by Henry Kamen
The opening of intellectual horizons in Spain was soon threatened from within by the growth of illuminism and the discovery of Protestants, and from without by the limitations imposed throughout Europe on free thought by political events.
The spiritual and devotional movements in Castile in the late fifteenth century were warmly patronized by Cisneros, and produced a literature of which the most outstanding example was the Spiritual ABC (1527) of the Franciscan friar Francisco de Osuna. Adepts of the Franciscan school believed in a mystical method known as recogimiento, the “gathering up” of the soul to God. Those who practiced it were recogidos. Out of this mystical school there grew up a version (condemned by the general chapter of the Franciscans in 1524) emphasizing the passive union of the soul with God. The method was known as dejamiento (abandonment), and adepts were called dejados or alumbrados (illuminists).11 Mystical movements and the search for a purer interior religion were common coin in Europe at this time. In Spain there was powerful patronage of mystics by the great nobility. One alumbrado group was patronized by the Mendoza duke of Infantado in his palace at Guadalajara. It consisted of the beata Isabel de la Cruz, Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz, and María de Cazalla and her Franciscan brother Juan, auxiliary bishop of Avila. Alcaraz was also connected with another group at Escalona, patronized by the marquis of Villena. Meanwhile a parallel group of adepts emerged in Valladolid. The chief influence here was the beata Francisca Hernández, whose fame as a holy woman attracted into her circle Bernardino Tovar, a brother of Juan de Vergara, and the Franciscan preacher Francisco Ortiz.
In 1519 Isabel de la Cruz was denounced to the Inquisition by a servant girl of the Mendozas. There had been fusses before about other holy women—the beata of Piedrahita (1512) was a famous example—and little may have come of this case. But investigations happened to coincide with alarm over Lutheranism in Germany, leading inquisitors to fear that elements of heresy were involved. One by one, in a slow and patient inquiry that stretched over several years, the illuminist leaders were detained on the orders of Inquisitor General Manrique. Isabel and Alcaraz were arrested in April 1524. On 23 September 1525 Manrique issued an “edict on the alumbrados,” a list of forty-eight propositions which gives a valuable summary of their doctrine and leaves little doubt that their beliefs were not orthodox.12 Isabel and Alcaraz were sentenced to appear in an auto de fe at Toledo on 22 July 1529.
The attention of the inquisitors now shifted to Valladolid, where Francisca Hernández had gathered around her a group of adepts who practiced recogimiento in opposition to the method of the Guadalajara mystics. Her most devoted admirer was the well-known preacher Francisco Ortiz,13 and she lived for a while with the rich Cazalla family, relatives of María de Cazalla. Her fame spread: great lords and clergy visited her, and Erasmians such as Eguía and Tovar frequented the house. Her imperious character brooked no rivalry, however, and she quarreled first with the Cazallas, then with the Erasmians. When she was arrested by the Inquisition in March 1529, the indignant Francisco Ortiz went into his pulpit and in front of a distinguished audience emotionally denounced the Inquisition for its “public and open” sin in detaining her. He was pulled down from the pulpit and spent that night in the cells of the Inquisition. His trial dragged on for three years, by which time he retracted because he had lost faith in Hernández. He was suspended from his priestly functions for five years and ordered to stay in a monastery for two, but his spirit was broken and he spent the last dozen years of his life there, refusing to emerge.
In August 1529 Manrique fell into political disgrace and was confined to his see of Seville. At the same time the protecting hand of the emperor was withdrawn: Charles left in July for Italy and took with him some of the most influential Erasmians. This made it possible for the traditionalists, who had been biding their time after the defeat at Valladolid, to take the offensive.
One of the first prosecutions for Erasmian ideas was that of Diego de Uceda, chamberlain to a high official in the order of Calatrava. A deeply religious Catholic, Uceda was also an Erasmian who was skeptical about superstitions and miracles. Journeying in February 1528 from Burgos to his native city of Córdoba, he fell in with a traveling companion to whom he talked too earnestly and freely about religion, particularly about Luther. Denounced to the Inquisition by his companion, he was arrested, tortured and condemned despite all the evidence that he was blameless in his religious beliefs and practices. He finally abjured his “errors” at the Toledo auto de fe of 22 July 1529.14
The mingling of mystical, Erasmian and heretical influences made the late 1520s a unique period of both freedom and tension. The inquisitors sought Lutheran ideas everywhere, and located them in the views of some of the alumbrados. More significant for them, perhaps, was the fact that nearly every person implicated in the groups of these years was of converso origin: Isabel, Alcaraz, Hernández, Ortiz, Tovar, the Cazallas. It was as though conversos were seeking to reject formal Catholicism by interiorizing their religion. Completely at home neither in Judaism nor in Christianity, many conversos at all social levels had demonstrated signs of skepticism, unease and Nicodemism.15 As far back as the reign of King Juan II of Castile (d. 1454), there had been the reputed case of Alfonso Fernández Samuel, who in his will had requested that when laid out in his coffin, he should have the cross placed at his feet, the Koran at his breast, and the Torah, “his life and light,” at his head.16 In the early years of the Inquisition, considerable evidence came to light not simply of judaizing but also of messianism on one hand and irreligious skepticism on the other. Many conversos, indeed, were ironically condemned for beliefs that orthodox Judaism would have regarded as heretical, such as denying the immortality of the soul.17 Their search for new ideas did not, therefore, necessarily imply any drift towards Judaism. There was nothing remotely Jewish about the beliefs of the alumbrados: the root influence was Franciscan spirituality, the environment was the comfortable patronage afforded by Old Christian nobility.18
From the moment she was detained, Hernández attempted to save her skin by incriminating all those against whom she bore a grudge. Tovar had persisted in following her despite the warnings of Vergara. It was no doubt knowledge of Juan de Vergara’s hostility that moved Hernández, at her trial in 1530, to denounce him as a Lutheran, a claim that was supported by other disciples of hers. Tovar was already in prison. He was followed there by his brother in June 1530. Finally, in April 1532 María de Cazalla was imprisoned and tortured and accused of the various heresies of Lutheranism, illuminism and Erasmianism.19 Her trial dragged on until December 1534, when she was fined and ordered not to associate again with illuminists. Her brother the bishop had opportunely died in 1530. The Inquisition had not yet finished with their family, however, for from them sprang the circle of Protestants that alarmed Valladolid two decades later. Although the circle had closed round the mystics, they emerged remarkably unscathed.20 Hernández was by 1532 living in freedom in Medina del Campo; Isabel and Alcaraz, condemned to “perpetual” prison, were released after a few years;21 María de Cazalla was fined and had to express her repentance.
The attack on the alumbrados, though of short duration and with few serious casualties, had consequences of lasting importance. This can be seen clearly in the case of the famous preacher Juan de Avila. Active in the mission field in Andalucia in the late 1520s, Avila was denounced as an alumbrado and spent nearly a year (1532–33) in the cells of the Inquisition. He used his idle hours to think out the shape of a book of spiritual guidance, the Audi, Filia, which was not in fact presented for publication until 1556. An innocent victim of the alumbrado scare in the 1530s (he was a converso), in the 1550s Avila fell foul not only of the Protestant scare but also of an inquisitor general, Valdés, who was suspicious of all mystical writings (“works of contemplation for artisans’ wives” was how he saw them, according to Luis de Granada). Valdés banned the book in his 1559 Index, and Avila in despair burnt a large number of his manuscripts.22 Though the Audi, Filia circulated i
n manuscript for several years, it was not until after its author’s death in 1569 that the Inquisition allowed it to be published again, at Toledo in 1574. A whole generation of spirituality—we shall come across the case of Luis de Granada—fell under suspicion because of the supposed danger from illuminism.
The most direct threat, however, seemed to come from Lutheranism. An Old Christian, the Basque priest Juan López de Celaín, who had links with the alumbrados of Guadalajara, was arrested in 1528 and burnt as a “Lutheran” in Granada in July 1530.23 Lutheranism was also one of the allegations made against Juan de Vergara.24 Secretary to Cisneros and later to his successor at Toledo, Alonso de Fonseca, Vergara was one of the foremost classical scholars in Spain. He had collaborated in the Polyglot Bible, had held the chair of philosophy at Alcalá and had proposed offering the chair of rhetoric there to Vives. Arrested in 1530, tried and imprisoned, Vergara was obliged to abjure his errors in an auto at Toledo on 21 December 1535, and to pay a heavy fine of 1,500 ducats. After this he was confined to a monastery, from which he emerged in 1537. Like others who completed their allotted penance, he was able to resume his old position in society. We encounter him once more in 1547 at the center of the great controversy in Toledo over the proposed statutes to exclude conversos from office in the cathedral. He died, still honored, in Alcalá in May 1566.25
Alonso de Virués, a Benedictine and preacher to Charles V, was the first of several eminent preachers of the emperor to be accused of heresy, presumably because of contacts that he, like Vergara, had made abroad. Arrested in 1533 and confined in prison by the Inquisition of Seville for four long years, he pleaded in vain that Erasmus had never been condemned as unorthodox. Finally, in 1537 he was made to abjure his errors, sentenced to confinement in a monastery for two years and banned from preaching for another year. Charles V made strenuous efforts to save Virués, and in May 1538 obtained from the pope a bull annulling the sentence. Virués was restored to favor and appointed in 1542 as bishop of the Canary Islands, where he died in 1545.
Another outstanding case, sometimes connected with the origins of Protestantism in Spain, was Juan de Valdés, also of the University of Alcalá, who in the fateful year 1529 published his theological study Dialogue of Christian Doctrine, which was closely based on some of Luther’s early writings. It was immediately attacked by the Inquisition despite the testimony of Vergara and others. The controversy over the book took so dangerous a turn that in 1530 Valdés fled to Italy, just in time to avoid the trial that was opened against him. His treatise was thereafter distinguished by appearing in every Index of prohibited books issued by the Inquisition.26 In 1533 Mateo Pascual, former rector of the Colegio Mayor of San Ildefonso at Alcalá University, and at the time vicar-general of the see of Saragossa, fell under suspicion for his links with Juan de Valdés. He was detained for a while in the Inquisition of Toledo, then released to return to Saragossa. Some years later he left Aragon and went to live in Rome, where he died peacefully in 1553.27
A further casualty of the alumbrado trials was the printer to Alcalá University, Miguel de Eguía, denounced by Francisca Hernández for Lutheranism. He was imprisoned in 1531 and spent over two years in the cells of the Inquisition at Valladolid,28 but was released at the end of 1533 and fully absolved. Less fortunate was Pedro de Lerma. Former chancellor of Alcalá University, former dean of the theological faculty at the Sorbonne, canon of Burgos cathedral, he fell under the influence of Erasmus and publicized it in his sermons. He was denounced to the Inquisition, imprisoned, and finally in 1537 was made to abjure publicly, in the towns where he had preached, eleven propositions he was accused of having taught. In shame and resentment the old man shook the dust of Spain off his feet and fled to Paris, where he resumed his position as a dean of the faculty, dying there in August 1541. According to his nephew Francisco Enzinas (famous in the history of European Protestantism as Dryander), people in Lerma’s home city of Burgos were so afraid of the possible consequences of this event that those who had sent their sons to study abroad recalled them at once.29 Such a reaction shows an awareness among some Spaniards of the problems involved. Erasmianism and the new humanism were being identified with the German heresy, and for many the only protection was dissociation.
In December 1533 Rodrigo Manrique, son of the inquisitor general, wrote from Paris to Luis Vives on the subject of Vergara’s imprisonment:
You are right. Our country is a land of pride and envy; you may add: of barbarism. For now it is clear that down there one cannot possess any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism. Thus silence has been imposed on the learned. As for those who take refuge in erudition, they have been filled, as you say, with great terror. . . . At Alcalá they are trying to uproot the study of Greek completely.30
Erasmus’s links with his friends in Spain were affected by the reaction. His last surviving letter to that country is dated December 1533. Three years later he died, still highly respected in the Catholic world, so much so that in 1535 the pope offered him a cardinal’s hat. In Spain his cause (as we shall see) survived, but was restricted to a few learned circles. His works remained on sale to the Spanish public for much of the century, but the tide now turned against him.
The history of these conflicts between a handful of scholars and ecclesiastical authority was by no means peculiar to Spain. All over Europe during these years, from Italy and Germany to France and England, there were new ways of thinking that brought on a direct collision between traditionalists and innovators. Though the Inquisition appears in a negative role in our story, it did not always favor the traditionalists, and we should remember that it did not pass a single death sentence, which sets it in startling contrast to what was happening in countries like England and France.
The decline of interest in Erasmianism, and the suspicions directed against liberal humanism, seemed to be justified by the apparent links between Erasmus and the growing Protestant menace. Bataillon has shown how in Spain the Protestant stream which sprang from illuminism between 1535 and 1555 adapted Erasmianism to its own purposes and moved towards the Lutheran doctrine of “justification by faith alone” without ever formally rejecting Catholic dogma.31 Many leading humanists, such as Juan de Valdés, were Erasmians whose defections from orthodoxy were so significant as to give cause for the belief that they were crypto-Protestants. Vigilance against radical Erasmianism was therefore strengthened.
The Lutheran threat, however, took a long time to develop. In 1520 Luther had probably not been heard of in Spain. Lutheran books were first sent to the peninsula, with what result we do not know, by Luther’s publisher Froben in 1519. The first Spaniards to come into contact with his teachings were those who accompanied the emperor to Germany. Some of them, seeing in him only a reformer, were even favorable to his ideas. A full generation went by after the conflicts over Erasmians and illuminists, and still Lutheranism failed to take root. There was, during those years in Spain, no atmosphere of restriction or repression. In the Netherlands, where Charles V also ruled, there was a ferocious repression of heresy, but not in Spain. During the generation before 1558, fewer than fifty cases of alleged Lutheranism among Spaniards came to the notice of the inquisitors.32 In most of them, it is difficult to identify any specifically Protestant beliefs. There was some curiosity about the heresies that Luther was propounding, but little sign of any active interest among Spaniards.
What explanation can we offer for this astonishing inability of Protestant ideas to penetrate the peninsula? With its wholly unreformed Church (see chapter 13 below), backward clergy and medieval-style religion, Spain was surely ripe for conquest by the Reformation. In one major respect, however, the country was peculiarly unfertile ground. Unlike England, France and Germany, Spain had not since the early Middle Ages experienced a single significant popular heresy. All its ideological struggles since the Reconquest had been directed against the minority religions, Judaism and Islam. There were consequently no native heresies (like Wycliffism in En
gland) on which the German ideas could build. One may add that Spain was for a time33 the only European country to possess a national institution dedicated to the elimination of heresy. By its vigilance and by coordinating its efforts throughout the peninsula, it may be argued that the Inquisition checked the seeds of heresy before they could be sown. This view, however, is both naïve and optimistic. At no time in history have governments been able to identify and eliminate security threats before they happen.
Nor was it possible to exclude new ideas, for the peninsula was not cut off from the world. In the 1540s, Spanish intellectuals came into direct contact with Lutheran ideas in foreign universities (at Louvain, for example, where Philip II was shocked by the views of some of the Spaniards in 1558; or in France, where Miguel Servet was educated); at the emperor’s court in Germany; and at international assemblies such as the Council of Trent (1546), where theologians were obliged to read Lutheran books in order to combat the errors in them. Among the laboring classes, Spaniards came into touch with immigrant workers from France or the Netherlands who had direct experience of the new beliefs. Ideas transmitted at this level, however, were confused, distorted and unlikely to strike root anywhere. Possibly the only group—a tiny one—that may have imported coherent ideas were the printers, nearly all foreign, who worked in publishers’ presses.
The most remarkable aspect of the case is that the Spanish government was actively allied with Lutherans in those mid-century years. In 1548 Charles V made an agreement, known as the Interim because it was deemed temporary, to allow toleration and coexistence in Germany between Catholics and Lutherans. The committee of fifteen theologians that gave formal approval to the agreement was made up largely of Germans but included three prominent Spaniards: Domingo de Soto, Pedro de Maluenda and Pedro de Soto. All three were from the Dominicans, the order most closely associated with the Inquisition in Spain; and Pedro de Soto in particular was (a contemporary reported) “an enthusiastic supporter” of the Interim. The accord between Catholics and Lutherans went a step further when at the next session of the Council of Trent, in 1551, the emperor’s personal representative insisted that Lutherans be allowed to take part, and Archbishop Guerrero of Granada entertained the Lutheran delegates at his private residence in Trent.34