Goa was central to Portugal’s expansion and by the early 17th century a city of extraordinary wealth. The viceroy resided in an elaborate palace with two large patios: from the first a stone stairway led to a large room, where murals were painted on the walls of all the fleets which had ever sailed from Portugal to Goa, giving the names of the ships and their captains, and even recording those ships which had been lost at sea. Beyond the palace was the town, filled with a bewildering number of craftsmen: carpenters, Masons, blacksmiths and shipbuilders, all working in houses built of oyster shells and sand.
Goa was renowned as an extraordinarily cosmopolitan city. The Portuguese were undisputed masters and the nobility would usually deign to be seen only on horseback, the harnesses of their mounts made of silk inlaid with gold, silver and pearls, and imported from Bengal, China and Persia. The wealth of the city, said the French traveller Pyrard de Laval, came largely from the work of the slaves, many of whom were brought from Mozambique and other parts of Africa.37 In these exchanges lay the origins of those tapestries which one could see so many years later in east Africa.
Such rapid growth could only be achieved by working with the local people. Having exploited divisions between Hindus and Muslims to capture Goa in the first place, the Portuguese maintained the indigenous system of labour organization and taxation until the end of the 16th century. Soldiers from Goa and Malabar served in the Portuguese army across the Estado da Índia to 1600, and Hindu mercenary captains were well known and respected until the middle of the 16th century.38 In this process of interdependence, bigotry could have little place. However as the home of the viceroyalty, Goa was also to become the centre of missionary operations in Asia; its role as the ‘Rome of the Orient’ was to map out a future for it where the Inquisition would play a part.39
Gradually, intolerance grew. On 30 June 1541 an order was issued to destroy all Hindu temples on Goa, and the following year the property of those temples was transferred into the hands of the religious orders.40 By the end of the decade a special tax was being levied on mosques in the towns of Bardes and Salsette. Between 1558 and 1561, under Viceroy Constantino de Braganca, roughly 900 temples were destroyed. By this time around one-fifth of Goa’s population had converted to Christianity, as Christians were preferred to Hindus for all the best jobs. The exclusion of these new others was gathering pace, in parallel with the exclusion of the recognized others at home, the conversos. Thus it did not take long before steps were taken to establish the Inquisition.41
The first inquisitorial punishment in Goa occurred as early as 1543, just seven years after the initial establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal, when the converso Jeronimo Dias was burnt alive.42 As yet, however, there was no official tribunal, and the Jesuit missionaries, then spreading through Asia under their charismatic head Francis Xavier, felt this to be a conspicuous lack. During the ten years he spent in the Orient from 1542 to 1552 Xavier baptized a minimum of 30,000 people and travelled to China, Japan, Cochin and Malacca preaching the gospel; in the midst of such zeal the presence of conversos and moriscos – in spite of various decrees banning New Christians from going to Asia from Portugal – seemed a considerable handicap.43
Thus in April 1545 and May 1546 Francis, who would later be made a saint, wrote to King John III and urged the establishment of an Inquisition in Goa.44 Eventually, in April 1560, its first inquisitors, Aleixo Dias Falcão and Francisco Marques Botelho, set sail from Portugal.45 Crucial in this extension of the inquisitorial remit from Europe to Asia was that the new king of Portugal, Sebastian, was just three years old when he inherited the throne in 1557; the regent was John III’s brother Henry, the inquisitor-general of Portugal.
With the introduction of the Inquisition, Goa changed. The number of churches grew so that by the early 17th century there was ‘not a square or crossroads where one cannot be seen’.46 All of them were sumptuously built and furnished with reliquaries of silver, gold and pearls.47 The Inquisition was said to be worse here than in Portugal;48 while the number of trials in Goa would be similar to those conducted by the Portuguese tribunals, the Catholic population was far smaller.49 As in Portugal, the Inquisition concentrated at first on conversos, with a curious correlation being noticed between the wealth of a converso and the fact of their arrest by the inquisitors.50 Burnings were frequent: seven died in 1574, and four more in 1585.51 In the nine autos between 1571 and 1580, not fewer than sixty-five people died,52 although the burnings became more sporadic in the years to follow.
The converso population of Goa dispersed. Many fled to China, Malacca and Cochin, where they could live in greater freedom,53 yet even there they were not always safe. Five were captured in Cochin in 1575.54 Residents from Malacca and Mozambique were also arrested.55 Several inquisitorial visits were made to Cochin in the 16th century, and in 1613 the Portuguese King Phillip II*6 asked the inquisitors of Goa to investigate the mines of Munhumutapa in modern Zimbabwe.56 By the end of the 16th century there were commissaries of the Inquisition in such far-flung places as Macau and Timor.57
One should not pretend that all or even the majority of people were affected in these outposts. But nor should one deny that this undoubtedly represents the first global spread of a persecuting institution. This was a mournful legacy to set alongside the heroics of the Portuguese navigators of the deep.
ONE NEEDS TO STOP to consider the enormity of this process. In 1492 Spain was still a divided nation with enemies at home, while Portuguese navigators had yet to round the Cape of Good Hope. With the loss of Constantinople, the world beyond the North African coast had become a spectral silence for Christians. And then, within the lifetime of a single human being, all had changed: the world had been explored and persecution had kept pace, the violent flipside to the wonder of discovery.
By the 1570s there were courts of the Inquisition in Goa, Mexico and Peru. In 1609 another tribunal would be added at Cartagena de las Indias in Colombia. Just as the inquisitors in Goa and Mexico set to work as soon as they arrived, in Peru the jail was so full by 1575 – just six years after the tribunal was founded – that there was nowhere to put the prisoners.58 Cases followed in areas which had no tribunal, such as Buenos Aires. Here the old conquistador of Chile Francisco de Aguirre was tried between 1571 and 1575 for blasphemies and lack of reverence for the Church.59 Just as in Spain, anyone could be a target in the Spanish colonies. Early cases in Peru concentrated on issues such as the bigamy of Old Christians and not the faithlessness of conversos or moriscos.60
Unlike the Inquisition in Goa, which was the bloodiest and most prolific of all the Portuguese tribunals, the Inquisition in America was more moderate than its counterpart in Spain. Only around 100 people would be ‘relaxed’ throughout its existence, and the vast bulk of its cases would consist of soliciting priests, bigamists and the like.61 The total number of cases in the American tribunals probably did not exceed 3,000, a small number in comparison to Iberia and Goa.62 Yet though trials may have been comparatively few, one must bear in mind that there was a tiny population of Spaniards and their African slaves who fell under inquisitorial jurisdiction; Mexico City, the capital of the viceroyalty, had only a few thousand households of Spaniards in the late 16th century.
In fact, the reach of the Inquisition in the Spanish empire was considerable. In the viceroyalty of Peru people were arrested in towns thousands of miles from Lima, such as Santa Cruz de la Sierra63 and Potosí64 in Bolivia, and Quito65 in Ecuador. Before the foundation of the tribunal of Cartagena in 1609 defendants were even brought from Bogotá to Lima to be tried.66 After the foundation of the Cartagena Inquisition, people were regularly arrested and taken there from Panama.67 Meanwhile, attempts were made to found a tribunal in Buenos Aires in the 1620s,68 and the tribunal of Mexico even tried defendants from the distant Philippines across the Pacific Ocean69 – for which it was responsible – and corresponded with Portuguese inquisitors about the people it had arrested in Manila.70
The reality was that every t
own in Spanish America was affected by the foundation of the Inquisition. Inquisitorial familiars and commissaries lived even in places far from the centres of the tribunal.71 They were known to keep watch and to be capable of exerting their influence on a whim. Thus although arrest and punishment did not always take place, surveillance existed.
The fundamental difference between Spain and the New World for the Inquisition was that a different form of social control needed to be exerted. In Spain the dominance of the traditional faith was not in question, and perceived internal blemishes on its purity by conversos, moriscos and Protestants were therefore the most worrying threats. In the New World an entirely novel society was being built, and the Inquisition intended to ensure that, to a broad degree, this conformed to its values. The problem was not just the mixture of European and Amerindian, but also the influx of Africans, who in Lima claimed that they could uncover criminals on ‘Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays’72 and in Cartagena openly admitted to having sex with the devil and revelling in his warm semen.73 In this situation the Inquisition was there not only as a bulwark against heresy but as a standard of correct values in a sea of perceived devilry.74
The difficulty with the Inquisition’s project was that the success of the Iberian powers in their empire-building had come about in part because of their origins as countries of mixed faiths. This cosmopolitanism had given the Iberians a considerable advantage in dealing with peoples in Africa, America and Asia, and contributed to their achievements as both conquerors and middlemen. By destroying this cosmopolitanism and what passed for tolerance at home through the Inquisition, Spain and Portugal stifled the ability of their representatives to act across borders; thus, over time, the mindset of the Inquisition and its export to the empire would hamper the ability of that empire to engage with different peoples and realities, and contribute to its collapse.
Mexico City 1589–1596
THE PROSECUTOR OF the Inquisition in Mexico was a man with an appropriate name. On 18 April 1589 Dr Lobo Guerrero – Doctor Wolf Warrior – issued an order for the arrest of Luis the Younger. The governor of Nuevo León, Luis’s uncle Luis de Carvajal y la Cueva, had already sensationally been arrested and thrown into the inquisitorial jail.
Typically, there was not a little that was political in these arrests. Governor Luis was an enemy of the viceroy of Mexico, Don Luis Suárez de Mendoza. On discovering that Carvajal was of converso blood, Mendoza sensed that this could provide the opportunity to snare him.75 At the same time the arrest of such an important figure would emphasize that no one was above the Inquisition, as the Carranza case had shown in Spain.
The evidence against the family dated back to Christmas 1587 when Luis the Younger’s sister Isabel had talked with a certain Phelipe Núñez from Lisbon, and said clearly that the Christian faith was no good. When Núñez became cross, Isabel told him how her father had said that ‘some ministers would persecute them in this world . . . these are the inquisitors’.76 Then she laughed and said that she had just been testing out the strength of his faith. Núñez was not convinced: on 7 March 1589 he denounced her, and she was arrested on 13 March. The evidence against the family was now all prepared, and Inquisitors Bonilla and Sanctos García were ready to strike.
First, however, Luis the Younger had to be tracked down. He worked with his brother Balthasar as an itinerant trader, roaming the broken hills of the colony selling shoes, cloth, raisins and jam. The two of them had determined to raise enough money to return to Europe to live with the Jews of Italy, and were calling in all their debts before they set sail.77 They must have been a striking sight as they criss-crossed the mule tracks of the empty sierras. The brothers even looked quite similar: Balthasar with his white face and blond beard, wearing a wide-brimmed black hat to shade his long head; Luis the Younger wearing similar shoes and clothes to his brother, with a long face and the beginnings of a beard.
That April Luis the Younger was on his way from his brother-in-law Jorge Almeida’s mines in Tasco to Mexico City. Hearing that his uncle the governor had been arrested by the Inquisition, he went into hiding in Mexico City with Balthasar. The brothers pondered their future. In the colony the outlook was bleak. They determined to try to flee to Cuba, where there was no inquisitorial court. Leaving in disguise, they got as far as the coast at Veracruz, but there their scruples defeated their instincts. They decided that one of them would have to return as their mother Francisca was alone in Mexico City at the mercy of the inquisitors.78
On Monday, 8 May Luis the Younger returned to Mexico City. The colonial capital crouched in the lee of the smoking volcano Popocatepetl, which provided a constant reminder of the violence that underpinned the city’s very existence. Arriving at the house of Francisca, Luis the Younger dined with his mother and sisters. The following evening, the secretary of the Mexican Inquisition Ariás Valdés and the chief bailiff Pedro de Villegas came and hammered at the door of the Carvajal home. Bursting in, they searched the house, and found Luis hiding in a small kitchen; he was bound and some silver coins were confiscated from his pockets, to be used to pay for his rations while he was a prisoner.79
As was usually the case, the inquisitorial trial reached an impasse. The prosecutor summoned Luis the Younger and made accusations against him. These were all denied. But finally, on 7 August, Luis asked for an audience and came in on his knees, beating himself on the chest, and shouting, ‘I have sinned, mercy, mercy! Give mercy to this sinner!’ He was ordered to stand up. He then informed the inquisitors that God had inspired him to confess, and that he had had to fight the devil, who had constantly attempted to dissuade him from telling the truth. Now, with his conscience saved, he freely confessed that his whole family were Judaizers.80
This was of course exactly what the inquisitors wanted to hear and enough to ruin Governor Luis, the new viceroy’s enemy. Although there was no question that the governor was a good Catholic, as Isabel and Luis the Younger made clear in their testimony, it was also clear that he had known of the heresies of his family and had not informed the Inquisition about them. This in itself was a crime, as everyone was obliged to come forward with such information. With this evidence, the inquisitors would be able to get their man.
Towards the end of 1589 the inquisitors settled on their sentences. Governor Luis de Carvajal y la Cueva was to be reconciled and exiled from the Indies for six years. Luis the younger, Francisca and Isabel were sentenced to four years penance in a monastery; Mariana had to do two years penance, Catalina and Leonor only one year each. Balthasar, who was still in hiding in Mexico City, and Francisca’s dead husband Francisco Rodríguez de Matos – the children’s father – were to be burnt in effigy in the auto of 25 February 1590.82
For the real heretics, Francisca and her children, this represented suffering but not unusual punishment in a world where the Inquisition was so powerful. For Governor Carvajal it was an unbearable humiliation. This man had carved out his own piece of empire. He had spent his life in flight from the fear which the Inquisition had brought to his uncles in Portugal and then Cape Verde. He had attached himself to the forces of the Spanish empire as a means of self-preservation and had prospered, but the empire could always turn its powers of destruction inward, and had destroyed him.
He died shortly after the auto in his prison cell, awaiting exile from the New World in which he had thought to find sanctuary.
WHILE THE INQUISITION was making inroads in Spanish America, things were different for the
slice of Portuguese ambition on that continent, Brazil. In Brazil visitors often felt as if they were in some kind of ‘earthly paradise’.83 The sun had the most golden rays of anywhere on earth; the stars were the happiest in the heavens.84 Europeans described it as ‘the best province for human life in the whole of America, fresh and incredibly fertile, delightful and pleasurable to the human eye’.85 Everything was covered ‘in a very high and thick forest, watered by streams in the many beautiful valleys’, and there were enough fish in the rivers and the sea to sustain people without meat at all.86 Such a bountiful place was this Brazil that the indigenous Tupinamba often lived to be 100 or 120 years old.87 Habitually naked and with their lower lip pierced with bone, often seen carrying maracas and with their bodies richly painted, they were thought to be carefree.88 And in beautiful Brazil, unlike Goa and the Spanish tribunals of Cartagena, Lima and Mexico, no official inquisitorial tribunal was ever set up under the Portuguese.
At first this seems anomalous. There are well-documented cases of Judaizing conversos in Brazil from the 1540s onward,89 and by 1553 people who had been accused by the Inquisition had fled to Brazil.90 It was classic territory for an inquisitorial tribunal. However, the reason for this absence was straightforward and cut to the heart of the political function of the Inquisition.
Unlike the great civilizations of the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru, Brazil did not offer the Portuguese a hierarchically organized society with the structures already in place for domination. There were, moreover, no great gold and silver mines, unlike in Mexico and Peru. Thus throughout the 16th century the Portuguese empire derived its wealth from the spice trade in Asia, and Brazil was of minor importance.91 It was only as profits from the sugar plantations of Brazil grew that the Portuguese crown turned its attention to its colony in America. In July 1621 the inquisitor-general of Portugal would write to the king that owing to the growing population of Brazil it would be a good idea to have resident officers of the Inquisition there.92 But by then it was too late; the Iberian powers were increasingly under threat from the Dutch and the English, and Portugal would never again have the economic muscle to establish a new tribunal. A policy of realpolitik was required which recognized that arresting wealthy conversos in the Americas was likely to do more harm than good.