Inquisition

  This remarkable case reveals the chasm between inquisitorial theory and practice. Although in theological theory simple fornication was most definitely a sin, these inquisitors saw nothing wrong with enjoying it in practice. In fact, they were all for it. Moreover, cases such as these are much more common than one might think. In Barcelona in 1592 Inquisitor Alonso Blanco was accused of slipping out in the middle of the night to visit the local brothels.22 And sixty-six years before, when the city of Granada was trying to persuade Charles V against instituting a tribunal of the Inquisition there in 1526, its councillors wrote:

  When the [inquisitorial] judges are bad, as can occur since they are human beings and not saintly like the Holy Office [sic], when they arrest virgins and respectable young married women, or when they order them to come secretly before them as the Holy Office requires, they have been known to do with them as they will, which the women only slightly protest against because of the great fear which they have [of them] . . . and meanwhile the scribes and officials of the Holy Office, being single men, as they are in some places, do the same thing with daughters and wives and female relatives of prisoners, and this is easy for them, as the favour will be granted in return for knowing something about the case.23

  It is worth stopping to think about what this actually meant. An institution established with the aim of purifying religious practice and combating its corruption was responsible for forcing married and single women to prostitute themselves for the sake of the men they loved or for fear of the consequences if they did not. Such events were not universal. They may not even have occurred in the majority of tribunals. But they clearly were not rarities either. It is difficult not to conclude that if there was a corrupting agent in the Iberian world at this time it was actually the Inquisition.

  For inquisitors power was everywhere, and they took advantage. Some kicked prisoners in the face if they did not get the right answer or simply to intimidate.24 The way some of them saw their charges is revealed by Miguel de Carpio, inquisitor of Seville between 1556 and 1578, who saw his mission as to ‘burn and embrace people’ – as if these two actions were in some way related – and wanted to ‘relax’ some prisoners rather than reconcile them simply because they were poor – luckily for them this was not always carried out, since other inquisitors were more moderate, and all such decisions were taken by vote.25

  When one looks at the frankly astonishing evidence of abuse of power and of inquisitors’ capacity to say one thing and do another, the gulf between theory and practice becomes ever more disturbing. In theory, therefore, the Inquisition came down hard on officials accepting gifts, and the very first rules of the institution from 1484 made it clear that this was not acceptable;26 fourteen years later, in the instructions written in Ávila in 1498, inquisitors were told not to impose high fines simply in order to get paid, and were ordered to live ‘honestly in their dress and adornments of their person as in every other respect’ – a veiled allusion to sexual misconduct.27 Yet these orders were contemporaneous to numerous cases of corruption and bribery.28

  Thus the theory and rule of the Inquisition were never the whole story, and to look at its history by reading its decrees is to miss the point. Like all institutions, the Inquisition was loathe to relinquish power once it had got hold of it. Thus it might pretend dismay at the cases of bribery and corruption, but these were themselves testament to the power of the institution, something of which it was all in favour. Power was too addictive to be sacrificed on the altar of morality. Rather than coming down hard on its own malefactors, the Inquisition often moved them on to another place, as they did with Muñoz de la Cuesta. There was no sense of shame; but it was a little inconvenient that morality was in fact the justifying principle of everything which the institution did.

  CONCENTRATION OF POWER was not, of course, the product simply of the personalities of the inquisitors. It required a detailed administrative machinery which channelled authority into the institution and to its functionaries. It also required the agreement of the state in this process since, as we have seen, the Inquisitions of Portugal and Spain were products of local conditions rather than of papal imposition.

  The Inquisition’s development of its administrative machinery was slow. In Spain the first tribunal was instituted in 1480 (Seville) and the last not until 1659 in Madrid. In Portugal and Goa, in contrast, the four tribunals were all founded within twenty-five years of each other in the mid-16th century. In Spain the Suprema had six members – five ecclesiastical councillors and one prosecutor – and the king was allowed to nominate two lay members from the Council of Castile; in Portugal the inquisitor-general was allowed to nominate members of the General Council of the Inquisition directly, which could lead to the sort of allegations of corruption that we saw in the case of Fernando Martines Mascarenhas.29 *4

  The bureaucratic differences between the two Inquisitions were matched by some differences in targets. As we have seen, the Portuguese Inquisition never dealt with moriscos or large numbers of Lutherans, unlike in Spain. With the moriscos, this was because Portugal had been reconquered from the Muslims much earlier and had assimilated them by the time of the Inquisition. As for Lutherans, at the height of the panic in Spain in the late 1550s the Portuguese Inquisition had only just got off the ground and was still happy to concentrate on the threat of the conversos.

  Nonetheless, the period of the joint monarchy (1580–1640) led to a growing fusion of bureaucratic styles. As the inquisitor-general of Portugal, Francisco de Castro – he of the damask hat – put it in 1632, ‘The mode of procedure conforms to law and is, according to the information that we have, substantially the same as that which is used by the Inquisitions of Castile’.30 This meant that many of the reforms which the Inquisition had undergone in Spain in the 16th century, when the Portuguese Inquisition had still been experiencing its growing pains, became characteristic of both institutions.

  In Spain, as with the expansion of the institution to prosecute Old Christians for blasphemy, bigamy and Lutheranism, bureaucratic growth coincided with the watch of Inquisitor-General Fernando de Valdés, the arch-enemy of Archbishop Carranza of Toledo.*5 Valdés reorganized the administration of the Inquisition in line with the needs of the Counter-Reformation. He put the Inquisition’s finances on a surer footing by securing annual rents from the churches (canonjías).31 *6 He also standardized inquisitorial procedures with general instructions issued in 1561, regularized visits to rural areas so that remote spots were covered more frequently, and established the Inquisition in areas where it had not previously had a presence.32

  However, perhaps the most important bureaucratic reform instituted by Valdés was his reorganization of the familiars of the Inquisition in a decree of 1553 known as the Concordia. Familiars were spies of the Inquisition, expected to report anything suspicious; they were often asked to help with the arrest of suspects, and were given drawings of fugitives to help track them down.33 Until the time of Valdés they had been sparse in Spain, but under him the Inquisition appointed familiars according to the size of each settlement. Granada, Seville and Toledo had fifty familiars each, Cordoba, Cuenca and Valldolid forty, Murcia thirty, Calahorra and Llerena twenty-five, towns of up to 3,000 residents (vecinos) ten, towns of up to 1,000 residents six, towns of up to 500 residents four, and towns of fewer than 500 residents two if needed.34

  This rationalized network of spies facilitated the movement of the Inquisition into daily life35 and fostered the growth of the power of individual inquisitors and other functionaries. At their peak there were over 20,000 familiars in Spain.36 Henceforth, until the institution declined from the mid-17th century onward, even small towns could not be sure of being free of spies who would report misdemeanours to the authorities. By 1600 even the isolated province of Guatemala in Central America had between sixty and one hundred, and there was no colonial town that was without its familiar.37 In Portugal, meanwhile, although there had been only eighteen familiars before the union with Spain in
1580, by 1640 another 1,600 were in place.38 From now on it would not just be inquisitors who routinely abused their powers; their sidekicks, the familiars, would also become a burden on the people in the towns and villages of Portugal, Spain and the colonies.

  Lisbon 1627–8

  THE PORTUGUESE CAPITAL suffered during the sixty years of the joint monarchy. The ships still came and went from the dockside at the Tejo. They sailed out to sea past the royal palace and the beautiful tower at Belén, shadowed by the green hills of Sintra. The dock still groaned with goods unloaded from Brazil and India, with porters hauling them up the narrow streets and passageways, towards the marketplaces and the homes of the nobility. Nevertheless, the decline was real. The greater emphasis placed by the (Spanish) monarchs on the Spanish empire meant that Portuguese colonial outposts began to suffer. Spain was not a country without enemies, and Portugal’s association with its neighbour made its imperial settlements into targets for the Dutch, who were still fighting the 80-year conflict with Spain which would eventually lead to their full independence in 1648.

  The problem for Portugal was that whereas the wealth of the Spanish empire in America came from great mining centres in the interior of Mexico and Peru, the Portuguese empire was based around coastal ports and was therefore much easier to target. Between 1603 and 1641 the Dutch attacked Goa (1603 and 1610), the Spice Islands (1605), Gorée (Senegal: 1619 and 1627), Mozambique (1607 and 1608), Malacca (1616, 1629 and 1641), Macao (1622 and 1626) and Mina (modern Ghana: 1637).39 Resentment of the Spanish empire in Portugal was therefore intense, as was the sense of decline which would accelerate during Portugal’s war for independence from Spain (1640–68). In these circumstances the presence of a group of people – familiars – who did little and expected others to shoulder their share of the social burden added to the problems.

  A classic instance of what went on was the case of Amador Fernandes, a familiar of the Holy Office in the 1620s. Fernandes must have been a threatening presence in the streets of Lisbon. He was about thirty-five years old and strongly built, his chin shaded by a black beard; whenever he opened his mouth people could count the gaps in his teeth, picked off by disease like trees by a hurricane.40 Fernandes earned his living by selling books but it appears that much of his time was spent on other, less reputable activities.

  Fernandes had been made a familiar in 1625. In 1627, the year before accusations began to be received about him by the inquisitors of Lisbon, he used his privileges in an unusual way. Donning his familiar’s habit and going out into the crowded streets of the city, he waylaid a man leading two mules and requisitioned them – this alone reveals the impunity with which familiars could act when on official business. The mules, he informed their owner, were needed for inquisitorial purposes. Fernandes proceeded to use them to go to a bullfight that afternoon.41

  This sort of thing was routine behaviour for Fernandes. When he caught the reconciliado Manoell Pinto not wearing his penitential sanbenito, he turned a blind eye when a bribe was offered; Pinto knew of two other reconciliados who had achieved the same result. One familiar, Antonio Antunes, recounted how Fernandes went around buying the deeds of debt of people he disliked, just so that he could go and threaten them with the Inquisition if they did not pay up.42 In March 1628 he lied to a group of conversos that he had been ordered to arrest one of their friends, just in order to frighten them.43

  Fernandes was clearly someone who enjoyed his ability to instil fear. It must also be recognized that he was thought of as a poor example; three of his accusers before the Inquisition in Lisbon were themselves familiars scandalized by his behaviour. The picture which they painted of him does not inspire confidence in his ability to discharge his inquisitorial duties with probity. One of these familiars, Antonio Teixeira, described him as ‘the worst man in the country’.44 Another, Manoel Pires, was Fernandes’s brother-in-law; Pires had few illusions about a man he described as ‘one of the worst men in the world for swearing and committing egregious actions [mal obrar]’.45

  The fact that other familiars denounced Fernandes shows that there were some checks and balance to the system, yet his reputation as a person of bad character also forces us to ask why on earth the Inquisition appointed him in the first place. Practices and rules varied a little between districts,46 but often the reality was that the appointment of familiars was left to the whims of inquisitors and was therefore open to widespread abuse. As one inquisitor put it in 1596, ‘he suspects that in the same way as he has received presents because this is said to be a normal way of doing things, so do other officials, and that he has received presents in connection with some applications to become a familiar’.47 In such circumstances it is not surprising that hypocrisy and abuse of power were often synonymous with the activities of familiars.

  What did this mean for daily life in the world of these inquisitorial functionaries? The way in which Amador Fernandes seized property and issued threats reveals a system where power depended on the whim of those who had it. One could not be secure in one’s possessions or in the chastity of women since inquisitors or familiars might seek to steal these away. This was a world of arbitrariness, a world in which it was not possible to feel safe.

  In the Portugal of Amador Fernandes – as in the cases we saw above of the behaviour of inquisitors in Spain – the gap between theory and practice was once again all too obvious. Thus in 1739 a rulebook composed for familiars in Portugal reveals both how they were supposed to behave and how they actually behaved. Familiars were supposed to be people ‘who behaved well, people of confidence and recognized abilities’.48 The fact that often they were not is revealed by the next requirement, that ‘they should have property from which they can live well’ – presumably so that they did not extort bribes from others. Familiars were not to ‘aggrieve or annoy anybody on the pretext of the privileges which they enjoy’ (so we can assume they did this frequently); they were to ‘speak about the conversos cautiously, so that it is not obvious that they hate them’ (obviously they did hate them, and frequently went around whipping up hatred against them); and they were not to ask for loans from conversos or accept gifts from people who had dealings with the Inquisition (clearly it was common practice to solicit bribes in return for silence or information).

  Although the number of familiars declined from the mid-17th century onward,49 particularly in Spain where the Inquisition required a greater degree of wealth before making an appointment, their hypocrisies and bad character were a constant from beginning to end. They often did not bother to wear even a figleaf of piety. In 1566 the familiar Juan de Gonbao of the kingdom of Valencia was punished for the very (un)Christian declaration: ‘I renounce God and will take a devil for my master if the devil has not taken the soul of my mother to hell’.50

  This lack of a moral compass poisoned the activities of the familiars. Two years later, in a decree of Zaragoza, the familiars of Aragon were universally acknowledged to be so corrupt that they all had to be sacked and sixty new ones created in their place. The sorts of things that had gone on before are revealed in the articles of the decree, which among other things stipulated that familiars who were tradesmen or merchants should be prosecuted by secular judges for committing fraud in weights and measures and provisions, and that familiars should not arrest anyone without having an inquisitorial warrant to do so.51

  Evidently, for some, to be a familiar was hardly a religious choice. It was rather to have the freedom to do as one wished in the knowledge that penances, if imposed, would come from the Inquisition itself, which had a vested interest in ensuring that punishments were minor. The power of familiars is illustrated best by the fact that the Inquisition had to prosecute people who pretended to be familiars in order to do as they pleased. False familiars sometimes robbed rich labourers, going into their houses and taking what they wanted at will.52 Other impersonators of familiars arrested converso women and then tried to have sex with them.53

  How dreadful familiars must have been if
people would stand mutely by and watch themselves be robbed by them or by people pretending to be them. There was no shame or pretence of shame. Power was (im)morality, as the familiar Francisco Ramírez of the region of Albacete realized. Ramírez, the familiar, who as a young man had been wont to take the clothes off the image of Jesus in the local church, don them and then roam the streets of the town by night pretending to be a ghost; who thus disguised would go to a house to carry on an affair with its owner; who had made another friend pregnant and persuaded her to have an abortion. Once this devout individual was made a familiar, he changed little. He began threatening all those against whom he had taken a dislike. The lives of others were for him playthings. He took against one local deacon, and chased him through his home town of Yeste, waving a pistol in the air.54

  THE LINK BETWEEN familiars and the inquisitors themselves was the offical known as the commissary. These were paid officials resident in the larger towns who managed the affairs of the local familiars and received depositions. Often, however, commissaries were little better than familiars.

  In 1592 a memorial was written by the clergy of Peru denouncing the behaviour of the commissaries throughout the country, and also in Potosí.*7 The commissaries, the clergy said, were violent, dishonest and argumentative. In Cochabamba (modern Bolivia), the commissary Martín Barco de Centinera revenged himself through the Inquisition on all his personal foes. He usurped royal authority, drank himself silly and boasted publicly of his affairs with married women. The inquisitors of Peru denied none of this, but merely said that getting good officers was difficult. This was the best they could do.55