Inquisition Page 8
One of the witnesses to the burning was a friar who began to incite the mob against the conversos. Two Dominican friars then came out from the monastery with a crucifix in their hands screaming, ‘Heresy, heresy!’ In what was clearly a popular version of the autos of Spain, where the Dominicans were the religious order in charge of the Inquisition, a mob of 500 people then ran through the narrow streets of the city, seizing conversos wherever they found them, killing them on the spot or dragging them half-dead to bonfires where they were burnt alive. The mayor of Lisbon tried to defend the conversos with sixty armed men, but the people turned on him and nothing could be done. The bonfires were stoked by servants and African slaves. There they glittered on the riverbank and in the Rossio, and that day 500 people were burnt.
Things worsened. The following day, a crowd of 1,000 broke down the doors of houses where they knew conversos were hiding. They pulled men, women and children out of churches, tearing images of Christ and the Virgin from their hands. The victims were dragged through the streets by their legs, crushed against walls and thrown onto the bonfires.
By Tuesday the fury had lessened, although not less than 1,900 people had died in the carnage. Manoel, who was out of the city, trying to avoid the plague, had the friars who had incited the crowd with their crucifixes burnt to death.33 Probably, his first feeling was anger at the mob taking the law into their own hands; yet what had happened was largely his fault for craving power through his marriage to Isabella and forcing the conversions.
How these actions coexist with Manoel’s gracious sensibilities is difficult to grasp. For this was also the musical ruler, the sponsor of fine architecture such as the Jeronymite monastery in Belén, a few miles down the estuary of the Tejo from Lisbon, with its haunting sense of interior space offset by finely detailed embellishments. The solidity of this vast undertaking – fifty years in the making – was such that it was one of the few buildings to withstand the great earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755, and its off-white façade still dominates the Tejo today.
The king’s blend of ruthlessness and grace can only be explained by the contradictoriness of human beings. That side of us which craves power would suggest that, though Manoel was pleased by fine art, he was roused more by the possibility of possession; this was why he had to have the widow of his predecessor’s son as wife and accepted her demand that he expel the Jews. The insecure pragmatist inside us would suggest instead that Manoel was troubled by the legitimacy of his rule after the death of so many before him in line to the throne, and felt that marriage to the widow of the rightful heir would resolve this.
Thus did the purely personal struggles and vanity of its ruler contribute towards the establishment of Portugal’s own Inquisition, which would affect everyone. Yet this tragedy brought its own irony. Manoel’s queen, Isabella, the initial trigger of so much bloodshed, died herself in childbirth in 1498, bathed in her own cataracts of blood just one year after the forced conversion of the Jews.
LISBON TODAY is one of the most unhurried cities in Europe. The clanking of the bells from trams mingles with the sound of leather on cobbles as people walk up and down the hills which give the city its shape and definition. In a bowl between the Castle of St George – once home to the inquisitorial jail – and the clubs playing fado and Brazilian music in the Bairro Alto, the old Rossio sprawls around a central fountain.
The sides of the Rossio are lined with genteel pavement cafes, shoeshine boys and newspaper stands. Strong coffee and custard pies – pasteis de Belén – are consumed. The atmosphere is at once romantic and decadent, and also shorn of the driving ambition which one can see on the streets of London and New York. It is difficult in this graceful atmosphere to imagine the fires being lit amid the riots of 1506. Yet while the violence has passed on, residues remain.
Though the details were different, the slide in Portugal towards the Inquisition had many similarities to that of its neighbour. In both societies a scapegoat was created out of an anomalous group which the society had no interest in preserving. When institutionalized persecution had begun, it was easier to promote than rein back.
As with Spain, the religious attitudes of the conversos in Lisbon were far from being as straightforward as the lynch mob believed. The fact that some of them took shelter in churches and had to be dragged away from Christian icons tells its own story, as does the fact that some Old Christians settled scores by setting the mob on their enemies, claiming them to be conversos. Portugal was in the grip of the plague, and of mass hysteria. There had already been minor riots against the conversos in 1504 in Lisbon and 1505 in Évora.34 Following events in Spain, Iberian societies knew where to turn for their escape valve in such times of crisis.
Though the riots of 1506 had nothing to do with the Inquisition per se, their mimicry of inquisitorial autos reveals that the Portuguese were well aware of what was occurring in Spain and were preparing to follow suit. Intolerance, once invented in Spain, had been easily exported; it would only be a matter of time before the Inquisition was established in Portugal as well. Once again, the target of persecution had largely been created by the very society which was to profess so much outrage at the enemy within.
Évora 1545–1548
ONCE ÁLVARO DE LEÃO had been rescued from his suicide attempt, two years of stalemate set in. Álvaro’s lawyers tried to claim that their man was insane, but the prosecutor rejected the defence. The accused had acted as a man of perfect good sense when it came to his business affairs, and when making his confession. There was nothing insane about him at all, merely something heretical.35
There was method in the stringing out of inquisitorial cases. The longer someone spent in prison, the more likely it was either that they would incriminate themselves to their fellow inmates, or that these inmates would themselves become so desperate that they would invent stories about other prisoners. The more cowardly, desperate to gain the favour of their judges, were often only too eager to betray their cellmates.
In Álvaro de Leão’s case, a prisoner came forward to claim that Leão had declared that the Messiah would come before the year 1550 and that the Old Christians would repent their maltreatment of the conversos. Álvaro was said to show his support of all those prisoners who refused to confess and to be extremely hostile towards those who were compliant with the inquisitorial process. When one prisoner said to him, ‘Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ will soon take us out of here’, Leão was said to have replied, ‘You’re the only one he’ll take’ [suggesting ‘You’re the only one who believes in him’].36
Leão denied everything at first. Then he blamed it all on his wife Lianor. It was she, he said, who had Judaized in the family home, while he had been a good Christian all along. Lianor, he said, had kept all the Mosaic practices, while he had been accused by others in Cortiços and Mogadouro simply because he was rich and disliked. Once they heard this, the inquisitors knew that they had their man. Prisoners would often begin by blaming their nearest and dearest, before finally confessing that they had been seditious heretics all along. So it was with Álvaro, who belatedly admitted attending a covert synagogue in Mogadouro and keeping the sabbath. Now, however, he claimed that he was a good Christian, and that he had made a sincere repentance and conversion to the one faith of Portugal.37
For the inquisitors, confession was everything. In theological terms it represented the sinner’s acceptance of his sin and the possibility of cleansing; in psychological terms it represented the triumph of their will over the prisoner’s and the prisoner’s acceptance of their own powerlessness. So yes, Álvaro admitted, he was a heretic who with his ideas had been subverting the nation’s identity. He was not ‘one of us’. He confessed everything that the inquisitors needed and wanted to hear.
Many of the features which become familiar in accounts of the Inquisition are apparent in the case of Álvaro de Leão. We see how family ties became nothing in an inquisitorial hearing, where a man could blame his wife to make himself seem less
guilty. The friendships made in inquisitorial cells often trailed ugly motivations in their wake, as prisoners denounced one another for crimes whose theological rationale almost certainly they did not understand. Conversations were started with the intention of drawing others out and with the hope that they could be denounced without the need for exaggeration or plain lying.
Such circumstances reveal the survival instinct in its basest form. Those who were subjected to this sort of treatment reacted in many different ways. Of course there were some who kept their counsel to the end, but many others became bent only on achieving their release at the expense of others. Something of this sordid process could not help but filter out into the society which had turned the conversos into victims.
THE DISCOVERY OF the ‘heresies’ of the Portuguese conversos had to wait for the death of Manoel I. After the riots of 1506 Manoel appears to have suffered something of a crisis of conscience. At least he kept his word: in 1512 he extended the period of grace which the conversos had from the Inquisition until 1533. However, on Manoel’s death in 1521, his successor John III showed less willingness to allow the conversos to integrate peacefully into national life and soon the first inquiries began to be made into the religious beliefs of the forced converts.38
In 1524 John III, goaded by his Spanish wife Catherine, planted a spy among the Portuguese conversos to see what faith they really practised. In Santarém, an old Moorish fortress town perched above the humid plains around the Tejo, he ordered Henrique Nunes to live and eat with the conversos of Lisbon. Though Nunes was himself a converso, he was someone in whom John III had complete confidence, since he had denounced his own brother to the authorities for Judaizing. Nunes had justified his betrayal to himself because he loved ‘God perfectly and the real perfect friend has to be a friend to friends and an enemy to enemies and have no respect for father or mother or brother but only for the truth’.39
With his conscience thus sparklingly clear, Nunes reported that the conversos of Lisbon kept the Jewish sabbath as best they could, that some of them had Jewish calendars of festivals and others acted as ritual slaughterers. They managed to keep Passover without eating yeast, baking some unleavened bread if they could and eating rice or chestnuts as an alternative. Some even married according to Jewish law and had ovens in which Passover cakes could be cooked. Their rabbi was a tailor called Navarro whose wife had been burnt in Spain. Navarro’s daughter knew countless Hebrew prayers by heart, and Navarro had an inordinately long beard which he had sworn not to cut until the Messiah came. Many other conversos had fled from Spain, or had had their parents and other close relatives burnt or reconciled there.40
His reports did not please the converso community and Nunes was murdered. He was rapidly adopted as a martyr, and miracles were said to occur at the place where he was buried. In the same year – 1524 – Jorge Temudo, a parish priest from Lisbon, produced a further report on the practices of the conversos which confirmed much of what Nunes had said and added to popular hostility.41 There was no doubt that the Portuguese conversos were stronger in their Judaizing than those in Spain, since many had come there after the expulsion from Spain in 1492 so as to be able to continue as Jews.
John III could now install his own Inquisition secure in the knowledge of full popular support. There were, in fact, precedents. In the 1480s John II had ordered some of the fleeing Spanish conversos to be tried by the bishops of Portugal for heresy,42 and some of these refugees had even been burnt in autos at the time.43 However, what Portugal lacked was the administrative structure which existed in Spain. It was this which John III really wanted to achieve.
The gathering hostility towards the conversos was such that when a severe earthquake struck the Tejo region in January 1531, the friars of Santarém declared that it was a punishment for the people of Portugal for allowing Jews to live among them. Not everyone was convinced however, and Gil Vicente, the greatest Portuguese poet and dramatist of the age, explained to the friars at a public meeting in the Franciscan monastery that an earthquake was in fact a phenomenon of nature.44
Vicente’s instructive homily had little effect. In December 1531 Pope Clement VII appointed Diogo da Silva the papal inquisitor in Portugal. However, the Portuguese conversos sent a one-eyed envoy, Duarte de Paz, to argue their case in Rome, and the bull appointing Silva was suspended the following October. But the prospect of the Inquisition was now very real.
The atmosphere in Portugal was that of gathering for the kill. As soon as news of the first bull was heard in Lamego in 1531, people started to discuss what property they wanted from the conversos. Some accused the king of being a coward, and said that he should just put the conversos to the sword and not bother with drawn-out trials. Others said that they and all their relatives were ready to act as witnesses right now, and the most moderate held that John III merely intended to burn the conversos within three years.45
Four years of diplomatic wrangles followed before the all-clear was given by Pope Paul III. The bull permitting a Portuguese tribunal to be established was issued on 23 May 1536 after considerable pressure from Emperor Charles V, ruler of Spain, who was in Rome at the time. Paul III had diluted the powers of the new tribunal by issuing a pardon to conversos the year before and ruling that no crimes prior to that date could be tried. Moreover the new Portuguese Inquisition did not have the same absolute power as its Spanish counterpart: the Pope had the power to elect three inquisitors and the king only one, there was no right of secrecy for witnesses, and the new institution did not yet have the same powers of confiscation as the Inquisition in Spain.46
The resistance of the papacy to the spread of the Inquisition emphasizes how far the new institutions in Spain and Portugal were political. The hatreds expressed by the people of Lamego on hearing of the publication of the bull revealed – as in Spain – that prejudice needed to be channelled. As in Spain, the conversos were the targets, and the papacy, try as it might, could in the end do nothing to protect the scapegoat. A dangerous ideology had created the threat within as a source of unity and power. It was not to be denied.
IN PORTUGAL, the first inquisitor-general was appointed in 1539. Cardinal Henry was John III’s brother. Born in Lisbon on 31 January 1512, it had snowed heavily on his first day of life; as this occurred very rarely in Lisbon, it was taken as a sign that the Lord would give him a clear view of things.
Henry was of medium build and very hardy. He was an excellent hunter and horseman, but also very learned. He was proficient in Latin and had studied Greek and Hebrew. He was a very serious person and spoke with asperity, telling things as he saw them. At the age of fourteen he had taken the habit, and was thus, given his character and position, ideally suited to embedding the new Inquisition in Portuguese society.47
With a basic administrative structure in place, the Inquisition soon began its work. The first edict of grace was read at Évora in 1536, nine years before Álvaro de Leão was imprisoned there. A tribunal followed in Lisbon in 1537, where the accusations flooded in.48 During the next few years courts sprang up all over the country, in places such as Tomar – still quite near Lisbon – and Coimbra, Lamego and Porto, all further to the north.49
These early years in Portugal were not as terrible as the first years had been in Spain. The dependence on Rome meant that the papal nuncio often intervened to secure a more lenient punishment, and there were comparatively few burnings. The first auto occurred in Lisbon in 1540, but in Coimbra one did not occur until 1567.50 The moderating influence of the papacy was not what John III wanted, and his ambassadors spent much of the 1540s pressing Pope Paul III to free the Inquisition from the limitations he had placed on it with the first bull. Eventually, on 16 July 1547, after John III had threatened a break with Rome, Pope Paul III succumbed, but even this was on condition that conversos would be able to leave Portugal freely for a whole year.
This condition was of course anathema to John III, who rejected it out of hand. Eventually he accepted papal conditions that
no goods could be confiscated during the first ten years after the 1547 bull and that there should be no sentencing of people to burn in the first year.51 On 10 July 1548, just before the end of the year’s grace, a pardon was issued to the conversos in the jails of the Inquisition and 1,800 people were released from prison; at the same time, the tribunals of Lamego, Porto and Tomar were abolished and the institution was centralized.52 This was perhaps an attempt by John III to show the papacy that he had kept his side of the bargain, and in the event the power to confiscate goods would only be granted in 1579, when John’s brother Henry, the inquisitor-general, was the elderly king.53
One of the beneficiaries of these negotiations was Álvaro de Leão, who would probably have been condemned to the stake at an earlier period in Spain. In Évora, however, he was merely sentenced to abjure (renounce) his errors, and released at the time of this general pardon of 1548.54 Álvaro had more sense than to remain in a place where he had enemies, and migrated to the great market town of Medina del Campo in Castile. Here traders gathered from all over Europe for the annual fairs, where most of the goods from Spain and the New World changed hands.55
Medina del Campo sits on one of the flattest parts of the Castilian plain. Here, in the shadow of the foreboding castle of La Mota, Álvaro would meet other members of his family. His niece Francisca, the daughter of his sister Catalina, had married Francisco Rodríguez de Matos, who traded regularly at the fairs.56 The couple had a large family and also moved to Medina del Campo, in the 1570s. It was here that the branches of the Leão and Carvajal families gathered. As we have seen, Álvaro’s wife was a Carvajal, and his niece Francisca was the daughter of another Carvajal; it was also here that the families would meet Francisca’s brother Luis, now doing great things for the Spanish in Mexico.