by Henry Kamen
Aware that it was unreasonable to castigate the tribunal for all Spain’s failures, the Liberal writer Juan Valera in 1876 asked whether it was not something in Spain’s own character that was culpable. He identified the cause as religious fanaticism: “a fever of pride, a delirium of vanity. . . . We thought we were the new people of God, and confused religion with patriotic egoism. . . . Hence our divorce and isolation from the rest of Europe.”62 Subsequent writers likewise looked at the problem in global terms. Claudio Sánchez Albornoz saw the seeds of future conflict in the massive rejection by Spain of its Jewish and Arabic culture: “we had no religious wars in the sixteenth century, but we have had them in the twentieth.”63 The contradictions within Spain that had apparently been reconciled by the imposition of religious uniformity were to break out again. For the conservative Ramón Menéndez Pidal the reconciliation had never taken place, and there always existed a struggle—often mute, never suppressed—between Two Spains.64 The interplay between African and European Spain, isolationist and international Spain, liberal and reactionary Spain, caused the tensions that explained the strife in Spanish history. The Two Spains followed “the fated destiny of the two sons of Oedipus, who would not consent to reign together and mortally wounded each other.” Menéndez Pidal looked forward to an age when reconciliation would eventually occur, and reintegration would lead to unity of purpose in a tolerant society.
The Inquisition was, we have seen, not peculiar to Iberia: it was at its most efficient in medieval France but was also active in Germany and in post-Reformation Italy and the Netherlands. Subsequently the Portuguese took it to India and the Spaniards planted it in the New World. Its outlook and methods were determined by the context in each of these regions, but its motives—to protect and purify—were of course common to any human society of that time and ours. The Catholic historian Lord Acton once commented that all these inquisitions were “an appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny and cruelty.” With good reason, critics of persecution applied the term “inquisition” to the procedure used by those who wished to silence opposition. Erroneous ideas, they contended, should not be countered with blood and fire. The position was maintained in Castile by Isabella the Catholic’s converso secretary Hernando de Pulgar, and in Europe by Erasmus, Luther and the German radical Balthasar Hubmaier. The last of these held that “the inquisitors are the greatest heretics of all,” because they ignored the teaching of Christ.65
The Reformation in its turn soon adopted the methods of the Inquisition, as we have seen from the case of Servet. Former liberals such as Luther became illiberal. A yet more striking case than that of Servet occurred when the normally liberal city of Basel in 1559, the very year that Spaniards in Valladolid were also executing heretics, exhumed the cadaver of a little-known heretic and burned it publicly at the stake before an audience of dignitaries. The famous physician Felix Platter was a witness: “The crowd was enormous. I saw the execution in the company of Sebastian Castellio.”66
Inquisitorial practices continued to flourish in the centuries that followed, and not only in Spain. In states throughout Europe, dissenters were executed, families were driven into exile, minorities were persecuted and books were prohibited. But it was Spain that came to be seen and presented as the most active oppressor of liberty. When John Milton in seventeenth-century England wrote his Areopagitica in defense of freedom of the press, he took Spain as the symbol of tyranny, and criticized his own government for wishing to “execute the Inquisition over us,” through “this Spanish policy of licensing books.” It became easy for later commentators to single out the Spanish tribunal in the way that Dostoyevsky did so brilliantly in The Brothers Karamazov.67 With time, other nations such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia would also be demonized in the historical literature, but somehow they never managed to displace Spain’s notorious tribunal from its pedestal of very special infamy. One of its most recent historians offers the opinion that “armed with terror, espionage and propaganda, the Inquisition proceeded to capture Spain’s opinion and control it flawlessly for three centuries and more. The notions it instilled in the Spanish public spread abroad and were accepted in Europe. It attempted genocide, it perpetrated a terrible crime against humanity, against religion and against the Church.”68
Spain’s Inquisition bears a manifest responsibility for its role and its acts, but no institution can ever be evaluated in isolation from the context and society that brought it into existence. Even when all explanations have been offered, the questions remain. How could a society as apparently tolerant as Castile, in which the three great faiths of the West had coexisted for centuries and into which the medieval Inquisition had never penetrated, change its ideology in the fifteenth century, against the instincts of many great men in both Church and state?69 How could a clergy and population that had never lusted for blood except in war (Queen Isabella thought even bullfighting too gory), gaze placidly upon the burning alive of scores of their fellow Spaniards for an offense—prevarication in religion—that had never hitherto been a crime? How could the Spanish people—the first Europeans to broaden their vision by traveling the oceans and opening up the New World—accept without serious opposition the mental restrictions proposed by the Inquisition? The preceding pages have tried to offer the elements of an answer, but it is in the nature of the inquisitorial phenomenon that no answer can match the complexity of the questions.
Even today in the twenty-first century other nations have had and continue to have their Inquisitions: the human condition is subject to frailties that are not limited to any one people or faith and that regularly reverse the gains made in previous generations by “progress.” All countries possess the rudiments of control: “a set of disciplinary procedures, targeting specified groups, codified in law, organized systematically, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, justified by a vision of the one true path, backed by institutional power.”70 Over and beyond these visible instruments, however, the essential component of an Inquisition was and is the compliance and cooperation of ordinary people. Control and coercion, in the name of religion or race or Homeland Security, continue to be practiced by public authority and accepted with incredible passivity by the population. There is little reason not to share the view of the great historian of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea: “how little religion and civilization have accomplished in elevating us above primitive savagery and how easily we slide back to it.”71
TIMELINE:
CHRONOLOGY OF THE INQUISITION
1184
medieval French Inquisition begins
1391
riots against Jews in Spain
1469
marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile
1474
beginning of reign of Ferdinand and Isabella
1478
papal bulls founding Spanish Inquisition
1480
Inquisition begins activities
1492
expulsion/conversion of Spain’s Jews; capitulation of Muslim Granada; discovery of America
1504
death of Isabella
1516
death of Ferdinand; Charles I (emperor Charles V) as king
1536
founding of Portuguese Inquisition
1542
Roman Inquisition founded
1556
Philip II becomes king of Spain
1561
Fernando de Valdés issues new Instructions for Inquisition
1563
final session of Council of Trent
1570
first tribunal of Inquisition in America, in Lima
1588
Great Armada against England
1598
death of Philip II; son Philip III becomes king
1609–11
expulsion of Moriscos
1621
reign of Philip IV begins
1665
reign of Charles II b
egins
1700
reign of Philip V begins
1767
expulsion of Jesuits from Spanish monarchy
1789
French Revolution begins
1808
abolition of Inquisition by Joseph I; abolished again in 1813 and 1820
1818
last converso prosecuted by Inquisition
1826
last person executed in Spain for heresy
1834
final abolition of Inquisition
ABBREVIATIONS
ACA:CA
Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona, section Consejo de Aragón
AE:CP, MD
Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, section Correspondance Politique, Mémoires et Documents
AEM
Anuario de estudios medievales
AGS
Archivo General de Simancas
AGS:CJH
AGS section Consejo y Juntas de Hacienda
AGS:E
AGS section Estado
AGS:E/K
AGS section Estado K
AGS:PR
AGS section Patronato Real
AHN Inq
Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, section Inquisición
AHR
American Historical Review
AHSI
Archivum historicum Societatis Jesu
AR
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte
ARSI, Epist. Hisp.
Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Epistolae Hispaniae
BH
Bulletin hispanique
BHR
Bibliothèque d’humanisme et de la Renaissance
BHS
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies
BL
British Library, London
BL Add
BL Additional manuscripts
BL Eg
BL Egerton manuscripts
BN
Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid
BRAE
Boletín de la Real Academia Española
BRAH
Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia
BZ
Biblioteca Zabalburu, Madrid
CHE
Cuadernos de historia de Espana
CHR
Catholic Historical Review
CODOIN
Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España
CSPV
Calendar of State Papers, Venetian
EconHR
Economic History Review
Favre
Collection Favre, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Geneva
HAHR
Hispanic American Historical Review
HR
Hispanic Review
HS
Hispania sacra
IMH
Institut Municipal d’Història, Barcelona
JEH
Journal of Ecclesiastical History
JQR
Jewish Quarterly Review
leg.
legajo (file)
MCV
Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez
MLR
Modern Language Review
MP
Modern Philology
NRFH
Nueva revista de filología hispánica
P&P
Past and Present
PAAJR
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research
PAPS
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
RABM
Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos
REJ
Revue des études Juives
RF
Razón y fe
RFE
Revista de filología española
RH
Revue historique
RI
Revista de la Inquisición
SCJ
Sixteenth Century Journal
NOTES
Items that appear in the “Select Bibliography,” works of general importance, are cited here only by name of author; other items are referenced fully when they first appear in these notes.
CHAPTER ONE. FAITH AND DOUBT IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
Epigraph. AHN Inq, lib. 733, f. 352.
1. Cited in Castro, p. 221.
2. Not least in the twentieth century, when a study by the philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid (1929), created a nationalist myth about him.
3. He is the theme of the study by Natalie Z. Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds, New York, 2006.
4. Cf. Sosa, pp. 8–11.
5. Any such statement depends on the time scale; it is obvious, for example, that the Danes in the ninth century imposed their way of life on the English, Scots and Irish.
6. Cf. Nirenberg, p. 249.
7. The “normality” was by no means blissful, despite one optimistic view that “the constant friction of shared village life . . . kindled mutual understanding and accommodation born of countless daily interactions”: Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Medieval Spain’s Golden Age of Enlightenment, New York, 2005, p. 206.
8. Greene, p. 105.
9. The literary tradition inspired by Américo Castro in a 1948 work, issued in English as The Structure of Spanish History, Princeton, 1954, and later as The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History, Berkeley, 1971, insisted that coexistence in medieval Spain was a convivencia (“living together”) between faiths. The idea of convivencia has since become trivialized and politically manipulated, and few scholars now accept it as an adequate label. Some specialists in literature, however, continue to accept a romantic and virtually fictitious view of life in medieval Spain, e.g., Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, New York, 2002.
10. An excellent discussion of weaknesses in the idea of convivencia is given by Maya Soifer, “Beyond Convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1, 1 (Jan. 2009), pp. 19–35.
11. Rosa Salicrú, “Crossing Boundaries in Late Medieval Mediterranean Iberia: Historical Glimpses of Christian-Islamic Intercultural Dialogue,” International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies 1, 1 (2008), pp. 42–43.
12. Denis Menjot, “Les minorités juives et musulmanes dans l’économie murcienne au bas Moyen-Age,” in Minorités et marginaux.
13. Adeline Rucquoi, “Juifs et Musulmanes dans une ville de la Castille septentrionale,” in Minorités et marginaux.
14. Salicrú, p. 42.
15. Carlos Carrete Parrondo, “Los judaizantes castellanos,” in Inquisición y conversos, p. 201.
16. Cited by Carlos Carrete Parrondo, El judaismo español y la Inquisición, Madrid, 1992, p. 103.
17. Baer, I, chaps. 5–6.
18. Shlomo D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 5 vols., Berkeley, 1967–88.
19. Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds, Baltimore, 2003. “Jews from Fez,” the authors say, “invented a wide range of strategies for survival, often resorting to conversion to another religion” (p. xxii).
20. Cf. Reinkowski, p. 409.
21. David Nirenberg, “What Can Medieval Spain Teach Us about Muslim-Jewish Relations?” CCAR Journal: A Reform Jewish Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2002, pp. 26–27.
22. Quoted in Reinkowski, p. 422.
23. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 36.
24. Carrete Parrondo 1991, p. 33.
25. The ritual continued into the twentieth century. My wife recalls how during Holy Week the pupils in her class were encouraged by the nuns to run around hitting desks and creating an uproar in a reenactment of the “killing of Jews.”
26. Nirenberg, “Muslim-Jewish,” pp. 25, 30.
27. Felipe de Meneses, Lu
z del alma cristiana (1554), Madrid, 1978, pp. 317, 321.
28. See the exposition in Kamen, Phoenix, passim.
29. The practice in the diocese of Toledo may be gauged by the prohibitions issued by the provincial council of Aranda in 1473: J. Tejada y Ramiro, Colección de cánones y de todos los concilios, 6 vols., Madrid, 1859, V, 24.
30. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 37, 79.
31. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 125. The identical affirmation was made by a tobacco dealer in 1707, two centuries later, in the town of Valdemoro: “there is no hell, it was invented only to frighten children,” AHN Inq, lib. 221/13.
32. Cited in Julio Caro Baroja, Las formas complejas de la vida religiosa, Madrid, 1978, p. 197.
33. IMH Consellers C.XVIII, vol. 8, f. 95; AHN Inq, lib. 731, f. 172.
34. Cited in D’Abrera, p. 177.
35. A balanced discussion on the subject can be found in the chapter by Nicholas Griffiths, “Popular Religious Scepticism in Post-Tridentine Cuenca,” in Twomey, pp. 95–123.
36. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 120.
37. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 122.
38. Carlos Carrete Parrondo, “‘Duelos os dé Dios, e avrá Christiandad’: Nueva página sobre el criptojudaísmo castellano,” Sefarad 52 (1992), p. 369.