Chapter 11
THE
TORTURES OF THE INQUISITION.
A Stunning Blow—Three Classes
in Italy—Flight of Peter Martyr Vermigli —of Ochino—Caraffa
made Pope—The Martyrs, Mollio and Tisserano— Italian Protestantism
Crushed—A Notable Epoch—Three Movements— The Inquisition
at Nuremberg—The Torture-Chamber— Its Furnishings— Max
Tower—The Chamber of Question—The various Instruments of Torture—The
Subterranean Dungeons—The Iron Virgin—Her Office— The Burial
of the Dead.
THE re-establishment of the Inquisition
decided the question of the Reformation of Italy. The country, struck
with this blow as it was lifting itself up, instantly fell back into the
old gulf. It had become suddenly apparent that religious reform must be
won with a great fight of suffering, and Italy had not strength to press
on through chains, and dungeons, and scaffolds to the goal she wished
to reach. The prize was glorious, she saw, but the price was great. Pallavicino
has confessed that it was the Inquisition that saved Italy from lapsing
into Protestantism.1
The religious question had divided
the Italians of that day into three classes. The bulk of the nation had
not thought on the question at all, and harbored no purpose of leaving
the Church of Rome. To them the restoration of the Inquisition had no
terrors. There was another and large class who had abandoned Rome, but
who had not
clearness to advance to the open profession of Protestantism.
They were most to be pitied of all should they fall into the hands of
the inquisitors, seeing they were too undecided either to decline or to
face the horrors of the Holy Office. The third class were in no doubt
as to the course they must pursue. They could not return to a Church which
they held to be superstitious, and they had no alternative before them
but provide for their safety by flight, or await death amid the fires
of the Inquisition. The consternation was great; for the Protestants had
not dreamed of their enemies having recourse to
such violent measures. Numbers fled, and these fugitives were to be found
in every city of Switzerland and Germany.2
Among these
was Bernardino Ochino, on whose eloquent orations all ranks of his countrymen
had been hanging but a few months before, and in whose audience the emperor
himself might be seen when he visited Italy. Not, however, till he had
been served with a citation from the Holy Office at Rome did Ochino make
his escape. Flight was almost as bitter as death to the orator. He was
leaving behind him the scene of those brilliant triumphs which he could
not hope to renew on a foreign soil. Pausing on the summit of the Great
St. Bernard, he devoted a few moments to those feelings of regret which
were so natural on abandoning so much that he could not hope ever again
to enjoy. He then went forward to Geneva. But, alas! the best days of
the eloquent monk were past. At Geneva, Ochino’s views became tainted
and obscured with the new philosophy, which was beginning to air itself
at that young school of pantheism.
Peter Martyr Vermigli
soon followed. He was presiding over the convent of his order in Lucca,
when the storm came with such sudden violence. He set his house in order
and fled; but it was discovered after he was gone that the heresy remained
although the heretic had escaped, his opinions having been embraced by
many of the Luccese monks. The same was found to be the case with the
order to which Ochino belonged, the Capuchins namely, and the Pope at
first meditated, as the only cure, the suppression of both orders. Peter
Martyr went ultimately to Strasburg, and a place was found for him in
its university, where his lamp continued to burn clearly to the close.
Juan di Valdez died before the tempest burst, which drove beyond the Alps
so many of the distinguished group that had formed itself around him at
Pausilippo, and saw not the evil days which came on his adopted country.
But the majority of those who had embraced the Protestant faith were unable
to escape. They were immured in the prisons of the various Holy Offices
throughout Italy; some were kept in dark cells for years, in the hope
that they would recant, others were quickly relieved by martyrdom. The
restorer of the Inquisition, the once reforming Caraffa, mounted the Papal
chair, under the name of Paul IV. The rigors of the Holy Office were not
likely to be relaxed under the new Pope; but twenty years were needed
to enable the torture and the stake to annihilate the Protestants of Italy.3
Peter
Martyr Vermigli
Italian victim of the Inquisition
Of those who suffered
martyrdom we shall mention only two—Mollio, a Bolognese professor,
renowned throughout Italy for his learning and his pure life; and Tisserano,
a native of Perugia. On the 15th of September, 1553, an assembly of the
Inquisition, consisting of six cardinals with their episcopal assessors,
was held with great pomp at Rome. A train of prisoners, with burning tapers
in their hands, was led in before the tribunal. All of them recanted save
Mollio and Tisserano. On leave being given them to speak, Mollio broke
out, says McCrie, "in a strain of bold and fervid invective, which
chained them to their seats, at the same time that it cut them to the
quick." He rebuked his judges for their lewdness, their avarice,
and their blood-thirsty cruelty, and concluded as follows:— "‘Wherefore
I appeal from your sentence, and summon you, cruel tyrants and murderers,
to answer before the judgment-seat of Christ at the last day, where your
pompous titles and gorgeous trappings will not dazzle, nor your guards
and torturing apparatus terrify us. And in testimony of this, take back
that which you have given me.’ In saying this, he threw the flaming
torch which he held in his hand on the ground, and extinguished it. Galled,
and gnashing upon him with their teeth, like the persecutors of the first
Christian martyrs, the cardinals ordered Mollio, together with his companion,
who approved of the testimony he had borne, to instant execution. They
were conveyed, accordingly, to the Campo del Flor, where they died with
the most pious fortitude."4
Mollio throwing down
his torch before the Inquisition
The eight years that elapsed between
1534 and 1542 are notable ones in the annals of Protestant Christianity.
That epoch witnessed the birth of three movements, Which were destined
to stamp a character upon the future of Europe, and powerfully to modify
the conflict then in progress in Christendom. In 1534 the Jesuits recorded
their first vow in the Church of Montmartre, in Paris. In 1540 their society
was regularly launched by the Papal edict. In 1542, Paul III issued the
bull for the re-establishment of the Inquisition; and in 1541 Calvin returned
to Geneva, to prepare that spiritual army that was to wage battle with
Jesuitism backed by the Inquisition. The meeting of these dates—the
contemporaneous rise of these three instrumentalities, is sufficiently
striking, and is one of the many proofs which we meet in history that
there is an Eye watching all that is done on earth, and that never does
an agency start up to destroy the world, but there is set over against
it a yet more powerful agency to convert the evil it would inflict into
good.
It is one of these great epochs at
which we have arrived. Jesuitism, the consummation of error — the
Inquisition, the maximum of force, stand up and array themselves against
a now fully developed Protestantism. In following the steps of the combatants,
we shall be led in succession to the mountains of the Waldenses, to the
cities of France, to the swamps of Holland, to the plains of Germany,
to Italy, to Spain, to England and Scotland. Round the whole of Christendom
will roll the tide of this great battle, casting down one nation into
the darkness of slavery, and lifting up another into the glory of freedom,
and causing the gigantic crimes of the persecutor and the despot to be
forgotten in the excelling splendor of the patriot and the martyr. This
is the struggle with the record of which we shall presently be occupied.
Meanwhile we proceed to describe one of those few Inquisitions that remain
to this day in almost the identical state in which they existed when the
Holy Office was being vigorously worked. This will enable us to realize
more vividly the terror of that weapon which Paul III prepared for the
hands of the Jesuits, and the Divine power of that faith which enabled
the confessors of the Gospel to withstand and triumph over it.
Turn we now to the
town of Nuremberg, in Bavaria. The zeal with which Duke Albert, the sovereign
of Bavaria, entered into the restoration of Roman Catholicism, we have
already narrated. To further the movement, he provided every one of the
chief towns of his dominions with a Holy Office, and the Inquisition of
Nuremberg still remains—an anomalous and horrible monument in the
midst of a city where the memorials of an exquisite art, and the creations
of an unrivalled genius, meet one at every step. We shall first describe
the Chamber of Torture.5
The house so called immediately adjoins
the Imperial Castle, which from its lofty site looks down on the city,
whose Gothic towers, sculptured fronts, and curiously ornamented gables
are seen covering both banks of the Pegnitz, which rolls below. The house
may have been the guard-room of the castle. It derives its name, the Torture-chamber,
not from the fact that the torture was here inflicted, but because into
this one chamber has been collected a complete set of the instruments
of torture gleaned from the various Inquisitions that formerly existed
in Bavaria. A glance suffices to show the whole dreadful apparatus by
which the adherents of Rome sought to maintain her dogmas. Placed next
to the door, and greeting the sight as one enters, is a collection of
hideous masks. These represent creatures monstrous of shape, and malignant
and fiendish of nature, It is in beholding them that we begin to perceive
how subtle was the genius that devised this system of coercion, and that
it took the mind as well as the body of the victim into account. In gazing
on them, one feels as if he had suddenly come into polluting and debasing
society, and had sunk to the same moral level with the creatures here
figured before him. He suffers a conscious abatement of dignity and fortitude.
The persecutor had calculated, doubtless, that the effect produced upon
the mind of his victim by these dreaded apparitions, would be that he
would become morally relaxed, and less able to sustain his cause. Unless
of strong mind, indeed, the unfortunate prisoner, on entering such a place,
and seeing himself encompassed with such unearthly and hideous shapes,
must have felt as if he were the vile heretic which the persecutor styled
him, and as if already the infernal den had opened its portals, and sent
forth its venomous swarms to bid him welcome. Yourself accursed, with
accursed beings are you henceforth to dwell—such was the silent language
of these abhorred images.
We pass on into the chamber, where
more dreadful sights meet our gaze. It is hung round and round with instruments
of torture, so numerous that it would take a long while even to name them,
and so diverse that it would take a much longer time to describe them.
We must take them in groups, for it were hopeless to think of going over
them one by one, and particularising the mode in which each operated,
and the ingenuity and art with which all of them have been adapted to
their horrible end. There were instruments for compressing the fingers
till the bones should be squeezed to splinters. There were instruments
for probing below the finger-nails till an exquisite pain, like a burning
fire, would run along the nerves. There were instruments for tearing out
the tongue, for scooping out the eyes, for grubbing-up the ears. There
were bunches of iron cords, with a spiked circle at the end of every whip,
for tearing the flesh from the back till bone and sinew were laid bare.
There were iron cases for the legs, which were tightened upon the limb
placed in them by means of a screw, till flesh and bone were reduced to
a jelly. There were cradles set full of sharp spikes, in which victims
were laid and rolled from side to side, the wretched occupant being pierced
at each movement of the machine with innumerable sharp points. There were
iron ladles with long handles, for holding molten lead or boiling pitch,
to be poured down the throat of the victim, and convert his body into
a burning cauldron. There were frames with holes to admit the hands and
feet, so contrived that the person put into them had his body bent into
unnatural and painful positions, and the agony grew greater and greater
by moments, and yet the man did not die. There were chestfuls of small
but most ingeniously constructed instruments for pinching, probing, or
tearing the more sensitive parts of the body, and continuing the pain
up to the very verge where reason or life gives way. On the floor and
walls of the apartment were other and larger instruments for the same
fearful end—lacerating, mangling, and agonizing living men; but these
we shall meet in other dungeons we are yet to visit.
The first impression on entering the
chamber was one of bewildering horror; a confused procession of mangled,
mutilated, agonising men, speechless in their great woe, the flesh peeled
from off their livid sinews, the sockets where eyes had been, hollow and
empty, seemed to pass before one. The most dreadful scenes which the great
genius of Dante has imagined, appeared tame in comparison with the spectral
groups which this chamber summoned up. The first impulse was to escape,
lest images of pain, memories of tormented men, who were made to die a
hundred deaths in one, should take hold of one’s mind, never again
to be effaced from it.
The things we have been surveying
are not the mere models of the instruments made use of in the Holy Office;
they are the veritable instruments themselves. We see before us the actual
implements by which hundreds and thousands of men and women, many of them
saints and confessors of the Lord Jesus, were torn, and mangled, and slain.
These terrible realities the men of the sixteenth century had to face
and endure, or renounce the hope of the life eternal. Painful they were
to flesh and blood—nay, not even endurable by flesh and blood unless
sustained by the Spirit of the mighty God.
We leave the Torture-chamber to visit
the Inquisition proper. We go eastward, about half a mile, keeping close
to the northern wall of the city, till we come to an old tower, styled
in the common parlance of Nuremberg the Max Tower. We pull the bell, the
iron handle and chain of which are seen suspended beside the door-post.
The cicerone appears, carrying a bunch of keys, a lantern, and some half-dozen
candles. The lantern is to show us our way, and the candles are for the
purpose of being lighted and stuck up at the turnings in the dark underground
passages which we are about to traverse. Should mischance befall our lantern,
these tapers, like beacon-lights in a narrow creek, will pilot us safely
back into the day. The cicerone, selecting the largest from the bunch
of keys, inserts it in the lock of the massy portal before which we stand,
bolt after bolt is turned, and the door, with hoarse heavy groan as it
turns on its hinge, opens slowly to us. We begin to descend. We go down
one flight of steps; we go down a second flight; we descend yet a third.
And now we pause a moment. The darkness is intense, for here never came
the faintest glimmer of day; but a gleam thrown forward from the lantern
showed us that we were arrived at the entrance of a horizontal, narrow
passage. We could see, by the flickering of the light upon its sides and
roof, that the corridor we were traversing was hewn out of the rock. We
had gone only a few paces when we were brought up before a massy door.
As far as the dim light served us, we could see the door, old, powdery
with dust, and partly worm-eaten. Passing in, the corridor continued,
and we went forward other three paces or so, when we found ourselves before
a second door. We opened and shut it behind us as we did the first. Again
we began to thread our way: a third door stopped us. We opened and closed
it in like manner. Every step was carrying us deeper into the heart of
the rock, and multiplying the barriers between us and the upper world.
We were shut in with the thick darkness and the awful silence. We began
to realize what must have been the feelings of some unhappy disciple of
the Gospel, surprised by the familiars of the Holy Office, led through
the midnight streets of Nuremberg, conducted to Max Tower, led down flight
after flight of stairs, and along this horizontal shaft in the rock, and
at every few paces a massy door, with its locks and bolts, closing behind
him! He must have felt how utterly he was beyond the reach of human pity
and human aid. No cry, however piercing, could reach the ear of man through
these roofs of rock. He was entirely in the power of those who had brought
him thither.
At last we came to a side-door in
the narrow passage. We halted, applied the key, and the door, with its
ancient mold, creaking harshly as if moving on a hinge long disused, opened
to let us in. We found ourselves in a rather roomy chamber, it might be
about twelve feet square. This was the Chamber of Question. Along one
side of the apartment ran a low platform. There sat of old the inquisitors,
three in number—the first a divine, the second a casuist, and the
third a civilian. The only occupant of that platform was the crucifix,
or image of the Savior on the cross, which still remained. The six candles
that usually burned before the "holy Fathers" were, of course,
extinguished, but our lantern supplied their place, and showed us the
grim furnishings of the apartment. In the middle was the horizontal rack
or bed of torture, on which the victim was stretched till bone started
from bone, and his dislocated frame became the seat of agony, which was
suspended only when it had reached a pitch that threatened death.
Leaning against the
wall of the chamber was the upright rack, which is simpler, but as an
instrument of torture not less effectual, than the horizontal one. There
was the iron chain which wound over a pulley, and hauled up the victim
to the vaulted roof; and there were the two great stone weights which,
tied to his feet, and the iron cord let go, brought him down with a jerk
that dislocated his limbs, while the spiky rollers, which he grazed in
his descent, cut into and excoriated his back, leaving his body a bloody,
dislocated mass.6
Here, too, was the cradle of which
we have made mention above, amply garnished within with cruel knobs, on
which the sufferer, tied hand and foot, was thrown at every movement of
the machine, to be bruised all over, and brought forth discoloured, swollen,
bleeding, but still living.
All round, ready to hand, were hung
the minor instruments of torture. There were screws and thumbkins for
the fingers, spiked collars for the neck, iron boots for the legs, gags
for the mouth, cloths to cover the face, and permit the slow percolation
of water, drop by drop, down the throat of the person undergoing this
form of torture. There were rollers set round with spikes, for bruising
the arms and back; there were iron scourges, pincers, and tongs for tearing
out the tongue, slitting the nose and ears, and otherwise disfiguring
and mangling the body till it was horrible and horrifying to look upon
it. There were other things of which an expert only could tell the name
and the use. Had these instruments a tongue, and could the history of
this chamber be written, how awful the tale!
We shall suppose that all this has
been gone through; that the confessor has been stretched on the bed of
torture; has been gashed, broken, mangled, and yet, by power given him
from above, has not denied his Savior: he has been "tortured not
accepting deliverance:" what further punishment has the Holy Office
in reserve for those from whom its torments have failed to extort a recantation?
These dreadful dungeons furnish us with the means of answering this question.
We return to the narrow passage, and
go forward a little way. Every few paces there comes a door, originally
strong and massy, and garnished with great iron knobs but now old and
moldy, and creaking when opened with a noise painfully loud in the deep
stillness. The windings are numerous, but at every turning of the passage
a lighted candle is placed, lest peradventure the way should be missed,
and the road back to the living world be lost for ever. A few steps are
taken downwards, very cautiously, for a lantern can barely show the ground.
Here there is a vaulted chamber, entirely dug out of the living rock,
except the roof, which is formed of hewn stone. It contains an iron image
of the Virgin; and on the opposite wall, suspended by an iron hook, is
a lamp, which when lighted shows the goodly proportions of "Our Lady."
On the instant of touching a spring the image flings open its arms, which
resemble the doors of a cupboard, and which are seen to be stuck full
on the inside with poignards, each about a foot in length. Some of these
knives are so placed as to enter the eyes of those whom the image enfolded
in its embrace, others are set so as to penetrate the ears and brain,
others to pierce the breast, and others again to gore the abdomen.
The person who had passed through
the terrible ordeal of the Question-chamber, but had made no recantation,
would be led along the tortuous passage by which we had come, and ushered
into this vault, where the first object that would greet his eye, the
pale light of the lamp falling on it, would be the iron Virgin. He would
be bidden to stand right in front of the image. The spring would be touched
by the executioner — the Virgin would fling open her arms, and the
wretched victim would straightway be forced within them. Another spring
was then touched — the Virgin closed upon her victim; a strong wooden
beam, fastened at one end to the wall by a movable joint, the other placed
against the doors of the iron image, was worked by a screw, and as the
beam was pushed out, the spiky arms of the Virgin slowly but irresistibly
closed upon the man, cruelly goring him.
When the dreadful business was ended,
it needed not that the executioner should put himself to the trouble of
making the Virgin unclasp the mangled carcass of her victim; provision
had been made for its quick and secret disposal. At the touching of a
third spring, the floor of the image would slide aside, and the body of
the victim drop down the mouth of a perpendicular shaft in the rock. We
look down this pit, and can see, at a great depth, the shimmer of water.
A canal had been made to flow underneath the vault where stood the iron
Virgin, and when she had done her work upon those who were delivered over
to her tender mercies, she let them fall, with quick descent and sullen
plunge, into the canal underneath, where they were floated to the Pegnitz,
and from the Pegnitz to the Rhine, and by the Rhine to the ocean, there
to sleep beside the dust of Huss and Jerome.
Footnotes
1Istoria Cone. Trent,
lib. 14., cap. 9.
2 Ranke, book. 2., sec. 6, p. 157; Lond., 1847.
3 McCrie’s Italy, p 233; Ed., 1833.
1106
4 Ib., pp. 318—320.
5 The Author was conducted over the Inquisition at
Nuremberg in
September, 1871, and
wrote the description given of it in the text
immediately thereafter
on the spot. Others must have seen it, but he
knows of no one who
has described it.
6 The Author has described with greater minuteness
the horizontal and
upright racks in his
account of the dungeons underneath the Town-house
of Nuremberg. (See
ante, book 9, chapter 5, p. 501.)
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