Inquisition Page 2
1701–14
War of the Spanish Succession.
1713–15
Melchor de Macanaz, minister of state of Philip V of Spain, proposes reforms of the Inquisition; the Inquisition launches a case against him.
1743–4
Trial of Freemasons in Portugal.
1751
Edict issued against Freemasons in Spain.
1755
Great earthquake destroys Lisbon on 1 November.
1756
The works of Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire are banned by the Spanish Inquisition.
1759
Jesuits expelled from Portugal.
1761
Last burning of a relajado at an inquisitorial auto in Portugal.
1767
Jesuits expelled from Spain.
1773
Decree issued in Portugal removing legal distinctions between Old Christians and conversos.
1776–80
Arrest, trial and penance of Pablo de Olavide in Spain.
1789
French Revolution.
1807
Napoleon invades Portugal; the Portuguese royal family flees to Brazil.
1808
Napoleon invades Spain and installs his brother as puppet king. On 4 December the new regime issues a decree abolishing the Inquisition.
1810
Decree permitting freedom of the press is promulgated at Cádiz on 18 October.
1812
Liberal constitution proclaimed at Cádiz on 12 March. The Tribunal of Goa is definitively abolished on 16 June.
1813
A decree abolishing the Spanish Inquisition is approved by the parliament in Cádiz.
1820
Ferdinand VII is forced to accept the liberal constitution after a revolt in Cádiz. On 9 March he passes a decree suppressing the Inquisition in Spain.
1821
Official abolition of the Inquisition in Portugal.
1834
Law abolishing the Inquisition is formally passed in Spain.
PROLOGUE
Above all were his peaceful procedures. He always administers justice in the beautiful link of peace. It could be the heraldry of his canopy – ‘Justice and peace have kissed.’
Mexico City 1649
ON MONDAY 11 MARCH 1649 a procession left the headquarters of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City. The gala troop swept between the whitewashed houses, enlivened by musicians dressed in silks of different colours playing trumpets, kettledrums and woodwind. The musicians’ horses were followed by the ministers of the Holy Office and the noblest gentlemen of the city, the ministers bearing the arms of the Inquisition, which so appropriately mirrored the battle between peace and violence which was at the heart of that curious institution: a cross in the middle, an olive branch to the right and a sword to the left.1
The procession, brought up at the rear by Don Juan Aguirre de Soaznava, the chief warden of the Inquisition in Mexico, snaked through the streets of one of the two most important cities in America, announcing amid the din of kettledrums and wind instruments that a grand trial of faith, or autos-da-fé, would be held in a month’s time. Notices were published in the buildings of the Holy Office, at the house of the archbishop, in front of the viceroy’s palace, in the town council and in various streets in the city.2
A month was in truth the absolute minimum necessary to prepare the great theatre for the auto. A stage was built, about 37 metres long and 24 metres wide, around which were placed eight marbled columns grouped in twos. In the keystone of an arch set above the boards was a depiction of a shield with the royal coat of arms, while a pyramid was built and decorated with a shield of the faith. Boys playing trumpets were painted above the doors for entering and leaving the stage, while the prisoners were to be housed in a structure topped by a cupola. The arena was shaded by sails nailed to the tops of forty tree trunks roughly 18 metres high, while thirty stairways were built connecting it to apartments and other buildings so that onlookers could take a rest from the demands of the auto. The whole was lavishly decorated with velvet hangings, carpets and crimson curtains, and the activity was such that ‘people were congregating every day and they remained from sun-up to the close of the day . . . they admired everything and felt that they were seeing something that could be perpetuated through the ages’.3
On 10 April, after a month’s hectic construction work, over 20,000 people filled Mexico City to watch the procession of the green cross which heralded the morrow’s auto. The streets between the Inquisition offices and the great arena were dotted with minor stages. People watched from benches, coaches, balconies and windows as Don Juan Aguirre de Soaznavar set out at three thirty in the afternoon, accompanied by a twelve-strong guard, pages and lackeys. The bells of all the churches and monasteries in the city rang out as the procession passed by. The guards were dressed in the green and black of the empire, embellished with gold and silver braiding. The pages wore fine green clothes and capes, while the lackeys were in groups of eight bearing swords of silver and gold. When the procession finally reached the Plaza del Volador, soldiers fired a celebratory salute and twenty Dominican friars walked forward with white candles to welcome the cross, at last, to the stage.4
It was seven o’clock. Night had fallen across the city, yet there were so many candles that they ‘made the entire theatre appear as if it were day’.5 The candles themselves were so thick that they would burn for two nights. Prayers were led from the stage, and a vast throng filled the Plaza del Volador. All the seats were taken. Few slept as they imagined the sentences that would be meted out to the condemned.
Yet ‘while the city was rampant with all varieties of rumours, the Holy Office . . . proceeded in silence with its labours’.6 In the offices of the Inquisition, two confessors were sent to the 15 people who had been condemned to die for secretly practising Judaism in spite of being baptized and outwardly professing the Catholic faith. These were the so-called relajados, the term used by the Inquisition for those who would be transferred to the secular authorities and put to death. All but one of the relajados protested their innocence and claimed to be good Christians. The exception was Tomás Treviño de Sobremonte, an itinerant merchant who admitted to being a Jew.7 Owing to Sobremonte’s refusal to accept the Christian faith he would be burnt to death the following day, while the other fourteen relajados would be given the relative clemency of being garrotted and then burnt.
At four in the morning the chief inquisitor of Mexico, Juan de Mañozca, arrived. The cathedral bells began to toll, to remind the populace that the auto was an earthly representation of the Last Judgement. As well as the fifteen relajados, the effigies of sixty-seven deceased people had been sculpted, to be burnt in place of their bodies for the heresy that they were no longer alive to exculpate; the effigies went first in this procession, followed by twenty-three boxes of their bones, which were also to be burnt. Then followed those prisoners who had been sentenced to suffer penances such as lashing, imprisonment, the galleys and confiscation of goods – the reconciliados. Last of all, the relajados were called and given the banners of their condemnation, which ‘consisted of sanbenitos [the penitential garb of all prisoners] decorated with flames and figures of demons’; these terrifying images also decorated the corozas, the conical hats which the prisoners wore as they made their way to the stage.8
The procession left the Holy Office at dawn. The relajados were given a green cross. Some of them were gagged, including Sobremonte, who ‘walked through the streets like a volcano of desperation . . . everyone was shouting at him, trying to persuade him or preaching to him. But he wouldn’t listen to anyone, being furious even with himself. He made his own obstinacy a point of honour’.9 Every relajado was accompanied by two confessors, who never let up in their preaching and exhortations to the condemned to repent. Many of the confessors cried as they went, ‘which caused copious tears to fill the eyes of all the onlookers on realizing the charitabl
e spirit showed by the ministers and the scarce interest shown by the accused’.10 The prisoners were followed by the ministers of the Inquisition on horseback, and then by a mule carrying a chest which bore the trial records and sentences of the accused. The head of the mule was adorned with silver plates engraved with gold designs; her neck was hung with silver and gold bells; and the chest with the trial records was mauve-coloured and inscribed with Japanese inlays and elaborate copperplates.11
The brilliant piece of theatre brought the entire colony to a standstill. People came from nearly 1,000 miles away to watch, so that ‘it appeared that all of New Spain*1 had been depopulated and brought to Mexico [City]’.12 The crowd hung from the fences, the scaffolds, carriages and balconies; they sat on 16,000 seats before the stage, shouting and applauding, riveted by the piety of the event and fascinated by the prisoners. As the condemned mounted the stage individually to hear their sentences, the Jesuit friar Mathias de Bocanegra marvelled at the doings of Chief Inquisitor Mañozca, whose ‘glorious solemnity, comprehensive capacity, wise intelligence, mature discretion, old experience, zealous integrity, all . . . justified his work’.13 ‘Above all,’ as Bocanegra put it, ‘were his peaceful procedures. He always administers justice in the beautiful link of peace. It could be the heraldry of his canopy – “Justice and peace have kissed.”’14
JUSTICE AND PEACE were adjectives ill-suited to describe Mañozca’s usual mode of behaviour. The record of this individual reveals a more chequered approach to the art of inquisitorial persecution. In fact, Mañozca’s true character had been apparent for forty years, ever since his appointment as one of the first inquisitors of Cartagena, Colombia, in 1609.*2
In Cartagena Mañozca and his colleague Mateo de Salcedo had made a habit of hauling market traders before them and seizing whatever took their fancy, throwing them into the inquisitorial jail if they did not comply.15 In January 1624 Mañozca was accused of having routinely smuggled goods in and out of Cartagena and freeing his associates when they were arrested for carrying contraband.16 He had destroyed rivals of his friends,17 and appointed a friend of his prior of the Dominican monastery even though his friend could not read Latin.18 When a butcher whose house adjoined his own made a ruckus by killing a pig, Mañozca arrested the butcher’s butler and servants and threw them in the inquisitorial jail.19 It was also public knowledge that he was having an affair with a married woman in the city.20
Perhaps hoping to improve matters, the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Spain – the Suprema – transferred Mañozca from Cartagena to Lima in Peru.21 In 1625 Mañozca was sent on a commission of inquiry to Quito, Ecuador, where he immediately stood down all the judges except the youngest one, whom he dominated absolutely.22 An associate of Mañozca’s took to parading Quito’s streets with an armed gang, occasionally assaulting royal officials in the plaza, and once stabbing an African slave with his sword to see if it was working properly.23 Mañozca summoned prisoners in chains from Cali, hundreds of miles away in southern Colombia, and kept them in jail for eight months. In all, he and his sidekicks spent over two years racking up huge bills and all but bankrupted the colonial authorities in the province.24
It was this sort of corruption that encouraged men like Juan Pérez de Segura, a trader in Peru in the 1580s, to declare that ‘inquisitors should be tied to the tail of a horse’.25 How delicious it would be to see them dragged through the very muck that was their bequest to so many others! But inquisitors were widely seen as above the law. Was it not typical that none of the litany of complaints had prevented Mañozca from being appointed chief inquisitor in Mexico in 1643 and preparing the trials which came to a head with the great auto of 1649?
Yet persecutors do not abide in a vacuum. Mañozca’s genius for tyranny took advantage of a time when what was called crypto-Judaism flourished. By 1649, Judaism had been condemned in Spanish dominions for over 150 years, and the religion of the twenty-five congregations of secret Jews in Mexico was a curious hybrid of Catholicism, Judaism and taboo rituals which in Mexico were associated with illicit sex.26 Although the Inquisition was charged with the extirpation of this heresy in Spanish territories, it had made little progress since its formation in 1478. New cells of these religious rebels were constantly being uncovered. There were even specialists in their detection, men such as Mañozca, who, prior to the events in Mexico in 1649, had been one of the inquisitors who uncovered the ‘great plot’ of the crypto-Jews in Lima in the late 1630s.27 It turned out to be impossible to separate entirely the pursuers of heresy from the heretics themselves; on some deep and unconscious level, each seemed to need the other.
The 1649 auto in Mexico was in every sense a grand piece of theatre, yet it is only a minor episode in the story of the Iberian Inquisitions. For the victims of the inquisitors, such as the crypto-Jews of Mexico, resistance punctuated their suffering and music occasionally alleviated their torture. As one of their sabbath prayers put it:
Whoever sings lessens his pain;
Whoever cries begets more strain:
I sing so as to remedy
The suffering that torments me.28
ONE MUST BEGIN by acknowledging the sheer vastness of the subject. From 1478 to the mid-18th century the Inquisition was the most powerful institution in Spain and its colonies in the Canaries, Latin America and the Philippines. In neighbouring Portugal and Portugal’s colonies in Africa, Asia and Brazil the Inquisition was pre-eminent for 250 years from 1536 onwards. This means that the Inquisition was a significant force in four continents for more than three centuries; we are dealing with a period stretching from the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella in the 15th century to the Napoleonic Wars.
These vast reaches of time and space are matched by the size of the perceived criminal class. Trials were held of witches in Mexico, bigamists in Brazil, seditious Freemasons, Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Protestants, fornicating priests and sodomizing sailors. In Mexico the Inquisition banned peyote – the hallucinogenic cactus written about by Carlos Castaneda in the 1960s and 70s – in 1620, because it ‘has been introduced into these provinces, for the purpose of detecting thefts, of divining other happenings and foretellings’.29 Neither indigenous cultural practices nor sorcery and superstition were suffered gladly, even though many of the fortune-tellers and sorcerers around were evidently second rate. Should the Inquisition really have bothered with sorcerers such as Isabel Jiménez, denounced in Guatemala in 1609 for ‘telling fortunes by reading palms . . . always provided that it was a Friday’?30
One of the main structural similarities between the Inquisitions of Portugal and Spain was their interest in places as far-flung as Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Goa and Mexico. Only the Iberian Inquisitions had the means to persecute such minor acts of blasphemy and superstition across the world, acts that would simply have raised laughter elsewhere. In Salvador da Bahia,*3 Brazil, the labourer Manuel de Paredes was denounced by his brother-in-law Gironimo de Bairros in 1591; Bairros was upset at Paredes’s jibe that his sister Pauloa had been no more a virgin when she had married him than Mary had been when she had given birth to Jesus (it was the slur on Mary’s virginity that made this a case worthy of the Inquisition).31 A similar idea was expressed by one Domingo Hernández in Valdivia, southern Chile, around 1580: when discussing ‘how the women of Valdivia slept with the men, [Hernández] said that Joseph had also slept with Mary’.32
Keeping a check on such irreverence was a way of shoring up authority over these gargantuan empires. Power was at the heart of the Inquisition, and thus, inevitably, did religion enter the province of politics. It was no accident that in 1587, just one year before the Spanish Armada set sail for England, Francis Drake’s cousin John was tried by the Inquisition in Lima. John Drake had lost his ship on the River Plate and spent fifteen months as a captive of the Guaraní Indians before managing to escape in a canoe and reach the city of Asunción in Paraguay.33 From here he had been taken to Buenos Aires, before being arrested and transported thousan
ds of miles to the nearest inquisitorial headquarters, in Lima, where he was ‘reconciled’ in the auto of 1587 and imprisoned in the Franciscan monastery of the city, still aged just twenty-three.34 One can but wonder if Francis Drake knew of his cousin’s fate and brooded on it in the months running up to the arrival of the Spanish Armada.
The long, sorry history of the Inquisition reveals countless similar examples. There were always, it turned out, others to persecute. But these others could remain dormant for decades, their heresies unapparent, until some political trigger released them for discovery. The challenge for the historian is the hugeness of the subject, something which in recent years has encouraged academic writers to concentrate on one small area or issue rather than on the whole. The intention of this book is to adopt a more overall perspective, to try and see what the significance of the whole ghastly business really was. For the Inquisition provided nothing less than the first seeds of totalitarian government, of institutionalized racial and sexual abuse.
SOONER OR LATER, one turns to numbers. Populations were much lower in the 16th and 17th centuries than today, perhaps one-fifth or one-sixth of current figures, so one needs to bear in mind that any human statistic represents a much higher percentage of the total population than it would now. Moreover, the Inquisition acted in many other ways beyond mere trials, through investigations of the purity of genealogies, preventing descendants of convicted heretics from taking up many jobs or wearing certain types of clothing, and through instilling a culture of secrecy.
The Inquisition was at its most severe in Spain during the first fifty years after its formation in 1478, when it is estimated that 50,000 people were tried, a significant proportion as relajados burnt at the stake.35 In some years, such as 1492, 2,000 people may have been ‘relaxed’ in person and another 2,000 burnt in effigy.36 Approximately 700 people were put to death in Seville alone between 1481 and 1488, and another fifty in Ciudad Real 1483–4.37 Around 10 per cent of the entire population of Toledo was tried by the Inquisition between 1486 and 1499, and 3 per cent ‘relaxed’ alive or in effigy.38 In the crown of Aragon, meanwhile, roughly 1,000 people were ‘relaxed’ between 1485 and 1530.39