The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  Finally, the biggest problem with the legislation of 1558–59 was that, true to form, many Spaniards simply ignored it. The printer of a new book normally preferred to apply for the license issued by the council of Castile, because it carried with it a “privilege” or exclusive right to publish and sell. Reprints, on the other hand, did not require a new license. Printers and authors therefore felt free to bring out so-called “reprints,” even if important changes had been introduced into the text.20 Many authors tried successfully to avoid the licensing and censorship process, which they knew could involve interminable delays. They published without permission, or (more frequently) published abroad, in Italy or in France. In the 1540s, most books by Spaniards had been published outside Spain, notably in Antwerp, Paris, Lyon and Venice.21 Despite the apparently restrictive nature of the 1558 law, Spanish writers continued throughout the century to publish as much abroad as they did at home. It was a freedom enjoyed, ironically, by no other European country.22

  The works published abroad were, naturally, imported into Spain. No intention of heresy arose. In the late sixteenth century at least sixty leading Spanish writers published their works abroad, in Lyon in France, rather than in Spain.23 The reason was that the quality of presses outside Spain was much better, and controls less onerous.24 As a consequence, the penalties laid down by the 1558 law often remained a virtual dead letter. Enjoying the ability to publish with impunity in the realms of Aragon, Italy, France or the Netherlands, Spaniards could boast that they had more freedom of literature than their neighbors did, despite the 1558 law. Even within Spain, the freedom enjoyed in the non-Castilian realms was remarkable. In Valencia at a later period, some 40 percent of publications reached their readers without having any sort of license or permission.25 Despite all the unlicensed publishing, not a single author or printer in Spain—other than those condemned as Protestants—is known to have suffered the death penalty. By contrast, in England and France the risk of punishment was real and executions frequent.

  Throughout Europe, the Reformation crisis generated hopes but also fears. It was the beginning, both in Spain and outside it, of an epoch of caution. “Before that time,” a Dominican said of the year 1558, “Spain was wholly untouched by these errors.” “There was no need at that time to be suspicious of anyone,” an abbot observed of the previous decades.26 Among humanists and university men, the old ideal of an international republic of letters began to break down. When there had been one sole faith in Europe, scholars traveled freely across frontiers. Now they tended to remain within national boundaries. Institutions began to give classes in the local language rather than in Latin. Spanish students were probably the least affected by the process, since they had seldom gone to foreign colleges. The ones they most frequented, in Bologna and Rome, were precisely those still permitted to them. In addition, they could of course attend any of the colleges in the king’s dominions, such as the Netherlands. In practice, difficulties of distance, financing and language were tending to rule these out. Active contacts continued for a while only with French universities. The spread of heresy there, and Spanish restrictions, reduced these to a minimum. Of 228 Spanish scientific authors from the early sixteenth century, some 11 percent had taught in foreign universities and 25 percent had studied abroad; after 1560 the proportion was negligible. Montpellier, famous for its medical studies, turned Calvinist during the 1560s. Between 1503 and 1550, 310 Spaniards (mostly Aragonese) studied there; up to 1565 14 more registered; after 1573 no further Spaniards feature in the official lists.27

  The frontiers, however, were never closed, least of all with France. Only Castilians were bound by the new restrictions. In 1565 the French ambassador in France reported that there were twenty Aragonese and Catalan students at the University of Toulouse, and he knew of two Catalans studying medicine at Montpellier.28 In the 1560s Navarrese with Protestant sympathies emigrated freely to France. Not until 1568 was the ban on study abroad extended to Spaniards living in the eastern part of the peninsula.29 However, as late as 1585 a frontier guard at Irún could report “having seen pass through some Spaniards on foot, others on horseback on excursion (though he does not know how many nor from where they came); and that there have also passed through the frontier-post Italians, Flemings, and Burgundians; and many Portuguese on foot and on horse with their wives, children and clothing.”30 Students crossed over to study in France. The secretary of the Inquisition in Logroño reported the case in 1584 of “a Dr. León, a medical doctor, who said he was a citizen of Valladolid, with two sons whom he said he was taking to study in Bordeaux. When asked why he was taking his sons to Bordeaux, where there was little security in matters of religion, and when there were so many good universities in Spain, he replied that if he did not find conditions suitable in Bordeaux he would take them to Paris.”31 Nothing was done to impede the doctor, who left his sons in Bordeaux and returned tranquilly to Valladolid. Several other scholars continued to study in France, but the Spanish government turned a blind eye. The new controls, despite their limited efficacy, may have curbed movement across frontiers. But they had little perceptible impact on intellectual life.

  Systematic guides to forbidden literature were first issued in the form of an “index” by the University of Paris in 1542. The University of Louvain began to issue Indexes in 1546, and in Italy various Indexes were published in the 1540s.32 The first printed Index to be used in Spain, issued by Inquisitor General Valdés in September 1551, was no more than a reprint of one compiled by Louvain in 1550, with a special appendix devoted to Spanish books. Steps were taken to have the 1551 Index distributed by the tribunals.33 Each tribunal was allowed to modify its local version, so we know of at least five Indexes issued in 1551–52, by the tribunals of Toledo, Valladolid, Valencia, Granada and Seville.34 The works of sixteen authors, mainly the leaders of the Reformation, were condemned in their entirety; but for the rest the Inquisition was content to ban some sixty-one works individually, and lay down regulations about Bibles, books in Hebrew and Arabic, and works printed without authorization.

  During those years a large number of unlicensed Bibles and New Testaments was entering the peninsula. Many had translations or comments that did not coincide with orthodox views. The Inquisition began steps to censor the editions, and meanwhile ordered its tribunals in May 1552 to collect any available copies. The results were astonishing. In Seville alone, the inquisitors rounded up 450 volumes.35 In Saragossa the tribunal confiscated 218 unlicensed Bibles, most of them published in Lyon.36 At least 20 unlicensed Bibles were identified in Valencia. Many could be found in Salamanca. Faced by an extensive distribution of unapproved volumes, Valdés issued in 1554 a general censure of Bibles and New Testaments, identifying for correction 65 editions of the Scriptures issued in Lyon, Antwerp, Paris and other places.37

  All the steps taken till the middle of the century were in response to an indirect threat from the Reformation. Heresy was still something distant; even the infiltration of Bibles could (it was felt)38 be handled without problems. The discovery of Protestants and the emergency laws of 1558 changed the situation radically. The Inquisition, entrusted with some of the censorship regulations, was ordered to put together an Index as quickly as possible.

  The task was undertaken by Fernando de Valdés. In little less than a year, and consulting with very few experts other than his fellow Dominican and friend Melchor Cano,39 Valdés managed to draw up a substantial Index of Prohibited Books, which was published in the summer of 1559. Books were divided into sections according to language, and forbidden if they fell into the following categories: all books by heresiarchs; all religious books written by those condemned by the Inquisition; all books on Jews and Muslims with an anti-Catholic bias; all heretical translations of the Bible; all vernacular translations of the Bible, even by Catholics; all devotional works in the vernacular; all controversial works between Catholics and heretics; all books on magic; all verse using Scriptural quotations “profanely”; all books printed si
nce 1515 without details of author and publisher; all anti-Catholic books; all pictures and figures disrespectful to religion.

  It is vital to understand the motives behind this ambitious, and wholly unrealistic, attempt to control the market in books. The approximately seven hundred books listed as forbidden were in no way a carefully considered response to the problem of Reformation heresy, or an attempt to ban books that Spaniards might actually possess. Valdés and his friends for the most part simply stuck together, in a hurried40 scissors and paste operation, prohibitions decreed in other countries. Seventy percent of the entries41 were drawn directly from the previous Index of 1551, from the Indexes of Louvain (1550) and Portugal (1551), and from other Indexes, notably of Paris and Venice. The biggest category of prohibited books, those in Latin, representing nearly two-thirds of the seven hundred items, were almost all (with seven exceptions) published in foreign countries.

  These details are highly significant. They demonstrate that the weight of the Index was directed to keeping out of Spain books that had for the most part never entered the country. The prohibition of fifty-four items in Dutch, a language unknown in Spain, could hardly be interpreted otherwise. Evidently, many foreign works were circulating within Spain, for booksellers relied heavily on book imports. But the true interest and significance of the Index for Spaniards at the time was less in its shadowboxing with books that they had neither seen nor read, than in those few books that they were able to read in their own language.

  Three categories of books in Spanish stand out for their condemnation in the Index. First, there was the question of Erasmus. Philip II when young had been a devotee of the humanist. On his trip to the Netherlands in 1548 he had made a special visit to his birthplace, Rotterdam.42 The controversies of the Reformation epoch, however, undermined Erasmus’s standing. The Index of 1551 included his Colloquies. While some were debating whether to condemn Erasmus more fully, the Roman Inquisition under Paul IV came out in 1559 with a general condemnation of all his works. The Jesuits protested strongly against the measure, among the most vociferous being the Dutchman Peter Canisius. Diego Laínez, for his part, said openly that the papal Index was something “which restricted many spirits and pleased few, particularly outside Italy.”43 The Jesuits were no friends of Erasmus, but they felt that sweeping bans were unhelpful. The Spanish Index of 1559 listed fourteen works in Spanish by Erasmus, including the Enchiridion. From this time his name fell into disfavor. The Spanish Index of 1612 banned completely all his works in Spanish, and classified the author in the category of auctores damnati.

  Erasmus remained (despite a common but mistaken opinion to the contrary) for more than a generation a respected name.44 His works were cited by leading authors both religious and secular. In Barcelona, his books remained openly on sale. Even his forbidden books were kept in private collections and highly treasured. His influence remained in the stream of thought that stretched as far as Cervantes. Intemperate defenses of him (Francisco Sánchez, “el Brocense,” in 1595 declared in a lecture, “Whoever speaks ill of Erasmus is either a friar or an ass!”)45 might of course invite recrimination. But in the end, as happens to most thinkers, he faded from view quite simply because he ceased to be the fashion.

  The second notable feature of the Index was its attention to literary works. In 1551 it had banned only a handful of Castilian works. By contrast, nineteen works of a literary character were now banned. Among the authors affected by prohibition of one or more items were Gil Vicente, Hernando de Talavera, Bartolomé Torres Naharro, Juan del Encina and Jorge Montemayor.46 The Lazarillo de Tormes was banned and also the Cancionero general. Each of these items had special circumstances that literary experts have since examined and clarified.

  The third and most notable aspect of the Index was its campaign against vernacular works of piety. Valdés and his advisers were vividly aware of the recent spiritualizing movements that had produced the alumbrados. They also suspected links between those movements and the Protestants. As a consequence they came down heavily on some of the best-known spiritual writers of the generation. The most prominent casualties were Juan de Avila’s Audi, Filia (discussed above, chapter 5), Luis de Granada’s Book of Prayer and Francisco Borja’s Works of a Christian.

  Granada’s Book of Prayer, first published in 1554, became so popular in Spain that it went through twenty-three editions up to the time it was put on the Index (principally at the request of Melchor Cano, who had been among the first to smell heresy in the Catechism of the archbishop of Toledo). It was in vain that Fray Luis tried to get the ban rescinded. Finding no help in Spain, he succeeded in getting the Book approved by the Council of Trent and the pope. Such approval was not enough for the inquisitors, and it was only when he accepted “corrections” in his text that the book was allowed to circulate freely.47

  The ban on Borja also emanated from Cano, an open enemy of the Jesuits. The problem was over the way some phrases in the book could be read.48 Because it was an international order, many in Spain were suspicious of the Company of Jesus. A Jesuit from Valladolid reported the opinion among some “that the Theatines (which is what they call us here in this Babel) have been the source of Luther’s errors.” Valdés’s Index fell like a thunderclap on the Company. Borja, duke of Gandía and former viceroy of Catalonia, was the most distinguished recruit ever to join the society in Spain. The ban on his work threatened to bring disrepute not only upon him but upon all the Jesuits. Fearing that he was about to be arrested by the Inquisition, he left Spain for Rome in the spring of 1560 and never again returned to his homeland.49

  This was not the end of the travails of the Jesuits. The 1559 Index prohibited devotional works in the vernacular even if they were not printed (at that time many books circulated in manuscript form). The worried rector of the Jesuit college in Seville went to the inquisitors to ask if the ban applied also to Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, which was used by the novices in manuscript translation and not published in Castilian until 1615. To his horror he was told that the prohibition did apply. He went back to the college, collected all the copies of the Exercises, handed them to the Inquisition, then took to his bed in mortification. “I have just handed them in,” he wrote to his superior in Rome, “today Friday 20 October at six in the evening. The pain of this has laid me low in bed with grief. I have seen in this time the prohibition of works that were highly Catholic and beneficial and by Christian authors.”50

  Seville was the scene also of another casualty of the drive against spiritualist piety. A much-respected Dominican friar, Domingo de Valtanás, aged seventy-three at the time, was arrested in 1561 on very vague charges, probably associated with illuminism, and confined to a monastery where he died shortly after.51 There were many pious Catholics who regretted the trend. Teresa of Avila testified that “when they banned many books in Spanish, so they could not be read, I very much regretted it, because some of them were entertaining to read and I could no longer read them because they were in Latin.”52 In fact the policy rested on the firm opinion of one theologian, Fray Diego de Chaves (subsequently a confessor to the king), who managed to convince Valdés and the Suprema that no works of piety written in Castilian should be allowed to circulate, since they would only lead unprepared readers astray.53 Spiritual works should be made accessible only to clergy, whose job it was to transmit doctrine to the people. This startling conviction, based in great measure on attitudes already expressed by the Dominican professor Melchor Cano, was accepted by the Inquisition, and had unforeseen consequences. The most famous literary work to fall foul of it in 1559 was the Catechism of Bartolomé Carranza (see chapter 8 below). But it also affected no less a work that the Roman Catechism, which had been issued by the papacy and was circulating in Spain (in Latin) with the full approval of the king and of the Church. When steps were taken, both in Spain and in Rome, to translate the Catechism into Castilian in order to benefit a wider Spanish readership, the Inquisition stepped in and blocked every move to publish transla
tions of the work.54

  The Index of 1559 has often been taken to represent the beginning of an epoch of repression in Spanish culture. It would probably be more correct to see it as the only repressive Index prior to the eighteenth century. It was the first but also the only pre-1700 Index to attack notable works of Castilian poetry and literature, all of them antedating the mid-sixteenth century. None of the authors concerned had a serious brush with the Inquisition on account of the work affected. Thereafter, no Index before the age of the Enlightenment went any further in attacks on Spanish literature. Rather than opening a repressive phase, the 1559 Index seems to have been, on one hand, an ill-thought-out attempt to control some aspects of creativity; and on the other, the first phase of a hostile response to aspects of native spirituality when published in the vernacular language.

  Censorship encouraged a practice that later became common: the burning of books. Book burning was, of course, a traditional device used by Christians against their enemies. The Emperor Constantine used it against Arian works. In 1248 the clergy in Paris burned fourteen cartloads of Jewish books. The medieval Inquisition followed suit, and in the sixteenth century it was a common practice in Italy, France (thousands of Protestant books were thrown to the flames in the city of Lyon in 1565) and England.55 Torquemada in his day had organized a book burning in his monastery in Salamanca. Jewish sacred books were the objects of a bonfire in Toledo in May 1490 when “many books by the said heretics were burnt publicly in the square.”56 A royal decree of October 1501 ordered Arabic books to be burnt in Granada, and a huge bonfire was held under the auspices of Cisneros. From March 1552 the Inquisition ordered that heretical books be burnt publicly.57 Some twenty-seven books were ordered to be burnt at a ceremony in Valladolid in January 1558.58

  In mid-century the Spaniards probably resorted to burning because it seemed the simplest way to get rid of offending material. Very many works perished. “On seven or eight occasions we have burnt mountains of books here in our college,” a Jesuit working for the Barcelona Holy Office reported in 1559.59 In 1561 an official in Seville asked what should be done with the numerous books he had rounded up. There were many books of hours, he said, which could be easily corrected. “Burn them,” the Inquisition replied. And what of the Bibles? “Burn them.” And the books of medicine, many with superstitious material? “Burn them.”60 This drastic solution was not always applied. Subsequently, when the tribunal had elaborated its new system of expurgation rather than condemnation, books were kept in store and not normally destroyed.