Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  For all its might and intelligence, creativity and tolerance, the kingdom of the Moors had been steadily shrinking since the beginning of the second millennium of Christ. The Reconquest of Spain by the Christians had pushed south slowly but relentlessly. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Moorish state was in its twilight, reduced to the humiliation of vassalage, enduring only at the sufferance of the Castilian kings, whose might increased year by year.

  The question was only who would finish the job… and when. The answer was the Catholic sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, in their triumph over the Moors in the apocalypse of 1492.

  If the thirteenth century in Spain represents the apogee of tolerance and cross-fertilization between the three great religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the seeds of later trouble were sown during the same period. For it was early in that century that the institution of the Inquisition was established in earnest.

  The problem of wayward belief had bedeviled the Christian Church since its earliest days. And yet, very early on, the attitude toward heretical views was one of forgiveness, tolerance, and exhortation. Christ himself had set the tone in an interchange with the apostle Peter, when Peter asked his Saviour (as recounted in Matthew 18:21) how many times he should forgive one who sinned against him.

  “I say not unto thee until seven times,” Jesus replied, “but Until seventy times seven.”

  And later St. Paul addressed the question of heresy in his instructions to Titus, the bishop of Crete (the Epistle of Paul to Titus, 1:10). “Vain talkers and deceivers” polluted the company of true believers, Paul wrote, and the purveyors of “Jewish fables” were among them.

  “Reject the man who is a heretic after the first and second admonition, Knowing that he who is so subverted and sinneth condemns himself” (3:11). There was no mention of punishment.

  This stance of suasion, admonition, and reconciliation lasted until the fourth century, when the doctrine of the early Church faced its first major challenge with the Manichean heresy. To Manicheans, the world was essentially evil, but through effort and discipline, the individual could achieve perfection. They believed in Christ but denied the Holy Sacraments. They rejected the authority of the pope and replaced him with their own high priest.

  To deal with this departure from official doctrine, the Church moved from persuasion to excommunication to confiscation of property and, finally, to corporeal punishment for the heretic. The administration of physical pain, however, was turned over to secular authority. In A.D. 382, the emperor Theodosius decreed that Manichean heretics should be put to death, and their property seized. In the seventh century in Spain, the concept of heresy was extended to Jews when a Spanish Visigoth king ordered that Jewish “heretics” should be threatened with fear into returning to the Church, and if they did not buckle under, their children should be seized. In the eleventh century, Manichean heretics were burned in France.

  But it was during the early part of the thirteenth century, with the arrival of St. Dominic, that the treatment of heresy reached a new level of vigilance. Domingo de Guzmán hailed from minor Spanish nobility, distantly related to the great House of Guzmán in central Castile. Educated at the University of Palencia, he took his religious calling seriously, twice attempting to sell himself into slavery to pay for the liberation of Christian captives in Moorish hands. In 1202, as a deputy to the bishop of Osma, Dominic was sent on a diplomatic mission to Toulouse, where, to his horror, he witnessed the perversions of the Albigensian heresy.

  In part, the Albigenses were reacting to the depravity and extravagance of the Catholic priesthood in southern France. Called neo-Manichean, the Albigenses, like their predecessors from the fourth century, saw the world as gripped in an eternal struggle between the forces of good and of evil. They rejected the authority of Rome and railed against the corruption of Catholic priests. They rejected the Old Testament and scrapped the sacraments of baptism for the believers and marriage for their leaders, who were known as the perfecti. The mass of believers, in contrast to their pure leaders, were granted wide moral licence and freed from religious obligations.

  From this experience in Toulouse, Dominic conceived the idea of a religious order devoted solely to the goal of combating heresy and propagating the true Catholic faith. As the idea advanced, the pope, Innocent III, declared a crusade against the Albigenses and set the nobility of northern France against that of the south in a bloody civil war that was to last for twenty years. Early in this crusade the papal legate to southern France was said to have uttered the words:

  “Slay all. God will know his own.”

  In the wake of mortal combat, Dominic and his cohorts followed the battle by engaging heretics in debate and seeking to reconcile them to the true faith. In 1215, his followers held their first gathering as an Order of Preachers; they were the first inquisitors. Three years later, they received formal Vatican sanction as an order and established monasteries in Segovia and Madrid. Initially, they were known as the Militia of Christ, and only later, after Dominic’s death in 1221 and his beatification as a saint, as the Dominicans. Only much later still did they become known familiarly as the “hounds of God.”

  Twelve years after St. Dominic’s death, his dogs and their Inquisition were formally entrusted with the job of eliminating the vestiges of the Albigensian heresy. It would take them another sixty years. In this union of military action and inquisition lay the model for the future.

  Over the next hundred years Dominican monasteries proliferated throughout Spain. In the eastern Iberian kingdom of Aragon, a formal office of the Inquisition was firmly established. In the year 1314 several heretics were banished, and several more were burned at the stake, though most suspects were “reconciled” to the faith. Fourteen years later, in 1325, the burning of a heretic was made into a spectacle as King James II of Aragon, his sons, and two bishops attended the festivities. In the 1330s, in Aragon, Dominican inquisitors prosecuted the first cases of witchcraft and Devil worship.

  Twenty years later, during the horror of the Black Death, one Nicolás Eymeric was made a cardinal and appointed Grand Inquisitor of Aragon. In 1376 he would publish his famous Guide to Inquisitors (Directorium inquisitorum), which was to become the standard manual for the next several centuries. In it Eymeric codified explicit instructions to his inquisitors for proceeding against suspect worshipers. The heretic, Eymeric wrote, was one who thought he could pick the parts of Christian doctrine he liked and discard the parts he disliked. His masterwork contained three parts. The first defined the fundamental tenets of the faith which the Christian was obligated to believe. The second was a catalogue of errors such as denying the Holy Trinity or engaging in Devil worship or the conjuring of devils through magic. And finally, he defined some sixty-nine separate heresies, a number of which were Manichean in nature.

  The inquisitor, wrote the cardinal, must be “modest in his bearing, circumspect in prudence, firm in his constancy, eminently learned in the sacred teaching of the Faith, and abounding in virtues.” Because his work was dangerous, and because, like Eymeric himself, the religious policeman was likely to be the most hated of priests, his love of God must transcend his fear of men. His power derived from the pope, and it included the authority to prosecute bishops and priests and to maintain his own prisons. For those who were denounced, there was a presumption of guilt. Eymeric enumerated the tricks that a wily culprit was likely to use in an examination and offered strategies to unmask such deceptions. When a confession began, it was likely to be a gushing torrent, and it should be allowed to continue to its end, lest the heretic “return to his vomit.” Should torture be needed to confirm guilt, only a bishop could order its administration, and it should be employed only as a last resort. Euphemistically, torture was called putting the suspect “to the question,” but Eymeric warned inquisitors not to rely too heavily upon it.

  “Some are so soft-hearted and foolish that they will admit everything, even though it be false, under light t
orture, while others are so obstinate that no matter how much they are tormented, the truth is not to be had from them. In putting men to the question, the greatest prudence is to be exercised.” Still, on the administration of torture, Cardinal Eymeric was responsible for one major procedural change: before him, the rules forbade the repeat of torture a second time. But in the parsing of the Directorium inquisitorum, torture could be “suspended” and then “continued” but not repeated.

  Despite the hair-splitting definitions of Eymeric’s manual, the hunt for heretics was not a widespread preoccupation in medieval Spain until well into the fifteenth century; public displays of inquisitional ire were rare and scattershot. Until the arrival of Ferdinand and Isabella, the prosecution of the wayward was known as the “Old Inquisition,” and it was reasonably benign and toothless, at least compared to what would follow. Partly due to the achievement of Alfonso the Learned in the thirteenth century, it did not exist at all in Castile, for he had put his realm beyond the reach of the Vatican.

  It would be left to Ferdinand and Isabella to institute the new, entirely more virulent Inquisition, and to make it into a uniquely Spanish institution. In that new endeavor, the successor to Nicolás Eymeric as Grand Inquisitor for all of Spain would cast a far broader and darker shadow.

  His name was Tomás de Torquemada.

  In the centuries before 1468, the Reconquest of Spain for Christianity went hand-in-hand with efforts toward unifying the northern Spanish realms. To the west of Castile lay Spain’s nemesis, Portugal. Originally part of León, the Portuguese kingdom was established as an independent state in A.D. 1095. It too had been overrun by the Moors. Yet once the Moors were thrown out of Portugal—Lisbon was recaptured in 1147 and the southwest of the country at the end of the same century—Portugal aggressively defended its independence. At the dawn of a new era, one man did more than any other to launch the golden age of Portuguese exploration, Prince Henry the Navigator.

  Before this visionary prince, the conventional view of the world was derived largely from the speculations of Ptolemy in the second century and from ancient Greek geography. Under these precepts, only three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, were believed to exist. The Indian Ocean was presumed an inland sea, Africa an island, whose vast central part was desert, “a land uninhabitable from the heat.” As the fifteenth century began, the furthest point on the African coast known to Europe was Cape Bojador (in what is today southern Morocco). Common lore suggested that any white man who ventured beyond the Rio de Oro in Cape Bojador would be changed into a black man, as God’s punishment for impious prying. The concept of the heavens was bound up with theories about the twelve pillars of the zodiac and the twenty-eight mansions of the Moon. The world itself was shaped like a pear, upon whose protruding stem lay the Garden of Paradise. To the west was “the green sea of Darkness,” where any adventurer foolish enough to hazard was sure to be swallowed up by terrible, oceanic whirlpools.

  Between the second and the fifteenth centuries, only the voyages of the Vikings in the far north, the explorations of Arab mariners down the east coast of Africa, and the overland journeys of Marco Polo had expanded the ancient knowledge of the world. The results of these voyages were melded with romances of discovery from such dubious sources as the Arabian Nights and the wanderings of Sinbad the Sailor.

  But the superstitions of his time did not daunt the Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator. Indeed, he set out to test and challenge those superstitions. If he was driven by his scientific curiosities and the certainty of the greater power and glory that Portugal would derive from new discoveries, he was also a crusader, determined to extend the rule of Christ on earth. The flags of Portugal and of Christ flew together from his ships in a noble quest for knowledge, for empire, and for souls that without their enterprise would be lost forever. In presenting his plans to his people over thirty years, he combined his motives in the phrase “Crusade of Discovery.”

  His caravels were the best in Europe. They sailed under the flag of the Order of Christ, whose sailors and marines were the successors of the fabled Knights Templar and of which Henry the Navigator himself was a grand master. As his evangelicals were known for their ferocity, so his sea captains were famous for their seamanship. To support them, the prince harnessed the talents of his Jewish and Moorish mathematicians and astronomers to the art of mapmaking. In 1445, his courageous mariners passed Cape Bojador, maintained their skin color, and discovered Cape Verde and Senegal. A year later, they pressed southward to Guinea.

  Their dream was to find a way around Africa to India. Though this would not happen for another fifty years, when Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, Portuguese sailors discovered and colonized the island of Madeira, where the first children born on that outpost were christened Adam and Eve. From Madeira they proceeded to the Canaries and the Azores, and Henry began to flirt with the thought that sailing due west could eventually bring the mariner to India.

  With Henry’s voyages down the coast of Africa and the establishment of Western outposts, the European slave trade began in earnest. At first the prince promoted this vigorous trade as a tool of Christian conversion. It was seen as an act of charity, guided by the will of God, even as the Africans violently resisted the brutality of their purported saviours. Even after the Navigator died in 1460, the impulse toward further discovery (and further slavery) continued undiminished. Portugal reigned as the great seapower of Europe.

  As fate would have it, a young Genoese sailor worked on the crew of one of these Portuguese voyages to Guinea. His name was Cristoforo Colombo. We know him today as Christopher Columbus.

  To the east of Castile lay the Kingdom of Aragon and the small, feisty, Kingdom of Navarre. Aragon comprised the principalities of Valencia, Catalonia, Majorca, and the other Balearic Islands, as well as Aragon itself. The kings of Aragon also held sway over Sicily and Naples, and thus, Aragonese medieval history had long been bound up with that of Italy. The King of Aragon ruled his kingdom tenuously, however. For there was a long tradition of local liberty called the fuero or jurisdiction, which accorded local barons the power over their villages and lands and forbade the king from stationing “foreign” troops on their soil. This generally produced a weakened monarchy that was in an unsteady state of conflict with its princes.

  At the opening of the fifteenth century, two brothers held the thrones of Castile and Aragon. Tranquility but not union came from this relationship. King Juan II of Castile was married to Isabel of Portugal, who was the grand-niece of Henry the Navigator. From this union issued two children, Isabella, born in 1451, and Alfonso, two years later. Aragon also sported a king named Juan II, and he was married to a Castilian woman of royal, and significantly, Jewish blood, named Juana Enriquez. From this union came one son, Ferdinand.

  Ferdinand of Aragon was born one year after Isabella of Castile, in the year 1452. Forty years later, they would be proclaimed “the Catholic monarchs.” Together, they would become the champions of the Spanish Reconquest, patrons of the New World, the unifiers of the Spanish Empire, and the purifiers of the Catholic faith.

  2

  Sowers of Discord

  AREVALO

  The childhood of Isabella of Castile was not a happy one. In the years 1454–64, until Isabella was thirteen years old, she and her brother, Alfonso, resided in the royal retreat southwest of Segovia called Arevalo. Its castle was small but well fortified, notable for an expansive keep beneath its rounded, crenellated walls, and well staffed with a strong component of monks and nuns to mind the royal upbringing. Their father, King Juan II, died in 1454, when Isabella was only three, and their mother, Isabel of Portugal, had fallen into a depression after each of her confinements. After her husband’s death, she receded completely into a permanent melancholy, withdrawing into the silence of her chambers.

  Juan II had had a long and decidedly undistinguished reign of nearly fifty years, from 1406 to 1454. Weak, amiab
le, and dependent, fond of pomp and ceremony, jousting tournaments, and literary colloquies, with no taste for conflict or statecraft, he had fallen under the sway of a clever court manipulator named Alvaro de Luna. Though de Luna was illegitimate, he issued from a noble house in Aragon, and he had learned well the diversions and the charms of court life. Dashingly handsome and irresistible to women, he wrote poetry and loved music. In becoming the king’s favorite, he garnered great wealth. Juan conferred upon him the titles of Grand Master of St. James and Constable of Castile, and with such titles and power, de Luna became the shadow king, quietly building his private bureaucracy within the realm. So close were king and consort, wrote a chronicler, that “lascivious” relations were suspected. “For thirty-five years [the king] lived happy at [de Luna]‘s side and submissive to his will.”

  By Maria of Aragon, his first queen, King Juan had one son, Enrique. In Enrique’s youth, de Luna introduced the boy to homosexuality, to make him compliant and easy to control, and this would have grave implications for the future. De Luna managed the king’s sex life well into adulthood. “The greatest marvel,” wrote a chronicler, “had been that even in the natural acts [the king] followed the orders of the Constable, and though young and of good constitution, and having a young and beautiful queen, if the Constable said not to, he would not go to her room, nor dally with other women, although naturally enough inclined to them.” This marriage was shortlived. Maria of Aragon died in 1447. For his new wife, Juan II took Isabel of Portugal, by whom Juan, despite his queen’s moodiness, was totally captivated.