THE SPANISH INQUISITION

THE SPANISH INQUISITION

A Historical Revision

FOURTH EDITION

Henry Kamen

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.

Fourth edition copyright © 2014 by Henry Kamen. All rights reserved.

First edition published 1965 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson as The Spanish Inquisition. Second edition published 1985 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson as Inquisition and Society in Spain. Third edition published 1998 by Yale University Press as The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. Fourth edition 2014.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kamen, Henry.

The Spanish Inquisition / Henry Kamen. — Fourth Edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-18051-0 (pbk.)

1. Inquisition—Spain. 2. Spain—Church history. I. Title.

BX1735.K312 2014

272'.20946—dc23 2013046026

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

What power is there like that of this holy tribunal? Non est potestas super terram, quae comparetur ei; it alone governs, disposes, annuls and orders as it wishes, and nobody dares say to it, Cur ista facis?

—FRAY TOMÁS RAMÓN, OP, BARCELONA, 1619

CONTENTS

Preface

ONE Faith and Doubt in the Mediterranean

TWO The Great Dispersion

THREE The Coming of the Inquisition

FOUR An Enduring Crisis

FIVE Excluding the Reformation

SIX The Impact on Literature and Science

SEVEN The End of Morisco Spain

EIGHT The Politics of Heresy

NINE Crime and Punishment

TEN The Image and Reality of Power

ELEVEN Gender, Sexuality and Witchcraft

TWELVE Race Purity and Its Critics

THIRTEEN The Religion of the People

FOURTEEN Twilight of the Holy Office

FIFTEEN Inventing the Inquisition

Timeline: Chronology of the Inquisition

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Index

Illustrations follow page 260

PREFACE

Quite some time ago, I wrote an exploratory study of the Spanish Inquisition that became a best seller in ten languages. Thanks in part to new perspectives opened up since then by scholars, I was able to prepare subsequent editions, the last one sixteen years ago. The present volume follows the same layout of material but is a substantially fresh work that relies inevitably on previous research (both mine and that of others) and in which I arrive at somewhat different conclusions, as the reader will see.

Very many volumes have been written about the Inquisition, among them popular histories, novels and essays, some with a tendency to sensationalism and an emphasis on deaths, tortures, tyranny and fear. These characteristics certainly existed. But how prevalent were they? And were they uniquely Spanish, unmatched by other peoples in other times? Modern scholarship has attempted to look at these questions. The classic work on the Spanish Inquisition is that of the American scholar Henry Charles Lea (1906–8), available online and still the most reliable history. Like leading European historians of his day, Lea looked for a key to an explanation in laws and institutions. Later scholars adopted other approaches. An organization that survived for over three centuries and exercised power in several continents is clearly amenable to different ways of interpreting its trajectory.

Problems of interpretation arise with the very documents that are the basis of research. Can we trust them? A few scholars have thrown the cat among the pigeons by declaring them to be unreliable. There are also students of literature who avoid historical documents because they prefer a subjective interlinear reading of literary texts. On the other side are those who by contrast put their full confidence in Inquisition sources, trusting in the possibility of writing a truthful study of its activities through the perspective of the inquisitors themselves. Most working historians, like myself, accept these approaches only in part and with many reservations. What cannot be denied, for example, is that the original sources, like all police-type documentation, present problems of tainted evidence. During its lifetime the Holy Office kept its papers secret; now that they are freely available they are ironically being used at times to support the very image that the Holy Office wished for itself: an institution backed solidly by state power, capable of instilling terror in the population, summoning the masses to huge rallies, controlling what people did, believed, read and even thought. It is an image found not only in popular books but even in scholarly ones, and it can seriously impede the advance towards a clearer understanding of the impact of security organizations on the society they attempt to police.

The present account prefers not to see the Inquisition as the only player in the dramas in which it participated. It accordingly tries not only to focus on the tribunal, which had a smaller part in religion and politics than we tend to think, but attempts to place it within the broader perspective of what other entities—Church, state and people—were doing. At the same time, it modifies the notion of a uniquely “Spanish” phenomenon, since much that went on in the peninsula was the common experience also of southern Europe and in particular of Italy, whose Inquisition has been very well studied in recent years. Even within the peninsula it is significant that many Spaniards looked on the Inquisition not as theirs but as an alien (that is, Castilian) tribunal.

This book obviously owes a great deal to scholars whose work has deepened our knowledge of the Holy Office. Even our disagreements have helped, by obliging me to look for evidence to support my own approach. Ongoing debates about approaches to and interpretations of the tribunal have been impossible to fit into the body of the text, and I have frequently relegated comments to the endnotes, which contain more archival information and references than previous editions. The quantity of material has obliged me to exclude detailed treatment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Inquisition was virtually inert.

I have tried to arrive at a portrait of the tribunal in its peninsular context more consistent with what we now know, but in doing so I may be depriving readers of the familiar images of terror, flames and tyranny they may prefer to see, and many who prefer moral outrage to dictate their view of the past will assuredly be disappointed. Perhaps that is just as well. A recent writer on the theme in the New Yorker has lamented that historians now study the Inquisition “without sufficient imagination,” not giving enough emphasis to pain and suffering. The yearning for yet more imaginative fiction is misplaced. Obsessive focus on something terrible called “inquisition” has often made us conjure up a historical Godzilla that fails to coincide with truth or reality. In fixing all our sights, moreover, on imagined happenings in the past, we run the risk not only of distorting what has been but also of failing to recognize the certainly more powerful inquisitions that still threaten us today. Coercion was no monopoly of Mediterranean culture, nor in our times does it any longer need religion or ideology to drive it. As Cullen Murphy comments in his broad-ranging new book, God’s Jury, “an inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.”

Lake Oconee, Georgia, 2013

THE SPANISH INQUISITION

1

FAITH AND DOUBT IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

Asked if he believed in God, he said Yes, and asked what it meant to believe in God, he answered that it meant good food, good drink and getting up at ten o’clock.

—A TEXTILE WORKER OF REUS, CATALONIA, 1632

In the fifteenth century the Iberian peninsula remained on the fringe of Europe, a subcontinent that had been visited by the Phoenicians and Greeks, then overrun by the Romans and the Arabs. Almost unobtrusive, its position between two great seas augured well for its future role as a gateway to undiscovered worlds. In the west it took in Portugal, a small but expanding society of under a million people, their energies directed to the sea and the first fruits of trade and colonization in Asia. In the south, al-Andalus: a society of half a million farmers and silk producers, Muslim in religion, proud remnants of a once-dominant culture. To the center and north: a Christian Spain of some 6 million souls, divided politically into the crown of Castile (with two-thirds of the territory of the peninsula and three-quarters of the population) and the crown of Aragon (made up of the realms of Valencia, Aragon and Catalonia). Travelers, traders and pilgrims to the medieval shrines were familiar with the exotic symbiosis of images in the peninsula: Romanesque churches and the splendid Gothic cathedral in Burgos, medieval synagogues in Toledo, the cool silence of the great mosque in Córdoba and the majesty of the Alhambra in Granada.

Christian Spain was not always sure of its own survival. For a while in the Middle Ages, it seemed as if half of Western Europe would go Muslim. Muslim settlers and caliphs already dominated the eastern Mediterranean, including the cities of Jerusalem and Alexandria and what remained of Christian power in Constantinople. They extended their activities to the western seas, passing by way of the chief islands of Greece and the coasts of Africa, sacking the city of Rome and building castles on the coasts of Italy and Provence. In the tenth century the caliphate of al-Andalus was master of most of the Iberian peninsula, and at the end of the century the great conqueror al-Mansur sacked León and Santiago and captured Barcelona. Spanish lands remained in places under Muslim control for nearly seven centuries, with the consequence that the Islamic peoples were no less a part of Spain than the Christian and Jewish populations. They intermarried with them, and exchanged ideas and languages, so that the three religions developed side by side within the Christian and Muslim kingdoms.

For long periods, close contact between three faiths—Christians, Muslims and Jews—encouraged familiarity between cultures. Christians lived under Muslim rule (as Mozárabes) and Muslims under Christian rule (as Mudéjares): as minorities they inevitably suffered social disadvantages, and there were times under Muslim rule when the Christian Mozárabes were all but eliminated. The laws observed by each community were not always stringently exclusive, and made allowances for diversity. Even military alliances were often made regardless of religion. When Christians went to war against the Muslims, it might be (a thirteenth-century writer argued) “neither because of the law [of Mohammed] nor because of the sect that they hold to,”[1] but because of conflict over land. Political links based on agreement between Christians and Muslims were exemplified by the most famous military hero of the time, the Cid (Arabic sayyid, lord). Celebrated in the Poem of the Cid, written about 1140, his real name was Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a Castilian noble who in about 1081 transferred his services from the Christians to the Muslim ruler of Saragossa and, after several campaigns, ended his career as independent ruler of the Muslim city of Valencia, which he captured in 1094. Despite his identification with the Muslims, he came to be looked upon by Christians as their ideal warrior.[2]

Christians had Muslims as vassals, and Muslims had Christians; both, similarly, took Jews under their wing. St. Ferdinand, king of Castile from 1230 to 1252, called himself “king of the three religions,” a singular claim in an increasingly intolerant age: it was the very period that saw the birth in Europe of the medieval papal Inquisition (c. 1232). The notion of a specifically religious crusade was largely absent from military campaigns in the peninsula, where it was possible for a Catalan philosopher, Ramón Llull (d. 1315), to compose a dialogue in Arabic in which the three characters were a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew. In the later stages of the wars between Christians and Muslims, echoes of coexistence remained but the reality of conflict was more aggressive. Christians cultivated the myth of the apostle St. James (Santiago), whose body was alleged to have been discovered at Compostela; thereafter Santiago “Matamoros” (the Moor-slayer) became a national patron saint. In al-Andalus, further invasions of militant Muslims from North Africa—the Almorávides in the late eleventh century; the Almohads in the late twelfth—gave added force to religious elements in the struggle against Christians.

Romans had applied the general term Hispania to all the regions of the peninsula, and in the same way there was imprecision about the use of the word “Spain,” habitually used when explaining peninsular matters to foreigners. Spain included a variety of different political and cultural systems, with a “religion” that consisted less in a fixed structure of beliefs than in the package of practices and attitudes laid down by regional society. The variety had been there for centuries. People tended to accept the neighbors they had known for generations, especially if they shared the same lord and ruler. At both social and personal level, this could mean a series of understandings between Muslim and Christian villages, or between Christian and Jewish neighbors. Communities lived side by side and shared many aspects of language, culture, food and dress, consciously borrowing each other’s outlook and ideas.

When we move our focus further out, we can see that the experience of Spain was by no means unique. Along much of the Mediterranean coastline—in North Africa, Egypt and Palestine, the Balkans—the ubiquity of Muslim expansion by both land and sea produced a network of settlements where Christians and Muslims had to live together, often with small groups of Jews. The global relationship was usually defined by conflict, which meant that through the generations thousands of men were constantly traveling to explore and fight in the seas and lands occupied by their principal rivals. War was the continual background of the landscape depicted by the emigrant al-Hasan al-Wazzan in his Description of Africa, first published in Christian Europe in 1550.[3] Born in Granada, in 1492 he passed over into Morocco and continued extensive travels through the Mediterranean, spending nine years in Italy as a Christian. His activities are a perfect example of the contacts and culture shared between the many residents of the inland sea.

A constant by-product of warfare was the proliferation of slaves, tens of thousands of them from all faiths, who spent years in strange lands and then (if fortunate) were ransomed and brought home, where they communicated their experiences and their ideas to their neighbors. A prime center for the ransoming of slaves was Algiers, where people of all nations and faiths rubbed shoulders and exchanged experiences.[4] The example of Catalan Spain was notable: in medieval times its rulers made their mark on the western Mediterranean, southern Italy, and the lands that stretched as far as Greece. Barcelona was a city, says a chronicler, “visited by merchants from Italy and all over the Mediterranean”; it was also a notable center for the ransom of slaves.

The coastal peoples naturally traded, and came to know cultures that were not their own; in some cases, as in medieval Sicily, farmers and traders of different faiths worked together. More immediately, they often had to accept and therefore understand the cultures that from time to time dominated their own homelands. In Spain as in other Mediterranean civilizations, on a scale that was seldom paralleled in northern Europe,[5] elements of how other people thought and behaved would inevitably filter through. At one and the same time, communities would preserve their traditional, restricted horizons, but individuals might be aware of external attitudes with which they had come into contact.

Within that social sharing, throughout the inland sea there were permanent elements of conflict, arising out of the different political, economic and religious status of each faith. Where cultural groups were a minority they accepted fully that there was a persistent dark side to the picture. Time and again, at moments when tensions might be at a peak, there were sudden social explosions: riots and massacres took their toll of lives, property and places of worship. When the violence occurred on a small scale, it could be seen as “controlled and stabilizing,”[6] because it encouraged people to maintain normality.[7] The capacity of minorities to put up with sporadic repression and survive well into early modern times under inequitable conditions was based on a long apprenticeship.

It is unlikely that outbreaks of violence were motivated by the wish to target “despised” minorities, for in much of the Mediterranean the Jews and Muslims were far from being “despised.” On the contrary, in good times they enjoyed social autonomy, occupied relevant status and enjoyed the protection not only of kings and nobles but also of their host communities. Even more remarkably, in the Muslim Mediterranean, as in the island of Crete,[8] there were exceptional situations where Christians intermarried with Muslims and enjoyed equal rights in the courts.

The communities of Christians, Jews and Muslims in Spain never lived together on the same terms, and their coexistence[9] was always a relationship between unequals.[10] Within that inequality, the minorities played their roles while attempting to avoid conflicts. The documents give remarkable glimpses of how, at specific moments, they came together: Muslims at Avila in 1474 attending the cathedral celebrations that proclaimed Isabella as queen, a guild in Segovia stating in writing that Muslims and Christians were equally members of the guild, Muslim ambassadors from Granada taking part in public jousts in Valencia and Saragossa.[11] In fifteenth-century Murcia,[12] the Muslims were an indispensable fund of labor in both town and country, and as such were protected by municipal laws. The Jews, for their part, made an essential contribution as artisans and small producers in leather, jewelry and textiles. They were also important in tax administration and in medicine. In theory, both minorities were restricted to specified areas of the towns they lived in. In practice, they preferred to live together and the laws on separation were seldom enforced. In Valladolid at the same period, the Muslims increased in number and importance, chose their residence freely, owned houses, lands and vineyards.[13] Though unequal in rights, the Valladolid Muslims were not marginalized. The tolerability of coexistence paved the way for their mass conversion in 1502.

In community celebrations, all three faiths participated. In Murcia, Muslim musicians and jugglers were an integral part of Christian religious celebrations. In Tarazona (Aragon) “almost all the musicians who played in the Corpus Christi procession were Muslims.”[14] In times of crisis the faiths necessarily collaborated. In 1470 in the town of Uclés, “a year of great drought, there were many processions of Christians as well as of Muslims and Jews, to pray for water.”[15] In such a community, there were some who saw no harm in participating with other faiths. “Hernán Sánchez Castro,” who was denounced for it twenty years later in Uclés, “set out from the church together with other Christians in the procession, and when they reached the square where the Jews were with the Torah he joined the procession of the Jews with their Torah and left the procession of the Christians.” Co-acceptance of the communities extended to acts of charity. Diego González remembered that in Huete in the 1470s, when he was a poor orphan, as a Christian he received alms from “both Jews and Muslims, for we used to beg for alms from all of them, and received help from them as we did from the Christians.” The kindness he received from Jews, indeed, encouraged him to pick up a smattering of Hebrew from them. It also led him subsequently to assert that “the Jew can find salvation in his own faith just as the Christian can in his.”[16] There was, of course, always another side to the coexistence. It was in Uclés in 1491 that a number of Jewish citizens voluntarily gave testimony against Christians of Jewish origin. And Diego González, twenty years later when he had become a priest, was arrested for his pro-Jewish tendencies and burnt as a heretic.

We can be certain of one thing. Spain was not, as often imagined, a society dominated exclusively by zealots. In the Mediterranean the confrontation of cultures was more constant than in northern Europe, but so also was the consciousness of living together in a multiple society. Jews had the advantage of community solidarity, but under pressure from other cultures they also suffered the disadvantage of internal dissent over belief.[17] They were, it has been argued, a Mediterranean people with the corresponding openness of perspective to be found anywhere in the countries of the inland sea.[18] The three faiths had coexisted long enough for many people to accept a certain validity for all of them. There were cases, common enough in European history, of Jews like Samuel Pallache, born in Fez in 1550 of a family that had lived in Spain before the expulsions of 1492, who made his career in many lands, serving different religions, before he finally settled in Amsterdam.[19]

This way of thinking was given added force, not just in Spain but throughout the Mediterranean, by the fact that a significant sector of people conformed outwardly to the official faith but retained an inward commitment to their own traditional religion (see chapter 7). Throughout the lands where Muslims ruled, Christians and Jews converted to the official religion because it offered advancement, but continued to practice their old faith in secret. There were crypto-Christians in Cyprus and Crete, Albania and Bosnia, just as there would be crypto-Muslims later under Christian rule.[20] Even when there was little compulsion, people converted: in thirteenth-century Aragon there were cases of Muslims converting to Judaism and Jews converting to Islam.[21] On her travels through the Balkans in the year 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu met Albanians who, “living between Christians and Mahometans and not being skill’d in controversie, declare that they are utterly unable to judge which Religion is best; but to be certain of not entirely rejecting the Truth, they very prudently follow both, and go to the Mosque on Fridays and the Church on Sundays.”[22] Echoes of this attitude could be found anywhere in the Mediterranean. A priest in Soria in 1490 commented that “there are three faiths, and I don’t know which is the best,” but went on to affirm that “I think that everyone can be saved in his own faith.”[23] “Who knows which is the better religion,” a Christian of Castile asked in 1501, “ours or those of the Muslims and the Jews?”[24]

The religions had to cope not just with oppression from the dominant faith but also with tension between the minority cultures. Muslims and Jews might dance together in the feasts of Christians, but at the same time they took the opportunity to attack each other. In fourteenth-century Aragon, the minorities often came to blows because they disputed precedence or because they felt they had suffered a slight. In special cases, such as the traditional Christian ritual in Holy Week of “killing Jews,” during which Christians were encouraged to commit acts of real or symbolic violence against Jews,[25] the Muslims gladly took part in the proceedings.[26]

Though there were confusions of belief in the peninsula, there seems, curiously, to have been no formal heresy in late medieval times, not even among Christians. The theologians gradually began to elaborate and define what they meant by “heresy” (see chapter 3) for there were certainly defects to identify in a Spain that appeared not to be convincingly Christian. In the mid-sixteenth century a prominent friar, Felipe de Meneses, lamented the ignorance and unbelief he had found throughout Castile, “not only in small hamlets and villages but even in cities and populous towns.” “Out of three hundred residents,” he affirmed, “you will find barely thirty who know what any ordinary Christian is obliged to know.”[27] In 1529 an influential book lamented that “superstitions and witchcraft in these times are widespread in our Spain,” and a bishop reported that people in his diocese “know nothing about Christianity.” Religious practice among Christians was a free mixture of community traditions, superstitious folklore and imprecise dogmatic beliefs.[28] Some writers went so far as to categorize unofficial and popular religious practices as diabolic magic. It was a situation that Church leaders before the fifteenth century did very little to remedy.[29]

Everyday religion among Christians continued to embrace an immense range of cultural and devotional options. Throughout Spain, among people of all racial and religious antecedents, it was possible to find expressions of disbelief in an afterlife, like the statements made time and again by laity and even by clergy to the effect that “nothing exists beyond being born and dying.”[30] The priest who made this last affirmation, around the year 1500, went on to state that the best one could hope for in this life was to “have a nice woman friend and eat well.” “There is no heaven and hell,” a man stated in 1495 in a village near Soria, “that is invented to frighten little boys.”[31] It is not surprising to find persons like Alvaro de Lillo maintaining in 1524 that “we are born and die and nothing more,” or María de la Mota claiming that “I’ll look after myself in this world and you’ll not see me badly off in the next.”[32] Both were tried by the Inquisition of Cuenca. There are many parallels to the cases of the Catalan peasant who asserted in 1539 that “there is no heaven, purgatory or hell; at the end we all have to end up in the same place, the bad will go to the same place as the good and the good will go to the same place as the bad”; or of the other who stated in 1593 that “he does not believe in heaven or hell, and God feeds the Muslims and heretics just the same as he feeds the Christians.”[33]

Statements like these could be found throughout the peninsula, as we know from the testimony presented to the Inquisition in many areas. But the mere fact that the phrases were denounced by neighbors suggests that they were neither current nor commonly acceptable, and it is unwise to suppose that popular skepticism flourished. We can even at times agree with the inquisitors themselves, whose opinion was that such statements reflected nothing more than rusticity. The town of Teruel was, and still is, a remote place. It was there in 1484 that Jaime Martinez was reported to them for stating: “Happiness and success can be found only in this world, in the next world there is no heaven or hell. God is just a tree: in summer he puts out leaves, in the winter he shakes them off and they fall. That is how God makes and unmakes us people.”[34] The issue, as those who have looked at the documents will probably agree, can be approached in various ways but remains difficult to fit into neat categories of belief and unbelief.[35]

When Christian warriors battled against Muslims in earlier epochs, they shouted their convictions as passionately as team supporters would do today in a sports event. At home, or in the inn, or working in the fields, their passion would not have been so aggressive. The bulk of surviving documentation gives us some key to this dual outlook, only, however, among Christians. In Soria in 1487, at a time when the final conquest of Granada was well under way, a resident commented that “the king is off to drive the Muslims out, when they haven’t done him any harm.”[36] “The Muslim can be saved in his faith just as the Christian can in his,”[37] another is reported to have said. The inquisitors in 1490 in Cuenca were informed of a Christian who claimed that “the good Jew and the good Muslim can, if they act correctly, go to heaven just like the good Christian.”[38] There is little or nothing to tell us how Jews and Muslims thought, but there is every probability that they also accepted the need to moderate their attitude when carrying out their daily duties alongside other faiths in the Mediterranean.

The examples serve to emphasize that the idea of the Inquisition being the creation of a fanatically Catholic society has no relation to reality. Spaniards were just as split between different religious options as they were between the various cultures of the regions of the peninsula. In the Middle Ages, Christian mercenary soldiers served Muslim commanders[39] just as Muslim mercenaries served under Christians. Christians who wished to go further and turn their backs on their own society often did so quite simply by embracing Islam. From the later Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, an impressive number of Spanish Christians changed (or were accused of changing) their faith in this way (chapter 7). The kingdom of Granada, in the same way, had a small community of renegade Christians who adopted the Islamic religion. Consequently, in Christian Spain it was not uncommon to find many people who expressed pro-Muslim sentiments. In 1486 the Inquisition of Saragossa tried a Christian “for saying that he was a Muslim, and for praying in the mosque like a Muslim.”[40] There are scores of similar cases in the documents.

Long after the epoch of multiple faiths in the peninsula had passed, many Spaniards retained at the back of their minds a feeling that their differences were not divisive. In the Granada countryside in the 1620s, a woman of Muslim origin felt that “the Muslim can be saved in his faith as the Jew can in his,” a Christian peasant felt that “everyone can find salvation in his own faith,” and another affirmed that “Jews who observe their law can be saved.”[41] The attitude was frequent enough to be ordinary, and could be found in every corner of Spain and every inlet of the Mediterranean, so much so that we can almost regard it as a commonplace of rural philosophy in southern Europe. When the north Italian miller Menocchio was pressed in 1584 by an Italian inquisitor on the subject of which was the true religion, he answered: “God the father has various children whom he loves, such as Christians, Turks and Jews, and to each of them he has given the will to live by his own law, and we do not know which is the right one.”[42] Do the opinions reflect indifference, or maybe a feeling of tolerance? Scholars today read the lesson in varying ways.[43] As the Inquisition shifted its attention from former Jews, it was to find that sentiments like these were common among ordinary Christians as well. Indeed, what was particularly alarming was not simply that true religion may have been perverted by heresy, but that in many parts of Spain it could be doubted whether there was any true religion at all, if villagers had respect neither for religion nor for its ministers. “I care nothing for the gospels,” stated a resident of Cuenca in 1490, and another said, “I swear to God it’s a fraud, from the pope to the cope!”[44] A local Jewish doctor in Soria in 1491 testified of a neighbor whose religion was under suspicion that “he was neither Christian nor Jew.”[45]

The remarkable absence of formal “heresy” in late medieval Spain may in part have been a consequence of its multiple cultures. The three faiths, even while respecting each other, attempted to maintain in some measure the purity of their own ideology. In times of crisis, as with the rabbis in 1492 or the Muslim alfaquis in 1609, they clung desperately to the uniqueness of their own truth. Christianity, for its part, remained so untarnished by formal heresy that the papal Inquisition, active in regions of France, Germany and Italy, was never deemed necessary in Castile and made only a token appearance in medieval Aragon. The virtual absence of organized heresy meant that though defections to other faiths were severely punished in Christian law, no systematic machinery was ever brought into existence to deal with nonbelievers or with those forced converts who had shaky belief. For decades, society continued to put up with them, and the policy of burning practiced elsewhere in Europe was little known in Spain.

The practice of “tolerance,” in the sense of allowing people to dissent, did not of course exist in any part of Christian Europe in the 1500s. It came into being only centuries later, when some states conceded legal rights to religious minorities. But frontier societies having contact with other cultures, as in the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe, were in a special category. Spain, like them, was a plural (and therefore in some sense forbearing) society long before toleration became a philosophical issue. The same was true of Transylvania and Poland. “There is nothing new about diversity of religion in Poland,” a Polish Lutheran stated in 1592. “In addition to the Greek Christians among us, pagans and Jews have been known for a long time, and faiths other than Roman Catholic have existed for centuries.”[46] It was therefore commonplace, within that plural context, to have toleration without a theory of toleration, because there were legal guarantees for each faith.[47] The protection given to the aljamas by Christian lords was by nature contractual: in return for protection, the Muslims and Jews paid taxes. Because there was no unitary political authority in Spain, the nobles felt free to allow their Muslims to observe their own cultural customs long after the Spanish crown had officially abolished the legal existence of Islam (in 1500 in Castile, in 1526 in the crown of Aragon). The development can be seen as inherent in the nature of pre-modern political systems in Europe. Before the advent of the modern (“nation”) state, small autonomous cultural groups could exist without being subjected to persecution, thanks to the protection of local authorities. The coming of the centralizing state, in post-Reformation Europe, removed that protection and aggravated intolerance.

Even while Christians and Muslims killed each other for political or economic reasons, they accepted coexistence within the same territory. Toleration was socially possible but not ideologically acceptable: it was a feature that Spain shared with other European states possessing cultural minorities. When traveling from one territory to another, one always had to be careful about observing the local laws. A French Capuchin friar recognized this in 1593 when apologizing for speaking too freely in Barcelona. “I spoke,” he explained to the inquisitors, “with the liberty of conscience that the kings have granted in France, and did not understand that in Spain one could not make use of this liberty.”[48]

There were Spanish Christians who, even in early modern times, disapproved of extreme measures against dissidence. They were not “progressives” but simply part of a European tradition stretching back into medieval times. Eminent persons at the court of Isabella of Castile, such as her secretary Hernando del Pulgar and her confessor Hernando de Talavera, expressed their opposition to religious coercion and the use of the death penalty. Alonso de Virués, humanist and bishop, subsequently (in 1542) criticized intolerance and those “who spare neither prison nor knout nor chains nor the axe; for such is the effect of these horrible means, that the torments they inflict on the body can never change the disposition of the soul.”[49] Philip II’s chaplain and court preacher Luis de Granada criticized (in 1582) those Spaniards who “through misdirected zeal for the faith, believe that they commit no sin when they do ill and harm to those who are not of the faith, whether Muslims or Jews or heretics or Gentiles.”[50] The Jesuit Juan de Mariana, who like Luis de Granada happened to be a supporter of the Inquisition, criticized both forced conversion[51] and racial discrimination. Their voices were no doubt few, and did not reflect a widespread opinion, but when added to the testimonies gathered from among ordinary people they demonstrate that Spain was far from being the single-minded and monolithic champion of orthodoxy that it was at one time thought to be.

Even among ordinary people, there were voices opposed to violence in religion. In 1545 the theologian and subsequent confessor of Philip II, Alfonso de Castro, traveled to his home town of Zamora and was startled to hear people there criticizing Charles V’s wars against the Protestants in Germany: “I heard many and various people, who prided themselves on being faithful Catholics, criticizing the Emperor’s wars as wrong and irreligious, and saying that it was not Christian to go to war against heretics, who should be conquered not with arms but with reasoning.”[52]

In the penumbra of the three great faiths there were, it is true, a number of those who, whether through the indifferentism born of coexistence or the cynicism born of persecution, seem to have had no active belief in formal religion. Without being able to penetrate their private lives, it is difficult to offer an explanation of their attitudes, if indeed we can accept what they said as authentic. Many can be identified through surviving documentation.[53] But were they in any sense unbelievers or atheists? The question of whether “unbelief” was in any way meaningful in pre-industrial Europe was first explored magisterially by Lucien Febvre,[54] but subsequent scholars have not reached agreement on the issue. At most, they have unearthed individual cases, scattered through the paperwork of Church tribunals in Spain and Italy, of unusual statements and attitudes, based normally on traditional folklore. Without venturing further into the problem of “unbelief,” one may certainly agree that those who had attitudes of “religious tolerance, relativism, universalism or skepticism” were a recognizable phenomenon in pre-industrial society.[55] They existed throughout the Mediterranean world, not simply in Spain but also in Portugal, Italy and North Africa, because it was the vastness of that world, with its inland sea, that opened out alternative perspectives.

The era of uncertain belief and fragile coexistence in Spain drew to an end thanks to developments in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, monarchs respectively of Aragon and of Castile. Their marriage in 1469 helped bring to an end a decade of civil war over succession to the thrones, and bound together the destinies of the two realms without in any way creating a political union between them. In seeking to stabilize their power in Castile and Aragon, the monarchs inevitably had to make alliances with great nobles and prelates, and at the same time attempt to eliminate social conflict in regions where the presence of Muslims and Jews appeared to be an unsettling factor. There was one region in particular, Andalucia, where social dissidence seemed to be an immediate cause of instability and called for a concentrated peacekeeping effort. It was where they first paid serious attention to calls being made for the introduction of a special court to inquire into the heresy of Christians of Jewish origin. When that court, the Inquisition, eventually came into existence in the year 1478, it received the full backing of both monarchs, but as events turned out it failed to bring about social tranquility, and the machinery of the Inquisition served only to intensify and deepen the shadow of conflict over Spain.

2

THE GREAT DISPERSION

Do not grieve over your departure, for you have to drink down your death in one gulp, whereas we have to stay behind among these wicked people, receiving death from them every day.

—JUAN DE LEÓN OF ARANDA, 1492

With the passage of time, the Inquisition that Ferdinand and Isabella set up a decade after the beginning of their reign came to play a significant part in national life, but at the beginning its horizons were limited and regional. The primary concern was with a tiny fragment of the population, the Christians of Jewish origin who lived in the southern corner of the peninsula. Many people in those years, among them officials of the royal court, wondered whether the creation of the new tribunal was much ado over nothing. The Jews of Spain, on the other hand, with their long experience of persecution by both Muslims and Christians, had every reason to be wary.

Jews had been in the peninsula from at least the third century, and in medieval Spain they constituted the single largest Jewish community in the world. “The kings and lords of Castile have had this advantage, that their Jewish subjects, reflecting the magnificence of their lords, have been the most learned, the most distinguished Jews that there have been in all the realms of the dispersion. They are distinguished in four ways: in lineage, in wealth, in virtues, in science.”[1] Penned by a fifteenth-century Castilian rabbi, the claim was a frankly starry-eyed vision of the past. Even had it been true once, by the time he wrote it was barely more than a memory.

Compared to Christians and Muslims, the Jews were few in number. In the thirteenth century they very likely formed just under 2 percent of Spain’s population, maybe some one hundred thousand persons.[2] Many preferred to live in towns that, by modern standards, were small. The Jewish presence created, at least in Christian minds, a stereotype of rich town dwellers. Most Jews, in fact, lived in the small villages that were typical of the medieval countryside. There they farmed, bred sheep, kept vineyards and orchards, and lived for the most part peacefully with their Christian neighbors. In the towns they often occupied professions which involved daily contact with Christians: as shopkeepers, grocers, dyers, weavers. Sometimes they made a profession their own: in Murcia in 1407 there were thirty Jewish tailors.[3]

This regular contact of coexistence was typical of the medieval period,[4] and encouraged Jews to choose their own criteria for social success, even when it clashed with the preferences of their spiritual leaders.[5] It enabled Christians, Jews and Muslims to understand and respect, but not necessarily love, each other. Spaniards of different faiths were able to pursue their daily tasks together. “In the commercial sphere, no visible barriers separated Jewish, Christian and Muslim merchants during the major period of Jewish life in Spain. Christian contractors built Jewish houses and Jewish craftsmen worked for Christian employers. Jewish advocates represented gentile clients in the secular courts. Jewish brokers acted as intermediaries between Christian and Muslim principals. As a by-product, such continuous daily contacts inevitably fostered tolerance and friendly relationships, despite the irritations kept alive in the name of religion.”[6] Christians could accept Jewish physicians without prejudice. “I, Miguel de Pertusa,” runs a private contract in Aragon in 1406, “make this contract with you Isaac Abenforma son of don Salomon” to treat his son of a head wound; “and I promise that even if he dies I shall satisfy and pay you” the fee due.[7]

The communities lived, for the most part, separate existences. Jews had different food requirements and religious observances, and did not normally intermarry with Christians. The separateness was, in time, made firmer by sporadic persecution. The first great Christian persecution of Jews occurred in the seventh century, making the latter greet with relief the invasions by Muslims from North Africa. Under the subsequent Muslim caliphate of Córdoba, Jews prospered socially and economically. This came to an end in the twelfth century with the overthrow of the caliphate by the invading Almorávides, who persecuted Christian and Jew alike and destroyed their places of worship. Many Jews fled to Christian territory and under the tolerant eye of Christian rulers continued to prosper in their new surroundings. They were not, like Muslims, obviously at war against Christians, and were therefore looked on more favorably. Christian laws ordered that specific areas of the towns be set aside for Jewish and Muslim minorities, but in practice there was freedom to choose. In many medieval towns in Castile, Jewish shops and residences could be found even within Christian and Muslim neighborhoods.[8]

Social and religious rivalry helped to break down the security of the minorities. From the thirteenth century onwards, anti-Jewish legislation became common in Europe. The Fourth Lateran Council of the Church in 1215 recommended that religious minorities dress differently. The Church council at Arles (France) in 1235 ordered all Jews to wear a round yellow patch, four fingers in width, over their hearts as a mark of identification. The decrees were never enforced in the Spanish kingdoms, though successive Cortes continued to call for action—in 1371 at Toro and 1405 at Madrid. In most towns Jews began to be restricted to their own quarter (called an aljama when it was organized as a corporate body). Each aljama was a separate society within the towns, with its own officials and its own taxes. It was exempt from most municipal obligations except the duty to defend the town, and paid taxes only to the crown, under whose direct control it came. In practice, the crown had few resources with which to protect the aljamas against hostile municipalities.

In time the Jewish situation worsened throughout Europe. State and Church authorities began to take a more aggressive attitude towards their minorities. In 1290 England expelled the few Jews in its territory, and in 1306 the French crown followed suit, with further expulsions in other states during that century. In Spain the pattern of coexistence managed to hold out. Hostility continued, however, to come from different groups: from urban elites who owed money to the Jews, from the ordinary Christian population who lived beside the Jews but resented their separateness, and from some rural communities that considered the urban Jews as their exploiters.

In the mid-fourteenth century the civil wars in Castile gave rise to excesses against the Jewish community in some towns. Religious fanaticism, stirred up in southern Spain in the 1370s and 1380s by Ferrant Martínez, archdeacon of Ecija, lit the spark to this powder keg. In June 1391, during a hot summer made worse by economic distress, urban mobs rioted, directing their anger against the privileged classes and against the Jews.[9] In Seville hundreds of Jews were murdered and the aljama was destroyed. Within days, in July and August, the fury spread across the peninsula. Those who were not murdered were compelled to accept baptism. In Córdoba, wrote a Hebrew poet, “there was not one, great or small, who did not apostatize.” In Valencia during the month of July, some 250 were murdered; in Barcelona during August, some 400. The major aljamas of Spain were wiped out. Royal authorities in both Castile and Aragon denounced the excesses and tried, in the major cities, to protect the Jews. A Jewish contemporary, Reuben ben Nissim, reported that in the crown of Aragon “many of the governors of the cities, and the ministers and nobles, defended us, and many of our brethren took refuge in castles, where they provided us with food.”[10] In many places it was not the mob but the upper classes who were the perpetrators. The city of Valencia blamed “men both of the country and the town, knights and friars, nobles.”[11] Many unprotected Jews were forced to become Christians. From this time the conversos came into existence on a grand scale.

Converso (or New Christian) was the term applied to one who had converted from Judaism or Islam. Their descendants were also referred to as conversos. Given the forced nature of the mass conversions of 1391, it was obvious that many could not have been genuine Christians. At least in the crown of Aragon, royal decrees made it plain that the forced conversions were unacceptable. Jews could, if they wished, return to their own religion.[12] But circumstances had changed and in many places, such as Barcelona and Mallorca, the converted felt it safer to remain in their new religion. Their adherence to Christianity was, within this context, voluntary. It posed problems, as we shall see, both for their former coreligionists and for the Christians. The conversos were inevitably regarded with suspicion as a fifth column within the Church. Terms of opprobrium were applied to them, the most common being marrano, a word of obscure origin.[13] Though no longer Jews in religion, they continued to suffer the rigors of anti-Semitism.

Even in the pluralist society of medieval Spain, Jews had always suffered discrimination. Like any other unprivileged minority they were excluded from jobs and professions exercising authority (for example, in town government or in the army), but served in a broad range of middling and lesser callings.[14] They still managed to play a role in public life in two main areas: medicine and financial administration. They also on occasion occupied a significant cultural role as translators from Arabic, a tongue the Christians had difficulty in learning. If doctors were in short supply, Jews stepped in to meet the demand. Royal and aristocratic circles relied heavily on them as physicians. In the kingdom of Aragon “there was not a noble or prelate in the land who did not keep a Jewish physician,”[15] and a similar situation existed in Castile. In many towns the only practicing doctors were Jews, who received correspondingly favorable treatment. In Madrid in the 1480s one of the Jewish doctors was exempted by the grateful town council from certain laws and taxes.[16]

Popular hostility to Jews was based in some measure on their financial activities.[17] In specific times and places their role could be important. In the thirteenth century, under Jaime I of Aragon, some bailiffs of royal revenues in the major cities were Jews. Henry II of Castile told the Cortes of Burgos in 1367 that “we farmed out the collection of the revenue to Jews because we found no others to bid for it.”[18] In 1369 a Jew, Joseph Picho, was “chief treasurer and manager of the revenues of the realm.” In 1469 the Cortes of Ocaña complained to Henry IV that “many prelates and other ecclesiastics farm to Jews and Moors the revenue and tithes that belong to them; and they enter churches to apportion the tithe among the contributors, to the great offense and injury of the Church.”[19]

The number of Jewish tax officials was, in proportion to Christians, always small. By the fifteenth century they served in the lower grades of the fiscal system, as tax gatherers rather than as treasurers. In the period 1440–69 only 15 percent (seventy-two persons) of tax-farmers serving the crown of Castile were Jews.[20] But a few Jews also played a significant role at the apex of the financial structure. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, Abraham Seneor was treasurer of the Santa Hermandad, David Abulafia was in charge of supplies for the troops at Granada, and Isaac Abravanel administered the tax on sheep, the servicio y montazgo. The tax-farming company headed by the converso Luis de Alcalá, which included among its members Seneor, rabbi Mair Melamed, the Bien-veniste brothers and other Jews, played a prominent role in Castilian finance for some twenty years of this reign.[21] Not surprisingly, a foreign traveler commented on Isabella that “her subjects say publicly that the queen is a protector of Jews.”

In size and numbers the aljamas shrank dramatically after the massacres of 1391, and indeed in some cities they no longer existed. In Barcelona, the medieval Jewish call (street) was abolished in 1424 because it was deemed unnecessary. In Toledo, the ancient aljama consisted by 1492 of possibly only forty houses. It appears that by the end of the fifteenth century Jews were no longer a significant middle class.[22] They were not, on the whole, rich (their annual tax contribution to the Castilian royal treasury in 1480 represented only 0.33 percent of its ordinary revenue), and had negligible social status. Their great days were undeniably long past. Within the changed circumstances, however, Jewish life maintained its equilibrium. In some fortunate towns, such as Murviedro on the coast of Valencia, the resident Jews escaped violence and their numbers were indeed augmented by refugees from other areas, principally the capital city, Valencia.[23]

Living in a region where the Jews had preferred the protection of the big towns, the chronicler Andrés Bernáldez commented later that they were

merchants, salesmen, tax gatherers, retailers, stewards of nobility, officials, tailors, shoemakers, tanners, weavers, grocers, peddlers, silk mercers, smiths, jewelers, and other like trades: none broke the earth or became a farmer, carpenter or builder, but all sought after comfortable posts and ways of making profits without much labor. . . . They never wanted to take jobs in plowing or digging, nor would they go through the fields tending cattle, nor would they teach their children to do so: all their wish was a job in the town, and earning their living without much labor while sitting on their bottoms.[24]

This picture, sometimes used to set a contrast between rural Christians and urban money-lending Jews, was not entirely true. Jews certainly lived in towns, where they shared much the same professions as Christians. In fourteenth-century Saragossa they were traders, shopkeepers, artisans, jewelers, tailors, shoemakers.[25] But there is ample evidence that from the fourteenth century the Jews had put less confidence in the cities and had moved out into the villages, where their relationship with Christians was normal and peaceful. By the late fifteenth century, contrary to what Bernáldez asserts, Jewish farmers and peasants could be found throughout Spain, but above all in the provinces of Castile. In Toledo, a considerable proportion of Jews seem to have worked their own lands, mainly growing wheat and producing olives and wine. In Máqueda (Toledo) there were 281 Jewish families to only 50 Christian.[26] Even when they had lands and cattle, however, for practical reasons of religious observance and security the Jews tended to live together, usually in a town or village environment. In Buitrago (Guadalajara), members of the prosperous Jewish community (which in 1492 boasted six rabbis and even a town councilor) owned 165 fields of flax, 102 meadows, 18 market gardens, a large amount of pasture and a few water rights.[27] In Hita, in the same region, they had two synagogues and nine rabbis; the major investment was in wine, with Jews owning 396 vineyards totaling no fewer than 66,400 vines.[28] Even in the Andalucian countryside, from which Bernáldez came, there were Jewish farmers owning lands, vineyards and herds of cattle.[29]

In the crown of Aragon the Jews also engaged in agriculture, but on a much smaller scale. The lands they possessed were smallholdings rather than big fields. For reasons of security, they lived in and limited their activity to the towns.[30] In some areas their holdings may have been more ambitious. In Sos in Upper Aragon, birthplace of King Ferdinand himself, Jews were “cultivators of vines, flax and cereals, and their business relations with Christians contributed to fraternal amity,” their main callings being as peasants or as moneylenders.[31]

There was considerable variety in the social position of Jews in the peninsula. In Avila, which was untouched by the fury of 1391, the Jews survived as perhaps the biggest aljama in Castile, constituting nearly half the city’s population of seven thousand.[32] In Zamora, also untouched in 1391, the small Jewish population actually grew in size. On the eve of the expulsion the three hundred Jewish families represented one-fifth of the population.[33] In general, it has been argued, “relations between Jews and Christians remained extremely cordial throughout the century” in many parts of Castile.[34]

The reduced number of Jews after 1391 did not necessarily imply a cultural decline. The communities preserved their identity, legislated for their people (a comprehensive law was drawn up by them in 1432 in Valladolid), enjoyed the protection of leading nobles as well as of the crown, and coexisted pacifically with Christians.[35] In Aragon the crown itself, first with Alfonso V and then with Juan II, favored the recovery of the aljamas, which paid taxes directly to the royal treasury. In 1479 Ferdinand expressly confirmed the autonomy of the Jewish community in Saragossa.[36] There were also many rich Jews, among them the financiers who enjoyed royal favor. Seneor in 1490 had a good fortune worth some 6 million maravedis (16,000 ducats), which included wheat fields, vineyards and a dozen houses in Segovia and Andalucia; Melamed had property worth over half that, including houses and lands in Segovia and Avila.[37]

Pressures and tensions were, inevitably, also present. In Castile a 1412 decree, inspired in part by the zealous Valencian saint, Vincent Ferrer (who shares some responsibility for the events of 1391), and the converso chancellor, Bishop Pablo de Santa María, deprived Jews of the right to hold office or possess titles, and prevented them changing their domicile. They were also excluded from various trades such as those of grocer, carpenter, tailor and butcher; they could not bear arms or hire Christians to work for them; they were not allowed to eat, drink, bathe or even talk with Christians; and they were forbidden to wear any but coarse clothes. In practice, extreme legislation of this type was unenforceable, and either ignored or revoked.

In Catalonia in 1413–14 Vincent Ferrer helped to organize a top-level debate between Christian and Jewish scholars, which Pope Benedict XIII ordered to be held in his presence at Tortosa. At this famous Disputation of Tortosa[38] the chief star on the Christian side was the recently converted papal physician Joshua Halorqui, who now took the name Jerónimo de Santa Fe. The Disputation brought about more conversions, including members of the prominent Aragonese family de la Caballería and entire aljamas in Aragon.

Though the Disputation had threatened to extinguish the Jewish community in Aragon (some three thousand were baptized), it also had a favorable sequel. Vincent Ferrer took his campaign north to France in 1416. In Aragon a new king, Alfonso V, guided by the now Christian members of the Caballería family, reversed all the anti-Jewish legislation of the Ferrer epoch. From 1416 onwards the Aragonese crown protected the Jews and conversos firmly, rejecting all attacks on them.[39] In Tortosa in 1438 the crown insisted, against the protests of the bishop, that Jewish and Muslim doctors could visit Christian patients if the latter wished.[40] Restrictions on the movements and rights of Jews were lifted.

A policy of separating Jews from Christians had frequently been attempted. But the Castilian legislation of 1412, which required separation, was never enforced; and in Aragon the crown under King Alfonso refused to sanction ghettos. Subsequent local measures met the same fate. In Seville in 1437 Jews were ordered to live only in their quarter, but by 1450 they could be found in different parts of the city.[41] Separation orders in Soria in 1412 and 1477 were never observed.[42] From the 1460s Christian spokesmen in Castile—among them the general of the Jeronimite order, Alonso de Oropesa—returned to the theme, arguing that the conversos would be less tempted to maintain their Jewish links if Jews were clearly separated. In the 1480 Cortes at Toledo, the crown agreed to decree a general enforcement of separation in Castile. Jews were to remain in their ghettos, if necessary separated by a wall. This went the way of previous laws. In Soria in 1489 the richer Jews still had their houses outside the ghetto. In Orense the city authorities solemnly met in the synagogue in 1484 and ordered the Jewish community to “observe the laws of Toledo,” giving them three days in which to do so. In practice, on neither side were any steps made to observe the law. Four years later, in 1488, vain efforts were still being made in Orense to enforce separation.[43] In the crown of Aragon at the same period some cities, such as Saragossa, attempted to enclose the Jews, but both Isabella and Ferdinand came out firmly against such measures.[44] We should remember, in parentheses, that separation was sometimes in the interests of Jews themselves, to protect them from harassment and to save the public authorities from the cost of repressing community riots.

In the century after the 1391 riots, therefore, there is ambiguous evidence of pressure on Jews. In many areas their situation was difficult, but this was nothing new. Repressive legislation, though decreed, was regularly unenforced. In 1483 Ferdinand ordered Jews in Saragossa to wear distinguishing symbols (a red patch), but there is no evidence it was observed. Moreover, the crown actively favored Jews and former Jews. The reign was one in which the Jewish financiers Seneor and Abravanel flourished, and in which the Caballería family dominated politics in Saragossa.

The fall in numbers, all the same, left its mark. The mass conversions of 1391 depleted many communities. In the crown of Aragon, by 1492 there remained only one-fourth of the Jews of a century before.[45] The rich aljamas of Barcelona, Valencia and Mallorca, the biggest cities in these realms, had disappeared altogether; in smaller towns they either disappeared or were reduced to tiny numbers. The famous community of Girona was, with only twenty-four taxpayers left, now a shadow of its former self.[46] In the realms of Castile, there was a mixture of survival and attrition. Seville had around five hundred Jewish families prior to the riots; a half century later it had only fifty. By the time Isabella succeeded to the throne, Jews in Castile totaled fewer than eighty thousand.[47] In 1492 the communities were scattered through some two hundred centers of population, but in some former centers, such as Cuenca, there was no Jewish presence at all.

From the beginning of their reign in 1474, Ferdinand and Isabella determined to maintain between Jews and Christians the same peace that they were trying to establish in the cities and among the nobility. The monarchs were never personally anti-Semitic. As early as 1468 Ferdinand had a Catalan Jew from Tárrega, David Abenasaya, as his physician, and both he and Isabella continued to have Jewish doctors and financiers as their closest collaborators. In both Aragon and Castile they followed the policy of their predecessors: taking the Jews under their direct personal control on the same terms as other Christian and Muslim communities which were in the royal jurisdiction. “All the Jews in my realms,” Isabella declared in 1477 when extending her protection to the community in Trujillo, “are mine and under my care and protection and it is my duty to defend and aid them and keep justice.” Likewise in 1479 she gave her protection to the fragile Jewish community in Cáceres.[48] Given that Jews were constantly on the defensive against powerful municipal interests, the interventions of the crown in local politics present an impressive picture of the monarchy protecting its Jews. In 1475, for example, the city of Bilbao was ordered by the crown to revoke commercial restrictions it had placed on Jews in the town of Medina de Pomar; in 1480 the town of Olmedo was ordered to construct a gate in the wall of the judería to give Jews access to the town square.[49] The monarchs intervened repeatedly against municipalities that tried to eliminate the commercial activity of the Jews.

Royal policy, however, had to contend with social tensions. In 1476 the Cortes of Madrigal, on the initiative not of the crown but of the towns, passed sumptuary laws against Jews and Mudéjares, enforcing the wearing of a distinctive symbol and restricting the practice of usury. Jews were inevitably unhappy (in Avila they refused to lend any money until the regulations on usury were clarified), but it was not until the legislation of the 1480 Cortes of Toledo, which tried to put into effect a policy of separation and restricted Jews to aljamas, that real hardships were suffered. There is no doubt that anti-Jewish groups in the municipalities were responsible for such measures. In Burgos in 1484 Jews were not allowed to sell food; in 1485 they were ordered to shut the aljama on all Christian feast days; in 1486 a limit was put on the number of Jews in the ghetto (the order was subsequently annulled by the crown).[50] In Saragossa during the late fifteenth century there was an unmistakable rise in anti-Jewish pressure, fomented by the clergy. The penalties against Jews for not paying respect to the religious procession on the day of Corpus Christi increased threefold within the short period of ten years.[51]

The anti-Jewish measures of the period did not represent any qualitative worsening of the position of Jews. In fact, the totality of existing legislation in Castile, had it been put into practice, was already highly prejudicial to them.[52] We need to look beyond the laws. Only then, in the realm of what really happened, is it possible to appreciate the extent to which community tolerance, administrative laxity and royal policy combined to guarantee the survival and viability of the minority faiths.

The position of Jews was undoubtedly affected by religious hostility to conversos, who as converts were entitled to the same civil privileges as Christians but who were repeatedly seen to be practicing their former faith. The monarchs became firmly convinced that a separation of Jews from Christians was the most effective answer to the situation, and in 1478 they set in motion a body whose entire concern was with judaizers: the Inquisition. Though the Inquisition had authority only over Christians, Jews quickly realized that they too were in the line of fire and all their worst travails date from those years.

The existence of the Inquisition—whose activities will concern us presently—forced Jews to revise their attitude to conversos. When the great conversions took place at the end of the fourteenth century, Jews may have felt that the neophytes were still their brethren. A century later, the perspective was somewhat different. Jewish dignitaries, scholars and leaders had, not always under active persecution, voluntarily embraced the Catholic faith. The poet Selomoh Bonafed, writing in the wake of the Disputation of Tortosa, lamented how “many of the most respected leaders of our aljamas abandoned them.”[53] Some converts, especially those who entered the clergy, became bitter persecutors of the Jews. The Jews of Burgos in 1392 complained that “the Jews who recently turned Christian oppress them and do them much harm.”[54] A visible gap opened up in some communities between Jews and ex-Jews. In the early fifteenth century rabbis were still expressing the view that most of the conversos were unwilling converts (anusim). By mid-century they took the view that most were meshumadim (renegades), real and voluntary Christians. Normal, friendly social relations between conversos and Jews could still be found at all levels.[55] But there were also ominous signs of tension.[56]

When the Inquisition began its operations many Jews found no difficulty in cooperating with it against the conversos. They themselves were, as non-Christians, exempt from its jurisdiction. By contrast, they could now pay off old scores. In small communities, the coexistence of Jews and conversos concealed long-standing tensions, even among those with close and apparently friendly family ties. In the town of Calatayud (Aragon) in 1488 one of the Jews, Acach de Funes, was scorned by both Jews and Christians as a liar and a cheat. He lived up to his reputation by bearing false witness before the Inquisition against several conversos of the town, who, he claimed, were practicing Jews.[57] In Aranda in the 1480s a Jewish resident went around “looking for Jewish witnesses to testify before the Inquisition” against a local converso. The same Jew admitted confidentially to a Christian friend that “it was all false” and that he was doing it out of personal enmity.[58]

False witness by Jews in Toledo was reported by Hernando de Pulgar. They were, wrote the royal secretary, “poor and vile men who from enmity or malice gave false testimony against some conversos saying that they judaized. Knowing the truth, the queen ordered them arrested and tortured.”[59] In Soria in 1490 a Jewish doctor testified freely against several conversos. He said that one converso, a legal official, had called Torquemada “the most accursed man in the world.” “It really grieves me,” the doctor told the inquisitors contritely, “to say these things against him, but everything I have said has been the unvarnished truth.”[60] In the town of Uclés in 1491, a dozen Jews spoke freely to the inquisitor about conversos they knew to have observed Jewish customs.[61] The Inquisition itself, according to Rabbi Capsali, demanded that the synagogues should impose an obligation on Jews to denounce conversos.[62] It seems, in any case, that Jews frequently told the inquisitors what they knew about the religious practices of their converso neighbors.[63]

Cooperation with the Inquisition was not a tactic that brought any benefits. From the 1460s, as we have seen, some Church leaders had begun to advocate the separation of Jews from Christians. This policy, as adopted by the Inquisition, took the form of a partial expulsion of Jews, in order to minimize the contact with conversos. At the end of 1482, a partial expulsion of the Jews of Andalucia was ordered.[64] The exiles were free to go to other provinces of Spain. In January 1483 Jews were ordered to be expelled from the dioceses of Seville, Córdoba and Cadiz. The crown delayed implementation and they were not actually driven out from Seville until summer 1484. It is possible that the expulsions were in part motivated by fear of Jewish collaboration with the Muslim kingdom of Granada, then under attack by Ferdinand’s forces; but the role of the Inquisition was paramount. In the event, the expulsions of these years were never fully carried out. A few years later, Jews were living without any problems in Cadiz and Córdoba.[65] In 1486 in Aragon the Inquisition issued an order expelling Jews from the dioceses of Saragossa, Albarracín and Teruel. The order was postponed, and later cancelled; no expulsions took place.[66] Meanwhile some towns carried out their own unauthorized expulsions, ignoring the protests of the crown.[67]

Though Ferdinand and Isabella intervened repeatedly to protect their Jews from excesses (as late as 1490 they began an enquiry into Medina del Campo’s ban on Jews setting up shops in the main square), the monarchs appear to have been thoroughly convinced by Inquisitor General Torquemada of the need for a separation of Jews. When the local expulsions had failed, after ten long years, to stem the alleged heresies of the conversos, the crown decided on the most drastic measure of all—a total expulsion of Jews.

Jews expelled by other countries in medieval times had been tiny minorities.[68] In Spain, by contrast, they had for centuries been a significant, prosperous and integral part of society. Their fate was now in the balance in a country where there was growing pressure against the other cultural minority, the Muslims. Since 1480 the whole economy of the state was geared to the war against Granada. There was also less tolerance of Islam. In 1490 the Muslims of Guadalajara were accused of converting a Jewish boy to Islam. Though they claimed in defense that such conversions “had been the custom in these realms,” the royal council ruled that “hereafter no Jew may turn Moor”; nor indeed could Moors turn Jew.[69] It had, of course, long been illegal (since at least 1255) for Christians to turn Jew or Muslim. When during the Granada war groups of ex-Christians were captured after the fall of Málaga, they were immediately put to death.[70] By contrast, after the fall of Granada several ex-Christians there who had turned Muslim were accepted back into the Church.[71]

Ferdinand and Isabella hesitated for some time over the idea of expulsion. The crown stood to lose revenue from the disappearance of a community whose taxes were paid directly to the crown, and which moreover had helped to finance the war in Granada. Many people in Spain may have been anxious to get rid of the Jews for social and economic reasons: the Old Christian elites and several municipalities saw in them a source of conflict and competition.[72] The decision to expel, however, was the crown’s alone, and it appears to have been taken exclusively for religious reasons. There are no grounds for maintaining that the government stood to profit, and Ferdinand himself admitted that the measure hurt his finances.[73] The king and queen were undoubtedly encouraged in their policy by the fall of Granada in January 1492, which seemed a signal of divine favor. On 31 March, while they were in the city, they issued the edict of expulsion, giving the Jews of both Castile and Aragon until 31 July to accept baptism or leave the country.

The decree gave as its main justification “the great harm suffered by Christians [i.e., conversos] from the contact, intercourse and communication which they have with the Jews, who always attempt in various ways to seduce faithful Christians from our Holy Catholic Faith.” “Over twelve years” of Inquisition had failed to solve the problem, nor had the recent expulsions from Andalucia been sufficient. It was now decided that “the only solution to all these ills is to separate the said Jews completely from contact with Christians, and expel them from all our realms.”[74]

When the news broke, a deputation of Jews led by Isaac Abravanel went to see the king. Their pleas failed, and at a second meeting they offered the king a large sum of money if he would reconsider his decision. There is a story that when Torquemada heard of the offer he burst into the monarchs’ presence and threw thirty pieces of silver on the table, demanding to know for what price Christ was to be sold again to the Jews. At a third meeting which Abravanel, Seneor and the Jewish leaders had with the king, it became clear that Ferdinand was determined to go ahead. In despair they turned to the queen. She, however, explained that the decision, which she firmly supported, came from Ferdinand: “the Lord has put this thing into the heart of the king.”[75]

The proposal to expel came in fact from the Inquisition. There can be no doubt about this because the king said so clearly in the text of the edict issued in Aragon, a ferocious document that was obviously drawn up by the inquisitors and reeks of a virulent anti-Semitism not present in the Castilian text.[76] There was more than a grain of truth in the story of Torquemada and the pieces of silver. The general expulsion was an extension of the regional expulsions that the Inquisition had been carrying out, with Ferdinand’s support, since 1481. The king also confirmed the key role of the Inquisition in a letter that he sent to the principal nobles of the realm. The copy sent to the count of Aranda on the same day as the edict explained the circumstances concisely:

The Holy Office of the Inquisition, seeing how some Christians are endangered by contact and communication with the Jews, has provided that the Jews be expelled from all our realms and territories, and has persuaded us to give our support and agreement to this, which we now do, because of our debts and obligations to the said Holy Office: and we do so despite the great harm to ourselves, seeking and preferring the salvation of souls above our own profit and that of individuals.[77]

Similar confirmation of the Inquisition’s role was made by the king in other letters sent the same day. The inquisitors of Saragossa, for example, were informed that the prior of Santa Cruz (that is, Torquemada) had been consulted and that “it has been decided by me and by him that the Jews be expelled.”[78]

Though most Jews in Spain were under royal jurisdiction, a few were not. The local expulsions in Andalucia in the 1480s, for example, had not been applicable to Jews living on the territories of the duke of Medinaceli. In 1492, therefore, the crown had to explain to the nobles, such as the Catalan duke of Cardona who had assumed that “his” Jews were not affected, that the edict was universal. However, nobles were granted the property of their expelled Jews as compensation. In Salamanca the royal officials were ordered not to touch the effects of Jews who lived on the estates of the duke of Alba.[79]

It is possible that the monarchs thought mass conversions would be more likely than mass emigration. In that sense, the 1492 edict may not have intended expulsion. The rabbi of Córdoba was baptized in May, with Cardinal Mendoza and the papal nuncio as sponsors. In June the eighty-year-old Abraham Seneor, chief judge of the Jewish aljamas of Castile[80] and principal treasurer of the crown, was baptized in Guadalupe with the king and queen as his sponsors. Seneor, a prototype “court Jew,” was a striking example of the way in which some Jews rendered faithful service to the crown and in the process managed to protect their community. He and his family adopted the surname Pérez Coronel; a week later he was nominated city councilor (regidor) of his hometown of Segovia and member of the royal council. His colleague Abravanel took over as spokesman for the Jews and began to negotiate terms for the emigration.

The edict may have come as a shock to communities where Jews lived tranquilly. In some Christian areas, however, public opinion was well prepared for it. Stories of Jewish atrocities had been circulating for years. One concerned an alleged ritual murder performed on a Christian child at Sepúlveda (Segovia) in 1468. The converso bishop of Segovia, Juan Arias Dávila, is reported to have punished sixteen Jews for the crime. The most famous of all the cases concerned the alleged ritual murder of a Christian infant at La Guardia in the province of Toledo in 1491. Six conversos and as many Jews were said to have been implicated in the crime, in which a Christian child was apparently crucified and had its heart cut out in an attempt to create a magical spell to destroy Christians. Such, at least, was the story pieced together from confessions extracted under torture, the culprits being executed publicly at Avila in November 1491.[81] The affair received wide publicity: we find a printed account of it circulating in Barcelona shortly after. The timing was ominous, and there can be little doubt that it helped prepare many to accept the expulsion of the Jews. Atrocity stories of this sort, common in Europe both before and since—in England there were the cases of William of Norwich in 1144 and Hugh of Lincoln in 1255—served to feed popular anti-Semitism.

Spanish Jews could not have been unaware of the expulsions recently put into effect in neighboring states. In Provence, soon to be part of France, an anti-Jewish movement was growing and led soon to expulsions; in the Italian duchies of Parma and Milan Jews were expelled in 1488 and 1490.[82] Farther away, in Poland, Jews were expelled from Warsaw in 1483, and partially from Cracow two years later.[83] There was therefore nothing exceptional about the case of Spain. In any case, the Spanish decree was not strictly one of expulsion, for (as we have seen) in practice the authorities throughout Spain offered Jews a firm choice between conversion and emigration. Some Jewish communities actually received official invitations, which survive in manuscript, that “those who become Christians will be given aid and be well treated.”[84] The edict did not seek to expel a people, but to eliminate a religion.[85] This was demonstrated by the efforts of clergy in those weeks to convert the Jews, and by the satisfaction with which converts were accepted into the Church. It is interesting to observe that the king stated expressly to Torquemada two months after issuing the edict: “many wish to become Christians, but are afraid to do so because of the Inquisition.” Accordingly, the king continued, “you will write to the inquisitors, ordering them that even if something is proved against those persons who become Christians after the decree of expulsion, no steps be taken against them, at least for small matters.”[86]

The expulsion was a traumatic experience that left its mark for centuries on the Western mind. In that decade there were already prophetic voices which seemed to implicate the fate of the Jews in some greater destiny.[87] Among some conversos, and presumably some Jews as well, there emerged a dream of leaving Sepharad (the Hebrew name for Spain) for the Promised Land and Jerusalem.[88] Among the Christians, the fall of Granada seemed to be (as it became) the omen for the conversion of the Jews. Was Ferdinand—always a firm believer in his own destiny—influenced by these voices? Was he influenced by the strong Catalan mystical tradition that identified the defeat of Islam in Spain with the destruction of the Jews?[89]

In giving the event its due importance, however, historians then and later exaggerated many of its aspects. They measured its significance in terms of immense numbers. The Jesuit Juan de Mariana, writing over a century later, stated that “the number of Jews who left Castile and Aragon is unknown; most authors say they were up to 170,000 families, but some even say they were as many as 800,000 souls: certainly a great number.”[90] Jews who took part in the emigration had no doubt of the dimensions of the tragedy. Isaac Abravanel wrote that “there left 300,000 people on foot from all the provinces of the king.”[91] For Jewish commentators, inflating the figures was a way of expressing solidarity with the victims.

In fact, few reliable statistics exist for the expulsion. Those given in standard histories are based on pure speculation. Our first care must be to estimate the possible Jewish population of Spain in 1492. A judicious analysis based on the tax returns of the communities in Castile gives us a fairly reliable total of around seventy thousand Jews in the crown of Castile at this date.[92] This accords with the estimate of under eighty thousand already mentioned above. The great days of a large and prosperous community were truly past. The situation was worse in the crown of Aragon, where Jews were reduced to one-fourth of their numbers as a result of the fateful year 1391.[93] In these realms, they numbered by the late fifteenth century some nine thousand.[94] In the whole of the kingdom of Valencia the Jews numbered probably only one thousand, most of them in the town of Murviedro.[95] In Navarre, there were some 250 families of Jews. In total, then, the Jews of Spain on the eve of the expulsion in 1492 numbered just over eighty thousand souls, a far cry from the totals offered by their own leaders or by most subsequent scholars.

The sufferings of those forced into exile for the sake of religion are vividly detailed by Bernáldez, in a picture that has become all too familiar since the fifteenth century.[96] The richer Jews out of charity helped to pay the costs of the poorer exiles, while the very poor managed to help themselves in no other way but by accepting baptism. Many were unable to sell their possessions for gold or silver, for the export of these metals from Castile was forbidden; so they sold houses and property for the most desperate substitutes. “They went round asking for buyers and found none to buy, some sold a house for an ass, and a vineyard for a little cloth or linen, since they could not take away gold or silver,” Bernáldez reported. The ships that met them at the ports were overcrowded and ill managed. Once they had put out to sea, storms drove them back, forcing hundreds to reconcile themselves to Spain and baptism. Others, not more fortunate, reached their desired haven in North Africa only to be pillaged and murdered. Hundreds of others staggered back to Spain by every available route, preferring familiar sufferings to those of the open sea and road. One of the exiles wrote:

Some traveled through the ocean but God’s hand was against them, and many were seized and sold as slaves, while many others drowned in the sea. Others were burned alive as the ships on which they were sailing were engulfed by flames. In the end, all suffered: some by the sword and some by captivity and some by disease, until but a few remained of the many.[97]

Without minimizing the transcendence of the expulsion decree, it must be emphasized that only a proportion of the Jews of Spain were affected by it. There were several reasons for this. Aware that a choice of conversion was offered, a great many took the option. It was one that their people had endured through the ages, and there seemed little reason not to accept it now. Chroniclers then and later lamented the rapidity with which their people went to be baptized. “Many remained in Spain who had not the strength to emigrate and whose hearts were not filled with God,” reported one Jewish contemporary. “In those terrible days,” reported another, “thousands and tens of thousands of Jews converted.”[98] The evidence suggests that possibly half of all the Jews of Spain preferred conversion to expulsion. Their motives were comprehensible. The majority in Aragon and possibly in Castile as well entered the Christian fold.[99] A potent motive was the fear of losing homes and livelihood. A converso woman resident in Almazán some years later observed that “those who remained behind did so in order not to lose their property.”[100]

Many others went into exile. Possibly a third of the nine thousand Jews of the crown of Aragon emigrated.[101] They went in their entirety to adjacent Christian lands, mainly to Italy. The exiles from Castile went mostly to neighboring lands where their faith was tolerated, such as Navarre and Portugal. For many the journey to Portugal ended in 1497, when all Jews there were ordered to become Christian as a condition of the marriage between King Manoel and Isabel, daughter of the Catholic monarchs. Several exiles, particularly from Andalucia, crossed over to North Africa. Others did so years later, after the Portuguese conversions of 1497. Navarre shut a door when it required its Jews to convert in 1498. Shem Tov ben Jamil, a refugee from Navarre who finally found shelter in Fez, at the end of his life looked back on the terrible events he had experienced. His account began with the words: “I have decided, with a broken heart, to write about” what transpired during the exile.[102]

We should not limit our gaze only to the peninsula, for Ferdinand was also directly king of Sicily, where the edict of expulsion was published on 18 June.[103] The viceroy of Sicily issued an order a month afterwards encouraging conversion and ordered it read in synagogues; at the same time he promised that converts would be well treated. The measure was not received favorably by all Christians: some of the nobility protested against the expulsion, and in Palermo so did the city councilors.[104] Conversions were slow to take place, so that the definitive enforcement of the order kept being put back repeatedly and was finalized only the following January. Those who decided to go into exile did not have to go far; some went to North Africa but most went to the neighboring kingdom of Naples, where the edict of expulsion was not in force, and from Naples many eventually returned a while later, fleeing in particular from the wars in that realm. There are no reliable figures for the number of Sicilian Jews who went into exile. The Italian peninsula, in any case, was a mosaic of states and jurisdictions that sometimes persecuted Jews and sometimes tolerated them. Sephardic Jews were well received, for example, in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, where the dukes issued special permissions and thereby enabled the port of Livorno to develop subsequently into the second biggest center of western Jewry after Amsterdam.[105]

Despite a persistent but misinformed tradition to that effect, no Jews are known to have gone to Turkey until very much later.[106] They had no ships to transport them, and no reliable documents attest their presence there. It was probably over half a century before the first refugees reached the Middle East, for they went initially to other lands that were easier to reach and where their religion was tolerated, such as Portugal and Naples. Christian travelers around the year 1550 reported meeting peninsular Jews in Egypt, in Palestine and even farther east, in Goa in India, but there is nothing to identify them with the exiles of 1492. Asia had its own Jews, of remote and undocumented origin.

All these emigrations shared one thing in common: suffering. A Genoese diplomat, seeing the refugees who arrived in the port there, commented that “no one could witness the sufferings of the Jews without being moved. . . . They could have been mistaken for wraiths, so haggard and emaciated did they look, undistinguishable from dead men.”[107] Wherever they went the refugees were exploited or mistreated. Inevitably, many attempted to return. In their exile in Africa, reported a rabbi from Málaga, “many could not take it any more and returned to Castile. Likewise this occurred to those who came to Portugal and the kingdom of Fez. And it was the same wherever one went.”[108] Between those who converted and those who returned, the total of those who left Spain forever was relatively small, possibly no more than forty thousand. The figures place many of the historical issues in a clearer perspective.

Many writers have assumed that the expulsion was motivated by greed and a wish to rob the Jews. There is little evidence of this, and it is highly improbable. The crown did not profit and had no intention of profiting. No one knew better than the king that Spain’s Jews were a dwindling minority with few resources. By Ferdinand’s own admission, he stood to lose some tax revenue; but the sum realized by the authorities from the sale of goods was negligible. Though Jewish communal property (mainly the synagogues and cemeteries) was seized by the crown,[109] it was in most cases handed over to local communities. The exiles were given the right to take permitted wealth with them. Aragonese Jews, for example, were “expressly permitted to take all their possessions, including gold, silver, animals and clothing, and were guaranteed that their property could not be appropriated for debt.”[110] Embarkation lists for the ports of Málaga and Almería, in Andalucia, show that many took substantial sums out of the country.[111] Several fortunate individuals were allowed to take most of their goods and jewels. One such was Isaac Perdoniel, granted the favor at the direct request of the last Muslim king of Granada, Boabdil.[112] Abravanel and his family were also given a special privilege to take their personal wealth with them. Others bribed officials to let them take treasure. In 1494 an official of Ciudad Real was prosecuted by the government for levying extortionate charges on Jews crossing to Portugal, and for “allowing through many persons and Jews from these realms [i.e., Castile] who were taking gold and silver and other forbidden items.”[113] Many individuals and corporations that had owed money to the Jews clearly benefited from the expulsion, but this was an incidental consequence of a measure that was primarily religious in motivation.

The effects on Spain were, beyond all doubt, smaller than is often claimed in popular literature. The sultan of Turkey is reported to have said at a later date that he “marveled greatly at expelling the Jews from Spain, since this was to expel its wealth.” The statement is completely apocryphal, and comes from a later, uncorroborated Jewish source.[114] The Jews had played only a small part in the country’s economy, and their loss had a similarly small impact.[115] In any case, in practice Jews had been allowed to transfer many assets to those who converted. In the village of Buitrago[116] there had been around one hundred Jewish families before the expulsion; only a few chose to leave, and there were seventy “converso” families there shortly after, so that the real transfer of property was probably minimal. Those exiles who returned, such as Samuel Abolafia of Toledo,[117] were immediately given back their property. In Ciudad Real an official was obliged to give back to Fernán Pérez, “formerly named Jacob de Medina,” “some houses that he sold to him at below their fair price, at the time that the Jews had to leave the kingdom.”[118] In Madrid in 1494 several expelled Jewish doctors who returned (as Christians) were welcomed back with open arms by the town council, which commented that “the more doctors there are, the better for the town, for all of them are good doctors.”[119]

No less mistaken is the claim that the crown’s purpose was to achieve unity of faith.[120] The king and queen were neither personally nor in their politics anti-Jewish. They had always protected and favored Jews and conversos. They might be accused of many things, but not of anti-Semitism.[121] Nor were they anti-Muslim. Ferdinand and Isabella made no move, until several years later, to disturb the faith of the enormous Muslim population of Spain, which in political terms was a far graver danger than the tiny Jewish minority.

Although the terms of the edict issued in Aragon were unmistakably anti-Semitic, the warm welcome given to returnees confirms that the expulsion was not motivated simply by racialism.[122] Jews who returned as Christians were welcomed, and the proportion of those who returned was high. They were, the evidence suggests, given back their jobs, property and houses. Those who had converted were protected against popular anti-Semitism. In 1493 the monarchs ordered people in the dioceses of Cuenca and Osma not to call baptized Jews tornadizos (turncoats).[123] The new converts and the old conversos continued to function in the trades and professions in which the Jews had distinguished themselves. The purely economic impact of the expulsion was thereby softened.

The diaspora (which was extended when the Jews in Naples, who by now included many émigrés from Spain, were ordered to convert or leave that territory in 1508) continued to be seen by some Jews in wholly somber hues.[124] Among them, Rabbi Elijah Capsali of Crete, a contemporary of these events, described how the Christians made the Jews suffer, “killing them by the sword, by starvation and by plague, selling them into captivity and forcing them to convert.”[125] Because of that suffering, the events of 1492 came much later to be seen by some as a reference point, a pre-figuring of the Holocaust of the twentieth century.

Not all who left, however, were interested in conserving the role of being victims. Though thrown into strange lands, they often turned defeat into success. As Rabbi Capsali prophesied, “the exile which appears so terrible to the eye will be the cause of the growth of our salvation.” The end of Iberian Jewry represented the closing of one chapter in history, but it also ushered in an age of activity for the Jews in Western Europe, as those from Spain went to other parts of the continent and contributed to their host societies with their knowledge and skills. Venice was the city where the great figure among the first exiles, Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), settled and wrote (in Hebrew) his chief philosophical works. Abravanel’s family came originally from Spain, but he was born in and spent half his adult life in Portugal, moving in 1483 to Castile, where he became one of the chief financiers of Ferdinand and Isabella. “I served them for eight years,” he testified later. “I also acquired great wealth and honor.” But as a result he found little time for what chiefly concerned him, reflecting on the scriptures. “In order to work for a non-Jewish king, I abandoned my inheritance.” When the expulsion was decreed he refused to convert (unlike his distinguished colleague, eighty-year-old Abraham Seneor), and left with all his family for Naples. In recognition of his outstanding services to the crown the king allowed him to emigrate with his gold and valuables, but his remembrance years later was only of “the bitter and hasty exile and forced conversions when we were exiled from Spain.”[126] After some uneasy years in Naples, he moved to Sicily and Corfu, then to the Adriatic coast, settling finally at Venice in 1503.

During these last years he devoted himself to messianic reflections (in a trilogy written from 1496 onwards) on the historic vocation of the persecuted Jews, asserting forcefully that his people still had a God-given destiny. Even those who had “betrayed our religion” by embracing Christianity and attaining wealth and honor among the nations would not be able to escape the same destiny, “for God will separate them and keep them distinct and apart.”[127] His published writings, infused by a profound rejection of the violence of his time, looked forward to an eventual liberation and may have helped to nurture the messianic tendencies that had already been present among Jews before 1492 but became more pronounced among the leaders of the Sephardic dispersion.[128] He felt that the Jews’ current wanderings among “the wilderness of the peoples” would shortly come to an end with the arrival of the Messiah.[129]

Contemporaries in Europe who heard of the expulsions reacted according to the information they received. Leaders of Church and state congratulated the Spanish king on his action. The movement of refugees from the peninsula was associated by Italians with a new sexual disease (syphilis), which was identified during those months in Italy and dubbed by some “the Jewish disease.”[130] Maybe in part as a consequence of the expulsions in the Mediterranean, there grew up among Europeans the legend of a Wandering Jew who had to atone for his offenses to Christ by being condemned to wander the world until the Second Coming.[131] The legend had little impact in Spain, where the removal of the Jews was decisive.[132]

Perhaps the most surprising reaction of all and one too often forgotten when we consider what happened in those years is that many Christians in Spain both then and later thought the expulsion to be wrong. Rabbi Capsali reported that after Ferdinand’s death several Spanish officials criticized the king for banishing the Jews.[133] His information is supported by that of Ferdinand’s subsequent biographer, the sixteenth-century Aragonese inquisitor and chronicler Jerónimo de Zurita, who tells us that “many were of the opinion that the king was making a mistake.”[134] The first historian of the Inquisition, the inquisitor Luis de Páramo, writing a century after the expulsion, was also firm on this point. “I cannot omit to mention,” he stated, “that there were learned men who did not feel that the edict was justified.”[135] He adds that there were those who felt that the expulsion was in effect an invitation to kill Jews, which was contrary to Holy Scripture’s requirement that Jews not be killed but rather converted.

In retrospect, there is every reason to criticize the curiously ambivalent policy of the crown after 1492. The practice of Judaism was forbidden in Spain, its adjacent kingdoms (such as Navarre and Sicily) and its colonies. But historians usually forget to mention that it was permitted in every other territory ruled by the Spanish crown in the early years of the sixteenth century. Jews flourished in Spanish Naples for another quarter of a century. Not until a century after 1492 was Judaism prohibited in Milan (under Spanish control from the mid-sixteenth century). Not until nearly two centuries later was it prohibited in Spanish Oran, in North Africa.[136] This tacit acceptance meant that the Jewish religion continued to have some role in the consciousness of Spaniards who traveled through the empire, long after it had officially ceased to exist in Spain. We can rule out, however, the fanciful idea that Jews made it to the New World. In time, those who were converts to Christianity certainly went to America, but there they faced problems with the new Inquisition.[137]

What Spain lost was neither wealth, for the Jews had not been rich, nor population, for few left. Some later commentators, writing at a time of economic difficulty, imagined that loss of wealth was the main consequence of 1492, and down to the nineteenth century their writings reflect this quaint obsession. But Spaniards who reflected on such things felt that the real loss was the failure of the rulers to protect their own people. The crown turned its back on the plural society of the past, cut off an entire community that had been a historic part of the nation, and intensified the converso problem without solving it. The Jews had finally been driven into the Christian fold. “In this way,” wrote the curate of Los Palacios, Andrés Bernáldez, “was fulfilled the prophecy of David in the psalm Eripe me, which says: Convertentur ad vesperam, et famen patientur, ut canes; et circuibunt civitatem. Which is to say: ‘They shall return at evening, and shall suffer hunger like dogs, and shall prowl round the city.’ Thus these were converted at a late hour and by force and after great suffering.”[138]

In the end, however, it was a mitigated loss. The expulsion did not destroy the profound links between the Jewish people and Spain. They had lived together for centuries and in reality would continue to do so, since tens of thousands converted and stayed on. Those who left took Spain with them. They took with them some of the cultural heritage of language, music, food and clothing, but above all it was the culture of their faith that endured. The principal language they had spoken was Castilian, which consequently became an important element in books they published outside Spain, as well as in everyday social discourse. Exiles and their descendants continued to speak Castilian in many communities in Italy and the Middle East. A Spanish traveler in Salonika in 1600 reported that Jews he met there spoke a language as fine as that spoken in Toledo.

At the same time the rabbis who ministered to the exiles tried to close the gates on the past by consigning Sepharad to oblivion. The country was treated by them officially as accursed, “a land of idolatry,” and Jews were discouraged from going back to it. Despite the prohibitions, many continued to feel a profound kinship with the land that had rejected them, and held it their chief pride to have come from Spain. Deprivation compelled them to redefine their attitude to their origins. It was not merely a question of looking backwards. In a sense, the land they had lost was also the promised land of the future. In a telling phrase, some of the chronicles refer to “Jerusalem which is in Sepharad,” meaning that Jerusalem was the real home and Spain simply a manifestation of that home. Spain, or at least an imagined Spain, continued to be a focus of attention. At the same time that their rabbis forbade them to go back, therefore, many Jews made an effort to do so (see chapter 14 below), thereby placing themselves at risk from the attention of the Inquisition.

As in other European countries, they managed to return. During the nineteenth century a few Jews visited Spain and lived there without problems, despite being officially prohibited. The Cortes in 1855 sanctioned their presence by voting that no Spaniard or foreigner be harassed for religious beliefs. This affected only private belief. In 1868 the government of General Prim went a step further, abrogating the 1492 expulsion decree and allowing the return of Jews (as well as of Protestants). The ban on the public exercise of other religions was eventually removed by article 21 of the Constitution of 1869, which established religious freedom for the first time.

3

THE COMING OF THE INQUISITION

Keep yourself from the flames! The reverend fathers are coming!

—A FRIAR TO A CONVERSO, SORIA, 1491

The expulsions of 1492 solved no problems, and only aggravated an old one. Those who converted and stayed were able to retain their property, but could hardly expect to be favorably accepted in communities where anti-Semitism had been stirred up. Emigrants were allowed to transfer their property to New Christians, so that assets often continued to remain in the same family. In post-1492 Christian society, the new conversos occupied exactly the same social position as the Jews. As before the expulsion, they continued to work as traders, tax gatherers, moneylenders, farmers, tailors and cobblers. The populace found it easy enough to identify them with the old Jews, both socially and religiously. The process was helped by the conservative habits of the conversos, the survival of Jewish practices and the difficulty many converts found in adapting themselves to Christian usage (particularly in diet). They had to merge into an already existing converso society with which they did not necessarily have much in common.

Who were the conversos?[1] At the upper social level, they played a significant role in some towns of Castile and the crown of Aragon.[2] By changing their religion after 1391, successful Jewish families became qualified to hold public office in the towns, with a consequent growth of rivalry between newcomers and the older oligarchies. In some areas of Castile, such as Burgos (where ex-Jewish families such as the Cartagenas and Maluendas were prominent) and Toledo, conversos were influential on the city council. In others they used their tenure of public office to band together, contributing to the bitter and sometimes bloody clan rivalry that characterized Castilian political life in the late fifteenth century. The converso historian Diego de Valera reports that in Córdoba on the city council “there was great enmity and rivalry, since the New Christians were very rich and kept buying public offices, which they made use of so arrogantly that the Old Christians would not put up with it.” In Segovia, according to the chronicler Alonso de Palencia, the conversos “shamelessly took over all the public posts and discharged them with extreme contempt of the nobility and with grave harm to the state.”[3] In the city of Palencia in 1465 “there were great factions of Old Christians and of conversos,” with the principal families of the city supporting the conversos.[4] The political role of conversos was evidently limited only to a handful of towns where Jews had been numerous, but in those few it could be significant. In Cuenca, converso families in the late fifteenth century occupied 85 percent of the posts on the city council.[5] In Guadalajara the powerful patronage of the duke of Infantado gave them a similar advantage.

Conversions became significant from the end of the fourteenth century and were substantial during the fifteenth. Converts from the Jewish and Islamic elites had the advantage of being accepted on equal terms into the Christian elite. In particular, the laws recognized no blood obstacle to Jews or Muslims being considered noble. A decree of Juan II of Castile in 1415, addressed to his converso treasurer, states: “Whereas I have been informed that members of your family were, when Jews, considered to be noble, it is right that you should be held in even more honor now that you are Christians. Therefore it is my decision that you be treated as nobles.”[6] Among the earlier converts at this period was Salomon Halevi, rabbi of Burgos, who was converted along with his brothers in 1390, adopted the name Pablo de Santa María, took holy orders and eventually became bishop of Cartagena and then of Burgos, tutor to the son of Henry III, and papal legate. His eldest son, Gonzalo, became bishop successively of Astorga, Plasencia and Sigüenza. His second son, Alonso de Cartagena, succeeded his father in the see of Burgos.[7] In Castile the finance minister of Henry IV, Diego Arias Dávila (d. 1466), was a converted Jew who founded a powerful dynasty that produced one of the conquistadors of central America, Pedrarias Dávila. One of Diego’s sons became bishop of Segovia, and a grandson became first count of Puñonrostro.

In Aragon members of the powerful de la Caballería family converted in the wake of the Disputation of Tortosa. Other important first-generation converts were leading government officials belonging to the Santa Fe and Sánchez families. Of particular importance was the Santangel family, Christians since 1415 and employed as high officials of the crown of Aragon. At the end of the fifteenth century some of the principal administrators of Aragon were conversos. At the very moment that the Inquisition began to function, five conversos—Luis de Santangel, Gabriel Sánchez, Sancho de Paternoy, Felipe Climent and Alfonso de la Caballería—held the five most important posts in the kingdom. Some also played a prominent part at the court of Castile. Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, uncle of the first inquisitor general, was of known converso blood,[8] as were at least four bishops. Three secretaries of the queen—Fernando Alvarez, Alfonso de Avila and Hernando del Pulgar—were New Christians, as was one of her chaplains, Alonso de Burgos. Several other officials at court were known conversos, among them the official chroniclers Diego de Valera and Alonso de Palencia. Isabella’s employment of both conversos and Jews was commented upon with surprise by foreign visitors.

Inevitably, many converso families continued in professions that they had previously exercised as Jews. The majority lived in urban centers rather than in the countryside. But many also lived in the country, disproving the common assumption that Jews were exclusively town dwellers. In the Seville-Cadiz area in the 1480s, about half of a sample of sixty-two hundred conversos lived in the rural areas, where they were under the direct jurisdiction of the great nobles, who were more capable of defending their interests.[9] In the countryside, they worked the land. In Aguilar de la Frontera, near Córdoba, of the sixty sanbenitos (penitential garments of the Inquisition) hung up in local churches in the late sixteenth century, about nineteen belonged to converso peasant farmers (labradores).[10] In the towns, small independent callings attracted them. Of a sample of 1,641 Toledo conversos who were involved with the Inquisition in 1495, the majority were in modest urban occupations, but there was a significant number of jewelers and silversmiths (59), traders (38), tax-farmers (15) and money changers (12).[11] The example of Badajoz, in Extremadura, shows that all the 231 conversos penalized by the Inquisition between 1493 and 1599 came from the professional and commercial classes. They held posts ranging from that of mayor and municipal official to the lesser occupations of physician, lawyer, trader, shopkeeper and manufacturer.[12] The same is true of Saragossa and other principal cities for which we have details. In Barcelona, out of a sample of 223 tried during these years, one-fourth were traders and another fourth in the textile industry.[13] In Andalucia, a sample for the year 1495 shows that nearly half were occupied in textiles and about a sixth in leather.[14]

Finance was an area in which conversos are known to have been active. Since medieval times, Jews were often restricted by the law over where they could invest their money, so they preferred to make the money work for itself in the market of loans. It is memorable that Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 was made possible thanks to converso finance. The Aragonese conversos Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sánchez protected and financed the expedition; Jews and conversos, including a Jewish interpreter, formed part of the crew; and it has been argued (on little secure evidence) that Columbus himself was descended from a family of Catalan conversos.[15] The role of Jews in the finance market, small but significant, was exaggerated in the nineteenth century by Jewish writers and even by some Spaniards, who suggested that the expulsion of 1492 was responsible for ruining the nation’s economy. In the seventeenth century some Spanish writers claimed that the growing wealth of countries like Holland was due in great measure to the help of converso capital flowing into Amsterdam. The reverse image, of Jews not as a benefit to Spain but as plotters against its well-being, also came into being. The mythical decline of Spain and the consequent triumph of its enemies were blamed on the international Jewish conspiracy. Among the first writers to take this line was the seventeenth-century poet Francisco de Quevedo, who claimed that Jewish elders from all over Europe had held a meeting at Salonika, where they drew up secret plans directed against Christendom. Quevedo went so far as to accuse the count duke of Olivares of planning to invite the Jews back into the country in order to undo all the harm of the expulsion of 1492.[16]

Conversos, like Jews before them, were also active in medicine.[17] As with the financiers, their numbers and importance in the profession should not be exaggerated. The Inquisition in Logroño (Navarre) at the end of the sixteenth century found itself in need of a doctor, but could find no Old Christian with the necessary qualifications; finally it had to appoint a converso. The Inquisition in Madrid was consulted and decreed that the tribunal should keep him but give him no official status, in the hope that an Old Christian might someday be found. An equally embarrassing case occurred in Llerena, where the Inquisition in 1579 reported that for lack of Old Christian doctors the town authorities had appointed as their official doctor “a man who was imprisoned by this Inquisition as a judaizer for three and a half years.”[18] The crown regularly employed converso doctors. Francisco López Villalobos was court physician to both Ferdinand the Catholic and Charles V. Among other famous conversos we should mention doctor Andrés Laguna (1499–1560), naturalist, botanist and physician, a native of Segovia and one of the great luminaries of Spanish science. The services of conversos to medicine are amply illustrated by the number of doctors who appear in the records of the Inquisition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Following a long tradition, converso families gave many sons and daughters into the hands of the Church, to be brought up in the religious orders. Converso students were also to be found in the universities of Spain. By the mid-sixteenth century it was maliciously reported that most of the Spanish clergy resident in Rome in search of preferment were of Jewish origin. Anti-converso publicists in the mid-fifteenth century had already suggested that New Christians were infiltrating the Church and threatening to take it over. Conversos, it was argued, had worked their way into the heart of Christian society, into the ranks of the aristocracy and the Church, and were planning to destroy it from within.

Infiltration of the aristocracy was, already in the fifteenth century, a known and accepted fact. In the wake of the anti-converso riots in Toledo in 1449, a royal secretary, Fernán Díaz de Toledo, wrote a report or Instruction for the bishop of Cuenca, in which he argued that all the leading noble lineages of Castile, including the Henríquez (from whom Ferdinand the Catholic descended), could trace their descent from conversos. The issue had, as we shall see (see chapter 12 below), considerable repercussions on Spanish society. Two sixteenth-century publications continued the controversy. In Aragon an assessor of the Inquisition of Saragossa drew up what became known as the Green Book (Libro verde) of Aragon,[19] a genealogical table tracing the origins of the nobility, from which it became clear that the most prominent families in the kingdom had not escaped converso infiltration. The document, set down in manuscript in the first decade of the sixteenth century, became a source of major scandal, for copies were passed from hand to hand, added to and distorted, until the government decided it could not tolerate the slander. In 1623, all available copies of the Libro verde were ordered to be burnt.

But already a far more powerful libel had been circulating in secret. In 1560 Cardinal Francisco Mendoza y Bobadilla, angered by a refusal to admit two members of his family into a military order, presented to Philip II a memorandum, later to be known as Tizón de la nobleza de España (Blot on the Nobility of Spain), in which he claimed to prove that virtually the whole of the nobility was of Jewish descent.[20] The proofs he offered were so incontrovertible that the Tizón was reprinted many times down to the nineteenth century, almost always as a tract against the power and influence of the nobility. At no time was even the slightest attempt at a rejoinder to these two publications made.

Questions of genealogy and blood could come to the fore in political life, where it was common to seek reasons for discrediting rivals. In an important memoir presented by the historian Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal to the emperor Charles V, it was reported that several of the most important members of the royal council were of converso origin. Among the exceptions, however, was Dr. Palacios Rubios, “a man of pure blood because he is of laboring descent.”[21] Purity (limpieza) from Jewish origins became, in a few towns of central Castile and Andalucia, an issue on which status struggles often chose to focus.

The controversies over genealogy in the fifteenth century highlight the prominent role in Castile of converso intellectuals.[22] A handful of upper-class Jewish converts made, by the quality of their writing, a contribution to intellectual life out of all proportion to their numbers. Converso officials who wrote histories included Alvar García de Santa María (d. 1460), Diego de Valera (d. 1488), and Alonso de Palencia (d. 1492). Other conversos were well-known poets, among them Juan de Mena (d. 1456) and Juan del Encina (d. 1529). Several of the converso writers entered into the controversy over blood origins, but their purpose was to defend genuine converts against Jews who refused to change their faith. Among them was Bishop Pablo de Santa María, with his Scrutinium scripturarum, written in 1432 but published posthumously. Another was the former rabbi Joshua Halorqui, who adopted the name Jerónimo de Santa Fe, founded a powerful converso family and produced his anti-Jewish polemics in the form of a work called Hebraeomastix. A member of a third great converso family, Pedro de la Caballería, wrote in 1450 the treatise Zelus Christi contra Judaeos. These three converso productions, based on a solid knowledge of Jewish culture, resorted to polemic at a learned level. The anti-Jewish strain could, of course, also be found in the writings of many who were not of converso origin.

By contrast, there were polemics that appealed to popular prejudices. The most significant of these was the Fortalitium fidei contra Judaeos, published in 1460, of Alonso de Espina. Espina, a well-known Franciscan friar and confessor to Henry IV of Castile, used his position to stir up hatred against Jews and conversos. Though described by most historians as a converso, he was almost certainly not one,[23] since the deliberate distortions and fabrications in his work betray a complete ignorance of Semitic society. In the 1450s he was exceptionally busy in a campaign to bring about the forced conversion of the Jews, and his tract helped by its themes and language to contribute to race hatred. For Espina, the crimes of Jews against Christians were all too well known: they were traitors, homosexuals, blasphemers, child murderers, assassins (in the guise of doctors), poisoners and usurers. What differentiates Espina from the converso apologists is the fact that his accusations were clearly racialist in character and purpose, whereas the anger of Santa María and the others was more explicitly directed against the stubborn unbelief of their unconverted brethren. Espina’s tract has been viewed as a draft proposal which influenced the structure of the Spanish Inquisition,[24] but in reality his ideas had no part to play. The Spanish Holy Office, when eventually founded, was based—as we shall see—on the concept of the medieval French Inquisition.

Though there was a generally peaceful coexistence between Old Christians and Jews during the fifteenth century, in some townships the presence of powerful converso families gave rise to struggles for power between Old Christians and conversos. Jews, normally incapacitated from office, did not feature directly. The first significant explosion of power struggles was in Toledo, ancient center of Castilian Jewry and Castile’s leading city. In 1449 there were serious disturbances here, directed in part against the minister of King Juan II, Alvaro de Luna, who was accused of favoring Jews. The Old Christian factions held court to determine whether conversos should be allowed to continue holding public office. Their leader, Pero Sarmiento, proposed a special statute (known as the Sentencia-Estatuto) which, despite opposition, was approved by the city council in June 1449. In this it was resolved “that no converso of Jewish descent may have or hold any office or benefice in the said city of Toledo, or in its territory and jurisdiction,” and that the testimony of conversos against Old Christians was not to be accepted in the courts.[25]

An immediate result was a bull issued by Pope Nicholas on 24 September 1449 under the significant title Humani generis enemicus (Enemy of the Human Race), in which he denounced the idea of excluding Christians from office simply because of their blood origins. “We decree and declare,” the pope went on, “that all Catholics are one body in Christ according to the teaching of our faith.” Another bull of the same date excommunicated Sarmiento and his colleagues for alleged rebellion against the Spanish crown. Other Spanish ecclesiastical authorities followed the pope in declaring that baptized converts were entitled to all the privileges of the Christian community. But the Sentencia-Estatuto represented powerful forces which could not easily be suppressed. The state of civil war then reigning in Castile made the crown all too willing to win friends by conciliation, and in 1450 the pope was asked by Juan II to suspend his excommunication of those practicing racialism. A year later, on 13 August 1451, the king formally gave his approval to the Sentencia-Estatuto. This meant a victory for the Old Christian party—a victory repeated once more when, on 16 June 1468, in the year after the Toledo riots of 1467, King Henry IV confirmed in office in the city all holders of posts formerly held by conversos. The same king, on 14 July of the same year, conceded to the city of Ciudad Real the privilege of excluding conversos from all municipal office.[26]

It was an issue affecting a limited area of Castile, and in each case the conflict was purely local, reflecting faction rivalries. There had been virtually no agitation since the great riots of 1391, and little outside central Castile. In other cities where conversos were powerful, such as Burgos and Avila, there were for the moment no riots. No immediate danger to the peace of the realm existed. The fact, however, that two Castilian cities tried to exclude conversos from public office was ominous. So was the fact that Old Christian oligarchies deliberately used anti-Semitic feeling to arouse the populace against their enemies. Some clergy were also worried about the effect on the unity of the Christian body. It was after some deliberation, therefore, that in about 1468 the archbishop of Toledo, Alonso Carrillo, condemned the existence in his diocese of guilds organized on racial lines, some of them excluding conversos and others excluding Old Christians. The archbishop stated:

Divisions bring great scandal and schism and divide the seamless garment of Christ who, as the Good Shepherd, gave us a command to love one another in unity and obedience to Holy Mother Church, under one Pontiff and Vicar of Christ, under one baptism, formed under the law into one body, so that whether Jew, Greek or Gentile we are regenerated by baptism and made into new men. From which it is obvious how culpable are those who, forgetting the purity of the law of the gospel, create different lineages, some calling themselves Old Christians and others calling themselves New Christians or conversos. . . . What is evil is that in the city of Toledo, as in the other cities, towns and places of our see, there are many guilds and fraternities of which some under pretence of piety do not receive conversos and others do not receive Old Christians.[27]

The archbishop therefore ordered the dissolution of the said guilds and forbade any similar racial associations under pain of excommunication. His good intentions bore little fruit, though it is true that for a quarter of a century after the Sentencia-Estatuto controversy died down and little evidence emerged of heresy among the conversos. A problem may certainly have existed, but there was little perception of it.

The issue raised its head again in the next round of anti-converso struggles, when the triggers to conflict were never exclusively religious. Disturbances were also aggravated during the later years of the fifteenth century by more frequent economic difficulties. In 1463 a converso in Andalucia commented that “here, thank God, there are disturbances but not directed against us.”[28] There were problems, however, in other parts of Castile, and in 1467 anti-converso riots occurred in Toledo and Ciudad Real. In Seville the aristocracy kept the troublemakers under control, and (reported an official) “the conversos were unharmed.”[29] The worst incidents came in 1473, with anti-converso riots and killings in several towns of Andalucia, notably Córdoba.[30] In Jaén that year one of the victims was the converso Constable of Castile, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, cut down at the high altar of the cathedral as he attempted to defend the conversos. These events demonstrated the very serious political situation in the south of the peninsula, and how readily the finger was being pointed at New Christians. In many cases, it has been argued, it was the Old Christian oligarchies who were manipulating the situation against both conversos and Jews.[31]

It was arguably the political events of those years rather than any perceived heresy that eventually brought an Inquisition into existence. The stage upon which the drama was played was central and southern Castile, roughly defined by the realms of Old and New Castile, and Andalucia. This area, the effective frontier of the medieval anti-Muslim Reconquest, was also that in which the majority of Spain’s Jews lived. Home still to the precarious coexistence of three faiths, it was potentially the zone of greatest social conflict in the peninsula.

The ambiguous religion of conversos raised a crucial question. Were the conversos Jews?[32] It is an issue that has concerned and inspired many modern scholars, who have been haunted by the specter of Christians of Jewish origin suffering persecution and holding fast to some elements of the culture of their Jewish ancestors.

The question was inevitably also raised at the relevant time, after the mass conversions of 1391. Of the thousands of Jews who in the course of the preceding century had been forced by persecution and pressure to accept baptism, few could have embraced Catholicism sincerely. Over time, however, the converts settled into their new religion without problems. When the great controversies broke out in Toledo, half a century after the 1391 riots, not a single Christian writer doubted that the New Christians were for the most part orthodox in belief and intention. Claims to the contrary were made at the height of the civic troubles, but never substantiated.

Those who remained in their Jewish faith, however, wanted to know how to coexist with those who had become Christians. In the fifteenth century, long before the great expulsion, the rabbis in North Africa were frequently asked for their judgments on the matter. Their opinions, or responsa, were unequivocal. The conversos must be regarded not as unwilling converts (anusim) but as real and voluntary converts (meshumadim).[33] It may have been a hard-line attitude and not necessarily shared by all Jewish leaders at the time, but there was ample evidence to back up the judgments. In many parts of Spain the conversos continued living in some measure as Jews, but with the advantage now of enjoying rights accorded to Christians. In Mallorca, a rabbi commented, the authorities “are lenient with the conversos and allow them to do as they will.”[34] From the Christian point of view, the conversos here seemed to be practicing Jews. In practice, however, they were legally Christians. And it was their voluntary Christianity which marked them out in Jewish eyes as renegades, meshumadim.

The spate of conversions throughout Spain during the fifteenth century intensified the controversy. Easygoing Jews who converted for convenience became, naturally, easygoing Christians. In an anti-Jewish polemic of the 1480s, the Alborayco,[35] the author described the conversos as being neither practicing Jews nor practicing Christians. Being neither one thing nor the other, they were known in some places as alboraycos, after the fabled animal of Mohammed which was neither horse nor mule (al-buraq). Anti-Semitic writers at the time of the Inquisition were, for their part, unanimous that conversos were secret Jews and must be dealt with firmly.

Many modern writers, in no way anti-Semitic, have consistently identified the conversos as Jews. An influential school in modern Jewish historiography has likewise ironically insisted that the Inquisition was right to consider all conversos aspiring Jews. Yitzhak Baer stated uncompromisingly that “the conversos and Jews were one people, united by destiny.”[36] “Every converso,” writes another historian, “did his best to fulfil Mosaic precepts, and one should regard as sincere the aim they all set themselves: to live as Jews.”[37] The main evidence used by these scholars who call in doubt the Christianity of the conversos, is—curiously enough—the documentation of the Holy Office, a huge mass of apparently damning testimony to the errors of thousands of conversos. If this view is accepted, not only does it appear to justify the establishment of the Inquisition but it also contradicts the testimony of many conversos of the late fifteenth century. Unsurprisingly, some other scholars refuse to accept the reliability of the Inquisition’s documents, on the grounds that they are a contaminated source.[38] Why, in other words, should the evidence gathered by the accusers be the principal basis for assessing the accused? It is a good question, which makes the religious status of converted Jews an issue of primary importance.

The two conflicting points of view we have mentioned share one clear weakness, a propensity to assume that—a few exceptions aside—all conversos were Jews, or all were Christians. Both approaches appear to be motivated by a deeply rooted conviction that authentic Jews would never make compromises about their faith and culture.[39] As it happens, there is abundant evidence that compromises were made, in every epoch, among all social classes and in all generations. There are three principal groups of witnesses to converso religion: the Jews, the conversos themselves and the enemies of the conversos. Nearly all their testimony comes down to us through the Inquisition. As a consequence, the debate has usually been presented to us through the perspective of the Inquisition papers, which should not be unconditionally ruled out of order, since a great deal of their affirmations seems sensible and convincing.[40]

The question of Jewish identity had been in doubt long before the birth of the Inquisition, and in lands far from Spain. Jews who converted under Muslim rule but remained secretly wedded to their old beliefs could be found in several parts of the Mediterranean.[41] In some areas they were known as New Muslims, suggesting that the Muslim authorities were aware they were not true converts. The neo-converts managed to survive for centuries, thanks in part to the benign policy of the Islamic authorities in certain territories. In Christian Spain, it was the pressure from a special institution, the Inquisition, that brought hidden doubts to the surface. Conversos who hitherto had been satisfied with mere “adhesion” to the official faith were now obliged to consider the option of full “conversion.” In the period before the year 1492, in short, there were from the standpoint of religious belief probably four broad categories among conversos: those who were practicing Christians, those who were nominal Christians but active judaizers, those who were syncretic and mixed both beliefs and those who were skeptical of both faiths.[42]

Among the Jews there appear to have been few doubts about the Christianity of the conversos. The opinions of religious leaders, cited above, are unequivocal. Jews and conversos might come together for family and social reunions, but always with the consciousness that they belonged to different streams of belief and practice. The most convincing testimony of all can be found after the establishment of the Inquisition. The failure of Jews in those years to make any significant move to help conversos shows that they were conscious of the gap between them.

The converso apologists of 1449, anxious to defend themselves against their critics, insisted on their own unquestionable Christianity. Fernán Díaz asserted that if there were any judaizers in Toledo they could be counted on the fingers of two hands. He pointed out that even the term “converts” was meaningless: “how can one call conversos those who are children and grandchildren of Christians, were born in Christianity and know nothing about Judaism or its rites?”[43] Later converso leaders, more realistically, were willing to admit the existence of religious confusion. The chronicler and royal secretary Hernando del Pulgar, a prominent converso, vouched for the existence of judaizers among the New Christians of Toledo. But he also pinpointed a cause: no attempts had ever been made to deal with the problem by missionary preaching rather than persecution. Despised by Old Christians for their race, scorned by the Jews for their apostasy, the conversos lived in a social atmosphere they had never willingly chosen. Many of them lived close to the Jewish quarter, to which they still felt a cultural affinity. They retained traditional characteristics in dress and especially in food that were difficult to shake off. A man named Mayor González in Ciudad Real in 1511 admitted that he “never ate eel nor octopus nor hare nor rabbit . . . until the inquisitors came to town.”[44] Several had vivid memories of the persecutions that in the 1440s and then in the 1470s had forced them to abandon their culture. A Jewish doctor in Soria in 1491 recalled an old converso who “told him, weeping, how much he repented having turned Christian.” Speaking of another converso, the doctor communicated the information that “he believed in neither the Christian nor the Jewish faith.”[45]

Pulgar reports that within the same converso household some members might be sincere Christians and others active Jews. His experience was that many “lived neither in one law nor the other,” retaining key Jewish customs while practicing formal Christianity. None of this altered the essentially Christian culture of most conversos. The syncretic nature of much of their religious practice left their faith unaffected. Like the Malabar and Chinese Christians of later centuries, who combined aspects of hereditary culture with their faith, they were believing Christians and proud of it.[46] The converso family of the bishop of Segovia, Diego Arias Dávila (1436–97), is a case in point. His still-Jewish sister lived in the household. Members of the family attended weddings in the Jewish quarter, and occasionally gave gifts to the synagogue.[47] In Saragossa in the 1480s, Jews and Christians ate in each other’s homes despite official disapproval. “Jews ate in converso homes as freely as conversos ate in the Jewish quarter.”[48]

Those among the Christians who criticized the conversos were their enemies. From the anti-Jewish propaganda of the 1440s to the polemics of half a century later, their anti-converso theme was constant. All conversos, went the refrain, are secret Jews. All of them are a threat to our society and our religion. It was alleged that they continued to practice the Jewish rites both secretly and openly, presenting the authorities with a large minority of pseudo-Christians who had neither respect nor love for their new faith. Was there in reality a “converso danger”? Were thousands of converso Christians all over Spain secretly observing Jewish practice? There is, as we shall see, good reason to doubt it.[49]

Writing several years later, when so much blood had been spilt that it would have been intolerable to deny the justice of what had happened, the anti-Jewish chronicler Bernáldez declared unhesitatingly that the conversos were secret heretics. Throughout the provinces of the south, according to the author of the Alborayco, of all the conversos “hardly any are true Christians, as is well known in all Spain.”[50] Written a decade after the birth of the Inquisition, it was a clear case of post hoc ergo. By contrast, ten years previously the hard evidence for the claim would have been difficult to find. Prosecutions of judaizers in the bishops’ courts were to be counted on the fingers of one hand. What, in any case, did “judaizing” imply? Even when the inquisitors started their work, they had no clear view of the offense. The basic ignorance of Jewish law shown by the inquisitors meant that by default they accused people of offenses which were cultural rather than religious. When in 1484 Inés de Belmonte admitted that she had habitually observed Saturday as a day of rest, she was condemned as a heretic, apostate and observer of the Jewish law, even though no evidence existed that she subscribed to any Jewish beliefs.[51] With time, the inquisitors defined the offense more clearly; but in doing so they were in effect bringing a crime into existence. People were consequently accused for what they were supposed to have done, rather than for what they really did. “I know very well of others who have erred much more than I,” complained a woman of Cuenca in 1489 who felt that her offense was negligible.[52]

There was another important aspect to the problem. New Christians who shared day-to-day doubts and unbelief were treated as heretics, whereas the very same doubts could be found everywhere among the non-Semitic Christian population. Popular skepticism about an afterlife persisted, we have had occasion to observe (chapter 1), among Spain’s population. “There is only birth and death, nothing more” or “you’ll not see me do badly in this life nor will you see me suffer in the next”[53] were affirmations, however, that in the mouths of conversos seemed to the inquisitors in the 1480s to be particularly suspicious. Blasphemies against Christ, the Virgin and the mass, were (as the inquisitors knew very well) commonplace among Old Christians.[54] Yet in the anti-converso trials they carried a mortally heavy assumption of guilt. For a converso to say: “I swear to God it’s all a joke, from the pope to the cope” or to suggest that “I can’t swallow the words of the holy gospels”[55] invited denunciation, even though they were sentiments that could be found anywhere in the Old Christian countryside. It was thanks in part to her advocate arguing that “to say such things does not necessarily imply unbelief in the faith” that Catalina de Zamora, who had insulted the Virgin publicly, was in 1484 acquitted of judaizing.[56] Ignorant witnesses contributed to the confusion of criteria: in 1492 not knowing the creed, or eating meat in Lent, were seen as signs of Judaism.[57] Anyone who did not conform to the rest of the community was looked upon as a “Jew.” Manuel Rodríguez, alchemist of Soria in the 1470s, treated official religion with disdain but was described by the parish priest as “among the most learned men in the world in just about everything.” Common repute consequently (according to the testimony of an official) held him to be a “Jew.”[58]

We may conclude that in the late 1470s very many conversos continued to practice their traditional culture but were not significantly defecting from their Christian religion. Among practicing Jews there were signs of a consciousness of the importance of prophecy and millenarianism,[59] and even among Christians there was a new eschatological perception of the future,[60] but there is no evidence of any significant pro-Jewish movement among conversos in the late fifteenth century.

However, even if there was little active judaizing, those who influenced crown policy thought they perceived it. They observed what certainly existed in many households: vestigial Jewish practices in matters of family habits and cuisine, residual Jewish culture in vocabulary, kinship links between Jews and conversos. These remnants were identifiably Jewish. They were not, however—and on this all those arrested by the Inquisition were adamant—proof of judaizing. The existence of a “converso danger,” it can be argued on this evidence, was invented for motives that may have had little to do with religion.

The harvest of heretics reaped by the early Inquisition owed its success to deliberate falsification or to the completely indiscriminate way in which residual Jewish customs were interpreted as being heretical. Though it can certainly be identified in the period after the forced conversions of 1492, there was no systematic “converso religion” in the 1480s to justify the creation of an inquisition.[61] Much of the evidence for judaizing was thin, if not false. In 1484 in Ciudad Real five witnesses were used by the prosecution against a converso. Four of them testified to events they claimed to remember from twelve, thirty-five and forty years before.[62] Not one offered evidence from the previous few months. One may reasonably doubt whether the accused was an active judaizer.

Logically, conversos never ceased to protest that false witness and greed were the driving forces of the Inquisition. Wherever possible, they attempted to clamp down on the voices alleging that there was heresy. In Aragon in 1484 the authorities, hostile to the new tribunal and favorably disposed to the conversos, claimed that there was no heresy anywhere in the realm. In Segovia in 1485 a group of conversos went “threatening anyone who said anything about there being heretics in this city.”[63] “Most of those burnt by the Inquisition,” a converso of Aranda said in 1501, “were burnt because of false witness.” “There’s no reason for them to come here,” another said, with reference to the inquisitors, “there are no heretics to burn.” “Very many of those arrested and burnt by the reverend fathers were arrested and burnt only because of their property.” “Of all those burnt in Aranda,” a resident stated in 1502, “not one was a heretic.”[64] The outright denial that there was any heresy was not necessarily an attempt to cover up by those who were guilty. The claim may have been, and shows every sign of having been, true.

The differing opinions among scholars in our day are testimony to the highly confusing nature of converso culture. The most plausible view of the matter is probably that held by very many at the time, namely, that most were practicing Christians, but that some were sympathetic to Judaism. Simply to be of Jewish origin did not mean that one shared Jewish beliefs. The consellers (city councilors) of Barcelona expressed this opinion forcefully to their new inquisitor in 1486: “We do not believe that all the conversos are heretics, or that to be a converso makes one a heretic.”[65] It was not the last time in history that a dispassionate view would be offered against the judgment of those who insisted that a specific race or religion carried the implication of guilt. A prosecution witness in Toledo in 1483, by contrast, expressed a view that was more congenial to the inquisitors: “all the conversos of this city were Jews.”[66] The “all,” commonplace in anti-Semitic polemic of the time and in writers like Andrés Bernáldez, was the big lie that justified the Inquisition.[67]

A factor that undoubtedly contributed to tension, over and above anti-converso feeling, was the conversos’ own sense of a separate identity.[68] Already a powerful minority by the mid-fifteenth century, conversos were secure of their social position and proud to be both Christian and of Jewish descent. They did not, as is sometimes thought, attempt to disguise their origins. As many of their own writers affirmed clearly, they were a nation. They had their own identity and took pride in it. Andrés Bernáldez reported that “they entertained the arrogant claim that there was no better people in the world than they.” Alonso de Palencia reported complaints by Old Christians that the conversos acted “as a nation apart, and nowhere would they agree to act together with the Old Christians; indeed, as though they were a people of totally opposed ideas, they openly and brazenly favored whatever was contrary to the Old Christians, as could be seen by the bitter fruit sown throughout the cities of the realm.” Implicit in the converso attitude was the claim that they were even better than Old Christians, because together with Christian faith they combined direct descent from the lineage (linaje) of Christ. It was said that Alonso de Cartagena when he recited the Hail Mary used to end with the words, “Holy Mary, Mother of God and my blood-relative, pray for us.” Converso nobles were considered to be even better than Old Christian nobles, because they were of Jewish origin. “Is there another nation so noble [as the Jews]?” asked Diego de Valera, quoting the Bible directly.

Converso separateness had a certain logic. The large number of converts after 1391 could not be easily fitted into existing social structures. In Barcelona and Valencia in the 1390s they were given their own churches, in each case a former synagogue. They also set up their own converso confraternities.[69] In the crown of Aragon they called themselves proudly “Christians of Israel.”[70] They had their own social life and intermarried among themselves. Palencia observed that they were “puffed-up, insolent and arrogant”; Bernáldez criticized their “haughty ostentation of great wealth and pride.”[71] These converso attitudes were probably created by self-defensiveness rather than arrogance. But they contributed to the wall of distrust between Old and New Christians. In particular, the idea of a converso nation, which rooted itself irrevocably in the mind of Jewish Christians (see chapter 14 below), made them appear as a separate, alien and enemy entity. This had fateful consequences.

A number of factors, religious as well as social and political, therefore contributed to the tensions experienced in the south of Spain. They were circumstances rooted in the everyday experience of people, and by no means imposed from above. On the religious front, however, the initiatives came from the top. Fears about an alleged converso heresy were being expressed by some clergy, and because of it there were demands for a special “inquisition” well before the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1461 a group of Franciscans led by Alonso de Espina approached the general of the Jeronimite Order with a view to “setting up in this realm an inquisition into heretics such as they have in France.”[72] The general, Alonso de Oropesa, supported the move warmly, and Henry IV of Castile appealed to Rome for an inquisition to be set up.[73] Nothing more was heard of the proposal. Another attempt was made by Oropesa some time later, in 1465, but it was an inopportune moment. Henry IV was faced by a serious rebellion against his crown that very year. Riots against the conversos broke out shortly after, notably in Toledo in 1467 and Segovia in 1473.

The Inquisition was not unknown in the territories that later formed a united Spain. Since 1232, papal commissions for inquisitors had been issued in the crown of Aragon, as part of the campaign against the Cathars then being conducted in the French areas of Languedoc.[74] This was the period when the Church for the first time began to think seriously about what the concept of heresy was, and with what means it could be combated.[75] Theologians tried to define what it was that Catholics shared in terms of belief, worship and loyalty, and by the same token what it was that could represent a threat to the three. Catalans such as the Dominican friars Ramon Penyafort in the thirteenth and Nicolau Eimeric in the fourteenth century were active in the medieval Inquisition, which was not directly concerned with Jews, though there was a distinct anti-Jewish tendency in its thinking. Jews, in any case, were only one example of the various groups and minorities that political interests and social pressures might seek to crush. The word “heresy” was a term that became applied to any attitude of such groups perceived to be out of step with the thinking of those who controlled power.

By the fifteenth century, when Catharism was a thing of the past, the papal Inquisition in the Aragonese territories had lapsed into virtual inactivity. Only a handful of trials took place in the late century.[76] Castile, on the other hand, had never known the existence of an inquisition. The bishops and their Church courts had so far sufficed to deal with the punishment of heretics, and they were active in the few prosecutions of the period. The discovery (and immediate burning) at Llerena in September 1467 of two conversos for practicing Judaism seemed to confirm the religious insincerity of New Christians, but it was an isolated incident with no repercussions.[77] Anti-Semitic preachers of course made the most of such cases. Among them was Alonso de Hojeda, a Dominican prior of Seville, who devoted all his energies to making the crown aware of the reality of the danger from Jews and false converts.[78]

In 1474 Isabella succeeded her brother Henry on the throne. Hojeda’s opportunity came when the queen visited Seville in July 1477 and stayed there for fifteen months. Historians are unanimous in citing Hojeda’s preaching as one of the immediate influences on the queen in her final decision about the conversos. Soon after Isabella’s departure from Seville, Hojeda claimed to have uncovered evidence of a secret meeting of judaizing conversos in the city. With this in hand he went to demand the institution of measures against the heretics.

The evidence seems to have impressed the crown, which asked for information on the situation in Seville. The report, supported by the authority of Pedro González de Mendoza, archbishop of Seville, and of Tomás de Torquemada, prior of a Dominican monastery in Segovia, suggested that not only in Seville but throughout Andalucia and Castile the conversos were practicing Jewish rites in secret. Accepting this testimony, Ferdinand and Isabella consented to introduce the machinery of a Church inquisition into Castile, and sent a request to Rome for the bull of institution.

The controversy over the conversos broke out at a time when the monarchs were fully occupied in the pacification of a realm that had been laid waste by the turmoil of civil war. They were threatened on all sides by continuing conflicts at local level, threats by dissident nobles and clergy, and a breakdown of law and order everywhere. With no civil service or permanent army at their command, they were unable to control events in the way they might have wished, and were obliged to make compromises with the political elites that ran the country. From 1476 onwards they encouraged the creation of local police forces known as the Hermandad. At the same time they attempted through the handful of civil governors (corregidores) to enforce the peace, punish and execute criminals and thieves, and in general restore public confidence in the crown.[79] In the midst of these measures of “pacification,” which inevitably had a high cost in money and lives, they were drawn from 1482 onwards into a long and expensive war against the Muslim kingdom of Granada.

The converso problem, when brought to the queen’s attention during her stay in Seville, may at the time have seemed a small matter of detail in the midst of her other commitments. The request for an inquisition was, likewise, not unusual. Royal officials had for some time now been authorized to make general “inquisitions” into crimes and offenses, and it was part of the pacification policy to make “inquisitions” into the activities of known or unknown delinquents.[80] When the crown sanctioned an inquisition into the activities of alleged judaizers, it was a more or less routine measure. In the event, it soon turned into something much graver because it seriously implicated converso urban elites, who till that date had supported the crown without question.

According to Hojeda and others, the converso problem was so serious that only the introduction of a full-time “inquisition” would be adequate. Consequently, the bull which was finally issued by Pope Sixtus IV on 1 November 1478 provided for the appointment of two or three priests over forty years of age as inquisitors. Powers of appointment and dismissal were granted to the Spanish crown.[81] After this, no further steps were taken for two years. This long interlude would seem to contradict Hojeda’s argument about the urgency of the converso danger. What seems a likely explanation is that the crown favored a cautious period of leniency before going on to severe measures, and that this policy may have been influenced in part by the large number of conversos in prominent positions at court. Finally, Ferdinand grew convinced of the need. As he explained several years later: “We could do no less, because we were told so many things about Andalucia.” In a letter to the pope in 1483 he was more specific: “In recent times, when neither we nor our predecessors took any measures, there was a great increase in heresy and in the risk of its spread, and many who seemed to be Christians were found to be living not simply not as Christians but even as godless persons.”[82]

On 27 September 1480 at Medina del Campo, commissions as inquisitors in accordance with the papal bull were issued to the Dominicans Juan de San Martín and Miguel de Morillo, with Juan Ruiz de Medina as their assessor or adviser. With these appointments the Spanish Inquisition came into definitive existence.

In historical perspective it may appear to have been an ominous and terrible event, yet it is easy to forget that in the same generation there were similar and no less ominous developments about the prosecution of heresy elsewhere in Europe. From the year 1401 a special new law in England permitted the execution of heretics. Between 1423 and 1522 in England over five hundred heresy trials took place, resulting in the burning of an estimated thirty people.[83] Shortly after 1500, the bishop of Lincoln set up an inquisition to enquire into the heretics of his diocese. Within a few years no fewer than 342 persons were denounced to the bishop as suspected heretics. “Wives and husbands denounced each other, and children accused their parents.”[84] In country after country of northern Europe—notably, for example, in the Czech lands—there were persons, movements and ideas that appeared subversive and that the authorities bestirred themselves to control. The circumstances of each case were different, but the threat of repression was never far distant. There were “inquisitions” developing in many parts of Europe, not only in Spain.

In Andalucia, the new body had clearly been set up as the result of agitation against the New Christians. This fact alone does not suffice to answer some fundamental questions. Of these, the most crucial is: on what evidence did the tribunal justify its existence? Historians have tended to accept without question the reason given by the Inquisition, namely, that an inquiry had to be made into conversos who were judaizing. The fact is that apart from a handful of scattered cases there was (we have suggested) no systematic evidence of judaizing. New Christian writers in mid-century had firmly denied such accusations. Zealots such as Espina could point only to unsubstantiated rumors and allegations. Nowhere in Spain, outside of the handful of cities in the center and south where political riots had taken place, was there pressure for an inquiry. The Cortes of Castile never asked for an inquisition.[85] Moreover, the book of the Alborayco, written in these years, expressly claimed that, unlike the south of the country, there were virtually no heretics among conversos in northern Spain.[86] If the Inquisition claimed to have religious motives, those motives were difficult to justify by the evidence. It would appear that community hostility, no less than religious suspicion, had an undeniable part in the move to set up a tribunal of inquiry.[87]

What did the monarchs hope to gain by agreeing to its foundation? It is a fundamental question that appears to have divided historians. One cannot rule out completely the possibility that the crown, in the person above all of Ferdinand, who was the guiding force in its establishment and who continued his efforts after the death of Isabella, wished to use it to consolidate his power. There is absolutely no evidence, however, that he did so; and in any case the new tribunal was most active in a region, Andalucia, where he was not king. Nor is it possible to document the view that Ferdinand was hoping to consolidate his power by directing opposition against the converso elite in Spain.[88] Further definition of Ferdinand’s intentions may be difficult to arrive at, but there can be no doubt of his religious position. He and Isabella were zealous Catholics, yet by no means anti-Jewish or even anti-converso. To the end of their lifetimes they always worked closely with converso advisers, as Ferdinand himself testified publicly many times. Finally, though a long historical tradition asserts it (and always without evidence), it is wholly unlikely that he established the Inquisition in order to augment his revenues. The tribunal, as we shall see later, never in those early years gained any lasting profit from the conversos. Money that came in, through fines and confiscations, was usually spent on the running costs of the tribunal (see chapter 8).

Was there a long-term strategy, or was the tribunal intended to be purely local and temporary? Neither the crown nor the early supporters of the Inquisition were looking, around 1480, much farther than the frontiers of Andalucia. The immediate purpose was to ensure religious orthodoxy solely in that region. For the first five years of its existence the tribunal (still exclusively Castilian) limited its activity to the south, particularly to the sees of Seville and Córdoba. It was the area where the social conflicts of the preceding century had concentrated. There was, as yet, no thought of a nation-wide or “Spanish” Inquisition. No firm arrangements for financing the tribunal were made, and no fixed centers of action were decided upon.

By mid-October 1480, operations had begun in Seville. In Andalucia, as in the rest of Castile, these had been years of political conflict. The appearance of the inquisitors was made possible because Isabella’s supporters in the civil wars imposed their authority on the local elite. The opposition, many of them conversos and supporters of rebel nobles, were pushed out. This background affected events in Seville. One of the city councilors there was the converso Diego de Susán—father to Susanna, famous as the comely maid, the fermosa fembra—who was connected with a group of merchants and political figures opposed to Isabella’s supporters.[89] A subsequent local chronicler put together a largely fictitious narrative in which Susán was presented as the center of a plot to stage a rising against the Inquisition. According to this account, he called a meeting of Seville dignitaries and of

many other rich and powerful men from the towns of Utrera and Carmona. These said to one another, “What do you think of them acting thus against us? Are we not the most propertied members of this city, and well loved by the people? Let us collect men together. . . .” And thus between them they assigned the raising of arms, men, money and other necessities. “And if they come to take us, we, together with armed men and the people will rise up and slay them and so be revenged on our enemies.”[90]

The narrative goes on to say that the rising might well have succeeded but for the fermosa fembra who, anxious about the possible fate of her Old Christian lover, betrayed the plot to the authorities. All those implicated were arrested and the occasion was made the excuse for detaining the richest and most powerful conversos of Seville. According to Bernáldez:

A few days after this they burnt three of the richest leaders of the city, namely Diego de Susán, who was said to be worth 10 million maravedis and was a chief rabbi, and who apparently died as a Christian; Manuel Sauli; and Bartolomé de Torralva. They also arrested Pedro Fernández Benadeba, who was one of the ringleaders and had in his house weapons to arm a hundred men, and Juan Fernández Abolafia, who had often been chief magistrate and was a great lawyer; and many other leading and very rich citizens, who were also burnt.[91]

When Susanna saw the result of her betrayal, she is said to have first retired to a convent, and then to have taken to the streets, remorse eating into her soul until she died in poverty and shame, her last wishes being that her skull should be placed over the door of her house as a warning and example to others. The whole story about the plot and betrayal was in reality a myth: Susán had died before 1479, the plot is undocumented and there was no daughter Susanna.[92]

The first auto de fe of the new Inquisition was celebrated on 6 February 1481, when six people were burnt at the stake and the sermon at the ceremony was preached by Fray Alonso de Hojeda. Hojeda’s triumph was short-lived, for within a few days the plague which was just beginning to ravage Seville numbered him among its first victims.

There was as yet little, in the spring of 1481, to cause alarm among conversos. No more than a handful of people had been executed. Many, however, did not trust the motives or the mercy of the inquisitors. They may or may not have been judaizers; in any case, they preferred to absent themselves. Over the next few months throughout Andalucia, according to the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar, thousands of households took flight, women and children included:

and since the absence of these people depopulated a large part of the country, the queen was informed that commerce was declining; but setting little importance on the decline in her revenue, and prizing highly the cleansing of her lands, she said that the essential thing was to purify the country of that sin of heresy, for she understood it to be in God’s service and her own. And the representations which were made to her about this matter did not alter her decision.[93]

The scale of operations created an enormous amount of work. More inquisitors were obviously needed. Accordingly, a papal brief of 11 February 1482 appointed seven more, all Dominican friars. One of them was the prior of the friary of Santa Cruz in Segovia, Tomás de Torquemada. New tribunals were set up at Córdoba in 1482, and at Ciudad Real and Jaén in 1483. The tribunal at Ciudad Real was only temporary, and was permanently transferred to Toledo in 1485. By 1492 the kingdom of Castile had tribunals at Avila, Córdoba, Jaén, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo and Valladolid. Not all these had a permanent existence, and the southern tribunals were far more active than those in the north.

The story of a plot in Seville looks suspiciously like an attempt to find good reasons for a subsequent repression. Doubts may similarly be expressed about a plot that was supposed to have occurred in Toledo, apparently planned for the feast of Corpus Christi 1485. The outcome, say the sources, followed the pattern of Seville, with betrayal, arrest and execution. All the relevant circumstances, however, suggest that the plot was spurious, an invented story embroidered upon by subsequent commentators.[94]

The machinery of the Inquisition was regulated in accordance with the needs of the administration. Isabella was at this time engaged in reforming the organs that controlled central government in Castile. When in 1480 at the Cortes of Toledo it was decided to reform the governing councils, it seemed natural to follow this up with a separate council for the increasingly important affairs of the Inquisition. A few years later, in 1488, this new council (known as the Suprema for short) came into existence (for the date 1488, see chapter 8 below). It consisted initially of three ecclesiastical members, and a fourth person as president of the council with the title of inquisitor general, a post given to Fray Tomás de Torquemada. The problem now was whether the Castilian Inquisition should be extended to the crown of Aragon, a completely autonomous state with its own laws, institutions and—as it happened—Inquisition.

Resistance to the introduction of the Inquisition into southern Castile had been meager and abortive. Popular opinion had been prepared for it and community rivalry welcomed it. The only serious setback to royal policy occurred on 29 January 1482 when Pope Sixtus IV, responding to protests from Spanish clergy about abuses committed by the inquisitors of Seville, revoked the powers granted by the bull of foundation and allowed the Seville inquisitors to continue only if subjected to their bishop. The appointment of the seven new inquisitors in 1482, far from being a surrender by the pope to the king, was accompanied by firm gestures by the pontiff in favor of the conversos. Ferdinand in May 1482 protested bitterly to Rome, particularly since a further conflict had now arisen over the introduction of the new Inquisition into Aragon.

As part of his vigorous new policy, Ferdinand took steps in 1481 and 1482 to assert royal control over the appointment and payment of the existing inquisitors in Aragon.[95] His aim was to resurrect the old papal Inquisition but also to subject it to his own control so as to come into line with practice in Castile. In Aragon, therefore, the reformed Inquisition was simply a continuance of the old tribunal, with the difference that the crown now controlled appointments and salaries, so that the tribunal—not yet “Spanish” but still medieval—became effectively more dependent on Ferdinand than on the pope.

The first activities of the reformed tribunal, with its main centers in the cities of Barcelona, Saragossa and Valencia, were directed against the conversos, who took alarm at developments and prepared for mass emigration. Differences with the pope, supplemented no doubt by pressure on Rome from conversos, brought the work of the inquisitors to a temporary stop. On 18 April 1482 Sixtus IV issued what Lea calls “the most extraordinary bull in the history of the Inquisition.” In this document the pope protested

that in Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca and Catalonia the Inquisition has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls, but by lust for wealth, and that many true and faithful Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves and other lower and even less proper persons, have without any legitimate proof been thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned as relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the secular arm to be executed, to the peril of souls, setting a pernicious example, and causing disgust to many.[96]

Accordingly, in future all episcopal officers should act with the inquisitors; the names and testimony of accusers should be given to the accused, who should be allowed counsel; episcopal jails should be the only ones used; and appeals should be allowed to Rome. The bull was extraordinary because, in Lea’s words, “for the first time heresy was declared to be, like any other crime, entitled to a fair trial and simple justice.”[97] Besides, there is little doubt that the pope welcomed the chance to assert his authority over an Inquisition that had once been papal and had now slipped entirely into the hands of the king of Aragon. So favorable was the bull to converso claims that their influence in obtaining it cannot be doubted.

Ferdinand was outraged by the papal action and pretended to disbelieve in the authenticity of the bull on the grounds that no sensible pontiff would have issued such a document. On 13 May 1482 he wrote to the pope:

Things have been told me, Holy Father which, if true, would seem to merit the greatest astonishment. It is said that Your Holiness has granted the conversos a general pardon for all the errors and offenses they have committed. . . . To these rumors, however, we have given no credence because they seem to be things which would in no way have been conceded by Your Holiness, who have a duty to the Inquisition. But if by chance concessions have been made through the persistent and cunning persuasion of the said conversos, I intend never to let them take effect. Take care therefore not to let the matter go further, and to revoke any concessions and entrust us with the care of this question.[98]

Before this resolution, Sixtus IV wavered, and on 14 October announced that he had suspended the bull. The way lay completely open to Ferdinand. Papal cooperation was definitively secured by the bull of 17 October 1483, which appointed Torquemada as inquisitor general of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia, thus uniting the Inquisitions of the Spanish crown under a single head. The new tribunal came directly under the control of the crown and was the only institution whose authority over heresy ran in all the territories of Spain, replacing the powers formerly exercised in the matter by bishops. This was not the end of papal interference. The next half century or so witnessed several attempts by Rome to interfere in questions of jurisdiction and to reform abuses that might give the Inquisition a bad name. Besides this, the conversos in Spain never gave up their struggle to modify the practices of the tribunal, which they rightly considered a threat not just to judaizers, but to the whole body of New Christians. Because of their representations to Rome, papal intervention was continued on their behalf, leading to several minor quarrels between crown and papacy.

Within the crown of Aragon there was bitter opposition to the introduction of the Castilian tribunal. Though Castile and Aragon had been joined by the marriage of the Catholic monarchs, they remained politically separate and each kingdom preserved its individual administration and liberties. In the eastern realms the fueros (laws) vested supreme authority less in the king alone, as was the case in Castile, than in the king acting together with the Cortes. When the latter was not in session its standing committee, the Diputación of each realm, watched over the laws. The resurrection of the old papal Inquisition posed a threat to the conversos but was no innovation and aroused little criticism. It was a different matter when Castilian inquisitors were appointed to realms where the fueros stipulated that senior officials must be native-born. The converso elite found that they had a constitutional argument to support their hostility.

In the kingdom of Aragon, with its capital in Saragossa, converso families had long played a prominent role in politics and finance. Regardless of inevitable opposition, on 4 May 1484 Torquemada appointed the first two inquisitors for Aragon, Gaspar Juglar and Pedro Arbués de Epila. According to Lea, the inquisitors set to work immediately, holding small autos de fe in the premises of the cathedral on 10 May and 3 June 1484.[99] This activity deeply disturbed not only conversos but all those whose loyalty was to the fueros of Aragon. The chronicler of Aragon, Jerónimo de Zurita, reported: “Those newly converted from the Jewish race, and many other leaders and gentry, claimed that the procedure was against the liberties of the realm, because for this offense [of heresy] their goods were confiscated and they were not given the names of witnesses who testified against them.” As a result, continued Zurita, the conversos had all the kingdom on their side, “including persons of the highest consideration, among them Old Christians and gentry.”[100]

When public opposition in Saragossa grew so great that there was a move to summon the four estates of the realm, Ferdinand hastily sent a circular letter to the chief nobles and deputies, justifying his position:

There is no intention of infringing the fueros but rather of enforcing their observance. It is not to be imagined that vassals so Catholic as those of Aragon would have demanded, or that kings so Catholic would have granted, fueros and liberties adverse to the faith and favorable to heresy. If the old inquisitors had acted conscientiously in accordance with the rules there would have been no cause for bringing in new ones, but they were without conscience and corrupted with bribes.

If there are so few heretics as is now asserted, there should not be such dread of the Inquisition. It is not to be impeded in sequestrating and confiscating and other necessary acts, for be assured that no cause or interest, however great, shall be allowed to interfere with its proceeding in future as it is now doing.[101]

Whatever the motives among Aragonese, whether personal dread or constitutional opposition, resistance continued. The most remarkable case of resistance occurred in 1484 in the city of Teruel, a hundred miles to the south of Saragossa.[102] In that year the tribunal of Saragossa sent two inquisitors to the city to establish the tribunal, but the magistrates refused them permission to enter. The inquisitors thereupon withdrew to the neighboring town of Cella, from which they issued an excommunication and interdict against the city and its magistrates. The clergy of Teruel promptly obtained papal letters releasing the city from the censures. The city authorities wrote to the king protesting that “they were coming to set up an Inquisition, which will cause the disorders that have happened in Castile.” The Inquisition then decreed in October 1484 that all the public offices in Teruel were confiscated to the crown and their present holders deprived of them. This was followed by an appeal to the king to carry out the decree. It was now the turn of the representatives of Aragon in Saragossa to protest to the king that “this is a kingdom of Christians,” that there were no heretics in the realm, and that heretics in any case should be opposed “with warnings and persuasion,” not force.[103] Ferdinand replied with an order in February 1485 to all his officials in Aragon, asking them to raise arms and help the inquisitors. The response to this was not adequate, so Ferdinand also called on troops from the borders of Castile to help in the enterprise. Faced with such massive coercion the city was easily reduced to obedience. With its submission in the spring of 1485 the Inquisition seemed to have triumphed everywhere in Aragon. Teruel’s resistance did not arise exclusively from the great influence exercised there by conversos. The city had good political reasons, as head of the only region inside Aragon with wholly autonomous laws.[104] Both it and Saragossa had to be brought to heel if the new Holy Office were to survive.

There were comparable problems in the Mediterranean realms of the crown of Aragon. Although the medieval Inquisition was moribund in Catalonia, the city of Barcelona had in 1461 received papal approval to have its own local inquisitor, Joan Comes. The Catalans therefore saw no need for a new tribunal. When the Cortes of the crown of Aragon met at Tarazona in April 1484, Catalonia refused to send deputies to approve the new Inquisition. In May Torquemada took the step of nominating two new inquisitors for Catalonia and at the same time revoked the commission held by Comes. The Catalans exploded into anger. The appointment of the new inquisitors, they wrote to Ferdinand, was “against the liberties, constitutions and agreements solemnly sworn by Your Majesty.” In Barcelona both legal and Church authorities ruled that Comes was the only rightful inquisitor of the city.[105] In reply, Ferdinand affirmed that “no cause nor interest, however great, will make us suspend the Inquisition.”

The conflict dragged on, and conversos began to emigrate in large numbers from the city. Fearing for the economic life of Barcelona, the consellers complained to Ferdinand in December 1485 of the “losses and disorder caused in this land by the Inquisition that Your Highness wishes to introduce. . . . The few remaining merchants have ceased to trade. . . . Foreign realms are growing rich and glorious through the depopulation of this country.” In May 1486, they warned Ferdinand that the city would be “totally depopulated and ruined if the Inquisition were introduced.” The protests were in vain. In February 1486 Pope Innocent VIII found a way out of the dilemma by sacking all the existing papal inquisitors in the crown of Aragon and securing the simultaneous withdrawal of the Castilian nominees. The initiative was handed back to Torquemada, who appointed a new inquisitor for Catalonia, Alonso de Espina, a Dominican prior from Castile.[106] Not until June 1487 did Espina succeed in entering the city, but his entry was boycotted by the Diputació and the consellers. Ferdinand therefore warned the city “to remember the example of Teruel, which was ruined because it did not obey the Inquisition.”[107] The consellers protested in their turn that the inquisitors were acting “against the laws, practice, customs and liberties of this city.”

The Holy Office was now firmly implanted, but little fruit remained for it to pluck. Throughout 1488 it burnt only seven accused, and in 1489 only three. There was never any doubt as to whom the Inquisition was directed against. Of 1,199 people it investigated in Catalonia between 1488 and 1505—most in their absence since they had fled—all but eight were conversos.[108] Among the distinguished refugees was the judge Antoni de Bardaxi, regent of the Chancillería, who ironically had given legal approval to the establishment of the Holy Office.

In the kingdom of Valencia, opposition was based similarly on the fueros. There were two existing inquisitors with papal commissions, the Dominicans Juan Cristóbal de Gualbes and Juan Orts, who from 1481 represented the revived medieval tribunal, but they seem to have done little. In March 1484 they were removed and Torquemada nominated, as representatives of the new Inquisition, the Aragonese Juan de Epila and the Valencian Martín Iñigo. Since the Cortes of Tarazona in 1484 had approved the new Inquisition, the nominees should have had no problems in Valencia. From July to October, however, the three estates of the Valencian Cortes kept up a stream of protests, asking “not that the Inquisition be suspended but that it be in the hands of natives of this realm,”[109] and detailing other requests, such as an end to secret testimony. Opposition crumbled before the obduracy of Ferdinand, who recalled that no protest had been made by the Valencians at Tarazona, and that the fueros must never be used to shield heresy. Even after the inquisitors began work in November 1484, opposition continued and the king was obliged to alternate threats with arguments. “If there are so few heretics in the realm,” his representatives commented acidly, “one wonders why people should be afraid of the Inquisition.”[110]

Converso opposition had by no means been destroyed. On the one hand it was growing in strength with the active support of Old Christians who resented the introduction of the new tribunal into Aragon, and on the other it was becoming more desperate because of the obvious failure of resistance as shown by the example of Teruel. In the highest converso circles the idea of the assassination of an inquisitor gained currency. It was also supported by some Old Christians, and by conversos as eminent as Gabriel Sánchez, treasurer of the king, and Sancho Paternoy, the royal treasurer (maestre racional) in Aragon. The climax came on the night of 15/16 September 1485, as the inquisitor Pedro Arbués was kneeling in prayer before the high altar of Saragossa cathedral. Beneath his gown the inquisitor wore a coat of mail and on his head a steel cap, because of warnings about threats against his life. On the night in question, eight conspirators hired by conversos entered the cathedral by the chapter door and stole up behind the inquisitor. After verifying that this was indeed Arbués, one of them stabbed him in the back with a stroke that went through his neck and proved to be his death wound. As Arbués staggered away, two of the others also inflicted wounds on him. The murderers made their escape and the canons of the cathedral rushed in to find the inquisitor dying. Arbués expired twenty-four hours later, on 17 September.

The shock of this murder led to developments that the conversos should certainly have foreseen.[111] When it was discovered that the assassins were conversos the whole mood of the city of Saragossa, and with it that of Aragon, changed. Arbués was declared a saint,[112] miracles were worked with his blood, mobs roamed the streets in search of conversos and a national assembly voted to suspend the fueros while the search for the assassins went on. In this atmosphere the inquisitors came into their own. Autos of the reformed Inquisition were held on 28 December 1485, and the murderers of Arbués expiated their crime in successive autos de fe lasting from 30 June 1486 to 15 December the same year. One of them had his hands cut off and nailed to the door of the Diputación, after which he was dragged to the marketplace, beheaded and quartered, and the pieces of his body suspended in the streets of the city. Another committed suicide in his cell the day before his ordeal by breaking a glass lamp and swallowing the fragments; he too suffered the same punishment, which was inflicted on his dead body.

More than these initial measures was needed in order to uproot the whole conspiracy, which involved so many and such eminent people that individuals were being punished for it as late as 1492. The heads that now rolled came from the highest families in Aragon. Whether they were judaizers or not, members of the leading converso houses had connived (or so it was claimed) in the murder and were sooner or later destroyed by the Inquisition, which remained in full control of all the judicial measures taken. A study of the list of accused shows the constant appearance of the great names of Santa Fe, Santangel, Caballería, and Sánchez. Francisco de Santa Fe, son of the famous converso Jerónimo and a counselor of the governor of Aragon, committed suicide by jumping from a tower and his remains were burnt in the auto of 15 December 1486. Sancho Paternoy was tortured and imprisoned. A member of the Santangel family, Luis, who had been personally knighted by Juan II for his military prowess, was beheaded and burnt in the marketplace of Saragossa on 8 August 1487; his more famous cousin Luis, whose money loans made possible the voyages of Columbus, was made to do penance in July 1491. Altogether, over fifteen members of the Santangel family were punished by the Inquisition before 1499; and between 1486 and 1503 fourteen members of the Sánchez family suffered a similar fate. This substantial sweep of conversos into the nets of the tribunal was effective in shaking the grip of New Christians on the Aragonese administration. Not for the first time, a cause triumphed through one useful martyrdom. For the conversos one murder, cheaply achieved at a total cost of 600 gold florins (which included the wages of the assassins), turned out to be an act of mass suicide that annihilated all opposition to the Inquisition for the next hundred years. The foolishness of the conspiracy can, with reason, call in doubt whether the conversos were really implicated.[113] But, in default of documentation to prove it, we may also doubt whether the murder was deliberately staged by the crown in order to smooth the way for the Inquisition.

Opportunely for Ferdinand, the crisis in Aragon coincided with his attempts to gain political control after the chaos of the civil wars. His constant emphasis on the need for the Inquisition was clear Realpolitik, but he was never in a position to use it to increase his power significantly, nor did he attempt to. Nor did he ever attempt to destroy the conversos as a political force. The king was wily enough to know that conversos in the crown of Aragon were a power network he could not trifle with. He had had their support from the beginning of his reign, and in return he gave his support to those not directly implicated in the troubles. Members of Luis de Santangel’s family were accused of Judaism, but the king protected them. Gabriel Sánchez’s case was particularly notable. Both his brother and his father-in-law were directly implicated in the Arbués murder. Accusations were made against both Sánchez and Alfonso de la Caballería. The king protected them firmly, and ordered the Inquisition to exempt them from its jurisdiction.[114]

In Mallorca, where the old Inquisition had already begun activities against judaizers in 1478, the new tribunal was introduced without incident in 1488 and began operations immediately. The inquisitors, Pedro Pérez de Munebrega and Sancho Marín, found enough work to keep them occupied in the hundreds of cases that filled the years 1488 to 1491. Politically, the island was undisturbed, though strong protests were made to the king in 1491 that “the inquisitors intrude into many matters, both criminal and civil, which are not their concern or jurisdiction; they try to take over all cases touching conversos even though no heresy is in question; they nominate as familiars many persons of bad reputation and let them carry arms day and night.”[115] Despite the discontent, no outbreaks against the tribunal occurred until a generation later under Charles V, when a rising headed by the converso bishop of Elna in 1518 led to the temporary expulsion of the inquisitors from the city of Palma. In Mallorca, conversos formed a considerable part of the population, thanks to the riots of 1391 in Palma, the preaching of Vincent Ferrer in 1413 and 1414 and the final forcible conversion of Jews there in 1435. The large number of conversos who were either pardoned because they confessed voluntarily or condemned because they had fled demonstrates that the inquisitors in those first years of the new tribunal had managed to identify a problem.

The new Inquisition had begun its activity in the capital cities of the crown of Aragon, and in some of the cities of south and central Castile, several years before the final decision to expel the Jews. In those twelve terrible years, conversos and Jews alike suffered from the rising tide of anti-Semitism. While the latter were being harassed and then threatened with expulsion from dioceses in Aragon and Andalucia, the former were being purged of those who retained vestiges of their ancestral Judaism. Many conversos fled abroad without necessarily intending thereby to defect from the Catholic faith. Refugees feature prominently among those condemned in the early years. In the first two years of the tribunal at Ciudad Real fifty-two accused were burnt alive but 220 were condemned to death in their absence. In the Barcelona auto de fe of 10 June 1491, three persons were burnt alive but 139 were judged in their absence. In Mallorca the same process was repeated when at the auto of 11 May 1493 only three accused were burnt in person but there were forty-seven burnings of the effigies of absent fugitives.[116] There was of course nothing exceptional in the phenomenon of escaping from the courts. At a very much later date a justice official in the kingdom of Valencia pointed out that among persons summoned to appear before the courts “three-fourths of those condemned are in fact absentees.”[117] The vast majority of possible victims, in short, managed to escape the clutches of the Holy Office.

The figures, as we have seen, indicate clearly who bore the brunt of the persecution: 99.3 percent of those accused by the Barcelona tribunal between 1488 and 1505, and 91.6 percent of those accused by that of Valencia between 1484 and 1530, were conversos of Jewish origin.[118] The tribunal, in other words, was not concerned with heresy in general. It was concerned with only one form of religious deviance: the apparently secret practice of Jewish rites. What appeared to be concern for religion was unmistakably racial in impact. Information about Jewish practices was gleaned through the edict of grace (for the edict in general, see chapter 9), a procedure modeled on that of the medieval Inquisition. The inquisitors would preach a sermon in the district they were visiting, recite a list of heresies, and invite those who wished to discharge their consciences to come forward and denounce themselves or others. If they came forward within the “period of grace”—usually thirty to forty days—they would be absolved and “reconciled” to the Church without suffering serious penalties. The benign terms encouraged self-denunciation. The edicts of grace, more than any other event, served to convince the inquisitors that a heresy problem existed. Before that period, there had been only polemics and rumors. Now the mass confessions, as Andrés Bernáldez was later to argue, demonstrated that “all of them were Jews.”

Hundreds of conversos, well aware that they had at some time been lax in observing the rules of their faith, came forward to admit their offenses and be reconciled. In Seville the prisons were filled to overflowing with conversos waiting to be interrogated as a result of their voluntary confessions. In Mallorca three hundred persons formed a procession during the first ceremony of contrition in 1488. The tribunal at Toledo initiated its career by reconciling an astonishing total of twenty-four hundred repentant conversos during the year 1486.[119] This in no way implied (despite a common but mistaken assumption) that they were judaizers or had tendencies to Judaism. Fear alone was the spur. Faced by the activity of the inquisitors, who now identified as heresy what many converso Christians had accepted as normal practice within the framework of belief, they felt that it was safer to clear their record. There were very many others who did not trust the Inquisition and preferred flight. They wandered from one province to another, always one step ahead of the reverend fathers. The majority, it seems, preferred to take the risk. They confessed and put themselves in the hands of the inquisitors.

By its willingness to condone the confessions of those who came forward during periods of grace, the Inquisition was accepting that an offense had been committed but that no intended or hidden heresy was involved. Those who confessed and accepted the conditions of penitence were henceforward free of possible disabilities. This optimistic view was obviously not accepted by the conversos, who had been forced into a compromising position that, in the long run, brought them further miseries. “One day when some others and I were talking about the Holy Inquisition,” a resident of Sigüenza stated in 1492, “they said that in Toledo very many had come forward to be reconciled, out of fear that false testimony would be made against them. And I said: Who is there who has not gone to be reconciled out of fear, even though he has done nothing?”[120] Some no doubt regretted bitterly that they had voluntarily joined the procession of penitents. “Did you see me yesterday in the procession of the reconciled?” a woman from Cuenca asked a friend in 1492. She burst out weeping: “and she wept a lot for having gone to be reconciled.” “God must be really put out that the reverend fathers do these things, they are devils and are not acting justly.”[121] Those who came forward to confess, it appears, did not feel that they had strayed from the Catholic faith.

Between fear and humiliation, many conversos lived in constant dread. “I was concerned because the Inquisition was coming,” a tanner of Segovia said. “I would rather see all the Muslims of Granada enter this city,” a resident of Cuenca exclaimed in 1491, “than the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which takes away life and honor.”[122]

Punishment by the Inquisition brought with it a number of civil disabilities (see chapter 10 below). In principle this situation could be avoided. From an early period many who admitted their faults during an edict of grace were allowed to wipe the slate clean by making a cash payment to the inquisitors. It was a welcome source of income to the Holy Office. “Rehabilitation” by this means must have appeared to many conversos a worthwhile price to pay for security. A major advantage was that no confiscation of goods was exacted of those who confessed voluntarily.[123] Thousands were “reconciled” to the Catholic faith, in Toledo alone some forty-three hundred persons in 1486–87.[124] Though there is no evidence of how common it was to rehabilitate offenders, lists that survive from Toledo, Segovia and several Andalucian towns show that the inquisitors were quite happy to exact the cash payment from thousands. The details for some fifteen hundred persons who went through the process in the city of Toledo in 1495–97 show us a normal cross-section of Toledo professions, the largest in number being jewelers, followed by the legal profession, administrators and traders.[125] There was, of course, no proof that those who paid for “rehabilitation” were in fact convinced judaizers. Moreover—and this was the sting in the tail of voluntary disclosure—it was a calculated risk whether the inquisitors would accept the repentance implied in confessions. Several persons were subsequently brought to trial for offenses committed after their rehabilitation.[126]

The determination of the tribunal to strike hard at supposed heresy was unmistakable. Because documentation for the early years has not usually survived, it is difficult to arrive at reliable figures for the activity of the Inquisition. The period of most intense persecution of conversos was between 1480 and 1530. In Aragon many who were not implicated in the murder of Inquisitor Arbués were drawn into the nets of the repression.[127] Hernando del Pulgar estimated that up to 1490 the Inquisition in Andalucia had burnt two thousand people and reconciled fifteen thousand others under the “edicts of grace.”[128] His contemporary Andrés Bernáldez estimated that in the diocese of Seville alone between 1480 and 1488 the tribunal had burnt over seven hundred people and reconciled more than five thousand, without counting all those who were sentenced to imprisonment.[129] A later historian, the annalist Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga, claimed that in Seville between 1481 and 1524 over twenty thousand had abjured their errors, and over a thousand obstinate heretics had been sent to the stake.[130]

The figures for deaths are certainly exaggerated, but it cannot be doubted that the total number of persons passing through the hands of the inquisitors ran into the thousands. The Toledo tribunal may have dealt with over eight thousand cases in the period 1481–1530.[131] The overwhelming majority of these were not in fact brought to trial; they were disciplined as a result of the edicts of grace, and had to undergo various penalties and penances, but escaped with their lives. Trial cases were very much fewer, and in them the penalty of death was pronounced for the most part against absent refugees. Effigies, which were burnt in the place of condemned absentees, may well form part of the total figures for executions given by early chroniclers. In reality, the extreme penalty of death for heresy was suffered by a very much smaller number than historians once thought. A recent carefully considered view is that in these years of the high tide of persecution, the tribunal of Saragossa had some 130 executions in person,[132] that of Valencia possibly some 225,[133] that of Barcelona some 34.[134]

In Castile the incidence of executions was certainly higher. In the auto de fe at Ciudad Real on 23 February 1484, 30 people were burnt alive and 40 in effigy; in the auto at Valladolid on 5 January 1492, 32 were burnt alive. The executions were, however, sporadic and concentrated only in the early years. In rounded terms, it is likely that over three-quarters of all those who perished under the Inquisition in the three centuries of its existence did so in the first thirty years. Lack of documentation, however, makes it impossible to arrive at totally reliable figures. One good estimate, based on documentation of the autos de fe, is that 250 persons were burnt in person in the Toledo tribunal between 1485 and 1501.[135] Since this tribunal and that of Seville and Jaén were among the few in Castile to have had an intense level of activity, it would not be improbable to suggest a figure five times higher, around 1,000 persons, as a rough total for those executed in the tribunals of Castile in the early period. Taking into account all the tribunals of Spain up to about 1520, it is unlikely that more than 2,000 people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition.[136]

The final death toll may have been smaller than historians once believed, but the overall impact was certainly devastating for the cultural minority most directly affected. The reign of terror had an inevitable consequence. Conversos ceased to come forward to admit their errors. Instead, they were forced to take refuge in the very beliefs and practices that they and their parents had turned their backs on. Active Judaism, which existed among some conversos, seems to have been caused primarily by the awakening of their consciousness under persecution. Under pressure, they reverted to the faith of their ancestors. A Jewish lady living in Sigüenza was surprised in 1488 to encounter a man whom she had known previously in Valladolid as a Christian. He now professed to be a Jew, and was begging for charity among the Jews. “What are you doing over here?” she asked him, “The Inquisition is around and will burn you.” He answered: “I want to go to Portugal.”[137] After no doubt equivocating for many years, he had made his decision and was going to risk all for it.

Since conversos occupied a significant place in administration, the professions and trade, diminishing numbers through persecution and emigration may have had an impact on the areas where they had been numerous. In Barcelona. according to the consellers in 1485, the refugees “have transferred to other realms all the money and goods they have in this city.”[138] In 1510 the few conversos who remained there claimed that they had once been a flourishing group of “over six hundred families, of whom over two hundred were traders,” and that they now numbered only fifty-seven families, close to ruin.[139] In Valencia, we know the professions of 736 conversos tried by the Inquisition: 34 percent were in commerce and 43 percent were artisans, principally in textiles.[140] The conversos were—it should be stressed—in no way the cream of the population, but their ruin could not fail to cause concern to some civic authorities. This, indeed, together with defense of local independence, was among the main causes of nonconverso resistance to the Inquisition in Teruel. Persecution of conversos was far more damaging to the local economy than the later and more spectacular expulsion of the Jews. The latter, because of their marginal status, had played a smaller role in key sectors of public life and controlled fewer economic resources.

The wish to eliminate conversos from public life was, some have argued, the main reason for the establishment of the Inquisition, and religion was never a genuine motive. In the process, the tribunal and the crown would get rich on the proceeds from confiscations.[141] The argument is plausible, particularly if we deny that there was any widespread judaizing movement among conversos. But, as we shall see, other issues were also involved, making it difficult to accept anti-converso greed as a significant motive. Moreover, the crucial fact is that Ferdinand, who vigorously denied any hostility to them, continued at all times to employ conversos in his service. “We have always had these people, like any others, in our service,” he declared in 1507, “and they have served us well. My intention always has been and still is that the good among them be rewarded and the bad punished, though charitably and not harshly.”[142] There is ample evidence to support the truth of his words.

The founding of the Inquisition has often been cited as evidence that the Catholic monarchs desired to impose uniformity of religion on Spain. The expulsion of the Jews would seem to confirm it. The monarchs, as fervent Catholics, certainly wished the nation to be united in faith. But there is no evidence at all of a deliberate policy to impose uniformity. Throughout the first decade of the Inquisition’s career, Ferdinand and Isabella did not cease to protect their Jews while simultaneously trying to eliminate judaizing among the conversos. Even after the expulsion of the Jews, the Muslims remained in full enjoyment of their freedom of religion—in Castile for another decade, in Aragon for another thirty years. The ruthless drive against “heresy,” far from aiming at religious unification, was no more than the culmination of a long period of social and political pressure directed against a specific section of the conversos.

When official chroniclers of those years, most of them sympathetic to the Holy Office, came to give an account of events, they slipped all too easily into a standard version of what had happened. All those who had fled from the Inquisition were considered, by implication, guilty. All those who had come forward for rehabilitation were, equally, written off as guilty; their confessions were there as evidence. It went without saying that all those found guilty and condemned were deemed by the chroniclers to have been rightly judged. The Jewish religion of the conversos became accepted as historical fact.

Yet the trial documents of the Holy Office give little cause to accept such a verdict, and their testimony is no more reliable than that of hostile witnesses in a criminal trial today. Many of the accused undoubtedly had pro-Jewish tendencies, for they had lived their lives in an ambivalent Christian-Jewish environment. But very rarely did the Inquisition manage to find concrete evidence against conversos, of whom the majority seem to have been dragged before courts on the basis of the gossip of neighbors, personal malice, communal prejudice and simple hearsay. According to a Jewish chronicler, conversos testified against conversos who would not pay them off.[143] The prosecution papers are full of the type of oral evidence that normal courts would have thrown out.[144] Some of the practices denounced to the inquisitors, moreover, by no means implied Judaism. Was it only Jews who turned their heads to the wall when they died?[145]

Above all, the inquisitors seem to have accepted without question some wholly incredible feats of memory. They had no problem in accepting as reliable the testimony of witnesses who knew nothing of an accused’s present religious life but could testify that twenty or thirty years ago they had seen him change his sheets on a Friday, or nod his head as though praying in the Jewish manner. Sancho de Ciudad, a leading citizen of Ciudad Real, was accused of practicing Judaism on the basis of events allegedly remembered by witnesses from ten, twenty and nearly thirty years before.[146] Juan de Chinchilla, tailor of Ciudad Real, made the mistake in 1483 of owning up to Jewish practices after the expiry of the edict of grace. All those who worked with him testified that he appeared to be a practicing Catholic. The only witnesses against him spoke of things they claimed to have seen sixteen and twenty years before. On their evidence he was burnt at the stake.[147] In Soria in 1490 the inquisitors accepted the word of a witness who had seen an official say Jewish prayers “twenty years ago,” and that of another who had seen certain objects in a house “over thirty years ago.”[148] A man in the same city recalled that a neighbor “forty years ago” never went to mass and an elderly woman reported hearing a specific phrase spoken “fifty years ago.”[149] Very rarely indeed could witnesses say they had seen firm evidence of Jewish practices in the previous week or month or year, but their memory seemed to work very well when it concerned words and events of half a lifetime ago. In most cases, the prosecution in these years relied either on voluntary confessions or on fragments of hearsay evidence dredged out from long-range memory. When María González was brought before the inquisitors at Ciudad Real in 1511, the only firm evidence against her was her own confession during an edict of grace in 1483. “Since then,” her defense attorney argued (and there was no evidence to the contrary), “she has lived as a Catholic.” However, her husband had been burnt as a heretic at that time, and in subsequent years she never ceased to maintain that “they burnt him on false witness” and that “he went to heaven like a martyr.”[150] On this flimsy evidence she too was sent to the stake.

When Juan González Pintado, a former secretary to the king and now city councilor of Ciudad Real, was tried by the Inquisition in 1484 for judaizing, the only detailed testimony against him dated from thirty-five years before.[151] By contrast, many witnesses testified that he was at this moment an excellent believing Christian. In such cases, other motives for the prosecution may be suspected. González, indeed, had been implicated in a rebellion twenty years before,[152] and echoes from that event may now have prejudiced his case.

If the idea that conversos were secret Jews is to be sustained principally by the evidence dug up by the Inquisition during the 1480s, there can be no doubt of the verdict. Very little convincing proof of Jewish belief or practice among the conversos can be found in the trials.[153] There is no need to question the sincerity of the inquisitors, or to imagine that they maliciously fabricated evidence. It is true that, in the beginning at least, they were not trained lawyers (they had studied Church law but the science of criminal law did not yet exist), nor did they have a very clear idea of Jewish religious practice. But they themselves were instruments of a judicial system in which social pressures and prejudices, expressed through unsupported oral testimony, were given virtually unquestioned validity.

Those convicted of judaizing fall into three main categories. First, there were those condemned on the evidence of members of the same family. Where this happened, the charges often appear plausible, though personal quarrels were evidently involved. Second, there were those condemned in their absence. Here the automatic presumption of guilt, the lack of any defense, and the fact that property of the accused was confiscated tend to make the evidence unacceptable. Third, there were those condemned on the hearsay of often malicious neighbors, most of whom had to reach back in their memory between ten and fifty years in order to find incriminating evidence. The inevitable conflict between various testimonies can be seen in the trial of Catalina de Zamora in Ciudad Real in 1484. She was accused by a number of witnesses of being a convinced and practicing Jew, and thoroughly hostile to the Inquisition (which she evidently was). An equally convincing group of witnesses swore that she was a good Catholic, and that the prosecution witnesses were “vulgar women of low intelligence.”[154] The inquisitors were convinced by this last group and threw the charges out, but imposed a punishment on her for having blasphemed against the Virgin.

In short, the trial papers leave no doubt that some conversos were addicted to Jewish practices and culture (like the converso of Soria who in the 1440s insisted on going into the synagogue and praying beside the Jews until one day they got fed up with him and threw him out into the street, despite his loud protests).[155] But there is no systematic evidence that conversos as a group were secret Jews. Nor is it possible to build on this fragile evidence any picture of a converso consciousness whose principal feature was the secret practice of Judaism.[156] In the perception of contemporary Jews who witnessed the persecution of the conversos, “only a few of them died as Jews, and of these most were women.”[157] This testimony was repeated so often at the time by Jews that it is unsafe to call it in question. Isaac Abravanel stressed four times in his writings that the charges made against the conversos were false. Deeply concerned for the fate of his own people, he would hardly have written off the conversos had he felt they were of the same faith. “The people will always call them ‘Jews,’” he wrote about the conversos, “and brand them as Israelites and falsely accuse them of judaizing in secret, a crime for which they are paying with death by fire.”[158] Another contemporary Jewish scholar, Isaac Arama, was no less explicit. “The Gentiles,” he wrote, “will always revile them, plot against them and falsely accuse them in matters of faith; they will always suspect them as judaizers, especially in our time, when the smoke of the autos de fe has risen towards the sky in all the realms of Spain.”[159]

This picture changed radically with the expulsion of 1492. To the large number of Jews who converted that year was soon added the very many who returned from exile and accepted baptism. Among both converts and returnees, few were happy with the situation. “If it were not for the debts owed to me,” said a man who came back from Portugal in 1494, “I would neither turn Christian nor return from Portugal.” “This is the real captivity,” another (reported in 1502) is said to have commented some years before, “when we were Jews we were lords, now we are slaves.”[160] From 1492, accordingly, that is to say twelve years after the establishment of the Inquisition, a real problem of judaizing arose. These judaizers had lived all their lives as Jews and refused now to forgo their birthright.

The major qualitative change that took place in converso culture after 1492 has never been adequately analyzed.[161] The new converts were decidedly not a part of the old “converso nation” of Christians. Whereas the older generation had been fundamentally Christian, the new converts were still consciously Jewish and yearned for their former culture.[162] “I repent of having become a Christian,” a resident of Medinaceli claimed in 1504. “We were well off in the Jewish faith,” another stated in Sigüenza. The expulsion had taken place because they were not good Jews, said a man in Almazán: “if evil has befallen us we deserve it, for we did not observe the ceremonies nor the other things that we had to do, and so the expulsion came upon us.” The opinion reflects that of a later Jewish chronicler who took the moralistic view that “the exile which appears so terrible to the eye will be the cause of our salvation.”[163] Speaking of a refugee who had gone to Portugal, another in Almazán in 1501 stated that “if I were now in that country I would not turn Christian.” “When we were Jews we never wanted for anything, and now we go in want of everything,” was the stated view of a new convert in 1505. “We were better off then and had much more than we now have.”

This attitude, evidently, continued to give the inquisitors much work to do. It is significant that in the 1480s their main hope of obtaining evidence had been through the edicts of grace and the spontaneous confessions of conversos. After the 1490s those edicts were almost superfluous, because the large number of accumulated testimonies was sufficient material from which to work. Moreover, the inquisitors could now count on the help of those conversos who, in revenge for denunciations made by Jews at that time, turned the tables on the ex-Jews and proffered evidence against them.

They happened to be difficult times for both Christians and former Jews, and both looked forward to new horizons. In Western Europe there were Christian leaders, among them Cardinal Cisneros, who entertained beliefs of a promised millennium, and King Ferdinand of Aragon shared the same outlook. Many conversos, hard pressed by the aftermath of 1492, put their faith in similar expectations. In Ciudad Real, in Córdoba and in Valencia, converso prophets expected the final coming of the Messiah.[164] They would continue to hope, in the centuries that followed, but the promise never bore fruit and the shadow of the Inquisition continued to mark the sky over their heads.

4

AN ENDURING CRISIS

In this land they bear ill will to the Inquisition and would destroy it if they could.

—INQUISITORS OF CATALONIA, 1618

Throughout the history of the Inquisition, commentators agreed on the impressive support given to it by the people. Foreign visitors to the peninsula were appalled by the way the public accepted autos de fe. Subsequent defenders of the tribunal felt that they could in part justify the Inquisition by the evidence of its roots in the authentic faith of Spaniards.[1] Opponents of the tribunal were equally impressed. Even the great Llorente, the first modern historian of the tribunal (see chapter 15), was staggered by the lack of evidence for any opposition to it in Spain. He stated in 1811 in a discourse read to the Royal Academy of History, meeting in Madrid at the height of the Peninsular War:

If in investigating what a nation thought about a certain institution we were to be guided solely by the testimony of public writers, there is no doubt that the Spanish people had as much love as hate for the Inquisition. . . . You will find hardly a book printed in Spain from the time of Charles the Fifth to our own days in which the Inquisition is not cited with praise.[2]

The apparent support given by the people to the Inquisition has inevitably created problems of interpretation. Partisans of the Holy Office have maintained that its popularity was based on its unswerving sense of justice, and that it responded to a profound religious need. Critics, by contrast, have presented it as a tyranny imposed by the state upon the free consciences of Spaniards. Both extremes of opinion can probably be supported by some contemporary evidence, but neither is wholly plausible. The primitive state bureaucracies of fifteenth-century Castile and Aragon were ill equipped to impose a tyranny on the mass of the people and in reality never attempted to do so. If the Inquisition acquired any base of support, on the other hand, we may ask why this came about.

As we shall see (chapter 10), in practice the Holy Office had little active or continuous contact with the people, because it was not, like the Church, a part of their daily lives. During the first thirty years its impact was limited to the chief urban centers of Andalucia and a handful of other cities including Toledo, Saragossa and Barcelona. Up to the mid-sixteenth century it was still an urban entity that seldom ventured out into the countryside. Not until almost a century after its foundation, when it went out for the first time into the frontier areas of the peninsula, into the mountainous Pyrenees and the remote northwest region of Galicia, did it bestir itself to face the 90 percent of the population that did not live in towns. In the preceding and crucial hundred years, the majority of Spaniards had no problems about accepting the Inquisition, simply because it was not there or at least had only a marginal impact on their daily lives. There were no remarkable protests against it, nor any uprisings.

Meanwhile, if there were protests they arose exclusively in urban centers, where specific local elites or relevant regional interests objected to interference by outsiders. This happened from the very beginning, in almost any town of note (whether in Andalucia or the crown of Aragon) where the newcomers were seen as a threat to the previous way of doing things. Religion was by no means the constant or even the principal motive for opposition. The Aragonese had never fully activated their medieval Inquisition and were in no mood to accept another. Castilians were in an even more sensitive position: never in all their history had they institutionalized the persecution of heresy. Religious dissidence in the highly fragmented medieval society of Castile had been channeled into three main directions: folk customs (see chapter 13), contact with Islam and contact with Jews. None of the three had raised concerns calling for repression of the sort that was being considered in the crown of Aragon, where in the thirteenth century Catharism was filtering through from the Pyrenees. Judaizers in Castile had occasionally been condemned by episcopal courts prior to the establishment of the Inquisition, but in accord with existing law.[3] How, then, did Spaniards come to accept a tribunal that was unknown to their own traditions[4] and from the first went against their understanding of justice? The most eloquent testimony to criticisms made at the time comes from the pen of the Jesuit Juan de Mariana, writing at the very end of the sixteenth century. According to him, some aspects of inquisitorial procedure[5]

at first appeared very oppressive to Spaniards. What caused the most surprise was that children paid for the crimes of their parents, and that accusers were not named or made known, nor confronted by the accused, nor was there publication of witnesses: all of which was contrary to the practice followed of old in other tribunals. Besides this, it appeared an innovation that sins of that sort should be punished by death. And what was most serious was that because of these secret investigations they were deprived of the liberty to listen and talk freely, since in all the cities, towns and villages there were persons placed to give information of what went on. This was considered by some to be the most wretched slavery and equal to death.[6]

Despite the strong language in which it is phrased, this opinion was not apparently shared by Mariana himself, who presents as “better and more correct” a contrary view in favor of the Inquisition. Significantly, he nowhere gives the impression that the critical view was held only by conversos. The specific points mentioned, on innovations in judicial procedure, the death sentence for judaizing and the practice of spying, were indeed questions that Old Christians raised in Castilian and Aragonese Cortes over the next few years. Fully aware of the novelty of inquisitorial practice, Mariana admitted that the new harsh measures were a deviation from the normal charitable procedure of the Church; but, he says, it was held “that the ancient customs of the Church should be changed in conformity with the needs of the times.”

“The needs of the times”: it is the clue to the survival of the Inquisition. While urban factions in Toledo, Ciudad Real and other towns were struggling to dislodge conversos from power, in the 1480s Ferdinand and Isabella, fresh from the civil wars and the constitutional settlement achieved at the Cortes of Toledo (1480), were beginning a military crusade against the Muslims of Granada. In 1486 they sought blessing for their cause at the shrine of St James in Compostela. Crisis times required crisis measures: the message was implicit in every major directive issued by Ferdinand in these years, and helps to explain the unusual cooperation he obtained in much of Spain. It may also help to explain the totally uncompromising firmness with which he insisted that the Inquisition be accepted everywhere, regardless of consequences. We have his remarkable statement to the consellers of Barcelona in 1486, that “before we decided on introducing this Inquisition into any of the cities of our realms, we carefully considered and looked at all the harm and ill that could follow from it and that could affect our taxes and revenue. But because our firm intention and concern is to prefer the service of God to our own, we wish the Inquisition to be established regardless, putting all other interests aside.”[7]

The stimulation of a feeling of crisis (aggravated by alleged converso plots, the murder of Arbués, or the episode of the La Guardia infant), and the universal response to the great ten-year-long crusade against Granada, pressurized many public authorities to conform and stilled the protests of individuals. The security measures in defense of society were accepted as essential even if they undermined some of the principles of that society. Because the Inquisition was a crisis instrument, it may be that Ferdinand never intended it to be permanent (no steps, for example, were taken at the time to give it a regular income). This certainly was the feeling of the Toledo writer who commented in 1538 that “if the Catholic monarchs were still alive, they would have reformed it twenty years ago, given the change in conditions.”[8] The unprecedented activities of the Holy Office were deemed by some to be acceptable in an emergency, until the crisis had passed. Unfortunately, those who controlled the security measures made sure that the crisis was perceived to endure for centuries.

Critics remained uneasy that harsh penalties should be imposed on those who had never been properly Christianized. Were judaizers wholly to blame? Had they ever been catechized after their forced baptism? And were the penalties not extreme? Mariana testifies to the existence of dissent in Castile: “At the time there were differing opinions. Some felt that those who sinned in this way should not suffer the death penalty: but apart from this they admitted that it was just to inflict any other kind of punishment. Among others sharing this opinion, was Hernando del Pulgar, a person of acute and elegant genius.”[9]

We may conjecture that Pulgar’s view was widely held in higher circles. The diputados of Aragon, as we have seen, protested to Ferdinand that correction should be by example and not by violence. Many Spaniards were indeed appalled at the tide of bloodshed. “We are all aghast,” the consellers of Barcelona informed Ferdinand bluntly in 1484, “at the news we receive of the executions and proceedings that they say are taking place in Castile.”[10] Pulgar was no less horrified. Denouncing the resort to coercion at a time when evangelization had not been tried, the royal secretary informed the archbishop of Seville that thousands of young conversos in Andalucia

have never been out of their homes or heard and learned any other doctrine but that which they had seen their parents practice at home. To burn all these would be not only cruel but difficult to carry out.

I do not say this, my lord, in favor of the evildoers, but to find a solution, which it seems to me would be to put in that province outstanding persons who by their exemplary life and teaching of doctrine would convert some and bring back others. Of course [the inquisitors] Diego de Merlo and doctor Medina are good men; but I know very well that they will not produce such good Christians with their fire as the bishops Pablo [de Santa Maria] and Alonso [de Cartagena] did with water.[11]

While agreeing that heresy should be repressed, Pulgar objected to capital punishment. His principal authority for this position was St. Augustine, who had advocated the use of force but not the death penalty against the Donatist heretics of North Africa in the fifth century.

Pulgar’s contemporary Juan de Lucena, a noted humanist and servant of the crown, also entered into public controversy over the methods of the Inquisition. At one time royal emissary to Rome and then a member of the royal council, Lucena was apparently a converso and, according to his adversary canon Alonso Ortiz of Toledo, not only “attempted with his sophistries to defend the conversos” but also “insisted to the king and queen that there should be no Inquisition.” Lucena claimed, says Ortiz, that Jews “baptized through fear did not receive the sacrament properly, and should therefore be treated not as heretics but as infidels,” and that “conversos ought to be convinced with reasons and inducements, not with coercion and punishments.”[12]

Further evidence of opposition to the persecution of Jews and conversos comes from an official of the Holy Office itself. The inquisitor Luis de Páramo (as we have observed) wrote that many learned Spaniards, both before and after 1492, thought the expulsion wrong in principle, as well as harmful to the Church, for two main reasons: first, because those who had been baptized by force had not received the sacrament properly and therefore remained essentially pagan;[13] second, because the expulsion was an implicit invitation to annihilate the Jews, which would be contrary to Scripture. The first reason was clearly of paramount importance, for if Jews had been forced into conversion their baptism was invalid and the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over them. The standard reply to this argument was simple. The mere fact that the Jews had chosen baptism as an alternative to death or exile meant that they had exercised the right of free choice: there was therefore no compulsion, and the sacrament was valid.

In the early years of the Inquisition, opposition was quite logically led by conversos. Unable to secure support in Spain they turned to Rome. A bull issued by Sixtus IV on 2 August 1483, and almost certainly obtained by converso money, ordered greater leniency to be exercised in the tribunal of Seville and revoked all appeal cases to Rome. Only eleven days later, however, the pope withdrew the bull, after pressure from the Spanish rulers. Sixtus IV died in 1484, to be succeeded by Innocent VIII, a pontiff who followed his policy of intervening in favor of the conversos while taking care not to anger the Catholic monarchs. The bulls issued by Innocent on 11 February and 15 July 1485, asking for more mercy and leniency and for greater use of the practice of secret reconciliation, are typical of the efforts made by the Holy See to avoid lasting infamy falling on the tribunal’s victims. Yet even if we see the hand of the conversos in all these attempts to mitigate the worst aspects of inquisitorial procedure, it is impossible to maintain that conversos alone constituted the opposition.

Hostility to the practice of sanbenitos, for example, was shared by Old and New Christian alike. These penitential garments (see chapter 9) were ordered to be worn in public by the condemned, causing them public humiliation and bringing ill fame to the towns where they lived. It was what Mariana singled out particularly as being “very oppressive to Spaniards.” In Andalucia, according to Bernáldez, people were allowed to cease wearing them “so that the disrepute of the territory should not grow.”[14] Spying would have been objected to in any community and, as we shall see, aroused appropriate reactions. Prior to 1492 the Jews themselves were asked to spy on conversos. At Toledo in 1485 the inquisitors collected the rabbis and made them swear to anathematize in their synagogues those Jews who did not denounce judaizers.[15] A high proportion of testimonies offered against conversos in Saragossa in the period before the expulsion came from Jews.[16] In particular, ex-Jews rather than Jews appear to have been the most active denouncers: in Ciudad Real in 1483–85 a former Jew, Fernán Falcón, was the chief witness used against most of those arrested for judaizing.[17]

Although conversos were notoriously hostile to the new tribunal, we hear little of opposition by Old Christians in Castile during the first two decades of the Inquisition’s existence. Yet this was, as we have seen, by far the most bloody period of its history. Hundreds of Christians of Jewish origin had been executed, ruined or driven into exile in a campaign without precedent in Spanish or European experience, and through all this few Old Christians had bestirred themselves to raise their voices in protest except when political considerations were in question. Occasionally, as in the case of Lucero in Andalucia, Old Christians did indeed find they were involved.

In 1499 the inquisitor of Córdoba was replaced after being found guilty of fraud and extortion. His successor, appointed in September that year, was Diego Rodríguez Lucero. Within a short time Lucero began his own bizarre career of extortion, arresting leading citizens on trifling or false pretexts in order to seize their property in confiscations. Prominent members of Old Christian families soon became ensnared in Lucero’s net and an atmosphere of terror gripped the community. That, at any rate, was the picture presented by those who opposed the inquisitor. Lucero himself had a different story. He had, he said, unearthed in the area a dangerous pro-Jewish millenarian movement.[18] There is, in effect, evidence that such a movement had arisen among groups of conversos in the region. Large numbers were arrested by Lucero and persuaded to confess. In 1500, states a report made to the royal council, 130 people were relaxed (that is, “executed,” in the terminology of the Inquisition) in two autos de fe.[19] After protests were made, the council sent a commission of inquiry that interviewed many of those arrested. The commissioners seem to have been convinced by the voluntary confessions of some prisoners, and gave their support to Lucero, who was left free to continue his activities. An annalist of Córdoba reports:

to gain credit as a zealous minister of the faith and to gain higher dignities, he began to treat the accused in prison with extreme rigor, forcing them to declare their accomplices, which resulted in the denunciation of so great a number of people, both conversos and Old Christians, that the city was scandalized and almost burst into rioting.[20]

Converso witnesses testified that they had been forced to teach Jewish prayers to Old Christian prisoners so that Lucero could accuse the latter of judaizing. A report from the cathedral chapter and city council in December 1506 accused Lucero of “killing and robbing and defaming any and everybody.” An independent inquiry by the Córdoba authorities in November concluded that Lucero’s evidence against his victims was “all fabricated”; that Fray Diego Deza, archbishop of Seville and inquisitor general, had failed to respond to petitions against the inquisitor; that four hundred innocent prisoners were currently in the cells; and that Lucero had deliberately burnt as many of his victims as possible (120 were apparently burnt alive in one auto in December 1504; 27 in another in May 1505) to stop them complaining to the new king of Castile, Philip the Fair. The king opportunely in June 1506 suspended another holocaust, this time of 160 persons, that Lucero was preparing.[21]

Lucero’s inquiries also led him to find evidence of the millenarian movement among members of the household of the eighty-year-old Jeronimite archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, formerly confessor to Queen Isabella. Accusing Talavera of having a “synagogue” in his palace, Lucero arrested the archbishop and his entire household (which included his sister, two nieces and their daughters, and the servants). The fact is that Talavera—as we note below—was not of converso origin and had no pro-Jewish leanings. Nevertheless, relatives and servants were tortured and duly produced denunciations against him. A rebellion by the city authorities in Córdoba in October 1506 put an end to the regime of Lucero, who fled. The papacy opportunely intervened, the archbishop was acquitted of all charges in April 1507 and he and his family were set free.[22] It came too late to benefit the old man. Walking barefoot and bareheaded through the streets of Granada in the procession on Ascension Day, 13 May, he was seized by a violent fever which the following day ended his life. On his deathbed he denounced “Lucero and his accomplices” for “trying to wipe out the conversos,” “which,” he continued, “is clearly against the Holy Catholic Faith, which requires that there be no distinction between Jew and Greek.”[23] Talavera’s care for his flock had left him no time to care for himself. He died in perfect poverty; his household, for which he had not provided, had to resort to the charity of the bishop of Málaga.

Nearly a century later, Fray José de Sigüenza, historian of the Jeronimite order, lamented that there had been no other prelates in Spain like Talavera. In his treatment of New Christians, says Fray José, Talavera

would not allow anyone to harm them in word or deed, or burden them with new taxes and impositions, for he detested the evil custom prevalent in Spain of treating members of the sects worse after their conversion than before it . . . so that many refused to accept a Faith in whose believers they saw so little charity and so much arrogance.

And if there had been more prelates who walked in this path, there would not have been so many lost souls stubborn in the sects of Moses and Mohammed within Spain, nor so many heretics in other nations.[24]

Talavera’s position was stated most clearly in his Catholic Refutation, a sharp attack that he directed against a “heretical leaflet” issued in 1480 by a pro-Jewish converso of Seville. Reading the text is enough to demonstrate that Talavera was no converso (as is sometimes alleged) and had no sympathy with conversos. Deflating the pretension of Jews and conversos to be a specially gifted nation (“the Greeks were much more so, and the Romans, and even the Arabs”), Talavera supported use of the death penalty for heresy. On the other hand, he attacked the anti-Semitism to which conversos were subjected, stating firmly that reason rather than persecution was the way to bring them back to the fold: “Heresies need to be corrected not only with punishments and lashes, but even more with Catholic reasoning.”[25] It was the policy he later adopted towards the Moriscos of Granada. His tract, possibly because of its controversial nature, was placed on the Index of forbidden books in 1559. The Inquisition subsequently decided merely to remove some phrases from it, but never got round to doing this.[26]

On 16 July of the same year, 1507, Gonzalo de Ayora, captain general and chronicler, wrote a letter of protest to the king’s secretary Miguel Almazán on behalf of the people persecuted by Lucero.

The government had failed to exercise effective control over its ministers. As for the Inquisition, the method adopted was to place so much confidence in the archbishop of Seville and in Lucero . . . that they were able to defame the whole kingdom, to destroy, without God or justice, a great part of it, slaying and robbing and violating maids and wives to the great dishonor of the Christian religion.

The damages which the wicked officials of the Inquisition have wrought in my land are so many and so great that no reasonable person on hearing of them would not grieve.[27]

The redress so urgently demanded had begun with the resignation of Deza under pressure, and the appointment on 5 June 1507 of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, cardinal archbishop of Toledo, as inquisitor general. In May 1508 the Suprema eventually voted to arrest Lucero, who was taken in chains to Burgos, while his victims in the prison of Córdoba were all released. The ex-inquisitor received no punishment for his crimes, but was allowed to retire to Seville, where he died in peace.

At the same time as the troubles in Córdoba, complaints were raised in Llerena (Extremadura) against the activities of the new inquisitor, a man named Bravo, who had for a time been an assistant of Lucero in Córdoba. So many wealthy prisoners were thrown into the cells by Bravo, despite the protests of one of his colleagues, that the relatives of the condemned finally gathered enough courage to petition the crown:

We the relatives and friends of the prisoners in the cells of the Inquisition of Llerena kiss the royal hands of Your Highness and testify that the inquisitors of that province, together with their officials, have persecuted and persecute both the prisoners and ourselves with great hatred and enmity, and have carried out many irregularities in the procedure of imprisonment and trial, and have maltreated not only the said prisoners but their wives and children and property.[28]

There is no record of any censure of Bravo’s policy, and it appears likely that he was allowed to pursue his career unchecked. Lucero’s influence also seems to have haunted the tribunal at Jaén, where a professional “witness” who had formerly served the inquisitor now extended his activities. The man’s name was Diego de Algeciras, and for a reasonable pittance he was ready to perjure himself in testifying to the judaizing activities of any number of conversos. Thanks to his assistance, the richest conversos of the city were soon in jail on suspicion of heresy. Those who still remained free petitioned the crown to restore jurisdiction over heresy to the bishop of Jaén, whose mercy they trusted more than the abuses of the officials of the Inquisition.[29]

Most abuses probably originated not with the inquisitors themselves but with their subordinate officials. Among the more notorious cases was the notary at Jaén, who locked a young girl of fifteen in a room, stripped her naked and whipped her until she agreed to testify against her mother.[30] A deposition drawn up by witnesses at Toledo and dated 26 September 1487 asserts that the receiver of confiscated goods in that tribunal, Juan de Uria, had defrauded sums amounting to 4,000 ducats, enough to set himself up in comfort.[31] There were opportunities for lining one’s pockets even at the bottom of the ladder. In 1588, the inquisitor from Madrid who carried out the inspection of the tribunal at Córdoba reported that both the doorkeeper and the messenger of the tribunal were criminals and profiteers, and that this was well known throughout the city, although apparently not to the inquisitors of Córdoba.[32]

In the crown of Aragon, too, Old Christians who had condoned the persecution of conversos now began after the death of Queen Isabella to rally to the defense of the fueros. Meeting together at Monzón in 1510, the representatives of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia raised the question of reform in jurisdiction. No further steps were taken until their next meeting at Monzón in 1512, when a comprehensive list of reforms was drawn up. To this list Ferdinand added his signature, thus agreeing to the first of the many concordias (accords) made between the Inquisition and the individual regions of Spain. Among other things, the accord of 1512 stipulated that the number of familiars in the kingdom should be limited; that the Inquisition should not be exempt from local taxes; that officials of the tribunal who committed crimes should be tried by a secular court; that in cases of confiscation, property which had formerly belonged to the condemned should not be included in the confiscation; and that trade with conversos should not be prohibited, since this depressed commerce. Moreover, the tribunal was not to exercise jurisdiction over usury, bigamy, blasphemy and witchcraft unless heresy were involved. The fact that pressure had to be put on the king through the Cortes proves how serious were some of the objections raised in Aragon against inquisitorial procedure. Yet the demands made in 1512 are relatively mild when compared with some of those made at a later date.

At the death of Ferdinand on 23 January 1516 the crown passed to his grandson Charles, who was in Flanders at the time. Since the death of Isabella on 26 November 1504 Ferdinand had been king of Aragon only, and Castile had been under the rule of their daughter Juana (the Mad), widow since 1506 of Philip the Fair of Austria. The death of Ferdinand would normally have meant the acceptance of Juana as queen, but her mental dislocation made her obviously unfitted to rule, so that her son Charles was everywhere accepted as rightful sovereign.

While awaiting the arrival of Charles in Spain, Cisneros maintained control of the Inquisition. In his will the Catholic King had called upon his successor to preserve the tribunal, which Charles had every intention of doing. But the new reign aroused hopes of reform, particularly in converso hearts, and Cisneros was greatly alarmed by a rumor that the king intended to allow the publication of the names of witnesses in inquisitorial trials. In a letter which the now aging cardinal wrote to Charles, apparently in March 1517, he asserted that the Inquisition was so perfect a tribunal “that there will never be any need for reform and it would be sinful to introduce changes.”[33] The publication of witnesses’ names would lead inevitably to their murder, he stated, as had happened recently in Talavera de la Reina when an accused converso, on learning the name of his denouncer, went out to waylay him and assassinated him (for the question of confidentiality of information, see below, chapter 9).

Cisneros was not, however, unalterably opposed to reforms, as his own life and career had demonstrated. During his tenure of the post of inquisitor general, he had taken care to dismiss the more notorious inquisitors, including the secretary of the Suprema. He wrote to Charles in December 1576 advising him that the royal secretary Calcena and others should have nothing further to do with the Inquisition, in view of their excesses. Lea’s very fair verdict is that “we may feel assured that he showed no mercy to those who sought to coin into money the blood of the conversos.”[34]

Whatever Cisneros’s views may have been, many contemporaries thought that some reform in the judicial procedure of the Inquisition was essential, even if they did not question its actual existence. The arrival of the seventeen-year-old king from Flanders set off a train of requests and demands which constituted the last chapter in the struggle to subject the Inquisition to the rule of law. When Charles, after arriving in Spain in September 1517, held the first Cortes of his reign at Valladolid in February 1518, the deputies petitioned “that Your Highness provide that the office of the Holy Inquisition proceed in such a way as to maintain justice, and that the wicked be punished and the innocent not suffer.”[35] They asked moreover that the forms of law be observed, and that inquisitors be chosen from reputable and learned men. The main result of this was the series of instructions for the Inquisition drawn up principally on the initiative of Jean le Sauvage, chancellor of the king, a man who was accused of being in the pay of the conversos. The preamble to these proposed instructions claims that

accused people have not been able to defend themselves fully, many innocent and guiltless have suffered death, harm, oppression, injury and infamy . . . and many of our vassals have absented themselves from these realms: and (as events have shown) in general these our realms have received and receive great ill and harm: and have been and are notorious for this throughout the world.

The proposed reforms, therefore, included provisions that prisoners placed in open, public prisons be able to receive visitors, be assigned counsel, be presented with an accusation on arrest and be given the names of witnesses. In addition, goods of the accused could not be taken and sold before a verdict, nor could the salaries of inquisitors be payable out of confiscations. Prisoners should be allowed recourse to mass and the sacraments while awaiting trial, and care should be taken not to let those condemned to perpetual prison die of hunger. If torture were used, it should be in moderation, and there should be no “new inventions of torture as have been used until now.” Each of these clauses points to the existence of problems which the new pragmatic was supposed to remedy.

Had the instructions ever been approved, a totally different tribunal would have come into existence. The rule of confidentiality of witnesses would have been completely removed, and opportunity for abuses presumably reduced. Happily for those who supported the Inquisition, the new inquisitor general appointed by Charles on the death of Cisneros was his own tutor the Dutch cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, bishop of Tortosa, who firmly opposed any innovation. Shortly after this, early in July 1518, Sauvage died. With him collapsed any hope of fundamental alterations in the structure of the Inquisition. Adrian, who as a Netherlander appears not to have had any close knowledge of Spanish problems, even reversed some of the reforms of Cisneros by reappointing Calcena to a post of authority as secretary to the Suprema.

Meanwhile Charles had gone to Aragon, where he accepted the allegiance of the kingdom in the Cortes which opened at Saragossa in May 1518. Surprisingly, when the Cortes offered to advance him a large sum of money in exchange for agreement to a list of thirty-one articles that were substantially the same as those drawn up in Castile by Sauvage, the king agreed. It soon became clear that he had no intention of observing the agreement, for a subsequent message to the Spanish ambassador in Rome asked him to secure from the pope revocation of the articles and a dispensation from his oath to observe them.

However, the Cortes had already taken the step of having Charles’s signature to the articles authenticated by Juan Prat, the notary of the Cortes. All the relevant papers were then sent to Rome in the hands of Diego de las Casas, a converso from Seville. After the dissolution of the Cortes in January 1519, the Inquisition stepped in to arrest Prat on the charge of having falsified the articles. The accusation was obviously false, but both ecclesiastical and secular authorities acted as though it were true. The new chancellor, Mercurino Gattinara, urgently drew up papers which he sent to Rome in April, claiming that these were genuine and that the official copy was a forgery. By now a serious constitutional quarrel had arisen inside Aragon, and the deputies and nobility of the realm, meeting in conference in May, sent a request to Charles for the release of Prat, threatening not to grant any money until their demands were met. They summoned the Cortes and refused to disperse until justice had been done.

At this stage Pope Leo X intervened in favor of the Aragonese. In July 1519 he issued three briefs, one to Charles, one to the inquisitor general and one to the tribunal of Saragossa, reducing the powers of the Inquisition to the bounds of ordinary canon law and revoking all special privileges granted by his predecessor. Charles and his officials refused to allow the publication of the brief in Spain, and sent a firm protest to Rome. The pope now shifted his position and suspended the briefs without revoking them. At this the Aragonese immediately discontinued payment of any grants to the crown. Finally, in December 1520 the pope confirmed the accord of 1518, but in terms which did not specify whether it was Prat’s or Gattinara’s version that was the correct one. A compromise was eventually reached in 1521, when Cardinal Adrian accepted the Aragonese version for the time being, and released Prat. The victory of the Aragonese was an unsubstantial one. The Inquisition at no time afterwards admitted the validity of the accords of 1512 and 1518, so that the struggles of these years were after all in vain.

At the Castilian Cortes of La Coruña in 1520, the requests made at Valladolid for a reform in the procedure of the Inquisition were repeated, but to no avail. Later that same year, while Charles was away in Flanders, another plan for reform was presented to him. This and subsequent proposals fell through. On his return to Spain, a Cortes was held at Valladolid in 1523. Again the old suggestions for reform were brought up, fortified by a request that the salaries of inquisitors should be paid by the crown and not drawn from confiscations. Failure was again the result. In 1525 the Cortes which met at Toledo complained of abuses committed by both inquisitors and familiars, but they achieved nothing beyond a promise that wrongs would be righted if they really existed. In 1526 in Granada the king was presented with a memorial demonstrating the defects in the secret procedure of the Inquisition, and asking for prisoners to be kept in public jails instead of the secret cells.[36] To this there is no recorded reply. Almost annually such requests had been presented to the crown, and as regularly refused. Quite obviously a persistent stream of opposition was in continual existence, dedicated not so much to the suppression of the Inquisition as to the cure of abuses. Against a stubborn Charles, however, no impact could be made. In April 1520 the king observed to a correspondent that “in the Cortes of Aragon and Catalonia the Holy Office has been criticized and attacked by some people who do not care much for its preservation.”[37] The reference to Aragon should not divert us from the fact that, as we have seen, criticism had been raised just as frequently in the realm of Castile. Throughout Spain, the organs of constitutional government became the last channels of protest available to opponents of the Holy Office.

From 1519 to 1521 the energies of Castilians were occupied in the famous revolt of the Comuneros, a confusing and complex struggle waged partly by town oligarchies against the royal authorities who had the support of the nobility, and partly by rival factions against each other in some of the great cities. Inevitably some conversos, with their known activity in many municipalities, could be found on the rebel side. Among the leading Comuneros were a Coronel in Segovia, a Zapata in Toledo, a Tovar in Valladolid; all the names were of well-known converso families. Rumor, seasoned in part with malice, tended to exaggerate their role. The Constable of Castile informed Charles V in 1521 that the “root cause of the uprising in these realms has been the conversos”; and after the rebel defeat at Villalar on 23 April 1521, according to the emperor’s jester, “many dead were found without foreskins.”[38] A generation later the archbishop of Toledo, Siliceo, could claim maliciously that “it is common knowledge in Spain that the Comunidades were incited by descendants of Jews.” In fact, there was no significant identification of the converso cause with that of the Comuneros, and many known conversos fought on the royalist side.

It is certain that some rebels hoped to modify or abolish the Inquisition: the Admiral of Castile claimed early in 1521 that “the Comuneros say there will be no Inquisition,” and hostility to the tribunal is recorded in various parts of the realm. But the junta that headed the Comunidad was scrupulously careful to cause no offense to the Holy Office, and not a single reference to the Inquisition occurs among the demands made to the government.[39] The tribunal survived this critical period with its functions intact. In Valencia, where a parallel revolt of Germanías (“brotherhoods”) was taking place, the functions of the Holy Office were in fact given further support as a result of compulsory mass baptisms that the rebels imposed on some of the Muslim population.

In the years after the Comunidades, objections to the activities of the Inquisition continued to be made in both Castile and Aragon. A typical example is the memorial drawn up on 5 August 1533 and read to Charles at the Aragonese Cortes in Monzón.[40] The sixteen articles included complaints that “some inquisitors of the Holy Office, in the voice and name of the Inquisition, have arrested and imprisoned people for private offenses in no way touching the Holy Office”; that inquisitors were taking part in secular business; that they had extended their jurisdiction illegitimately by prosecuting cases of sodomy, usury and bigamy—questions which had nothing to do with heresy; that the inquisitors of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia had an excessive number of familiars, whose identity was kept concealed, thus provoking numerous abuses. As for the Moriscos, said the protest, addressing itself to the inquisitor general, “Your Reverence knows well the way in which they were ‘converted,’ and the little or no teaching or instruction in our Holy Catholic faith which has been given them, and the lack of churches in the places where they live. Yet despite this lack of teaching and instruction, they are being proceeded against as heretics.” Worse still, the Inquisition was illegitimately seizing the land they had confiscated from the Moorish converts. To all these complaints Alonso Manrique, the inquisitor general, gave a firm, negative reply. The protests were shelved.

Complaints along these lines were to play an important part in future controversies over the Inquisition. Inquisitorial jurisdiction in moral matters, for instance, was considered, then as later, a wrongful extension of its powers. But sweeping appeals like the protest of 1533 were growing fewer as the position of the Holy Office became stronger. Not only did the existence of the Inquisition become almost wholly unquestioned, but toleration of its attendant abuses became more common. As papal and royal favor confirmed it in its position as one of the key institutions of the realm, it survived all opposition, though it was never immune from criticism.

By the mid-sixteenth century the tribunal was constitutionally secure. In part this happened because of the implicit support of the Old Christian majority, who had tolerated two decades of bloodletting directed against the conversos because it suited their own interests and who, too late, attempted to restrain the Inquisition when it appeared to be working against them. By then, in the new social atmosphere created by the European Reformation, the Holy Office had become essential to the maintenance of the established religion. In part, also, the Inquisition survived because of the unswerving support of the crown, which could ill afford to lose so useful an institution. Like Ferdinand before him, Charles V was firmly dedicated to it, and introduced a similar tribunal into the Netherlands in 1520.[41] When the Aragonese disputes over Juan Prat occurred in 1518, Charles informed the Cortes: “you can be sure that we would rather agree to lose part of our realms and states than permit anything to be done therein against the honor of God and against the authority of the Holy Office.”[42] During the Comunidades, Charles exhorted his viceroys in Spain to resist any attack on the Inquisition.[43] In subsequent years, therefore, the monarchy had at its disposal a unique institution upon which it could possibly call in case of need. As it turned out, the need did not arise. There were repercussions in the crown of Aragon, where some of the activities of the tribunal were always regarded as unconstitutional. However, in Castile the Holy Office was never used to increase royal power, and its own powers were always circumscribed by day-to-day conflicts with other royal authorities and tribunals.

These years of tension and conflict help to clarify what we know about popular support among Spaniards for the Inquisition. Support is easiest to identify in the realms of the south of Castile, where the tribunal in its early period was restricted to a few big towns, had almost no contact with the population of the countryside and came into conflict in the urban centers with no significant interest group apart from the converso elite. Unlike the institutions of the Church, to which believing Christians paid tithes and other donations, the tribunal demanded neither obedience nor taxes from the ordinary people; there was consequently no pressing reason for popular hostility. The Inquisition merged itself into existing power structures and gained the collaboration of local elites, who were happy to accept honorary posts (as “familiars”) in the tribunal.

In the north of Castile and in the other realms of the peninsula, the degree of support was much more tenuous. Converso elites continued to be potent enemies, particularly in the kingdom of Aragon. But more than anything else it was the question of legal privileges that blighted the attempt to collaborate with non-Castilians. In Italy, Aragon and Catalonia, “local elites never lost their jealousy of its special privileges.”[44] There were also a wide variety of other reasons that condemned the inquisitors to unpopularity outside Castile. They were resented by local clergy, they were seen as foreigners[45] and they did not speak the language (for the issue of language, see chapter 8). “We are hated as officials of the Holy Office, especially in this town,” the inquisitor of Navarre wrote in 1547.[46] He happened to be in a gloomy mood. Moreover, here on the mountainous frontier the Inquisition, even by the late sixteenth century, was a novelty that the population, most of whom spoke no Spanish, refused to accept. In 1574 an Inquisition official narrowly escaped lynching by the people of the Vall d’Arán in the Catalan Pyrenees. He reported back that “in that land they will not on any account permit the Holy Office to enter.”[47] In Catalonia the tribunal was never fully accepted. “In this province,” the inquisitors complained in 1618, “they bear ill-will to the tribunal of the Holy Office and would destroy it if they could.”[48] It was an exaggeration, for Catalans always worked along with the tribunal if it suited their interests. But they certainly viewed it as an alien institution, not because it was an Inquisition—they already had their own medieval one—but because it was Castilian.

For three centuries more, the Inquisition would continue to be a standard feature of the Spanish landscape. Just as it had been bitterly opposed by the conversos, so in time it would also earn the profound hatred of other minorities. Its anti-Morisco activity arguably earned it some popularity among Christians. The chief victims at its autos in the crown of Aragon were “nearly always,” it has been pointed out, “people for whom the general public had little sympathy.”[49] In Aragon and Valencia the accused were Moriscos, in Catalonia they were French immigrants. Despite this victimization of minorities, the Inquisition found it difficult to earn genuine popular support in the eastern realms of the peninsula. The rest of the Spanish population gradually came to accept it, but in a spirit that was by no means enthusiastic. It was essentially a policing body and therefore feared as the police can be, popular only when it acted out prejudices against minorities and outsiders.

The ordinary people as a whole came very seldom into contact with it, and on balance accepted its activity without too much demur. The only significant popular riots against it were always a side effect of political disturbances (as in Saragossa in 1591). The inquisitors time and again tried to argue that the people were with them, and they were not necessarily wrong. “It is only the lords and leading persons who wage this war against the Holy Office,” they complained in Aragon in 1566, “and not the people.”[50] At no time in ancien régime Spain did the populace attack the Inquisition as a religious institution. In 1640 in Barcelona they scared the Castilian inquisitors out of the country, but it was no more than a prelude to setting up a native non-Castilian Inquisition. Only in March 1820 in Madrid did the mobs for the first time break with intent into the tribunal’s palaces, by now half-empty buildings from which a handful of startled prisoners were liberated.

Support for the tribunal was of course always modified by considerable reserve. “It is fine,” a Catalan noble said in 1586, “for the Holy Office to look into questions of faith and punish bad Christians; but as for other matters, they should be dealt with when the Cortes meets.”[51] Like other Spaniards, he saw clearly that there were things in which the Inquisition had no business to meddle. And indeed the Inquisition meddled much less than we might think. Both defenders and opponents of the Inquisition have often accepted without question the image of an omniscient, omnipotent tribunal whose fingers reached into every corner of the land. The extravagant rhetoric on both sides has been one of the major obstacles to understanding. For the Inquisition to have been as powerful as suggested, the fifty or so inquisitors in Spain would need to have had an extensive bureaucracy, a reliable system of informers, regular income and the cooperation of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Seldom if ever did they have any of these.

Though often presented as such, therefore, there is no good reason for thinking of the Inquisition as a sinister tyranny imposed on an unwilling people. It never enjoyed enough power to become a tyranny, and it was brought into being by a particular social situation—the converso question—that in the relevant areas counted on substantial popular support. In some regions its impact was deadly; in others people never saw the tribunal at any moment of their lives. It fulfilled a role—as guardian against foreign ideas, as keeper of public morality, as arbiter between factions, as tribunal for small causes—that no other institution fulfilled. Moreover, over long periods of time and substantial areas of the country, it was inactive and all but disappeared. It did not exist in northwest Spain during the entire century after it came into existence in Andalucia. In the 140 years between 1536 and 1675 the tribunal that had been set up in Mallorca did virtually nothing.[52] In the early decades the Holy Office went through periods when the glare of publicity shone on its activities, but all too often thereafter it was swallowed up by shadows. After an explosive entry into the course of Spain’s history it slipped surreptitiously into the stream of daily life, where its impact and duration was to be much longer than anyone could have imagined at the beginning.

5

EXCLUDING THE REFORMATION

We live in such difficult times that it is dangerous either to speak or be silent.

—JUAN LUIS VIVES TO ERASMUS, 1534

In the early dawn of the European Reformation many intellectuals in Spain were foremost in their support for change. At the 1520 Diet of Worms, when Luther had to defend himself publicly, “everybody, especially the Spaniards, went to see him,” admitted the humanist Juan de Vergara. “At the beginning everybody agreed with him,” Vergara went on, “and even those who now write against him confess that at the beginning they were in favor of him.”[1]

Educated Spaniards of that generation were excited at the new horizons opened up by European Renaissance scholarship. Scholars who went to Italy, such as Antonio de Nebrija, who returned from there to take up a chair at Salamanca in 1505, were in the vanguard of the drive to promote learning. From Italy Peter Martyr of Anghiera came in 1488 to educate the young nobles of Castile, preceded four years before by Lucio Marineo Siculo, who joined the ranks of the professors at Salamanca. A key figure in the advancement of learning was Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo from 1495 and inquisitor general from 1507. He founded the University of Alcalá, which hoped to be a center of humanist studies. Its first chancellor, Pedro de Lerma, had studied at Paris. Nebrija was, as Erasmus wrote in 1521 to his friend Luis Vives (an exile from Valencia and now a native of the Netherlands), its “principal ornament.” Among its professors were the converso brothers Juan and Francisco de Vergara. One of the key tasks that Cisneros set the professors of the university was the production of a critical edition of the Bible which he hoped would be a classic of contemporary scholarship. The Polyglot Bible that resulted from this enterprise consisted of six volumes, with the Hebrew, Chaldean and Greek originals of the Bible printed in columns parallel to the Latin Vulgate. The Complutensian (from Compluto, the Latin for Alcalá) Polyglot was finally published in 1522.

The accession in 1519 of Charles I of Spain to the imperial title (as Charles V of Germany) encouraged some to believe that the country was about to participate in a great European enterprise. But the enthusiasm among scholars turned out eventually to be misplaced. The Polyglot, a beautiful but expensive product, found no ready market. The humanist aspirations of some Spanish scholars could not overcome the narrow mental perspectives among very many others.[2] The clearest sign of a problem was what happened to the writings of Erasmus. The great Dutch humanist was acknowledged throughout Europe as the doyen of classical studies. From Charles’s own homeland, the Netherlands, his influence began to penetrate the open frontiers of Spain, and in 1517 Cisneros unsuccessfully invited him to come and visit. By 1524 a small number of intellectuals in the peninsula had rallied to the doctrines of Erasmus, to whom Vives commented approvingly in June 1524, “our Spaniards are also interesting themselves in your works.”

The wit and satire directed by Erasmus against ecclesiastical abuses, and particularly against lax standards in the mendicant orders, found a ready hearing in a country where the highest Church officials had themselves supported reform. The presence of prominent intellectuals and literary men in the entourage of Charles V ensured protection for the new ideas at court. Significantly, the two principal prelates in the Church—the archbishop of Toledo, Alonso de Fonseca, successor to Cisneros, and Alonso Manrique, the inquisitor general—were keen Erasmians. Erasmus’s success was confirmed with the translation of his Enchiridion, undertaken in 1524 by Alonso Fernández, archdeacon of Alcor. The enthusiastic translator wrote (with evident exaggeration) to the author in 1527:

At the emperor’s court, in the cities, in the churches, in the convents, even in the inns and on the highways, everyone has the Enchiridion of Erasmus in Spanish. Till then it used to be read in Latin by a minority of Latinists, and even these did not fully understand it. Now it is read in Spanish by people of every sort, and those who had formerly never heard of Erasmus have learned of his existence through this single book.[3]

The publisher of the Enchiridion, Miguel de Eguía, was printer to the University of Alcalá and brought out about a hundred books of humanist orientation. Erasmus, by far the best seller, was informed in 1526 that “though the printers have produced many thousands of copies, they cannot satisfy the multitude of buyers.” There were many personal contacts between his friends who came to Spain and Spaniards who went north to see him. Among the latter the most significant was young Juan de Vergara, who left the peninsula with the emperor in 1520 and spent two years with Erasmus in the Netherlands. On his return, starry-eyed, he wrote back to Vives: “The admiration felt for Erasmus by all Spaniards is astonishing.”

It was not quite true. Many Spanish scholars were critical of the northerner’s methods of exegesis. Others were uneasy at similarities between Erasmus and Luther. Some of the mendicant orders in particular were smarting under the satirical attacks of Erasmus, and pressed for a debate on his “heresies.” A conference of the Castilian Church[4] presided over by Manrique, and including some thirty voting representatives of the orders as well as all the known theological experts, eventually met at Valladolid in the summer of 1527.[5] The deliberations were inconclusive, with half the representatives coming out in favor of the Dutchman, but the result was viewed as a victory for the humanists. On 13 December Charles V himself wrote to Erasmus, asking him not to worry over controversy in Spain, “as though, so long as we are here, one could make a decision contrary to Erasmus, whose Christian piety is well known to us. . . . Take courage and be assured that we shall always hold your honor and repute in the greatest esteem.”[6]

The achievements of Spanish humanism were, perhaps inevitably, exaggerated by contemporaries. No more than a fraction of the elite (notable among them the grandee Mendoza family)[7] were active patrons of the arts, and only a small number of clergy and scholars was devoted to classical studies. Few changes occurred in literary culture, and the popular tradition (represented, for example, by the Celestina of 1499) remained predominant in printed works. Among clergy, learned aspects of humanism always took second place to the influence of scholastic theology.[8] The new learning favored by Charles V was largely a phenomenon of the emperor’s court. Beyond its confines, even among the nobles and elite, Latin in Spain was virtually a dead tongue, studied but never spoken.[9] The Florentine ambassador Guicciardini in 1512 made an observation that other foreigners were to echo throughout the century. The Spaniards, he said, “are not interested in letters, and one finds very little knowledge either among the nobility or in other classes, and few people know Latin.” Regular contact with the Netherlands and Italy had by the early 1500s introduced some literate Spaniards to the art and spirituality of the north and the literature of the Renaissance, but the impact was small. The study of Greek never caught on. When some years later in 1561 Cardinal Mendoza of Burgos was asked to suggest scholars with knowledge of Greek who might suitably represent Spain at the Council of Trent, he could name only four people in the whole country.[10]

The opening of intellectual horizons in Spain was soon threatened from within by the growth of illuminism and the discovery of Protestants, and from without by the limitations imposed throughout Europe on free thought by political events.

The spiritual and devotional movements in Castile in the late fifteenth century were warmly patronized by Cisneros, and produced a literature of which the most outstanding example was the Spiritual ABC (1527) of the Franciscan friar Francisco de Osuna. Adepts of the Franciscan school believed in a mystical method known as recogimiento, the “gathering up” of the soul to God. Those who practiced it were recogidos. Out of this mystical school there grew up a version (condemned by the general chapter of the Franciscans in 1524) emphasizing the passive union of the soul with God. The method was known as dejamiento (abandonment), and adepts were called dejados or alumbrados (illuminists).[11] Mystical movements and the search for a purer interior religion were common coin in Europe at this time. In Spain there was powerful patronage of mystics by the great nobility. One alumbrado group was patronized by the Mendoza duke of Infantado in his palace at Guadalajara. It consisted of the beata Isabel de la Cruz, Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz, and María de Cazalla and her Franciscan brother Juan, auxiliary bishop of Avila. Alcaraz was also connected with another group at Escalona, patronized by the marquis of Villena. Meanwhile a parallel group of adepts emerged in Valladolid. The chief influence here was the beata Francisca Hernández, whose fame as a holy woman attracted into her circle Bernardino Tovar, a brother of Juan de Vergara, and the Franciscan preacher Francisco Ortiz.

In 1519 Isabel de la Cruz was denounced to the Inquisition by a servant girl of the Mendozas. There had been fusses before about other holy women—the beata of Piedrahita (1512) was a famous example—and little may have come of this case. But investigations happened to coincide with alarm over Lutheranism in Germany, leading inquisitors to fear that elements of heresy were involved. One by one, in a slow and patient inquiry that stretched over several years, the illuminist leaders were detained on the orders of Inquisitor General Manrique. Isabel and Alcaraz were arrested in April 1524. On 23 September 1525 Manrique issued an “edict on the alumbrados,” a list of forty-eight propositions which gives a valuable summary of their doctrine and leaves little doubt that their beliefs were not orthodox.[12] Isabel and Alcaraz were sentenced to appear in an auto de fe at Toledo on 22 July 1529.

The attention of the inquisitors now shifted to Valladolid, where Francisca Hernández had gathered around her a group of adepts who practiced recogimiento in opposition to the method of the Guadalajara mystics. Her most devoted admirer was the well-known preacher Francisco Ortiz,[13] and she lived for a while with the rich Cazalla family, relatives of María de Cazalla. Her fame spread: great lords and clergy visited her, and Erasmians such as Eguía and Tovar frequented the house. Her imperious character brooked no rivalry, however, and she quarreled first with the Cazallas, then with the Erasmians. When she was arrested by the Inquisition in March 1529, the indignant Francisco Ortiz went into his pulpit and in front of a distinguished audience emotionally denounced the Inquisition for its “public and open” sin in detaining her. He was pulled down from the pulpit and spent that night in the cells of the Inquisition. His trial dragged on for three years, by which time he retracted because he had lost faith in Hernández. He was suspended from his priestly functions for five years and ordered to stay in a monastery for two, but his spirit was broken and he spent the last dozen years of his life there, refusing to emerge.

In August 1529 Manrique fell into political disgrace and was confined to his see of Seville. At the same time the protecting hand of the emperor was withdrawn: Charles left in July for Italy and took with him some of the most influential Erasmians. This made it possible for the traditionalists, who had been biding their time after the defeat at Valladolid, to take the offensive.

One of the first prosecutions for Erasmian ideas was that of Diego de Uceda, chamberlain to a high official in the order of Calatrava. A deeply religious Catholic, Uceda was also an Erasmian who was skeptical about superstitions and miracles. Journeying in February 1528 from Burgos to his native city of Córdoba, he fell in with a traveling companion to whom he talked too earnestly and freely about religion, particularly about Luther. Denounced to the Inquisition by his companion, he was arrested, tortured and condemned despite all the evidence that he was blameless in his religious beliefs and practices. He finally abjured his “errors” at the Toledo auto de fe of 22 July 1529.[14]

The mingling of mystical, Erasmian and heretical influences made the late 1520s a unique period of both freedom and tension. The inquisitors sought Lutheran ideas everywhere, and located them in the views of some of the alumbrados. More significant for them, perhaps, was the fact that nearly every person implicated in the groups of these years was of converso origin: Isabel, Alcaraz, Hernández, Ortiz, Tovar, the Cazallas. It was as though conversos were seeking to reject formal Catholicism by interiorizing their religion. Completely at home neither in Judaism nor in Christianity, many conversos at all social levels had demonstrated signs of skepticism, unease and Nicodemism.[15] As far back as the reign of King Juan II of Castile (d. 1454), there had been the reputed case of Alfonso Fernández Samuel, who in his will had requested that when laid out in his coffin, he should have the cross placed at his feet, the Koran at his breast, and the Torah, “his life and light,” at his head.[16] In the early years of the Inquisition, considerable evidence came to light not simply of judaizing but also of messianism on one hand and irreligious skepticism on the other. Many conversos, indeed, were ironically condemned for beliefs that orthodox Judaism would have regarded as heretical, such as denying the immortality of the soul.[17] Their search for new ideas did not, therefore, necessarily imply any drift towards Judaism. There was nothing remotely Jewish about the beliefs of the alumbrados: the root influence was Franciscan spirituality, the environment was the comfortable patronage afforded by Old Christian nobility.[18]

From the moment she was detained, Hernández attempted to save her skin by incriminating all those against whom she bore a grudge. Tovar had persisted in following her despite the warnings of Vergara. It was no doubt knowledge of Juan de Vergara’s hostility that moved Hernández, at her trial in 1530, to denounce him as a Lutheran, a claim that was supported by other disciples of hers. Tovar was already in prison. He was followed there by his brother in June 1530. Finally, in April 1532 María de Cazalla was imprisoned and tortured and accused of the various heresies of Lutheranism, illuminism and Erasmianism.[19] Her trial dragged on until December 1534, when she was fined and ordered not to associate again with illuminists. Her brother the bishop had opportunely died in 1530. The Inquisition had not yet finished with their family, however, for from them sprang the circle of Protestants that alarmed Valladolid two decades later. Although the circle had closed round the mystics, they emerged remarkably unscathed.[20] Hernández was by 1532 living in freedom in Medina del Campo; Isabel and Alcaraz, condemned to “perpetual” prison, were released after a few years;[21] María de Cazalla was fined and had to express her repentance.

The attack on the alumbrados, though of short duration and with few serious casualties, had consequences of lasting importance. This can be seen clearly in the case of the famous preacher Juan de Avila. Active in the mission field in Andalucia in the late 1520s, Avila was denounced as an alumbrado and spent nearly a year (1532–33) in the cells of the Inquisition. He used his idle hours to think out the shape of a book of spiritual guidance, the Audi, Filia, which was not in fact presented for publication until 1556. An innocent victim of the alumbrado scare in the 1530s (he was a converso), in the 1550s Avila fell foul not only of the Protestant scare but also of an inquisitor general, Valdés, who was suspicious of all mystical writings (“works of contemplation for artisans’ wives” was how he saw them, according to Luis de Granada). Valdés banned the book in his 1559 Index, and Avila in despair burnt a large number of his manuscripts.[22] Though the Audi, Filia circulated in manuscript for several years, it was not until after its author’s death in 1569 that the Inquisition allowed it to be published again, at Toledo in 1574. A whole generation of spirituality—we shall come across the case of Luis de Granada—fell under suspicion because of the supposed danger from illuminism.

The most direct threat, however, seemed to come from Lutheranism. An Old Christian, the Basque priest Juan López de Celaín, who had links with the alumbrados of Guadalajara, was arrested in 1528 and burnt as a “Lutheran” in Granada in July 1530.[23] Lutheranism was also one of the allegations made against Juan de Vergara.[24] Secretary to Cisneros and later to his successor at Toledo, Alonso de Fonseca, Vergara was one of the foremost classical scholars in Spain. He had collaborated in the Polyglot Bible, had held the chair of philosophy at Alcalá and had proposed offering the chair of rhetoric there to Vives. Arrested in 1530, tried and imprisoned, Vergara was obliged to abjure his errors in an auto at Toledo on 21 December 1535, and to pay a heavy fine of 1,500 ducats. After this he was confined to a monastery, from which he emerged in 1537. Like others who completed their allotted penance, he was able to resume his old position in society. We encounter him once more in 1547 at the center of the great controversy in Toledo over the proposed statutes to exclude conversos from office in the cathedral. He died, still honored, in Alcalá in May 1566.[25]

Alonso de Virués, a Benedictine and preacher to Charles V, was the first of several eminent preachers of the emperor to be accused of heresy, presumably because of contacts that he, like Vergara, had made abroad. Arrested in 1533 and confined in prison by the Inquisition of Seville for four long years, he pleaded in vain that Erasmus had never been condemned as unorthodox. Finally, in 1537 he was made to abjure his errors, sentenced to confinement in a monastery for two years and banned from preaching for another year. Charles V made strenuous efforts to save Virués, and in May 1538 obtained from the pope a bull annulling the sentence. Virués was restored to favor and appointed in 1542 as bishop of the Canary Islands, where he died in 1545.

Another outstanding case, sometimes connected with the origins of Protestantism in Spain, was Juan de Valdés, also of the University of Alcalá, who in the fateful year 1529 published his theological study Dialogue of Christian Doctrine, which was closely based on some of Luther’s early writings. It was immediately attacked by the Inquisition despite the testimony of Vergara and others. The controversy over the book took so dangerous a turn that in 1530 Valdés fled to Italy, just in time to avoid the trial that was opened against him. His treatise was thereafter distinguished by appearing in every Index of prohibited books issued by the Inquisition.[26] In 1533 Mateo Pascual, former rector of the Colegio Mayor of San Ildefonso at Alcalá University, and at the time vicar-general of the see of Saragossa, fell under suspicion for his links with Juan de Valdés. He was detained for a while in the Inquisition of Toledo, then released to return to Saragossa. Some years later he left Aragon and went to live in Rome, where he died peacefully in 1553.[27]

A further casualty of the alumbrado trials was the printer to Alcalá University, Miguel de Eguía, denounced by Francisca Hernández for Lutheranism. He was imprisoned in 1531 and spent over two years in the cells of the Inquisition at Valladolid,[28] but was released at the end of 1533 and fully absolved. Less fortunate was Pedro de Lerma. Former chancellor of Alcalá University, former dean of the theological faculty at the Sorbonne, canon of Burgos cathedral, he fell under the influence of Erasmus and publicized it in his sermons. He was denounced to the Inquisition, imprisoned, and finally in 1537 was made to abjure publicly, in the towns where he had preached, eleven propositions he was accused of having taught. In shame and resentment the old man shook the dust of Spain off his feet and fled to Paris, where he resumed his position as a dean of the faculty, dying there in August 1541. According to his nephew Francisco Enzinas (famous in the history of European Protestantism as Dryander), people in Lerma’s home city of Burgos were so afraid of the possible consequences of this event that those who had sent their sons to study abroad recalled them at once.[29] Such a reaction shows an awareness among some Spaniards of the problems involved. Erasmianism and the new humanism were being identified with the German heresy, and for many the only protection was dissociation.

In December 1533 Rodrigo Manrique, son of the inquisitor general, wrote from Paris to Luis Vives on the subject of Vergara’s imprisonment:

You are right. Our country is a land of pride and envy; you may add: of barbarism. For now it is clear that down there one cannot possess any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism. Thus silence has been imposed on the learned. As for those who take refuge in erudition, they have been filled, as you say, with great terror. . . . At Alcalá they are trying to uproot the study of Greek completely.[30]

Erasmus’s links with his friends in Spain were affected by the reaction. His last surviving letter to that country is dated December 1533. Three years later he died, still highly respected in the Catholic world, so much so that in 1535 the pope offered him a cardinal’s hat. In Spain his cause (as we shall see) survived, but was restricted to a few learned circles. His works remained on sale to the Spanish public for much of the century, but the tide now turned against him.

The history of these conflicts between a handful of scholars and ecclesiastical authority was by no means peculiar to Spain. All over Europe during these years, from Italy and Germany to France and England, there were new ways of thinking that brought on a direct collision between traditionalists and innovators. Though the Inquisition appears in a negative role in our story, it did not always favor the traditionalists, and we should remember that it did not pass a single death sentence, which sets it in startling contrast to what was happening in countries like England and France.

The decline of interest in Erasmianism, and the suspicions directed against liberal humanism, seemed to be justified by the apparent links between Erasmus and the growing Protestant menace. Bataillon has shown how in Spain the Protestant stream which sprang from illuminism between 1535 and 1555 adapted Erasmianism to its own purposes and moved towards the Lutheran doctrine of “justification by faith alone” without ever formally rejecting Catholic dogma.[31] Many leading humanists, such as Juan de Valdés, were Erasmians whose defections from orthodoxy were so significant as to give cause for the belief that they were crypto-Protestants. Vigilance against radical Erasmianism was therefore strengthened.

The Lutheran threat, however, took a long time to develop. In 1520 Luther had probably not been heard of in Spain. Lutheran books were first sent to the peninsula, with what result we do not know, by Luther’s publisher Froben in 1519. The first Spaniards to come into contact with his teachings were those who accompanied the emperor to Germany. Some of them, seeing in him only a reformer, were even favorable to his ideas. A full generation went by after the conflicts over Erasmians and illuminists, and still Lutheranism failed to take root. There was, during those years in Spain, no atmosphere of restriction or repression. In the Netherlands, where Charles V also ruled, there was a ferocious repression of heresy, but not in Spain. During the generation before 1558, fewer than fifty cases of alleged Lutheranism among Spaniards came to the notice of the inquisitors.[32] In most of them, it is difficult to identify any specifically Protestant beliefs. There was some curiosity about the heresies that Luther was propounding, but little sign of any active interest among Spaniards.

What explanation can we offer for this astonishing inability of Protestant ideas to penetrate the peninsula? With its wholly unreformed Church (see chapter 13 below), backward clergy and medieval-style religion, Spain was surely ripe for conquest by the Reformation. In one major respect, however, the country was peculiarly unfertile ground. Unlike England, France and Germany, Spain had not since the early Middle Ages experienced a single significant popular heresy. All its ideological struggles since the Reconquest had been directed against the minority religions, Judaism and Islam. There were consequently no native heresies (like Wycliffism in England) on which the German ideas could build. One may add that Spain was for a time[33] the only European country to possess a national institution dedicated to the elimination of heresy. By its vigilance and by coordinating its efforts throughout the peninsula, it may be argued that the Inquisition checked the seeds of heresy before they could be sown. This view, however, is both naïve and optimistic. At no time in history have governments been able to identify and eliminate security threats before they happen.

Nor was it possible to exclude new ideas, for the peninsula was not cut off from the world. In the 1540s, Spanish intellectuals came into direct contact with Lutheran ideas in foreign universities (at Louvain, for example, where Philip II was shocked by the views of some of the Spaniards in 1558; or in France, where Miguel Servet was educated); at the emperor’s court in Germany; and at international assemblies such as the Council of Trent (1546), where theologians were obliged to read Lutheran books in order to combat the errors in them. Among the laboring classes, Spaniards came into touch with immigrant workers from France or the Netherlands who had direct experience of the new beliefs. Ideas transmitted at this level, however, were confused, distorted and unlikely to strike root anywhere. Possibly the only group—a tiny one—that may have imported coherent ideas were the printers, nearly all foreign, who worked in publishers’ presses.

The most remarkable aspect of the case is that the Spanish government was actively allied with Lutherans in those mid-century years. In 1548 Charles V made an agreement, known as the Interim because it was deemed temporary, to allow toleration and coexistence in Germany between Catholics and Lutherans. The committee of fifteen theologians that gave formal approval to the agreement was made up largely of Germans but included three prominent Spaniards: Domingo de Soto, Pedro de Maluenda and Pedro de Soto. All three were from the Dominicans, the order most closely associated with the Inquisition in Spain; and Pedro de Soto in particular was (a contemporary reported) “an enthusiastic supporter” of the Interim. The accord between Catholics and Lutherans went a step further when at the next session of the Council of Trent, in 1551, the emperor’s personal representative insisted that Lutherans be allowed to take part, and Archbishop Guerrero of Granada entertained the Lutheran delegates at his private residence in Trent.[34]

Quite obviously, the Spanish theologians were willing to accept Protestants if no alternative solution could be found. Several years before, Charles’s confessor Garcia de Loaysa, who became archbishop of Seville and inquisitor general until 1546, had stated precisely to the emperor: “My advice is that Your Majesty should make a compromise and excuse their heresies.”[35] The political situation in Germany offered no other option. In Spain, however, the inquisitors seem to have had a completely different policy; there they were vigilant against any entry of the virus of heresy, especially if it came from Germany.

The area most vulnerable to the penetration of foreign ideas was Seville, center of international commerce. In 1552 the Inquisition there seized some 450 Bibles printed abroad.[36] As a center of printing, Seville was also one of the towns where foreign typesetters and printers might fall foul of the alert over heresy.[37] As archbishop of Seville, Manrique had encouraged the appointment of scholars from Alcalá to be canons and preachers in the cathedral. But times were changing, both in Spain as a whole and in Seville. In 1546 the city obtained a new archbishop who was also made inquisitor general, Fernando de Valdés, a ruthless careerist who saw heresy everywhere.[38]

One of the cathedral preachers in Seville, Juan Gil, commonly known as Egidio, was nominated by Charles V in 1549 as bishop of Tortosa. The appointment was quashed when Egidio was accused of heresy and in 1552 made to retract ten propositions. “In truth,” commented a member of the disciplinary committee, the emperor’s confessor Domingo de Soto, “apart from this lapse he is a very good man, and his election [as bishop] was a good decision.”[39] Egidio died in peace at the end of 1555.[40] In 1556 Valdés objected to the appointment as cathedral preacher of Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, an Alcalá humanist and converso who had been chaplain to Charles V in Germany. His writings were examined for heresy. Arrested by the Inquisition, he died in its cells two years later. Neither Egidio nor Constantino can be considered a Lutheran. They were humanists who believed in a strongly spiritual religious life and none of their views appears to have been explicitly heretical.[41]

There were, certainly, Protestant sympathizers in Seville. International trade links brought together in the city a broad range of people and opinions that could not fail to influence some Spaniards. Heretical books were imported in quantity. The Spanish “Protestants” in Seville probably totaled around 120 persons, including the prior and members of the Jeronimite monastery of San Isidoro, together with several nuns from the Jeronimite convent of Santa Paula. The Seville group managed to exist in security until the 1550s, when some monks from San Isidoro opportunely fled. The exiles included Cipriano de Valera, Casiodoro de Reina,[42] Juan Pérez de Pineda and Antonio del Corro, who played little part in Spanish history but were glories of the European Reformation. The first three named, as we shall see shortly, during their exile gave to Spain something it badly lacked: a new translation of the Bible.

Meanwhile, in northern Castile, another circle of Protestant sympathizers had come into existence.[43] The founder was an Italian, Carlos de Seso, who had turned to Protestantism after reading Juan de Valdés, and who from 1554 had been corregidor (civil governor) of the town of Toro. His missionary zeal soon converted an influential and distinguished circle centered on Valladolid and numbering some fifty-five persons, most of noble status and some with converso origins. The most eminent of the converts was Dr. Agustín Cazalla, who had been to Germany as chaplain to Charles V and had also accompanied Philip there. Cazalla was influenced by his brother Pedro—parish priest of Pedrosa, near Valladolid—and with him the whole Cazalla family, led by their mother Leonor de Vivero,[44] fell into heresy. Their beliefs were no simple extension of the illuminist or Erasmian attitudes of the previous generation. In their clear rejection of most Catholic dogma the Valladolid heretics were true Protestants. They also included scions of impeccably Old Christian nobility. A leading member of the group, Fray Domingo de Rojas, son of the marquis of Poza, recruited young Anna Enríquez, daughter of the marquis of Alcañices. He told her “that there were only two sacraments, baptism and communion; that in communion Christ did not have the part attributed to him; and that the worst of all things was to say mass, since Christ had already been sacrificed once and for all.”[45]

The Seville group was uncovered in 1557, when Juan Ponce de León, eldest son of the count of Bailén, was arrested together with others for introducing books from Geneva. His chief accomplice was Julián Hernández, who had spent a considerable time in the Reformed churches of Paris, Scotland and Frankfurt, and who specialized in smuggling Protestant literature into his native country.[46] The Inquisition collected information and in 1558 made a wave of arrests, including the whole Cazalla family in April and Constantino in August. A harsh repression was set in train by Fernando de Valdés, who was concerned to exploit the discovery in order to regain the favor he had recently lost with the court in Spain.

Commenting on the high social origins of many of the accused, Valdés told Charles V that “much greater harm can follow if one treats them with the leniency that the Holy Office has shown towards Jewish and Muslim conversos, who generally have been of lowly origin.” The emperor did not need to be alerted. The sudden emergence in Spain’s two principal cities of a contagion from which everyone felt the country had been free sent shock waves through the nation.[47] Charles, in retirement at his villa beside the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura, saw to his horror the rise within Spain of the very menace that had split Germany apart. For him there could be only one response: ruthless repression. His historic letter of 25 May 1558 to his daughter Juana, regent in Spain during Philip II’s absence in the Netherlands, appealed to her to follow the tough policy that he himself had used against heresy in Flanders.

I am very satisfied with what you say you have written to the king, informing him of what is happening about the people imprisoned as Lutherans, more of whom are being daily discovered. But believe me, my daughter, this business has caused and still causes me more anxiety and pain than I can express, for while the king and I were abroad these realms remained in perfect peace, free from this calamity, but now that I have returned here to rest and recuperate and serve Our Lord, this great outrage and treachery, implicating such notable persons, occurs in my presence and in yours. You know that because of this I suffered and went through great trials and expenses in Germany, and lost so much of my good health. Were it not for the conviction I have that you and the members of your councils will find a radical cure to this unfortunate situation, punishing the guilty thoroughly to prevent them spreading, I do not know whether I could restrain myself leaving here to settle the matter. Since this affair is more important for the service of Our Lord and the good and preservation of these realms than any other, and since it is only in its beginnings, with such small forces that they can be easily put down, it is necessary to place the greatest stress and weight on a quick remedy and exemplary punishment. I do not know whether it will be enough in these cases to follow the usual practice, by which according to common law all those who beg for mercy and have their confession accepted are pardoned with a light penance if it is a first offense. Such people, if set free, are at liberty to commit the same offense, particularly if they are educated persons.

One can imagine the evil consequences, for it is clear that they cannot act without armed organization and leaders, and so it must be seen whether they can be proceeded against as creators of sedition, upheaval, riots and disturbance in the state. They would then be guilty of rebellion and could not expect any mercy. In this connection I cannot omit to mention what was and is the custom in Flanders. I wanted to introduce an Inquisition to punish the heresies that some people had caught from neighboring Germany and England and even France. Everyone opposed this on the grounds that there were no Jews among them. Finally an order was issued declaring that all people of whatever state and condition who came under certain specified categories were to be ipso facto burnt and their goods confiscated. Necessity obliged me to act in this way. I do not know what the king my son has done since then, but I think that the same reason will have made him continue as I did, because I advised and begged him to be very severe in dealing with these people.

Believe me, my daughter, if so great an evil is not suppressed and remedied without distinction of persons from the very beginning, I cannot promise that the king or anyone else will be in a position to do it afterwards.[48]

This letter really marks the turning point in Spain. From now on, thanks to the fears of Charles and the policy laid down for Inquisitor General Valdés, heterodoxy was treated as a threat to the state and the religious establishment. Writing to the pope on 9 September the same year, Valdés affirmed that “these errors and heresies of Luther and his brood which have begun to be preached and sown in Spain, threaten sedition and riot.”[49]

Sedition and riot, armed organization and leaders—how far from the dreams of Cazalla and Constantino! Yet once again well-meaning men were prey to the tensions gripping Europe, and the result was a series of autos de fe that burnt out Protestantism in Spain. The first significant auto was held at Valladolid on Trinity Sunday, 21 May 1559, in the presence of the regent Juana and her court. Of the thirty accused, fourteen were burnt in person, including Cazalla and his brother and sister. The only one to die unrepentant was Francisco Herrero from Toro. All the rest died repentant after professing conversion, among them Agustín Cazalla, who blessed the Holy Office and wept aloud for his sins.

The next auto at Valladolid was held on 8 October in the presence of Philip, who had now returned to Spain and for whom an impressive ceremony was mounted. Of the thirty accused, twenty-six were considered Protestants, and of these twelve (including four nuns) were burnt at the stake. Carlos de Seso was the showpiece. The inquisitors had for days attempted to make him recant and, in fear for his life, he had shown every sign of repentance. But when at last he realized that he was to be executed regardless, he made a full and moving statement of belief: “in Jesus Christ alone do I hope, him alone I trust and adore, and placing my unworthy hand in his sacred side I go through the virtue of his blood to enjoy the promises that he has made to his chosen.”[50] He and one other accused were burnt alive as impenitents. “How could you allow this to happen?” he is said to have called out to the king during the procession in the auto. “If my own son were as wicked as you,” Philip is said to have replied indignantly, “I myself would carry the wood with which to burn him!” The exchange, not documented in any reliable source, is completely apocryphal. Curiously enough, we do have a document demonstrating that almost exactly the same words were used by the pope in an interview with the Venetian ambassador in Rome twelve months before![51]

It was now the turn of Seville, where sympathy for Constantino and hostility to the actions of the Inquisition was widespread. A Jesuit reported in 1559 of the former that “he was and still is highly esteemed,” and that “there are a great many of these murmurings [against the Inquisition].”[52] The first great auto there was held on Sunday, 24 September 1559.[53] Of the seventy-six accused present, nineteen were burnt as Lutherans, one of them in effigy only.[54] This was followed by the auto held on Sunday, 22 December 1560.[55] Of the total of fifty-four accused on this occasion, fourteen were burnt in person and three in effigy; in all, forty of the accused were Protestants. Egidio and Constantino were two of those burnt in effigy, while those actually burnt included two English sailors, William Brook and Nicholas Burton, and a native of Seville, Leonor Gómez, together with her three young daughters. This auto de fe was followed by one two years later, on 26 April 1562, and by another on 28 October. The whole of that year 1562 saw eighty-eight cases of Protestantism punished; of these, eighteen were burnt in person, among them the prior of San Isidoro and four of his priests.

With these burnings native Protestantism was almost totally extinguished in Spain. For contemporaries in 1559, it was the start to an emergency without precedent in their history. That very August the primate of the Spanish Church, archbishop Carranza of Toledo, was arrested by the Inquisition on charges arising in part out of allegations made by Cazalla and Seso (see chapter 8). Threatened, as it seemed, by the incursion of heresy, the inquisitors stretched their resources to check the contagion wherever it might appear. In Toledo in September 1559 placards were found posted up on houses and in the cathedral itself attacking the Catholic Church as “not the Church of Jesus Christ but the Church of the devil and of Antichrist his son, the Antichrist pope.”[56] The culprit, apprehended in 1560 and burnt, was a priest, Sebastian Martínez. At the same time, in Seville pamphlets circulated attacking “these thieves of inquisitors, who rob publicly and who burnt the bones of Egidio and of Constantino out of jealousy.” The leaflets also asked the public to “pray to God for his true Church to be strong and constant in the truth and bear with the persecution from the synagogue of Satan” (that is, the Inquisition).[57]

The great autos de fe up to 1562 served to remind the population of the gravity of the crisis and taught them to try to identify Lutherans in their midst. As a consequence the tribunals of the Inquisition in the 1560s devoted themselves to a hunt for Lutheran heresy, and drew into their net scores of Spaniards who in an unguarded moment had made statements praising Luther or attacking the clergy. In Cuenca, for instance, no sooner had one resident heard the news from Valladolid than he zealously denounced one of his neighbors to the Inquisition for reading a certain book of whose contents he—being illiterate—knew nothing. In those same weeks the archbishop of Tarragona (Fernando de Loazes, who had some years before been inquisitor in Barcelona) stopped over in Cuenca on his way to his diocese. He was asked about the Carranza case, and replied: “If the archbishop was a heretic, we are all heretics.” He too was denounced to the Inquisition. In both cases, the inquisitors sensibly took no action.[58]

These years helped the old and ailing[59] Inquisitor General Valdés to save his career for a while longer. He attempted to convince Philip II that a major crisis was in the making, and that only the Inquisition could resolve it. In May 1558 he wrote informing the king, who was then in Brussels, of Lutheran books in Salamanca and many other places, of problems with the Moriscos, of the discovery of judaizers in Murcia, and of the Lutherans in Valladolid and Seville.[60] The Murcia cases, in which personal conflicts led to a large number of people being executed on very flimsy evidence,[61] was a local phenomenon of passing importance. The Protestant cases were serious enough, on the other hand, to encourage Valdés to ask, virtually, that the country be put into the hands of the Inquisition.[62] He suggested that new tribunals be set up immediately in Galicia, Asturias and the Basque country; that a second tribunal be set up in Valladolid; that special vigilantes be set up everywhere; that no book should in future be printed without the permission of the Inquisition; that no books be sold without prior examination by the inquisitors; and so on. Fortunately, the new king took no notice of these suggestions at the time, but a few of them were implemented later, notably the idea of establishing a tribunal in Galicia.

The Protestant scare was in any case never as grave as Valdés made out. After the anti-Lutheran repression of these months, the Inquisition was in reality over the hump. From the 1560s Judaism was no longer an issue and the Reformation no longer a threat. Autos de fe were wound down. When held they were more showy and ceremonious, in the manner of the great autos of 1559, to make up for the lack of penitents.[63] In perspective, the Protestant crisis in Spain, often presented as a singularly harsh period of repression, was somewhat less bloody than the ferocious religious persecution in other countries. The mid-sixteenth century, a fateful time in Europe for religious freedom, was certainly the period when the death penalty for heresy was heavily used in Spain. Even so, it has been calculated that no more than eighty-three persons—sixty-four Spaniards and nineteen foreigners—died at the hands of the Inquisition between 1559 and 1563.[64] The English authorities under Queen Mary had executed nearly four times as many heretics as died in Spain in the years just after 1559, the French under Henry II at least three times as many. In the Netherlands fifteen times as many had died. An expert estimates that “between 1523 and 1566, around 1,300 men and women in the Habsburg Netherlands lost their lives, while thousands more were fined, mutilated or banished.”[65] And this was before Philip II’s general the duke of Alba began his repression there! In these last three countries, very many more died for religious reasons in the years that followed. “The healthiest country of all is Spain,” Philip II observed with some justice to the inquisitor general.[66]

Despite all the alarms, Protestantism never developed into a real threat in Spain. Several cases, from all over the peninsula, are known to us because they appear in the records of the Inquisition. Three men appeared on suspicion in an auto in Saragossa on 17 May 1560. In an auto of 20 November 1562 two were burnt alive for Protestantism.[67] The total number of Spaniards executed for “Lutheranism” (as the inquisitors insisted on labeling all varieties of Reformation belief) during the crisis years 1559–62 was, as we have seen, sixty-four. Those cited during the late century for the same offense totaled about two hundred. Most of them were in no sense Protestants. The majority of these cases demonstrated in reality the ignorance of the inquisitors rather than any real Lutheran threat. They recall the equally indiscriminate persecution that the tribunal had directed against conversos a half century before. Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as “Lutheran.” Disrespect to church images, eating meat on forbidden days were taken as signs of heresy. A hapless uneducated woman of Toledo who claimed in 1568 that “all those who die go straight to heaven,” was accused of the heresy of denying the existence of purgatory.[68] It is clear that in such cases, of which there were very many, the agents of the Holy Office were reacting to unofficial beliefs among the people rather than to any infiltration of heresy.

There were of course a few convinced heretics to be found—among them the nobleman Gaspar de Centelles, burnt in Valencia in 1564,[69] and Fray Cristóbal de Morales, burnt in Granada in 1571—but less than a dozen Spaniards were burnt alive for Lutheranism in the later part of the century outside the cases tried at Valladolid and Seville. Others—like the slightly crazy friar Pedro de Orellana,[70] who spent twenty-eight years in the prisons of the Holy Office—were arrested for offenses that included suspicion of “Lutheranism” but had no identifiable Lutheran beliefs.

Much of the potential Spanish Reformation had emigrated abroad. Since mid-century Spaniards sympathetic to the Reformation could be found dotted around intellectual groups in Western Europe. Rather than refugees, they were part of the well-worn tradition of wandering scholars. True emigration commenced with the discovery of the Protestant cells in Seville and Valladolid. A small stream of refugees made their way into the Reformation communities abroad.

Many in Spain were alarmed by the trend. In some cases, there were fears of the dishonor that could be brought on families by heresy. This provoked at least one murder, that of Juan Díaz in Germany, to which we shall refer later (chapter 12). The government, for its part, tried to repatriate Spaniards who fell under suspicion. Philip II was convinced by his officials that it would be a useful policy. In 1561 his ambassador in London, Quadra, reported that several Spanish Protestants were flocking to that city. “They arrive every day with their wives and children and it is said that many more are expected.”[71] Philip’s father had in the 1540s condoned the occasional seizure outside Spain of Castilians who became active Protestants. They were packed off home and made to face the music there. The intention was not, as a subsequent ambassador of Philip in England explained, to eliminate them but to keep an eye on them and hope that others would take the hint and mend their ways.[72] Under Philip II, the selective kidnapping was carried out by two agents based in the Netherlands, one of them the army paymaster Alonso del Canto. They were sponsored by the king’s secretary Francisco de Eraso. With the help of special funds, a little network was set up to spy on Spanish émigrés living in England, the Netherlands and Germany. Their most notable success was in persuading the famous humanist Furió Ceriol to return to Spain in 1563. In the process, they collected valuable information on Spanish Protestants abroad.[73] Canto in the spring of 1564 was able to inform Madrid of the preparation by Juan Pérez de Pineda of a new version of the Bible in Spanish.[74]

The real brunt of the attack on so-called “Lutheranism” was borne by foreign visitors, such as traders and sailors, and by foreigners resident in Spain. The heresy scare intensified xenophobia among many sections of the population. It made Spain, at least for a while, unsafe for foreigners, in a pattern that has since become familiar in many countries where problems of security are deemed to exist. The Holy Office had been active against foreigners from as early as the 1530s. Spain’s extensive trade with northern Europe made contact with its citizens inevitable, especially in the ports. The first Protestant foreigner to be burnt by the Inquisition was young John Tack, an Englishman of Flemish origin, burnt in Bilbao in May 1539.[75] Down to 1560, nine other foreigners were arrested and reconciled by the inquisitors on this coastline.

In the Toledo area in the 1560s French and Flemish residents were those principally accused of heresy.[76] Some had accompanied Philip II back from Flanders or had come with the new queen, Elizabeth Valois, from France. The 1560s were the only decade in which Flemings figured in any number.[77] More usually, those accused were French. In Barcelona the inquisitor in 1560 felt it opportune to hold an auto de fe “so that people are on their guard against foreigners.”[78] Foreigners indeed constituted the bulk of prosecutions in these years, especially in frontier tribunals.[79] Nearly all the cases arising at Valencia from 1554 to 1598 involved foreigners, eight of whom were burnt in person or in effigy. In the tribunal of Calahorra (later transferred to Logroño), though there were as many as sixty-eight cases of suspected Lutheranism in 1540–99, the majority (82 percent) were foreigners. “All the people punished in this Inquisition are poor foreigners,” the tribunal reported in 1565.[80] In northern Spain, as a result of the proximity of the Calvinist areas of France, Frenchmen were singled out for suspicion. Between 1560 and 1600, the Inquisition in the provinces of the crown of Aragon and in Navarre executed some eighty Frenchmen as presumed heretics, burnt another hundred in effigy, and sent some 380 to the galleys.[81]

The victimization of non-Spaniards by the Inquisition brings into focus its xenophobic and racialist tendencies. This would continue to be the attitude of all security and immigration agencies down to our own times. As it had pointed the finger once at people of Jewish and Muslim origin, so it now pointed the finger at all foreigners, regardless of religion. The attitude, even when practiced in the crown of Aragon, must be attributed mainly to the Castilian inquisitors. In the 1560s the consellers of Barcelona reminded the inquisitors that they were unwise to pick on French people indiscriminately, since they must know that the greater part of Frenchmen were Catholic. But the inquisitors, sticking by an ideological attitude that could be found among many Spaniards, both clergy and laymen, up to the first half of the twentieth century, persisted in describing all nations outside Spain as “tierras de herejes” (heretical countries).[82] Of all nations, they said time and again, only Spain was Catholic. It has been calculated that between 1517 and 1648 over 2,550 foreigners were arrested by the Spanish Inquisition,[83] proof enough of a degree of repression, but one that produced very few martyrs.

The Castilian inquisitors looked with special suspicion on the Basques and Catalans. In 1567 the local inquisitor, who happened to be visiting the Basque town of San Sebastian, commented that “the natives of this town have too much contact with the French, with whom they link up through marriage; and they always speak their language, rather than their own or Spanish.”[84] There was, in effect, an open frontier between France and Spain’s three border regions: the Basque country, the kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia. It did not help that the three regions were almost wholly free of royal administrative control. The bookshops of Barcelona were full of books printed in France.[85] Possibly one-tenth of the population of Barcelona and one-third of that of Perpignan, Catalonia’s two main cities, was French. Despite this unimpeded contact between the two nations, Catalans made not the slightest move towards embracing heresy from France. In default of victims among the Catalans, the Inquisition sought them among the French. In Barcelona between 1552 and 1578 there were fifty-one alleged Lutherans burnt in person or in effigy, but all were foreign.

It was in France, as it happened, that the inquisitors failed to get their hands on one of the most notable Spanish heretics of the Reformation epoch. Miguel Servet, born in 1511 near Saragossa, was at the age of seventeen sent by his father to study at Toulouse in France, and spent the rest of his life outside his native country.[86] A perpetual exile, he was driven by his brilliant mind and restless search for knowledge. He dedicated himself to learning the tongues that opened the way to knowledge, and ended up with a command of Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. He visited the German lands as a member of the court of the Emperor Charles V, and met the principal leaders of the Reformation, among them Melanchthon and Bucer. In 1531 he was studying medicine at the University of Paris, but never obtained any qualifications. That same year, at the age of twenty, he published in Haguenau his work on Errors about the Trinity, in which he argued that the Christian teaching about three persons in one God had no basis in the Bible. The book shocked by its premises and was forbidden even in some cities controlled by the Reformation. Word of his theories got about, and in the course of 1532 the Inquisition in Spain and the French Inquisition in Toulouse made independent moves to bring him to trial. Servet did not ignore the threat, and decided to go into hiding or even emigrate to America. He changed his name to Michel de Villeneuve and began a peregrinating life, moving quietly round France for the next twenty years, always with caution but also burning with the excitement of new ideas. He studied more medicine at Paris, and worked in the south as a printer. Finally in 1553 he published anonymously in Latin at Vienne his principal work, The Restoration of Christianity, a fat volume of over seven hundred pages in octavo.

Scholars today remember the Restoration because it contains, on pages 169–71, the first statement published in Europe modifying older views on the pulmonary circulation of blood. Servet was fascinated by medicine but in fact his real purpose was religious, to put into print the dream of a new, radical Reformation to which the work of Luther and Calvin would be only a prelude. His attention to blood arose from the idea, common enough at the time, that the human soul resides in the blood, which alone gives life. But his concern was over the future of the soul rather than over the movement of blood. His basic idea in the Restoration was that the historic Christ was only a man, not God. God was not three persons, as the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity maintained, but simply one. He quoted from both Islamic and Jewish sources on this point, thereby provoking accusations (certainly unfounded) that he was pro-Jewish or of Jewish origin. Salvation of the soul, he maintained, was to be achieved through Christ, the man. The proposition was not simply heretical; it struck at the root of classical Christianity and was seen by all religious leaders as blasphemous. In reality, Servet rejected every single tenet of classical Christianity, whether taught by Catholics or by Protestants.[87] The Spanish inquisitors, when informed of the book’s contents, took the matter as clear evidence that contact of Spaniards with foreigners could be dangerous.

The book also outraged the leader of the Reformation in Geneva, John Calvin. Michel de Villeneuve was suspected of being the author, and thanks to information from one of Calvin’s friends was arrested by the French Inquisition at Vienne. Servet managed to escape from his confinement within a few days, but made the mistake four months later of leaving France and passing through Geneva, where in August 1553 he was recognized when he attended a church service at which Calvin was preaching. He was immediately arrested and put on trial, and as a result of pressure from Calvin was condemned to be executed as a heretic (for denying the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ) by burning. The act took place outside the gates of Geneva, in the area called Champel, on 27 October. It was a slow, painful death, for the logs on the stake were damp and took time to fire up. Servet, who had the book on the Restoration strapped to his body, cried out in agony: “Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me!”

The act unleashed a fierce controversy among European intellectuals over whether religious dissent (that is, “heresy”) was an offense that should be punished by the death penalty. A Frenchman, Sebastian Castellio, used the execution as an argument to defend (in 1554) the right of individual dissent. In a subsequent work that was not published until half a century after the burning at Champel, Castellio concluded that “killing a man is not defending a doctrine, it is merely killing a man. When the people of Geneva killed Servetus, they did not defend a doctrine, they killed a man.”[88] Servet, as it turned out, was the only Spaniard to be executed outside Spain for heresy.

The failure of the Protestant cause in the Mediterranean inevitably brings us back to the question, already mentioned above, of why no Reformation occurred there. The Inquisition may certainly take some credit, but its measures were of limited scope both in Spain and in Italy. Repression was more efficient, bloody and brutal in other countries, notably the Netherlands, yet persecution there did not check heresy. Indeed, many observers argued both then and later that repression had stimulated it. Philip II was convinced that timely repression and continual vigilance were the key. “Had there been no Inquisition,” he affirmed in 1569, “there would be many more heretics, and the country would be much afflicted, as are those where there is no Inquisition as in Spain.”[89] The king may have believed it, but there is little evidence to show he was right.

Nor is it possible to maintain that Spain was sealed off from contact with heresy. The implausible image of an iron curtain of the Holy Office descending on the country and cutting it off from the rest of the world has no relation to reality. Precisely in the 1550s and 1560s, Spaniards were traveling abroad more than ever. More Spaniards than ever before published (as we shall see) their books abroad. Tens of thousands, mainly Castilians, served abroad in the army, where they rubbed shoulders with people of other faiths (the Spanish army in Flanders was not too choosy about the religion of recruits). The frontier in the Pyrenees, Spain’s chief overland link with the world outside, was occasionally watched because of the danger of military intervention by French Protestant nobles and by bandits, but it could never be closed. Throughout the late sixteenth century, Spaniards drifted at will over it. Some went to trade, some to be educated, some because they wished to join the Calvinists in Geneva. At the same time, many foreigners, principally artisans, came to Spain. It was a handful of these who, through carelessness on their part, fell into the hands of the Inquisition.

The open coastline and the great ports were an obvious point of entry for heretical literature. In the same way, the difficulty in controlling the Pyrenees frontier comes through in the anxious correspondence of an ambassador to France in the 1560s, Francés de Álava. In 1564 and 1565 he sent reports to the king of booksellers from Saragossa, Medina del Campo and Alcalá who had come to Lyon and Toulouse to purchase books on law and philosophy for taking home.[90] One of the booksellers, he said, had links with Geneva. This importation of foreign books, we may observe, was carried out in open contravention of the laws of Castile. Álava also confirmed that “many books, catechisms and psalters in Basque” had passed through Toulouse to Spain.[91] Basque was his own native language, so he knew of what he spoke. Books in Catalan, he reported, had also been taken into Catalonia, and other heretical books had gone to Pamplona.[92] In those same weeks the archbishop of Bordeaux forwarded a report on a citizen of Burgos who “had taken four or five loads of heretical books in Spanish and in Latin through the mountains of Jaca.”[93] Despite the open frontier, heresy failed to penetrate or at least to achieve any gains. The Reformation remained, for Spaniards, a phenomenon that barely affected them.

Because Spain remained almost impervious to heresy in the sixteenth century, later generations presented it as a unique case of fidelity to the faith. The triumphant words of the nineteenth-century scholar Menéndez y Pelayo are well known to many Spaniards: “One faith, one baptism, one flock, one shepherd, one Church, one crusade, a legion of saints. Spain, which preached the gospel to half the world, Spain the hammer of heretics, the light of Trent, the sword of Rome, the cradle of St Ignatius, that is our greatness and our unity, we have no other.”[94] It was a wholly fictitious image, and one that gave comfort to those who believed in it. The problem is that Spain’s indifference to the great tides of European thought is indeed impressive. In Catalonia, the inquisitors were continually suspicious of the religion of the Catalans, but failed all the same to find any heresy in the region. “Their Christianity is such,” an inquisitor reported in 1569, “that it is cause for wonder, living as they do next to and among heretics and dealing with them every day.”[95] The Reformation in any of its forms failed to appeal to Spaniards until the twentieth century, when the collapse of old dogmas opened the gates to sectarian movements.[96]

Though the Reformation failed, it left a considerable legacy to the country it had failed to penetrate. Sympathizers of the Reformation looked to the Bible as their main inspiration and in consequence some of the exiles devoted their efforts to translating it. The classic version of the Bible had been in Latin (the so-called Vulgate), of which already in the thirteenth century a king of Castile, Alfonso the Wise, had ordered a Castilian translation to be prepared. In the early days of the Reformation, there was considerable controversy over whether the Bible should be translated at all.[97] Translation of small items from the Bible, such as the Psalms, met with few problems.[98] But the appearance of various unauthorized versions of the New Testament, which bypassed the Vulgate in order to go back to original Greek texts, which were often given an unorthodox interpretation, put the Inquisition on its guard. In the early sixteenth century it began rounding up copies of the translated Bible that had been imported into Spain. In the Index of Prohibited Books it issued in 1559, all translations of the Bible in Spanish were disallowed.

As a consequence, translations into Spanish could be produced only outside Spain. The best known of them was published in 1553, in Ferrara (Italy), by Jewish refugees from the peninsula who felt the need for a text of the Old Testament for their co-religionists, most of whom did not know Hebrew. It was suitable for use in the synagogue but not calculated to reach the man in the street. Christian Spaniards who based their thinking on direct reading of the Scriptures needed a more accessible text. This was supplied by the exile Casiodoro de Reina.[99] Reina, from near Badajoz (Extremadura) and of Morisco origin, was one of the friars who fled from the monastery of San Isidoro in Seville. Like some of the others, he ended up in Geneva, the capital of Calvinism. He eventually moved to England, where he stayed for five years and became pastor of a Spanish church. In London his stay coincided with that of another of the Seville exiles, Cipriano de Valera, a firm Calvinist who made England his home and taught both at Cambridge and Oxford.

During all this time Reina was painstakingly working to realize his great dream, a translation of the whole Bible, on whose preparation he had been consulting with other exile friends. It still staggers the imagination to think of this humble monk from Seville as one of the great humanist scholars of the age of the Reformation, yet that he undoubtedly was. In later years he moved easily through the major languages of Europe, such as French and German; and as translator he was in command of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. The Spanish Protestant Bible in fact had its origins from well before Reina. A part of the New Testament was published in 1543 at Antwerp, by the Spanish exile Francisco Enzinas, who left his native Burgos with his brother Diego at an unknown date and went to northern Europe, first to the Netherlands and then to Germany, because of his sympathy with the ideas of the Reformation. Diego chose to go to Italy, where he was later arrested on a charge of heresy and burnt at the stake in 1547.

Francisco had better fortune. At the instigation of the German reformer Melanchthon, he studied at Luther’s University of Wittenberg and translated the New Testament into Spanish from the Greek edition of Erasmus, managing to get it published at Antwerp in 1543.[100] On the title page Enzinas stated clearly that the edition was dedicated to Charles V, and in an interview with the emperor he did manage to obtain his consent for the publication. Shortly after the interview, however, he was detained on suspicion of heresy at the instance of Charles’s confessor Pedro de Soto, and kept under house arrest in Brussels. He escaped after a year, persuaded by now that he must identify himself with the Reformation. He spent two years in England, where he obtained a teaching post at Cambridge during the years of freethinking that marked the reign of the boy-king Edward VI. Enzinas returned to the continent two years later in order to supervise the printing of his works, but died of the plague during a visit to Strasbourg.

Enzinas’s version of the New Testament was in turn used by Juan Pérez de Pineda, another of the Seville monks, as the basis for an edition which he published in Geneva in 1556, an impressive volume of over seven hundred pages, printed in a small format (five by three inches) that could be easily hidden away. The edition formed the bulk of the cargo that a certain Julián Hernández attempted to smuggle into Seville in two huge wine casks the year after. The casks were discovered and confiscated, the smuggler was arrested and later perished in an auto de fe in Seville. Pérez de Pineda later completed his own translation of the New Testament, which he intended to publish in Paris. Unfortunately, agents of Philip II managed to seize and destroy almost all copies of the edition.

When Reina came to prepare his own effort, he was obliged to do much of the New Testament himself. He followed the guidelines of the text by Pérez de Pineda (who died in 1566), modified some of the translation, and added some explanatory notes. His version of the Bible was eventually published in the Swiss city of Basel in September 1569, the first complete translation into contemporary Castilian. It was known as the Bear Bible because of an engraving on the title page of a bear retrieving honey from a tree. Years later it was retouched slightly by Cipriano de Valera, who brought out an edition which he published in Amsterdam in 1602. Known generally today as the Reina-Valera Bible, it has been read and used for centuries by Hispanic Protestants, and remains the standard text of their Bible. It was, for example, the text that the Englishman George Borrow took with him to Spain in 1836, when he set out on a trip to sell the Bible to a population that had never seen it. Reina’s later views became thoroughly Lutheran, and he died as a pastor in the German city of Frankfurt, comforted by his wife and his numerous family.

Reina’s long and eventful life was closely tied to what went on in Spain, and he always had Spain uppermost in his mind. Above all, he seems to have been partly responsible for the first, and most deadly, work of polemic directed against the Spanish Inquisition, the Sanctae Inquisitionis hispanicae artes (Secrets of the Holy Spanish Inquisition), published in Heidelberg in 1567. The pseudonym used by the author was Reginaldus Gonzalvus Montanus, but the work appears to have been written by Reina and another exile, Antonio del Corro.[101] Their direct knowledge (there were descriptions of how the monks in San Isidoro secretly read forbidden literature during their hours of prayer) gave authority to the account and turned it into an international success. Between 1568 and 1570 it was issued in two editions in English, one in French, three in Dutch, four in German and one in Hungarian. It served for a long time as a basic element in the development of propaganda directed by Protestant writers against the Spanish government. The mid-sixteenth century, we have seen, was the peak period for persecution of Protestants in Spain, though fortunately very few suffered for their beliefs, thanks to escaping overseas to freedom.

The firmness with which Spain resisted all the dissenting movements that could have threatened it confirmed its reputation as the most inflexibly Catholic country of Europe. But was it truly a Catholic country? Very many clergy doubted it even at the time (see chapter 15 below). And the Inquisition, as the figures attest, played only a small part in repressing or excluding heretics, so that it is unconvincing to give it credit for the failure of the Reformation. As we have seen, the inquisitors themselves could not understand how the frontier regions of Spain, which enjoyed intimate daily contact with Calvinist areas of France, did not fall into heresy. The inability of limpid northern theology to enter on any appreciable scale into the mindset of the Mediterranean peoples may have played a greater role in the story than we realize. Their way of thinking, rather than their religious fervor, was what protected Spaniards.

Whatever services the Holy Office may have rendered to keeping heresy at bay, in the end it was not Protestant but Catholic Spaniards who undermined the established religion. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, the Spanish people began to express their detestation of the official Church. This opened the doors wide to an unprecedented spectacle, a huge upsurge of opinion against the established faith that for the first time in its history created a massive emigration of clergy from the peninsula, and in certain parts of Spain brought the practice of the Catholic religion to a halt.[102] The early twentieth century underscored this trend in fire and blood, on a scale that surpassed any savagery committed in the epoch of the Inquisition.

6

THE IMPACT ON LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

The times are such that one should think carefully before writing books.

—ANTONIO DE ARAOZ, SJ, SEPTEMBER 1559

In its early years the attempts of the Inquisition to identify and control erroneous beliefs were directed mainly against ideas, practices and words, rather than against writings. In pre-modern Europe culture and belief were primarily expressed orally; only occasionally did the inquisitors find it necessary to attack the objects through which ideas could be transmitted, namely, books.

Since medieval times, books were produced in manuscript form and copied by hand where necessary; they were rare, expensive and hard to find, but in a Europe where illiteracy was the order of the day the demand was small. Still, the inquisitors by no means neglected their significance. When Hebrew books and the Talmud were found in the possession of conversos, they were seized and destroyed. The inquisitors also seem from an early period to have frowned on books about magic and astrology. There is a reference, probably from the late 1480s, to the burning of a large quantity of such items found at the University of Salamanca.

The diffusion of the printing press in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century revolutionized the art of communication, made it cheaper and easier to produce and distribute works, and facilitated the spread of both news and ideas. Authorities in both Church and state became aware of the need to oversee the output of books, and also welcomed the opportunity to tax them. In Castile, controls by the government over printing date back to Ferdinand and Isabella. On 8 July 1502, they issued a pragmatic by which licenses were made obligatory for the printing of books inside the realm as well as for the introduction of foreign books. Licenses could be granted only by the presidents of the Chancillerías (high courts) of Valladolid and Granada, and by the prelates of Toledo, Seville, Granada, Burgos and Salamanca.[1] Publishing was in its infancy, and the law had little effect. Outside Castile, that is to say in approximately one-third of Spain, printing remained free of government control.

The intervention of the state in pre-publication was new, but there was no intention of censorship since there were already controls available. The Lateran Council in 1515, and in particular the Council of Trent in 1564, granted bishops in Europe a general power to license books for printing. In the early 1500s printing was still a novelty, printed books were few and controls were lax. The coming of the Reformation, by contrast, unleashed a flood of controversial literature, which authorities everywhere attempted to curb.[2] In England the government produced licensing laws in 1538, and in the 1540s various Italian authorities passed similar edicts. All over Europe authors found their wish to publish freely being hindered by irksome interference. Spain came late into the field of controls: the earliest measures were taken by the state, not by the Inquisition or the Church, and were, as we have seen, valid only for Castile, not for the other realms of Spain.

The Holy Office was given no formal powers to license books, though between 1520 and 1550 it informally managed to issue a few permits to print.[3] After the 1550s it limited itself exclusively to the new field of post-publication censorship. Since there were in Spain no existing guides to heretical books, the tribunal had to rely at first on foreign direction. It was a papal order that provoked the first ban on Lutheran books in Spain, issued by Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht in April 1521 in his capacity as inquisitor general. Thereafter prohibitions of individual books were notified through letters (cartas acordadas) sent to the tribunals, and from 1540 regular lists of banned works were issued by the Holy Office. When feasible, a catalogue of prohibited works, the famous Index, was issued.

Before entering into the complex theme of controls over the printed word, it would be wise to clarify some important issues. The measures described here took the form of attempts to control; we cannot be sure that the attempts succeeded, or were even put into effect. Every European country was a mass of autonomous jurisdictions, not always bound by the decrees of a central authority. At no point were the officials who issued the measures in possession of the means to carry them out. The Inquisition, moreover, was not the only state body taking part in the process, though it certainly had an exceptional role in being able also to censor the spoken word, since verbal utterances were the basis of the greater proportion of its prosecutions.

In the 1530s and 1540s the Inquisition attempted to stop the entry of heretical literature into the peninsula. As the only state tribunal that could operate throughout Spain, it was able to act in areas (such as seaports) and in regions (such as the Basque country) where Castilian state officials could not. The government, however, took no direct initiative over controlling literature until the shock discovery of Protestants in 1558, an event that stung the regent Juana into action. On 7 September 1558 she issued a radical decree of control (valid only for Castile and not for the rest of Spain). The law banned the introduction into Castile of all books printed in other realms in Spanish, obliged printers to seek licenses from the council of Castile (which in 1554 had been granted control over such permits), and laid down a strict procedure for the operation of censorship. Contravention of any of these points would be punished by death and confiscation (a formal penalty that, as it happened, was never imposed). At the same time the Inquisition was allowed to issue licenses when printing for its own purpose. According to the new rules, manuscripts were to be checked and censored both before and after publication, and all booksellers were to keep by them a copy of the Index of Prohibited Books. So wide-ranging was the decree of 1558 that it remained theoretically in force until the end of the ancien régime.[4]

Philip II at that date was in Brussels, from which he wrote approving all the measures taken by his sister. Heresy was spreading through European universities. As a consequence, just before returning to Spain the king banned his Netherlands subjects from studying in France. When he arrived in the peninsula in 1559, he issued a similar order on 22 November to all subjects of the crown of Castile studying or teaching abroad to return within four months. An exception was made for those studying at three named colleges in Italy—Bologna, Rome, Naples—and one in Portugal (Coimbra). No Castilians were in future to be allowed abroad to study except at these.

The censorship law of 1558 and the ban on studying in some countries were intended to be radical measures. They have often been misconstrued as affecting all Spain, and converting it into a police state in the area of literature.[5] There were, in reality, several weaknesses in the legislation.

The biggest loophole in both measures was that they only affected Castile, not the whole of Spain. Philip was able to issue his decrees through the council of Castile; in the other realms of Spain, by contrast, he would have had to summon the Cortes, which he did not do at this time. The entire eastern half of the peninsula, and the whole length of the Pyrenees as well as the Basque coastline—that is to say, precisely the most vulnerable frontiers of the country—were consequently exempt from the law. Any author who had difficulties getting a license to publish in Madrid retained the option of going to one of the other peninsular realms. A case in question was the king’s former tutor, the humanist Sepúlveda, who in 1565 felt frustrated by the censors in Castile and tried to get one of his works published in Aragon or, failing that, in Venice.[6]

The crown of Aragon, in effect, enjoyed considerable freedom in publishing. In Catalonia, the king complained in 1568, “the printers publish many new books without having our license.”[7] Not until many decades later in the reign did the government manage to claim some degree of control over licensing in the crown of Aragon: in Catalonia from 1573, in Valencia from the 1580s, in Aragon from as late as 1592.[8] Even in Castile the 1558 law exempted most ecclesiastical books (which constituted the most important part of regular book production) and Inquisition publications from the need to obtain state control.[9] Over a large part of Spain, consequently, the 1558 law was either not in force or ineffective. Where it was not in force, printing normally had to be licensed by the local bishop.

A second loophole was that the control of imports was operative in Castile alone. The 7 September law regulated the import of books only “into these realms” (Castile and León). The other realms, namely, “Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia and Navarre,” were excluded from the law.[10] Books coming from them to Castile were subject to control, but there was no legislation to restrain books coming to them from outside. The stores of Barcelona, for example, imported freely books published in foreign countries in Spanish and other languages.[11] In 1561 the bookshop of the Barcelona printer Joan Guardiola held a stock of over nine thousand volumes, of which “ninety per cent came directly from publishers in Lyon, with several from Paris and others from Antwerp and Venice.”[12]

Third, the 1558 measure in Castile did not in principle involve the Inquisition. As a state law, its implementation lay in the hands of municipal authorities, who had to oversee such matters as book imports and censorship of texts, but found they lacked the experience to do so. Bundles of imported books were held up for months because cities had no officials trained in inspecting them (nor, evidently, did officials have the expertise to analyze texts in French, Greek, Latin or foreign tongues). Eventually, nearly thirty years later, at the instance of the leading Madrid bookseller Francisco López, the council of Castile agreed that each city should contract a professor from the local university to carry out the work.[13] Outside Castile, by contrast, the government was obliged to rely on the Inquisition in its attempts to oversee the book import trade.

Fourth, the printing controls had to contend with the reality that Spain relied heavily on foreign imports for its access to literature.[14] When the tutor of the future Philip II went book shopping for the prince in Salamanca in the 1540s, most of the books he bought were printed abroad. Imported volumes on humanities (including the complete works of Erasmus), literature, science and art featured in the list.[15] It became impossible to apply effectively the law controlling imports, because bookshops in Spain depended for their living on supplies from outside, and there were not enough officials or experts to examine every single volume entering the country. Foreign presses continued to dominate the printing of religious works not only in Bibles but also in mass books and works of devotion.[16] Both public and clergy continued to favor imported books. In Seville, Fernando Colón, son of the explorer, included in his library over five hundred editions of works by Reformation writers, including Luther and Melanchthon.[17] In 1561, three years after the 1558 law was supposed to be in place, a city official in Alcalá insisted: “for some years foreign booksellers have come to this town and university from France and other parts, in order to sell their books, which are of better quality and also cheaper.”[18] The flow of foreign books was desired by booksellers and never restricted, as the case of Barcelona shows. No attempt was ever made by the Inquisition to interfere with trade in this city. Ten years after the restrictive decrees of 1558–59, Catalan booksellers continued to rely for their income on the uninterrupted import of hundreds of foreign books, many of which went on to Castile. “The books that enter through this frontier are very numerous,” the inquisitors reported from Catalonia in 1569, “and even if there were many inquisitors we would not be enough to deal with so many volumes.”[19]

Finally, the biggest problem with the legislation of 1558–59 was that, true to form, many Spaniards simply ignored it. The printer of a new book normally preferred to apply for the license issued by the council of Castile, because it carried with it a “privilege” or exclusive right to publish and sell. Reprints, on the other hand, did not require a new license. Printers and authors therefore felt free to bring out so-called “reprints,” even if important changes had been introduced into the text.[20] Many authors tried successfully to avoid the licensing and censorship process, which they knew could involve interminable delays. They published without permission, or (more frequently) published abroad, in Italy or in France. In the 1540s, most books by Spaniards had been published outside Spain, notably in Antwerp, Paris, Lyon and Venice.[21] Despite the apparently restrictive nature of the 1558 law, Spanish writers continued throughout the century to publish as much abroad as they did at home. It was a freedom enjoyed, ironically, by no other European country.[22]

The works published abroad were, naturally, imported into Spain. No intention of heresy arose. In the late sixteenth century at least sixty leading Spanish writers published their works abroad, in Lyon in France, rather than in Spain.[23] The reason was that the quality of presses outside Spain was much better, and controls less onerous.[24] As a consequence, the penalties laid down by the 1558 law often remained a virtual dead letter. Enjoying the ability to publish with impunity in the realms of Aragon, Italy, France or the Netherlands, Spaniards could boast that they had more freedom of literature than their neighbors did, despite the 1558 law. Even within Spain, the freedom enjoyed in the non-Castilian realms was remarkable. In Valencia at a later period, some 40 percent of publications reached their readers without having any sort of license or permission.[25] Despite all the unlicensed publishing, not a single author or printer in Spain—other than those condemned as Protestants—is known to have suffered the death penalty. By contrast, in England and France the risk of punishment was real and executions frequent.

Throughout Europe, the Reformation crisis generated hopes but also fears. It was the beginning, both in Spain and outside it, of an epoch of caution. “Before that time,” a Dominican said of the year 1558, “Spain was wholly untouched by these errors.” “There was no need at that time to be suspicious of anyone,” an abbot observed of the previous decades.[26] Among humanists and university men, the old ideal of an international republic of letters began to break down. When there had been one sole faith in Europe, scholars traveled freely across frontiers. Now they tended to remain within national boundaries. Institutions began to give classes in the local language rather than in Latin. Spanish students were probably the least affected by the process, since they had seldom gone to foreign colleges. The ones they most frequented, in Bologna and Rome, were precisely those still permitted to them. In addition, they could of course attend any of the colleges in the king’s dominions, such as the Netherlands. In practice, difficulties of distance, financing and language were tending to rule these out. Active contacts continued for a while only with French universities. The spread of heresy there, and Spanish restrictions, reduced these to a minimum. Of 228 Spanish scientific authors from the early sixteenth century, some 11 percent had taught in foreign universities and 25 percent had studied abroad; after 1560 the proportion was negligible. Montpellier, famous for its medical studies, turned Calvinist during the 1560s. Between 1503 and 1550, 310 Spaniards (mostly Aragonese) studied there; up to 1565 14 more registered; after 1573 no further Spaniards feature in the official lists.[27]

The frontiers, however, were never closed, least of all with France. Only Castilians were bound by the new restrictions. In 1565 the French ambassador in France reported that there were twenty Aragonese and Catalan students at the University of Toulouse, and he knew of two Catalans studying medicine at Montpellier.[28] In the 1560s Navarrese with Protestant sympathies emigrated freely to France. Not until 1568 was the ban on study abroad extended to Spaniards living in the eastern part of the peninsula.[29] However, as late as 1585 a frontier guard at Irún could report “having seen pass through some Spaniards on foot, others on horseback on excursion (though he does not know how many nor from where they came); and that there have also passed through the frontier-post Italians, Flemings, and Burgundians; and many Portuguese on foot and on horse with their wives, children and clothing.”[30] Students crossed over to study in France. The secretary of the Inquisition in Logroño reported the case in 1584 of “a Dr. León, a medical doctor, who said he was a citizen of Valladolid, with two sons whom he said he was taking to study in Bordeaux. When asked why he was taking his sons to Bordeaux, where there was little security in matters of religion, and when there were so many good universities in Spain, he replied that if he did not find conditions suitable in Bordeaux he would take them to Paris.”[31] Nothing was done to impede the doctor, who left his sons in Bordeaux and returned tranquilly to Valladolid. Several other scholars continued to study in France, but the Spanish government turned a blind eye. The new controls, despite their limited efficacy, may have curbed movement across frontiers. But they had little perceptible impact on intellectual life.

Systematic guides to forbidden literature were first issued in the form of an “index” by the University of Paris in 1542. The University of Louvain began to issue Indexes in 1546, and in Italy various Indexes were published in the 1540s.[32] The first printed Index to be used in Spain, issued by Inquisitor General Valdés in September 1551, was no more than a reprint of one compiled by Louvain in 1550, with a special appendix devoted to Spanish books. Steps were taken to have the 1551 Index distributed by the tribunals.[33] Each tribunal was allowed to modify its local version, so we know of at least five Indexes issued in 1551–52, by the tribunals of Toledo, Valladolid, Valencia, Granada and Seville.[34] The works of sixteen authors, mainly the leaders of the Reformation, were condemned in their entirety; but for the rest the Inquisition was content to ban some sixty-one works individually, and lay down regulations about Bibles, books in Hebrew and Arabic, and works printed without authorization.

During those years a large number of unlicensed Bibles and New Testaments was entering the peninsula. Many had translations or comments that did not coincide with orthodox views. The Inquisition began steps to censor the editions, and meanwhile ordered its tribunals in May 1552 to collect any available copies. The results were astonishing. In Seville alone, the inquisitors rounded up 450 volumes.[35] In Saragossa the tribunal confiscated 218 unlicensed Bibles, most of them published in Lyon.[36] At least 20 unlicensed Bibles were identified in Valencia. Many could be found in Salamanca. Faced by an extensive distribution of unapproved volumes, Valdés issued in 1554 a general censure of Bibles and New Testaments, identifying for correction 65 editions of the Scriptures issued in Lyon, Antwerp, Paris and other places.[37]

All the steps taken till the middle of the century were in response to an indirect threat from the Reformation. Heresy was still something distant; even the infiltration of Bibles could (it was felt)[38] be handled without problems. The discovery of Protestants and the emergency laws of 1558 changed the situation radically. The Inquisition, entrusted with some of the censorship regulations, was ordered to put together an Index as quickly as possible.

The task was undertaken by Fernando de Valdés. In little less than a year, and consulting with very few experts other than his fellow Dominican and friend Melchor Cano,[39] Valdés managed to draw up a substantial Index of Prohibited Books, which was published in the summer of 1559. Books were divided into sections according to language, and forbidden if they fell into the following categories: all books by heresiarchs; all religious books written by those condemned by the Inquisition; all books on Jews and Muslims with an anti-Catholic bias; all heretical translations of the Bible; all vernacular translations of the Bible, even by Catholics; all devotional works in the vernacular; all controversial works between Catholics and heretics; all books on magic; all verse using Scriptural quotations “profanely”; all books printed since 1515 without details of author and publisher; all anti-Catholic books; all pictures and figures disrespectful to religion.

It is vital to understand the motives behind this ambitious, and wholly unrealistic, attempt to control the market in books. The approximately seven hundred books listed as forbidden were in no way a carefully considered response to the problem of Reformation heresy, or an attempt to ban books that Spaniards might actually possess. Valdés and his friends for the most part simply stuck together, in a hurried[40] scissors and paste operation, prohibitions decreed in other countries. Seventy percent of the entries[41] were drawn directly from the previous Index of 1551, from the Indexes of Louvain (1550) and Portugal (1551), and from other Indexes, notably of Paris and Venice. The biggest category of prohibited books, those in Latin, representing nearly two-thirds of the seven hundred items, were almost all (with seven exceptions) published in foreign countries.

These details are highly significant. They demonstrate that the weight of the Index was directed to keeping out of Spain books that had for the most part never entered the country. The prohibition of fifty-four items in Dutch, a language unknown in Spain, could hardly be interpreted otherwise. Evidently, many foreign works were circulating within Spain, for booksellers relied heavily on book imports. But the true interest and significance of the Index for Spaniards at the time was less in its shadowboxing with books that they had neither seen nor read, than in those few books that they were able to read in their own language.

Three categories of books in Spanish stand out for their condemnation in the Index. First, there was the question of Erasmus. Philip II when young had been a devotee of the humanist. On his trip to the Netherlands in 1548 he had made a special visit to his birthplace, Rotterdam.[42] The controversies of the Reformation epoch, however, undermined Erasmus’s standing. The Index of 1551 included his Colloquies. While some were debating whether to condemn Erasmus more fully, the Roman Inquisition under Paul IV came out in 1559 with a general condemnation of all his works. The Jesuits protested strongly against the measure, among the most vociferous being the Dutchman Peter Canisius. Diego Laínez, for his part, said openly that the papal Index was something “which restricted many spirits and pleased few, particularly outside Italy.”[43] The Jesuits were no friends of Erasmus, but they felt that sweeping bans were unhelpful. The Spanish Index of 1559 listed fourteen works in Spanish by Erasmus, including the Enchiridion. From this time his name fell into disfavor. The Spanish Index of 1612 banned completely all his works in Spanish, and classified the author in the category of auctores damnati.

Erasmus remained (despite a common but mistaken opinion to the contrary) for more than a generation a respected name.[44] His works were cited by leading authors both religious and secular. In Barcelona, his books remained openly on sale. Even his forbidden books were kept in private collections and highly treasured. His influence remained in the stream of thought that stretched as far as Cervantes. Intemperate defenses of him (Francisco Sánchez, “el Brocense,” in 1595 declared in a lecture, “Whoever speaks ill of Erasmus is either a friar or an ass!”)[45] might of course invite recrimination. But in the end, as happens to most thinkers, he faded from view quite simply because he ceased to be the fashion.

The second notable feature of the Index was its attention to literary works. In 1551 it had banned only a handful of Castilian works. By contrast, nineteen works of a literary character were now banned. Among the authors affected by prohibition of one or more items were Gil Vicente, Hernando de Talavera, Bartolomé Torres Naharro, Juan del Encina and Jorge Montemayor.[46] The Lazarillo de Tormes was banned and also the Cancionero general. Each of these items had special circumstances that literary experts have since examined and clarified.

The third and most notable aspect of the Index was its campaign against vernacular works of piety. Valdés and his advisers were vividly aware of the recent spiritualizing movements that had produced the alumbrados. They also suspected links between those movements and the Protestants. As a consequence they came down heavily on some of the best-known spiritual writers of the generation. The most prominent casualties were Juan de Avila’s Audi, Filia (discussed above, chapter 5), Luis de Granada’s Book of Prayer and Francisco Borja’s Works of a Christian.

Granada’s Book of Prayer, first published in 1554, became so popular in Spain that it went through twenty-three editions up to the time it was put on the Index (principally at the request of Melchor Cano, who had been among the first to smell heresy in the Catechism of the archbishop of Toledo). It was in vain that Fray Luis tried to get the ban rescinded. Finding no help in Spain, he succeeded in getting the Book approved by the Council of Trent and the pope. Such approval was not enough for the inquisitors, and it was only when he accepted “corrections” in his text that the book was allowed to circulate freely.[47]

The ban on Borja also emanated from Cano, an open enemy of the Jesuits. The problem was over the way some phrases in the book could be read.[48] Because it was an international order, many in Spain were suspicious of the Company of Jesus. A Jesuit from Valladolid reported the opinion among some “that the Theatines (which is what they call us here in this Babel) have been the source of Luther’s errors.” Valdés’s Index fell like a thunderclap on the Company. Borja, duke of Gandía and former viceroy of Catalonia, was the most distinguished recruit ever to join the society in Spain. The ban on his work threatened to bring disrepute not only upon him but upon all the Jesuits. Fearing that he was about to be arrested by the Inquisition, he left Spain for Rome in the spring of 1560 and never again returned to his homeland.[49]

This was not the end of the travails of the Jesuits. The 1559 Index prohibited devotional works in the vernacular even if they were not printed (at that time many books circulated in manuscript form). The worried rector of the Jesuit college in Seville went to the inquisitors to ask if the ban applied also to Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, which was used by the novices in manuscript translation and not published in Castilian until 1615. To his horror he was told that the prohibition did apply. He went back to the college, collected all the copies of the Exercises, handed them to the Inquisition, then took to his bed in mortification. “I have just handed them in,” he wrote to his superior in Rome, “today Friday 20 October at six in the evening. The pain of this has laid me low in bed with grief. I have seen in this time the prohibition of works that were highly Catholic and beneficial and by Christian authors.”[50]

Seville was the scene also of another casualty of the drive against spiritualist piety. A much-respected Dominican friar, Domingo de Valtanás, aged seventy-three at the time, was arrested in 1561 on very vague charges, probably associated with illuminism, and confined to a monastery where he died shortly after.[51] There were many pious Catholics who regretted the trend. Teresa of Avila testified that “when they banned many books in Spanish, so they could not be read, I very much regretted it, because some of them were entertaining to read and I could no longer read them because they were in Latin.”[52] In fact the policy rested on the firm opinion of one theologian, Fray Diego de Chaves (subsequently a confessor to the king), who managed to convince Valdés and the Suprema that no works of piety written in Castilian should be allowed to circulate, since they would only lead unprepared readers astray.[53] Spiritual works should be made accessible only to clergy, whose job it was to transmit doctrine to the people. This startling conviction, based in great measure on attitudes already expressed by the Dominican professor Melchor Cano, was accepted by the Inquisition, and had unforeseen consequences. The most famous literary work to fall foul of it in 1559 was the Catechism of Bartolomé Carranza (see chapter 8 below). But it also affected no less a work that the Roman Catechism, which had been issued by the papacy and was circulating in Spain (in Latin) with the full approval of the king and of the Church. When steps were taken, both in Spain and in Rome, to translate the Catechism into Castilian in order to benefit a wider Spanish readership, the Inquisition stepped in and blocked every move to publish translations of the work.[54]

The Index of 1559 has often been taken to represent the beginning of an epoch of repression in Spanish culture. It would probably be more correct to see it as the only repressive Index prior to the eighteenth century. It was the first but also the only pre-1700 Index to attack notable works of Castilian poetry and literature, all of them antedating the mid-sixteenth century. None of the authors concerned had a serious brush with the Inquisition on account of the work affected. Thereafter, no Index before the age of the Enlightenment went any further in attacks on Spanish literature. Rather than opening a repressive phase, the 1559 Index seems to have been, on one hand, an ill-thought-out attempt to control some aspects of creativity; and on the other, the first phase of a hostile response to aspects of native spirituality when published in the vernacular language.

Censorship encouraged a practice that later became common: the burning of books. Book burning was, of course, a traditional device used by Christians against their enemies. The Emperor Constantine used it against Arian works. In 1248 the clergy in Paris burned fourteen cartloads of Jewish books. The medieval Inquisition followed suit, and in the sixteenth century it was a common practice in Italy, France (thousands of Protestant books were thrown to the flames in the city of Lyon in 1565) and England.[55] Torquemada in his day had organized a book burning in his monastery in Salamanca. Jewish sacred books were the objects of a bonfire in Toledo in May 1490 when “many books by the said heretics were burnt publicly in the square.”[56] A royal decree of October 1501 ordered Arabic books to be burnt in Granada, and a huge bonfire was held under the auspices of Cisneros. From March 1552 the Inquisition ordered that heretical books be burnt publicly.[57] Some twenty-seven books were ordered to be burnt at a ceremony in Valladolid in January 1558.[58]

In mid-century the Spaniards probably resorted to burning because it seemed the simplest way to get rid of offending material. Very many works perished. “On seven or eight occasions we have burnt mountains of books here in our college,” a Jesuit working for the Barcelona Holy Office reported in 1559.[59] In 1561 an official in Seville asked what should be done with the numerous books he had rounded up. There were many books of hours, he said, which could be easily corrected. “Burn them,” the Inquisition replied. And what of the Bibles? “Burn them.” And the books of medicine, many with superstitious material? “Burn them.”[60] This drastic solution was not always applied. Subsequently, when the tribunal had elaborated its new system of expurgation rather than condemnation, books were kept in store and not normally destroyed.

The 1559 Index had set out to identify and prohibit suspicious books in their entirety. Subsequent Indexes started from a completely different perspective. The next Index was not issued for a quarter of a century, and in the interim the Inquisition proceeded by cartas acordadas, issuing some forty-three orders affecting a total of fifty books.[61] The single most important influence on Catholic thinking about censorship at this period was the Index of Prohibited Books issued by the Council of Trent in 1564. Its premises were accepted as authoritative by all the theologians and inquisitors who helped to prepare the next Spanish Index. Meanwhile, Philip II had arranged for the Tridentine Index to be published in Flanders in 1570, and sponsored the preparation there by Benito Arias Montano, the distinguished Hebraist, of a special “expurgatory” Index (1571). Montano’s Index was novel because it adopted the practice of excising offending passages from otherwise orthodox books, which thereby escaped blanket prohibition. Philip II felt that there were lessons to be learned from the method of censorship adopted in Flanders, for he informed the duke of Alba at the end of 1569 that Montano’s draft index “will be a model for making one like it here, and to this effect a copy has been given to those of the Inquisition.”[62]

The Indexes of 1564 and 1571 played a fundamental part in the elaboration of Spain’s new Index, first discussed at a committee meeting in Salamanca in the latter year. Very little progress was made, possibly in part because of profound disagreements among the professors of Salamanca, some of whom (as we shall see) were in 1572 arrested by the Inquisition as a result of intrigues within the professorial body. Only after the end of this affair, in 1578, were the plans to prepare an Index resumed.[63] Juan de Mariana devoted considerable time to helping the compilers: “I worked on it as much as anybody, and for a long time had four secretaries together helping me.”[64] The Index which emerged consisted of two volumes—one of prohibited books (1583), the other of expurgated (1584)—issued by Inquisitor General Gaspar de Quiroga. There was an impressive increase in items compared with the previous Index. Valdés had prohibited some 700 items; the 1583 Index included 2,315, three times as many.[65] Of these, 74 percent were in Latin, 8.5 percent in Castilian and 17.5 percent in other languages.

The scope of the 1583 Index was, in appearance, staggering. By its sheer size it drew into its ambit the whole of the European intellectual world, both past and present. Editions of classical authors and of fathers of the Church, the collected works of Peter Abelard and of Rabelais, selected works by William of Ockham, Savonarola, Jean Bodin, Machiavelli, Juan Luis Vives, Marsiglio of Padua, Ariosto, Dante and Thomas More (whose Utopia was banned until expurgated, although the Index conceded that he was vir alius pius et catholicus) were among the casualties. At first glance it would appear that the Inquisition was declaring war against the whole of European culture.

We would be wrong to accept the impression, because the Quiroga Index was much less aggressive than appears. For the most part it simply took over existing condemnations in the Catholic world. It integrated almost wholesale the previous Index of 1559, the Tridentine Index of 1564, the Antwerp Index of 1570 and items from other sources.[66] The result was a big increase in titles, but as far as peninsular items were concerned there was very little change. About forty further books of Spanish origin were added to those in the Valdés list. Some were uncorrected editions of works that were otherwise now permitted, such as the Lazarillo and the Audi, Filia. In general, none of the new prohibitions was readily identifiable as a work of creative literature. Though it is possible, then, to criticize the Valdés Index for the harm it may have done to elements of Spanish literature, the Quiroga Index did virtually nothing to affect the literary or reading habits of Spaniards. The overwhelming bulk of books it prohibited was unknown to Spaniards, had never entered Spain, and was in languages that Spaniards could not read. The 215 books prohibited in Dutch and German, for example, featured in the Index simply because the Quiroga compilers copied the Antwerp Index wholesale. It is consequently misleading to regard the 1583 Index as directly repressive. It affected only in part the daily reality of readers, students or booksellers. More directly relevant may have been the expurgations listed in the 1584 Index.[67] Authors and printers may have been irritated by these, but they were hardly a blow to creativity.

Among the influences behind the Quiroga Index were Montano, Mariana and other intellectuals. All were zealous upholders of the Counter-Reformation who saw in the machinery of censorship a golden opportunity not to repress freedom of learning but actively to form the culture of the society in which they lived. The vast borrowing of prohibitions from the Tridentine Index was their gesture to papal authority, but of more direct interest to them than the obvious struggle against heresy was the problem of educating Spaniards. A contemporary of theirs, the Toledo humanist and poet Alvar Gómez de Castro, left a memoir detailing principles of censorship.[68] He divided harmful works into two categories: those in Latin and those in the vernacular. Harmful books in the first category may be kept by instructed persons, he stated, but should not be used in schools. Of those in the second category, some, such as Boccaccio, should be carefully expurgated. As for Spanish books in the second category, some are books of romance and chivalry, and “since they are without imagination or learning and it is a waste of time to read them, it is better to prohibit them, except for the first four books of Amadis.” Others in this class are books on love, of which some, such as the Celestina, are serious and good, while others are of such poor quality that they should be banned. Also in this class are works of poetry, again including both good and bad: the bad should be expurgated or eliminated. The interesting criterion employed was obviously that of literary merit.

Mariana conceded in 1579 that otherwise excellent books by Borja and others should continue to be banned because of “the evil times,” and was even firmer than Gómez de Castro in his views on the educative role of books.[69] He recommended that the Spanish Index should include the Tridentine rule banning “absolutely those books that narrate or teach lascivious and obscene things” (his advice was not followed). Mariana also urged that “in particular one should ban such books both in Latin and in Castilian, to wit Celestina, Diana de Montemayor, and books of chivalry, even if it were only to force people to read good books and genuine histories.” His full list of unworthy literature also included selected works by Virgil, Ovid, Catullus, Propertius and other classical authors. Not all these suggestions were adopted by the compilers of the 1583 Index.

The inquisitors very seldom went looking for books to censor. They already had long lists to guide them, and further items were brought to their attention by zealous members of the public. They had to rely heavily on expert calificadores (censors), usually theologians from the religious orders.[70] In the earlier period these tended to be mostly Dominicans;[71] by the seventeenth century many were Franciscans and Jesuits.[72] The system, if it can be called such, was (like all censorship systems) haphazard. Completely arbitrary decisions were made, and censors frequently contradicted each other. Judgments were made that had nothing to do with religion. The resulting confusion can be seen in the case of Bodin’s Republic, a Spanish translation of which suffered so many different criticisms in 1594 from the censors that it was decided to ban it totally.[73] Fortunately, subsequent inquisitors reversed the decision and let the book through after expurgations. The example demonstrates that there was seldom any official criterion of “inquisitorial” censorship. The inquisitors and their censors simply put into effect the ideas prevailing among those who controlled the system. The fact that prominent intellects like Juan de Mariana and Melchor Cano were employed as censors did not affect—or improve—the criteria applied.

The Spanish Index was controlled only by the Spanish authorities and had no connection with that of Rome, which began in the sixteenth century to draw up its own list of prohibited books. While Spain often had on its list works which Rome had prohibited, there was no rule that one Index should follow the lead of the other, and several authors were astonished to find that Spain had forbidden books of theirs which circulated freely in Italy. Alternatively, Rome would ban books which circulated freely in Spain.[74] There was one other important difference between the two. The Roman Index was exclusively one of prohibition: that is, it banned books without regard to the number of errors in it, and without specifying whether a book could be published if it were expurgated. The Spanish Index, on the other hand, both expurgated and prohibited books, so that some works could circulate if the relevant passages cited in the Index were excised. In this respect the Spanish system was more liberal. When the Indexes clashed, reasons were invariably political, as in the case of the Italian cardinal Baronio, who some years later, in 1594, complained that although the pope had sanctioned his writings there were moves to put him on the Spanish Index. Baronio was certainly not in favor in Spain, but the relevant work by him was banned only by the state and not by the Inquisition.[75]

The Indexes of the seventeenth century were those of 1612 (with an appendix in 1614), 1632 and 1640. A prominent part in their compilation was played by the Jesuit Juan de Pineda, aided among others by Francisco Peña, the editor of Eimeric. Over twenty years after Quiroga’s Index, the Suprema in 1605 began preparation of a new one.[76] It took seven years to draw up. The Index of 1612, issued under Inquisitor General Sandoval y Rojas, departed from previous practice. Instead of publishing separate volumes for prohibited and expurgated books, as was done in 1583–84, the cardinal published both together in an Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum. The volume departed in another way from previous practice. Instead of dividing the material simply into Latin and vernacular books, it now divided the material into three classes. Into the first went authors who were completely prohibited; into the second went books that were prohibited, regardless of author; and into the third went books not bearing the names of their authors. For example, all heresiarchs would go into the first class, whereas Dante’s Monarchia would go into the second. Even this classification, however, was not strictly adhered to. Though Erasmus fell into the first class, and all his works without exception were banned in Spanish translation, several of his Latin works which were clearly beyond suspicion were permitted.

The Index of 1632 was issued by Inquisitor General Zapata, and that of 1640 by Inquisitor General Antonio de Sotomayor. Similar to the 1612 compilation in scope and content, Sotomayor’s Index offered a general survey of the intellectual advances of the seventeenth century, and complemented the efforts of the Quiroga Index to oversee aspects of European thought. It is not surprising to find Francis Bacon and other major writers condemned in the first class as heretics. Like the Quiroga Index, that of 1640 had little impact on native literature, apart from the surprising appearance of Mariana, who had to endure expurgations in seven of his works as well as in his De mutatione monetae (on the coinage) and his Treatise on Death and Immortality; and the well-known case of Cervantes, who lost by expurgation a sentence in book two, chapter thirty-six, of his Quixote, concerning works of charity. Despite its coincidence with the early period of the Scientific Revolution, moreover, the 1640 Index was tolerant towards some aspects of science. Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, as heretics, were classified as auctores damnati and therefore appeared in class one; but virtually all their works were permitted in Spain after very minor expurgations. Some were allowed without any expurgation, but with the proviso that a note on the book should state that it was by a condemned author. Into this category fell Kepler’s Astronomia nova of 1609, his Epitome astronomiae copernicanae of 1618, and his Chilias logarithmorum, published at Marburg in 1624.

With these Indexes ended the first great period in the censorship of the Inquisition. The great compilations of 1583 and 1640 were not by their nature repressive weapons, and served more to dissuade Spaniards from reading foreign authors whom none but a few could have read anyway. The real weight of censorship in the country operated, it must be stressed, outside the scope of the Indexes: in the various systems of control at the disposal of both state and Inquisition, and in the formative restrictions that the Counter-Reformation introduced into Spain.

Any evaluation of the role of the Indexes also needs to take into account the practical question of whether they were put into effect. We may consider the situation in Catalonia. Twelve copies of the Quiroga Index arrived in Barcelona in October 1584; they were at once redistributed, a copy being sent to each bishop in Catalonia. The bishop was asked to collaborate with the comisarios (local clergy who helped the Inquisition) of that area. The comisario in his turn had to communicate the contents of his single copy to the leading persons of his district, and to the main booksellers. The booksellers for their part refused to buy copies of the Index “because they say they are very expensive.” In this instance, it appears that a single copy of the Index had to serve for an entire bishopric. If the example is typical, it would appear that in many parts of Spain the Index remained scarce and unknown. “There must be a great many books that are not corrected,” the inquisitors of Barcelona mused in 1586, when they commented on the lack of available copies. Certainly, unavailability of the Index was an excuse given by some booksellers in the city in 1593 when they were accused of selling prohibited books.[77]

The first concern of the Inquisition in matters of book control was over the entry of foreign books. The successful activities of Julián Hernández, who perished in the auto at Seville in December 1560, were a fraction of the effort made by Protestants to bring books into the country. In 1556 Margaret of Parma, Philip II’s regent in the Netherlands, informed the Spanish council of State that heretics “intend to send to Spain through Seville thirty thousand books of Calvin, and I hear that Marcus Pérez, who is here in Antwerp, is charged with this task.”[78] Seaports were inevitably the center of inquisitorial scrutiny, and foreign sailors were vulnerable to arrest if they happened to be carrying Protestant devotional literature. Diplomats abroad sent back regular information on any unusual activity by printers or traders. The Inquisition began to claim the right to be the first to visit foreign ships when they entered territorial waters, but that provoked continual conflicts with local officials. In Bilbao the corregidor was ordered by the crown to give precedence to the Inquisition; in the Canaries the diocesan vicars were similarly told to give way.[79]

From the beginning of the Protestant scare, the inquisitors were aware that a rigid control of book imports had to be exercised. By early 1521 Lutheran books, translated into Spanish by conversos in Antwerp, were entering Spain via the Flanders trade route. The first ban on them was issued by Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, regent of Spain and inquisitor general, on 7 April 1521. In view of the Comunero revolt, the political no less than the religious implications of Luther were taken seriously. Books continued to arrive at all the major ports in the peninsula, but the Inquisition was vigilant: a vessel seized at Pasajes had its hold full of books “of writings by Luther and his followers.” In Burgos Bernardino Tovar was able to purchase Lutheran books imported from Flanders. By 1524, it was reported from the court, “there is so much awareness of Luther that nothing else is talked about.”[80]

The flow of books was impossible to stop completely, since Spain depended on imports for much of its literature. “From one hour to the next,” the Inquisition commented in 1532, “books keep arriving from Germany.” Its officials were ordered to keep a watch at seaports. Special attention was paid to the Basque coast. In 1553, for perhaps the first time,[81] detailed instructions were issued to inquisitors about how to carry out visits to foreign ships in Spanish ports. But few heretical books were ever found. The real victims of vigilance were booksellers. From 1559, when a shipment of three thousand books destined for Alcalá was seized on a French vessel in San Sebastián,[82] booksellers in Spain had to put up with wholesale embargoes of their precious imports. In general, the shipments were neither confiscated nor censored. They were simply delayed until the bureaucracy had decided that no illegal imports were taking place. In 1564 the Inquisition ordered its officials in Bilbao and San Sebastián to send on to booksellers in Medina 245 bales of books imported from Lyon. Three years later the books were still in the ports. Embargos apart, books continued to enter freely. “Every day,” the inquisitors of Catalonia reported in 1572, “books enter both for Spain and for other parts.”[83]

Although commercial cargo was the usual hiding place for illegal books, the ever-zealous Inquisition insisted in 1581 that “the packages and the beds of the sailors” should also be examined.[84] The searching of ships was always subject to diplomatic agreements. The peace treaty between England and Spain in 1604, for example, gave English ships protection, and in 1605 inquisitors in the ports were ordered not to visit English or Scottish vessels.[85] In general, the operation to control book imports was riddled with inefficiency.[86] The inquisitors of Barcelona in 1569, unable to process the great number of books entering, reported that “to entrust the work to friars and experts is not enough to keep people happy, and annoys the booksellers.” They therefore proposed “a commission of two persons to look at the books, paid by the booksellers, whose suggestion it is.”[87] Orders were sent out periodically by the Suprema for books to be seized; but, the council complained in 1606, “it is reported that many of the books ordered to be picked up are not being collected.”[88]

Inevitably, condemned books filtered into the country. In Barcelona in 1569 the bookshops were still selling “many forbidden books.”[89] Their continuing entry is demonstrated by the case in Madrid of Joseph Antonio de Salas, knight of the Order of Calatrava, whose library was offered for sale to the public on his death in 1651. It was then found that among the 2,424 volumes in the collection, to quote the censor, “there were many books prohibited or unexpurgated or worthy of examination, either because they were by heretical authors or were newly published abroad by unknown writers.”[90] There were 250 prohibited works—a proportion of one in ten—confirming that foreign books were smuggled regularly and often successfully into Spain, despite the death penalty attached to the offense.

The second major control was at the point of contact between a book and its potential reader. Libraries and bookshops were at intervals visited and checked. Bishops were encouraged to inspect all libraries in their dioceses, and at Salamanca University a score of the staff went carefully through the library to weed out any dangerous books. As early as 1536 Thomas de Villanueva was employed by the inquisitor general to visit bookshops in Valencia. A lightning check in 1566 in Seville is described thus by an inquisitor: “at a fixed hour, nine in the morning, all the bookshops of Seville were occupied by familiars of the Holy Office, so that they could not warn each other nor hide nor take out any books, and later we came and made all the shops close and are visiting them one by one.”[91] In reality, such visits were few and far between. They also took place only in big towns where there was an inquisitorial presence. And even there, as the inquisitors of Barcelona admitted in 1569, the bookshops “have not been visited for many years.”[92] Bookshops, moreover, pleaded ignorance if found with books that needed censoring. In Barcelona in 1593, as we have seen, they said that no copies of the Index were available, and they were consequently unable to monitor forbidden items.[93] On this occasion, some booksellers were fined. It is the only recorded case of any action being taken against bookshops in that city.

The task of censorship obviously took many years. Total prohibition was in principle easier. In Barcelona in 1560 the inquisitors appointed a Jesuit to be their censor. With the Index by his side, he advised worried librarians of religious houses “what books they can keep and which they have to tear up and burn.”[94] Expurgation, on the other hand, was more onerous. One censor reported to the Inquisition that to expurgate a private library in Madrid worth 18,000 ducats he had labored eight hours daily for four months.[95] Benito Arias Montano, whose task was to check the entire library of the Escorial, inevitably took a little longer. One way or the other, both authors and booksellers always found reason to complain.[96] A few privileged readers were conceded exemption from the system. Up to the 1540s it had been common for the Inquisition to allow individuals special licenses to read or keep prohibited books, usually for purposes of study (how, for instance, could one refute Luther without first reading him?). After 1559 all such licenses were suspended, and not until the 1580s were exceptions made.

The greatest damage of all, in any system of censorship, was suffered by the book itself. Some books probably disappeared altogether, and not exclusively through the fault of the inquisitors. A report drawn up for them at the end of the sixteenth century says that

many, to avoid taking their books to the inquisitors, burn not only those prohibited and to be expurgated but even those that are approved and harmless, or else get rid of them or sell them for a pittance. In this way an infinite number are neither examined nor corrected, but are eventually lost to nobody’s advantage, for their owners suffer great losses and, what is more important, a great many good books disappear.[97]

Clumsy expurgators of books tore out pages, cut them up carelessly or defaced them horribly by inking out passages and pictures. To avoid this sort of mistreatment, book owners preferred to have their property examined by a cultured expurgator, such as the Jesuit father Gubern in Barcelona in 1559. There, apparently, “no one shows resentment even though he scores through the rare and precious books they have.”[98] An even more preferable alternative, adopted by many book owners, bookshops and institutions, was to get hold of a copy of the Index and carry out the expurgations without letting anybody else handle the books.[99]

Literature collected during searches was, from the end of the sixteenth century, not burnt but sent to the nearest tribunal for further judgment. There it remained until disposed of. Thus in December 1634 the tribunal of Saragossa had in its keeping 116 copies of the Bible, 55 copies of various works by Erasmus and 83 volumes of the works of Francisco de Quevedo.[100] Later generations sometimes preferred to store the prohibited books. The Escorial was used regularly for this purpose. In 1585 the prior reported that its library possessed “many prohibited books sent at different times by His Majesty, and kept there by license from Don Gaspar de Quiroga.” The volumes included unlicensed Bibles, the Koran and works by Savonarola and Machiavelli. Half a century later the practice was still being carried on, for in 1639 the Escorial possessed a total of 932 prohibited books.[101] Laudable as this may appear, it was not practiced everywhere, with the result that some works condemned by the Inquisition may have been wiped out of existence. In the early seventeenth century there was a plan, supported by both inquisitors and booksellers, to set up a central store of banned books; but “none of those in favor of setting it up wished to take on the task of doing it,”[102] so nothing was done.

There were always strong differences of opinion over the criteria to be adopted in censorship. Everyone agreed on the need for control, but they also disagreed on the methods. No one, even in that day, was so sanguine as to believe that the inquisitors knew best. A Salamanca professor, Francisco Sancho, was one of those who in the 1550s tried to advise the Suprema;[103] and there were many others who did likewise. It was a Spaniard resident in Rome, Bartolomé de Valverde, chaplain to Philip II, who in 1584 protested to Cardinal Sirleto, then the director of the Roman Index, over the poor quality of his censors, “condemning works they have never read. . . . They are usually nonentities who know not a word either of Greek or of Hebrew, and lack either judgment or capacity. They are paid nothing for reading innumerable books, and therefore to discharge themselves from a task little to their taste, they take the way out which confers on them an air of learning, and suppress the books.”

Malicious and ignorant inquisitors were not a rarity, and none put his personal ambition to greater use than Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés, who undermined the career of Juan de Vergara and destroyed that of Bartolomé Carranza. In general, however, the involvement of the Inquisition in cultural matters was governed less by the personality or inadequacy of the inquisitors than by the social climate. In literature, no less than in religious matters, prosecutions were set in motion largely by denunciations made by private individuals, so that the Inquisition, although prosecutor, was seldom the initiator. This can be seen in the brush that Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, had with the Inquisition, when current suspicions of conversos and illuminists caused him to be denounced because of his religious practices while a student at Alcalá in 1527.[104]

At Alcalá he developed links with others who were interested in improving their spiritual lives through the formation of small prayer groups consisting not of clergy but only of lay people.[105] Ignatius had a group consisting of three or four other young men, who dressed in a singular way—in long habits with hoods—and met in each other’s rooms for prayers. The circle was later widened with the addition of some women. Unfortunately, these happened to be the very months that the alumbrados were attracting the attention of Church authorities. At the end of 1526, Ignatius and his friends were warned by an officer of the Inquisition to change their spiritual methods and to dress more conventionally. The following April, Ignatius was arrested by the bishop’s tribunal on related charges, and a couple of months later was forbidden to teach his ideas publicly. In the summer he moved from Alcalá in order to get away from the harassment and settled in Salamanca, but was detained there for the same reasons and warned that he should study more before trying out spiritual methods. In addition to the doubts about his prayer activities, there was a lurking suspicious in the minds of the authorities that he and his friends were Jews or conversos. Ignatius indignantly rejected these suspicions, and ever thereafter treated with contempt the anti-Semitic attitude of officials in Castile. In the autumn, he left the hassle behind him, traveled north through Barcelona and took the road for Paris, where seven years later he and a group of friends founded the Society of Jesus. Ignatius never returned to Spain, where for a long time there continued to be a strong current of suspicion directed against him and his followers. Prominent clergy and prelates, usually from the rival Dominican order, never ceased to insinuate that the Jesuits were heretics. In 1553 a Dominican theologian was still insisting that Loyola had fled from Spain because he was an alumbrado.[106]

The change in the cultural climate in the 1550s had a crucial influence on the Inquisition, which hardened its attitudes rapidly under Valdés. Ideas that might in other times have been tolerated were now discouraged. One of the great sticking points was the use of language. Prior to the European Reformation, interpreting the sacred texts of the Church had been the preserve of a minority of scholars versed in arcane languages: Latin above all, but then also—with the humanists—Greek and Hebrew. Even in the early days of the Inquisition there were conflicts between scholars. University men had a long-standing dispute between “grammarians” (literary scholars) and theologians. In 1504 the Inquisitor General Diego de Deza confiscated the papers of the humanist Nebrija. Nebrija had dared to maintain that as a philologist he was no less capable than a theologian like Deza of determining the texts of Holy Scripture. Subsequently Nebrija was able to rely on the full protection of Cardinal Cisneros. In an Apologia ten years later, he accused Deza of seizing his writings “not to examine them or condemn them, but to stop me writing. That good prelate wanted to wipe out all traces of the two languages on which our religion depends [Hebrew and Greek].” The humanist commented indignantly on the injury to scholarship: “Must I reject as false what appears to me in every way as clear, true and evident as light and truth itself? What does this sort of slavery mean? What unjust domination when one is prevented from saying what one thinks, although to do so involves no slight or insult to religion!”[107]

The Reformation brought a different dimension to the fore, that of making Scripture and other sacred texts available to a public that had no knowledge of languages. Were ordinary readers capable of reading the text correctly or should vernacular translations be controlled and even prohibited? It was an issue that split learned opinion throughout Europe, and the Inquisition sooner or later had to take a stand on a number of questions.

How could one distinguish between orthodox and unorthodox piety if both used the same language? How could one grasp the real meaning of a religious text? Dissenting from the tendentious interpretation put on Carranza’s writings by Melchor Cano, his fellow Dominican Juan de la Peña argued that “it is impossible to avoid all the methods of expression used by heretics, unless we learn our speech all over again.” Yet the inquisitors were, of course, right to suspect—as in the case of the alumbrados and even more of the exiled Juan de Valdés—that heterodoxy was sheltering behind pious language. This did not stop many from criticizing the 1559 Index. In September that year, a Jesuit wrote:

The faint-hearted have reacted by becoming more faint-hearted and those dedicated to virtue are in dismay, seeing that the inquisitor general has published an edict forbidding almost all the books in Spanish that have been used up to now by those who try to serve God; and we are in times when women are told to stick to their beads and not bother about other devotions.[108]

On a number of crucial matters, therefore, opinions were sharply divided.

As might be expected, some of the bitterest intellectual conflicts of the period originated not in the Inquisition but among university professors. Personal malice and partisan interest were, then as now, potent forces. The drive against Erasmus at the University of Valencia in the 1520s, for example, took the form of a personal campaign promoted by the rector, Juan Celaya. On his initiative, the faculty refused a chair to the humanist Pedro Juan Oliver,[109] a move that may have prejudiced the development of classical studies at the university. Perhaps the most notorious conflict in which university men made use of the Inquisition for their own purposes originated in the malicious denunciations of some of his colleagues made by a professor at the University of Salamanca, León de Castro.

In December 1571 Castro and a Dominican colleague, Bartolomé de Medina, laid before the Inquisition at Valladolid some accusations against three professors at the university. The three in question were Luis de León of the Order of St. Augustine, Gaspar de Grajal and Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra. The denunciations said that they had taken heretical liberties with their study of Scripture and theology. Fray Luis in particular bore the brunt of the attack. Famous as a theologian and celebrated now as one of Spain’s finest poets, at the age of thirty-four he was elected to a chair at Salamanca. He thereby aroused the hostility of his rivals, who slandered him because of his converso descent and accused him of uttering dangerous theological propositions. It was said that he questioned the accuracy of the Vulgate translation of the Bible; preferred the Hebrew text to the Latin; translated the Song of Songs as a profane love song instead of a divine canticle; and held that scholastic theology harmed the study of Scripture.[110] Grajal[111] was arrested on similar charges on 22 March 1572. Five days later Luis de León and Martínez were taken into custody. Blind belief in the justice of their cause and in the benevolence of the Holy Office cheered the prisoners, but they were soon disillusioned. For Fray Luis it was to be the beginning of an imprisonment that lasted four years, eight months and nineteen days. Cut off almost completely from the outside world in the cells of the tribunal at Valladolid, his only consolation was the permission he received to read and write in his cell, out of which emerged his classic devotional treatise The Names of Christ. From the first he was aware of a campaign against himself, and he complained of the incredible slowness of the trial. On 18 April 1572 he wrote from his cell: “I have great suspicions that false testimony has been laid against me, for I know that in the last two years people have said and still say many things about me that are transparent lies, and I know that I have many enemies.”

He awaited justice, yet none was forthcoming, nor was there any promise of an early trial. His constant appeals were of no avail. A year later, on 7 March 1573, he was writing to the inquisitors: “It is now a year since I have been in this prison and in all this time you have not deigned to publish the names of witnesses in my case, nor have I been given any opportunity of a full defense.”

He was finally sentenced to a reprimand which involved retraction of the several propositions he was said to have held. In prison he had suffered despair, fever and humiliation. Release from the cells came in mid-December 1576. Weary but undefeated, he greeted his freedom with characteristic restraint:

Aqui la envidia y mentira

Me tuvieron encerrado.

dichoso el humilde estado

del sabio que se retira

y de aqueste mundo malvado,

y con pobre mesa y casa,

en el campo deleitoso,

con solo Dios se compasa,

y a solas su vida pasa

ni envidiado ni envidioso.

[Here envy and lies held me in prison. Happy the humble state of the scholar who retires from this malicious world and there in the pleasant countryside, with modest table and dwelling, governs his life with God alone, and passes his days all by himself, neither envied nor envying.]

Restored once more to his rostrum at the university, he is said to have begun his first lecture with the words, “As I was saying last time . . .” But for his enemies this was not the last time. In 1582 he was summoned to a second trial for having uttered rash propositions. The inquisitor general, Gaspar de Quiroga, intervened on his behalf and in 1584 he escaped with a warning to avoid controversial issues in future.[112]

Less fortunate than Fray Luis were his other colleagues at the university. Gaspar de Grajal, who had been arrested five days before, was thrown into the cells of the Inquisition. There his health gave way, and he died before judgment could be passed on him. A colleague from the university of Osuna, Alonso Gudiel, who was professor of Scripture there, was also arrested in the same month on the basis of Castro’s accusations. Before this case had been dealt with he also died in prison, in April 1573. The only one to outlast his treatment was Cantalapiedra, who had been professor of Hebrew at Salamanca and whose whole life had been dedicated to the study of Holy Scripture. His term of imprisonment in a Valladolid cell exceeded even that of Luis de León. It lasted for over five years, from March 1572 to May 1577, and despite his constant appeals for a quick decision there was no hurry to bring him to trial. Eventually he was freed but never regained his academic post. “I have labored to interpret scripture before the whole world,” he told the inquisitors in 1577, “but my only reward has been the destruction of my life, my honor, my health and my possessions.”[113] The bitter lesson he drew from this was drawn by many other contemporaries: “it is better to walk carefully and be prudent”(sapere ad sobrietatem).

The work of León de Castro was not yet over. The Hebrew scholar and humanist Benito Arias Montano had spent several years collaborating with Netherlands scholars on the preparation, patronized by Philip II, of a new Polyglot Bible, which was printed and issued in Antwerp in 1571 in eight volumes.[114] Provisional approval was secured from Rome in 1572 and 1576. There was, however, considerable criticism of the project in Spain. In 1575, writing from Rome, Montano complained of “a great rumor which a certain León de Castro of Salamanca has raised in that university, to criticize and discredit the greatest work of letters that has ever been published in the world, the Royal Bible which His Majesty has for the benefit of Christendom ordered to be printed in Antwerp under my direction.”

León de Castro was not the only critic. There were others, wrote Montano in 1579, “men of letters who seek to find and note some error in my writings, making extraordinary efforts to do so.”[115] It is easy to recognize in his words the conviction that he alone was right, and the others were mistaken. The conflict was one that all scholars have experienced, but in Montano’s case the fact is that the criticisms made of the Polyglot are now seen to have been in part justified. He was fortunate that the Holy Office was not brought into the quarrel.

Although the storm passed, Montano was the object of further, and this time indirect, attacks. In 1592 he was instrumental in bringing about a profound change in the spiritual life of José de Sigüenza, Jeronimite historian and monk of the Escorial, where Montano was librarian. Montano, it has been suggested, had heterodox views on religion that he had picked up in the Netherlands and may have communicated to Sigüenza. No evidence for this thesis has been found, but it is undeniable that Montano had an enormous influence on Sigüenza. In 1592 some of Sigüenza’s malicious colleagues, motivated in part by hostility to Montano’s Hebraic studies, denounced Sigüenza to the Inquisition. It was a brief three-month trial, and Sigüenza was completely exonerated.[116]

Another famous man of letters to fall foul of the Holy Office was Francisco Sánchez, “el Brocense,” professor of grammar at Salamanca. He was denounced in 1584 on charges of loose and presumptuous opinions on theological matters, and summoned before the tribunal of Valladolid. Although the tribunal voted for his arrest and the sequestration of his goods, the Suprema altered the sentence to one of grave reprimand only. Brocense’s turbulent and intemperate mind was not put off by this narrow escape, and he returned to the battle, disputing theology with theologians (once again it was a case of conflict between theologians and grammarians) and expressing contempt for Aquinas and the Dominicans. In 1593, at the age of eighty, this excitable old man found himself in trouble once more. Reports of his speeches were relayed to the tribunal of Valladolid, and in 1596 the Inquisition began proceedings. No action was taken until 1600, when he was put under house arrest and his papers sequestrated. Among the charges raised against him was that “he always subjects his understanding to obedience to the faith; but that in matters that are not of faith he has no wish to subject his understanding.”[117] In ill health and humiliated by his treatment, Sánchez died at the beginning of December 1600. Because of the scandal hanging over his name, he was denied funeral honors by the University of Salamanca.

These were virtually the only intellectuals of that time to have had brushes with religious authority, and in each case the conflict was provoked not by the Inquisition but by rivalry over the interpretation of sacred texts at one university, Salamanca. Nothing comparable happened in the rest of the peninsula. We cannot therefore suggest that the Holy Office was in some way a threat to freedom of thought in Spain. There were, however, two significant and worrying aspects to these events. One was the anti-Semitic tenor to the prosecutions. It is notable that three of the accused—Luis de León, Gaspar de Grajal and Alonso Gudiel—were of converso origin; and witnesses claimed that Cantalapiedra was also. “Grajal and Fray Luis are well known to be conversos, so I believe they wish to blot out our Catholic Faith and return to their law,” stated a witness.[118] A second aspect for concern was expressed by the accused themselves. When Luis de León heard of the arrest of his colleague Grajal he wrote indignantly to a friend in Granada, “This fate of the master has scandalized everyone and given just cause for keeping silent out of fear.” On another occasion, Fray Luis informs us, he had been lecturing about the fraternal correction of heretics when

those students who were furthest from the rostrum signaled that I should speak louder, because my voice was hoarse and they could not hear well. Whereupon I said, “I am hoarse, and it’s better to speak low like this so that the inquisitors don’t hear us.” I don’t know if this offended anyone.[119]

As a quantity of evidence—some of it noted elsewhere in this book—demonstrates, Spaniards in that age did not hesitate to express opinions about anything they wished to criticize, including the Inquisition. What Luis de León seemed to be implying was something different: the possibility that motivated persons would use existing legal processes to crush a differing point of view. It was a real fear, which haunted many in early modern Europe and continues to exist in many societies even today.[120] The prosecutions inspired a strong reaction from the Jesuit historian Mariana. In a famous passage, he said that the case

caused anxiety to many until they should know the outcome. There was dissatisfaction that persons illustrious for their learning and reputation had to defend themselves in prison from so serious a threat to their fame and good name. It was a sad state when virtuous men, because of their great achievements, had to undergo hostility, accusations and injuries from those who should have been their defenders. . . . The case in question depressed the spirits of many who observed the plight of another, seeing how much affliction threatened those who spoke freely what they thought. In this way, many passed over to the other camp, or trimmed their sails to the wind. What else was there to do? The greatest of follies is to exert oneself in vain, and to weary oneself without winning anything but hatred. Those who agreed with current ideas did so with even greater eagerness, and entertained opinions that were approved of and were the least dangerous, without any great concern for the truth.[121]

The problems of a handful of persons at Salamanca help us to set in perspective the view that the Inquisition was an enemy of intellectuals. Conflicts were surprisingly few, in part probably because writers steered clear of trouble. There were occasional prosecutions that in no way involved intellectual freedom. An example is that of the Seville writer Juan de Mal Lara. From 1561 to 1562 he was imprisoned by the Seville Inquisition, not for any errors but for allegedly writing defamatory verses.[122] The incident had no ill effect on his career. Conflicts between different approaches to learning or to spirituality inevitably continued. Where they could, protagonists would bring in the Inquisition on their side, using where possible (as in the Salamanca cases) anti-Semitic insinuations.

Almost invariably the Inquisition, like other policing bodies in all times and places, tended to operate in favor of the conservatives. When a learned and conservative Dominican at Salamanca in 1571 complained that “in this university there is great play about novelty and little about the antiquity of our religion and faith,”[123] he knew he could count on the Inquisition. When the inquisitorial prosecutor of el Brocense alleged that the latter was “a rash, insolent heretic, temerarious and stubborn like all grammarians and Erasmians,”[124] he was openly taking sides against university professors who analyzed texts (they were “grammarians”) and studied classical languages (“Erasmians”). The dispute among university teachers over how one should analyze texts of classical authors, and even of the Bible, became perilous ground because some inquisitors felt they should have a voice in it. It was no wonder that when the humanist Pedro Juan Núñez wrote to Jerónimo de Zurita in 1556, he complained that the inquisitors did not wish people to study humanities “because of the dangers present in them, for when a humanist corrects an error in Cicero he has to correct the same error in Scripture. This and other similar problems drive me insane, and often take away from me any wish to carry on.”[125]

The inquisitors, of course, did not create the trend nor set the pace. They were only a small part of an attitude that could be found in most of the post-Reformation world. In the same way the reaction against unorthodox spirituality was common to much of Counter-Reformation Europe, and the Inquisition was no innovator in this respect. A general (and not simply inquisitorial) suspicion of illuminism and certain types of popular religion explains the difficulties that St. Teresa of Avila experienced. On one occasion, she remarks in her autobiographical Life, “people came to me in great alarm, saying that these were difficult times, that some charge might be raised against me, and that I might have to appear before the inquisitors. But this merely amused me and made me laugh. I never had any fear on that score.”

In 1574 the autobiography, still in manuscript form, attracted suspicion in common with writings by some other beatas. Her adviser, Father Báñez, recommended that it not be published until after her death. She had problems subsequently in 1576 when denunciations were made to the tribunal of Seville against her and her reformed Carmelites, but the Inquisition did not press the matter. Seriously worried, she told one of her advisers, Father Gracián, “Father, would that we could all be burnt for Christ,” and on another occasion, “Father, the Holy Inquisition, sent by God to protect his faith, is hardly likely to harm someone who has such faith as I.”[126] After her death (1582) further denunciations were made against her in 1589–91 by Alonso de la Fuente, a friar with an obsession about illuminists, but the Inquisition ignored him.

The continuing history of the later alumbrados, with which the incident of St. Teresa is closely related, revolves around the denunciations made by Alonso de la Fuente from 1573 onwards against groups of adepts in Extremadura and later in Andalucia. Undoubtedly crazed, with a burning hatred of Jews and Jesuits, Fray Alonso was observant enough to be able to identify the new illuminism and its leaders, most of whom were clergy. In the town of Zafra, according to him, “there are seventy priests, and sixty of them are Jews.” He also picked on the influential priest Juan de Avila, who was working in Baeza, and accused him of being an illuminist. The inquisitors happened to value his information, which helped make possible his short (he died in 1594) and destructive career. At an auto de fe in Llerena on 14 June 1579, twenty alumbrados were among the sixty penitents. The group had unusual beliefs, rejecting the Church and Christ and centering their devotion on “God.” Their leader, Hernando Alvarez, “said that Jesus Christ was good for nothing except to be a gipsy.” Subsequently, alumbrados in Andalucia appeared in an auto held at Córdoba on 21 January 1590.[127]

An important undercurrent in the academic disputes of the time was, we have seen, the suspicion directed against writers of Jewish origin. The identification of creativity with conversos became, in the hands of the twentieth-century scholar Américo Castro, a tool of literary analysis.[128] A key part in this analysis was concerned with the impact of the Inquisition on conversos and, by implication, on Spanish literature. Castro argued in several brilliant essays that the Semitic background of Spain, as expressed through the careers of thinkers and writers of Jewish origin, contributed to the formation of an intense creative consciousness. In line with the Liberal preconceptions of his time, he argued that the Inquisition crushed all intellectual life but converso creativity was rich enough to be stimulated even under persecution. Enthusiastic followers of his thesis, using racial origins as a key to their approach, offered a vision of peninsular history in which the crucial element was the suffering “converso,”[129] seen as the key to Spain’s genius.

The most notable attempt to use the interpretation was in studies on the Celestina, on the premise that its author, Fernando de Rojas, was a converso.[130] It is incontestable that some of the best known figures of Hispanic culture in the time of the Inquisition were of Jewish origin. Among the religious (and literary) figures were the reformer St. Teresa of Avila and the poet St. John of the Cross. Diligent researchers have put together a list of many other significant names from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, all of them occupying a central place in Hispanic culture as clergy, poets, preachers, nuns, writers and scholars. They have suggested that many other personages, such as Hernando de Talavera, Arias Montano and Bartolomé de las Casas, were also of converso origin.[131] The most enthusiastic have not hesitated to claim Miguel de Cervantes and the painter Diego de Velázquez as conversos. The conclusions arrived at by supporters of this approach are principally two. First, Jewish blood was the most creative element in Hispanic culture. Second, since the Inquisition actively discriminated against people of Jewish origin, it was directly responsible for crushing Spanish creativity.

These hypotheses—which have for the last century provoked deep ideological quarrels among Castilian scholars[132]—concern us here only with respect to the role of the Inquisition. A crucial distinction should probably be made between, on one hand, the existence of anti-Semitic sentiment in Spanish society and, on the other hand, the persecution of individual converso writers. Thanks to generations of polemic and prejudice, anti-Semitism was commonplace in Golden Age Spain, and has been endemic in Spanish society down to today. It could be found anywhere, in popular conduct and elite attitudes, in universities and in the government. Inquisitors, like others, often shared an anti-Semitic viewpoint and brought it to bear in their work. In their experience, heresy had nearly always (judaizers, alumbrados, some Lutherans) been associated with people of Jewish origin.

The prominence in Spanish culture of some persons of Jewish origin, however, is itself an argument against assuming too easily that Spain’s society and Inquisition were rabidly anti-Semitic, or that peninsular culture was somehow damaged by it. The example of Teresa of Avila speaks for itself. She was notoriously of converso stock. Her grandfather was punished by the Inquisition in 1485 for allegedly judaizing. Yet the fact was never cited against her nor did it affect her career, or her subsequent adoption as patron saint of Spain in the seventeenth century. Numerous other cases may be cited (see chapter 12), among them the humanist Juan Luis Vives, who spent his entire career outside Spain.

Born in Valencia city of converso parents who continued to practice their Jewish religion in secret, Vives was sent by his father to study abroad in Paris at the age of sixteen in 1509, a year after the death of his mother in an epidemic. His life and career were thereafter based in the Netherlands, and though always conscious of his roots he was no longer an active part of the Hispanic world. Early in 1522 he heard (too late to be able to profit from it) that the second duke of Alba, Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo, had invited him to return to Spain as tutor to his grandson.[133] Even though the duke may have known of Vives’s Jewish origins, he and his wife certainly harbored no anti-Semitic prejudices, and members of their family were subsequently active patrons of Teresa of Avila. In the same year, 1522, Vives was invited to occupy a chair at the University of Alcalá, but hesitated. Family circumstances combined to complicate his life. In 1520 his father was arrested by the Inquisition as a judaizer and burnt alive in 1524. Four years later his long-dead mother was also prosecuted and her bones disinterred and burnt.[134] This shocking history had no impact on his standing in Spain, where he was always held in the highest respect by the establishment and his books circulated without problems. In the event, he chose to go to England rather than Spain, a country where, he felt, “everything is darkness and night, no less in what is happening than in what I feel.” The silence over his family background was a sign that Spaniards wished to conceal a problem. Indeed, his Jewish origins were hidden so effectively that scholars only learned about them in the twentieth century. For his part, Vives lost hope of ever achieving recognition in his homeland. Shortly before his death he stated that “Spaniards are indifferent to study. I shall be read there by few, and understood by even fewer.”[135]

Public figures continued to have problems if their converso origins clashed with anti-Semitic prejudices. But, as in the case of St. Teresa, there was no systematic pressure. A case in point is that of Diego Pérez de Valdivia, apostle of the Counter-Reformation in Catalonia in the 1580s.[136] Of converso origin, he spent several months in the cells of the Inquisition of Córdoba, where he was accused of asserting, among other things, that conversos were better people than non-conversos, and that “it is a sin to observe the principles of racial purity.” The incident was quietly buried by all concerned. Pérez spent his subsequent career in Barcelona where, with the support of bishops, Inquisition and clergy, he pursued a prominent career as religious writer, reformer and preacher.

A prolonged discussion of such cases—of which there are many—is unlikely to have much impact on those who share in the confrontation—dating back to the early nineteenth century—between two deeply entrenched ideological positions. One position, shared by the Liberals of that period and by “progressives” down to today, declares the Inquisition responsible for Spain’s intellectual backwardness and its alleged isolation from the modern world and from Europe. The other, held to no less passionately by conservatives, controverts these claims.

There are great names among the progressives. “It would seem superfluous to insist,” argued the historian Henry Charles Lea, “that a system of severe repression of thought by all the instrumentalities of Inquisition and state is an ample explanation of the decadence of Spanish learning and literature.”[137] For the English Catholic historian Lord Acton, the injury inflicted on literature by the Inquisition was “the most obvious and conspicuous fact of modern history.”[138] The scholar Américo Castro put the argument succinctly. Writing in exile from his study in Harvard, he asserted that “not thinking, not knowing, not reading” was the fate of Spaniards crushed by “the sadism and lust for plunder of those of the Holy Office.”[139]

On the opposing side, among the Catholic voices that expressed dissent the most striking was that of a young scholar of twenty-two, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, who produced a brilliant essay on Spanish Science (1876), which aimed to prove that the Inquisition had not eliminated learning in Spain. In a passage in his Historia de los heterodóxos españoles (1880), he denounced the Liberals passionately:

It is a matter not just of love for one’s country but also of historical justice to undo this progressivist legend, brutally imposed by the lawmakers of the Cortes of Cadiz, which presents us as a nation of barbarians in whom neither learning nor art could arise because all was suffocated by the smoke of the Inquisition’s pyres. Only crass ignorance of things Spanish could explain why in an official document for the decree abolishing the Holy Office they printed these words, an eternal evidence of shame for its authors: “Writing ceased in Spain when the Inquisition was established.”

“Writing ceased in Spain when the Inquisition was established!” Did it cease with the arrival at its peak of our classic literature, which possesses a theatre superior in fruitfulness and richness of invention to any in the world; a lyric poetry that nobody can equal in simplicity, sobriety and greatness of inspiration; among the poets, the only poet of the Renaissance to achieve a union of the old forms and the new spirit; a novelist who will remain as exemplary and eternal paragon of healthy and powerful naturalism; a school of mystics in whom the Castilian language appears to be a language of angels? The fact is that never in Spain was there more written, or better written, than in those two golden centuries of the Inquisition.[140]

The stirring words—based also, of course, on an ideological vision of the past—helped to rally conservative Spaniards who had on many fronts been losing the initiative to the floodtide of Liberalism in Spain. Basic to the indignant peroration, moreover, there was a simple question that Menéndez y Pelayo thrust before the eyes of his opponents. Had there really been a systematic repression of liberty and of thought? Did Spaniards really—as Américo Castro continued to maintain two generations later—stop thinking, writing and reading for three hundred years? The reality, as scholars realize, was that neither the Index nor the censorship system created an adequate machinery of control, and the Holy Office was never in a position to affect or dictate the cultural evolution of Spain.

The Index, for several reasons, had less impact than is often thought. First, most of the books banned in it were never even remotely in reach of the Spanish reader and had never been available in the peninsula. In order to compile their lists, the inquisitors (as we have seen) copied out foreign prohibitions (notably that of Louvain) or the items on offer at the famous book fairs of Frankfurt. The result—as anyone who manages to get sight of an Index can easily verify—was a long list of items, both unobtainable and incomprehensible, in foreign languages. For instance, the Index of 1583 prohibited 1,709 books in Latin, 215 in German, 104 in French, 72 in Italian and 18 in Portuguese.[141] The items in Castilian totaled 197, less than 1 percent of the total of works condemned. The Indexes are a very good guide to what the inquisitors would have liked to prohibit, but since Spaniards had no access to most of the books, the effective impact on their reading was minimal. Second, the Index was large, expensive, in short supply and inevitably both imperfect and out of date. It was consequently difficult to enforce. In Barcelona, where many bookstores refused to buy the Index because of its cost, banned books continued to be on sale years after appearing in the Index.[142] Third, the Index faced sharp criticism from booksellers and from those who felt that its criteria were faulty.

Finally, the bulk of creative and scientific literature available to Spaniards never appeared in the Index. The romances of chivalry which made up the staple reading of ordinary Spaniards at home and the campfire reading of adventurers on the American frontier—between 1501 and 1650 a total of 267 editions of chivalric novels was issued, two-thirds of them in the early sixteenth century[143]—were never proscribed, though often attacked. The riches of scholarship opened up by the imperial experience during the Inquisition’s great period were never affected: the histories of Herrera, Oviedo, Bernal Díaz and López de Gómara, the natural history of Sahagún, the treatises on mathematics, botany, metallurgy and shipbuilding that flourished under Philip II, never came within the ambit of the inquisitors. Long after the measures of 1558–59 Spain continued to profit from a world experience vaster than that of any other European nation. Its contribution to navigation, geography, natural history and aspects of medicine was highly valued in Europe, leading to some 1,226 editions of Spanish works of the period 1475–1600 being published abroad prior to 1800.[144]

Books published in Castilian were scarcely touched and certainly never blotted out by the Inquisition; many were avidly collected by book lovers throughout the continent. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, private and public libraries in the northern Netherlands stocked over 1,000 editions by Castilian authors, and 130 editions in translation from Castilian. In total, they stocked nearly 6,000 editions of works in all languages dealing with Spain.[145] In the same way, during the seventeenth century a number of Spanish literary works entered without impediment into France.[146]

The overall impact of systems of literary censorship is difficult to judge. How many people could read and might therefore be affected? An examination of 2,843 signatures for New Castile in the period 1540–1817 seems to indicate that 45 percent of them could read and write,[147] yet only eight people out of this total confessed to possessing a book. Moreover, we know that it was common for laborers to know how to sign (for their wages), without being able to read or write, so the analysis of signatures is doubtful as evidence. In practice, the great majority of Spaniards were never in contact with a book.[148] Nearly everywhere in Europe until the eighteenth century the transmission of culture remained oral, and the illiterate mass of the population was unaffected by literary controls. We should also bear in mind that Castile had one of the smallest book markets of the sixteenth century, a period when it published less than 3 percent of the books produced by Europeans.[149] At the great book fair periodically held at Frankfurt, Spanish books were almost nonexistent.[150]

Though some continue to believe that Spanish literature suffered at the hands of the Inquisition, there are four good reasons to question the belief. First, most Western countries had a comparable system of control, yet none appears to have suffered significantly.[151] Second, most prohibited books had a negligible readership in the peninsula. The works most in demand by the public were, as in other Catholic countries, religious and devotional works, and textbooks (such as Latin grammars) for use in schools. Few of these appeared on the Index. Third, those who really wished to obtain banned books of special interest—in astrology, medicine, scholarship—faced few obstacles. They brought books in personally, or through commercial channels, or asked friends abroad to send them.[152] Total freedom of movement between the peninsula and France and Italy guaranteed an unimpeded circulation of people, books and—at one remove—ideas. In 1585, when international tension was at its height and Spain had started building its famous Armada, the frontier with France at Irún was, according to the king’s own officials, an open door through which Spaniards, English, Italians, Portuguese, French and Netherlanders passed without restriction.[153] Finally, no evidence has ever emerged that the book controls eliminated promising new life among intellectuals or prejudiced existing schools of thought. Up to the mid-sixteenth century, the Inquisition played no significant negative role in the literary world, prosecuted no notable writer and interfered substantially only with some texts of Renaissance theatre.[154] Not until the onset of the Reformation, and many years after censorship was being practiced in England and France, did the Holy Office attempt to operate a system of cultural control.

The Inquisition’s overseeing of literature, in short, looked imposing in theory but was unimpressive in practice. A glance at the content of the later Indexes reveals that they had a limited, even petty role. Góngora had minor problems with the censor in 1627;[155] Cervantes had one line excised from the Quixote in 1632;[156] the expurgations of Francisco de Osuna and Antonio de Guevara in the Index of 1612 are trivial; that of Florián de Ocampo in 1632 ridiculous.[157] Many creative writers had brushes with the Inquisition, but the total effect of these incidents appears to have been so slight that no convincing conclusion can be drawn. Lope de Vega appeared on the Index, but a century after his death.

Some experts in literature maintain that even if there was little quantifiable damage to literary creativity, there was hidden damage. Writers, they argue (with specific reference to conversos) exercised self-censorship; and if they published, they did so in a “coded” language where words meant something different from what they appeared to mean. The approach is an intriguing (though unconvincing) way of analyzing literary works. As a literary and philosophical device, “dissimulation” was accepted at the time as necessary by a number of commentators, among them the English savant Francis Bacon and the Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius;[158] and was also proposed later in Torquato Accetto’s Dissimulazione onesta (1641). But the identification of hidden meanings is somewhat different from alleging hidden damage. Indeed, some writers who dissimulated were also those—Quevedo is a case in point[159]—who most openly challenged authority.

The fact is that book control and censorship were systematically evaded in all countries where practiced. In both Italy[160] and France[161] the attempts at control were both “futile” and “inefficient.” In England, likewise, despite indubitably harsh laws (and more death sentences than in Spain!), “authors rarely encountered difficulties.”[162] The evidence for Spain is clear enough. Though some scholars differ,[163] in general there are no grounds for believing that Spaniards were unique among Europeans in their efficiency at imposing control,[164] or that they were subjected to a regime of “thought control” which “fossilized academic culture” for three hundred years.[165] The book trade continued to function successfully for a long time without disruption, as we know from the evidence of Barcelona. At a later date, when authors tended to publish in the vernacular rather than in Latin, the nature of the trade changed; but if there was an “almost total rift from the book culture of Europe,”[166] the Holy Office was hardly the culprit, since Spain never formed a significant part of that culture. If ordinary Spaniards did not read foreign authors it was for the very same reason that prevails today, when there is no Inquisition looking over their shoulders: the books were not available in Spanish or were too specialized for their tastes.

The impact of the Inquisition on science was minimal, and largely indirect. Spaniards seem not to have been in the front rank of inquiry into knowledge, and in the early modern period had possibly the least dedication to science, measured by the university affiliation of scientists,[167] of any nation in Western Europe. Those who took learning seriously went to Italy. Thanks to access to Italian and French expertise, scientific inquiry in Spain did not collapse. Technology filtered into the country: some foreign treatises were translated; engineers were imported by the state. Foreign technicians—all of them Catholic—came to the peninsula with their expertise. Above all, the enormous influence of Spain’s New World through the contact it afforded with new perspectives,[168] new materials, new knowledge of plants, trees, medicines and animals, helped to stimulate the European mind and push it into a new dimension of activity.[169] The Inquisition was marginal to all these developments, did not impede them, and did not normally interfere unless there was a specific problem concerned with matters of faith. Scientific books written by Catholics tended to circulate freely (a minor exception, the works of Paracelsus and a few others were banned).[170] The 1583 Quiroga Index had a negligible impact on the accessibility of scientific works, and Galileo was never put on the list of forbidden books. The most direct attacks mounted by the Inquisition were against selected works in the area of astrology and alchemy, sciences that were deemed to carry overtones of superstition.[171]

There was consequently no pressure inhibiting Spaniards from taking part in European advances. If they did so to only a limited extent,[172] and if there was an imbalance between scientific progress in the peninsula and in the rest of Europe during and after the Renaissance, the Inquisition was not perceptibly responsible. The undiscriminating range of books it prohibited may well have impacted on some branch of science and dissuaded some concealed scholar of genius, but there is not a single known case of this happening and it would not have had serious consequences for learning during the sixteenth century. By the late seventeenth century, on the other hand, it was clear that English and Dutch intellectuals—writing in languages that Spaniards found incomprehensible—had become the pioneers in science and medicine. They were Protestants, and their books automatically fell within the scope of inquisitorial bans. Logically, some Spaniards from the mid-seventeenth century began to look on the Holy Office as the great obstacle to learning. The complaint of the young Valencian physician Juan de Cabriada in 1687 echoed the outlook of his generation: “how sad and shameful it is that, like savages, we have to be the last to receive the innovations and knowledge that the rest of Europe already has.”[173] Those who could read French in Cabriada’s day managed to import scientific and philosophical works privately. Descartes was being read in Oviedo, Hobbes in Seville.[174] For a century thereafter, however, intellectuals in the peninsula faced an uphill struggle in their attempts to make contact with the new learning. The Scientific Revolution came, but it passed Spain by. When the Royal Society of London in the 1660s began to organize its scientific links with intellectuals from the continent, not a single Spaniard featured.

In the ports, where contact with the exterior was easier, Spaniards with the ability and interest had access to European thought. In 1691 the inquisitors of Seville seized the library of a priest, Juan Cruzado de la Cruz y Messa, a scholar who not only had an apparent command of English, French, Italian and Dutch, but also an extensive interest in science.[175] The 1,125 volumes, constituting one of the most remarkable book collections to have emerged from that period, included a Dutch/French and a French/English dictionary to help with vocabulary, various treatises on optics, astronomy, trigonometry, navigation and mathematics, and the works of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, and other European authors, as well as maps in Flemish and Hoefnagel’s volumes on the cities of Europe. It is unclear why Cruzado came to the attention of the inquisitors, but his library is evidence that those who wished could have access to any aspect of European thought. And there were no serious impediments. The Inquisition did not, for example, interfere with mail. In those same years the professor of astronomy at Salamanca complained to a French correspondent in Madrid that “these wars with France are extremely irksome to us since they impede the passage of books from there.”[176]

Looking back on Spain’s failure to participate in the mainstream of Western science, later commentators tried to seek an explanation. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Valencian scholar Gregorio Mayans decided that “one of the reasons why the arts and sciences have declined so greatly has been the law promulgated by Philip II, prohibiting study in foreign universities.”[177] We have already commented on the misapprehension over the 1559 decree to which Mayans referred. Unwilling to seek any further for an explanation, subsequent writers did not hesitate to blame the Inquisition. It was to these that the young intellectual Menéndez y Pelayo addressed his essays on Spanish Science (1876), to which we have referred. It was the first serious look at what may have happened to creative and scientific literature in the generations when Spain’s culture drifted apart from Europe, but the arguments were ignored by those wedded to the view that Spanish learning was backward solely because of the Inquisition. The debate over science continues, always with strongly ideological overtones, and mordant comments such as the observation by Ortega y Gasset: “Spanish science has always been barbaric, mystical and errant, and I presume that it will always remain so.”

The Inquisition, it has been repeated interminably,[178] not only cut the peninsula off from the outside world (by the decrees of 1558–59) but also forbade Spaniards traveling abroad or having contact with other nations. The truth is that no legislation to this effect ever existed in early modern Spain, and common sense demonstrates quite the reverse. In fact, no Europeans traveled so much as the Spaniards. Their travel literature became a standard point of reference for seafaring nations such as the British and the Dutch.[179] Under Habsburg rule the armies of Spain went everywhere in Europe, its ships traversed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and its language was spoken from central Europe to the Philippines. Tens of thousands of Spaniards went abroad every year, mainly to serve in the armed forces. A scholar reminds us: “early modern Spain was a highly mobile society, its people constantly on the move.”[180] Cultural and commercial contact with all parts of Western Europe, especially the Netherlands and Italy, continued absolutely without interruption. We may conclude that it is both implausible and untrue to suggest that Spain was denied contact with the outside world, or that the Inquisition was responsible for it.

An astonishing—and admittedly exceptional—example of this international contact was the labor of Fernando Colón, son of the great explorer Christopher Columbus. In the 1520s, during his travels through Europe with the court of the emperor Charles V, he built up one of the richest collections of books ever known, which came to form part of the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville.[181] Fortuitously, as we have seen, the collection included over five hundred editions of German and Swiss theology of the Reformation period, which lay tranquilly on the bookshelves until rooted out by zealous censors a hundred years later.

The image of a nation sunk in fear, inertia and superstition because of the Inquisition was part of the mythology created around the tribunal in the nineteenth century and transmitted to later generations. The reality was that no less than the English or the French, Spaniards said and did what they liked (see chapter 13). Like other European states, the country had active political institutions at all levels. Free discussion of political affairs was tolerated, and public controversy occurred on a scale paralleled in few other countries. Unpalatable aspects of national life—anti-Semitism, intolerance to Moriscos and their eventual expulsion, oppression of peasants, high taxes—were nowhere so hotly debated as among Spaniards themselves. The historian Antonio de Herrera affirmed that such free discussion was essential, for otherwise “the reputation of Spain would fall rapidly, for foreign and enemy nations would say that small credence could be placed in the words of her rulers, since their subjects were not allowed to speak freely.”[182] In the seventeenth century the arbitristas continued the tradition of controversy, and the diplomat Saavedra y Fajardo commented approvingly that “though grumbling is in itself bad, it is good for the state. Grumbling is proof that there is liberty in the state; in a tyranny it is not permitted.”[183]

Freedom in Spain was a positive side of the picture. The negative side was the unquestionably parochial state of peninsular elite culture, a situation that had little to do with the Inquisition. As we have commented, thousands of Spaniards traveled throughout the Western world. Despite these extensive imperial contacts, Spain was and remained on the fringe of the major currents in West European philosophy, science and creative art. In the great age of empire, Philip II drew for technological expertise on Italians, Belgians and Germans rather than Spaniards.[184] Spaniards did not export what expertise they may have had, but instead called on outsiders to contribute theirs. In the same way they exported little in the way of books, but imported them. “The Iberian peninsula was not well placed to contribute to the book market, and books published in Spain made little impact on the wider European market.”[185] Spanish printing, in the new age of book production, was probably the worst in Western Europe.[186] The Castilian elite, with a few prominent exceptions, was criticized at the time by Italian and German diplomats for its lack of cultural sophistication.[187] Saavedra y Fajardo commented that northern Europeans “traverse the world and learn languages, arts and sciences; Spaniards remain in tight seclusion in their country.”[188] The Inquisition had no responsibility for the situation, but many observers felt—and with good reason—that it incarnated in some sense the backward aspects of peninsular society. This, as we shall see, contributed powerfully to mold the enduring image of the Holy Office.

Spaniards began to expand their vision in the eighteenth century, when a new French dynasty helped to change perspectives. For the first time, thanks to French sponsorship, Spaniards explored the scientific wonders of the New World. A French-directed expedition in 1735, with the participation of two young naval cadets, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, turned into the first major contribution of the Spanish empire to the observational science of the Enlightenment.[189] By this time the Inquisition was almost an irrelevance. From the 1680s there were signs of active contact with European ideas. By the 1750s several Spaniards, albeit hesitantly,[190] were abreast of new trends in medical science and philosophy. They were exceptional: for the most part, the Spanish elite was cut off from cultural contact by an unreformed educational system, and by lack of familiarity with any of the languages in which the new thinking was being published. It is significant that we know of no substantial literary correspondence between Spanish and European intellectuals before the late eighteenth century, when the literary contacts of the Valencian scholar Mayans i Ciscar (who looked to Italy rather than northern Europe for his inspiration) began to take shape. There was therefore a serious intellectual divide between the south and the north. “If a nobleman wishes to educate his sons,” a prominent minister in Madrid reported in 1713, “he has to send them to colleges in Bologna, Rome, France and other places.”[191] Spain consequently never featured as a desirable component of the Grand Tour: its universities were (explained one pained English visitor in 1664) “just where our universities were 100 years ago.”[192] There was no apparent reason for going there; like the rest of southern Europe, it remained on the outer confines of the European experience. “No country is less known to the rest of Europe,” Dr. Johnson concluded in 1761.[193]

7

THE END OF MORISCO SPAIN

We were taken to the Inquisition where, for no more than following the truth, we were deprived of life, property and children.

—A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MORISCO EXILE IN TUNIS

In the eleventh century, the tide began to turn against Islam. The pope in 1095 summoned all Christian princes to come together in a great crusade against the infidel.[1] Already, in northern Spain, Christian princes from France and Burgundy were helping the kings of Castile and Aragon against the Muslims, and in 1085 Toledo was captured. Finally, in 1212 a combined Christian force put together by Castile met the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa and shattered their control in the peninsula. By the mid-thirteenth century the Muslims retained power only in the kingdom of Granada. Two centuries of formal peace ensued. With the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella to the throne in 1474, belligerent ardor was redirected into a new war of conquest. Of the two realms of Spain, Aragon had been the one with an imperial history, but Castile with its superior resources in men and money rapidly took over the leadership.

The war against Granada, which excited the imagination of Christian Europe, took on the status of a European crusade, blessed by the papacy and with funds and volunteers from all over the continent. Campaigns began in 1482 and still retained much of the old medieval spirit: the deeds of Rodrigo Ponce de León, marquis of Cadiz, seemed to recall those of the famed warrior the Cid. But the age of chivalry was passing. The brutal enslavement of the entire population (fifteen thousand people) of Málaga after its capture in 1487 gave proof of the savagery of the Christians.[2] Military idealism in that period continued to be fed by chivalric novels, notably the Amadis de Gaula (1508), but beneath the superficial gloss of gallantry there burned an ideological intolerance typified by the conquests in Africa of Cardinal Cisneros, who helped to finance the capture of Mers-el-Kebir in 1505 and Oran in 1509 (the latter an event marred by mass slaughter of the defenseless civil population).[3]

Ten years of war ended with the capitulation of Granada in 1492. The end of the kingdom of al-Andalus meant that the Muslims (known among Spaniards as “Moors”) ceased to exist as a nation, and became no more than a minority within a Christian country. As subjects of a Christian king they were now, like the Muslims who had for centuries lived under Christian rule, known as “Mudéjares.” The terms of the capitulation of Granada were generous to the vanquished and reflected medieval traditions of coexistence. The Mudéjares were guaranteed their customs, property, laws and religion. They kept their own officials, to be supervised, however, by Castilian governors. Those wishing to emigrate were allowed to so.

The reality of the settlement was somewhat different from these terms. Many of the elite found life under Christian rule intolerable and passed over into North Africa. Reorganization of the territory was entrusted to Iñigo López de Mendoza, second count of Tendilla and later first marquis of Mondéjar. Hernando de Talavera was appointed first archbishop, and encouraged conversions by means of charitable persuasion, respect for Mudéjar culture and the use of Arabic during religious services. Progress was slow, and in 1499 Cisneros asked Ferdinand and Isabella, who were then in Granada, for permission to pursue a more vigorous policy.

There appear to have been no compulsory conversions. But the policy of mass baptisms provoked a brief revolt in December 1499 in the Albaicín, the Muslim quarter of Granada. The rising was pacified only through the good offices of Tendilla and Talavera. There were further scattered revolts in other parts of the south, through most of 1500 and into the early weeks of 1501. They presented the government with a serious policy problem. Some, including Tendilla and Cisneros, favored harsh measures. Cisneros’s view was that by rebellion the Mudéjares had forfeited all rights granted by the terms of capitulation and they should be offered a clear choice between baptism or expulsion. His personal preference was “that they be converted and enslaved, for as slaves they will be better Christians and the land will be pacified for ever.”[4] Ferdinand, by contrast, favored moderation. “If your horse trips up,” he told his councilors, “you don’t seize your sword to kill him, instead you give him a smack on his flanks. So my view and that of the queen is that these Moors be baptized. And if they don’t become Christians, their children and grandchildren will.”[5] It was an important indication of the widely different policy that the monarchs would adopt towards the Muslims in Castile and in Aragon. In Granada and Castile, as Ferdinand saw it, circumstances made obligatory conversion inevitable. In Aragon, there was as yet no need for that approach.

Over the next few months the Mudéjares of Granada were systematically baptized; a few were allowed to emigrate. By 1501 it was officially assumed that the kingdom had become one of Christian Muslims—the Moriscos. They were granted legal equality with Christians, but were forbidden to carry arms and were subjected to pressure to abandon their culture. A huge bonfire of Arabic books, ordered by a royal decree of October 1501,[6] was held in Granada. It was the end of the capitulations and of Muslim al-Andalus. “If the king of the conquest does not keep faith,” lamented a contemporary Arab leader and scholar, Yuce Venegas, at that time resident on his estates near Granada, “what can we expect from his successors?”[7]

With Granada apparently converted, Isabella was not inclined to tolerate Muslims elsewhere in her realms. On 12 February 1502 all Mudéjares in Castile were offered the choice between baptism and exile. Virtually all of them, subjects of the crown since the Middle Ages, chose baptism, since emigration was rendered almost impossible by stringent conditions. With their conversion Islam vanished from Castilian territory, and continued to be tolerated only in the crown of Aragon. The different policy adopted in the two realms demonstrated that unity of religion was not an immediate priority of the crown.[8] By repeating a step that had already been taken against the Jews, Isabella abolished plurality of faiths in her dominions of Castile but also created within the body of Christian society the wholly new problem of the Moriscos.

From about 1511, various decrees attempted to make the new converts modify their cultural identity and abandon Muslim practices. These measures culminated in an assembly convoked by the authorities in Granada in 1526. At the meeting all the distinctive characteristics of Morisco civilization—the use of Arabic, their clothes, their jewelry, the ritual slaughter of animals, circumcision[9]—came under attack. A decree was passed encouraging intermarriage between Old Christians and Moriscos. It was also decided to transfer the local tribunal of the Inquisition from Jaén to Granada.

In the crown of Aragon there was no comparable pressure on the Mudéjares. The principal reason for this was the great power of the landed nobility and the authority of the Cortes. On the estates of the nobles the poorer Mudéjares formed a plentiful, cheap and productive source of labor, from which the expression arose “Mientras más Moros más ganancia” (More Muslims, more profit). Whether to placate his nobility or in pursuit of a moderate policy, Ferdinand repeatedly warned the inquisitors of Aragon not to persecute the Mudéjar population or resort to forced conversions. The Mudéjares therefore continued to lead an independent existence until the revolt of the Comuneros in 1520.

At the same time that the Comunidades of 1520 broke out in Castile, Valencia experienced disturbances of its own. Here the rebels, grouped into Germanías, or brotherhoods, organized an urban revolution directed against the local aristocracy. Valencia had the largest Muslim population of any part of Spain. The Mudéjares were almost exclusively a rural community and were subjected to the big landowners of the realm. The Germanía leaders saw that the simplest way to destroy the power of the nobles in the countryside would be to free their vassals, and this they did by baptizing them. The years 1520–22 in Valencia thus witnessed the forcible baptism of thousands of Muslims. The defeat of the rebels by royal troops should in theory have allowed the Mudéjares to revert to Islam, since forced baptisms were universally regarded as invalid. But the authorities were not so eager to lose their new converts. The Inquisition in particular was concerned to hold the Mudéjares to the letter of their baptism. To the argument that the conversions had taken place under compulsion, the standard answer was once again given that to choose baptism as an alternative to death meant the exercise of free choice, which rendered the sacrament of baptism valid.[10] The Inquisition was therefore ordered to proceed on the assumption that all properly administered baptisms were valid.

It now seemed incongruous to tolerate Muslims elsewhere in the crown of Aragon. In November 1525 Charles V issued a decree ordering the conversion of all Mudéjares in Valencia by the end of the year, and of those elsewhere by the end of January 1526. From 1526 the Muslim religion no longer existed in Spain officially: all Mudéjares were now Moriscos. Writing to the pope in December that year, Charles V admitted that “the conversion was not wholly voluntary among many of them, and since then they have not been instructed in our holy faith.” Considerable efforts were subsequently made to evangelize the new “converts” in the regions of greatest concentration. Among the clergy leading the campaign was the distinguished humanist Antonio de Guevara, who labored in Valencia and Granada.[11]

The situation of the Moriscos varied across the peninsula according to density of population. The highest concentration was in the kingdom of Granada, where Moriscos in the 1560s were some 54 percent of the population; in areas such as the Alpujarra mountains they constituted the totality. In Valencia they formed a third of the population in the late sixteenth century, in Aragon about a fifth. In Catalonia Moriscos were a tiny group, and in Castile they were proportionately even less, perhaps a total of some twenty thousand in 1502,[12] scattered throughout the country in small urban morerías and living at peace with their Christian neighbors.

There were major differences between the Morisco communities. The Granadans, recently subjugated, included a flourishing upper class, preserved their religion and culture intact and usually spoke Arabic (algarabía, the Christians called it). They were an integral Islamic civilization. The Valencians were largely a rural proletariat, but because they lived quite separately from the Christian population and were so numerous, they managed to preserve most of their customs, religion and language. Elsewhere in Spain, Arabic was almost unknown among the Moriscos. All spoke a form of Castilian. In Aragon, where Mudéjares had lived longest among Christians, the decline of Arabic produced the beginnings, in the sixteenth century, of a Morisco literature written in Spanish. Residual knowledge of Arabic, however, was sufficient to warrant the import of sacred texts from abroad.[13] Aragonese Moriscos, for the most part, lived and dressed like their Christian neighbors; they differed only in religion.[14]

Though deprived of access to Christian society by discrimination, the Moriscos were not uniformly poor. As a separate community, they had an economic life parallel to that of Christians. The majority worked the land. But in Aragon they also herded flocks of sheep and cattle for the market; in Saragossa they were carpenters, metalworkers and cloth workers. They were active in the building industry, and produced swords and arms for sale. Some were traders, investing their profits in the land.[15] In towns wholly populated by Moriscos, such as Almonacid de la Sierra (in Aragon), the inhabitants logically produced their own liberal professions: a surgeon, a scrivener, a lawyer, a noble, in addition to lesser callings.[16]

To maintain their internal integrity, the Muslim leaders strengthened the social role of their community, the aljama. It was an institution that allowed them to preserve their autonomy and culture, but at the same time made it possible to cooperate on good terms with the authorities.[17] They spoke among themselves the version of Spanish known as aljamía.[18] When written down, in Arabic script, this produced a secret literature that the inquisitors were unable to read and that they normally categorized, when they discovered and confiscated writings, as “Korans.” Not until the middle of the nineteenth century did the Arabist Pascual de Gayangos, resident for nearly half his life in France and England, discover that what appeared to be Arabic was in reality a special variant of Castilian.[19]

Until the early years of the reign of Philip II the efforts of the Inquisition to keep Moriscos to their nominal Christianity were little more than a gesture. The largest numbers to be prosecuted were in the crown of Aragon, but they were only the tip of the iceberg of unbelief in Morisco Spain. There were two main reasons for the relative absence of prosecutions: the conviction of both Church and state that a proper program of conversion should be undertaken, and the strong opposition of Christian lords to any interference with their rights over their Morisco vassals. In Aragon, for instance, nearly 70 percent of the Moriscos were under noble jurisdiction.[20] We may add to these two reasons the fact that Mediterranean society, not only on Spain’s coast but throughout the inland sea as far as Greece, still accepted the possibility of social coexistence between Christians and Muslims. In some islands near Corfu, there were even cases of upper-class Muslim ladies who converted voluntarily to Christianity.[21]

In January 1526 the leaders of the Valencian Moriscos succeeded in obtaining from the crown and the inquisitor general Manrique a secret concordia, or agreement, that if they all submitted to baptism they would be free for forty years from any prosecution by the Holy Office, since it would be impossible for them to shed all their customs at once. In 1528 the agreement was made public, and in that same year the Cortes of Aragon, meeting at Monzón, asked Charles to prevent the Inquisition prosecuting Moriscos until they had been instructed in the faith. Their request was timely, for the guarantee was no more lasting than the one granted to the Mudéjares of Granada. The Holy Office interpreted the accord to mean that it could bring to trial those converts who had slipped back into Islamic practices.

In December of 1526, the year when the Inquisition was transferred from Jaén to Granada, regulations were reissued forbidding Granada Moriscos to use the Arabic language, Muslim clothes or Muslim names. Morisco money offered to Charles brought about the suspension of these rules. But the removal of one burden was balanced by the imposition of another in the form of the Inquisition, whose activity the Moriscos continued trying to curtail over the next generation. In Aragon, protests raised against the Inquisition in the Cortes of Monzón of 1533 included claims that the tribunal was seizing land confiscated from its victims, to the detriment of the feudal owners of the land.[22] Similar complaints were raised in the Cortes of 1537 and 1542. In 1546 the pope intervened and agreed that for a minimum period of ten years the Inquisition should not confiscate any property from the Moriscos.

Only the year after this, however, we find the Cortes of Valencia stating that the tribunal was disregarding such injunctions. It was after great difficulty that finally in 1571 the Inquisition showed itself open to compromise. The resulting accord was embodied in a decree of October 1571 by which, in return for an annual payment of 2,500 ducats to the Inquisition, the tribunal agreed not to confiscate or sequestrate the property of Moriscos on trial for heresy. Monetary fines could be levied, but with a limit of 10 ducats only. The agreement benefited all sides: the Inquisition, since it brought in a regular annual revenue; the Moriscos, since it protected property for members of their families; and the lords of the Moriscos, since it preserved lands they had leased to their Morisco dependents.

The religious problem, and the activities of the Inquisition, aggravated the position of the Moriscos and provoked many of the conflicts of this period. Spanish publicists later claimed that these events led logically to the decision to expel the Moriscos. In reality, expulsion was never inevitable. There was little difference between the tensions of the time and the equally tense coexistence of the Middle Ages. Islamic civilization was able to cope with the pressures placed on it. Christian society, for its part, regularly turned a blind eye to the Islamic activities of the Moriscos.

Though Moriscos still retained many of their old social customs, and fought to preserve their own religion, they gradually came to realize that some compromises would have to be made. Forced to conform to Christianity, they sought advice from their leaders. In about 1504 a mufti living in Oran (north Africa) issued a fatwa, or opinion, on the situation of Muslims living in Spain. He ruled that in times of persecution Muslims could conform to virtually all outward rules of Christianity without defecting from their beliefs.[23] This ruling, which permitted taqiyya (dispensation from religious obligations when under persecution), circulated in text among the Moriscos in the 1560s. The practice made it possible for Moriscos to cling on to their religion.[24] It also enabled them to live in their own country, Spain, on terms that they could in some measure decide for themselves. But it did not close their minds to Christianity. On the contrary, many accepted that they could be partially Christian and share in both religions, a state of mind to be found at the same period in southeast Europe, where many Muslims rejected orthodoxy in favor of a more open, syncretic approach.[25] The Mediterranean, we have already seen (chapter 1), had no sharp ideological divide: Christians and Muslims (not to mention several minority faiths) lived and traded together, even in times of armed conflict.[26]

In many parts of the peninsula, consequently, there continued to be a practical coexistence between Old Christians and New Christians of Muslim origin. The town of Arcos de Medinaceli, on the estates of the duke of Medinaceli near the frontier of Castile with Aragon, was in the 1550s nine-tenths Morisco in population. The Moriscos played their due part in the financial and political administration of the town, sharing municipal posts equally with Old Christians.[27] When Moriscos were buried, Old Christians attended the funeral. It was a poor community, which may explain the absence of anything beyond the formal signs of Christianity in the religion of the Moriscos. But there was clear evidence that many of them, even though formally Catholic, also had special rites—in their fasts, their burials, their ablutions—that differentiated them from other Christians. None of this altered the tranquility in which the communities in Arcos lived during the two generations before the revolt in Granada.

It was not a unique situation. Reading the times through the perspective of inquisitorial documents, one can be misled into imagining a permanent state of confrontation. Though there were important and periodic conflicts, what also seems striking is the absence of confrontation in many parts of Spain through much of the sixteenth century.[28] It was in this period too that the Christians could afford still to entertain a romanticized vision of their links with Moriscos, with the appearance in 1565 of the romance Abencerraje y Jarifa, a story of love between Christian and Muslim. Some Moriscos also took a universal view of religious truth. The Inquisition of Toledo tried one for saying “that every one should be allowed to practice his own religion,” another for maintaining “that the Jew and the Muslim could each be saved in his own law.”[29]

There was a notable increase in tension between the communities by the end of the sixteenth century, though to present an image of oppression by Christians based on sexual hatred goes beyond the general run of the available evidence.[30] The ability of the communities to coexist was recognized and welcomed by many, but did not alter the fact that as a whole the Moriscos refused assimilation.[31] That—as social experts can recognize easily in the light of attempts today to integrate minorities of a different religion—was central. Apart from culture, dress and communal autonomy, the principal problem remained that of conversion, for Moriscos overwhelmingly rejected the type of Christianity offered to them.

In 1513 archbishop Talavera of Granada, who had encouraged his Moriscos to sing Arabic hymns at mass, complained to the crown about cultural pressure put upon them. Francisco Núñez Muley, a Morisco leader who in his youth was page to Talavera, recalled how the archbishop went through the mountains of Granada to preach and say mass. Since there was no organ for music he made the natives play the zambra (a traditional dance), and during mass always said the greeting “The Lord be with you” in Arabic. “I remember this,” Núñez reminisced, “as if it were yesterday.”[32] Many Christian nobles understood the need for some cultural tolerance. In 1514 the count of Tendilla criticized Ferdinand’s attempt to make Moriscos abandon their clothing: “What clothing did we use to wear in Spain, how did we wear our hair, what sort of food did we eat, if not in the Morisco style?”[33]

But the early missionary efforts were fruitless. When he went to Granada in 1526, Charles V was informed that “the Moriscos are truly Muslims: it is twenty-seven years since their conversion and there are not twenty-seven or even seven of them who are Christians.” In Granada and Valencia they held fast to their religion, observing prayers, fasts and ablutions, and were strengthened in their faith by their clergy, the alfaquis. Had religious practice alone been at issue, social tension might not have been so high. But in the everyday contact with Old Christians there was periodic irritation and conflict over dress, speech, customs and, above all, food. Moriscos slaughtered their animal meat ritually, did not touch pork (the meat most commonly eaten in Spain) or wine, and cooked only with olive oil, whereas Christians cooked with butter or lard. They tended also to live apart in separate communities, which could lead to antagonism: for example, in Aragon there was friction between highland Christians (the montañeses) and Moriscos living in the plains. Even in Castile, where the older Morisco communities were more assimilated, there were cases such as Hornachos (Extremadura), a flourishing and almost entirely Morisco town of five thousand people which at the expulsion in 1610 emigrated in its entirety to Morocco. Though religious zeal was weaker in Castile and in those parts of Aragon where coexistence with Christians had diluted traditional practices, Islam endured because of community solidarity. In general, Moriscos were strongly repelled by the doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and felt extreme repugnance at the sacraments of baptism (families would wash the chrism off on returning home, and hold a Muslim ceremony), penitence and the Eucharist (Morisco irreverence at mass was proverbial).[34]

There were many attempts to catechize them.[35] From 1526, missionaries were sent out in Valencia and Granada. In the 1540s a Franciscan, Fray Bartolomé de los Angeles, carried out missions in Valencia; in the 1560s further campaigns were conducted there by Jesuits and other clergy. In 1566 the archbishop of Valencia, Martín de Ayala, published his manual Christian Doctrine in Arab and Castilian. Ayala also tried, with little success, to find clergy who knew, or could learn, Arabic. Juan de Ribera, archbishop of Valencia from 1568, initiated a financial scheme to increase the stipends of priests and make work among the Moriscos more congenial to the clergy. He also helped to found a seminary and a college for Morisco boys and girls. For the forty-three years that he held this see, Ribera made every effort to travel round his bishopric and attend to the needs of the Moriscos.[36]

Considerable opposition to the missionary program in the crown of Aragon came from the seigneurs, who had opposed the forced conversions of 1526 and at every stage fought the activities of the Inquisition. In 1561 in Valencia the inquisitor Miranda named members of the rich Morisco family of Abenamir as familiars of the Inquisition, but the duke of Segorbe, their overlord, ordered them to give up the appointment since his protection was sufficient for them. In 1566 the Inquisition of Aragon complained that “the seigneurs daily persecute the comisarios and familiars that the Holy Office has in their lands, expelling them and telling them that in their territory they want no Inquisition.”[37] It was in the nobles’ interest to keep Morisco dependents under their control, since they were a substantial source of revenue. In various meetings of the Cortes they pressed continually for Moriscos to be free from inquisitorial confiscations, a concession eventually granted in the 1571 agreement.

There were conflicts between nobles and the Inquisition. In 1541 a prominent Valencian grandee, the Admiral of Aragon, Sancho de Moncada, was reprimanded by the Inquisition for building a mosque for his Moriscos and telling them “that they should pretend to be Christians externally but remain Muslims internally.” In 1569 he was placed under house arrest for three years for persistently protecting his Muslim vassals against the Holy Office.[38] In 1571 the Grand Master of the Order of Montesa appeared in an auto de fe for protecting his Moriscos. In 1582 in Aragon when the lord of Ariza, Jaime Palafox, heard that the Inquisition had arrested three of his vassals, he and his men burst into the house of a familiar and beat and stabbed him to death. The courts sent him “for life” to the North African fortress of Oran.[39]

Even had the nobles been more cooperative, it is unlikely that the Moriscos would have responded favorably to Christian overtures. Supported by the taqiyya, they defiantly maintained and proclaimed their separateness. Maria la Monja of Arcos in 1524 said “that not for all the world would she cease saying that she had been a Muslim, so great a source of pride was it for her.”[40] The authorities, as the Granada regulations of December 1526 showed, were convinced that all Morisco customs were obstacles to the acceptance of Christianity. In 1538 a Morisco of Toledo was arrested by the Inquisition and accused of “playing music at night, dancing the zambra and eating couscous,” implying that these activities were heretical. In 1544 the synod of the bishopric of Guadix held that “it is suspicious to take baths, especially on Thursday and Friday night”! Even the Morisco manner of sitting—never on seats but always on the ground—could be viewed as evidence of a preference for Islam.

In several parts of Spain the Inquisition prosecuted Morisco religion when the occasion arose. In Daimiel (Ciudad Real), where the community had duly converted in 1502, a generation of tranquility was interrupted by an important series of arrests and prosecutions around 1540.[41] The most intense period of religious pressure did not come until after the provincial Church councils of 1565. Attempts to Christianize Spaniards, the clergy felt, made no sense if not applied also to the Moriscos. In Granada the Church council demanded that radical measures be adopted. Philip II’s chief minister, Cardinal Espinosa, agreed. In Valencia, however, the archbishop, Martín de Ayala, wrote to Philip II in 1567 protesting vigorously against the senseless persecution of Moriscos by the Inquisition:

I cannot fail to advise Your Majesty of the danger in this realm, because the inquisitors have recently punished, with confiscation of goods, some of the newly converted. I was there in the auto in order to please the Holy Office, but it pained me deeply that they punished persons who were not in any way guilty, and their guilt is no worse than that of all the others in this kingdom. I feel that it would be beneficial and very necessary for Your Majesty to order the inquisitors to suspend action against the said newly converted.[42]

Tensions and conflicts were at their most intense in the most Islamic of the Morisco territories, Granada. When all the repressive legislation was repeated in a pragmatic of January 1567 in Granada, the community leader Francisco Núñez Muley drew up a memorial protesting against the injustices done to his people:

Every day we are mistreated in every way, by both secular officials and clergy, all of which is so obvious that it needs no proof. . . . How can people be deprived of their natural tongue, in which they were born and raised? The Egyptians, Syrians, Maltese and other Christian people speak, read and write in Arabic, and are still Christians as we are.

Two generations of tension exploded finally into the revolt that began on Christmas Eve of 1568 in Granada and spread to the Alpujarras. It was a savage war, with atrocities on both sides, and military repression was brutal. Thousands of Moriscos died. Over eighty thousand were forcibly expelled from the kingdom and made to settle in Castile. The end of the rebellion did little to solve the problem. The Granadans brought into Castilian communities an Islamic presence they had not hitherto known. Where Castile had had about twenty thousand Mudéjares, by the end of the century the numbers had swelled to over one hundred thousand, mostly Arabic in tongue and Muslim in culture. Moreover, the military threat was now obvious. Some four thousand Turks and Berbers had come into Spain to fight alongside the insurgents in the Alpujarras. Morisco banditry in the south reached its peak in the 1560s. There were millenarian hopes of liberation from oppression. Inevitably, seeing the obduracy of the Moriscos, the authorities reverted to a repressive policy.

The Granada war created a decisive change in attitudes. The excesses committed on both sides were without equal in the experience of contemporaries. It was the most savage war to be fought in Europe that century. Philip II was staggered by the massacres of priests committed by the rebels. The Moriscos, for their part, had suffered unspeakable atrocities. Apart from the deaths and expulsions, thousands were sold into slavery within Spain. In Córdoba alone, in 1573, there were over fifteen hundred Morisco slaves.[43]

From that period the attempts at conversion decreased and the repression intensified. Those expelled from Granada to the provinces of Castile took with them their Islamic beliefs and their hatred of Castile. In Arcos de Medinaceli the older community of integrated Moriscos was pressurized by threats from the newcomers to declare themselves openly as Muslims.[44] From the 1570s in Aragon and Valencia, Moriscos formed the bulk of Inquisition prosecutions.[45] In the tribunal of Granada itself, Moriscos represented 82 percent of those prosecuted between 1560 and 1571.[46] In the tribunal of Cuenca, the arrival of the Granadans quintupled the number of Moriscos prosecuted, strengthened the faith of the Castilian Muslims and provoked a wave of persecution by the Holy Office.[47] In the tribunal of Saragossa 266 Moriscos had been tried over the years 1540–59; between 1560 and 1614 the total shot up to 2,371, a ninefold increase. In Valencia there were 82 Morisco prosecutions in the earlier period, but 2,465 in the latter—a thirtyfold increase. In the autos de fe in both tribunals in the 1580s, Moriscos constituted up to 90 percent of all accused. The repression in Aragon was singularly harsh. Though the kingdom had only half as many Moriscos as Valencia, it suffered much higher rates of execution and condemnation to the galleys.[48]

It is true that the repression of the Moriscos was not strictly comparable to the severity meted out to judaizers and Protestants. In Cuenca only 7 Moriscos were executed in person out of 102 cases in the period 1583–1600, and in Granada only 20 were executed out of 917 Moriscos appearing in autos in the years 1550–95.[49] This was because the Moriscos were not usually treated as heretics but rather as semi-infidels to whom patience should be shown. However, there is no doubt that the patience of the Christian missionaries had long since run out. Reporting from a visit to the Moriscos of Aragon in 1568, the bishop of Tortosa wrote: “These people have me fed up and exasperated. . . . They have a damnable attitude and make me despair of any good in them. . . . I have been through these mountains for eight days now and find them more Muslim than ever and very set in their bad ways. I repeat my advice that they should be given a general pardon without insisting on confessions, for there is no other way (unless it be to burn them all).”[50] He was, obviously, not recommending the latter option. “All of them live as Muslims, and no one doubts this,” the Inquisition of Aragon had affirmed in 1565.[51]

Throughout Spain there was ample evidence that most Moriscos were proud of their Islamic religion and fought to preserve their culture. The Morisco María de Lara, prosecuted by the Inquisition of Granada in 1572, admitted: “at home we were Muslims, outside home we were Christians.” She and her family ate their meals virtually in secret within their own houses, so as not to betray the fact that the meat they consumed came from an animal that had been ritually killed. Oppression only strengthened their separateness. “They marry among themselves and do not mix with Old Christians, none of them enters religion nor joins the army nor enters domestic service nor begs alms; they live separately from Old Christians, take part in trade and are rich,” runs a report of 1589 made to Philip II on the Moriscos of Toledo.[52] By contrast, for Moriscos the inquisitors were “thieving wolves whose trade is arrogance and greed, sodomy and lust, tyranny, robbery and injustice.” The Inquisition was “a tribunal of the devil, attended by deceit and blindness.”[53]

Even while the confrontation developed, in some parts of Spain there was peace between Christians and Muslims. In many communities, the continued coexistence of both cultures was accepted. In the area of La Sagra (Toledo), where Moriscos were some 5 percent of the population, during the late sixteenth century there was “a peaceful and fruitful coexistence.”[54] In the province of Cuenca, coexistence was positive.[55] In parts of Aragon, there was even occasional intermarriage between the communities.[56]

Some Moriscos had over the years made their own contribution towards creating a sympathetic attitude among the majority population. In 1588 when workers were demolishing a part of the former mosque in Granada in order to build a third nave of the cathedral, they found in the rubble a leaden box with a parchment in Arabic. Two prominent Morisco leaders, Alonso del Castillo and his son-in-law Miguel de Luna, were called in to decipher the document. Their conclusion (there was nobody at hand to contradict them) was that it was an early version of the Gospel of St. John, written in Arabic. A few years later, starting in 1595 but continuing through to 1600, the surprising discovery was made in the caves of Valparaiso (later named Sacromonte, or “sacred hill”), outside Granada, of over twenty leaden sheets engraved in ancient Arabic, which Luna also helped to translate. His conclusion, which he communicated to the expectant (and credulous) Church authorities, was that they added further information to the Christian revelation. The tablets were judged to date from very early Christian times, and depicted a form of religious practice in which features offensive to Muslims did not exist.[57]

A big controversy ensued, with the authorities of the Church in Granada insisting on their authenticity, while the very few Spanish experts who knew Arabic—among them the scholar Benito Arias Montano—had little doubt that they were forgeries. The tablets were taken to Rome in 1642, examined and eventually pronounced to be a fraud (perpetrated almost certainly by Luna and Castillo in an attempt to fuse together Islamic culture and Christian faith). It was a notable attempt to claim a place for Arabic Christianity within the framework of Iberian Catholicism. But the tablets also helped to reinforce the special sense of identity that the civic leaders of Granada, whatever their ethnic descent, claimed for themselves. If Christianity could trace some of its origins to the caves of Sacromonte, they felt, Granada could claim a special place in Christendom. In 2000 the papacy returned the tablets to Granada, where they can be seen today in a museum.

Despite continuing signs of coexistence, there were events that aggravated confrontation between Christian and Islamic civilization in Spain. In Granada Moriscos were now, after the expulsions, less than a tenth of the population;[58] and the center of tension moved to the huge Morisco community of Valencia.[59] Here the military threat from the Ottoman empire, backed up by piracy and coastal raids, made the authorities take steps to restrict and disarm Moriscos. The Alpujarra crisis of 1568–70 was followed opportunely by victory over the Turkish fleet at Lepanto in 1571. But Lepanto did not end fears of invasion.[60] Morisco banditry in the south worsened after the 1570s. From this decade French Protestant leaders were in touch with Aragonese Moriscos. Street riots between the communities took place. In Córdoba there were serious incidents in August 1578, provoked in part by open Morisco rejoicing at the destruction of the Portuguese army in the battle of Alcazar el Kebir.[61] In 1580 at Seville a conspiracy abetting invasion from Morocco was discovered. In 1602 Moriscos were plotting with Henry IV of France. In 1608 the Valencian Moriscos asked for help from Morocco. The threat was powerful and real. “Fear entered into the heart of Spain.”[62]

By the 1580s official opinion had moved in favor of a solution similar to that of 1492. In Lisbon in 1581 Philip II convened a special committee to discuss the matter. In September 1582 the council of State formally proposed a general expulsion. The decision was approved by both Church and Inquisition. It was warmly supported by Martín de Salvatierra, bishop of Segorbe, who had in 1587 drawn up a memorial favoring expulsion,[63] and by Archbishop Ribera who, seeing the failure of his zealous attempts to convert the Moriscos, turned into their most implacable enemy. He wrote to the king, urging that the entire Morisco population be expelled, “as was done with the Jews, though it is more necessary that the Moriscos leave.”[64]

When Philip III came to the throne in 1598 it became clear that at all levels there were many who disagreed with the proposal of expulsion. No opinions in favor were expressed in the Cortes of Castile or in those of Valencia. Both the duke of Lerma and the king’s confessor in 1602 opposed expulsion since “it would be terrible to drive baptized people into Barbary and thus force them to turn Muslim.” As late as 1607 the crown’s highest ministers preferred a policy of preaching and instruction. The publicists (arbitristas) of the period were uniformly opposed to expulsion. González de Cellorigo in his Memorial (1600) denounced the idea. The nobility of the crown of Aragon were solidly against any measure that would deprive them of their labor force.

However, by 1609 the duke of Lerma had changed his mind. He presented to the council of State a decision that the lords in Valencia—where his own estates lay—should be compensated by being given the lands of the expelled Moriscos. Opportunely, the lords were coming round to support expulsion. For years, their costs had been rising while the fixed rents from their Morisco vassals stagnated.[65] There were, moreover, fears for security. Morisco population growth seemed uncontrollable. Between Alicante and Valencia on one side and Saragossa on the other, a huge mass of 200,000 Muslim souls advanced into the flesh of Christian Spain. In Granada there were further expulsions to counteract the rise in numbers. In Aragon there had been 5,674 Moriscos in 1495, but in 1610 they numbered 14,190—a fifth of the population. In Valencia the results of censuses made in 1565 and 1609 suggested that the Old Christians might have increased by 44.7 percent and the Moriscos by a remarkable 69.7 percent. “Their aim was to grow and multiply like weeds,” claimed a writer in 1612.[66] Castration as a method of control was recommended in 1587 by Martín de Salvatierra.

Were all Moriscos without exception, even if they were good Christians, to be expelled? What about those whose families had been Christian for centuries? What about husbands and wives in mixed marriages? Or their children? The questions troubled many in the royal council,[67] but the rigorists won the day. The inquisitor general, Bernardo Rojas de Sandoval, who happened to be uncle of the chief minister the duke of Lerma, insisted that “all are apostates.” The man whom the king put in charge of the operation, the count of Salazar, was also firm that no exceptions be made. The expulsion was eventually decreed on 4 April 1609, and took place in stages up to 1614.

Since the country had few naval resources, the operation was made possible only through the help of hundreds of English, French and Italian merchants who agreed to charter their trading vessels.[68] The first act of expulsion took place at nightfall on 2 October 1609, when seventeen galleys from Naples and a dozen foreign merchant ships sailed out from the port of Denia in Valencia, with five thousand Moriscos on board, destined for the Spanish colony of Oran in North Africa. For the next five years, in all the villages where they lived, the soldiers systematically rounded up and escorted to points of embarkation tens of thousands of Spaniards of Islamic origin. Some villages rebelled and were duly castigated; in Valencia alone over five thousand Moriscos died as a result. Hundreds took to flight and lived in the mountains as outlaws, but they were slowly rooted out. Thousands of children “under the age of reason” (that is, less than twelve or fourteen years) were retained in Spain against the wishes of their distraught parents. The inhabitants of the totally Morisco village of Hornachos in Extremadura, agreed in 1610 to accept expulsion to Africa on one condition: that they could take their children with them.

In all, about 300,000 Moriscos were expelled, from a peninsular total of some 320,000.[69] Although the human losses of the expulsion represented little more than four percent of Spain’s population, the real impact in some areas was very severe. Where Moriscos had been a large minority, as in Valencia and Aragon, there was immediate economic catastrophe. But even where they were few in number, the fact that they had a minimal inactive population with no gentry or clergy or soldiers meant that their absence could lead to dislocation. Tax returns fell and agricultural output declined.

The Inquisition also faced a bleak future. In 1611 the tribunals of Valencia and Saragossa complained that the expulsion had resulted in their bankruptcy, since they were losing 7,500 ducats a year which they had formerly received from ground rents. The tribunal of Valencia at the same time acknowledged receiving some compensation, but claimed that a sum of nearly 19,000 ducats was still payable to it by the government to make up for what it had lost.[70] A statement of revenue drawn up for the tribunal of Valencia just before the expulsion of the Moriscos shows that 42.7 percent of its income derived directly from the Morisco population. A similar statement drawn up for the Inquisition of Saragossa in 1612 showed that since the expulsion its revenue had fallen by over 48 percent.[71]

The authorities had carried out a radical surgery to excise from Spain two of the three great cultures of the peninsula.[72] The contemporary French statesman Cardinal Richelieu in his memoirs described the Morisco expulsions as “the most barbarous act in human annals.” Cervantes in his Quixote makes a Morisco character, Ricote, applaud the heroic act of Philip III “to expel poisonous fruit from Spain, now clean and free of the fears in which our numbers held her.”[73] Writers then and later closed their ranks and attempted to justify the operation. Many of the Valencian nobility had opposed expulsion, but Boronat, the leading historian of the Morisco question, glosses over their opposition and praises those few lords “of pure blood and Christian heart” whose religion overrode their self-interest and made them support the measure. For the historian Florencio Janer the expulsion was the necessary excision of an “enemy race” from the heart of Spain.[74]

These uncompromising statements do not necessarily reflect the real opinion of all Spaniards. When the mass ejection was first being mooted, an official of the Inquisition spoke up and opposed the move, “because after all they are Spaniards like ourselves.”[75] Time and again, officials and intellectuals spoke up for the Islamic minority, defended them and opposed any extreme measure such as expulsion. A well-known theologian of the time, Pedro de Valencia, condemned the proposed move as “unjust”;[76] a government official, Fernández de Navarrete, stated that it was “a mistaken policy decision.” Even Philip III’s chief minister, the duke of Lerma, who eventually directed the measures of 1609, admitted that it was “terrible to drive baptized people into Africa.” Given the enormous controversy aroused within Spain by the expulsions, it is not surprising that as late as 1690 the Moroccan envoy in Madrid could report hearing officials denounce the duke of Lerma’s responsibility for the act.[77]

The Spanish Inquisition took no active part in the decision to expel, which was arrived at exclusively by a small group of court politicians. It continued, however, to act with severity against Moriscos accused of offenses against religion, and after 1609 those still in its cells were given the unenviable choice of punishment or exile. Almost in its totality, Muslim Spain was rejected and driven into the sea: thousands for whom there had been no other home were expelled to France, Africa and the Levant.[78] It was the last act in the creation of an orthodox society and completed the tragedy that had been initiated in 1492.

Few exceptions on religious grounds were allowed. In 1611 when it was proposed to expel the Moriscos of the valley of Ricote, a community of six towns in Murcia, a special report pointed out that the twenty-five hundred inhabitants were truly Christian.[79] But the expulsion still went ahead. Even so, the realm was not as cleansed from Islamic heresy as the zealots would have wished. A small proportion of Moriscos managed to obtain special permission to remain: they consisted in part of the wealthy assimilated elite, in part of slaves, and thousands of children, who were put into care to be brought up as Christians. Also included were adults who had married non-Moriscos, could demonstrate that their parents were non-Moriscos or had the local bishop’s certificate saying they were authentic Christians.[80] The inquisitors themselves allowed groups of Christian Moriscos to remain behind.[81]

The vast majority of expelled Spaniards had to settle for a new life in the Muslim territories of North Africa.[82] Others managed to negotiate with the Ottoman authorities of Eastern Europe in order to migrate to the Balkans. Many of those expelled also yearned to return home. An agent of the English government in Morocco in 1625 reported that the Moriscos in exile were offering to supply men for an invasion of Spain. “Many have confessed to me that they are Christians. They complain bitterly of their cruel exile, and desire deeply to return under Christian rule.”[83] Many who were expelled simply made their way back and tried to carry on their lives as before. For decades afterwards, Moriscos could be found throughout the peninsula. A typical returnee was Diego Díaz, a butcher by profession who explained how in 1609 “they put us on a ship to take us out of Spain. We put into port in Algiers, where I was for six months. After that, I got into another boat, a fishing boat. When I saw the Spanish coastline I jumped into the water and swam ashore at Tortosa. From there I went to Valencia, where I learnt my trade.”[84] He managed to carry on his life without incident, quite publicly, for over twenty years, until quarrels with his neighbors got him into trouble with the authorities.

There were areas where the expelled insisted on returning en masse. In one remarkable case in Castile,[85] they kept returning stubbornly, and six hundred returnees had to be expelled again to France; but they came back, and had to be expelled for the third time two years later. Resident Christians colluded in the return of exiles. Between 1615 and 1700 prosecutions of Moriscos made up about 9 percent of cases tried by the Inquisition. The incidence varied from only one case in Valladolid to 197 in Valencia and 245 in Murcia.[86] There continued, moreover, to be startling cases in later years, such as the group of wealthy Morisco families brought to trial in Granada in 1728.[87]

Among the interesting persons detained by the Holy Office in this period was Alonso de Luna, born around 1565 in the town of Linares (near Jaén in Andalucia). He seems to have been a son of Miguel de Luna, taking his first name from his grandfather Alonso del Castillo. He grew up in Granada, was brought up as a Christian, and spoke and wrote Arabic as well as he did Castilian. At the age of twenty he converted secretly to Islam and read the Koran (there must have been many copies accessible) so thoroughly that he claimed later to know it by heart. His unquestionable gifts as a scholar made it possible for him to form part of the team that translated the leaden books of Sacromonte. He studied Latin, philosophy and medicine at college, perhaps one of the colleges set up in Granada by Christian clergy.

At an undisclosed age, he left the city and went traveling through Europe. It was an absence—we do not know how many years in all—that opened his mind to new perceptions of the relationship between Islam and the West. He spent some time in the south of France, then in 1610 (the year, that is, after the final expulsion of Moriscos had commenced) was in Rome, where he made contact with some of the pope’s physicians. In 1612 he was in Istanbul, where he met some of the Moriscos who had been expelled from Spain and also helped the Dutch ambassador, Cornelis Haga, to negotiate an alliance between Turkey and the United Provinces (which were at that date enjoying a truce with Spain, from which they would become independent many years later).[88] During all these journeys he managed to pick up sufficient French and Italian to be able to write in these languages, which suggests that his absence was not a short one, and may have lasted for at least a decade. In those fruitful years, he may have put together the ideas which led to the writing of a mysterious document, known to us only in Italian and Spanish originals, called The Gospel of Barnabas, whose authorship has always puzzled scholars and which was probably written in Istanbul.[89]

The Gospel seems to have first emerged among exiled Moriscos living in Tunis shortly after the expulsion. It became known on the continent of Europe in the course of the seventeenth century, in an Italian version now preserved in the National Library at Vienna. A version in Spanish certainly existed, for it was consulted by the English scholar George Sale when he was preparing a translation of the Koran (1734), but it later disappeared and only in 1976 turned up in Australia in a partial eighteenth-century copy. The text of this intriguing document[90] claims to be an authentic life of Christ, dating from the same period as the gospels of the Christian Bible. The basic difference is that it disagrees at several points with Christian tradition, states that Jesus (who is quoted as saying firmly, “I am not the Messiah”) was a mortal prophet but not the Son of God, that he was not crucified (Judas Iscariot was), and that he foretold the coming of the true Messiah (described as the “Messenger”), Mohammed. The gospel was first printed in English in 1907, arousing such interest that an Arabic version was published the year after.

At several points in the Gospel, Jesus states explicitly that the Savior of the world is not himself but Mohammed.

The disciples asked, “O Master, who shall that man be of whom you speak, who shall come into the world?” Jesus answered with joy of heart: “He is Mohammed; Messenger of God, and when he comes into the world, even as the rain makes the earth to bear fruit when for a long time it has not rained, even so shall he be occasion of good works among men, through the abundant mercy which he shall bring. For he is a white cloud full of the mercy of God, which mercy God shall sprinkle upon the faithful like rain.”

The Gospel was obviously written by a Muslim, and apparently drawn up in Spanish as its original text, for the Italian version has several significant spelling errors. The fact that it has several explicit references to western Mediterranean society, and even to the writings of Dante, suggest a sixteenth-century authorship,[91] very possibly Alonso de Luna. The intention of the document, to demonstrate that Christianity is a valid religion but that its focus really points to Mohammed as the Messiah, has fascinated Muslims around the world, and continues to be studied by some of them today as a serious text. The idea of a compatibility, leading eventually to a convergence, between Christianity and Islam, was directly in line not only with the forgeries of Sacromonte but also, remarkably, with Luna’s own direct testimony as given to the Spanish authorities.

For by 1618 Luna was back in Spain. We do not know what motivated him to go back, though it seems likely that his travels had made him develop a sense of a special mission, one that particularly affected Spain and its Muslim exiles and therefore required Luna’s presence in the country. He was also in very poor health, and no doubt hoped to end his days in the land that had once been al-Andalus. In 1618, shortly after his return, he was arrested by the Inquisition of Murcia, on the Mediterranean coast some distance from Granada, and questioned over several matters. His answers are vivid proof of the messianic hopes that some Spanish Muslims were developing. The Inquisition caught him with letters written in his own hand, one addressed to the pope and three others to the king. The letters described a vision he had had, according to the statement he made to the Inquisition:

One night in the countryside he was by the power of God carried by angels to the fourth heaven, and from there to the sixth, and he had many visions and saw God our Lord seated on his throne, with his angels who were moving the heavens. And God said to him, “My son, do not be afraid, I shall give you to know all things, write to the king and to the pope and tell them that it is now the time of the Resurrection, when all heresies will end, and the whole world will convert to the Holy Catholic Faith.” And in the last days he will come to help the Arab nation, and the conversion will be through the Arab language, because it is the most perfect language and God has chosen it as the best, and the angels use it to praise him. And God will punish the Spaniards because they did not wish to use it, even though everybody has a duty to know it.

And God had ordered him to write in the letters that the king should know that during his reign the General Conversion would come about. And God also revealed to him that the books of Sacromonte of this city contain the entire Catholic and Gospel truth. And that there remains one book to be read, which till now no one has managed to read or understand, which God is keeping back for himself, to be read and interpreted and given out at the Conversion and Last Judgment.[92]

It seems likely that in the end the Inquisition released Luna with a simple reprimand. In a written report, inquisitors say that they thought of torturing or imprisoning him, but judged that he was too ailing to put up with either. An open condemnation of what he was claiming was out of the question, since that would have brought the Inquisition into direct conflict with the cathedral of Granada, which continued to maintain that the tablets of Sacromonte were part of the divine revelation. So Luna probably got off, and disappears thereafter into the mists of history.

The exiled Moriscos of Spain now merged their lives into that of the Islamic peoples of the Mediterranean. The émigrés from Hornachos settled in what had been the deserted town of Rabat in Morocco, and gave it new life; others settled in Salé, just across the river from Rabat. Across the centuries the émigrés managed to retain a certain nostalgic and imagined folk memory of the land from which they came. Their houses, their vocabulary, even their music retain vestiges of the Andalucia that had been their home, and the guitar their music players strum in the street at night is the guitar that sings of lost Granada.[93] The memory survives.[94] A traditional ballad in Tunisia goes:

May rain lavishly sprinkle you as it showers!

Oh, my time of love in Andalucia:

our time together was just a sleeper’s dream

or a secretly grasped moment.[95]

Despite everything, Islam continued to form an extension of the Hispanic experience and could not be wholly uprooted. It was, curiously enough, the absence and exile of the Muslims that made Spaniards accept them back into the mainstream of peninsular culture. Social practices that in former times were seen as unacceptable because they were Islamic passed after the expulsions into general use among Christians and formed part of the style and manners of Spain. Throughout Spanish society, Muslim habits and courtesies prevailed until our own time.[96] Even the Catholic way of thinking could not escape from some remnants of seven centuries of Muslim influence. Islamic thought and concepts could be found deep within the mystical ideas of Christians, as Arabist scholars have convincingly suggested. Aspects of the writing of the mystic and poet Juan de la Cruz, and of the imagery used by Teresa of Avila in her mystical work The Interior Castle were derived from Islamic sources. Though Islam had disappeared from Spain, it remained a permanent part of Spain’s international confrontations, ever present in the war by both sea and land that continued unabated till the nineteenth century, when Spain’s dream of expanding into Africa turned sour after the terrible slaughter of its forces at the battle of Annual in Morocco in 1921.

Long before the expulsions, in a society where Muslims were perceived as an enemy, those who wished to rebel against Christian values expressed opinions in their favor or even joined them.[97] Individuals who rebelled against aspects of their own environment deliberately adopted pro-Arab attitudes and customs. Time and again, there were cases of Spaniards who became “renegades” and either entered Muslim service or embraced Islam.[98] It was, as we have noted (chapter 1) a phenomenon that was not confined to Spain and existed long before the Inquisition. War and piracy were responsible for most of the involuntary converts. The number of persons who crossed into the world of Islam may have been substantial;[99] a scholar suggests “hundreds of thousands,” voluntarily or not, in the whole area of the Mediterranean.[100] We know some of their stories because they frequently found refuge in Spain, where they explained to the inquisitors what had made them cross over from one faith to the other. Some had been captured as children, and only as adults several years later were they able to choose to return. We have the testimony of a Portuguese priest, Antonio de Sosa, who was held prisoner in Algiers between 1577 and 1581. His Topography of Algiers, published posthumously in Spain thirty years later (1612), is a fascinating eyewitness account of cultural life in the city. According to him, Christian converts to Islam constituted more than half of the population of Algiers around 1580–81, a detail that (if correct) underlines the continual crossing of religious and political boundaries in the early modern Mediterranean. Such interchanges led to the creation of a new frontier society that lived in the in-between, simultaneously partaking of various cultures.[101] It was a general phenomenon that extended through the inland sea and as far as the Balkans, where tens of thousands of Christians in the Ottoman Empire converted to Islam and enjoyed the privileges of elite status.[102]

In the wake of the expulsions, historical memories of Islam’s fundamental role in the peninsula were consciously blotted out for nearly three hundred years. Neglect of the language of Spanish Arabs was such that when the authorities in 1749 wished to prepare a catalogue of the Arabic manuscripts in the Escorial, they had to call on a Syrian Christian priest to come to Spain to do the work. The legacy of Islam was left to perish. In his richly informed and illustrated Travels through Spain in the Years 1775 and 1776 (1779), the English Catholic traveler Henry Swinburne offered a pioneering perspective of a country that seemed to have lost touch with Europe. Some Spaniards who read the work (in French translation) were angered by it. The diplomat José Nicolás de Azara protested that the author “speaks endlessly of Muslims, their history and architecture, especially in Córdoba and Granada; and surpasses himself in praises of that sublime people, in order to humiliate our own.”[103] In fact, when Swinburne was in Granada he was struck, as Washington Irving subsequently would be, by the total neglect of the Islamic heritage. “The glories of Granada have passed away with its old inhabitants,” he observed. “The streets are choked with filth; its aqueducts crumbled to dust; its woods destroyed; its territory depopulated; its trade lost; in a word, everything in a most deplorable situation.”[104] Fortunately, in the nineteenth century the Romantic movement in European literature and Orientalism in art, helped powerfully by Americans such as Washington Irving as well as Spanish scholars and artists, began to restore dignity to the Muslim past.[105]

Islamic Spain revived in the twentieth century. During the civil war of 1936, Arab volunteers fought alongside the army insurgents, and long after the victory of Franco in the war I remember vividly seeing the long columns of the brightly costumed Muslim cavalry guard as they escorted the dictator to his residence in the Pardo outside Madrid. With the coming of democracy came the era of immigration from Africa, and with it a revival of Muslim claims to al-Andalus. Muslims in Spain number 1 million, or 2 percent of the population. The Inquisition would shudder to know that a grand mosque, completed in 2003, now again calls the faithful to prayer in the Albaicín, and that some six hundred mosques have been founded on Spanish soil.

8

THE POLITICS OF HERESY

In the days of the blessed memory of Philip II, the Inquisition experienced great felicity.

—THE INQUISITORS OF CATALONIA, 1623

Before modern research began to analyze the nature and activity of the Holy Office, it was common to exaggerate its authority and influence. In 1827 the German historian Ranke argued that “the Inquisition was the most effective instrument in completing the absolute power of the monarch.”[1] His opinion (not a careless one, for as we shall see it was based on reports of the time) influenced subsequent writers,[2] and the view can still be found that “the Inquisition was used as the first centralized institution, essential for the process of state-building in Italy, Spain and Portugal,”[3] and that the monarchy established it in order “to attain absolute power.”[4] The reality is that in traditional Spain the king did not aspire to nor have absolute powers,[5] and seldom if ever attempted to extend his authority through the Holy Office, which played no part whatsoever in the building of the modern Spanish state.[6]

To avoid attributing to the tribunal of the Inquisition a power that it did not possess, we should bear in mind that it was only one royal court among others, and always had quarrels over jurisdiction with other legal entities. Spain before the eighteenth century was (like other European regions such as France and Italy) not a unified country: there was a multitude of judicial systems and tribunals, often with overlapping competence, and even the crown was not deemed the supreme authority in regions (particularly outside Castile) where noble and local courts might in certain matters enjoy higher standing. In addition, throughout Spain there were Church courts, which by medieval tradition derived their authority from the pope and not the crown. The new Inquisition, when it was created, entered a world where asserting its authority against other entities was no easy matter.

From its inception, it was meant by Ferdinand and Isabella to be under their control and not, like the medieval tribunal, under that of the pope. Sixtus IV was surprisingly cooperative. His bull of institution of 1 November 1478 gave the Catholic monarchs power not only over appointments but also, tacitly, over confiscations. The inquisitors were to have the jurisdiction over heretics normally held by bishops, but were not given any jurisdiction over bishops themselves. Subsequently the pope saw his error in granting independence to a tribunal of this sort, and stated his protest in a brief of 29 January 1482. At the same time he refused to allow Ferdinand to extend his control over the old Inquisition in Aragon.

Further conflict ensued with the bull issued by Sixtus on 18 April that year, denouncing abuses in the procedure of the Inquisition. Ferdinand held firm to his policy despite opposition in Rome and Aragon. His victory was confirmed by the bull which on 17 October 1483 appointed Torquemada as chief inquisitor of the crown of Aragon. Earlier that year Torquemada had also received a bull of appointment as inquisitor general of Castile. He was now the only individual in the peninsula whose writ extended (in theory) over all Spain, unlike the king, who enjoyed considerable authority in Castile and rather less in the crown of Aragon and the Basque country. In practice, of course, the inquisitor general’s powers were very limited and always relied on the crown for backup.

The Holy Office was in every way an instrument of royal policy, and remained politically subject to the crown. “Although you and the others enjoy the title of inquisitor,” Ferdinand reminded his inquisitors of Aragon firmly in 1486, “it is I and the queen who have appointed you, and without our support you can do very little.”[7] But royal control did not imply royal support (as we shall see) and did not make it exclusively a secular tribunal. Any authority and jurisdiction exercised by the inquisitors came directly or indirectly from Rome, without which the tribunal would have ceased to exist. Bulls of appointment, canonical regulations and spheres of jurisdiction—all had to have the prior approval of Rome. The Inquisition was consequently also an ecclesiastical tribunal for which the Church of Rome assumed ultimate responsibility, a status that could also be convenient for the inquisitors when they wished to evade instructions from the crown.

The central organization of the new tribunal was in 1488[8] vested in a council, the Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisicion, known for short as the Suprema. This joined the crown’s other administrative councils whose existence had been confirmed at the Cortes of Toledo in 1480. Although Torquemada was the first inquisitor general, the effective “father” of the Inquisition was Cardinal Mendoza, archbishop of Seville and later of Toledo. It was this prelate, famous as a patron of Columbus, who put in motion the negotiations with Rome leading to the establishment of the tribunal. Yet above him towers the shadow of Torquemada. The austere Dominican friar, prior of the monastery of Santa Cruz at Segovia, left his indelible mark on the tribunal, and in 1484 Sixtus IV praised him for having “directed your zeal to those matters which contribute to the praise of God and the benefit of the orthodox faith.”[9] Of distant converso origin, he was the first Dominican to introduce (1496) a statute of blood purity into a religious house, his new foundation at Avila dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas. It was the place where he eventually retired, confessing that “I feel free of passions since I came to live here.”[10] He died in 1498, at the age of eighty. A leading minister of Philip II later commented: “Because he was a poor friar, he was the best inquisitor general there ever was.”[11] There were obviously other opinions about him: around 1485 a lawyer in Soria felt Torquemada was “a vile heretic, the most accursed man in the world.”[12]

Torquemada’s importance suggests that the Dominicans were controlling the new Inquisition as they had controlled the medieval one. From 1231 in Germany and then from 1233 in Provence, the Dominicans were the order specially chosen by the pope for the task of inquiring into heresy. In Spain, however, though all the early appointments were of Dominicans, and they continued to play an important role, only a minority of inquisitors came from the order. In Valencia there were only six Dominicans among the fifty-two for whom details are available over the period 1482–1609,[13] and in Toledo only one among the fifty-seven inquisitors recorded between 1482 and 1598. The same picture is true for the summit: out of the forty-five inquisitors general who held office, only six were Dominicans. A special privilege was obtained on 16 December 1618 when Philip III, at the request of the duke of Lerma, created a permanent place in the Suprema for a member of the order, to be occupied in the first place by the then inquisitor general, Aliaga.[14] By the late seventeenth century, in contrast, Jesuits had become influential in the Inquisition.

Although the inquisitor general may seem to have been a powerful individual, in practice his commission was often limited in authority and renewable only after papal approval. Moreover, the pope could grant equivalent powers to other clerics in Spain, as in 1491 when a second inquisitor general of Castile and Aragon was appointed for a brief time, and in 1494 when four bishops in Spain were promoted to this post to help the now senile Torquemada. When Torquemada died, he was succeeded by Diego Deza, who in 1505 became archbishop of Seville. It was not until 1504 that Deza became sole head of the Inquisition, because the bishops appointed under Torquemada continued to hold office up to that date. The death of Queen Isabella on 26 November 1504 led to a temporary separation of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, because of Ferdinand’s quarrels with his son-in-law, Philip I of Castile. As a result, Ferdinand asked the pope to appoint a separate inquisitor for Aragon. This occurred in June 1507 when Cisneros was appointed to Castile and the bishop of Vic, Juan Enguera, to Aragon. The two posts remained separate until the death of Cisneros in 1518, when Charles I appointed Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, bishop of Tortosa and since 1516 inquisitor general of Aragon, as inquisitor for Castile as well. After this the tribunal remained under one head alone.

In historical fiction the person of the inquisitor general seems to assume an almost sinister identity when he is termed the Grand Inquisitor, a title that is used, for example, in Schiller’s drama Don Carlos and in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. The truth is that by virtue of his distinctive office, the inquisitor general was indeed a figure of power. In the last days of the Holy Office, in the Cortes of Cadiz in 1813, the question was even raised whether the absence of an inquisitor general (there was none at that moment) meant that in consequence no Inquisition existed.[15] As president of one of the permanent administrative councils of the monarchy, the inquisitor general always played a very important role in politics, though it did not follow that he carried exceptional weight. Apart from his functions as a state councilor, he was personally responsible for all senior appointments in the Inquisition and at the same time had special powers in such matters as permission to read prohibited books or dispensation from certain legal impediments.[16]

The council of the Inquisition (the Suprema) was presided over by the inquisitor general. All authority exercised by inquisitors was at one time held to be by direct delegation from the pope, but later this was modified to the opinion that it was the inquisitor general himself who delegated the papal powers. Though he might be nominated by the crown, only the pope could appoint him. Growth of the inquisitor general’s power was modified by the increasing authority of the Suprema. The relationship between Suprema and inquisitor general was never satisfactorily settled, because they usually acted in concert and did not dispute supremacy. But there were several occasions when the council attempted to take an independent line. In the early years of Philip IV, conflicts between the council and its chairman were persistent. But the inquisitor general of the time, Cardinal Zapata, angrily told his councilors not to interfere in what did not concern them. “There was dead silence,” a secretary recorded, “and none of the members of the council said a word.”[17]

In the early seventeenth century the Suprema consisted of about six members, who usually met every morning and also three afternoons a week. The afternoon sessions, normally on legal business, were also attended by two members of the council of Castile. Correspondence was divided between two secretariats, one for “Aragon”[18] and one for Castile. Members of the Suprema were appointed by the king alone, and the Suprema usually issued orders without any need to have the vote of the inquisitor general. When divisions arose in the council, a decision was taken by majority vote, in which the vote of the inquisitor general counted no more than that of another. This did not affect his unique authority. Inquisitors general, such as Antonio de Sotomayor in 1643,[19] continued to insist unequivocally on their exclusive right to exercise the powers conferred by the pope.

The substantial autonomy of the inquisitor general, however, was confined to matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In political matters, the authority of the crown could always prevail. One outstanding case of very much later, that of Fray Froilán Diaz, brought out clearly the extent to which the crown could decide the relative roles of the inquisitor general and the Suprema.

Froilán Díaz, a Dominican who had been confessor since 1698 to the king, Charles II (1665–1700), was arrested in 1700 after various palace intrigues on the charge of having helped to cast a spell over the hapless king, known in Spanish history as el Hechizado, the Bewitched. The prosecution was at the instance of the German queen and her friend Balthasar de Mendoza, bishop of Segovia, who in 1699 had been appointed inquisitor general. Díaz, an ex-officio member of the Suprema, was imprisoned while an investigation was made by five theologians. They found that there was no basis for charges against him. Accordingly, in June 1700 all the members of the council except Mendoza voted for Díaz’s acquittal. Mendoza refused to accept the findings and ordered the arrest of the other members of the Suprema until they assented to the arrest of Díaz. At the same time he ordered the tribunal of Murcia to bring Díaz to trial. This the inquisitors did—and acquitted him. Mendoza thereupon ordered a retrial and kept Díaz in prison. Opposition to the actions of the inquisitor general was by now universal. There was consequently wide support for the new French king, Philip V, when he discovered that Mendoza was politically opposed to the Bourbon dynasty. He confined him to his see of Segovia, but Mendoza now made the mistake of appealing to Rome, an act unprecedented in the whole history of the Spanish Inquisition. The crown immediately stepped in to prevent any interference from Rome, and finally in 1704 Díaz was rehabilitated and reinstated in the Suprema, while Mendoza was replaced as inquisitor general in March 1705.[20]

The case proved to be the last important one in which the inquisitor general attempted to assert his supremacy. Thereafter the concern of the tribunal with administrative routine and censorship, rather than great matters of state, involved fewer opportunities for personal initiative, and authority came more and more to reside in the Suprema and the machinery it controlled. More obscure prelates were also chosen as inquisitor general, a significant example being the choice of the bishop of Ceuta (in North Africa) to succeed Mendoza in 1705.

The growth of the Suprema’s authority led to greater centralization of decisions, a process that accelerated in the seventeenth century as the volume of heretics, and therefore of business, diminished in the provincial tribunals. In the early days, as the case of Lucero showed, local autonomy could be carried to scandalous extremes. At first, cases were referred by provincial tribunals to the Suprema only if agreement could not be reached, or if the council summoned a case before it. In 1550, when it was felt that the Barcelona tribunal was showing excessive severity in suppressing a witch craze in Catalonia (chapter 11), all sentences passed by it were required to be confirmed by the Suprema. The Barcelona inquisitors do not seem to have accepted interference from the center, for the inquisitor general in 1566 was obliged to examine their records and denounce the irregularities and cruelties in the tribunal. From this time onwards, greater attention was paid by the Suprema to the procedure and sentences of local tribunals. These were required after 1632 to send in monthly reports of their activities. By the mid-seventeenth century all sentences were required to be submitted to the Suprema before being carried out. With this, the machinery of the Inquisition reached its most complete stage of centralization. In the eighteenth century business became so rare that the tribunals became mere appendages of the Suprema, which initiated all prosecutions.

These bureaucratic details about organization do little to help us understand how a tiny body like the Inquisition managed to leave so large a footprint on the fabric of history. The truth is that the tribunal created in Castile in 1478 was heir to and formed part of an impressive medieval tradition of vigilance against heresy; it did not have to invent anything new in rules and structure, because it simply took over what had been practiced two centuries before in France. If there were doubts about how to proceed, the experts simply looked up what had been done by the French.

The Spanish Inquisition was based essentially on the medieval one. The crucial fact may easily be overlooked because of the wholly different conditions under which each tribunal came into existence. There was in reality no other precedent from which to work, and the Spanish inquisitors followed down to the last detail—in all aspects of arrest, trial, procedure, confiscations and recruitment of personnel—the regulations that had been in use in thirteenth-century Languedoc and Aragon. As late as the reign of Philip II, the classic Aragonese manual of Nicolau Eimeric could be accepted as a standard guide by its Spanish commentator, Francisco Peña.[21] There is no reason, therefore, to think of the Inquisition in the peninsula as peculiarly Spanish. Apart from some obvious differences, such as the transfer in Spain of authority over heresy from bishops to inquisitors, the Inquisition in the peninsula was simply an adaptation to Spanish conditions of the medieval French tribunal.

At the same time, of course, the social context within which the two Inquisitions worked was wholly different. Unlike the Inquisition of Languedoc two centuries before, the Spanish tribunal was installed from above, by pope and king, and enjoyed state support until the end of its existence. It did not restrict its operations to one local society but attempted to penetrate all the societies of the peninsula. Though concerned initially with one form of religious error, it quickly extended its inquiries to many others. Finally, the inquisitors of Spain never became agents of control, as those of Languedoc apparently did, “devising methods of using power and coercion to give fantasies a legally validated and socially accepted reality.”[22]

In attempting to understand the structure of the Spanish Inquisition, we must not suppose that it was a carefully planned organization. The admirable description of its structure given by Lea[23] leaves the reader with a deceptive impression of efficiency, because it summarizes in one masterly chapter a process that in fact covered over three centuries. The tribunal evolved very slowly and not always efficiently. The first rules drawn up were those agreed upon in a meeting at Seville on 29 November 1484. There was at yet no formal body called “inquisition,” and the rules of 1484 used the word only to refer to the work that the inquisitors were doing,[24] that is, they were inquiring (the Latin verb was inquirere) into matters for which they had a papal commission. The rules of 1484 did not even contemplate a “Spanish” area of operation: the inquisitors who came together to consult on the proposed rules were those functioning in Seville, Córdoba, Jaén and Ciudad Real, cities in the south of the peninsula belonging to the crown of Castile. Some of the terminology used was still based on medieval France: they referred to a “sermón de fe,” which in Spain later became the procedure known as an “auto de fe.” Above all, the Castilians seem to have learnt from the way in which the French had run their inquiries: keeping exhaustive records, making copies of the documents, and employing a reference system to make it easier to consult and compare the documents, especially through use of an index of names. The said documents were always to be kept in a special chest with multiple keys, so that they remained inviolably secret. A century before the state in Castile (under Philip II) began the systematic keeping of government archives, the Inquisition was quietly and efficiently storing away a vast pile of documents that four centuries later would serve as the raw material for the first noninquisitorial histories of the Inquisition. It was the first time in European history that a policing body managed to create a data bank of all its proceedings and of all the accused who passed through its chambers.

Under Torquemada the rules were amplified in 1485, 1488 (when for the first time each tribunal of officials was referred to as an “inquisition”) and 1498. His successor Diego Deza added some articles in 1500. All these regulations were later known under the collective title of Instrucciones antiguas (Old Instructions). They were unsystematic, had to be regularly modified and led to variations of practice between different tribunals. Over half a century went by before more detailed rules were drawn up. By that time, it is crucial to remember, there was no longer any substantial problem of Jewish or Islamic origin, so it is pertinent to ask why further development was necessary. The interesting fact is that an organized, bureaucratic Inquisition emerged only with the issue in September 1561 of the Instructions of Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés, in eighty-one clauses. These set out to achieve a centralized organization, firm control by the Suprema and financial stability for the tribunals. A product of the crisis years after 1558, the Valdés Instructions gave the Holy Office a reputation for rigidity, and we shall look presently at some aspects.[25] Subsequent modifications were collected and printed by Gaspar Isidro de Argüello at Madrid in 1627 and 1630 (Instrucciones del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición, sumariamente, antiguas y nuevas) (Summary of the Old and the New Instructions). This was followed by the comprehensive Compilación de las Instrucciones (Collected Instructions) published at Madrid in 1667.[26]

The tribunals of the Inquisition in their early days were itinerant and active mainly in the southern part of Castile, where the religious minorities were most numerous. It was several years before King Ferdinand brought the crown of Aragon into the framework. Inquisitions were set up wherever there seemed to be a need and political conditions permitted. In 1486, for example, a special inquisition was sanctioned by Torquemada to act solely within the Jeronimite order. It seems to have functioned for about five years. Even when inquisitors had a fixed base, they moved around for their duties. The Barcelona inquisitors, for example, celebrated autos de fe in Girona and Tarragona. In the first years of the Inquisition the following tribunals were established:[27] 1482, in Seville, Córdoba, Valencia and Saragossa; 1483, in Jaén and Ciudad Real (moved to Toledo 1485); 1484, in Barcelona and Teruel; 1485, in Toledo, Llerena and Medina del Campo (moved to Salamanca 1488); 1486, in Segovia and Lleida; 1488, in Salamanca, Murcia, Alcaraz, Mallorca and Valladolid (moved to Palencia 1493); 1489, in Burgos, Cuenca and Osma; 1490, in Avila; 1491, in Calahorra, Sigüenza and Jérez; 1492, in León. This proliferation of tribunals became uneconomic once the number of prosecutions decreased. In 1503, therefore, the five tribunals of León, Burgos, Salamanca, Avila and Segovia were suppressed and merged into the single vast tribunal of Valladolid. By 1507 there were only seven tribunals in Spain where in 1495 there had been sixteen.

Map 1. The districts of the Spanish Inquisition, 1570–1820.

Table 1

Several changes occurred in the sixteenth century, including the establishment of the tribunal at Granada in 1526. After two unsuccessful attempts, an Inquisition was finally set up in Galicia in 1574 (some years after the tribunal had begun to operate in America). The network, which theoretically covered all Spain’s territory, had enormous gaps in it. Inquisitors did not venture into the area of the Pyrenees until the end of the sixteenth century. When in 1582 they first entered the Vall d’Áneu, in the Pyrenees of Catalonia, they were attacked by a gang of clergy “numbering over forty, with red caps and feathers and each with two pistols.”[28]

The permanent tribunals of Spain, with dates of first establishment, are shown in table 1.[29]

The location of the districts is shown on map 1. It is evidence of the remarkable indifference of the Inquisition to other secular or ecclesiastical authority that its districts often crossed political frontiers. The territory of Orihuela in Valencia, for example, was put under the tribunal of Murcia; Teruel in Aragon was put under the tribunal of Valencia; Calahorra in Castile was put under the Navarrese tribunal of Logroño; and Lleida in Catalonia fell under the control of the tribunal of Aragon. The Inquisition was able to do this because its authority in matters of heresy (and not, we should emphasize, in other matters) covered the whole of Spain regardless of frontiers. Portugal, for the period 1580–1640, when it came under the Spanish crown, at first kept its Inquisition entirely independent. In 1586, however, Philip II nominated the cardinal Archduke Albert of Austria, who was governor of Portugal, as head of the Portuguese Inquisition, so bringing the Portuguese tribunal more into touch with Spain.

Because the Inquisition of Spain was a direct instrument of the Spanish crown and therefore in some sense functioned in a uniform way throughout the Spanish empire, it is common practice among some scholars to look at its activity without making any distinction between countries. This can give rise to serious confusion of theme and context. The present study, which attempts to limit its survey to the peninsular Inquisition, inevitably incurs problems when touching on matters of race, society and politics that had a widely different framework in Andalucia, the Canary Islands, Sicily or Catalonia. The framework would become yet more intricate were we to include in our focus the American tribunals of Lima (1570), Mexico (1571) and Cartagena (1610), or the territories of the Philippines and Goa, all of which had entirely different societies and historical contexts. A feature such as the auto de fe, for instance, might be formally the same in each of these areas, but its origins and context would usually be distinct, so that a broad comparison between countries would have doubtful validity. In the same way, racialist attitudes as experienced in Spanish society would have little in common with the same attitudes in Mexico or the Philippines.

Each tribunal, according to Torquemada’s Instructions of 1498, was to consist of two inquisitors (“a jurist and a theologian, or two jurists”), an assessor (calificador), a constable (alguacil) and a prosecutor (fiscal), with any other necessary subordinates. The number of personnel grew over time. A century later, the major tribunals of the peninsula had three inquisitors each.[30] Contrary to the image—still widely current—of inquisitors as small-minded clerics and theologians fanatically dedicated to the extirpation of heresy, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the inquisitors were drawn from qualified personnel and developed over time into an elite bureaucracy.[31]

Because the Holy Office was in a sense a court of law, its administrators should ideally have been trained lawyers: the sixteenth-century lawyer Diego de Simancas thought that “it is more useful to have jurists (letrados) rather than theologians as inquisitors.” In practice, since they were drawn from the religious orders, they were often theologians. By the same token, inquisitors did not have to be clergy and could be laymen (well into the seventeenth century there were occasional examples of laymen). All this shows that the inquisitors were in principle a bureaucracy not of the Church but of the state. They received their training in the same institutions that contributed personnel to the councils of state and the high courts. An analysis of fifty-seven inquisitors of Toledo, from the period 1482–1598,[32] shows that all but two had degrees and doctorates based on the study of canon law at university, and that nearly half had been trained in the exclusive colleges known as Colegios Mayores.

Philip III in 1608 stipulated that all inquisitors must be jurists. These men were of course trained only in the law of the Church, or canon law; they were not equipped for matters touching on criminal law, a discipline that developed in Europe only after the eighteenth century.[33] This meant that in crucial matters, such as the rules of evidence, which today are assumed to play a vital role in court trials, the inquisitors had to develop their practice as they went. They would have learnt a bit from works such as Eimeric’s manual for the medieval French inquisitors, but in cases where criminal matters might be directly at issue they normally called in a civil lawyer to advise them.[34]

Many went on to serve in the high courts of the realm.[35] For these, service in the Inquisition was merely a stepping-stone to a further career. In practice, of course, the bureaucracy of state and Church overlapped, so that although some inquisitors were laymen it was more useful to be in holy orders. Moreover, the ecclesiastical character of inquisitors was underlined by their dependence on canonries for income and by the subsequent promotion of many to bishoprics.

The tribunals of the Holy Office were few in terms of geographical coverage, and staffed by only a small handful of personnel. The fact is enough to explode any idea about its capacity to impose its presence in a pre-modern world without adequate roads, bureaucracy or communications. It became essential to seek help from the local population in all the areas that a policing body would today require: collecting information, detaining suspects, transporting prisoners. These functions could be carried out thanks to help from familiars and comisarios.

The familiar, a common feature of the medieval Inquisition, was continued in the Spanish one. Essentially he was a lay servant of the Holy Office, ready at all times to perform duties in the service of the tribunal. In return he was allowed to bear arms to protect the inquisitors, and enjoyed a number of privileges in common with the other officials. To become a familiar was normally an honor, and the Inquisition in its peak days could boast of a high proportion of nobles and titled persons among its familiars. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the familiars were banded together in a confraternity (hermandad) known as the Congregation of St. Peter Martyr, modeled directly on the associations founded by the medieval Inquisition after the murder of an inquisitor, Peter Martyr, in Verona (Italy) in 1252.

Familiars acquired notoriety in fact and in legend for acting as informers, but this was never their real purpose; neither familiars nor comisarios were meant to be spies. The Spanish government, like those of England and France, had a few political spies in its employment, but there is no record of attempts to spy on the religion of Spaniards. The documents of the Inquisition show clearly that most denunciations were made not through a secret police system but by ordinary people—neighbors, acquaintances—in response to appeals made in the edicts of faith or simply as a result of personal conflicts (see chapter 9).

Since familiars were usually laymen,[36] it was inevitable that jurisdiction over them in cases of crime would be claimed by the secular courts. Conflicts arose regularly and more so after 1518 when Charles V decreed that the cognizance by secular courts of criminal cases concerning familiars and other officials and servants of the Inquisition was contrary to its privileges. After this ruling the tribunal did not hesitate to protect even the humblest of employees from the justice of the civil courts, a position that led to further friction and quarrels. For example, two of the biggest and most dramatic conflicts between the Catalan authorities and the Inquisition, in 1568 and 1611, were provoked by a quarrel over butcher’s meat and by officials confiscating a weapon from an Inquisition employee.[37] The tribunal also had to be wary of Church authorities, who did not hesitate to arrest personnel of the Inquisition when necessary. Referring to the archbishop of Tarragona, the highest Church dignitary in the crown of Aragon, the inquisitors of Barcelona observed in 1615 that “we are very careful not to give him any reason to be dissatisfied with us or with the familiars.”[38]

Because the number appointed was often excessive, accords (concordias) between state and Inquisition in both Castile and Aragon attempted to set ceiling figures. The Castile agreement of 1553 suggested a maximum of 805 familiars for Toledo, 554 for Granada and 1,009 for Galicia, though in reality the number varied widely. In Galicia in 1611 there were a total of 388 familiars and 100 comisarios for the whole province (a theoretical ratio of 1 official per 241 households in the population), but they were distributed through less than 6.4 percent of the towns and villages—evidence of a very low level of contact between Inquisition and people.[39] In Valencia, by contrast, in 1567 there were as many as 1,638 familiars (a ratio of 1 for every 42 households).[40]

One solution to which the Inquisition agreed was a voluntary limitation on the number of familiars. An accord made for Castile in 1553 was devoted largely to defining the number of familiars and the jurisdiction of the civil courts. In all serious crimes secular justice was to hold good and the Inquisition was limited to the cognizance of petty offenses only. Although this remained in force until the end of the Inquisition, it was only partly successful. Disputes continued as before, and neither the secular nor the inquisitorial courts were concerned to observe it. In the crown of Aragon new accords had to be made because they were even less observed than in Castile. Although Valencia received an accord in 1554 by which the number of familiars was reduced and jurisdiction defined, it was found necessary in 1568 to issue a new one. Philip II, in a note to the inquisitor general in 1574, admitted that he had personal experience of the problems: “we all know that in the past there have been very great irregularities, and I can assure you that I saw it in Valencia with my own eyes.”[41] Reforms were not effective, to judge by a report of the council of Aragon on 21 July 1632, which claimed that no peace or safety could be expected in Valencia unless there was a reform in the selection of familiars, since nearly all the crimes committed involved familiars who were sure to escape with impunity, relying as they did on the intervention of their protectors the inquisitors.[42]

In Aragon the struggle was even more pronounced because of the great pride taken in their constitutional liberties by the aristocracy of the realm. Here the question of familiars was not resolved by the accord of 1568, which was the same as that issued in Valencia the same year. It was only after 1646, when the Cortes of Aragon had passed measures which restricted the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, that some satisfaction was gained by the secular tribunals of the realm.

In Catalonia conflicts over familiars were nominally settled by an agreement made at the Cortes of Monzón in August 1512, but the Inquisition never really accepted this. Then in 1553 the Cortes ruled that no official exercising civil jurisdiction in Catalonia could be a familiar. Further disputes ended in the Inquisition proposing a settlement in 1568. This was violently opposed by the Catalans. The viceroy reported that “all the courts, the consellers, the diputats and other judicial officers are determined to lay down their lives” rather than accept it. Small wonder that the Barcelona inquisitors reported that the Catalans “will not be content until they have driven the Inquisition from this realm.”[43] Finally in 1585 it was conceded by the Inquisition at Monzón that in Catalonia “familiars and officials of the Holy Office cannot be admitted to office in the courts or in public administration.” It was a unique concession, very detrimental to the interests of the Catalan Inquisition, which reported in 1609 that “for a long time now people do not seek to become familiars, in order not to disqualify themselves from holding [civil] posts.”[44] In that year there were only fifteen familiars in the entire territory of Catalonia. In the Vall d’Arán, technically in Catalonia and ruled over by the king but forming part of a French diocese, “no one wants to be a familiar even though we go to their houses and beg them.”[45]

The endless story of disputes over the numbers of familiars and problems over jurisdiction has tended to overshadow the history of the familiars themselves. By creating a network within each tribunal district, the Inquisition hoped to attach to its interests a section of the local population that made it possible for the two or three resident inquisitors to carry out their duties adequately. The social standing of familiars was therefore of paramount importance, and attempts were made to recruit from the highest circles and the purest blood. In Galicia the policy seems to have succeeded in one or two towns, for the twenty-five familiars in Santiago were successful merchants in the city, a sort of businessman’s club. Likewise, in the seaport of Mataró (Catalonia) in 1628, the familiars were two business partners who formed the core of a flourishing trade network.[46] As a rule, people were eager to accept the post if it protected them from secular jurisdiction and gave them privileges of freedom from some types of taxation. In both Andalucia and Valencia lesser gentry were a small but significant portion of familiars.[47] In the predominantly rural society of those times, however, most familiars in the crown of Aragon were inevitably peasant farmers (labradores).[48] In Catalonia, outside the cities virtually all familiars were farmers, with merchants as a significant proportion only in the ports.[49]

Although the network established a presence for the Inquisition, it did little else. It by no means acted as a form of social control, for familiars very rarely figured as suppliers of information, nor is it likely that anyone in a rural community would have risked his life to become a professional informer. In some areas familiars were openly discriminated against, if we may believe the inquisitors of Llerena (Extremadura), complaining in 1597 of “the injuries which the corregidores, legal officials and town councils commit against the familiars of this Holy Office simply because they are familiars. The fact is that a man can live in his village for twenty or thirty years without the officials doing anything to injure him, but as soon as he becomes a familiar they move against him, especially if there are conversos in the town council.”[50]

The steady decline in the number of familiars suggests that the post, even with its privileges, was not always much sought after. Between 1611 and 1641 in Galicia the number of familiars fell by 44 percent; where previously they had existed in 226 villages, now they were to be found in only 108.[51] Writers of that time continued nevertheless to give wholly misleading figures for the numbers of familiars in Spain. In a well-known book published in 1675 the author Alonso Núñez de Castro claimed that “there are more than 20,000 familiars in Spain.”[52] Another contemporary, the French ambassador, borrowed the wholly inaccurate figure from him and repeated it in his memoirs. Their testimony helped to maintain the legend of a Spain overrun by officials of the Inquisition. In fact, the numbers were shrinking. An account given by the Holy Office in 1748 shows that the province of Toledo had less than a hundred familiars instead of the eight hundred to which it was entitled, and the entire kingdom of Aragon had only thirty-five instead of the thousand or more it was permitted.[53] The evidence suggests that the organizational apparatus built up by the Inquisition was flimsy, did not exercise social control and had only a marginal impact on the daily lives of most Spaniards.

A similar conclusion may be applied to the role of comisarios, brought into existence from the 1560s.[54] They were normally local parish priests who acted for the Inquisition on special occasions and supplied it with data on births and marriages. They also frequently passed on denunciations from their parishioners to the regional inquisitors, in the way they had done in Languedoc in the medieval Inquisition.[55] Without their essential help, the inquisitors would have been wholly unable to carry out their role in the Spanish countryside. In some areas, commensurate with the duties they had to carry out, comisarios could be men of education.[56] In others, they fell far short of the required standard. In 1553 the bishop of Pamplona complained that those in his diocese were “idiots,” and had elected to become comisarios only in order to escape from his jurisdiction.[57] In Catalonia in 1570 the inquisitors reported that nobody wanted the post, and by the mid-seventeenth century there were almost no comisarios in the province.

The most surprising aspect of the administration of the Holy Office was its often inadequate financing. Even though it was a government department, it was left to fend for itself. In this it mirrored the model of the medieval French Inquisition, which never received a fixed source of revenue. The Spanish tribunal was from the first financed out of the proceeds of its own activities. Confiscations were, in the early period, far and away the most important source.[58]

Confiscation of property was the standard punishment prescribed by canon law for heresy. Ferdinand stated in 1485 that confiscations imposed in Spain were by order of the pope, so it would seem that the Church controlled the process. In fact, at the beginning it was the secular authorities who carried out confiscations. Only later did the inquisitors take over control. There were normally two stages to the exercise. At the first stage, upon the arrest of a suspect his goods and income might be “sequestrated.” This could have terrible consequences and was much dreaded. The sequestrations were used to pay the costs of the prisoner in jail. If he were there long enough the money might all be used up, thereby driving his dependents into poverty. In effect, therefore, a sequestration might amount to a confiscation. Confiscation proper, which occurred only at the second stage, resulted from a judicial verdict and was a regular penalty for major offenses.

The principal victims of confiscations were the richer conversos, whose wealth must have stirred many an orthodox spirit. As Queen Isabella’s secretary Hernando del Pulgar wrote sardonically of the citizens of Toledo during a time of civil disturbances: “What great inquisitors of the faith they must be, to be finding heresies in the property of the peasants of the town of Fuensalida, which they rob and burn!”[59] The initial seizures carried out by the Inquisition were substantial. The alleged plot of conversos against the Inquisition in Seville in 1481 was followed by confiscation of the property not only of the fabled Susán but of “many others, very prominent and very rich,” to quote Bernáldez. In the words of a later chronicler of Seville, “what was noticeable was the great number of prosecutions against moneyed men.”[60] In the years after this, great and wealthy converso families could be ruined by even the slightest taint of heresy, since being condemned to “reconciliation” (see chapter 9) meant that all the culprit’s property was confiscated and not allowed to pass to his descendants, so that widows and children were often left without any provision.

Not surprisingly, many ordinary Spaniards came to the conclusion that the Inquisition was devised simply to rob people. “They were burnt only for the money they had,” a resident of Cuenca declared. “They burn only the well-off, because they have property; the others they leave alone,” said another. In 1504 an accused stated that “only the rich were burnt by the Inquisition, not the poor.”[61] When a woman in Aranda de Duero in 1501 expressed alarm about the announced coming of the inquisitors to those parts, a man retorted: “Don’t be afraid of being burnt, they’re only after the money.”[62] In 1483 after a city councilor of Ciudad Real, the converso Juan González Pintado, was burnt for heresy, Catalina de Zamora was accused of asserting that “this Inquisition that the fathers are carrying out is as much for taking property from the conversos as for defending the faith.”[63] “It is the goods,” she said on another occasion, “that are the heretics.” This saying appears to have become common usage in Spain. The city authorities of Barcelona, protesting in 1509 against the technique of confiscations, complained that “goods are not heretics.”[64] The issue certainly influenced the advice given by the Suprema in 1539 to the inquisitor of Navarre, that he should go easy on confiscations “so as not to cause people to say that the Holy Office is doing this out of cupidity.”[65] People continued all the same to believe it. The Inquisition was there, a Catalan commented in 1572, “only to get money.” In addition to the profits made at Seville, the Inquisition found confiscations could be profitable elsewhere. During its brief year-long stay in the small town of Guadalupe in 1485, enough money was raised from confiscations by the tribunal to pay almost entirely for the building of a royal residence costing 7,286 ducats.[66]

In most of the cases we have on record, the money from confiscated property seems to have been largely disposed of by the Inquisition. It will probably never be clear what proportion of money went to the crown and what to the tribunal. Whatever King Ferdinand’s expectations may have been,[67] no available documentation supports the idea of the crown raking in profits. In 1524 a treasurer informed Charles V that his predecessor had received 10 million ducats from the conversos, but the figure is both unverified and implausible.[68]

From time to time confiscations might be substantial. In 1592 in Granada an inquisitor admitted that of the fifty-odd women he had arrested “many or most were rich.”[69] In later periods there were bonanzas. In 1676, towards the end of the last great and fruitful campaign of the Inquisition against the Portuguese judaizers resident in Spain, the Suprema claimed that it had obtained from the royal treasury confiscations amounting to 772,748 ducats and 884,979 pesos. These sums are extremely large for the period, and suggest that the crown was receiving a high proportion of confiscations. But that was not always true. If we look at the value of property confiscated on Mallorca after the alleged converso conspiracy of 1678 had been discovered, we find that the totals come to well over 2.5 million ducats,[70] certainly the biggest single sum gathered in by the Inquisition in all the three centuries of its existence. Of this vast sum, however, it seems that the crown received under 5 percent.

Invariably judicial disputes arose over property that had been seized. Debts of the accused had to be paid; the expenses of officials and of court cases had to be met. The crown could claim a third, as had apparently occurred under Ferdinand and Isabella. Some of the money was invested in censos (annuities) and houses by the inquisitors. In the city of Lleida in 1487, the confiscations from converso property were assigned to the city council, a religious order, a hospital and to various other needs, so that the Inquisition did not manage to control all the revenue available.[71] By a thousand different routes the money trickled out of the hands of the inquisitors. When the reason was not mismanagement, it was the sheer dishonesty of minor officials. Whatever the income from confiscations at any time, it is safe to assume that the tribunals did not grow appreciably wealthier, or at least did not keep up their temporary wealth for long periods.

After confiscations, there were three important sources of flexible revenue. These were “fines,” which could be levied at any rate desired and were often used simply to raise money to cover expenses; and “penances” (penitencias), which were more formal and were usually decreed at a solemn occasion such as an auto de fe. Both fines and penances could, of course, be realized out of sequestrated property. Finally, there was the category of “dispensations” or “commutations,” when a punishment decreed by the Inquisition was commuted to a cash payment. This penalty, also sometimes called a “composition,” seems to have been most in use in the decade after the expulsion of the Jews and was levied on conversos who wished to be “rehabilitated,” that is, wipe their slate clean of offenses. Nearly two thousand persons paid this fine in Seville in 1494, and about the same number in Toledo the year after. The income, with so many people involved, could be substantial. Many with money were only too willing to pay for relief from the public shame of having to wear a sanbenito or penitential garment. At later periods, the method served to purchase relief from certain penalties: some, for example, managed to escape service in the galleys by paying for dispensations.

Together, these apparently small sources of income produced respectable sums, though never enough to substantiate the sweeping view that the Inquisition was founded to rob the conversos. Between 1493 and 1495 the various tribunals handed to the council of the Inquisition some 45,000 ducats for fines.[72] In 1497 the royal treasurer acknowledged receipt from the Toledo Inquisition of about 17,000 ducats realized from dispensations.[73] In general, it is likely that these various sources of income never came to more than 2 percent of government treasury receipts in any year.[74] The crown was not in the business for profits. It does not alter the fact that many families might face misery as a result of the fines.

Why, during this phase of comparatively high income, was no provision made for a secure financial base? This may have been in part, as we have mentioned, because the Spanish Inquisition was modeled on the medieval, which had no secure funds either. But we must also take into account the fact that the early Inquisition in Spain was an itinerant tribunal, created for an emergency and with no long-term plans, as the various Instructions of Torquemada show clearly. The Catholic Kings may well have thought of it as being no more permanent than that other useful organization of theirs, the Hermandad.

There were certainly no financial problems in the first years. After Isabella’s death in 1504, however, there was a sharp drop in confiscation income. “It is reported that the costs of the Inquisition exceed its income,” an official noted.[75] The treasury of the Inquisition received in 1509 one-tenth of what it was receiving in 1498.[76] Over the next generation, with the disappearance of the great persecution of conversos, income plummeted. The crown had to decide what to do about this situation. Because the Inquisition was strictly a royal tribunal, revenue from confiscations and fines went in the first instance to the crown, which then paid out for the salaries and expenses of the inquisitors. Under the Catholic Kings, the Holy Office was totally subject to the crown for finance. As late as 1540 the Suprema reported that orders for salaries of inquisitors in the crown of Aragon were always signed by the king and not by the inquisitor general.[77]

The crown, however, helped itself to so much inquisitorial income that very soon it had to find extra money for salaries, and Ferdinand therefore turned to the Church. In 1488 the pope granted him the right to appoint inquisitors to one prebend[78] (when vacant) in each cathedral or collegiate church. The king made ten appointments that year. He had, however, endangered the financial position of the Inquisition, and under the absentee Charles V the Suprema slowly began to take control away from the crown. In the 1540s royal control was virtually nominal, and by the 1550s the Suprema was actually withholding details of confiscations from the king.[79] It was at this period that the Inquisition obtained its next secure source of revenue.

Already, in 1501, the pope had granted to all the tribunals of Spain the income from specified canonries and prebends, but for several reasons this had never fully taken effect. The government was still wrestling with the problem half a century later. In 1547 Prince Philip informed his father that he was discussing with Inquisitor General Valdés and Francisco de los Cobos “a memorandum they have drawn up on their ideas for the reform and supply of the salaries of the Inquisition.” The emperor, he added, “knows better than anybody how important it is to maintain the Inquisition in these realms, and how great an advantage it would be if they had secure salaries.”[80] Impressed by the struggles of the Inquisition against heresy within Spain, the pope in 1559 generously repeated the terms of the grant of 1501. The concession responded to efforts which Valdés and Philip II had been making for several years. From now on, aided by the income from ecclesiastical offices and from various financial agreements made with the Moriscos in the 1570s, the Inquisition became less dependent on the crown for survival. It also ceased to rely on (dwindling) confiscations. The canonries and investments (censos) were more secure and became, at last, a reliable basis of income for the Holy Office.

The evolution from deficit to relative stability can be seen in the case of the tribunal of Llerena. In the early sixteenth century, with profitable income from judaizers now virtually a thing of the past, most tribunals faced severe problems. The dangers of this situation were certainly in the mind of the anonymous converso of Toledo who in 1538 directed a memorial to Charles V: “Your Majesty should above all provide that the expenses of the Holy Office do not come from the property of the condemned, because it is a repugnant thing if inquisitors cannot eat unless they burn [recia cosa es que si no queman no comen].”[81] Unfortunately, this is exactly what the inquisitors of Llerena were forced to do. With no revenue coming in, they were obliged to go out and look for it. “We must look out,” one inquisitor commented, “for a solution to maintain the said tribunal in the future.” In 1550 the salaries of officials, amounting to 1,395 ducats, could not be met by income from current fines, which brought in only 1,000 ducats.[82] In July 1554 the inquisitor Dr. Ramirez informed the Suprema that “this Inquisition cannot subsist without going on a visitation every year.” As remedies he proposed that one of the two posts of inquisitor be suppressed; that the post of receiver be dropped and the work given to the notary; that confiscations be looked after directly by the remaining inquisitor; and that further visitations be made to the diocese of Badajoz, which was promisingly full of suspicious people, so that “with a bit of care there will be no lack of business whereby God our Lord will be served and the Holy Office be able to sustain itself.” By July 1572, with the new system of canonries, all this had changed. Two canonries, in Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, now brought in 1,813 ducats, and extensive confiscations from the wealthy family of Lorenzo Angelo in Badajoz raised income in 1572 to nearly 5,000 ducats.[83]

For the next two centuries confiscations and canonries remained the chief direct sources of finance for each tribunal. Two canonries, in Málaga and Antequera, provided the tribunal of Granada with 12.8 percent of its income in 1573;[84] three canonries, in Córdoba, Jaén and Ubeda together provided 40 percent of the income of the tribunal of Córdoba in 1578;[85] and four canonries—in Badajoz, Plasencia, Coria and Ciudad Rodrigo—provided 37.1 percent of that of the tribunal of Llerena in 1611.[86] Without the regular annual income from these Church offices, the Inquisition would have gone bankrupt.

By their nature, confiscations and sequestrations could never bring in a reliable income. The vast majority of all those accused by the Inquisition were people of humble means and the inquisitors would need to have had a regular annual turnover of hundreds of prisoners in order to get anything like a substantial revenue. Windfalls like the great persecution of Chuetas in Mallorca in the 1680s were exceptional. The normal picture was of tribunals trying desperately to find income for the costs of administration, prosecution, maintenance of prisoners and the increasingly expensive autos de fe. The documentation is full of complaints by local inquisitors that they cannot provide either for themselves or for their prisoners.

The regular state of deficit in the tribunals can be seen by looking at the percentage shortfall of expenses against income over a period of time. For example, income in Granada in 1618 was 3 percent more than costs, but in 1671 expenses were 3 percent more than income and in 1705 27 percent more.[87] The figures leave no doubt that the Inquisition was in a parlous financial state. The accounts of income and expenditure of the tribunal of Córdoba show us a persistent history of debt over three centuries: in 1578 expenses exceeded income by 14.6 percent, in 1642 by 26.8 percent, in 1661 by 33.8 percent, in 1726 by 11.2 percent.[88]

Why were the tribunals in constant debt? Quite apart from insufficient income and difficulties caused by the highest inflation rate in Europe, the problems of the Inquisition can be explained simply by the fact that bureaucracy was absorbing an enormous proportion of income. In 1498 Torquemada had suggested that each tribunal have two inquisitors and a small number of officials. By the late sixteenth century this concept of a modest establishment had disappeared forever. Córdoba in 1578 had twenty-six officials, Llerena in 1598 had thirty;[89] the number in each case included three inquisitors. In Córdoba salaries consumed 75.6 percent of income. In addition to this, each tribunal had to send a proportion of income to the Suprema, which had its own expenses. The sum contributed by Córdoba to the Suprema in 1578 represented nearly a fifth of its costs. At this period the salaries of the Suprema bureaucracy were impressively high.[90] The Council spent 15,500 ducats a year on wages (the inquisitor general got a quarter of this), compared with an average total wage bill for each of the bigger provincial tribunals of around 3,200 ducats. Local tribunals also had to finance special expenses such as the autos de fe. In 1655, at a time when its normal annual income was around 9,300 ducats, Córdoba put on an auto which cost over 5,300 ducats.[91]

This brings us to the most crucial source of inquisitorial income: censos, or investment income. We know that the Inquisition never became a great property-owning institution, and that the estates owned at the end of the eighteenth century were of modest value only. The tribunal of Seville, for example, owned a total of twenty-five rented dwellings and two small estates in 1799.[92] The Holy Office had never lacked the opportunity to become rich, but several factors hindered it doing so. Sequestrations and confiscations did not always produce their full values. Against them had to be set the cost of maintaining prisoners, the debts already owed by those arrested and the claims of innocent dependent relatives. For example, when in 1760 a royal official in Santander was arrested, his sequestrated property was valued at 32,000 ducats, but of this 36.6 percent went to payment of his debts, 31.7 percent to his heirs, and only the remaining 31.7 percent to the Inquisition.[93] The example is not necessarily typical: in all too many cases the Inquisition refused to pay creditors or family, and kept confiscated property for itself. From the beginning, moreover, the crown had decided that the tribunal required cash rather than an accumulation of property. Confiscations were therefore put up for sale in the open market, and the cash obtained was invested, “as ordered by the Catholic king” (the reference, to King Ferdinand, was in 1519).[94] Many tribunals were very lax in buying censos, and in 1579 the Suprema had to insist that as soon as one censo was paid off the cash must be reinvested in another. The need to have a steady income—one quite independent of the unreliable and irregular income from confiscations—was undoubtedly the main reason why by the sixteenth century most tribunals were investing heavily in censos. After the turmoil of the Morisco expulsions, we find the Valencia tribunal in 1630 with 45,500 ducats invested in censos at 5 percent, yielding an annual income of 2,275 ducats.

Censos, in short, became the regular cash source of the Inquisition. In 1573 no less than 74 percent, and in 1576 80 percent, of the income of the Granada tribunal came from censos and house rents;[95] in 1611, 63.3 percent of the income of Llerena came from censos.[96] Everywhere the tribunals began to rely on investment income for survival. In the tribunals in Morisco territory the Inquisition was excessively vulnerable because most of the censos were on land worked by the Moriscos. Events such as the Alpujarra risings or the Morisco expulsion after 1609 were therefore disastrous, not simply because of the loss of the special payments made by the racial minorities but because most of the cash income, in censos and rents, came from Moriscos.

The Inquisition, in financial terms, became a sort of bank through which money from various sectors of society—conversos, Moriscos, financiers—was channeled. Since the inquisitors needed a regular flow rather than future benefits, censos were a fair business risk and preferable to any other economic activity (they brought in 7 percent in the late sixteenth century, arguably a higher rate of return than most other investments). Thus the Holy Office joined other ranks of society which the writer González de Cellorigo was later (in 1600) to condemn for their devotion to the quick profit from censos, “the plague and ruin of Spain.”

Inevitably, individual inquisitors saw no reason why they should not also profit. Lea cites the cases of the Suprema president who was banished in 1642 for malversation of funds, and the inquisitor who died in 1643 allegedly leaving 40,000 ducats in gold and silver.[97] One may well suspect that some tribunals were richer than their financial statements suggested. Take, for instance, the tribunal of Toledo, which on paper had a permanent deficit. If this were really true, how does one explain the interesting case history of the accountant of the Inquisition there, the priest Juan de Castrejana, who was born in poverty but who managed before his death in 1681 to buy up lands in his hometown, endow a chapel and a hospital, lend money to his town council, buy investments in Madrid, set up a silk-manufacturing company and lend money to the silk merchants of Madrid?[98]

In the late seventeenth century there were other positive signs for the inquisitors. It was without any doubt a period of decline in both income and personnel. The oft-criticized familiars had all but disappeared. In 1748 their numbers had been reduced to less than a fifth of those permitted. In Galicia and in Aragon, 98 percent of towns had no familiar.[99] Punishment of heresy also disappeared. The only aspect that improved, from the Inquisition’s point of view, was finance. At the end of the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth, numerous tribunals were faced once again by a lucrative spate of confiscations. This happened most notably in Granada, in Murcia and—most impressively of all—in Mallorca. In the course of the eighteenth century, with the almost total disappearance of prosecutions, revenue from fines and confiscations obviously slumped. By contrast, the censos, in an expanding agrarian economy, now yielded splendid returns. The tribunal of Murcia may serve as example. In 1792 its income was 103,000 ducats. Because it had few or no cases to deal with, costs absorbed only 40 percent of this, leaving a nice favorable balance of 60 percent.[100]

Our glance at the Inquisition’s structure underlines the very exceptional nature of the institution. There were “Inquisitions” before and later, in Germany, France and Italy, and all were small papal commissions with a purely temporary role. There were also from time to time courts in other countries—like the Star Chamber in England and the Chambre Ardente in France—that looked into cases of heresy. But in Spain, for the very first time in European history, a disciplinary tribunal was created that had both the sanction of the pope and the full political support of the state, exercising an open-ended program of investigating first heresy and then other related offenses. The tribunal, moreover, was given jurisdiction that usually overrode that of the bishops, was exercised over the greater part of national territory, and had exceptional backup in the form of a governing body with the status of a royal council of state. It began developing, moreover, an unprecedented system of archiving information for which later-day historians would be supremely grateful.

Presented in this way, the Inquisition was a thing of awe. The inquisitors themselves did not hesitate to affirm their position and their power, and through the generations those who had been their prisoners—notably Jews and Protestants—helped to build up the same terrifying image. Behind this face, however, there were perhaps more solid realities. It was still the post-medieval era, not one for imposing the lineaments of a police state. The means did not exist for a handful of men, with run-of-the-mill training and no technology or adequate communications on hand, to set up a machinery of repression. As time would show, there were almost insurmountable barriers that quickly limited the capacity for tyranny.

The barriers to efficiency were, in broad terms, three. First, there was systematic and unending resistance from other courts, both royal and autonomous, and from regional authorities. Second, there were the innate drawbacks of a primitive organization run by persons who were often ignorant, incompetent and corrupt. Civil and Church authorities in previous times in Europe had tried methods for collecting information and identifying dissenters,[101] but the Inquisition still had a long way to go before it could achieve a satisfactory level of data efficiency. Third, all systems of control need to draw support as well as information from the grass roots, but the inquisitors never managed to achieve this to any adequate extent. These three issues are fundamental to an understanding of the tribunal, and help us avoid the mistaken view of the Inquisition as an all-powerful organ of state power.

Perhaps the most significant aspect is that there was, as we have seen in chapter 4, constant resistance. Though the Inquisition is often supposed to have led a relatively tranquil existence among the people of Spain, and even to have dominated the people by its presence, it was never sure of its position and was always anxious to emphasize its rights and privileges. Foreign travelers who referred glibly to its immense power were deceiving themselves and us. Its political life was always stormy, and quarrels of jurisdiction plagued its entire career, which was marked by serious disputes with the papacy, the bishops and virtually every other authority in the state.

Its conflicts with Rome usually concerned jurisdiction, but occasionally issues of principle might transform a question of jurisdiction into something much greater. The Inquisition derived its authority from the pope and was consequently governed by papal regulations. Complaints against the tribunal could be best dealt with if taken directly to the fount of authority, the pope. The conversos in the fifteenth century did their best both in Castile and in Aragon to obtain papal decrees to modify the rigor of the Holy Office. This was a legitimate procedure, since the constitution of the tribunal allowed appeals to Rome, which was eager to maintain its rights, not only to preserve control but also to protect possible sources of revenue, for the conversos paid liberally for any bulls granted by the pope. But the Spanish monarchs, supported by the inquisitors, refused to take cognizance of papal letters that contradicted the verdict of their courts. Ferdinand’s famous letter to Sixtus IV in May 1482 illustrates the firmness of the crown’s attitude. The vacillation of Rome before Spanish claims, and the contradictory policies followed by successive popes, made it possible in the end for inquisitors usually to have things their own way. As early as 2 August 1483 Sixtus IV granted to the conversos a bull which revoked to Rome all cases of appeal, but only eleven days later he suspended this, claiming he had been misled. When his successor Innocent VIII tried to pursue a similar policy of issuing papal letters to appellants from Spain, Ferdinand stepped in and on 15 December 1484 issued a pragmatic decreeing death and confiscation for anyone making use of papal letters without royal permission.[102]

Ferdinand’s next decree, of 31 August 1509, renewed the penalties of the 1484 decree. Under Charles V the papacy became more cautious. Clement VII in 1524 and 1525 renewed the permission it had regularly (in 1483, 1486, 1502, 1507, 1518 and 1523) granted to the inquisitor general to exercise appellate jurisdiction in place of the pope and to hear appeals that would normally have been directed to the Holy See. This did not mean that Rome had given up the right to hear appeals, and when papal letters again began to be issued, Charles V in 1537 reinforced the decree of 1509.

Although Rome did occasionally refer appeals back to Spain,[103] the Inquisition was more usually employed rejecting the claims made by holders of papal letters. This situation continued throughout the seventeenth century. But the Inquisition was not unduly concerned by difficulties with Rome, and even before the end of the sixteenth century we find the secretary of the Suprema asserting complacently that the Holy See had abandoned its claim to ultimate jurisdiction over cases tried by the tribunal.

Under Philip V the new Bourbon dynasty tolerated no interference by Rome, and thereby continued the tradition of Philip II. Hostility under Philip V was aggravated by the international situation and by the pope’s support for the archduke Charles, Habsburg pretender to the throne of Spain. In 1705 papal decrees were forbidden in Spain and all appeals to Rome prohibited. This assertion of “regalism” was supported by most of the bishops and also by the advocate-general Melchor de Macanaz in a famous memorandum of 1713. With the advent of the Bourbons and their new extension of power over the western Mediterranean, in both Spain and Italy a declining papacy had little opportunity to assert its old jurisdictional claims.

Before the birth of the papal Inquisition in the thirteenth century, bishops had the principal jurisdiction over heretics. This episcopal power was for all purposes suspended with the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, which claimed and maintained exclusive authority over all cases of heresy. Bishops still in theory retained their rights of jurisdiction, but in practice they seldom or ever put the claim into effect. In January 1584 the Suprema informed the bishop of Tortosa that the popes had given the Inquisition exclusive jurisdiction over heresy and had prohibited cognizance by others. This claim was obviously false, since in 1595 the pope, Clement VIII, informed the archbishop of Granada that the authority of inquisitors in cases of heresy did not exclude episcopal jurisdiction.[104] These opposing pretensions led to frequent and serious quarrels between bishops and tribunals that were never satisfactorily settled.

Most of the religious orders were subject immediately to the papacy by their constitution, and were therefore generally free from episcopal jurisdiction. Since, however, the powers of the Inquisition derived from the papacy, the tribunals made every effort to bring the friars under their control in matters of faith. Political rivalry entered into this question, because the Dominican order had won for itself a special position not only in the medieval Inquisition but also in the Spanish. Hostility between Dominicans and Franciscans led to the latter obtaining bulls from Rome to protect their privileges. Under Charles V the opposition crumbled. In 1525 the emperor obtained two briefs from the pope subjecting all friars in Spain to the Inquisition and its officers. This did not last long, for in 1534 the pope restored to the Franciscans and other orders all the privileges they had previously enjoyed. The struggle went on intermittently until the beginning of seventeenth century, when papal briefs of 1592 and 1606 decided entirely in favor of the Inquisition.

We have seen that the Society of Jesus, although founded and controlled by Spaniards, encountered suspicion in sixteenth-century Spain. Siliceo, the archbishop of Toledo, was hostile; and the famous Dominican Melchor Cano led a vigorous campaign in which he denounced the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius as heretical. Cano and Siliceo were only part of a wider campaign to discredit the Jesuit order.[105] One of the liberties questioned by the Inquisition was the Jesuit privilege of not having to denounce heretics to anyone but their own superior in the order. When in 1585 it was learned that the fathers of the Jesuit college at Monterrey in Galicia had been concealing the heresies of some of their number instead of denouncing them to the Holy Office, the latter acted immediately by arresting the provincial of Castile and two fathers from Monterrey. The Inquisition did not succeed in punishing its prisoners because the case was revoked to Rome in 1587, but the affair clinched its victory over the religious orders.

Only one class of people, the bishops, remained beyond inquisitorial jurisdiction. Bishops could be tried only by Rome, a rule that had been upheld in the medieval Inquisition. In Spain the issue was of some importance because of the high proportion of bishops who had converso blood. Among the earliest of those singled out for attack by the Inquisition was Bishop Juan Arias Dávila of Segovia, who took over the see in 1461. He had refused to allow the Holy Office into his diocese, and on being accused by the tribunal was summoned to Rome in 1490, in his eightieth year.[106] Even more distinguished was Pedro de Aranda, bishop of Calahorra and in 1482 president of the council of Castile. He was summoned to Rome in 1493 and died there in disgrace in 1500. One of the most eminent bishops to suffer patent injustice was Hernando de Talavera, whose case we have already noted. But the most famous example of a clash between inquisitorial and episcopal authority, in a case that also involved royal and papal privileges, was that of Bartolomé de Carranza, archbishop of Toledo.

Bartolomé de Carranza y Miranda was born in 1503 in Navarre, of poor but hidalgo parents.[107] At the age of twelve he entered the University of Alcalá, and at seventeen joined the Dominican order. He was sent to study at Valladolid where his intellectual gifts soon won him a chair in theology. In his early thirties he went to Rome to win his doctorate in the same subject, and returned to Spain famous. For a while he acted as a censor to the Inquisition, but refused all offers of promotion. In 1542 he refused the wealthy see of Cuzco in America, and likewise rejected the post of royal confessor in 1548, and that of bishop of the Canaries in 1550. He was twice sent to the sessions of the Council of Trent as a Spanish representative, in 1545 and 1551. He returned to Spain in 1553 and in the following year accompanied Prince Philip on his journey to England to marry Mary Tudor. There he apparently distinguished himself by the zeal with which he crushed heretics and purified the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The testimony for his activity in those months comes principally from his own defense before the Inquisition a few years later; it is possible that he exaggerated his role, though a scholar states: “it is hard to deny that Carranza was central to the violence against reformed believers in England.”[108]

In May 1557 Archbishop Siliceo of Toledo died. Philip, then in Brussels, immediately decided to give the post to Carranza, who refused the honor as he had refused all others. The king was adamant. Eventually Carranza said that he would accept only if ordered to do so. In this way he became the holder of the most important see in the Catholic world after Rome. Carranza was a parvenu in the ecclesiastical circles of Spain. His claims to Toledo were less than those of other distinguished prelates in Spain, notably his personal enemy the inquisitor general Fernando de Valdés.[109] Like Siliceo, Carranza was a man of humble origins thrown into a rigidly aristocratic milieu. He had been nominated to the see while abroad without any effort by Philip to consult his Spanish advisers. Intellectually he was far inferior to his brother Dominican, Melchor Cano, a brilliant theologian who had always been Carranza’s bitterest rival in the order. The new archbishop obviously had enemies. Only the weapon of attack was lacking. This was supplied by Carranza himself in his Commentaries on the Christian Catechism, which he published in Castilian in 1558 at Antwerp.

The Commentaries were considered thoroughly orthodox in doctrine. The Council of Trent examined and approved the work, and numerous other distinguished theologians in Spain agreed with this. But, as we have had occasion to see (in chapter 6 above), there were new considerations that affected the fate of spiritual writings in Spain. Phrases in his work were seized upon by hostile critics, notably Cano, and were denounced as heresy. The archbishop of Granada called the work “reliable, trustworthy, pious and Catholic”: the bishop of Almería said the book “contained no heresy and much excellent doctrine.” Yet Melchor Cano asserted that the work “contains many propositions which are scandalous, rash and ill-sounding, others which savor of heresy, others which are erroneous, and even some which are heretical.” Led by Valdés, whose hostility to spiritual writings in unlettered hands was decisive, the Inquisition accepted Cano’s opinion. Small wonder that pope Pius V claimed that “the theologians of Spain want to make him a heretic although he is not one!” Nor can we entirely discount the issue of a clash of personalities. Both Valdés and Cano detested Carranza; and in the world of ecclesiastical politics the archbishop had enemies such as Pedro de Castro, bishop of Cuenca, and his brother Rodrigo, a member of the Suprema.

What ruined Carranza was the Protestant crisis in Spain, which occurred at precisely the time of his elevation to the see of Toledo. Interrogation of Carlos de Seso and Pedro Cazalla resulted in detailed denunciations of the archbishop. On one occasion he was said to have told them he believed as they did; on another he was reported as saying, “As for me, I don’t believe in purgatory.” He was said to have used Lutheran terminology when preaching in London. The inquisitor general carefully took note of all these testimonies. Still the Holy Office did not act against Carranza, for as a bishop he was answerable only to Rome. Valdés made urgent representations to Rome, and in January 1559 Pope Paul IV sent letters empowering the Inquisition to act against bishops for a limited period of two years, but both the prisoner and the case were to be referred to Rome. Valdés received the brief on 8 April 1559. On 6 May the fiscal of the Inquisition drew up an indictment calling for the arrest of Carranza “for having preached, written and dogmatized many heresies of Luther.” After much pressure Philip II gave his sanction on 26 June. On 6 August Carranza, expecting the blow to fall any day, was summoned to Valladolid by the government.

Fearing the import of the summons, Carranza set out but delayed the progress of his journey. On 16 August he was met by a Dominican colleague and friend from Alcalá who warned him that the Inquisition was searching to arrest him. Shaken by this, the archbishop continued his journey until four days later he reached the safety of Torrelaguna, just north of Madrid, where he met his friend Fray Pedro de Soto, who had come from Valladolid to warn him. But already it was too late. Carranza did not know that four days before his arrival the officials of the Inquisition had taken up their residence in Torrelaguna and were awaiting his coming. He reached the little town on Sunday, 20 August. Very early in the morning of Tuesday, 22 August, the inquisitors Diego Ramírez and Rodrigo Castro, together with about ten armed familiars, made their way up to Carranza’s bedroom and demanded, “Open to the Holy Office!” The intruders were let in, and an official addressed the archbishop, “Your Honor, I have been ordered to arrest Your Reverence in the name of the Holy Office.” Carranza said quietly, “Do you have sufficient warrant for this?” The official then read the order signed by the Suprema.

Carranza protested, “Do the inquisitors not know that they cannot be my judges, since by my dignity and consecration I am subject immediately to the pope and to no other?” This was the moment for the trump card to be played. Ramírez said, “Your Reverence will be fully satisfied on that account,” and showed him the papal brief. All that day the archbishop was kept under house arrest and in the evening a curfew was imposed on the town. No one was to venture into the streets after nine p.m. and nobody was to look out of the windows. In the silence and darkness that midnight the inquisitors and their prey were spirited out of Torrelaguna. In the early hours of 28 August Carranza was escorted into Valladolid, and allotted as prison a couple of rooms in a private residence in the city.[110]

During the whole of his confinement he was not allowed any recourse to the sacraments. In human terms, the tragic story of the archbishop was just beginning; but politically the story was at an end. From now on Carranza ceased to matter as a human being and became a mere pawn in the struggle for jurisdiction between Rome and the Inquisition. He no longer counted in a controversy where the real issues had become the ambitions of individuals and the pretensions of ecclesiastical tribunals. Marañón observes that in this atmosphere of villainy there was at least one just man—Dr. Martín de Azpilcueta, known as Dr. Navarro—who accepted a commission from Philip II to go and protect the interests of the archbishop at his eventual trial in Rome.

In the prolonged negotiations between Rome and the Spanish authorities, the papacy was concerned to claim its rights over Carranza and thereby to vindicate its unique control over bishops. Philip II saw the papal claim as interference in Spanish affairs and refused to allow the Inquisition to surrender its prisoner. Pope Pius IV in 1565 sent a special legation to negotiate in Madrid. Among its members were three prelates who later became popes as Gregory XIII, Urban VII and Sixtus V. They failed to make the mission a success. As one of them (reflecting a perception that many Italians had about Spain) wrote back to Rome:

Nobody dares to speak in favor of Carranza for fear of the Inquisition. No Spaniard would dare to absolve the archbishop, even if he were believed innocent, because this would mean opposing the Inquisition. The authority of the latter would not allow it to admit that it had imprisoned Carranza unjustly. The most ardent defenders of justice here consider that it is better for an innocent man to be condemned than for the Inquisition to suffer disgrace.[111]

With the accession of Pius V to the papal throne in 1566, a solution came into sight. From his prison cell Carranza managed to smuggle a message out to Rome in the form of a paper bearing in his handwriting the words, “Lord, if it be thou, bid me come to thee upon the waters” (Matthew XIV, 28). This was exactly what Pius intended to do. In July 1566 he managed to reach an agreement with the Spanish authorities. After seven years of house arrest in his lodgings in Valladolid, Carranza was at last allowed to go to Rome to see the pope. The archbishop went with a special traveling companion, the duke of Alba, who was setting out on his historic visit to the Netherlands. Carranza arrived at the port of Cartagena on the last day of 1566, and was put up at the fortress until the fleet could sail. “The archbishop of Toledo,” Alba wrote to Philip’s chief minister, Cardinal Espinosa, with wry humor, “has been going out of his mind since yesterday thinking that because we spent last night embarking we did not intend to take him with us. They tell me that every hour we delay seems like a year to the archbishop.” After nearly four months of waiting in port, Carranza’s patience was rewarded. “In order to lose no more time,” the duke informed the king on 26 April, “I have decided to leave tonight.” In the darkness before dawn, a great fleet of forty ships sailed out to sea and made their way northwards up the coastline.

The aging archbishop reached Rome and was placed in honorable confinement in the castle of Sant’ Angelo. This second detention lasted nine years. Pius V died in 1572 without having decided the case. His successor, Gregory XIII, finally issued sentence in April 1576. The verdict was a compromise, made no doubt in order to placate Spain. The Commentaries were condemned and prohibited and Carranza was obliged to abjure a list of “errors,” after which he was told to retire to a monastery in Orvieto. Meanwhile the papacy was to administer the vacant and wealthy see of Toledo. The sentence was only in part satisfactory to Philip and to the Inquisition, whose authority would have suffered by an acquittal. It satisfied Rome, which had vindicated its sole authority over bishops; and, in a sense, it may have satisfied Carranza, who was not accused of any heresy despite the prohibition of his book, which was to remain in all the editions of the Spanish Index except the last one in 1790. Justice had been replaced by political compromise. Everything had been taken into consideration except the frail old man who, eighteen days after the papal verdict had been read over him, contracted a urinary infection from which he died at three a.m. on 2 May 1576.

From the beginning, the tribunal was closely allied with and dependent on the crown, with the result that later historians came to regard it as a secular tribunal more than an ecclesiastical one. This argument was adopted especially by Catholic apologists who hoped to disembarrass the Church of an unattractive chapter in ecclesiastical history. There is a prima facie case for the argument. The Suprema was a government council, not a Church one. The crown had absolute powers of appointment and dismissal of inquisitors, power which Ferdinand employed whenever he felt it necessary. In questions of administration, although decisions were in practice left to inquisitors, the king was kept carefully informed. A letter from Ferdinand to Torquemada, dated 22 July 1486, even shows the king laying down regulations for detailed and minor points such as the salaries of doorkeepers in the Inquisition. For any other question, he tells Torquemada, “see to it yourself and do as you think fit.”[112] Royal control over the Inquisition is demonstrated by the fact that pleas for redress and reform by the Cortes in the early sixteenth century were all addressed to the crown. Most important of all, the tribunal was financially dependent on the crown.

However, as we have seen, the Inquisition was also an ecclesiastical tribunal. The papacy recognized the juridical existence of the Inquisition, but not apparently its status as a council, which made it a state body.[113] Much ink has been spent on trying to define the nature of inquisitorial authority. The truth is that the Inquisition itself always claimed dual jurisdiction. Problems inevitably arose when it came to defining the frontier between the two types of authority. Though the question of jurisdiction over familiars, for example, had repeatedly been agreed upon through accords, there continued to be constant quarrels between civil courts and the Inquisition. As late as the seventeenth century an official of the Inquisition, discussing “whether the jurisdiction that the Holy Office exercises over its lay officers and familiars is ecclesiastical or secular,” came arbitrarily to the conclusion that “this jurisdiction is ecclesiastical.”[114] In other words, secular courts could not try familiars. On the other hand, the Inquisition itself demanded the right to try laymen for nonecclesiastical offenses and for injuries done to its officers. At one and the same time, then, the Inquisition claimed to be exempt from secular authority but also claimed to be able to exercise secular authority.

It also claimed precedence over both Church and state in public events. This was one of the most common causes of conflict. The inquisitors argued that because they represented both pope and king they were entitled to precedence over all other authorities, including bishops and viceroys. As a result, Church and city authorities would often refuse to attend autos de fe (the judges of the Chancillería of Valladolid refused to attend the great auto of May 1559 for this reason), and in Barcelona the city consellers as a rule never went to autos.

The problem of jurisdiction arose out of the peculiar dual nature of inquisitorial power. To confirm its claim of exclusive authority over its own officials, the tribunal always took refuge in the papal bulls it had been granted. Neither the crown nor the Church courts, it argued, could go against these privileges. When critics pointed out that this limited the Inquisition to being a papal and ecclesiastical tribunal, inquisitors were quick to retort that, on the contrary, the Holy Office was also a secular tribunal, exercising power delegated by the crown. Indeed, the crown always supported this pretension. On 18 August 1501 King Ferdinand issued a decree prohibiting one of his own corregidors from “issuing a declaration saying that the Inquisition is of a different jurisdiction, because in fact it is all ours.” And on 9 December 1503 at Ocaña, Queen Isabella confirmed the dual jurisdiction of the Holy Office, saying that “the one jurisdiction aids and complements the other, so that justice may be done in the service of God.”[115] Armed with these powers, the inquisitors were, of course, free to arrest royal officials in the name of royal authority, even when royal courts ruled against. The crown, we should note, usually abstained from interfering in such cases, in order not to take sides. In the sixteenth century officials of the Holy Office arrested the corregidor of Murcia for disrespect, the diputats of Perpignan for insults and the vicar general of Saragossa for arresting a comisario. They made the entire city council of Tarragona together with the dean and chapter of the cathedral attend mass as penitents with candles in their hands, to atone for not letting the inquisitors into their city when they were fleeing from a plague in Barcelona.[116]

Conflicts between the Inquisition and secular authorities were at their most acute in the realms of the crown of Aragon. The undoubted hostility of the Inquisition to the fueros (regional laws) was put plainly in a statement it issued in 1565: “there is no point in saying that [the actions of the Inquisition] are against the fueros and laws of the realm, since the Holy Office is not subject to the fueros when these are out of step with the law.”[117] It was an arrogant claim, though in practice the inquisitors were careful not to overstep the limits of prudence. Nothing, however, could efface from the minds of officials in the crown of Aragon the feeling that the Inquisition was an alien institution.

In certain regions, the question of language was crucial. Roughly one in four Spaniards during the sixteenth century did not habitually speak Spanish. If Moriscos were interrogated, a translator often had to be on hand. In Catalonia testimony might be taken in the regional language but then transcribed in the only language understood by inquisitors, Spanish. The translated or transcribed text, not the original deposition, would then be used as the basis for prosecution. Though Catalan was commonly used for interrogations and trials in the first few decades, after the 1560s it was decided that “since Catalans normally understand our language, depositions should be made in the Castilian language and all trials held in private should be written in it.”[118] As may be imagined, the change opened the way to serious deformations of meaning. The diputats of Catalonia in 1600 pointed out that when evidence was given in Catalan or French, the Inquisition secretaries, who knew neither language, would make their interview notes in Castilian, leading to grave distortions and injustice. The Inquisition blithely ignored such protests. The rule was also applied in Valencia, and confirmed the alien character of the institution in Catalan-speaking areas. The diputats protested bitterly that “ever since foreigners [they meant Castilians] took over the Inquisition, there have been many cases of injustice.”[119]

In Valencia and Aragon, conflicts with the Inquisition centered on familiars and Moriscos. In both matters the nobility contested inquisitorial jurisdiction. In Aragon the Cortes of Monzón in 1564 claimed that

the inquisitors publish edicts on whatever they please and against everybody, on matters outside their jurisdiction, and against all the rules and laws of this kingdom. For many years now they have begun arresting many people who have not been nor are heretics, some for having quarreled with servants of their familiars, others for debts and petty causes.[120]

In 1566 the diputados of Aragon were demanding that “the inquisitors should not be able to issue edicts without the approval of the bishop.” By 1591, during the Antonio Pérez troubles, the rebels were demanding “that there should be no Inquisition in Aragon, or if there is one the inquisitors and their ministers should not be Castilians.”

Catalonia, of all the realms, was notoriously the most hostile to the Inquisition. In 1566 the diputats of Perpignan arrested and imprisoned the officials of the Inquisition after a dispute. The diputat Caldes de Santa Fe (a priest, as it happened) led the prisoners through the city, the Inquisition later complained, “to the sound of trumpets, and held celebrations and banquets as though he had gained a triumph and done something heroic.” The quarrel extended to Barcelona in 1568 when the Catalans refused to accept the accord of that year about familiars. The viceroy reported in 1569 that “they are all determined to lose their lives, family and income” rather than give in to the Inquisition.[121] Continual conflicts were blamed directly on the Inquisition even by the council of Aragon in Madrid. “The said inquisitors,” the members of the council stated in 1587, “are those who normally give rise to the quarrels that occur.”[122] The persistent opposition of the Catalans to the pretensions of the Inquisition was never in theory successful. On the other hand, though the inquisitors scored in nearly every skirmish, they never won the war.[123]

In Catalonia the Inquisition was always a despised institution, enjoying only minority support among the elite and people. “In this province,” the inquisitors reported in 1618, “they bear ill will to the tribunal of the Holy Office and would destroy it if they could.”[124] “Among the trials suffered by this Inquisition and its officials,” inquisitor Andrés Bravo reported grimly from Barcelona in 1632, “are the contempt and scorn they face both in public and in private.”[125] Not surprisingly, during the revolt against Castile in 1640 the Catalans drove out the Castilian Inquisition and in September 1643 reestablished the medieval papal one. This was suppressed when Barcelona fell in 1652, and the Castilian tribunal was reintroduced in August 1653. The unmistakable hostility in Catalonia, however, had its other side. Because the Holy Office was an independent jurisdiction, with its own bureaucracy and legal rights, many Catalans of humble origin were—the inquisitors explained in 1613—eager to become part of its apparatus “in order to free themselves from the heavy taxes and contributions that the nobles and even the bishops impose on their subjects.”[126] It was the positive side of the more normal unwillingness—as we have seen above—of Catalans to become officials of the Holy Office.

Thanks to the great number of competing jurisdictions, both of Church and of state, in Castile conflicts were no less serious than in the fuero regions. Several times in the course of the seventeenth century the council of Castile urged the king to take action, notably in proceedings in 1620, 1622 and 1631. In 1639 the inquisitors were accused of “enjoying the privilege of afflicting the soul with censures, life with adversity, and honor with exposure.”[127] It is significant that most of these protests occurred in the crisis years of the century, when the statutes of limpieza and other aspects of public policy were called in question. Opposition to the Inquisition in Castile was normally led by representatives of royal authority, that is, by competing jurisdictions such as high courts, civil governors and government councils in Madrid. The tribunal was seen as the opponent, not the promoter, of crown authority. The fact undermines a common but misplaced view that the Inquisition was a bulwark of royal power.

Government ministers repeatedly criticized its role. During the 1591 troubles in Saragossa (touched on below), his own advisers in Madrid protested to Philip II that “it is very important that the tribunal not meddle in matters that do not concern it directly.”[128] Philip’s commander in Saragossa, Vargas, likewise insisted that “to conserve its authority the Inquisition should not interfere in things that do not concern it.”[129] The virtually unanimous opposition of Madrid ministers to the Inquisition during those events is confirmed by a memorandum written by the next king’s chief minister, the duke of Lerma, in 1599. “It is important to see,” he wrote, “that the Inquisition does not meddle in things that are not its concern, since one can see the harm it did in Saragossa over Antonio Pérez.”[130]

This clearly confirms that the tribunal was not significantly employed with the intention of extending royal power. The few occasions when the crown made use of inquisitorial officials, in order to check smuggling at the frontiers or the distribution of false coin, were marginal and temporary. Occasionally the king might interfere in trials, but discreetly. A case in point is that of Felipe de Bardaxi, an Aragonese noble condemned in absentia for blasphemous swearing by the tribunal of Saragossa in 1563. He stayed in France, where he remained safely out of the hands of the inquisitors. In France he also helped the king by acting as an agent in negotiations with the Catholic nobles there. Philip therefore prevailed on the Aragonese Inquisition to suspend its verdict against him confiscating his property.[131]

Endless clashes between the Inquisition and other Castilian courts reached a climax at the end of the seventeenth century.[132] The Chancillería of Granada, a supreme court of the realm, had been humiliated by the Inquisition in a dispute in 1623, but in 1682 was caught up in yet another typically petty case over a secretary of the Inquisition who had ordered the arrest of a noisy neighbor. This time the city council, the archbishop and the Chancillería combined against the Holy Office with such effectiveness that the crown ordered the banishment until further notice of the inquisitors. At the same time the council of Castile protested energetically against the abuses committed by the Inquisition. The final straw came in 1696, when the Diputación of Catalonia entered into conflict with the inquisitor of Barcelona, Bartolomé Sanz y Muñoz, and complained that “the disorders in this tribunal arise in part because inquisitors are normally foreigners, from another province, who have no understanding of the temperament of our people.”[133] Sanz was deported from Catalonia by royal order. As an immediate result, the government in Madrid set up a special committee consisting of two members from each of the six leading councils. On 12 May 1696 this body issued a damning report on the abuses of jurisdiction committed by the tribunal:

There is no vassal free of its power whom it does not treat as an immediate subordinate, subjecting him to its mandates, censures, fines and prisons; no casual offense or light incivility to its servants which it does not avenge and punish as a crime against religion; not satisfied with exempting the persons and property of its officials from all public taxes and contributions, it even wishes to claim the immunity of not having criminals arrested in its houses; in the style of its letters it uses and affects ways to decrease respect for the royal judges and even respect for the authority of superior magistrates.[134]

The report then went on to argue that precedent fully favored complete royal authority over the Inquisition in all matters not pertaining to faith. Although the report was not acted upon, the attitude of Philip V in the subsequent reign made it clear that he wished to subject the tribunal more closely to royal control, and “regalism” came to be the official policy of the state with regard to the Inquisition. From what we have seen, particularly in respect of the conflicts between state tribunals and the Holy Office, it becomes difficult to sustain the old argument that the Inquisition served the interests of royal absolutism.

The tribunal of course had a political role. Its authority very conveniently did not recognize frontiers within Spain,[135] and the crown consequently made use of it when no other recourse was available. But it would be impossible to demonstrate that royal power was strengthened in any way. Ferdinand the Catholic, for example, used the Inquisition as a political lever. Behind virtually every move of his concerning the Inquisition, political motives can be discerned. In 1507 he was pursuing the famous son of Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia, into Navarre. Failing to secure his victim by any other means, Ferdinand persuaded the Inquisition to initiate proceedings against him for blasphemy, atheism and materialism. But Borgia’s death in battle cheated both the Holy Office and the king of Aragon of their prey. Later, in the case of Antonio Pérez, touched on below, the crown made a similar use of the tribunal. Never, in any of these cases, did it attempt to increase its own authority. The Holy Office was useful in some specific cases but normally restricted its activity to its own sphere, and did not give up its ecclesiastical role for a purely political one.[136] Though it was periodically involved in political intrigues, there is little evidence that its religious character was used for political purposes. Its involvement in the prominent case of Jerónimo de Villanueva, who enjoyed power and influence under Philip IV’s chief minister Olivares and fell soon after his master, was based on legitimate charges arising out of the spiritual practices of the nuns of the convent of San Placido.[137]

The alleged alliance between Inquisition and crown is usually identified with the reign of Philip II. In the sixteenth century the Venetian ambassadors, who were consistently critical of Spain’s role in Italy, claimed that Philip II was using the tribunal to extend his power. The papal nuncios told the same story. “The king and his ministers,” nuncio Castagna reported in 1567 apropos of some problems with the Catalans, “cannot exercise any control over them save through the Inquisition, so they refuse to listen to them at all and instead try to give the greatest possible authority to the Inquisition.”[138] The claim, though sometimes accepted by scholars,[139] was wholly untrue. In those same years the Venetian ambassadors in Madrid were also making the grotesque claim that the Inquisition, not Philip II, ruled Spain.[140] Any modern study of the reign of this king demonstrates that such statements have no basis in fact.[141]

In a few moments of national crisis the Holy Office played a role, but always a marginal one. When the revolution of 1640 broke out in Catalonia, for example, it was the inquisitor general himself who suggested that his tribunal should begin proceedings against the rebels. During the War of the Spanish Succession from 1702 to 1714, when the provinces of the crown of Aragon broke away from Castilian tutelage, it was the Inquisition that threatened censures against those guilty of treasonable opinions. An inquisitorial edict of 1706 ordered penitents to denounce confessors who told them in the confessional that Philip V was not the rightful king of Spain.[142] However, at no time was the offense of disloyalty to be treated as one over which the Inquisition had jurisdiction.[143]

The tribunal rarely took any action that was nakedly political, and its political views were usually subordinated to those of the other councils and of the king himself. The reverse was also true: if the other councils recommended a course of action not to its liking in matters of religion, the Inquisition could attempt to block the consensus.[144] Philip II is said to have claimed on one occasion that “twenty clerics of the Inquisition keep my realms in peace.”[145] The king never said it. The claim, moreover, has no meaning. There was no possible ground on which the tribunal could maintain that it had helped to keep the people of Spain subservient to the crown.

Although inquisitors habitually clashed with every other jurisdiction, both Church and secular, political conflict arose out of the way in which power was exercised in old-regime Europe, rather than out of any tendency on their part to quarrel. At town level the inquisitors found that local elites were their main protagonists. In the countryside, their biggest problem was always the authority of the local nobility. In the realm of Aragon they clashed repeatedly with the lords over familiars and over the question of Morisco vassals. In the mid-1550s the Inquisition in Aragon tried to press for the disarming of Moriscos, who had frequently used violence against its officers. The Aragonese lords tenaciously defended the Moriscos, provoking major incidents with the inquisitors. On both sides, the famous fueros were cited. The lords claimed that the fueros were threatened; the Inquisition claimed the fueros were an obstacle to good government. “If your Majesty does not bare your teeth,” the inquisitors of Saragossa wrote to the government in 1560, “you will have great trouble with them.”[146] Troublemakers tried to make use of this conflict of authority by passing from one jurisdiction to the other. In Aragon a noble in 1581 claimed that some of his vassals “try to become familiars in order to avoid punishment by my officials.” In the same years other Aragonese vassals, reported the inquisitors, “want to become familiars to be free of the jurisdiction of the count of Ribagorza and his officials.”[147]

Perhaps the first great case in which the crown used the Inquisition as a political instrument was that of Antonio Pérez. In 1571 Pérez became secretary of state to Philip II. Two years later his patron and chief minister of Philip, Ruy Gómez, prince of Eboli, died. Pérez thereby obtained one of the most powerful posts in the monarchy and also inherited leadership of the court faction formerly led by Ruy Gómez. A contemporary observed that Pérez “climbed so high that His Majesty would not do anything save what the said Antonio Pérez marked out for him. Whenever His Majesty even went out in his coach, Antonio Pérez went with him. When the pope, my lord Don Juan of Austria, or other lords required anything of the king, they had recourse to Antonio Pérez and by his means obtained what they solicited of His Majesty.” Another said, “Great men worshipped him, ministers admitted his superiority, the king loved him.”[148] Philip confided matters of state to this brilliant young man of reputed converso origin whose success enabled him to live as a great lord and whose charm led him into a close and still mysterious liaison with the princess of Eboli, the beautiful one-eyed widow of Ruy Gómez.

Ambition eventually led to Pérez’s ruin. At the center of the monarchy, he held the king’s secrets and controlled the money offered by pretendants to favors. His long arm stretched as far as Flanders, where at that moment the king’s half brother, Don Juan of Austria, was acting both as governor and as pacifier of rebellion. Pérez distrusted the implications of Don Juan’s policies and disagreed with the attitude of Don Juan’s secretary Juan de Escobedo. He began to influence Philip surreptitiously against them.

Suspicious of the way his plans for Flanders were being blocked by Madrid, Don Juan sent Escobedo to Spain in 1577 to make enquiries. On arriving at the court it became clear to Escobedo that Pérez had been playing a double game with his master and with the king. He began to look around for evidence to condemn the royal secretary. But Pérez had already managed to convince Philip that Escobedo was the malign influence in the affairs of Flanders. This would, in his mind, make it easier to get rid of Escobedo. He tried using poison, but this failed. Then on the night of Easter Monday, 31 March 1578, hired assassins came up to Escobedo as he rode with a few friends through the narrow, dark streets of Madrid, and ran their swords through his body.

Popular rumor quickly pointed to Pérez as the assassin. Escobedo’s family, aided by Pérez’s rival in the secretariat of state, Mateo Vázquez, demanded justice for the murdered man. Philip refused to believe in Pérez’s guilt, but at the same time he initiated an investigation. It was over a year before any measures were taken. Then, in July 1579, the king ordered the arrest of La Eboli and Pérez. Pérez’s friend Gaspar de Quiroga, archbishop of Toledo and inquisitor general, “did not hesitate to face public opinion by showing an ostentatious liking for Pérez and his group. On the day after the imprisonment of Pérez and La Eboli, when all Madrid singled them out as responsible for the crime, Don Gaspar visited Antonio’s wife and children, and offered money to them, as also to the princess’s children.”[149]

Not until June 1584 were the charges against Pérez drawn up by the prosecutor. He was accused of selling posts, receiving bribes and betraying state secrets. The Escobedo affair was left aside as though it were irrelevant. The investigation that followed led to Pérez being sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and an enormous fine. He was still subjected to mild treatment, principally because he had in his possession state papers that (he said) incriminated the king. His refusal to surrender them led to firmer treatment by the government, and in 1588 an accusation of murder was presented against him. After two years of rigorous imprisonment, in February 1590 he was put to the torture and ordered to state his reason for murdering Escobedo. His statement under torture produced a confession of responsibility for Escobedo’s death, but did not directly implicate the king. All this time the inquisitor general had continued to protect the secretary. He sent Pérez advice, guided the tactics of his defense, kept him informed of proceedings in the royal council and knew of (and perhaps assisted in) plans to escape. Escape had now become necessary, since all hope was lost after Pérez’s confession. In April 1590, with the help of several highly placed friends, Pérez escaped from prison in Madrid and rode across country to the borders of Aragon.

There he was protected from the king’s hand by the fueros. Once he had set foot in Aragon the crown of Castile was powerless to touch him. The government in Castile did not hesitate to take appropriate measures against the fugitive, and in July 1590 the royal secretary, Rodrigo Vázquez, put his signature to the death sentence issued against him. That sentence, however, was valid only in Castile. In Aragon, Pérez appealed to be tried by the court of the justiciar of Aragon, which was independent of crown control. They lodged him for his own security in the justiciar’s prison in Saragossa. From here, he began a campaign to win over Aragon to his cause. Several members of the lesser nobility, fired by enthusiasm for the liberties of their country, rallied to him.

There was only one course open to Philip—to use the Inquisition to get at Pérez. And it was Quiroga, as inquisitor general, who was forced to set in motion what Marañón calls the “last and cruelest prosecution against his former friend.” Philip’s recourse to the Inquisition encountered some difficulty at first, because it was necessary to find guilt of heresy before charges could be preferred. But the royal confessor, Father Chaves—who seventeen years before had taken part in the prosecution of Carranza—now managed to find the necessary evidence in some of the more innocuous expletives used by Pérez. Of one sentence where Pérez wagered his word against God’s nose, Chaves noted: “this proposition is suspect of the Badian heresy which says that God is corporal and has human members.” Pérez’s assumed intention to escape abroad from prison, insofar as it included a plan to escape across the Protestant state of Béarn, was presented as heresy because it implied consorting with heretics. Armed with these fabricated accusations, the Inquisition proceeded to move.

On 24 May 1591 the inquisitors in Saragossa had Pérez transferred from the justiciar’s prison to their own in the Aljafería, after the justiciar had been induced to sign a warrant for the removal. By now, Pérez’s propaganda against the king had made him a popular hero in Saragossa. No sooner had the news of Pérez’s move been made known than a mob thronged the streets calling for his release and threatening the authorities. In the ensuing tumult the viceroy of Aragon, the marquis of Almenara, received wounds from which he died a fortnight later. But Pérez was victoriously returned to the justiciar’s prison by the mob, whose members “went all the way calling out, ‘Liberty!’ And he cried out with them.”[150] The May riots were repeated on 24 September, when once again the Inquisition claimed jurisdiction over the prisoner and tried to remove him to the Aljafería. The events of 24 September removed any doubts in Madrid about the need for action. It was less a riot than a massacre. The casualties were twenty-three dead and many seriously wounded.[151]

After this occasion, when the prisoner was set free by the rioters, the whole political situation changed. The Inquisition had failed in its immediate purpose and a viceroy had been murdered by rebels harboring a fugitive. Fearing intervention from France, Philip’s ministers advised that an army be sent in. In October 1591 Castilian troops entered Aragon, met no resistance whatever and entered peacefully into Saragossa. On December 19 some dissident nobles were arrested and dispatched immediately under escort to Castile. The next day the justiciar was arrested. On December 20, just after his arrest, he had his supper tranquilly. Later he was taken to meet a group of officials, including the governor of Aragon, Ramón Cerdán, a Flanders veteran. The king’s sentence was read to him. He became distraught, but was told to compose himself since he had only twelve hours to live. At ten the next morning, he was beheaded in the market square of the city, under the windows of his residence.[152]

Philip was concerned to reach a general pacification without delay. A general pardon was published in January 1592. It was accompanied by a list of over 150 persons who were excepted. The Inquisition was also encouraged to play its part. The result was an enormous auto de fe held in Saragossa on October 20 that year, when eighty-eight accused participated in the ceremony. The name of Pérez featured among them, on a charge of homosexuality. Many of the others were accused of taking part in the riots against the Inquisition. A further ceremony, including more rioters, was held just over a year later.

Pérez, meanwhile, was far away. He fled across the mountains to the neighboring Protestant state of Béarn (French Navarre), where he made his base in Pau, which he used as a center for attacking the king in any way possible. He also published there in 1591 a little volume which claimed to explain his situation. Titled Relaciones, it was printed twice in the city and then republished in different editions and languages during his subsequent exile in London and France. The king made some efforts to have Pérez kidnapped, but they came to nothing, and very soon he tired of spending so much money on a person who seemed not worth it. The Inquisition, however, went ahead with its plans. In Pérez’s absence, in the spring of 1592 the tribunal of Saragossa drew up a list of charges accusing him of rebellion, heresy, blasphemy and homosexuality. Though a desperate attempt to invent a case against him, the charges may have had some truth in them, as we shall see. It was the beginning of a complex sparring match between the ex-secretary and his king that gave rise to accusations, counter-accusations and long-enduring historical legends. Perez, for instance, almost immediately began to spread the story that he had fallen into disgrace because of rivalry with the king for the love of the princess of Eboli. It was a piece of gossip that, like all gossip, caught the immediate attention of the public and still remains perhaps the best-known untruth about the entire history of Antonio Pérez.

The failure of all his efforts in Pau convinced Pérez that he must go to England if he wanted firm action. His first direct letter to Queen Elizabeth I was dated April 1592 from Pau. His arrival in England in April 1593, with a letter of support from the king of France, who was interested in an alliance with the English against Spain, began a new and strikingly different phase in his career. He was now, as he wrote, “senex, et prae timore persecutionis exanimis et excanguis.”[153] In England he became a member of the coterie around the earl of Essex and a friend of the philosopher Francis Bacon. During the early weeks of his stay he continued to be pursued by Philip II, who was said to be implicated in the plot of a certain Dr. Lopez to assassinate Pérez. Lopez was arrested and executed, not, however, because of anything to do with Pérez, but because the plot was also said to be directed against Elizabeth.

During his stay in England, Pérez drew up several long and complex memoirs proposing policies against Spain, which he sent to the queen and to her chancellor Lord Burghley. He became active in the group of nobles attached to the earl of Essex at Essex House in Westminster, and worked in his secretariat, which consisted of some nobles as well as humanists from Oxford. He stayed in France for a while, then again in England from April to May 1596. By this time he was unable to count on the queen’s firm support. “Her political disillusionment with Pérez coincided with the awareness that he had been entangled with some English adolescents.”[154] The most powerful reason for hostility to Pérez at court was, it seems, on these grounds of sexual morality. The accusations leveled against him by the Inquisition in Saragossa may, in all probability, have had some basis in popular rumor, and we cannot entirely discount the matter.

In the end, his many months in England and his access to important figures in government, including the queen, did not achieve any success for Pérez’s many proposals. His position with Elizabeth became extremely shaky when the overconfident Essex, who was now principal commander in Ireland, attempted a rebellion against the queen but was arrested in 1599 and executed as a traitor in 1601. Events conspired to make it impossible for Pérez to achieve his expressed wish to “live and die in England,” a country he claimed to admire even though he did not speak its language.[155]

In 1604 he went reluctantly to France, where he had enjoyed since the 1590s official status as a personally appointed member of the king’s council, and unsuccessfully tried to gain the support of the court. Pérez never returned to the Spain of his birth and died in comparative obscurity in Paris in 1611, in the house of an Italian banker friend, where he complained of the cold (“this snow in France”) and of his “depression, because I am alone.” His friend arranged for him to be buried in the nearby monastery church of the Célestins.

During its last century—to which we shall give little attention in this study—the Inquisition emerged out of virtual inactivity in only one famous political case, when it arrested a leading government minister, Pablo de Olavide. Olavide (1725–1803) was born into a rich family in Lima, Peru, and moved in 1750 to Spain, where after some initial problems he married a wealthy widow and entered high society. From 1757 to 1765 he traveled extensively through Western Europe, particularly in France, where he imbibed the culture of the great period of the French Enlightenment. During his travels he began buying books, with the intention of building up the finest and most modern collection in Spain. Nearly all the volumes he accumulated and sent to Madrid were in French, and many were on the Inquisition’s list of forbidden books. He had the works of Bacon, Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Rousseau, and all the latest English novels in French translation.[156] When he settled down in Spain his contacts, education, and wealth turned his house into one of the cultural centers of Madrid. He was offered a post in the reformed administration that assumed power after the serious urban riots of 1766, which became for him a stepping-stone to success. The year after, 1767, he was appointed to the powerful position of intendant in Seville and Andalucia, but also continued to play a crucial part in the central government. His activities provoked the profound opposition of sectors in the Church, and in 1775 a priest denounced him as “the most dangerous intellectual in Spain.”[157] It is true that Olavide’s conduct as a public official had often been provocative. As a partisan of the Enlightenment, he criticized what he felt was superstition, decried the worship of images and the public recital of the rosary. On one occasion he stated jokingly: “What we need is a bit of Mohammedanism in Spain!” His joviality and openness offended many. When he returned to Madrid from Seville in 1776 he was arrested by the Inquisition on charges of heresy and atheism.

It says much for the power of the supposedly moribund Inquisition that it was able to keep the once-powerful minister under house arrest for two years. Eventually, in November 1778, he was brought out, put on trial before a select assembly of clergy and officials and condemned to banishment from the capital, loss of all his goods and six years confinement in a monastery. It was a startling affair, in which the Inquisition and conservative sectors of the Church were evidently giving a warning to the government. Olavide was sent to a monastery in the south of Spain, in Murcia. The specific instructions of the inquisitor general in June 1779 were that he should have “a clean and comfortable room, and be allowed at the same time to go out, walking or riding or in a carriage, and permitted to take the waters when the doctors so direct.”[158] His confinement, it turned out, was more like a paid holiday. He carried out religious devotions, went to mass daily and kept a frugal diet (for his health), but was accompanied by his family, traveled around taking the waters, and in August 1780 was given permission (for his health) to take the waters at Caldes de Montbuy in Catalonia. Once in Catalonia, he decided it was better to take the waters in Arles, a town just over the French border which he knew personally. In the first week of November, he was free, in France.

He spent the next twenty years in exile, residing mainly in Switzerland and Paris. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the war waged against France in 1793 by Spain and other European powers, he was rounded up in Paris in 1794 as a suspicious foreigner, and kept in prison for two years. He emerged a disappointed and changed man, angry at all the “progressive” ideas that had led to the “horrible Revolution in this country.” In 1797 he published at Valencia a book titled Triumph of the Gospel, in which he renounced all his former progressive ideas and praised the Inquisition. At least, that is what the book appeared to be saying. Some scholars suggest that the author had not really changed his attitude, and was framing his message in such a way as to make possible his return.[159] Thanks to the publication he was certainly allowed back in 1798 to Spain, where he died quietly, far from public life, in a small Andalucian town.

As these cases show, the Inquisition often had a political role, but a far from decisive one. From what we have seen of the often flimsy network of its officials, the financial difficulties of the inquisitors and the perennial conflicts with all other jurisdictions, it is fair to conclude that its real impact was, after the first crisis decades, so marginal to the daily lives of Spaniards that over broad areas of Spain—above all in the rural districts—it was little more than an irrelevance. In Catalonia, beyond the major cities, a town might see an inquisitor maybe once every ten years, or even once in a century; many never saw one in their entire history.[160] Central Castile excepted, this picture is valid for most of Spain. The people accepted the tribunal, on this showing, not because it weighed on them heavily and oppressed them, but for precisely the opposite reason: it was seldom seen, and even less often heard. It has sometimes been suggested that the survival of the proverb “Con el Rey y con la Santa Inquisición, chitón!” (“On the king and the Holy Office, not a word!”)[161] is testimony to the power of the tribunal to silence criticism. The suggestion not only betrays an unjustified belief that Spaniards are unable or unwilling to criticize those who rule over them: it is also unhistorical. The archives of the Inquisition contain thousands of cases of forthright criticism by ordinary Spaniards, not subversive radicals wishing to abolish the institution (though many did so wish) but ordinary citizens objecting to bullying familiars, greedy inquisitors and corrupt personnel. Very many Spaniards, neither of Jewish nor of Muslim origin, hated the Holy Office. Like any police system, it was not loved; and its political role was brittle; but many Spaniards seem to have felt that its continuation was a guarantee of the everyday framework in which they lived.

9

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

It makes one think that all this great machinery for the punishment of a few poor beggars, is more a wish for display on the part of the inquisitors than a real zeal for religion.

—FRENCH AMBASSADOR, MARQUIS DE VILLARS, ON MADRID AUTO DE FE OF 1680

Pre-industrial policing systems in Europe functioned under the immense disadvantage of having no common code defining what might be a crime, no guide as to punishments, no officials to make inquiries and maintain order and no body of archived information on which to draw. When it came to considering heresy as a crime, the problems were even graver. The Spanish Inquisition, however, was in the exceptional position of having its medieval predecessors in French Languedoc to guide it. Bernard Gui’s Liber sententiarum (Book of Sentences), covering over nine hundred judicial cases between 1308 and 1323, showed the range of punishments that might be imposed for heresy. Torquemada began, as we have seen, the practice of publishing Instructions about procedure. But how could information for the prosecution be obtained? The edicts of faith certainly invited the public to collaborate, but what if—as was usually the case—they did not? The bulk of information eventually came from informers, a type that has helped to perpetuate the ill reputation of the Inquisition.

The single most important feature of police systems, and of the Inquisition, was therefore the quality of information received. Was it reliable? Could it be used for prosecution? In its early decades when it targeted Jewish conversos, the Inquisition received a great deal of information, which went into its archives and which modern researchers—perhaps too naïvely—have accepted as reliable and have faithfully published in bulky volumes.[1] Common sense suggests that, as with all verbal testimony given to the police, we should exercise great caution over accepting the validity of voluntary information. At least in the case of testimony concerning conversos of that early period, some historians therefore (as we have seen) discount the evidence as unreliable.[2]

The inquisitors faced the same problem. Guided only by their (often limited) judicial experience, their knowledge of human nature, and what they knew from local practice or had gleaned from the manuals of the medieval Inquisition, they had to make decisions that affected literally the lives and livelihood of the persons who came before them. Not surprisingly, massive injustices occurred, especially when the inquisitor might have an axe to grind, through personal or cultural prejudice. Well after the great period of converso prosecutions, when so-called heresy was not the main issue, the problems continued. Widespread ignorance and illiteracy among the population were among the obstacles, since witnesses were unable to identify evidence correctly. When one of the household servants of the late count duke of Olivares, influenced no doubt by an enemy of the same, testified to the inquisitors in 1646 that Olivares had persons read to him at bedtime from the Koran and from Martin Luther, could they dare to accept the evidence?[3]

In town and in country, information came from below. The positive aspect of pre-industrial community relations in Europe was the sense of welfare and belonging, but a negative aspect was the absence of privacy. Neighborhoods did not necessarily offer neighborliness. “People were constantly observed by their neighbors. Reputation shaped the attitudes of neighbor to neighbor.”[4] Correct behavior was as a consequence never simply a personal option; it was a requirement imposed and judged by community norms, and regulated according to contexts of religion, gender or economy. Incorrect behavior, with the corresponding bad reputation, might provoke grave conflicts within the community, and was one of the factors that most served to bring people to the attention of the Inquisition. A woman with a reputation as a “witch,” for example, would be tolerated for many years by her village, but in a year of agrarian crisis she might find that her lack of status would work against her.

Information was often supplied in contexts where it was clear that informers were exploiting the Inquisition in order to serve their own private grievances. We may take as a guide the nature of denunciations in the early seventeenth century in Catalonia,[5] where evidence was of two main types: against outsiders to the community, such as French immigrants; and against those who provoked tension within the community. The free-ranging commission of the inquisitors was an open invitation to people who wished to air grievances. In a typical case in Barcelona in 1607, a young wife quarreling with her husband, a silversmith, denounced both him and his mother to the Inquisition. A neighbor, a house painter, protested that “if she were a good wife she would not have accused her husband and her mother-in-law before the Inquisition.” One of her friends retorted that “if the accusations were not true the Inquisition would punish the accuser.” To this the painter replied: “They do favors for everybody!”[6] The wife promptly denounced him also. The inquisitors eventually fined him a small sum for doubting their impartiality, but had nothing more than a reprimand for the silversmith (even though he had threatened to kill his wife for denouncing his mother). They evidently did not wish to get involved. In another case, the inquisitors were faced with an incident in the village of La Guardia (Montserrat) when a woman refused to accept the kiss of peace at mass in the church and instead made a scene, “to the great scandal of the village,” which ended in her being denounced to the Inquisition for blasphemy.[7] The inquisitors refused to take any action or be drawn into the quarrel, and limited themselves to examining the woman to see if she knew her basic prayers. Time and again, in case after case, private, family and community quarrels were the real motive in denunciations that masqueraded as religious. In these circumstances, the Inquisition was effectively being manipulated by private persons using it as a tool of communal or personal vengeance. As in the case of other criminal courts, “the public nature of this vengeance was a pious legal fiction that hid private affairs, private concerns and private vindictiveness, transforming the private world of recrimination and victimization into the public world of judgments and sanctions.”[8]

Even outright attacks on the Inquisition were not always what they seemed. In 1632, when a trader of St Pere Pescador (Girona) fired a gun at an employee of the Holy Office the inquisitors recognized that the whole affair arose out of circumstances that were not his fault: “the quarrel,” they concluded, “was born out of conflicts the two had had a long time ago.”[9] For much of its career, after the initial decades of pressure against conversos, the Inquisition no longer went heresy hunting but intervened in circumstances affecting the moral and social conduct of Spaniards. It became the perfect instrument for settling scores. The scenario for “propositions” (see chapter 13), blasphemy and other loose statements was always the same: family quarrels, drunkenness, violent husbands, personal hatreds. Case histories on these themes in the archives run into the tens of thousands.

The systems of justice prevailing at that time in Europe relied overwhelmingly on the collaboration of the public. And it was the testimony of the public—of, that is, neighbors, fellow parishioners, relatives, personal enemies—that the accused most dreaded. As we have had occasion to see, enmity and vengeance inspired much of the evidence offered to the Inquisition in its early years. Fear of neighbors, rather than of the Inquisition, was on this premise the first—and constant—concern of those denounced. We have ample evidence of it in the flight of conversos from Andalucia and Catalonia during the 1490s. An example is Manuel Rodríguez, a converso from Andalucia who was described by neighbors in Soria (where he found himself in 1490) as being “pale and dead with fright.”[10]

The denunciation process was not peculiar to the inquisitorial regime. Since the days of the Roman Empire, it was a regular feature of the judicial system not only in Spain but in all European countries.[11] The Catholic Church had developed its own system of law, in which the judicial denunciation was made not only for the reformation but also for the punishment of the guilty person. The inquiry or “inquisition” that followed was dedicated to eliciting factual evidence.

The prosecutors in all state tribunals relied heavily on informers, many of whom could claim the right to a proportion of the property of the accused. It was a practice that on occasion aroused protests in the Cortes. Juan de Mariana, already cited above, reported the consternation among Castilians when they found that “they were deprived of the liberty to hear and talk freely, since in all the cities, towns and villages there were persons to give information of what went on. This was considered by some the most wretched slavery and equal to death.”[12] The use of informers, common enough at the time, was nowhere resorted to so callously as in the period of anti-Jewish hysteria, when within the community person was set against person on the accidental basis of blood origins. But denunciation, suspicion and hostility came of course from within the community itself. Sermons and public exhortations encouraged a moral obligation to denounce both oneself and others. We have seen that in 1485 the rabbis of Toledo were asked to tell Jews to report judaizers. The Jewish and converso communities were split apart by such pressures. A particularly striking example of how rock-solid resistance to persecution could suddenly crumble, leading to betrayal and terror, is supplied in the great Chueta tragedy in Mallorca in 1678 (see chapter 14).

Even where anti-Semitism was not the driving force, the possibility of denunciation and recrimination would have been “equal to death” for those caught up in it. Petty denunciations were the rule rather than the exception. The Inquisition became a useful weapon for paying off old scores. “In Castile fifteen hundred people have been burnt through false witness,”[13] a villager asserted in the 1480s. When the Lutheran crisis burst upon Seville in 1560, a stream of people turned up every day at Triana castle, the offices of the Inquisition, to report what they claimed to know. We have this information from the lips of one of the informants, who subsequently admitted that he had fabricated accusations out of sheer malice.[14]

In 1530 Aldonça de Vargas in the Canary Islands was reported to the Inquisition for having smiled when she heard mention of the Virgin Mary. We can only imagine the motives of the person who denounced her. In 1635 Pedro Ginesta, a man over eighty years old and of French origin, was brought before the tribunal of Barcelona by an erstwhile comrade for having forgetfully eaten a meal of bacon and onions on a day of abstinence. “The said prisoner,” ran the indictment, “being of a nation infected with heresy [i.e., France], it is presumed [my emphasis] that he has on many other occasions eaten flesh on forbidden days, after the manner of the sect of Luther.”[15] Denunciations based on suspicion, therefore, could lead to accusations based on conjecture. This was the quality of thousands of pieces of information fed to the tribunal by malicious people living in the same community.

Some denunciations, of course, had nothing to do with heresy, as in the case of Alonso de Jaén, who was prosecuted in 1530 for urinating against the walls of a church; or in that of Gonzalez Ruiz, who said to his opponent during a game of cards, “Even with God as your partner you won’t win this game.”[16] Both cases were self-denunciations, undoubtedly motivated by the fear that if one did not confess one would be denounced. For people in this frame of mind the edicts offered a welcome opportunity to unburden oneself of fear rather than of guilt. Two husbands accused themselves in 1581 of having asserted in conversation with their wives that fornication was no sin. The wives were summoned and confirmed the confessions. One possible motive for the action taken by the husbands was fear that their wives would denounce them.[17] Or they may simply have felt compunction to confess the offense. By contrast, no such need was felt by the graduate priest Juan Batanero, a doctor of the village of Alcazar de San Juan, who was said to have “affirmed that simple fornication is no sin, and that he has papers with the arguments for this opinion, which he cannot reveal for fear of the Inquisition, but after his death they can be published.”[18] He was denounced by one of his hearers.

The fear generated by the tribunal, in short, usually had its origins in social disharmony. The records of the Inquisition are full of instances where neighbors denounced neighbors, friends denounced friends, and members of the same family denounced each other. In the judaizing cases at Granada in the 1590s, the inquisitors had reason to be grateful to María Alvarez, “who was the one who first revealed all that has been discovered about her mother and sisters and relatives.”[19] Many of these cases would have arisen through sheer malice or hatred. Vengeful witnesses had everything on their side: their evidence was always hearsay, their identity was always kept secret and the costs of prosecution were borne not by them but by the tribunal.[20]

If the Holy Office welcomed denunciations, it often knew when to distinguish between the false and the true. In 1637 when Felipe Leonart, a needle maker of French origin living in Tarragona, was unanimously denounced by his wife, son and daughter-in-law for Lutheranism, the tribunal very quickly realized that the charges had been made out of malice, and suspended the trial after rejecting the accusations.[21] The official record would have us believe that false witness was rare. In the tribunal of Toledo, there were apparently (according to Lea) only eight cases of perjury detected in the 1,172 trials that took place between 1575 and 1610.[22] Anyone with the slightest experience of court testimony must reject the accuracy of this conclusion. The real level of perjury was obviously very much higher, but impossible to identify. Perjurers themselves were not treated with any severity commensurate with the ruin they brought upon their victims, though in some few cases they suffered burning, scourging or the galleys. More difficult to deal with were cases of pathological self-denouncers such as the French nun in a convent at Alcalá, Ursule de la Croix, who confessed to heresy and eating meat on Fridays. She was absolved, but confessed again to the offenses. The second time she was reconciled and given a light penance. When she decided to denounce herself for the third time in 1594, however, she was obligingly sent to the stake.[23]

In the Spanish Inquisition, witnesses were given more advantages than in any secular court of justice, because their names were concealed. This provoked strong opposition, clearly expressed in the several Cortes held under Charles V, particularly that of Valladolid in February 1518. But the influence of Cisneros prevailed against allowing the publication of witnesses’ names, and the practice remained unaltered. Concealment of names meant that when a charge was drawn up against a prisoner it had to be phrased in general terms, so that the accused could not identify witnesses and accusers. The practice continues in modern judicial systems.[24] The necessity for concealment, Cisneros had argued, was justified by cases in which witnesses had been murdered in order to prevent them testifying. But, as a memorial from the city of Granada put it in 1526, the system of anonymity was an open invitation to perjury and malicious testimony.[25] This objection might not have been valid but for the fact that all denunciations were taken seriously, and even if a man were later exonerated the harm brought on him by a slight and secret accusation could be immense. When, for example, Enrique Jorge Henriques, physician to the duke of Alba, died in 1622, secret witnesses claimed that his body had been buried according to Jewish rites. The consequence was that all Henriques’s family, relatives and household were thrown into prison and kept there for two years until their acquittal for lack of evidence.[26]

There were other cases, perhaps more significant and terrible, where fear of denunciation alone became the spur to confession and counter-denunciation. The “term of grace” in the 1480s had an important clause which set the seal on all this. To denounce oneself as a heretic was not enough to be able to benefit from the terms of the edict. It was also necessary to denounce all those accomplices who shared the error or had led one into it. It was surely not entirely exaggeration for a converso writer of Toledo to claim in 1538 that

preachers do not dare to preach, and those who preach do not dare to touch on contentious matters, for their lives and honor are in the mouths of two ignoramuses, and nobody in this life is without his policeman. . . . Bit by bit many rich people leave the country for foreign realms, in order not to live all their lives in fear and trembling every time an officer of the Inquisition enters their house; for continual fear is a worse death than a sudden demise.[27]

The travails of those of converso origin were, evidently, shared also by the Moriscos. The hatred of these for the Inquisition always included an element of fear. “Out of fear,” an inquisitor of Granada reported in 1568, some Moriscos who had previously refused to do so “very quickly learned” the Castilian language. “Out of fear,” some women “began to dress like Castilians.”[28]

In the first century of its existence the Inquisition went out to look for heretics rather than wait for them to be brought in. This was inevitable when tribunals were itinerant, but also continued when they were settled in fixed centers. The 1498 Instructions stipulated that “the inquisitors go to all the towns that have not taken the oath of the general Inquisition.” In 1517 such visitations were supposed to be once every four months, and by 1581 were required once a year. The purpose was to maintain an inquisitorial presence, though in practice the visits were few and far between.

In line with the practice of carrying out their public activity with the greatest solemnity impossible, the inquisitors took care to develop formal rituals. Instructions issued to the inquisitors of the town of Llerena (Extremadura) in 1592 show how the process worked.[29] When they began a visitation in a district they would first present their credentials to the local Church and secular authorities, then announce a Sunday or feast day when residents would have to go to high mass, together with their children and servants, to hear the “edict” read. At the end of the sermon or the creed, the inquisitor or his representative would hold a crucifix in front of the congregation and ask everybody to raise his right hand, cross himself and repeat after the inquisitor a solemn oath to support the Inquisition and its ministers. He would then proceed to read the edict.

In the early years the document was an “edict of grace,” modeled on those of the medieval Inquisition, which recited a list of heresies and invited those who wished to discharge their consciences to come forward and denounce themselves or others. If they came forward within the “period of grace”—usually thirty to forty days—they would be reconciled to the Church without suffering serious penalties. The benign terms encouraged self-denunciation. In Mallorca the first edict to be published brought in 337 conversos who denounced themselves. In Seville the edict filled the prisons to overflowing. The scale of voluntary denunciation in Toledo was impressive: the number of penitents in the city alone in 1486 was 2,400.[30] After about 1500, edicts of grace against judaizers had served their purpose. They were replaced by “edicts of faith,” which omitted the period of grace and instead invited denunciation of those guilty of a detailed list of offenses. By contrast, when the drive against Moriscos was stepped up during the sixteenth century, edicts of grace were used once again to elicit information from them. In 1568 an edict of grace in Valencia encouraged 2,689 Moriscos to denounce themselves.[31] In 1570 some of the Morisco vassals of the duke of Medinaceli voluntarily asked for an edict of grace so that they could, by their declarations, dissociate themselves from the more radical pro-Muslim attitudes of refugees from Granada.[32] On this evidence, edicts of grace were for the inquisitors a means of obtaining information and for the cultural minorities a mechanism to regularize their position as painlessly as possible.

In the earlier period the heresies listed were principally Judaic or Islamic, but as time went on further offenses were added. Even so, the edict of faith during the sixteenth century had no regular format, and each tribunal used the text that best suited its purposes. The Suprema seems to have had no official version; not until around 1630 did it adopt an agreed text that was allowed into circulation. This was an extremely lengthy and impressive document giving details of every conceivable offense, from Jewish and Muslim heresies to the errors of Lutherans and alumbrados, and so on to popular superstitions, moral offenses and hostile attitudes to the Church and Inquisition. It must have taken an hour or more to read from the pulpit.[33] But it is highly unlikely that the congregation listened to it, as one historian suggests, in “fear and terror.”[34] Since virtually none of the offenses could normally be found in Catholic communities, nor would most of the hearers understand the terminology, it is more likely that congregations were simply puzzled or bored. This was certainly the reason why inquisitors in Catalonia stopped reading out edicts after the 1580s.[35] The texts had little or no bearing on the daily life of Spaniards. Even when referring to judaizers, the edicts of the seventeenth century (below, chapter 14) curiously mentioned practices that no longer existed and had no relevance to the current religious situation.

Before an arrest took place, the evidence in the case was presented to a number of theologians who acted as consultants or assessors (calificadores) to determine whether the charges involved heresy. If they decided that there was sufficient proof, the prosecutor (fiscal) drew up a demand for the arrest of the accused, who was then taken into custody. Such at least were the rules. But in numerous cases (as happens also in all systems of justice today), arrest might precede the collection of evidence, so that the preliminary safeguards against wrongful arrest were dispensed with. As a result, prisoners might sit in inquisitorial jails without any firm charge being produced against them. This led the Cortes of Aragon in 1533 to protest against arrest for arbitrary reasons or on trifling charges. Zeal of officials and inquisitors alike often outran discretion. In the tribunal of Valladolid in 1699 several suspects (including a girl aged nine and a boy aged fourteen) had lain in prison for up to two years without any calificación having been made of the evidence against them.

Arrest was accompanied by immediate seizure of the goods held by the accused. An inventory was made of everything in the possession of the man or his family, and all this was held by officials of the Inquisition until the case had been decided. The inventories drawn up in this way are of great historical interest, since they allow us to see in minute detail exactly how the household of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century family was run. Every item in the house, including pots and pans, spoons, rags and old clothes, was carefully noted down in the presence of a notary. In some cases these items were valued at the time of the inventory—an important measure because of the frequent need to sell the items to pay for the upkeep of a prisoner or his dependants. If a prisoner’s case went unheard or undecided for years on end, the sequestration of his property involved real hardship for his dependants, deprived at one blow of their means of income and even of their own homes. For as long as the accused stayed in prison the costs of his upkeep were met out of his sequestrated property, which was as a rule sold piece by piece at public auction.

Initially no provision was made for relatives during sequestration and the government had to intervene to help. In July 1486 Ferdinand ordered the tribunal in Saragossa to support the needy children of an accused man, Juan Navarro, out of the latter’s property while the case was being heard. Others were not so lucky. There were instances of a rich prisoner’s children dying of hunger and of others begging in the streets. These problems were finally remedied in the Instructions of 1561, which allowed the support of dependants out of sequestrations. The concession, already in practice but not codified till the mid-sixteenth century, came too late to save two generations of conversos from destruction of their property. Even after 1561, accused persons sometimes found little security for their property against dishonest officials, or against arbitrary arrest and lengthy trials.

The arrested person was usually spirited away into the prisons of the Inquisition, there to await trial. Normally each tribunal had a section of its building set apart for the “secret prison” (“secret” meant no more then “private,” to distinguish it from “public” prisons), used particularly for the confinement of prisoners and not for temporary detainees awaiting trial. The Inquisition was usually fortunate in its choice of residences. In some of the largest cities of Spain it was allowed the use of fortified castles with ancient and reliable prison cells. The tribunal of Saragossa resided in the Aljafería, that of Seville in the Triana (in 1627 it moved to a site within the city) and that of Córdoba in the Alcázar.

In all these buildings the jails were in a fairly good condition. This may explain why the secret prisons of the Inquisition were generally considered less harsh and more humane than either the royal prisons or ordinary ecclesiastical jails. There is the case of a friar in Valladolid in 1629 who made some heretical statements simply in order to be transferred from the prison he was in to that of the Inquisition. On another occasion, in 1675, a priest confined in the episcopal prison pretended to be a judaizer in order to be transferred to the inquisitorial prison. In 1624, when the inquisitors of Barcelona had more prisoners than available cells, they refused to send the extra prisoners to the city prison, where “there are over four hundred prisoners who are starving to death and every day they remove three or four dead.”[36] No better evidence could be cited for the superiority of inquisitorial jails than that of Córdoba in 1820, when the prison authorities complained about the miserable and unhealthy state of the city prison and asked that the municipality should transfer its prisoners to the prison of the Inquisition, which was “safe, clean and spacious. At present it has twenty-six cells, rooms which can hold two hundred prisoners at a time, a completely separate prison for women, and places for work.” On another occasion the authorities there reported that “the building of the Inquisition is separate from the rest of the city, isolated and exposed on all sides to the winds, spacious, supplied abundantly with water, with sewers well distributed and planned to serve the prisoners, and with the separation and ventilation necessary to good health. It would be a prison well suited to preserve the health of prisoners.”[37]

By contrast, the tribunal of Llerena was housed in a building it described in 1567 as “small, old, poor and shabby,” with fifty-two cells, certainly not enough for the 130 prisoners it had that year.[38] The tribunal at Logroño in the sixteenth century had unhealthy premises that led directly, in times of epidemic, to the death of unfortunate prisoners. In the hot summer of 1584 over twenty prisoners died in their cells.[39] A more personal description of an inquisitorial prison is given by a prisoner who left an account of the cells of the tribunal at Lisbon in 1802. The picture resembles any Spanish inquisitorial prison:

The jailer who for greater dignity has the name of Alcaide, addressed to me almost a little sermon, recommending me to behave in this respectable house with great propriety; stating also that I must not make any noise in my room, nor speak aloud, lest the other prisoners might happen to be in the neighboring cells and hear me, with other instructions of a similar kind. He then took me to my cell, a small room twelve feet by eight, with a door to the passage; in this door were two iron grates, far from each other, and occupying the thickness of the wall, which was three feet, and outside of these grates there was besides a wooden door; in the upper part of this was an aperture that let into the cell a borrowed light from the passage, which passage received its light from the windows fronting a narrow yard, but having opposite, at a very short distance, very high walls; in this small room were a kind of wood frame without feet, whereon lay a straw mattress, which was to be my bed; a small water-pot; and another utensil for various purposes, which was only emptied every eight days, when I went to mass in the prisoners’ private chapel. This was the only opportunity I had of taking fresh air during such a period, and they contrived several divisions in the chapel in such a manner that the prisoners could never see each other, or know how many were granted the favor of going to mass. The cell was arched above, and the floor was brick, the wall being formed of stone, and very thick. The place was consequently very cold in winter, and so damp that very frequently the grates were covered with drops of water like dew; and my clothes, during the winter, were in a state of perpetual moisture. Such was my abode for the period of nearly three years.[40]

The fact that the practice in its prisons could be humane should not be taken to mean that the Inquisition was benevolent. Efforts were made, however, to see that the jails were not dens of horror. Prisoners were fed regularly and adequately from their own purse on available food, particularly bread, meat and wine. In the cells in Madrid in 1676 prisoners were fed on bread, mutton, hake, sardines, soup, vegetables, lettuce, figs, oil, vinegar and wine.[41] Since the prisoners complained about this diet, the real quality of the items may be doubted. One fortunate prisoner in Toledo in 1709 managed to order for himself in addition regular supplies of oil, vinegar, ice, eggs, chocolate and bacon.[42] The expenses of all paupers were paid for by the tribunal itself: at Las Palmas the money spent on the pauper Catalina de Candelaria during her six-month stay in 1662 came to 5 ducats. One of those who could afford to pay, Isabel Perdomo, had to fund her seven-week stay in the same prison in 1674.[43] Apart from food, prisoners in some tribunals were well cared for, this depending on their financial resources. Juan de Abel of Granada was granted in his cell the use of “a mattress, a quilt, two sheets, two pillows, a rug, a blanket” and other items.[44] Even paupers were given slippers, shirts and similar items. Besides this, some comforts were allowed, such as the use of writing paper—a concession exploited to the full by Luis de León, who spent his four years in prison at Valladolid composing his devotional treatise The Names of Christ.

There was, of course, another side to the picture. Prisoners were normally cut off from all contact with the world outside, and even within the prison were secluded from each other if possible. Inadequate cells often made overcrowding inevitable. In Granada in the 1570s, a period coinciding with the anti-Morisco repression, there was an average of four persons in each cell.[45] The figure, of course, seems quite humane when compared with the conditions faced by prisoners in many twenty-first-century prisons.[46] On finally leaving the jail prisoners were obliged to take an oath not to reveal anything they had seen or experienced in the cells. Small wonder if this secrecy gave rise to the most bloodcurdling legends about what went on inside. A rule of the Spanish and the Roman Inquisitions was that detainees were denied all access to mass and the sacraments. One of the most notable sufferers in this respect was Carranza, whose trials must have been doubled by this heavy deprivation of spiritual comfort during his reclusion.

To balance the fortunate few who were treated reasonably there are records of the many who did not fare so well. John Hill, an English sailor captured in 1574 and imprisoned by the Las Palmas tribunal, complained of having to sleep on the floor with fleas, of lack of bread and water, and of being left all but naked.[47] These were standard complaints that could have been made of any other prison, secular or ecclesiastical. Other ordeals would include having to wear chains (not frequent in the Inquisition), and being left interminably in unlit and unheated cells. In addition the Inquisition used two instruments to punish awkward prisoners: one was the mordaza, or gag, used to prevent prisoners talking or blaspheming; the other was the pie de amigo, an iron fork utilized to keep the head upright forcibly. In view of the deplorable state of many prisons in the modern world today, one may agree with Lea “that the secret prisons of the Inquisition were less intolerable places of abode than the episcopal and public jails. The general policy respecting them was more humane and enlightened than that of other jurisdictions, whether in Spain or elsewhere.”[48]

The severities of prison life led to a regular death rate which could be attributed not to torture (about which inquisitors were usually careful) but to disease and unhealthy conditions. As the inquisitor general Cardinal Adrian observed in 1517, the prisons were meant for temporary detention only and never for punishment. Prisoners were seldom condemned to rot in the cells. They were there—some for lengthy periods—as a preliminary to trial. Inquisitors might take care to avoid cruelty, brutality and harsh treatment, but that did not prevent tragedies. In 1699 a forty-year-old seamstress was confined in the cells at Valladolid on suspicion of judaizing. Confined with her were her four sons, aged thirteen to seventeen. Within six months the two youngest were taken to hospital, where they died.[49] It was a consequence of the practice, all too common, of throwing entire families, children included, into the cells. Madness and suicide were also regular consequences of imprisonment.

Interrogations were usually conducted in the presence of a secretary, who noted down questions and answers, and a notary. Very many cases were obviously about trivial offenses, misdemeanors that involved the tribunal only because no other court was available. In these circumstances, the interrogation would not have the intensity accorded to cases of heresy. When it came to serious cases, however, we cannot discount the inquisitors drawing on the long experience of the medieval Inquisition, which produced in the writings of Bernard Gui and Nicolau Eimeric two excellent manuals explaining techniques on how to squeeze the truth out of suspects.[50] Eimeric, for example, set out ten ways in which heretics seek to “hide their errors.” Among them are “redirecting the question,” “feigning illness,” “changing the subject” and “feigning stupidity.” The efficient inquisitor, in short, had a good amount of experience to back him up. In Languedoc, it has been argued, “many of the techniques relied on a strategy of isolation” of the accused.[51] In addition, the inquisitor had at his disposal tricks in the technique of interrogation that, properly used, made it unnecessary to resort to severe measures. Only a very detailed analysis of the available documentation could reveal to us whether the inquisitors in Spain made use of such techniques. The fact is, as modern experience has shown, that intensive interrogation can get a person to confess to offenses he has not committed, even without formal torture. In the United States, there have been in the last thirty years more than forty cases documented in which individuals have confessed to crimes they did not commit.

If verbal trickery and psychological pressure failed to work, the permitted alternative was the use of torture, a practice inherited from the medieval Inquisition.[52] The Instructions of 1561 laid down no rules for its use but urged that its application should be according to “the conscience and will of the appointed judges, following law, reason and good conscience. Inquisitors should take great care that the sentence of torture is justified and follows precedent.”[53] Torture was universal in the European criminal process, and its use by the Spanish Inquisition was in no way exceptional.[54] Often the accused was placed in conspectu tormentorum, so that merely the sight of the instruments of torture would provoke a confession.

Confessions gained under torture were never accepted as valid because they had obviously been obtained by pressure. It was therefore essential for the accused to ratify his confession the day after the ordeal. If he refused to do this, a legal subterfuge was invoked. As the rules forbade anyone to be tortured more than once, the end of every torture session was treated as a suspension only, and refusal to ratify the confession would be met with a threat to “continue” the torture. Besides being compelled to confess their own heresies, accused were often also tortured in caput alienum, that is, to confess knowledge of the crimes of others.

In statistical terms, it would be correct to say that torture was used infrequently. Though permitted by the Instructions of 1484, in the early years it seems to have been considered superfluous and was seldom used. Abundant testimony from edicts of grace and from witnesses was more than sufficient to keep the judicial process functioning. Out of over four hundred conversos tried by the Inquisition at Ciudad Real in 1483–85, only two are known to have been tortured.[55] The incidence of torture in Valencia before 1530 was low. After the 1530s, however, things changed radically. It was now a question of rooting out underground and unconfessed Judaism. Torture was therefore more frequently applied. After 1530 in Valencia about a third of those qualifying were tortured.[56] The key to its frequency is that its use was limited only to cases of heresy. This meant that minor offenses, which were the bulk of crimes tried by the Inquisition for a great part of its history, did not qualify for it. In the tribunal of Granada from 1573 to 1577, 18 out of 256 accused were tortured, just over 7 percent. In Seville from 1606 to 1612, 21 out of 184 were tortured, just over 11 percent.[57] By the mid-eighteenth century torture had virtually fallen out of use in the tribunal, and finally in 1816 the pope forbade its use in any of the tribunals subject to the Holy See.

However, the apparent infrequency of torture has encouraged some writers to downplay its importance. This ignores its very real impact at select periods on the groups that most suffered from it. After the early sixteenth century, for example, it was applied rigorously in cases of suspected Protestantism and Judaism. In epochs when these offenses were rare, the need for torture declined. Lea estimates that in the Toledo tribunal between 1575 and 1610, only about a third of those accused of heretical offenses were in fact tortured.[58] However, at a later period when the Inquisition thought it had discovered a recrudescence of heresy, there was no hesitation about resorting to severe measures as a way of obtaining information. In the late seventeenth century at least three-fourths of all those accused in Spain of judaizing—several hundreds of people—were tortured.[59] In 1699 the inquisitors of Seville complained that they hardly had the time to carry out all the tortures required. Supporting evidence for the frequency of the punishment in this tribunal comes from the doctor who in 1702 claimed back payment for his presence at 434 sessions of torture.[60]

Torture—like other elements of the system of justice at that time, such as imprisonment—was employed exclusively to elicit information or a confession, and never used as a punishment. The scenes of sadism conjured up by popular writers on the Inquisition have little basis in reality. Torturers used were normally the public executioners who worked for the secular courts. Those required to be present at the proceedings were the inquisitors themselves, a representative of the bishop and a secretary to record everything faithfully. Physicians were usually available in case of emergency. On the evidence available, at no time were the inquisitors so sophisticated as to resort to psychological methods or brainwashing.[61] In the case of judaizers of the later seventeenth century, the special care in tracking down family networks and in encouraging relatives to denounce each other may with some reason be considered as exceptionally cruel; though it may also be explained as xenophobia, since those under suspicion were invariably of Portuguese origin.

The basic rule in torture was that the accused should suffer no danger to life or limb. By Church law, ecclesiastical tribunals could not kill nor could they shed blood. No distinctive tortures were used by the Inquisition (the gripping tale of punishment in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” was imaginative fiction). Those most often employed were in common use in other secular and ecclesiastical tribunals, and any complaints of novel tortures would certainly refer to rare exceptions. The three main ones were the garrucha, the toca and the potro. The garrucha, or pulley, involved being hung by the wrists from a pulley on the ceiling, with heavy weights attached to the feet. The accused was raised slowly and then suddenly allowed to fall with a jerk. The effect was to stretch and perhaps dislocate arms and legs. The toca, or water torture, was more complicated. The accused was tied down on a rack, his mouth was kept forcibly open and a toca, or linen cloth, was put down his throat to conduct water poured slowly from a jar. The severity of the torture varied with the number of jars of water used. The potro, which was the most common after the sixteenth century, involved being bound tightly on a rack by cords which were passed round the body and limbs and were controlled by the executioner, who tightened them by turns of the cords at the end. With each turn the cords bit into the body and traveled round the flesh. In all these tortures it was the rule to strip the accused first. Both men and women were divested of their clothes and left naked except for minimal garments.[62]

There seems to have been no age limit for victims, nor was there any limit on the torture. An accused would often be subjected to all three tortures before confessing. The less obdurate might need only one torture. While the Inquisition did not usually subject very old and very young people to torture, there are cases when tribunals apparently found this necessary. Women aged between seventy and ninety years are on record as having been put on the rack. In 1607 at Valencia a girl of thirteen was subjected to torture, but she seems to have been mildly treated since she overcame it without confessing. Allowances for age might be made. In 1579 the inquisitors of Llerena informed the Suprema that “all the clergy arrested for being alumbrados have been tortured and they haven’t confessed anything, though it must be said that since several of them are very old and also ill and infirm from their long confinement, it has not been possible to torture them with the required rigor.”[63] Those who had to undergo the experience were often left in a sorry state. Many were left with limbs irreparably broken, sometimes with both health and reason diminished; others died under torture.[64]

It was standard practice, which the Inquisition took over from secular courts,[65] to record all details of torture. A secretary noted every word and gesture during the proceedings, thus providing us with impressive if macabre evidence of the sufferings of the accused. Here are extracts from the official accounts of two tortures carried out in the sixteenth century. In the first is a woman accused in 1568 of not eating pork and of changing her linen on Saturdays.

She was ordered to be placed on the rack. She said: “Señores, why will you not tell me what I have to say? Señor, put me on the ground—have I not said that I did it all?” She was told to talk. She said: “I don’t remember—take me away—I did what the witnesses say.” She was told to tell in detail what the witnesses said. She said: “Señor, as I have told you, I do not know for certain. I have said that I did all that the witnesses say. Señores, release me, for I do not remember.” She was told to talk. She said: “Señores, it does not help me to say that I did it and I have admitted that what I have done has brought me to this suffering—Señor, you know the truth—Señores, for God’s sake have mercy on me. Oh Señor, take these things from my arms—Señor release me, they are killing me.” She was tied on the rack with the cords, she was admonished to tell the truth and the order given to tighten the ropes. She said: “Señor, do you not see how these people are killing me? I did it—for God’s sake let me go!”[66]

Foreign heretics were submitted to the same procedure. Here is the case of Jacob Petersen from Dunkirk, a sailor aged twenty who was examined by the tribunal of the Canaries in November 1597. He was stripped and bound and given three turns of the cord.

On being given these he said first, “Oh God!” and then, “There’s no mercy”: after the turns he was admonished, and he said, “I don’t know what to say, oh dear God!” Then three more turns of the cord were ordered to be given, and after two of them he said, “Oh God, oh God, there’s no mercy, oh God help me, help me!”[67]

After three more turns he confessed.

While these examples give us some insight into the agony of those who were tortured, it should be remembered that the procedure was often mild enough for very many to overcome it. Civil jurisdictions both in Spain and the rest of Europe made use of similar tortures, but often with a degree of cruelty and mutilation that shows up the Inquisition in a relatively favorable light. This together with the usually good level of prison conditions may invite us to conclude that the tribunal was not in principle dedicated to cruelty. In perspective, nevertheless, the efficiency of the Holy Office seems to have served as a model for governments and police systems down to our own day. Though experts in law commonly agree that torture was never a reliable method of getting at the truth, the grim reality is that the three forms of it used by the Inquisition in Spain “all remain in use today” in many countries, “as investigations by governments and human rights organizations attest.”[68]

Since the Inquisition usually arrested suspects only after the evidence against them seemed conclusive and had been approved by assessors, the accused could be presumed guilty from the start and would have to prove his own innocence. The main task of the Inquisition would be to obtain an admission of guilt and a penitential submission. If in the process of inquiry, however, it became clear that the evidence was false and the prisoner presumably innocent, he was immediately set free. In 1680 in the tribunal of Saragossa, Ana María Pérez, aged forty-five, was accused of various things by no fewer than twenty-nine residents of her village, among them the parish priest.[69] The inquisitors had no difficulty deciding that it was a case of malicious victimization by residents, and set her free. Meanwhile, the horrified village learned that during her arrest the parish priest and his housekeeper mistress both died. It seemed the hand of God.

One of the peculiarities of inquisitorial procedure that brought hardship and suffering to many was the refusal to divulge reasons for arrest, so that prisoners went for days and months without knowing why they were in the cells of the tribunal. Instead of accusing the prisoner, the inquisitors approached him and gave three warnings, over a period of weeks, to search his conscience, confess the truth and trust to the mercy of the tribunal. The third warning was accompanied by the information that the prosecutor intended to present an accusation, and that it would be wisest to confess before the charges were laid. The effect of this enforced ignorance was to depress and break down a prisoner. If innocent, he remained bewildered about what to confess, or else confessed crimes the Inquisition was not accusing him of; if guilty, he was left to wonder how much of the truth the Inquisition really knew, and whether it was a trick to force him to confess.

When, after the three warnings, the prosecutor eventually read the articles of accusation, the accused was required to answer charges on the spot, with no time or advocate to help him consider his defense. Any reply made in these circumstances could hardly fail to be incriminating. Only after this was permission given to enlist legal help for the defense.

One important concession made by the Spanish but not by the medieval Inquisition was that the accused could have the services of an advocate. This was written into the Instructions of 1484 and generally upheld, though later modifications to the rule sometimes rendered the use of a lawyer farcical. In the earlier years the accused could choose their lawyers freely, but the growing caution of the Holy Office later confined the choice to special lawyers nominated by the tribunal, so that by the mid-sixteenth century the prisoners’ advocates, or abogados de los presos, were recognized as officials of the Inquisition, dependent upon and working with the inquisitors. This new class of lawyers was obviously distrusted by some prisoners, for in 1559 we have the case of a prisoner in Valencia telling his cell mate that

though the inquisitor might give him an advocate he would give him no one good but a fellow who would do only what the inquisitor wanted, and if by chance he asked for an advocate or solicitor not of the Inquisition, they would not serve, for if they went contrary to the inquisitor’s wishes he would get up some charge of false belief or want of respect and cast them into prison.[70]

This does not mean that many advocates did not do their duty conscientiously. But they were hindered by the restrictions of the tribunal and by the subtle and dangerous task of defending the prisoner while condemning his heresy. Some special cases exist where the accused were allowed counsel of their own choice: one such was Carranza, who chose among others the distinguished canonist Martín de Azpilcueta to defend him.

When a prisoner was finally accused he was given a copy of the evidence against him in order to help him prepare a defense. This publication of the evidence was by no means as helpful as it might seem. In the first place, as we have seen, the names of all witnesses were suppressed. Even more important, all evidence that might help to identify witnesses was also suppressed. This meant that the prisoner was often deprived of details of the complete case against him. In this way the inquisitors were free to use as evidence information that had not been communicated to the accused. While this helped to protect witnesses against identification and recrimination, it sometimes crippled the defense. On this question the practice of the Suprema was not at first decided, but Valdés’s Instructions of 1561 finally stipulated that any evidence liable to betray a witness could be omitted, and that only evidence contained in the publication was to be used in the case. This last regulation preserved the forms of justice.

The accused had several avenues of defense short of demonstrating the complete falsity of an accusation. He could call favorable witnesses, disable hostile ones by proving personal enmity or object to his judges, a process known as recusation. Several extenuating circumstances such as drunkenness, insanity, extreme youth and so on could also be pleaded. All these expedients were resorted to regularly, not always with equal success. In the great majority of trials before the Spanish Inquisition, defense consisted solely in the resort to witnesses, since this was the only way to get at the unknown sources of evidence.

The problem caused by anonymous witnesses was a serious one. We have the case of Diego de Uceda (see chapter 5 above), who was accused in 1528 of Lutheranism on the basis of a chance talk with a stranger on the road from Burgos to Córdoba. The suppression of all details of time and place in the published evidence led Uceda to imagine that the accusation arose from a talk some nights later at Guadarrama, and all his energies were spent vainly on proving that this latter conversation had been innocuous, while the real evidence against him went uncontradicted. Uceda decided to call witnesses in his favor: he had to wait six months before they could all be traced, and even then their depositions did not help to contradict the evidence. The resort to favorable witnesses was thus an unreliable and lengthy procedure.

Greater success could be had by disabling hostile witnesses. Felipe Leonart, whose case we have already noted, had no difficulty in 1637 in proving that accusations by his family had been made out of malice. Similarly, Gaspar Torralba of the village of Vayona, near Chinchón, gave in his defense in 1531 a list of 152 persons as his mortal enemies; most of the 35 witnesses against him happened to be on the list, and he was consequently let off lightly.[71] Pedro Sánchez de Contreras was accused at Logroño of blasphemy in 1669, but because he happened to be a magistrate he had full material evidence on all his enemies, men whom he had prosecuted for various crimes. He therefore handed the tribunal an enormous dossier with the criminal records of all his potential accusers; the case was dropped.[72]

Recusation of judges called for considerable courage, and was therefore not resorted to except where the prisoner could prove their personal enmity. Carranza was one of the few who succeeded in having his judges changed for this reason, though in the event it was of little help to him. Attempts to escape trial by pleading insanity or a wide range of other extenuating circumstances (drunkenness, grief) were also often made. The Inquisition could go to great lengths to establish the truth, and some of its attitudes may even be described as enlightened (witchcraft, as we shall see, was treated as a form of insanity). Drunkenness was cited as an excuse in the case of Andrés González, aged twenty, when accused by the tribunal of Toledo in 1678 of blaspheming and swearing that “he cared not for God or the Virgin,” “he did not believe in God,” “he believed in Mohammed.” As the story of his life unfolded before the inquisitors, they heard of his mother, who had died when he was ten, and of his father, who had remarried with a woman who beat Andrés and forced him to leave home. He had wandered in search of work until he came to Toledo, where he married a girl and worked partly as an agricultural laborer, partly as a carpenter’s assistant. They were poor and lived in the house of his wife’s sister, where his hostile in-laws drove him to drink, which was when he was heard to swear; “and when I quarreled with my wife, her cousin and his wife, her sister and her sister’s husband, all used to turn on me and beat me till the blood came to my teeth.”[73] The Inquisition sympathized, but banished him from the area for three years.

Popular literature on the Inquisition devotes considerable attention to the judicial process, but in reality there was no formal “trial,” in the sense of a single act carried out in a single room within a set period of time.[74] The proceedings consisted instead of a series of audiences at which the prosecution and defense made their respective submissions; and a series of interrogations was carried out by the inquisitors in the presence of a notary. When both prosecution and defense had completed their duties, the case was held to be concluded, and the time arrived for sentence to be pronounced. For this it was necessary to form a consulta de fe, a body consisting of the inquisitors, one representative of the bishop, and officials qualified in theology or law, known as consultants (consultores). Together they voted on the case. In this way verdicts were seldom left to the arbitrary discretion of the inquisitors alone, but were monitored by legal experts from outside. In Barcelona, for example, regional practice required that nearly all verdicts be reached in the presence of the inquisitors together with judges from the royal court (the Audiencia) for civil and criminal matters, and from the bishop’s court for matters concerning clergy.[75] In a typical case in 1539,[76] involving a woman accused of judaizing, the judges were one inquisitor, two from the royal Audiencia, two abbots and a doctor of laws.

According to the Valdés Instructions of 1561, if the inquisitors and the episcopal representative agreed, their vote prevailed even against a majority of consulters; but if they disagreed, the case was to be referred to the Suprema. From the early seventeenth century, all judgments had to be approved by the Suprema in Madrid before implementation. By the eighteenth century, centralization under the Suprema meant that few if any important decisions were made by provincial tribunals, and consultas de fe ceased to exist because all sentences were passed by the Suprema alone.

Such was the basic procedure. But as in all courts, both then and now, it was of course open to abuse at every stage. The most important drawback from the prisoner’s point of view was the impossibility of adequate defense. His advocate’s role was limited to drawing up articles that were presented to the judges: beyond this no argument or cross-examination was allowed. It meant that in reality the inquisitors were both judge and jury, both prosecution and defense, and the prisoner’s fate depended almost entirely on the mood and character of the inquisitors and the other judges.

As a rule the tribunals tried to bring the case to a fairly rapid conclusion, since it could be costly keeping the accused in the cells. But a few had to resign themselves to interminably long proceedings that were not always the fault of the Inquisition. The classic case is that of Carranza, but others suffered no less. The inquisitors of Llerena in 1590, overwhelmed by successive denunciations of alumbrados, judaizers and Moriscos, reported the urgency of “attending to the trials of the prisoners in this Inquisition, of whom there are over sixty, and some of them have been in prison up to seven years and many up to four years, and every day they present complaints that their affairs are being delayed so long.” As if this were not enough, they were just receiving denunciations made by an aggrieved Morisco of Hornachos against the rest of the town, “and he is giving so much information that we believe he will take several years to finish.”[77]

Other examples of delays include the case of Gabriel Escobar, a cleric in minor orders, who was arrested by the tribunal of Toledo in 1607 on a charge of illuminism, and died in prison in 1622 before his trial had finished. A Mexican priest, Joseph Brunón de Vertiz, who was arrested in 1649, died in prison in 1656 before his trial had even begun; he was eventually tried posthumously, condemned and burnt in effigy only in 1659.[78] These delays took a toll not only of the years and health of a prisoner but also of his sequestrated property, which was retained all this time to pay for any expenses incurred.

One is sometimes given an impression that the Inquisition was a major punishing body, its terrible power threatening great and small alike. Spain in reality was no different from the rest of pre-modern Europe. A complex network of jurisdictions—exercised by the crown, the nobles, the cities, the local communities and the Church—covered the landscape, with authority over specific crimes and with the right to mete out certain penalties, including the death penalty. The relevant crimes falling under these jurisdictions might include offenses of honor (such as insults and rape), violations of the peace (such as drunken behavior), violence (including killing), and theft of community or Church goods (for instance, robbing grain or stealing sacred objects).[79] The Church’s right to look into heresy was, as we know, passed over to the Inquisition. Apart from this category, the Inquisition had powers in only a very small area of offenses, some of which (such as sex crimes and sorcery) often in any case fell under multiple jurisdictions.

The systems of justice in Europe were not necessarily directed towards punishment; settlement always had priority. Out-of-court negotiations between parties helped to keep the peace and also secure justice.[80] In the same way, many of the first-level interventions of the Inquisition were intended to decide whether the matter should have come before the tribunal. Indeed, strictly speaking, the Inquisition was not there to punish at all; its role was primarily to inquire and only if necessary to discipline. The punishing was usually done through other authorities, at its most extreme by “relaxing” (a word that in time took on terrible overtones) persons to the secular arm of power. In any normal year, the number of people punished by the Inquisition was a minute fraction of those who passed before criminal courts. In the eighteenth century, the criminal justice court of the town of Madrid, the Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte, dealt with approximately five hundred cases a year.[81] Given its relative inactivity at that period, the Inquisition would have needed not a year but a complete century to attain the figure.

Analysis of the punishments decreed by tribunals should ideally be based on reliable data, but these do not exist. Nearly all the documentation on the early years of the Inquisition has disappeared, and for subsequent periods the records are often incomplete. Despite all the defects and gaps, as a whole the available papers of the Inquisition constitute the fullest prosecution records to survive from any European tribunal of early modern times. Working from them, we see that the activity of the tribunal can be divided into five main phases: (1) the period of intense anti-converso persecution after 1480, to about 1520; (2) the relatively quiet early sixteenth century; (3) the period of activity against Protestants and Moriscos, 1559–1614; (4) the seventeenth century, when most of those tried were neither of Jewish nor of Moorish origin; (5) the eighteenth century, when heresy was no longer a concern.

A generation ago, some researchers attempted to count up the “cases of faith” in the surviving records with a view to quantifying the impact of the Inquisition.[82] The exercise helped us to get a global view of some aspects, by indicating, for example, the periods in which certain offenses and minorities were most persecuted, or by giving a general idea of the number of people sentenced. But historians quickly saw that the method was both deficient and unreliable. The margin of error in counting up cases was unacceptably high, sometimes between 50 and 100 percent wrong.[83] Cases were added up as single items, without taking into account multiple offenses or the implication of more than one person. Offenses, moreover, were classified by the researchers according to the categories laid down by the Inquisition, which not only tended to mislead but also meant that important types of offenses did not appear at all in the analyses. In Catalonia, for example, a high proportion of cases, mostly in civil and criminal matters, was never entered in the official list of “cases of faith,” where the apparent totals “may often represent little more than half their activity.”[84] Not surprisingly, one scholar concludes that the figures offered by the researchers “are not always reliable, and pose serious problems.” His own estimate of Inquisition cases—not necessarily more correct—suggests a total four times greater than theirs.[85] The idea of counting cases may, it seems, be helpful within certain limits, but less helpful when used as a basis for an accurate assessment.

Above all, the surviving records reflect neither the number of offenses nor the scale of inquisitorial activity. Like statistics for crime, they are seldom complete or reliable. More properly, they reflect only the response of the Inquisition to some cases referred to it by members of the public or by interested parties. Very many offenses were neither detected nor reported nor acted upon; and the inquisitors were active in many areas not referred to in the index they used for cataloging papers.

A study of the tribunal of Toledo, summarized below in graph 1, shows us the offenses prosecuted over the centuries of highest activity.[86]

The outcome of a prosecution could take four main forms. Accused were acquitted (“absolved” or “suspended”), made to do penance (penitenciado), “reconciled” (reconciliado) or burnt (relajado, “relaxed” in person or in effigy). The three categories of punishment usually combined both spiritual and corporal penalties. In the tribunal of Valencia, an estimate for 3,075 trials in 1566–1609 have been analyzed as follows: 44.2 percent were made to do penance, 40.2 percent were reconciled, 2.5 percent absolved, 9 percent suspended, 2.1 percent burnt in effigy, 2.0 percent burnt in person.[87] In Galicia between 1560 and 1700, of 2,203 cases, 18.5 percent were absolved, 62.7 percent made to do penance, 16.1 percent reconciled, 1.9 percent relaxed in effigy, 0.7 percent relaxed in person.[88] In the Canary Islands, the number of cases from 1504 to 1820 totaled 2,263; of these, 11 persons were burnt in person and 107 in effigy.[89]

Graph 1. Prosecutions in the tribunal of Toledo, 1483–1700.

The number of acquittals, though few, was an improvement on the medieval tribunal, which as a rule never acquitted. In its first cases in 1483–85 in Ciudad Real, the inquisitors set free several accused, among them the converso cobbler Diego López, accused of judaizing: “we absolve him, declare him free and acquitted, and reaffirm his good reputation.”[90] Outright acquittal, however, meant admitting an error, so it was also common to suspend cases, which was not necessarily a good thing, for it left one technically under suspicion and meant that the prosecution could at any time be renewed. There was only a limited chance of appeal. In cases that ended in a public auto de fe, this was because the accused were not informed of their sentence until they were in the actual procession during the auto; by then it was too late to appeal. The delay in delivering a verdict would naturally heighten the suspense, fear and despair felt by prisoners. But when a man was sentenced to be relaxed he was always informed of his fate the night before the ceremony to give him time in which to prepare his soul for confession and repentance. Later in the history of the tribunal this information was given as much as three days in advance. In private autos there was much more opportunity to appeal after the sentence had been read out. In such cases the appeal always went to the Suprema, appeals to Rome not being encouraged.

Doing penance was the least of the punishments imposed. Those who did penance had to “abjure” their offenses: de levi for a lesser offense, de vehementi for a graver one. The penitent swore to avoid his sin in the future, and if he swore de vehementi, any relapse made him liable to severe punishment on the next occasion.

Penitents were then condemned to physical penalties such as the sanbenito, fines, banishment or sometimes the galleys. “Reconciliation” was in theory the return of a sinner to the bosom of the Church after due spiritual penance had been performed. In practice it was the most severe punishment the Inquisition could inflict, short of relaxation. All the penalties were heavier: in addition to the sanbenito, accused persons could be condemned to flogging and to long spells in prison or the galleys. In most cases confiscation of goods occurred, so that even if a prisoner escaped with a prison sentence of a few months, he came out an orthodox Catholic indeed but facing a life of beggary. An additional rule, frequently enforced, was that anyone backsliding after reconciliation was to be treated as a relapsed heretic and sent to the stake.

The sanbenito, a corrupt form of the words saco bendito (sackcloth of repentance, a garment long in use in the Church),[91] was a penitential garment used in the medieval Inquisition and taken over by the Spanish one.[92] It was usually a yellow garment with one or two diagonal crosses imposed on it, and penitents were condemned to wear it as a mark of infamy for any period from a few months to life. Those who were to be relaxed at an auto de fe had to wear a black sanbenito on which were painted flames, demons and other decorative matter. Anyone condemned to wearing the ordinary sanbenito had to put it on whenever he went out of doors, a practice by no means popular in the first decades of the Inquisition. The order to wear a sanbenito for life should not be taken literally. It was invariably commuted to a much shorter period at the discretion of the inquisitor. The chief criticism leveled at the time against the garments was less over the shame they were meant to cast on their wearers than over the policy of perpetuating infamy by hanging them up in the local parish church as a permanent record.

The imprisonment decreed by the Inquisition could be either for a short term of months and years, or for life, the latter usually being classified as “perpetual and irremissible.” Prison sentences, then as now, were never literally observed. By the sixteenth century “perpetual” normally signified in practice a few months,[93] and rarely involved more than three years, if the prisoner was repentant. A “lifetime” sentence was more commonly completed in ten years or less. Despite this the Inquisition continued to decree “perpetual” sentences, probably because in canon law it was the custom to condemn heretics to life imprisonment. Incongruous sentences such as “perpetual prison for one year” appear as a matter of course in inquisitorial decrees.

None of the sentences necessarily involved actual confinement in a prison. Though jails existed everywhere, they were employed temporarily until the fate of the accused person could be decided. The penitentiary system, in which the prison itself was the punishment, did not come into existence in Europe until the nineteenth century.[94] By the Instructions of 1488 inquisitors could at their discretion confine a man to his own house or to some other institution such as a convent or hospital, with the result that very many “prisoners” served their sentences in moderate comfort. The main reason for this surprising concession is that the tribunals often lacked prison space when their cells were already full, and had to make do with alternatives. Important prisoners, such as the Admiral of Aragon or Archbishop Carranza, normally underwent house arrest rather than going to prison. The prison cells also often had an open regime. In some tribunals, the prisoners were free to come and go, providing they observed basic rules.[95] A prisoner in Granada in 1565 was allowed to bring into his cell two mattresses, a bedspread, four sheets, two cushions and blankets, and a table.[96] In 1655 a report on the tribunal of Granada observed that prisoners were allowed out at all hours of the day without restriction, they wandered through the city and its suburbs and amused themselves at friends’ houses, returning to their prison only at night; in this way they were given a comfortable lodging house for which they paid no rent.[97]

The galleys were a punishment unknown to the medieval Inquisition, and were devised for the new one by Ferdinand the Catholic, who thereby found a cheap source of labor without having to resort to open slavery. The punishment was perhaps the most indefensible of any operated by the Spanish Inquisition and, in the opinion of a recent scholar, the most dreaded.[98] It began to be used more frequently from the mid-sixteenth century, to meet rising demand from the royal fleet. In the 1570s Spain maintained in the Mediterranean somewhere in the region of 150 galleys, an enormous force that demanded a good supply of rowers and confirmed galley service as an essential part of the country’s penal system.[99] Offenses such as bigamy and sodomy were normally punished with the galleys, but occasionally those condemned for heresy were sent there as well. The convicted were seldom sentenced to any period over five years, in contrast to secular tribunals which then and later condemned prisoners to the galleys for life.[100] The galleys constituted an economical form of punishment: tribunals were freed from the duty of maintaining penitents in their prisons, and the state was saved the need to hire rowers at some expense. After the Morisco uprising in Andalucia in 1569, the galleys became a frequent punishment for those taken prisoner.[101] The tribunals of the crown of Aragon were those that imposed the sentence most frequently, usually on Moriscos and foreign Protestants; in the late sixteenth century they sent about fifty men a year to the galleys.[102] By the mid-eighteenth century the galley as a fighting vessel was obsolete; in consequence the Holy Office, like the state, ceased to use it as a sentence.

A more common form of physical punishment was flogging. The use of the lash as chastisement was very old in Christian tradition. As a criminal punishment, however, it was very severe, carrying with it the stigma of degradation and shame, and there were bitter protests against its use in the early period of the tribunal. In principle, it could be used only against those of low social status. In the Inquisition, the accused was usually condemned to be “whipped through the streets,” in which case (if male) he had to appear stripped to the waist, often mounted on an ass for greater shame, and was duly flogged through the streets with the specified number of strokes by the public executioner. During this journey, passersby and children would show their scorn by hurling stones at the accused. Women were flogged in the same way as men. Nor was there any limit on age, cases on record showing that girls in their teens and women of seventy or eighty were subjected to the same treatment. It was the general rule to prescribe no more than two hundred lashes for the accused, and sentences of one hundred lashes were very common.

A convicted person might be sentenced to different punishments simultaneously. At the Granada auto on 30 May 1672 Alonso Ribero was sentenced to four years’ banishment from the locality, six years in the galleys and a hundred strokes of the lash, for falsifying documents of the Inquisition; and Francisco de Alarcón to five years’ banishment, five years in the galleys, two hundred strokes of the lash and a money fine, for blasphemy.[103] Other penalties in the canon need little explanation. Exile or banishment from the locality was a common sentence for bad influences. Confiscations were exacted whenever possible. Of the several unusual punishments which at one time or another made their appearance, it is worth noting the one dealt out in the Mexican Inquisition in December 1664 to a penitent who was smeared with honey, then covered with feathers and made to stand in the sun for four hours during an auto de fe.

The ultimate penalty was death, normally at the stake. The execution of heretics had not been common practice in the medieval Church, but from the middle of the thirteenth century the authorities in Western Europe, responding in particular to the spread of the Cathar heresy, began to sanction its regular use.[104] The Spanish Inquisition cannot be accused of any innovation in this respect. It had been the practice, hallowed by the medieval tribunal, for Church courts to condemn a heretic and then hand him over, or “relax” him, to the secular authorities. These were obliged to carry out the sentence of blood which the Holy Office was forbidden by law to carry out. In all this there was no pretence that the Inquisition was not the body directly and fully responsible for the deaths that occurred.

The Holy Office has a venerable reputation as a juggernaut of death, based as it happens largely on fiction. We have suggested above (chapter 3) that taking into account all the tribunals of Spain up to about 1520, it is unlikely that more than two thousand people were executed for heresy in that period by the Inquisition. Very few were executed in the next three centuries, and we can in all probability accept the estimate, made on the basis of available documentation, that a maximum of three thousand persons may have suffered death during the entire history of the tribunal. Figures for executions do not of course tell the whole story of cruelty and oppression, since the negative impact of the Holy Office extended far beyond the question of burnings.

But the figures should also be set into a wider context. Because scholars have never attempted to study systematically the prosecution of crime in pre-industrial Spain, nor the extent to which other tribunals punished overlapping offenses (such as sodomy or witchcraft), it is impossible to say whether the Inquisition stood out for its severity. There is every possibility that in normal periods—excluding, that is, the late fifteenth century—fewer people were punished or executed by the Holy Office than in other criminal jurisdictions in the peninsula. When we compare figures for Europe, moreover, it is obvious that other nations were as capable of cruelty as the Spaniards. Limiting ourselves only to cases of heresy, from 1520 to about 1560 (a period when religious repression outside Spain had by no means reached its peak) possibly three thousand persons were executed by the state courts in Western Europe.[105] The Inquisition played only a small part in this. By the 1560s, indeed, Spain was one of the countries with the lowest level of executions for religious reasons.

Two classes of people alone qualified for the stake—unrepentant heretics and relapsed heretics. The latter consisted of those who, after being pardoned a first time, had repeated the offense and were judged to have relapsed into heresy. Those who were sentenced to be “relaxed” did not always die at the stake. They were normally given the choice between repenting before the auto de fe reached its climax, in which case they were “mercifully” strangled when the flames were lit; or remaining unrepentant, in which case they were roasted alive. The vast majority of those who were “relaxed” were in fact burnt in effigy only, either because they had died or because they had saved themselves by flight. In the early years of the Inquisition the large number of condemned burnt in effigy is a guide to the volume of refugees escaping from the tribunal. As we have already seen (chapter 3), in the first two years of the tribunal at Ciudad Real, 52 accused were burnt alive but 220 were condemned to death in their absence.

The proportionately small number of executions is an effective argument against the legend of a bloodthirsty tribunal. Nothing, certainly, can efface the cost in lives of the terrible first twenty or so years. Nor can occasional outbursts of savagery, such as overtook the Chuetas in the late seventeenth century, be minimized. But it is clear that for most of its existence the Inquisition was far from being a monster of death either in intention or in capability. The figures given above for punishments in Valencia suggest an execution rate of well under 2 percent of the accused, and in Galicia and the Canary Islands less than 1 percent. It has been estimated that in nineteen of the tribunals, over the period 1540–1700, about 1.8 percent of the condemned were executed (i.e., relaxed in person).[106] If this is anywhere near the truth, it would seem that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fewer than three people a year were executed by the Inquisition in the whole of the Spanish monarchy from Sicily to Peru, certainly a lower rate than in any provincial court of justice in Spain or anywhere else in Europe.

A comparison, indeed, of Spanish secular courts with the Inquisition can only be in favor of the latter. In 1573, for instance, the corregidor of Plasencia handed over to the Holy Office in Llerena a Morisco condemned by his jurisdiction to be hanged and quartered for allegedly smashing an image of the Virgin; but the Inquisition found the case unproven and set him free.[107] On a more continent-wide scale, one could compare death rates of the Inquisition with those of other tribunals, as we have done above for the mid-sixteenth century, but contexts are so different that no meaningful comparison is possible. It must be remembered, of course, that the apparently low overall death rate masks a very high rate in the first half century of the Inquisition, and a consistently high rate affecting people of Jewish and Muslim origin. The executions probably made no impact on the population as a whole, but were a significant burden on conversos.

Condemnation usually meant that the accused had to appear in an auto de fe. This ceremony was held either in private (auto particular) in a church, or in public (auto público or auto general): it is the latter that has become notorious as the auto de fe, during which penalties decreed by the Inquisition were publicly announced. The gory reputation of the tribunal has always derived from what it is presumed to have done during this ceremony, which we shall look at again in the chapter that follows.

We can see the way the auto de fe evolved simply by comparing one in the 1480s with another two hundred years later. There is available a contemporary account of the first auto de fe held at Toledo, on Sunday, 12 February 1486, during which seven hundred judaizers were reconciled to the Church. At this early epoch ceremonial and ritual were notably absent. The inquisitors had no intention of putting on a show for the public, and were occupied solely with the task of reconciling large numbers of heretics quickly and efficiently.

All the reconciled went in procession, to the number of 750 persons, including both men and women. They went in procession from the church of St. Peter Martyr in the following way. The men were all together in a group, bareheaded and unshod, and since it was extremely cold they were told to wear soles under their feet which were otherwise bare; in their hands were unlit candles. The women were together in a group, their heads uncovered and their faces bare, unshod like the men and with candles. Among all these were many prominent men in high office. With the bitter cold and the dishonor and disgrace they suffered from the great number of spectators (since a great many people from outlying districts had come to see them), they went along howling loudly and weeping and tearing out their hair, no doubt more for the dishonor they were suffering than for any offense they had committed against God. Thus they went in tribulation through the streets along which the Corpus Christi procession goes, until they came to the cathedral. At the door of the church were two chaplains who made the sign of the cross on each one’s forehead, saying. “Receive the sign of the cross, which you denied and lost through being deceived.” Then they went into the church until they arrived at a scaffolding erected by the new gate, and on it were the father inquisitors. Nearby was another scaffolding on which stood an altar at which they said mass and delivered a sermon. After this a notary stood up and began to call each one by name, saying, “Is X here?” The penitent raised his candle and said, “Yes.” There in public they read all the things in which he had judaized. The same was done for the women. When this was over they were publicly allotted penance and ordered to go in procession for six Fridays, disciplining their body with scourges of hemp-cord, barebacked, unshod and bareheaded; and they were to fast for those six Fridays. It was also ordered that all the days of their life they were to hold no public office such as mayor, bailiff, town councilor, or judge, or be public notaries or messengers, and that those who held these offices were to lose them. And that they were not to become moneychangers, shopkeepers, or grocers or hold any official post whatever. And they were not to wear silk or scarlet or colored cloths or gold or silver or pearls or coral or any jewels. Nor could they stand as witnesses. And they were ordered that if they relapsed, that is if they fell to the same error again, and resorted to any of the aforementioned things, they would be condemned to the fire. And when all this was over they went away at two o’clock in the afternoon.[108]

Two o’clock is around the time of the midday meal in the south of Spain. The inquisitors had therefore managed to get through 750 prisoners in one morning. This is a far cry from the dilatory pace, pomp and ritual of the post-1559 ceremonial autos, which went on well into the night and sometimes were continued the following day, as happened at Logroño in 1610. The speed at Toledo in 1486 was probably a record, for after the 750 accused in February the tribunal managed to deal with 900 reconciliations on 2 April, 750 on 11 June, and 900 on 10 December, not to speak of two other autos on 16 and 17 August, when 27 people were burnt.

The sophisticated public autos put on after the mid-sixteenth century were substantially different. Typically, the scene would be set in the biggest square or public place available. The elaborate and impressive staging of the proceedings made for heavy expense, and because of this public autos were not very frequent. The auto held at Logroño on 18 October 1570 cost a total of 20 ducats, most of which was spent not on the auto but on the feast of celebration held after it. The expenditure was criticized by the Suprema, and the cost of an auto held the subsequent year on 27 December was cut down to one-fifth.[109] These costs may be compared with those of a larger tribunal, Seville, which in 1600 calculated that each of its autos cost over 300 ducats.[110] Costs did not cease to rise in Seville: the auto there on 30 January 1624 cost nearly four times as much, and one on 29 March 1648 eight times as much.[111] Even these levels were surpassed by the tribunal of Córdoba, which spent 5,700 ducats on its auto of 3 May 1655.[112]

In the later period of the Inquisition, holding an auto depended entirely on the discretion of individual tribunals and (since the proceedings were essentially a show) the availability of detainees. When necessary, prisoners were brought from the very ends of the peninsula: for the great 1680 auto in Madrid condemned were brought from Galicia and Andalucia. When enough prisoners had accumulated to make the holding of an event worthwhile, a date was fixed and the inquisitors informed the city and cathedral authorities. One calendar month before the auto a procession consisting of familiars and notaries of the Inquisition would march through the streets of the town proclaiming the date of the ceremony. In the intervening month, all the preparations would have to be made. Orders went out to carpenters and masons to prepare the scaffolding for the occasion, and furniture and decorations we made ready. The evening before the auto a special procession took place, known as the procession of the Green Cross, during which familiars and others carried the cross of the Holy Office to the site of the ceremony. All that night prayers and preparations would be made, then early next morning mass was celebrated, breakfast was given to all who were to appear in the auto (including the condemned) and a procession began, which led directly to the square where the auto would be held.

The grandiose ceremony held on 30 June 1680 in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid in the presence of the king and his court was in striking contrast to the simplicity and efficiency of autos in the first years of the Inquisition.[113] Among the distinguished persons attending was the French ambassador the marquis de Villars, who left an account of his impressions. The scene was captured on behalf of the Inquisition by the Italian artist Francesco Rizzi in an enormous canvas that now hangs in the Prado art gallery.[114] A short version of the official narrative of the auto (the original text was written by a familiar of the Holy Office, José del Olmo) was published in London in 1748 and goes as follows:

A Scaffold, fifty Feet in Length, was erected in the Square, which was raised to the same Height with the Balcony made for the King to sit in. At the End, and along the whole Breadth of the Scaffold, at the Right of the King’s Balcony, an Amphitheatre was raised, to which they ascend by twenty-five or thirty Steps; and this was appointed for the Council of the Inquisition, and the other Councils of Spain. Above these Steps and under a Canopy, the Grand Inquisitor’s Rostrum was placed so that he was raised much higher than the King’s Balcony. At the Left of the Scaffold and Balcony, a second Amphitheatre was erected of the same Extent with the former, for the Criminals to stand in.

A month after Proclamation had been made of the Act of Faith, the Ceremony opened with a Procession, [This procession took place on the eve, 29 June, one of the great feast days of the Church] which proceeded from St Mary’s Church in the following order. The March was preceded by an Hundred Coal Merchants, all arm’d with Pikes and Muskets; these People furnishing the Wood with which the Criminals are burnt. They were followed by Dominicans, before whom a white Cross was carried. Then came the Duke of Medina-Celi, carrying the Standard of the Inquisition. Afterwards was brought forwards a green Cross covered with black Crepe; which was followed by several Grandees and other Persons of Quality, who were Familiars of the Inquisition. The March was clos’d by Fifty Guards belonging to the Inquisition, clothed with black and white Garments and commanded by the Marquis of Povar, hereditary Protector of the Inquisition. The procession having marched in this Order before the Palace, proceeded afterwards to the Square, where the Standard and the Green Cross were placed on the Scaffold, where none but the Dominicans stayed, the rest being retired. These Friars spent Part of the Night in singing of Psalms, and several Masses were celebrated on the Altar from Daybreak to Six in the Morning. An Hour after, the King and Queen of Spain, the Queen-Mother, and all the Ladies of Quality, appeared in the Balconies.

At Eight O’clock the Procession began, in like Manner as the Day before, with the Company of Coal Merchants, who placed themselves on the Left of the King’s Balcony, his Guards standing on his Right (the rest of the Balconies and Scaffolds being fill’d by the Embassadors, the Nobility and Gentry). Afterwards came thirty Men, carrying Images made in Pasteboard, as big as Life. Some of these represented those who were dead in Prison, whose Bones were also brought in Trunks, with Flames painted round them: and the rest of the Figures represented those who having escaped the Hands of the Inquisition were outlawed. These Figures were placed at one End of the Amphitheatre.

After these there came twelve Men and Women, with Ropes about their Necks and Torches in their Hands, with Pasteboard Caps three Feet high, on which their Crimes were written, or represented, in different Manners. These were followed by fifty others having Torches also in their Hands and cloathed with a yellow Sanbenito or Great Coat without Sleeves, with a large St. Andrew’s Cross, of a red Color, before and behind. These were Criminals who (this being the first Time of their prisonment) had repented of their Crimes; these are usually condemned either to some Years’ Imprisonment or to wear the Sanbenito, which is looked upon to be the greatest Disgrace that can happen to a Family. Each of the Criminals were led by two Familiars of the Inquisition. Next came twenty more Criminals, of both Sexes, who had relapsed thrice into their former Errors and were condemn’d to the Flames. Those who had given some Tokens of Repentance were to be strangled before they were burnt; but for the rest, for having persisted obstinately in their Errors, were to be burnt alive. These wore Linen Sanbenitos, having Devils and Flames painted on them, and Caps after the same Manner: Five or six among them who were more obstinate than the rest were gagged to prevent their uttering any blasphemous Tenets. Such as were condemned to die were surrounded, besides the two Familiars, with four or five Monks, who were preparing them for Death as they went along.

These Criminals passed, in the Order above mentioned, under the King’s Balcony; and after having walked round the scaffold were placed in the Amphitheatre that stood on the left, and each of them surrounded with the Familiars and Monks who attended them. Some of the Grandees, who were Familiars, seated themselves on two Benches which had been prepared for them at the lowest Part of the other Amphitheatre. The Officers of all the other Councils, and several other Persons of Distinction, both Secular and Regular, all of them on Horseback, with great Solemnity arrived afterwards and placed themselves on the Amphitheatre towards the Right hand, on both Sides the Rostrum in which the Grand Inquisitor was to seat himself. He himself came last of all, in a purple Habit, accompanied by the President of the Council of Castile, when, being seated in his Place, the President withdrew.

They then began to celebrate Mass. . . .

About Twelve O’clock they began to read the Sentence of the condemned Criminals. That of the Criminals who died in Prison, or were outlawed, was first read. Their Figures in Pasteboard were carried up into a little Scaffold and put into small Cages made for that Purpose. They then went on to read the Sentences to each Criminal, who thereupon were put into the said Cages one by one in order for all Men to know them. The whole Ceremony lasted till Nine at Night: and when they had finished the Celebration of the Mass the King withdrew and the Criminals who had been condemn’d to be burnt were delivered over to the Secular Arm, and being mounted upon Asses were carried through the Gate called Foncaral, and at Midnight near this Place were all executed.[115]

In the auto de fe eleven people abjured their errors and fifty-six were reconciled, two of them in effigy because they had died in prison. There were fifty-three relaxations, of which nineteen were in person. The procedure at the auto represents the fully developed practice of the Inquisition.

The burning of accused was not a part of the principal ceremony and took place instead at a subsidiary one, normally outside the city, where the pomp of the main procession was absent. The central features of the auto were the procession, the mass, the sermon at the mass and the reconciliation of sinners. It would be mistaken to suppose, as is commonly done, that the burnings were the centerpiece. They may have been a spectacular component of many autos but were the least necessary part of the proceedings, and scores took place without a single faggot being set alight. In the 1680 auto, as the narrative states, the burnings took place at midnight. We cannot doubt that there were people who wished to watch. No researcher, unfortunately, has discovered exactly who, or how many, stayed up late in order to witness what happened. Certainly the court and dignitaries did not do so. The secondary status allotted to heresy executions is in interesting contrast to normal criminal executions in Europe, where both dignitaries and public had a part to play in an act of theatre that was meant to point out a lesson to other would-be evildoers.[116]

The burning of a judaizer is described in detail in a contemporary narrative by an inquisitor of the auto held at Logroño on 24 August 1719. We enter the picture at the stage where the accused is already on the stake and a lighted torch is passed before his face to warn him of what awaits him if he does not repent. Around the judaizer are numbers of religious who

pressed the accused with greater anxiety and zeal to convert himself. With perfect serenity he said, “I will convert myself to the faith of Jesus Christ,” words which he had not been heard to utter until then. This overjoyed all the religious who began to embrace him with tenderness and gave infinite thanks to God for having opened to them a door for his conversion. . . . And as he was making his confession of faith a learned religious of the Franciscan Order asked him, “In what law do you die?” He turned and looked him in the eye and said, “Father, I have already told you that I die in the faith of Jesus Christ.” This caused great pleasure and joy among all, and the Franciscan, who was kneeling down, arose and embraced the accused. All the others did the same with great satisfaction, giving thanks for the infinite goodness of God. . . . At this moment the accused saw the executioner, who had put his head out from behind the stake and asked him, “Why did you call me a dog before?” The executioner replied, “Because you denied the faith of Jesus Christ: but now that you have confessed, we are brothers, and if I have offended you by what I said, I beg your pardon on my knees.” The accused forgave him gladly, and the two embraced. . . . And desirous that the soul which had given so many signs of conversion should not be lost, I went round casually behind the stake to where the executioner was, and gave him the order to strangle him immediately because it was very important not to delay. This he did with great expedition.

When it was certain that he was dead, the executioner was ordered to set fire at the four corners of the pyre to the brushwood and charcoal that had been piled up. He did this at once, and it began to burn on all sides, the flames rising swiftly up the platform and burning the wood and clothing. When the cords binding the accused had been burnt off he fell through the open trap door into the pyre and his whole body was reduced to ashes.[117]

The ashes were scattered through the fields or on the river, and with this the heretic, whose conversion had brought him no temporal benefit, passed out of existence—though not out of memory, for a sanbenito bearing his name would as a rule have been placed in the local church after his death. There was no age limit for those condemned to the stake: women in their eighties and boys in their teens were treated in the same way as any other heretics.

Figure 1. The Virgin of the Catholic Monarchs, attributed to Fernando Gallego (1468–1507). Kneeling behind Ferdinand is Torquemada, first inquisitor general of Spain. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.

Figure 2. A victim of the Spanish Inquisition, wearing the sanbenito habit of the penitent. Line engraving from “Historia Inquisitionis,” by Philipp van Limborch, 1692. The Granger Collection, New York.

Figure 3. A victim of the Spanish Inquisition, wearing the sanbenito habit of the heretic. Line engraving from “Historia Inquisitionis,” by Philipp van Limborch, 1692. The Granger Collection, New York.

Figure 4. A seventeenth-century Dutch engraving of the procession of an auto de fe. Line engraving from “Historia Inquisitionis,” by Philipp van Limborch, 1692. The Granger Collection, New York.

Figure 5. St. Dominic Presiding at an Auto de Fe, by Pedro Berruguete (c. 1490). The images are meant to emphasize the special role of the Dominican order (and its thirteenth-century founder) in the activity of the Inquisition.

Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 6. Mercy and justice on the banner of the Inquisition.

The Granger Collection, New York.

Figure 7. A contemporary Dutch print depicting what the Valladolid auto de fe of May 1559 was imagined to have been like. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 8. An eighteenth-century print, by Bernard Picart, depicting an imagined scene of the burning of heretics in Lisbon after an auto de fe.

The Granger Collection, New York.

Figure 9. The great auto de fe of 1680, held in the Plaza Mayor at Madrid before King Charles II. Detail from the contemporary canvas by Francesco Rizzi.

Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 10. A masterpiece of satire: Goya’s Auto de fe.

Album/Art Resource, NY.

10

THE IMAGE AND REALITY OF POWER

We have gone into lands where no inquisitor has ever been.

—THE INQUISITORS OF CATALONIA, 1578

When presenting itself before the public, the Inquisition wished to be seen above all as a deterrent. The coming of its officials to a town was therefore, in principle, designed to cause fear. In his introduction to the fourteenth-century Manual of Eimeric, written as a guide for the medieval Inquisition, the Spanish theologian Francisco Peña commented in 1578: “we must remember that the main purpose of the trial and execution is not to save the soul of the accused but to achieve the public good and put fear into others [ut alii terreantur].”[1] The public activity of the Holy Office was thus based on a premise, common to all policing systems at all times, that fear is the most useful deterrent.

In reality, as police officials everywhere can recognize, that is usually wishful thinking. The presence, and therefore the impact, of the Inquisition could be daunting, but it does not follow that it imposed fear and uniformity throughout Spain. The fear set in train by the early Inquisition undoubtedly existed for those it targeted, but it is relevant to ask who else had reason to be afraid. The tribunal itself, of course, never ceased to proclaim its successes. At an auto de fe in Barcelona in 1602, the inquisitors reported with considerable satisfaction: “our procession caused terror in the people.”[2] It was a pious lie, for thanks to the almost total lack of prosecutions the inquisitors at that date had not been able to mount a public auto in Barcelona for over a quarter of a century, and at few moments of their history had the authorities or the people in Catalonia ever been afraid of the Holy Office. And what was true for Spaniards in Catalonia was arguably also true for many others in the rest of Spain.

The societies in which we live today are permeated with public and covert forces of vigilance, but the population is not necessarily terrorized. In the same way, in many Christian communities throughout Spain where internal discord was low and public solidarity high, fear of the Inquisition was virtually absent. Catalonia was an outstanding example of a community that held the Inquisition in contempt and despised its methods. In 1560 the inquisitors in Barcelona complained that the city authorities never came to autos de fe, and that in Catalonia as a whole the people, “vaunting themselves as good Christians, all claim that the Inquisition is superfluous here and does nothing nor is there anything for it to do.” This, we may recall, was precisely at the period when the discovery of Protestants had raised widespread alarm in Castile. In Catalonia, by contrast, there was no concern on the part of the authorities. “All the people of this land,” the inquisitors reported in 1627, “both clergy and laymen, have always shown little sympathy for the Holy Office.”[3] A typical attitude was that of the parish priest of Taús (Urgell) who asserted in 1632 that “he didn’t recognize the Inquisition and didn’t give a fig for it.”[4] Significantly, the Inquisition was unable to take any action against him, not indeed was it ever able to impose its authority on the people of that diocese.

There may have been many other regions of Spain where a similar absence of fear prevailed. Because the information available to inquisitors came not from their own investigations but almost exclusively from members of the public, it was in effect the public that dictated the forms of inquisitorial justice. The judges were able to assert their own interpretations and prejudices, but the most substantive part of the matter, the evidence, was produced by witnesses. In a very real sense, the Inquisition was set in motion by ordinary people.[5] And where they refused to cooperate the tribunal was impotent and incapable of inspiring fear. Time after time, villages and communities simply refused to break the bonds of neighborliness, such as they were, by spilling information to outside authorities.[6]

Foreign travelers and diplomats visiting Spain nevertheless had their own opinions about matters, and were at their most confident when reporting on the immense sway that they felt the Holy Office exercised over the people. In 1563 the Venetian ambassador Tiepolo said that everyone shuddered at its name, as it had total authority over the property, life, honor and even the souls of men. “The king,” he wrote, “favors it, the better to keep the people under control.”[7] It was not the first time that Venetian diplomats confused fact with fiction, and Tiepolo’s report would have been most gratifying to the Inquisition itself had it been true. Ironically, the inquisitors had their work cut out trying to make sure that they could maintain a position of preeminence. They were a small group of officials, with no permanent income and no guaranteed privileges, liable always to come into conflict with other officials of Church and state, and often unemployed in periods of tranquility. Despite this, they managed to survive, thanks to their persistence in trying to project their image and cultivate the structure of their power.

What could they do to affirm their position? In the first and crucial generation of existence, they operated in limited areas of the country and never ceased to encounter opposition (chapters 4 and 8). City and Church officials blocked their way at almost every turn. No sooner did they establish themselves in the former Islamic territory of Granada than they were at loggerheads with the authorities as well as the archbishop. The effort to maintain their public status over and against the other authorities in Church and state was, it would seem, not very successful. We may well ask, then, at what stage the tribunal is supposed to have imposed a regime of fear on the population (over and above the persecution it directed against the converso minority). By the 1530s the persecution of former Jews and Muslims was almost a distant memory, autos de fe were few and far between, and new movements of spiritual revival were penetrating the country.

It may well have been this tranquility and lack of fear that worried Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés when he took over the Inquisition in 1547. With a long and distinguished career behind him, serving in the highest offices of state, he had already been a member of the Suprema for over twenty years.[8] His most striking contribution was the invention of the new auto de fe, which attempted to identify the Inquisition with fear and power. He also helped to draw up the new 1561 Instructions, which set out for the first time the basic judicial procedure to be followed by the tribunal.[9] Thanks in part to him, the tribunal began to receive a regular income not based on confiscations.

It would be no exaggeration to consider Valdés the second founder of the Inquisition. His position at the head of the tribunal coincides with all its best-known activities, against heretics and heretical books and even against great personalities of state such as Carranza. His star had been waning in government circles after the death of Charles V, and the discovery of “heretics” enabled him to recover the initiative. Valdés was particularly forceful in his letters from Spain to Philip II in Brussels. He was aware that reports unfavorable to him had managed to reach Philip, sent (he said) by “some people whose intentions will one day be exposed.” Concerned to ensure his own political survival, he painted an alarming picture of Lutherans active in Seville, Valladolid and Salamanca, Jews active in Murcia, and Moriscos in the throes of discontent. The only remedy, he said, was to put the Inquisition in charge.[10] In effect, reading his letters one can see that he wished the whole of Castile to be handed over to the Inquisition, as an emergency measure. The absent Philip had no other machinery available to handle the situation, and agreed with him about the need for quick action. In long and confident letters to the king in Brussels, Valdés described the efficiency with which the Holy Office was acting and the impressive number of people it had arrested and punished.[11]

One of the problems Valdés no doubt had in mind was the low profile of the Inquisition in the mid-sixteenth century. Many modern accounts lump together indiscriminately all its activities over three centuries and offer a portrait that takes no account of changes in its role, while the truth is that before Valdés the tribunal in the decades after it had dealt with conversos had barely begun to achieve the fame it later enjoyed. In some cities, such as Seville and Saragossa, it was lodged in key buildings, but otherwise had little public presence. There was an astonishing absence of visible imagery for it. The arms of the tribunal—a cross of faith intertwined with an olive branch of mercy—were engraved on the public façade of all the buildings controlled by the tribunal, and can still be seen today in the medieval centers of some cities. Apart from the symbol, however, Spaniards seem to have had no visual images of the presence of the Holy Office. Like other peoples of the Mediterranean, they lived much of their life outdoors, where their festivities and processions were concentrated in every month of the year. But the Inquisition was not there in the streets, nor—apart from sanbenitos hung in a few parishes—in the churches, nor in social activity of any sort.

For over one hundred years after it was founded, the Inquisition had no confraternity to bind together its employees and give them a social identity. Not until 1603 did the Suprema get around to founding a confraternity for its familiars, dedicated to St. Peter Martyr (who happened to be an Italian inquisitor murdered in 1254!). A confraternity had among its privileges that of being able to organize street processions, so that at last the tribunal could have a social presence alongside other Church groups. The Spanish Inquisition’s own martyr, Pedro Arbués, was not beatified by the papacy until 1662, or nearly two hundred years after his death; and he was, curiously enough, not canonized as a saint until half a century after the demise of the Inquisition itself. Meanwhile, the inquisitors had to struggle for other privileges and rights, and the “public theatre” that some have professed to see in their work was both rare and limited.

The contempt with which inquisitors could be treated may be seen from what happened in Barcelona in 1561, a few months before Inquisitor General Valdés issued his new Instructions. The city authorities, the consellers, were at high mass on Passion Sunday in the church of Santa Maria del Mar when they were informed that a crisis had arisen in the cathedral. The two inquisitors of Barcelona had attempted to read out an “edict of faith” and to do so had placed their chairs before the high altar, each chair with a carpet before it. The bishop whose cathedral it was immediately protested, saying that only royalty could use the privilege of sitting before the high altar. Messages went to and fro between the bishop, the consellers and the inquisitors. A messenger reported to the consellers:

After the message had been delivered the father inquisitors said in their Castilian tongue: “Who are you?” The messengers and I replied: “We are messengers of the city.” Then the inquisitors retorted: “Tell the consellers that we represent His Holiness the pope and are in the service of God and His Holiness and of His Majesty, and here we stay!” Then the messengers replied: “The place of the inquisitors is in the choir of the church seated next to the bishop, and they cannot sit at the high altar.” Then the said inquisitors retorted with great vehemence and a certain degree of anger: “Get out! Get out!”

Eventually the consellers came from Santa Maria del Mar and crowded into the back of the cathedral, where they were joined by the viceroy himself. When the inquisitors refused to heed appeals from the viceroy, he angrily ordered his officers to remove the chairs by force. The stubborn inquisitors, deprived of their seats, remained standing impassively until the end of the mass.[12] It was one of many such incidents that occurred in different parts of Spain through the centuries, and evidently calls in doubt the fear that Spaniards are supposed to have had of the Holy Office.

It also raises the intriguing question of why the tribunal did not attempt to communicate its image in order to win support. The question is perhaps most relevant to the mid-sixteenth century, when for the first time the auto de fe became visually imposing. Yet there is virtually no historical record of it in Spanish art. Various explanations could be suggested. It may be that the public auto was never accepted as an event of which to be proud, since its ingredients were punishment and shame. There was a similar public rejection, throughout Spanish history, of the shame involved in sanbenitos. The antagonism to the tribunal of both municipal and Church authorities also made it impossible for the Inquisition to display its images in any public place controlled by those bodies. A painting glorifying the Inquisition would therefore have to be kept discreetly either in a building of the tribunal (such as the offices of the Suprema in Madrid), or in a monastery run by the religious order most identified with it, namely, the Dominicans. Where are these images now? Not all the buildings of the Holy Office were destroyed by popular violence, nor was all its public property wiped out, so we may conclude that the absence of visual art is due to the simple fact that it did not exist. Throughout the great era of inquisitorial activity, not a single significant artist seems to have wished to dedicate a canvas to its triumphs. The Inquisition itself did nothing to dissuade artists: after all, the whole point of the auto and its processions was to put on a public display.

By contrast, Europeans who wished to criticize Spanish policy were prolific in turning out images of the Inquisition. Indeed, we owe to them rather than to Spaniards the origins of the idea that the tribunal was an instrument of terror. During the high tide of the Dutch Revolt, artists in northern Europe began to produce prints that have established for all time the picture we still have of the public ceremonial of the Inquisition. It was certainly because of Dutch interest, and the predominance of Dutch and German printers in the European market, that the first known images emerged from northern engravers. Due to the fact that their purpose was usually anti-Spanish propaganda, the prints do not give a wholly reliable image of what they purport to show. They were also few in number. Only in the seventeenth century was the first convincing publication of images made, in the magnificent volume A History of the Inquisition published by Philipp van Limborch in Amsterdam in 1692, still the most often consulted source. Limborch was a leading Dutch intellectual and proponent of religious toleration. His work, written as an appendix to his edition of the medieval inquisitor Bernard Gui, included several engravings that came to be widely reproduced. In the eighteenth century, a yet more exhaustive collection of engravings became available with the appearance of Bernard Picart’s monumental seven-volume Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, published in Amsterdam by Jean Frédéric Bernard between 1723 and 1743.[13] Among its 3,000 pages of text and 250 pages of engraved images, the immense work included numerous prints about the Inquisition, with illustrations of an auto in Madrid and a ceremonial procession of the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa. Goa, indeed, became the setting for many foreign prints that were reproduced and attributed erroneously to the Spanish Inquisition. From that century onwards, representations by European artists additionally took the form of satire.[14] Virtually all subsequent images of the Inquisition were satirical or simply fictitious (among the latter we may include pictorial representations of torture, common from the eighteenth century onwards). Incredible as it may seem, in the age of the printing press not a single authentic Spanish image of the Holy Office saw the light of day. In the battle of images, the Inquisition was a clear loser.

The argument that has been developed in these pages is that the Inquisition had no intrinsic power of its own with which to terrify the people. It was the people themselves who collaborated with the process of inquiry, and the inquisitors used the methods they had learnt through the years—group therapy, public confession, selective interrogation, ceremonies and processions—to exploit the situation. Those methods may very plausibly be seen as a sort of technology of power, which is the approach adopted by a fine study of the medieval Inquisition in Languedoc.[15] The Languedoc inquisitors, however, were working in a different environment, that of the often closely-knit Cathar community, which they tried to undermine from within. In Spain the inquisitors sometimes had the luck to penetrate closed groups—whether of conversos or witches or male-factors—but more usually had to deal with scattered segments of the general population and therefore undermined nobody, neither the notoriously unchristian Morisco communities nor the Basque areas infected by witch fears. The Languedoc inquisitors also used, to a degree unknown in Spain, the practice of rounding up and imprisoning large numbers of suspects.[16] Since the social context was fundamentally different in Languedoc and in Spain, it is unhelpful to try to compare their Inquisitions.

The tribunal found it particularly difficult to obtain the collaboration of the people. Visitations—the theme that has brought us to look at the denunciation process—were invariably hated by the inquisitors.[17] Each visitation involved having to travel long periods through difficult countryside and sometimes through territory in private jurisdiction where the authorities were actively hostile. The inquisitors also had to carry with them a large number of copies of the edict of faith for distribution, as well as “all the files, books and registers of witnesses touching that district,” and lists of anyone who might have been punished in the churches of the area, in case the sanbenitos needed to be renewed.

Perhaps the only consolation was that the inquisitor, accompanied by a secretary and a constable (alguacil), was undertaking real pastoral work. In his visitation of 1553 the inquisitor of Llerena went to twenty-five towns, and in that of 1554 to twenty-two: the former journey lasted six months and the latter four. In Galicia in 1569 and 1570 the visitations lasted eight months, but by the 1580s it was possible to cut the period down to three. In Toledo in 1541 and 1542 the period was ten months, but by the late century had been reduced to four. Journeys had to be made in good weather and not in harvest time: the months chosen were therefore normally between February and July.

The many months spent traveling show that visitations were a vital part of the inquisitorial presence, and could take up almost half the time of an inquisitor. Moreover, in visitation years the majority of those punished might be out in the villages rather than in the tribunal’s place of residence, so that few actual trials would take place. Between 1552 and 1559 the tribunal of Llerena sentenced an average of 122 persons a year on visitations, and managed to get about 800 ducats a year in fines. Against these gains were to be set the disadvantages that the offenses punished were mostly petty; the money raised was never sufficient even to cover salaries; conflicts might arise between the inquisitor who stayed behind and the one who went visiting; and business would pile up during absences (in 1590 the Llerena inquisitors refused pointedly to undertake a visitation, even though directed to do so by the Suprema, because of the urgent cases pending in the tribunal).[18] Not surprisingly, by the early seventeenth century visitations were practiced in few of the tribunals, save for special areas such as the realm of Granada, where it was felt that vigilance over the Morisco population was needed.

In any case, visitations palpably failed to impose fear of the Inquisition on the Spanish people. The sheer impossibility of one inquisitor being able with any degree of frequency to visit the vast areas involved meant that in practice visits were restricted to larger centers of population from which fines might more easily be raised. Add to this the infrequency of visitations after the early sixteenth century, together with the fixing of tribunals in the cities, and we get a picture of a rural Spain that was largely out of touch with the Inquisition. “This valley,” a correspondent wrote in 1562 from the Vall d’Arán in the Catalan Pyrenees, “does not know the Holy Inquisition.”[19] The Galician countryside and villages, we are told, almost never saw the Holy Office.[20]

This gulf between the Inquisition and much of rural Spain was, moreover, even greater than appears at first sight. Faced by the temerarious appearance in their midst of an outsider demanding to know their private sins and public errors, the rural communities responded with their own wall of silence.[21] Was the inquisitor of Barcelona in 1581, Dr. Caldas, simply being naïve when reporting after his visitation that he was surprised at how few denunciations there were?[22] It had been ten years since the last visitation to the archdiocese of Tarragona. Yet after four months visiting twenty-three towns (including very large ones such as Igualada, Cervera, Tarragona and Vilafranca), Dr. Caldas obtained no more than fifty-three petty denunciations.

The very nature of the denunciations in these and other Catalan towns leads irresistibly to the conclusion, not that villagers used the Inquisition to play off scores against each other, but that many rural communities solidly rejected the interference of the Inquisition. Five denunciations to Dr. Caldas were against familiars; one involved alleged bestiality “twelve years ago”; one was against a man for saying “ten years ago” that simple fornication was no sin; one involved a woman having said thirty years before (she was now dead) that there was no heaven and hell. In town after town, in this and other visitations, there was silence.

It is possible (though not likely) that the Catalans were different. Five months of a visitation in 1590 produced exactly five cases: a monk who expressed himself badly in a sermon, a priest who admitted sodomizing a woman, a man for disrespect at mass, two shepherds for bestiality.[23] Year after year in the 1580s the Barcelona tribunal kept apologizing to the Suprema for the tiny number of prosecutions: “it is not negligence on our part that there are no more cases” (1586), “we have made every effort, so that it is not negligence that there are no more cases” (1588).[24] The inquisitors reported in 1623 that edicts of faith were now seldom read in Catalonia.

They produce few denunciations, and this year we were almost resolved not to publish the edict in this city, because for the last four years not a single person has come to the tribunal in response to the edicts. And in 1621 we visited the regions of Girona and Perpignan, and even though it was ten years since the last visitation and both are large towns, there were only four or five denunciations, two of them trifling; and if we read the edicts every year the only fruit would be that people would lose their fear of and respect for the censures.[25]

In some communities the number of cases could be high. There were undoubtedly parts of Spain where old scores were paid off when the inquisitors came to call. The high figure of 240 denunciations in the diocese of Burgos in 1541 may possibly have reflected tensions between sections of the population.[26] But in compact and stable communities, where there were few or no minority groups to victimize, the Inquisition was pushed aside as an irrelevance. In Morisco areas the people were willing to denounce themselves under the terms of edicts of grace, but when edicts of faith were proclaimed their community solidarity made them mute.

This perspective of the activities of the inquisitors inevitably modifies some long-held theories about the impact of their work. In his classic history, Henry C. Lea summed up his informed opinion of the tribunal: “The real importance of the Inquisition is not so much in the awful solemnities of the autos de fe, as in the silent influence exercised by its incessant and secret labors among the mass of the people.”[27] The picture we have seen, which could with further research explore the length and breadth of the country, is of a complete absence of any “incessant labors” among the people, and an absence therefore of any power to influence their behavior and culture.

Secrecy was not, it seems, originally a part of the inquisitorial framework, and early records refer to public trials and a public prison rather than a private (“secret”) one. But by the beginning of the sixteenth century “secrecy” became the general rule and was enforced in all the business of the tribunal. It was an application of a principle—confidentiality—that in time became a fundamental practice of all policing systems. The various Instructions of the Inquisition, although set down in print, were for restricted circulation only and not for the public eye. One consequence of confidentiality was that the public was left in ignorance of the methods and procedure of the Inquisition. In its earlier period this helped the tribunal by creating reverential fear in the minds of wrongdoers, but later on led to the rise of hostility based on a highly imaginative idea of how the tribunal worked. Modern police systems, aware of the need to defuse hostility, tend to cover up their methods and to release only carefully controlled information. The Inquisition did not release any information at all, and logically had to suffer the brunt of slanders from its enemies. The natural outcome of this ignorance could be seen during the debates in the Cortes of Cadiz in 1813, on the projected decree to abolish the Inquisition. If the defenders of the tribunal relied on the argument of a mystical and mythical unity given to Spain by the tribunal, its detractors relied almost completely on legendary misapprehensions about the entire structure and function of the institution (see chapter 15 below).

The outside world may have been kept uninformed, but internally the flow of information was almost impeccable. The administrative and secretarial apparatus of the tribunal took care to set down on paper even the most trifling business. Thanks to this, the Spanish Inquisition is one of the few early modern institutions about whose procedure an enormous amount of documentation is available. Like any judicial court, it needed paperwork in order to survive: the struggle to establish precedents and to keep written evidence of privileges forced officials to record everything, including disagreements among themselves about policy options. Fortunately, a good part of this documentation has survived, making it the first European security organization that we can study adequately through its own records.

Those records, however, are no more nor less trustworthy than the context within which they were drawn up. Like bureaucrats of any era, the inquisitors were anxious to emphasize their successes, of which the most striking demonstration—one that has remained embedded in the standard image we have of the tribunal—was the auto de fe.

The ceremony of an auto de fe has a literature all to itself.[28] Among the Spaniards it began its career as a religious act of penitence and justice, and ended it as a public festivity rather like bullfighting or fireworks. To foreigners it always remained a thing of impressive horror and fear. Their journals and letters written while on tour in Spain reveal both amazement and disgust at a practice that was unknown in the rest of Europe. We have the direct testimony of two of Philip II’s aides. One of them, the Netherlander Jean de Vandenesse, was present at the great auto de fe of Valladolid in October 1559. He went afterwards out of curiosity to see the executions and was shocked. Twelve accused, among them four nuns, were burnt at the stake; two were burnt alive. “It was distressing to see,” he limited himself to commenting.[29] A generation later, the Fleming Jean Lhermite, who attended an auto in the company of Philip II at Toledo in February 1591, went after the auto to see the executions and described the proceedings as “a very sad spectacle, distressing to see.”[30] It was no doubt unpleasant to see clergy presiding over the killing of condemned persons, but the public execution of criminals in other countries was not very different from an auto de fe, and more frequently outdid the auto in savagery. Indeed, few countries had so savage a record of executions as that from which Vandenesse and Lhermite hailed.

Foreigners were also, like the French ambassador the marquis of Villars, who attended the Madrid auto de fe of 1680, puzzled by the contrast between the often irreligious behavior of Spaniards in their daily life and the intensity of the auto ceremonial. Were Spaniards both irreligious and at the same time profoundly religious? And was the auto a typical expression of Spanish mentality, as bullfights were later assumed to be? Did Spaniards revel in blood?

The way we consider an auto de fe has all too often been dictated by the Inquisition itself, because historians have always consulted the large number of printed accounts it issued after its ceremonies, and relied for visual authenticity on just one famous image, the massive canvas devoted to the auto of 1680. Printed accounts are rare for the sixteenth century and became common only from the seventeenth. Texts as well as engravings were conveniently supplied by the tribunal, which used them to draw attention to itself as the main player in the drama and wished readers to admire its power. In the painting of 1680 we are invited to marvel at the great persons, including royalty, nobility and senior clergy, who preside over the session and awe us by their presence. We are also asked to learn from the humiliation of the condemned persons who parade before us in their costumes and meekly submit to their punishment. All the information is supplied exclusively by the Inquisition. May we not suspect that the story is somehow being manipulated in order to influence us?

The reality, it turns out, is that public autos had only a tiny role in the overall drama of the Inquisition. Uncommon in the early sixteenth century, after the Protestant scare of the mid-century they became infrequent again, virtually once-in-a-lifetime events except in areas where there were periodic outbreaks of persecution. Smaller tribunals, particularly those without conversos and Moriscos in their district, could seldom afford to have them. This was regrettable, as an inquisitor of Barcelona commented in 1560, because “I certainly think autos necessary in order to induce fear both among foreigners who come here, and among the people of this country.”[31] By the early seventeenth century public autos were rare in Barcelona. “This Inquisition,” the inquisitors explained to the Suprema, “is unique in Spain in that it does not celebrate autos with the same pomp and decency as in other Inquisitions, and this Inquisition is very poor, so that what used to be done in public autos is now more conveniently done in some church.”[32] Nevertheless, there were tribunals that held autos de fe more frequently because of particular local circumstances. We find, for example, the tribunal of Granada holding fifteen autos between 1549 and 1593 (one every three years), that of Murcia holding ten between 1557 and 1568 (one a year), and that of Córdoba holding seven between 1693 and 1702 (one every eighteen months): it was formerly Islamic territory, where the higher profile of Moriscos provoked more persecution. For the most part these autos were not public, but small sessions conducted inside a church.

Apart from its purpose of punishing heretics, the ceremony of the public auto was an attempt by the Inquisition to assert its presence in the context where most Spaniards conduct their social life: in the streets. The streets were the traditional setting for all the celebrations, ceremonies and entertainments of the people. When public festivities such as Carnival took place, people from both town and country would throng in and entertain themselves around the setting of the central spectacle. Spaniards enjoy a holiday. Virtually all social celebrations were under the control of the community and the town authorities, with the collaboration of the Church. The Inquisition, which could not always count on the cooperation of these bodies, attempted to add its ceremony to the many others that already filled the festive year.

Far from being a reflection of the religious inclinations of Spaniards, the public auto in the sixteenth century was the premeditated imposition of a ritual that had no roots whatever in the community. People came to see it precisely because it was a colorful ceremony that did not form part of their normal faith, religion and everyday existence. It was, above all, a novelty: in the first seventy years of the tribunal the auto was a drab event that had little appeal to the public. There were no lengthy ceremonials presided over by clergy in solemn robes assisted by officials and nobility wearing garments of office. Instead, there was little more than a simple religious rite, directed by a handful of clergy, to determine the penalties for arrested heretics. The ceremony was not necessarily even held on a holiday (as it was later), clear proof that only a marginal role was assigned to participation by the public. In Barcelona, the first recorded auto de fe of this type took place in mid-December 1487, when a small column of fifty accused persons was escorted out of the Dominican convent near the port and up the street to the Plaça del Rei, outside the offices of the Inquisition, where a small ceremony of “reconciliation” took place. It was a cold morning, and it is doubtful whether the procession attracted much curiosity.

The auto had a long evolution and by no means played the central role it is often credited with having. Though the inquisitors certainly wished otherwise, it would seem that even on a holiday (with which public autos were subsequently planned to coincide) the people were not necessarily interested in the religious ceremonies of the Holy Office. The problem was not new; it existed also for other religious festivities. In the course of the sixteenth century the Church authorities made enormous—and, from some of the evidence available, often fruitless—efforts to gain control of holidays such as Carnival, Easter and Midsummer’s Eve. A century later, in Holy Week of 1650, the bishop of Barcelona denounced “many persons who with little fear of God and little care for the sovereign mysteries not only ignore them but even, with no respect and great contempt, bring benches, chairs, gifts, snacks, meals and other refreshments, thereby introducing profanity and scandal into the temple of God. And in the churches and streets they scoff and sneer at the priests and the devotions, when they should with tears and profound sorrow be weeping.”[33] This does not sound much like a pious Catholic country.

The same risk of popular indifference was run by the inquisitors, who in the mid-sixteenth century attempted new ways of gaining attention, such as holding street processions before the great day. Perhaps the most convincing evidence of apathy is the fact that Spanish artists (as we have seen) took no notice of autos de fe. An event that is supposed to have had so great an impact on people would surely have left us with some visual record. There is none. The only image available for the format of an auto in its early years is a wholly imaginary composite painting done at the end of the fifteenth century by Pedro Berruguete, showing St. Dominic presiding over a session of the medieval French tribunal. Nor, apart from incidental mentions, is there any attention given to the subject by writers of the time.[34] The scarcity of images is especially lamentable, because we may suspect that a successful public auto de fe could have had all the ingredients of a carnival. Not until two hundred years after the foundation of the tribunal do we find an attempt to capture the auto in art. A diligent researcher has uncovered details of a contract made in 1660 by the Inquisition of Seville to have a grand painting done of the auto de fe held in the city that spring, “in order that it be on record for all time.”[35] It may be that other, similar paintings were commissioned by tribunals, but we have no record of them (apart from the famous canvas of the 1680 auto). It raises the possibility that no adequate effort was made, in either the preceding or the subsequent centuries, to project an image of inquisitorial power.

In the mid-sixteenth century, at last, fundamental changes occurred. During the previous generation, autos de fe were so infrequent that they all but disappeared in the greater part of Spain. The discovery of Protestant heretics in 1558, and the willingness of the crown to assist in their punishment, encouraged Inquisitor General Valdés to draw up a set of rules for the staging of a flamboyant new style of public ceremony that would reaffirm the power of the Inquisition and reinforce its presence, not simply by asserting a presence in the streets but even more by insisting on the collaboration of those in authority. A new, ceremonial auto de fe was deliberately invented by him and his associates as a way of imposing the power and presence of the Inquisition. They may even have based themselves on the Berruguete painting, a true case of life imitating art. The inquisitor general’s status had been waning in government circles, and he was anxious to recover the initiative.

The first of the new-style “public” (also known as “general”) autos was held in the presence of the court in Valladolid in May 1559. Philip returned in time to be able to preside over another in the city in October. The ceremony attracted much attention, for it had almost fallen into disuse in Spain. It was practiced frequently up to the 1520s, during the great persecution of conversos by the Inquisition, but in the following generation few autos were held. The king himself had never seen one.[36] The two Valladolid displays were intentionally impressive.

The ceremony of 8 October was staged by the Inquisition in the main city square of Valladolid, with the assisting public crowding around the sides. The proceedings began at six a.m., when a formal sermon was preached. Then the king, baring his sword before the inquisitors, took an oath to uphold the authority of the Holy Office. The central spectacle was a procession of penitents whose sentences were read out by the officiating inquisitors. This occupied the most time: those who repented were publicly accepted back into the bosom of the Church, while the unrepentant were condemned to the relevant punishments. Solemn mass brought the proceedings to a close. The whole ceremony lasted some twelve hours, and we are informed (by the Inquisition) that there were several thousand spectators. Through its combination of faith, punishment and spectacle, the auto was deliberately devised as a piece of theatre that would both impress and deter.

The rules were enshrined for the first time in the inquisitorial Instructions of 1561[37] and subsequently elaborated upon. It was decided that autos be held on feast days, so as to ensure maximum public participation. All the leading officials and elite were expected to assist. As it turned out, very often they refused to come because of inevitable conflicts over precedence. At the first and therefore most symbolic of all the new-style autos, that of May 1559 in Valladolid, the judges of the royal court of Chancillería refused to attend, even though royalty was present, because they were not given due precedence. To prevent such things happening in future, the inquisitors insisted from the 1590s onwards that public authorities must be present. In practice, at most autos, whether public or private, few or no officials attended,[38] bishops preferred not to get involved, and local quarrels often kept the local nobility away.[39] The rules for arranging autos laid special emphasis on the promotion of the Inquisition’s own status, a fact that immediately led to conflicts with officials of both Church and state who, at the opening of the proceedings, were asked to take oaths of loyalty to the Inquisition. The inquisitors also feared—as happened quite often—that they would be upstaged at their own ceremony by officials of other jurisdictions claiming precedence, and were careful about whom they invited.

The presence of the king, for example, was exceptional. It is sometimes mistakenly claimed that the auto was made use of by the crown to assert its superior position and strengthen its power through ceremonial theatre.[40] That may have occurred within a certain context in the New World,[41] but was completely untrue of Spain. In the peninsula, kings had no worries about asserting their power and did not make a habit of assisting at autos, which in any case were few and far between and very quickly went out of fashion. Ferdinand and Isabella never went to any autos, nor did Charles V who, however, could not refuse turning up at the one held in his honor in the city of Valencia in 1528 to celebrate his one and only visit there.

The case of Philip II reveals something about the politics of autos. He attended three of them in Spain in his lifetime, or one every twenty-four years (hardly the zeal of a fanatic), and at none of them did he witness any executions.[42] The only king of his dynasty to really travel throughout the peninsula, it was inevitable that he should be induced to attend an auto at some point during his travels. The autos he attended were specially arranged by the Inquisition so that the king could not refuse to come to them, the event being in effect exploited not by the crown but by the Inquisition, in order to emphasize its authority. The 1559 auto of Valladolid was specially laid on by Inquisitor General Valdés to boost his standing; that of 1564 in Barcelona was, as mentioned below, an attempt by the tribunal of that city to assert its standing against the city authorities of Barcelona. Philip attended an auto of the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon in 1582 as a gesture of support to the Church of Portugal, a realm he had just occupied militarily. His last attendance at an auto was in 1591; prior to that, he had not been at one in Spain in nearly thirty years. Writing in 1591 to his daughter Catalina, duchess of Savoy, he noted: “Your sister will give you an account of an auto de fe of the Inquisition that we saw yesterday, you have never seen one.”[43] It is a telling detail: a Spanish princess eighteen years old, daughter of an alleged fanatic, who had never in her lifetime witnessed an auto!

In Catalonia the regional authorities, and even the king’s own viceroy, habitually boycotted all autos. “Neither the viceroy nor the consellers tend to come to the auto,” the inquisitors of Barcelona reported in 1560; though, one of them added a few years later, “the viceroy says that he would do so if His Majesty orders him to.”[44] Philip II never gave the order, and took no interest in asserting the royal presence at such events. His presence at the auto in Barcelona on 5 March 1564 was a lucky break for the desperate inquisitors, who at last got the opportunity to put on a right royal ceremony. Philip II was staying for a month in the city exclusively in order to welcome his bishops returning from the Council of Trent, and could not avoid the occasion, which this time counted on the cooperation of the city with the Inquisition. Subsequent kings turned up to an auto once during their reign. Philip III made an appearance at one in Madrid on 6 March 1600; and Philip IV, exceptionally, asked for one to be held in 1632 as a gesture of thanks for his wife’s recovery from ill health. The last great public auto of the Habsburg dynasty was that of 1680. It also represents probably the most extreme form of the mythology of power that the Holy Office wished to present.

We may be guided with confidence by a notable who was present: the French ambassador, the marquis de Villars. He sat through part of the proceedings and later commented cynically in his memoirs: “it makes one think that all this great machinery for the punishment of a few poor beggars, is more a wish for display on the part of the inquisitors than a real zeal for religion.”[45] It was certainly a period for display, when the crumbling Spanish monarchy, desperate to proclaim its successes to the world, arranged for triumphant murals to be painted in the Escorial to celebrate the victory of Lepanto one hundred years before. In the same vein, the decaying Inquisition persecuted conversos while at the same time conniving in their rise to the highest offices of state.[46] The grandiose oil painting of the auto by Rizzi was yet another display calculated to impress, but also to deceive viewers into assuming typical an event that was wholly exceptional.

At the very period that the incidence of heresy was trailing off, the public ceremonial of the Inquisition became even more elaborate, a true art form of the Baroque. What is more, the tribunal in this later period took great care to distribute information sheets after the holding of an auto, so as to assert its achievements. The event might certainly draw an audience, as in Valladolid in 1559, when the new king’s return to Spain (after an absence abroad of five years!) was the star attraction. The problem is that there is no reliable information on how many people came because of the auto, and we cannot place too much trust in the printed statements issued by the inquisitors. All modern accounts ask us to believe that the Holy Office had an amazing power to draw crowds. “The main streets were crammed,” one historian informs us, “with people dressed in their Sunday best, and resounded to the singing of choirs.” “The people massed along the route.”[47] The only difficulty is that, apart from the testimony of the inquisitors themselves, no contemporary text or illustration supports this picture.

To set the matter in perspective, we must ask ourselves: whom did the people come to see? And where did they come from? Discounting the possibility that they came to see the inquisitors, we can understand that there was curiosity to see the people arrested by them. Over and above any other motive, however, people came to see the great ones of state. The pioneering autos in Valladolid in 1559 must have drawn visitors from far and wide, especially since the new king was making his first public appearance. Many spent the night prior to the autos sitting in the square to make sure they had a good place for the next day’s ceremony (public habits have changed not a whit over the centuries).[48] People whose windows overlooked the square rented out available space. The impression given by documents is that those who lined the streets at such functions were normally those who lived in the city rather than outsiders, and they came to see what was happening rather than to show their religious zeal. Within the comparable context of public executions, a historian comments that “the crowds watching executions in pre-industrial Europe were mainly composed of city-dwellers.”[49] Many, of course, thronged in from outlying districts if a festivity coincided with the day when an auto was to be held. But can we believe the Inquisition official who tells us proudly that the auto of 1610 at Logroño attracted some thirty thousand people from France, Aragon, Navarre, the Basque country and Castile?[50] The town had a population of only around four thousand, making it highly unlikely that it had the resources to receive the stated number of visitors; it was an event, moreover, that went on for two days. The season was November, already cold up in the mountains and hardly the time for camping out in the streets.

After the 1560s the deliberate coincidence of autos with holidays, together with their novelty and striking ritual, certainly drew in (as was the intention) crowds of sightseers. The event also attracted attention in Europe, where the first engravings of the ceremony, done by Dutch and German artists, appeared in the same decade. The best-known Dutch engraving, which purports to be of a Valladolid auto of 1559, is, foreseeably, a wholly imaginary composition, depicting neither the town square nor the presence of any public other than well-heeled nobles. As it happens, the new ceremonial auto had a relatively short life span. In Castile it had its heyday during the years of repression of Protestants, from 1559 to the 1570s.[51] In those same years, it was exported to the other tribunals of the monarchy. The first ceremonial auto to be held in Barcelona was staged in the public square of the Born in 1564, to celebrate a visit by Philip II.[52] The Catalans gave permission for it to be held, though they were not happy about it; the inquisitors for their part made desperate efforts to round up sufficient accused to put on a good show. The first great auto to be held at Logroño was in 1570. The first at Palermo (Sicily) was in 1573, when “for the first time” (a contemporary reports) a special procession was held. After the 1570s, it appears, ceremonial public autos were rare in Castile.[53]

Accounts sponsored by the Inquisition suggest, nonetheless, that some of the autos had a good audience up to the last years of the seventeenth century. Lea accepts their testimony and mentions “the population pouring in from all the surrounding district, camping out in the fields, in the vast crowds described with so much pride in the relations of the great autos.”[54] The sources for his information, quite frankly, cannot be trusted. Some locations chosen, such as the Plaza Mayor in Madrid or the Born market in Barcelona, were natural theatre spaces where it was possible to erect temporary scaffolding for the public. Every documented case, however, suggests that the main attraction for visitors were the personalities attending rather than the religious ceremony.

In every print issued by European engravers, attention is focused on the great personages present and the public is wholly invisible. In Limborch’s volume on the Inquisition, only a handful of people, mostly children, watch the long, winding procession of accused and friars. Not a single Spanish print exists to show us any active participation by the public. If there were many people about in the streets, they were sightseers and visitors who came because of the relevant feast day, or to see the processions, but not necessarily because of the auto. Feast days were the occasion, throughout Spain, of massive social gatherings, and of considerable migration from the countryside to the urban center where celebrations were held. This might happen up to thirty or forty times a year, according to region,[55] and because of it the inquisitors after 1560 were most anxious that their ceremony should coincide with feasts in order to have a public.

In practice, religion was not always the driving force of festivities (any more than it is today in the famous street processions of Holy Week). The complaint by the bishop of Barcelona in 1650, quoted above, shows people preferring to entertain themselves rather than sit through endless rituals. And autos were undeniably tedious! Common sense suggests that if a ceremony began at about seven a.m. in the open air on a cold November morning, commenced with a long sermon, and then continued for another ten hours with interminable reading of the sentences of just eleven accused persons,[56] as happened in the auto at Logroño in 1610, any members of the public who came out of curiosity would have vanished long before the end.

It is logical to conclude that the relevant attraction was most likely the feast day or the presence of royalty, not the auto. Existing prints give some indication of a public presence only when the theme was the street procession put on by the inquisitors, and even then the presence of sightseers was limited.[57] In a rare example of a Spanish painting representing an auto, that of Seville on 13 April 1660, the public is unequivocally represented, but in a manner confirming their “absolute indifference” to the proceedings of the auto. No public presence is depicted in the auto itself. Soldiers, ladies, gentlemen, beggars, salesmen are all there in the streets adjacent to the proceedings, but carry on their activities without “the slightest indication of piety, concern or preoccupation before the drama unfolding only a few meters away.”[58]

In short, the public auto as an instrument of religiosity and fear seems to have been a fantasy created by the Inquisition’s own propaganda and subsequently by those who, for one reason or another, exaggerated its impact. The tribunal made efforts to print and distribute information about it, especially in the period—the eighteenth century—when they had all but disappeared.[59] The auto subsequently entered the world of creative fiction, where it flourished with great success. In his Candide (1759) Voltaire had a brilliant satirical comment on one held in Portugal:

After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fé; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.

The auto was singled out in Gothic novels because of the flames in which scores of tender virgins perished. Perhaps the high point of this fictional drama was arrived at in Verdi’s great opera of 1867, Don Carlo, in which the auto de fe is presented as “a grandiose spectacle that demonstrated the somber horrors of absolutist Spain.”[60] In those same years, Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov was also evoking an image of blood with the Grand Inquisitor burning “almost a hundred” victims in one day, “in the presence of the king and the whole population of Seville.”

The real-life public auto, in contrast to these fictions, was a religious spectacle with an active life of little more than a decade. It was marginal to the religious and cultural life of Spaniards, who may have gone to the ceremony because it coincided with a feast day, but its rarity after around 1580 was notable. A diarist from Barcelona, Jeroni Pujades, had to wait until he was thirty-four before he managed to see his first public auto in 1602, and then had to wait another twenty-five years to see his next.[61] Seville, famous for being the first center of inquisitorial activity and scene of frequent autos during the sixteenth century, held only four public autos during the seventeenth, an average of one every twenty-five years.[62] In some cities, of course, autos were frequent because the accused had to be brought out of prison to have their sentences decided, but the ceremony in such cases was private and correspondingly less imposing. The most impressive auto of all was held towards the end of the lifespan of the Habsburg dynasty, in 1680, and stood out by the mere fact of its rarity.

By the eighteenth century the lack of accused and the rising cost of public ceremonies meant that public autos gradually fell into disuse. The new Bourbon king, Philip V, was the first Spanish monarch to refuse to attend one, in 1701, on the firm direction of his tutor, the marquis of Louville.[63] Twenty years later, he seems to have attended one held in Madrid on the second Sunday of May 1721, when one man and one woman were burnt alive, and sixteen others were also sentenced.[64] By the second half of the century only private autos were in use by the Inquisition.

11

GENDER, SEXUALITY AND WITCHCRAFT

One must look for evidence, according to law, of an offense having been committed.

—PEDRO DE VALENCIA, ON THE STORIES OF THE WITCHES, 1611

Thanks to the efficient way in which it looked after the paperwork of judicial testimony, the Inquisition preserved for posterity an amazing variety of information about the private, family and religious life of a sector of the population that normally features little in state records: women. The broad lines of inquisitorial activity did not discriminate between men and women, and there is no basis for attempting to look at its proceedings in terms of gender prejudice. Of the two thousand cases that came before the tribunal of Valencia in its first half century, for example, exactly half were women and half men.[1] Similar figures, from which no significant conclusions can be drawn,[2] exist for other tribunals. The tribunal of Barcelona during its lifetime dealt with some six thousand cases, of which two-thirds were men.[3] There were, however, some areas of concern where the officials of the all-male Holy Office had to deal directly with women as women, and where it is fair to ask whether the gender difference was relevant or not.

In pre-industrial Europe, structures of power outside the noble class were normally in the hands of men, but in traditional society male dominance was not as universal as we might think.[4] It is common practice to quote literary sources as proof of masculine disdain for women, and if we limited ourselves to them we would indeed encounter overwhelming evidence for it.[5] Among the Spanish clergy (and, inevitably, many inquisitors) there were notoriously misogynistic attitudes. But there were also other clergy during the age of the Counter-Reformation who inquired impartially into domestic roles. Cristóbal Acosta affirmed (1585) that the duty of a man was to “honor woman and never speak ill of her; employ the eyes in looking on her, the hands in serving her, the property in giving her gifts, the heart in making her happy.” Marco Antonio de Camos (1592) maintained that the wife is “neither superior nor inferior but equal in love and companionship.”[6]

Beyond the printed page of tracts that called their value in question, real life often gave women a role that opened doors. In complex urban societies they tended to be more disadvantaged, but in the simpler societies of village and countryside, they had a greater share in tasks and their status was less restricted.[7] The superior position of men was based on two decisive roles: the private one of family head, normally allotted to the patriarchal figure; and the public one of warrior and provider, protecting the ideals and beliefs on which society rested. Women (with an occasional exception among the upper nobility) were never able successfully to challenge the male monopoly in these two areas. Their formal roles, accepted in the literature of the time, were three: as unmarried women (including widows), as wives, or as religious persons. But at various stages of their life cycle, and in select communities of Europe, they were able to exercise choices that gave them considerable freedom of movement within the apparently firm restrictions imposed by tradition. As recent studies have indicated,[8] the space available to some women in early modern Europe was more extensive and liberating than often supposed. In the Spanish countryside, they baked the bread, worked the fields, gathered in the harvest, tended sheep and ran lodging houses and taverns.[9] In regions such as rural northwest Spain, the Galician women had to fulfill tasks made necessary by the absence of their husbands as fishermen or as seasonal emigrant workers in Castile.[10] Moreover, as parents, lovers or property owners, women everywhere were often in a position of authority that contradicted the formal gender role allotted to them.[11] They might attempt, as the Aragonese writer María de Zayas noted, “to make themselves more secure.”[12]

Though authority in Church and state was firmly in the hands of men, they did not consistently wield it against women. Court prosecutions for crime in Europe do not show a direct bias against women.[13] The Inquisition, likewise, acted overwhelmingly against men and had no particular predisposition against women. Even in the Mediterranean, the man-wife relationship was not necessarily based on conflict, nor even on an absolute authority exercised by one over the other, but on a fulfillment of complementary roles.[14] Many tracts of the time reveal that cooperation and love between the married couple was both desired and practiced.[15] In parts of France and Spain it was common for the wife to control the household money, which the husband was by custom obliged to hand over out of his wages. These attitudes referred primarily to the domestic sphere; when it came to public roles, women not of the upper classes continued to have a restricted role.

The role of a woman as wife, in charge of children and household, made her also the transmitter of family traditions and culture. She passed on the language of her forebears, their beliefs and attitudes, their preferences in food.[16] In the case of the forbidden cultures of Christian Spain, whether Muslim or Jewish,[17] this could bring women to the attention of the Inquisition. No one knew this better than the exiled philosopher Juan Luis Vives (see chapter 6), who commented after the dishonor suffered by his mother at the hands of the Inquisition: “my memory of her is the most sacred of memories, and whenever I think of her I embrace and kiss her in spirit.” Perhaps because it is commonly accepted that women had this special role of transmission, no systematic studies have been done of the evidence mounted against them in Inquisition trials.

However, though the Inquisition had no special misogynistic agenda, the high profile of women both in popular religion (as beatas) and as visionaries brought them unerringly to the attention of the Church authorities and the Holy Office. In the early sixteenth century, a period when messianic movements could be identified in many parts of Europe, Castilian women were notably active as spiritual influences.[18] Their ideas were part of a stream of medieval (and predominantly male) spirituality that, in Europe, went back to the Franciscans, the Lollards and the Hussites, and that surfaced, in the sixteenth century, through the Anabaptists. Educated Spanish clergy who knew something of the drive against heresy in pre-Reformation Europe would have been aware of the richness of the spirituality, whether male or female, that still circulated in religious circles.[19]

Women, of whatever social level, traditionally entered religious foundations when young (as virgins dedicated to Christ) or when mature and widowed. The best-known case in Spain’s great age is Teresa of Avila, whose life and writings have been exhaustively studied, and who incidentally also had a brush with the Inquisition (see chapter 6). Women with an inclination for religion outside a foundation often chose to be what Spaniards termed a beata; they lived apart, taking some vows (normally of chastity and poverty), and maintaining some contact with a male religious order.[20] Very often a rural beata might develop a relation (and a reputation) with a nearby village, which might lead to one or both parties exaggerating her significance. They might venerate her as a saint, or she might claim to work miracles and see visions.

It was the sort of context that could call for the intervention of an outside disciplinary authority, such as the bishop or the Inquisition. Bishops preferred religious women to work within the structure of the parish or the diocese, and by the same token they attempted to impose the rules of the cloister on nuns.[21] The Inquisition had other motives. Some prominent religious women got involved in political issues, and their cases took on a very high profile indeed, with the Inquisition and with other relevant bodies.[22] Religious men in a political context also suffered the same complications.[23] By contrast, most rural “religious” men and women whose cases the Inquisition investigated never emerged from obscurity nor—despite claims by some writers[24]—can the Inquisition be seen as attempting to pick specifically on feminine spirituality. The image of spiritual women being cowed by the Inquisition, scholars remind us, is no longer valid. “Even at the height of the Catholic Reformation in Spain, laywomen were integral in defining their own religious experience. The wide range of outlets for devotion meant that women’s religious activity was much more independent than traditionally recognized.”[25] Some visionaries were disciplined, others were not. In a typical case in the diocese of Toledo in 1697, village passions were stirred up because of allegations that a local girl was not only working miracles but also having an affair with a local priest. The parish priest took the matter to the Inquisition, which after an investigation decided that nothing was wrong, the girl was both virtuous and pious, and there was no evidence of a liaison.[26]

Whether they dealt with men or women, the inquisitors always acted as mediators rather than as initiators of discipline. They declared and might try to impose the rules, but when it came to receiving denunciations, they relied entirely on the collaboration of the public. If there were denunciations, the nature of conflict in small societies made it inevitable that women would form a good proportion of those summoned before the Holy Office. The context within which the Inquisition moved, however, made the issue of gender irrelevant. Men no less than women were examined for religious or sexual attitudes, and the real forum within which both were disciplined was either the family or the community (an entity in which women participated on comparable terms with men), or even the local religious community. Men too were disciplined: countryside religion operated by men, in the form of itinerant clergy and pious hermits,[27] was frowned upon and sometimes prosecuted because it spurned the control exercised by religious orders and the diocese.

Beatas and visionaries were not consistently the victims of repression. The mere fact that they could be found in such quantity shows that they enjoyed both success and fame. The proven sanctity of St. Teresa acted as a spur to towns and religious orders anxious to achieve a Teresa of their own, and throughout Spain holy women were encouraged and tolerated. At the end of the sixteenth century a prominent Jesuit lamented “the great number of deluded women to be seen in our time in many of the principal cities of Spain.”[28] The inquisitors collected information when necessary, but in the end got tired of having so much paper on their hands about holy women who neither achieved heights of sanctity nor did anything very wrong, and they burned much of what they had.[29] There was no doubt of the abundance of paperwork. Fortunately for historians, much of it has survived, and thanks to it we have the benefit of insight into visionaries such as Lucrecia de León.

Aged twenty-two when arrested by the Inquisition in Madrid in 1590, Lucrecia was a seer whose prophecies and dreams stimulated a small aristocratic circle at court.[30] Her dreams, coming in the wake of the disaster of the Spanish Armada (1588), took on a verisimilitude not to be found in those of other visionaries such as the soldier-prophet Miguel de Piedrola. She saw a Spain ravaged and invaded, a Philip too feeble to cope. Some dreams were uncanny prognostications. In December 1587, eight months before the event, she saw the defeat of the Spanish fleet by the English. Subsequent dreams, as narrated to her confidants, presented an image of the kingdom which undoubtedly reflected concerns felt and expressed by very many people. In a dream in the spring of 1590 she was told by one of her dream figures: “Philip does not know, and if he knows he does not want to believe, that his enemies will soon be in his lands. He wants to spend his summers in the Escorial, but he should beware, it is not the time to retire there without fear.” “Beware,” warned one of the figures, “for this is the time of thunder.” Another dream a week later presented Philip as a tyrant who “has destroyed the poor,” and who would be punished by God through the agency of Elizabeth of England. Philip lived in his palace, “his eyes bound and his ears shut,” surrounded by a Spain in ruins: “the hour has come to endure purgatory in Spain.”[31]

Lucrecia’s dreams, which seem to have stopped shortly after her arrest, were limited in their impact to a small group of people and were not therefore accorded too much significance by the government. But the inquisitors took a more serious view. They saw that Lucrecia was repeating calumnies which echoed those spread about by William of Orange’s Apology.[32] She spoke of “sins committed by the king in killing his son and queen Elizabeth [Valois].” The king had “taken the land from the peasants.” God would punish. “God wished to remove him and his son, and there would remain no one of his seed, and the Moriscos and heretics would destroy Spain.” People had been repeating these things for several months, if not years. The king himself seemed to accept the criticisms and calumnies as normal.

Both laity and clergy were affected by another major sphere into which the inquisitors intruded: their sexual life. It was an area that attracted the attention of authorities in both Protestant and Catholic Europe. Some writers suggest that women featured as deliberate victims of rules set by men.[33] It would, as we have already indicated above, be difficult to demonstrate that the inquisitors had a specific agenda in matters related to sexuality. Their attitude was derived exclusively from their own cultural background and the general practice of Church and society; different inquisitors came to different conclusions, whether in matters of sodomy, bigamy or witchcraft. In matters of clerical sin, they were unusually lenient with those who shared the cloth, but even this partiality was simply an extension of the deeply ingrained social belief that Eve was the temptress, not Adam. When the lovely young Paula Ponsa began, in 1589, her long career of love among the clergy of her parish in Premià (Barcelona), the inquisitors found that the community unanimously blamed her rather than the priests, who were accordingly not disciplined.[34]

Concern over public behavior was no monopoly of Spaniards. Attempts to control sexual morality affected both men and women, looming large, for example, in the program of the Reformed churches in Scotland.[35] In Sweden the prosecution of sexual offenses increased in early modern times as a consequence of the Reformation.[36] At the same period the Counter-Reformation also put sexual discipline at the top of its program. Bishops after Trent made extensive efforts in Spain to impose the official view on the sanctity of matrimony. In Barcelona after 1570, for example, licenses to marry could not be issued without both parties being formally instructed in religion, and the bishops issued decrees against the common practice of young people living together after betrothal.[37] The Inquisition, for its part, enforced post-Tridentine morality by attempting in some areas to stamp out the widespread and seemingly traditional conviction that sexual intercourse was by itself no sin.

In pre-industrial Europe, a low level of religious awareness and the persistence of traditional moral practices combined to produce far greater sexual freedom among all age groups than is commonly imagined.[38] This was reflected in the remarkably widespread view that sex between two independent adults (“simple fornication” was the phrase identified by the inquisitors) was not wrong if it did not go against other commitments.[39] By extension, concubinage was not wrong, nor was it wrong for an unmarried adult to have sex with a prostitute, since payment created a licit contract.

Both laity and clergy, both men and women, seem to have accepted this type of sexual freedom. The inquisitors of Toledo were already occupied with the problem when from 1573 the Suprema encouraged other colleagues to pursue the offense. In practice, Toledo remained the only tribunal to dedicate itself consistently to the matter. Prosecutions of people maintaining that simple fornication was no offense constituted a fifth of all its cases in 1566–70, and a quarter in 1601–5.[40] An indication that the imposition of the new morality was, in some measure, an imposition of urban rigor on rural laxity comes from Galicia, where statements about fornication (such as that of Alonso de Meixide, who maintained “that in his village it had never been a sin to have carnal intercourse between unmarried men and women”) were more commonly found among the peasantry. This was so much the case that the inquisitors there explained in 1585 that “the reason why we are less strict with fornicators is because we know from experience that most of those we arrest in these lands, where there is a great lack of doctrine especially in the rural areas, speak from stupidity and ignorance and not from a wish to commit heresy.”[41]

In Barcelona in 1599 a client warned a prostitute that what she did was a sin, to which she replied that “it is no sin since we are both unmarried.” He then inexplicably denounced her to the inquisitors, who dismissed the matter but warned her “to learn the catechism and come to the Inquisition every two weeks until she has learnt it.” The problem, evidently, arose from the existence of brothels, which operated with public license in most parts of Spain.[42] Isabella the Catholic accepted the practice of prostitution, and even turned brothels into a state monopoly so that she could tax them. It is interesting to see a respected theologian, Francisco Farfán, who in 1585 published a massive volume of one thousand pages attacking the idea of “simple fornication,”[43] arguing that the prohibition of prostitution was a greater evil than prostitution itself, because a society without brothels encouraged homosexuality, incest, the propositioning of innocent women, and an increased number of people living together in sin. Since the city authorities continued to permit brothels, which did their best business during religious festivals, all that the clergy could do was to try to convince both prostitutes and their customers of the sinfulness of their actions. It did not help when priests with ulterior motives told attractive women in the parish that “fornication is no sin.”[44] In short, the Holy Office never sought out or punished female prostitution, limiting its intervention only to related offenses. The state seems to have attempted to close municipal brothels in 1623, but inevitably without success.

The problem was evidently part of the human condition. A report in Castile in 1620 ruefully observed that “many here believe that simple fornication is permitted.”[45] In Barcelona in 1627 the Inquisition was inquiring into the cases of two nuns who managed to convince their confessor that sex with them was not wrong, and of a priest who formed a small group dedicated to the practice of free love.[46] The Counter-Reformation Church had many and varied ways of dealing with the troubling problem of carnal desire, but at the heart of it the core concern seems to have been that of clerical celibacy. A long Christian tradition, expressed in the confessor’s manuals of late medieval Europe,[47] treated as shameful and sinful all functions of the sexual organs, castigated all sensual pleasure as diabolic, and looked with horror on all bodily fluids. Many Spanish clergy published in the same tradition. The Jesuit Francisco Arias in his Spiritual Progress (Madrid, 1603) warned clergy that “they must guard their eyes not only from too much looking at women, but should also take care not to look with liberty at the beauty of boys of a tender age.”[48] Inevitably the Inquisition had to concern itself with clergy who strayed.

There was therefore a rich field for the inquisitors once they began inquiring into any heresy that might be detected in moral offenses. Other authorities—the community, the parish priest—might be concerned about the sexual content of offenses, but the Holy Office limited its concern to the presumed heresy. This was the case in the matter of bigamy. Because the offense was normally punishable in civil and Church courts, there were constant protests against the Inquisition’s interference. The Catalan accord of 1512, for example, stipulated that bishops alone should try bigamy cases unless heresy was involved. The Inquisition, however, argued that bigamy implied a measure of heresy, since it questioned the sacredness of matrimony; it therefore continued its activity despite repeated protests from the Cortes of Aragon. Nor was the Holy Office wasting its time on an offense of negligible importance. In a society that did not permit divorce, bigamy was surprisingly frequent as one alternative to an unsatisfactory marriage, and in most tribunals it represented about 5 percent of cases tried.

Women no less than men resorted to bigamy. First marriages in pre-industrial Spain were usually within the local community, but when men and women left in search of employment, or when men disappeared in far-off wars, the option of remarriage presented itself. In a sample of eleven women in Galicia accused of bigamy by the Inquisition, the first husband had on average been absent over fifteen years,[49] and the women remarried on the presumption—incorrect, as it turned out—that their first spouse was dead. From the mid-sixteenth century a public lashing and three to five years in the galleys became the standard punishment decreed by the Inquisition for men, a much lighter penalty than that meted out by secular courts. Women were normally banished from the locality. Many of the accused did not feel they were committing wrong. When Francisco Cossio was arrested by the tribunal of Toledo in 1694, the evidence against him included a fascinating private letter to his parish priest in which he said that “it is true that marriage, in the opinion of those with whom I have discussed it, is valid; but in my case it was necessary to revalidate it in order to continue it.”[50] The revalidation was, of course, with another woman, and in another area.

There were contexts in which the Inquisition could be seen as indirectly defending the civil status of women. The moral behavior of clergy had preoccupied Church reformers through the centuries, and bishops were happy to obtain the cooperation of the Inquisition. Trent had placed clerical reform at the forefront of its program, and bishops attempted to define the duties of priests more strictly by cutting back their public role (they could no longer, for example, go to taverns or wedding feasts). It was inevitably easier to pass decrees than to enforce them, and clergy continued to use their privileged social position to disport themselves, break the laws and seduce parishioners.[51] They also continued the long-standing custom of keeping women, who fulfilled a role as housekeepers but were also bed partners. Celibacy of the clergy was a rule that had been very laxly enforced in Europe. The problem, attended to by both Church courts and Inquisition, was insoluble (see chapter 13). In the two years 1561–62 the vicar general of Barcelona had to issue fifty-seven warnings to clergy of the diocese over their concubines. In what appear to be the figures for a single year, 1613, the Inquisition of Catalonia disciplined seventy-seven of its familiars and comisarios for various offenses. All the thirty-eight comisarios (who were parish clergy) had one offense in common, “matters to do with women.”[52]

Among the many cases of marginal sexuality in which the Inquisition intervened the most significant was sodomy. The tribunal occasionally brushed with cases of lesbians and transsexuals, conditions that have attracted the attention of modern researchers but that the inquisitors found it difficult to deal with.[53] Homosexuality in the Middle Ages was treated as the ultimate crime against morality: the standard definitions of it refer to the “abominable” or the “unspeakable” crime. The usual punishment was burning alive or, in Spain, castration and stoning to death. Under Ferdinand and Isabella the punishment was changed to burning alive and confiscation of property. Since the old Inquisition had exercised jurisdiction over sodomy, the Spanish tribunal seems to have begun to do so, but in 1509 the Suprema ordered that no action was to be taken against homosexuals except when heresy was involved. Here a curious split in policy seems to have occurred, because although the tribunals of Castile never again exercised jurisdiction over sodomy, the Inquisition in Aragon now officially adopted powers over the offense. On 24 February 1524 the pope, Clement VII, issued a brief granting the Inquisition of the realms of Aragon jurisdiction over sodomy, irrespective of the presence of heresy. From this time onwards the Aragonese inquisitors kept their new authority,[54] which they never gave up, despite the typical complaints raised by the Cortes of Monzón in 1533. Aragon was unique in this matter, for not even the Roman Inquisition exercised jurisdiction over the offense. The inquisitors of Catalonia accepted jurisdiction in principle, but normally put cases in the hands of the royal Audiencia for judgment.[55] The punishment laid down by the law, and rigorously enforced by the state, was death by burning.

The Inquisition was harsh to sodomizers (both men and women participants), but tended to restrict death by burning only to those aged over twenty-five. Minors, inevitably a high proportion of those arrested, were normally whipped and sent to the galleys. A certain liberality on the part of the Suprema can be seen in the fact that some death sentences were commuted, and mildness was also shown to clergy, who were always a high proportion of offenders. The treatment of bestiality, usually placed in the same category as homosexuality, altered this picture somewhat, for it was almost invariably punished ruthlessly. The accused were normally marginalized people of poor intelligence, but this appears not to have helped them. By contrast, some highly placed homosexual offenders were more favorably treated. The most famous case was that of the Valencian grandee Pedro Galcerán de Borja, grand master of the chivalric Order of Montesa.[56] In 1572 he was arrested by the Inquisition of Valencia on charges of sodomy. The case dragged on for some three years; he was heavily fined, but subsequently returned to active political life.

In general, the crown of Aragon had a record of great severity in the matter. The tribunal of Saragossa in the late sixteenth century stands out as exceptional. Between 1571 and 1579 over 100 men were tried by it on bestiality or homosexuality charges, and at least 36 of them were executed. In total, between 1570 and 1630 the inquisitors here handled 543 cases, and executed 102 persons.[57] The tribunals of Barcelona and Valencia were considerably less rigorous. In overall perspective, punishment of sodomy may be seen as a preoccupation of both secular and ecclesiastical courts. In Seville and Madrid, where the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over the offense, secular courts were equally merciless with those it decided to castigate.[58]

Modern researchers who use the papers of the Holy Office in order to peep into the lives and problems of the persons in its archives have stumbled across several cases concerning sexual abnormality.[59] The cases, however, do not fit into any pattern of alleged sexual repression by the tribunal. Community norms and individual initiative, rather than religious belief, had always governed sexual conduct, and this continued to be the rule everywhere in Europe. The Inquisition did not intrude into the private lives of citizens or spy on them, and it is consequently important to understand how private sexual practices came to its attention. Almost without exception, cases of sodomy were revealed in the way that all other offenses were: through private denunciations (see chapter 9).[60] With few exceptions, familiars did not report them. The inquisitors were doing no more than enforcing community standards, but their activity in this as in other sexual matters had no identifiable impact on transgressors.[61] It is doubtful if the intrusion of religious authorities into the sphere of public morality had much effect in any European country,[62] except where the community gave full support. A recent scholar concludes: “Spaniards did not cower before the Church or the Inquisition. Even at the height of the Catholic Reformation in Spain, non-marital sex flourished. Prostitutes walked the streets, aristocrats had mistresses, adulterers had secret rendezvous, and men had sex with men. As in all times and places, some people got into trouble with ecclesiastical and secular authorities, while others flaunted their relationships to the chagrin of those same powers.”[63]

One of the areas in which the Inquisition had a part to play was in the effort to reform the religion of the people (chapter 13), concerning aspects of it that were looked upon as superstition. Popular culture, especially in the rural areas, had always sought unorthodox cures to daily afflictions. Villages had their wise men or women (curanderos) who could offer medicinal ointments, find lost objects, heal wounded animals, or help a girl to win the affections of her loved one. Cures might take the form of potions, charms, spells or simply advice. It was a subculture that coexisted with and did not try to subvert official Catholicism, though in certain New Christian regions the Christian content of the spells was doubtful.[64] In rural areas the world of magic even entered the Church, with many clergy incorporating folk practices—rites, prayers, offerings, dances—into the normal liturgy. All this, as we shall see, was stamped on firmly by reforming bishops, post-Tridentine clergy and the Inquisition. In the process of contrasting the dark world of primitive superstition with the illuminated world of the gospel, unfortunately, preachers and learned men unduly simplified the forces at work and helped to create fears of “witchcraft.”

The identification and persecution of sorcery and witchcraft was a continent-wide phenomenon with an incidence stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, and has been extensively studied.[65] In numerical terms, women made up the greater number of accused, more than three-fourths in most regions of Europe and over 90 percent in certain areas such as Essex in England.[66] However, the fact that they made up the overwhelming majority of those prosecuted was due less to the prejudice of the law than to the nature of the local societies within which the accusations originated. Witchcraft and other related forms of magical practice had a broad social basis[67] and were by no means gender specific, so that there is no basis for presenting witchcraft accusations primarily in terms of misogyny.[68] As several scholars have emphasized, witches were persecuted not because they were women but because they were witches. The writings of those who attacked witchcraft at the time show no identifiable prejudice against women as women.[69] There were, certainly, cultural and sexual considerations that put women more at risk. A woman’s role as creator, as midwife, as healer (the “wise woman” of the village), as visionary, provided points at which an anguished male-dominated society might choose to victimize her for sudden disasters caused by crop failures or epidemics. In practice, women as healers came rather low in the list of the categories of women who appeared before the Holy Office.[70] Any analysis of the phenomenon of women in witchcraft persecution must look equally at the problems of the accusing society and the vulnerable position of the female accused. The Inquisition intruded into this complex world because it had no option other than to respond to complaints from people in the villages.[71]

Men were also commonly accused of sorcery. In northern France and in Aragon, during the sixteenth century more men than women were prosecuted for the offense. Normally, however, females predominated, and though males might feature as accused, all the treatises of the time have no hesitation in picking out women as the principal players. Witchcraft “was a sex-related but not a sex-specific crime.”[72] One of the most adamant opponents of the witch persecution in seventeenth-century Catalonia, the Jesuit Pere Gil, identified the accused in 1619 as “simple-minded women of little intelligence, feeble and timid, most of them poor, untaught in Christian doctrine and easily deceived.” “There is little opposition,” he wrote, “when the villages and people say of the witches that they do infinite ills and deserve a thousand deaths. For since they are poor, exposed, simple-minded and ignorant in the Christian religion, no one takes their side.”[73] Gil’s analysis, it should be noted, refers to such women because they were a disadvantaged population in the villages, not because they were women. The majority of female accused were old, often marginalized by their communities. But a few were young, victims of village or family tensions. We may cite by way of comparison some witchcraft cases in Augsburg, Germany, where accusations reflected deep antagonisms among women themselves, and often the operating motive was simply envy.[74] In Catalonia, Gil reports that members of the same family were frequently those who pointed the finger.

A variety of courts had jurisdiction over the offense. In 1370 and 1387 the laws of Castile declared that sorcery was a crime involving heresy, for which laymen would be punished by the state and clergy by the Church. Well after the foundation of the Inquisition, jurisdiction over sorcery and witchcraft remained in secular hands: this is demonstrated by a royal decree of 1500 which ordered an investigation into sorcery but put the matter into the hands of the civil courts.[75] The medieval Inquisition had likewise left such questions largely in secular hands, so that no change of policy was involved. By the early sixteenth century, when the Holy Office began inquiries into the offense, verdicts were still normally in the hands of the state courts. The Inquisition’s reluctance to interfere was motivated by doubts whether any heresy was involved. Certain types of popular superstition, “sorcery,” and the whole range of astrology were ill-defined areas in which many learned men and clergy themselves dabbled. Astrology, for example, was on the university syllabus at Salamanca, but not until the late sixteenth century did the Inquisition, encouraged by the papacy, attempt to suppress it as a science. Quiroga’s Index of 1583 followed Rome in banning occult arts and divination. Shortly after, in 1585, Pope Sixtus V issued a bull denouncing magic.

There were precedents for these moves. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis desiderantes which first recognized witchcraft as a problem. Two German Dominicans, Kramer and Sprenger, were sent to deal with the superstition in north and central Germany. Two years later they issued their handbook, the Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches). In this impressive compilation of case histories the Dominicans argued that, far from witchcraft being a delusion, it was a practice based on actual commerce with Satan and the powers of darkness, and that witches did in fact eat and devour human children, copulate with devils, fly through the air to their meetings, or “sabbats,” injure cattle, raise up storms and conjure down lightning. The view of the Malleus was supported by subsequent decrees of popes and bishops. The witch craze gained momentum in Europe, but there was always an important number of clergy who considered that talk of flying through the air and copulation with the devil was a delusion to be pitied rather than punished.

Medieval practice in secular courts had been that witches should be burnt, and the Inquisition at first followed suit. The Saragossa tribunal burnt one in 1498,[76] another in 1499 and three in 1500. From this time on, cases of witches were regularly identified, the first at Toledo being in 1513 and at Cuenca in 1515. In Cuenca the popular fear was fed by stories of children being found bruised and murdered, “wherefore it is suspected they were wounded or killed by xorguinos and xorguinas (wizards and witches).”[77] From 1520 edicts of faith in both Castile and Aragon began to add magic, sorcery and witchcraft to the list of offenses implying heresy. However, the belief in the sabbat was still far from being accepted by learned opinion. At Saragossa in 1521 a theologian declared that the sabbat “was a delusion and could not have occurred, so no heresy is involved.”

Meanwhile, learned opinion was taking stock of the phenomenon. In 1529 two friars, Martín de Castañega, with his Treatise of Superstitions (Logroño), and Pedro de Ciruelo, with his Treatise Reproving Superstitions (Alcalá), separately published commentaries on what Ciruelo termed “the vain superstitions and witchcraft which in these times are widespread in our Spain.” Both authors agreed that popular beliefs in magic were rooted in the ignorance of the rural population, and should be remedied through education rather than disciplinary measures. However, some secular courts continued with their harsh line. In Navarre for most of the sixteenth century, witchcraft was examined not by the Inquisition but by the state. In 1525 possibly thirty witches were burnt on the orders of the state prosecutor, Balanza, an official of the royal council of Navarre.[78]

The Holy Office desisted from interfering in such cases, not because inquisitors were liberal on the matter but because they tended to be skeptical of the powers attributed to the devil, and the tribunal in any case had no exclusive jurisdiction over the offense. Subsequent policy in the matter arose out of a historic meeting held at Granada in 1526.[79] As a result of the persecution of witches by secular authorities in Navarre that year, Inquisitor General Manrique delegated a committee of ten, which included the lawyer Hernando de Guevara and the future inquisitor general Valdés, to decide whether witches really did go to the sabbat. The discussion paper offered to the meeting stated that “the majority of jurists in this realm agree that witches do not exist,” because of the impossibility of the acts they claimed to do. A vote was taken and a majority—six—of those present decided “that they really go” to the sabbat; a minority of four, including Valdés and Guevara, voted “that they go in their imagination.” The meeting also decided that since the homicides to which witches frequently confessed might well be illusory, they should be tried by the Inquisition and not handed over to the civil authorities. If, however, the authorities had proof of homicide, they should be free to act on their own account.

Many of those on the committee were during those same weeks in Granada discussing the conversion of the Moriscos. In general the committee was concerned more to educate the so-called witches than to chastise them. The bishop of Mondoñedo, for example, suggested the following remedies: “send preachers to those parts, to tell the people of the errors of the witches and how they have been deceived by the devil; the inquisitors and secular judges should proceed with caution; the monasteries of that region should be reformed.” One of the resolutions of the whole committee was that “great care be taken to preach to them in their language,” namely, in Basque. The urgent need for re-Christianization was noted subsequently by the theologian Alfonso de Castro in his Adversus haereses (1534), referring to “Navarre, Vizcaya, Asturias, Galicia and other parts, where the word of God has seldom been preached. Among these people there are many pagan superstitions and rites, solely because of the lack of preachers.”

The persecution and execution of witches continued but the Holy Office, guided by the 1526 resolutions, played very little part in it. The 1526 decisions were communicated in detail to local tribunals. In Navarre, for example, the inquisitors were given strict instructions not to proceed in such cases without consulting the Suprema and the local judges.[80] Witch persecution is reported to have occurred in Navarre in 1527–28,[81] with the participation of the local inquisitor Avellaneda, and the execution of at least fifty witches on the authority of the royal council of Navarre. Since no convincing documents for this appear to have surfaced, however, it has been suggested that the whole affair was spurious and based on a forgery.[82] When further troubles occurred in Navarre in 1538 the then inquisitor, Valdeolivas, was instructed by the Suprema not to accept the confessions of witches literally, and to “speak to the principal people and explain to them that the loss of harvests and other ills are either sent by God for our sins or are a result of bad weather, and that witches should not be suspected.”

In other Inquisitions of the peninsula a similar skepticism was the rule. The tribunal of Saragossa executed a witch in 1535,[83] but after protests by the Suprema it executed no further witches throughout its history. In 1550 the inquisitor of Barcelona, Diego Sarmiento, was dismissed for having executed witches without referring the cases to the Suprema. The case began in 1548, when a Valencian called Juan Mallet was called in by various towns to identify witches in the Tarragona area. “They took him through the villages,” says a report of the Inquisition, “and made the people come out of their houses so he could look at them and say which were witches, and those he pointed out were arrested without any other proof or information whatever.” The prosecutions were conducted by local justices. On this occasion inquisitor Sarmiento obtained custody of some of the arrested women, on the excuse that the Inquisition had jurisdiction. He was then faced with the problem of what to do with them. In June 1548 he organized a special conference in the palace of the Inquisition in Barcelona. Those attending were the bishop, the seven judges of the royal Audiencia, and nine leading prelates including the abbot of Montserrat. Sarmiento put to them exactly the question that had been debated in Granada in 1526. He asked whether “the witches were able to go to the sabbat bodily and assume the form of animals, as some of them claim and confess.” The unanimous conclusion of the learned men was: “they were of the opinion that these witches can travel bodily because the devil takes them, and can do the ills and murders they confess and they should be firmly punished.” It was as a result of this decision that Sarmiento allowed seven of the women to be burnt early in 1549.

The Suprema in Valladolid was appalled. In May 1549 it sent inquisitor Francisco Vaca to make a report. Vaca ordered the immediate release of two witches still in the cells. He then sent to Valladolid one of the most damning denunciations of witchcraft persecution ever recorded. In a report that identifies him as the first person in Spanish history to apply the rules of evidence to the phenomenon, Vaca condemned the witch craze on the basis that no credible proofs had been produced. He sent one of the documents in the case to the Suprema with the comment: “I believe that most of the other cases are as laughable as this one indicates.” He recommended freeing all those detained in the villages, and the return of all goods confiscated. Inquisitor Sarmiento was dismissed in 1550 for his part in the events. For the rest of its career the Inquisition in Catalonia punished no witches.[84] The pioneering work of Francisco Vaca was of historic and enduring importance.

For the rest of the sixteenth century the Inquisition continued to maintain its hostility to persecution. As late as 1568 the Suprema ordered the tribunal of Barcelona to hand back to the episcopal court a case of “incantations”; and in Navarre in 1596 (the case of the witches of Araiz) the local inquisitor ordered that “it is agreed not to deal with these matters in the Holy Office,” and the prosecution reverted to the royal council of Navarre. Juana Izquierda, tried before the Toledo tribunal in 1591, confessed to taking part in the ritual murder of a number of children. Sixteen witnesses testified that the children had in fact died suddenly, and that Izquierda was reputed to be a witch. What would in any other European country have earned Izquierda the death sentence, in Spain earned her nothing more than abjuration de levi and two hundred lashes.[85]

The only significant relapse from this good record occurred a few years later in Navarre, where the tribunal had for many years resisted pressure by the royal council to use the death penalty against witches.[86] The explanation for the relapse must be sought not in Spain but in France. Just across the frontier, in the Pays de Labourd, the Bordeaux judge Pierre de Lancre had conducted a horrendous witch hunt in the autumn of 1609, during which he executed eighty witches. The campaign supplied most of the material for his famous book on witchcraft, Tableau de l’inconstance (1612). The Labourd executions sent a shiver of terror through the Navarrese valleys and created a witch scare in Spanish territory that swept along with it the inquisitors of Logroño, one of whom was Alonso de Salazar Frias.[87] A great auto de fe was held in the city on Sunday, 7 November 1610. So lengthy were the proceedings that the ceremony had to be continued the following day. Of the fifty-three prisoners who took part in the auto, twenty-nine were accused of witchcraft and, of these, five were burnt in effigy and six in person.[88] This extreme measure produced a reaction in the Suprema, which in March the next year ordered the same Alonso de Salazar Frias to visit the relevant districts of Navarre, carrying with him an edict of grace to invite the inhabitants to repudiate their errors.

Salazar had ample precedents to guide him, and the pioneering report by Francisco Vaca, drawn up over half a century before in Barcelona, would in all probability have been available to him. His own conclusions were therefore almost foreseeable. He began work in May 1611 and ended his labors in January 1612, but only on 24 March did he eventually present his report to the Suprema. During the time of his mission, Salazar declared, he reconciled 1,802 persons. Of these, 1,384 were children between the ages of nine and twelve in the case of girls, and between nine and fourteen in the case of boys. Of the others, “several were old and even senile, over the age of seventy and eighty.” After close examination of all the confessions and evidence about murders, witch sabbats and sexual intercourse with devils, Salazar came to his conclusion:

I have not found the slightest evidence from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred. Indeed, my previous suspicions have been strengthened by new evidence from the visitation: that the evidence of the accused alone, without external proof, is insufficient to justify arrest; and that three-quarters and more have accused themselves and their accomplices falsely.

I also feel certain that under present conditions there is no need of fresh edicts or the prolongation of those existing, but rather that in the diseased state of the public mind every agitation of the matter is harmful and increases the evil. I deduce the importance of silence and reserve from the experience that there were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about.

His long memorial[89] was, as we have seen, by no means the first with such recommendations, and there is no reason to pick him out either as a pioneer or as a rationalist before the age of rationalism. Like Vaca before him, he laid great store by the laws of evidence. As a trained lawyer, he was interested less in the theological debate over the reality of witchcraft than in the material problem of having to arrest people on the basis of unsupported hearsay. “There is no use in saying that the evidence for witchcraft is certain. Nobody doubts this. . . . The real question is: are we to believe that witchcraft has occurred in a case simply because the witches say so?”

Salazar’s report was contested by his colleagues but finally accepted by the Suprema. He was helped powerfully by the fact that, as he himself pointed out, the Inquisition since 1526 had turned its face against the traditional death sentence for witches; that more and more lawyers, rather than theologians, were becoming inquisitors; and that the best-informed opinion in Spain was in favor of skepticism over the reality of witchcraft.

Even before the mission to Navarre, the inquisitor general had commissioned a report from the prominent scholar Pedro de Valencia. In his report, dated April 1611,[90] Valencia was careful not to deny the reality of witchcraft, but his conclusions suggested that there was a strong element of mental sickness in the Navarre events, and that exceptional care must be taken to prove offenses. “The accused must be examined first to see if they are in their right mind or possessed or melancholic.” Their conduct “is more that of madmen than of heretics, and should be cured with whips and sticks rather than with sanbenitos.” Finally Valencia advised that “one must look for evidence, according to law, of an offense having been committed.”

On 29 August 1614 the Suprema issued authoritative instructions that reaffirmed the policy of 1526 and the conclusions of Vaca and Salazar. They were to remain the principal guide to the future policy of the Inquisition. Drawn up in thirty-two articles, the instructions adopted skepticism towards the claims of witches, and advised caution and leniency in all investigations. Belated justice was done to the victims of the Logroño auto of 1610: their sanbenitos were not to be exposed, and no stigma was to attach to them or to their descendants. Although the Inquisition was still obliged to follow European opinion and regard witchcraft as a crime, in practice all testimony to such a crime was rejected as delusion, so that Spain was saved from the ravages of popular witch hysteria and witch burnings at a time when it was prevalent all over Europe.

The decision of 1614 benefited those accused but placed the Inquisition in an ambiguous position in theory and in practice: in theory, because it admitted that diabolism was possible but denied any single instance of it; in practice, because it became reluctant to intervene in witchcraft cases and often conceded jurisdiction to the civil authorities. The Inquisition reverted to its practice of not burning, but continued to prosecute all types of superstition with vigor. In many tribunals in the seventeenth century “superstition” was the largest category of cases after “statements.”

Two cases from Barcelona show how the new attitude worked.[91] In 1665 the tribunal uncovered a group of middle-class diabolists who recited black masses, conjured up devils and beheaded a goat at one of their ceremonies. A priest in the group was suspended from holy orders for five years, and a surgeon was flogged and banished for the same length of time. In the same year Isabel Amada, a widow of Mataró, was denounced by shepherds who had refused to give her alms. Within three days, they said, “two of their mules and thirty sheep died, and the accused claimed that she had done it with the help of the devil.” She was set free by the inquisitors. Such lenient verdicts would have been unthinkable in most European countries.

The approach adopted by the Inquisition by no means signified that witches escaped, nor was Spain any more enlightened in this matter than other countries. Jurisdiction over witchcraft in Spain was also exercised by the civil authorities, which meant that—contrary to what is frequently affirmed—witches continued to be executed regularly. In the kingdom of Aragon, for example, the civil authorities continued in full possession of their jurisdiction over witchcraft and the Inquisition seems to have made no more than token efforts to assert its claims. At least as many witches were tried before noninquisitorial courts in Upper Aragon in the early seventeenth century as before the Inquisition.[92] Witches in Aragon were hanged, not burnt, by the civil courts, but the number of those executed is not known. In Catalonia, likewise, executions continued. In the jurisdiction of Vic, forty-five witches were sentenced by the civil authorities in 1618–22. Dozens of witches were hanged in several towns throughout Catalonia, including some in the Pyrenees. The royal courts tried in vain to intervene: their efforts were blocked by the local and baronial jurisdictions in which the executions took place. In 1621, a bishop reported, “the barons and lords of the villages, on seeing the loss of crops and the clamoring of the people, have supplied a cure for the ills by punishing these women.”[93] The rector of the Jesuits in Barcelona, Pere Gil, penned a powerful plea to the viceroy to intervene, but with little result. The incidents declined in number after 1627.[94]

In classical narratives of witch persecution the blame for savage verdicts used to be laid firmly by historians on the judges, and several personages in France, Germany and England were duly cast in the role of monsters attempting to impose their beliefs on ignorant rural populations. The immense extent of the phenomenon, however, has obliged scholars to revise their verdicts and look more deeply for explanations. In particular, the evidence points constantly to pressure from villagers rather than from official tribunals.[95] In small communities, denunciations for witchcraft often arose simply out of family and communal tensions.[96] The inquisitors in Spain were quite aware of the part played by a persecuting community in cases of alleged witchcraft, and of the vulnerability of women in the community. When Pascuala Gil, aged twenty-eight and wife of a shepherd, came before the inquisitors of Saragossa in 1679 on a charge of witchcraft brought by her neighbors, they “recognized her great truth and innocence.” When María Pérez, aged forty-five, came before them on the same charge, they agreed unanimously that all twenty-one of her accusers (including the parish priest) were motivated by malice, and “recognized her innocence.”[97]

Popular enthusiasm today for the theme of witchcraft has inevitably dragged the Spanish Holy Office into the arena of errors, exaggerations and attempts to produce impressive statistics. As it happens, the tribunal fits into none of the patterns to be found in other countries in Europe: there were no mass arrests or executions, no bloodthirsty judges, and no fading out of superstition before the inexorable advance of reason. Even the pioneering achievement of Francisco Vaca, the first inquisitor to really bring about an end to persecution in a peninsular community, was based not on enlightened rationalism but simply on a lawyer’s application of the rules of evidence. Set against a European background, Spain’s role in the prosecution of witchcraft was relatively small; and though its secular and episcopal tribunals were occasionally active the Inquisition played almost no part in the process. “The apex of prosecutions from 1560 to 1630”[98] in northern and central Europe had no parallel in Spain, and the tens of thousands who died in other countries in that period were a grim contrast to the tranquility of life in the Mediterranean.

12

RACE PURITY AND ITS CRITICS

What plague could destroy a state more than this matter has destroyed the conscience of our Spain?

—FERNANDO DE VALDÉS, SJ, 1632

The extraordinary role of the concept of honor in pre-modern societies, especially in terms of its relation to blood, has repeatedly attracted attention. In simple terms, “honor” represents the values of a society as represented in the conduct of individuals, but the contentious point is whether individuals observe the code of honor correctly. In a pre-modern society the notion of honor was often a cover for imposing certain preferences of power (superiority of noble blood, of free men over slaves, of Christians over Jews) and of gender (superiority of men over women). Notions of honor, blood and race can be found in all civilizations, including those of Christian Europe, where myths were deliberately fostered in order to demonstrate—one example, among many—that the aristocracy were descended from “pure” races such as the Franks (in France and Germany) and the Goths (in Spain).[1] True eminence, many Europeans liked to think, came from blood and heredity, not from effort and improvement.

In Christian society, honor had been earned not simply by personal integrity (in the case of women, their virginity) but also by demonstrating that one had achieved distinction, especially in battle. In time the respected ideals of society—valor, virility, piety, honest wealth—became the basis of “honor” and “reputation.” At its simplest level in the village, “honor” was the opinion held of one by neighbors, and to compromise one’s honor—by crime, by sexual misconduct—brought disgrace. At the apex of the social pyramid a noble was in danger of compromising his honor in many ways, but society allowed him several avenues of defense, because he had broader obligations to his kin, his dependants and sometimes his community. The violent methods of protecting honor—assassinating a seducer, dueling with someone who had uttered an insult—were punishable by law, though in many cases the law gave way to public opinion and let the perpetrator go free.

Much of the concern for honor found its way into printed treatises and dramatic works, and eventually came to influence scholars of literature, as well as historians, who felt that honor—and its attendant violence—was a particular attribute of Mediterranean culture.[2] People who lived in the Mediterranean, they argued, followed different moral codes from those in the rest of Europe. Specialists in Spanish literature, influenced by what they knew about the popularity of “honor” theatre in seventeenth-century Castile, went further and suggested that the belief in honor was “a unique and defining element of Spanish culture.”[3] Others built on these premises to suggest that the concern for honor and pure blood was first developed by the Inquisition in its fight against the Jews and eventually became a dominant obsession of the Hispanic mind. The Inquisition, indeed, was seen as a key element in generating the concern for blood purity.

Spaniards, of course, had no monopoly of the notion of honor, nor any extraordinary attachment to its blood (that is, racist) characteristics.[4] In late medieval Spain, outsiders and people of another race, even if they were not Christian but had status, could enjoy full respect. There is ample evidence of Jews and Muslims of the elite being treated on equal terms by Christians; and Christian writers accepted this equality without hesitation. Intermarriage between Christians and non-Christians could even be contemplated with pride. By the fifteenth century, however, the deterioration in the sociopolitical position of Jews and Muslims had significantly affected their position in the system of values, while the view that Old Christians possessed honor through the mere fact of not being tainted by Semitic blood was growing. “Though poor,” says Sancho Panza in the seventeenth century in Quixote, “I am an Old Christian, and owe nothing to anybody.” Sancho’s pride was that he had no Jewish blood. Some literature specialists argued that Jews themselves were originally responsible for this divisive distinction between Jews and Christians on the basis of blood.[5] Whatever the origins of the idea, many Christians began to feel that their status or honor was best preserved by avoiding intercultural marriages. This jarred with the notorious fact that the principal families of Aragon and Castile, and even the royal family, could trace their descent through conversos. Old Christian Spain would collapse, some felt, if this process went on. Now, it seemed, was the time to stop Jewish infiltration. The consequent beginnings of a stress on racial purity gave rise to the idea of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood).

The idea was not new. Unofficial attempts to marginalize Christians of Jewish or Muslim origin had occurred at least since the early decades of the fifteenth century. In Barcelona in 1436 the city banned persons of converso origin from acting as notaries within its jurisdiction. In Catalonia and Valencia that same year complaints were made to the pope that conversos were being excluded from office. In Castile the town of Villena obtained a royal privilege in February 1446 to exclude conversos from residence. By contrast, in Lleida in 1437 the converso brokers fought successfully against attempts to exclude them from civic office.[6] These measures reflected wide variations in practice, which depended on specific local conditions and conflicts.

The discriminatory measures of the middle and late century, by contrast, had a wider significance. In Castile in the 1440s and 1460s, and the crown of Aragon in the 1460s, the instability of royal power provoked disorder and rebellion. In Castile the king’s unpopular chief minister, Alvaro de Luna, was of converso origin. Jews and conversos supported him and as a result earned the hostility of the minister’s enemies. The most prominent of these was the chief magistrate of Toledo, Pero Sarmiento, who in June 1449 used his position to push through a municipal law (the Sentencia-Estatuto) excluding people of converso origin from office in Toledo. The excuse given for the law was that conversos had through their nefarious activities been responsible for recent serious street riots. Disturbances were repeated in a handful of Castilian cities in the following years. The same situation occurred in the civil wars in Aragon, when King Juan II received the support of both Jews and conversos. His opponents accordingly directed their attacks at these minorities.

Later, in 1472, Juan II stated uncompromisingly that he had “verified the fidelity of the conversos to his cause and his person, and had promoted them to the highest offices in his court.”[7] In both Castile and Aragon during these years of turmoil, many measures were taken against minorities by opponents of the crown. Though obviously motivated by some element of anti-Jewish feeling, they did not necessarily represent the nature of popular opinion. Nor do they suggest that the position of Jews and conversos was worsening. After the return of peaceful conditions, in both realms the crown tried to revoke anti-converso measures.

The troubles in Toledo, however, touched such important issues of principle that an immediate controversy was aroused.[8] One of the first attacks on the Sentencia-Estatuto was made by the distinguished legist Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo, who emphasized the common traditions and inheritance of Jews and Christians, and pointed out that a baptized Jew was no different from a baptized Gentile. The Mother of God, he said, and all the apostles had been Jews. Those self-styled Christians who had drawn up the Sentencia were moved by material greed and were wolves disguised as sheep in the flock of Christ. At the same time the converso royal secretary Fernan Díaz de Toledo drew up a memorandum (Instrucción)[9] for his friend Lope de Barrientos, bishop of Cuenca and the king’s chancellor. In this remarkable document, which openly defended his people, the secretary listed the Jewish origins of the chief families of Castile. On the basis of the memorandum, Barrientos (who was not a converso) wrote a passionate defense of the conversos.[10] Another distinguished intervention came from the Dominican cardinal Juan de Torquemada, who was of distant converso origin, in his Treatise against Midianites and Ishmaelites (1449).[11] The most important refutation of the Sentencia came from the pen of the bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, son of the converso Pablo de Santa María, his predecessor in the see. Holder of many high offices of state, in 1434 he led the Spanish delegation to the Church council at Basel, where in a famous speech he defended the international standing of Spain. In his Defence of Christian Unity (1449–50), he argued that the Catholic Church was properly the home of the Jews, and that Gentiles were the outsiders who had been invited in. His moderate arguments were continued by the superior of the Jeronimites, Alonso de Oropesa, who in 1465 completed his Light to Enlighten the Gentiles, which stressed the need for unity in the Church, and outlined the rightful place held in it by Jews.[12]

The objections raised by these writers, and reflected in the hostility to the Sentencia-Estatuto shown both by the pope and the archbishop of Toledo, may not have exercised much influence on opinion, for it was not an age of printed books or of numerous readers. However, the decades of tranquility in Castile after the Sarmiento riots demonstrate clearly that there was no triumph whatever of moves in favor of racial discrimination. It is a consideration to keep in mind when considering the role of the Inquisition. At the same time there may have been a growing consciousness of the importance of lineage: it has been suggested that the various conflicts of the period were instrumental in encouraging leaders of different religions to affirm their own identity by marking themselves off from each other.[13]

From the 1480s, when the Inquisition began its activities, it profiled the role of conversos and undoubtedly gave an impetus to the spread of discrimination, whose impact was—we should be careful to note—felt not in Spain as a whole but principally in central and southern Castile. The social antagonism of which Castilians had long been aware was now heightened by the spectacle of scores of “judaizers” being found guilty of heretical practices and sent to the stake. True religion, it seemed, must be protected by the exclusion of conversos from positions of importance. In 1483 a papal bull ordered that episcopal inquisitors should be Old Christians. In the same year the Castilian military orders of Alcántara and Calatrava adopted rules excluding all descendants of Muslims and Jews. A handful of religious bodies—and no more than a handful—began to insert discriminatory clauses into their statutes.

The university college (Colegio Mayor) of San Bartolomé in Salamanca was the first institution in Spain to adopt a statute of exclusion. It did this at the time of the anti-converso hysteria that accompanied the founding of the Inquisition, around 1482.[14] At the same date the influential Spanish college of San Clemente in Bologna (Italy), at which some Castilians studied, began excluding “those who fled from Seville [in 1480] because they were not Old Christians.”[15] The San Clemente exclusion had, we should stress, important features. It was directed only against those suspected of heresy, from one region alone, and did not apply to all conversos. Conversos therefore continued to attend the college tranquilly. The murder of Pedro Arbués in 1485 changed all this. Arbués had graduated from the college only ten years before, and was highly regarded there. The result was a statute, formally adopted in 1488, excluding all conversos from entry.[16] The Colegio of Santa Cruz at Valladolid had a statute as part of its foundation rules in 1488. Other Valladolid colleges took no action for decades. That of San Ildefonso, founded by Cisneros in 1486, had no statutes against conversos, but after the cardinal’s death the college adopted one in 1519. When he founded the great Dominican friary of St. Thomas Aquinas in Avila, Torquemada applied to the pope in 1496 for a decree excluding all descendants of Jews.

None of these moves had any great significance. The colleges were small elite bodies that did not affect open access to the university. The number of institutions that practiced exclusion continued to be extremely small, and restricted to central Castile. It was not until 1531, over thirty years later, that any other Dominican foundation followed Torquemada’s lead. Persecution of judaizers was by then trailing off, and there was evidently no obsession about excluding people because of their origins. The first cathedral chapter in Castile to adopt a limpieza statute was that of Badajoz in 1511. This was thirty years after the foundation of the Inquisition, and clearly not related to that event. The cathedral chapter of Seville in 1515 adopted one on the initiative of its archbishop, the inquisitor Diego de Deza. Decades passed, and few institutions seemed intent on exclusion. Over twenty years later, in 1537, the university of Seville, originally founded by a converso, adopted a statute of blood purity after someone carefully blotted out of the original charter the clause making the university open to all.[17]

Those years up to around 1530 had been the period of most intense persecution of conversos by the Holy Office, yet as we can see there was no great pressure to introduce into public life measures in favor of purity of blood (limpieza). The Inquisition, certainly, made no move in that direction. Discrimination of some sort was being practiced sporadically in parts of Spain at least a century before the Holy Office came into existence, and the tribunal’s own exclusion rules did not refer to questions of blood but only to offenses. It is important to understand the distinction. From the beginning, it was laid down in Torquemada’s instruction issued at Seville in November 1484 that

the children and grandchildren of those condemned [by the Inquisition] may not hold or possess public offices, or posts, or honors, or be promoted to holy orders, or be judges, mayors, constables, magistrates, jurors, stewards, officials of weights and measures, merchants, notaries, public clerks, lawyers, attorneys, secretaries, accountants, treasurers, physicians, surgeons, shopkeepers, brokers, changers, weight inspectors, collectors, tax-farmers, or holders of any other similar public office.[18]

The exclusion was a temporary punishment for heresy, and not based on race. This idea was upheld by the Catholic Monarchs, who issued two decrees in 1501 forbidding the children of those condemned by the tribunal to hold any post of honor or to be notaries, public clerks, physicians or surgeons in Castile. We know of course that the decrees were seldom observed. It was a period when laws and regulations evaporated into thin air, and everyone felt free to ignore the list of exclusions. The crucial issue (too frequently forgotten) is that neither the state law nor the Inquisition rule applied to people of Jewish origin in general, but only to those who had been made to do penitence in some way.

From the very beginning of the discriminatory process, then, there was a clear ambivalence in what really happened. There may have been rancor against people of Jewish origin, but the very few institutions that discriminated usually limited themselves to penalizing families suspected of heresy. And even then the process of excluding conversos was not put into effect systematically. In the Spanish College at Bologna young men of known Jewish origin continued to enter without serious problems. The students even elected a converso rector in 1492, four years after conversos were theoretically refused entry.[19] In Seville cathedral the rules were repeatedly infringed, and in 1523 the canons had to petition the crown to confirm the validity of their decree of 1515. The statute, however, continued to be unobserved for generations more, as some of the canons complained with feeling to the government in 1586.[20]

The relative liberality of the Jeronimite order, shown in the writings of Alonso de Oropesa, superior of the order from 1457 and reelected for four successive terms, appears to have attracted judaizers to become members. The problem appeared to be so grave that a special commission of “inquisition,” along the lines of the medieval French one and two decades before the birth of the subsequent Spanish one, was set up at the mother house at Guadalupe in 1462.[21] Officials resisted pressure to discriminate against conversos, but in 1485 another scandal broke out when it was alleged that a friar, Diego de Marchena, had been accepted as a member though he had never been baptized, and had continued to practice Judaism (or so it was alleged, citing events of eighteen years before!) within the protection of the monastery.[22] A special investigation by the order censured 21 out of the 130 friars for alleged Jewish activities; one of the accused was sentenced to be confined, and Marchena was tortured and handed over to the authorities to be burnt as a heretic.[23]

The chapter meeting of the order in 1486 adopted a statute excluding conversos.[24] It was a move that had little support in Castile, and the statute was later revoked after a special appeal by Ferdinand and Isabella. The trend towards exclusion was unfortunately reinforced by the discovery that year of a nest of judaizers in another Jeronimite monastery, that of La Sisla in Toledo. The prior, Garcia de Zapata, used to say when elevating the Host at mass, “Up, little Peter, and let the people look at you,” and when in confession would allegedly turn his back on the penitent. The Inquisition of Toledo burnt him and four other monks of the monastery in 1486–87. The result was that in 1493 the order passed a rule (approved by the pope in 1495) that “non recipiantur conversi.” In 1552 the exclusion was extended to all those of Muslim origin.

Other religious orders were, as it happens, extremely reluctant to follow the Jeronimite example. Not until over thirty years later, in 1525, did the Franciscans adopt a statute of limpieza, doing so against strong internal opposition. The Dominicans began some form of discrimination from as early as 1489, and a limpieza statute was apparently adopted by them in Aragon. In practice, exclusion never became official policy in either order, and decisions were not observed or were countermanded.[25] It is obvious from what we have seen that the existence and growth of discrimination cannot in any way be presented as a triumph of ideas of limpieza in Spain, though a handful of scholars have enthusiastically insisted on it in the face of all the evidence.[26] The idea of blood purity as a demiurge of Hispanic society is a tantalizing one that has launched several literary essays, but has little historical evidence to support it.[27] Let us reconsider some of the evidence.

The Sarmiento statute had been firmly rebutted by the highest authorities in Church and state in Castile, and never took effect in its hometown, Toledo. In the same way, subsequent expressions of racialism in Spain were regularly contested. Anti-Semitism continued to exist, but the zeal for statutes was very strictly confined to a handful of institutions in a limited number of regions. Over and beyond institutions, ordinary people from all walks of life practiced discrimination only if it fell in with their other social preferences; otherwise, for generations and without conflict they made friendships, married, went shopping and lived with neighbors who may or may not have had different racial antecedents.

It follows that there is no reason whatever to present the concern for blood purity as a sort of mania that had taken hold of Spaniards and that, by extension, formed part of the cultural package they took with them to the American colonies.[28] The idea of an obsession continues all the same to inspire some works of scholarship, in which wholly fictitious premises about blood purity inform otherwise valid research.[29] Problems of race in the New World, it would be fair to stress, developed in special circumstances brought about by the colonial regime,[30] and ideas favoring cultural discrimination did not have Spain as their only origin. Colonial settlers of all nations, including Britain[31] and France[32] and not just Spain, had prejudices about racial and blood purity.

As it happened, in Spain any attempt to introduce limpieza rules in the half century after the foundation of the Inquisition always encountered bitter opposition. The statute of 1488 in San Clemente in Bologna likewise led to a decade of disturbances, including the murder of the college’s rector in 1493.[33] Conversos may with reason be identified as the leaders of the opposition. Nevertheless, when we look closer at some of the cases, unexpected questions arise which cast in doubt the opinion that Spain was somehow in the grip of a racialist frenzy. Why did so few public institutions adopt statutes? Why did they take so long to do so? Why, above all, did the Inquisition not exclude conversos? And why, once certain bodies adopted statutes, did they not observe them?

We shall return to these questions in a moment. They need to be considered in the light of the famous exclusion statute adopted by Toledo cathedral in 1547.[34]

An attempt was made unsuccessfully in 1536 to introduce a statute of limpieza into the chapter. The new archbishop in 1546, Juan Martinez Siliceo, did not mean to fail. Born of humble peasant stock, Siliceo had struggled upwards to carve out a brilliant career for himself. He had studied for six years at the university of Paris and later taught there for three. Called home to teach at Salamanca, he soon attracted enough attention to be appointed tutor to Charles V’s son, Philip, a post he held for ten years. When the see of Toledo fell vacant in 1546 he was appointed to it. The new archbishop was preoccupied with more than just his freshly won dignity. He had been haunted all his life by the shadow of his humble origins, and drew his pride from the fact that his parents had been Old Christians.

One hundred years after the statute of Pero Sarmiento in the very same city of Toledo, Siliceo decided to revive a controversy that was long since dead. In his new post he felt in no mood to compromise with converso Christians whose racial antecedents were in his mind the principal threat to a secure and unsullied Church. When, therefore, in September 1546 he discovered that the pope had just appointed a converso, Dr. Fernando Jiménez, to a vacant canonry in the cathedral, and that the new incumbent’s father had once been condemned by the Inquisition as a judaizer, he refused to accept the appointment. Siliceo wrote to the pope protesting against his candidate, and sounding a warning that the first church in Spain was now in danger of becoming a “new synagogue.” The pope withdrew his man, but Siliceo thought this was not enough and proceeded to draw up a statute to exclude all conversos from office in the cathedral. A chapter meeting was hurriedly convoked on 23 July 1547, and with ten dissentient votes against twenty-four, a statute of limpieza was pushed through.

The voting figures show that not all the canons had been present at the meeting. An immediate protest was raised by the archdeacons of Guadalajara and Talavera, Pero González de Mendoza and Alvaro de Mendoza, both sons of the powerful duke of Infantado, and both Old Christians. Condemning the injustice and impropriety of the statute, they criticized the archbishop for not calling all the dignitaries of the cathedral to his meeting, and also threatened to appeal to the pope. The controversy that followed gives us an invaluable summary of the views both of opponents and of supporters of the limpieza statutes.

According to the explanatory document drawn up by Siliceo,[35] the policy of limpieza was now practiced in Spain by the military orders, by university colleges and by religious orders. The existence of a converso danger was proved by the fact that the Lutheran heretics of Germany were nearly all descendants of Jews. Nearer home, “the archbishop has found that not only the majority but nearly all the parish priests of his archdiocese with a care of souls . . . are descendants of Jews.” Moreover, conversos were not content with controlling the wealth of Spain. They were now trying to dominate the Church. The size of the danger was shown by the fact that in the last fifty years over fifty thousand conversos had been burnt and made to do penitence by the Inquisition, yet they still continued to flourish. To emphasize this argument, the archbishop declared that of the ten who had voted against his statute, no fewer than nine were of Jewish origin, five of them coming from the prolific converso family to which Fray García de Zapata belonged.

Apart from untruths and exaggerations, Siliceo was not giving the whole picture. It is true that among the most hostile to the statute were the dean of the cathedral, Diego de Castilla, and the humanist Juan de Vergara, both conversos; but at least six other canons who shared their hostility were Old Christians. What distinguished these canons (two of whom were, as we know, of the noble house of Mendoza) and the dean was their irrefutably aristocratic lineage, in contrast to Siliceo, who was of humble origin. In the protest drawn up by the dissentient clergy[36] the complaint was made that, first, the statute was against canon law; second, it was against the laws of the kingdom; third, it contradicted Holy Scripture; fourth, it was against natural reason; and, fifth, it defamed “many noble and leading people of these realms.” The sting lay in the fifth article. As Siliceo and his opponents well knew, few members of the nobility had not been tainted with converso blood. By promoting a limpieza statute, therefore, the archbishop was obviously claiming for his own class a racial purity that the tainted nobility could not boast.

There was immediate highly placed opposition to the statute outside the cathedral. The city council of Toledo protested energetically against the measure, which (they said) threatened to bring back the civil wars of the Comunidades to the city. Previous archbishops, they added, had refused to exclude conversos, and Cardinal Tavera in 1536 had ordered no action on a proposal to introduce a statute that year. If the present statute were allowed to proceed, it would arouse “hatreds and long-standing enmities.” The councilors knew of what they spoke. Their petition, addressed to Prince Philip early in August 1547, managed to secure approval in the city council only after a heated debate.

The prince, then ruling Spain in his father’s absence, was deeply concerned. He sent a special judge to Toledo to look at the situation on the spot. He also asked the president of the council of Castile, the highest court in the land, to send him an opinion from both the judicial and the Church point of view. The council of Castile gave its legal verdict on 25 August. “The statute,” they ruled, “is unjust and scandalous and putting it into effect would cause many problems.” They recommended that the prince order it to be suspended for the moment. To obtain a Church point of view, the president of the council, who happened also to be bishop of Sigüenza, called a meeting of his clergy. They ruled that “the statute in its present harsh form raises grave problems, and putting it into effect would cause even more.” It should be suspended until further consultation.[37]

The prince accordingly suspended the statute in mid-September 1547, and referred the matter to Charles V in Germany. Siliceo was furious. At the end of September he protested to his former pupil against the suspension, “decreed without hearing us.” For the moment, he was silenced. The statute was condemned by the University of Alcalá as a source of “discord sown by the devil.” Toledo had a long history of conflict involving conversos, and officials were concerned to soothe passions.

Not till nine years later was the statute allowed to proceed. The pope issued a formal approval in 1555, and in August 1556 the royal council ratified it.[38] Philip II was absent in the Netherlands and took no part in the decision, nor is there reason to believe that he had changed his mind on the matter. A statement that I once mistakenly attributed to him, to the effect that “all the heresies that have occurred in Germany and France have been sown by descendants of Jews, as we have seen and still see daily in Spain,” was not his but comes from a letter to him from Siliceo.[39] There is of course clear evidence that there were some anti-Semitic views among his advisers. It is less well known that substantial elite opinion, in Castile as well as in the government, opposed such views. Philip’s biographer Cabrera de Córdoba, in referring to the Siliceo statute as “detested by those who decide the principles of good government,” reported that the Cortes had an “undying hatred” of the measure.[40] His statements are a reflection of the impressive opposition, within the very heart of Castile, to the notion of limpieza.[41]

Confirmation of the Toledo statute in 1556 came only a few months before Siliceo’s death the following year. As we shall see, the confirmation was a pure formality and the statute was consistently ignored. The see of Toledo soon had serious problems of its own, with the suspension of its new archbishop, Carranza (see chapter 8), on a charge of heresy. By mid-century, above all thanks to the new alarm over Lutheranism, concern for limpieza was put on the back burner and exclusion statutes came to a virtual stop.[42] The only notable exception was the Inquisition, which decided at last—one hundred years after its foundation—to enforce limpieza in the recruitment of its officials through a royal order of December 1572.

In view of the frequent misapprehension that Spain had been taken over by a racialist mania, the year 1572 is a good point at which to stop and look at the available evidence. Anti-Semitism would continue to prevail throughout Castilian society, as it did in many other regions of Europe, but the relevant question is: to what extent was it backed up by statutes of blood purity? The “statute communities,” as they were called, were at this period limited to the six university Colegios Mayores; some religious orders (Jeronimites, Dominicans and Franciscans); the Inquisition; and some cathedrals (Badajoz, Córdoba, Jaén, León, Osma, Oviedo, Seville, Sigüenza, Toledo and Valencia). Virtually only one non-religious sector was affected: the medieval military orders (the Order of Santiago adopted one as late as 1555), and their administrative organ the council of Orders. Private legal arrangements, such as property entails (mayorazgos), might also lay down conditions of limpieza. A sprinkling of town councils and confraternities, mainly in Castile, also had rules calling for exclusion.

Though limited in number, some of these bodies were of crucial importance. From the sixteenth century, entry into a Colegio Mayor became the essential stepping-stone to a career in the higher echelons of both Church and state in Castile.[43] If conversos were excluded, they would find the upper level of professions closed to them. In the same way the encomiendas of the military orders were one of the most desirable ways of attaining noble status, so that decisions about limpieza by the council of Orders were critical. Exclusion from the military orders would be a severe blow to the social pretensions of a converso family. The panorama, evidently, looked bleak for people of Jewish origin.

The real picture was far more complex. First, the very small number of institutions with statutes (less than a sixth of Spain’s sees, for example) refutes any idea of a limpieza mania sweeping the country. Time and again, other bodies cited this fact in defense of their own refusal to follow the trend. The statutes, moreover, existed almost exclusively in Castile. In Catalonia, for example, limpieza rules were unknown before the period of the Counter-Reformation, when they crept in together with the other baggage of Castilian ecclesiastics.[44] Even in Castile, they were rarely found in city councils, despite considerable pressure in favor from anti-converso factions. In brief, the statutes were never part of the public law of Spain and never featured in any body of public law. Their validity was restricted only to those private institutions that had them.

Second, they were always controversial and were never widely accepted. In Rome Pope Paul IV approved the Toledo statute, but he did it out of policy and not principle. The same pope in 1565 refused to approve a new statute for the cathedral of Seville and condemned discrimination as contrary to canon law and ecclesiastical order. His successor, Pius V, was a consistent enemy of the statutes. In Spain a continual debate, directed largely against the statutes, was unleashed. The tide of controversy was stemmed by the Inquisition, which in 1572 tried to forbid any writings either for or against the statutes.

Third, even where statutes existed Spaniards found it possible to impose them with a typical laxity that in many cases undermined their existence. Philip II was no exception. When he felt it necessary, he appointed converso Church dignitaries even if it contravened a statute. In some dioceses the rules were regularly bypassed. In Toledo in 1557, one year after the government confirmed the famous statute, a converso was appointed as canon of the cathedral.[45] In the see of Sigüenza in 1567 the bishop decided to ignore the statute in existence when making appointments.[46] In 1589 Philip II appointed a priest of known converso origin, Gabriel Márquez, to be his chaplain in the same cathedral of Sigüenza. When it was pointed out that the statute forbade this, Philip suspended the appointment but ordered that the statute be looked into.[47] In the Inquisition itself, the rules were often disregarded, and clergy of known converso origin were employed as assessors.[48] In the late century familiars were often (cases are documented in Murcia and Barcelona) appointed without any proofs at all, though there continued to be exceptional efforts in some cases.[49]

Despite the prohibitions in the military orders, known conversos were accepted. In 1552 Prince Philip, then regent of Spain, appointed his friend Ruy Gómez (not a converso) as president of the military order of Calatrava. Ruy Gómez remarked confidentially to a friend that the current president of the order of Alcántara “is a New Christian.”[50] When king, Philip continued to tolerate conversos in the military orders. He bestowed a knighthood of Santiago on a famous Flanders war veteran, but knowing that this contravened the rules he ordered that no inquiry be made into his genealogy.[51] The few city councils with statutes seem not to have paid attention to the rules except when it served their purpose. Toledo city in 1566 adopted a statute that was (exceptionally) approved by the government. Despite it, converso families like the Franco, Villareal, Herrera and Ramírez continued freely throughout the period to occupy posts.[52] Philip subsequently refused to approve limpieza statutes for other cities. In Cuenca, which had a long history of antagonism to conversos, converso families during the late sixteenth century in fact occupied 50 percent of the posts on the city council.[53] A leading judge of the time, Castillo de Bobadilla, observed that conversos in Castile had free access to municipal posts; and another jurist, Pedro Núñez de Avendaño, commented that conversos were sometimes in theory excluded from “public offices, although in practice they are freely admitted.”[54] The gap was vast between adoption of statutes and their implementation.

Fourth, where statutes existed, those who wished to avoid them did so by bribes or by fraudulent proofs. Rich conversos, complained some members of the Cortes of Madrid in 1551, “obtain sanction from Your Majesty through bribes, and in this the state is much prejudiced.”[55] Bribes persisted at every level, but it was the false proofs that emerged as the biggest preoccupation. False proofs implied corruption and scandal. It was this, possibly more than any other single aspect, which excited elite opposition to the statutes. Men of undocumented origins could rise to the highest offices in the land (a case in point was Philip II’s own private secretary Mateo Vázquez de Leca)[56] if the right money was paid.

Throughout these years, then, there was a profound ambivalence about the implementation of exclusion. It had been the practice in the early years of the Inquisition to “rehabilitate”[57] conversos accused of lesser offenses. Those who had completed their penitences and paid a sum of money could obtain from the Inquisition a certificate restoring their former status. Since they had not been judged guilty of heresy, they did not incur any major penalties. It meant—despite a commonly held opinion to the contrary—that mere punishment by the inquisitors did not necessarily prejudice one’s career. The practice coincided with an accepted principle of canon law.

Conversos, whether or not made to do penitence by the Inquisition, might in principle be excluded from many important bodies; in practice, they were capable of acceding to most public offices in Spain. In 1522 the Inquisition stipulated that the universities of Salamanca and Valladolid should not grant degrees to conversos. But in 1537 Charles V decreed that in colleges where New Christians were being excluded, “the constitutions of founders be respected.”[58] Throughout the period, conversos can be found both as students and as professors in the major universities. The situation in the non-Castilian regions was no different. The father of the Murcian humanist Francisco de Cascales was burnt at the stake as an alleged judaizer in 1564. Cascales opportunely exiled himself from the city. In 1601, however, he returned to Murcia and was appointed to the chair of grammar there. Everybody knew about his origins but no questions were asked.[59]

A central figure in controversies at Salamanca University during the 1570s, Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra, was a known converso who had been appointed to the chair of Hebrew there in 1559. The same university had not hesitated, a generation before (in 1531), to appoint the converso Pablo Coronel (a relative of Abraham Seneor) as professor of Hebrew. Although discrimination of some sort may have been practiced at Salamanca, the university was always opposed to formal exclusion. When in 1562 the rector proposed introducing a limpieza statute, the university assembly voted that “before introducing it we should consider carefully the many types of problems that might arise.” Finally, “it was resolved that for the time being it should not be introduced.” When another attempt was made to introduce a statute in 1566, Philip II himself stepped in to prohibit it.[60] Six years later, the Inquisition instructed the university to drop further discussion of the issue.

There can be no doubt of the threat that limpieza could represent, as we know from many cases in the documentation. Though it was practiced in only a limited number of institutions, these were so significant that a barrier to status mobility was frequently created. In theory, canon law limited the extent to which the sins of fathers could be visited on their sons and grandsons. Limpieza adopted no such limits. If it were proved that an ancestor on any side of the family had been punished by the Inquisition or was a Muslim or Jew, the descendant could be accounted of impure blood and disabled from the relevant office. Applicants might have to present genealogical proofs of the purity of their lineage. The fraud, perjury, extortion and blackmail that came into existence because of the need to prove limpieza was widely recognized as a moral evil. If candidates could not offer convincing genealogical proofs, comisarios were appointed to visit the localities concerned and take sworn statements from witnesses about the antecedents of the applicant. They examined parish records and collected verbal testimony. In an age when written evidence was rare, the reputation of applicants lay wholly at the mercy of local gossip and hostile neighbors. Bribery became necessary.

If an applicant was refused a post with the Inquisition, the tribunal never gave any reason, with the result that the family of the man became suspected of impurity even if this was not the case. Some applicants had to go through legal processes which might last several years, with all the attendant expenses, before a proper genealogy could be drawn up. Others resorted to perjury to obtain posts, thus involving themselves and their witnesses in heavy fines and infamy when the tribunal discovered their offense. Frequently applicants would be disabled from employment simply by the malicious gossip of enemies, because “common rumor” was allowed as evidence.[61] Genealogy became a social weapon.

None of this, however, created an insuperable barrier to entry into the elite or the nobility. Formal barriers, in reality, existed only for entry into the military orders of Castile. To obtain an encomienda in any of these, one had to have one’s lineage checked by the council of Orders in Madrid. This bureaucratic obstacle could be bypassed only if the king himself intervened (as, we have seen, he sometimes did). Otherwise it obviously opened up a hornet’s nest of inquiries and slanders. Entry into the titled nobility, by contrast, was a process unaffected by any limpieza rules. The standard treatise on nobility, the Summa nobilitatis (1553) of Juan Arce de Otalora, affirmed expressly that all converts from Judaism and Islam “may without any discrimination be admitted on equal terms to the rank and immunities of nobility.”[62] He pointed out that it was well known that many illustrious persons in Spain were of distant Jewish origin. However, he added, those among the converts who were guilty of heresy could be excluded. The approach coincided fully with that of the Inquisition.

For the Inquisition was indubitably at the center of the picture. Its punishments contributed to bringing shame on the accused, and shame or infamy was beyond doubt the worst punishment imaginable in those times. In the ordinary criminal courts, humiliating punishments that brought public shame (vergüenza) and ridicule were often feared more than the death sentence, since they ruined one’s reputation in the local community and brought disgrace on one’s family and relatives. “Infamy” affected honor, religion and even “race,” in the view of those Spaniards who tried to lump together impurity, infamy and Jewishness. A writer of the time of Philip IV, Juan Escobar de Corro, in his Treatise on the Purity of the Nobility (c. 1632) equated the words “purity” (that is, freedom from Jewish blood) and “honor,” and argued that the stain on an impure lineage was ineffaceable and perpetual.[63] This went beyond mere statutes of exclusion and advanced towards unmistakable racialism. “Race and infamy,” it has been pointed out, “were components of a larger complex of social, political and clannish attitudes.”[64]

Though some lesser punishments in the rules of the Inquisition allowed the accused to apply for “rehabilitation” after the penitence had been performed (see chapter 3), so that no stain of infamy remained, there were also humiliating penalties (such as flogging), which might affect “honor” more enduringly. Perhaps the most demeaning punishment in the Inquisition, however, was being condemned to wear the sanbenito, worn also by accused before they were burnt at the stake. As we have seen (chapter 4), wearing it brought up associations both of shame and of Jewish heresy.

Early in the sixteenth century the practice was begun of hanging up the sanbenitos of offenders after the period for which the garment had to be worn. This practice was standardized by the official Instructions of 1561, which stipulated that “all the sanbenitos of the condemned, living or dead, present or absent, be placed in the churches where they used to live . . . in order that there may be perpetual memory of the infamy of the heretics and their descendants.”[65] The declared aim of displaying the garments was therefore to perpetuate the dishonor of condemned persons, so that from generation to generation whole families should be penalized for the sins of their ancestors. Since those accused in the early period were usually punished for judaizing, the ruling clearly identified Jewishness with infamy. It became general practice to replace old and decaying sanbenitos with new ones bearing the names of the same offenders. In the Dominican priory of Santa Catarina in Barcelona, a count made in the year 1600 found that the walls were covered with an enormous accumulation of more than 538 sanbenitos, most apparently dating to the fifteenth century and some totally perished.[66]

The garments were widely hated not only by the families concerned but also by the districts on which they brought disrepute. The city of Logroño (Navarre) in 1570 successfully petitioned the Suprema to be allowed to remove from its churches the great number of sanbenitos belonging properly to churches in other regions.[67] In the rising against the Spanish government in Sicily in 1516, the sanbenitos in the churches were torn down and never replaced. Even clergy participated: in 1603 the parish priest of the Catalan frontier town of Cotlliure (now in France) helped one of his parishioners destroy a sanbenito of his grandfather.[68] Wherever there were public disturbances in Hispanic territories, one of the first targets of rioters were the exposed garments.

One of the obvious uses of this system was that family details asked for in job applications could be tested against the evidence of the garments. As matters turned out, in the end it mattered not at all whether a man had been burnt or simply made to do penance in an auto de fe. If his sanbenito survived, his descendants could still suffer public disability. Though the Holy Office clearly helped to perpetuate infamy, from very early on it also tried to restrict the rumor and slander associated with it, and in numerous cases prosecuted those who attempted to defame their neighbors. Ironically, it therefore became an offense, punishable by the Inquisition itself, to call someone a “Jew.” In 1620, for example, Antonio Vergonyós, a familiar and priest of Girona, was banished for a year from his village for slandering a neighbor as a “Jueu.”[69]

The way in which the Inquisition equated race, heresy and shame was commented on frequently by observers. In the peninsula the tribunal took every care to ensure that sanbenitos be exposed. This was done in many regions until the end of the eighteenth century, and travelers never ceased to comment on them. As late as 1821 a Spanish exile living in England, Blanco White, recalled seeing them when a boy:

There exists among us a distinction over blood [i.e., blood purity] that I believe to be peculiar to Spain. The great mass of our people accepts it so blindly that the most humble laborer considers its lack to be a fount of misery and degradation that he is condemned to transmit to all his posterity. The slightest stain of African, Indian, Moorish or Jewish blood is a blot on the whole family up to the final generation, and not even the passage of years can remove the knowledge of this fact, nor can the obscurity and low origins of those who suffer this disgrace cause it to disappear.[70]

Was the concern over heresy and purity of race peculiarly Spanish? In an influential essay written nearly a century ago, a French scholar suggested that Spaniards, influenced by the Inquisition, felt heresy (and not simply Jewishness but any deviation from the traditional Catholic norm) to be a “blot” on the purity and honor of the nation. He cited the case of Juan Díaz—a Spanish friend of the reformer Bucer—who was assassinated in Germany by his own brother Alfonso, a Catholic who feared that his brother’s heresy would bring shame on his family and on all Spain.[71] To the objection that the incident can hardly be taken as indicative of a national obsession with honor, we must also recognize that some people at the time readily identified heresy with impurity. The violent reaction against the Valladolid Protestants in 1559 was provoked in part by a popular rejection of foreign ideas. “Before that time,” commented one contemporary, “Spain was clean [limpia] of these errors.”[72] When the prisoners Carlos de Seso and Fray Domingo de Rojas were being brought back to Valladolid, reported the inquisitor general, “in all the villages through which they passed, crowds of men, women and children came out to see them, calling for them to be burnt. The friar[73] was very afraid that his relatives would kill him on the journey.”[74] When young Anna Enríquez, daughter of the marquesa of Alcañices and sister-in-law of Francisco Borja, was condemned by the Inquisition in those same weeks to wear a sanbenito for her part in the Protestant group of Valladolid, Borja used his influence to have the sanbenito part of her sentence annulled: the public “honor” of her family was thereby saved.

Concepts of blood and honor could become linked, especially among elite families and institutions that were by nature exclusivist, to notions of the purity of race and religion. Spain was not the only country to contain such ideas, either then or today. It is doubtful, however, if this type of concern for limpieza was widespread. When Philip II’s officials, as we have seen above, employed the heretic hunter Alonso del Canto to procure the return to Spain of select persons,[75] concern for purity and honor seems not to have been mentioned at any point as a motive.

As we have seen, the statutes calling for purity of blood were never the law of the land in any corner of Spain, a situation that made it possible for many prominent persons to attack them. However, the fact that there were powerful supporters of the statutes led to continual controversy. The theme was an ongoing source of friction between the Society of Jesus and the Inquisition. We have seen that Ignatius Loyola, when a student at Alcalá in 1527, fell under suspicion because of his strict religious practices. This was the very year that the province of Guipúzcoa made into law an earlier ordinance of 1483, forbidding entry to conversos. At this time Ignatius indignantly denied any knowledge of Judaism, since he was a noble from a province (Guipúzcoa) which had hardly known Jews. Some years later, however, he declared while dining with friends that he would have considered it a divine favor to be descended from Jews. When asked his reason for saying this, he protested, “What! To be related to Christ Our Lord and to Our Lady the glorious Virgin Mary?” On another occasion a fellow Basque who was a friend of his spat when he mentioned the word “Jew.” Ignatius took him aside and said, according to his biographer, “‘Now, Don Pedro de Zárate, be reasonable and listen to me’—And he gave him so many reasons that he all but persuaded him to become a Jew.”[76] The incidents show that Ignatius had managed to free himself from one of the major social prejudices prevailing in Spain.

Like its founder, the Society of Jesus refused to associate itself with racialism. When in 1551 the Jesuits opened a college at Alcalá without the permission of Archbishop Siliceo, the latter issued an order forbidding any Jesuit to act as a priest without first being personally examined by him. It was no secret that the reason for this order was Siliceo’s hostility to the presence of converso Christians in the college. Francisco Villanueva, rector of the college, wrote indignantly to Ignatius about this: “It is a great pity that there seems to be nobody willing to leave these poor people anywhere to stay on earth, and I would like to have the energy to become their defender, particularly since one encounters among them more virtue than among the Old Christians and hidalgos.”[77]

The first provincial of the Jesuits in Spain, Antonio de Araoz, impressed, however, upon Ignatius that Siliceo had promised to visit the order with great favors if it would only adopt a statute of limpieza. He also warned that the good name of the Society in Spain would be harmed by the knowledge that there were New Christians in its ranks. Despite this, Ignatius refused to change his attitude. All through the controversy in Spain about the statutes of limpieza, and up to his death in 1556, he would not allow his order to discriminate against conversos. When conversos did apply to enter its ranks he advised them to join the Company in Italy rather than in Spain. When talking of the limpieza cult he would refer to it as el humor español—“the Spanish whim”; or, more bitingly on one occasion, el humor de la corte y del Rey de España—“the whim of the Spanish king and his court.”

All the superiors of the order after Loyola were firm in their opposition to the statutes. The immediate successor of Ignatius was Diego Laínez, superior from 1558 to 1565. The fact that he was a converso aroused opposition to his election from sectors of the Spanish Church. In a letter to Araoz in 1560 Laínez denounced limpieza as el humor o error nacional (the national whim or error) and demanded total obedience from the Spanish Jesuits. In 1564 a Jesuit wrote from Seville to Laínez, lamenting the divisions within the order based on lineage. “These distinctions do much harm, especially among those who recall that golden time of affection at the beginning.”[78] Laínez’s successor was a Spaniard of unimpeachable Old Christian blood—Francisco Borja. On one occasion the prince of Eboli, chief minister of Philip II, asked Borja why his Company allowed conversos in its ranks. Borja pointed out that the king himself employed known conversos:

Why does the king keep in his service X and Y, who are conversos? If His Majesty disregards this in those he places in his household, why should I make an issue about admitting them into the service of that Lord for whom there is no distinction between persons, between Greek and Jew, or barbarian and Scythian?[79]

By the 1590s, however, the Jesuits in Spain found that recruitment was falling off as the whispering campaign initiated by its enemies succeeded in presenting the Society as a party of Jews. Moreover, by a process of selection, the chief posts in the Spanish province were going to Jesuits who favored exclusion. The result was the success of pressure for a modification to the constitution of the Society, and at the General Congregation held at Rome in December 1593 it was voted to give way to Spanish pressure and exclude conversos from membership in Spain.

The Jesuits, essentially an international order, found themselves being torn apart by the issue.[80] Those who were not Spaniards objected to the way in which they were being dragged into provincial Spanish matters. Among the few voices raised in protest from Spain was that of Father Pedro de Ribadeneira.[81] Due almost exclusively to his single-handed efforts to keep the Society to the path laid down by Loyola, a reaction to the vote of 1593 took place in the order. It led to a decree in February 1608, by which all conversos who had been Christians for five generations were allowed to enter the Society. The 1608 decree was nominally only a concession, but in practice it involved the complete reversal of the decision of 1593, since most conversos in Spain had in fact been Christians for five generations, as a result of the compulsory conversions of 1492.

Another leading Jesuit, Juan de Mariana, had meanwhile in his treatise De rege (On Kingship) (1599) penned an uncompromising attack on racial discrimination. “The marks of infamy,” he urged, “should not be eternal, and it is necessary to fix a limit beyond which descendants must not pay for the faults of their predecessors.”[82] The opposition of the Jesuits was not unique. Though a few other sees followed Toledo in adopting limpieza, the statutes were never universally accepted. Of the sixty cathedrals in Spain, as we have seen, possibly no more than twelve ever had statutes. Many that had them never operated them. Leading clergy penned attacks on the system of discrimination. Melchor Cano appears to have criticized it in a paper of 1550, and another Dominican, Domingo Valtanás, attacked the statutes in a book published in Seville in 1556.[83] In Rome, prominent Spaniards spoke openly against limpieza. This persuaded Diego de Simancas, bishop of Zamora, to publish in about 1572 his Defence of the Toledo Statute, possibly the last substantial defense of the doctrines of Siliceo.

As a final example of the way in which many Spaniards rejected blood purity prejudice, we may take the case of the priest Diego Pérez de Valdivia, apostle of the Counter-Reformation in Catalonia. A close disciple of the Andalucian spiritual leader Juan de Avila, he was not only of known converso origin but had the ill fortune to spend months in the cells of the Inquisition of Córdoba, where he was accused, among other things, of stating that conversos were better people than non-conversos, and that “it is a sin to observe the rules of limpieza.”[84] None of it affected his career. Freed from confinement, he moved in 1578 to Barcelona, where he worked on the closest terms with the bishop and the Inquisition, and became the city’s most famous preacher.

The evidence is incontrovertible that zeal for blood purity never formed the dominant ideology of Church and state in early modern Spain,[85] though it was persistent enough—above all in Castile—for many prominent Spaniards to speak out against it. Anti-Semitic discrimination could be found everywhere (as in other European societies where people of Jewish origin had a visible public role), but not necessarily in the form of statutes of limpieza, which were few and haphazardly observed. The statutes focused attention, of course, because they became relevant when applying for certain posts and honors in old regime Castile and its colonies. If a member of a family were refused a post because of alleged impurity of blood, it could create a stigma on the rest of his kin. The demand for proofs threatened to expose both humble and elite persons to infamy.

The widespread rejection of blood purity proofs eventually provoked a revolutionary crise de conscience in the very citadel of orthodoxy, the Inquisition.[86] From about 1580, when Cardinal Quiroga was inquisitor general, serious doubts about statutes were raised in the Holy Office. “I was in the council of the Inquisition in 1580,” reports a subsequent inquisitor general, Guevara, “and saw this matter proceed very far, with the council resolved to petition the king about it, and putting forward many pressing reasons.” Nothing more seems to have happened until the 1590s, when Philip II himself had second thoughts. The king, reports a later writer, “was very attached to the statutes, but in the last days of his life, when experience had matured, he ordered a big committee to be set up specifically to discuss this matter, and all of them agreed with His Majesty that the statutes should be restricted to one hundred years,” meaning that freedom from the taint of heresy for three generations should make any converso fit for office.

Because of the king’s death, nothing came of the proposal, but the ground was prepared for the great attack on the statutes mounted by the noted Dominican theologian Agustín Salucio, whose Discourse on limpieza, which he had apparently discussed directly with Philip II, was published in 1599.[87] Salucio, then aged seventy-six (he died in 1601), felt that “I could not be true to my conscience if I did not speak my opinion on so important a matter.” His book was supported by personal letters from the very highest authorities: the patriarch of Valencia, Juan de Ribera; the archbishop of Burgos; the duke of Lerma.[88] Taking his stand on the innumerable abuses committed in the process of limpieza proofs—false testimony, bribery, forgery, lies—Salucio protested that “the scandals and abuses . . . have provoked a secret war against the authority of the statutes.” “It is said,” he commented, “that there is no peace when the state is divided into two factions, as it is now divided almost in half, as in a civil war.” He presented two main objections of principle to the statutes: they had outlived their purpose; and whatever good they achieved was outweighed by the harm. “It would be a great comfort to the assurance of peace in the realm,” he summed up, “to restrict the statutes so that Old Christians and Moriscos and conversos should all come to form one united body, and that all should be Old Christians and in peace.”

The work caused an immediate crisis in the Inquisition. The Suprema overruled the inquisitor general and banned the book. However, deputies to the Cortes had been sent copies of the Discourse by wily old Salucio, and they at once insisted on debating the matter. On 11 February 1600 they presented a memorial to Philip III, petitioning “how important it is to make a decision on this matter, because of the great offenses caused to God every day.” At the same time they set up a committee to report on Salucio’s paper. In a discussion paper sent by the Cortes to the committee, they complained that “in Spain we esteem a common person who is limpio more than a hidalgo who is not limpio.”[89] As a result, the memorial continued, there were now two sorts of nobility in Spain, “a greater, which is that of hidalguia; and a lesser, which is that of limpieza, whose members we call Old Christians.” Irrational criteria of purity had also come into existence: swordsmen were reputed limpios and physicians were reputed Jews; people from León and Asturias were called Old Christians and those from Almagro conversos. “All this is so absurd that were we another nation we would call ourselves barbarians who governed themselves without reason, without law, and without God.”

Another evil effect, they said, was that because of rigorous genealogical proofs the state lost eminent subjects who had the talent to become great theologians and jurists but who did not follow these professions because they knew they would not be admitted to any honors. As a result, people of no rank and little learning had risen to high posts in the country, while true and learned nobility had been deprived of the chance to pursue their careers. Discrimination against Jewish blood would only make the conversos become more compact, defensive and dangerous; whereas in France and Italy the lack of discrimination had allowed them to merge peacefully into the community. The natural consequence of limpieza proofs would be that those who were irrefutably limpios (and hence alone capable of holding office) would soon be a tiny minority in the country with the great mass of the people against them, “affronted, discontented and ripe for rebellion.”

In the summer of 1600 the duke of Lerma asked the new inquisitor general, Cardinal Niño de Guevara, to report on Salucio’s book and various other documents. In August Guevara sent the king an astonishing report,[90] which contradicted the views of the majority of the Suprema and praised Salucio as “a very learned friar to whom the whole Catholic Church and particularly the Holy See owe a great deal.” The split in the Inquisition was not resolved, and Salucio’s book remained under ban. However, with so many eminent leaders of Church and state hostile to the statutes, the floodgates to public discussion had been opened. In about 1613 a New Christian of Portuguese origin, Diego Sánchez de Vargas, issued in Madrid an attack against the statutes. In 1616 the Madrid magistrate Mateo López Bravo complained in his On the King that for those excluded by the limpieza laws “there remains no way of hope except the sowing of discord.” In 1619 Martín González de Cellorigo, a noted writer on economic matters who was now resident in Toledo and an official of the Inquisition, wrote a Plea for Justice on behalf of the New Christians: it was addressed to the inquisitor general but not actually published.[91]

In about 1621 an inquisitor, Juan Roco Campofrío, bishop of Zamora and later of Soria, wrote a Discourse[92] against the statutes. It is an interesting document, because the great debate had already passed, and he relied on exaggeration in order to present his arguments. According to him, the proofs of limpieza were a source of moral and political scandal in the nation. The stigma of impurity had divided Spain into two constantly warring halves. The outrages and quarrels provoked by the statutes had been responsible for over 90 percent of the civil and criminal trials in Spanish courts. The racialism of the statutes was wrong, for many conversos and Moriscos had been more virtuous than so-called Old Christians, and many of those brought to trial by the Inquisition had in fact been true Christians and not Jews. The great danger, the inquisitor went on, was that the greater part of the population of Spain would soon be branded as impure, and the only remaining guarantee of Old Christian blood would be one’s plebeian origin.

The inquisitor’s tract was only one of the many written on the subject. It was now the period when Spaniards were questioning the mistaken policies of their leaders, and they did not omit the theme of racialism. A censor of the Inquisition, Francisco Murcia de la Llana, in a Discourse of 1624 condemned both the racialism and the xenophobia of his contemporaries:

Look into yourself [he addressed Spain] and consider that no other nation has these statutes, and that Judaism has flourished most where they have existed. Yet if any of your sons marries a Frenchwoman or a Genoan or an Italian you despise his wife as a foreigner. What ignorance! What overwhelming Spanish madness![93]

In his famous Conservation of Monarchies (1626) Pedro Fernández de Navarrete also attacked discrimination against conversos and Moriscos, warning that “all realms in which many are excluded from honors run a great risk of coming to ruin.”[94]

Though Lerma had been opposed to the statutes, he did little to change them. It was otherwise with Olivares, who came to power in 1621 at the accession of Philip IV. Olivares never made a secret of his hostility to limpieza. At his instigation, the Inquisition in 1626 issued perhaps the most remarkable document ever to proceed from the inner portals of the Holy Office.[95] Conceding that there were now few or no judaizers in Spain, the Suprema in this 1626 document argued that “it follows that since what gave rise to the statutes has totally ceased, it would be civic and political prudence that at least the rigor of their practice should cease.” Denouncing the widespread perjuries and forgeries involved, the inquisitors said: “nobody can doubt this if he sees what goes on today in every city, town or village, even in the testimonials for familiars in any little hamlet. No one could better inform Your Majesty of this abuse, from direct experience, than the Holy Office.” After analyzing in detail the evils of the system of genealogical proofs, the Suprema went on to argue that Hebrews no less than Gentiles were members of Christ’s Church and that unity of all, without discrimination, was essential. In words that could have been written by Olivares himself, the council of the Inquisition stated that its aspirations were exactly those of Philip IV:

that your several kingdoms should act in conformity and unity for both good and ill, joining together in friendly equality, so that Castile should act with Aragon, and both with Portugal, and all of them with Italy and the other realms, to help and aid each other as though they were one body (fortunate enough to have Your Majesty as head). These considerations, so in keeping with God’s intentions, are in large measure frustrated if there remain such odious divisions and such bloody enmities as those which exist between those held to be limpios, and those held to be stained with the race of Judaism.

In this favorable climate it was possible for the Committee for Reform (Junta de Reformación) in February 1623 to decree new rules modifying the practice of limpieza. One act (involving three positive proofs of limpieza in any one of the four lines of descent) was enough when applying for office and no others were needed when promoted or changing one’s job. Verbal evidence was not admitted if unsupported by more solid proof, and “rumor” was disallowed. All literature purporting to list the descent of families from Jews, such as the notorious Green Book of Aragon (Libro verde de Aragón), was ordered to be publicly burnt. Although these measures aroused much opposition, they also released a flood of anti-limpieza writings which take their stand with the other literature that makes this reign a time of intellectual crisis in Spanish history. That the problem was appreciated in the highest circles is shown by the report given by one member of the Committee for Reform, who claimed that limpieza was

the cause and origin of a great multitude of sins, perjuries, falsehoods, disputes and lawsuits both civil and criminal. Many of our people, seeing that they are not admitted to the honors and offices of their native land, have absented themselves from these realms and gone to others, in despair at seeing themselves covered with infamy. So much so that I have been told of two eminent gentlemen of these realms who were among the greatest soldiers of our time and who declared on their deathbeds that since they were unable to gain entry into the orders of chivalry they had very often been tempted by the devil to kill themselves or to go over and serve the Turk, and that they knew of some who had done so.[96]

The reform of February 1623 was ordered to be observed “by all the councils, courts, Colegios Mayores and statute communities.” In fact, it remained a dead letter and was not observed by a single body outside the government and the Inquisition. The latter, not surprisingly, soon ceased to observe the reform. Controversy therefore continued well into the seventeenth century. The inquisitor general in 1623 commissioned a further reasoned attack on the statutes by Diego Serrano de Silva, a member of the Suprema.

From its inception in the 1580s, this impressive and astonishing campaign against the statutes of limpieza was led, at every stage, by inquisitors general and officials of the Inquisition, supported by ministers of state such as Lerma and Olivares. Their view, as events showed, might have been powerful in elite circles but was a minority one within the Holy Office. By the 1630s confusion reigned once again in the limpieza rules. The Suprema by majority vote in 1628 declared that “we are convinced that observance of the statutes of limpieza is both just and praiseworthy.”[97] Government ministers were concerned at the problems that would continue to rise in applications for posts and titles. Eventually in 1638 the crown issued yet another decree, reinforcing the reform of 1623.[98]

The predictable conservatism of the inquisitors was no guide to the state of informed opinion in Castile. As they had done in the sixteenth century, prominent individuals both inside and outside the Holy Office continued to express their disagreement with discrimination based on racial origin.[99] In his well-known Five Excellences of the Spaniard (1629), Fray Benito de Peñalosa commented that “when we come to the question of limpieza, there are things much to be lamented. . . . It is something absurd and most prejudicial.” He pleaded for reforms.[100] In 1632 a powerful and persuasive argument against limpieza was published by Fernando de Valdés, rector of the Jesuit seminary in Madrid and a consultant for the Inquisition. Basing himself on Salucio’s discourse but going further in his attack on the statutes, Valdés summed up: “Let the final and strongest argument against the statutes be that our republic has lost its respect for them.”[101] In 1635 the noted political writer Jerónimo de Zeballos, repeating arguments used by his predecessors, wrote his own Discourse against the practice of limpieza.[102]

The publication of these works, and indeed the half century or so of open controversy over the question, demonstrates irrefutably that limpieza was never an untouchable theme. Numerous prominent intellectuals from the mid-sixteenth century onwards questioned it and attacked it openly, and it would be irresponsible to deny that they did so. As we have observed above, discrimination by limpieza was never accepted officially in Spanish law, nor in the vast majority of the institutions, churches and municipalities of Spain.[103] What did exist very widely, thanks to centuries of coexistence with Jews and conversos, was a pervasive anti-Semitism that might take the form of social prejudice and discrimination, but not within the ambit of any limpieza regulations, for those existed in very few areas. The prejudice hurt most deeply and profoundly, as racial discrimination tends to do, in the sphere of status, rank and promotion. But at no point did it ever become a national obsession.[104]

On the other hand, it tended to survive precisely because struggles for status are a feature of the human condition. In mid-seventeenth-century Logroño, those who opposed the existing elite on the city council tried to base their campaign on the alleged lack of limpieza among the councilors.[105] In personal disputes and rivalries, insults used racial references as the point of attack. “Juan Ruiz de Vergara called another” who was competing for a post in a military order “commoner”; whereupon “the other responded that if he was a commoner Ruiz was a converso.” In another case, “the man called Juan de Clavijo a ‘Jew,’ but not because he was one.”[106] The use of the word “Jew” in insults became a commonplace of Spanish discourse, as the documents of Castilian criminal courts show. In 1609, in Yébenes (Toledo) María Prieta called Pedro Hernández a “moro judío ladrón infame” (“dirty Moor Jew crook”), a delightful set of expletives that got her in trouble but clearly did not seriously concern principles of honor or of limpieza.[107] The deliberate use of racial insults to discredit enemies and rivals ended only in discrediting limpieza itself. By the late seventeenth century the few remaining statutes were being openly ignored and contravened in every walk of life. In the reign of the last Habsburg, the converso Manuel José Cortizos, whose father was known to have been a practicing Jew, was nevertheless elevated to the rank of marquis; and the Madrid society doctor Diego Zapata continued his career despite being imprisoned twice for judaizing.[108]

The only exception to this strange mixture of persecution and tolerance occurred in the island of Mallorca, where the converso community suffered from prejudice. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, “although good Catholics, their sons were denied entrance to the higher ranks of the clergy, and their daughters to the religious orders. They were forced to live in a restricted area of the city, and the people calumniated them with the names Hebreos, Judios, Chuetas. Guilds, army, navy and public offices were closed to them.”[109] Despite various efforts by the government and some clergy, discrimination continued up to the end of the nineteenth century. In 1858 they were still “refused all public offices and admission to guilds and brotherhoods so that they were confined to trading. They were compelled to marry among themselves, for no one would contract alliances with them nor would the ecclesiastical authorities grant licenses for mixed marriages.”[110]

Echoes of the statutes continued in Spain through the eighteenth century. In 1751 a government minister, José de Carvajal, thought the treatise of Agustín Salucio so convincing that he ordered a copy of it to be made for himself;[111] and the prime minister, the count of Floridablanca, went on record with the statement that the penalties for impurity were unjust because “they punish a man’s sacred action, that is, his conversion to our holy faith, with the same penalty as his greatest crime, that is, apostasy from it.”[112] Despite such criticisms, the residual practice of anti-Semitism survived the abolition of the Inquisition. So far did purity of blood cease to have any connection with the Jewish problem, however, that in 1788 we find Charles III’s minister Aranda using the phrase limpieza de sangre in the sense of purity from any taint of servile office or trade, so that the synonymous term limpieza de oficios also came into existence by the end of the century.[113] Official recognition of its practice ceased with a royal order of 31 January 1835 directed to the Economic Society of Madrid, but up to 1859 it was still necessary for entrance into the corps of officer cadets. The last official act was a law of 16 May 1865 abolishing proofs of purity for marriages and for certain government posts. The removal of legal barriers could not, evidently, wholly efface an attitude rooted in the practice of centuries.

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 2a[20] 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 for “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.

“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 them[38] 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 verbal 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]

Foreign visitors who publicly showed disrespect to acts of Spanish religion (refusing to take off one’s hat, for example, if the Sacrament passed in the street) were liable to arrest by the Inquisition. This happened so frequently that nations trading to Spain made it their primary concern to secure guarantees for their traders before they would proceed any farther with commercial negotiations. England, being a market for Spanish materials, secured easier terms than might have been expected. In 1576 the Alba-Cobham agreement settled the position of the Inquisition vis-à-vis English sailors. The tribunal was allowed to act against sailors only on the basis of what they did after arriving in a Spanish port. Any confiscation was to be confined to the goods of the accused alone, and was not to include the ship and cargo, since these did not usually belong to him. Despite the outbreak of hostilities between England and Spain over the Dutch question, the agreement of 1576 continued to hold good for at least two decades after.[56] When peace eventually came under James I, the agreement was incorporated into the treaty of 1604.

In general, since the late sixteenth century the authorities in Spain’s principal ports had turned a blind eye to the trading activities of foreign Protestants, mainly English, Dutch and Germans. The peace treaties with England in 1604 and with the Dutch in 1609 merely accepted the situation. Some French merchants continued to fall foul of the tribunal.[57] In broad terms, however, the resolution of the council of State in 1612, accepted by the Inquisition, was that English, French, Dutch and Bearnese Protestant merchants not be molested, “provided they cause no public disturbance.”[58] Commercial realities imposed the need for toleration.

England secured a renewal of these guarantees after the war of 1624–30, in article 19 of the peace treaty of 1630, which promised security to English sailors “so long as they gave no scandal to others.” The proviso was not to the liking of the government of Oliver Cromwell, which took power in mid-century. In 1653 he proposed to Spain a treaty of alliance which would have given Englishmen virtual immunity from the Inquisition. The relevant articles would have allowed English subjects to hold religious services openly, to use Bibles freely, to be immune from confiscation of property and to have some Spanish soil set apart for the burial of English dead. So great was his prestige that the Spanish council of State was quite ready to concede the articles,[59] but the proposal was rejected because of the firm opposition of the Suprema, which refused to allow any compromise.

Foreign Protestants did not normally appear in autos de fe at the end of the seventeenth century, but the pressure on them continued, especially in the ports. Catalonia, for example, experienced the presence of foreigners in the form of sailors in the ports, soldiers in foreign regiments of the Spanish army and French immigration across the Pyrenees. The Barcelona tribunal had regular numbers of “spontaneous” self-denunciations from foreigners wishing to become Catholics. In the 1670s and 1680s there were about a dozen cases a year, often outnumbering prosecutions of native Spaniards. In the record year 1676 no fewer than sixty-four foreigners came before the Inquisition there, renounced the heresies they had professed and asked to be baptized.[60] There were still unfortunate cases—such as the twenty-three-year-old Englishman who was arrested for public misbehavior in Barcelona in 1689 and died in the cells of Inquisition—but in general the Holy Office was both lenient and tolerant. It is significant that after the long War of the Spanish Succession from 1705 to 1714, when thousands of heretical (Huguenot, English and German) troops had been captured by Spanish forces on Spanish territory, not a single fire was lit by the Inquisition to burn out any heresy that might have entered the country.

The fate of foreigners who fell into the hands of the Holy Office may best be examined in the well-documented history of the tribunal in the Canary Islands. The Canaries were a regular port of call for Englishmen, not only for direct trade (in wines) but also because they were a convenient halt before the long voyage across the Atlantic to Spanish America and the South Seas. Between 1586 and 1596 in particular, English traders and sailors were subjected to irregular persecution by the Spanish authorities, then at war with England. An auto de fe held at Las Palmas on 22 July 1587 included for the first time fourteen English seamen, one of whom—George Gaspar of London—was relaxed in person, the only Englishman ever to suffer death in this tribunal. The next public auto, on 1 May 1591, included the burning of the effigies of four English seamen, two of whom had been reconciled in the previous auto. The auto de fe of 21 December 1597, apparently the last in which Englishmen appeared,[61] included eleven English sailors. This is not, of course, the total number of Englishmen who were captured by the Inquisition. The lists show that from 1574 to 1624 at least forty-four Englishmen were detained in the cells of the Canaries Inquisition. Many saved their skins by “spontaneous” conversion. During the seventeenth century at least 89 foreigners became Catholics in this way, and in the eighteenth century 214 did, of whom the English were a majority.[62]

The English sailors were particularly vulnerable to the Inquisition because many of them were old enough to have been baptized in the true faith under Queen Mary, and young enough to have conformed without difficulty to the Elizabethan settlement. They were consequently apostates and heretics, ideal material for the tribunal. The long history of tolerance to traders, however, influenced the tribunal to take a more realistic attitude towards foreigners. When war broke out again in 1624 between England and Spain, the resident English were left unmolested, thanks to the inquisitors in the Canaries. Commercial reasons were the main motive behind the anxiety of the authorities not to persecute foreigners unnecessarily. The moderate attitude seems to have encouraged the traders, for by 1654 the number of Dutch and English residents in Tenerife alone was put at fifteen hundred.[63]

This happy state of affairs was almost immediately shattered by Cromwell’s clumsy aggression against Hispaniola in 1655. The Spanish authorities undertook reprisals against the community of English merchants in the peninsula, who, forewarned of the Hispaniola expedition, got out of the country before the blow fell. Officials charged with carrying out the reprisals arrived too late. In Tenerife the confiscations “in this island, in Canary, and in La Palma are of small consideration.” In the port of Santa María “there was one Englishman, no more.” In Cadiz only the English Catholics remained. In San Lucar “they were so forewarned that nothing considerable remains,” and “the majority of them and the richest have sold everything and left with the English fleet.”[64] They eventually came back, as they always did. By that time Protestant merchants had little to fear from the wrath of the Inquisition, which had grown to respect the existence of bona fide trading communities where religion counted far less than the annual profit. To this extent the Holy Office was moving out of an intolerant age into a more liberal one.

If we were to consider these activities out of their context, the Holy Office would appear to have intervened in nearly all the main aspects of religious life. This impression can lead to mistaken conclusions. Some writers have assumed that the Inquisition was an effective weapon of social control, keeping the population in its place and maintaining the social and religious norms of the Counter-Reformation. Others consider that the inquisitors succeeded in imposing on the popular culture of the masses an elite culture that was both rigid and orthodox. There is no plausible evidence to support either of these contentions, which are the stuff of scholarly discourse but vanish into insubstantial air when looked at closely. Social control was always possible when attempted within specific limits and by an effective authority, but implausible when looked for in the parameters within which the inquisitors operated,[65] namely, the three or four state units constituting peninsular Hispanic territory,[66] over a time span of more than three centuries.

In their daily lives Spaniards, like others in Europe, had to deal with many authorities set over them. They contended with secular lords, royal officials, Church personnel, religious communities and urban officials. The Holy Office also was one of these authorities. But except at times when the inquisitor came round on his visitation, the people had little contact with him and could not possibly have been influenced by him. The presence of a local familiar or comisario did not affect the situation; their job was to help the inquisitor if he came, not to act as links in an information network.

The likely degree of contact, in a world where (unlike our own today) control depended on contact, is in effect an excellent guide to whether the Inquisition managed to have any impact on the ordinary people of Spain. The evidence from the tribunal of Catalonia is beyond question.[67] No proper visitations were made here by the inquisitors during the early sixteenth century. In the second half of the century sixteen visitations in all were made, but they were always partial visits done in rotation, and limited to the major towns. These towns might be visited once every ten years. The people out in the countryside, by contrast, were lucky if they managed to see an inquisitor in their entire lives. There were large areas of the principality that had no contact with the Inquisition throughout its three centuries of history. The one thousand Catalans prosecuted by the Inquisition in the years 1578–1635 came overwhelmingly from the two main cities, Barcelona and Perpignan.[68] Even in Castile, the evidence for the Inquisition of Toledo is identical. The activity of the tribunal, in short, was restricted to the principal city (where its influence was in any case notoriously small). Out in the countryside it had neither activity nor influence. In any of the three areas that historians have studied with respect to visitations (see above, chapter 10)—Catalonia, Toledo and Galicia—the degree of social control was negligible.[69]

After generations of living with the Holy Office the people accepted it, because it had almost no contact with their daily lives. Apart from politically motivated regional protests in Aragon and Catalonia, no demands for its abolition were made before the age of Enlightenment. In the few centers where it existed, the Inquisition might even be positively welcomed, for it offered a disciplinary presence not often found in the society of that time. People with grudges or complaints, particularly within families and within communities, could take their problems to the tribunal and ask for a solution. In our world, complainants go to the police; in Spain, they went to the Inquisition. “You watch out,” an angry housewife in Saragossa screamed at her innkeeper husband (in 1486), “or I’ll accuse you to the inquisitor of being a bad Christian!”[70] A wife of forty in Manresa (Catalonia, 1665) was periodically beaten by her husband, who also refused to give her money for housekeeping; the climax came when he went to the inquisitors, showed them a statue of Christ with its head and legs broken, and accused her of doing it. They dismissed the case. A mother in the village of La Bisbal (Catalonia, 1677) had a row with her twenty-year-old son and encouraged friends to denounce him to the Inquisition.[71] A court of this type, ideal for domestic quarrels, could conceivably be welcomed by some Spaniards even in the twentieth century.[72] Acceptance was probably greater in the cities, where the numerous clergy gave it active support in their sermons and where the tribunal from time to time put on autos de fe to reaffirm its role. But even in the unexplored countryside it could sometimes have a positive role to play. The documents record very many cases of village conflict and tension that in the last resort looked for a solution to one or other of the disciplinary tribunals in the nearby city.

It would be unrealistic to assume that a sporadically active body such as the Holy Office had any lasting impact on the religion of the people, and two hundred years after its foundation the Spaniards could be as irreligious as ever. In a scene that could have come from a film by the anticlerical film director Luis Buñuel, we have the story in 1676 of Manuel Sánchez, police officer of the town of Pastrana, who went out for a country picnic one August day with his friends the town butcher and tailor, their wives and other friends. After lunch they came to a chapel one league outside the town, where Sánchez and his two friends dressed up in the church vestments and celebrated a mockery of the mass, “laughing and joking while the women there laughed at them.” After saying mass the three left the altar, “laughing a great deal, and threw the vestments down on the cases with utter contempt.”[73] When the case came up for attention by the Inquisition two years later, the three principals were directed to leave the town for a year, though the likelihood is that they ignored the order, since they themselves were the men of substance in the town and the Holy Office had no jurisdiction there.

Hostility to the tribunal at a popular level was commonplace. Very broadly, there were three main reasons for it. First, the Inquisition was a policing body, and therefore (like the police today) resented by ample sectors of the population. Its disciplinary duties were modest, but excited the hostility of those who by definition did not like police intrusion. In moments of anger, such people could not refrain from cursing the Holy Office. Where possible, the Inquisition tried to protect its reputation against them. The archives contain hundreds of statements expressing rage or contempt, ample material with which to prove the hostility of the Spanish people. “I don’t give a damn for God or for the Inquisition!” “I care as much for the Inquisition as for the tail of my dog!” “What Inquisition? I know of none!” “I could take on the whole Inquisition!” “The Inquisition exists only to rob people!” The multitude of oaths in the documents, however, no more prove hostility than the absence of such in the late eighteenth century proves support. Enmity to the tribunal was common, but most oaths were uttered out of habit or when drunk or in moments of anger or stress. The brawling and the swearing demonstrate a lack of respect, but otherwise prove little more than that Spaniards have never inertly accepted the political or religious systems imposed on them.

The second reason for hostility was when jurisdictions clashed. No other tribunal in all Spanish history provoked so much friction with every other authority in both Church and state. The conflicts were particularly intense in the realms of the crown of Aragon. In Catalonia the inquisitors complained more than once, and apparently with good reason, that the Catalans wanted to get rid of them. But, despite all the fury, its opponents never once questioned the religious rationale of the Holy Office.

In ancien régime Spain, no popular movements attacked the Inquisition and no rioters laid a finger on its property. The exceptions, to be found principally in the eastern provinces of Spain, are notable. In 1591 the tribunal of Saragossa intervened rashly (as we have seen) in the Antonio Pérez affair and was directly attacked by the angry mob. In 1619 in Valencia the inquisitors had to take refuge when rioters protested against decrees prohibiting the cult of a popular local saint, Jeroni Simó.[74] In 1628 the inquisitors of Barcelona reported in desperation to the Suprema: “the people of this land are insolent, rebellious and totally opposed to the Inquisition, and make particular efforts to do everything they can against it, and the nobility and other persons do the same in every way possible.”[75] In the revolutionary Barcelona of 1640 the mob, informed that Castilian soldiers were lodged in the Inquisition, burst into the building, smashed down the doors, threatened the inquisitors and took away documentation. An inquisitor reported:

They tried to break into several other parts of the palace in order to find the hideout where they said the Castilians were. They leveled insults at us, among them that it would be fitting to hang the inquisitors by their feet and flog them till they confessed. On Christmas Day they came back and continued the riot. They went through all the files and took away a large quantity of papers.[76]

Not only in Catalonia but in all the peripheral realms of the peninsula, including Valencia, Navarre, the Basque country and Galicia, the tribunal never ceased to be regarded as a foreign institution because of its identification with Castilian hegemony.

The third reason for hostility was the evidently alien character of the tribunal. The inquisitors were Castilians, unable to speak the languages or dialects of the rural communities into which they intruded. They were city men, unwelcome in the quite different environment of country villages. Their visits, we have seen, were very rare indeed. In contrast to the welcome they usually gave to wandering preachers, villages were seldom pleased to see an inquisitor. In sixteenth-century Galicia, a parish priest begged his congregation to be deaf and dumb when the inquisitors visited. “Let us be very careful tomorrow,” he said, “when the inquisitor comes here. For the love of God, don’t go telling things about each other or meddle in things touching the Holy Office.”[77] In seventeenth-century Catalonia the parish priest of Aiguaviva publicly rebuked the comisarios of the Inquisition when they came to check the baptismal records in order to carry out a proof of limpieza. “He told them not to write lies, and that it would not be the first time they had done so, by falsifying signatures and other things.”[78]

As we have seen, the effective contact of the tribunal with the people was at all times, outside the big towns, marginal. In sixteenth-century Mexico, “95 percent of the population never had any contact with the Inquisition.”[79] A similar situation can be found in much of Spain. In Catalonia, “in over ninety percent of the towns, during more than three centuries of existence, the Holy Office never once intruded.”[80] We have seen already that the rarity of visits through the countryside by inquisitors in effect cut off much of Spain from contact with the Inquisition. In Galicia the tribunal was almost unknown, functioning in the diocese of Ourense “for a total of only 16 months during the entire seventeenth century.”[81] In the heartland of Castile, by contrast, communications were better and contact more effective. But even in the tribunal of Toledo townspeople denounced to the inquisitors outnumbered peasants by five to one,[82] testimony to the difficulties of contact with the much larger rural population. Though the Inquisition was singularly effective in its initial campaign against alleged judaizers in Andalucia in the 1480s, therefore, there is good reason to conclude that it failed when it turned to matters that were not directly questions of heresy, and it never attempted at any time to impose social control over the people of Spain.

Though not always active, it remained in the background, its personnel eager to demonstrate that it had a real role to play. Outside of the notable periods of heresy hunting, the cases that came its way were trivial, and had little to do with enforcing the faith. If the inquisitors were lucky, they might pick up a vagrant.[83] One such came their way in 1661 in the little village of Méntrida, southwest of Madrid, and we may focus on it as an ordinary case of contact between a Spaniard and the Holy Office in the high tide of empire. Domingo de Chaves was born in Galicia in the last years of King Philip II, and at the age of nine left home to work until he was thirteen as a farm laborer in Castile, moving on to serve in the kitchen of a noble household. At the age of twenty he enlisted in a regiment that went to Flanders, where he served fourteen years, and was captured by English pirates. A prisoner in London for a month, he was ransomed and returned to Flanders in time to take part in the disastrous battle of Rocroi (1643). He was a prisoner in France for a year, and then made his way to Spain, where he took part in campaigns in Catalonia and in Portugal. After a Spanish defeat in Portugal (1659), he returned to Castile and wandered round, looking for employment and begging for his living.

Now aged sixty-five, he was begging in the street in Méntrida when the parish priest approached him and advised him either to find work or suffer his lot with patience, reminding him at the same time that Christ had died for him. “He may have died for you,” Domingo retorted, “but not for me.” Puzzled by the reply, the priest questioned him further. “I am from England,” Domingo explained, “and am not a Christian!” “If you are not a Christian,” the priest responded, “why do you publicly carry a rosary in your hand?” “Only to deceive you so that you and others give me alms!” was Domingo’s cheerful reply. The town mayor was standing behind the priest. When he heard Domingo’s outrageous words he ordered him to be thrown into the town prison. Because heresy seemed to be involved, the prisoner was transferred later to the cells of the Inquisition in the city of Toledo.

Domingo’s full and fascinating life story, covering his wanderings throughout Spain and all over Western Europe, was subsequently narrated to the inquisitors and the secretary, who copied it all down. His words had been typical for a man of his background, illiterate (he had never been to school) but basically a Christian (he knew the Our Father and the Hail Mary), and the inquisitors could hardly ask for more. It was the condition of the majority of all Spaniards. After listening to his life history, they dismissed his case without even a reprimand. The Inquisition still had a role to play when its attention was drawn to cases like that of Domingo, but the religion of the people was not in its power to oversee or control, and Spaniards were already beginning to treat the tribunal as an irrelevance.

14

TWILIGHT OF THE HOLY OFFICE

In a nation like Spain there are many nations, so intermingled that the original one can no longer be recognized. Israel, by contrast, is one people among many, one even though scattered, and in all places separate and distinct.

—ISAAC CARDOSO, THE EXCELLENCES OF THE JEWS, 1679

The large number of judaizing cases with which the Inquisition dealt in the early years of the sixteenth century marked the end of the generation of ex-Jews who had had direct acquaintance with the Mosaic law taught before 1492. Anyone punished for judaizing in 1532 at the age of fifty would have been ten years old in 1492, old enough to remember the Jewish environment and practice of his family. Approximately after the 1530s, this generation and its memories disappeared. The figures suggest that from 1531 to 1560 possibly only 3 percent of the cases dealt with by the tribunal of Toledo concerned judaizers.[1]

For the rest of the sixteenth century Spain was, with a few exceptions, no longer conscious of a judaizing problem. By the 1540s conversos had virtually disappeared from Inquisition trials.[2] In many sectors of public life, particularly in the early part of the century, there was little discrimination against conversos. Samuel Abolafia, who returned voluntarily to Spain in 1499 and became a Christian as Diego Gomez, became integrated into Old Christian society despite a brush with the Inquisition.[3] Feeling against people of Jewish origin showed itself more in prejudice than in persecution. Anti-Semitism existed, as in other European states, but the discriminatory statutes of limpieza were seldom enforced and seem to have had little impact. There were attempts to restrict socially damaging aspects of anti-Semitism. It was, as we have seen, a common insult in Spain to call someone a Jew. The Inquisition tried to stamp on the practice. The aggrieved party could take his case to the Holy Office as the body best qualified to examine his genealogy, disprove the accusation publicly, and thus uphold his “honor.” By the 1580s, as the growing feeling against statutes of limpieza shows, anti-Semitic prejudice was itself being called in question. It was a key argument of Salucio that judaizers had almost totally disappeared from the realm, “and although there are signs that some remain, it is undeniable that in general there is no fear or suspicion of them.” He may have been optimistic, but the phrase “no fear or suspicion” in a document that received the approval of the crown, the inquisitor general and the Cortes of Castile, cannot be taken lightly. Other writers admitted that most conversos were now peaceful and reliable Christians. Diego Serrano de Silva in 1623 argued: “we see by the experience of many years that families of this race are at heart thorough Christians, devout and pious, giving their daughters to convents, their sons to the priesthood.”

Many conversos of course retained their hatred for the Inquisition. In 1528 in Catalonia the tribunal arrested a man for distributing a manuscript which accused the Inquisition of lies, perjury, murder, robbery and raping women in prison. His offense, we should note, was also an offense against public law, which prohibited the distribution of slanders. In 1567 in Badajoz the inquisitors seized a notice that had been posted up in public and stated that “the property of every New Christian is at risk, six years from today not a single one will be left to arrest.”[4] We cannot doubt that in many corners of Spain there were groups of families who led crypto-Jewish lives, generation after generation, but we venture into the world of make-believe when we imagine—as some writers do—the survival of a Jewish underground that managed somehow both to remain submerged and to dominate Castilian culture in the early modern period.

By and large the conversos, if we follow the testimony of witnesses such as Serrano de Silva, appeared to be integrated. In 1570 when an inquisitor of Cuenca was asked to go on a visit of his district, he preferred not to visit the areas of Castile, “where, by the grace of God, it is believed that there are no heretics,” but instead towards the Morisco areas near Aragon.[5] Most conversos seem to have felt no affinity with their distant origins. Occasional problems might be caused by the limpieza regulations where they existed, but these were commonly overcome. In Fregenal de la Sierra (Extremadura) most of the townspeople were conversos and therefore conveniently swore to each other’s Old Christian credentials. The inquisitor reported that the people apparently believed sincerely that baptism made one automatically into an Old Christian. During an inquisitorial visit in 1576, he said, over four hundred false witnesses to proofs of limpieza were found, and “most of those who go to America from this district are conversos.”[6] Higher up in elite society, where there was more contempt for limpieza, false testimonials were winked at and some conversos had little difficulty in making their way. The wealthy Márquez Cardoso family, for example, employed agents of Old Christian origin and noble rank to swear to their limpieza.[7]

There continued, however, to be judaizers. For the most part, it is difficult to describe them as Jews, since their heresies owed more to strong family and community traditions than to active Jewish belief.[8] Most external signs of Judaism had disappeared. Circumcision was no longer practiced, since children were liable to discovery; synagogues or meeting places were no longer possible; the sabbath was normally not observed, though token observances might be made or observance even moved to a different day; the great festivals of the year were not celebrated, though there appears to have been a general preference to celebrate at least one—the fast of Esther. Many learned to eat the forbidden foods since there was no better way of dissimulation. Judaizers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were often unrecognizable as Jews. Those who clung fast to their identity, nevertheless, maintained an ineradicable faith in the one God of Israel, passed down from father to son the few traditional prayers they could remember and used the Catholic Old Testament as their basic reading.

Occasionally, the capacity to conserve age-old beliefs and customs was astonishing. One such survival group was discovered in 1588 in the heart of Castile, in and around the town of Quintanar de la Orden (La Mancha).[9] Over a period of several months, culminating in autos de fe in 1590–92, a hundred people here of pure Castilian origin were identified and punished as judaizers. They managed, without access to outside contact or their own sacred texts, to preserve faithfully (in Castilian) the key rituals and prayers of Judaism. A number of other cases came to light in the south of the peninsula in the last decade of the sixteenth century. An auto at Toledo on 9 June 1591 included twenty-seven judaizers, of whom one was relaxed in person and two in effigy (these were from the Quintanar case). In that year 1591 a number of denunciations were made in the tribunal of Granada. “In this case,” the inquisitors reported, “up to now 173 judaizers have been discovered, without counting the deceased, and every day more are being discovered.”[10] The accused were natives of the region and mostly women. Their Mosaic practices were purely residual, transmitted stubbornly over two generations by the women.[11] A large auto was held in Granada on 27 May 1593, with 102 penitents, 89 of them alleged judaizers. Further accused from the same case were displayed in the auto there on 25 October 1595, with 77 penitents, of whom 59 were alleged judaizers. An auto at Seville in 1595 included 89 judaizers.[12]

However, the high degree of integration of conversos calls seriously in question any attempt to identify them as a separate religious identity within the population.[13] The Inquisition of this period, if we may judge by its edicts of faith, had a somewhat confused image of the type of offense committed by alleged judaizers. In the late fifteenth century and the early sixteenth, edicts issued by distinct tribunals listed the offenses that could be identified. By around 1630 the Holy Office settled for a single standard edict, common to all the tribunals.[14] The text of this edict, whether through the sloth or the ignorance of the inquisitors, described judaizing practices as they may possibly have been identified around the year 1490, but which a century and a half later were evidently no longer practiced as stated. The edicts issued in the seventeenth century described full Jewish customs, when common sense indicated that only an utterly crazy judaizer would have openly practiced any of them. A typical edict, evidently using text dating from a century before, contains the following passage inviting people to identify judaizers in their midst:

If you know or have heard of anyone who keeps the Sabbath according to the law of Moses, putting on clean sheets and other new garments, and putting clean cloths on the table and clean sheets on the bed on feast-days in honor of the Sabbath, and using no lights from Friday evening onwards; or if they have purified the meat they are to eat by bleeding it in water; or have cut the throats of cattle or birds they are eating, uttering certain words and covering the blood with earth: or have eaten meat in Lent and on other days forbidden by Holy Mother Church; or have fasted the great fast, going barefooted that day; or if they say Jewish prayers, at night begging forgiveness of each other, the parents placing their hands on the heads of their children without making the sign of the cross or saying anything but, “Be blessed by God and by me”; or if they bless the table in the Jewish way; or if they recite the psalms without the Gloria Patri; or if any woman keeps forty days after childbirth without entering a church; or if they circumcise their children or give them Jewish names; or if after baptism they wash the place where the oil and chrism was put; or if anyone on his deathbed turns to the wall to die, and when he is dead they wash him with hot water, shaving the hair off all parts of his body . . .

The references made, such as to the giving of Jewish names or the eating of “meat prepared by Jewish hands,” were evidently out of touch with reality, since Jewish names and Jewish butchers had not existed in Spain for a century and a half.[15]

The genuineness of some of the “judaizing” of these years must, therefore, be called in question. The inquisitors were only too ready to identify a heresy where there was none, on the testimony of uninformed members of the public. Quite apart from recording the animosity of hostile and ignorant witnesses, the Inquisition trial papers also record attitudes and statements that were not peculiar to conversos but were shared by broad sections of the Christian population. Insults to saints, the Virgin, priests, the mass and Christ himself, were (as we have seen) commonplace among the Spanish people. It is possible that such insults were among the few options available to disgruntled conversos.[16] But they were no evidence of a tendency to judaize.

The degree of integration can be seen precisely in contexts which appear to show the contrary. The groups of families involved in the autos de fe in Granada in the 1590s were all from the well-to-do bureaucracy, occupying important posts in the city council and the high court (Chancillería). Though scores of their relatives were punished by the Inquisition (mostly the women), not a single male member of these families lost his job.[17] As in most of Spain, limpieza rules were a dead letter. The men freely went to university and occupied posts in every major institution. The 1590 cases were a mere hiccup. As the city of Granada stated, the hope was that soon all this would be a mere memory, as had transpired with the cases at Murcia in the 1560s: “not a trace remains of those events.”[18]

The relatively undisturbed life of Spanish conversos was transformed from the late 1580s by an influx of Portuguese conversos. Of the refugees who fled from Spain before and during 1492, a great number went to Portugal, swelling its Jewish community to about a fifth of the total population. Portugal did not yet have an Inquisition, so the trials now suffered by the Spanish exiles who had gone there were caused by the crown, the clergy and the populace. The permission that had been granted to Jews to reside (at the price of nearly a ducat a head) was limited to six months only, after which they were offered the same alternatives of conversion or expulsion. When the time was up the richer Jews bought themselves further toleration, but the poorer were not so lucky and many went into exile again, over the sea and across to Africa. The final imposition of conversion on the Jews in Portugal was modified in 1497 by the promise not to persecute conversos for a period of twenty years. Although the crown benefited from tolerating this active minority, communal hatreds were soon stirred, and in 1506 Lisbon witnessed the first great massacre of New Christians. Despite such outbreaks, there was little official persecution until about 1530, so that the conversos in Portugal were flourishing undisturbed at precisely the time that their generation was being rooted out in Spain.

In 1532 King João III determined to introduce an Inquisition on the Spanish model. The institution of this tribunal was delayed only by the powerful support commanded in Rome by wealthy New Christians.[19] Eventually in 1540 the Portuguese Inquisition celebrated its first auto de fe; but its powers were still not fully defined, thanks to the vacillation of Rome and the enormous bribes offered periodically by the conversos. Only on 16 July 1547 did the pope issue the bull which finally settled the structure of an independent Portuguese Inquisition.

The presence of a native Inquisition was one of the factors provoking a mass emigration of Portuguese New Christians back into Spain, which for many of them had been the land of their birth. In the three tribunals of the Portuguese Inquisition, at Lisbon, Evora and Coimbra, there were between 1547 and 1580 thirty-four autos de fe, with 169 relaxations in person, 51 in effigy and 1,998 penitents.[20] This activity, for a country with so large a percentage of Jewish descendants, was arguably less intense than in the early years of the Spanish Inquisition; but had an impact nevertheless on those affected. The move of conversos back to Spain began around 1570,[21] before the union of the crowns in the person of Philip II in 1580. The union, which had as one consequence an increase in inquisitorial rigor, probably accelerated the return movement. In 1586 the cardinal archduke Albert of Austria, at that time governor of Portugal, was named inquisitor general of the country, with the result that within nineteen years (1581–1600) the three Portuguese tribunals held fifty autos de fe, in forty-five of which there was a total of 162 relaxations in person, 59 in effigy and 2,979 penitents.[22]

It is small wonder that by the end of the reign of Philip II the Spanish Inquisition was alarmed to discover within Spain the existence of a new threat, this time from the Portuguese who had fled from their own Inquisition. Having seen the hostility of the Inquisition to racial minorities, specially the Moriscos, and to foreigners in general but specially to the French, it would be rash to imagine that the tribunal viewed Portuguese immigrants with equanimity. There is every reason to consider that their condition as foreigners, no less than their lineage, made them an immediate focus of attention.

From the 1590s judaizers of Portuguese origin began to make a significant appearance in trials. In 1593 the inquisitors of Cuenca, alerted no doubt by the recent case of native judaizers in Quintanar, began a far-reaching inquiry into a group of Portuguese families in Alarcón.[23] In the 1600s the preponderance of Portuguese among judaizers became clear and undeniable. To take a few examples at random: in the auto at Córdoba on 2 December 1625, thirty-nine of the forty-five judaizers made to do penitence were Portuguese, and the four relaxations were all of Portuguese; another auto there, on 21 December 1627, included fifty-eight judaizers, all of them Portuguese, and Portuguese represented all the eighteen relaxations, of which five were in person. An auto at Madrid on 4 July 1632 featured seventeen Portuguese among the forty-four accused, and similarly one at Cuenca on 29 June 1654 featured eighteen of the same nation out of fifty-seven cases. Finally, in the Córdoba auto of 3 May 1655 three out of five judaizers relaxed were Portuguese, as were seven out of nine made to do penitence, and almost all the forty-three reconciled were of the same nationality.[24] The ebb of Castilian Jewry was replaced by a tide of Portuguese New Christians who fed the flames and coffers of the Holy Office. Of over twenty-three hundred persons prosecuted for judaizing by the Spanish tribunals between the 1660s and 1720s, 43 percent were Portuguese by origin.[25]

Many of the converso families of the earlier generation were by now merged into Castilian society. The families around Ciudad Rodrigo, for example, were dedicated to the soil and to herding.[26] By contrast the newer conversos, who had not yet had the opportunity of integrating, earned their living in commerce and the professions. The Portuguese newcomers around Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz were traders and administrators of taxes. Of 343 known occupations among judaizers tried in Granada during the seventeenth century, just over half were traders, with shop keeping, medicine and tax collecting figuring prominently among the professions.[27] In the Cuenca area the new immigrants were small traders and dealers in money. Their aptitude for business prompted Spaniards in the area to claim, in a phrase that explains much about the subsequent persecution, that they were “very rich and grasping people” and “ate in style and did much business.”[28]

The return to Spain signified the emergence of a new tendency in the life of peninsular Jews. Till then the general trend had been towards emigration or integration. Since well before 1492, conversos and Jews had fled abroad. A feeling for Sepharad permeated the memory of exiles and helped to stimulate developments in thought and literature. Jews and conversos living outside Spain felt that they were different from others and different even from other Jews, precisely because they were from Sepharad. The word Sepharad, however, was always imprecise, because at most it could refer to the old areas of Jewish settlement in southern Spain, mainly Andalucia and part of Castile; it never signified what we know today as “Spain.” The cultivation of specific Hispanic cultural habits, which meant combining features of both Spain and Portugal, became a distinguishing feature of the communities that left the peninsula. Everywhere, the refugees clung on to the memory of where they came from. One hundred years after the expulsion, the Jews who had ended up in Tunis were still called “the community of the exile,” and in the eighteenth century their insistence on their origins made them set up their own synagogue and cemetery, separate from that of the other Jews.[29]

The yearning for Sepharad, however, changed perspectives and brought a new generation back to the land of their fathers.[30] Hundreds returned to the peninsula though they knew full well that as practicing Jews they might fall foul of the Inquisition. Their motives included a wish to live again in a cultural environment that formed part of their being, and for it they were willing to accept the Christian faith. Many also were part of the mercantile network run by Jews in Western European ports.[31] They had no problems crossing the land frontier or entering through Portugal. Several lived to regret having come back. One such was Baltasar López, arrested in Santiago in 1677, who regretted that he had not stayed in Bayonne (France), where he had his home and his wife and had at least been able to “live freely as a Jew.”[32]

The immigrants brought a new perspective into the life of the Inquisition, which now found that it had to struggle against the royal wish to tolerate such wealthy subjects as the Portuguese. Just after 1602 the Portuguese offered Philip III a gift of 1,860,000 ducats (not to mention enormous gifts to the royal ministers) if the crown would issue a general pardon to judaizers of their nation for past offenses. That the conversos could afford so great a sum is clear from their own admission that they were worth 80 million ducats all told. Royal penury gave way before such a magnificent offer, and application was made to Rome. The papal decree for a pardon was issued on 23 August 1604 and published on 16 January 1605; on the latter date the three Portuguese tribunals released a total of 410 prisoners.[33] By this astonishing agreement the Spanish crown revealed its own financial bankruptcy and its willingness to jettison religious ideals when the profits from a bribe exceeded those from confiscations.

This did not mean any more than a temporary respite in the work of the Inquisition, which resumed activity in both Portugal and Spain as soon as the terms of the pardon had been worked off. In Portugal particularly, the Inquisition resumed work with a thoroughness it had not shown in the old days, and when in 1628 the prelates of Portugal proposed new measures to be enforced against the New Christians, the latter paid Philip III another handsome sum, probably well over 80,000 ducats, to allow them to leave for Spain. The emigrants, however, left not only for Spain but also for foreign lands of the dispersion, so swelling the numbers of the communities in France, Holland and England. It was perfectly obvious to everyone that such emigration was a grave loss to Spain, and the matter was discussed with the royal ministers by the Portuguese residing in Spain under Philip IV. A memorandum sent to the king by the New Christian merchants claimed that they were the financial mainstay of the crown, since their contribution lay in

sending to the East Indies countless ships laden with merchandise, whose customs duties maintain the navy and enrich the kingdom; supporting Brazil and producing the machinery to obtain sugar for all Europe: maintaining the trade to Angola, Cabo Verde and other colonies from which Your Majesty has obtained so many duties; delivering slaves to the Indies for their service, and journeying and trading from Spain to all the world. Finally, the New Christians are today in Portugal and Castile those who maintain commerce, the farming of the revenues to Your Majesty, and the agreements to supply money outside the realm.[34]

Because of emigration, they claimed, the advantages of their services were being lost and Rouen, Bordeaux, Nantes and Florence were benefiting from it. The Spanish authorities were susceptible to this kind of argument, and to stories that the commercial powers—particularly Holland and, in Cromwell’s day, England—were controlled by Jews. The Portuguese merchants must therefore be retained in the peninsula. This became easier after the first state bankruptcy of Philip IV’s reign, in 1626. The losses suffered on that occasion by the Genoese bankers created a vacuum into which Portuguese financiers moved, although not without great protests from contemporaries. One of these, the writer Pellicer de Ossau, in 1640 expressed the following objections:

It was thought that the evils brought about by the Genoese financiers could be cured by resorting to the Portuguese, for since they were at the time subjects of the crown, to make use of them would also benefit the crown. But this was only to go from bad to worse. For since most of the Portuguese merchants were Jews, fear of the Inquisition made them establish their main trading houses in Flanders and cities of the north, keeping only a few connections in Spain. The result was that far from Spain benefiting, most of the profits went to the Dutch and other heretics.[35]

The count duke of Olivares, prime minister of Philip IV, saw matters in quite a different light. He ignored any protests which might interrupt his plans to use Jewish finance to restore the fortunes of the monarchy, and the years of his ministry in Spain were those when converso bankers flourished most.[36] His modification of the statutes of limpieza in 1623 was the first public break to be made with official anti-Semitism. In 1634, and again in 1641, he is said to have opened negotiations with the exiled Jews in Africa and the Levant, to persuade them to return to Spain under guarantees which would reverse the negative consequences of their expulsion. This radical and certainly unpopular policy seems to have contributed eventually to the downfall of Olivares.

In 1628 Philip IV granted the Portuguese financiers freedom to trade and settle without restriction, hoping thereby to win back from foreigners a section of the Indies trade. Thanks to this, the New Christians extended their influence to the principal trading channels of Spain and America. However successful they may have been in business, they could nevertheless not escape the consequences of their cultural origin, and several of them had to suffer the rigors of the Inquisition. From the 1630s to the 1680s some of the wealthiest men in Spain were ruined in fame and fortune by the Holy Office. The Portuguese financiers among them were, in addition, tarnished by identification with their nation, which was in revolt against Madrid after 1640; and with the disgrace of Olivares in 1643 their last great protector disappeared.

In 1636 the Inquisition brought the financier Manuel Fernández Pinto to trial for judaizing. On one occasion during his career he had lent Philip IV the sum of 100,000 ducats. Now the tribunal extorted from him the enormous sum of 300,000 ducats in confiscations.[37] Even more prominent than Pinto was Juan Núñez Saravía,[38] whom we first meet as contributor, with nine other Portuguese financiers, to a loan of 2,159,438 ducats made to Philip IV in 1627. In 1630 Saravía was denounced to the Inquisition as a judaizer and protector of judaizers. No action was taken by the tribunal, which continued to accumulate evidence from France and America showing that, besides his religious errors, Saravía was also guilty of exporting bullion to his co-religionists abroad and importing base money in its place.

Early in 1632 Saravía and his brother Enrique were arrested, and after the usual delays of the Inquisition Juan was finally in 1636 put to mild torture, under which he admitted nothing. He was condemned to abjure de vehementi and fined 20,000 ducats, appearing with his brother and other judaizers in the Toledo auto of 13 December 1637. From men of Saravía’s standing the tribunal could expect to make large profits, and besides the fine on Juan it is estimated that his brother Enrique was condemned to confiscations which amounted to over 300,000 ducats. Juan Saravía was no doubt ruined by a case which had destroyed his good name and obliged him to fritter away five years in an inquisitorial prison, for he never makes any further appearance among the number of bankers who served the crown.

After 1640, as we have observed, the Portuguese financiers in Spain were in a difficult position, without a native country and without official support, particularly after the fall of Olivares.[39] The wealthier among them were eliminated one by one. In 1641 a probable relative of Saravía called Diego de Saravía was tried by the Inquisition and suffered the confiscation of 250,000 ducats in gold, silver and coin. In 1646 the aged financier Manuel Enrique was arrested and condemned, and in 1647 another financier (not named in the records I have consulted) was tried at Toledo. The documents bring out the close connections between the accused. In 1646, for instance, the property of the wealthy financier Esteban Luis Diamante was sequestrated by the Inquisition. Diamante was a colleague in the banking firm of his brothers-in-law Gaspar and Alfonso Rodríguez Pasarino, of whom the latter was in prison accused of judaizing, while the former had saved himself by flight. Alfonso had a daughter named Violante who was married to the eminent banker Simon de Fonseca Piña, an astute and wealthy businessman who seems never to have come into conflict with the Holy Office. The property confiscated from the Pasarinos on this occasion probably exceeded 100,000 ducats.[40]

Apart from the wealthy few, there were whole families of ordinary conversos living in Madrid who suffered from the renewal of persecution. The 1650s saw the beginning of wholesale arrests and trials which turned into a reign of terror for the Portuguese converso minority in the capital. A contemporary living in Madrid in mid-century supplies us with a dramatic account of facts and rumors about arrests.[41] “No one trusts the Portuguese financiers any more. They are going bankrupt and fleeing from the Inquisition. I have been assured that after the auto at Cuenca over two hundred families took to flight during the night. This is what fear can do” (22 August 1654). “In Seville at the beginning of April four wealthy Portuguese merchants were seized at night by the Inquisition” (17 May 1655). “The Cardosos have fled to Amsterdam, taking 200,000 ducats in wool and 250,000 in gold. It is said this was because the Inquisition wished to arrest them, and so they are in search of a land where one lives in greater freedom than in Spain” (2 June 1655). The wealthy Cardoso brothers, who administered taxes in several provinces, fled because a blackmailer had threatened to testify that they were judaizers unless they paid for silence. Faced with the possibility of having to prove their case against false testimony, “they preferred to fly from punishment rather than remain in jail until the truth was established” (29 May 1655). The diarist thought it a serious matter that lying witnesses should be able to ruin the lives of prominent men like these.

The fact is that if it is the practice in the Holy Office, as they say it is, not to punish false witnesses because no one would denounce if they did so, then that is terrible and even inhuman, to leave the life, honor and property of one who may be innocent to the mercy of his enemies. Every day we see many people like this emerging from their travails after great sufferings and years of prison.

“On Monday the thirteenth at midnight the Inquisition seized fourteen Portuguese traders and financiers, in particular two tobacco merchants. These people sprout like mushrooms” (15 September 1655). “Since last Saturday the Inquisition in Madrid has imprisoned seventeen Portuguese families. . . . In the street of the Peromostenses they are hurriedly building a prison big enough to hold all the people that fall every day into the trap. It is said for certain that there is not a Portuguese of high or low degree in Madrid who does not judaize” (18 September 1655). “There is not a single tobacco merchant in Madrid whom the Inquisition hasn’t arrested. The other day they took away two entire families, both parents and children. Many others are fleeing to France” (23 October 1655).

The condemnation of judaizers and the flight of wealthy fugitives brought about precisely the situation Olivares had attempted to avoid: bankruptcies among the trading classes of Madrid and other cities, leading to a collapse of confidence in some leading financiers and a consequent contraction in the size of the group of bankers on whom the crown could ultimately rely. Heads continued to roll. “There has been an auto at Cuenca. Brito abjured de vehementi; he was condemned to the sanbenito, banishment and to pay 6,000 ducats. Montesinos met the same fate, but the fine was higher: 10,000 ducats. Blandon, 4,000. El Pelado, 300. . . . All were from Madrid and had lived years there; very rich men” (8 January 1656). Brito was the financier Francisco Díaz Méndez Brito, who was made to do penance this once, and then again at a later date imprisoned by the Inquisition. Montesinos was the banker and merchant Fernando de Montesinos Téllez, a prominent financier who at the age of sixty-six was imprisoned together with his wife, Serafina de Almeida, in 1654, by the Inquisition of Cuenca. Serafina was a cousin of the Cortizos family, whom we shall meet presently. Fernando was a man of enormous fortune. His assets at the time of his arrest amounted to 567,256 ducats; of this sum a substantial part was tied up in Amsterdam, so that his effective assets were put at 474,096 ducats. His household goods alone, worth 10,000 ducats, were a testimony to his affluence,[42] yet the Inquisition penalized the couple only, and left the fortune undisturbed. Fernando and Serafina were fined a total of 8,000 ducats. After this “he went to Amsterdam to live there freely, terrified of being burnt if he returned. He left his sons behind, having given them all his property. It is said that they will send the property over there bit by bit, and then one day do the same as he” (22 November 1656). Montesinos, therefore, apparently returned to the open practice of Judaism in Amsterdam. But his sons, far from following his example, continued the family’s financial services to the crown. The great deflation of 1680 began their ruin as bankers, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century they had gone into liquidation.

The liberal attitude of the Inquisition towards Montesinos’s fortune was not dictated by unselfishness. The fact was that so many wealthy financiers were appearing before the tribunal that the government took alarm at the possible threat to the financial stability of the state. On 7 September 1654 the council of Finance came to an agreement with the Inquisition that the latter was to attend only to the personal property of those accused, and that money which was involved in official contracts was to be dealt with by the former. The agreement had the virtue of differentiating between a financier and his firm. As a result we find that the imprisonment of principals such as Fernando Montesinos did not automatically lead to the dissolution of their business.

The auto de fe held at Cuenca on 29 June 1654 included among its accused the financier Francisco Coello, administrator of taxes in Malaga.[43] In 1658 Francisco López Pereira, administrator of taxes in Granada, who had once before been tried by the Inquisition of Coimbra, in 1651, made another appearance before the tribunal in Spain but had his case suspended. Diego Gómez de Salazar, administrator of the tobacco monopoly in Castile and a fervent judaizer, was reconciled in the auto held at Valladolid on 30 October 1664 and almost all his family suffered condemnation in due course.

Among the most prominent conversos in mid-century was the financier Manuel Cortizos de Villasante, born in Valladolid of Portuguese parents.[44] His astuteness and financial dealings raised him to the highest ranks in the kingdom, and he had become by the end of his life a knight of the Order of Calatrava, lord of Arrifana, a member of the council of Finance and secretary of the Contaduría Mayor de Cuentas, the principal department of the treasury. All this occurred at a time when the statutes of limpieza were theoretically in full force, so that his rise confirms what we know of their peripheral role in public life. Suddenly, after his death in 1650, it was discovered that he had been a secret judaizer and had been buried according to Jewish rites. The discovery would normally have led to the ruin of his family, but their rank and influence saved them from disaster. Indeed, notwithstanding the strong suspicion that other members of family were also secret Jews, Manuel’s son Sebastian was in 1657 appointed Spanish ambassador to Genoa; while another son, Manuel José Cortizos, continued his father’s work as a financier of the crown, obtained the title of viscount of Valdefuentes in 1668 and shortly afterwards that of marquis of Villaflores. Throughout the reign of Charles II, Cortizos was second to none in the financial services he rendered the crown. In 1679, thanks to defaulting by his creditors, he was obliged to ask for a moratorium on his transactions, even though his assets were worth several million ducats.

Another tobacco administrator in a high social position, Luis Márquez Cardoso, was reconciled together with his wife at an auto in Toledo in November 1669. In August 1691 Simon Ruiz Pessoa, a leading Portuguese financier who had managed the customs duties of Andalucia from 1683 to 1685, was arrested by the Inquisition in Madrid. In 1694 Francisco del Castillo, a member of the Contaduria Mayor de Cuentas, born in Osuna and resident in Ecija, was arrested in Seville by the tribunal.

The most eminent Portuguese financier to suffer in this reign was Francisco Báez Eminente. He took no part in international exchange but restricted his considerable fortune to the administration of the customs duties of Andalucia, Seville and the Indies (the almojarifazgos), as well as provisioning the royal army and navy in Andalucia. During his term of administration in 1686 such severe measures were taken against smugglers that, according to one source, “we came to experience what was held to be impossible in Cadiz, namely that there should be no smuggling.” Eminente was a member of the Contaduría Mayor, and in view of the fact that a good part of Castile’s trade passed through Andalucia his work was of the highest importance to the crown, which he served, as the government later admitted, “for over forty years with credit, industry and zeal that were well known.” Despite this long service and his advanced years, on 6 December 1689 he was suddenly arrested by the Inquisition in Madrid. His colleague Bernardo de Paz y Castañeda was arrested at about the same time. The arrests made no difference to the firm of Eminente, which had been handed over to his son Juan Francisco in April 1689, and continued successfully under him well into the next century.

Thus, once again in the later seventeenth century, judaizers were the main preoccupation of the Inquisition. In the tribunal of Toledo they made up nearly half of all cases, and in the 1670s in Andalucia there was a notable increase in prosecutions.[45]

The more active Judaism of the Portuguese brought new life to the conversos of Spain. It also helped to create a wholly new Judeo-converso consciousness in Western Europe. The consciousness, ironically, had its roots in Spain. Within the peninsula most conversos remained cut off from the development of international Jewry. It is remarkable, for instance, that the millenarian movement of Sabbatai Zvi, which shook the entire Jewish world and found its ablest controversialist in the North African rabbi Jacob Saportas,[46] seems to have caused no tremor in Spain, even though the Inquisition was aware of the phenomenon and warned its tribunals to keep a watch at the ports for any unusual emigration of conversos.

A feeling for Sepharad, however, permeated the thought of West European Jews outside the peninsula and helped to stimulate developments in thought and literature. Ironically, the conversos who lived abroad felt that they were different from others and different even from other Jews, precisely because they were from Sepharad. The cultivation of Iberian cultural habits became a distinguishing feature of exile communities.[47] Amsterdam afforded liberty of printing to those who wished to publish. But Sepharad was still home, and many were deeply conscious of their roots there. Among them was the young Spinoza, of Spanish origin even though he lived all his life outside the peninsula. The peninsula itself did not provide congenial ground for Jewish speculative thought, a fact that prompted the exile of one of the best-known converso figures of the period, Isaac Cardoso.

Cardoso (1603–83) was born in Portugal but when he was six his family moved to Spain, where he showed promise as a pupil of the Jesuits, became a professor of philosophy at Valladolid and in 1640 a physician to Philip IV. Direct experience of the treatment of Portuguese immigrants at the hands of the Inquisition began his disillusion with his life as a Christian. He left the country in 1648 at the mature age of forty-five and went to live as a Jew in Venice.[48] Here he published his Philosophia libera (1673), which was an exposition of atomist philosophy based on Gassendi, and owed little to Judaism. Six years later, he published at Amsterdam his The Excellences of the Jews, a polemic directed against Spinoza and written deliberately in Spanish for the benefit of the Sephardi community.

A few writers exiled themselves, but could not resist the call home. Enriquez Gómez (b. Cuenca, 1600), whose parents had been tried by the Inquisition and who himself became a Jew in France, remained so attracted by the pull of Sepharad—the only land that could provide him with a public for the language in which he wrote—that he returned to Spain in 1650 and wrote for thirteen years in Seville under the pseudonym Fernando de Zárate. While abroad in Rouen in 1647 Gómez wrote the second part of his Política angélica, a reasoned program for reform of the Inquisition: he asked for the identification of witnesses, the suppression of confiscations, a ban on sanbenitos and speedy trials. He reserved his harshest strictures for the practice of limpieza, which he called “the most barbarous seed sown by the devil in Christendom. . . . Because of it the best families have left the realm; it has created thousands of godless, has injured neighborly love, has divided the people and has perpetuated enmities.”[49] While in Seville he had the unusual opportunity to see himself burned in effigy in an auto there in April 1660. The inquisitors eventually caught up with him. He was arrested in September 1661 and died of a heart attack in the cells in March 1663. In July that year he was once again condemned in effigy in an auto.[50]

A more determined exile was Gaspar Méndez, who fled to Amsterdam, where he changed his name to Abraham Idana and in 1686 wrote a stinging attack on the Inquisition for “using unheard-of tortures to force many to confess what they have not done, this being the cause why many who have been arrested and have entered the prisons without knowing anything other than that they are Christians, have come out as Jews. This is the reason why I left a country where such a tribunal holds sway.”[51]

Iberia, despite the echoes of the Inquisition, gave to Jewish and converso exiles a common bond that made them all “men of the nation.”[52] Even those who were no longer practicing Jews felt a profound kinship, based less on religion than on origins, with the converso world from which they had emerged.[53] A few of those who contributed to the new brand of converso consciousness in Europe broke firmly with orthodox Judaism. They included Uriel da Costa, Isaac Orobio de Castro and, at one remove, Spinoza. Orobio, born 1617 in Portugal, moved with his parents around mid-century to Málaga.[54] He studied medicine at the University of Osuna. In 1654 he and his family were arrested by the Inquisition of Seville on a charge of judaizing. They appeared in an auto de fe but were lightly punished and eventually, in 1658, released. A couple of years later they left Spain. Orobio arrived in 1662 in Amsterdam, where he participated in the rich intellectual world of the Jews. In the background of the thinking of the Sephardic diaspora, there always remained the memory of Spain. Through men such as Orobio, “the social thinking of Spain found its way into the writings of the Jews of Amsterdam.”[55] The undoubted interplay between displaced conversos and the European intellectual environment has inspired Jewish scholars in our day to open up new perspectives about the relationship between the Inquisition, Jewish thought and the modern world.[56]

The closing years of the seventeenth century, no longer viewed by historians as years of decay, were thus a period when conversos not only looked to new horizons, but also contributed to new trends of thought. In the peninsula, they emerged into public life. Tolerance for them was, however, balanced by residual surges of persecution in several tribunals of the peninsula, notably in the Balearic Islands. The French ambassador, the marquis of Villars, was a witness to this blend of tolerance and persecution. He was present at the great auto of June 1680, and observed that “these punishments do not significantly diminish the number of Jews in Spain and above all in Madrid where, while some are punished with great severity, one sees several others employed in finance, esteemed and respected though known to be of Jewish origin.”[57]

Among the most significant conversos of the late century, and a man whose career aptly illustrates the strange mixture of tolerance and intolerance of those days, was Dr. Diego Mateo Zapata.[58] Born of Portuguese parents in Murcia in 1664, Zapata was brought up by his mother as a secret Jew. In 1678 she was arrested, tortured and emerged in an auto de fe in 1681. His father was arrested on suspicion, but set free. Zapata went to the University of Valencia to study medicine, and then to Alcalá, where he was befriended by Francisco Enríquez de Villacorta, a doctor of Jewish origins. He moved to Madrid and thanks to his connections managed to prosper. In 1692 he was arrested in Madrid by the Inquisition on charges of Judaism, and spent a year in the cells of the tribunal at Cuenca; the prosecution was suspended, and he was released in 1693. In 1702 he was elected president of the Royal Society of Medicine in Seville. The early eighteenth century found him rich and successful in Madrid, in possession of a large library that included the works of Bacon, Gassendi, Bayle, Paracelsus, Pascal and other philosophers, many of them prohibited by the Holy Office. In 1721 he was suddenly arrested again on charges of Judaism, and appeared in an auto de fe in Cuenca in 1725, condemned to ten years’ banishment and the loss of half his goods. He returned to active work in Madrid, helped to found the Royal Academy of Medicine in 1734 and died in 1745.

His posthumously published Sunset of the Aristotelian Forms, which appeared in 1745, was a radical departure from his earlier devotion to the principles of Galen, which still dominated orthodox medicine in Spain. Zapata shares with Dr. Juan Muñoz Peralta the sad fame of being among the last men of medicine to suffer at the hands of the Inquisition.[59] Peralta was distinguished enough to have been physician to the king and queen in the War of Succession, and was subsequently summoned to Versailles to attend to Louis XIV himself. In 1700 he was elected first president of the Royal Medical Society of Seville. Tried and imprisoned by the Inquisition shortly before 1724, he never returned to practice as a royal physician.

Thanks to the immigration from Portugal, conversos predominated in the autos of the late seventeenth century. In the Granada auto de fe of 30 May 1672 there were 79 judaizers out of 90 accused, 57 of them Portuguese. The great Madrid auto of 30 June 1680 included 104 judaizers, nearly all Portuguese. The Córdoba auto of 29 September 1684 included 34 judaizers (some of them cried out, “Moses, Moses” as they perished in the flames) among the 48 penitents.[60] Autos de fe after the 1680s show a definite decline from these numbers, indicating that the first generation of Portuguese conversos had been purged as surely as the native conversos had been at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

A special exception to this decline of persecution must be noted in Mallorca, where the burnings erupted only in the closing years of the seventeenth century. Mallorca followed a slightly different development from the rest of Spain.[61] The medieval Inquisition had existed there since 1232 and the new tribunal was introduced only in 1488. Even before this, the island had a Jewish problem which paralleled that on the mainland. The great massacres of 1391 were repeated here in riots in August 1391, and Vincent Ferrer extended his proselytizing activities to the island in 1413. By about 1435 it was reckoned that the whole Jewish population had embraced Christianity, but as on the mainland it was found necessary to introduce the Inquisition to root out the doubtful cases. The first autos de fe showed the existence of a problem. In 1489 there were 53 relaxations of conversos, most of whom were burnt in effigy as fugitives. On 26 March 1490, after fewer than 424 conversos had responded to the terms of clemency offered in an edict of grace, 86 conversos were reconciled; and on 31 May 1490 there were 36 relaxations and 56 reconciliations. Up to September 1531 every person condemned in the Mallorcan Inquisition was of Jewish origin, and the total number of “relaxations” to that date was 535 (of these, 82 were executed in person, the others were condemned in effigy).[62]

By the 1530s the same phenomenon that we have noted for peninsular Spain occurred: the number of converso victims declined sharply and a whole generation of judaizers ceased to exist. Now, however, the Morisco problem took its place, aggravated by the fact that Morisco refugees from Valencia often chose to flee to the Balearic Islands. Mass reconciliations of Moriscos occurred in Mallorca from the 1530s, and the first condemnations took place in the auto of 10 July 1535. Between 1530 and 1645 there were ninety-nine Moriscos reconciled in Mallorca, twenty-seven of them in 1613 alone.[63] The corresponding absence of judaizers is shown by the fact that between 1535 and 1645 there were only ten people accused, seven of them Moriscos. The absence of judaizers at this particular period, when they proliferated in Spain, is evidence that the Portuguese emigrants did not make their way to the Balearics in any numbers.

After a lull of well over a century, the storm burst eventually over the converso descendants—the Chuetas—in 1675, when a young man of nineteen years, Alonso López, was burnt in the auto of 13 January.[64] With him were burnt the effigies of six Portuguese judaizers, indicating that persecution in the Spanish peninsula had at last driven them out into the Mediterranean. Repercussions from this case led in 1677 to a general arrest of conversos, and by 1678 the Inquisition had arrested 237 people on the charge of complicity in what seems to have been a genuine attempt to assert their political and human rights. Now followed two great waves of devastation in 1679 and 1691. In the spring of the former year no fewer than five autos de fe were held in Mallorca, with a total of 221 reconciliations. As we have seen, the confiscations made at these autos reached a record total of well over 2.5 million ducats. Crushed by these events, the conversos waited ten years before they could stir again. In 1688 some of them, led by Onofre Cortes and Rafael Valls, attempted to recoup all in a plot which fell through and led directly to the four autos de fe held in 1691, at which thirty-seven prisoners were relaxed in person; those reconciled or burnt in effigy increased this figure to a total of eighty-six converso victims. After this great suppression, the conversos of Mallorca made no further attempt to improve their position. They remained into modern times a depressed community, subjected to calumny and discrimination.

Throughout Spain, the seventeenth century closed with a renewed attack on conversos. The eighteenth century opened with a new dynasty and an apparently new outlook on religion. Philip V marked the change by refusing to attend an auto de fe held in his honor. The year was 1701 and the Inquisition, wishing to assert its role with the new king, invited him to attend. As we have seen (chapter 10), Philip was advised by his tutor not to show up. The public auto de fe was a disagreeable phenomenon in the eyes of the French and indeed of all foreigners. With the purging of native judaizers and then of the Portuguese immigrants, it appeared that the book was being closed on the converso problem.

However, it appears that very much later the king attended an auto in Madrid in 1721. His presence coincided with a new outbreak of persecution, so that the change of dynasty involved very little change in religious practice, and the persistence of judaizers in Spain was treated with almost as much severity as in the preceding century. The toll of judaizers in the 1720s, though substantial, represented the tail end of a long history of persecution. There were several important autos in 1720 in Madrid, Mallorca, Granada and Seville, but the real wave of repression broke out in 1721 and lasted to the end of the decade. The peak years were 1721–25, when sixty-six autos appear to have been held. We should remember that the auto at this period was usually a small, private ceremony, with a couple of priests and a handful of accused, held for convenience inside a church. Between 1726 and 1730 possibly another eighteen were celebrated. The persecution of the 1720s was directed almost exclusively against Portuguese immigrants, who made up nearly 80 percent of the cases of those years.[65] Over the whole period from the 1660s to the 1720s, the Spanish tribunals prosecuted over twenty-two hundred persons for judaizing.[66] Some 3 percent of these were burnt at the stake (in the 1720s the incidence was higher, over 8 percent).[67] The majority—over three-fourths—spent a short period in confinement.

In the years after 1730 the number of autos and of accused declined rapidly, and by mid-century the converso community had ceased to be a major religious issue. With this last great persecution the practice of Judaism in Spain crumbled and decayed. Cases were rare in the later eighteenth century, the last one to occur at Toledo being in 1756. Among more than five thousand cases coming before the tribunals between 1780 and 1820, when the Inquisition was suppressed, there were only sixteen cases of judaizing, and of these ten were of foreigners while the remaining six were prosecuted only on suspicion.[68] The practice of Judaism had been to all appearances eliminated from Spain, the last prosecution being the case of Manuel Santiago Vivar at Córdoba in 1818.

Meanwhile, there were promising signs for Spanish Jews, thanks in part to the capture of Gibraltar by the British in 1704 and its cession to Britain by the Peace of Utrecht (1713). In the peace treaty Spain insisted on a condition “that on no account must Jews and Muslims be allowed to live or reside in the said city of Gibraltar.” The British made no attempt to observe these discriminatory demands, and very rapidly the Jewish community grew. By 1717 there were three hundred Jewish families there, with their own synagogue, and by the nineteenth century Jews were a tenth of the population on the Rock. When I visited the town a few years ago, it had four synagogues. Some of the leading members of the community are direct descendants of Jews who were expelled in 1492.

In Spain, the presence of the Jew continued to be felt long after this date. As long as anti-Semitic prejudices continued to exist, of course, cultural discrimination would be practiced. Nineteenth-century liberals tried to confront the issue by the strategy of passing laws against discrimination. The Cortes of Cadiz in 1811 abolished the practice of limpieza in several areas but the conservative regime of Ferdinand VII in 1824 reinforced all the old regulations. The Liberals under Isabella II in 1865 repeated the ban on discrimination. None of this affected deep-seated prejudices. When in 1797 finance minister Pedro Varela resurrected the long-forgotten idea of Olivares and attempted to bring the Jews back into Spain, his suggestions were firmly rejected by Charles IV. As late as 1802 the crown was issuing threats against those of its subjects who were shielding Jews from the Inquisition. In 1804 a French Jewish merchant of Bayonne was molested by the tribunal, whereupon the indignant French ambassador intervened to say “that the exercise of international rights ought not to depend on an arbitrary distinction about the religion in which a man was born and the religious principles he professed.”[69] The struggle continued into the opening decades of the twentieth century, where it merged into problems that are part of contemporary history.

To the new generation of Spaniards, Jews were the dark stain on the history of their country. Their shadow was everywhere present, yet they themselves were extinct. The only surviving memory of them was in the sanbenitos that foreign travelers report having seen hung in churches in the peninsula well into the nineteenth century. But if the Inquisition could claim to have rid Spain of the Jewish menace, it was still partly to blame for the bitter legacy of anti-Semitism in the country. The political right wing in nineteenth-century Spain and Europe adopted the Jew as its prototype enemy, sometimes distinct from and sometimes identified with the Freemason. The Jew, who was now little more than a myth, became identified in certain minds with all that was hostile to the tradition represented by the Inquisition. To be a Jew meant not being a Catholic, therefore not to be a Catholic meant being a Jew: one result of this popular reasoning meant that “Jews and Freemasons,” “Jews and Protestants” and “Jews and foreigners” became self-explanatory identifications. In the constant struggle waged by the right wing to preserve Catholic Spain, all that was hostile and sinister became personified in the Jew who was on the other side. The aberrations of the nineteenth century found their last heyday in the racist literature circulated in Spain during the Second World War, but anti-Semitism as a prejudice continues to feature down to our own day in public attitudes and in the thinking of both right-wing and left-wing politicians.[70]

Speculation and curiosity still hang around the issue of Jewish survivals in the nineteenth century. The question was put at its most dramatic by the English traveler and linguist George Borrow during his indefatigable journeys with the Bible round western Spain. In 1836 he was riding by night on his donkey through Old Castile, when about two leagues before Talavera he fell into conversation with a figure making the same journey on foot.

Hardly had a few words been exchanged than the man walked on about ten paces, in the same manner as he had previously done: all of a sudden he turned, and taking the bridle of the donkey gently in his hand, stopped her. I had now a full view of his face and figure, and those huge features and Herculean form still occasionally revisit me in my dreams. I see him standing in the moonshine, staring me in the face with his deep calm eyes. At last he said: “Are you then one of us?”[71]

In this way, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Borrow claimed to have come upon one of the few remaining communities of secret Jews in Spain. The incident has been attacked by writers of all shades of opinion, and there is little doubt that the speeches Borrow puts into the mouth of his new friend Abarbanel verge on fantasy. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that Borrow did meet Spaniards—as he later met an ex-inquisitor—who claimed to know of secret judaizers in the country. Several other travelers made similar reports. One of his predecessors, Joseph Townsend, reported in 1787 after traveling through the country:

Even to the present day both Mahometans and Jews are thought to be numerous in Spain, the former among the mountains, the latter in all great cities. Their principal disguise is more than common zeal in external conformity to all the precepts of the Church: and the most apparently bigoted, not only of the clergy, but of the inquisitors themselves, are by some persons suspected to be Jews.[72]

Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact remains that Judaism continued to be an issue in Spain long after the last heretic had died at the stake. On the one hand, there was a legacy of suspicion and fear based on anti-Semitism—the willingness to blame the secret and concealed enemy for all the evils of policy and history. On the other, there was a distinct atmosphere of racialism that persisted into modern times. Spain remains still the European country with the highest level of prejudice against Jews and against Israel.[73] On both counts the Inquisition had some (and not necessarily a principal) part to play, and some responsibility to bear, in the tragedy of a hunted people.

During the later eighteenth century the Inquisition became openly political in its hostility to the Enlightenment, as we have seen from the case of Pablo de Olavide (chapter 8), and lost the little support it had enjoyed among the progressive elite in Spain.[74] The relative frequency of executions in the earlier years disappeared in the eighteenth century, and in the twenty-nine years of the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only four people were executed by burning.[75]

In the epoch following the French Revolution, one of the first acts of the French regime that occupied Spain in 1808 was to abolish the Holy Office, on 4 December. The patriotic forces in the country were represented at the Cortes of Cadiz (1810), which on 22 February 1813 also decreed the abolition of the Inquisition, by a margin of ninety votes against sixty. It was an act that provoked considerable opposition from traditionalists, and on 21 July 1814 Ferdinand VII restored the tribunal, but in name rather than in reality. Effectively the Holy Office was now moribund. On 9 March 1820 the king was forced by Liberal opposition to abolish it yet again. In Rome the papal authorities objected on the principle that the tribunal had been founded by papal bull and only the papacy could abolish it. However, they conceded, “there is no reason to regret the disappearance of the Inquisition in Spain.”[76] The final decree of suppression, issued by the government of Queen Isabella II on 15 July 1834, was little more than a formality. From this date the Inquisition ceased to exist in the Spanish monarchy.

The last person known to have been executed for heresy in Spain was sentenced not by the Inquisition, as often stated, but by a tribunal that replaced it when it was suspended.[77] A schoolmaster of Valencia named Cayetano Ripoll had been captured by the French army during the Peninsular War and taken to France, where he became a convert to Deism. Returning home, he took up his post but was accused of not taking his pupils to mass, and of teaching them to say “Praise be to God” instead of “Ave María purissima.” Arrested in 1824, his trial lasted nearly two years. A secular court sentenced him to be hanged and burnt: he was hanged on 26 July 1826, but the burning was only symbolic, in the form of flames painted on a barrel. Execution of heretics had long since disappeared from the penal system of other European states.[78]

Long before it disappeared, the Holy Office had entered the realm of mythology. Since the sixteenth century, opponents of the tribunal had taken the initiative in attacking it through the useful medium of the printing press. Clinging to its rule of secrecy, it refused to be drawn into any public debate and thereby left the field wide open to its enemies, who set about “inventing” their own image of the Inquisition.

15

INVENTING THE INQUISITION

. . . a wild monster, of such strange form and horrible mien that all Europe trembles at the mere mention of its name.

—SAMUEL USQUE, IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

From its very inception, the Inquisition in Spain provoked a war of words.[1] Its opponents through the ages contributed to building up a powerful image about its intentions and malign achievements. Their propaganda was so successful that even today it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. The first common misconception, found among northern Europeans, was to consider the tribunal a peculiarity of the Mediterranean: “insupportable to free peoples, such as the French, Flemish and Germans, it is suited to Spaniards, Italians and other southerners.”[2] The facts that Germans and French were the first in medieval times to have the tribunal, and that the Flemish and English were no less brutal in persecuting heresy, were somehow forgotten. An enduring and persistent misreading of what Spain’s Holy Office was and did helped to fix in the mind an image of a nation infected by exotic ghosts that were peculiarly its own.

When the printing press first began to form public opinion, in the sixteenth century, the most diligent victims of the Inquisition happened to be supporters of the Reformation, and they set about convincing Europe that Spain’s intentions were not limited to Jews and Muslims but were now directed against Christian truth and liberty. For the first time, in the 1560s images of the dreaded (and, we have seen above, newly elaborated) auto de fe were reproduced as proof of the terrible fate awaiting the enemies of Spain. Protestant pens depicted the struggle as one for freedom from a tyrannical faith. Wherever Catholicism triumphed, they claimed, not only religious but civil liberty was extinguished. The Reformation was seen as bringing about the liberation of the human spirit from the fetters of darkness and superstition. Propaganda along these lines proved to be strikingly effective in the context of the political conflicts of the period, and there were always refugees from persecution to lend substance to the story.

Surprisingly, an early major source of anti-Inquisition propaganda happened to be Catholic in origin. With the outstanding exception of the Holy Roman Empire, every significant Catholic state in Europe, including France, was at some time hostile to Spain. From 1494 onwards, Spanish troops intervened in Italy to check the expansion of French influence, and they remained there. Ferdinand the Catholic had been king of Sicily; he now also took over the kingdom of Naples. Under Charles V, Spaniards in addition took over the duchy of Milan and established their power firmly in the Italian peninsula, where many states, including the papacy, quickly came to view them as oppressors. The sixteenth-century humanist Sepúlveda, who lived in Italy for a while, commented that “the Italians are hostile to the Spaniards because of the many ills they have suffered at their hands. It is for this reason that Italians always want to attack the Spanish soldiers in Italy.”[3] The artist Rubens saw from his personal experience that in the seventeenth century “the Italians have little affection for Spain.”[4] For most thinking Italians, the Spaniards were “barbarians.”[5]

The unfavorable image of Spain extended also to the Inquisition.[6] The most successful revolts against the tribunal occurred in the Italian territories of the Spanish crown. There were risings in 1511 and 1526 in Sicily, caused partly by popular hatred of the familiars. Ferdinand the Catholic attempted to introduce the Spanish tribunal into Naples, which already had its own episcopal Inquisition, but effective protests blocked his bid. In 1547 and 1564 there were further risings in the region because of rumors that the Spanish tribunal was going to be established.

Despite reassurances from Philip II, Italians continued to cultivate their own vision of Spanish policy. When Italian diplomats, whether from independent states (such as Venice) or from the papacy, came to visit the peninsula, they saw little to praise. The reports they sent home described a poor and backward nation dominated by a tyrannical Inquisition. Francesco Guicciardini, Florentine ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic, stated that Spaniards were “very religious in externals and outward show, but not so in fact.”[7] In 1525 the Venetian ambassador Contarini claimed that everyone trembled before the Holy Office. In 1557 ambassador Badoero spoke of the terror caused by its procedures. In 1565 ambassador Soranzo reported that its authority transcended that of the king. In the crown of Aragon, he reported, “the king makes every attempt to destroy the many privileges they have, and knowing that there is no easier or more certain way of doing it than through the Inquisition, never ceases to augment its authority.”[8] Italians felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of the conversos. Moreover, the anti-Semitism of the Spanish authorities was scorned in Italy, where the Jewish community led a comparatively tranquil existence. The Spanish ambassador at Rome reported in 1652: “In Spain it is held in great horror to be descended from a heretic or a Jew, but here they laugh at these matters, and at us, because we concern ourselves with them.”[9]

The political struggle against Spain in Western Europe, led by the Dutch and English, who opportunely possessed the most active printing presses, focused attention on an alleged threat to liberty from the Inquisition. In France the Protestants feared that Henry III, in concert with Philip of Spain, planned to establish a new Inquisition. In the Netherlands, William of Orange and the count of Egmont were so disturbed that they asked Cardinal Granvelle in 1561 to deny the report. Philip II assured Granvelle unequivocally that the Spanish model of Inquisition was unsuitable for export to the Netherlands or Italy.[10] Even in England, where he had exercised some influence as husband of Mary Tudor, no steps were ever taken to introduce the tribunal. Indeed, during that period Philip attempted to restrain the Marian persecution of heretics.[11] The truth was that most European countries already had their own machinery for dealing with heretics and had no need for outside help.

At this point a new voice was added to the weapons of propaganda directed against Spanish intentions. Even as the duke of Alba in 1566 was leading his troops towards the Netherlands through the forested valleys of the Rhineland, two Spanish Protestants were running off the presses in nearby Heidelberg the first edition of a book that would became a powerful weapon against Spanish imperialism in Europe. The Sanctae Inquisitionis hispanicae artes (Secrets of the Holy Spanish Inquisition), published in Heidelberg in 1567, states (as we have seen in chapter 5 above) that its author was Reginaldus Gonzalvus Montanus, but it seems in reality to have been written jointly by two Spanish Protestant exiles, Casiodoro de Reina and Antonio del Corro.[12] They supplied, for perhaps the first time, a full description of the functioning of the tribunal and its persecution of Protestants. At the date it was published there was almost no negative image of Spain in Europe, and the repression undertaken by Alba in the Netherlands had not yet come to pass.

Indeed, rather than Spain it was the Netherlands where the Inquisition, in the words of Philip II himself, was “more merciless than the one here.” At the very time that magistrates in Antwerp were objecting to the possibility of a Spanish tribunal, they themselves were executing heretics. The Antwerp courts between 1557 and 1562 executed 103 dissidents.[13] More heretics died in this one northern city in five years than in the whole of Spain in the entire sixteenth century. Overall, in the Habsburg Netherlands at least 1,300 persons were executed for heresy between 1523 and 1566.[14] Rumors of Spain’s intentions—as early as 1546 there were pamphlets in the Netherlands suggesting that the emperor Charles V was intending to introduce the Spanish Inquisition there[15]—reflected genuine fears but in substance were a legend to discredit Spain and support resistance. William of Orange in his famous Apology of 1581, written in reply to a decree outlawing him, turned the issue into a brilliant exercise in anti-Spanish propaganda. The execution of heretics, he claimed, was a natural occupation for bloodthirsty Spaniards: “the brightness of the fires wherein they have tormented so many poor Christians, was never delightful or pleasant to mine eyes, as it hath rejoyc’d the sight of the Duke of Alba and the Spaniards.” “I will no more wonder,” he added, “at that which all the world believeth: to wit, that the greatest part of the Spaniards, and especially those that count themselves noblemen, are of the blood of the Moors and Jews.”[16]

Rumors of Spain’s alleged intentions continued all the same to be a useful weapon to discredit Spain and encourage resistance to the military intervention. The author’s firsthand knowledge in the Artes gave authority to his account,[17] which was issued between 1568 and 1570 in two editions in English, one in French, three in Dutch, four in German and one in Hungarian.[18] From that time, Protestant Europe was taught to recognize its most deadly enemy in the terrible Inquisition of Spain. As time went on, the anti-Inquisition saga grew, thanks to the efforts of zealous Protestants to keep alive the cause for which their martyrs suffered. In England, which had just suffered the persecution of Protestants under Queen Mary, John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs (1563) warned his contemporaries: “This dreadful engine of tyranny may at any time be introduced into a country where the Catholics have the ascendancy; and hence how careful ought we to be, who are not cursed with such an arbitrary court, to prevent its introduction.”[19]

The attacks multiplied, with an increasing fixation on Spain as the source of oppression. The preparation of the Spanish Armada of 1588 encouraged the English government to launch a war of words against Philip II.[20] It financed leaflets, among them the successful A Fig for the Spaniard (1591). English sailors who had spent time in the cells of the Inquisition were given help with publishing their stories.[21] Antonio Pérez, resident at this time in England, contributed to the campaign by his authorship of the leaflet A Treatise Paraenetical (1598). At the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century propagandists in northern Europe also took part in the same campaign.

The stories and propaganda took on a life of their own, giving rise to purely fictional accounts that aimed simply to entertain their public with descriptions of humans fiendishly tortured and virgins ruthlessly violated. The campaigns in early nineteenth-century Spain during the Napoleonic wars were a fertile source of horrors claimed to have been discovered in the cellars of the now-abolished Inquisition. In one account, published as an appendix to an edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the writer described how the French troops of liberation broke into the secret cells of the tribunal in Madrid, where

they found the instruments of torture, of every kind which the ingenuity of men or devils could invent. The first instrument was a machine by which the victim was confined and then, beginning with the fingers, all the joints in the hands, arms and body were broken and drawn one after another, until the sufferer died. The second [was the water torture]. The third was an infernal machine, laid horizontally, on which the victim was bound: the machine then being placed between two scores of knives so fixed that by turning the machine with a crank the flesh of the sufferer was all torn from his limbs into small pieces. The fourth surpassed the others in fiendish ingenuity. Its exterior was a large doll, richly dressed and having the appearance of a beautiful woman with her arms extended ready to embrace her victim. A semicircle was drawn around her, and the person who passed over this fatal mark touched a spring which caused the diabolical engine to open, its arms immediately clasped him, and a thousand knives cut him in as many pieces.[22]

Learned scholars were not exempt from the tradition. One of the best examples, a narrative of Spain’s activity in the sixteenth-century Netherlands, could be found in the American John Motley’s brilliant and still authoritative The Rise of the Dutch Republic, first published in London in 1855, which presented a wholly fictitious description of the Inquisition:

It taught the savages of India and America to shudder at the name of Christianity. The fear of its introduction froze the earlier heretics of Italy, France and Germany into orthodoxy. It was a court owning allegiance to no temporal authority, superior to all other tribunals. It was a bench of monks without appeal, having its familiars in every house, diving into the secrets of every fireside, judging and executing its horrible decrees without responsibility. It condemned not deeds but thoughts. It affected to descend into individual conscience, and to punish the crimes which it pretended to discover.

Its process was reduced to a horrible simplicity. It arrested on suspicion, tortured till confession, and then punished by fire. Two witnesses, and those to separate facts, were sufficient to consign the victim to a loathsome dungeon. Here he was sparingly supplied with food, forbidden to speak, or even to sing—to which pastime it could hardly be thought he would feel much inclination—and then left to himself till famine and misery should break his spirit. The accuser might be his son, father, or the wife of his bosom, for all were enjoined, under the death penalty, to inform the inquisitors of every suspicious word which might fall from their nearest relatives. The indictment being thus supported, the prisoner was tried by torture. The torture took place at midnight, in a gloomy dungeon, dimly lighted by torches. The victim—whether man, matron, or tender virgin—was stripped naked and stretched upon the wooden bench. Water, weights, fires, pulleys, screws—all the apparatus by which the sinews could be strained without cracking, the bones bruised without breaking, and the body racked exquisitely without giving up its ghost—was now put into operation. The executioner, enveloped in a black robe from head to foot, with his eyes glaring at his victim through holes cut in the hood which muffled his face, practiced successively all the forms of torture which the devilish ingenuity of the monk had invented. The imagination sickens when striving to keep pace with these dreadful realities.[23]

The anti-Spanish attitudes are sometimes referred to as a “Black Legend,” but no such notion existed in the sixteenth century or even later. The term was invented in 1914 by a Castilian nationalist writer, Julián Juderías, who felt that Protestant foreigners and progressive Spaniards had systematically been defaming his country; in defense, he sought a label to pin on their attitudes.[24] Persistent employment of the label for ideological ends in order to rebut any criticism of Spain’s imperial record has made it both unsuitable to use and inaccurate. In any case many of Spain’s actions, as with imperial powers today, were all too real and no “legend.” Montano’s famous book attacking the Inquisition, for example, was in good measure a factually accurate account. In the same way, accounts of military atrocities committed by Spain in the Netherlands and Italy were usually based on fact. At all times, imperial nations tend to suffer—justly or unjustly—in the arena of public opinion, and Spain was no exception, becoming the first victim of a long tradition of polemic that picked on the Inquisition as the most salient point of attack. Visual images made a particularly powerful contribution, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ranging from informative prints about autos de fe to fictitious and salacious images of young virgins tortured and ravished. Until the period of the Cortes of Cadiz, all such images were produced exclusively outside the peninsula and are consequently marginal to our narrative here.[25]

During the nineteenth century we encounter the final and historically the most enduring “legend,” one created not by foreigners but by Spaniards themselves. When the British fleet under Nelson defeated the French and Spanish naval forces at Trafalgar in 1805, one of the mortal victims on the Spanish side was the naval commander Dionisio Alcalá Galiano. His infant son Antonio ended up as a leading Liberal politician, opponent of absolutism, and eventually (after eleven years as a political refugee, seven of them in London) prime minister of his country. In 1828 when in exile in London he was appointed to the first teaching post in Spanish language ever established in England, at University College. He devoted his inaugural lecture to attacking the Spanish Inquisition, which he accused of having repressed liberty of thought and crushed all intellectual initiative. No history, he said, had been written in Spain since the middle of the seventeenth century, when thanks to the Inquisition his country had entered into “absolute mental darkness.”[26] For Spaniards it was to be a period when the Liberal myth of the Inquisition was first systematically presented to them, but the tone of Alcalá Galiano’s message would not have surprised his Protestant audience. Already, the English-speaking world had played some part in preparing the downfall of the Holy Office.

In 1788, the year preceding the French Revolution, a priest from the Canary Islands, Antonio José Ruiz de Padrón, found himself in the city of Philadelphia. His ship from Spain, originally bound for Cuba, had been diverted by a storm to the safety of that port. During his brief stay he made contact with other clergy, who told him of conversations they were having at the house of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a man of unfixed religious opinions, as well as being a Freemason, and Padrón found himself drawn into the active discussions. His English was fragmentary, but he also managed to take part in subsequent talks over religion at the house of George Washington. During the conversations he was driven to admit that the Holy Office was an iniquitous body that deserved abolition. Washington pressed him to speak his mind more openly, so Padrón repeated his opinion the following Sunday from the pulpit of the local Catholic church in Philadelphia.[27] His sermon was in Spanish but did not fall wholly on deaf ears for, as he informed the Cortes of Cadiz two decades later:

There were present all the Spaniards of the frigates of war Hero and Loreto besides the crews of eight or ten vessels from Florida which were at the moment in port. As the result of a petition from the congregation my sermon was translated into English and on the octave practically the same things were said by Father Beeston, one of the two curates of the parish. The gathering of all who came to hear this sermon was so great that I myself had barely chance to occupy a narrow place in the sanctuary which I owed to the sincere friendship of the priests of the church. The Protestant ministers wished without doubt to undeceive themselves as to the sincerity with which a Spaniard would dare to talk on the Inquisition. They certainly obtained their wish. My sermon was the first ever preached in our language in that part of the country.[28]

When he returned to Spain, he was determined to work further for the abolition of the Inquisition. He managed to get elected as a deputy for the Canaries to the Cortes of Cadiz in 1812, and took a leading part in the debates the following year, with an impassioned speech attacking the tribunal, which he declared to be unnecessary to the Church, inimical to the state and contrary to the spirit of the gospel. His speech, delivered in January 1813, was decisive in winning votes for abolition. In the same period that Padrón began his campaign in the Cortes, in the city of London a Liberal exile, the Catalan writer Antonio Puigblanch, published a virulent attack on the celebrated tribunal.

Puigblanch, born in the seaport of Mataró, went to Madrid to complete his studies, and obtained a chair at the University of Alcalá. His remarkable scholarship was matched only by his profound concern for reform in Church and state. Caught up in the politics of the Cortes that opened at Cadiz in 1810, in the following year he published his influential The Inquisition Unmasked (La Inquisición sin máscara).[29] The preface stated his purpose clearly: “My intention is to destroy the Inquisition from its foundations.” Without the advantage of access to the documents of the Holy Office, Puigblanch made use of a broad range of published sources to demonstrate that the existence and the methods of the Inquisition (that is, its trial procedure, its rigor, its secrecy, its use of torture, its control of censorship) were against the rules of the Church and of civil society. His substantial volume of some five hundred pages, amply backed up by hundreds of footnotes and quotations in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French, had an undeniable impact on readers. Political events dictated that he become an exile in England, to which he fled in 1815 and where in 1816 he published an English translation of the book. Apart from a brief return to Spain, he made England his permanent home.

Puigblanch’s work was the first serious Spanish attack on the Inquisition since the sixteenth-century book by González Montano. It still makes for interesting reading, though its value is somewhat limited because it habitually chooses to employ invective rather than solid evidence. Puigblanch wrote, for example: “As befitted a tribunal created in the centuries of darkness, the laws on which it was founded are a stack of ravings of a sick mind. Perfidious in its words and villainous in its acts, it only felt itself happy when it had victims to condemn.”[30] At one point, he accuses the tribunal of blighting all “science” in Spain, but the only scientist he identifies is the Italian Galileo. Uninformed invective continued to be the main weapon employed by most opponents of the Inquisition in those years.

The Liberal campaign took concrete form in the period associated with the Cortes of Cadiz. The “patriots” who took part in the debates over abolishing the Inquisition knew virtually nothing about the subject but were not put off by that. Some may have been guided by Puigblanch, but the most concrete source of information available was Juan Antonio Llorente. Llorente, from Aragon, was a priest who worked with the Inquisition in Logroño and in 1789 became one of its secretaries in Madrid. In 1809, when the French king of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, abolished the Inquisition, he asked Llorente to prepare a history of the tribunal. With all the archives of the Holy Office at his disposal, Llorente managed to publish in Madrid in 1812 his Annals of the Inquisition of Spain, in two volumes, and the Historical Memoir on National Opinion in Spain about the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The latter served as the main source of information for the deputies in the Cortes of Cadiz when they carried out their own abolition of the tribunal.[31] When the pro-French officials of Joseph were forced to leave the country with the king, Llorente accompanied them, and published in French in Paris his great work in four volumes, A Critical History of the Spanish Inquisition (1817–18).

It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of Llorente’s achievement. With a rare impartiality (not found, for example, in Puigblanch), and a deep commitment to the seriousness of the task he had undertaken, Llorente attempted to put together from his rich harvest of papers a solid account of what the mysterious tribunal had been busy doing. Subsequently both his personal character and historical accuracy were assailed, primarily by his own countrymen, but this was the normal fate of all historical research that dared to overturn old prejudices. There were inevitably weaknesses in a work so vast that it would normally have taken several years and several scholars to produce, but Llorente’s Annals and History were the first fully documented accounts of the Inquisition to have seen the light of day in over three hundred years. They opened up and exposed to public view hitherto darkened corners of Spain’s history, and for those who doubted his account the author published not only details of his sources but also pièces justificatives to confound criticism. The History became a best seller in French, selling four thousand copies within less than a year, with plans for translation into German, English and Italian; but it also provoked opposition in conservative circles and led to him being expelled back to Spain, where he died of poor health shortly after his arrival.[32]

For a very long time, Llorente’s account dominated the field; and even today his work is recognized as a classic.[33] In the process, he and his contemporaries also laid some foundations of the myth that still dominates popular thinking. The preface to an abridged English translation of his work, published in London in 1827, has the following conclusion on the impact of the Inquisition: “The horrid conduct of this Holy Office weakened the power and diminished the population of Spain, by arresting the progress of arts, sciences, industry and commerce, and by compelling multitudes of families to abandon the kingdom; by instigating the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors; and by immolating on its flaming piles more than three hundred thousand victims.”[34]

Historians today would find Llorente’s conclusion bizarre. We know that the Holy Office had no impact on population growth, played no perceptible role for or against industry and science and executed little more than 1 percent of the number of victims stated by Llorente. However, Liberals were anxious to identify those responsible for the travails of their country, and who could be more convenient to blame than the Inquisition?

The Liberal myth was given added force by the famous Caprichos of the painter Francisco de Goya. As a solid, believing Catholic and official court artist, Goya had no reason to fall foul of the Church. However, his friends tended to be ministers who had little sympathy with the Inquisition and its political role. In the 1790s from time to time he included in his work satirical references to the Holy Office and the clergy. Among his Caprichos, for example, two (nos. 23 and 24) are explicitly critical of the Inquisition. Goya’s appointment as chief painter to the king gave him protection against malicious critics, but when some of the Caprichos were denounced to the Inquisition he decided to avoid further fuss by donating the whole series to the king. There was no doubt about his opinions. Liberals were influential in the session of the Cortes that met in 1812 at Cadiz, where they led the parliamentary debate over abolishing the Inquisition. Goya’s contribution to the proceedings was to paint a powerful satirical work (usually dated to between 1812 and 1819) depicting the tribunal.

The painting, together with various etchings on the same subject, represents an exceptional moment because it is the only occasion that any Spanish painter in four hundred years took enough interest to dedicate a substantial work of art to the theme. Unfortunately, both art and artist have become victims of an urge to produce romantic history. The artist has been depicted—in studies, novels and even in films—as target of a tribunal that was in fact all but dead and could not have represented any threat to him. And his painting Auto de Fe of the Inquisition,[35] truly an imaginative and savage expression of anticlerical rage, has been constantly and on no evidence whatever invoked as evidence of how Spaniards perceived the Holy Office. The work, a satirical collage of an imaginary event, depicting several wholly unrelated elements, portrays no auto de fe that could ever have taken place. Goya wished to attack, and did so with his unique genius; but in the end his paintings were creative fantasy rather than historical testimony.[36]

The sum total of the Liberal contribution to the image of the Inquisition was to strengthen even further the idea that the tribunal had been an enemy of the human race. We can judge of the opinion widely held among educated and progressive Spaniards through the presentation given by José Amador de los Ríos in his pioneering Historical Studies on the Jews (1848). Amador declared that under Philip II the tribunal:

extended its terrible rule more and more. Till then it had punished dangerous tendencies, and persecuted crimes of sacrilege and belief with the greatest severity and determination. Through its triumph, the Inquisition aspired to rule consciences, it wished to hold the key to human understanding, launched its anathemas against those who would not bow their neck to its projects, and welcomed into its prisons all who dared doubt the legitimacy of its law. So it was that, in a century of achievement for the name of Spaniard, when the Castilian flag flew from one end of Europe to another, while the arts and letters were cultivated by geniuses who rivaled the glories of Italy, there was hardly a single man of learning who was not thrust into the prisons of the Holy Office, victim of the envy and spite of the inquisitors.[37]

In the period that Amador de los Ríos was writing, scholars began to reassess the relation between Jews and the Inquisition. This development seems to have first taken place in England in the 1830s. Historians and novelists, conscious of the movements for emancipation of Catholics and Jews in England, began to use fifteenth-century Spain as a paradigm for the birth of a nation based on racial and religious homogeneity.[38] They were influenced by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, notably his Ivanhoe, which had a Jewess as its heroine. American works such as Washington Irving’s imaginative Conquest of Granada (1829), and Prescott’s masterly History of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837) were also influential. The public, which had hitherto thought of the Inquisition only in terms of the persecution of Protestants, was able through such publications to appreciate the key role of the Jews in Spain.

The new awareness of the Jewish role gave rise to a number of important studies, both in Spain (the publications of Amador de los Ríos) and outside it (the pioneering researches of Yitzhak Baer). The terrible reality that most of the mortal victims of the Spanish Inquisition were of Jewish origin left an ineffaceable image of the tribunal in the mind of the Jewish people and its historians. Descendants of those who survived the great diaspora of 1492 considered the Inquisition to be their own special historical nightmare. Samuel Usque, Portuguese author of Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel (1553), painted a terrifying picture of the Inquisition as a monster that “rises in the air on a thousand wings . . . wherever it passes its shadow spreads a pall of gloom over the brightest sun . . . the green grass which it treads or the luxuriant tree on which it alights, dries, decays and withers . . . it desolates the countryside until it is like the Syrian deserts and sands.”[39]

This vision created a powerful tradition about the Inquisition that rooted itself in the perception of those who felt that they were better equipped than anyone to understand how it operated. The pioneering researches of Yitzhak Baer paved the way to yet more voluminous studies that discovered in the Inquisition a way of interpreting the place of Jews in the modern world. In developing their ideas, some of these writers often discarded historical evidence and invented a palpably untrue image of the Inquisition. A respected Jewish scholar maintained that the Inquisition “maintained its hold on the Iberian population through its terrorist methods, the dependence of royal power on its support, and the apparent absence of any alternative to combat heresy,” and that “practically no one was safe from its grasp.”[40] Others projected the image of a whole people driven into exile (“the entire Jewish population left Spain . . . some 200,000”), and a Spain reduced to slavery (“under the iron grip of an institution that was feared and abhorred”).[41] These wholly erroneous presentations were obviously deeply influenced by a generation that had suffered the experience of twentieth-century Nazi Germany.

Writers managed, however, to snatch hope out of the ashes. The Inquisition came to be seen by some scholars as, ironically, an impulse to enlightenment. One writes: “The story of the conversos . . . concerns the attempt of the oppressed to break the silence imposed on them by the persecuting society, and transmit the perspective of the persecuted to future generations.”[42] A figure like Spinoza was seen as the paradigm of intellectuality breaking with the medieval past. Thanks to this, Jews could be seen as the precursors of modernity.[43] It was a novel and stimulating interpretation, but the emphasis on the role of Jews also had an unhelpful aspect. It helped to skew perspectives of the Inquisition, which came to be viewed and interpreted by many almost exclusively within the context of the sufferings of Jews, when the tribunal also in fact had a much broader significance for the sociology of the Spanish people and of the Christian religion.

Among non-Jewish historians the perception of the Inquisition was complex, and they tended, like Voltaire, to pay more attention to cultural aspects such as the question of human freedom. Llorente was one of the sources used by the American historian W. H. Prescott for his three-volume unfinished study of the reign of Philip II (1855). In this work Prescott found himself fascinated by the Inquisition, which he depicted as “the malignant influence of an eye that never slumbered, an unseen arm ever raised to strike.”[44] Prescott’s striking vision of the Inquisition may have contributed in part to the powerful image of the Grand Inquisitor created by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (who read Prescott in Russian in 1858)[45] in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. The vision of Spain in English-speaking countries was not, however, wholly negative, thanks to the Oriental exoticism conveyed by Washington Irving’s writings, and by the work of painters such as John S. Sargent, who paid a visit to Spain and did a canvas of the Alhambra (1879).

In the 1870s another American scholar, Henry Charles Lea, began collecting material for a proposed history of the Inquisition in Spain. His work, published in four volumes in 1906 (but not consulted by Spanish scholars until some eighty years later), remains still the definitive history of the tribunal. Though Lea had strong prejudices that he expressed uncompromisingly, his work once and for all rescued the tribunal from the make-believe world of invented history, and placed it firmly in the arena of documented fact. He retained, nevertheless, a deep pessimism about the political and moral future of the country he believed to have been paralyzed by the Inquisition.

It was that country where, in effect, opinions about the role of the Inquisition remained most at variance and most deeply rooted. Nineteenth-century Liberals like Alcalá Galiano were ready to attribute every failure in Spanish history to the Inquisition. All the economic problems of the country were blamed on the Holy Office.[46] Subsequently, other writers took up the theme. The persecution of conversos and the expulsion of the Jews led, they claimed, to the impoverishment and decay of Spain and the destruction of its middle class. Religious persecution led to the decay of trade and a collapse of Spanish power and wealth. Censorship led to intellectual isolation, the obliteration of learning and the crushing of science and humanism. These views, which can still be encountered in Spain’s press and centers of higher learning, provoked from Menéndez y Pelayo in 1876 a biting satire on those who identified the tribunal with all the ills of Spain: “Why was there no industry in Spain? Because of the Inquisition. Why are we Spaniards lazy? Because of the Inquisition. Why are there bullfights in Spain? Because of the Inquisition. Why do Spaniards take a siesta? Because of the Inquisition.”[47]

In nineteenth-century Spain there were conservatives and Catholics who, while not partisans of the tribunal, rejected the uninformed criticisms directed against it. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, the towering intellectual figure of his day in Spain, was perhaps the only competent defender the Inquisition ever had. In his works, which we have cited above (chapter 6), he brushed aside the labor of Llorente as “lacking in erudition, puerile in criticism, insipid in style, without vigor or charm,” and dismissed the History of the Inquisition as “a pile of calumnies, dry and sterile, malicious, indigestible, vague and incoherent.”[48] However, he did not have a closed mind, and also helped to promote research on the subject. From 1887 he was in correspondence with Henry Charles Lea, who was then preparing his studies on the medieval and Spanish Inquisitions, and helped obtain for him transcripts of documents from the Spanish archives.[49] Maturity and courtesy mellowed the older man, and helped to make his views take their place in the arena of civilized scholarship. The conservative tendency he represented, however, also continued to produce writings of a less scholarly nature. With very rare exceptions, such as the fundamental and pioneering studies by the Jesuit scholar Fidel Fita, Spanish clergy who wrote about the Inquisition up to the 1970s allowed their ideological views to influence their research.

Myths about the Inquisition became both long lasting and deep rooted among Spaniards, because they were essential to the maintenance of political ideology both of left and right. Partisan approaches coinciding with Liberal and conservative views of the past continued to survive with surprising vigor well into contemporary Spain. Both views maintained that vital aspects of Spanish culture could not be understood or explained without bringing into play the responsibility, for evil and for good, of the Inquisition. The nature and impact of the fifteenth-century tribunal consequently came to be seen as a key to the way Spain developed four hundred years later. Whenever it became necessary to explain a particularly contentious issue, there was nothing easier than to raise the cry of “Inquisition!” in the same way that one might cry out “Fire!” Since the Inquisition was perceived as a reactionary body, any attempt to modify its image in respect of the harm it was alleged to have done to the Jews, to liberty and to culture was likewise considered reactionary.

As more serious research began to be published on the theme, the legend of the bloody Inquisition began to disappear among scholars, but continued to survive among those who, since the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century,[50] made their living from it: writers of popular fiction. Perhaps the most successful (and close to fictional) work ever published on the Spanish Inquisition were the three volumes published in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the British writer Eleanor Hibbert, writing under the pseudonym Jean Plaidy.[51] Other popular writers continued in the same vein. Thanks to their labors, the subject has unfailingly excited the interest of the public. The malignant Inquisition also continued to feature as a convenient tailor’s dummy on which to hang venerable myths.[52] Spain was particularly vulnerable to this process.[53] For a long time, little or no research was done in Spain on the circumstances that presumably provoked the incredible disaster said to have overtaken the country during the lifetime of the Holy Office. Instead, writers offered the public a virtually fictional account of its role. In 1927 an author of a new History of Spain, Mario Méndez Bejarano,[54] offered his readers a verdict plucked right out of the air:

An inconceivable passivity, an incomprehension bordering on brain damage and reinforced by apathy, paralyzed all healthy action. The seventeenth century lacked any scientific or literary substance, drawing its learning and its soul only from the preceding century. Religious intolerance stifled all free thought. . . . Fear of error led to a fall into ignorance, Spanish thinkers had to learn to print their books outside the country, and there hardly remained any man of merit who did not in greater or lesser degree suffer persecution from the hateful tribunal of the Inquisition.

From these incredible lines it can be seen that many Spaniards, on the eve of a long Civil War (1936–39) in which hundreds of thousands would lose their lives, were still relying for their ideas and their hopes for the future on a vision of the past that had been totally distorted by ideology and a complete lack of serious historical research.

The distortions of political ideology were matched by the distortions in folk memory. Since the people, as we have seen, had very little active contact with the Inquisition, they preserved in their minds a fictional record of what it must have been like in the experience of the past. For some elderly Galician peasants, who narrated their thoughts to a researcher half a century ago,[55] the Inquisition perceived by their forefathers was still a living and frightening memory. The inquisitors (they claimed to remember) came in the night in carriages specially fitted with rubber wheels that would make no noise; they listened at doors and windows to hear what people were saying; they took away beautiful girls; their favorite torture—on this there was absolute unanimity among those interviewed—was to sit their victim down and drip boiling oil on his head until he died. The persistence of this bizarre and completely fantastic image among peasants in a region almost never visited by inquisitors was, one may argue, evidence of the enormous gap that had opened up between the tribunal and the society it purported to defend.

Contact with the outside world was one of the most potent causes of growing disillusion with the Inquisition. Spaniards came to realize that coercion was not inevitable in religion, and that other nations seemed to exist happily without it. We have the opinion of a pharmacist arrested by the Inquisition at Laguna (Tenerife) in 1707. He is reported to have said “that one could live in France because they do not have the poverty and subjection that today exists in Spain and Portugal, since in France they do not try to find out nor do they make a point of knowing who everyone is and what religion he has and professes. And so he who lives properly and is of good character may become what he wishes.”[56]

A generation later, in 1741, another native of the Canaries, the marquis de la Villa de San Andrés, echoed precisely the same sentiments when he praised Paris, where life was free and unrestricted “and no one asks where you are going or questions who you are, nor at Easter does the priest ask if you have been to confession.”[57] This was the spirit that threatened to splinter the defenses of a traditionalist society. It was, in one way, an urge to freedom, but in another way it was a demand for justice. The fate of the Jews and Muslims continued to be on the conscience of intelligent statesmen. When the government minister José Carvajal began to interest himself in the attacks directed a century and a half previously by Salucio against the statutes of limpieza, his main preoccupation was “the cruel impiety with which they have treated those who were outside the Catholic religion, barring all human doors of entry against them.”[58] This was in 1751. A similar approach was adopted by the statesman of the Spanish Enlightenment, Jovellanos, in 1798. For him the primary reason for criticizing the Inquisition was the fate of the conversos:

From this arose the infamy that covered descendants of these conversos, who were reputed infamous by public opinion. The laws upheld this and approved the statutes of limpieza de sangre, which kept out so many innocent people not only from posts of honor and trust but also from entering churches, colleges, convents and even unions and trade guilds. From this came the perpetuation of hatred not only against the Inquisition but against religion itself.[59]

Jovellanos’s comments did not refer to his own time, when discrimination could have had very little impact, but on the situation he deemed to have existed two hundred years before. He argued that the injustices committed against a section of society by the Inquisition now needed to be remedied. The tribunal had lost all theoretical justification for its existence, since the modern threat to religion came no longer from Jews and Moriscos and heretics but from unbelievers. Against these the tribunal would be of little avail, since the inquisitors were ignorant and incapable. The time had come to get rid of such a superfluous body, right the injustices of history and restore to the bishops their old powers over heresy.

Despite their progressive stance, Jovellanos and his Catholic colleagues in the government and the nobility were not radical revolutionaries. Their desire for reform and for changes in society was limited by the concern for stability. The Catholic liberals who opposed the Inquisition were unwilling to look too far. Jovellanos wrote to his friend, the Scotsman Alexander Jardine: “You approve of the spirit of rebellion; I do not. I disapprove of it openly and am far from believing that it carries the seal of merit.”[60] Because of this the attitude of Catholics as such towards the Inquisition ceased to be of great consequence, and was lost among the waves of turbulence created by those whose hatred of the Holy Office was only part of their distrust of organized religion.

Because the Inquisition was a conflictive institution its history has always been polemical. The rule of secrecy, unfortunately, gagged the mouths of its own spokesmen and aided those of its detractors, so that for its entire career the propaganda war was won effortlessly by its enemies. The discovery of the riches of inquisitorial documentation has helped to restore the balance of information but also created new dangers. Ease of access to the archives has often encouraged us to rely exclusively on the Inquisition for information, as though prosecution records were a uniquely trustworthy source. In consequence, an enormous amount of data has been produced, but much of it can fail to convince because it does not look beyond the documents. The result is that slow progress has been made towards understanding the social or ideological conditions in which the Holy Office operated.

Undue concentration on the actions and role of the Holy Office, while ignoring the immense range of factors that made up its social context in the peninsula and in Europe, now appears to be the biggest single obstacle to understanding the phenomenon. Attention to the Baroque display of the public auto de fe, an event that might happen once a generation, while ignoring the significance of the feasts and processions of town communities and the Church; or attention to the minute and trivial nature of day-to-day prosecutions, while turning a blind eye to the substantial number of similar offenses in secular and Church jurisdictions; are typical of the way in which research may lose its way. Fixing our gaze too closely and exclusively on the Holy Office, some of us may be tempted to imagine it as “an ecclesiastical power that shaped religious debate, reasserted Catholic doctrine, structured relations between Church and state, diffused a value system and defined boundaries of behavior and thought among the population.”[61] Every part of such an assessment would, nevertheless, be open to question. Few working scholars would apply such ambitious attributes even to the GPU in early Soviet Russia or the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, and by the same token there is no basis for applying them to the tiny handful of clergy who constituted the Inquisition in Spain.

Once the facile use of the Inquisition as an explanation for all the good or ill has been removed, the challenge to explain the evolution of Spain becomes sharper. The decay in the universities, for example, clearly owed little to the Inquisition. Theology fell into a rigid Thomist and scholastic mold. “If they prove to me that my faith is founded on St. Thomas,” exclaimed the writer El Brocense, “I’ll shit on it and find another!” But by the seventeenth century, and with no push from the inquisitors, St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle were the unshakeable pillars of philosophy in Spain. Population decline played a part in the declining intake of Castilian universities, where matriculations reached their peak in around 1620 and declined continually into the eighteenth century. No new universities were founded in Castile between 1620 and the early nineteenth century. As in all periods of economic recession, preference went to “useful” rather than speculative studies and the lack of prospects in certain subjects effectively doomed them. By 1648 it was proposed at Salamanca to suppress the chairs of Greek, Hebrew, mathematics and other subjects: Greek and Hebrew had not been taught since the 1550s. For none of this can the Inquisition be blamed. In area after area of Spanish culture it is increasingly obvious that factors were at work which it would be grotesque to try to attribute to the Inquisition.

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 begins

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, Luz 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.

39. Simon Barton, “Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, c. 1100–1300,” in Collins and Goodman.

40. Monter 1990, p. 24.

41. M. A. Fernández García, Inquisición, comportamiento y mentalidad en el reino de Granada (1600–1700), Granada, 1989, p. 110, 246.

42. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore, 1992, p. 49.

43. The principal argument in the study by Stuart B. Schwartz (see bibliography) is that the attitudes showed liberality and toleration.

44. Carrete Parrondo 1991, p. 37. The “cope” is a vestment worn by the priest when saying mass.

45. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 58.

46. Cited by Janusz Tazbir, A State without Stakes: Polish Religious Toleration in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Warsaw, 1973, p. 35.

47. I develop this point in “Toleration and the Law in the West, 1500–1700,” Ratio Juris 10, 1 (Mar. 1997), pp. 36–44.

48. AHN Inq, lib. 731, f. 172.

49. Alonso Virués, Philippicae disputationes, Antwerp, 1542, p. 157.

50. Luis de Granada, Introduction del symbolo de la fe, Barcelona, 1597, part IV, trat. 1, p. 493.

51. Mariana, book 26, chap. 13.

52. Alfonso de Castro, De iuxta haereticorum punitione libri tres, Venice, 1549, book II, chap. 14, 202. The book was first published at Salamanca in 1547. For the context of tolerant attitudes in Spain, see Kamen, “Toleration and Dissent,” pp. 3–23.

53. John Edwards, “Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria c. 1480–1500,” P&P 120 (1988).

54. Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais, Paris, 1947. Some later scholars found the parameters of Febvre’s discussion too narrow and preferred a wide-ranging definition of “atheism,” as in Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, Oxford, 1992.

55. Schwartz, p. 7.

CHAPTER TWO. THE GREAT DISPERSION

Epigraph. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 153.

1. “La Biblia de Mosé Arragel de Guadalfajara,” cited in Castro, p. 489.

2. Cf. Angus Mackay, “The Jews in Spain during the Middle Ages,” in Kedourie, p. 33.

3. Mackay, in Kedourie, p. 34.

4. See chapter 1 above for comments about the inappropriateness of the concept “convivencia” for inter-community relations in medieval Spain.

5. Jonathan Ray, “Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval Convivencia,” Jewish Social Studies 11, 2 (Winter 2005).

6. Neuman, II, 184.

7. Cited by Pilar Pérez Viñuales in Destierros aragoneses, p. 131.

8. Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia, Ithaca, 2006, p. 152.

9. Baer, II, 95–134; P. Wolff, “The 1391 Pogrom in Spain: Social Crisis or Not?” P&P 50 (1971); A. Mackay, “Popular Movements and Pogroms in 15th-Century Castile,” P&P 55 (1972).

10. Cited in Roth, p. 34.

11. Cited in Gutwirth, “Towards expulsion: 1391–1492,” in Kedourie, p. 54.

12. I here accept, in part, Roth, pp. 34–35.

13. Some writers equate the word with “pig,” but this is etymologically undocumented. By contrast there are several examples of the word being used to refer to one who “mars,” i.e., spoils, the Christian faith. Thus Carrete Parrondo in Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 53, cites a converso of 1497 saying: “Bien me llaman a mí marrano, pues que marré en volverme de la buena ley a la mala.”

14. Cf. David Romano, “Rasgos de la minoría judía en la Corona de Aragón,” in Xudeus e Conversos, II, 229–30.

15. Neuman, II, 217; Castro, pp. 491–6; Caro Baroja, II, 162–90.

16. M. A. González and P. de Forteza, “Los médicos madrileños a fines del siglo XV,” Torre de los Lujanes 31 (1996), p. 225.

17. Monsalvo Antón, pp. 70–84.

18. Castro, p. 499.

19. Neuman, II, 187.

20. M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Los judíos en el arrendamiento de impuestos,” Cuadernos de historia, anexos de Hispania 6 (1975).

21. Carlos Alvarez García, “Los judíos y la hacienda real bajo el reinado de los Reyes Católicos,” in Tres culturas, p. 88.

22. This is the argument followed by Baer.

23. Mark D. Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain, Princeton, 2004, pp. 30–31. The town, known as Murviedro in Castilian and Morvedre in Valencian, changed its name officially to Sagunto in the later nineteenth century.

24. Bernáldez, chap. 43, p. 98.

25. Asunción Blasco, “Los judíos en Aragón durante la baja Edad Media,” in Destierros aragoneses, p. 57.

26. Pilar León Tello, Judíos de Toledo, 2 vols. Madrid, 1979, II, 549–607.

27. F. Cantera Burgos and C. Carrete Parrondo, “La judería de Buitrago,” Sefarad 32 (1972).

28. F. Cantera Burgos and C. Carrete Parrondo, “La judería de Hita,” Sefarad 32 (1972).

29. A. A. Bel Bravo, Los Reyes Católicos y los judíos andaluces (1474–1492), Granada, 1989, p. 128.

30. David Romano, “Judíos hispánicos y mundo rural,” Sefarad 51 (1991), p. 364.

31. J. Cabezudo Astraín, “La judería de Sos del Rey Católico,” Sefarad 32 (1972).

32. P. León Tello, “La judería de Avila durante el reinado de los Reyes Católicos,” Sefarad 23 (1963).

33. M. F. Ladero Quesada, “Judíos y cristianos en la Zamora bajomedieval,” in Proyección histórica de España en sus tres culturas, Valladolid, 1993, I, 159–64.

34. Roth, p. 66.

35. For arguments against a decline, see E. Gutwirth, in Kedourie, pp. 54–68.

36. M. A. Motis Dolader, “La expulsión de los judíos aragoneses,” in Destierros aragoneses, p. 84.

37. Carlos Alvarez García, “Los judíos y la hacienda real bajo el reinado de los Reyes Católicos,” in Tres culturas, pp. 94–95.

38. Baer, II, 70–243.

39. Riera Sans, pp. 76–77.

40. Riera Sans, p. 77.

41. Cited in Roth, p. 66.

42. E. Cantera Montenegro, “El apartamento de judíos y mudéjares en las diócesis de Osma y Sigüenza a fines del siglo XV,” AEM 17 (1987).

43. Carlos Barros, “La tolerancia hacia los judíos en la Edad Media gallega,” in Xudeus e Conversos, I, 103.

44. Motis Dolader, “Los judíos zaragozanos,” pp. 394–95.

45. Riera Sans, p. 79.

46. A possible total of seventy people, since not every taxpayer represented a full family.

47. Sources cited in J. Valdeón, “Motivaciones socioeconómicas de las fricciones entre viejocristianos, judíos y conversos,” in Alcalá 1995, p. 75.

48. Suárez Fernández, p. 16.

49. Suárez Fernández, p. 15.

50. Suárez Fernández, p. 33.

51. Motis Dolader, “Los judíos zaragozanos,” p. 397.

52. Cf. the details in Monsalvo Antón, pp. 148–80.

53. Cited by Angeles Navarro, “La literatura y pensamiento de los hispanohebreos en el siglo XV,” in La expulsión de los judíos de España. II Curso de Cultura hispano-judía y sefardí, Toledo, 1993, p. 57.

54. Cited by Valdeón, p. 76, in Alcalá 1995.

55. Cf. Roth, pp. 74–78. Also Kriegel, in Xudeus e Conversos, I, 185: “la plus grosse partie de la documentation témoigne indiscutablement d’une solidarité des Juifs avec les conversos.”

56. “The majority of Jews had no love for the conversos:” Roth, p. 215.

57. E. Marín, “Inventario de bienes muebles de judíos en 1492,” Sefarad 48 (1988), n. 65.

58. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 77. The statement is of 1502.

59. Cited in Roth, p. 241.

60. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 23.

61. C. Carrete Parrondo, “Los judaizantes castellanos,” in Inquisición y conversos, p. 198.

62. Cited in Roth, p. 214.

63. D’Abrera, pp. 62–65.

64. Fidel Fita, “Nuevos datos para escribir la historia de los judíos españoles: La Inquisición en Jérez de la Frontera,” BRAH 15 (1889).

65. Roth, pp. 283–84.

66. Motis Dolader, “Los judíos zaragozanos,” p. 405.

67. Suárez Fernández, p. 41.

68. For England, see the excellent study by Robin R. Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290, Cambridge, 1998.

69. Suárez Fernández, p. 20.

70. W. H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, 3rd edn., London, 1841, p. 269, n. 1.

71. J. Meseguer Fernández, “La Inquisición en Granada,” in Nueva visión, p. 386.

72. Stephen Haliczer, “The Castilian Urban Patriciate and the Jewish Expulsions of 1480–92,” AHR 78 (Feb. 1973).

73. Cf. Maurice Kriegel, “La prise d’une décision: L’expulsion des juifs d’Espagne en 1492,” RH 260 (1978).

74. The text of the original decree of expulsion, from which these quotations are taken, has never been definitively established, and different scholars give different readings. See the short discussion by Carlos Carrete Parrondo, “Reflexiones sobre el decreto de expulsión”, in La expulsión de los judíos, pp. 111–17.

75. Netanyahu 1968, pp. 54–56.

76. Printed in R. Conde, La expulsión de los judíos de la Corona de Aragón, Saragossa, 1991, doc. 1; also in Alcalá 1995, p.,129.

77. León Tello, Judíos de Toledo, I, 347.

78. Motis Dolader, in Destierros aragoneses, p. 105.

79. Fontes Iudaeorum, I, 137.

80. I adopt the form used by Roth, p. 80. The sources refer to Seneor as chief “rab” or “rabbi,” but he was obviously a political rather than a religious figure.

81. Fidel Fita, “La verdad sobre el martirio del Santo Niño de La Guardia,” BRAH 11 (1887); H. C. Lea, “El Santo Niño de La Guardia,” in his Chapters from the Religious History of Spain, Philadelphia, 1890, pp. 437–68; Baer, II, 398–423.

82. Danièle Iancu, Les juifs de Provence, 1475–1501: De l’insertion à l’expulsion, Aix, 1986; Shlomo Simonsohn, The Jews in the Duchy of Milan, 2 vols., Jerusalem, 1982, I, xxiv.

83. Bernard Dov Weinryb, The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100 to 1800, Philadelphia, 1972.

84. Yitzhak Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien (Urkunden und Regesten II), Berlin, 1936, pp. 411–13.

85. Motis Dolader, in Destierros aragoneses, p. 111.

86. Cited by Maurice Kriegel, “El edicto de expulsión: motivos, fines, contexto,” in Alcalá 1995, p. 142.

87. The theme of Jewish providentialism has attracted a multitude of learned commentaries, but is marginal to the theme of this chapter. An article with useful references is Claude B. Stuczynski, “Providentialism in Early Modern Catholic Iberia: Competing Influences of Hebrew Political Traditions,” Hebraic Political Studies 3, 4 (Fall 2008), pp. 377–95.

88. C. Carrete Parrondo, “Movimientos mesiánicos en las juderías de Castilla,” in Tres culturas, p. 68; J. N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250–1516, vol.II, 1410–1516, Oxford, 1978, pp. 419, 451.

89. Alain Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica, Valladolid, 1983, p. 305.

90. Mariana, book 26, chap. 1.

91. Raphael, p. 53.

92. Henry Kamen, “The Mediterranean and the Expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492,” P&P 119 (May 1988), pp. 34–45; M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Las juderías de Castilla según algunos ‘servicios’ fiscales,” Sefarad 31 (1971).

93. Riera Sans, p. 78.

94. Kamen, “The Mediterranean,” p. 37, suggests ten thousand. Riera Sans suggests a total of some nine thousand.

95. José Hinojosa Montalvo, “La demografía de la aljama judía de Sagunto,” Sefarad 55 (1995), p. 274. On the name Sagunto, see note 23 of this chapter.

96. Bernáldez, chaps. 110, 112.

97. Solomon Ibn Verga, in Raphael, p. 97.

98. Joseph Ha Cohen and Rabbi Capsali, in Raphael, pp. 17, 106.

99. For Aragon, A. Blasco, “Los judíos del reino de Aragón. Balance de los estudios,” Actes del primer col. loqui d’història dels jueus a la Corona d’Aragó, Lleida, 1991.

100. C. Carrete Parrondo 1991, p. 35.

101. Cf. Motis Dolader, “Las comunidades judías en la corona de Aragón,” in Alcalá 1995, pp. 32–54.

102. Raphael, p. 120.

103. Zeldes, passim. For the Jews of Sicily, see also Shlomo Simonsohn, The Jews of Sicily, 3 vols., Leiden, 1997–2001.

104. Zeldes, p. 24.

105. Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, New Haven, 2009, p. 5.

106. Rabbi Capsali, for instance (Raphael, p. 18), does not list Turkey as one of the immediate destinations of the exiles. Only later, he says (Raphael, pp. 20, 26), did some Jews from Naples go there.

107. Cited Robert Bonfil, “Italia: Un triste epílogo,” in Alcalá 1995, p. 249.

108. Rabbi Ha Levi, in Raphael, p. 87.

109. Fontes Iudaeorum, I, 133, order of 25 June 1492.

110. Gampel, p. 107.

111. Ladero 1988, p. 255.

112. Ladero 1988, p. 253.

113. Fontes Iudaeorum, I, 75.

114. Cf. Raphael, p. 43.

115. The point, well known to specialists in the period, is reaffirmed by Roth, p. 313.

116. Cantera Burgos and Carrete Parrondo, “La judería de Buitrago.”

117. J. Gómez-Menor, “Un judío converso de 1498. Diego Gómez de Toledo (Semuel Abolafia) y su proceso inquisitorial,” Sefarad 33 (1973).

118. Fontes Iudaeorum, I, 75.

119. González and de Forteza, “Los médicos madrileños a fines del siglo XV,” p. 223.

120. My conclusion, affirmed long ago, is supported by Roth, p. 315: “The truth is that the monarchs had no master plan for unification of the faith”; and by Kriegel, in Xudeus e Conversos, I, 188: “aucun document rédigé à l’inspiration des souverains ne fait reférence à la notion de la désirabilité d’une liquidation du pluralisme religieux.”

121. The point, made thirty years ago by Domínguez Ortiz and by myself, has been re-affirmed by a Jewish scholar: Roth, pp. 272–75.

122. The central argument of Netanyahu’s 1995 study, that the expulsion was just one element in a general drive to eliminate all Jews, and therefore racist rather than religious in motive, is not generally accepted by scholars.

123. Suárez Fernández, p. 41.

124. There is a useful summary of some post-exile attitudes among Jews in J. N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700, Ann Arbor, 2000, pp. 162–78.

125. Raphael, p. 42.

126. Raphael, p. 54.

127. Netanyahu 1968, pp. 201–4.

128. Netanyahu 1968, p. 249.

129. Eric Lawee, Isaac Abarbanel’s Stance toward Tradition, New York, 2001, p. 162.

130. E. Gutwirth, “Reacciones ante la expulsión,” in Alcalá 1995, p. 207.

131. George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, Providence, 1965.

132. Joseph E. Gillet, “Traces of the Wandering Jew in Spain,” Romanic Review 22 (1931), pp. 16–27.

133. Raphael, pp. 17, 43.

134. Jerónimo de Zurita, Historia del rey Don Hernando el Catholico, 6 vols., Saragossa, 1610, I, 9.

135. Luis de Páramo, De origine et progressu Officii Sanctae Inquisitionis, Madrid, 1598, book II, título 2, chap. 6, p. 165.

136. One hundred years after the expulsion of Jews from Spain, there was a small Jewish community in Oran, numbering seventy persons. At the end of the reign of Philip II, moves were made to expel them from Oran as well as from Milan. In the event nothing happened, and Jews continued to be tolerated there until the end of the seventeenth century. For the expulsions from Oran in 1669, see Kamen 1980, pp. 306–7; Jonathan Israel, “The Jews of Spanish Orán and Their Expulsion in 1669,” in Conflicts of Empires. Spain, the Low Countries and the Struggle for World Supremacy, 1585–1713, London, 1997; and J.-F. Schaub, Les juifs du roi d’Espagne: Oran, 1509–1669, Paris, 1999.

137. There is a vast literature on conversos and the Inquisition in the New World. Apart from the classic works by Henry Charles Lea, several recent scholars have produced excellent studies. For a modern survey, see Ricardo Escobar Quevedo, Inquisición y judaizantes en América española (siglos XVI-XVII), prologue by Charles Amiel, Bogotá, 2008. More popular in approach is Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History, New York, 2009.

138. Bernáldez, chap. 112, p. 262.

CHAPTER THREE. THE COMING OF THE INQUISITION

Epigraph. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 56.

1. There is a vast, and often polemical, literature on the subject. This chapter offers a brief introduction related to the coming of the Inquisition. Some scholars prefer the term “crypto-Jew” to “converso”; this presupposes (incorrectly) that the person was always a secret Jew, and its use is avoided here.

2. The “crown” of Aragon was made up of three principal regions: the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, and the principality of Catalonia.

3. F. Márquez Villanueva, “Conversos y cargos concejiles en el siglo XV,” RABM 63, 2 (1957).

4. Cited by J. Valdeón, “Fricciones entre viejocristianos, judíos y conversos,” p. 83, in Alcalá 1995.

5. P. L. Lorenzo Cadarso, “Oligarquías conversas de Cuenca y Guadalajara (siglos XV y XVI),” Hispania 186 (1994), p. 59.

6. Lorenzo Cadarso, “Oligarquías conversas,” p. 58.

7. Outline of the family in Roth, pp. 136–50. Also L. Serrano, Los conversos D. Pablo de Santa María y D. Alfonso de Cartagena, Madrid, 1942, pp. 23–24.

8. By contrast, there is no reason whatever for supposing—as is often done—that the first archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, was of converso origin.

9. Ladero 1984, p. 47.

10. “Copia de los sanvenitos que corresponden a la villa de Aguilar de la Frontera,” BL Add. 21447, ff. 137–39.

11. Cantera Burgos and León Tello, pp. xi–xii.

12. A. Rodríguez Moñino, “Les Judaisants à Badajoz de 1493 à 1599,” REJ (1956).

13. Blázquez Miguel, p. 40.

14. M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Sevilla y los conversos: Los ‘habilitados’ en 1495,” Sefarad 52 (1992), pp. 438–39.

15. Domínguez Ortiz 1955, p. 217–19.

16. For Quevedo, the Jewish conspiracy and Olivares, cf. J. H. Elliott, The Count Duke of Olivares, London and New Haven, 1986, pp. 11, 556, 558.

17. Caro Baroja, II, 162–244.

18. Inquisitors to Suprema, 28 Apr. 1579, AHN Inq, leg. 2704.

19. Published by R. Amador de los Ríos in the Revista de España 105–6 (1885).

20. Printed in Caro Baroja, III, 287–99.

21. Caro Baroja, II, 264.

22. Good details in Roth, chap. 6. Another approach to converso intellectuals is Claude B. Stuczynski, “Pro-Converso Apologetics and Biblical Exegesis,” in Jonathan Dexter, Arturo Prats, eds., The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain, Leiden, 2012.

23. B. Netanyahu, “Fray Alonso de Espina: Was He a New Christian?” PAAJR 43 (1976).

24. Beinart 1981, p. 20.

25. E. Benito Ruano, Toledo en el siglo XV, Madrid, 1961, appendices 16, 18, 19, 22, 44.

26. L. Delgado Merchán, Historia documentada de Ciudad Real, Ciudad Real, 1907, p. 419.

27. Caro Baroja, III, 279–81.

28. Ladero 1984, p. 30.

29. Ladero 1984, p. 31.

30. For tensions in Córdoba, cf. John Edwards, “The Judeoconversos in the Urban Life of Córdoba, 1450–1520,” in Villes et sociétés urbaines au moyen age, Paris, 1994.

31. Stephen Haliczer, “The Castilian Urban Patriciate and the Jewish Expulsions of 1480–92,” AHR 78 (Feb. 1973).

32. A survey of the central issues is given in Gitlitz, chap. 20, “Conversion.”

33. Netanyahu 1995, pp. 208–9; Roth, p. 32.

34. Roth, p. 40.

35. I follow the discussion in Netanyahu 1995, pp. 848ff, though I do not accept his dating the document to 1467.

36. Baer, II, 424.

37. Beinart 1981, p. 242.

38. Benzion Netanyahu, most notably, refuses to use Inquisition documents in his many influential studies. See also Ellis Rivkin, “How Jewish were the New Christians?” in Hispania Judaica. I: History, Barcelona, 1980.

39. For a critical analysis of Netanyahu’s exposition, for example, see Martha G. Krow-Lucal, “Marginalizing History: Observations on the Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Judaism 46, 1 (Winter 1997).

40. A good summary of texts on this point can be found in chap. 21, “The Social Contexts of Crypto-Judaism,” in Gitlitz, pp. 587 onwards.

41. Cf. Reinkowski, pp. 426–27.

42. I take the categories from Gitlitz, pp. 82–90, but they can also be found in other books.

43. Cited in Netanyahu 1995, p. 410.

44. Cited in Gitlitz, p. 533. See chap. 19 in Gitlitz for details about food practices among the conversos.

45. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 58.

46. One must add that the official Church in later centuries prohibited the syncretic practices of the Malabar and Chinese Christians.

47. E. Gutwirth, “Elementos étnicos e históricos en las relaciones judeo-conversos en Segovia,” in Kaplan, p. 97.

48. D’Abrera, p. 129.

49. A fair summary of such doubts is in Roth, pp. 216–21.

50. Netanyahu 1995, p. 853.

51. Beinart 1974, I, 339. Beinart’s edition of these documents is invaluable; however, his own commentary on them is open to dispute.

52. C. Carrete Parrondo, “Los judaizantes castellanos,” in Inquisición y conversos, p. 197.

53. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 37, 137.

54. Cf. John Edwards, “Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain,” P&P 120 (Aug. 1988), p. 13. See also my chapter 13 below.

55. Both cited from Carrete Parrondo 1991, pp. 37–38.

56. Beinart 1974, I, 371.

57. Beinart 1974, I, 311, 330.

58. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 27, 45.

59. See especially the analysis of the thought of Isaac Abravanel, in Netanyahu 1968, pp. 202, 236–42. Also Carlos Carrete Parrondo, “Movimientos mesiánicos en las juderías de Castilla,” in Tres culturas, p. 68.

60. Alain Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica, Valladolid, 1983.

61. Cf. Edwards, “Religious Faith,” p. 24.

62. Beinart 1974, I, 481.

63. E. Gutwirth, “Relaciones judeo-conversos en Segovia,” in Kaplan, p. 101.

64. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 130, 98, 108.

65. Francesc Carreres i Candi, “L’Inquisició barcelonina, substituïda per l’Inquisició castellana (1446–1487),” Institut d’estudis Catalans (1909–10), p. 163.

66. Beinart 1974, I, 82.

67. Cf. Netanyahu 1995, p. 1047.

68. Summarized in Netanyahu 1995, pp. 995–96, from whom I take the examples that follow.

69. Riera Sans, p. 84.

70. Riera Sans, p. 85.

71. Alonso de Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, 4 vols., Madrid, 1904–8; Bernáldez, p. 599.

72. C. Carrete Parrondo, “Los conversos jerónimos,” p. 101.

73. Azcona, p. 252.

74. Roth, p. 203, mistakenly dates the foundation of the Inquisition to 1179. No such body existed at that time.

75. Cf. Given, pp. 5–6. In particular, R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, Oxford, 1987.

76. Cf. Monter 1990, p. 4, n. 3.

77. Lea, I, 153.

78. Roth, p. 229, identifies Hojeda as “head inquisitor” of Seville in 1478. I have found no evidence for this.

79. A good sketch of their measures is given in Tomás y Valiente, pp. 28–42.

80. Cf. Tomás y Valiente, pp. 157–60. The inquiries were known as “inquisitio” in Latin, “pesquisa” in Castilian.

81. The bulls of the early years were printed (with some errors) in Bernardino Llorca, SJ, Bulario pontificio de la Inquisición española en su período constitucional (1478–1525), vol. 15, Miscellanea historiae pontificae, Rome, 1949. A modern, corrected edition is that of Gonzalo Martínez Díez, SJ, Bulario de la Inquisición española, hasta la muerte de Fernando el Católico, Madrid, 1997.

82. Azcona p. 268.

83. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition, Lanham, 2011, p. 244.

84. Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, 3 vols., London, 1963, I, 128–29.

85. Lea, I, 154.

86. Cited in Netanyahu 1995, p. 853.

87. Netanyahu 1995, pp. 1041–43, 1052, lays stress on “racialism,” whereas I tend to see community tension as the relevant factor.

88. The central thesis of Netanyahu 1995, pp. 1005–40, without citing appropriate evidence, is that Ferdinand’s motives were anti-Jewish and racist.

89. Cf. A. Cascales Ramos, La Inquisición en Andalucia. Resistencia de los conversos a su implantación, Seville, 1986, pp. 57–69. A study of the same years is Béatrice Pérez, Inquisition, pouvoir, société. La province de Séville et ses judéoconvers sous les Rois Catholiques, Paris, 2007.

90. Relación histórica de la Judería de Sevilla, Seville, 1849, p. 24.

91. Bernáldez, chap. 44, p. 99.

92. Cf. Roth, pp. 244–46; Netanyahu 1995, pp. 1149–54.

93. Pulgar, V, 337.

94. I follow the arguments in Netanyahu 1995, pp. 1155–64.

95. Lea, I, 231.

96. Lea, I, 587.

97. Lea, I, 233.

98. Lea, I, 590, appendix 11.

99. Lea, I, 244–45. In a previous edition of this book I suggested that the autos took place not in 1484 but the year after; I now see no reason to reject the date 1484.

100. Quoted in Llorente 1812, p. 90.

101. Lea, I, 247.

102. Antonio C. Floriano, “El Tribunal del Santo Oficio en Aragón. Establecimiento de la Inquisición en Teruel,” BRAH 86–87 (1925) and 88 (1926). Floriano’s basic documentation, as well as other original sources, are published in the excellent compilation by Sesma Muñoz.

103. Sesma Muñoz, pp. 97–100.

104. Sesma Muñoz, p. 20.

105. Carreres i Candi, “L’Inquisició barcelonina,” pp. 134–37.

106. This was not the same Alonso de Espina as the Franciscan who was active in Andalucia twenty years before.

107. Sesma Muñoz, p. 23.

108. Figures are from the basic source for the early years of the Catalan Inquisition: Pere Miquel Carbonell, in Colección de documentos inéditos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona, 1864–65, vols. 27–8.

109. García-Cárcel 1976, p. 50.

110. García-Cárcel 1976, p. 60.

111. Previous murders of inquisitors, notably by the Cathars in France in 1243, had always provoked a severe reaction. Other assassinated inquisitors included Conrad of Marburg (Germany) in 1233 and Peter of Verona (Italy) in 1252.

112. He was popularly venerated as “el Santo martyr,” and assigned a feast day in Spain in the sixteenth century, but not beatified by Rome until 1662, and canonized only in 1867.

113. Netanyahu 1995, pp. 1164–72, has some interesting but unsubstantiated arguments in this respect.

114. Jordi Ventura, “A l’entorn del judaisme de les famílies Santangel i Sanchez,” in XIII Congrés d’Història de la Corona d’Aragó, Palma, 1990, III, 47.

115. Jordi Ventura, “Els inicis de la Inquisició espanyola a Mallorca,” Randa 5 (1977).

116. Lea, I, 167, 183, 267.

117. “Papel de Don Pedro Borja,” undated but around 1650, in ACA:CA, leg. 929.

118. Figures for Barcelona from Carbonell, for Valencia from García-Cárcel 1976, p. 195.

119. Lea, I, 169.

120. This is my translation of a particularly difficult phrase.

121. C. Carrete Parrondo, “Los judaizantes castellanos,” in Inquisición y conversos, p. 197.

122. C. Carrete Parrondo, “Los judaizantes castellanos,” in Inquisición y conversos, p. 196.

123. There were always exceptions: cf. Historia de la Inquisición, II, 347–57.

124. Lea, I, 169–70.

125. Cantera Burgos and León Tello, Judaizantes, pp. xi–xxii.

126. Ladero 1984, p 41, suggests that most conversos did not reappear before the Inquisition, a conclusion I accept.

127. D’Abrera.

128. Pulgar, chap. 96, p. 336.

129. Bernáldez, chap. 44, p. 101.

130. Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga, Anales de Sevilla, Madrid, 1677, p. 482. It has been suggested more plausibly that deaths did not exceed 248: Klaus Wagner, “La Inquisición en Sevilla (1481–1524),” in Homenaje al Profesor Carriazo, Seville, 1973, vol. III.

131. Dedieu, p. 242.

132. Monter 1990, pp. 15, 21. The diagram of cases in Aragon in M. A. Motis Dolader, “Los judíos zaragozanos,” p. 402, suggests even fewer executions, but his data are evidently incomplete.

133. The figures given in García-Cárcel 1976, p. 174, according to which some seven hundred people were executed, are unproven. Monter 1990, p. 21, n. 36, concludes that García-Cárcel’s figures are “inaccurate.”

134. Monter 1990, p. 21. This figure is supported by the painstaking work of Blázquez Miguel, who suggests fourteen executions of conversos up to 1499, and around twenty in the subsequent period: Blázquez Miguel, pp. 38, 51.

135. Fidel Fita, “La Inquisición toledana”; Fita also suggests that five hundred were burnt in effigy.

136. Monter 1990, p. 53, makes a lower estimate of fifteen hundred executions.

137. Carrete Parrondo 1991, p. 40.

138. Carreres i Candi, “L’Inquisició barcelonina,” p. 160.

139. IMH Consellers C.XVIII-6.

140. García-Cárcel 1976, p. 171.

141. Roth p. 222: “the desire to totally eradicate the converso class and also to enrich by the confiscation of as much property as possible.”

142. Text published by Azcona, in Nueva visión, p. 127.

143. Samuel Usque, in Raphael, p. 137.

144. And that many historians appear to have accepted unquestioningly.

145. Cf. J. Jiménez Lozano, “The Persistence of Judaic and Islamic Cultemas in Spanish Society,” in Alcalá 1987, who also cites Llorente in this respect, p. 407.

146. Beinart 1974, I, 16–21.

147. Beinart 1974, I, 163–80. Even Beinart is forced to comment that the “Jewish” practices of Chinchilla seem “unimpressive.”

148. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 19, 21.

149. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 32.

150. Beinart 1974, I, 193.

151. Beinart 1974, I, 116.

152. Beinart 1974, I, 92.

153. To this extent, at least, the evidence supports Netanyahu’s view that accused conversos were in large measure Christians.

154. Beinart 1974, I, 404.

155. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 24. The testimony was given by a Jew in 1490.

156. Reading through the case histories now, this point appears quite obvious to me. It was the reading of Netanyahu’s forceful Origins (1995)–whose central argument I happen not to accept–that obliged me to rethink the whole question through the available evidence. See also, on this question, Roth, pp. 217–20, 268.

157. Anonymous chronicler, c. 1495, in Raphael, p. 133.

158. Netanyahu 1995, p. 928.

159. Netanyahu 1995, p. 929.

160. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 107, 149.

161. There would, obviously, be almost no written sources to throw light on what one of the experts on the period, Tarsicio de Azcona, refers to as the post-1492 years of “la supresión de los conversos” (in Nueva visión, p. 120).

162. All quotations that follow come from Carrete Parrondo 1991. Carrete, however, does not distinguish between pre-1480 and post-1492 conversos.

163. Rabbi Capsali, in Raphael, p. 44.

164. Stephen Sharot, Comparative Perspectives on Judaisms and Jewish Identities, Detroit, 2011, pp. 105–6.

CHAPTER FOUR. AN ENDURING CRISIS

Epigraph. Inquisitors to Suprema, 1618, AHN Inq, lib. 743, f. 95.

1. “What we cannot doubt, is that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the immense majority of the Spanish people, with their kings, magistrates and bishops leading them, gave their decisive support to the proceedings of the Inquisition:” Bernardino Llorca, SJ, La Inquisición en España, Barcelona, 1936, p. 166.

2. Llorente 1812, p. 37.

3. For pre-Inquisition trials in one city, see Beinart 1981, p. 78.

4. Both Américo Castro, in various writings, and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz (the latter in España, un enigma histórico, 2 vols., 2nd edn., Buenos Aires, 1956, chap. I, n. 4) argue that the Inquisition was patently non-Spanish and therefore of Jewish origin.

5. And not, as some writers suggest, the Inquisition itself.

6. Mariana, vol. 31, p. 202.

7. J. Vicens Vives, Ferran II i la ciutat de Barcelona, 1479–1516, 2 vols., Barcelona, 1936, I, 376.

8. Miguel Avilés, “Motivos de crítica a la Inquisición en tiempos de Carlos V,” in Nueva Visión, p. 187.

9. Mariana, vol. 31, p. 202.

10. Vicens Vives, Ferran II, I, 382.

11. BN MS.1517. For Pulgar’s general position, see F. Cantera Burgos, “Fernando de Pulgar y los conversos,” Sefarad 4 (1944).

12. Cited in Márquez, Literatura, p. 25; cf. Azcona p. 263.

13. “Baptizati invite non recipiunt Sacramentum nec characterem baptismalem, sed remanent infideles occulti:” Páramo, De origine, p. 165.

14. Bernáldez, chap. 44.

15. H. Graetz, “La police de l’Inquisition d’Espagne à ses débuts,” BRAH 23 (1893).

16. D’Abrera, pp. 63–64.

17. Beinart 1981, p. 134.

18. Cf. J. Edwards, “Trial of an Inquisitor: The Dismissal of Diego Rodríguez Lucero, Inquisitor of Córdoba, in 1508,” JEH 37, 2 (Apr. 1986).

19. Tarsicio de Azcona, in Nueva Visión, p. 144.

20. Luis Ramírez y Las Casas Deza, Anales de Córdoba, in CODOIN, vol. 112, p. 279.

21. R. Gracia Boix, Colección de documentos para la historia de la Inquisición de Córdoba, Córdoba, 1982, pp. 86, 96, 103. Tarsicio de Azcona, in Nueva Visión, p. 145.

22. T. Herrero del Collado, “El proceso inquisitorial por delito de herejía contra Hernando de Talavera,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español (1969).

23. Text (of May 1507) published by Azcona in Nueva visión, p. 130.

24. José de Sigüenza, Historia de la Orden de San Jerónimo, 2 vols., Madrid, 1907 (Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vols. 8, 12) II, 306. The numerous episodes of resistance to the Inquisition on the part of clergy, based on principles of conscience, are surveyed in Stefania Pastore, Il Vangelo e la Spada. She commences her study specifically with the writings of Sigüenza.

25. Católica impugnación, ed. F. Martín, introd. by F. Márquez Villanueva, Barcelona, 1961, p.,68.

26. Márquez, Literatura, p. 233.

27. C. Fernández Duro, “Vida y obras de Gonzalo de Ayora,” BRAH 17 (1890).

28. AGS:PR Inq, leg. 28, f. 39.

29. Lea, I, 211.

30. Lea, I, 211.

31. AGS:PR Inq, leg. 28, f. 16.

32. AHN Inq, leg. 4724^2, no. 8.

33. P. Gayangos and Vicente de la Fuente, Cartas del Cardenal Don Fray Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, Madrid, 1867, p. 261.

34. Lea, I, 215.

35. Details in the next few pages come from Llorente 1812, pp. 119–31.

36. AGS:PR Inq, leg. 28, f. 45.

37. Llorente 1812, p. 156.

38. Joseph Pérez, La révolution des “Comunidades” de Castille (1520–1521), Bordeaux, 1970, p. 509.

39. For all this, J. I. Gutiérrez Nieto, “Los conversos y el movimiento comunero,” Hispania 94 (1964); and Pérez, La révolution, pp. 507–14, 549–52.

40. BL Eg.1832, ff. 37–40.

41. Aline Goosens, Les Inquisitions modernes dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux, 1520–1633, 2 vols. Brussels 1997–1998.

42. Colas Latorre and Salas Auséns, p. 505.

43. Pérez, La révolution, p. 551, n. 117.

44. Monter 1990, p. 324.

45. Being a foreigner did not have the connotation it has today. At that time “foreigner” meant that you were not native-born, and consequently did not enjoy certain local civic rights such as eligibility for public office.

46. Reguera, p. 121.

47. Comisario to inquisitors, 14 Sept. 1574, AHN Inq, lib. 738, f. 5.

48. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 260.

49. Monter 1990, p. 322.

50. Carrasco Urgoiti, p. 156.

51. AHN Inq, lib. 731, f. 4.

52. This fascinating inactivity also has its interest for the social historian.

CHAPTER FIVE. EXCLUDING THE REFORMATION

Epigraph. Bataillon, p. 490.

1. Bataillon, pp. 110, 454. For an overview of the impact of the Reformation on Spain, see H. Kamen, “Spain,” in B. Scribner, R. Porter and M. Teich, eds., The Reformation in National Context, Cambridge, 1994.

2. “The record of Spanish humanism was on the whole depressing”: Jeremy Lawrance, “Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula,” in A. Goodman and A. MacKay, eds., The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, London, 1990.

3. Bataillon, p. 280.

4. Like England at the same period, Spain had two autonomous Church entities, the Church in the crown of Castile, and the Church in the crown of Aragon (the latter usually had its council meetings in Tarragona).

5. Bataillon, p. 240. The basic document in the debate has been printed by M. Avilés, Erasmo y la Inquisición, Madrid, 1980.

6. Bataillon, p. 277.

7. Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, New Brunswick, 1979.

8. For a comment on the state of Spanish humanism, see Lawrance, “Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula,” pp. 248–54.

9. On the state of spoken Latin, Gil Fernández, pp. 30–35.

10. Cardinal Mendoza to king, 20 Sept. 1561, AGS:E, leg. 142.

11. See Alastair Hamilton, “The Alumbrados: Dejamiento and Its Practitioners,” in Kallendorf, pp. 103–24. The converso roots of illuminism are emphasized by Stefania Pastore, Un’eresia spagnola: Spiritualità conversa, alumbradismo e Inquisizione (1449–1559), Florence, 2004.

12. Márquez, Alumbrados, prints the edict, pp. 229–38.

13. There is a splendid study by Angela Selke, El Santo Oficio de la Inquisición. Proceso de Fr. Francisco Ortiz (1529–1532), Madrid, 1968.

14. John E. Longhurst, Luther and the Spanish Inquisition: The Case of Diego de Uceda, 1528–1529, Albuquerque, 1953.

15. Nicodemism is the practice of concealing one’s true religious convictions while conforming outwardly to an official religion. For a historical discussion, see Carlo Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo: Simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’ Europa del 1500, Turin, 1971.

16. Baer, II, 275.

17. Baer, II, 350–56.

18. Cf. the comments of J. L. Novalín, discussing the views of Márquez, in García-Villoslada, III, ii, 153–54.

19. M. Ortega Costa, Proceso de la Inquisición contra María de Cazalla, Madrid, 1978.

20. A good summary of the principal trials is by Melquiades Andrés in Historia, I, 488–520.

21. Isabel was released in December 1538, Alcaraz in February 1539. A late casualty of the alumbrado trials was the Old Christian Rodrigo de Bivar, chaplain to the duke of Infantado, arrested in 1539 but released: see Alastair Hamilton, El proceso de Rodrigo de Bivar (1539), Madrid, 1979.

22. Juan de Avila, Avisos y reglas cristianas sobre aquel verso de David: Audi, Filia, ed. L. Sala Balust, Barcelona, 1963, p. 32.

23. Angela Selke, in BH 62 (1960).

24. Bataillon, pp. 438–70.

25. Description of his death made to Francisco Borja: ARSI, Epist. Hisp., 103, f. 231.

26. J. E. Longhurst, Erasmus and the Spanish Inquisition: The Case of Juan de Valdés, Albuquerque, 1950; José C. Nieto, Juan de Valdes and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformation, Geneva, 1970; Bataillon, Erasmo y el Erasmismo, Barcelona, 1977, pp. 245–85; Carlos Gilly, “Juan de Valdés: Übersetzer und Bearbeiter von Luthers Schriften in seinem Diálogo de Doctrina,” AR 74 (1983).

27. Bataillon, pp. 476–77.

28. J. Goñi Gaztámbide, “El impresor Miguel de Eguía procesado por la Inquisición,” HS 1 (1948).

29. Lea, III, 419.

30. Bataillon, p. 490.

31. Bataillon, p. 545.

32. Schäfer identifies only thirty-two cases; but several more (cf. M. Jiménez Monteserín, “Los luteranos ante el tribunal de la Inquisición de Cuenca 1525–1600,” Nueva visión, p. 695) can be found.

33. The Netherlands had a new Inquisition from 1520, and the Roman or Italian Inquisition (studied by Christopher F. Black, The Italian Inquisition, New Haven, 2009) came into existence in 1542, but most countries had ways of looking out for heresy.

34. Details and references in Kamen, “Toleration and Dissent,” pp. 12–13.

35. Kamen, “Toleration and Dissent,” p. 10.

36. J. I. Tellechea, “Biblias secuestradas por la Inquisición española en 1552,” BH 64 (1962).

37. Clive Griffin, Journeymen-Printers, Heresy and the Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Oxford, 2005.

38. The authoritative study is Novalín.

39. Soto to emperor, 25 Aug. 1552, AGS:E, leg. 89, f. 68.

40. For Egidio and other “Protestants,” see Boehmer.

41. Cf. Alvaro Huerga, Predicadores, alumbrados e Inquisición en el siglo XVI, Madrid, 1973. Robert C. Spach, “Juan Gil and Sixteenth-Century Spanish Protestantism,” SCJ 26, 4 (1995), inclines to the view that Egidio was neo-Protestant; but I am not convinced of this.

42. A. Gordon Kinder, “Cipriano de Valera, Spanish Reformer,” in BHS 46 (1969); and his Cassiodoro de Reina, London, 1975. For the Seville community, Schäfer, I, 345–67; II, 271–426.

43. Schäfer, I, 233–48; III, 1–813.

44. Leonor de Vivero was the wife of Pedro de Cazalla of Valladolid. Both had been patrons in 1520 of Francisca Hernández, and were related to María de Cazalla, the alumbrada of Guadalajara. Of the ten children of Leonor and Pedro, four were burnt by the Inquisition (the three priests Agustín de Cazalla, Francisco de Vivero and Pedro de Cazalla). Leonor’s bones were exhumed, and the family house razed to the ground.

45. On Rojas and Seso, see Tellechea 1977; and “El clima religioso español en 1550,” in Tellechea 1968, I, 105–239.

46. J. E. Longhurst, “Julian Hernández,” and E. Droz, “Note sur les impressions gene-voises transportées par Hernández,” BHR 22 (1960).

47. Tellechea 1968, II, 241, n. 21.

48. AGS:PR Inq, leg. 28, f. 37.

49. Lea, III, 571, appendix VIII.

50. Tellechea 1968, I, 147.

51. “Were our father a heretic we would carry the wood to burn him,” CSPV, VI, ii, no. 1067.

52. Diego Suárez to Laínez, Seville, 23 Aug. 1559, ARSI, Epist. Hisp., 96, f. 398.

53. Schäfer, II, 286–88.

54. Dead and absent accused were represented at autos by figures or effigies which were burnt in their stead: hence the need to talk of others being burnt in person.

55. BN MS.9175, ff. 258–60.

56. Schäfer, II, 107.

57. Huerga 1958, p. 9.

58. Both cases cited in Jiménez Monteserín, “Los luteranos,” Nueva visión, pp. 724–27.

59. He died in 1568, aged eighty-five.

60. Valdés to Philip, AGS:E, leg. 129, f. 128.

61. Cf. Monter 1990, p. 43; Jerónimo García Servet, El humanista Cascales y la Inquisición murciana, Madrid, 1978; J. Contreras, Sotos contra Riquelmes, Madrid, 1992.

62. “Lo que parece convernia proveerse,” AGS:E, leg. 129, f. 112.

63. Cf. Monter 1990, p. 50: “after 1570 great autos were rarely held in Castile.” He sees “an increase in pomp and solemnity around 1570,” p. 51. For further discussion of autos, see chapter 10 below.

64. The exact number is uncertain. The figures I give are those of Werner Thomas, La represión, p. 264. For slightly different figures, see Monter 1996.

65. The figures come from Alastair Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries, London, 1990, pp. 152–74. See also Judith Pollman, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635, Oxford, 2011, p. 45.

66. Philip to Valdés, 23 Aug. 1560, Favre, vol. 29, f. 4.

67. A. Gordon Kinder, “A Hitherto Unknown Group of Protestants in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Cuadernos de historia de Jerónimo Zurita 51–52 (1985), pp. 140–41.

68. Christine Wagner, “Los Luteranos ante la Inquisición de Toledo en el siglo XVI,” HS 46, 94 (1994), p. 480.

69. Cf. Bataillon, p. 728; Monter 1990, p. 130.

70. Eugenio Asensio, “Pedro de Orellana, minorita luterano,” in Nueva visión, pp. 785–95.

71. Quadra to king, London, 11 Oct. 1561, AE:CP, MD, vol. 234, f. 105.

72. Guzmán de Silva to king, London, 26 Apr. 1565, CODOIN, vol. 26, p. 540.

73. Canto’s detailed memorandum of 1563, in AGS:CJH, leg. 55, f. 174, gives a good sketch of Spanish heretics in Europe.

74. Canto to Eraso, Brussels, 12 May 1564, AGS:E, leg. 526, f. 125.

75. Reguera, p. 145.

76. Klaus Wagner, “La Inquisición en Sevilla (1481–1524),” in Homenaje al Profesor Carriazo, Seville, 1973, III, 490.

77. Werner Thomas, Een spel van kat en muis. Zuidnederlanders voor de Inquisitie in Spanje 1530–1750, Brussels, 1991, p. 151. See also the same author’s La represión del protestantismo.

78. Letter to Suprema, 23 Oct. 1560, AHN Inq, lib. 730, f. 23.

79. Schäfer, II, 1–106.

80. Reguera, p. 70.

81. Monter 1990, p. 236. Figures are rounded off.

82. I can recall sitting through a sermon in Valladolid in the 1960s, when the preacher denounced all foreign Catholics for their liberal tendencies (he also denounced women who wore pants).

83. Thomas Werner, La represión, p. viii.

84. Reguera, p. 163.

85. For details, see Kamen, Phoenix, chap. 8.

86. The standard and still the best introduction to Servet’s life is Roland Bainton, Hunted Heretic, Boston, 1953.

87. Cf. Jerome Friedman, Michael Servetus: A Case Study in Total Heresy, Geneva, 1978, pp. 17, 133.

88. Contra libellum Calvini (1612), cited in Lecler, I, 355.

89. Philip to Requesens, Jan. 1569, cited in Serrano, III, cii.

90. Álava to Philip II, AGS:E/K, 1502, ff. 9, 15; 1503, f. 22.

91. Álava to Philip II, Feb. 1565, AGS:E/K, 1503, f. 37.

92. Álava to Philip II, June 1565, AGS:E/K, 1504, f. 6.

93. AGS:E/K, 1503, f. 76.

94. The quotation comes from the epilogue to the last volume of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’s multi-volume opus, Historia de los heterodóxos españoles, Madrid, 1880.

95. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 220.

96. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists are the two most numerous sects in a Protestant population (2012) estimated to total over three hundred thousand persons.

97. Cf. Bataillon, pp. 552–55.

98. Laurie Kaplis-Hohwald, Translation of the Biblical Psalms in Golden Age Spain, Lampeter, 2003, p. 3.

99. Jorge A. González, Casiodoro de Reina, Mexico City, 1969.

100. Cf. Bataillon, p. 514.

101. Nicolas Castrillo, El “Reginaldo Montano”: Primer libro polémico contra la Inquisición española, Madrid, 1991, p. 31.

102. See Kamen, 2007, chap. 3.

CHAPTER SIX. THE IMPACT ON LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

Epigraph. Father Antonio Araoz to Diego Laínez, ARSI, Epist. Hisp., 96, f. 430.

1. Text in Bujanda, V, 121–22.

2. Cf. Pettegree, chap. 10, “The Literature of Conflict.” A recent symposium discussing some issues is Reading and Censorship in Early Modern Europe, Barcelona, 2010.

3. Cf. Bujanda, V, 44.

4. The law is printed in Bujanda, V, 122–27; also in Fermín de los Reyes Gómez, El libro en España y América. Legislación y censura (siglos XV–XVIII), 2 vols., Madrid, 2000.

5. Cf. J. H. Elliott, “The measures administered a drastic shock to Spanish intellectual life. By cutting off the supply of foreign books, they undermined the confidence of Spanish men of letters,” Imperial Spain, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 226. These inaccurate statements are unfortunately repeated in many books.

6. I owe this information to an unpublished paper by R. W. Truman on “Censorship in Spain: 1558–1631.”

7. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 396.

8. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 397.

9. Bujanda, V, 125; Kamen, Phoenix, p. 397.

10. Bujanda, V, 124.

11. Kamen, Phoenix, chap. 8.

12. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 411.

13. García Oro and Portela, p. 85.

14. Most of what follows is drawn from Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 388ff.

15. G. Antolín, “La librería de Felipe II,” BRAH 90 (1927), p. 341.

16. Cf. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 388ff.

17. Pettegree, pp. 87–88.

18. García Oro and Portela, p. 101.

19. AHN Inq, leg. 2155^1.

20. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 398. There were theoretical controls on some reprints, e.g., in 1569 the royal council claimed the sole right to relicense Church publications.

21. T. S. Beardsley Jr., “Spanish Printers and the Classics, 1482–1599,” HR, 47 (1979), p. 30.

22. Cf. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 389–95. The Spanish tongue was in common use in the Netherlands, Italy and America, so Spanish books were regularly published there.

23. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 393.

24. Jaime Moll, “Problemas bibliográficas del libro del Siglo de Oro,” BRAE 59 (1979); also his “Valoración de la industria editorial española del siglo XVI,” in Livre et lecture en Espagne et en France sous l’Ancien Régime, Paris, 1981.

25. Cited in Kamen, Phoenix, p. 398.

26. Tellechea 1968, II, 241, 255.

27. Lopez Piñero, pp. 141–44.

28. Francés de Álava to king, from Montpellier, 18 Dec. 1564, AGS:E/K, leg. 1505, f. 28; from Toulouse, 18 Jan. 1565, AGS:E/K, leg. 1503, f. 20.

29. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 396.

30. BZ, 130, f. 12.

31. Report of Jan. 1585, BZ, 130, f. 12.

32. For the Indexes in general, see Heinrich Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher, 2 vols. Bonn, 1883–85.

33. Tres indices expurgatorios de la Inquisición española en el siglo XVI, Madrid, 1952.

34. Cf. Bujanda, V, 63–76.

35. J. I. Tellechea, “Biblias publicadas fuera de España secuestradas por la Inquisición española en 1552,” BH 64 (1962).

36. Monter 1990, p. 238.

37. Bujanda, V, 77–90, 148–62.

38. Bujanda, V, 162, sees the 1554 censorship of Bibles as still “fruit d’un certain oecuménisme.”

39. Cf. Bujanda, V, 110.

40. Valdés’s biographer, Novalín, emphasizes “la rápidez con que fue compuesto este Indice”: Novalin, I, 280.

41. Calculated from the analysis in Bujanda, V, 164–91.

42. Kamen 1997, chap. 2.

43. Mario Scaduto, SJ, “Laínez e l’Indice del 1559,” AHSI 24 (1955).

44. Cf. Otis H. Green, Spain and the Western Tradition, 4 vols., Madison, 1963–66, IV, 140.

45. Cf. Bataillon, pp. 734–36.

46. Cf. Márquez, Literatura, pp. 151–52, 233–35.

47. Justo Cuervo, “Fray Luis de Granada y la Inquisición,” in Homenaje a Menéndez Pelayo, 2 vols., Madrid, 1899, I, 733–43.

48. For the book and its context see, for example, José C. Nieto, El renacimiento y la otra España, Geneva, 1997, pp. 301–3.

49. Cándido de Dalmases, SJ, “San Francisco de Borja y la Inquisición española, 1559–61,” AHSI 41 (1972).

50. Juan Suárez to Laínez, 20 Oct. 1559, ARSI, Epist. Hisp., 96, f. 444.

51. Huerga 1958, passim.

52. Quoted in Rodríguez, p. 145.

53. Rodríguez, pp. 107–19.

54. Rodríguez, chap. III.

55. For England, see David Cressy, “Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart England,” SCJ 36, 2 (Summer 2005).

56. Cited C. Carrete Parrondo, “Los judaizantes castellanos,” in Inquisición y conversos, p. 194.

57. Cf. Bujanda, V, 74.

58. Pinto Crespo, pp. 166–69, shows that not all the books were in fact burnt.

59. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 223.

60. V. Pinto Crispo, “Nuevas perspectivas sobre el contenido de los Indices inquisitoriales hispanos del siglo XVI,” HS 33 (1981), p. 616.

61. Pinto Crespo, p. 182.

62. Philip II to Alba, 24 Dec. 1569, AGS:E, leg. 542, f. 4.

63. Bujanda, VI, 38–39, offers this valuable suggestion to explain the delay in the Index.

64. Felix Asensio, SJ, “Juan de Mariana ante el Indice quiroguiano de 1583–4,” Estudios bíblicos 31 (1972).

65. Bujanda, VI, 76.

66. Bujanda, VI, 76–82.

67. Bujanda, VI, 100–8.

68. Text in RABM 8 (1903), pp. 218–21. On the authorship, P. E. Russell, “Secular Literature and the Censors: A Sixteenth-Century Document Re-examined,” BHS 69 (1982).

69. Cf. the memoir printed in Bujanda, VI, 55–63.

70. We have no adequate study of the censors who worked in the Spanish system. A study on America that illuminates aspects of the Spanish context is Martin Austin Nesvig, Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico, New Haven, 2009.

71. Pinto Crespo, p. 56.

72. Cf. Perfiles jurídicos, p. 390.

73. Miguel Avilés, “La censura inquisitorial de ‘Los seis libros de la República’ de Jean Bodin,” HS 37, 76 (1985).

74. See the sharp protest by the seventeenth-century inquisitorial censor Murcia de la Llana when Rome banned a book by a Jesuit friend: “it is incredible that a book should be totally banned by Rome after circulating for many years among Spaniards without causing any offence”: AHN Inq, lib. 1231, ff. 672–73.

75. J. Pérez Villanueva, “Baronio y la Inquisición española,” in Baronio storico e la Controriforma: Atti de convegno di studi, Sora 1979, Sora, 1982.

76. Kamen, Phoenix, p .228.

77. Sources for this paragraph in Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 225–26.

78. Cited in Pinto Crespo, p. 104. Marcus Pérez, a Calvinist, was of Spanish converso origin.

79. “Sobre visitas de navios,” AHN Inq, lib. 1275, f. 123.

80. A. Redondo, “Luther et l’Espagne de 1520 à 1536,” MCV 1 (1965).

81. Pardo Tomás, p. 30.

82. Reguera, pp. 140–42.

83. AHN Inq, lib. 737, f. 343.

84. AHN Inq, lib. 1233, f. 209.

85. AHN Inq, lib. 743.

86. See Nesvig, “Cordon Sanitaire: Efforts and Failures of Book Censorship,” in Ideology and Inquisition, for a good assessment of how the system of controls worked in colonial Mexico.

87. AHN Inq, leg. 2155^1.

88. Order of Mar. 1606, AHN Inq, lib. 743.

89. AHN Inq, lib. 737, f. 73.

90. AHN Inq, leg. 4470^1, no. 3.

91. Pinto Crespo, p. 128.

92. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 224.

93. AHN Inq, lib. 731, f. 166.

94. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 223.

95. AHN Inq, leg. 4470^1, no. 3.

96. C. Péligry, “Les difficultés de l’édition castillane au XVIIe siècle,” MCV 13 (1977).

97. Pinto Crespo, p. 641.

98. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 223.

99. Cf. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 228.

100. AHN Inq, leg. 4517^1, no. 1.

101. AHN Inq, leg. 4470^1, no. 4; leg. 4517^1, no. 1. Cf. also Pardo Tomás, pp. 289–91.

102. M. Agulló y Cobo, “La Inquisición y los libreros españoles en el siglo XVII,” Cuadernos bibliográficos 28 (1972).

103. See Bujanda, V, 127–31.

104. Fidel Fita, SJ, “Los tres procesos de San Ignacio de Loyola en Alcalá de Henares,” BRAH 33 (1898).

105. Cf. Hamilton, pp. 91–97.

106. Hamilton, p. 97. Loyola continued to be looked upon as an illuminist by his critics both in Paris and even in papal Rome: see Enrique García Hernán, Ignacio de Loyola, Madrid, 2013.

107. Llorente 1817–18, I, 343–45; Márquez, Literatura, pp. 40–42; Bataillon, p. 164.

108. Dalmases, “Francisco de Borja,”, p. 64.

109. Gil Fernández, p. 447.

110. For a presentation of Fray Luis’s experience with the Inquisition, see Colin P. Thompson, The Strife of Tongues: Fray Luis de Leon and the Golden Age of Spain, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 51–75.

111. Fernando Domínguez Reboiras, Gaspar de Grajal (1530–1575). Frühneuzeitliche Bibelwissenschaft im Streit mit Universität und Inquisition, Münster, 1998.

112. Lea, III, 149–62; Luis Alonso Getino, OP, “La causa de Fr Luis de León,” RABM 9 (1903) and 11 (1904); CODOIN, vols. 10–11.

113. Miguel de la Pinta Llorente, OP, Proceso contra el hebraista Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra, Madrid, 1946, p. 392.

114. B. Rekers, Benito Arias Montano, London, 1972, chap. 3. Rekers’s study has several important slips, including the claim that “the whole of Montano’s work was prohibited” by the Inquisition (p. 68); on this point see J. A. Jones, “Pedro de Valencia’s Defence of Arias Montano: The Expurgatory Indexes of 1607 (Rome) and 1612 (Madrid),” BHR 40 (1978). Rekers also accepts the unproven claim by A. Sicroff (Sicroff, p. 269) that Montano was of converso origin.

115. CODOIN, vol. 41, pp. 316, 387.

116. Gregorio de Andrés, Proceso inquisitorial del Padre Sigüenza, Madrid, 1975.

117. A. Tovar and M. de la Pinta Llorente, Procesos inquisitoriales contra Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, Madrid, 1941, p. xliv.

118. “Por ser Grajal y Fray Luis notorios conversos, pienso que no quieren mas que oscurecer a nuestra fe catolica y bolver a su ley”: quoted in Thompson, The Strife of Tongues, p. 57.

119. Américo Castro, “Erasmo en tiempo de Cervantes,” RFE 18 (1931), p. 364.

120. Cf. the intriguing book by Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism, Oxford. 2006.

121. Américo Castro, “Erasmo en tiempo de Cervantes,” p. 366.

122. Juan de Mal Lara, Filosofia vulgar, ed. A. Vilanova, 3 vols., Barcelona, 1958–59, I, 29.

123. Miguel de la Pinta Llorente, La Inquisición española y los problemas de la cultura y de la intolerancia, Madrid, 1953, p. 152.

124. Cited in Márquez, Literatura, p. 83.

125. Cited in part in Bataillon, p. 727.

126. Enrique Llamas, Santa Teresa de Jesús y la Inquisición española, Madrid, 1972, p. 99. See also F. Márquez Villanueva, Espiritualidad y literatura en el siglo XVI, Madrid, 1968, pp. 145–52, 179–86. A study by Carole Slade, St Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life, Berkeley, 1995, suggests that Teresa’s Inquisition experiences influenced all her writing.

127. Alvaro Huerga, Predicadores, alumbrados e Inquisición en el siglo XVI, Madrid, 1973; Los alumbrados de Baeza, Jaén, 1978; Historia de los alumbrados (1570–1630), 2 vols., Madrid, 1978.

128. For a brief critique, see Kamen, 1996.

129. Cf the entertaining essay by Nicholas Round, “La ‘peculiaridad’ literaria de los conversos. ¿Unicornio o snark?” in Alcalá 1995, p. 557.

130. The observations by Márquez, Literatura, pp. 46–48, to the effect that Rojas has never been firmly identified as a converso, have not to my knowledge been refuted.

131. A partial list of possible conversos in J.-C. Gómez-Menor, “Linaje judío de escritores religiosos y místicos españoles del siglo XVI,” in Alcalá 1995, p. 587.

132. A caustic critique of Castro’s views is given by Eugenio Asensio, “Notas sobre la historiografía de Américo Castro,” AEM 8 (1972–73). The fundamental divide occurred between Castro and his colleague Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz.

133. The circumstances of this invitation are explained in my The Duke of Alba, New Haven and London. 2004, chap. 2.

134. Miguel de la Pinta Llorente and J. M. de Palacio, Procesos inquisitoriales contra la familia judía de Juan Luis Vives, Madrid, 1964.

135. Cited by Gregorio Marañón, Españoles fuera de España, Buenos Aires, 1947, p. 145.

136. See Kamen, Phoenix, p. 271, and sources there cited.

137. Lea, IV, 528.

138. Lord Acton, Essays on Church and State, London, 1952, p. 393.

139. Américo Castro, España en su historia. Cristianos, moros y judíos, Buenos Aires, 1948, p. 598.

140. Menéndez y Pelayo, V, 482.

141. Bujanda, VI, 76.

142. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 418, 421.

143. Maxime Chevalier, Lectura y lectores en la España del siglo XVI y XVII, Madrid, 1976.

144. López Piñero, pp. 147–48.

145. Jan Lechner, Repertorio de obras de autores españoles en bibliotecas holandesas hasta comienzos del siglo XVIII, Utrecht, 2001, p. 309. I am grateful to Dr. Lechner for making this very useful work available to me.

146. José Manuel Losada Goya, Bibliographie critique de la littérature espagnole en France au XVIIe siècle, Geneva, 1999.

147. M.-C. Rodríguez and B. Bennassar, “Signatures et niveau culturel,” Caravelle 31 (1978); where the criterion adopted for writing was the ability to make a signature. Cf. Manuel Peña, “El espejo de los libros: Lecturas y lectores en la España del siglo de oro,” La cultura del libro en la edad moderna: Andalucía y América, Córdoba, 2001.

148. Even today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the official statistic is that one of every two Spanish adults never opens a book.

149. Cf. Andrew Pettegree, “Centre and Periphery in the European Book World,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2008), p. 127.

150. See the appendix on foreign vernacular books at the fair, by Andrew Pettegree, “French books at the Frankfurt Fair,” in Heal and Grell, p. 266.

151. “The mechanisms of censorship were of limited significance in altering intellectual development”: R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe. Culture and Education, 1500–1800, London. 1988, p. 165.

152. Cf. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 401.

153. Marquis of Almazán to Philip II, 23 Mar. 1585, BZ, 130, f. 12.

154. Márquez, Literatura, pp. 189–200.

155. A. Paz y Meliá, Papeles de Inquisición, 2nd edn, Madrid, 1947, pp. 23, 69, 71.

156. “Las obras de caridad que se hazen tibia y flojamente no tienen mérito ni valen nada”: Quijote, part 2, chap. 36. See A. Castro, “Cervantes y la Inquisición,” MP 27 (1929–30).

157. Márquez, Literatura, pp. 168–69.

158. See Rosario Villari, Elogio della dissimulazione, Bari, 1987, p. 19. Another recent survey, by Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, Berkeley, 2009, focuses mainly on Italy.

159. On this writer, cf. the opinion of Manning, p. 11.

160. Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605, Princeton, 1977, p. 162.

161. Alfred Soman, “Press, Pulpit and Censorship in France before Richelieu,” PAPS 120 (1976), p. 454.

162. Debora K. Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England, Philadelphia, 2006, p. 236.

163. Pardo Tomás feels (p. 269) that “la eficacia de los sistemas de control fue elevada” up to the seventeenth century. His view is based exclusively on the Inquisition’s own papers, which were obviously optimistic about the success achieved.

164. Angel Alcalá, in “Inquisitorial Control of Writers,” in Alcalá 1987, p. 321, places emphasis on the word “control.” Elsewhere (same volume, p. 617) he states his opinion that “the inquisitorial system kept Spain in chains for three hundred and fifty years.”

165. The view of Pinto Crespo, “Thought Control in Spain,” in Haliczer 1987, p. 185. See also Haliczer’s recent view: “the increasing weight of censorship created a chilling effect on Spanish intellectual life. This repressive atmosphere was greatly reinforced by inquisitorial activity against intellectual or academic discourse”: Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain, Oxford, 2002, p. 10.

166. Pardo Tomás, p. 87, expresses this opinion because a report of the Inquisition in 1632 stated that “de los libros que salen de herejes son muy pocos los que llegan a España.” The report, full of self-satisfaction, needs to be contrasted with the reality that foreign books were readily available to those who sought them.

167. Cf. John Gascoigne, “A Reappraisal of the Role of the Universities in the Scientific Revolution,” in David Lindberg and Robert Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge, 1990, p. 250.

168. Cf. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution, Austin, 2006, pp. 28–134.

169. For these themes, see in particular Daniela Bleichmar, Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800, Stanford, 2009, and the reference to the Inquisition at p. 321.

170. Pardo Tomás, pp. 220–27.

171. Pardo Tomás, pp. 151–83.

172. Useful texts showing how some Spaniards had contact with scientific principles are set out in J. M. López Piñero, V. Navarro Brotons and E. Portela Marco, Materiales para la historia de las ciencias en España: s.XVI-XVII, Valencia, 1976.

173. For the context of this, see Kamen 1980, p. 324.

174. Unfamiliar with the languages of northern Europe, educated Spaniards accessed works in English and Dutch through the relevant French translation.

175. AHN Inq, leg. 4695/2.

176. Ramón Ceñal, “Cartesianismo en España. Notas para su historia (1650–1750),” Revista de la Universidad de Oviedo (1945), special number, p. 30.

177. Cited in Gil Fernández, p. 476.

178. Cf. the opinion of R. O. Jones in 1971: “La España de Felipe II quedó cerrada a las nuevas corrientes de ideas del otro lado de sus fronteras,” in Historia de la literatura española. Siglo de oro: Prosa y poesía, Barcelona, 1974, p. 124.

179. In sixteenth-century England Hakluyt edited many Spanish travel accounts; for the Low Countries, see Jan Lechner, Repertorio de obras de autores españoles.

180. David E. Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World in Golden Age Castile, Cambridge, 1996, p. 129.

181. Cf. Pettegree, pp. 87–88.

182. Cited by L. Hanke, “Free Speech in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America,” HAHR 26 (1946).

183. Diego Saavedra Fajardo, Empresas, cited in José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, Manchester, 1986, p. 275.

184. David C. Goodman, Power and Penury: Government, Technology and Science in Philip II’s Spain, Cambridge, 1988, passim.

185. Pettegree, p. 114.

186. The view of D. W. Cruikshank, “‘Literature’ and the Book Trade in Golden Age Spain,” MLR 73 (1978). Cf. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 389–93 and authorities cited there.

187. A notable exception was the Mendoza family. For a perspective of the nobles as a whole, see Gil Fernández, pp. 299–327; Friedrich Edelmayer, “Aspectos del trabajo de los embajadores de la casa de Austria en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI,” Pedralbes 9 (1989), p. 47.

188. Quoted in Ramón Menéndez Pidal, The Spaniards in Their History, trans. Walter Starkie, London, 1950, p. 204.

189. Antonio Lafuente and Antonio Mazuecos, Los caballeros del punto fijo. Ciencia, política y aventura en la expedición geodésica hispanofrancesa al virreinato del Perú en el siglo XVIII, Madrid, 1987. See also Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, New York, 2003, chap. 10.

190. Cf. the presentations by François Lopez and Francisco Sánchez-Blanco in Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, Charlottesville, Va. (spring 1997).

191. Macanaz, cited in Kamen, Phoenix, p. 313.

192. Cited in Kamen 1980, p. 313.

193. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols., London, 1949, I, 226.

CHAPTER SEVEN. THE END OF MORISCO SPAIN

Epigraph. Cited by Luce López-Baralt, in her chapter in Legacy of Muslim Spain, p. 551.

1. See the fine account by Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols., Cambridge, 1954, I, 107.

2. By now, Christian savagery in holy wars was habitual, the obvious example being the brutal massacre of all the inhabitants of Jerusalem—men, women and children, Muslims and Jews alike—when the Crusaders captured the city in 1099: Runciman, Crusades, I, 286–87.

3. For Cisneros’s conquests, see Kamen, Empire, pp. 30–31.

4. Cisneros to the chapter of Toledo cathedral, 3 Feb. 1500, in Ladero 1988, p. 427.

5. Cited in Ladero 1988, p. 305, n.66.

6. Royal letter of 12 Oct. 1501, in Ladero 1988, p. 478.

7. Quoted by L. P. Harvey, in his chapter in Legacy of Muslim Spain, p. 219.

8. My view, repeated over the years, is now reinforced by the work of Mark D. Meyerson, “Religious Change, Regionalism, and Royal Power in the Spain of Fernando and Isabel,” in L. J. Simon, ed., Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages, vol. I, Leiden, 1995, pp. 101–2.

9. On this, cf. B. Vincent, “Los moriscos y la circuncisión,” in Vincent.

10. H. C. Lea, The Moriscos of Spain: Their Conversion and Expulsion, London, 1901, pp. 409–14. Lea’s book is still the best general study.

11. A. Redondo, Antonio de Guevara (1480?-1545) et l’Espagne de son temps, Geneva, 1976.

12. M. A. Ladero Quesada, Los Mudéjares del reino de Castilla en tiempo de Isabel I, Valladolid, 1969.

13. Jacqueline Fournel, “Le livre et la civilisation écrite dans la communauté morisque aragonaise (1540–1620),” MCV 15 (1979).

14. Monter 1990, p. 212.

15. G. Colás Latorre, “Los moriscos aragoneses y su expulsión,” in Destierros aragoneses, pp. 203–5.

16. M. C. Anson Calvo, in Destierros aragoneses, p. 309.

17. Cf. Mikel de Epalza, “Les Morisques,” in Les Morisques et leur temps, Paris, 1983, pp. 38–39.

18. Cf. Mikel de Epalza, in Destierros aragoneses, p. 225.

19. See Kamen 2007, chap. 2. Gayangos’s discovery was reported in a letter to a friend: “About a year ago I was turning over hundreds of Spanish manuscripts in the library of the British Museum, when I chanced across some aljamiado poems. Then in Madrid I was examining some so-called Arabic manuscripts in the National Library, and discovered that most of them even though written in Arabic characters really contained accounts in Castilian and in Catalan, more or less mixed up with Arab words, depending on the education or calling of the writer. I mentioned this discovery to my late master the Baron Silvestre de Sacy [in Paris], who encouraged me to try and decipher some of the documents. I did so, and though it was very hard work at first, because of the corrupt language, the progress I made soon repaid my efforts fully.”

20. G. Colás Latorre, in Destierros aragoneses, p. 199.

21. The cases happened in 1637: see Eric Dursteler, “Muslim Renegade Women: Conversion and Agency in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 16, 1–2 (2006), pp. 103–12.

22. BL, Egerton 1832, ff. 37–38, gives a long list of the complaints of the Cortes against the Inquisition in every sphere of its activity.

23. Leila Sabbagh, “La religion des Moriscos entre deux fatwas,” in Les Morisques et leur temps, p. 49.

24. In reality, taqiyya was a principle of long standing in Islam, a form of mental reservation that was officially permitted to Shia Muslims who suffered persecution from states controlled by Sunni Muslims. See Etan Kohlberg, “Taqiyya in Shi’i Islam,” in Hans G. Kippenberg and Guy G. Strournsa, eds., Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions, Leiden, 1995, pp. 345–80.

25. Reinkowski, pp. 422–23.

26. “The theory of a sharply divided Christian and Muslim world is not tenable”: Ciappara, p. 225.

27. Raphael Carrasco, p. 198.

28. G. Colás Latorre, “Cristianos y moriscos en Aragón,” MCV 29, 2 (1993).

29. Peter Dressendörfer, Islam unter der Inquisition. Die Morisco-Prozesse in Toledo 1575–1610, Wiesbaden, 1971, p. 64, n. 171.

30. “Sexualization transformed Moriscos into a dangerous deviant group, and provided imagery to justify Christian oppression. Moriscos represented the impure, the lewd, and the nefarious. . . . Christians saw sexual menace”: Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain, Princeton, 2005, pp. 54–56.

31. R. Carrasco, “Le refus d’assimilation des Morisques: Aspects politiques et culturels d’après les sources inquisitoriales,” in Les Morisques et leur temps.

32. A. Fernández de Madrid, Vida de Fray Fernando de Talavera, Granada, 1992, p. lix.

33. Quoted in Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, p. 187.

34. Cardaillac, passim. A good survey also is Anwar G. Chejne, Islam and the West: The Moriscos, Albany, 1983.

35. Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent, chap. 5; R. Benítez and E. Ciscar, “La Iglesia ante la conversión y la expulsión de los Moriscos,” in García-Villoslada, IV, 255–307.

36. Ehlers, pp. 84–90.

37. Carrasco Urgoiti, p. 149.

38. Cf. Monter 1990, p. 133.

39. J. Contreras, “La Inquisición de Aragón: Estructura y oposición (1550–1700),” Estudios de historia social 1 (1977). “Life” sentences in Spain never amounted to more than a few months.

40. García-Arenal 1978, p. 84.

41. J.-P. Dedieu, “Les Morisques de Daimiel et l’Inquisition,” in Les Morisques et leur temps.

42. Archbishop of Valencia to Philip II, 9 Aug. 1567, BL, Egerton, 1510, f. 115.

43. J. Aranda Doncel, “La esclavitud en Córdoba,” in Córdoba, apuntes para su historia, Córdoba, 1981.

44. Carrasco, p. 205.

45. Cf. Monter 1990, chap. 9, with useful new perspectives.

46. Vincent, p. 125.

47. García-Arenal 1978, pp. 11, 23, 39.

48. Monter 1990, p. 189.

49. García-Arenal 1978, p. 39; García Fuentes, p. xxxiii.

50. Bishop of Tortosa to Cardinal Espinosa, 28 July 1568, AHN Inq, leg. 2155^1.

51. Carrasco Urgoiti, p. 148.

52. L. García Ballester, Medicina, ciencia y minorías marginadas: Los moriscos, Granada, 1977.

53. Cardaillac, p. 100.

54. J. M. Magán García and R. Sánchez González, Moriscos granadinos en La Sagra de Toledo 1570–1610, Toledo, 1993, p. 82.

55. García-Arenal 1978, p. 117.

56. Monter 1990, pp. 224–26.

57. A thorough study of the matter can be found in Manuel Barrios Aguilera and Mercedes García-Arenal, eds., Los plomos del Sacromonte: Invención y tesoro, Valencia, 2006; and by the same authors, ¿La historia inventada? Los libros plúmbeos y el legado sacromontano, Granada, 2008. There is a good discussion in David Coleman, Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old-World Frontier City, 1492–1600, Ithaca, 2003, pp. 189–201; and in A. K. Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain. Baltimore, 2007.

58. B. Vincent, “Los moriscos del reino de Granada después de 1570,” NRFH 30 (1981).

59. T. Halperin Donghi, “Les Morisques du royaume de Valence au XVIe siècle,” Annales (1956); T. Halperin Donghi, “Un conflicto nacional en el siglo de oro,” CHE 23–24 (1955), and 25–26 (1957).

60. A. Hess, “The Moriscos: An Ottoman Fifth Column,” AHR 74 (1968–69).

61. J. Aranda Doncel, “Cristianos y moriscos en Córdoba,” in Les Morisques et leur temps, p. 263.

62. Braudel, I, 591. The phrase may appear exaggerated, but problems of multi-cultural coexistence are still an issue in Europe, for example, in England and the Netherlands.

63. BN, MS.721, ff. 39–46.

64. Ehlers, p. 111.

65. This conclusion, drawn from research by James Casey, is summarized in Henry Kamen, Spain, 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict, London, 1991, p. 221.

66. In reality, in Valencia at least, Morisco growth was already falling off: James Casey, “Moriscos and the Depopulation of Valencia,” P&P 50 (1971).

67. Cf. James B. Tueller, Good and Fruitful Christians. Moriscos and Catholicism in Early Modern Spain, New Orleans, 2002, pp. 161–72.

68. The following details are drawn from the authoritative study by Henri Lapeyre, Géographie de l’Espagne morisque, Paris, 1959.

69. Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent, chap. 9.

70. BL, Eg.MS.1151, ff. 323, 336. Cf. Pascual Boronat, Los moriscos españoles y su expulsión, 2 vols., Valencia, 1901, II, 657–61 .

71. AHN Inq, leg. 4671^1.

72. Carr, chaps. 18–20, gives an excellent survey of the expulsion.

73. On Cervantes’ views, cf. F. Márquez Villanueva, Personajes y temas del Quijote, Madrid, 1975.

74. Boronat, Los moriscos españoles, II, 196–97; F. Janer, La condición social de los moriscos de España, Madrid, 1857, pp. 114, 116.

75. García-Cárcel 1980, p. 102.

76. Boronat, Los moriscos españoles, II, 68–93.

77. Kamen 1980, p. 304.

78. The best survey of the emigration is Henri Lapeyre, La géographie de l’Espagne morisque, Paris, 1959.

79. For Ricote, see Tueller, Good and Fruitful Christians, pp. 180–89.

80. For some cases, Rosa Blasco, “Los moriscos que permanecieron en el obispado de Orihuela después de 1609,” Sharq al-Andalus 6 (1989).

81. Alcalá 1987, p. 83.

82. Martine Ravillard, Bibliographie commentée des Morisques, Algiers, 1979.

83. Cited in G. Gozalbes Busto, Los moriscos en Marruecos, Granada, 1992, p. 115.

84. Quoted in Kagan and Dyer, p. 126.

85. Trevor Dadson, Los moriscos de Villarubia de los Ojos (siglos XV-XVIII), Madrid, 2007, cited in Carr, p. 269.

86. Figures (probably insecure) as given by Contreras, in Henningsen and Tedeschi, p. 119.

87. AHN Inq, leg. 5126^1. This case is completely unstudied.

88. Wiegers, p. 12.

89. Wiegers, pp. 13–14, puts forward the idea of Luna as the possible author. However, he also says in another essay: “It seems most likely that the author was a European convert to Islam who wrote in Istanbul and was in close contact with Moriscos in Tunis, Spain and Morocco” (Wiegers, “European Converts to Islam in the Maghrib and the Polemical Writings of the Moriscos,” in Mercedes García-Arenal, ed., Conversions islamiques. Identités religieuses en Islam méditerranéen, Paris, 2001, p. 212).

90. Available in several published editions, and also as an e-document on the Internet.

91. The best summary of research on the Gospel of Barnabas is by Jan Slomp, “The Gospel of Barnabas in Recent Research,” Islamochristiana, Rome, 23 (1997). Basic contributions to the idea of a Morisco origin came from M. de Epalza, “Le milieu hispano-moresque de l’Evangile islamisant de Barnabé (XVI-XVIIe s.),” Islamochristiana, Rome, 8 (1982), and more recently from Luis Bernabé, “Los mecanismos de una resistencia: Los libros plúmbeos del Sacromonte y el Evangelio de Bernabé,” al-Qantara, Madrid, 23, 2 (2002).

92. Our information on Alonso de Luna comes from his statements to the Inquisition in AHN Inq, leg. 1953, reproduced, for example, in Bernard Vincent, “Et quelques voix de plus: De Francisco Núñez Muley à Fatima Ratal,” Sharq al-Andalus 12 (1995), pp. 142–44.

93. Beebe Bahrami, “Al-Andalus and Memory: The Past and Being Present among Hispano-Moroccan Andalucians from Rabat,” in Beckwith, pp. 127, 137.

94. For aspects of the continuing Hispanic memory among exiles, see Míkel de Epalza and Ramon Petit, eds., Recueil d’études sur les moriscos andalous en Tunisie, Madrid and Tunis, 1973. I am grateful to Luce López-Baralt for this reference.

95. Susan T. Rivers, “Exiles from Andalucia,” Aramco World 42, 4 (July–Aug. 1991).

96. Castro, chap. VIII, “Islamic Tradition and Spanish Life.”

97. Bennassar 1988, pp. 1349–66.

98. Anita González, “La Inquisición en las fronteras del Mediterráneo. Historia de los renegados, 1540–1694,” Areas 9 (1988), pp. 51–74. The phenomenon of renegades could also be found among Christian Italians.

99. Some figures for the case of Malta are in Ciappara, pp. 250–60.

100. Bennassar 1988, p. 1349.

101. Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612), ed. and introd. by María Antonia Garcés, trans. Diana de Armas Wilson, Notre Dame, 2011, p. 8.

102. Tijana Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Stanford, 2011, p. 2.

103. Ronald Hilton, La légende noire au 18e siècle: Le monde hispanique vu du dehors, 2002 (online).

104. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, in the Years 1775 and 1776, 2nd edn., 2 vols., London, 1787, I, 261.

105. For Orientalism in Spain, see Kamen 2007, chap. 2.

CHAPTER EIGHT. THE POLITICS OF HERESY

Epigraph. Inquisitors to Suprema, 1623, AHN Inq, lib. 744, f. 146.

1. Leopold von Ranke, The Ottoman and Spanish Empires, Philadelphia, 1945, translated from the German version of 1827.

2. For example, Bennassar 1979, p. 373, on the tribunal as “arme absolue de la monarchie”; A. Domínguez Ortiz, “Regalismo y relaciones Iglesia-Estado,” in García-Villoslada, IV, 113–21; and Perry and Cruz, p. 110: “historians may be wrong in concluding that the Holy Office did not serve as an instrument of royal absolutism.”

3. Bethencourt, p. 1. The idea of the Inquisition as an instrument for building the modern state is proposed by some students of institutional history, e.g., Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, Durham, 2004, who presents the Spanish tribunal as “the most modern of Spain’s bureaucracies” (p. 6), creator of “modern power” and bureaucracy, a contributor to “state building in the name of truth” (p. 120). For a corrective to this view, see Alejandro Cañeque, “On Modernity, Colonialism and the Spanish Inquisition: Reflections on the Spanish Empire in the New World,” 2011 paper delivered at Boston, accessible online.

4. Netanyahu 1995, p. 1051. Netanyahu denies that the king wished to achieve absolutism through political means (p. 1024); rather, he states, the king’s objective was to consolidate his power by playing the religious card against the Jews.

5. The best and only survey of royal absolutism in Spain is I. A. A. Thompson, “Absolutism, Legalism and the Law in Castile, 1500–1700,” in R. G. Asch and H. Duchhardt, eds., Der Absolutismus—Ein Mythos? Cologne, 1996. Spanish “legists,” writes Thompson, “rejected the concept of absolute as illegitimate and abhorrent.”

6. For a balanced view of the role of clerical elites in state building, see Hélène Millet and Peter Moraw, “Clerics in the State,” in Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Power Elites and State Building, Oxford, 1996, chap. 9.

7. Sesma Muñoz, p. 229.

8. This date, suggested by José Antonio Escudero (“The Origin of the Suprema,” in Alcalá 1987), revises the date 1483 given by Lea.

9. Lea, I, 174.

10. Quoted in Galván Rodríguez, p. 37.

11. Quoted in Poole, p. 81.

12. Fontes Iudaeorum, II, 23: “el más perro hombre del mundo, hereje cruel.”

13. García-Cárcel 1976, p. 135; García-Cárcel 1980, p. 127.

14. AHN Inq, lib. 1275, f. 169.

15. See Galván Rodríguez, p. 567.

16. Galván Rodríguez, p. 676.

17. Cited by R. López Vela, in Historia, II, 105.

18. In fact, for Aragon, Italy, Navarre and America.

19. Historia, II, 112–16.

20. Lea, II, 168–78. The case has been studied recently in a Madrid thesis by Chicha Gómez.

21. Nicolau Eimeric and Francisco Peña, Le manual des inquisiteurs, ed. L. Sala-Molins, Paris, 1973.

22. Given, p. 215.

23. Lea, II, passim.

24. “‘Inquisition’ was what the inquisitors did when carrying out their functions”: Novalín, in Historia, I, 635.

25. For one view of the Instructions, see J. L. González Novalín, “Reforma de las leyes del Santo Oficio,” in Nueva visión, pp. 211–17.

26. AHN Inq, lib. 497.

27. I here follow J. Contreras and J. P. Dedieu, “Geografía de la Inquisición española: La formación de los distritos, 1470–1820,” Hispania 40 (1980); but their information should be balanced against the exhaustive listing in Lea, I, 541–55.

28. Report to Suprema, Apr. 1582, AHN Inq, lib. 739, f. 176.

29. It is possible to offer alternative dates, depending on what one means by “establishment.”

30. Toledo had four: see R. Pérez-Bustamante, “Nóminas de inquisidores,” in Nueva visión, p. 261.

31. Cf. J. Caro Baroja, El señor inquisidor y otras vidas por oficio, Madrid, 1970, pp. 20, 31.

32. J.-P. Dedieu, in Bennassar 1979, p. 84.

33. Some theoretical aspects of criminal law, however, were being explored by sixteenth-century Spanish writers such as Alfonso de Castro.

34. The relevance of medieval inquisitors such as Gui and Eimeric to the subsequent development of the phenomenon of Inquisition is one of the themes in Karen Sullivan, The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors, Chicago, 2011, especially chap. 7.

35. With prominent exceptions such as Fernando de Valdés, inquisitors have been little studied. A pioneering work was Caro Baroja’s El Señor Inquisidor y otras vidas por oficio, Madrid, 2006 edn, first publ. 1968. I have been unable to consult the forthcoming study by Kimberly Lynn, Between Court and Confessional: The Politics of Spanish Inquisitors, Cambridge, 2013.

36. Rules of 1560 and 1573 required that they be married, peaceable and of non-converso origin, with a minimum age of twenty-five: Lea, II, 275, 279.

37. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 217.

38. Letter of 25 Aug, 1615, AHN Inq, lib. 742, f. 254.

39. Contreras, pp. 90–92.

40. R. García-Cárcel, “Número y sociología de los familiares de la Inquisición valenciana,” in Nueva visión, p. 277.

41. Philip II to Quiroga, 16 July 1574, BL, Eg.1506, f .21v.

42. Lea, I, 447.

43. Report of 13 May 1628, AHN Inq, leg. 21551.

44. Letter of 7 May 1609, AHN Inq, lib. 741, f. 325.

45. Letter of 8 Oct. 1622, AHN Inq, lib. 744, f. 7.

46. The familars were Narcis Portell and Salvador Feliu: see Kamen, Phoenix, p. 268. As merchants, they were not interested in holding administrative posts.

47. García-Cárcel, “Número y sociología,” p. 279. In Valencia and Granada the Inquisition also appointed Moriscos as familiars.

48. The conclusion in Jaime Contreras, “The Social Infrastructure of the Inquisition: Familiars and Commissioners,” in Alcalá 1987, pp. 133–58, that familiars in Aragon were from “the middle class and wealthy bourgeoisie,” is incorrect.

49. For familiars in Catalonia, see Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 265–70, a picture that corrects the presentation given by Contreras, “The Social Infrastructure,” p. 151, of Catalan familiars as having “a predominance of the middle classes.”

50. Inquisitors to Suprema, 24 June 1597, AHN Inq, leg. 27071.

51. Contreras, “The Social Infrastructure,” pp. 90–92, 129–30.

52. Libro histórico politico. Sólo Madrid es Corte, Madrid, 1675.

53. AHN Inq, leg. 5025/1.

54. An analysis of comisarios in the diocese of Cuenca is given by Sara Nalle, “Inquisitors, Priests and People during the Catholic Reformation in Spain,” SCJ 18, 4 (1987). She gives an unlikely image of an Inquisition “with the ability to correct the religious beliefs and activities of the most humble shepherd or lofty lord.” Her later study on the same area, God in La Mancha, modifies this position somewhat.

55. Cf. Given, pp. 198–99.

56. Nalle, “Inquisitors,” p. 584.

57. Reguera, p. 57.

58. The rest of this chapter contains some references to cash and coinage. The Inquisition papers tend to calculate coinage in the form of the maravedi, a minute copper coin. To avoid absurd figures running into millions, I have converted all maravedis into ducats (375 maravedis equalled 1 ducat), a coin used in the sixteenth century in Castile. On confiscations, see Henry Kamen, “Confiscations in the Economy of the Spanish Inquisition,” EconHR 18, 3 (1965).

59. Hernando del Pulgar, Los claros varones de España, Madrid, 1747, p. 252.

60. Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga, Annales de Sevilla, Madrid, 1677, p. 389.

61. C. Carrete Parrondo, “Los judaizantes castellanos,” in Inquisición y conversos, p. 196.

62. Cited by Amando Represa, “El miedo y la huida ante la Inquisición,” in Proyección histórica de España en sus tres culturas, Valladolid, 1993, I, 259–64.

63. Beinart 1974, I, 391.

64. Copy of petition by consellers to king, IMH, Consellers C.XVIII-6.

65. Thomas, La represión, p. 25.

66. Fidel Fita, “La Inquisición en Guadalupe,” BRAH 23 (1893), pp. 283–88.

67. Cf. Pilar Huerga, “La Hacienda de la Inquisición aragonesa durante el reinado de Fernando el Católico,” Jerónimo Zurita 63–64 (1991; publ. 1994).

68. Cf. Lea, II, 367, 371.

69. García Ivars, p. 221.

70. A total arrived at after consulting the voluminous papers in AHN Inq, legs. 4776–79.

71. Pedro Sanahuja, OFM, Lérida en sus luchas por la fe, Lleida, 1946, p. 162.

72. Azcona, p. 274.

73. Lea, II, 403.

74. Ladero 1984, p .40.

75. Ladero 1984, p. 41.

76. Historia, II, 909.

77. Lea, I, 329.

78. A “prebend” (from the late Latin praebenda) was a salary deriving from a church or cathedral; similarly, a canonry, mentioned below, was the income a member of the cathedral body drew from the cathedral.

79. Lea, I, 330.

80. To emperor, 25 Jan. 1547: AGS:E, leg. 75, f. 302.

81. M. Avilés, “Motivos de crítica,” in Nueva visión, p. 191.

82. AHN Inq, leg. 2700.

83. AHN Inq, leg. 2702.

84. AHN Inq, leg. 4760^1.

85. AHN Inq, leg. 4723^3.

86. Cited in J. Fernández Nieva, La Inquisición y los moriscos extremeños (1585–1610), Badajoz, 1979, p. 87.

87. For 1618, from García-Cárcel 1980, p. 177; for 1671–78, from AHN Inq, leg. 4994^1; for 1705, from AGS: Gracia y Justicia, leg. 622.

88. AHN Inq, leg. 4723^3.

89. AHN Inq, leg. 47233; Fernández Nieva, La Inquisición, p. 16.

90. “Memoria de los salarios que tienen,” AHN Inq, lib. 1232 ff. 205–9.

91. AHN Inq, leg. 4724^1, exped. 1.

92. Kamen, “Confiscations.”

93. AHN Inq, leg. 4597^2.

94. Lea, II, 433.

95. AHN Inq, leg. 4760^1; also M. I. Pérez de Colosia and J. Gil, Málaga y la Inquisición (1550–1600), no. 38 of Jábega, 1982, p. 13.

96. Fernández Nieva, La Inquisición,p. 87.

97. Lea, II, 438.

98. Kamen, Spain, p. 360.

99. G. Cerrillo, “Los familiares de la Inquisición en la época borbónica,” RI 4 (1995).

100. Historia, II, 1059.

101. Cf. Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, New York, 2007.

102. Lea, II, 110.

103. In BN, MS.718, ff. 108–10, “Remisiones de causas hechas por los sumos Pontifices a la Inquisición de España,” there are examples of twenty-one such appeals referred back between 1569 and 1608.

104. Lea, II, 8.

105. A. Astraín, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la asistencia de España, 7 vols., Madrid, 1902–25, vols. I–III.

106. A prosecution paper is published by Carlos Carrete Parrondo as Fontes Iudaeorum, vol. III.

107. This brief account, virtually unchanged from the first edition of this book, is based on Menéndez Pelayo, V, 9–82; G. Marañón, “El proceso del arzobispo Carranza,” BRAH 127 (1950), pp. 135–78; Lea, II, 48–86; and Tellechea 1969, I, 23–26. The various studies by Tellechea on Carranza are definitive; but there is still no adequate biography.

108. John Edwards, Mary I, England’s Catholic Queen, New Haven and London, 2011, p. 264. See also John Edwards and R. W. Truman, Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza, Aldershot, 2005.

109. The definitive life of Valdés, by J. L. González Novalín, El inquisidor general Fernando de Valdés, throws considerable light on the case.

110. Cf. Tellechea, in Historia, I, 566 (a useful summary of the case, published 1984).

111. Marañón, “El proceso,” p. 145.

112. Lea, I, 567–69, appendix I.

113. A point made by R. López Vela in Historia, II, 88, 100.

114. AHN Inq, lib. 1262, ff. 138–47.

115. AHN Inq, lib. 1275, f. 232.

116. “Justicias reales castigados por el Sancto Oficio,” AHN Inq, lib. 1275, ff. 1–8.

117. Cited in Carrasco Urgoiti, p. 151; my italics.

118. AHN Inq, leg. 1592^1, no. 2.

119. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 218.

120. Cited in Carrasco Urgoiti, p. 142.

121. AHN Inq, leg. 2155^1.

122. Consulta of Aragon, 22 Aug. 1587, ACA:CA, leg. 262, f. 4.

123. “Exemplares de haverse mandado borrar de libros de Audiencias y Consejos cedulas dadas contra el estilo de la Inquisición,” AHN Inq, lib. 1275, f. 203, is taken up almost wholly with conflicts with Barcelona.

124. To Suprema, 7 Sept. 1618, AHN Inq, lib. 743, ff. 95–99.

125. Quoted in Kamen, Phoenix, p. 211.

126. To Suprema, 12 Jan. 1613, AHN Inq, lib. 742, ff. 128–129. See the extended discussion of this in Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 268–70.

127. Menéndez y Pelayo, VI, 56.

128. Junta on Aragon to Philip II, 14 July 1591, BZ, 186, f. 15.

129. Cited by Gregorio Marañón, Antonio Pérez (El hombre, el drama, la época). 2 vols., Madrid, 1947, II, 605.

130. In a letter of Philip III, 14. Aug 1599, ACA:CA, leg. 264, f. 108.

131. AGS:E/K, 1505, nos. 46–77.

132. What follows is drawn from Henry Kamen, La España de Carlos II, Barcelona, 1981, pp. 364–69. This study contains a chapter 8, on the Church (and the Inquisition), that does not appear in the previously published English version, which is cited in my present bibliography as “Kamen 1980.”

133. This quotation, and the Sanz case, are detailed in Kamen 1980.

134. “Consulta que hizo la Junta que mandó formar el Señor Rey Don Carlos 2º a Su Magd para reformar abusos de Inquisición,” Real Academia de la Historia, MS. Est.23.gr.5.a.B, no. 129, ff. 308–52.

135. The mistaken idea of the Inquisition as a unique political body in Spain exercising jurisdiction that cut across frontiers is repeated frequently by nonhistorians. A recent example is Georgina Dopico-Black, Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain, Durham, 2001, p. 10: “The Spanish Inquisition served as an instrument of national centralization. The Supreme Council of the Inquisition was the only formal institution with jurisdiction over all the kingdoms of Spain.” Neither of these statements is correct.

136. Cf. R. López Vela in Historia, II, 117.

137. Lea, II, 133–57.

138. Serrano, III, lxx.

139. E.g., by Lea, in general; also by Monter 1990, p. 27.

140. Cf. Lea, IV, 514.

141. See, for example, Kamen 1997; also Patrick Williams, Philip II, New York, 2001.

142. BN, MS.2569. No denunciation or prosecution ever took place.

143. Galván Rodríguez, p. 448.

144. In the 1650s, for example, the council of State agreed to grant toleration to English Protestant sailors in Spanish ports, but the Inquisition blocked the measure.

145. Quoted thus in Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, España, un enigma histórico, 2 vols., 2nd edn., Buenos Aires, 1956, II, 563. Lea, IV, 250, quotes it as four clerics. The origin of the quote is unknown.

146. Cited J. Contreras, “La Inquisición aragonesa,” HS 36, 76 (1985), pp. 516–17.

147. Contreras, “La Inquisición aragonesa,” pp. 516–17.

148. Here I use quotations from the one-volume English edition of Gregorio Marañón, Antonio Pérez: “Spanish Traitor,” London, 1954, pp. 11, 13.

149. Marañón, Antonio Pérez: “Spanish Traitor,” p. 53.

150. Marañón, Antonio Pérez: “Spanish Traitor,” p. 276. The word “liberty” here meant expressly “the laws of Aragon,” and not the general concept of liberty.

151. The names of the dead are given in CODOIN, XII, 418–20.

152. This version of his death, given by the count of Luna (Francisco de Gurrea y Aragón, conde de Luna, Comentarios de los sucesos de Aragon en los años 1591 y 1592. Madrid, 1888, pp. 251–53), who was present in the city and knew all those participating in the execution, must be accepted over the highly dramatic version offered by many historians.

153. Ungerer, I, 84. “Old, weary and worn out from persecution.”

154. Ungerer, I, 212.

155. Ungerer, I, 304.

156. Marcelin Defourneaux, Pablo de Olavide ou l’Afrancesado (1725–1803), Paris, 1959, pp. 476–91.

157. Defourneaux, Pablo de Olavide, p. 327.

158. I take the details that follow from Manuela Moreno, “Breve biografía de Olavide,” Inquisición española. Nuevas aproximaciones, Madrid, 1987.

159. Jean Sarrailh, L’Espagne éclairée de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1954, p. 622, who cites also the opinion of the French scholar Morel-Fatio.

160. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 437.

161. Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes, Madrid, 1924, p. 124.

CHAPTER NINE. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

1. E.g., Beinart 1974.

2. This is the case, notably, of Netanyahu 1995.

3. AHN Inq, leg. 1867, no. 36.

4. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England, Oxford, 1988, pp. 98–101.

5. The material that follows is drawn from Kamen, Phoenix. The history of the Inquisition in Catalonia can be followed in three main studies: the references in Lea’s volumes, my chapter 5 in Phoenix, and the volume by Juan Blázquez Miguel, La Inquisición en Cataluña. El Tribunal del Santo Oficio de Barcelona (1487–1820), Toledo, 1990.

6. AHN Inq, lib. 732, f. 30v.

7. AHN Inq, lib. 733, f. 367v.

8. López-Lázaro, p. 21.

9. AHN Inq, lib. 733, f. 385.

10. Amando Represa, “El miedo y la huida ante la Inquisición,” in Proyección histórica de España en sus tres culturas, Valladolid, 1993, I, 254–64.

11. Tomás y Valiente, pp. 167–70.

12. Mariana, vol. 31, p. 202.

13. Cited by Represa, “El miedo,” pp. 259–64.

14. Huerga 1958, p. 13.

15. Records of the Spanish Inquisition, Translated from the Original Manuscripts, Boston, 1828, p. 27.

16. Birch, I, 103, 112.

17. Lea, II, 99.

18. AHN Inq, leg. 218, no. 20, case of 1674.

19. García Ivars, p. 231.

20. This useful point is made by Dedieu, p. 108.

21. Records of the Spanish Inquisition, pp. 78–113.

22. Lea, III, 552, analyzing a manuscript from the University of Halle.

23. Lea, II, 572.

24. For example, in the United States the taking of evidence by a grand jury involves applying the rule of secrecy to “the identities of witnesses or jurors, the substance of testimony” as well as actual transcripts, “the strategy or direction of the investigation, the deliberations or questions of jurors, and the like”: Federal Rules for Criminal Proceedings 6(e).

25. AGS:PR Inq, leg. 28; cf. Lea, I, 585.

26. I am now unable to locate my source for this. Cf. Caro Baroja, II, 187.

27. Miguel Avilés, “Motivos de crítica a la Inquisición en tiempos de Carlos V,” in Nueva Visión, p. 190.

28. Cited by Vincent, p. 142.

29. “La orden que ha de guardar el inquisidor que huviera de salir a visitar de la Inquisición de Llerena,” AHN Inq, lib. 1229, ff. 168–79.

30. Baer, II, 343; Lea, I, 169. Since not all parishes figure in this total, the real number of penitents may have been much higher.

31. García-Cárcel 1980, p. 192.

32. Carrasco, pp. 203–5.

33. The edict of faith for the year 1624, printed in Miguel Jiménez Monteserín, Introducción a la Inquisición española, Madrid, 1980, runs to thirty-two pages (pp. 503–35).

34. Contreras, in Historia, I, 755, makes this claim on the terror caused in Galicia by edicts.

35. Cf. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 247. One should add that all edicts were read in Castilian, a language incomprehensible to the population in many parts of Spain, especially Catalonia.

36. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 471, n. 220.

37. CODOIN, 112, pp. 264–65, 270.

38. AHN Inq, leg. 2701.

39. Iñaki Reguera, “Las cárceles de la Inquisición de Logroño,” in Perfiles, p. 437.

40. “Extracts from a Narrative of the Persecution of Hippolyto Joseph da Costa Pereira,” in the English version of Philipp van Limborch’s classic The History of the Inquisition, London, 1816, pp. 521–30.

41. Escamilla-Colin, I, 678.

42. M. de la Pinta Llorente, Las cárceles inquisitoriales españolas, Madrid, 1949, p. 115.

43. Birch, I, 367–68.

44. Pinta Llorente, Las cárceles, p. 102.

45. B. Vincent, “La prison inquisitoriale au XVIe siècle,” in A. Redondo, Les problèmes de l’exclusion en Espagne (XVIe–XVIIe siècles), Paris, 1983, p. 117.

46. In some prisons in Brazil today, twenty-five inmates have to fit into cells constructed for four people. Prison systems in Europe are supposed to provide at least five square meters of living space for each detainee; in practice many countries provide only two square meters. According to official statistics, three-quarters of the prisons in France, England, Italy and Spain suffer from this overcrowding. Details in Prison Overcrowding and Prison Population Inflation, the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 2000.

47. Birch, I, 235.

48. Lea, II, 534.

49. Escamilla-Colin, I, 696.

50. In what follows, I draw on the fine sketch given in Murphy, pp. 47–53.

51. Given, p. 217.

52. Lea, III, 11.

53. AHN Inq, lib. 497, f. 45.

54. A study that looks at the Inquisition’s use of torture in a European perspective is Ariel Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul, Oxford, 2001, chap. 7.

55. Beinart 1981, p. 120.

56. García-Cárcel 1980, p. 199.

57. Bennassar 1979, pp. 115–16.

58. Lea, III, 33.

59. Escamilla-Colin, I, 599.

60. Escamilla-Colin, I, 593.

61. Some historians, on the other hand, maintain that the inquisitors had sophisticated Communist-style methods. For example, Dedieu, pp. 80–82, believes that inquisitors and Chinese Communists “appliquaient des techniques semblables.” Similarly, Joseph Perez, The Spanish Inquisition, New Haven and London, 2004, pp. 222–24, claims to see “similarities between an inquisitorial trial and a Stalinist one.” He also views the tribunal as “an anticipation of modern totalitarianism” (p. 175).

62. The rack was virtually the only torture used by the tribunal in the seventeenth century. A detailed account of torture methods at that epoch is given in AHN Inq, lib. 1226, ff. 605–9: “La forma que se tiene en executar los tormentos en Castilla,” dated 24 May 1662.

63. Inquisitors to Suprema, 1 Apr. 1579, AHN Inq, leg. 2704.

64. Cases of the 1660s cited by Escamilla-Colin, I, 593–97.

65. For a case of 1648 in a secular court, cf. Tomás y Valiente, p. 414.

66. Lea, III, 25.

67. Birch, I, 381.

68. Murphy, p. 90. The water torture, in particular, or “waterboarding” as it is now known, has gained a grim notoriety through its regular use by agents of the United States government in Guantánamo.

69. AHN Inq, lib. 998, f. 212.

70. Lea, III, 46.

71. Lea, III, 68.

72. AHN Inq, leg. 1679, no. 3.

73. AHN Inq, leg. 37, no. 1.

74. J.-P. Dedieu, “L’Inquisition et le droit. Analyse formelle de la procédure inquisitoriale en cause de foi,” MCV 23 (1987), gives a schematic explanation of trial procedure.

75. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 255.

76. IMH, Barcelona, Consellers C.XVIII, vol. 8, f. 65.

77. To Suprema, 2 May 1590, AHN Inq, leg. 2706^1, no. 33. The Morisco was Gonzalo Bejarano, a convicted thief, whose vengeful revelations began the last great prosecution against the Moriscos of Hornachos.

78. Lea, III, 79.

79. Casey, chap. 8, “Obedience to the Law,” gives an excellent outline; but the history of crime in pre-modern Spain has barely begun to be studied.

80. T. A. Mantecón, “Meaning and Social Context of Crime in Preindustrial Times: Rural Society in the North of Spain, 17th and 18th centuries,” Crime, histoire & sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 2, 1 (1998), offers a useful bibliography relating particularly to Spain.

81. López-Lázaro, p. 76.

82. The most ambitious were the figures offered by G. Henningsen and J. Contreras, “Forty-four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700),” in Henningsen and Tedeschi, pp. 100–29.

83. In the tribunal of Murcia, where the Contreras figures offered a total of 1735 cases between 1562 and 1682, the real total of cases was 2726, or over 50 percent more: J. Blázquez Miguel, El tribunal de la Inquisición en Murcia, Murcia, 1986, p. 274. In the tribunal of Granada, where the Contreras figures offered 538 cases for the period 1550–1700, the real total was 1,187 persons tried, or over 100 percent more: Blázquez Miguel, “Algunas precisiones sobre estadística inquisitorial,” HS 40 (1988), p. 137. For the tribunal of Barcelona, there are major disparities between the Contreras figures and the real number of cases.

84. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 259.

85. Bethencourt, pp. 31, 444.

86. Dedieu, pp. 240–41, tables 34, 35.

87. García-Cárcel 1980, p. 212. A closer look at these cases (and those from Galicia) may well produce a different analysis, but the figures can serve to give an idea of the balance between different penalties.

88. Contreras, p. 550.

89. Birch, I, xxiv.

90. Beinart 1974, I, 607.

91. Cf. Lea, III, 162.

92. The incorrect form sambenito grew up because Castilians pronounced “m” instead of “n” in the word.

93. Escamilla-Colin, I, 830.

94. A large literature on this topic was launched with the influential work of Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, first published in Paris in French in 1975.

95. Cf. Dedieu, “L’Inquisition et le droit,” p. 247.

96. B. Vincent, “La prison inquisitoriale au XVIe siècle,” in Augustin Redondo, Les problèmes de l’exclusion en Espagne (Xve–XVIIe siècles, Paris, 1983, p. 120.

97. Lea, III, 156.

98. Monter 1990, p. 32. Monter has the best available study of this punishment.

99. Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660, London, 2002, pp. 68–69.

100. In reality, even in state tribunals “life” meant a maximum of ten years, according to a declaration issued by the Council of War in 1690: report of 19 Aug. 1690, AGS:E, leg. 4138.

101. Vincent, p. 141.

102. Monter 1990, p. 35.

103. BN, MS.9475.

104. The essential study is R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Oxford, 1987; the most extensive treatment is Henry C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, 3 vols., New York, 1887, available in many editions and online; a useful summary may be found in Peters, pp. 56–64.

105. Monter 1996, p. 50. See also the figures cited above in chapter 5.

106. Cf. Bennassar 1979, p. 118.

107. Letter of 11 May 1573, AHN Inq, leg. 2703.

108. Fita, “La Inquisición toledana.”

109. J. Simón Díaz, “La Inquisición de Logroño (1570–1580),” Berceo 1 (1946).

110. AHN Inq, leg. 4696^2.

111. AHN Inq, leg. 5047^3.

112. AHN Inq, leg. 4724^1, no. 1.

113. A full account exists, by M. V. Caballero, “El auto de fe de 1680,” RI 3 (1994), pp. 69–140.

114. Rizzi, a colleague of Claudio Coello and other Castilian painters, seems to have been born in 1614 and died in 1685.

115. An Authentick Narrative of the Origin, Establishment and Progress of the Inquisition, London, 1748, pp. 35–39. The original account is Joseph del Olmo, Relación histórica del auto general de fe que se celebró en Madrid este año de 1680, Madrid, 1680. I have consulted the text in Bodleian Library Vet.G.3.e.6.

116. Spierenburg studies the case of Amsterdam but also has a wider perspective.

117. Fidel Fita, “La Inquisición de Logroño y un judaizante quemado en 1719,” BRAH 45 (1904).

CHAPTER TEN. THE IMAGE AND REALITY OF POWER

Epigraph. Inquisitors of Barcelona to Suprema, AHN Inq, leg. 1592^1.

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. 2706^1, 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. 2155^1.

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. 2155^2.

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. 2155^2.

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. 3712^2, 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. 2155^1.

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.

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 America, 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. 2156^1.

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) that “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.

7. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 431–32. See also William A. Christian Jr, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Princeton, 1981.

8. Curiously, no attempt has ever been made to study anticlericalism in Spain before the nineteenth century. Historians have examined it in other European countries, because of a presumed affinity with the Reformation; but have tended to play down its importance. For a recent overview on England, see Christopher Haigh, “The Clergy and Parish Discipline in England, 1570–1640,” in Heal and Grell, chap. 6.

9. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 208–10, gives some examples from Catalonia in the 1620s.

10. The cases cited here and in the previous paragraph come from Kamen 1980, pp. 297–303.

11. Reguera, p. 28.

12. M. Angeles Cristóbal, “La Inquisición de Logroño,” in Inquisición española: Nuevas aproximaciones, Madrid, 1987, p. 141.

13. J. Contreras, “La Inquisición aragonesa,” HS 38, 76 (1985), p. 522.

14. José Sánchez Herrero, Concilios provinciales y sínodos Toledanos de los siglos XIV y XV, La Laguna, 1976.

15. Borja to Ignatius Loyola, 7 June 1546, in Monumenta historica Societatis Jesu: S. Franciscus Borgia, 5 vols., Madrid, 1896–1908, II, 520.

16. Melquiades Andrés, in Historia, I, 505.

17. This sentence is, of course, a simplification. There was no movement known as “Counter-Reformation” (a term that did not come into existence until the late nineteenth century), and the decrees of Trent had in fact been trickling out for many years before.

18. A scholar refers to “the Inquisition’s function of shaping society to conform with Counter Reformation ideals” (Giles, p. 9), but the Inquisition never had such a function, nor would anyone have known what those “ideals” were.

19. J. L. González Novalín, “Religiosidad y reforma del pueblo cristiano,” in García-Villoslada, III-1, 351–84, gives a good summary of the missionary problem in Spain.

20. The exact figure is 996, rounded upwards; data are taken from Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 263–64.

21. As in rural England: see K. Wrightson in Journal of Peasant Studies 5 (1977).

22. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, 2 vols., London, 1965, I, 109, 113.

23. Juan Antonio Alejandre and María Jesús Torquemada, Palabra de hereje. La Inquisición de Sevilla ante el delito de proposiciones, Seville, 1998; cited in Schwartz, p. 18.

24. Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident XIVe à XVIIIe siècles: Une cité assiégée, Paris, 1978.

25. Kamen, Phoenix, pp. 263–64.

26. Schwartz, p. 22, refers to “the crime of propositions,” but of course there was no such crime; the term was a bureaucratic label meant to refer to a variety of “statements.”

27. Marina Torres Arce, Un tribunal de la fe en el reinado de Felipe V. Reos, delitos y procesos en el Santo Oficio de Logroño (1700–1746), Logroño, 2002, p. 107.

28. AHN Inq, leg. 41, no. 21.

29. A recent study on related aspects of this theme is Keitt.

30. An interesting discussion of blasphemy as an expression of anger rather than irreligion, based on cases tried by the Inquisition, is given in Maureen Flynn, “Blasphemy and the Play of Anger in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” P&P 149 (1995).

31. For the early years of the new confession box in Catalonia, see Kamen, Phoenix.

32. The most recent studies are by Adelina Sarrión Mora, Sexualidad y confesión: La solicitación ante el tribunal del Santo Oficio (siglos XVI-XIX), Madrid, 1994; and most notably Haliczer 1996.

33. AHN Inq, leg. 2155^1.

34. García-Cárcel 1980, p. 285.

35. Cf. Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750, Ithaca, 2005, p. 112.

36. The striking essay by Wietse de Boer, “At Heresy’s Door: Borromeo, Penance and Confessional Boundaries in Early Modern Europe,” in Firey, pp. 343–76, touches on the problem of social and religious order. His study The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan, Leiden, 2001, discusses the role of the Roman Inquisition and other authorities.

37. An overview of aspects of the confessional is given by Gretchen Starr-Le Beau, “Lay Piety and Community Identity in the Early Modern World,” in Firey, pp. 395–418.

38. During the War of Succession (see chapter 8 above), the Inquisition formally ordered penitents to denounce confessors who supported the Habsburg pretender to the throne; nothing came of this order.

39. Contreras, pp. 561, 667.

40. García Fuentes, p. 445.

41. Cf. Kamen 1980, pp. 299–300.

42. It has been argued that an analysis of several hundred interrogations from the tribunal of Toledo (J. P. Dedieu, “‘Christianisation’ en Nouvelle Castille. Catéchisme, communion, messe et confirmation dans l’archvêché de Tolède, 1540–1650,” MCV 15 [1979]) indicates an improvement in knowledge of the essentials during the late sixteenth century. The conclusion is unsafe, since the analysis was not carried out on the same persons nor on compatible age groups nor in the same communities, so no credible comparison can be made.

43. AHN Inq, leg. 79, no. 24, f. 38. My conclusions for Toledo are based on cases in AHN Inq, legs. 24, 27, 41, 90.

44. V. Pinto Crespo, “La actitud de la Inquisición ante la iconografía religiosa,” HS 31 (1978). Unfortunately, the pages on Inquisition and art by Michael Scholz-Hänsel in Roodenburg and Spierenburg, chap. 6, are lamentably inaccurate. He states: “The considerable number of Inquisitional persecutions of individual artists show how much this social group must have learned to fear early modern discipline” (p. 126). This “considerable number” appears to be imaginary.

45. A good recent study on this complex subject is Palma Martínez-Burgos, Ídolos e imágenes. La controversia del arte religioso en el siglo XVI español, Valladolid, 1990. I am grateful to the author for sending me a copy.

46. AHN Inq, leg. 1592^1, no. 15.

47. Cf. William A. Christian Jr., Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain, Princeton, 1981.

48. R. María de Hornedo, “Teatro e iglesia,” in García-Villoslada, IV, 330.

49. Isabel Testón and Mercedes Santillana, “El clero cacereño durante los siglos XVI al XVIII,” Historia moderna. Actas de las II jornadas de metodología y didáctica, Cáceres, 1983, p. 466.

50. AHN Inq, lib. 735.

51. AHN Inq, leg. 217, f. 12; Contreras, p. 561.

52. AHN Inq, lib. 217, f. 12.

53. Cf. Kamen 2007, pp. 125–26; Historia, I, pp. 1113–23, a section written by J. I. Tell-echea. The story of Molinos is closely connected to Roman politics, and has little to do with Spain.

54. Schäfer.

55. Lea, III, 447.

56. Albert Loomie, SJ, “Religion and Elizabethan Commerce with Spain,” CHR (Apr. 1964).

57. Cf. Monter 1990, pp. 248–49.

58. Cited in Angeles Cristóbal, “La Inquisición de Logroño,” p. 145.

59. Consulta of State, 31 Mar. 1653, AGS:E, leg. 2528.

60. AHN Inq, lib. 735, f. 176.

61. L. de Alberti and A. B. Wallis Chapman, eds., English Merchants and the Spanish Inquisition in the Canaries, London, 1912, p. 80, n. 1.

62. F. Fajardo Spinola, Reducciones de protestantes al catolicismo en Canarias durante el siglo XVIII: 1700–1812, Gran Canaria, 1977, pp. 48, 51.

63. Alberti and Chapman, English Merchants, p. x.

64. AGS:E, leg. 2981.

65. For a discussion of relevant problems, see Roodenburg and Spierenburg, especially chap. 1 (by Heinz Schilling) and chap. 2 (by James A. Sharpe). I disagree with Spierenburg’s claim (p. 12): “the state backing that the Inquisition enjoyed made the activities of its tribunals akin to formal social control.” The statement makes little sense if the evidence for an exercise of control does not exist.

66. That is, Castile, Aragon, the Basque country and Navarre.

67. Kamen, Phoenix, chap. 5.

68. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 263.

69. Inquisition/citizen contact was, of course, higher in towns like Toledo and Madrid. Further studies, along the lines adopted for Catalonia, would clarify the issue of contact.

70. Sesma Muñoz, p. 23.

71. Both cases detailed in AHN Inq, lib. 735, f. 330.

72. I refer to a report in a national Spanish newspaper, El País, some years ago (13 Nov. 1996), of a woman in Pontevedra who went to the local police and denounced her husband for not performing his sexual duties towards her.

73. AHN Inq, leg. 226, no. 10.

74. James Casey, Early Modern Spain: A Social History, London and New York, 1999, p. 243.

75. 29 Jan. 1628, AHN Inq, lib. 745, ff. 226, 254.

76. AHN Inq, lib. 748, ff. 300–303.

77. Contreras, p. 683.

78. AHN Inq, lib. 735, f. 349.

79. Richard Greenleaf, cited in Historia, II, 665.

80. Kamen, Phoenix, p. 436.

81. Poska, p. 7.

82. Dedieu, p. 260.

83. The following case comes from AHN Inq, leg. 200/2, no. 51.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN. TWILIGHT OF THE HOLY OFFICE

Epigraph. Cited in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso, a Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, New York, 1971, p. 392.

1. Dedieu, p. 254. I presume I have read his figures rightly.

2. Cf. Monter 1990, p. 37.

3. See Gómez-Menor, “Un judío converso de 1498.”

4. 1528 prosecution of Gaspar Mercader, AHN Inq, leg. 2155^1; the Badajoz case in leg. 2701.

5. Cited R. Carrasco, “Preludio al siglo de los portugueses,” Hispania 166 (1987), p. 523.

6. Licenciado Montoya to Suprema, 11 Jan. 1581, AHN Inq, leg. 2705^1, no. 21.

7. Caro Baroja, III, 51.

8. The debate over the religion of these conversos is qualitatively different from that over the religion of the anusim of the fifteenth century. For some aspects of converso religion, see Cecil Roth, “The Religion of the Marranos,” JQR 22 (1931); Braunstein; and I. S. Révah, “Les Marranes,” REJ (1959), p. 54.

9. Charles Amiel, “El criptojudaismo castellano en La Mancha a finales del siglo XVI,” in Alcalá 1995, pp. 503–12.

10. García Ivars, p. 205.

11. García Ivars, pp. 236–38.

12. BN, MS.721, ff. 127–31; García Fuentes; Lea, III, 267.

13. It consequently seems inadvisable to isolate them as a historical phenomenon, as though they were a separate race (which they were not) or a separate religion (which they were not either). This ethnicist approach, confusing together both pre-1492 and post-1492 conversos, and those of Spanish and Portuguese origin, is the basis of some current research (as presented by J. Contreras, “The Judeo-Converso Minority in Spain,” in Perry and Cruz).

14. Charles Amiel, “Crypto-judaisme et Inquisition. La matière juive dans les édits de foi,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 210, 2 (1993), p. 157.

15. A typical edict is reproduced in photocopy in Caro Baroja, I, 440–41.

16. As suggested by David Gitlitz, “Las presuntas profanaciones judías del ritual cristiano,” in Alcalá 1995, pp. 156–63.

17. García Ivars, p. 243.

18. García Ivars, p. 221. The Murcia cases have been referred to above, chapters 5 and 12.

19. Lea, III, 239ff; A. Herculano, História da origem e estabelecimento da Inquisição em Portugal, 3 vols., Lisbon, 1907, I, 228–86.

20. Lea, III, 259.

21. Carrasco, “Preludio,” p. 540.

22. Lea, III, 265.

23. Carrasco, “Preludio,” p. 524.

24. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Arch.Σ.130, no. 8; Gaspar Matute y Luquín, Colección de los autos generales i particulares de fe celebrados por el tribunal de la Inquisición de Córdoba, Córdoba, 1840, pp. 65, 127; BN, MS.718, f. 375, and MS.6751, f. 53.

25. Escamilla-Colin, I, 266.

26. Pilar Huerga Criado, En la raya de Portugal. Solidaridad y tensiones en la comunidad judeoconversa, Salamanca, 1993.

27. J. Blázquez Miguel, “Algunas precisiones sobre estadística,” HS 40 (1988), p. 138.

28. Carrasco, “Preludio,” p. 556.

29. Caro Baroja, I, part 1, p. 220.

30. Cf. Yosef Kaplan, “The Travels of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam to the ‘Lands of Idolatry’ (1644–1724),” in Kaplan.

31. Graizbord, p. 4.

32. Escamilla-Colin, I, 348.

33. Lea, III, 267–70.

34. Elkan Adler, “Documents sur les Marranes d’Espagne et de Portugal sous Philippe IV,” REJ 49 (1904).

35. Caro Baroja, II, 56–57.

36. Cf. J. H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares, New Haven, 1986, pp. 300–304.

37. Caro Baroja, II, 59.

38. A. Domínguez Ortiz, “El proceso inquisitorial de Juan Núñez Saravía, banquero de Felipe IV,” Hispania 61 (1955).

39. Cf. James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain, 1626–1650, New Brunswick, 1983, pp. 118–21.

40. The accounts of the firm are in AHN Inq, leg. 5096^2.

41. The source is Avisos de don Jerónimo de Barrionuevo (1654–58), published by A. Paz y Melia in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vols. 221–22, Madrid, 1968.

42. The Montesinos accounts are in AHN Inq, leg. 4971^1.

43. BN, MS.718. f. 375.

44. This and the following cases from Kamen 1980, pp. 305–6.

45. García Ivars, p. 250.

46. For Sabbatai, see the masterly work of Gerschom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, Princeton, 1973.

47. Miriam Bodian, “‘Men of the Nation’: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe,” P&P 143 (1994), p. 66. The emerging perspectives of Jews in Europe at this time are strikingly discussed by David Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, especially chap. 6: “Toward Modernity: Some Final Thoughts.”

48. The thought of Cardoso is analyzed by Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto; and there is a perceptive essay on his life in Enrique Ruspoli, La marca del exilio, Madrid, 1992.

49. I. S. Révah, “Un pamphlet d’Antonio Enríquez Gómez,” REJ 121 (1962).

50. See N. Kramer-Hellinx, “Antonio Enriquez Gómez: Desafío de la Inquisición,” in Xudeus e Conversos, I, 289–307.

51. Maxim Kerkhof, “La ‘Inquisición de Luzifer y visita de todos los diablos,’” Sefarad 38 (1978).

52. A stimulating perspective of the Portuguese “nation” in its Jewish and imperial role is given by Daviken Studwicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640, Oxford, 2007.

53. A look at Iberian conversos in Europe is offered by Renee L. Melammed, A Question of Identity: Iberian Conversos in Historical Perspective, New York, 2004.

54. Details from the superb study by Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro, Oxford, 1989.

55. Kaplan, Orobio de Castro, p. 323.

56. Yirmiyahu Yovel, for instance, sees the displaced conversos as influential in the creation of “Western modernization”: Yovel, chap. 9.

57. Cited in Kamen 1980, p. 304.

58. J. B. Vilar Ramírez, El Dr Diego Mateo Zapata (1664–1745), Murcia, 1970.

59. For both men, see A. Domínguez Ortiz, Hechos y figuras del siglo XVIII español, Madrid, 1973, pp. 159–91.

60. BN, MS.9475; Joseph del Olmo, Relación; Matute y Luquín, Colección. p. 210.

61. Angela Selke, Vida y muerte de los Chuetas de Mallorca, Madrid, 1980, is a brilliant and moving account.

62. Inquisición de Mallorca. Reconciliados y relajados 1488–1691, Barcelona, 1946, pp. 201–75.

63. Inquisición de Mallorca, pp. 109–99.

64. Braunstein gives the best documented study.

65. Teófanes Egido, in Historia, I, 1386. For repression in Cuenca, see R. de Lera García, “La última gran persecución inquisitorial contra el criptojudaismo: el tribunal de Cuenca 1718–1725,” Sefarad 47, 1 (1987).

66. Escamilla-Colin, I, 874.

67. Teófanes Egido, in Historia, I, 1397.

68. Lea, III, 311.

69. G. Desdevises du Dézert, “Notes sur l’Inquisition espagnole au dix-huitième siècle,” RH 6 (1899).

70. A recent Socialist government in Spain funded in 2005 the establishment of a so-called Alliance of Civilizations that aimed to foster links between Spain and Islamic countries but expressly excluded any participation by Israel.

71. The Bible in Spain, London, 1930, p. 155.

72. A Journey through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787, 3 vols., London, 1792, III, 84.

73. See the informative article by Gustavo D. Perednik, “Naïve Spanish Judeophobia,” in Jewish Political Studies Review 15, 3–4 (Fall 2003).

74. Because of the low-key profile of the Inquisition in the eighteenth century, I have intentionally omitted any treatment of its role in that period. The most relevant aspect is cultural, on which there are four classic studies: Jean Sarrailh, L’Espagne éclairée de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1954; Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain, Princeton, 1958; Marcelin Defourneaux, L’Inquisition espagnole et les livres français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1963; and Joel Saugnieux, Le Jansénisme espagnol du XVIIIe siècle, ses composants et ses sources, Oviedo, 1975.

75. Llorente 1817–18, IV, 92.

76. Luis Alonso Tejada, Ocaso de la Inquisición en los últimos años del reinado de Fernando VII, Madrid, 1969, p. 43.

77. Lea, IV, 461.

78. Thomas Aikenhead, a student from Edinburgh, was the last person in Britain to be executed for blasphemy, in 1697. This was eighty-five years after the death of Edward Wightman, the last person to be burned at the stake for heresy in England (1612).

CHAPTER FIFTEEN. INVENTING THE INQUISITION

1. Chap. 5 in Peters gives a discussion ranging over the whole of Europe. The present chapter is restricted mainly to how Spaniards (rather than Europeans) saw and see the Inquisition.

2. Quoted in Hillgarth, Mirror, p. 234.

3. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Obras completas, 4 vols., Pozoblanco, 1995–2000, II, 96.

4. Peter Paul Rubens, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, trans. and ed. by Ruth Saunders Magurn, Cambridge, Mass., 1955, p. 258.

5. Vittorio di Tocco, Ideali di indipendenza in Italia durante la preponderanza spagnuola, Messina, 1926, pp. 99, 103, 124.

6. Sverker Arnoldsson, La Leyenda Negra: Estudios sobre sus orígenes, Göteborg, 1960.

7. “Relazione di Spagna,” Opere, Bari, 1929–36, X, p. 131.

8. Eugenio Alberi, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato, Florence, 1839–40, serie I, vol. 5, p. 85.

9. M. de la Pinta Llorente, Aspectos históricos del sentimiento religioso en España, Madrid, 1961, p. 37.

10. L. P. Gachard, Correspondance de Philippe II sur les affaires des Pays-Bas, 6 vols., Brussels, 1848–79, I, clxxvi.

11. Kamen 1997, p. 62.

12. Nicolas Castrillo, El “Reginaldo Montano”: Primer libro polémico contra la Inquisición Española, Madrid, 1991, p. 31.

13. F. E. Beemon, “The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition and the Preconditions for the Dutch Revolt,” AR 85 (1994), p. 255.

14. Alastair Duke, “The ‘Inquisition’ and the Repression of Religious Dissent in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1521–1566,” in Alastair Duke, Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries, Farnham, U.K., 2009, p. 100.

15. Alastair Duke, “A Legend in the Making: News of the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ in the Low Countries in German Evangelical Pamphlets, 1546–1550,” in Duke, Dissident Identities, p. 122.

16. An Apology or Defence of William the First of Nassau, Prince of Orange, London, 1707, pp. 497, 530.

17. Peters, pp. 133–34: “Much of his information is generally accurate. . . . His appeal lay in the base of accuracy upon which he erected an otherwise extremely misleading description of the Inquisition.”

18. A. Gordon Kinder, “Spain’s Little Known ‘Noble Army of Martyrs,’” in Twomey, p. 79.

19. The Book of Martyrs, London, 1863, p. 153.

20. H. Kamen and J. Pérez, La imagen internacional de la España de Felipe II, Valladolid, 1980, p. 56; William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England, Durham, 1971, pp. 76, 84.

21. A fascinating selection of Inquisition papers relevant to English sailors is the volume by L. de Alberti and A.B. Wallis Chapman, eds., English Merchants and the Spanish Inquisition in the Canaries, London, 1912.

22. The Book of Martyrs, p. 1060.

23. John L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, London 1912, p. 165.

24. Julián Juderías, La Leyenda Negra, Madrid, 1914, republished very often afterwards. The term was taken up by subsequent authors, e.g., Sverker Arnoldsson and W. S. Maltby, cited above.

25. Edward Peters, “The Inquisition in Literature and Art,” chap. 7 of his Inquisition, is a useful introduction on the European context.

26. Vicente Llorens, El Romanticismo español, Madrid, 1989, p. 71.

27. Quarterly Review (London), Oct. 1813–Jan. 1814, p. 205.

28. Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 17 (1906), p. 40.

29. In Spanish there is a photostat edition, published in 1988 in Barcelona; my quotes are from this.

30. Puigblanch, La Inquisición, p. 487.

31. See the introduction by Gerard Dufour to his edition of the Memoria histórica, Paris, 1977.

32. Gerard Dufour, Juan Antonio Llorente en France (1813–1822), Geneva, 1982, pp. 143, 344.

33. For some evaluations, cf. Antonio Márquez’s introduction to J. A. Llorente, Noticia biográfica, Madrid, 1982; and Peters, pp. 278–83.

34. The History of the Inquisition of Spain, London, 1827, preface.

35. In the Academia de San Fernando, Madrid.

36. In the same way, Goya’s famous portrayal of the uprising against French troops is a product of his imagination and not of an eyewitness: see Janis Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment, New Haven, 1992. One parallel to Goya’s painting on the Inquisition is the likewise imaginative mural by Diego Rivera, The Court of the Inquisition (Palacio Nacional, Mexico).

37. José Amador de los Ríos, Estudios históricos, políticos y literarios sobre los judíos de España, Madrid, 1848, p. 515.

38. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity. Durham, 1995, p. 127.

39. Raphael, pp. 136–37.

40. Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 17 vols., 2nd edn., New York, 1952, XV, 174.

41. Beinart, in Kedourie, pp. 107, 114.

42. J. Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity, Albany, 1992, p. 8.

43. This is the prime argument of Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within. He writes: “The Marrano mind contributed to initiating the modern will: the demand to reform the world, especially in matters of religious freedom, toleration, free trade and the creation of a cosmopolitan-inspired model of life” (p. 343). In the process, he supplies a highly incorrect account of the Inquisition and its methods.

44. Cited by Peters, p. 286.

45. Peters, p. 261.

46. In this respect, there is a useful summary of the 1813 Cortes debates by Stephen Haliczer, in Alcalá 1987, p. 526.

47. M. Menéndez y Pelayo, La ciencia española, Madrid 1953, p. 102.

48. Menéndez y Pelayo, Heterodóxos, VI, 18–19.

49. Jo Tollebeek, Writing the Inquisition in Europe and America: The Correspondence between Henry Charles Lea and Paul Fredericq (1888–1908), Brussels, 2004, p. xlv.

50. Cf. Peters, pp. 204–21.

51. The three volumes by Jean Plaidy were The Rise of the Spanish Inquisition (1959), The Growth of the Spanish Inquisition (1960) and The End of the Spanish Inquisition (1961). The work continues to be reprinted.

52. Cf. Daniel Muñoz Sempere, La Inquisición española como tema literario, London, 2008, p. 212.

53. For a brief discussion, see Kamen, Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity, New Haven and London, 2008, chap. 5.

54. Historia de la filosofía en España, Madrid, 1927, pp. 295–305.

55. Carmelo Lisón Tolosana, Ensayos de antropología social, Madrid, 1973: “Breve historial brujesco gallego,” especially pp. 193–97.

56. Birch, II, 905.

57. Quoted in J. Vicens Vives, ed., Historia de España y América, 5 vols., Barcelona, 1957, IV, 247.

58. Carvajal to Luyando, 28 Sept. 1751, BN, MS.13043, f. 130.

59. “Representación a Carlos IV sobre lo que era el tribunal de la Inquisición,” Obras, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 87, Madrid, 1956), V, 333.

60. Jean Sarrailh, L’Espagne éclairée de la seconde moitié du 18e siècle, Paris, 1954, p. 317.

61. Bethencourt, p. 2.

62. “Del influjo de la Inquisición y del fanatismo religioso en la decadencia de la literatura española,” Disertaciones y juicios literarios, Madrid, 1878, p. 107.

63. Sánchez Albornoz, España. Un enigma histórico, II, 563. Sánchez Albornoz, as it happened, insisted that it was desirable for Spain to reject both the Islamic and Jewish aspects of its civilization: see Kamen 2007, pp. 47, 91–92.

64. The Spaniards in Their History, London, 1950, pp. 204–45.

65. Cf. Lecler, I, 205.

66. The victim was the Anabaptist David Joris, who had died quietly in Basel three years before. See Lecler, I, 221–22.

67. I first read Karamazov at the age of twelve, and remain still haunted by the scene when the Grand Inquisitor confronts Christ.

68. Netanyahu 1995, pp. 1075–76.

69. Netanyahu’s answer to the question is that a racialist policy was adopted by the state, but most historians do not accept this.

70. Murphy, p. 188.

71. In Tollebeek, Writing the Inquisition, p. xcii.

GLOSSARY

abjuration

public renunciation by an accused, usually done during an auto de fe

alfaqui

Muslim clergy who ministered to the Muslim/Morisco population

aljama

Arabic word for the community in which Muslims or Jews lived separate from their Christian neighbors; known in Castilian as a judería or a morería

alumbrado

an illuminist, mystic who minimized the role of the Church and ceremonies

anusim

Hebrew term for Jews converted to Christianity against their will

arbitrista

writer of arbitrios, or proposals for reform

auto de fe

“act of faith,” often held in public, at which those tried by the Inquisition had their sentences declared

beata

woman who dedicated herself to a solitary religious life, within or without a religious order

calificador

assessor, usually a theologian, who examined evidence to see if heresy was involved

censo

annuity from investments

Chancillería

the Castilian high court in Valladolid and Granada; other high courts were called audiencias

colegios mayores

elite graduate colleges at the main universities

comisario

select local clergy who helped the Inquisition in administrative matters

conseller

member of the Consell de Cent, the city council of Barcelona

converso

a person converted from the Jewish or Muslim faiths, especially the former; applied also to all descendants of the same

convivencia

coexistence, in this case of the three religious cultures of Spain

corregidor

civil governor in the main Castilian towns

Cortes

parliament of each realm of Spain (in Catalan, Corts)

Diputación

(in Catalan, Diputació) standing committee of the Cortes, of particular importance in the crown of Aragon. Members were called diputados in Aragon, diputats in Catalonia

ducat

Castilian unit of coinage, equivalent to 375 maravedis or 11 reales

edict

declaration (of “grace” or of “faith”) read out publicly by the inquisitors or their officials at the commencement of proceedings in a district

encomienda

in medieval Spain, a knighthood in one of the military orders; in colonial Spanish America the word had a different meaning

familiar

lay official of the Inquisition

fuero

local law or privilege

hermandad

a brotherhood or confraternity, usually based on a parish church and associated with devotion to a particular saint

hidalgo

one of noble rank

judaizer

used in this book to refer to a converso accused of illicitly practicing the Jewish religion

judería

Castilian word for a Jewish community

limpieza de sangre

“purity of blood,” freedom from Semitic blood

maravedi

medieval Castilian unit of account

Marrano

abusive word, of obscure origin, applied to Jewish conversos

meshumadim

Hebrew term for Jews who converted “voluntarily” to Christianity

Moor

in Spanish, moro, term used by Spaniards to refer to a Muslim

Moriscos

Castilian term for Muslims converted to Christianity and their descendants

Mozárabes

Christians living under Muslim rule

Mudéjares

Muslims living under Christian rule

New Christian

term applied (especially in Portugal) to people of Jewish origin

sanbenito

penitential garment of the Inquisition

Sephardic

term applied to Jews of Spanish origin, from “Sepharad,” a Hebrew word referring to Iberia

Suprema

central council of the Inquisition

taqiyya

the tactic of conformism permitted in certain conditions to Muslims living under an alien faith

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alcalá, Angel, ed. The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind. Boulder, 1987.

Alcalá, Angel, ed. Judíos, sefarditas, conversos. Valladolid, 1995.

Avilés, Miguel. “Motivos de crítica a la Inquisición en tiempos de Carlos V.” In Nueva visión.

Azcona, Tarsicio de. Isabel la Católica. Vida y reinado. Madrid, 2002.

Baer, Yitzhak. A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1966.

Bataillon, Marcel. Erasmo y España. Mexico City, 1966.

Beckwith, Stacy N. Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain. New York, 2000.

Behringer, Wolfgang. Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History. Cambridge, 2004.

Beinart, Haim, ed. Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real. 3 vols. Jerusalem, 1974.

Beinart, Haim. Conversos on Trial: The Inquisition in Ciudad Real. Jerusalem, 1981.

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INDEX

Abelard, Peter, 130

Abolafia, Samuel, 31, 351

Abravanel, Isaac, 17, 20, 25–27, 31–32, 72

Accetto, Torquato, 152

Acosta, Cristóbal, 281

Acton, Lord, 148, 392

admiral of Aragon, 167

admiral of Castile, 87, 331

Adrian of Utrecht, cardinal, 85–86, 119, 134, 184, 237

al-Andalus, 1, 2, 159–160, 177, 180

Álava, 113

Alba, duke of, 26, 107, 129, 147, 211, 231, 342, 376–377

Albania, 6

Albert, archduke, 191, 356

Alcalá, 92–93, 98–99, 102, 113, 122, 135, 138, 208–209, 230, 293, 319, 367

Alcalá, Luis de, 17

Alcalá, university of, 147, 310, 318, 381

Alcalá Galiano, Antonio, 380, 386

Alcántara, Order of, 304, 313

Alexander VI, 217

Alfonso V, 19

Alfonso the Wise, King, 114

Algiers, 3, 175, 179

al-Hasan al-Wazzan, 3

Aliaga, Luis de, 183

aljama, 10, 15, 17–22, 26, 162

Almazán, Miguel, 81

Alpujarras, rebellion in, 168

alumbrados, 95–98, 126, 138, 140, 146–147, 233, 240, 245, 341

Álvarez, Hernando, 146

Amadis de Gaula, 131, 158

Amador de los Ríos, José, 384

America, 111, 190, 208, 331, 343, 352, 359–360, 378

no emigration of Jews to, 34

Amsterdam, 6, 30, 39, 115, 266, 361–362, 365–366

Anabaptists, 283

anti-Semitism, 16, 21, 25–26, 31–32, 36, 65, 81, 138, 143, 144, 147, 155, 229, 311, 326–327, 351, 359, 370, 372, 376

Antwerp, 115, 121–122, 125, 130, 134, 142, 208, 376

anusim, 22, 44

Aragon, opposition to Inquisition in, 59

papal Inquisition in, 57

Arama, Isaac, 72

Aranda, count of, 25, 327

Aranda, Pedro de, 207

Araoz, Antonio de 118, 319

arbitristas, 155, 172

Arbués, Pedro de, 59, 62–64, 67, 76, 264, 305

Arce de Otalora, Juan, 315

Arias, Francisco, 288

Arias Dávila, Diego, 37, 47

Arias Dávila, Juan, 26, 207

Arias Montano, Benito, 129, 131, 136, 142–143, 147, 171, 379

Arles, 224

Arles, Council of, 15

astrology, 118, 151, 153, 293

atheism, 11, 217, 224

autos de fe, 59, 63, 65, 68, 72, 74, 79, 95–96, 105–106, 109, 115, 146, 167, 169, 187–188, 191, 198, 202, 212, 221, 226, 249, 252–254, 258, 261–263, 265, 269–270, 272–274, 279, 296, 317, 328, 343–344, 353, 355, 363, 366–369, 374, 379, 383, 390

and Spanish mentality, 271

as propaganda by Inquisition, 271, 273, 279

costs of, 255

first auto held, 56

iconography of, 273, 277–278

new form invented by Fernando Valdés, 263, 274, 277

presence of royalty at, 275–276

Avellaneda, inquisitor, 295

Ávila, 4, 18–19, 21, 26, 42, 56, 95, 127, 146, 183, 188, 305

Ávila, Alfonso de, 38

Ávila, Juan de, 97, 320

Ayala, Martín de, 166, 168

Ayora, Gonzalo de, 81

Azara, Félix de 180

Azpilcueta, Martín de, 210, 243

Bacon, Francis, 133, 152, 154, 222, 223, 367

Badajoz, 38, 114, 201, 305, 311, 352, 357

Badoero, ambassador, 375

Baer, Yitzhak, 45, 384, 385

Bardaxi, Antoni de, 62

Bardaxi, Felipe de, 216

Barrientos, Lope de, 304

Bayle, Pierre, 223, 367

Bayonne, 358, 370

Bear Bible, 115

beata, 95, 283, 337

Bernáldez, Andrés, 17–18, 28, 34, 47, 50, 55, 66–67, 79, 197

Berruguete, Pedro, 273, 274

bestiality, 268, 290

Bible, 50, 92, 101, 111, 122, 124–125, 129, 137, 140, 142, 145, 176, 343, 371

translations of, 102, 109, 114–115

Bienveniste, 17

bigamy, 83, 87, 251, 286, 288

Bilbao, 21, 109, 134, 135, 330

bishops, jurisdiction of, 206

Black Legend, 379

Blanco White, José María, 317

blasphemy, 83, 217, 222, 227, 228, 244, 252, 334, 336

blood purity. See limpieza

Boabdil, 31

Bodin, Jean, 130, 132

Bologna, 120, 123, 157, 305–306, 308

Bonafed, Selomoh, 22

books, control of. See Chapter 5 passim

and censorship, 136

burning of, 128, 129

import of, 103, 134–135

Bordeaux, 113, 124, 296, 359

Borgia, Cesare, 217

Borja, Francisco de, 127, 131, 318–319, 331–332

Borja, Pedro Galceran de, 290

Boronat, Pascual, 173

Borromeo, Carlo, 337

Borrow, George, 116, 371

Brahe, Tycho, 133

Bravo, inquisitor, 82

Brito, Francisco Díaz Méndez, 362

Brocense, 126, 143, 145, 391

Bucer, Martin, 111, 317

Buitrago, 18, 31

Burghley, Lord, 222

Burgos, 1, 16, 21–22, 36–37, 42, 82, 94, 96, 99, 113, 115, 119, 134, 188, 243, 269, 304, 321

Burgos, Alonso de, 38

Caballería, Alfonso de la, 64

Caballería, Pedro de la, 41

Caballería family, 19–20, 37–38, 63

Cabriada, Juan de, 153

Cáceres, 21

Calahorra, 109, 188, 190, 207

Calatrava, Order of, 96, 135, 304, 313, 363

Calcena, secretary 84, 85

Calvin, John 111, 134

Camargo, 340

Camos, Marco Antonio de, 281

Canary Islands, 98, 191, 229, 248, 253, 343, 380

Canisius, Peter, 126

Cano, Melchor, 125, 127–128, 132, 139, 207–209, 320

Cantalapiedra, Martín Martínez de, 140, 142, 143, 314

Canto, Alonso del, 109, 318

capital punishment, opposition to, 77

Capsali, rabbi, 23, 32, 33

Cardona, duke of, 26

Cardoso, Isaac, 351, 365

Cardoso financiers, 361

Carmelite order, 145

Carranza, Bartolomé de, 106, 127–128, 138–139, 207–211, 221, 237, 243–245, 250, 263, 311, 340

Carrillo, Alonso, 43, 330

Cartagena, 191, 211

Cartagena, Alonso de, 37, 50, 77, 304

Carvajal, José de, 327, 389

Cascales, Francisco de, 314

Castañega, Martín de, 293

Castellio, Sebastian, 112, 392

Castillo, Alonso del, 170, 171, 175

Castillo de Bobadilla, 313

Castro, Alfonso de, 11, 294

Castro, Alonso Núñez de, 195

Castro, Américo, 146, 148, 149

Castro, León de, 140, 142

Castro, Pedro de, 209

Castro, Rodrigo de, 209

Catalans and Inquisition, 13, 51, 61, 89, 110, 123, 194, 213–215, 217, 261–262, 268, 278, 332, 335, 345, 347

Cathars, 51, 75, 267

Cazalla, Agustín, 102

Cazalla, Juan de, 105

Cazalla, Maria de, 95, 97, 103, 105, 106

Cazalla, Pedro, 209

Celestina, 94, 131, 146

celibacy, 287

Cellorigo, Martín González de, 172, 203, 323

censorship and Inquisition, 119–122, 125, 129, 131–133, 136–138, 149, 151–152, 155, 185, 381

censos, 198, 200, 202–204

Centelles, Gaspar de, 108

Cerdán, Ramón, 221

Cervantes, 126, 133, 147, 152, 173

Chambre Ardente, 204

Charles II, 185

Charles III, 327, 372

Charles IV, 370, 372

Charles V, 11, 39–40, 64, 74, 83–88, 93–94, 96, 98, 100–104, 111, 115, 155, 161, 163, 166, 184, 193, 198, 200, 206–207, 231, 263, 275, 308, 310, 314, 375, 377

policy to Protestants, 103

Chaves, Diego de, 128, 220

Chaves, Domingo de, 349

chivalry, books of, 131, 150, 158

Chuetas, 201, 229, 253, 327, 368

Cid, El, 2, 158

Ciruelo, Pedro de, 293

Cisneros, cardinal, 73, 82–85, 92–93, 95, 98, 129, 139, 158–159, 184, 231, 305, 329–330

Cisneros, García de, 330

Ciudad Real, 31, 42–43, 46, 49, 56, 65, 68, 70–73, 76, 79, 167, 187–188, 197, 238, 248, 253

Ciudad Rodrigo, 201, 357

Clement VII, 206, 289

Clement VIII, 206

Cobos, Francisco de los, 200

Coello, Francisco, 363

coexistence of faiths, 2, 4–5, 10–11, 14–15, 22, 41, 44, 101, 159, 163–164, 166, 170–171, 326

Coimbra, 120, 279, 356, 363

Colón, Fernando, 122, 155

Comes, Joan, 61

comisarios, 133, 167, 192–193, 196, 289, 315, 348

Comuneros, revolt of, 87, 134, 161, 310

confession, sacrament of, 337

confiscations by Inquisition, 54, 67, 69, 79, 83–84, 86, 120, 167–168, 182, 186, 196–202, 204–205, 249, 263, 289, 342–344, 358, 360, 365, 368

confraternity of Inquisition, 192, 264

conscience, liberty of, 10

Constable of Castile, 43, 87

Contarini, ambassador, 375

converso nation, idea of, 50, 73

conversos, 16, 19–20, 23–27, 31–32, 36–37, 39–43, 45–46, 48–49, 52–59, 61–68, 70, 72–73, 76–84, 87–89, 96, 98, 103, 108, 118, 134, 138, 143–148, 152, 195–199, 203, 205, 226, 228, 232, 234, 238, 254, 264, 267, 271, 274, 276, 302–314, 318–320, 322–324, 326, 332, 351–357, 361, 363, 364, 366–369, 376, 385–386, 389

attitude of Jews to, 22–23

forced conversion of, 16

heresy of, 43–44, 47, 49–51

hostility to, 41, 43, 47, 51, 69

professions of, 36, 38–39, 69

religion of, 44–49, 70–71

conversos in Aragon, 63

Córdoba, 1, 14–15, 23, 26, 36, 38, 43, 55–56, 73, 79–80, 82, 83, 96, 146, 148, 169, 171, 180, 187–188, 190, 201–202, 234–235, 243, 255, 272, 311, 320, 356, 367, 370

Córdoba, Luis Cabrera de, 311

Coronel family, 26, 87, 314

Corro, Antonio del, 102, 116, 376

Cortes of Cadiz, 149, 184, 270, 370, 372, 379–382

Cortizos de Villasante, Manuel, 327, 362–363

Costa, Uriel da, 366

Counter Reformation, 148, 337

Crete, 4, 6, 32

Cromwell, Oliver, 343–344, 359

Cruz, Isabel de la, 95

crypto-Christians, 6

crypto-Muslims, 6

Cuenca, 7–9, 20, 32, 37, 40, 48, 66–67, 106, 169–170, 188, 190, 197, 209, 293, 304, 313, 352, 356–357, 361–363, 365, 367

Cyprus, 6

Daimiel, 167

Dante, 130, 133, 177

Dávila, Pedrarias, 37

death penalty, 10, 77–78, 81, 107, 112, 123, 135, 246, 296, 379

deaths in Inquisition, 252

denunciation process, 48, 73, 80, 138, 140, 145–146, 193, 196, 209, 227–231, 245, 267–269, 284, 290, 335, 339, 343, 353

Descartes, 153, 154

Deza, Diego de, 80, 82, 139, 183, 188, 305

Diamante, Esteban Luis, 361

Diana de Montemayor, 131

Díaz, Alfonso, 303

Díaz, Fernán, 2, 40, 46, 303

Díaz, Froilán, 185

Díaz, Juan, 108, 317

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 150

discrimination, racial, 11, 16, 162, 304, 307–308, 312, 314–315, 320–322, 324–327, 351, 369–370, 389

dissimulation, 152, 353

Dominican order, 51–53, 56, 61–62, 101, 123, 125, 127–128, 131, 139–140, 143, 145, 183, 185, 207–209, 257, 265, 272, 293, 304–305, 307, 311, 316, 320–321, 331

Dostoyevsky, 279, 386, 392

Dryander. See Enzinas, Francisco de

Eboli, princess of, 219, 222

Eboli, Ruy Gómez, prince of, 219, 313, 319

edict of faith, 193, 226, 232–233, 269, 293, 353

edict of grace, 65, 67, 70, 73, 232, 296, 368

Egidio, Juan Gil, 102, 105, 106

Eguía, Miguel de, 93, 95, 98

Eimeric, Nicolau, 51, 132, 186, 192, 237, 261

Elizabeth I of England, 222, 285

Elizabeth Valois, 285

Eminente, Francisco Báez, 364

Encina, Juan del, 41, 126

Enríquez Gómez, Antonio, 365

Enzinas, Francisco de, 99, 115

Erasmus, 92–94, 98–100, 115, 121, 126, 133, 137, 140, 392

Eraso, Francisco de, 109

Escobar de Corro, Juan, 315

Escobedo, Juan de, 219, 220

Escorial, 136–137, 142, 179, 276, 285

Espina, Alonso de, 41, 51, 54

Espina, Alonso de, inquisitor, 61

Espinosa, cardinal, 168, 211

Essex, earl of, 222–223, 291

executions, 68, 253, 376. See also deaths in Inquisition

familiars, 64, 83, 86–87, 89, 136, 167, 192, 193, 203, 209, 212, 214, 218, 225, 256, 264, 268, 289–290, 312, 324, 375, 378

not active as informers, 195

numbers of, 193–195

social role of, 194

Farfan, Francisco 287

fear and the Inquisition, 23, 29, 66–67, 78, 95, 105, 143–145, 155, 210, 229–233, 249, 261–263, 265, 268–271, 273, 279, 285, 335, 344, 352, 359, 361, 372, 378

Febvre, Lucien 11

Ferdinand II, king, 11, 13, 17–21, 23–25, 27, 29–31, 33, 39, 40, 51–54, 57–58, 60–62, 70, 73, 76–77, 83, 88, 118, 158–160, 165, 182, 184, 188, 196, 198–199, 202, 205, 206, 212–213, 217, 234, 250, 275, 289, 307, 375, 384

claims control over Inquisition, 57–58, 182

not hostile to conversos, 64, 69

support for Inquisition, 76

Ferdinand VII, 370, 372

fermosa fembra, 55

Ferrer, Vincent, 19, 64, 368

Fez, 6, 29–30

Fita, Fidel 387

Fonseca, Alonso de, 93, 98

foreigners and Inquisition, 3, 89, 94, 107, 109–111, 113, 214, 216, 270–271, 341–343, 344, 356, 359, 369–371, 379

fornication, 230, 268, 286–287, 334

Foxe, John, 377, 378

Franciscan order, 41, 51, 95, 97, 131, 166, 207, 259, 283, 307, 311, 331, 337, 339

Franklin, Benjamin, 380

French Revolution, 224, 372, 380

frontiers, not closed, 55, 93, 120, 123–124, 190, 216

Fuente, Alonso de la, 145

fueros, 59–60, 62–63, 83, 213, 218, 220

Furió Ceriol, Fadrique 109

Galicia, 75, 107, 190, 193, 195, 203, 207, 248, 253, 256, 267, 288, 294, 328, 329, 338, 341, 346, 348, 349

Galileo, 153, 381

Galíndez de Carvajal, 40

galleys, 109, 169, 172, 199, 230, 249–251, 288, 290

Gassendi, 154, 365, 367

Gattinara, Mercurino, 85–86

Gayangos, Pascual de 162

gender issues and Inquisition, 227, 281–282, 284, 291

Geneva, 103, 111–115

Germanías, 87, 161

Gibraltar, 370

Gil, Pere, 102, 126, 292, 299

Girona, 20, 188, 228, 269, 317

Goa, 30, 191, 266

Gómez de Castro, Alvar, 131

Góngora, Luis de, 152

González de Oviedo, Fernando, 150

González Montano, 376–377, 381

Gospel of Barnabas, 176

Goya, Francisco de, 383

Grajal, Gaspar de 140, 142–143

grammarians, 139

Granada, Luis de, 10, 97

Granvelle, cardinal, 376

Green Book of Aragon, 325

Gregory XIII, 210, 211

Grotius, Hugo, 152

Guadalajara, 18, 24, 37, 95, 98

Guadalupe, 26, 197, 306

Gualbes, Juan Cristóbal de, 62

Guardiola, Joan, 121

Gudiel, Alonso de, 142–143

Guerrero, archbishop, 101

Guevara, Antonio de, 152, 161, 321

Guevara, Hernando de, 294

Guevara, Niño de, 323

Gui, Bernard, 226, 237, 266

Guicciardini, Francesco, 94, 375

Halevi, Salomon, 37

Halorqui, Joshua, 19, 41

Heidelberg, 376

Henry II of Castile, 16

Henry II of France, 107

Henry III of France, 37, 376

Henry IV of Castile, 16, 37, 41–42, 51

Henry IV of France, 171

heresy, executions in Europe for, 107

Hernández, Francisca, 95–98

Hernández, Julian, 103, 115, 134

Herrera, Antonio de, 150, 155

Hobbes, Thomas, 153, 154

Hoefnagel, 154

Hojeda, Alonso de, 52–53, 56

homosexuality, 222, 287, 289, 290

honor and blood, 32, 37, 67, 88, 94, 142, 192, 208, 215, 231, 246, 262, 275, 281, 301–302, 306, 315–318, 326, 352, 354, 361, 369, 389

Hornachos, 166, 173, 178, 245

Hubmaier, Balthasar, 392

Huelva, 332

Hugh of Lincoln, 26

Hussites, 283

illuminists. See alumbrados

Index of Prohibited Books, 81, 97–98, 114, 119–120, 124–133, 136–138, 140, 149, 152–153, 211, 293, 340

impact of, 149–151

Infantado, duke of, 37, 95, 309

informers and Inquisition, 90, 192, 226–229

Innocent VIII, 61, 78, 205, 293

Inquisition, French, 111

Inquisition, papal, 2

Inquisition, Spanish, 221, 263, 274, 285

and art, 339

and gender, 281–283

and isolation of Spain, 155

and the theater, 340

as a product of crisis, 77

as ecclesiastical tribunal, 212

as secular tribunal, 211

as temporary and itinerant, 188

barriers to its success, 334

continuous resistance to, 205

financing of, 196, 199–204

iconography of, 266

inactivity of, 91

in folk memory, 388

indebtedness of, 201–202

Jewish historiography on, 384

legends about. See Chapter 15 passim

liberal myth on, 383

little contact with people of Spain, 75, 345, 348

manipulated by public, 228

marginal impact of, 225

motives for foundation, 69

not a bulwark of royal power, 215, 217–218

not a weapon of social control, 345

not equipped to be a tyranny, 204

personnel of, 192

political role of, 225

popular support for, 74, 88–90

prosecution procedure, 242

reasons for hostility to, 347–348

seen as having absolute power, 181

sources of information, 227–228

structure and rules of, 187–188

trial procedure, 244

uses Castilian language, 3, 34, 41, 76, 89, 110, 113, 123, 125, 128, 139, 140, 149, 152, 155, 162–163, 177, 179, 213–214, 232, 294, 334, 336, 365

welcomed as a social arbiter, 346

Inquisitor General, 24, 38, 57, 59, 80, 82, 84–87, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101–102, 104, 106–107, 119, 124, 130, 132–134, 136, 138–141, 163, 172, 182–186, 188, 194, 199–200, 202, 206, 208–209, 218–220, 224, 237, 263–264, 274, 275, 294, 297, 318, 321–323, 325, 352, 356

inquisitors, qualifications of, 191

salaries of, 200, 202

interrogation, techniques of, 237–238, 266

Iranzo, Miguel Lucas de, 43

Irving, Washington, 180, 384, 386

Isabella, queen, 4, 10–11, 13, 17, 20–21, 24, 31–32, 38, 51–52, 54, 55, 57, 70, 76, 80, 83, 118, 158–160, 182–183, 196, 198–199, 213, 275, 287, 289, 307, 331, 384, 392–393

Isabella II, 370, 372

Isidoro, St., monastery of, 102, 106, 114, 116, 188

Islam and Spain’s culture, 178

Italy, 34

Jaén, 43, 56, 68, 82, 160, 163, 187–188, 201, 311

Jaime I, 16

Janer, Florencio, 174

Jeronimite order, 20, 51, 80–81, 102, 142, 188, 304, 306–307, 311, 330

Jerusalem, 1, 27, 35

Jesuits, 126–127, 131, 138, 139, 146, 166, 183, 299, 318–320, 331–332, 334, 340, 365

Jews

attitude to conversos, 23

consequences of expulsions, 31, 34

conversions of, 72

criticism of expulsions, 33

denounce conversos, 73, 79

expulsions of, 23–25, 27–32, 69

in finance, 17

professions of, 14, 16–19

return of, 35

Jews and Gibraltar, 370

João III, 355

John of the Cross, 146

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 157

Jovellanos, 389

Juan, Jorge, 156

Juan II of Aragon, 19, 63, 303

Juan II of Castile, 37, 42, 96

Juan of Austria, Don 219

Juana, regent, 103, 105, 120

Juana (the Mad), queen, 83

judaizing, evidence for, 71

Juderías, Julián, 379

Juglar, Gaspar, 59

jurisdiction, conflicts of, 21–22, 25, 38, 42, 59, 64, 78, 82, 83, 87–88, 163, 181–182, 185, 193–196, 204–207, 210, 212–216, 218, 221, 253, 267, 289–290, 292, 294–295, 298–299, 302, 334, 341, 347

Justiciar of Aragon, 220, 221

Kepler, Johann, 133

Koran, 96, 137, 175–176, 227

La Guardia, ritual murder at, 26, 76

Laguna, Andrés, 39

Laínez, Diego, 126, 319

Lancre, Pierre de, 296

Languedoc, 51, 186–187, 196, 226, 238, 267

Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 147

las Casas, Diego de, 85

Lateran Council, 15

Lazarillo de Tormes, 126

Lea, Henry Charles, 58–59, 84, 148, 187, 203, 230, 237, 239, 269, 278, 386–387, 393

León, Luis de, 2, 13, 121, 124, 140, 142–143, 144, 236, 311, 322

León, Pedro de, 332

Lepanto, 171, 276

Lerma, duke of, 99, 172, 174, 183, 215, 321, 323, 324–325

Lerma, Pedro de, 92, 99

lesbians, 289

Lhermite, Jean, 271

Libro verde, 40, 325

Lima, 191, 223

Limborch, Philipp van, 266, 278

limpieza (purity of blood), 40, 215, 302, 305, 307–315, 318–327, 348, 351–352, 355, 359, 363, 365, 370, 389

Lisbon, 171, 235, 275, 279, 355, 356

literature and Inquisition, 151

Livorno, 30

Lleida, 188, 190, 198, 303

Llerena, 39, 52, 82, 146, 188, 190, 195, 200–203, 232, 235, 240, 245, 253, 267, 340

Llorente, Juan Antonio, 74, 382, 383, 385–386

Llull, Ramon, 2

Loaysa, cardinal, 101

Loazes, Fernando de, 106

Locke, John, 223

Logroño, 39, 109, 124, 190, 235, 244, 255, 259, 277–279, 293, 296, 298, 316, 326, 335, 382

Lollards, 283

London, 108, 114, 154, 209, 222, 256, 344, 349, 378, 380–382

Lope de Vega, 152, 340

López Bravo, Mateo, 323

López de Celaín, Juan, 97

López de Gómara, 150

Louvain, 101, 124–125, 150

Loyola, Ignatius, 127, 138–139, 318–320, 341

Lucena, Juan de, 78

Lucero, Diego Rodriguez, 79, 80–82, 186

Lucrecia de León, 285

Luna, Alonso de, 175, 177–178

Luna, Alvaro de, 42, 303

Luna, Miguel de, 170–171, 175

Luther, Martin, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 104, 106, 111, 115, 122, 127, 134, 136, 209, 227, 229, 392

Lutherans. See Protestants

Macanaz, Melchor de, 206

Machiavelli, 130, 137

Madrigal, Cortes of, 21

magic, prosecution of, 7, 118, 125, 291, 293–294

Mal Lara, Juan de, 144

Málaga, 24, 30, 81, 158, 201, 366

Malleus Maleficarum, 293

Mallorca, 16, 20, 44, 58, 64–66, 91, 188, 190, 198, 201, 204, 229, 232, 327, 367–369

Maluenda, Pedro de, 101

Manoel, king of Portugal, 29

Manrique, Alonso, 88, 93–96, 102, 163, 294

Manrique, Rodrigo, 99

Marchena, Diego de 307

Mariana, Juan de, 10, 27, 75–77, 79, 130–133, 144, 228, 320

Marín, Sancho, 64

Marineo Siculo, Lucio, 92

Márquez Cardoso family, 352

marrano, meaning of, 16

Marsiglio of Padua, 130

Martínez, Ferrant, 15

Martyr of Anghiera, Peter, 92

Mary Tudor, 107, 208, 376

Mataró, 195, 298, 381

Mayans i Ciscar, 154, 156

Medina del Campo, 24, 53, 56, 97, 113, 188

Medinaceli, duke of, 26, 164, 232

Mediterranean and religious coexistence, 1, 3–11, 33, 45, 112, 116, 163–164, 177–179, 206, 264, 282, 302, 336, 368, 374

Melamed, Mair, 17, 19

Melanchthon, 111, 115, 122

Mena, Juan de, 41

Méndez, Gaspar, 365

Mendoza, Balthasar de, 185

Mendoza, cardinal, 26, 40, 94, 182, 309

Mendoza, Iñigo López de, count of Tendilla, 159

Mendoza, noble family, 94–95, 309

Mendoza, Pedro González de, 52

Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 391

Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino 113, 149, 154, 386

Meneses, Felipe de, 6, 328

Menocchio, 9

meshumadim, 22, 44

messianism of Jews, 32

Mexico, 191, 331, 348

Milan, 27, 33, 337, 375

millenarianism, 73, 79

Milton, John, 392

Molinos, Miguel de, 341

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 6

Montemayor, Jorge 126

Montesinos Téllez, Fernando de, 362

Monzón, 83, 87, 163, 194, 214, 289

mordaza, 237

More, Thomas, 130

Moriscos, 81, 87, 89, 106, 155, 160–170, 174–178, 200, 203, 213–214, 218, 231, 232, 245, 247, 251, 263, 271, 285, 294, 322–324, 331, 356, 368, 389. See Chapter 7 passim

expulsions of, 168, 169, 171–173, 175

protected by nobles, 167

reject Christian culture, 166

social life of, 162, 164, 170

Motley, John, 378

Mozárabes, 2

Mudéjares, 2, 21, 159–163, 168

Murcia, 4, 5, 14, 106, 174–175, 177, 185, 188, 190, 204, 213, 224, 263, 272, 313–314, 355, 366

Murcia de la Llana, Francisco, 323

Murviedro, 17, 28

mysticism, 27, 95–97, 154, 178, 341

Naples, 29–30, 32–33, 120, 173, 375

Navarre, 28–29, 33, 39, 89, 109, 121, 197, 208, 217, 222, 277, 294, 296, 316, 329, 331, 348

Navarre, witchcraft in, 296–297

Navarrete, Fernández de, 174, 324

Nebrija, 92, 139

neighbors, denunciation by, 3, 7, 14, 23, 70, 72, 106, 123, 161–162, 175, 193, 227–228, 230, 299, 301, 307, 315, 317, 334–336

New Christians, 36–38, 40, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 59, 63, 81, 164, 314, 319, 323, 355–359

Nicodemism, 96

Nissim, Reuben ben, 15

Núñez Muley, 165, 168

Ocaña, 16, 213

Ockham, William of, 130

Olavide, Pablo de 223–224, 372

Olivares, duke of 39, 217, 227, 324, 325, 359–360, 362, 370

Oliver, Pedro Juan, 140

Olmedo, 21

Orán, 33, 159, 167

Orange, William of, 285, 376, 377

Orihuela, 190

Orobio de Castro, Isaac, 366

Oropesa, Alonso de, 20, 51, 304, 306

Ortega y Gasset, 154

Ortiz, Alonso, 67, 78

Ortiz, Francisco de, 95–96, 340

Orts, Juan, 62

Osma, 32, 188, 311

Osuna, Francisco de, 95, 152

Ourense, 348

Oviedo, 153, 311, 332

Oxford, 114, 208, 223

Palacios Rubios, 40

Palencia, Alonso de, 37–38, 41, 50

Pallache, Samuel, 6

Pamplona, 113, 196, 339

Paracelsus, 153, 367

Páramo, Luis de, 33, 78

Paris, 92, 99, 103, 111, 115, 121, 122, 124–125, 128, 139, 147, 223–224, 308, 382, 389

Parma, 27

Parma, Margaret of, 134

Pasarino, Alfonso Rodríguez, 361

Pascal, 367

Pascual, Mateo, 98

Paternoy, Sancho de, 37, 62–63

Pau, 222

Paul IV, 126, 209, 312

Peña, Francisco, 132, 186, 261

Peña, Juan de la, 139

Peñalosa, 326

Penyafort, Ramón de, 51

Peralta, Juan Muñoz, 367

Pérez, Antonio, 26, 31, 64, 102, 109, 214, 215, 217, 219–223, 347, 377

Pérez, Marcus, 134

Pérez de Munebrega, Pedro, 64

Pérez de Pineda, 102, 109, 115

Pérez de Valdivia, 148, 320

Peter Martyr, Italian saint, 192, 264

Philip I. See Philip the Fair

Philip II, 10–11, 40, 101, 103, 107, 109, 120–121, 126, 129, 134, 138, 142, 150, 154, 156, 162, 168–171, 181, 183, 186–187, 191, 194, 200, 206, 209–210, 215, 217–219, 222, 263, 270, 278, 285, 310, 312–314, 318, 319, 321, 328, 341, 349, 356, 375–376, 377, 384–385

and Protestants, 106, 108, 112, 115

presence at autos de fe, 275–276

Philip III, 172, 173–174, 183, 192, 276, 322, 358

Philip IV, 184, 217, 276, 315, 324, 358, 359–360, 365

Philip V, 185, 206, 217–218, 280, 369

Philip the Fair, 80, 83

Philippines, 155, 191

Picart, 266

pie de amigo, 237

Piedrahita, beata of, 95

Piedrola, Miguel de, 285

Pineda, Juan de, 132

Pinto, Manuel Fernández, 360

Pius IV, 210, 337

Pius V, 209, 211, 312

Plaidy, Jean, 387

Platter, Thomas, 392

Poe, Edgar Allan, 239

Poland, 10, 27

Polyglot Bible, 92, 98

Polyglot Bible of 1571, 142

Ponce de la Fuente, Constantino, 102, 103, 105, 106

Ponce de León, Juan, 103

Ponce de León, Rodrigo, 158

Portugal, 1, 11, 29–32, 69, 72, 73, 125, 190, 275, 279, 324, 349, 355–359, 365–367, 388

Portuguese financiers, 359–361

Portuguese Inquisition, 191, 266, 275, 355, 356, 358

Portuguese New Christians, 355–356, 358, 367, 369

Prat, Juan, 85, 86, 88

Prescott, W. H., 384–385

printing press, 118, 266, 373, 374

prisons of the Inquisition, 234, 236, 237, 250

propositions. See statements

prostitution, 287

Protestants, 11, 35, 94, 97, 100–108, 111, 114, 116, 120, 123, 125–126, 128, 134, 153, 169, 171, 204, 209, 221–222, 239, 247, 251, 262, 271, 274, 278, 285, 317–318, 341–343, 371, 374, 376–377, 379–380, 384

Puigblanch, Antonio, 381, 382

Pujades, Jeroni, 280

Pulgar, Hernando del, 10, 23, 38, 46–47, 56, 67, 77–78, 196, 392

punishments of Inquisition, 78, 81, 226, 246, 249, 251–253, 274, 315–316, 338, 366

Quadra, 108

Quevedo, Francisco de, 39, 137, 152

Quietism, 341

Quintanar de la Orden, 353

Quiroga, Gaspar, inquisitor general, 130–133, 137, 141, 153, 219, 220, 293, 321

Rabat, 178

Rabelais, 130

racialism, 41, 110, 191, 308, 311

Ranke, Leopold von, 181

reconciliation, 78, 197, 249, 258, 273, 391

reforms in Inquisition, 83–85, 326, 329–330, 332

refugees from Inquisition, 17, 30, 33, 62, 65, 68–69, 108, 114, 233, 253, 355, 357, 368, 374

rehabilitation by Inquisition, 67, 70, 198, 316

Reina, Casiodoro de, 102, 114–116, 376

relaxing to secular arm, 79, 169, 246, 248–249, 253, 342, 344, 353, 356, 369

religion of the people. See Chapter 13 passim

Renaissance, 92, 94, 149, 151, 153

renegades to Islam, 44, 179

Ribadeneira, Pedro de, 320

Ribera, 166, 171, 321

Richelieu, cardinal, 173

Ripoll, Cayetano, 372

ritual child murder, 26, 296

Rizzi, Francesco, 256, 276

Roco Campofrío, Juan, 323

Rojas, Domingo de, 103

Rojas, Fernando de, 146

Rojas de Sandoval, Bernardo, inquisitor general, 172

Roman Index of Prohibited Books, 132

Rousseau, 223

Royal Society of London, 154

Rubens, 375

Ruiz de Alcaraz, Pedro, 95

Ruiz de Padrón, Antonio José, 380–381

Ruiz Pessoa, Simon, 363

Saavedra y Fajardo, Diego de, 156

Sabbatai Zvi, 364

Sacromonte, leaden books of 170–171, 175, 177–178

Sahagún, Bernadino de 150

Salazar, count of, 172, 296

Salazar Frias, Alonso de, 296–298

Salé, 178

Sale, George, 176

Salonika, 34, 39

Salucio, Agustín, 321–323, 326–327, 352, 389

Salvatierra, Martin de, 171–172

San Bartolomé, college of, 305

San Clemente, college of, 305, 308

sanbenitos, 38, 79, 199, 249, 260, 264, 265, 267, 298, 316–318, 362, 365, 370

Sánchez, Francisco, 126, 143

Sánchez, Gabriel, 64

Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio, 391

Sánchez converso family, 37, 38, 62, 63, 64, 244

Sánchez de Vargas, 323

Sandoval y Rojas, inquisitor general, 132

Santa Fe, Francisco de, 63

Santa Fe, Jerónimo de, 19, 37, 41

Santa Fe converso family, 63

Santa María, Alvar García de, 41

Santa María, Pablo de, 19, 37, 41, 77, 304

Santangel, Luis de, 37–38, 63–64

Santiago, 2, 190, 195, 313, 331, 342, 358

Santiago, Order of, 311

Santiago Vivar, 370

Sanz y Muñoz, Bartolomé, 216

Saportas, Jacob, 364

Saravía, Juan Núñez, 360

Sargent, John S., 386

Sarmiento, Diego, 295–296

Sarmiento, Pero, 42, 303–304, 307–308

Sauvage, Jean le, 84, 85

Savonarola, 130, 137

science and Inquisition, 13, 39, 71, 121, 133, 152–154, 156, 293, 381, 383, 386

Scientific Revolution, 133, 154

Scott, Sir Walter, 384

secrecy in Inquisition, 86, 236, 269, 373, 381, 390

secret prisons, 234

Segovia, 4, 19, 26, 37, 39, 47, 49, 51–52, 56, 67, 87, 183, 185, 188, 207

self-denunciation, 66, 232

Seneor, Abraham 17, 19–20, 25–26, 32, 314

Sentencia-Estatuto, 42–43, 303–304

Sepharad, 27, 35, 357, 364, 365

Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 120, 375

Sepúlveda, ritual murder at, 26

Serrano de Silva, Diego, 325, 352

Servet, Miguel, 101, 110–112, 392

Seso, Carlos de, 102, 105, 106, 209, 318

sexual issues and the Inquisition, 33, 165, 223, 284–286, 288, 290–291, 297, 301, 330, 336–337

shame as punishment, 251

Sicily, 4, 29, 32, 33, 191, 253, 278, 316, 375

Sigüenza, bishop of, 310, 312

Sigüenza, José de, 81, 142

Siliceo, Juan de, 87, 207–208, 308–311, 319–320

Simancas, Diego de, 191, 320

Sirleto, cardinal, 138

Sixtus IV, 53, 57–58, 78, 182–183, 205

Sixtus V, 210, 293

skepticism in religion, 7, 11, 46, 48, 96, 297–298

slaves, 3, 28, 73, 159, 169, 174, 301, 359

Society of Jesus. See Jesuits

sodomy, 87, 170, 251–252, 286, 289–290

solicitation. See sexual issues and the Inquisition

Soranzo, ambassador, 375

Sosa, Antonio de, 179

Soto, Domingo de, 101, 102

Soto, Pedro de, 101, 115, 209

Sotomayor, inquisitor, 133, 185

Spanish Road, 376

Spanish Succession, War of the, 218, 343

Spinoza, 365, 366, 385

St. Augustine, 77, 140

St. Ferdinand, 2

Star Chamber, 204

statements, 7, 11, 106, 174, 203, 217, 228, 234, 277, 287, 298, 311, 315, 334–335, 338, 341, 347, 354

superstition, 7, 96, 153, 155, 224, 233, 291, 293–294, 298–299, 329, 374

Suprema, 82, 84, 85, 128, 132, 135, 137, 143, 182–185, 188, 197–200, 202–203, 206, 209–212, 233, 240, 243, 245, 249, 255, 263–265, 268–269, 272, 286, 289–290, 295–298, 316, 322–325, 343, 347

authority of, 186

creation of, 57

Swinburne, Henry, 179

Talavera, Hernando de, 10, 80–81, 126, 146, 159, 165, 207

taqiyya, 164, 167

Tarazona, 5, 61, 62

Tarragona, 106, 188, 193, 213, 230, 268, 295, 330

Tavera, cardinal, 310

Teresa of Avila, 127, 145–148, 178, 283–284

Teruel, resistance in, 7, 23, 60–62, 69, 188, 190

thought control in Inquisition, 152

Tiepolo, 262

Tizón de la Nobleza, 40

toleration, 9–11, 14, 22, 24, 101, 165, 327, 266, 343–344, 355, 366

Torquemada, cardinal Juan de, 38, 304

Torquemada, Tomás de, inquisitor general, 23–25, 27, 52, 56–57, 59, 61–62, 128, 182–183, 188, 191, 199, 202, 212, 226, 305–306

Torres Naharro, 126

Tortosa, 19, 37, 85, 102, 169, 175, 184, 206

Tortosa, Disputation of, 19, 22

torture, 26, 85, 220, 237, 240, 238–241, 266, 360, 378–379, 381, 388

infrequency of, 238

Tovar, Barnardino, 95, 134

Tovar family, 87, 95–97

transsexuals, 289

Trent, Council of, 94, 101, 113, 119, 127, 129, 208, 276, 286, 289, 331

trial papers, unreliability of, 72

Tunis, 158, 176, 357

Uceda, Diego de, 96, 243

Ulloa, Antonio de, 156

Urban VII, 210

Usque, Samuel, 374, 384

usury, 21, 83, 87

Vaca, Francisco, 295–298, 300

Valdeolivas, inquisitor, 295

Valdés, Fernando de, inquisitor general, 97, 102–104, 106–107, 124–128, 130, 138–139, 188, 200, 208–209, 243, 245, 263–264, 274–275, 294, 301, 326, 337

Valdés, Fernando de, Jesuit, 326

Valdés, Juan de, 98, 100, 140

Valencia, Pedro de, 174, 297

Valera, Cipriano de, 102, 114, 115

Valera, Diego de, 36, 38, 41, 50, 115

Valera, Juan, 391

Vall d’Arán, 89, 194, 268

Valtanás, Domingo de, 127, 320

Vandenesse, 270

Varela, Pedro 370

Vargas, Alonso de, 215

Vázquez de Leca, Mateo, 313

Velázquez, 147

Venetian ambassadors and Inquisition, 105, 217, 262

Venice, 32, 120, 121–122, 125, 365, 375

Verdi, 279

Vergara, Juan de, 92–93, 95, 97–99, 138, 309

Vic, 184, 299

Vicente, Gil, 126

Villalobos, Francisco Lopez, 39

Villanueva, Francisco de, 319

Villanueva, Jeronimo de, 217

Villanueva, Thomas de, 136

Villars, marquis de, 226, 256, 271, 276, 366

Villena, marquis of, 95

Virués, Alonso de 10, 98

visitations by Inquisition, 200, 232, 267–269, 332, 334, 338, 345, 346

Vivero, Leonor de, 103

Vives, Juan Luis, 92–94, 98–99, 130, 147–148, 283

Voltaire, 223, 279, 385

Wandering Jew legend, 33

Washington, George, 180, 380

William of Norwich, 26

witchcraft, 7, 83, 244, 252, 267, 286, 291–299

Wycliffe, 100

xenophobia, 110

Zamora, 11, 18, 320, 323

Zapata, cardinal and inquisitor, 133, 184

Zapata, Diego Mateo, 327, 366, 367

Zapata, fray García de, 307

Zapata family, 87, 309, 366

Zayas, Maria de, 282

Zeballos, Jerónimo de, 326

Zurita, Jerónimo de, 33, 59, 145