Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  The habits of their common people were exactly the same as those of the stinking Jews, as a result of the continued contact between them. They were just as greedy and gluttonous, never losing the Jewish customs of eating revolting food, and stews or awful dishes of onions and garlic, of things fried in oil, and they cooked their meat in oil, or they poured oil on it instead of lard and pig fat in order to avoid the lard; and this mixture of oil and meat produces a horrible stench; and as a result their houses and doorways stank of that disgusting food; and they themselves also had the smell of Jews about them. And they observed the Passover and Saturdays as best they could; they sent oil for the lamps to the synagogue; they had Jews who secretly preached to them in ther homes, especially and very clandestinely to the women.

  Bernáldez watched the Inquisition’s introduction with approval. ‘The King and Queen were made aware of all this,’ he reported. They had asked the bishop of Cadiz to look into the problem with the help of the radical Hojeda, who belonged to the same Dominican order as Torquemada. The report that came back was, predictably, full of dark warnings of terrible heresy. ‘Given that this could in no way be tolerated, nor resolved without an inquisition into it, they denounced the situation at great length to their highnesses, informing them of how, who and where the Jewish ceremonies were performed and which powerful people were involved along with a large part of the [population of the] city of Seville,’ Benáldez reported.19

  Isabella’s inquisitors, then, were clearly expected to find evidence of heresy. While making sure that they were installed in proper living quarters she also wrote warning the city’s asistente (as Seville’s version of the corregidor – the royal overseer in the cities whose power Isabella was busy increasing as she extended her reach deeper into Castilian society – was called) to watch out for the trouble and unrest which, she supposed, their arrival might provoke. ‘If anyone does [create trouble], arrest them and confiscate their property and goods,’ Isabella instructed. The inquisitors took just days to provoke tumult, making a show of authority by pursuing the most prominent conversos first. ‘By different ways and means they knew within a very few days the truth about this wickedly depraved heresy and they began to arrest men and women from among the most guilty, and they put them in San Pablo [monastery]; and then they arrested some of the most respected and wealthiest of them,’ Bernáldez said. With such a large number of conversos considered suspect, the jails quickly filled up and, as an overflow, the inquisitors had to borrow the castle across the River Guadalquivir in Triana, transporting the prisoners across the elaborate pontoon-style bridge called the Puente de Barcas.20

  Sevillanos soon became used to the smoke and smell of the Inquisition fires, which burned their first victims on 6 February 1481, on a bonfire overlooked by four plaster statues of the prophets. ‘At the first burning, they brought six men and women out into [the Plaza de] Tablada and burned them: and Friar Alonso [Hojeda], a jealous defender of the faith of Jesus Christ and the person who worked hardest to bring the inquisition to Seville, preached there,’ Bernáldez reported. ‘In the first few days they burned three of the most important and richest men in the city.’ The victims included Pedro Fernández Benadeba, the mayordomo of the city’s cathedral, and a respected, learned judge called Juan Fernández Abolasia. ‘Neither their wealth nor favours could help them,’ said Bernáldez, who noted that three converso priests and four monks were also among those burned over the next eight years.21

  The first two inquisitors, the Dominican friars Juan de San Martín and Miguel de Morillo, were not as high ranking as the pope might have expected for such an important role, but they were accompanied, at least to begin with, by Juan Ruíz de Medina, the prior of the large collegiate church in Isabella’s beloved Medina del Campo, who would rise rapidly through the ranks of both royal and ecclesiastical officialdom. Their powers were extraordinary. By January 1481, just three months after starting, they felt free to threaten one of the city’s strongmen, the Marquess of Cadiz, for protecting conversos who had fled to his lands. The marquess must originally have thought of them as two lowly friars, but their warning to him was another blow to the status of the Grandees, as – either by design or through useful coincidence – this new, royal-backed Inquisition also served Isabella and Ferdinand’s wider, authoritarian aim of wresting power from them. ‘We warn you that we will act against you and others in every possible way … as a defender, protector, receiver and coverer-up of heresy,’ they said.22

  Those who ‘confessed’ and repented, the so-called reconciliados, might be let off with fines, but only after public humiliation at the crowded open-air auto de fe ceremonies. Up to 500 reconciliados at a time were paraded through the city’s streets in their rag-like gowns and tall, conical sanbenito hats. ‘The inquisitors would take people out of prison and put sanbenitos on them – with red crosses in front and behind – and they had to walk around in those sanbenitos for a long time,’ said Bernáldez.23 Those who escaped Seville often ended up being condemned in their absence and their possessions handed over to the royal treasury – which received a considerable boost from the flood of fines and confiscated property. The church itself could not spill human blood, so the guilty were handed over to the so-called ‘secular arm’, the civil authorities who carried out the executions either by fire or by garrotting. The latter was the ‘lucky’ fate of those who confessed on their way to execution. It was the church, however, that promoted death by burning – a concept alien to Castile’s common law. The logic was that this was doing the victims a favour, as punishment on earth might save them from eternal damnation after death.24

  In time the fires came to incinerate not just the living but the already dead, like those in Seville’s graveyards about whom Isabella had written to her inquisitors. These were dug up and their bones thrown on to the fires. Their offspring were notified and invited to defend them, but they mostly declined. They only risked being prosecuted themselves. Even then, their children often found themselves forced to pay fines for the supposed crimes of their deceased, disinterred and carbonised forebears – including those who had died up to seventy years before. Later instructions to inquisitors in the city were quite clear. ‘While concentrating on those who are alive, one should not neglect those deemed to have died as Jewish heretics, who should be exhumed so they can be burned and so that the tax collectors can deal with their goods according to the relevant laws,’ proclaimed the instructions, signed by Torquemada, who was made inquisitor general in 1483 and became its driving spirit. Among those to receive property taken from Seville’s conversos was Torquemada’s own servant, Martín de Escalada, who was gifted the houses taken from Juan Pinto, ‘the Deaf Man’. The burning of the already dead was accompanied by great ceremony. Effigies were made, dressed in Jewish burial clothes and individually denounced at one of the great auto de fe gatherings before being pronounced guilty and tossed into the flames with the bones. Four hundred of the dead were condemned and ritually burned at a single sitting in Toledo.25

  Palencia, who was also from a converso family, put the numbers who were in some way dealt with by Seville’s Inquisition in its early years at 16,000 – or half the city’s converso population, and one in six of its inhabitants. Like many, he seemed anxious to distance himself by showing support for the Inquisition, blaming some of his fellow conversos for daring to rise above their station. ‘Extraordinarily enriched by strange arts, proud and aspiring with insolent arrogance to public office, men of lowly extraction had bought themselves the status of gentlemen with money, against the rules and using the vilest trickery,’26 he wrote. Their other crime, in other words, was to be successful newcomers into the Christian community, using the quick wit and adaptability of the outsider to their advantage as soon as they had converted and had access to the privileges and tricks of the dominant, Christian majority.

  With the Seville inquisitors so rapidly and efficiently ‘proving’ that judaising was widespread, it was inevitable that the Inquisition
should soon extend its reach to other cities in Andalusia and across both Castile and Aragon – making it one of the first shared projects of the new Spain being created by Isabella and Ferdinand. The forced confessions of Seville’s supposed secret Jews helped to convince them that heresy had become an epidemic. ‘From their confessions … the [secret] Jews in Córdoba, Toledo, Burgos, Valencia, Segovia and the whole of Spain were found out about,’ said Bernáldez. The Inquisition thus became a self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling machine. By extracting false confessions from thoseit tortured or tyrannised, it created such a huge number of heretics that it was quickly assumed that many of the conversos really must be secret Jews. And the more that conversos saw there was no escape beyond confession, the more inquisitors were furnished withproof. To affirm one’s innocence, as the proudest and most devout conversos did, was a risky strategy that could end up in the torture chamber. If the wealthy, the privileged and even ordained members of the church were unable to defend themselves, then the lowly craftsmen and tradesmen who made up most of the converso population must have fared even worse. Anonymity was guaranteed to those who denounced suspected judaisers, meaning that the accused could often do little to defend themselves. An Inquisition document from 150 years later lays out its sweeping approach to suspicious behaviour that good Christians should immediately denounce:

  If you know of or have heard of anyone who keeps the Sabbath, observing the Law of Moses, wearing clean white shirts and other best clothes, and putting out clean table-clothes and clean sheets on the beds on feast days, in honour of the said Sabbath, without lighting lights from Friday evening onwards … Or who have eaten meat during Lent and other days prohibited by the Holy Mother Church. Or who have done the great fast, which they call the fast of pardon, remaining barefooted. Or if they say Jewish prayers and at night beg forgiveness of each other, with parents placing their hand on children’s heads without making the sign of the cross or saying anything but: ‘Be blessed by God, and by Me’ … Or if any woman spends the forty days after childbirth without entering church. Of if they circumcise their children at birth, or give them Jewish names. Or if after baptism they wash the places where the oil and chrism were put. Or if when someone is on their death bed, they turn to the wall to die, or wash the dead body with warm water, shaving their beard, armpits and other parts of their body.27

  With anonymity guaranteed, the Inquisition became a conduit for private revenge and popular hatred. Old Christians no longer needed to riot or attack the neighbourhoods of the conversos, who were also derided as marranos, or pigs. They could simply make up stories. The Inquisition was, in that respect, an efficient way of maintaining public order (something Isabella was keen on, as sevillanos knew only too well), if only by transferring the blame – and punishment – on to the victims. Even some Jews, who looked down on the conversos as traitors, joined the game, volunteering as witnesses – false or otherwise – against those whose families had shunned their own faith or who, quite simply, were personal enemies. A Jewish doctor was among the witnesses in a case in Soria, telling the inquisitors that one of the accused had called none other than the chief inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada ‘a dog … and cruel heretic’.28 Jews came under intense pressure. ‘Proclamations were issued in all the synagogues that every man or woman who knew anything about the marranos’ conduct was required to inform on them, regardless of whether their offence had been a minor or major one,’ wrote a Jewish historian who spoke to those in exile.29 Isabella herself moved to quash some of the false testimony given against conversos in Toledo, ordering arrests and torture.30

  A Jewish writer saw greed behind many of the denunciations, whether by old Christians, fellow conversos or Jews. ‘If a woman longed for the silver and gold vessels of her neighbour or of a woman who shared the same building with her, and the woman refused to hand them over, she [the other woman] was denounced,’ he wrote.31 A second Jewish author agreed. ‘There were at that time some conversos who delivered their own brothers into the cruel monster’s power. Poverty was the spur and the reason for most of their evil acts. Many poor conversos went to the houses of their richer brothers to ask for a loan of fifty or one hundred crusados for their need. If any refused them, they accused him of Judaising.’32 Two conversos from Huesca, Simon de Santángel and his wife, were famously burned at Lleida after being denounced by their own son.

  Where inquisitors were not sure of guilt, or wished to force a defendant to testify, torture was encouraged. A document instructing torturers is most eloquent. It gives a step-by-step guide to using the rack to stretch limbs to breaking point, advising the torturer to take his time and offer the victim a chance to speak in between each step.33 Victims were to be tied to the rack with separate ropes around each limb that could also be tightened, stopping the flow of blood. ‘You must understand that these steps in the torture are designed to inflict the greatest possible pain on the prisoner in order to get a confession by applying it to the most sensitive areas and going from limb to limb,’ the anonymous author explained. ‘You may apply whatever is most effective. I am just writing down what I have done.’ It was easier to confess than to resist.

  As suspicious behaviour often revolved around household habits in the kitchen and elsewhere, many more women than men were arrested.34 When a thirty-two-year-old spice merchant’s wife called Marina González was visited on her sickbed by an Inquisition notary in her home town of Almagro she admitted to following certain Jewish customs and rituals, blamed her two brothers-in-law and begged for pardon. ‘From now onwards [I pledge] to live and die and end my days in the Holy Catholic Faith for the rest of my life,’ she said. But when she was arrested again and taken before the Toledo tribunal by the city Inquisition’s special jailer, Pedro González, ‘the Snub-Nosed’, the court decided she should be tortured to discover whether she had stuck to her pledge.35 Her lawyers pointed out that she never rested on the Sabbath, owned a statue of St Catherine, ate pork, killed fowls by strangling them and ate ‘all other christian foods, without distinction’. Marina González lived, dressed and spoke like a good Christian woman ‘hearing mass and taking holy communion and following the church’s fasts’, they declared, and they complained that the allegations were all vague, with no dates or places. ‘And though she wears little skirts made of red cloth … your reverences did not forbid such a thing unless it was of scarlet.’36

  Marina González was given a chance to confess, but insisted on her innocence and was sent to the torture chamber.

  She was stripped of her little old skirts and placed on the rack, with cords tied tightly around her arms and legs and a cord holding her head tight … and with a jar which contained around three pints, they started to administer the water and once they had poured a pint [into her mouth and nose], the Licenciate [Fernando de Mazuecos, the inquisitor] asked whether she had done anything wrong; and she said ‘no’. They continued to pour the water and then she said that she would tell them the truth; but she did not say anything. [So] they gave her more water and she said that, if they stopped, she would tell them the truth. But she did not say anything at all. His Reverence ordered that she be given more water until that three-pint jug was emptied and she never said a thing.

  Occasionally they untied her head, allowing her to sit up and inviting her to talk. She at first refused, but eventually accused a neighbour of observing Jewish fasts. Taken back to prison, Marina González refused to eat, and this was her final mistake. She was found guilty of trying ‘to kill herself in prison in order to avoid confessing to her errors’. She was placed on a wooden scaffold in the city’s Plaza Zocodover, while the judgment was read out loud. ‘We declare her a heretic and relapsed apostate,’ the court decided. ‘And having incurred the sentence of major excommunication and confiscation and loss of her goods, we must remit her to the justice of the secular arm [the civil authorities, answerable to the crown, who carried out the punishments].’ That meant death.37

  Seville’s conversos reacted angrily to
the Inquisition’s high-handedness, clamouring for proper justice and demanding that Isabella and Ferdinand intervene. The conversos mostly considered themselves to be – and were – proper Christians, at least as good as those who had no Jewish blood.

  All Christians were, in theory, on an equal footing before God and they could not understand why the Inquisition’s victims were ‘only those converted to the faith who came from Jewish lineage, and not others’. Heresy of other kinds was not rife in Spain, but ordinary Spaniards were hardly good, observant Christians. ‘Of 300 people, you will barely find 30 who know what they are meant to know,’ wrote a Dominican friar sixty years later, pointing out that the rich were as likely to be ignorant as the poor. Secrecy and torture distorted the judicial process, the conversos complained, while those who erred in their faith should be reasoned with, not burned. ‘They said it was inhuman and cruel to throw into the fire anyone who pronounced the name of Christ, who confessed that they were Christian and wished to live as a Christian,’ said Pulgar.38

  Men like Pulgar, who clearly saw the hand of ‘the Christian queen’ at work, could see that it was wrong to punish the majority for the sins of a few. ‘You should treat the few relapsed people in one way, but treat the majority differently,’ he said.39 Pulgar could also see that the conversos’ lapses, where they existed, often reflected those of old Christians. With few good examples to follow, it was not surprising if some conversos were not observing church doctrine properly: ‘Given that the old ones are such bad Christians, the new ones are [also] bad,’ he wrote. ‘To burn them all because of this would be the cruellest of things.’