by Henry Kamen
The familiar, a common feature of the medieval Inquisition, was continued in the Spanish one. Essentially he was a lay servant of the Holy Office, ready at all times to perform duties in the service of the tribunal. In return he was allowed to bear arms to protect the inquisitors, and enjoyed a number of privileges in common with the other officials. To become a familiar was normally an honor, and the Inquisition in its peak days could boast of a high proportion of nobles and titled persons among its familiars. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the familiars were banded together in a confraternity (hermandad) known as the Congregation of St. Peter Martyr, modeled directly on the associations founded by the medieval Inquisition after the murder of an inquisitor, Peter Martyr, in Verona (Italy) in 1252.
Familiars acquired notoriety in fact and in legend for acting as informers, but this was never their real purpose; neither familiars nor comisarios were meant to be spies. The Spanish government, like those of England and France, had a few political spies in its employment, but there is no record of attempts to spy on the religion of Spaniards. The documents of the Inquisition show clearly that most denunciations were made not through a secret police system but by ordinary people—neighbors, acquaintances—in response to appeals made in the edicts of faith or simply as a result of personal conflicts (see chapter 9).
Since familiars were usually laymen,36 it was inevitable that jurisdiction over them in cases of crime would be claimed by the secular courts. Conflicts arose regularly and more so after 1518 when Charles V decreed that the cognizance by secular courts of criminal cases concerning familiars and other officials and servants of the Inquisition was contrary to its privileges. After this ruling the tribunal did not hesitate to protect even the humblest of employees from the justice of the civil courts, a position that led to further friction and quarrels. For example, two of the biggest and most dramatic conflicts between the Catalan authorities and the Inquisition, in 1568 and 1611, were provoked by a quarrel over butcher’s meat and by officials confiscating a weapon from an Inquisition employee.37 The tribunal also had to be wary of Church authorities, who did not hesitate to arrest personnel of the Inquisition when necessary. Referring to the archbishop of Tarragona, the highest Church dignitary in the crown of Aragon, the inquisitors of Barcelona observed in 1615 that “we are very careful not to give him any reason to be dissatisfied with us or with the familiars.”38
Because the number appointed was often excessive, accords (concordias) between state and Inquisition in both Castile and Aragon attempted to set ceiling figures. The Castile agreement of 1553 suggested a maximum of 805 familiars for Toledo, 554 for Granada and 1,009 for Galicia, though in reality the number varied widely. In Galicia in 1611 there were a total of 388 familiars and 100 comisarios for the whole province (a theoretical ratio of 1 official per 241 households in the population), but they were distributed through less than 6.4 percent of the towns and villages—evidence of a very low level of contact between Inquisition and people.39 In Valencia, by contrast, in 1567 there were as many as 1,638 familiars (a ratio of 1 for every 42 households).40
One solution to which the Inquisition agreed was a voluntary limitation on the number of familiars. An accord made for Castile in 1553 was devoted largely to defining the number of familiars and the jurisdiction of the civil courts. In all serious crimes secular justice was to hold good and the Inquisition was limited to the cognizance of petty offenses only. Although this remained in force until the end of the Inquisition, it was only partly successful. Disputes continued as before, and neither the secular nor the inquisitorial courts were concerned to observe it. In the crown of Aragon new accords had to be made because they were even less observed than in Castile. Although Valencia received an accord in 1554 by which the number of familiars was reduced and jurisdiction defined, it was found necessary in 1568 to issue a new one. Philip II, in a note to the inquisitor general in 1574, admitted that he had personal experience of the problems: “we all know that in the past there have been very great irregularities, and I can assure you that I saw it in Valencia with my own eyes.”41 Reforms were not effective, to judge by a report of the council of Aragon on 21 July 1632, which claimed that no peace or safety could be expected in Valencia unless there was a reform in the selection of familiars, since nearly all the crimes committed involved familiars who were sure to escape with impunity, relying as they did on the intervention of their protectors the inquisitors.42
In Aragon the struggle was even more pronounced because of the great pride taken in their constitutional liberties by the aristocracy of the realm. Here the question of familiars was not resolved by the accord of 1568, which was the same as that issued in Valencia the same year. It was only after 1646, when the Cortes of Aragon had passed measures which restricted the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, that some satisfaction was gained by the secular tribunals of the realm.
In Catalonia conflicts over familiars were nominally settled by an agreement made at the Cortes of Monzón in August 1512, but the Inquisition never really accepted this. Then in 1553 the Cortes ruled that no official exercising civil jurisdiction in Catalonia could be a familiar. Further disputes ended in the Inquisition proposing a settlement in 1568. This was violently opposed by the Catalans. The viceroy reported that “all the courts, the consellers, the diputats and other judicial officers are determined to lay down their lives” rather than accept it. Small wonder that the Barcelona inquisitors reported that the Catalans “will not be content until they have driven the Inquisition from this realm.”43 Finally in 1585 it was conceded by the Inquisition at Monzón that in Catalonia “familiars and officials of the Holy Office cannot be admitted to office in the courts or in public administration.” It was a unique concession, very detrimental to the interests of the Catalan Inquisition, which reported in 1609 that “for a long time now people do not seek to become familiars, in order not to disqualify themselves from holding [civil] posts.”44 In that year there were only fifteen familiars in the entire territory of Catalonia. In the Vall d’Arán, technically in Catalonia and ruled over by the king but forming part of a French diocese, “no one wants to be a familiar even though we go to their houses and beg them.”45
The endless story of disputes over the numbers of familiars and problems over jurisdiction has tended to overshadow the history of the familiars themselves. By creating a network within each tribunal district, the Inquisition hoped to attach to its interests a section of the local population that made it possible for the two or three resident inquisitors to carry out their duties adequately. The social standing of familiars was therefore of paramount importance, and attempts were made to recruit from the highest circles and the purest blood. In Galicia the policy seems to have succeeded in one or two towns, for the twenty-five familiars in Santiago were successful merchants in the city, a sort of businessman’s club. Likewise, in the seaport of Mataró (Catalonia) in 1628, the familiars were two business partners who formed the core of a flourishing trade network.46 As a rule, people were eager to accept the post if it protected them from secular jurisdiction and gave them privileges of freedom from some types of taxation. In both Andalucia and Valencia lesser gentry were a small but significant portion of familiars.47 In the predominantly rural society of those times, however, most familiars in the crown of Aragon were inevitably peasant farmers (labradores).48 In Catalonia, outside the cities virtually all familiars were farmers, with merchants as a significant proportion only in the ports.49
Although the network established a presence for the Inquisition, it did little else. It by no means acted as a form of social control, for familiars very rarely figured as suppliers of information, nor is it likely that anyone in a rural community would have risked his life to become a professional informer. In some areas familiars were openly discriminated against, if we may believe the inquisitors of Llerena (Extremadura), complaining in 1597 of “the injuries which the corregidores, legal officials and town councils commit against the familiars of this Holy Office
simply because they are familiars. The fact is that a man can live in his village for twenty or thirty years without the officials doing anything to injure him, but as soon as he becomes a familiar they move against him, especially if there are conversos in the town council.”50
The steady decline in the number of familiars suggests that the post, even with its privileges, was not always much sought after. Between 1611 and 1641 in Galicia the number of familiars fell by 44 percent; where previously they had existed in 226 villages, now they were to be found in only 108.51 Writers of that time continued nevertheless to give wholly misleading figures for the numbers of familiars in Spain. In a well-known book published in 1675 the author Alonso Núñez de Castro claimed that “there are more than 20,000 familiars in Spain.”52 Another contemporary, the French ambassador, borrowed the wholly inaccurate figure from him and repeated it in his memoirs. Their testimony helped to maintain the legend of a Spain overrun by officials of the Inquisition. In fact, the numbers were shrinking. An account given by the Holy Office in 1748 shows that the province of Toledo had less than a hundred familiars instead of the eight hundred to which it was entitled, and the entire kingdom of Aragon had only thirty-five instead of the thousand or more it was permitted.53 The evidence suggests that the organizational apparatus built up by the Inquisition was flimsy, did not exercise social control and had only a marginal impact on the daily lives of most Spaniards.
A similar conclusion may be applied to the role of comisarios, brought into existence from the 1560s.54 They were normally local parish priests who acted for the Inquisition on special occasions and supplied it with data on births and marriages. They also frequently passed on denunciations from their parishioners to the regional inquisitors, in the way they had done in Languedoc in the medieval Inquisition.55 Without their essential help, the inquisitors would have been wholly unable to carry out their role in the Spanish countryside. In some areas, commensurate with the duties they had to carry out, comisarios could be men of education.56 In others, they fell far short of the required standard. In 1553 the bishop of Pamplona complained that those in his diocese were “idiots,” and had elected to become comisarios only in order to escape from his jurisdiction.57 In Catalonia in 1570 the inquisitors reported that nobody wanted the post, and by the mid-seventeenth century there were almost no comisarios in the province.
The most surprising aspect of the administration of the Holy Office was its often inadequate financing. Even though it was a government department, it was left to fend for itself. In this it mirrored the model of the medieval French Inquisition, which never received a fixed source of revenue. The Spanish tribunal was from the first financed out of the proceeds of its own activities. Confiscations were, in the early period, far and away the most important source.58
Confiscation of property was the standard punishment prescribed by canon law for heresy. Ferdinand stated in 1485 that confiscations imposed in Spain were by order of the pope, so it would seem that the Church controlled the process. In fact, at the beginning it was the secular authorities who carried out confiscations. Only later did the inquisitors take over control. There were normally two stages to the exercise. At the first stage, upon the arrest of a suspect his goods and income might be “sequestrated.” This could have terrible consequences and was much dreaded. The sequestrations were used to pay the costs of the prisoner in jail. If he were there long enough the money might all be used up, thereby driving his dependents into poverty. In effect, therefore, a sequestration might amount to a confiscation. Confiscation proper, which occurred only at the second stage, resulted from a judicial verdict and was a regular penalty for major offenses.
The principal victims of confiscations were the richer conversos, whose wealth must have stirred many an orthodox spirit. As Queen Isabella’s secretary Hernando del Pulgar wrote sardonically of the citizens of Toledo during a time of civil disturbances: “What great inquisitors of the faith they must be, to be finding heresies in the property of the peasants of the town of Fuensalida, which they rob and burn!”59 The initial seizures carried out by the Inquisition were substantial. The alleged plot of conversos against the Inquisition in Seville in 1481 was followed by confiscation of the property not only of the fabled Susán but of “many others, very prominent and very rich,” to quote Bernáldez. In the words of a later chronicler of Seville, “what was noticeable was the great number of prosecutions against moneyed men.”60 In the years after this, great and wealthy converso families could be ruined by even the slightest taint of heresy, since being condemned to “reconciliation” (see chapter 9) meant that all the culprit’s property was confiscated and not allowed to pass to his descendants, so that widows and children were often left without any provision.
Not surprisingly, many ordinary Spaniards came to the conclusion that the Inquisition was devised simply to rob people. “They were burnt only for the money they had,” a resident of Cuenca declared. “They burn only the well-off, because they have property; the others they leave alone,” said another. In 1504 an accused stated that “only the rich were burnt by the Inquisition, not the poor.”61 When a woman in Aranda de Duero in 1501 expressed alarm about the announced coming of the inquisitors to those parts, a man retorted: “Don’t be afraid of being burnt, they’re only after the money.”62 In 1483 after a city councilor of Ciudad Real, the converso Juan González Pintado, was burnt for heresy, Catalina de Zamora was accused of asserting that “this Inquisition that the fathers are carrying out is as much for taking property from the conversos as for defending the faith.”63 “It is the goods,” she said on another occasion, “that are the heretics.” This saying appears to have become common usage in Spain. The city authorities of Barcelona, protesting in 1509 against the technique of confiscations, complained that “goods are not heretics.”64 The issue certainly influenced the advice given by the Suprema in 1539 to the inquisitor of Navarre, that he should go easy on confiscations “so as not to cause people to say that the Holy Office is doing this out of cupidity.”65 People continued all the same to believe it. The Inquisition was there, a Catalan commented in 1572, “only to get money.” In addition to the profits made at Seville, the Inquisition found confiscations could be profitable elsewhere. During its brief year-long stay in the small town of Guadalupe in 1485, enough money was raised from confiscations by the tribunal to pay almost entirely for the building of a royal residence costing 7,286 ducats.66
In most of the cases we have on record, the money from confiscated property seems to have been largely disposed of by the Inquisition. It will probably never be clear what proportion of money went to the crown and what to the tribunal. Whatever King Ferdinand’s expectations may have been,67 no available documentation supports the idea of the crown raking in profits. In 1524 a treasurer informed Charles V that his predecessor had received 10 million ducats from the conversos, but the figure is both unverified and implausible.68
From time to time confiscations might be substantial. In 1592 in Granada an inquisitor admitted that of the fifty-odd women he had arrested “many or most were rich.”69 In later periods there were bonanzas. In 1676, towards the end of the last great and fruitful campaign of the Inquisition against the Portuguese judaizers resident in Spain, the Suprema claimed that it had obtained from the royal treasury confiscations amounting to 772,748 ducats and 884,979 pesos. These sums are extremely large for the period, and suggest that the crown was receiving a high proportion of confiscations. But that was not always true. If we look at the value of property confiscated on Mallorca after the alleged converso conspiracy of 1678 had been discovered, we find that the totals come to well over 2.5 million ducats,70 certainly the biggest single sum gathered in by the Inquisition in all the three centuries of its existence. Of this vast sum, however, it seems that the crown received under 5 percent.
Invariably judicial disputes arose over property that had been seized. Debts of the accused had to be paid; the expenses of officials and of court cases had to be met. The crown c
ould claim a third, as had apparently occurred under Ferdinand and Isabella. Some of the money was invested in censos (annuities) and houses by the inquisitors. In the city of Lleida in 1487, the confiscations from converso property were assigned to the city council, a religious order, a hospital and to various other needs, so that the Inquisition did not manage to control all the revenue available.71 By a thousand different routes the money trickled out of the hands of the inquisitors. When the reason was not mismanagement, it was the sheer dishonesty of minor officials. Whatever the income from confiscations at any time, it is safe to assume that the tribunals did not grow appreciably wealthier, or at least did not keep up their temporary wealth for long periods.
After confiscations, there were three important sources of flexible revenue. These were “fines,” which could be levied at any rate desired and were often used simply to raise money to cover expenses; and “penances” (penitencias), which were more formal and were usually decreed at a solemn occasion such as an auto de fe. Both fines and penances could, of course, be realized out of sequestrated property. Finally, there was the category of “dispensations” or “commutations,” when a punishment decreed by the Inquisition was commuted to a cash payment. This penalty, also sometimes called a “composition,” seems to have been most in use in the decade after the expulsion of the Jews and was levied on conversos who wished to be “rehabilitated,” that is, wipe their slate clean of offenses. Nearly two thousand persons paid this fine in Seville in 1494, and about the same number in Toledo the year after. The income, with so many people involved, could be substantial. Many with money were only too willing to pay for relief from the public shame of having to wear a sanbenito or penitential garment. At later periods, the method served to purchase relief from certain penalties: some, for example, managed to escape service in the galleys by paying for dispensations.