Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Why had silence replaced the song? It was not any aridity in Spain as such, for her daily life provided a lyricism used to good effect by alien composers as diverse as Mozart, Verdi, Bizet and Rossini. Of course, they wrote opera, which is a complex form that may or may not be congenial to a given group of composers, but even in simpler forms Spanish musicians had at their disposal thematic material much richer than that used by Brahms, Smetana and Bartók, but they did little with it, abandoning their subject matter to foreigners like Strauss, Rimski-Korsakov, Chabrier, Ravel and Lalo. Now, we know that Spanish composers had the training and the technique, so their failure to create must have been caused by some force outside themselves. And the more I contemplated this problem, the more I was driven to that central question of Spanish intellectual history: Was it the Inquisition that crushed Spain’s creative life?

  The Black Legend would have us think so. It says that the Inquisition so terrorized Spanish society that anyone with an inquiring mind was silenced, that science and invention were impeded and that the speculation which is necessary alike for progress and great works of art was impossible. Much evidence of philosophers imprisoned and theologians burned can be cited to support these charges, and years ago when I first studied the matter there was no adequate rebuttal.

  In recent decades, however, Spanish intellectuals have begun to fight back and some of the arguments they have developed have been startling. For me the most representative came in a book where I did not expect them, César Silió Cortés’ Isabel the Catholic, Founder of Spain, printed In 1954. Dr. Silió, a member of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, finds in writing his biography that he must deal frontally with this matter of the Inquisition, since it was Queen Isabel who sponsored the institution. If the Inquisition were judged to be as bad as anti-Spanish writers have charged, its evil would reflect upon the patron Queen of Spain; but if it were seen to be otherwise, then whatever glory pertains to it would also pertain to Isabel.

  Dr. Silió’s arguments are unequivocal. 1. The Inquisition was not a Spanish invention but was of Italian origin, was centuries old and was introduced into Spain rather later than elsewhere. 2. It was not introduced by Isabel, for it had operated in Spain under her predecessors as early as 1232. 3. Compared to the earlier versions, the Isabel Inquisition was only one-fifth as harsh in the number of persons condemned to death. 4. It actually saved lives, for because of it the religious wars which seared the rest of Europe were avoided. 5. Far from inhibiting Spanish intellectual life, it in a sense encouraged it; on the Spanish index one can find not a single book of philosophical merit, whether written by a foreigner or by a Spaniard. 6. Nor did it deter science, for it never proscribed a single line of Copernicus, Galileo or Newton. 7. The punishments it did administer were far less severe in kind and number than those exercised in other countries at the same time, a fact conspicuously true when one considers the large number of half-mad people who were burned as witches in Germany and England, a practice which the Inquisition did not tolerate, because only a brief questioning by the Inquisitors was needed to prove that the accused was mentally incompetent.

  Silió makes three additional defenses which must be considered in further detail. 8. He points out that the period of Spain’s greatest intellectual achievement coincided with the apex of Inquisition power, and no inhibition deterred the artists, writers and musicians. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote when the Inquisition was strongest. Calderón de la Barca wrote his soaring dramas in the same climate and so did Lope de Vega. Victoria composed his great music under the Inquisition. Poets, essayists and historians flourished in this period, and none seemed to suffer. Books were printed at a rate which exceeded that in other countries and philosophy and sciences prospered. This was the age of the university, when Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares were at their apex in both number of students and vitality of thought. If one wants to insist that the Inquisition hampered intellectual life, he has the Golden Age to contend with.

  9. Furthermore, the Inquisition was necessary because Jews had infiltrated national life and had to be eradicated. In fact, the ordinary people of Spain were more insistent upon this than were the rulers, for as Silió says, ‘The massacres of Jews were the work of popular wrath, of people faced by the infiltration of a tenacious race, astute and industrious, who, even though they suffered death and cruel exploitation, bent before the hurricanes in order to surge forth anew, like some evil weed, monopolizing the riches, exploiting usury and gathering together everything.’ Silió also points out that it was impossible to accept Jews within the society because they stole little Christian children and crucified them, thus making a mockery of Good Friday. In proof of this charge he cites the case of Yucé Franco, who during the last days of June, 1490, assembled a group of Jews to perform just such a crucifixion. Franco, whose name was typically Jewish, was captured on July 1, 1490, and it was not until sixteen months later, after the most careful legal investigations by the Inquisition, that he was condemned. Even then all evidence was turned over to the university faculty at Salamanca for them to assure themselves that the trial had been properly conducted, and when Salamanca approved, the dossier was forwarded to a jury of educated men here in Avila, and they too concurred. The public burning took place in this city on November 16, 1491, as a result of which wild popular riots broke out against all Jews, even though Fernando and Isabel had forbidden such outbursts. Silió contends that it was only this hideous Jewish crime, one of many, that forced the Spanish sovereigns to decree the general expulsion of Jews from Spain. Silió points out that the facts of the Yucé Franco case and the justice of the decision cannot be questioned, even though there was no visual proof of the crime, because the investigation was carried out under the personal supervision of a wise and just judge, Tomás de Torquemada, who is proved to have been a humble man, lacking ostentation, desiring only justice, and far from the ‘new Nero’ that popular writers have tried to make him. When the old lies against the inquisitor general are removed one by one, Torquemada stands forth as ‘an agreeable, lovable, hard-working, able and modest man whose only ambition was to imitate Jesus Christ.’ Such a man, Silió argues, would never have let the Inquisition get out of hand.

  Silió’s final point is brief and powerful: ‘The Spanish Inquisition as established by the Catholic Kings was adequate to its time and necessary in that time.’

  Some years ago I was obliged to read everything in print in the languages I could handle regarding the Spanish Inquisition, and I reached these conclusions, which in certain limited areas coincide with Silió’s. 1. In the beginning Spain’s Inquisition was no more cruel than similar inquisitorial bodies operating in other European countries. 2. The number of persons executed in Spain at the height of the European movement, say from 1492–1550, did not exceed records established in other countries. 3. The operation of the Spanish Index in proscribing books was more lenient than the Italian. 4, No one can deny that Spanish culture achieved its Golden Age coincident with the Inquisition. 5. So far as I was able to ascertain, no Jew was ever executed by the Inquisition. If a man under investigation could say simply, ‘Yes, I’m a Jew and have never been otherwise,’ his gold and silver were confiscated and he was banished from Spain, but he was in no way subject to the Inquisition and certainly he was never burned. 6. The Jews who did suffer, and in the thousands, were those who had at one time been baptized as Catholics, had been legal Catholics and had committed apostasy by reverting to Jewish practices. These were rooted out with great severity, but when they were burned, it was as Catholics, not as Jews. 7. Particularly sad were the cases of shipwrecked English sailors in the middle years of the sixteenth century, for if they swam to Spanish soil they were in real danger of being burned. The Inquisition maintained that any Englishmen who was then a Protestant must have been born and baptized a Catholic and was ipso facto a heretic deserving death. The frequency with which such sailors were condemned on this theological technicality was appalling. 8. The persecution
of Protestants in Spain, more especially the hated Lutherans, may have been more severe in numbers than the similar persecution of Catholics in Protestant countries, but it was not more vicious. The falsity of the Black Legend was obvious. 9. But the more I studied this problem the more apparent it became that something fundamental had happened in Spain that had not happened in the rest of Europe, and I began to think that the differential must be this: That whereas all European nations had originally sponsored some form of Inquisition, with Spain’s less cruel than others, it was only in Spain that the institution lingered on, so that the last public burning occurred in 1781, when an old woman was hauled to the stake after witnesses had sworn that ‘she had conducted carnal converse with the Devil, after which she laid eggs with prophecies written on them.’ On February 22, 1813, the Cortes abolished the Inquisition by a vote of ninety to sixty, but on July 21 of the following year, King Fernando VII having regained the throne, it was restored. In 1820, when the nation turned more liberal, the king again had to order the abolishment of the Inquisition, but as soon as he felt himself strong enough to do so, he revoked his decree. It was not until July 15, 1834, that the tribunal was finally suppressed, its properties being applied to a reduction of the national debt, but even then strong movements arose throughout Spain demanding ‘the restoration of our beloved Inquisition,’ and for years the issue remained lively. The last public execution which could be charged against the spirit of the Inquisition took place on June 26, 1826, in Valencia, the victim being a schoolteacher whose crime was that in public prayer he used ‘Praise be to God’ rather than ‘Ave Maria.’ It was the terrible prolongation that constituted the difference, as if Spain had found in this bizarre social weapon a ritual that satisfied some deep national appetite. I therefore answered my rhetorical question affirmatively: The Inquisition, through its persistence, had been the cause of Spain’s decline.

  Along the Sierpes in Sevilla, along the promenade in Badajoz and even in the smallest Spanish city, you will find the glass-fronted club where old mens sit lost in reflection. This one happens to be in the Plaza Mayor at Salamanca.

  Then in 1965, when I had finished my study, a book called The Spanish Inquisition appeared and I discovered with a certain wryness that its author, Henry Kamen, who teaches history at the University of Edinburgh, had done my work for me, but about four years too late. He had summarized in unhysterical form our knowledge of the Inquisition, and I commend his book to anyone who wishes to pursue the matter. It is true that he relied on old standard works like Juan Antonio Llorente’s Historic Memoir Regarding Spanish National Opinion on the Inquisition (circulated in manuscript in 1811; later developed into the four-volume Histoire critique de l’Inquisition d’Espagne, Paris, 1818) and Henry Charles Lea’s A History of the Inquisition of Spain (1906–1908), but he also looks into collateral problems, and it is this aspect of his work that is most rewarding.

  On basic facts about the Inquisition he differs little from Silió, except of course regarding the Yucé Franco ritual murder which modern scholars know to have been an invention, and he also confirms my conclusions with an important exception, which I shall note in the next paragraph. The facts he cites are sometimes startling. ‘The total number of so-called witches executed in the seventeenth century in Germany alone has been put as high as a hundred thousand, a figure which is probably four times as great as the number of people burned by the Spanish Inquisition in all its history.’ The Bishop of Bamberg during the period 1622–1633 caused six hundred witches to be burned and in the same period the Bishop of Würzburg nine hundred.

  Kamen reaches three main conclusions. The ordinary people of Spain applauded the Inquisition and did not think of it as oppressive. My argument, that the Inquisition caused Spain’s decline, he holds to be inaccurate, in that he finds no substantial evidence to support it. He believes that the real tragedy of the Inquisition was that it helped create a closed society from which alien elements were expelled and into which no new ideas were allowed to enter. It is in the analysis of this third proposition that he provides much new material.

  He contends that although the Inquisition may have begun as a solution to a religious problem, it quickly became an instrument for enforcing a pernicious theory regarding ‘purity of blood,’ which meant that any family whose ancestors had been either Moorish or Jewish was contaminated. Since Moors had married in Spain for seven hundred years and Jews for eleven hundred, and since there had been forced conversions of both, there had to be much impure blood in Spain, and its eradication provided a chance for informers to appropriate jobs, money and titles now belonging to the impure. Researchers who hoped to overthrow great families drew up a black list entitled The Green Book of Aragón, which identified families in that kingdom having impure blood, involving hundreds in catastrophe. It was so successful that in 1560 a disgruntled cardinal, irritated beause two relatives had been refused admittance to a military order, compiled Blot on the Nobility of Spain, identifying by name those families with impure blood.

  It is difficult to imagine what such a charge entailed. The family could have been practicing Christians for three hundred years and without blemish so far as their Catholicism was concerned, but merely because they had a touch of Moorish or Jewish blood they could not send their sons to a university, or work in certain jobs, or hold office in a cathedral, or become officers in the army, or dignitaries in the Church. Military orders like that of Santiago had strict requirements of racial purity and became instruments of reaction and oppression. All Spanish life was corrupted by this mania and thousands were drawn into the net of the Inquisition principally because friends reported that they had hidden their Jewishness. Before a man could apply for any important job he had to present a genealogy going back numerous generations, and the compiling of such records provided a fruitful source of bribery and blackmail. Incredible as it seems, laws policing purity of blood continued in force until January 31, 1835; in the army the application of the principle continued to 1859 and in the obtaining of marriage licenses to 1865.

  It was this continuing battle for conformity that punished Spain so severely; although the role played by the Inquisition in religion could be matched in other countries, its part in eradicating those social variations which interact to build strong nations was here unique. Spain was driven by a mania for homogeneity, not realizing that no one group of people can generate all the concepts necessary for its survival. The country insisted upon a closed society and succeeded in getting it, but what it excluded was more significant than what it enclosed

  In 1770 the University of Salamanca forbade Descartes to be taught because he was dangerous to Catholic principles, Thomas Hobbes because he was too compendious and John Locke because he was obscure and must be read with extreme care. As late as 1645 a university professor in Logroño was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and perpetual deprivation of the right to teach because he had referred to the contents of a prohibited book. At one point the Inquisition of a northern city issued the blanket directive that no university should teach from any book that had been published within forty years. Even the great professors who had worked at Alcalá de Hernares with Cardinal Cisneros building the Poliglota were intimidated and efforts were made to prohibit the study of Greek on grounds that devout men knew that the true Bible existed only in Latin. For me the insanity is best exemplified in the case of a man who was overheard wagering his word against God’s nose. A learned gloss was issued proving that such a statement identified the blasphemer as a member of the Badian heresy, which treated God as a corporeal being with human attributes, and for believing this a man should be burned. Word crept across Spain that it was prudent to remain silent, and speculation ceased, but as Kamen points out, it was not the Inquisition that should be blamed but the total drift of society.

  However, we must not explain away too much. There is today in Spain a strong spirit of revisionism in historical scholarship which says, ‘Since the excesses charged against Spain by th
e Black Legend have been proved false, their contraries must be true. Thus Felipe II was a king without blemish. The Inquisition was good rather than bad. Tómas de Torquemada was a gentle Christian. And, as a matter of fact, Spain never suffered a decline.’ A frontal attack is also mounted against any criticism of contemporary Spain, however mild, by charging that the author is once more purveying the errors of the Black Legend. In recent reading I have collected eighteen examples of newspaper articles attacking books, plays, paintings, motion pictures and general news stories as contaminated by the Black Legend. Honest and fair comment supported by historical research on the one hand or by contemporary observation on the other is thus condemned, and it is even popular to deny that Spain ever suffered post-Golden Age reversals, but to refute this tempting thesis one needs only quote the experts. Sometime around 1640, when Spain ached from defeats in all fields, King Felipe IV said, ‘These evil events have been caused by your sins and mine in particular … I believe that God our Lord is angry and irate with me and my realms on account of many sins and particularly on account of mine.’ In 1957 Generalísimo Franco said of a later period, ‘While other world powers were able to marshal their strength, Spain sank into a hundred-year sleep.’

  The decline was real and I believe, in spite of Kamen’s argument to the contrary, that the Inquisition was largely to blame. For almost four centuries it enforced an intellectual conformity and rejected all minorities. The Moors, the Jews, the Illuminati, the Jesuits and the Protestants were expelled and their ideas with them. Spain thus became the next nation in a tragic series who decided to fence out new ideas rather than welcome them and she suffered the inescapable penalty. An oyster can live to itself, but without grains of sand for agitation it cannot produce pearls.