Europe's inner demons

The Inquisition was in no sense the spearhead of the campaign against ritual magic. On the contrary, its intervention was small-scale and, one suspects, self-defeating. The very year after the sentencing of Recordi, Pope John withdrew the powers he had granted; all trials then in progress were to be completed as quickly as possible, and the documents forwarded to him. One wonders whether these second thoughts were not prompted by the Recordi case; leading Carmelites are known not to have shared the inquisitor’s views, and they may have induced doubts in the pope himself. However that may be, though magicians continued to be tried under the inquisitorial procedure, it was no longer the Inquisition that tried them. When the next pope, Benedict XII, had to deal with a case of ritual magic he appointed one Guillen Lombardi to carry out the investigation. Lombardi was not a friar, as were the regular inquisitors, but a canon and later provost of a collegiate church. He was also a highly qualified lawyer; and he operated under the eye of the pope himself, for the prisoners were held in the papal prisons.⁽³⁴⁾

It is striking how often, in the first half of the century, the accused were clerics — something which rarely happened in the great witch-hunt itself. The reason is plain: ritual magic could be practised only by those who were learned enough to study the magic books; and in that period such people were still mostly to be found amongst the clergy. Moreover clerics, being professionally concerned with demons, were more apt than laymen to fancy that they could command them. And for the same reason they were apt to be suspected, whether by laymen or by their fellow clerics, even when in reality they were innocent of any dealings with the hosts of hell. That was the state of affairs at the beginning of the fourteenth century, at the time of the trials of Pope Boniface and Bishop Guichard; it still obtained during the spate of trials under John XXII; and clerics continued to figure in the few trials known to have been held under Benedict XII and Clement VI — which brings us to mid-century.

After that date the evidence becomes very fragmentary. It is certain that ritual magic continued to be practised (it was still being practised in the seventeenth century), and also that from time to time action was taken to suppress it and to punish its adepts. On the far side of the Pyrenees the inquisitor-general of Aragon, Nicolas Eymeric, whose writings we have already considered, certainly had some dealings with such people: he mentions the confessions which he extracted from them, and also the Solomonic books which he had seized and burned. In France, on the other hand, the Inquisition seems to have been permanently handicapped by the restrictions imposed by John XXII in 1330. In 1374 the inquisitor of France wrote to Pope Gregory XI complaining that many people, including clerics, were invoking demons; and that when he tried to proceed against them, his jurisdiction was contested. The pope responded by authorizing him to prosecute and punish such offences, but limited the authorization to two years.⁽³⁵⁾

And although the authorization must have been renewed, only a couple more cases of ritual magic are known to have been judged by inquisitors.

In 1380 the provost of Paris, Hugues Aubryot, was summoned before the bishop of Paris and a Dominican inquisitor to answer a number of charges.⁽³⁶⁾

His real offence seems to have been that he had infringed the privileges of the Church by imprisoning clerics, including members of the University; but the charges ranged from heretical talk to partiality towards Jews. Moreover, though Aubryot was in his sixties, he was accused of seducing young girls and married women by means of magic. Although demons are not specifically mentioned, one suspects that they were lurking somewhere in the background of this trial; anyway Aubryot was imprisoned for life. The other case involved one Géraud Cassendi, notary of Bogoyran near Carcassonne.⁽³⁷⁾ He was tried by the Inquisition in 1410, on a charge of invoking demons and seducing women and girls. A witness stated that he had seen Cassendi take some threads of gold from an image of the Virgin and work them into his shirt. Thus protected, he had conjured up demons by reading from a book; whereupon many demons appeared — though they disappeared again when the witness, understandably alarmed, threw a shoe at them. The outcome of this case is unknown.

By the late fourteenth century the secular courts in Paris were extending their powers at the expense of the ecclesiastical tribunals; and in 1390-1 two significant trials were held at the Châtelet. Here the accused were no longer clerics or notables but women of low social status — and nevertheless their confessions were still formulated in terms of ritual magic.⁽³⁸⁾