Often imprisonment, along with both physical and mental torture, was used to extract
a confession. Then penalties were assigned. Bernard Gui, an inquisitor in Languedoc
from 1308 to 1323, gave out 633 punishments; nearly half involved imprisonment. A
few heretics were required to go on penitential pilgrimages. Forty-one people (6.5 per
cent of those punished by Bernard) were burned alive. Many former heretics were
forced to wear crosses sewn to their clothing, rather like Jews, but shamed by a
different marker.
Strengthened Monarchs and Their Adaptations
The impulse behind “purification” was less hatred than the exercise of power.
Expelling the Jews meant confiscating their property and calling in their loans while
polishing an image of zealous religiosity. Burning lepers was one way to gain access
to the assets of leprosaria and claim new forms of hegemony. Imprisonment and
burning put heretics’ property into the hands of secular authorities. Yet even as kings
and other great lords manipulated the institutions and rhetoric of piety and purity for
political ends, they learned how to adapt to, mollify, and use—rather than stamp out
—new and up-and-coming classes. As their power increased, they came to welcome
the broad-based support that representative institutions afforded them.
All across Europe, from Spain to Poland, from England to Hungary, rulers
summoned parliaments. Growing out of ad hoc advisory sessions that kings and other
rulers held with the most powerful people in their realms, parliaments became solemn
and formal assemblies in the thirteenth century, moments when rulers celebrated their
power and where the “orders”—clergy, nobles, and commons—assented to their
wishes. Eventually parliaments became organs through which groups not ordinarily at
court could articulate their interests.
The orders (or “estates”) were based on the traditional division of society into
those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Unlike modern classes,
defined largely by economic status, medieval orders cut across economic boundaries.
The clerics, for example, included humble parish priests as well as archbishops; the
commons included wealthy merchants as well as impoverished peasants. That, at
least, was the theory. In practice, rulers did not so much command representatives of
the orders to come to court as they summoned the most powerful members of their
realm, whether clerics, nobles, or important townsmen. Above all they wanted
support for their policies and tax demands.
