• 1184 – Pope Lucius III required bishops to make a judicial inquiry for heresy in their dioceses, a provision renewed by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215
• 1227 – Pope Gregory IX appointed the first judges delegate as inquisitors for heretical depravity
• Papal inquisitors had authority over everyone except bishops and their officials but there was no central authority to coordinate their activities, but after 1248 or 1249, when the first handbook of inquisitorial practice was written, inquisitors adopted common procedures
• 1252 – Pope Innocent IV licensed inquisitors to allow obdurate heretics to be tortured by lay henchmen
• Persecution by the inquisition also contributed to the collapse of Catharism, a dualist heresy that had great influence in southern France and northern Italy, by about 1325
Procedures and organisation:
• When instituting an inquiry in a district, an inquisitor would normally declare a period of grace during which those who voluntarily confessed their own involvement in heresy would be given only light penances
• The inquisitor used these confessions to compile a list of suspects whom he summoned to his tribunal and failure to appear was considered evidence of guilt
• The trial was often a battle of wits between the inquisitor and the accused, the only other people present were a notary, who kept a record of the proceedings, and sworn witnesses, who attested the record’s accuracy
• No lawyer would defend a suspect for fear of being accused of abetting heresy, and suspects were not normally told what charges had been made against them or by whom
• The accused might appeal to the pope before proceedings began, but this involved considerable expense
• Judicial penances were imposed on those who had been convicted of heresy and had recanted
• Most common punishments were penitential pilgrimages. The wearing of yellow crosses on clothing and imprisonment
• 2 types of prisons: open prison where cells were built around a courtyard in which the inmates enjoyed considerable freedom, or a high security prison where inmates were kept in solitary confinement
• Heretics who admitted their errors but refused to recant were handed over to the secular authorities and burned at the stake
• Although heresy was a capital offence in virtually all the states of western Europe, some rulers e.g. the kings of Castile and Europe, refused to license the inquisition
and they were very brutal