It is not difficult to imagine the fears and undercurrents which must have cut through even the most minor interactions in families like this. Álvaro de Leão, as we have seen, believed that he had been denounced by his enemies, and was denounced by acquaintances in the jail of Évora. He had himself denounced his wife. There was no effective defence against false witnesses, and converso contemporaries of Álvaro accused the Inquisition of bribing people to denounce them.57
There was, moreover, no defence against abuse of power for someone like Álvaro who had already been reconciled. In Madrid in the 1520s a rich converso who had been reconciled saw his four daughters become sexual prey for some friars. One of them, Vicente, was seen with his habit off, romping with the eldest girl in her room, and two other girls were seen at dusk entering the lodgings of Charles V’s confessor the bishop of Osma, and not leaving until the dawn had risen.58
One must suspect that these girls fell into the laps of these ugly individuals because of the fear of what might happen should they or their father suffer another accusation. There had been a dangerous concentration of power in Iberia and progressive limitation of local rights and freedoms. The results were there for all to see, and for people like Álvaro de Leão to fear. For all too many people, the religious path had become simply an excuse for the exercise of power.
PERHAPS IT SHOULD NOT be surprising that the Portuguese crown showed little understanding of this process, and of its dangers. Power, and keeping up with their Spanish rivals, were what mattered to the country’s monarchs. So while John III and his brother Henry were determinedly lobbying their case before the papacy, they did not pause to consider how, after the initial bloodletting of the 1480s and 1490s, the new Inquisition had been brought to its knees in Spain by a series of scandals that almost led to its abolition.
On the death of Queen Isabella in 1504 the new king of Castile was Philip I, a Habsburg born in the Low Countries. Isabella’s widower Ferdinand remained only as king of Aragon. Philip suspended inquisitorial trials in September 1505.59 As heretics became increasingly difficult to track down tribunals were abolished. Of the seventeen tribunals which had existed under Torquemada, only seven were left by 1506.60 But in this same year Philip died. His wife, Juana – daughter of the Reyes Católicos – took to travelling the country with his corpse and was declared insane. She was incarcerated in a monastery in Tordesillas for the rest of her life, and Ferdinand acted as regent of the couple’s infant son Charles, later Charles V. Thus with its greatest champion effectively ruling the country, the Inquisition was saved.
There was nevertheless an increasing awareness in many circles that inquisitorial justice left much to be desired. The city of Granada complained to Charles V in 1526 that the procedures of the Inquisition meant that ‘good Christians are more in danger than bad ones of being both imprisoned and condemned even though they are blameless, something which has happened many times’.61 The secrecy of inquisitorial procedure meant that ‘many souls have been condemned to hell . . . since they are able to say what they do secretly, they condemn themselves and give evidence about things they have never seen’.62
The complaints from Granada were prompted by the fact that this was the year in which a tribunal was transferred to the city.63 Nevertheless, they underlined the fact that thinking people were well aware of the abuses that were carried out in the name of inquisitorial justice in Spain. They knew about them, but nothing was done to stop them. That supposed guardians of the faith should commit these crimes was of course horrendous but, as we shall see later, it was nothing out of the ordinary.*2 In the final analysis, few people were willing to put their own personal security and material wealth on the line provided that the institution did not affect them. By the time it did affect them, it would, of course, be too late to do anything about it.
The troubles of the Spanish Inquisition were common knowledge in Portugal in these years. To see the dangers of the judicial process that they were about to install, all the Portuguese needed to do was to recall the major crisis which had almost brought down the Spanish Inquisition in 1506: the terrible torture and abuse of power by the Inquisition in the ancient city of Cordoba. But the Portuguese monarchy evidently cared more for power than for what could truly be called justice.
Chapter Three
TORTURED JUSTICE
. . . if the prisoner should die or be injured or suffer heavy bleeding or have a limb mutilated during the torture, this will be their fault and responsibility and not ours, because they have refused to tell the truth.
Cordoba 1506
IN 1506 CORDOBA was in the clutches of Inquisitor Diego Rodríguez Lucero. Inquisitor Lucero was known as ‘el tenebrero’ – the bringer of darkness.1 His mode of procedure was summed up by one complaint made about him to the Suprema:
Lucero wanted to make love to the wife of Julian Trigueros, and he took her because they resisted; her husband, who was an Old Christian, went to demand justice from [King Ferdinand] and [Ferdinand] confirmed the justice of his cause and sent [Trigueros] to the archbishop of Seville [Diego Deza, the inquisitor-general], who sent him back to Lucero. [Trigueros] arrived at Cordoba one Wednesday to continue with his case and he was burnt on the Saturday of the following week. Lucero kept his wife as his mistress. [And in another case] as the daughter of Diego Celemín was exceptionally beautiful, her parents and her husband did not want to give her to him, and so Lucero had the three of them burnt and now has a child by her, and he has kept her for a long time in the alcazar as a mistress.2
The city’s noble families complained. They wrote to the court that Lucero and his minions had invented a terrific lie against many of the most distinguished Christians of the city and the surrounding area. Innocents had been accused of being heretics; prisoners had been forced to give evidence against them. It was not just the nobility who suffered; accusations were levelled at monks and nuns, and at ordinary folk. And what was more all this false and misleading evidence was secured through torture.3
In 1507 Cordoba’s authorities went further. They wrote to King Ferdinand, noting how the devil had a habit of putting rotten apples among the good. With the Inquisition, where the ‘work was most saintly . . . demons dressed in flesh have appeared’.4 The inquisitor, they said, secured as many witnesses as he felt like from those in his jail. He forced their acquiescence through torture and threats, and withheld rations from those who refused to cooperate. Of his 500 prisoners, claimed the authorities, 150 had resisted the threats: they had been burnt and paraded past Cordoba’s great mosque-turned-cathedral with gags in their mouths so that they could not tell the truth of what had happened before being burnt.
The Reverend Inquisitor Lucero was evidently a hawk rather than a dove. His motto was, ‘Give me a Jew and I’ll give you him burnt’.5 A former schoolteacher in the desert region of Almería, he had been installed as inquisitor in Granada in 1500, which he had described as ‘Judea la Pequenna’ – Little Jewry – declaring that the city gates should be shut and all its heretical inhabitants burnt. During his time there approximately eighty people died at the Inquisition’s hands in Granada.6 Lucero had been appointed to Cordoba in 1502 to ‘improve’ things, with the tribunal at a low ebb following the corruption of Inquisitor Pedro de Guiral, accused in 1499 of taking bribes from the families of defendants.7
The first serious historian of the Inquisition, Llorente, who had access to records that have since been lost, said that 2,592 people died in Andalusia during these years, with another 829 burnt in effigy and 32,952 reconciled.*1 It was not for nothing that Lucero was known as the bringer of darkness.
ONE OF THE MOST dubious trials led by Lucero in these years was that of the converso Juan de Córdoba Membreque. Membreque had been arrested in 1502 and accused by his slave Mina8 from the Gold Coast of leading a synagogue which met on Mondays and Thursdays, of keeping all the Jewish fasts and of wearing the appropriate clothing for each of the Jewish holy days. Membreque’s sermons to the assembled converso fai
thful were said to include promises that they would all be taken to a promised land where they would find great riches. On the way they would cross a river of milk and another of water, and when they bathed in this they would all return to the age of twenty-five. The prophet Elias would come to lead them forth, and when he came the land would shake and the sun and moon would die and the heavens would open, the sea would run red with blood, the trees would dry out and a great storm of stones would rain down on the earth. Dressed entirely in white the conversos would depart, and all Christians would convert to Judaism and join them.
What was curious about Membreque’s trial was that at a time when the merest hint of Jewishness in a Spaniard could lead to their being burnt to death, there were ninety-three witnesses to his heretical activities who all came forward to give exactly the same story about his ‘secret’ synagogue and sermons. Either Membreque was the least secretive person in the world, or he had had some kind of death wish – or there was more (or rather, less) to the evidence of his ninety-three accusers than met the inquisitor’s eye. Membreque even proved at his trial that he had been hundreds of miles from Cordoba at the time the ‘offences’ had been committed. But it didn’t matter; he was found guilty and ‘relaxed’ to the secular arm, burning at the stake in 1504.9
Travesties like this revealed just how open to abuse the Inquisition’s powers of arrest and interrogation really were. The murmuring in Cordoba swelled. The Bishop of Catania in Sicily sent an official to inquire into the complaints, and some of the witnesses confessed to giving false evidence. Lucero and his officials had asked them leading questions, they said, and when they refused to testify they had been tortured and subjected to terrifying threats. These prisoners, many of them just children, were then forced to learn the prayers of the Jews by heart. They were taught the prayers by Jewish converts to Christianity to ‘prove’ that they had been subverted by those they accused. The prisoners said that they had been so terrified by the threats of torture that they had done nothing else in jail except learn these prayers.10
Thus the jails that were supposed to safeguard the Catholic faith echoed to the sound of Hebrew. Cordoba’s winding streets, touched by the ghosts of their Islamic past, buzzed with the scandal. When Lucero and his officials realized that they had been reported to their superiors, they hurried through a new auto, burning most of those whom they had previously tortured into testifying to the heresies of others.11
The inquisitorial investigation into Lucero, when it finally commenced following the Cordoban authorities’ complaints, came too late. Although higher authorities were now plainly aware of the way in which torture had been used to secure false information, and of how this information had led to the incineration of numerous innocents, they did nothing to suppress its use by the Inquisition. Torture was, after all, an age-old weapon of the state, and not one it wished to relinquish.
THOUGH THE WELL- DOCUMENTED excesses of inquisitors such as Lucero gave the central inquisitorial council, the Suprema, strong evidence of the miscarriages of justice that could result from torture, in the first 150 years of the Inquisition there was never any question of it being deemed incompatible with civilized society, or even plain counter-productive. In medieval Castile and Portugal torture was in daily use by criminal courts so its employment by the Spanish and then Portuguese Inquisitions was not remarkable. Torture was integral to Iberian judicial systems, and even the horror of an auto has to be placed in the context of the punishments of the time; those sentenced to death by the English judicial system in the 16th century could be disembowelled and castrated whilst still alive before being beheaded.12
All this has made some authors argue that the evils of torture under the Inquisition have been exaggerated. As well as the fact that torture was simply a feature of the time, it has been said that the Inquisition was ‘slow to use torture’, that the civil courts were much worse than inquisitorial ones in its application, and even that torture was rarely used after around 1500.13 It is indeed true that inquisitors could show leniency towards those they were torturing; during the inquisitorial trials of Valencian moriscos in 1597 several were spared being ‘put to the question’ because of their age or infirmity.14 And of course one must be aware of the curious phenomenon of condemning this aspect of the past through the present’s more civilized values. Yet the fact is that inquisitorial torture – as the evidence from Valencia also shows – carried on far beyond 1500, and it was more severe than in the civil courts.
Thus in 1596 in Valencia half of all the moriscos who confessed were tortured or threatened with torture.15 In Toledo in 1590 one morisco, the cobbler Alonso de Salas, died in the torture chamber.16 Almost 85 per cent of moriscos examined by the Inquisition in Valencia were tortured between 1580 and 1610, and almost 79 per cent of those in Zaragoza.17 The threat of torture often led to confessions; as in Ciudad Real in 1483,*2 it also often led to suicides,18 and one morisco declared that ‘with torture the inquisitors had made him say what they wanted . . . and that he had more fear before them than in front of all the devils of hell and that God in Heaven did not have as much power as they did’.19
In the 16th and 17th centuries it was not, moreover, just the moriscos who suffered. Over in Portugal, in Évora, a quarter of all those accused of sodomy were tortured, including a twelve-year-old boy who was raped by his brother-in-law and then tried for his ‘crime’ and tortured into a confession.20 Torture was simply an aspect of the judicial process and not one which many people found abhorrent. On the contrary, it was seen as a useful way of getting to the ‘truth’.
Nevertheless, contemporaries often did think that the Inquisition’s use of torture was worse than that of the secular courts, as the Lucero case and the protests from Cordoba show. The chronicler Hernando de Pulgar, secretary to the Reyes Católicos, noted that torture by the Inquisition was thought particularly cruel.21 Counsellor to the Inquisition, the theologian and bishop of Zamora Diego de Simancas (died 1564), argued that inquisitors should be more inclined to use torture than other judges as the crime of heresy was hidden and difficult to prove.22 In 1578 Francisco Peña*3 noted that torture was frequently used straight away by inquisitors without awaiting other proofs, even though it had traditionally been used differently;23 others noted that whereas in the old medieval Inquisition two pieces of evidence were needed before proceeding to torture, in Spain ‘torture was entirely arbitrary, the judges being able to order it whenever they want to’.24
When used according to the Inquisition’s rules – and not arbitrarily in the manner of Lucero – torture was inflicted on victims in precise circumstances. When the evidence was strong but not decisive, and it was suspected that a confession was not complete, prisoners were given the chance of ‘purging’ the evidence. Torture was thus often used against those who had already confessed their own guilt but were suspected of withholding the names of accomplices. Once one name was extracted, this was evidence that others might be lurking, and so the torture could go on, and on.
There were two main instruments of torture – pulleys and water – with many variations. For the pulleys, the prisoner’s hands were tied behind their back. Hoisted from the floor, they were kept suspended at the inquisitors’ pleasure like slaughtered rabbits hung up to dry. Occasionally they were let fall a short distance. If the ‘right’ answers were not forthcoming, weights were sometimes attached to make the joint pain more intense and the abrasions of the cords chafing at
mangled wrists even more severe. The use of water was more common. The prisoner was placed on a potro, a trestle table, with the head lower than the feet, the throat and forehead held fast by a metal strap. The limbs were tied to the potro with ropes which bit into the flesh while others were twisted around them like tourniquets. The mouth was then forced open and water poured down the prisoner’s throat. Unable to breathe because of the water in their throats and with their bellies horribly bloated, their victims gasped for life as the inquisitors patiently admonished them to tell the ‘truth’.
With time, methods of torture evolved. By the early 17th century a refinement had been added to the potro known as the trampa, in which the prisoner’s legs swung through a gap in the table to which they had been tied down; another wooden bar with a hard edge was placed below the gap, and the legs were dragged through this tiny opening with a rope fastened to the toes and the ankle. Each time the rope was given a turn about the ankle and pulled tight, the prisoner was dragged further through the gap. Five turns were thought to be severe, but in Latin America seven or even eight turns were not unknown and some moriscos were subjected to ten or more.29
Pablo García, secretary of the Suprema in Madrid, wrote detailed instructions in 1591 as to how inquisitors were to proceed when torturing someone. The prisoner, García wrote, should receive a warning, advising them that they were suspected of not having told the whole truth and that the evidence of their case had been shown to learned people with clear consciences who felt that they should be tortured. Torture, it was believed, would lead to their confession.
García then instructed that the inquisitors should recite the following prayer before the torment began:
Christi Nomine Invocato: