Late Medieval Inquisitors and the Framing of Eastern Christianity: Procedures, Consultations and Treatises

Although the confessional control of Eastern Christianity was not an ordinary concern of late-medieval inquisitors, scattered evidence attests their implication in cases concerning Oriental communities. These include, for example, the attribution by the pope of inquisitorial privileges to bishops or mendicant friars active in the Near East; or the undertaking of judicial procedures concerning Eastern converts in the West. While such cases are rare, inquisitorial attitudes towards the Oriental Christianity are best documented by the theological and legal reflection displayed in ad hoc inquiries and anti-heresy treatises. Occasionally, theologians, clerics, and inquisitors offered their expertise in the evaluation Oriental Christians’ errors. This is the case of their implication in a vast inquiry about the Armenians, held at the Avignon court per viam inquisitionis iudicialis et sollemnis. Most notably, several summae compiled from to the thirteenth to the fifteenth century engage with Greeks and Armenians, and to a lesser degree to Jacobites, Nestorians, and Georgians, providing descriptions and refutations of their doctrines, liturgy, sacraments administration, fasting costumes, and so on. Relying upon a blurred distinction between heresy and schism, these works are usually aimed at the construction of a universal knowledge of heresy, thus placing Eastern Christians within comprehensive inventories of all heresies, eastern and western, past and present. The account of the Christian East offered in these treatises and its wider contribution to the reconstruction of a distinctive inquisitorial attitude towards Eastern “schismatics” or “heretics” in the late medieval period is at the core of this paper.