by Henry Kamen
The Sarmiento statute had been firmly rebutted by the highest authorities in Church and state in Castile, and never took effect in its hometown, Toledo. In the same way, subsequent expressions of racialism in Spain were regularly contested. Anti-Semitism continued to exist, but the zeal for statutes was very strictly confined to a handful of institutions in a limited number of regions. Over and beyond institutions, ordinary people from all walks of life practiced discrimination only if it fell in with their other social preferences; otherwise, for generations and without conflict they made friendships, married, went shopping and lived with neighbors who may or may not have had different racial antecedents.
It follows that there is no reason whatever to present the concern for blood purity as a sort of mania that had taken hold of Spaniards and that, by extension, formed part of the cultural package they took with them to the American colonies.28 The idea of an obsession continues all the same to inspire some works of scholarship, in which wholly fictitious premises about blood purity inform otherwise valid research.29 Problems of race in the New World, it would be fair to stress, developed in special circumstances brought about by the colonial regime,30 and ideas favoring cultural discrimination did not have Spain as their only origin. Colonial settlers of all nations, including Britain31 and France32 and not just Spain, had prejudices about racial and blood purity.
As it happened, in Spain any attempt to introduce limpieza rules in the half century after the foundation of the Inquisition always encountered bitter opposition. The statute of 1488 in San Clemente in Bologna likewise led to a decade of disturbances, including the murder of the college’s rector in 1493.33 Conversos may with reason be identified as the leaders of the opposition. Nevertheless, when we look closer at some of the cases, unexpected questions arise which cast in doubt the opinion that Spain was somehow in the grip of a racialist frenzy. Why did so few public institutions adopt statutes? Why did they take so long to do so? Why, above all, did the Inquisition not exclude conversos? And why, once certain bodies adopted statutes, did they not observe them?
We shall return to these questions in a moment. They need to be considered in the light of the famous exclusion statute adopted by Toledo cathedral in 1547.34
An attempt was made unsuccessfully in 1536 to introduce a statute of limpieza into the chapter. The new archbishop in 1546, Juan Martinez Siliceo, did not mean to fail. Born of humble peasant stock, Siliceo had struggled upwards to carve out a brilliant career for himself. He had studied for six years at the university of Paris and later taught there for three. Called home to teach at Salamanca, he soon attracted enough attention to be appointed tutor to Charles V’s son, Philip, a post he held for ten years. When the see of Toledo fell vacant in 1546 he was appointed to it. The new archbishop was preoccupied with more than just his freshly won dignity. He had been haunted all his life by the shadow of his humble origins, and drew his pride from the fact that his parents had been Old Christians.
One hundred years after the statute of Pero Sarmiento in the very same city of Toledo, Siliceo decided to revive a controversy that was long since dead. In his new post he felt in no mood to compromise with converso Christians whose racial antecedents were in his mind the principal threat to a secure and unsullied Church. When, therefore, in September 1546 he discovered that the pope had just appointed a converso, Dr. Fernando Jiménez, to a vacant canonry in the cathedral, and that the new incumbent’s father had once been condemned by the Inquisition as a judaizer, he refused to accept the appointment. Siliceo wrote to the pope protesting against his candidate, and sounding a warning that the first church in Spain was now in danger of becoming a “new synagogue.” The pope withdrew his man, but Siliceo thought this was not enough and proceeded to draw up a statute to exclude all conversos from office in the cathedral. A chapter meeting was hurriedly convoked on 23 July 1547, and with ten dissentient votes against twenty-four, a statute of limpieza was pushed through.
The voting figures show that not all the canons had been present at the meeting. An immediate protest was raised by the archdeacons of Guadalajara and Talavera, Pero González de Mendoza and Alvaro de Mendoza, both sons of the powerful duke of Infantado, and both Old Christians. Condemning the injustice and impropriety of the statute, they criticized the archbishop for not calling all the dignitaries of the cathedral to his meeting, and also threatened to appeal to the pope. The controversy that followed gives us an invaluable summary of the views both of opponents and of supporters of the limpieza statutes.
According to the explanatory document drawn up by Siliceo,35 the policy of limpieza was now practiced in Spain by the military orders, by university colleges and by religious orders. The existence of a converso danger was proved by the fact that the Lutheran heretics of Germany were nearly all descendants of Jews. Nearer home, “the archbishop has found that not only the majority but nearly all the parish priests of his archdiocese with a care of souls . . . are descendants of Jews.” Moreover, conversos were not content with controlling the wealth of Spain. They were now trying to dominate the Church. The size of the danger was shown by the fact that in the last fifty years over fifty thousand conversos had been burnt and made to do penitence by the Inquisition, yet they still continued to flourish. To emphasize this argument, the archbishop declared that of the ten who had voted against his statute, no fewer than nine were of Jewish origin, five of them coming from the prolific converso family to which Fray García de Zapata belonged.
Apart from untruths and exaggerations, Siliceo was not giving the whole picture. It is true that among the most hostile to the statute were the dean of the cathedral, Diego de Castilla, and the humanist Juan de Vergara, both conversos; but at least six other canons who shared their hostility were Old Christians. What distinguished these canons (two of whom were, as we know, of the noble house of Mendoza) and the dean was their irrefutably aristocratic lineage, in contrast to Siliceo, who was of humble origin. In the protest drawn up by the dissentient clergy36 the complaint was made that, first, the statute was against canon law; second, it was against the laws of the kingdom; third, it contradicted Holy Scripture; fourth, it was against natural reason; and, fifth, it defamed “many noble and leading people of these realms.” The sting lay in the fifth article. As Siliceo and his opponents well knew, few members of the nobility had not been tainted with converso blood. By promoting a limpieza statute, therefore, the archbishop was obviously claiming for his own class a racial purity that the tainted nobility could not boast.
There was immediate highly placed opposition to the statute outside the cathedral. The city council of Toledo protested energetically against the measure, which (they said) threatened to bring back the civil wars of the Comunidades to the city. Previous archbishops, they added, had refused to exclude conversos, and Cardinal Tavera in 1536 had ordered no action on a proposal to introduce a statute that year. If the present statute were allowed to proceed, it would arouse “hatreds and long-standing enmities.” The councilors knew of what they spoke. Their petition, addressed to Prince Philip early in August 1547, managed to secure approval in the city council only after a heated debate.
The prince, then ruling Spain in his father’s absence, was deeply concerned. He sent a special judge to Toledo to look at the situation on the spot. He also asked the president of the council of Castile, the highest court in the land, to send him an opinion from both the judicial and the Church point of view. The council of Castile gave its legal verdict on 25 August. “The statute,” they ruled, “is unjust and scandalous and putting it into effect would cause many problems.” They recommended that the prince order it to be suspended for the moment. To obtain a Church point of view, the president of the council, who happened also to be bishop of Sigüenza, called a meeting of his clergy. They ruled that “the statute in its present harsh form raises grave problems, and putting it into effect would cause even more.” It should be suspended until further consultation.37
The prince accordingly suspended the statute
in mid-September 1547, and referred the matter to Charles V in Germany. Siliceo was furious. At the end of September he protested to his former pupil against the suspension, “decreed without hearing us.” For the moment, he was silenced. The statute was condemned by the University of Alcalá as a source of “discord sown by the devil.” Toledo had a long history of conflict involving conversos, and officials were concerned to soothe passions.
Not till nine years later was the statute allowed to proceed. The pope issued a formal approval in 1555, and in August 1556 the royal council ratified it.38 Philip II was absent in the Netherlands and took no part in the decision, nor is there reason to believe that he had changed his mind on the matter. A statement that I once mistakenly attributed to him, to the effect that “all the heresies that have occurred in Germany and France have been sown by descendants of Jews, as we have seen and still see daily in Spain,” was not his but comes from a letter to him from Siliceo.39 There is of course clear evidence that there were some anti-Semitic views among his advisers. It is less well known that substantial elite opinion, in Castile as well as in the government, opposed such views. Philip’s biographer Cabrera de Córdoba, in referring to the Siliceo statute as “detested by those who decide the principles of good government,” reported that the Cortes had an “undying hatred” of the measure.40 His statements are a reflection of the impressive opposition, within the very heart of Castile, to the notion of limpieza.41
Confirmation of the Toledo statute in 1556 came only a few months before Siliceo’s death the following year. As we shall see, the confirmation was a pure formality and the statute was consistently ignored. The see of Toledo soon had serious problems of its own, with the suspension of its new archbishop, Carranza (see chapter 8), on a charge of heresy. By mid-century, above all thanks to the new alarm over Lutheranism, concern for limpieza was put on the back burner and exclusion statutes came to a virtual stop.42 The only notable exception was the Inquisition, which decided at last—one hundred years after its foundation—to enforce limpieza in the recruitment of its officials through a royal order of December 1572.
In view of the frequent misapprehension that Spain had been taken over by a racialist mania, the year 1572 is a good point at which to stop and look at the available evidence. Anti-Semitism would continue to prevail throughout Castilian society, as it did in many other regions of Europe, but the relevant question is: to what extent was it backed up by statutes of blood purity? The “statute communities,” as they were called, were at this period limited to the six university Colegios Mayores; some religious orders (Jeronimites, Dominicans and Franciscans); the Inquisition; and some cathedrals (Badajoz, Córdoba, Jaén, León, Osma, Oviedo, Seville, Sigüenza, Toledo and Valencia). Virtually only one non-religious sector was affected: the medieval military orders (the Order of Santiago adopted one as late as 1555), and their administrative organ the council of Orders. Private legal arrangements, such as property entails (mayorazgos), might also lay down conditions of limpieza. A sprinkling of town councils and confraternities, mainly in Castile, also had rules calling for exclusion.
Though limited in number, some of these bodies were of crucial importance. From the sixteenth century, entry into a Colegio Mayor became the essential stepping-stone to a career in the higher echelons of both Church and state in Castile.43 If conversos were excluded, they would find the upper level of professions closed to them. In the same way the encomiendas of the military orders were one of the most desirable ways of attaining noble status, so that decisions about limpieza by the council of Orders were critical. Exclusion from the military orders would be a severe blow to the social pretensions of a converso family. The panorama, evidently, looked bleak for people of Jewish origin.
The real picture was far more complex. First, the very small number of institutions with statutes (less than a sixth of Spain’s sees, for example) refutes any idea of a limpieza mania sweeping the country. Time and again, other bodies cited this fact in defense of their own refusal to follow the trend. The statutes, moreover, existed almost exclusively in Castile. In Catalonia, for example, limpieza rules were unknown before the period of the Counter-Reformation, when they crept in together with the other baggage of Castilian ecclesiastics.44 Even in Castile, they were rarely found in city councils, despite considerable pressure in favor from anti-converso factions. In brief, the statutes were never part of the public law of Spain and never featured in any body of public law. Their validity was restricted only to those private institutions that had them.
Second, they were always controversial and were never widely accepted. In Rome Pope Paul IV approved the Toledo statute, but he did it out of policy and not principle. The same pope in 1565 refused to approve a new statute for the cathedral of Seville and condemned discrimination as contrary to canon law and ecclesiastical order. His successor, Pius V, was a consistent enemy of the statutes. In Spain a continual debate, directed largely against the statutes, was unleashed. The tide of controversy was stemmed by the Inquisition, which in 1572 tried to forbid any writings either for or against the statutes.
Third, even where statutes existed Spaniards found it possible to impose them with a typical laxity that in many cases undermined their existence. Philip II was no exception. When he felt it necessary, he appointed converso Church dignitaries even if it contravened a statute. In some dioceses the rules were regularly bypassed. In Toledo in 1557, one year after the government confirmed the famous statute, a converso was appointed as canon of the cathedral.45 In the see of Sigüenza in 1567 the bishop decided to ignore the statute in existence when making appointments.46 In 1589 Philip II appointed a priest of known converso origin, Gabriel Márquez, to be his chaplain in the same cathedral of Sigüenza. When it was pointed out that the statute forbade this, Philip suspended the appointment but ordered that the statute be looked into.47 In the Inquisition itself, the rules were often disregarded, and clergy of known converso origin were employed as assessors.48 In the late century familiars were often (cases are documented in Murcia and Barcelona) appointed without any proofs at all, though there continued to be exceptional efforts in some cases.49
Despite the prohibitions in the military orders, known conversos were accepted. In 1552 Prince Philip, then regent of Spain, appointed his friend Ruy Gómez (not a converso) as president of the military order of Calatrava. Ruy Gómez remarked confidentially to a friend that the current president of the order of Alcántara “is a New Christian.”50 When king, Philip continued to tolerate conversos in the military orders. He bestowed a knighthood of Santiago on a famous Flanders war veteran, but knowing that this contravened the rules he ordered that no inquiry be made into his genealogy.51 The few city councils with statutes seem not to have paid attention to the rules except when it served their purpose. Toledo city in 1566 adopted a statute that was (exceptionally) approved by the government. Despite it, converso families like the Franco, Villareal, Herrera and Ramírez continued freely throughout the period to occupy posts.52 Philip subsequently refused to approve limpieza statutes for other cities. In Cuenca, which had a long history of antagonism to conversos, converso families during the late sixteenth century in fact occupied 50 percent of the posts on the city council.53 A leading judge of the time, Castillo de Bobadilla, observed that conversos in Castile had free access to municipal posts; and another jurist, Pedro Núñez de Avendaño, commented that conversos were sometimes in theory excluded from “public offices, although in practice they are freely admitted.”54 The gap was vast between adoption of statutes and their implementation.
Fourth, where statutes existed, those who wished to avoid them did so by bribes or by fraudulent proofs. Rich conversos, complained some members of the Cortes of Madrid in 1551, “obtain sanction from Your Majesty through bribes, and in this the state is much prejudiced.”55 Bribes persisted at every level, but it was the false proofs that emerged as the biggest preoccupation. False proofs implied corruption and scandal. It was this, possibly more than any other single aspect
, which excited elite opposition to the statutes. Men of undocumented origins could rise to the highest offices in the land (a case in point was Philip II’s own private secretary Mateo Vázquez de Leca)56 if the right money was paid.
Throughout these years, then, there was a profound ambivalence about the implementation of exclusion. It had been the practice in the early years of the Inquisition to “rehabilitate”57 conversos accused of lesser offenses. Those who had completed their penitences and paid a sum of money could obtain from the Inquisition a certificate restoring their former status. Since they had not been judged guilty of heresy, they did not incur any major penalties. It meant—despite a commonly held opinion to the contrary—that mere punishment by the inquisitors did not necessarily prejudice one’s career. The practice coincided with an accepted principle of canon law.
Conversos, whether or not made to do penitence by the Inquisition, might in principle be excluded from many important bodies; in practice, they were capable of acceding to most public offices in Spain. In 1522 the Inquisition stipulated that the universities of Salamanca and Valladolid should not grant degrees to conversos. But in 1537 Charles V decreed that in colleges where New Christians were being excluded, “the constitutions of founders be respected.”58 Throughout the period, conversos can be found both as students and as professors in the major universities. The situation in the non-Castilian regions was no different. The father of the Murcian humanist Francisco de Cascales was burnt at the stake as an alleged judaizer in 1564. Cascales opportunely exiled himself from the city. In 1601, however, he returned to Murcia and was appointed to the chair of grammar there. Everybody knew about his origins but no questions were asked.59