The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  This attitude, evidently, continued to give the inquisitors much work to do. It is significant that in the 1480s their main hope of obtaining evidence had been through the edicts of grace and the spontaneous confessions of conversos. After the 1490s those edicts were almost superfluous, because the large number of accumulated testimonies was sufficient material from which to work. Moreover, the inquisitors could now count on the help of those conversos who, in revenge for denunciations made by Jews at that time, turned the tables on the ex-Jews and proffered evidence against them.

  They happened to be difficult times for both Christians and former Jews, and both looked forward to new horizons. In Western Europe there were Christian leaders, among them Cardinal Cisneros, who entertained beliefs of a promised millennium, and King Ferdinand of Aragon shared the same outlook. Many conversos, hard pressed by the aftermath of 1492, put their faith in similar expectations. In Ciudad Real, in Córdoba and in Valencia, converso prophets expected the final coming of the Messiah.164 They would continue to hope, in the centuries that followed, but the promise never bore fruit and the shadow of the Inquisition continued to mark the sky over their heads.

  4

  AN ENDURING CRISIS

  In this land they bear ill will to the Inquisition and would destroy it if they could.

  —INQUISITORS OF CATALONIA, 1618

  Throughout the history of the Inquisition, commentators agreed on the impressive support given to it by the people. Foreign visitors to the peninsula were appalled by the way the public accepted autos de fe. Subsequent defenders of the tribunal felt that they could in part justify the Inquisition by the evidence of its roots in the authentic faith of Spaniards.1 Opponents of the tribunal were equally impressed. Even the great Llorente, the first modern historian of the tribunal (see chapter 15), was staggered by the lack of evidence for any opposition to it in Spain. He stated in 1811 in a discourse read to the Royal Academy of History, meeting in Madrid at the height of the Peninsular War:

  If in investigating what a nation thought about a certain institution we were to be guided solely by the testimony of public writers, there is no doubt that the Spanish people had as much love as hate for the Inquisition. . . . You will find hardly a book printed in Spain from the time of Charles the Fifth to our own days in which the Inquisition is not cited with praise.2

  The apparent support given by the people to the Inquisition has inevitably created problems of interpretation. Partisans of the Holy Office have maintained that its popularity was based on its unswerving sense of justice, and that it responded to a profound religious need. Critics, by contrast, have presented it as a tyranny imposed by the state upon the free consciences of Spaniards. Both extremes of opinion can probably be supported by some contemporary evidence, but neither is wholly plausible. The primitive state bureaucracies of fifteenth-century Castile and Aragon were ill equipped to impose a tyranny on the mass of the people and in reality never attempted to do so. If the Inquisition acquired any base of support, on the other hand, we may ask why this came about.

  As we shall see (chapter 10), in practice the Holy Office had little active or continuous contact with the people, because it was not, like the Church, a part of their daily lives. During the first thirty years its impact was limited to the chief urban centers of Andalucia and a handful of other cities including Toledo, Saragossa and Barcelona. Up to the mid-sixteenth century it was still an urban entity that seldom ventured out into the countryside. Not until almost a century after its foundation, when it went out for the first time into the frontier areas of the peninsula, into the mountainous Pyrenees and the remote northwest region of Galicia, did it bestir itself to face the 90 percent of the population that did not live in towns. In the preceding and crucial hundred years, the majority of Spaniards had no problems about accepting the Inquisition, simply because it was not there or at least had only a marginal impact on their daily lives. There were no remarkable protests against it, nor any uprisings.

  Meanwhile, if there were protests they arose exclusively in urban centers, where specific local elites or relevant regional interests objected to interference by outsiders. This happened from the very beginning, in almost any town of note (whether in Andalucia or the crown of Aragon) where the newcomers were seen as a threat to the previous way of doing things. Religion was by no means the constant or even the principal motive for opposition. The Aragonese had never fully activated their medieval Inquisition and were in no mood to accept another. Castilians were in an even more sensitive position: never in all their history had they institutionalized the persecution of heresy. Religious dissidence in the highly fragmented medieval society of Castile had been channeled into three main directions: folk customs (see chapter 13), contact with Islam and contact with Jews. None of the three had raised concerns calling for repression of the sort that was being considered in the crown of Aragon, where in the thirteenth century Catharism was filtering through from the Pyrenees. Judaizers in Castile had occasionally been condemned by episcopal courts prior to the establishment of the Inquisition, but in accord with existing law.3 How, then, did Spaniards come to accept a tribunal that was unknown to their own traditions4 and from the first went against their understanding of justice? The most eloquent testimony to criticisms made at the time comes from the pen of the Jesuit Juan de Mariana, writing at the very end of the sixteenth century. According to him, some aspects of inquisitorial procedure5

  at first appeared very oppressive to Spaniards. What caused the most surprise was that children paid for the crimes of their parents, and that accusers were not named or made known, nor confronted by the accused, nor was there publication of witnesses: all of which was contrary to the practice followed of old in other tribunals. Besides this, it appeared an innovation that sins of that sort should be punished by death. And what was most serious was that because of these secret investigations they were deprived of the liberty to listen and talk freely, since in all the cities, towns and villages there were persons placed to give information of what went on. This was considered by some to be the most wretched slavery and equal to death.6

  Despite the strong language in which it is phrased, this opinion was not apparently shared by Mariana himself, who presents as “better and more correct” a contrary view in favor of the Inquisition. Significantly, he nowhere gives the impression that the critical view was held only by conversos. The specific points mentioned, on innovations in judicial procedure, the death sentence for judaizing and the practice of spying, were indeed questions that Old Christians raised in Castilian and Aragonese Cortes over the next few years. Fully aware of the novelty of inquisitorial practice, Mariana admitted that the new harsh measures were a deviation from the normal charitable procedure of the Church; but, he says, it was held “that the ancient customs of the Church should be changed in conformity with the needs of the times.”

  “The needs of the times”: it is the clue to the survival of the Inquisition. While urban factions in Toledo, Ciudad Real and other towns were struggling to dislodge conversos from power, in the 1480s Ferdinand and Isabella, fresh from the civil wars and the constitutional settlement achieved at the Cortes of Toledo (1480), were beginning a military crusade against the Muslims of Granada. In 1486 they sought blessing for their cause at the shrine of St James in Compostela. Crisis times required crisis measures: the message was implicit in every major directive issued by Ferdinand in these years, and helps to explain the unusual cooperation he obtained in much of Spain. It may also help to explain the totally uncompromising firmness with which he insisted that the Inquisition be accepted everywhere, regardless of consequences. We have his remarkable statement to the consellers of Barcelona in 1486, that “before we decided on introducing this Inquisition into any of the cities of our realms, we carefully considered and looked at all the harm and ill that could follow from it and that could affect our taxes and revenue. But because our firm intention and concern is to prefer the service of God to our own, we wish the Inquisition
to be established regardless, putting all other interests aside.”7

  The stimulation of a feeling of crisis (aggravated by alleged converso plots, the murder of Arbués, or the episode of the La Guardia infant), and the universal response to the great ten-year-long crusade against Granada, pressurized many public authorities to conform and stilled the protests of individuals. The security measures in defense of society were accepted as essential even if they undermined some of the principles of that society. Because the Inquisition was a crisis instrument, it may be that Ferdinand never intended it to be permanent (no steps, for example, were taken at the time to give it a regular income). This certainly was the feeling of the Toledo writer who commented in 1538 that “if the Catholic monarchs were still alive, they would have reformed it twenty years ago, given the change in conditions.”8 The unprecedented activities of the Holy Office were deemed by some to be acceptable in an emergency, until the crisis had passed. Unfortunately, those who controlled the security measures made sure that the crisis was perceived to endure for centuries.

  Critics remained uneasy that harsh penalties should be imposed on those who had never been properly Christianized. Were judaizers wholly to blame? Had they ever been catechized after their forced baptism? And were the penalties not extreme? Mariana testifies to the existence of dissent in Castile: “At the time there were differing opinions. Some felt that those who sinned in this way should not suffer the death penalty: but apart from this they admitted that it was just to inflict any other kind of punishment. Among others sharing this opinion, was Hernando del Pulgar, a person of acute and elegant genius.”9

  We may conjecture that Pulgar’s view was widely held in higher circles. The diputados of Aragon, as we have seen, protested to Ferdinand that correction should be by example and not by violence. Many Spaniards were indeed appalled at the tide of bloodshed. “We are all aghast,” the consellers of Barcelona informed Ferdinand bluntly in 1484, “at the news we receive of the executions and proceedings that they say are taking place in Castile.”10 Pulgar was no less horrified. Denouncing the resort to coercion at a time when evangelization had not been tried, the royal secretary informed the archbishop of Seville that thousands of young conversos in Andalucia

  have never been out of their homes or heard and learned any other doctrine but that which they had seen their parents practice at home. To burn all these would be not only cruel but difficult to carry out.

  I do not say this, my lord, in favor of the evildoers, but to find a solution, which it seems to me would be to put in that province outstanding persons who by their exemplary life and teaching of doctrine would convert some and bring back others. Of course [the inquisitors] Diego de Merlo and doctor Medina are good men; but I know very well that they will not produce such good Christians with their fire as the bishops Pablo [de Santa Maria] and Alonso [de Cartagena] did with water.11

  While agreeing that heresy should be repressed, Pulgar objected to capital punishment. His principal authority for this position was St. Augustine, who had advocated the use of force but not the death penalty against the Donatist heretics of North Africa in the fifth century.

  Pulgar’s contemporary Juan de Lucena, a noted humanist and servant of the crown, also entered into public controversy over the methods of the Inquisition. At one time royal emissary to Rome and then a member of the royal council, Lucena was apparently a converso and, according to his adversary canon Alonso Ortiz of Toledo, not only “attempted with his sophistries to defend the conversos” but also “insisted to the king and queen that there should be no Inquisition.” Lucena claimed, says Ortiz, that Jews “baptized through fear did not receive the sacrament properly, and should therefore be treated not as heretics but as infidels,” and that “conversos ought to be convinced with reasons and inducements, not with coercion and punishments.”12

  Further evidence of opposition to the persecution of Jews and conversos comes from an official of the Holy Office itself. The inquisitor Luis de Páramo (as we have observed) wrote that many learned Spaniards, both before and after 1492, thought the expulsion wrong in principle, as well as harmful to the Church, for two main reasons: first, because those who had been baptized by force had not received the sacrament properly and therefore remained essentially pagan;13 second, because the expulsion was an implicit invitation to annihilate the Jews, which would be contrary to Scripture. The first reason was clearly of paramount importance, for if Jews had been forced into conversion their baptism was invalid and the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over them. The standard reply to this argument was simple. The mere fact that the Jews had chosen baptism as an alternative to death or exile meant that they had exercised the right of free choice: there was therefore no compulsion, and the sacrament was valid.

  In the early years of the Inquisition, opposition was quite logically led by conversos. Unable to secure support in Spain they turned to Rome. A bull issued by Sixtus IV on 2 August 1483, and almost certainly obtained by converso money, ordered greater leniency to be exercised in the tribunal of Seville and revoked all appeal cases to Rome. Only eleven days later, however, the pope withdrew the bull, after pressure from the Spanish rulers. Sixtus IV died in 1484, to be succeeded by Innocent VIII, a pontiff who followed his policy of intervening in favor of the conversos while taking care not to anger the Catholic monarchs. The bulls issued by Innocent on 11 February and 15 July 1485, asking for more mercy and leniency and for greater use of the practice of secret reconciliation, are typical of the efforts made by the Holy See to avoid lasting infamy falling on the tribunal’s victims. Yet even if we see the hand of the conversos in all these attempts to mitigate the worst aspects of inquisitorial procedure, it is impossible to maintain that conversos alone constituted the opposition.

  Hostility to the practice of sanbenitos, for example, was shared by Old and New Christian alike. These penitential garments (see chapter 9) were ordered to be worn in public by the condemned, causing them public humiliation and bringing ill fame to the towns where they lived. It was what Mariana singled out particularly as being “very oppressive to Spaniards.” In Andalucia, according to Bernáldez, people were allowed to cease wearing them “so that the disrepute of the territory should not grow.”14 Spying would have been objected to in any community and, as we shall see, aroused appropriate reactions. Prior to 1492 the Jews themselves were asked to spy on conversos. At Toledo in 1485 the inquisitors collected the rabbis and made them swear to anathematize in their synagogues those Jews who did not denounce judaizers.15 A high proportion of testimonies offered against conversos in Saragossa in the period before the expulsion came from Jews.16 In particular, ex-Jews rather than Jews appear to have been the most active denouncers: in Ciudad Real in 1483–85 a former Jew, Fernán Falcón, was the chief witness used against most of those arrested for judaizing.17

  Although conversos were notoriously hostile to the new tribunal, we hear little of opposition by Old Christians in Castile during the first two decades of the Inquisition’s existence. Yet this was, as we have seen, by far the most bloody period of its history. Hundreds of Christians of Jewish origin had been executed, ruined or driven into exile in a campaign without precedent in Spanish or European experience, and through all this few Old Christians had bestirred themselves to raise their voices in protest except when political considerations were in question. Occasionally, as in the case of Lucero in Andalucia, Old Christians did indeed find they were involved.

  In 1499 the inquisitor of Córdoba was replaced after being found guilty of fraud and extortion. His successor, appointed in September that year, was Diego Rodríguez Lucero. Within a short time Lucero began his own bizarre career of extortion, arresting leading citizens on trifling or false pretexts in order to seize their property in confiscations. Prominent members of Old Christian families soon became ensnared in Lucero’s net and an atmosphere of terror gripped the community. That, at any rate, was the picture presented by those who opposed the inquisitor. Lucero himself had a different sto
ry. He had, he said, unearthed in the area a dangerous pro-Jewish millenarian movement.18 There is, in effect, evidence that such a movement had arisen among groups of conversos in the region. Large numbers were arrested by Lucero and persuaded to confess. In 1500, states a report made to the royal council, 130 people were relaxed (that is, “executed,” in the terminology of the Inquisition) in two autos de fe.19 After protests were made, the council sent a commission of inquiry that interviewed many of those arrested. The commissioners seem to have been convinced by the voluntary confessions of some prisoners, and gave their support to Lucero, who was left free to continue his activities. An annalist of Córdoba reports:

  to gain credit as a zealous minister of the faith and to gain higher dignities, he began to treat the accused in prison with extreme rigor, forcing them to declare their accomplices, which resulted in the denunciation of so great a number of people, both conversos and Old Christians, that the city was scandalized and almost burst into rioting.20

  Converso witnesses testified that they had been forced to teach Jewish prayers to Old Christian prisoners so that Lucero could accuse the latter of judaizing. A report from the cathedral chapter and city council in December 1506 accused Lucero of “killing and robbing and defaming any and everybody.” An independent inquiry by the Córdoba authorities in November concluded that Lucero’s evidence against his victims was “all fabricated”; that Fray Diego Deza, archbishop of Seville and inquisitor general, had failed to respond to petitions against the inquisitor; that four hundred innocent prisoners were currently in the cells; and that Lucero had deliberately burnt as many of his victims as possible (120 were apparently burnt alive in one auto in December 1504; 27 in another in May 1505) to stop them complaining to the new king of Castile, Philip the Fair. The king opportunely in June 1506 suspended another holocaust, this time of 160 persons, that Lucero was preparing.21