by Henry Kamen
Ferdinand’s next decree, of 31 August 1509, renewed the penalties of the 1484 decree. Under Charles V the papacy became more cautious. Clement VII in 1524 and 1525 renewed the permission it had regularly (in 1483, 1486, 1502, 1507, 1518 and 1523) granted to the inquisitor general to exercise appellate jurisdiction in place of the pope and to hear appeals that would normally have been directed to the Holy See. This did not mean that Rome had given up the right to hear appeals, and when papal letters again began to be issued, Charles V in 1537 reinforced the decree of 1509.
Although Rome did occasionally refer appeals back to Spain,103 the Inquisition was more usually employed rejecting the claims made by holders of papal letters. This situation continued throughout the seventeenth century. But the Inquisition was not unduly concerned by difficulties with Rome, and even before the end of the sixteenth century we find the secretary of the Suprema asserting complacently that the Holy See had abandoned its claim to ultimate jurisdiction over cases tried by the tribunal.
Under Philip V the new Bourbon dynasty tolerated no interference by Rome, and thereby continued the tradition of Philip II. Hostility under Philip V was aggravated by the international situation and by the pope’s support for the archduke Charles, Habsburg pretender to the throne of Spain. In 1705 papal decrees were forbidden in Spain and all appeals to Rome prohibited. This assertion of “regalism” was supported by most of the bishops and also by the advocate-general Melchor de Macanaz in a famous memorandum of 1713. With the advent of the Bourbons and their new extension of power over the western Mediterranean, in both Spain and Italy a declining papacy had little opportunity to assert its old jurisdictional claims.
Before the birth of the papal Inquisition in the thirteenth century, bishops had the principal jurisdiction over heretics. This episcopal power was for all purposes suspended with the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, which claimed and maintained exclusive authority over all cases of heresy. Bishops still in theory retained their rights of jurisdiction, but in practice they seldom or ever put the claim into effect. In January 1584 the Suprema informed the bishop of Tortosa that the popes had given the Inquisition exclusive jurisdiction over heresy and had prohibited cognizance by others. This claim was obviously false, since in 1595 the pope, Clement VIII, informed the archbishop of Granada that the authority of inquisitors in cases of heresy did not exclude episcopal jurisdiction.104 These opposing pretensions led to frequent and serious quarrels between bishops and tribunals that were never satisfactorily settled.
Most of the religious orders were subject immediately to the papacy by their constitution, and were therefore generally free from episcopal jurisdiction. Since, however, the powers of the Inquisition derived from the papacy, the tribunals made every effort to bring the friars under their control in matters of faith. Political rivalry entered into this question, because the Dominican order had won for itself a special position not only in the medieval Inquisition but also in the Spanish. Hostility between Dominicans and Franciscans led to the latter obtaining bulls from Rome to protect their privileges. Under Charles V the opposition crumbled. In 1525 the emperor obtained two briefs from the pope subjecting all friars in Spain to the Inquisition and its officers. This did not last long, for in 1534 the pope restored to the Franciscans and other orders all the privileges they had previously enjoyed. The struggle went on intermittently until the beginning of seventeenth century, when papal briefs of 1592 and 1606 decided entirely in favor of the Inquisition.
We have seen that the Society of Jesus, although founded and controlled by Spaniards, encountered suspicion in sixteenth-century Spain. Siliceo, the archbishop of Toledo, was hostile; and the famous Dominican Melchor Cano led a vigorous campaign in which he denounced the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius as heretical. Cano and Siliceo were only part of a wider campaign to discredit the Jesuit order.105 One of the liberties questioned by the Inquisition was the Jesuit privilege of not having to denounce heretics to anyone but their own superior in the order. When in 1585 it was learned that the fathers of the Jesuit college at Monterrey in Galicia had been concealing the heresies of some of their number instead of denouncing them to the Holy Office, the latter acted immediately by arresting the provincial of Castile and two fathers from Monterrey. The Inquisition did not succeed in punishing its prisoners because the case was revoked to Rome in 1587, but the affair clinched its victory over the religious orders.
Only one class of people, the bishops, remained beyond inquisitorial jurisdiction. Bishops could be tried only by Rome, a rule that had been upheld in the medieval Inquisition. In Spain the issue was of some importance because of the high proportion of bishops who had converso blood. Among the earliest of those singled out for attack by the Inquisition was Bishop Juan Arias Dávila of Segovia, who took over the see in 1461. He had refused to allow the Holy Office into his diocese, and on being accused by the tribunal was summoned to Rome in 1490, in his eightieth year.106 Even more distinguished was Pedro de Aranda, bishop of Calahorra and in 1482 president of the council of Castile. He was summoned to Rome in 1493 and died there in disgrace in 1500. One of the most eminent bishops to suffer patent injustice was Hernando de Talavera, whose case we have already noted. But the most famous example of a clash between inquisitorial and episcopal authority, in a case that also involved royal and papal privileges, was that of Bartolomé de Carranza, archbishop of Toledo.
Bartolomé de Carranza y Miranda was born in 1503 in Navarre, of poor but hidalgo parents.107 At the age of twelve he entered the University of Alcalá, and at seventeen joined the Dominican order. He was sent to study at Valladolid where his intellectual gifts soon won him a chair in theology. In his early thirties he went to Rome to win his doctorate in the same subject, and returned to Spain famous. For a while he acted as a censor to the Inquisition, but refused all offers of promotion. In 1542 he refused the wealthy see of Cuzco in America, and likewise rejected the post of royal confessor in 1548, and that of bishop of the Canaries in 1550. He was twice sent to the sessions of the Council of Trent as a Spanish representative, in 1545 and 1551. He returned to Spain in 1553 and in the following year accompanied Prince Philip on his journey to England to marry Mary Tudor. There he apparently distinguished himself by the zeal with which he crushed heretics and purified the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The testimony for his activity in those months comes principally from his own defense before the Inquisition a few years later; it is possible that he exaggerated his role, though a scholar states: “it is hard to deny that Carranza was central to the violence against reformed believers in England.”108
In May 1557 Archbishop Siliceo of Toledo died. Philip, then in Brussels, immediately decided to give the post to Carranza, who refused the honor as he had refused all others. The king was adamant. Eventually Carranza said that he would accept only if ordered to do so. In this way he became the holder of the most important see in the Catholic world after Rome. Carranza was a parvenu in the ecclesiastical circles of Spain. His claims to Toledo were less than those of other distinguished prelates in Spain, notably his personal enemy the inquisitor general Fernando de Valdés.109 Like Siliceo, Carranza was a man of humble origins thrown into a rigidly aristocratic milieu. He had been nominated to the see while abroad without any effort by Philip to consult his Spanish advisers. Intellectually he was far inferior to his brother Dominican, Melchor Cano, a brilliant theologian who had always been Carranza’s bitterest rival in the order. The new archbishop obviously had enemies. Only the weapon of attack was lacking. This was supplied by Carranza himself in his Commentaries on the Christian Catechism, which he published in Castilian in 1558 at Antwerp.
The Commentaries were considered thoroughly orthodox in doctrine. The Council of Trent examined and approved the work, and numerous other distinguished theologians in Spain agreed with this. But, as we have had occasion to see (in chapter 6 above), there were new considerations that affected the fate of spiritual writings in Spain. Phrases in his work were seized upon by hostile
critics, notably Cano, and were denounced as heresy. The archbishop of Granada called the work “reliable, trustworthy, pious and Catholic”: the bishop of Almería said the book “contained no heresy and much excellent doctrine.” Yet Melchor Cano asserted that the work “contains many propositions which are scandalous, rash and ill-sounding, others which savor of heresy, others which are erroneous, and even some which are heretical.” Led by Valdés, whose hostility to spiritual writings in unlettered hands was decisive, the Inquisition accepted Cano’s opinion. Small wonder that pope Pius V claimed that “the theologians of Spain want to make him a heretic although he is not one!” Nor can we entirely discount the issue of a clash of personalities. Both Valdés and Cano detested Carranza; and in the world of ecclesiastical politics the archbishop had enemies such as Pedro de Castro, bishop of Cuenca, and his brother Rodrigo, a member of the Suprema.
What ruined Carranza was the Protestant crisis in Spain, which occurred at precisely the time of his elevation to the see of Toledo. Interrogation of Carlos de Seso and Pedro Cazalla resulted in detailed denunciations of the archbishop. On one occasion he was said to have told them he believed as they did; on another he was reported as saying, “As for me, I don’t believe in purgatory.” He was said to have used Lutheran terminology when preaching in London. The inquisitor general carefully took note of all these testimonies. Still the Holy Office did not act against Carranza, for as a bishop he was answerable only to Rome. Valdés made urgent representations to Rome, and in January 1559 Pope Paul IV sent letters empowering the Inquisition to act against bishops for a limited period of two years, but both the prisoner and the case were to be referred to Rome. Valdés received the brief on 8 April 1559. On 6 May the fiscal of the Inquisition drew up an indictment calling for the arrest of Carranza “for having preached, written and dogmatized many heresies of Luther.” After much pressure Philip II gave his sanction on 26 June. On 6 August Carranza, expecting the blow to fall any day, was summoned to Valladolid by the government.
Fearing the import of the summons, Carranza set out but delayed the progress of his journey. On 16 August he was met by a Dominican colleague and friend from Alcalá who warned him that the Inquisition was searching to arrest him. Shaken by this, the archbishop continued his journey until four days later he reached the safety of Torrelaguna, just north of Madrid, where he met his friend Fray Pedro de Soto, who had come from Valladolid to warn him. But already it was too late. Carranza did not know that four days before his arrival the officials of the Inquisition had taken up their residence in Torrelaguna and were awaiting his coming. He reached the little town on Sunday, 20 August. Very early in the morning of Tuesday, 22 August, the inquisitors Diego Ramírez and Rodrigo Castro, together with about ten armed familiars, made their way up to Carranza’s bedroom and demanded, “Open to the Holy Office!” The intruders were let in, and an official addressed the archbishop, “Your Honor, I have been ordered to arrest Your Reverence in the name of the Holy Office.” Carranza said quietly, “Do you have sufficient warrant for this?” The official then read the order signed by the Suprema.
Carranza protested, “Do the inquisitors not know that they cannot be my judges, since by my dignity and consecration I am subject immediately to the pope and to no other?” This was the moment for the trump card to be played. Ramírez said, “Your Reverence will be fully satisfied on that account,” and showed him the papal brief. All that day the archbishop was kept under house arrest and in the evening a curfew was imposed on the town. No one was to venture into the streets after nine p.m. and nobody was to look out of the windows. In the silence and darkness that midnight the inquisitors and their prey were spirited out of Torrelaguna. In the early hours of 28 August Carranza was escorted into Valladolid, and allotted as prison a couple of rooms in a private residence in the city.110
During the whole of his confinement he was not allowed any recourse to the sacraments. In human terms, the tragic story of the archbishop was just beginning; but politically the story was at an end. From now on Carranza ceased to matter as a human being and became a mere pawn in the struggle for jurisdiction between Rome and the Inquisition. He no longer counted in a controversy where the real issues had become the ambitions of individuals and the pretensions of ecclesiastical tribunals. Marañón observes that in this atmosphere of villainy there was at least one just man—Dr. Martín de Azpilcueta, known as Dr. Navarro—who accepted a commission from Philip II to go and protect the interests of the archbishop at his eventual trial in Rome.
In the prolonged negotiations between Rome and the Spanish authorities, the papacy was concerned to claim its rights over Carranza and thereby to vindicate its unique control over bishops. Philip II saw the papal claim as interference in Spanish affairs and refused to allow the Inquisition to surrender its prisoner. Pope Pius IV in 1565 sent a special legation to negotiate in Madrid. Among its members were three prelates who later became popes as Gregory XIII, Urban VII and Sixtus V. They failed to make the mission a success. As one of them (reflecting a perception that many Italians had about Spain) wrote back to Rome:
Nobody dares to speak in favor of Carranza for fear of the Inquisition. No Spaniard would dare to absolve the archbishop, even if he were believed innocent, because this would mean opposing the Inquisition. The authority of the latter would not allow it to admit that it had imprisoned Carranza unjustly. The most ardent defenders of justice here consider that it is better for an innocent man to be condemned than for the Inquisition to suffer disgrace.111
With the accession of Pius V to the papal throne in 1566, a solution came into sight. From his prison cell Carranza managed to smuggle a message out to Rome in the form of a paper bearing in his handwriting the words, “Lord, if it be thou, bid me come to thee upon the waters” (Matthew XIV, 28). This was exactly what Pius intended to do. In July 1566 he managed to reach an agreement with the Spanish authorities. After seven years of house arrest in his lodgings in Valladolid, Carranza was at last allowed to go to Rome to see the pope. The archbishop went with a special traveling companion, the duke of Alba, who was setting out on his historic visit to the Netherlands. Carranza arrived at the port of Cartagena on the last day of 1566, and was put up at the fortress until the fleet could sail. “The archbishop of Toledo,” Alba wrote to Philip’s chief minister, Cardinal Espinosa, with wry humor, “has been going out of his mind since yesterday thinking that because we spent last night embarking we did not intend to take him with us. They tell me that every hour we delay seems like a year to the archbishop.” After nearly four months of waiting in port, Carranza’s patience was rewarded. “In order to lose no more time,” the duke informed the king on 26 April, “I have decided to leave tonight.” In the darkness before dawn, a great fleet of forty ships sailed out to sea and made their way northwards up the coastline.
The aging archbishop reached Rome and was placed in honorable confinement in the castle of Sant’ Angelo. This second detention lasted nine years. Pius V died in 1572 without having decided the case. His successor, Gregory XIII, finally issued sentence in April 1576. The verdict was a compromise, made no doubt in order to placate Spain. The Commentaries were condemned and prohibited and Carranza was obliged to abjure a list of “errors,” after which he was told to retire to a monastery in Orvieto. Meanwhile the papacy was to administer the vacant and wealthy see of Toledo. The sentence was only in part satisfactory to Philip and to the Inquisition, whose authority would have suffered by an acquittal. It satisfied Rome, which had vindicated its sole authority over bishops; and, in a sense, it may have satisfied Carranza, who was not accused of any heresy despite the prohibition of his book, which was to remain in all the editions of the Spanish Index except the last one in 1790. Justice had been replaced by political compromise. Everything had been taken into consideration except the frail old man who, eighteen days after the papal verdict had been read over him, contracted a urinary infection from which he died at three a.m. on 2 May 1576.
From the beginning, the tr
ibunal was closely allied with and dependent on the crown, with the result that later historians came to regard it as a secular tribunal more than an ecclesiastical one. This argument was adopted especially by Catholic apologists who hoped to disembarrass the Church of an unattractive chapter in ecclesiastical history. There is a prima facie case for the argument. The Suprema was a government council, not a Church one. The crown had absolute powers of appointment and dismissal of inquisitors, power which Ferdinand employed whenever he felt it necessary. In questions of administration, although decisions were in practice left to inquisitors, the king was kept carefully informed. A letter from Ferdinand to Torquemada, dated 22 July 1486, even shows the king laying down regulations for detailed and minor points such as the salaries of doorkeepers in the Inquisition. For any other question, he tells Torquemada, “see to it yourself and do as you think fit.”112 Royal control over the Inquisition is demonstrated by the fact that pleas for redress and reform by the Cortes in the early sixteenth century were all addressed to the crown. Most important of all, the tribunal was financially dependent on the crown.
However, as we have seen, the Inquisition was also an ecclesiastical tribunal. The papacy recognized the juridical existence of the Inquisition, but not apparently its status as a council, which made it a state body.113 Much ink has been spent on trying to define the nature of inquisitorial authority. The truth is that the Inquisition itself always claimed dual jurisdiction. Problems inevitably arose when it came to defining the frontier between the two types of authority. Though the question of jurisdiction over familiars, for example, had repeatedly been agreed upon through accords, there continued to be constant quarrels between civil courts and the Inquisition. As late as the seventeenth century an official of the Inquisition, discussing “whether the jurisdiction that the Holy Office exercises over its lay officers and familiars is ecclesiastical or secular,” came arbitrarily to the conclusion that “this jurisdiction is ecclesiastical.”114 In other words, secular courts could not try familiars. On the other hand, the Inquisition itself demanded the right to try laymen for nonecclesiastical offenses and for injuries done to its officers. At one and the same time, then, the Inquisition claimed to be exempt from secular authority but also claimed to be able to exercise secular authority.