Europe's inner demons

The context that Lamothe-Langon gives to the confessions — and which Hansen omitted to examine — shows them to be spurious. For in Lamothe-Langon’s history the confessions are presented as part of a sermon preached by the inquisitor Pierre Guidonis in the cloisters of St Stephen’s at Toulouse, on an occasion when he pronounced judgement on no less than sixty-three persons accused of heresy or witchcraft. Lamothe-Langon lists by name a number of personages, ecclesiastical and lay, who are supposed to have been present on that solemn occasion; they include six “capitouls”, or members of the town council of Toulouse. But whereas the six capitouls named really were in office in 1335, the inquisitor was not. This is not to deny that Pierre Guidonis existed — he was in fact the nephew of the famous inquisitor Bernard Guidonis (or Gui). But in 1335 Pierre Guidonis was not an inquisitor at all but was the prior of the Dominican convent at Carcassonne. If he was ever inquisitor at Toulouse at all, it can only have been in 1344; and even this is more than doubtful.⁽¹⁵⁾ Nor can the mistake be due to a mere slip of the pen — by 1344 not one of the capitouls listed by Lamothe-Langon was still in office.

⁽¹⁶⁾ It is quite impossible that any contemporary source should have listed these men as being present at an inquisitorial judgement by Pierre Guidonis. From this it follows that the document which Lamothe-Langon claims as his source never existed; and the confessions of Anne-Marie de Georgel and Catherine, wife of Pierre Delort, evaporate into thin air.

Much else evaporates with them. According to Lamothe-Langon, every single one of the sixty-three persons judged on that occasion was found guilty; eight being executed, eleven sentenced to life imprisonment and the rest to twenty years’ imprisonment. Elsewhere he states: “Between 1320 and 1350 the inquisition of Carcassonne passed more than 400 sentences for the single offence of magic; more than 200 of these entailed the death penalty. The inquisition of Toulouse was still more severe: 600 persons appeared before it; and two-thirds of these were executed by the secular arm. These abominable executions continued during the last part of the century.”⁽¹⁷⁾

And in fact the trials listed extend right down to the 1480s. These statements provide the sole basis for the belief, which has by now become a commonplace, that the Inquisition conducted a massive witch-hunt in the south of France, reaching its height during the fourteenth century and continuing at intervals until late in the fifteenth.

We shall be considering in a later chapter what developments in the fourteenth century really did prepare the way for the great witch-hunt, and what share the Inquisition really did have in those developments. Here there is no need to go into detail — a few simple facts are enough to show that the witch-hunts listed by Lamothe-Langon cannot possibly have taken place.

It is true that in 1320 the inquisitors of Toulouse and Carcassonne were empowered by Pope John XXII to proceed against practitioners of certain types of magic.⁽¹⁸⁾ But neither the pope nor the inquisitors were thinking of anything remotely resembling Lamothe-Langon’s witches. The papal instructions contain not a word about assemblies of Devil-worshipping women; and when Bernard Guidonis produced his classic manual for inquisitors, on the basis of his experience as inquisitor for the whole area between Toulouse, Albi and Carcassonne from 1307 to 1324, he too had nothing to say about such matters.⁽¹⁹⁾

Indeed, the inquisitors showed little enthusiasm for carrying out even the limited instructions given by the pope. In 1329 the inquisitor of Carcassonne did sentence a monk to life imprisonment for practising love-magic; but that is the only trial of an alleged magician that is known, on solid historical grounds, to have been conducted by any one of the many inquisitors of Carcassonne or of Toulouse during the fourteenth century.

In 1330 the pope in effect withdrew the authorization. He issued instructions that any sorcery trials then being conducted in France, whether by inquisitors or by bishops, should be completed as quickly as possible; that the documents should be sent to him; and that no more cases should be undertaken.⁽²⁰⁾ Thereafter such trials were carried out not by inquisitors but by commissions specially appointed by the pope. During the period 1330-50, when according to Lamothe-Langon the inquisitors of Toulouse and Carcassonne were burning witches by the hundred, they were in reality confined to their traditional role of pursuing heretics.

There is no doubt about it: there never was an inquisitorial witch-hunt at Toulouse or at Carcassonne. Not only the famous trial of 1335 but the whole saga was invented by Lamothe-Langon. We are faced with a spectacular historical hoax.

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