A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 3

by Henry Charles Lea

RAZING HOUSES

In the imperial jurisprudence, houses in which heretics held their conventicles were forfeited to the Church and this provision was adopted in the legislation of Alfonso X.[341] When prosecution was systematized in the thirteenth century, this was modified to tearing down all houses in which heretics were found, the site remaining forever accursed and unfit for human habitation. This was accepted by the Church and found its way into all the lands that admitted the Inquisition.[342] Aragon adopted it and when, about 1340, the Spiritual Franciscan Fray Bonanato was burnt, and his disciples were scattered, the building which they had occupied at Villafranca del Panadés, near Barcelona, was levelled to the ground.[343]

In the early days of the Spanish Inquisition, the strict enforcement of the rule would have led to great destruction and serious impairment of the value of confiscations. It seems therefore to have been reserved for buildings in which the heretics or apostates had been accustomed to assemble, and then the king, as the recipient of confiscations, decided the matter. A letter of Ferdinand, May 23, 1501, to Aliaga his receiver at Valencia, states that the inquisitors have asked him to decree the destruction of a house in which a synagogue had been found, to which he assents with the suggestive addition that the civic authorities must be ordered to offer no opposition. It turned out that Ferdinand had already given the house to Juan Pérez, the scrivener of sequestrations, whereupon he ordered Aliaga to have it appraised and to pay the value to Pérez.[344] He seems to have offered no opposition to Lucero’s operations in Córdova, where a number of houses were torn down as having served as synagogues, and he ordered them rebuilt when the Congregacion Católica assembled at Valladolid, in 1509, pronounced the prosecutions fictitious.[345]

When the confiscations passed to the Inquisition, financial considerations apparently got the better of zeal, for when, in 1539, at Valencia, trials of a number of Judaizers revealed that a crucifix had been maltreated in a house used for their assemblies, and the tribunal desired authority for its destruction and the erection of a memorial chapel, the Suprema replied cautiously with a number of questions as to value, location and expense, as there were no funds for the purpose, and it ordered the auto de fe to be held, reserving decision as to the house.[346] The subsequent proceedings against the convicts, who revoked their confessions, show that the house was still standing four or five years later.

There was no such hesitation in the stimulated excitement following the discovery of Protestantism in high places in 1559. When, in the Valladolid auto de fe of May 21, the Cazalla family were nearly exterminated, the house of the mother, Leonor de Vibero, where the little group used to assemble, was razed, and a pillar was erected on the spot, with an inscription that can still be read—“During the pontificate of Paul IV and the reign of Philip II, the Holy Office of the Inquisition condemned this building of Pedro de Cazalla and Leonor de Vibero his wife to be torn down and levelled with the ground, since here the Lutherans assembled to hold meetings against our holy Catholic faith and the Church of Rome, May 21, 1559.” Similarly in the great auto of Seville, September 24, 1559, the houses of Luis de Alerego and Isabel de Baena, which had served as Protestant conventicles, were destroyed.[347]

SPIRITUAL PENANCES

A thrifty disposition to restrain inconsiderate zeal for obliterating the receptacles of heresy was manifested by the Suprema, in 1565, when it forbade the razing of a house unless it belonged to the delinquents and thus would not have to be paid for.[348] This restriction, however, was not observed on an occasion which was perhaps the latest as well as the most conspicuous example of the practice. In the great Madrid auto of July 4, 1632, which was honored by the presence of Philip IV, among those who were burnt were Miguel Rodríguez and his wife Isabel Núñez Alvárez, in whose house not only were held Jewish meetings, but an image of Christ had been scourged and when it shed blood and thrice spoke to them they consumed it with fire. Of course it was doomed and on the day after the execution the Inquisition ordered it to be appraised in order that the owner might be compensated. He was the Licentiate Barquero, a highly respected jurist, who protested against its destruction until he received good security for its value. No time was lost. On the 6th the Inquisitor Cristóval de Ibarra, accompanied by the Admiral of Castile, the Duke of Medina de la Torres and other gentlemen, many familiars and a crowd of workmen, and preceded by a guard of halberdiers with banner and drums, marched to the spot, where a secretary read a proclamation of the Toledo tribunal to the effect that it ordered the demolition of the house where a holy Christ had been scourged and maltreated. Then the drums beat and the workmen assailed the structure so zealously that by nine o’clock that night there was not a vestige of it left, the populace eagerly aiding them in tearing the stones from the walls and carrying off the timbers. The site was not left, as the canons direct, to be a receptacle of filth. Money was raised and a Capuchin convent was erected, known as La Paciencia, in remembrance of the patience with which Christ had borne the indignities heaped upon him.[349]

SPIRITUAL PENANCES.

It might be presupposed that, in dealing with spiritual offences, and professing that its main object was the salvation of souls, the Inquisition would incline rather to spiritual exercises than to pecuniary and corporal punishments—that it would seek to instruct and elevate the spirit rather than to afflict the body. Religious persecution, however, has always preferred the harshness of coercion, and has held that the surest way to bring conviction to the soul was to torment the flesh. We need therefore not be surprised to see how insignificant a place spiritual penances held in the sentences of the Holy Office, and it would scarce be worth while to consider them except to note how little was the importance attributed to them by the tribunals.

Except in trifling cases, which merited no real punishment, such spiritual penances as we occasionally meet with are conjoined with material penalties. A man sentenced to imprisonment may perhaps be required to fast on Fridays for six months or a year, and to recite on those days a prescribed number of Ave Marias and Paternosters or other prayers. Pilgrimages to shrines as distant as St. Thomas of Canterbury or St. James of Compostela, so frequently prescribed in the medieval Inquisition, were unknown. It is true that the formula of sentence on the reconciled, condemning them to prison, requires them on Saturdays to make a pilgrimage to some designated shrine in the vicinity, where on their knees they must repeat with devotion five Paters, Ave Marias, Credos and Salve Reginas, but this was not often used in practice.[350] Clerical offenders, sentenced to reclusion in convents, frequently had spiritual exercises included among numerous other inflictions. While this moderation was the rule, occasionally of course the unlimited discretion of the tribunals made exceptions, as in a singularly ill-judged penance imposed at Toledo, in 1653, on Gerónima Mendes, a child ten years of age, convicted of Judaism, who was sentenced to a month’s instruction in the faith and the daily recitation of the rosary for a year. Seeing that the rosary consists of seventeen Paternosters, sixteen Gloria Patris, a hundred and fifty-three Ave Marias and the Apostles’ Creed, one can estimate the burden imposed on a child of such tender years and how little it would conduce to training the youthful penitent in a love for the faith.[351] Such an infliction however was exceptional, and it frequently happens, in the reports of the tribunals, after detailing the material portions of a sentence, that there is a mere general allusion to “some spiritual penances,” which suggests how slender was the consideration bestowed on them. There is one type of better promise, not infrequent in the later period, such as a sentence pronounced at Toledo, in 1777, on Antonio Rubio and Diego González, condemned for heretical acts and blasphemy, the former to five years’ labor in the arsenal of Cartagena and the latter to three years in the presidio of Ceuta, both of whom were required, before leaving prison, to perform fifteen days of spiritual exercises under a director who would instruct them.[352]