Heretics

Hostility with Constantinople had begun with a dispute over territory and evolved into a conflict over religious practice. The pope resented Byzantine rule over the parts of Italy he thought should be under his control. The pope and the Byzantine church also had long-standing religious differences concerning the nature of God as well as how the Church should be organized. In the meantime, the Turks were moving into Roman-occupied territories and were overrunning the Christian-held territories as the Church bickered with itself.

European fighters met with the emperor to coordinate strategy, but the two sides had very different interests. The Byzantines wanted to protect their own territory from Muslim invasion and saw the Crusaders only as reinforcements. The Crusaders, on the other hand, had a much larger goal that was to recover from the Muslims the city of Jerusalem and others that the Christians considered holy. The European Christians were interested in the Byzantines only if they could help the Crusaders achieve their goal. This conflict of interest greatly increased hostility between the Byzantine Empire and the west.

The Crusades began a series of wars by western European Christians to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims. Beginning in 1095 and ending in the late thirteenth century, these were wars on a grand scale that were no more than organized slaughters of fellow Christians, Jews, and anyone else who got in the way of the Roman Church. The term "crusade" was used to designate any military effort by Europeans against non-Roman Christians. These crusaders carved out feudal states in the Near East expanding European rule. For the first time western Christendom undertook military initiative far from home, and for the first time significant numbers left to carry their culture and religion abroad. In addition to the campaigns in the east, the crusading movement included other wars against Muslims, pagans, and dissident Christians and the general expansion of Christian Europe. In a sense, these Crusades were no more than an expression of militant Christianity, the power of the Roman Church, and unchecked European aggression. The Roman Church cleverly combined religious interests with that of secular and military enterprises. As these Christians lived in different cultures, which they learned and in some degree, absorbed, they also began to impose their own religion.

In 814, the death of Charlemagne began the collapse of his enormously powerful empire. Soon Christian Europe was under attack and on the defensive. Magyars, a nomadic people from Asia, began to pillage eastern and central Europe. Beginning about 780, many centuries of Viking raids would disrupt life in northern parts of Europe, especially England. Soon these attacks would become widespread, and even threatened Mediterranean cities. The greatest threat for the Roman Church, however, came from the forces of Islam. Militant and victorious in the centuries following the death of their leader, Muhammad in 632, these Islamic forces had conquered most if not all of North Africa by 700. Soon, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and most of Spain fell to them. The Islamic armies established bases in Italy, thereby greatly reducing the size and power of the Byzantine Empire and began a siege of Constantinople.

Pages 42/43

The word "inquisition" is from the Latin verb inquiro meaning to inquire. Soon the inquisitors, these lunatics, were not interested in inquiring into anything, instead their minds were made up based upon rumor, innuendo, and neighborhood feuds. Often, they did not even wait for complaints, and sought out persons to accuse others of heresy. The Church claims that the Inquisition was originally created to combat the heretical groups within the Roman fold, however, history shows that it soon extended its activity to include accused witches, diviners, blasphemers, and other "sacrilegious persons" as defined by Roman Church dogma. Europe trembled at their unchecked power, and by inserting Church law into secular law, the civil authorities had little choice but to uphold the inquisitor. They had, it seems, absolute power. These inquisitors were recruited almost exclusively from the Franciscan and Dominican orders, and during the early period, these inquisitors rode the circuit in search of heretics. This practice was short lived. Soon the inquisitors acquired the right to summon the suspects from their homes to the Inquisition center. It was employed mostly in the south of France and in northern Italy. Throughout the Inquisition’s history, king, prince, emperor, or pope succeeded in gaining complete control of this institution. The Inquisition reached its apex in the second half of the thirteenth century, during a time when the tribunals were led by a "grand inquisitor" that was entirely free from any authority, including that of the pope. It was impossible to eradicate their wonton abuse. The most notorious of these "grand inquisitors" was a man of Jewish decent by the name of Thomas de Torquiamada.

Pages 69/70

The result of the witch trials was much like the European experience, with a chain-reaction of confessions, denouncements, and more arrests. In an effort to help ease convictions, the civil courts relaxed traditional rules of evidence and procedure. In place of the normal rules and methods, the courts used what was common among Inquisitors in Europe. They scourged the women’s bodies for marks of satanic involvement. These could be anything, a wart, a mole, or even a birthmark. Also widely accepted as reliable were "spectral sources." For example, if someone had a dream or a vision of a woman being a witch, well, that was good enough for a condemnation by the judges. Those killed were not the few who submitted quickly and obediently to the authorities. If you denied being a witch and insisted that you had rights that must be acknowledged, you were put on the quick path to flame. Your chances were also bad if you were an older woman, and if you were thought to be deviant, troublesome, or somehow a disorderly woman. The Puritan code of conformity suggested that the first women to be accused of witchcraft in Salem were seen as different and treated as social outcasts. By the time, the Salem witch trials were over, nineteen people had been executed, two died in prison with their infant children, and one man had been pressed to death under rocks. The authorities clearly used these witch trials to impose their own ideas of order and righteousness upon the local populace. As in Europe, violence was a tool to be used by religion to enforce uniformity and conformity in the face of dissent and social disorder. In Europe, as in the New World, this use of "justice" and court procedure opened the floodgates of private notifications of people accused of alleged magic. Laws in general had been up to the local rulers. Nearly all allowed torture as means of investigation, not only for the witch-hunt, but any kind of criminal trial. It was thought that torture would make the guilty give up knowledge only perpetrators have. The court, however, needed to have the same or better knowledge to prosecute the perpetrator, thereby finding the accused guilty. These tribunals invented their own mechanism of argumentation that made most any suspect guilty. Every suspect in trial was asked for his companions in the devil’s sect. Often a victim would confess and give names of friends and relatives. In all, most scholars place the number of victims of these witch trials, both in Europe and America, as totaling more than 250,000.