by Henry Kamen
On 27 September 1480 at Medina del Campo, commissions as inquisitors in accordance with the papal bull were issued to the Dominicans Juan de San Martín and Miguel de Morillo, with Juan Ruiz de Medina as their assessor or adviser. With these appointments the Spanish Inquisition came into definitive existence.
In historical perspective it may appear to have been an ominous and terrible event, yet it is easy to forget that in the same generation there were similar and no less ominous developments about the prosecution of heresy elsewhere in Europe. From the year 1401 a special new law in England permitted the execution of heretics. Between 1423 and 1522 in England over five hundred heresy trials took place, resulting in the burning of an estimated thirty people.83 Shortly after 1500, the bishop of Lincoln set up an inquisition to enquire into the heretics of his diocese. Within a few years no fewer than 342 persons were denounced to the bishop as suspected heretics. “Wives and husbands denounced each other, and children accused their parents.”84 In country after country of northern Europe—notably, for example, in the Czech lands—there were persons, movements and ideas that appeared subversive and that the authorities bestirred themselves to control. The circumstances of each case were different, but the threat of repression was never far distant. There were “inquisitions” developing in many parts of Europe, not only in Spain.
In Andalucia, the new body had clearly been set up as the result of agitation against the New Christians. This fact alone does not suffice to answer some fundamental questions. Of these, the most crucial is: on what evidence did the tribunal justify its existence? Historians have tended to accept without question the reason given by the Inquisition, namely, that an inquiry had to be made into conversos who were judaizing. The fact is that apart from a handful of scattered cases there was (we have suggested) no systematic evidence of judaizing. New Christian writers in mid-century had firmly denied such accusations. Zealots such as Espina could point only to unsubstantiated rumors and allegations. Nowhere in Spain, outside of the handful of cities in the center and south where political riots had taken place, was there pressure for an inquiry. The Cortes of Castile never asked for an inquisition.85 Moreover, the book of the Alborayco, written in these years, expressly claimed that, unlike the south of the country, there were virtually no heretics among conversos in northern Spain.86 If the Inquisition claimed to have religious motives, those motives were difficult to justify by the evidence. It would appear that community hostility, no less than religious suspicion, had an undeniable part in the move to set up a tribunal of inquiry.87
What did the monarchs hope to gain by agreeing to its foundation? It is a fundamental question that appears to have divided historians. One cannot rule out completely the possibility that the crown, in the person above all of Ferdinand, who was the guiding force in its establishment and who continued his efforts after the death of Isabella, wished to use it to consolidate his power. There is absolutely no evidence, however, that he did so; and in any case the new tribunal was most active in a region, Andalucia, where he was not king. Nor is it possible to document the view that Ferdinand was hoping to consolidate his power by directing opposition against the converso elite in Spain.88 Further definition of Ferdinand’s intentions may be difficult to arrive at, but there can be no doubt of his religious position. He and Isabella were zealous Catholics, yet by no means anti-Jewish or even anti-converso. To the end of their lifetimes they always worked closely with converso advisers, as Ferdinand himself testified publicly many times. Finally, though a long historical tradition asserts it (and always without evidence), it is wholly unlikely that he established the Inquisition in order to augment his revenues. The tribunal, as we shall see later, never in those early years gained any lasting profit from the conversos. Money that came in, through fines and confiscations, was usually spent on the running costs of the tribunal (see chapter 8).
Was there a long-term strategy, or was the tribunal intended to be purely local and temporary? Neither the crown nor the early supporters of the Inquisition were looking, around 1480, much farther than the frontiers of Andalucia. The immediate purpose was to ensure religious orthodoxy solely in that region. For the first five years of its existence the tribunal (still exclusively Castilian) limited its activity to the south, particularly to the sees of Seville and Córdoba. It was the area where the social conflicts of the preceding century had concentrated. There was, as yet, no thought of a nation-wide or “Spanish” Inquisition. No firm arrangements for financing the tribunal were made, and no fixed centers of action were decided upon.
By mid-October 1480, operations had begun in Seville. In Andalucia, as in the rest of Castile, these had been years of political conflict. The appearance of the inquisitors was made possible because Isabella’s supporters in the civil wars imposed their authority on the local elite. The opposition, many of them conversos and supporters of rebel nobles, were pushed out. This background affected events in Seville. One of the city councilors there was the converso Diego de Susán—father to Susanna, famous as the comely maid, the fermosa fembra—who was connected with a group of merchants and political figures opposed to Isabella’s supporters.89 A subsequent local chronicler put together a largely fictitious narrative in which Susán was presented as the center of a plot to stage a rising against the Inquisition. According to this account, he called a meeting of Seville dignitaries and of
many other rich and powerful men from the towns of Utrera and Carmona. These said to one another, “What do you think of them acting thus against us? Are we not the most propertied members of this city, and well loved by the people? Let us collect men together. . . .” And thus between them they assigned the raising of arms, men, money and other necessities. “And if they come to take us, we, together with armed men and the people will rise up and slay them and so be revenged on our enemies.”90
The narrative goes on to say that the rising might well have succeeded but for the fermosa fembra who, anxious about the possible fate of her Old Christian lover, betrayed the plot to the authorities. All those implicated were arrested and the occasion was made the excuse for detaining the richest and most powerful conversos of Seville. According to Bernáldez:
A few days after this they burnt three of the richest leaders of the city, namely Diego de Susán, who was said to be worth 10 million maravedis and was a chief rabbi, and who apparently died as a Christian; Manuel Sauli; and Bartolomé de Torralva. They also arrested Pedro Fernández Benadeba, who was one of the ringleaders and had in his house weapons to arm a hundred men, and Juan Fernández Abolafia, who had often been chief magistrate and was a great lawyer; and many other leading and very rich citizens, who were also burnt.91
When Susanna saw the result of her betrayal, she is said to have first retired to a convent, and then to have taken to the streets, remorse eating into her soul until she died in poverty and shame, her last wishes being that her skull should be placed over the door of her house as a warning and example to others. The whole story about the plot and betrayal was in reality a myth: Susán had died before 1479, the plot is undocumented and there was no daughter Susanna.92
The first auto de fe of the new Inquisition was celebrated on 6 February 1481, when six people were burnt at the stake and the sermon at the ceremony was preached by Fray Alonso de Hojeda. Hojeda’s triumph was short-lived, for within a few days the plague which was just beginning to ravage Seville numbered him among its first victims.
There was as yet little, in the spring of 1481, to cause alarm among conversos. No more than a handful of people had been executed. Many, however, did not trust the motives or the mercy of the inquisitors. They may or may not have been judaizers; in any case, they preferred to absent themselves. Over the next few months throughout Andalucia, according to the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar, thousands of households took flight, women and children included:
and since the absence of these people depopulated a large part of the country, the queen was informed that commerce was declining; but settin
g little importance on the decline in her revenue, and prizing highly the cleansing of her lands, she said that the essential thing was to purify the country of that sin of heresy, for she understood it to be in God’s service and her own. And the representations which were made to her about this matter did not alter her decision.93
The scale of operations created an enormous amount of work. More inquisitors were obviously needed. Accordingly, a papal brief of 11 February 1482 appointed seven more, all Dominican friars. One of them was the prior of the friary of Santa Cruz in Segovia, Tomás de Torquemada. New tribunals were set up at Córdoba in 1482, and at Ciudad Real and Jaén in 1483. The tribunal at Ciudad Real was only temporary, and was permanently transferred to Toledo in 1485. By 1492 the kingdom of Castile had tribunals at Avila, Córdoba, Jaén, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo and Valladolid. Not all these had a permanent existence, and the southern tribunals were far more active than those in the north.
The story of a plot in Seville looks suspiciously like an attempt to find good reasons for a subsequent repression. Doubts may similarly be expressed about a plot that was supposed to have occurred in Toledo, apparently planned for the feast of Corpus Christi 1485. The outcome, say the sources, followed the pattern of Seville, with betrayal, arrest and execution. All the relevant circumstances, however, suggest that the plot was spurious, an invented story embroidered upon by subsequent commentators.94
The machinery of the Inquisition was regulated in accordance with the needs of the administration. Isabella was at this time engaged in reforming the organs that controlled central government in Castile. When in 1480 at the Cortes of Toledo it was decided to reform the governing councils, it seemed natural to follow this up with a separate council for the increasingly important affairs of the Inquisition. A few years later, in 1488, this new council (known as the Suprema for short) came into existence (for the date 1488, see chapter 8 below). It consisted initially of three ecclesiastical members, and a fourth person as president of the council with the title of inquisitor general, a post given to Fray Tomás de Torquemada. The problem now was whether the Castilian Inquisition should be extended to the crown of Aragon, a completely autonomous state with its own laws, institutions and—as it happened—Inquisition.
Resistance to the introduction of the Inquisition into southern Castile had been meager and abortive. Popular opinion had been prepared for it and community rivalry welcomed it. The only serious setback to royal policy occurred on 29 January 1482 when Pope Sixtus IV, responding to protests from Spanish clergy about abuses committed by the inquisitors of Seville, revoked the powers granted by the bull of foundation and allowed the Seville inquisitors to continue only if subjected to their bishop. The appointment of the seven new inquisitors in 1482, far from being a surrender by the pope to the king, was accompanied by firm gestures by the pontiff in favor of the conversos. Ferdinand in May 1482 protested bitterly to Rome, particularly since a further conflict had now arisen over the introduction of the new Inquisition into Aragon.
As part of his vigorous new policy, Ferdinand took steps in 1481 and 1482 to assert royal control over the appointment and payment of the existing inquisitors in Aragon.95 His aim was to resurrect the old papal Inquisition but also to subject it to his own control so as to come into line with practice in Castile. In Aragon, therefore, the reformed Inquisition was simply a continuance of the old tribunal, with the difference that the crown now controlled appointments and salaries, so that the tribunal—not yet “Spanish” but still medieval—became effectively more dependent on Ferdinand than on the pope.
The first activities of the reformed tribunal, with its main centers in the cities of Barcelona, Saragossa and Valencia, were directed against the conversos, who took alarm at developments and prepared for mass emigration. Differences with the pope, supplemented no doubt by pressure on Rome from conversos, brought the work of the inquisitors to a temporary stop. On 18 April 1482 Sixtus IV issued what Lea calls “the most extraordinary bull in the history of the Inquisition.” In this document the pope protested
that in Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca and Catalonia the Inquisition has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls, but by lust for wealth, and that many true and faithful Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves and other lower and even less proper persons, have without any legitimate proof been thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned as relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the secular arm to be executed, to the peril of souls, setting a pernicious example, and causing disgust to many.96
Accordingly, in future all episcopal officers should act with the inquisitors; the names and testimony of accusers should be given to the accused, who should be allowed counsel; episcopal jails should be the only ones used; and appeals should be allowed to Rome. The bull was extraordinary because, in Lea’s words, “for the first time heresy was declared to be, like any other crime, entitled to a fair trial and simple justice.”97 Besides, there is little doubt that the pope welcomed the chance to assert his authority over an Inquisition that had once been papal and had now slipped entirely into the hands of the king of Aragon. So favorable was the bull to converso claims that their influence in obtaining it cannot be doubted.
Ferdinand was outraged by the papal action and pretended to disbelieve in the authenticity of the bull on the grounds that no sensible pontiff would have issued such a document. On 13 May 1482 he wrote to the pope:
Things have been told me, Holy Father which, if true, would seem to merit the greatest astonishment. It is said that Your Holiness has granted the conversos a general pardon for all the errors and offenses they have committed. . . . To these rumors, however, we have given no credence because they seem to be things which would in no way have been conceded by Your Holiness, who have a duty to the Inquisition. But if by chance concessions have been made through the persistent and cunning persuasion of the said conversos, I intend never to let them take effect. Take care therefore not to let the matter go further, and to revoke any concessions and entrust us with the care of this question.98
Before this resolution, Sixtus IV wavered, and on 14 October announced that he had suspended the bull. The way lay completely open to Ferdinand. Papal cooperation was definitively secured by the bull of 17 October 1483, which appointed Torquemada as inquisitor general of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia, thus uniting the Inquisitions of the Spanish crown under a single head. The new tribunal came directly under the control of the crown and was the only institution whose authority over heresy ran in all the territories of Spain, replacing the powers formerly exercised in the matter by bishops. This was not the end of papal interference. The next half century or so witnessed several attempts by Rome to interfere in questions of jurisdiction and to reform abuses that might give the Inquisition a bad name. Besides this, the conversos in Spain never gave up their struggle to modify the practices of the tribunal, which they rightly considered a threat not just to judaizers, but to the whole body of New Christians. Because of their representations to Rome, papal intervention was continued on their behalf, leading to several minor quarrels between crown and papacy.
Within the crown of Aragon there was bitter opposition to the introduction of the Castilian tribunal. Though Castile and Aragon had been joined by the marriage of the Catholic monarchs, they remained politically separate and each kingdom preserved its individual administration and liberties. In the eastern realms the fueros (laws) vested supreme authority less in the king alone, as was the case in Castile, than in the king acting together with the Cortes. When the latter was not in session its standing committee, the Diputación of each realm, watched over the laws. The resurrection of the old papal Inquisition posed a threat to the conversos but was no innovation and aroused little criticism. It was a different matter when Castilian inquisitors were appointed to realms where the fueros stipulated that senior officials must be native-born. The converso elite found that they had a c
onstitutional argument to support their hostility.
In the kingdom of Aragon, with its capital in Saragossa, converso families had long played a prominent role in politics and finance. Regardless of inevitable opposition, on 4 May 1484 Torquemada appointed the first two inquisitors for Aragon, Gaspar Juglar and Pedro Arbués de Epila. According to Lea, the inquisitors set to work immediately, holding small autos de fe in the premises of the cathedral on 10 May and 3 June 1484.99 This activity deeply disturbed not only conversos but all those whose loyalty was to the fueros of Aragon. The chronicler of Aragon, Jerónimo de Zurita, reported: “Those newly converted from the Jewish race, and many other leaders and gentry, claimed that the procedure was against the liberties of the realm, because for this offense [of heresy] their goods were confiscated and they were not given the names of witnesses who testified against them.” As a result, continued Zurita, the conversos had all the kingdom on their side, “including persons of the highest consideration, among them Old Christians and gentry.”100