Holy smoke: The rise of the Spanish Inquisition
‘But I am not guilty,’ said K, ‘it’s a misunderstanding. And if it comes to that, how can any man be called guilty? We are all simply men here, one as much as the other’.
‘That is true’, said the priest, ‘but that’s how all guilty men talk’.
Franz Kafka, The Trial
By DAVID MYTON
In this first of two essays, I examine the rise of the Spanish Inquisition and endeavor to contextualize it within the contemporary religious setting. The second essay, which I plan to publish next Saturday, will explore in more detail the career and impact of the Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada.
On August 3 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, on the first of a series of voyages across the Atlantic that would eventually lead to European settlement in the bountiful lands of the Americas.
His quest was supported and financed by some notable people including, among others, the Roman Catholic monarchs of Spain, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, as well as Cardinal Archbishop Pero Mendoza, one of the chief architects of the Spanish Inquisition which, at that time, was in full combustive mode.
Other financiers and Columbus supporters included several Jews and a number of conversos - Jews who had converted to Christianity, many of whom, back on land, were then experiencing the wrathful “justice” of the Inquisitors.
Columbus would find a “new world” across the ocean. But the old world would not be far behind, bringing with it all its extraordinary baggage of goodness mixed with much evil, including the very worst elements of medieval religion.
By mid-1492 tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition - headed by Tomas de Torquemada -were operating in eight major cities throughout the land of Spain, dispensing their idea of religious justice.
In this year, the Inquisition (with full support of the King and Queen) had its collective eye on one particular group: the Iberian peninsula’s Jewish population.
‘Protecting’ the converted
With the passing of the Alhambra Decree on March 31, 1492, all practicing Jews (somewhere between 40,000-100,000) were expelled from the lands of Spain, seeking refuge in nearby France, Italy, Greece and Turkey among other places.
Ferdinand and Isabella desired to “protect” the so-called converso population - around 200,000 Jews who had converted to Christianity in earlier times to avoid persecution.
It was believed the remaining religious Jews had been trying to “de-convert” their former co-religionists, thus deserving their expulsion from the realm.
Torquemada, a Dominican who was appointed head of the Inquisition in 1483, was central to the religious policy-making of the monarchs. He was not only a political advisor - he had also been religious confessor to Queen Isabella since her childhood.
He had become an immensely powerful and much feared individual. The mere mentioning of his name could strike fear into the hearts of men and women throughout the realm.
“No name has been more closely connected with the Spanish Inquisition,” writes Jean Plaidy …
“It is strange that this man, who for the first 58 years of his life lived in comparative obscurity, should in his remaining 20 years have left such a mark on the world; it is characteristic of human nature that in some the name should arouse horror and in others admiration, in some disgust, and in others something like adoration. Tomas de Torquemada has been called a cruel bigot; he has also been called the light of Spain, the savior of his country, and the honor of his Order.” - Jean Plaidy, The Spanish Inquisition, Book Club Associates/Robert Hale Ltd, 1978, p125.
The religious background
To endeavor to understand Torquemada and the Inquisition it is necessary to examine the broader role of religion in 13th-16th century Europe.
To be a Christian in this era was not merely a matter of internalised spirituality, but also of external conformity. Those who attracted the attention of religious authorities were rarely the contented and conformist:
“Small deviations from accepted social practice were sufficient to mark anyone as of uncertain faith … An anachronistic vocabulary of those who later attacked the religion cannot be used to evaluate it. In its own terms, on its own premises, the religion was perfectly rational, from Biblical givens which were undeniably historical.” (R N Swanson, Religion and Devotion In Europe c.1215-c.1515, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks, 1995, pp313-314)
The great saints of the period, writes Karen Armstrong, “seemed to regard the world and God as irreconcilable opposites” while there existed …
“… a terror of heresy and doctrinal deviations, a hyperactive awareness of sin and an obsession with Hell … From birth and baptism to death and burial religion dominated the life of every single man and woman … [it] was taken for granted as a fact of life.” (Armstrong, A History Of God, Random House, London, 1993, pp285-287)
A community in communion
The preeminent, central feature of the medieval Catholic religion was the celebration of the Mass, especially the elevated Host.
Communion through the Host did not just bring Christ down to earth, it was also a focus for “a community in communion” … and it was needed often to ensure “a continuity of celebration, almost perpetual worship integral to the process whereby individuals sought and attained salvation”. (Swanson, op cit, pp137-138)
Within all this, people simply got on with the business of living. This included the “folklorization” of religion in which people simply existed with their beliefs …
“as an incoherent whole … Fairies, ghosts and suchlike were accepted; as was the devil. Masses, prayers, invocations of saints and incantations gave the desired results, so they worked.” (Swanson, pp312-316 passim)
By the fourth century CE Christianity (Roman Catholicism) had spread from the Mediterranean region into parts of continental Europe and Britain. (For more details check out this article)
However, a number of schisms (possibly around 90) had emerged - including that of Arius, a priest of Alexandria, who denied that Christ was God Incarnate; the Manichaean; the Gnostic; and Pelagian (among others).
Beginning in the 11th century, the western European Christians also undertook a number of Crusades to check the spread of Islam, to retake control of the Holy Land in the eastern Mediterranean (Check out this article for more details) and, in 1208 under Pope Innocent III, a campaign to suppress the Cathar, or Albigenses, in the south of France.
All these various heresies - plus those committed by local citizens - had to be confronted.
Heretics ‘choose evil over good’
For the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) heretics become heretics because they are confused people …
“… who choose evil over good and who, by donning a fair-seeming guise make this evil seem to be a good … the heretical other is an essentially irrational, diabolically inspired force and, as such, can be redeemed not through rational arguments but only through divine grace”. (Karen Sullivan, The Inner Lives Of Medieval Inquisitors, University of Chicago Press, 2011, p33)
To turn the heretic away from sin involves not rational arguments that demonstrate the falsity of his beliefs, but rather “by praying to God to illuminate him in the darkness in which he lives”. (ibid)
It was within this broad context that in 1233 Pope Gregory IX issued a Bull that conferred on the Dominican Order the job of eradicating heresy within the Church.
Pope Gregory’s Bull provided for the excommunication from the Church of all heretics, and ordained that all those condemned by the Church should be delivered to the secular authorities for punishment.
To do this, the Pope established a permanent tribunal - or inquisition - staffed by Dominican brothers, whose Inquisitors were given legal authority to convict suspected heretics without any possibility of appeal and to pronounce summary death sentences:
“Now, with the Pope’s blessing, the machinery for mass extermination was established on an official legal basis, with a formal sanction and mandate derived directly from the highest authority in Christendom …” (Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Inquisition, Viking, London, 1999, p21)
The Tribunal’s constitution decreed that those convicted of heresy should be delivered over to the secular authorities for punishment “and that if any, through the fear of death, should desire to return to the faith they may be imprisoned for life”. (Rafael Sabatini, Torquemada And The Spanish Inquisition. A History, Stanley Paul, London, 1930, p43)
Aiders and abettors excommunicated
Abettors, concealers, and defenders of heretics would also suffer excommunication and should any give Christian burial to one who has died under excommunication “he shall himself incur excommunication from which he shall not be delivered until with his own hands he shall have exhumed the corpse” and otherwise disposed of it. (ibid, p46)
Dominic Guzman (1170-1221), founder and master general of the Order of Preachers, was said to have regularly kept vigil at night in churches where, sobbing as he prayed, he …
“… begged the Virgin Mary to take pity on people who sinned and suffered for their sins” as he believed God had “given him special grace to weep for the wretched and afflicted … Such was his grief for them that he would flagellate himself on their behalf, whipping his body three times a night”. (Sullivan, The Inner Lives Of Medieval Inquisitors, op cit p53)
Dominic was distinguished by his relatively tolerant attitude to alleged heretics. He preached to them and entreated them to abandon their errors, and wept for them when they did not.
“The heretics may need to be punished for refusing to abandon their heresy, but Dominic still pities them for having to suffer such punishment.” (Sullivan, ibid, p73)
In 1273 Pope Gregory X ordered that Inquisitors should operate in conjunction with local bishops with whom it would share authority and jurisdiction.
In this time there began a tradition that the Inquisition should keep bloodshed to a minimum - so the rack, thumbscrew and water torture were employed “to cause maximum pain and minimum mess” while its “supreme instrument of torture” became fire. (Baigent & Lee, op cit, p28)
“Fire derived its legal precedent and sanction from the law of Imperial Rome [in which] death by fire was the standardised punishment for parricide, sacrilege, arson, sorcery and treason. Herein lay the precedent for dealing with heretics” (ibid)
The Church, write Baigent and Lee, embraced fire “with the rabid zeal of institutionalised pyromania [and] incendiary enthusiasm”. On one occasion in 1239 the French inquisitor Robert Le Petit presided over the simultaneous death by fire of 180 victims …
“Under the auspices of such men as this, the ancient pagan practice of ritual human sacrifice was effectively resurrected in the guise of Christian piety. The burning of a heretic became an occasion for celebration, a joyous event,” (Baigent & Lee, op cit, pp28-29)
How to be a successful Inquisitor
In 1376 the Aragonese Dominican Nicholas Eymerich (1320-99) penned the Directorium inquisitorum - a handy “how to” guide on being a successful Inquisitor. It would be eagerly read and put into practice by future black-robed prosecutors of assorted heretics.
Eymerich was far from the first inquisitor to deceive and torture accused parties or to burn them at the stake once they had been proven guilty, but he was the first to address and justify these practices at length, writes Karen Sullivan:
“… The accused party represents not a passive, powerless object of the inquisitor’s violence but rather an active, powerful subject of his own deeds, because Eymerich conceives of him principally not in terms of his body, which may admittedly undergo suffering, but in terms of his soul, which remains free … What is occurring during the trial, as Eymerich imagines it, is not so much an encounter between an inquisitor and an accused party as an encounter between God and the accused party, where the inquisitor serves as the intercessor through whose intervention this connection takes place …” (Sullivan, The Inner Lives Of Medieval Inquisitors, p173\
We can be sure that one man in particular read and digested the lessons and tricks of the trade of his inquisitorial forbears: enter Tomas de Torquemada, soon to be Spain’s first Grand Inquisitor and head of the Spanish Inquisition.
Torquemada the chosen advisor
Torquemada (1420-1498) joined the Dominican Order as a youth at their monastery in Valladolid, later becoming prior of the Monastery of Santa Cruz, Segovia - an office he held for 22 years.
It was here he became confessor to the young princess Isabella - he was her choice - and continued as close advisor when she became Queen of Castile in 1474.
In 1469 Isabella had married Ferdinand, crown prince (and soon to be king) of Aragon, an act that united two of the three Christian kingdoms on the peninsula (the third was Portugal). Pope Alexander VI, a close ally, formally titled them “the Catholic Monarchs”.
Large numbers of Muslims and Jews has lived in the region since around 8CE, coexisting alongside Christians populations in what was termed convivencia - enabling “Christians, Jews and Muslims to understand and respect, but not necessarily love, each other”, (Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition. A Historical Revision, Yale University Press, 1997, p8)
However, these communities never lived together on equal terms … “so-called convivencia was always a relationship between unequals. Within that inequality, the minorities played their roles while attempting to avoid conflicts.” (Kaman, ibid, p2)
Many Jews who continued to suffer persecution converted to Christianity. Known as Marranos or Conversos they attempted to assimilate into the majority population. However, suspicions grew that these Conversos were so-called Judaizers “practising their Jewish religion in secret while outwardly affecting sincerity in their Catholic faith”. (ibid, p12)
Increasingly, they were accused of representing an ever-present danger to the existence of Christian Spain.
Ferdinand and Isabella, determined to unite the country into one realm, embarked on “a program of hugely ambitious scope and scale” - to “extirpate the last Moorish or Islamic enclaves from their domains” and “to purge both Islam and Judaism, as well as paganism and Christian heresies”.
To this end, in 1478, they determined they needed their own Inquisition. Accordingly, Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull authorizing them to appoint two Dominicans as Inquisitors who would track down heretics.
They conducted their first auto da fe in February 1481, burning alive at the stake six individuals.
Then in August 1483 Tomas de Torquemada was appointed Grand Inquisitor for Castile and León, and on October 17 his powers were extended to Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and Majorca.
By the beginning of November that year “the flames had claimed another 288 victims, while 79 had been sentenced to life imprisonment”. (Baigent and Lee, The Inquisition, pp62-63)
In my next essay planned for Saturday I will examine career and legacy of Tomas de Torquemada.
REFERENCES
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Inquisition, Viking, London, 1999
Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society In Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1985
Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition. A Historical Revision, Yale University Press, 1997
Jean Plaidy, The Spanish Inquisition, Book Club Associates, London, 1978
Alec Ryrie, Everyone Expects the Spanish Inquisition: the Making of Spain’s Black Legend, YouTube lecture, 25/9/19
Rafael Sabatini, Torquemada And The Spanish Inquisition. A History, Stanley Paul, London, 1930
Karen Sullivan, The Inner Lives Of Medieval Inquisitors, University of Chicago Press, 2011