entry
Mar 2011
The Medieval Inquisition in Naples
"Medieval
inquisition" refers to the institution set up by Pope
Lucius III within the Roman Catholic Church in
1184 to deal with heresy. In what follows I
cover the period from that date up through the
mid-1300s, times that included the beginning of the
Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade, the reign of
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, and the subsequent
Angevin dynasty in southern Italy. Before that change
of dynasties, the city of Naples was within the
Kingdom of Sicily (the capital was Palermo). The term
"Kingdom of Naples" was not used until well beyond the
period under discussion. I shall try to distinguish
carefully between the city of "Naples" and the
"Kingdom of Sicily."
It
was not the intent of the Inquisition to deal with
members of religious faiths perceived by Christian
Europe as "foreign," such as Jews or Muslims
(exception: during the early Angevin reign, the
Inquisition went on a campaign/rampage in southern
Italy to convert Jews. See text.). (The general
mistreatment of Jews in medieval Europe is beyond the
scope of this entry except where it overlaps with the
history of the Inquisition.) As for Muslims, you could
wage wars against them (as in the Crusades), but that
was an external affair (exception: the Muslims in Lucera. See text); thus, at
least in theory, neither Jew nor Muslim could be
punished simply
for being infideles.
Heretics, however, were internal. They were Christians
who deviated from the "true" faith and who threatened
the order of things, the fabric of the Holy Roman
Empire, itself. Heretics were to be dealt with
judicially within the dual Christian/State system;
first by the church to determine guilt, and then by
civil authorities for punishment.
Pope Innocent
III
After centuries of oblivion, a
reminder of the Medieval Inquisition has been
reopened in Naples on the premises of the old
Dominican monastery annexed to the church. The
entrance is on a narrow alley that angles over from
Piazzetta Casanova on via San Sebastiano to pass
between the back of the music
conservatory and the back of the entire San Domenico Maggiore
complex. At that point, the monastic premises
contained the Inquisition Chamber. A local
newspaper, on the occasion of the reopening of the
premises, scoffed at the notion that Naples had ever
"rejected" the Inquisition. The writer then made the
comment that "for centuries, starting in 1233
thousands of persons [heretics] passed through the
chamber." The article is accompanied by pictures of
medieval torture. At least as far as the Medieval
Inquisition is concerned, the matter is not so cut
and dried.
First, it is true, in spite
of what the journalist may think, that the city of
Naples (and thus the entire Spanish vicerealm of
Naples) rejected
at least one Inquisition.
That was in 1547; the affair involved the
particularly severe Spanish Inquisition. (Read about
that episode here.) There
was, however, an earlier one, what historians term
the Medieval Inquisition, proclaimed in 1184 by Pope
Lucius III to suppress the growing Catharist and
Albigensian heresies in southern France. It was the
first step in what eventually turned into the
Albigensian Crusade—i.e., a war declared by powerful
Pope Innocent III*1
(image, above) to eliminate those heresies in the
Languedoc region of France. In 1199, almost at the
beginning of his reign, Innocent had written:
The civil law punishes traitors
with the confiscation of their property and death;
it is only out of kindness that the lives of their
children are spared. All the more then should we
excommunicate and confiscate the property of those
who are traitors to the faith of Jesus Christ; for
it is an infinitely greater sin to offend the
divine majesty than to attack the majesty of the
sovereign. (cited in Vanandard, p.66)
The
Albigensian Crusade lasted from 1209 to 1229 and was
"successful" at the cost of about one million lives.*2
During that period (in 1215), Innocent convoked the
Fourth Lateran Council; it declared all heretics excommunicated, and
delivered them over to the state to receive due
punishment, generally banishment and confiscation of
property, but also death. Beginning in the
1230s, Pope Gregory IX then favored the Dominican Order
as tools of the Inquisition; the Dominicans were
mendicants and accustomed to travel, and they had a
reputation as enemies of heresy.
Frederick II (statue,
facade,
Royal Palace, Naples.)
That order had a
strong presence in the city of Naples, centered on the
large church and monastery of San
Domenico Maggiore; the premises had earlier been
Benedictine but passed to the Dominicans in 1221. At
that time—a year earlier—the King of Sicily, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen,
had become the new Holy Roman Emperor. He has come down
to us as one of the most able and powerful rulers of the
Middle Ages as well as one of the great antagonists of
the Papacy. He was termed a "heretic" by the pope, and
Frederick, in turn, called the pope the "anti-Christ."
Frederick was ex-communicated at least three times. One
might then plausibly think that at least in southern
Italy heretics would be safe; after all, Frederick had a
reputation as a religious pluralist (indeed, on various
occasions in his life, he employed
a Muslim army!). Much of that reputation, however,
is based on Frederick's later career. When he came to
power, he did so with the backing of Innocent III.
In return for
that papal support, Frederick, among other things, issued
in 1220 a decree against heretics, one that allowed
religious authorities to see to the enforcement of such
decrees in Italy. His imperial law of that
year was in accordance with the Lateran Council of
1215 and "condemned heretics to every form of
banishment, to perpetual infamy, together with the
confiscation of their property, and the annulment of
all their civil acts and powers" (cited in Vanandard,
p. 107). He also enacted at Ravenna in 1227 another imperial
law condemning heretics to death. Gregory IX (pope from
1227-1241) denounced the heretics he said were swarming
through Frederick's kingdom of Sicily, especially in the
cities of Aversa and Naples and urged Frederick to
prosecute them with vigor. Frederick responded in his
own Constitution of Melfi (from
1231). It is a document still seen as having been
centuries ahead of its time, one that set civil law
above ecclesiastical law. That may be true, but it did
contain a
declaration against heresy. Maybe Fredrick was trying to
continue his balancing act with the Papacy, but the
Constitution of Melfi did establish the Inquisition in
the Kingdom of Sicily, including the city of Naples. It
was, however, a State Inquisition. (As strange as it
sounds, it was indeed a secular mechanism, run by
Frederick's civil servants and not by the Dominican
order.)
One source
(Ullman, cited in Dolan, below) has said, "Whilst
faith and religion are nowadays matters of private
opinion, at that time they were issues of public law, of
public concern and public interest." Another
(Journet, cited in Dolan) has said, "Heresy loomed up
unexpectedly as something anarchic, something capable
of destroying the whole political and social structure
from within. It amounted to a crime against public
safety." That is the spirit in which
Frederick's relation to "heresy" should be understood. His
own Constitution of Melfi condemned heresy, sacrilege,
treason, usury, and counterfeiting as structural crimes
against the state. He may truly have been (or, at least,
would become later in life) a religious pluralist, but if
you were a "heretic," in that you questioned the accepted
ecclesiastical order of things, you were questioning
authority and potentially undermining the social fabric of
the state. Again, "heresy" refers to "wrong" Christians
and not to Jews or Muslims. Muslims were more than
tolerated in the Kingdom of Sicily under Frederick II, and
Jews retained their status as Servi camerae
regis [servants of the royal chamber],
(which meant that they were second-class but protected
servants of the Crown).
Amabile (p.44), however, makes
the interesting point that for Frederick there may have
been no difference
(!) between heresy and sedition. (Indeed, in
1246 Frederick specified in a decree that clerics who
agitated against him were liable to be burned). Amabile
also notes that as far as the early Dominican presence
in Naples is concerned, there is very little
documentation. In short, the idea that from 1233 onward,
the premises of San Domenico Maggiore were a torture
chamber run by monks who then turned over their
"heretic" victims to Frederick for punishment —well,
that cannot be substantiated. Also, there were no large
bodies of heretics in the south such as the Albigensians
and Catharists in the north of Italy and southern
France; thus, in Frederick's Kingdom of Sicily there was
never such a thing as the spectacle of mass burnings of
heretics that had occurred in the Albigensian Crusade.
In any event, Frederick was not a heretic hunter. This
is not to say that he was a "nice guy." He was not, but
he ran his own State Inquisition against all enemies,
secular and ecclesiastical, and he could be quite cruel
and ruthless in dealing with
them.
When Frederick passed
from the scene in 1250, there was about a 15-year period
during which the "Inquisition was silent" (Amabile, p.
50). The period covered a very violent change of
dynasties, a series of battles with Frederick's
heirs on one side and the French House of Anjou on
the other. The latter (supported by the Papacy) won and
took over the Kingdom of Sicily. In the words of one
source (Starr 1946): "The transition from Hohenstaufen
to Angevin rule marked a momentous and retrogressive
[emphasis added] change in the history of southern
Italy." The Angevins
were dependent on the good will of the Papacy (which had
helped them take over the kingdom in the first place);
thus, they now caved in to the demands of the Pope and
instituted the ecclesiastical Inquisition in the Kingdom
of Naples with the arrival of Charles I of Anjou in Naples
in 1268.
While the Dominican
Inquisitors in Naples, as elsewhere, were concerned with
Christian heretics, they were now equally enthusiastic
about converting Jews. The Inquisition thus instigated a
campaign to convert the Jews of southern Italy. This
campaign included the reconversion of "relapsed Jews"
and compelled Jews to inform on converts who had
returned in secret to the synagogue. It also included
the searching of Jewish homes to seize hallowed
liturgical books such as the Talmud, a ban on the
building of new synagogues, and the imposition of the
canons of the Fourth Lateran Council that Jews must
identify themselves by a yellow badge.
It is worth noting
that the Angevin kings were not enthusiastic about certain
Dominican practices such as rewarding Jews who converted
with tax-exemption for life. This meant that otherwise
taxable land was removed from the royal tax-base;
collectively, the loss of revenue to the state was
considerable, hardly something to please a monarch. How
many Jews converted? Exact numbers are difficult to come
by, but sources converge on a figure of about 8,000 in
southern Italy as a whole. By 1293, forced conversion by
the Inquisition had largely succeeded in that most Jewish
communities in southern Italy had either disappeared (in
smaller towns) or been greatly reduced in larger places
such as Naples or Salerno. The Inquisition also had a hand
at the still sizable Muslim colony in Lucera, remnants of the Muslim
army of Frederick II. Conversion to Christianity was
rendered moot when the armies of Charles II of Naples
simply descended on the colony in 1300 and destroyed it.
The population was either killed or exiled.
The Angevin rulers
then, however, seem to have become more concerned with
consolidating their hold on the kingdom than in pursuing
heretics. They had been through a very shaky period
(including the loss of Sicily in the 1280s as a result of
an episode known as the Sicilian
Vespers). The 1300s came at the end of the great
Guelph-Ghibelline controversy, which pitted,
respectively, the Papacy against the princes of the empire. The century included the bizarre
removal of the Papacy from Rome to Avignon in France
between 1309-1378; there were episodes of extreme
hostility within the Angevin aristocracy, itself, as
well as between the House of Anjou and the Popes in Avignon and/or anti-Popes (and
even anti-anti-Popes!) elsewhere. Charges of "heresy"
flew back and forth among the various popes and princes
such that the Inquisition was more of a political than a
religious tool. Importantly, however, in Italy we also
find the likes of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch and the beginnings of
the intellectual and literary currents we now call
"Humanism." In the city of Naples and in the kingdom at
large, the 1300s included a sort of Golden Age under Robert the Wise, who at
least tolerated, in spite of papal cajoling,
some heresies. (These included the so-called "Franciscan
heretics"—those who proclaimed that since Christ had
possessed nothing, we should follow His example. While some of those
heretics were burned in Avignon, the kingdom of southern
Italy had a reputation as a place where they could hide
out.) Generally,
the Church lost much moral authority during the period,
and newly national sentiments in Europe worked against a
central supranational ecclesiastical authority. The
princes of Europe, thus, would no longer respond, say, in
1350 as they had in 1200 to ecclesiastical decrees to root
out heretics. In the Kingdom of Sicily/Naples, itself, the stage was being set
for a takeover in the 1400s of the entire kingdom by the same
Aragonese who had taken Sicily from the Angevins in the
1280s.
By definition,
something called the "Medieval
Inquisition" ceases when the Middle Ages cease.
That seems to have been in the 1300s, when what we call
the "Renaissance" began. Dates are very fluid, so perhaps
it is helpful to think of the transition as one of a slow
shift of cultural identity. That is, if you had asked
someone in Europe in 1000 or 1100 or even 1200 "What are
you?," the first response, most likely, would have been,
"I'm a Christian" (or Jew or Muslim); thus, the
identification of self is linked to an overriding
ecclesiastical allegiance. That defines the Middle Ages.
The minute people started to say that they were French or
Sicilian (meaning the Kingdom of Sicily) then they were
identifying themselves with the new concept of nation
states, with new concepts of humanism and of national
language and literature. In other words, one's sense of who one is has
shifted from the ecclesiastical to the secular. It is no
longer the Middle Ages. In the Kingdom of Sicily, that
started to happen relatively early —in the reign of
Frederick II.
Somewhere
in the mid-late-1300s, then, the Inquisition that we
term "medieval" can be said to have gone into abeyance in
the kingdom. The Inquisition would return with renewed
vigor as the Spanish Inquisition in the late 1400s and
be important in the Spanish Empire, true, but with
little effect in the vicerealm of Naples.
[For a
dynastic time line, click here.]
notes:
*1. There were ten Popes from Lucius
III through 1250, the year in which Emperor Frederick
II died. Of those, Innocent III was the most
important: he served 18 years, was responsible for the
Albigensian Crusade, the Fourth Lateran Council and,
importantly, the fratricidal Fourth Crusade
(1202-1204), the justification for which was that
Muslims were heretics and not simply followers of an
"alien" faith—thus, the Holy Lands could be seized. ^up
*2. Even by more
recent standards of slaughter, the Albigensian Crusade
was ferocious. It destroyed the old Occitan culture
and language (in modern terms, called "Provençal") and
has given us the infamous expression, loosely rendered
as "Kill everyone. God will sort it out." A Papal
legate, when asked by a Crusader how to distinguish
heretics from true Catholics, is said to have
answered: "Caedite
eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" –
"Kill them all! The Lord knows which ones are his".
up^
references/bibliography
—Amabile, Luigi. Il santo
Officio della Inquisizione in Napoli, S. Lapi,
Città di Castello 1892. [There is also a photostatic
reprint published by Rubbettino. Soveria Mannelli (prov.
of Catanzaro). 1987.
—Dolan, John P. "A
Note on Emperor Frederick II and Jewish Tolerance" in
Jewish Social
Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Jul.,
1960), pp. 165-174.
—Journet, Charles. The Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 1, p. 240. New York.
1955.
—Kelly, Samantha. The new Solomon: Robert
of Naples (1309-1343) and fourteenth-century
kingship. Koninklijke Brill
NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. 2003.
—Starr, Joshua. "The Mass Conversion of
Jews in Southern Italy (1290-1293)" in Speculum,Vol. 21,
No. 2 (Apr., 1946), pp. 203-211. Published
by: Medieval Academy of America.
—Ullman, Walter. The
Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages. New
York 1953, p. 448.
—Vanandard, E. The
Inquisition, A Critical and Historical Study of the
Coercive Power of the Church. Longmans,
Green, and Co. New York, 1908.
—Voltmer, Ernest. entry: "Guelphs" in The Papacy: An
Encyclopedia, vol. 2. Gaius-Proxies, gen.
ed. Philippe Levillain. Routledge. NY, 2002.
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