A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

DEVELOPMENT OF PROSCRIPTION

The Dominicans were not as active as the Franciscans in obtaining papal protection of their limpieza. In a long list of briefs conceded to Spanish Dominican houses there is no allusion to the exclusion of Conversos between Torquemada’s of 1496 and 1531 when the houses of Santa Maria Nieba and San Pedro Martir of Toledo were forbidden to receive any fraile suspected of Jewish or Moorish origin, while in the college of Santa Maria the professors and students of arts and theology were required to be free from all suspicion of such descent.[839] The sentiment of the Order was less proscriptive than that of the Franciscans. Its most conspicuous member of the period was Thomas de Vio, better known as Cardinal Caietano who, when consulted, in 1514, by the regent of Salamanca, as to the legality of excluding those of Jewish blood from the Order, replied that it was not a mortal sin but, seeing that the race had furnished Jesus Christ and the apostles and the salvation of man, it was irrational and ungrateful to discriminate against them, as well as an obstacle to their conversion.[840] Paul III agreed with him for, in a motu proprio of 1535 addressed to the Dominican Provincial, he forbade any impediment to the entrance in the Order of those of Jewish or Moorish blood and, on learning that this was disregarded in some houses, he repeated and confirmed it with censures by a brief of August 3, 1537.[841]

In this, as in so much else, any one seemed able to get from the Holy See whatever he wanted and Paul reversed himself, in 1538, when the convent of San Pablo of Córdova represented that, in most of the colleges of the Order, descendants of Conversos were not received or, if admitted in error, were ejected, and it desired the same concession to its college, as necessary for its preservation and the peace of the house. Paul promptly acceded to this request and ordered the inquisitors and the dean of Córdova to defend the convent in these privileges, even to calling in the aid of the secular arm.[842] This was followed by a more general measure, in 1542, when, by command of Paul, Cardinal Juan de Toledo, Bishop of Burgos, prohibited the Dominicans of Aragon from receiving into the Order descendants of Jews or of convicts of the Inquisition to the fourth generation. It is not likely that this was confined to Aragon and, in the next year, we find the Suprema addressing the provincial and the definitors urging that no Conversos be allowed to enter.[843]

Charles V was as inconsistent as Paul III. In 1537 he issued a decree reciting that as, in some colleges of the universities, admittance was refused to New Christians he ordered that the constitutions of the founders be observed.[844] Yet when the chapter of Córdova, in 1530, adopted a statute of limpieza applicable to all the ministrants of the cathedral, and was unable to obtain papal confirmation, he ordered its observance and contributed by his influence to induce Paul IV, in 1555, to confirm it.[845]

The movement was one which was constantly gaining momentum. In 1548, Archbishop Siliceo of Toledo enumerates, among the bodies refusing admission to all except Old Christians, the three great military Orders of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcántara, membership in which was the object of ambition to almost every Spanish layman of gentle birth. In all the Spanish colleges, including that of Bologna founded by Cardinal Albornoz, none but Old Christians were received and from these colleges were drawn the members of councils and chancelleries and other judicial officials. It was the same with the Minims, by express statute of the founder St. Francis de Paula, and in other Orders and monasteries of both men and women. Cathedral chapters were beginning to adopt it, such as those of Córdova and Jaen; numerous confraternities were based upon it, and many mayorazgos, or entailed estates were conditioned on it.[846] Thus the mania for absolute purity of blood was spreading irresistibly and, while it would be impossible now to enumerate accurately the bodies which made it a condition precedent of membership, it is safe to say that the avenues of distinction, and even of livelihood, in public life and in the Church, were rapidly closing to all who bore the fatal mancha or stain. In time even admission to holy orders required proof of limpieza.[847]

SILICEO’S TOLEDO STATUTE

The Conversos, however, were too able and energetic to yield without a struggle and how the losing battle was waged is seen in the decisive case of the primatial church of Toledo. The Cardinal Archbishop Tavera attempted, in 1539, to procure the adoption of a statute of limpieza in the cathedral, but the opposition was so strong that he was obliged to desist.[848] His successor was Juan Martínez Pedernales, who adopted the classic appellation of Siliceo—a Salamanca professor who had the luck to be appointed tutor to Prince Philip and was rewarded with the see of Murcia, in 1541, whence he was translated to Toledo, in 1546. He was roused to indignation when, in September of that year, papal letters were presented to the chapter granting a canonry to Doctor Hernan Ximenes, whose father had been reconciled by the Inquisition. Although the chapter had several Converso members it refused admission to Ximenes and wrote a rambling and inconsequential letter to Paul III justifying its disobedience. To prevent such contamination for the future, Siliceo drew up a statute forbidding that any but an Old Christian should hold a position in the cathedral, even down to the choir-boys; all aspirants were to present their genealogies and deposit a sum of money to defray the expense of an investigation. In July, 1547, he came to Toledo, with a large retinue of gentlemen, and secretly assured himself of the assent of a majority of the canons, who bound themselves with oaths to adopt it; a meeting of the chapter was called and the measure was sprung upon it, in violation of its rules of order—as he frankly said, if notice had been given and discussion allowed it could not have been passed, for the Conversos would have intrigued successfully against it. The vote in its favor was twenty-five to ten, not including the dean, who opposed it but had no vote. The minority claimed that they were the wiser and better part of the chapter, and probably they were, for they included the archdeacons of Guadalajara and Talavera, both sons of the Duke del Infantado, and Juan de Vergara, one of the most illustrious men of letters of the day, who had had experience of the rigor of the Inquisition. This action aroused so much excitement in the city that the Royal Council sent an alcalde de corte, who reported that, for the sake of peace, the statute had better not be enforced, in consequence of which Prince Philip, then holding the Córtes of Monzon, sent orders to suspend it until the emperor’s pleasure could be learned. The struggle was thus transferred to the imperial court and to Rome. The matter was argued publicly in the Rota, when the conclusion was against confirmation and the pope signed a brief to that effect, but the archbishop’s envoy, Diego de Guzman, used such persuasive arguments that Paul secretly evoked the matter to himself and signed another brief, May 28, 1548, confirming the statute, so that each side could boast of his support. Charles referred the question back to the Royal Council, to which both sides presented memorials. Their temper may be judged by the argument of the chapter that, after so many religious bodies had adopted the exclusion, if the opponents contend it to be unscriptural, they are manifest heretics and should be burnt to ashes.

A memorial of Siliceo to Charles is in the same key. A strange medley of evils is attributed to Jews and Conversos—even the German Lutherans are descendants of Jews. On taking possession of his archbishopric he had found that nearly all the beneficed priests and those having cure of souls were of Jewish extraction, and there was danger of Conversos obtaining entire possession of the Church, owing to the sale of preferment in Rome, where there were at the time five or six thousand Spaniards, most of them Conversos, bargaining for benefices. It was the same in the other professions, where judges, lawyers, notaries, scriveners, farmers of the revenue, etc., were mostly of Jewish stock, and they alone were physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, in spite of all that the Inquisition had burnt and was daily burning; they adopted these callings solely for the purpose of killing Christians—it was but the other day that, in a Toledo auto, there was reconciled a surgeon who always placed a poisonous powder in the wounds of his Christian patients. If Charles did not confirm the statute, the outlook was that the Conversos would govern the church of Toledo. Wild as all this may seem to us, it gives us a valuable insight into the impulses which governed Spain in its dealings with the alien races within her borders. It was a humiliating admission that they were regarded as men of superior intelligence and ability, whose wrongs for generations had converted them into irreconcilable enemies, the object of mingled dread and detestation; as they could not be matched in intellect, the only policy was brute repression and extermination.[849]

Of course Siliceo carried the day. The confirmation of his statute by Paul III was conclusive and was regarded as establishing on irrefragable grounds the necessity of limpieza as a qualification for all who aspired to position in Church or State.[850] Toledo maintained it even against the pope. In 1573, the Venetian envoy, Leonardo Donato, reports that he had seen all the authority of the stern Pius V vainly exerted to secure the archidiaconate of Toledo for a servant of his who was not limpio and who finally had to content himself with transferring the dignity to another and retaining a heavy pension on the revenues.[851]