Spanish Inquisition
Heather Delaria:
Beginnings
Alonso 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, 1478, Pope Sixtus IV published the bull Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus, through which the Inquisition was established in the Kingdom of Castile. The bull 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.
Heather Delaria:
English: The trial of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition. Bronze relief by Ettore Ferrari (1845-1929), Campo de' Fiori, Rome.
Français : Le procès de Giordano Bruno devant le Saint-Office. Bas-relief en bronze d'Ettore Ferrari (1845-1929), Campo de' Fiori, Rome.
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. With it, the Inquisition became the only institution with authority throughout all the kingdoms 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.
The 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 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 Spanish Jews emigrated mainly to Portugal (from where they were expelled in 1497) and to Morocco. Much later the Sefardim, descendants of Spanish Jews, established flourishing communities in many cities of Europe, North Africa, and, mainly, in 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.
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Repression of Protestants
"Maniera di bruciare coloro che furono condannati dall'Inquisizione". Autodafé e roghi dell'Inquisizione iberica, in un'incisione originale del XVII secolo.
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. A large percentage of these Protestants were of Jewish origin.
Depite 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.
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Spanish painting from the 1400s by Pedro Berruguete showing the miracle of Fanjeaux. According to the Libellus of Jordan of Saxony, the books of the Cathars and those of the Catholics were subjected to trial by fire before Saint Dominic. The Catholic books were rejected three times by the flames. Scanned from a history book.
An image frequently misinterpreted as the Spanish Inquisition burning prohibited books. This is actually Pedro Berruguete's La Prueba del Fuego (1400s). It depicts a legend of St Dominic's dispute with the Cathars: they both consign their writings into the flames, and while the Cathars' text burn, St Dominic's miraculously leaps from the flames.
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: Gil Vicente, 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 Moore, known in Spain as Tomás Moro. One of the most outstanding cases, and best known, 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.
Heather Delaria:
The Inquisition and the Moriscos
Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de
Date of birth/death 1746-03-30 1828-04-16
Location of birth/death Deutsch: Fuendetodos bei Zaragoza
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.
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