The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

The description which it would be necessary to make of it would be indecent (sic) in an Ordinance...” 19
Even when torture is the law of the land, policing it is problematic when there might be people
watching.
While torture could theoretically only be applied when there were so-called indicia
(indications) of probable guilt, even this protection for the accused was liable to be entirely foregone in
cases of heresy and witchcraft, and other conspiracies. Church canon in the middle ages defined heresy
as the equivalent of treason. This followed from the divine right of kings, where the legitimacy of the
monarch flows from notions of having been appointed by God, as evidenced by the papal blessing
officially necessary to rule before the Treaty of Westphalia. A heretic was therefore not only a rebel
against the Catholic Church, but against all secular authority deriving its right to rule from that Church.
Singled out for specific reprisal were the Waldensians and the Albigensians:
After further appeals to the pope had failed the heretics [Waldensians] were anathematized and
excommunicated, and subjected to increasingly severe persecution. From the 1190s onward they were the
objects of the first medieval legislation against heretics, subjecting them to all the penalties of traitors and
outlaws, with the additional horror of death by burning. (Ruthven, p. 84-5)
In the case of the Albigensians, the threat to the medieval papacy went far deeper than mere
heterodoxy. These created a whole rival priesthood, and were supported politically by one of the more
powerful warlord-houses in Europe: Count Raymond VI of Toulouse and his sons. While the
Inquisition which followed the Albigensian crusade focused officially on reclaiming souls for the
Church and on extirpating the practices that led them astray, the Inquisition very quickly found itself
relying on torture in order to produce confessions (necessary for salvation) as well as denunciations of
other heretics.
This focus on confessions was the result of a more general change in how heresy was
understood by the Church: whereas previously the Church had focused on the leaders of heretical
movements, and had considered the laity to be sheep who had strayed and would return to the fold
without leadership, by the early 13 th Century the Inquisition feared that heretical beliefs by the laity
would maintain heretical movements even in the absence of a heresiarch. (Arnold, 2001) But if
individual beliefs were the proof of the crime of heresy, then there would be no way to identify
criminals except through confession and denunciation – and torture would be the tool to extract them.
By compelling testimony about overlooked heretics, the Inquisition had created a vicious circle of
19 Ibid, p. 60
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