TORQUEMADA’S FURTHER “INSTRUCTIONS”
The intrepid but ineffectual resistance offered by Zaragoza to the
Inquisition was emulated by the principal cities of Aragon; one and all
protested against the institution of this tribunal under the new form
which Torquemada had given it.
But nowhere was resistance of the least avail against the iron purpose
of the Grand Inquisitor, armed with the entire force of civil justice
to constrain the people into submission to the ecclesiastical will.
Teruel had been thrown into open revolt by the proposal to appoint
inquisitors there; and so fierce and determined was the armed
resistance, that not until the King’s troops made their appearance
in the streets of that city, in March 1485, were order and obedience
restored.
In Valencia, too, there was a vigorous opposition led by the nobles,
and throughout Cataluña the resistance was so resolute that it was
not until two years later that the Sovereigns were able to reduce the
people to submission.
Barcelona urged an ancient right to appoint her own inquisitors,
and refused persistently and angrily to recognize the authority of
Torquemada or his delegates, in spite of any bulls that might have been
issued by Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII. Nor was this city’s obstinacy
conquered until 1487, after Pope Innocent had issued his second bull,
confirming Torquemada in the office of Grand Inquisitor of Castile,
Leon, Aragon, and Valencia, and further extending his jurisdiction so
that it included all the Spains--in which bull he formally cancelled
the ancient rights of Barcelona to appoint her own inquisitors.
* * * * *
It should be sufficiently clear from this that, notwithstanding
the racial antipathy between Spaniard and Jew, notwithstanding the
religious spirit so very ardent in the people of Spain, serving
to aggravate beyond all reason that hatred of the Israelite, the
Inquisition--as Torquemada understood and controlled it--was very
far from being desired by them. That this grim institution should
have contrived so firmly to establish itself upon Spanish soil and to
wield there a power such as it wielded in no other Catholic country
of Europe, was due entirely to the brothers of St. Dominic and the
fanaticism of Torquemada playing upon the bigotry and acquisitiveness
of the Sovereigns.
Assailants of the Roman Church have urged that the Inquisition was
a religious institution. Defenders of that same Church, in their
endeavour to shift so terrible a burden from her shoulders, have sought
to show that the Inquisition was a political machine. It was neither,
and at the same time it was both. But chiefly and primarily it was
just a clerical weapon. And clericalism in the Iberian Peninsula,
pervaded by the spirit of Torquemada, converted that institution into
an instrument far more dreadful and oppressive than was its character
in Italy, or France, or any other Roman Catholic country of the world
in which the Holy Office held jurisdiction.
In Spain it had set up in the evening of the fifteenth century an
absolute reign of terror, depriving men of all liberty of conscience
and of speech and spreading a network of espionage over the face of the
land.
And in the meantime, practice having brought to light certain
shortcomings in the decrees which he had already issued, Torquemada
added a further eleven articles in 1485. In the main, however, these
are concerned with the internal affairs of the Holy Office rather than
with its attitude towards offenders.
Articles I and II provide for the payment of officers of the
Inquisition, and decree that no officer shall receive gifts of any
nature under pain of instant dismissal.
Article III disposes that the inquisitors shall keep a permanent agent
in Rome, who shall be skilled in the law, so that he may attend to
matters appertaining to the Holy Office.
From this it is to be inferred that appeals to the Vatican continued
to be numerous, notwithstanding the provisions made by the Pope to
constitute Torquemada the supreme arbiter in matters of the Faith.
Articles V to XI are entirely concerned with details relating to
confiscations. These would be of no particular interest, but that they
serve to show how vast by now was the business of confiscation, since
the manner of conducting it and disposing of confiscated property
should demand so many decrees to govern it.
Article IV is the only one that may be said to concern the actual
jurisprudence of the Holy Office. This is intended not so much to
soften the rigour as to remove the inconveniences that might arise out
of Article X of the “Instructions” of 1484.
By that article it was decreed that confiscation should be
retrospective--_i.e._ that a heretic’s property should be confiscate
not from the day of the discovery of his heresy, but from the date of
the offence itself. So that any property that might in the meantime
have been alienated--whether in the ordinary way of commerce or
otherwise--must be considered as the property of the Holy Office, and
was to be seized by the Holy Office, no matter into whose hands it
might meanwhile have passed.
Such a decree, as will be seen, was proving a serious hindrance to
trade; for it became unsafe to purchase anything from any one, since
should either party to the transaction subsequently be discovered to
have fallen into the sin of heresy prior to that transaction, the other
would be stripped of the acquired property, and might be subjected
to the entire loss. Moreover, as proceedings were taken against the
dead, and as there was no limit imposed upon the retrospection allowed
to inquisitors, no man could account himself safe from confiscations
incurred through the sin of some other from whom he or his forbears had
acquired the property.
The vagueness of this article urgently demanded amending, and this
was the purpose of Article IV of the “Instructions” of 1485. It
decreed that all contracts concluded before 1479 should be accounted
valid, although it might come to be discovered against either of the
contracting parties that he was guilty of heresy at the time of such
contract.
This is the only instance in which we find Torquemada promulgating a
decree to soften the rigour of any previous enactment, and it is very
clear that it is a decree dictated not by clemency but by expediency.
In the event of fraud, or of any one being a party to a fraud to abuse
the privilege conferred by this article, Torquemada provided that the
offender, if reconciled, should receive a hundred lashes and be branded
on the face with a hot iron; whilst, if not reconciled--even though
he should be a good Catholic--he must suffer confiscation of all his
property.[135]
To justify the punishment of branding on the face, the case of Cain
is urged as a proper precedent, and so modern a historian as Garcia
Rodrigo does not hesitate to put this seriously forward.[136]
Three years later--in 1488--Torquemada found it necessary to add a
further fifteen articles to his “Instructions,” and we may anticipate a
little by briefly surveying their provisions at this stage.
Complaints to Rome of the injustices and the excessive rigour
of the inquisitors--a constant feature of Torquemada’s
Grand-Inquisitorship--had by that time become so numerous that the Pope
found it necessary to order Torquemada to re-edit what Amador de los
Rios very aptly terms his “Code of Terror.”[137]
The chief ground of these complaints had concerned the delays that so
commonly occurred in bringing an accused to trial. When a prisoner’s
acquittal ultimately chanced to take place, it was after a long term
of imprisonment for which there was no compensation or redress; and
when the person so treated was a man of position and influence, it is
natural that he would protest strongly against the treatment to which
he had been subjected before it was discovered that no charge could
be sustained against him. The real reason of these delays must not be
supposed to lie in dilatoriness or sluggishness on the part of the
inquisitors. Indeed, the excessive dispatch with which they conducted
the affairs of their tribunal is a matter to the scandal of which
Llorente draws attention more than once--and particularly in the course
of chronicling the fact that in the year of its introduction into
Toledo this court dealt--as we shall see--with no less than some 3,300
cases, 27 of the accused being burnt and the remainder penanced in
various degrees. He protests with reason that it is utterly impossible
that at such a rate of procedure evidence can properly have been sifted
and any sort of justice done.
Where delays took place they were the result of the extreme reluctance
on the part of the Holy Office to allow any to go free upon whom
its talons had once fastened. Thus, when even the slight degree or
evidence necessary to enable the inquisitors to convict was lacking,
they would delay in the daily hope that such evidence might be
forthcoming, and by repeated examinations they would meanwhile seek to
force the unfortunate prisoner into contradictions that should justify
them in resorting to torture.
In view of the explicit pontifical command, Torquemada was compelled to
amend this state of things, at least in theory, by decreeing (Article
III) that there should be no delays in proceeding to trial through
lack of proof. Where proof was lacking, the accused should at once be
restored to liberty, since he could at any time--when fresh proof was
forthcoming--be rearrested.
Similarly, with a view of expediting trials, he ordered (Article IV)
that since in all the courts of the Inquisition there were not the
necessary lawyers, henceforth, when a case was completed, the _dossier_
of the proceedings should be sent to the Grand Inquisitor himself, and
he would then submit it to the lawyers of the Suprema, who would advise
upon it.
But he amply made up for what softening of rigour might be contained in
these articles by the greater severity enjoined in some of the other
decrees which he embodied in these “Instructions” of 1488.
Finding that the inquisitors of Aragon had been departing from certain
of his enactments of 1484, diluting them with the weaker rules that
had obtained under the old Inquisition in that kingdom, he commanded
that all inquisitors should proceed in strict obedience to the statutes
contained in the past “Instructions.”
He provided (Article V) that the inquisitors should themselves visit
the prisons once in every fortnight, but that no outsiders should be
permitted to communicate with the prisoners, save of course the priests
who would go to comfort them. To the end that a still greater secrecy
should be observed in the trials, he commanded (Article VI) that when
the depositions of the witnesses were being taken none should be
present other than those who were by law absolutely necessary; and he
enjoined (Article VII) the safe and secret custody of all documents
relating to the cases tried.
We are left to gather that the harshness of his enactment concerning
the children of heretics had been tempered a little by a natural
humane pity which did not at all commend itself to the pitiless Grand
Inquisitor; for we now find him (Article XI) enjoining inquisitors to
take care that the decree forbidding those unfortunates the use of gold
and silver and fine garments, and disqualifying them from honourable
employment, should be rigorously enforced.
He provided (Article XIII) that all the expenses of the Holy
Office--which must have been enormous by now, considering to what vast
proportions he had developed that organization--should be defrayed
out of confiscated property before this was surrendered to the Royal
treasury; and further (Article XV), that all appointed notaries,
fiscals, and constables should discharge their functions in person and
not by deputy.
The most interesting of these statutes of 1488, in consequence of
the information it conveys on the subject of the activities of the
Inquisition and the enormous scale of the prosecutions upon which it
was engaged, is contained in Article XIV. The prisons of Spain were
becoming so crowded, and the expense of maintaining the prisoners
was imposing so heavy a tax upon the Holy Office, that it had become
urgently necessary to make some fresh provision that would relieve this
burden. Therefore, as this article sets forth, Torquemada enjoined the
Sovereigns to order the building in every district of the Inquisition
of a quadrangular enclosure of small houses (_casillas_) for the
residence of those sentenced to the penance of imprisonment. These
houses were to be so contrived that the penitents might pursue in them
their business or trade and earn their own livelihood, thus relieving
the Inquisition of the heavy expense of supporting them. Each of these
quadrangular penitentiaries--for this is the origin of the term--was to
be equipped with its own chapel.[138]