by Henry Kamen
In the early seventeenth century the Suprema consisted of about six members, who usually met every morning and also three afternoons a week. The afternoon sessions, normally on legal business, were also attended by two members of the council of Castile. Correspondence was divided between two secretariats, one for “Aragon”18 and one for Castile. Members of the Suprema were appointed by the king alone, and the Suprema usually issued orders without any need to have the vote of the inquisitor general. When divisions arose in the council, a decision was taken by majority vote, in which the vote of the inquisitor general counted no more than that of another. This did not affect his unique authority. Inquisitors general, such as Antonio de Sotomayor in 1643,19 continued to insist unequivocally on their exclusive right to exercise the powers conferred by the pope.
The substantial autonomy of the inquisitor general, however, was confined to matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In political matters, the authority of the crown could always prevail. One outstanding case of very much later, that of Fray Froilán Diaz, brought out clearly the extent to which the crown could decide the relative roles of the inquisitor general and the Suprema.
Froilán Díaz, a Dominican who had been confessor since 1698 to the king, Charles II (1665–1700), was arrested in 1700 after various palace intrigues on the charge of having helped to cast a spell over the hapless king, known in Spanish history as el Hechizado, the Bewitched. The prosecution was at the instance of the German queen and her friend Balthasar de Mendoza, bishop of Segovia, who in 1699 had been appointed inquisitor general. Díaz, an ex-officio member of the Suprema, was imprisoned while an investigation was made by five theologians. They found that there was no basis for charges against him. Accordingly, in June 1700 all the members of the council except Mendoza voted for Díaz’s acquittal. Mendoza refused to accept the findings and ordered the arrest of the other members of the Suprema until they assented to the arrest of Díaz. At the same time he ordered the tribunal of Murcia to bring Díaz to trial. This the inquisitors did—and acquitted him. Mendoza thereupon ordered a retrial and kept Díaz in prison. Opposition to the actions of the inquisitor general was by now universal. There was consequently wide support for the new French king, Philip V, when he discovered that Mendoza was politically opposed to the Bourbon dynasty. He confined him to his see of Segovia, but Mendoza now made the mistake of appealing to Rome, an act unprecedented in the whole history of the Spanish Inquisition. The crown immediately stepped in to prevent any interference from Rome, and finally in 1704 Díaz was rehabilitated and reinstated in the Suprema, while Mendoza was replaced as inquisitor general in March 1705.20
The case proved to be the last important one in which the inquisitor general attempted to assert his supremacy. Thereafter the concern of the tribunal with administrative routine and censorship, rather than great matters of state, involved fewer opportunities for personal initiative, and authority came more and more to reside in the Suprema and the machinery it controlled. More obscure prelates were also chosen as inquisitor general, a significant example being the choice of the bishop of Ceuta (in North Africa) to succeed Mendoza in 1705.
The growth of the Suprema’s authority led to greater centralization of decisions, a process that accelerated in the seventeenth century as the volume of heretics, and therefore of business, diminished in the provincial tribunals. In the early days, as the case of Lucero showed, local autonomy could be carried to scandalous extremes. At first, cases were referred by provincial tribunals to the Suprema only if agreement could not be reached, or if the council summoned a case before it. In 1550, when it was felt that the Barcelona tribunal was showing excessive severity in suppressing a witch craze in Catalonia (chapter 11), all sentences passed by it were required to be confirmed by the Suprema. The Barcelona inquisitors do not seem to have accepted interference from the center, for the inquisitor general in 1566 was obliged to examine their records and denounce the irregularities and cruelties in the tribunal. From this time onwards, greater attention was paid by the Suprema to the procedure and sentences of local tribunals. These were required after 1632 to send in monthly reports of their activities. By the mid-seventeenth century all sentences were required to be submitted to the Suprema before being carried out. With this, the machinery of the Inquisition reached its most complete stage of centralization. In the eighteenth century business became so rare that the tribunals became mere appendages of the Suprema, which initiated all prosecutions.
These bureaucratic details about organization do little to help us understand how a tiny body like the Inquisition managed to leave so large a footprint on the fabric of history. The truth is that the tribunal created in Castile in 1478 was heir to and formed part of an impressive medieval tradition of vigilance against heresy; it did not have to invent anything new in rules and structure, because it simply took over what had been practiced two centuries before in France. If there were doubts about how to proceed, the experts simply looked up what had been done by the French.
The Spanish Inquisition was based essentially on the medieval one. The crucial fact may easily be overlooked because of the wholly different conditions under which each tribunal came into existence. There was in reality no other precedent from which to work, and the Spanish inquisitors followed down to the last detail—in all aspects of arrest, trial, procedure, confiscations and recruitment of personnel—the regulations that had been in use in thirteenth-century Languedoc and Aragon. As late as the reign of Philip II, the classic Aragonese manual of Nicolau Eimeric could be accepted as a standard guide by its Spanish commentator, Francisco Peña.21 There is no reason, therefore, to think of the Inquisition in the peninsula as peculiarly Spanish. Apart from some obvious differences, such as the transfer in Spain of authority over heresy from bishops to inquisitors, the Inquisition in the peninsula was simply an adaptation to Spanish conditions of the medieval French tribunal.
At the same time, of course, the social context within which the two Inquisitions worked was wholly different. Unlike the Inquisition of Languedoc two centuries before, the Spanish tribunal was installed from above, by pope and king, and enjoyed state support until the end of its existence. It did not restrict its operations to one local society but attempted to penetrate all the societies of the peninsula. Though concerned initially with one form of religious error, it quickly extended its inquiries to many others. Finally, the inquisitors of Spain never became agents of control, as those of Languedoc apparently did, “devising methods of using power and coercion to give fantasies a legally validated and socially accepted reality.”22
In attempting to understand the structure of the Spanish Inquisition, we must not suppose that it was a carefully planned organization. The admirable description of its structure given by Lea23 leaves the reader with a deceptive impression of efficiency, because it summarizes in one masterly chapter a process that in fact covered over three centuries. The tribunal evolved very slowly and not always efficiently. The first rules drawn up were those agreed upon in a meeting at Seville on 29 November 1484. There was at yet no formal body called “inquisition,” and the rules of 1484 used the word only to refer to the work that the inquisitors were doing,24 that is, they were inquiring (the Latin verb was inquirere) into matters for which they had a papal commission. The rules of 1484 did not even contemplate a “Spanish” area of operation: the inquisitors who came together to consult on the proposed rules were those functioning in Seville, Córdoba, Jaén and Ciudad Real, cities in the south of the peninsula belonging to the crown of Castile. Some of the terminology used was still based on medieval France: they referred to a “sermón de fe,” which in Spain later became the procedure known as an “auto de fe.” Above all, the Castilians seem to have learnt from the way in which the French had run their inquiries: keeping exhaustive records, making copies of the documents, and employing a reference system to make it easier to consult and compare the documents, especially through use of an index of names. The said documents were always to be kept in a s
pecial chest with multiple keys, so that they remained inviolably secret. A century before the state in Castile (under Philip II) began the systematic keeping of government archives, the Inquisition was quietly and efficiently storing away a vast pile of documents that four centuries later would serve as the raw material for the first noninquisitorial histories of the Inquisition. It was the first time in European history that a policing body managed to create a data bank of all its proceedings and of all the accused who passed through its chambers.
Under Torquemada the rules were amplified in 1485, 1488 (when for the first time each tribunal of officials was referred to as an “inquisition”) and 1498. His successor Diego Deza added some articles in 1500. All these regulations were later known under the collective title of Instrucciones antiguas (Old Instructions). They were unsystematic, had to be regularly modified and led to variations of practice between different tribunals. Over half a century went by before more detailed rules were drawn up. By that time, it is crucial to remember, there was no longer any substantial problem of Jewish or Islamic origin, so it is pertinent to ask why further development was necessary. The interesting fact is that an organized, bureaucratic Inquisition emerged only with the issue in September 1561 of the Instructions of Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés, in eighty-one clauses. These set out to achieve a centralized organization, firm control by the Suprema and financial stability for the tribunals. A product of the crisis years after 1558, the Valdés Instructions gave the Holy Office a reputation for rigidity, and we shall look presently at some aspects.25 Subsequent modifications were collected and printed by Gaspar Isidro de Argüello at Madrid in 1627 and 1630 (Instrucciones del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición, sumariamente, antiguas y nuevas) (Summary of the Old and the New Instructions). This was followed by the comprehensive Compilación de las Instrucciones (Collected Instructions) published at Madrid in 1667.26
The tribunals of the Inquisition in their early days were itinerant and active mainly in the southern part of Castile, where the religious minorities were most numerous. It was several years before King Ferdinand brought the crown of Aragon into the framework. Inquisitions were set up wherever there seemed to be a need and political conditions permitted. In 1486, for example, a special inquisition was sanctioned by Torquemada to act solely within the Jeronimite order. It seems to have functioned for about five years. Even when inquisitors had a fixed base, they moved around for their duties. The Barcelona inquisitors, for example, celebrated autos de fe in Girona and Tarragona. In the first years of the Inquisition the following tribunals were established:27 1482, in Seville, Córdoba, Valencia and Saragossa; 1483, in Jaén and Ciudad Real (moved to Toledo 1485); 1484, in Barcelona and Teruel; 1485, in Toledo, Llerena and Medina del Campo (moved to Salamanca 1488); 1486, in Segovia and Lleida; 1488, in Salamanca, Murcia, Alcaraz, Mallorca and Valladolid (moved to Palencia 1493); 1489, in Burgos, Cuenca and Osma; 1490, in Avila; 1491, in Calahorra, Sigüenza and Jérez; 1492, in León. This proliferation of tribunals became uneconomic once the number of prosecutions decreased. In 1503, therefore, the five tribunals of León, Burgos, Salamanca, Avila and Segovia were suppressed and merged into the single vast tribunal of Valladolid. By 1507 there were only seven tribunals in Spain where in 1495 there had been sixteen.
Map 1. The districts of the Spanish Inquisition, 1570–1820.
Table 1
Several changes occurred in the sixteenth century, including the establishment of the tribunal at Granada in 1526. After two unsuccessful attempts, an Inquisition was finally set up in Galicia in 1574 (some years after the tribunal had begun to operate in America). The network, which theoretically covered all Spain’s territory, had enormous gaps in it. Inquisitors did not venture into the area of the Pyrenees until the end of the sixteenth century. When in 1582 they first entered the Vall d’Áneu, in the Pyrenees of Catalonia, they were attacked by a gang of clergy “numbering over forty, with red caps and feathers and each with two pistols.”28
The permanent tribunals of Spain, with dates of first establishment, are shown in table 1.29
The location of the districts is shown on map 1. It is evidence of the remarkable indifference of the Inquisition to other secular or ecclesiastical authority that its districts often crossed political frontiers. The territory of Orihuela in Valencia, for example, was put under the tribunal of Murcia; Teruel in Aragon was put under the tribunal of Valencia; Calahorra in Castile was put under the Navarrese tribunal of Logroño; and Lleida in Catalonia fell under the control of the tribunal of Aragon. The Inquisition was able to do this because its authority in matters of heresy (and not, we should emphasize, in other matters) covered the whole of Spain regardless of frontiers. Portugal, for the period 1580–1640, when it came under the Spanish crown, at first kept its Inquisition entirely independent. In 1586, however, Philip II nominated the cardinal Archduke Albert of Austria, who was governor of Portugal, as head of the Portuguese Inquisition, so bringing the Portuguese tribunal more into touch with Spain.
Because the Inquisition of Spain was a direct instrument of the Spanish crown and therefore in some sense functioned in a uniform way throughout the Spanish empire, it is common practice among some scholars to look at its activity without making any distinction between countries. This can give rise to serious confusion of theme and context. The present study, which attempts to limit its survey to the peninsular Inquisition, inevitably incurs problems when touching on matters of race, society and politics that had a widely different framework in Andalucia, the Canary Islands, Sicily or Catalonia. The framework would become yet more intricate were we to include in our focus the American tribunals of Lima (1570), Mexico (1571) and Cartagena (1610), or the territories of the Philippines and Goa, all of which had entirely different societies and historical contexts. A feature such as the auto de fe, for instance, might be formally the same in each of these areas, but its origins and context would usually be distinct, so that a broad comparison between countries would have doubtful validity. In the same way, racialist attitudes as experienced in Spanish society would have little in common with the same attitudes in Mexico or the Philippines.
Each tribunal, according to Torquemada’s Instructions of 1498, was to consist of two inquisitors (“a jurist and a theologian, or two jurists”), an assessor (calificador), a constable (alguacil) and a prosecutor (fiscal), with any other necessary subordinates. The number of personnel grew over time. A century later, the major tribunals of the peninsula had three inquisitors each.30 Contrary to the image—still widely current—of inquisitors as small-minded clerics and theologians fanatically dedicated to the extirpation of heresy, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the inquisitors were drawn from qualified personnel and developed over time into an elite bureaucracy.31
Because the Holy Office was in a sense a court of law, its administrators should ideally have been trained lawyers: the sixteenth-century lawyer Diego de Simancas thought that “it is more useful to have jurists (letrados) rather than theologians as inquisitors.” In practice, since they were drawn from the religious orders, they were often theologians. By the same token, inquisitors did not have to be clergy and could be laymen (well into the seventeenth century there were occasional examples of laymen). All this shows that the inquisitors were in principle a bureaucracy not of the Church but of the state. They received their training in the same institutions that contributed personnel to the councils of state and the high courts. An analysis of fifty-seven inquisitors of Toledo, from the period 1482–1598,32 shows that all but two had degrees and doctorates based on the study of canon law at university, and that nearly half had been trained in the exclusive colleges known as Colegios Mayores.
Philip III in 1608 stipulated that all inquisitors must be jurists. These men were of course trained only in the law of the Church, or canon law; they were not equipped for matters touching on criminal law, a discipline that developed in Europe only after the eighteenth century.33 This meant that in crucial matters, such as the rules of
evidence, which today are assumed to play a vital role in court trials, the inquisitors had to develop their practice as they went. They would have learnt a bit from works such as Eimeric’s manual for the medieval French inquisitors, but in cases where criminal matters might be directly at issue they normally called in a civil lawyer to advise them.34
Many went on to serve in the high courts of the realm.35 For these, service in the Inquisition was merely a stepping-stone to a further career. In practice, of course, the bureaucracy of state and Church overlapped, so that although some inquisitors were laymen it was more useful to be in holy orders. Moreover, the ecclesiastical character of inquisitors was underlined by their dependence on canonries for income and by the subsequent promotion of many to bishoprics.
The tribunals of the Holy Office were few in terms of geographical coverage, and staffed by only a small handful of personnel. The fact is enough to explode any idea about its capacity to impose its presence in a pre-modern world without adequate roads, bureaucracy or communications. It became essential to seek help from the local population in all the areas that a policing body would today require: collecting information, detaining suspects, transporting prisoners. These functions could be carried out thanks to help from familiars and comisarios.