The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  CHAPTER TEN. THE IMAGE AND REALITY OF POWER

  Epigraph. Inquisitors of Barcelona to Suprema, AHN Inq, leg. 15921.

  1. The quotation from Peña was rendered into French with the verb “terroriser” by a scholar (Bennassar 1979), seemingly in order to present the tribunal as an instrument of terror.

  2. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 257.

  3. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 256, 260.

  4. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 260.

  5. “One of the duties of the good citizen, as constituted in modern Europe, was to inform the authorities in order to hinder the commission of crimes, or uphold the existing order. The surveillance societies that emerged over the past two centuries can be distinguished . . . particularly because of the role envisaged for citizens, whose duty became to watch, listen and inform. . . . ‘Panopticism’ was established: the all-seeing society in which no one ever felt beyond surveillance”: Robert Gellately, “Denunciations in Twentieth-Century Germany: Aspects of Self-Policing in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds., Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989, Chicago, 1997, p. 185.

  6. Cf. Ciappara, pp. 343–45, explaining the example of Malta.

  7. Eugenio Alberi, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato, Florence, 1839–40, series I, vol. 5, p. 22.

  8. The definitive biography is by J. L. González Novalín, who has also published other valuable studies on Valdés as inquisitor general.

  9. Cf. Novalín, in Historia, I, 637–41.

  10. Memorials and letters of Valdés to king, AGS:E, leg. 129, ff. 110–12, 128.

  11. AGS:E, leg. 137, ff. 12, 15.

  12. Manual de novells ardits vulgarment appelat Dietari de l’Antich Consell Barceloní, Barcelona, 1892–1975, IV, pp. 390–97.

  13. Lynn Avery Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and W. W. Mijnhardt, eds., Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion, Los Angeles, 2010.

  14. Emile van der Vekené, “L’Inquisition dans la caricature,” RI, no. 12 (2006).

  15. James Given, “The Inquisitors of Languedoc and the Medieval Technology of Power,” American Historical Review 94, 2 (Apr. 1989); and at greater length in his book, noted in the bibliography.

  16. At one stage, in 1308, the inquisitor arrested the entire population of the village of Montaillou in the county of Foix. This was only possible with the help of the local lord, something that never happened in Spain.

  17. In what follows, the evidence for Llerena comes from AHN Inq, leg. 2700; for Toledo from J. P. Dedieu, “Les inquisiteurs de Tolède et la visite du district. La sédentarisation d’un tribunal (1550–1630),” MCV 13 (1977); for Galicia from Contreras, pp. 476–511.

  18. AHN Inq, leg. 27061, no. 33.

  19. AHN Inq, lib. 730, f. 108.

  20. Contreras, p. 488.

  21. Cf. García-Cárcel 1980, p. 190: “la respuesta al edicto fue casi siempre silenciosa.” He shows that visitations in Valencia in 1589 and 1590 brought in only sixteen and thirty-eight denunciations respectively: p. 189.

  22. “Memoria de las villas y lugares que visitó el Dr Juan Alvarez de Caldas,” AHN Inq, leg. 21551.

  23. AHN Inq, leg. 1592/1, nos. 6, 8.

  24. AHN Inq, lib. 731, ff. 10, 23.

  25. Inquisitors to Suprema, 15 July 1623, AHN Inq, leg. 21552.

  26. Dedieu, p. 253. High figures for arrests normally meant a find of heretics: e.g., the Llerena tribunal arrested 130 “judaizers” in Badajoz in 1567.

  27. Lea, I, v.

  28. A broad study is Consuelo Maqueda Abreu, El auto de fe; there is also a short paper by Miguel Avilés, “The Auto de Fe and the Social Model of Counter Reformation Spain,” in Alcalá 1987, pp. 249–64. The analysis in Bethencourt, chap. 7, based principally on evidence from Portugal, offers conclusions that (I suggest below) cannot be sustained.

  29. Jean de Vandenesse, Journal des voyages de Philippe II, in L. P. Gachard, Collection des voyages des souverains des Pays-Bas, vols. II, IV, Brussels, 1882, IV, 68.

  30. Jean Lhermite, Le Passetemps, 2 vols., Antwerp, 1890–96, I, 113.

  31. Inquisitors to Suprema, 23 Oct. and 21 Nov. 1560, AHN Inq, lib. 730, ff. 23, 26.

  32. To Suprema, 13 Aug. 1622, AHN Inq, leg. 21552.

  33. Decree of 8 Apr. 1650, Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona: C, vol. 80, ff. 66–68.

  34. “Discussion of the ceremony was never public in the sixteenth century,” comments Bethencourt, p. 293. His suggestion, which is that the Inquisition wanted to keep the auto under wraps, goes clean against all its efforts to make the auto as public as possible.

  35. María Victoria González de Caldas, “New Images of the Holy Office in Seville: The Auto de Fe,” in Alcalá 1987, p. 273.

  36. In a previous version of this book I stated that Philip “previously attended only one, a humble affair in Toledo on February 25, 1550.” The source I used was mistaken; Philip at that date was in Brussels.

  37. Maqueda, p. 20.

  38. Maqueda, p. 53: “en general constatamos una escasa asistencia de autoridades.”

  39. Maqueda, p. 45.

  40. A typical but baseless claim about the auto de fe is that “in the centralization of the state, this potent symbolic demonstration of authority was an effective means of control, as the spectacle worked as a threat through spreading fear of retribution”: Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples, Cambridge, 2002, p. 71.

  41. Cf., for example, Alejandro Caneque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico, New York, 2004, referring to the auto de fe in its Mexican context.

  42. The autos were those of 8 October 1559 in Valladolid, 5 March 1564 in Barcelona, and 25 February 1591 in Toledo. Philip also attended one in Lisbon on 1 April 1582. Bethencourt, p. 251, forgets to include the auto of 1591 in the list of those that Philip attended.

  43. King to Catalina, Toledo, 10 June 1591, in Erika Spivakovsky, Felipe II. Epistolario familiar. Cartas a su hija, la infanta doña Catalina (1585–1596), Madrid, 1975, p. 127.

  44. Inquisitors to the Suprema, 21 Nov. 1560, AHN Inq, lib. 710, f. 26; and 20 May 1569, at f. 91.

  45. Marquis de Villars, Mémoires, Paris, 1893, p. 189.

  46. Kamen, Spain, p. 304.

  47. Bethencourt, pp. 265, 267.

  48. Maqueda, p. 129.

  49. Spierenburg, p. 84.

  50. Henningsen, p. 184.

  51. Dedieu sees a decline in autos after 1580: p. 276.

  52. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 45.

  53. Monter 1990, pp. 50, 52.

  54. Lea, III, 225.

  55. By way of example, the Church council of Tarragona in 1565 decreed that communities of the crown of Aragon might have thirty-three feast days other than Sundays: Kamen, Phoenix, p. 174. A century later, the number actually celebrated was double this.

  56. Summarized by Henningsen, p. 188.

  57. The prints reproduced in Limborch’s Inquisition show few sightseers.

  58. Victoria González de Caldas, “The Auto de Fe,” in Alcalá 1987, p. 288.

  59. It is interesting to note that the Spanish relations of autos in the collection of the University of Notre Dame refer for the most part to the exceptional years of religious persecution 1721–24.

  60. The words are of Edward Peters, in Inquisition, p. 241.

  61. Dietari de Jeroni Pujades, ed. J. M. Casas Homs, 4 vols., Barcelona, 1975–76, I, 199; IV, 93.

  62. Victoria González de Caldas, El poder y su imagen. La Inquisición Real, Seville, 2001, p. 234.

  63. Charles-Auguste d’Allonville, marquis de Louville, Mémoires secrets sur l’établissement de la maison de Bourbon en Espagne, 2 vols., Paris, 1818, I, 124.

  64. Crónica festiva de dos reinados en la Gaceta de Madrid (1700–1759), Madrid, 1996, p. 100.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN. GENDER, SEXUALITY AND WITCHCRAFT

  1. García-Cárcel 1976, p. 167. The precise dates were between 1484 and 1530.


  2. The figures stretch across different periods, different offenses and different social contexts, offering no firm basis for analysis.

  3. Blázquez Miguel, p. 345.

  4. Some writers believe there was a deliberate repression of women “perpetuated by the patriarchy during Spain’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to justify the silencing of the inferior sex and women’s exclusion from the public sphere”: the opinion of Joan F. Cammarata, ed., Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain, Gainesville, 2003, p. 2. There is of course little basis for this sweeping judgment, whether applied to Spain or any other country in early modern Europe.

  5. Cf. the conclusion of Mary Giles that “enclosure extended throughout society, sealing women in their homes, nuns in convents, and even prostitutes in brothels,” a terrifying panorama “in a society carefully tended by the Holy Office.” This dramatic presentation continues: “there is in the experience of women an element suggestive of unspeakable terror and shame entirely absent in the men’s ordeals.” She concludes that women were raped by the Inquisition. See Giles, pp. 10, 14–15. Some other scholars share this view, for example: “Inquisition trial records are filled with the suspicious activities of women whose spirituality and perceived powers of speech merited prosecution because men could no longer control and police them. From the inquisitors’ perspective, women tended to be either fools or dangerously mischievous”: Israel Burshatin, “Written on the Body: Slave or Hermaphrodite in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, eds., Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Durham, 1999, p. 432. For a more balanced outline of women and convent enclosure, see Barbara B. Diefendorf, “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation: The Role of Women,” in Lisa Vollendorf and Daniella Kostroun, eds., Women, Religion and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), Los Angeles, 2009.

  6. Both cited in Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 297, 330.

  7. Cf. Martin King Whyte, The Status of Women in Preindustrial Societies, Princeton, 1978, pp. 167–73.

  8. For example, Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2000, chap. 3, “Women’s Economic Role.” She states: “restrictions did not mean that women had no impact on economic development,” p. 134. See also the valuable bibliography at the end of her chapter.

  9. David E. Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World in Golden Age Castile, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 53, 71–72, 92, 131, 136, 151.

  10. A recent study on the well-known case of Galician women is by Allyson M. Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia, Oxford, 2006.

  11. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England, Oxford, 1988, p. 3.

  12. José Antonio Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social, Madrid, 1986, p. 695.

  13. Cf. Marjorie McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600, Cambridge, 1998, p. 74.

  14. Martine Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family, Oxford, 1983, p. 9.

  15. Casey, pp. 212–13.

  16. In food, for example, see the analysis in D’Abrera.

  17. Renée Levine Melammed, “Crypto-Jewish Women Facing the Spanish Inquisition: Transmitting Religious Practices, Beliefs, and Attitudes,” in Mark D. Meyerson and Edward D. English, eds., Christians, Muslims and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, Notre Dame, 1999.

  18. Geraldine McKendrick and Angus MacKay, “Visionaries and Affective Spirituality during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in Perry and Cruz, p. 93.

  19. An extraordinarily rich perspective of Hispanic spirituality is given in Kallendorf.

  20. The order most chosen seems to have been the Franciscan. It was also obligatory to have a male religious for purposes of advice and confession.

  21. For Catalonia see Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 330–39.

  22. Perhaps the most prominent case is María de Jesús de Agreda, a native of Aragon and spiritual adviser to king Philip IV. Her only brush with the Inquisition is summarized by Clark Colahan, “María de Jesús de Agreda,” in Giles, pp. 155–70.

  23. A fascinating case, which may merit study, is that of the soldier-prophet Miguel de Piedrola, commented on by Kamen 1997, pp. 158, 281, and also by Kagan and Dyer, pp. 60–86.

  24. “In Counter-Reformation Spain, with the Inquisition serving as the religious arm of the law, women’s spirituality in particular was seen as increasingly threatening”: Vollendorf, p. 119. The Inquisition was not a religious police, and it would be interesting to know who—apart from some chauvinist clergy—saw spiritual women as a threat.

  25. Allyson M. Poska and Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, “Redefining Expectations: Women and the Church in Early Modern Spain,” in Dinan and Meyers, p. 23.

  26. AHN Inq, leg. 69, no. 4. The case concerned Catalina de Almagro of the village of Villatobos.

  27. On the persecution of hermits in Spain, Alain Saint-Saëns, Valets de Dieu, suppôts du Diable, New Orleans, 1999.

  28. Pedro de Ribadeneira, quoted in Llamas, Santa Teresa, p. 20.

  29. Cf. Ronald Cueto, “The Problem of the Female Visionary in the Catholic Monarchy,” in Twomey, p. 10.

  30. Richard Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Berkeley, 1990, p. 127.

  31. “Sueños desde fin de Março de 1588 hasta 18 de abril 1590,” AHN Inq, leg. 37122, exped. 2, pieza 4, ff. 25, 27, 33, 38.

  32. William of Orange’s Apology was written as propaganda against the Spanish presence in the Netherlands.

  33. “Women were excluded from power. . . . The requirement of chastity kept women at home, silenced them, isolated them, left them in ignorance. It was the source of all other impediments”: Gillian T. Ahlgren, The Inquisition of Francisca: A Sixteenth-Century Visionary on Trial, Chicago, 2005, pp. xxiii–xxiv. The judgment is excessive.

  34. See Kamen, Phoenix, p. 325.

  35. M. F. Graham, The Uses of Reform: “Godly Discipline” and Popular Behaviour in Scotland, 1560–1610, Leiden, 1996.

  36. Eva Österberg and Dag Lindström, Crime and Social Control in Medieval and Early Modern Swedish Towns, Uppsala, 1988, pp. 54, 138.

  37. More often than not, “betrothal” meant the traditional practice of plighting troth, or giving one’s word (verba de futuro), generally taken to be equivalent to marriage.

  38. For sexual practice in England, see Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 267–74.

  39. Any other sort of intercourse implied an offense. Involuntary intercourse was rape, and between married adults (i.e., married to another) voluntary intercourse was adultery.

  40. Dedieu, in Bennassar 1979, p. 327.

  41. Contreras, pp. 628–30.

  42. For this and the cited case, see Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 320–21.

  43. Francisco Farfán, Tres libros contra el pecado de la simple fornicación, Salamanca, 1585.

  44. AHN Inq, leg. 21551.

  45. Cited in Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, Bibliografía de las controversías sobre la licitud del teatro en España, Madrid, 1904, p. 217.

  46. AHN Inq, lib. 733 ff. 251, 266.

  47. Cf. Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, Princeton, 1977, chap. 4.

  48. Francisco Arias, Aprovechamiento espiritual, Madrid, 1603, p. 697.

  49. A useful short essay is Allyson M. Poska, “When Bigamy is the Charge,” in Giles, pp. 189–205.

  50. AHN Inq, leg. 24, no. 7.

  51. For the scandalous life of the clergy in Coria in 1591, see A. Rodríguez Sánchez, “Inmoralidad y represión,” in Historia Moderna. Actas, Cáceres, 1983, pp. 451–62.

  52. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 324.

  53. Vollendorf, chap. 1, discusses a relevant case.

  54. The best survey of this development is Monter 1990, chap. 13.

  55. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 255.

  56. Monter 1990, pp. 134–37.

  57. Monter 1990, p. 288. There are
comparable figures in Cristian Berco, “Social Control and Its Limits: Sodomy, Local Sexual Encounters, and Inquisitors during Spain’s Golden Age,” SCJ 36, 2 (summer 2005).

  58. Monter 1990, pp. 289–90.

  59. E.g., Israel Burshatin, “Interrogating Hermaphroditism in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin, eds., Hispanisms and Homosexualities, Durham, 1998.

  60. Cf. Berco, “Social Control and Its Limits,” p. 340.

  61. Nor, it is almost superfluous to say, does police efficiency today have much impact on crime figures.

  62. The view that there was a “construction of a new authoritarian moral order,” argued in James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (1550–1730), Oxford, 1995, p. 8, cannot be proved.

  63. Allyson Poska, “How Women’s History Has Transformed the Study of Early Modern Spain,” Bulletin of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (2011).

  64. Morisco sorcery was a dimension of belief in relevant areas. See Julio Caro Baroja, Vidas mágicas e Inquisición, 2 vols., Madrid, 1967, I, 49–52.

  65. Among surveys of the literature, see Thomas A. Fudge, “Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of European Witch Hunting,” History Compass 4, 3, (May 2006).

  66. Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, London, 1987, p. 124.

  67. See, for example, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971; also, recently, Jonathan Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, Cambridge, 2011.

  68. The alleged “connection between the witch accusation and hatred of women” (affirmed by Ahlgren, The Inquisition of Francisca, p. xxi) is an unacceptable simplification, made also by Vollendorf, p. 149: “Inquisition trials for witchcraft disproportionately involved women,” which appears to mean that the inquisitors picked on women. See the balanced comments of Wolfgang Behringer, pp. 37–40.

  69. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Oxford, 1997, p. 110.

  70. Cf. Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition, pp. 79, 83, for cases in Venice.

  71. The interesting cases examined by Helena Sánchez Ortega, in La Inquisición y los Gitanos, Madrid, 1988, and in “Sorcery and Eroticism in Love Magic,” in Perry and Cruz, pp. 58–92, unfortunately omit any analysis of a vital factor: how cases ended up being examined by the Inquisition.