After this initial fury, the Spanish Inquisition became less blood-thirsty, so that between 1540 and 1700 84,000 people were tried.40 In the reign of Philip V (1700–46) there was a rekindling of violence after the War of the Spanish Succession finished in 1714, with 1,463 trials and 111 executions. But thereafter the institution was in decline.41 In Portugal, meanwhile, where there was a lower population than in Spain, there were approximately 45,000 trials between 1536 and 1767 (including 13,667 in Goa)42 with at least 1,543 people being relaxed.43
There is no doubt that these figures are lower than many have long believed.44 Removing the first fifty years of inquisitorial history in Portugal and Spain from the equation, the number of deaths is much lower than the number of people killed during the witch-hunts of northern Europe between 1560 and 1680, which is put at a minimum of 40,000.45 And whereas bloody witch-hunts engulfed Austria, England, France, Germany, Holland, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland and Transylvania, the Inquisition in Portugal and Spain, while prosecuting ‘witches’, executed very few of them. These comparisons have led historians – both past and present – to claim that Spain has been the victim of a ‘black legend’ which paints the violence of its Inquisition and of Spain’s conquest of America in the worst light possible whilst skating over similar or worse excesses elsewhere.
The ‘black legend’ originated in the mid-16th century after the pope freed Alfonso Díaz, a lawyer at the papal court; Díaz had instigated the murder of his own brother Juan because he had become a Protestant whilst studying in Paris.46 The case became something of a cause célèbre and led to numerous anti-Catholic pamphlets across northern Europe. These were augmented by the publication in the 1560s of a book by an anonymous Spanish fugitive from the Inquisition written under the pseudonym Reinaldo González Montes. Montes had probably been a monk accused of Protestantism in Seville in the 1560s, and he published a graphic and unsympathetic account of the Inquisition after his escape to northern Europe.47 Such publications were seized on by countries jealous and fearful of Spain’s power; they quickly became tools in a propaganda campaign which, there can be no doubt, unfairly demonized the activities of the Inquisition in comparison to other persecutions then occurring both in Europe and elsewhere.48
Yet there is a difference between putting the Inquisition in context and excusing its excesses. The Inquisition did not overly persecute witches, but this was principally because, as we shall see, the unique cultural mixture of Portugal and Spain provided other scapegoats to persecute without the need to invent witches.49 Even more seriously, in the desire to put right the black legend, worrying errors of fact are still being made by some, such as the claim that torture was ‘only rarely applied – almost exclusively during the first two decades’ (see Chapter Three).50
In Spain, many of these revisionist historians were originally trained under the Franco regime, to which the Catholic Church was a formidable ideological prop. The intellectual atmosphere of this era is well expressed by the view of Antonio Sierra Corella, author of a book on censorship under the Inquisition, who declared in 1947, ‘Only some wretched author, infected by an anachronistic sense of liberalism, could argue with any conviction against the legal censorship of science and literature, as if this vital social function were an unjust and annoying interference of power.’51
The Francoist era was one when people often wrote obliquely about present events by concentrating on an aspect of the past.52 The growth in revisionist views of the Inquisition under Franco in fact mirrored the attempt to sanitize views of the general’s regime and of its impact on Spain.53 The legacy of these views today should not, therefore, be treated with the respect which in some circles it is still afforded – unless we want to find that the black legend is replaced by a white one, and that the dangers of creating a persecuting state apparatus are not fully appreciated.
WE MUST EXAMINE the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions together.54 The procedure of these institutions was almost identical.55 The Inquisition spread from Spain to Portugal, and the first papal bull establishing the Inquisition in Portugal was obtained through the pressure of Charles V, the Habsburg ruler of Spain.56 Moreover, the Inquisition originated in both countries through the persecution of crypto-Jews, and in both it became subordinate to the monarchy.57 Perhaps most importantly of all – and in contrast to the papal Inquisition and the earlier medieval Inquisition – in each of the two countries the institution spread to the colonies.
Thus, this book does not focus on the medieval and Italian Inquisitions. While many of the procedures of the Spanish body – such as secrecy in court proceedings – were inherited from the medieval Inquisition,58 *4 the crucial difference is that whereas the medieval Inquisition was controlled by the papacy or its representatives, the bishops, the Spanish Inquisition formed in 1478 came directly under the control of the Spanish crown.59
Thus one of the best reasons to concentrate on the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions is that this is a story of power and the abuse of power, rather than an excuse to reprise the anti-Catholic propaganda of the past. During the formation of the Inquisition in Portugal the papacy was always more benign than the Portuguese crown under John III: where John banned converted Jews from leaving Portugal in 1532, Pope Clement VII issued them a general pardon in 1533; when, after the Inquisition had been founded in 1536, John wanted the bishop of Lamego made the Portuguese inquisitor-general, the papacy refused for fear that he would be too violent; and when Pope Paul III issued the bull Meditatio Corbis on 16 July 1547, which at last gave the Portuguese Inquisition the same freedoms as its Spanish counterpart, he did so on condition that for a whole year everyone who wanted to would freely be able to leave Portugal, and so escape persecution.62 Similarly, when the institution of the Inquisition in Spain led to violent excesses, Pope Sixtus IV tried hard in 1482 to curtail the powers of the new body and complained to the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.63
The papal role in the Inquisitions of Portugal and Spain was, in fact, almost always moderate. The papacy was always reluctant to sanction the excesses of the Inquisitions in Iberia, and was routinely bypassed. Leonardo Donato, an Italian traveller, noted in 1573 how the Pope had ‘no involvement’ in the Spanish Inquisition, and that Pius V had been unable to override it in order to achieve a position for a servant of his.64 Even the victims of the Inquisition came to recognize the difference between justice in Rome and justice in Iberia, with Juana Roba, a morisca (descendant of a converted Muslim), prosecuted in Valencia in 1587 for saying among other things that ‘since the pope let everyone live according to their faith in Rome why were things done differently [in Spain]?’65
Thus the abuse of inquisitorial power in Iberia was a political rather than a religious abuse of power, and the story of the Iberian Inquisitions need not be an anti-Catholic diatribe.66 Persecution never was the monopoly of Spaniards, Portuguese or Catholics. It was something of which all peoples were capable.67
IN 1595, SIX RESIDENTS of the small town of Hellín, in the south-eastern Spanish district of Murcia, gave evidence to an inquisitor. During this era inquisitorial visits were supposed to be made on a regular basis to inquire into the orthodoxy of residents of even the smallest villages, and in Hellín a considerable scandal had been caused by the labourer Francisco Maestre.
Maestre had been elected major-domo of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Rosario. Unfortunately, this election had been held in his absence, and when the insignias, sceptre and standard were taken to his
house he was less than pleased and said, ‘What manure, shit, what stench or rubbish are you bringing me here?’, and having been informed that these were the insignias of Our Lady of Rosario he replied, ‘It’s just shit and more shit’.68 This response did not go down well. Maestre was hauled before the inquisitors, excusing himself by explaining that he had been tired and had not taken in the insignias properly when they had arrived.
As this story shows, to understand the nature of the Inquisition there is no need for legends, either black or white. There is in fact a huge archive.69 Reading through it, there are many times – as with the Maestre case – when laughter is as appropriate a response as sadness. Sometimes, the mirth is caused by the constant examples of people who refused to be cowed by fear; at others, it is tempered by admiration at the wit of prisoners in the face of adversity.
Here I think of the Englishman William Lithgow, who was arrested by the Inquisition in Malaga in 1620 and harangued for being a Protestant. The arrest was unlawful, since there was an agreement at this time between the Spanish and English crowns that the English should not be arrested by the Inquisition. Nevertheless, after being given eight days by a Jesuit confessor to convert or face the consequences, the Jesuit departed Lithgow’s cell with the words, ‘My Son, behold you deserve to be burnt quick, but by the grace of our Lady of Loretta, whom you have blasphemed, we will save your body and soul’. At a hearing with the inquisitor the next day Lithgow was subjected to a tirade of accusations. Yet instead of showing any fear he replied, ‘Reverend Sir, the nature of Charity and Religion does not consist in opprobrious speeches’ – whereupon he was kicked in the face by the inquisitor and soon enough tortured.70
William Lithgow turned out to be a fortunate man. The English consul in Malaga heard of his case, managed to get the ambassador in Madrid to secure his release, and he was able to write his memoirs twenty years later. Of course few were as lucky as him, and it is in this constant struggle between fear and resilience that the real drama of the Inquisition emerges. Just thirty-two years after the first auto in Seville, the Florentine ambassador Guicciardini wrote in 1513 how the inquisitors, ‘confiscating the goods of the guilty and at times burning them, have made everyone afraid’.71 Fear percolated every layer of society: in 1559 a case was begun against the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé Carranza, the primate of all Spain, for ‘heresy’, which revealed that no one was free from suspicion (see Chapter Five); by the late 16th century, the moriscos of Cuenca kept their goods away from their houses, since if they were arrested by the Inquisition these would all be confiscated;72 and by 1602 moriscos lived in such fear of the Inquisition that some fainted at the mere sight of an inquisitorial aide.73
This sense of fear was carefully cultivated by the inquisitorial authorities. In 1564 a lawyer wrote to the Suprema from Galicia to say that there was a need ‘that people nurture fear’ there respecting the Inquisition.74 And in 1578, when Francisco Peña republished Directorium Inquisitorium – the 14th-century rubric for inquisitorial procedure written by Nicolas Eymerich, an inquisitor of Aragon – he wrote, ‘We must remember that the essential aim of the trial and death sentence is not saving the soul of the defendant but furthering the public good and terrorizing the people’.75
The Inquisition clearly believed that fear was the best way to achieve political ends. This was, as the French historian Bartolomé Benassar has put it, a ‘pedagogy of fear’:76 an entire institutional and political armoury designed to propagate terror in the population whose best interests it supposedly had at heart. The fear was mythologized through the use of torture and burning. It began from the very moment the inquisitors arrived in a town and read their edict of faith, enjoining anyone who had either committed an error of the faith, or knew of someone who had done, to come before the inquisitors within thirty days and confess or denounce.77 Fear spread through society with the power of the Inquisition to deliver social and financial ruin, ensuring the poverty of its victims by confiscating their goods, banishing them from their home towns and decreeing that their descendants could not fill any official post or wear silks, jewels or any other adornments of prestige.78 Most of all, fear was ensured by the principle of secrecy, which meant that the accused could not know the names of their accusers.
Yet it was the apparatus of fear which in the end destroyed the whole. As the stories of Lithgow in Malaga and Maestre in Hellín show, resistance was never far away. The inquisitors’ attempts to impose their will through force merely inspired rebellion; this in turn created more targets, and so a vicious circle formed. It was impossible to purge society of its enemies, because society – and the Inquisition – was itself creating them.
The essential world view of the Iberian Inquisitions was that anything that was different was a form of rebellion. Their sheer diversity and long time-span, together with their enormous bureaucratic machine, make them unparalleled as institutions through which to examine persecution. This is, in the end, the story of how persecution can arise and how it can be avoided; it is a story whose relevance never vanishes, a warning from the past.79
My hope is that the violence of some of what follows is tempered, and transcended, by the ultimate refusal of people in the Iberian worlds to submit to the reign of fear. The fact that excesses of power always, in the end, destroy their perpetrators is a source of consolation, and a testament to the complex and paradoxical nature of the human condition that emerges from the remarkable stories which fill the archives of the Inquisition in Portugal and Spain. Thus in telling this story I hope to fulfil something of what the great American historian Henry Charles Lea described as his philosophy of history: Lea, whose three-volume history of the Spanish Inquisition remains the standard work on the subject, completed the publication of his book with Macmillan exactly one hundred years ago; it was his hope that the study of the past ‘can make us more exigent with the present and more hopeful of the future’.80
Chapter One
THE END OF TOLERANCE
Who can doubt that what seems in this tribunal to be severity of justice is in fact a medicine, ordained by mercy for the health of the delinquents?
Teruel and Zaragoza 1484–1486
IN THE HOUSEHOLD OF Juan Garces de Marcilla, hatred coursed its prey. Marcilla was a local noble in the remote Aragonese town of Teruel. Ashamed of his indigence, he had married Brianda, daughter of a powerful local businessman, Jaime Martínez Santángel. Marcilla loathed his in-laws and this was an era in which such workaday odium could be taken to its extreme: he made sure that they would be burnt to death.
The new inquisitor, Juan de Solibera, arrived in Teruel in May 1484. There was no welcoming committee. In fact, the local authorities were appalled. They probably knew that there had been resistance in some parts of Castile to the introduction of the Inquisition there.1 They determined to follow suit. When there were so many great and elegant cities in the kingdom of Aragon, why had their remote settlement high in the bare hills been selected as the first calling point for the new institution? What were the implications of the sacking of the old inquisitors and the introduction of the new? The town leaders wrote that they feared the Inquisition would bring the same chaos as it had ‘in Castile, and that [the inquisitors] would bring the very same heinous procedures that they had used there, in violation of all law’.2 Yet not everyone was as fearful; some, like Marcilla, sensed an opportunity in the interstices of hatred.
Initially, however, Marcilla was in the minority. The authorities held out. In resisting, they were not merely standing up for local autonomy; they perhaps sensed that the new Inquisition, designed to persecute people who were different, would destroy the delicate cultural fabric which made the town what it was. For the inhabitants of Teruel were a mixed bunch. In addition to the majority Christian population, there was a large community of people descended from Jewish converts to Christianity – conversos.*1 Between 1391 and 1413 there had been many such conversions, some of them voluntary and some of them forced;3 the children a
nd grandchildren of these converts were mostly sincere Christians, but they maintained some of the cultural practices of their Jewish ancestors. In addition to the conversos, Teruel had a large population of converted Muslims who had switched to Christianity along with the Jews after listening to the preaching of St Vincent Ferrer in the early 15th century. These converts – known as moriscos – had abandoned Moorish dress and no longer spoke Arabic; they had assimilated fully into society.4
The arrival of the inquisitor caused panic. The Inquisition had been created in Spain within the past few years to target alleged bad Christians among the conversos, and three years previously the first auto had been staged, in Seville. The combination of fear and local official resistance meant that as soon as he appeared in Teruel Solibera was shut up in a monastery for three weeks and prevented from preaching his inaugural sermon. Eventually he had to move to a nearby hamlet, from which he righteously thundered excommunications at the town officials.5 They responded with gusto. In open mockery of inquisitorial procedure, they built a great fire with a stake in the middle. Yet instead of this serving as a place for the burning of heretics, they surrounded the fire with stones which were hurled at anyone who came to the town with royal letters or decrees supporting the Inquisition.6