A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

CHAPTER IV.
LIMPIEZA.

REPEATED allusions have occurred above to the limpieza, or purity of blood, required in all officials of the Inquisition. This was so remarkable a development of the prevailing fanaticism and exercised so much influence on the social condition of Spain that it deserves a somewhat detailed investigation.

The first indication of this exclusiveness is seen in the Sentencia Estatuto of Toledo, in 1449, under which all Conversos were stripped of official positions as being suspect in the faith (Vol. I., p. 126). This, as we have seen, elicited the bull of Nicholas V, denouncing such legislation as unchristian, forbidding discrimination between Old and New Christians and confirming the laws to that effect of Alfonso X, Henry III and Juan II. This was evaded in the founding of a confraternity, under the title of Christian Love, in Córdova, in 1473, from which all Conversos were rigorously excluded, leading to the tumults and massacres described above.[825] It may have been this which induced Archbishop Carillo of Toledo, in a provincial synod held at Alcalá, to denounce the growing practice of brotherhoods, bound under oaths to exclude Conversos and alleging these oaths in justification. All such statutes were declared invalid and all who had taken such oaths were released from them.[826] In 1473, also, Juan II of Aragon abrogated the statutes of a similar association in Majorca and ordered that Conversos should have full enjoyment of all faculties in his dominions.[827] A somewhat ludicrous aspect was given to this prejudice by a guild of stone-masons in Toledo, composed principally of Mudéjares, which, in 1481, adopted a rule forbidding members from teaching their art to Conversos, and the next year a still more prescriptive statute was adopted in Guipúzcoa, prohibiting Conversos from settling or marrying in the province.[828]

The earliest official recognition of a distinction between Old and New Christians was the bull of Sixtus IV, in 1483 (supra, p. 11) ordering that episcopal inquisitors should be Old Christians. The next step was more portentous of the future. When, in 1485, the temporary Inquisition was established in the Geronimite monastery of Guadalupe, a Jew was found among the monks, who had been living as one of them for forty years and yet had never been baptized. His prompt burning in front of the convent gates did not allay the dread that other heretics might find similar refuge in the Order, leading the General Chapter to decree that no descendant of a Jew should be admitted; those already entered, if they had not professed, were expelled, and those who had professed were incapacitated for any honor or dignity. Much discussion ensued; the decree was held as contravening the bull of Nicholas V in 1449, and there was prospect of trouble, leading Ferdinand and Isabella to apply to Innocent VIII for a remedy. He evaded a decision in the brief Decet Romanam, September 25, 1486, by clothing the Archbishop of Seville and the Bishops of Córdova and Leon with authority to decide all questions under the decree and to revoke, modify and strengthen it at their discretion. This of course was held to be a practical confirmation of the new rule, and we are told that Our Lady of Guadalupe was so delighted that she coruscated in miracles, which Fray Francisco Sancho de la Fuente undertook to record, but they were so abundant that his zeal was exhausted and he abandoned the pious task.[829]

The next instance was a special and limited one. After Torquemada had founded at Avila his convent of St. Thomas Aquinas, he grew apprehensive that the hatred which he had earned from the Conversos might lead them to enter it with evil intent. In 1496 he therefore applied to Alexander VI for a decree forbidding the reception of any one descended, directly or indirectly from Jews, a request which the pontiff readily granted, subjecting to ipso facto excommunication any prior or other person contravening the rule.[830]

DEVELOPMENT OF PROSCRIPTION

The tendency to discriminate against Conversos was stimulated by the disabilities inflicted under the canon law on the children and grandchildren of impenitent heretics. This will be treated more fully hereafter and it suffices to say here that it was construed as applying to the children and grandchildren of all condemned or reconciled by the Inquisition. It was the subject of some debate, and the Instructions of 1488 required inquisitors to enforce by heavy penalties the incapacity of such descendants to hold any public office or to be admitted to holy orders.[831] These disabilities were extended still further by the sovereigns, in two pragmáticas of 1501, forbidding the children and grandchildren by the male line and the children by the female to hold any office of honor or to be notaries, scriveners, physicians, surgeons, or apothecaries. These pragmáticas were promptly sent by the Suprema to all tribunals, with orders for their strict enforcement, as the sovereigns did not permit exceptions to be made.[832]

In this rising tide of proscription it is pleasant to find an exception. There was no more uncompromising defender of the faith than Ximenes but, in organizing his University of Alcalá, he made no discrimination against Conversos. In his carefully elaborated details as to qualifications for professorships, fellowships, degrees and the other objects of academic ambition, there is not a word indicating that the taint of Jewish or Moorish blood was an obstacle.[833] It was doubtless this which excepted Alcalá from the ominous decree of the Suprema, November 20, 1522, prohibiting Salamanca, Valladolid and Toledo from conferring degrees upon any convert from Judaism, or on any son or grandson of one condemned by the Inquisition.[834] Where it found warrant for such assumption of authority it might be difficult to say, but the effect of such proscription can scarce be exaggerated, in thus barring the way to all the learned professions and consequently to public employment and ecclesiastical preferment.

The next step was taken by the Observantine Franciscans who, in 1525, procured from Clement VII a brief providing that in Spain no fraile descended from Jews, or from one convicted by the Inquisition, should be promoted to any office or dignity, and that thereafter no one laboring under such defect should be admitted into the Order.[835]

By this time the question of limpieza was ever present and every one was popularly classed as an Old Christian or a New, for genealogies seem to have been public property. When, in 1528, Diego de Uceda was tried for Lutheranism and claimed to be an Old Christian, the Toledo tribunal sought testimony in Córdova, where the witnesses unhesitatingly described his family, paternal and maternal, as perfectly pure from stain of Converso blood, which they said was notorious throughout the city.[836] The increasing importance of the matter led the Inquisition to amass evidence for itself and, in 1530, the tribunals were ordered to summon before them the descendants of all who had been relaxed or reconciled and ascertain whether they had changed their names. From this general inquest each tribunal compiled for its own district a register of genealogies, comprising all the infected families which, when duly kept up, preserved a mass of testimony infinitely disquieting to subsequent generations.[837] The growing importance of the questions involved, to society at large, is indicated by a petition of the Córtes of Segovia in 1532, that those should be held as Old Christians who could prove their descent from Christian parents, grand-parents and great-grand-parents—or, if necessary, from great-great-grand-parents—and that no imputation of lack of limpieza should be cast on them, unless there was evidence to prove their descent from Jews or Moors, or that an ancestor had been condemned by the Inquisition.[838]