The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  Lucero’s inquiries also led him to find evidence of the millenarian movement among members of the household of the eighty-year-old Jeronimite archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, formerly confessor to Queen Isabella. Accusing Talavera of having a “synagogue” in his palace, Lucero arrested the archbishop and his entire household (which included his sister, two nieces and their daughters, and the servants). The fact is that Talavera—as we note below—was not of converso origin and had no pro-Jewish leanings. Nevertheless, relatives and servants were tortured and duly produced denunciations against him. A rebellion by the city authorities in Córdoba in October 1506 put an end to the regime of Lucero, who fled. The papacy opportunely intervened, the archbishop was acquitted of all charges in April 1507 and he and his family were set free.22 It came too late to benefit the old man. Walking barefoot and bareheaded through the streets of Granada in the procession on Ascension Day, 13 May, he was seized by a violent fever which the following day ended his life. On his deathbed he denounced “Lucero and his accomplices” for “trying to wipe out the conversos,” “which,” he continued, “is clearly against the Holy Catholic Faith, which requires that there be no distinction between Jew and Greek.”23 Talavera’s care for his flock had left him no time to care for himself. He died in perfect poverty; his household, for which he had not provided, had to resort to the charity of the bishop of Málaga.

  Nearly a century later, Fray José de Sigüenza, historian of the Jeronimite order, lamented that there had been no other prelates in Spain like Talavera. In his treatment of New Christians, says Fray José, Talavera

  would not allow anyone to harm them in word or deed, or burden them with new taxes and impositions, for he detested the evil custom prevalent in Spain of treating members of the sects worse after their conversion than before it . . . so that many refused to accept a Faith in whose believers they saw so little charity and so much arrogance.

  And if there had been more prelates who walked in this path, there would not have been so many lost souls stubborn in the sects of Moses and Mohammed within Spain, nor so many heretics in other nations.24

  Talavera’s position was stated most clearly in his Catholic Refutation, a sharp attack that he directed against a “heretical leaflet” issued in 1480 by a pro-Jewish converso of Seville. Reading the text is enough to demonstrate that Talavera was no converso (as is sometimes alleged) and had no sympathy with conversos. Deflating the pretension of Jews and conversos to be a specially gifted nation (“the Greeks were much more so, and the Romans, and even the Arabs”), Talavera supported use of the death penalty for heresy. On the other hand, he attacked the anti-Semitism to which conversos were subjected, stating firmly that reason rather than persecution was the way to bring them back to the fold: “Heresies need to be corrected not only with punishments and lashes, but even more with Catholic reasoning.”25 It was the policy he later adopted towards the Moriscos of Granada. His tract, possibly because of its controversial nature, was placed on the Index of forbidden books in 1559. The Inquisition subsequently decided merely to remove some phrases from it, but never got round to doing this.26

  On 16 July of the same year, 1507, Gonzalo de Ayora, captain general and chronicler, wrote a letter of protest to the king’s secretary Miguel Almazán on behalf of the people persecuted by Lucero.

  The government had failed to exercise effective control over its ministers. As for the Inquisition, the method adopted was to place so much confidence in the archbishop of Seville and in Lucero . . . that they were able to defame the whole kingdom, to destroy, without God or justice, a great part of it, slaying and robbing and violating maids and wives to the great dishonor of the Christian religion.

  The damages which the wicked officials of the Inquisition have wrought in my land are so many and so great that no reasonable person on hearing of them would not grieve.27

  The redress so urgently demanded had begun with the resignation of Deza under pressure, and the appointment on 5 June 1507 of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, cardinal archbishop of Toledo, as inquisitor general. In May 1508 the Suprema eventually voted to arrest Lucero, who was taken in chains to Burgos, while his victims in the prison of Córdoba were all released. The ex-inquisitor received no punishment for his crimes, but was allowed to retire to Seville, where he died in peace.

  At the same time as the troubles in Córdoba, complaints were raised in Llerena (Extremadura) against the activities of the new inquisitor, a man named Bravo, who had for a time been an assistant of Lucero in Córdoba. So many wealthy prisoners were thrown into the cells by Bravo, despite the protests of one of his colleagues, that the relatives of the condemned finally gathered enough courage to petition the crown:

  We the relatives and friends of the prisoners in the cells of the Inquisition of Llerena kiss the royal hands of Your Highness and testify that the inquisitors of that province, together with their officials, have persecuted and persecute both the prisoners and ourselves with great hatred and enmity, and have carried out many irregularities in the procedure of imprisonment and trial, and have maltreated not only the said prisoners but their wives and children and property.28

  There is no record of any censure of Bravo’s policy, and it appears likely that he was allowed to pursue his career unchecked. Lucero’s influence also seems to have haunted the tribunal at Jaén, where a professional “witness” who had formerly served the inquisitor now extended his activities. The man’s name was Diego de Algeciras, and for a reasonable pittance he was ready to perjure himself in testifying to the judaizing activities of any number of conversos. Thanks to his assistance, the richest conversos of the city were soon in jail on suspicion of heresy. Those who still remained free petitioned the crown to restore jurisdiction over heresy to the bishop of Jaén, whose mercy they trusted more than the abuses of the officials of the Inquisition.29

  Most abuses probably originated not with the inquisitors themselves but with their subordinate officials. Among the more notorious cases was the notary at Jaén, who locked a young girl of fifteen in a room, stripped her naked and whipped her until she agreed to testify against her mother.30 A deposition drawn up by witnesses at Toledo and dated 26 September 1487 asserts that the receiver of confiscated goods in that tribunal, Juan de Uria, had defrauded sums amounting to 4,000 ducats, enough to set himself up in comfort.31 There were opportunities for lining one’s pockets even at the bottom of the ladder. In 1588, the inquisitor from Madrid who carried out the inspection of the tribunal at Córdoba reported that both the doorkeeper and the messenger of the tribunal were criminals and profiteers, and that this was well known throughout the city, although apparently not to the inquisitors of Córdoba.32

  In the crown of Aragon, too, Old Christians who had condoned the persecution of conversos now began after the death of Queen Isabella to rally to the defense of the fueros. Meeting together at Monzón in 1510, the representatives of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia raised the question of reform in jurisdiction. No further steps were taken until their next meeting at Monzón in 1512, when a comprehensive list of reforms was drawn up. To this list Ferdinand added his signature, thus agreeing to the first of the many concordias (accords) made between the Inquisition and the individual regions of Spain. Among other things, the accord of 1512 stipulated that the number of familiars in the kingdom should be limited; that the Inquisition should not be exempt from local taxes; that officials of the tribunal who committed crimes should be tried by a secular court; that in cases of confiscation, property which had formerly belonged to the condemned should not be included in the confiscation; and that trade with conversos should not be prohibited, since this depressed commerce. Moreover, the tribunal was not to exercise jurisdiction over usury, bigamy, blasphemy and witchcraft unless heresy were involved. The fact that pressure had to be put on the king through the Cortes proves how serious were some of the objections raised in Aragon against inquisitorial procedure. Yet the demands made in 1512 are relatively mild when compared with some of
those made at a later date.

  At the death of Ferdinand on 23 January 1516 the crown passed to his grandson Charles, who was in Flanders at the time. Since the death of Isabella on 26 November 1504 Ferdinand had been king of Aragon only, and Castile had been under the rule of their daughter Juana (the Mad), widow since 1506 of Philip the Fair of Austria. The death of Ferdinand would normally have meant the acceptance of Juana as queen, but her mental dislocation made her obviously unfitted to rule, so that her son Charles was everywhere accepted as rightful sovereign.

  While awaiting the arrival of Charles in Spain, Cisneros maintained control of the Inquisition. In his will the Catholic King had called upon his successor to preserve the tribunal, which Charles had every intention of doing. But the new reign aroused hopes of reform, particularly in converso hearts, and Cisneros was greatly alarmed by a rumor that the king intended to allow the publication of the names of witnesses in inquisitorial trials. In a letter which the now aging cardinal wrote to Charles, apparently in March 1517, he asserted that the Inquisition was so perfect a tribunal “that there will never be any need for reform and it would be sinful to introduce changes.”33 The publication of witnesses’ names would lead inevitably to their murder, he stated, as had happened recently in Talavera de la Reina when an accused converso, on learning the name of his denouncer, went out to waylay him and assassinated him (for the question of confidentiality of information, see below, chapter 9).

  Cisneros was not, however, unalterably opposed to reforms, as his own life and career had demonstrated. During his tenure of the post of inquisitor general, he had taken care to dismiss the more notorious inquisitors, including the secretary of the Suprema. He wrote to Charles in December 1576 advising him that the royal secretary Calcena and others should have nothing further to do with the Inquisition, in view of their excesses. Lea’s very fair verdict is that “we may feel assured that he showed no mercy to those who sought to coin into money the blood of the conversos.”34

  Whatever Cisneros’s views may have been, many contemporaries thought that some reform in the judicial procedure of the Inquisition was essential, even if they did not question its actual existence. The arrival of the seventeen-year-old king from Flanders set off a train of requests and demands which constituted the last chapter in the struggle to subject the Inquisition to the rule of law. When Charles, after arriving in Spain in September 1517, held the first Cortes of his reign at Valladolid in February 1518, the deputies petitioned “that Your Highness provide that the office of the Holy Inquisition proceed in such a way as to maintain justice, and that the wicked be punished and the innocent not suffer.”35 They asked moreover that the forms of law be observed, and that inquisitors be chosen from reputable and learned men. The main result of this was the series of instructions for the Inquisition drawn up principally on the initiative of Jean le Sauvage, chancellor of the king, a man who was accused of being in the pay of the conversos. The preamble to these proposed instructions claims that

  accused people have not been able to defend themselves fully, many innocent and guiltless have suffered death, harm, oppression, injury and infamy . . . and many of our vassals have absented themselves from these realms: and (as events have shown) in general these our realms have received and receive great ill and harm: and have been and are notorious for this throughout the world.

  The proposed reforms, therefore, included provisions that prisoners placed in open, public prisons be able to receive visitors, be assigned counsel, be presented with an accusation on arrest and be given the names of witnesses. In addition, goods of the accused could not be taken and sold before a verdict, nor could the salaries of inquisitors be payable out of confiscations. Prisoners should be allowed recourse to mass and the sacraments while awaiting trial, and care should be taken not to let those condemned to perpetual prison die of hunger. If torture were used, it should be in moderation, and there should be no “new inventions of torture as have been used until now.” Each of these clauses points to the existence of problems which the new pragmatic was supposed to remedy.

  Had the instructions ever been approved, a totally different tribunal would have come into existence. The rule of confidentiality of witnesses would have been completely removed, and opportunity for abuses presumably reduced. Happily for those who supported the Inquisition, the new inquisitor general appointed by Charles on the death of Cisneros was his own tutor the Dutch cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, bishop of Tortosa, who firmly opposed any innovation. Shortly after this, early in July 1518, Sauvage died. With him collapsed any hope of fundamental alterations in the structure of the Inquisition. Adrian, who as a Netherlander appears not to have had any close knowledge of Spanish problems, even reversed some of the reforms of Cisneros by reappointing Calcena to a post of authority as secretary to the Suprema.

  Meanwhile Charles had gone to Aragon, where he accepted the allegiance of the kingdom in the Cortes which opened at Saragossa in May 1518. Surprisingly, when the Cortes offered to advance him a large sum of money in exchange for agreement to a list of thirty-one articles that were substantially the same as those drawn up in Castile by Sauvage, the king agreed. It soon became clear that he had no intention of observing the agreement, for a subsequent message to the Spanish ambassador in Rome asked him to secure from the pope revocation of the articles and a dispensation from his oath to observe them.

  However, the Cortes had already taken the step of having Charles’s signature to the articles authenticated by Juan Prat, the notary of the Cortes. All the relevant papers were then sent to Rome in the hands of Diego de las Casas, a converso from Seville. After the dissolution of the Cortes in January 1519, the Inquisition stepped in to arrest Prat on the charge of having falsified the articles. The accusation was obviously false, but both ecclesiastical and secular authorities acted as though it were true. The new chancellor, Mercurino Gattinara, urgently drew up papers which he sent to Rome in April, claiming that these were genuine and that the official copy was a forgery. By now a serious constitutional quarrel had arisen inside Aragon, and the deputies and nobility of the realm, meeting in conference in May, sent a request to Charles for the release of Prat, threatening not to grant any money until their demands were met. They summoned the Cortes and refused to disperse until justice had been done.

  At this stage Pope Leo X intervened in favor of the Aragonese. In July 1519 he issued three briefs, one to Charles, one to the inquisitor general and one to the tribunal of Saragossa, reducing the powers of the Inquisition to the bounds of ordinary canon law and revoking all special privileges granted by his predecessor. Charles and his officials refused to allow the publication of the brief in Spain, and sent a firm protest to Rome. The pope now shifted his position and suspended the briefs without revoking them. At this the Aragonese immediately discontinued payment of any grants to the crown. Finally, in December 1520 the pope confirmed the accord of 1518, but in terms which did not specify whether it was Prat’s or Gattinara’s version that was the correct one. A compromise was eventually reached in 1521, when Cardinal Adrian accepted the Aragonese version for the time being, and released Prat. The victory of the Aragonese was an unsubstantial one. The Inquisition at no time afterwards admitted the validity of the accords of 1512 and 1518, so that the struggles of these years were after all in vain.

  At the Castilian Cortes of La Coruña in 1520, the requests made at Valladolid for a reform in the procedure of the Inquisition were repeated, but to no avail. Later that same year, while Charles was away in Flanders, another plan for reform was presented to him. This and subsequent proposals fell through. On his return to Spain, a Cortes was held at Valladolid in 1523. Again the old suggestions for reform were brought up, fortified by a request that the salaries of inquisitors should be paid by the crown and not drawn from confiscations. Failure was again the result. In 1525 the Cortes which met at Toledo complained of abuses committed by both inquisitors and familiars, but they achieved nothing beyond a promise that wrongs would be righted if
they really existed. In 1526 in Granada the king was presented with a memorial demonstrating the defects in the secret procedure of the Inquisition, and asking for prisoners to be kept in public jails instead of the secret cells.36 To this there is no recorded reply. Almost annually such requests had been presented to the crown, and as regularly refused. Quite obviously a persistent stream of opposition was in continual existence, dedicated not so much to the suppression of the Inquisition as to the cure of abuses. Against a stubborn Charles, however, no impact could be made. In April 1520 the king observed to a correspondent that “in the Cortes of Aragon and Catalonia the Holy Office has been criticized and attacked by some people who do not care much for its preservation.”37 The reference to Aragon should not divert us from the fact that, as we have seen, criticism had been raised just as frequently in the realm of Castile. Throughout Spain, the organs of constitutional government became the last channels of protest available to opponents of the Holy Office.

  From 1519 to 1521 the energies of Castilians were occupied in the famous revolt of the Comuneros, a confusing and complex struggle waged partly by town oligarchies against the royal authorities who had the support of the nobility, and partly by rival factions against each other in some of the great cities. Inevitably some conversos, with their known activity in many municipalities, could be found on the rebel side. Among the leading Comuneros were a Coronel in Segovia, a Zapata in Toledo, a Tovar in Valladolid; all the names were of well-known converso families. Rumor, seasoned in part with malice, tended to exaggerate their role. The Constable of Castile informed Charles V in 1521 that the “root cause of the uprising in these realms has been the conversos”; and after the rebel defeat at Villalar on 23 April 1521, according to the emperor’s jester, “many dead were found without foreskins.”38 A generation later the archbishop of Toledo, Siliceo, could claim maliciously that “it is common knowledge in Spain that the Comunidades were incited by descendants of Jews.” In fact, there was no significant identification of the converso cause with that of the Comuneros, and many known conversos fought on the royalist side.