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

by Henry Charles Lea

In 1630 the Council of Indies presented to Philip IV a formal complaint in thirty-four articles against the tribunal of Cartagena, which very probably contributed to the enactment of the Concordia of 1633.[800] Meanwhile a new governor, Francisco de Murga, had resolutely undertaken to abate the insolence of the inquisitors and had become involved in specially bitter quarrels with the inquisitor Vélez de Asas y Argos, who had been promoted, in 1626, from the position of fiscal. In a letter of December 12, 1632, the inquisitors describe him as the most dangerous man on earth, for he daily framed a thousand devices to trip them up and, if this could not be stopped, there would be no living in the city. He was certainly audacious for one day he took from the executioner a negro who was being scourged through the streets for heresy. For this they excommunicated him, but when they sent officials and familiars to notify him, he clapped them all into gaol and held them there under heavy guard for twenty-four hours. Then he called a junta in the house of the bishop and, by its advice, asked for absolution, which was administered in a manner so humiliating that the Council of Indies presented a formal complaint to the king. This did not tend to harmony and the quarrel went on, to the discomfiture of the tribunal, showing what a determined man could do, when supported by the universal detestation in which the Inquisition was held. In fact, as the inquisitors complained, in a letter of August 8, 1633, the mass of the people held them in mortal hatred, which they could explain only by the wiles of the devil seeking to obstruct their pious work.[801]

Meanwhile the home authorities were leisurely engaged in endeavoring to reconcile the irreconcileable. A consulta of the Suprema, March 23, 1633, suggested measures to that effect but in vain. Philip IV adopted a more practical course in ordering the Suprema to summon Vélez to Spain, but it disobeyed and, when he repeated the order, it replied, May 3, 1635, that it was ready to obey but had deferred in expectation of his replying to its consulta of May 26, 1634; besides, it had not yet received the papers containing the inquisitors’ side of the matter. To this the king replied by curtly commanding immediate compliance, but it still dallied and it was not until 1636 that Vélez was compelled to sail for Spain. At the same time the Suprema admitted the fault of the tribunal by ordering the inquisitors, March 15, 1636, not to plot and conspire against Murga nor, after his retirement, against his deputy and officials. The sincerity of this was soon put to the test. Murga had died before Vélez left Cartagena and, in April, 1636, the tribunal was delighted to receive orders to arrest his deputy, Francisco de Llano Valdés, who was asserted to be the cause of all the troubles. The order was joyfully obeyed, but to little effect. In prison Llano Valdés became intimate with Inquisitor Cortázar, for both were Biscayans; a false certificate of illness was procured from the physician and he was given his house as a prison; he was soon seen on the streets again and was even called in frequently to administer torture, as the tribunal had no official skilled in the art.[802]

The death of Murga did not end the debate, which was transferred to Spain, where Vélez arrived in December, 1636. It dragged on with customary procrastination. The Suprema urged his return to Cartagena, declaring that his service had been most satisfactory, and that he had been dishonored by being summoned to Spain without cause, which could only be repaired by his restoration. The Council of Indies insisted that he had exposed Cartagena to destruction and that he should be provided for with a post in Spain. Philip IV sought to compromise the matter by deciding against his return and that he should have one of the best Spanish tribunals—it being the ordinary policy of the Inquisition that when a man had proved his unfitness in one position, he should be promoted to a higher station in which to exercise his powers of evil. Finally it was settled that he should have the great tribunal of Mexico, but the commander of the fleet, Don Carlos de Ibarra, ordered him to take ship direct to Honduras and made public proclamation that no one should receive him on board or carry him to Cartagena, under pain of treason and confiscation. Then the Suprema, September 30, 1639, made a final effort to obtain his restoration to Cartagena, but this failed and he at last took his seat in the Mexican tribunal.[803]

Vélez had been on terms not much better with his colleague, Martin de Cortázar y Ascarate, who accused him of endeavoring to encompass the death of Llano Valdés in prison and of seeking to rule the tribunal with a faction of the officials, consisting of the fiscal Juan Ortiz, his son, the secretary Luis Blanco and the other secretary, Juan de Uriarte, father-in-law of Blanco. As for Cortázar himself, two of the consultors, Juan de Cuadros Peña and Rodrigo de Oviedo, wrote to the Suprema, August 10, 1635, representing his utter ignorance; he knew no Latin and his Castilian was so imperfect as to be unintelligible; he was proud and haughty and his cruelty was evinced by the savage tortures which he inflicted on the accused. Then, on November 16, 1640, Ortiz was promoted to the inquisitorship and his family had complete control.[804]

They used their power for their own enrichment, dividing among themselves the moneys in the coffer and paying no debts unless they were bribed. That they should soon be involved in strife with the municipality, was inevitable. In 1641 an excessive scarcity caused by the ravages of locusts led the cabildo, or city authorities, to prescribe maximum prices for provisions and to order an examination into the quantities of produce in the several plantations, so as to prevent exportation. Ortiz and his officials claimed exemption from these regulations; he ordered the secretary of the cabildo to furnish him with its proceedings, that he might see which of the regidores voted for them, so that he might imprison them, as was done with Don Cristóval de Bermúdez and Don Baltasar de Escovar, on complaint of the servants of the officials, for distributing provisions equally—arbitrary imprisonment without observing any formalities or opportunity for defence. Then, as the secretary did not comply with the demand, he was similarly thrown in prison. When meat was brought into the city for distribution the servants of the officials claimed whole carcasses, which they cut up and retailed at excessive prices. Driven to extremities, the city complained to the king of the violence of the tribunal and the excesses of its officials, when Ortiz again demanded a copy of the proceedings of the cabildo, leading to further intolerable vexations, which caused it to send the regidor, Nicolás Heras Pantoja as procurator to ask for a visitador.[805]

This imprisonment in the secret prison, we may remark, was an inveterate abuse; it was in itself the severest punishment, as it implied heresy and inflicted indelible infamy on the individual and his posterity. It was the subject of repeated complaints and, at last, a consulta of the Council of Indies, June 14, 1646, led the king to order the Suprema to instruct the Cartagena tribunal not to molest the people; when any one was arrested for matters not of faith, he must be placed in a decent prison, outside of the Inquisition. The Suprema had already taken such action in letters of April 28, 1645, and it repeated this July 28, 1646. Yet a letter from Cartagena of June 10, 1649, represented that, in spite of these orders, the inquisitors continued to throw many people into the secret prison, for causes not of faith, till at length three citizens who had been thus dishonored supplicated the king to remedy the great injuries thus inflicted. The Council of Indies, in a consulta of February 21, 1650, represented strongly to the king the disorders arising from the disregard of his commands and urged that positive orders to obey be given to the inquisitors. This he sent with his endorsement to the Suprema, which, on April 8th, wrote to the tribunal to observe its previous instructions—but without producing permanent effect.[806]

Meanwhile the prayer of the city for a visitador had been answered after a fashion, though not in consequence of its supplication. According to a statement of the Suprema in 1646, it had, at the close of 1642, determined to send an inspector to Lima and Cartagena, as those tribunals had not been visited since their foundation. There had recently been great sequestrations and confiscations, giving rise in Lima to over two thousand lawsuits, while in Cartagena it was necessary to investigate the settlements made with the claimants and the net collections secured. There were no charges, it said, against the inquisitors and it was only the financial matters that were concerned. There was hesitation as to the selection of a visitor; he had to be an old inquisitor and no one would accept the position without the assurance of a good benefice in the Indies or of a place in the Suprema itself. To give him more authority it was resolved to make him a member of the Suprema and to swear him in before his departure. Unfortunately the choice fell upon Dr. Martin Real, then serving in the tribunal of Toledo, a man of learning and imbued with the highest conceptions of inquisitorial authority, who had acted as visitor in Sicily, where he earned the reputation of a breeder of troubles, through his ungovernable temper and headstrong character. This was known to the Suprema, but it was thought that what he had suffered in consequence of it and the warnings that would be given would render him cautious. Philip IV objected, in view of what had occurred in Sicily, and suggested other names, but yielded on condition that he should not take the oath as councillor until the day of his departure. Then the Council of Indies protested against the appointment as dangerous to the peace of the colonies, but the Suprema represented that the matter had gone too far to be reconsidered without disgracing Real; that the opposition came from those who desired to prevent the visitation and that it did not concern the inquisitors but only the confiscations. The king made no further objection and Real was duly commissioned and departed early in 1643.[807]

The result justified fully the apprehensions of Philip and the Council of Indies, but it may be doubted whether the most even-tempered visitor, honestly bent on performing his duty, could have averted an explosion. The object of the mission was the investigation of the finances; there can be little question that, as in the other tribunals, false reports had been made as to the results of the enormous confiscations accruing from the prosecution of the Judaizing New Christians, and an inspection of the accounts was to be prevented at all hazards. The city was in a state of combustion with the chronic quarrels between the tribunal and the civil and military authorities. Real’s temper would not allow him to be neutral and it was easy to create a situation which should preclude the dreaded investigation. Such, at least, is the most rational explanation of the events as they can be disentangled from the somewhat conflicting accounts that have reached us.

Towards the end of July, 1643, Real arrived in Cartagena and with him came a new inquisitor, Juan Bautista de Villadiego, a man nearly seventy years of age, and a fiscal, Pedro Triunfo de Socaya. Real’s first act was to forbid Ortiz and Uriarte from entrance to the secreto, evidently with a view of examinating their accounts without interference, at the same time handing them appointments to equivalent positions in Llerena and Logroño—the favorite method used by the Suprema when officials had destroyed their usefulness where they were. Villadiego however refused to let Real have the keys of the money-chest, so the object of his visitation was frustrated and he revenged himself by exceeding the powers of his commission and assuming control of the tribunal. To obtain the keys of the coffer he led a disorderly crowd to Villadiego’s house, broke it open, personally assaulted him, seized the furniture and sold it at auction to pay the fine which he had imposed on him. Real further espoused the cause of the governor and cabildo and interfered by liberating a secretary whom Villadiego had arrested in order to learn who had voted against him. Then Villadiego endeavored to establish a rival tribunal in his own house and appointed officials to run it, a schism which lasted for two months, until Real judicially sentenced him to consider his house as a prison. Villadiego thereupon, on the night of February 11, 1644, with his own hands, posted notices that Real was excommunicated and Real retorted by arresting him.

He was replaced by Juan Pereira Castro, who took possession as inquisitor, August 22, 1644, and lost no time in organizing a faction among the officials and the clergy against Real and was concerned in libels upon him which were posted on the night of September 3d. For this, on insufficient evidence, Real arrested Ortiz de la Masa, an ecclesiastic of high standing, and proposed to torture him, which created an immense scandal among both clergy and laity. Pereira in vain endeavored to release him and, on January 25, 1645, he and Real exchanged excommunications, resulting in an interdict under which the city lay for many months. A few days later, on January 28th, Pereira, the fiscal Socaya and the notary, Tomás de Vega, locked themselves up in the tribunal for fear of arrest, and there they remained for seven months, solacing their self-inflicted captivity with feasting and gambling, while Real could neither get his salary nor the papers which were necessary for the business of his visitation. Many of those whom he had treated harshly hurried to Spain and brought suits against him in the Suprema, and we hear of Socaya sending with them forty bars of silver to substantiate their complaints.