The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (33 page)

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Spain—once a rare example of cultural and religious diversity in the heart of Christendom—had expelled almost all its professing Jews and Muslims. But the Church was now confronting a powerful competitor for the hearts and minds of Christian believers—the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther openly challenged the religious monopoly of the Roman Catholic church, and the inevitable result was a sudden profusion of new churches, clerics, and rituals, all of which were seen by the Vatican as deeply heretical. Here, too, the war on heresy was overlaid with political, economic, and cultural conflicts between Spain and England, who were old and bitter rivals for mastery of the high seas and the New World. The men and women who were charged, tried, and punished by the Spanish Inquisition for the crime of Protestantism were scapegoats in a culture war and a geopolitical standoff that started with the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants.
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The medieval Roman Catholic church regarded the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages as a threat to its own authority—indeed, the preference of the Cathars for Bibles in translation had been one of their supposed crimes—but the Protestant churches actively encouraged the practice. As early as 1521, Bibles printed abroad were subject to seizure at Spanish ports of entry, and the Spanish Inquisition later issued its own index of banned books that booksellers were required by law to keep in their shops.

Protestants joined the Jewish and Muslim
conversos
as principal targets of the Spanish Inquisition. In 1533, a priest who was charged with the seduction of a nun sought to appease the inquisitors by offering them the names of seventy men and women whom he denounced as “Lutheran heretics.” By 1551, possession of a translation of the Bible in “the vulgar tongues”—that is, any language other than Greek or Latin—was a crime. The first Protestant burned for heresy by the Spanish Inquisition went to the stake in 1540, and twenty-six of the thirty accused heretics at an auto-da-fé at Toledo in 1559 were Protestants. On the way to the stake, one victim appealed to King Phillip II for mercy, but without success.
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“I myself would bring the faggots to burn my own son,” the king is said to have replied, “were he as perverse as you.”
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When the meager supply of native-born Protestants ran low, the occasional English sailor or merchant was arrested—sometimes on Spanish soil and sometimes when an English ship was taken on the high seas—and tortured, tried, and punished by the Spanish Inquisition. The first Englishman to be burned alive as a heretic, a young man named John Tack, was judged and condemned by the Inquisition at Bilbao. An Englishman named John Massey, arriving at Seville in 1575, was sentenced to a term of seven years in an inquisitorial prison for the crime of possessing a Protestant prayer book titled
The Treasury of Gladness.
Thanks to the global reach of the Inquisition, a cousin of Sir Francis Drake was tried at an auto in Buenos Aires, and the son of Sir John Hawkins suffered the same fate in Lima.

Still, the Spanish Inquisition did not content itself with Marranos, Moriscos, and Protestants. Now and then, some more exotic heresy would excite the imagination of the inquisitors. A preacher in Guadalajara was condemned for teaching that “sexual union was union with God.” A woman in Aragón claimed to be the bride of Christ but bedded down with her young male disciples. A priest in Seville was accused of conducting “indecent orgies” after mass and demanding that his female congregants lift their skirts for his pleasure as a form of penance. A band of Africans, pressed into slavery and baptized after their arrival in Spain, were charged as “votaries of hoodoo.” All of these religious eccentrics were judged to be heretics and punished by the Spanish Inquisition.
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The inquisitors were uncomfortable with any variety of religious experience that they did not understand and endorse. The mystical practices of the so-called illuminists (
alumbrados
), by which the spiritual seeker supposedly achieved unity with God, drew the attention of the Spanish Inquisition, as did the teachings of Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), a charismatic Carmelite nun who came under inquisitorial scrutiny several times during her lifetime because of her mystical practices and angelic visions. The fact that Teresa carried Jewish blood in her veins further excited the suspicions of the Inquisition. “Father, would that we could all be burnt for Christ,” she remarked to a sympathetic priest when she was denounced as a heretic to the tribunal at Seville. Although Teresa was never formally condemned for heresy, the Inquisition refused to permit the publication of her famous memoir,
Life of Mother Teresa of Jesus,
until after her death in 1582.
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Still later, the inquisitors bestirred themselves to address the perceived danger of Freemasonry—“a horrid compound of sacrilege and many other abominable crimes,” according to one inquisitorial document. One enterprising inquisitor succeeded in infiltrating a Masonic lodge to see for himself what manner of “occult depravity” went on there. He was sufficiently alarmed to bring formal charges against the members of nearly one hundred lodges in Spain. Yet again, the Inquisition acted to rid the Iberian Peninsula of what it regarded as the foul contagion of any idea not sanctioned by the Church and any living creature tainted by impure blood, and to do so at any cost in human suffering.
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The Inquisition served more than one function in Spain as it did elsewhere across the centuries and throughout western Europe. As an instrument of state terror, the Inquisition was a convenient tool for establishing the sovereignty of the newly created monarchy that ruled over what had been a collection of little kingdoms and principalities, including some places that had long been ruled by Muslim rather than Christian kings. A decree issued by the Inquisition during the upheavals of the War of Spanish Succession at the opening of the eighteenth century, for example, required that all good Catholics report to the Inquisition any priest who questioned the claim of Philip V to the Spanish crown. Nor was he the first or only Spanish monarch to put the inquisitors on the scent of a political enemy.

Not even the pope was capable of overmastering the Spanish monarchy when it came to the Inquisition. Complaints against the atrocities of the inquisitors were raised by men of purely Christian blood and practice, but when the popes attempted to temper the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, they were generally ignored by the kings of Spain. Thus, for example, when Pope Leo X issued a bull in 1518 to curb a few of the procedural abuses of the Inquisition, Charles V prohibited its publication within the borders of Spain.
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A Spanish proverb captured the chilling effect of the alliance between the crown and the Inquisition:
Con el rey y con la inquisición, chiton!
—“With King and Inquisition, silence!”
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Then, too, the Inquisition served as a means for the king to enrich himself at the expense of his subjects. An account by the Venetian ambassador to Madrid confirms the secondary gain that could be achieved by finding and burning rich
conversos
on charges of being secret Jews: “A fortnight ago last Sunday, an act was performed at Murcia, which is called at Toledo an act of the Inquisition, whereat twenty-nine individuals were burned as Jews,” the ambassador wrote to the Doge. “Among them were some chief personages, so that the confiscation of their property will yield to the King upwards of 4,000,000 ducats.” The Inquisition, too, routinely profited from whatever extortionate fines and seizures could be extracted from its victims; one wealthy financier was dispossessed of 300,000 ducats in gold and silver after he was charged by the inquisitors with the crime of being a secret Jew.
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Finally, the Spanish Inquisition, like its counterpart in Rome, provided the shock troops in a culture war against the values of the Enlightenment. The old ways of life that had prevailed during the High Middle Ages were being challenged by humanism in arts and letters, rationalism in science and technology, diversity and toleration in religious practice, and the movement toward representative democracy in government, all of which the Spanish monarchy and the Spanish Inquisition regarded as dangerous heresies. “If the Holy Office had not come to this realm, some of these people would have been like those in England,” observed a Spanish priest, referring to the place where all the unsettling new ideas were being openly entertained and put into practice.
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So the inquisitors undertook to erect a wall around the Iberian Peninsula to keep out the contagion of people and ideas from what they called
tierras de herejes
(heretical nations), that is, any country that lay outside the Spanish empire. A visit by a Spanish subject to a foreign country was regarded as sufficient cause for suspicion of heresy and even an actionable crime in the eyes of the inquisitors. Agents of the Inquisition boarded foreign ships in Spanish ports and searched for forbidden books, which eventually included the works of such famous figures of the Enlightenment as Voltaire and Montesquieu, Rousseau and Locke.
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Objectionable books were censored, sometimes by the simple expedient of tearing out pages, or consigned to the flames, and the recommended punishment for possession of a banned book was the stake.
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Even Cervantes felt the fearful chill of the Inquisition. Although only one line of
Don Quixote
was censored by the vigilant inquisitors in 1632, he is reported to have said that he “would have made the book more amusing had it not been for the Holy Office.” As late as 1814, when the Spanish Inquisition had already been abolished in parts of Spain and was rapidly approaching its final collapse, Francisco Goya was condemned by the inquisitors for having painted the sensuous
Naked Maja
—a stunning portrait of a reclining nude woman—although he exacted a certain measure of revenge by documenting the sufferings of the Inquisition’s victims in a series of memorable drawings.
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No offense against moral order was too trivial to escape the attention of the Spanish Inquisition. A quarrel between congregants during a Sunday mass, a curse uttered during a game of dice, a flirtatious remark offered to a young woman during a religious procession, the eating of meat on a Friday, and the failure to attend church services were all the subject of inquisitorial proceedings. Any opinion that struck the inquisitors as impious or impertinent might provoke a formal prosecution, as when one of the notaries on the inquisitorial staff was heard to say: “Tithes are ours, and the clergy are our servants, which is why we pay them tithes.” For his daring words, the man was brought before the same tribunal that he had assisted in the prosecution of other accused heretics.
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As self-appointed moral guardians, the inquisitors were especially interested in what Christians did under the covers and behind closed doors. Bigamists, both men and women, were always at risk—the inquisitors reasoned that “bigamy implied a measure of heresy”—but the Inquisition extended its jurisdiction to almost every kind of sexual combination. A man and woman who shared a home after their formal betrothal but before their wedding could be prosecuted for “simple fornication.” Since the Church was always hostile toward sexual practices that did not result in conception—one of the supposed crimes of the Cathars and various other heretical cults, real and imagined—the Spanish Inquisition in Aragón undertook to prosecute acts of bestiality and sodomy by both men and women, a policy that had the practical effect of equating homosexuality with heresy. Minors convicted of sodomy were whipped and condemned to forced labor, but the penalty for adults over the age of twenty-five who engaged in such sexual acts was burning at the stake.
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The Spanish Inquisition was not as vexed by fears of witchcraft as other inquisitors around Europe. After twenty-nine men and women were condemned as witches by the tribunal in Navarre in 1610—and six of them were burned alive—
La Suprema
dispatched one of its inquisitors, Alonzo Salazar y Frias, to conduct a formal investigation into the supposed dangers of sorcery in Spain. As we have already noted, Salazar y Frias concluded that the witch panic had been called into existence by the witch-hunters: “I have not found the slightest evidence,” he reported, “from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred.” As a result of his findings, he welcomed nearly two thousand accused witches back into the Church, including children as young as nine years old.
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Aside from its admirable restraint in cases of witchcraft, however, the Spanish Inquisition steadily expanded its scope of operations, restlessly and anxiously searching for new heresies to condemn and new suspects to torture and burn. The victims of an auto-da-fé that took place in Seville on May 3, 1579, for example, included a Flemish bookbinder accused of embracing the new heresy of Lutheranism, an English gunner’s mate who had been taken in a sea battle with a flotilla commanded by the great English commander Sir John Hawkins, a Morisco charged with continuing secretly to practice his Islamic faith, plus a few accused crypto-Jews, a miscellaneous assortment of defendants charged with blasphemy and sorcery, and a single bigamist, a total of thirty-eight in all. Significantly, only the bookbinder was burned alive at the stake, a measure of how threatening a Protestant man of letters was to the status quo of Spain. The rest were given milder “penances.”