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

by Henry Charles Lea

In 1532 the see of Cartagena was founded and, in 1547, that of Popayan. In 1553 came the Franciscan Fray Juan Barrios with a bull of Julius III by which the see of Santa Marta was transferred to Santa Fe and erected into an archbishopric, thus sundering it from the metropolis of Lima. Santa Marta was reduced to an abbacy, to be subsequently re-erected. Cartagena was dismembered from Santo Domingo and the archiepiscopal province included it with Popayan and Santa Marta. In the absence of the Inquisition, Archbishop Barrios exercised its functions and, in a series of Synodal Constitutions, issued in 1556, he ordered that no books should be possessed or sold without being first examined by the bishop or his deputies, under the penalty of fifty pesos.[758]

When, in 1570, the tribunal of Lima was established, its authority extended over all the Spanish possessions from Panamá to the south. The organization of so extended a territory was a work of time and the material at hand for it was of the worst description, as we have seen in the preceding chapter. It was not until 1577 that Inquisitor Cerezuela appointed a commissioner for Santa Fe, when his choice fell upon D. Lope Clavijo, dean of the metropolitan chapter. In the exercise of his new authority, Clavijo naturally became involved in bitter quarrels with the archbishop, Luis Zapata de Cardenas. His character reflected no credit on the Holy Office, if it be true as reported that his official apartments became a receptacle for women, on some of whom he committed violence, and that the nuns of Tunja were obliged to forbid his entrance into their parlor, in order to escape his licentious conversation. The Commissioner of Popayan, Gonzalo de Torres, was no better and was the source of infinite trouble to the bishop, until the visitador, Juan Ruiz de Prado, summoned him to trial in Lima, on a prosecution containing twenty charges. He seems, in 1589, to have been deprived of his office, which, as Archbishop Lobo Guerrero said to the Suprema, he used only as a means of committing offences against God. We hear also of Juan García, Commissioner of Cumaná, appointed by Inquisitor Ulloa, as a reward for committing perjury against an enemy of the latter. His adulteries and incests with maids, wives and widows, mothers, daughters and sisters, were notorious and he had caused the death of more than a hundred Indian laborers without baptism or confession. Like the others, he only sought the place for the protection afforded from punishment for his crimes.[759]

Under worthies such as these, it is easy to understand that little attention was paid to the purification of the faith among the colonists. The cases sent to Lima for trial were few and unimportant. There were no Protestants among them; the only accusation of Judaism was that of Juan de Herrera, in 1592, of which he was absolved in 1595, after undergoing torture; the rest were the ordinary run of inquisitorial business—sorcery, bigamy, blasphemy and propositions, more or less innocent. That the commissioners, however, did not neglect opportunities that presented themselves may be assumed from the case of Juan Fernández, a merchant who, in 1588, denounced himself to the Commissioner of Cartagena because, on hearing that a man had hanged himself he had exclaimed “May God forgive him!” This proposition was decided to be heretical; Fernández was arrested, with sequestration of property, and was sentenced to abjure de levi, to hear mass as a penitent, and to pay a fine of a hundred pesos.[760]

It was evident that, if the faith was to be properly guarded, some authoritative tribunal nearer than Lima or Mexico was necessary for the vast territory which included the whole sweep of the Antilles and the coast of Tierra Firme from Panamá to Guiana. As early as April 8, 1580, Inquisitor Cerezuela wrote that the people of New Granada were asking for one, in view of their distance from Lima; this was great—fully six hundred leagues—and there would be no inconvenience in such a step except that he has understood that there were no suitable persons there to serve as consultors and calificadores.[761] Again, in 1600, Inquisitor Ordóñez y Flores represented to the Suprema the enormous extent of the territory assigned to the Lima tribunal and suggested two new ones—one at La Plata and the other at Santa Fe. The latter should include the sees of Popayan, Cartagena, Santa Marta and Venezuela, making a district four hundred leagues in length, in which it was impossible to provide commissioners; at present there was but one, with whom communication was so difficult that sometimes two years passed without hearing from him. A year earlier, in 1599, Archbishop Lobo Guerrero had written to the king to the same effect. He described the land as the most vicious and sinful in the Spanish dominions, and the faith as on the point of destruction; the distance to Lima was so great that offenders either died or escaped on the road and there was no money to meet the cost of sending them.[762]

The same cry went up from the islands. In 1594 the Council of Indies suggested to the king that, in view of the failure of all efforts to suppress the dealings of the people of Santo Domingo with the English and French corsairs, and with pirates of all nations, the inquisitor-general should commission the Archbishop of Santo Domingo as an inquisitor. On this being submitted to the Suprema it replied that there were disadvantages in the plan and the true remedy would be to establish a tribunal on the island, which could be done on the most economical basis. Philip II ordered a junta of a member of each council to consider a grant of inquisitorial power to the archbishop for a term of three or four years.[763] Nothing was done. The king shrank from the expense of a new tribunal and the Suprema was too jealous of the episcopate to delegate its power to the archbishop. A similar fate awaited a complaint of Bishop Martin of Puerto Rico, in 1606, as to the influx of heretic traders and sailors with their books, to remedy which he urged that a tribunal be established in Santo Domingo, or that delegated power be granted to the bishops, including authority to appoint alguaziles and familiars with the recognized privileges and exemptions.[764]

There can be no doubt that many representations of the same import poured in upon the court and finally, in 1608, the Council of Indies formally urged the erection of a tribunal in Santo Domingo. After due discussion, it was resolved to include in the district all the lands surrounding the Caribbean, except Central America, and, as its inquisitors subsequently boasted, it enjoyed the most extensive territories of any tribunal, embracing the archbishoprics of both Santa Fe and Santo Domingo and the bishoprics of Cartagena, Panamá, Santa Marta, Popayan, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Santiago de Cuba.[765] Its seat was fixed at Cartagena, as a central point and leading port of entry, which had had time to recover from its devastation by Drake in 1585. Its position and its safe and capacious harbor, easily defensible by fortifications, rendered it the entrepôt of the trade with the Pacific, and the place where the treasures of the colonies were gathered for transhipment to Spain, while the pearl fishery of Margarita and the productions of a province rich in mineral and agricultural wealth gave it a large and lucrative commerce. As the seat of a tribunal it had the advantage that, unlike Lima and Mexico, it was not a capital where the humors of inquisitors could be in some slight degree controlled by a viceroy and a royal Audiencia. They had only to deal directly with a local governor and municipal authorities on the one side, and with a simple bishop on the other; there was little to restrain them, short of the Suprema beyond the Atlantic, and we shall see that they took full advantage of their position in the endless embroilments which formed their chief occupation. The history of the tribunal is to be found not so much in its autos de fe as in the guerrilla war which for a century it maintained with the authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, rendering decent and orderly government impossible and going far to explain the decadence and decrepitude of the colony.

Extensive as was the district of the tribunal, it sought to extend its authority still farther over Florida. As early as 1606 there is a curious letter from Fray Juan Cabezas, Bishop of Cuba, reciting that the tribunal of Mexico had appointed Fray Francisco Carranco as commissioner in Havana—under what authority does not appear. On the news of his coming the good bishop fled from Havana and took refuge in St. Augustine, whence he despatched his provisor to Spain to protest against the announced intentions of Carranco to include Florida within his jurisdiction. This had caused lively anxiety among the garrison, some three hundred in number, who with the friars were the only Spaniards there. The Indians as yet were so little rooted in the faith that recently in the missions they had slain four or five of the missionaries. There were, he adds, many women and children, for most of the soldiers were married and the effort was made to induce all to marry, for the hardships of the place were such that, without these ties, the governor would not venture to send any one away with the expectation of his return.[766] In 1621 there was some discussion as to sending a commissioner there, but nothing was done. Then, in 1630, Inquisitor Agustin Ugarte y Saravia reported from Cartagena that he had sent to the Governor of St. Augustine, Luis de Rojas y Borja, commissions in blank for a commissioner and familiar, fearing that, if appointees were sent, he would not receive them, as the settlement was wholly military, even the Franciscan missionaries being rated as soldiers.[767] It is not likely that the governor filled out the commissions, for Florida remained deprived of the blessing of the Holy Office. In 1692 another attempt was made. The Cartagena tribunal appointed Fray Pedro de Lima as commissioner with power to nominate subordinates, without requiring proofs of limpieza. Of this he availed himself to create a notary, an alguazil mayor and four familiars, thus establishing a tribunal of his own. The governor, Don Diego de Quiroga y Lanada, took the alarm and wrote earnestly to the Council of Indies. All this, he said, was simply to escape the royal jurisdiction; Fray Pedro, as a friar, was ineligible to the post of commissioner; the tribunal of Cartagena had no jurisdiction over Florida, where, by the Concordias, there was to be no Inquisition and, if cases of faith arose, they were to be treated by the cura or the ecclesiastical Vicariate. The Council of Indies, December 9, 1695, reported this to the king, asking that the Suprema be told to order the Cartagena tribunal to desist; to this Carlos II assented and the attempt to establish an Inquisition in Florida seems to have ended here.[768]

On June 29, 1610, Mateo de Salcedo and Juan de Mañozca—the latter a name of evil import to the Spanish colonies—the newly appointed inquisitors for Cartagena, set sail from Cádiz, with a fiscal, alguazil, notary and messenger, and power to appoint all necessary subordinates, whose commissions would be issued by the Suprema. On August 9th they arrived at Santo Domingo, where they were received with all honor and published the Edict of Faith; they received some self-denunciations, they appointed the Dominican Provincial as temporary commissioner, and the archbishop surrendered the papers of all cases heard by him and his predecessors. Sailing on September 4th, they reached Cartagena on the 21st, where their reception by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities was conducted with great pomp. On the 26th the royal letters were read and the oaths of obedience taken; three houses were rented for their occupation until a suitable building could be rented. The king allowed them 8000 pesos for their installation, with which they bought the houses in which they were lodged, paying half in cash and, with the remainder of the money, building a prison with thirteen cells.[769] For the support of the officials, as in the case of Mexico and Lima, the king provided a subvention of 8400 ducats a year, until the fines and confiscations should suffice to defray expenses; but, profiting by experience, he endeavored to guard against the habitual deceit of the tribunals. In his cédula of March 8, 1610, to the treasury officials of Cartagena, he ordered that sum to be paid out of any funds in the treasury or, if those were not sufficient, then out of what came in from the province, but, in order to know how much of this subvention should be paid, the receiver of the tribunal was required to furnish every year a statement of the confiscations and of all moneys applicable to the salaries, which were to be duly deducted from the treasury payments.[770] We shall see, as in Mexico and Peru, how fruitless was the precaution against audacious inquisitorial mendacity.

The tribunal found little to do in justification of its existence. It was not until February 2, 1614, that it held its first auto de fe, in which it presented about thirty penitents, whose offences consisted of trivial propositions, blasphemies, superstitious arts and the like. Nevertheless the ceremonies were conducted with all solemnity to impress the population, and a long and grandiloquent report was sent to the Suprema. Four readers of the sentences were employed, so that the reading could be continuous, yet such was the verbosity that the ceremonies lasted from half-past nine in the morning until after sunset and the auto had to be finished by torch-light. There were about a dozen sentences of scourging through the streets and when, on the next afternoon, the infliction was to commence, a motley crowd of negroes, mestizos, mulattos and Spaniards, estimated at four thousand, assembled, armed with oranges and other fruits wherewith to pelt the victims. The escort provided for them was afraid to venture forth until the inquisitors made proclamation threatening a hundred lashes for any such manifestation of pious zeal, when every one dropped his missile and the punishment was carried out in peace.[771]

Besides these there had been despatched in the audience-chamber sixteen cases, one of which is worth mentioning as an example of the spirit in which the inquisitors commenced their duties. For some matter of slight importance, Doña Lorenza de Acereto, a noble married woman, had been penanced by the episcopal provisor Almanso, prior to the founding of the tribunal. Probably stimulated by the Edict of Faith she was impelled to denounce herself to it and Mañozca, who had some private grudge to satisfy, imprisoned her for eight months and then sentenced her to a fine of 4000 ducats and exile for two years. When the sentence was read, she appealed to the inquisitor-general but, as she was leaving the room, she was warned that she would be immured for life in the secret prison and, in dread of this, she withdrew the appeal. It chanced that Almanso was soon afterwards sent to Madrid by his bishop to complain of the tribunal; he represented this matter to the Suprema, which sent for the papers of the trial and, on examining them, suspended the case as groundless.[772]