to ecclesiastical authorities⁷. Another all encompassing category, almost any one could be accused of being a concealer, favorer, or adherent of heretics.

Impeding the Inquisition: Preventing the inquisitors from exercising their functions⁸ (In practice, this category acted as a catch-all offense. Any one who was not quick enough to respond to or improperly fulfilled any command of any Inquisitor or any of the Inquisitor's assistants could be charged under this clause.)

Oath: Refusing to take an oath to drive the heretics from their territory⁹ (applies to city magistrates, governors of provinces, kings, and other secular officials).

Defense of the Church: Refusing to defend the church against heretics when so requested by the Inquisition¹⁰ (applies to city magistrates, governors of provinces, kings, and other secular officials). Includes neglecting to burn heretics who have been condemned by the church.

Secular law: Refusing to repeal statutes which are contrary to the measures decreed by the holy office (applies to city magistrates, governors of provinces, kings, and other secular officials)¹¹.

Lawyers: Assisting heretics by their advice or concealing papers, records, and other writings, which might make their errors, dwellings, or stations known. (applies to all lawyers, notaries, and other persons belonging to the law)12

Christian burial: Burying a dead heretic in consecrated ground¹³

Witnesses: Refusing to testify against a heretic¹⁴

Index of Forbidden Books: Buying, keeping, or reading books on the Index of Prohibited Books¹⁵ (The Index included Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Bible written in the vernacular was on the Index of 1550¹⁶)

Jews and Moors: "Proselytizing" Catholics to embrace their faith (and proselytizing was defined very loosely.)¹⁷

Decoration: Decorating furniture or personal items (snuff boxes or fans) with forbidden images such as scenes from mythology

Old and New Testaments: Possessing any books of the Old or New Testaments in the vernacular¹⁸

Some categories are very broad and include

Believing that people who ascribe to non-Catholic faiths (e.g., Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Protestants, and other smaller denominations and sects) are not destined to spend eternity in hell

Adhering to any non-Catholic Christian faith

Claiming that priests and monks can lawfully marry

Failure to Maintain¹⁹
            Transubstantiation
            Special efficacy of consecrated priests
            Efficacy of holy water
            Necessity of auricular confession to a priest
            Necessity of priests for the absolution of sins
            Infallibility of the Pope
            Pope holds the keys to heaven
            Good works are necessary for salvation

Maintaining that²⁰
            God did not establish the regular religious orders
            Marriage is better and more perfect than celibacy
            No festivals but the Sabbath
            Not sinful to eat meat on Friday, in Lent, or on other fast-days
            Persecution for conscience's sake was sinful²¹

Concealers, favorers, and adherents of heretics (Aiding and abetting)²²
            Visiting a sick mother who had been declared a heretic
            Employing a suspected heretic for one day's work
            Refusing to report heretical acts to ecclesiastical. authorities
            Giving a crust of bread or a few pennies to a heretic as a charity
            Talking with a heretic
            Neglecting to turn in a parent, sibling, neighbor, or friend who held unorthodox beliefs²³
            Showing respect to a heretic at your parents command while still a minor

Crimes which constituted Actual Heresy included

Simony (rarely prosecuted)

Defending an heretic or an heretical opinion²⁴

Maintaining that
            Donation of Constantine was a forgery²⁵
            Clerical immunity drew its origin from the civil power²⁶
            Church has ever exceeded her rightful prerogatives²⁷
            State should be independent of the church²⁸
            Church should not be allowed to coerce into submission all who may disregard her authority²⁹

Anyone who remained excommunicated for a year without having absolution from the church was considered a heretic and, when captured, would be burned at the stake

Punishment:

            Upon arrest (not conviction) for even slight suspicion of heresy, the accused's assets were inventoried and impounded by the church³⁰. If the accused was proven innocent (which very, very rarely happened), the goods were returned. All goods, including the family home, were seized. A man's family (wife, children, dependent siblings or parents) were turned out to fend for themselves³¹. Yet, someone who helped even people related to a person accused of slight suspicion of heresy risked being charged with heresy himself. All of the accused's possessions were forfeit, even a king's entire kingdom the moment the heresy took place³², even if it went undetected for years. The accused was assumed to be guilty from the moment at which the alleged heresy took place. If the accused sold any goods between the time of his alleged heresy and the detection of the alleged crime, the church went to the current owner of the property to recover the goods for the church, no matter how many hands the property had passed through or how many years had elapsed since the alleged heresy. Commerce stagnated since no contract could be depended on to be valid and binding³³. Even the possessions of dead men who had died in communion with the church and who were posthumously deemed to be heretics were confiscated from his heirs or from his heirs' heirs or from whomever the property currently belonged. So even property that had been in a family for many generations was not held securely because even heirs could be deprived of their inheritance.

            In Italy and elsewhere, the property was split into 3 equal portions with one portion going to the church, one to the state, and one to the Inquisition³⁴- quite a motivation for the state to be complicit with the church in such a gross miscarriage of justice. In other places, one third went to the church, one third to the state, and one third to the accuser- quite a motivation for an individual to report heretics on the flimsiest of evidence.

            Slight suspicion of heresy eventually lead to a system of fines as a penance by doing good works.³⁵ Eventually almost all penalties could be commuted for the right price, and, even later, this process would lead to the selling of indulgences.

            Slight suspicion of heresy entailed going on a pilgrimage in which the penitent was required to bring back a testimonial letter from the shrine indicating that the penitent actually performed the pilgrimage.³⁶ Often these pilgrimages lasted for years which entailed a separation from home and family for years. In the absence of the penitent, the family carried on as best as it could.

            Once accused of suspicion of heresy, a man lost his office and was disqualified from all official positions in future.³⁷ Required to a life-long "wearing of the crosses" as a symbol of his perpetual infamy, the penitent was subjected to life long ridicule and, perhaps, even worse, to the knowledge that if any person accused him of heresy, he faced either certain lifelong imprisonment on bread and water or the stake.

            Suspicion of heresy annulled all rights.³⁸ Like a heretic, someone accused of suspicion of heresy was an outlaw, a man outside of the law, where one's life and possessions were forfeit to the first comer strong enough to take them from him. He was a pariah, finding employment enough to earn his daily bread honestly was a perpetual struggle.

            Scourging, as Lea writes, was no trivial matter.

"Stripped as much as decency and the inclemency of the weather would permit, the penitent presented himself every Sunday, between the Epistle and the Gospel, with a rod in his hand, to the priest engaged in celebrating mass, who soundly scourged him in the presence of the congregation, as a fitting interlude in the mysteries of divine service. On the first Sunday in every month, after mass, he was to visit, similarly equipped, every house in which he had seen heretics, and receive the same infliction; and on the occasion of every solemn procession he was to accompany it in the same guise, to be beaten at every station and at the end. Even when the town happened to be placed under interdict, or himself to be excommunicated, there was to be no cessation of the penance, and apparently it lasted as long as the wretched life of the penitent, or at least until it pleased the inquisitor to remember him and liberate him.³⁹"

            Finally, it should be noted that as part of the trial procedure itself, the accused were routinely tortured, often resulting in lifelong physical suffering, mental anguish, and crippling disabilities for the survivors⁴⁰.

            Punishment for vehement suspicion of heresy with abjuration was life imprisonment on bread and water which served as a penance for the accused, a way for the authorities to ensure that the penitent was keeping to the straight and narrow, and as a method of keeping the potential source of infection away from the rest of the flock.

            The penalties for actual heresy included all the penalties for suspicion of heresy. Further, all of the heretics children, to the second generation, were declared ineligible for any positions of emolument or dignity, unless they should win mercy by betraying their father or some other heretic⁴¹. His house was to be destroyed and never to be rebuilt.⁴²

            If the heretic abjured his heresy before sentence was passed, he spent the remainder of his life doing penance in prison on rations of bread and water. If he relapsed into heresy, he was burned at the stake

            If the heretic abjured his heresy between the passing of sentence and his execution, as a show of mercy the heretic would be strangled before burning.

            If the heretic did not abjure his sin, the Inquisition wanted a slow and painful death at the stake in the hope that earthly torments would cause the heretic to abjure his heresies so that his soul could be snatched from the devil at the last moment⁴³

            If the heretic did not abjure his heresy, he was burned at the stake. Lea gives us a first hand account of the burning of Jan Hus.

"As for minor details, we happen to have them preserved in an account by an eye-witness of the execution of John Huss at Constance, in 1415. He was made to stand upon a couple of fagots and tightly bound to a thick post with ropes, around the ankles, below the knee, above the knee, at the groin, the waist, and under the arms. A chain was also secured around his neck. Then it was observed that he faced east, which was not fitting for a heretic, and he was shifted to the west; fagots mixed with straw were piled around him to the chin. Then the Count Palatine Louis, who superintended the execution, approached with the Marshal of Constance, and asked him for the last time to recant. On his refusal they withdrew and clapped their hands, which was the signal for the executioners to light the pile. After it had burned away there followed the revolting process requisite to utterly destroy the half-burned body -- separating it in pieces, breaking up the bones and throwing the fragments and the viscera on a fresh fire of logs.⁴⁴"

            The Church had the right at any time to increase or decrease the penalty (for example, one convicted of vehement suspicion of heresy could be freed from prison, or sent to the stake)⁴⁵

            Relapsed heretics were not given a third chance, they went to the stake. Those guilty of the vehement suspicion of heresy who were later found to express heretical ideas were treated as relapsed heretics and went to the stake.

            Modern commentators on the Inquisition note that the Inquisitors almost always asked for mercy for the convicted. Lea writes,

"It is altogether a modern perversion of history to assume, as apologists do, that the request for mercy was sincere, and that the secular magistrate and not the Inquisition was responsible for the death of the heretic. We can easily imagine the smile of amused surprise with which Gregory IX or Gregory XI would have listened to the dialectics with which Comte Joseph de Maistre proves that it is an error to suppose, and much more to assert, that Catholic priests can in any manner be instrumental in compassing the death of a fellow-creature.⁴⁶"

            Death did not stop the work of the Inquisitors. A dead person could be convicted of heresy, the bodies of dead heretics could be disinterred and burnt, their property confiscated, their memory pronounced infamous, and their descendants forbidden from holding church offices until the third generation. ⁴⁷

            The Pope, his legates, his nuncios, his officers, their familiars and other ecclesiastical officials (bishops, priests) were exempt, and if any of these were denounced as heretics, the inquisitor could only take the secret information and refer it to the Pope.⁴⁸"

End Notes

1. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 431
   
2. Llorente, p. 21
   
3. Llorente, p. 21
   
4. Llorente, p. 21
   
5. Llorente, pp. 21-22
   
6. Llorente, p. 22
   
7. Llorente, p. 22
   
8. Llorente, p. 22
   
9. Llorente, p. 22
   
10. Llorente, p. 22
    
11. Llorente, p. 22; Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 538
    
12. Llorente, p. 22
    
13. Llorente, p. 22
    
14. Llorente, p. 22
    
15. Llorente, p. 111
    
16. Llorente, pp. 102-103
    
17. Llorente, p. 23
    
18. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 324
    
19. Llorente, pp. 113-114
    
20. Llorente, pp. 113-114
    
21. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 2, p. 224
    
22. "Under canon law, any one, from the meanest to the highest, who opposed or impeded in any way the functions of an inquisitor, or gave aid or counsel to those who did so, became at one ipso facto excommunicate. After the lapse of a year in this condition he was legally a heretic to be handed over without further ceremony to the secular arm for burning, without trial and without forgiveness." Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 349
    
23. "No tie of kindred served as an excuse for concealing heresy. The son must denounce the father, the husband was guilty if he did not deliver his wife to a frightful death. Every human bond was severed by the guilt of heresy; children were taught to desert their parents, and even the sacrament of matrimony could not unite an orthodox wife to a misbelieving husband." Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, pp. 228
    
24. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, pp. 321
    
25. Lea, Studies, p. 168
    
26. Lea, Studies, p. 232
    
27. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 2, p. 476
    
28. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 2, p. 476
    
29. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 2, p. 476
    
30. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 505
    
31. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, pp. 520-521
    
32. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 502-503, 504, 520
    
33. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 522
    
34. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 510
    
35. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 460
    
36. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 465, 466
    
37. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 2, p. 338
    
38. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 2, p. 149
    
39. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, pp. 464-465
    
40. "When the despairing cry of the population induce Clement V to order an investigation into the iniquities of the Inquisition of Carcassonne, the commission issued to the cardinals sent thither in 1306 recites that confessions were extorted by torture so severe that the unfortunates subjected to it had only the alternative of death; and in the proceedings before the commissioners the use of torture is so frequently alluded to as to leave no doubt of its habitual employment. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that in the fragmentary documents of inquisitorial proceedings which have reached us the references to torture are singularly few. Apparently it was felt that to record its use would in some sort invalidate the force of the testimony."Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 423-424
    
41. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 321
    
42. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 321
    
43. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, pp. 551-552
    
44. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 552
    
45. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, p. 495
    
46. Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, pp. 227-228
    
47. Llorente, p. 23
    
48. Llorente, p. 23

References

            Henry Charles Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, (1888) [New York: Harbor Press 1955 ]

            Henry Charles Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 2, (1888) [New York: Harbor Press 1955 ]

            Henry Charles Lea, Studies in Church History: The Rise of the Temporal Power, Benefit of Clergy, Excommunication, The Early Church and Slavery (1869) [Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea's Sons & Co.1883]

            Juan Antonio Llorente, A Critical History of the Inquisition of Spain (John Lilburne 1823 abridged English edition) [Williamstown, Mass: John Lilburne Company 1967]