Inquisition

  The article caused a furore in Spain, with numerous people launching vituperative attacks on it pointing to the health of the sciences there. Yet, on closer examination these ‘sciences’ were all taken in the humanistic sense, and referred to subjects such as grammar, jurisprudence and theology. No one could come up with examples of luminaries in natural science from Spain.

  The divisions between the Enlightenment and ultramontane supporters of absolute papal authority and the Inquisition became more stark, as supporters of the Enlightenment defended Morvilliers. One of them, Cañuelo, described the condition of Spain in drastic terms: ‘Our poverty and ignorance have never been greater’, he wrote. ‘But we console ourselves’, he went on with bitter irony, ‘with the thought that our wealth is still not so great that we have actually got enough to be able to eat and to clothe ourselves . . . We need chickpeas, beans . . . we need meat; half of Spain is short of bacon; we have to import all the fish we eat except that which is freshly caught; we are in greatest need of eggs, which are brought from Berne to be sold in the Plaza in Madrid’.13 Everything from thread to make clothes to furniture and children’s toys was imported, and had to be paid for in silver and gold, he said. ‘But let us console ourselves and rely on our apologists. They will make us believe that we are the richest and most powerful nation in the Universe, and even that we have reached the greatest peaks of worldly happiness . . . and thus will they keep us in ignorance’.14

  By the late 18th century ignorance was indeed characteristic of most parts of Spain outside the cities. Typical was Villacañas in the district of Toledo, where in the 1770s Andrés de las Blancas claimed to have the ability to save young men from military service. This was because, he told his neighbours, he had made a pact with the devil to give away his son Lorenzo. Lorenzo would disappear one dusk, ostensibly to go and see his diabolic master in Toledo, and return at midnight with powders and other ingredients whose stench was so revolting that they made people’s throats gag. For a fee of between sixty and one hundred reales, Las Blancas would supply this magical concoction to his clients, making the father and the son take it while fasting. Then the hapless dupes would put their hands into a jar and recite the following rhyme:

  A demon am I,

  I am the devil’s mate,

  My hand goes down to test

  The currents of my fate.

  My payment is rewarded,

  Should freedom be my guide;

  I take the devil’s name

  and put my hand inside.15

  Such goings-on were not uncommon; it was still widely thought that the right spell could make the face of a malevolent witch appear in a barrel of water.16 When the lame beggar Ignacio Rodríguez offered to sell charms to women which would seduce the men of their choice into a sexual relationship, he managed to convince many of them that these amazing charms would only work if the women first had a sexual relationship with him; once this had been consummated, all they had to do was mix the charms with their pubic hair and their desires would be realized.17

  Some defenders of the society of which the Inquisition was the moral guardian have asserted that Spain was the ‘least superstitious society in the world’ in this period.18 In the light of such stories as these, however, and of the goings-on we saw involving beatas and exorcisms in Chapter Twelve, this seems a curious judgement to make. Much of the population undoubtedly remained extremely gullible and superstitious; but these qualities were in opposition to the movement favouring the Enlightenment in intellectual circles.

  It was, however, such circles, with their greater access to the levers of power and the ideas sweeping across the rest of Europe, who had the momentum. Thus it was that as the 18th century ended and Napoleon’s forces began to sweep across Europe, the episodes of resistance which had sporadically punctuated the history of the Inquisition finally moved into the ascendancy.

  IN ORDER TO SECURE and maintain its place at the heart of society, a persecuting institution must have popular support. As Hugh Trevor-Roper put it, ‘without the tribunes of the people, social persecution cannot be organized’.19 Once the social tensions have been defused, however, the masses slink back into their respectable lives and any blame falls on the institutions which received their silent sanction. Thus does society scapegoat scapegoating institutions for its own crimes.

  The Inquisition always was a popular movement in Portugal and Spain.20 As soon as it was established, had people not rushed to denounce converses?21 Was the Inquisition perhaps a product of the popular mentality, rather than its cause?22 In fact it was both; the Inquisition could not have arisen without popular support, but it then used the powers vested in it to shape the ideas of the people.

  Was there any way the rise of the Inquisition could have been stopped? There were of course the local factors at the beginning: the tensions between Old Christians and converses, the civil war in Castile, growing urbanization. There was much specific to Portugal and Spain, in particular the cultural mixture which was then unique in Europe. The Inquisition was, in the end, an ideological prop for developing a ‘pure’ nation and culture from ‘impurities’ – the ideological counterpart to the violence of the defeat of the Moors and the expulsion of the Jews.

  Violence, of course, was nothing new in the world. What was new, and reached beyond the boundaries of Iberia, was the institutionalization of violence. The power of the Inquisition was a symbol of the growing force of the state, a force which went with modernization. It was the beginning of totalitarianism. And yet in the worlds of the Inquisition the popular support for aggression, expansion and persecution was always in tension with a resistance.

  We have seen signs of this resistance at various points throughout our story: the converso plot to kill inquisitor Arbues in Zaragoza; the constant Aragonese complaints directed at the tribunal until the mid-16th century; the repeated attacks on officers of the Inquisition by moriscos. These were not merely isolated cases: at the zenith of protests against Inquisitor Lucero in Cordoba in September 1506 a mob stormed the Alcázar and freed all the prisoners;23 there were two popular uprisings against the Inquisition in Spain in 1591;24 and a mob stoned an inquisitor in Rio de Janeiro in 1646.25

  These pressures for and against persecution mirror the struggles in the minds of countless individuals, in all of us perhaps, between the impulse for love and the impulse for destruction. This was at the heart of the psychological drama of the Inquisition and it is not a little consolation to see that throughout its history there were people capable of allowing their good impulses to triumph. For as well as all the tales of horror and cruelty, the archives of the Inquisition are occasionally touched by softer emotions. Incarcerated in the inquisitorial jail in Malaga in 1620, William Lithgow found his spirits raised by some of the staff. One of the Moorish slaves in the inquisitorial jail hid a handful of raisins and figs in his shirtsleeves once a fortnight, beginning the night after Lithgow had been tortured; the slave was crippled in all his limbs, and had to drop the fruit out of his sleeves onto the floor, where Lithgow would lick them up one by one. Then when Lithgow fell ill an African slave tended him for four weeks, bringing food daily and secreting a bottle of wine in her pocket for him. Lithgow was so touched that he composed a poem for her, which ended, ‘For she a savage bred, yet shews more love / And humane pitty, than desert could moove’.26

  Perhaps Lithgow sensed that the Inquisition was indeed a desert of emotion – a place for mutilation and self-mutilation, and for repression. Yet away from this desert there were always members of society willing to risk their lives or reputations to protect the persecuted. In Portugal some Old Christians opened inquisitorial letters and showed them as a warning to conversos.27 Many Old Christians hid conversos who were hoping to escape.28 And we have already seen how at the time of the forced conversions of Jews in 1497 some Christians hid Jewish children rather than have them seized from their parents by the authorities.*1 Yet perhaps the most moving way of all in which Old Christians stood together with
conversos and showed that there must always be brave individuals who stand up to persecution was when some of them adopted the Jewish religion themselves, and died in the autos as a result.29

  Seville 1720

  On 25 July 1720 a thirty-six-year-old friar, Joseph Díaz Pimienta (also known as Abraham Díaz Pimienta), was garrotted before being burnt at an auto in Seville, convicted of the crime of crypto-Judaism. Pimienta had led an extraordinary life of adventure, double-dealing, weakness of mind and, in the end, great courage. What had appalled the inquisitors most about this friar was that he was an Old Christian, and he was made to suffer the ultimate penalty for his acceptance of Judaism.30

  Pimienta had spent most of his adult life in the Caribbean. He had studied grammar and morals – this last apparently without much success – in Puebla de los Angeles, the second city of Mexico, which lies deep in its fertile valley between the ancient temples of Cholula and the city of Tlaxcala. From Puebla he had gone to Cuba, where he entered a monastery in 1706 at the age of twenty-two. Something of Pimienta’s tempestuous character is revealed by the fact that he at once had violent disagreements with some of his fellow friars, and escaped the monastery two months later, spending ten months living with his parents before returning to the monastic life.

  One can discern that all was not well with Pimienta in the Cuban monastery. After a further eighteen months he asked to be able to complete his studies elsewhere, but was refused. Chafing at the restrictions of the monastic life, Pimienta fled again. First he went to Caracas. From Caracas he made his way up the Caribbean coast, through the jungles of Darien and past the former Mayan heartlands of the Yucatán, until he reached Veracruz, the Caribbean port that served Mexico City. This was where the Carvajals had arrived in the New World 150 years before, the port where Luis de Carvajal, the governor of Nuevo León, had helped to overcome the pirate John Hawkins; it was still attractive to chancers and people wishing to reinvent themselves.

  From Veracruz Pimienta climbed into the highlands around Puebla, where he forged his baptismal papers in order to obtain written permission to be a priest. Yet his life of constant travelling in the fetid lowlands of the coast, in the highlands, from one outpost of colonial barbarity to another, had not calmed his spirit. He returned from Puebla to Veracruz, and after four months went back to Havana. He was stripped of his priestly titles in Cuba by the bishop, who had learnt of his forged papers. He returned to the monastery, twice, and escaped, twice – each time he was put in the stocks on his reappearance. He was pardoned and decided to try to return to Mexico. He was short of money, so he decided to steal some mules of his mother’s. He was spotted by one of her servants, and fired on him, injuring the man. He knew that the authorities were after him, so he took ship with some English pirates who dumped him on an isolated headland on the Cuban coast. At this point Pimienta made for Trinidad, where he decided to re-enter the priesthood.

  What is one to make of this envoy of the divine? As a priest in Trinidad, he began an affair with a married woman whose husband threatened to kill him. He took to going about with pistols, and shot one mulatto after an argument. Then, with his options rapidly narrowing, he sailed from Trinidad to the nearby island of Curação, just north of the Caribbean coast of South America. This was controlled by the Dutch and home to a large Jewish population descended from the Jews of Portugal and Spain. Pimienta had decided to become a Jew; such a choice was understandable in this deeply religious person, especially as he had heard that people were given money to convert, sometimes as much as 300 pesetas.

  In Curação, however, things did not go as planned. Pimienta cooked up a story of coming from a good Jewish family and being forced to convert to Christianity by the Inquisition. He was aiming to take the money and run. The Jews, however, insisted on instructing him in their faith first, and took him to live in a village where he was taught important prayers and rituals. He was eventually accepted into the faith and given some money, but Pimienta, who appears to have found it impossible to stick at anything for more than a few months, found the ritual demands of Judaism increasingly onerous. Moving to Jamaica, he tried to throw a copy of the New Testament onto a fire but seemed to see blood coming from it, which he took as a sign to leave Judaism.

  Pimienta had clearly become a man tortured by unresolved desires. Twice he went to the synagogue in Jamaica but he recited Catholic prayers during the service. Then he heard that the Inquisition was after him again, so he escaped from the island with fifteen Indians and a Jew; something of the inner conflicts now devouring him emerges in his attempt to exorcise his frustration by flogging the Jew, forcing him to eat ham and making him recite the names of the Holy Trinity. But Pimienta was then himself turned on by the Indians with him and left for dead after a fight. He dragged himself through the jungles of the South American coast until he reached a camp, where he was seized, put in chains and taken to the nearest Spanish settlement at the Río de la Hacha. From there he was taken before the court of the Inquisition in Cartagena, where he was reconciled and deported to spend the rest of his days in Spain.

  Penniless, Pimienta sought help from the crypto-Jews of Cádiz. He wrote to the commissary of the Inquisition there that he was a Jew and would always remain one – in order, he told the commissary later, to deceive the crypto-Jews and reveal their heresy. The Inquisition arrested him. He declared that ever since his reconciliation in Cartagena he had been a good Christian. Then he changed his mind and said that he had really been a Jew ever since his time in Curação. He said that he had kept the Jewish sabbath in prison, and refrained from eating ham and any meat not killed according to Jewish law.

  For two months in the inquisitorial jail of Seville efforts were made to save Pimienta. But perhaps all he really longed for was release from his endless sufferings. He stubbornly maintained his Judaism. On 22 July he was told that he would be killed in the auto three days later, and at length, in his journey through the crowds of the streets of Seville, he repented and begged for Christian mercy. This confused and saddened Old Christian, spent by his life of adventure and confusion in America and Europe, was given the clemency of being strangled by the executioner, before his lifeless corpse was burnt and its ashes billowed up into the unyielding skies above.

  HOW COULD AN Old Christian adopt Judaism? Spanish Christians were imbued from a young age with an ideology that demonized the Jewish and Muslim faiths and made them aware that accepting the tenets of these religions could lead to their deaths. Yet Pimienta was not alone, and throughout the history of the Inquisition there were cases of Old Christians who did the same.

  Moreover, it was not just that a few Old Christians became heretics. Aspects of both Jewish and Muslim culture filtered into Iberian society and were widely adopted by the Old Christian population. Many of these practices lasted down to the 20th century. In the 1970s the Spanish researcher José Jimenéz Lozano investigated the cultural practices of people living in the rural heartlands of Castile, and found that many of the older people recalled customs which, unbeknown to them, came straight from Judaism. All fat was removed from meat when it was slaughtered, and blood spilt on the ground was covered up. Cold meals were called adafinas, the name given by Jews in Spain to their sabbath meals, which were cooked on Friday and eaten cold on Saturday. The bodies of the dead were washed, and women underwent forty days of quarantine with no sexual contact after giving birth. Most extraordinary of all, in the town of Palencia he found that bread without yeast was made during Easter, a legacy of the Jewish practice of eating unleavened bread during Passover, which occurs at the same time of year.31 His respondents all thought of themselves as devout Christians, yet, as Jiménez Lozano wrote, had they been observed by the Inquisition, they would without question have been arrested for heresy.

  These were not just isolated rural practices. The custom of cooking food in oil rather than lard, now seen as typically Iberian, is in origin a Jewish one, denounced by the 15th-century supporter of the Inquisition Andrés Bernaldez.3
2 And large numbers of people observed elements of Judaism in the 20th century in Portugal and Brazil – as many as 20,000 in Portugal, according to one researcher, even though not many of these can have been of ‘pure’ converso stock.33 Thus in spite of the best efforts of the Inquisition to excise heresy, the reverse had happened: traits of the hated heresy had spread through Iberian society, touching not only people of Islamic and Jewish descent, but the whole culture.

  This evidence is all the more extraordinary when we consider that, as we saw right at the start of our story, conversos in 15th-century Spain were not in the main active crypto-Jews and had moved away from the faith of their ancestors. Thus it was not a question of the Inquisition persecuting heretics and not even a question of the Inquisition encouraging its first targets, the conversos, to become heretical; the reality was that even some people who had little or no Jewish ancestry were pushed towards heresy by the atmosphere created by the Inquisition.

  In considering why this might be so, one is reminded of some of the people we have come across in this story: the Old Christian ladies who flocked to Erasmus’s ideas precisely because he was so attacked in some circles, or the head of the Masonic lodges in Naples who became a Mason for the same reason. Persecution and demonization can make a group more attractive. The desire to break taboos and prohibitions runs very deep in human beings, after all, as Eve showed in the Garden of Eden. Moreover, the customs of the conversos were constantly read out to the population during the inquisitorial edicts of grace which warned people what heretical customs they needed to guard against.

  It was in fact the acts of demonization and persecution which ensured that the threats to society persisted. On some unconscious level, therefore, imperial, expansionist Iberia desired the persistence of these ideas, as enemy threats against which it could define itself. This self-definition through hatred of the enemy was powerful, but it also fostered paranoia, delusion and ultimately the collapse of the very imperial edifice which the Inquisition sought so hard to sustain.