by Henry Kamen
The auto had a long evolution and by no means played the central role it is often credited with having. Though the inquisitors certainly wished otherwise, it would seem that even on a holiday (with which public autos were subsequently planned to coincide) the people were not necessarily interested in the religious ceremonies of the Holy Office. The problem was not new; it existed also for other religious festivities. In the course of the sixteenth century the Church authorities made enormous—and, from some of the evidence available, often fruitless—efforts to gain control of holidays such as Carnival, Easter and Midsummer’s Eve. A century later, in Holy Week of 1650, the bishop of Barcelona denounced “many persons who with little fear of God and little care for the sovereign mysteries not only ignore them but even, with no respect and great contempt, bring benches, chairs, gifts, snacks, meals and other refreshments, thereby introducing profanity and scandal into the temple of God. And in the churches and streets they scoff and sneer at the priests and the devotions, when they should with tears and profound sorrow be weeping.”33 This does not sound much like a pious Catholic country.
The same risk of popular indifference was run by the inquisitors, who in the mid-sixteenth century attempted new ways of gaining attention, such as holding street processions before the great day. Perhaps the most convincing evidence of apathy is the fact that Spanish artists (as we have seen) took no notice of autos de fe. An event that is supposed to have had so great an impact on people would surely have left us with some visual record. There is none. The only image available for the format of an auto in its early years is a wholly imaginary composite painting done at the end of the fifteenth century by Pedro Berruguete, showing St. Dominic presiding over a session of the medieval French tribunal. Nor, apart from incidental mentions, is there any attention given to the subject by writers of the time.34 The scarcity of images is especially lamentable, because we may suspect that a successful public auto de fe could have had all the ingredients of a carnival. Not until two hundred years after the foundation of the tribunal do we find an attempt to capture the auto in art. A diligent researcher has uncovered details of a contract made in 1660 by the Inquisition of Seville to have a grand painting done of the auto de fe held in the city that spring, “in order that it be on record for all time.”35 It may be that other, similar paintings were commissioned by tribunals, but we have no record of them (apart from the famous canvas of the 1680 auto). It raises the possibility that no adequate effort was made, in either the preceding or the subsequent centuries, to project an image of inquisitorial power.
In the mid-sixteenth century, at last, fundamental changes occurred. During the previous generation, autos de fe were so infrequent that they all but disappeared in the greater part of Spain. The discovery of Protestant heretics in 1558, and the willingness of the crown to assist in their punishment, encouraged Inquisitor General Valdés to draw up a set of rules for the staging of a flamboyant new style of public ceremony that would reaffirm the power of the Inquisition and reinforce its presence, not simply by asserting a presence in the streets but even more by insisting on the collaboration of those in authority. A new, ceremonial auto de fe was deliberately invented by him and his associates as a way of imposing the power and presence of the Inquisition. They may even have based themselves on the Berruguete painting, a true case of life imitating art. The inquisitor general’s status had been waning in government circles, and he was anxious to recover the initiative.
The first of the new-style “public” (also known as “general”) autos was held in the presence of the court in Valladolid in May 1559. Philip returned in time to be able to preside over another in the city in October. The ceremony attracted much attention, for it had almost fallen into disuse in Spain. It was practiced frequently up to the 1520s, during the great persecution of conversos by the Inquisition, but in the following generation few autos were held. The king himself had never seen one.36 The two Valladolid displays were intentionally impressive.
The ceremony of 8 October was staged by the Inquisition in the main city square of Valladolid, with the assisting public crowding around the sides. The proceedings began at six a.m., when a formal sermon was preached. Then the king, baring his sword before the inquisitors, took an oath to uphold the authority of the Holy Office. The central spectacle was a procession of penitents whose sentences were read out by the officiating inquisitors. This occupied the most time: those who repented were publicly accepted back into the bosom of the Church, while the unrepentant were condemned to the relevant punishments. Solemn mass brought the proceedings to a close. The whole ceremony lasted some twelve hours, and we are informed (by the Inquisition) that there were several thousand spectators. Through its combination of faith, punishment and spectacle, the auto was deliberately devised as a piece of theatre that would both impress and deter.
The rules were enshrined for the first time in the inquisitorial Instructions of 156137 and subsequently elaborated upon. It was decided that autos be held on feast days, so as to ensure maximum public participation. All the leading officials and elite were expected to assist. As it turned out, very often they refused to come because of inevitable conflicts over precedence. At the first and therefore most symbolic of all the new-style autos, that of May 1559 in Valladolid, the judges of the royal court of Chancillería refused to attend, even though royalty was present, because they were not given due precedence. To prevent such things happening in future, the inquisitors insisted from the 1590s onwards that public authorities must be present. In practice, at most autos, whether public or private, few or no officials attended,38 bishops preferred not to get involved, and local quarrels often kept the local nobility away.39 The rules for arranging autos laid special emphasis on the promotion of the Inquisition’s own status, a fact that immediately led to conflicts with officials of both Church and state who, at the opening of the proceedings, were asked to take oaths of loyalty to the Inquisition. The inquisitors also feared—as happened quite often—that they would be upstaged at their own ceremony by officials of other jurisdictions claiming precedence, and were careful about whom they invited.
The presence of the king, for example, was exceptional. It is sometimes mistakenly claimed that the auto was made use of by the crown to assert its superior position and strengthen its power through ceremonial theatre.40 That may have occurred within a certain context in the New World,41 but was completely untrue of Spain. In the peninsula, kings had no worries about asserting their power and did not make a habit of assisting at autos, which in any case were few and far between and very quickly went out of fashion. Ferdinand and Isabella never went to any autos, nor did Charles V who, however, could not refuse turning up at the one held in his honor in the city of Valencia in 1528 to celebrate his one and only visit there.
The case of Philip II reveals something about the politics of autos. He attended three of them in Spain in his lifetime, or one every twenty-four years (hardly the zeal of a fanatic), and at none of them did he witness any executions.42 The only king of his dynasty to really travel throughout the peninsula, it was inevitable that he should be induced to attend an auto at some point during his travels. The autos he attended were specially arranged by the Inquisition so that the king could not refuse to come to them, the event being in effect exploited not by the crown but by the Inquisition, in order to emphasize its authority. The 1559 auto of Valladolid was specially laid on by Inquisitor General Valdés to boost his standing; that of 1564 in Barcelona was, as mentioned below, an attempt by the tribunal of that city to assert its standing against the city authorities of Barcelona. Philip attended an auto of the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon in 1582 as a gesture of support to the Church of Portugal, a realm he had just occupied militarily. His last attendance at an auto was in 1591; prior to that, he had not been at one in Spain in nearly thirty years. Writing in 1591 to his daughter Catalina, duchess of Savoy, he noted: “Your sister will give you an account of an auto de fe of the Inquisition that we saw yesterday, you
have never seen one.”43 It is a telling detail: a Spanish princess eighteen years old, daughter of an alleged fanatic, who had never in her lifetime witnessed an auto!
In Catalonia the regional authorities, and even the king’s own viceroy, habitually boycotted all autos. “Neither the viceroy nor the consellers tend to come to the auto,” the inquisitors of Barcelona reported in 1560; though, one of them added a few years later, “the viceroy says that he would do so if His Majesty orders him to.”44 Philip II never gave the order, and took no interest in asserting the royal presence at such events. His presence at the auto in Barcelona on 5 March 1564 was a lucky break for the desperate inquisitors, who at last got the opportunity to put on a right royal ceremony. Philip II was staying for a month in the city exclusively in order to welcome his bishops returning from the Council of Trent, and could not avoid the occasion, which this time counted on the cooperation of the city with the Inquisition. Subsequent kings turned up to an auto once during their reign. Philip III made an appearance at one in Madrid on 6 March 1600; and Philip IV, exceptionally, asked for one to be held in 1632 as a gesture of thanks for his wife’s recovery from ill health. The last great public auto of the Habsburg dynasty was that of 1680. It also represents probably the most extreme form of the mythology of power that the Holy Office wished to present.
We may be guided with confidence by a notable who was present: the French ambassador, the marquis de Villars. He sat through part of the proceedings and later commented cynically in his memoirs: “it makes one think that all this great machinery for the punishment of a few poor beggars, is more a wish for display on the part of the inquisitors than a real zeal for religion.”45 It was certainly a period for display, when the crumbling Spanish monarchy, desperate to proclaim its successes to the world, arranged for triumphant murals to be painted in the Escorial to celebrate the victory of Lepanto one hundred years before. In the same vein, the decaying Inquisition persecuted conversos while at the same time conniving in their rise to the highest offices of state.46 The grandiose oil painting of the auto by Rizzi was yet another display calculated to impress, but also to deceive viewers into assuming typical an event that was wholly exceptional.
At the very period that the incidence of heresy was trailing off, the public ceremonial of the Inquisition became even more elaborate, a true art form of the Baroque. What is more, the tribunal in this later period took great care to distribute information sheets after the holding of an auto, so as to assert its achievements. The event might certainly draw an audience, as in Valladolid in 1559, when the new king’s return to Spain (after an absence abroad of five years!) was the star attraction. The problem is that there is no reliable information on how many people came because of the auto, and we cannot place too much trust in the printed statements issued by the inquisitors. All modern accounts ask us to believe that the Holy Office had an amazing power to draw crowds. “The main streets were crammed,” one historian informs us, “with people dressed in their Sunday best, and resounded to the singing of choirs.” “The people massed along the route.”47 The only difficulty is that, apart from the testimony of the inquisitors themselves, no contemporary text or illustration supports this picture.
To set the matter in perspective, we must ask ourselves: whom did the people come to see? And where did they come from? Discounting the possibility that they came to see the inquisitors, we can understand that there was curiosity to see the people arrested by them. Over and above any other motive, however, people came to see the great ones of state. The pioneering autos in Valladolid in 1559 must have drawn visitors from far and wide, especially since the new king was making his first public appearance. Many spent the night prior to the autos sitting in the square to make sure they had a good place for the next day’s ceremony (public habits have changed not a whit over the centuries).48 People whose windows overlooked the square rented out available space. The impression given by documents is that those who lined the streets at such functions were normally those who lived in the city rather than outsiders, and they came to see what was happening rather than to show their religious zeal. Within the comparable context of public executions, a historian comments that “the crowds watching executions in pre-industrial Europe were mainly composed of city-dwellers.”49 Many, of course, thronged in from outlying districts if a festivity coincided with the day when an auto was to be held. But can we believe the Inquisition official who tells us proudly that the auto of 1610 at Logroño attracted some thirty thousand people from France, Aragon, Navarre, the Basque country and Castile?50 The town had a population of only around four thousand, making it highly unlikely that it had the resources to receive the stated number of visitors; it was an event, moreover, that went on for two days. The season was November, already cold up in the mountains and hardly the time for camping out in the streets.
After the 1560s the deliberate coincidence of autos with holidays, together with their novelty and striking ritual, certainly drew in (as was the intention) crowds of sightseers. The event also attracted attention in Europe, where the first engravings of the ceremony, done by Dutch and German artists, appeared in the same decade. The best-known Dutch engraving, which purports to be of a Valladolid auto of 1559, is, foreseeably, a wholly imaginary composition, depicting neither the town square nor the presence of any public other than well-heeled nobles. As it happens, the new ceremonial auto had a relatively short life span. In Castile it had its heyday during the years of repression of Protestants, from 1559 to the 1570s.51 In those same years, it was exported to the other tribunals of the monarchy. The first ceremonial auto to be held in Barcelona was staged in the public square of the Born in 1564, to celebrate a visit by Philip II.52 The Catalans gave permission for it to be held, though they were not happy about it; the inquisitors for their part made desperate efforts to round up sufficient accused to put on a good show. The first great auto to be held at Logroño was in 1570. The first at Palermo (Sicily) was in 1573, when “for the first time” (a contemporary reports) a special procession was held. After the 1570s, it appears, ceremonial public autos were rare in Castile.53
Accounts sponsored by the Inquisition suggest, nonetheless, that some of the autos had a good audience up to the last years of the seventeenth century. Lea accepts their testimony and mentions “the population pouring in from all the surrounding district, camping out in the fields, in the vast crowds described with so much pride in the relations of the great autos.”54 The sources for his information, quite frankly, cannot be trusted. Some locations chosen, such as the Plaza Mayor in Madrid or the Born market in Barcelona, were natural theatre spaces where it was possible to erect temporary scaffolding for the public. Every documented case, however, suggests that the main attraction for visitors were the personalities attending rather than the religious ceremony.
In every print issued by European engravers, attention is focused on the great personages present and the public is wholly invisible. In Limborch’s volume on the Inquisition, only a handful of people, mostly children, watch the long, winding procession of accused and friars. Not a single Spanish print exists to show us any active participation by the public. If there were many people about in the streets, they were sightseers and visitors who came because of the relevant feast day, or to see the processions, but not necessarily because of the auto. Feast days were the occasion, throughout Spain, of massive social gatherings, and of considerable migration from the countryside to the urban center where celebrations were held. This might happen up to thirty or forty times a year, according to region,55 and because of it the inquisitors after 1560 were most anxious that their ceremony should coincide with feasts in order to have a public.
In practice, religion was not always the driving force of festivities (any more than it is today in the famous street processions of Holy Week). The complaint by the bishop of Barcelona in 1650, quoted above, shows people preferring to entertain themselves rather than sit through endless rituals. And autos were undeniably tedious! Common sense
suggests that if a ceremony began at about seven a.m. in the open air on a cold November morning, commenced with a long sermon, and then continued for another ten hours with interminable reading of the sentences of just eleven accused persons,56 as happened in the auto at Logroño in 1610, any members of the public who came out of curiosity would have vanished long before the end.
It is logical to conclude that the relevant attraction was most likely the feast day or the presence of royalty, not the auto. Existing prints give some indication of a public presence only when the theme was the street procession put on by the inquisitors, and even then the presence of sightseers was limited.57 In a rare example of a Spanish painting representing an auto, that of Seville on 13 April 1660, the public is unequivocally represented, but in a manner confirming their “absolute indifference” to the proceedings of the auto. No public presence is depicted in the auto itself. Soldiers, ladies, gentlemen, beggars, salesmen are all there in the streets adjacent to the proceedings, but carry on their activities without “the slightest indication of piety, concern or preoccupation before the drama unfolding only a few meters away.”58
In short, the public auto as an instrument of religiosity and fear seems to have been a fantasy created by the Inquisition’s own propaganda and subsequently by those who, for one reason or another, exaggerated its impact. The tribunal made efforts to print and distribute information about it, especially in the period—the eighteenth century—when they had all but disappeared.59 The auto subsequently entered the world of creative fiction, where it flourished with great success. In his Candide (1759) Voltaire had a brilliant satirical comment on one held in Portugal: