Thus as the revolt swept eastern Spain in 1521, the Muslims were driven to the fonts and murdered. Some 40,000 people died in the battles, not to mention many others through hunger and epidemics.55 The germanía fighters looked for Muslims wherever they could find them, killing all those who refused to be baptized.56 Mosques were consecrated as churches and mass was said in them.57 In Gandía baptisms were performed by using wet brooms and branches which had been dipped in a spring. In Polop the Moors took refuge in the castle for several days and only emerged when the germanía forces promised to spare them if they would be baptized – ‘and as soon as the baptisms were over they slit the throats of 600 of them, ignoring their promise and saying that this was a way of sending souls into heaven and coins into their pockets’.58
The revolt was finally crushed by the end of 1522. At once Inquisitor Churruca of Valencia demanded powers over the former Muslims, seeking lists of those who had been converted. The problem was that the forced conversions had been so random and disordered that no one knew who had been baptized and who had not. The only solution was seen to be to complete the job in hand, and in February 1524 Churruca was given powers by the Suprema to investigate apostate moriscos. An extraordinary meeting of the Suprema was convoked in Madrid the following spring, and on 11 April Inquisitor-General Manrique ruled that all Muslims were thereafter to be deemed Christians.59 As the congregation put it, ‘since in the conversion and baptism there was not any absolute violence or force, those that were baptized must be compelled to keep the [Catholic] faith’;60 clearly they had decided that, if the conversion had not been forced under the germanías, they needed to ensure that it was so now.
The order for the moriscos to convert or leave was accompanied by a set of provisions which actually made it impossible for them to do anything but remain in the country as ‘Christians’. A series of letters from Aragon made it clear that they were essential to the prosperity of the kingdom, and on 22 December 1525 Charles V issued a decree simply banning them from leaving Aragon. Thus, as the king himself had written to the pope on 14 December 1525, ‘the conversion which was made was not at all voluntary for many of them, and since then they have not been instructed and taught about our Catholic faith’.61
The result of all this was of course that the moriscos had little love for their new ‘faith’. As the Venetian ambassador Andrea Navajero put it in the same year, ‘the moriscos speak their own language and very few of them want to learn Spanish; they are Christians by force and very poorly instructed in our faith, since no effort is made in this direction’;62 they kept their old style of dress and dyed their hair black, and were either secret Muslims or atheists, according to Navajero.63
The complete absence of Christian instruction did not prevent the Inquisition from setting to work examining the orthodoxy of the new converts, however. Though on 6 January 1526 an edict was issued stating that the moriscos should have forty years free of inquisitorial investigation, this was modified a few months later. In Valencia a series of autos between 1533 and 1540 saw fifty people burn at the stake.64 Only in 1542 did Charles V finally order a sixteen-year moratorium on the investigation of moriscos by the Inquisition. This was on the petition of Friar Antonio Ramírez de Haro, who was given the task of instructing the moriscos. Something of the situation at the time was revealed in his first set of ordinances, in which he commanded that moriscos had to inform their priests on giving birth so that the child could be baptized. Clearly, this was not common, and even at this late stage there were moriscos who were never baptized and could not properly be called Christians.65
Such, then, was the sorry condition of the moriscos in much of Spain by the 1550s. After the violence of their first conversion, they had been subjected to a series of bloody autos before belatedly evangelization began. Yet they still retained their customs and were clearly a community apart. As the conversos had found in the 15th century, this was a dangerous situation in Iberia, and by 1558, as Inquisitor-General Valdés considered their petition for a pardon in Salamanca and recounted his dilemmas in his letter, danger loomed again for the moriscos.
This had been evident for a few years. When the Count of Tendilla tried in 1555 to secure a brief from the papacy absolving and returning any confiscated property to all moriscos who confessed their crimes, he was blocked by Valdés, who suggested that Tendilla himself should be arrested for daring to come up with such a plan.66 Throughout the 1550s the Turks had been making conquests at the expense of the Spaniards in North Africa, and the moriscos were increasingly seen as an Islamic fifth column.67 The scene was set for their persecution as the second half of the 16th century unwound; but before this could begin, Inquisitor-General Valdés would have to deal with the most dangerous enemy of all, one mentioned in his letter, which had struck right at the heart of the Spanish court, at Valladolid.
Valladolid 1558–9
ON 6 JUNE 1554 Charles V drew up his will in Brussels. His reign over the Holy Roman Empire had become bogged down in wars in Germany and the Low Countries with Protestant rebels, and he sensed that he would not be able to maintain his grip on his vast dominions for much longer. His son Philip was already ruling Spain, and was soon to become Philip II. Many issues preoccupied Charles in these his last years, but foremost among them was the imperative to see off the Protestant threat. Thus, as he put it in his will:
Because of the great paternal love that I have for my dearest and beloved son, the serene Prince Philip, and because I desire an even greater increase in his virtues and the saving of his soul . . . I order and request him affectionately that, as a very Catholic prince fearful of God’s commandments, he should be always mindful of matters pertaining to his honour and service, and obey the commandments of the Holy Mother Church. In particular I request that he favours and makes others favour the Holy Office of the Inquisition.68
Philip had been born in May 1527. He had large blue eyes with thick eyebrows, a prominent lower lip, and was held to resemble his father Charles, in particular at the point of his chin. Philip followed a carnivorous diet, refusing to eat fish ‘or any other thing that was not nutritious’, liked to dress elegantly, usually wearing feathers in his cap, and had a very sweet tooth. In spite of the sobriety which he would attempt to impose on Spanish society, as a young man he was attracted to women and liked to wander about disguised by night even in the midst of the most serious affairs of state.69 When his father Charles retired to a monastery at Yuste in Extremadura, early in 1557, Philip II was ready to take on the mantle of defender of the faith; in the two years that followed, opportunities rapidly came his way to win his spurs as a champion of the Inquisition against the Protestant threat.
On 31 May of that year Cardinal Silíceo, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, died and the most important see in Spain became vacant. Philip II, then in Flanders, decided to nominate the Dominican monk, preacher and theologian Bartolomé de Carranza for the post. This was one of the most significant acts he had made since the retirement of his father. Philip had got to know Carranza well in England as the husband of Mary Tudor; Carranza had been one of his main Spanish allies among the Protestant English.70
Carranza had been chosen for the mission in England in part because of his long inquisitorial experience. For thirty years he had undertaken numerous inquisitorial commissions and, in his own words, had ‘constantly persecuted heretics’.71 In England Carranza insisted on the burning of the Protestant Archbishop Cranmer of Canterbury in 1556; over 30,000 people fled the country in fear.72 Carranza visited Oxford in 1556 and Cambridge in 1557, and in Cambridge ordered the public burning of heretical books and Bibles in English.73 Such was Carranza’s zeal that the English soon came to know him as the ‘black monk’,74 and there were many assassination attempts.75
This pious Dominican, who preferred to believe everything he was told rather than doubt people, who was a byword for modesty, with his large bald head, his eyebrows set close together like Philip II and his hirsute face, was surely on
e of the least likely targets imaginable for the Inquisition.76 But such was the obsession with hidden enemies, and such the fears coming to convulse Spanish society, that none of his zealous activity against Protestants would be sufficient to protect him.
Carranza’s problems were to begin because of the rivalry which existed between him and Inquisitor-General Fernando Valdés. Valdés was something of a talisman for the Inquisition, without question the most important inquisitor-general in the history of the institution after Torquemada. His was not a will that was easily checked, and the election of his rival Carranza to the see of Toledo was not something he was prepared to observe with equanimity from his inquisitorial eyrie.
Valdés was not without skeletons in his closet, having fathered an illegitimate child as a young man.77 This had not prevented him joining the court of Cisneros in 1516, aged 33. From here his rise had been smooth, appointed to the Suprema by Inquisitor-General Manrique in 1524, before being made president of the chancellery of Valladolid in 1535, archbishop of Seville in 1546 and inquisitor-general in 1547.78 Yet such consummate political and networking skills did not accompany softness and piety of temperament. Valdés was impressively ahead of his time in dismissing stories of witchcraft as fantasies,79 but this in itself may well have been because he had no need of imaginary demons, being quite capable of inventing them among his own adversaries.
As soon as Valdés became inquisitor-general, he made a series of appointments. His nephew Menendo was made inquisitor of Valladolid; other relatives, Diego de Valdés and Diego Meléndez, were appointed to posts in the Inquisitions of Murcia and Granada. One of his closest confidants, Hartuno de Ibargüen, was made secretary of the Suprema, and Ibargüen’s brother Juan appointed receiver of confiscated goods for Asturias, Castile and Galicia. He also promoted his nephew Juan, who by the time of Valdés’s death in 1566 was inquisitor of Zaragoza.80 This manipulation of the inquisitorial bureaucracy was to occupy so much of Valdés’s time that he only spent fourteen months in his see of Seville during the twenty years during which he was its archbishop;81 something which was to be one of the principal sources of his hatred for Carranza.
Prior to being made archbishop of Toledo Carranza had declared that it was the duty of bishops to reside in their dioceses, and that they should not be made presidents of royal courts (audiencias). Valdés was never in Seville and was the president of several audiencias so was unlikely to be pleased by such opinions.82 Valdés saw little difference between the private and the public, as his nepotism after his appointment revealed, and was widely regarded as a person of passions and hatreds.83 Well able to make use of the enormous power that he wielded, Valdés determined to bring down the primate of Spain through the Inquisition.
WHAT OF THE MOOD in central Spain at this crucial moment? In Valladolid, home of the Spanish court, the Suprema sat in its palace, increasingly isolated by its embattled mentality from the orchards and plains beyond the city walls. From Valladolid the plateau swept south and then crested the forested slopes of the Gredos mountains. Beyond the hills lay more of the plateau, stretching its aridity out towards the province of the new archbishop, Carranza. The very proximity of the territories of the two adversaries added drama to their conflict.
On accepting his appointment to the see of Toledo, Carranza at once made for Spain. At the same time, however, he published in Antwerp in 1558 his Commentaries on the Christian Catechism,*9 a book designed to remedy the ignorance of the clergy in the Netherlands and to put a halt to the spread of Protestant teachings in England.84 In spite of these noble Catholic aims, however, it was this very same book which was to prove his undoing.
Hearing of the book, Valdés wondered if it was not his chance to ruin the new archbishop, who had not yet even arrived in the country. Although copies were rare in Spain, he obtained one and began to consult it in his apartments. One day the Dominican theologian Melchor Cano entered Valdés’s lodgings and saw Carranza’s Catechism on the table.85 Cano was a longstanding enemy of Carranza, as numerous witnesses were to attest in subsequent proceedings;86 Carranza was the elder, the humbler and indisputably the more successful. Cano, aware that the inquisitor-general had no love for the new archbishop either, sensed his chance. Seeing the book lying there, Cano said to Valdés, ‘In that book there are lots of things which people should not be allowed to read’. Valdés was delighted, asked Cano to show him which things these were and decided there and then to give the book to Cano for a definitive view as to its orthodoxy.87
Prior to coming across the work in Valdés’s apartments, Cano had searched high and low for a copy. So desperate was he to sniff out its heresy and feel righteously appalled by it that he had even broken into the cell of a friar in the monastery of St Paul one night and confiscated a chest containing a copy of the book.88 This desperation was married to his preconceived certainty that the book was heretical. Indeed, as he had told one of Carranza’s friends, Antonio de Salazar, ‘since [Carranza] had not wanted to write in his [Cano’s] favour to the general of the order and the pope, he had read his [Catechism] with a great deal of curiosity and attention’.89
One could not expect such a person to provide an objective opinion. But this did not trouble Valdés, who quickly numbered Cano among his confidants. Cano soon took a trip to the town of Laguna on one of Valdés’s mules, with one of his servants and with his expenses covered by the Suprema.90
By the time Carranza arrived in Valladolid from the Low Countries in August 1558, he knew a storm was brewing. Twice he wrote to Valdés offering to follow the inquisitor-general’s advice in making any corrections that were perceived necessary to his Catechism. Twice, he was ignored. Carranza then continued his journey south through the northern hills of Extremadura, towards Yuste, where Charles V was entering the last days of his life. On 13 September he met Melchor Cano in the town of San Leonardo de Alba; Cano was en route to Valladolid to begin his censorship of the Catechism. When Carranza asked Cano about the interest which the Inquisition had taken in him, Cano piously replied that he could tell him nothing owing to the secrecy of the Holy Office.91
Eight days later, on 21 September 1558, Charles V died at Yuste. Carranza was present and was said by his companion the friar Diego de Ximenes to have had a perfect comportment.92 However during his presence at Yuste he had given Charles’s confessor Juan de Regla short shrift, and thus in December Regla travelled to Valladolid and declared that Carranza had uttered ‘Lutheran-sounding’ phrases at the emperor’s deathbed.93 The reality was that in the state to which Spain had descended, any phrase was capable of sounding Lutheran if sufficiently twisted.
Cano’s judgement was music to Valdés’s ears; he had told him what he wanted to hear. When other theologians issued opinions saying that there was nothing wrong with the Catechism, he ignored them.97 When one, Juan de la Peña, pointed out that St Augustine himself had said that faith alone could save mankind, and that on this ground alone one could not convict Carranza of heresy, he himself became an object of suspicion, so that his cell was broken into and his papers seized.98 And when in May 1559 Valdés heard that the theologians of the University of Alcalá were planning unanimously to approve the Catechism, he ordered the commissary (local repre
sentative) of the Inquisition in Alcalá to decree that no member of the university could publish a theological opinion on any book whatsoever.99
Valdés’s quarry was not going to escape his clutches. While Cano was protesting to Carranza that he could tell him nothing because of the secrecy of the Inquisition, Valdés was happily breaking the very same code of secrecy, preparing the public atmosphere for this most sensational arrest.100 One could accuse others of hypocrisy, but this did not mean that one had to forego hypocrisy entirely, particularly if it could aid the inquisitorial process.
In the midst of this double-dealing, Valdés’s agents were lobbying hard in Rome for a papal brief which would permit the Inquisition to proceed against bishops. The fact that suspicion was now enough to demonstrate guilt was revealed when one of them said in the curia, ‘Why does it bother your Excellency whether he is burnt there or here, since in the end he has got to die?’101 On 9 January 1559 the pope gave the desired brief, and, as one of Valdés’s servants put it, ‘the whole house celebrated as if [Valdés] had been made a cardinal’.102
Carranza did his best to continue work. Ignoring the rumours, he reached his see and began his duties as archbishop. According to his biographer, during the ten months and nine days which he spent there he disbursed over 80,000 ducats on dowries for orphans, sustaining widows, pensions for poor students and alleviating conditions in hospitals and prisons.103 The implacable zeal which he devoted to his activities was testament to a man whose condition meant that he had plenty of spare energy. Yet in spite of the transparency of his good works, on 6 May 1559 the prosecutor of the Inquisition in Valladolid issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of propagating Lutheran errors;104 on 26 June this was confirmed by Philip II.105
Discussions began as to how to bring Carranza to Valladolid. Early in August the archbishop, who was in the university town of Alcalá, received a letter from the regent Doña Juana, requesting his presence in Valladolid for the arrival of Philip II from Flanders.106 Meanwhile, the Inquisition sent Don Rodrigo de Castro, a future archbishop of Seville, to be his companion and keep an eye on him, though ostensibly he was his friend.107