The inquisition in the Spanish dependencies / Sicily—Naples—Sardinia—Milan—the Canaries—Mexico—Peru—New Granada

by Henry Charles Lea

The memorial of Mendoza tells the same story of the alliance between the visitador and the inquisitor, and mentions a case of a priest named Hernan Gutiérrez de Ulloa, who had lent a considerable sum to Inquisitor Ulloa and being unable to obtain repayment had procured a papal brief against him. Prado took the brief from him, fined him heavily, suspended him for a year from his benefice and sentenced him to four years’ reclusion, the result being that he died under the persecution.[636]

The evil friendship between these men did not last long and, in January, 1588, Prado commenced the real duties of his office. He overhauled all the proceedings of the tribunal since its foundation, examining 1265 documents, his notes on which covered 1650 pages and fully substantiated his conclusions as to its irregular methods, its cruel delays, and its inflicting public penances for matters not of faith and beyond its jurisdiction. He reported that he had drawn up 216 charges against Ulloa, many of them applicable also to Cerezuela. There were six about his relations with women, involving much publicity and scandal, and there would have been more had he cared to investigate further in this direction. He said that Ulloa had accumulated considerable sums which he sent to Spain; he was virtually the farmer of the quicksilver mines of Guancavelica, for when bids were invited he frightened off all bidders except his brother and an accomplice, who obtained the contract for twenty or thirty thousand pesos less than others were ready to offer. He kept around him a band of disreputable creatures, who ministered to his vices and were above the law. No one could collect debts of them, for when suit was brought he would order it discontinued and he was obeyed. When he was sole inquisitor he used to go hunting for a fortnight at a time, leaving the accused in prison and delaying their cases. Sometimes he took with him a certain mestizo who had a quarrel with another mestizo and was prosecuted in the royal court. Ulloa demanded the case, claiming that the defendant was his servant; the court demurred as the man was not de familia but only an occasional employee, whereupon he excommunicated the judge and all the alcaldes; they surrendered the case which was settled before him for eight pesos.[637]

When Prado presented the 216 charges, Ulloa quietly allowed a year to elapse before undertaking to answer them. Prado seems to have been in no hurry. Four years had been spent in the visit and the Suprema had repeatedly ordered his return, which he answered by alleging Ulloa’s repeated absences, sometimes for months together, during which he could not leave the tribunal; then he gave sickness as an excuse, or that he had not a real with which to pay for the voyage. Finally he sent the papers by the secretary, Martínez de Marcolaeta, who started from Callao May 6, 1592, and reached Spain the same year. After this Ulloa no longer kept terms with him and ordered him to leave the tribunal, which he refused to do. Ulloa then denounced him to the Suprema, pointing out that he could have sailed at any departure of the fleets but that he desired to remain because he was in partnership with an Augustinian fraile, Francisco de Figueroa, whom he appointed commissioner at Trujillo and then at Potosí, where they made twenty-five thousand pesos. Ulloa publicly spoke of him in terms too opprobrious for any lackey to endure, and the fiscal, Arpide, joined in accusing him of unlawful gains, in granting licences to leave the country, and of protecting unworthy persons by appointing them as familiars. The Suprema attributed the quarrel to the close friendship which Prado had formed for a Dr. Salinas, a man of notoriously bad character, whom he had made advocate of prisoners and then of the fisc, in which capacity he had his suits brought before the tribunal, to the wronging of third parties.[638]

Finally the orders of the Suprema became so pressing that Prado was obliged to leave Lima, April 14, 1594, Ulloa managing so that he received no salary for his return. From Havana he sent a report of his visit, which was approved, not without some rebuke. Of the 216 charges against Ulloa, 118 were accepted and, by sentence of December 15, 1594, he was suspended for five years, fined and ordered to present himself before the inquisitor-general for reprimand—a sentence suggestive of the customary indulgence shown to official malfeasance. Prado also proposed thirty-one articles of reform, the most important of which was the deprivation of the fuero, in criminal cases, of familiars and servants of commissioners; subordinates of the tribunal were to have regular salaries so as to remove the temptation of accepting bribes, and there were many other suggestions for improving the operation of the tribunal, diminishing injustice and relieving the people from abusive extortions. The Suprema approved of all this and directed Prado to return to Lima and put the reform into execution, but, when these orders reached Havana, Prado had sailed for Spain; he did not get back to Lima until 1596, by which time Ulloa had escaped his sentence by dying and there is little trace of any reform by Prado, who died January 18, 1599.[639]

Meanwhile the vacant inquisitorship had been filled by the arrival, February 4, 1594, of the Licentiate Antonio Ordóñez y Flóres. Ulloa at once announced his intention of visiting the district, which he carried out in spite of his colleague’s protest to delay until he should have familiarized himself with the business of the tribunal. Ulloa traversed the land spreading terror wherever he went by the indulgence of his passions. A memorial to the inquisitor-general, from a gentleman named Diego Vanegas, son of a judge of the Contratacion of Seville, affords an illustration of the reckless abuses possible under such institutions. When Ulloa, on his way to Charcas, stopped at Cuzco and lodged in the house of Francisco de Loaysa, a servant of the latter came where Vanegas and some friends were talking in the public square, and began boasting of the powers of the inquisitor which were the greatest on earth; there was, he said, the Licentiate Parra who had some words with a servant of Ulloa, in consequence of which he was arrested; Ulloa called him a dog of a Jew, an ensambenitado, with other insults and threw him in prison. Vanegas remarked that they did not wish to hear anything more about it, and for this he was seized and carried before Ulloa who called him a scoundrel, an Indian, a dog and other opprobrious epithets. Then summoning his servants, about twenty persons rushed in whom he told to kill the rascal. One of them gave him a severe cut on the head while the rest pummelled him. Doña Mariana, wife of the host, entered and interceded for him; Ulloa declared that he was going to give him five hundred lashes, but on her entreaty he diminished it to three hundred, then to two hundred and finally consented to send him to the corregidor with orders to banish him. Ulloa left Cuzco the next day but, hearing on the road that Vanegas had said that he would go to Spain to complain, he sent back orders to seize him. Vanegas was taken from his bed where he was recovering from his wounds, was thrown in prison in chains and the next day was carried to Siguana where Ulloa swore him on the cross, made him sign a paper without reading it and carried him to Potosí, where he lay chained in prison for four months. Thence he was sent two hundred leagues to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, as a soldier condemned to serve for three years on the frontier or in the galleys. Then he was returned in chains through Potosí to Misque, being wounded in an attempt to escape. Carried fifty leagues farther, still in chains, he effected his escape and, after many perils in four hundred leagues of travel, he reached Lima, where he reported to the viceroy and with his permission and that of Ordóñez he was allowed to sail for Spain to present his complaint.[640]

Ulloa continued his so-called visitation in this fashion until orders came in October, 1596, to Cepeda, President of the Audiencia of la Plata, to notify him that his commission would terminate in four months. He appealed to the viceroy who told him that he must obey it, and Cepeda ordered him to leave Potosí. He refused, alleging his health, but the corregidor, Alonso Osorio, communicated to him a further order of the Audiencia, requiring him to do so in ten days. He still pleaded sickness, but Osorio arrested him and all his servants and, after three days, ejected him from the city. He reached Lima, July 7, 1597, and died six days later at the age of 63. He attributed his disgrace to the report of a visitador of the Audiencia of Lima that he and his brother, whom he had made alguazil of the tribunal, had embezzled some three hundred thousand pesos.[641] If there were even partial truth in the statement the plea of the poverty of the tribunal can be understood.

Meanwhile Ordóñez had commenced his official career by letting it be known that all who had claims to collect within the district of the Inquisition could assign them to him, and they would divide the proceeds. This was an open invitation to the commission of fraud, resulting, as the secretary reported, in converting the Holy Office into a business office. He also took money from the chest—at one time as much as ten thousand pesos—which he confided to a merchant to trade for him in Mexico. Before the year was out, the receiver and the secretary were making bitter complaints of him to the Suprema—he was young, inexperienced, violent tempered and abusive. Those who came voluntarily to the tribunal to discharge their consciences were so ill-treated that they declared they would rather go to hell. He would order the secretary to alter the evidence and, if a witness remonstrated, he would be abused and threatened. On his part he wrote equally unfavorable accounts of his subordinates; he knew that they assailed him but he ascribed this to the friends of Ulloa and Prado.[642]

Whether the Suprema believed these accusations or not, Ordóñez was not disturbed and continued to be sole inquisitor, with the exception of the brief second term of Prado from 1596 to 1599, until the arrival of Francisco Verdugo, a new inquisitor, towards the close of 1601. He was a man of different type, who had been advocate in the tribunal of Seville and fiscal in that of Murcia. While a strenuous persecutor of heresy, he was not inclined to abuse his office and he shortly reported to the Suprema that they had suspended a hundred informaciones—cases in preparation—which were without sufficient proof or were matters that did not concern the Holy Office. Ordóñez continued in office until 1612, when he became Archbishop of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, a promotion that was not to his taste, as he complained that the revenues of the see were insufficient for his decent support. Doubtless it afforded fewer opportunities than the inquisitorship.[643]

His successor, Andrés Juan Gaitan reached Lima, October 12, 1611; he had been fiscal of the tribunals of Cuenca and Seville and was therefore experienced in the work. About the same time Panamá, New Granada and the Antilles were detached from the tribunal of Lima on the founding of that of Cartagena.[644] In October, 1623, Verdugo left Lima to occupy the see of Guamanga, to which he had been promoted. For several years he and Gaitan had been on such bad terms that they would not speak to each other, and Gaitan had moreover quarrelled with the Viceroy Guadalcázar, who had resumed a certain repartimiento of Indians that he had granted to the inquisitor. His enforcement, moreover, of the royal orders about the payment of salaries was bitterly resented by the officials and intensified the embroilment. The vacancy left by Verdugo was soon filled by Juan de Mañozca who, after founding the tribunal of Cartagena, was sent as visitador of the Audiencia of Quito and, in place of going there directly, came to Lima and occupied the position of inquisitor ad interim much to Gaitan’s disgust. He reported to the Suprema that the condition of the tribunal was deplorable; unless some action was taken there would be no Inquisition, but only a gang of men obeying a will the most obdurate and most terrible that he had ever met, under which the tribunal was diverted from its proper functions to serve Gaitan’s interest or caprices, for good or for ill. There was nothing with which he did not interfere, and that with such violence that he offended all good men, and even his own faction followed him rather through force than willingly. The fiscal was a coward; it was a pity to pay their salaries for they did nothing but impair the authority of the Holy Office.[645]

In October, 1625, Juan Gutiérrez Flóres arrived to take Verdugo’s place. In consequence of Mañozca’s representations he was ordered to make a secret report, which was equally unfavorable. Gaitan, he said, controlled the tribunal absolutely and supported all the claims of the officials without regard to justice. This was thoroughly understood by the people, and we can readily imagine the oppression and terrorism which afflicted the community. Flóres died, September 22, 1631; and the tribunal was reinforced by the appointment of Juan de Mañozca and Antonio de Castro y del Castillo. Gaitan continued to serve for some years, though infirm with age and sickness, accused to the last of abusing his position for gain.[646] There soon followed the Portuguese complicidad grande, of which more hereafter, and this, with the complications of the resultant confiscations, for years afforded the tribunal abundant occupation more or less legitimate. With its consequent enrichment there came torpidity and for many years it did little work and its annals are bare. In June, 1688, there came as inquisitor Francisco de Valera, transferred from the tribunal of Cartagena, in order to restore peace to that city, disturbed, as we shall see hereafter, by a prolonged conflict between him and the bishop, Benavides y Piedrola. This transfer [Greek:]had been arranged for 1685, but he had delayed obedience, awaiting the arrival of a successor and, on reaching Lima, he was met with a command from the Suprema to return to Spain, which he evaded on the ground that this would leave but a single inquisitor. He paid no attention to a royal cédula of April 1, 1691, ordering Viceroy Monclova to send him at once to Spain without listening to excuses, but this was to be expected, for royal commands were not obeyed by inquisitors unless they were transmitted by the Suprema. Finally the latter ordered his jubilation or retirement on half-pay—the usual punishment of inquisitors whose offences were too flagrant to be overlooked. This reached Lima in 1703, when the tribunal submissively answered that it would obey the command with due exactitude, but that Valera had died on the previous second day of August.[647]