A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

As in everything else, it was impossible to enforce compliance with wholesome regulations. Cervantes, in the report of his Barcelona visitation of 1561, says that commissioners paid no attention to the limitations of their powers. They were thoroughly untrained and ignorant of their duties and had no hesitation in appointing other commissioners. As they had authority to appoint a notary and an alguazil, they set up little courts throughout the land, armed with the awful authority of the Holy Office, and it requires no stretch of the imagination to conceive the tyranny and extortion with which they afflicted the people.[786]

Not much was gained when, in 1561, the Suprema ordered that they should be appointed only in places where it was necessary and that they must be quiet and peaceable persons; or, in 1565, when it prescribed great care in issuing commissions, which must be so limited as to prevent them from appointing deputies.[787] Salazar’s report of his inspection of Barcelona, in 1566, shows that the evil continued unchecked; commissioners were appointed in unnecessary numbers, often by a single inquisitor during a visitation, and sometimes they were ignorant laymen, although the office inferred that it should be reserved exclusively to those in holy orders.[788] It is not strange that this new infliction, which seemed to bring the terrors of the Inquisition to every man’s door, should form the subject of vigorous remonstrances, and the Concordias of 1568, by their enumeration of what was forbidden, show the abuses under which the populations were suffering. That of Valencia provided that there should be such officials only in Tortosa, Segorbe, Teruel, Gandía, Castellon de la Plana, Denia and Játiva, with two in the city of Valencia, and that they should be called deputized commissioners and not, as heretofore, lieutenant inquisitors. That of Aragon limited them to Lérida, Huesca, Tarazona, Daroca, Calatayud, Jaca, Barbastro and towns on the French frontier. Both provided that in future they should not try cases, or make arrests save to prevent flight, nor should they grant licences for the importation or exportation of provisions and other matters. They might have an assessor and a notary, enjoying all privileges and exemptions, and, if an alguazil was needed, they could assign that post to a familiar without enlarging his exemptions.[789] All this is eloquent of the methods by which these would-be local inquisitors had magnified their office to the vexation of the people.

Catalonia rejected the Concordia of 1568 and, in the Córtes of 1599, it demanded that neither rectors of churches nor frailes should be appointed as commissioners. To this the Suprema, in its memorial to Clement VIII, replied that the object was to prevent the Inquisition from having proper commissioners, as Catalonia was too poor in the requisite material to exclude these classes in places where there were no cathedrals or collegiate churches.[790]

In 1572, the Suprema made an effort to check the multiplication of these officials by decreeing that they should be appointed only in the chief towns of archpriestly districts, but it promptly receded from this and, the next year, authorized them wherever it seemed necessary, which amounted to unlimited permission. An order, in 1576, that they were not to be defended in prosecutions for concubinage is suggestive as to the prevailing morality and, in 1584, they were instructed to keep in constant correspondence with the tribunals, reporting everything that occurred in their districts, which indicates how comprehensive a system of espionage was established.[791]

COMMISSIONERS

The Suprema, in a carta acordada of March 24, 1604, made a serious attempt to check existing evils. It called attention to the abuses in appointing commissioners, notaries and familiars, whose multitude and general unworthiness resulted in greatly impairing the authority of the Inquisition. In future, commissioners were to be appointed only in the chief towns of the partidos, or local judicial districts, or at least four leagues apart. Inquisitors should bear in mind that their duties embrace cases of the utmost importance, requiring men of intelligence, virtue and silence; they should have benefices or revenues sufficient to live with the dignity befitting their high office.[792] The prescription as to number and location received scant obedience. We chance to meet with them in obscure places like Cobeña and Fuentelsas, and a list of them in the little province of Guipúzcoa, which has but four partidos, amounts to seventeen. An experienced writer, in 1648, after reciting the limitations, states that there are places where there are three or four, disguised by appointments nominally to neighboring hamlets.[793]

Although without salary, the office had become attractive, not only on account of the importance and immunities which it conferred, but also because a large part of the attendant labor brought in satisfactory fees. In the eagerness to prove limpieza, investigations into genealogies were perpetual; nearly all these passed through the Inquisition and were confided to the commissioner nearest to the birth-place of the applicant. He was expected to pay roundly and the commissioner was entitled to sixteen reales a day for his time, or to two ducats if he had to leave his residence. Moreover the knowledge thus acquired of the genealogies of his neighbors gave him power to render them uncomfortable, as we may gather from a carta acordada of 1622, forbidding commissioners to make notes of the ancestry of those who were not officials of the Inquisition and threatening dismissal for stigmatizing any one as a Jew, Moor, Converso or descendant of such.[794] At sea-ports and frontier towns, also, the commissioners had a considerable source of revenue from fees for the examinations requisite to prevent the entrance of heretics and heretic books—fees which, as we shall see hereafter, were the abundant source of complaint. These positions the inquisitor-general reserved for his own appointment and finally also those in the cathedral towns and larger cities.[795]

In the effort at reform made by Philip V, investigation was made into the character of the commissioners, their notaries and the familiars and, soon after this, in 1706, the Suprema asserted that, in Castile, there was not one fourth of the number permitted by the Concordia of 1553, which it attributed partly to the War of Succession then raging and partly to the molestation to which they were exposed.[796] Unquestionably the number declined rapidly during the eighteenth century, as will be seen by the table in the Appendix where, although Saragossa still has thirty-eight and Barcelona twenty-eight, the other tribunals report only from two to seven, except the Canaries, where the scattered group of islands necessarily demanded a considerable number. This diminution may be explained by the growing habit of appointing temporary commissioners in any place where work was to be done. Moreover the increasing facilities of communication favored local centralization in the tribunal, even as general centralization was stimulated in the Suprema. Denunciations were readily sent by mail and temporary commissions were issued for their investigation. So, too, in the matter of limpieza, the tribunal could dispense its patronage more profitably by sending out from head-quarters special commissioners who earned a larger per diem at the expense of the applicant. To accommodate this new development, when in 1816 a new cartilla of instructions for commissioners was printed, it was provided at the end with a number of blank commissions which could be detached and filled in for use. A hundred copies were supplied to each tribunal, twenty of them bound to be used as a whole and eighty in sheets to be thus cut up. Within a month one tribunal applied for a further stock and fifty copies were sent.[797] Little as the inquisitors of the time had to do, they were evidently devolving their duties upon others more generally than ever.

FAMILIARS