The Jesuits Were the Inquisition’s Secret Weapon

In August 1556 a 24-year-old student from the Kingdom of Naples was boiled alive in a pot of oil, pitch and turpentine in Rome’s Piazza Navona. The student’s name was Pomponio Algieri. His crime was an error of belief. Algieri had publicly and persistently claimed that the Catholic Church taught lies, that the pope had no authority and that people should be free to join churches other than the Church of Rome. To our ears, Algieri’s ideas are relatively uncontroversial. But to the cardinals of the Roman Inquisition they could not have been more dangerous.

It was the mission of the Roman Inquisition to stem the spread of heresy: ideas that conflicted with the teachings and authority of the Catholic Church. In the early 16th century, heresy had become a critical issue in Europe, when Martin Luther refuted Catholic doctrine and declared the pope an ‘anti-Christ’. Luther’s ideas moved people from all strata of society to reject Catholic orthodoxy and papal authority. They also gave inspiration and momentum to other religious reformers. Soon Christendom was fractured into conflicting religious camps: the Protestant Reformation had begun. For those who embraced it, the Reformation had liberated them from the corruption, doctrinal perversion and grinding yoke of Rome. But, for those who remained loyal to the Holy See, Luther had destroyed divinely ordained hierarchies and condemned thousands of souls to the fires of hell.

By the 1540s Protestant ideas had arrived in Italy. There, they rocked the Catholic Church at its heart. In 1542, Pope Paul III ordered a small group of cardinals to form the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition, charging them to curb heresy among lay people and churchmen alike. From a palazzo in Rome these cardinal-inquisitors established and supervised tribunals all over Italy, encouraging people to denounce suspected heretics who could then be investigated and converted. Inquisitors could impose penalties of varying severity on proven religious rebels. Some were sentenced to recite prayers, fast and perform spiritual penances. Others were fined, ordered to row galleys or, like Algieri, condemned to an agonising public death.

Technically, the severity of the punishment correlated with the gravity of the error and the stubbornness of the heretic – though, in reality, it could depend on the disposition of the inquisitor or pope in charge.

Algieri is a little-known figure and the manner of his execution was highly unusual. Nevertheless, his story might seem familiar. The popular image of the Roman Inquisition has been influenced by association with the gory Black Legend of the Spanish tribunal. It has also been shaped by a handful of Italian trials that, like Algieri’s, ended in the death of the accused. Most visitors to Rome will meet the gaze of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, immortalised in a bronze statue in the Campo de’ Fiori on the spot where flames silenced his heresy in the year 1600. Familiar, too, is the fate of the astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei: while not executed on the orders of the Roman Inquisition, he died under house arrest on a charge of suspected heresy. In recent years, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) and Alberto Fasulo’s eponymous film (2018) have popularised the story of the lowly Friulian miller known as Menocchio. In 1599, Menocchio was tried by inquisitors and executed after claiming that the universe was created from chaos from which spirits emerged ‘like worms from a cheese’. Even fictional tales of the medieval Italian inquisition have contributed to popular perceptions of the 16th-century tribunal. Just like the cases of Bruno, Galileo and Menocchio, stories like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose suggest that Italian inquisitors were uncompromising in their brutality.

Gory extremes

Whether true or fictional, these stories reflect certain facets of the work of the Roman Inquisition. But these facets were neither typical of its daily work nor representative of its overall mission. For many papal inquisitors, such extreme punishments were manifest failures. Ultimately, they sought to convince heretics of their error and bring them willingly back into the Catholic fold. It was for this reason that the cardinal-inquisitors ordered local tribunals to use torture sparingly – and only after securing a special sanction from Rome. Sentences were often lighter, or indeed commuted; ‘perpetual’ imprisonment, for example, ordinarily lasted for just three years and, under most popes, execution was only sanctioned when a proven heretic had relapsed into heresy after recanting and being forgiven.

Though such punishments for crimes of belief might seem unjustifiable, we must remember that inquisitors did not commit them customarily out of cruelty. Inquisitors believed that impenitent heretics must be silenced lest they attract new followers, dragging yet more souls down to hell. It was for this reason that Giordano Bruno was gagged, even as he was put to death. An eternity of torment for the many was a far worse fate than the death of just one. When dealing with ordinary people of little influence who had erred for the first time, inquisitors were usually lenient, offering soft penances and pardon in return for a full recantation. Of course, there were occasions when such standards were flouted. Nonetheless, the existence of such norms indicates that we must look beyond the gory extremes if we are to understand the workings of the Holy Office of Rome.

Fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency

To seek genuine conversions was no easy task. Like the Spanish Inquisition, the papal tribunal relied upon heretics turning themselves in or faithful Catholics reporting their neighbours and friends. The reputation of the inquisitors hindered this project from the start. Even as the Roman Inquisition began its work its public image was tainted by tales of torture and brutal punishments perpetrated by its medieval and Spanish counterparts. Moreover, no matter how seldom they occurred, public executions like Algieri’s lived long in the memory. Just five years after the Roman Inquisition was founded, a priest in Bologna lamented that even remorseful religious rebels dared not reveal themselves as they ‘knew that in Rome [the inquisitors] went castigating those who were suspected of heresy’. Local inquisitors urged the cardinals in Rome to do something, anything, that would make their organisation ‘less odious’ to ordinary people. Far from being the inquisitors’ most significant tool, it seems that severe punishments could actually impede their work.

Realising that a reputation for cruelty hindered their efforts to win converts, the Roman inquisitors sought out collaborators with a more genial public image. A brand new religious order called the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, offered the Holy Office the perfect partnership. On their collaborative missions with the Society, the most effective tools of the Roman Inquisition were not weapons of violence but rather Jesuits, who were known for consolation and compromise. The fact that these missions have not penetrated popular conceptions of the Roman Inquisition is hardly surprising. The key to their success was that these Jesuit inquisitors kept their connection with the tribunal completely undercover.

The Roman Inquisition did take some measures to improve its own reputation. When an inquisitor arrived at a new location, he posted printed edicts in public places assuring heretics that he ‘sought the salvation of souls, not the death of men’. At the height of the activity of the Roman Inquisition, one such poster assumed an almost gushing tone, promising that inquisitors’ ‘arms [were] always held open to welcome’ heretics and their hearts ‘inclined to indulgence’. Over the course of the 16th century more and more people presented themselves to the tribunal voluntarily in exchange for lighter punishments. But at the height of the post-Reformation crisis, as paupers and princes were called before inquisitors, promises of leniency were insufficient to mollify the public mood. Fear could even bubble over into violence towards the Holy Office. In Ferrara, the inquisitor Camillo Campeggio promised pardon to all penitent heretics. Still, on Christmas night of 1567, locals murdered two members of his tribunal in cold blood.

Bad reputation

When the Roman Inquisition could not repair its own marred reputation, it called upon Jesuit collaborators. Jesuits are often characterised as the most intimate associates of the pope and his cardinals, but when the Roman Inquisition was established they had no such reputation. In 1542 the Jesuit order was just two years old and, with a Basque leader, Ignatius Loyola, and members from Spain and Portugal as well as Savoy, it had an international image that was associated with the Iberian peninsula as much as Rome. While the laity complained of corruption and moral deviancy among their priests and prelates, they found that Jesuits lived up to the loftiest standards of morality. What is more, the first Jesuits were principally missionaries and pastors rather than doctrinal judges. They spent their days preaching, hearing confessions and transforming the souls of the laity through careful, individually tailored spiritual counsel. Just when the inquisitors needed benign figures to engage and convert the laity, they found the Jesuits, a group of eager young men with a reputation that could not have been further from their own.

From the very beginning, the Jesuits’ labours supported those of the Holy Office. They re-educated religious dissenters, with Loyola personally taking men from the prisons of the Roman Inquisition to the Jesuits’ house for religious instruction. Scholarly members of the Society would also help the tribunal’s sister institution, the Congregation of the Index, compiling lists of books that were to be expunged or banned for heresy. Moreover, the Jesuits supported the work of the inquisitors in their everyday mission, calling heretics to conversion with rousing public sermons and turning hearts towards repentance in intimate spiritual encounters. In work that befitted the pastoral and increasingly scholarly mission of their Society, the first Jesuits provided vital support to the Roman Inquisition.

More surprisingly, perhaps, Jesuits also undertook explicitly inquisitorial tasks. After months of spying on suspected heretics in Ferrara and Lucca, Father Silvestro Landini brought local inquisitors a list of names for further investigation. Father Nicolas Bobadilla, a firebrand founding member of the Society, not only denounced heretics to the Inquisition but actively sought them out as an official commissary of the Roman tribunal. In the 1560s, Portuguese Jesuit Cristóbal Rodríguez would make this role his own, working hand-in-glove with the Dominican arch-inquisitor Cardinal Michele Ghislieri. When Ghislieri became Pope Pius V, he and Rodriguez would expand their inquisitorial projects, conducting missions across Italy, from the southern stretches of the Kingdom of Naples to the far eastern corners of the Papal States.

Some Jesuits proved much more effective inquisitorial collaborators than others. Success depended on strategy and, related to this, reputation. Things went wrong if the Jesuits appeared to act as inquisitors; religious rebels bolted when they associated the Jesuits’ behaviour with that of the feared tribunal. Bobadilla fell foul of this approach early on in his career, for he was more than candid when it came to questions of religious orthodoxy. This was the Jesuit who had been banished from the Holy Roman Empire for chiding the Emperor Charles V for being too soft on heretics. Even before he became an inquisitorial commissary – even before the official foundation of the Roman Inquisition – Bobadilla made it his business to bring suspected heretics to repentance or justice. In 1540, Bobadilla found himself in a meeting of the followers of Juan de Valdes, a Spaniard who had fled his native land after his religious views had excited the suspicions of its inquisition. Hovering at the door of the crowded room, Bobadilla was scandalised when the speaker, probably Valdes himself, claimed that St Paul had implied that the pope was the anti-Christ. To Bobadilla this was reprehensible heresy. He leapt into action, howling: ‘You lie! You lie! You lie!’ The speaker and crowd fled, evading Bobadilla and the state authorities. Here, the Jesuit faced the same obstacle that would impede the work of the Roman Inquisition: his angry outburst had excited fear of punishment and lost him the opportunity to win converts.

It was the Jesuits, with their kindly, pastoral persona, who would prove the most successful inquisitorial collaborators. Within a few decades of the foundation of the Roman Inquisition this strategy was already well-established. In a letter to Cristóbal Rodriguez in 1567, Cardinal Michele Bonelli the nephew of Pius V – ordered the Jesuit to go to the Papal States ‘to find out what priests, religious [orders], bishops, governors and other public people’ had committed in matters of morality, blasphemy and heresy. Bonelli reminded Rodriguez that ‘the way of finding this [information] out secretly’ was to emphasise his image as a Jesuit, telling him ‘to go first with a companion teaching Christian Doctrine and hearing confessions etc, as is normal for your Society’. According to Cardinal Bonelli, as long as Rodriguez looked like a Jesuit pastor people would trust him enough to confess their misdemeanours. Most importantly, nobody would suspect that he was an undercover inquisitorial spy.

Although we might assume that a pious Jesuit would be outraged at the suggestion of such deception, Rodriguez was already a master at the ruse. In 1564 he had adopted this strategy with aplomb when working with Pius V (then cardinal-inquisitor Ghislieri) in Vulturara, a diocese deep in the south of Italy in what was then the Kingdom of Naples. Rodriguez’s mission was to convert local communities of Waldensians, a 12th-century sect that had allied with the Protestants after the Reformation, continuing the work of an earlier inquisitorial commissary, Father Valero Malvicino. Still, when Rodriguez arrived in the Kingdom of Naples, he went directly to the viceroy to tell him the complete opposite: that he was not on the mission ‘as a commissary or judge of the Holy Office, like the cardinals had asked’, but only to teach and preach. Rodriguez also made sure that locals saw him as a loving pastor rather than an inquisitor, gently teaching them ‘the truth of the faith’ and working ‘slowly to encourage them and to persuade them to confess the truth’ of their heresy. Rodriguez’s pastoral work was hardly cynical. He genuinely believed that a gentle, non-judicial approach was best when it came to converting souls. However, the notion that Rodriguez’s mission was purely pastoral is directly contradicted by records held in the Jesuits’ own archive. One document explicitly states that Rodriguez was a ‘commissary of the Holy Office of Rome’ who ‘was in the diocese of Vulturara’. Moreover, Rodriguez’s own reports from the mission describe duties that were strictly inquisitorial: imposing penances on those who would confess and working ‘to pick and imprison the others’. 

Good cop, bad cop

By distancing himself from the Roman Inquisition, Rodriguez acted in a way that befitted his order and benefited the cardinal-inquisitors. For in Vulturara, inquisitors were completely loathed. On arriving in the diocese Rodriguez had reported that he found ‘the whole land very terrified and alarmed’ as the last commissary had ‘put many in prison, and from there to the galleys’. Moreover, in the years immediately preceding Rodriguez’s arrival, local heresy hunters had repressed neighbouring Waldensian communities using excessive violence. Not content with destroying villages, burning some men and throwing others from a tower, the local governor had disinterred and burnt the bones of dead dissenters. Rodriguez claimed that people had been left so petrified that they would not even come to church. With the reputation of those who policed heresy mired in the brutality of such recent events, Rodriguez would have won neither conversions nor intelligence if he had worked openly as an inquisitorial agent. As a Jesuit pastor, on the other hand, he negotiated with the inquisitors on behalf of the heretics. The Jesuit was the good cop; the inquisitors the bad. The strategy worked. After promising that locals would be treated fairly and that their relatives would not be harmed, Rodriguez recorded more than 400 conversions.

There were also compelling political motives to deny links with the Roman Inquisition. According to a report sent to Jesuit headquarters from the Kingdom of Naples, the work of a diligent missionary in Vulturara had been abruptly stalled when ‘ministers of the devil’ spread rumours that he ‘was acting in an office of the Roman Inquisition’. State authorities imprisoned the Jesuit as, in the Kingdom of Naples, independent activities of the Roman Inquisition were illegal. Since the foundation of the papal tribunal, the Spanish rulers of Naples had blocked its work. For them, the Roman Inquisition represented the court of a foreign power: the tribunal of the prince of the Papal States or, in other words, the pope. According to the report, the Jesuit was only released from prison when he convinced the viceroy that he was merely a humble pastor and not an inquisitor working for the pope of Rome. This anonymous Jesuit was, undoubtedly, Cristóbal Rodriguez. In Vulturara, association with the Roman Inquisition could have robbed him of not only conversions but of his personal liberty.

Though image was clearly fundamental to the Jesuits’ appeal as inquisitorial collaborators, their contribution was not merely superficial. While they provided a friendly face for the loathed tribunal, offering inquisitors access to penitents and places that would otherwise be off limits, their methods were also genuinely effective, particularly in contrast to the more violent strategies that had damaged the inquisitors’ reputation. Increasingly, the Roman Inquisition and its satellite tribunals softened their own approach, embracing summary procedures with private recantations and spiritual penances in place of formal processes with interrogations and harsher punishments. The use of Jesuit collaborators with soft strategies was part of the genesis of this approach in the 16th century. By the 17th century, summary processes outnumbered formal processes in many of the tribunals for which we have data.

At the same time, popes and their inquisitors embarked on an energetic campaign to repair the public image of the Church and its approach to heresy. In addition to offering summary processes, they empowered confessors to absolve certain groups of heretics in the complete secrecy of sacramental confession. They even offered material support to those born in Protestant countries who came to Rome to return to the ‘womb of the holy mother Church’. And, when they secured prominent converts, popes lauded them with great pomp and privilege. When Queen Christina of Sweden converted from Lutheranism in 1655, Pope Alexander VII organised her triumphal procession southwards through Trent, Ferrara and Bologna, with festivities culminating in her spectacular entry into Rome on a papal sedan chair designed by Gianlorenzo Bernini. Yes, the inquisitors of this period pursued Galileo for his theory of heliocentricism and executed Bruno when he would not relinquish his beliefs. But by the 17th century the vast majority of heresy cases were resolved with a voluntary appearance at an inquisitorial tribunal and light salutary penances.

Save our souls

Many associate the terms ‘inquisition’ and ‘heretic’ with the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation. Yet the Roman Inquisition – the only tribunal set up by the Church to combat Protestantism – is still the least known of the heresy tribunals. Whether through Gothic literature, Hammer horror, historical fiction or Monty Python, popular accounts of inquisitorial work have been dominated by the Spanish Inquisition, which was founded and run by the monarchs of Spain, not the pope. In reality, the strategies and methods of the Roman Inquisition (and, to a large extent, its Spanish counterpart) are not easily corralled into a Black Legend of obdurate cruelty. Yes, violence occurred and was understandably highlighted in Protestant martyrologies, but the inquisitors’ crueller methods have cast a disproportionately long shadow. To fully understand the Roman Inquisition we must remember that it strove for the ‘salvation of souls, not the death of men’. In taking this broader view we do not become apologists for a censorship of belief that would be abhorrent in any modern, liberal democracy. We merely begin to understand this institution on its own terms and to see that its mission to conserve Catholicism and to save souls demanded the tools of clemency and compromise over and above the blunt instrument of the burning stake.

Jessica Dalton is a historian of the religious and political history of Europe and author of Between Popes, Inquisitors and Princes (Brill, July 2020).