by Green, Toby
What does this imply about how the Inquisition saw the powers which it had? This observation reveals that abuse of power was seen almost as inevitable, and as a minor failing compared to the prospect of the absence of this power altogether. Power would inevitably be abused, but at least in such cases it would be inquisitorial functionaries and not others who were abusing it.
The impunity with which inquisitorial officials operated is revealed by such cases. There were frequent disputes between them and royal officials, who protested that they did as they pleased. When a servant of an inquisitor had a fight with a prostitute in a brothel in Barcelona in 1565 the officials who arrested him were themselves thrown into the inquisitorial jail for three months.56 As we have seen, the Council of Granada accused minor functionaries of the Inquisition of bribery and sexual exploitation.57 *8 There were of course some kinder officials, but they were not always encouraged; when Miguel de Xea, an assistant in the inquisitorial jail in Toledo in the early 1590s, took to letting some prisoners out into courtyards and allowing messages to reach them, he was denounced by nine people and himself tried by the tribunal.58
The Inquisition did attempt to arrest or at least censure those who misused their powers, but abuses continued inexorably. As far as the familiars of Portugal and Spain were concerned, their freedom of action and disdain for others stemmed directly from the privileges which the Inquisition itself had secured for them. In Portugal, from 1562 onwards familiars were ‘exempt from paying extraordinary taxes, demands, loans and any other charges requested by the royal councils or the towns where they are resident . . . nor can their houses, storehouses or stables be requisitioned by the army . . . and likewise nor can their bread, wine, clothes, straw, barley, wood, chickens, eggs, horses, mules and pack-animals be so requisitioned’.59
These were exemptions and freedoms shared by no other members of society. Officials of the Inquisition were constantly claiming rights and privileges, such as freedom from taxation or free lodging when travelling. The exemption from having their homes or goods requisitioned by royal armies was also a fact of inquisitorial life in Spain, and the subject of widespread anger. The unpopularity of familiars in Iberian societies is shown nowhere more graphically than by the fact that, in Catalonia alone, there were hundreds of attacks on them over the history of the Inquisition.60 Eventually, in 1634, with the Iberian empires approaching crisis point, Philip IV of Spain withdrew all exemptions, pleading necessities of state;61 yet as we have seen in this chapter, often this did not prevent familiars from continuing to do as they wished.
The abuses of power committed by officials of the Inquisition from the loftiest inquisitor to the poorest jailer make plain the power of this institution in Iberian societies. The Italian traveller Leonardo Donato said in 1573 that the Inquisition was of ‘such extreme and tremendous authority . . . that I really do not believe there to be a greater one in Spain’.62 By the early 17th century people were requesting it to do things which had nothing to do with its role, such as punishing people exporting money from Spain.63 They applied to it because it was the most powerful body in Spain, and because it had a power which people had come to know, and to fear.
AS THE INQUISITION moved through its more than three centuries of existence naturally its structures evolved. One should not pretend that its administrative reach was always universal and all-powerful and, as we have seen, the number of familiars declined rapidly in Spain in the 17th century. Yet we should also not doubt that the Inquisition touched most aspects of most people’s lives for most of its life. By the 17th century it was seen by some as a state within a state in Portugal,64 and it had what was unquestionably the largest and most powerful bureaucracy in the country.
The precision of inquisitorial administration at some points in its history is remarkable. In Spain in the late 16th century all descendants of Jews and Muslims had to register with the Inquisition.65 Such precision continued long into the 18th century. In 1723 the small provincial town of Aguilar de la Frontera near Cordoba provided a list of all the sanbenitos hung in its churches. There were a total of 132, including those of twelve people who had been ‘relaxed’ and 111 penitents between 1594 and 1723.66 The list reveals both the reach of the Inquisition in provincial Spain, and also how this reach was constantly in the minds of the people through the sanbenitos hung in the churches.
What did the presence of these sanbenitos imply? It meant that each Sunday, as the parishioners attended mass, they were reminded of the reality of heresy, and of the fact that it could well be in their midst. Even as the host was elevated, the sermon preached and prayers offered, the threat of impurity was in the minds of the faithful. Thus did fear coexist with prayer even at the most exalted moments of religious devotion.
The practice of hanging sanbenitos in churches with the names of penitents continued throughout the life of the Inquisition in Spain. Documents exist showing that measures were periodically put in place to restore the sanbenitos,67 some of which, by the end of the Inquisition’s history, were nearly 300 years old. Only between 1788 and 1798 did a commission begin to examine the origin of the practice and whether or not it ought to be continued.68
Another indication of the bureaucratic fastidiousness of the Inquisition can be seen in the inventories which it compiled of the goods of its prisoners. As soon as a person was arrested, a notary would enter their home and produce a list of their possessions. These inventories are extraordinarily detailed. Every last handkerchief or sheet was noted down. Thus, when Francisco Piñero was arrested by the Inquisition in Cartagena in 1636, his inventory included the following items:69
– One mattress
– Four cedar chairs with broken seats
– Two handkerchiefs
– Cloths from Rouen
– Napkins
– Pillows
– A black silk jacket
– An old parasol
One imagines that the officials did not make use of the broken-seated cedar chairs or the old parasol. They proceeded cautiously with every aspect of their investigation. Having examined the contents of Piñero’s wardrobe, they decided that one rotten hat and some old black stockings that were also mouldy should be thrown out; these were, it was felt, unlikely to add much to the Inquisition’s finances.
This emphasis on the minutiae of daily life is what makes Inquisition archives such a fascinating store of material. Yet this fastidious bureaucracy is also testament to the mentality that we saw in Chapter Three in the torture chamber in the sense that what was written down was somehow legitimated. Once a theft had been noted, it had been legalized, and thus record-keeping could be used for ill as well as good.70
Precise administration and abuse of power were two sides of the same coin: the enormous power of the Inquisition in Iberian societies. It was because the Inquisition wielded so much power that its employees were often able to act disgracefully and get away with it, and it was because the Inquisition was so powerful that it was able to create such a thorough and meticulous bureaucracy.
Thus the world learnt that an excess of power and an excess of administration often go together. The ability to determine on paper the probity of individuals and to decide what should happen in places which the scribes would never see made the exercise of administrative power a remote activity. The powerful could be shielded from the consequences of their actions.
The culmination and catharsis of such power came, collectively, in the autos. By the middle of the 17th century, as we saw in the Prologue, these were lavish and pompous affairs. Something of the ceremony and importance of these events is revealed by the fact that in the auto of Cordoba of 1627 the second largest expense after building the stage was in paying for the candle wax.71 Of all the details one can find, this is perhaps the most expressive of the extraordinary theatricality of those public shows.
Yet the very cost of these autos at a time when the Spanish economy was in decline made them increasingly infrequent. The 17th century also saw the r
ise of the so-called autos particulares, more local affairs which did not require so much of an outlay.72 After all, the costs of staging an auto had risen by over 4,700 per cent between 1554 and 1632 in comparison with inflation of only a little over 100 per cent.73 Such vast extravagance is testament to the insatiable expansion of the Inquisition, but it was clearly unsustainable and only presaged a long decline.
IT IS HARDLY ORIGINAL to assert that great empires have always eventually fallen into decline. Power is heady and all-consuming, but eventually it fails. Thus we study with fascination the ruins of civilizations such as those that once dominated Easter Island, the Maya, Tiahuanaco in Bolivia and Great Zimbabwe. The dissipation of power appears to be something inherent to it, but it is perhaps not something that the powerful can bear to accept on a conscious level.
The story of the Inquisition is not alien to this dynamic. Spain was the most powerful country in the world in the 16th century and it was at this time that its persecuting institution, the Inquisition, reached its zenith. Yet the Inquisition’s projection of power and its incessant seeking after enemies created the conditions for a decline from which the imperial power itself never recovered.
Administration was not irrelevant to this process. As we have seen in the last three chapters, the inquisitorial infrastructure was increasingly applied to tasks which from an objective position seem pointless. Such tasks occupied vast amounts of time and energy which could have been put towards more productive work. The very diversification and spread of the inquisitorial machine was a symbol of the institution’s power but also a condition of the stagnation which developed as Spain stuttered towards the end of the 17th century and the crisis of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14).
In thinking of this process of power’s self-destructiveness, it is worth thinking back to the process of the creation of the morisco enemy and their expulsion. We saw there that this was the choice of a society which could have assimilated the converts but chose to marginalize and humiliate this ambiguous group, in so doing vaunting its power. But it was in fact precisely this expulsion of the moriscos which precipitated the most serious decline in Spain.
In 1525, following the forced conversions of Aragon’s Moors after the germanía revolt,*9 the prospect of unconverted Muslims leaving the country terrified the nobility. They wrote a long letter to Charles V, maintaining that the prosperity of the whole kingdom depended on the Moors, and that Aragon would be ruined if they left. It was the Moors who did all the harvesting, performed all the crafts, and whose rents sustained the churches, the monasteries and the nobility.74 The nobles remained supporters of the moriscos throughout the 16th century, sponsoring their petitions to be freed from inquisitorial jails75 precisely because the profitability of their agricultural estates depended on them. Moriscos provided the backbone of the agricultural economy in Aragon and Valencia and it was sheer folly to expel them, but, as we have seen, this is precisely what the country did, in accordance with an ideology of demonization in which the Inquisition had been pivotal.
The effects were stark. In June 1610, once the expulsion of the moriscos had been decreed, the viceroy of Aragon described how the nobility had lost 80 per cent of their income virtually overnight and were in danger of being bankrupted by their creditors.76 Entire towns were deserted. In Asco, Catalonia, the town was emptied, the houses crumbled, the vines, olive groves and plantations of mulberry trees went to seed.77 With the loss of the majority of Aragon and Valencia’s labourers came hyperinflation as the moriscos sold off their goods for a fraction of their true worth.78 The situation there became so bad that people who turned to agriculture were exempted from military service.79
Such measures achieved little, however. By 1638 the total number of settlements in the kingdom of Valencia had fallen from 755 to 550, a decline of almost one third, with 205 former morisco villages simply abandoned.80 Four per cent of the entire population of Spain had left,81 and with it much of Spain’s agricultural expertise. This picture was mirrored in Castile, where the population fell by almost 15 per cent between 1591 and 1631.82 Populations continued to decline throughout the 17th century, and only in 1787 did the kingdom of Castile recover the population level of 1591.83
The results of this decline – precipitated in part by the expulsion of the moriscos – were dire. In 1620 William Lithgow described Spain as ‘neither well inhabited nor populous: Yea, so desartuous that in the very heart of Spaine, I have gone eighteene leagues (two dayes journey) unseeing house or village . . . and commonly eight leagues without any house’.*10 84 Depopulation accompanied decline, and Lithgow, who had travelled widely in Asia and Africa, felt that ‘the most penurious Peasants in the world be here, whose Quotidian moanes, might draw teares from stones. Their Villages . . . wanting Gardens, Hedges, Closses, Barnes . . .’85
The comprehensive bureaucracy of the Inquisition thus presided over a comprehensive decline, and when one thinks of the stagnation fostered by the institution, the seas separating intention and reality become oceans. The Inquisition was supposed, after all, to safeguard society, but with it had come decline. It was supposed to purify the faith, but how were people supposed to believe in the faith when its guardians behaved so shamelessly? Far from safeguarding the faith, the Inquisition often only fostered cynicism. Just as it had invented enemies rather than destroying them, so it corrupted society rather than purifying it.
The gulf between intentions and results may seem extraordinary to some, yet it supports the view of some psychoanalysts that ‘the fact that someone sincerely believes in a statement is not enough to determine his sincerity’.86 For example, just as a person or institution may claim to be motivated by religious ends when the goals are purely political, so political aims can be cited when the goals of some dramatic and violent action are purely religious. To judge the Inquisition by its actions and effects and not by its stated intentions and beliefs, the institution was not a champion of purity or the security of society; in the end, it fostered corruption and decline.
Lima 1587
HERE IS THE TALE of the 16th-century inquisitor of Peru, Antonio Gutíerrez de Ulloa. The qualities of this man were eloquently expressed by the viceroy of Peru, Fernando de Torres y Portugal, who declared that ‘instead of talking of “the inquisitor of Peru” it was more accurate to talk of “the Peru of the inquisitor” ’.87 Precisely what the viceroy meant was revealed in an inquisitorial visit of inquiry made by Juan Ruiz de Prado in the late 1580s.
It emerged that Gutíerrez de Ulloa, like so many inquisitors before and after him, had a strange attitude to his position. The affairs with married women – Catalina Morejón, Catalina Alconchel and the wife of the farrier Sancho Casco – come as no surprise. Gutíerrez de Ulloa however went further even than the (admittedly strong) competition. He began an affair with the young noblewoman María Delgado Tello when she was only eleven years old, and fathered a child with her who he packed off to live near the silver mines in Potosí.88 Gutíerrez de Ulloa, indeed, soon became the terror of the young women of Lima, entering their rooms by night dressed as a young suitor, in silk stockings and a short cape. He made his housekeeper pregnant. His lovers had public arguments one of which Gutíerrez defused by letting the one he was seeing out by a secret door while the one he was not seeing shouted from the street. He accompanied some of his flames to their properties outside Lima and abandoned his post for weeks. And when he met a love rival near the house of a woman whom he was going to sleep with he stabbed him and left him for dead.
By the time Ruiz de Prado arrived, Gutíerrez de Ulloa had been an inquisitor in Peru for almost twenty years. The visitor formulated over 200 accusations against him. One would expect that in a case of such severity Gutíerrez de Ulloa would have been stripped of his post and punished, but instead he managed to drag it out for so long that Ruiz de Prado’s finances ebbed away and he had to leave before he could arrest him. What, then, was Gutíerrez de Ulloa’s punishment? He was made an inquisitorial visitor hims
elf, of the province of Charcas (the north of modern Argentina), and left in December 1594 for Buenos Aires.
How can one measure the effects of centuries of abuse of power and bureaucratic stagnation? The decline of Iberia and the comparative poverty of its ex-colonies compared with North America are possible yardsticks, but there are others. In the early 1990s, when I was an employee of the Municipality of Santiago, Chile and provided with lodging as part of my contract, I was offered an iron for my laundry. The iron, however, took several months to get hold of; the problem, my contact informed me, was that the mayor of Santiago had to sign the contract for the release of the iron, and he was usually either busy or absent.
Many people will have similar stories of bureaucratic inertia from around the world. It may be an oversimplification to suggest that such practices are a direct legacy of the administrative bonanza which accompanied the Holy Office, but it is not perhaps inaccurate to suggest that an attitude was cultivated of respect towards administration and of the importance of administration in society, and that this attitude has endured.
What was created most of all was a state of mind. As one scholar so eloquently put it, ‘What difference is there between the inquisitorial sanbenito and the yellow star imposed upon the Jews in the thirties and forties in several European countries . . . or the brands applied to slaves in so many countries of the Americas in the course of the nineteenth century? . . . Evidently, the inquisitorial mind is still alive’.89
Chapter Eleven
THE THREAT OF KNOWLEDGE
Thus silence has been imposed on the learned; and as for those who ran to the call of science, as you say, great terror has been inspired in them.