The Spanish Inquisition

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by Henry Kamen


  It is a matter not just of love for one’s country but also of historical justice to undo this progressivist legend, brutally imposed by the lawmakers of the Cortes of Cadiz, which presents us as a nation of barbarians in whom neither learning nor art could arise because all was suffocated by the smoke of the Inquisition’s pyres. Only crass ignorance of things Spanish could explain why in an official document for the decree abolishing the Holy Office they printed these words, an eternal evidence of shame for its authors: “Writing ceased in Spain when the Inquisition was established.”

  “Writing ceased in Spain when the Inquisition was established!” Did it cease with the arrival at its peak of our classic literature, which possesses a theatre superior in fruitfulness and richness of invention to any in the world; a lyric poetry that nobody can equal in simplicity, sobriety and greatness of inspiration; among the poets, the only poet of the Renaissance to achieve a union of the old forms and the new spirit; a novelist who will remain as exemplary and eternal paragon of healthy and powerful naturalism; a school of mystics in whom the Castilian language appears to be a language of angels? The fact is that never in Spain was there more written, or better written, than in those two golden centuries of the Inquisition.140

  The stirring words—based also, of course, on an ideological vision of the past—helped to rally conservative Spaniards who had on many fronts been losing the initiative to the floodtide of Liberalism in Spain. Basic to the indignant peroration, moreover, there was a simple question that Menéndez y Pelayo thrust before the eyes of his opponents. Had there really been a systematic repression of liberty and of thought? Did Spaniards really—as Américo Castro continued to maintain two generations later—stop thinking, writing and reading for three hundred years? The reality, as scholars realize, was that neither the Index nor the censorship system created an adequate machinery of control, and the Holy Office was never in a position to affect or dictate the cultural evolution of Spain.

  The Index, for several reasons, had less impact than is often thought. First, most of the books banned in it were never even remotely in reach of the Spanish reader and had never been available in the peninsula. In order to compile their lists, the inquisitors (as we have seen) copied out foreign prohibitions (notably that of Louvain) or the items on offer at the famous book fairs of Frankfurt. The result—as anyone who manages to get sight of an Index can easily verify—was a long list of items, both unobtainable and incomprehensible, in foreign languages. For instance, the Index of 1583 prohibited 1,709 books in Latin, 215 in German, 104 in French, 72 in Italian and 18 in Portuguese.141 The items in Castilian totaled 197, less than 1 percent of the total of works condemned. The Indexes are a very good guide to what the inquisitors would have liked to prohibit, but since Spaniards had no access to most of the books, the effective impact on their reading was minimal. Second, the Index was large, expensive, in short supply and inevitably both imperfect and out of date. It was consequently difficult to enforce. In Barcelona, where many bookstores refused to buy the Index because of its cost, banned books continued to be on sale years after appearing in the Index.142 Third, the Index faced sharp criticism from booksellers and from those who felt that its criteria were faulty.

  Finally, the bulk of creative and scientific literature available to Spaniards never appeared in the Index. The romances of chivalry which made up the staple reading of ordinary Spaniards at home and the campfire reading of adventurers on the American frontier—between 1501 and 1650 a total of 267 editions of chivalric novels was issued, two-thirds of them in the early sixteenth century143—were never proscribed, though often attacked. The riches of scholarship opened up by the imperial experience during the Inquisition’s great period were never affected: the histories of Herrera, Oviedo, Bernal Díaz and López de Gómara, the natural history of Sahagún, the treatises on mathematics, botany, metallurgy and shipbuilding that flourished under Philip II, never came within the ambit of the inquisitors. Long after the measures of 1558–59 Spain continued to profit from a world experience vaster than that of any other European nation. Its contribution to navigation, geography, natural history and aspects of medicine was highly valued in Europe, leading to some 1,226 editions of Spanish works of the period 1475–1600 being published abroad prior to 1800.144

  Books published in Castilian were scarcely touched and certainly never blotted out by the Inquisition; many were avidly collected by book lovers throughout the continent. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, private and public libraries in the northern Netherlands stocked over 1,000 editions by Castilian authors, and 130 editions in translation from Castilian. In total, they stocked nearly 6,000 editions of works in all languages dealing with Spain.145 In the same way, during the seventeenth century a number of Spanish literary works entered without impediment into France.146

  The overall impact of systems of literary censorship is difficult to judge. How many people could read and might therefore be affected? An examination of 2,843 signatures for New Castile in the period 1540–1817 seems to indicate that 45 percent of them could read and write,147 yet only eight people out of this total confessed to possessing a book. Moreover, we know that it was common for laborers to know how to sign (for their wages), without being able to read or write, so the analysis of signatures is doubtful as evidence. In practice, the great majority of Spaniards were never in contact with a book.148 Nearly everywhere in Europe until the eighteenth century the transmission of culture remained oral, and the illiterate mass of the population was unaffected by literary controls. We should also bear in mind that Castile had one of the smallest book markets of the sixteenth century, a period when it published less than 3 percent of the books produced by Europeans.149 At the great book fair periodically held at Frankfurt, Spanish books were almost nonexistent.150

  Though some continue to believe that Spanish literature suffered at the hands of the Inquisition, there are four good reasons to question the belief. First, most Western countries had a comparable system of control, yet none appears to have suffered significantly.151 Second, most prohibited books had a negligible readership in the peninsula. The works most in demand by the public were, as in other Catholic countries, religious and devotional works, and textbooks (such as Latin grammars) for use in schools. Few of these appeared on the Index. Third, those who really wished to obtain banned books of special interest—in astrology, medicine, scholarship—faced few obstacles. They brought books in personally, or through commercial channels, or asked friends abroad to send them.152 Total freedom of movement between the peninsula and France and Italy guaranteed an unimpeded circulation of people, books and—at one remove—ideas. In 1585, when international tension was at its height and Spain had started building its famous Armada, the frontier with France at Irún was, according to the king’s own officials, an open door through which Spaniards, English, Italians, Portuguese, French and Netherlanders passed without restriction.153 Finally, no evidence has ever emerged that the book controls eliminated promising new life among intellectuals or prejudiced existing schools of thought. Up to the mid-sixteenth century, the Inquisition played no significant negative role in the literary world, prosecuted no notable writer and interfered substantially only with some texts of Renaissance theatre.154 Not until the onset of the Reformation, and many years after censorship was being practiced in England and France, did the Holy Office attempt to operate a system of cultural control.

  The Inquisition’s overseeing of literature, in short, looked imposing in theory but was unimpressive in practice. A glance at the content of the later Indexes reveals that they had a limited, even petty role. Góngora had minor problems with the censor in 1627;155 Cervantes had one line excised from the Quixote in 1632;156 the expurgations of Francisco de Osuna and Antonio de Guevara in the Index of 1612 are trivial; that of Florián de Ocampo in 1632 ridiculous.157 Many creative writers had brushes with the Inquisition, but the total effect of these incidents appears to have been so slight that no convincing conclusion can
be drawn. Lope de Vega appeared on the Index, but a century after his death.

  Some experts in literature maintain that even if there was little quantifiable damage to literary creativity, there was hidden damage. Writers, they argue (with specific reference to conversos) exercised self-censorship; and if they published, they did so in a “coded” language where words meant something different from what they appeared to mean. The approach is an intriguing (though unconvincing) way of analyzing literary works. As a literary and philosophical device, “dissimulation” was accepted at the time as necessary by a number of commentators, among them the English savant Francis Bacon and the Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius;158 and was also proposed later in Torquato Accetto’s Dissimulazione onesta (1641). But the identification of hidden meanings is somewhat different from alleging hidden damage. Indeed, some writers who dissimulated were also those—Quevedo is a case in point159—who most openly challenged authority.

  The fact is that book control and censorship were systematically evaded in all countries where practiced. In both Italy160 and France161 the attempts at control were both “futile” and “inefficient.” In England, likewise, despite indubitably harsh laws (and more death sentences than in Spain!), “authors rarely encountered difficulties.”162 The evidence for Spain is clear enough. Though some scholars differ,163 in general there are no grounds for believing that Spaniards were unique among Europeans in their efficiency at imposing control,164 or that they were subjected to a regime of “thought control” which “fossilized academic culture” for three hundred years.165 The book trade continued to function successfully for a long time without disruption, as we know from the evidence of Barcelona. At a later date, when authors tended to publish in the vernacular rather than in Latin, the nature of the trade changed; but if there was an “almost total rift from the book culture of Europe,”166 the Holy Office was hardly the culprit, since Spain never formed a significant part of that culture. If ordinary Spaniards did not read foreign authors it was for the very same reason that prevails today, when there is no Inquisition looking over their shoulders: the books were not available in Spanish or were too specialized for their tastes.

  The impact of the Inquisition on science was minimal, and largely indirect. Spaniards seem not to have been in the front rank of inquiry into knowledge, and in the early modern period had possibly the least dedication to science, measured by the university affiliation of scientists,167 of any nation in Western Europe. Those who took learning seriously went to Italy. Thanks to access to Italian and French expertise, scientific inquiry in Spain did not collapse. Technology filtered into the country: some foreign treatises were translated; engineers were imported by the state. Foreign technicians—all of them Catholic—came to the peninsula with their expertise. Above all, the enormous influence of Spain’s New World through the contact it afforded with new perspectives,168 new materials, new knowledge of plants, trees, medicines and animals, helped to stimulate the European mind and push it into a new dimension of activity.169 The Inquisition was marginal to all these developments, did not impede them, and did not normally interfere unless there was a specific problem concerned with matters of faith. Scientific books written by Catholics tended to circulate freely (a minor exception, the works of Paracelsus and a few others were banned).170 The 1583 Quiroga Index had a negligible impact on the accessibility of scientific works, and Galileo was never put on the list of forbidden books. The most direct attacks mounted by the Inquisition were against selected works in the area of astrology and alchemy, sciences that were deemed to carry overtones of superstition.171

  There was consequently no pressure inhibiting Spaniards from taking part in European advances. If they did so to only a limited extent,172 and if there was an imbalance between scientific progress in the peninsula and in the rest of Europe during and after the Renaissance, the Inquisition was not perceptibly responsible. The undiscriminating range of books it prohibited may well have impacted on some branch of science and dissuaded some concealed scholar of genius, but there is not a single known case of this happening and it would not have had serious consequences for learning during the sixteenth century. By the late seventeenth century, on the other hand, it was clear that English and Dutch intellectuals—writing in languages that Spaniards found incomprehensible—had become the pioneers in science and medicine. They were Protestants, and their books automatically fell within the scope of inquisitorial bans. Logically, some Spaniards from the mid-seventeenth century began to look on the Holy Office as the great obstacle to learning. The complaint of the young Valencian physician Juan de Cabriada in 1687 echoed the outlook of his generation: “how sad and shameful it is that, like savages, we have to be the last to receive the innovations and knowledge that the rest of Europe already has.”173 Those who could read French in Cabriada’s day managed to import scientific and philosophical works privately. Descartes was being read in Oviedo, Hobbes in Seville.174 For a century thereafter, however, intellectuals in the peninsula faced an uphill struggle in their attempts to make contact with the new learning. The Scientific Revolution came, but it passed Spain by. When the Royal Society of London in the 1660s began to organize its scientific links with intellectuals from the continent, not a single Spaniard featured.

  In the ports, where contact with the exterior was easier, Spaniards with the ability and interest had access to European thought. In 1691 the inquisitors of Seville seized the library of a priest, Juan Cruzado de la Cruz y Messa, a scholar who not only had an apparent command of English, French, Italian and Dutch, but also an extensive interest in science.175 The 1,125 volumes, constituting one of the most remarkable book collections to have emerged from that period, included a Dutch/French and a French/English dictionary to help with vocabulary, various treatises on optics, astronomy, trigonometry, navigation and mathematics, and the works of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, and other European authors, as well as maps in Flemish and Hoefnagel’s volumes on the cities of Europe. It is unclear why Cruzado came to the attention of the inquisitors, but his library is evidence that those who wished could have access to any aspect of European thought. And there were no serious impediments. The Inquisition did not, for example, interfere with mail. In those same years the professor of astronomy at Salamanca complained to a French correspondent in Madrid that “these wars with France are extremely irksome to us since they impede the passage of books from there.”176

  Looking back on Spain’s failure to participate in the mainstream of Western science, later commentators tried to seek an explanation. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Valencian scholar Gregorio Mayans decided that “one of the reasons why the arts and sciences have declined so greatly has been the law promulgated by Philip II, prohibiting study in foreign universities.”177 We have already commented on the misapprehension over the 1559 decree to which Mayans referred. Unwilling to seek any further for an explanation, subsequent writers did not hesitate to blame the Inquisition. It was to these that the young intellectual Menéndez y Pelayo addressed his essays on Spanish Science (1876), to which we have referred. It was the first serious look at what may have happened to creative and scientific literature in the generations when Spain’s culture drifted apart from Europe, but the arguments were ignored by those wedded to the view that Spanish learning was backward solely because of the Inquisition. The debate over science continues, always with strongly ideological overtones, and mordant comments such as the observation by Ortega y Gasset: “Spanish science has always been barbaric, mystical and errant, and I presume that it will always remain so.”

  The Inquisition, it has been repeated interminably,178 not only cut the peninsula off from the outside world (by the decrees of 1558–59) but also forbade Spaniards traveling abroad or having contact with other nations. The truth is that no legislation to this effect ever existed in early modern Spain, and common sense demonstrates quite the reverse. In fact, no Europeans traveled so much as the Spaniards. Their travel literature became a standard
point of reference for seafaring nations such as the British and the Dutch.179 Under Habsburg rule the armies of Spain went everywhere in Europe, its ships traversed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and its language was spoken from central Europe to the Philippines. Tens of thousands of Spaniards went abroad every year, mainly to serve in the armed forces. A scholar reminds us: “early modern Spain was a highly mobile society, its people constantly on the move.”180 Cultural and commercial contact with all parts of Western Europe, especially the Netherlands and Italy, continued absolutely without interruption. We may conclude that it is both implausible and untrue to suggest that Spain was denied contact with the outside world, or that the Inquisition was responsible for it.

  An astonishing—and admittedly exceptional—example of this international contact was the labor of Fernando Colón, son of the great explorer Christopher Columbus. In the 1520s, during his travels through Europe with the court of the emperor Charles V, he built up one of the richest collections of books ever known, which came to form part of the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville.181 Fortuitously, as we have seen, the collection included over five hundred editions of German and Swiss theology of the Reformation period, which lay tranquilly on the bookshelves until rooted out by zealous censors a hundred years later.

  The image of a nation sunk in fear, inertia and superstition because of the Inquisition was part of the mythology created around the tribunal in the nineteenth century and transmitted to later generations. The reality was that no less than the English or the French, Spaniards said and did what they liked (see chapter 13). Like other European states, the country had active political institutions at all levels. Free discussion of political affairs was tolerated, and public controversy occurred on a scale paralleled in few other countries. Unpalatable aspects of national life—anti-Semitism, intolerance to Moriscos and their eventual expulsion, oppression of peasants, high taxes—were nowhere so hotly debated as among Spaniards themselves. The historian Antonio de Herrera affirmed that such free discussion was essential, for otherwise “the reputation of Spain would fall rapidly, for foreign and enemy nations would say that small credence could be placed in the words of her rulers, since their subjects were not allowed to speak freely.”182 In the seventeenth century the arbitristas continued the tradition of controversy, and the diplomat Saavedra y Fajardo commented approvingly that “though grumbling is in itself bad, it is good for the state. Grumbling is proof that there is liberty in the state; in a tyranny it is not permitted.”183

 

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