The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  When public opposition in Saragossa grew so great that there was a move to summon the four estates of the realm, Ferdinand hastily sent a circular letter to the chief nobles and deputies, justifying his position:

  There is no intention of infringing the fueros but rather of enforcing their observance. It is not to be imagined that vassals so Catholic as those of Aragon would have demanded, or that kings so Catholic would have granted, fueros and liberties adverse to the faith and favorable to heresy. If the old inquisitors had acted conscientiously in accordance with the rules there would have been no cause for bringing in new ones, but they were without conscience and corrupted with bribes.

  If there are so few heretics as is now asserted, there should not be such dread of the Inquisition. It is not to be impeded in sequestrating and confiscating and other necessary acts, for be assured that no cause or interest, however great, shall be allowed to interfere with its proceeding in future as it is now doing.101

  Whatever the motives among Aragonese, whether personal dread or constitutional opposition, resistance continued. The most remarkable case of resistance occurred in 1484 in the city of Teruel, a hundred miles to the south of Saragossa.102 In that year the tribunal of Saragossa sent two inquisitors to the city to establish the tribunal, but the magistrates refused them permission to enter. The inquisitors thereupon withdrew to the neighboring town of Cella, from which they issued an excommunication and interdict against the city and its magistrates. The clergy of Teruel promptly obtained papal letters releasing the city from the censures. The city authorities wrote to the king protesting that “they were coming to set up an Inquisition, which will cause the disorders that have happened in Castile.” The Inquisition then decreed in October 1484 that all the public offices in Teruel were confiscated to the crown and their present holders deprived of them. This was followed by an appeal to the king to carry out the decree. It was now the turn of the representatives of Aragon in Saragossa to protest to the king that “this is a kingdom of Christians,” that there were no heretics in the realm, and that heretics in any case should be opposed “with warnings and persuasion,” not force.103 Ferdinand replied with an order in February 1485 to all his officials in Aragon, asking them to raise arms and help the inquisitors. The response to this was not adequate, so Ferdinand also called on troops from the borders of Castile to help in the enterprise. Faced with such massive coercion the city was easily reduced to obedience. With its submission in the spring of 1485 the Inquisition seemed to have triumphed everywhere in Aragon. Teruel’s resistance did not arise exclusively from the great influence exercised there by conversos. The city had good political reasons, as head of the only region inside Aragon with wholly autonomous laws.104 Both it and Saragossa had to be brought to heel if the new Holy Office were to survive.

  There were comparable problems in the Mediterranean realms of the crown of Aragon. Although the medieval Inquisition was moribund in Catalonia, the city of Barcelona had in 1461 received papal approval to have its own local inquisitor, Joan Comes. The Catalans therefore saw no need for a new tribunal. When the Cortes of the crown of Aragon met at Tarazona in April 1484, Catalonia refused to send deputies to approve the new Inquisition. In May Torquemada took the step of nominating two new inquisitors for Catalonia and at the same time revoked the commission held by Comes. The Catalans exploded into anger. The appointment of the new inquisitors, they wrote to Ferdinand, was “against the liberties, constitutions and agreements solemnly sworn by Your Majesty.” In Barcelona both legal and Church authorities ruled that Comes was the only rightful inquisitor of the city.105 In reply, Ferdinand affirmed that “no cause nor interest, however great, will make us suspend the Inquisition.”

  The conflict dragged on, and conversos began to emigrate in large numbers from the city. Fearing for the economic life of Barcelona, the consellers complained to Ferdinand in December 1485 of the “losses and disorder caused in this land by the Inquisition that Your Highness wishes to introduce. . . . The few remaining merchants have ceased to trade. . . . Foreign realms are growing rich and glorious through the depopulation of this country.” In May 1486, they warned Ferdinand that the city would be “totally depopulated and ruined if the Inquisition were introduced.” The protests were in vain. In February 1486 Pope Innocent VIII found a way out of the dilemma by sacking all the existing papal inquisitors in the crown of Aragon and securing the simultaneous withdrawal of the Castilian nominees. The initiative was handed back to Torquemada, who appointed a new inquisitor for Catalonia, Alonso de Espina, a Dominican prior from Castile.106 Not until June 1487 did Espina succeed in entering the city, but his entry was boycotted by the Diputació and the consellers. Ferdinand therefore warned the city “to remember the example of Teruel, which was ruined because it did not obey the Inquisition.”107 The consellers protested in their turn that the inquisitors were acting “against the laws, practice, customs and liberties of this city.”

  The Holy Office was now firmly implanted, but little fruit remained for it to pluck. Throughout 1488 it burnt only seven accused, and in 1489 only three. There was never any doubt as to whom the Inquisition was directed against. Of 1,199 people it investigated in Catalonia between 1488 and 1505—most in their absence since they had fled—all but eight were conversos.108 Among the distinguished refugees was the judge Antoni de Bardaxi, regent of the Chancillería, who ironically had given legal approval to the establishment of the Holy Office.

  In the kingdom of Valencia, opposition was based similarly on the fueros. There were two existing inquisitors with papal commissions, the Dominicans Juan Cristóbal de Gualbes and Juan Orts, who from 1481 represented the revived medieval tribunal, but they seem to have done little. In March 1484 they were removed and Torquemada nominated, as representatives of the new Inquisition, the Aragonese Juan de Epila and the Valencian Martín Iñigo. Since the Cortes of Tarazona in 1484 had approved the new Inquisition, the nominees should have had no problems in Valencia. From July to October, however, the three estates of the Valencian Cortes kept up a stream of protests, asking “not that the Inquisition be suspended but that it be in the hands of natives of this realm,”109 and detailing other requests, such as an end to secret testimony. Opposition crumbled before the obduracy of Ferdinand, who recalled that no protest had been made by the Valencians at Tarazona, and that the fueros must never be used to shield heresy. Even after the inquisitors began work in November 1484, opposition continued and the king was obliged to alternate threats with arguments. “If there are so few heretics in the realm,” his representatives commented acidly, “one wonders why people should be afraid of the Inquisition.”110

  Converso opposition had by no means been destroyed. On the one hand it was growing in strength with the active support of Old Christians who resented the introduction of the new tribunal into Aragon, and on the other it was becoming more desperate because of the obvious failure of resistance as shown by the example of Teruel. In the highest converso circles the idea of the assassination of an inquisitor gained currency. It was also supported by some Old Christians, and by conversos as eminent as Gabriel Sánchez, treasurer of the king, and Sancho Paternoy, the royal treasurer (maestre racional) in Aragon. The climax came on the night of 15/16 September 1485, as the inquisitor Pedro Arbués was kneeling in prayer before the high altar of Saragossa cathedral. Beneath his gown the inquisitor wore a coat of mail and on his head a steel cap, because of warnings about threats against his life. On the night in question, eight conspirators hired by conversos entered the cathedral by the chapter door and stole up behind the inquisitor. After verifying that this was indeed Arbués, one of them stabbed him in the back with a stroke that went through his neck and proved to be his death wound. As Arbués staggered away, two of the others also inflicted wounds on him. The murderers made their escape and the canons of the cathedral rushed in to find the inquisitor dying. Arbués expired twenty-four hours later, on 17 September.

  The shock of this murder led to developments that th
e conversos should certainly have foreseen.111 When it was discovered that the assassins were conversos the whole mood of the city of Saragossa, and with it that of Aragon, changed. Arbués was declared a saint,112 miracles were worked with his blood, mobs roamed the streets in search of conversos and a national assembly voted to suspend the fueros while the search for the assassins went on. In this atmosphere the inquisitors came into their own. Autos of the reformed Inquisition were held on 28 December 1485, and the murderers of Arbués expiated their crime in successive autos de fe lasting from 30 June 1486 to 15 December the same year. One of them had his hands cut off and nailed to the door of the Diputación, after which he was dragged to the marketplace, beheaded and quartered, and the pieces of his body suspended in the streets of the city. Another committed suicide in his cell the day before his ordeal by breaking a glass lamp and swallowing the fragments; he too suffered the same punishment, which was inflicted on his dead body.

  More than these initial measures was needed in order to uproot the whole conspiracy, which involved so many and such eminent people that individuals were being punished for it as late as 1492. The heads that now rolled came from the highest families in Aragon. Whether they were judaizers or not, members of the leading converso houses had connived (or so it was claimed) in the murder and were sooner or later destroyed by the Inquisition, which remained in full control of all the judicial measures taken. A study of the list of accused shows the constant appearance of the great names of Santa Fe, Santangel, Caballería, and Sánchez. Francisco de Santa Fe, son of the famous converso Jerónimo and a counselor of the governor of Aragon, committed suicide by jumping from a tower and his remains were burnt in the auto of 15 December 1486. Sancho Paternoy was tortured and imprisoned. A member of the Santangel family, Luis, who had been personally knighted by Juan II for his military prowess, was beheaded and burnt in the marketplace of Saragossa on 8 August 1487; his more famous cousin Luis, whose money loans made possible the voyages of Columbus, was made to do penance in July 1491. Altogether, over fifteen members of the Santangel family were punished by the Inquisition before 1499; and between 1486 and 1503 fourteen members of the Sánchez family suffered a similar fate. This substantial sweep of conversos into the nets of the tribunal was effective in shaking the grip of New Christians on the Aragonese administration. Not for the first time, a cause triumphed through one useful martyrdom. For the conversos one murder, cheaply achieved at a total cost of 600 gold florins (which included the wages of the assassins), turned out to be an act of mass suicide that annihilated all opposition to the Inquisition for the next hundred years. The foolishness of the conspiracy can, with reason, call in doubt whether the conversos were really implicated.113 But, in default of documentation to prove it, we may also doubt whether the murder was deliberately staged by the crown in order to smooth the way for the Inquisition.

  Opportunely for Ferdinand, the crisis in Aragon coincided with his attempts to gain political control after the chaos of the civil wars. His constant emphasis on the need for the Inquisition was clear Realpolitik, but he was never in a position to use it to increase his power significantly, nor did he attempt to. Nor did he ever attempt to destroy the conversos as a political force. The king was wily enough to know that conversos in the crown of Aragon were a power network he could not trifle with. He had had their support from the beginning of his reign, and in return he gave his support to those not directly implicated in the troubles. Members of Luis de Santangel’s family were accused of Judaism, but the king protected them. Gabriel Sánchez’s case was particularly notable. Both his brother and his father-in-law were directly implicated in the Arbués murder. Accusations were made against both Sánchez and Alfonso de la Caballería. The king protected them firmly, and ordered the Inquisition to exempt them from its jurisdiction.114

  In Mallorca, where the old Inquisition had already begun activities against judaizers in 1478, the new tribunal was introduced without incident in 1488 and began operations immediately. The inquisitors, Pedro Pérez de Munebrega and Sancho Marín, found enough work to keep them occupied in the hundreds of cases that filled the years 1488 to 1491. Politically, the island was undisturbed, though strong protests were made to the king in 1491 that “the inquisitors intrude into many matters, both criminal and civil, which are not their concern or jurisdiction; they try to take over all cases touching conversos even though no heresy is in question; they nominate as familiars many persons of bad reputation and let them carry arms day and night.”115 Despite the discontent, no outbreaks against the tribunal occurred until a generation later under Charles V, when a rising headed by the converso bishop of Elna in 1518 led to the temporary expulsion of the inquisitors from the city of Palma. In Mallorca, conversos formed a considerable part of the population, thanks to the riots of 1391 in Palma, the preaching of Vincent Ferrer in 1413 and 1414 and the final forcible conversion of Jews there in 1435. The large number of conversos who were either pardoned because they confessed voluntarily or condemned because they had fled demonstrates that the inquisitors in those first years of the new tribunal had managed to identify a problem.

  The new Inquisition had begun its activity in the capital cities of the crown of Aragon, and in some of the cities of south and central Castile, several years before the final decision to expel the Jews. In those twelve terrible years, conversos and Jews alike suffered from the rising tide of anti-Semitism. While the latter were being harassed and then threatened with expulsion from dioceses in Aragon and Andalucia, the former were being purged of those who retained vestiges of their ancestral Judaism. Many conversos fled abroad without necessarily intending thereby to defect from the Catholic faith. Refugees feature prominently among those condemned in the early years. In the first two years of the tribunal at Ciudad Real fifty-two accused were burnt alive but 220 were condemned to death in their absence. In the Barcelona auto de fe of 10 June 1491, three persons were burnt alive but 139 were judged in their absence. In Mallorca the same process was repeated when at the auto of 11 May 1493 only three accused were burnt in person but there were forty-seven burnings of the effigies of absent fugitives.116 There was of course nothing exceptional in the phenomenon of escaping from the courts. At a very much later date a justice official in the kingdom of Valencia pointed out that among persons summoned to appear before the courts “three-fourths of those condemned are in fact absentees.”117 The vast majority of possible victims, in short, managed to escape the clutches of the Holy Office.

  The figures, as we have seen, indicate clearly who bore the brunt of the persecution: 99.3 percent of those accused by the Barcelona tribunal between 1488 and 1505, and 91.6 percent of those accused by that of Valencia between 1484 and 1530, were conversos of Jewish origin.118 The tribunal, in other words, was not concerned with heresy in general. It was concerned with only one form of religious deviance: the apparently secret practice of Jewish rites. What appeared to be concern for religion was unmistakably racial in impact. Information about Jewish practices was gleaned through the edict of grace (for the edict in general, see chapter 9), a procedure modeled on that of the medieval Inquisition. The inquisitors would preach a sermon in the district they were visiting, recite a list of heresies, and invite those who wished to discharge their consciences to come forward and denounce themselves or others. If they came forward within the “period of grace”—usually thirty to forty days—they would be absolved and “reconciled” to the Church without suffering serious penalties. The benign terms encouraged self-denunciation. The edicts of grace, more than any other event, served to convince the inquisitors that a heresy problem existed. Before that period, there had been only polemics and rumors. Now the mass confessions, as Andrés Bernáldez was later to argue, demonstrated that “all of them were Jews.”

  Hundreds of conversos, well aware that they had at some time been lax in observing the rules of their faith, came forward to admit their offenses and be reconciled. In Seville the prisons were filled to overflowing with conversos waitin
g to be interrogated as a result of their voluntary confessions. In Mallorca three hundred persons formed a procession during the first ceremony of contrition in 1488. The tribunal at Toledo initiated its career by reconciling an astonishing total of twenty-four hundred repentant conversos during the year 1486.119 This in no way implied (despite a common but mistaken assumption) that they were judaizers or had tendencies to Judaism. Fear alone was the spur. Faced by the activity of the inquisitors, who now identified as heresy what many converso Christians had accepted as normal practice within the framework of belief, they felt that it was safer to clear their record. There were very many others who did not trust the Inquisition and preferred flight. They wandered from one province to another, always one step ahead of the reverend fathers. The majority, it seems, preferred to take the risk. They confessed and put themselves in the hands of the inquisitors.

  By its willingness to condone the confessions of those who came forward during periods of grace, the Inquisition was accepting that an offense had been committed but that no intended or hidden heresy was involved. Those who confessed and accepted the conditions of penitence were henceforward free of possible disabilities. This optimistic view was obviously not accepted by the conversos, who had been forced into a compromising position that, in the long run, brought them further miseries. “One day when some others and I were talking about the Holy Inquisition,” a resident of Sigüenza stated in 1492, “they said that in Toledo very many had come forward to be reconciled, out of fear that false testimony would be made against them. And I said: Who is there who has not gone to be reconciled out of fear, even though he has done nothing?”120 Some no doubt regretted bitterly that they had voluntarily joined the procession of penitents. “Did you see me yesterday in the procession of the reconciled?” a woman from Cuenca asked a friend in 1492. She burst out weeping: “and she wept a lot for having gone to be reconciled.” “God must be really put out that the reverend fathers do these things, they are devils and are not acting justly.”121 Those who came forward to confess, it appears, did not feel that they had strayed from the Catholic faith.