The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the American War of Independence and then the French Revolution were to furnish the Inquisition in Mexico with a new raison d'être. So-called ‘free-thinkers’ were regarded as heretics. Anything pertaining to the recently formulated ‘Rights of Man’, anything that echoed the arguments of Thomas Paine or such French writers as Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, was deemed to be tainted by ‘free-thinking’. It was also deemed to be seditious – as inimical to the State as to the Church. The Inquisition therefore began to function not only as an instrument of Catholic orthodoxy, but also as the government's secret police. Its targets now became anyone who bought, sold, printed, circulated, disseminated or even possessed material expounding inflammatory ideas, as well as anyone who promulgated such ideas orally. Revolutionary books and pamphlets, imported from France, from Britain or from Britain's former colonies in North America, became dangerous contraband. Anyone trafficking in such contraband became subject to prosecution.

  As governments of our own century have discovered, it is difficult enough to choke off the smuggling of alcohol, tobacco, drugs and pornography. To suppress the circulation of ideas is ultimately impossible. By 1810, moreover, the Inquisition in Mexico had been cut off from its parent in Spain, since Spain now lay under the Napoleonic yoke and the Inquisition there had been dissolved. When insurrection erupted in Mexico, therefore, the authorities lacked the resources to suppress it, and could no longer hope for support from the mother country. And indeed, the royalist factions in Mexico had become as hostile to the Inquisition as the revolutionary forces.

  In 1813 Napoleon's suppression of the Inquisition in Spain was reaffirmed by the restored Bourbon monarchy. This measure was applied by extension to Spanish colonies abroad, including Mexico – which by then was itself in the throes of a struggle for independence. As revolution spread across Latin America, the administration in Mexico appropriated all property of the Inquisition. No prisoners were found in its jails. Its palace was thrown open to the populace, who ‘gave rein to their contempt’.3

  In January 1815, the Inquisition in Mexico was temporarily restored when royalist forces in the country gained a brief ascendancy over their revolutionary opponents. The tribunal's property was returned, but only 773 pesos of its former wealth remained, and none of its furniture. In 1817, there was one last prosecution – of a man accused of reading prohibited books. Then, in 1820, as Mexico wrested her independence from Spain, the Inquisition was finally and definitively suppressed.

  Lima

  Established in 1571, the Inquisition in Mexico had exercised jurisdiction over Central America, over Spanish holdings in North America and across the Pacific to the Spanish dominion of the Philippines. Two years before, in 1569, an Inquisitor had arrived in Peru, and a separate tribunal was established in Lima in 1570. Its jurisdiction extended southwards to Chile and Argentina, and for a time at least northwards to Colombia, Venezuela and the islands of the Caribbean.

  The activities of the Inquisition in Peru ran closely parallel to those of its kindred institution in Mexico. As in Mexico, heresy had initially fallen under the jurisdiction of local bishops. When the Inquisition was officially established in 1570, there were more than a hundred cases pending in Lima and Cuzco. As in Mexico, authority over all such cases was transferred from the bishops to the Inquisition's own official tribunal, which launched its regime with the burning of a French Protestant in 1573.

  In Lima, too, Indians were exempted from the Inquisition's jurisdiction. But representatives of the tribunal were installed in every locality occupied by Spanish settlers. Cases from Buenos Aires, some 2,000 miles away, as well as from Santiago de Chile, were routinely transferred to Lima. Again, the Inquisition in Peru derived the bulk of its ever burgeoning income from the persecution of wealthy merchants. Many such, mostly of Portuguese descent, were arrested in 1634; they were charged with being clandestine Jews and their property was automatically confiscated. In 1639, a ‘Great Auto’ was conducted, similar to those in Mexico, and millions of additional pesos were pocketed by the Inquisition. This revenue, according to one historian, ‘virtually disappeared without anyone knowing where it went’.4 When Philip IV of Spain learned the scale of the confiscations, he demanded his share of the proceeds. The Inquisition acknowledged the sum it had acquired, but pleaded it had almost nothing left after paying off its creditors – few of whom actually existed.

  Like its Mexican counterpart, the Inquisition in Peru had its share of nuisance cases to address, particularly the seduction of women by priests in the confessional. Between 1578 and 1585, there were fifteen such cases. By 1595, twenty-four priests were in prison, charged with the same offence. One of them had displayed sufficient priapic activity to be denounced by forty-three women. On the whole, sentences pronounced on sexually delinquent priests were laughable. Most were simply banned from hearing confessions for a time, or consigned for a year or so to a cloister. One – having seduced twenty-eight women and raped another in church – was banished.

  As in Mexico, Protestants were fair game – and less embarrassing than lascivious priests. Among the Englishmen in the auto of 30 November 1587 was John Drake, a cousin of Sir Francis. Having sailed around Cape Horn, Drake's ship had been wrecked in the Pacific, off the coast of what is now Chile. He and one companion had made their way over the mountains, then paddled downriver by canoe all the way to Buenos Aires. Here, they were captured and sent over the mountains again to Lima. At his trial Drake capitulated, converted to Catholicism and was sentenced to three years in a monastery. His companion, being more stubborn, was tortured, then sentenced to four years in the galleys followed by life imprisonment.

  English prisoners appeared again in an auto of April. 1592, and three were sentenced to death. Then, in 1593, Richard Hawkins, son of Sir John, mounted a foolhardy expedition against Spanish installations on the Pacific coast, then advanced inland. In the summer of the following year, after a battle near Quito, in modern Ecuador, he was forced to surrender, along with seventy-four others. Sixty-two of these were immediately sent to the galleys. The remainder, including Hawkins himself, were brought to Lima and handed over to the Inquisition. Eight of them, along with seven other English prisoners captured elsewhere, were tried in an auto of 17 December 1595. All of them converted to the Church and thereby escaped the stake, although four other victims of different nationalities were burned. Hawkins himself was too ill to appear at his trial. His name, however, and the respect he commanded from his Spanish captors, earned him a special dispensation. He was eventually able to return to England, where he was knighted.

  During the latter part of the seventeenth century, the Inquisition in Peru, like its Mexican counterpart, became increasingly desultory, decadent and corrupt. Inquisitors comported themselves like nobles and indulged freely in secular pleasures. One of them, for example, acquired notoriety for keeping two sisters as mistresses.

  As in Mexico, the Inquisition in Peru derived a new impetus from the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. Peruvian Inquisitors, too, became zealous in their quest for politically seditious material, and in their persecution of ‘free-thinkers’, Freemasons, putative or real revolutionaries and all other perceived adversaries of the regime. In 1813, however, the Inquisition in Peru was suppressed by the restored Spanish monarchy. It was reestablished in 1814, but nothing of the money it had lost was refunded. In 1820, it was finally and definitively suppressed.

  New Granada

  Although the first Spanish settlements had been in the West Indies and the islands of the Caribbean, they came under Peruvian authority. Not until 1719 was a new, third, viceroyalty created, that of New Granada, with its capital at Cartagena in what is now Colombia. The subdivision of jurisdiction in Latin America occurred under the Church before it occurred under the Crown. In 1532, the episcopal See of Cartagena was created and a bishop in residence was established. In 1547, Bogotá became a provincial capital. Six years later, it was raised to the sta
tus of an archbishopric. Colombia, Venezuela and the islands of the Caribbean fell politically under the authority of the Viceroy of Peru, but they possessed their own ecclesiastical authority. The Archbishop of Bogotá enjoyed powers equal to those of his counterparts in Lima and Mexico City. These included, at least initially, inquisitorial powers. Thus, in 1556, the archbishop ordered that no books could be sold or even owned in his archdiocese unless they had first been examined and approved by the Church.

  As has been noted, the Inquisition established its own autonomous tribunal in Lima in 1570, with authority over all Spanish possessions in Latin America south of Panama. In 1577, the Lima tribunal dispatched an Inquisitor to Bogotá. The individual in question quickly became notorious. He feuded bitterly with the archbishop. He regularly kept women in his apartments – and not infrequently violently mistreated them. The local nuns forbade him access to their premises because of his ‘licentious conversation’. One of his successors created even greater scandal, becoming infamous for ‘adulteries and incests with maids, wives and widows, mothers, daughters and sisters’.5

  In 1608, the Inquisition in Spain established a new, separate tribunal at Cartagena, invested with powers comparable to those of Lima and Mexico City. Its jurisdiction extended from Panama, through Colombia and Venezuela, to the Guianas and the West Indies. The new tribunal soon became even more corrupt than those of Lima and Mexico City. For more than a century, there was no viceroy within striking distance to keep it in check. And when the viceroyalty of New Granada was finally established in 1719, the Cartagena Inquisition was too firmly entrenched to sanction much interference.

  The first auto de fe was conducted in February 1614. Thirty victims were paraded through the city and tried for a variety of trivial offences. Desiring to compete with the pomp and pageantry that characterised such events in Lima and Mexico City, the Cartagena Inquisitors took their business very seriously indeed, and ‘such was the verbosity that the ceremonies lasted from half-past nine in the morning until after sunset’.6

  By the seventeenth century, the West Indies and the Caribbean coast of Latin America contained a broader and more diverse cultural and racial mix than Spain's other colonial dominions. In addition to Spanish and Portuguese settlers, there were the Indians, from a diverse number of tribal affiliations; and because of the region's maritime accessibility, there were more Europeans than in Mexico or Peru - Italian, English, French, Dutch. At the time of the initial conquest, Charles V had presided not only over Spain, but over the Holy Roman Empire as well, and many of the early conquistadores had therefore been of German and Austrian extraction. By 1600, their descendants comprised a sizeable Germanic community. Finally, there was a burgeoning population of black slaves from Africa.

  In the West Indies and along the Caribbean coast, in cities like Cartagena, Maracaibo and Caracas, people of diverse cultures, races and ethnic backgrounds jostled together in close, often incestuous, proximity. Individuals of mixed blood made up an increasingly significant portion of the population. And the physiological cross-fertilisation was inevitably accompanied by a cross-fertilisation in ideas and religious beliefs, out of which, ‘voodoo’, in its various guises and manifestations, emerged. So, too, did sometimes bizarre amalgams of Christianity and older Indian traditions. Imported from the non-Catholic parts of Europe, esoteric thought – Rosicrucianism, for example – found the region fertile soil in which to flourish. The result was a hybridisation much more complex than the relative ‘purity’ of Mexico and Peru.

  In theory at least, this situation should have afforded the Inquisition in Cartagena abundant opportunity to run amok. In practice, however, it remained comparatively inert, basking indolently in the fruits of its corruption. Only at sporadic intervals would it bestir itself. Thus, for instance, during the first half of the seventeenth century, witchcraft became a temporary cause célèbre – especially, it was alleged, among black slaves employed in the mines. At an auto in March 1634, twenty-one putative witches were tried. Most, however, escaped with only whippings and fines. One was tortured for some ninety minutes and died. Two were sentenced to the stake, but La Suprema in Spain refused to ratify the sentences and even released one of the accused.

  In March 1622, an Englishman was burned for Protestantism. According to contemporary reports, he was not chained to the stake in the customary fashion, but ‘calmly sat on a faggot and remained motionless till life was extinct’.7 In 1636 and again in 1638, the Cartagena Inquisition, like its counterparts in Lima and Mexico City, turned its attention to wealthy Portuguese merchants – who, as a now standard justification, were accused of Judaising. The confiscations resulting from the trials brought in immense revenues. Content with these, the Inquisition lapsed into profound and prolonged lethargy. Between 1656 and 1818, it did not even bother to publish the annual ‘Edict of Faith’.

  The lethargy was rudely interrupted in 1697, when French privateers captured Cartagena and sacked the city. One of their first actions was to storm the Inquisition's palace, plunder the tribunal's official regalia and immolate it in a mock auto de fe. Demoralised by this trauma, the Inquisition in Cartagena never fully recovered. Forty-four years later, it suffered another debilitating blow. In 1741, the War of Jenkins's Ear,* that most bizarre and surreal of conflicts, was escalating into the War of the Austrian Succession. At the beginning of March, a squadron of the Royal Navy under Admiral Vernon blockaded Cartagena. Having attempted a half-hearted landing and been repulsed, the British admiral contented himself with subjecting the city to a month-long naval bombardment, which left an enduring memory in the minds of the populace. Thus does the event figure in Gabriel García Márquez's short novel, Of Love and Other Demons, which offers a revealing insight into the corruption and sexual activity of the Cartagena Inquisition during the last third of the eighteenth century. During the British naval bombardment of Cartagena, the palace of the Inquisition was totally demolished. It was not to be rebuilt for twenty-five years. By that time, revolution was already looming on the horizon – and, with it, the Inquisition's demise.

  But the Cartagena Inquisition proved sluggish even in opposing the revolution that threatened its extinction. In 1789, a Spanish translation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man was published. Not surprisingly, it was promptly banned, being perceived as inimical to the stable order of society and conducive to that most insidious form of subversion, tolerance. In 1794, as the Reign of Terror swept France, the viceroys of New Granada and Peru wrote to their respective Inquisitions, demanding that all copies of the offending text be ferreted out and destroyed. After what purported to be a lengthy and diligent search, the Cartagena Inquisition claimed not to have found a single copy.

  It hardly mattered whether this futility stemmed from torpor or from covert revolutionary sympathy. The Inquisition in Cartagena was soon to incur the same fate as its counterparts in Mexico and Peru. In 1810, the first popular uprising occurred, and the Cartagena Inquisition, despised as it was by virtually the entire city, became a primary target. After being briefly restored, it was suppressed again in 1820, along with its counterparts elsewhere. In 1821, the revolutionary forces emerged triumphant, and the vice-president of the newly established United States of Colombia officially declared the Inquisition abolished. Shortly thereafter, the Congress of the fledgling country pronounced the Inquisition ‘extinguished forever and never to be re-established’.8

  6

  A Crusade Against Witchcraft

  While smoke from the Spanish Inquisition's fires cast a malodorous pall from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World, the original, older Papal Inquisition was keeping productively busy elsewhere in Europe. It had found a new target, which it harried with fresh impetus. Its enthusiasm in doing so during the centuries that followed was to claim more lives than had the Albigensian Crusade.

  Conventional history, popular assumptions and tradition to the contrary, the Church had never really established as complete authority as it wished over the peoples of
western Europe. Admittedly, its writ ran everywhere. It could call anyone, peasant or monarch, to account. It could divide the continent into dioceses and bishoprics, could bully individuals into purchasing indulgences, could extort tithes. It could punish anyone who defied its teachings, or whom it chose to accuse of doing so. It could dragoon whole communities into attending Mass and observing its other statutory rites and rituals, holy days, feast days and festivals. And it could, indeed, elicit a significant degree of voluntary allegiance in exchange for the solace and consolation it offered, the reassurance and posthumous rewards it promised. But in what is now called ‘the battle for hearts and minds’, it had not met with unqualified success. While many hearts and minds did take seriously the Virgin and the saints, there were many others for whom the Virgin and the saints were simply new masks, new guises, new manifestations of much older deities or principles. And there were many other hearts and minds that remained at least in part devotedly and unabashedly pagan.

  As early as the twelfth century, the Church had preached crusades against the pagan tribes of Prussia and the Baltic coast – the territory that subsequently comprised Pomerania, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Within its own established sphere of influence, however, the Church had conducted at best only a sequence of holding actions against what it perceived to be the forces of darkness – the brooding, sinister, malevolent energies apparently lurking in the gloomy forests that still covered much of the land. For pious Christians, these forests and the darkness associated with them concealed innumerable forms of evil, and provided an impregnable refuge for the demonic. Surrounded by such forests, villages and towns, not to mention isolated abbeys and monasteries, were like spiritual outposts or forts, stranded in the wilderness of hostile country and often beleaguered or besieged.