The Spanish Inquisition

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by Henry Kamen


  72. Levack, The Witch-Hunt, p. 124.

  73. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 241–42.

  74. Lyndal Roper, “Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early Modern Germany,” in J. Barry, M. Hester and G. Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 1997, p. 211.

  75. Lea, IV, 183.

  76. Cf. Monter 1990, p. 255.

  77. S. Cirac Estopañán, Los procesos de hechicerías en la Inquisición de Castilla la Nueva, Madrid, 1942, p. 196.

  78. F. Idoate, Un documento de la Inquisición sobre brujería, Pamplona, 1972, p. 13.

  79. Not, as Novalín has it (1980, p. 63), in 1525; nor, as Caro Baroja (Vidas mágicas, II, 60) claims, in 1529. The notes of the meeting are in AHN Inq, lib. 1231, ff. 634–37, “Dubia quae in causa praesenti videntur.” I have also consulted the copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Arch.Σ.130. Cf. Lea, IV, 212–14.

  80. Reguera, pp. 197–98.

  81. The Basque cases emboldened Fray Martín de Castañega, Treatise of Superstitions, to explain that women were more likely than men to be witches because they were, among other things, “more talkative and cannot keep secrets.”

  82. Monter 1990, p. 262.

  83. See Monter 1990, p. 264.

  84. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 237–38.

  85. Lea, IV, 223.

  86. Monter 1990, pp. 268–69.

  87. On the Navarre context, Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, Reno, 1980; and J. Caro Baroja, Inquisición, brujería y criptojudaismo, Barcelona, 1974, pp. 183–315.

  88. BN, MS.718, f. 271. It is notable that of the accused twelve were aged over seventy, eleven over eighty and four over ninety.

  89. Henningsen, Witches’ Advocate; Lea, IV, 231–34.

  90. “Acerca de los cuentos de las bruxas. Discurso de Pedro de Valencia,” AHN Inq, lib. 1231, ff. 608–29.

  91. AHN Inq, lib. 735.

  92. Angel Gari, Brujería e Inquisición en el Alto Aragón en la primera mitad del siglo XVII, Saragossa, 1991, pp. 240–41. The Inquisition in Upper Aragon tried 121 cases in that period (mostly men), and the secular courts 64 (mostly women). In addition, cases were tried by the episcopal courts, a subject studied by María Tausiet, Ponzoña en los ojos. Brujería y superstición en Aragón en el siglo XVI, Saragossa, 2000.

  93. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 243.

  94. On all this, Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 239–45.

  95. Behringer, “Weather, Hunger and Fear: Origins of the European Witch-Hunts,” German History 13, 1 (1995), p. 6, comments on cases in Trier and in the Saarland where villagers were responsible for persecution.

  96. Cf. Rainer Walz, Hexenglaube und magische Kommunikation im Dorf der frühen Neuzeit, Paderborn, 1993, pp. 422–57.

  97. AHN Inq, lib. 998, ff. 189, 212.

  98. In southwest Germany between 1560 and 1670 some 2,953 people were executed for witchcraft, four-fifths of them between 1570 and 1630. The German lands are examined by Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2003, p. 357.

  CHAPTER TWELVE. RACE PURITY AND ITS CRITICS

  1. Arlette Jouanna, L’idée de race en France au XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle (1498–1614), 3 vols., Paris, 1976; also André Devyver, Le sang épuré: Les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de l’ancien régime, 1560–1720, Brussels, 1973.

  2. The concept of honor in preindustrial Spain and the Mediterranean is a central theme in many literary and sociological studies; a starting point is J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honor and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, London, 1966.

  3. The stated view is analyzed and questioned in Scott K. Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain, New Haven, 2008, p. 4.

  4. Patricia M. Rodriguez Mosquera, Antony S. R. Manstead and Agneta H. Fischer, “Honor in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (2002). The problem with this piece of research is that it looks for differences of values in a twenty-first-century world where most of us share common values.

  5. This was the view of Américo Castro, contradicted firmly by B. Netanyahu, “Américo Castro and His View on the Origins of pureza de sangre,” PAAJR 46–47 (1979–80).

  6. All cases cited in Riera Sans, p. 87.

  7. Riera Sans, p. 89.

  8. See the chapter titled “The Great Debate” in Netanyahu 1995, pp. 351–661.

  9. Nicholas Round, “Politics, Style and Group Attitudes in the Instrucción del Relator,” BHS 46 (1969), pp. 289–319.

  10. Cf. Roth, p. 92.

  11. Juan de Torquemada, Tractatus contra Madianitas et Ismaelitas, ed. N. López Martínez, Burgos, 1957.

  12. Alonso de Oropesa, Luz para conocimiento de los Gentiles, ed. Luis A. Díaz y Díaz, Madrid, 1979.

  13. David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” P&P 174 (Feb. 2002).

  14. B. Cuart Moner, “Los estatutos del Colegio de San Clemente,” in E. Verdera y Tüells, ed., El Cardenal Albornoz y el Colegio de España, 6 vols., Bologna, 1979, IV, 602. This corrects the common error which dates the statute to 1414.

  15. Cuart Moner, p. 11.

  16. Cuart Moner, p. 17.

  17. Domínguez Ortiz 1955, p. 58.

  18. AHN Inq, lib. 497, f. 22.

  19. Cuart Moner, p. 32.

  20. All details in a copy of letter from Charles V, 26 Nov. 1523, enclosed with a document of 1586: BZ, 140, f. 278.

  21. Cf. Starr-LeBeau, pp. 117–21.

  22. Cf. discussion in Roth, pp. 233–36.

  23. Starr-LeBeau, pp. 214–17.

  24. C. Carrete Parrondo, “Los conversos jerónimos,” pp. 97–116.

  25. Domínguez Ortiz 1955, pp. 67–70, gives some details of the contradictory regulations adopted in the orders.

  26. Netanyahu 1995 states (p. 1063): “The limpieza movement progressed until it dominated all Spanish ecclesiastical organizations and a major part of Spain’s public opinion.” The affirmation is incorrect, but similar statements can be found in innumerable books, e.g., Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason, Princeton, 1989, claims that the statutes of blood purity “triumphed and became the law of the realm in Spain” (p. 17). “The monarchy,” write other scholars with reference to Philip II, “abetted the spread of blood purity statutes designed to keep conversos out of cathedral chapters, religious orders, universities and public office” (Kagan and Dyer, p. 106). The reality is that Philip II blocked the 1547 purity statute, had conversos as private secretaries (Gonzalo Perez) and spiritual advisers (St. Teresa), appointed them to bishoprics and to the highest military commands, and in his older years encouraged the Inquisition to abolish all systems of blood discrimination against them.

  27. I offer a brief comment in Kamen 1996.

  28. A recent study by John M. Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s, Albuquerque, 2004, argues that “the fixation with purity of blood permeated all levels of Spanish society” (p. 20), a statement without foundation. He also states (more plausibly, since racial discrimination in colonial societies is a commonplace of all empires) that “blood remained the axis round which social identities were fashioned” in America (p. 25).

  29. María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, 2008, argues (p. 1) that “the ideology of purity of blood produced a Spanish society obsessed with genealogy.” Her chap. 2, however, offers no evidence for this. A similar lack of evidence occurs in a work by Annie Molinié-Bertrand, Raphael Carrasco and Béatrice Pérez, La pureté de sang en Espagne: Du lignage à la race, Paris, 2011, which argues that “toutes les strates de la société espagnole se trouvent ébranlées par ce préjugé du sang.”

  30. For some sensible comments, see John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in Ameri
ca, 1492–1830, New Haven and London, 2006, pp. 82–83, who feels the idea of purity was “diluted by the Atlantic crossing.” See also pp. 171, 323 of the same work.

  31. Cf. Sophie Gilmartin, Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy, Cambridge, 1998, p. 17: “Many felt that it was necessary to increase the strength, both in numbers and in purity of blood, of Anglo-Saxons, so that they would be able to populate and secure the new lands of the Empire.”

  32. Guillaume Aubert, “The Blood of France: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, 3 (2004), pp. 439–78.

  33. Cuart Moner, p. 30.

  34. The pioneering study (1960) on this statute by Sicroff failed to consult crucial historical documentation, and arrived at a series of erroneous conclusions.

  35. “Sobre el Estatuto de limpieza de la Sancta Iglesia de Toledo,” BN, MS.13267, f. 278. Nearly all statements made by the archbishop in the document are either untrue or a distortion, but I have preferred to let them stand without comment.

  36. “La contradicion hecha por algunas dignidades,” BN, MS. 1703, ff. 1–17.

  37. The president of Castile was Hernando Niño de Guevara. All documents here are in AGS, Cámara de Castilla, leg. 291, f. 1.

  38. Sicroff, p. 137.

  39. The passage is erroneously cited as being Philip’s by Sicroff, p. 138. It is by Siliceo, and may be found in his memoir to Philip in BN, MS.13,267, f. 281.

  40. L. Cabrera de Córdoba, Filipe Segundo, rey de España, 4 vols., Madrid, 1876–77, I, 47.

  41. A particularly notable error is the following: “in 1555 a statute was passed confirming purity of blood as essential for entry to any office in Spain.” The spurious claim is made in Toby Green, Inquisition: The Reign of Fear, London, 2007, p. 197.

  42. Martínez refers to “the continuing spread of limpieza statues in the second half of the sixteenth century” (Genealogical Fictions, p. 45), when, as far as the available facts tell us, they did not spread.

  43. Richard Kagan, Students and Society in Early Modern Spain, Baltimore, 1974, p. 94.

  44. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 271.

  45. Kamen, Crisis and Change, VII, 7.

  46. Domínguez Ortiz 1955, p. 65.

  47. BL. Add.28263, ff. 491–92.

  48. Cf. cases cited in Kamen, Crisis and Change, VII, 24, n. 27.

  49. Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona, Inquisició, years 1623–1629, documents an application to become a familiar from the resident of a Catalan village containing twelve households. To comply with rules, the inquisitors in 1623 sent out a comisario, a notary and an assistant, who interviewed fifty-three witnesses from the surrounding area, and spent eleven days drawing up a file of ninety-six closely written pages. Because of defects in their work, they were sent back five years later to repeat the whole inquiry and interview twenty-four more witnesses. The issue of limpieza as such did not arise, because Jews had never lived in that part of Catalonia. The inquisitors were more worried about intermarriage between local residents and people who came from France.

  50. Ruy Gómez to Francisco de Eraso, 25 Nov. 1552, AGS:E, leg. 89, f. 123.

  51. The captain was Julián Romero, one of Philip II’s most famous commanders in Flanders: see Cabrera de Córdoba, Filipe Segundo, II, 429.

  52. Linda Martz, “Pure Blood Statutes in Sixteenth-Century Toledo: Implementation as Opposed to Adoption,” Sefarad 54, 1 (1994), pp. 91–94.

  53. P. L. Lorenzo Cadarso, “Oligarquías conversas de Cuenca y Guadalajara (siglos XV y XVI),” Hispania 186 (1994), p. 79.

  54. Both cited in B. González Alonso, Sobre el estado y la administración de la corona de Castilla en el antiguo régimen, Madrid, 1981, p. 71.

  55. Cited in Kamen, Crisis and Change, VII, 3.

  56. Poole, p. 50.

  57. Cf. my references in chapter 3 and chapter 10 of this book.

  58. Cited in Sicroff, p. 94, n. 125.

  59. Domínguez Nafría, p. 64.

  60. C. Carrete Parrondo, El judaismo español y la Inquisición, Madrid, 1992, p. 155; Gil Fernández, p. 470.

  61. For examples of all this, Lea, II, 300–306.

  62. Summa nobilitatis, Salamanca, 1559, p. 186.

  63. J. Edwards, “From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism: Juan Escobar del Corro’s Tractatus,” Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies (1986), division B, vol. 1, pp. 143–50.

  64. Poole, p. 19.

  65. AHN Inq, lib. 497, f. 50.

  66. Inquisitors to Suprema, 9 May 1600, AHN Inq, lib. 740.

  67. N. Hergueta, “La Inquisición de Logroño. Nuevos datos históricos,” BRAH 45 (1904).

  68. AHN Inq, lib. 731, f. 499.

  69. AHN Inq, leg. 1586, no. 8.

  70. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, London, 1821.

  71. M. Bataillon, “Honneur et Inquisition,” BH 27 (1925). Bataillon quoted the comment of the contemporary historian Sepúlveda to the effect that Díaz’s heresy “et familiae suae atque adeo patriae et totius Hispaniae infamiam pertinentibus occurreret.” Sepúlveda’s view seems highly subjective.

  72. Tellechea 1968, II, 241, n. 21.

  73. Rojas was the son of the marquis of Poza.

  74. Tellechea 1977, p. 53.

  75. R. Truman and A. G. Kinder, “The Pursuit of Spanish Heretics in the Low Countries: The Activities of Alonso del Canto, 1561–1564,” JEH 30 (1979).

  76. Eusebio Rey, “San Ignacio de Loyola y el problema de los ‘Cristianos Nuevos,’” RF 153 (1956).

  77. Cited in Sicroff, p. 272.

  78. Father Baptista to Laínez, 31 Aug. 1564, ARSI, Epist. Hisp., 101, f. 286.

  79. Eusebio Rey, “San Ignacio de Loyola,” p. 190.

  80. Robert Aleksander Maryks, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus, Leiden, 2010.

  81. It has been argued that Ribadeneira was of converso origin; see J. Gómez-Menor, “La progenie hebrea del padre Pedro de Ribadeneira S.I.,” Sefarad 36 (1976).

  82. Obras, Madrid, 1872, IV, 540.

  83. Domínguez Ortiz 1955, p. 43.

  84. The papers on his case are in AHN Inq, leg. 2393 and in libs. 578–79. See also J. M. Sánchez Gómez, “Un discípulo del P. Mro. Ávila en la Inquisición de Córdoba,” Hispania 9, 34 (1949); and J. M. Madurell i Marimón, “Diego Pérez de Valdivia en Barcelona,” Analecta Sacra Tarraconenses 30 (1957).

  85. Sicroff offers an unsubstantiated image (chap. 3 of his book) of a limpieza “officially supported by Church and state.”

  86. A fuller version of what follows is available in English as “A Crisis of Conscience in Golden Age Spain: the Inquisition against ‘Limpieza de Sangre,’” in Kamen, Crisis and Change, chap. 7.

  87. Fray Agustín Salucio, Discurso sobre los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, Cieza, 1975.

  88. BN, MS.17909/5.

  89. “Papel que dio el Reyno de Castilla a uno de los Sres ministros de la Junta diputada para tratarse sobre el Memorial presentado por el Reyno a S.M. con el libro del Pe Mro Salucio,” BN MS.13043, ff. 116–27.

  90. AHN Inq, leg. 21561.

  91. I. S. Révah, “Le plaidoyer en faveur des ‘Nouveaux-Chrétiens’ portugais du licencié Martín González de Cellorigo (1619),” REJ 122 (1963).

  92. “Discurso de un inquisidor sobre los estatutos de limpieza,” BN, MS.13043, ff. 132–71.

  93. “Discurso politico del desempeño del Reyno,” in Caro Baroja, III, 318–20.

  94. Conservación de monarquías, Madrid, 1626, discourse VII.

  95. “El Inquisidor General y Real Consejo de la Suprema,” AHN Inq, lib. 1240, ff. 6–11.

  96. Domínguez Ortiz 1955, appendix IVe, p. 233.

  97. Kamen, Crisis and Change, VII, 18.

  98. J. A. Martínez Bara, “Los actos positivos en las pruebas genealógicas en el siglo XVII,” in Nueva visión, p. 313.

  99. The controversy refutes the claim by Sicroff (p. 265) tha
t “it was forbidden in Spain to question the basis of the statutes.”

  100. Libro de las cinco excelencias del Español, Pamplona, 1629, p. 100.

  101. Cf. Kamen, Crisis and Change, VII, 20–21.

  102. Domínguez Ortiz 1955, pp. 245–47.

  103. The fact does not prevent one writer claiming: “The proliferating limpieza de sangre laws threatened all with loss of honor and status” (Kevin Ingram, The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, vol. 1, Leiden 2009, p. 17).

  104. The undocumented image of “obsession” continues to survive among some literary scholars. For a comment, see my “Limpieza and the Ghost of Américo Castro.”

  105. F. M. Burgos Esteban, “Los estatutos de limpieza y sus pruebas en el siglo XVII,” in Xudeus e Conversos, I, 370.

  106. Xudeus e Conversos, I, 371.

  107. Taylor, p. 118. Taylor gives further examples of racial insults on pp. 39–49, 55.

  108. Kamen 1980, pp. 305, 307.

  109. Braunstein, p. 123.

  110. Cited in Lea, II, 314.

  111. Carvajal to Joseph de Luyando, 28 Sept. 1751, BN, MS.13043, f. 130.

  112. Domínguez Ortiz 1955, p. 129, n. 14.

  113. Domínguez Ortiz 1955, p. 130.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN. THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE

  Epigraph. “Memorial para el asiento de Perineos,” ACA:CA, leg. 78, f. 161.

  1. For the opinion of foreigners, see J. N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700, Ann Arbor, 2000.

  2. Philip II to Luis de Requeséns, Jan. 1569, in Serrano, III, cii.

  3. Quoted in Kamen, Phoenix, p. 87.

  4. Contreras, pp. 461, 463.

  5. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, London, 1966.

  6. Some scholars take a different view. “Ces espagnols sont profondément chrétiens,” says Dedieu, p. 43; “these people were all Christians,” Poska, p. 9. The debate may be over what “Christian” means.

 

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