Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  These converts were termed “New-Christians” by the Spaniards. By those of their own race who had remained faithful they were called “marranos” — a contemptuous epithet derived from Maran-atha, (“The Lord is coming”), but supposed by the Christians to signify “accursed.” It came into general use before very long.

  These New-Christians, as a consequence of their conversion, gained not merely the privileges recently lost to them as Jews, but found themselves upon a footing of absolute equality with the Old-Christians; every profession was open to them, and by applying themselves to these with all their energy and intelligence, they found themselves before very long in possession of some of the highest offices in the land.

  But in the meanwhile the rigour of the decrees of 141 2 came to be considerably relaxed; a degree of liberty and of intermingling with Christians was permitted to the Jews, and many of the offices which they had occupied of old came once more under their control, chiefly those concerned with commerce and finance and the farming of the taxes. Under the deplorable rule of Henry IV the nobles, whose slave he was, demanded that he should “expel from his service and States the Jews who, exploiting public misery, have contrived to return to the appointments of tax-gatherers.”

  The weak King agreed, but neglected to execute his promise; it was presently forgotten, and the Jewish section of the community was allowed to continue under the conditions of ease we have described. Under these conditions was it found by Ferdinand and Isabella upon their accession, nor does it appear that they paid any particular attention to it until invited to do so by the “clerics and laymen” who, as Pulgar tells us, represented to them that in the re-Judaizings that were taking place was matter for their jurisdiction.

  [* “Chronica,” II. cap. lxxvi.]

  CHAPTER VI. THE NEW-CHRISTIANS

  It must clearly be understood that so far the Inquisition, which for some three centuries already had been very active in Italy and Southern France, had not reached Castile.

  Even as recently as 1474, when Pope Sixtus IV had ordered the Dominicans to set up the Inquisition in Spain, and whilst in obedience to that command inquisitors were appointed in Aragon, Valencia, Cataluiia, and Navarre, it was not held necessary to make any appointment in Castile, where no heresy of any account could be perceived. Trials of such offences against the Faith as might occur were conducted by the bishops, who were fully empowered to deal with them; and such offences being rare, the necessity for a special tribunal did not suggest itself nor did the Pope press the matter, desirous though he might be to see the Inquisition universally established.

  There was, of course, a large Hebrew population, and also a considerable number of Moslems, in the peninsula. But these did not come within the jurisdiction of any ecclesiastical court. The Inquisition itself could take no cognizance of them, as they did not offend against the Faith.

  Explanation is perhaps necessary. We touch here upon a point on which the religious persecution known as the Inquisition compares favourably with any other religious persecution in history, and in common justice this point should not — as but too frequently has been the case — be obscured. There is too little to be urged in favour of this tribunal so terribly inequitable in its practices that we can afford to slur over the one feature of its constitution that is invested with a degree of equity.

  Whatever may have been the case in the course of civil and popular persecutions, whatever may have been done by a frenzied populace at the instigation of odd fanatical preachers acting without the authority of their superiors in giving rein to the fierce bigotry they had nurtured in their souls, the Church herself, it must be clearly understood, neither urged nor sanctioned the persecution of those born into any religion that was not in itself a heresy of the Roman Faith. The tribunal of the Inquisition was established solely — and moved solely — to deal with those who apostatized or seceded from the ranks of the Roman Church, precisely as an army deals with deserting soldiers. Fanatical, horribly narrow, cruelly bigoted as was the spirit of the Inquisition, yet the inquisitors confined their prosecutions to apostates, to the adulterers of a faith whose purity and incorruptibility they had made it their mission to maintain.

  If the Church repressed liberty of conscience, if she stifled rationalism and crushed independence of thought, she did so only where her own children were concerned — those who had been born into the Catholic Faith or who had embraced it in conversion. With those born into any other independent religion she had no concern. To Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, and Pagan, and to the savages of the New World, when it came presently to be discovered, she accorded the fullest religious freedom.

  To appreciate this, it is but necessary to consider such enactments as those of Honorius III for the protection of the Jews, of Clement VI, who threatened their persecutors with excommunication, and the action of Pope and Archbishop in the case of the inflammatory sermons of Hernando Martinez. It is sufficient to consider that when the Jews were driven out of Spain — as shall presently be seen — they actually found a refuge in Rome itself, and were received with kindliness by Pope Alexander VI (Roderigo Borgia), which in itself is one of the oddest ironies that ecclesiastical history can offer.

  And if this is not sufficient, let us for a moment consider the immunity and comparative peace enjoyed by the Jews who dwelt in Rome itself, in their district of Trastevere.

  They were a recognized section of the community in the Papal City. On his coronation procession each Pope would pause near the Campo de’ Fiori to receive the company of Jews that came, headed by the Rabbi, to pay homage to their sovereign — precisely as their ancestors had come to pay homage to the emperor.

  To the Vicar of Christ the Rabbi would now proffer the rolls of the Pentateuch, swathed in a cloth . The Pope would take them into his hands, to show that he respected the law contained in them, and would then put them behind him, to signify that this law now belonged to the past. From behind the Pontiff the Rabbi would receive back his sacred scriptures, and depart with his escort, usually accompanied by the jeers, insults, and vituperations of the Roman populace.*

  [* See Gregorovius, “Geschichte der Stadt Rom,” bk. ix. cap. ii.]

  It will be understood, then, that the Inquisition’s establishment in Spain was not urged for the purpose of persecuting the Jews. It had no concern with Jews, if we confine the term purely to its religious meaning, signifying the observers of the law of Moses. Its concern was entirely with the apostasy of those who, although of the Jewish race, had become Christians by conversion. By the subsequent secret re-Judaizings, or return of these New-Christians to the religion of their fathers (which they had abandoned out of material considerations), they came within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and rendered themselves liable to prosecution as heretics, a prosecution which could never have overtaken them had they but continued in their original faith.

  There is no denying that many of those who had been baptized against their will, as the only means of saving their lives when the fury of the Christian mob was unleashed against them, had remained Jews at heart, had continued in secret to practise the Jewish rites, and were exerting themselves to bring back to the fold of Israel their apostate brethren. Others, however, upon receiving baptism may have determined to keep the law to which they now pledged themselves and to persevere honestly in Christianity. Yet many of the old Jewish observances were become habitual with them: the trained — almost the hereditary — repugnance to certain meats, the observance of certain feast days, and several minor domestic laws that are part of the Jewish code, were too deeply implanted in them to be plucked up by the roots at the first attempt. Time was required in which they could settle into Christian habits; two or three generations might be necessary in some families before these habits came to be perfectly acquired and the old ones to be entirely obliterated. Had those who urged the Sovereigns to introduce the Inquisition into Castile, or had the Sovereigns themselves but perceived this and exercised the necessary and reasonable patience in
the matter, Spain might have been spared the horrors that took root in her soil and sapped the vigour and intellectual energy of her children, so that in her case decadence pressed swift and close upon the very heels of supreme achievement.

  Execrable as is the memory of the Inquisition to all the world, to none should be it so execrable as to Spain, since the evil that it wrought recoiled entirely upon herself.

  It was on the occasion of Isabella’s first visit to Seville — that punitive visit already mentioned — that the establishment of the Holy Office in Spain was first proposed to her. The King was at the time in Estremadura upon the business of fortifying his frontiers against Portugal.

  The proposal came from Alonso de Ojeda, the Prior of the Dominicans of Seville, a man who enjoyed great credit and was reputed saintly (“vir plus ac sanctus,” Paramo calls him).

  Seeing her zeal to put down lawlessness and to purify and restore order to the country, Ojeda urged upon her notice the spread of the detestable Judaizing movement that was toward. He laid stress upon the hypocrisy that had underlain so many of the conversions of the Jews. He pointed out — with some degree of justice — that these men had made a mock of the Holy Church, had defiled her sacraments, and had perpetrated the most abominable sacrilege by their pretended acceptance of the Christian faith. He urged that not only must this be punished, but that the havoc which these Judaizers were working among the more faithful New-Christians, and the proselytizing which they went so far as to attempt among OldChristians, must be checked.

  To carry out this urgently-required purification, he implored the Queen to establish the Inquisition.*

  [* Pulgar, “Chronica,” II. cap, lxxvi.]

  There was a speciousness, and even a justice, in his arguments which must have impressed that pious lady. But her piety, intense as it was, did not carry her to the lengths required of her by her priestly counsellor. The balance of her splendid mind was singularly true. She perceived that here was matter that called for a remedy; but she perceived also the fanaticism inspiring the friar who stood before her, and realized how his fanaticism must exaggerate the evil.

  She was aware also of the extreme malevolence of which the New-Christians were the object. By their conversion they might have deflected the religious hostility of the Castilians; but the more deeply-rooted racial antagonism remained. It not only remained, but it was quickened by the envy which these NewChristians were exciting. The energy and intelligence inherent in men of their race were serving them now, as they had served them before, to their undoing. There were no offices of eminence in which New-Christians were not to be found; there were none in which they did not outnumber the Old-Christians — the pure-blooded Castilians.

  This the Queen knew, for she was herself surrounded by converts and the descendants of converts. Several of her counsellors, her three secretaries — one of whom was that chronicler, Pulgar, whose record of the situation has been quoted — and her very treasurer were all New-Christians.*

  [* In “Claros Varones de España,” Pulgar says that even in the veins of her sometime confessor, Frey Juan de Torquemada, Cardinal of San Sisto, there was a strain of Jewish blood. But the authority is insufficient, and Pulgar, himself a New-Christian, is perhaps anxious to include as many illustrious men of his day as possible in the New-Christian ranks. Zurita, on the other hand, says that the Cardinal’s nephew, Fr. Thomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, was of “clean blood” — de limpia linaje (lib. xx. cap. xlix.). The term “clean” in this connection arose out of the popular conception that the blood of a Jew was a dark-hued fluid, distinguishable from the bright red blood of the Christian.]

  These men Isabella knew intimately, and esteemed. Judging the New-Christians generally by those in her immediate service, she was naturally led to discount Ojeda’s imputations against them. She perceived the source of these imputations, and she must have taken into consideration the ineradicable bitterness of the popular feeling against Jews and the intensity of a prejudice which extended — as we have said — to the New-Christians to such an extent that they continued to be known as “Judios,” notwithstanding their conversion, so that often in contemporary chronicles it is difficult to determine to which class the writer is referring.

  We have said that, in spite of conversions, the racial hostility remained. The Christian attitude towards the Hebrew had not changed in the hundred years that were sped since, under the incitings of the Archdeacon of Ecija, the mob had risen up and massacred them. They were the descendants of the crucifiers always.

  A vestige of this feeling lingers to this day in the peninsula. In the vocabulary of the Portuguese lower orders, and even of the indifferently educated, there is no such word as “cruel.” “Jew” is the term that has entirely usurped its functions, and as an injunction against cruelty to man or beast, “Don’t be a Jew!” (Não seja judeu!) is still the only phrase.

  No conception of what was the popular feeling at the time can be conveyed more adequately than by a translation of the passage from Bernaldez concerning the manners and customs of the Jews. Bernaldez was a priest, and therefore, to some extent, an educated man — as in the main his history bears witness — yet a piece of writing so ludicrously stupid and detestably malicious as this passage can only have emanated from a mind in which bigotry had destroyed all sense of proportion.

  The only historical value of the passage lies in the deplorable fact that undoubtedly it may be accepted as a faithful mirror of the prejudice that existed in Isabella’s day.

  It runs:

  “Just as heretics and Jews have always fled from Christian doctrines, so they have always fled from Christian customs. They are great drinkers and gluttons, who never lose the Jewish habit of eating garbage of onions and garlic fried in oil, and of meat stewed in oil, which they use instead of lard; and oil with meat is a thing that smells very badly, so that their houses and doorways stink vilely of that garbage; and they have the peculiar smell of Jews in consequence of their food and of the fact that they are not baptized. And although some have been baptized, yet the virtue of the baptism having been annulled by their credulity [i.e. their adherence to their own faith] and by their Judaizing, they stink like Jews. They will not eat pork save under compulsion. They eat meat in Lent and on the eve of feast days...They keep the Passover and the Sabbath as best they can. They send oil to the synagogues for the lamps. Jews come to preach to them in their houses secretly — especially to the women, very secretly They have Rabbis to slaughter their beasts and poultry. They eat unleavened bread in the Jewish season. They perform all their Jewish rites as much in secret as possible, and women as well as men seek whenever possible to avoid the sacraments of Holy Church...They never confess truthfully, and it happened that a priest, once confessing one of these, cut a fragment of cloth from his garment, saying: ‘As you have never sinned, let me have this as a relic to heal the sick.’...Not without reason did Our Lord call them generatio prava et adultera. They do not believe that God rewards virginity and chastity, and all their endeavour is to multiply. And in the days of the strength of this heresy many monasteries were violated by their merchants and wealthy men, and many professed nuns were ravished and derided, they not believing in or fearing excommunication, but rather doing this to vituperate Jesus Christ and the Church. Commonly swindling people by many wiles and cheats, as in buying and selling, they have no conscience where Christians are concerned. Never would they undertake agriculture, ploughing or tilling or raising cattle, nor have they ever taught their children any office but that of sitting down to earn enough to eat by as little labour as possible. Many of them have raised up great estates in a few years, not being sparing of their thieving and usury, maintaining that they earn it from their enemies...”*

  [* Bernaldez, “Historia de los Reyes Catholicos,” cap. xliii: “Modo de vivir de los Judios.”]

  This atrocious tissue of misrepresentation would be utterly negligible and contemptible were it not for the fact — as has been said — tha
t it was written in good faith (the good faith of a bigot) and reflects what was currently believed, fostered by the envy which is plainly revealed when Bernaldez alludes to the occupations of the Jews and the New-Christians — all of whom he assumes to be false to the faith they have embraced.

  SEVILLE.

  From Colmenar’s “Délices d’Espagne.”

  Isabella must have been conscious of this feeling, and she must have rated it at its proper value. She had received in 1474 a very pitiful narrative poem of the New-Christian Anton Montoro, which painted with terrible vividness a slaughter of the conversos and implored justice upon the assassins, protesting the innocence of the New-Christians and the sincerity of their conversions. Her gentle nature must have been moved to compassion by that lament, and her acute mind must have perceived the evil passions and the envy that were stirring under the fair cloak of saintly zeal.

  All these considerations being weighed, she resisted the representations of Ojeda.

  But weightier than any may have been the reflection of the power which the tribunal of the Inquisition must place in the hands of the clergy. Already and very bravely she had expressed her resentment of clerical usurpation of royal rights in Spain, and to repress it she had not hesitated to front the Pope himself If she acceded now to Ojeda’s request, she would be permitting the priesthood to set up a court which, not being subject to any temporal law, must alienate from her some portion of that sovereignty which so jealously she guarded.