by Henry Kamen
“Propositions” were never a crime,26 but merely a label for verbal “statements” that required correction. As such, each statement was relevant because it might touch on a significant aspect of Christian life and belief. For the most part, however, statements were identified not because the Inquisition looked for them, but because they were carried to the inquisitors in the wake of personal quarrels and community conflicts. In the tribunal of Logroño in the early eighteenth century, for example, all denunciation of verbal statements was made by people well known to the accused, invariably the parish priest, neighbors, religious from the same monastery, or members of the family.27 The tribunal was called in as a social arbiter, to keep the peace or to resolve disputes. It was a valuable function that more normally was performed by parish priests, but which in special cases might call for the intervention of the inquisitors.
A simple case, one among thousands, may be cited.28 In April 1673 the two rival parishes of Sta Quitería and Sta María of the town of Alcazar de San Juan (Toledo) went out in procession to the fields to pray for rain, bearing with them the local statue of Our Lady of the Conception. One of the men in the procession, Francisco Millán, of the parish of Sta María, called out, “those in Sta Quitería think the Virgin is going to bring rain, but it will rain testicles [literally, “cuernos,” horns], I swear by Christ!” Those of Sta Quitería immediately referred the insult to the Inquisition, which happened to be conveniently nearby. Millán, with four children and married to a local girl, had spent much of his life working on the Mediterranean coast and had been a soldier for two years and even served in a monastery for one year. He was obviously a restless spirit with enemies in the community, and the inquisitors made it their first responsibility to protect the peace between the parishes. He was accordingly recommended by them to leave the district for four years. What appears at first sight the disciplining of a “statement” was in reality an attempt to keep the peace of the community.
The Inquisition joined other Church authorities in demanding more respect for the sacred.29 Blasphemy, or disrespect to sacred things, was at the time a public offense against God and punishable by both state and Church. In time, the tribunal gave the term a very broad definition, provoking protests by the Cortes of both Castile and Aragon. The Cortes of Madrid in 1534 asked specifically that cases of blasphemy be reserved to the secular courts alone. The Holy Office continued, however, to intervene in the offense, punishing bad language according to the gravity of the context. Blasphemous oaths during a game of dice, sexual advances to a girl during a religious procession, refusal to abstain from meat on Fridays, obscene references to the Virgin, willful failure to go to mass: these were typical of the thousands of cases disciplined by the Inquisition.30
The offenses of the clergy also came in for scrutiny. As we have seen (chapter 11), their sexual conduct was part of the folklore of the countryside. The Inquisition was particularly interested in the problem of solicitation during confession. The Church had always encouraged the faithful to confess their sins to a priest in order to receive absolution, but in the early sixteenth century the evidence indicates that in Spain and also in the rest of Europe the most that Catholics might do was to fulfill the formal obligation of confessing once a year. Church leaders during the Counter-Reformation emphasized that believers should go to communion more often, and as a corollary should also confess their sins more regularly. The problem was that in Spain there was a widespread reluctance to confess personal sins to a priest who, as likely as not, was known for his sexual adventures with parishioners. The confession box as we know it today did not come into use in the Church until the late sixteenth century, before which there was no physical barrier between a confessor and a penitent, so that occasions for physical contact could easily arise.31 The frequent scandals caused Fernando de Valdés in 1561 to obtain authority from Pius IV for the Inquisition to exercise control over cases of solicitation, which were interpreted as heresy because they misused the sacrament of penance.
The sexual aspect of solicitation features in Inquisition documentation and has attracted the attention of scholars.32 Though accused confessors were invariably guilty, as not only individual but also village testimony could confirm, there were inevitably cases where the person confessing might be judged to have had a share of the blame. Inevitably also, as has happened with the experience of the Church today, accused clergy were given the benefit of the doubt, and seldom served out the sentences passed on them by the Inquisition and other Church authorities. The most frequent punishment ordered for guilty persons was suspension from office. The Inquisition papers documenting sexual acts in the confessional by priests with women, men and boys offer hundreds of anecdotes as well as insights into parish life of the time. Among curious cases of solicitation was that denounced by an elderly beata in Guissona (Catalonia) in 1581, against an itinerant Franciscan who “told her she must accept the penance he imposed, which startled her; the friar said he had to give her a slap on her buttocks and he made her raise her skirts and gave her a pat on the buttocks and said to her, ‘Margarita, next time show some shame,’ and then he absolved her.”33 In Valencia the parish priest of Beniganim was accused in 1608 of having solicited twenty-nine women, most of them unmarried, “with lascivious and amorous invitations to perform filthy and immoral acts.”34
The anecdotes form only one aspect of the relevance of the sacrament of confession during the Counter-Reformation. The relation between male and female in the confessional also had positive spiritual overtones. Many confessors, impressed by the piety of their female penitents (among them nuns), were the first to encourage others to imitate the piety they had encountered, and sometimes wrote biographies of the women.35 The archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, who invented the new confessional box, had clear ideas—soon picked up by Spanish clergy—about how the penitent should also be instructed about Christian duties and frequenting the sacraments. Confession therefore took on a vital role in the evolution of religious discipline and education.36 The rites of penance also played a significant part in community activities.37 Though there were occasions when the Inquisition tried to make a more direct use of the confessional, for example, by ordering penitents to denounce statements made to them38 or things done to them during confession, in practice the local church and community were the only arbiters of what went on in confession. As a result, solicitation was one of the offenses against which the Holy Office never managed to make any headway.
The attempt to discipline words and actions was time-consuming, and formed the principal activity of inquisitors during their visitations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The problem was particularly grave in rural areas. In Galicia in 1585, for example, the inquisitors admitted that doubts about the presence of Christ in the sacrament were widespread, but “more out of ignorance than malice,” and that questioning of the virginity of Mary was “through sheer thick-headedness rather than out of a wish to offend.” They had the case of the man in a tavern who, when a priest present claimed to be able to change bread into the body of Christ, exclaimed in unbelief, “Go on! God’s in heaven and not in that host which you eat at mass!”39 In Granada in 1595, a shepherd from the village of Alhama claimed not to believe in confession and said to his friends: “What sort of confession is it that you make to a priest who is as much of a sinner as I? Perfect confession is made only to God.” The inquisitors concluded that “he seemed very rustic and ignorant and with little or no capacity of understanding,” and sent him to a monastery to be educated.40
Rather than making its sentences lighter because of the low degree of religious understanding in rural areas, the Inquisition seems to have increased its punishments in order to achieve greater disciplinary effect. Thus every type of expression—whether mumbled by a drunkard in a tavern or preached by an ignorant priest from the pulpit—considered offensive, blasphemous, irreverent or heretical, was—if denounced—carefully examined by the Holy Office. It was at the ludicrous level of v
erbal offenses rather than heretical acts that the Inquisition came most into contact with the ordinary people of Spain for the greater part of its history.
For those who were arrested instead of being simply made to do penitence during a visitation, there was normally a close examination in the basic elements of belief.41 The accused were asked to recite in Castilian the Our Father, Hail Mary, Credo, Salve Regina and the Ten Commandments, as well as other statements of belief. Very many failed to show knowledge of anything more than the first two. The list of articles seems to have come into use in the 1540s, and provides useful evidence of attempts to instruct ordinary Spaniards in the faith. However, there is no valid evidence that the attempts met with any success.42 In default of statistical proof we have to fall back on simple impressions. Evidence for the late seventeenth century from the Toledo Inquisition, where most of those who were denounced lived in townships, suggests that levels of religious knowledge were fairly good. Scores of accused from the lower classes and even some from rural areas enjoyed a basic knowledge of the prayers of the Church, and all were able to recite the Our Father and Hail Mary, but very little more. An example was Inés López, an illiterate fifty-year-old hospital nurse who in 1664 “crossed herself and recited the Our Father and Hail Mary well in Castilian, but did not know the Creed, the Salve, the Confiteor, the laws of God and of the Church, the articles of faith or the sacraments; the inquisitor warned her and ordered her to learn them, for she has an obligation to do so as a Christian.”43
There is no evidence of any improvement across time in elementary religious knowledge, and for that to have happened the quality of general education in the parishes—a subject of which we know nothing—would need to have improved. In parts of Spain that did not enjoy the density of clergy and schools to be found in Madrid and Toledo, ignorance was still the order of the day. The Church set up schools, made sermons obligatory and enforced recitation of prayers at mass. There were of course many things it could not do, and never achieved, nor could the Inquisition, which was not a teaching institution, make any contribution. The ordinary people continued to be ignorant of basic dogmas and articles of faith, as we know from the existence all over Spain of doubts over essentials of faith such as the doctrine of purgatory. Nor, as bishops complained time and again, could the country clergy, almost as ignorant as their parishioners, remedy the situation.
Even in its negative disciplinary role, however, the Inquisition made some contribution to the evolution of Spanish religion. It attempted to impose on Spaniards a new respect for the sacred, notably in art, in public devotions and in sermons. This can be seen in the other side of the tribunal’s disciplining activity: its attempt to control the clergy. Clergy were encouraged to put their churches in order. Diocesan synods at Granada in 1573 and Pamplona in 1591 were among those which ordered the removal and burial of unseemly church images. The Inquisition, likewise, attempted where it could to censor religious imagery.44 In Seville in the early seventeenth century it recruited the artist Francisco Pacheco to comment on the suitability of public imagery. The attempt to regulate art was usually futile; there was no obvious way to influence taste.45 As in other matters, the Inquisition had to put up with denunciations from ignorant people. In 1583 a Franciscan friar from Cervera denounced a painting he said he had seen in a church in Barcelona. It represented John the Baptist as eighty years old and St. Elizabeth as twenty years old. This, he said, was incorrect and therefore heretical; and “I suspect that the man who painted it was Dutch.”46
Public devotions were generally under the supervision of the bishops, but here too the Inquisition had a role. It helped to repress devotional excesses, such as credulity about visions of the Virgin.47 The celebration of pilgrimages and of fiestas such as Corpus Christi was regulated by the episcopate. But written works, such as the text of autos sacramentales (plays performed for the feast of Corpus), normally had to be approved by the Inquisition, creating occasional conflicts with writers. On the other hand, the tribunal steadfastly refused to be drawn into the debate over whether theatres were immoral and should be banned. It is well known that substantial Counter-Reformation opinion, especially among the Jesuits, was in favor of shutting theatres; and indeed they were shut periodically from 1597 onwards. But theatres were normally under the control of the council of Castile, not of the Holy Office, and the only way the latter could express an opinion was when plays were printed. Even then it kept clear of the theatre, and the major dramatists of the Golden Age were untouched. No play by Lope de Vega, for example, was interfered with until 1801. When the Inquisition did tread into the field, by requiring expurgations (in the 1707 Index) in the Jesuit Camargo’s Discourse on the Theatre (1689), it explained that the ban was “until changes are made; but the Holy Office does not by prohibiting this book intend to comment on or condemn either of the opinions on the desirability or undesirability of seeing, reading, writing or performing plays.”48
A highly significant area of activity was sermons. No form of propaganda in the Counter-Reformation was more widely used than the spoken word, in view of the high levels of illiteracy. Correspondingly, in no other form of communication did the Inquisition interfere more frequently. Sermons were to the public of those days what television is to modern times: the most direct form of control over opinion. The impact of the Holy Office on sermons—among famous sermons denounced to it were those by Carranza and Fray Francisco Ortiz—was perhaps even more decisive than its impact on printed literature. Bishops normally welcomed intervention by the inquisitors, for they themselves had little or no machinery with which to control some of the absurdities preached from the pulpits of their clergy.
Occasionally, inquisitorial intervention took on political tones. The tribunal of Llerena in 1606 prosecuted Diego Díaz, priest of Torre de Don Miguel, for preaching (in Portuguese) that God had not died for Castilians:49 and the tribunal of Barcelona in 1666 prosecuted a priest of Reus for having declared that “he would prefer to be in hell beside a Frenchman than in heaven beside a Castilian.”50 More normally, the problem lay in preachers who got carried away by their own eloquence or who were shaky in their theology, such as the Cistercian friar of Toledo who in 1683 put the glories of Mary above those of the Sacrament, or the priest in Tuy (Galicia) who on Holy Thursday told his flock that in the Sacrament they were celebrating only the semblance of God, whose real presence was above in heaven.51
The cases remind us that the Holy Office was still meant to be on guard against heresy, and assessors of the tribunal were called upon from time to time to decide whether statements and religious devotions had to be disciplined. Suspect spiritual practices were those that most attracted attention, as with the alumbrados and even Ignatius Loyola in the sixteenth century. In Toledo in 1677 the tribunal had to rebuke some devout young nobles who formed a group dedicated to the belief that the body of the Virgin was contained together with that of Christ in the Holy Sacrament.52 At the end of the seventeenth century the influence of the semi-mystical trend known as Quietism—already known in France—was felt in Spain. In September 1685 a priest in Saragossa denounced to the Inquisition a work that had been published ten years previously, the Spiritual Guide, by an Aragonese priest resident in Rome, Miguel de Molinos. From that moment the tribunal was on the watch for Quietists, but only a handful of cases turned up, usually among clergy, and they were always dealt with leniently.53 The history of Molinos was tied up with spiritual issues that surfaced well outside the ambit of Spanish experience.
We have seen that a good part of the Inquisition’s zeal for religion can be described as little more than distrust of foreigners, such as travelers, sailors and merchants. This was ironic, since Spain’s imperial expansion took thousands of Spaniards abroad and brought them into touch with the rest of the world on a scale unprecedented in their history. The imperial experience did nothing to change the xenophobic outlook commonly found in Spain and reflected in the attitude of the inquisitors, who from 1558 used the Lutheran scare
as a disincentive against contact with outsiders. A common accusation leveled against many arrested foreigners was that they had been to a tierra de herejes, which in inquisitorial parlance meant any country not under Spanish control.
All properly baptized persons, being ipso facto Christians and members of the Church, were deemed to come under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Foreign heretics, if baptized, therefore appeared from time to time in autos. The burning of Protestants at Seville in the mid-1500s shows a gradual increase in the number of foreigners seized, a natural phenomenon in an international seaport. When Philip II returned to Spain from Flanders in 1559 he brought with him a large number of Flemings, some of whom happened later to fall foul of the Holy Office. Of those appearing in the Seville auto of April 1562, twenty-one were foreigners—nearly all Frenchmen. At the auto of 19 April 1564 six Flemings were relaxed in person, and two other foreigners abjured de vehementi. At the one on 13 May 1565 four foreigners were relaxed in effigy, seven reconciled and three abjured de vehementi. One Scottish Protestant was relaxed at the Toledo auto of 9 June 1591, and another, master of the ship Mary of Grace, at the auto of 19 June 1594.
The harvest reaped by the Inquisition was by now greater from foreign than from native Protestants. In Barcelona from 1552 to 1578, the only relaxations of Protestants were of fifty-one French people. Santiago in the same period punished over forty foreign Protestants. These figures were typical of the rest of Spain. The details given by Schäfer show that up to 1600 the cases of alleged Lutheranism cited before the tribunals of the peninsula totaled 1,995, of which 1,640 cases concerned foreigners.54 Merchants from countries hostile to Spain ran the risk of having their crews arrested, their ships seized and their cargoes confiscated. Of the two Englishmen relaxed at the great Seville auto of 12 December 1560, one, Nicholas Burton, was a ship’s master whose cargo was appropriated by the authorities.55