The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  Pulgar reports that within the same converso household some members might be sincere Christians and others active Jews. His experience was that many “lived neither in one law nor the other,” retaining key Jewish customs while practicing formal Christianity. None of this altered the essentially Christian culture of most conversos. The syncretic nature of much of their religious practice left their faith unaffected. Like the Malabar and Chinese Christians of later centuries, who combined aspects of hereditary culture with their faith, they were believing Christians and proud of it.46 The converso family of the bishop of Segovia, Diego Arias Dávila (1436–97), is a case in point. His still-Jewish sister lived in the household. Members of the family attended weddings in the Jewish quarter, and occasionally gave gifts to the synagogue.47 In Saragossa in the 1480s, Jews and Christians ate in each other’s homes despite official disapproval. “Jews ate in converso homes as freely as conversos ate in the Jewish quarter.”48

  Those among the Christians who criticized the conversos were their enemies. From the anti-Jewish propaganda of the 1440s to the polemics of half a century later, their anti-converso theme was constant. All conversos, went the refrain, are secret Jews. All of them are a threat to our society and our religion. It was alleged that they continued to practice the Jewish rites both secretly and openly, presenting the authorities with a large minority of pseudo-Christians who had neither respect nor love for their new faith. Was there in reality a “converso danger”? Were thousands of converso Christians all over Spain secretly observing Jewish practice? There is, as we shall see, good reason to doubt it.49

  Writing several years later, when so much blood had been spilt that it would have been intolerable to deny the justice of what had happened, the anti-Jewish chronicler Bernáldez declared unhesitatingly that the conversos were secret heretics. Throughout the provinces of the south, according to the author of the Alborayco, of all the conversos “hardly any are true Christians, as is well known in all Spain.”50 Written a decade after the birth of the Inquisition, it was a clear case of post hoc ergo. By contrast, ten years previously the hard evidence for the claim would have been difficult to find. Prosecutions of judaizers in the bishops’ courts were to be counted on the fingers of one hand. What, in any case, did “judaizing” imply? Even when the inquisitors started their work, they had no clear view of the offense. The basic ignorance of Jewish law shown by the inquisitors meant that by default they accused people of offenses which were cultural rather than religious. When in 1484 Inés de Belmonte admitted that she had habitually observed Saturday as a day of rest, she was condemned as a heretic, apostate and observer of the Jewish law, even though no evidence existed that she subscribed to any Jewish beliefs.51 With time, the inquisitors defined the offense more clearly; but in doing so they were in effect bringing a crime into existence. People were consequently accused for what they were supposed to have done, rather than for what they really did. “I know very well of others who have erred much more than I,” complained a woman of Cuenca in 1489 who felt that her offense was negligible.52

  There was another important aspect to the problem. New Christians who shared day-to-day doubts and unbelief were treated as heretics, whereas the very same doubts could be found everywhere among the non-Semitic Christian population. Popular skepticism about an afterlife persisted, we have had occasion to observe (chapter 1), among Spain’s population. “There is only birth and death, nothing more” or “you’ll not see me do badly in this life nor will you see me suffer in the next”53 were affirmations, however, that in the mouths of conversos seemed to the inquisitors in the 1480s to be particularly suspicious. Blasphemies against Christ, the Virgin and the mass, were (as the inquisitors knew very well) commonplace among Old Christians.54 Yet in the anti-converso trials they carried a mortally heavy assumption of guilt. For a converso to say: “I swear to God it’s all a joke, from the pope to the cope” or to suggest that “I can’t swallow the words of the holy gospels”55 invited denunciation, even though they were sentiments that could be found anywhere in the Old Christian countryside. It was thanks in part to her advocate arguing that “to say such things does not necessarily imply unbelief in the faith” that Catalina de Zamora, who had insulted the Virgin publicly, was in 1484 acquitted of judaizing.56 Ignorant witnesses contributed to the confusion of criteria: in 1492 not knowing the creed, or eating meat in Lent, were seen as signs of Judaism.57 Anyone who did not conform to the rest of the community was looked upon as a “Jew.” Manuel Rodríguez, alchemist of Soria in the 1470s, treated official religion with disdain but was described by the parish priest as “among the most learned men in the world in just about everything.” Common repute consequently (according to the testimony of an official) held him to be a “Jew.”58

  We may conclude that in the late 1470s very many conversos continued to practice their traditional culture but were not significantly defecting from their Christian religion. Among practicing Jews there were signs of a consciousness of the importance of prophecy and millenarianism,59 and even among Christians there was a new eschatological perception of the future,60 but there is no evidence of any significant pro-Jewish movement among conversos in the late fifteenth century.

  However, even if there was little active judaizing, those who influenced crown policy thought they perceived it. They observed what certainly existed in many households: vestigial Jewish practices in matters of family habits and cuisine, residual Jewish culture in vocabulary, kinship links between Jews and conversos. These remnants were identifiably Jewish. They were not, however—and on this all those arrested by the Inquisition were adamant—proof of judaizing. The existence of a “converso danger,” it can be argued on this evidence, was invented for motives that may have had little to do with religion.

  The harvest of heretics reaped by the early Inquisition owed its success to deliberate falsification or to the completely indiscriminate way in which residual Jewish customs were interpreted as being heretical. Though it can certainly be identified in the period after the forced conversions of 1492, there was no systematic “converso religion” in the 1480s to justify the creation of an inquisition.61 Much of the evidence for judaizing was thin, if not false. In 1484 in Ciudad Real five witnesses were used by the prosecution against a converso. Four of them testified to events they claimed to remember from twelve, thirty-five and forty years before.62 Not one offered evidence from the previous few months. One may reasonably doubt whether the accused was an active judaizer.

  Logically, conversos never ceased to protest that false witness and greed were the driving forces of the Inquisition. Wherever possible, they attempted to clamp down on the voices alleging that there was heresy. In Aragon in 1484 the authorities, hostile to the new tribunal and favorably disposed to the conversos, claimed that there was no heresy anywhere in the realm. In Segovia in 1485 a group of conversos went “threatening anyone who said anything about there being heretics in this city.”63 “Most of those burnt by the Inquisition,” a converso of Aranda said in 1501, “were burnt because of false witness.” “There’s no reason for them to come here,” another said, with reference to the inquisitors, “there are no heretics to burn.” “Very many of those arrested and burnt by the reverend fathers were arrested and burnt only because of their property.” “Of all those burnt in Aranda,” a resident stated in 1502, “not one was a heretic.”64 The outright denial that there was any heresy was not necessarily an attempt to cover up by those who were guilty. The claim may have been, and shows every sign of having been, true.

  The differing opinions among scholars in our day are testimony to the highly confusing nature of converso culture. The most plausible view of the matter is probably that held by very many at the time, namely, that most were practicing Christians, but that some were sympathetic to Judaism. Simply to be of Jewish origin did not mean that one shared Jewish beliefs. The consellers (city councilors) of Barcelona expressed this opinion forcefully to their new inquisitor in 1486: “We do not believe th
at all the conversos are heretics, or that to be a converso makes one a heretic.”65 It was not the last time in history that a dispassionate view would be offered against the judgment of those who insisted that a specific race or religion carried the implication of guilt. A prosecution witness in Toledo in 1483, by contrast, expressed a view that was more congenial to the inquisitors: “all the conversos of this city were Jews.”66 The “all,” commonplace in anti-Semitic polemic of the time and in writers like Andrés Bernáldez, was the big lie that justified the Inquisition.67

  A factor that undoubtedly contributed to tension, over and above anti-converso feeling, was the conversos’ own sense of a separate identity.68 Already a powerful minority by the mid-fifteenth century, conversos were secure of their social position and proud to be both Christian and of Jewish descent. They did not, as is sometimes thought, attempt to disguise their origins. As many of their own writers affirmed clearly, they were a nation. They had their own identity and took pride in it. Andrés Bernáldez reported that “they entertained the arrogant claim that there was no better people in the world than they.” Alonso de Palencia reported complaints by Old Christians that the conversos acted “as a nation apart, and nowhere would they agree to act together with the Old Christians; indeed, as though they were a people of totally opposed ideas, they openly and brazenly favored whatever was contrary to the Old Christians, as could be seen by the bitter fruit sown throughout the cities of the realm.” Implicit in the converso attitude was the claim that they were even better than Old Christians, because together with Christian faith they combined direct descent from the lineage (linaje) of Christ. It was said that Alonso de Cartagena when he recited the Hail Mary used to end with the words, “Holy Mary, Mother of God and my blood-relative, pray for us.” Converso nobles were considered to be even better than Old Christian nobles, because they were of Jewish origin. “Is there another nation so noble [as the Jews]?” asked Diego de Valera, quoting the Bible directly.

  Converso separateness had a certain logic. The large number of converts after 1391 could not be easily fitted into existing social structures. In Barcelona and Valencia in the 1390s they were given their own churches, in each case a former synagogue. They also set up their own converso confraternities.69 In the crown of Aragon they called themselves proudly “Christians of Israel.”70 They had their own social life and intermarried among themselves. Palencia observed that they were “puffed-up, insolent and arrogant”; Bernáldez criticized their “haughty ostentation of great wealth and pride.”71 These converso attitudes were probably created by self-defensiveness rather than arrogance. But they contributed to the wall of distrust between Old and New Christians. In particular, the idea of a converso nation, which rooted itself irrevocably in the mind of Jewish Christians (see chapter 14 below), made them appear as a separate, alien and enemy entity. This had fateful consequences.

  A number of factors, religious as well as social and political, therefore contributed to the tensions experienced in the south of Spain. They were circumstances rooted in the everyday experience of people, and by no means imposed from above. On the religious front, however, the initiatives came from the top. Fears about an alleged converso heresy were being expressed by some clergy, and because of it there were demands for a special “inquisition” well before the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1461 a group of Franciscans led by Alonso de Espina approached the general of the Jeronimite Order with a view to “setting up in this realm an inquisition into heretics such as they have in France.”72 The general, Alonso de Oropesa, supported the move warmly, and Henry IV of Castile appealed to Rome for an inquisition to be set up.73 Nothing more was heard of the proposal. Another attempt was made by Oropesa some time later, in 1465, but it was an inopportune moment. Henry IV was faced by a serious rebellion against his crown that very year. Riots against the conversos broke out shortly after, notably in Toledo in 1467 and Segovia in 1473.

  The Inquisition was not unknown in the territories that later formed a united Spain. Since 1232, papal commissions for inquisitors had been issued in the crown of Aragon, as part of the campaign against the Cathars then being conducted in the French areas of Languedoc.74 This was the period when the Church for the first time began to think seriously about what the concept of heresy was, and with what means it could be combated.75 Theologians tried to define what it was that Catholics shared in terms of belief, worship and loyalty, and by the same token what it was that could represent a threat to the three. Catalans such as the Dominican friars Ramon Penyafort in the thirteenth and Nicolau Eimeric in the fourteenth century were active in the medieval Inquisition, which was not directly concerned with Jews, though there was a distinct anti-Jewish tendency in its thinking. Jews, in any case, were only one example of the various groups and minorities that political interests and social pressures might seek to crush. The word “heresy” was a term that became applied to any attitude of such groups perceived to be out of step with the thinking of those who controlled power.

  By the fifteenth century, when Catharism was a thing of the past, the papal Inquisition in the Aragonese territories had lapsed into virtual inactivity. Only a handful of trials took place in the late century.76 Castile, on the other hand, had never known the existence of an inquisition. The bishops and their Church courts had so far sufficed to deal with the punishment of heretics, and they were active in the few prosecutions of the period. The discovery (and immediate burning) at Llerena in September 1467 of two conversos for practicing Judaism seemed to confirm the religious insincerity of New Christians, but it was an isolated incident with no repercussions.77 Anti-Semitic preachers of course made the most of such cases. Among them was Alonso de Hojeda, a Dominican prior of Seville, who devoted all his energies to making the crown aware of the reality of the danger from Jews and false converts.78

  In 1474 Isabella succeeded her brother Henry on the throne. Hojeda’s opportunity came when the queen visited Seville in July 1477 and stayed there for fifteen months. Historians are unanimous in citing Hojeda’s preaching as one of the immediate influences on the queen in her final decision about the conversos. Soon after Isabella’s departure from Seville, Hojeda claimed to have uncovered evidence of a secret meeting of judaizing conversos in the city. With this in hand he went to demand the institution of measures against the heretics.

  The evidence seems to have impressed the crown, which asked for information on the situation in Seville. The report, supported by the authority of Pedro González de Mendoza, archbishop of Seville, and of Tomás de Torquemada, prior of a Dominican monastery in Segovia, suggested that not only in Seville but throughout Andalucia and Castile the conversos were practicing Jewish rites in secret. Accepting this testimony, Ferdinand and Isabella consented to introduce the machinery of a Church inquisition into Castile, and sent a request to Rome for the bull of institution.

  The controversy over the conversos broke out at a time when the monarchs were fully occupied in the pacification of a realm that had been laid waste by the turmoil of civil war. They were threatened on all sides by continuing conflicts at local level, threats by dissident nobles and clergy, and a breakdown of law and order everywhere. With no civil service or permanent army at their command, they were unable to control events in the way they might have wished, and were obliged to make compromises with the political elites that ran the country. From 1476 onwards they encouraged the creation of local police forces known as the Hermandad. At the same time they attempted through the handful of civil governors (corregidores) to enforce the peace, punish and execute criminals and thieves, and in general restore public confidence in the crown.79 In the midst of these measures of “pacification,” which inevitably had a high cost in money and lives, they were drawn from 1482 onwards into a long and expensive war against the Muslim kingdom of Granada.

  The converso problem, when brought to the queen’s attention during her stay in Seville, may at the time have seemed a small matter of detail in the midst of her other commitments. T
he request for an inquisition was, likewise, not unusual. Royal officials had for some time now been authorized to make general “inquisitions” into crimes and offenses, and it was part of the pacification policy to make “inquisitions” into the activities of known or unknown delinquents.80 When the crown sanctioned an inquisition into the activities of alleged judaizers, it was a more or less routine measure. In the event, it soon turned into something much graver because it seriously implicated converso urban elites, who till that date had supported the crown without question.

  According to Hojeda and others, the converso problem was so serious that only the introduction of a full-time “inquisition” would be adequate. Consequently, the bull which was finally issued by Pope Sixtus IV on 1 November 1478 provided for the appointment of two or three priests over forty years of age as inquisitors. Powers of appointment and dismissal were granted to the Spanish crown.81 After this, no further steps were taken for two years. This long interlude would seem to contradict Hojeda’s argument about the urgency of the converso danger. What seems a likely explanation is that the crown favored a cautious period of leniency before going on to severe measures, and that this policy may have been influenced in part by the large number of conversos in prominent positions at court. Finally, Ferdinand grew convinced of the need. As he explained several years later: “We could do no less, because we were told so many things about Andalucia.” In a letter to the pope in 1483 he was more specific: “In recent times, when neither we nor our predecessors took any measures, there was a great increase in heresy and in the risk of its spread, and many who seemed to be Christians were found to be living not simply not as Christians but even as godless persons.”82