by Green, Toby
By this time the decree of abolition passed by the Cádiz Cortes in 1813 had finally come into effect in Spain. After the ejection of French troops in 1813 King Ferdinand VII had returned to Spain and reinstalled the Inquisition, briefly. But a revolution had occurred in January 1820, again centring on Cádiz, and Ferdinand had only managed to retain his throne by promising to respect the constitution passed during the earlier Cádiz Cortes. Ferdinand proceeded to release prisoners from the inquisitorial jails and to pass a decree suppressing the Inquisition on 9 March 1820,59 a decree ultimately converted into a law of abolition in 1834.
As soon as Ferdinand VII’s decision to abide by the constitution of Cádiz was published on 8 March 1820 people took matters into their own hands. In Madrid a crowd of several hundred went to the jail of the Inquisition, where they freed seven detainees, all of them political prisoners. Those freed refused to be carried aloft in triumph to their homes; a tailor offered himself for the role instead, even though he had never had anything to do with the Inquisition. Then the crowd made a bonfire of all the furniture and paperwork that they had taken from the palace.60
The scapegoating of the scapegoater could not be checked; repressed feelings and anger returned with an awesome inevitability. The jails of the Inquisition were stormed in Seville and Valencia on 10 March. In Palma, Mallorca the inquisitorial palace was destroyed.61 In Barcelona the mob arrived at 1 p.m. on 10 March outside the palace of the captain-general, demanding the declaration of the constitution. He agreed, and they made for the inquisitorial palace with the aim of putting an end to the Inquisition for good. They forced the gates of the prison, as in Madrid, and freed the prisoners. More bonfires were lit, plumes of smoke rising into the sky as the trial records and archives of the Catalonian tribunal darkened the skies overhead.62
Poor Iberia! Portugal and Spain, once the seats of the greatest empires in the world, had been reduced to ruin. Divisions ruled. The Inquisition had tried to produce a united ideology, had persecuted threats when and where it had found them, but had only managed to preside over imperial decline. It could not be said that the persecution of the enemy had contributed to prosperity or the enhancement of people’s lives. Repression had followed, and frustration. From frustration came anger, and then mutual rancour.
The stage was set for increasing bitterness. In time the divisions would slide into the terrible conflict of the Spanish Civil War and the mutual antagonism of conservatives and liberals which foreshadowed Portugal under Salazar. The enemy never vanished. The Inquisition had helped in its pursuit, yet the split which had in consequence been opened up would become wider than an ocean. Thus in Portugal and Spain had paranoia bled prosperity into decay. It was the imperial society’s intolerance and pursuit of phantom threats which had ground its own empire into the melancholy runnels of oblivion.
Endnotes
PROLOGUE
*1 The modern republic of Mexico was known as ‘Nueva España’, or New Spain, in the colonial period. In order to make things clearer, in this book I shall refer to New Spain as Mexico.
*2 The area known today as Colombia was called the New Kingdom of Granada, ‘Nuevo Reino de Granada’, in colonial times; for clarity’s sake, I shall refer to this as Colombia.
*3 Known today as Salvador, but in the colonial period more commonly as Bahia, a use I follow in this book.
*4 Founded in the early 13th century in southern France and brought to Aragon – but not Castile – in 1237.
CHAPTER ONE
*1 Over the long history of the Inquisition, many different terms were used to describe the descendants of converted Jews. For the sake of clarity, I shall describe them as conversos throughout this book, although it needs to be remembered that this is a word usually limited to 15th-century Spain, and that the term New Christian (cristão novo) was used instead in Portugal; however as in Spain New Christian referred to people of Muslim as well as Jewish descent, I shall stick to converso.
*2 Under Ferdinand III, Castilian forces took Cordoba (1236), Murcia (1241), Jaén (1246) and Seville (1248).
*3 There were attacks in Medina del Campo (1461), Toledo (1467), Jaén (1468), Valladolid (1470) and Cordoba (1473); the latter was perhaps the most serious, as the riots spread throughout the surrounding province.
*4 See here.
*5 He would become king of Aragon in 1479.
CHAPTER TWO
*1 See here.
*2 See Chapter Ten.
CHAPTER THREE
*1 Many historians dismiss Llorente’s figures out of hand. During the 19th century he suffered a withering attack from conservative historians such as Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, from which his reputation has never entirely recovered. Nevertheless, although there evidently was a large dose of ideology in Llorente’s critical history of the Inquisition, Llorente was secretary of the Suprema and had access to many records which were lost during the Napoleonic Wars (partly, it is true, because he himself stole some of them). Where records exist with which to compare his estimates, he is broadly borne out.
*2 See here.
*3 See pages here.
*4 Seehere.
*5 The Portuguese converso whose fate we followed in the last chapter.
*6 See here.
*7 Although the number of relaxations declined in the late-16th and 17th centuries, this was not the common perception. Many prisoners believed that they would be burnt right up until the day of the auto, since it was only then that their sentence would be revealed to them. This is made clear by Dellon’s (1815) account of his sentencing in Goa in the late 17th century.
CHAPTER FOUR
*1 This Luis was the uncle of the Luis the Younger we met in the previous chapter, and was called in Mexico Luis the Elder. However as he is a young man in this chapter I will simply call him Luis to avoid confusion.
*2 Today, however, malaria has been almost entirely eradicated from the islands.
*3 See Chapter Two. This was prior to their release as part of the general pardon in July of that year.
*4 See here.
*5 For more discussion of the treatment of sodomy by the Inquisition, see Chapter Twelve.
*6 See Chapter Eight for a full discussion of this idea.
*7 This is not the Melchior Cano who was an enemy of Archbishop Carranza of Toledo – see these pages.
*8 San Juan de Ulúa lies on the outskirts of the modern city of Veracruz.
*9 For a description of these events, see here.
CHAPTER FIVE
*1 Tarshish is thought to have been the biblical name for Spain, and the destination of Jonah’s ship suspected to be on the eastern coast in the region of Valencia.
*2 See here.
*3 See these pages.
*4 For a full discussion of beatas, see Chapter Twelve.
*5 See here.
*6 For a more detailed account of the relationship of washing and crypto-Islam, see these pages.
*7 See here.
*8 See here.
*9 Comentarios del Catecismo Cristiano.
CHAPTER SIX
*1 See these pages.
*2 See here.
*3 It is difficult to be precise about numbers; Miles Phillips said three died, but the trial records reveal only one execution – (Conway (ed.) (1927: 158) – but as this is one of the three mentioned by Phillips, the likelihood is that the figure of three may be accurate.
*4 See these pages.
*5 See these pages for an account of Luis the Younger.
*6 Phillip III of Spain.
*7 See pages here.
CHAPTER SEVEN
*1 This was not the case in Portugal, however, where the conversos remained the principal target of the Inquisition.
*2 See pages here.
*3 Joan being the Catalan variant of the Castilian name Juan.
*4 See page here.
*5 See pages here.
*6 See pages here.
CHAPTER EIGHT
*1 See pages here.
&
nbsp; *2 As I shall call him to distinguish him from his son.
*3 See pages here.
*4 The first centre, it will be recalled, of inquisitorial activity in Castile – See pages here.
CHAPTER NINE
*1 See page here.
*2 See page here.
*3 It was here that the provocative farce performed by Mestre Diogo, and witnessed by Luis de Carvajal’s uncle Francisco Jorge, had been performed in 1562. See above, page here.
*4 The modern town of Ziguinchor, in the Casamance region of southern Senegal.
*5 In the Iberian colonies of Africa and Latin America, slaves usually took the surname of their ethnicity, Bran being then a common term for an ethnic group found in modern Guinea-Bissau.
*6 See page here.
CHAPTER TEN
*1 See pages here. here and here.
*2 Of Spain, and Philip III of Portugal.
*3 See page here.
*4 See page here.
*5 See pages here.
*6 See page here.
*7 Then in Peru, now in Bolivia, and capital of the world’s silver trade in the colonial period.
*8 See page here.
*9 See pages here.
*10 A league is equivalent to approximately three miles.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
*1 See here.
*2 For a discussion of these conversions in the 14th and 15th centuries, see here.
*3 Later of course himself tried by the Roman Inquisition for his ideas.
*4 This is because the heroine of the festival of Purim, Esther, was herself a sort of crypto-Jew.
*5 See here.
*6 Quod Nihil Scitur in the original Latin.
*7 See here.
*8 Gran Índice Prohibitorio.
*9 An octavo page is 20 centimetres high.
*10 A folio page is 30 centimetres high.
*11 See here.
CHAPTER TWELVE
*1 In recent years the ideas of Freud have come under sustained attack from numerous quarters. Freud is accused of suppressing actual cases of sexual abuse (Masson 1990), of scientific laxity in the development of psychoanalytic theory (Eysenck: 1985 and Crews: 1993), of willfully mythologizing his own role in the development of psychoanalytic ideas (Eysenck: 1985) and of the fact that the psychoanalytic process itself fails to demonstrate any measurable success in its treatment of patients (Stannard: 1980). Thus in spite of the unquestioned influence Freud’s ideas have had, the critical strength of psychoanalysis has been shaken. I use some Freudian terminology in this book because of my own argument that, although Freud’s use of certain concepts is questionable, this does not mean that the concepts themselves are invalid. The concept of neurosis clearly does describe some phenomena which do occur. See Green (2007: Appendix A) for a fuller discussion.
*2 See here.
*3 Although there is little evidence that many of them whipped themselves – as is the implication of the English term.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
*1 See here.
*2 See here.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
*1 See here.
*2 See here.
Notes
For a list of abbreviations used in these notes see here.
PROLOGUE
1 Bethencourt (1994: 79) describes the arms of the Inquisition in the Spanish dominions. My account of this autos-da-fé is taken from Liebman’s (1974) translation of Bocanegra’s eyewitness description of the event.
2 Liebman (1974) 38.
3 Ibid. 41–5 for the description of the stage, which was 44 varas long and 28 varas wide, a vara being equivalent to 85 centimetres.
4 Ibid. 50–4.
5 Ibid. 54.
6 Ibid. 57.
7 Wiznitzer (1971b) 144–5; Wachtel (2001a) 116–20. During Sobremonte’s trial, his son recited a Jewish prayer that Sobremonte had taught him, and it emerged that he was seen as a rabbi in Mexico and had celebrated his marriage to Marí Gomez according to Jewish law. Sobremonte had been reconciled by the Mexican Inquisition in 1625; his second offence permitted the sentence of relaxation – death – to be pronounced. His trial is published in BAGN (1935–7) Vols 6–8.
8 Liebman (1974) 62–3.
9 Ibid. 65.
10 Ibid. 63.
11 Ibid. 64.
12 Ibid. 39.
13 Ibid. 24.
14 Ibid. 24–5.
15 AGI, Santa Fe 228, Expediente 63.
16 AGI, Santa Fe 228, Expediente 81A, nos 6–7, 9.
17 Ibid. nos 12, 18; Mañozca threatened these poor folk with the galleys and loss of office if they did not back down.
18 Ibid. no. 19.
19 Ibid. no. 30.
20 Ibid. no. 33.
21 The appointment was made in 1623 – see Lea (1908) 476.
22 AGI, Quito, Expediente 20A, no. 5.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid. no. 8.
25 Toribio Medina (1887) Vol. 1, 191.
26 Liebman (1970) 57. See Wachtel (2001a: 134–9) for an analysis of how there was an elision between the idea of some Jewish rituals and making love in the language of the Mexican crypto-Jews.
27 Pérez Canto (1984) 1134.
28 Liebman (1970) 64: ‘Quem canta, seu mal espanta;/Quem chora, seu mal aumenta:/Eu canto para espalhar/a paixão que me attormenta’. The translation is my own.
29 Palmer (1976) 63.
30 Chinchilla Aguilar (1952) 227.
31 PV, 272.
32 Toribio de Medina (1890) Vol. 1, 283.
33 Hakluyt (1600) 727.
34 AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1028, 160r–164r. During his trial Drake always protested that he had realized, on arriving at Asunción (and falling into the hands of the Spanish), that he wanted to be a Catholic. The documents do not relate what happened after his release from the monastery, though the likelihood is that he remained in Peru as the Inquisition in America often placed bans on travel for former reconciliados from Protestant countries who might be tempted to repeat their former errors.
35 Blázquez Miguel (1986b) 83.
36 Ibid.
37 Blázquez Miguel (1990) 28.
38 Blázquez Miguel (1986b) 64.
39 Blázquez Miguel (1990) 29–30.
40 Contreras and Henningsen (1986) 113–114; Bethencourt (1994) 365.
41 García Cárcel and Moreno Martínez (2000) 87.
42 Bethencourt (1994) 365.
43 Marques (1972) 292, 399, 402.
44 Mario Cohen (2000) 56.
45 Paiva (1997) 189.
46 Kinder (1997) 61–6.
47 Ruiz de Pablos (ed.) (1997).
48 An excellent statement of this view is Pinta Llorente (1953–8) Vol. 2, 61.
49 Trevor-Roper (1984) 113; Paiva (1997) 347–9.
50 Rawlings (2006) 2.
51 Sierra Corella (1947) 17.
52 See Tomás y Valiente’s (1990) introduction to the second edition of his book on torture, originally published in 1973 during the Francoist era.
53 This is how to interpret Pinta Llorente’s blaming of the decline of Spain in the 18th century on university lecturers (1961: 123–4) or his statement that ‘today we know absolutely the paternal and merciful spirit which almost always accompanied the actions and procedures of the Spanish Inquisition. He who puts the honour and glory of God, and the maintenance of a moral order, above all else . . . has to admit the excellence of this national institution’ (81).
54 This is a curious gap in the historiography of the Inquisition. While amongst Portuguese and Spanish authors it is understandable that there should be a focus on their own national histories, authors in English have concentrated on Spain: Lea (1906–7) devoted a chapter of his work on Spain to Portugal, as if it was some kind of Spanish province, while both Kamen (1965, 1997) and Monter (1990) looked only at Spain. The best comparative work of the Spanish, Portuguese and Roman tribunals is Bethencourt (1994).
55 Thus the protocol of the auto in Mexico described in this chapter can be compared to that of
the auto in Évora in 1623 (Mendonça and Moreira (1980: 135–40)); they can be seen to be very similar, although the standards of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal were different (Ibid. 134).
56 Almeida (1968) Vol. 2, 401.
57 These points of similarity are drawn out by Vainfas (1989) 190.
58 Lea (1963) 128.
59 Kagan and Dyer (2004) 11.
60 These acts as breaks with the past are cited by Bethencourt (1994) 22.
61 Lea (1906), Vol. 1, 163.
62 Almeida (1968) Vol. 2, 387–9, 403, 414.
63 Llorca (1949) 61, 68; García Cárcel and Moreno Martínez (2000) 33–4. Persecution under the the later Italian Inquisition was also far less exacting than in Portugal and Spain. Only 2–3 per cent of prisoners were tortured in Venice in the 16th century, far less than was the case at that time under Portuguese or Spanish tribunals. Fewer people were executed under the Inquisition in Italy in the 16th century than during the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in England between the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor (Grendler (1977) 52–8).
64 García Mercadal (ed.) (1999) Vol. 2, 354, 371.
65 AHN, Inquisición, Libro 937, folio 14r.
66 This view is in opposition to that of some scholars such as Dedieu (1989: 57) and Domínguez Ortiz (1993: 26) who stress that the tribunal was ecclesiastical. While of course the interests of most of its officers were overwhelmingly theological in direction, there can be no doubt that in the wider political context the separation of the Iberian tribunals from Rome made them into fundamentally political institutions.
67 F. Ruiz (1987) 40–1.
68 AHN, Inquisición, Legajo 2022, Expediente 24, folio 4r: ‘no es sino mierda y mas mierda’.
69 This is in spite of the destruction across Spain of large numbers of documents during the Napoleonic Wars and the ensuing liberal revolution, which meant that the archives of the tribunals of Cordoba, Granada and Seville were almost completely destroyed (García Fuentes (1981) xi).