The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  It is certain that some rebels hoped to modify or abolish the Inquisition: the Admiral of Castile claimed early in 1521 that “the Comuneros say there will be no Inquisition,” and hostility to the tribunal is recorded in various parts of the realm. But the junta that headed the Comunidad was scrupulously careful to cause no offense to the Holy Office, and not a single reference to the Inquisition occurs among the demands made to the government.39 The tribunal survived this critical period with its functions intact. In Valencia, where a parallel revolt of Germanías (“brotherhoods”) was taking place, the functions of the Holy Office were in fact given further support as a result of compulsory mass baptisms that the rebels imposed on some of the Muslim population.

  In the years after the Comunidades, objections to the activities of the Inquisition continued to be made in both Castile and Aragon. A typical example is the memorial drawn up on 5 August 1533 and read to Charles at the Aragonese Cortes in Monzón.40 The sixteen articles included complaints that “some inquisitors of the Holy Office, in the voice and name of the Inquisition, have arrested and imprisoned people for private offenses in no way touching the Holy Office”; that inquisitors were taking part in secular business; that they had extended their jurisdiction illegitimately by prosecuting cases of sodomy, usury and bigamy—questions which had nothing to do with heresy; that the inquisitors of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia had an excessive number of familiars, whose identity was kept concealed, thus provoking numerous abuses. As for the Moriscos, said the protest, addressing itself to the inquisitor general, “Your Reverence knows well the way in which they were ‘converted,’ and the little or no teaching or instruction in our Holy Catholic faith which has been given them, and the lack of churches in the places where they live. Yet despite this lack of teaching and instruction, they are being proceeded against as heretics.” Worse still, the Inquisition was illegitimately seizing the land they had confiscated from the Moorish converts. To all these complaints Alonso Manrique, the inquisitor general, gave a firm, negative reply. The protests were shelved.

  Complaints along these lines were to play an important part in future controversies over the Inquisition. Inquisitorial jurisdiction in moral matters, for instance, was considered, then as later, a wrongful extension of its powers. But sweeping appeals like the protest of 1533 were growing fewer as the position of the Holy Office became stronger. Not only did the existence of the Inquisition become almost wholly unquestioned, but toleration of its attendant abuses became more common. As papal and royal favor confirmed it in its position as one of the key institutions of the realm, it survived all opposition, though it was never immune from criticism.

  By the mid-sixteenth century the tribunal was constitutionally secure. In part this happened because of the implicit support of the Old Christian majority, who had tolerated two decades of bloodletting directed against the conversos because it suited their own interests and who, too late, attempted to restrain the Inquisition when it appeared to be working against them. By then, in the new social atmosphere created by the European Reformation, the Holy Office had become essential to the maintenance of the established religion. In part, also, the Inquisition survived because of the unswerving support of the crown, which could ill afford to lose so useful an institution. Like Ferdinand before him, Charles V was firmly dedicated to it, and introduced a similar tribunal into the Netherlands in 1520.41 When the Aragonese disputes over Juan Prat occurred in 1518, Charles informed the Cortes: “you can be sure that we would rather agree to lose part of our realms and states than permit anything to be done therein against the honor of God and against the authority of the Holy Office.”42 During the Comunidades, Charles exhorted his viceroys in Spain to resist any attack on the Inquisition.43 In subsequent years, therefore, the monarchy had at its disposal a unique institution upon which it could possibly call in case of need. As it turned out, the need did not arise. There were repercussions in the crown of Aragon, where some of the activities of the tribunal were always regarded as unconstitutional. However, in Castile the Holy Office was never used to increase royal power, and its own powers were always circumscribed by day-to-day conflicts with other royal authorities and tribunals.

  These years of tension and conflict help to clarify what we know about popular support among Spaniards for the Inquisition. Support is easiest to identify in the realms of the south of Castile, where the tribunal in its early period was restricted to a few big towns, had almost no contact with the population of the countryside and came into conflict in the urban centers with no significant interest group apart from the converso elite. Unlike the institutions of the Church, to which believing Christians paid tithes and other donations, the tribunal demanded neither obedience nor taxes from the ordinary people; there was consequently no pressing reason for popular hostility. The Inquisition merged itself into existing power structures and gained the collaboration of local elites, who were happy to accept honorary posts (as “familiars”) in the tribunal.

  In the north of Castile and in the other realms of the peninsula, the degree of support was much more tenuous. Converso elites continued to be potent enemies, particularly in the kingdom of Aragon. But more than anything else it was the question of legal privileges that blighted the attempt to collaborate with non-Castilians. In Italy, Aragon and Catalonia, “local elites never lost their jealousy of its special privileges.”44 There were also a wide variety of other reasons that condemned the inquisitors to unpopularity outside Castile. They were resented by local clergy, they were seen as foreigners45 and they did not speak the language (for the issue of language, see chapter 8). “We are hated as officials of the Holy Office, especially in this town,” the inquisitor of Navarre wrote in 1547.46 He happened to be in a gloomy mood. Moreover, here on the mountainous frontier the Inquisition, even by the late sixteenth century, was a novelty that the population, most of whom spoke no Spanish, refused to accept. In 1574 an Inquisition official narrowly escaped lynching by the people of the Vall d’Arán in the Catalan Pyrenees. He reported back that “in that land they will not on any account permit the Holy Office to enter.”47 In Catalonia the tribunal was never fully accepted. “In this province,” the inquisitors complained in 1618, “they bear ill-will to the tribunal of the Holy Office and would destroy it if they could.”48 It was an exaggeration, for Catalans always worked along with the tribunal if it suited their interests. But they certainly viewed it as an alien institution, not because it was an Inquisition—they already had their own medieval one—but because it was Castilian.

  For three centuries more, the Inquisition would continue to be a standard feature of the Spanish landscape. Just as it had been bitterly opposed by the conversos, so in time it would also earn the profound hatred of other minorities. Its anti-Morisco activity arguably earned it some popularity among Christians. The chief victims at its autos in the crown of Aragon were “nearly always,” it has been pointed out, “people for whom the general public had little sympathy.”49 In Aragon and Valencia the accused were Moriscos, in Catalonia they were French immigrants. Despite this victimization of minorities, the Inquisition found it difficult to earn genuine popular support in the eastern realms of the peninsula. The rest of the Spanish population gradually came to accept it, but in a spirit that was by no means enthusiastic. It was essentially a policing body and therefore feared as the police can be, popular only when it acted out prejudices against minorities and outsiders.

  The ordinary people as a whole came very seldom into contact with it, and on balance accepted its activity without too much demur. The only significant popular riots against it were always a side effect of political disturbances (as in Saragossa in 1591). The inquisitors time and again tried to argue that the people were with them, and they were not necessarily wrong. “It is only the lords and leading persons who wage this war against the Holy Office,” they complained in Aragon in 1566, “and not the people.”50 At no time in ancien régime Spain did the populace attack the Inquisition as a religious inst
itution. In 1640 in Barcelona they scared the Castilian inquisitors out of the country, but it was no more than a prelude to setting up a native non-Castilian Inquisition. Only in March 1820 in Madrid did the mobs for the first time break with intent into the tribunal’s palaces, by now half-empty buildings from which a handful of startled prisoners were liberated.

  Support for the tribunal was of course always modified by considerable reserve. “It is fine,” a Catalan noble said in 1586, “for the Holy Office to look into questions of faith and punish bad Christians; but as for other matters, they should be dealt with when the Cortes meets.”51 Like other Spaniards, he saw clearly that there were things in which the Inquisition had no business to meddle. And indeed the Inquisition meddled much less than we might think. Both defenders and opponents of the Inquisition have often accepted without question the image of an omniscient, omnipotent tribunal whose fingers reached into every corner of the land. The extravagant rhetoric on both sides has been one of the major obstacles to understanding. For the Inquisition to have been as powerful as suggested, the fifty or so inquisitors in Spain would need to have had an extensive bureaucracy, a reliable system of informers, regular income and the cooperation of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Seldom if ever did they have any of these.

  Though often presented as such, therefore, there is no good reason for thinking of the Inquisition as a sinister tyranny imposed on an unwilling people. It never enjoyed enough power to become a tyranny, and it was brought into being by a particular social situation—the converso question—that in the relevant areas counted on substantial popular support. In some regions its impact was deadly; in others people never saw the tribunal at any moment of their lives. It fulfilled a role—as guardian against foreign ideas, as keeper of public morality, as arbiter between factions, as tribunal for small causes—that no other institution fulfilled. Moreover, over long periods of time and substantial areas of the country, it was inactive and all but disappeared. It did not exist in northwest Spain during the entire century after it came into existence in Andalucia. In the 140 years between 1536 and 1675 the tribunal that had been set up in Mallorca did virtually nothing.52 In the early decades the Holy Office went through periods when the glare of publicity shone on its activities, but all too often thereafter it was swallowed up by shadows. After an explosive entry into the course of Spain’s history it slipped surreptitiously into the stream of daily life, where its impact and duration was to be much longer than anyone could have imagined at the beginning.

  5

  EXCLUDING THE REFORMATION

  We live in such difficult times that it is dangerous either to speak or be silent.

  —JUAN LUIS VIVES TO ERASMUS, 1534

  In the early dawn of the European Reformation many intellectuals in Spain were foremost in their support for change. At the 1520 Diet of Worms, when Luther had to defend himself publicly, “everybody, especially the Spaniards, went to see him,” admitted the humanist Juan de Vergara. “At the beginning everybody agreed with him,” Vergara went on, “and even those who now write against him confess that at the beginning they were in favor of him.”1

  Educated Spaniards of that generation were excited at the new horizons opened up by European Renaissance scholarship. Scholars who went to Italy, such as Antonio de Nebrija, who returned from there to take up a chair at Salamanca in 1505, were in the vanguard of the drive to promote learning. From Italy Peter Martyr of Anghiera came in 1488 to educate the young nobles of Castile, preceded four years before by Lucio Marineo Siculo, who joined the ranks of the professors at Salamanca. A key figure in the advancement of learning was Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo from 1495 and inquisitor general from 1507. He founded the University of Alcalá, which hoped to be a center of humanist studies. Its first chancellor, Pedro de Lerma, had studied at Paris. Nebrija was, as Erasmus wrote in 1521 to his friend Luis Vives (an exile from Valencia and now a native of the Netherlands), its “principal ornament.” Among its professors were the converso brothers Juan and Francisco de Vergara. One of the key tasks that Cisneros set the professors of the university was the production of a critical edition of the Bible which he hoped would be a classic of contemporary scholarship. The Polyglot Bible that resulted from this enterprise consisted of six volumes, with the Hebrew, Chaldean and Greek originals of the Bible printed in columns parallel to the Latin Vulgate. The Complutensian (from Compluto, the Latin for Alcalá) Polyglot was finally published in 1522.

  The accession in 1519 of Charles I of Spain to the imperial title (as Charles V of Germany) encouraged some to believe that the country was about to participate in a great European enterprise. But the enthusiasm among scholars turned out eventually to be misplaced. The Polyglot, a beautiful but expensive product, found no ready market. The humanist aspirations of some Spanish scholars could not overcome the narrow mental perspectives among very many others.2 The clearest sign of a problem was what happened to the writings of Erasmus. The great Dutch humanist was acknowledged throughout Europe as the doyen of classical studies. From Charles’s own homeland, the Netherlands, his influence began to penetrate the open frontiers of Spain, and in 1517 Cisneros unsuccessfully invited him to come and visit. By 1524 a small number of intellectuals in the peninsula had rallied to the doctrines of Erasmus, to whom Vives commented approvingly in June 1524, “our Spaniards are also interesting themselves in your works.”

  The wit and satire directed by Erasmus against ecclesiastical abuses, and particularly against lax standards in the mendicant orders, found a ready hearing in a country where the highest Church officials had themselves supported reform. The presence of prominent intellectuals and literary men in the entourage of Charles V ensured protection for the new ideas at court. Significantly, the two principal prelates in the Church—the archbishop of Toledo, Alonso de Fonseca, successor to Cisneros, and Alonso Manrique, the inquisitor general—were keen Erasmians. Erasmus’s success was confirmed with the translation of his Enchiridion, undertaken in 1524 by Alonso Fernández, archdeacon of Alcor. The enthusiastic translator wrote (with evident exaggeration) to the author in 1527:

  At the emperor’s court, in the cities, in the churches, in the convents, even in the inns and on the highways, everyone has the Enchiridion of Erasmus in Spanish. Till then it used to be read in Latin by a minority of Latinists, and even these did not fully understand it. Now it is read in Spanish by people of every sort, and those who had formerly never heard of Erasmus have learned of his existence through this single book.3

  The publisher of the Enchiridion, Miguel de Eguía, was printer to the University of Alcalá and brought out about a hundred books of humanist orientation. Erasmus, by far the best seller, was informed in 1526 that “though the printers have produced many thousands of copies, they cannot satisfy the multitude of buyers.” There were many personal contacts between his friends who came to Spain and Spaniards who went north to see him. Among the latter the most significant was young Juan de Vergara, who left the peninsula with the emperor in 1520 and spent two years with Erasmus in the Netherlands. On his return, starry-eyed, he wrote back to Vives: “The admiration felt for Erasmus by all Spaniards is astonishing.”

  It was not quite true. Many Spanish scholars were critical of the northerner’s methods of exegesis. Others were uneasy at similarities between Erasmus and Luther. Some of the mendicant orders in particular were smarting under the satirical attacks of Erasmus, and pressed for a debate on his “heresies.” A conference of the Castilian Church4 presided over by Manrique, and including some thirty voting representatives of the orders as well as all the known theological experts, eventually met at Valladolid in the summer of 1527.5 The deliberations were inconclusive, with half the representatives coming out in favor of the Dutchman, but the result was viewed as a victory for the humanists. On 13 December Charles V himself wrote to Erasmus, asking him not to worry over controversy in Spain, “as though, so long as we are here, one could make a decision contrary to Erasmus, whose Christian piety is w
ell known to us. . . . Take courage and be assured that we shall always hold your honor and repute in the greatest esteem.”6

  The achievements of Spanish humanism were, perhaps inevitably, exaggerated by contemporaries. No more than a fraction of the elite (notable among them the grandee Mendoza family)7 were active patrons of the arts, and only a small number of clergy and scholars was devoted to classical studies. Few changes occurred in literary culture, and the popular tradition (represented, for example, by the Celestina of 1499) remained predominant in printed works. Among clergy, learned aspects of humanism always took second place to the influence of scholastic theology.8 The new learning favored by Charles V was largely a phenomenon of the emperor’s court. Beyond its confines, even among the nobles and elite, Latin in Spain was virtually a dead tongue, studied but never spoken.9 The Florentine ambassador Guicciardini in 1512 made an observation that other foreigners were to echo throughout the century. The Spaniards, he said, “are not interested in letters, and one finds very little knowledge either among the nobility or in other classes, and few people know Latin.” Regular contact with the Netherlands and Italy had by the early 1500s introduced some literate Spaniards to the art and spirituality of the north and the literature of the Renaissance, but the impact was small. The study of Greek never caught on. When some years later in 1561 Cardinal Mendoza of Burgos was asked to suggest scholars with knowledge of Greek who might suitably represent Spain at the Council of Trent, he could name only four people in the whole country.10