Showing the Instruments: The Vocabulary of Inquisitorial Torture

Inquisitors did not usually begin with pain. They began with a sequence of formal steps, each with its own name, and the early steps were meant to make the later ones unnecessary. A suspect might be sentenced to torture, led to the chamber, shown the implements, stripped and bound, and asked at every pause to tell the truth. Many confessed somewhere along that path. The words used for each stage were technical terms in a body of law that took itself seriously, and reading them closely shows both how the system tried to limit itself and how easily those limits were stretched.

This article follows that vocabulary through the medieval inquisitions, the Spanish Holy Office, and the secular courts that shared the same law, using the inquisitors’ own manuals as reported by historians, a seventeenth-century Protestant critic, and modern legal and archival scholarship.

Why the law wanted a confession

Judicial torture in medieval and early modern Europe grew out of a law of proof, not out of an appetite for cruelty. After the Church effectively ended the ordeals in 1215, the jurists who designed the replacement system set a very high bar for conviction in serious crimes. As the legal historian John Langbein explains, conviction required either two unimpeachable eyewitnesses, evidence “clear as the noonday sun,” or the accused’s own confession.¹ Circumstantial evidence alone could not convict. Torture entered as a way to obtain the confession when the eyewitnesses were missing, and its rules were written in the language of evidence: a “half proof” (one eyewitness, or weighty circumstantial indications, each valued on a tariff of quarter proofs and half proofs) was the threshold for sending a suspect to the torture chamber.¹

The Church had been slow to accept this. Henry Charles Lea, whose histories of 1887 to 1907 remain among the fullest English accounts built on inquisitorial records, notes that Gratian’s canon law held that no confession should be extorted by torment.² The change came with Innocent IV’s bull Ad extirpanda of 1252, which ordered secular authorities to force captured heretics to confess and name accomplices, in Lea’s rendering “just as thieves and robbers are forced to confess their crimes and accuse their accomplices.”² The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 gives the bull’s limit as citra membri diminutionem et mortis periculum, short of loss of limb or danger of death.³ Clerics were at first barred even from being present, but in 1256 Alexander IV allowed inquisitors to absolve one another of the resulting “irregularity,” and torture moved under their direct supervision.²

The usual Latin word for the procedure was quaestio, the “question,” and French courts likewise spoke of la question.⁴ The Catholic Encyclopedia describes it as “this violent testimony (quaestio)” and stresses that it was treated as a means of eliciting truth, not as a punishment.³

Degrees: from threat to the rope

The best-known list of stages comes from the Italian jurist Julius Clarus (Giulio Claro), as quoted by Philipp van Limborch, professor of divinity at Amsterdam, in his History of the Inquisition, translated into English by Samuel Chandler in 1731. In the English version Clarus says: “there are five degrees of torture, viz. First, the being threatened to be tortured. Secondly, being carried to the place of torture. Thirdly, by stripping and binding. Fourthly, the being hoisted up on the rack. Fifthly, squassation.”⁵ “Squassation” was the sudden drop of a prisoner hoisted by the wrists on a rope, the most severe stage of the pulley torture that the Spanish called the garrucha and the Italians the strappado.⁵⁶

Clarus also gave a shorter scheme of three degrees, in which the first, “to terrify,” covered the threat, the walk to the chamber, and the stripping and binding.⁵ Limborch adds a commentator’s account of how the senate of Milan graded its orders: “let him be interrogated by torture,” “let him be tortured,” “let him be well tortured,” “let him be severely tortured,” and finally “very severely even unto death,” each phrase standing for a defined degree of hoisting and number of drops.⁵ A sentence of a few words thus carried a precise operational meaning for the executioner.

The medieval inquisitor Nicolau Eymerich, whose instructions on the subject Lea calls the fullest that survive, laid out the same escalation. The prisoner was shown the implements and urged to confess; if he refused he was stripped and bound and urged again; only then was torment applied, with gradually increasing severity, and further implements were displayed with the warning that he would face them all.² Lea’s judgment is that the efficacy of torture lay less in what it extracted than in the dread it produced, “near or remote.”²

The Spanish Inquisition had a formal name for stopping at the threshold. A tribunal unsure whether the evidence justified torture could sentence the accused to be placed in conspectu tormentorum, in sight of the torments: read the sentence, taken to the chamber, stripped, perhaps tied to the trestle, and no more. Lea, who worked from the Spanish trial records, says this threat “was frequently effective.”⁶ Even fees reflected the distinction: a fee list of 1553 gave the executioner one real for administering torture and half a real if it was only threatened.⁶

“Continued,” not repeated

One of the most revealing pieces of jargon concerns repetition. Law across Europe held that torture could be applied only once, unless new evidence appeared. The rule was evaded by a change of verb. In Limborch’s account, inquisitors who failed to obtain a confession could “assign the second or third day to continue, not to repeat the torture.”⁵ The Catholic Encyclopedia quotes Eymerich defending fresh sessions “not by way of repetition, but as a continuation” (non ad modum iterationis sed continuationis).³ Lea, writing of the medieval tribunals, observes that with this distinction “the holy casuists were able to continue it indefinitely.”²

The Spanish tribunals used the same device. A session ended not with release but with the statement that the inquisitors were obliged to suspend the torture for now, and would resume it if the prisoner did not tell the whole truth. Prisoners who had just confessed were sometimes warned that if they retracted, the torture would be “continued.”⁶ Modern archival work suggests the loophole was used sparingly in Spain, however: the political scientist Ron Hassner, summarizing recent studies, writes that torture was rarely repeated and that suspending a session rather than ending it “was rarely employed.”⁷

Ratification produced a second set of formulas. Because a confession under torment could not count as voluntary, it had to be confirmed outside the chamber, in principle after twenty-four hours.⁶² Records then stated, in the formula the Catholic Encyclopedia cites, confessionem esse veram, non factam vi tormentorum, that the confession was true and not made through force of torment.³ Langbein notes the practical result: an accused who recanted at the ratification hearing could be tortured again, and learned that only a “voluntary” confession would end it.¹ Lea calls the Spanish declaration that ratification was not made through fear of torture “a falsehood,” since retraction everywhere invited further torment.⁶

The Spanish working vocabulary

In Spain the instruments were named for ordinary objects, and the records measured severity in countable units. Lea, describing the early period, reports that two methods dominated: the garrucha (pulley) and the water torture.⁶ For the second, the prisoner lay on the escalera or potro, a slanted trestle; cordeles (cords) bound the limbs and garrotes, cords tightened with sticks, were twisted around arms and legs; a toca, a strip of linen, was placed in the throat and water was poured through it from a jarra, a jar holding usually a little more than a quart.⁶ The secretary recorded the number of jarras used, which is how severity was judged afterward: in 1490 a priest received a single jarra and was later acquitted, while other records reach six or eight.⁶

By the 1640s, according to a report the tribunal of Córdoba sent to the central council, the Suprema, the pulley and the water had been given up there for more than thirty years. The methods in use were the trampa (forcing the legs through a narrowed rung), the mancuerda (a cord around the arms pulled by the executioner’s weight), and the potro with its garrotes. The unit now was the vuelta, or turn: three were ordinary practice, five reckoned very rigorous.⁶

Instructions also controlled speech. During torture, Lea writes, “the only words to be addressed to him were ‘Tell the truth.’” No questions were put and no names mentioned, because sufferers would say anything suggested to them.⁶ Langbein describes the same rule against “suggestive questioning” in secular procedure, along with the ideal that a confession should contain details that, in the words of the German code of 1532, “no innocent person can know.”¹

The obvious weakness of the instruction is visible in the records themselves. Lea prints the secretary’s minutes of the 1568 Toledo case of Elvira del Campo, a woman accused of Judaizing practices, namely of not eating pork and of putting on clean linen on Saturdays. She admitted the acts but denied heretical intent, and the minutes show her repeatedly asking to be told what she was supposed to say.⁶ Lea’s conclusion about such records is blunt: “The result was a test of endurance and not of veracity.”⁶

Words for people and outcomes

The procedure classified prisoners by how they answered. A negativo denied the charges; a diminuto confessed, but less than the evidence showed; one tortured in caput alienum, “against another’s head,” was tortured as a witness against others, often after his own case was settled.⁶ Limborch’s sources make the same distinction, noting that a convicted heretic tortured to name accomplices was “not tortured as a criminal, but as a witness.”⁵ France had parallel terms: the question préparatoire was torture before judgment to obtain a confession, the question définitive or préalable was torture after condemnation to obtain names, and either could be ordinaire or extraordinaire according to severity.⁴

Endurance had its own legal language. A prisoner who withstood torture without confessing had “purged” the evidence and, in principle, earned acquittal; in Lea’s rendering of the records, he “overcame” the torture.⁶¹ In practice, Lea found, Spanish tribunals seldom acquitted such prisoners outright and often imposed abjuration, fines, or exile on the ground that they had not been “sufficiently” tortured.⁶

Public sentences tended to say less. Lea notes a reluctance to mention torture in sentences read at autos de fe. In the Elvira del Campo sentence it appears only as “mas diligencias” (further measures), and a sentence of 1725 refers to “cierta diligencia” (a certain measure).⁶ Of 636 sentences in the Toulouse register of 1309 to 1323, Lea and the Catholic Encyclopedia both note, only one alludes to torture, although Limborch, who printed that register, quoted a few further passages that refer to it; either way, the formal record reveals very little.²³⁵

How often was it used? Lea thought reliable overall statistics impossible, but his one firm series comes from Toledo between 1575 and 1610: of 411 people tried for heretical offenses that admitted torture, 109 were tortured once and 8 twice, with others stopped by fainting, confessing before it began, or placed only in sight of the instruments. He puts the rate at about thirty-two percent of such prosecutions and considers this probably below the average.⁶ Hassner, working from the same Toledo manuscript, counts 123 people tortured among all 1,046 tried there in those years, about 12 percent, and a quarter of the 397 accused heretics; generalizing across the Inquisition’s history, he estimates that roughly a fifth of those accused of heresy were tortured, with wide variation by tribunal and decade.⁷ He also argues against the popular picture of the Spanish tribunal as a place of unusual refinement: in his view it confined itself to a few of the secular courts’ own methods, depended on public executioners, and was as a rule less cruel than those courts, while the system as a whole remained “evil in conception and in execution.”⁶

The end of the terms

Critics within the system had long doubted its results. The Catholic Encyclopedia quotes Eymerich himself: Quaestiones sunt fallaces et inefficaces, torture is deceptive and ineffectual.³ Langbein stresses that such complaints were nearly as old as the law of torture, and that it survived because the two-eyewitness rule left no tolerable alternative until the eighteenth century, when torture was abolished together with the system of proof that had required it.¹

The vocabulary was retired piece by piece. France abolished the question préparatoire by royal edict in 1780, though the edict was not strictly obeyed, and the question préalable in 1788, “at least temporarily,” in Lea’s phrase.⁴ In Spain, Fernando VII’s decree of July 25, 1814 forbade judges to use any pressure or torment to obtain confessions or testimony. Lea doubted that it applied to the Spanish Inquisition, restored the same year, which by then had little to do with actual heresy.⁶³ The Catholic Encyclopedia says Pius VII approved the restored tribunal on conditions that included the abolition of torture, and Lea, citing the historian Juan Antonio Llorente, reports a letter from Rome of March 1816, printed in the Gazette de France, stating that the pope had forbidden torture in all tribunals of the Inquisition. Lea saw no reason to doubt it, although no such brief appears in the bullarium of Pius VII.³⁶ The exact papal act therefore remains uncertain, but by the second decade of the nineteenth century the words continuance, jarra, and in conspectu tormentorum had passed from procedure into history.

Footnotes

1. Langbein 1978, pp. 3-8. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Lea 1887, History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, vol. 1, ch. IX. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Blötzer, “Inquisition,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), sections on procedure and the Spanish Inquisition. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

4. Lea 1892, Superstition and Force, 4th ed., “Torture.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Limborch 1816, pp. 414-417. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

6. Lea 1907, History of the Inquisition of Spain, vol. 3, bk. VI, ch. VII. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹

7. Hassner 2020, “The Cost of Torture,” sections on the myths of inquisitorial torture and on Toledo, 1575-1610. ↩ ↩²