The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  For by 1618 Luna was back in Spain. We do not know what motivated him to go back, though it seems likely that his travels had made him develop a sense of a special mission, one that particularly affected Spain and its Muslim exiles and therefore required Luna’s presence in the country. He was also in very poor health, and no doubt hoped to end his days in the land that had once been al-Andalus. In 1618, shortly after his return, he was arrested by the Inquisition of Murcia, on the Mediterranean coast some distance from Granada, and questioned over several matters. His answers are vivid proof of the messianic hopes that some Spanish Muslims were developing. The Inquisition caught him with letters written in his own hand, one addressed to the pope and three others to the king. The letters described a vision he had had, according to the statement he made to the Inquisition:

  One night in the countryside he was by the power of God carried by angels to the fourth heaven, and from there to the sixth, and he had many visions and saw God our Lord seated on his throne, with his angels who were moving the heavens. And God said to him, “My son, do not be afraid, I shall give you to know all things, write to the king and to the pope and tell them that it is now the time of the Resurrection, when all heresies will end, and the whole world will convert to the Holy Catholic Faith.” And in the last days he will come to help the Arab nation, and the conversion will be through the Arab language, because it is the most perfect language and God has chosen it as the best, and the angels use it to praise him. And God will punish the Spaniards because they did not wish to use it, even though everybody has a duty to know it.

  And God had ordered him to write in the letters that the king should know that during his reign the General Conversion would come about. And God also revealed to him that the books of Sacromonte of this city contain the entire Catholic and Gospel truth. And that there remains one book to be read, which till now no one has managed to read or understand, which God is keeping back for himself, to be read and interpreted and given out at the Conversion and Last Judgment.92

  It seems likely that in the end the Inquisition released Luna with a simple reprimand. In a written report, inquisitors say that they thought of torturing or imprisoning him, but judged that he was too ailing to put up with either. An open condemnation of what he was claiming was out of the question, since that would have brought the Inquisition into direct conflict with the cathedral of Granada, which continued to maintain that the tablets of Sacromonte were part of the divine revelation. So Luna probably got off, and disappears thereafter into the mists of history.

  The exiled Moriscos of Spain now merged their lives into that of the Islamic peoples of the Mediterranean. The émigrés from Hornachos settled in what had been the deserted town of Rabat in Morocco, and gave it new life; others settled in Salé, just across the river from Rabat. Across the centuries the émigrés managed to retain a certain nostalgic and imagined folk memory of the land from which they came. Their houses, their vocabulary, even their music retain vestiges of the Andalucia that had been their home, and the guitar their music players strum in the street at night is the guitar that sings of lost Granada.93 The memory survives.94 A traditional ballad in Tunisia goes:

  May rain lavishly sprinkle you as it showers!

  Oh, my time of love in Andalucia:

  our time together was just a sleeper’s dream

  or a secretly grasped moment.95

  Despite everything, Islam continued to form an extension of the Hispanic experience and could not be wholly uprooted. It was, curiously enough, the absence and exile of the Muslims that made Spaniards accept them back into the mainstream of peninsular culture. Social practices that in former times were seen as unacceptable because they were Islamic passed after the expulsions into general use among Christians and formed part of the style and manners of Spain. Throughout Spanish society, Muslim habits and courtesies prevailed until our own time.96 Even the Catholic way of thinking could not escape from some remnants of seven centuries of Muslim influence. Islamic thought and concepts could be found deep within the mystical ideas of Christians, as Arabist scholars have convincingly suggested. Aspects of the writing of the mystic and poet Juan de la Cruz, and of the imagery used by Teresa of Avila in her mystical work The Interior Castle were derived from Islamic sources. Though Islam had disappeared from Spain, it remained a permanent part of Spain’s international confrontations, ever present in the war by both sea and land that continued unabated till the nineteenth century, when Spain’s dream of expanding into Africa turned sour after the terrible slaughter of its forces at the battle of Annual in Morocco in 1921.

  Long before the expulsions, in a society where Muslims were perceived as an enemy, those who wished to rebel against Christian values expressed opinions in their favor or even joined them.97 Individuals who rebelled against aspects of their own environment deliberately adopted pro-Arab attitudes and customs. Time and again, there were cases of Spaniards who became “renegades” and either entered Muslim service or embraced Islam.98 It was, as we have noted (chapter 1) a phenomenon that was not confined to Spain and existed long before the Inquisition. War and piracy were responsible for most of the involuntary converts. The number of persons who crossed into the world of Islam may have been substantial;99 a scholar suggests “hundreds of thousands,” voluntarily or not, in the whole area of the Mediterranean.100 We know some of their stories because they frequently found refuge in Spain, where they explained to the inquisitors what had made them cross over from one faith to the other. Some had been captured as children, and only as adults several years later were they able to choose to return. We have the testimony of a Portuguese priest, Antonio de Sosa, who was held prisoner in Algiers between 1577 and 1581. His Topography of Algiers, published posthumously in Spain thirty years later (1612), is a fascinating eyewitness account of cultural life in the city. According to him, Christian converts to Islam constituted more than half of the population of Algiers around 1580–81, a detail that (if correct) underlines the continual crossing of religious and political boundaries in the early modern Mediterranean. Such interchanges led to the creation of a new frontier society that lived in the in-between, simultaneously partaking of various cultures.101 It was a general phenomenon that extended through the inland sea and as far as the Balkans, where tens of thousands of Christians in the Ottoman Empire converted to Islam and enjoyed the privileges of elite status.102

  In the wake of the expulsions, historical memories of Islam’s fundamental role in the peninsula were consciously blotted out for nearly three hundred years. Neglect of the language of Spanish Arabs was such that when the authorities in 1749 wished to prepare a catalogue of the Arabic manuscripts in the Escorial, they had to call on a Syrian Christian priest to come to Spain to do the work. The legacy of Islam was left to perish. In his richly informed and illustrated Travels through Spain in the Years 1775 and 1776 (1779), the English Catholic traveler Henry Swinburne offered a pioneering perspective of a country that seemed to have lost touch with Europe. Some Spaniards who read the work (in French translation) were angered by it. The diplomat José Nicolás de Azara protested that the author “speaks endlessly of Muslims, their history and architecture, especially in Córdoba and Granada; and surpasses himself in praises of that sublime people, in order to humiliate our own.”103 In fact, when Swinburne was in Granada he was struck, as Washington Irving subsequently would be, by the total neglect of the Islamic heritage. “The glories of Granada have passed away with its old inhabitants,” he observed. “The streets are choked with filth; its aqueducts crumbled to dust; its woods destroyed; its territory depopulated; its trade lost; in a word, everything in a most deplorable situation.”104 Fortunately, in the nineteenth century the Romantic movement in European literature and Orientalism in art, helped powerfully by Americans such as Washington Irving as well as Spanish scholars and artists, began to restore dignity to the Muslim past.105

  Islamic Spain revived in the twentieth century. During the civil war of 1936, Arab volunteers fought
alongside the army insurgents, and long after the victory of Franco in the war I remember vividly seeing the long columns of the brightly costumed Muslim cavalry guard as they escorted the dictator to his residence in the Pardo outside Madrid. With the coming of democracy came the era of immigration from Africa, and with it a revival of Muslim claims to al-Andalus. Muslims in Spain number 1 million, or 2 percent of the population. The Inquisition would shudder to know that a grand mosque, completed in 2003, now again calls the faithful to prayer in the Albaicín, and that some six hundred mosques have been founded on Spanish soil.

  8

  THE POLITICS OF HERESY

  In the days of the blessed memory of Philip II, the Inquisition experienced great felicity.

  —THE INQUISITORS OF CATALONIA, 1623

  Before modern research began to analyze the nature and activity of the Holy Office, it was common to exaggerate its authority and influence. In 1827 the German historian Ranke argued that “the Inquisition was the most effective instrument in completing the absolute power of the monarch.”1 His opinion (not a careless one, for as we shall see it was based on reports of the time) influenced subsequent writers,2 and the view can still be found that “the Inquisition was used as the first centralized institution, essential for the process of state-building in Italy, Spain and Portugal,”3 and that the monarchy established it in order “to attain absolute power.”4 The reality is that in traditional Spain the king did not aspire to nor have absolute powers,5 and seldom if ever attempted to extend his authority through the Holy Office, which played no part whatsoever in the building of the modern Spanish state.6

  To avoid attributing to the tribunal of the Inquisition a power that it did not possess, we should bear in mind that it was only one royal court among others, and always had quarrels over jurisdiction with other legal entities. Spain before the eighteenth century was (like other European regions such as France and Italy) not a unified country: there was a multitude of judicial systems and tribunals, often with overlapping competence, and even the crown was not deemed the supreme authority in regions (particularly outside Castile) where noble and local courts might in certain matters enjoy higher standing. In addition, throughout Spain there were Church courts, which by medieval tradition derived their authority from the pope and not the crown. The new Inquisition, when it was created, entered a world where asserting its authority against other entities was no easy matter.

  From its inception, it was meant by Ferdinand and Isabella to be under their control and not, like the medieval tribunal, under that of the pope. Sixtus IV was surprisingly cooperative. His bull of institution of 1 November 1478 gave the Catholic monarchs power not only over appointments but also, tacitly, over confiscations. The inquisitors were to have the jurisdiction over heretics normally held by bishops, but were not given any jurisdiction over bishops themselves. Subsequently the pope saw his error in granting independence to a tribunal of this sort, and stated his protest in a brief of 29 January 1482. At the same time he refused to allow Ferdinand to extend his control over the old Inquisition in Aragon.

  Further conflict ensued with the bull issued by Sixtus on 18 April that year, denouncing abuses in the procedure of the Inquisition. Ferdinand held firm to his policy despite opposition in Rome and Aragon. His victory was confirmed by the bull which on 17 October 1483 appointed Torquemada as chief inquisitor of the crown of Aragon. Earlier that year Torquemada had also received a bull of appointment as inquisitor general of Castile. He was now the only individual in the peninsula whose writ extended (in theory) over all Spain, unlike the king, who enjoyed considerable authority in Castile and rather less in the crown of Aragon and the Basque country. In practice, of course, the inquisitor general’s powers were very limited and always relied on the crown for backup.

  The Holy Office was in every way an instrument of royal policy, and remained politically subject to the crown. “Although you and the others enjoy the title of inquisitor,” Ferdinand reminded his inquisitors of Aragon firmly in 1486, “it is I and the queen who have appointed you, and without our support you can do very little.”7 But royal control did not imply royal support (as we shall see) and did not make it exclusively a secular tribunal. Any authority and jurisdiction exercised by the inquisitors came directly or indirectly from Rome, without which the tribunal would have ceased to exist. Bulls of appointment, canonical regulations and spheres of jurisdiction—all had to have the prior approval of Rome. The Inquisition was consequently also an ecclesiastical tribunal for which the Church of Rome assumed ultimate responsibility, a status that could also be convenient for the inquisitors when they wished to evade instructions from the crown.

  The central organization of the new tribunal was in 14888 vested in a council, the Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisicion, known for short as the Suprema. This joined the crown’s other administrative councils whose existence had been confirmed at the Cortes of Toledo in 1480. Although Torquemada was the first inquisitor general, the effective “father” of the Inquisition was Cardinal Mendoza, archbishop of Seville and later of Toledo. It was this prelate, famous as a patron of Columbus, who put in motion the negotiations with Rome leading to the establishment of the tribunal. Yet above him towers the shadow of Torquemada. The austere Dominican friar, prior of the monastery of Santa Cruz at Segovia, left his indelible mark on the tribunal, and in 1484 Sixtus IV praised him for having “directed your zeal to those matters which contribute to the praise of God and the benefit of the orthodox faith.”9 Of distant converso origin, he was the first Dominican to introduce (1496) a statute of blood purity into a religious house, his new foundation at Avila dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas. It was the place where he eventually retired, confessing that “I feel free of passions since I came to live here.”10 He died in 1498, at the age of eighty. A leading minister of Philip II later commented: “Because he was a poor friar, he was the best inquisitor general there ever was.”11 There were obviously other opinions about him: around 1485 a lawyer in Soria felt Torquemada was “a vile heretic, the most accursed man in the world.”12

  Torquemada’s importance suggests that the Dominicans were controlling the new Inquisition as they had controlled the medieval one. From 1231 in Germany and then from 1233 in Provence, the Dominicans were the order specially chosen by the pope for the task of inquiring into heresy. In Spain, however, though all the early appointments were of Dominicans, and they continued to play an important role, only a minority of inquisitors came from the order. In Valencia there were only six Dominicans among the fifty-two for whom details are available over the period 1482–1609,13 and in Toledo only one among the fifty-seven inquisitors recorded between 1482 and 1598. The same picture is true for the summit: out of the forty-five inquisitors general who held office, only six were Dominicans. A special privilege was obtained on 16 December 1618 when Philip III, at the request of the duke of Lerma, created a permanent place in the Suprema for a member of the order, to be occupied in the first place by the then inquisitor general, Aliaga.14 By the late seventeenth century, in contrast, Jesuits had become influential in the Inquisition.

  Although the inquisitor general may seem to have been a powerful individual, in practice his commission was often limited in authority and renewable only after papal approval. Moreover, the pope could grant equivalent powers to other clerics in Spain, as in 1491 when a second inquisitor general of Castile and Aragon was appointed for a brief time, and in 1494 when four bishops in Spain were promoted to this post to help the now senile Torquemada. When Torquemada died, he was succeeded by Diego Deza, who in 1505 became archbishop of Seville. It was not until 1504 that Deza became sole head of the Inquisition, because the bishops appointed under Torquemada continued to hold office up to that date. The death of Queen Isabella on 26 November 1504 led to a temporary separation of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, because of Ferdinand’s quarrels with his son-in-law, Philip I of Castile. As a result, Ferdinand asked the pope to appoint a separate inquisitor for Aragon. This occu
rred in June 1507 when Cisneros was appointed to Castile and the bishop of Vic, Juan Enguera, to Aragon. The two posts remained separate until the death of Cisneros in 1518, when Charles I appointed Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, bishop of Tortosa and since 1516 inquisitor general of Aragon, as inquisitor for Castile as well. After this the tribunal remained under one head alone.

  In historical fiction the person of the inquisitor general seems to assume an almost sinister identity when he is termed the Grand Inquisitor, a title that is used, for example, in Schiller’s drama Don Carlos and in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. The truth is that by virtue of his distinctive office, the inquisitor general was indeed a figure of power. In the last days of the Holy Office, in the Cortes of Cadiz in 1813, the question was even raised whether the absence of an inquisitor general (there was none at that moment) meant that in consequence no Inquisition existed.15 As president of one of the permanent administrative councils of the monarchy, the inquisitor general always played a very important role in politics, though it did not follow that he carried exceptional weight. Apart from his functions as a state councilor, he was personally responsible for all senior appointments in the Inquisition and at the same time had special powers in such matters as permission to read prohibited books or dispensation from certain legal impediments.16

  The council of the Inquisition (the Suprema) was presided over by the inquisitor general. All authority exercised by inquisitors was at one time held to be by direct delegation from the pope, but later this was modified to the opinion that it was the inquisitor general himself who delegated the papal powers. Though he might be nominated by the crown, only the pope could appoint him. Growth of the inquisitor general’s power was modified by the increasing authority of the Suprema. The relationship between Suprema and inquisitor general was never satisfactorily settled, because they usually acted in concert and did not dispute supremacy. But there were several occasions when the council attempted to take an independent line. In the early years of Philip IV, conflicts between the council and its chairman were persistent. But the inquisitor general of the time, Cardinal Zapata, angrily told his councilors not to interfere in what did not concern them. “There was dead silence,” a secretary recorded, “and none of the members of the council said a word.”17