The phraseology of the decree would seem to suspend the spiritual as well as the temporal jurisdiction of the tribunal and historians have generally so regarded it. This however is impossible as the former was a delegation from the pope over which the emperor had no control and any attempt to do so would have been equivalent to abolishing the Inquisition, while the auto of 1541 shows that it continued to exercise its spiritual jurisdiction. It assumed however that its capacity to suppress heresy was fatally crippled by depriving its officials of the privilege of its exclusive forum, as expressed in a document quoted by Franchina (p. 69)—“Notandum est quod quando in anno 1535 fuit limitata seu suspensa jurisdictio temporalis hujus Sancti Officii in aliquibus casibus per invictissimum imperatorem Carolum V felicis memoriæ, jurisdictio spiritualis causarum fidei fuit in suspenso et quasi mortua.” So a consulta of the Suprema to Philip III, October 2, 1609, refers to Charles having deprived the Sicilian Inquisition of its temporal jurisdiction, resulting in such recrudescence of heresy that he was obliged to restore it.—Archivo de Simancas, Inquisicion, Lib. 927, fol. 323.
Inquisitor Páramo, in a letter of November 8, 1600, to Philip III, states the case to be that Charles was misled by false accounts of the misdeeds of the familiars and deprived them of their immunities but, on being better informed, he restored them.—Ibidem, Lib. 41, fol. 258.
[52] Páramo, pp. 202-3.—Parecer de Martin Real, ubi sup.
[53] Franchina, pp. 149, 159, 163.
[54] Páramo, p. 43. I give the date of 1543 as stated by Páramo, but it is evidently an error for 1516, when the tumult occurred under Cervera.
[55] Archivo de Simancas, Inquisicion, Sala 40, Lib. 4, fol. 136. The financial mismanagement of the Sicilian tribunal was notorious. In 1560, the Contador-general Zurita states that he had finished auditing its accounts with much labor, as they had not been examined for twenty years and were in much disorder.—Ibidem, fol. 239.
[56] La Mantia, p. 50.
[57] Franchina, pp. 167, 183.—Páramo, p. 204.
[58] Llorente, Historia crítica, cap. XVI, art. ii, n. 5. The date of this affair is not unimportant and has curiously been involved in doubt. As printed by Llorente, the letter of December 16, 1543, is duly signed Prince Philip and is doubtless correctly dated, as Terranova was governor in 1544 (Gervasii Siculæ Sanctiones, I, 295). It is somewhat remarkable that in the Simancas archives (Legajo 1465, fol. 60) there are two letters of Philip II on this affair, one dated from the Escorial, April 24, 1568, to the Sicilian inquisitors and the other to Terranova, dated from Madrid, April 29, 1568. The dates are evidently erroneous for in that year the Marquis of Pescara was viceroy (Gervasii, III, 121). Portocarrero also blunders in the date (op. cit., n. 105), placing the affair in 1608. La Mantia moreover says (p. 52) that a MS. copy of a letter of the inquisitors, April 10th, bears a later date. A letter of the Suprema to the inquisitors, prescribing the punishment, is dated December 15th, without indication of the year (Simancas, Lib. 78, fol. 372). It speaks of two familiars tortured, orders Terranova to hear mass in a monastery as a penitent and to pay the sufferers 200 ducats, to which the officials concerned in the affair were to add 100 more.
[59] Franchina, p. 174.