by Henry Kamen
In community celebrations, all three faiths participated. In Murcia, Muslim musicians and jugglers were an integral part of Christian religious celebrations. In Tarazona (Aragon) “almost all the musicians who played in the Corpus Christi procession were Muslims.”14 In times of crisis the faiths necessarily collaborated. In 1470 in the town of Uclés, “a year of great drought, there were many processions of Christians as well as of Muslims and Jews, to pray for water.”15 In such a community, there were some who saw no harm in participating with other faiths. “Hernán Sánchez Castro,” who was denounced for it twenty years later in Uclés, “set out from the church together with other Christians in the procession, and when they reached the square where the Jews were with the Torah he joined the procession of the Jews with their Torah and left the procession of the Christians.” Co-acceptance of the communities extended to acts of charity. Diego González remembered that in Huete in the 1470s, when he was a poor orphan, as a Christian he received alms from “both Jews and Muslims, for we used to beg for alms from all of them, and received help from them as we did from the Christians.” The kindness he received from Jews, indeed, encouraged him to pick up a smattering of Hebrew from them. It also led him subsequently to assert that “the Jew can find salvation in his own faith just as the Christian can in his.”16 There was, of course, always another side to the coexistence. It was in Uclés in 1491 that a number of Jewish citizens voluntarily gave testimony against Christians of Jewish origin. And Diego González, twenty years later when he had become a priest, was arrested for his pro-Jewish tendencies and burnt as a heretic.
We can be certain of one thing. Spain was not, as often imagined, a society dominated exclusively by zealots. In the Mediterranean the confrontation of cultures was more constant than in northern Europe, but so also was the consciousness of living together in a multiple society. Jews had the advantage of community solidarity, but under pressure from other cultures they also suffered the disadvantage of internal dissent over belief.17 They were, it has been argued, a Mediterranean people with the corresponding openness of perspective to be found anywhere in the countries of the inland sea.18 The three faiths had coexisted long enough for many people to accept a certain validity for all of them. There were cases, common enough in European history, of Jews like Samuel Pallache, born in Fez in 1550 of a family that had lived in Spain before the expulsions of 1492, who made his career in many lands, serving different religions, before he finally settled in Amsterdam.19
This way of thinking was given added force, not just in Spain but throughout the Mediterranean, by the fact that a significant sector of people conformed outwardly to the official faith but retained an inward commitment to their own traditional religion (see chapter 7). Throughout the lands where Muslims ruled, Christians and Jews converted to the official religion because it offered advancement, but continued to practice their old faith in secret. There were crypto-Christians in Cyprus and Crete, Albania and Bosnia, just as there would be crypto-Muslims later under Christian rule.20 Even when there was little compulsion, people converted: in thirteenth-century Aragon there were cases of Muslims converting to Judaism and Jews converting to Islam.21 On her travels through the Balkans in the year 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu met Albanians who, “living between Christians and Mahometans and not being skill’d in controversie, declare that they are utterly unable to judge which Religion is best; but to be certain of not entirely rejecting the Truth, they very prudently follow both, and go to the Mosque on Fridays and the Church on Sundays.”22 Echoes of this attitude could be found anywhere in the Mediterranean. A priest in Soria in 1490 commented that “there are three faiths, and I don’t know which is the best,” but went on to affirm that “I think that everyone can be saved in his own faith.”23 “Who knows which is the better religion,” a Christian of Castile asked in 1501, “ours or those of the Muslims and the Jews?”24
The religions had to cope not just with oppression from the dominant faith but also with tension between the minority cultures. Muslims and Jews might dance together in the feasts of Christians, but at the same time they took the opportunity to attack each other. In fourteenth-century Aragon, the minorities often came to blows because they disputed precedence or because they felt they had suffered a slight. In special cases, such as the traditional Christian ritual in Holy Week of “killing Jews,” during which Christians were encouraged to commit acts of real or symbolic violence against Jews,25 the Muslims gladly took part in the proceedings.26
Though there were confusions of belief in the peninsula, there seems, curiously, to have been no formal heresy in late medieval times, not even among Christians. The theologians gradually began to elaborate and define what they meant by “heresy” (see chapter 3) for there were certainly defects to identify in a Spain that appeared not to be convincingly Christian. In the mid-sixteenth century a prominent friar, Felipe de Meneses, lamented the ignorance and unbelief he had found throughout Castile, “not only in small hamlets and villages but even in cities and populous towns.” “Out of three hundred residents,” he affirmed, “you will find barely thirty who know what any ordinary Christian is obliged to know.”27 In 1529 an influential book lamented that “superstitions and witchcraft in these times are widespread in our Spain,” and a bishop reported that people in his diocese “know nothing about Christianity.” Religious practice among Christians was a free mixture of community traditions, superstitious folklore and imprecise dogmatic beliefs.28 Some writers went so far as to categorize unofficial and popular religious practices as diabolic magic. It was a situation that Church leaders before the fifteenth century did very little to remedy.29
Everyday religion among Christians continued to embrace an immense range of cultural and devotional options. Throughout Spain, among people of all racial and religious antecedents, it was possible to find expressions of disbelief in an afterlife, like the statements made time and again by laity and even by clergy to the effect that “nothing exists beyond being born and dying.”30 The priest who made this last affirmation, around the year 1500, went on to state that the best one could hope for in this life was to “have a nice woman friend and eat well.” “There is no heaven and hell,” a man stated in 1495 in a village near Soria, “that is invented to frighten little boys.”31 It is not surprising to find persons like Alvaro de Lillo maintaining in 1524 that “we are born and die and nothing more,” or María de la Mota claiming that “I’ll look after myself in this world and you’ll not see me badly off in the next.”32 Both were tried by the Inquisition of Cuenca. There are many parallels to the cases of the Catalan peasant who asserted in 1539 that “there is no heaven, purgatory or hell; at the end we all have to end up in the same place, the bad will go to the same place as the good and the good will go to the same place as the bad”; or of the other who stated in 1593 that “he does not believe in heaven or hell, and God feeds the Muslims and heretics just the same as he feeds the Christians.”33
Statements like these could be found throughout the peninsula, as we know from the testimony presented to the Inquisition in many areas. But the mere fact that the phrases were denounced by neighbors suggests that they were neither current nor commonly acceptable, and it is unwise to suppose that popular skepticism flourished. We can even at times agree with the inquisitors themselves, whose opinion was that such statements reflected nothing more than rusticity. The town of Teruel was, and still is, a remote place. It was there in 1484 that Jaime Martinez was reported to them for stating: “Happiness and success can be found only in this world, in the next world there is no heaven or hell. God is just a tree: in summer he puts out leaves, in the winter he shakes them off and they fall. That is how God makes and unmakes us people.”34 The issue, as those who have looked at the documents will probably agree, can be approached in various ways but remains difficult to fit into neat categories of belief and unbelief.35
When Christian warriors battled against Muslims in earlier epochs, they shouted their convictions as passionatel
y as team supporters would do today in a sports event. At home, or in the inn, or working in the fields, their passion would not have been so aggressive. The bulk of surviving documentation gives us some key to this dual outlook, only, however, among Christians. In Soria in 1487, at a time when the final conquest of Granada was well under way, a resident commented that “the king is off to drive the Muslims out, when they haven’t done him any harm.”36 “The Muslim can be saved in his faith just as the Christian can in his,”37 another is reported to have said. The inquisitors in 1490 in Cuenca were informed of a Christian who claimed that “the good Jew and the good Muslim can, if they act correctly, go to heaven just like the good Christian.”38 There is little or nothing to tell us how Jews and Muslims thought, but there is every probability that they also accepted the need to moderate their attitude when carrying out their daily duties alongside other faiths in the Mediterranean.
The examples serve to emphasize that the idea of the Inquisition being the creation of a fanatically Catholic society has no relation to reality. Spaniards were just as split between different religious options as they were between the various cultures of the regions of the peninsula. In the Middle Ages, Christian mercenary soldiers served Muslim commanders39 just as Muslim mercenaries served under Christians. Christians who wished to go further and turn their backs on their own society often did so quite simply by embracing Islam. From the later Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, an impressive number of Spanish Christians changed (or were accused of changing) their faith in this way (chapter 7). The kingdom of Granada, in the same way, had a small community of renegade Christians who adopted the Islamic religion. Consequently, in Christian Spain it was not uncommon to find many people who expressed pro-Muslim sentiments. In 1486 the Inquisition of Saragossa tried a Christian “for saying that he was a Muslim, and for praying in the mosque like a Muslim.”40 There are scores of similar cases in the documents.
Long after the epoch of multiple faiths in the peninsula had passed, many Spaniards retained at the back of their minds a feeling that their differences were not divisive. In the Granada countryside in the 1620s, a woman of Muslim origin felt that “the Muslim can be saved in his faith as the Jew can in his,” a Christian peasant felt that “everyone can find salvation in his own faith,” and another affirmed that “Jews who observe their law can be saved.”41 The attitude was frequent enough to be ordinary, and could be found in every corner of Spain and every inlet of the Mediterranean, so much so that we can almost regard it as a commonplace of rural philosophy in southern Europe. When the north Italian miller Menocchio was pressed in 1584 by an Italian inquisitor on the subject of which was the true religion, he answered: “God the father has various children whom he loves, such as Christians, Turks and Jews, and to each of them he has given the will to live by his own law, and we do not know which is the right one.”42 Do the opinions reflect indifference, or maybe a feeling of tolerance? Scholars today read the lesson in varying ways.43 As the Inquisition shifted its attention from former Jews, it was to find that sentiments like these were common among ordinary Christians as well. Indeed, what was particularly alarming was not simply that true religion may have been perverted by heresy, but that in many parts of Spain it could be doubted whether there was any true religion at all, if villagers had respect neither for religion nor for its ministers. “I care nothing for the gospels,” stated a resident of Cuenca in 1490, and another said, “I swear to God it’s a fraud, from the pope to the cope!”44 A local Jewish doctor in Soria in 1491 testified of a neighbor whose religion was under suspicion that “he was neither Christian nor Jew.”45
The remarkable absence of formal “heresy” in late medieval Spain may in part have been a consequence of its multiple cultures. The three faiths, even while respecting each other, attempted to maintain in some measure the purity of their own ideology. In times of crisis, as with the rabbis in 1492 or the Muslim alfaquis in 1609, they clung desperately to the uniqueness of their own truth. Christianity, for its part, remained so untarnished by formal heresy that the papal Inquisition, active in regions of France, Germany and Italy, was never deemed necessary in Castile and made only a token appearance in medieval Aragon. The virtual absence of organized heresy meant that though defections to other faiths were severely punished in Christian law, no systematic machinery was ever brought into existence to deal with nonbelievers or with those forced converts who had shaky belief. For decades, society continued to put up with them, and the policy of burning practiced elsewhere in Europe was little known in Spain.
The practice of “tolerance,” in the sense of allowing people to dissent, did not of course exist in any part of Christian Europe in the 1500s. It came into being only centuries later, when some states conceded legal rights to religious minorities. But frontier societies having contact with other cultures, as in the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe, were in a special category. Spain, like them, was a plural (and therefore in some sense forbearing) society long before toleration became a philosophical issue. The same was true of Transylvania and Poland. “There is nothing new about diversity of religion in Poland,” a Polish Lutheran stated in 1592. “In addition to the Greek Christians among us, pagans and Jews have been known for a long time, and faiths other than Roman Catholic have existed for centuries.”46 It was therefore commonplace, within that plural context, to have toleration without a theory of toleration, because there were legal guarantees for each faith.47 The protection given to the aljamas by Christian lords was by nature contractual: in return for protection, the Muslims and Jews paid taxes. Because there was no unitary political authority in Spain, the nobles felt free to allow their Muslims to observe their own cultural customs long after the Spanish crown had officially abolished the legal existence of Islam (in 1500 in Castile, in 1526 in the crown of Aragon). The development can be seen as inherent in the nature of pre-modern political systems in Europe. Before the advent of the modern (“nation”) state, small autonomous cultural groups could exist without being subjected to persecution, thanks to the protection of local authorities. The coming of the centralizing state, in post-Reformation Europe, removed that protection and aggravated intolerance.
Even while Christians and Muslims killed each other for political or economic reasons, they accepted coexistence within the same territory. Toleration was socially possible but not ideologically acceptable: it was a feature that Spain shared with other European states possessing cultural minorities. When traveling from one territory to another, one always had to be careful about observing the local laws. A French Capuchin friar recognized this in 1593 when apologizing for speaking too freely in Barcelona. “I spoke,” he explained to the inquisitors, “with the liberty of conscience that the kings have granted in France, and did not understand that in Spain one could not make use of this liberty.”48
There were Spanish Christians who, even in early modern times, disapproved of extreme measures against dissidence. They were not “progressives” but simply part of a European tradition stretching back into medieval times. Eminent persons at the court of Isabella of Castile, such as her secretary Hernando del Pulgar and her confessor Hernando de Talavera, expressed their opposition to religious coercion and the use of the death penalty. Alonso de Virués, humanist and bishop, subsequently (in 1542) criticized intolerance and those “who spare neither prison nor knout nor chains nor the axe; for such is the effect of these horrible means, that the torments they inflict on the body can never change the disposition of the soul.”49 Philip II’s chaplain and court preacher Luis de Granada criticized (in 1582) those Spaniards who “through misdirected zeal for the faith, believe that they commit no sin when they do ill and harm to those who are not of the faith, whether Muslims or Jews or heretics or Gentiles.”50 The Jesuit Juan de Mariana, who like Luis de Granada happened to be a supporter of the Inquisition, criticized both forced conversion51 and racial discrimination. Their voices were no doubt few, and did not reflect a widespread opinion, but when added to the testi
monies gathered from among ordinary people they demonstrate that Spain was far from being the single-minded and monolithic champion of orthodoxy that it was at one time thought to be.
Even among ordinary people, there were voices opposed to violence in religion. In 1545 the theologian and subsequent confessor of Philip II, Alfonso de Castro, traveled to his home town of Zamora and was startled to hear people there criticizing Charles V’s wars against the Protestants in Germany: “I heard many and various people, who prided themselves on being faithful Catholics, criticizing the Emperor’s wars as wrong and irreligious, and saying that it was not Christian to go to war against heretics, who should be conquered not with arms but with reasoning.”52
In the penumbra of the three great faiths there were, it is true, a number of those who, whether through the indifferentism born of coexistence or the cynicism born of persecution, seem to have had no active belief in formal religion. Without being able to penetrate their private lives, it is difficult to offer an explanation of their attitudes, if indeed we can accept what they said as authentic. Many can be identified through surviving documentation.53 But were they in any sense unbelievers or atheists? The question of whether “unbelief” was in any way meaningful in pre-industrial Europe was first explored magisterially by Lucien Febvre,54 but subsequent scholars have not reached agreement on the issue. At most, they have unearthed individual cases, scattered through the paperwork of Church tribunals in Spain and Italy, of unusual statements and attitudes, based normally on traditional folklore. Without venturing further into the problem of “unbelief,” one may certainly agree that those who had attitudes of “religious tolerance, relativism, universalism or skepticism” were a recognizable phenomenon in pre-industrial society.55 They existed throughout the Mediterranean world, not simply in Spain but also in Portugal, Italy and North Africa, because it was the vastness of that world, with its inland sea, that opened out alternative perspectives.