Inquisition

  It did not take long for the Inquisition to become involved in censorship. In 1505 Inquisitor-General Diego de Deza attempted to prohibit a book by the grammatical scholar Antonio de Nebrija on the Bible80 even though the book had not yet been completed.81 Deza fell from grace after the Lucero affair, and his successor Cardinal Cisneros allowed the book to be published. Nonetheless, a precedent had been set.

  By the 1520s the inquisitorial machine was beginning to investigate books as they entered Spain, and when in 1523 one French ship was found to have a small crate of Lutheran books, sixteen places were visited over the region of Guipuzcoa (the Basque country) to ensure that they had not become dispersed.82 By the 1530s bookshops were being visited all over Aragon, and the association of the Inquisition with censorship had become irreversible.83

  The instructions set out for visiting bookshops in the search for banned books were precise. First, the inquisitorial functionary was to order the shop to close and ask the owner for a list of all the books that he had – which the owner was obliged to keep. Then the functionary had to ask if there were any books which needed to be added to the list. Then the functionary was to check the list and see if any were from the latest catalogue of banned books. Finally the functionary had to check all the books on the shelves and cross them off against the owner’s list. Ideally, the rules of operation suggested, visits should be made early in the morning so as not to damage trade.84

  Booksellers are not today thought of as great adventurers, but in this era in Iberia this is what they were. One does not imagine such shops, filled with ponderous books accumulating dust, as owned by risk-takers, yet this was the reality. One can imagine the booksellers being torn between the demands of the Inquisition and the fact that banned books gave them the greatest profits. Thus while the bureaucracy clamped down on seditious ideas in another way it encouraged them.

  The hazards which daily afflicted booksellers were many; books were frequently impounded, threatening them with bankruptcy. In the late 16th century Vicencio Millis, a bookseller from the market town of Medina del Campo, appealed to the inquisitorial authorities. His father Jacob had sent him thirty-three bundles of books from Lyon in France which had been impounded at the port in Bilbao to be inspected. This process was taking so long that Millis wrote to ask that the inspection occur in Medina del Campo instead, so that at least he could sell the ones which were passed fit for the general public.85

  It is true that, from their own perspective, the Inquisition had much to dislike about some of these books. Heretics were also adopting wily ruses to get their seditious – and salacious – material into Spain, including in 1604 offering inquisitorial functionaries afternoon tea when they went to inspect their ships in port for banned books.86 Sometimes they printed heretical books with the names of printers based in Catholic cities and sent them to their allies in Spain to smuggle in through Seville concealed within orthodox and decent books which aroused no suspicion.87

  The reality was that a country with such a lengthy coastline could never be proof against this invasion of foreign books and ideas. One man was found with 250 prohibited works in his library in 1651.88 Books could be smuggled over the passes of the Pyrenees, or concealed in clothes, trunks and hidden compartments in ships. They could be rowed ashore by starlight outside the major ports and then never seen again. There was a constant demand for them since as the cliche so accurately puts it, nothing excites so much as prohibition.

  But while censorship could not prevent ideas from entering Spain, it could limit them to a very small section of society and act as a declaration of intent in which learning and innovative scientific thought were frowned upon; and this, was indeed precisely the effect of the first indexes of censorship.

  LIKE A STUBBORN BACKACHE which refuses to disappear whatever position one adopts, we find ourselves back with an old foe, Inquisitor-General of Spain Fernando de Valdés. This is, we should recall, the same Valdés who destroyed his rival Archbishop Carranza of Toledo, expanded the scope of the Inquisition from conversos and moriscos to the Old Christian population, and reorganized the administrative structure of the Inquisition so that familiars were found in every small town across Spain. With his unequalled genius for administering persecution and repression, it was Valdés who presided over the creation of the first genuinely wide-ranging Spanish index of censorship in 1559 – at the height of his campaign to snare Archbishop Carranza.

  Given all the cases we have seen of family members and friends denouncing one another, it should not surprise us that again personal enmity should have had such a decisive influence on the subsequent cultural history of Spain. The 1559 index was developed precisely as a means of discrediting Carranza’s Catechism, one of the main thrusts of the investigation against him.*7

  In February 1559 under Valdés’s leadership the Suprema ordered that all works in Spain dealing with the Bible which had been published in vernacular languages outside the country should be seized, adding in a letter to the Inquisition in Seville that commentaries on Carranza’s Catechism should be confiscated, and that ‘in order for it not to appear that only this book is being examined [i.e., it was precisely only this book which was of interest], it would be good to publish edicts ordering the seizure of all books written in the vernacular dealing with Christian doctrine’.89 Matters moved swiftly, and by 20 March the Suprema was already talking of a ‘catalogue of books’ to be printed ‘as soon as possible’. Eventually, publication came in August 1559, the very same month that Car-ranza was arrested.

  It is true that there were precedents for this move by Valdés. Prior to this first index, lists of suspect books had been published by the Inquisition in 1540 and 154590 and prohibitions of Lutheran books stretched back to 1521.91 The first full index had been published in 1551, but there was nothing distinctively Spanish about it, as it reproduced a list published in Louvain (in modern Belgium – then under the control of Charles V) in 1550.92

  What was different about Valdés’s 1559 index was that, in the midst of the persecution of the Lutheran threat in Valladolid and Seville and the pursuit of Carranza, with threats supposedly looming on all fronts, the opportunity was taken to ban not only religious books but works of all genres. The novels of Bocaccio appeared on the list, together with the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes and other works by some of the most important writers of the early 16th century.93 For the first time, censorship was expanding from the religious sphere.

  It would however be a mistake to pretend that Valdés and Spain were acting in isolation. The first papal index of banned books had been issued by Pope Paul IV in 1557, as a result of discussions at the Council of Trent94 and Portuguese indexes had been issued in 1547 and 1551.95 Valdés also operated with complete royal approval, since in 1554 the Council of Castile had been made the sole authority to issue licences to print books,96 and in 1558 Philip II had published a law prohibiting all booksellers from selling or possessing any book banned by the Inquisition on pain of death, and banning the possession of books written in the vernacular and published outside Spain without royal licence.97 Knowledge had become a commodity to be monitored.

  Valdés, as might be expected, did not rest with the establishment of the index. Censorship itself was centralized; the Suprema ordered at the height of the Carranza case that nothing could be censored without its approval.98 From 1558 onward printers were supposed to be visited once every four months, and sometimes the production of suspect works was suspended.99 A royal decree of 1558 imposed for the first time systematic control on the import of books, and a further thirty-three royal letters were written on the subject through to 1612.100 Increasing numbers of calificadores were appointed, religious people in each district of the Inquisition who were sent books to read and approve or censor for orthodox eyes.101 If the physical purity of the nation was increasingly bound up with ideas of blood, its mental purity was associated with preventing corruption by ‘impure’ ideas.

  Just as the association of know
ledge with heresy discouraged people from taking to learning, so this ‘trial of the book’ also had enormous effects on society. By the 1560s, just a few suspect lines were enough for a book to be banned; a work by Carranza’s lawyer Dr Navarro was denounced in 1572 simply for having a few words in favour of the archbishop.102 The number of books prohibited swelled like a cancer, from 699 under Valdés in 1559 to 2,315 under Inquisitor-General Quiroga in the index published in 1583. In this Great Index of Prohibitions*8 books by Abelard, Dante, Machiavelli, More, Rabelais and Vives were banned, together with everything ever translated from Erasmus into Spanish and twenty-two of his works in Latin, and classical authors including Herodotus, Tacitus, Plato, Pliny and Ovid. Prohibition was extended to images, coins, portraits, medals, songs and statues.103

  The poor inquisitorial staff! How was it possible to contend with a world in which so much heretical material was to hand? One went into a neighbour’s house and saw a blasphemous image on a medal. One tried to ignore it, and began to study a book for some peace of mind only to be outraged by a statement betraying a lack of orthodoxy. Closing one’s eyes to the sins of the world, one heard blasphemies in the siren-like voices of a choir. The four calificadores of Cordoba wrote to the Suprema in 1584 that there were so many books on the list that they would never finish their task of censorship if they were not provided with reinforcements.104

  This was a society in which to be orthodox was to be perennially hot under the collar. The potential for outrage grew all the time, with the gargantuan appetite of the publishing industry. In 1559 the index of prohibited books was fifty-nine octavo pages*9 in length; the indexes of 1707 and 1747 would be over 1,000 pages in folio.105 *10 It was increasingly possible to feel scandalized and affronted, as the vituperative letters of the calificadores made clear: such-and-such a passage was escandaloso (underlined – scandalous), malsonante (underlined – sounded bad), perjudicial a la fe (underlined – prejudicial to the faith).

  The willingness to be offended and to react with violence is a typical expression of a victim mentality. The Inquisition had created a world view that felt under siege and therefore felt justified in its persecutions. But the siege was laid more by internal repressions than by the deeds of enemies.

  WHAT OCCURRED IN SPAIN did not occur in inquisitorial isolation. In Portugal censorship commenced in an organized fashion as soon as the Inquisition was launched there in 1536. By 1539 books had to be approved by the Inquisition to be published, and in 1540 Cardinal Henry delegated censorship to three Dominican friars.106 It was not only published books that were censored; works were subject to preventive censorship – submitted for approval before publication and amended accordingly.107

  By the last quarter of the 16th century censorship in Portugal was well established. Every book had to be approved by the General Council of the Inquisition, local religious figures where the book was published, and by the palace authorities (Desembargo do Paço).108 By 1581 lascivious books and comedies and plays in which religious people were portrayed were banned.109 Among the books confiscated in a sudden visit to bookshops in 1606 were La Celestina and Don Quixote.110

  In the New World all works of the imagination and profane books and theatre were banned throughout the colonial period.111 Ports were checked everywhere, with regular inspections of ships even in remote districts such as Guatemala.112 With such a vast remit censorship was in many ways harsher than in Spain.113 As soon as ships docked in Mexico near Veracruz, inquisitorial commissaries inspected the luggage of all passengers and sailors for books, making an inventory and sending it to the customs house for clearance.114 Foreign printers were prosecuted, and the majority of correspondence between the tribunal in Mexico City and regional commissaries related to the book trade.115 In 1690 the number of inquisitorial visits to English ships to search for banned books was such that the English ambassador in Mexico City complained to the Inquisition.116

  It is of course a mistake to pretend that censorship was exclusively an Iberian phenomenon. Louis XV of France (1715–74) threatened authors and printers of seditious books with death117 while 294 books were prohibited in Britain between 1524 and 1683.118 Yet when one compares this number to the 2,315 banned in the 1583 Spanish index alone, it becomes apparent that censorship in Iberia was of a different order to that elsewhere. It may not always have been effective, and banned books did seep in little by little, but the ideology behind it created an atmosphere in which many types of learning became suspect. Perhaps even more damaging than official censorship was the self-censorship which such a climate fostered, as people feared being cast adrift if they strayed from the prevailing ideology. Thus from small beginnings and individual bans did an entire world of ideas fall into inertia. A permanent sense of insecurity among intellectuals was created which meant that there was a fear of new ideas and discoveries.119 Intellectual activity was turned into the mere repetition of pre-established schemas, and Iberian intellectual life fossilized,120 becoming a mirror of the economic and political paralysis which took over from the 17th century onward.

  This curious and sad history is difficult to imagine among the archives of Portugal and Spain, with their venerable tomes and lovingly preserved documents. Yet occasionally, if one looks hard enough, the legacy is there. In Lisbon one venue for my research was the archive of the palace of Ajuda, set on a high promontory above the estuary of the Tejo and the tower at Belén. The dirty cobbles of the streets below were more reminiscent of working-class districts in Montevideo or Santiago de Chile than a European city, and the palace itself was an anomaly; for above the workaday difficulties and sacrifices of one of the poorer cities of Europe were pendulous halls of marble, with shelves reaching like Towers of Babel into the architraves, stacked with books almost as high and as thick as a person.

  In the palace of Ajuda one can sit surrounded by copies of Mercator, ancient globes, dust and silence. Here, at least, books are valued and preserved. But in the excessive respect accorded to them is a hint of the polarities of previous centuries, where elites had had access to forbidden knowledge while the rest of the population was deliberately denied it.

  Cartagena de las Indias 1634

  SOMETHING OF THE UNUSUAL moral compass which the Inquisition developed under the twin impulses of expansion and fear of knowledge coalesced in a remarkable case in Cartagena, Colombia in 1634. The ship Nuestra Señora de Monserrate arrived in port from Cacheu in Guinea-Bissau, captained by one Diogo Barassa, with over 300 contraband slaves hidden under the poop deck, who had lived in appalling conditions throughout the forty days of the voyage from Africa.121

  Arriving on 30 July, the ship was visited by the inquisitorial secretary, who was concerned to see if any banned books were on board. The conditions on such ships were described in graphic detail during a subsequent visit the same year to a different ship, this time from Angola. On that occasion the secretary wrote,

  There were a large number of male and female blacks hidden behind some grass mats which covered them. They were so crammed in and piled on top of one another that it was only with extreme difficulty that I managed to pass the entrance and go into the space beneath the poop deck, and even then it was impossible for me to get more than halfway in since the blacks were so closely knit. The heat was so immense that I could not bear it and so I turned back and made two sailors from the ship go forward with lit candles between the blacks. There seemed to be more than 400 of them hidden there.122

  On the Nuestra Señora de Montserrate from Cacheu the inquisitorial secretary proceeded to make a thorough examination. However, he found no books prohibited by the Inquisition and so was content to finish the visit without taking any action.123 Prohibited books might have been anathema to the Inquisition, but the appalling conditions of the contraband slaves did not on this occasion even rate a mention by the inquisitorial flunkey. Theologically, the inaction of the official was justified, since the papacy had granted some moral legitimacy to the slave trade as a mode of saving souls. Perhaps,
indeed, the more souls squeezed into those putrid sanctuaries of rotting wood rolling across the ocean, the better. But this surely reveals to us only that no dogma is godlike enough to warrant our unflinching approval.

  It was of course a different vein of this very same dogma which led to the attempt to bar certain types of literary production from Iberian society. As we saw above, by 1583 many great authors had been banned, including Dante, Erasmus, Thomas More and Ovid. Although inquisitors were more interested in theology than works of literature124 the greats continued to be excluded. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries there were repeated complaints about the impossibility of getting hold of Machiavelli in Spain,125 and in 1659–60 a protracted debate began in Zaragoza and Madrid regarding Bartolomé de las Casas.

  Las Casas’ Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies is today recognized as one of the classic historical texts dealing with the Spanish discovery of America, but things were seen very differently in the 17th century. In 1659 the first person to propose censoring this work, the Jesuit Francisco Minguijon, did so saying that these ‘injurious tales to the Spanish nation should be seized . . . even if they are true’.126 The following year five Franciscan friars agreed, saying that the book was ‘for the most part a defamatory libel against the Spaniards, injurious, pernicious, and denigratory, and an excuse for foreign nations to hate and abominate the Spaniards, which is enough to make it scandalous’.127 As another calificador put it, as ‘the excesses have been remedied . . . it should be prohibited and it falls within law 16 of the expurgatory index of 1640 which deals with words and clauses which detract from the reputation of neighbours’.128

  In such an ideology truth no longer mattered; the appearance of truth was everything. Literature, though it remained the province of culture, was produced in the awareness that it did not escape the eyes of the censors. La Celestina – banned much earlier in Portugal – was expurgated many times before being banned in Spain in 1793, three years after the prohibition of all Montaigne’s essays.129 The entire works of Rabelais were banned in Spain in 1667, including the book for which he is now best remembered, Gargantua and Pantagruel.130