As for the few Waldenses who survived the massacre, they fled to the more
inaccessible valleys of Piedmont and there maintained a church of their
own until the days of the Reformation.
The Albigenses were less fortunate. After a century of flogging and
hanging, their name disappears from the court reports of the Inquisition.
But three centuries later, in a slightly modified form, their doctrines
were to crop up again and propagated by a Saxon priest called Martin
Luther, they were to cause that reform which was to break the monopoly
which the papal super-state had enjoyed for almost fifteen hundred years.
All that, of course, was hidden to the shrewd eyes of Innocent III. As
far as he was concerned, the difficulty was at an end and the principle
of absolute obedience had been triumphantly re-asserted. The famous
command in Luke xiv: 23 where Christ tells how a certain man who wished
to give a party, finding that there still was room in his banqueting hall
and that several of the guests had remained away, had said unto his
servant, “Go out into the highways and compel them to come in,” had once
more been fulfilled.
“They,” the heretics, had been compelled to come in.
The problem how to make them stay in still faced the Church and this was
not solved until many years later.
Then, after many unsuccessful experiments with local tribunals, special
courts of inquiry, such as had been used for the first time during the
Albigensian uprising, were instituted in the different capitals of
Europe. They were given jurisdiction over all cases of heresy and they
came to be known simply as the Inquisition.
Even today when the Inquisition has long since ceased to function, the
mere name fills our hearts with a vague feeling of unrest. We have
visions of dark dungeons in Havanna, of torture chambers in Lisbon, of
rusty cauldrons and branding irons in the museum of Cracow, of yellow
hoods and black masks, of a king with a heavy lower jaw leering at an
endless row of old men and women, slowly shuffling to the gibbet.
Several popular novels written during the latter half of the nineteenth
century have undoubtedly had something to do with this impression of
sinister brutality. Let us therefore deduct twenty-five per cent for the
phantasy of our romantic scribes and another twenty-five for Protestant
prejudice and we shall find that enough horror remains to justify those
who claim that all secret tribunals are an insufferable evil and should
never again be tolerated in a community of civilized people.
Henry Charles Lea has treated the subject of the Inquisition in eight
ponderous volumes. I shall have to reduce these to two or three pages,
and it will be quite impossible to give a concise account of one of the
most complicated problems of medieval history within so short a space.
For there never was an Inquisition as there is a Supreme Court or an
International Court of Arbitration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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