According to some modern estimates, around 150,000 people were
prosecuted for various offences during the three-century duration of the
Spanish Inquisition, of whom between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed,
approximately 2.7 percent of all cases.
The Inquisition, however, which expanded to include lands under the
Spanish Crown in the Americas, did not include the indigenous. The King
of Spain ordered "that the inquisitors should never proceed against the
Indians, but against the old Christians and their descendants and other
persons against whom in these kingdoms of Spain it is customary to
proceed".
The Roman Emperor Constantine
legalized Christianity in 312. Having been severely persecuted under
previous emperors, the new religion now commenced its program of
persecution of heresies - Arianism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, Adamites, Donatists, Pelagians, and Priscillianists In 380 Emperor Theodosius I established Nicene Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire. It condemned other Christian creeds as heresies and approved their punishment. In 438, under Emperor Theodosius II, the Codex Theodosianus (Theodosian Code) already provided for the confiscation of property and the death penalty for heretics.
Following the conversion of Spain's Visigoth
royal family to Catholicism in 587, the situation for Jews deteriorated
as the monarchy and church aligned to consolidate the realm under the
new religion. The Church's Councils of Toledo imposed restrictions, including prohibitions on intermarriage and holding office, culminating in King Sisebut's 613 decree demanding conversion or expulsion, which led many Jews to flee or convert. Despite brief periods of tolerance, subsequent rulers and church councils intensified persecution, banning all Jewish rites,
ordering forced baptisms, seizing property, enslaving Jews (after
accusations of conspiracy in 694), taking children away from Jewish
parents,
and imposing severe economic hardships. This relentless oppression
alienated the Jewish population, causing some to welcome the Muslim
invasion in 711.
While Muslims of the Holy Land were the primary targets of the Crusades, other perceived enemies of Christianity soon became targets. In 1184 Pope Lucius III created the Episcopal Inquisition to combat Catharism
in southern France. Heretics were to be handed over to secular
authorities for punishment, have their property seized, and face
excommunication. When this failed to stem the heresy, Pope Innocent III called forth the Albigensian Crusade. 200,000 to 1,000,000 Cathars were killed, massacres perpetrated (e.g. at Beziers), hundreds burned at the stake. It was the start of a centralization in the fight against heresy, The Dominican Order was established to preach against the heresy, later serving as inquisitors throughout Europe. In 1252 Pope Innocent IV issued the bull Ad extirpanda, authorizing inquisitors to use torture against heretics.
European Jews likewise became targets, leading to massacres and expulsions.
While papal bulls sought to shield Jews from violence, starting in the
twelfth century they also prohibited Jews from holding public office,
required them to wear distinctive badges, ordered the burning of the
Talmud, along with other restrictions aimed at keeping Jews subordinate. In 1231 the Papal Inquisition expanded to Aragon. Jews were forced to listen to sermons by Dominican friars, who sought to convert them, at times leading to violence. Books by Spanish friars attacked Jews and Muslims. In Castile
the Church Synod of Zamora protested rights granted Jews by the king.
Calls for restrictions on Spanish Jews were made by Popes and Cortes
(assemblies of the Church, nobles and cities).
Some kings protected Jews, since they benefited from the taxes levied
on Jews, and Jews serving as courtiers and tax collectors. Others - like Alfonso X, Sancho IV and Henry II - restricted Jews and exploited anti-Jewish sentiment for political gain.
The Shepherds' Crusade of 1320, started to help reconquer Spain from the Muslims, instead killed hundreds of Jews in France and Spain. In 1328, mobs inflamed by the sermons of the Franciscan preacher, Pedro
Olligoyen, massacred several Jewish communities in Navarre. Years of virulent anti-Jewish preaching by Ferrand Martínez, Archdeacon of Ecija, climaxed in the massacres of 1391 when riots broke out in Seville, Barcelona, Valencia, Toledo and elsewhere across Spain, killing thousands of Jews..
To save themselves, some fled, mainly to North Africa, and an estimated
100,000, or one half of all Spanish Jews, converted to Catholicism. The
latter were called conversos.
While mostly poor or of modest means, some conversos became successful
in government and commerce, drawing resentment. Converses were also
suspected of continuing to practice Judaism in secret. Periods of
stress, food shortages, plague and inflation led to attacks on conversos
- in 1449 in Toledo (where conversos were tortured and burned alive),
in 1462 in Carmona, again in Toledo in 1467, etc. In Cordoba in 1473
mobs killed conversos, regardless of sex and age, burning and looting
their homes.
Activity of the Inquisition
Start of the Inquisition
Torquemada is buried in the monastery of Saint Thomas at Ávila, and left his own epitaph: "Pestem Fugat Haereticam" i.e. "drove away the pestilence of heresy".
Fray Alonso de Ojeda, a Dominican friar from Seville, convinced Queen Isabella of the existence of Crypto-Judaism among Andalusianconversos during her stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478.A report, produced by Pedro González de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville, and by the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, confessor to Ferdinand and Isabella, corroborated this assertion. The Spanish monarchs requested a papal bull to establish an inquisition in Spain. In 1478 Pope Sixtus IV granted the bull Exigit sincerae devotionis affectus, to deal with those who have been baptized, but "revert to the rites and customs of the Jews and to keep the dogmas and precepts of the Jewish superstition and perfidy" To "expel this perfidy" and "to convert the infidels to the proper faith", the bull permitted the monarchs to select and appoint three bishops or priests over forty years of age to act as inquisitors.
The first two inquisitors, Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín were named two years later, on 27 September 1480. The first auto de fé execution was held in Seville on 6 February 1481: six people were burned alive.
Thousands of conversos fled in terror, depopulating large parts of the
country, hurting commerce. Government revenues declined, but the Queen
was interested in "the purity of her lands", stating, per the chronicler
Hernando del Pulgar, "the essential thing was to cleanse the country of
that sin of heresy". The Inquisition grew rapidly in the Kingdom of Castile. By 1492, tribunals existed in eight Castilian cities: Ávila, Córdoba, Jaén, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo, and Valladolid.
In 1482 Ferdinand sought to take over the existing Papal Inquisition in Aragon,
which led to resistance since it infringed on local rights. Relatives
and others complained of the brutality to the Pope, who wanted to
maintain control of the inquisition. Sixtus IV promulgated a new bull (1482), affirming that:
...
in Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca and Catalonia the Inquisition has for
some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of
souls, but by lust for wealth, and that many true and faithful
Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves and other lower
and even less proper persons, have without any legitimate proof been
thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned as relapsed
heretics, deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the
secular arm to be executed, to the peril of souls, setting a pernicious
example, and causing disgust to many.
The historian Henry Charles Lea, wrote that the Pope sought to have heresy treated same as other crimes. According to the book A History of the Jewish People,
In
1482 the pope was still trying to maintain control over the Inquisition
and to gain acceptance for his own attitude towards the New Christians which was generally more moderate than that of the Inquisition and the local rulers.
Outraged,
Ferdinand feigned doubt about the bull's veracity, arguing that no
sensible pope would have published such a document. He wrote the pope on
13 May 1482, saying: "Take care therefore not to let the matter go
further, and to revoke any concessions and entrust us with the care of
this question."
The Pope suspended the bull, then switched to full cooperation, by
issuing a new bull of October 17, 1483, with which he appointed
Torquemada Inquisitor General of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, thus
uniting all Spanish inquisitions under a single head.
Setting to work immediately, they burned the first converses at the
stake in Aragon in 1484. Opposition continued in Aragon and Catalonia,
which sought to maintain local control. Pope Innocent VIII
then resolved the issue by withdrawing all papal inquisitors from
Aragon and Catalonia, thus relinquishing full control to Torquemada,
including all appeals to be addressed by Torquemada and not the pope,
Torquemada quickly established procedures for the Inquisition. In 1484, based on Nicholas Eymerich's Directorium Inquisitorum, he created a twenty-eight-article inquisitor's code, Compilación de las instrucciones del oficio de la Santa Inquisición (i.e. Compilation of the instructions of the office of the Holy Inquisition), essentially unaltered for more than three centuries following Torquemada's death.
A new court would be announced with a thirty-day grace period for
self-confessions and denunciations, and the gathering of accusations by
neighbors and acquaintances. Evidence that was used to identify a
crypto-Jew included the absence of chimney smoke on Saturdays (a sign
the family might secretly be honoring the Sabbath), the buying of many
vegetables before Passover, or the purchase of meat from a converted
butcher. The court could employ physical torture to extract confessions. Crypto-Jews were allowed to confess and do penance, although those who relapsed were executed.
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII
attempted to allow appeals to Rome against the Inquisition, which would
weaken the function of the institution as protection against the pope,
but Ferdinand in December 1484 and again in 1509 decreed death and
confiscation for anyone making use of such procedures without royal
permission.
With this, the Inquisition became the only institution that held
authority across all the realms of the Spanish monarchy and, in all of
them, a useful mechanism at the service of the crown. The cities of
Aragón continued resisting and even saw revolt, as in Teruel, from 1484 to 1485. The murder of InquisidorPedro Arbués (later made a saint) in Zaragoza on 15 September 1485 caused public opinion to turn against the conversos and in favour of the Inquisition. In Aragón, the Inquisitorial courts focused specifically on members of the powerful converso minority, ending their influence in the Aragonese administration.
The Inquisition was extremely active between 1480 and 1530.
Different sources give different estimates of the number of trials and
executions in this period; some estimate about 2,000 executions based on the documentation of the autos de fé, the majority being conversos of Jewish origin.
Kamen offers striking statistics: 91.6% of those judged in Valencia
between 1484 and 1530, and 99.3% of those judged in Barcelona between
1484 and 1505 were of Jewish origin.
False conversions
The
Inquisition had jurisdiction only over Christians. It had no power to
investigate, prosecute, or convict Jews, Muslims, or any open member of
other religions. Anyone who was known to identify as either Jew or
Muslim was outside of Inquisitorial jurisdiction and could be tried only
by the King. All the Inquisition could do in some of those cases was to
deport the individual according to the King's law, but usually, even
that had to go through a civil tribunal. The Inquisition had the
authority to try only those who self-identified as Christians (initially
for taxation purposes, later to avoid deportation as well) while
practicing another religion de facto. Even those were treated as
Christians. If they confessed or identified not as judaizantes
but as fully practicing Jews, they fell back into the previously
explained category and could not be targeted, although they would have
pleaded guilty to previously lying about being Christian.
Though not subject to the Inquisition, Jews who refused to
convert or leave Spain were called heretics and at risk of being burnt
to death at a stake.
Expulsion of Jews and Jewish conversos
The Spanish Inquisition had been established in part to prevent conversos
from engaging in Jewish practices, which, as Christians, they were
supposed to have given up. This remedy for securing the orthodoxy of conversos was eventually deemed inadequate since the main justification the monarchy gave for formally expelling all Jews from Spain was the "great harm suffered by Christians (i.e., conversos)
from the contact, intercourse and communication which they have with
the Jews, who always attempt in various ways to seduce faithful
Christians from our Holy Catholic Faith" according to the 1492 edict.
The Alhambra Decree, issued in January 1492, gave the choice between expulsion, conversion, or death.[3]
It was among the few expulsion orders that allowed conversion as an
alternative and used as a proof of the religious, not racial, element of
the measure. The enforcement of this decree was very unequal, with the
focus mainly on coastal and southern regions—those at risk of Ottoman
invasion—and more gradual and ineffective enforcement towards the
interior.
Historic accounts of the number of Jews who left Spain were based
on speculation, and some aspects were exaggerated by early accounts and
historians: Juan de Mariana speaks of 800,000 people, and Don Isaac Abravanel
of 300,000. While few reliable statistics exist for the expulsion,
modern estimates based on tax returns and population estimates of
communities are much lower, with Kamen stating that of a population of
approximately 80,000 Jews and 200,000 conversos, about 40,000 emigrated.
The Jews of the kingdom of Castile emigrated mainly to Portugal (where
the entire community was forcibly converted in 1497) and to North
Africa. The Jews of the kingdom of Aragon fled to other Christian areas,
including Italy, rather than to Muslim lands, as often assumed. Although the vast majority of conversos
simply assimilated into the Catholic dominant culture, a minority
continued to practice Judaism in secret and gradually migrated
throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, mainly to areas
where Sephardic communities were already present as a result of the
Alhambra Decree.
The most intense period of persecution of conversos lasted until 1530. From 1531 to 1560, the percentage of conversos
among the Inquisition trials dropped to 3% of the total. There was a
rebound of persecutions when a group of crypto-Jews was discovered in Quintanar de la Orden in 1588, and there was a rise in denunciations of conversos in the last decade of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, some conversos who had fled to Portugal began to return to Spain, fleeing the persecution of the Portuguese Inquisition,
founded in 1536. This led to a rapid increase in the trials of
crypto-Jews, among them numerous important financiers. In 1691, during a
number of autos de fé in Majorca, 37 chuetas, or conversos of Majorca, were burned alive.
During the eighteenth century, the number of conversos
accused by the Inquisition decreased significantly. Manuel Santiago
Vivar, tried in Córdoba in 1818, was the last person tried for being a
crypto-Jew.
Expulsion of Moriscos and Morisco conversos
The Inquisition searched for false or relapsed converts among the Moriscos, who had converted from Islam. Beginning with a decree on 14 February 1502, Muslims in Granada had to choose between conversion to Christianity or expulsion. In the Crown of Aragon, most Muslims faced this choice after the Revolt of the Brotherhoods
(1519–1523). The enforcement of the expulsion of the Moriscos was
implemented unevenly, especially in the lands of the interior and the
north. In these regions, coexistence had lasted for over five centuries
and Moriscos were protected by the population; in many cases, expulsion
orders were partially or completely ignored.
The War of the Alpujarras
(1568–71), a general Muslim/Morisco uprising in Granada that expected
to aid Ottoman disembarkation in the peninsula, ended in a forced
dispersal of about half of the region's Moriscos throughout Castile and
Andalusia as well as increased suspicions by Spanish authorities against
this community.
Many Moriscos were suspected of practising Islam in secret, and
the jealousy with which they guarded the privacy of their domestic life
prevented the verification of this suspicion. Initially, they were not severely persecuted by the Inquisition, experiencing instead a policy of evangelization, a policy not followed by those conversos
who were suspected of being crypto-Jews. There were various reasons for
this. In the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon, a large number of the
Moriscos were under the jurisdiction of the nobility, and persecution
would have been viewed as a frontal assault on the economic interests of
this powerful social class. Most importantly, the moriscos had
integrated into Spanish society significantly better than the Jews,
intermarrying with the population often, and were not seen as a foreign
element, especially in rural areas. Still, fears ran high among the population that the Moriscos were traitorous, especially in Granada. Barbary pirates backed by Spain's enemy, the Ottoman Empire, regularly raided the coast, and the Moriscos were suspected of aiding them.
In the second half of the century, late in the reign of Philip II, conditions worsened between Old Christians and Moriscos. The Morisco Revolt
in Granada in 1568–1570 was harshly suppressed, and the Inquisition
intensified its attention on the Moriscos. From 1570, Morisco cases
became predominant in the tribunals of Zaragoza,
Valencia, and Granada; in the tribunal of Granada, between 1560 and
1571, 82% of those accused were Moriscos, who were a vast majority of
the Kingdom's population. Still, the Moriscos did not experience the same harshness as Judaizing conversos and Protestants, and the number of capital punishments was proportionally less.
In 1609, King Philip III, upon the advice of his financial adviser the Duke of Lerma and Archbishop of Valencia Juan de Ribera, decreed the Expulsion of the Moriscos.
Hundreds of thousands of Moriscos were expelled. This was further
fueled by the religious intolerance of Archbishop Ribera, who quoted the
Old Testament texts ordering the enemies of God to be slain without
mercy and setting forth the duties of kings to extirpate them. The edict required: "The Moriscos
to depart, under the pain of death and confiscation, without trial or
sentence... to take with them no money, bullion, jewels or bills of
exchange.... just what they could carry."
Although initial estimates of the number expelled, such as those of
Henri Lapeyre, reach 300,000 Moriscos (or 4% of the total Spanish
population), the extent and severity of the expulsion in much of Spain
has been increasingly challenged by modern historians such as Trevor J.
Dadson.
Nevertheless, the eastern region of Valencia, where ethnic tensions
were high, was particularly affected by the expulsion, suffering
economic collapse and depopulation of much of its territory.
Of those permanently expelled, the majority finally settled in the Maghreb or the Barbary coast. Those who avoided expulsion or who managed to return were gradually absorbed by the dominant culture.[64]
The Inquisition pursued some trials against Moriscos who remained
or returned after expulsion: at the height of the Inquisition, cases
against Moriscos are estimated to have constituted less than 10 percent
of those judged by the Inquisition. Upon the coronation of Philip IV
in 1621, the new king gave the order to desist from attempting to
impose measures on the remaining Moriscos and returnees. In September
1628, the Council of the Supreme Inquisition ordered inquisitors in
Seville not to prosecute expelled Moriscos "unless they cause
significant commotion."
The last mass prosecution against Moriscos for crypto-Islamic practices
occurred in Granada in 1727, with most of those convicted receiving
relatively light sentences. By the end of the 18th century, the
indigenous practice of Islam is considered to have been effectively
extinguished in Spain.
Christian heretics
Protestantism
The burning of a Dutch Anabaptist, Anneken Hendriks, who was charged with heresy in Amsterdam (1571)
Despite popular myths about the Spanish Inquisition relating to
Protestants, it dealt with very few cases involving actual Protestants,
as there were so few in Spain.
Lutheran was an accusation used by the Inquisition to act against all
those who acted in a way that was offensive to the church. The first of
the trials against those labeled by the Inquisition as "Lutheran" were
those against the sect of mystics known as the "Alumbrados" of Guadalajara and Valladolid.
These trials were long and ended with prison sentences of differing
lengths, though no person in the sect faced execution. The subject of
the "Alumbrados" put the Inquisition on the trail of many intellectuals
and clerics who, interested in Erasmian ideas, had strayed from orthodoxy. Both Charles I and Philip II were confessed admirers of Erasmus.
The first trials against Lutheran
groups, as such, took place between 1558 and 1562, at the beginning of
the reign of Philip II, against two communities of Protestants from the
cities of Valladolid and Seville, numbering about 120. The trials signaled a notable intensification of the Inquisition's activities. A number of autos de fé were held, some of them presided over by members of the royal family, and around 100 executions took place. The autos de fé of the mid-century virtually put an end to Spanish Protestantism, which was, throughout, a small phenomenon to begin with.
After 1562, though the trials continued, the repression was much
reduced. In the last decades of the 16th century, approximately 200
Spaniards were accused of being Protestant.
Most of them were in no sense Protestants ... Irreligious
sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions, were all
captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the
cases) as "Lutheran." Disrespect to church images, and eating meat on
forbidden days, were taken as signs of heresy...
It is estimated that a dozen Protestant Spaniards were burned alive at the stake in the later part of the sixteenth century.[74]
Protestantism was treated as a marker to identify agents of
foreign powers and symptoms of political disloyalty as much as, if not
more than, a cause of prosecution in itself.
Even though the Inquisition may have had theoretical permission to
investigate Orthodox schismatics, it rarely did. There was no major war
between Spain and any Orthodox country, so there was no reason to do so.
There was one casualty tortured by those "Jesuits" (though most likely Franciscans) who administered the Spanish Inquisition in North America, according to authorities within the Eastern Orthodox Church: St. Peter the Aleut.
Even that single report has various numbers of inaccuracies that make
it problematic, and has no confirmation in the Inquisitorial archives.
Witchcraft and superstition
The category "superstitions" includes trials related to witchcraft.
The witch-hunt in Spain had much less intensity than in other European
countries (particularly France, Scotland, and Germany). One remarkable
case was that of Logroño, in which the witches of Zugarramurdi in Navarre were persecuted. During the auto de fé that took place in Logroño on 7 and 8 November 1610, six people were burned and another five burned in effigy.
The role of the Inquisition in cases of witchcraft was much more
restricted than is commonly believed. Well after the foundation of the
Inquisition, jurisdiction over sorcery and witchcraft remained in
secular hands.
In general, the Spanish Inquisition maintained a skeptical attitude
towards cases of witchcraft, considering it as a mere superstition
without any basis. Alonso de Salazar Frías,
who took the Edict of Faith to various parts of Navarre after the
trials of Logroño, noted in his report to the Suprema that "there were
neither witches nor bewitched in a village until they were talked and
written about".
Blasphemy
Included under the rubric of heretical propositions were verbal offences, from outright blasphemy
to questionable statements regarding religious beliefs, from issues of
sexual morality to misbehaviour of the clergy. Many were brought to
trial for affirming that simple fornication (sex between unmarried persons) was not a sin or for putting in doubt different aspects of Christian faith, such as Transubstantiation or the virginity of Mary.
Also, members of the clergy themselves were occasionally accused of
heretical propositions. These offences rarely led to severe penalties.
Sodomy
Pope Clement VII granted the Inquisition jurisdiction over sodomy within Aragon in 1524 in response to a petition from the Saragossa tribunal.
The Inquisition in Castile declined to take the same jurisdiction,
making sodomy the only major crime with such a significant regional
discrepancy. Even within Aragon, the treatment of sodomy varied
significantly by region because the pope's decree required that it be
prosecuted according to each area's local law. For instance, contemporaries considered the tribunal of the city of Zaragoza unusually harsh.
The first person known to have been executed by the Inquisition
for sodomy was a priest, Salvador Vidal, in 1541. Others convicted of
sodomy received sentences including fines, burning in effigy, public
whipping, and the galleys. The first burning for sodomy took place in Valencia in 1572.
Sodomy was an expansive term; while a 1560 decision ruled that lesbian sex not involving a dildo could not be prosecuted as sodomy, bestiality routinely was, especially in Saragossa in the 1570s. Men might also be prosecuted based on accusations of engaging in heterosexual sodomy with their wives. For that time and place, the word "sodomy" covered several kinds of not procreative sexual acts denounced by the Church, like coitus interruptus, masturbation, fellatio, anal coitus (whether heterosexual or homosexual), etc.
Those accused included 19% clergy, 6% nobles, 37% workers, 19% servants, and 18% soldiers and sailors. Nearly all of almost 500 cases of sodomy between persons concerned the relationship between an older man and an adolescent, often by coercion, with only a few cases where the couple were consenting homosexual
adults. About 100 of the total involved allegations of child abuse.
Adolescents were typically punished more leniently than adults, but only
when they were very young (approximately below the age of twelve) or
when the case concerned rape did they have a chance to avoid punishment
altogether.
Prosecutions for sodomy gradually declined, primarily due to
decisions from the Suprema intended to reduce the publicity for sodomy
cases. In 1579, public autos de fé ceased to include people
convicted on sodomy charges unless they were sentenced to death; even
the death sentences were excluded from public proclamation after 1610.
In 1589, Aragon raised the minimum age for sodomy executions to 25, and
by 1633, executions for sodomy had generally come to an end.
The Roman Catholic Church has regarded Freemasonry as heretical since about 1738; the suspicion
of Freemasonry was potentially a capital offence. Spanish Inquisition
records reveal two prosecutions in Spain and only a few more throughout
the Spanish Empire. In 1815, Francisco Javier de Mier y Campillo, the Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition and the Bishop of Almería,
suppressed Freemasonry and denounced the lodges as "societies which
lead to atheism, to sedition and to all errors and crimes." He then instituted a purge during which Spaniards could be arrested on the charge of being "suspected of Freemasonry".
Censorship
As one manifestation of the Counter-Reformation,
the Spanish Inquisition worked to impede the diffusion of heretical
ideas in Spain by producing "Indexes" of prohibited books. Such lists of
prohibited books were common in Europe a decade before the Inquisition
published its first. The first Index published in Spain in 1551 was, in
reality, a reprinting of the Index published by the University of Leuven in 1550, with an appendix dedicated to Spanish texts. Subsequent Indexes were published in 1559, 1583, 1612, 1632, and 1640.
Included in the Indices, at one point, were some of the great works of Spanish literature, but most of the works were plays and religious in nature.
A number of religious writers who are today considered saints by the
Catholic Church saw their works appear in the Indexes. At first, this
might seem counter-intuitive or even nonsensical—how were these Spanish
authors published in the first place if their texts were then prohibited
by the Inquisition and placed in the Index? The answer lies in the
process of publication and censorship in Early Modern Spain. Books in
Early Modern Spain faced prepublication licensing and approval (which
could include modification) by both secular and religious authorities.
Once approved and published, the circulating text also faced the
possibility of post-hoc censorship by being denounced by the
Inquisition—sometimes decades later. Likewise, as Catholic theology
evolved, once-prohibited texts might be removed from the Index.
At first, inclusion in the Index meant total prohibition of a
text. This proved not only impractical but also contrary to the goals of
having a literate and well-educated clergy. In time, a compromise
solution was adopted in which trusted Inquisition officials blotted out
words, lines, or whole passages of otherwise acceptable texts, thus
allowing these expurgated editions to circulate. Although, in theory,
the Indexes imposed enormous restrictions on the diffusion of culture in
Spain, some historians argue that such strict control was impossible in
practice and that there was much more liberty in this respect than is
often believed. Irving Leonard has conclusively demonstrated that,
despite repeated royal prohibitions, romances of chivalry, such as Amadis of Gaul, found their way to the New World with the blessing of the Inquisition. Moreover, with the coming of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, increasing numbers of licenses to possess and read prohibited texts were granted.
Despite the repeated publication of the Indexes and a large
bureaucracy of censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede
the development of Spanish literature's "Siglo de Oro",
although almost all of its major authors crossed paths with the Holy
Office at one point or another. Among the Spanish authors included in
the Index are Bartolomé Torres Naharro, Juan del Enzina, Jorge de Montemayor, Juan de Valdés and Lope de Vega, as well as the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes and the Cancionero General by Hernando del Castillo. La Celestina,
which was not included in the Indexes of the 16th century, was
expurgated in 1632 and prohibited in its entirety in 1790. Among the
non-Spanish authors prohibited were Ovid, Dante, Rabelais, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Jean Bodin, Valentine Naibod, and Thomas More
(known in Spain as Tomás Moro). One of the most outstanding and
best-known cases in which the Inquisition directly confronted literary
activity is that of Fray Luis de León,
noted humanist and religious writer of converso origin, who was
imprisoned for four years (from 1572 to 1576) for having translated the Song of Songs directly from Hebrew.
One of the major effects of the Inquisition was to end free
thought and scientific thought in Spain. As one contemporary Spaniard in
exile put it: "Our country is a land of pride and envy ... barbarism; down there one cannot produce any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism. Thus silence was imposed on the learned."
For the next few centuries, while the rest of Europe was slowly
awakened by the influence of the Enlightenment, Spain stagnated. This conclusion is contested.
The censorship
of books was very ineffective and prohibited books circulated in Spain
without significant problems. The Spanish Inquisition never persecuted
scientists, and relatively few scientific books were placed on the
Index. On the other hand, Spain was a state with more political freedom
than other absolute monarchies in the 16th to 18th centuries. The apparent paradox is explained by both the hermeticist religious ideas of the Spanish church and monarchy and the budding seed of what would become enlightened absolutism
taking shape in Spain. The list of banned books was not, as interpreted
sometimes, a list of evil books but a list of books that lay people
were very likely to misinterpret. The presence of highly symbolical and
high-quality literature on the list was so explained. These metaphorical
or parable-sounding books were listed as not meant for free
circulation, but there might be no objections to the book itself and the
circulation among scholars was mostly free. Most of these books were
carefully collected by the elite. The practical totality of the
prohibited books can be found now, as then, in the library of the Monasterio del Escorial, carefully collected by Philip II and Philip III.
The collection was "public" after Philip II's death and members of
universities, intellectuals, courtesans, clergy, and certain branches of
the nobility didn't have too many problems accessing them and
commissioning authorised copies. The Inquisition has not been known to
make any serious attempt to stop this for all the books, but there are
some records of them "suggesting" the King of Spain to stop collecting
grimoires or magic-related ones.
Family and marriage
Bigamy
The
Inquisition also pursued offences against morals and general social
order, at times in open conflict with the jurisdictions of civil
tribunals. In particular, there were trials for bigamy, a relatively frequent offence
in a society that only permitted divorce under the most extreme
circumstances. In the case of men, the penalty was two hundred lashes
and five to ten years of "service to the Crown". Said service could be
whatever the court deemed most beneficial for the nation, but it usually
was either five years as an oarsman in a royal galley for those without any qualification (possibly a death sentence)
or ten years working maintained but without salary in a public Hospital
or charitable institution of the sort for those with some special
skill, such as doctors, surgeons, or lawyers. The penalty was five to seven years as an oarsman in the case of Portugal.
Unnatural marriage
Under
the category of "unnatural marriage" fell any marriage or attempted
marriage between two individuals who could not procreate. The Catholic
Church, in general, and in a nation constantly at war like Spain, emphasised the reproductive goal of marriage.
The Spanish Inquisition's policy in this regard was restrictive
but applied in a very egalitarian way. It considered any
non-reproductive marriage unnatural and any reproductive marriage
natural, regardless of gender or sex involved. The two forms of obvious
male sterility were either due to damage to the genitals through
castration or accidental wounding at war (capón) or to some genetic
condition that might keep the man from completing puberty (lampiño).
Female sterility was also a reason to declare a marriage unnatural but
was harder to prove. One case that dealt with marriage, sex, and gender
was the trial of Eleno de Céspedes.
Non-religious crimes
The
notion of religion and civil law being separate is a modern
construction and made no sense in the 15th century, so there was no
difference between breaking a law regarding religion and breaking a law
regarding tax collection. The difference between them is a modern
projection the institution itself did not have. As such, the Inquisition
was the prosecutor (in some cases the only prosecutor) of any crimes
that could be perpetrated without the public taking notice (mainly
domestic crimes, crimes against the weakest members of society,
administrative crimes and forgeries, organized crime, and crimes against
the Crown).
Examples include crimes associated with sexual or family relations such as rape and sexual violence (the Inquisition was the first and only body who punished it across the nation), bestiality, pedophilia (often overlapping with sodomy), incest, child abuse or neglect and (as discussed) bigamy. Non-religious crimes also included procurement (not prostitution), human trafficking, smuggling, forgery or falsification of currency, documents or signatures, tax fraud (many religious crimes were considered subdivisions of this one), illegal weapons, swindles,
disrespect to the Crown or its institutions (the Inquisition included,
but also the church, the guard, and the kings themselves), espionage for a foreign power, conspiracy, treason.[102][103]
The non-religious crimes processed by the Inquisition accounted
for a considerable percentage of its total investigations and are often
hard to separate in the statistics, even when documentation is
available. The line between religious and non-religious crimes did not
exist in 15th-century Spain as a legal concept. Many of the crimes
listed here and some of the religious crimes listed in previous sections
were contemplated under the same article. For example, "sodomy"
included paedophilia as a subtype. Often, part of the data given for
prosecution of male homosexuality corresponds to convictions for
paedophilia, not adult homosexuality. In other cases, religious and
non-religious crimes were seen as distinct but equivalent. The treatment
of public blasphemy and street swindlers was similar (since both
involved "misleading the public in a harmful way"). Making counterfeit
currency and heretic proselytism were also treated similarly; both of
them were punished by death and subdivided in similar ways since both
were "spreading falsifications". In general, heresy and falsifications
of material documents were treated similarly by the Spanish Inquisition,
indicating that they may have been thought of as equivalent actions.
Trials were often further complicated by the attempts of witnesses or victims to add further charges, especially witchcraft. Like with Eleno de Céspedes,
charges for witchcraft done in this way, or in general, were quickly
dismissed but they often show in the statistics as investigations made.
Organization
Beyond
its role in religious affairs, the Inquisition was also an institution
at the service of the monarchy. The Inquisitor General, in charge of the
Holy Office, was designated by the crown. The Inquisitor General was
the only public office whose authority stretched to all the kingdoms of
Spain (including the American viceroyalties), except for a brief period
(1507–1518) during which there were two Inquisitors General, one in the
kingdom of Castile, and the other in Aragon.
Inquisitor General
Auto de fé, Plaza Mayor in Lima, Viceroyalty of Peru (17th century)
The Inquisitor General
presided over the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition
(commonly abbreviated as "Council of the Suprema"), created in 1483,
which was made up of six members named directly by the crown (the number
of members of the Suprema varied throughout the Inquisition's history,
but it was never more than ten). Over time, the authority of the Suprema
grew at the expense of the power of the Inquisitor General.
The Council of Castile and the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition
By the 17th century, two councilors from the Royal Council of Castile
played a key role in overseeing the Council of the Spanish Inquisition,
advising the monarchy on legal and religious matters. At this time, the
Spanish Inquisition consisted of six primary councilors, two afternoon
members from the Royal Council of Castile, and a permanent Dominican seat. Additionally, the fiscal (prosecutor)
was responsible for managing inquisitorial trials and legal
proceedings. With royal approval, the Council adjusted its structure to
improve efficiency, including chamber divisions for handling cases.
Notable members included:
Joseph González, Commissary General of the Crusade, Councilor of Castile
Doctor Gaspar de Medrano, the second-ranking Councilor of Castile
The Royal Council and the Inquisition remained deeply intertwined,
enforcing religious conformity while serving as an instrument of
monarchical control.
Schedule
The Suprema
met every morning, except for holidays, and for two hours in the
afternoon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The morning sessions
were devoted to questions of faith, while the afternoons were reserved
for "minor heresies," cases of perceived unacceptable sexual behavior, bigamy, witchcraft, etc.
Tribunals
Below
the Suprema were the various tribunals of the Inquisition, initially
itinerant, which installed themselves where they were necessary to
combat heresy but later settled in fixed locations. During the first
phase, numerous tribunals were established, but the period after 1495
saw a marked tendency towards centralization.
In the kingdom of Castile, the following permanent tribunals of the Inquisition were established:
Initially, each of the tribunals included two inquisitors, calificadors (qualifiers), an alguacil (bailiff), and a fiscal
(prosecutor); new positions were added as the institution matured. The
inquisitors were preferably jurists more than theologians; in 1608, Philip III
even stipulated that all inquisitors needed to have a background in
law. The inquisitors rarely remained in the position for a long time:
for the Court of Valencia, for example, the average tenure in the position was about two years. Most of the inquisitors belonged to the secular clergy (priests who were not members of religious orders) and had a university education.
The fiscal was in charge of presenting the accusation,
investigating the denunciations, and interrogating the witnesses by the
use of physical and mental torture. The calificadores were
generally theologians; it fell to them to determine whether the
defendant's conduct added up to a crime against the faith. Consultants
were expert jurists who advised the court on questions of procedure. The
court had, in addition, three secretaries: the notario de secuestros (Notary of Property), who registered the goods of the accused at the moment of his detention; the notario del secreto (Notary of the Secret), who recorded the testimony of the defendant and the witnesses; and the Escribano General (General Notary), secretary of the court. The alguacil
was the executive arm of the court, responsible for detaining, jailing,
and physically torturing the defendant. Other civil employees were the nuncio, ordered to spread official notices of the court, and the alcaide, the jailer in charge of feeding the prisoners.
In addition to the members of the court, two auxiliary figures existed that collaborated with the Holy Office: the familiares and the comissarios (commissioners). Familiares were lay collaborators of the Inquisition who had to be permanently at the service of the Holy Office. To become a familiar was considered an honor since it was a public recognition of limpieza de sangre—Old Christian status—and brought with it certain additional privileges. Although many nobles held the position, most of the familiares
came from the ranks of commoners. The commissioners, on the other hand,
were members of the religious orders who collaborated occasionally with
the Holy Office.
One of the most striking aspects of the organization of the
Inquisition was its form of financing: devoid of its own budget, the
Inquisition depended almost exclusively on the confiscation of the goods
of the denounced.
It is not surprising, therefore, that many of those prosecuted were
rich men. That the situation was open to abuse is evident, as stands out
in the memorandum that a converso from Toledo directed to Charles I:
Your Majesty must provide, before all else, that the
expenses of the Holy Office do not come from the properties of the
condemned, because if that is the case if they do not burn they do not
eat.
Mode of operation
Accusation
When the Inquisition arrived in a city, the first step was the Edict of Grace.
Following the Sunday Mass, the Inquisitor would proceed to read the
edict, which described possible heresies and encouraged all the
congregation to come to the tribunals of the Inquisition to "relieve
their consciences". They were called Edicts of Grace because all the self-incriminated who presented themselves within a period of grace
(usually ranging from thirty to forty days) were offered the
possibility of reconciliation with the Church without severe punishment.The promise of benevolence was effective, and many voluntarily
presented themselves to the Inquisition. These were encouraged to
denounce others who had also committed offences, informants being the
Inquisition's primary source of information. After about 1500, the
Edicts of Grace were replaced by the Edicts of Faith, which left out the grace period and instead encouraged the denunciation of those deemed guilty.
The denunciations were anonymous, and the defendants had no way
of knowing the identities of their accusers. This was one of the points
most criticized by those who opposed the Inquisition. In practice, false
denunciations were frequent. Denunciations were made for a variety of
reasons apart from genuine concern. Some just went after
non-conformists. Others wished to hurt a neighbor or get rid of an
opponent.
This method turned everyone into an agent of the Inquisition and
made everyone aware that a simple word or deed could bring them before
the tribunal. Denunciation was elevated to the rank of a superior
religious duty, filled the nation with spies, and made each individual
an object of suspicion to their neighbor, family, and any strangers they
might meet.
After a denunciation, the case was examined by the calificadores,
who had to determine whether there was heresy involved. This was
followed by the detention of the accused. In practice, many were
detained in preventive custody, and many cases of lengthy incarcerations
occurred, lasting up to two years before the calificadores examined the case.
Detention of the accused entailed the preventive sequestration of
their property by the Inquisition. The property of the prisoner was
used to pay for procedural expenses and the accused's maintenance and
costs. Often, the relatives of the defendant found themselves in
outright misery. This situation was remedied only by following
instructions written in 1561.
However, Llorente, despite having consulted numerous records of old
Inquisition proceedings, did not find any record of such an agreement in
favor of the children of condemned heretics.
Some authors, such as apologist William Thomas Walsh,
stated that the entire process was undertaken with the utmost secrecy,
as much for the public as for the accused, who were not informed about
the accusations that were levied against them. Months or even years
could pass without the accused being informed about why they were
imprisoned. The prisoners remained isolated, and, during this time, they
were not allowed to attend Mass nor receive the sacraments.
The jails of the Inquisition were no worse than those of secular
authorities, and there are even certain testimonies that occasionally
they were much better.
According to William Walsh, the miseries of the Jews "are not the
result, fundamentally, of the hatred and misunderstanding of others, but
the consequence of their own stubborn rejection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ".
Trial
Two priests and a suspected heretic in a Spanish Inquisition interrogation chamber (Bernard Picart's engraving, 1722). In contrast to the Inquisitor's armchair, Eymeric's manual suggests that the accused be sat on a low bench.
The inquisitorial process consisted of a series of hearings in which
both the denouncers and the defendant gave separate testimony. A defense counsel,
a so-called lawyer, a member of the tribunal itself, was assigned to
the defendant; his role was simply to advise the accused and to
encourage them to speak the truth. He was obliged to renounce the defense at the moment when he realized his client's guilt.
The prosecution was directed by the fiscal. Interrogation of the defendant was done in the presence of the notario del secreto,
who meticulously wrote down the words of the accused. The archives of
the Inquisition, in comparison to those of other judicial systems of the
era, are striking in the completeness of their documentation.
To defend themselves, the accused had two main choices: abonos (to find favourable and character witnesses) or tachas
(to demonstrate that the witnesses of accusers — whose identity he did
not know — were not trustworthy, and were his personal enemies.
The structure of the trials was similar to modern trials and,
according to apologists, advanced for the time with regard to fairness.
The Inquisition, "professional and efficient", was dependent on the
political power of the King. The lack of separation of powers allows for
assuming questionable fairness in certain scenarios. The fairness of
the Inquisitorial tribunals is alleged by apologists to be among the
best in early modern Europe when it came to the trial of laymen.
There are also testimonies by former prisoners that, if believed,
suggest that said fairness was less than ideal when national or
political interests were involved.
There is hardly one item in the whole
Inquisitorial procedure that could be squared with the demands of
justice; on the contrary, every one of its items is the denial of
justice or a hideous caricature of it [...] its principles are the very
denial of the demands made by the most primitive concepts of natural
justice [...] This kind of proceeding has no longer any semblance to a
judicial trial but is rather its systematic and methodical perversion.
A
fictional scene of a jail of the Spanish Inquisition, with a priest
supervising his scribe while men and women are suspended from pulleys,
tortured on the rack or burnt with torches (Etching, date unknown)
To obtain a confession or information relevant to an investigation, the Inquisition used torture, as prescribed in the instrucciones.
It is impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy the number of
cases in which it was employed during the Inquisition's existence.
Torture would be applied if the alleged heresy was "half proven"
and could be repeated, according to Article XV of Torquemada's
instructions. Henry Lea estimates that between 1575 and 1610, the court of Toledo
tortured approximately a third of those processed for Protestant
heresy. Nearly all of the accused in several cases tried by the Lima
tribunal between 1635 and 1639 appear to have been tortured; the
Valladolid tribunal report for 1624 reveals that in eleven cases
involving Jews and one involving a Protestant used torture; in 1655, all
nine cases involving Jews employed torture.
The recently opened Vatican Archives suggest lower numbers.
"In truth," says Thomas Madden, "the Inquisition brought order,
justice, and compassion to combat rampant secular and popular
persecutions of heretics." And concludes: "The Spanish people loved
their Inquisition. That is why it lasted for so long." In other periods, the proportions of torture varied remarkably.
Torture
A rack on display at the Torture Museum in Toledo, SpainAn engraved depiction of water torture (1556)In the strappado
torture, the victim's hands are tied behind their back and the body is
suspended by the wrists, resulting in dislocated shoulders. Weights can
be added to the feet (engraving, 1768)
Torture was employed in all civil and religious trials in Europe. The
Spanish Inquisition allegedly used it more restrictively than was
common at the time. Unlike both civil trials and other inquisitions, it
had strict regulations in relation to when, what, whom, frequency,
duration, and supervising.. According to some scholars, the Spanish Inquisition engaged in torture less often and with greater care than secular courts.
Kamen and other scholars cite the lack of evidence for the use of
torture. Their conclusions are based on research uncovered in newly
opened files of the Spanish Inquisition's archives. Stories of torture
and other maltreatment of prisoners appear to have been based on
Protestant propaganda as well as popular imagination and ignorance.
When: Torture was allowed when guilt was "half proven" or
there existed a "presumption of guilt", as stated in Article XV of
Torquemada's instruciones and in Eymerich's directions.
However, Eymerich admits that information obtained through torment was
not always reliable, and should be used only when all other means of
obtaining "the truth" had failed.
What: The Spanish Inquisition was not permitted to "maim,
mutilate, draw blood or cause any sort of permanent damage" to the
prisoner. Ecclesiastical tribunals were prohibited by church law from
shedding blood. As a result of torture, many had broken limbs, or other
definitive health problems, and some died.
Supervision: A Physician was usually available in case of emergency.
It was also required for a doctor to certify that the prisoner was
healthy enough to go through the torment without suffering harm, which of course happened.
Among the methods of torture allowed were garrucha, toca, and the potro (which were all used in other secular and ecclesiastical tribunals). The application of the garrucha, also known as the strappado,
consisted of suspending the victim from the ceiling by the wrists,
which are tied behind the back. Sometimes weights were tied to the feet,
with a series of lifts and violent drops, during which the arms and
legs suffered violent pulls and were sometimes dislocated.
The use of the toca (cloth), also called interrogatorio mejorado del agua (enhanced water interrogation), now known as waterboarding,
is better documented. It consisted of forcing the victim to ingest
water poured from a jar so that they had the impression of drowning. The potro, the rack, in which the limbs were slowly pulled apart, was thought to be the instrument of torture used most frequently. The assertion that confessionem esse veram, non factam vi tormentorum
(literally: '[a person's] confession is truth, not made by way of
torture') sometimes follows a description of how, after torture had
ended, the subject "freely" confessed to the offences.
In practice, those who recanted confessions made during torture knew
that they could be tortured again. Under torture, or even harsh
interrogation, comments Cullen Murphy, people will say anything. Bernard Délicieux,
the Franciscan friar who was tortured by the Inquisition and ultimately
died in prison as a result of the abuse, said the Inquisition's tactics
would have proved St. Peter and St. Paul to be heretics.[148]
Once the process concluded, the inquisitors met with a representative of the bishop and with the consultores (consultants), experts in theology or Canon Law (but not necessarily clergy themselves), which was called the consulta de fe
(faith consultation/religion check). The case was voted and sentence
pronounced, which had to be unanimous. In case of discrepancies, the Suprema had to be informed.
Sentencing
The results of the trial could be the following:
Although quite rare in actual practice, the defendant could be acquitted, but an acquittal was interpreted as a dishonourable reflection on the inquisitors.
The trial could be suspended, in which case the defendant,
although under suspicion, went free (with the threat that the process
could be reopened at any time). In the unusual instance of a defendant
being declared not guilty during the trial, the decision was made in
private
The defendant could be penanced. Since they were considered guilty, they had to publicly abjure their crimes (de levi if it was a misdemeanor, and de vehementi if the crime were serious), and accept a public punishment. Among these were sanbenito, forced church attendance, exile, scourging, fines or even sentencing to service as oarsmen in royal galleys.
The defendant could be reconciled. In addition to the public
ceremony in which the condemned was reconciled with the Catholic Church,
more severe punishments were used, among them long sentences to jail or
the galleys, plus the confiscation of all property. Physical
punishments, such as whipping, were also used. The reconciled were
prohibited from working as advocates, landlords, apothecaries, doctors,
surgeons, and other professions. They were banned from carrying weapons,
wearing jewelry or gold, and from riding horses. The restrictions also
applied to the offspring of the convicted.
The most serious punishment was relaxation to the secular arm, i.e. burning at the stake.
This penalty was frequently applied to impenitent heretics and those
who had relapsed. Execution was public. If the condemned repented, they
were "shown mercy" by being garroted
before their corpse was burned; if not, they were burned alive. The
victims were handed over to the secular authorities, who had no access
to the process; they only administered the sentences and were obliged to
do so on pain of heresy and excommunication.
Frequently, cases were judged in absentia. When the accused
died before the trial finished, the condemned were burned in effigy. The
death of an accused did not extinguish the inquisitorial actions, even
up to forty years after the death. When it was considered proven that
the deceased were heretics in their lifetime, their corpses were exhumed
and burned, their property confiscated and the heirs disinherited.
The distribution of the punishments varied considerably over
time. It is believed that sentences of death were enforced most
frequently in the early stages of the Inquisition. According to García
Cárcel, one of the most active courts—the court of Valencia—employed the death penalty in 40% of cases before 1530, but later that percentage dropped to 3%. By the middle of the 16th century, inquisition courts viewed torture as unnecessary, and death sentences had become rare.
Rizi's 1683 painting of the 1680 auto de fé, Plaza Mayor in Madrid
If the sentence was condemnatory, this implied that the condemned had to participate in the ceremony of an auto de fé (more commonly known in English as an auto-da-fé) that solemnized their return to the Church (in most cases), or punishment as an impenitent heretic. The autos de fé could be public (auto publico or auto general) or private (auto particular).
Although initially the public autos did not have any
special solemnity nor sought a large attendance of spectators, with time
they became expensive and solemn ceremonies, a display of the great
power shared by the Church and the State, celebrated with large public
crowds, amidst a festive atmosphere. The auto de fé eventually became a baroque spectacle, with staging meticulously calculated to cause the greatest effect among the spectators. The autos
were conducted in a large public space (frequently in the largest plaza
of the city), generally on holidays. The rituals related to the auto began the previous night (the "procession of the Green Cross") and sometimes lasted the whole day.
The auto de fé frequently was taken to the canvas by painters: one of the better-known examples is the 1683 painting by Francisco Rizi, held by the Prado Museum in Madrid that represents the auto celebrated in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid on 30 June 1680. The last public auto de fé took place in 1691.
The auto de fé involved a Catholic Mass, prayer, a public procession of those found guilty, and a reading of their sentences.
They took place in public squares or esplanades and lasted several
hours; ecclesiastical and civil authorities attended. Artistic
representations of the auto de fé usually depict torture and the burning at the stake. This type of activity never took place during an auto de fé,
which was in essence a religious act. Torture was not administered
after a trial concluded, and executions were always held after and
separate from the auto de fé,
though in the minds and experiences of observers and those undergoing
the confession and execution, the separation of the two might be
experienced as merely a technicality.
The first recorded auto de fé was held in Paris in 1242, during the reign of Louis IX. The first Spanish auto de fé
did not take place until 1481 in Seville; six of the men and women
subjected to this first religious ritual were later executed by being
burned alive at the stake.
The Inquisition had limited power in Portugal, having been
established in 1536 and officially lasting until 1821, although its
influence was much weakened with the government of the Marquis of Pombal in the second half of the 18th century. The Marquis, himself a familiar, transformed it into a royal court, and the heretics continued to be persecuted, as so the "high spirits".
Autos de fé also took place in Mexico, Brazil and Peru:
contemporary historians of the Conquistadors such as Bernal Díaz del
Castillo record them. They also took place in the Portuguese colony of
Goa, India, following the establishment of Inquisition there in
1562–1563.
Transformation in the Enlightenment
The arrival of the Enlightenment
in Spain slowed inquisitorial activity. In the first half of the 18th
century, 111 were condemned to be burned in person, and 117 in effigy,
most of them for judaizing. In the reign of Philip V, there were 125 autos de fé, while in the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only 44.
Auto-da-fé, Viceroyalty of New Spain, 18th century
During the 18th century, the Inquisition changed: Enlightenment ideas
were the closest threat that had to be fought. The main figures of the
Spanish Enlightenment were in favour of the abolition of the
Inquisition, and many were processed by the Holy Office, among them Olavide, in 1776; Iriarte, in 1779; and Jovellanos,
in 1796; Jovellanos sent a report to Charles IV in which he indicated
the inefficiency of the Inquisition's courts and the ignorance of those
who operated them: "... friars who take [the position] only to obtain
gossip and exemption from the choir; who are ignorant of foreign
languages, who only know a little scholastic theology."
In its new role, the Inquisition tried to accentuate its function
of censoring publications but found that Charles III had secularized censorship procedures, and, on many occasions, the authorization of the Council of Castile
hit the more intransigent position of the Inquisition. Since the
Inquisition itself was an arm of the state, being within the Council of
Castile, civil rather than ecclesiastical censorship usually prevailed.
This loss of influence can also be explained because the foreign
Enlightenment texts entered the peninsula through prominent members of
the nobility or government,[168] influential people with whom it was very difficult to interfere. Thus, for example, Diderot's Encyclopedia entered Spain thanks to special licenses granted by the king.
After the French Revolution
the Council of Castile, fearing that revolutionary ideas would
penetrate Spain's borders, decided to reactivate the Holy Office that
was directly charged with the persecution of French works. An
Inquisition edict of December 1789, that received the full approval of
Charles IV and Floridablanca, stated that:
having news that several books have been scattered and
promoted in these kingdoms... that, without being contented with the
simple narration events of a seditious nature... seem to form a
theoretical and practical code of independence from the legitimate
powers.... destroying in this way the political and social order... the
reading of thirty and nine French works is prohibited, under fine...
The fight from within against the Inquisition was almost always
clandestine. The first texts that questioned the Inquisition and praised
the ideas of Voltaire or Montesquieu
appeared in 1759. After the suspension of pre-publication censorship on
the part of the Council of Castile in 1785, the newspaper El Censor began the publication of protests against the activities of the Holy Office by means of a rationalist critique. Valentin de Foronda published Espíritu de los Mejores Diarios,
a plea in favour of freedom of expression that was avidly read in the
salons. Also, in the same vein, Manuel de Aguirre wrote On Toleration in
El Censor, El Correo de los Ciegos and El Diario de Madrid.
During the reign of Charles IV of Spain (1788–1808), in spite of the fears that the French Revolution
provoked, several events accelerated the decline of the Inquisition.
The state stopped being a mere social organizer and began to worry about
the well-being of the public. As a result, the land-holding power of
the Church was reconsidered, in the señoríos and more generally in the accumulated wealth that had prevented social progress. The power of the throne increased, under which Enlightenment thinkers found better protection for their ideas. Manuel Godoy and Antonio Alcalá Galiano were openly hostile to an institution whose only role had been reduced to censorship and was the very embodiment of the Spanish Black Legend, internationally, and was not suitable to the political interests of the moment:
The Inquisition? Its old power no longer exists: the
horrible authority that this bloodthirsty court had exerted in other
times was reduced... the Holy Office had come to be a species of
commission for book censorship, nothing more...
The Inquisition was first abolished during the domination of Napoleon and the reign of Joseph Bonaparte (1808–1812). In 1813, the liberal deputies of the Cortes of Cádiz also obtained its abolition,
largely as a result of the Holy Office's condemnation of the popular
revolt against French invasion. But the Inquisition was reconstituted
when Ferdinand VII recovered the throne on 1 July 1814. Juan Antonio Llorente, who had been the Inquisition's general secretary in 1789, became a Bonapartist and published a critical history in 1817 from his French exile, based on his privileged access to its archives.
Possibly as a result of Llorente's criticisms, the Inquisition
was once again temporarily abolished during the three-year Liberal
interlude known as the Trienio liberal, but still the old system had not yet had its last gasp. Later, during the period known as the Ominous Decade, the Inquisition was not formally re-established, although, de facto, it returned under the Congregation of the Meetings of Faith (Juntas da Fé), created in the dioceses by King Ferdinand VII. The last known person to be executed by the Inquisition was Cayetano Ripoll, a school teacher who was condemned and hanged by the Congregation on 26 July 1826.
On that day, Ripoll was hanged in Valencia, for having taught deist
principles. This execution occurred against the backdrop of a
European-wide scandal concerning the despotic attitudes still prevailing
in Spain. Finally, on 15 July 1834, the Spanish Inquisition was
definitively abolished by a Royal Decree signed by regent Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand VII's liberal widow, during the minority of Isabella II and with the approval of the President of the Cabinet Francisco Martínez de la Rosa.
The prohibitions, persecution and eventual Jewish mass emigration from Spain and Portugal probably had adverse effects on the development of the Spanish and the Portuguese economy.
Jews and Non-Catholic Christians reportedly had substantially better
numerical skills than the Catholic majority, which might be due to the
Jewish religious doctrine, which focused strongly on education. Even when Jews were forced to quit their highly skilled urban occupations, their numeracy
advantage persisted. However, during the inquisition, spillover-effects
of these skills were rare because of forced separation and Jewish
emigration, which was detrimental for economic development.
Outcomes
Confiscations
It
is unknown exactly how much wealth was confiscated from converted Jews
and others tried by the Inquisition. Wealth confiscated in one year of
persecution in the small town of Guadaloupe paid the costs of building a
royal residence.
There are numerous records of the opinion of ordinary Spaniards of the
time that "the Inquisition was devised simply to rob people". "They were
burnt only for the money they had", a resident of Cuenca averred. "They
burn only the well-off", said another. In 1504 an accused stated, "only
the rich were burnt". In 1484 Catalina de Zamora was accused of
asserting that "this Inquisition that the fathers are carrying out is as
much for taking property from the conversos as for defending the faith.
It is the goods that are the heretics." This saying passed into common
usage in Spain. In 1524 a treasurer informed Charles V that his
predecessor had received ten million ducats from the conversos, but the
figure is unverified. In 1592 an inquisitor admitted that most of the
fifty women he arrested were rich. In 1676, the Suprema claimed it had
confiscated over 700,000 ducats for the royal treasury (which was paid
money only after the Inquisition's own budget, amounting in one known
case to only 5%). The property on Mallorca alone in 1678 was worth "well
over 2,500,000 ducats".
Death tolls and sentenced
Contemporary illustration of the auto de fé of Valladolid, in which fourteen Protestants were burned at the stake for their faith, on 21 May 1559
García Cárcel estimates that the total number prosecuted by the
Inquisition throughout its history was approximately 150,000; applying
the percentages of executions that appeared in the trials of
1560–1700—about 2%—the approximate total would be about 3,000 put to
death. Nevertheless, some authors consider that the toll may have been
higher, keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel
for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively, and estimate
between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed.
Other authors disagree and estimate a max death toll between 1% and 5%,
(depending on the time span used) combining all the processes the
inquisition carried, both religious and non-religious ones. In either case, this is significantly lower than the number of people executed exclusively for witchcraft in other parts of Europe during about the same time span as the Spanish Inquisition (estimated at c. 40,000–60,000).
Modern historians have begun to study the documentary records of
the Inquisition. The archives of the Suprema, today held by the National Historical Archive of Spain
(Archivo Histórico Nacional), conserves the annual relations of all
processes between 1540 and 1700. This material provides information for
approximately 44,674 judgments. These 44,674 cases include 826
executions in persona and 778 in effigie (i.e. an effigy
was burned). This material is far from being complete—for example, the
tribunal of Cuenca is entirely omitted, because no relaciones de causas
from this tribunal have been found, and significant gaps concern some
other tribunals (e.g., Valladolid). Many more cases not reported to the
Suprema are known from the other sources (i.e., no relaciones de causas
from Cuenca have been found, but its original records have been
preserved), but were not included in Contreras-Henningsen's statistics
for the methodological reasons. William Monter estimates 1000 executions between 1530 and 1630 and 250 between 1630 and 1730.
The archives of the Suprema only provide information about
processes prior to 1560. To study the processes themselves, it is
necessary to examine the archives of the local tribunals, the majority
of which have been lost to the devastation of war, the ravages of time
or other events. Some archives have survived including those of Toledo,
where 12,000 were judged for offences related to heresy, mainly minor
"blasphemy", and those of Valencia.
These indicate that the Inquisition was most active in the period
between 1480 and 1530 and that during this period the percentage
condemned to death was much more significant than in the years that
followed. Modern estimates show approximately 2,000 executions in persona in the whole of Spain up to 1530.
Statistics for the period 1540–1700
The statistics of Henningsen and Contreras are based entirely on relaciones de causas.
The number of years for which cases are documented varies for different
tribunals. Data for the Aragonese Secretariat are probably complete,
some small lacunae may concern only Valencia and possibly Sardinia and
Cartagena, but the numbers for Castilian Secretariat—except Canaries and
Galicia—should be considered as minimal due to gaps in the
documentation. In some cases it is remarked that the number does not
concern the whole period 1540–1700.
According to Toby Green, the great unchecked power given to inquisitors meant that they were "widely seen as above the law",
and they sometimes had motives for imprisoning or executing alleged
offenders that had nothing to do with punishing religious nonconformity.Green quotes a complaint by historian Manuel Barrios about one Inquisitor, Diego Rodriguez Lucero, who in Cordoba in 1506 burned to death the husbands of two women; he then kept the women as mistresses. According to Barrios
the daughter of Diego Celemin was exceptionally
beautiful, her parents and her husband did not want to give her to
[Lucero], and so Lucero had the three of them burnt and now has a child
by her, and he has kept for a long time in the alcazar as a mistress.
Some writers disagree with Green.
These authors do not necessarily deny the abuses of power, but classify
them as politically instigated and comparable to those of any other law
enforcement body of the period. Criticisms, usually indirect, have gone
from the suspiciously sexual overtones or similarities of these
accounts with unrelated older antisemitic accounts of kidnap and
torture, to the clear proofs of control that the king had over the institution, to the sources used by Green, or just by reaching completely different conclusions.
Long-term economic effects
According
to a 2021 study, "municipalities of Spain with a history of a stronger
inquisitorial presence show lower economic performance, educational
attainment, and trust today."
Intrepretation
Within the context of medieval Europe, there are several hypotheses of what prompted the creation of the tribunal after centuries of tolerance.
"Too Multi-Religious" hypothesis
The Spanish Inquisition is interpretable as a response to the multi-religious nature of Spanish society following the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim Moors.
The Reconquista did not result in the total expulsion of Muslims from
Spain since they, along with Jews, were tolerated by the ruling
Christian elite. Large cities, especially Seville, Valladolid, and Barcelona, had significant Jewish populations centered on Juderia, but in the coming years, the Muslims became increasingly alienated and relegated from power centers.
Cultural historian Américo Castro has characterized post-reconquest medieval Spain as a society of relatively peaceful co-existence (convivencia)
punctuated by occasional conflict among the ruling Catholics, Jews, and
Muslims. As historian Henry Kamen notes, the "so-called convivencia was
always a relationship between unequals."
Despite their legal inequality, there was a long tradition of Jewish
service to the Crown of Aragon, and Jews occupied many important posts,
both religious and political. Castile itself had an unofficial rabbi. Ferdinand's father, John II, named the Jewish Abiathar Crescas Court Astronomer.
Antisemitic
attitudes increased throughout Europe during the late 13th century and
into the 14th century. England and France expelled their Jewish populations in 1290 and 1306, respectively. During the Reconquista, Spain's anti-Jewish sentiment steadily increased. This prejudice climaxed in the summer of 1391 when violent anti-Jewish riots broke out in Spanish cities such as Barcelona and Valencia, killing thousands of Jews. To linguistically distinguish the Jews from non-converted or long-established Catholic families, new converts were called conversos, or New Catholics.
According to Don Hasdai Crescas, persecution against Jews began in earnest in Seville in 1391, on the 1st day of the lunar month Tammuz (June). From there, the violence spread to Córdoba, and by the 17th day of the same lunar month, it had reached Toledo (called then by Jews after its Arabic name "Ṭulayṭulah") in the region of Castile. Then the violence spread to Mallorca, and by the 1st day of the lunar month Elul, it had also reached the Jews of Barcelona in Catalonia, where the slain was approximately two-hundred and fifty. Indeed, many Jews who resided in the neighboring provinces of Lleida and Gironda and the kingdom of Valencia had also been affected, as were the Jews of Al-Andalus (Andalucía). While many died a martyr's death, others converted to save themselves.
Encouraged by the preaching of Ferrand Martínez, Archdeacon of Ecija,
the general unrest affected nearly all the Jews in Spain, during which
an estimated 200,000 Jews changed their religion or else concealed their
religion, becoming known in Hebrew as Anusim,
meaning "those who are compelled [to hide their religion]." Only a
handful of the more principal persons of the Jewish community, those who
had found refuge among the viceroys in the outlying towns and
districts, managed to escape.
Forced baptism was contrary to the law of the Catholic Church
and, theoretically, anybody who had been forcibly baptized could legally
return to Judaism. Legal definitions of the time theoretically
acknowledged that a forced baptism was not a valid sacrament but
confined this to cases where it was administered by physical force: a
person who had consented to baptism under threat of death or serious
injury was still regarded as a voluntary convert, and accordingly
forbidden to revert to Judaism. After the public violence, many of the converts "felt it safer to remain in their new religion." Thus, after 1391, a new social group appeared and was referred to as conversos or New Christians. Many conversos,
now freed from the anti-Semitic restrictions imposed on Jewish
employment, attained important positions in fifteenth-century Spain,
including positions in the government and the Church. Among many others,
physicians Andrés Laguna and Francisco López de Villalobos (Ferdinand's court physician), writers Juan del Encina, Juan de Mena, Diego de Valera, and Alonso de Palencia, and bankers Luis de Santángel and Gabriel Sánchez (who financed the voyage of Christopher Columbus) were all conversos. Conversos—not
without opposition—managed to attain high positions in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy, at times becoming severe detractors of
Judaism.
Some even received titles of nobility and, as a result, during the
following century, some works attempted to demonstrate many nobles of
Spain descended from Israelites.
According to this hypothesis, the Inquisition was created to
standardize various laws and the numerous jurisdictions Spain was
divided into. It would be an administrative program analogous to the Santa Hermandad (the "Holy Brotherhood", ancestor to the Guardia Civil,
a law enforcement body answering to the crown that prosecuted thieves
and criminals across counties in a way local county authorities could
not), an institution that would guarantee uniform prosecution of crimes
against royal laws across all local jurisdictions.
The unusual authority wielded by the king over the nobility in
the Kingdom of Castile contributed to the kingdom's prosperity in
Europe. This strong control kept the kingdom politically stable and
prevented in-fighting that weakened other countries like England. Under
the Trastámara dynasty,
both kings of Castile and Aragon had lost power to the great nobles,
who now formed dissenting and conspiratorial factions. Taxation and
varying privileges differed from county to county, and powerful noble
families constantly extorted the kings to attain further concessions,
particularly in Aragon.
The main goals of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs were to
unite their two kingdoms and strengthen royal influence to guarantee
stability. In pursuit of this, they sought to unify the laws of their
realms further and reduce the power of the nobility in certain local
areas. They attained this partially by raw military strength by creating
a combined army between the two of them that could outmatch the
military of most noble coalitions in the Peninsula. It was impossible to
change the entire laws of both realms by force alone, and due to
reasonable suspicion of one another, the monarchs kept their kingdoms
separate during their lifetimes. The only way to unify both kingdoms and
ensure that Isabella, Ferdinand, and their descendants maintained the
power of both kingdoms without uniting them in life was to find or
create an executive, legislative, and judicial arm directly under the
Crown empowered to act in both kingdoms. This goal, the hypothesis goes,
might have given birth to the Spanish Inquisition.
The religious organization capable of overseeing this role was
obvious. Catholicism was the only institution common to both kingdoms
and the only one with enough popular support that the nobility could not
easily attack it. Through the Spanish Inquisition, Isabella and
Ferdinand created a personal police force and personal code of law that
rested above the structure of their respective realms without altering
or mixing them and could operate freely in both. As the Inquisition had
the backing of both kingdoms, it would exist independent of both the
nobility and local interests of either kingdom.
According to this view, the prosecution of heretics would be
secondary, or simply not considered different, from the prosecution of
conspirators, traitors, or groups of any kind who planned to resist
royal authority. Royal authority rested on the divine right and oaths of
loyalty held before God, so the connection between religious deviation
and political disloyalty would appear obvious. The disproportionately
high representation of the nobility and high clergy among those
investigated by the Inquisition supported this hypothesis, as well as
the many administrative and civil crimes the Inquisition oversaw. The
Inquisition prosecuted the counterfeiting of royal seals and currency,
ensured the effective transmission of the orders of the kings, and
verified the authenticity of official documents traveling through the
kingdoms, from one kingdom to the other.
The "Placate Europe" hypothesis
At a time in which most of Europe had already expelled the Jews from the Christian kingdoms, the "dirty blood"
of Spaniards was met with open suspicion and contempt. As the world
became smaller and foreign relations became more relevant to stay in
power, this foreign image of "being the seed of Jews and Moors" may have
become a problem. In addition, the coup that allowed Isabella to take
the throne from Joanna of Castile ("la Beltraneja")
and the Catholic Monarchs to marry had estranged Castile from
Portugal, its historical ally, and created the need for new
relationships. Similarly, Aragon's ambitions lay in control of the
Mediterranean and the defense against France. As their policy of royal marriages
proved, the Catholic Monarchs were deeply concerned about France's
growing power and expected to create strong dynastic alliances across
Europe. In this scenario, the Iberian reputation of being too tolerant
was a problem.
Despite the prestige earned through the reconquest (Reconquista),
the foreign image of Spaniards coexisted with an almost universal image
of heretics and "bad Christians" due to the long coexistence between
the three religions they had accepted in their lands. Anti-Jewish
stereotypes created to justify or prompt the expulsion and expropriation
of the European Jews applied to Spaniards in most European courts, and
the idea of them being "greedy, gold-thirsty, cruel and violent" because
of the "Jewish and Moorish blood" was prevalent in Europe prior to the
discovery of America. Chronicles by foreign travelers circulated through
Europe, describing the tolerant ambiance reigning in the court of
Isabella and Ferdinand and how Moors and Jews were free to go about
without risk of forced conversion. Past and common clashes between the
Pope and the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula regarding the Inquisition
in Castile's case and regarding South Italy in Aragon's case also
reinforced their image of heretics in the international courts. These
accusations and images could have had direct political and military
consequences, especially considering that the union of two powerful
kingdoms was a delicate moment that could prompt fear and violent
reactions from neighbors, more so if combined with the expansion of the
Ottoman Turks on the Mediterranean.
The creation of the Inquisition and the expulsion of both Jews
and Moriscos may have been part of a strategy to whitewash the image of
Spain and ease international fears regarding Spain's allegiance. In this
scenario, the creation of the Inquisition could have been part of the
Catholic Monarchs' strategy to "turn" away from African allies and
"towards" Europe, a tool to turn both actual Spain and the Spanish image
more European and improve relations with the Pope.
The "Ottoman Scare" hypothesis
The
alleged discovery of Morisco plots to support a possible Ottoman
invasion was a crucial factor in their decision to create the
Inquisition. At this time, the Ottoman Empire
was experiencing rapid growth, and the Aragonese Mediterranean Empire
was crumbling under debt and war exhaustion. Ferdinand reasonably feared
that he would not be capable of repelling an Ottoman attack on Spain's
shores, especially if the Ottomans had internal help. The regions with
the highest concentration of Moriscos were those close to the common
naval crossings between Spain and Africa. The weakness of the Aragonese
Naval Empire combined with the resentment of the higher nobility against
the monarchs, the dynastic claims of Portugal on Castile,
and the two monarchs' exterior politics that turned away from Morocco
and other African nations in favor of Europe, created a fear of a second
Muslim invasion, and in turn a second Muslim occupation, that was
hardly unfounded. This fear may have been the base reason for the
expulsion of those citizens who had either a religious reason to support
the invasion of the Ottomans (Moriscos) or no particular religious
reason to be against it (Jews). The Inquisition might have been part of
the preparations to enforce these measures and ensure their
effectiveness by rooting out false converts that would still pose a
threat of foreign espionage.
In favor of this view, there is the military sense it makes, the
many early attempts of peaceful conversion and persuasion that the
Monarchs used at the beginning of their reign, and the sudden turn
towards the creation of the Inquisition and the edicts of expulsion when
those initial attempts failed. The conquest of Naples by the Gran Capitan
is also proof of an interest in Mediterranean expansion and
re-establishment of Spanish power in that sea that was bound to generate
frictions with the Ottoman Empire and other African nations. Therefore,
the Inquisition would have been created as a permanent body to prevent
the existence of citizens with religious sympathies with African nations
now that rivalry with them had been deemed unavoidable.
Renaissance ideas and implementation
The creation of the Spanish Inquisition was consistent with the most important political philosophers of the Florentine School, with whom the kings were known to have contact (Guicciardini, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli,
Segni, Pitti, Nardi, Varchi, etc.) Both Guicciardini and Machiavelli
defended the importance of centralization and unification to create a
strong state capable of repelling foreign invasions and also warned of
the dangers of excessive social uniformity to the creativity and
innovation of a nation. Machiavelli considered piety and morals
desirable for the subjects but not so much for the ruler, who should use
them as a way to unify its population. He also warned of the nefarious
influence of a corrupt church in the creation of a selfish population
and middle nobility, which had fragmented the peninsula and made it
unable to resist either France or Aragon. German philosophers at the
time were spreading the importance of a vassal sharing the religion of
their lord.
The Inquisition may have just been the result of putting these
ideas into practice. The use of religion as a unifying factor across a
land that was allowed to stay diverse and maintain different laws in
other respects, and the creation of the Inquisition to enforce laws
across it, maintain said religious unity, and control the local elites
were consistent with most of those teachings.
Alternatively, the enforcement of Catholicism across the realm
might indeed be the result of simple religious devotion by the monarchs.
(see § purely religious reasons)
The recent scholarship on the expulsion of the Jews leans towards the
belief of religious motivations being at the bottom of it.
However, considering the reports on Ferdinand's political persona, that
is unlikely the only reason. Machiavelli, among others, described
Ferdinand as a man who didn't know the meaning of piety, but who made
political use of it and would have achieved little if he had known it.
He was Machiavelli's main inspiration while writing The Prince.
The "Keeping the Pope in Check" hypothesis
The
hierarchy of the Catholic Church had made many attempts during the
Middle Ages to take over Christian Spain politically, such as claiming
the Church's ownership over all land reconquered from non-Christians (a
claim that was rejected by Castile but accepted by Aragon and Portugal).
In the past, the papacy had tried and partially succeeded in forcing
the Mozarabic Rite out of Iberia. Its intervention had been pivotal for Aragon's loss of Rosellon. The meddling regarding Aragon's control over South Italy was even stronger historically. In their lifetime, the Catholic Monarchs had problems withPope Paul II,
a fervent proponent of absolute authority for the church over the
kings. Carrillo actively opposed them both and often used Spain's "mixed
blood" as an excuse to intervene. The papacy and the monarchs of Europe
had been involved in a rivalry for power throughout the high Middle Ages that Rome already won in other powerful kingdoms, like France.
Since the legitimacy granted by the church was necessary for both
monarchs, especially Isabella, to stay in power, the creation of the
Spanish Inquisition may have been a way to concede to the Pope's demands
and criticism regarding Spain's mixed religious heritage, while
simultaneously ensuring that the Pope could hardly force the second
Inquisition of his own and create a tool to control the power of the
Roman Church in Spain. The Spanish Inquisition was unique at the time
because it was not led by the Pope. Once the bull of creation was
granted, the head of the Inquisition was the Monarch of Spain. It was in
charge of enforcing the laws of the king regarding religion and other
private-life matters, not of following orders from Rome, from which it
was independent. This independence allowed the Inquisition to
investigate, prosecute, and convict clergy for both corruption and
treason of conspiracy against the crown (on the Pope's behalf,
presumably) without the Pope's intervention. The Inquisition was,
despite its title of "Holy", not necessarily formed by the clergy, and
secular lawyers were equally welcome to it. If it was an attempt at
keeping Rome out of Spain, it was an extremely successful and refined
one. It was a bureaucratic body that had the nominal authority of the
church and permission to prosecute members of the church, which the
kings could not do, while answering only to the Spanish Crown. This did
not prevent the Pope from having some influence on the decisions of
Spanish monarchs, but it did force the influence to be through the
kings, making direct influence very difficult.
Other hypotheses
Other hypotheses that circulate regarding the Spanish Inquisition's creation include:
Economic reasons: As one penalty that the Inquisition
could enforce on the convicts was the confiscation of their property,
which became Crown property, it has been stated that the creation of the
Inquisition was a way to finance the crown. There is no solid reason
for this hypothesis to stand alone, nor for the Kings of Spain to need
an institution to do this gradually instead of confiscating property
through edicts, but it may be one reason the Inquisition stayed for so
long. This hypothesis notes the tendency of the Inquisition to operate
in large and wealthy cities and is favoured by those who consider that
most of those prosecuted for practising Judaism and Islam in secret were
innocent of it. Gustav Bergenroth,
editor and translator of the Spanish state papers from 1485 to 1509,
believed that revenue was the incentive for Ferdinand and Isabella's
decision to invite the Inquisition into Spain.
Other authors point out that both monarchs were very aware of the
economic consequences they would suffer from a decrease in population.
Intolerance and racism: This argument is usually made regarding the expulsion of the Jews or the Moriscos,
and since the Inquisition was so closely interconnected with those
actions, it can be expanded to it. It varies between those who deny that
Spain was really that different from the rest of Europe regarding
tolerance and openmindedness and those who argue that it used to be, but
gradually the antisemitic and racist atmosphere of medieval Europe
rubbed onto it.(see § The "Placate Europe" hypothesis)
It explains the creation of the Inquisition as the result of the same
forces as those that caused the creation of similar entities across
Europe. This view may account for the similarities between the Spanish
Inquisition and similar institutions but does not account for its many
unique characteristics, including its time of appearance and its
duration through time, so even if accepted it requires the addition of
some of the other hypothesis to be complete.
Purely religious reasons: This view argues that the Catholic
Monarchs had the Inquisition created to prosecute heretics and sodomites
out of diligence of the laws of the Church, which seemed to them to
clearly forbid both.
Historiography
How
historians and commentators have viewed the Spanish Inquisition has
changed over time and continues to be a source of controversy. Before
and during the 19th century, historical interest focused on who was
being persecuted. In the early and mid-20th century, historians examined
the specifics of what happened and how it influenced Spanish history.
In the later 20th and 21st centuries, some historians have re-examined
how severe the Inquisition truly was, calling into question some of the
assumptions made in earlier periods.
19th to early 20th century scholarship
Before
the rise of professional historians in the 19th century, the Spanish
Inquisition had been portrayed primarily by Protestant scholars who saw
it as the archetypal symbol of Catholic intolerance and ecclesiastical
power. The Spanish Inquisition for them was largely associated with the persecution of Protestants. William H. Prescott
described the Inquisition as an "eye that never slumbered". Despite the
existence of extensive documentation regarding the trials and
procedures, and to the Inquisition's deep bureaucratization, none of
these sources was studied outside of Spain, and Spanish scholars arguing
against the predominant view were automatically dismissed. The
19th-century professional historians, including the Spanish scholar Amador de los Ríos,
were the first to successfully challenge this perception in the
international sphere and get foreign scholars to take note of their
discoveries. Said scholars would obtain international recognition and
start a period of revision on the Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition.
At the start of the 20th century Henry Charles Lea published the groundbreaking History of the Inquisition in Spain.
This influential work describes the Spanish Inquisition as "an engine
of immense power, constantly applied for the furtherance of
obscurantism, the repression of thought, the exclusion of foreign ideas
and the obstruction of progress."
Lea documented the Inquisition's methods and modes of operation in no
uncertain terms, calling it "theocratic absolutism" at its worst. In the context of the polarization between Protestants and Catholics during the second half of the 19th century, some of Lea's contemporaries, as well as most modern scholars thought Lea's work had an anti-Catholic bias.
Starting in the 1920s, Jewish scholars picked up where Lea's work left off. They published Yitzhak Baer's History of the Jews in Christian Spain, Cecil Roth's History of the Marranos and, after World War II, the work of Haim Beinart, who for the first time published trial transcripts of cases involving conversos.
Toby Green,
while accepting that there was a certain demonization of the Spanish
Inquisition in comparison with other contemporary persecutions, argues
that the habitual use of torture should not be denied, and that
correcting the "black legend" should not mean replacing it with a "white
legend."[]
Richard L. Kagan says that Henry Kamen failed to "enter the belly of
the beast and assess what it really meant to the people who lived with
it." Kamen does not, according to Kagan, "lead the reader through an
actual trial. Had he done so, a reader might conclude that the
institution he portrays as relatively benign in hindsight was also
capable of inspiring fear and desperate attempts to escape, and thus
more deserving of its earlier reputation." For Kagan, in order to
reconstruct the world of those who were trapped in the Inquisition's
net, studies that thoroughly examine the meticulous archives of the
Inquisition are necessary.
The works of Juderias in (1913) and other Spanish scholars prior to him were mostly ignored by international scholarship until 1960.
One of the first books to build on them and internationally challenge the classical view was The Spanish Inquisition (1965) by Henry Kamen.
Kamen argued that the Inquisition was not nearly as cruel or as
powerful as commonly believed. The book was very influential and largely
responsible for subsequent studies in the 1970s to try to quantify
(from archival records) the Inquisition's activities.
Those studies showed there was an initial burst of activity against
conversos suspected of relapsing into Judaism, and a mid-16th century
pursuit of Protestants, but, according to these studies, the Inquisition
served principally as a forum Spaniards occasionally used to humiliate
and punish people they did not like: blasphemers, bigamists, foreigners
and, in Aragon, homosexuals, and horse smugglers.
Kamen went on to publish two more books in 1985 and 2006 that
incorporated new findings, further supporting the view that the
Inquisition was not as bad as once described by Lea and others. Along
similar lines is Edward Peters's Inquisition (1988).
One of the most important works about the inquisition's relation to the Jewish conversos or New Christians is The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (1995/2002) by Benzion Netanyahu.
It challenges the view that most conversos were actually practicing
Judaism in secret and were persecuted for their crypto-Judaism. Rather,
according to Netanyahu, the persecution was fundamentally racial, and
was a matter of envy of their success in Spanish society.
This view has been challenged; the majority of historians either align
with religious causes or with merely cultural ones, with no significant
racial element.
In popular culture
Literature
There was no remedy, from Los Caprichos, 1797–98, by Francisco de Goya.
The literature of the 18th century approaches the theme of the Inquisition from a critical point of view. In Candide by Voltaire, the Inquisition appears as the epitome of intolerance and arbitrary justice in Europe.
The literature of the 19th century tends to focus on the element
of torture employed by the Inquisition. In France, in the early 19th
century, the epistolary novelCornelia Bororquia, or the Victim of the Inquisition, which has been attributed to Spaniard Luiz Gutiérrez, and is based on the case of María de Bohórquez, ferociously criticizes the Inquisition and its representatives.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky's book, The Brothers Karamazov, (1880) there is a chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor." A story within a story (several times published separately in book form) tells the appearance of Jesus Christ
in Seville, during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Arrested by the
Grand Inquisitor, an old Cardinal, he is condemned to die at the stake
"like the vilest of heretics". The Inquisitor questions him: "Is it You?
(...) Don't answer, remain silent. And You have no right to add
anything to what you have already said. So why have You come to disturb
us? For You really have come to disturb us, and You know it." Christ
doesn't say a word, he just kisses him. At the end of the episode, the
Inquisitor releases him with the words: "Go and don't come back any
more... never... never, never!"
The Inquisition also appears in 20th-century literature. La Gesta del Marrano, by the Argentine author Marcos Aguinis,
portrays the length of the Inquisition's arm to reach people in
Argentina during the 16th and 17th centuries. The first book in Les Daniels' "Don Sebastian Vampire Chronicles", The Black Castle (1978), is set in 15th-century Spain and includes both descriptions of Inquisitorial questioning and an auto de fé, as well as Tomás de Torquemada, who is featured in one chapter. The Marvel Comics series Marvel 1602 shows the Inquisition targeting Mutants for "blasphemy". The character Magneto also appears as the Grand Inquisitor. The second of the Captain Alatriste novels by the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte has the narrator being tortured by the Inquisition. In 1998, the Spanish writer Miguel Delibes published the historical novel The Heretic, about the Protestants of Valladolid and their repression by the Inquisition. Samuel Shellabarger's Captain from Castile deals directly with the Spanish Inquisition.
In the novel La Catedral del Mar by Ildefonso Falcones,
published in 2006 and set in the 14th century, there are scenes of
inquisition investigations in small towns and a great scene in
Barcelona.[250]
Film
The 1947 epic Captain from Castile by Darryl F. Zanuck, starring Tyrone Power,
uses the Inquisition as the major plot point of the film. It tells how
powerful families used their evils to ruin their rivals. The first part
of the film shows this and the reach of the Inquisition reoccurs
throughout this movie following Pedro De Vargas (played by Power) even
to the 'New World'.
The film The Fountain (2006), by Darren Aronofsky, features the Spanish Inquisition as part of a plot in 1500 when the Grand Inquisitor threatens Queen Isabella's life.
Goya's Ghosts (2006) by Miloš Forman
is set in Spain between 1792 and 1809 and focuses realistically on the
role of the Inquisition and its end under Napoleon's rule.
The film Assassin's Creed (2016) by Justin Kurzel, starring Michael Fassbender,
is set in both modern times and Spain during the Inquisition. The film
follows Callum Lynch (played by Fassbender) as he is forced to relive
the memories of his ancestor, Aguilar de Nerha (also played by
Fassbender), an Assassin during the Spanish Inquisition.
The Grand Inquisitor of Spain plays a part in Don Carlos (1867), a play by Friedrich Schiller (which was the basis for the opera Don Carlos in five acts by Giuseppe Verdi, in which the Inquisitor is also featured, and the third act is dedicated to an auto de fé).
The 1965 musical Man of La Mancha depicts a fictionalized account of the author Miguel de Cervantes' run-in with Spanish authorities. The character of Cervantes produces a play-within-a-play of his unfinished manuscript, Don Quixote, while he awaits sentencing by the Inquisition.
Monty Python members Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones performing "The Spanish Inquisition" sketch during the 2014 Python reunion. In the Monty Python comedy team's Spanish Inquisition sketches,
an inept group of Inquisitors repeatedly burst into scenes, after
someone utters the words "I didn't expect a kind of Spanish
Inquisition", screaming "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" The
Inquisition then uses ineffectual forms of torture, including a dish-drying rack, soft cushions and a comfy chair.
The Universe of Warhammer 40,000
borrows several elements and concepts of the Catholic church
Imaginarium, including the notion of the Black Legend's ideal of a
fanatic Inquisitors, for some of its troops in Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr.
The video game Blasphemous portrays a nightmarish version of the Spanish Inquisition, where the protagonist, named 'The Penitent one' wears a capirote
(cone-shaped hat). The Penitent one battles twisted religious
iconography and meets many characters attempting to atone for their sins
along the way.
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