The formal initiation of the Spanish Inquisition built on the previous inquisitions like a ball of snow, where once set rolling corruption increased. This institution employed the same interrogation methods of the Medieval Inquisition, issued the same manuals at first, relied on the same codes of canon law, and employed the same kinds of record-keeping. The Spanish Inquisition proved a mirror image of its predecessors; however, scholars always treat it as a separate entity while acknowledging its antecedents. Unlike earlier inquisitions, the Spanish Inquisition, a wholly owned subsidiary of the state, created by the monarchy, remained under the monarchy’s control. It involved a different power dynamic between popes and kings and pursued different heretics; its officials expounded not bound up only with religion but with an ideology of ethnicity—the nation of limpieza de sangre. [1] It concerned classes of people rather than just categories of belief. It also attempted more systematic censorship than the Medieval Inquisition, drawing up lists of illegal books in Spain, keeping the masses misinformed and pitting them against one another. The monarchy offered no answer to any problem from economic issues to the plague. With the affirmation of causes to these problems—the conversos [2]—neighbor turned against neighbor, and the social, cultural, and religious strife kept everyone diverted from the real issues, devoting their attention on heretics. In such a tumultuous climate, most people kept to themselves out of fear of accusation of heresy. With the public in isolation and distracted, the Holy Office easily robbed them blind through taxation, debt, and confiscation. The less known about the workings of this social institution of society, the more the masses trusted those who wield the power in it; and the more the masses entrusted themselves to those who wielded such power, the more vulnerable and victimized they became. A further study on the social consciousness of the masses that swept across the Iberian Peninsula proves imperative in comprehending Ferdinand and Isabella’s tools of coercion, manipulation, and fear that transformed the abuse of inquisitorial power from religious to political purposes.
One of Ferdinand and Isabella’s first objectives involved taking Granada, the final Muslim stronghold on the peninsula. [3] The effort helped build a national army and strengthen political and economic institutions. [4] The administration levied taxes on commercial transactions. As the monarchy rose in power, the nobility, clergy, and cities declined. The Reconquista meant the slow and systematic extension of Christian power over all Muslim lands, merging Christian and Muslim armies and societies. The Reconquista destroyed the racial and religious coexistence, which despite incessant armed conflict, distinguished the society of medieval Spain. Close contact between the peoples of the peninsula led to a mutual tolerance among the three main communities of Christians, Jews, and Moors. Within the territories of each community, Christians tolerated dissident minorities to a degree that made it possible to consider racial or religious divisions as irrelevant. Political considerations appear dominant in such a policy. The different communities shared in common culture, blurring racial prejudices and military alliances, often made irrespective of religion. Spain coexisted in a relatively open society which reflects immense credit on the ideals of the time. A new social climate spread through the Iberian Peninsula. Centuries of conflict replaced the period of relative openness and tolerance. Spain’s golden age of three religions coincided with a phase of territorial, demographic, and economic expansion. The social, economic, and political upheavals that followed, and the wars and natural catastrophes that preceded and shadowed the Black Death, created a new situation, ushering in a phase of recession, hardship, and tensions when, for both Christians and Jews, everything changed. Not only in Spain, but throughout Europe, populations experienced a state of disarray, faced with misfortunes without understanding or the ability to fix. Everyone turned against the Jews, accusing them of propagating the plague by poisoning the water wells. [5] The accusations against Jews for profaning consecrated communion hosts and committing ritual crimes erupted.
The king’s royal power depended on an effective state apparatus, and this presupposed rising taxes. The Jews collected taxes. Animosity arose toward Jews as the instruments of fiscal oppression. In reality, the Aljamas also suffered from the crisis: the Jews too succumbed to crippling taxation, even more so than the Christians. [6] The opposition seized upon the problem and exploited it for political ends, encouraging Christians to believe the opposite. The nobles of Castile, who challenged the authority of King Peter I, used anti-Semitism as a propaganda weapon and won support of the Christian people.[7] For the first time anti-Semitism, exploited for political ends, adopted violence leading to murder and looting. Anti-Semitism presented as an ideological justification for a social conflict sans religion. Famine, rising prices, and heavy taxation provoked tensions and clashes between the poor and the rich, and anti-Semitism deflected the violence towards the Jews. Since Christians now regarded Jews as guilty of the crime imputed to them, Christian hostility toward Jews grew. The sentiment of anti-Semitic violence culminated on June 4, 1391, in Seville when Ferrand Martínez, a priest who identified Jews as the cause of economic misery, incited anti-Jewish riots. The attack began at dawn, with forces of Martínez striking simultaneously at several positions of the Jewish borough. Poorly defended, these positions crumbled, and the hordes of attackers burst through. An unprecedented scale of bloodshed and rapine followed. Christians butchered thousands of Jews, mostly men, and took thousands of women and children captive and sold them into slavery. The riots in Seville fulfilled Martínez’ hopes; and they must have also suited his further plans. Amador de los Ríos described the effect of those riots as “contagious,” as an “example” that inflamed the fanaticism of the masses throughout the territory of the archdioscese of Seville. They were all imbued with a fierce hatred of Jews which sought an outlet in violence. [8]
In 1492 the sovereigns decided to expel the Jews.[9] Without baptism, the Holy Office could not charge the Jews with heresy. Torquemada, the Inquisitor General of both Castile and Aragon, suggested that their expulsion correlated with the Inquisition and convinced the Catholic sovereigns with an argument set out in the preamble to the decree of March 31, 1492. [10] The presence of Jews linked by kinship, friendship, and work made the assimilation of the Conversos impossible. Torquemada aimed to create an irreversible situation. The climate of religious exaltation that followed the capture of Granada achieved the rest. Reasons of a political nature supported the religious argument. The creation of a modern state seemed to presuppose a united faith. Many Jews preferred to convert rather than abandon the lands of their ancestors. The social rise of the Conversos did not pass unnoticed, and in popular circles it aroused antagonistic reactions. While the royal authorities, the aristocracy, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy encouraged the assimilation of the Conversos, the masses remained hostile. Long-standing anti-Semitism now condemned Jews and New Christians alike. People continued to believe that both groups exploited them and monopolized the best jobs; but, because many occupied high-profile positions, the Conversos attracted most of the popular anti-Semitism. [11] The combination of economic hardship and political crisis lent itself to exploitation. In times of pressure, societies divert the focus of violence toward ambiguous and presumably dangerous groups. [12] The Conversos materialized as such a group, now in the category of Christians but not long ago belonging to the category of Jews, and seemed an easy enough target to destroy. Christians and Jews alike hated Conversos; each excluded them for lack of understanding. Where a more mild approach might have led to genuine assimilation, the very exaggeration of the minority’s supposedly seditious behavior actually created the threatening ideology supposedly eradicated by the action of the Inquisition.
Inquisitors commonly, almost automatically, penalized “Judaizing” with confiscation of the convict’s property. In consequence, silver and gold, houses and shops, vineyards and workshops, warehouses and cash flowed into the coffers of the Holy Office. [13] The resulting incentive to convict affluent Conversos served the interest of the Old Christian competitors, many of whom welcomed the Inquisition as a means to destroy the economic power and social ambition of their rivals. The economic role of the Holy Office subsidized its self-sufficient identification drives. The individual tribunal in each province of Spain benefited primarily from these confiscations, in order to pay for its own salaries and cover all its sometimes-heavy administrative costs. The Conversos realized this extensive level of corruption and knew this meant a larger danger in greater confiscations of their possessions. Each year the provincial tribunals sent a contribution to meet the expenses of the Suprema which sometimes spent all accumulated funds from confiscations. [14] The following instructions pertaining to the receivers of confiscated goods and to the scribe of sequestration as of 1516 demonstrate the many parties involved and the desperation to collect as many confiscations as possible:
[H]enceforth all salaries paid to agents of receivers are revoked, and the receivers shall content themselves with the salary of sixty thousand maravedis which is given to them. If they hire some additional agents, it shall be at their cost, not the Treasury’s . . . the receiver is obliged to give an account of all the goods of his receivership, with expenditures, and without leaving anything out. If he does not provide such an account of a particular item, he shall be obliged to repay the efforts made with the item over the year; and if he does not do so, he shall not be paid, and he shall pay the interest on the damage that he has made the Exchequer accrue. [15]
The work of the Inquisition desired to destroy the economic standing of a rival group, to exclude the New Christians socially, or to confiscate their property, and thus sustain the Holy Office as an institution. Yet these interests do not constitute the prime motive behind the Inquisition. The Inquisition embodied a highly self-alienated spirit, not because it concealed hidden economic interests, but primarily because it gave a perverse expression to genuine spiritual interests.[16] The self-righteousness and holy zeal in which people unwittingly encase their latent fears and cruelty, their hatred for the “other,” the anxieties which uncertainty breeds in them, and their desire to find justification for the miseries of their existence, illustrate this sort of spiritual alienation. The holy perversity of the Inquisition manipulated this self-alienation through the Spanish monarchy and the papacy standing behind the Inquisitor General and the Suprema[17] of the Inquisition. Ferdinand, the true creator of the Spanish Inquisition, gave it its distinctly national character. Regarded as a great asset of the Crown, the creation of the Inquisition provided Ferdinand with the zeal of influence and authority. He would only appoint those who agreed with him as inquisitors; he would allow no inquisitor to receive a papal bull without communicating its contents to him.[18] Convinced that success of the institution’s operations held first-rate importance to the monarchy, the king conducted business efficiently, not only by appointing the appropriate staff, but also installing new methods of punishment. Ferdinand invented the use of galleys as punishment, securing the Inquisition’s status as an agency not just of religious but of government power. Spain, a maritime power, engaged for centuries in contests against European rivals and the Ottoman Turks. The medieval inquisition levied penitential punishments designed to bring convicted sinners into a restored union with God. Sentencing prisoners to the galleys served a different purpose altogether—it was designed to bring convicted sinners into battle with enemies. [19] Ferdinand implemented the galleys creating a cheap source of labor without having to resort to open slavery as seen in the case of Juan de Velasco el Ducayac, morisco, resident of Gabia la Chica:
He was inside the territory of Málaga and went with the rebellious Moors to where they could be Moors publicly. He performed the "guadoch" and "zalá" of the Moors, and walked around with weapons. It was voted to relax him to the secular arm for having lied and been defective in his confession . . . and we sent the trial to Your Lordship(s), and you ordered the sentence carried out. But in the midst of carrying out that sentence, he confessed his intention entirely, about himself as well as others. He was admitted to reconciliation in the usual form and sentenced to perpetual galleys.[20]
The power of Ferdinand exceeded the expectations of the pope, but the Spanish Inquisition slipped through Rome’s fingers and into the wrathful grip of the king and queen. The conversos did their best in Castile and Aragon to obtain papal decrees to modify the rigor of the Holy Office partaking in the battle between church and state. Papal decrees were a legitimate procedure, since the constitution of the tribunal allowed appeals to Rome, and Rome eagerly attempted to maintain its rights in the matter, not only to preserve control over the courts of the Inquisition, but also to preserve possible sources of revenue, since the conversos paid for any bulls granted by the pope. Ferdinand’s letter to Sixtus IV in May 1482 illustrated the firmness of the Spanish attitude. The vacillation of Rome before Spanish claims and the contradictory policies followed by successive popes made it possible in the end for the inquisitors to have things their own way. As early as August 2, 1483, Sixtus IV granted to the conversos a bull which revoked to Rome all cases of appeal, but only eleven days later he suspended this, claiming he had been misled. When his successor Innocent VIII tried to pursue a similar policy of issuing papal letters appellants from Spain, Ferdinand stepped in and issued on December 15, 1484, a pragmatic decreeing death and confiscation for anyone making use of papal letters without royal permission.[21]
The Inquisition believed in fear as the best way to achieve political ends. It became an entire institutional and political armory designed to propagate terror in the population whose best interests it pretended to concern. The fear mythologized through the use of torture and burning. It began from the very moment the inquisitors arrived in a town and read their Edict of Faith, enjoining anyone who either committed an error of faith, or knew someone who did, to come before the inquisitors within thirty days and confess or denounce.[22] Fear spread through society with the power of the Inquisition to deliver social and financial ruin, ensuring the poverty of its victims by confiscating their goods, banishing them from their homes and decreeing that their descendants could not fill any official post or wear silks, jewels, or anything representative of prestige. The principle of secrecy ensured fear most of all, which meant that the accused could not know the names of their accusers. The inquisitors’ attempts to impose their will through force merely inspired rebellion, this in turn created more targets, and so a vicious circle formed. It became impossible to purge society of its enemies, because society and the Inquisition created them. Many cases exist of witnesses brought before the Inquisition to testify against heretics. If the witnesses did not cooperate, they would be subjected to the same fate as the accused heretics themselves. This was exactly what happened to Francisca Hernández in Toledo on October 12, 1530:
Before Inquisitor Mexia, Francisca Hernández was asked to declare which people were alumbrados, since she had said that Miguel de Eguía had praised were Juan López [de Celaín}; Diego López; Bernardino de Tovar; Isabel de la Cruz; Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz; Francisco Ximénez; bachiller Olivares; Gutierrez, chaplain of the Marquis [de Villena]; Marquina [sic]; Pedro de Cazalla; María de Cazalla; Mosen Pascual; Maestro [Juan de] Castillo; and Licentiate [Pedro] Ortiz of Toledo. Next, this witness said she had heard from Bishop Cazalla that María de Cazalla, his sister, was the teacher of the alumbrados of Pastrana and Guadalajara, and that his judgment was nothing in comparison to hers. She also heard him say that exterior works were nothing, and his sister excelled so much and was so wise that she attained perfection in the matter of exterior works. Asked what works the bishop was referring to, the witness said praying, fasting, disciplines, bowing to statues, and other similar things. . . . [23]
Owing primarily to the national aspect of the Inquisition and its dimensions as “thought police,”[24] early modern Spain displayed the rudiments of the term later dubbed totalitarianism more than any other European monarchy. Torquemada arrived on the scene as one of the greatest early bureaucrats of the modern era, a herald of the modern phenomenon of tyranny by bureaucracy.[25] He spawned a secret espionage and judiciary apparatus that cast its net over the country and created a climate of fear in the service of an official ideology. Torquemada crafted the system and gave it a solid pattern and stringent rulers but also left leeway for local needs and set guidelines for future growth.[26] The inquisitor also insisted on a legalistic character of the Inquisition and the imperative to record every detail. The Spanish Inquisition resembled modern dictatorships in this way.
As in the medieval Inquisition, the procedure of exterminating heretics began with the announcement of a period of grace, first issued in an “Edict of Grace” and in later years in an “Edict of Faith.”[27] Inquisitors demanded heretics to come forward or to denounce others known to them; this remained the basic method of finding suspected heretics. Many people denounced themselves or confessed out of fear that a friend or neighbor might so do later anyway; such fears, counter-denunciations and chain reactions within small communities clearly increased the awe in which the Inquisition orchestrated. This practice brought the risk of false testimony, cast doubts upon the trustworthiness of witnesses, and easily allowed minor infringements to erupt into heresy. Secrecy manipulated accusations, formulated in lack of immediate identification by the prisoner of the person denouncing him, and prisoners did not understand the precise nature of charges against them. Once a prisoner failed to guess the identity of the accuser, they attempted to recall any occasion on which they committed some action that might be open to interpretations of heresy, losing the prisoner in a labyrinth of paranoia. Marina González confessed during an Edict of Grace, when the inquisitors invited those guilty of heresy to declare their sins to the Inquisition for reconciliation in writing which supposedly resulted in less punishment:
I, Marina González, am the wife of Francisco de Toledo, a spice merchant, who is a resident of this village of Almagro. I present myself before Your Lordships to declare my faults and the sins I have committed, in offense against our Redeemer and Master Jesus Christ and against our Holy Catholic Faith. She includes a long list of activities completed during the Sabbath, things she had eaten and when they were eaten, breaking feast days, and relatives stayed in her home upon giving birth during the night of the fairies. "...I lay this before Your Reverences and ask for penance because I offended Our Redeemer and Master Jesus Christ, going against our Holy Catholic Faith in certain necessary things. Though I cannot remember all of these things at the moment, I assure you I will declare them when they come to me. And from today onward I will live and die and finish up in the Holy Catholic Faith, which I embrace in her defense all the days of my life. For all things I confessed, I beg pardon and the redemption of our lord Jesus Christ. May Your Reverences give me a penance that is healthful for my soul, which I am ready to complete.[28]
Since the arrest of a suspected heretic took place after the calificadoes[29] made an assessment of the evidence, the prisoner was declared guilty at the moment of arrest. The purpose of interrogation, then, was to obtain a confession not so much to prove the suspect’s guilt. The main task of the tribunal acted not as a court of justice, but as a disciplinary body called in existence to meet a national emergency, stressing the fundamentally political nature of the Spanish Inquisition. Interrogation ensued instead of the modern sense of the term trial. The prisoner, kept in ignorance of the reasons behind his arrest and imprisonment, received no precise charge, therefore little possibility of making a plausible defense. The prisoner was required to confess to a crime that he attempted desperately to imagine, and held little chance of admitting exactly what the Inquisition had in mind. Once the calificadoes accepted the witness testimony, the accused being already convicted, they informed the accused of charges and gave a much edited version of the case against the convicted—omitting any details that might enable any guess toward the identity of the witnesses against him. If the interrogation satisfied the Inquisitors, they pronounced the convict’s sentence.[30] Inquisitors resorted to torture for one main purpose: to elicit confessions by the victim—about himself or people he knew— that they could legally regard as “the truth.” The Spanish Inquisition applied the same rules of torture exhibited in the medieval Inquisition after Clement V’s reforms.[31] An inquisitor could only torture a prisoner once. The inquisitor then stated clearly at the end of each session the suspension of torture, so that records speak of the continuation of torture and never fresh tortures. A public executioner carried out torture in the presence of an inquisitor, a representative of the local bishop, and a doctor. The Spanish Inquisition claimed no innovative torture techniques, and the most common methods were in fact akin to those used by the medieval inquisition, consisting of the garrucha,[32] the toca,[33] and the potro.[34] To avoid torture, a free confession in the torture chamber often sufficed; however, it remains undeniable that a good deal of torture took place during the long history of the Spanish Inquisition, with greater emphasis on the fascinating administrative aspects of the tribunal or its overall effect on the history and culture in Spain.[35]
The most terrible punishment for heresy remained that of the stake. Just as the Inquisition never sentenced an offender to the forfeiture of his property, so it never condemned anyone to death. The Inquisition instead relaxed the impenitent to the secular arm. By the authority of the states and in accordance with its laws, execution of the heretic took place. The inquisitors would allow the convicted heretic to fall into the hands of the temporal power, which dealt with the heretic not in accordance with the Church, but with strict and impartial justice, underlying the sentence of “relaxation to the secular arm.”[36] Mother Church spilt not a single drop of blood. The stake applied only for drastic measures—mainly relapsed heretics. Owing to the protection of documentation,[37] Marina González’s preserved confessions surfaced as evidence of relapse as a penanced individual reappearing before the tribunal in 1494 and worthy of the stake:
HOLDING GOD BEFORE OUR EYES:
We find that we must pronounce and declare that the chief prosecutor’s intention has been well proven, while the party Marina González has not proven anything useful. Therefore, we must declare her a relapsed heretic and apostate. She has incurred a sentence of major excommunication and the confiscation and loss of all her possessions. We must relax her to justice and the secular arm, and we declare our judgment through these writings. This judgment was given in Toledo, June 30, 1494, by the lord inquisitors in the Plaza de Zocodover in that city, acting as the tribunal while standing on a wooden scaffold; this judgment was read in a loud voice in presence of Marina González. Juan de Sepúlveda and Nicolas Fernandez, canons of Toledo, were witnesses . . . as were a doctor and magistrate.[38]
The creation of the Spanish Inquisition combatted mainly the dangers of heresy, but did not long confine itself to this activity. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the Inquisition managed to obtain jurisdiction over nearly all crimes which originally fell under the survey of church courts. Once the power of bishops over cases of heresy was surrendered to the Holy Office, the episcopal courts began to lose the initiative, because the Inquisition extended the term “heresy” to cover as many other crimes as possible.[39] In this way a tribunal, limited in power because its jurisdiction extended only over heretics and cases of heresy, became an all-powerful authority brought to bear on every aspect of Spanish life. The theological twist given to a simple moral crime excused the invasion of private life. The Inquisition prosecuted immorality not because of the actual sin, but because of the presumed mental error behind it. As a result, a large number of cases brought before the tribunal included harmless statements about private morality even where no heresy existed. The Holy Office aimed to inculcate a sense of the correct behavior and beliefs expected of a Christian. Between 1560 and 1630, a campaign of social control moved under way.[40] This campaign directed its objective toward the confinement of all sexual liaisons within legitimate marriage. Punishment of all who engaged in bigamy, adultery, incest, or fornication was part of a concerted attempt at social engineering. The secular courts, too, bridled careless speech and sexual promiscuity. The courts, however, lacked the ubiquity of the Holy Office with its familiars,[41] clergy, and judges. The Inquisition could count on the support of tribunals. The Holy Office maneuvered jurisdiction over sorcery, witchcraft, bigamy, solicitation in the confessional, the utterance of pernicious or scandalous opinions, and undertook the censorship of books.
Scandalous thoughts included those in accordance with Martin Luther or Erasmus. The trial of Diego de Uceda appeared as the first of a long series of investigations of Spain’s Erasmists. It began the Inquisition’s struggle against courtiers and university professors whose prestige and influence gave them temporary immunity from attack. The trial of Diego fits a pattern of events concerned with the threat against orthodoxy. The Spanish Inquisition at this particular historical moment was concerned with the problem of Lutheran heresy. The minority of Luther’s followers in number in the Iberian Peninsula held little weight in this case. Lutheranism brought dread to the breadth of the orthodox. Its mere existence threatened orthodoxy; therefore, elimination of Lutheranism proved imperative before it erupted into political chaos. Defining orthodoxy became the first step in positively identifying Lutheranism. As a by-product of the extirpation of heresy, there developed the need for a definition of orthodoxy. Diego believed in his orthodoxy; yet, he discovered the heretical nature of his ideas. Institutions such as the Spanish Inquisition are necessary to protect the existing way of life against revolution and anarchy. The protection of certain religious and political ideals demanded constant vigilance and swift punishment for subversion whether deliberate or unintentional.[42] Inquisitors brought Diego de Uceda into questioning at Córdoba for supposedly defending the words of Martin Luther on claims that confession should be made to God and not the priest. The Inquisitorial door slammed shut on Diego when he claimed that Luther’s statements on church officials’ financial modesty interested him. The morning of February 28, 1528, he persisted in protesting his inability to recall any more than he stated on the previous day, and that everything he ever said on matters of theology harmonized with his own conscience. He pointed out that his lineage consisted of Old Christian on both sides of his family, having not a drop of Jewish Converso blood in him. In March 1528, Diego was transferred to the Inquisition jail in Toledo where the Holy Office found him guilty of apostate heresy against the Holy Catholic Faith and a follower of Martin Luther. The Holy Office confiscated all Diego’s property and turned it over to the royal treasury, and relaxed him to the secular arm. His descendants for two generations were deprived of all public and ecclesiastical offices and honors.[43] Forty-three years later, the attack against Lutheran ideas remained persistent as seen in the auto de fe[44] of Friar Cristóbal who was relaxed in person to the secular arm, for having believed the errors of Martin Luther, with confiscation of goods:
Friar Cristóbal de Morales, resident of Seville, a Carthusian friar of the village of Cazalla. Relapsed heretic for maintaining that there is no other sacrament except baptism and the Lord’s Suppers, and that everything else, including the Mass, is a joke. He maintains that there is no Purgatory, but only the [redeeming] blood of Christ, who died once for everyone. He believes the power of the pope, bishops, and archbishops is . . . a matter of tyranny and ambition . . . He believes that fasts and other pious works matter little for salvation, and that pious works for the dead are ridiculous and a clerical invention. In this faith he hoped to live and die, though he had been weak in sustaining it. He composed epigrams in praise of Martin Luther. After he was reconciled and thrown into the galleys for the same heresy by the Inquisition in Toledo, he tried to convince other people of these errors once he was there. Relaxed to justice and the secular arm with confiscation of goods.[45]
The Spanish Inquisition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries held a special historical quality as compared to its medieval European predecessors. Its phenomenal strength and endurance resided in its capacity for hypocrisy. New innovations included representation and justification of theatrical society devoted to role playing, to the appearance of honor, to ostensive prayer, and to all the other forms of self-masking. The masses not only accepted the Inquisition, they worshipped it, insofar as the grim festivals of the auto de fé[46] simultaneously fed upon and nourished the collective hypocrisy of the population that attended them. Given the large number of forced conversions that followed the pogroms of 1394, nobody knew wholeheartedly the members of their ancestry.[47] One could only ignore the past or hide it, and above all, applaud vigorously the condemnation of those who got caught, along with the institution catching them.
The Spanish citizens defined themselves in comparison to others. By expressing pure adoration for the Inquisition, they separated themselves by negating the Conversos. Hatred of the “others” occasionally focuses on religion, but often religion plays only one part of a broader collective self-assertion in which ethnic, racial, cultural, and local components act. The religious impulse worked in concert with other energies, political and identification, which flowed toward the creation of the new Spanish entity. The Inquisition helped create the impetus and fan the crusading sense of purpose that propelled the wheels of unified Spain. The king and queen’s privileges and powers, believed by others as divinely sanctioned, strengthened their hold over their subjects. Religious imperatives operated in symbiosis with political forces to create the emergent Spanish sense of self, which involved the recognition of the role of the monarchy, of religious homogeneity, and later also of pure blood. The Inquisition redirected religious drives into political channels and became ingredients of broader definition of identity, allying themselves with social and economic interests causing conflicts. The socioeconomic camps were from inception defined and divided Old Christians against New Christians. Charges against conversos found in every aspect of their lives—religious, social, economic, or political—struck deep roots in the people’s thinking and served as common ground for the rising demand to oust the conversos from Spain’s society. Ultimately the religious charges came to play a larger part in the anti-Marrano campaign, because religious law offered a better opportunity to use them as destructive weapons. The success of the Castilian nobility constructed pernicious effects of deeper importance and of greater duration than it could ever have realized. Modern thinkers must consider how a nation can be constricted and hedged about by the narrow vision of its own ruling classes. The Spanish Inquisition adapted a method of controlling the minds of its people that lasted even up to the Bolshevik Revolution 500 years later. The theoretical view of the suspect’s guilt mirrored flexibility from the very beginning. In his instructions on the use of Red Terror, the Chekist M. I. Lattsis wrote:
In the interrogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused.[48]
The Bolshevik Revolution of the 1900s paralleled the Spanish Inquisition on matters of conducting the populace, harboring fear and confusion through manipulation. Arbitrary lists of names prepared, or an initial suspicion, or a denunciation by an informer, or any anonymous denunciation, just as during the Inquisition, sufficed to bring about the arrest of the suspect, followed by the inevitable formal charge. Solzhenitsyn elaborates on the manner of inquiry that “the time allotted for investigation, instead of solving a crime, exhausted, wore down, weakened, and rendered helpless the defendant, so that he would want it to end at any cost.”[49]
Russians during the Bolshevik Revolution and Spaniards during the Inquisition were pitted against those with differing cultural, social, and political backgrounds. Across culture and time, the human consciousness amplifies outside influences—peoples’ own underlying worst enemy. By keeping the people from access to information, distracted from the real enemy, or the real issue, and kept in fear and confusion, the masses not only accepted the ruling classes, but praised them out of fear of damnation, or in honest belief of exterminating the “evildoers.” Whether bound together by fear or association, corruption always involves the willingness of the people to follow.
Notes
1. Blood purity. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (New York: New American Library, 1971), 124.
2. The Inquisition burned only bad Christians, mostly baptized Conversos, but had no jurisdiction over Jews. The reason is that the Inquisition was based on a canon law, which applies only within the Church. When Conversos Judaized they were heretical traitors to the church. Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 174.
3. In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella sent a formal request to Rome for the establishment of an inquisition in Spain. Pope Sixtus IV granted the request and, in a break with precedent, allowed the secular authorities to have power of appointment and dismissal over the new inquisitors. John Edwards, Ferdinand and Isabella: Profiles in Power (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2005), 68-69.
4. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 12-13.
5. The first wave of persecutions, the Pastoureaux crusade, began in France and reached Navarre in 1321. In Pamplona, Jews were assassinated. In Estella, in 1328, the sermons preached by a Franciscan provoked a riot; the houses of Jews were sacked and Jews killed. Twenty years later, there were similar scenes in Barcelona, establishing anti-Semitism in Spain. Joseph Pérez., The Spanish Inquisition: A History, trans. Janet Lloyd (New haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 5-6.
6. Castellanos tax imposed on all citizens which Jews collected. This heavy tax was collected in addition to the direct annual tax paid by the Jews of the state. Jewish communal property and income from the Jewish community connected to a system of loans known as juro. Before the expulsion, the Crown had incurred considerable debts, and it was forced to pledge the Jewish taxes to pay the juro annuities. The Crown attempted to discharge debts using Jewish property. If any of those loans had been made by Jews, then they were exiled. Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, trans. Jeffery M. Green (Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 23-24, 60-69, 206.
7. Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition, 6-8.
8. Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995), 149.
9. Pérez, The Inquisition, 34-35.
10. Ibid.
11. Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition, 14.
12. Toby Green, Inquisition: The Reign of Fear (London: Pan Books, 2007), 24-25.
13. Yovel, The Other Within, 171.
14. Henry Kamen, “Confiscations in the Economy of the Spanish Inquisition,” The Economic History Review 18, no. 3 (1965): 513.
15. ArgÜello, “Instructions of the Holy Office of the Inquisiton, Handled Summarily, Both Old and new,” in The Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1614: An Anthology of Sources, ed. Trans. Lu Ann Homza (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), 78.
16. Yovel, The Other Within, 167.
17. The Suprema was organized and controlled by the office of the Inquisitor General. There was an alguazil, or constable responsible for arrests, calificadores, or assessors of the evidence, and a fiscal, or prosecutor—whose role indicates that the Spanish Inquisition adopted the procedure of accusatio rather than inquisitio; in addition there were large numbers of subordinates such as gaolers, chaplains, clerks, notaries, and familiars. The whole organization was supervised by visitadores, or travelling inspectors, who reported back to the Suprema on the functioning of provincial inquisitions. The structure is not dissimilar to that of the medieval Inquisition, except for the presence and function of the fiscal. Edward Burman, The Inquisition: The Hammer of Heresy (New York: Dorset Press, 1992), 138-139.
18. A.S. Turberville, The Spanish Inquisition (USA: Archon Books, 1968), 57-58.
19. Cullen Murphey, God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 84-85.
20. “People reconciled with monastic habit, perpetual prison, and the confiscation of goods for having believed the sect of Muhammed was good, and that they would save themselves through it” in Homza, Anthology of Sources, 243.
21. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 231-232.
22. Green, Inquisition, 13.
23. “Statement of Francisca Hernández, Toledo, October 12, 1530” in Homza, Anthology of Sources, 118.
24. Yovel, The Other Within, 161-162.
25. Torquemada became the prior of the Dominican monastery of Santa Cruz, at Segovia, and there he met Isabella, forging a close personal bond and becoming her confessor. He encouraged her marriage to Ferdinand, which united the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and in time became confessor to Ferdinand as well. After the Inquisition was set up under royal control, Torquemada was appointed as one of several inquisitors, and assumed the position of inquisitor general a year later. Murphey, God’s Jury, 81-82.
26. For more details of Torquemada’s Directorium see Rafael Sabatini, Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition: A History (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1930), 140-144.
27. The Edict of Grace. “…the inquisitors shall proclaim a period of grace of thirty or forty days, whichever is more suitable, so that all people, men as well as women, who find themselves guilty of any sin of heresy or apostasy, or of keeping and performing the rituals and ceremonies of the Jews, or any [rituals] which may be contrary to the Christian religion, may come to disclose their errors before the inquisitors shall assure the audience that all those who come with good contrition and repentance to disclose their errors and everything they know…who come to confess shall be given penances that are healthful for their souls, they shall not receive a penalty of death or perpetual prison, and their goods shall not be taken…” Argűello, “Instructions of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, Handled Summarily, Both Old and New,” in Homza, Anthology of Sources, 64-65.
29. “Marina’s Confession from 1484” in Homza, Anthology of Sources, 27-29.
30. Burman, The Inquisition, 144-145.
31. Ibid., 150-151.
32. Ibid., 146-150.
33. The garrucha (“pulley”) was a form of torture by suspension, and worked through gravity. Typically the hands of the interrogated person were tied behind his back. By means of pulley or a rope thrown over a rafter, the body would be hoisted off the ground by the hands, and then dropped with a jerk. The strain on the shoulders was immense. Joints could be pulled from their sockets. Muscles could be stretched to the point where elasticity would never return. Damage to the brachial plexus, the nerve fibers running from the spinal cord to the arms contorted the pleural cavity, making breathing difficult. Murphey, God’s Jury, 90.
34. Toca, means “cloth,” referencing the fabric that plugged a victim’s upturned mouth, and upon which water was poured. The effect was to induce the sensation of asphyxiation by drowning. “Waterboarding” is the English term commonly used today. The modern term in Spanish is submarino. Ibid., 92.
35. Potro means “colt,” referencing a small platform with four legs. Several things could occur on this platform. The victim might be placed on his back, his legs and arms fastened tautly to winches at each end. Each turn of the winches would stretch him by some additional increment. Ligaments might snap. Bones could be pulled form their sockets. Another version of the rack relied on tight compression. Rope would be wrapped around the body and fastened to the winches, coiling tighter with every turn. The rope sometimes cut through muscle. Ibid., 91.
36. For more on the background of medieval torture see Ibid., 55-56.
37. Turberville, The Spanish Inquisition, 107.
38. Protection of documents [1488]. “…inquisitors agreed that all the writings of the Inquisition, regardless of condition, shall be collected in chests in a public place where the inquisitors are accustomed to act, so that any writing that may be needed can easily be at hand. Taking the writings outside [the tribunal] is forbidden. The keys of the chests shall pass from the hand of the inquisitors into the power of the notaries of the said office, who witness the acts and writings.” “Instructions given in Valladolid by the Prior of Santa Cruz” in Homza, Anthology of Sources, 72.
39. “Marina’s sentence. June 30, 1494” in Ibid., 49.
40. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 198-199.
41. Geoffrey Parker, “Some Recent Work on the Inquisition in Spain and Italy,” The Journal of Modern History 54, no.3 (September 1982): 520.
42. The familiars, spies and informers, were responsible for spreading fear of the Inquisition through their lawless arrogance. Burman, The Inquisition, 139-140.
43. John Edward Longhurst, Luther and the Spanish Inquisition: The Case of Diego de Uceda 1528-1529 (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1953), 75-76.
44. Ibid., 20-32.
45. For further information on auto de fé see Burman, The Inquisition, 151-153.
46. “Auto de fé celebrated in Granada, March 18, 1571” in Homza, Anthology of Sources, 246.
47. For description of first auto de fé see Murphey, God’s Jury, 65-67.
48. Stephen Gilman, “The Case of Diego Alonso: Hypocrisy and the Spanish Inquisition,” Daedalus 108, no. 3 (Summer 1979): 135.
49. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973), 96.
50. Ibid., 97.
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