Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  Juana and her court were present at the first of a series of auto de fe which were held with the intended result of ensuring that Protestantism was literally burnt out of Spain. And to eradicate even the knowledge of the protestant message, tribunals were set up in every region. Edicts were issued prohibiting the publication of books unless permission to do so was received from the inquisitors. No future books could be sold without prior censorship.

  In fairness, Spain was not alone in the murder of Protestants. “The English authorities under (Catholic) Queen Mary had executed nearly three times as many heretics as did Spain in the years after 1559; the French under Henry II at least twice as many; the Netherlands ten times as many died.”340 To assure a consistent supply of people to burn, the inquisitors from 1560 to 1598 attacked foreigners: Calvinist French, Protestant English and Flemish, Lutheran Germans and the Basque, all were the new focus of Spain’s xenophobic and racist policies. These prejudices and fears radically influenced the dissemination of learning at exactly the time when the new technology of the printing press made knowledge acquisition readily available for the first time. Now suspicious books written by foreigners were burnt by the same authorities who burnt people. And if Hebrew books such as the Talmud were discovered in the possession of conversos, they were seized and destroyed. The sciences of the time, reintroduced by Arabs, were also banned. “The inquisitors … frowned on magic and astrology … (and burned) a large quantity of such books found in the University of Salamanca”341 Ferdinand and Isabella had issued requirements for obtaining licenses to print and/or import books. Then two Catholic Church Councils in 1515 and 1564 had given bishops the power to license books. But that was in the infancy of printing, and most books were still written in Latin.

  The Reformation brought immense changes: Books were now written in German, French and English, contained heterodox ideas and were seen as directly detrimental to the Church of Rome’s established dominance. Licensing laws were issued now by other governments: England in 1538, Italian authorities in the 1540’s.

  Determined to stop the flow of ideas, Spain began to radically censor books, in effect banning them. “From 1540, regular lists of banned works were issued by the Holy Office (Inquisition), when feasible, a catalog of prohibited works, the famous Index, was issued. All manuscripts were to be checked and censored both before and after publication and all booksellers were to keep by them a copy of the Index of prohibited books.”342 The penalty for disobeying these edicts of censorship during the Spanish Inquisition was property confiscation and execution of the accused. This Index was maintained and distributed by the Catholic Church, sent worldwide to parochial schools and parish churches for five hundred years, lasting well into the twentieth century.

  Secrecy, Greed and Torture

  The Spanish Inquisition was the quintessential amalgamation of the state enabling the policies of the Church of Rome, while absolute control over the process was maintained by the monarchs and their advisors. As Church, the Inquisition covered all regions of the Iberian Peninsula, even and particularly those not controlled by the Crown. As State, the Crown paid the inquisitors and took the majority of the confiscations. In the gray areas in between, while most inquisitors were Dominicans (later Jesuits), in Spain they did not have to be clergy and could be laymen. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Kamen says that the inquisitors were “an elite bureaucracy” because the Holy Office (of the Inquisition) was in fact a court, and its administrators were to be trained as lawyers.343 Their training was given at the same institutions that prepared others for councils of state and high courts. But as Professor Kamen also acknowledges, “In practice, of course, the bureaucracy of state and church overlapped, so that, although some inquisitors were laymen it was more useful to be in the holy orders.”344 But this was no ordinary court. Because its reach was intended to cover the land mass of the entire peninsula, the Spanish Inquisition employed, as had the ongoing Papal Inquisition before it, a great number of people who were hired as familiars and comisarios.

  The familiar was the more controversial and despised of the two. His special privileges as servant of the inquisitors entitled him to bear arms, normally prohibited by local governments in an effort to keep peace and prevent crimes. The familiars acted as informers and spies among their own people. Because they were protected, these familiars were rarely punished for crimes against the common people. The secular courts turned a “blind eye” towards their misdeeds, which infuriated the people who found themselves subjected to this lawlessness.

  The comisario was another type of informer, held in low esteem because he was also a local parish priest who did most of the paperwork for the inquisitors and informed or denounced his parishioners, setting in process the arrest, trial and death sentence of local people for the crime against the church of heresy.

  The excessive number of familiars, often recruited from the upper strata of society, was a source of constant conflict between the inquisitors and the locals. As examples of this excess, the city of Valencia had 1,638 familiars in 1567 which was a ratio of one for every 42 households. Barcelona in 1600 had 815 familiars, or one for every 110 households.345 How did the inquisitors pay all these employees and still provide for their own household servants, the court costs with notaries and still have funds for a notably lavish lifestyle? This is perhaps the crux of the corruption that fueled the “spiritual” fires ending in the condemnation and execution of so many tens of thousands of people. The crux is contained in two words: confiscation and censo.

  In another of those confusions where lines of church and state are blurred, the court of the Holy Office (Inquisition) was a government department in Spain, but the “Spanish Tribunal was from the first financed out of the proceeds of its own activities. Confiscations were, in the early period, far and away the most important source.”346 Canon (Church) law had long ago established confiscation as the punishment for heresy, as has been seen previously during the Papal Inquisition.

  In Spain, confiscation took place in two phases. The first was called “sequestration,” which meant that upon arrest the suspect had their goods and income taken out of their control and used to pay for the costs of imprisonment, but not for the maintenance of the suspect’s family. This ensured dreadful hardship. Because imprisonment could last for months or years before trial, this process was actually confiscation, even if going by another name.

  The second phase took place after the verdict of guilty was passed by the inquisitors at court. But a guilty verdict was not necessary to effect ruin on entire communities as a result of inquisitional activity. “Great and wealthy converso families were ruined by even the slightest taint of heresy, for ‘reconciliation’ meant that all the culprits property was confiscated and none of it was allowed to pass to descendents, so that widows and children were often left without any provision.”347 By these acts, the Inquisition drew down upon itself the popular belief that it was an institution designed to rob the people, to steal their possessions, starting with the richest among them and working its way down to the peasants.

  As early as 1484, conversa Catlalina de Zamora said at her interrogation, “This inquisition that the fathers are carrying out is as much for taking property from the conversos as for defending the faith.”348 Her famous statement became part of the common language among the people who fervently believed she was correct in her assessment.

  In 1524, the treasurer of Charles V reported that the previous ruler, King Ferdinand, had received 10,000,000 ducats from converso confiscations. In 1676 the Inquisition reported that the royal treasury had given it 772,748 ducats and 884,979 pesos – extremely large amounts of money. The single largest recorded amount of money received directly by the Spanish Inquisition was in 1678 from an alleged Mallorcan converso conspiracy: It was 2,500,000 ducats. Of this huge amount, the Crown received five percent, and the Inquisition kept the remaining ninety-five percent for its own use.349

  Monetary fines and monetary penances were
also popular means by which the inquisitors enriched themselves and financed court proceedings. Grand inquisitor Torquemada in 1498 set up each tribunal with two inquisitors and a few officials. But by 1578, Cordoba had 26 officials whose salaries accounted for 76.5% of local income due the inquisitors. The Inquisitor General of Spain received 1.5 million maravedis, and each inquisitor received a yearly salary of over 700,000. One auto de fe in 1655 cost two million maravedis, nearly two thirds of the annual income for the Cordoba Inquisition. So, with extraordinary expenses out of control, the inquisitors turned to the last and perhaps the most dependable source of monetary income: censos, or investment income, which became the “regular cash source of income of the Inquisition.”350 For the year of 1573, no less than 74% and in 1576,80% of the income of the Granada Tribunal, came from censos and house rents – everywhere the tribunals began to rely on investment income for survival. These investments gathered 7% interest.351

  Disaster struck this scheme during the Alpujara uprisings, or the Morisco (Muslim) expulsion of 1609, in both loss of income from special payments such as bribes made to the inquisitors by these out-groups and also because “most of the cash income in censos and rents, came from Moriscos. The Inquisition, in financial terms, became a sort of bank through which money from various sectors of society – conversos, moriscos, financiers – was channeled.”352 This “channeled money” was the ill-gotten gain from forced confiscation, bribes and monetary “penances” – all extortion money or blood money from executions. The inquisitors often refused to pay the outstanding debts of the accused, allowed the people to rot in prison without trial and then auctioned off their property without considering women or children. Having no means of support, these unfortunates became street beggars.

  After confiscation, the issue of secrecy was the next largest concern of the process. Prisoners were ordered to take an oath never to recount anything they had witnessed or personally encountered during incarceration. Besides contributing to lurid accounts of prison life, this rule of secrecy set the stage for and actually encouraged the use of extreme torture.

  The first torture was prison itself. Prisoners were provided a diet of only bread and water for their entire period of confinement. Some were chained; all were denied regular food and fresh air. The inquisitors had various “ordeals” to which they subjected the accused in prison. One ordeal was being forced to wear chains on hands, feet and around the neck. Another ordeal was being sentenced to life-long imprisonment. The Inquisition imposed this sentence for the first time in recorded history.

  “The severities of prison life led to a regular death rate which could be attributed to disease and unhealthy conditions … it was a consequence of the practice, all too common, of throwing entire families, children included, into the cells. Madness and suicide were also regular consequences of imprisonment.”353 However, the Inquisition neither took credit for these deaths directly related to their actions nor did they keep records of the actual number of deaths resulting.

  Actual methods of torture were accepted means of obtaining confessions from the accused on their way to the death sentence. In this realm of sadistic torture, the inquisitors kept meticulous recorded documentation by eye witnesses, scribes and notaries, who were sitting near the inquisitor, writing down his questions as well as the answers of the tortured.

  Two instruments to punish prisoners who were being uncooperative were the mordaza (or gag), which prevented prisoners from speaking or drinking water and the pic de amigo, a strange name for an iron fork used to forcibly keep the prisoner’s head upright.354

  From papal instructions of 1484 and until 1816 when another Pope forbade its use, torture was integral to forcing confessions not only about specific accusations but also with regard to implication of others, whose names the inquisitor often supplied. In 1699, three-quarters of those accused were tortured. Inquisitors in Seville “complained they hardly had time to carry out all the tortures required.”355 Yet the professor insists that in his view, torture was never used as a punishment! If not, what was it? It is hard to justify belief that torture was actually a form of “ecumenical counseling.”

  Once again, there is the cooperation between state and church in the process of torture. The torturers were public executioners who were employed by the secular courts. During their service to the inquisitors, working as torturers, the executioners wore the same black hoods with eye slits, as they would have done when performing hangings, beheadings or burnings when they were employed by the state.

  The inquisitor was a representative of the Roman Church. Also present in the torture room (in addition to the victim and the executioner) was a representative of the local bishop and a secretary/scribe/notary employed directly by the church, equaling a total of at least five people. Painters of the period have depicted many more witnessing the torture, but that may or may not be accurate.

  According to church law, inquisitors could not kill people, nor were they permitted to shed blood. Church law also required that when the accused were tortured, they should suffer no danger to life or limb.356 In order to circumvent canon law, the inquisitors figured out a way to “absolve” one another from the sins they committed while presiding over torture. Then as a further deceit, after passing the death sentence the inquisitors turned the victim over to the state for execution, considering that the accused lived long enough after being tortured. If not, the accused victim’s bones were burnt. All the while, inquisitional scribes/notaries took copious notes on torture, and from them the various methods are detailed.

  First, all prisoners, men and women alike, were stripped before torture, so that all body parts were evident. There was no age limit: Both children and the elderly suffered equally with the young adult and the middle-aged. There was no limit on torture, although it was only sanctioned for use once. To order a second or third round, the inquisitors had it written that the first torture was “resumed” or continued even if time had passed in between the sessions.

  The most popular methods of physical torture were

  Garrucha: the torture was by a pulley, attached to the ceiling, from which the victim was hung by their wrists, with heavy weights attached to their feet. The person was raised off the ground and then dropped as a free-fall. The effect was to dislocate arms and legs, whiplashing the neck and damaging the spine.

  Toca: water torture. The person was tied onto a rack, mouth forced open, and a toca or linen towel forced down the open throat which conducted water poured from a large jar, swelling the stomach. Paddles were used to beat the abdomen.

  Potro: used from 1500’s onward. The victim was tied to the rack by cords passed around the torso and limbs. Controlled by the executioner, who tightened the cords by turning them at their ends, this torture resulted in the cords biting into the flesh, bleeding and sometimes severing bits of skin and causing excruciating pain.

  Women aged seventy to ninety years old were not spared torture, nor were girls as young as thirteen. “Those who had to undergo the experience were often left in a sorry state. Many were left with limbs irreparably broken (crushed), sometimes with both health and reason (sanity) diminished; others died under torture.”357

  Three-quarters of all those accused were subjected to torture. The Spanish Inquisition lasted more than three hundred years.

  Morisca Women

  Much has been written about the Conversa women, those who were converted from Judaism in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition, but what of another group of women, the Moriscas who were also required to convert to Catholicism from Islam?

  The life of a morisca visionary, Beatriz de Robes, condemned by the Inquisition as an alumbradismo, accused of Illuminist heresy is a portrait of their quandary. Who were these Illuminists? What did they believe? These people saw themselves as Christians, as Catholics who often went to communion and sought an internal experience of God through prayer rather than through the externals of church sermons. They did not believe that crosses or other relics sold by
the church either embodied or symbolized God. Theirs was a doctrine of “pure love” which alarmed the inquisitors, reminding them of the centuries-old Free Spirit movements in which people believed they could obtain a state of perfection outside the authority of the Roman Church. In light of the turbulence of the early 1600’s, Illuminists appealed to the poor and the powerless, as had all the alternatives to Catholicism before it.

  In the port of Seville where morisca Beatriz lived and was to be tried, as trade increased with the New World, a price revolution sent the cost of goods skyrocketing, while never increasing wages. “Tensions between the old paternalistic system of landed nobility and newly developing commercial capitalism also impelled many people to seek a religious faith that could provide consolation and an alternative to customary hierarchies of authority.”358 Instead of the Roman Church becoming flexible enough to incorporate the Illuminists, the Inquisition tried to eliminate them, as it had done to the Cathars in Europe and to the conversos of Jewish origin in Spain.