The Spanish Inquisition
Page 39
The burning of a judaizer is described in detail in a contemporary narrative by an inquisitor of the auto held at Logroño on 24 August 1719. We enter the picture at the stage where the accused is already on the stake and a lighted torch is passed before his face to warn him of what awaits him if he does not repent. Around the judaizer are numbers of religious who
pressed the accused with greater anxiety and zeal to convert himself. With perfect serenity he said, “I will convert myself to the faith of Jesus Christ,” words which he had not been heard to utter until then. This overjoyed all the religious who began to embrace him with tenderness and gave infinite thanks to God for having opened to them a door for his conversion. . . . And as he was making his confession of faith a learned religious of the Franciscan Order asked him, “In what law do you die?” He turned and looked him in the eye and said, “Father, I have already told you that I die in the faith of Jesus Christ.” This caused great pleasure and joy among all, and the Franciscan, who was kneeling down, arose and embraced the accused. All the others did the same with great satisfaction, giving thanks for the infinite goodness of God. . . . At this moment the accused saw the executioner, who had put his head out from behind the stake and asked him, “Why did you call me a dog before?” The executioner replied, “Because you denied the faith of Jesus Christ: but now that you have confessed, we are brothers, and if I have offended you by what I said, I beg your pardon on my knees.” The accused forgave him gladly, and the two embraced. . . . And desirous that the soul which had given so many signs of conversion should not be lost, I went round casually behind the stake to where the executioner was, and gave him the order to strangle him immediately because it was very important not to delay. This he did with great expedition.
When it was certain that he was dead, the executioner was ordered to set fire at the four corners of the pyre to the brushwood and charcoal that had been piled up. He did this at once, and it began to burn on all sides, the flames rising swiftly up the platform and burning the wood and clothing. When the cords binding the accused had been burnt off he fell through the open trap door into the pyre and his whole body was reduced to ashes.117
The ashes were scattered through the fields or on the river, and with this the heretic, whose conversion had brought him no temporal benefit, passed out of existence—though not out of memory, for a sanbenito bearing his name would as a rule have been placed in the local church after his death. There was no age limit for those condemned to the stake: women in their eighties and boys in their teens were treated in the same way as any other heretics.
Figure 1. The Virgin of the Catholic Monarchs, attributed to Fernando Gallego (1468–1507). Kneeling behind Ferdinand is Torquemada, first inquisitor general of Spain. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.
Figure 2. A victim of the Spanish Inquisition, wearing the sanbenito habit of the penitent. Line engraving from “Historia Inquisitionis,” by Philipp van Limborch, 1692. The Granger Collection, New York.
Figure 3. A victim of the Spanish Inquisition, wearing the sanbenito habit of the heretic. Line engraving from “Historia Inquisitionis,” by Philipp van Limborch, 1692. The Granger Collection, New York.
Figure 4. A seventeenth-century Dutch engraving of the procession of an auto de fe. Line engraving from “Historia Inquisitionis,” by Philipp van Limborch, 1692. The Granger Collection, New York.
Figure 5. St. Dominic Presiding at an Auto de Fe, by Pedro Berruguete (c. 1490). The images are meant to emphasize the special role of the Dominican order (and its thirteenth-century founder) in the activity of the Inquisition.
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Figure 6. Mercy and justice on the banner of the Inquisition.
The Granger Collection, New York.
Figure 7. A contemporary Dutch print depicting what the Valladolid auto de fe of May 1559 was imagined to have been like. © Trustees of the British Museum.
Figure 8. An eighteenth-century print, by Bernard Picart, depicting an imagined scene of the burning of heretics in Lisbon after an auto de fe.
The Granger Collection, New York.
Figure 9. The great auto de fe of 1680, held in the Plaza Mayor at Madrid before King Charles II. Detail from the contemporary canvas by Francesco Rizzi.
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Figure 10. A masterpiece of satire: Goya’s Auto de fe.
Album/Art Resource, NY.
10
THE IMAGE AND REALITY OF POWER
We have gone into lands where no inquisitor has ever been.
—THE INQUISITORS OF CATALONIA, 1578
When presenting itself before the public, the Inquisition wished to be seen above all as a deterrent. The coming of its officials to a town was therefore, in principle, designed to cause fear. In his introduction to the fourteenth-century Manual of Eimeric, written as a guide for the medieval Inquisition, the Spanish theologian Francisco Peña commented in 1578: “we must remember that the main purpose of the trial and execution is not to save the soul of the accused but to achieve the public good and put fear into others [ut alii terreantur].”1 The public activity of the Holy Office was thus based on a premise, common to all policing systems at all times, that fear is the most useful deterrent.
In reality, as police officials everywhere can recognize, that is usually wishful thinking. The presence, and therefore the impact, of the Inquisition could be daunting, but it does not follow that it imposed fear and uniformity throughout Spain. The fear set in train by the early Inquisition undoubtedly existed for those it targeted, but it is relevant to ask who else had reason to be afraid. The tribunal itself, of course, never ceased to proclaim its successes. At an auto de fe in Barcelona in 1602, the inquisitors reported with considerable satisfaction: “our procession caused terror in the people.”2 It was a pious lie, for thanks to the almost total lack of prosecutions the inquisitors at that date had not been able to mount a public auto in Barcelona for over a quarter of a century, and at few moments of their history had the authorities or the people in Catalonia ever been afraid of the Holy Office. And what was true for Spaniards in Catalonia was arguably also true for many others in the rest of Spain.
The societies in which we live today are permeated with public and covert forces of vigilance, but the population is not necessarily terrorized. In the same way, in many Christian communities throughout Spain where internal discord was low and public solidarity high, fear of the Inquisition was virtually absent. Catalonia was an outstanding example of a community that held the Inquisition in contempt and despised its methods. In 1560 the inquisitors in Barcelona complained that the city authorities never came to autos de fe, and that in Catalonia as a whole the people, “vaunting themselves as good Christians, all claim that the Inquisition is superfluous here and does nothing nor is there anything for it to do.” This, we may recall, was precisely at the period when the discovery of Protestants had raised widespread alarm in Castile. In Catalonia, by contrast, there was no concern on the part of the authorities. “All the people of this land,” the inquisitors reported in 1627, “both clergy and laymen, have always shown little sympathy for the Holy Office.”3 A typical attitude was that of the parish priest of Taús (Urgell) who asserted in 1632 that “he didn’t recognize the Inquisition and didn’t give a fig for it.”4 Significantly, the Inquisition was unable to take any action against him, not indeed was it ever able to impose its authority on the people of that diocese.
There may have been many other regions of Spain where a similar absence of fear prevailed. Because the information available to inquisitors came not from their own investigations but almost exclusively from members of the public, it was in effect the public that dictated the forms of inquisitorial justice. The judges were able to assert their own interpretations and prejudices, but the most substantive part of the matter, the evidence, was produced by witnesses. In a very real sense, the Inquisition was set in motion by ordinary people.5 And where they refused to cooperate the tribunal was impotent
and incapable of inspiring fear. Time after time, villages and communities simply refused to break the bonds of neighborliness, such as they were, by spilling information to outside authorities.6
Foreign travelers and diplomats visiting Spain nevertheless had their own opinions about matters, and were at their most confident when reporting on the immense sway that they felt the Holy Office exercised over the people. In 1563 the Venetian ambassador Tiepolo said that everyone shuddered at its name, as it had total authority over the property, life, honor and even the souls of men. “The king,” he wrote, “favors it, the better to keep the people under control.”7 It was not the first time that Venetian diplomats confused fact with fiction, and Tiepolo’s report would have been most gratifying to the Inquisition itself had it been true. Ironically, the inquisitors had their work cut out trying to make sure that they could maintain a position of preeminence. They were a small group of officials, with no permanent income and no guaranteed privileges, liable always to come into conflict with other officials of Church and state, and often unemployed in periods of tranquility. Despite this, they managed to survive, thanks to their persistence in trying to project their image and cultivate the structure of their power.
What could they do to affirm their position? In the first and crucial generation of existence, they operated in limited areas of the country and never ceased to encounter opposition (chapters 4 and 8). City and Church officials blocked their way at almost every turn. No sooner did they establish themselves in the former Islamic territory of Granada than they were at loggerheads with the authorities as well as the archbishop. The effort to maintain their public status over and against the other authorities in Church and state was, it would seem, not very successful. We may well ask, then, at what stage the tribunal is supposed to have imposed a regime of fear on the population (over and above the persecution it directed against the converso minority). By the 1530s the persecution of former Jews and Muslims was almost a distant memory, autos de fe were few and far between, and new movements of spiritual revival were penetrating the country.
It may well have been this tranquility and lack of fear that worried Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés when he took over the Inquisition in 1547. With a long and distinguished career behind him, serving in the highest offices of state, he had already been a member of the Suprema for over twenty years.8 His most striking contribution was the invention of the new auto de fe, which attempted to identify the Inquisition with fear and power. He also helped to draw up the new 1561 Instructions, which set out for the first time the basic judicial procedure to be followed by the tribunal.9 Thanks in part to him, the tribunal began to receive a regular income not based on confiscations.
It would be no exaggeration to consider Valdés the second founder of the Inquisition. His position at the head of the tribunal coincides with all its best-known activities, against heretics and heretical books and even against great personalities of state such as Carranza. His star had been waning in government circles after the death of Charles V, and the discovery of “heretics” enabled him to recover the initiative. Valdés was particularly forceful in his letters from Spain to Philip II in Brussels. He was aware that reports unfavorable to him had managed to reach Philip, sent (he said) by “some people whose intentions will one day be exposed.” Concerned to ensure his own political survival, he painted an alarming picture of Lutherans active in Seville, Valladolid and Salamanca, Jews active in Murcia, and Moriscos in the throes of discontent. The only remedy, he said, was to put the Inquisition in charge.10 In effect, reading his letters one can see that he wished the whole of Castile to be handed over to the Inquisition, as an emergency measure. The absent Philip had no other machinery available to handle the situation, and agreed with him about the need for quick action. In long and confident letters to the king in Brussels, Valdés described the efficiency with which the Holy Office was acting and the impressive number of people it had arrested and punished.11
One of the problems Valdés no doubt had in mind was the low profile of the Inquisition in the mid-sixteenth century. Many modern accounts lump together indiscriminately all its activities over three centuries and offer a portrait that takes no account of changes in its role, while the truth is that before Valdés the tribunal in the decades after it had dealt with conversos had barely begun to achieve the fame it later enjoyed. In some cities, such as Seville and Saragossa, it was lodged in key buildings, but otherwise had little public presence. There was an astonishing absence of visible imagery for it. The arms of the tribunal—a cross of faith intertwined with an olive branch of mercy—were engraved on the public façade of all the buildings controlled by the tribunal, and can still be seen today in the medieval centers of some cities. Apart from the symbol, however, Spaniards seem to have had no visual images of the presence of the Holy Office. Like other peoples of the Mediterranean, they lived much of their life outdoors, where their festivities and processions were concentrated in every month of the year. But the Inquisition was not there in the streets, nor—apart from sanbenitos hung in a few parishes—in the churches, nor in social activity of any sort.
For over one hundred years after it was founded, the Inquisition had no confraternity to bind together its employees and give them a social identity. Not until 1603 did the Suprema get around to founding a confraternity for its familiars, dedicated to St. Peter Martyr (who happened to be an Italian inquisitor murdered in 1254!). A confraternity had among its privileges that of being able to organize street processions, so that at last the tribunal could have a social presence alongside other Church groups. The Spanish Inquisition’s own martyr, Pedro Arbués, was not beatified by the papacy until 1662, or nearly two hundred years after his death; and he was, curiously enough, not canonized as a saint until half a century after the demise of the Inquisition itself. Meanwhile, the inquisitors had to struggle for other privileges and rights, and the “public theatre” that some have professed to see in their work was both rare and limited.
The contempt with which inquisitors could be treated may be seen from what happened in Barcelona in 1561, a few months before Inquisitor General Valdés issued his new Instructions. The city authorities, the consellers, were at high mass on Passion Sunday in the church of Santa Maria del Mar when they were informed that a crisis had arisen in the cathedral. The two inquisitors of Barcelona had attempted to read out an “edict of faith” and to do so had placed their chairs before the high altar, each chair with a carpet before it. The bishop whose cathedral it was immediately protested, saying that only royalty could use the privilege of sitting before the high altar. Messages went to and fro between the bishop, the consellers and the inquisitors. A messenger reported to the consellers:
After the message had been delivered the father inquisitors said in their Castilian tongue: “Who are you?” The messengers and I replied: “We are messengers of the city.” Then the inquisitors retorted: “Tell the consellers that we represent His Holiness the pope and are in the service of God and His Holiness and of His Majesty, and here we stay!” Then the messengers replied: “The place of the inquisitors is in the choir of the church seated next to the bishop, and they cannot sit at the high altar.” Then the said inquisitors retorted with great vehemence and a certain degree of anger: “Get out! Get out!”
Eventually the consellers came from Santa Maria del Mar and crowded into the back of the cathedral, where they were joined by the viceroy himself. When the inquisitors refused to heed appeals from the viceroy, he angrily ordered his officers to remove the chairs by force. The stubborn inquisitors, deprived of their seats, remained standing impassively until the end of the mass.12 It was one of many such incidents that occurred in different parts of Spain through the centuries, and evidently calls in doubt the fear that Spaniards are supposed to have had of the Holy Office.
It also raises the intriguing question of why the tribunal did not attempt to communicate its image in order to win support. The question is perhaps most relevant to the mid
-sixteenth century, when for the first time the auto de fe became visually imposing. Yet there is virtually no historical record of it in Spanish art. Various explanations could be suggested. It may be that the public auto was never accepted as an event of which to be proud, since its ingredients were punishment and shame. There was a similar public rejection, throughout Spanish history, of the shame involved in sanbenitos. The antagonism to the tribunal of both municipal and Church authorities also made it impossible for the Inquisition to display its images in any public place controlled by those bodies. A painting glorifying the Inquisition would therefore have to be kept discreetly either in a building of the tribunal (such as the offices of the Suprema in Madrid), or in a monastery run by the religious order most identified with it, namely, the Dominicans. Where are these images now? Not all the buildings of the Holy Office were destroyed by popular violence, nor was all its public property wiped out, so we may conclude that the absence of visual art is due to the simple fact that it did not exist. Throughout the great era of inquisitorial activity, not a single significant artist seems to have wished to dedicate a canvas to its triumphs. The Inquisition itself did nothing to dissuade artists: after all, the whole point of the auto and its processions was to put on a public display.
By contrast, Europeans who wished to criticize Spanish policy were prolific in turning out images of the Inquisition. Indeed, we owe to them rather than to Spaniards the origins of the idea that the tribunal was an instrument of terror. During the high tide of the Dutch Revolt, artists in northern Europe began to produce prints that have established for all time the picture we still have of the public ceremonial of the Inquisition. It was certainly because of Dutch interest, and the predominance of Dutch and German printers in the European market, that the first known images emerged from northern engravers. Due to the fact that their purpose was usually anti-Spanish propaganda, the prints do not give a wholly reliable image of what they purport to show. They were also few in number. Only in the seventeenth century was the first convincing publication of images made, in the magnificent volume A History of the Inquisition published by Philipp van Limborch in Amsterdam in 1692, still the most often consulted source. Limborch was a leading Dutch intellectual and proponent of religious toleration. His work, written as an appendix to his edition of the medieval inquisitor Bernard Gui, included several engravings that came to be widely reproduced. In the eighteenth century, a yet more exhaustive collection of engravings became available with the appearance of Bernard Picart’s monumental seven-volume Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, published in Amsterdam by Jean Frédéric Bernard between 1723 and 1743.13 Among its 3,000 pages of text and 250 pages of engraved images, the immense work included numerous prints about the Inquisition, with illustrations of an auto in Madrid and a ceremonial procession of the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa. Goa, indeed, became the setting for many foreign prints that were reproduced and attributed erroneously to the Spanish Inquisition. From that century onwards, representations by European artists additionally took the form of satire.14 Virtually all subsequent images of the Inquisition were satirical or simply fictitious (among the latter we may include pictorial representations of torture, common from the eighteenth century onwards). Incredible as it may seem, in the age of the printing press not a single authentic Spanish image of the Holy Office saw the light of day. In the battle of images, the Inquisition was a clear loser.