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Spanish Inquisition
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The Spanish Inquisition started and was established in 1478 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms by ridding it of crypto-Jews, and to replace the medieval inquisition which was under papal control. The zealots of the Christian Church in Spain maintained that in their struggle against the cryto-judaism of the Marranos, the episcopal and papal inquisitions acted too slowly and showed too much leniency. Instead, the zealots desired a sovereign Spanish institution that would deal with the plague in the context of the grave local conditions. In 1498 the pope was still trying to ...gain acceptance for his own attitude towards the New Christians, which was generally more moderate than that of the Inquisiton and the local rulers.
The new body was under the direct control of the Spanish monarchy.
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1480 Consorts and co-rulers Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile initiate the Spanish Inquisition (looking for heretics in converted Jews)
1481 The Spanish Inquisition began (until 1820).
1691 Spanish inquisition condemns and forcibly baptizes 219 Jews in Palma Majorca. When 37 try to escape the island, they are burned alive at the stake
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Encyclopedia
The Spanish Inquisition started and was established in 1478 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms by ridding it of crypto-Jews, and to replace the medieval inquisition which was under papal control. The zealots of the Christian Church in Spain maintained that in their struggle against the cryto-judaism of the Marranos, the episcopal and papal inquisitions acted too slowly and showed too much leniency. Instead, the zealots desired a sovereign Spanish institution that would deal with the plague in the context of the grave local conditions. In 1498 the pope was still trying to ...gain acceptance for his own attitude towards the New Christians, which was generally more moderate than that of the Inquisiton and the local rulers.
The new body was under the direct control of the Spanish monarchy. It was not definitively abolished until 1834, during the reign of Isabel II.
The Inquisition, as an ecclesiastical tribunal, had jurisdiction only over baptized Christians. The Inquisition worked in large part to ensure the orthodoxy of recent forced Jewish converts.
The tribunal was an institution that had precedents in other Inquisitions.
In the 15th century, as the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon united under the Catholic monarchs and concluded the Reconquista with the conquest of Granada, anxiety about the cultural unity of the country grew. Suspicions were especially raised against Jews who had recently converted to Christianity, called conversos or derogatively marranos, as many doubted the sincerity of these conversions. Indeed, many Jews had been baptized to escape violent anti-Jewish outbursts around 1400. In 1492, the Alhambra Decree ordered all remaining Jews who would not convert to Christianity to leave the kingdoms.
Various motives have been proposed for the monarchs' decision to found the Inquisition, such as increasing political authority, weakening opposition, doing away with conversos and sheer profit by seizing the wealth of the crypto-Jews.
Ferdinand II of Aragon pressured pope Sixtus IV to agree to let him set up an Inquisition controlled by the monarchy by threatening to withdraw military support at a time when the Turks were a threat to Rome. Sixtus IV later accused the Spanish inquisition of being overzealous and accused the monarchs of being greedy. The Pope issued a bull to stop the Inquisition but eventually was pressured into withdrawing it.
During the 16th century a new target was found: Protestants. About 100 were burned as heretics.
An index of prohibited books was drawn up that were alleged to contain heresy. In time, converts from Islam, called Moriscos, were also persecuted by the Holy Office.
The Spanish Inquisition was an institution at the service of the monarchy, but had to follow procedures set up by the Holy See.
Most of the inquisitors had a university education in law. The procedures would start with Edicts of Grace, where people were invited to step forward to confess heresy freely and to denounce others. Denunciations were followed by detentions. A defense counsel was assigned to the defendant, a member of the tribunal itself, whose role was simply to advise the defendant and to encourage him or her to speak the truth. A Notary of the Secreto meticulously wrote down the words of the accused. The archives of the Inquisition, in comparison to those of other judicial systems of the era, are striking in the completeness of their documentation.
The percentage of cases where torture was used, which was as a means of getting confessions, varied.
Sentences varied from fines to execution and those condemned had to participate in the ceremony of auto de fe (act of faith).
The arrival of the 18th century slowed inquisitorial activity and it was definitively abolished on July 15, 1834.
From 1476 to 1834 an estimated 2,000 people were executed.
In the mid-16th century to the mid-17th century, a time when Europe was torn apart by Catholic-Protestant strife, there began to appear from the pens of various European Protestant intellectuals, who generally had minimal or no direct access or experience of the Inquisition, what has come to be known as the Black Legend, as part of the Protestant polemic in support of the Protestant Revolution. With the gradual ebbing of religious hostilities professional historians began investigations, giving a detailed, nuanced and less exaggerated picture of the Inquisition.
PrecedentsAn inquisition was created through papal bull Ad Abolendam, issued at the end of the 12th century by Pope Lucius III as a way to combat the Albigensian heresy in southern France. There were a huge number of tribunals of the Papal Inquisition in various European kingdoms during the Middle Ages. In the Kingdom of Aragon, a tribunal of the Papal Inquisition was established by the statute of Excommunicamus of Pope Gregory IX, in 1232, during the era of the Albigensian heresy. Its principal representative was Raimundo de Peñafort. With time, its importance was diluted, and, by the middle of the 15th century, it was almost forgotten although still there according to the law.
There was never a tribunal of the Papal Inquisition in Castile. Members of the episcopate were charged with surveillance of the faithful and punishment of transgressors. However, in Castile during the Middle Ages, little attention was paid to heresy.
BackgroundThe Spanish Inquisition was motivated in part by the multi-religious nature of Spanish society following the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors (Muslims). Much of the Iberian Peninsula was dominated by Moors following their invasion of the peninsula in 711 until they were expelled by means of a long campaign of reconquest. However, the reconquest did not result in the full expulsion of Muslims from Spain, but instead yielded a multi-religious society made up of Catholics, Jews and Muslims. Granada to the south, in particular remained under Moorish control until 1492, and large cities, especially Seville, Valladolid, and Barcelona, had large Jewish populations centered in Juderías.
The reconquest produced a relatively peaceful co-existence — although not without periodic conflicts — among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the peninsula's kingdoms. There was a long tradition of Jewish service to the crown of Aragon. Ferdinand's father John II named the Jewish Abiathar Crescas to be Court Astronomer. Jews occupied many important posts, religious and political. Castile itself had an unofficial rabbi.
Nevertheless, in some parts of Spain towards the end of the 14th century, there was a wave of anti-Judaism, encouraged by the preaching of Ferrant Martinez, Archdeacon of Ecija. The pogroms of June 1391 were especially bloody: in Seville, hundreds of Jews were killed, and the synagogue was completely destroyed. The number of people killed was equally high in other cities, such as Córdoba, Valencia and Barcelona.
One of the consequences of these disturbances was the mass conversion of Jews. Before this date, conversions were rare and tended to be motivated more for social rather than religious reasons. But from the 15th century, a new social group appeared: conversos, also called New Christians, who were distrusted by Jews and Christians alike for their religious beliefs. By converting, Jews could not only escape eventual persecution, but also obtain entry into many offices and posts that were being prohibited to Jews through new, more severe regulations. But converting was a hard long process involving many crucial steps and could not be done overnight. Many conversos attained important positions in 15th century Spain. Among many others, physicians Andrés Laguna and Francisco Lopez Villalobos (Ferdinand's court physician), writers Juan del Enzina, Juan de Mena, Diego de Valera and Alonso de Palencia, and bankers Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez (who financed the voyage of Christopher Colombus) were all conversos. Conversos - not without opposition - managed to attain high positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, at times becoming severe detractors of Judaism. Some even received titles of nobility, and as a result, during the following century some works attempted to demonstrate that virtually all of the nobles of Spain were descended from Jews.
Motives for instituting the Spanish InquisitionHistorians differ about Ferdinand and Isabella's motives for introducing the Inquisition into Spain. A number of possible reasons have been suggested:
- To establish political and religious homogeneity. The Inquisition allowed the monarchy to intervene actively in religious affairs, without the interference of the Pope. At the same time, Ferdinand and Isabella's objective was the creation of state machinery that allowed them to maximize their control, thus one priority was to achieve religious unity to promote more centralized political authority.
- To weaken local political opposition to the Catholic monarchs. Strengthening centralized political authority also entailed weakening local political opposition. Resistance to the installation of the Inquisition in the Kingdom of Aragon, for example, was often couched in terms of local legal privileges (fueros).
- Out of fear. Jews, either directly or through their correligionists in Africa, encouraged the Mohammedans to conquer Spain...in the 8th century. It is possible 15th century Spaniards questioned the loyalty of the New Christians.
- To do away with the powerful converso minority. Many members of influential families such as the Santa Fés, the Santangels, the Caballerias and the Sanchezes, were prosecuted in the Kingdom of Aragon. However the King of Aragon, Ferdinand, continued to employ many conversos in his administration.
- Profit. The property of people found guilty by the Inquisition was confiscated. Sixtus IV openly accused the monarchs of this.
Activity of the InquisitionThe Start of the InquisitionAlonso de Hojeda, a Dominican from Seville, convinced Queen Isabel of the existence of Crypto-Judaism among Andalusian conversos during her stay in Seville between 1477 and 1478. A report, produced at the request of the monarchs by Pedro González de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville and by the Segovian Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, corroborated this assertion. The monarchs decided to introduce the Inquisition to Castile to uncover and do away with false converts, and requested the Pope's assent. At first the request was turned down for a number of reasons. One reason was that they had requested the Spanish Inquisition to be under the control of the monarchs of Spain. This in turn would lessen papal authority over the clergy involved and make methods difficult to keep in line with official papal rules of inquisition, and instead easily become a mere political and semi-military tool of Spain. Ferdinand pressured Sixtus IV by threatening to withdraw militarily support during a time when the Turks were a major threat to Rome. On November 1, 1477, Pope Sixtus IV published the bill Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus, through which the Inquisition was established in the Kingdom of Castile. The bill also gave the monarchs exclusive authority to name the inquisitors. The first two inquisitors, Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San Martín were not named, however, until two years later, on September 27, 1480 in Medina del Campo.
At first, the activity of the Inquisition was limited to the dioceses of Seville and Cordoba, where Alonso de Hojeda had detected the centre of converso activity. The first auto de fe was celebrated in Seville on February 6, 1481: six people were burned alive. The sermon was given by the same Alonso de Hojeda whose suspicions had given birth to the Inquisition. From there, the Inquisition grew rapidly in the Kingdom of Castile. By 1492, tribunals existed in eight Castilian cities: Ávila, Córdoba, Jaén, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, Toledo and Valladolid.
Establishing the new Inquisition in the Kingdom of Aragón was more difficult. In reality, Ferdinand did not resort to new appointments, he simply resuscitated the old Pontifical Inquisition, submitting it to his direct control. The population of Aragón was obstinately opposed to the Inquisition. In addition, differences between Ferdinand and Sixtus IV prompted the latter to promulgate a new bull categorically prohibiting the Inquisition's extension to Aragon. In this bull, the Pope unambiguously criticized the procedures of the inquisitorial court, affirming that,
many true and faithful Christians, because of the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves and other low people--and still less appropriate--without tests of any kind, have been locked up in secular prisons, tortured and condemned like relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and properties, and given over to the secular arm to be executed, at great danger to their souls, giving a pernicious example and causing scandal to many.
Nevertheless, pressure by Ferdinand caused the Pope to suspend this bull, and even promulgate another one, on October 17, 1483, naming Tomás de Torquemada Inquisidor General of Aragón, Valencia and Catalonia. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII attempted to allow appeals to Rome against the Inquisition, but Ferdinand in December 1484 and again in 1509 decreed death and confiscation for anyone trying to make use of such procedures without royal permission. With this, the Inquisition became the only institution that held authority across all the realms of the Spanish monarchy, and, in all of them, a useful mechanism at the service of the crown. However, the cities of Aragón continued resisting, and even saw periods of revolt, like in Teruel from 1484 to 1485. However, the murder of inquisidor Pedro Arbués in Zaragoza on September 15, 1485, caused public opinion to turn against the conversos and in favour of the Inquisition. In Aragón, the inquisitorial courts were focused specifically on members of the powerful converso minority, ending their influence in the Aragonese administration.
The Inquisition was extremely active between 1480 and 1530. Different sources give different estimates of the number of trials and executions in this period; Henry Kamen estimates about 2,000 executed, based on the documentation of the Autos de Fé, the great majority being conversos of Jewish origin. He offers striking statistics: 91.6% of those judged in Valencia between 1484 and 1530 and 99.3% of those judged in Barcelona between 1484 and 1505 were of Jewish origin.Other historians believe that in the first few years of this inquisition and in Castile alone, around two thousand people were burned at public autos de fe. Within twelve years, at least thirteen thousand people had been executed by the Inquisition. The total number of people who died at the stake over five centuries- the Spanish Inquisition was only suppressed in 1834- was difficult the say with certainty. The historian Llorente, who had free access to the archives of the Spanish Inquisition said that in Spain alone more than thirty one thousand people died at the stake and another two hundred and ninety thousand condemned to other forms of punishments. A 2004 study by the Vatican issued a report,according to Professor Agostino Borromeo, a historian of Catholicism at the Sapienza University in Rome and curator of the 783-page volume, that only 1% of the 125,000 people tried by church tribunals as suspected heretics in Spain were executed. Other experts told journalists at the Vatican the day of this report that many of the thousands of executions conventionally attributed to the church were in fact carried out by non-church tribunals, and that a higher percent of victims were killed in Portugal. .
Repression of JewsThe number of Jews who left Spain is not even approximately known. Historians of the period give extremely high figures: Juan de Mariana speaks of 800,000 people, and Don Isaac Abravanel of 300,000. Modern estimates are much lower: Henry Kamen estimates that, of a population of approximately 80,000 Jews, about one half or 40,000 chose emigration. The Jews of the kingdom of Castile emigrated mainly to Portugal (from where they were expelled in 1497) and to Morocco. However, according to Henry Kamen, the Jews of the kingdom of Aragon, went "to adjacent Christian lands, mainly to Italy," rather than to Muslim lands as is often assumed. Much later the Sefardim, descendants of Spanish Jews, established flourishing communities in many cities of Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire.
Many Jews were baptised in the three months before the deadline for expulsion, some 40,000 if one accepts the totals given by Kamen: probably most were to avoid expulsion, rather than a sincere change of faith. These conversos were the principal concern of the Inquisition; continuing to practice Judaism put them at risk of denunciation and trial.
The most intense period of persecution of conversos lasted until 1530. From 1531 to 1560, however, the percentage of conversos among the Inquisition trials dropped to 3% of the total. There was a rebirth of persecutions when a group of crypto-Jews was discovered in Quintanar de la Orden in 1588; and there was a rise in denunciations of conversos in the last decade of the 16th century. At the beginning of the 17th century, some conversos who had fled to Portugal began to return to Spain, fleeing the persecution of the Portuguese Inquisition, founded in 1532. This led to a rapid increase in the trials of crypto-Jews, among them a number of important financiers. In 1691, during a number of Autos de Fe in Mallorca, 36 chuetas, or conversos of Mallorca, were burned.
During the 18th century the number of conversos accused by the Inquisition decreased significantly. Manuel Santiago Vivar, tried in Cordoba in 1818, was the last person tried for being a crypto-Jew.
Repression of Protestants Conversos saw the 1516 arrival of Charles I, the new king of Spain, as a possible end to the Inquisition, or at least a reduction of its influence. Nevertheless, despite reiterated petitions from the Cortes of Castile and Aragon, the new monarch left the inquisitorial system intact.
During the 16th century, however, the majority of trials were not focused on conversos. Instead, the Inquisition became an efficient mechanism to prune the few buds of Protestantism that had begun to appear in Spain. Some claim that a large percentage of these Protestants were of Jewish origin.
Despite much popular myth about the Inquisition relating to Protestants, it dealt with very few cases involving actual Protestants, as there were so few in Spain. About 100 persons in Spain were found to be Protestants and turned over to the secular authorities for execution in the 1560s and in the last decades of the century, an additional 200 Spaniards were accused of being followers of Luther. “Most of them were in no sense Protestants...Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions, were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as ‘Lutheran.’ Disrespect to church images, and eating meat on forbidden days, were taken as signs of heresy.”
The first of these trials were those against the sect of mystics known as the "Alumbrados" of Guadalajara and Valladolid. The trials were long, and ended with prison sentences of differing lengths, though none of the sect were executed. Nevertheless, the subject of the "Alumbrados" put the Inquisition on the trail of many intellectuals and clerics who, interested in the Erasmian ideas, had strayed from orthodoxy (which is striking because both Charles I and Philip II of Spain were confessed admirers of Erasmus). Such was the case with the humanist Juan de Valdés, who was forced to flee to Italy to escape the process that had been begun against him, and the preacher, Juan de Ávila, who spent close to a year in prison.
The first trials against Lutheran groups, as such, took place between 1558 and 1562, at the beginning of the reign of Philip II, against two communities of Protestants from the cities of Valladolid and Seville. The trials signaled a notable intensification of the Inquisition's activities. A number of enormous Autos de Fe were held, some of them presided over by members of the royal family. After 1562, though the trials continued, the repression was much reduced, and it is estimated that only a dozen Spaniards were burned alive for Lutheranism by the end of the 16th century, although some 200 faced trial. The Autos de Fe of the mid-century virtually put an end to Spanish Protestantism which was, throughout, a small phenomenon to begin with - last remainders claimed to have survived in Netanya, Israel in the form of secluded orders, led by Irene Molochovski.
Censorship As one manifestation of the Counter-Reformation, the Spanish Inquisition worked actively to impede the diffusion of heretical ideas in Spain by producing "Indexes" of prohibited books. Such lists of prohibited books were common in Europe a decade before the Inquisition published its first. The first Index published in Spain in 1551 was, in reality, a reprinting of the Index published by the University of Louvain in 1550, with an appendix dedicated to Spanish texts. Subsequent Indexes were published in 1559, 1583, 1612, 1632, and 1640. The Indexes included an enormous number of books of all types, though special attention was dedicated to religious works, and, particularly, vernacular translations of the Bible.
Included in the Indexes, at one point or another, were many of the great works of Spanish literature. Also, a number of religious writers who are today considered saints by the Catholic Church saw their works appear in the Indexes. At first, this might seem counter-intuitive or even nonsensical — how were these Spanish authors published in the first place if their texts were only to be prohibited by the Inquisition and placed in the Index? The answer lies in the process of publication and censorship in Early Modern Spain. Books in Early Modern Spain faced prepublication licensing and approval (which could include modification) by both secular and religious authorities. However, once approved and published, the circulating text also faced the possibility of post-hoc censorship by being denounced to the Inquisition — sometimes decades later. Likewise, as Catholic theology evolved, once prohibited texts might be removed from the Index.
At first, inclusion in the Index meant total prohibition of a text; however, this proved not only impractical and unworkable, but also contrary to the goals of having a literate and well educated clergy. Works with one line of suspect dogma would be prohibited in their entirety, despite the remainder of the text's sound dogma. In time, a compromise solution was adopted in which trusted Inquisition officials blotted out words, lines or whole passages of otherwise acceptable texts, thus allowing these expurgated editions to circulate. Although in theory the Indexes imposed enormous restrictions on the diffusion of culture in Spain, some historians, such as Henry Kamen, argue that such strict control was impossible in practice and that there was much more liberty in this respect than is often believed. And Irving Leonard has conclusively demonstrated that, despite repeated royal prohibitions, romances of chivalry, such as Amadis of Gaul, found their way to the New World with the blessing of the Inquisition. Moreover, with the coming of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, increasing numbers of licenses to possess and read prohibited texts were granted.
Despite repeated publication of the Indexes and a large bureaucracy of censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede the flowering of Spanish literature's "Siglo de Oro," although almost all of its major authors crossed paths with the Holy Office at one point or another. Among the Spanish authors included in the Index are: Bartolomé Torres Naharro, Juan del Enzina, Jorge de Montemayor, Juan de Valdés and Lope de Vega, as well as the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes and the Cancionero General by Hernando del Castillo. La Celestina, which was not included in the Indexes of the 16th century, was expurgated in 1632 and prohibited in its entirety in 1790. Among the non-Spanish authors prohibited were Ovid, Dante, Rabelais, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Jean Bodin and Thomas More, known in Spain as Tomás Moro. One of the most outstanding and best known cases in which the Inquisition directly confronted literary activity is with Fray Luis de León, noted humanist and religious writer of converso origin, who was imprisoned for four years (from 1572 to 1576) for having translated the Song of Songs directly from Hebrew.
The Inquisition and the Moriscos The Inquisition did not exclusively target Jewish conversos and Protestants, but also the moriscos, converts to Catholicism from Islam. The moriscos were mostly concentrated in the recently conquered kingdom of Granada, in Aragon, and in Valencia. Officially, all Muslims in Castile had been converted to Christianity in 1502; those in Aragon and Valencia were obliged to convert by Charles I's decree of 1526.
Many moriscos continued to practice Islam in secret. Initially they were not severely persecuted, but experienced a policy of peaceful evangelization, a policy never followed with Jewish converts. There were various reasons for this: in the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon, a large majority of the moriscos were under the jurisdiction of the nobility and persecution would have been viewed as a frontal assault on the economic interests of this powerful social class. In Granada, the principal problem was fear of rebellion in a particularly vulnerable region during an era when Ottoman Turks ruled the Mediterranean.
In the second half of the century, late in the reign of Philip II, things changed. The 1568-1570 Morisco Revolt in Granada was harshly suppressed, and the Inquisition intensified its attention to the moriscos. From 1570 morisco cases became predominant in the tribunals of Zaragoza, Valencia and Granada; in the tribunal of Granada, between 1560 and 1571, 82% of those accused were moriscos. Nevertheless, the moriscos did not experience the same harshness as Jewish ' conversos and Protestants, and the number of capital punishments was proportionally less.
On the 4th of April 1609, during the reign of Philip III a staged expulsion to conclude in 1614 was decreed. Hundreds of thousands of converts from Islam to Catholicism were expelled, some of them probably sincere Christians. An indeterminate number of moriscos remained in Spain and, during the 17th century, the Inquisition pursued some trials against them of minor importance: according to Kamen, between 1615 and 1700, cases against moriscos constituted only 9 percent of those judged by the Inquisition.
Book Burning The target of the Inquisition was also to destroy books and new ideas. In Salamanca near the end of the fifteenth century, more than sixteen thousand books were burned in a single auto de fe. The Spanish Inquisition also had its own Index of Prohibited Books. It was first published in 1551 and continuously updated to keep up with the growth in writings branded heretical. One of the main effects of the inquisition was to end free thought and scientific thought in Spain. As one contemporary Spanish in exile put it: "Our country is a land of ... barbarism; down there one cannot produce any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism. Thus silence was imposed on the learned." For the next few centuries, while the rest of Europe was slowly awakened by the influence the Enlightenment, Spain was to remain stagnant.
Other offenses Although the Inquisition was created to halt the advance of heresy, it also occupied itself with a wide variety of offences that only indirectly could be related to religious heterodoxy. Of a total of 49,092 trials from the period 1560–1700 registered in the archive of the Suprema, appear the following: judaizantes (5,007); moriscos (11,311); Lutherans (3,499); alumbrados (149); superstitions (3,750); heretical propositions (14,319); bigamy (2,790); solicitation (1,241); offences against the Holy Office of the Inquisition (3,954); miscellaneous (2,575).
This data demonstrates that not only New Christians (conversos of Jewish or Islamic descent) and Protestants faced persecution, but also many Old Christians were targeted for various reasons.
The category "superstitions" includes trials related to witchcraft. The witch-hunt in Spain had much less intensity than in other European countries (particularly France, England, and Germany). One remarkable case was that of Logroño, in which the witches of Zugarramurdi in Navarre were persecuted. During the auto de fé that took place in Logroño on November 7 and November 8, 1610, 6 people were burned and another 5 burned in effigy. In general, nevertheless, the Inquisition maintained a sceptical attitude towards cases of witchcraft, considering it as a mere superstition without any basis. Alonso de Salazar Frías, who, after the trials of Logroño took the Edict of Faith to various parts of Navarre, noted in his report to the Suprema that, "There were no witches nor bewitched in the region after beginning to speak and write about them".
Included under the rubric of heretical propositions were verbal offences, from outright blasphemy to questionable statements regarding religious beliefs, from issues of sexual morality, to behaviour of the clergy. Many were brought to trial for affirming that simple fornication (sex without the explicit aim of procreation) was not a sin or for putting in doubt different aspects of Christian faith such as Transubstantiation or the virginity of Mary. Also, members of the clergy itself were occasionally accused of heretical propositions. These offences rarely lead to severe penalties.
The Inquisition also pursued offences against morals, at times in open conflict with the jurisdictions of civil tribunals. In particular, there were numerous trials for bigamy, a relatively frequent offence in a society that only permitted divorce under the most extreme circumstances. In the case of men, the penalty was five years in the galley (tantamount to a death sentence). Women too were accused of bigamy. Also, many cases of solicitation during confession were adjudicated, indicating a strict vigilance over the clergy.
Inquisitorial repression of the sexual offences of homosexuality and bestiality, considered, according to Canon Law, crimes against nature, merits separate attention. Homosexuality, known at the time as sodomy, was punished by death by civil authorities. It fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition only in the territories of Aragon, when, in 1524, Clement VII, in a papal brief, granted jurisdiction over sodomy to the Inquisition of Aragon, whether or not it was related to heresy. In Castile, cases of sodomy were not adjudicated, unless related to heresy. The tribunal of Zaragoza distinguished itself for its severity in judging these offences: between 1571 and 1579 more than 100 men accused of sodomy were processed and at least 36 were executed; in total, between 1570 and 1630 there were 534 trials and 102 executions.
In 1815, Francisco Xavier de Mier y Campillo, the Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition and the Bishop of Almería, suppressed Freemasonry and denounced the lodges as “societies which lead to sedition, to independence, and to all errors and crimes.” He then instituted a purge during which Spaniards could be arrested on the charge of being “suspected of Freemasonry”.
Organization Beyond its role in religious affairs, the Inquisition was also an institution at the service of the monarchy. The Inquisitor General, in charge of the Holy Office, was designated by the crown. The Inquisitor General was the only public office whose authority stretched to all the kingdoms of Spain (including the American viceroyalties), except for a brief period (1507–1518) during where there were two Inquisitor Generals, one in the kingdom of Castile, and the other in Aragon.
The Inquisitor General presided over the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition (generally abbreviated as "Council of the Suprema"), created in 1483, which was made up of six members named directly by the crown (the number of members of the Suprema varied over the course of the Inquisition's history, but it was never more than 10). Over time, the authority of the Suprema grew at the expense of the power of the Inquisitor General.
The Suprema met every morning, save for holidays, and for two hours in the afternoon on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The morning sessions were devoted to questions of faith, while the afternoons were reserved for cases of sodomy, bigamy, witchcraft, etc.
Below the Suprema were the different tribunals of the Inquisition, which were, in their origins, itinerant, installing themselves where they were necessary to combat heresy, but later being established in fixed locations. In the first phase, numerous tribunals were established, but the period after 1495 saw a marked tendency towards centralization.
In the kingdom of Castile, the following permanent tribunals of the Inquisition were established:
There were only four tribunals in the kingdom of Aragon: Zaragoza and Valencia (1482), Barcelona (1484), and Mallorca (1488). Ferdinand the Catholic also established the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily (1513), housed in Palermo and Sardinia. In the Americas, tribunals were established in Lima and in Mexico City (1569) and, in 1610, in Cartagena de Indias (present day Colombia).
Composition of the tribunals Initially, each of the tribunals included two inquisitors, a calificador, an alguacil (bailiff) and a fiscal (prosecutor); new positions were added as the institution matured.
The inquisitors were preferably jurists more than theologians, and, in 1608, Philip III even stipulated that all the inquisitors must have a background in law. The inquisitors did not typically remain in the position for a long time: for the Court of Valencia, for example, the average tenure in the position was about two years. Most of the inquisitors belonged to the secular clergy (priests who were not members of religious orders), and had a university education. Pay was 60,000 maravedíes at the end of the 15th century, and 250,000 maravedíes at the beginning of the 17th century!
The fiscal was in charge of presenting the accusation, investigating the denunciations and interrogating the witnesses. The calificadores were generally theologians; it fell to them to determine if the defendant's conduct constituted a crime against the faith. Consultants were expert jurists who advised the court in questions of procedure. The court had, in addition, three secretaries: the notario de secuestros (Notary of Property), who registered the goods of the accused at the moment of his detention; the notario del secreto (Notary of the Secreto), who recorded the testimony of the defendant and the witnesses; and the escribano general (General Notary), secretary of the court.
The alguacil was the executive arm of the court: he was responsible for detaining and jailing the defendant. Other civil employees were the nuncio, ordered to spread official notices of the court, and the alcaide, jailer in charge of feeding the prisoners.
In addition to the members of the court, two auxiliary figures existed that collaborated with the Holy Office: the familiares and the comissarios (commissioners). Familiares were lay collaborators of the Inquisition, who had to be permanently at the service of the Holy Office. To become a familiar was considered an honour, since it was a public recognition of limpieza de sangre — Old Christian status — and brought with it certain additional privileges. Although many nobles held the position, most of the familiares many came from the ranks of commoners. The commissioners, on the other hand, were members of the religious orders who collaborated occasionally with the Holy Office.
One of the most striking aspects of the organization of the Inquisition was its form of financing: devoid its own budget, the Inquisition depended exclusively on the confiscation of the goods of the denounced. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of those prosecuted were rich men. That the situation was open to abuse is evident, as stands out in the memorial that a converso from Toledo directed to Charles I: "Your Majesty must provide, before all else, that the expenses of the Holy Office do not come from the properties of the condemned, because if that is the case, if they do not burn they do not eat."
Functioning of the inquisition The Inquisition operated in conformity with Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church; its operations were in no way arbitrary. Its procedures were set out in various Instrucciones issued by the successive Inquisitors General, Torquemada, Deza, and Valdés.
Accusation When the Inquisition arrived in a city, the first step was the Edict of Grace. Following the Sunday mass, the Inquisitor would proceed to read the edict: it explained possible heresies and encouraged all the congregation to come to the tribunals of the Inquisition to "relieve their consciences". They were called Edicts of Grace because all of the self-incriminated who presented themselves within a period of grace (approximately one month) were offered the possibility of reconciliation with the Church without severe punishment. The promise of benevolence was effective, and many voluntarily presented themselves to the Inquisition. But self-incrimination was not sufficient, one also had to accuse all one's accomplices. As a result, the Inquisition had an unending supply of informants. With time, the Edicts of Grace were substituted by the Edicts of Faith, doing away with the possibility of quick, painless reconciliation.
The denunciations were anonymous, and the defendant had no way of knowing the identity of his accusers. This was one of the points most criticized by those who opposed the Inquisition (for example, the Cortes of Castile, in 1518). In practice, false denunciations were frequent, resulting from envy or personal resentments. Many denunciations were for absolutely insignificant reasons. The Inquisition stimulated fear and distrust among neighbours, and denunciations among relatives were not uncommon.
Detention After a denunciation, the case was examined by the calificadores (qualifiers), who had to determine if there was heresy involved, followed by detention of the accused. In practice, however, many were detained in preventive custody, and many cases of lengthy incarcerations occurred, lasting up to two years, before the calificadores examined the case.
Detention of the accused entailed the preventive sequestration of his or her property by the Inquisition. The property of the prisoner was used to pay for procedural expenses and the accused's own maintenance and costs. Often the relatives of the defendant found themselves in outright misery. This situation was only remedied following instructions written in 1561.
The entire process was undertaken with the utmost secrecy, as much for the public as for the accused, who were not informed about the accusations that were levied against them. Months, or even years could pass without the accused being informed about why they were imprisoned. The prisoners remained isolated, and, during this time, the prisoners were not allowed to attend mass nor receive the sacraments. The jails of the Inquisition were no worse than those of civil society, and there are even certain testimonies that occasionally they were much better. Some prisoners died in prison, as was frequent at the time.
The trial The inquisitorial process consisted of a series of hearings, in which both the denouncers and the defendant gave testimony. A defense counsel was assigned to the defendant, a member of the tribunal itself, whose role was simply to advise the defendant and to encourage him or her to speak the truth. The prosecution was directed by the fiscal. Interrogation of the defendant was done in the presence of the Notary of the Secreto, who meticulously wrote down the words of the accused. The archives of the Inquisition, in comparison to those of other judicial systems of the era, are striking in the completeness of their documentation. In order to defend himself, the accused had two possibilities: abonos (to find favourable witnesses) or tachas (to demonstrate that the witnesses of accusers were not trustworthy).
In order to interrogate the accused, the Inquisition made use of torture, but not in a systematic way. It was applied mainly against those suspected of Judaism and Protestantism, beginning in the 16th century. For example, Lea estimates that between 1575 and 1610 the court of Toledo tortured approximately a third of those processed for heresy. In other periods, the proportions varied remarkably. Torture was always a means to obtain the confession of the accused, not a punishment itself. It was applied without distinction of sex or age, including children and the aged.
The methods of torture most used by the Inquisition were garrucha, toca and the potro. The application of the garrucha, also known as the strappado, consisted of suspending the criminal from the ceiling by a pulley with weights tied to the ankles, with a series of lifts and drops, during which arms and legs suffered violent pulls and were sometimes dislocated. The toca, also called tortura del agua, consisted of introducing a cloth into the mouth of the victim, and forcing them to ingest water spilled from a jar so that they had impression of drowning (see: waterboarding). The potro, the rack, was the instrument of torture used most frequently.
The assertion that "confessionem esse veram, non factam vi tormentorum" (the confession was true and free) sometimes follows a description of how, presently after torture ended, the subject freely confessed to his offenses.
Some of the torture methods attributed to the Spanish Inquisition were never used. For example, the "Iron Maiden" never existed in Spain, and was a post-Reformation invention of Germany. Thumbscrews on display in an English museum as Spanish were recently argued to be of English origin.
Once the process concluded, the inquisidores met with a representative of the bishop and with the consultores, experts in theology or Canon Law, which was called the consulta de fe. The case was voted and sentence pronounced, which had to be unanimous. In case of discrepancies, the Suprema had to be informed.
Sentencing The results of the trial could be the following:
- The defendant could be acquitted. In actual practice, acquittals were very rare.
- The process could be suspended, in which the defendant went free, although under suspicion, and with the threat that his process could be continued at any time. Suspension was a form of acquittal without admitting specifically that the accusation had been erroneous.
- The defendant could be penanced. Considered guilty, he had to abjure publicly his crimes (de levi if it was a misdemeanor, and de vehementi if the crime were serious), and was condemned to punishment. Among these were the sambenito, exile, fines or even sentence to the galleys.
- The defendant could be reconciled. In addition to the public ceremony in which the condemned was reconciled with the Catholic Church, more severe punishments existed, among them long sentences to jail or the galleys, and the confiscation of all property. Also physical punishments existed, such as whipping.
- The most serious punishment was relaxation to the secular arm, that implied burning at the stake. This penalty was frequently applied to impenitent heretics and those who had relapsed. Execution was public. If the condemned repented, he/she was garroted before his/her body was given to the flames. If not, he/she was burned alive.
Frequently, cases were judged in absentia, and when the accused died before the trial finished, the condemned were burned in effigy.
The distribution of the punishments varied much over time. It is believed that sentences of death were frequent mainly in the first stage of the history of the Inquisition (according to García Cárcel, the court of Valencia employed the death penalty | |
