by John Keahey
De Maupassant, Washington, and Sciascia were not the only writers distressed by the lives of sulfur miners. Pirandello, who was born in nearby Agrigento and whose father once was a wealthy sulfur merchant, wrote about it in the short story “Ciàula Discovers the Moon.” Verga also describes the life of these children in his short story “Rosso malpelo.” This one, set in an underground sand mine, details the brutality some miners directed toward weaker workers.
The man who showed me the photographs told of knowing, when he was a small child, old men who had been child laborers, forced to carry the heavy loads on backs made up of still soft and forming bones. They all walked permanently stooped over, he said.
I bid the kindly gentlemen farewell. Again they shake my hand, wish me a bon voyage, unmute the television, and resume watching their soccer match.
SIX
Sciascia and the Inquisition
Who’er doth enter this horrid tomb.
Here sees the realm of cruelty severe;
Wherefore ’tis writ upon the walls of gloom,
Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Down here we know not if ’tis dark or day.
But tears we know and pain and cruelty;
And here we know not if we ever may
Hear struck the hour of long-craved liberty.
—A mid-seventeenth-century verse, translated from Sicilian, believed written by Simone Rao, and found on a wall of a cell in the Inquisitors Prison, Palermo
ONE BRUTALLY hot July afternoon I found myself standing before Palermo’s cathedral. It had started life as a temple that served various pagan interlopers, eventually evolved into a Christian church in the fifth century, and then came under control of Constantinople. It became a mosque during the Arab period, then became, once again, a Western Christian center that saw the coronation of Norman and German kings and their successors. But it really sprouted into full bloom under the Spanish.
Emotionally, I have a hard time with what went on here in the name of the church. It was the Spanish who, under the reign of those great patrons of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand and Isabella, allowed a revival of the comparatively tame Medieval Inquisition. They let it evolve into what became the feared, despotic Spanish Inquisition that covered much of Europe, including this island off the toe of Italy, and some of the Americas.
In both of its forms, it operated for centuries. Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia spent much of his adult life studying that impact on his fellow Sicilians and on an early resident of his home village, Racalmuto.
But before we get into that tale, it is helpful to understand the roots of the concept “inquisition,” which date back to Roman times. Edward Peters in his simply titled book Inquisition, says that for the Romans, “inquisitor was often a synonym for investigato,” or someone who “searched for proofs.” As time went on, Christianity, even in its earliest iterations, used teaching and persuasion, often in the gentlest of forms, to set right its fallen-away members. This was true well into the twelfth century.
But when persuasio failed, other disciplinary means were called for, and in the twelfth century, basing its work on earlier literature, [the church] erected an elaborate disciplinary structure.… Such disciplinary measures were aimed more often at protecting the faith of the community rather than explicitly punishing the heretic.
Thus were created the medieval inquisitors. The job was given to the Dominicans, formed by Saint Dominic, who were spread around the realm. The idea was to bring in a group of teachers who had no ties to local politics, and who would judge heresy on ecclesiastical terms, staying above the local entanglements that often led to accusations. And the Dominicans were able to take the process out of the hands of “individual fanatic pursuers of heresy.”
One element of the Medieval Inquisition that differed from the later, more barbarous Spanish Inquisition was the way witnesses were used against suspected heretics. In the medieval form, witnesses against an accused heretic may have been kept secret from the general population, but they had to testify and be known to the accused. In the fifteenth century, as the subsequent Spanish Inquisition really got rolling, the accused never knew who the accuser was. And if torture was used by medieval inquisitors to extract a confession—and then only when there were shaky witnesses or proof of guilt was not clear-cut—that confession had to be repeated the following day without torture to ensure the accused really meant what he or she said while in excruciating pain the previous day.
Also, church officials under this earlier, comparatively gentler form, could not condemn anyone to death. The unrepentant heretic was turned over to civil authorities who followed secular law and punished the offender, usually by burning.
Another historian of the Inquisition, Toby Green, tells us that at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, a “visitor from Sicily … Felipe de Barberis was attached to the old medieval Inquisition in Sicily, and he suggested [to the Catholic rulers that they] found one in Spain … Ferdinand and Isabella were convinced.” And so the more intense, more dreaded Inquisition began—and at the urging of a Sicilian!
It started in Spain as a way to persecute conversi, or Jews who had converted to Christianity but were suspected, rightly or wrongly, of secretly practicing Judaism. Spies were dispatched on Friday nights to the Jewish quarters in Spanish-controlled cities, such as Palermo and Catania and elsewhere in the Spanish empire, where they would watch to see if fires were lighted in the homes. This is something Catholics would have no problem doing on a chilly Friday night, but observant Jews would abstain from the labor of fire building—much as they do today by not operating machinery—as they began to observe their Sabbath. The Inquisition gradually, over the decades, expanded its reach throughout Spain’s vast empire deep within the ranks of true believers whom it suspected, again rightly or wrongly, of heresy.
* * *
The large, open space that fronts the Cathedral of Palermo is a tranquil spot. It is an escape from the jammed, noisy Via Vittorio Emanuele that, arrow straight for a kilometer or more, slices through the heart of the city, from the Norman palace, now known as Palazzo Reale, to the sea. The Piazza Cattedrale has numerous palm trees defining its far corners and anchoring small squares of hedged-in areas surrounding a massive statue of the city’s patron saint, Santa Rosalia. Clusters of schoolchildren on outings, mixing in with camera-toting tourists, lounge around the few brief fringes of green.
The judgments of the Spanish Inquisition were not carried out in front of the cathedral, but it is where hundreds of citizens gathered to view the ceremonies that led up to the actual burnings and to partake of a sumptuous feast. The processions that led to the site where the so-called guilty were “relaxed,” as inquisitors euphemistically referred to it, began from here.
Off and on for some three hundred years, between 1478 to the mid-eighteenth century, church leaders adorned in gloriously colored robes started their saunters in solemn processions down the route now followed by Via Vittorio Emanuele. As they neared the sea, they turned right, slowly ambling past the Steri Palace, the headquarters of the Inquisition where so-called heretics were tortured and the religious fathers passed judgment. They would proceed for a few hundred meters more to Piazza Sant’Erasmo, now the site of Villa Giulia. There, a huge pile of wood dominated the open space; erupting from its center was a tall, sturdy post.
Condemned by inquisitors—usually for speaking out against church authority—men and women were burned here, where now beautiful gardens and structures abound. Some sources estimated that upward of five thousand people throughout the Spanish world were “relaxed” in this way; the number for those burned in Sicily from 1487 to 1782 might reach around 250.
Whatever the numbers, these burnings, along with hangings, beheadings, and other brutalities, were conducted in magnificently orchestrated performances known as auto-da-fé, literally the “grand trial of faith.” It was better known as the “ceremony” for the punishment of heretics.
Historian Green, in hi
s book Inquisition: The Reign of Fear, wryly described one such event, conducted in 1647 in Mexico City, as a “brilliant piece of theater.” It likely was a model for what took place elsewhere, including Palermo. All this happened during a time of growing Protestantism and the Counter-Reformation, when the leaders of the Catholic Church, as Green tells us, sought to shore
up authority over these gargantuan empires. Power was at the heart of the Inquisition, and thus, inevitably, did religion enter the province of politics.… There were always, it turned out, others to persecute. But these others could remain dormant for decades, their heresies unapparent, until some political trigger released them for discovery.… For the Inquisition provided nothing less than the first seeds of totalitarian government, of institutionalized racial and sexual abuse.
It was a strange, dehumanizing exercise. Men and women were stripped naked, their bodies twisted and bent before an impassive panel of priestly men of God and a scribe who wrote down every detail: The specific type of torture applied, each question, each answer, each scream. The archived records of this body of the church make for difficult reading.
In addition to the politics that may have driven some of the condemnations, the practice was usually coupled with the confiscation of a condemned heretic’s land. This led to the creation, particularly in Sicily, of massive estates for church leaders and their friends. At the same time, there certainly were some inquisitors who believed that sending a heretic to the fire was the only way to cleanse his or her soul for entry into God’s kingdom. For them and, they believed, for the condemned, the auto was a joyful, necessary experience.
One observation Green makes in his book particularly affects me. He described a painting executed around 1495 by Pedro de Berruguete. It hangs in Madrid’s Prado museum and shows various church leaders, including Saint Dominic, presiding over the mass burning of heretics—something he may never have done in reality. His actual role in the earlier Medieval Inquisition is in dispute among scholars, some of who maintain he was never personally involved.
Whatever the reality, the saint, says Green, “is portrayed benevolently, but what is most striking is the air of serenity and justice which envelops the dignitaries around him” as “the little men beneath them” are tied to the posts and flames are licking at their feet. Iron rods protrude suggestively from their crotches, placed there to hold their bodies upright as the flames burn into flesh. What particularly strikes the historian about the demeanor of the church officials in the painting “is the calmness, indeed the indifference, of the dignitaries to the fates of the condemned … their suffering is not supposed to be a cause for concern.” One prelate even dozes in his seat just below the saint’s throne.
* * *
Such moments as described in that painting and the Mexico City auto did take place in this Sicilian city in the now beautiful garden area full of tourists and young people, and in other cities in Sicily as well. The Spanish Inquisition functioned efficiently throughout the centuries-long Spanish rule. This does not mean that all Sicilians embraced the Inquisition. Green reports that during a five-year period in the early 1500s, more than seventy people were burned in autos. In one year alone, 1513, thirty-five people were burned. These numbers began to gnaw away at the Sicilian soul. The Sicilian Parliament lodged a protest about the scores of people being led to the stake “shouting out their innocence in vain and that they had only confessed under torture their guilt.”
News of Ferdinand’s death in 1516 was met by mobs filling Palermo’s streets. They sacked the viceroy’s palace, burned the Inquisition’s archive, and freed prisoners. Of course, things settled down, inquisitors returned and, eventually, the persecutions resumed, but at a much slower pace than before.
But the practice continued to flay at Sicilian souls. Friction remained. A powder magazine in the Inquisition headquarters exploded in 1593. Inquisitors were nearly killed and, in one case, one actually died at the hands of a prisoner—a situation described in a Sciascia story.
After centuries of pain and suffering, it did end, in 1783. “[T]he Sicilian Inquisition was abolished by royal order, its buildings and finances were confiscated, its records sealed, and its prisoners released,” writes Green. While the records may have been sealed, many were burned in the courtyard of the Steri Palace in Palermo’s Kalsa quarter.
The Steri prisons had come into being beginning in 1603 in the form we see them today. The Inquisition in Sicily, after the turbulent sixteenth century, had moved into the palace in 1601 and endured there for nearly two hundred years more, until 1783. The first cells, on the ground floor, were built by 1605; another six cells on a new floor above were added some years later. Each cell had an indentation in a wall, with a hole in the bottom, that was used as a toilet. The cell entrances were low, perhaps four feet high, forcing a prisoner to stoop. As many as twelve men would be confined to a single cell, and the only light was from a slot high up on the outside wall.
* * *
I am drawn to all this because of Leonardo Sciascia’s chilling critique of the Spanish practice and the opportunity I had to visit the prison under the guidance of Sciascia’s son-in-law, Nino Catalano, an engineer instrumental in the restoration of the prison.
In The Death of the Inquisitor, the writer focuses on the story of a monk from his village of Racalmuto. Fra Diego la Matina, age thirty-seven, a member of the Reformed Order of Saint Augustine—“Impertinent, Pertinacious, Incorrigible”—was burned at the stake in 1658. His final crime: murdering an inquisitor while imprisoned for life adjacent to the Steri Palace. His story is complex. Sciascia is uncertain why the friar first ran afoul of the church. He conjectures that Fra Diego’s heresies may have been social, not theological. The friar may have been “a thief and not a man of ideas.” This may explain why, until the murder, authorities were content only to lock him up.
Despite his religious standing, he seems to have been in and out of trouble with the church most of his adult life. He was brought before the tribunal several times but escaped punishment by abjuring, or renouncing his crimes. On two occasions, he was sent to the royal galleys. During his second time there, in 1649, he “seduced several galley convicts into his errors.” This caused him to be condemned for life to the prison behind the Steri. He escaped once. Some sources say he broke through the walls and commandeered the “rope of torture” that was hanging from the hook in the torture room and used it in his escape over the walls.
Somehow, the friar made it back to Racalmuto, hiding in a cave in the countryside. One writer Sciascia quotes says Fra Diego roamed the countryside “clearing his way with the blood of others.” Sciascia does not believe the friar murdered anyone, saying the “blood of others” is a metaphor in Sicily meaning the “property of others.” Eventually, the damaged friar, once a man of God, was recaptured and carried away, in chains, back to the Steri.
This was his final incarceration. It was reported that, during a visit to the prison by the chief inquisitor, Monsignor Don Juan Lopez de Cisneros, La Matina came out in a rage and beat him severely with his shackles. Sciascia speculates that the friar was likely being tortured when the attack occurred rather than being subjected to a friendly visit and that somehow he slipped his restraints and broke away from his jailers. The inquisitor died sometime later and was lauded as a martyr. This attack was too much for the Holy Fathers to ignore. La Matina was condemned to the stake in Piazza Sant’Erasmo.
Sciascia gives us a vivid description of the preparations for this auto-de-fé that included thirty-two other prisoners described as including nine women: “witches, possessors of the evil eye, invokers of demons.”
It promised to be, in the eyes of the faithful, a glorious affair. A stadium that could hold several hundred spectators was built in the open area in front of the cathedral. Chained into a heavy wooden chair built especially to hold him fast, he was brought there to hear his sentence and to be drummed out of his order.
Reportedly, Fra Diego shouted and cursed as
he was carried through the vast crowd. His curses became so unsettling that guards had to place a “brake” in his mouth—probably, speculates Sciascia, a sort of horse bit. The friar was ceremoniously stripped of his office, and the crowd was told only that he was “a heretic, an apostate, a blasphemer, and a parricide for having killed Monsignor de Cisneros.” It was the Spanish Inquisition’s practice to withhold publicly details of the crimes of all those condemned lest they “offend the ears of Catholics.”
The thirty-two other prisoners each stepped forward and abjured their crimes and were absolved. All that was left for the now defrocked friar was for him to be carried, still chained in his chair, on an ox-drawn cart to the stake awaiting him in Piazza Sant’Erasmo. “[T]he wood was fired, and the foul body of the evil heretic was quickly smoked, engulfed, burned, and reduced to ashes, and the mad infernal soul passed on to suffer and to blaspheme forever.”
In an appendix to his story, written just a few months after The Death of the Inquisitor was first published, Sciascia recognizes that there are many unanswered questions about the impact of the Inquisition on Sicilians. While the joyful Palermitani, on June 27, 1783, publicly burned many of the records, another archive survived and was transferred to Madrid. Sciascia writes: “We hope that some historian will decide to study them.”
* * *
I am back in Palermo a few days after meeting with members of the writer’s family, including son-in-law Nino Catalano, at Sciascia’s country home near Racalmuto. It is a bright July morning in 2009. The sun climbs higher, as does the mercury in the thermometer near the entrance to a coffee bar where I grab my morning espresso. I had originally planned to be at a pensione on the east slope of Etna, but Nino’s invitation, conveyed through his son, Vito, changed everything. Nino is an engineer and director of the technical department of the University of Palermo.