Marcilla organized the inquisitor’s fightback. First he ensured that Solibera was given an armed guard. Then he used the guard to ensure that Teruel’s rebellious officials were arrested. All of them were sacked. Marcilla was made captain of the town. He was instructed to seize Teruel, appoint new officials and install the new Inquisition.
In March 1485 Marcilla took the town and the Inquisition began work. In August the first auto was held and two converso effigies were burnt; in January 1486 there was another auto and nine conversos were burnt. The most important of them was Jaime Martínez Santángel, the brother-in-law of one of the officials who had resisted Inquisitor Solibera the year before. Two of Santangel’s sons were burnt alive and one was burnt in effigy.7 Jaime Martínez Santángel, one recalls, was the father-in-law of Marcilla, and his sons were Marcilla’s brothers-in-law. Through the Inquisition Marcilla had set about destroying his relatives by marriage.8 He had also given his support to an institution which the new monarchs of Aragon and Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella – known as the Reyes Católicos – had placed at the forefront of their domestic policy. This alone was enough to see him rise through the ranks even as his wife’s family was destroyed.
Soon enough, in Zaragoza, the capital of the kingdom of Aragon on the banks of the Ebro river, events in Teruel would be echoed. Zaragoza was renowned for its nobility and the beauty of its women. Just eight years before the Spanish conquest of Granada in 1492, there was still a large Moorish quarter with an oil press and functioning mosque,9 while travellers often admired its houses of thin red Roman-style bricks and its bevy of churches.10
Soon, however, there would be blood. Word of events in Teruel began to reach the town. Anger in the converso community grew. It was bad enough that the Inquisition had begun work in Castile, but now who was this Marcilla, to bring down Don Jaime Martínez Santángel of Aragon! Doubtless this doughty champion of the Inquisition had married Brianda for her converso money: he despised her, although perhaps her family had slighted him, flaunting their wealth in the face of his much-vaunted but straitened nobility.
Beneath the anger pulsed fear. For what Marcilla had really done was to effect a coup. With the Inquisition, there was the prospect of power.
SOLIBERA’S FELLOW inquisitor was Pedro de Arbues. Arbues had been born not far from Zaragoza in 1441.11 He had studied at Bologna in Italy and risen through the ranks of the Church before being made an inquisitor alongside Solibera in 1484. His attachment to the ideology of the times was revealed by the inaugural speech he made to the Council of the Inquisition in Zaragoza. ‘Our purpose,’ he said, ‘is to watch over the vine of the Church as careful sentries, picking out heresies from the wheat of religion ... if it is carefully considered, it will be seen that all this, which seems horrible at first glance, is nothing but mercy . . . 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?’12
With Arbues and Solibera, the Inquisition set up shop in Aragon. As edicts of faith were read, people began to follow the initial rebellious example of Teruel. Both Catholics who had no Jewish or Islamic ancestry – the so-called Old Christians – and conversos started to murmur against the Inquisition in Zaragoza. The conversos were joined by members of the nobility and the richest people of the city, who complained that the new Inquisition acted in violation of the laws of Aragon, confiscating goods and keeping secret the names of witnesses, two things ‘most new, and never seen before, and most prejudicial for the kingdom’.13 By February 1485 the indignation was such that some conversos decided to attempt something outrageous: the assassination of the feared Arbues.14
The plot was hatched in the house of the leading converso Luis de Santángel. A bounty of 500 florins was placed on the head of Arbues, and a team of six assassins was chosen. The team was a mixture of conversos – the father of one of them, Juan de Esperandeu, had already been imprisoned by the Inquisition – and Old Christians, including Vidal Duranzo, the Gascon servant of Juan de Abadía, another of the assassins.15 The idea was that if Arbues was killed, no inquisitor would dare to fill his shoes.16
Rumours were rife. The first auto in Zaragoza, with burnings, took place in May. Another followed in June. Indignation rose all the while among the converso community. Assuming a conspiracy, Arbues took to wearing a chain-mail undershirt and an iron helmet beneath his hat.17 One night, Juan de Esperandeu tried to cut away one of the bars of his window while Arbues was asleep in bed but he was discovered and ran off in the dark.18
Arbues was carried back to his lodgings. He died before dawn. The news spread at once and the cry went up throughout the town: ‘A fuego con los conversos!’ – ‘To the fire with the conversos!’ It was only through the intervention of Don Alonso de Aragón, viceroy and archbishop of Aragon, who rode out into the mob to calm them, that the converso quarter was saved from being put to the torch.20 As it was, it was decided that the perpetrators would be punished by the Inquisition instead.
The investigations started at once. The famed inquisitor-general Tomás de Torquemada sent three replacement inquisitors in Arbues’s stead, and the prime suspects were interrogated. One of those seized was Duranzo, who confessed after being tortured. Promised mercy if he would disclose the names of his accomplices, he revealed all; on claiming his mercy when he had finished, he was told that, unlike the other conspirators, he would receive the mercy of not having his hands severed before he was hung, drawn and quartered.21
So began the fires in Zaragoza. In 1486 there were to be no fewer than fourteen autos there: forty-two people were burnt alive and fourteen in effigy. To increase the public fear and the impres-siveness of the autos, Inquisitor-General Torquemada ordered that a fortnight before each auto the event should be proclaimed publicly across the city by a parade of mounted officials.22 This, for the first time, turned the Inquisition into a genuinely public affair. The terror of the converso community was total, and many of them fled. Among the victims were three ancestors of the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne: Juan Fernando López de Villanueva, his son Micer Pablo and their cousin Ramón López; the rest of the family escaped to France, Antwerp and London where the fear was distilled for several generations to come.23
In general, following these events in Zaragoza, people’s fury at the Inquisition rarely exceeded their fear. Yet even before their anger clouded their judgement, the conversos had not been alone in their distrust of the new institution, as the events in Teruel and the initial reactions in Zaragoza had shown.24 The suspicion and resistance with which the Inquisition had been greeted in Aragon had arisen because this was a new institution which represented a way of treating people which seemed excessive. Yet it would not take long for the excessive to appear normal, and for fear of the new institution to become a way of life.
SPAIN DURING THE REIGNof the Reyes Católicos was unique in Europe. The Jews had arrived before the birth of Christ,25 and with the Moorish invasion of 711 there had been large-scale migration from North Africa. Even after the Christian reconquest, which had its most decisive triumphs in the mid-13th century,*2 Spain, with its blend of cultures, was more akin to a Muslim society than it was to the rest of Europe. Ph
ysical geography may have tied Iberia to the lands north of the Pyrenees but the importance of geographical ideas of space was limited then, and the fact that Spain felt like an Islamic sort of place was much more important:26 for visitors from northern Europe, the legacy of the convivencia – the centuries of shared Christian, Jewish and Muslim life in the peninsula – was a place with what seemed to their eyes to be confused categories.
There was, for instance, the way in which people dressed. Whether they were going to a party or doing the housework, women in Spain covered their heads with tocados, elaborate headdresses sometimes made of velvet or satin that wound down the neck.27 For most women’s clothing, however, silk was the material of choice, something which went back to the manufacturing traditions of Moorish Andalusia.28
Among men, the second half of the 15th century had even seen a growing fashion for Moorish dress. During the reign of Henry IV (1454–74) this was so prevalent that ‘whoever imitated [the Moors] the best pleased the king the most’.29 And in 1497 King Ferdinand no less presented himself with his train of nobles dressed in Moorish style at Burgos to celebrate the betrothal of his son Prince John.30 Moorish fashion accessories for men included the sayo, a bodysuit over which other garments were worn, and two types of hooded cloak, the albornoz and the capellar.31
For other Europeans, then, even Christian Spaniards seemed exotic. The secretary of the Baron de Rosmithal, visiting Burgos in the middle of the 15th century, described a Christian noble’s house where the women were all ‘richly dressed in the Moorish style, following Moorish customs in their dress, food and drink . . . dancing very beautifully in the Moorish style, all of them dark, with black eyes’.32 Over seven centuries of Moorish presence – and for much of this time dominance – in Iberia had left deep marks which the conquest of Granada in 1492 would not erase; even the most widely recognizable of all Spanish phrases today, ¡Olé!, derives from the Arabic Wa-l-lah – For God.33
Cultural crossovers were many. In Castile Jews often sponsored Christians at their baptisms, while Christians did likewise at Jewish circumcision ceremonies.34 In the 14th century Christians would bring Muslim friends to mass and even hire Muslim buskers to play music in churches during night vigils.35 As late as the 15th century Christians and Jews apprenticed their children to live among the other religious group for years36 while Jews converted to Islam and Muslims converted to Judaism.37 And although sexual relations between peoples of different faiths were taboo, they were common enough; in 1356 the king of Aragon granted a local monastery jurisdiction over Muslim women caught having sex with Christians in the locality, but the following year had to change this so that women who had had sex with the monks themselves were not included.38
Yet in spite of all this sharing in one another’s lives, the fault lines between the three faiths were always there, waiting to be exaggerated by extremists. Muslims and Christians used bath houses on different days, for instance, while neither Jews nor Muslims were permitted to convert Christians.39 By the late 15th century there was considerable pressure to separate Jews and Muslims in cities from Christians. The barriers were coming up.
Thus it was that by the end of the 15th century, when the furore around the Inquisition broke out in Aragon, the three communities performed quite different functions in Spanish society. The Christians were nobles, churchmen and fighters;40 Jews were craftsmen, financiers and intellectuals; and Muslims were predominantly agriculturalists and craftsmen.41 This was a society where activity was increasingly defined by faith – something which would have disastrous consequences for Spanish society when two of the faiths were excluded.
In Spain, the militarized nature of Christian society after the reconquest created a national character that was decidedly testy. ‘They are proud, and think that no nation can be compared to their own,’ wrote one Italian traveller, ‘. . . they do not like foreigners, and are very surly with them; they are inclined to take up weapons, more so than any other Christian nation, and are extremely good at using them, being agile and very expert, and very quick in moving their arms; they value honour to such a degree that they prefer to give little thought to their own deaths rather than stain it’.42
Such characteristics were problematic. The tendency of human societies towards aggression had been exaggerated in Spain by the triumph of the warrior caste in the reconquest. After the whole country but Granada had been won for Christendom, the 15th century saw a series of civil wars. Seville was sacked in 1471 by the rival supporters of the duke of Medina Sidonia and the marquis of Cádiz,43 and the factionalism spilled out into a civil war which raged across Andalusia for four years.44 The situation was so bad that, said the chronicler Bernaldez, ‘it is impossible to write about the travails of King Henry [IV] at that time’.45 Towns were destroyed, crowngoods stolen, and royal rents plummeted to levels never seen before.46
If Spain were to survive, the aggression would have to be directed at some external foe. A target was needed on which all this destructive energy could be spent. In societies ambiguous groups are often thought dangerous and can become the focus of violence at times of pressure.47 The conversos were just such a group, now in the category of Christians, but not long ago belonging to the category of Jews. They would prove to be easy enough to vilify, and destroy.
Toledo 1449
ON 26 JANUARY 1449, Don Álvaro de Luna, King John II of Castile’s special constable, passed through Toledo. Luna was a short man with an unusually small face, but he was a great horseman and a talented fighter. He was the most powerful man in Castile.48
Luna was en route to fight John II’s cause against the Aragonese, who had recently attacked. Crossing the River Tejo and climbing the steep steps away from the yellowing plains up to the Plaza de Zocódover, he demanded one million maravedís from Toledo for the campaign. The Toledanos were incensed; suspecting the rich converso tax collector Alonso Cota of instigating the tax, a mob gathered the next day, after Luna had departed, and sacked the Magdalena quarter, where the richest conversos lived. The targeting of scapegoats had begun.49
Luna was hardly a popular figure in Toledo. In justifying the riot to King John, the mayor (alcalde mayor) of Toledo, Pero de Sarmiento, described how for the past thirty years Luna had ‘tyrannically and dissipatedly devastated and usurped your kingdoms every day . . . seizing for himself the task of ruling and commanding and the glory and power of [the] Crown’.50 Near Toledo, Sarmiento continued, Luna had destroyed vines and plantations, killed or seized the residents and burnt their houses, ‘making war against us as if we were Moors’.51 Luna’s most grievous crime, however, was selling public offices to the highest bidder; he had dealt openly with conversos, ‘who are mostly infidels and heretics, and have Judaized and Judaize [were secret Jews while outwardly Christian]’.52
John II was one of the weakest kings Castile had had for a long time. Tall, blond and pale-faced, he was more interested in reading, hunting in the woods, singing and playing musical instruments than in ruling.53 He left the daily running of the kingdom’s affairs to Luna, and this was the cause of much resentment. Luna was said to be richer than all the nobles and bishops of Spain put together.54 If there was any town or property near his own he had to have it, and so ‘his estate grew like the plague’.55
This was, then, the condition of the kingdom when Luna arrived in Toledo early in 1449. Power under John II had become increasingly concentrated; witch-hunts of imaginary enemies took place, and some collaborated to rob others. It was a foretaste of the Inquisition; the feebleness of the king had allowed dangerous precedents to be set.56
Having sanctioned the riot against the conversos of Toledo, Mayor Sarmiento needed to find some justification for his behaviour. Moreover the attack on Luna’s converso ally Cota was a thinly veiled attack on the king himself. When John II arrived, Sarmiento refused to allow him in, and instead bombarded the royal party with arrows and stones from the bluster of crags upon which Toledo perched.57 Sarmiento then threw numerous gentlemen, ladies,
monks and nuns out of the city. An excuse for all this had to be found, and, in keeping with the initial riot of 27 January, it was found in the conversos.
On 5 June 1449 Sarmiento published his so-called Sentencia-Estatuto on behalf of the city. In this he described how the conversos slaughtered lambs on Maundy Thursday, eating them and ‘making other sorts of Jewish holocausts and sacrifices’.58 They had recently gathered and plotted to seize the city and destroy the Old Christians. In view of the arbitrary power which they exercised over Christians and the dubiousness of their Christian faith, the conversos were banned from all official posts in the city and from acting as witnesses.59 Only those who could prove their limpieza de sangre (the absence of any Jewish ancestry) could hold public office.
The arguments of the rebels in Toledo did not stand up. If Luna was such a tyrant that he appointed conversos to tyrannize Old Christians, it could not be true that the conversos were all-powerful in the city (as they answered to Luna); while if the conversos were all-powerful, Luna could not be such a tyrant.60 Moreover the accusation that conversos were bloodsucking financiers was a wild generalization, since the vast majority of conversos in Toledo and elsewhere in Spain did not work in finance and were artisans.61 As with the history of scapegoating in general, the activities of a few were extended to the whole.62
The inconsistencies of the argument suggest that the religious failings of the conversos – the supposed justification for the statute enacted against them – were, if not simply false, exaggerated to promote the rebels’ own political agenda.63 If religion was so important to the outbreak of violence against conversos, it is difficult to understand why, after the pogroms of 1391, Jews were able to live in such peace in 15th-century Spain that people migrated there from both Portugal and North Africa to join Jewish communities.64 Many conversos had actually risen to powerful positions in the Church and were unimpeachable Christians; the same accusations could not be made against all of them with a clear conscience.