by Henry Kamen
In the early years the document was an “edict of grace,” modeled on those of the medieval Inquisition, which recited a list of heresies and invited those who wished to discharge their consciences to come forward and denounce themselves or others. If they came forward within the “period of grace”—usually thirty to forty days—they would be reconciled to the Church without suffering serious penalties. The benign terms encouraged self-denunciation. In Mallorca the first edict to be published brought in 337 conversos who denounced themselves. In Seville the edict filled the prisons to overflowing. The scale of voluntary denunciation in Toledo was impressive: the number of penitents in the city alone in 1486 was 2,400.30 After about 1500, edicts of grace against judaizers had served their purpose. They were replaced by “edicts of faith,” which omitted the period of grace and instead invited denunciation of those guilty of a detailed list of offenses. By contrast, when the drive against Moriscos was stepped up during the sixteenth century, edicts of grace were used once again to elicit information from them. In 1568 an edict of grace in Valencia encouraged 2,689 Moriscos to denounce themselves.31 In 1570 some of the Morisco vassals of the duke of Medinaceli voluntarily asked for an edict of grace so that they could, by their declarations, dissociate themselves from the more radical pro-Muslim attitudes of refugees from Granada.32 On this evidence, edicts of grace were for the inquisitors a means of obtaining information and for the cultural minorities a mechanism to regularize their position as painlessly as possible.
In the earlier period the heresies listed were principally Judaic or Islamic, but as time went on further offenses were added. Even so, the edict of faith during the sixteenth century had no regular format, and each tribunal used the text that best suited its purposes. The Suprema seems to have had no official version; not until around 1630 did it adopt an agreed text that was allowed into circulation. This was an extremely lengthy and impressive document giving details of every conceivable offense, from Jewish and Muslim heresies to the errors of Lutherans and alumbrados, and so on to popular superstitions, moral offenses and hostile attitudes to the Church and Inquisition. It must have taken an hour or more to read from the pulpit.33 But it is highly unlikely that the congregation listened to it, as one historian suggests, in “fear and terror.”34 Since virtually none of the offenses could normally be found in Catholic communities, nor would most of the hearers understand the terminology, it is more likely that congregations were simply puzzled or bored. This was certainly the reason why inquisitors in Catalonia stopped reading out edicts after the 1580s.35 The texts had little or no bearing on the daily life of Spaniards. Even when referring to judaizers, the edicts of the seventeenth century (below, chapter 14) curiously mentioned practices that no longer existed and had no relevance to the current religious situation.
Before an arrest took place, the evidence in the case was presented to a number of theologians who acted as consultants or assessors (calificadores) to determine whether the charges involved heresy. If they decided that there was sufficient proof, the prosecutor (fiscal) drew up a demand for the arrest of the accused, who was then taken into custody. Such at least were the rules. But in numerous cases (as happens also in all systems of justice today), arrest might precede the collection of evidence, so that the preliminary safeguards against wrongful arrest were dispensed with. As a result, prisoners might sit in inquisitorial jails without any firm charge being produced against them. This led the Cortes of Aragon in 1533 to protest against arrest for arbitrary reasons or on trifling charges. Zeal of officials and inquisitors alike often outran discretion. In the tribunal of Valladolid in 1699 several suspects (including a girl aged nine and a boy aged fourteen) had lain in prison for up to two years without any calificación having been made of the evidence against them.
Arrest was accompanied by immediate seizure of the goods held by the accused. An inventory was made of everything in the possession of the man or his family, and all this was held by officials of the Inquisition until the case had been decided. The inventories drawn up in this way are of great historical interest, since they allow us to see in minute detail exactly how the household of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century family was run. Every item in the house, including pots and pans, spoons, rags and old clothes, was carefully noted down in the presence of a notary. In some cases these items were valued at the time of the inventory—an important measure because of the frequent need to sell the items to pay for the upkeep of a prisoner or his dependants. If a prisoner’s case went unheard or undecided for years on end, the sequestration of his property involved real hardship for his dependants, deprived at one blow of their means of income and even of their own homes. For as long as the accused stayed in prison the costs of his upkeep were met out of his sequestrated property, which was as a rule sold piece by piece at public auction.
Initially no provision was made for relatives during sequestration and the government had to intervene to help. In July 1486 Ferdinand ordered the tribunal in Saragossa to support the needy children of an accused man, Juan Navarro, out of the latter’s property while the case was being heard. Others were not so lucky. There were instances of a rich prisoner’s children dying of hunger and of others begging in the streets. These problems were finally remedied in the Instructions of 1561, which allowed the support of dependants out of sequestrations. The concession, already in practice but not codified till the mid-sixteenth century, came too late to save two generations of conversos from destruction of their property. Even after 1561, accused persons sometimes found little security for their property against dishonest officials, or against arbitrary arrest and lengthy trials.
The arrested person was usually spirited away into the prisons of the Inquisition, there to await trial. Normally each tribunal had a section of its building set apart for the “secret prison” (“secret” meant no more then “private,” to distinguish it from “public” prisons), used particularly for the confinement of prisoners and not for temporary detainees awaiting trial. The Inquisition was usually fortunate in its choice of residences. In some of the largest cities of Spain it was allowed the use of fortified castles with ancient and reliable prison cells. The tribunal of Saragossa resided in the Aljafería, that of Seville in the Triana (in 1627 it moved to a site within the city) and that of Córdoba in the Alcázar.
In all these buildings the jails were in a fairly good condition. This may explain why the secret prisons of the Inquisition were generally considered less harsh and more humane than either the royal prisons or ordinary ecclesiastical jails. There is the case of a friar in Valladolid in 1629 who made some heretical statements simply in order to be transferred from the prison he was in to that of the Inquisition. On another occasion, in 1675, a priest confined in the episcopal prison pretended to be a judaizer in order to be transferred to the inquisitorial prison. In 1624, when the inquisitors of Barcelona had more prisoners than available cells, they refused to send the extra prisoners to the city prison, where “there are over four hundred prisoners who are starving to death and every day they remove three or four dead.”36 No better evidence could be cited for the superiority of inquisitorial jails than that of Córdoba in 1820, when the prison authorities complained about the miserable and unhealthy state of the city prison and asked that the municipality should transfer its prisoners to the prison of the Inquisition, which was “safe, clean and spacious. At present it has twenty-six cells, rooms which can hold two hundred prisoners at a time, a completely separate prison for women, and places for work.” On another occasion the authorities there reported that “the building of the Inquisition is separate from the rest of the city, isolated and exposed on all sides to the winds, spacious, supplied abundantly with water, with sewers well distributed and planned to serve the prisoners, and with the separation and ventilation necessary to good health. It would be a prison well suited to preserve the health of prisoners.”37
By contrast, the tribunal of Llerena was housed in a building it described in 1567 as “small, old,
poor and shabby,” with fifty-two cells, certainly not enough for the 130 prisoners it had that year.38 The tribunal at Logroño in the sixteenth century had unhealthy premises that led directly, in times of epidemic, to the death of unfortunate prisoners. In the hot summer of 1584 over twenty prisoners died in their cells.39 A more personal description of an inquisitorial prison is given by a prisoner who left an account of the cells of the tribunal at Lisbon in 1802. The picture resembles any Spanish inquisitorial prison:
The jailer who for greater dignity has the name of Alcaide, addressed to me almost a little sermon, recommending me to behave in this respectable house with great propriety; stating also that I must not make any noise in my room, nor speak aloud, lest the other prisoners might happen to be in the neighboring cells and hear me, with other instructions of a similar kind. He then took me to my cell, a small room twelve feet by eight, with a door to the passage; in this door were two iron grates, far from each other, and occupying the thickness of the wall, which was three feet, and outside of these grates there was besides a wooden door; in the upper part of this was an aperture that let into the cell a borrowed light from the passage, which passage received its light from the windows fronting a narrow yard, but having opposite, at a very short distance, very high walls; in this small room were a kind of wood frame without feet, whereon lay a straw mattress, which was to be my bed; a small water-pot; and another utensil for various purposes, which was only emptied every eight days, when I went to mass in the prisoners’ private chapel. This was the only opportunity I had of taking fresh air during such a period, and they contrived several divisions in the chapel in such a manner that the prisoners could never see each other, or know how many were granted the favor of going to mass. The cell was arched above, and the floor was brick, the wall being formed of stone, and very thick. The place was consequently very cold in winter, and so damp that very frequently the grates were covered with drops of water like dew; and my clothes, during the winter, were in a state of perpetual moisture. Such was my abode for the period of nearly three years.40
The fact that the practice in its prisons could be humane should not be taken to mean that the Inquisition was benevolent. Efforts were made, however, to see that the jails were not dens of horror. Prisoners were fed regularly and adequately from their own purse on available food, particularly bread, meat and wine. In the cells in Madrid in 1676 prisoners were fed on bread, mutton, hake, sardines, soup, vegetables, lettuce, figs, oil, vinegar and wine.41 Since the prisoners complained about this diet, the real quality of the items may be doubted. One fortunate prisoner in Toledo in 1709 managed to order for himself in addition regular supplies of oil, vinegar, ice, eggs, chocolate and bacon.42 The expenses of all paupers were paid for by the tribunal itself: at Las Palmas the money spent on the pauper Catalina de Candelaria during her six-month stay in 1662 came to 5 ducats. One of those who could afford to pay, Isabel Perdomo, had to fund her seven-week stay in the same prison in 1674.43 Apart from food, prisoners in some tribunals were well cared for, this depending on their financial resources. Juan de Abel of Granada was granted in his cell the use of “a mattress, a quilt, two sheets, two pillows, a rug, a blanket” and other items.44 Even paupers were given slippers, shirts and similar items. Besides this, some comforts were allowed, such as the use of writing paper—a concession exploited to the full by Luis de León, who spent his four years in prison at Valladolid composing his devotional treatise The Names of Christ.
There was, of course, another side to the picture. Prisoners were normally cut off from all contact with the world outside, and even within the prison were secluded from each other if possible. Inadequate cells often made overcrowding inevitable. In Granada in the 1570s, a period coinciding with the anti-Morisco repression, there was an average of four persons in each cell.45 The figure, of course, seems quite humane when compared with the conditions faced by prisoners in many twenty-first-century prisons.46 On finally leaving the jail prisoners were obliged to take an oath not to reveal anything they had seen or experienced in the cells. Small wonder if this secrecy gave rise to the most bloodcurdling legends about what went on inside. A rule of the Spanish and the Roman Inquisitions was that detainees were denied all access to mass and the sacraments. One of the most notable sufferers in this respect was Carranza, whose trials must have been doubled by this heavy deprivation of spiritual comfort during his reclusion.
To balance the fortunate few who were treated reasonably there are records of the many who did not fare so well. John Hill, an English sailor captured in 1574 and imprisoned by the Las Palmas tribunal, complained of having to sleep on the floor with fleas, of lack of bread and water, and of being left all but naked.47 These were standard complaints that could have been made of any other prison, secular or ecclesiastical. Other ordeals would include having to wear chains (not frequent in the Inquisition), and being left interminably in unlit and unheated cells. In addition the Inquisition used two instruments to punish awkward prisoners: one was the mordaza, or gag, used to prevent prisoners talking or blaspheming; the other was the pie de amigo, an iron fork utilized to keep the head upright forcibly. In view of the deplorable state of many prisons in the modern world today, one may agree with Lea “that the secret prisons of the Inquisition were less intolerable places of abode than the episcopal and public jails. The general policy respecting them was more humane and enlightened than that of other jurisdictions, whether in Spain or elsewhere.”48
The severities of prison life led to a regular death rate which could be attributed not to torture (about which inquisitors were usually careful) but to disease and unhealthy conditions. As the inquisitor general Cardinal Adrian observed in 1517, the prisons were meant for temporary detention only and never for punishment. Prisoners were seldom condemned to rot in the cells. They were there—some for lengthy periods—as a preliminary to trial. Inquisitors might take care to avoid cruelty, brutality and harsh treatment, but that did not prevent tragedies. In 1699 a forty-year-old seamstress was confined in the cells at Valladolid on suspicion of judaizing. Confined with her were her four sons, aged thirteen to seventeen. Within six months the two youngest were taken to hospital, where they died.49 It was a consequence of the practice, all too common, of throwing entire families, children included, into the cells. Madness and suicide were also regular consequences of imprisonment.
Interrogations were usually conducted in the presence of a secretary, who noted down questions and answers, and a notary. Very many cases were obviously about trivial offenses, misdemeanors that involved the tribunal only because no other court was available. In these circumstances, the interrogation would not have the intensity accorded to cases of heresy. When it came to serious cases, however, we cannot discount the inquisitors drawing on the long experience of the medieval Inquisition, which produced in the writings of Bernard Gui and Nicolau Eimeric two excellent manuals explaining techniques on how to squeeze the truth out of suspects.50 Eimeric, for example, set out ten ways in which heretics seek to “hide their errors.” Among them are “redirecting the question,” “feigning illness,” “changing the subject” and “feigning stupidity.” The efficient inquisitor, in short, had a good amount of experience to back him up. In Languedoc, it has been argued, “many of the techniques relied on a strategy of isolation” of the accused.51 In addition, the inquisitor had at his disposal tricks in the technique of interrogation that, properly used, made it unnecessary to resort to severe measures. Only a very detailed analysis of the available documentation could reveal to us whether the inquisitors in Spain made use of such techniques. The fact is, as modern experience has shown, that intensive interrogation can get a person to confess to offenses he has not committed, even without formal torture. In the United States, there have been in the last thirty years more than forty cases documented in which individuals have confessed to crimes they did not commit.
If verbal trickery and psychological pressure failed to work, the permitted alternative was the use of torture,
a practice inherited from the medieval Inquisition.52 The Instructions of 1561 laid down no rules for its use but urged that its application should be according to “the conscience and will of the appointed judges, following law, reason and good conscience. Inquisitors should take great care that the sentence of torture is justified and follows precedent.”53 Torture was universal in the European criminal process, and its use by the Spanish Inquisition was in no way exceptional.54 Often the accused was placed in conspectu tormentorum, so that merely the sight of the instruments of torture would provoke a confession.
Confessions gained under torture were never accepted as valid because they had obviously been obtained by pressure. It was therefore essential for the accused to ratify his confession the day after the ordeal. If he refused to do this, a legal subterfuge was invoked. As the rules forbade anyone to be tortured more than once, the end of every torture session was treated as a suspension only, and refusal to ratify the confession would be met with a threat to “continue” the torture. Besides being compelled to confess their own heresies, accused were often also tortured in caput alienum, that is, to confess knowledge of the crimes of others.
In statistical terms, it would be correct to say that torture was used infrequently. Though permitted by the Instructions of 1484, in the early years it seems to have been considered superfluous and was seldom used. Abundant testimony from edicts of grace and from witnesses was more than sufficient to keep the judicial process functioning. Out of over four hundred conversos tried by the Inquisition at Ciudad Real in 1483–85, only two are known to have been tortured.55 The incidence of torture in Valencia before 1530 was low. After the 1530s, however, things changed radically. It was now a question of rooting out underground and unconfessed Judaism. Torture was therefore more frequently applied. After 1530 in Valencia about a third of those qualifying were tortured.56 The key to its frequency is that its use was limited only to cases of heresy. This meant that minor offenses, which were the bulk of crimes tried by the Inquisition for a great part of its history, did not qualify for it. In the tribunal of Granada from 1573 to 1577, 18 out of 256 accused were tortured, just over 7 percent. In Seville from 1606 to 1612, 21 out of 184 were tortured, just over 11 percent.57 By the mid-eighteenth century torture had virtually fallen out of use in the tribunal, and finally in 1816 the pope forbade its use in any of the tribunals subject to the Holy See.