A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

We have seen that the Instructions of 1484-5, when recognizing the validity of transactions anterior to 1479, asserted absolutely the right of the fisc to refuse payment of debts and made no concessions as to those contracted subsequently to that period. At the same time a clause concerning claims made by nobles, who had received fugitives in their lands, shows that the Inquisition felt the matter to be within its discretion.[964] The earliest positive admission that I have met of an obligation to pay debts due by a confiscated estate is an order by Ferdinand, May 12, 1486, to Alfonso de Mesa, receiver at Teruel, that wages due in good faith by heretics to their Moorish servants, are to be paid—but this may perhaps be attributable to the special preference allowed to servants’ wages by the laws of Aragon.[965] Various contradictory decisions illustrate the uncertainty hanging over the matter at this time, and it is clearly manifested by two letters of Ferdinand, evidently drawn up for him by his unscrupulous secretary Calcena. The first of these, March 6, 1498, relates to the Castillo de Calanya, which Calcena had obtained from the confiscated estate of Johan Benete and against which certain parties held censos (ground-rents) and other claims. The king is made to order the receiver to suspend action, because the debts had been contracted after Benete had committed acts of heresy. The other letter, March 11, 1498, reiterates an order of August 29, 1497, to a receiver to pay out of the sequestrated property of Antoni Cones a hundred ducats which Calcena had lent him and to pay him before any other creditors.[966]

By this time however the claims of creditors were beginning to be officially recognized. The Instructions of 1498 give detailed orders as to surrendering property belonging to others, and promptly paying debts clearly due out of sequestrated estates and, when confiscation was pronounced, a proclamation was to be made to all claimants to present their claims within a designated time, which in 1499 was fixed at thirty days, while no property was to be sold until the claims against it had been determined.[967] Yet, in spite of this, the rights of creditors were admitted with difficulty by the receivers and numerous instances occur in which they were obliged to appeal to Ferdinand. As late as 1515, Margarita Dartes, wife of Doctor Francisco Dartes, assessor of the Valencia tribunal, complained that in 1499 she had bought a censo secured on a house of Aldonza Cocarredes; Aldonza had now been relaxed and Aliaga, the receiver, refused to recognize the censo because it had been created after she had committed heresy. Ferdinand admitted the validity of this argument and said that, in the rigor of justice, she had lost her claim but, in view of the fact that her husband had been in the service of the Inquisition since its foundation, he ordered it paid as a favor.[968]

OBSTACLES OFFERED TO CREDITORS

An examination of the records of the Valencia court of confiscations, in 1531 and 1532, evinces on the whole an evident desire to administer the law rigidly, whether in favor of or against the fisc. Among the claimants were a number of serving women for wages, which were always allowed, although the court exercised somewhat arbitrary discretion in cutting down the amounts.[969] Gradually the honest policy prevailed and, in 1543, the Suprema instructed the tribunals that the first thing to be paid were the debts that were properly proved—a rule which apparently was difficult to enforce, for the order had to be repeated in 1546 and again in 1547.[970] Yet it was no easy matter for creditors to obtain payment against the resistance offered by receivers and their advocates. In 1565, after Pierre and Gilles de Bonneville were burnt for Protestantism in Toledo, the fiscal reported to the inquisitors that numerous creditors had come forward whose claims were pending before the juez de los bienes, wherefore he asked for a certificate as to the date of the culprits’ heresies, in order to use it before the court. The inquisitors duly certified that the date was about 1550, the object being to plead the obsolete canonical rule that subsequent obligations were invalid.[971] That chicanery of all kinds was employed to exhaust the patience of creditors and accumulate costs is plainly admitted in the memorial of 1623 to the Suprema, which states that, in the suits of creditors, there is much that brings discredit on the Inquisition, for confiscations are managed solely for the benefit of those who administer them, the appointees of the juez de los bienes and ordinarily his kinsmen or friends, for whose advantage the suits are prolonged until they become immortal.[972] Abuses such as these were inevitable in a system which confined everything within the circle of the Inquisition, permitting no outside interference or supervision, while dealing so tenderly with official malfeasance. It would be difficult to overestimate the wide-spread damage resulting when the accused were merchants with extensive and complicated transactions, as in the immense confiscations in Mexico and Peru from 1630 to 1650 and those of Majorca in 1678, when funds and merchandise of correspondents were tied up for an indefinite time to the destruction of their credit. The hazards to which business was thus exposed was a factor, and by no means the least important, in the decay of Spanish commerce, for no one could foresee at what moment the blow might fall. Sequestration accompanied arrest and, in 1635, it was ordered that, during the pending of a trial, no payments or delivery of property should be made to creditors, no matter what evidence they presented, without awaiting the decision of the Suprema, the only exception being claims of the king, which were to be paid without delay. In 1721 this prohibition to pay debts was made absolute, excepting a few trivial matters such as servants’ wages and house-rent.[973] That foreigners dealing with Spain had ample cause to dread the decisions of the juez de los bienes is shown by a remarkable clause in the English treaty of 1665 which provided that, in case of sequestration of property by any tribunal of either nation, the effects or debts belonging to a subject of the other should not suffer confiscation but should be restored to the owner.[974] On the whole, however, the Spanish Inquisition is entitled to the credit of mitigating, in favor of creditors, the abhorrent harshness of the inquisitorial law of confiscation, although in practice its officials were guilty of minimising, as far as they could, the benefits of this moderation.

DOWRIES

In the matter of dowries there was also a partial mitigation of the old severity. The dowry was forfeited by the wife’s heresy but not by that of the husband and, in the latter case, it descended to her children. There was one provision, however, which worked infinite hardship for, if the parents of the wife had been guilty of heresy at the time of her marriage, it was forfeited on the ground that all their property then belonged to the fisc and they had no power of alienation. The cases are numerous in which the parties, after prolonged married life, thus suddenly found themselves despoiled by the condemnation of parents who had enjoyed the reputation of faithful Christians and, in the inter-marriages, so frequent in the earlier period, the blow thus often fell upon Old Christians. We hear of these cases through despairing appeals to Ferdinand for mercy—appeals to which he not infrequently responded by abandoning his claims or surrendering a part. A typical case, illustrative of many others, is that Juan Quirat, of Elche, whose petition to the king, in 1513, represents that, twenty-five years before, he had married Violante Propinan, receiving ten thousand sueldos as her dowry from her parents, Luis and Blanca. Eight years ago they were condemned, and now the receiver claims the dowry; he is a poor escudero or squire and the enforcement of the claim would send him with his wife and children to the hospital, in view of all which Ferdinand charitably waived his right.[975] More peculiar was the case of Juan Castellon of Majorca who, when trading in Tunis, was enslaved by a brother of Barbarossa; after forty-two months of captivity he was ransomed for four hundred ducats and returned home in 1520 to find that his wife’s mother, Isabel Luna, had been condemned and the dowry received from her was claimed by the receiver. He petitioned Cardinal Adrian; the matter was referred to Charles V, who humanely ordered that, if his story was true and he was unable to pay, the confiscation should be remitted.[976] The hardship was sometimes aggravated by an ostentatious custom of inserting in the marriage-contract a larger sum than was actually paid. Thus, in 1531, the magnifico Diego de Montemayor, Baile of the Grau of Valencia, swore that he received only three thousand sueldos of the six thousand specified in his marriage-contract with Beatriz Scrivana, in 1510, and that the larger sum had been inserted honoris causa.[977]

The dowries of nuns were subject to the same merciless absorption. In 1510, the convent of Santa Inez of Córdova appealed to Ferdinand, stating that, some twenty years previous, Pedro Syllero had placed his niece there as a nun, giving as her dowry certain houses which it had peacefully enjoyed until her grandfather had recently been condemned for heresy and the property was seized as part of his confiscated estate. This was strictly legal and it was a pure act of grace when the king ordered the houses to be released.[978]

Still, the dowry of an orthodox wife was exempt from the confiscation of a heretic husband’s estate, but it was imperilled by the possibility that the estate might be exhausted in the maintenance of the husband in prison during a prolonged trial and by the sacrifice of values in the realization of assets at auction, which was imperative. In the proceedings of the juzgado de bienes of Valencia in 1531 there are numerous cases which show that this claim of the wife was fully recognized and a fair adjudication made in the complicated questions which frequently arose.[979]

Correlative to this was the liability of the husband to pay to the fisc the dowry of a wife condemned or reconciled for heresy. How pitilessly in time this was exacted is manifested in 1549 by a petition to Valdés from Don Pedro Gascon, who represents himself as an hidalgo whose ancestors had served the king faithfully. The judge of confiscations at Cuenca had condemned him in a hundred and fifty ducats for the dowry of his wife and the receiver had cast him in prison to enforce payment. While there he had sold a large part of his property and had paid fifty ducats, but the rest of his estate would not produce the remaining hundred. Ferdinand would have forgiven him the balance, but Valdés only looked to obtaining assurance of ultimate payment when he empowered the receiver to grant him six years’ time on his furnishing good security.[980]