Chapter II: Retrospect (2)

This is confirmed by Inquisitor-general Valdés who states that when, in 1546, he assumed the archbishopric of Seville, he found the clergy and the dignitaries of his cathedral thoroughly demoralized. They had no shame in their children and grandchildren; their women lived with them openly, as though married, and accompanied them to church, and many of them kept public gaming tables in their houses, which were resorts of disorderly characters. If we may believe him, he resolutely undertook a reform and effected it at great labor and expense, owing to appeals and suits in Rome and in Granada and in the Royal Council and before apostolic judges. Then Francisco de Erasso, a favorite of Charles V, obtained a canonry and joined those who desired to return to their former dissolute life, against which, in 1556, he appeals to Philip II for protection.[1101] The lower ranks of the clergy were no better, if we may believe the synod of Orihuela, in 1600, which asserts that their concubinage was the cause of the animosity of the people against them,[1102] and we have seen, when treating of Solicitation, how frequent was the advantage taken of the opportunities of the confessional.

There were few prelates as conscientious as Valdés represents himself. Alfonso de Castro attributes the existence of heresy to their negligence; they were so slothful that they paid no attention to their duties; those who did otherwise were so rare that they were like jewels among pebbles.[1103] The Venitian envoy, Giovanni Soranzo is less cautious in his utterance, for he describes them as living luxuriously and squandering their revenues on splendid establishments; few of them were without children, in whom they took no shame and for whose advancement they employed every means.[1104] At the other end of the scale were the clerks in the lower orders, immersed in secular affairs, who took the tonsure in order to enjoy the protection from justice afforded by the Church. These were the despair of those responsible for public order. Fernando de Aragon, Viceroy of Valencia, complains, August 21, 1544, of the impossibility of enforcing justice owing to the zeal with which the church authorities protected the tonsure, whether right or wrong. The officials of the archbishops, he says, have been debased and ignorant men; whose sole aim has been to save criminals from the punishment of their crimes. He is encouraged to hope for better things from the appointment as archbishop of San Tomas de Vilanova, and the latter follows, September 8th, with allusions to his own sufferings in consequence of his efforts to remedy this condition, which is an offence to justice and to God and a great damage to the people.[1105]

[Sidenote: _FANATICAL INTOLERANCE_]

A Church composed of such elements was not fitted to exercise for good the enormous influence which it enjoyed over public affairs, not only in shaping the policy of the kingdom but in directing the national tendencies. The theory was still the medieval one--that the ecclesiastical power is the sun and the royal power the moon, which derives its light from the sun.[1106] To its influence, as represented by Torquemada, was due the expulsion of the Jews; by Ximenes, the enforced conversion of the Moors; by Espinosa, the rebellion of Granada; by Juan de Ribera and his fellows, the expulsion of the Moriscos. In the royal councils, which formed a bureaucracy, prelates held leading and often dominant positions, and their subordinates were largely drawn from clerical ranks. In 1602 a proposition to increase the schools of artillery was referred to a junta presided over by the royal confessor, which reported that the expense could not be afforded; the schools came to be under the charge of Jesuits and frailes and speedily dwindled to nothing.[1107] The position of royal confessor was one of the highest political importance. Under Charles V he participated in all deliberations and had a preponderating influence.[1108] Under Philip II, his confessor Fray Diego de Chaves, played a leading part in the tragedy of Antonio Pérez. Fray Caspar de Toledo, confessor of Philip III boasted that, whenever he told the king that a thing must be done under pain of mortal sin or that it was sinful, he was obeyed without discussion.[1109] The Regent María Ana of Austria was completely under the domination of her confessor Nithard, and the letters to him of Clement XI, on European politics, indicate that be was the real ruler.[1110] The substitution of Froilan Díaz for Fray Pedro Matilla, as confessor of Carlos II, was the only step necessary to effect a revolution in the government and, when Díaz fled to Rome, he was reclaimed as a fugitive chief minister of state. We have seen under Philip V the power wielded by his confessors Daubenton and Robinet, and the part played by Rábago under Fernando VI. What thus ruled the court was perpetually at work in every parish and every family, where the pulpit and the confessional exercised an incalculable influence. What the Spaniard became was what the Church wished him to be. Clericalism thus, for good or for evil, was a leading factor in controlling the destinies of Spain, in exhausting its resources, in moulding the character of its people, and the Inquisition was its crowning work.

Under such influences, the toleration which had been so marked a feature of the medieval period gradually gave place to a fanaticism finding its expression in the Inquisition and inflamed into greater fierceness by the existence and reaction of that institution. There can be no question as to the sincere devoutness of Charles V, according to the unanimous testimony of the Venetian envoys, who describe his punctual discharge of all religious observances and who state that the surest avenue to his favor was the manifestation of earnest zeal for religion.[1111] Shortly before his death, he expressed deep regret that he had not executed Luther at Worms, in spite of his pledged safe-conduct, for he ought to have forfeited his word in order to avenge the offence to God. In his will, executed in 1554 at Brussels, he charged Philip II in the most earnest manner to favor in all ways the Inquisition, because of the many and great offences to God which it prevents or punishes and, in the codicil of September 9, 1558, dictated on his death-bed, his first thought is to repeat the injunction and to urge his son, by the obedience due to a father, to prosecute heresy, rigorously, unsparingly and relentlessly.[1112] Philip II needed no such exhortations. From his earliest youth he had breathed an atmosphere surcharged by the conflict with heresy; he had been taught that a sovereign's highest duty to God and man was to enforce unity of faith, not only as a paramount religious obligation, but because it was an axiom of the statesmanship of the time that, in no other way, could the peace of a kingdom be preserved. There is no reason to doubt his perfect sincerity when, in 1568, the Archduke Charles came to Spain, as the representative of the German princes, to urge an accommodation with the Netherlands, and Philip, besides his formal reply, gave the archduke secret instructions to tell the emperor that no human influence, or considerations of state, or all that the whole world could say or do, would make him vary a hair's breadth from the course which he had adopted and intended to pursue in this matter of religion, throughout all his dominions; that he would listen to no advice with regard to it, and would take ill any that might be offered. At the same time he wrote to Chantonnay, his ambassador at Vienna, that what he was doing in the Netherlands was for their advantage and the preservation of the Catholic faith, and that he would make no change in his policy, if it involved risking all his possessions and if the whole world should fall upon his head. So, in 1574, the instructions to the commissioners sent to Breda to confer with the deputies of William the Silent, were to declare emphatically that he would suffer no one to live under his throne who was not completely a Catholic.[1113] Philip was merely translating into practice the teachings of the Church and won its unstinted admiration. Cardinal Pallavicini contrasts the vacillating persecution in France with his sanguinary rigor, which was not only grateful to heaven but propitious to his kingdom, thus saved by salutary blood-letting.[1114]

[Sidenote: _FANATICAL INTOLERANCE_]

It was natural that Philip, in his will, executed March 7, 1594, should reiterate to his son and successor the injunctions which he had received from his father. The Inquisition was to be the object of special favor, even greater than in the past, for the times were perilous and full of so many errors in the faith.[1115] Philip III had not energy enough to be an active persecutor and if, under the guidance of Lerma, he expelled the Moriscos, under the same tutelage he made peace with England in 1605 and a truce with Holland in 1609, to the disgust of the pious who could not understand any dealings with heretics. Yet he was a most religious prince, who spent hours every day in his devotions and in examining his conscience, and who set a shining example by the frequency with which he sought confession and communion.[1116]

It was a matter of course that he should, in his will, leave to his successor the customary instructions to foster the Inquisition. As to Philip IV, we have seen abundant instances of his subservience to it, during his half-century of reign, and of his readiness to subordinate to it all other interests. He showed his consistency in this when, at the dictation of the Suprema, he incurred a war with England through his refusal to sign a treaty forbidding the persecution of Englishmen in Spain on account of their religion[1117] and, in his will, executed in 1665, he laid the customary injunctions on his successor to aid and favor the Inquisition, adding an exhortation to honor and defend the clergy in all their exemptions and immunities, and earnestly to labor for the reformation of the religious Orders.[1118]

Carlos II was a nonentity who need not be considered and, with the Bourbons, we enter on the dawn of a new era, in which fanaticism no longer dominates the policy of the State. It is true that Philip V, when abdicating, in 1724, enjoined on his son Luis the preservation of the faith through the instrumentality of the Inquisition as fervently as any of his predecessors and that, during the first third of the century, there was a fierce recrudescence of inquisitorial activity, but we have seen how the spirit of the age gradually made itself felt and, although the duty of exterminating heresy was still admitted in theory, in practice its enforcement was greatly mitigated.

It is difficult for us, in the indifferentism of the twentieth century, to realize or to understand the violence of the passions excited by questions of faith, dissociated from all temporal interests, and their influence on a people so emotional as the Spaniards and so apt, as they tell us themselves, to be swayed by imagination rather than by reason. We have seen (Vol. III, p. 284) the whole kingdom of Portugal thrown into excitement by the theft of a pyx with a consecrated host and that only the opportune discovery of the culprit saved all the New Christians from expulsion. It might seem to us a very trivial affair that, on the eve of Good Friday, 1640, there was posted, in the chapter-house of Granada, a placard ridiculing the Christian religion, praising the Mosaic Law, and blaspheming the purity of the Virgin, but it produced the greatest excitement throughout Spain. Special services were held in all the churches to appease the insulted deity and to discover the malefactor. He was detected, in the person of a hermit of the Santa Imagen del Triunfo, who was arrested, and Inquisitor Rodezno deemed it advisable to break the inviolable secrecy of the Inquisition in order to calm the public agitation, by letting the people know that the culprit had been discovered and convicted. Learned doctors improved the occasion by printing dissertations in which it was proved that he must be burnt alive, if no death more atrocious could be invented to suit the crime.[1119] The fanatical hatred of heresy _per se_, thus sedulously inculcated and engrained in the moral fibre of every Spaniard is seen in the statutes of Limpieza, which closed the avenues to distinction to the descendants of Conversos and of those who had been penanced by the Inquisition, so that even arrest and imprisonment for a trivial offence inflicted, according to popular prejudice, an indelible stigma on a family. We have seen to what insane extent this was carried and what evil it wrought in the social organization, but more prolific in evil was the habit of thought by which it was engendered and which it intensified.

[Sidenote: _SUPERFICIAL DEVOUTNESS_]

Yet practically the religion which was so sensitive as to purity of faith was of a very superficial character. External observances were strictly enforced, and the Inquisition was ever on the watch to punish any irreverence in act or word, yet Alfonso de Castro tells us that, in the mountainous provinces, such as Asturias, Galicia and elsewhere, the word of God was so rarely preached to the people that they observed many pagan rites and many superstitions.[1120] To labor on Sunday or feast-day was a serious offence, involving suspicion of heresy, yet Carranza says that more offences against God were committed on Sundays than in all the week-days combined; those who went to mass mostly spent the time in business or in talking or sleeping; those who did not go, gratified their vanity or their appetites; the ancient Jews used to say that, on their feast-days, the demons left the cities for refuge in the mountain caves, but now it would seem that on week-days the demons avoided the people who were busy with their labors and, on feast-days, came trooping joyfully from the deserts, for then they find the doors open to all kinds of vices.[1121]

Paolo Tiepolo, in 1563, observes that, in all external signs of religion, the Spaniards are exceedingly devout, but he doubts whether the interior corresponds; the clergy live as they choose, without any one reprehending them, and he is scandalized by the buffooneries and burlesques performed in the churches on feast-days.[1122] The churches, in fact, seem to have been places for everything save devotion. Azpilcueta describes the profane observances during divine service, the inattention of the priests, the processions of masks and demons, the banquets and feastings, and other disgraceful profanations, so that there are few of the faithful who do not sin in church, and few who do not utter idle, vain, foul, evil or profane words; in hot weather, the coolness of the churches made them favorite lounging-places for both sexes, including monks and nuns, and much that was indecent occurred; they were moreover places for the transaction of business, and more bargaining took place there than in the markets.[1123] This was not a mere passing custom. A century later Francisco Santos pictures for us a church crowded with so-called worshippers, where the services could scarce be heard for the noise; beggars crying for alms and wrangling among themselves; two men quarrelling fiercely and on the point of drawing their swords; a group of young gallants chattering and maltreating a poor man who had chanced to touch them in passing; people leaving one mass that had commenced to follow a priest, who had the reputation of greater despatch in his sacred functions; in a chapel a bevy of fair ladies drinking chocolate, discussing fashions and waited on by their admirers--all is worldly and the religious observance is the merest pretext.[1124] This irreverence was shared by the priests. A brief of Urban VIII, January 30, 1642, recites complaints from the dean and chapter of Seville concerning the use of tobacco in the churches, both in smoking and snuffing, even by priests while celebrating mass, and of their profanation of the sacred cloths by using them and staining them with tobacco, wherefore he decrees excommunication _latæ sententiæ_ for the use of the weed within the sacred precincts.[1125] It is evident that the Inquisition, while enforcing conformity as to dogma and outward observance, failed to inspire genuine respect for religion.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _RESULTS OF INTOLERANCE_]

It will thus be seen how little really was gained for religion by the spirit of fierce intolerance largely responsible for the material causes of decadence which we have passed rapidly in review. The irrational resolve to enforce unity of faith at every cost spurred Ferdinand and Isabella to burn and pauperize those among their subjects who were most economically valuable, to expel those who could not be reduced to conformity and to institute a system of confiscation of which we have seen the destructive influence on industry and on the credit on which commerce and industry depend, while the application of this to the condemnation of the dead not only brought misery on innocent descendants but unsettled titles and involved all transactions in insecurity. This sanctified the ambition of Charles V with the halo of religion. This was the motive which underlay the suicidal policy of Philip II, leading to the endless wars with the Netherlands, to the rebellion of Granada and to the wasteful support of the Ligue. This was at the bottom of the Morisco disaffection, culminating in the expulsion of 1610, just after Philip III had practically accepted the loss of Holland by the truce of 1609. The land was robbed of its most industrious classes, it was drained of its bravest soldiers, its trade and productiveness were fatally crippled, and it was reduced to the lowest term of financial exhaustion, all for the greater glory of God, and in the belief that it was avenging offences to God. To meet the exigencies arising from this, and from the thoughtless extravagance of the monarchs, the labor, on which rested the resources of the State, was crushed to earth and subjected to burdens that defeated their own ends, for they drove the producer in despair from the soil. Productive industry and commerce, enfeebled by the expulsions, were so handicapped that they dwindled almost to extinction and passed virtually into the hands of foreigners, who dealt under the mask of _testas ferrias_--of Spaniards who lent their names to the real principals, for the most part the very heretics whom Spain had exhausted herself to destroy. Trade and credit were hampered, not only through the vitiation of the currency but through the ever-impending risk of sequestration and confiscation, and the impediments of the censorship as developed in the _visitas de navios_. The blindness and inefficiency of the Government intensified in every way the evils created by its mistaken policy but, at the root of all, lay the prolonged and relentless determination to enforce conformity, at a time when the industrial and commericial era was opening, which was to bring wealth and power to the nations wise enough and liberal enough to avail themselves of its opportunities--opportunities which Spain was invited virtually to monopolize through its control of the trade of the Indies and the production of the precious metals. There is melancholy truth in the boast of Doctor Pedro Peralta Barnuevo, in his relation of the Lima auto of 1733, that the determination to enforce unity of faith at all costs had rendered Spain rather a church than a monarchy, and her kings protectors of the faith rather than sovereigns. She was a temple, in which the altars were cities and the oblations were men, and she despised the prosperity of the State in comparison with devotion to religion.[1126]

Isabella and her Hapsburg descendants were but obeying the dictates of conscience and executing the laws of the Church, when they sought to suppress heresy and apostasy by force, and they might well deem it both duty and good policy at a time when it was universally taught that unity of faith was the surest guarantee of the happiness and prosperity of nations. Spain, with accustomed thoroughness, carried out this theory for three centuries to a _reductio ad absurdum_, through the Inquisition, organized, armed and equipped to the last point of possible perfection for its work. The elaborate arguments of its latest defender only show that it cannot be defended without also defending the whole policy of the House of Hapsburg, which wrought such misery and degradation.[1127] It was the essential part of a system and, as such, it contributed its full share to the ruin of Spain.

[Sidenote: _INFLUENCE ON THE PEOPLE_]

That occasionally even an inquisitor could have a glimmer of the truth appears from a very remarkable memorial addressed to Philip IV by a member of the Suprema, with regard to the Portuguese Jews. He states that they consider the rigor of the Inquisition as a blessing, since it drives them from Spain to other lands, where they can enjoy their religion and acquire prosperity. He wishes to prevent this exodus, which is depriving Spain of population and wealth and exposing it to peril, and to win back those who have expatriated themselves, to which end he proposes greatly to soften inquisitorial severity in regard to confiscation, imprisonment and the wearing of the sanbenito, except in the case of hardened impenitents. He would welcome them back and, even if their Catholicism were merely external, he argues that their children would become good Catholics, even as has proved to be the case with the descendants of the Castilian Jews. Indeed, he goes so far as to urge that foreigners in general should be encouraged to bring their capital to Spain, to settle and be naturalized, to marry Spanish wives and thus minister to the wealth and prosperity of the land.[1128] The worldly wisdom of this was too oppugnant to the prejudices of the time, which clamored, as we have seen, for extermination and isolation, and its sagacious counsels were unheeded. The Judaizers were driven forth, to aid in building up Holland with their wealth and intelligence, and Spain, in ever deepening poverty, continued to cherish the ideals which she had embodied in the Inquisition.

There was one service the performance of which it was never tired of claiming for itself and is still claimed for it by its advocates--that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it preserved Spain from the religious wars which desolated France and Germany. This service may well be called in question, for the temperament and training of the Spanish nation render ludicrous the assumption that a couple of hundred heretics, among whom but half a dozen had the spirit of martyrdom for their faith, could cause such spread of dissidence as to endanger peace; yet even should we admit this service, its method, in causing intellectual torpor and segregating the nation from all influences from abroad, only postponed the inevitable, while intensifying the disturbance when the change should come from medievalism to modernism. The nineteenth century bore, in an aggravated form, the brunt which should have fallen on the sixteenth. When the spirit of the Revolution broke in, it found a population sedulously trained to passive obedience to the State and submissiveness to the Church. It had been so long taught, by theocratic absolutism, that it must not think or reason for itself, that it had lost the power of reasoning on the great problems of life. It was without reverence for law, for it was accustomed to see the arbitrary will of an absolute sovereign override the law, and it was without experience to choose between the sober realities of responsible government and the glittering promises of ardent idealists. Yet the Revolution passed away leaving matters as they were before. The habit of unquestioning submission, inherited through generations, has become so fixed a part of the national character that, as we are told, the people fail to recognize that they are as completely under bondage to Caciquism as erstwhile they were to monarchy--that in fact the nation is still in its infancy and is unfit to govern itself.[1129]

As in temporal, so it has been in the spiritual field. In the turmoil of the Revolution the Inquisition died a natural death, but the Church filled the vacancy. It had grown so accustomed to the acceptance, on all hands, of its divine mission, it had so long enjoyed unassailable wealth and power, that it could not adapt itself to the necessities of the new situation and, when it could not rely upon the brute force of the State, it called into play the popular passions which it had fostered. As an irreconcileable, it provoked the attacks made on its overgrown wealth and numbers; it was uncompromising and would listen to no adjustment, for it claimed the full benefit of the canon law under which it was exempted from all interference by the State; its attitude was of immovable hostility to the new order of things, and it suffered the rough handling that inevitably resulted, courting martyrdom rather than tamely to permit profane hands to be laid upon the ark. It has thus continued to be an unassimilable element in the political situation, its policy directed from Rome and the vast influence of its perfect organization employed to retard rather than to stimulate progress in good government and material prosperity.[1130] What may be the outcome of the pending struggle between Church and State, aroused by the recognition of civil marriage, it is too early to predict.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _INDIFFERENCE TO MORALS_]

Thus the conclusion that may be drawn from our review of the causes underlying the misfortunes of Spain is that what may fairly be attributable to the Inquisition is its service as the official instrument of the intolerance that led to such grave results, and its influence on the Spanish character in intensifying that intolerance into a national characteristic, while benumbing the Spanish intellect until it may be said for a time to have almost ceased to think. The objects for which it was so shrewdly and so carefully organized were effectually attained and, in the eyes of experienced statesmen, at the time of its fullest development, it was the bulwork of the faith. In 1573, Leonardo Donato reflects the prevailing view in governmental circles when he speaks of its authority and severity as absolutely necessary, for the number of the New Christians was everywhere so great, recently baptized with God knows what disposition, and with ancestral memories still vivid, that, if it were not for the incessant watch kept over them by the Inquisition, there would be great danger that Spain would lose her religion. In 1581, Gioan Francesco Morosini declares that, although the Spaniards were in appearance the most devout and Catholic of nations, yet, what between the Jews, Moriscos and heretics, Spain would be more infected than Germany or England if it were not for the fear inspired by the severity of the Inquisition; and the same views are expressed by Giambattista Confalonieri in 1591, and by the Lucchese envoy Damiano Bernardini, in 1602.[1131] Yet the faith, thus sedulously preserved at such fearful cost, was largely, as we have seen, one of exterior observance, without corresponding internal piety, ready to burst into flame for the maintenance of a dogma like the Immaculate Conception, and to earn heaven by paying for masses and anniversaries and chaplaincies, but not to labor for it by purity of life and self-abnegation, or by obeying the divine command to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow. The natural result of this, when brought face to face with modern conditions, is that Cánovas del Castillo, in a debate in the Córtes of 1869, declared with sorrow that Spain, of all nations, was the one most indifferent to religion, and a recent author asserts that there would be no hazard in affirming the Spaniards to be the most irreligious, indifferent, and practically atheist people in Europe.[1132]

In fact, the dissociation of religion from morals--the incongruous connection of ardent zeal for dogma with laxity of life--was stimulated by the Inquisition. As we have seen, it paid no attention to morals and thus taught the lesson that they were unimportant in comparison with accuracy of belief. No matter how dissolute was the conduct of the confessor with his spiritual daughters, he was safe so long as he did not commit a technical transgression inferring suspicion of misbelief as to the sacrament, and even when he neglected these precautions we have seen how benignant was the treatment extended to him. It is true that, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Inquisition showed remarkable ardor in prosecuting those who gave utterance to the common opinion that there was no sin in simple fornication between the unmarried, and that in large measure it suppressed the utterance, but, as it punished only the utterance and not the sin, this did nothing to advance morality. The same may be said of its ignorant destruction of works of art which it regarded as indecent and the occasional prohibition of a book or play that evoked its disapprobation. In the absence of more serious work a few cases may be found of its undertaking to vindicate morals, but they are too rare for us to attribute to them any motive save a desire to intermeddle. The advancement of morality in fact was no part of its functions as a bulwark of the faith; rather, indeed, it aided in disseminating corruption by its custom of reading at the autos de fe sentences _con méritos_ of which the details were an effective popular education in vice.[1133] The result is seen in the seventeenth century, when the only heretics were the scattered and persecuted Portuguese, and yet there has probably never existed a society more abandoned to corruption--so abandoned, indeed, that even the sense of shame was lost. Padre Corella was no rigorist but, towards the close of the century, he draws a hideous picture of social conditions; everywhere, he says, is vice and crime, lust and cruelty, fraud and rapine, in the seats of trade, in the halls of justice, in the family, in the court, in the churches, while the clergy, if possible, are worse than the laity. Philip IV, who so religiously supported the Inquisition, was not only notorious for his licentiousness, but amused himself with scandalously sacrilegious comedies and farces in his palace theatre, where the scenes and persons of Scripture were made subjects of ridicule, and this style passed into popular literature and rhymes which escaped the censure.[1134]

[Sidenote: _CONTEMPT FOR LAW_]

Spanish theology, which was supreme in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, made only one real contribution--the invention of Probabilism by Bartolomé de Medina in his commentaries on Aquinas in 1577. On this was founded the new science of Moral Theology, devoted to evading the penalties of sin, and to applying to the decrees of God the favorite Spanish device for eluding those of the king, by obeying and not executing. Escobar, held up to an infamous immortality by Pascal, merely compiled what he found in theologians of the highest authority and, when the laxity of the Jesuit Moya's _Opusculum_ called forth a papal prohibition in 1666, repeated in 1680, the Spanish Inquisition asserted its independence by refusing to put the work on the Index.[1135] The practical influence of all this is described in a memorial of nine Spanish bishops, in 1717, to Clement XI, against the _Consultas Morales_ of the Capuchin Martin de Torricella, in which they state that Probabilism had undermined all morality and all obedience to divine, municipal and canon law, and that multitudes lived disorderly lives under appeal to probabilistic casuistry, for so-called probable opinions could be had to justify whatever men desired to do.[1136]

If the power of the Inquisition thus was withheld when it might have been exerted with benefit to society, it was actively employed, under the later Hapsburgs, to loosen the bonds of social order and stimulate contempt for law. To it was largely attributable the virtual anarchy of Spain, during the seventeenth century, arising from the numerous competing jurisdictions and the contempt felt for the royal officials. This found its origin in the insolent audacity with which the Inquisition enforced its claims to jurisdiction. When the royal officials were excommunicated, arrested and imprisoned without scruple, and the highest courts were treated with contempt and contumely, respect for law and its ministers was fatally weakened. That the other privileged jurisdictions--the Cruzada, the spiritual, and the military--should follow the example was inevitable, and the social condition of Spain became deplorable.[1137] In 1677, the Council of Castile represented to Carlos II the evils thus inflicted on the people by the two chief offenders, the Inquisition and the Cruzada, the most oppressive form of which was the abuse of excommunication for matters purely secular. The Council had endeavored to remedy this, but its authority had been suspended and it was powerless to protect the vassals of the crown. Carlos feebly replied that, although he could deprive them of the royal jurisdiction which they abused, yet he deemed it better not to do so, and he contented himself with prohibiting the use of censures in temporal matters--a prohibition which of course was disregarded.[1138] In the very next year Carlos was made to feel his powerlessness in the face of the arrogant superiority asserted by the Inquisition.

When, in 1678, the raid on the whole trading community of Majorca gave promise of immense confiscations, Carlos prudently ordered, May 30th, the viceroy to look after the safety of the sequestrations. The viceroy thereupon asked for inventories or statements and, on their refusal, made threats of taking further measures. The tribunal reported to the Suprema which instructed the inquisitors to defend their jurisdiction by censures and, if necessary, by a _cessatio a divinis_, when, if this did not suffice, they were to entrust their prisoners to the bishop and sail for Spain, reporting to the pope. After despatching this defiant and revolutionary missive, the Suprema, on August 8th, condescended to inform the king of it in the form of a stinging rebuke. The request of the viceroy, it said, was an unexampled assault on religion and the Holy See, and also a profanation of the most venerable sacredness of the Inquisition; sequestrated property was ecclesiastical property until confiscated, and to allow a layman to control it would be subversive of all law, as well as a violation of the secrecy of the Inquisition. Carlos humbly apologized; he had not meant to show distrust and would punish the viceroy if he had exceeded his instructions, but he complained that, without notice to him, the inquisitors should have been ordered to leave Majorca, and thus cause irreparable evils. The Suprema, in reply, followed up its advantage. The abandonment of Majorca by the inquisitors would be a less evil than violating the secrecy of the Inquisition; the viceroy should have positive orders to keep his hands off, and the king ought to have consulted it before issuing such instructions; this would have prevented all trouble, for the operations of the Inquisition were so special and peculiar that even his superior intelligence could not understand them without explanations.[1139] This insolence accomplished its purpose; Carlos was effectually snubbed, and we have seen how small was the share of the spoils eventually doled out to him.

[Sidenote: _DOMINATION_]

The Inquisition, in fact, was virtually an independent power in the state, which asserted itself after the vigorous personality of Ferdinand had been forgotten. Its aspiration to dominate the land was revealed in the projected Order of _Santa María de la Espada blanca_ which Philip II was shrewd enough to crush while yet there was time, but the measure of independence which it had already attained was seen when the Córtes of the kingdoms of Aragon sought to get the signature of the inquisitor-general, as well as of the king, to the concessions which they secured, and when the Inquisition ignored the royal agreements, even to the point of deliberately contravening them in the matter of confiscations. It was manifested, in the affair of Antonio Pérez, when Philip II was obliged to call it to his assistance, and it followed its own interests in disregard of the royal policy. So, in the long struggle with Bilbao over the _visitas de navios_, it virtually set at defiance both the crown and all the authorities of Biscay. If it helped the monarchy in the struggle with Rome over the regalías, when it had thus secured its independence of the papal Inquisition it had no scruple in turning its powers of censorship against the royal prerogative. But for the advent of the Bourbon dynasty, it might reasonably have looked forward to becoming eventually dominant, for it combined legislative and executive functions, temporal and spiritual jurisdiction, and asserted, like the Church, the right to define the limits of its own powers. Its whole career, indeed, shows how baseless is the modern theory that it was an instrument of the State in establishing the autocracy of the monarch. If the fallacy of this requires further proof it is sufficiently demonstrated, even under the first of the Bourbons, by the fate of Macanaz, whom it dismissed from power and condemned to a life of poverty and exile because, in the service of the king, he endeavored to render it what Ranke and Gams fancy it to have been. It is true that, in its period of decadence, it joined forces with the crown to withstand the inroad of free thought, which was equally threatening to both, and that it employed its expiring power to suppress political as well as spiritual heresy, but in this it was fighting its own battle as much as that of the monarchy on which it depended for existence.

* * * * *

Defenders of the Inquisition, in the controversy over its suppression and since then, have relied largely on the assertion that, during its existence, no voice was raised against it, that all organs of public opinion and all writers praised it, as the protector of religion, and as extremely careful to administer exact justice. So far from this being the case, we have seen its own admissions (Vol. I, p. 538) of the hearty hatred felt for it and its officials, and we have heard the complaints of the Córtes of Valladolid in 1518 and 1523, of Coruña in 1520 and of Madrid in 1575, besides the ceaseless struggles of Aragon and Catalonia, whose Córtes had not been reduced to servility. What was its reputation throughout Europe may be gauged by the fact that, in 1535, when João III was endeavoring to have an Inquisition of his own in Portugal, and there was talk of referring the subject to the general council then expected shortly to assemble, his ambassador at Rome, Martinho, Archbishop of Funchal, warned him that, if the matter was broached in the council, it would result in abolishing the Inquisition of Spain.[1140] In Spain, its reputation is to be gathered from the unbiased reports of the Venetian envoys, who lauded its services in the suppression of heresy, and to whom, as practical statesmen, it was an object of wonder and admiration, as a machine perfectly devised to keep the people in abject subjection. In these reports it is observable that, while all are emphatic as to its rigor, not one hazards approval of its justice. The envoys were profoundly impressed by the universal awe which it inspired. As early as 1525, Gasparo Contarini tells us that every one trembled before it, for its severity and the dread entertained for it were greater even than for the Council of Ten. In 1557, Federico Badoero speaks of the terror caused by its pitiless procedure. In 1563, Paolo Tiepolo, after dwelling on the secrecy and unsparing rigor of its judgements, says that every one shudders at its very name, as it has supreme authority over the property, life, honor and even the souls of men. Two years later Giovanni Soranzo speaks of the great fear inspired by it, for its authority transcends incomparably that of the king. In 1567, Antonio Tiepolo echoes these assertions, and all agree in their comments on the influence of the mysterious secrecy of its operation and the relentless severity of its action.[1141]

[Sidenote: _HABITUAL SELF-RESTRAINT_]

It scarce needs this testimony to explain why no unfavorable opinion of the Inquisition is to be expected of Spaniards during its existence, except by those who spoke as mandatories of the people in the Córtes or high officials in contests over competencias. Terror rendered silence imperative, and secrecy made ignorance universal. The discharged prisoner was sworn to reveal nothing of what he had endured and any complaint of injustice subjected him to prosecution. Criticism was held to be impeding its action and was a crime subject to condign punishment. Writers had ever to keep in view its censorship, with the certainty that any ill-judged word would ensure the suppression of a book, and any attempt at self-justification would lead to worse consequences, as Belando found when a petition to be heard cost him life-long imprisonment and prohibition to use the pen. When, in the yearly Edict of Faith, every one was required, under pain of excommunication, to denounce any impeding, direct or indirect, of the tribunal, or any criticism of the justice of its operation, restraint became universal and habitual and, in the instinct of self-preservation, men would naturally seek to teach themselves and their children not even to think ill of the Inquisition lest, in some unguarded moment, a chance utterance might lead to prosecution and infamy. The popular _refran, Con el Rey y la Inquisicion, chiton_!--Silence as to the king and the Inquisition--reveals to us better than a world of argument, the result of this repression through generations, and its efficiency is seen in the fact that in Toledo, from 1648 to 1794, there was but a single trial for speaking ill of the Holy Office. Such training bore its fruits when autocracy broke down under the Revolution and the experiment of self-government was essayed.

The Spaniard was taught not alone to repress his opinions as to the Inquisition but to keep a guard on his tongue under all circumstances, not only in public but in the sacred confidence of his own family, for the duty of denunciation applied to husband and father, to wife and children. Even as early as 1534, the orthodox Juan Luis Vives complained to Erasmus that in those difficult times it was dangerous either to speak or to keep silent.[1142] The cautious Mariana tells us that the most grievous oppression caused by the introduction of the Inquisition was the deprivation of freedom of speech, which some persons regarded as a servitude worse than death.[1143] We have seen how seriously were treated even the most trivial and careless expressions, which could be tortured into disregard of some theological tenet or disrespect for some church observance, and it behooved every one to be on his guard at all times and in all places. The yearly Edict of Faith kept the terror of the Inquisition constantly before every man and was perhaps the most efficient device ever invented to subject a population to the fear of an ever-impending danger. No other nation ever lived through centuries under a moral oppression so complete, so minute and so all-pervading.

That the Inquisition inspired a dread greater than that felt for the royal authority is illustrated by a curious instance, in which it was utilized for good in subduing a lawless community. In 1588, Lupus Martin de Govilla, Inquisitor of Barcelona, in a visitation came to Montblanch, where no inquisitor had been for many years. He found it a populous town, torn by factions so bitter that men were slain in the streets, battles were fought in the plaza, and women at their windows were shot with arquebuses. After publishing the Edict of Faith he discovered that witnesses were afraid to come to him through the streets and, regarding this as a contempt of the Inquisition, he issued a proclamation forbidding the carrying of arquebuses and cross-bows, and his order was obeyed. He made an example of one offender by requiring him to hear mass as a penitent, banishing him and confiscating his arquebus, which quieted the people, so that the Inquisition could be carried on. Then a murder occurred, and the regidors procured from the viceroy full powers for him to pacify the town; by general agreement all placed themselves under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, as there was no safety under the royal, and they gave thanks to God that peace was restored, and that men could move around without arms. Govilla went to Poblet, when news was brought him of another murder; he returned and imprisoned and penanced those guilty, who complained to the viceroy, but the Audiencia, after examination dismissed the complaint, and this strange jurisdiction of the Inquisition seems to have continued for some ten years.[1144]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _STATISTICS OF VICTIMS_]

Before dismissing the impression produced by the severity of the Inquisition it will not be amiss to attempt some conjecture as to the totality of its operations, especially as regards the burnings, which naturally affected more profoundly the imagination. There is no question that the number of these has been greatly exaggerated in popular belief, an exaggeration to which Llorente has largely contributed by his absurd method of computation, on an arbitrary assumption of a certain annual average for each tribunal in successive periods. It is impossible now to reconstruct the statistics of the Inquisition, especially during its early activity, but some general conclusions can be formed from the details accessible as to a few tribunals.

The burnings without doubt were numerous during the first few years, through the unregulated ardor of inquisitors, little versed in the canon law, who seem to have condemned right and left, on flimsy evidence, and without allowing their victims the benefit of applying for reconciliation, for, while there might be numerous negativos, there certainly were few pertinacious impenitents. The discretion allowed to them to judge as to the genuineness of conversion gave a dangerous power, which was doubtless abused by zealots, and the principle that imperfect confession was conclusive of impenitence added many to the list of victims, while the wholesale reconciliations under the Edicts of Grace afforded an abundant harvest to be garnered under the rule condemning relapse. In the early years, moreover, the absent and the dead contributed with their effigies largely to the terrible solemnities of the quemadero.

Modern writers vary irreconcileably in their estimates, influenced more largely by subjective considerations than by the imperfect statistics at their command. Rodrigo coolly asserts as a positive fact that those who perished in Spain at the stake for heresy did not amount to 400 and that these were voluntary victims, who refused to retract their errors.[1145] Father Gams reckons 2000 for the period up to the death of Isabella, in 1504, and as many more from that date up to 1758.[1146] On the other hand, Llorente calculates that, up to the end of Torquemada's activity, there had been condemned 105,294 persons, of whom 8800 were burnt alive, 6500 in effigy and 90,004 exposed to public penance, while, up to 1524, the grand totals amounted to 14,344, 9372 and 195,937.[1147] Even these figures are exceeded by Amador de los Rios, who is not usually given to exaggeration. He assumes that, up to 1525, when the Moriscos commenced to suffer as heretics, the number of those burnt alive amounted to 28,540, of those burnt in effigy to 16,520 and those penanced to 303,847, making a total of 348,907 condemnations for Judaism.[1148] Don Melgares Marin, whose familiarity with the documents is incontestable, tells us that, in Castile, during 1481, more than 20,000 were reconciled under Edicts of Grace, more than 3000 were penanced with the sanbenito, and more than 4000 were burnt, but he adduces no authorities in support of the estimate.[1149]

[Sidenote: _STATISTICS OF VICTIMS_]

The only contemporary who gives us figures for the whole of Spain is Hernando de Pulgar, secretary of Queen Isabella. His official position gave him facilities for obtaining information, and his scarcely veiled dislike for the Inquisition was not likely to lead to underrating its activity. He states at 15,000 those who had come in under Edicts of Grace, and at 2000 those who were burnt, besides the dead whose bones were exhumed in great quantities; the number of penitents he does not estimate. Unluckily, he gives no date but, as his Chronicle ends in 1490, we may assume that to be the term comprised.[1150] With some variations his figures were adopted by subsequent writers.[1151] Bernáldez only makes the general statement that throughout Spain an infinite number were burnt and condemned and reconciled and imprisoned, and of those reconciled many relapsed and were burnt.[1152]

Imperfect as are the records, we may endeavor to test these various estimates by such evidence as is at hand respecting a few of the tribunals. In this we may commence with Seville, which was unquestionably the most active. The Inquisition had started there, as the centre of crypto-Judaism; it was the most populous city of Castile, with nearly half a million of inhabitants, and its unrivalled commercial activity rendered it peculiarly attractive to the Conversos, while Isabella's Andalusian decree of expulsion must have largely increased the number of pseudo-proselytes. In 1524, there was placed over the gateway of the castle of Triana, occupied by the tribunal, an inscription of which the purport is not entirely clear, but signifying that, up to that time, it had caused the abjuration of more than 20,000 heretics and had burnt nearly 1000 obstinate ones.[1153] This is probably an understatement, if we are to believe Bernáldez, who asserts that in eight years, from the founding of the Seville tribunal up to 1488, it had burnt in person more than 700 heretics, besides many effigies of fugitives and an infinite number of bones; those reconciled during the same period he estimates at 5000.[1154] Still its activity must soon have greatly diminished for, in 1502, Antoine de Lalaing, visiting the Castle of Triana, describes it as containing more than twenty heretic prisoners which he evidently regards as a large number, but which would argue a very moderate amount of persecution in view of the leisurely procedure that was becoming usual.[1155] There is therefore an apparent tendency to exaggerate the achievements of the Holy Office in the statement of its secretary Zurita, some half-century or more later, that in Seville alone, up to the year 1520, there were more than 4000 culprits burnt and more than 30,000 reconciled and penanced, besides the numerous fugitives, and he adds that an author, very diligent in the matter, affirms these figures to be exceedingly defective and that, in the archbishopric of Seville alone, there were condemned as Judaizing heretics, more than a hundred thousand persons, including those reconciled.[1156] Cardinal Contarini, when Venetian envoy in 1525, was evidently misled by this tendency to amplification, when he describes the Inquisition as having made a slaughter of the New Christians impossible to exaggerate.[1157]

[Sidenote: _STATISTICS OF VICTIMS_]

Unfortunately no authentic records have seen the light by which to test the accuracy of these varying estimates of the activity of the most destructive tribunal during the early period. It is otherwise with several of those that ranked next to it in importance. For the province of Toledo, as we have seen, the first tribunal was established at Ciudad Real where, in its two years of existence, it relaxed in person 47 and in effigy 98.[1158] Transferred to Toledo, in 1485, its operations at first were energetic, but they diminished greatly towards the end of the century until, in 1501, it had a spasmodic period of activity through the discovery of "La Moça de Herrera" (Vol. I, p. 186) a young Jewish prophetess, to whose numerous believers no mercy was shown, for those who had been reconciled thus incurred the penalty of relapse. The total operations of the Toledo tribunal, from its origin in 1485 until 1501, amount to 250 relaxed in person, over 500 in effigy, about 200 imprisoned and 5200 reconciled under Edicts of Grace. Of the personally relaxed, nearly half, or 117, were followers of the prophetess, leaving only 139 ordinary Judaizers and, of those imprisoned, about 140 may be accounted for in the same way.[1159] Saragossa was reckoned as one of the most deadly tribunals in Spain--indeed, Llorente remarks that if he had taken it and Toledo as the basis of his calculations, he would have tripled the number of victims.[1160] For this we have the details of the sixty-five autos, held from 1485 to 1502, furnished by the record printed in the Appendix to Volume I. Summarized, this gives the totals of 119 burnt alive, 5 quartered, beheaded or strangled prior to burning, 3 bodies burnt, 29 effigies burnt and 458 penanced, or an aggregate of 614.[1161] The _Libro Verde de Aragon_, moreover, gives us an official list of the residents of Saragossa burnt, from 1483 to 1574, in summarizing which it appears that, during these ninety-two years, the total of relaxations in person was 125 and in effigy 77, including seven witches, three sorcerers and four Protestants. Tabulation by years emphasizes the diminution of activity after the close of the fifteenth century.[1162]