THE INQUISITION
A POLITICAL AND MILITARY STUDY OF ITS ESTABLISHMENT
BY
HOFFMAN NICKERSON
WITH A PREFACE BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
JOHN BALE, SONS & DANIELSSON, LTD.
83-91, GREAT TITCHFIELD STREET
LONDON, W. 1.
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1923
CONTENTS.
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PREFACE BY MR. HILAIRE BELLOC
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CHAPTERI.—The Mediæval Recovery of Civilization
CHAPTERII.—Languedoc and the Albigenses
CHAPTERIII.—The Preliminaries of the Crusade
CHAPTERIV.—The Albigensian Crusade—The Early War
CHAPTERV.—The Albigensian Crusade—Muret and its Sequel
CHAPTERVI.—The Mendicant Orders and the Inquisition
CHAPTERVII.—Epilogue on Prohibition
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TWO MAPS IN POCKET AT END OF BOOK.
(1) Languedoc and Adjacent Lands in 1209.
(2) (a) Town of Muret, 1213; (b) Battle of Muret, September 11, 1213, 1st phase; (c) Battle of Muret, 2nd phase; (d) Battle of Muret, 3rd phase; and (e) Approximate Restoration of Toulouse in 1217-1218 to illustrate its siege by De Montfort
DEDICATORY LETTER.
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To R. C. N.
MY DEAR—
This book is rightfully yours for your unfailing help and encouragement. In dedicating it I do but make a payment on account.
It was begun during a term in the New York State Legislature, when I endured Prohibition lobbyists, and cast about for something which might serve as a historical precedent in the way of religio-political oppression on so vast a scale. I was not long before discovering that traditional Christianity had more to say for the Inquisitors than for the Prohibitionists, so that the parallel with Prohibition has been thrust into an epilogue.
My thanks are due to many mutual friends. Among them are M. Joseph Poux, Archiviste du Département de l’Aude; Father Astruc, Curé of St. Vincent’s Church, Carcassone; Father Villemagne, Curé of Castelnau; Professor Joseph Anglade of the University of Toulouse; M. Galaberd, Archiviste and Librarian of the City of Toulouse, and M. Jules Chalande, also of Toulouse and of the Société Archéologique du Midi de la France. To the studious man, France is a sort of paradise, for the local scholars receive you with enthusiasm and lay themselves out to forward your work.
Our good friend Belloc, the Master of those who would celebrate the Middle Ages in the English tongue, besides his kindly preface, has been good enough to read the manuscript and make several helpful suggestions.
Finally, although all theological discussion has herein been avoided, still I am sure you would prefer to have me frank with my readers and tell them that I am by birth an Episcopalian, as we call Anglicans in America, and by choice a member of the so-called Anglo-Catholic party in that communion.
HOFFMAN NICKERSON.
34, West 54 Street,
New York, N. Y.
January, 1923.
PREFACE.
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NEARLY all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language is the work of shovelling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past.
The history of Europe and of the world suffered, so far as English letters were concerned, from two vital defects rising at the end of the eighteenth century and lasting to the end of the nineteenth: when the wholesome reaction began.
In the first place it was not thorough.
In the second place it blindly followed the continental anti-Catholic tradition and particularly the German anti-Catholic tradition.
Now that the historian should not be thorough, that he should scamp his work, is an obvious defect. We have suffered from it in England, especially our two old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which do not set out to be seats of learning so much as social and aristocratic institutions.
But the second defect was worse still. History may be scrappy and superficial and yet, on the whole, right; but if its whole orientation is warped by a wrong appreciation of the past, then, however detailed and full of research, it is worse than worthless; it is harmful and it had better not have been written at all.
These preliminary remarks apply to the history of Europe as a whole and especially to the history of Europe between the coarsening of the foundational Roman administrative system in the fifth century and the rise of modern culture in the seventeenth.
They do not apply to late local history. Late (post 1600) local history was thoroughly well done. The history of England itself, when it deals only with the England which sprang out of the completed Reformation century (still more the local history of the United States) was detailed and exact. What is more important than exactitude in detail, it was consonant with the spirit of the thing described. The writers on either side of the Atlantic, but especially upon the American side, understood the material with which they were dealing. Here in England (where I write this Preface) the work on later history was also national and well done, though it suffered from no small defect in that the original Catholic England (which was like a foreign country to the writers in question) lingered on as a dwindling minority
