The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Spain—once a rare example of cultural and religious diversity in the heart of Christendom—had expelled almost all its professing Jews and Muslims. But the Church was now confronting a powerful competitor for the hearts and minds of Christian believers—the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther openly challenged the religious monopoly of the Roman Catholic church, and the inevitable result was a sudden profusion of new churches, clerics, and rituals, all of which were seen by the Vatican as deeply heretical. Here, too, the war on heresy was overlaid with political, economic, and cultural conflicts between Spain and England, who were old and bitter rivals for mastery of the high seas and the New World. The men and women who were charged, tried, and punished by the Spanish Inquisition for the crime of Protestantism were scapegoats in a culture war and a geopolitical standoff that started with the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants.32

  The medieval Roman Catholic church regarded the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages as a threat to its own authority—indeed, the preference of the Cathars for Bibles in translation had been one of their supposed crimes—but the Protestant churches actively encouraged the practice. As early as 1521, Bibles printed abroad were subject to seizure at Spanish ports of entry, and the Spanish Inquisition later issued its own index of banned books that booksellers were required by law to keep in their shops.

  Protestants joined the Jewish and Muslim conversos as principal targets of the Spanish Inquisition. In 1533, a priest who was charged with the seduction of a nun sought to appease the inquisitors by offering them the names of seventy men and women whom he denounced as “Lutheran heretics.” By 1551, possession of a translation of the Bible in “the vulgar tongues”—that is, any language other than Greek or Latin—was a crime. The first Protestant burned for heresy by the Spanish Inquisition went to the stake in 1540, and twenty-six of the thirty accused heretics at an auto-da-fé at Toledo in 1559 were Protestants. On the way to the stake, one victim appealed to King Phillip II for mercy, but without success.33 “I myself would bring the faggots to burn my own son,” the king is said to have replied, “were he as perverse as you.”34

  When the meager supply of native-born Protestants ran low, the occasional English sailor or merchant was arrested—sometimes on Spanish soil and sometimes when an English ship was taken on the high seas—and tortured, tried, and punished by the Spanish Inquisition. The first Englishman to be burned alive as a heretic, a young man named John Tack, was judged and condemned by the Inquisition at Bilbao. An Englishman named John Massey, arriving at Seville in 1575, was sentenced to a term of seven years in an inquisitorial prison for the crime of possessing a Protestant prayer book titled The Treasury of Gladness. Thanks to the global reach of the Inquisition, a cousin of Sir Francis Drake was tried at an auto in Buenos Aires, and the son of Sir John Hawkins suffered the same fate in Lima.

  Still, the Spanish Inquisition did not content itself with Marranos, Moriscos, and Protestants. Now and then, some more exotic heresy would excite the imagination of the inquisitors. A preacher in Guadalajara was condemned for teaching that “sexual union was union with God.” A woman in Aragón claimed to be the bride of Christ but bedded down with her young male disciples. A priest in Seville was accused of conducting “indecent orgies” after mass and demanding that his female congregants lift their skirts for his pleasure as a form of penance. A band of Africans, pressed into slavery and baptized after their arrival in Spain, were charged as “votaries of hoodoo.” All of these religious eccentrics were judged to be heretics and punished by the Spanish Inquisition.35

  The inquisitors were uncomfortable with any variety of religious experience that they did not understand and endorse. The mystical practices of the so-called illuminists (alumbrados), by which the spiritual seeker supposedly achieved unity with God, drew the attention of the Spanish Inquisition, as did the teachings of Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), a charismatic Carmelite nun who came under inquisitorial scrutiny several times during her lifetime because of her mystical practices and angelic visions. The fact that Teresa carried Jewish blood in her veins further excited the suspicions of the Inquisition. “Father, would that we could all be burnt for Christ,” she remarked to a sympathetic priest when she was denounced as a heretic to the tribunal at Seville. Although Teresa was never formally condemned for heresy, the Inquisition refused to permit the publication of her famous memoir, Life of Mother Teresa of Jesus, until after her death in 1582.36

  Still later, the inquisitors bestirred themselves to address the perceived danger of Freemasonry—“a horrid compound of sacrilege and many other abominable crimes,” according to one inquisitorial document. One enterprising inquisitor succeeded in infiltrating a Masonic lodge to see for himself what manner of “occult depravity” went on there. He was sufficiently alarmed to bring formal charges against the members of nearly one hundred lodges in Spain. Yet again, the Inquisition acted to rid the Iberian Peninsula of what it regarded as the foul contagion of any idea not sanctioned by the Church and any living creature tainted by impure blood, and to do so at any cost in human suffering.37

  The Inquisition served more than one function in Spain as it did elsewhere across the centuries and throughout western Europe. As an instrument of state terror, the Inquisition was a convenient tool for establishing the sovereignty of the newly created monarchy that ruled over what had been a collection of little kingdoms and principalities, including some places that had long been ruled by Muslim rather than Christian kings. A decree issued by the Inquisition during the upheavals of the War of Spanish Succession at the opening of the eighteenth century, for example, required that all good Catholics report to the Inquisition any priest who questioned the claim of Philip V to the Spanish crown. Nor was he the first or only Spanish monarch to put the inquisitors on the scent of a political enemy.

  Not even the pope was capable of overmastering the Spanish monarchy when it came to the Inquisition. Complaints against the atrocities of the inquisitors were raised by men of purely Christian blood and practice, but when the popes attempted to temper the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, they were generally ignored by the kings of Spain. Thus, for example, when Pope Leo X issued a bull in 1518 to curb a few of the procedural abuses of the Inquisition, Charles V prohibited its publication within the borders of Spain.* A Spanish proverb captured the chilling effect of the alliance between the crown and the Inquisition: Con el rey y con la inquisición, chiton!—“With King and Inquisition, silence!”38

  Then, too, the Inquisition served as a means for the king to enrich himself at the expense of his subjects. An account by the Venetian ambassador to Madrid confirms the secondary gain that could be achieved by finding and burning rich conversos on charges of being secret Jews: “A fortnight ago last Sunday, an act was performed at Murcia, which is called at Toledo an act of the Inquisition, whereat twenty-nine individuals were burned as Jews,” the ambassador wrote to the Doge. “Among them were some chief personages, so that the confiscation of their property will yield to the King upwards of 4,000,000 ducats.” The Inquisition, too, routinely profited from whatever extortionate fines and seizures could be extracted from its victims; one wealthy financier was dispossessed of 300,000 ducats in gold and silver after he was charged by the inquisitors with the crime of being a secret Jew.39

  Finally, the Spanish Inquisition, like its counterpart in Rome, provided the shock troops in a culture war against the values of the Enlightenment. The old ways of life that had prevailed during the High Middle Ages were being challenged by humanism in arts and letters, rationalism in science and technology, diversity and toleration in religious practice, and the movement toward representative democracy in government, all of which the Spanish monarchy and the Spanish Inquisition regarded as dangerous heresies. “If the Holy Office had not come to this realm, some of these people would have been like those in England,” observed a Spanish priest, referring to the place where all the unsettling
new ideas were being openly entertained and put into practice.40

  So the inquisitors undertook to erect a wall around the Iberian Peninsula to keep out the contagion of people and ideas from what they called tierras de herejes (heretical nations), that is, any country that lay outside the Spanish empire. A visit by a Spanish subject to a foreign country was regarded as sufficient cause for suspicion of heresy and even an actionable crime in the eyes of the inquisitors. Agents of the Inquisition boarded foreign ships in Spanish ports and searched for forbidden books, which eventually included the works of such famous figures of the Enlightenment as Voltaire and Montesquieu, Rousseau and Locke.* Objectionable books were censored, sometimes by the simple expedient of tearing out pages, or consigned to the flames, and the recommended punishment for possession of a banned book was the stake.41

  Even Cervantes felt the fearful chill of the Inquisition. Although only one line of Don Quixote was censored by the vigilant inquisitors in 1632, he is reported to have said that he “would have made the book more amusing had it not been for the Holy Office.” As late as 1814, when the Spanish Inquisition had already been abolished in parts of Spain and was rapidly approaching its final collapse, Francisco Goya was condemned by the inquisitors for having painted the sensuous Naked Maja—a stunning portrait of a reclining nude woman—although he exacted a certain measure of revenge by documenting the sufferings of the Inquisition’s victims in a series of memorable drawings.42

  No offense against moral order was too trivial to escape the attention of the Spanish Inquisition. A quarrel between congregants during a Sunday mass, a curse uttered during a game of dice, a flirtatious remark offered to a young woman during a religious procession, the eating of meat on a Friday, and the failure to attend church services were all the subject of inquisitorial proceedings. Any opinion that struck the inquisitors as impious or impertinent might provoke a formal prosecution, as when one of the notaries on the inquisitorial staff was heard to say: “Tithes are ours, and the clergy are our servants, which is why we pay them tithes.” For his daring words, the man was brought before the same tribunal that he had assisted in the prosecution of other accused heretics.43

  As self-appointed moral guardians, the inquisitors were especially interested in what Christians did under the covers and behind closed doors. Bigamists, both men and women, were always at risk—the inquisitors reasoned that “bigamy implied a measure of heresy”—but the Inquisition extended its jurisdiction to almost every kind of sexual combination. A man and woman who shared a home after their formal betrothal but before their wedding could be prosecuted for “simple fornication.” Since the Church was always hostile toward sexual practices that did not result in conception—one of the supposed crimes of the Cathars and various other heretical cults, real and imagined—the Spanish Inquisition in Aragón undertook to prosecute acts of bestiality and sodomy by both men and women, a policy that had the practical effect of equating homosexuality with heresy. Minors convicted of sodomy were whipped and condemned to forced labor, but the penalty for adults over the age of twenty-five who engaged in such sexual acts was burning at the stake.44

  The Spanish Inquisition was not as vexed by fears of witchcraft as other inquisitors around Europe. After twenty-nine men and women were condemned as witches by the tribunal in Navarre in 1610—and six of them were burned alive—La Suprema dispatched one of its inquisitors, Alonzo Salazar y Frias, to conduct a formal investigation into the supposed dangers of sorcery in Spain. As we have already noted, Salazar y Frias concluded that the witch panic had been called into existence by the witch-hunters: “I have not found the slightest evidence,” he reported, “from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred.” As a result of his findings, he welcomed nearly two thousand accused witches back into the Church, including children as young as nine years old.45

  Aside from its admirable restraint in cases of witchcraft, however, the Spanish Inquisition steadily expanded its scope of operations, restlessly and anxiously searching for new heresies to condemn and new suspects to torture and burn. The victims of an auto-da-fé that took place in Seville on May 3, 1579, for example, included a Flemish bookbinder accused of embracing the new heresy of Lutheranism, an English gunner’s mate who had been taken in a sea battle with a flotilla commanded by the great English commander Sir John Hawkins, a Morisco charged with continuing secretly to practice his Islamic faith, plus a few accused crypto-Jews, a miscellaneous assortment of defendants charged with blasphemy and sorcery, and a single bigamist, a total of thirty-eight in all. Significantly, only the bookbinder was burned alive at the stake, a measure of how threatening a Protestant man of letters was to the status quo of Spain. The rest were given milder “penances.”

  The old techniques of the medieval Inquisition were still in use in Spain. The inquisitors carried the title of Inquisitor Against Heresy and Apostolic Perversity, and they traveled throughout Spain in search of heretics. When they arrived in a town, they generally commenced the proceedings by publishing a so-called Edict of Grace, which invited all heretics to come forward and confess their crimes on the promise of mild penances. As was true during the medieval Inquisition, confession alone was insufficient; the naming of names was required.*

  The long history and dire reputation of the Inquisition was itself a weapon. The inquisitors relied on the terror that it inspired to extract self-denunciation and the denunciation of others. Thus, for example, the Edict of Grace that was promulgated in Toledo in 1486 succeeded in summoning forth some 2,400 conversos of Jewish ancestry who were willing to confess to their own heresies and betray their friends, neighbors, and relations in order to escape the torture chamber and the stake, and another 2,689 Moriscos came forward to do the same in Valencia in 1568.46 “We must remember that the main purpose of the trial and execution,” wrote one Spanish inquisitor in 1578 in a commentary on Eymerich’s classic manual, “is not to save the soul of the accused but to achieve the public good and put fear into others.”47

  Every palace and prison of the Spanish Inquisition, of course, was equipped with a torture chamber. According to an English account published in 1600, the place of torture was both functional and theatrical; the inquisitors first posed their questions to the victim, and then if satisfactory answers were not forthcoming, they watched as the public executioner applied the instruments to the victim’s flesh and bone. To enhance the terror, the torturer was dressed in a black linen robe, and his head was covered in a black hood with eyeholes, “this done to amaze the Patient, as if a devil came to punish his Misdeeds.”48

  The transcript of the interrogation of Elvira del Campo, charged as a secret Jew and tortured by the Inquisition at Toledo in 1568 after it was observed that she refrained from eating pork and changed her undergarments on Saturday, preserves a vivid example of how even a willing victim might find it hard to please the demanding inquisitors. “Tell me what you want for I don’t know what to say,” the naked woman pleaded, and then, as the inquisitor proceeded through the prescribed degrees of torture, she struggled to come up with a satisfactory confession: “Loosen me a little that I may remember what I have to tell; I don’t know what I have done; I did not eat pork for it made me sick; I have done everything; loosen me and I will tell the truth. Lord, bear witness that they are killing me without my being able to confess!”49

  The text of a typical Edict of Faith included a comprehensive and surprisingly accurate description of Jewish religious observances, and a good Christian was duty-bound to report to the Inquisition anyone who practiced them—those “who prepare on Fridays the food for Saturdays…who do not work on Friday evenings and Saturdays as on other days…who celebrate the festival of unleavened bread, eating unleavened bread and celery and bitter herbs…observe the fast of the Day of Atonement when they do not eat all day until the evening after star-rise…who slaughter poultry according to the Judaic law,” and so on.50

  Once a suspect was arrested, all the standard operating procedures
of the medieval Inquisition were called into use. Apologists for the Spanish Inquisition point out that its victims were theoretically entitled to an advocate during the formal proceedings, a privilege that had been unavailable to victims of the medieval Inquisition. But the role of the attorney was so circumscribed that the assistance of counsel was ineffective or even “farcical.” At first, victims was permitted to choose their own attorneys—if they could afford one and could find one willing to take the case—but the Inquisition later permitted only those attorneys who were approved in advance, “a fellow who would do only what the inquisitor wanted,” according to a prisoner of the Inquisition in 1559.51

  The proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition, in fact, cannot properly be called a trial at all. Rather, the inquisitors convened a series of “audiences” at which testimony was taken and evidence was presented, always behind closed doors and always with the names of witnesses withheld from the defendant. Anyone charged with the crime of heresy by the Inquisition was presumed to be guilty, and the burden of proving innocence fell wholly on the accused. During some periods of its long history, the Spanish Inquisition looked to a committee of inquisitors, priests, judges, and other experts in law and theology known as a consulta de fé to weigh the evidence, decide on guilt or innocence, and determine punishment. Later, however, the authority was removed to La Suprema, the council that oversaw the operations of the Spanish Inquisition and acted alone in deciding whether an accused heretic lived or died.52

  Unlike the medieval Inquisition, which invariably condemned those whom it charged, the Spanish Inquisition was known to issue the occasional acquittal—an “absolution” in inquisitorial parlance. But since absolution implied that the accused heretic had been arrested and charged in error, the inquisitors preferred merely to suspend the proceedings rather than impugn the authority of the Inquisition by admitting that they had been wrong in the first place. Here was yet another catch in the workings of the inquisitorial machinery: an accused heretic whose trial was suspended remained at risk that the proceedings could be resumed at any moment, if and when the inquisitors were able to secure additional betrayals and denunciations from a victim of torture in another case. Thus did the victim fall into a kind of purgatory from which it was nearly impossible to escape.