Purity of ancestry was one of the murkier faces of the Inquisition’s hydra. It was not something that caused death directly but, just like the minor penances which we observed in the last chapter, it could ruin families. The obsession with limpieza de sangre became a way of isolating members of society. Once the moriscos had been expelled, this became a highly effective way of continuing to punish invented enemies from an increasingly distant and legendary past.
The legacy of the doctrine of purity of blood for Iberian society remains controversial. But holding the almost 800 carefully handwritten pages of the purity investigations of Antonio the Younger in one’s hands, it is clear that this was an idea, a mania, which came to obsess individuals and the social kaleidoscope of which they were a part. Under this doctrine, children paid for the sins of their fathers in this generation, the next and the next. Not for nothing have some historians seen limpieza de sangre as the seed of the modern idea of racism.5
WHAT WAS THE MENTALITY from which these ideas sprang? Iberia in the 15th century feels under siege: towns are barricaded within their walls; the streets are narrow and closed off to all but a sliver of blue sky above. From the urban strongholds the world beyond is unseen. This world has been won from the Muslim enemy only after years of struggle and loss. The yellowing countryside is a zone of fear.
The resident of 15th-century Iberia asks: How can these fears of ours be managed before they destroy us? The answer is to project them onto others. Rationalizations of these fears look for qualities which separate and qualities which unite. Those conversos are different because of their Jewish forebears, their bloodline. Thus a race is invented where this faith had always been a religion, where the great Jewish sage born in medieval Iberia, Maimonides, had once written that people of all nations were able to be Jews.6 A pathology of race is devised – something which modern scientists tell us does not exist, even though we must all behave as if it does.7 And it is precisely because this is an irrational pathology that it has the capacity to endure for so long.
The idea of purity of blood had emerged during the riots against the conversos in Toledo in 1449. In those febrile days the conversos were accused by the ringleader of the violence, Pero de Sarmiento, of maintaining Jewish rites and of oppressing Christians. Thenceforth in Toledo no one was to be able to hold public office if they could not prove their cleanliness of blood – that is, an absence of Jewish ancestry.*3 Thus it was that the religious failings of the conversos were first carried over into a racialist doctrine.8
That this idea of inherent racial impurity was radically new is shown by the fact that the Toledano statute of purity of blood was attacked at once. Pope Nicholas V issued a bull in 1451 condemning the statute and ordering that all genuine Christians, whether descended from Gentiles or Jews, be allowed to hold official posts.9 The bishop of Cuenca, Lope de Barrientos, wrote a condemnation and several important theologians issued rebuttals of the principles of the statute.10 The reality was that, as one leading scholar has put it, the statute of Toledo was ‘squarely opposed to religious concepts which had dominated Christian thinking for centuries’.11
Yet all the same the idea managed to gain a toehold from which it could expand over the coming centuries. Pope Nicholas V’s bull was ignored. In 1473 the Old Christians of Cordoba formed a brotherhood banning those of ‘impure’ lineage.12 In 1482 the stonemasons of Toledo banned the discussion of trade secrets with any conversos, and the town of Guipúzcoa banned conversos from living and marrying among them.13
Soon, the toehold had become a foothold. In 1486 a statute of purity was adopted by the Jeronymite religious order.14 In 1489 the Dominicans followed suit. So, in 1525, did the Franciscans.15 Then in 1547 the archbishop of Toledo, Juan Martínez Silíceo, pushed through a statute barring all conversos from membership of the council of Toledo’s cathedral. This was highly controversial and provoked condemnations from the University of Alcalá and the archdeacons of Guadalajara and Talavera. It was initially resisted by Philip II – then regent, not king of Spain – but in 1555 a statute was passed confirming purity of blood as essential for entry to any office in Spain, and the following year the statute of Toledo’s cathedral was confirmed.16
It is worth pausing, amid this headlong rush towards a pathology, to consider the language with which these statutes were introduced. In his enthusiastic championing of the statute in Toledo’s cathedral Archbishop Silíceo compared conversos to horses:
Here are some of the characteristic tactics of modern racism, which first began to develop in the 16th century along with the Atlantic slave trade.18 There is the dehumanization of the conversos by associating them with animals, and the idea of an innate flaw in their make-up which can be transmitted from generation to generation.19 Thus had the end of tolerance which had accompanied the rise of the Inquisition also helped to usher in a new form of intolerance.
As we can see, prejudice based on racial notions developed rapidly in Spain alongside the rise of the Inquisition in the late 15th century. This was no coincidence. While the Inquisition attempted to prove the incompatibility of conversos with the Christian religion, the racialist statutes of purity represented an attempt to show the incompatibility of the conversos with the emerging Spanish nation. These were different and mutually contradictory projects, since religion had never had anything to do with race. Yet this would not prevent the Inquisition from adopting the new discriminatory doctrine.
By the end of the 16th century the statutes had touched every aspect of life in Spain. The last religious order to impose a statute of purity was the Jesuits, who delayed until 1593.20 This tardiness occurred because many key figures in the early history of the order were themselves conversos, including the second Jesuit general, Diego Laínez.21 Yet when in 1622 the Italian Jesuit Francesco Sacchini wrote a history of the order and mentioned Laínez’s Jewish ancestry, he was staggered to find opposition in Spain. The Jesuits demanded the removal of the offending paragraph. Why was it, Sacchini wrote, that descent from Jews was a stain only in Spain?22
As this example shows, over the phenomenon’s long history the concern with purity of blood was to remain purely Iberian and had nothing to do with Catholicism. The Inquisition’s adoption of some of the policies and language of this ideology in Portugal and Spain was therefore, fundamentally in contravention of Catholic doctrine. It was proof, again, that these were institutions whose persecution originated in political and social forces and not in the religious ideals
of the Catholic Church.23
So, although from a theological perspective the Inquisition ought to have had no truck with the idea of purity of blood, the institution did not see it like that. After its inauguration in Spain in the 1480s the Inquisition encouraged the ideal of purity by excluding from public office and individual authority anyone who had been condemned as a converso.24 In the 16th and 17th centuries the Inquisitions of Portugal and Spain were the key public institutions consolidating the concept of purity of blood.25 When in 1586 the Jesuits had still not instituted their statute of purity, Inquisitors Pablo Hernández and Doctor Salcedo wrote to the Jesuit General Claudio Acquaviva to express their disquiet at the number of conversos in the order.26
The pivotal role of the Inquisition in propagating the idea of purity by this time is revealed by the trial records of Toledo. Thus in 1587 alone the tribunal of Toledo convicted eight people for falsifying genealogical information in inquiries on purity of blood.27 In one of these cases the archives of the Inquisition were used to prove that the lawyer Antonio de Olvera was the great-grands
on of someone who had been reconciled by the Inquisition in Toledo. In another Gerónimo de Villareal, who was trying to place his daughter in a convent where there was a requirement of purity of blood, was found to be the great-great grandson of four people who had been ‘relaxed’.28
Thus while it had not been the Inquisition which had imposed the idea of purity at first, it was quick to adopt it and profit from it.29 Here, in these cases from Toledo, we see another reason why the Inquisition was so hated and feared. Even distant descendants of penitents were barred simply from trying to enter convents (and be good Christians), or from becoming public notaries.30 Moreover, as the generations passed and family connections grew ever more complex, so did the possibility of the discovery of some tenuous connection with an earlier heretic. There was no one who could be sure that they could not be ruined by an inquiry into their purity of blood.
The Inquisitions of both Portugal and Spain were central in the fostering of this social condition. On 3 February 1548 Cardinal Henry, brother of John III and the first inquisitor-general of Portugal, wrote a letter in which he cited St Paul’s dictum, ‘Modicum fermenti totam massam corrumpit’ – A tiny drop can corrupt the whole – and, wrote Henry, this would be enough not only ‘to corrupt the conversos . . . but also many of the Old Christians’.31 The same quotation would be cited in a book on purity of blood written by Juan Escobar de Corro in 1632.32 That such ideas had themselves thoroughly stained the inquisitorial hierarchy was revealed by a letter of the Spanish inquisitor-general Gaspar de Quiroga dated 1577, in which he cited the adage ‘Commixti sont inter gentes, et didicerunt opera ejus’ – If people are mixed their works collapse33 – a view which in itself reveals the hypocrisy and self-deception of the doctrine since Quiroga himself probably had converso great-grandparents.34
The feelings of the Church hierarchy rapidly became those of the wider population. A Portuguese saying of the 17th century had it that ‘Blood without guilt is enough, and guilt itself is in the blood’.35 This obsession with the sins of past generations was not merely an early manifestation of modern racist mentality,36 it also symbolized a coming psychological crisis in Iberian society. A disproportionate obsession with purity is seen by some as symptomatic of dangerous psychological or social conflicts.37 The desire was to wash out bloodstains which had become invisible to all but those who were unable to forget them, and their own guilt in their creation.
WHILE PSYCHOLOGICALLY While psychologically Iberian society was proud to think of itself as becoming cleaner and cleaner, physically the reality was somewhat different. From Madrid to Lisbon and Murcia to Coimbra, in order to be known as a good Catholic it was important to stink.
One witness gave a detailed description of the Islamic conduct of the morisca Maria de Mendoza in the region of Cuenca:
One workday, after the evening mealtime, this witness saw the said Maria de Mendoca collect a pitcher of water from the fountain in the orchard . . . and take it up to the highest rooms in the house near the chimneypots, since that day they had prepared jams up there and left a lantern. And after seeing her carry up this pitcher of water, about an hour later this witness went up to the space near the chimneypots and found the door of the room closed; thereupon the witness opened it and put their head round the door and saw that the said Maria was as stark naked as her mother had been the day she was born, and that she was barefoot even though it was summertime, in June or July, and that she was kneeling down and washing her hair.38
One may read this passage many times, struggling to locate the heresy, unless one knows that, incredible as it seems today, washing was indeed seen as heretical. In a society governed by doctrines of purity, moriscos were frequently denounced for washing. This was seen as suspicious because of the ritual ablutions prescribed by the Islamic faith. When challenged their defence was that they had ‘only’ been cleaning themselves.39
Ablutions and simple bodily cleanliness rapidly became indistinguishable; one could not, after all, smell the difference. A morisco of Granada, Bermudez de Pedraza, was denounced for washing ‘even though it was December’.40 In Valencia in 1603 the morisco Francisco Mancana confessed to having moistened a piece of cloth and washed his face, neck and genitals with it, but denied that this was a ceremony.41 The extent of Iberia’s stench was revealed by the denunciation of a scandalized Old Christian of San Clemente near Cuenca, who recounted how ‘it was not only the morisco custom to wash themselves when they got married and when they died but also many times during the year’.42 One must of course recall that washing was a much rarer phenomenon in 16th century Europe than it is today, but even then the consequences of such views of cleanliness were unusually fetid.
Thus the emphasis on purity, on cleanliness of blood, was purely metaphorical. Its status as an irrational obsession is surely revealed by this curious dichotomy between an ideology of cleanliness and the pong of reality. The fear of genuine cleanliness – and perhaps the unconscious awareness that the ideal was a fantasy – was perfectly expressed by the horror of washing and by the fact that this extended to the smallest social gesture. The French cleric Bartolomé Joly noted in the early 17th century that people never washed their hands in Spain before eating.43
Just as the heresies of its converso and morisco enemies had been largely invented, so of course was this myth of the impurity of their blood. It was in fact precisely in the 16th century, after most conversos had disappeared from Spain, that the obsession with impurity exploded.44 For a time it found expression also through concerns with the moriscos, with the children of moriscos and Old Christians treated as impure.45 But after the expulsion of the moriscos, the persecution of impure blood was increasingly the persecution of something that, like the windmills of Don Quixote, existed only in a fevered imagination.
AS THIS HOSTILITY towards bodily cleanliness shows, there are many different types and styles of purity. For some moriscos the Old Christian concept of purity probably seemed strange, given the emphasis of the Islamic faith on ritual ablutions. And while in Spain pathologies concerning purity of blood were directed at both the Jewish and the Muslim ‘stain’, in Portugal it was just the descendants of the conversos who were associated with impurity. Unlike Spain, Portugal had never had a morisco ‘problem’. This, combined with the later onslaught of the Inquisition, meant that the conversos remained there the target of both the Portuguese Inquisition and of the new racialist doctrines.
This important difference between Portugal and Spain was a source of tension, since in 1580 Philip II of Spain had assumed the crown of Portugal as well; such was the inbreeding among the Iberian royal families that he was the next in line to the throne.46 Between 1580 and 1640 Portugal and Spain were ruled by what was known as the dual monarchy, although Spain always had the upper hand. The fact that the Portuguese Inquisition was still dealing with the conversos meant that the Portuguese became stereotyped in Spain as Jews. As the saying had it, ‘The Portuguese was born of the Jew’s fart’.47 This meant that in Portugal the Inquisition became increasingly concerned with ridding itself of this image, and thus with preserving the purity of the Old Christian population.
By the early 17th century, as in Spain, notions of purity had run through Portuguese society like a virus. In 1604, Portugal’s conversos had bought a general pardon for any religious failings, but this would only prove a temporary respite and did not lessen their marginalization. While in the late 1580s there had still been attempts by conversos to prevent statutes of purity from becoming generalized, by 1630 those who were ‘unclean’ had been officially barred from academic life, judicial and treasury posts, and the religious and military orders.48
In Portugal, however, conversos were less easy to bar from positions of social prestige than they had been in Spain. They represented an important part of the urban and educated population, and the administration could not function efficiently without them. As over the installation of the Inquisition in Brazil, the Portuguese crown practised realpolitik. Thus in spite of
royal decrees passed six times between 1600 and 1640 barring them from public service, ‘people of the Hebrew nation’ were constantly turning up in the most influential of positions.49
So the language of exclusion was pushed further. In 1640, in a published code of inquisitorial practice, the Portuguese Inquisition demanded that its officials be of pure blood.50 Just as in Spain, paranoia spread with the idea of impurity. Anyone with a drop of impure blood was now seen as a New rather than an Old Christian. One inquisitorial document of 1624 referred to 200,000 New Christian families in Portugal, whereas in fact there were only 6,000 New Christians left in the whole country whose ancestors had not intermarried with Old Christians.51 At a council in Tomar in 1628 it was even suggested that the conversos of Portugal, like the moriscos before them in Spain, should be expelled.52
The obsession with purity of blood was not something that would disappear easily from Portuguese society. If one walks through the streets of downtown Lisbon today, it comes across as one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe, with the streets off the great Rossio and the trams to and from Belén filled with immigrants from Brazil and Portugal’s former colonies in Africa. Yet in the Portuguese empire in Africa in the 20th century the residues of these ideas of purity had lived on, and those with lighter (‘purer’) skins advanced more quickly up the ranks in the colonies of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.
If you were to have walked down the streets of Lisbon back in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, when the spread of the ideology of purity began, it would have appeared a very different place. People were not allowed to move from one parish to another in the city without the approval of the local priest.53 There were frequent shortages of bread and meat. Lack of fresh water was a constant problem.54 Fantasists bandied wild superstitions about the place; in 1579, shortly after the death of King Sebastian in Morocco, one visionary declared that he would be reborn as a star in the night sky.55 Royal decrees were shouted by town criers from various points throughout the city.56 On the days of the grand autos, people ran to the streets where the conversos lived and stoned their houses.57