Inquisition

  Yet at the same time one should not fall into the trap of making the Inquisition the scapegoat for the failings of human beings. The admonition to be nosy was one which many people were only too happy to follow. Most of us, if we are honest, will admit to enjoying the discussion of mutual acquaintances. Gossip is communal, it is fun, and best of all it allows us to talk about the failings of others rather than think about our own. By giving such behaviour moral legitimacy, the Inquisition took a brilliant step towards ensuring its own popularity, allowing the desire to gossip to be concealed behind the desire to do good.

  From the legitimation of gossip came, as we have seen, the spread of the Inquisition into all walks of public life. In Portugal teachers and midwives were required to be examined on their lives and customs before being given a licence.62 In Sicily no foreign schoolteachers were appointed without inquisitorial permission, and autos spread from the capital, Palermo, to the cities of Catania and Messina on the east coast.63 Yet this constant promotion of conformity would have the same effect on human society as a drought has on a river. People stagnated as innovation and creativity were leached out of society by the more immediate gratifications offered by gossip and revenge.

  Chapter Ten

  THE ADMINISTRATION OF FEAR

  . . . instead of talking of ‘the inquisitor of Peru’ it was more accurate to talk of ‘the Peru of the inquisitor’ . . .

  AT THIS MOMENT we seem to have reached to the heart of neighbourly odium. Questions mentionable and unmentionable circle the towns and their acid decay. How did the Inquisition penetrate the everyday? What made people submit to administration and its brittle soul? We have seen that there was a sense of complicity, of pleasure at the licence to spy. But to take advantage of this passivity there had to be an organization ready to take command.

  The tale is a familiar one, though foreign in its antiquity. The minutiae of its procedures is, as we have seen, something which marks the Inquisition out as a modern persecuting institution, one of the first of its kind. With the administration of persecution went the possibility of stealing power, and from power came the corruption of what was supposed to be an institution of purity. The Inquisition, theoretically an instrument of the divine, was nothing if not human.

  This corruption is no surprise. As the story has unravelled, it has been punctuated by bloodthirstiness and frequent instances of sexual predation by inquisitors. Often, indeed, the two have been connected. Lucero in Cordoba, Manozca in Lima and Mexico, Salazar in Murcia, these inquisitors arranged large-scale burnings even as they satisfied their baser desires, and they were by no means out of the ordinary.*1 According to the social bonds of the time, these overbearing men had something alluring about them – the power to punish, and the power to forgive.

  As these examples show, corruption was as commonplace in the colonies as in Portugal and Spain. The same held elsewhere. In Cartagena, the hub of the slave trade to South America, abuses of power occurred on a daily basis as vast numbers of contraband African slaves arrived in America in appalling conditions. Perhaps, then, the Spanish settler Lorenzo Martínez de Castro should not have been surprised in 1643 to find himself a resident of the inquisitorial jail.

  On the arrival of Martín Real, an inquisitorial visitor of inquiry from the Suprema in Spain, Martínez de Castro had written and described the activities of Inquisitor Juan Ortiz with his wife, Rufina de Roxas. Ortiz had recently begun the unusual practice of taking Rufina’s confession in a session that lasted all night. As Martínez de Castro rhetorically put it, ‘What business is so serious that a married woman has to have her confession taken all night, and what scribe could possibly exist who would write down her declaration? What divine law orders an inquisitor to commit public adultery, so that if I had killed my wife it would have been on his account?’1 The sense of outrage and scandal is to be expected, but there is nothing in the complaint to indicate surprise; rather, merely the hope that the grievance would be listened to. It was, and over the next six months Real tried to get to the bottom of what had, or had not, gone on.

  Martínez de Castro’s wife, Rufina, was only seventeen-years-old in June 1643 when her problems began. Freshly arrived from Seville, one can surmise that she was still adjusting to life in the New World and to the urges of her body. Probably, she found her older husband boring, domineering or both. Such is the implication of the fact that in the first half of 1643 she took to giving him ‘wild aubergines’, which, her slave Thomassa had told her, would make him sleep so that she could go out by night and do as she pleased – and, perhaps more importantly, not do as he pleased.2

  Rufina’s problems began when she told Thomassa not to confess to a priest her part in this mild drugging of her husband because, she informed her, it was not a sin.3 This order of Rufina’s was overheard by a mulatto carpenter, Pedro Suárez. Here was a chance for some excitement. He determined to denounce her to the Inquisition.4 Suárez does not come across from the evidence as a particularly devout person; far more likely is that the motivation for his betrayal was his own thwarted desire for Rufina.

  In any event, on the very same day that Suárez went to denounce her the messenger of the Inquisition in Cartagena came to Rufina’s house and ordered all of her female slaves to come in for questioning. Rufina fell into a panic. She rushed to a priest for advice, and was told she should go to the Inquisition at once to make a full confession. The peculiar values of that distant time and place are revealed by the fact that, in the Inquisition’s eyes, her sin was not the drugging of her husband, but the advice to her slave Thomassa not to confess her part in it.

  On her way back from seeing the priest Rufina met a friend of hers, Inés. Inés clearly knew a thing or two about Inquisitor Juan Ortiz. She suggested that Rufina throw herself at his feet; it would help, she added, if she put on her jewels and finest clothes so that she looked as beautiful as she could. Rufina did as she was told and went to visit Ortiz that evening. The man who accompanied her and her female slave through the narrow streets that night, keeping them safe from physical threat, was none other than Pedro Suárez, her accuser.5

  Rufina spent half an hour with Ortiz that evening, with her slave Ana just outside in the darkened corridor. She emerged announcing to Suárez that the inquisitor had declared that this was not a matter for the Inquisition but nevertheless went to see Ortiz the following evening, accompanied again by Suárez. Ortiz told her to come back by day two days later, dressed in black and carried through the city by her slaves to make an official confession.6 This would just be a formality for her to go through so that any question of an offence against the faith was forgotten.

  Ortiz, however, had clearly learnt how to snare women like Rufina. Once her guard was down, the shift from relief to fear was one which could provoke other extreme feelings. When she arrived on the appointed day at six in the morning with her slaves, Ortiz changed his approach. He tore into her angrily, and said that it was now clear that the Inquisition would have no option but to arrest her; she was to come two days later by night and see if there might be any remedy.7

  The hapless Rufina did the inquisitor’s bidding. Passing through Cartagena in the moonlight, she arrived on the evening in question again with Suárez and her slave Ana in tow. Ortiz asked her if she had come accompanied by a man. Yes, she had; her protector Suárez was waiting for her. She should not have brought him, said Ortiz. Such people, he continued – no doubt thinking of Suárez’s own accusation of Rufina – were not to be trusted, and moreover he had invited her ‘so that she should come to his bedroom, leading her to understand that he wanted her to stay the night with him’.8

  Rufina made an excuse and left. She was summoned again two days later. This time, she confessed to the Suprema visitor Martín Real, she had worn a white shift and a skirt embroidered with green taffeta. She had arrived late at night and gone in through the side door of the inquisitor’s lodgings, not by the front door as on previous occasions. This time she did spend the night.9

/>   At first one is shocked by the abuse of power. But consider again how Rufina described the clothes she had worn on the night Ortiz seduced her. This is the description of someone who had taken great care with her appearance before setting out, and, moreover, who by going in via the side door had known what would await her. It is the statement of someone appalled by power, but yet finding this emotion sublimated into a feeling of intense attraction and the release of submission.

  Here we touch on the emotional landscape of one of the more disturbing scientific experiments of the 20th century. In 1961 Stanley Milgram sought to test human response to people in authority. Participants were ordered to administer increasingly large electric shocks to an unseen person in a nearby room. There was in fact no person being tortured and the participants heard the shouts and cries of an actor, yet in spite of the screams two-thirds of the participants gave the largest shock of all, which could have been lethal.

  Authority and power compel. Inquisitor Ortiz had played his hand with skill, showing Rufina his potential for compassion before making her fear his power. Such power perhaps accentuated her feelings of loneliness in this alien city so far from her home in Spain. Here, where the streets were filled with American Indians and African slaves, and where the sufferings of those unloaded from

  slave ships were constantly apparent, the consequences of disobedience and powerlessness were obvious. Authority became all too easy to obey.

  The inquisitorial visitor Real, when he uncovered the truth of the matter, concluded that Rufina had sinned by sleeping with Ortiz; the inquisitor’s failing, in contrast, had been in not punishing her for her crime against the faith. It may seem extraordinary that the Inquisition saw the liaison as Rufina’s sin rather than the inquisitor’s, but this was the (misogynistic) world view of that institution.

  Men such as Ortiz are difficult to forgive. Inquisitors had to have legal training and were not usually friars but rather priests who had not taken holy orders.10 Perhaps this makes such failings as these less hypocritical, but only marginally so. In the end what one finds is that power was concentrated to such an extent in the hands of these agents of God that many of them were unable to resist the opportunities that followed. Strengthening the powers of the Inquisition entailed strengthening the corruption of power; the inquisitors were in fact ‘neither demons nor angels . . . just men, in all their glory and all their wretchedness’.11

  THE POWER OF INQUISITORS does not just emerge in their sexual activities; it touched every aspect of their lives: their dress, their behaviour to their colleagues and their pride. To observe how power could corrupt an inquisitor’s sense of what was and was not permitted, we shall examine the will of the inquisitor-general of Portugal, Dom Francisco de Castro. Castro was a key figure in the Inquisition’s power struggle with John IV, the first king of Portugal after the split with Spain in 1640. In his efforts to make the Portuguese state solvent, John IV passed a law in 1649 barring the confiscation of goods by the Inquisition from converso merchants. Unhappy at this threat to its revenues, the Inquisition then engaged in a protracted power struggle with him, bolstered by the papacy, who did not recognize John and allowed see after see to fall vacant as bishops died.

  Following the death of the first Portuguese inquisitor-general, John III’s brother Cardinal Henry, these individuals had generally had a chequered reputation. In 1621 a letter had been written urgently to King Philip IV*2 saying that the Portuguese Inquisition was on the verge of ruin because of the corruption of Inquisitor-General Fernando Martines Mascarenhas. A council needed to be formed to resolve the problems, and its members should be neither related to the inquisitor-general nor in his debt.12 Clearly, there was a feeling that Martines Mascarenhas was not entirely above worldly affairs.

  Similarly, the wardrobe of the venerable inquisitor Francisco de Castro as revealed in his will illustrates a different sort of corruption, but one which was no less endemic. It gives some idea of the lifestyle which this individual followed in his battle with heresy. In his wardrobe were pieces of camlet, dressing gowns, capes, jerkins, knickerbockers, black silk socks, a sunhat made of damask and bonnets, all stored in leather trunks, damask bags and large chests. In fact, let us not make the mistake of thinking that the inquisitor-general had just this one damask hat. No! He had two flat hats with green ties to wear at court and another for when he was travelling plus two hats made of palm leaves, adorned with taffeta and embellished with black and green ribbons.

  This was not an individual forced to go short of the necessities of life. Even the spittoon and the travelling urinal which he took with him on journeys to catch his holy spittle and urine were made of silver. He had no shortage of mirrors with which to admire himself. He had a golden dinner service, large tablecloths for when he was having banquets and smaller ones for more personal use. In the midst of such opulence Inquisitor-General Francisco de Castro managed to enshrine the necessary social hierarchies; while he and his colleagues ate from golden plates, his servants ate off dishes made from tin.13

  All this was in keeping with the pride and ostentation to which inquisitors were given. The Inquisition was a body driven by status, as its rules of operation make clear. At autos inquisitors sat on chairs and other officials sat on benches. In court the prosecutor was given a chair, but it was smaller than the inquisitors’ chairs; in Galicia, one prosecutor responded by ordering that his own subordinates take off their bonnets when talking to him.14 All power flowed via the hierarchy to the inquisitors, who only deferred to the authority of the scriptures; everyone else deferred to them.

  Does one suppose that all inquisitors began life as hypocrites who would be prepared to say one thing and do another? This would be too simplistic; the most famous inquisitors are those that did appalling things,15 while the many who were ‘just doing their job’ and progressing inexorably up the career ladder tend to be passed over.16 Perhaps, indeed, the view that inquisitors either followed the Mengele or the Eichmann school of persecution is also too easy an answer. Human beings, as the archives of the Inquisition show, have countless ways of working out their inner torment.

  What we do see, though, when looking at the lives of inquisitors and of inquisitorial operatives in general, is the endless abuse of power. Inquisitors like Juan Ortiz in Cartagena, with his predatory conquest of the young bride Rufina de Roxas, were anything but atypical. Indeed one of the best arguments against those historians who downplay the impact of the Inquisition is the very impunity with which inquisitorial staff abused their power. Had the Inquisition not been feared and its power disproportionate, some of the terrible things that officials felt able to do would surely not have been tolerated.

  Santiago de Compostela 1609

  IN GALICIA, spiritual heartland of Spain, destination of the great pilgrimages from France and across Spain, all was not well between the two inquisitors. As a network of Judaizing conversos was uncovered around Santiago, Inquisitors Muñoz de la Cuesta and Ochoa began to write letters complaining about one another. In July 1607 Muñoz de la Cuesta had accused Ochoa of insisting on doing things only the way he wanted and of stringing out trials of impoverished prisoners unnecessarily, creating a financial burden for the tribunal. Then, in 1609, when the number of prisoners taken in Galicia was such that the Suprema ordered additional buildings to be constructed to house the prison, Muñoz de la Cuesta accused Ochoa of taking over some of these buildings in order to expand his own apartments. The Suprema censured Munoz de la Cuesta for the disagreements between the two men, so, feeling that he was in danger of being sacked, Muñoz de la Cuesta arranged for an anonymous letter to be sent to the Suprema alleging all sorts of irregularities on the part of Ochoa.17

  Tired of the constant sniping between the two inquisitors, the Suprema arranged for a visitor to come and examine the affairs of the tribunal. They appointed the inquisitor of Zaragoza, Delgadillo de la Canal, who rapidly formulated over sixty charges against both inquisitors, including the fact that each of them had
embezzled confiscated goods into the hands of their friends.18 However, it was their open sexual peccadilloes which were perhaps most astonishing for men who were supposed to uphold the sanctity of the divine law; it is worth recalling again that inquisitors were supposed to prosecute, among other blasphemies, the statement, ‘Simple fornication is not a sin’.*3

  Among the charges laid at the door of Muñoz de la Cuesta was that he went to orchards on the fringes of the city and seduced young women there. He had brought a girl called María to Santiago, even though she was only fifteen or sixteen years old, and showered her with gifts. He accompanied married women to the theatre and invited them on a daily basis to his rooms in the tribunal offices; it was public knowledge that he slept with them, and that he had even attempted to seduce nuns through third parties.19 Although he was suspended from his post in 1612 none of these manifest failings prevented him from being appointed inquisitor of Barcelona in 161520 – something which says a lot about the competition.

  Ochoa was little better. He had bombarded a married woman, Quitería Rodríguez, with presents until he had persuaded her to move to Santiago and live with him openly in sin. She had been with him for several years, and all the inquisitorial officials were forced to call her señora – my lady. When he had eventually been forced to separate from her, he had gone around the tribunal crying and sobbing, calling out, ‘Oh, my beloved Quitería!’ Eventually he had hit upon the ruse of inviting her back with her cuckolded husband Juan Piñeiro, whom he had appointed to a post in the bureaucracy. Ochoa had then taken to presiding over inquisitorial hearings with Quitería beside him, while she had been known to protest at the unreasonable volume of paperwork and at the thoughtless and selfish cries of the prisoners in their jail cells.21 Clearly, Ochoa had decided that it was better to be a hypocrite than to induce the sin of bigamy by marrying Quitería; otherwise he might have ended up having to prosecute his beloved or, worse still, see her prosecuted by his arch-rival Muñoz de la Cuesta.