. In medieval Latin, the term inquisitio generally conveyed the sense of investigation or inquest. Charlemagne’s agents, the missi dominici, conducted inquests; William the Conqueror’s survey that produced Domesday Book was an inquisitio. Emperor Henry IV encountered opposition from the Saxons when he attempted to conduct an inquisitio concerning lost royal rights in Saxony. Thus, the investigation of religious dissent, the practice with which the word “inquisition” has been most closely identified, was in a major sense merely another form of investigation by an authority competent to inaugurate an inquest and carry it out.
Other forms of inquisitio included the obligation of bishops to make visitations to the religious institutions of their dioceses and to correct wrongs found during such visitations. Various forms of inquisitio were used in the church, usually against erring or criminous clergy, more frequently after 1200. These instances of the term probably echoed older Roman criminal legal procedure, which from the 1st century tended to supplant an older private accusatorial criminal procedure with one in which the magistrate or judge assumed the responsibility for assembling evidence and carrying out a criminal trial. This process was technically known as cognitio extraordinaria. In another instance, inquisition might be made into the writings of a scholar accused of error.
With the emergence of formalized and institutionalized papal authority in the 11th century and classical canon law in the mid-12th, other dimensions were added to inquisitio. Papally delegated investigators and judges were instituted and in some instances could subdelegate all or part of their judicial authority to others. With the growth of widespread forms of religious dissent, popes urged bishops to investigate heresy in their own dioceses and appointed monastic figures to preach against it. This combination of delegation and appointment was not restricted to matters of dissent, however; popes also appointed preachers of the Crusades and later constituted the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and delegated judicial authority for other matters as well.
Earlier episcopal attempts to discover heresy were hampered by the survival in many regions of the accusatorial procedure—that is, someone had to accuse publicly those he suspected of heresy. In 1162, however, Pope Alexander III wrote to Henry, archbishop of Reims, ordering an archiepiscopal inquest into reported heresy in Flanders. The next year, at the Council of Tours, Alexander included a canon indicating that heretics were to be sought out by local ecclesiastical authorities. Another canon, c. 10 of Tours, stated that “it is expedient to discover new remedies for new maladies,” and some of Alexander III’s other correspondence indicates a concern for the secrecy of heretics and could be considered a rationale for requiring the inquisitio procedure in this instance.
As for the laity, Alexander also allowed the procedure of denunciation—that is, accusation without the responsibilities normally incumbent on the accuser. This was a form of the denunciatio evangelica that with accusation and inquisition came to be regarded as the three standard means of making a crime known to authorities. Denunciations were to be made by suitable people, synodal witnesses—testes synodales, a principle laid out in the well-known decretal of Alexander III, Ad abolendam of 1184, which also insisted that the ordinaries (bishops) of dioceses conduct hearings of these special witnesses for the purpose of discovering heresy.
As the perception of the extent and danger of heresy increased, more and more severe penalties were imposed by both ecclesiastical and temporal powers for those convicted. Crusades against heretics were launched, and the use of the inquest increased during the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216). In 1199, Innocent III appointed the abbots of Cîteaux and other Cistercian monasteries to hold inquests in Metz in matters of dissent, and in the process of rationalizing the prosecution of criminous clerics, Innocent commanded that they be proceeded against by the inquisitio method rather than by accusation. Recent schol arship has indicated how important the changing criminal law of clergy now seems to have been for developments in criminal procedure generally.
In the wake of the Albigensian Crusade, the pope and the king of France collaborated upon the general constitution of inquisitorial tribunals throughout the kingdom, established in the ordonnance Cupientes of 1229. Cupientes established, as Maisonneuve stated, “the inquisitorial procedure, by virtue of which all vassals and officers of the king were obliged specifically to seek out heretics and accomplices to heresy.” In the same year, the Council of Toulouse formalized the episcopal inquisition. With the increasing importance of the mendicant orders, particularly the Dominicans, in the early 13th century, mendicant inquisitors joined mendicant confessors and preachers. After the disastrous inquisitorial experiments of Robert le Bougre in 1233–35, Dominicans began to be used regularly as inquisitors, even in episcopal inquisitions.
Inquisitorial tribunals flourished most effectively in the south of France, but in 1310 Marguerite Porete became the first capital victim of the inquisitors at Paris, followed by the destruction of the Templars in 1316. The case of Jeanne d’Arc in 1431 reflects the increasingly prominent role in the inquisitional tribunals not only of the Dominicans but of the faculty of theology at the University of Paris and continued the close collaboration among episcopal, mendicant, and political authorities.
From the 14th century through the 16th, the faculty of theology of Paris provided most of the inquisitorial activity in France.
