Finally, however, some Inquisitors, realizing the emptiness of this formula, dispensed with it altogether, and boldly assumed the full responsibility for their sentences. They deemed the rôle of the State so unimportant in the execration of heretics, that they did not even mention it. The Inquisition is the real judge; it lights the fires. "All whom we cause to be burned," says the famous Dominican Sprenger in his _Malleus Maleficarum_.[1] Although not intended as an accurate statement of fact,[2] it indicates pretty well the current idea regarding the share of the ecclesiastical tribunals in the punishment of heretics.
[1] _Malleus maleficarum maleficas et earum hæresim framea conterens_, auct. Jacobo Sprengero, Lugduni, 1660, pars ii, quæst. i, cap. ii, p. 108, col. 2.
[2] We must interpret in the same sense the decree of the Council of Constance pronouncing the penalty of the stake against the followers of John Huss, John Wyclif and Jerome of Prague. Session xxiv, no. 23, Harduin, _Concilia_, vol. viii, col. 896 et seq. The Council here indicates only the usual punishment for the relapsed, without really decreeing it.
It is evident that the theologians and canonists were simply apologists for the Inquisition, and interpreters of its laws. As a rule, they tried, like St. Raymond Pennafort and St. Thomas, to defend the decrees of the Popes. We cannot say that they succeeded in their task. Some by their untimely zeal rather compromised the cause they endeavored to defend. Others, going counter to the canon law, drew conclusions from it that the Popes never dreamed of, and in this way made the procedure of the Inquisition, already severe enough, still more severe, especially in the use of torture.
We do not intend to relate every detail of the Inquisition's action. A brief outline, a sort of bird's-eye view, will suffice.
Its field, although very extensive, did not comprise the whole of Christendom, nor even all the Latin countries. The Scandinavian kingdoms escaped it almost entirely; England experienced it only once in the case of the Templars; Castile and Portugal knew nothing of it before the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was almost unknown in France--at least as an established institution--except in the South, in what was called the county of Toulouse, and later on in Languedoc.