The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  According to the Valdés Instructions of 1561, if the inquisitors and the episcopal representative agreed, their vote prevailed even against a majority of consulters; but if they disagreed, the case was to be referred to the Suprema. From the early seventeenth century, all judgments had to be approved by the Suprema in Madrid before implementation. By the eighteenth century, centralization under the Suprema meant that few if any important decisions were made by provincial tribunals, and consultas de fe ceased to exist because all sentences were passed by the Suprema alone.

  Such was the basic procedure. But as in all courts, both then and now, it was of course open to abuse at every stage. The most important drawback from the prisoner’s point of view was the impossibility of adequate defense. His advocate’s role was limited to drawing up articles that were presented to the judges: beyond this no argument or cross-examination was allowed. It meant that in reality the inquisitors were both judge and jury, both prosecution and defense, and the prisoner’s fate depended almost entirely on the mood and character of the inquisitors and the other judges.

  As a rule the tribunals tried to bring the case to a fairly rapid conclusion, since it could be costly keeping the accused in the cells. But a few had to resign themselves to interminably long proceedings that were not always the fault of the Inquisition. The classic case is that of Carranza, but others suffered no less. The inquisitors of Llerena in 1590, overwhelmed by successive denunciations of alumbrados, judaizers and Moriscos, reported the urgency of “attending to the trials of the prisoners in this Inquisition, of whom there are over sixty, and some of them have been in prison up to seven years and many up to four years, and every day they present complaints that their affairs are being delayed so long.” As if this were not enough, they were just receiving denunciations made by an aggrieved Morisco of Hornachos against the rest of the town, “and he is giving so much information that we believe he will take several years to finish.”77

  Other examples of delays include the case of Gabriel Escobar, a cleric in minor orders, who was arrested by the tribunal of Toledo in 1607 on a charge of illuminism, and died in prison in 1622 before his trial had finished. A Mexican priest, Joseph Brunón de Vertiz, who was arrested in 1649, died in prison in 1656 before his trial had even begun; he was eventually tried posthumously, condemned and burnt in effigy only in 1659.78 These delays took a toll not only of the years and health of a prisoner but also of his sequestrated property, which was retained all this time to pay for any expenses incurred.

  One is sometimes given an impression that the Inquisition was a major punishing body, its terrible power threatening great and small alike. Spain in reality was no different from the rest of pre-modern Europe. A complex network of jurisdictions—exercised by the crown, the nobles, the cities, the local communities and the Church—covered the landscape, with authority over specific crimes and with the right to mete out certain penalties, including the death penalty. The relevant crimes falling under these jurisdictions might include offenses of honor (such as insults and rape), violations of the peace (such as drunken behavior), violence (including killing), and theft of community or Church goods (for instance, robbing grain or stealing sacred objects).79 The Church’s right to look into heresy was, as we know, passed over to the Inquisition. Apart from this category, the Inquisition had powers in only a very small area of offenses, some of which (such as sex crimes and sorcery) often in any case fell under multiple jurisdictions.

  The systems of justice in Europe were not necessarily directed towards punishment; settlement always had priority. Out-of-court negotiations between parties helped to keep the peace and also secure justice.80 In the same way, many of the first-level interventions of the Inquisition were intended to decide whether the matter should have come before the tribunal. Indeed, strictly speaking, the Inquisition was not there to punish at all; its role was primarily to inquire and only if necessary to discipline. The punishing was usually done through other authorities, at its most extreme by “relaxing” (a word that in time took on terrible overtones) persons to the secular arm of power. In any normal year, the number of people punished by the Inquisition was a minute fraction of those who passed before criminal courts. In the eighteenth century, the criminal justice court of the town of Madrid, the Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte, dealt with approximately five hundred cases a year.81 Given its relative inactivity at that period, the Inquisition would have needed not a year but a complete century to attain the figure.

  Analysis of the punishments decreed by tribunals should ideally be based on reliable data, but these do not exist. Nearly all the documentation on the early years of the Inquisition has disappeared, and for subsequent periods the records are often incomplete. Despite all the defects and gaps, as a whole the available papers of the Inquisition constitute the fullest prosecution records to survive from any European tribunal of early modern times. Working from them, we see that the activity of the tribunal can be divided into five main phases: (1) the period of intense anti-converso persecution after 1480, to about 1520; (2) the relatively quiet early sixteenth century; (3) the period of activity against Protestants and Moriscos, 1559–1614; (4) the seventeenth century, when most of those tried were neither of Jewish nor of Moorish origin; (5) the eighteenth century, when heresy was no longer a concern.

  A generation ago, some researchers attempted to count up the “cases of faith” in the surviving records with a view to quantifying the impact of the Inquisition.82 The exercise helped us to get a global view of some aspects, by indicating, for example, the periods in which certain offenses and minorities were most persecuted, or by giving a general idea of the number of people sentenced. But historians quickly saw that the method was both deficient and unreliable. The margin of error in counting up cases was unacceptably high, sometimes between 50 and 100 percent wrong.83 Cases were added up as single items, without taking into account multiple offenses or the implication of more than one person. Offenses, moreover, were classified by the researchers according to the categories laid down by the Inquisition, which not only tended to mislead but also meant that important types of offenses did not appear at all in the analyses. In Catalonia, for example, a high proportion of cases, mostly in civil and criminal matters, was never entered in the official list of “cases of faith,” where the apparent totals “may often represent little more than half their activity.”84 Not surprisingly, one scholar concludes that the figures offered by the researchers “are not always reliable, and pose serious problems.” His own estimate of Inquisition cases—not necessarily more correct—suggests a total four times greater than theirs.85 The idea of counting cases may, it seems, be helpful within certain limits, but less helpful when used as a basis for an accurate assessment.

  Above all, the surviving records reflect neither the number of offenses nor the scale of inquisitorial activity. Like statistics for crime, they are seldom complete or reliable. More properly, they reflect only the response of the Inquisition to some cases referred to it by members of the public or by interested parties. Very many offenses were neither detected nor reported nor acted upon; and the inquisitors were active in many areas not referred to in the index they used for cataloging papers.

  A study of the tribunal of Toledo, summarized below in graph 1, shows us the offenses prosecuted over the centuries of highest activity.86

  The outcome of a prosecution could take four main forms. Accused were acquitted (“absolved” or “suspended”), made to do penance (penitenciado), “reconciled” (reconciliado) or burnt (relajado, “relaxed” in person or in effigy). The three categories of punishment usually combined both spiritual and corporal penalties. In the tribunal of Valencia, an estimate for 3,075 trials in 1566–1609 have been analyzed as follows: 44.2 percent were made to do penance, 40.2 percent were reconciled, 2.5 percent absolved, 9 percent suspended, 2.1 percent burnt in effigy, 2.0 percent burnt in person.87 In Galicia between 1560 and 1700, of 2,203 cases, 18.5 percent were absolved, 62.7 percent made to do
penance, 16.1 percent reconciled, 1.9 percent relaxed in effigy, 0.7 percent relaxed in person.88 In the Canary Islands, the number of cases from 1504 to 1820 totaled 2,263; of these, 11 persons were burnt in person and 107 in effigy.89

  Graph 1. Prosecutions in the tribunal of Toledo, 1483–1700.

  The number of acquittals, though few, was an improvement on the medieval tribunal, which as a rule never acquitted. In its first cases in 1483–85 in Ciudad Real, the inquisitors set free several accused, among them the converso cobbler Diego López, accused of judaizing: “we absolve him, declare him free and acquitted, and reaffirm his good reputation.”90 Outright acquittal, however, meant admitting an error, so it was also common to suspend cases, which was not necessarily a good thing, for it left one technically under suspicion and meant that the prosecution could at any time be renewed. There was only a limited chance of appeal. In cases that ended in a public auto de fe, this was because the accused were not informed of their sentence until they were in the actual procession during the auto; by then it was too late to appeal. The delay in delivering a verdict would naturally heighten the suspense, fear and despair felt by prisoners. But when a man was sentenced to be relaxed he was always informed of his fate the night before the ceremony to give him time in which to prepare his soul for confession and repentance. Later in the history of the tribunal this information was given as much as three days in advance. In private autos there was much more opportunity to appeal after the sentence had been read out. In such cases the appeal always went to the Suprema, appeals to Rome not being encouraged.

  Doing penance was the least of the punishments imposed. Those who did penance had to “abjure” their offenses: de levi for a lesser offense, de vehementi for a graver one. The penitent swore to avoid his sin in the future, and if he swore de vehementi, any relapse made him liable to severe punishment on the next occasion.

  Penitents were then condemned to physical penalties such as the sanbenito, fines, banishment or sometimes the galleys. “Reconciliation” was in theory the return of a sinner to the bosom of the Church after due spiritual penance had been performed. In practice it was the most severe punishment the Inquisition could inflict, short of relaxation. All the penalties were heavier: in addition to the sanbenito, accused persons could be condemned to flogging and to long spells in prison or the galleys. In most cases confiscation of goods occurred, so that even if a prisoner escaped with a prison sentence of a few months, he came out an orthodox Catholic indeed but facing a life of beggary. An additional rule, frequently enforced, was that anyone backsliding after reconciliation was to be treated as a relapsed heretic and sent to the stake.

  The sanbenito, a corrupt form of the words saco bendito (sackcloth of repentance, a garment long in use in the Church),91 was a penitential garment used in the medieval Inquisition and taken over by the Spanish one.92 It was usually a yellow garment with one or two diagonal crosses imposed on it, and penitents were condemned to wear it as a mark of infamy for any period from a few months to life. Those who were to be relaxed at an auto de fe had to wear a black sanbenito on which were painted flames, demons and other decorative matter. Anyone condemned to wearing the ordinary sanbenito had to put it on whenever he went out of doors, a practice by no means popular in the first decades of the Inquisition. The order to wear a sanbenito for life should not be taken literally. It was invariably commuted to a much shorter period at the discretion of the inquisitor. The chief criticism leveled at the time against the garments was less over the shame they were meant to cast on their wearers than over the policy of perpetuating infamy by hanging them up in the local parish church as a permanent record.

  The imprisonment decreed by the Inquisition could be either for a short term of months and years, or for life, the latter usually being classified as “perpetual and irremissible.” Prison sentences, then as now, were never literally observed. By the sixteenth century “perpetual” normally signified in practice a few months,93 and rarely involved more than three years, if the prisoner was repentant. A “lifetime” sentence was more commonly completed in ten years or less. Despite this the Inquisition continued to decree “perpetual” sentences, probably because in canon law it was the custom to condemn heretics to life imprisonment. Incongruous sentences such as “perpetual prison for one year” appear as a matter of course in inquisitorial decrees.

  None of the sentences necessarily involved actual confinement in a prison. Though jails existed everywhere, they were employed temporarily until the fate of the accused person could be decided. The penitentiary system, in which the prison itself was the punishment, did not come into existence in Europe until the nineteenth century.94 By the Instructions of 1488 inquisitors could at their discretion confine a man to his own house or to some other institution such as a convent or hospital, with the result that very many “prisoners” served their sentences in moderate comfort. The main reason for this surprising concession is that the tribunals often lacked prison space when their cells were already full, and had to make do with alternatives. Important prisoners, such as the Admiral of Aragon or Archbishop Carranza, normally underwent house arrest rather than going to prison. The prison cells also often had an open regime. In some tribunals, the prisoners were free to come and go, providing they observed basic rules.95 A prisoner in Granada in 1565 was allowed to bring into his cell two mattresses, a bedspread, four sheets, two cushions and blankets, and a table.96 In 1655 a report on the tribunal of Granada observed that prisoners were allowed out at all hours of the day without restriction, they wandered through the city and its suburbs and amused themselves at friends’ houses, returning to their prison only at night; in this way they were given a comfortable lodging house for which they paid no rent.97

  The galleys were a punishment unknown to the medieval Inquisition, and were devised for the new one by Ferdinand the Catholic, who thereby found a cheap source of labor without having to resort to open slavery. The punishment was perhaps the most indefensible of any operated by the Spanish Inquisition and, in the opinion of a recent scholar, the most dreaded.98 It began to be used more frequently from the mid-sixteenth century, to meet rising demand from the royal fleet. In the 1570s Spain maintained in the Mediterranean somewhere in the region of 150 galleys, an enormous force that demanded a good supply of rowers and confirmed galley service as an essential part of the country’s penal system.99 Offenses such as bigamy and sodomy were normally punished with the galleys, but occasionally those condemned for heresy were sent there as well. The convicted were seldom sentenced to any period over five years, in contrast to secular tribunals which then and later condemned prisoners to the galleys for life.100 The galleys constituted an economical form of punishment: tribunals were freed from the duty of maintaining penitents in their prisons, and the state was saved the need to hire rowers at some expense. After the Morisco uprising in Andalucia in 1569, the galleys became a frequent punishment for those taken prisoner.101 The tribunals of the crown of Aragon were those that imposed the sentence most frequently, usually on Moriscos and foreign Protestants; in the late sixteenth century they sent about fifty men a year to the galleys.102 By the mid-eighteenth century the galley as a fighting vessel was obsolete; in consequence the Holy Office, like the state, ceased to use it as a sentence.

  A more common form of physical punishment was flogging. The use of the lash as chastisement was very old in Christian tradition. As a criminal punishment, however, it was very severe, carrying with it the stigma of degradation and shame, and there were bitter protests against its use in the early period of the tribunal. In principle, it could be used only against those of low social status. In the Inquisition, the accused was usually condemned to be “whipped through the streets,” in which case (if male) he had to appear stripped to the waist, often mounted on an ass for greater shame, and was duly flogged through the streets with the specified number of strokes by the public executioner. During this journey, passersby and children would show their scorn by hurling stones at the ac
cused. Women were flogged in the same way as men. Nor was there any limit on age, cases on record showing that girls in their teens and women of seventy or eighty were subjected to the same treatment. It was the general rule to prescribe no more than two hundred lashes for the accused, and sentences of one hundred lashes were very common.

  A convicted person might be sentenced to different punishments simultaneously. At the Granada auto on 30 May 1672 Alonso Ribero was sentenced to four years’ banishment from the locality, six years in the galleys and a hundred strokes of the lash, for falsifying documents of the Inquisition; and Francisco de Alarcón to five years’ banishment, five years in the galleys, two hundred strokes of the lash and a money fine, for blasphemy.103 Other penalties in the canon need little explanation. Exile or banishment from the locality was a common sentence for bad influences. Confiscations were exacted whenever possible. Of the several unusual punishments which at one time or another made their appearance, it is worth noting the one dealt out in the Mexican Inquisition in December 1664 to a penitent who was smeared with honey, then covered with feathers and made to stand in the sun for four hours during an auto de fe.

  The ultimate penalty was death, normally at the stake. The execution of heretics had not been common practice in the medieval Church, but from the middle of the thirteenth century the authorities in Western Europe, responding in particular to the spread of the Cathar heresy, began to sanction its regular use.104 The Spanish Inquisition cannot be accused of any innovation in this respect. It had been the practice, hallowed by the medieval tribunal, for Church courts to condemn a heretic and then hand him over, or “relax” him, to the secular authorities. These were obliged to carry out the sentence of blood which the Holy Office was forbidden by law to carry out. In all this there was no pretence that the Inquisition was not the body directly and fully responsible for the deaths that occurred.