God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  Edgardo recovered, but in time word of her act began to circulate in Bologna, and then by degrees found its way to the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, in Rome. The rules were clear: Jews were not permitted to raise Christian children. Edgardo was now a Christian—had he not been baptized? And so there came a knock at the door:

  “There must be some mistake,” Momolo said. “My son was never baptized. . . . Who says Edgardo was baptized? Who says he has to be taken?”

  “I am only acting according to orders,” pleaded the Marshal. “I’m just following the Inquisitor’s orders.”

  The boy was brought to Rome. The pleas of the family proved unavailing. On occasion, the Mortaras were permitted to visit Edgardo, but never alone. The case provoked an international outcry—Napoleon III weighed in, along with the Rothschilds and Sir Moses Montefiore—but Pope Pius IX paid no heed. He raised Edgardo as if he were his own son. When Rome fell to the Italian forces, Edgardo was nineteen, and legally free to make his own decisions. By then he had been living in Rome for thirteen years. He chose to remain with the pope, who endowed him with a trust fund.

  The historian David Kertzer recounts the story, which was long forgotten, in his book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. Eventually Edgardo became a priest, and made a specialty of preaching to communities of Jews throughout Europe. He died in Belgium in 1940, shortly after the outbreak of World War II. Four years later, when Rome was liberated, Kertzer’s father, a rabbi and an army chaplain who had landed with American forces at Anzio, conducted the first Sabbath service to be held in Rome’s liberated central synagogue.

  Kertzer writes that half a century later, “I sat outside the Chief Rabbi’s office there, in the adjacent reading room, poring through the 1858 correspondence between the Secretary of Rome’s Jewish community and Momolo Mortara, the desperate father of a boy taken from him and his religion.”

  5. The Ends of the Earth

  The Global Inquisition

  Where is the stairway to heaven? The Sandia

  Mountains seem to be as close as you can get.

  —A BLASPHEMER IN NEW MEXICO, 1729

  This is the man who would like to

  see me burned at the stake.

  —TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, 1948

  Coming to America

  THE CITY OF SANTA FE, New Mexico, likes to project an image of rich and harmonic diversity. Glance for a moment at the tourist literature, and you will read that this is a place where three cultures thrive—Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo. Up to a point, the public image captures something true. Without a doubt, the ingredients in restaurant kitchens, and in kitchens at home, mingle democratically. Spanish is spoken widely in the city, and even more widely on the outskirts and up in the mountains. Pueblo Indians sell jewelry under the eaves of the Palace of the Governors, and Indian reservations occupy the countryside to the north and west. Anglo money is everywhere. The people who have it tend to be educated and to think of themselves as open-minded, drawn to the city for the very mystique it prizes. The official self-portrait—the “City Different”—is easy to recognize. It lies visibly on the surface.

  The things below—sharp divergences in class, ethnicity, outlook, and power—have not disappeared, even as they’ve changed. Anglos, mostly newcomers, have made up a majority of Santa Fe’s population since 1990. The city center, restored to a condition that in reality it never knew, is unaffordable to longtime natives. The old Hispanic community has been altered and divided by an influx of immigrants from Mexico. The plaza, once the city’s living heart, is now a tourist zone. At Mass on Sunday, in the cathedral memorialized by Willa Cather, the archbishop sometimes asks how many people are visitors from elsewhere. Often it’s a majority.

  These days, Americans of every kind are acutely sensitive to historical grievance, and Santa Fe has more than its share. From time to time, events bring that sense of grievance unexpectedly into public view. Several years ago, workers excavating ground for a new parking garage to serve the Santa Fe convention center, which stands a block from the plaza, started turning up human bones. They had stumbled on an ancient burial site. But whose bones were they? The area had been continuously occupied since prehistoric times, so it could well have been an ordinary burying ground for the Indians who inhabited Santa Fe before the conquistadors arrived. It might also have been used by the early colonists. One theory momentarily caused a stir: maybe it was a mass grave for Indians the Spanish had killed.

  The notion was not far-fetched. The first Spanish settlers had made their way north from Mexico in the late 1590s. In 1680, Indians throughout the New Mexico territory, acting with great coordination, rose up and expelled the Spanish, who fled south to the safety of El Paso. The Indians destroyed mission churches and burned the invaders’ records. They moved into the Palace of the Governors. The Spanish returned in force in 1693 and retook the territory. As the story is commonly told, the reconquest of Santa Fe was accomplished without bloodshed. But in his account of the episode, translated into English in the early 1990s, the leader of the expedition wrote frankly of ordering the execution of seventy Indian prisoners in Santa Fe for the crime of apostasy from the Catholic faith. Their bodies would most likely have been buried somewhere nearby. Had the workers at the convention center just found them?

  As it turned out, no. After a brief investigation, archaeologists determined that the bones were those of Indians who had lived around the year 1200. The remains of a few Spaniards were mixed in among them. The city scaled back the size of the garage, out of respect, and construction went on. But an embarrassing question had been raised—all the more embarrassing because every summer for three hundred years the city has commemorated the “peaceful reconquest” with the Fiesta de Santa Fe. A statue of the Virgin Mary that the Spanish carried with them, known as La Conquistadora, is paraded through the streets. Now there sprang up a group called Santa Feans for Truth and Reconciliation to protest the fiesta.

  And there have been incidents. The Cross of the Martyrs, near the center of town, honors twenty-one priests, all of them Franciscans, who were killed during the Pueblo Revolt; someone has begun painting it red every year in time for the Indian Market art bazaar. In the plaza, an inscription on an obelisk commemorates the “heroes who have fallen in various battles with savage Indians”; some years ago, a man with a chisel calmly went up to the obelisk and removed the word “savage.” It has not been restored.

  A friend of my family, Fray Angélico Chávez, a Franciscan priest, served for many years as the official historian of the state of New Mexico. He died in 1996. Chávez was a small man with nut-brown skin and an aquiline nose. He spoke quietly and often slyly. A statue of him stands today outside the library at the Palace of the Governors. Chávez could trace his family back fifteen generations or so, to the original Spanish settlers. In his later years, he would repair in the afternoon to a bar near the plaza, wearing a beret and sipping an old-fashioned under the gaze of provocative but badly painted nude odalisques on the dark-paneled walls. He left the priesthood for a time, returning before his death. His work explored many problematic seams in New Mexico’s history, but he was proud of his heritage. He was fond of quoting William Faulkner’s observation: “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”

  It was Chávez who pointed out to me, during a conversation among the odalisques, that although Americans never think of the Inquisition as something that took root in what is now the United States (“We don’t really think of America as having a Spanish history at all,” he said), in fact the Spanish Inquisition played a role in the early history of New Mexico. He nodded in the direction of the Palace of the Governors. Right there, in the middle of the city, a governor had been murdered as the result of a dispute with the religious authorities. People had been beheaded in the plaza, where Indians today lay out jewelry on blankets. For historians, he went on, the Inquisition would prove to be a blessing. Virtually the only written records we have from New Mexico before 1680 are Inquisition do
cuments; they were routinely sent for safekeeping to Mexico City, the capital of New Spain, and therefore survived the Pueblo Revolt. Everything else was destroyed. So we should be grateful to the Inquisition for something! Of course, Chávez added, after enjoying his joke, we must not forget that the Inquisition was partly to blame for the uprising in the first place.

  Soft Power

  Christopher Columbus was a man of worldly ambitions—he harbored dreams of wealth and influence. His contract with the Spanish monarchs stipulated that if his expedition proved successful, he would be knighted, would be made the governor of any new lands, and would be awarded the title Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Also, he was to receive 10 percent of any gold that was found. He haggled mightily over these terms. Columbus owned a copy of the Book of Marco Polo, and his highlights, marginal notations, and underlinings—“perfumes,” “gold mines,” “pearls, precious gems, golden fabric, ivory”—reveal a man with an eye for earthly gain. At the same time, he was deeply religious, even obsessively so. In later life, he compiled the Book of Prophecies, a collection of apocalyptic writings. He entertained the idea that his voyages would reveal the site of the Garden of Eden. He came to see his mission, at least in part, as messianic destiny: carrying Christ to a larger world. His very name played into this vision, and in penning his signature he would eventually render Cristoforo as Christo-ferens, its Greco-Latin root, meaning “Christ-bearer.” In describing his needs to Ferdinand and Isabella, he made specific provision for “parish priests or friars” to set up churches and convert the Indians.

  No one knows for sure how to weigh the importance of one motive relative to another in the mind of Columbus. That said, when he set sail in 1492—scribbling a note in his log about the expulsion of Spanish Jews—he neither considered nor foresaw that his efforts would enable the Inquisition to circumnavigate the world. But that would be one result, and in very short order.

  “Globalization” did not become a widely used term until the late twentieth century—popularized by a Harvard Business School professor—but it started to become a reality in the fifteenth, as the age of exploration opened an entire planet to conquest and trade. “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” the old saying had it; during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it very nearly didn’t set on the Inquisition either. Depending on the time of year, there would have been just a short interval after the sun had set on the Inquisition’s outpost in Mexico City before it rose on the outpost in Manila—a few brief moments when the Inquisition was in darkness everywhere.

  The Inquisition was able to spread so rapidly for two main reasons. One of them was simply the revolution in communications—communications understood broadly, as the projection of ideas and power over distance. A disciplinary enterprise like the Inquisition must be able to transmit messages over both short distances (down the hall) and long ones (across the mountains, across the sea). All that secretarial machinery would be of little consequence if words and authority, and the people who embodied them, could travel only with great difficulty, or not at all. The sophisticated communications networks of ancient Rome fell into decay with the end of the empire. It had once been possible for a messenger to make the trip from Rome to Alexandria and back—by land and sea, under perfect conditions—in about three weeks. Such feats were impossible in a medieval world in which roads had crumbled, “law” was local and unpredictable, and the waters were swept by roving marauders. In the early Middle Ages, communication was essentially oral, and neither words nor people traveled very far. Most journeys were made on foot, which in practice meant that one could cover about ten miles a day.

  But over time, and very gradually, conditions began to improve. Monasteries and then universities revived the art of making and distributing books. The Carolingian rulers set up a system of missi domini—“messengers of the lord”—to bring a semblance of administrative control to their domains. Religious orders created their own networks of messengers. The Cistercian system, probably the best, linked 6,000 establishments throughout Europe. The development of pilgrimage routes—chief among them, the ones that led from all over the continent to the holy sites in Rome—and then of the routes employed by those who joined the Crusades, opened up well-trod pathways with an infrastructure of inns, stables, blacksmiths, and cobblers to support them.

  By the fifteenth century, transport by sea could occur over longer distances and with greater safety and accuracy than ever before. For one thing, ships were better. Interactions between northern and southern Europe, and between Europe and the Islamic lands, had led to the development of well-designed, smooth-hulled caravels, with two or three masts and a rudder at the stern—a more robust and reliable vessel than the old clinker ships. The caravels combined lateen-rigged and square-rigged sails—they could make headway running into the wind as well as before the wind. The technology of navigation had advanced. The magnetic compass, floating in a bowl, was now widely in service, providing a general sense of direction, and so were the quadrant and the astrolabe, which allowed navigators to fix a ship’s latitude.

  The other reason the Inquisition went global was that like anything else based on organizational principles, it was highly portable. The “soft” power of an influential state is the power that derives from culture, religion, technology, and methods of administration, as opposed to simple violence or its threat. Portability is the hallmark of any empire. As different as one city may have been from another in the Roman Empire, its public center bore the unmistakable imprint of Roman rule: the temples of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva; the imposing basilica; the public latrines. One would have felt, as Edward Gibbon wrote, that imperial authority was being exercised “with the same facility on the banks of the Thames, or of the Nile, as on those of the Tiber.” In any British colony during the high noon of empire, you would find a starchy Government House, schoolchildren in tartans, judges in wigs, toasts to the monarch. The Spanish Empire was no different, though its bureaucratic machinery was relatively modest. The institutions of crown and church—strongly linked to Madrid, sometimes to the point of punctilious micromanagement—were transplanted wholesale.

  Spain and Portugal changed the places they colonized in many ways. The most successful transplants were language and religion. In time, after centuries, the imperial powers would retreat. The Church itself would lose its tenuous hold on temporal authority. But it would never shed its new, planetary character. The Church became the world’s first truly globalized institution. Its effort to regulate how people think and behave became global too.

  “Mission Creep”

  The Inquisition followed the flag, and its targets at first were those who arrived under that flag, rather than people already living where the flag was planted. The Inquisition was always a tool for use primarily on Christians, including conversos suspected of backsliding; it did not, for instance, haul Indians into tribunals unless they had previously embraced the faith. There were many conversos in the New World and elsewhere in the empires of Spain and Portugal. Columbus numbered at least five men of Jewish ancestry among the crew on his first voyage. One of them served as the expedition’s physician, another as its surgeon. A third served as bursar. A fourth, Luis de Torres, baptized the year Columbus set sail, was brought along as a translator—he knew Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic, and Columbus believed those languages might come in handy. Life in Iberia was at best conditional for conversos, at worst dangerous, and many chose to seek opportunities in Asia, Africa, and America. Jews who had not converted did the same. The new imperial colonies offered hope of a fresh start, far from the prying eyes and heavy hands of kings and bishops.

  It was a sensible choice, and paid off for large numbers. Many of them were from Portugal. Their families may have fled from Spain to that temporarily freer kingdom—only to flee again when the Portuguese commenced their own inquisition. No place in Iberia seemed reliable in the long run. Portugal sometimes encouraged converso emigration; technically, conversos were not allowed to emigrat
e from Spain, but the looser reality of a beckoning frontier, and the need for manpower, made the prohibition largely a dead letter.

  The Inquisition took note. As early as 1532, a converso family was plucked from Mexico and returned to Spain on orders issued by a faraway tribunal. Before long, clerics in the colonies—mainly members of the Franciscan Order, with their hooded brown habits and belts of knotted cord, but also Dominicans—were given explicit inquisitorial powers. Within the span of a lifetime after Columbus, tribunals of the Inquisition had been put into place in cities around the world—functioning replicas of the tribunals back home. Spain established a tribunal in Mexico City in 1569 and in Lima that same year. An Inquisition office was set up in Manila in 1583 (subject to the jurisdiction of the tribunal in Mexico City) and a full tribunal was established in Cartagena in 1611. Under the Portuguese, the Inquisition was established in Goa in 1560, where its activity was intense. The hand of the Portuguese Inquisition can be seen in places as far-flung as Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, the Cape Verde Islands, and Macau, though its touch in some of these places was light.

  “The Holy Office of the Inquisition,” writes the historian France V. Scholes, “was the most important ecclesiastical court in the New World.” He goes on: