The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual
Page 23
The early conversos and their descendants, in fact, achieved rapid and remarkable success in the century following the anti-Semitic riots of 1391. They found new opportunities in the government, the courts, the army, the university, and even the Church; remarkably, Jewish blood ran in the veins of the Torquemada family, which provided the first grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisiton. Far from marrying only their fellow conversos, the newly converted Christians were able to make favorable matches in the highest circles of the Spanish aristocracy. By 1480, “barely a single aristocratic family in Aragon, from the royal house downwards, was free from some Jewish admixture or alliance,” according to Cecil Roth, and both the supreme court and the legislature of the kingdom of Aragón included men who were descended from conversos.22
The good fortune of the conversos was distressing to members of the Christian gentry and aristocracy, who resented the new competition for positions of profit and privilege. A distinction came to be made between converts to Christianity and their descendants, who were called New Christians (cristianos nuevos), and Christians who had been born into the faith, now pridefully called Old Christians. The conversos of Jewish origin found themselves the victims of Jew hatred that came from both the mob and the gentry. Within a century after the pogroms that had prompted the first wave of conversions, both professing Jews and converted Jews would come under attack by the throne and the Inquisition, too.*
Until then, the Inquisition had operated only fitfully in the Iberian Peninsula. Nicholas Eymerich, author of the famous handbook of the medieval Inquisition, had served as inquisitor in Aragón in the fourteenth century, but he was removed from office after the pope received complaints from the Spanish clergy that Eymerich was rather too zealous in the pursuit of heresy. Still, the Old Christians understood how the machinery of persecution designed to dispose of “heretical filth” like the Cathars and Waldensians could be repurposed for the extermination of conversos of Jewish origin. And they found a champion in Tomás de Torquemada, the Dominican friar who served as confessor to Queen Isabella I of Castile (1451–1504) and was perhaps the single most notorious figure in the long history of the Inquisition.
Torquemada worked diligently to poison the minds of Isabella and her husband, King Ferdinand II of Aragón (1452–1516), against the policy of convivencia that had once allowed Christians, Jews, and Muslims to live in peace on the same soil. The king and queen were both attended by Jewish doctors, and both were willing to accept money from Jewish financiers. Indeed, Isabella regarded the Jews of Castile as her personal possession and saw herself as their protector: “All the Jews in my realms are mine,” she had once decreed, “and it belongs to me to defend and aid them.” Now, however, Torquemada urged her to undertake the mission of erasing Jewish presence and influence for all times. When Isabella and Ferdinand ascended to the throne of a newly unified Spanish monarchy in 1479 as los reyes católicos (the Catholic monarchs), the cherished goal of a purged and purified Spain was finally within reach.23
A pretext for the war on Spanish Jewry was supposedly provided, if one was needed, by the amorous adventures of a young caballero who ventured into the Judería of Seville by night to woo an alluring Jewish woman whose faith apparently mattered less to her suitor than her beauty. He is said to have slipped into her house, silently and discreetly, and thus surprised the members of the household in a compromising scene. A celebration of some kind, attended by a mixed company of Jews and New Christians, was in progress behind closed doors. Since it was Eastertide, which usually coincides with the observance of Passover, the gathering triggered all the ugly old suspicions about the ritual practices of Judaism. Even if the knight had only stumbled upon an ordinary seder meal, as it surely was, the fact that conversos were in attendance at all amounted to proof that they were, in fact, crypto-Jews.
The tale was reported to Isabella, who finally resolved to do the bidding of her confessor by putting the Inquisition to the task of ridding Spain of conversos who were guilty of the heresy known as Judaizing, that is, secretly practicing Judaism while professing to be Christians and seeking to convince others to do the same. The Spanish ambassador in Rome was instructed to petition Pope Sixtus IV for a suitable decree, and the pope complied in 1478 by authorizing the establishment of a branch operation of the Inquisition in Spain, the so-called Tribunal of the Holy Office. Significantly, the pope delegated to the king and queen the power to appoint, remove, and replace the inquisitors, with the sole proviso that they must be priests over the age of forty. On Christmas Day in 1480, the newly appointed inquisitors arrived in Seville, and by February 6, 1481, the first conversos of Jewish ancestry had been arrested, tried, and convicted, the first auto-da-fé convened, and six men and women burned alive at the stake.
Such were the modest first efforts of the Spanish Inquisition, but its mere existence was enough to inspire panic among conversos throughout Spain. Some eight thousand fled the precincts of Seville for refuge in Cádiz, but they were promptly arrested and returned on the demand of the inquisitors. Later, when terrorized conversos crossed the border into France, the pope himself ordered that they be seized and returned to Spain. The Dominican convent in Seville, pressed into service as the center of operations, was soon overwhelmed with accused heretics, and the castle of Triana was put at the disposal of the friar-inquisitors. Within six months of the first auto, another 298 men and women had been burned alive, and some 1,500 had confessed, recanted, and received lesser penances, ranging from the wearing of crosses to life imprisonment. Following the example of the medieval Inquisition, the inquisitors resorted to the old practice of exhuming dead heretics and burning their bones or effigies.
All the old tools and techniques to be found in the inquisitor’s handbooks were put to use by the Spanish Inquisition, but some new ones were required, too. Just as a pale complexion and an emaciated torso were once seen as telltale signs of a Cathar perfectus, certain external signs were regarded as evidence that a converso was a secret Jew. Washing one’s hands before prayer, calling a child by a name from the Old Testament, and preparing a meal that did not include pork or shellfish were all regarded as suspicious acts according to the broadsheets that were published and distributed to alert the populace to the presence of secret Jews. Changing one’s undergarments on Saturday, for example, was sufficient evidence to justify the arrest and interrogation under torture of a New Christian on charges of being a secret Jew.
The inquisitors hunted out their victims by every means available and wherever they could be found. Strictly speaking, as we have seen, Jews who had remained Jews were beyond the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition, but the inquisitors ordered Spanish rabbis to use their influence, including the threat of excommunication, to compel their congregants to tell what they knew about conversos who had secretly remained in the faith or returned to it after their baptisms. According to the old Catch-22 that had caught so many other victims of the Inquisition, Jews who refused to act as informers were regarded as fautors and thus placed themselves under the authority of the Inquisition. They, too, were arrested, tortured, and burned for the crime of refusing to name names.
The ever-increasing number of victims prompted the appointment of additional inquisitors, the creation of tribunals in venues across Spain—a total of fifteen in all, ranging from the capital city of Madrid to the far-flung Balearic Islands—and eventually the establishment of an inquisitorial high command with responsibility for overseeing the work of the friar-inquisitors throughout Spain and around the world, El Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición, generally known as La Suprema. The musty old handbooks of Gui and Eymerich were reissued, but La Suprema also published its own manuals, known as instrucciónes, by which the inquisitors were briefed on the new and unique mission of the Spanish Inquisition. Once in full operation, the friar-inquisitors followed the conquistadores all the way to the New World.
Torquemada was formally appointed as an inquisitor in 1482 and soon elevated to the high rank of
grand inquisitor. The Dominican monk, a prideful ascetic who had taken the customary vows of poverty and obedience, was now supplied with a palace and a bodyguard of fifty mounted men and two hundred foot soldiers. Since the Spanish Inquisition did not hesitate to arrest, dispossess, and incinerate men and women who regarded themselves as powerful and influential—and since Torquemada was willing to quarrel with the emissaries of the pope himself—the grand inquisitor was fearful of assassination and took ample precautions to preserve his own life. As it turned out, he lived a long life and died peacefully in the safe confines of his bedchamber.
The Spanish Inquisition, as we have seen, was less concerned about Christian dissidents than about crypto-Jews, real or imagined. According to the inquisitors, the public conversion of a Jew to Christianity was likely to be a mere ruse, and even the distant descendants of a converso remained under suspicion. Any trace of Jewish origins, no matter how faint or remote, was enough to justify the accusation that the man or woman was a “Judaizer.” For example, the bishop of Segovia, Juan Arias Dávila, a man of distant Jewish ancestry, dutifully hunted for the conversos who might be secretly practicing Judaism within his diocese, and he brought up sixteen Jews on charges based on the old blood libel. But the bishop himself was eventually arrested by the Inquisition on charges that he had arranged for the graves of his dead relatives to be exhumed, according to Roth, “in order to destroy proof of the fact that they had been interred in accordance with Jewish rites.”24
High rank offered no immunity for the descendants of conversos. In fact, the most assimilated converso families may have been at even greater risk than crypto-Jews who actually practiced Judaism, if only because they possessed wealth that the inquisitors wanted to seize and posts that Old Christians wanted to hold. Among the victims of the Inquisition in the kingdom of Aragón, for example, were men from converso families who held the titles of master of the royal household, high treasurer, and assessor, all of whom were convicted of participating in a conspiracy to assassinate the inquisitor Pedro Arbués in 1485. The plot was successful—Arbués was stabbed to death as he knelt at the altar in the cathedral at Zaragoza, despite taking the precaution of wearing a coat of mail under his robes—but the act of resistance did nothing to stop the Inquisition. Indeed, more than two hundred victims were rounded up and executed in its aftermath, and the conversos found themselves at greater risk than before.
Nor was it easy for victims of the Spanish Inquisition to escape its long reach. Spanish Jews and conversos of Jewish origin who crossed the border into Portugal, for example, found themselves at risk from the tribunals that operated there. King Manuel had agreed to embrace the Spanish approach to the Jewish question in an effort to win the hand of the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and a decree of expulsion was issued a week after their betrothal in 1496. In 1536, the Portuguese king successfully petitioned the pope for an inquisition of his own, and, again in imitation of Spain, the priest who served as royal confessor was named inquisitor general. Thereafter, the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal acted in parallel and, for the period when Spain conquered and ruled over Portugal, as a single unified operation.
Some Jewish families fled the Iberian Peninsula and eventually found refuge in Holland and England, Italy and Turkey, and later the Americas, including the ancestors of such luminaries as the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the American jurist Benjamin Cardozo, and the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli.* But the Inquisition soon extended its jurisdiction to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and dependencies around the world, including tribunals in Sicily, Goa, and Manila, and thriving branch offices in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. The first auto on American soil was held in Mexico City in 1528, when two Marranos from Spain were burned alive. Not even the New World offered a safe refuge from the latest version of the inquisitorial war on heresy.
The year 1492 figures prominently in the history of Spain for more than one reason. In that year, of course, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella dispatched Christopher Columbus on a voyage that was intended to reach Asia and ended up on the shores of a newly discovered continent. Then, too, the army of the Catholic Monarchs defeated the last Muslim ruler to reign on Spanish soil, thus completing the so-called Reconquista and bringing the Iberian Peninsula under exclusive Christian sovereignty for the first time since 711. And, finally, in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella resolved to extend the mission of the Spanish Inquisition to its logical extreme by ridding Spain of all Jews. By royal decree, the Jewish population of Spain was offered a choice—convert to Christianity (and thus place itself at risk of the Inquisition) or depart from Spain.
An atrocity was tricked up to justify the expulsion and ease the concerns of any Spaniard who might take the idea of convivencia too seriously. A nameless baby was said to have been abducted in the town of Ávila in 1491 and then killed by a cabal of Jews and conversos to supply blood for one of those diabolical rituals that were the commonplace of anti-Semitic lore. Like other slanders directed at accused heretics across the ages, the foul deed had been wholly invented by a few hateful priests, but the lie was credible enough to prompt the arrest of some seventy new victims of the Inquisition. More important, the imaginary crime was described in lurid propaganda tracts circulated throughout Spain, thus provoking a new surge of fear and loathing directed toward Spanish Jewry.
On March 30, 1492, the formal decree of expulsion was issued by Ferdinand and Isabella. Only four months later, the Jews who declined to convert were forced to trudge across the border or embark by sea to their places of exile. Some sources place the total number of expelled Jews at 300,000 men, women, and children; others, at 800,000. According to the calculations of more recent and more exacting historians, however, the total Jewish population of Spain in 1492 was only slightly more than 80,000, and perhaps only half—40,000 or so—actually resettled outside Spain. Those who stayed behind complied with the royal decree by submitting to baptism, thus putting themselves in the same predicament that bedeviled the earlier generations of conversos and presenting the Inquisition with the opportunity to test the sincerity of their conversion.25
In fact, the expulsion of Spanish Jewry was yet another tool of persecution urged on the Catholic Monarchs by the grand inquisitor and the more radical elements among the Old Christians. Torquemada insisted that the inquisitors at work across Spain, no matter how zealous they might be, were unable to protect those conversos who aspired to be authentic Christians from the predations of professing Jews, “who always attempt in various ways to seduce faithful Christians from our Holy Catholic Faith.” Torquemada advocated the expulsion of Spanish Jewry as a kind of radical surgery to excise a malignant growth from the body of Spain, thus reducing to manageable proportions the contagion that was the object of the Inquisition.26
A story is told that when a delegation representing the Jewish community petitioned King Ferdinand to withdraw the decree of expulsion—and offered a sizable gift by way of encouragement—Torquemada charged into the room and dramatically tossed thirty silver coins onto the table, “demanding to know for what price Christ was to be sold again to the Jews.” The story is invented, but the fact remains that the king and queen were hesitant to expel “their” Jews and thus forfeit the considerable tax revenues that flowed directly into the royal coffers. Such was the will and guile of Torquemada, however, that the Catholic Monarchs submitted to his demands and issued the decree that he sought.27 “The Holy Office of the Inquisition, seeing how some Christians are endangered by contact and communication with the Jews,” wrote King Ferdinand by way of explanation, “has persuaded us to give our support and agreement to this, which we now do, because of our debts and obligations to the said Holy Office; and we do so despite the great harm to ourselves.”28
The same fate later befell the Muslim communities of Spain. Just as most Spanish cities included a Judería, so too was there a Morería where the so-called Moors made their homes. Starting in 1501, and continuing with ever greater scope and severity, the Muslim p
opulation of Spain was presented with the same harsh choice that had been extended to the Jewish population: convert or depart. The Muslims who agreed to embrace Christianity were treated with no more credulity than the Jews had been, and the term Moriscos was coined to describe crypto-Muslims just as Marranos was used to describe crypto-Jews. “Lost souls stubborn in the sects of Moses and Mohammed” is how Jewish and Islamic communities were described by a Spanish historian of the sixteenth century, Fray José de Sigüenza, whose blend of piety and compassion prompted him to complain about the “evil custom prevalent in Spain of treating members of the sects worse after their conversion than before it.”29
Thus did the convivencia that had prevailed during the Golden Age of Spain come to a final and tragic end. Muslims were subjected to baptism en masse, and mosques were converted into churches. Arabic books were seized and burned on royal command. All objects and practices that were associated with the Muslim community in Spain—their use of the Arabic language, their distinctive garb and adornments, and their rituals of circumcision and slaughter of animals—were solemnly condemned. By 1526, the war on Islam was complete and “the Muslim religion no longer existed in Spain officially,” according to historian Henry Kamen.30
So it was that the Inquisition added Moriscos to its list of usual suspects on the assumption that Muslims, like Jews, were likely to feign a conversion to Christianity. Just as a New Christian with Jewish ancestry might come under suspicion for changing her underwear on Saturday, a New Christian of Moorish extraction was suspect if she decorated herself with henna. One woman was denounced to the Inquisition as a secret Muslim by her own lover because of “her habits in the matter of sexual hygiene,” for example, and a few young men of Muslim ancestry were arrested in Toledo in 1538 because they were seen sharing a plate of couscous.31