Let’s say it with a metaphor of our time: Minos, first of all, is a computer. He enters the data and he returns it on screen through a primitive, grotesque graphics card.

For centuries, the tradition of commentaries have made these thresholds of the abyss resonate as something terrible, overwhelming, frightening. But if read well, we realize that we are actually facing a grotesque and comic parody.

We are in the fifth canto of the Inferno; Dante is descending from the first circle, Limbo, down into the second, where the true realm of sin begins. At the entrance to the true Hell stands he: Minos.

“There standeth Minos horribly, and snarls; Examines the transgressions at the entrance; Judges, and sends according as he girds him.” Inferno, Canto V, lines 4–6

And a little further down, at line 18, when this monster sees a living man arrive and interrupts his work for a moment, Dante writes that he does so “leaving the practice of so great an office” (lasciando l’atto di cotanto offizio):

“O thou that to this dolorous hostelry Comest,” said Minos to me, when he saw me, Leaving the practice of so great an office... Inferno, Canto V, lines 16–18

“So great an office.” That sound solemn but, as Maria Soresina argued in her studies on Dante’s Catharism, we are actually facing a parody.

From Regal Legislator to Satan’s Bureaucrat
To understand how violent Dante’s satire is, we must first ask ourselves who Minos was before Dante put a beast’s tail on him.

Reading the Enciclopedia Dantesca, we can discover that Minos was the very symbol of majesty and incorruptible justice.
Minos, the historical and mythical king and legislator of Crete (he gave his name to the Minoan age), had been placed by Homer, Virgil and Statius as supreme judge of the pagan underworld.
In the sixth book of the Aeneid, Virgil portrays him with an almost sacred solemnity:

“Quaesitor Minos urnam movet.” Aeneid, Book VI, line 432

The inquisitor, the magistrate Minos shakes the urn of fates and examines the lives and sins of the dead.
This figure of the judge on the threshold of the underworld is not an isolated invention of the Greeks or Romans; it responds to a universal archetype present in all liturgies of the afterlife, from the Etruscan to the Osirian one.
Even if in our Dantean sources we do not find a direct link with the otherworldly judges of ancient Persia or India, the direct reference is to the psychostasia of ancient Egypt, the tribunal of Osiris and Anubis, where the heart of the deceased was weighed on the scales of justice before the goddess Maat to decide the eternal destiny of the soul.

Even in 1327, a commentator like Guido da Pisa listed Minos with extreme respect among the seven great legislators of antiquity, placing him in line alongside Moses, Phoroneus, Mercury, Solon, Lycurgus, and Numa Pompilius. And when Dante, at line 9, calls him “this discriminator of transgressions” (quel conoscitor de le peccata), as Domenico Consoli explains, he uses a technicality of Roman law: the cognitor, the magistrate who instructs the trial with infallible expertise.

All this immense, venerable, ancient majesty is heavily manipulated by Dante:

“I say, that when the spirit evil-born Cometh before him, wholly it confesses; And this discriminator of transgressions Seeth what place in Hell is meet for it; Girds himself with his tail as many times As grades he wishes it should be thrust down.” Inferno, Canto V, lines 7–12

As all the great commentators of the twentieth century have noted, Dante commits a deliberate outrage: he takes away Minos’s scepter, tears from his hands the Virgilian urn of fates, and degrades him in a demonic and bestial key. He makes him snarl like a rabid dog at the entrance and attaches to his backside a grotesque tail.

As Vittorio Sermonti masterfully wrote, Dante’s Minos is by now stripped of all dignity; he is no longer a king:

“The mythical king of Crete, son of Jupiter and the maiden Europa, who sits in Virgil’s underworld, where he issues unappealable sentences with the solemnity of a chthonic god and the rigor of a judge in a Roman criminal trial, here is reduced to a grim and animalistic official of Satan’s bureaucracy, more a director of a penal colony than a magistrate. With meticulous wrath of vengeance he applies sentences of eternal death imposed by a law whose designs he ignores and which has condemned him too. A daunting task, but let’s face it, devoid of any majesty. Perhaps ‘so great an office’ means nothing more than ‘that whole lot of work.’” Vittorio Sermonti, commentary on Inferno, Canto V

A grim and animalistic official of Satan’s bureaucracy, a dog on a chain, precisely: a computer following a code.

Seven Centuries of Commentaries: The Two Great Questions
To understand how exactly this infernal computer work, let’s reread the verses of the fifth canto:

“Girds himself with his tail as many times As grades he wishes it should be thrust down. Always before him many of them stand; They go by turns each one unto the judgment; They speak, and hear, and then are downward hurled.” Inferno, Canto V, lines 11–15

On these few words, for seven centuries, the commentators of the Comedy have literally divided themselves, bringing out two great questions that are not at all scholarly pedantries, but the key to understanding what Dante is really showing us.

1. How does Minos’s tail move?
If a sinner must descend to the eighth or the ninth circle, does Minos make a single turn of the tail, repeating it eight or nine times in a row, or is it a tail so long and monstrous as to wrap it all together in eight or nine simultaneous coils around his own torso?

Here seven centuries of commentaries split in two. A minority of modern scholars, tried to save a minimum of mechanical plausibility. Nine simultaneous rings around the belly seemed to them an excessive grotesque, almost ridiculous, and therefore they hypothesized a single stroke or turn of the tail repeated rhythmically multiple times.

But the vast majority of ancient and modern interpreters have no doubts: Minos’s tail is disproportionately long and wraps around the body in multiple simultaneous coils. And in the twentieth century, Pietrobono notes an extraordinary visual detail: that tail that wraps the body from bottom to top in so many rings portrays in summary the figure of the infernal abyss.

But above all there is the visual proof of the manuscripts. In the miniatures of the codices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Minos is always painted with a very long tail twisted in multiple simultaneous rings around his torso. And there is the textual proof inside the poem: in the twenty-seventh canto, when an exceptional damned soul, Guido da Montefeltro, recounts his own judgment:

“He bore me unto Minos, who entwined Eight times his tail about his stubborn back, And after he had bitten it in great rage, Said: ‘Of the thievish fire a culprit this.’” Inferno, Canto XXVII, lines 124–127

The verb “to entwine” (attorse) paints a physical, plastic wrapping of tight coils around the back.
Certainly, the early fourteenth-century commentators tried to ennoble this monstrous tail with moral allegory. They said that since the tail is the last part of the animal, it symbolizes the finis vitae, the last instant of human life on which God passes judgment. And others, like Pietro Alighieri, saw in Minos snarling and biting his tail the remorsus conscientiae, the worm of the remorse of conscience spoken of by the prophet Isaiah: Vermis eorum non morietur.

2. What do the damned souls “hear”?
The second great question of the commentaries concerns the verses in which Dante writes that the souls “speak, and hear, and then are downward hurled” (dicono e odono e poi son giù volte). They speak because they confess all their sins. But what do they hear? What do they listen to if Minos issues the sentence making the graphics card of his tail speak?

In the nineteenth century, in 1826, a visionary and heterodox commentator like Gabriele Rossetti went so far as to imagine an exotic track. He thought that Minos’s judgment resembled the silent sentencing system of the mandarins in China, who indicated the number of lashes to inflict on the condemned by showing an equal number of tokens, and he hypothesized that Dante had heard this detail from the tales of Marco Polo or other travelers. Other critics have thought of an entirely inner, spiritual listening: it is the very conscience of the damned that hears its own condemnation within itself.
Other critics, by contrast, have highlighted the extremely rapid stylistic synthesis of those three verbs (speaking, listening, being hurled downward) which conveys the chilling speed of an infernal assembly line.

And yet the most solid response, supported since the fourteenth century by Boccaccio, is another: Minos is not mute at all. In fact, the graphics card of the tail can only indicate the number of the circle, but if a damned soul ends up in the seventh circle, which is divided into three rings, or in the eighth circle, which is divided into ten pouches, or in the ninth, which is divided into four zones, how does he know which subsector he must fall into?
The answer is very simple: Minos must tell him by voice.

We find the irrefutable proof that Minos, besides wrapping the rings of his tail, pronounces the sentence by voice, exactly where the clue of the coils had already led us: in the twenty-seventh canto of the Inferno, in the eighth pouch of the eighth circle, among the counselors of fraud wrapped in the double-pointed flames like Ulysses. It is the episode we have already mentioned about Guido da Montefeltro. And, coincidentally, this episode is about confession, repentance, Franciscan friars and papal deception.

Guido tells Dante that in life he was a cunning military leader, “The deeds I did were not those of a lion, but a fox” (Inferno XXVII, 74–75), and that he decided in his old age to become a Franciscan friar to save his soul. But “the Leader of the modern Pharisees” (Inferno XXVII, 85), that is Pope Boniface VIII, at war against the Colonna family barricaded in the stronghold of Palestrina, calls him back into service and asks him for fraudulent advice to raze the city to the ground. Guido hesitates, and Boniface plays the card of the absolute power of the keys: “Henceforth I thee absolve” (Inferno XXVII, 101), I give you preventive absolution for the sin you are about to commit. Guido yields and whispers the formula of betrayal: “The promise long with the fulfilment short” (Inferno XXVII, 110), that is “promise a lot to the Colonnas, keep very little”.

When Guido dies, Saint Francis himself descends from heaven to take the soul of his friar, but a black cherub stands before him, a logical devil straight out of the theology university, who stops Saint Francis and tells him:

“Take him not; do me no wrong! He must come down among my servitors, Because he gave the fraudulent advice, From which time forth I have been at his hair; For who repents not cannot be absolved, Nor can one both repent and will at once, Because of the contradiction which consents not.” Inferno, Canto XXVII, lines 114–120

One cannot absolve someone who does not repent, and one cannot repent of a sin at the same instant in which one wishes to commit it. The principle of non-contradiction does not allow it. It does not allow it even for a pope. And so the devil drags Guido down to Minos:

“He bore me unto Minos, who entwined Eight times his tail about his stubborn back, And after he had bitten it in great rage, Said: ‘Of the thievish fire a culprit this.’” Inferno, Canto XXVII, lines 124–127

Eight turns of the tail to indicate the eighth circle, and the spoken sentence of the “thievish fire”, the fire that steals and hides the souls, to send him to the eighth pouch.

Maria Soresina’s Intuition: The Parody of the Priest Confessor
Everything around Minos revolves, therefore, around confession and the distorted use of ecclesiastical power. And it is here that Maria Soresina‘s intuition fits in. In her 2009 essay Libertà va cercando. Il catarismo nella Commedia di Dante, the scholar points out that for the Cathar heretics the Catholic sacrament of auricular confession made in the ear of a priest, as well as the idea of a hell administered by a judging clergy, was pure absurdity, a lie to be rejected entirely.

According to Soresina, when Dante in the fifth canto shows us the souls in line he is depicting a caustic parody of the line of the faithful in front of the confessional. And when at line 18 he calls that grotesque entwining of the tail “the practice of so great an office” (l’atto di cotanto offizio), he deliberately uses a technical term of the ecclesiastical liturgy (to officiate, to administer a sacrament) to ridicule the priest confessor.

The Missing Piece: Minos’s Tail and the Torture Rope of the Inquisition
But I would add a question: in commentaries on Dante, or in Soresina’s own books, has anyone ever taken things a step further? Has anyone ever drawn a connection between the tail that Minos wraps around his torso a certain number of times and the rope that inquisitors (a very specific, peculiar kind of “confessor”) would wrap around the bodies of heretics?

The philological answer is no.
Neither the commentators nor Soresina herself have ever superimposed the turns of the cord, the turns of Minos’s tail, and the turns of the rope of the Inquisition. And it is exactly this the missing piece that, in my opinion, we can put in its place.

In fact, in front of a normal priest confessor no one is immediately cast down into the abyss of punishment after speaking.
Before whom, instead, in Dante’s Middle Ages did one go in line to speak (that is, to confess under coercion) to hear the sentence, and one ended up immediately being handed over to the secular arm for the execution? Before the inquisitor.

In his YouTube lectures, Professor Federico Edoardo Perozziello explains how the Inquisition functioned during the 12th and 13th centuries: a veritable infernal machine of repression, born from an ironclad pact between the spiritual authority of the popes and the temporal power of kings and emperors.

“The religious man does not kill directly; he hands over the guilty of heresy for capital punishment to the established order. The established order executes, because if the established order does not execute the directives of the inquisitorial tribunal, it loses its own legitimacy.
Until it comes then to the turning point of 1252, when Pope Innocent IV issues a bull with the significant name, which is Ad extirpanda, in which he utilizes the use of torture to facilitate the confession of heretics.
There was a whole very accurate decalogue of a certain sequence of steps that the inquisitor had to follow, but also the type of tortures was not at discretion; it was tied to a typology of tortures, the rope, basically, which served to pull the joints with a number of turns proportional to the severity of the heresy itself that had to be confessed.
In short, in the end it also relied heavily on the experience of the inquisitor. So true is it that the most astute inquisitors write true and proper treatises in which they list hundreds of cases to be subjected to inquisition and eventually to torture, hundreds of theological errors. So, theoretically, no one escapes anymore.” Professor Federico Edoardo Perozziello

As Professor Perozziello explains with great rigor, retracing the legal roots of the Inquisition, everything was based on a colossal formal paradox codified since the Decretum of Gratian and perfected between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Church formally does not kill and does not shed blood, because the Church vivificat, brings salvation. No bishop, no inquisitor went personally with a torch in hand to set fire to the pyre. The ecclesiastical tribunal instructed the trial and extorted the confession, issued the judgment, and then released the culprit to the secular arm, which carried out the sentence so as not to lose its own political and sacred legitimacy.

It is a grip that closes impeccably precisely in the decades that precede the birth of Dante:

In 1184 in Verona, Pope Lucius III and Frederick Barbarossa issue the decretal Ad abolendam, which obliges bishops to hunt down heretics.

In 1199, and in 1205 right from Viterbo, Pope Innocent III launches the decretals Vergentis in senium, which equates heresy to the Roman crime of lèse-majesté against God, and Si adversus nos, launched specifically to eradicate the Cathars who in Viterbo had reached public offices.

Between 1224 and 1231, with the constitutions of Frederick II and the bull Excommunicamus of Gregory IX, the stake becomes the official and systematic punishment, while special tribunals entrusted to the mendicant orders are born.

Finally, in May 1252, just thirteen years before the birth of Dante, Pope Innocent IV issues the terrible bull Ad extirpanda. With this bull, the pontiff officially authorizes the use of torture in Inquisition trials to extort the confession from heretics, a torture that, to respect the hypocritical ecclesiastical ban on shedding blood within the confines of prisons, systematically used the torture of the rope and water to break the limbs and the resistance of anyone.

And just two years later, in 1254, with the bull Malitia huius temporis, the same Innocent IV divides Italy into eight inquisitorial provinces, entrusting two to the Dominicans and fully six (including Tuscany, Romagna, Veneto, Umbria, Marche, and Lazio) to the Franciscan friars, just twenty-eight years after the death of Saint Francis.

Professor Perozziello explains that great inquisitors contemporary to Dante were not sadistic monsters from a horror movie, they were cold, highly lucid bureaucrats of the doctrine.
One of the most famous was the Dominican Bernard Gui, appointed inquisitor of Toulouse against the Cathars in 1307 and author of the famous manual in five parts, Practica Inquisitionis Haereticae Pravitatis, written specifically to teach inquisitors how to classify and grade the severity of individual heresies.

If we want to draw an improper parallel with our times (improper as are all the inevitable temptations of reading in the Divine Comedy ourselves, the current world in which we live), the inquisitors, whether Dominicans or Franciscans, were a kind of CSI, of scientific police of that time. Knowing the theological doctrine inside out and in the smallest microscopic detail (“discriminator of transgressions,” Dante says of Minos), they were in a position to find, even in the minuscule detail of an answer from the accused, the trace of his heresy. And therefore, having found the minuscule trace of DNA that blamed him, they handed the accused over to the secular arm for the execution of the sentence, just as today the CSI entrusts its discovery to the magistrate so that he can arrange for the arrest.

Now, it is certainly true that the written and meticulous codification of the number of turns of rope that we find in the manuals of inquisitorial torture is subsequent by a few decades to the death of Dante. However, the legal and inquisitorial manuals do not invent something from nothing: they put in writing and codify an established practice.
A practice that was already fully operative in the years of Dante and in the decades immediately preceding, after the bull Ad extirpanda of 1252, when the Cathars were lowered into the dungeons and were subjected to a scientific method of torture without shedding of blood, in a way that they were forced to confess.

That method worked in that way: the more serious was the heretical fault to be confessed or to be punished, the more were the turns of rope wrapped around the body of the accused. That is why the illuminated manuscripts of the fourteenth century and seven centuries of commentators were right in seeing a very long tail of Minos that wraps in multiple simultaneous coils around the torso.

And here’s explained the Dante’s satirical and fierce genius: he overturns the scene of the tribunal of the Inquisition.
In his Hell, the turns of rope no longer tighten the tortured body of the victim, but become a ridiculous, monstrous tail that the inquisitor himself (the discriminator of transgressions, the obtuse, foolish bureaucrat caught up in so great an office) entwines by himself around his own stubborn back.

Minos isn’t anymore a solemn judge of the underworld. He is the grotesque caricature of the medieval inquisitor, a chained dog without free will, a cold processor of data who receives an extorted confession and who, on his ancient graphics card made of flesh and tail, displays the turns of rope of the guilty.