Saint Dominic and the Albigensians

Berruguete painted this panel for the upper cloister of the Dominican monastery of Santo Tomas in Avila, at some point between 1491 and 1499. The prior of that house was Tomas de Torquemada, the first Inquisitor General of Castile, and the altarpiece the panel belonged to ran through the life of Saint Dominic, the friar who had founded the order nearly 300 years earlier.

The scene is the ordeal by fire. Dominic and a spokesman for the Albigensians, a movement in southern France that Rome condemned as heretical, each put their writings into the flames. The heretics' book burns. His is thrown clear, and a miracle settles the question that the arguing had not.

Dominican writers of the 13th century tell the episode and place it around 1207, two years before crusading armies reached Languedoc. After Beziers fell in July 1209 the papal legate wrote to Rome that almost 20,000 people had been killed in the town, a number historians read as inflated. How far Dominic himself took part in that campaign is still argued over. He died in 1221, ten years before the papal Inquisition his order would largely staff was set up.

A number in red is written in the lower left corner of the panel, an old inventory mark and not a date.