by Henry Kamen
The argument that has been developed in these pages is that the Inquisition had no intrinsic power of its own with which to terrify the people. It was the people themselves who collaborated with the process of inquiry, and the inquisitors used the methods they had learnt through the years—group therapy, public confession, selective interrogation, ceremonies and processions—to exploit the situation. Those methods may very plausibly be seen as a sort of technology of power, which is the approach adopted by a fine study of the medieval Inquisition in Languedoc.15 The Languedoc inquisitors, however, were working in a different environment, that of the often closely-knit Cathar community, which they tried to undermine from within. In Spain the inquisitors sometimes had the luck to penetrate closed groups—whether of conversos or witches or male-factors—but more usually had to deal with scattered segments of the general population and therefore undermined nobody, neither the notoriously unchristian Morisco communities nor the Basque areas infected by witch fears. The Languedoc inquisitors also used, to a degree unknown in Spain, the practice of rounding up and imprisoning large numbers of suspects.16 Since the social context was fundamentally different in Languedoc and in Spain, it is unhelpful to try to compare their Inquisitions.
The tribunal found it particularly difficult to obtain the collaboration of the people. Visitations—the theme that has brought us to look at the denunciation process—were invariably hated by the inquisitors.17 Each visitation involved having to travel long periods through difficult countryside and sometimes through territory in private jurisdiction where the authorities were actively hostile. The inquisitors also had to carry with them a large number of copies of the edict of faith for distribution, as well as “all the files, books and registers of witnesses touching that district,” and lists of anyone who might have been punished in the churches of the area, in case the sanbenitos needed to be renewed.
Perhaps the only consolation was that the inquisitor, accompanied by a secretary and a constable (alguacil), was undertaking real pastoral work. In his visitation of 1553 the inquisitor of Llerena went to twenty-five towns, and in that of 1554 to twenty-two: the former journey lasted six months and the latter four. In Galicia in 1569 and 1570 the visitations lasted eight months, but by the 1580s it was possible to cut the period down to three. In Toledo in 1541 and 1542 the period was ten months, but by the late century had been reduced to four. Journeys had to be made in good weather and not in harvest time: the months chosen were therefore normally between February and July.
The many months spent traveling show that visitations were a vital part of the inquisitorial presence, and could take up almost half the time of an inquisitor. Moreover, in visitation years the majority of those punished might be out in the villages rather than in the tribunal’s place of residence, so that few actual trials would take place. Between 1552 and 1559 the tribunal of Llerena sentenced an average of 122 persons a year on visitations, and managed to get about 800 ducats a year in fines. Against these gains were to be set the disadvantages that the offenses punished were mostly petty; the money raised was never sufficient even to cover salaries; conflicts might arise between the inquisitor who stayed behind and the one who went visiting; and business would pile up during absences (in 1590 the Llerena inquisitors refused pointedly to undertake a visitation, even though directed to do so by the Suprema, because of the urgent cases pending in the tribunal).18 Not surprisingly, by the early seventeenth century visitations were practiced in few of the tribunals, save for special areas such as the realm of Granada, where it was felt that vigilance over the Morisco population was needed.
In any case, visitations palpably failed to impose fear of the Inquisition on the Spanish people. The sheer impossibility of one inquisitor being able with any degree of frequency to visit the vast areas involved meant that in practice visits were restricted to larger centers of population from which fines might more easily be raised. Add to this the infrequency of visitations after the early sixteenth century, together with the fixing of tribunals in the cities, and we get a picture of a rural Spain that was largely out of touch with the Inquisition. “This valley,” a correspondent wrote in 1562 from the Vall d’Arán in the Catalan Pyrenees, “does not know the Holy Inquisition.”19 The Galician countryside and villages, we are told, almost never saw the Holy Office.20
This gulf between the Inquisition and much of rural Spain was, moreover, even greater than appears at first sight. Faced by the temerarious appearance in their midst of an outsider demanding to know their private sins and public errors, the rural communities responded with their own wall of silence.21 Was the inquisitor of Barcelona in 1581, Dr. Caldas, simply being naïve when reporting after his visitation that he was surprised at how few denunciations there were?22 It had been ten years since the last visitation to the archdiocese of Tarragona. Yet after four months visiting twenty-three towns (including very large ones such as Igualada, Cervera, Tarragona and Vilafranca), Dr. Caldas obtained no more than fifty-three petty denunciations.
The very nature of the denunciations in these and other Catalan towns leads irresistibly to the conclusion, not that villagers used the Inquisition to play off scores against each other, but that many rural communities solidly rejected the interference of the Inquisition. Five denunciations to Dr. Caldas were against familiars; one involved alleged bestiality “twelve years ago”; one was against a man for saying “ten years ago” that simple fornication was no sin; one involved a woman having said thirty years before (she was now dead) that there was no heaven and hell. In town after town, in this and other visitations, there was silence.
It is possible (though not likely) that the Catalans were different. Five months of a visitation in 1590 produced exactly five cases: a monk who expressed himself badly in a sermon, a priest who admitted sodomizing a woman, a man for disrespect at mass, two shepherds for bestiality.23 Year after year in the 1580s the Barcelona tribunal kept apologizing to the Suprema for the tiny number of prosecutions: “it is not negligence on our part that there are no more cases” (1586), “we have made every effort, so that it is not negligence that there are no more cases” (1588).24 The inquisitors reported in 1623 that edicts of faith were now seldom read in Catalonia.
They produce few denunciations, and this year we were almost resolved not to publish the edict in this city, because for the last four years not a single person has come to the tribunal in response to the edicts. And in 1621 we visited the regions of Girona and Perpignan, and even though it was ten years since the last visitation and both are large towns, there were only four or five denunciations, two of them trifling; and if we read the edicts every year the only fruit would be that people would lose their fear of and respect for the censures.25
In some communities the number of cases could be high. There were undoubtedly parts of Spain where old scores were paid off when the inquisitors came to call. The high figure of 240 denunciations in the diocese of Burgos in 1541 may possibly have reflected tensions between sections of the population.26 But in compact and stable communities, where there were few or no minority groups to victimize, the Inquisition was pushed aside as an irrelevance. In Morisco areas the people were willing to denounce themselves under the terms of edicts of grace, but when edicts of faith were proclaimed their community solidarity made them mute.
This perspective of the activities of the inquisitors inevitably modifies some long-held theories about the impact of their work. In his classic history, Henry C. Lea summed up his informed opinion of the tribunal: “The real importance of the Inquisition is not so much in the awful solemnities of the autos de fe, as in the silent influence exercised by its incessant and secret labors among the mass of the people.”27 The picture we have seen, which could with further research explore the length and breadth of the country, is of a complete absence of any “incessant labors” among the people, and an absence therefore of any power to influence their behavior and culture.
Secrecy was not, it seems, originally a part of the inquisito
rial framework, and early records refer to public trials and a public prison rather than a private (“secret”) one. But by the beginning of the sixteenth century “secrecy” became the general rule and was enforced in all the business of the tribunal. It was an application of a principle—confidentiality—that in time became a fundamental practice of all policing systems. The various Instructions of the Inquisition, although set down in print, were for restricted circulation only and not for the public eye. One consequence of confidentiality was that the public was left in ignorance of the methods and procedure of the Inquisition. In its earlier period this helped the tribunal by creating reverential fear in the minds of wrongdoers, but later on led to the rise of hostility based on a highly imaginative idea of how the tribunal worked. Modern police systems, aware of the need to defuse hostility, tend to cover up their methods and to release only carefully controlled information. The Inquisition did not release any information at all, and logically had to suffer the brunt of slanders from its enemies. The natural outcome of this ignorance could be seen during the debates in the Cortes of Cadiz in 1813, on the projected decree to abolish the Inquisition. If the defenders of the tribunal relied on the argument of a mystical and mythical unity given to Spain by the tribunal, its detractors relied almost completely on legendary misapprehensions about the entire structure and function of the institution (see chapter 15 below).
The outside world may have been kept uninformed, but internally the flow of information was almost impeccable. The administrative and secretarial apparatus of the tribunal took care to set down on paper even the most trifling business. Thanks to this, the Spanish Inquisition is one of the few early modern institutions about whose procedure an enormous amount of documentation is available. Like any judicial court, it needed paperwork in order to survive: the struggle to establish precedents and to keep written evidence of privileges forced officials to record everything, including disagreements among themselves about policy options. Fortunately, a good part of this documentation has survived, making it the first European security organization that we can study adequately through its own records.
Those records, however, are no more nor less trustworthy than the context within which they were drawn up. Like bureaucrats of any era, the inquisitors were anxious to emphasize their successes, of which the most striking demonstration—one that has remained embedded in the standard image we have of the tribunal—was the auto de fe.
The ceremony of an auto de fe has a literature all to itself.28 Among the Spaniards it began its career as a religious act of penitence and justice, and ended it as a public festivity rather like bullfighting or fireworks. To foreigners it always remained a thing of impressive horror and fear. Their journals and letters written while on tour in Spain reveal both amazement and disgust at a practice that was unknown in the rest of Europe. We have the direct testimony of two of Philip II’s aides. One of them, the Netherlander Jean de Vandenesse, was present at the great auto de fe of Valladolid in October 1559. He went afterwards out of curiosity to see the executions and was shocked. Twelve accused, among them four nuns, were burnt at the stake; two were burnt alive. “It was distressing to see,” he limited himself to commenting.29 A generation later, the Fleming Jean Lhermite, who attended an auto in the company of Philip II at Toledo in February 1591, went after the auto to see the executions and described the proceedings as “a very sad spectacle, distressing to see.”30 It was no doubt unpleasant to see clergy presiding over the killing of condemned persons, but the public execution of criminals in other countries was not very different from an auto de fe, and more frequently outdid the auto in savagery. Indeed, few countries had so savage a record of executions as that from which Vandenesse and Lhermite hailed.
Foreigners were also, like the French ambassador the marquis of Villars, who attended the Madrid auto de fe of 1680, puzzled by the contrast between the often irreligious behavior of Spaniards in their daily life and the intensity of the auto ceremonial. Were Spaniards both irreligious and at the same time profoundly religious? And was the auto a typical expression of Spanish mentality, as bullfights were later assumed to be? Did Spaniards revel in blood?
The way we consider an auto de fe has all too often been dictated by the Inquisition itself, because historians have always consulted the large number of printed accounts it issued after its ceremonies, and relied for visual authenticity on just one famous image, the massive canvas devoted to the auto of 1680. Printed accounts are rare for the sixteenth century and became common only from the seventeenth. Texts as well as engravings were conveniently supplied by the tribunal, which used them to draw attention to itself as the main player in the drama and wished readers to admire its power. In the painting of 1680 we are invited to marvel at the great persons, including royalty, nobility and senior clergy, who preside over the session and awe us by their presence. We are also asked to learn from the humiliation of the condemned persons who parade before us in their costumes and meekly submit to their punishment. All the information is supplied exclusively by the Inquisition. May we not suspect that the story is somehow being manipulated in order to influence us?
The reality, it turns out, is that public autos had only a tiny role in the overall drama of the Inquisition. Uncommon in the early sixteenth century, after the Protestant scare of the mid-century they became infrequent again, virtually once-in-a-lifetime events except in areas where there were periodic outbreaks of persecution. Smaller tribunals, particularly those without conversos and Moriscos in their district, could seldom afford to have them. This was regrettable, as an inquisitor of Barcelona commented in 1560, because “I certainly think autos necessary in order to induce fear both among foreigners who come here, and among the people of this country.”31 By the early seventeenth century public autos were rare in Barcelona. “This Inquisition,” the inquisitors explained to the Suprema, “is unique in Spain in that it does not celebrate autos with the same pomp and decency as in other Inquisitions, and this Inquisition is very poor, so that what used to be done in public autos is now more conveniently done in some church.”32 Nevertheless, there were tribunals that held autos de fe more frequently because of particular local circumstances. We find, for example, the tribunal of Granada holding fifteen autos between 1549 and 1593 (one every three years), that of Murcia holding ten between 1557 and 1568 (one a year), and that of Córdoba holding seven between 1693 and 1702 (one every eighteen months): it was formerly Islamic territory, where the higher profile of Moriscos provoked more persecution. For the most part these autos were not public, but small sessions conducted inside a church.
Apart from its purpose of punishing heretics, the ceremony of the public auto was an attempt by the Inquisition to assert its presence in the context where most Spaniards conduct their social life: in the streets. The streets were the traditional setting for all the celebrations, ceremonies and entertainments of the people. When public festivities such as Carnival took place, people from both town and country would throng in and entertain themselves around the setting of the central spectacle. Spaniards enjoy a holiday. Virtually all social celebrations were under the control of the community and the town authorities, with the collaboration of the Church. The Inquisition, which could not always count on the cooperation of these bodies, attempted to add its ceremony to the many others that already filled the festive year.
Far from being a reflection of the religious inclinations of Spaniards, the public auto in the sixteenth century was the premeditated imposition of a ritual that had no roots whatever in the community. People came to see it precisely because it was a colorful ceremony that did not form part of their normal faith, religion and everyday existence. It was, above all, a novelty: in the first seventy years of the tribunal the auto was a drab event that had little appeal to the public. There were no lengthy ceremonials presided over by clergy in solemn robes assisted by officials and nobility wearing garments of office. Instead, there was little more than a simple religious rite, directed by a handful of
clergy, to determine the penalties for arrested heretics. The ceremony was not necessarily even held on a holiday (as it was later), clear proof that only a marginal role was assigned to participation by the public. In Barcelona, the first recorded auto de fe of this type took place in mid-December 1487, when a small column of fifty accused persons was escorted out of the Dominican convent near the port and up the street to the Plaça del Rei, outside the offices of the Inquisition, where a small ceremony of “reconciliation” took place. It was a cold morning, and it is doubtful whether the procession attracted much curiosity.