THE MOST PERNICIOUS effect of this code of secrecy on society was, as Mariana noted, the cultivation of wariness and dissimulation.61 The practice encouraged general suspicion of society and the invention of stories in an attempt to avoid torture.
At the first hearing, on top of being asked whether they had any personal enemies, the prisoner would also be asked if they knew or suspected why they had been called to the tribunal, and if they had done anything which might be against the tenets of the Church. If they replied that they had no idea why they were there, they would be dispatched to the cells, with the implication that they had better think harder.
Trials then entered a period of cat and mouse. The inquisitors tried to tease out the truth as they already knew it to be; the accused tried to confess as little as possible (if guilty) or loudly to protest their innocence. After the early years in Spain when cases were dispatched summarily, this period of the trial often dragged on for years. One prisoner in Peru, Manuel Henriques, spent twenty-nine years in Lima’s jails before being burnt at the stake in 1664.62 Defendants lay festering in the cells, called for questioning at the whim of their tormentors to be told that the inquisitors had ‘evidence from reliable people’ that they were concealing the truth.
If the secrecy of proceedings was guaranteed to foster mutual distrust and injustice, then the lawyers chosen for the task of the prisoner’s defence were little better. After the first fifty years of the tribunal in Spain, during which time defendants were able to choose their lawyers,63 defence counsel were chosen at the discretion of the inquisitors from a panel which they appointed. These hand-picked advocates were to make no suggestions to their client except to confess; the lawyer’s sole duty was to abandon someone considered a pertinaz or stubborn heretic – that is, someone who would not confess – and admonish a Christian to tell the truth. Prisoners were expected to pay for the privilege of counsel out of their own pockets, unless they were too poor to be able to do so.64
To be fair to the lawyers, their advice was the best option for the accused. Those who confessed fully and professed sincere repentance, denouncing all their ‘accomplices’ as a sign of contrition, were reconciled to the Church. Although they were forced to wear a sanbenito as a public sign of their humiliation, their goods were most often confiscated by the Inquisition and the names of their descendants permanently tarnished by their public shame, at least they did not have the fear that they might be ‘relaxed’.*7
With all the cards stacked against the prisoners, inquisitorial jails could be fractious places. Although conditions varied and in some places were lax enough for prisoners to wander the streets by day or be allowed to serve out their terms at home,65 things were often more severe. As late as the 1770s suicides were such a serious problem in Portugal and Goa that the codes of practice for the Inquisition in both places had chapters dedicated to those who killed themselves in jail.66 The famous Jesuit preacher from Brazil António Vieira described the inquisitorial cells of the mid-17th century in sombre terms: ‘There are usually four or five men, and sometimes more, in the cells . . . each one is given a pitcher of water to last eight days (if it runs out before then, they have to be patient) and a bedpan, as well as a container for defecation which is also emptied every eight days . . . the cells are usually full of rats, and the stench is such that it is a mercy for the prisoners to leave the cells alive.’67
Often, the atmosphere boiled over. One night in 1631 Jorge Rebello, a prisoner in Lisbon, was challenged by a warder for making too much noise with his cellmates. Rebello shouted back that ‘the prisoners were much more honourable than the warders’, and when the warder told him to shut up if he did not want to be gagged, Jorge Rebello took out a knife and started brandishing it violently, saying that ‘he swore by the Holy Sacrament that any son of a bitch who wanted to come into the cell would first have to nail him down if he did not want to be killed’. The warder went to fetch some guards, but when they broke into the cell and tried to take the knife Rebello sank his teeth into one of the guard’s hands and left permanent marks there.68
Reading records of inquisitorial trials, it becomes clear that, far more than the burnings at the stake (which became more a punctuation than a regular feature of trials), it was the relentless injustice of the system that created fear among prisoners. Those arrested were not only destroyed economically, physically and psychologically, they were forced to subsidize their own humiliation. William Collins from Oxford had to pay the muleteer who brought him as a prisoner to the Inquisition in Mexico City in 1572, where he would eventually be convicted as a Lutheran and sentenced to ten years in the galleys.69 Meanwhile, it was those who were sentenced to be lashed that had to pay the person who lacerated them, not the Inquisition.70
It was therefore not for nothing that, having himself been through this judicial system in Goa, the Frenchman Charles Dellon noted at the end of the 17th century that ‘the judges [of the Inquisition] execute a system of jurisprudence unknown to other tribunals’.71 The legal system was such that mere suspicion could be enough to satisfy the authorities of a person’s guilt, as was graphically revealed when the ‘threat’ of the Freemasons appeared in Spain in the 18th century. In 1751 Francisco Rávago, the confessor of Ferdinand VI, urged the king to take action, since ‘in matters of this gravity, suspicion alone – and one which is not at all implausible – is enough to prevent the damage, without awaiting certainty or evidence’.72
Such stagnant and paranoid thinking was in many ways a reprise of what Eymeric had said in the 14th century: ‘If an accusation appears stripped of all appearance of truth, the inquisitor should not strike it from his book because of this; for what is not uncovered at one moment, may well be uncovered at another’.73
MADRID’S Archive Histórico National is an elegant building adorned with marble stairways which conceal a cool, shaded courtyard where researchers can rest from their labours. Documents are conveyed to a large, rectangular room, where historians pore over the gently disintegrating ledgers of Spanish and Latin American history. Sunlight flows in from outside, occasionally illuminating the records of torture and mutilation. Here in the present, the past is relived.
One summer’s day I read the trial of Manuel Álvarez Prieto, a converso accused of Judaizing and imprisoned in Cartagena in 1636. Álvarez Prieto first confessed to his crime, and then retracted his confession, saying he had been mad when he made it. He was taken to the potro, where he spent three hours and withstood seven turns of the rope without confessing. At this point the torturers suspended his agony and Álvarez Prieto was noted to be in a perilous state of health: both his arms were broken and so mangled that the surgeon said that he was in peril of his life.
Álvarez Prieto died two days later. The inquisitors declared that this was his fault. Having asked for water in his cell he had spat it out over his wounds and made them worse. He had wanted to die. The inquisitors declared him guilty as charged and ordered that his bones be burnt, his goods confiscated and the names of his descendants besmirched forever.74
This pleasant room, filled with humane and pleasant people reading about inhumane and terrible events, took on a different light as I read of the inquisitors’ refusal to accept responsibility in this case of death by torture. For in pondering inquisitorial justice, one returns so often to the question of torture. This declined in use from the middle of the 17th century onward but was still not unheard of in 1700.75 Yet for all torture’s long inquisitorial history, records are mute when it comes to the torturers themselves. What did the inquisitors think as their victims writhed in the potro? How did they feel at the prospect of scarring people for life in the name of God?
Clearly, in Álvarez Prieto’s case, the inquisitors had given such questions little thought. Yet one would like to imagine that occasionally some of them might have questioned their own motives and asked why they were so compelled by the suffering of others. The documents are mute on this subject. In the archive the pain is studied in silence, and
the silence is returned. One comes to suspect that it was only because inquisitors were certain of the absolute justice of their cause that they were able to torture their prisoners with such a pitiless sense of purpose.
Mexico City 1594–1596
IN NOVEMBER1594 evidence began to be received by the Inquisition in Mexico City of the crypto-Judaizing activites of Luis’s de Carvajal el mozo – Luis the Younger. Arrested and imprisoned for the second time by the Inquisition, he had already been reconciled for Judaizing in 1589 and had done four years’ penance in a monastery.
Soon the evidence began to build up from both within and outside the jail. One of the key witnesses was Luis’s cellmate Luis Diaz, who had told him that he wanted to convert to Judaism. Diaz was in fact an inquisitorial spy, and the evidence he secured was confirmed by the notary and secretary of the Mexican tribunal. These functionaries of justice had crept through the jail’s secret passageways by candlelight to a hidden door to the cell. There they had written down everything they heard exchanged between Carvajal and Diaz.
The prisoner remained oblivious to such machinations, believing himself to be protected by his God. Discovering that his sister Leonor was also in the jail, on 13 May 1595 Luis asked his jailer to send her some fruit from him. At first he sent a melon. When the jailer looked inside the melon he found an avocado stone wrapped up in a piece of purple cloth; Luis was using the fruit as an elaborate postal service – he had carved the words ‘the patience of Job’ into the stone. The next day he asked the jailer to give Leonor a banana. Again, he had taken out the fruit and replaced it with an avocado stone on which he had written a message to his sister. These messages, filled with references to Jewish prophets, were the final pieces of evidence. The inquisitors allowed them to pass for some days, until on 17 May Luis sent a bowl of fruit containing another telltale banana whose fruit had been taken out. This time he had sewn up the skin so that no one should be able to tell what he had done.76
Such stories of ingenuity are not as rare as might be thought. At the final hearing of his trial in Lima in 1638 Francisco Maldonado da Silva – who had been arrested in Concepción, Chile eleven years before – produced two books each more than one hundred pages long. Da Silva had cobbled together the books from scraps of paper which he had managed to accumulate, and written down his thoughts in an ink made from charcoal. He wrote using pens which he had cut out of eggshells with a knife made from a nail. It was an extraordinary feat, and Da Silva said that the books were a full discharge of his conscience. The inquisitors sentenced him to be relaxed the following year.77
Luis’s case was not so dissimilar. With the evidence mounting up, on Monday, 6 February 1596, the inquisitors voted to torture him. Hearing the sentence, the prisoner protested. He had already admitted that his mother had Judaized. ‘She is the thing that he loved most in the world, and he would much more easily have denounced anyone else he knew of than her. And so if there is evidence against him that he has information on other people who he has not mentioned these witnesses do not deserve to be believed.’ After all, as Luis pointed out, such witnesses ‘do not know the way in which the reverend inquisitors desire that people should not tell lies, [so they] say more than they ought to because they are afraid that they will be tortured’.
Perhaps sensing the barbs of irony, the inquisitors proceeded with the torture. The process began on the Wednesday at 9.30 in the morning. Luis said:
‘God give me strength to burst rather than tell a lie.’
And with this he was ordered to enter the torture chamber and he went in with the torturer who was ordered to strip him. And standing naked in the flesh . . . he was again urged to take steps so that the torture did not proceed. And he said: That he had told the truth and that God would not desire him to bear witness against anyone. At this, his arms were tied loosely and he was urged to tell the truth. And he replied: seeing that he was in this state, he wanted to tell the truth.
Luis was taken out of the potro and proceeded to denounce his entire family and their Judaic activities, in particular his mother Francisca and his sisters Isabel, Leonor and Mariana. However, even this confession did not satisfy the inquisitors.
And urged to tell the truth, he said: that he had nothing more to say. And with that he was ordered back into the potro and entered with the torturer, and was urged to tell the truth. He was given one turn of the rope and he said: ‘Ay! Oh Lord, forgive me Lord, let this be a payment for my abominations’. Urged to tell the truth, he was given a second turn of the rope, and he gave a huge shout: ‘Ay! Ay! Ay!’ And he said: that it was true that his little sister Anica kept the law that God gave to Moses, and that he had told the truth, and that the inquisitors should not revenge themselves on him. And he said all this crying, and was then urged to tell the truth, and was given a third turn of the rope, and he shouted again: ‘God, Lord of Israel, I am being forced to lie, Lord the one God take pity on me! Woe is me! How sad to have to lie’. And then he said that he had already told the truth and he filled the air with his complaints.78
Twisted in the potro, Luis proceeded to incriminate more people, some of them distant relatives and passing acquaintances. This victim of the torture chamber was the great-nephew of Alvaro de Leão from Mogadouro, tried by the Inquisition in Évora almost fifty years before. He proceeded to denounce Álvaro de Leão’s three brothers, Duarte, Francisco and Jorge, all great-uncles of his whom he had never met and who had been instrumental in his travelling to Mexico in the first place.
Some of the accusations probably were accurate; some probably were not. Given the inquisitorial justice system, it is difficult to be sure of anything except the reality of suspicion. For inquisitorial procedure used mallets to crack acorns. Its practitioners were actors in a system of jurisprudence which prosecuted the innocent as well as the guilty and fomented a hatred of the system itself. Such a code excelled at securing convictions but also undermined the society which it had supposedly been designed to defend.
Chapter Four
ESCAPE
. . . if the corrupted boy did not denounce what had happened within a day of being raped, he would be burnt for it.
SOME TIME AROUND April 1548 Luis de Carvajal y la Cueva arrived from Portugal on the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa.1 *1 He was then only nine years old.2 To many of the islanders Luis’s arrival would have seemed odd. This rosary of mountains rising sheer from the sea was not a place for boys. What was he doing there? Surely he would be one of the first to fall victim to Cape Verde’s annual round of fevers.
Thousands of miles away from Europe, life on the islands was tough. The main island of Santiago lay 300 miles west of the coast of Africa; its capital, Ribeira Grande, was ‘richer in money than in virtue’, as the Bishop of Bahia put it four years later.3 Ribeira Grande was a notorious breeding ground for fevers.*2 Some blamed this on the Africans for ‘corrupting the air as it is [corrupted] in their land’.4 Each year, the rainy season between August and October would claim the lives of many settlers, so that as the Italian traveller Francesco Carletti put it some years later, ‘the Portuguese men and women always appear to be staggering through the streets at each step, and have a colour so pallid or, to say it better so yellow, that they seem more dead than alive’.5 And yet this was to be the Carvajal child’s new home: the major African slaving port throughout the 16th century, where ships were ‘constantly arriving with goods from many countries’ to exchange for the black ivory6 and where the sea was always a brilliant guard, the walls of the island prison withdrawing into its blue impenetrability.
In fact there was a simple explanation for Luis’s presence. For he was the son of Gaspar de Carvajal and Catalina de Leão, and the nephew of Álvaro and Jorge de Leão, who were still languishing then in the inquisitorial jails in Évora.*3 The young boy was on the run. He had had a tortuous journey.
With his uncles’ incarceration in Évora hanging over the family, Luis had been taken
by his father from Portugal to Spain. It cannot have been a coincidence that this took place in the second half of 1547, just after Pope Paul III had granted full powers to the Portuguese Inquisition.*4 Fearing that the first years of the Portuguese Inquisition would visit the same excesses on the conversos as they had experienced after the installation of the Inquisition in Spain, Gaspar de Carvajal was looking for a secure future for his young son.
First they had travelled to Sahagún, in Spain. Here they had visited the abbot of the monastery, who was a relative of theirs. But then Gaspar had fallen ill in Salamanca and Luis had tended to him. Gaspar had tried to get back to Portugal, but he had died in Benavente before reaching the border.7
The young Luis was now in serious danger. His father was dead and his mother’s family were incarcerated in Évora. Unaware that Álvaro and Jorge de Leão would be released by the Inquisition as part of the general amnesty, Luis’s relatives must have feared that their imprisonment would lead to a chain of arrests that would destroy the family. Luis’s uncle, Duarte de Leão – the brother of Álvaro and Jorge – was the factor of the Casa da Guiné in Lisbon, the major administrative body dealing with Portugal’s African trade. This meant that he was in charge of buying and selling slaves and for the accounts. Duarte had spent time in Guiné and knew many people there.8 He came to Benavente to collect the orphan Luis and took him to Lisbon.9
Lisbon was then the most African city in Europe. It was the perfect introduction to the sort of life to be found in Cape Verde, for in 1551 it was estimated that there were 9,950 slaves in the city, one in ten of the population.10 African slaves were auctioned at the Pelourinho Velho – the old pillory – a square where criminals were punished.11 The luckier slaves were bought by masters who fitted them out in livery and sent them to spend their days wandering the narrow cobbled streets attending to household business; those who were less fortunate had to carry their owners in litters up and down the cluster of hills overlooking the Tejo river and the flatlands on the south side of the estuary.12