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

by Cullen Murphy

  The jurisdiction of the Inquisition was wide and elastic. Heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, bigamy, the practice of superstition, sorcery and demonology, propositions subversive of the faith, denial of ecclesiastical authority, lack of respect for ecclesiastical persons, institutions, and censures, solicitation in the confessional, evil-sounding words—these were some of the causes for prosecution by the tribunal. No member of the non-aboriginal community was exempt.

  Some years ago, the Bancroft Library at the University of California came into possession of sixty-one volumes of manuscript records from the Mexican Inquisition spanning the years 1593 to 1817. Each of the volumes is devoted to the case of a single individual. Some of them run to hundreds of pages. Sewn into the middle of one volume—the case of a man accused of not believing in the Virgin Mary—is the rope he used to hang himself while in prison, in 1597. Looking at the accusations, one gets a vivid sense of the range of transgressions that came before the Inquisition, and of the phenomenon that in our time goes by “mission creep”:

  “suspicion of being a Lutheran”

  “asserting that sexual intercourse with him was not a sin”

  “claiming sexual intercourse with saints”

  “saying mass and giving penance without being a priest”

  “revelations and clairvoyance”

  “fraud, superstition, and unlicensed practice of medicine”

  “witchcraft”

  “seeking sexual intercourse with a woman by telling her that God had ordered it”

  “hypocrisy, false visions, revelations, and miracles”

  “officiating in the marriage of two dogs”

  And, as usual, there was the crime of “practicing Judaism.” This accusation would always get the Inquisition’s attention, but in terms of numbers, the prosecution of alleged crypto-Jews was concentrated in two great waves of zeal.

  The first occurred in the 1590s, in the wake of an influx of converso colonists into Mexico, when some two hundred people were investigated for activities that marked them, in the Inquisition’s view, as crypto-Jews. The most celebrated among the victims was Luis de Carvajal, the nephew of a prominent conquistador. In 1596, Carvajal was burned at the stake along with his mother, three sisters, and three other convicted judaizers. He left behind a deeply personal and affecting memoir, a testament to his Jewish faith composed between periods of imprisonment. Additional fragments of Carvajal’s writing survived in the form of letters he sought to smuggle to his siblings as he awaited execution, written on eggshells or the skins of fruit, or engraved with a pin on an avocado pit. The last entry in his memoir is dated according to the Hebrew calendar: “the fifth month of the year five thousand three hundred and fifty-seven of our creation.”

  The second wave of prosecution came half a century later, in 1642. A converso community was by then a palpable reality in Mexico City—old European patterns had reasserted themselves—and for the most part it was left alone. Conversos tended to marry one another. They kept up various rituals. Some observed the Sabbath and specific holy days. Men might be circumcised. (Inquisition surgeons checked.) For certain conversos, such behavior was little more than a cultural holdover. For others, Judaism remained the core of identity. The conversos tended to cluster in an identifiable neighborhood—it lay between the cathedral and the present-day Church of Santo Domingo, where the Inquisition made its home. The plaza in front of the church was where autos-da-fé were held.

  The Inquisition stepped in abruptly. The precipitating event was a geopolitical crisis—what today would be called a national-security threat. For sixty years, Portugal had been annexed to Spain. In 1640, Portugal seceded, and Mexico was gripped by fear of a Portuguese invasion. The ancestors of many conversos had come from Portugal; their descendants were even called portugueses. Fear of the one became fear of the other—a dynamic of conflation that will seem familiar to modern eyes. Beginning in 1642 and over the next several years, more than 130 suspected crypto-Jews were brought before the tribunal in Mexico City. By one estimate, fewer than 6 percent of this number were completely exonerated of the charges brought against them. The rest were found culpable to some degree. The judicial procedures used were those the Inquisition had developed over time: long periods of incarceration interrupted at irregular intervals by interrogation, with torture employed in about a third of the cases. Personal property would have been seized and sequestered at the outset of the proceedings. In the end, most of those brought before the tribunal confessed to the charges and submitted to “reconciliation”—but in many cases lost their wealth and property anyway, and were expelled from New Spain. A handful of the accused—refusing to be reconciled, or considered to have relapsed—were sent to the stake.

  Such was the state of affairs in Mexico City, the capital. But the Inquisition was already moving on.

  A Murder in Santa Fe

  Roads can be superseded, but they’re very hard to erase. Iron Age tracks, like the Pilgrims’ Way in southern England, can be found all over Europe, and are still used by hikers. The ancient Silk Road, braiding through Central Asia, remains easy to trace. Interstate 25 is the modern highway that follows the Rio Grande from Santa Fe down through Albuquerque to Las Cruces and El Paso. All along the way, sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, and especially when the sun is low, you can see notches and deep cuts on successive ridgelines that mark the course of an old road. In the lowlands between, you can make out the ruts left by wheels in the grass. In other places, the road is revealed as a line of sight through the cottonwoods.

  This is the Camino Real, the oldest European road in America, which in the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries gradually pushed its way north from Mexico City. The road followed Indian footpaths. It was the route taken by Juan de Oñate in 1598, a generation before Plymouth Rock, when he and several hundred men, women, and children ventured into what is now New Mexico and settled not far from present-day Santa Fe. The Villa de Santa Fe itself was founded a decade later. For more than two hundred years, until the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, which provided a link to Missouri, the Camino Real would be New Mexico’s only significant connection to the rest of the world.

  The province was as remote as a space station, and needed massive and regular resupply. A great convoy, or conducta, made the journey about once a year in each direction, traveling 1,500 miles at a pace of perhaps twenty miles a day. There would be hundreds of people in each conducta, along with trade goods, cattle and pigs on the hoof, and mail. The convoy was heavily armed—attacks by Apaches and other tribes were routine. The documents of government passed in both directions, as did the documents of the Franciscan Order and of the Inquisition.

  The documentation is voluminous. The Inquisition records are held at the Archivo General de la Nación, in Mexico City, a massive building that until the 1970s was used as a prison. People called it the Black Palace. Pancho Villa once escaped from it. The prison cells now hold documents, and researchers sit at desks in the hallways outside them. The Inquisition records fill 1,550 folios. They include accounts of depositions and trials, narratives of local events, instructions from the tribunal to distant clerics, the clerics’ replies, and humdrum correspondence of every kind. When someone was charged with an offense before the Inquisition, one of the first things interrogators did was to ask him for a discurso de la vida—the story of his life—which often yielded a long and rambling narrative, full of incident and revelation. What the Inquisition register of Jacques Fournier accomplished for the village of Montaillou in the fourteenth century, the Inquisition records in Mexico City accomplished for Spain’s American possessions two and three centuries later.

  The information about New Mexico is surprisingly detailed. In some ways, the role of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie was played by France V. Scholes, a student of Frederick Jackson Turner and himself an inspiring teacher to a generation of historians. Scholes was the first American historian to become intimately familiar with the Inquisition arc
hives in Mexico, and he used them to repopulate the vast empty spaces of early New Mexican history.

  Representatives of the Inquisition, known as comisarios, rotated through the province regularly, after background checks to confirm their doctrinal fealty and limpieza de sangre—their purity of blood. The commissaries took evidence in cases of every kind. We learn of one Indian woman who claimed she had been having an affair with the governor, and of another Indian woman who had been brought from her pueblo to Sante Fe because she possessed certain magical arts, and might save the life of a Spanish soldier. The use of peyote by Indians and colonists alike was remarked. One man reported that some of his belongings had been stolen, and that after eating peyote he had experienced a vision: a man and a woman had appeared to him, and described where his belongings could be found. (And there they were!) We learn about the use of love potions and aphrodisiacs. One woman explained that the way to enchant a man was to wash her private parts with water and then use the water to cook him a meal, or to make him chocolate.

  The Inquisition left a double legacy in New Mexico. The first part was immediate, and led to political convulsions that shaped the territory for years to come. The second was demographic, and remains to some extent conjectural.

  The immediate consequence was a violent conflict between church and state—between inquisitors and governors or the people standing in for them. Church and state in New Mexico had one large interest in common—the extension of Spanish power—but with respect to day-to-day management, and even ultimate goals, their interests often diverged sharply. The Church wanted to win souls for Christ—to build missions, keep them safe, stamp out Indian folkways, and make the exploitation of Indian labor a Church monopoly. The state needed to support a garrison. It also wanted to lure in enough settlers to develop this poor, dry territory as best it could. It gave away land, tolerated the colonists’ abuse of Indians, and even sanctioned slavery and the slave trade.

  The clash became especially intense because no buffering institutions stood in the way to absorb the friction. In Europe, neither secular rulers nor the Inquisition could ever act in complete isolation. The apparatus of civil society lay thick upon the ground. Towns and cities enjoyed rights and privileges. Guilds and benevolent societies formed diverse networks of association. Family ties were ancient and complex. Church and state—fractured into subunits and jurisdictions and hierarchies—were hardly monolithic. The power of an institution like the Inquisition was rarely the same in practice as it was on paper.

  In New Mexico, the situation was different. The European population living in and around Santa Fe in the earliest decades numbered no more than several hundred. Any internecine conflict immediately achieved the status of a crisis. As Scholes would observe, “The very simplicity of political, social, and economic conditions permitted such issues to assume a greater relative importance than would have been the case if life had been more varied and complex.” It was a hothouse environment, where clashes of rights and jurisdiction became intensely personal.

  The fact that communication to and from the outside world occurred mainly in rare but regularized bursts must have added a surreal dimension to life in New Mexico. Friars and governors sometimes employed special messengers, though the risk of interception or misadventure was high. That recourse aside, there was only the conducta. Imagine the various antagonists in Santa Fe, their animosities building, writing long, furious accounts to their superiors, but having to wait for the next convoy to send them. The warring documents then travel together to Mexico City and are dispersed to their various destinations. Meetings are held. Decisions are made. Sometimes the authorities in Spain must be consulted—the letters undertake another slow journey. Meanwhile, the antagonists stew. Sometimes they fight. At last—six months later? a year? two years?—the responses converge on the next conducta bound for Santa Fe. When they arrive, the documents are separated and delivered to the antagonists. The advice and instructions reshape the battle lines. The war continues. Pens scratch busily in the candlelight in anticipation of the next conducta.

  Church and state never achieved a lasting convivencia in Santa Fe. The actors on the scene were to some extent proxies, backed by powerful interests in Mexico City and Madrid. The friars were quick to levy charges of blasphemy, witchcraft, and other transgressions against the governors and their allies, knowing that these would stir the Inquisition’s interest. The governors did the same. In 1642, in the aftermath of a particularly ugly and complicated series of church-state altercations, members of the pro-church faction burst in on the former governor, Luis de Rosas, and ran him through with a sword. Rosas was an undiplomatic man with a violent temper. The friars were glad to see him go. But his murder was an affront to civil authority. Competing versions of events made their way to Mexico City. The return trip brought a new governor, who carried secret orders about how to deal with the killers of Rosas. He issued a general pardon to calm things down, and then quietly rounded up the eight men he held responsible. On July 21, 1643, all eight were decapitated in the Santa Fe plaza. The head of a man named Antonio de Baca, the ringleader, was nailed to the gibbet and left there for all to see. A popular guide to Santa Fe, on the lookout for carefully parsed superlatives, refers to the event as “the largest mass beheading of Europeans by Europeans in a continental American town.”

  The beheadings had a sobering effect, but not for long—the story of the next several decades is one of renewed church-state conflict. Complaints to the Inquisition were again used as a weapon. In the 1660s, the tribunal brought formal charges of heresy and blasphemy against two governors of New Mexico, the wife of one of them, and four soldiers serving in the province. One of the governors had already left the scene. The other six individuals were arrested, bound hand and foot, and hauled off to Mexico City with the conducta. In the end, none of the accused went to the stake. One died in prison. The rest suffered penalties ranging from public abjuration to loss of property to permanent exile.

  What no one paid much attention to was the effect of all this strife on the Indians. They had lived under Spanish rule since the 1590s, sometimes in servitude and usually with resentment. Some groups were more docile than others; some were overtly hostile. They fought among themselves. But they also took note of the divisions among the Spanish elite. Finally they rose up in a coordinated attack. It occurred within months of the great auto-da-fé held that year in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, an event celebrated in a monumental painting by Francisco Ricci that hangs in the Prado.

  After the reconquest, the old patterns of animosity reasserted themselves, though not with quite the same intensity. The Inquisition remained active in New Mexico, and maintained a quieter presence in Arizona, California, and Texas. The sole trial held in Spanish California involved a man named Ramon Sotilo, in Los Angeles, who was accused of “having expressed views on religion that not even a Protestant would dare hold.” On one occasion, the Inquisition’s commissary in California confiscated four copies of a game known as El Eusebio. In Santa Fe, cases were opened and closed, reports sent to headquarters, defendants convicted and sentenced. A celebrated episode concerned a man named Miguel de Quintana, the “mad poet” of New Mexico, whose satiric verses brought him into repeated conflict with the Inquisition between 1732 and 1737. Quintana was harassed but not killed, and was eventually exonerated. His work survives because it was confiscated and filed away in the Inquisition archives, along with an immense amount of related correspondence. Fray Angélico Chávez gave Quintana the epithet “mad,” but it was nothing personal: Chávez also suggested that he be made New Mexico’s poet laureate.

  As time went on, a new threat was recognized: the influx of foreign ideas. The young United States, an empire in embryo that would supplant much of Spain’s, was moving inexorably toward the Mississippi and deeper into the continent. The old lifeline south to Mexico City was no longer the only significant path for communications; now there were overland routes to the east. Ships from everywhere sailed up a
nd down the Pacific coast. Books and other influences from the outside world began to make their way in. There is correspondence in the Inquisition files about a California man suspected of owning a book by Voltaire. For the most part, censorship wasn’t an issue in California; as one historian observes, Californians weren’t known for reading books. In Mexico, a man was denounced—by his mother—for owning a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract. Imprisoned by the Inquisition, he escaped and fled to New Orleans.

  The issue was not just the pernicious influence of new ideas, although that was a serious concern. There was also a fear that outlanders would pass themselves off as good Catholics—a kind of fifth column, with who knew what agenda. “Particular care was taken to ferret out French and English catechisms that did not have the Holy Office imprimatur,” the historian Richard E. Greenleaf writes. “These works were smuggled into New Spain via Louisiana and Texas, and were apparently used by foreigners who wished to appear knowledgeable about Catholic dogma.” In 1795, the Inquisition in New Mexico appointed a censor in an explicit but vain attempt to keep printed matter out: the books were too many, the censors too few.

  The censors would keep at it until Mexico won its independence from Spain, in 1821, and the Inquisition in North America at last came to an end. Indeed, they kept at it even afterward—the Inquisition’s ganglia continued to fire. A decree arrived in California that same year, banning the “escandalosisimo dance called the waltz.”

  Against All Odds

  The Inquisition’s second legacy in New Mexico, persisting perhaps into our own time, was demographic. As noted, conversos by the thousands had made their way to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Many lived fully as the Christians they had become. Some lived as Christians but preserved cultural traces of their heritage. And some, whatever the outward appearance, lived secretly as Jews. The numbers in any of these categories are unknowable, and the sporadic flare-up of Inquisition activity made identification with Judaism extremely dangerous. Could it be that small remnant communities of crypto-Jews survived in remote pockets of Hispanic America—and exist even today?