by Henry Kamen
Together, these apparently small sources of income produced respectable sums, though never enough to substantiate the sweeping view that the Inquisition was founded to rob the conversos. Between 1493 and 1495 the various tribunals handed to the council of the Inquisition some 45,000 ducats for fines.72 In 1497 the royal treasurer acknowledged receipt from the Toledo Inquisition of about 17,000 ducats realized from dispensations.73 In general, it is likely that these various sources of income never came to more than 2 percent of government treasury receipts in any year.74 The crown was not in the business for profits. It does not alter the fact that many families might face misery as a result of the fines.
Why, during this phase of comparatively high income, was no provision made for a secure financial base? This may have been in part, as we have mentioned, because the Spanish Inquisition was modeled on the medieval, which had no secure funds either. But we must also take into account the fact that the early Inquisition in Spain was an itinerant tribunal, created for an emergency and with no long-term plans, as the various Instructions of Torquemada show clearly. The Catholic Kings may well have thought of it as being no more permanent than that other useful organization of theirs, the Hermandad.
There were certainly no financial problems in the first years. After Isabella’s death in 1504, however, there was a sharp drop in confiscation income. “It is reported that the costs of the Inquisition exceed its income,” an official noted.75 The treasury of the Inquisition received in 1509 one-tenth of what it was receiving in 1498.76 Over the next generation, with the disappearance of the great persecution of conversos, income plummeted. The crown had to decide what to do about this situation. Because the Inquisition was strictly a royal tribunal, revenue from confiscations and fines went in the first instance to the crown, which then paid out for the salaries and expenses of the inquisitors. Under the Catholic Kings, the Holy Office was totally subject to the crown for finance. As late as 1540 the Suprema reported that orders for salaries of inquisitors in the crown of Aragon were always signed by the king and not by the inquisitor general.77
The crown, however, helped itself to so much inquisitorial income that very soon it had to find extra money for salaries, and Ferdinand therefore turned to the Church. In 1488 the pope granted him the right to appoint inquisitors to one prebend78 (when vacant) in each cathedral or collegiate church. The king made ten appointments that year. He had, however, endangered the financial position of the Inquisition, and under the absentee Charles V the Suprema slowly began to take control away from the crown. In the 1540s royal control was virtually nominal, and by the 1550s the Suprema was actually withholding details of confiscations from the king.79 It was at this period that the Inquisition obtained its next secure source of revenue.
Already, in 1501, the pope had granted to all the tribunals of Spain the income from specified canonries and prebends, but for several reasons this had never fully taken effect. The government was still wrestling with the problem half a century later. In 1547 Prince Philip informed his father that he was discussing with Inquisitor General Valdés and Francisco de los Cobos “a memorandum they have drawn up on their ideas for the reform and supply of the salaries of the Inquisition.” The emperor, he added, “knows better than anybody how important it is to maintain the Inquisition in these realms, and how great an advantage it would be if they had secure salaries.”80 Impressed by the struggles of the Inquisition against heresy within Spain, the pope in 1559 generously repeated the terms of the grant of 1501. The concession responded to efforts which Valdés and Philip II had been making for several years. From now on, aided by the income from ecclesiastical offices and from various financial agreements made with the Moriscos in the 1570s, the Inquisition became less dependent on the crown for survival. It also ceased to rely on (dwindling) confiscations. The canonries and investments (censos) were more secure and became, at last, a reliable basis of income for the Holy Office.
The evolution from deficit to relative stability can be seen in the case of the tribunal of Llerena. In the early sixteenth century, with profitable income from judaizers now virtually a thing of the past, most tribunals faced severe problems. The dangers of this situation were certainly in the mind of the anonymous converso of Toledo who in 1538 directed a memorial to Charles V: “Your Majesty should above all provide that the expenses of the Holy Office do not come from the property of the condemned, because it is a repugnant thing if inquisitors cannot eat unless they burn [recia cosa es que si no queman no comen].”81 Unfortunately, this is exactly what the inquisitors of Llerena were forced to do. With no revenue coming in, they were obliged to go out and look for it. “We must look out,” one inquisitor commented, “for a solution to maintain the said tribunal in the future.” In 1550 the salaries of officials, amounting to 1,395 ducats, could not be met by income from current fines, which brought in only 1,000 ducats.82 In July 1554 the inquisitor Dr. Ramirez informed the Suprema that “this Inquisition cannot subsist without going on a visitation every year.” As remedies he proposed that one of the two posts of inquisitor be suppressed; that the post of receiver be dropped and the work given to the notary; that confiscations be looked after directly by the remaining inquisitor; and that further visitations be made to the diocese of Badajoz, which was promisingly full of suspicious people, so that “with a bit of care there will be no lack of business whereby God our Lord will be served and the Holy Office be able to sustain itself.” By July 1572, with the new system of canonries, all this had changed. Two canonries, in Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, now brought in 1,813 ducats, and extensive confiscations from the wealthy family of Lorenzo Angelo in Badajoz raised income in 1572 to nearly 5,000 ducats.83
For the next two centuries confiscations and canonries remained the chief direct sources of finance for each tribunal. Two canonries, in Málaga and Antequera, provided the tribunal of Granada with 12.8 percent of its income in 1573;84 three canonries, in Córdoba, Jaén and Ubeda together provided 40 percent of the income of the tribunal of Córdoba in 1578;85 and four canonries—in Badajoz, Plasencia, Coria and Ciudad Rodrigo—provided 37.1 percent of that of the tribunal of Llerena in 1611.86 Without the regular annual income from these Church offices, the Inquisition would have gone bankrupt.
By their nature, confiscations and sequestrations could never bring in a reliable income. The vast majority of all those accused by the Inquisition were people of humble means and the inquisitors would need to have had a regular annual turnover of hundreds of prisoners in order to get anything like a substantial revenue. Windfalls like the great persecution of Chuetas in Mallorca in the 1680s were exceptional. The normal picture was of tribunals trying desperately to find income for the costs of administration, prosecution, maintenance of prisoners and the increasingly expensive autos de fe. The documentation is full of complaints by local inquisitors that they cannot provide either for themselves or for their prisoners.
The regular state of deficit in the tribunals can be seen by looking at the percentage shortfall of expenses against income over a period of time. For example, income in Granada in 1618 was 3 percent more than costs, but in 1671 expenses were 3 percent more than income and in 1705 27 percent more.87 The figures leave no doubt that the Inquisition was in a parlous financial state. The accounts of income and expenditure of the tribunal of Córdoba show us a persistent history of debt over three centuries: in 1578 expenses exceeded income by 14.6 percent, in 1642 by 26.8 percent, in 1661 by 33.8 percent, in 1726 by 11.2 percent.88
Why were the tribunals in constant debt? Quite apart from insufficient income and difficulties caused by the highest inflation rate in Europe, the problems of the Inquisition can be explained simply by the fact that bureaucracy was absorbing an enormous proportion of income. In 1498 Torquemada had suggested that each tribunal have two inquisitors and a small number of officials. By the late sixteenth century this concept of a modest establishment had disappeared forever. Córdoba in 1578 had twenty-six officials, Llerena in 1598 had thirty;89 the n
umber in each case included three inquisitors. In Córdoba salaries consumed 75.6 percent of income. In addition to this, each tribunal had to send a proportion of income to the Suprema, which had its own expenses. The sum contributed by Córdoba to the Suprema in 1578 represented nearly a fifth of its costs. At this period the salaries of the Suprema bureaucracy were impressively high.90 The Council spent 15,500 ducats a year on wages (the inquisitor general got a quarter of this), compared with an average total wage bill for each of the bigger provincial tribunals of around 3,200 ducats. Local tribunals also had to finance special expenses such as the autos de fe. In 1655, at a time when its normal annual income was around 9,300 ducats, Córdoba put on an auto which cost over 5,300 ducats.91
This brings us to the most crucial source of inquisitorial income: censos, or investment income. We know that the Inquisition never became a great property-owning institution, and that the estates owned at the end of the eighteenth century were of modest value only. The tribunal of Seville, for example, owned a total of twenty-five rented dwellings and two small estates in 1799.92 The Holy Office had never lacked the opportunity to become rich, but several factors hindered it doing so. Sequestrations and confiscations did not always produce their full values. Against them had to be set the cost of maintaining prisoners, the debts already owed by those arrested and the claims of innocent dependent relatives. For example, when in 1760 a royal official in Santander was arrested, his sequestrated property was valued at 32,000 ducats, but of this 36.6 percent went to payment of his debts, 31.7 percent to his heirs, and only the remaining 31.7 percent to the Inquisition.93 The example is not necessarily typical: in all too many cases the Inquisition refused to pay creditors or family, and kept confiscated property for itself. From the beginning, moreover, the crown had decided that the tribunal required cash rather than an accumulation of property. Confiscations were therefore put up for sale in the open market, and the cash obtained was invested, “as ordered by the Catholic king” (the reference, to King Ferdinand, was in 1519).94 Many tribunals were very lax in buying censos, and in 1579 the Suprema had to insist that as soon as one censo was paid off the cash must be reinvested in another. The need to have a steady income—one quite independent of the unreliable and irregular income from confiscations—was undoubtedly the main reason why by the sixteenth century most tribunals were investing heavily in censos. After the turmoil of the Morisco expulsions, we find the Valencia tribunal in 1630 with 45,500 ducats invested in censos at 5 percent, yielding an annual income of 2,275 ducats.
Censos, in short, became the regular cash source of the Inquisition. In 1573 no less than 74 percent, and in 1576 80 percent, of the income of the Granada tribunal came from censos and house rents;95 in 1611, 63.3 percent of the income of Llerena came from censos.96 Everywhere the tribunals began to rely on investment income for survival. In the tribunals in Morisco territory the Inquisition was excessively vulnerable because most of the censos were on land worked by the Moriscos. Events such as the Alpujarra risings or the Morisco expulsion after 1609 were therefore disastrous, not simply because of the loss of the special payments made by the racial minorities but because most of the cash income, in censos and rents, came from Moriscos.
The Inquisition, in financial terms, became a sort of bank through which money from various sectors of society—conversos, Moriscos, financiers—was channeled. Since the inquisitors needed a regular flow rather than future benefits, censos were a fair business risk and preferable to any other economic activity (they brought in 7 percent in the late sixteenth century, arguably a higher rate of return than most other investments). Thus the Holy Office joined other ranks of society which the writer González de Cellorigo was later (in 1600) to condemn for their devotion to the quick profit from censos, “the plague and ruin of Spain.”
Inevitably, individual inquisitors saw no reason why they should not also profit. Lea cites the cases of the Suprema president who was banished in 1642 for malversation of funds, and the inquisitor who died in 1643 allegedly leaving 40,000 ducats in gold and silver.97 One may well suspect that some tribunals were richer than their financial statements suggested. Take, for instance, the tribunal of Toledo, which on paper had a permanent deficit. If this were really true, how does one explain the interesting case history of the accountant of the Inquisition there, the priest Juan de Castrejana, who was born in poverty but who managed before his death in 1681 to buy up lands in his hometown, endow a chapel and a hospital, lend money to his town council, buy investments in Madrid, set up a silk-manufacturing company and lend money to the silk merchants of Madrid?98
In the late seventeenth century there were other positive signs for the inquisitors. It was without any doubt a period of decline in both income and personnel. The oft-criticized familiars had all but disappeared. In 1748 their numbers had been reduced to less than a fifth of those permitted. In Galicia and in Aragon, 98 percent of towns had no familiar.99 Punishment of heresy also disappeared. The only aspect that improved, from the Inquisition’s point of view, was finance. At the end of the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth, numerous tribunals were faced once again by a lucrative spate of confiscations. This happened most notably in Granada, in Murcia and—most impressively of all—in Mallorca. In the course of the eighteenth century, with the almost total disappearance of prosecutions, revenue from fines and confiscations obviously slumped. By contrast, the censos, in an expanding agrarian economy, now yielded splendid returns. The tribunal of Murcia may serve as example. In 1792 its income was 103,000 ducats. Because it had few or no cases to deal with, costs absorbed only 40 percent of this, leaving a nice favorable balance of 60 percent.100
Our glance at the Inquisition’s structure underlines the very exceptional nature of the institution. There were “Inquisitions” before and later, in Germany, France and Italy, and all were small papal commissions with a purely temporary role. There were also from time to time courts in other countries—like the Star Chamber in England and the Chambre Ardente in France—that looked into cases of heresy. But in Spain, for the very first time in European history, a disciplinary tribunal was created that had both the sanction of the pope and the full political support of the state, exercising an open-ended program of investigating first heresy and then other related offenses. The tribunal, moreover, was given jurisdiction that usually overrode that of the bishops, was exercised over the greater part of national territory, and had exceptional backup in the form of a governing body with the status of a royal council of state. It began developing, moreover, an unprecedented system of archiving information for which later-day historians would be supremely grateful.
Presented in this way, the Inquisition was a thing of awe. The inquisitors themselves did not hesitate to affirm their position and their power, and through the generations those who had been their prisoners—notably Jews and Protestants—helped to build up the same terrifying image. Behind this face, however, there were perhaps more solid realities. It was still the post-medieval era, not one for imposing the lineaments of a police state. The means did not exist for a handful of men, with run-of-the-mill training and no technology or adequate communications on hand, to set up a machinery of repression. As time would show, there were almost insurmountable barriers that quickly limited the capacity for tyranny.
The barriers to efficiency were, in broad terms, three. First, there was systematic and unending resistance from other courts, both royal and autonomous, and from regional authorities. Second, there were the innate drawbacks of a primitive organization run by persons who were often ignorant, incompetent and corrupt. Civil and Church authorities in previous times in Europe had tried methods for collecting information and identifying dissenters,101 but the Inquisition still had a long way to go before it could achieve a satisfactory level of data efficiency. Third, all systems of control need to draw support as well as information from the grass roots, but the inquisitors never managed to achieve this to any adequate extent. These three issues are fundamental
to an understanding of the tribunal, and help us avoid the mistaken view of the Inquisition as an all-powerful organ of state power.
Perhaps the most significant aspect is that there was, as we have seen in chapter 4, constant resistance. Though the Inquisition is often supposed to have led a relatively tranquil existence among the people of Spain, and even to have dominated the people by its presence, it was never sure of its position and was always anxious to emphasize its rights and privileges. Foreign travelers who referred glibly to its immense power were deceiving themselves and us. Its political life was always stormy, and quarrels of jurisdiction plagued its entire career, which was marked by serious disputes with the papacy, the bishops and virtually every other authority in the state.
Its conflicts with Rome usually concerned jurisdiction, but occasionally issues of principle might transform a question of jurisdiction into something much greater. The Inquisition derived its authority from the pope and was consequently governed by papal regulations. Complaints against the tribunal could be best dealt with if taken directly to the fount of authority, the pope. The conversos in the fifteenth century did their best both in Castile and in Aragon to obtain papal decrees to modify the rigor of the Holy Office. This was a legitimate procedure, since the constitution of the tribunal allowed appeals to Rome, which was eager to maintain its rights, not only to preserve control but also to protect possible sources of revenue, for the conversos paid liberally for any bulls granted by the pope. But the Spanish monarchs, supported by the inquisitors, refused to take cognizance of papal letters that contradicted the verdict of their courts. Ferdinand’s famous letter to Sixtus IV in May 1482 illustrates the firmness of the crown’s attitude. The vacillation of Rome before Spanish claims, and the contradictory policies followed by successive popes, made it possible in the end for inquisitors usually to have things their own way. As early as 2 August 1483 Sixtus IV granted to the conversos a bull which revoked to Rome all cases of appeal, but only eleven days later he suspended this, claiming he had been misled. When his successor Innocent VIII tried to pursue a similar policy of issuing papal letters to appellants from Spain, Ferdinand stepped in and on 15 December 1484 issued a pragmatic decreeing death and confiscation for anyone making use of papal letters without royal permission.102