Compliments to Nanu-Nebt for her link on the Inquisition. Given that most of what is popularly 'known' about this much misunderstood institution is based more on Hollywood and anti-Catholic propaganda than fact, that site was accurate, fair and balanced and addressed many of the silly myths. Most of what you can find on the Inquisition on the web and elsewhere ranges from nasty and error-filled bile to total honking nonsense.

But regarding the question about why the Inquisition exhibited such 'intolerance' - that's a bit like blaming medieval people for not driving cars. 'Tolerance', pluralism, mutual respect for contrary ideas etc are actually modern ideas; very modern ideas in fact. As recently as 150 years ago a Briton could land a hefty jail term for 'blasphemy' and anyone who wasn't an Anglican Christian could forget about a career in most professional areas of endeavour.

To blame medieval people living in the medieval world with medieval ideas and a medieval mindset for not thinking like us doesn't make a lot of sense. It's a bit like going to a highland New Guinean village and giving a warrior who has undertaken a revenge killing - a just, moral and noble thing in his culture - for not phoning the police rather than taking the law into his own hands. Killing someone who has injured your family may be immoral to us. Not doing so is immoral to him.

Our modern ideas that all beliefs are to be respected, that the repression of one is a threat to them all (including our own), that these things are entirely personal and not the concern of the state etc - all things which seem self-evident to us - took centuries to develop. In the Middle Ages they would be considered plain weird or totally incomprehensible.

For the overwhelming majority of medieval people, there was ONE way to see the world and that was through the teachings and theology of the Catholic Church. This was not, as the Hollywood/anti-clerical myths imply, because the wicked evil Church kept everyone brainwashed or suppressed out of fear. It was because the overwhelming majority of Europeans at the time were Catholics. Which isn't surprising - they were hardly going to be Shintos or Buddhists.

There were minorities who practiced other religions, particularly Jews. At some times and in some places they lived fairly harmoniously with their Catholic neighbours. In others, they were mistrusted, misunderstood, oppressed or victimised, much like minorities within a dominant religious culture today (try being a Sikh or Muslim in the Bible Belt today, for example).

There were major exceptions to this rule, the mixed Jewish/Christian/Muslim cultures of Spain for example. But, on the whole, the Catholic Christian world view held sway because virtually everyone was a Catholic Christian.

In a world where this was the overwhelmingly dominant world view, minorities which seemed to threaten it were regarded not just with suspicion but, often, with panic and hysteria. Far from the Inquisition/s being simply a tool to keep such ideas from bubbling to the surface, it was actually established to keep heretics, suspected heretics and people accused of heresy from being lynched by mobs. Heretics then were about as popular as pedophiles today. The Church didn't like the idea of mobs deciding someone was a heretic on mere suspicion. The Inquisition was a learned and actually highly meticulous instrument to sift through evidence of supposed heresy and ensure, through expert theological inquiry, who was and wasn't a heretic.

It's also not true that there was no separation of Church and State. They didn't have *our* sharp distinctions and separations between the two (because they didn't have our religious diversity to begin with), but the Middle Ages was marked by long struggles between the Church and the secular authorities: largely ones where the Church was trying to protect itself from domination from secular authority, not the other way around.

The Inquisition was also not about gaining property and possessions. This practice corrupted the processes of the (much later) Witch Craze period, but that was in the Renaissance and Early Modern Periods, not the Middle Ages and it was a largely Protestant affair. The Medieval Inquisition had little to no interest in 'witches'.

And it's also not true that there was no free inquiry or speculation about theological matters. Medieval scholars excelled at taking their beliefs back to first principles and questioning fundamentals like the Creation and the existence of God from a purely rational perspective. It was the ructions and insecurities caused by the Reformation which increased the centralised doctrine and authoritarian aspects of the churches (Catholic and Protestant), but medieval theology was distinctive in that it believed in the rational basis of these questions.

Indeed, as Edward Grant argues in his excellent God and Reason in the Middle Ages and other recent works, it was this belief which laid the foundations of modern scientific thinking.

I am currently working on a website which paints a more accurate picture of these issues and details why the anti-Medieval myths of an oppressive 'Dark Age' is a simplistic and erroneous distortion of the facts. I'll make sure I post a link here when it is ready. Cheers,

Thiu