by Green, Toby
Here is the curious paradox of an institution that was able to see that some of those claiming to fly by night to covens were mentally ill, and a population many of whom still believed that such events were part of daily life. Yet the explanation for this is quite simple: just as the witch-hunts in northern Europe expressed powerful social drives and contradictions which required a scapegoat, so in Iberia the Inquisition had already targeted its own scapegoats, in the shape of the conversos and the moriscos. Witches were no longer necessary; fantastical enemies were not required as others had already been invented.30
For the citizens of Portugal and Spain, however, things were different. Envy and jealousy, those quotidian emotions, could be exorcised daily in gossip and spying on neighbours, rivals and enemies. A moral purpose could be served by watching people who may have been pure of blood but were open to being contaminated by other types of heretical activity and by their own fantasies of demonic possession and magic.
THERE WAS OF COURSE no need to be a converso or a morisco in order to enter into a pact with the devil or to practise witchcraft. All Old Christians were equally susceptible to this sort of behaviour. Thus the sense in a large part of the general population that witches were ubiquitous and of interest to the Inquisition – even if it was misplaced – fostered an atmosphere in which the daily practices of all classes of people came under scrutiny. Just as under Inquisitor-General Valdés in the mid-16th century concentration on the Lutheran threat had widened the possibilities of suspicion, so now interest in beliefs beyond Islam and Judaism meant that every member of society could be an object of vigilance.
As it happened, Valdés had also been a key figure in the expansion of inquisitorial vigilance to Old Christians, as a leader of the movement that became known as the Counter-Reformation. In the aftermath of the Carranza case which had convulsed the Spanish elite in the 1550s the Inquisition in Spain had moved on to examine the collective attitudes of the nation.31 The Inquisition began to move out from urban centres, making regular visits to rural districts and, in the second half of the 16th century, prosecuting with increasing severity minor offences which were expressive of ignorance or anger rather than heresy – bigamy and blasphemy being particularly targeted.32
In order to achieve this reach, Valdés undertook a thoroughgoing reform of inquisitorial institutions. He reorganized inquisitorial finances by securing for the Inquisition the right to charge rents on canonjias, specific ecclesiastical posts. He greatly expanded the network of inquisitorial officials from the cities to small towns and villages throughout Spain. He revised the rules governing the administration of the Inquisition, and by the end of his life had secured the institutional pre-eminence of the Inquisition over all other civil and ecclesiastical courts in Spain.33 Thus, like many of the most terrible persecutors who followed him in other places and at other times, Valdés was a meticulous administrator.34
The advance of the Inquisition was accompanied by a massive programme of religious indoctrination, following the impetus of the Council of Trent,35 perhaps the most important council ever held by the Catholic Church. The aim was to achieve uniformity of behaviour in keeping with Catholic doctrine and morals through a concerted effort of indoctrination.36 The irony was that most Old Christians were already good Catholics, and did not understand why the Inquisition should have anything to do with them.37 Had they not supported the establishment of the Inquisition? They found it difficult to grasp how this institution of persecution could so suddenly turn on its supporters and be used to repress them.38
The way in which the atmosphere in Spain changed between the formation of the Inquisition and the reforms of Valdés is best exemplified by looking at blasphemy. In the instructions issued by Inquisitor-General Diego de Deza in Seville in 1500 it was specifically stated that words uttered ‘with anger or ire’ were not heretical but blasphemous, and should not come under the province of the Inquisition.39 By the 1560s all that had changed, and the most innocuous remark thrown out in the heat of the moment could be enough for a denunciation to the Inquisition. Thus, in 1560 the trader Melchior de Berrio from Granada was sentenced to three years in the galleys for having offended the Holy Sacrament;40 in 1562 the labourer Luis Godines from Cordoba was tried for saying that ‘the tithe could go to the devil since the devil invented it.’41 Now everyone, Old and New Christian alike, had to watch what they said, and to whom they said it.
To read through the archives of the Inquisitions of Portugal and Spain is to develop the general impression that blasphemy and swearing were as common then as they are now. Indeed, it does not seem as though the fact that the Inquisition dealt with these crimes had much effect in stemming them; anger is not something easy to repress, and the same clearly holds for the words that go with it.
Blasphemy tended to come into one of three categories. The first was general disparagement of the Church and its institutions. Luis Godines’s dismissal of the tithe in Cordoba is one good example of this; another comes from Marco Antonio Font, a royal bailiff in Valencia in the early 17th century who was sent to arrest a man who claimed to be an official of the crusade. Font greeted him with the challenging (and blasphemous) remark, ‘So you’re from the crusade are you? I shit on the crusade, I’ll wipe my arse with the papal bull and with the crusade’.42
The second type of blasphemy was when the offender expressed overt scepticism of God sometimes bordering on atheism. This was quite common, and people often blasphemed when they lost their faith in God.43 At times the blasphemous expression was merely a version of common sense, as when the Old Christian labourer Afonso Annes declared near Porto in Portugal in 1569, ‘God could not be in the sky and in the church at the same time’.44
Perhaps the most explosive type of blasphemy, however, was that which reflected what the Inquisition saw as sexual deviance. One of the most common types of blasphemy was to assert that the condition of a married person was better than that of a friar. Such a view was in direct opposition to that of St Thomas Aquinas, who had held that total chastity was superior to any other condition, as it was the best route to perfection and a relationship with God.45 This philosophy was of course meat and drink to the (theoretically) celibate friars themselves, but could be expected to hold less sway among the general population. Typical of those who fell foul of this rule was Alonso García in Cordoba, who had declared that ‘it was not a sin to sleep with a woman if you paid her’.46 In Évora the way these blasphemies related to daily life was graphically revealed when Fernão Matheus was accused of saying that it was not a sin to sleep with two sisters; his sister-in-law Isabel Díaz was accused shortly afterwards of saying that it was not a sin to have sex with her brother-in-law.47
The punishments meted out for this sort of self-betrayal were more minor than those directed at conversos or moriscos but usually stretched to lashes and sometimes exile, the galleys and/or prison. For the Inquisition to secure a conviction people had to monitor their neighbours for any sign of nonconformity. Thus while in the colonies the Inquisition’s presence in daily life was often seen in the denunciation of slaves renouncing God or practising some form of ‘sorcery’, in Iberia the state of mind which it fostered led to vigilance over the most mundane of conversations.
It is in this context that we can see why historians tend to think of the Inquisition as one of the first modern institutions. With its organization and ability to check on the lives of its citizens, it was a forerunner of the organizations which cast such a shadow over human beings in the 20th century. It is true that some historians today hold that this facet of the Inquisition has been exaggerated and that the Old Christians perceived it as a remote tribunal.48 But the reach of the Inquisition was something which varied with the period in question. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries its reach within rural communities was immense, with an administrative presence even in small towns where there was no tribunal. Yet although this reach contracted, collective memory ensured that in its later years the scope of the Inquisiti
on was imagined to be far greater than it actually was.
IF YOU ENTER a restaurant in Spain today and carefully examine the menu, you may notice something specific to Spanish culture. Any soup or stew described as ‘a la Española’ or ‘Castellana’ is served with slices of ham or pieces of roast pork in it. A popular chain of restaurants in Madrid is called the Museo del Jamón (Museum of Ham), and once you have pushed your way past the dozens of legs of ham curing from the rafters this is as good a place as any to test out one of these dishes. One of the most ironically named dishes of all is Judias con Jamón – Jewesses with ham – or rather, as it is today, beans and ham.
Turn from the restaurants to the culinary emblem of Spain, the tapas bar. Here, you can sit on a stool beside the bar and the barman will hand you a plate of food to whet your appetite while you cradle a cold beer. Look at the food you have been given: pork scratchings, a piece of chorizo, some prawns, a collection of pickled shellfish. It is rude not to eat it, and so you comply, even though it may be stale or cold. You will probably not notice that these offerings – like many portions of tapas – are against both Islamic and Jewish dietary laws.
Turn back the clock over 300 years to the island of Majorca, the jewel of the Balearics. Here in the late 17th century a large community of conversos still lived in the capital of the island, Palma, occupying a ghetto known as the Sagell. One summer’s day in 1673 a group of local bigwigs gathered in the garden of one of the richer conversos, Pedro de Onofre de Cortés. Also present were Gabriel Ruiz, a familiar of the Inquisition and Antonio de Puigdorfila, who was related to the bailiff of the Inquisition. Miguel Pont, a shoemaker, described what happened next.
Among other things that [the visitors] had brought and set out to eat was a stew with blood sausage made of pork, and one of the brothers [of the converso Pedro de Onofre de Cortés] – he does not remember which – wanted to eat some of it, whereupon the other Cortés said to him: That is blood sausage, pork! And they ate none of the stew but rather some fish and fruit that they had. Then the aforementioned Antonio de Puigdorfila said to them, Why do you not eat this? And he insisted that the damned Jews eat. But they said that it would make them ill; and the rest of those present then laughed and said to one another: Look, the Jews have refused to eat the stew!49
Here, then, was a social dynamic where the visitors generously brought food to a house where, if conversos did keep some aspects of the Jewish law, they would be unable to eat it. Such generosity was a challenge and a veiled threat. It spread through the culinary tradition as a means of testing people, keeping watch over their orthodoxy and gaining a hold over those thought to be suspicious. As both Islam and Judaism banned the consumption of pork, offering it to a converso or a morisco was the perfect way to humiliate someone while pretending to keep to the rules of Christian charity. The refusal of people to eat pork is constantly present in the cases of conversos and moriscos before the Inquisition, and testifies to how the ideology of the Inquisition percolated the most basic human activity of all, eating.
For conversos and moriscos the nature of culinary vigilance varied. For conversos the question of the consumption of pork was critical and, as the Italian traveller Leonardo Donato noted in 1573, ‘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’.50 For moriscos an additionally dangerous period came during Ramadan, when the slightest hint that they were not eating during the day could lead to a denunciation, in another instance of the interplay of sham generosity with the ideology of the Inquisition. In 1578 a morisco in the district of Valencia was accused of refusing to eat or drink throughout the day during the fast of Ramadan when working with some Old Christians at a house, even though ‘they invited him to eat and have snacks’.51 The same year an Old Christian denounced four moriscos who had come and worked on his land during Ramadan in 1577 and had neither eaten nor drunk throughout the day.52
Evidently, in order for such accusations to be made, the suspects would have to be observed constantly, with the question always lurking as to whether or not they would eat or drink. One can imagine the pleasure and tension in the witnesses as they watched. One suspects that many would have taken more delight in proven sedition than in vindicating the suspect.
It is clear that such extreme vigilance began very early in the Inquisition’s history. When the conversa Maria de Cazalla – later accused of being an alumbrada – was attending mass in the Castilian town of Guadalajara in 1525, Diego Carrillo observed that she lowered her eyes when the sacrament was raised and then turned them to look at the church door.53 This sort of accusation was commonplace, and it is difficult not to feel simultaneous amusement and revulsion at the hypocrisy of people denouncing others for not observing the sacrament with sufficient attention, when for their own part they were clearly more interested in observing the behaviour of potential heretics than they were in offering their own reverence to the body of Christ.
Such questions concerning this sort of evidence do not seem to have occurred to the inquisitors, however, and church was one of the prime locations where the behaviour of conversos and moriscos was examined. In 1566 one morisco was reconciled in Granada ‘since when the priest raised the Holy Sacrament he was seated with his head lowered and his hands covering his eyes so as not to see it’.54 Thirteen years later the morisco Gómez Enreymada – banished from Granada after the failed uprising – was denounced by eight witnesses for behaving suspiciously when the sacrament was raised by the priest.55 The intensity with which people were watched over is illustrated by the fact that three witnesses denounced the morisco Miguel Melich in Valencia for not having confessed for a whole year;56 clearly, all of them had been watching him and keeping notes.
Perhaps the most extraordinary example of vigilance comes from a case of 1597 when the morisco Bartolomé Sánchez was arrested with his whole family. One of the witnesses, a neighbour, maintained that Sánchez washed himself even after defecating. One can only conclude that even this most private of bodily functions was considered fair game, something which perhaps should not surprise us in a society where the mere fact of washing was thought suspicious.
But if catching people out when shitting was legitimate, the problem was that this was merely society shitting on itself. Given the extraordinary diligence with which members of the community watched over the conversos and moriscos in their midst, it is difficult not to conclude that it was precisely this grounding in vigilance which enabled it to be transferred to members of the Old Christian community itself. Expertise in securing evidence for the persecution of others would be turned back on the dominant community. Thus again was the persecuting institution able to turn skills and practices developed in one context against the very people who had supported its creation in the first place.
The effect on society was stark. As the historian Juan de Mariana put it, the secret investigations of the Inquisition ‘deprived people of the freedom to listen and talk among themselves’.57 Since the slightest slip of the tongue could lead to a denunciation, humiliation and the loss of privileges, the society of vigilance became the society of suspicion, and of division.
LET US RETURN TO the gory days right at the start of the history of the Iberian Inquisitions – to Seville in 1484 and the first Instructions issued for the operation of the Inquisition by Inquisitor-General Tomás de Torquemada. The sixth chapter of the Instructions declared as follows:
The said inquisitors should order that [heretics and apostates] cannot hold public offices, nor benefices, that they cannot be attorneys, nor landlords, nor druggists, nor spice merchants, nor doctors, nor surgeons, nor bloodletters, nor brokers. And that they cannot wear gold or silver or coral or pearls or any such thing, nor precious stones, nor wear any sort of silk or camlet . . . and that they cannot ride horses, or bear arms for the whole of their lives on penalty of being found guilty of relapsing [into their heresy].58
Something of the anxiety of those touched by these prohibitions comes across from the case of Jerónima de Vargas, who in 1560 made a heartfelt plea to inquisitors to allow her to wear silk, taken as a sign of nobility and honour in Castilian society. Jerónima’s parents had been reconciled in Cuenca eighteen years before, when she was two years old, and she feared that if her husband, a member of the petty nobility, discovered that she could not wear silk then he ‘would not give her a good life or provide a marital life [sleep with her]’.61
It is worthwhile thinking again about what Torquemada’s original Instructions of 1484 implied. For if people are to be prevented from wearing certain types of clothing and jewellery, from riding horses and bearing arms, and from entering certain professions, then it is obvious that they will have to be watched over. From the very start, then, the Inquisition set out rules which insinuated mutual vigilance into society. Thus while it was not the Inquisition which did all the watching, nor all the accusing, it was the rules of the Inquisition which created the atmosphere from which this followed.