Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  French historian, Jean Markale in his book The Great Goddess further details the traces of this association. From the first century, Gallic coins feature women riders on both gold and silver coins. On one coin, a nude woman, sword in hand, hair flowing, is riding toward the right-a “virgin warrior who Caesar names Minerva, who is mother goddess, represented here in her warrior role of protecting the social group. Another coin found in Rennes represents the same nude female warrior on horseback with sword and shield. Another had sword from which light rays emanate.”282 This particular female, horse-riding divinity, the Goddess Epona in her most archaic form, was known throughout the Roman Empire as the protectress of horses and riders and was a Celtic Divinity.283 Even later, the Goddess Epona is represented carrying fruits and flowers, symbolizing that she is also the Provider, universal mother, with “mastery over what the earth produces.”284

  Joan d’Arc combined all the qualities of the old religion: She was the earth-bound peasant, she took the name of her mother’s clan calling herself Jeanne Romee, received her prophesies from a place whose sacredness of ancient tree and spring would be recognized, and personified the mystery of the Celtic/Gallic Goddess Epona as she led her men to do battle over the heart of France. Almost instantaneously her present reality intertwined with people’s older beliefs to create an invincible spiritual and physical force, resulting in the population joining together to take back their homeland. Joan marched on Orleans, taking the city. Then she and her army took Jargeau, then the city of Meung and finally Patay, forcing the English general to surrender. With this, she broke the stranglehold of the Hundred Years War and the domination of the English over the French, which had persisted nearly three hundred years.

  In triumphs, one after the other, Joan’s campaigns in the Loire, the capture of Troyes, and the march through the countryside to Rheims brought her prophesy to its conclusion: She had restored France to the French and caused the king to be crowned.

  Joan d’Arc placing the crown on the head of the king harkens back to the most ancient of goddess truths, whereby no king could rule except by being crowned by the sovereign queen, representative on earth of the great goddess. In all respects, therefore, Joan d’Arc had fulfilled the prophesy. Her mission accomplished, Joan asked to return to her mother and the simple life of her village. And as the only reward she requested from the king, she asked that her village not be taxed in perpetuity. This wish granted, Joan left for home. Her career as the youngest general ever to command the forces of a nation, at age seventeen, was a span of one year and one month. Thirteen months is the exact time-span of the lunar year.

  But Joan never returned home. Her last battle in May at the age of eighteen was in Compiegne where she was captured and held as a prisoner of war. Under any normal circumstance, she would have been ransomed, as established under the rules of war. John of Luxembourg set the sum as a prince’s ransom, a compliment, and a defined sum of 61,125 francs. But neither the king of France nor anyone else came forward to pay it to the English. After five and a half months, the Church of Rome paid the ransom, but not to set Joan free. No. They intended to try her in the court of the Inquisition, with charges of wearing men’s clothing and “other impieties.”285 Less than two years before, the churchmen at the University had praised her. Now other churchmen wanted to damn her. Her phenomenal rise unnerved the churchmen, thinking as they did in terms of control and power. Her popularity with the people was in direct contrast to the opinion the people had of them and their growing corruption. Her crowning of the king was seen as a usurpation of their own power. Her ease of leadership of the people put their struggle against these same people into greater jeopardy and could not be tolerated. But when all that was accounted for, as it might have been with a man who found himself in the same situation, what was now unforgivable was the fact that all of this had been accomplished by a woman.

  The Church of Rome, through Bishop Cauchon of Beauvais, imprisoned Joan in a dungeon of the Castle of Rouen. She was put in an iron cage with her hands and neck chained to a pillar with English guards in her room, day and night. And for the final year of her life, she lived in prison. Accused of devils witchcraft, a charge she always denied, Joan was interrogated endlessly, not given legal counsel and not permitted visitors. Because she continued to deny guilt and because the Inquisition required confession before burning, she was tricked into signing papers, which she was unable to read, that said she had confessed. Then the same bishop who ransomed her posed as her confessor. What she told him in confidence about her voices of prophesy, he later equated with the doing of the devil, thereby sealing her fate. For her final day in court, someone took the dress she had been required to wear for her appearances before the tribunal, forcing her to wear pants which put her in rebellion against church authority. When the burning was to occur, great crowds gathered along the streets, not to cheer as had often happened but to openly weep for the Maid of Orleans. She was forced to wear the mitre-shaped cap as she rode in a cart which was used to transport felons. On the cap were printed the words Heretic, relapsed, apostate, idolater. As she passed, an invocation for the dying was murmured from street to street, people blessing her, praying for her, holding candles to light her way, kneeling down in great sorrow before the Maid. The English soldiers stood elbow-to-elbow on the sides of the roads, and behind them stood the people of France.

  The executioner bound her to the stake, around which wood had been piled on the platform. She was frail from her year in prison and the torment which she had endured. When the flames first leaped at her, she asked for holy water in terror. Then calmer, she faced her death, her eyes on a makeshift wooden cross an English soldier had hastily made for her out of pieces of the wood with which she was being burned to death. It was the year 1431. The liberator of France, the Maid of Orleans was murdered as a sorceress witch.286

  Both the father and older brother of the Maid had died during her trial at Rouen, but her mother Isabel lived on and was given a pension by the grateful city of Orleans. Twenty years after her death, a discussion was held in the great cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, as a first step in what is now called the Rehabilitation, meaning the restoration of the truth about the life and contribution of Joan of Arc. Her mother attended and was openly venerated by all in the vast crowds who gathered in and around the great cathedral.

  Although this mission was long overdue and a worthy one, the reason behind organizing it was as ugly as her trial and death had been. The English, having lost their claim to the French territory, were now questioning the legitimacy of the monarch, Charles VII to rule, because he had been crowned by a woman “proven by priests to have been in league with Satan and burnt for it by them as a sorceress.”287 Charles VII, having done nothing to assist Joan in her lifetime, now appealed to the Pope in order to preserve his own throne. The Pope convened a commission of ecclesiastics to revisit the life of Joan d’Arc and render their judgment. The commissioners sat to hear testimony in Paris, Rouen, Orleans, and the village of Domremy. It examined the records of Joan’s trials, examined the Bastard of Orleans, and many witnesses and friends of the Maid. They eventually found in her favor in 1456, in order to preserve the monarchy of the king of France and the Church which had backed him.

  In 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized Joan d’Arc as a saint.

  THE SPANISH INQUISITION

  The Spanish Inquisition begins with a marriage, is fueled by an advanced sense of prejudice, propelled by an insatiable thirst for power and enforced with the assistance of the Catholic Church, which was also engaged in fending off the Protestant Reformation. All forces converged simultaneously, resulting in a sequence of cultural, economic and social disasters across the Iberian Peninsula.

  Isabella and Ferdinand

  Across the Southern Pyrennees Mountains, two other young people were to change the face of their world for many, many generations yet to be born. Now writing as a revisionist historian, Henry Kamen, in his work The Spanish Inquisition transpo
rts us into an entirely different Inquisition from that which is still ongoing throughout much of the European continent. Spain is not yet a unified state or homogenous political entity, but is ruled by different monarchs in various regions, primarily the more populated areas of Castile and Aragon. Granada is still held by Arab Moslems. There has been significant effort by Rome and the leaders of Castile and Aragon to recapture Granada from Moorish control, but their efforts are as yet unsuccessful. The intent of Rome is to establish Catholic control over the entire Iberian Peninsula.

  Kamen writes, “In the fifteenth century, the Iberian peninsula remained on the fringe of Europe, a subcontinent that had been overrun by the Romans and the Arabs, offering to the curious visitor an exotic symbioses of images: Romanesque churches and the splendid synagogues in Toledo, the cool silence of the great Mosque in Cordoba and the majesty of the Alhambra in Granada.”288

  But overall, during the Moorish governance, it was a tolerant society, incorporating communities of Roman Catholic Christians, Islamic Arabs and the Jews of various nationalities all living together and working out the differences in a social context called convivencia or coexistence, since the eighth century. All three major Western religions were tolerated by the elite. Ancient traditions among the peasants, who had arrived through migrations many centuries before Romans, Christians, Jews or Moslems, were still matriarchal since their lives remained relatively untouched through minimal contact with others in the cities. From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries – over seven hundred years – there was general tolerance of differing religious practices and respect for all these differences between both races and religions. In fact, under Moslem rule, the intelligencia were highly regarded and progressive education was widespread. Universities and medical training flourished with the result that Jewish physicians were trained to go throughout Europe to teach and practice among the nobility. Nowhere in this Arab world were there attempts to forcibly convert either Jews or Christians to Islam. However, in Toledo, works of literature written by Avicenna, Maimonides and Averroes were translated and made available to Christian scholars, increasing shared cultural understanding.

  Beginning in 1212, a Christian army fought with the Moslem Almohads and won. This was the beginning of a pact between Rome and the Spanish rulers to finance the wars of the Reconquest, returning the peninsula to Christian control. Within fifty years, the Muslims retained only the large kingdom of Granada on the Mediterranean coast. Under previous Moorish rule there had been a social structure and division of labor along predetermined lines. The Muslims built the houses, the Christians farmed the land, and the “Jews presided over the enterprise as a fiscal agent and skillful technician.”289

  Christians living under Moslem rule were called mozarabes, and Muslims living in Christian communities were mudejares, peasants doing farm work or hired as menial labor. The Jews tended to congregate in the larger towns and be involved in professional trades. Where Christians were in the majority, they treated both Moslem and Jews with disrespect, even when tolerating their religious practices.

  In 1391, civil wars erupted in the region of Castile, and by June of that year urban mobs rioted, directing their pent up anger against the ruling classes and toward the Jews. In Seville, the Aljama was destroyed along with countless numbers of Jews. Those who survived were forced to convert to Catholicism and be baptized. In July, some two hundred and fifty were murdered in Valencia, and in the following month about four hundred were murdered in Barcelona. The major aljamas of Spain were disassembled, and the conversos came into existence as a large population. The term converso was used interchangeably for anyone who had converted to Christianity from their previous religious affiliation as either Jew or Moslem. All of their descendants would be labeled the same, enabling the rest of society to know that these people formed an out-group. This process of the choice of either forcible mass conversion or death became the hallmark of the Spanish Inquisition, which they would also export to the lands of the New World wherever they conquered.

  Quite another view of the 1391 riots is found in a book titled Heretics or Daughters of Israel? by Renee Levine Melammed, in which she writes

  The motives of the rioters of 1391, were not as clear cut as one might think: they have been accused of having pure religious motivations, economic and socioeconomic motives and anti-semitic tendencies as well as class resentment … whatever the reasons and whoever the participants, the results are similar: tremendous loss of Jewish life, perhaps as much as a third of Spanish Jewry, major destruction of property, and also forced conversion and baptism of tens of thousands of Jews, perhaps another third of the community.291

  By her calculation, this was the largest forced conversion of Jews in history.

  In 1393 a Dominican preacher named Vincente Ferrer preached separate quarters for each converso group with restrictions as to how much interaction they would be allowed. Since his order, the Dominicans, were the major inquisitors of Europe, his suggestions were taken seriously. About fifteen years later, in 1412, Castile passed just such a law to segregate Jews from Christians. It would require another 80 years for total segregation of Jews and Christians to be accomplished.291 Events now begin to move more swiftly. In the 1460’s another civil war broke out in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, which divided the country, threatening anarchy, as Christians sought to break the long-standing custom of tolerance, disturbing conventional patterns of both work and governance.

  Then in 1474 Ferdinand, (1452–1516) king of Aragon, Sicily (later of Naples), and Isabella, (1451–1504) queen of Castile, married and began to rule over their newly combined and united kingdoms. Isabella, known as “the Catholic,” ruled in her own right as queen of Castile and then as joint ruler of Aragon with her husband from 1470 to her death in 1504 at the age of 53.

  Peace did not result, however. Quite the contrary. There were recon-quest wars fought in both Italy and Granada. These wars in Italy provoked bitter criticism, and in Granada the entire population of Malaga was put into slavery after its fall in 1487, giving these Christian soldiers the reputation of savagery. In reality, the recurring savagery of the Christians was not new.

  The marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand did, however, herald a new age. Unfortunately it was one of intolerance.

  The new rulers of Spain were willing to pursue an intolerant policy regardless of its economic consequences. In regard to both the Jew and the Mudejares, Isabella was warned that pressure would produce economic disruption, but she was steeled in her resolve by (Cardinal) Cisneros and the rigorists. Ferdinand, responding to protests from Barcelona, maintained that spiritual ideals were far more importance than material considerations about the economy.292

  For the conversos, now segregated, life became very complicated. Even in their own homes, they were under suspicion for perpetuating the dietary and household customs of their former religion. If a married woman wished to leave Spain and reconnect with Judiasm once again, unless her husband was in accord, it was necessary for her to obtain a divorce outside the country, but was it a legitimate Jewish “get” or not? And, without a divorce, she could not remarry. Nevertheless, the conversos were supposed to be given equal rights with Christians, but the Old Christians still considered them to be Jews. In fact, Melammed says that inclusion was intolerable to Spanish Christians, giving rise to intense anti-semitism and open hatred for the conversos. And Kamen spells out the consequences:

  A new basis of exclusion had been created: one’s religion was now the essential factor. Following the violence, the municipality of Toledo in 1449 established the Sentencia-Estatudo, excluding Jews and conversos of Jewish origin from public offices: purity of blood (Limpieza de Sangre) was to become the essential requirement to hold civil or ecclessitical office, to bear witness in court, to serve as a notary, or to display authority over an Old Christian. Later these limitations would be expanded to exclude the converts from military orders, from attending university and from various titles, offices and honors.2
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  Echoes of the limpieza de sangre policy will become so well established that it will haunt all the way into the 20th century, providing an historical basis for the reign of terror imposed by a Catholic Hitler in Germany before and during the Second World War.

  For Ferdinand and Isabella the next step was obvious: They called for a national Inquisition, led by and controlled through the Crown. They were aware that the papal Inquisition orchestrated from Rome was well established already on the Continent, but on their Iberian peninsula, the newly formed Inquisition would have a major shift in focus.

  “The fear here was of the judaizer, who ostensibly was a Christian. Every converso and conversa was a potential judaizer, or believer in the Law of Moses. While observance of Judaism (by the Jew) is not heresy in the eyes of the Catholic church, observance of Jewish tradition, rites or beliefs is heretical if practiced by the baptized.” It was the Jewish blood that “created a proclivity to undermine the Church and its dogma.”294