What the Renaissance teaches us about torture.

Just over half a century ago, the great historian J.H. Hexter set out to teach the world a modest lesson. In an essay titled "The Historian and his Day," he used the example of his own life to refute the claim--a common one in his era and ours--that historians, caught up in the passions and controversies of their own time, cannot view the past objectively. In fact, he explained, he usually worked in the opposite way. Hexter spent the bulk of his time not in the present but in the past, or at least in its remains: the records of earlier centuries that his job at Queens College required him to interpret. When called on to understand a contemporary political or social problem, he responded by marshalling his much deeper expertise about history: "Instead of the passions, prejudices, assumptions and prepossessions, the events, crises and tensions of the present dominating my view of the past, it is the other way about. ... I make sense of present-day welfare-state policy by thinking of it in connection with the 'commonwealth' policies of Elizabeth."In recent weeks, I have found myself appreciating Hexter's work even more than when I first read it. Like him, I am a historian. Like him, I spend most of my time in the years between 1400 and 1700. And, like him, I have found that, if you devote yourself to reading early modern sources, you see a surprising number of things that illuminate our current situation. Specifically, I have been working on a book about magic in Renaissance Europe. The subject could hardly seem more academic. And, yet, it has made me confront a body of fact and experience that speaks directly to the present. Magic was prestigious in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it was also dangerous. Many of those who practiced it borrowed terms, ideas, and amulets from the Jews--a people often seen as particularly magical and suspect. Magicians claimed that they practiced a high, learned art, one that drew only on the natural powers of stones and plants and planets. But they were constantly mistaken for witches: the men and women, widely thought to be ubiquitous, who supposedly sold their souls to the devil in return for power to do harm. More than one magician, finally, convinced himself that he possessed substantial powers: powers so vast that he could challenge the church in the name of his own ability to bring about miracles more astounding than those of Jesus. In exploring these risky beliefs and their consequences, I found myself abruptly transported, again and again, from the distant past to the present. As I followed the fates of Jews and magicians, I encountered a body of information about torture and its uses--information that was put down on the spot by sworn notaries and witnessed by others in an age when those who ordered torture did not pretend otherwise, much less claim that they could annul the practice by calling it "enhanced interrogation." The historians who assembled this evidence did so in order to understand the past. Nonetheless, they have helped me see the present in perspective. Modern scholars have long been both fascinated and horrified by torture. The pioneering medievalist Henry Charles Lea--who, in the nineteenth century, penned the first systematic, documented history of the Inquisition--wrote at length about the ways in which inquisitors had used torture to make prisoners confess heretical views and actions. An enlightened man writing in what he saw as an enlightened age, he looked back in horror at these barbarous practices and condemned them with a clarity that anyone reading public statements now must envy. Lea's successors--the British social historian Henry Kamen, the Yale legal historian John Langbein, and the University of Pennsylvania medievalist Edward Peters, among others--have modified his account in many ways. They have shown that the Inquisition was both fairer and less brutal than he held, and they have explained the abolition of judicial torture as the result not of the new critical spirit of the Enlightenment but of changes in the law of proof. (That is, as a range of penalties lighter than execution became available, judges no longer felt they had to have a confession in order to convict a subject--the principle that had necessitated the widespread use of torture in the first place.) Yet scholars continue to admire Lea's immense learning, and they still cite his accounts of the actual instruments of torture and the ways in which these were applied. Most recently, historians of a new generation have plumbed the archives, where they have discovered a much wider range of documents than Lea knew, including many transcripts of actual trials. They have taught us much about the effects of torture as inflicted by professionals who were trained to use pain as a tool of inquiry. And their research makes clear that torture--as inflicted in the past--was anything but a sure way of arriving at the truth. In 1475, three Jewish households in Trent, a city in northern Italy, were accused of murdering a Christian boy named Simon. Supposedly, they needed his blood to carry out the Passover ritual. The "blood libel"--the theory that Jews drank Christian blood or used it in the making of matzo--was already well- established by this time, and a number of Jews had been executed for these crimes since the twelfth century. But in the late fifteenth century, the accusations turned, as Ronnie Po-chia Hsia has shown in two brilliant books, into something more pervasive: a "discourse of ritual murder," given credence, especially in nearby Germany, by illustrated pamphlets and songs that retold the stories in dramatic, accessible ways, and reinforced by a series of trials and executions. The trial at Trent not only served as a model but also directly gave rise to persecutions elsewhere, as desperate Jewish defendants implicated their coreligionists in other cities. The surviving records of the Trent trial make clear why Jews confessed that they committed these terrible crimes. Once the Jews had been accused and imprisoned, they were systematically interrogated. The podesta, a city official, asked questions; the accused answered. Like other authorities in the areas governed by Roman law--which treated external evidence as mere clues, not proof of guilt--they needed to win confessions from their suspects in order to convict them. As soon as the answers seemed evasive or stubborn, the torturer tied the accused person's arms behind his or her back. Using a pulley, he would lift the defendant, agonizingly, toward the ceiling. Then, at the podesta's orders, the torturer would make the accused "jump" or "dance"--pulling him or her up, then releasing the rope, dislocating limbs and inflicting stunning pain. Other, complementary ways of making the Jews speak included placing onions and sulfur under their noses, which seems to have had a powerful effect, and holding hot eggs under their arms. But the pulley system, known as a strappado, was enough for most. To read the records of the Trent Inquisition, which Hsia and the Italian scholars Diego Quaglioni and Anna Esposito have studied in detail, is to listen to transactions that shake the mind. The transcripts of the interrogations, made by secretaries appointed by the court, are often cast in disturbingly flat prose and in the third person--but leave no doubt as to the meaning or tone of the original remarks. Early in the process, you hear suspects desperately trying to maintain their innocence. For instance, Samuel, the head of one of the Jewish families, asks the podesta--while dangling in the air--where he had learned that Jews needed Christian blood. The podesta answers that he had learned this from the Jews and demanded "the truth, the truth!" According to the record of the proceedings, Samuel "answered: He has said it and they are torturing him unjustly. At that, it was ordered to make him jump two or three arm's length. So there he hung and said: 'God the Helper and Truth help me.' And after he had been hanging for two thirds of an hour, it was ordered to let him down and return him to prison." Far worse, you can also hear the Jews, once broken, trying to confess. They strive desperately to find the right words, the ones that would confirm the podesta's suspicions and corroborate the forced confessions of their peers without implicating anyone who was not already a suspect. Samuel confessed only after another strappado session in which he had sulfur held under his nose and beams tied to his legs. Even then, he named only one other Jew. It took still more time with the strappado--as well as a drink of holy water and hot eggs under his armpits--to make him break down completely and invent the Jewish plot to commit ritual murder that the podesta wanted, naming names and giving details. Once or twice, through the constricted, formulaic language of the trial record, you can even hear a suspect speaking back, defying his torturers: Podesta: What did he think of the Christian faith? Israel: He wants to say the truth. He does not believe in anything of the Christian faith. ... It is a joke to say that God came down from heaven to earth, walked around and lived among men. He believes only in God and nothing more. He believes also that the Jewish faith is right and holy. Israel's savage irony reflected his rage and despair. So did his eventual confession that Jews really ate Christian blood. Indeed, hardly anyone resisted for long--though two of the women, as Hsia shows, made subtle efforts to exonerate accused Jewish children. Once they broke, the witnesses filled in every detail the Christians wanted. They implicated loved ones, friends, and members of other Jewish communities. They died, hideously. And they became the villains of Christian images and songs. Amazingly, some still maintain that their confessions were valid. There are websites insisting that Simon of Trent is really a saint, even though the Catholic Church, after inquiry, removed him from the calendar of saints in 1965. Recently, the amateur merchants of holy filth were joined by a professional scholar. Israeli historian Ariel Toaff argued in a strange book, steeped in ambiguities, that the confessions might have contained some truth: that the tortured Jews really did, sometimes, use Christian blood for ritual ends. But this flies in the face of everything we know about normal Jewish life--notably, the simple fact that eating blood is forbidden by Jewish law. It also ignores-- as the websites do--that the Jews were telling their Christian tormenters exactly what they wanted to hear. As the medievalist David Abulafia explained in the Times Literary Supplement, "Toaff's handling of the evidence is deeply flawed; he takes extorted statements at face value." Nowadays, no competent historian trusts confessions wrung by torture that confirm the strange and fixed ideas of the torturer. Carlo Ginzburg, one of the most gifted explorers of Inquisition records, has taught us that they deserve credence precisely when the witnesses make statements that surprise those who are questioning them, not when they confirm prejudices that had been stirred up by friars committed to denouncing Jews and further exacerbated by tensions between neighbors. The conclusion--drawn by the vast majority of modern scholars who have studied this material--is that torture could compel ordinary Jews, law-abiding craftsmen and housewives and teenagers, to confess fantastic crimes. Torn from their normal lives, imprisoned, subjected to terrifying, intense pain, most of them would, quite simply, say anything. Only the bravest held up for long--and, with just a few exceptions, even they eventually broke as well. Jews did not suffer alone. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, witches joined them as victims of torture, and their experiences are even more revealing for the present. Drawing on the detailed prescriptions of the Malleus Maleficarum, a guide to the practices of witches that reads like a strange amalgam of Monty Python and Mein Kampf, torturers treated the men and women who had been accused of giving themselves to the devil exactly as their counterparts at Trent and elsewhere had treated Jews. Again, the strappado was applied. And, again, the accused confessed--confessed doing things that violated the laws not only of Moses, but of nature itself. Witch after witch admitted having flown to a Sabbat--a meeting where witches supposedly worshipped the devil--as well as having destroyed crops, killed babies, and made men impotent by giving them the illusion that they had lost their penises. Most of the accusers probably believed their charges, which had the support of learned authority. Some of the accused witches, as the Oxford historian Lyndal Roper has argued, also internalized the accusations as they were tortured and confessed--actually accepting the view that they were guilty. But they weren't. Whenever a rare skeptic materialized and tried to verify the charges, they proved false. In 1612, Alonso de Salazar Frias had doctors and pharmacists examine 22 jars of supposed "potions, powders and ointments." Not only did they fail to make anyone ill or enable anyone to fly, they proved entirely harmless-- even when a woman thought to be a witch had to eat one of them in public. Evidently, Salazar reported, "they were only made by people who were forced to fabricate these things"--as others fabricated their confessions, to satisfy their inquisitors. Unsurprisingly, in England, where torture was not normally used, witches were far less likely to confess to the range of physically impossible crimes that they admitted to on the Continent. Not everyone who was tortured, however, was innocent. The Dominican Tommaso Campanella, a great utopian thinker and a serious philosopher, was also a terrorist, to use a modern term that more or less fits his deeds. He walked the back roads of his native Calabria, where he urged the immiserated peasants to rise up against the tyranny of state and church. He told them that Jesus had not been the son of God but a magician, and he claimed that he himself had even greater magical powers. Thanks to the miracles he would work, and to an alliance he had made with the Turks, he hoped to throw off the yoke of Christianity and usher in a new "Age of the Spirit." Captured by the authorities, Campanella was subjected to the strappado for 36 hours without a break. The records of his interrogation, like those of the Jews of Trent, inspire horror--horror at the ability of the inquisitors to destroy their own souls as they expertly labored to save Campanella's by making him confess. But he resisted, feigning insanity, and kept up the pretense so consistently that he could not be broken or executed. Instead, he was imprisoned for many years--surviving to eventually advise Pope Urban VIII on how to avoid the evil astrological effects of an eclipse. Campanella himself described his refusal to confess as a miracle--a violation of the laws of nature. Yet, in this instance, the accusations were true. Campanella's story makes clear that someone who opposed the existing order from conviction could stand up to unimaginable pain without breaking. This, too, has not ceased to be the case. Living mostly in the Renaissance, I have learned something that matters from my colleagues. Torture does not obtain truth. Applied with leading questions, it can make most ordinary people--as it would certainly make me--say anything their examiners want, if they can only work out what that is. Applied to the extraordinarily defiant, it may not work at all. In either case, it is not an instrument that a decent society has any business applying. Anyone who claims otherwise abandons the Enlightenment ideals that brought our country into being- -and stands with the torturers of Trent against the Jews who did their best to speak the truth.

By Anthony Grafton