THE INQUISITION
TORQUEMADA AND ISABELLA--THE NEW TRIBUNAL--THE PENALTY OF UNSOUND
OPINIONS--THREE CENTURIES OF SHAME
The history of Spain assumed a new phase when, at the fall of Granada,
the attention of potentates and people ceased to be absorbed by the
excitement of a great religious war. Then the past and the romance of it
ended and the history of modern Spain began.
Before proceeding with the latter, a name and a tribunal detain
attention. The one is Torquemada. The other is the Inquisition. Burke
has described them both, as follows:
* * * * *
The Inquisition, established in Italy by Honorius III. in 1231, and in
France by St. Louis in 1233, was formally introduced into Spain by
Gregory IX. in 1235, by a Rescript of April 30th, addressed to Mongriu,
Archbishop-Administrator of Tarragona, confirming and explaining
previous Briefs and Bulls upon the subject of the repression of heresy;
and prescribing the issue of certain Instructions which had been
prepared at the desire of his holiness by a Spanish saint, the Dominican
Raymond of Penafort. From this time forward, Bulls on the subject of
the Inquisition into heresy were frequently issued; and the followers of
Dominic were ever the trusted agents of the Holy See.
The first suggestion of the serious introduction of the Tribunal of the
Holy Office into Castile, at the end of the fifteenth century, is said
to have come from Sicily. An Italian friar bearing the suggestive name
of Dei Barberi, Inquisitor-general at Messina, paid a visit to his
sovereign Ferdinand at Seville in 1477, in order to procure the
confirmation of a privilege accorded to the Sicilian Dominicans by the
Emperor Frederic II., in 1233, by virtue of which the Inquisitors
entered into possession of one-third of the goods of the heretic whom
they condemned. This dangerous charter was confirmed in due course by
Ferdinand on the 2d of September, 1477, and by Isabella on the 18th of
October; and very little argument was required on the part of the
gratified envoy to convince his sovereign of the various temporal and
spiritual advantages that would follow the introduction of the Tribunal,
that had so long existed in an undeveloped form in Sicily and in Aragon,
into the dominions of his pious consort, Isabella of Castile.
In the middle of the year 1480 there was as yet no court of the Holy
Inquisition established in Spain. At length, pressed by the Papal
Nuncio, by the Dominicans, by her confessor, most of all by her husband,
Isabella gave her consent; and at length, in August, 1483, the
Inquisition was established as a permanent tribunal. Tomas de Torquemada
was appointed Inquisitor-general of both Castile and Aragon. Subordinate
tribunals were constituted; new and more stringent regulations were
made; the victims smoked from day to day on the great stone altar of
the Quemadero.
The life of Tomas de Torquemada is the history of contemporary Spain.
Born of a noble family, already distinguished in the Church by the
reputation of the cardinal his uncle, Tomas early assumed the habit of a
Dominican, and was in course of time appointed prior of an important
monastery at Segovia, and confessor to the young Princess Isabella. His
influence upon that royal lady was naturally great; his piety pleased
her; his austerity affected her; and his powerful will directed, if it
could not subdue, a will as powerful as his own. Brought up far away
from a court whose frivolities had no charm for her, and where, under
any circumstances, she would have been considered as a rival if not a
pretender, the counsels of her confessor, both sacred and secular, were
the most authoritative that she could expect to obtain. It has been
constantly asserted that the friar obtained from the princess a promise
that, in the event of her elevation to the throne of Castile, she would
devote herself to the destruction of heretics and the increase of the
power of the Church. Such a promise would have been but one of many
which such a confessor would have obtained from such a penitent, and
would have been but the natural result of his teaching. Nor is it
surprising that in the intrigues that preceded the death of Henry IV.,
and the War of Succession that immediately followed it, the whole
influence of the priesthood should have been cast on the side of
Isabella and against her niece Joanna. For ten years, says the
biographer of his Order, the skillful hand of Torquemada cultivated the
intellect of Isabella; and in due course the propitious marriage with
Ferdinand of Aragon, far from removing his pupil from his sacerdotal
influence, brought him a new and an equally illustrious penitent.
Torquemada became the confessor of the king as well as of the queen.
If the establishment of the Inquisition was the fulfillment of
Isabella’s vow, and the realization of the aspirations of her tutor, his
appointment as Inquisitor-general, although it necessitated the choice
of another confessor, did not by any means withdraw him from his old
sphere of influence. He ceased not to preach the destruction of the
Moslem, even as he was employed about the destruction of the Jew; and if
Isabella was the active patroness of the war in Granada, there was a
darker spirit behind the throne, ever preaching the sacred duty of the
slaughter of the infidel and the heretic of every race and nation.
Torquemada was at once a politician and an enthusiast; rigid, austere,
uncompromising; unbounded in his ambition, yet content to sacrifice
himself to the cause that made him what he was. His moral superiority to
the Innocents and Alexanders at Rome, his intellectual superiority to
the Carrillos and the fighting bishops of Spain, gave him that enormous
influence over both queen and king which his consuming bigotry and his
relentless tenacity of purpose induced him to use with such dreadful
effect. Aggressive even in his profession of humility, Torquemada was
insolent, not only to his unhappy victims, but to his colleagues, to his
sovereigns, to his Holy Father at Rome. He was, perhaps, the only man in
Europe who was more masterful than Isabella, more bloodthirsty than
Alexander; and he was able to impose his own will on both queen and
pope. Rejecting in his proud humility every offer of the miter, he
asserted and maintained his ecclesiastical supremacy even over the
Primate of Spain. Attended by a body-guard of noble youths who were glad
to secure at once the favor of the queen and immunity from
ecclesiastical censure by assuming the habit of the Familiars of the
Holy Office, the great destroyer lived in daily dread of the hand of the
assassin.
Fifty horsemen and two hundred foot-guards always attended him. Nor was
it deemed inconsistent with the purity of his own religious faith that
he should carry about with him a talisman, in the shape of the horn of
some strange animal, invested with the mysterious power of preventing
the action of poison.
On the death of Torquemada in September, 1498, Don Diego Deza was
promoted to the office of Inquisitor-general of Spain. Yet the activity
of the Ecclesiastical Tribunal was rather increased than diminished by
the change of masters, and an attempt was made soon afterward to extend
its operations to Naples. But Gonsalvo de Cordova, who was then acting
as viceroy, took upon himself to disregard not only the demands of the
Inquisitors, but the orders of Ferdinand (June 30, 1504), and to
postpone the introduction of the new tribunal into the country that he
so wisely and so liberally governed. After the recall of his great
representative, some six years later, Ferdinand himself made another
attempt to establish the hated Tribunal in Italy in 1510. But even
Ferdinand did not prevail; and Naples retained the happy immunity which
it owed to the Great Captain.
If no error is more gross than to suppose that the establishment of the
Inquisition was due to popular feeling in Spain, it is almost equally
false to assert that it was the work of the contemporary popes. Rome was
bad enough at the end of the fifteenth century; but her vast load of
wickedness need not be increased by the burden of sins that are not her
own. The everlasting shame of the Spanish Inquisition is that of the
Catholic kings. It is not difficult to understand why the poor and
rapacious Ferdinand of Aragon should welcome the establishment of an
instrument of extortion which placed at his disposal the accumulated
savings of the richest citizens of Castile. It is yet easier to
comprehend that Isabella, who was not of a temper to brook resistance to
authority in Church or State, should have consented to what her husband
so earnestly desired. The queen, moreover, was at least sincerely
religious, after the fashion of the day; and was constrained to follow
the dictates of her confessor in matters judged by him to be within his
spiritual jurisdiction, even while she was, as a civil ruler,
withstanding the Pope himself on matters of temporal sovereignty.
It is the height of folly to brand Isabella as a hypocrite, because we
are unable to follow the workings of a medieval mind, or to appreciate
the curious religious temper--by no means confined to the men and women
of the fifteenth century--that can permit or compel the same person to
be devoted to Popery and to be at war with the Pope, and find in the
punctilious observance of ceremonial duty excuse or encouragement for
the gratification of any vice and the commission of any crime. But that
the nobility and people of Castile should have permitted the crown to
impose upon them a foreign and an ecclesiastical despotism, is at first
sight much harder to understand. No one reason, but an unhappy
combination of causes, may perhaps be found to explain it.
The influence of the queen was great. Respected as well as feared by the
nobles, she was long admired and beloved by the mass of the people.[6]
The great success of her administration, which was apparent even by the
end of 1480; her repression of the nobility; her studied respect for the
Cortes; all these things predisposed the Castilians, who had so long
suffered under weak and unworthy sovereigns, to trust themselves not
only to the justice but to the wisdom of the queen. The influence of the
clergy, if not so great as it was in France or Italy, was no doubt
considerable, and, as a rule, though not always, it was cast on the side
of the Inquisition. Last and most unhappy reason of all, the nobility
and the people were divided; and, if not actually hostile, were at least
ever at variance in Castile.
The first efforts of the new tribunal, too, were directed either against
the converted Jews, of whose prosperity the Christians were already
jealous, and for whose interested tergiversations no one could feel any
respect; or against the more or less converted Moslems, toward whom
their neighbors still maintained a certain hereditary antipathy. The New
Christians alone were to be haled before the new tribunal. The Old
Christians might trust in the queen, if not in their own irreproachable
lineage, to protect them from hurt or harm.
The number of subordinate or subsidiary tribunals of the Holy Office was
at first only four; established at Seville, Cordova, Jaen, and Ciudad
Real. The number was gradually increased, during the reign of the
Catholic kings, to thirteen; and over all these Ferdinand erected, in
1483, a court of supervision under the name of the Council of the
Supreme, consisting of the Grand Inquisitor as President, and three
other subordinate ecclesiastics, well disposed to the crown, and ready
to guard the royal interests in confiscated property.
One of the first duties of this tremendous Council was the preparation
of a code of rules or Instructions, based upon the Inquisitor’s Manual
of Eymeric, which had been promulgated in Aragon in the fourteenth
century. The new work was promptly and thoroughly done; and twenty-eight
comprehensive sections left but little to be provided for in the future.
The prosecution of unorthodox Spanish bishops by Torquemada on the
ground of the supposed backslidings of their respective fathers is
sufficiently characteristic of the methods of the Inquisition to be
worthy of a passing notice. Davila, bishop of Segovia, and Aranda,
bishop of Calahorra, were the sons of Jews who had been converted and
baptized by St. Vincent Ferrer. No suspicion existed as to the orthodoxy
of the prelates, both of whom were men distinguished for their learning
and their piety. But it was suggested that their fathers had relapsed
into Judaism before they died. They had each, indeed, left considerable
fortunes behind them: and it was sought to exhume and burn their mortal
remains, and to declare the property--long in the enjoyment of their
heirs and successors--forfeited to the crown; and, in spite of a brief
of Innocent VIII., of the 25th of September, 1487, the attempt was made
by the Spanish Inquisitors. Both prelates sought refuge and protection
by personal recourse to Rome (1490). Bishop Davila, in spite of the
urgent remonstrances of Isabella herself, ultimately secured the
protection of Alexander VI. and was invested with additional dignities
and honors. Bishop Aranda was less fortunate. He was stripped of his
office and possessions, and died a prisoner in the castle of St. Angelo
in 1497.
It was not only living or dying heretics who paid the penalty of their
unsound opinions. Men long dead, if they were represented by rich
descendants, were cited before the Tribunal, judged, condemned, and the
lands and goods that had descended to their heirs passed into the
coffers of the Catholic kings. The scandal was so great that Isabella
actually wrote to the Bishop of Segovia to defend herself against an
accusation that no one had ever presumed to formulate. “I have,” said
the queen, “caused great calamities, I have depopulated towns and
provinces and kingdoms, for the love of Christ and of His Holy Mother,
but I have never touched a maravedi of confiscated property; and I have
employed the money in educating and dowering the children of the
condemned.”
This strange apology, which seems to have to some extent imposed upon
Prescott, is shown, by more recent examination of the State papers to be
a most deliberate and daring falsehood, and would go far to justify the
suggestion of Bergenroth that if Ferdinand never scrupled to tell direct
untruths and make false promises whenever he thought it expedient, Queen
Isabella excelled her husband in “disregard of veracity.”
If the Holy Office had existed in Aragon in an undeveloped state from
the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, and if it was actually
introduced into Castile at the suggestion of an Inquisitor of the
Aragonese island of Sicily, the old independence of the inhabitants once
more asserted itself when the time arrived for the introduction of the
brand-new Castilian Tribunal into the old kingdom that is watered by the
Ebro. Saragossa, indeed, may be nearer to Rome than Toledo; but the
Catalan has ever been less submissive than his brother or cousin in
Castile; less obedient to authority; more impatient of royal and
ecclesiastical oppression. Yet Aragon, which had defied Innocent at
Muret, and vanquished Martin at Gerona, was no match for the inquisitors
of Ferdinand the Catholic.
The Inquisition, as we have seen, had once before been established in
Aragon; but in one most important particular the new institution
differed from the old. In former days, even in the rare cases when the
heretic paid the penalty of his heterodoxy with his life, his property
passed to his heirs. The ecclesiastical tribunal of Ferdinand was not
only more efficient in the matter of burning or otherwise disposing of
accused persons; but the property of all doubtful Catholics, even of
those who were graciously permitted to live after their trial, was
absolutely forfeit to the crown. And the number of rich men, not only
converted Jews but prosperous Christians, whose orthodoxy failed to come
up to the new standard, was even in those days considered remarkable.
Ferdinand at all times hated popular assemblies. He spent the greater
part of his time in Castile; and he saw as little as possible of the
people of Aragon. But in April, 1484, he summoned a Cortes at Saragossa,
and decreed by royal ordinance the establishment of the new tribunal.
The old constitutional spirit of the Aragonese seems to have evaporated;
and a degenerate justiciary was found to swear to support the
jurisdiction of the Inquisitors. Yet envoys and delegates of the Commons
of Aragon were dispatched to Castile, whither Ferdinand had promptly
retired, and also to Rome, to remonstrate against the new Institution,
and more especially against the new provisions for the forfeiture of the
property of the convicted. If these provisions, contrary to the laws of
Aragon, were repealed or suspended, the deputies “were persuaded,” and
there was a grim humor in the suggestion, “that the Tribunal itself
would soon cease to exist.”
But the repression of heresy was far too profitable an undertaking to be
lightly abandoned; nor was Ferdinand of Aragon the man to abandon it;
and the envoys returned from an unsuccessful mission to Valladolid to
find a Quemadero already blazing at Saragossa.
Yet the Aragonese were not at once reduced to subjection. A popular
conspiracy led to the assassination of the Inquisitor-general, Pedro de
Arbues, in spite of his steel cap and coat of mail, as he stood one day
at matins in the Cathedral of Saragossa (15th September, 1457); but this
daring crime served only to enrage Ferdinand and to strengthen the power
of the Inquisition. A most rigorous and indefatigable inquiry, which was
extended from Saragossa into every part of Aragon, was at once
undertaken; and an immense number of victims, chosen not only from among
the people, but from almost every noble family in Aragon, if it did not
appease the vengeance of the Inquisitors, gratified at least the avarice
of Ferdinand. Among the accused, indeed, was Don Jayme of Navarre, a
nephew of the King of Aragon--a son of Eleanor, queen of Navarre, and
her husband, Gaston de Foix--who was actually arrested and imprisoned by
the Holy Office; and discharged only after having done public penance,
as convicted of having in some way sympathized with the assassination of
Arbues. But it may be noted that the young prince was anything but a
favorite with his uncle, to whom this bit of ecclesiastical discipline
was no doubt very gratifying.
But it was not only at Saragossa that opposition was offered to the
establishment of the new Tribunal. In every part of Aragon and of
Valencia; at Lerida, at Teruel, at Barcelona, the people rose against
this new exhibition of royal and priestly tyranny. And it was not for
fully two years, and after the adoption of the most savage measures of
repression both royal and ecclesiastical, that the Inquisition was
finally accepted in the kingdom of Aragon, and that Torquemada,
fortified by no less than two special Bulls, made his triumphal entry as
Inquisitor-general into Barcelona on the 27th of October, 1488.
Among all the tens of thousands of innocent persons who were tortured
and done to death by the Inquisition in Spain, it is instructive to turn
to the record of one man at least who broke through the meshes of the
ecclesiastical net that was spread abroad in the country; for the mode
of his escape is sufficiently instructive. Ready money at command, but
not exposed to seizure, was the sole shield and safeguard against the
assaults of Church and State. Don Alfonso de la Caballeria was a Jew by
race, and a man who was actually concerned in the murder of the
Inquisitor Arbues; but his great wealth enabled him to purchase not only
one but two Briefs from Rome, and to secure the further favor of
Ferdinand. He was accused and prosecuted in vain by the Holy Office of
Aragon. He not only escaped with his life, but he rose to a high
position in the State, and eventually mingled his Jewish and heretic
blood with that of royalty itself.
Various attempts were made by the Commons of Aragon to abate the powers
of the Inquisition; and at the Cortes of Monzon, in 1510, so vigorous a
remonstrance was addressed to Ferdinand that he was unable to do more
than avoid a decision by a postponement on the ground of desiring fuller
information; and two years later, at the same place, he was compelled to
sanction a declaration or ordinance, by which the authority assumed by
the Holy Office, in defiance of the Constitution of Aragon, was
specifically declared to be illegal; and the king swore to abolish the
privileges and jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Within a few months,
however, he caused himself to be absolved from this oath by a Papal
Brief; and the Inquisition remained unreformed and triumphant. But the
Aragonese had not yet entirely lost their independence, and a popular
rising compelled the king not only to renounce the Brief, so lately
received, but to solicit from the Pope a Bull (May 12, 1515),
exonerating him from so doing, and calling upon all men, lay and
ecclesiastical, to maintain the authority of the Cortes. Aragon was
satisfied. And the people enjoyed for a season the blessings of
comparative immunity from persecution.
To recall the manifold horrors of the actual working of the Inquisition
in Spain would be a painful and an odious task. To record them in any
detail is surely superfluous; even though they are entirely denied by
such eminent modern writers as Hefele, in Germany, or Menendez Pelayo,
in Spain. The hidden enemy, the secret denunciation, the sudden arrest,
the unknown dungeon, the prolonged interrogatory, the hideous torture,
the pitiless judge, the certain sentence, the cruel execution, the
public display of sacerdotal vengeance, the plunder of the survivors,
innocent even of ecclesiastical offense--all these things are known to
every reader of every history. All other considerations apart, it is an
abuse of language to speak of the proceedings before the Inquisition as
a trial, for the tribunal was nothing but a Board of Conviction. One
acquittal in two thousand accusations was, according to Llorente, who
had access to all the records of the Holy Office in Spain, about the
proportion that was observed in their judicial findings.
Statistics, as a rule, are not convincing, and figures are rarely
impressive; yet it may be added that, according to Llorente’s cautious
estimate, over ten thousand persons were burned alive during the
eighteen years of Torquemada’s supremacy alone; that over six thousand
more were burned in effigy either in their absence or after their death,
and their property acquired by the Holy Office; while the number of
those whose goods were confiscated, after undergoing less rigorous
punishments, is variously computed at somewhat more or somewhat less
than one hundred thousand. But it is obvious that even these terrible
figures give but a very feeble idea of the vast sum of human suffering
that followed the steps of this dreadful institution. For they tell no
tale of the thousands who died, and the tens of thousands who suffered,
in the torture chamber. They hardly suggest the anguish of the widow and
the orphan of the principal victims, who were left, bereaved and
plundered, to struggle with a hard and unsympathetic world, desolate,
poor, and disgraced.
Nor does the most exaggerated presentment of human suffering tell of the
disastrous effects of the entire system upon religion, upon morals, upon
civil society at large. The terrorism, the espionage, the daily and
hourly dread of denunciation, in which every honest man and woman must
have lived, the boundless opportunities for extortion and for the
gratification of private vengeance and worldly hatred, must have
poisoned the whole social life of Spain. The work of the Inquisition,
while it tended, no doubt, to make men orthodox, tended also to make
them false, and suspicious, and cruel. Before the middle of the
sixteenth century, the Holy Office had profoundly affected the national
character; and the Spaniard, who had been celebrated in Europe during
countless centuries for every manly virtue, became, in the new world
that had been given to him, no less notorious for a cruelty beyond the
imagination of a Roman emperor, and a rapacity beyond the dreams of a
republican proconsul.
Torquemada and Ferdinand may have burned their thousands and plundered
their ten thousands in Spain. Their disciples put to death millions of
the gentlest races of the earth, and ravaged without scruple or pity the
fairest and most fertile regions of the new Continent which had been
given to them to possess.
As long as the Inquisition confined its operations to the Jews and the
Moors, the Old Christians were injured and depraved by the development
of those tendencies to cruelty and rapacity that lie dormant in the
heart of every man. But this was not the end. For when Spain at length
sheltered no more aliens to be persecuted and plundered in the name of
religion, and murder and extortion were forced to seek their easy prey
in the new world beyond the Atlantic Ocean, the Holy Office turned its
attention to domestic heresy; and the character of the Spaniard in
Europe became still further demoralized and perverted. Every man was
suspected. Every man became suspicious. The lightest word might lead to
the heaviest accusation. The nation became somber and silent. Religious
life was but a step removed from heresy. Religion died. Original thought
was above all things dangerous. The Spaniard took refuge in Routine.
Social intercourse was obviously full of peril. A prudent man kept
himself to himself, and was glad to escape the observation of his
neighbors. Castile became a spiritual desert. The Castilian wrapped
himself in his cloak, and sought safety in dignified abstraction.
The Holy Office has done its work in Spain. A rapacious government, an
enslaved people, a hollow religion, a corrupt Church, a century of
blood, three centuries of shame, all these things followed in its wake.
And the country of Viriatus and Seneca, of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius,
where Ruy Diaz fought, and Alfonso studied, and where two warrior kings
in two successive centuries defied Rome temporal and Rome spiritual, and
all the crusaders of Europe--Spain, hardly conquered by Scipio or by
Cæsar, was enslaved by the dead hand of Dominic.