The Spanish Inquisition

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by Henry Kamen




  THE SPANISH INQUISITION

  THE SPANISH INQUISITION

  A Historical Revision

  FOURTH EDITION

  Henry Kamen

  Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.

  Fourth edition copyright © 2014 by Henry Kamen. All rights reserved.

  First edition published 1965 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson as The Spanish Inquisition. Second edition published 1985 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson as Inquisition and Society in Spain. Third edition published 1998 by Yale University Press as The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. Fourth edition 2014.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Set in Electra and Trajan type by Integrated Publishing Solutions.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kamen, Henry.

  The Spanish Inquisition / Henry Kamen. — Fourth Edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-18051-0 (pbk.)

  1. Inquisition—Spain. 2. Spain—Church history. I. Title.

  BX1735.K312 2014

  272'.20946—dc23 2013046026

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  What power is there like that of this holy tribunal? Non est potestas super terram, quae comparetur ei; it alone governs, disposes, annuls and orders as it wishes, and nobody dares say to it, Cur ista facis?

  —FRAY TOMÁS RAMÓN, OP, BARCELONA, 1619

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  ONE Faith and Doubt in the Mediterranean

  TWO The Great Dispersion

  THREE The Coming of the Inquisition

  FOUR An Enduring Crisis

  FIVE Excluding the Reformation

  SIX The Impact on Literature and Science

  SEVEN The End of Morisco Spain

  EIGHT The Politics of Heresy

  NINE Crime and Punishment

  TEN The Image and Reality of Power

  ELEVEN Gender, Sexuality and Witchcraft

  TWELVE Race Purity and Its Critics

  THIRTEEN The Religion of the People

  FOURTEEN Twilight of the Holy Office

  FIFTEEN Inventing the Inquisition

  Timeline: Chronology of the Inquisition

  List of Abbreviations

  Notes

  Glossary

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations follow page 260

  PREFACE

  Quite some time ago, I wrote an exploratory study of the Spanish Inquisition that became a best seller in ten languages. Thanks in part to new perspectives opened up since then by scholars, I was able to prepare subsequent editions, the last one sixteen years ago. The present volume follows the same layout of material but is a substantially fresh work that relies inevitably on previous research (both mine and that of others) and in which I arrive at somewhat different conclusions, as the reader will see.

  Very many volumes have been written about the Inquisition, among them popular histories, novels and essays, some with a tendency to sensationalism and an emphasis on deaths, tortures, tyranny and fear. These characteristics certainly existed. But how prevalent were they? And were they uniquely Spanish, unmatched by other peoples in other times? Modern scholarship has attempted to look at these questions. The classic work on the Spanish Inquisition is that of the American scholar Henry Charles Lea (1906–8), available online and still the most reliable history. Like leading European historians of his day, Lea looked for a key to an explanation in laws and institutions. Later scholars adopted other approaches. An organization that survived for over three centuries and exercised power in several continents is clearly amenable to different ways of interpreting its trajectory.

  Problems of interpretation arise with the very documents that are the basis of research. Can we trust them? A few scholars have thrown the cat among the pigeons by declaring them to be unreliable. There are also students of literature who avoid historical documents because they prefer a subjective interlinear reading of literary texts. On the other side are those who by contrast put their full confidence in Inquisition sources, trusting in the possibility of writing a truthful study of its activities through the perspective of the inquisitors themselves. Most working historians, like myself, accept these approaches only in part and with many reservations. What cannot be denied, for example, is that the original sources, like all police-type documentation, present problems of tainted evidence. During its lifetime the Holy Office kept its papers secret; now that they are freely available they are ironically being used at times to support the very image that the Holy Office wished for itself: an institution backed solidly by state power, capable of instilling terror in the population, summoning the masses to huge rallies, controlling what people did, believed, read and even thought. It is an image found not only in popular books but even in scholarly ones, and it can seriously impede the advance towards a clearer understanding of the impact of security organizations on the society they attempt to police.

  The present account prefers not to see the Inquisition as the only player in the dramas in which it participated. It accordingly tries not only to focus on the tribunal, which had a smaller part in religion and politics than we tend to think, but attempts to place it within the broader perspective of what other entities—Church, state and people—were doing. At the same time, it modifies the notion of a uniquely “Spanish” phenomenon, since much that went on in the peninsula was the common experience also of southern Europe and in particular of Italy, whose Inquisition has been very well studied in recent years. Even within the peninsula it is significant that many Spaniards looked on the Inquisition not as theirs but as an alien (that is, Castilian) tribunal.

  This book obviously owes a great deal to scholars whose work has deepened our knowledge of the Holy Office. Even our disagreements have helped, by obliging me to look for evidence to support my own approach. Ongoing debates about approaches to and interpretations of the tribunal have been impossible to fit into the body of the text, and I have frequently relegated comments to the endnotes, which contain more archival information and references than previous editions. The quantity of material has obliged me to exclude detailed treatment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Inquisition was virtually inert.

  I have tried to arrive at a portrait of the tribunal in its peninsular context more consistent with what we now know, but in doing so I may be depriving readers of the familiar images of terror, flames and tyranny they may prefer to see, and many who prefer moral outrage to dictate their view of the past will assuredly be disappointed. Perhaps that is just as well. A recent writer on the theme in the New Yorker has lamented that historians now study the Inquisition “without sufficient imagination,” not giving enough emphasis to pain and suffering. The yearning for yet more imaginative fiction is misplaced. Obsessive focus on something terrible called “inquisition” has often made us conjure up a historical Godzilla that fails to coincide with truth or reality. In fixing all our sights, moreover, on imagined happenings in the past, we run the risk not only of distor
ting what has been but also of failing to recognize the certainly more powerful inquisitions that still threaten us today. Coercion was no monopoly of Mediterranean culture, nor in our times does it any longer need religion or ideology to drive it. As Cullen Murphy comments in his broad-ranging new book, God’s Jury, “an inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.”

  Lake Oconee, Georgia, 2013

  THE SPANISH INQUISITION

  1

  FAITH AND DOUBT IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

  Asked if he believed in God, he said Yes, and asked what it meant to believe in God, he answered that it meant good food, good drink and getting up at ten o’clock.

  —A TEXTILE WORKER OF REUS, CATALONIA, 1632

  In the fifteenth century the Iberian peninsula remained on the fringe of Europe, a subcontinent that had been visited by the Phoenicians and Greeks, then overrun by the Romans and the Arabs. Almost unobtrusive, its position between two great seas augured well for its future role as a gateway to undiscovered worlds. In the west it took in Portugal, a small but expanding society of under a million people, their energies directed to the sea and the first fruits of trade and colonization in Asia. In the south, al-Andalus: a society of half a million farmers and silk producers, Muslim in religion, proud remnants of a once-dominant culture. To the center and north: a Christian Spain of some 6 million souls, divided politically into the crown of Castile (with two-thirds of the territory of the peninsula and three-quarters of the population) and the crown of Aragon (made up of the realms of Valencia, Aragon and Catalonia). Travelers, traders and pilgrims to the medieval shrines were familiar with the exotic symbiosis of images in the peninsula: Romanesque churches and the splendid Gothic cathedral in Burgos, medieval synagogues in Toledo, the cool silence of the great mosque in Córdoba and the majesty of the Alhambra in Granada.

  Christian Spain was not always sure of its own survival. For a while in the Middle Ages, it seemed as if half of Western Europe would go Muslim. Muslim settlers and caliphs already dominated the eastern Mediterranean, including the cities of Jerusalem and Alexandria and what remained of Christian power in Constantinople. They extended their activities to the western seas, passing by way of the chief islands of Greece and the coasts of Africa, sacking the city of Rome and building castles on the coasts of Italy and Provence. In the tenth century the caliphate of al-Andalus was master of most of the Iberian peninsula, and at the end of the century the great conqueror al-Mansur sacked León and Santiago and captured Barcelona. Spanish lands remained in places under Muslim control for nearly seven centuries, with the consequence that the Islamic peoples were no less a part of Spain than the Christian and Jewish populations. They intermarried with them, and exchanged ideas and languages, so that the three religions developed side by side within the Christian and Muslim kingdoms.

  For long periods, close contact between three faiths—Christians, Muslims and Jews—encouraged familiarity between cultures. Christians lived under Muslim rule (as Mozárabes) and Muslims under Christian rule (as Mudéjares): as minorities they inevitably suffered social disadvantages, and there were times under Muslim rule when the Christian Mozárabes were all but eliminated. The laws observed by each community were not always stringently exclusive, and made allowances for diversity. Even military alliances were often made regardless of religion. When Christians went to war against the Muslims, it might be (a thirteenth-century writer argued) “neither because of the law [of Mohammed] nor because of the sect that they hold to,”1 but because of conflict over land. Political links based on agreement between Christians and Muslims were exemplified by the most famous military hero of the time, the Cid (Arabic sayyid, lord). Celebrated in the Poem of the Cid, written about 1140, his real name was Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a Castilian noble who in about 1081 transferred his services from the Christians to the Muslim ruler of Saragossa and, after several campaigns, ended his career as independent ruler of the Muslim city of Valencia, which he captured in 1094. Despite his identification with the Muslims, he came to be looked upon by Christians as their ideal warrior.2

  Christians had Muslims as vassals, and Muslims had Christians; both, similarly, took Jews under their wing. St. Ferdinand, king of Castile from 1230 to 1252, called himself “king of the three religions,” a singular claim in an increasingly intolerant age: it was the very period that saw the birth in Europe of the medieval papal Inquisition (c. 1232). The notion of a specifically religious crusade was largely absent from military campaigns in the peninsula, where it was possible for a Catalan philosopher, Ramón Llull (d. 1315), to compose a dialogue in Arabic in which the three characters were a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew. In the later stages of the wars between Christians and Muslims, echoes of coexistence remained but the reality of conflict was more aggressive. Christians cultivated the myth of the apostle St. James (Santiago), whose body was alleged to have been discovered at Compostela; thereafter Santiago “Matamoros” (the Moor-slayer) became a national patron saint. In al-Andalus, further invasions of militant Muslims from North Africa—the Almorávides in the late eleventh century; the Almohads in the late twelfth—gave added force to religious elements in the struggle against Christians.

  Romans had applied the general term Hispania to all the regions of the peninsula, and in the same way there was imprecision about the use of the word “Spain,” habitually used when explaining peninsular matters to foreigners. Spain included a variety of different political and cultural systems, with a “religion” that consisted less in a fixed structure of beliefs than in the package of practices and attitudes laid down by regional society. The variety had been there for centuries. People tended to accept the neighbors they had known for generations, especially if they shared the same lord and ruler. At both social and personal level, this could mean a series of understandings between Muslim and Christian villages, or between Christian and Jewish neighbors. Communities lived side by side and shared many aspects of language, culture, food and dress, consciously borrowing each other’s outlook and ideas.

  When we move our focus further out, we can see that the experience of Spain was by no means unique. Along much of the Mediterranean coastline—in North Africa, Egypt and Palestine, the Balkans—the ubiquity of Muslim expansion by both land and sea produced a network of settlements where Christians and Muslims had to live together, often with small groups of Jews. The global relationship was usually defined by conflict, which meant that through the generations thousands of men were constantly traveling to explore and fight in the seas and lands occupied by their principal rivals. War was the continual background of the landscape depicted by the emigrant al-Hasan al-Wazzan in his Description of Africa, first published in Christian Europe in 1550.3 Born in Granada, in 1492 he passed over into Morocco and continued extensive travels through the Mediterranean, spending nine years in Italy as a Christian. His activities are a perfect example of the contacts and culture shared between the many residents of the inland sea.

  A constant by-product of warfare was the proliferation of slaves, tens of thousands of them from all faiths, who spent years in strange lands and then (if fortunate) were ransomed and brought home, where they communicated their experiences and their ideas to their neighbors. A prime center for the ransoming of slaves was Algiers, where people of all nations and faiths rubbed shoulders and exchanged experiences.4 The example of Catalan Spain was notable: in medieval times its rulers made their mark on the western Mediterranean, southern Italy, and the lands that stretched as far as Greece. Barcelona was a city, says a chronicler, “visited by merchants from Italy and all over the Mediterranean”; it was also a notable center for the ransom of slaves.

  The coastal peoples naturally traded, and came to know cultures that were not their own; in some cases, as in medieval Sicily, farmers and traders of different faiths worked together. More immediately, they often had to accept and therefore understand the cultures that from time to time dominated their own homelands. I
n Spain as in other Mediterranean civilizations, on a scale that was seldom paralleled in northern Europe,5 elements of how other people thought and behaved would inevitably filter through. At one and the same time, communities would preserve their traditional, restricted horizons, but individuals might be aware of external attitudes with which they had come into contact.

  Within that social sharing, throughout the inland sea there were permanent elements of conflict, arising out of the different political, economic and religious status of each faith. Where cultural groups were a minority they accepted fully that there was a persistent dark side to the picture. Time and again, at moments when tensions might be at a peak, there were sudden social explosions: riots and massacres took their toll of lives, property and places of worship. When the violence occurred on a small scale, it could be seen as “controlled and stabilizing,”6 because it encouraged people to maintain normality.7 The capacity of minorities to put up with sporadic repression and survive well into early modern times under inequitable conditions was based on a long apprenticeship.

  It is unlikely that outbreaks of violence were motivated by the wish to target “despised” minorities, for in much of the Mediterranean the Jews and Muslims were far from being “despised.” On the contrary, in good times they enjoyed social autonomy, occupied relevant status and enjoyed the protection not only of kings and nobles but also of their host communities. Even more remarkably, in the Muslim Mediterranean, as in the island of Crete,8 there were exceptional situations where Christians intermarried with Muslims and enjoyed equal rights in the courts.

  The communities of Christians, Jews and Muslims in Spain never lived together on the same terms, and their coexistence9 was always a relationship between unequals.10 Within that inequality, the minorities played their roles while attempting to avoid conflicts. The documents give remarkable glimpses of how, at specific moments, they came together: Muslims at Avila in 1474 attending the cathedral celebrations that proclaimed Isabella as queen, a guild in Segovia stating in writing that Muslims and Christians were equally members of the guild, Muslim ambassadors from Granada taking part in public jousts in Valencia and Saragossa.11 In fifteenth-century Murcia,12 the Muslims were an indispensable fund of labor in both town and country, and as such were protected by municipal laws. The Jews, for their part, made an essential contribution as artisans and small producers in leather, jewelry and textiles. They were also important in tax administration and in medicine. In theory, both minorities were restricted to specified areas of the towns they lived in. In practice, they preferred to live together and the laws on separation were seldom enforced. In Valladolid at the same period, the Muslims increased in number and importance, chose their residence freely, owned houses, lands and vineyards.13 Though unequal in rights, the Valladolid Muslims were not marginalized. The tolerability of coexistence paved the way for their mass conversion in 1502.

 

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