The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  A central figure in controversies at Salamanca University during the 1570s, Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra, was a known converso who had been appointed to the chair of Hebrew there in 1559. The same university had not hesitated, a generation before (in 1531), to appoint the converso Pablo Coronel (a relative of Abraham Seneor) as professor of Hebrew. Although discrimination of some sort may have been practiced at Salamanca, the university was always opposed to formal exclusion. When in 1562 the rector proposed introducing a limpieza statute, the university assembly voted that “before introducing it we should consider carefully the many types of problems that might arise.” Finally, “it was resolved that for the time being it should not be introduced.” When another attempt was made to introduce a statute in 1566, Philip II himself stepped in to prohibit it.60 Six years later, the Inquisition instructed the university to drop further discussion of the issue.

  There can be no doubt of the threat that limpieza could represent, as we know from many cases in the documentation. Though it was practiced in only a limited number of institutions, these were so significant that a barrier to status mobility was frequently created. In theory, canon law limited the extent to which the sins of fathers could be visited on their sons and grandsons. Limpieza adopted no such limits. If it were proved that an ancestor on any side of the family had been punished by the Inquisition or was a Muslim or Jew, the descendant could be accounted of impure blood and disabled from the relevant office. Applicants might have to present genealogical proofs of the purity of their lineage. The fraud, perjury, extortion and blackmail that came into existence because of the need to prove limpieza was widely recognized as a moral evil. If candidates could not offer convincing genealogical proofs, comisarios were appointed to visit the localities concerned and take sworn statements from witnesses about the antecedents of the applicant. They examined parish records and collected verbal testimony. In an age when written evidence was rare, the reputation of applicants lay wholly at the mercy of local gossip and hostile neighbors. Bribery became necessary.

  If an applicant was refused a post with the Inquisition, the tribunal never gave any reason, with the result that the family of the man became suspected of impurity even if this was not the case. Some applicants had to go through legal processes which might last several years, with all the attendant expenses, before a proper genealogy could be drawn up. Others resorted to perjury to obtain posts, thus involving themselves and their witnesses in heavy fines and infamy when the tribunal discovered their offense. Frequently applicants would be disabled from employment simply by the malicious gossip of enemies, because “common rumor” was allowed as evidence.61 Genealogy became a social weapon.

  None of this, however, created an insuperable barrier to entry into the elite or the nobility. Formal barriers, in reality, existed only for entry into the military orders of Castile. To obtain an encomienda in any of these, one had to have one’s lineage checked by the council of Orders in Madrid. This bureaucratic obstacle could be bypassed only if the king himself intervened (as, we have seen, he sometimes did). Otherwise it obviously opened up a hornet’s nest of inquiries and slanders. Entry into the titled nobility, by contrast, was a process unaffected by any limpieza rules. The standard treatise on nobility, the Summa nobilitatis (1553) of Juan Arce de Otalora, affirmed expressly that all converts from Judaism and Islam “may without any discrimination be admitted on equal terms to the rank and immunities of nobility.”62 He pointed out that it was well known that many illustrious persons in Spain were of distant Jewish origin. However, he added, those among the converts who were guilty of heresy could be excluded. The approach coincided fully with that of the Inquisition.

  For the Inquisition was indubitably at the center of the picture. Its punishments contributed to bringing shame on the accused, and shame or infamy was beyond doubt the worst punishment imaginable in those times. In the ordinary criminal courts, humiliating punishments that brought public shame (vergüenza) and ridicule were often feared more than the death sentence, since they ruined one’s reputation in the local community and brought disgrace on one’s family and relatives. “Infamy” affected honor, religion and even “race,” in the view of those Spaniards who tried to lump together impurity, infamy and Jewishness. A writer of the time of Philip IV, Juan Escobar de Corro, in his Treatise on the Purity of the Nobility (c. 1632) equated the words “purity” (that is, freedom from Jewish blood) and “honor,” and argued that the stain on an impure lineage was ineffaceable and perpetual.63 This went beyond mere statutes of exclusion and advanced towards unmistakable racialism. “Race and infamy,” it has been pointed out, “were components of a larger complex of social, political and clannish attitudes.”64

  Though some lesser punishments in the rules of the Inquisition allowed the accused to apply for “rehabilitation” after the penitence had been performed (see chapter 3), so that no stain of infamy remained, there were also humiliating penalties (such as flogging), which might affect “honor” more enduringly. Perhaps the most demeaning punishment in the Inquisition, however, was being condemned to wear the sanbenito, worn also by accused before they were burnt at the stake. As we have seen (chapter 4), wearing it brought up associations both of shame and of Jewish heresy.

  Early in the sixteenth century the practice was begun of hanging up the sanbenitos of offenders after the period for which the garment had to be worn. This practice was standardized by the official Instructions of 1561, which stipulated that “all the sanbenitos of the condemned, living or dead, present or absent, be placed in the churches where they used to live . . . in order that there may be perpetual memory of the infamy of the heretics and their descendants.”65 The declared aim of displaying the garments was therefore to perpetuate the dishonor of condemned persons, so that from generation to generation whole families should be penalized for the sins of their ancestors. Since those accused in the early period were usually punished for judaizing, the ruling clearly identified Jewishness with infamy. It became general practice to replace old and decaying sanbenitos with new ones bearing the names of the same offenders. In the Dominican priory of Santa Catarina in Barcelona, a count made in the year 1600 found that the walls were covered with an enormous accumulation of more than 538 sanbenitos, most apparently dating to the fifteenth century and some totally perished.66

  The garments were widely hated not only by the families concerned but also by the districts on which they brought disrepute. The city of Logroño (Navarre) in 1570 successfully petitioned the Suprema to be allowed to remove from its churches the great number of sanbenitos belonging properly to churches in other regions.67 In the rising against the Spanish government in Sicily in 1516, the sanbenitos in the churches were torn down and never replaced. Even clergy participated: in 1603 the parish priest of the Catalan frontier town of Cotlliure (now in France) helped one of his parishioners destroy a sanbenito of his grandfather.68 Wherever there were public disturbances in Hispanic territories, one of the first targets of rioters were the exposed garments.

  One of the obvious uses of this system was that family details asked for in job applications could be tested against the evidence of the garments. As matters turned out, in the end it mattered not at all whether a man had been burnt or simply made to do penance in an auto de fe. If his sanbenito survived, his descendants could still suffer public disability. Though the Holy Office clearly helped to perpetuate infamy, from very early on it also tried to restrict the rumor and slander associated with it, and in numerous cases prosecuted those who attempted to defame their neighbors. Ironically, it therefore became an offense, punishable by the Inquisition itself, to call someone a “Jew.” In 1620, for example, Antonio Vergonyós, a familiar and priest of Girona, was banished for a year from his village for slandering a neighbor as a “Jueu.”69

  The way in which the Inquisition equated race, heresy and shame was commented on frequently by observers. In the peninsula the tribunal took every care to ensure that sanbenitos be exposed. This wa
s done in many regions until the end of the eighteenth century, and travelers never ceased to comment on them. As late as 1821 a Spanish exile living in England, Blanco White, recalled seeing them when a boy:

  There exists among us a distinction over blood [i.e., blood purity] that I believe to be peculiar to Spain. The great mass of our people accepts it so blindly that the most humble laborer considers its lack to be a fount of misery and degradation that he is condemned to transmit to all his posterity. The slightest stain of African, Indian, Moorish or Jewish blood is a blot on the whole family up to the final generation, and not even the passage of years can remove the knowledge of this fact, nor can the obscurity and low origins of those who suffer this disgrace cause it to disappear.70

  Was the concern over heresy and purity of race peculiarly Spanish? In an influential essay written nearly a century ago, a French scholar suggested that Spaniards, influenced by the Inquisition, felt heresy (and not simply Jewishness but any deviation from the traditional Catholic norm) to be a “blot” on the purity and honor of the nation. He cited the case of Juan Díaz—a Spanish friend of the reformer Bucer—who was assassinated in Germany by his own brother Alfonso, a Catholic who feared that his brother’s heresy would bring shame on his family and on all Spain.71 To the objection that the incident can hardly be taken as indicative of a national obsession with honor, we must also recognize that some people at the time readily identified heresy with impurity. The violent reaction against the Valladolid Protestants in 1559 was provoked in part by a popular rejection of foreign ideas. “Before that time,” commented one contemporary, “Spain was clean [limpia] of these errors.”72 When the prisoners Carlos de Seso and Fray Domingo de Rojas were being brought back to Valladolid, reported the inquisitor general, “in all the villages through which they passed, crowds of men, women and children came out to see them, calling for them to be burnt. The friar73 was very afraid that his relatives would kill him on the journey.”74 When young Anna Enríquez, daughter of the marquesa of Alcañices and sister-in-law of Francisco Borja, was condemned by the Inquisition in those same weeks to wear a sanbenito for her part in the Protestant group of Valladolid, Borja used his influence to have the sanbenito part of her sentence annulled: the public “honor” of her family was thereby saved.

  Concepts of blood and honor could become linked, especially among elite families and institutions that were by nature exclusivist, to notions of the purity of race and religion. Spain was not the only country to contain such ideas, either then or today. It is doubtful, however, if this type of concern for limpieza was widespread. When Philip II’s officials, as we have seen above, employed the heretic hunter Alonso del Canto to procure the return to Spain of select persons,75 concern for purity and honor seems not to have been mentioned at any point as a motive.

  As we have seen, the statutes calling for purity of blood were never the law of the land in any corner of Spain, a situation that made it possible for many prominent persons to attack them. However, the fact that there were powerful supporters of the statutes led to continual controversy. The theme was an ongoing source of friction between the Society of Jesus and the Inquisition. We have seen that Ignatius Loyola, when a student at Alcalá in 1527, fell under suspicion because of his strict religious practices. This was the very year that the province of Guipúzcoa made into law an earlier ordinance of 1483, forbidding entry to conversos. At this time Ignatius indignantly denied any knowledge of Judaism, since he was a noble from a province (Guipúzcoa) which had hardly known Jews. Some years later, however, he declared while dining with friends that he would have considered it a divine favor to be descended from Jews. When asked his reason for saying this, he protested, “What! To be related to Christ Our Lord and to Our Lady the glorious Virgin Mary?” On another occasion a fellow Basque who was a friend of his spat when he mentioned the word “Jew.” Ignatius took him aside and said, according to his biographer, “‘Now, Don Pedro de Zárate, be reasonable and listen to me’—And he gave him so many reasons that he all but persuaded him to become a Jew.”76 The incidents show that Ignatius had managed to free himself from one of the major social prejudices prevailing in Spain.

  Like its founder, the Society of Jesus refused to associate itself with racialism. When in 1551 the Jesuits opened a college at Alcalá without the permission of Archbishop Siliceo, the latter issued an order forbidding any Jesuit to act as a priest without first being personally examined by him. It was no secret that the reason for this order was Siliceo’s hostility to the presence of converso Christians in the college. Francisco Villanueva, rector of the college, wrote indignantly to Ignatius about this: “It is a great pity that there seems to be nobody willing to leave these poor people anywhere to stay on earth, and I would like to have the energy to become their defender, particularly since one encounters among them more virtue than among the Old Christians and hidalgos.”77

  The first provincial of the Jesuits in Spain, Antonio de Araoz, impressed, however, upon Ignatius that Siliceo had promised to visit the order with great favors if it would only adopt a statute of limpieza. He also warned that the good name of the Society in Spain would be harmed by the knowledge that there were New Christians in its ranks. Despite this, Ignatius refused to change his attitude. All through the controversy in Spain about the statutes of limpieza, and up to his death in 1556, he would not allow his order to discriminate against conversos. When conversos did apply to enter its ranks he advised them to join the Company in Italy rather than in Spain. When talking of the limpieza cult he would refer to it as el humor español—“the Spanish whim”; or, more bitingly on one occasion, el humor de la corte y del Rey de España—“the whim of the Spanish king and his court.”

  All the superiors of the order after Loyola were firm in their opposition to the statutes. The immediate successor of Ignatius was Diego Laínez, superior from 1558 to 1565. The fact that he was a converso aroused opposition to his election from sectors of the Spanish Church. In a letter to Araoz in 1560 Laínez denounced limpieza as el humor o error nacional (the national whim or error) and demanded total obedience from the Spanish Jesuits. In 1564 a Jesuit wrote from Seville to Laínez, lamenting the divisions within the order based on lineage. “These distinctions do much harm, especially among those who recall that golden time of affection at the beginning.”78 Laínez’s successor was a Spaniard of unimpeachable Old Christian blood—Francisco Borja. On one occasion the prince of Eboli, chief minister of Philip II, asked Borja why his Company allowed conversos in its ranks. Borja pointed out that the king himself employed known conversos:

  Why does the king keep in his service X and Y, who are conversos? If His Majesty disregards this in those he places in his household, why should I make an issue about admitting them into the service of that Lord for whom there is no distinction between persons, between Greek and Jew, or barbarian and Scythian?79

  By the 1590s, however, the Jesuits in Spain found that recruitment was falling off as the whispering campaign initiated by its enemies succeeded in presenting the Society as a party of Jews. Moreover, by a process of selection, the chief posts in the Spanish province were going to Jesuits who favored exclusion. The result was the success of pressure for a modification to the constitution of the Society, and at the General Congregation held at Rome in December 1593 it was voted to give way to Spanish pressure and exclude conversos from membership in Spain.

  The Jesuits, essentially an international order, found themselves being torn apart by the issue.80 Those who were not Spaniards objected to the way in which they were being dragged into provincial Spanish matters. Among the few voices raised in protest from Spain was that of Father Pedro de Ribadeneira.81 Due almost exclusively to his single-handed efforts to keep the Society to the path laid down by Loyola, a reaction to the vote of 1593 took place in the order. It led to a decree in February 1608, by which all conversos who had been Christians for five generations were allowed to enter the Society. The 1608 decree was nominally only a concession, but in
practice it involved the complete reversal of the decision of 1593, since most conversos in Spain had in fact been Christians for five generations, as a result of the compulsory conversions of 1492.

  Another leading Jesuit, Juan de Mariana, had meanwhile in his treatise De rege (On Kingship) (1599) penned an uncompromising attack on racial discrimination. “The marks of infamy,” he urged, “should not be eternal, and it is necessary to fix a limit beyond which descendants must not pay for the faults of their predecessors.”82 The opposition of the Jesuits was not unique. Though a few other sees followed Toledo in adopting limpieza, the statutes were never universally accepted. Of the sixty cathedrals in Spain, as we have seen, possibly no more than twelve ever had statutes. Many that had them never operated them. Leading clergy penned attacks on the system of discrimination. Melchor Cano appears to have criticized it in a paper of 1550, and another Dominican, Domingo Valtanás, attacked the statutes in a book published in Seville in 1556.83 In Rome, prominent Spaniards spoke openly against limpieza. This persuaded Diego de Simancas, bishop of Zamora, to publish in about 1572 his Defence of the Toledo Statute, possibly the last substantial defense of the doctrines of Siliceo.

  As a final example of the way in which many Spaniards rejected blood purity prejudice, we may take the case of the priest Diego Pérez de Valdivia, apostle of the Counter-Reformation in Catalonia. A close disciple of the Andalucian spiritual leader Juan de Avila, he was not only of known converso origin but had the ill fortune to spend months in the cells of the Inquisition of Córdoba, where he was accused, among other things, of stating that conversos were better people than non-conversos, and that “it is a sin to observe the rules of limpieza.”84 None of it affected his career. Freed from confinement, he moved in 1578 to Barcelona, where he worked on the closest terms with the bishop and the Inquisition, and became the city’s most famous preacher.