Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition: A History

by Rafael Sabatini

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[FREY TOMÁS DE TORQUEMADA]	Frontispiece
From a Painting attributed to Miguel Zittoz.
FACING PAGE
[ST. PETER THE MARTYR PREACHING]	32
From the Painting by Berruguete.
[ST. DOMINIC]	48
From the Painting in the Prado Gallery, attributed to Miguel Zittoz.
[POPE INNOCENT III. AND ST. DOMINIC]	64
From a Fresco in the Church of the Sacro Speco, Subiaco.
[ISABELLA THE CATHOLIC]	80
From a Painting in the Prado Gallery, attributed to Miguel Zittoz.
[SEVILLE]	96
From Colmenar’s “Délices d’Espagne.”
[FERDINAND OF ARAGON AND THE INFANTE DON JUAN]	128
From the Painting in the Prado Gallery attributed to Miguel Zittoz.
[TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST PRINTED EDITION OF THE “INSTRUCTIONS” OF TORQUEMADA]	144
[TOLEDO]	176
From Colmenar’s “Délices d’Espagne.”
[PROCESSION TO AUTO DE FÉ]	208
From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis.”
[THE AUTO DE FÉ]	240
From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis.”
[BANNER OF THE INQUISITION]	272
From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis.”
[SANBENITO OF PENITENT ADMITTED TO RECONCILIATION]	304
From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis.”
[SANBENITO OF PENITENT RELAPSED]	336
From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis.”
[SANBENITO OF IMPENITENT]	368
From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis.”
[SPAIN AND PORTUGAL]	384
From Colmenar’s “Délices d’Espagne.”

TORQUEMADA

CHAPTER I
EARLY PERSECUTIONS

In an endeavour to trace the Inquisition to its source it is not necessary to go as far back into antiquity as went Paramo; nor yet is it possible to agree with him that God Himself was the first inquisitor, that the first “Act of Faith” was executed upon Adam and Eve, and that their expulsion from Eden is a proper precedent for the confiscation of the property of heretics.[1]

Nevertheless, it is necessary to go very far back indeed; for it is in the very dawn of Christianity that the beginnings of this organization are to be discovered.

There is no more lamentable lesson to be culled from history than that contained in her inability to furnish a single instance of a religion accepted with unquestioning sincerity and fervour which did not, out of those very qualities, beget intolerance. It would seem that only when a faith has been diluted by certain general elements of doubt, that only when a certain degree of indifference has crept into the observance of a prevailing cult, does it become possible for the members of that cult to bear themselves complacently towards the members of another. Until this comes to pass, intolerance is the very breath of religion, and—when the power is present—this intolerance never fails to express itself in persecution.

Deplorable as this is in all religions, in none is it so utterly anomalous as in Christianity, which is established upon tenets of charity, patience, and forbearance, and which has for cardinal guidance its Founder’s sublime admonition—“Love one another!”

From the earliest days of its history, persecution has unfailingly signalized the spread of Christianity, until to the thoughtful observer Christianity must afford the grimmest, the saddest—indeed, the most tragic—of all the paradoxes that go to make up the history of civilized man.

Its benign gospel of love has been thundered forth in malign hatred; its divine lesson of patience and forbearance has been taught in murderous impatience and bloodthirsty intolerance; its mild tenets of mercy and compassion have been ferociously expounded with fire and sword and rack; its precepts of humility have been inculcated with a pride and arrogance as harsh as any that the world has known.

It is impossible to deny that at almost any time in the history of Christianity the enlightened pagan of the second century would have been justified of his stinging gibe—“Behold how these Christians love one another!”

It may even be said of the earliest Christians that it was largely through their own intolerance of the opinions and beliefs of others that they brought upon themselves the persecutions to which through three centuries they were intermittently subjected. Certain it is that they were the first to disturb the toleration which in polytheistic Rome was accorded to all religions. They might have pursued their cult unmolested so long as they accorded the same liberty to others. But by the vehemence with which they denounced false all creeds but their own, they offended the zealous worshippers of other gods, and so disturbed the peace of the community; by denying obedience to the state in which they dwelt, by refusing to bear arms for the Empire on the plea of “Nolo militare; militia mea est ad Dominum!” they provoked the resentment of the law. When driven, by the beginnings of persecution, to assemble and celebrate their rites in secret, this very secrecy became the cause of further and sharper proceedings against them. Their mysteriousness evoked suspicion, and surmise sprang up to explain it. Very soon there was levelled against them the charge from which hardly any cult that celebrates in secret has been exempt. It was put abroad that they practised abominations, and that they engaged in the ritual murder of infants. Public opinion, ever credulous where evil is the subject, was still further inflamed against them, and fresh and greater disorders were the result. Thus they came to be denounced for atheism, insubordination, and subversion of public order.

The severity dealt out to them by a state hitherto indifferent—through the agnosticism prevalent in the ruling classes—to the religious opinions of its citizens, was dictated by the desire to suppress an element that had become socially perturbative, rather than by any vindictiveness or intolerance towards this new cult out of Syria.

Under Claudius we see the Nazarenes expelled from Rome as disturbers of the public peace; under Nero and Domitian we see them, denounced as hostes publici, suffering their first great persecution. But that persecution on purely religious grounds was repugnant to the Roman is shown by the conduct of Nerva, who forbade delations and oppressions on the score of belief, and recalled the Christians who had been banished. His successor, the just and wise Trajan, provoked perhaps by the fierce insurrection of the Jews which occurred in his reign, moved against the Nazarenes at first, but later on afforded them complete toleration. Similarly were they unmolested by the accomplished Adrian, who, indeed, so far approved of their creed as to have notions of including Christ in the Roman Pantheon; and they were left in peace by his successor Antoninus, notwithstanding that the last was so attached to the faith of his country and to the service of the gods as to have earned for himself the surname of Pius.

With the accession of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was rendered hostile to the new doctrine not only by his own stoical convictions, but also because politically he viewed the Christians with disfavour, came the next great persecution; and persecution was their portion thereafter for some sixty years, under four reigns, until the accession of Alexander Severus in the third decade of the third century of the Christian era.

Alexander’s mother, Julia Mannea, is believed to have been instructed in the new doctrine by Origen, the Alexandrian, although her conversion to Christianity and her ideas upon it do not appear to be greatly in advance of those of Adrian, for she is said to have included an image of Christ in the group of beneficent deities set up in her lararium.[2]

For twenty years the Christians now knew peace and enjoyed the fullest liberty. Upon that followed a period of severe oppression, initiated by Decius, continued by Valerian and Aurelian, and reaching something of a climax under Diocletian, in the dawn of the fourth century, when the Christians endured the cruellest and most ferocious of all these persecutions. But the end of their sufferings was at hand, and with the accession of Constantine in 312 a new era began for Christianity. Constantine, upheld by the Christians as their saviour, in admitting the inevitable predominance which the new religion had obtained in rather less than three hundred years, was compelled to recognize the rights of its votaries not only to existence but to authority.

Legends surround the history of this emperor. The most popular relates how, when he was marching against Maxentius, his rival for the throne, desponding in the consciousness of his own inferior force, there appeared at sunset a fiery cross in the heavens with the inscription ΕΝ ΤΟΓΤΩ ΝΙΚΑ—IN THIS SIGN YOU CONQUER. And it is claimed that as a consequence of this portent, whose injunction he obeyed, he sought instruction in Christianity, was baptized and made public avowal of that faith. Others maintain that he was reared in Christianity by his mother, St. Helena—she who made an expedition to the Holy Land to recover the true cross, and who is said to have built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; whilst others still assert that Constantine did not receive baptism until at the point of death, and that throughout his life, whilst undoubtedly favouring Christians, he continued in the pagan religion in which he had been educated by his father.

The truth probably lies midway. During the early years of his reign Constantine not only pursued a middle course, according religious liberty to all sects, but, himself, whilst leaning strongly towards Christianity, retained his imperial dignity of High-priest of the polytheistic Roman cult, and the title “Pontifex Maximus,” which later—together with so much else of pagan origin—was appropriated by the Christians and bestowed upon their chief bishop. But in 313-14 he refused to celebrate the ludi seculares, and in 330 he issued an edict forbidding temple-worship, whilst the Christian Council of Nicæa, in 325, was held undoubtedly under his auspices.

From the very moment that the new religion found itself recognized and invested not only with civil rights but actually with power, from the very moment that the Christian could rear his head and go openly and unafraid abroad, from that very moment do we find him engaging in persecutions against the votaries of other cults—against pagan, Jew, and heretic. For although Christianity was but in the beginning of the fourth century of its existence, not only had it spread irresistibly and mightily in spite of the repressive measures against it, but it was already beginning to know dismemberment and divisions in its own body. Indeed, it has been computed that the number of schisms in the fourth century amounted to no less than ninety.

Of these the most famous is that of Arius, a priest of Alexandria, who denied that Christ was God Incarnate, accounting Him no more than divinely inspired, the first and the highest of the sons of men. Although already denounced by the Synod that met at Alexandria in 321, so great had been the spread of this doctrine that the Œcumenical Council of Nicæa was convoked especially to deal with it. It was then condemned as heretical, and the Articles of Faith were defined and set down in the Nicene Creed, which is recited to this day.

Other famous heresies were the Manichæan, the Gnostic, the Adamite, the Severist, and the Donatist; and to these were soon to be added, amongst others, the Pelagian and the Priscilliantist.

Perhaps the Manichæans’ chief claim to celebrity lies in the fact that the great St. Augustine of Tagaste, when he abandoned the disorders of his youth, entered Christianity through this sect, which professed a form of it vitiated by Sun-worship and Buddhism.

The other heresies—with the exception of the Pelagian—were, in the main, equally fantastic. The Gnostic heresy, with its many subdivisions, was made up of mysticism and magic, and founded upon Zoroastrian notions of dualism, of the two powers of good and evil, light and darkness. To the power of evil it attributed all creation save man, whose soul was accounted of divine substance. The Adamites claimed to be in the state of original innocency of Adam before the fall; they demanded purity in their followers, rejected marriage, which they urged could never have come into existence but for sin, and they expelled from their Church all sinners against their tenets, even as Adam and Eve had been expelled from Eden. The Severists denied the resurrection of the flesh, would not accept the acts of the apostles, and carried purity to fantastic lengths. The Soldiers of Florinus denied the Last Judgment, and held it as an undeniable truth that the resurrection of the flesh lay entirely in reproduction.

The Pelagians were the followers of Pelagius, a British monk who settled in Rome towards the year 400, and his heresy at least was founded upon rational grounds. He denied the doctrine of original sin, maintained that every human being was born in a state of innocency, and that his perseverance in virtue depended upon himself. He found numerous followers, and for twenty years the conflict raged between Pelagians and the Church, until Pope Zosimus declared against them and banished Pelagius from Rome.

From Constantine onwards Christianity steadily maintains her ascendancy, and her earliest assertion of her power is to bare the sword of persecution, oblivious of the lofty protests against it which she, herself, had uttered, the broad and noble advocacy of tolerance which she had urged in the days of her own affliction. We find Optatus urging the massacre of the Donatists—who claimed that theirs was the true Church—and Constantine threatening with the stake any Jew who should affront a Christian and any Christian who should become a Jew. We find him demolishing the churches of the Arians and Donatists, banishing their priests and forbidding under pain of death the propagation of their doctrines.

The power of Christianity suffered one slight check thereafter, under the tolerant rule of Julian the Apostate, who reopened the pagan temples and restored the cult of the old gods; but it rose again to be finally and firmly established under Theodosius in 380.

Now we see the pagan temples not only closed, but razed to the ground, the images broken and swept away, their worship, and even private sacrifice, forbidden under pain of death. From Libanius we may gather something of the desolation which this spread among the pagan peasant-folk. Residing at a distance from the great centres where doctrines were being expounded, they found themselves bereft of the old gods and without knowledge of the new. Their plight is a far more pathetic one than that of the Arians, Manichæans, Donatists, and all other heretics against whom there was a similar enactment.

It is now, at this early date, that for the first time we come across the title “Inquisitor of the Faith,” in the first law[3] promulgated to render death the penalty of heresy. It is now that we find the great Augustine of Tagaste—the mightiest genius that the Church has brought forth—denouncing religious liberty with the question, “Quid est enim pejor, mors animæ quam libertas erroris?”[4] and strenuously urging the death of heretics on the ground that it is a merciful measure, since it must result in the saving of others from the damnation consequent upon their being led into error. Similarly he applauded those decrees of death against any one pursuing the polytheism that but a few generations earlier had been the official religion of the Roman Empire.

It was Augustine—of whom it has been truly said that “no man since the days of the Apostles has infused into the Church a larger measure of his spirit”—in his enormous fervour, and with the overwhelming arguments inspired by his stupendous intellect, who laid down the principles that governed persecution, and were cited in justification of it for nearly 1,500 years after his day. “He was,” says Lecky, “the most staunch and enthusiastic defender of all those doctrines that grow out of the habits of mind that lead to persecution.”[5]

So far, however much persecution may have been inspired by the Church, its actual execution had rested entirely and solely with the civil authorities; and this aloofness, indeed, is urged upon the clergy by St. Augustine. But already before the close of the fourth century we find ecclesiastics themselves directly engaged in causing the death of heretics.

Priscillian, a Spanish theologian, was led by St. Paul’s “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?” to seek to render himself by purity a worthy dwelling. He preached from that text a doctrine of stern asceticism, and forbade the marriage of the clergy. This at the time was optional,[6] and by proclaiming it to be Christ’s law he laid himself open to a charge of heresy. He was accused of magic and licentiousness, excommunicated in 380 and burnt alive, together with several of his companions, by order of two Christian bishops. He has been described as the first martyr burnt by a Spanish Inquisition.[7]

It must be added that the deed excited the profoundest indignation on the part of the clergy against those bishops who had been responsible for it, and St. Martin of Tours hotly denounced the act. But this indignation was not provoked by the fact that men had suffered death for heresy, but by the circumstance that ecclesiastics had procured the execution. For it was part of the pure teaching of the early Church that under no circumstances—not as judge, soldier, or executioner—should a Christian render himself the instrument of the death of a fellow-creature; and it was partly through their rigid obedience to this precept that the Christians had first drawn attention to themselves and aroused the resentment of the Roman government, as we have seen. Now, whilst at no time after the Church’s accession to power was this teaching observed with any degree of strictness, yet there were limits to the extent to which it might be neglected, and that limit, it was considered, had been exceeded by those prelates responsible for the death of the Priscilliantists.

The point, apparently trivial at present, has been insisted upon here, in view of the important and curious part which it was destined to play in the procedure of the Inquisition.

The Church had now come to identify herself with the State. She had strengthened her organizations; she had permeated the State with her influences, until it may almost be said that the State had lost its capacity for independent existence, and had become her instrument. The civil laws were based upon her spiritual laws; the standard of morality was founded upon her doctrines; the development of the arts—of painting, sculpture, literature, and music—became such as was best adapted for her service, and, cramped thereby into confines far too narrow, was partly arrested for a time; sciences and crafts were stimulated only by her needs and curbed by her principles; the very recreation of the people was governed by her spirit.

And yet, whilst influencing the State in its every ramification so profoundly that State and Church appeared welded into one disintegrable whole, she kept herself independent, unfettered, and autonomous. So that when that great Empire of the West upon which she had seemed to lean was laid in ruins by the invading barbarians, she continued upright, unshaken by that tremendous cataclysm. She remained to conquer the barbarian far more subtly and completely than he had conquered. Her conquest lay in bringing him to look upon her as the natural inheritor of fallen Rome. Soon she entered upon that splendid heritage, claiming for her own the world-supremacy that Rome had boasted, and assuming dominion over the new nations that were building upon the ruins of the shattered empire.

CHAPTER II
THE INQUISITION CANONICALLY ESTABLISHED

For some seven centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire persecutions for heresy were very rare and very slight. This, however, cannot be attributed to mercy. Although some of the old heresies survived, yet they were so sapped of their vitality that they were no longer openly flaunted in defiance of the mother-Church, but were practised in such obscurity as, in the main, to escape observation.

Fresh schisms, on the other hand, do not appear to have sprung up during that spell. Largely this would be due to the clear formulation of the Catholic theology by the various œcumenical councils held in the years that followed upon the Christian emancipation, and by the intellectual breadth of these doctrines, which were entirely adequate and all-sufficient to the intellectual capacity of the time. But this state of things could only have endured at the cost of arresting man’s intellectual progress. A certain restraint and curb undoubtedly was exerted, but definitely to check the imaginative and reasoning faculties of man has never been within the power of any creed, and never can be. It was in vain that the Church sought to coerce thought and to stifle the learning that struck at her very foundations and discovered the error of the cosmic and historical conceptions upon which her theology was based; in vain that she entrenched herself within her doctrines, and adhered rigidly to the form she had adopted.

Upon this uncompromising rigidity of the Catholic Church much censure has been poured. The present aim is a cold survey of certain features of history, and in such a task all polemical matters should be avoided. Yet it may be permissible to say a word here to elucidate rather than to defend an attitude that has been unduly abused.

It is admitted that the unyielding policy of the Church was one that militated seriously against intellectual evolution, and on that account it is to be deplored. But let the unbiassed mind consider for a moment the alternative. The admission of error is the commencement of disruption. Where one error is admitted, a thread is drawn from a weft whose threads are interdependent for the stability of the whole. Who has yielded once has set up a precedent that will be urged against him to make him yield again, and yet again, until he shall have yielded all, and, having nothing left, must suffer an imperceptible effacement.

When all is considered, there is an indisputable dignity in the attitude of a Church which, claiming that what she teaches rests not upon human knowledge but upon divine inspiration, refuses to cede one jot of her doctrines to man’s discoveries; holding—and incontestably, so long as the premise is admitted—that however certain may appear the truths which human subtlety has disclosed, however false may appear the doctrines to which she owes her being, it still remains that the former are human and the latter divine of origin. Between the two she proudly holds that there is no disputing; that error possible to man is impossible to divinity; that man’s perception of error in the divine tenets of the Church is no more than the manifestation of his own liability to err.

The Church of Rome realized that either she must be entirely, or entirely cease to be. And it is matter for unprejudiced consideration whether the spectacle of her immobility is not more dignified than would have been that of her yielding up her divinities one by one to the expanding humanities, and thus gradually undergoing a course of dismemberment which must in the end remove her last claim to existence. In the attitude she assumed she remained the absolute mistress of her votaries; had she departed from it she must have become their abject servant.

Dr. Rule invites his readers to notice attentively that “no Church but that of Rome ever had an Inquisition.”[8] But he neglects to carry the consideration to its logical conclusion, and to add that in no Christian Church but that of Rome could an Inquisition be possible. For it would be impossible to offend heretically against any Church that accommodates itself to new habits of thought in a measure as these occur, and gives way step by step before the onslaught of learning.[9]

The Church of Rome presented her immutable formularies, her unchangeable doctrines to the world. “This,” she announced, “is my teaching. By this I hold. This you must accept without reservations, in its entirety, or you are no child of mine.”

With that there could be no cavil. Had she but added the admission of man’s liberty to accept or reject her teaching, had she but left man free to confess or not her doctrines as his conscience and intelligence directed, all would have been well. Unfortunately she accounted it her duty to go further; she used coercion and compulsion to such an extent that she imbued her children with the spirit of the eighteenth-century Jacobin, exclaiming, “Be my brother, or I kill you!”

Unable by intellectual means to stem the intellectual secession from her ranks, she had recourse to physical measures, and revived the fiercely coercive methods of the first centuries.

A serious heretical outbreak had been occurring in Southern France. There, it would seem, all the schisms that had disturbed the Church since her foundation were gathered together—Arians, Manichæans, and Gnostics—to which were added certain more recent sects, such as the Cathars, the Waldenses, and the Boni Homines, or Good People.

These new-comers deserve a word of explanation.

The Cathars, like the Gnostics, were dualists; indeed, their creed was little more than a development of Gnosticism. They believed that the earth was the only hell or purgatory, that it was given over to the power of the devil, and that human bodies were no more than the prisons of the angel spirits that fell with Lucifer. In heaven their celestial bodies still awaited them, but they could not resume these until they had worked out their expiation. To accomplish this a man must die reconciled with God; failing that, another earthly existence awaited him in the body of man or beast, according to his deserts. It will be seen that, saving for abundant Christian elements introduced into this faith, it was little more than a revival of metempsychosis, the oldest and most fascinating of intelligent beliefs.

The Waldenses, or Vaudois, with whom were allied the Good People, were the earliest Protestants, as we understand the term. They claimed for every man the right to interpret the Bible and to celebrate the sacraments of the Church without the need of being in holy orders. Further, they denied that the Roman Church was the Church of Christ.

These sects were known collectively as the Albigenses, so called because the Council of Lombers, convoked to pronounce their condemnation, had been held in the Diocese of Albi in 1165.

Photo by Anderson.

ST. PETER THE MARTYR PREACHING.
From the Painting by Berruguete.

Pope Innocent III made an attempt to convert them; with this aim in view he sent two monks, Peter de Castelnau and one Rodolfe, to restore order amongst them and induce them to return to submission. But when they murdered one of his legates the Holy Father had recourse to those other less legitimate measures of combating liberty of conscience. He ordered the King of France, the nobles and clergy of the kingdom, to assume the crusader’s cross, and to proceed to the extirpation of the Albigensian heretics, whom he described as a worse danger to Christendom than the Saracens; and he armed them for the fray with the same spiritual weapons that John VIII had bestowed upon those who went to war in Palestine in the ninth century. Upon all who might die in the service of the Church he pronounced a plenary indulgence.

It is not the present aim to follow the history of the horrible strife that ensued—the massacres, pillages, burnings that took place in the course of the war between the Albigenses under Raymond of Toulouse and the Crusaders under Simon de Montfort. For over twenty years did that war drag on, and in the course of it the original grounds of the quarrel were forgotten; it passed into a struggle for supremacy between North and South, and thus, properly speaking, out of the history of the Inquisition.[10]

Now, for all that the title “Inquisitor of the Faith” was first bestowed by the Theodosian Code, and for all that persecutions against heretics and others had been afoot since an even earlier date than that of Theodosius, Innocent III is to be considered the founder of the Holy Inquisition as an integral part of the Church. For it is under his jurisdiction that the faculty of persecuting heretics, which hitherto had belonged entirely to the secular arm, is now conferred upon the clergy. He dispatched two Cistercian monks as inquisitors into France and Spain, to engage in the work of extirpating heretics; and he strictly enjoined all princes, nobles and prelates to afford every assistance to these emissaries, and to further them in every way in the work they were sent to do.[11]

Himself, personally, Pope Innocent directed his attention to the Paterini—a sect which rebelled against the celibacy imposed upon the clergy—who were gaining ground in Italy. He invoked the secular arm to assist him in their apprehension, imprisonment, and banishment, in seizing their possessions, which were confiscated, and in razing their houses to the ground.

In 1209 he assembled a council at Avignon, under the presidency of his legates, wherein by his directions it was ordained that every bishop should select such of his subjects, counts, castellans, and knights as might seem to him proper, and swear them to undertake the extermination of all excommunicated heretics.

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“And to the end that the bishop may be the better enabled to purge his diocese of heretical pravity, let him swear one priest and two, three or more laymen of good repute in every parish to report to the bishop himself, and to the governors of cities or to the lords and bailiffs of places, the existence of any heretics or abettors of heresy wherever found, to the end that these may be punished according to the canonical and legal dispensations, in all cases suffering forfeiture of property. And should the said governors and others be negligent or reluctant in the execution of this divine service, let their persons be severally excommunicated, and their territories placed under the interdict of the Church.”[12]

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In the year 1215 Pope Innocent held a further council at the Lateran in which he extended the field of ecclesiastical activity in persecution. He issued an injunction to all rulers, “as they desired to be esteemed faithful, to swear a public oath that they would labour zealously to exterminate from their dominions all those who were denounced as heretics by the Church.”[13]

This injunction was backed by a bull which menaced with excommunication and forfeiture of jurisdiction any prince who should fail to extirpate heretics from his dominions—so that at one stroke the Pope asserted his power to an extent that denied liberty of conscience to people and independence to princes.

And meanwhile every heretic against the Holy Catholic and Orthodox Faith, as accepted by the fathers assembled in the Church of St. John, was excommunicated, and there followed these provisions:

“When condemned, the secular powers, or their representatives, being present, they shall be delivered to these for punishment, the clerics being previously degraded from their orders. The property of laymen shall be confiscated; that of clerics bestowed upon their churches. Persons marked with suspicion only shall, unless they can clear themselves, be smitten with the sword of anathema, and shunned by all. If they persist for a year in excommunication, they shall be condemned as heretics.

“Secular powers must be moved or led, or at need compelled by ecclesiastical censure, to make public oath for the defence of the faith, as they themselves desire to be esteemed faithful, undertaking to labour with all their power to extirpate from their dominions those whom the Church shall denounce as heretics.”[14]

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The excommunication that was to wait upon disobedience was no empty threat, nor yet was it concerned alone with the spiritual part of man. The Pope’s anathema imposed the same penalties upon those against whom it was launched as the Druid’s curse had imposed of old.[15]

Persons under the ban of the Church might hold no office, nor claim any of the ordinary rights of citizenship, or, indeed, of existence. In sickness or distress none might show them charity under pain of incurring the same curse, nor after death should their bodies be given Christian burial.

By these provisions and injunctions the Inquisition may be said to have entered upon the second stage of its evolution, and to have assumed a strictly ecclesiastical character—in short, to be canonically established.

It was Pope Innocent III who placed in the hands of the Church this terrible weapon of persecution, and who, by the awful severity of his own attitude towards liberty of conscience, of thought, and of expression, afforded to fanaticism and religious intolerance an example that was to be their merciless guide through centuries to come.

CHAPTER III
THE ORDER OF ST. DOMINIC

“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow Me!”

The contrast between the condition thus enjoined by the Founder of Christianity and the worldly position occupied by His Vicar on earth was now fast approaching the climax which was to become absolute with the era of the Renaissance.

From the simple folk foregathering in Rome in the middle of the first century to discuss and to guide one another in the practice of the new doctrine of love and humility, conveyed by word of mouth from the East, in all its pristine simplicity, unburdened as yet by theological complexities, unfettered by formularies, it is a far cry indeed to the proud curial Christians of the Rome of Pope Innocent III.

The successor of Peter, the poor fisherman of Galilee, was enthroned with a splendour outrivalling that of any other earthly potentate. Temporally he was lord of considerable dominions; spiritually he claimed empire over the entire Christian world, and maintained his supremacy with the thunderbolts of anathema which he had forged himself. His glittering court was thronged with rustling, scarlet prelates, with patricians in cloth of gold and silver, captains in steel, mincing fops and stately senators. He was arrayed in garments woven of the very finest fleece, crowned with the triple diadem of white peacock feathers within three flaming circlets of precious stones. On his coronation kings served him upon the knee at table; throughout his reign princes and patricians were his lackeys.

From the steps of the Lateran on the day of his accession he would fling a handful of money to the Roman crowd, exclaiming: “Gold and silver are not for me. What I have I give to thee.”

Yet his riches were vast, their sources almost inexhaustible. The luxury in which he lived and moved was the most sumptuous that wealth could command and art and artifice produce.

Nor was this ecclesiastical magnificence confined to Rome and the Papal Court. Gradually it had come to permeate the entire body clerical until it had affected even the monastic orders. From the simplicity of their beginnings these orders had developed into baronial institutions. The fathers presided in noble abbeys over wide tracts of arable and vineyard which they owned and cultivated, and over rural districts and parishes, which they governed and taxed as feudal lords rather than served as priests.

So arrogant and aristocratic was become the spirit of a clergy whose mission was to preach the sublimest and most ideal of democratic doctrines, that the Church seemed no longer within the reach of plebeian and peasant-folk. It was fast becoming an institution of patricians for patricians.

How long this state of things might have endured, what results might have attended its endurance, it were perhaps idle to speculate. That a change was wrought, that provision was made for the lowly and the poor, is due to the advent of two men as similar in much as in much else they were dissimilar. They met in Rome at the foot of the pontifical throne.

Either might have been the founder of a religion had he not found already in the world an ideal religion which he could serve. Both were men born into easy circumstances of life; one, Francesco Bernardone, was the son of a wealthy merchant of Assisi; the other, Domingo de Guzman, of Calahorra, was a nobleman of Spain.

To-day the Church includes them in her Calendar as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic. They are the resplendent twain whom Dante beheld together in his “Paradise”:

“L’un fu tutto serafico in ardore,
L’altro per sapienza in terra fue
Di cherubica luce un splendore.”[16]

St. Francis—through the sweetness and tenderness that emanated from his poetic, mystic nature, the most lovable of all the saints—came from his native Assisi to implore the Father of Fathers to permit him to band together into an order the barefoot companions he had already gained, to the end that they should practise Christ’s injunction of poverty and self-abnegation, and minister to the afflicted.

St. Dominic—and our concern is more with him—had been chosen for his eloquence and learning to accompany the Bishop of Osma upon an inquisitorial journey into Southern France. There he had witnessed the fierce carnage that was toward. He had preached to the heretics at Toulouse, and the burning, passionate eloquence of his oratory had made converts of many of those who were prepared to resist the cruel arguments of fire and steel.

In the ardour of his zeal he had flung aside his rank and the ease and dignity it afforded him. Like St. Francis he went barefoot, embracing poverty and self-denial; yet, less mystical, less tender, entirely practical where the propagation of the Faith was concerned, he had exulted in the bloody victories that Simon de Montfort had won over the heretical Albigenses.

Yet, if he gloried in the end achieved—conceiving it the supremest of all human ends—he must have been touched with regret for the means employed.

He has been termed a fierce and cruel zealot. But ferocity and cruelty do not go hand in hand with such lowly humility as undoubtedly was his. And the very object of his mission to Rome permits, if it does not point to, a very different conclusion. He went deploring the bloodshed he had witnessed, however greatly he may have prized the fruits of it. Inspired by the success that had attended his oratory, he aimed at providing other and gentler means by which in the first instance to seek the attainment of the same ends. He went to implore Pope Innocent’s leave to found an order of preachers who in poverty and lowliness should go abroad to win back to the Roman fold the sheep that had strayed into heretical pastures.

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Pope Innocent considered the simultaneous requests of both these men—requests which, springing from the same passionate fervour in both, yet came by different, if similar, channels to a sort of unity in the end.

He perceived the services which such men as these might render to the Church, endowed as they were with the magnetic power of creating followings, of inflaming hearts, and replenishing the flickering lamp of public zeal.

He detected no heresy, no irony, in the cult of pauperdom which they would go forth to preach under the sanction and charter of the luxurious, aristocratic, curial court.

But there existed another obstacle to his granting them their prayers. So numerous already were the monastic orders that a Council of the Lateran had decreed that no more should be created. Favouring these petitioners, however, he was applying himself to the surmounting of the difficulty when death took him.

Thus the burden of solving this problem was thrust upon his successor, Honorius III. And it is said that the new pope was spurred to discover a solution by a dream—which has been made the subject of a fresco by Bennozzo Gozzoli—in which he beheld this saintly pair supporting with their hands the tottering Lateran.

Since he could not establish them and their followers as monastic fathers, he had recourse to creating brotherhoods for them. These brotherhoods, he affiliated to the order of St. Augustine, the Dominicans as friars-preachers (fratres predicatores) and the Franciscans as friars-minors (fratres minores).

Thus were launched these two mendicant orders, which by the enormous following they were so soon to win, were destined to become one of the greatest means of power of the Roman Church.

In the lifetime of their founders the fundamental laws of poverty were observed in all their intended purity. But soon thereafter, being men under their rough habits, and susceptible to the ambition that is man’s, upon the acquisition of power followed the acquisition of wealth. Their founders had accomplished a renascence of the original spirit of Christianity. But soon this began to undergo modification, and to respond to worldly influences, until the history of the friars-mendicant repeats and mirrors the history of Christianity itself. In a measure as they spread through Christendom, so they acquired convents, lands, and property as they went. The personal poverty of each brother remained, it is true; they still went abroad barefoot and coarsely garbed, “without staff, or bag, or bread, or money,” as their rule decreed. Individually they kept the vow of privation; but considered collectively their poverty “remained outside the convent gate,” as Gregorovius says, echoing what Dante had said before him.[17]

For the service of the Church the friars-mendicant became a splendid army, and an army, moreover, whose maintenance made no draught upon the pontifical treasury, since, by virtue of their mendicancy, the orders were entirely self-supporting. And whilst both orders, magnificently organized, grew extremely powerful, the Dominicans became formidable through their control of that Inquisition whose early stirrings had inspired St. Dominic to his task.

His aim had been to found a preaching order whose special mission should be the overthrow of heresy wherever found. The brethren were to combat it, employing their eloquence on the one hand to induce the heretic to abjure his error, on the other to inflame the faithful against him, so that terror should accomplish what might not be possible to persuasion.

It may be that this mission which they had made specially their own, as their founder ordained, peculiarly fitted the Dominicans to assume the government of an ecclesiastical establishment whose aim was identical. It was this order of St. Dominic that was to erect the grim edifice of the Holy Office, and to develop and assume entire control of the terrible machinery of the Inquisition. Their persuasion was to be the ghastly persuasion of the rack; their eloquence was to be the burning eloquence of the tongues of material flame that should lick their agonizing victims out of existence. And all for the love of Christ!

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Although it might be difficult to show—as has been attempted—that Domingo de Guzman himself was actually the first ordained Inquisitor, nevertheless as early as 1224, within three years of his death, the Inquisition in Italy and elsewhere was already entirely in the hands of the Dominicans. This is shown by a constitution promulgated at Padua in February of that year by the Emperor Frederic II. It contains the following announcement:

“Be it known to all that we have received under our special protection the preaching friars of the order of preachers, sent into our Empire on business of the Faith against heretics, and likewise all who may lend them assistance—as much in going as in abiding and returning—save such as are already prescribed; and it is our wish that all should give them favour and assistance; wherefore we order our subjects to receive benignly any of the said friars whenever and wherever they may arrive, keeping them secure from the enmity of heretics, assisting them in every way to accomplish their ministry regarding the business of the Faith.... And we do not doubt that you will render homage to God and our Empire by collaborating with the said friars to deliver our Empire from the new and unusual infamy of heretical pravity.”[18]

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The constitution decreed that heretics when so condemned by the Church and delivered over to the secular arm should be condignly punished; that if any, through the fear of death, should desire to return to the faith, he should receive the penance that might be imposed canonically and be imprisoned for life; that if in any part of the Empire heretics should be discovered by the inquisitors or by other zealous Catholics, the civil powers should be under the obligation of effecting their arrest at the request of the said inquisitors or other Catholics, and of holding them in safe custody until excommunicated by the Church, when they should be burnt; that the same punishment should be suffered by fautores—i.e. those guilty of concealing or defending heretics; that fugitives be sought for, and that converts from the same heresy be employed to discover them.

Odious as was this last enactment, there was yet worse contained in the Emperor’s constitution. It was decreed that “the sin of lèse-Majesté divine being, as it is, greater than that of lèse-Majesté humaine, and God being the avenger of the sins of the fathers on the children, to the end that these may not imitate the sins of those, the descendants of heretics to the second generation shall be deemed incapable of honours or of holding any public office—excepting the innocent children who shall denounce the iniquity of their fathers.”[19]

The barbarous provision here given in italics calls for no comment.

Within four years of issuing that harsh proclamation against all rebels from the sway of Rome, Frederic himself, in rebellion against the pontiff’s temporal sway, was to feel the lash of excommunication. But with that we have no concern. After his reconciliation with the Pope he renewed the constitution of 1224, adding a provision concerning blasphemers, who, in common with heretics of whatever sect, should suffer death by fire; yet if the bishops should desire to save any such, this could only be done subject to the offender’s being deprived of his tongue, so that never again should he blaspheme God.

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In the year 1227 Ugolino Conti, who had been a friend of Dominic and of Francis, ascended the papal throne under the style of Gregory IX.

It was this pontiff who, carrying forward the work that had been undertaken in that direction by Innocent III, gave the Inquisition a stable form. He definitely placed the control of it in the hands of the Dominican friars, giving them, where necessary, the assistance of the Franciscans. But the participation of the latter in the business of that terrible tribunal is so slight as to be insignificant.

Gregory’s bull, given in “Raynaldus,”[20] is one of excommunication against all heretics.

Further, it ordains that all condemned by the Church shall be delivered to the secular arm for punishment, all clerics so delivered being first degraded from their orders; that should any wish to abjure his heresy and return to the Church, penance shall be imposed upon him, and he shall suffer perpetual imprisonment. Abettors, concealers, and defenders of heretics are similarly excommunicated; and if any such shall neglect to procure absolution within one year, he shall be accounted infamous, and shall be neither eligible for any public office nor the elector of any other, nor act as witness, testator, inheritor, nor have power to seek justice when wronged. If a judge, no proceedings shall be laid before him, and his sentences, where passed, shall be null and void; if an advocate, he shall not have faculty to plead; if a notary, his deeds shall be void; if a cleric, he shall be deposed from his office and benefices.

Similarly, the ban of excommunication shall fall upon those who hold traffic with any who are excommunicated, and they shall further be punished with other penalties.

Those who are under suspicion of heresy, unless they see to it that they overcome the suspicion either by canonical purgation or otherwise according to the quality of the person and the motives for the suspicion, shall be excommunicated, and if they do not give condign satisfaction within one year, they shall be deemed heretics. Their claims or appeals shall not then be admitted, nor shall judges, advocates, or notaries exercise their functions in favour of them; priests shall refuse to administer the sacraments to them and to admit their alms or oblations, and so shall the Templars and Hospitallers and other regular orders, under pain of loss of office, from which naught can save them but a mandate from the Holy See.

Should any give Christian burial to one who has died under excommunication, he shall himself incur excommunication, from which he shall not be delivered until with his own hands he shall have exhumed the corpse, and so disposed that the place may never again be used for sepulture.

Should any know of the existence of heretics or of any who practise secret conventicles or whose ways of living are uncommon, they are bound under pain of excommunication to divulge the same to their confessor or other by whom they believe it will come to the knowledge of their prelate.

Children of heretics and of the abettors or concealers of heretics shall be deprived until the second generation of holding any public office or benefice.

To the provisions of this bull, additions were made by the civil governor of Rome, as representing the secular arm whose concern it would be to inflict the punishments regarding which the Church refrained from being explicit—confining herself to the promise that they should be “condign.”

He provided that: those arrested should be detained in prison until condemned by the Church, when, after eight days, they should be punished.

Their property should be confiscated, one-third going to the delator, one-third to the judge who should pronounce sentence, and one-third to repair the walls of Rome, or otherwise as might be considered.

The dwellings of heretics or of any who should consciously have entertained heretics should be razed to the ground.

If any man should have knowledge of the existence of heretics and fail to denounce them he should be fined the sum of 20 livres. Should he lack the means to pay, he was to be banished until he could find them.

Abettors and concealers of heretics should for the first offence suffer confiscation of one-third of their property, to be applied to keeping the walls of Rome in repair. If the offence were repeated, then they should be banished for ever.

All who were elected senators must swear before taking office that they would observe all laws against heretics; and were any to refuse this oath his acts as senator would be null and void and none should be obliged to follow or obey him, whilst those who might have sworn obedience to him were absolved of their oath. Should a senator accept this oath but afterwards refuse or neglect to respect its terms, he must incur the penalties of perjury, suffer a fine of 200 silver marks, to be applied to the repairing of the walls, and become ineligible for any public office.

Two years later—in 1233—at a Council held at Béziers, the papal legate, Gaultier of Tournai, elaborated these canons by the following provisions:

“All magistrates, nobles, vassals, and others shall diligently seek to discover, apprehend, and punish heretics wherever found. Every parish in which a heretic is discovered shall pay as a penalty for having harboured him one silver mark to the person who shall have discovered him. All houses in which heretics may have preached shall be demolished and the property confiscated, and fire shall be set to all caves and other hiding-places where heretics are alleged to be concealed. All the property of heretics shall be confiscated, and their children shall inherit nothing. Their abettors, concealers, or defenders shall be dealt with in the same manner. Any persons suspected of heresy must make public profession of faith upon oath, under pain of suffering as heretics; they shall be compelled to attend divine service on every feast-day, and all who are reconciled to the Church shall wear as a distinguishing badge two crosses externally on their garments—one on the breast, the other on the back—both of yellow cloth, three fingers in width, the vertical limb measuring 2½ hands, the horizontal one 2 hands.[21] If a hood is worn, this must bear a third cross—all under pain of being deemed heretics and suffering confiscation of property.”[22]

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These enactments by their uncompromising harshness abundantly reveal the extent to which heretics were execrated by the Church in her intolerance and her firm determination to extirpate them. They also reveal something of the far-reaching, pitiless, priestly subtlety and craft which were to render so terrible this tribunal.

The provisions for the punishment of those who should be moved by Christian charity to succour any of the persecuted were devised to the end that terror should stifle all such compassion; whilst the decree that the children of convicted heretics should suffer disinheritance and become ineligible for any honourable appointment was calculatedly introduced to forge a further weapon out of parental love. Where a man might readily, himself, have endured martyrdom for his convictions, he would be made to pause before including his children in the same sacrifice, before suffering them to go destitute and branded.

In the eyes of the Church the end in view could not fail to justify any means that might be employed. The extirpation of heresy was a consummation so very fervently to be desired that any steps—almost any sin—would be condonable if conducive to that end.

It has been argued that this crusade against heresy was political, a campaign waged by the Church to protect herself from the onslaught of liberty of thought, which was threatening her overthrow. Such no doubt had been the case in earlier centuries; but it was so no longer. Roman Catholicism had grown and spread like a mighty tree, until her shadow lay across the face of Europe and her roots were thrust far and wide into the soil. These had taken too firm a hold, they were too full of vigour, to permit that the withering of an occasional branch should give her concern for the vitality of the growth itself. She had no such concern. However abominable, however feral, however unchristian even, may have been the institution of the Holy Office, it is difficult to think that the spirit in which it was founded was other than pure and disinterested.

Photo by Lacoste.

ST. DOMINIC.
From the Painting in the Prado Gallery, attributed to Miguel Zittoz.

It may seem bitterly ironical that men should have been found who in the name of the meek and compassionate Christ relentlessly racked and burnt their fellow-creatures. It was—bitterly, deplorably, tragically ironical. But they were not conscious of the irony. In what they did they were sincere—as sincere as St. Augustine when he urged the extermination of heretics; and none can call in question his sincerity or the purity of his motives.

To understand their attitude it is but necessary to consider the absolute belief that was the Catholics’ in what Lecky calls “the doctrine of exclusive salvation.” Starting from the premise that the Church of Rome is the true and only Church of Christ, they held that no salvation was possible for any man who was not a member of it. Nor could ignorance—however absolute—of the true faith be urged as an excuse for error, any more than may ignorance of the law be pleaded in the worldly courts to-day. Thus, not only did they account irrevocably damned those who schismatically deserted from the Church, and those who like Jew and Moslem remained deliberately outside its walls, but similarly—such was man’s indifferently flattering conception of divine justice and divine intelligence—the savages who had never so much as heard the name of Christ, and the very babe who died before his heritage of Original Sin could be washed away by the baptismal waters. Indeed, fathers of the Church had waged heated wars of controversy concerning the precise moment at which pre-natal life sets in, and, consequently, damnation is incurred by the soul of the fœtus should it perish in the womb.

When it is considered that such doctrines were held dogmatically, it will be realized that in the sight of the Church—whose business was the salvation of souls—there could be no sin so intolerable, so execrable, as heresy. It will be realized how it happened that the Church could consider those of her children who were guilty of such crimes as murder, rape, adultery, and the sin of the Cities of the Plain, with the tolerance of an indulgent parent, whilst rising up in intolerant wrath to smite the heretic whose life might be a model of pure conduct. The former were guilty of only the sins of weak humanity; and sinners who have the faith may seek forgiveness, and find it in contrition. But heresy was not merely the worst of sins, as some have held. In the eyes of the Church it transcended the realm of sin—it was infinitely worse than sin, because it represented a state that was entirely hopeless, a state not to be redeemed or mitigated by good actions or purity of life.

Taking this view of heresy, the Church accounted it her duty to stamp out this awful soul-pestilence so as to prevent its spreading; and she had St. Augustine’s word for it that it was merciful to be merciless in the attainment of that object. When viewed, as it were, from within, there is nothing illogical in the attitude of the Church towards heresy. What is illogical is the conception of God that is involved in the doctrine of exclusive salvation.

Even if we survey the case of Galileo—one of the most illustrious prisoners ever arraigned before the tribunal of the Holy Office—we have no just cause to suppose that, in demanding his retraction of the theory of the earth’s movement round the sun, the inquisitors were inspired by any motives beyond the fear lest the spread of a notion—honestly deemed by them to be an illusion—should disturb man’s faith in the Biblical teaching with which it was in conflict.

CHAPTER IV
ISABELLA THE CATHOLIC

Llorente agrees with the earlier writers on the subject in considering the Spanish Inquisition as an institution distinct from that which had been established to deal with the Albigenses and their coevals in heresy. It is distinct only in that it represents a further development of the organization launched by Innocent III and perfected by Gregory IX.

Before entering upon the consideration of this Modern Inquisition—as it is called—it will perhaps be well to take a survey of the Spain of the Catholic Sovereigns—Ferdinand and Isabella—in whose reign that tribunal was set up in Castile.

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For seven hundred years, with varying fortune and in varying degree, the Saracen had lorded it in the Peninsula.

First had come Berber Tarik, in 711, to overthrow the Visigothic Kingdom of Roderic, to spread the Moslem dominion as far as the mountains in the north and east and west from sea to sea. When the Berber tribe, the Syrians, and the Arabs had fallen to wrangling among themselves, Abdurrahman the Omayyad crossed from Africa to found the independent amirate, which in the tenth century became the Caliphate of Cordova.

Meanwhile the Christians had been consolidating their forces in the mountain fastnesses of the north to which they had been driven, and under Alfonso I they founded the Kingdom of Galicia. Thence, gradually but irresistibly, presenting a bold front to the Moorish conqueror, they forced their way down into the plains of Leon and Castile, so that by the following century they had driven the Saracens south of the Tagus. Following up their advantage, they continued to press them, intent upon driving them into the sea, and they might have succeeded but for the coming of Yusuf ben Techufin, who checked the Christian conquest, hurled them back across the Tagus, and, master of the country to the south of it, founded there the Empire of the Almoravides.

After these came the Almohades—the followers of the Mahdi—and the land rang for half a century with the clash of battle between Cross and Crescent, Castile, Leon, Aragon, and the new-born Kingdom of Portugal striving side by side to crush the common foe at Navas de Tolosa.

In 1236 Leon and Castile—now united into one kingdom—in alliance with Aragon, wrested Cordova from the Moors; in 1248 Seville was conquered, and in 1265 Diego of Aragon drove the Saracen from Murcia, and thereby reduced the Moslem occupation to Granada and a line of Mediterranean seaboard about Cadiz, in which they remained until Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, by virtue of their marriage, had united the two crowns on the death (in 1474) of Henry IV, Isabella’s brother.

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Ferdinand brought, with Aragon, Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples; Isabella brought, with Castile, Leon and the rest of the Spanish territory, saving Granada and that portion of the coast still in Moorish hands. And thus was founded, by the welding of these several principalities into one single state, that mighty Kingdom of Spain which Columbus was so soon to enrich by a new world.

But though founded by this marriage, this kingdom still required consolidating and subjecting. Generations of misrule in Castile, culminating in the lax reigns of John II and Henry IV, had permitted the spread of a lawlessness so utter that its like was not to be found in any other state at that time. Anarchy was paramount mistress of the land, and Pulgar has left us a striking picture of the impossible conditions that prevailed.

“In those days,” he writes, “justice suffered, and was not to be done upon the malefactors who plundered and tyrannized in townships and on the highways. None paid debts who did not want to do so; none was restrained from committing any crime, and none dreamed of obedience or subjection to a superior. What with present and past wars, people were so accustomed to turbulence that he who did not do violence to others was held to be a man of no account.

Citizens, peasants, and men of peace were not masters of their own property, nor could they have recourse to any for redress of the wrongs they suffered at the hands of governors of fortresses and other thieves and robbers. Every man would gladly have engaged to give the half of his property if at that price he might have purchased security and peace for himself and his family. Often there was talk in towns and villages of forming brotherhoods to remedy all these evils. But a leader was wanting who should have at heart the justice and tranquillity of the Kingdom.”[23]

The nobility, as may be conceived—and, indeed, as Pulgar clearly indicates—were not only tainted with the general lawlessness, but were themselves the chief offenders, each man a law unto himself, a tyrannical, extortionate ruler of his vassals, lord of life and death, unscrupulously abusing his power, little better than a highway robber, caring nothing for the monarchy so long as the monarchy left him undisturbed, ready to rebel against it should it attempt to curtail his brigandage.

To crush these and other unruly elements in the state, to resolve into order the chaos that had invaded every quarter of the kingdom, was the task which at the outset the young Queen perceived awaiting her—a task that must have daunted any mind less virile, any spirit less vigorous.

And there were other and more pressing matters demanding her instant attention if she were to retain her seat upon this almost bankrupt throne of Castile which she had inherited from her brother.

Alfonso V of Portugal was in arms, invading her frontiers to dispute, on his niece Juana’s behalf, Isabella’s right.

Henry IV had left no legitimate issue, but his wife Juana of Portugal had brought forth in wedlock a daughter of whom she pretended that he was the father, whilst the King of Portugal, to serve interests of his own, recognized the girl as his legitimate niece. Public opinion, however, hesitated so little to proclaim her bastardy that it had named her La Beltraneja, after Beltran de la Cueva who notoriously had been her mother’s lover. And what Beltran de la Cueva, himself, thought about it, may be inferred from the circumstance that in the ensuing struggle he was found fighting for the honour of Castile under the banner of Queen Isabella.

The war demanded all the attention and resources of the Catholic Monarchs, and Isabella’s own share in these labours was conspicuous. They resulted in the rout of the Portuguese supporters of the pretender at Toro in 1476. By that victory Isabella was securely seated upon her throne and became joint ruler with Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon.

She was twenty-five years of age at the time, a fair, shapely woman of middle height, with a clear complexion, eyes between green and blue, and a gracious, winsome countenance remarkable for its habitual serenity. Such, indeed, was her self-control, Pulgar tells us, that not only did she carefully conceal her anger when it was aroused, but even in childbirth she could “dissemble her feelings, betraying no sign or expression of the pain to which all women are subject.” He adds that she was very ceremonious in dress and equipage, that she was deliberate of gesture, quick-witted, and ready of tongue, and that in the midst of the labour of government—and very arduous labour, as shall be seen—she found time to learn Latin, so that she could understand all that was said in that tongue.

“She was a zealous Catholic and very charitable, yet in her judgments she inclined rather to rigour than to mercy. She listened to counsel, but acted chiefly upon her own opinions. Of a rare fidelity to her word, she never failed to fulfil that to which she had pledged herself, save where compelled by stress of circumstance. She was reproached, together with her husband, of being wanting in generosity, because, seeing the royal patrimony diminished by the alienation of fiefs and castles, she was always very careful of such concessions.

“‘Kings,’ she was wont to say, ‘should preserve with care their dominions, because in alienating them they lose at once the money necessary to make themselves beloved and the power to make themselves feared.’”[24]

Such is the portrait that Pulgar has left us, and considering that he is writing of a sovereign, it would be no more than reasonable to suspect flattery and that curious, undiscriminating enthusiasm which never fails to create panegyrists when it is a question of depicting a prince, however inept, to his contemporaries. But if Pulgar has erred in this instance, it has been on the side of moderation in his portrayal of this gifted, high-spirited woman.

Her actions speak more eloquently of her character than can the pen of any chronicler, and it is in the deeds of princes that we must seek their true natures, not in what may have been written of them in their own day. The deeds of Isabella’s life—with one dark exception that is the subject of this history—more than bear out all that Pulgar and others have set down in praise of her.

No sooner had she overthrown those who came from abroad to dispute her right to the crown than she turned her attention to the subjugation of those who disputed her authority at home. In this herculean labour she had the assistance of Alonzo de Quintanilla, her chancellor, and Juan Ortega, the King’s sacristan. These men proposed to organize at their own risk one of those brotherhoods which Pulgar mentions as having been so ardently desired by the country for its protection from those who preyed upon it. This hermandad was to act under royal sanction and guidance, with the object of procuring peace and protection of property in the kingdom. Isabella readily approved the proposal, and the brotherhood was immediately founded, a tax to support it being levied upon those in whose interest it was established, and very willingly paid by them.

Splendidly organized, this association, half military, half civil, so effectively discharged the functions for which it was created, that twenty years later—in 1498—it was possible to abolish it, and to replace it by a much simpler and less costly system of police which then sufficed to preserve the order that had been restored.

Further to subject the turbulent and insubordinate nobility, Isabella employed methods similar to those adopted in like case by her neighbour, Louis XI of France. She bestowed the offices of state upon men of merit without regard to birth, which hitherto had been accounted the only qualification. The career of the law was thrown open to the burgher classes, and every office under the crown was made accessible to lawyers, who thus became the staunch friends of the sovereign.

If the nobles did not dare to revolt, at least they protested in the strongest terms against these two innovations that so materially affected and weakened their prestige. They represented in particular that the institution of the hermandad was the manifestation of a want of confidence in the “faithful nobility,” and they implored that four members of their order should be appointed by the Catholic Sovereigns to form a council of supreme direction of the affairs of State, as under the late King Henry IV.

To this the Catholic Sovereigns replied that the hermandad was a tutelary institution which was very welcome to the country, and which it was their pleasure to maintain. As for the offices of State, it was for the sovereigns to appoint such men as they considered best qualified to hold them. The nobles, they added, were free to remain at Court or to withdraw to their own domains, as they might see fit; but as for the sovereigns, themselves, as long as it should please God to preserve them in the high position in which He had deigned to place them, it should be their care not to imitate the monarch who was cited to them as an example, and not to become puppets in the hands of their “faithful nobility.”

That answer gave the nobles pause. It led them to perceive that a change had taken place, and that the lawless days of Henry IV were at an end. To have made them realize this was something. But there was more to be done before they would understand that they must submit to the altered conditions, and Isabella pursued the policy she had adopted with an unswerving directness, as the following story from Pulgar’s Chronicle bears witness:

A quarrel had broken out in the Queen’s palace at Valladolid between Don Fadrique Enriquez (son of the Admiral of Castile) and Don Ramiro de Guzman. Knowledge of it reached the Queen, and she ordered both disputants to hold themselves under arrest in their own quarters until she should provide that judgment be given between them by the Courts. Fadrique, however, signified his contempt of the royal mandate by disobeying it and continuing at large. Learning this, Isabella gave the more obedient Guzman his liberty, and the assurance of her word that he should suffer no harm.

A few days later he was riding peacefully through the street, secure in the Queen’s safe-conduct, when he was set upon by three masked horsemen of the household of Fadrique and severely beaten. No sooner did the Queen hear of this further affront to her authority than she got to horse, and rode through torrential rain from Valladolid to the Admiral’s castle at Simancas. In fact, in such haste did she set out that she rode alone, without waiting for an escort. This, however, followed presently, but did not come up with her save under the very walls of the Admiral’s fortress.

She summoned the Admiral, and commanded him to deliver up his rebellious son to her justice, and when Don Alonso Enriquez protested that his son was not there, she bade her followers search the castle from battlements to dungeons. The search, however, proved fruitless, and Isabella returned empty-handed and indignant to Valladolid. Arrived there, she took to her bed, and to those who came to seek news of her health, she replied: “My body aches with the blows delivered yesterday against my safe-conduct by Don Fadrique.”

The Admiral, trembling before the royal wrath, resolved to deliver up his son and cast him upon the mercy of the Queen. So the Constable of Castile—Fadrique’s uncle—undertook the office of intercessor. He went with Don Fadrique to Valladolid, and imploring Isabella to consider that the young man was but in his twentieth year and that he had sinned through the rashness of youth, begged her to do upon him the justice she might wish or the mercy that was due.

The Queen, however, was not to be moved to mercy for offences that set her royal authority in contempt. She was inexorable. She refused to see the offender, and submitted him to the indignity of being taken to prison through the streets of the city by an alcalde. After a spell of confinement there she banished him to Sicily, prohibiting his return to Spain under pain of severest punishment.

It happened, however, that Don Ramiro de Guzman did not consider his honour sufficiently avenged by his enemy’s exile. One night, when the Court was at Medina del Campo, he ambushed himself in his turn with some followers of his own, and attacked the Admiral, to return him the blows received from his son. From this indignity the Admiral was saved by his escort. But when Isabella heard of the affair, she treated Guzman as a rebel, seized his castles in Leon and Castile, as she would have seized his person, but that to escape her anger he fled to Portugal for shelter.[25]

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No less determined was her conduct in the matter of the Grand-Mastership of Santiago.

There were in Spain three religio-military orders: the Knights of Alcantara, the celibate Knights of Calatrava—who were the successors of the Knights Templars—and the Knights of Santiago. This last order had been founded for the purpose of affording protection to the pilgrims who came into Spain to visit the shrine at Compostella of St. James the Apostle, who is alleged to have been the first to bear the message of Christianity into the Iberian Peninsula.[26] These pilgrimages, chiefly from France, were a great source of revenue to the country, and it became of importance to ensure their immunity from the predatory hordes that infested the highways. Further, the Knights of Santiago had found employment for their arms in the crusade waged on Spanish soil against the Moors, in token whereof they wore the Crusader’s cross in red upon their white cloaks. They acquired great power and wealth, possessing castles and convents in every part of Spain, so that the office of Grand Master of the Order was one of great weight and importance—too great, in the opinion of Isabella, to be in the hands of a subject.

This opinion she boldly manifested in 1476, when the death of Don Rodrigo Manrique left the office vacant. She took horse, as was her custom, and rode to Huete, where the Chapter of the Order was assembled upon the business of the necessary election, and she frankly urged that to an office so exalted it was not fitting that any but the King should be elected.

The proposal was not received with satisfaction. Ferdinand was an Aragonese, and despite the union of the two kingdoms which must be completed when he should succeed to the throne of Aragon, he was still looked upon as a foreigner by the Castilians. Under Isabella’s insistence, however, a compromise was effected. The Chapter consented to elect Ferdinand to the office of Grand-Master on condition that he should nominate a gentleman of Castile to act as his deputy for the discharge of the duties of the position. This was done, and Alonso de Cardenas—a loyal servant of the Sovereigns—was chosen as the royal deputy. Thus Isabella established it that the appointment of Grand-Master of the Order of Santiago should be a royal prerogative.

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Even more strikingly than in either of the instances cited does the Queen’s resolute, spirited nature manifest itself in her manner of dealing with a revolt that took place in Segovia at the commencement of her reign.

During the war with Portugal the Catholic Sovereigns had entrusted their eldest daughter, the Princess Isabella, to the care of Andrés de Cabrera, the Seneschal of the Castle of Segovia, and his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla.

Cabrera, a man of stern and rigid equity, had occasion to depose his lieutenant, Alonso Maldonado, from his office, conferring this upon his own brother-in-law, Pedro de Bobadilla. Maldonado conspired to avenge himself. He begged Bobadilla’s permission to remove some stones that were in the castle, upon the pretext that he required them for his own house, and he sent some men of his own to fetch them. These men, who were secretly armed, having gained admission, stabbed the sentry and seized the person of Bobadilla, whilst Maldonado, with other of his people, took possession of the castle itself. The inmates of the Alcazar, hearing the uproar, fled to the Homenaje Tower, taking with them the Infanta, who was five years of age at the time. Fortified in this, they defied Maldonado when he attacked it. Finding it impregnable, the rebel ordered Bobadilla to be brought forward, and threatened the besieged that unless they admitted him he would put the prisoner to death.

To this threat Cabrera’s dignified reply was that Maldonado must do as he pleased, but the gates would not be opened to him.

By this time a multitude of the townspeople had gathered there, alarmed by the disturbance and armed for any emergency. To these Maldonado cunningly represented that what he was about was being done in their interests against the overbearing tyranny of the Governor, and he invited them to join hands with him in the cause of liberty to complete the work he had so excellently begun. The populace largely took sides with him, so that Segovia was flung into a state of war. There was constant fighting in the streets, and the gates were in the hands of the rebels, with the exception of that of St. John, which was held for Cabrera.

It is believed that it was Maria de Bobadilla herself who, stealing undetected from the Alcazar, escaped from Segovia and bore to the Queen the news of what was taking place, and the consequent peril of the royal child.

Upon learning this, Isabella instantly repaired to Segovia. The leaders of the rebellion had news of her approach, but dared not carry their insubordination to the length of closing the gates against her. They went so far, however, as to ride out to meet her and to attempt to deny admittance to her followers; and her counsellors, seeing the humour of the populace, urged her to be prudent and to accede to their wishes. But her proud spirit flared up under that cautious advice.

“Learn,” she cried, “that I am Queen of Castile, that this city is mine, and that no conditions are to be imposed upon me before I enter it. I shall enter, then, and with me all those whom I may judge necessary for my service.”

With that she ordered her escort forward, and entered the city by a gate that was held by her partisans, and so won through to the Alcazar.

Thither flocked the infuriated mob, and thundered at the gates, demanding admission.

The Queen, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the Cardinal of Spain and the Count of Benavente, who were with her, ordered the gates to be thrown open and as many admitted as the place would hold. The populace surged into the courtyard, clamouring for the Seneschal. To meet them came the slight, fair young queen, alone and fearless, and when in their astonishment they had fallen silent—

“People of Segovia,” she calmly addressed them, “what do you seek?”

Dominated by her serenity, awed by her majesty, their fury fell from them. Humbly now they urged their grievance against Cabrera, accusing him of oppression, and imploring of the Queen’s grace his demission.

Instantly she promised them that their request should be granted; whereupon the revulsion was complete, and the mob that but a few moments earlier had been yelling threats and execrations now raised their voices loyally to acclaim her.

She commanded them to return to their homes and their labours, and to leave the administration of justice in her hands, sending her their ambassadors to prefer their complaint against Cabrera, which she would investigate.

As she commanded so it was done, and when she had examined the accusations against the Seneschal and satisfied herself that they were groundless, she announced him free from guilt and reinstated him in his office, the conquered people bowing submissively to her ruling.[27]

In 1477 Isabella moved into Andalusia, in which province, as elsewhere, law and order had ceased to exist. She entered Seville with the proclaimed intention of demanding an account of the guilty. But at the very rumour of her approach and the business upon which she came, some thousands of the inhabitants whose consciences were uneasy made haste to depart the city.

Alarmed by this depopulation, the Sevillans implored the Queen to sheathe the sword of justice, representing that after the bloody affrays that for years had been afflicting the district there was scarcely a family in which some member was not answerable to the law.

Isabella, gentle and merciful by nature—which renders her association with the Inquisition the more deplorable—lent an ear to these representations, and granted an amnesty for all crimes committed since the death of Henry IV. But she was not so lenient with those who had prostituted the justice which they administered in her name. Informed of the judges who were making a trade and extortion of their judgments, she punished them by deposition, and herself fixed the scale of legal costs to be observed in future.

Finding a mass of impending law-suits which the misrule of the past years had put upon the province, she directed her attention to clearing up this Augean stable. Every Friday, attended by her Council, she sat in the great hall of the Alcazar of Seville to hear the plaints of the most humble of her subjects; and so earnestly and vigorously did she go to work that in two months she had disposed of litigations that might have dragged on for years.

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Upon her accession she had found the royal treasury exhausted by the inept administration of the last two reigns and the prodigal, reckless grants that Henry IV and Juan II had made to the nobles. This condition of things had seriously embarrassed the Catholic Sovereigns, and they had been driven to various expedients to raise the requisite funds for the war with Portugal. Now that the war was at an end, they found themselves without the means necessary to maintain the royal state.

Isabella made a close investigation of the grants that had been made by her brother and father, and she cancelled all those that were the fruit of caprice and wantonness, restoring to the Crown the revenues that had been recklessly alienated and the taxes that the country had hitherto paid to none but the bandits who oppressed it.

Similarly she found the public credit entirely ruined. Under the late king such had been the laxity, that in three years no less than 150 public mints had been authorized, and this permitted such abuses that a point had been reached where it almost seemed that every Spaniard minted his own money, or that, as Rosseeuw St. Hilaire puts it, “coining was the country’s chief industry.”

Photo by Alinari.

POPE INNOCENT III. AND ST. DOMINIC.
From a Fresco in the Church of the Sacro Speco, Subiaco.

She reduced the number of mints to five, and exercised the severest control over their output, thereby liberating trade from the fear of fraud that had been stifling it. An increased and steadily increasing prosperity was the almost immediate result of this wise measure.

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Having restored order in the country, she turned her attention to the Court, applied herself to the purification of its morals, and set about converting it from the disgusting licence that had prevailed in her brother’s time.

Herself of a rigid chastity, she exacted the same purity of conduct in all the women who approached her, and she submitted the noble damsels brought up at her Court to the very strictest surveillance. Loving the King very sincerely, she was notoriously inclined to jealousy: let him but look too assiduously upon any lady of her train, and Isabella found a way to remove her from the Court. She saw to it that the pages who were in waiting upon her should be given a good education, that thus they might avoid the idleness which unfailingly leads to waste of character and to immorality. Finally, according to Bernaldez,[28] she extended her moral reforms to the convents, which were no less in need of them than the Court, and she corrected and punished the great depravity that was permeating all conventual orders.[29]

There is no chronicler of her reign who does not dilate upon her great piety. Bernaldez compares her to St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine,[30] and describes her as very devoted to the Holy Faith and very obedient to Holy Church. Bernaldez, of course, was writing after the establishment of the Inquisition, of which he, in common with other contemporary and subsequent chroniclers, very warmly approved; and he may have been very largely influenced by consideration of the support which she had unfortunately lent to its introduction into Castile. But that her piety was extreme and sincere we infer from the moment that we see her, after the battle of Toro, which definitely gave her the crown, going barefoot to church to a service of thanksgiving.

Yet, however ardent her piety, it would not carry her the length of recognizing in the Pope the temporal over-lord of Castile.

From the thirteenth century the power of the Church had been increasing in Spain under the dogma of the spiritual sovereignty of Rome over all the Catholic churches of the world. The clergy had amassed enormous wealth with that facility so peculiarly their own when the occasion is afforded them, and to this end they had abused the reckless, foolish liberality of Isabella’s predecessors.

Lucius Marinæus informs us that the incomes of the four archbishoprics—Toledo, Santiago, Seville, and Granada—amounted to 134,000 ducats,[31] whilst those of the twenty bishoprics came to some 250,000 ducats.

Surrounded as she was by priestly counsellors whom she respected, she nevertheless manifested plainly her impatience of the clerical usurpation of the rights of the Crown. The chief of these abuses was no doubt that practised by the Pontiff himself, in conferring upon foreigners the highest and richest benefices of the Church of Spain, ignoring that it was the prerogative of the Crown to name the bishops—always subject to papal confirmation. That Isabella, devout and priest-surrounded as she was, should have dared to oppose the Holy See and the terrible Pope Sixtus IV, as fearlessly as she had opposed her predatory nobles, is perhaps the highest proof that history can yield of her strength of character.

Her smouldering indignation flared out when the Pope, ignoring her nomination of her chaplain, Alonzo de Burgos, to the vacant bishopric of Cuenca, appointed his own nephew, Raffaele Riario, Cardinal of San Sisto, to that vacant see.

Twice already had she sought the pontiff’s confirmation of nominees of her own for other benefices—the Archbishopric of Saragoza and the Bishopric of Tarragona—and on each occasion her nominee had been set aside in favour of a creature of the Pope’s. But this third contemptuous disregard of her prerogative was more than her patience could endure. The Catholic Sovereigns refused to ratify the appointment of Riario, and begged the Pope—submissively at first—to cancel it.

But the harsh, overbearing Sixtus returned an answer characteristic of his arrogant nature. It was his, he announced, to distribute at his pleasure all the benefices of Christendom; and he condescended to explain that the power which it had pleased God to confer upon him on earth could not be limited by any will but his own, and that it was governed only by the interests of the Catholic Faith, of which he was the sole arbiter.

But his stubbornness met a stubbornness as great. The Catholic Sovereigns replied by withdrawing their ambassador from the Papal Court, and issuing an injunction to all Spanish subjects to leave Rome.

Matters were becoming strained; an open rupture impended between Spain and the Vatican. But the Sovereigns had notified the Pope that it was their intention to summon a general council of the Church to settle the matter in dispute, and no Pope of those days could contemplate with equanimity a general council assembled for the purpose of sitting in judgment upon his decrees. Whatever the result, since at these councils the papal authority was questioned, it must follow that thereafter that authority would be impaired. Therefore this was the stock threat employed to bring a recalcitrant pontiff to a reasonable frame of mind.

It made Sixtus realize the strength of purpose that was opposed to him; and, knowing as he did that this resoluteness backed an undeniable right which he had violated, he perceived that he dared carry insistence no further. So, despite his earlier assertion that the power which he held from God could be limited by no will but his own and governed by no consideration but that of the interests of the Faith, he gave way completely.

The three royal nominees were duly confirmed in the vacant sees, and Sixtus gave an undertaking that in future he would make no appointments to the benefices of Spain save of such ecclesiastics as the Catholic Sovereigns should nominate.[32]

It is to be added that in acting upon this signal victory which she had won, Isabella used the faculty it gave her with such pious wisdom, sincerity, and discretion that had the Pope but followed her example in the appointment of dignitaries, it would have contributed to the greater honour and glory of the Church. For she sternly opposed the granting of benefices upon any grounds but those of absolute merit.

Having won her way in this, she was the better able to curb the predatory habits of her clergy by edicts that limited their power to proper clerical confines.

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“It is amazing,” comments Pulgar, “that a woman should have been able, single-handed and in so little time, by her judgment and perseverance to accomplish what many men and great kings had been unable to do in many years.”

“Properly to judge the notable improvements,” says Rosseeuw St. Hilaire,[33] “which this reign effected in industry and agriculture, it would be necessary to follow year by year the table of ordinances issued by the Catholic Sovereigns. It would be seen that in many things the genius of the founders of the Castilian Monarchy forestalled the work of centuries. The happy results of these reforms were soon experienced everywhere: the highways were purged of malefactors, new roads of communication were opened up, rivers were bridged, consular tribunals established in commercial centres, consulates created in Flanders, England, France, and Italy; with maritime commerce expanding daily and in a measure with the progress of industry, new buildings sprang up in every city, and the population rapidly increased. All announced a new era of regeneration in Castile. Contemporary writers, struck by these prodigies, exalt with one voice this glorious reign which opens new destinies to Spain.”

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It is certain that in no other country in Europe at this date were the laws so well maintained and the rights of the individual so well protected. Justice was rigorously done, there were no longer arbitrary imprisonments and sequestrations, whilst the unequal and capricious taxation of the past was abolished for all time.

“Such,” says Marinæus, “was the strict justice meted out to each in this happy reign that all men, nobles and knights, traders and husbandmen, rich and poor, masters and servants, were treated alike and received equally their share of it.”

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Where so much was good, where so much stout service was done to the cause of progress and civilization, it is the more deplorable to find in this reign the one evil thing that is now to be considered—so evil that it must be held to counterbalance and stultify all the excellences of Isabella’s sway.

The particular praise which so far we have heard their contemporaries bestowing upon the Catholic Sovereigns, is a praise which every man in every age must echo.

But there was praise as loud upon another score, as universally uttered by every contemporary and many subsequent historians, some no doubt because they were sincere in the deadly bigotry that inspired it, others because they did not dare to express themselves in different terms.

“By her,” cries Bernaldez, as a climax to his summing-up of her many virtues and wise provisions, “was burnt and destroyed the most evil and abominable Mosaic, Talmudic, Jewish heresy.”

And Mariana, the historian, accounts the introduction of the Inquisition into Spain the most glorious feature of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. He is setting it above all the moral splendours of that day when he exclaims:

“Still better and happier fortune for Spain was the establishment in Castile at about this time of a new and holy tribunal of severe and grave judges for the purpose of inquiring into and punishing heretical pravity and apostasy....”[34]

It would be unjust to suppose that there is a man to be found to-day in the Church of Rome, of which the Spanish Inquisition was a deplorable and integral part, who can turn with us in other than regret to consider this black shadow that lies across one of the brightest pages of history.

CHAPTER V
THE JEWS IN SPAIN

You have seen the Catholic Sovereigns instilling order into that distracted land of Spain, enforcing submissiveness to the law, instituting a system of police for the repression of brigandage, curtailing the depredations of the nobles, checking the abuses and usurpations of the clergy, restoring public credit, and generally quelling all the elements of unrest that had afflicted the State.

But one gravely disturbing element still remained in the bitter rancour prevailing between Christian and Jew.

“Some clerics and many laymen,” says Pulgar,[35] “informed the Sovereigns that there were in the Kingdom many Christians of Jewish extraction who were Judaizing[36] again and holding Jewish rites in their houses, and who neither believed the Catholic Faith nor performed the Catholic duties. They implored the Sovereigns, as they were Christian princes, to punish that detestable error, because if left unpunished it might so spread that our Holy Catholic Faith must receive great harm.”

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Exactly to realize the position at the time, and the force behind the arguments employed to induce the Catholic Sovereigns to complete the ordering of the kingdom by the repression of the re-Judaizing, or apostasy, of the New-Christians—as the baptized Jews and their descendants were termed—it is necessary to take at least a brief retrospective survey of the history of the Israelites in Spain.

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At what period the Jews first appeared in the peninsula it is not easy to determine with accuracy.

Salazar de Mendoza and other ancient historians, who base their writings upon the work of Tomás Tamayo de Vargas, put forward views upon this subject that are curious rather than important.

They assert that the Kingdom of Spain was founded by Tubal, the son of Japhet, who had Europe for his portion when the division was made among the sons of Noah. Hence it was called Tubalia, and later on Sepharad by the Jews, and Hesperida by the Greeks. They hold that the first Jews in the Iberian Peninsula were probably those who came with Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Chaldea, and that he brought with him, in addition to Chaldeans and Persians, ten tribes of Israel, who peopled Toledo,[37] and built there the most beautiful synagogue that had been theirs since the temple of Solomon. This synagogue, Mendoza states, afterwards became the Convent of Santa Maria la Blanca (a statement which the architecture of Santa Maria la Blanca very flatly contradicts). He further informs us that they built another synagogue at Zamora, and that those who worshipped there always prided themselves—his point of view, of course, is narrowly Christian—that to them had been addressed St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews.

They founded a university at Lucena (near Cordova), and schools where the law was taught, so that the holy Jewish religion spread rapidly, and was observed throughout Spain until the coming of Our Lord into the world. Then, in 37 A.D., the Apostle St. James came to preach the new gospel in Iberia, “so that Spain was the first land after Judea to receive the holy law of grace.” Following the writings of Vargas, he goes so far as to say: “and although to many it has seemed apocryphal that the Toledo Jews wrote to denounce the Passion of Our Lord, the assertion is not without good foundation.”[38]

Amador de los Rios is probably correct in his opinion that the Jews made their first appearance in Spain during the Visigothic dominion, after the fall of Jerusalem; and scarcely had they settled in the peninsula when they began to experience the bitterness of persecution. But after they had been delivered from this by the Saracen invaders, to whom by race and creed they were fairly sympathetic, they enjoyed—alike under Moslem and Christian rule—a season of prosperity in Spain, which endured until the close of the thirteenth century. And this notwithstanding the undercurrent of mutual contempt and hatred, of Christian for Jew and Jew for Christian, that was invincible in an age of strong religious feeling.

To the Christian every Jew he encountered was his natural and hereditary enemy, a descendant of those who had crucified the Saviour; therefore he was an object of execration, a man upon whom it must be meritorious to avenge the world’s greatest crime which had been perpetrated by his forbears.

The Jew, on the other hand, held the Christian in a contempt as thorough. From the standpoint of his own pure and unadulterated monotheism, he looked scornfully upon a religion that must appear to him no better than an adaptation of polytheism, developed upon the doctrines of one whom the Jews had rejected as an impostor who had attempted to usurp the place of the promised Messiah. To the truly devout Jew of those days the Christian religion can have been little better than a blasphemy. Nor was that the only source of his contempt. Looking back upon his own splendid ancestry, upon the antiquity of his race and the high order of its culture—the fruit of centuries of intellectual evolution—what but scorn could he entertain for these Spaniards of yesterday’s hatching, who were just emerging from the slough of barbarism?

It is clear that mutual esteem between the races was out of all question in an age of strong religious prejudices. Toleration, however, was possible, and the Jew applied himself to win it. To this end he employed at once the vices and the virtues of the unfortunate, which centuries of tribulation had rendered inherent in him.

Armed with a stoicism that was almost pitiful, he donned a mask of indifference to confront expressed hatred and contempt; to violence he opposed cunning and the long-suffering patience that is so peculiarly his own—the patience that is allied with a high order of intelligence; the patience which, interpreted into “an infinite capacity for taking pains,” has been urged as the definition of genius, and is the secret of the Jew’s success wherever he is established.

In the cohesion in a foreign land of this people that cannot keep together as a nation, and in their extraordinary commercial acuteness, lies the strength of the Jews. They grew wealthy by their industry and thrift, until they were in a position to purchase those privileges which in Christendom are the birth-right of every Christian. Their numbers, too, made it difficult in Spain to treat them with contumely; for upon the reasoned estimate of Amador de los Rios[39] there were close upon a million Jews in Castile at the end of the thirteenth century.

They formed by their solidarity—as they always do—an imperium in imperio, a state of their own within the state; they had their own language and customs; they were governed by their own laws, which were enforced by their Rabbis and chiefs, and they pursued their own religion unmolested, for even the observation of the Sabbath was respected by the Castilians. Thus they came to create for themselves in a foreign country a simulacrum of their own native land.

It is true that they were afflicted from time to time by sporadic, local persecutions; but in the main they enjoyed a tolerance and religious liberty which the poor harried Albigenses beyond the Pyrenees might well have envied. For the Church, which had already established the Inquisition, was very far—for reasons that shall be considered in the next chapter—from instigating any persecution of the Children of Israel. Thus, Honorius III, whilst carrying forward the policy of Innocent III, and enjoining the extirpation of heretics in Southern France and elsewhere, confirmed (November 7, 1217) the privileges accorded to the Jews by his predecessors upon the throne of St. Peter. These were that no Jew should be constrained to receive baptism; that should he incline to embrace the Christian Faith he must be received in it with love and benevolence; that his feasts and religious ceremonies must be respected by Christians; that the whipping or stoning of Jews be forbidden and punished; that their burial-places be held sacred.

And when King Ferdinand III—afterwards canonized—wrested Seville from the Moors (1224), he made over one of the best districts of the city to the Jews, and gave them the four mosques contained in it that they might convert them into synagogues.

The only restraint placed upon them by the law was that they must refrain, under pain of death, from attempting to proselytize among Christians, and that they must show respect for the Christian religion.

These were the halcyon days of Hebrew prosperity in Spain. Their distinguished abilities were recognized, and they won to many positions of importance in the government. The finances of the kingdom were in their control, and Castile prospered under their able administration of its commerce. Alfonso VIII, in whose reign it is estimated there were 12,000 Jews in Toledo alone, employed a Jew as his treasurer, and did not disdain to take a Jewess for his mistress—an interesting little fact in view of the law that was so soon to be promulgated on that subject.

Hardly less than their value to the nation’s commerce were their services to science, art, and literature. They excelled particularly in medicine and chemistry, and the most skilful doctors and surgeons of the Middle Ages were men of their race.

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In the middle of the thirteenth century a change unfortunately set in, and this external harmony so laboriously established was disturbed by an excrescence of the real feelings that had never ceased to underlie it. Largely the Jews were themselves to blame. Deluded by the religious liberty that was conceded them, by the dignities to which men of their faith had climbed, and by the prosperity which they had attained, they failed to perceive that their accumulated wealth was in itself a menace to their safety.

Emboldened by the consideration shown them, they committed the imprudence of giving a free rein to their Oriental taste for splendour; they surrounded themselves with luxury, and permitted themselves an ostentatious magnificence in their raiment and equipages, and thus proclaimed the wealth they had been amassing through generations of comparative obscurity.

Had they confined themselves to this strictly personal display all might yet have been well. But being dressed and housed in princely fashion, they put on princely ways. They grew haughty and arrogant with the horrible arrogance of wealth. They allowed their disdain of the less affluent Christians to transpire in their contemptuous bearing towards them, and being unchecked in this it was but another step to abuse the privileges which they enjoyed.

Their parade of wealth had provoked envy—the most dangerous and maleficent of the passions implanted in the human heart. Their arrogance and cavalier bearing stirred that envy into activity.

Questions arose touching the sources of their wealth. It was propounded against them that their usurious practices had ruined many of the Christians whom they now dared to spurn. And although usury had been sanctioned and it had been proclaimed lawful for them to charge a rate of interest as high as 40 per centum, it was suddenly remembered that usury had in all times been uncompromisingly condemned by the Church—and by the term usury the Church then understood any interest, however slight, paid upon borrowed money.

Fanaticism began to stir uneasily in its slumber, and presently, under the spur of greed, it roused itself and reared its horrid head. Public feeling against the Israelites was increased by the fact that they had practically acquired control of the ever-unpopular offices for the collection of taxes.

The populace grew menacing. Evil tales concerning them were put about, and they were accused, among other ritual abominations, of practising human sacrifices.

Whether there was any real ground for the accusation is one of those historical mysteries that baffle the student. On the one hand it seems impossible to collect sufficient data to establish any single one of the many specific accusations made; whilst on the other hand, in view of the persistence with which the charge crops up in different countries and at different epochs,[40] it would be presumptuous to dismiss it as groundless.

The first official recognition of the accusation is to be found in the code known as the Partidas, promulgated by Alfonso XI (1256-1263), which contains the following clause:

“As we hear that in some places the Jews on Good Friday make a mocking commemoration of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, stealing boys and crucifying them, or making waxen images and crucifying these when boys are not procurable, we order that should it become known that hereafter, in any part of our realm, such a thing is done, all those whom it is ascertained are connected with the deed shall be arrested and brought before the King. And when he shall have satisfied himself of the truth of the charge he shall have them put to death, as many as they may be.”[41]

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Llorente mentions four specific cases of ritual murder, to which he appears to attach credit:

1250.—A choir-boy of the Metropolitan Church of Zaragoza, named Domingo de Val, crucified by Jews. He was afterwards canonized and worshipped at Zaragoza as a martyr.

1452.—A boy crucified by Jews at Valladolid.

1454.—A boy from the lordship of the Marquess of Almarza, near Zamora, crucified. His heart was afterwards burnt and the ashes were consumed in wine by the Jews who attended the ceremony. The body was afterwards discovered by a dog, and this led to the arrest of the culprits and their conviction.

1468.—At Sepulveda, in the Bishopric of Segovia, a boy was taken on the Thursday of Holy Week, and on Good Friday he was crowned with thorns, whipped, and finally crucified. The Bishop, D. Juan Arias, having received intelligence of this crime, instituted an inquiry which resulted in the arrest of several men, who, being convicted, were put to death.

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Llorente gives as his authority for the third and fourth cases the “Fortalicium Fidei” of Espina—by no means an authority to be unquestioningly accepted. For the second he mentions no authority whatever; whilst for fuller information upon the first he refers his readers to the “Historia de Santo Domingo de Val,” which is of no more authority than most works of this class.[42] But the canonization of this victim gives rise to thought; for it was never the way of the Church of Rome to proceed recklessly and without due evidence in such matters. Even if it were, however, it would be necessary in this case to show a motive for such recklessness. The only motive possible would be the desire to create justification for a persecution of the Jews. But, as has been said—and as shall presently be made abundantly clear—it never was the aim of the Church of Rome to engage in such persecution or to incite to it.

The famous case of the crucifixion of the “Holy Infant” of La Gardia, whose trial was directed by Torquemada himself, shall be considered in its proper place.

As is well known, the practice of human sacrifice is an extremely old one; and it has been associated in varying forms with many widely different cults. The earliest absolutely historical instance of Jews resorting to it is probably that quoted by Dr. J. G. Frazer (in “The Golden Bough”) from the “Historia Ecclesiastica” of Socrates. The scholiast relates how in 416, at Imnestar in Syria, a company of Jews during one of their festivals fell to deriding Christians and their Christ. At the height of their frenzy they seized a boy, bound him to a cross, and hung him up. A brawl was the result, and the authorities intervened to make the Jews pay dearly for their crime.

Amador de los Rios, in dealing with the spread of this charge against the Spanish Hebrews in the thirteenth century, attributes it to the subject’s having been made the theme of an exceedingly dramatic narrative poem in the “Milagros de Nuestra Señora” by Gonzalo de Berceo. At the same time he does not go so far as to urge that the story upon which the ballad was founded may not have had its roots in fact. On the contrary, he suggests that such may have been the case, and having chronicled the persistence of the accusation, he refrains from expressing any definite opinion on the subject, hesitating either to accept, or to dismiss as idle calumnies, these charges of ritual murder.

From the able arguments that have been put forward on this same subject by Frazer and Wendland, it is to be concluded that in any case the Christians were mistaken in assuming that these alleged crucifixions held at the Feast of Purim—whether of human beings or of effigies—were intended as a mockery of the Passion of the Redeemer. Their origin is a far more ancient one, involving a rite of which the Sacrifice of Golgotha may itself have been an individual celebration—the commemoration of the hanging of Haman—which, again, was the continuation of a ritual practised by the Babylonians and acquired from them by the Jews during their captivity.[43]

Photo by Lacoste.

ISABELLA THE CATHOLIC.
From a Painting in the Prado Gallery, attributed to Miguel Zittoz.

Whatever may be the truth of this matter of ritual murder, there is no doubt that these rumours were diligently spread to inflame the popular mind against the Jews.

Fanatical monks—ignoring the papal injunctions of forbearance and toleration towards the Children of Israel—went forth through Castile preaching the iniquity of the Jews and God’s wrath to fall upon the land that harboured them. Thus incited, and perceiving profit in the business, the faithful rose to destroy them. Massacres and pillages were the inevitable result, although as a rule the authorities were prompt to intervene and repress the populace’s combined fanaticism and quest for plunder.

But when in 1342 the Black Death spread over Europe, the Dominicans and others renewed their denunciations, and led men to believe the Jews responsible for the pestilence that afflicted the land. In Germany they were ruthlessly given to choose between death and baptism, and they suffered horribly until Pope Clement VI stepped in to save them. He besought the Emperor to restrain his murderers; and finding that his pleadings lacked effect, he launched the thunderbolts of excommunication against all who should continue to engage in the persecution of the Jews.

Stricken with terror before that awful menace of the Church, the faithful paused in the carnage, and the voice of denunciation fell silent.

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Thus, for a season, they won a little measure of peace. But throughout the fourteenth century spurts of persecution broke out here and there, and massacres took place in Castile, Aragon, and Navarre. The authorities, too, with the precedent of the Partidas before them, whilst not going the length of sanctioning, or even permitting violence where they could repress it, yet practised upon the Jews the most flagrant and cruel injustices. Of these the worst instance is that of the tax of 20,000 gold dobles levied upon the aljamas of Toledo by Henry II on his accession in 1369. To realize this sum he ordered the public sale not only of the property of the Jews, but actually of their persons into slavery, as is to be seen by his decree.[44]

The persecutions with which they were visited were chiefly procured by the monks, who went abroad preaching against them, fomenting the hatred of the Christians against a people who were largely their creditors. Even where the religious incentive was insufficient, the easy way of wiping out debts which this gratification of their piety afforded proved irresistible to a people whose flagrant immorality—in every sense of the term—went hand in hand with their perfervid devoutness.

These persecutions, as we have said, the authorities made haste to quell. But there arose presently a rabid fanatic who proved altogether irrepressible. His name was Hernando Martinez. He was a Dominican friar, and Canon of Ecija. Of his sincerity there can be no doubt; and their sincerity is the most terrible thing about such men, blinding them to the point of utter madness. He was ready to suffer any martyrdom sooner than be silent in a cause in which he considered it his sacred duty to give tongue. About this sacred duty he went forth, screaming his denunciations of the Jews, frenziedly inciting the mob to rise up and destroy this accursed race, these enemies of God, these crucifiers of the Saviour. Indeed, he could not have shown a more fierce and frothing hatred of them had they been the very men who at the throne of Pilate had clamoured for the blood of Christ—and for whose pardon the gentle Redeemer had prayed in His expiring moments: a matter this which escaped the attention of the Archdeacon of Ecija, being—like many another—too full of piety to find room for Christianity in his soul.

Appeals against him were made to the Archbishop of Seville, whose official, or representative, he was. He was ordered by his Archbishop to desist, and when in flagrant disobedience to his superior he continued to preach his gospel of blood and hatred, appeals were made to the King, and even to the Pope; and by King and Pope was he commanded to cease his inflammatory sermons.

But he defied them all alike. In his fanatical fury he carried his contumacy so far as to call in question the papal authority, and to declare illicit the sanction given by the popes for the erection and preservation of synagogues. This was perilously akin to heresy. Men had been sent to the stake for less, and Hernando Martinez must have been utterly mad if he conceived that the Church would permit him to continue the diffusion of such doctrines.

He was brought before the episcopal court to answer for his words. He answered defiantly—told them that the breath of God was in him, and that it was not for men to stop his mouth.

Thereupon Don Pedro Barroso—the archbishop—ordered that he should stand his trial for contumacy and heresy, and meanwhile suspended him from all jurisdiction and all duties as archiepiscopal official.

It happened, however, that Barroso died shortly thereafter, before the trial could take place; and Martinez contrived to get himself elected by the Chapter to the position of one of the provisors of the diocese pending the appointment of a successor to Barroso. Thus he resumed his power and the faculty to preach; and he used it so ruthlessly that in December of 1390 several synagogues in Seville were laid in ruins by the mob acting in obedience to his incitement.

The Jews appealed to the King for protection, and the authorities, now thoroughly roused, ordered that Martinez be deposed from his office and forbidden to preach, and that the demolished synagogues be rebuilt by the Chapter which had made itself responsible by electing him.

But Martinez, ever defiant, disregarded both King and Chapter. He pursued his bloodthirsty mission, stirring up a populace that was but too ready to perceive—through his arguments—a way to perform an act that must be pleasing to God whilst enriching itself at the same time. What populace could have been proof against such reasoning?

Finally, in the summer of 1391, the whole country was ablaze with fanatical persecution. The fierce flames broke out first in Seville, under the assiduous fanning of the deposed archdeacon.

Three years before, in view of the harm that it was urged the Jews were doing to religion by their free intermingling with Christians, King John I had ordered them to live apart in districts appointed for them, which came to be known as Juderias (Jewries or ghettos). It was commanded that the Christians should not enter these, and that for purposes of trade the Jews should come to the public markets and there erect tents, but they must own no house or domicile beyond the precincts of the Juderias, and they must withdraw to these at nightfall.

Into the Juderia of Seville the mob now penetrated, wrought by Martinez to a pitch of frenzy almost equal to his own. They went armed, and they put the place to sack and slaughter, butchering its every tenant without discrimination or pity for age or sex. The number of the slain has been estimated at some four thousand, men, women, and children.[45]

From Seville the conflagration spread to the other cities of Spain, and what had happened there happened in Burgos, Valencia, Toledo, and Cordova, and further in Aragon, Cataluna, and Navarre, whilst the streets of Barcelona are said to have run with the blood of immolated Jews.

Into the Jewry of every town went the infuriated mob to force Christ—as these Christians understood Him—upon the inhabitants; to offer the terror-stricken Jews the choice between steel and water—death and baptism.

So mighty and violent was the outbreak that the authorities were powerless to quell it, and where they attempted to do so with any degree of determination they were themselves caught in the fury of the populace. Nor did the slaughter cease until the Christians were glutted, and some fifty thousand Jews had perished.

The churches were now filled with Jews who came clamouring for baptism, having perceived that through its waters lay the way to temporal as well as to spiritual life, and having in most cases—in the abject state of terror to which they had been reduced—more concern for the former than for the latter. Llorente estimates the number of baptized at over a million, and this number was considerably swelled by the conversions effected by St. Vincent Ferrer, who came forth upon his mission to the Jews in the early years of the fifteenth century, and who induced thousands to enter the fold of Christianity by his eloquence and by the marvels which it is said he wrought.

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The fury of the mob having spent itself, peace was gradually restored, and little by little those Jews who had remained faithful to their religion and yet survived began to come forth from their hiding-places, to assemble, and, with the amazing, invincible patience and pertinacity of their race, to build up once more the edifice that had been demolished.

But if the sword of persecution was sheathed, the spirit that had guided it was still abroad, and the Jews were made to experience further repressive measures. Under decrees of 1412-13 they lost most of the few privileges that the late king had left them.

It was ordained by these that henceforth no Jew should occupy the position of a judge even in a Hebrew court, nor should any Jew be permitted to bear witness. All synagogues were to be closed or converted into Christian temples, with the exception of one in every town in which Jews should be established. They were forbidden to continue the practice of the professions of medicine, surgery, and chemistry, in which they had specialised with such good results to the community. They were no longer to occupy the offices of tax-collectors, and all commerce with Christians was forbidden them. They must neither buy nor sell in trade with Christians, nor eat with them, nor use their baths, nor send their children to the same schools. The ghetto was ordered to be walled round, so as to be enclosed and cut off from the rest of the city, and they were forbidden to issue from it. Intercourse between a Jew and a Christian woman was forbidden under pain of death by burning, even though the woman were a prostitute. They were forbidden to shave, and compelled to allow their beards and hair to grow, in addition to which they were ordered to wear as a distinguishing mark a circle of red cloth upon the shoulder of their gabardines. They were further compelled to hear three sermons annually from a Christian preacher, whose aim it was to pour abuse and contumely upon them, to inveigh against their accursed race and creed, to assure them of the certainty of the damnation that awaited them, and to exalt before them the excellences of the Catholic religion (based, be it remembered, that we may fully savour the irony, upon Faith, Hope, and Charity).[46]

When King John I had established the Juderias in 1388, curtailing at the same time the privileges which until then the Jews had enjoyed—at least by paying for them—there had been many who, finding the restraint imposed upon them altogether intolerable, had abandoned the faith of their fathers and embraced Christianity. Those who held the affairs of this world in esteem had sought baptism, and whilst many in doing so had entirely broken with the past—and often, as is the way of converts, become zealots in their observance of the faith embraced—many others, whilst outwardly complying with the obligations of the Christian religion, continued in secret to observe the law of Moses and their Jewish rites. Similarly these further decrees against their liberty had the effect of causing still more numerous conversions to Christianity.

These converts were termed “New-Christians” by the Spaniards. By those of their own race who had remained faithful they were called “marranos”—a contemptuous epithet derived from Maran-atha, (“The Lord is coming”), but supposed by the Christians to signify “accursed.” It came into general use before very long.

These New-Christians, as a consequence of their conversion, gained not merely the privileges recently lost to them as Jews, but found themselves upon a footing of absolute equality with the Old-Christians; every profession was open to them, and by applying themselves to these with all their energy and intelligence, they found themselves before very long in possession of some of the highest offices in the land.

But in the meanwhile the rigour of the decrees of 1412 came to be considerably relaxed; a degree of liberty and of intermingling with Christians was permitted to the Jews, and many of the offices which they had occupied of old came once more under their control, chiefly those concerned with commerce and finance and the farming of the taxes. Under the deplorable rule of Henry IV the nobles, whose slave he was, demanded that he should “expel from his service and States the Jews who, exploiting public misery, have contrived to return to the appointments of tax-gatherers.”

The weak King agreed, but neglected to execute his promise; it was presently forgotten, and the Jewish section of the community was allowed to continue under the conditions of ease we have described. Under these conditions was it found by Ferdinand and Isabella upon their accession, nor does it appear that they paid any particular attention to it until invited to do so by the “clerics and laymen” who, as Pulgar[47] tells us, represented to them that in the re-Judaizings that were taking place was matter for their jurisdiction.

CHAPTER VI
THE NEW-CHRISTIANS

It must clearly be understood that so far the Inquisition, which for some three centuries already had been very active in Italy and Southern France, had not reached Castile.

Even as recently as 1474, when Pope Sixtus IV had ordered the Dominicans to set up the Inquisition in Spain, and whilst in obedience to that command inquisitors were appointed in Aragon, Valencia, Cataluña, and Navarre, it was not held necessary to make any appointment in Castile, where no heresy of any account could be perceived. Trials of such offences against the Faith as might occur were conducted by the bishops, who were fully empowered to deal with them; and such offences being rare, the necessity for a special tribunal did not suggest itself, nor did the Pope press the matter, desirous though he might be to see the Inquisition universally established.

There was, of course, a large Hebrew population, and also a considerable number of Moslems, in the peninsula. But these did not come within the jurisdiction of any ecclesiastical court. The Inquisition itself could take no cognizance of them, as they did not offend against the Faith.

Explanation is perhaps necessary. We touch here upon a point on which the religious persecution known as the Inquisition compares favourably with any other religious persecution in history, and in common justice this point should not—as but too frequently has been the case—be obscured. There is too little to be urged in favour of this tribunal so terribly inequitable in its practices that we can afford to slur over the one feature of its constitution that is invested with a degree of equity.

Whatever may have been the case in the course of civil and popular persecutions, whatever may have been done by a frenzied populace at the instigation of odd fanatical preachers acting without the authority of their superiors in giving rein to the fierce bigotry they had nurtured in their souls, the Church herself, it must be clearly understood, neither urged nor sanctioned the persecution of those born into any religion that was not in itself a heresy of the Roman Faith. The tribunal of the Inquisition was established solely—and moved solely—to deal with those who apostatized or seceded from the ranks of the Roman Church, precisely as an army deals with deserting soldiers. Fanatical, horribly narrow, cruelly bigoted as was the spirit of the Inquisition, yet the inquisitors confined their prosecutions to apostates, to the adulterers of a faith whose purity and incorruptibility they had made it their mission to maintain.

If the Church repressed liberty of conscience, if she stifled rationalism and crushed independence of thought, she did so only where her own children were concerned—those who had been born into the Catholic Faith or who had embraced it in conversion. With those born into any other independent religion she had no concern. To Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, and Pagan, and to the savages of the New World, when it came presently to be discovered, she accorded the fullest religious freedom.

To appreciate this, it is but necessary to consider such enactments as those of Honorius III for the protection of the Jews, of Clement VI, who threatened their persecutors with excommunication, and the action of Pope and Archbishop in the case of the inflammatory sermons of Hernando Martinez. It is sufficient to consider that when the Jews were driven out of Spain—as shall presently be seen—they actually found a refuge in Rome itself, and were received with kindliness by Pope Alexander VI (Roderigo Borgia), which in itself is one of the oddest ironies that ecclesiastical history can offer.

And if this is not sufficient, let us for a moment consider the immunity and comparative peace enjoyed by the Jews who dwelt in Rome itself, in their district of Trastevere.

They were a recognized section of the community in the Papal City. On his coronation procession each Pope would pause near the Campo de’Fiori to receive the company of Jews that came, headed by the Rabbi, to pay homage to their sovereign—precisely as their ancestors had come to pay homage to the emperor.

To the Vicar of Christ the Rabbi would now proffer the rolls of the Pentateuch, swathed in a cloth. The Pope would take them into his hands, to show that he respected the law contained in them, and would then put them behind him, to signify that this law now belonged to the past. From behind the Pontiff the Rabbi would receive back his sacred scriptures, and depart with his escort, usually accompanied by the jeers, insults, and vituperations of the Roman populace.[48]

It will be understood, then, that the Inquisition’s establishment in Spain was not urged for the purpose of persecuting the Jews. It had no concern with Jews, if we confine the term purely to its religious meaning, signifying the observers of the law of Moses. Its concern was entirely with the apostasy of those who, although of the Jewish race, had become Christians by conversion. By the subsequent secret re-Judaizings, or return of these New-Christians to the religion of their fathers (which they had abandoned out of material considerations), they came within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and rendered themselves liable to prosecution as heretics, a prosecution which could never have overtaken them had they but continued in their original faith.

There is no denying that many of those who had been baptized against their will, as the only means of saving their lives when the fury of the Christian mob was unleashed against them, had remained Jews at heart, had continued in secret to practise the Jewish rites, and were exerting themselves to bring back to the fold of Israel their apostate brethren. Others, however, upon receiving baptism may have determined to keep the law to which they now pledged themselves and to persevere honestly in Christianity. Yet many of the old Jewish observances were become habitual with them: the trained—almost the hereditary—repugnance to certain meats, the observance of certain feast days, and several minor domestic laws that are part of the Jewish code, were too deeply implanted in them to be plucked up by the roots at the first attempt. Time was required in which they could settle into Christian habits; two or three generations might be necessary in some families before these habits came to be perfectly acquired and the old ones to be entirely obliterated. Had those who urged the Sovereigns to introduce the Inquisition into Castile, or had the Sovereigns themselves but perceived this and exercised the necessary and reasonable patience in the matter, Spain might have been spared the horrors that took root in her soil and sapped the vigour and intellectual energy of her children, so that in her case decadence pressed swift and close upon the very heels of supreme achievement.

Execrable as is the memory of the Inquisition to all the world, to none should be it so execrable as to Spain, since the evil that it wrought recoiled entirely upon herself.

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It was on the occasion of Isabella’s first visit to Seville—that punitive visit already mentioned—that the establishment of the Holy Office in Spain was first proposed to her. The King was at the time in Estremadura upon the business of fortifying his frontiers against Portugal.

The proposal came from Alonso de Ojeda, the Prior of the Dominicans of Seville, a man who enjoyed great credit and was reputed saintly (“vir pius ac sanctus,” Paramo calls him).

Seeing her zeal to put down lawlessness and to purify and restore order to the country, Ojeda urged upon her notice the spread of the detestable Judaizing movement that was toward. He laid stress upon the hypocrisy that had underlain so many of the conversions of the Jews. He pointed out—with some degree of justice—that these men had made a mock of the Holy Church, had defiled her sacraments, and had perpetrated the most abominable sacrilege by their pretended acceptance of the Christian faith. He urged that not only must this be punished, but that the havoc which these Judaizers were working among the more faithful New-Christians, and the proselytizing which they went so far as to attempt among Old-Christians, must be checked.

To carry out this urgently-required purification, he implored the Queen to establish the Inquisition.[49]

There was a speciousness, and even a justice, in his arguments which must have impressed that pious lady. But her piety, intense as it was, did not carry her to the lengths required of her by her priestly counsellor. The balance of her splendid mind was singularly true. She perceived that here was matter that called for a remedy; but she perceived also the fanaticism inspiring the friar who stood before her, and realized how his fanaticism must exaggerate the evil.

She was aware also of the extreme malevolence of which the New-Christians were the object. By their conversion they might have deflected the religious hostility of the Castilians; but the more deeply-rooted racial antagonism remained. It not only remained, but it was quickened by the envy which these New-Christians were exciting. The energy and intelligence inherent in men of their race were serving them now, as they had served them before, to their undoing. There were no offices of eminence in which New-Christians were not to be found; there were none in which they did not outnumber the Old-Christians—the pure-blooded Castilians.

This the Queen knew, for she was herself surrounded by converts and the descendants of converts. Several of her counsellors, her three secretaries—one of whom was that chronicler, Pulgar, whose record of the situation has been quoted—and her very treasurer were all New-Christians.[50]

These men Isabella knew intimately, and esteemed. Judging the New-Christians generally by those in her immediate service, she was naturally led to discount Ojeda’s imputations against them. She perceived the source of these imputations, and she must have taken into consideration the ineradicable bitterness of the popular feeling against Jews and the intensity of a prejudice which extended—as we have said—to the New-Christians to such an extent that they continued to be known as “Judios,” notwithstanding their conversion, so that often in contemporary chronicles it is difficult to determine to which class the writer is referring.

We have said that, in spite of conversions, the racial hostility remained. The Christian attitude towards the Hebrew had not changed in the hundred years that were sped since, under the incitings of the Archdeacon of Ecija, the mob had risen up and massacred them. They were the descendants of the crucifiers always.

A vestige of this feeling lingers to this day in the peninsula. In the vocabulary of the Portuguese lower orders, and even of the indifferently educated, there is no such word as “cruel.” “Jew” is the term that has entirely usurped its functions, and as an injunction against cruelty to man or beast, “Don’t be a Jew!” (Não seja judeu!) is still the only phrase.

No conception of what was the popular feeling at the time can be conveyed more adequately than by a translation of the passage from Bernaldez concerning the manners and customs of the Jews. Bernaldez was a priest, and therefore, to some extent, an educated man—as in the main his history bears witness—yet a piece of writing so ludicrously stupid and detestably malicious as this passage can only have emanated from a mind in which bigotry had destroyed all sense of proportion.

The only historical value of the passage lies in the deplorable fact that undoubtedly it may be accepted as a faithful mirror of the prejudice that existed in Isabella’s day.

It runs:

“Just as heretics and Jews have always fled from Christian doctrines, so they have always fled from Christian customs. They are great drinkers and gluttons, who never lose the Jewish habit of eating garbage of onions and garlic fried in oil, and of meat stewed in oil, which they use instead of lard; and oil with meat is a thing that smells very badly, so that their houses and doorways stink vilely of that garbage; and they have the peculiar smell of Jews in consequence of their food and of the fact that they are not baptized. And although some have been baptized, yet the virtue of the baptism having been annulled by their credulity [i.e. their adherence to their own faith] and by their Judaizing, they stink like Jews. They will not eat pork save under compulsion. They eat meat in Lent and on the eve of feast days.... They keep the Passover and the Sabbath as best they can. They send oil to the synagogues for the lamps. Jews come to preach to them in their houses secretly—especially to the women, very secretly. They have Rabbis to slaughter their beasts and poultry. They eat unleavened bread in the Jewish season. They perform all their Jewish rites as much in secret as possible, and women as well as men seek whenever possible to avoid the sacraments of Holy Church.... They never confess truthfully, and it happened that a priest, once confessing one of these, cut a fragment of cloth from his garment, saying: ‘As you have never sinned, let me have this as a relic to heal the sick.’... Not without reason did Our Lord call them generatio prava et adultera. They do not believe that God rewards virginity and chastity, and all their endeavour is to multiply. And in the days of the strength of this heresy many monasteries were violated by their merchants and wealthy men, and many professed nuns were ravished and derided, they not believing in or fearing excommunication, but rather doing this to vituperate Jesus Christ and the Church. Commonly swindling people by many wiles and cheats, as in buying and selling, they have no conscience where Christians are concerned. Never would they undertake agriculture, ploughing or tilling or raising cattle, nor have they ever taught their children any office but that of sitting down to earn enough to eat by as little labour as possible. Many of them have raised up great estates in a few years, not being sparing of their thieving and usury, maintaining that they earn it from their enemies....”[51]

Photo by Donald Macbeth.

SEVILLE.
From Colmenar’s “Délices d’Espagne.”

This atrocious tissue of misrepresentation would be utterly negligible and contemptible were it not for the fact—as has been said—that it was written in good faith (the good faith of a bigot) and reflects what was currently believed, fostered by the envy which is plainly revealed when Bernaldez alludes to the occupations of the Jews and the New-Christians—all of whom he assumes to be false to the faith they have embraced.

Isabella must have been conscious of this feeling, and she must have rated it at its proper value. She had received in 1474 a very pitiful narrative poem of the New-Christian Anton Montoro, which painted with terrible vividness a slaughter of the conversos and implored justice upon the assassins, protesting the innocence of the New-Christians and the sincerity of their conversions. Her gentle nature must have been moved to compassion by that lament, and her acute mind must have perceived the evil passions and the envy that were stirring under the fair cloak of saintly zeal.

All these considerations being weighed, she resisted the representations of Ojeda.

But weightier than any may have been the reflection of the power which the tribunal of the Inquisition must place in the hands of the clergy. Already and very bravely she had expressed her resentment of clerical usurpation of royal rights in Spain, and to repress it she had not hesitated to front the Pope himself. If she acceded now to Ojeda’s request, she would be permitting the priesthood to set up a court which, not being subject to any temporal law, must alienate from her some portion of that sovereignty which so jealously she guarded.

Thus she came to dismiss the petition of the Dominican, and there can be little doubt when all the circumstances are considered—as presently they shall be—that in this she had the entire support of the Cardinal of Spain, Don Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville, who was with her at the time.

Ojeda withdrew, baffled, but by no means resigned. He awaited a more favourable season, what time he kept the popular feeling in a state of ferment. And no sooner had Ferdinand come to rejoin his Queen in Seville than the Dominican renewed his importunities.

He hoped to find an ally in the King. Moreover he was now supported by Fr. Filippo de’ Barberi, the Sicilian Inquisitor. The latter had newly arrived in Spain, where he came to seek at the hands of the Catholic Sovereigns—who were rulers of Sicily—the confirmation of an ancient decree promulgated in 1223 by the Emperor Frederic II. By virtue of this decree one-third of the confiscated property of heretics became the perquisite of the Inquisition; and it also ordained that the governors of all districts should afford protection to the inquisitors and assistance in their work of prosecuting heretics and any Jew who might have contracted marriage with a Christian.

These privileges the Sovereigns duly confirmed, accounting it their duty to do so since they related to the Inquisition as established by Honorius III. But not on that account did Isabella yet lean towards the introduction of the tribunal into Castile.

It happened, however, that to the arguments of Ojeda and Barberi were added the persuasions of the papal legate a latere at the court of Castile—Nicolao Franco, Bishop of Trevisa—who conceived, no doubt, that the institution of the Inquisition here would be pleasing to Pope Sixtus IV, since it must increase the authority of the Church in Spain.

To Ferdinand it is probable that the suggestion was not without allurement, since it must have offered him a way at once to gratify the piety that was his, and—out of the confiscations that must ensue from the prosecution of so very wealthy a section of the community—to replenish the almost exhausted coffers of the treasury. When the way of conscience is also the way of profit, there is little difficulty in following it. But, after all, though joint sovereign of Spain and paramount in Aragon, Ferdinand had not in Castile the power of Isabella. It was her kingdom when all was said, and although his position there was by no means that of a simple prince-consort, yet he was bound by law and by policy to remain submissive to her will. In view of her attitude, he could do little more than add his own to the persuasions of the three priestly advocates, and amongst them they so pressed Isabella that she gave way to the extent of a compromise.

She consented that steps should be taken not only to check the Judaizing of the New-Christians, but also to effect conversions among the Jews themselves; and she entrusted the difficult task of enforcing the observance of the Christian faith and the Catholic dogmas to the Cardinal of Spain—than whom, from a Christian and humanitarian point of view, no man of his day could have been more desirable, which is as much as to say that from the point of view of his Catholic contemporaries no man could have been less so.

Isabella’s announcement of her determination in the matter must have come as something of a shock to Ojeda, who conceived himself on the way to prevail with her. This concession to his wishes was far from being the concession that he sought, since it passed over the heads of the preaching friars, who had made such work—by their own methods—their special mission.

The Queen, however, had decided, and there was no more to be said. The Cardinal of Spain went about his task in that sincere Christian spirit and with that zeal for truth and justice that is associated with his name. He compiled for the purpose of his mission an instrucción, which has not survived, but which Ortiz de Zuñiga[52] and Pulgar[53] inform us was in the form of a catechism.

In this “he indicates,” says Pulgar, “the duties of the true Christian from the day of his birth, in the sacrament of baptism as in all other sacraments which it is his obligation to receive, as well as what he should be taught, what believe and what perform as a faithful Christian at all times and on all days until the day of his death.”

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Mariana, Zurita, and other historians, upon the word of Paramo[54] and of Salazar de Mendoza, have ventured to ascribe the establishment of the Inquisition in Castile to the Cardinal of Spain. Their object in so doing has been to heap honour and glory upon his name and memory; for in their opinion he could have had no greater claim than this to the gratitude and reverence of humanity. But the justice of a less bigoted age demands that truth shall prevail in this respect, and that his memory be deprived of that very questionable honour. The Cardinal’s contemporaries do not justify what Paramo claims for him. And, to reduce the argument to its lowest plane, it would have been extremely unlikely that Cardinal Mendoza should advocate the establishment of a court that must deprive him and the other Spanish bishops of the jurisdiction in causas de Fé hitherto vested in themselves.

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The Primate pursued, then, the task imposed upon him, causing his “catechism” to be expounded and taught by all parish priests in all pulpits and schools.

But however zealous his methods, they were not the methods desired by Ojeda and the papal legate. The Dominican, vexed by the turn of events, and determined to return to the assault as soon as ever occasion offered, cast about him for fresh arguments that should prevail with the Sovereigns.

And then there befell an incident in Seville to supply his fanatical needs and place in his hands the very weapon that he sought.

A young nobleman of the famous house of Guzman had engaged in an amorous intrigue with the daughter of a New-Christian. In the pursuit of this amour he repaired secretly to her father’s house on the night of Thursday in Holy Week of that year 1478, and was admitted by the girl. But the lovers being disturbed by voices in the house, Guzman was driven to conceal himself. From his concealment he overheard the conversation of several Judaizers who were being entertained by the father of his mistress. He heard them vehemently denying the divinity of Christ and as vehemently blaspheming His name and the Holy Faith.

Having quitted the house, he went straight to the Prior of the Dominicans to relate what he had overheard and to denounce the blasphemers.

This young Castilian is so very interesting a type that a slight digression to consider him more closely may be permitted. It is of assistance to understand the mental attitude, the crass complacency of the bigot. He knew that the highest virtue that a Christian could practise was the virtue of chastity, and, conversely, that the worst offence against God into which he could fall was that of unchastity. Or at least he had been taught these things, and he accepted them in a sub-conscious, automatic sort of way. Yet since the sin was his own, it gave his consciousness no uneasiness that he should perpetrate it, that he should slink like a thief into the house of this New-Christian to debauch his daughter. But let him hear this New-Christian or his friends express opinions of disbelief in this God whom he believed in and—by his own lights—insulted, and behold him outraged in all his feelings against those unspeakable fellows. Behold him running hot-foot to Prior Ojeda to relate with horror the tale of this vileness that he had overheard, so little concerned about the vileness through which he himself had acquired his knowledge that he makes no effort to conceal it. And, apparently, the Dominican, in a like horror at the New-Christians’ offence against a God in whom they do not believe, accounts of little moment the Castilian’s offence against the God in whom he does believe.

It is a nice illumination of the contrast between the theory and the practice of Christianity.

Upon the young man’s information Ojeda instituted an inquiry, and six Judaizers were arrested. They confessed their guilt, and begged to be reconciled to the Church. As the Inquisition had not yet been established, with its terrible decree against “relapsos,”[55] their prayer was granted, after the fulfilment of the penance imposed.[56]

With the tale of this “execrable wickedness” Ojeda repaired at once to Cordova, whither the Sovereigns had by now withdrawn. The story would lose nothing in its repetition by this pious and saintly man, and he was in a position to add to it that the good folk of Seville were almost in revolt from indignation at that happening in their midst.

Having shown thus how urgently it was required, he once more implored the Sovereigns to establish the Inquisition. And it is not to be doubted that his petition would be backed by that of the legate Franco, who was at the Court.

Yet Isabella still showed repugnance, still hesitated to consent to the extreme course advocated.

But at this moment, according to Llorente,[57] another advocate appears upon the scene to plead the cause of the Faith—a figure in the white habit and black cloak of the Dominican Brotherhood, a man in his fifty-eighth year, tall and gaunt and stooping slightly at the shoulders, mild-eyed, of a cast of countenance that is gentle, noble, and benign.

This is Frey Tomás de Torquemada, Prior of the Dominican Convent of Holy Cross of Segovia, the nephew of the late illustrious Juan de Torquemada, Cardinal of San Sisto.

His influence with the Queen is vast; his eloquence fiery; his mental energy compelling. Ojeda looks on, and his hopes grow confident at last.

CHAPTER VII
THE PRIOR OF HOLY CROSS

If ever a name held the omen of a man’s life, that name is Torquemada. To such an extraordinary degree is it instinct with the suggestion of the machinery of fire and torture over which he was destined to preside, that it almost seems a fictitious name, a nom de guerre, a grim invention, compounded of the Latin torque and the Spanish quemada, to fit the man who was to hold the office of Grand Inquisitor.

It was derived from the northern town of Torquemada (the Turre Cremata of the Romans), where the illustrious family had its beginnings. This family first sprang into historical distinction with the knighting by Alfonso XI of Lope Alonso de Torquemada (Hijodalgo a los Fueros de Castilla), and thereafter was maintained in prominence by several members who held more or less distinguished offices. But the most illustrious bearer of the name was the cultured Dominican Juan de Torquemada (Lope Alonso’s great-grandson), who was raised to the purple with the title of Cardinal of San Sisto. He was one of the most learned, eminent, and respected theologians of his age, an upholder of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and the most ardent champion since Thomas Aquinas of the doctrine of papal infallibility. He enriched theological literature by several works, the best known of which is his “Meditations.”

Fr. Tomás de Torquemada was the son of the Cardinal’s only brother, Pero Fernandez de Torquemada. He was born at Valladolid in 1420, and after a scholastic career of some distinction—if Garcia Rodrigo is to be believed in this particular[58]—he followed in his uncle’s footsteps, soliciting the habit of the Order of St. Dominic, which he assumed in the Convent of St. Paul of Valladolid upon completing his studies of philosophy and divinity, and receiving a doctor’s degree.

He filled with distinction the chair of canon law and theology, and in the fullness of time was elected Prior of the Convent of Santa Cruz of Segovia. He so distinguished himself in the discharge of the duties of this office by his piety, his learning, and his zeal, that he was repeatedly re-elected, there being at the time no rule of the order to inhibit it. Such was the austerity of his character that he never ate meat, or used linen either in his clothing or on his bed.[59] He observed the rule of poverty imposed by his order so rigorously that he was unable to provide his only sister with an endowment suitable to her station, and could allow her no more than would permit her to live as a nun under the rule of the tertiary order of St. Dominic.

At what epoch the Prior of Holy Cross first became the confessor of the Infanta Isabella it is not now possible to ascertain. Jaime Bleda tells us that in the fulfilment of this office he had extracted from her, during her youth at the Court of her brother King Henry IV, a promise that should she ever come to the throne she would devote her life to the extirpation of heresy from her realm.[60]

This may be dismissed as one of those popular fictions that arise concerning the intimate affairs of princes, for it cannot be said that it is borne out by the circumstances under consideration.

Isabella’s reluctance to proceed to extreme—or even vigorous—measures against those of her subjects accused of Judaizing is admitted by every serious student of her reign, however opinions may vary as to the motives that swayed her in this course.

There remains, however, out of Bleda’s anecdote, the fact that Torquemada had been Isabella’s confessor in early years—which in itself bears out the statement that the Dominican had achieved distinction. It follows by virtue of his having occupied this office that he must have acquired over the mind of a woman so devout a considerable ascendancy where matters connected with the Faith were concerned.

This influence he came now to exert.

To support it he brought an indubitable sincerity and disinterestedness of motives; he brought a reputation for sanctity derived from the rigid purity of his life and the stern asceticism which he practised—a reputation which could not fail to act upon the imagination of a woman of Isabella’s pious temperament; and, finally, he brought the dominant, masterful personality and the burning eloquence that were his own.

When all this is taken into account it is not surprising that the Queen’s resistance, weakened already by the onslaughts of Ojeda and his associates, the King and the papal legate, should at last have broken down; and that under the compelling persuasion of the Prior of Holy Cross she should reluctantly have consented to the establishment of the Holy Office in her dominions.

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Thus it befell that by order of the Catholic Sovereigns their Orator at the Pontifical Court, D. Francisco de Santillana, applied to Sixtus IV for a bull that should empower Ferdinand and Isabella to set up the tribunal of the Inquisition in Castile, to enable them—as Bernaldez puts it—to proceed to the extirpation of heresy “by the way of fire”—por via del fuego.

This bull was duly granted under date of November 7, 1478.

It gave the Sovereigns the faculty of electing three bishops or archbishops or other God-fearing and upright priests, regular or secular, of over forty years of age, who must be masters or bachelors of divinity and doctors or licentiates of canon law, to make inquisition throughout the kingdom against heretics, apostates, and their abettors.

His Holiness accorded to the men so elected the requisite jurisdiction to proceed according to law and custom, and he further empowered the Sovereigns to annul such nominations as they might make and to replace their nominees as they saw fit.[61]

The Sovereigns were in Cordova when the bull reached them in the following month of December. But they did not at once proceed to act upon it. Before doing so, Isabella made one last effort to repress the Judaizing and apostatizing movement by the gentler measures concerted with the Cardinal of Spain in 1477.

To the task of continuing with increased vigour the teachings of the “catechism” drawn up by Mendoza she now appointed Diego Alonso de Solis, Bishop of Cadiz, D. Diego de Merlo, Coadjutor of Seville, and Alonso de Ojeda, to whom these royal orders must have been a fresh source of disappointment and chagrin.

Torquemada, we must assume, had withdrawn once more to his convent of Segovia, and perhaps the removal of his stern influence enabled the Queen to make this last effort to avoid the course to which he had all but constrained her.

Having concluded these arrangements, the Sovereigns repaired to Toledo. There, in the spring of the year 1480, the Cortes assembled to make oath of fealty to the infant Prince of Asturias to whom Isabella had given birth in June of 1478. Whilst this oath was the chief motive of the assembly, it was by no means the only business with which it had to deal. Many other matters received attention; amongst them the necessity for remedying the evils arising out of the commerce between Christians and Jews was seriously considered.

It was decreed that the old laws concerning the Jews, which lately had been falling into partial desuetude, should be re-enforced, particularly those which prescribed that all Jews should wear the distinguishing badge of the circlet of red cloth on the shoulders of their gabardines; that they should keep strictly to their Juderias, always retiring to these at nightfall; that walls to enclose these Juderias should be erected wherever they might still be wanting, and that no Jew should practise as a doctor, surgeon, apothecary, or innkeeper.

Beyond that, however, the Cortes did not go; and the institution of the Inquisition to deal with Judaizers was not so much as mentioned, which circumstance Llorente accepts as a further proof of the Queen’s antipathy to the Holy Office.

Coming at a time when the Jews were once more beginning to taste the sweets of freedom, there can be little doubt that these provisions, which thrust them back into bondage and ignominy, must have been extremely galling to them. It is possible that these measures against the men of his race spurred a New-Christian to the rash step of publishing a pamphlet in which he criticized and censured the royal action in the matter. Carried away by his feelings, the writer—intentionally or not—fell into heresy in the course of his writings, to which the Jeronymite monk, Hernando de Talavera, published a reply.

Rodrigo[62] assumes that this heretical pamphlet put an end to the Queen’s patience. It may very well have been the case, or at least it may have afforded Ferdinand and the others who desired the Inquisition a final argument whereby to overcome what reluctance still lingered with her.

Be that as it may, it was very soon after this—September 27, 1480—that the Sovereigns, who at the time were at Medina del Campo, acted at last upon the papal bull which had now been in their hands for nearly two years, and delegated their faculty of giving inquisitors to Castile to the Cardinal of Spain and Fr. Tomás de Torquemada.

Mendoza and Torquemada proceeded at once to carry out the task entrusted to them, and appointed as inquisitors of the faith for Seville—where Judaizing was represented to be most flagrant—the Dominican friars Juan de San Martino and Miguel Morillo. The latter was the Provincial of the Dominicans of Aragon, and was already a person of experience in such matters, having acted as inquisitor in Rousillon. To assist them in the discharge of their office, the secular priest Juan Ruiz de Medina, a doctor of canon law, and Juan Lopez de Barco, one of the Queen’s chaplains, were appointed, the former to the position of assessor, the latter to that of fiscal.

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It is necessary, in view of the much that has been written, and although the danger be incurred of labouring the point, to examine more closely the attitude of the Sovereigns towards the tribunal which they now sanctioned.

Isabella’s zeal, both pious and political, urged her, as has been said, to proceed in such a way as should set a term to the unrest arising out of the public feeling against Judaizers and apostatizing Moriscoes (baptized Moors). Ferdinand not only shared her feelings, but pious zeal in him went to the lengths of bigotry, and he aimed essentially at a political unity that should be inseparably allied and interwoven with religious unity.

Isabella would have laboured slowly, preferring, even at the sacrifice of time, to achieve her ends by gentle means and the exercise of that patience which was so very necessary if good results were to be obtained. Ferdinand, perhaps less pitiful, perhaps—to do him full justice—less hopeful of the power of argument and indoctrination, lending an ear to the priestly assertion “contra negantes veritatis nulla est disputatio,” would have proceeded at once to the introduction into Castile of the stern repressive measures already being exerted in his native Aragon.

On the score of their different attitudes the Sovereigns might have found themselves in conflict, but that in this matter they had a ground of common interest. Both were agreed that in no case should Spain be brought under the ecclesiastical sway which the establishment of the usual form of Inquisition must set up. If this were to be—as usual hitherto—under pontifical control, its officers would be appointed by the Pope, or, vicariously, by the Dominican provincials, and a proportion of the confiscations consequent upon conviction would be gathered into the pontifical coffers.

For all his bigotry and his desire to see the Holy Office instituted in Castile, Ferdinand was as averse as Isabella to its introduction in a form that must restore the clerical usurpations they had been at such pains to repress.

If Isabella admitted the Inquisition as a last means of quelling the disturbing elements in her kingdom, it must be an Inquisition on lines entirely different from those which hitherto had obtained elsewhere. The appointment of its officers must no more rest with the Pope than the bestowal of Spanish benefices. It must be the prerogative of the Sovereigns themselves, and it must carry with it the power to depose and replace, where necessary, such inquisitors as they might appoint. Further, Rome must have no share in the property confiscated from Spanish subjects, the disposal of this being entirely controlled by the Sovereigns.

It has been argued that here was the cause of all Isabella’s hesitancy: that greed and statecraft were the mainsprings of her conduct in the matter, and that humanitarian considerations had no part in it; that the bull had been applied for earlier than has been generally supposed, and that the delay had resulted from the Pope’s disinclination to grant any such terms as were demanded.

The latter statement may not be without foundation. But to say deliberately that no humanitarian considerations governed the Queen’s conduct is to say a great deal more than the circumstances warrant. To establish this hypothesis it would be necessary to advance some adequate reason for her reluctance to act upon the bull when once it was in her hands. For the bull of November 1478 conceded all that the Sovereigns demanded, all that they desired. Yet Isabella allowed nearly two years to pass before proceeding to exercise the faculties conferred by it, and during that time Cardinal Mendoza and his co-operators diligently pursued the work of effecting conversions by means of his “catechism.”

The conclusion that this was dictated by humane considerations on the part of the Queen is the only one that appears reasonable, nor is any alternative put forward to account for the delay of nearly two years.

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When the Cardinal of Spain and the Prior of Holy Cross, acting jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns, appointed the first inquisitors for Castile, they instructed these to set up a tribunal in Seville, which of all the cities of Spain was the one where Judaizing was alleged to be most flagrantly conducted.[63]

The Sovereigns issued on October 9 a command to all loyal subjects to afford the two inquisitors every assistance they might require on their journey to Seville and all facilities there for carrying out their mission.

The subjects, however, were so little loyal on this occasion that upon the arrival of the inquisitors at Seville, these found a reception of all solemnity awaiting them and every respect accorded to them, but no assistance. To such an extent was this withheld that they found it quite impossible to set about the business upon which they came. They complained of this state of things to the King, and as a result he sent special orders on December 27 to the Coadjutor of Seville and the civil authorities of the district, commanding them to lend the inquisitors every support.

In consequence of this they were at last enabled to establish their court and proceed to the business upon which they came.[64]

The very rumour of their approach had filled the New-Christians with anxiety, and a glimpse of the gloomy funereal pageant—the white-robed, black-hooded inquisitors, with their attendant familiars and barefoot friars, the procession headed by a Dominican carrying the white cross—on its way to the Convent of St. Paul, where they took up their quarters, was enough to put to flight some thousands of those who had cause to fear that they might become the objects of the attention of that fearful court.

These fugitives sought refuge in the feudal lordships of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, of the formidable Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, Marquis of Cadiz, and of the Count of Arcos.

But in all ages it had been the way of the Inquisition not only to suspect readily, but to allow suspicion to usurp the place that elsewhere is reserved for proof. And so they proceeded to construe into evidence of guilt this flight of the timorous, as is shown by the edict they published on January 2 of 1481.

In this—having set forth their appointment by the Sovereigns, and the terms of the bull under which such appointment had been made—they announced that, inasmuch as it had come to their knowledge that many persons had departed out of Seville in fear of prosecution upon grounds of heretical pravity, they commanded the Marquess of Cadiz, the Count of Arcos, and the other nobles of the Kingdom of Castile, that within fifteen days of the publication of this edict they should make an exact account of the persons of both sexes that had sought refuge in their lordships or jurisdictions; that they should arrest all these and bring them safely to the prison of the Inquisition in Seville, confiscating their property and placing this together with an inventory in the hands of some person of trust, to be held by them at the disposal of the inquisitors; that none should dare to shelter any fugitive, but comply exactly with the terms of this edict under pain of greater excommunication and the other penalties by law established against abettors of heretics, amongst which penalties was that of the annulment of their dignities and offices, their subjects and vassals being absolved of all vassalage and subjection; and the inquisitors reserved to themselves and their superiors the power of absolution from the ecclesiastical censure incurred by all who might fail to obey the terms of this edict.

CHAPTER VIII
THE HOLY OFFICE IN SEVILLE

The stern purpose of the inquisitors and the severity with which they intended to proceed were plainly revealed by that edict of January 2, 1481. The harsh injustice that lay in its call upon the authorities to arrest men and women merely because they had departed from Seville before departure was in any way forbidden is typical of the flagrantly arbitrary methods of the Inquisition. That it should have struck terror into the New-Christians who had remained in Seville, and that it should have moved them to take measures to protect themselves against a court in which justice seemed little likely to be observed, and to whose cruel mercies the most innocent might find himself exposed at any moment, is not surprising—particularly when it is considered how great was the number of New-Christians who occupied positions of eminence in Seville.

A group of these prominent citizens assembled at the invitation of Diego de Susan, one of the wealthiest and most influential men of Seville, whose fortune was estimated at ten million maravedis. They came together to consider what measures should be taken for the defence of themselves, their persons and property, from the unscrupulous activities of this tribunal, and they determined that if necessary they would resort to force.

Among those who entered into this conspiracy were some ecclesiastics, and several who held office under the Crown, such as the Governor of Triana, Juan Fernandez Abolafio, the Captain of Justice and farmer of the royal customs, his brother Fernandez the licentiate, Bartolomé Torralba, and the wealthy and well-connected Manuel Sauli.

Susan addressed them. He reminded them that they were the principal citizens of Seville, that they were wealthy not only in property but in the good-will of the people, and that it but required resolution and solidarity on their part to enable them to prevail against the inquisitors in the event of these friars making any attempt upon them.

All concurring, it was concerted that each of the conspirators should engage himself to provide a proportion of the men, arms, and money and what else might be necessary for their purpose.

But Susan to his undoing had a daughter. This girl, whose beauty was so extraordinary that she was surnamed la hermosa fembra, had taken a Castilian lover. What motives may have actuated her, what part the lover may have played in these, does not transpire. All that is known is that she betrayed the conspiracy to the inquisitors—“impiously violating the natural laws engraved by God’s finger upon the human heart.”

Susan and his unfortunate confederates were seized as a consequence of that infamous delation; they were lodged in the cells of the Convent of St. Paul, which meanwhile did duty as a prison, and brought to trial before the Court of the Holy Office sitting in the convent.[65]

They were tried for heresy and apostasy, of course; since upon no other grounds was it possible for the Holy Office to deal with them. It is unfortunate that Llorente should have unearthed no record of this trial—one of the first held by the Inquisition in Castile—and that nothing should be known of what took place beyond the fact that Susan, Sauli, Bartolomé Torralba, and the brothers Fernandez were found guilty of the alleged offence of apostasy and were delivered up to the secular arm for punishment.

Garcia Rodrigo has devoted a couple of pages of his “Historia Verdadera” to an elaborate piece of fiction in which he asserts that these men were persistent in their error in spite of the strenuous efforts made to save them. He invests the fanatical Ojeda with the character of an angel of mercy, and represents him hovering round the condemned, exhorting them, almost with tears, to abjure their error, and he assures us that although the Dominican persevered in his charitable efforts up to the last moment, all was vain.

There is not a grain of evidence to support the statement, nor does Garcia Rodrigo pretend to advance any. As a matter of fact, Bernaldez, the only available authority who mentions Susan’s end, tells us specifically that he died a Christian. And when it is considered that Bernaldez is an ardent admirer and champion of the Inquisition, such a pronouncement from his pen is sufficient to convict the inquisitors Morillo and San Martin of having proceeded in a manner that was vindictive and ultra vires. For at this epoch it was not yet decreed that those who had relapsed (relapsos) should suffer capital punishment unless they persisted in their apostasy—as Rodrigo, obviously for the purpose of justifying the inquisitors, unwarrantably asserts did Susan and his confederates.

Llorente considers the blood-lust of the inquisitors established by these merciless convictions, urging that it is incredible that all the prisoners should have refused to recant and to submit themselves to penance—even assuming that they were actually guilty of apostasy as alleged. For when all is considered it must remain extremely doubtful whether they had Judaized at all, and it is not improbable—from what we see of the spirit that actuated the inquisitors—that Morillo and San Martin may have construed the action of those men into an offence against the Faith for the purpose of bringing them within the jurisdiction of the Holy Office.

They were condemned to be the chief actors in the first Auto de Fé that was held in Seville. This took place on February 6.[66]

There was about this Auto comparatively little of that pomp and ceremonial, that ghastly theatricality that was presently to distinguish these proceedings. But the essentials were already present.

Susan and his fellows were led forth barefoot, in the ignominious, yellow penitential sack, a candle in the hand of each. Hemmed about by halberdiers, they were paraded through the streets of a city in which they had won the goodwill and respect of all, to be gazed upon by a people whose eyes must have been filled with horror and dismay. To head the procession went a black-robed Dominican holding aloft the green cross of the Inquisition, now swathed in a veil of crape; behind him, walking two by two, came the familiars of the Holy Office, members of the Confraternity of St. Peter the Martyr; next followed the doomed men amid their guards; and last came the inquisitors with their attendants and a considerable body of Dominicans from the Convent of St. Paul, headed by their prior, the fanatical Ojeda.

The procession headed for the Cathedral, where the sufferers were taken to hear Mass and forced to listen to a sermon framed for the occasion which was preached by Ojeda, and must have increased the exquisite torment of their protracted agony. Thence they were conducted—once more processionally—out of the city to the meadows of Tablada. There they were attached to the stakes that had been erected, fire was set to the faggots, and thus they perished miserably, to the greater honour and glory of the Catholic Apostolic Church.[67]

Ojeda may have looked with satisfaction upon that holocaust, upon those cruel flames which more than any man in Spain he had been instrumental in kindling, and which being kindled would continue to cast their lurid glow over that fair land for close upon four centuries. It was the first burning that Ojeda witnessed, and it was the last. His own hour was at hand. His mission, whatever ends it had to serve in the eternal scheme of things, was completed there on the meadows of Tablada, and he might now depart. A few days later he lay dead, stricken down by the plague that was ravaging the south of Spain, and sought him out for one of its first victims.

And from the pulpits of Seville the Dominicans thundered forth declarations that this pestilence was a visitation of God upon an unfaithful city. They never paused to consider that if that were indeed the case either God’s aim must be singularly untrue since the shafts of His wrath overtook such faithful servants as Ojeda, or else....

But an incapacity to conduct its reasonings to a logical conclusion, and an utter want of any sense of proportion, are the main factors in all fanaticism.

Lest they should themselves be stricken by these bolts of pestilence launched against the unfaithful, behold next the inquisitors scuttling out of Seville! They go in quest of more salubrious districts, and, presumably upon the assumption that these—since they remain healthy—are escaping divine attention, the Dominicans zealously proceed to light their fires that they may repair this heavenly oversight.[68]

But that villegiatura of theirs did not take place until they had transacted a deal more of their horrible business in Seville. Great had been the results of the edict of January 2. The nobles, not daring to run the risk of the threatened ecclesiastical censure, proceeded to effect the arrests demanded, and gangs of pinioned captives were brought daily into the city from the surrounding country districts where they had sought shelter. And in the city itself the familiars of the Holy Office were busily effecting the capture of suspects and of those against whom, either out of bigotry or malice, delations had been made.

So numerous were the arrests that by the middle of the month of January already the capacity of the Convent of St. Paul was strained to its utmost, and the inquisitors were compelled to remove themselves, their tribunal and their prison to the ampler quarters of the Castle of Triana, accorded to them by the Sovereigns in response to their request for it.[69]

The edict of January 2 was soon succeeded by a second one, known as the “Edict of Grace.” This exhorted all who were guilty of apostasy to come forward voluntarily within a term appointed, to confess their sins and be reconciled to the Church. It assured them that if they did this with real contrition and a firm purpose of amendment, they should receive absolution and suffer no confiscation of property. And it concluded with a warning that if they allowed the term of grace to expire without taking advantage of it, and they should afterwards be accused by others, they would be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law.

Amador de los Rios is of opinion that Cardinal Mendoza was “instrumental” in having this edict published, in which case it would hardly be too much to assume that he was the instrument of Isabella in the matter. Nor is it too much to assume that the inspiration was purely merciful, and that there was no thought in the mind of either Queen or Cardinal of the edict’s being turned, as it was, to treacherous account.

The response was immediate. It is estimated that not less than 20,000 conversos who had been guilty of Judaizing came forward to avail themselves of its promise of amnesty and to secure absolution for their infidelity to the religion they had embraced. They discovered to their horror that they had walked into a trap as cruel as any that smooth-faced, benign-voiced priestcraft had ever devised.

The inquisitors had thought well to saddle the promised absolution and immunity from punishment with a condition which they had not published, a condition which they had secretly reserved to spring it now upon these self-convicted apostates at their mercy. They pointed out with infernal subtlety that the edict provided that the contrition of the self-accused must be sincere, and that of this sincerity the penitents must give the only proof possible by disclosing the names of all Judaizers known to them.

The demand was an infamy; for not even under the seal of private confession is a priest authorized to impose upon a penitent as a condition of absolution that he shall divulge the name even of an accomplice or a partner in guilt. Yet here it was demanded of these that they should go much further, and denounce such sinners as they knew; and the demand was framed in such specious terms—as the only proof they could offer of the sincerity of their own contrition—that none dared have taxed the inquisitors with malpractice or with subverting the ends and purpose of this edict they had been forced to publish.

The wretched apostates found themselves between the sword and the wall. Either they must perpetrate the infamy of betraying those of their race whom they knew to be Judaizers, or they must submit not only to the cruel death by fire, but to the destitution of their children as a consequence of the confiscation of their property. Most of them gave way, and purchased their reconciliation at the price of betrayal. And there were men like Bernaldez, the parish priest of Palacios, who applauded this procedure of the Holy Office. “A very glorious thing” (muy hazañosa cosa), he exclaims, “was the reconciliation of these people, as thus by their confessions were discovered all that were Judaizers, and in Seville knowledge was obtained of Judaizers in Toledo, Cordova, and Burgos.”[70]

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Upon the expiry of the term of grace a further edict was published by Morillo and San Martin, in which they now commanded, under pain of mortal sin and greater excommunication, with its attendant penalties, the discovery of all persons known to be engaged in Judaizing practices.

And that there should be no excuse offered by any on the score of ignorance of such practices, these were published in thirty-seven articles appended to the edict, articles whose malign comprehensiveness left no man secure.

They set forth the following signs by which New-Christians guilty of Judaizing might be recognized:

I. Any who await the Messiah, or say that he has not yet come, and that he will come to lead them out of captivity into the promised land.

II. Any who after baptism have returned expressly to the Mosaic faith.

III. Any who declare that the law of Moses is as good as that of Jesus Christ and as efficient for salvation.

IV. Any who keep the Sabbath in honour of the law of Moses—of which the proof is afforded by their assuming clean shirts and more decent garments than on other days, and clean covers on the table, as well as by their refraining from lighting fires and from engaging in all work from Friday evening.

V. Any who strip the tallow or fat from meats that they are to eat and purify it by washing in water, bleeding it, or extracting the glandule from the leg of lambs or other animals slaughtered for food.

VI. Any who cut the throats of animals or poultry that are intended for food, first testing the knife on their finger-nail, covering the blood with earth, and uttering certain words that are customary among Jews.

VII. Any who eat meat in Lent and on other days on which it is forbidden by Holy Church.

VIII. Any who keep the great fast of the Jews known by different names, or the fast of Chiphurim or Quipur in the tenth Hebrew month—whereof the proof shall be their having gone barefoot during the period of the said fast, as is the custom of the Jews, their having said Jewish prayers, or asked pardon one of another, or fathers having laid hands upon the heads of their children without making the sign of the Cross or saying anything but “By God and by me be thou blessed.”

IX and X. Any who keep the fast of Queen Esther, which is observed by the Jews in memory and imitation of what they did in captivity in the reign of Ahasuerus, or the fast of Rebeaso.

XI. Any who shall keep other fasts peculiar to the Jews, such as those of Monday and Thursday, of which the proof shall be: their not eating on such days until after the appearance of the first evening star; their having abstained from meat; their having washed on the previous day or cut their nails or the points of their hair, keeping or burning these; their reciting certain Jewish prayers, raising or lowering their heads with their faces to the wall, after washing their hands in water or in earth; their dressing themselves in sackcloth and girding themselves with cords or strips of leather.

XII, XIII, and XIV concern any who keep the Paschal seasons; which is to be discovered by their setting up green boughs, inviting to table and sending presents of comestibles, and the keeping of the feast of candles.

XV to XIX concern any who observe Hebrew table-customs: whether they bless their viands according to the Jewish custom, whether they drink “lawful” wine—i.e. wine that has been pressed by Jews—and eat meat that has been slaughtered by Jews.

XX. Any who recite the Psalms of David without concluding with the versicle “Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritu Sancto.”

XXI. Any woman who abstains from going to church for forty days after delivery of child, out of reverence for the law of Moses.

XXII to XXVI concern any who circumcise their children, give them Hebrew names, or after baptism cause their heads to be shaven where anointed with the sacred oil, or any who cause their children to be washed on the seventh day after birth in a basin in which, in addition to the water, they have placed gold and silver, pearls, wheat, barley, and other things.

XXVII. Any who are married in the Jewish manner.

XXVIII. Any who hold the Ruaya—which is a valedictory supper before setting out upon a long journey.

XXIX and XXX. Any who carry Hebrew relics or make burnt-offerings of bread.

XXXI. Any who in articulo mortis have turned or been turned with their faces to the wall to die in this attitude.

XXXII. Any who wash a corpse in warm water or shave it according to the Jewish custom, and otherwise dress it for the grave as is prescribed by the Mosaic law.

XXXIII to XXXVI concern Jewish expressions of mourning, such as the abstaining from meat, the spilling of water from the jars in the dwelling of the deceased, etc.

XXXVII. Any who bury their dead in virgin soil or in a Jewish cemetery.[71]

Reference has already been made to the inherent character of many Jewish customs, which even the most sincere of New-Christians retained despite themselves; these customs, being racial rather than religious, were very far from signifying Judaic apostasy, since they contained nothing that was directly opposed to the Christian teaching. In the list published by the Seville inquisitors it will be seen that such customs were deliberately included as evidences of apostasy.

Consider Articles IV, V, and VII, concerning the assumption of clean linen on Saturdays and the stripping of fat from beef and mutton, which nowise offend against the Christian faith, and might well be the perpetuation of customs acquired before baptism was received.

Even more flagrant is Article XXXI, which lays it down as evidence of Judaizing that a man shall turn his face to the wall when at the point of death; but most flagrant of all is Article XXVIII, concerning the valedictory meal partaken of before setting out upon a journey, for it is a custom that at all times has been as much in vogue among Christians as among men of any other religion.

Clearly not a New-Christian in Seville was safe from the delations of the malevolent, since such ridiculously slight grounds of suspicion were set forth by the tribunal. So extravagant and absurd are some of these articles that one is forced to agree with Llorente, that in formulating them the inquisitors proceeded with deliberate malice. He contends that deliberately they cast a wide net that by their heavy draught they should satisfy the Queen that she had heard no more than the truth as to the extent to which Judaizing was rampant in Castile, and the urgent need there was for the introduction of the Inquisition.

Whether in this they proceeded according to instructions received from Torquemada or Ojeda does not transpire, but there can be little doubt that the results obtained must have been in accordance with the wishes of both, since they justified to the Queen the representations these friars had so insistently made to her.

And the system of espionage which the inquisitors set up to increase their haul of victims was as sly and cunning as anything in the history of spying. Conceive the astuteness of the friar who climbed to the roof of the Convent of St. Paul on Saturday mornings to observe and note the houses of New-Christians from whose chimneys no smoke was to be seen issuing, that he might lay the information thus obtained before the tribunal, which would proceed to arrest the inhabitants upon a strong suspicion that they were Judaizers who would not desecrate the Sabbath by lighting fires.[72]

“What,” asks Llorente, “could be expected of a tribunal that began in this way?” And he at once supplies the answer: “That which happened—neither more nor less.”

With the methods of procedure that obtained in the trials conducted by these inquisitors we need not just now concern ourselves. For the moment it is enough to say that to the vices inherent in such a judicial system must be added, in the case of the first inquisitors of Seville, a zeal—not only to convict, but actually to be burning heretics—so ferociously excessive as to proclaim that they were gratifying their hatred of these Jews.

This upon the word of that sober chronicler Pulgar, who, whilst in general terms approving the introduction of the Inquisition, as has been seen, denounces in the following particular terms the practices of Morillo and San Martin: “In the manner in which they conducted their proceedings they showed that they held those people in hatred.”[73]

The Auto of February 6 was followed by another on March 26, at which seventeen victims were burnt on the fields of Tablada. And now that the fires were lighted, the inquisitors saw to it that they were well supplied with human fuel. Burnings followed one another at such a rate that by the month of November—upon the word of Llorente—298 condemned had been sent to the flames in the town of Seville alone, whilst 79 others by reconciling themselves to the Church secured the commutation of their sentence to one of perpetual imprisonment.

Mariana, the historian who gave thanks to God for the introduction of the Inquisition into Castile, informs us with flagrant calm that the number of Judaizers burnt in the Archbishopric during that year 1481 amounted to 8,000, whilst some 17,000 were submitted to penance.

In addition to those burnt alive, many who had fled the country were burnt in effigy, having been tried and found guilty during an absence described as contumacious. And similarly the court went through the horrible farce of sitting in judgment upon many who were dead, and, having convicted them, it dug up their bones and flung these to the flames.

Such was the prodigious activity of the Holy Office, and to such an extent did its holocausts promise to continue, that the Governor of Seville ordered the erection on the fields of Tablada of a permanent platform of stone of vast proportions known as the Quemadero, or Burning-place. It was adorned by figures of the four Prophets. At each of its four corners towered one of these colossal statues of plaster, and Llorente tells us that they were not merely for ornament. He says that they were hollow and so contrived that a condemned person might be placed in each and so die by slow fire.[74]

This Quemadero remained standing, a monument to religious intolerance and fanatical cruelty, until the soldiers of Napoleon demolished it in the nineteenth century.[75]

So ruthless were Morillo and San Martin, and so negligent of equity or even the observance of the ordinary rules of judicial procedure, that in the end we find the Pope himself—in January of 1482—addressing a letter of protest to the Sovereigns.

The first edict commanding the nobles to arrest all those who had fled from Seville had had the effect of driving many of these fugitive New-Christians farther afield in their quest for safety. Some had escaped into Portugal, others had crossed the Mediterranean and sought shelter in Morocco, whilst others still had taken their courage in both hands and sought sanctuary in Rome itself, at the very feet of the Pontiff. Other fugitives followed presently, when the tribunal had already inaugurated its terrible work; and these came clamouring their grievances and protesting that in spite of their innocence they dared no longer remain in a State where no New-Christian was safe from the hatred and injustice shown by the inquisitors to men of their race. Therefore they were driven to seek from Christ’s Vicar the protection to which all Christians and true Catholics were entitled at his hands.

Photo by Lacoste.

FERDINAND OF ARAGON AND THE INFANTE DON JUAN.
From the Painting in the Prado Gallery attributed to Miguel Zittoz.

They informed the Pontiff of the methods that were being pursued; they set forth how the inquisitors in their eagerness to secure convictions proceeded entirely upon their own initiative and without the concurrence of the assessor and diocesan ordinary, as had been prescribed; how they were departing from all legal form, imprisoning unjustly, torturing cruelly and unduly, and falsely stigmatizing innocent men as formal heretics, thereafter delivering them to the secular arm for punishment, in addition to confiscating their property so that their children were left in want and under the brand of infamy.

The Pope gave ear to these plaints, convinced himself of their truth, and made his protest to Ferdinand and Isabella. He announced in his brief that he would have deprived the inquisitors of their office but that he was restrained by consideration for the Sovereigns who had appointed them; nevertheless, he was sending them a brief of admonition, and should they again give cause for complaint he would be constrained to depose them. In the meantime he revoked the faculty given the Sovereigns of appointing inquisitors, protesting that when conceding this he had not sufficiently considered that already there were inquisitors in the Sovereigns’ dominions and that the General of the Dominicans and the Spanish provincials of that order had the right to make such appointments. The bull that he had granted was therefore in opposition to that right, and would never have been granted had the matter been sufficiently considered.[76]

CHAPTER IX
THE SUPREME COUNCIL

The Sovereigns appear to have submitted without protest to this papal interference and to the revocation of the faculty bestowed upon them of nominating the inquisitors in their kingdom. This submission was hardly to have been expected from their earlier attitude, but there are two reasons, either or both of which may possibly account for it.

It will be remembered that there was a considerable number of New-Christians about the Court and in immediate attendance upon the Queen, one of whom was her secretary Pulgar. What view Pulgar took of the Seville proceedings we know, and it is not too much to assume that his view was the view of all Christians of Jewish extraction. These New-Christians and others may very well have urged upon the notice of the Sovereigns the cruelties and injustices that were being practised, drawing their attention to the decree that made innocent children suffer for the offences of which their parents had been convicted—a decree which, hideous enough when the parents were actually guilty, became unspeakably hideous when that guilt was no more than presumed.

In view of such representations the Sovereigns may have found the papal rebuke unanswerable and the Pope’s action justified.

Then, again, they may have taken into consideration the projected war upon Granada, the last province of the peninsula remaining in Moorish hands. Funds were urgently required for this campaign, and the confiscations that were daily being effected by the Holy Office were rapidly supplying these—for the early victims of the Inquisition, as we know, were persons of great wealth and distinction.[77]

Now the papal brief, whilst it cancelled the royal prerogative of appointing inquisitors, did not attempt to divert the course of this stream of confiscated property, nor, indeed, made any mention of the matter. So that they may have hesitated to oppose themselves to measures which they recognized as just and which continued to supply them with the means for what they looked upon as a righteous crusade.

Bigotry and acquisitiveness were again joining forces, and, united, they must prove, as ever, irresistible.

But on February 11, 1482, the Roman Curia issued another brief addressed to the Sovereigns, wherein—entirely ignoring what already had been written—it was announced that the General of the Dominicans, Fr. Alonso de Cebrian, having represented to the Pope the need to multiply the number of inquisitors in Spain, his Holiness had resolved to appoint the said Fr. Alonso and seven other Dominicans to conduct the affairs of the Holy Office in that kingdom, commanding them to exercise their ministry in conjunction with the diocesan ordinary and in accordance with the terms set forth in the briefs that were being addressed to them.[78]

One of the eight Dominicans mentioned by the Pope was Fr. Tomás de Torquemada, who by now was become confessor to the King and to the Cardinal of Spain.

This brief, following so rapidly upon that which revoked the Sovereigns’ power, may have caused Ferdinand and Isabella to look upon it as the second move in an intrigue whose aim was to strengthen the ecclesiastical arm in Spain to the detriment of the royal authority.

On April 17 Sixtus sent the promised instructions to the inquisitors of Aragon, Cataluña, Valencia, and Mallorca. These indicated a procedure in matters of faith so contrary to common law, that no sooner did the inquisitors attempt to carry them into execution than there was an uproar which afforded Ferdinand grounds upon which to indite a protest to the Holy Father.

A reply came in the following October. Sixtus wrote that the briefs of last April had been drawn up after conference with several members of the Sacred College; that these cardinals were now absent from Rome, but that on their return the matter should be further considered. Meanwhile, however, in view of the results that had attended those briefs, he was informing the inquisitors that they were exempt from acting upon the terms set forth in them and instructing them to proceed, as formerly, in co-operation with the diocesan ordinaries.

But in the meantime, for all the Pope’s protest against the excessive severity of the Seville tribunal, this severity continued so undiminished, not only in Seville but also in the districts under the jurisdiction of other inquisitors, that there was a continuous emigration from Spain of the wealthy New-Christian families. Many of these repaired to Rome to appeal to the Pontifical Courts and to procure there an absolution which should accord them immunity from the Spanish tribunals of the Holy Office.

But even when this absolution was procured a large number of these emigrants never thought of returning to Spain, considering it wiser to settle in a country in which they were in less danger of persecution.

Although it is certain that the Sovereigns can have had no prevision of what actually was to happen as a consequence—though not in their own day, nor for some time afterwards—although they may have been very far from foreseeing that by driving out these energetic, industrious, intelligent men they were depriving the country of the financially able, wealth-producing element of the community—still they did undoubtedly perceive what was immediately before them; and they began to fear the possibility of their country’s being drained of its present wealth if these emigrations were to continue.

So Isabella wrote to the Pope entreating him to establish a court of appeal in Spain, and thus dispose that proceedings started within the kingdom could there be carried to their conclusion without the need for these appeals to Rome. To this the Pope replied in affectionate terms on February 23, 1483, promising to give the matter every consideration.[79]

Shortly thereafter he held a conference of the Spanish Cardinals, the principal of whom in wealth, importance, and distinction was Roderigo Borgia, Cardinal of Valencia. At this conference several provisions were agreed upon, and these were embodied in the briefs dispatched from the Vatican on May 25 following.

The first of these was to the Sovereigns. It contained a gracious assent to their petition, and exhorted them to be zealous in this matter of the Faith, reminding them that Jehu had consolidated his kingdom by the destruction of idolatry, and that the Sovereigns would meet with the same good fortune, as already God was giving them many victories over the Moors to reward their piety and the purity of their faith.

The second was to Iñigo Manrique, Archbishop of Seville (having succeeded in this see to the Cardinal of Spain, who was now Archbishop of Toledo), appointing him judge of appeal in Causas de Fé.

The remaining briefs were addressed to the Archbishop of Toledo and the other Spanish archbishops, commanding them, to the end that the functions of the Inquisition should be discharged with integrity, that in the event of there being in their ecclesiastical provinces any bishops who were of Jewish descent, they should suavely admonish these not to intervene in person in the proceedings of the Holy Office, but to allow themselves to be represented by their principal officials, provisors, and diocesan vicars-general—always provided that none of these was of Jewish blood.

This decree was natural enough, and there was some occasion for it, considering the number of Spanish families of Jewish consanguinity as a consequence of marriages between Christians and conversos—many of these marriages having been contracted between Castilians of good birth and the daughters of wealthy baptized Jews. It is a decree that entirely contradicts Pulgar’s assertion that Torquemada was of Jewish extraction.

The appointment of Manrique as judge of appeal was a very brief one, nor did it work satisfactorily and accomplish what the Queen desired. In the following August came another papal brief, stating that, notwithstanding that appointment, fugitive New-Christians from the Archbishopric of Seville continued to arrive in Rome and to make their appeals to the Apostolic Courts, protesting that they dared not address these to the appointed tribunal in Seville, for fear of being treated with excessive rigour.

Many stated that, by virtue of the ban against them for having left the city, they were fearful of being flung into prison unheard. Many, again, had already been tried during their absence and burnt in effigy, and they were apprehensive that if they returned their appeals would be refused a hearing, and they would be sent at once to the flames in execution of the sentence already pronounced against them.

Therefore the Pope now ordered Manrique to admit to reconciliation all who might seek it, in despite of any judgment or sentence already passed upon them.

Had these commands prevailed, the destruction wrought by the Inquisition would have been considerably reduced, since none could have suffered but the persistent apostate. The brief, however, does not appear to have been even dispatched. No sooner was its merciful decree indited than it was regretted and retracted. Eleven days later Sixtus wrote to Ferdinand acquainting him with the terms of that brief which had been intended for Manrique, but explaining that these had not been sufficiently considered, and that, therefore, he was retaining it whilst fresh measures were deliberated.

The position must have been growing intolerable to the Sovereigns, for the Holy Office in Spain, directed in this fashion from Rome, was governed by unstable and ever-shifting elements that were eminently disturbing to the State—particularly now that the Inquisition was growing rapidly in importance. Therefore Isabella wrote again, imploring the Holy Father to give that institution a settled form. To this the Pope acceded, perhaps himself aware of the necessity for the thing requested. A head was necessary for the consolidated institution it was now proposed to form, and Frey Tomás de Torquemada, from what was known of his life, his character, and his ability, was judged to be the man to fill this important office. Accordingly he was recommended to Sixtus by the Sovereigns, and he received his appointment from the Pope, first as Grand Inquisitor for Castile, and soon after (by the bull of October 17, 1483) his jurisdiction was extended to include Aragon; so that he found himself at the head of the Holy Office in Spain, and invested with the fullest powers. It was his to elect, depose, and replace subaltern inquisitors at his will, and the jurisdiction of all those he appointed was subject to and dependent upon himself.[80]

Llorente says of him: “The result accredited the election. It seemed almost impossible that there should be another man so capable of executing the intentions of King Ferdinand to multiply confiscations, the intentions of the Roman Curia to propagate its jurisdiction and pecuniary maxims, and the intentions of the projectors of the Inquisition and its Autos de Fé to inspire terror.”[81]

With his elevation to that important position—a position whose importance his own energy and determination were to increase until his power in the land should almost rival that of the Sovereigns themselves—the Spanish Inquisition enters now upon a new phase. Under the jurisdiction and control of that stern-souled, mild-eyed ascetic, the entire character of the Holy Office is transformed.

Immediately upon his appointment he set about reconstituting it so that it should be in harmony with the wishes of the Sovereigns. To assist him he appointed as his assessors the jurisconsults Juan Gutierrez de Lachaves and Tristan de Medina, and he proceeded to establish four permanent tribunals: one in Seville, under Morillo and San Martin, whom he left undisturbed in their office, but subject to the new rules which he laid down for the transaction of affairs; one in Cordova, under Pedro Martinez de Barrio and Anton Ruiz Morales, with Fr. Martin de Caso as assessor; one in Jaen, under Juan Garcia de Cañas and Fr. Juan de Yarza; and one in Villa Real,[82] which shortly afterwards was transferred to Toledo, under Francisco Sanchez de la Fuente and Pedro Dias de Costana.

In addition to these he appointed other inquisitors who, without being attached to any permanent tribunal, were to proceed wherever he should direct them as occasion arose to set up temporary courts.

In Toledo, Valladolid, Avila, Segovia, and other cities there were inquisitors already of the Pope’s appointing. Some of these failed to show the complete submission to his orders which Torquemada demanded, with the result that they were promptly deposed and their places filled by others whom he nominated. Those who manifested obedience to his rule he confirmed in their appointments, but usually he sent a nominee of his own to act in conjunction with them.

Torquemada himself remained at Court; for now that the Inquisition was established upon its new footing it became necessary that he should be in constant communication with the Sovereigns for whom he acted. Consultations were necessary on the score of the measures to be taken for the administration of what was rapidly become a corporation of great importance in the realm. From this it presently resulted that to the four royal councils already in existence for the conduct of the affairs of the kingdom, a fifth was added especially to deal with inquisitorial matters. Whether the suggestion emanated from the Sovereigns or from Torquemada, there are no means of ascertaining, nor does it greatly signify.

This Supreme Council of the Inquisition was established in 1484. It consisted of three royal councillors: Alonso Carillo, Bishop of Mazzara, Sancho Velasquez de Cuellar, and Poncio de Valencia, all doctors of laws, and of Torquemada’s two assessors. To preside over this “Suprema”—as the council came to be called—Torquemada was appointed, thus enormously increasing the power and influence which already he wielded.

The three royal councillors had a definite vote in all matters that appertained to the jurisdiction of the Sovereigns; but in all matters of spiritual jurisdiction, which was vested entirely in the Grand Inquisitor by the papal bull, their votes were merely consultative—amounting to no more than an expression of opinion.

It was Torquemada’s desire that his subordinates should act with absolute uniformity in the discharge of the duties entrusted to them, and that the courts of the Holy Office throughout Spain should one and all be identical in their methods of procedure, the instruments of his will and the expression of his conceptions. With this end in view he summoned the inquisitors by him appointed to the Tribunals of Seville, Cordova, Jaen, and Villa Real to confer with him and his assessors and the royal councillors.

The assembly took place in Seville on October 29, and its business was the formulation of the first instructions of Torquemada for the guidance of all inquisitors.

In the library of the British Museum there is a vellum-bound copy of the edition of this code, which was subsequently published at Madrid in 1576.[83] It contains, in addition to Torquemada’s articles of 1484 and subsequent years, others added by his successors, and there are marginal notes giving the authorship of each. The work is partly printed, partly in manuscript, and a considerable number of pages remain in blank, that further instructions may be filled in as the need occurs. The printed matter is frequently underscored by the pen of one or another of the inquisitors through whose hands this copy passed during its active existence.

The twenty-eight articles compiled by Torquemada at the assembly of 1484, and constituting his first “Instructions for the Governance of the Holy Office,” demand a chapter to themselves.

CHAPTER X
THE JURISPRUDENCE OF THE HOLY OFFICE—THE FIRST “INSTRUCTIONS” OF TORQUEMADA

The first manual for the use of inquisitors was probably written somewhere about 1320. It was the work of the Dominican friar Bernard Gui—“Practica Inquisitionis Heretice Pravitatis—Bernardo Guidonis, Ordinis Fratrum Predicatorum”—and it summarised the experience gathered during a hundred years by the inquisitors of Southern France.

It is divided into five parts. The first three are directly concerned with procedure, and the formulæ are given for every occasion—citation, arrest, pardon, commutation, and sentence—with the fullest particulars for the guidance of inquisitors. The fourth part treats of the powers vested in the tribunal of the Inquisition, and cites the authorities—i.e. the decrees of pontiffs and of councils. The fifth part surveys and defines the various heretical sects of Gui’s day, gives particulars of the doctrines, rites, and ceremonies by which each one may be known, and lays down methods by which heretical guile may be circumvented in examination.

The work was used by French inquisitors in general and those of Toulouse in particular, and it is more than probable that it inspired Nicolaus Eymeric to compile his voluminous “Directorium Inquisitorum” towards the middle of the fourteenth century.

Nicolaus Eymeric was Grand Inquisitor of Aragon, and he prepared his directory, or manual of procedure, as a guide for his confrères in the business of prosecuting those guilty of heretical pravity.

The work circulated freely in its manuscript form, and it was one of the first to be printed in Barcelona upon the introduction of the printing-press, so that in Torquemada’s day copies were widely diffused, and were in the hands of all inquisitors in the world.

The bulk of the “Directorium” is little more than a compilation. It is divided into three parts. The first lays down the chief Articles of the Christian Faith; the second is a collection of the decretals, bulls, and briefs of the popes upon the subject of heretics and heresies, and the decision of the various councils held to determine matters connected with heretics and their abettors, sorcerers, excommunicates, Jews and infidels; the third part, which is Eymeric’s own contribution to the subject, deals with the manner in which trials should be conducted, and gives a detailed list of the offences that come under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office.

It may be well before proceeding further to give a résumé of the grounds upon which the Inquisition instituted proceedings, as set forth in the “Directorium.”

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All heretics in general are subject to the animadversions of the Holy Office; but there are, in addition, certain offenders who, whilst not exactly guilty of heresy, nevertheless render themselves justiciable by the Inquisition. These are:

Blasphemers who in blaspheming say that which is contrary to the Christian Faith. Thus, he who says, “The season is so bad that God Himself could not give us good weather,” sins upon a matter of faith.

Sorcerers and Diviners, when in their sorceries they perform that which is in the nature of heresy—such as re-baptizing infants, burning incense to a skull, etc. But if they confine their sorceries to foretelling the future by chiromancy or palmistry, by drawing the short straw, or consulting the astrolabe, they are guilty of simple sorcery, and it is for the secular courts to prosecute them.

Amongst the latter are to be placed those who administer love-philtres to women.

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Devil-worshippers: Those who invoke devils. These are to be divided into three classes:

(a) Those who worship the devil, sacrificing to him, prostrating themselves, singing prayers and fasting, burning incense or lighting candles in his honour.

(b) Those who confine themselves to offering a Dulie or Hyperdulie cult to Satan, introducing the names of devils into the litanies.

(c) Those who invoke the devil by tracing magic figures, placing an infant in a circle, using a sword, a bed, or a mirror, etc.

In general it is easy to recognize those who have dealings with devils on account of their ferocious aspect and terrible air.

The invocation in any of the three manners cited is always a heresy. But if the devil should only be asked to do things that are of his office—such as to tempt a woman to the sin of luxury—provided that this is done without adoration or prayer, but in terms of command, there are authors who hold that in such cases the person so proceeding is not guilty of heresy.

Amongst those who invoke devils are astrologers and alchymists, who when they do not succeed in making the discoveries they seek never fail to have recourse to the devil, sacrificing to him and invoking him expressly or tacitly.

Jews and Infidels: The first when they sin against their religion in any of the articles of faith that are the same with them as with us—i.e. that are common alike to Jew and to Christian—or when they attack dogmas that are, similarly, common to both creeds.

As for infidels, the Church and the Pope, and consequently the Inquisition, may punish them when they sin against the laws of nature—the only laws they know.

Jews and infidels who attempt to pervert Christians are also regarded as abettors or fautores.

In spite of the prohibition to succour a heretic, a man would not be regarded as an abettor who gave food to a heretic dying of hunger, since it is possible that if spared the latter might yet come to be converted.

Excommunicates who remain in excommunication during a whole year, by which are to be understood not merely those who are excommunicate as heretics, or abettors of heretics, but excommunicate upon any grounds whatsoever. In fact, the indifference to excommunication renders them suspect of heresy.

Apostates.—Apostate Christians who become Jews or Mohammedans (these religions not being heresies), even though they should have apostatized through fear of death. The fear of torture or death not being one that can touch a person who is firm in the Faith, no apostasy is to be excused upon such grounds.[84]

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With the “Directorium” of Eymeric before him, Torquemada set to work to draw up the first articles of his famous code. Additions were to be made to it later, as the need for such additions came to be shown by experience; but no subsequent addition was of the importance of these original twenty-eight articles. They may be said to have given the jurisprudence of the Spanish Inquisition a settled form, which continued practically unchanged for over three hundred years after Torquemada’s death.

A survey of these articles and of the passages from Eymeric that have a bearing upon them, together with some of the annotations of the scholiast Francesco Pegna,[85] should serve to convey some notion of the jurisprudence of the Holy Office and of the extraordinary spirit that inspired and governed it—a spirit at once crafty and stupid, subtle and obvious, saintly and diabolical, consistent in nothing—not even in cruelty, for in its warped and dreadful way it accounted itself merciful, and not only represented but believed that its aims were charitable. It practised its abominations of cruelty out of love for the human race, to save the human race from eternal damnation; and whilst it wept on the one hand over the wretched heretic it flung to the flames, it exulted on the other in the thought that by burning one who was smitten with the pestilence of heresy it saved perhaps a hundred from infection and from purging that infection in an eternity of hell-fire.

They are rash who see hypocrisy in the priestly code that is to follow. Hypocrites there may have been, there must have been, and many; such a system was a very hotbed of hypocrisy. Yet the system itself was not hypocritical. It was sincere, dreadfully, tragically, ardently sincere, with the most hopeless, intolerable, and stupid of all sincerity—the sincerity of fanaticism, which destroys all sense of proportion, and distorts man’s intellectual vision until with an easy conscience he makes of guile and craft and falsehood the principles that shall enable him to do what he conceives to be his duty by his fellow-man.

The doctrine of exclusive salvation was the source of all this evil. But that doctrine was firmly and sincerely held. Torquemada or any other inquisitor might have uttered the words which an inspired poet has caused to fall from the lips of Philip II.:

“The blood and sweat of heretics at the stake
Is God’s best dew upon the barren field.”[86]

And he would have uttered them with a calm and firm conviction, assured that he did no more than proclaim an obvious truth which might serve him as a guide to do his duty by man and God. For all that he did he could find a commandment in the Scriptures. Was burning the proper death for heretics? He answered the question out of the very mouth of Christ, as you shall see. Should a heretic’s property be confiscated? Eymeric and Paramo point to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden as a consequence of their disobedience—the first of all heresies—and ask you what was that but confiscation. Is it proper to impose a garment of shame upon those convicted of lesser heresies, or upon penitents who are reconciled? Paramo will answer you that Adam and Eve wore skins after their fall, and implies that this is a proper precedent for the infamous sanbenito.

And so on: Moses, David, John the Baptist, and the gentle Saviour Himself are made to afford reason for this course and for that, as the need arises, and each reason is more grotesque than the other, until you are stunned by the blows of these clumsy arguments. You cease to wonder that the translation of the Bible was forbidden, that its study was inhibited. If those who were learned in theology could interpret it so extravagantly, what might not the unlearned achieve?

But let us pass on to the consideration of Torquemada’s code.