CHAPTER V
THE INQUISITION
TORQUEMADA AND ISABELLA—THE NEW TRIBUNAL—THE PENALTY OF UNSOUND OPINIONS—THREE CENTURIES OF SHAME
The history of Spain assumed a new phase when, at the fall of Granada, the attention of potentates and people ceased to be absorbed by the excitement of a great religious war. Then the past and the romance of it ended and the history of modern Spain began.
Before proceeding with the latter, a name and a tribunal detain attention. The one is Torquemada. The other is the Inquisition. Burke has described them both, as follows:
The Inquisition, established in Italy by Honorius III. in 1231, and in France by St. Louis in 1233, was formally introduced into Spain by Gregory IX. in 1235, by a Rescript of April 30th, addressed to Mongriu, Archbishop-Administrator of Tarragona, confirming and explaining previous Briefs and Bulls upon the subject of the repression of heresy; and prescribing the issue of certain Instructions which had been prepared at the desire of his holiness by a Spanish saint, the Dominican Raymond of Penafort. From this time forward, Bulls on the subject of the Inquisition into heresy were frequently issued; and the followers of Dominic were ever the trusted agents of the Holy See.
The first suggestion of the serious introduction of the Tribunal of the Holy Office into Castile, at the end of the fifteenth century, is said to have come from Sicily. An Italian friar bearing the suggestive name of Dei Barberi, Inquisitor-general at Messina, paid a visit to his sovereign Ferdinand at Seville in 1477, in order to procure the confirmation of a privilege accorded to the Sicilian Dominicans by the Emperor Frederic II., in 1233, by virtue of which the Inquisitors entered into possession of one-third of the goods of the heretic whom they condemned. This dangerous charter was confirmed in due course by Ferdinand on the 2d of September, 1477, and by Isabella on the 18th of October; and very little argument was required on the part of the gratified envoy to convince his sovereign of the various temporal and spiritual advantages that would follow the introduction of the Tribunal, that had so long existed in an undeveloped form in Sicily and in Aragon, into the dominions of his pious consort, Isabella of Castile.
In the middle of the year 1480 there was as yet no court of the Holy Inquisition established in Spain. At length, pressed by the Papal Nuncio, by the Dominicans, by her confessor, most of all by her husband, Isabella gave her consent; and at length, in August, 1483, the Inquisition was established as a permanent tribunal. Tomas de Torquemada was appointed Inquisitor-general of both Castile and Aragon. Subordinate tribunals were constituted; new and more stringent regulations were made; the victims smoked from day to day on the great stone altar of the Quemadero.
The life of Tomas de Torquemada is the history of contemporary Spain. Born of a noble family, already distinguished in the Church by the reputation of the cardinal his uncle, Tomas early assumed the habit of a Dominican, and was in course of time appointed prior of an important monastery at Segovia, and confessor to the young Princess Isabella. His influence upon that royal lady was naturally great; his piety pleased her; his austerity affected her; and his powerful will directed, if it could not subdue, a will as powerful as his own. Brought up far away from a court whose frivolities had no charm for her, and where, under any circumstances, she would have been considered as a rival if not a pretender, the counsels of her confessor, both sacred and secular, were the most authoritative that she could expect to obtain. It has been constantly asserted that the friar obtained from the princess a promise that, in the event of her elevation to the throne of Castile, she would devote herself to the destruction of heretics and the increase of the power of the Church. Such a promise would have been but one of many which such a confessor would have obtained from such a penitent, and would have been but the natural result of his teaching. Nor is it surprising that in the intrigues that preceded the death of Henry IV., and the War of Succession that immediately followed it, the whole influence of the priesthood should have been cast on the side of Isabella and against her niece Joanna. For ten years, says the biographer of his Order, the skillful hand of Torquemada cultivated the intellect of Isabella; and in due course the propitious marriage with Ferdinand of Aragon, far from removing his pupil from his sacerdotal influence, brought him a new and an equally illustrious penitent. Torquemada became the confessor of the king as well as of the queen.
If the establishment of the Inquisition was the fulfillment of Isabella’s vow, and the realization of the aspirations of her tutor, his appointment as Inquisitor-general, although it necessitated the choice of another confessor, did not by any means withdraw him from his old sphere of influence. He ceased not to preach the destruction of the Moslem, even as he was employed about the destruction of the Jew; and if Isabella was the active patroness of the war in Granada, there was a darker spirit behind the throne, ever preaching the sacred duty of the slaughter of the infidel and the heretic of every race and nation.
Torquemada was at once a politician and an enthusiast; rigid, austere, uncompromising; unbounded in his ambition, yet content to sacrifice himself to the cause that made him what he was. His moral superiority to the Innocents and Alexanders at Rome, his intellectual superiority to the Carrillos and the fighting bishops of Spain, gave him that enormous influence over both queen and king which his consuming bigotry and his relentless tenacity of purpose induced him to use with such dreadful effect. Aggressive even in his profession of humility, Torquemada was insolent, not only to his unhappy victims, but to his colleagues, to his sovereigns, to his Holy Father at Rome. He was, perhaps, the only man in Europe who was more masterful than Isabella, more bloodthirsty than Alexander; and he was able to impose his own will on both queen and pope. Rejecting in his proud humility every offer of the miter, he asserted and maintained his ecclesiastical supremacy even over the Primate of Spain. Attended by a body-guard of noble youths who were glad to secure at once the favor of the queen and immunity from ecclesiastical censure by assuming the habit of the Familiars of the Holy Office, the great destroyer lived in daily dread of the hand of the assassin.