by Henry Kamen
13
THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE
The causes of the ruin of those people are: ignorance both in faith and in customs; not having anyone to teach them, since the parish priests are like the rest; not having the Inquisition.
—REPORT TO PHILIP II ON THE PEOPLE IN THE SPANISH PYRENEES, 1581
From the sixteenth century onwards, visitors agreed that the culture of Spain’s people was irremediably Catholic. As evidence they cited the endless religious processions, the ubiquity of clergy, exaggerated number of saints’ days and holidays, universal attendance at mass, the piety of public personages, and the autos de fe of the notorious Inquisition.1 There seemed to be almost no deviation from the path of traditional Christianity. By the end of the sixteenth century, Spaniards found to their relief that despite possible threats from the Muslim and Jewish presence and the rise of the Reformation in Europe, they had been saved from the ravages of heresy, unlike England, which had suffered upheavals, and France, which had endured a destructive civil war. Church writers congratulated themselves on living in perhaps the only Christian country in Europe.
To what did they owe this good fortune? The answer they offered was invariably the same: the Inquisition! The king himself, Philip II, declared in 1569: “Had there been no Inquisition there would have been many more heretics in Spain.”2 A contemporary, Fray Felipe de Meneses, thought that had the Holy Office not been active with its “smoke from the sacred fire,” the country might now be in the hands of heretics.3 At the same time, however, religious leaders were none too confident about the state of the people entrusted to their care. An inquisitor suggested in 1572 that Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, should have its own Inquisition:
If any part of these realms needs an Inquisition it is Galicia, which lacks the religion that there is in Old Castile, has no priests or lettered persons or impressive churches or people who are used to going to mass and hearing sermons. . . . They are superstitious and the benefices so poor that as a result there are not enough clergy.4
The Inquisition was duly introduced shortly after. “If the Holy Office had not come to this realm,” a Galician priest wrote later, “some of these people would have been like those in England,” namely, lost in ignorance and heresy. The comments underscore the often forgotten role of the Holy Office, not as a punisher of heretics but as an educator of the Christian people.
The apparently “Christian” culture of the people of Spain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries left much to be desired, since both clergy and people were equally ignorant of basic essentials. “Religion” ended up (as in other parts of Europe) as an extension of social discourse rather than a system of faith; it was, in other words, what you did rather than what you believed. Religion was the center of village activity, of community feeling, and of armed conflict. Rather than being only a list of beliefs and practices laid down by the Church, it was very much more, the sum of inherited attitudes and rituals relating both to the invisible and to the visible world.5 All sections of society, both in town and country, participated in the rituals, which on one hand determined leisure and work activity, and on the other hand assigned to people their roles and status within the community.
There was no essential contradiction between Spaniards being “Christian” yet at the same time having no real knowledge of Christianity. The clergy themselves were massively ignorant of the doctrines of the Church. Over much of Spain Christianity was still only a veneer.6 The religion of the people remained backward, despite gestures of reform by Cisneros and other prelates. It was still a period of vague theology, irregular religious practice, nonresidence of both bishops and clergy, and widespread ignorance of the faith among both priests and parishioners. Over vast areas of Spain—the sierras of Andalucia, the mountains of Galicia and Cantabria, the Pyrenees of Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia—the people combined formal religion and folk superstition in their everyday attempt to survive against the onslaught of climate and mortality. The standard religious unit was the rural parish, coinciding normally with the limits of the village. Over four-fifths of Spain’s population lived in this environment, beyond the reach of the big towns, to which villagers went only on market days to sell their produce. As religious reformers and inquisitors quickly found out, the rural parishes were close-knit communities with their own special type of religion and their own saints. They were also hostile to any attempt by outsiders—whether clergy or inquisitors or townspeople—to intrude into their way of life. “The nerve centre of everyday religion—the local community—was capable of maintaining its own identity while at the same time absorbing and adapting or rejecting what was offered by the reforms.”7
The community basis of popular religion explains not only attitudes to the Inquisition—which we shall touch on below—but also some seemingly non-Christian characteristics, such as the prevalence of anticlericalism. As in other Christian countries, very many Spaniards disliked their clergy.8 Some did so because of the obligation to support the Church through tithes, others because of the sexual activity of priests among their women, others quite simply because they hated both religion and clergy. Sacrilege in the form of physical attacks on clergy, churches and clerical property could be found at any time, notably in periods of civil disorder and banditry, when theft of silver and money from churches was also common.9
Anticlerical sentiments could be punished by the Inquisition if they seemed to call in doubt sacred aspects of the Church, but as a rule they only merited a reprimand. Among the accused we find Lorenzo Sánchez, notary of the Inquisition itself, saying in 1669 that “tithes are ours, and the clergy are our servants, which is why we pay them tithes.” Active hostility to religion fell into the category of sacrilege, as in the case in 1665 of Francesc Dalmau, a farmer of Tarragona, who was accused of going into the pulpit fifteen minutes before mass began and preaching ridiculous and absurd things until the priest appeared; it was also said that he habitually left mass for the duration of the sermon and that he ridiculed Holy Week ceremonies.10
Clergy recognized that the people were lax in their observance of religion, and woefully ignorant about their faith. In Vizcaya in 1539 an inquisitor reported that “I found men aged ninety years who did not know the Hail Mary or how to make the sign of the cross.”11 In the town of Bilbao, stated another in 1547, “the parish priests and vicars who live there report that one in twelve of the souls there never goes to confession.”12 In the north of Aragon, reported another colleague in 1549, there were many villages “that have never had sight of nor contact with Church or Inquisition.”13
The Holy Office was far from being the only institution interested in the religious life of Spaniards. Already by the late fifteenth century there had been three major channels through which changes were being introduced into peninsular religion: the reforms of religious orders, instanced on one hand by the remarkable growth of the Jeronimite order and on the other by imposition of the reformist Observance on the mendicant orders; the interest of humanist bishops in reforming the lives of their clergy and people, as shown by the synodal decrees of the see of Toledo under Alonso Carrillo and Cisneros;14 and the new literature of spirituality exemplified in García de Cisneros’s Exercises in the Spiritual Life (1500). As elsewhere in Catholic Europe, humanist reformers were well aware that theirs was an elite movement that would take time to filter down into the life of the people. Efforts were, however, being made by the orders. From 1518 the Dominicans were active in the remote countryside of Asturias. The principal impulse to popular missions came from the growth of the Jesuits in the 1540s. At the same time, several reforming bishops tried to introduce changes into their dioceses. It was an uphill task. In Barcelona, Francisco Borja, at the time duke of Gandía and viceroy of Catalonia, worked hand in hand with reforming bishops but commented on “the little that has been achieved, both in the time of Queen Isabella and in our own.”15
From the early sixteenth century a patient effort of evangelization was made.
In America in 1524 a group of Franciscan missionaries, numbering twelve in deliberate imitation of the early apostles, set out to convert Mexico. In 1525 the Admiral of Castile, Fadrique Enríquez, drew up a plan to recruit twelve apostles to convert his estates at Medina de Rioseco to Christianity.16 The problem in both cases was perceived as being the same: there were “Indies” of unbelief no less in Spain than in the New World. From the 1540s at least, the Church authorities became concerned not only with the problem of converting the Moriscos but also with that of bringing the un-Christianized parts of the country back into the fold. In Santiago in 1543 the diocesan visitor reported that “parishioners suffer greatly from the ignorance of their curates and rectors”; in Navarre in 1544 ignorant clergy “cause great harm to the consciences of these poor people.” Many rural parishes lacked clergy, particularly in Catalonia and the Basque country, where ignorance of the language made it difficult for priests to communicate with their flock. The immense confusion of jurisdictions presented a major obstacle: churches, monasteries, orders, secular lords, bishops, towns, the Inquisition—all disputed each other’s authority.
The piecemeal efforts to reform religion in the early part of the century were given a unity of purpose by the coming of the Counter-Reformation and the issue in 1564 of the decrees of the Council of Trent.17 Concerned to keep religious change under his control, the king in 1565 ordered the holding of Church councils in the principal sees of the monarchy. Subsequent proposals for reform involved the collaboration of the Inquisition. It was only at this late period—nearly a century after its foundation—that the Holy Office joined the effort to oversee the general religious practice of the people, and even then its contribution was small.18 The journeys made to villages by inquisitors were an attempt to remind people that the Holy Office existed, and were a tiny component of a very much broader program in which all sectors of the Church took part.
The inquisitors were not the only clergy to show their faces. Over the same period many bishops and clergy were also carrying out visitations of their dioceses and religious houses. The tasks did not necessarily overlap. Bishops were primarily concerned with getting good clergy and decent churches; the Inquisition was concerned with getting orthodox worshippers. Jesuits also entered the country in these years and made Spain into a mission field. “This land,” a canon of Oviedo wrote in 1568 to the superior of the Jesuits, Francisco Borja, “is in extreme need of good laborers, such as we trust are those in the Society of Jesus.” Another wrote in the same year to Borja: “There are no Indies where you will suffer greater dangers and miseries, or which could more need to hear the word of God, than these Asturias.”19 The mission field soon encompassed all of Spain. The Jesuit Pedro de León, who worked all over Andalucia and Extremadura, wrote that “since I began in the year 1582, and up to now in 1615, there has not been a single year in which I have not been on some mission, and on two or three in some years.” The need was stressed by an earlier Jesuit, reporting on the inhabitants of villages near Huelva: “many live in caves, without priests or sacraments; so ignorant that some cannot make the sign of the cross; in their dress and way of life very like Indians.”
By venturing into the mission field, the Inquisition began to take cognizance of some offenses that had formerly been poorly policed. The prosecution figures for Toledo (chapter 10) indicate beyond doubt that whereas in the first phase of its history the tribunal had been concerned almost exclusively with conversos, in the next century its attention was focused primarily on the remaining 99 percent of the population. Nearly two-thirds of those interrogated by the Holy Office in this later period were ordinary Catholic Spaniards, unconnected with formal heresy or with the minority cultures. The new policy of directing attention to Old Christians cannot be viewed cynically as a desperate move to find sources of revenue, since the prosecuted were invariably humble and poor, and the tribunal’s financial position was in any case better after the mid-sixteenth century.
Heresy was no longer the target. Its almost entire absence in much of Spain during the peak years of religious conflict in Europe can be illustrated by the diagrams of the activity of the Inquisition among Catalans shown in graphs 2a20 and 2b. The Catalans represented just over half of the cases dealt with by the Inquisition in those years. Yet allegations of heresy were never made against them. Instead, heresy accusations were limited to the French and others of non-Catalan origin, as shown in the diagram.
By its collaboration with the campaigns of bishops, clergy and religious orders among the native population, the Inquisition contributed actively to promoting the religious reforms favored by the Counter-Reformation in Spain. But its role was always auxiliary, and seldom decisive; it helped other Church and civil courts to inquire into certain offenses, but seldom claimed exclusive jurisdiction over those offenses. As a result, it is doubtful whether its contribution was as significant or successful as that of other branches of the Church. We have already seen that the attempt to make a direct impact through visitations was not fruitful. Because (as we have seen in chapter 9) prosecutions in the Inquisition came through pressure from below,21 the tribunal was in a peculiarly strong position to affect and mold popular culture, and the volume of prosecutions in some areas may suggest that it was carrying out its task successfully. The Holy Office, however, suffered from at least one major disadvantage: it was always an alien body. Bishops, through their parish priests, were directly linked to the roots of community feeling, and were able to carry out a considerable program of religious change based on persuasion. The Inquisition, by contrast, was exclusively a punishing body. It was operated, moreover, by outsiders (usually unable to speak the local language), and though feared was never loved. As a result, its successes were always flawed.
Graph 2. Tribunal of Barcelona, showing 1,735 cases tried over the years 1578–1635.
Graph A. (top) The offenses of 1,000 Catalans.
Graph B. (bottom) The 1,735 cases by national category.
The entry of the tribunal into the area of disciplining the Catholic laity can be dated with some precision. From the mid-sixteenth century reformist clergy in Spain, inspired in part by the Jesuits, became concerned about the low levels of moral and spiritual life. A few tribunals, led by that of Toledo, showed that they were willing to take action against non-Christian conduct. From the 1560s, prosecutions multiplied, not so much for actions as for purely verbal offenses. The inquisitors themselves classified these as “propositions” (that is, “statements”). Ordinary people who in casual conversation, or in moments of anger or stress, expressed sentiments that offended their neighbors, were likely to find themselves denounced to the Inquisition and correspondingly disciplined. A broad range of themes might be involved. Statements about clergy and the Church, about aspects of belief and about sexuality, were among the most common. In particular, persistent blasphemy and affirmations about “simple fornication” were treated seriously. The offense arose less with the words than with the intention behind them and the implicit danger to faith and morals.
We should be clear about the place of verbal offenses in traditional culture. In a pre-literate age, where only a minority could read or write, all important social affirmations—such as personal pledges or court testimony—were made orally. “Whole aspects of social life,” it has been pointed out for medieval Europe, “were only very imperfectly covered by texts, and often not at all. . . . The majority of courts contented themselves with purely oral decisions.”22 A man’s spoken word was his bond. Judicial evidence consisted of what some people said about others. By the same token, negative declarations—insults, slander—were usually verbal. Verbal statements directed against one’s neighbors and against God or religion were treated with severity (as they still can be today in many societies) by both state and Church authorities, for they disturbed the peace of the community. All legal tribunals of the day, and not only the Holy Office, therefore paid attention to the consequences of the spoken word. The inquisitors never went out looking f
or “statements,” since their job was not the wholly impossible one of regulating what Spaniards said. Nor were they trying to impose a form of social control, and they did not intrude into the personal conduct of people. In practice, it was always members of the public who, out of malice or (not infrequently) out of zeal, took the trouble to report offensive words. In short, “statements” were denounced from below; only then might there be prosecution from above.
Some historians suggest that a word spoken out of turn in Golden Age Spain could entail terrible consequences. “Anyone who risked his own opinion or expressed a discordant one was on the edge of an abyss.”23 The available evidence (and common sense) offers scant support for this view, which not only ignores the reality of everyday life in rural Spain but also quite implausibly presents pre-industrial society as a veritable police state. Neither Spain nor any other European community of that time accords with this idea, and the only recent scholar who offers us the possibility of “fear” on this scale does not include elements of everyday speech in his survey.24
Was vigilance of statements significant in any way? The statistics speak for themselves. Nearly one-third of the one thousand Catalans disciplined by the Inquisition between 1578 and 1635 were taken to task for what they had said rather than for anything they did.25 In other words, just over three hundred persons were questioned by the Inquisition over “statements,” a derisive average of five persons a year in a population of half a million. None of them suffered any entry into the abyss. All were discharged. Catalans (in common with other Spaniards) continued, both before and after that period, to express their opinions and disagreements without concern. If they entertained fear, it would have been because of neighbors and personal enemies who took advantage of an inquisitorial visit to denounce harsh words uttered decades before but that had continued to rankle in the mind.