King Ferdinand recognised that persecution of Jews and ‘conversos’ would inevitably have adverse economic repercussions for the country. Neither he nor Queen Isabella, however, could resist the combined pressure of the Inquisition and the popular sentiment it had invoked. In a letter to his most influential nobles and courtiers, the king wrote:
The Holy Office of the Inquisition, seeing how some Christians are endangered by contact and communication with the Jews, has provided that the Jews be expelled from all our realms and territories, and has persuaded us to give our support and agreement to this… we do so despite the great harm to ourselves, seeking and preferring the salvation of our souls above our own profit…17
On 1 January 1483, the monarchs wrote to appease the Inquisition in Andalucia, announcing that all Jews living in the region were to be expelled. On 12 May 1486, all Jews were driven from large tracts of Aragón. But wholesale expulsion had to be deferred for the moment because money and other forms of support from Jews and ‘conversos’ were urgently needed for the ongoing campaign against the Muslims, pushed back into their ever-contracting Kingdom of Granada.
There is evidence to suggest a clandestine deal was concluded between Torquemada, representing the Inquisition, and the Spanish Crown. Torquemada appears to have accepted the Crown's procrastination in expelling all Jews from Spain until the Muslim Kingdom of Granada was finally and definitively conquered. In other words, Jews would be left unmolested in certain areas until they and their resources were no longer needed. In the meantime, the Inquisition set about preparing the ground for what was to follow. Thus ensued the notorious case of ‘the Holy Child of La Guardia’, a trumped-up affair as crass as anything perpetrated in our own century by Hitler or Stalin.
On 14 November 1491, two weeks before the fall of Granada, five Jews and six ‘conversos’ were sent to the stake at Ávila. They had been convicted of desecrating the host. They had also been convicted of crucifying a Christian child, whose heart they had allegedly ripped out. The purpose of this gruesome exercise had supposedly been to perform a magical ritual intended to neutralise the power of the Inquisition and to send all Christians ‘raving mad to their deaths’. The Inquisition assiduously publicised the case in every city of Castile and Aragón, whipping anti-Semitic frenzy up to a peak.18
A fortnight later, Granada capitulated, and the last Islamic enclave in Spain ceased to exist. Three months thereafter, in March of the following year, a royal edict ordered all Jews in Spain to convert or be expelled. Those who did neither became fair game for the Inquisition. As Carlos Fuentes has said, Spain, in 1492, banished sensuality with the Moors, banished intelligence with the Jews and proceeded to go sterile for the next five centuries.
Even before the final expulsion, however, Jews and ‘conversos’ had fallen prey to the Spanish Inquisition in far greater numbers than had heretics. After 1492, the persecution merely intensified, reinforced by a new semblance of legality and legitimacy. Of all those tried by the Inquisition in Barcelona between 1488 and 1505, 99.3 per cent were Jews or ‘conversos’. Jews or ‘conversos’ made up 91.6 per cent of all cases tried by the Inquisition in Valencia between 1484 and 1530. As one historian observes:
The tribunal, in other words, was not concerned with heresy in general. It was concerned with only one form of religious deviance: the apparently secret practice of Jewish rites.19
The End of the Inquisition
With unabated ferocity, the Spanish Inquisition pursued its work for more than 200 years. In England, the reign of William and Mary was followed by Anne‘s, then by the Hanoverians’. The country was soon to be integrated with Scotland as the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and then to embark on the ‘high civilisation’ of the Augustan Age. In France, a zenith of cultural achievement had already been attained under Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, who, though elderly, still presided over his raffiné court of Versailles. In Spain, ‘the seventeenth century closed with a holocaust of conversos’.20
The War of the Spanish Succession (1704–15) confirmed the change of dynasty brought about when, in 1701, the Bourbon Philip V ascended the throne formerly occupied by Habsburgs. There seemed to be a fleeting prospect of enlightenment when the new monarch refused to attend an auto de fe conducted in his honour. Shortly thereafter, however, the Inquisition reasserted its stranglehold on Spanish society, and the severity of the previous two centuries was resumed. A new wave of repression occurred in the early 1720s.
For some of the Inquisition's intended victims, there was now at least a refuge of sorts close at hand. In 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, a British fleet under Admiral Sir George Rooke had launched one of the first amphibious operations of modern times and captured the stronghold of Gibraltar. In 1713, Spain formally ceded ‘the Rock’ to Britain – on condition ‘that on no account must Jews and Muslims be allowed to live or reside in the said city of Gibraltar’. To the frustration of the Inquisition, no attempt whatever was made to observe the Spanish proviso. The Jewish community on Gibraltar rapidly grew, and, by 1717, possessed its own synagogue.
After 1730, the power and influence of the Spanish Inquisition began perceptibly to decrease. There was no shortage of prospective victims, but Spain could not remain altogether insulated from the tolerance coming to prevail elsewhere in Europe. And the Inquisition's functionaries, as one commentator has observed, ‘were becoming indifferent and careless, except in the matter of drawing their salaries’. Between 1740 and 1794, the tribunal sitting at Toledo tried only one case a year on average.
During the French Revolution, the Spanish Inquisition lapsed into virtual inertia, cowed by the alarming anti-clerical developments just beyond the Pyrenees. There were, indeed, grounds for misgiving. In 1808, a French army under Napoleon's subordinate, Marshal Joachim Murat, marched into Spain and occupied the country. The Bourbon dynasty was deposed and Napoleon's brother, Joseph, was installed as king. According to the treaty that ensued, the Catholic religion was to be tolerated like any other. Although disgruntled, the Inquisition fancied itself safe; and on this assumption it endorsed the new regime. Certain Inquisitors, however, proved incapable of curbing the zeal of more than three centuries. With touchingly naive imprudence, they arrested Murat's secretary, a classical scholar and self-proclaimed revolutionary atheist. Murat promptly dispatched troops to release the man by force. On 4 December 1808, Napoleon himself arrived in Madrid. That same day, he issued a decree abolishing the Inquisition and confiscating the whole of its property.
In areas of the country remote from French authority, provincial tribunals continued to operate, defying Napoleon's edict, throughout the Peninsular War (1808–14). Their support, however, was haemorrhaging away. They were opposed not only by the Napoleonic regime, but also by the British army under the future Duke of Wellington, then engaged in wresting the Iberian Peninsula back from Imperial France. Even the Spanish forces allied with Wellington's army – Spanish royalists and Catholics, intent on restoring the Bourbon monarchy – were hostile to the Inquisition. In 1813, as Wellington's reconquest of Spain neared its completion, his Spanish allies echoed their French adversaries in decreeing the Inquisition formally abolished.
On 21 July 1814, the Bourbon Ferdinand VII was restored to the Spanish throne. The Inquisition was nominally restored with him; but it had lost most of its archives and documents during the preceding years and could work only in the most desultory fashion. The last prosecution of a Jew in Spain occurred at Córdoba in 1818. Although anti-Semitism was to remain rife in the country, it could no longer be orchestrated by the Inquisition, which had been effectively neutered. In 1820, the people of such cities as Barcelona and Valencia sacked the Inquisition's premises and plundered its archives – the paper from which was bestowed on local fireworks manufacturers and ended as components of skyrockets. At last, on 15 July 1834, a final formal ‘decree of suppression’ brought the Spanish Inquisition to an end. It had lasted three and a half centuries, and had left Spain in a conditio
n from which she is only now beginning to recover.
5
Saving the New World
Where Spanish explorers, conquistadores, soldiers and settlers set foot, Spanish missionaries swiftly followed. Where the missionaries set foot and planted their crosses, the Inquisition swiftly followed. In addition to its fourteen major tribunals on the Iberian Peninsula, there was one each in outlying Spanish possessions – in the Canary Islands, in Mallorca, in Sardinia and in Sicily, which at the time was ruled by Spanish viceroys. In 1492, the year in which Muslims and Jews were definitively expelled from Spain, Christopher Columbus made his landfall in the West Indies. The conquest of the Americas then began; and the Inquisition was quick to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the New World.
As in Spain, the Inquisition's official brief was to ferret out and punish heresy in order to ensure the ‘purity’ of the Catholic faith. The Indians encountered in the New World knew nothing, of course, of Christianity. They could not be accused of heresy – of deviating from the faith – because they had nothing of the faith from which to deviate. In consequence, they were declared immune to action by the Inquisition – unless they had been converted to Christianity, then relapsed into their former beliefs and practices. It soon became apparent, however, that punishing Indians who converted and then relapsed effectively dissuaded others from converting at all. This situation threatened to pit the Inquisition against the missionaries, for whom the salvation of ‘heathen’ souls was paramount. The Inquisition was compelled to give way. It did so more or less willingly, since the persecution of Indians produced little gain anyway – in confiscated goods and property, for example, or in denunciations. All Indians were therefore placed beyond the Inquisition's remit and jurisdiction.
Given the relative dearth of Jews, Muslims and certifiable heretics in the New World, the Inquisition was sometimes pressed to find a raison d'être for itself. It found a partial solution to this problem in proliferating bureaucracy and paperwork. Inquisitors wrote dispatches back to Spain on an almost daily basis, summarising events and activities, reporting on the minutiae of the life around them, acting in effect as diarists, chroniclers and operatives in an elaborate surveillance network worthy of a modern secret police force or intelligence agency. The accumulation of paper was immense. The archives in Madrid alone today include more than 1,000 manuscripts and 4,000 bundles of loose pages, all systematically organised. The records of actual tribunals run to a hundred or so volumes, each of 1,000 pages.
This is not to say that the Inquisition in the New World could not find individuals to persecute, put on trial and, often enough, burn. But approximately 60 per cent of the trials conducted in Central and South America were for minor offences, such as the occasional blasphemy, sexual transgression or display of superstition. Most of the remainder were of alleged Judaisers, as well as of Christians suspected of experimenting with Indian rituals or of practising alchemy, astrology, cabbalism and other forms of heterodox or esoteric thought. And Inquisitors in the New World could also roast in their fires a form of delicacy not readily accessible to their colleagues in Spain – that is, Protestants. Protestants, of course, were regarded as the most pernicious and dangerous heretics of all. They were an unknown species in Spain. In the oceans and coastal waters of the Americas, however, they could be found with increasing frequency, often in the shape of English or Dutch pirates and privateers. Their activities in such capacities rendered them all the more desirable as candidates for the stake.
The Tribunal of Mexico
The first missionaries were dispatched to the West Indies in 1500, eight years after Columbus's initial landfall. The first bishop arrived there around 1519 or 1520, just as Hernán Cortés was embarking on the conquest of Mexico. In 1519, two Inquisitors were also appointed. One of them died before his ship sailed. His replacement was not appointed until 1524. The new Inquisitor proceeded to Mexico, by now thoroughly subdued. Here, he found a heretic to burn and promptly returned to Spain. Three years later, in 1527, the first bishops were appointed in Mexico, with authorisation to act as Inquisitors themselves.
The Inquisition did not establish its own tribunal in Mexico until 1570. It did so in Mexico City and immediately commandeered all jurisdiction over heresy from the local bishops. The first auto de fe was conducted on 28 February 1574. Two weeks prior to the event, it was announced by an elaborate fanfare of trumpets and drums. The affair was cranked up to the status of a major municipal spectacle, with stadium-style seating being erected for official functionaries and their families, as well as for provincial dignitaries invited to Mexico City for the occasion. The seventy-four prisoners committed to trial consisted largely of Protestants. Thirty-six of them were English – remnants of Sir John Hawkins's crew, captured six years before. At the conclusion of the trials, four Protestants were burned at the stake, two English, one Irish and one French.
The ‘high point’ of the Inquisition in Mexico came with the ‘Great Auto’ of 11 April 1649. It was directed specifically at the so-called ‘New Christians’ – the Hispanic-American term for Judaic converts or ‘conversos’ – who dominated trade between Spain and her colonies almost to the point of monopoly. The evidence against these individuals was tenuous enough. But the Inquisition lusted after their money and their property; and it had even more latitude for spurious prosecution in the New World than it did in Spain.
The ‘Great Auto’ of 1649 was even more of a spectacle than its predecessor of 1574. Like its predecessor, it was announced in advance by solemn processions of trumpets and drums across the whole of Mexico. Crowds began to arrive in Mexico City two weeks prior to the event, some from 600 miles distant. On the afternoon preceding the scheduled trials, an extravagant pageant was arranged. Double lines of opulent coaches moved through the streets of the capital, carrying nobles and notables. Prominent at the head of the parade was the standard of the Inquisition. On arriving at the square where the auto was to be conducted, many spectators remained in their coaches all night so as not to lose their places or their view of the proceedings.
Altogether, 109 prisoners were to be tried – representing, reportedly, ‘the greater portion of Mexican commerce’. All of them had had their estates and other property confiscated, and none of it was returned, not even to those subsequently reconciled to the Church after the required penances. Twenty individuals were burned in effigy, some of them having previously escaped from prison, some having died there under torture, two having committed suicide. Of the prisoners present in person, thirteen were sentenced to the stake; but after repenting at the last moment and being reconciled to the Church, twelve were accorded the mercy of being garrotted before the flames could reach them. Only one man, a certain Tomás Treviño, was actually burned alive. He had previously denied the charge against him of being a clandestine Jew. The night before his execution, however, he had learned of his conviction and had thereupon openly proclaimed his Judaism, declaring his intention to die in his true faith.
To silence what were styled his blasphemies, he was taken to the auto gagged, in spite of which he made audible assertion of his faith and of his contempt for Christianity.1
At the stake, he remained defiant.
Undaunted to the last, he drew the blazing brands towards him with his feet and his last audible words were – ‘Pile on the wood; how much my money costs me’.2
The ‘Great Auto’ of 1649 reflects the Inquisition in Mexico at its peak. On the whole, however, immolations on anything even approaching this scale were rare. For the most part, the Inquisition in Mexico busied itself in amassing wealth, in managing and profiting from the goods and properties it confiscated. Not infrequently, it would trump up charges against individuals for the sole purpose of obtaining their goods and property – which would never be returned, even if the accused were exonerated. In the years immediately preceding the ‘Great Auto’ of 1649, 270,000 pesos' worth of resources were confiscated. Confiscations from the ‘Great Auto’ itself brough
t in a total of 3 million pesos. In today's money, this sum would be the equivalent of some £30 million, and its purchasing power at the time was significantly greater. In the eighteenth century, a hundred years after the ‘Great Auto’, the currency had already been dramatically devalued. Even then, however, it cost 12,600 pesos to rebuild the Inquisition's palace in Cartagena after its destruction by British guns. At the time of the ‘Great Auto’ then, 3 million pesos would have sufficed to build upwards of 238 major municipal structures. Between 1646 and 1649, the Inquisition obtained enough revenue through its confiscations to sustain itself for 327 years. And this revenue did not include an annual stipend of 10,000 pesos received from the Spanish Crown.
After the ‘Great Auto’ of 1649, the Inquisition in Mexico grew increasingly dormant, content to repose on its wealth. By then it was receiving an immense income, for which it had to do very little. Among its chief problems was that of priests found guilty of sexual transgressions, such as seducing women in the confessional. Culprits of this kind were seldom burned, however, being sentenced to penances of varying severity. By 1702, when the Bourbons succeeded the Habsburgs to the Spanish throne, the Inquisition had lapsed into decadence. In that year, it presided over no more than four cases – three against bigamists, one against a Jesuit who revelled in stripping female penitents naked and whipping them.
The Inquisition Page 9