Inquisition

  It was in such circumstances of publicly tolerated violence directed at a minority community that persecution and the neurotic idea of cleanliness flourished. Inquisitorial documents began to note down whether a witness or defendant was a half, a quarter, an eighth or even a sixteenth converso.58 In Goa in 1632 the inquisitorial familiar Francisco Pereira was prevented from marrying because his fiancée had Moorish blood;59 this followed the passing of a law in Portugal three years earlier which limited the dowries of converso brides in an attempt to discourage mixed marriages between Old and New Christians.60 All this was accompanied by the severest persecutions of conversos by the Inquisition yet. There were so many trials in the district of Coimbra in the early 1620s that in some towns every single converso was arrested.61 Further south, the region around Beja was also devastated; eight people were burnt there in 1619 alone,62 while 240 more were ‘relaxed’ across Portugal between 1620 and 1640 and almost 5,000 were tried.63

  The Inquisition’s interest in purity of blood and its targeting of the minority were therefore two sides of the same coin. Persecution tended to precede this guilt complex of purity. Yet as the numbers of genuine members of the minority groups fell, persecution would return to haunt the descendants of the very people who had applauded it when it had begun, those who were tainted merely in one-quarter, one-eighth or one-sixteenth of their bloodline.

  Cartagena de las Indias 1664

  ON 11 APRIL 1664 an investigation of purity of blood was launched by the tribunal of the Inquisition in Cartagena de las Indias. It was a legal obligation for all the functionaries of the Inquisition to provide proof of their purity. Yet this investigation by the Colombian tribunal was not into some petitioner for an inquisitorial post, but into the lineage of a certain Ana Salgado de Castro who merely wanted to marry Joseph Deza Calderón, the notary of the Inquisition of Cartagena.64

  Salgado de Castro’s family was not, it transpired, one to which inquisitorial jurisprudence was unknown. Her father had been a familiar of the Inquisition in Cartagena, and in order to secure this post inquiries into his ancestry had been made in his home territory of Bayonne – in modern south-west France. Further inquiries had had to be made by the inquisitorial tribunals of Cordoba, Galicia, Seville and Toledo. Each of these inquiries had required separate investigations made in villages of the relevant district, a process which often took years. While Seville had returned its inquiry to the Suprema on 10 September 1647, the information from Galicia had not been received until six years later, on 29 October 1653.

  Moreover, this was not the only bureaucratic exercise which Ana Salgado de Castro’s family had precipitated. Her maternal uncle had also been a familiar of the Inquisition in Cartagena, and so had also had to prove his purity of blood. This had merely required investigation in three inquisitorial districts, Cordoba, Seville and Toledo. Bearing in mind the enormous distance which separates Colombia from Spain and the many months which were required for communications to cross the Atlantic, attempting to prove the purity of one’s ancestry was an endeavour which could – as Antonio de Costa the Elder had found even in the parochial environment of Cinctorres – consume a lifetime.

  Given that Ana Salgado de Castro’s lineage had already been shown to be pure in both her father’s and her mother’s branches of the family, one might have thought that no further paperwork would be necessary for her merely to marry an official of the Inquisition. This would have been the rational view. But the Inquisition in Portugal and Spain and in their colonies was an organization which imposed a veneer of rationality upon irrational passions. The investigation into Salgado de Castro’s ancestry proceeded implacably. A list of thirteen questions was compiled by the tribunal of Cartagena to be put to witnesses in the districts of Galicia and Seville. Years passed. The whole sorry process had to be revisited again and again if the stains were to be well and truly wrung out, even somewhere as distant from the heart of empire as Cartagena.

  By the middle of the 17th century, then, as the use of torture declined in dungeons of inquisitorial jails, it was sublimated in the paperwork which every citizen required to confirm the honour of their lineage. The investigation of one’s ancestry by a clutch of inquisitorial tribunals had become completely normal. When the grandiloquently named Alonso de Medina Merina y Cortés attempted to become a familiar of the Inquisition in Cartagena de las Indias in 1662 investigations were made in Llerena, Seville and Toledo.65 And when Alonso Sánchez Espinosa y Luna applied to be a familiar in Quito in 1670 the purity of both he and his wife Feliciana had to be investigated in the regions of Valladolid and Toledo, and the whole process took a staggering eighteen years.66

  The records of this last case betray one of the main reasons both for the growing mania of the Inquisition for purity of blood and why such investigations took so long. After keeping him waiting for eighteen years the inquisitors trespassed further on the patience of Sanchez Espinosa y Luna. He was expected to pay for the tribunal’s ink and paper. Purity of blood was, it turned out, a neat mechanism for ensuring the purity of the finances of the Inquisition.

  Mexico 1709

  AT THE HEIGHT of the War of the Spanish Succession, as Britain, France and the Netherlands fought over the corpse of Spanish imperialism and ambition, the friar Antonio Medrano applied to be a calificador of the Inquisition in Mexico – one of the people who assessed the orthodoxy of published books and whether or not they ought to be censored by the Inquisition.

  The itemized bill which Medrano had to pay following the requisite investigation into his purity of blood included the following:

  –

  Paying for the letter received in Mexico from the Suprema with communications about his genealogy.

  –

  Paying for a letter from the district of Cuenca, in Spain, regarding his genealogy.

  –

  Paying for the official deed which was written to confirm his genealogy.

  –

  Paying for the costs of making a copy of the trial regarding his purity.

  –

  Paying for the time and work of officials in the town of Villarobledo in La Mancha for inquiring into his ancestry.

  –

  Paying for the work of the inquisitorial notary in exhaustively compiling all of this information.

  –

  Paying for the costs of the Inquisition’s paper.

  And, most cunningly of all:

  –

  Paying for the costs of calculating the bill which was issued when the whole process was completed.67

  Such itemized bills were commonplace in these investigations. They reveal the methodical processes of the Inquisition. For example there was a charge per witness interrogated by an inquisitorial official in these proofs of purity (in 1629 it was four reales68). Of course, for the people mired in this belief system such procedures were standard practice and entirely normal. The very fact that from an external standpoint they seem insane reveals that no amount of internal coherency in a belief system can make it objectively true or valid.

  Just as some modern law firms derive great profits from their photocopying charges, so the Inquisition could pay a substantial part of its day-to-day costs by fostering this ideology of purity. Probanzas of purity – as they were known – continued long into the 18th century69 and were a crucial source of the Inquisition’s financial stability, although eventually they did begin to decline in importance.70

  This is of course a different thing from saying that the Inquisition was entirely motivated by greed.71 As passion can so often get the better of cold rationality, the Inquisition was frequently in economic difficulties. After the expulsion of the moriscos, one of its main sources of funds in Aragon and Valencia – confiscations and the tax paid by moriscos to the Inquisition – evaporated. In general the Inquisition, as an organ of the state, suffered the same economic vicissitudes as the Spanish crown.72 As decline set in during the 17th century, new sources of income were required, such as charges for increasingl
y complex investigations of purity.

  The problem was that this meant that the Inquisition now sustained itself through meaningless bureaucratic exercises. Although there were various attempts to reform the system, these were stymied. Thus Philip II died before he could implement his idea of only investigating the past hundred years of a person’s ancestry, which was mooted in a panel of inquiry which first convened in 1596.73 A reform of 1623 begun by Philip IV was however accepted: this held that after three positive inquiries no further investigations should be permitted,74 but sixteen years later he had to reiterate the terms of this condition to the Inquisition.75 Attempts to ease purity requirements were ignored by the Inquisition, as is revealed by Philip IV’s letter to the Suprema in 1627 in which he repeated the conditions of 1623 and added that he wanted them to be ‘executed and complied with as they are written, and without your own interpretations’.76

  The way in which the idea of purity had come to dominate the institution was shown when in 1633 Philip IV ordered the Council of the Inquisition to create two courts: one for its affairs and another simply for the handling of proofs of genealogy.77 The effect of inquiries into bloodlines had been summarized in Philip IV’s letter to the Suprema of 1627, where he reminded the officials that ‘the best interests of God and my person consist in acting justly, and remedying the costs, annoyances and vexations of my vassals, so that you should look for ways of obtaining information in places which do not foment enmities, factions and force the perjury of witnesses’.78

  A chasm was yawning in front of Spanish society, and yet it pressed blindly on, proving the purity of what could not be proven. People argued over who was or was not clean but it all came down to influence, rumour, bitterness. Far from ensuring the integrity of society, the obsession with purity of blood had merely begun the process of dividing it. This would, in the long run, have terrible consequences.

  Lima 1675

  CONCERNS HAVE BEEN raised concerning the purity of the ancestry of a certain Andres de Angulo, applicant for a post in the Inquisition. Extremely serious discoveries have been made regarding his ancestry. Is it not the case that the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Angulo, Fernando Alonsso, was ‘relaxed’ by the Inquisition? Was not the heretic Alonsso nothing less than the great-great-grandfather of Angulo’s grandmother? To put it plainly, Angulo is the ‘grandson of Maria de Nalda Garcon . . . who was the daughter of Pedro de Nalda Garcon, and of Isavvel Martinez de Avenzana and Francisca Gonzalez de Higuera whose parents were Sancho Martinez de Avenzana and Catalina Martinez . . .’79

  Plain speaking he may not have been, but the prosecutor was nothing if not rigorous. In order to prove poor Angulo’s lack of purity, he had prised from the Inquisition’s archives an extract of the accusation made against Angulo’s great-great-great-great grandfather Diego Saenz, and included in his deposition an extraordinarily detailed family tree which can still be read today in the reading room of the Archivo Histórico Nacional, where the genealogies of Angulo’s maternal great-grandparents, and of Angulo’s grand-paternal great-great grandparents, and of the grandparents and great-uncles and great-aunts of Angulo’s great-great grandmother can all be examined in the archive’s fastidious quiet by those given to such studies.

  Surely it was clear from such a laborious investigation that the said Andres de Angulo was irreparably stained, entirely unsuited to an official post, and deserving of the severest humiliation? Yet when investigations were made in Lardero, and in Navarrete, and in Nalda, all witnesses declared the Angulo family to be beyond reproach. The righteous outrage was an invention. The prosecutor’s elaborate paper trail was declared a fiction, and Angulo was awarded his coveted post.

  While Andrés de Angulo’s ancestry was being libelled, in Ciudad Real*4 Luis de Aguilera, who had applied to be a commissary of the Inquisition, was undergoing a similar experience. In 1669, using his expert knowledge of bloodlines the prosecutor traced Aguilera’s ancestry as far back as 1531 to show that he was not pure of blood; to this was appended a decree of the Reyes Católicos from the 15th century related to some supposed converso ancestors of Aguilera’s, the Loazas.80

  Family trees were examined. One was included in the trial records – which ran to 500 pages merely on the question of this comparatively minor official’s ancestry – which proved that seven generations previously one of Aguilera’s ancestors had married a woman of converso descent. As the prosecutor declared, the failure to declare ‘such close’ relationships as those of his ‘maternal ancestors to the sixth generation’ revealed an insupportable impurity.

  The case dragged on for ten years. Further inquiries were made in Ciudad Real. Thirty-seven witnesses declared that Aguilera was of pure blood. Eight said that he was not. The Tribunal of the Inquisition of Toledo decided that this was sufficient to bar him from the post, and Aguilera’s life was ruined by the poor marriage allegedly made by his great-great-great-great-grandparents.

  There was nothing new about such difficulties. Fifty years earlier, in Ronda, the Inquisition investigated the purity of blood of Don Rodrigo de Ovalle from this hilltop town in Andalusia, where just over three centuries later Franco’s forces would execute Republicans daily during the Spanish Civil War. The inquisitors had little time to consider the terrible abyss beneath Ronda’s crags or the cultivated valleys below. After all, as they said, Rodrigo de Ovalle’s lineage would indeed be ‘of very bad quality if it derived from Ysavel Hernandez the wife of Hernando Diaz of Toledo, the public notary of royal income [in Seville]’. Was it not the case that the terrible Ysavel Hernandez had been reconciled by the Holy Office of the Inquisition the small matter of 123 years before, in 1502?81 Had not her parents Alonso Hernandez and Francisca Sanchez been burnt in statute?

  Such damage to the nation’s purity could not be allowed! Was it not a reminder of the fusion of cultures and peoples which lay at the heart of Spanish society?

  A RUNDOWN HOTEL in Buenos Aires in 1996: the ageing receptionist embarks upon a political discussion. The good thing about the rule of Pinochet in Chile was that he tidied up the country, getting rid of the rabble-rousers and the no-good do-gooders: limpió – he cleaned it up. It is a shame that the military rulers of Argentina had not shown similar skills in limpieza.

  The idea of cleanliness had become a form of purging. In 20th-century South Africa schoolchildren had combs passed through their hair to check for any curls which might betray African ancestors.82 In the southern United States in the 19th century, in that region so close to the Hispanic influence of Mexico, the ‘one-drop’ rule marginalized those thought to have any African slave ancestry at all, even if to the naked eye they appeared white.83 In 17th-century Iberia the evidence of ‘one-drop’ impurity of Jewish or Muslim ancestors lay in the bowels of the Inquisition’s bureaucracy.

  Thus did societies learn that the mask of a pure body could be superimposed on an impure soul. Cases of limpieza pursue endless chains across the archives of the Inquisition.84 This is only logical. If the slightest stain going back any number of generations is deemed pernicious, then the greater the number of generations to be checked, the more detailed the investigations must be. The Inquisition was, then, only logical. But its logic was one that strangled with bureaucracy the society which it claimed to be attempting to preserve. The ideology of purity meant that the possibility of heresy did not end with death. Indeed at times even the lineages of dead applicants for official posts were investigated;85 if purity could be proven it was of benefit to their relatives, while if it could not this was something which every citizen needed to know.

  What had begun life as the persecution of one caste, the conversos, eventually came to mean that any impurity of ancestry was social death.86 This was true of heretics and even those whose Christian faith was unimpeachable and who had only one distant converso or morisco ancestor. As the distance from the first heretics grew, so did the numbers of those whose lives could be ruined. The way in which all social groups were eventually affected is clea
r in the petition of Antonio de Costa the Younger of Cinctorres. As the last code of practice for the Inquisition of Goa put it, ‘mere imprisonment in the inquisitorial jail for any crime whatsoever has come to imply an ineradicable infamy on the person of the imprisoned and on their descendants, even after fulfilling the punishment and penance imposed’.87

  Portugal and Spain were of course not unique in their approach to people they considered impure. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown, every society has its ideas about what is or is not clean, and develops techniques for dealing with what it perceives as anomalous. Yet at the same time one of the signs of a healthy society is the failure of such ideas to dominate. Where cleanliness is the principal obsession, neurosis may follow.88 Pity breaks through. For do not the audience of Macbeth feel a stab of compassion for the madness of the cursed king’s wife, condemned to an eternity of guilt as she washes out stains which are for her eyes only?

  Chapter Nine

  EVERY ASPECT OF LIFE

  . . . they are observed in their works and their ways of life with such attention that, even if they prevaricate in the smallest Christian rite, they are seen as suspicious of heresy and punished . . .

  IN THIS CURIOUS story of violence and fetid emotion, the most obvious questions of all can be difficult to answer. We have just explored a series of protracted inquiries in small villages as to the ancestry of minor officials. In such cases how could inquisitors know that the information they received was accurate? The answer must be through the trust they had in the capacity of villagers to keep watch on one another and to know intimate details of one another’s distant ancestry – or at least pretend to know such details. Iberia had become a society of spies.