by Henry Kamen
9
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
It makes one think that all this great machinery for the punishment of a few poor beggars, is more a wish for display on the part of the inquisitors than a real zeal for religion.
—FRENCH AMBASSADOR, MARQUIS DE VILLARS, ON MADRID AUTO DE FE OF 1680
Pre-industrial policing systems in Europe functioned under the immense disadvantage of having no common code defining what might be a crime, no guide as to punishments, no officials to make inquiries and maintain order and no body of archived information on which to draw. When it came to considering heresy as a crime, the problems were even graver. The Spanish Inquisition, however, was in the exceptional position of having its medieval predecessors in French Languedoc to guide it. Bernard Gui’s Liber sententiarum (Book of Sentences), covering over nine hundred judicial cases between 1308 and 1323, showed the range of punishments that might be imposed for heresy. Torquemada began, as we have seen, the practice of publishing Instructions about procedure. But how could information for the prosecution be obtained? The edicts of faith certainly invited the public to collaborate, but what if—as was usually the case—they did not? The bulk of information eventually came from informers, a type that has helped to perpetuate the ill reputation of the Inquisition.
The single most important feature of police systems, and of the Inquisition, was therefore the quality of information received. Was it reliable? Could it be used for prosecution? In its early decades when it targeted Jewish conversos, the Inquisition received a great deal of information, which went into its archives and which modern researchers—perhaps too naïvely—have accepted as reliable and have faithfully published in bulky volumes.1 Common sense suggests that, as with all verbal testimony given to the police, we should exercise great caution over accepting the validity of voluntary information. At least in the case of testimony concerning conversos of that early period, some historians therefore (as we have seen) discount the evidence as unreliable.2
The inquisitors faced the same problem. Guided only by their (often limited) judicial experience, their knowledge of human nature, and what they knew from local practice or had gleaned from the manuals of the medieval Inquisition, they had to make decisions that affected literally the lives and livelihood of the persons who came before them. Not surprisingly, massive injustices occurred, especially when the inquisitor might have an axe to grind, through personal or cultural prejudice. Well after the great period of converso prosecutions, when so-called heresy was not the main issue, the problems continued. Widespread ignorance and illiteracy among the population were among the obstacles, since witnesses were unable to identify evidence correctly. When one of the household servants of the late count duke of Olivares, influenced no doubt by an enemy of the same, testified to the inquisitors in 1646 that Olivares had persons read to him at bedtime from the Koran and from Martin Luther, could they dare to accept the evidence?3
In town and in country, information came from below. The positive aspect of pre-industrial community relations in Europe was the sense of welfare and belonging, but a negative aspect was the absence of privacy. Neighborhoods did not necessarily offer neighborliness. “People were constantly observed by their neighbors. Reputation shaped the attitudes of neighbor to neighbor.”4 Correct behavior was as a consequence never simply a personal option; it was a requirement imposed and judged by community norms, and regulated according to contexts of religion, gender or economy. Incorrect behavior, with the corresponding bad reputation, might provoke grave conflicts within the community, and was one of the factors that most served to bring people to the attention of the Inquisition. A woman with a reputation as a “witch,” for example, would be tolerated for many years by her village, but in a year of agrarian crisis she might find that her lack of status would work against her.
Information was often supplied in contexts where it was clear that informers were exploiting the Inquisition in order to serve their own private grievances. We may take as a guide the nature of denunciations in the early seventeenth century in Catalonia,5 where evidence was of two main types: against outsiders to the community, such as French immigrants; and against those who provoked tension within the community. The free-ranging commission of the inquisitors was an open invitation to people who wished to air grievances. In a typical case in Barcelona in 1607, a young wife quarreling with her husband, a silversmith, denounced both him and his mother to the Inquisition. A neighbor, a house painter, protested that “if she were a good wife she would not have accused her husband and her mother-in-law before the Inquisition.” One of her friends retorted that “if the accusations were not true the Inquisition would punish the accuser.” To this the painter replied: “They do favors for everybody!”6 The wife promptly denounced him also. The inquisitors eventually fined him a small sum for doubting their impartiality, but had nothing more than a reprimand for the silversmith (even though he had threatened to kill his wife for denouncing his mother). They evidently did not wish to get involved. In another case, the inquisitors were faced with an incident in the village of La Guardia (Montserrat) when a woman refused to accept the kiss of peace at mass in the church and instead made a scene, “to the great scandal of the village,” which ended in her being denounced to the Inquisition for blasphemy.7 The inquisitors refused to take any action or be drawn into the quarrel, and limited themselves to examining the woman to see if she knew her basic prayers. Time and again, in case after case, private, family and community quarrels were the real motive in denunciations that masqueraded as religious. In these circumstances, the Inquisition was effectively being manipulated by private persons using it as a tool of communal or personal vengeance. As in the case of other criminal courts, “the public nature of this vengeance was a pious legal fiction that hid private affairs, private concerns and private vindictiveness, transforming the private world of recrimination and victimization into the public world of judgments and sanctions.”8
Even outright attacks on the Inquisition were not always what they seemed. In 1632, when a trader of St Pere Pescador (Girona) fired a gun at an employee of the Holy Office the inquisitors recognized that the whole affair arose out of circumstances that were not his fault: “the quarrel,” they concluded, “was born out of conflicts the two had had a long time ago.”9 For much of its career, after the initial decades of pressure against conversos, the Inquisition no longer went heresy hunting but intervened in circumstances affecting the moral and social conduct of Spaniards. It became the perfect instrument for settling scores. The scenario for “propositions” (see chapter 13), blasphemy and other loose statements was always the same: family quarrels, drunkenness, violent husbands, personal hatreds. Case histories on these themes in the archives run into the tens of thousands.
The systems of justice prevailing at that time in Europe relied overwhelmingly on the collaboration of the public. And it was the testimony of the public—of, that is, neighbors, fellow parishioners, relatives, personal enemies—that the accused most dreaded. As we have had occasion to see, enmity and vengeance inspired much of the evidence offered to the Inquisition in its early years. Fear of neighbors, rather than of the Inquisition, was on this premise the first—and constant—concern of those denounced. We have ample evidence of it in the flight of conversos from Andalucia and Catalonia during the 1490s. An example is Manuel Rodríguez, a converso from Andalucia who was described by neighbors in Soria (where he found himself in 1490) as being “pale and dead with fright.”10
The denunciation process was not peculiar to the inquisitorial regime. Since the days of the Roman Empire, it was a regular feature of the judicial system not only in Spain but in all European countries.11 The Catholic Church had developed its own system of law, in which the judicial denunciation was made not only for the reformation but also for the punishment of the guilty person. The inquiry or “inquisition” that followed was dedicated to eliciting factual evidence.
The prosecutors in all state tribunals relied heavily
on informers, many of whom could claim the right to a proportion of the property of the accused. It was a practice that on occasion aroused protests in the Cortes. Juan de Mariana, already cited above, reported the consternation among Castilians when they found that “they were deprived of the liberty to hear and talk freely, since in all the cities, towns and villages there were persons to give information of what went on. This was considered by some the most wretched slavery and equal to death.”12 The use of informers, common enough at the time, was nowhere resorted to so callously as in the period of anti-Jewish hysteria, when within the community person was set against person on the accidental basis of blood origins. But denunciation, suspicion and hostility came of course from within the community itself. Sermons and public exhortations encouraged a moral obligation to denounce both oneself and others. We have seen that in 1485 the rabbis of Toledo were asked to tell Jews to report judaizers. The Jewish and converso communities were split apart by such pressures. A particularly striking example of how rock-solid resistance to persecution could suddenly crumble, leading to betrayal and terror, is supplied in the great Chueta tragedy in Mallorca in 1678 (see chapter 14).
Even where anti-Semitism was not the driving force, the possibility of denunciation and recrimination would have been “equal to death” for those caught up in it. Petty denunciations were the rule rather than the exception. The Inquisition became a useful weapon for paying off old scores. “In Castile fifteen hundred people have been burnt through false witness,”13 a villager asserted in the 1480s. When the Lutheran crisis burst upon Seville in 1560, a stream of people turned up every day at Triana castle, the offices of the Inquisition, to report what they claimed to know. We have this information from the lips of one of the informants, who subsequently admitted that he had fabricated accusations out of sheer malice.14
In 1530 Aldonça de Vargas in the Canary Islands was reported to the Inquisition for having smiled when she heard mention of the Virgin Mary. We can only imagine the motives of the person who denounced her. In 1635 Pedro Ginesta, a man over eighty years old and of French origin, was brought before the tribunal of Barcelona by an erstwhile comrade for having forgetfully eaten a meal of bacon and onions on a day of abstinence. “The said prisoner,” ran the indictment, “being of a nation infected with heresy [i.e., France], it is presumed [my emphasis] that he has on many other occasions eaten flesh on forbidden days, after the manner of the sect of Luther.”15 Denunciations based on suspicion, therefore, could lead to accusations based on conjecture. This was the quality of thousands of pieces of information fed to the tribunal by malicious people living in the same community.
Some denunciations, of course, had nothing to do with heresy, as in the case of Alonso de Jaén, who was prosecuted in 1530 for urinating against the walls of a church; or in that of Gonzalez Ruiz, who said to his opponent during a game of cards, “Even with God as your partner you won’t win this game.”16 Both cases were self-denunciations, undoubtedly motivated by the fear that if one did not confess one would be denounced. For people in this frame of mind the edicts offered a welcome opportunity to unburden oneself of fear rather than of guilt. Two husbands accused themselves in 1581 of having asserted in conversation with their wives that fornication was no sin. The wives were summoned and confirmed the confessions. One possible motive for the action taken by the husbands was fear that their wives would denounce them.17 Or they may simply have felt compunction to confess the offense. By contrast, no such need was felt by the graduate priest Juan Batanero, a doctor of the village of Alcazar de San Juan, who was said to have “affirmed that simple fornication is no sin, and that he has papers with the arguments for this opinion, which he cannot reveal for fear of the Inquisition, but after his death they can be published.”18 He was denounced by one of his hearers.
The fear generated by the tribunal, in short, usually had its origins in social disharmony. The records of the Inquisition are full of instances where neighbors denounced neighbors, friends denounced friends, and members of the same family denounced each other. In the judaizing cases at Granada in the 1590s, the inquisitors had reason to be grateful to María Alvarez, “who was the one who first revealed all that has been discovered about her mother and sisters and relatives.”19 Many of these cases would have arisen through sheer malice or hatred. Vengeful witnesses had everything on their side: their evidence was always hearsay, their identity was always kept secret and the costs of prosecution were borne not by them but by the tribunal.20
If the Holy Office welcomed denunciations, it often knew when to distinguish between the false and the true. In 1637 when Felipe Leonart, a needle maker of French origin living in Tarragona, was unanimously denounced by his wife, son and daughter-in-law for Lutheranism, the tribunal very quickly realized that the charges had been made out of malice, and suspended the trial after rejecting the accusations.21 The official record would have us believe that false witness was rare. In the tribunal of Toledo, there were apparently (according to Lea) only eight cases of perjury detected in the 1,172 trials that took place between 1575 and 1610.22 Anyone with the slightest experience of court testimony must reject the accuracy of this conclusion. The real level of perjury was obviously very much higher, but impossible to identify. Perjurers themselves were not treated with any severity commensurate with the ruin they brought upon their victims, though in some few cases they suffered burning, scourging or the galleys. More difficult to deal with were cases of pathological self-denouncers such as the French nun in a convent at Alcalá, Ursule de la Croix, who confessed to heresy and eating meat on Fridays. She was absolved, but confessed again to the offenses. The second time she was reconciled and given a light penance. When she decided to denounce herself for the third time in 1594, however, she was obligingly sent to the stake.23
In the Spanish Inquisition, witnesses were given more advantages than in any secular court of justice, because their names were concealed. This provoked strong opposition, clearly expressed in the several Cortes held under Charles V, particularly that of Valladolid in February 1518. But the influence of Cisneros prevailed against allowing the publication of witnesses’ names, and the practice remained unaltered. Concealment of names meant that when a charge was drawn up against a prisoner it had to be phrased in general terms, so that the accused could not identify witnesses and accusers. The practice continues in modern judicial systems.24 The necessity for concealment, Cisneros had argued, was justified by cases in which witnesses had been murdered in order to prevent them testifying. But, as a memorial from the city of Granada put it in 1526, the system of anonymity was an open invitation to perjury and malicious testimony.25 This objection might not have been valid but for the fact that all denunciations were taken seriously, and even if a man were later exonerated the harm brought on him by a slight and secret accusation could be immense. When, for example, Enrique Jorge Henriques, physician to the duke of Alba, died in 1622, secret witnesses claimed that his body had been buried according to Jewish rites. The consequence was that all Henriques’s family, relatives and household were thrown into prison and kept there for two years until their acquittal for lack of evidence.26
There were other cases, perhaps more significant and terrible, where fear of denunciation alone became the spur to confession and counter-denunciation. The “term of grace” in the 1480s had an important clause which set the seal on all this. To denounce oneself as a heretic was not enough to be able to benefit from the terms of the edict. It was also necessary to denounce all those accomplices who shared the error or had led one into it. It was surely not entirely exaggeration for a converso writer of Toledo to claim in 1538 that
preachers do not dare to preach, and those who preach do not dare to touch on contentious matters, for their lives and honor are in the mouths of two ignoramuses, and nobody in this life is without his policeman. . . . Bit by bit many rich people leave the country for foreign realms, in order not to live all their lives in fear and trembling every time an officer of the Inqu
isition enters their house; for continual fear is a worse death than a sudden demise.27
The travails of those of converso origin were, evidently, shared also by the Moriscos. The hatred of these for the Inquisition always included an element of fear. “Out of fear,” an inquisitor of Granada reported in 1568, some Moriscos who had previously refused to do so “very quickly learned” the Castilian language. “Out of fear,” some women “began to dress like Castilians.”28
In the first century of its existence the Inquisition went out to look for heretics rather than wait for them to be brought in. This was inevitable when tribunals were itinerant, but also continued when they were settled in fixed centers. The 1498 Instructions stipulated that “the inquisitors go to all the towns that have not taken the oath of the general Inquisition.” In 1517 such visitations were supposed to be once every four months, and by 1581 were required once a year. The purpose was to maintain an inquisitorial presence, though in practice the visits were few and far between.
In line with the practice of carrying out their public activity with the greatest solemnity impossible, the inquisitors took care to develop formal rituals. Instructions issued to the inquisitors of the town of Llerena (Extremadura) in 1592 show how the process worked.29 When they began a visitation in a district they would first present their credentials to the local Church and secular authorities, then announce a Sunday or feast day when residents would have to go to high mass, together with their children and servants, to hear the “edict” read. At the end of the sermon or the creed, the inquisitor or his representative would hold a crucifix in front of the congregation and ask everybody to raise his right hand, cross himself and repeat after the inquisitor a solemn oath to support the Inquisition and its ministers. He would then proceed to read the edict.