The papal Inquisition became fully organized only in the second half of the thirteenth century; but already in 1231, following the agreement between Gregory XII and Frederick II, the archbishop of Mainz appointed a certain Conrad of Marburg as inquisitor for his vast see. It was a fateful step, for the man turned out to be a blind fanatic. Moreover, there was as yet no established routine to restrain his fanaticism. The procedure later developed by the Inquisition, unfair as it was, was less arbitrary than the procedure concocted by this pioneering amateur.(14)
It seems likely that Conrad of Marburg was of aristocratic descent, and had once belonged to the monastic order of the Premonstratensians; but latterly he was simply a secular priest. He had had a university education, probably at Paris, and was celebrated for his learning; but he was even more famous for his formidable personality and austere way of life. Thin with fasting, of sombre and threatening mien, he was both respected and feared. He was utterly incorruptible; though he spent long years at the court of the count of Thuringia, and exercised great influence, he refused all benefices and remained a simple priest. He was also terrifyingly severe. As confessor to the countess— now St Elizabeth of Thuringia — he treated his penitent with a harshness which was extraordinary even by the standards of the time. He would, for instance, trick the twenty-one-year-old widow into some trivial and unwitting disobedience, and then have her and her maids flogged so severely that the scars were visible weeks later.
Popes were accustomed to trust Conrad with the defence of the faith. In 1215 and again in 1227, when plans were being laid for yet another assault on Islam, Conrad was appointed to preach the crusade. As he rode from place to place — always on a donkey, in imitation of Jesus— he was followed by crowds of clerics and layfolk, men and women; at the approach to towns the inhabitants would come in procession to meet him, with banners and candles and incense. His success as a preacher of the crusade made him famous.
Conrad also had plenty of experience in defending the faith against inner enemies. By insisting that bishops were obliged, on pain of dismissal, to pursue and punish heretics in their dioceses, the Lateran Council of 1215 encouraged informers. Those consumed with an urge to exterminate all heretics rushed in with denunciations. Amongst these people Conrad distinguished himself, and his zeal did not pass unnoticed. In 1227 the Pope gave him the task of preparing dossiers on the basis of which formal denunciations could be lodged with the bishops. In 1229 Conrad preached against heretics at Strasbourg, and so effectively that two persons were burned. His appointment in 1231 as Germany’s first official inquisitor was an appropriate culmination for such a career.
A couple of unofficial and, it would seem, self-appointed inquisitors were already at work. One was a lay brother in the Dominican Order called Conrad Torso, the other a one-eyed, one-armed rogue called Johannes; both were said to be former heretics. They must somehow have acquired the prestige which in those days was always enjoyed by holy men; for they had the support of the populace, which enabled them to intimidate the magistrates into burning whomever they designated. The friars, Dominicans and Franciscans alike, also took orders from them and assisted with the burnings.
Conrad Torso and Johannes began by discovering a few genuine heretics — people who not only admitted their beliefs but impenitently persisted in them; these were duly tried, condemned and handed over to the secular arm for execution. But soon the two men showed themselves less discriminating. They claimed to be able to detect a heretic by his or her appearance; and as they proceeded from town to town and village to village they denounced people on these purely intuitive grounds. Those burned now included perfectly orthodox Catholics, who from the midst of the flames still called on Jesus, Mary and the saints. “We would gladly burn a hundred,” said the amateur inquisitors, “if just one among them were guilty.”(15)
At first they found their victims amongst_the poor: but that did not satisfy them, and they soon hit on a device which put the rich also at their mercy. The German king, Henry VII, had just issued a decree governing the disposal of the property of anyone condemned for heresy: part of the property was to go to the person’s overlords, but part was to pass to his or her heirs. The inquisitors proposed a new arrangement: when a wealthy person was burned on their indication, the whole of the property should be confiscated and divided amongst the various overlords, including the king; the heirs were to receive nothing at all. It seems that for a while the proposal achieved its object; the inquisitors did receive support from the highest strata in society.
The shady characters Conrad Torso and Johannes attached themselves to the genuine fanatic Conrad of Marburg, and the resulting combination proved astonishingly powerful. Vast areas were subject to its arbitrary and despotic will. These judges feared no man, and their judgements struck indiscriminately at peasants and burghers, clerics and knights. Whoever they chose to accuse was given no time to think or to prepare a defence but was judged at once. If he was condemned he was not allowed even to see his confessor but was executed as soon as possible, often on the very day of his arrest. And there was only one way to escape condemnation and execution: the accused must confess to heresy. But then proof of repentance was required: the accused had to have his scalp shaved, as an outward sign of shame; more importantly, he had to name fellow heretics and specify the “heretics’ school” where he had been instructed. If he was unable to provide satisfactory information on his own, Conrad of Marburg and his companions were ready to help. They would offer the names of leading nobles — whereupon the accused would commonly hasten to agree: “Those people are as guilty as I, we were in the same school together.” Some did this in order to save their dependants from expropriation and poverty, but most did it simply from fear of being burned alive. Terror reached such a pitch that brother would denounce brother, a wife her husband, a lord his peasant and a peasant his lord.
Conrad also relied greatly on denunciations supplied by former heretics who had since returned to the Church. Whatever such people told him he accepted blindly, without troubling to check it; and this casual approach led to endless abuses. Real heretics were able to exploit his credulity to their own advantage. They arranged for some of their number to fake conversion, so that they could then denounce good Catholics as heretics — partly to avenge their brethren who had perished in the flames, partly to direct attention away from their brethren who were still alive. And the persecutory apparatus could also be exploited for purposes of private vengeance. A young woman called Adelheid voluntarily presented herself as a repentant heretic for the sole purpose of denouncing her relatives, who were trying to deprive her of an inheritance. Conrad obligingly had them all burned.(16)
Conrad’s activity as inquisitor lasted about a year and a half and covered places as far apart as Erfurt, Marburg and the Rhine towns of Mainz, Bingen and Worms. It is impossible to say even approximately how many burnings it involved, but all contemporary sources agree that they were very numerous. Certainly the atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety, the wave of false denunciations and false confessions, produced widespread disquiet in the population.