A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

We have those of Toledo, from 1575 to 1610, not wholly complete, for the auto of 1595 is omitted, and the MS. breaks off at the commencement of that of 1610. Toledo, at the time, was the most important tribunal in Spain, for it included Madrid, yet during these thirty-five years the relaxations amount to only eleven in person and fifteen in effigy, so that, allowing for the omissions, there may have been one in person every three years and one in effigy every two years, while the various penances number in all nine hundred and four.[1167] Small as are these results they continued to diminish. For the same tribunal we have a record extending from 1648 to 1794 and, during this century and a half, there were only eight relaxations in person and sixty-three in effigy, the latest execution occurring in 1738. This gives us an average of one of the former every eighteen years and one of the latter every two years and a quarter. In addition, there were a thousand and ninety-four penanced in various ways.[1168] It is true that, about 1650, a separate tribunal was erected in Madrid, but a list of relaxations there, from its foundation up to 1754, when relaxation had virtually become obsolete, gives us only an aggregate of nineteen in person and sixteen in effigy, or one in every five years of the former and in six years of the latter.[1169] During the height of the renewed persecution of Judaizers in the eighteenth century, in the whole of the sixty-four autos celebrated throughout Spain from 1721 to 1727, the total number of relaxations was seventy-seven in person and seventy-four in effigy, making an average of about eleven a year of each class—a grim record enough, but vastly less than has been popularly accepted.[1170] Nor must it be forgotten that, in the vast majority of cases, the victim was mercifully strangled before the fire was set. We have seen how very small was the proportion of impenitents who persevered to the last and refused to earn the garrote by professing conversion.

The material at hand as yet is evidently insufficient to justify even a guess at the ghastly total. Yet, after all, it is not a matter of as much moment, as seems to have been imagined, to determine how many human beings the Inquisition consigned to the stake, how many bones it exhumed, how many effigies it burnt, how many penitents it threw into prison or sent to the galleys, how many orphans its confiscations cast penniless on the world. The story is terrible enough without reducing it to figures. Its awful significance lies in the fact that men were found who conscientiously did this, to the utmost of their ability, in the name of the gospel of peace and of Him who came to teach the brotherhood of man. It is enough to know that the inquisitors used their utmost efforts to stamp out what they deemed heresy, and the tale of their victims is not the gauge of their cruelty but of the number of heretics whom they could discover. Save when pride or cupidity or ambition may have been the impelling motive, the men are not to be blamed, but the teaching which gave them such a conception of the duty so relentlessly performed, and framed a system of procedure which shrouded their acts in darkness and deprived the accused of his legitimate means of defence. The good Cura de los Palacios was evidently a kindly natured man, but he declares that the fires lighted by the Inquisition shall burn to the very heart of the wood, until all Judaizers are slain and not one remains, even to their children if infected with the same leprosy.[1171]

In the hurried work of the early period there was no effort made to induce the conversion that would save the accused from the stake, but, in later times, the persistent labor bestowed on the condemned, during the three days prior to the auto, is evidence that the tribunals did not act through thirst of blood and that they were sincerely desirous to save both the body and soul of the heretic, in the same spirit that torture was sometimes piously administered in order to confirm the sufferer in the faith. Still, at times, there was doubtless a certain pride in affording to the populace the spectacle of a relaxation and thus demonstrating the authority of the Holy Office. That the public should relish the entertainment thus provided was natural, both from the inherent attraction which the sight of suffering has for a certain class of minds, and from the assiduous teaching that heresy was to be exterminated and that the slaying of a heretic was an acceptable offering to God. The Inquisitor Lorenzo Flores relates that, at the great Valladolid auto of 1609, where there were seventy penitents, many of them reconciled or sentenced to abjuration de vehementi, the people murmured because the one condemned to relaxation had professed conversion in time and had thus escaped the stake, and there were many complaints that the auto was not worth the expense of coming to see. He adds that, at Toledo, where there was no one relaxed, the people declared that the auto was a failure.[1172]

PROFITABLE PERSECUTION

There is something terrible in the fierce exultation which fanaticism experienced in the agonies of the misbeliever. Padre Garau, in his account of the Mallorquin auto of May 6, 1691, gloats with an exuberance, which he knew would be shared by his readers, on the agonies of the three impenitents who were burnt alive. As the flames reached them they struggled desperately to free themselves from the iron ring which clasped them to the stake. Rafael Benito Terongi succeeded in releasing himself but to no purpose, for he fell sideways into the fire. His sister Cathalina, who had boasted that she would cast herself into the flames, when they began to lick her, shrieked to be set free. Rafael Valls, who had professed stoical insensibility, stood motionless as a statue so long as only the smoke reached him, but, when the flames attacked him, he bent and twisted and writhed till he could no more; he was as fat as a sucking-pig and burnt internally, so that, after the flames left him, he continued burning like a hot coal and, bursting open, his entrails fell out like those of Judas. Thus burning alive they died, to burn forever in hell.[1173] Such were the lessons which the Church inculcated and such was the training which it gave to Spain, so that the auto de fe came to be regarded as a spectacular religious entertainment on the occasion of a royal visit, or in honor of the marriage of princes. Incidental to this was the cruel perpetuation of ancestral disgrace by the display of sanbenitos in churches, which Philip II rightly reckoned as the severest of inflictions. It intensified the terror inspired by the tribunal which, with a word, could consign a whole lineage to infamy. It kept alive and vigorous the horror of heresy and was aggravated by the statutes of Limpieza.

I hesitate to impugn the motives of those who were active in these terrible “triumphs of the faith,” as they were fondly termed and, as stated above, the efforts to induce conversion show that there was no absolute thirst of blood, yet it is impossible, in reviewing the career of the Inquisition, not to recognize how powerful an adjunct to fanaticism was the profitableness of persecution. Had the Holy Office been a source of expense instead of income, we may reasonably doubt whether the ardor of Ferdinand and Isabella would have sufficed for its introduction, and it certainly would have had but a comparatively short and inactive career. We have seen how closely Ferdinand watched its expenditures and endeavored to keep down its cost, while enjoying the results of its productiveness, and how grudgingly the crown ministered to its necessities when aid was unavoidable. We have seen moreover how eagerly the Inquisition itself grasped at all sources of gain, how it was stimulated to convict its victims by the prospect of their confiscations, and how fines and penances were scaled, not by the guilt of the culprits but by its necessities; how jealously it guarded its receipts, and how little it recked of deception and mendacity when there was attempt to investigate its finances. After all is said, the Inquisition was an institution with a double duty—the destruction of heresy and the raising of money to encompass that destruction—and there are not wanting indications that the latter tended to supersede, or at least to obscure, the former. We may well question the purity of zeal which provided punishments and disabilities for heresy and at the same time chaffered over the market price of commutations and dispensations through which those penalties could be evaded. Not only confiscation but pecuniary penance and fines were a source of revenue provocative of continual abuse, and the rage for Limpieza provided abundant opportunities for extortion. The filthy odor of gain pervades all the active period of the Inquisition, and its comparative inactivity during its later career may perhaps be attributed as much to the absence of wealthy heretics as to the diminishing spirit of intolerance.

Various ingenious theories have been framed to relieve the Inquisition of responsibility for the remarkable eclipse of Spanish intellectual progress after the sixteenth century.[1174] It is one of the interesting problems in the history of literature that Spain, whose brilliant achievements throughout the Reformation period promised to make her as dominant in the world of letters as in military and naval enterprise, should, within the space of a couple of generations, have become the most uncultured land in Christendom, without a public to encourage learning and genius, and without learning and genius to stimulate a public. For this there must have been a cause and no other adequate one than the Inquisition has been discovered to account for this occultation.

INTELLECTUAL TORPIDITY

Indeed, but for the effort to argue it away, it would seem superfluous to insist that a system of severe repression of thought, by all the instrumentalities of Inquisition and State, is an ample explanation of the decadence of Spanish learning and literature, especially when coupled with the obstacles thrown around printing and publication by their combined censorship. The tribulations of Luis de Leon and Francisco Sánchez illustrate the dangers to which independent thinkers were exposed; the great printing-house of Portonares was ruined by the exigencies of the Inquisition in the matter of the Vatable Bible. All a priori considerations cast the responsibility on the censorship of thought, whether printed or expressed verbally in what were known as “propositions,” and the burden of proof is thrown upon those who deny it. Their reliance is on the fact that Isabella stimulated the development of Spanish culture and, at the same time, established the Inquisition, which thus was in existence for more than a century before the decadence became marked. This is quite easily explicable. The Inquisition was founded to extirpate Jewish and Moorish apostasy; in this it long had ample work without developing its evil capacity in the direction of censorship, save in such a sporadic instance as Diego Deza’s prosecution, in 1504, of the foremost scholar of his time, Elío Antonio de Nebrija, for venturing to correct the errors of the Vulgate for the Complutensian Polyglot, in the service of Ximenez who protected him and, when inquisitor-general, allowed him to resume his labors.[1175] With the advent of Lutheranism there gradually commenced the search for errors; crude Indexes of condemned books were compiled, reading and investigation became restricted; the pragmática of 1559 forbade education at foreign seats of learning and an elaborate system was gradually organized for protecting Spain from intellectual intercourse with other lands, while at home every phrase that could be construed in an objectionable sense was condemned. For awhile the men whose training had been free from these trammels persisted, in spite of persecution more or less severe, but they gradually died out and had no successors. In 1601 Mariana explained that he translated his History from the original Latin because there were few who understood that language; such learning brought neither honor nor profit and he feared the unskilfulness of those who threatened to undertake the task.[1176] It is true, however, that Latin was widely studied as essential to gaining place in Church or State, but to the neglect of everything else. Fray Peñalosa y Mondragon, in 1629, while boasting of the thirty-two universities and four thousand Latin schools and of Spanish pre-eminence in the supreme science of theology, for which there were infinite rewards, admits that there were none for the other sciences and arts, which were not regarded with favor or estimated as formerly.[1177] The intellectual energy of the nation, diverted from more serious channels, continued through another period to exhibit itself in the lighter fields of literature, where the names of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderon de la Barca, Quevedo de Villegas and others show of what Spanish intellect was still capable if it were allowed free play. Even these however passed away and had no successors in the growing intellectual torpor created by obscurantist censorship, and a dreary blank followed which even the stimulation attempted by Philip V could not relieve.

INFLUENCE FOR EVIL