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The Inquisition — Description

Our story today begins not in Spain, as one might expect, but rather on that other side of the Pyrenees, where all the evil things of the world slink out from the crevices of flaky grease rolls: France. Yeah that's right Ava’s back bitcheeeees.
“Ava what did the French do this time?” Well that was… kinda the question the church had on their desk too. It's November 1184 at the Synod of Verona, and there are several things on Pope Lucius III's docket, but first and foremost for our discussion is the hearing of one Peter Waldo. Hey I found him! Peter Waldo was a merchant from Lyon who, having acquired nothing in his bountiful career that he'd be able to take with him to the other side, turned to the words of his god for wisdom and the salvation of his soul. The path to his redemption was obvious, for indeed it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God, and you cannot serve God and Mammon. Very well, Waldo was inspired, if it is more blessed to give than to receive, then he would forgo all of his grubby wealth, distribute it among his community, and live amidst the impoverished as one of their own. And lo, as early as 1170, he found comfort and open hearts from his neighbors and comrades, people who have been content without profit, because they had something more important. They had each other. They had happiness, and armed with the mouth of Jesus, their movement gained traction. The Poor of Lyon were sweeping the city with a persuasive call to abandon the demon of wealth and live the same lifestyle as the dirt poor carpenter who went to the cross for his convictions over a millennium ago.
Waldo was popular, really popular, and so Pope Lucius III summoned him to explain what it was he so professed that was getting the whole social order uprooted. Waldo explained his case, and beseeched Christendom's highest seat for his grace and permission to continue his gospel with the Vatican's stamp of approval. Perhaps too, Waldo was certain, the Catholic Church will be moved by his message and give away to the less fortunate that giant pile of money which the Pope and his cardinals are currently sitting on right now.
Lucius rubbed his chin, listening intently, measuring every conceivable response as a man who was literate in the scholarship of theology and the prowess of philosophy. Mhm. Mhmm.
“Fuck you,” said the Pope.
“I- er… w- I'm sorry?” stammered Waldo.
“Fuck you. Ur excommunicated for heresy now.”
“Fuck me??”
“Yep, fuck you. We're gonna call the cops now aaaaaaand he's gone. Barnacles.”
That, having gone about as well as everyone thought it would, was the last anyone really saw of Waldo, he and his followers ultimately fleeing into the Alps. The Waldensians are actually still there to this day, interestingly enough, good for them. They're the ones that bailed before shit hit the fan. His “heresy” against the only church that supposedly gets to decide who sits at the cool kid's table in heaven was but one of many threats to the Catholic Church's wallet- eruhihiiiii mean spiritual purity on the chopping block that day. Strictly speaking though, before we move forward, what actually even is heresy? Like legally? What was this word supposed to mean, before any relevance its actual definition carries got thrown onto the human bonfire? Like for the sake of argument, dropping the cynical bitch routine I do for the internet and assuming the Catholic Church was primarily shitting their pants over the theological implications, what is a heretic?
Strictly speaking heresy, as laid out by Irenaeus in the 2nd century, is not just believing something other than Jesus. A heretical belief is something that an already baptized Christian individual holds to be true which does not agree with the Catholic Church's officially documented stance on the grand cosmology of things. I for example am a heretic by the Catholic definition, because I was baptized and raised Christian, and now I'm the polytheistic witch they're absolutely gonna burn any day now. It would be different if I was born pagan, then I'd just be unlearned. The word “heresy” comes from the Greek “haíresis” meaning “choice”. You have to be aware of the choices available to you in order to make a choice. I however grew up in cornshuck Sunday school, a genuine believer who then read the Bible for herself and came away with the conclusion that this was a message intended for someone else. In the dusty attic minds of the church fathers who first laid these things out, I'm infinitely worse than a pagan who just hasn't heard the Good Word, I'm an outright apostate. I know this all seems extremely pedantic, and it is, but this subtlety will become crucial the further we get into this tragic tale.
Since it was evident at a cursory glance that France is positively crab-walking with heretics, Pope Lucius concluded the Synod of Verona that he needed some men on the ground to investigate, diagnose, and convert. His bull Ad abolendam called for local bishops to stop whatever they think is so important right now and go outside - gasp - and look for heretics. This is why they're called “inquisitors”, as in those who inquest into matters. They're like… church detectives. It is important to note, however, that throughout its disparagingly long history, the inquisitors themselves were never legally permitted to execute convicted heretics. That just wasn't in their purview by canon law (as if that's ever prevented police violence and racial profiling but we'll get to that). Most cities and states of medieval Europe had their own, secular heresy laws on the books, so an execution would be punishment for violating state law, not church law. Inquisitors were just… the narks, very powerful narks.
After Waldo was never found again, the Pope's next worst headache were the Cathars, tucked away in the Languedoc region of southern France. These guys were… odd, kind of spontaneous, and it's gonna kill my little autistic soul to not go too deep into this for brevity's sake. The Cathars are what I can only describe as the Christian equivalent to the Nizari Assassins. They're superficially Gnostic, believing that the Devil is the god of the Old Testament while Jesus is the god of the New Testament, and that human beings are the souls of angels imprisoned by the Devil in clay bodies and a material illusion. Like the Nizaris, lords of the Languedoc sheltered their Cathar subjects, well respected in their communities for their charity and polite demeanor, in high-walled castles peaked atop the tallest mountains. Like the Assassins, when they saw people coming into their homeland just to suck their purses dry and execute their neighbors, they turned to coordinated murder.
On March 25, 1199, Pope Innocent III issued the bull Vergentis in senium, which equated a conviction of heresy with treason against church and state. Being a heretic no longer just gave you a slap on the wrist and an Ave Maria, it also delegitimatized your inherence and that of all your descendants. Heresy is a blood curse now, and it's a dinner bell for all of your rivals who are now legally permitted to overthrow you in the name of God. The highest lord in the region was King Philip II's self-righteous little nephew, Raymond IV, the Count of Toulouse. While not a Cathar himself, he respected everything they did for the community, happy to share an ale with them, and that cost him his throne. Raymond got into an argument with the church's go-between guy, Pierre de Castelnau, on January 14, 1208, and on January 15, Pierre was stabbed to death by mysterious malefactors. Wtf where was this Assassin's Creed game hiding all along?
Pope Innocent, in turn, called for a crusade against the Cathars, because he's had such good luck with those. The Albigensian Crusade was an absolute meat grinder. From 1209 to Toulouse's surrender in 1229, the crusaders unstoppably rampaged across the countryside, grabbing land for themselves and slaughtering 200,000 civilians, a realistic percentage of which weren't even Cathars, because the crusaders couldn't be bothered with the difference. Preacher man says you're a heretic? Lol guess I'm free to murder ya as a godless criminal then. Why, those brimstone Bible-thumpers however were truly overwhelmed by the sure scale of all this heresy! They really needed to sit down and get this all into an Excel sheet! They penned the official procedures for heresy trials at the Fourth Lateran Council in November 1215, and the authority of persecution was transferred to the resources of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in 1231. Now that it was given a standardized office, we now have a singular unit we can comfortably refer to as the Inquisition.
Among the stuck-up nutcases who wrote their resumes in Cathar blood was one Konrad von Marburg, selected by Mr. The Pope himself to lead the charge against a supposed wave of Luciferian sentiment. The Gesta Treverorum recalls a woman named Lucardis as the patient zero for this heresy, burnt at the stake not even for worshipping Lucifer as one might suspect, no instead the Luciferians were Christians who just… genuinely felt bad for the guy. Just because he's in time out doesn't mean he's not still Steve's son, afterall, and I for one believe without doubt in my mind that Steve cannot bring himself to disown any of his children. He'll get angry, sure, he has a temper and he'll be first to admit that, but he has forgiveness in his heart and a clean slate on the table even for the Devil himself. The Catholic Church, however, says nah, fuck that guy, and fuck anyone who even feels bad for him, clearly this is a theological gateway drug to Devil-worship which we must suppress immediately! Inquisitor Konrad was sent to the Rhineland to smuggle this particular heresy in its crib… oh and to make sure it was those pesky peasants in the Stedingen getting accused of heresy, cause like the Archbishop of Bremen wants more money out of them and they won't stop whining about how they “can't afford to feed their families under the tithes being demanded of them”. Come now, you stingy heretics, what would Jesus say?
Evidently, Jesus wasn't too happy with this whole systematic conspiracy against the poor, because Konrad was ambushed on the road from Mainz and assassinated by a mysterious band of dissenting knights on July 30, 1233. If the nobles weren't convinced by Pope Gregory's call for a crusade against their own subjects already, they sure as shit were now. Since war is pay-to-win, you can probably imagine the disgusting slaughter that ensued over the next year. You probably don't want to though, the women and children were not spared, and those left behind were drained of every penny they were worth. I'm sure these rich fucks slept content and comfortable in their velvet bedsheets afterwards, at least until another inquisitor, one Peter of Verona, was assassinated by the Cathars in April 1252. Clearly, these “heretics” weren't getting the memo, so on May 15, 1252, Pope Innocent IV signed off on a bull titled Ad extirpanda, meaning “to eradicate”. The Inquisition still had to pass the killing part onto the secular authorities for the Church's self image boner or whatever, but now they had the Vatican's official stamp of approval to exercise torture against anyone whose lips weren't satisfactorily loose. You can get anyone to order their own execution like a fuckin’ canary when you snap their wrists and dislocate their arms, afterall.
“Wait Ava was the Inquisition this whole time just a way to protect the financial interests of the elitist church and state?” Personally I say of course it was, what as if it was going to be anything else? Oh but don't go thinking you're safe if you've already been Pope-approved. Take for instance the Fraticelli, scattered offshoots of the Franciscan Order decried as heretics in 1296. The Franciscans were one of many so-called “mendicant orders”, that is, Church-sponsored monastic organizations built to support travelling preachers who'd taken a vow of poverty. The reason the Franciscans got to stay and Waldo had to go was that Waldo advocated that everyone give up their money, while for the Franciscans, living an impoverished lifestyle was just an act of individual spirituality. Pope Nicholas III established a bull in 1279 which basically provided employee benefits to the Franciscans so that they weren't reliant on the good of people's hearts or alms-begging to support their mission. Basically the Order itself could own as much material wealth as it wanted as a subsidy of the Catholic Church, and individual friars were free to take from that pot as necessary. The Fraticelli, however, thought that this defeated the whole point of taking a vow of poverty in the first place, and their suggestion that hey maybe the Church could benefit from such an oath as well is what got the heresy-hammer brought down directly on top of their chrome-domes.
Then in came our old friend Negative-Fucks Philip IV, King of France. After setting his pet Pope up in Avignon in 1309, Philip caught wind of this whole Inquisition scheme and went “wait wait wait, you're telling me you have the power to just point at a guy, call him a heretic, and I can then legally turn them into kabobs? That's… brilliant! Have I got the list for you!” So it was that in March 1314, Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and whatever remnants of his knights that didn't get the memo to go into hiding were burnt at the stake. On paper, the heresy they were accused of was worshipping some cartoonish dark devil god called Baphomet, but we all know the crime they were really guilty of was being owed a fuckload of money out of Philip's bank account.
“Jesus Christ Ava this is madness! What of people just minding their own damn business! Are they at least safe?” Oh fuck no we can't have that either silly! Take Marguerite Porete for example, who was burnt at the stake in 1310 for the crime of talking out of her ass, which in all fairness is probably what they're gonna burn me for too. I'm not even joking, I tried really hard but I well and truly have no clue what the hell Porete's theology actually is. She was what we'd refer to today as a Beguine, basically a feminist offshoot of the broader “Free Spirit” heresy the Church was trying to eliminate. I think the idea is basically that seeking a relationship with God should be gone about in the same borderline erotic sort of peacocking routine through which contemporary courtly love was performed, regardless if it's a man or a woman aiming to seduce Jesus. Hippies, they were medieval hippies, so of course the Man couldn't just leave that well enough alone.
With a fetid stink in the stale air of burnt bowels and flayed flesh, people began to figure that if it's the Pope who's out to get them, then maybe the Pope is the one that needs to be sent to God personally to answer for his crimes. In 1317, Hugues Géraud, a bishop who got caught sticking his hand in the tithing tray, went through a frankly unnecessary amount of witchy steps to poison Pope John XXII's bread with like… voodoo dolls and rat tails and just all manner of unstomachable shit stuffed into the loaves. Unable to play it cool at the delivery gate, however, Géraud and his conspirators were caught, confessed, and burnt at the stake. Pope John was shocked and appalled, not that someone would want him dead, but that someone would want him that dead! I mean you could've just dropped some snake venom in his wine like a civilized member of society but no! Clearly this magic that the kids are so into these days must be corrupting the minds of our youth and turning them into sacrilegious monsters! So, instead of learning a hard lesson and changing his ways to be more accepting and charitable towards his fellow man, Pope John got Inquisitor Bernard Gui on the horn and told him it's go-time. Gui published a new foundational manual for his organization in 1324, amended with the newly granted authority to persecute any and all magic. Magic, once a completely neutral science throughout medieval European society, a commonplace practice for man to find answers and cooperation from the divine, was now being defined and persecuted as a purely demonic and willful illusion which could get you turned into a briquette.
Bernard Gui was there to watch the last Cathar go up in carnal smoke in 1321, a damned man named Guillaume Bélibaste. He was delivered into custody personally by Gui's partner in crime, one aspiring Inquisitor named Jacques Fournier. Bishop of Pamiers at the time, his thorough unseaming of the Cathar community from nave to stern got him promoted to cardinal in 1327. Once inside the Vatican, he made swift friends with John XXII, who was now the Inquisition's number one fan. Fournier himself didn't consider himself that much of an advisor so much as an expert. He knew the law but not the lawcraft. He was only elected John's replacement because the other candidate refused to budge on the issue of the Avignon shit show. Guess I'm the most powerful man in the entire religion now, oops. Welp, call me Benedict XII and let's go point out which people we don't like who we think should be burned today! That, my darlings, is how the executioner goes from jury to judge.
Benedict XII had been a card-carrying member of the Cistercian Order his whole career, and as such saw fit to use his position to boost the health and wellbeing of the monastic community. Into a reconstituted Dominican Order walked Nicholas Eymeric in 1334. A Spaniard from Girona, Nicholas was thrilled with the opportunity that his promotion to Grand Inquisitor in 1357 afforded him! His beloved Aragon was just crawling with heresy, you see! While in the midst of getting fired from multiple postings for being a fucking maniac, Emyeric took his anger out on a Barcelona gentleman and accused sorcerer named Astruc Dapiera in 1370. Dapiera was thrown in a dungeon and tortured multiple times, something which hypothetically was illegal by the Inquisition's own laws. See the 1252 bull permitted that an accused could only be tortured once, as once was seen as sufficient enough to wrench the “truth” out of someone, and if they did confess to whatever they're accused of during the torture session, then that confession had to be reaffirmed nix-torture later on to confirm that the accused meant what they said. Torturing someone once is still one too many, of course, but there was at least some check on this balance. But the word of law is a slippery eel, and Emyeric argued that actually he could torture this guy multiple times because he was torturing Dapiera once for each individual charge of heresy. It's funny how even numbers can override their own meanings in the mouth of a forked tongue, isn't it?
There was, however, one other problem with the validity of Emyeric's persecution: Dapiera was not a Christian, not until after his soul was ground to his bones by twenty years of life imprisonment and he conceded to baptism. Astruc Dapiera was Jewish. By the Church's own definition, the Inquisition had no jurisdiction to charge Dapiera on anything. Remember, heretics are, definitionally, people who are already Christians. This was just a hate crime. In his 1376 manual for the Inquisition, the Directorium Inquisitorum, Emyeric would try to justify his heinous actions by arguing that the organization has a right to persecute Jews for laws which they both had in common, which was a crock of horseshit even by medieval standards. The Jews were citizens under the protection of the King of Aragon just as anyone else. This was the tragically doomed beauty of medieval Spain, a multicultural crossroads where the brightest mathematicians of the Muslim world shared tea with Christian theologians. Gasp and shock, getting along with each other does in fact work! Talking to another fucking human being, sharing ideas as freely as goods, cracking this damned Universe open and suckling its magic breast, it makes a community rich, safe, stable, and more independent. Police brutality is an appalling insult to society and, if nothing else, downright unprofitable. Emyeric was exiled from Aragon in 1377, and when he tried to come back and steal his position back from the new guy in 1383, King Peter IV ordered him fucking drowned. Emyeric stayed juuuuust out of reach enough to dodge the executioner until Peter died in 1386 and his son John I succeeded him. Emyeric was in bed with John so his reappointment was guaranteed, but when Emyeric tried to imprison the entire town of Valencia for heresy in 1388, even John had to go okay dude you're a fuckin lunatic, get the fuck out fr man. Emyeric died a public disgrace hidden away in the cowardly protection of a monastery in 1399. Sadly the Inquisition was not banished with him. They kept the “good ones”, because there's totally good ones, right?
No, for the record, there's not. Dapiera had accepted baptism in 1391, during a period when the whole of Spain had fallen into propagandistic hysteria after Henry III of Castile pointed an angry mob at the Jewish citizens he'd forcibly sewn bright yellow stars onto. John of Aragon tried his damndest to keep the violence from spreading to his domain, bless his heart, but a swarm of racist yokels is sadly the most effective siege engine we've yet concocted as a miserably misguided species. Thousands of innocent people were pulled out of their homes and murdered in 1391, and thousands more accepted subjection to the ritual drowning these mad bastards are so obsessed with. The damage was already done to these poor folks’ reputations in whatever community they had left after the carnage. Most rabbis would understand you did what you had to do to not die, but that doesn't stop your family from disowning you. On the one hand, you're still Jewish in your heart, but you're now cut off from the very family that makes you Jewish. Your only option for a friend in this world is to then lean into this new Catholic thing, but of course they're all racist and won't even believe you really meant it when you said you converted. And even if you are accepted, now you're a Christian, which means they can now try you for any heresy they have on the books any time they change their minds. You are fucked.
By 1478, this self-fulfilling paranoia which Catholic Spain had towards these “conversos”, as they were called, had made Queen Isabella of Castile too damn itchy to restrain her trigger finger. On November 1, Pope Sixtus IV, a man who just really really wanted people to listen to him, gave Isabella the go-ahead to appoint her own Inquisitors as she saw fit. The First Brother of this little parade of Sith bootlickers was Tomás de Torquemada, her confessor since girlhood. His tenure saw the innovation of the “auto-da-fé”, translated as “act of faith”, though it's a depressing deconstruction of the word. Neighbors were encouraged to turn on each other, lies or not, we'll sort it out later. Those found accused of heresy or, God forbid, being secretly Jewish, were then dragged to the communally designated “quemadero” or “burning place”, publicly flogged, humiliated, and tied to a post at the center of a literal stage to be burned alive to the raucous cheering of people you thought you could trust. The first twelve conversos to be rounded up were burned in Seville on February 6, 1481. Approximately 4,000 people went up in a screaming blaze after them.
The message was loud and clear: leave or die. The Muslim citizens of the Emirate of Granada were incorporated under Isabella's umbrella when their country fell to invasion on January 2, 1492. They were given the same unfair choice as the Jews. Isabella's Alhambra Decree declared that all Jews must either convert, leave Spain forever, or be executed by the crown. Those rich enough to flee sought refuge on the other side of the Atlantic, to find safety in a new world as far away from Spain as conceivably possible. Except this too was a trap, because it's always a trap. In 1494, Pope Alexander VI's Treaty of Tordesillas split the world into two hemispheres of conquest, one to Spain, the other to Portugal. Hypothetically, this was to divide the stolen spoils of the Americas in half, but this was before Europeans realized just how big this continent is, so Portugal got the easternmost tip of Brazil, and Spain had the whole of the sunset to pillage and defile. With the Empire came the Inquisition to root out all the runaways who had escaped their grasp, because the goal was never segregation, it was eradication, and don't think you were safe just because you were in the government's service. Luis de Carvajal had moved to Mexico in 1580; placing his family under the sanction of his uncle, the governor of New Mexico. In 1596, the Inquisition sniffed out his Jewish heritage like a pack of cancerous mongrels. They tortured him on the rack until he broke and surrendered the names of 120 conversos who identified as Jewish under his protection, including his own mother and sisters. All of them were wrung through an auto-da-fé and burnt at the stake in the middle of Mexico City.
Then of course there were the people who already fucking lived here. You may remember from above that the Church treats people who've never heard of Jesus differently than heretics who made an informed choice of their own. The Inquisition, as such, had to leave the slaughter and erasure of the indigenous peoples of the new mega colony to the conquistadors, but they could still persecute their leaders. Once they'd had their religion forcibly neutered, the puppeteered elite of the Aztec Empire could now be punished as an executable heretic for even blinking at the thought of stepping out of line. Juan de Zumárraga, first bishop of Mexico, was put in charge of policing these noblemen, of keeping them good converted “Christians”. His was the pen that signed the damnation notice of Carlos Ometochtzin in 1539. Ometochtzin was the son of Nezahualpilli, the once sovereign King of Texcoco, and he was incinerated in the hellfire of a god whose hurricane wrath overcast even the abyssal bloodthirst of the ones he had feared once and always.
This method of rooting out indigenous insurgency weaponized the country against itself all the way up to December 1815, when a Catholic priest of multicultural descent named José María Morelos was tried by the Inquisition and executed by firing squad. Morelos had been the spearhead of the Mexican uprising against the Spanish government since 1811, and thankfully his death was a powerful enough symbol to ensure his execution would be the last in Mexico. Iturbide secured the nation's independence in 1821, and the Mexican Inquisition broke down into irrelevancy as any authority they once had was reduced to discardable whining.
The truly last man to die by the Inquisition's downturned thumb however met his surely heartbroken maker in Spain, where it all began. Cayetano Ripoll was a schoolteacher from Valencia, a veteran whose time in a French POW dungeon had convinced him that God may exist, but he's certainly AFK. The Inquisition decried this as Deism and heresy, and so on July 26, 1826, Ripoll was hung by the neck until dead, that his body may be desecrated and unsanctified all for someone's sick power fantasy. It then came to pass, in the vultured whalefall of Napoleon's grand design, that such a barbaric institution as the Spanish Inquisition had no place in the world. It never did. Queen Maria Christina struck a bargain with the Liberal movement that she could just slide by without signing a constitution if they'd just protect the birthright of her infant daughter. As a show of proof that she was good on her word about her intent to reform the government, the Queen signed the dissolution of the Spanish Inquisition on July 15, 1834. Good riddance, and may we never allow this to happen again. Please protect your neighbors, even the ones you don't like. When governments fall and gates are breached, the only defense we well and truly are left with at the end of the day is each other. You wouldn't want it to be your family, and I wouldn't want it to be yours. Don't run into the fire for a sheaf of papyrus, look after the girl at the counter, the guy on his way home, the faces you see every day, because they see you every day. They'd recognize you better than anyone you can name from TV if you just stop and offer a memory of kindness. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”.
Design notes, I'm actually really happy with how this came out. I've been experimenting with better ways to pace my workflow, especially with more labor-intensive formats like these faction sheets, and it's proven a very fruitful endeavor. I realized I needed to start taking these all one at a time rather than as one big unit of lineart that needs to be cleaned up all at once. I think the only one I got lazy on was the agile, but that's par for the course. I had to think outside the box for their weapons too because technically the Inquisition never killed anyone, but they sure didn't shove a lot of implements under a lot of fingernails, and I tried to select armaments that hinted more towards the torturous execution angle. Researching for this piece was, frankly, brutal, and I hope you all have a better day than I've been having. We're going to the Moon right now, let's leave all our mistakes behind. We can leave all our mistakes behind.