A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

CONTROL OVER TRIBUNALS

In its relations with the tribunals the Suprema had even greater success. As it gradually absorbed the inquisitor-general, it exercised his power, which was virtually unlimited and irresponsible, over them, until it became a centralized oligarchy of the most absolute kind. To this, of course, the progressive improvement in communication largely contributed. In the earlier period, the delays and expenses of special messengers and couriers rendered it necessary for the local tribunals to be virtually independent in the routine business of arresting, trying, sentencing and punishing offenders. Only matters about which there could be dispute or which involved consequences of importance, would warrant the delay and expense of consulting the central head. Items in the accounts and allusions in the correspondence show that, when this was necessary, the outlay for a messenger was a subject to be carefully weighed. The matter was complicated by the fact that the central head was perambulating, moving with the court from one province to another, and its precise seat at any one moment might be unknown to those at a distance. The permanent choice of Madrid as a capital by Philip II—broken by a short transfer to Valladolid—was favorable to centralization, and still more so was the development of the post-office, establishing regular communication at a comparatively trivial cost, although at first the Inquisition was somewhat chary about confiding its secret documents to the postmen.

At first there was hesitation in intruding upon the functions of the tribunals. A letter of November 10, 1493, from the Suprema to the inquisitors of Toledo, asks as a favor for the information on which a certain arrest had been made, explaining that this was at the especial request of the queen.[454] Where there was not unanimity, however, a reference to some higher authority was essential, and we have seen that, in 1488, Torquemada ordered that all such cases should be sent to him to be decided in the Suprema and, in 1507, Ximenes went further and required all cases in which the accused did not confess to be sent to the Council.[455] This seems speedily to have become obsolete, but the rule as to discordia was permanent. In 1509 a letter of the Suprema extends it to arrests and all other acts on which votes were taken, when a report with all the opinions was to be forwarded for its decision.[456] The costs attendant on these references were not small, for we happen to meet with an order, May 23, 1501, to pay to Inquisitor Mercado a hundred ducats for his expenses and sickness while at the court examining the cases brought from his tribunal of Valencia. Possibly for this reason references to the Suprema were not encouraged for, about this time, it ordered that none should be brought to it except those in which there was discordia, and in these it expected that the parties should be represented by counsel.[457] The same motive may have led to an order, in 1528, limiting these references to cases of great importance, but this restriction was removed in another of July 11, 1532, when it was explained that, if an inquisitor dissented from the other two and from the Ordinary, the case must be sent up.[458]

Practically, the authority of the Suprema over the tribunals was limited only by its discretion, and inevitably it was making constant encroachments on their independence of action. Its correspondence, in 1539 and 1540, with the Valencia tribunal shows an increasing number of cases submitted to it and its supervision over minute details of current business.[459] In 1543 the case of a Morisca, named Mari Gomez la Sazeda, shows that a sentence of torture had to be submitted to it and its reply indicates conscientious scrutiny of the records, for it ordered the re-examination of certain witnesses, but, if they were absent or dead, then she might be tortured moderately.[460] A further extension of authority is seen during a witch-craze in Catalonia when, to restrain the cruelty of the Barcelona tribunal, in 1537, all cases of witchcraft, after being voted on, were ordered to be submitted to it for final decision and, in a recrudescence of the epidemic, between 1545 and 1550, it required all sentences of relaxation to be sent to it, even when unanimous.[461] On this last occasion, however, the Barcelona tribunal asserted its independence of action by disregarding the command and a phrase in the Instructions of 1561, requiring, in all cases of special importance, the sentences to be submitted before execution, was too vague to be of much practical effect.[462]

CONTROL OVER TRIBUNALS

The supervision which the Suprema was thus gradually developing was most salutary as a check upon the irresponsibility of the tribunals, whose acts were shrouded in impenetrable secrecy except when scrutinized with more or less conscientious investigation by visitors at intervals of five or ten years. The conditions in Barcelona as revealed by successive visitations, between 1540 and 1580, show how a tribunal might violate systematically the Instructions, and how fruitless were the exposures made by visitors when the inquisitors chose to disregard the orders elicited by reports of their misdoings. They were virtually a law unto themselves; no one dared to complain of them and the victims’ mouths were closed by the oath of secrecy which bound them under severe penalties not to divulge their experiences. The whole system was so devised as to expose the inquisitor to the maximum of temptation with the minimum risk of detection, and it was the merest chance whether this power was exercised by a Lucero or by a conscientious judge. The consulta de fe and the concurrence of the Ordinary furnished but a feeble barrier, for the record could generally be so presented as to produce the desired impression and the consultors, proud of their position and its immunities, were indisposed to give trouble, especially as their adverse votes did not create a discordia. When Salazar, in 1566, took the unusual trouble of investigating the interminable records of the individual trials, the rebuke of the Suprema to the inquisitors of Barcelona speaks of the numbers of those sentenced to relaxation, reconciliation, the galleys, scourging, etc., after the grossest informalities in the conduct of the trials.[463] The world can never know the cruelties perpetrated under a system which relieved the tribunals from accountability, and consequently any supervision was a benefit, even that imperfectly exercised by the distant Suprema.

There seems to have come a dawning consciousness of this, possibly stimulated by the revelations of Salazar’s investigations into the three tribunals of the crown of Aragon, which led to the Concordia of 1568. In the same year a carta acordada of June 22nd ordered that even when sentences of relaxation were voted unanimously, the process should be sent to the Suprema for its action.[464] From this time forward its intervention, on one score or another, gradually increased. From the records of the tribunal of Toledo, between 1575 and 1610, it appears that it intervened in 228 cases out of 1172, or substantially in one out of five, while in only 82 of these cases, or one out of fourteen, was there discordia—sometimes as to arrest and trial, sometimes as to torture, but mostly as to the final sentence.[465]

At this period it would seem to be the practice in the Suprema to refer cases to two members and act on their report. Thus in the matter of Mari Vaez, condemned in 1594 to relaxation in effigy, the two are Vigil de Quiñones and Mendoza, whose names are inscribed on the back of the sentence and under them the word “Justª” on the strength of which the secretary writes the formal letter to the tribunal, ending with “hagais, señores justicia”—the customary formula of confirmation.[466] As might be expected the degree of scrutiny exercised in the performance of this duty was variable. In the case of Jacques Curtancion, in 1599, it was observed that the ratification of the confession of the accused had been made in the presence of only one interpreter, when the rules required two; the papers were therefore returned to the tribunal of Granada for the rectification of this irregularity, but this exactitude was of no benefit to the sufferer.[467] On the other hand, Pedro Flamenco was tortured in Toledo at 10 A.M., June 10, 1570, after which the consulta de fe was held which condemned him to relaxation for fictitious confession. At the earliest the papers could not have reached Madrid until late on the 11th, but on the 12th was despatched the formal reply confirming the sentence. There could scarce have been time to read the voluminous record and certainly none to give it more than perfunctory consideration.[468] Again, delays attributable only to negligence were not infrequent. Diego de Horozco was sentenced to relaxation by the tribunal of Cuenca, which sent the process to the Suprema, September 3, 1585 and, at the same time, asked for instructions about the cases of Alonso Sainz and Francisco Caquen which had been previously forwarded. No reply was received for more than a month, when the tribunal wrote again, October 14th, that it was anxious to hold an auto de fe. This brought the prompt answer to torture Horozco and execute justice in accordance with the result.[469]