Titans of History (22 page)

But when the Church threatened to hand her over to the secular courts, Joan—petrified and ill—confessed to heresy and agreed to put on women's clothes, choosing life imprisonment over a painful death. Within days of recanting, however, Joan changed back into men's clothes, saying the voices had censured her treacherous abjuration. Handed over to the secular authorities, the young woman barely out of her teens—who had always had a premonition of an early death—was burned at the stake as a witch.

Joan's conviction was unwavering. Allowed to make her confession and receive communion, she died gazing at a cross held up by a priest, who, acceding to her request, shouted out assurances of salvation so that she could hear him over the fire's roar. So anxious were the English that no relic of her should remain to keep her legend alive, they burned her body three times, then scattered her dust in the River Seine.

Twenty years later, safely installed on his throne, Charles VII ordered an inquiry into the trial. Joan's conviction was overturned. Five hundred years later, on May 16, 1920, she was made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

1420–98

If anyone possesses a certain amount of learning, he is found to be full of heresies, errors, traces of Judaism. Thus they have imposed silence on men of letters; those who have pursued learning have come to feel, as you say, a great terror
.

Don Rodrigo Manrique, son of the inquisitor general, letter to Luis Vives, 1533

The very name of Tomás de Torquemada, the first inquisitor general in Spain, was enough to induce a tremor of fear among even the most hardened of his contemporaries. Since then, Torquemada—the persecutor of Jews, Moors and other supposed heretics under the intolerant and repressive rule of Ferdinand and Isabella—has become a byword for religious fanaticism and persecuting zeal.

Little is known of his early life, other than the fact that the man who would become the bane of Spain's Jews was himself of Jewish descent: his grandmother was a
converso
—a Jewish convert to Catholicism. During his youth Torquemada joined the Dominican religious order, and in 1452 he was appointed prior of a monastery in Santa Cruz. Though he continued to occupy that post for the next two decades, he also became a confessor and adviser to King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, whose marriage in 1479 effectively united the two principal Spanish kingdoms. Under their dual monarchy, a renewed effort was made to complete the
Reconquista
(the re-conquest of Spain from Muslim
rule) that had stalled some two centuries earlier. This endeavor ended in success in 1492 with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim outpost in Spain.

In the meantime, Torquemada had convinced the government that the continued presence in Spain of Jews, Muslims and even recent converts to Christianity from those faiths represented a dangerous corruption of the true Catholic faith. As a result of Torquemada's urging, repressive laws had been passed aimed at forcing the expulsion of Spain's non-Christian minorities.

The Spanish Inquisition was established on November 1, 1478 by Pope Sixtus IV. Its job was to root out deviance and heresy from within the Church, and every girl over the age of twelve and every boy over the age of fourteen was subject to its power. It was not the first time such an entity had been created—an inquisition had temporarily existed in 13th-century France, to deal with the remnants of the Cathar heretics in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade. This new Inquisition, however, was to be far more enduring and methodical in its operation.

The first two inquisitors were appointed in 1480, and the first burnings followed a few months later, in February 1481, when six people were executed as heretics. Thereafter the pace of killing picked up, and in February 1482, to cope with the increasing workload, a further seven inquisitors—including Torquemada—were appointed by the pope. Within a decade, the hearings of the Inquisition were operating in eight major cities across Spain.

Inquisitors would arrive in a town and convene a special Mass, which all were obliged to attend. There they would preach a sermon before calling on those guilty of heresy to come forward and confess. Suspected transgressors were given a period of thirty to forty days to turn themselves in. Those who complied were liable to be “rewarded” with a less severe penalty than those who proved recalcitrant. Nevertheless, all who did confess were also required to
identify other heretics who had not complied. Denunciation was thus as integral to the working of the inquisition as confession. In consequence, the inquisition quickly became an opportunity to settle old scores.

The accused were arrested and thrown into prison, and their property, and that of their family, was confiscated. Interrogation then followed, the inquisitors being instructed to apply torture according to their “conscience and will.” A suspect could have water forced down his throat, be stretched on the rack, or hung with his hands tied behind his back—whatever was deemed necessary to extract a confession. Many were maimed in the process; countless others died. And for those who broke under the pressure, there was only one outcome: death by burning. Before being burned alive at the euphemistically named
auto da fé
(act of faith), the victim had two choices. They could repent and kiss the cross, or remain defiant. In the former case they were granted the mercy of being garroted prior to the flames being lit; otherwise, a protracted and hideously painful death was sure to follow.

In 1482 Torquemada was appointed as one of the inquisitors, and shortly afterward he became inquisitor general, the most senior position in the entire organization.

Torquemada was now almost as powerful as Ferdinand and Isabella themselves; certainly, he was more feared than the temporal authorities. Under his guiding hand the inquisition hit new heights of activity. In 1484 he oversaw the proclamation of twenty-eight articles, listing the sins that the inquisition was attempting to expose and purge. They ranged from apostasy and blasphemy to sodomy and sorcery—though many were focused on identifying and exposing Jews. During the course of their investigations, inquisitors were empowered to use all means necessary to discover the truth—a ruling that
de facto
legitimized torture in pursuit of a forced confession.

The result was a policy of violent persecution. In the month
of February 1484 alone, thirty people in the city of Ciudad Real were found guilty of an assortment of “crimes” and burned alive. Between 1485 and 1501, 250 were burned in Toledo; and on one occasion in 1492, in Torquemada's home town of Valladolid, thirty-two people were burned in one inferno.

Arguing that the soul of Spain was in jeopardy, Torquemada declared that the Jews, in particular, were a mortal threat, and in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella decreed that all Jews who had not accepted the truth of the Christian revelation were to be expelled from Spain. Some 30–80,000 left the country—many of them rescued and given sanctuary by the tolerant Islamic Ottomans in Istanbul, Izmir and Salonika (modern Thessaloniki in Greece).

Torquemada still did not deem his work done, and even refused the bishopric of Seville to continue in his role. In so doing, he found that the rewards of his exertions were not solely spiritual; indeed, he amassed a large personal fortune from the confiscated wealth of those whom the Inquisition had found guilty of heresy. Wherever he traveled, he was accompanied by fifty mounted men and 250 foot soldiers, a force that reflected his growing unpopularity, but which also added to the terror and awe inspired when he arrived in a new town to root out its heretics.

Ultimately, only death removed Torquemada from office. Over the previous two decades his relentless zeal had led to as many as two thousand people meeting a hideous end in the flames. Torquemada will forever be remembered as religious bigotry personified—the living incarnation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor who seeks to burn Jesus Christ himself for the sake of his beloved Catholic Church, but who ends up in a spiritual abyss.

1431–76

His way of life was as evil as his name
.
Late-15th-century Russian manuscript

Vlad III,
hospodar
(prince) of Wallachia, claimed he was saving his Christian people from the Muslim Ottomans, but he was more interested in wielding his personal power in the treacherous intrigues of local dynastic and imperial politics. He was a degenerate, murderous sadist who displayed a cruelty so savage that he inspired the legend of Dracula. Yet the story of Dracula is tame compared with the reality. Murdering tens of thousands of people—from crippled peasants and vagrants to nobles and foreign ambassadors—he became known as the Impaler Prince: his favorite method of execution was to impale his victims on sharpened wooden stakes, oiled at the tip and inserted into their intestines. Vlad was most likely born in a military fortress, the citadel of Sighisoara, Transylvania (part of today's Romania) in 1431. His family name was Dracul, meaning dragon, handed down through his father, who had been a member of the Order of the Dragon—which Vlad also joined at the age of five—a secret organization created by the holy Roman emperor to uphold Christianity and resist Muslim Ottoman incursions into Europe. His mother was a Moldavian princess and his father Vlad II, a former prince of Wallachia, exiled in Transylvania.

When Vlad was a child, his father, under threat of attack from the Ottoman sultan, had been forced to reassure the Turks of his
obedience by sending two of his sons, including Vlad, into Ottoman custody in 1444. The experience, lasting four years, in which he was beaten and whipped for his insolence and fiery character, left Vlad with a hatred of the Turks.

Wallachia (also in modern-day Romania) was not a traditional hereditary monarchy and although Vlad had a claim to the throne, his father's exile put him in a weak position. His elder brother, Mircea II, ruled briefly in 1442, but was forced into hiding the following year and eventually captured by his enemies in 1447, who burned out his eyes and buried him alive. Wallachian politics were duplicitous and brutal: Vlad's young brother, Radu the Handsome, later enlisted the help of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II to oust his brother.

In 1447, the same year Mircea was killed, boyars (regional noble families) loyal to John Hunyadi, the White Knight of Hungary, also captured and murdered Vlad's father, claiming he was too dependent on the Ottomans. The Ottomans invaded shortly afterward to assert their control in the region and installed the seventeen-year-old Vlad as a puppet prince in 1448, only for Hunyadi to intervene again and force him to flee to Moldavia. Vlad subsequently took the bold step of traveling to Hungary—with which Wallachia had repeatedly been at war. Impressing Hunyadi with his anti-Ottoman credentials, he eventually became Hungary's preferred candidate for the Wallachian throne.

In 1456, as the Hungarians attacked the Ottomans in Serbia, Vlad used the opportunity to invade and take control of Wallachia, killing his rival Vladislav II from the Danesti clan, and taking the throne back for the Draculs. On Easter Sunday, he invited the leading boyars to a banquet, killing the oldest and enslaving those who were still young enough to work. Many died working on new fortifications for Vlad's castles in conditions so severe that their noble finery disintegrated, leaving them naked.

Establishing Tirgoviste as his capital, Vlad was determined to make Wallachia a great kingdom, with a prosperous and healthy people. To him, however, that meant eradicating the nobility, as well as anyone else perceived as a drain on the country's resources. Among his targets were the poorest and most vulnerable—vagrants, the disabled and the mentally ill—thousands of whom he invited to a feast in Tirgoviste, only to lock them in the hall and burn them alive as soon as they had finished eating. (It was dangerous to accept an invitation from Vlad, but even more dangerous to refuse.) Vlad also persecuted women accused of immoral acts such as adultery—their breasts were cut off, and they were then skinned or boiled alive, and their bodies put on public display. German merchants living in Transylvania, whom he regarded as foreign parasites, were also the object of the wrath of Vlad. On St. Bartholomew's Day, 1459 he ordered the execution of 30,000 merchants and boyars from the city of Brasov—10,000 more followed in Sibiu the following year.

Usually his victims were impaled. Death was excruciating and could take hours, as the stake eventually made its way through the guts and out of the mouth. Executing thousands at the same time, he would organize the stakes in concentric circles round his castles, and forbid anyone to remove the victim, often dining in the presence of rotting flesh—the higher the rank, the longer the stake reserved for them. Other methods of execution included skinning and boiling, and he once hammered nails into the heads of foreign ambassadors who refused to remove their hats at his court. Such was his bloodthirstiness that it was also rumored he drank the blood of his victims and feasted on their flesh.

In the winter of 1461–2, he crossed the Danube and pillaged the Ottoman-controlled area between Serbia and the Black Sea, killing 20,000 people. As Sultan Mehmet II gathered tens of thousands of troops for a revenge mission, they arrived on the banks of the Danube to see 20,000 Turkish prisoners whom Vlad's armies
had impaled, creating a forest of bodies on stakes.

Despite a daring attempt to infiltrate the enemy camp in disguise and kill the sultan, Vlad was overwhelmed by the scale of the Ottoman onslaught. As the Turks surrounded his castle in 1462, his wife jumped from the window, while Vlad fled, and the Ottomans installed his younger brother Radu on the throne. Captured by the Hungarians, Vlad spent the next ten years in custody, dreaming of regaining his throne while impaling mice and birds on miniature stakes. Somehow, he secured the backing of the Hungarians again, remarrying into the Hungarian royal family and winning support for his invasion of Wallachia in 1476, when he briefly deposed the new ruler, Basarab the Elder of the Danesti. Once again, however, he was no match for the invading Ottomans, and he was killed near Bucharest, perhaps even by his own men, his head removed and sent back to Constantinople, where it was displayed on a stick.