by Henry Kamen
However, the apparent infrequency of torture has encouraged some writers to downplay its importance. This ignores its very real impact at select periods on the groups that most suffered from it. After the early sixteenth century, for example, it was applied rigorously in cases of suspected Protestantism and Judaism. In epochs when these offenses were rare, the need for torture declined. Lea estimates that in the Toledo tribunal between 1575 and 1610, only about a third of those accused of heretical offenses were in fact tortured.58 However, at a later period when the Inquisition thought it had discovered a recrudescence of heresy, there was no hesitation about resorting to severe measures as a way of obtaining information. In the late seventeenth century at least three-fourths of all those accused in Spain of judaizing—several hundreds of people—were tortured.59 In 1699 the inquisitors of Seville complained that they hardly had the time to carry out all the tortures required. Supporting evidence for the frequency of the punishment in this tribunal comes from the doctor who in 1702 claimed back payment for his presence at 434 sessions of torture.60
Torture—like other elements of the system of justice at that time, such as imprisonment—was employed exclusively to elicit information or a confession, and never used as a punishment. The scenes of sadism conjured up by popular writers on the Inquisition have little basis in reality. Torturers used were normally the public executioners who worked for the secular courts. Those required to be present at the proceedings were the inquisitors themselves, a representative of the bishop and a secretary to record everything faithfully. Physicians were usually available in case of emergency. On the evidence available, at no time were the inquisitors so sophisticated as to resort to psychological methods or brainwashing.61 In the case of judaizers of the later seventeenth century, the special care in tracking down family networks and in encouraging relatives to denounce each other may with some reason be considered as exceptionally cruel; though it may also be explained as xenophobia, since those under suspicion were invariably of Portuguese origin.
The basic rule in torture was that the accused should suffer no danger to life or limb. By Church law, ecclesiastical tribunals could not kill nor could they shed blood. No distinctive tortures were used by the Inquisition (the gripping tale of punishment in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” was imaginative fiction). Those most often employed were in common use in other secular and ecclesiastical tribunals, and any complaints of novel tortures would certainly refer to rare exceptions. The three main ones were the garrucha, the toca and the potro. The garrucha, or pulley, involved being hung by the wrists from a pulley on the ceiling, with heavy weights attached to the feet. The accused was raised slowly and then suddenly allowed to fall with a jerk. The effect was to stretch and perhaps dislocate arms and legs. The toca, or water torture, was more complicated. The accused was tied down on a rack, his mouth was kept forcibly open and a toca, or linen cloth, was put down his throat to conduct water poured slowly from a jar. The severity of the torture varied with the number of jars of water used. The potro, which was the most common after the sixteenth century, involved being bound tightly on a rack by cords which were passed round the body and limbs and were controlled by the executioner, who tightened them by turns of the cords at the end. With each turn the cords bit into the body and traveled round the flesh. In all these tortures it was the rule to strip the accused first. Both men and women were divested of their clothes and left naked except for minimal garments.62
There seems to have been no age limit for victims, nor was there any limit on the torture. An accused would often be subjected to all three tortures before confessing. The less obdurate might need only one torture. While the Inquisition did not usually subject very old and very young people to torture, there are cases when tribunals apparently found this necessary. Women aged between seventy and ninety years are on record as having been put on the rack. In 1607 at Valencia a girl of thirteen was subjected to torture, but she seems to have been mildly treated since she overcame it without confessing. Allowances for age might be made. In 1579 the inquisitors of Llerena informed the Suprema that “all the clergy arrested for being alumbrados have been tortured and they haven’t confessed anything, though it must be said that since several of them are very old and also ill and infirm from their long confinement, it has not been possible to torture them with the required rigor.”63 Those who had to undergo the experience were often left in a sorry state. Many were left with limbs irreparably broken, sometimes with both health and reason diminished; others died under torture.64
It was standard practice, which the Inquisition took over from secular courts,65 to record all details of torture. A secretary noted every word and gesture during the proceedings, thus providing us with impressive if macabre evidence of the sufferings of the accused. Here are extracts from the official accounts of two tortures carried out in the sixteenth century. In the first is a woman accused in 1568 of not eating pork and of changing her linen on Saturdays.
She was ordered to be placed on the rack. She said: “Señores, why will you not tell me what I have to say? Señor, put me on the ground—have I not said that I did it all?” She was told to talk. She said: “I don’t remember—take me away—I did what the witnesses say.” She was told to tell in detail what the witnesses said. She said: “Señor, as I have told you, I do not know for certain. I have said that I did all that the witnesses say. Señores, release me, for I do not remember.” She was told to talk. She said: “Señores, it does not help me to say that I did it and I have admitted that what I have done has brought me to this suffering—Señor, you know the truth—Señores, for God’s sake have mercy on me. Oh Señor, take these things from my arms—Señor release me, they are killing me.” She was tied on the rack with the cords, she was admonished to tell the truth and the order given to tighten the ropes. She said: “Señor, do you not see how these people are killing me? I did it—for God’s sake let me go!”66
Foreign heretics were submitted to the same procedure. Here is the case of Jacob Petersen from Dunkirk, a sailor aged twenty who was examined by the tribunal of the Canaries in November 1597. He was stripped and bound and given three turns of the cord.
On being given these he said first, “Oh God!” and then, “There’s no mercy”: after the turns he was admonished, and he said, “I don’t know what to say, oh dear God!” Then three more turns of the cord were ordered to be given, and after two of them he said, “Oh God, oh God, there’s no mercy, oh God help me, help me!”67
After three more turns he confessed.
While these examples give us some insight into the agony of those who were tortured, it should be remembered that the procedure was often mild enough for very many to overcome it. Civil jurisdictions both in Spain and the rest of Europe made use of similar tortures, but often with a degree of cruelty and mutilation that shows up the Inquisition in a relatively favorable light. This together with the usually good level of prison conditions may invite us to conclude that the tribunal was not in principle dedicated to cruelty. In perspective, nevertheless, the efficiency of the Holy Office seems to have served as a model for governments and police systems down to our own day. Though experts in law commonly agree that torture was never a reliable method of getting at the truth, the grim reality is that the three forms of it used by the Inquisition in Spain “all remain in use today” in many countries, “as investigations by governments and human rights organizations attest.”68
Since the Inquisition usually arrested suspects only after the evidence against them seemed conclusive and had been approved by assessors, the accused could be presumed guilty from the start and would have to prove his own innocence. The main task of the Inquisition would be to obtain an admission of guilt and a penitential submission. If in the process of inquiry, however, it became clear that the evidence was false and the prisoner presumably innocent, he was immediately set free. In 1680 in the tribunal of Saragossa, Ana María Pérez, aged forty-five, was accused of vari
ous things by no fewer than twenty-nine residents of her village, among them the parish priest.69 The inquisitors had no difficulty deciding that it was a case of malicious victimization by residents, and set her free. Meanwhile, the horrified village learned that during her arrest the parish priest and his housekeeper mistress both died. It seemed the hand of God.
One of the peculiarities of inquisitorial procedure that brought hardship and suffering to many was the refusal to divulge reasons for arrest, so that prisoners went for days and months without knowing why they were in the cells of the tribunal. Instead of accusing the prisoner, the inquisitors approached him and gave three warnings, over a period of weeks, to search his conscience, confess the truth and trust to the mercy of the tribunal. The third warning was accompanied by the information that the prosecutor intended to present an accusation, and that it would be wisest to confess before the charges were laid. The effect of this enforced ignorance was to depress and break down a prisoner. If innocent, he remained bewildered about what to confess, or else confessed crimes the Inquisition was not accusing him of; if guilty, he was left to wonder how much of the truth the Inquisition really knew, and whether it was a trick to force him to confess.
When, after the three warnings, the prosecutor eventually read the articles of accusation, the accused was required to answer charges on the spot, with no time or advocate to help him consider his defense. Any reply made in these circumstances could hardly fail to be incriminating. Only after this was permission given to enlist legal help for the defense.
One important concession made by the Spanish but not by the medieval Inquisition was that the accused could have the services of an advocate. This was written into the Instructions of 1484 and generally upheld, though later modifications to the rule sometimes rendered the use of a lawyer farcical. In the earlier years the accused could choose their lawyers freely, but the growing caution of the Holy Office later confined the choice to special lawyers nominated by the tribunal, so that by the mid-sixteenth century the prisoners’ advocates, or abogados de los presos, were recognized as officials of the Inquisition, dependent upon and working with the inquisitors. This new class of lawyers was obviously distrusted by some prisoners, for in 1559 we have the case of a prisoner in Valencia telling his cell mate that
though the inquisitor might give him an advocate he would give him no one good but a fellow who would do only what the inquisitor wanted, and if by chance he asked for an advocate or solicitor not of the Inquisition, they would not serve, for if they went contrary to the inquisitor’s wishes he would get up some charge of false belief or want of respect and cast them into prison.70
This does not mean that many advocates did not do their duty conscientiously. But they were hindered by the restrictions of the tribunal and by the subtle and dangerous task of defending the prisoner while condemning his heresy. Some special cases exist where the accused were allowed counsel of their own choice: one such was Carranza, who chose among others the distinguished canonist Martín de Azpilcueta to defend him.
When a prisoner was finally accused he was given a copy of the evidence against him in order to help him prepare a defense. This publication of the evidence was by no means as helpful as it might seem. In the first place, as we have seen, the names of all witnesses were suppressed. Even more important, all evidence that might help to identify witnesses was also suppressed. This meant that the prisoner was often deprived of details of the complete case against him. In this way the inquisitors were free to use as evidence information that had not been communicated to the accused. While this helped to protect witnesses against identification and recrimination, it sometimes crippled the defense. On this question the practice of the Suprema was not at first decided, but Valdés’s Instructions of 1561 finally stipulated that any evidence liable to betray a witness could be omitted, and that only evidence contained in the publication was to be used in the case. This last regulation preserved the forms of justice.
The accused had several avenues of defense short of demonstrating the complete falsity of an accusation. He could call favorable witnesses, disable hostile ones by proving personal enmity or object to his judges, a process known as recusation. Several extenuating circumstances such as drunkenness, insanity, extreme youth and so on could also be pleaded. All these expedients were resorted to regularly, not always with equal success. In the great majority of trials before the Spanish Inquisition, defense consisted solely in the resort to witnesses, since this was the only way to get at the unknown sources of evidence.
The problem caused by anonymous witnesses was a serious one. We have the case of Diego de Uceda (see chapter 5 above), who was accused in 1528 of Lutheranism on the basis of a chance talk with a stranger on the road from Burgos to Córdoba. The suppression of all details of time and place in the published evidence led Uceda to imagine that the accusation arose from a talk some nights later at Guadarrama, and all his energies were spent vainly on proving that this latter conversation had been innocuous, while the real evidence against him went uncontradicted. Uceda decided to call witnesses in his favor: he had to wait six months before they could all be traced, and even then their depositions did not help to contradict the evidence. The resort to favorable witnesses was thus an unreliable and lengthy procedure.
Greater success could be had by disabling hostile witnesses. Felipe Leonart, whose case we have already noted, had no difficulty in 1637 in proving that accusations by his family had been made out of malice. Similarly, Gaspar Torralba of the village of Vayona, near Chinchón, gave in his defense in 1531 a list of 152 persons as his mortal enemies; most of the 35 witnesses against him happened to be on the list, and he was consequently let off lightly.71 Pedro Sánchez de Contreras was accused at Logroño of blasphemy in 1669, but because he happened to be a magistrate he had full material evidence on all his enemies, men whom he had prosecuted for various crimes. He therefore handed the tribunal an enormous dossier with the criminal records of all his potential accusers; the case was dropped.72
Recusation of judges called for considerable courage, and was therefore not resorted to except where the prisoner could prove their personal enmity. Carranza was one of the few who succeeded in having his judges changed for this reason, though in the event it was of little help to him. Attempts to escape trial by pleading insanity or a wide range of other extenuating circumstances (drunkenness, grief) were also often made. The Inquisition could go to great lengths to establish the truth, and some of its attitudes may even be described as enlightened (witchcraft, as we shall see, was treated as a form of insanity). Drunkenness was cited as an excuse in the case of Andrés González, aged twenty, when accused by the tribunal of Toledo in 1678 of blaspheming and swearing that “he cared not for God or the Virgin,” “he did not believe in God,” “he believed in Mohammed.” As the story of his life unfolded before the inquisitors, they heard of his mother, who had died when he was ten, and of his father, who had remarried with a woman who beat Andrés and forced him to leave home. He had wandered in search of work until he came to Toledo, where he married a girl and worked partly as an agricultural laborer, partly as a carpenter’s assistant. They were poor and lived in the house of his wife’s sister, where his hostile in-laws drove him to drink, which was when he was heard to swear; “and when I quarreled with my wife, her cousin and his wife, her sister and her sister’s husband, all used to turn on me and beat me till the blood came to my teeth.”73 The Inquisition sympathized, but banished him from the area for three years.
Popular literature on the Inquisition devotes considerable attention to the judicial process, but in reality there was no formal “trial,” in the sense of a single act carried out in a single room within a set period of time.74 The proceedings consisted instead of a series of audiences at which the prosecution and defense made their respective submissions; and a series of interrogations was carried out by the inquisitors in the presence of a notary. When both prosecution and defense had completed their duties, the case
was held to be concluded, and the time arrived for sentence to be pronounced. For this it was necessary to form a consulta de fe, a body consisting of the inquisitors, one representative of the bishop, and officials qualified in theology or law, known as consultants (consultores). Together they voted on the case. In this way verdicts were seldom left to the arbitrary discretion of the inquisitors alone, but were monitored by legal experts from outside. In Barcelona, for example, regional practice required that nearly all verdicts be reached in the presence of the inquisitors together with judges from the royal court (the Audiencia) for civil and criminal matters, and from the bishop’s court for matters concerning clergy.75 In a typical case in 1539,76 involving a woman accused of judaizing, the judges were one inquisitor, two from the royal Audiencia, two abbots and a doctor of laws.