The broth retort against the inquisitor

The broth retort against the inquisitor is a comic tale in which a layman turns the inquisitor’s own religious language against him. A prosecution begun to extract money over a thoughtless remark ends when the accused links a Gospel promise of abundance to the great cauldrons of broth routinely removed from the friars’ table. The joke does more than secure his release: it exposes the gap between the inquisitor’s display of piety and the appetite and avarice his conduct betrays.

Setting and Accusation

Emilia introduces the episode as a recent occurrence in her city. Its central opponent is a friar of the Friars Minor who serves as an inquisitor of heretical pravity. Though he works to appear devout and tender toward the Christian religion, the tale says he is as diligent in discovering who has a full purse as in investigating who lacks the Faith. His attention to a wealthy target is therefore presented from the outset as financial opportunism rather than a sincere effort to correct belief.

The target is a good, simple man, richer in money than in wit. Speaking among friends, and perhaps heated by wine or high spirits, he says that his wine is so good that Christ himself might drink it. The remark is reported to the inquisitor, who promptly arrives with legal force and brings a serious case against him. Asked whether he said it, the man admits that he did and explains the circumstances. The inquisitor, however, treats the boast as though it were a grave assault on Christ, threatening that the man has merited the fire. The scale of the threat makes the prosecution seem less like careful examination of belief than a performance designed to frighten its defendant.

The Price of Mercy

The inquisitor’s menace succeeds in terrifying the man. Through intermediaries, the accused pays to secure merciful treatment, and the narrative renders the bribe through a running joke about ointment: money becomes the salve for the clergy’s pestilential covetousness, especially that of the Friars Minor, who supposedly dare not touch it. The mock remedy makes the corruption legible without disguising the material exchange. The inquisitor threatens a severe penalty; payment changes what punishment is imposed.

After receiving the money, the inquisitor commutes the threatened fire to the wearing of a cross, yellow upon black, as though the penitent were setting out on a crusade overseas. The public-looking sign of penance thus follows a private payment. He also keeps the man near him for several days: each morning the man must hear Mass at Santa Croce, then present himself at the inquisitor’s dinner, after which he is free to spend the rest of the day as he pleases. The prescribed routine brings him repeatedly into view of the very household whose conduct will supply the material for his answer.

The Gospel Turned Back

At Mass one morning, the man hears a Gospel verse promising that each person will receive an hundredfold and possess eternal life. He remembers it and, when he reports for dinner, tells the inquisitor that the words have filled him with compassion for the friar and his brethren because of the danger awaiting them in the next life. Asked what he means, he explains that he has seen enormous cauldrons of broth taken away each day from before the inquisitor and the other friars as surplus and distributed to poor people. If each cauldron earns an hundredfold in the world to come, he reasons, the friars will have so much broth that they will all be drowned in it.

The retort works by taking the inquisitor’s own scriptural assurance literally and applying it to a visible daily practice. The man does not dispute the Gospel; he says he believes what he heard. Instead, he makes the verse’s promise expose the friars’ appetite: what they treat as excess at their table becomes, under the promise of multiplication, a flood that threatens them. The image of drowning in broth replaces the inquisitor’s threatened fire with a comic consequence drawn from the convent’s own meals. His compassion is pointedly double-edged: it sounds pious while making the friars’ gluttony the subject of judgment.

Exposure and Release

Everyone at the inquisitor’s table laughs. The inquisitor recognizes the rebuke to his and his brethren’s broth-swilling hypocrisy and grows furious. Yet he does not bring another prosecution. The tale says he has already incurred blame for what he has done; despite his anger, he orders the man to do as he pleases and never appear before him again. The layman’s wit therefore wins a practical release, while the laughter makes the criticism audible to the company gathered at the table.

Emilia frames the episode as a layman’s biting but laughable reproof of a covetous monk. Its reversal is precise: the inquisitor begins with the power to define an offense and threaten punishment, but the man uses a verse heard at Mass to make the friars’ everyday conduct answerable to a moral standard. The scene does not show the inquisitor confessing or reforming; it shows his authority checked, for the moment, by a joke that the company understands. Religious language remains central, but it is no longer his instrument alone: the accused turns it into a measure of the greed and gluttony that the inquisitor’s show of holiness was meant to conceal.