by Henry Kamen
There were of course a few convinced heretics to be found—among them the nobleman Gaspar de Centelles, burnt in Valencia in 1564,69 and Fray Cristóbal de Morales, burnt in Granada in 1571—but less than a dozen Spaniards were burnt alive for Lutheranism in the later part of the century outside the cases tried at Valladolid and Seville. Others—like the slightly crazy friar Pedro de Orellana,70 who spent twenty-eight years in the prisons of the Holy Office—were arrested for offenses that included suspicion of “Lutheranism” but had no identifiable Lutheran beliefs.
Much of the potential Spanish Reformation had emigrated abroad. Since mid-century Spaniards sympathetic to the Reformation could be found dotted around intellectual groups in Western Europe. Rather than refugees, they were part of the well-worn tradition of wandering scholars. True emigration commenced with the discovery of the Protestant cells in Seville and Valladolid. A small stream of refugees made their way into the Reformation communities abroad.
Many in Spain were alarmed by the trend. In some cases, there were fears of the dishonor that could be brought on families by heresy. This provoked at least one murder, that of Juan Díaz in Germany, to which we shall refer later (chapter 12). The government, for its part, tried to repatriate Spaniards who fell under suspicion. Philip II was convinced by his officials that it would be a useful policy. In 1561 his ambassador in London, Quadra, reported that several Spanish Protestants were flocking to that city. “They arrive every day with their wives and children and it is said that many more are expected.”71 Philip’s father had in the 1540s condoned the occasional seizure outside Spain of Castilians who became active Protestants. They were packed off home and made to face the music there. The intention was not, as a subsequent ambassador of Philip in England explained, to eliminate them but to keep an eye on them and hope that others would take the hint and mend their ways.72 Under Philip II, the selective kidnapping was carried out by two agents based in the Netherlands, one of them the army paymaster Alonso del Canto. They were sponsored by the king’s secretary Francisco de Eraso. With the help of special funds, a little network was set up to spy on Spanish émigrés living in England, the Netherlands and Germany. Their most notable success was in persuading the famous humanist Furió Ceriol to return to Spain in 1563. In the process, they collected valuable information on Spanish Protestants abroad.73 Canto in the spring of 1564 was able to inform Madrid of the preparation by Juan Pérez de Pineda of a new version of the Bible in Spanish.74
The real brunt of the attack on so-called “Lutheranism” was borne by foreign visitors, such as traders and sailors, and by foreigners resident in Spain. The heresy scare intensified xenophobia among many sections of the population. It made Spain, at least for a while, unsafe for foreigners, in a pattern that has since become familiar in many countries where problems of security are deemed to exist. The Holy Office had been active against foreigners from as early as the 1530s. Spain’s extensive trade with northern Europe made contact with its citizens inevitable, especially in the ports. The first Protestant foreigner to be burnt by the Inquisition was young John Tack, an Englishman of Flemish origin, burnt in Bilbao in May 1539.75 Down to 1560, nine other foreigners were arrested and reconciled by the inquisitors on this coastline.
In the Toledo area in the 1560s French and Flemish residents were those principally accused of heresy.76 Some had accompanied Philip II back from Flanders or had come with the new queen, Elizabeth Valois, from France. The 1560s were the only decade in which Flemings figured in any number.77 More usually, those accused were French. In Barcelona the inquisitor in 1560 felt it opportune to hold an auto de fe “so that people are on their guard against foreigners.”78 Foreigners indeed constituted the bulk of prosecutions in these years, especially in frontier tribunals.79 Nearly all the cases arising at Valencia from 1554 to 1598 involved foreigners, eight of whom were burnt in person or in effigy. In the tribunal of Calahorra (later transferred to Logroño), though there were as many as sixty-eight cases of suspected Lutheranism in 1540–99, the majority (82 percent) were foreigners. “All the people punished in this Inquisition are poor foreigners,” the tribunal reported in 1565.80 In northern Spain, as a result of the proximity of the Calvinist areas of France, Frenchmen were singled out for suspicion. Between 1560 and 1600, the Inquisition in the provinces of the crown of Aragon and in Navarre executed some eighty Frenchmen as presumed heretics, burnt another hundred in effigy, and sent some 380 to the galleys.81
The victimization of non-Spaniards by the Inquisition brings into focus its xenophobic and racialist tendencies. This would continue to be the attitude of all security and immigration agencies down to our own times. As it had pointed the finger once at people of Jewish and Muslim origin, so it now pointed the finger at all foreigners, regardless of religion. The attitude, even when practiced in the crown of Aragon, must be attributed mainly to the Castilian inquisitors. In the 1560s the consellers of Barcelona reminded the inquisitors that they were unwise to pick on French people indiscriminately, since they must know that the greater part of Frenchmen were Catholic. But the inquisitors, sticking by an ideological attitude that could be found among many Spaniards, both clergy and laymen, up to the first half of the twentieth century, persisted in describing all nations outside Spain as “tierras de herejes” (heretical countries).82 Of all nations, they said time and again, only Spain was Catholic. It has been calculated that between 1517 and 1648 over 2,550 foreigners were arrested by the Spanish Inquisition,83 proof enough of a degree of repression, but one that produced very few martyrs.
The Castilian inquisitors looked with special suspicion on the Basques and Catalans. In 1567 the local inquisitor, who happened to be visiting the Basque town of San Sebastian, commented that “the natives of this town have too much contact with the French, with whom they link up through marriage; and they always speak their language, rather than their own or Spanish.”84 There was, in effect, an open frontier between France and Spain’s three border regions: the Basque country, the kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia. It did not help that the three regions were almost wholly free of royal administrative control. The bookshops of Barcelona were full of books printed in France.85 Possibly one-tenth of the population of Barcelona and one-third of that of Perpignan, Catalonia’s two main cities, was French. Despite this unimpeded contact between the two nations, Catalans made not the slightest move towards embracing heresy from France. In default of victims among the Catalans, the Inquisition sought them among the French. In Barcelona between 1552 and 1578 there were fifty-one alleged Lutherans burnt in person or in effigy, but all were foreign.
It was in France, as it happened, that the inquisitors failed to get their hands on one of the most notable Spanish heretics of the Reformation epoch. Miguel Servet, born in 1511 near Saragossa, was at the age of seventeen sent by his father to study at Toulouse in France, and spent the rest of his life outside his native country.86 A perpetual exile, he was driven by his brilliant mind and restless search for knowledge. He dedicated himself to learning the tongues that opened the way to knowledge, and ended up with a command of Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. He visited the German lands as a member of the court of the Emperor Charles V, and met the principal leaders of the Reformation, among them Melanchthon and Bucer. In 1531 he was studying medicine at the University of Paris, but never obtained any qualifications. That same year, at the age of twenty, he published in Haguenau his work on Errors about the Trinity, in which he argued that the Christian teaching about three persons in one God had no basis in the Bible. The book shocked by its premises and was forbidden even in some cities controlled by the Reformation. Word of his theories got about, and in the course of 1532 the Inquisition in Spain and the French Inquisition in Toulouse made independent moves to bring him to trial. Servet did not ignore the threat, and decided to go into hiding or even emigrate to America. He changed his name to Michel de Villeneuve and began a peregrinating life, moving quietly round France for the next twenty years, always with caution but also burning w
ith the excitement of new ideas. He studied more medicine at Paris, and worked in the south as a printer. Finally in 1553 he published anonymously in Latin at Vienne his principal work, The Restoration of Christianity, a fat volume of over seven hundred pages in octavo.
Scholars today remember the Restoration because it contains, on pages 169–71, the first statement published in Europe modifying older views on the pulmonary circulation of blood. Servet was fascinated by medicine but in fact his real purpose was religious, to put into print the dream of a new, radical Reformation to which the work of Luther and Calvin would be only a prelude. His attention to blood arose from the idea, common enough at the time, that the human soul resides in the blood, which alone gives life. But his concern was over the future of the soul rather than over the movement of blood. His basic idea in the Restoration was that the historic Christ was only a man, not God. God was not three persons, as the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity maintained, but simply one. He quoted from both Islamic and Jewish sources on this point, thereby provoking accusations (certainly unfounded) that he was pro-Jewish or of Jewish origin. Salvation of the soul, he maintained, was to be achieved through Christ, the man. The proposition was not simply heretical; it struck at the root of classical Christianity and was seen by all religious leaders as blasphemous. In reality, Servet rejected every single tenet of classical Christianity, whether taught by Catholics or by Protestants.87 The Spanish inquisitors, when informed of the book’s contents, took the matter as clear evidence that contact of Spaniards with foreigners could be dangerous.
The book also outraged the leader of the Reformation in Geneva, John Calvin. Michel de Villeneuve was suspected of being the author, and thanks to information from one of Calvin’s friends was arrested by the French Inquisition at Vienne. Servet managed to escape from his confinement within a few days, but made the mistake four months later of leaving France and passing through Geneva, where in August 1553 he was recognized when he attended a church service at which Calvin was preaching. He was immediately arrested and put on trial, and as a result of pressure from Calvin was condemned to be executed as a heretic (for denying the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ) by burning. The act took place outside the gates of Geneva, in the area called Champel, on 27 October. It was a slow, painful death, for the logs on the stake were damp and took time to fire up. Servet, who had the book on the Restoration strapped to his body, cried out in agony: “Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me!”
The act unleashed a fierce controversy among European intellectuals over whether religious dissent (that is, “heresy”) was an offense that should be punished by the death penalty. A Frenchman, Sebastian Castellio, used the execution as an argument to defend (in 1554) the right of individual dissent. In a subsequent work that was not published until half a century after the burning at Champel, Castellio concluded that “killing a man is not defending a doctrine, it is merely killing a man. When the people of Geneva killed Servetus, they did not defend a doctrine, they killed a man.”88 Servet, as it turned out, was the only Spaniard to be executed outside Spain for heresy.
The failure of the Protestant cause in the Mediterranean inevitably brings us back to the question, already mentioned above, of why no Reformation occurred there. The Inquisition may certainly take some credit, but its measures were of limited scope both in Spain and in Italy. Repression was more efficient, bloody and brutal in other countries, notably the Netherlands, yet persecution there did not check heresy. Indeed, many observers argued both then and later that repression had stimulated it. Philip II was convinced that timely repression and continual vigilance were the key. “Had there been no Inquisition,” he affirmed in 1569, “there would be many more heretics, and the country would be much afflicted, as are those where there is no Inquisition as in Spain.”89 The king may have believed it, but there is little evidence to show he was right.
Nor is it possible to maintain that Spain was sealed off from contact with heresy. The implausible image of an iron curtain of the Holy Office descending on the country and cutting it off from the rest of the world has no relation to reality. Precisely in the 1550s and 1560s, Spaniards were traveling abroad more than ever. More Spaniards than ever before published (as we shall see) their books abroad. Tens of thousands, mainly Castilians, served abroad in the army, where they rubbed shoulders with people of other faiths (the Spanish army in Flanders was not too choosy about the religion of recruits). The frontier in the Pyrenees, Spain’s chief overland link with the world outside, was occasionally watched because of the danger of military intervention by French Protestant nobles and by bandits, but it could never be closed. Throughout the late sixteenth century, Spaniards drifted at will over it. Some went to trade, some to be educated, some because they wished to join the Calvinists in Geneva. At the same time, many foreigners, principally artisans, came to Spain. It was a handful of these who, through carelessness on their part, fell into the hands of the Inquisition.
The open coastline and the great ports were an obvious point of entry for heretical literature. In the same way, the difficulty in controlling the Pyrenees frontier comes through in the anxious correspondence of an ambassador to France in the 1560s, Francés de Álava. In 1564 and 1565 he sent reports to the king of booksellers from Saragossa, Medina del Campo and Alcalá who had come to Lyon and Toulouse to purchase books on law and philosophy for taking home.90 One of the booksellers, he said, had links with Geneva. This importation of foreign books, we may observe, was carried out in open contravention of the laws of Castile. Álava also confirmed that “many books, catechisms and psalters in Basque” had passed through Toulouse to Spain.91 Basque was his own native language, so he knew of what he spoke. Books in Catalan, he reported, had also been taken into Catalonia, and other heretical books had gone to Pamplona.92 In those same weeks the archbishop of Bordeaux forwarded a report on a citizen of Burgos who “had taken four or five loads of heretical books in Spanish and in Latin through the mountains of Jaca.”93 Despite the open frontier, heresy failed to penetrate or at least to achieve any gains. The Reformation remained, for Spaniards, a phenomenon that barely affected them.
Because Spain remained almost impervious to heresy in the sixteenth century, later generations presented it as a unique case of fidelity to the faith. The triumphant words of the nineteenth-century scholar Menéndez y Pelayo are well known to many Spaniards: “One faith, one baptism, one flock, one shepherd, one Church, one crusade, a legion of saints. Spain, which preached the gospel to half the world, Spain the hammer of heretics, the light of Trent, the sword of Rome, the cradle of St Ignatius, that is our greatness and our unity, we have no other.”94 It was a wholly fictitious image, and one that gave comfort to those who believed in it. The problem is that Spain’s indifference to the great tides of European thought is indeed impressive. In Catalonia, the inquisitors were continually suspicious of the religion of the Catalans, but failed all the same to find any heresy in the region. “Their Christianity is such,” an inquisitor reported in 1569, “that it is cause for wonder, living as they do next to and among heretics and dealing with them every day.”95 The Reformation in any of its forms failed to appeal to Spaniards until the twentieth century, when the collapse of old dogmas opened the gates to sectarian movements.96
Though the Reformation failed, it left a considerable legacy to the country it had failed to penetrate. Sympathizers of the Reformation looked to the Bible as their main inspiration and in consequence some of the exiles devoted their efforts to translating it. The classic version of the Bible had been in Latin (the so-called Vulgate), of which already in the thirteenth century a king of Castile, Alfonso the Wise, had ordered a Castilian translation to be prepared. In the early days of the Reformation, there was considerable controversy over whether the Bible should be translated at all.97 Translation of small items from the Bible, such as the Psalms, met with few problems.98 But the appearance of various unauthorized versions of the New Testament, which bypassed the Vulg
ate in order to go back to original Greek texts, which were often given an unorthodox interpretation, put the Inquisition on its guard. In the early sixteenth century it began rounding up copies of the translated Bible that had been imported into Spain. In the Index of Prohibited Books it issued in 1559, all translations of the Bible in Spanish were disallowed.
As a consequence, translations into Spanish could be produced only outside Spain. The best known of them was published in 1553, in Ferrara (Italy), by Jewish refugees from the peninsula who felt the need for a text of the Old Testament for their co-religionists, most of whom did not know Hebrew. It was suitable for use in the synagogue but not calculated to reach the man in the street. Christian Spaniards who based their thinking on direct reading of the Scriptures needed a more accessible text. This was supplied by the exile Casiodoro de Reina.99 Reina, from near Badajoz (Extremadura) and of Morisco origin, was one of the friars who fled from the monastery of San Isidoro in Seville. Like some of the others, he ended up in Geneva, the capital of Calvinism. He eventually moved to England, where he stayed for five years and became pastor of a Spanish church. In London his stay coincided with that of another of the Seville exiles, Cipriano de Valera, a firm Calvinist who made England his home and taught both at Cambridge and Oxford.