A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

With wealth thus constantly accumulating, the church or monastery would purchase lands from the laity, and as these became exempt from taxation it could afford to pay more than a secular purchaser. Whatever thus passed into ecclesiastical possession was never alienated; it remained in the grip of the Dead Hand which, by constant accretions, came to hold a large portion of the most desirable lands and thus of the wealth of the kingdom.

It would be tedious to recapitulate the complaints of the Córtes and the devices attempted by legislation from the eleventh century onward to check this growth, which was regarded as threatening the most serious evils to the nation.[1071] Laws were adopted only to be evaded or forgotten, and the process went on. A new element, however, was injected into the struggle when, in 1438, the Córtes of Madrigal made a vigorous representation to Juan II that, if no remedy were applied, all the best lands in the kingdom would belong to the Church, resulting in manifold injury to the people and the crown, to which the feeble king evasively replied that he would apply to the pope.[1072] Hitherto Spanish independence of the papacy had regarded all such questions as subject to national regulation, but this utterance indicated that papal confirmation was beginning to be recognized as necessary in everything that affected the Church. This was not at once admitted, for Juan, in 1447, in response to the Córtes of Valladolid, and by a decree of 1452, imposed a tax of twenty per cent, on all purchases, bequests and donations,[1073] but it gradually established itself and furnished a ready answer to the vigorous representations which, with growing insistence, the Córtes of the sixteenth century made in 1515, 1518, 1523, 1528, 1532, 1534, 1537, 1538, 1542, 1544, 1551 and 1573.[1074] This put all remedy out of the question, for no pope could be expected to set limits to ecclesiastical wealth and influence, from which the curia derived its revenues; and the petitions of the Córtes served only to emphasize the magnitude of the evil and its universal recognition by the people.

It was not only the progressive absorption of wealth and land that was detrimental but the corresponding increase in the numbers of the clergy, regular and secular, who were released from all the duties of the citizen, and whose vows of celibacy aided in accelerating the diminution of the population. The process continued with added vigor, especially after the commencement of the seventeenth century, owing partly to a wave of religious fervor which led to the founding of chapels and convents on a greater scale than ever, and partly to the growing destitution forcing men to seek conventual refuge, where they might at least escape starvation, and inducing parents to give their sons such smattering of education as might enable them to take orders and have at least a chance to secure a livelihood free from the crushing burdens of taxation. The result of this is seen in Fray Bleda’s boast, in 1618, that one-fourth of the Christians of Spain were priests, frailes or nuns, and, even though this is obviously an over-estimate, it indicates how great was the task imposed on the producing classes to support in idleness so large a portion of the population.[1075] The increase was largely in the Mendicant Orders, whose systematic begging, that no one dared refuse, was a grievous addition to the tithes and first fruits.

A single instance will illustrate this inordinate growth. Cardinal Mendoza, Archbishop of Toledo, the “third king” under Ferdinand and Isabella, stubbornly refused to allow convents to be founded in his province, saying that there were already many that were injurious to the people obliged to sustain them, but this ceased with his death in 1495. His biographer, Doctor Pedro de Salazar, penitentiary of the cathedral, tells us that the city of Toledo held a privilege from Alfonso X prohibiting the erection of convents there. At that time there were six, but in 1625, when he wrote, these had been enlarged and numerous others had been founded, so that they then occupied more than fifty royal and noble houses and more than six hundred smaller ones. The disastrous influence of this on the prosperity of the place is self-evident and Salazar regards this portentous development of ecclesiasticism as the chief cause of the decline in the population of Spain, which he estimates at twenty-five per cent.[1076]

THE BURDEN Of THE CHURCH

The consulta of the Council of Castile, in 1619, naturally included in its enumeration of the causes of national distress the foundation of so many religious houses, which were filled with those attracted, not by vocation but by a life of idleness, while their lands were exempt from taxation.[1077] In a similar mood, the Córtes, assembled by Philip IV on his accession, made a forcible and somewhat rhetorical representation, asking for measures to restrain the multiplication of foundations and the purchases of land, which not only diminished the alcavalas but, in a few years, would exempt all real estate from the royal jurisdiction and accumulate all taxation on the miserable poor, thus destroying the population of the provinces, for it was evident that, if the clergy continued to increase as it was doing, the villages would be without inhabitants, the fields without laborers, the sea without mariners and the arts without craftsmen; commerce would be extinct and, marriage being despised, the world would not last for a century.[1078]

At the earnest request of the kingdom, which represented that it could not support these idle multitudes or furnish soldiers for war, Urban VIII, in 1634, granted a bull reforming the religious Orders and suppressing some of the Barefooted ones, but the opposing influences were too strong and it was ineffective.[1079] In 1677 the matter was again debated, including the excessive numbers of the secular clergy, but action was postponed until there was a better prospect of results. The recognized evils were too serious to remain thus pigeon-holed, and an attempt was again made in 1691, the feebleness of which demonstrates how completely the Church dominated the State and could not be reformed without its own consent. The king deplored the multiplication of convents, and the consequent relaxation of discipline, and the pope was to be asked for authority to appoint visitors with full powers. The excessive increase of the secular priesthood, he said, was the cause of numerous disorders, to cure which the pope was to be applied to for faculties enabling bishops and abbots to reduce their numbers, so that all incumbents could live decently. The clergy in minor orders were so numerous that their exemption from the royal jurisdiction and the public burdens was a grievous injury to the laity and the bishops were asked to limit their ordination. The absorption of lands by the Church was an evil which had puzzled the wisest heads in all ages; many states had adopted laws regulating this, but he hesitated to have recourse to such measures until statistics could be gathered, and it could be decided how to reduce the numbers of the secular clergy.[1080] In short, the Church was an Old Man of the Sea, strangling the State, which lacked power to rid itself of its oppressor.

With the advent of the Bourbons there was less tendency to this hopelessness and, in 1713, the plain-spoken Macanaz, in a report to the king, presented a terrible picture of the misery and impoverishment resulting from the overgrown numbers and wealth of the clergy.[1081] Yet, short of revolution, effective remedy was impossible, and Philip V contented himself with a decree expressing regret that, without papal assent or a concordat, he could not afford general relief to his vassals. While awaiting this, however, he severely characterized the frauds of confessors in inducing the dying to impoverish their heirs. Such testators were declared not to be of free will, their bequests were invalid and scriveners drawing them were threatened with condign punishment.[1082]

Much of this evil would have been averted had the salutary reforms prescribed by the Council of Trent been enforced,[1083] but they had been a dead letter, at least in Spain. In 1723, however, Philip induced the Spanish bishops to supplicate Innocent XIII on the subject, resulting in a constitution in which he embodied at great length the Tridentine decrees as to restricting ordinations and the number of religious in convents.[1084] It was a tribute to the capacious learning rather than to the consistency of Macanaz that the Regular Orders employed him to draw up a memorial to the king, protesting against the enforcement of the papal decree, in which he lavished praises on them, and argued vigorously against any restriction on numbers beyond the capacity of support.[1085] This, however, was but a lawyer’s argument for a client and did not prevent him, in memorials to Philip V, about 1740 and to Fernando VI, in 1746, from expressing his true opinions as to the evils which were a main cause of Spanish distress—more than half the land held in mortmain and exempt from public burdens, and the immense number of those who, in place of being good laborers were bad priests, wandering around as beggars to the scandal of religion, while the overgrown religious Orders were useless consumers, living on the rest of the nation.[1086]