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The system worked like this: anyone could denounce a family member, a neighbor, or any other citizen to the Inquisition. Once denounced, the accused might hear at night the knock on the door that meant immediate arrest. It is a knock that echoes through centuries. The accused would be taken straightaway to a secret prison. He was not allowed any money, paper, or visitors. He was not told the charges against him. The accusers’ names were kept secret. The Inquisition demanded a confession, and the accused was shown the devices of torture that awaited those who refused to acknowledge their crimes. But of course those arrested, knowing neither their accuser nor the charges against them, had no way of knowing what they were expected to confess. After three demands for confession, the accused was read a list of charges (carefully edited to conceal the witnesses’ identity) and required to answer on the spot.
Yet this sudden and mysterious imprisonment was only part of the process. For after the arrest was made, all the goods of the accused were seized. A thorough inventory was compiled posthaste, from gold and coins right down to items of kitchenware. Values were assigned. A notary examined and verified the figures. And then the costs of imprisonment of the accused were paid from his own assets. As the time in prison accumulated, the goods of the accused would be sold at public auction. Sometimes an entire family would be imprisoned during this period. But even if they were not, the families might starve to death or be thrown into the street to beg, since the family was now without income and all its goods were being sold off. No provision was made to support the family of the accused until 1561.
If the accused had not confessed satisfactorily, and the accusation was grave, then the tribunal turned to torture, infrequently but systematically. Anyone of any age could be tortured. The inquisitors, specialists in human torment, had looked carefully into the wretched cabinet of savagery and chosen three tortures. In all of them, the accused was stripped down. In the first, the rack, he or she was tied down and stretched into progressive agonies. The second was the strapado: with wrists tied behind the back with a rope suspended from the ceiling on a pulley, the accused was hoisted high with weights on the feet, then dropped suddenly. The pressure ruined muscle and nerve and pulled shoulder joints from sockets. The third was called the water torture, and its details are well-known, since with shame I note that in the administration of President George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, the practice was officially adopted in military interrogations in the United States of America, where it is known as waterboarding. I do not know whether President Bush decided with special excitement that his administration should adopt a medieval torture that had the professional blessing of the Spanish Inquisition. Perhaps he felt it gave him more historical gravitas and luster. Whatever the case, during the Inquisition, this torture, like the others, was attended by a whole battery of officials: inquisitors, a notary, a secretary to record what was said, the torturers themselves, and occasionally a physician. If there was a confession, then it had to be repeated in prison the next day. If it was not, the torture began again.
If the accused did not die under torture or die in prison, he still could be sentenced to burn at the stake for heresy. If condemned to die, the victims were informed the night before, which made appeal rather difficult. They went to the auto-da-fé—the public ceremony to announce judgments and punishments—wearing a yellow garment called a sanbenito, painted with crosses, flames, and devils. They wore also the corozo, a pointed hat that is a prominent feature today in Spain in the promenades of men during the celebration, if that is the word, of Semana Santa—Holy Week in the Christian calendar. The condemned, after their exhibition, condemnation, and sentencing, were then, as was said, “relaxed” to their executioners. It is one of the most detestable uses ever made of a verb, even though our language has been, over the centuries, recruited often enough into the service of hatred. Those condemned in absentia were burned in effigy. Those condemned who had already died had their corpses dug up and burnt.
The lesser punishments were to do penance, which could be a fine, banishment, service in the galleys, or wearing the sanbenito, with all its florid images of judgment and punishment. It was a public sign of shame and ignominy, and a penitent might be forced to wear it a short time, or for life, though that sentence could be commuted. After the time was up, the sanbenito was hung in the church to mark the disgrace of the family. For the more severe sentence of reconciliation, the prisoner got a long prison sentence, banishment, forced galley service, or flogging; in addition, the prisoner and his family usually had all their wealth confiscated. Galley service, of course, supplied the military with men who could be worked to death, or who succumbed to the disease rampant in the ships. As to flogging, the sentences were often between one and two hundred lashes. Men and women, young and old, received this sentence. They were stripped to the waist, mounted on a donkey, and whipped through the streets. During the course of this punishment, those in the street were able to scorn the sufferers, hurl stones at them, and shout execrations.
I recount all this because, as famous as is the Inquisition, its methods and rules are still not widely known. In the popular imagination, we recall grisly stories of heretics tied to stakes and having gobbets of flesh ripped from them with tongs heated in a fire, before the victims were burned to death. But this grandstanding of the executioners is, I suggest, not the real key to understanding the Inquisition. What this rare institution offered is a finely calculated formula for hatred that any society, anywhere, might use for its own purposes. The formula worked because of its closely fitted, potent assembly of elements. Taken together, they are: anonymous denunciation, secret prisons, confinement without charge, seizure of wealth, family disgrace, torture, popular ceremonies of punishment and humiliation, and public execution. To this list we must add one more, the absolutely crucial piece: sponsorship and control by the highest power in the land. For the Spanish Inquisition had this essential component: it was the creation of Ferdinand and Isabel.
We come, then, to one of the hinges upon which turned the history of Spain. In 1482, only a little more than one year after the first burnings, Pope Sixtus IV, upon receiving a series of reports of Ferdinand and Isabel’s Inquisition, understood what was happening. And he had had enough. He issued another bull, one of the most extraordinary ever to come forth from the Vatican. We read it even today with admiration. For the pope was forcibly taking back the Inquisition, which had been, after all, his to begin with. He was on to Ferdinand and Isabel, and he told them the truth:
… the Inquisition has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and salvation of souls, but by lust for wealth, and that many true and faithful Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves, and other lower and even less proper persons, have without any legitimate proof been thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned as relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the secular arm to be executed, to the peril of souls, setting a pernicious example and causing disgust to many.
Pope Sixtus had a solution which a modern-day civil-rights activist would recognize. Bishops, who were responsible to Rome (rather than to Ferdinand and Isabel) had to oversee the inquisitors. The accused had to be informed of all charges against him. All accusers had to be clearly identified. The accused must be allowed a legal defender. Episcopal prisons only must be used. And any sentence handed down could be appealed directly to Rome.
Pope Sixtus had issued in clear and forceful terms a bull designed to correct the practices of the Inquisition that made it a source of terror and a demonic instrument of royal power. The bull all but severed the insidious connection between the Inquisition and Ferdinand and Isabel. It meant that the Vatican could control the institution and stop the monarchs from using it as a political tool. It is open to question whether the Inquisition would have become, instead, an instrument of terror of the Catholic church. But the proclamation was a political move of drama and consequence, since it restored control of the institution to Rome a
nd so gave to the Vatican the measure of power it needed to influence politics and civil society in Spain. Sixtus, with his bull, had stopped the new Spanish Inquisition in its tracks by doing away with some of its most diabolical practices. His eloquent declaration had the potential to change the history of Spain, as it reorganized in the decades before and after the capture of Granada in 1492.
Ferdinand understood that the whole royal initiative was at risk, and he responded to Sixtus with righteous fury. He brought political pressure on the pope through key Spanish bishops. He professed amazement. He wrote that the bull could not be authentic. He claimed, falsely, that the pope had given a general pardon to conversos in Spain, whatever their offenses. He said the “concessions” offered by Sixtus were due to the “cunning persuasions” of the conversos. He flatly declared his intention to defy the bull. And he asked aggressively for the bull to be revoked and full powers over the Spanish Inquisition to be entrusted to him and his queen. An essential question of power hung in the balance. Ferdinand and Isabel had to subdue the pope or lose control of the machinery of accusation, torture, and confiscation.
The months rolled on. We will never know the full extent of the political flame-throwing, the exchange of threats and promises, private meetings and messages, and the acid tension between Rome and the Spanish Crown. In October, only five months after he asserted rightful control over the Inquisition in Spain, Pope Sixtus IV caved in. He suspended the bull. Ferdinand and Isabel had faced down the Vatican. They resumed complete control over the Inquisition in Spain. To add cream to their victory, their control was confirmed in yet another papal bull the next year, which took the definitive further step of appointing as inquisitor general the choice of Ferdinand himself, a man who had been the confessor of both Ferdinand and Isabel, Tomás de Torquemada. Working with the sovereigns, Torquemada would appoint new inquisitors, establish their duties, and create permanent courts in most major cities where conversos lived. The combination of papal blessing and royal power meant that no region could resist, though many knew well what terror was coming their way.
The Spanish Inquisition lasted until 1834, a three-hundred-and-fifty-four-year run. It is useful to reflect on what it was and what it was not. To do so is to step into the tempestuous pool of Spanish history, with its violent waves of opinion and durable scholarly animosities. But just as with the history of Al-Andalus, enough time has passed, and enough work has been done, so that the facts on the ground might be assessed more accurately.
The picture is complex. It is important, given the infernal reputation of the Inquisition, not to overstate its influence and its scope. Such is its strange power, even today, that it has been portrayed as a monolithic, pervasive force responsible for just about every atrocious event in Spain in the centuries just after the fall of Granada. It was not such a force. Some writers have put the deaths ordered by the Inquisition at sensational figures, as if it were some cosmic death squad, but the final toll of men and women burnt at the stake, after much scholarly sweat and estimation, comes in at around ten to twelve thousand. And this in a period when religious wars convulsed whole societies, with much higher death tolls. The banning of certain books, via the famous Index of Prohibited Books, was not uniquely an initiative of the Spanish Inquisition, which was following the lead of the Vatican and other Catholic countries in Europe that had published their own indices. And the institution, though it was designed by Ferdinand and Isabel to have authority throughout Spain, did not in fact have a marked and dramatic presence everywhere in the country. Some less-populated areas might go a good long while without suffering the ministrations of the Inquisition, so that its local impact was slight. For some of the years, or even decades of its existence, the auto-da-fé was not much in evidence, whether due to temporary financial difficulties of the tribunal or an unfortunate lack of new victims. When victims were available, not every one was tortured, and only a small percentage of those arrested were burnt alive. Nor was the Inquisition a universally acclaimed institution. Many Spaniards fought against it, wrote against it, and resisted its influence, often at terrible risk to themselves.
All this being the case, we need to marshal the facts and try to get a clear look at what it meant for the country that created it at the time it was created, and what it has meant since.
We must remember, first of all, the context: Al-Andalus. It cannot be repeated often enough: three great faiths lived together, studied together, did business together, made war as allies and companions of one another, and learned one another’s languages. Muslims and Jews governed together; Christian kings governed Muslim and Jewish subjects. An earlier King Ferdinand, the third, the father of Alphonso the Wise, in the thirteenth century called himself, accurately enough, the “King of the Three Religions.” At his death, his tomb in Seville bore inscriptions cut into fine marble, as befits a king. But not merely one: there are four inscriptions, in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Castilian. The Hebrew and Arabic texts refer to Spain as, respectively, Sefarad and Al-Andalus, and use dates computed and adjusted according to Jewish and Muslim calendars. And each inscription uses the ceremonial and rhetorical language of its own religious tradition, all in honor of one of the great kings of Al-Andalus. It is one of the most moving and beautiful tributes to any man in the history of Spain.
King Ferdinand of the fifteenth century and his powerful Queen Isabel did not honor their ancestors, nor did they celebrate, conserve, and bear forward for the benefit of Spain the genius of their own people. This was a king and queen who had fallen heir to the most rich, various, and distinguished intellectual heritage in medieval Europe. They lived in the midst of the Renaissance, a cultural awakening built on the foundations provided in large part by Al-Andalus. No country in Europe was in possession of the resources of mind and wealth as Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. What did they do with their inheritance, at one of the most promising moments in European history?
Ferdinand and Isabel had extraordinary political skills, organized around a central principle: the concentration of power. And that will to power, in all its skill and purposefulness, its energy and shrewd, ferocious ambition, was nowhere more evident than in their remaking of the Inquisition into their personal ministry. Recall that for these monarchs, the principal struggle was to unify Spain beneath their banner. It was a country divided by geography, language, culture, and religion, fragmented by a temperamental nobility and proudly independent regions. By what means could Ferdinand and Isabel extend, consolidate, and enrich their power? The answer, of course, was by any means possible. But they needed an institution whose writ would run throughout the country, and whose power was fierce, unquestioned, and historic, yet an institution that could be wholly subjugated to royal power. It was a political puzzle of the first order. With the Holy Inquisition, they had a robust solution. For even in those cities of Spain where the monarchs were weak, the Catholic church had a presence, power, resources, and authority. It was their main chance. Ferdinand and Isabel seized the Inquisition, held it, defended it, dominated and used it, and then left it to history and to Spain.
It was the perfect instrument. Since the accusers were secret, every man and woman was vulnerable to the most absurd and groundless denunciations. Since the accused paid for his or her own imprisonment, torture, and punishment, each of them might be confined and tormented to the limits of their wealth. Since the confiscated wealth of the accused paid for the Inquisition, with a healthy share given to Ferdinand and Isabel, it was in the interest of the church and the court to target powerful converso families with large fortunes. Since the officers and associated staff of the Inquisition were exempt from accusation, from any civil or criminal procedure in secular courts, and even from some taxation, they could, and did, engage in profiteering, fraud, larceny, and criminal assault, all while enjoying perfect legal immunity. It is hard to imagine a more masterfully designed instrument of power, and any of us reading this history would be glad to say that is the end of it.