The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fé; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.

  The auto was singled out in Gothic novels because of the flames in which scores of tender virgins perished. Perhaps the high point of this fictional drama was arrived at in Verdi’s great opera of 1867, Don Carlo, in which the auto de fe is presented as “a grandiose spectacle that demonstrated the somber horrors of absolutist Spain.”60 In those same years, Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov was also evoking an image of blood with the Grand Inquisitor burning “almost a hundred” victims in one day, “in the presence of the king and the whole population of Seville.”

  The real-life public auto, in contrast to these fictions, was a religious spectacle with an active life of little more than a decade. It was marginal to the religious and cultural life of Spaniards, who may have gone to the ceremony because it coincided with a feast day, but its rarity after around 1580 was notable. A diarist from Barcelona, Jeroni Pujades, had to wait until he was thirty-four before he managed to see his first public auto in 1602, and then had to wait another twenty-five years to see his next.61 Seville, famous for being the first center of inquisitorial activity and scene of frequent autos during the sixteenth century, held only four public autos during the seventeenth, an average of one every twenty-five years.62 In some cities, of course, autos were frequent because the accused had to be brought out of prison to have their sentences decided, but the ceremony in such cases was private and correspondingly less imposing. The most impressive auto of all was held towards the end of the lifespan of the Habsburg dynasty, in 1680, and stood out by the mere fact of its rarity.

  By the eighteenth century the lack of accused and the rising cost of public ceremonies meant that public autos gradually fell into disuse. The new Bourbon king, Philip V, was the first Spanish monarch to refuse to attend one, in 1701, on the firm direction of his tutor, the marquis of Louville.63 Twenty years later, he seems to have attended one held in Madrid on the second Sunday of May 1721, when one man and one woman were burnt alive, and sixteen others were also sentenced.64 By the second half of the century only private autos were in use by the Inquisition.

  11

  GENDER, SEXUALITY AND WITCHCRAFT

  One must look for evidence, according to law, of an offense having been committed.

  —PEDRO DE VALENCIA, ON THE STORIES OF THE WITCHES, 1611

  Thanks to the efficient way in which it looked after the paperwork of judicial testimony, the Inquisition preserved for posterity an amazing variety of information about the private, family and religious life of a sector of the population that normally features little in state records: women. The broad lines of inquisitorial activity did not discriminate between men and women, and there is no basis for attempting to look at its proceedings in terms of gender prejudice. Of the two thousand cases that came before the tribunal of Valencia in its first half century, for example, exactly half were women and half men.1 Similar figures, from which no significant conclusions can be drawn,2 exist for other tribunals. The tribunal of Barcelona during its lifetime dealt with some six thousand cases, of which two-thirds were men.3 There were, however, some areas of concern where the officials of the all-male Holy Office had to deal directly with women as women, and where it is fair to ask whether the gender difference was relevant or not.

  In pre-industrial Europe, structures of power outside the noble class were normally in the hands of men, but in traditional society male dominance was not as universal as we might think.4 It is common practice to quote literary sources as proof of masculine disdain for women, and if we limited ourselves to them we would indeed encounter overwhelming evidence for it.5 Among the Spanish clergy (and, inevitably, many inquisitors) there were notoriously misogynistic attitudes. But there were also other clergy during the age of the Counter-Reformation who inquired impartially into domestic roles. Cristóbal Acosta affirmed (1585) that the duty of a man was to “honor woman and never speak ill of her; employ the eyes in looking on her, the hands in serving her, the property in giving her gifts, the heart in making her happy.” Marco Antonio de Camos (1592) maintained that the wife is “neither superior nor inferior but equal in love and companionship.”6

  Beyond the printed page of tracts that called their value in question, real life often gave women a role that opened doors. In complex urban societies they tended to be more disadvantaged, but in the simpler societies of village and countryside, they had a greater share in tasks and their status was less restricted.7 The superior position of men was based on two decisive roles: the private one of family head, normally allotted to the patriarchal figure; and the public one of warrior and provider, protecting the ideals and beliefs on which society rested. Women (with an occasional exception among the upper nobility) were never able successfully to challenge the male monopoly in these two areas. Their formal roles, accepted in the literature of the time, were three: as unmarried women (including widows), as wives, or as religious persons. But at various stages of their life cycle, and in select communities of Europe, they were able to exercise choices that gave them considerable freedom of movement within the apparently firm restrictions imposed by tradition. As recent studies have indicated,8 the space available to some women in early modern Europe was more extensive and liberating than often supposed. In the Spanish countryside, they baked the bread, worked the fields, gathered in the harvest, tended sheep and ran lodging houses and taverns.9 In regions such as rural northwest Spain, the Galician women had to fulfill tasks made necessary by the absence of their husbands as fishermen or as seasonal emigrant workers in Castile.10 Moreover, as parents, lovers or property owners, women everywhere were often in a position of authority that contradicted the formal gender role allotted to them.11 They might attempt, as the Aragonese writer María de Zayas noted, “to make themselves more secure.”12

  Though authority in Church and state was firmly in the hands of men, they did not consistently wield it against women. Court prosecutions for crime in Europe do not show a direct bias against women.13 The Inquisition, likewise, acted overwhelmingly against men and had no particular predisposition against women. Even in the Mediterranean, the man-wife relationship was not necessarily based on conflict, nor even on an absolute authority exercised by one over the other, but on a fulfillment of complementary roles.14 Many tracts of the time reveal that cooperation and love between the married couple was both desired and practiced.15 In parts of France and Spain it was common for the wife to control the household money, which the husband was by custom obliged to hand over out of his wages. These attitudes referred primarily to the domestic sphere; when it came to public roles, women not of the upper classes continued to have a restricted role.

  The role of a woman as wife, in charge of children and household, made her also the transmitter of family traditions and culture. She passed on the language of her forebears, their beliefs and attitudes, their preferences in food.16 In the case of the forbidden cultures of Christian Spain, whether Muslim or Jewish,17 this could bring women to the attention of the Inquisition. No one knew this better than the exiled philosopher Juan Luis Vives (see chapter 6), who commented after the dishonor suffered by his mother at the hands of the Inquisition: “my memory of her is the most sacred of memories, and whenever I think of her I embrace and kiss her in spirit.” Perhaps because it is commonly accepted that women had this special role of transmission, no systematic studies have been done of the evidence mounted against them in Inquisition trials.

  However, though the Inquisition had no special misogynistic agenda, the high profile of women both in popular religion (as beatas) and as visionaries brought them unerringly to the attention of the Church authorities and the Holy Office. In the early sixteenth c
entury, a period when messianic movements could be identified in many parts of Europe, Castilian women were notably active as spiritual influences.18 Their ideas were part of a stream of medieval (and predominantly male) spirituality that, in Europe, went back to the Franciscans, the Lollards and the Hussites, and that surfaced, in the sixteenth century, through the Anabaptists. Educated Spanish clergy who knew something of the drive against heresy in pre-Reformation Europe would have been aware of the richness of the spirituality, whether male or female, that still circulated in religious circles.19

  Women, of whatever social level, traditionally entered religious foundations when young (as virgins dedicated to Christ) or when mature and widowed. The best-known case in Spain’s great age is Teresa of Avila, whose life and writings have been exhaustively studied, and who incidentally also had a brush with the Inquisition (see chapter 6). Women with an inclination for religion outside a foundation often chose to be what Spaniards termed a beata; they lived apart, taking some vows (normally of chastity and poverty), and maintaining some contact with a male religious order.20 Very often a rural beata might develop a relation (and a reputation) with a nearby village, which might lead to one or both parties exaggerating her significance. They might venerate her as a saint, or she might claim to work miracles and see visions.

  It was the sort of context that could call for the intervention of an outside disciplinary authority, such as the bishop or the Inquisition. Bishops preferred religious women to work within the structure of the parish or the diocese, and by the same token they attempted to impose the rules of the cloister on nuns.21 The Inquisition had other motives. Some prominent religious women got involved in political issues, and their cases took on a very high profile indeed, with the Inquisition and with other relevant bodies.22 Religious men in a political context also suffered the same complications.23 By contrast, most rural “religious” men and women whose cases the Inquisition investigated never emerged from obscurity nor—despite claims by some writers24—can the Inquisition be seen as attempting to pick specifically on feminine spirituality. The image of spiritual women being cowed by the Inquisition, scholars remind us, is no longer valid. “Even at the height of the Catholic Reformation in Spain, laywomen were integral in defining their own religious experience. The wide range of outlets for devotion meant that women’s religious activity was much more independent than traditionally recognized.”25 Some visionaries were disciplined, others were not. In a typical case in the diocese of Toledo in 1697, village passions were stirred up because of allegations that a local girl was not only working miracles but also having an affair with a local priest. The parish priest took the matter to the Inquisition, which after an investigation decided that nothing was wrong, the girl was both virtuous and pious, and there was no evidence of a liaison.26

  Whether they dealt with men or women, the inquisitors always acted as mediators rather than as initiators of discipline. They declared and might try to impose the rules, but when it came to receiving denunciations, they relied entirely on the collaboration of the public. If there were denunciations, the nature of conflict in small societies made it inevitable that women would form a good proportion of those summoned before the Holy Office. The context within which the Inquisition moved, however, made the issue of gender irrelevant. Men no less than women were examined for religious or sexual attitudes, and the real forum within which both were disciplined was either the family or the community (an entity in which women participated on comparable terms with men), or even the local religious community. Men too were disciplined: countryside religion operated by men, in the form of itinerant clergy and pious hermits,27 was frowned upon and sometimes prosecuted because it spurned the control exercised by religious orders and the diocese.

  Beatas and visionaries were not consistently the victims of repression. The mere fact that they could be found in such quantity shows that they enjoyed both success and fame. The proven sanctity of St. Teresa acted as a spur to towns and religious orders anxious to achieve a Teresa of their own, and throughout Spain holy women were encouraged and tolerated. At the end of the sixteenth century a prominent Jesuit lamented “the great number of deluded women to be seen in our time in many of the principal cities of Spain.”28 The inquisitors collected information when necessary, but in the end got tired of having so much paper on their hands about holy women who neither achieved heights of sanctity nor did anything very wrong, and they burned much of what they had.29 There was no doubt of the abundance of paperwork. Fortunately for historians, much of it has survived, and thanks to it we have the benefit of insight into visionaries such as Lucrecia de León.

  Aged twenty-two when arrested by the Inquisition in Madrid in 1590, Lucrecia was a seer whose prophecies and dreams stimulated a small aristocratic circle at court.30 Her dreams, coming in the wake of the disaster of the Spanish Armada (1588), took on a verisimilitude not to be found in those of other visionaries such as the soldier-prophet Miguel de Piedrola. She saw a Spain ravaged and invaded, a Philip too feeble to cope. Some dreams were uncanny prognostications. In December 1587, eight months before the event, she saw the defeat of the Spanish fleet by the English. Subsequent dreams, as narrated to her confidants, presented an image of the kingdom which undoubtedly reflected concerns felt and expressed by very many people. In a dream in the spring of 1590 she was told by one of her dream figures: “Philip does not know, and if he knows he does not want to believe, that his enemies will soon be in his lands. He wants to spend his summers in the Escorial, but he should beware, it is not the time to retire there without fear.” “Beware,” warned one of the figures, “for this is the time of thunder.” Another dream a week later presented Philip as a tyrant who “has destroyed the poor,” and who would be punished by God through the agency of Elizabeth of England. Philip lived in his palace, “his eyes bound and his ears shut,” surrounded by a Spain in ruins: “the hour has come to endure purgatory in Spain.”31

  Lucrecia’s dreams, which seem to have stopped shortly after her arrest, were limited in their impact to a small group of people and were not therefore accorded too much significance by the government. But the inquisitors took a more serious view. They saw that Lucrecia was repeating calumnies which echoed those spread about by William of Orange’s Apology.32 She spoke of “sins committed by the king in killing his son and queen Elizabeth [Valois].” The king had “taken the land from the peasants.” God would punish. “God wished to remove him and his son, and there would remain no one of his seed, and the Moriscos and heretics would destroy Spain.” People had been repeating these things for several months, if not years. The king himself seemed to accept the criticisms and calumnies as normal.

  Both laity and clergy were affected by another major sphere into which the inquisitors intruded: their sexual life. It was an area that attracted the attention of authorities in both Protestant and Catholic Europe. Some writers suggest that women featured as deliberate victims of rules set by men.33 It would, as we have already indicated above, be difficult to demonstrate that the inquisitors had a specific agenda in matters related to sexuality. Their attitude was derived exclusively from their own cultural background and the general practice of Church and society; different inquisitors came to different conclusions, whether in matters of sodomy, bigamy or witchcraft. In matters of clerical sin, they were unusually lenient with those who shared the cloth, but even this partiality was simply an extension of the deeply ingrained social belief that Eve was the temptress, not Adam. When the lovely young Paula Ponsa began, in 1589, her long career of love among the clergy of her parish in Premià (Barcelona), the inquisitors found that the community unanimously blamed her rather than the priests, who were accordingly not disciplined.34

  Concern over public behavior was no monopoly of Spaniards. Attempts to control sexual morality affected both men and women, looming large, for example, in the program of the Reformed churches in Scotland.35 In Sweden the prosecution of sexual offenses increased in early modern times as a con
sequence of the Reformation.36 At the same period the Counter-Reformation also put sexual discipline at the top of its program. Bishops after Trent made extensive efforts in Spain to impose the official view on the sanctity of matrimony. In Barcelona after 1570, for example, licenses to marry could not be issued without both parties being formally instructed in religion, and the bishops issued decrees against the common practice of young people living together after betrothal.37 The Inquisition, for its part, enforced post-Tridentine morality by attempting in some areas to stamp out the widespread and seemingly traditional conviction that sexual intercourse was by itself no sin.

  In pre-industrial Europe, a low level of religious awareness and the persistence of traditional moral practices combined to produce far greater sexual freedom among all age groups than is commonly imagined.38 This was reflected in the remarkably widespread view that sex between two independent adults (“simple fornication” was the phrase identified by the inquisitors) was not wrong if it did not go against other commitments.39 By extension, concubinage was not wrong, nor was it wrong for an unmarried adult to have sex with a prostitute, since payment created a licit contract.

  Both laity and clergy, both men and women, seem to have accepted this type of sexual freedom. The inquisitors of Toledo were already occupied with the problem when from 1573 the Suprema encouraged other colleagues to pursue the offense. In practice, Toledo remained the only tribunal to dedicate itself consistently to the matter. Prosecutions of people maintaining that simple fornication was no offense constituted a fifth of all its cases in 1566–70, and a quarter in 1601–5.40 An indication that the imposition of the new morality was, in some measure, an imposition of urban rigor on rural laxity comes from Galicia, where statements about fornication (such as that of Alonso de Meixide, who maintained “that in his village it had never been a sin to have carnal intercourse between unmarried men and women”) were more commonly found among the peasantry. This was so much the case that the inquisitors there explained in 1585 that “the reason why we are less strict with fornicators is because we know from experience that most of those we arrest in these lands, where there is a great lack of doctrine especially in the rural areas, speak from stupidity and ignorance and not from a wish to commit heresy.”41