History of Spanish Literature, vol. 1 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

CHAPTER XXIV.

Spanish Intolerance. — The Inquisition. — Persecution of Jews and Moors. — Persecution of Christians for Opinion. — State of the Press in Spain. — Concluding Remarks on the whole Period.

The condition of things in Spain at the end of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella seemed, as we have intimated, to announce a long period of national prosperity. But one institution, destined soon to discourage and check that intellectual freedom without which there can be no wise and generous advancement in any people, was already beginning to give token of its great and blighting power.

The Christian Spaniards had, from an early period, been essentially intolerant. To their perpetual wars with the Moors had been added, from the end of the fourteenth century, an exasperated feeling against the Jews, which the government had vainly endeavoured to control, and which had shown itself, at different times, in the plunder and murder of multitudes of that devoted race throughout the country. Both races were hated by the mass of the Spanish people with a bitter hatred: the first as their conquerors; the last for the oppressive claims their wealth had given them on great numbers of the Christian inhabitants. In relation to both, it was never forgotten that they were the enemies of that cross under which all true Spaniards had for centuries gone to battle; and of both it was taught by the priesthood, and willingly believed by the laity, that their opposition to the faith of Christ was an offence against God, which it was a merit in his people to punish.[734] Columbus wearing the cord of Saint Francis in the streets of Seville, and consecrating to wars against misbelief in Asia the wealth he was seeking in the New World, whose soil he earnestly desired should never be trodden by any foot save that of a Roman Catholic Christian, was but a type of the Spanish character in the age when he adopted it.[735]

When, therefore, it was proposed to establish in Spain the Inquisition, which had been so efficiently used to exterminate the heresy of the Albigenses, and which had even followed its victims in their flight from Provence to Aragon, little serious opposition was made to the undertaking. Ferdinand, perhaps, was not unwilling to see a power grow up near his throne with which the political government of the country could hardly fail to be in alliance, while the piety of the wiser Isabella, which, as we can see from her correspondence with her confessor, was little enlightened, led her conscience so completely astray, that she finally asked for the introduction of the Holy Office into her own dominions as a Christian benefit to her people.[736] After a negotiation with the court of Rome, and some changes in the original project, it was therefore established in the city of Seville in 1481; the first Grand Inquisitors being Dominicans and their first meeting being held in a convent of their order, on the 2d of January. Its earliest victims were Jews. Six were burned within four days from the time when the tribunal first sat, and Mariana states the whole number of those who suffered in Andalusia alone during the first year of its existence at two thousand, besides seventeen thousand who underwent some form of punishment less severe than that of the stake;[737] all, it should be remembered, being done with the rejoicing assent of the mass of the people, whose shouts followed the exile of the whole body of the Jewish race from Spain in 1492, and whose persecution of the Hebrew blood, wherever found, and however hidden under the disguises of conversion and baptism, has hardly ceased down to our own days.[738]

The fall of Granada, which preceded by a few months this cruel expulsion of the Jews, placed the remains of the Moorish nation no less at the mercy of their conquerors. It is true, that, by the treaty which surrendered the city to the Catholic sovereigns, the property of the vanquished, their religious privileges, their mosques, and their worship were solemnly secured to them; but in Spain, whatever portion of the soil the Christians had wrested from their ancient enemies had always been regarded only as so much territory restored to its rightful owners, and any stipulations that might accompany its recovery were rarely respected. The spirit and even the terms of the capitulation of Granada were, therefore, soon violated. The Christian laws of Spain were introduced there; the Inquisition followed; and a persecution of the descendants of the old Arab invaders was begun by their new masters, which, after being carried on above a century with constantly increasing crimes, was ended in 1609, like the persecution of the Jews, by the forcible expulsion of the whole race.[739]

Such severity brought with it, of course, a great amount of fraud and falsehood. Multitudes of the followers of Mohammed—beginning with four thousand whom Cardinal Ximenes baptized on the day when, contrary to the provisions of the capitulation of Granada, he consecrated the great mosque of the Albaycin as a Christian temple—were forced to enter the fold of the Church, without either understanding its doctrines or desiring to receive its instructions. With these, as with the converted Jews, the Inquisition was permitted to deal unchecked by the power of the state. They were, therefore, from the first, watched; soon they were imprisoned; and then they were tortured, to obtain proof that their conversion was not genuine. But it was all done in secrecy and in darkness. From the moment when the Inquisition laid its grasp on the object of its suspicions to that of his execution, no voice was heard to issue from its cells. The very witnesses it summoned were punished with death or perpetual imprisonment, if they revealed what they had seen or heard before its dread tribunals; and often of the victim nothing was known, but that he had disappeared from his accustomed haunts in society, never again to be seen.

The effect was appalling. The imaginations of men were filled with horror at the idea of a power so vast and so noiseless; one which was constantly, but invisibly, around them; whose blow was death, but whose steps could neither be heard nor followed amidst the gloom into which it retreated farther and farther as efforts were made to pursue it. From its first establishment, therefore, while the great body of the Spanish Christians rejoiced in the purity and orthodoxy of their faith, and not unwillingly saw its enemies called to expiate their unbelief by the most terrible of mortal punishments, the intellectual and cultivated portions of society felt the sense of their personal security gradually shaken, until, at last, it became an anxious object of their lives to avoid the suspicions of a tribunal which infused into their minds a terror deeper and more effectual in proportion as it was accompanied by a misgiving how far they might conscientiously oppose its authority. Many of the nobler and more enlightened, especially on the comparatively free soil of Aragon, struggled against an invasion of their rights whose consequences they partly foresaw. But the powers of the government and the Church, united in measures which were sustained by the passions and religion of the lower classes of society, became irresistible. The fires of the Inquisition were gradually lighted over the whole country, and the people everywhere thronged to witness its sacrifices, as acts of faith and devotion.

From this moment, Spanish intolerance, which through the Moorish wars had accompanied the contest and shared its chivalrous spirit, took that air of sombre fanaticism which it never afterwards lost. Soon, its warfare was turned against the opinions and thoughts of men, even more than against their external conduct or their crimes. The Inquisition, which was its true exponent and appropriate instrument, gradually enlarged its own jurisdiction by means of crafty abuses, as well as by the regular forms of law, until none found himself too humble to escape its notice, or too high to be reached by its power. The whole land bent under its influence, and the few who comprehended the mischief that must follow bowed, like the rest, to its authority, or were subjected to its punishments.

From an inquiry into the private opinions of individuals to an interference with the press and with printed books there was but a step. It was a step, however, that was not taken at once; partly because books were still few and of little comparative importance anywhere, and partly because, in Spain, they had already been subjected to the censorship of the civil authority, which, in this particular, seemed unwilling to surrender its jurisdiction. But such scruples were quickly removed by the appearance and progress of the Reformation of Luther; a revolution which comes within the next period of the history of Spanish literature, when we shall find displayed in their broad practical results the influence of the spirit of intolerance and the power of the Church and the Inquisition on the character of the Spanish people.