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Ever since his impoverished childhood in rural Sardinia, Franco Bozza had enjoyed giving pain. His first victims had been insects and worms, and as a young boy he’d spent many contented hours developing increasingly elaborate ways of slowly dissecting them and watching them writhe and die. Before the age of eight, Franco had progressed to practising his skills on small birds and mammals. Some fledglings in a nest suffered first. Later, local dogs started to disappear. As Franco progressed through his teens he grew into a master torturer and an expert in inflicting agony. He loved it. It was the thing that made him feel most alive.

By the time he’d left school at the age of thirteen he’d become almost equally fascinated with Catholicism. He was entranced by the crueller images of Christian tradition–the crown of thorns, the bleeding stigmata of Christ, the way the nails had been hammered through the hands and feet into the cross. Franco polished the basic literacy skills he’d learned in school just so he could read about the deliciously gruesome history of the Church. One day he came across an old book that described the persecution of heretics by the medieval Inquisition. He read how, after the conquest of a Cathar stronghold in the year 1210, the commander of the Church forces had ordered that a hundred Cathar heretics have their ears, noses and lips cut off, their eyes gouged out, and be paraded before the ramparts of other heretic castles as an example. The boy was deeply inspired by such macabre genius, and he would lie awake at night wishing he could somehow have taken part in it.

Franco fell in love with religious art, and would walk miles to the nearest town to visit the library and drool over historic prints showing grisly images of religious oppression. His favourite painting was The Hay Wagon by Hieronymus Bosch in the 1480s, showing horrible tortures at the hands of demons, bodies pierced by spears and blades, and–most exciting of all–a nude woman. It wasn’t her nudity in itself that provoked such choking feelings of lust in him. Her arms were tied behind her back, and all that covered her nakedness was a black toad clapped to her genitals. She was a witch. She would be burnt. This was what generated such intense, almost frantic, excitement in him.

Franco learned about the historical backdrop to Bosch’s painting, the furious misogyny of the Catholic Church during the fifteenth century when Pope Innocent VIII had issued his Witch Bull, the document that gave the Vatican’s seal of approval to the torture and burning of women suspected, however vaguely, of being in league with the Devil. Franco went on from there to discover the book known as the Malleus Malificarum, the ‘Witches’ Hammer’, the official Inquisition manual of torture and sadism for those who served God by drenching themselves in heretic blood. It instilled in young Franco the same violent horror of female sexuality that had permeated medieval Christian faith. A woman who indulged in sex, who enjoyed it, didn’t just lie there, must be the Devil’s bride. Which meant she had to die. In a horrible way. That was the part he liked best.

Franco became an expert on the entire bloody past of the Catholic Inquisition and the Church that had spawned it. While others admired the beautiful artwork by Botticelli and Michelangelo in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel for its own sake, Franco revelled in the fact that while these works of art were being commissioned by the Church, a quarter million women across Europe were being put to the stake with the Pope’s blessing. The more he learned, the more he came to appreciate that to subscribe to the Catholic faith and its legacy was, tacitly or otherwise, to espouse centuries of systematic and unrestrained mass murder, war, oppression, torture and corruption. He’d found his spiritual calling, and he rejoiced in it.

Eventually, in 1977, it came time for Franco to marry his intended, the daughter of the local gunsmith. He reluctantly agreed to the marriage to Maria, to please his parents.

On his wedding night, he discovered that he was completely impotent. At the time, this caused him no concern. He’d never cared that he was still a virgin, because he already knew that the only thing that could excite him was when he had his knife and could inflict pain. That was what drew him and made him feel powerful. Female flesh had no allure for him.

But as weeks turned into months and he continued to show no interest in her sexually, Maria started taunting him. One night she pushed him too far. ‘I’m going out to find a real man with balls,’ she screamed at him. ‘And then everyone will know that my husband is nothing but a useless castrato.’

Franco was already powerful and muscular at the age of twenty. Enraged, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her up to the bedroom where he threw her brutally down on the bed, knocked her semiconscious and took a knife to her flesh.

That had been the night that Franco had made a life-changing discovery, that a woman’s body could excite him after all. He didn’t touch her–only the steel touched her. He left Maria tied to the bed, mutilated and permanently disfigured. He fled the village in the middle of the night. Maria’s father and brothers came after him, vowing revenge.

Franco had never ventured more than a few miles from his village before, and he was soon lost, penniless and hungry in the verdant Sardinian countryside. It was outside a bar near Cagliari, begging for food, that Maria’s elder brother Salvatore found him one night. Salvatore crept up on the unsuspecting Franco from behind and slashed his throat with his knife.

A weaker man would have collapsed and died, let himself be butchered. Franco was half starved and drenched in the blood that spurted from the gash in his neck. But the pain and the smell of the blood gave him new strength, raw energy. He stayed on his feet like a wounded animal. Instead of running, he attacked. If Salvatore had brought a gun that night, it would have been different. But Franco took the knife from him, overpowered him and cut his liver out. Slowly.

It was the first time he’d killed a man, but it wouldn’t be the last. He robbed Salvatore’s body of money, and fled to the coast where he took the ferry to the Italian mainland. His cut throat healed, but he would speak in a strangled whisper for the rest of his life.

With the ensuing vendetta against him, Franco Bozza was exiled from Sardinia. He travelled around southern Italy, bumming from job to job. But his lust for inflicting pain was never far away, and before the age of twenty-four his talents were being put to good use by Mafia hoods who employed him to press information out of their captured enemies. Franco Bozza was a natural, and his fearsome reputation soon spread through the criminal underworld as an exceptionally callous and cold-hearted torturer. When it came to prolonging life and maximizing agony, he was the undisputed maestro.

When Bozza–or the Inquisitor, as he now styled himself–wasn’t performing his art on some hapless criminal he’d stalk the streets at night and prey on prostitutes, luring them to their death with his whispering voice. Their pitiful remains began to appear in dingy hotel rooms all over southern Italy. Rumours spread of a ‘monster’, a maniac who feasted on pain and death the way a vampire feasted on blood. But the Inquisitor always covered his tracks. His police record was as virginal as his sexuality.

One day in 1997 Franco Bozza got an unexpected phone call–not from the usual underworld kingpin or Mafia boss, but from a Vatican bishop.

It was through the shadows of the underworld that Massimiliano Usberti had heard of this Inquisitor. The man’s notorious religious zeal, his absolute devotion to God and his unflinching will to punish the wicked, were just the qualities Usberti wanted for his new organization. When Bozza heard what his role was to be, he seized the opportunity right away. It was perfect for him.

The organization was called Gladius Domini. The Sword of God.

Franco Bozza had just become its blade.