Chapter II: Retrospect (3)

Barcelona is another important tribunal of which we have accurate statistics during its early years, furnished by the royal archivist, Pere Miguel Carbonell. From its foundation to the end of Torquemada's career, in 1498, there were thirty-one autos celebrated in Barcelona, Tarragona, Lérida, Gerona, Perpignan, Vich, Elne and Balaguer. In these the totals are only 10 strangled and burnt, 13 burnt alive, 15 dead and 430 burnt in effigy, 1 reconciled in effigy, 116 penanced with prison and 304 reconciled for spontaneous confession.[1163]

Valencia, of all the tribunals, was the one which best maintained its activity throughout the sixteenth century, owing to the dense Morisco population. We have a list of all persons imprisoned for heresy, from the beginning in 1485 up to 1592 inclusive, amounting in all to 3104, of whom 530 were contributed by the last four years, 1589-92, when the persecution of the Moriscos was particularly active. There is also an alphabetical list of persons relaxed, from the beginning until 1593, unfortunately imperfect and ending with the letter N, but, by adding twenty-five per cent. we can obtain a reasonably close approximation to the total. The list as we have it gives 515 relaxations in person and 383 in effigy, or, with the addition of twenty-five per cent., 643 of the former and 479 of the latter, being nearly an average of six per annum of the former and four and a half of the latter.[1164]

Valladolid had the most extensive territory of all the tribunals, but it comprised the northern provinces, where the New Christians were comparatively few. It was not organized for work until 1488, making its first arrest on September 29th of that year, and holding its first auto on June 19, 1489, when, after nine months' work on new ground, there were but eighteen relaxations in person and four in effigy. The next auto recorded did not occur until January 5, 1492, when the relaxations in person numbered thirty-two and in effigy two.[1165] This, while sufficiently cruel, indicates that the victims in the northern provinces bore but a small proportion to those in the southern.

[Sidenote: _STATISTICS OF VICTIMS_]

At the other extremity of Spain was the little tribunal of Majorca, which acquired a sudden and sinister reputation by the occurrences of 1678 and 1691. It started in 1488 and for some years was fairly active, lapsing in time into virtual torpor, as far as persecution was concerned, so that, including its autos of 1678 and 1691, the whole aggregate of its work for over two centuries amounted to 139 relaxations in person, 482 in effigy and 637 reconciliations, in addition to 338 reconciled under Edicts of Grace in 1488 and 1491.[1166]

In the later periods there are records which enable us to reach a fairly accurate computation of the activity of some at least of the tribunals. A few of these I have had the opportunity of consulting and the researches of future students will doubtless in time compile tolerably complete statistics for the second and third centuries of the Inquisition, after the Suprema had compelled the tribunals to render periodical reports.

[Sidenote: _CONSCIENTIOUS CRUELTY_]

We have those of Toledo, from 1575 to 1610, not wholly complete, for the auto of 1595 is omitted, and the MS. breaks off at the commencement of that of 1610. Toledo, at the time, was the most important tribunal in Spain, for it included Madrid, yet during these thirty-five years the relaxations amount to only eleven in person and fifteen in effigy, so that, allowing for the omissions, there may have been one in person every three years and one in effigy every two years, while the various penances number in all nine hundred and four.[1167] Small as are these results they continued to diminish. For the same tribunal we have a record extending from 1648 to 1794 and, during this century and a half, there were only eight relaxations in person and sixty-three in effigy, the latest execution occurring in 1738. This gives us an average of one of the former every eighteen years and one of the latter every two years and a quarter. In addition, there were a thousand and ninety-four penanced in various ways.[1168] It is true that, about 1650, a separate tribunal was erected in Madrid, but a list of relaxations there, from its foundation up to 1754, when relaxation had virtually become obsolete, gives us only an aggregate of nineteen in person and sixteen in effigy, or one in every five years of the former and in six years of the latter.[1169] During the height of the renewed persecution of Judaizers in the eighteenth century, in the whole of the sixty-four autos celebrated throughout Spain from 1721 to 1727, the total number of relaxations was seventy-seven in person and seventy-four in effigy, making an average of about eleven a year of each class--a grim record enough, but vastly less than has been popularly accepted.[1170] Nor must it be forgotten that, in the vast majority of cases, the victim was mercifully strangled before the fire was set. We have seen how very small was the proportion of impenitents who persevered to the last and refused to earn the garrote by professing conversion.

The material at hand as yet is evidently insufficient to justify even a guess at the ghastly total. Yet, after all, it is not a matter of as much moment, as seems to have been imagined, to determine how many human beings the Inquisition consigned to the stake, how many bones it exhumed, how many effigies it burnt, how many penitents it threw into prison or sent to the galleys, how many orphans its confiscations cast penniless on the world. The story is terrible enough without reducing it to figures. Its awful significance lies in the fact that men were found who conscientiously did this, to the utmost of their ability, in the name of the gospel of peace and of Him who came to teach the brotherhood of man. It is enough to know that the inquisitors used their utmost efforts to stamp out what they deemed heresy, and the tale of their victims is not the gauge of their cruelty but of the number of heretics whom they could discover. Save when pride or cupidity or ambition may have been the impelling motive, the men are not to be blamed, but the teaching which gave them such a conception of the duty so relentlessly performed, and framed a system of procedure which shrouded their acts in darkness and deprived the accused of his legitimate means of defence. The good Cura de los Palacios was evidently a kindly natured man, but he declares that the fires lighted by the Inquisition shall burn to the very heart of the wood, until all Judaizers are slain and not one remains, even to their children if infected with the same leprosy.[1171]

In the hurried work of the early period there was no effort made to induce the conversion that would save the accused from the stake, but, in later times, the persistent labor bestowed on the condemned, during the three days prior to the auto, is evidence that the tribunals did not act through thirst of blood and that they were sincerely desirous to save both the body and soul of the heretic, in the same spirit that torture was sometimes piously administered in order to confirm the sufferer in the faith. Still, at times, there was doubtless a certain pride in affording to the populace the spectacle of a relaxation and thus demonstrating the authority of the Holy Office. That the public should relish the entertainment thus provided was natural, both from the inherent attraction which the sight of suffering has for a certain class of minds, and from the assiduous teaching that heresy was to be exterminated and that the slaying of a heretic was an acceptable offering to God. The Inquisitor Lorenzo Flores relates that, at the great Valladolid auto of 1609, where there were seventy penitents, many of them reconciled or sentenced to abjuration _de vehementi_, the people murmured because the one condemned to relaxation had professed conversion in time and had thus escaped the stake, and there were many complaints that the auto was not worth the expense of coming to see. He adds that, at Toledo, where there was no one relaxed, the people declared that the auto was a failure.[1172]

[Sidenote: _PROFITABLE PERSECUTION_]

There is something terrible in the fierce exultation which fanaticism experienced in the agonies of the misbeliever. Padre Garau, in his account of the Mallorquin auto of May 6, 1691, gloats with an exuberance, which he knew would be shared by his readers, on the agonies of the three impenitents who were burnt alive. As the flames reached them they struggled desperately to free themselves from the iron ring which clasped them to the stake. Rafael Benito Terongi succeeded in releasing himself but to no purpose, for he fell sideways into the fire. His sister Cathalina, who had boasted that she would cast herself into the flames, when they began to lick her, shrieked to be set free. Rafael Valls, who had professed stoical insensibility, stood motionless as a statue so long as only the smoke reached him, but, when the flames attacked him, he bent and twisted and writhed till he could no more; he was as fat as a sucking-pig and burnt internally, so that, after the flames left him, he continued burning like a hot coal and, bursting open, his entrails fell out like those of Judas. Thus burning alive they died, to burn forever in hell.[1173] Such were the lessons which the Church inculcated and such was the training which it gave to Spain, so that the auto de fe came to be regarded as a spectacular religious entertainment on the occasion of a royal visit, or in honor of the marriage of princes. Incidental to this was the cruel perpetuation of ancestral disgrace by the display of sanbenitos in churches, which Philip II rightly reckoned as the severest of inflictions. It intensified the terror inspired by the tribunal which, with a word, could consign a whole lineage to infamy. It kept alive and vigorous the horror of heresy and was aggravated by the statutes of Limpieza.

I hesitate to impugn the motives of those who were active in these terrible "triumphs of the faith," as they were fondly termed and, as stated above, the efforts to induce conversion show that there was no absolute thirst of blood, yet it is impossible, in reviewing the career of the Inquisition, not to recognize how powerful an adjunct to fanaticism was the profitableness of persecution. Had the Holy Office been a source of expense instead of income, we may reasonably doubt whether the ardor of Ferdinand and Isabella would have sufficed for its introduction, and it certainly would have had but a comparatively short and inactive career. We have seen how closely Ferdinand watched its expenditures and endeavored to keep down its cost, while enjoying the results of its productiveness, and how grudgingly the crown ministered to its necessities when aid was unavoidable. We have seen moreover how eagerly the Inquisition itself grasped at all sources of gain, how it was stimulated to convict its victims by the prospect of their confiscations, and how fines and penances were scaled, not by the guilt of the culprits but by its necessities; how jealously it guarded its receipts, and how little it recked of deception and mendacity when there was attempt to investigate its finances. After all is said, the Inquisition was an institution with a double duty--the destruction of heresy and the raising of money to encompass that destruction--and there are not wanting indications that the latter tended to supersede, or at least to obscure, the former. We may well question the purity of zeal which provided punishments and disabilities for heresy and at the same time chaffered over the market price of commutations and dispensations through which those penalties could be evaded. Not only confiscation but pecuniary penance and fines were a source of revenue provocative of continual abuse, and the rage for Limpieza provided abundant opportunities for extortion. The filthy odor of gain pervades all the active period of the Inquisition, and its comparative inactivity during its later career may perhaps be attributed as much to the absence of wealthy heretics as to the diminishing spirit of intolerance.

* * * * *

Various ingenious theories have been framed to relieve the Inquisition of responsibility for the remarkable eclipse of Spanish intellectual progress after the sixteenth century.[1174] It is one of the interesting problems in the history of literature that Spain, whose brilliant achievements throughout the Reformation period promised to make her as dominant in the world of letters as in military and naval enterprise, should, within the space of a couple of generations, have become the most uncultured land in Christendom, without a public to encourage learning and genius, and without learning and genius to stimulate a public. For this there must have been a cause and no other adequate one than the Inquisition has been discovered to account for this occultation.

[Sidenote: _INTELLECTUAL TORPIDITY_]

Indeed, but for the effort to argue it away, it would seem superfluous to insist that a system of severe repression of thought, by all the instrumentalities of Inquisition and State, is an ample explanation of the decadence of Spanish learning and literature, especially when coupled with the obstacles thrown around printing and publication by their combined censorship. The tribulations of Luis de Leon and Francisco Sánchez illustrate the dangers to which independent thinkers were exposed; the great printing-house of Portonares was ruined by the exigencies of the Inquisition in the matter of the Vatable Bible. All a priori considerations cast the responsibility on the censorship of thought, whether printed or expressed verbally in what were known as "propositions," and the burden of proof is thrown upon those who deny it. Their reliance is on the fact that Isabella stimulated the development of Spanish culture and, at the same time, established the Inquisition, which thus was in existence for more than a century before the decadence became marked. This is quite easily explicable. The Inquisition was founded to extirpate Jewish and Moorish apostasy; in this it long had ample work without developing its evil capacity in the direction of censorship, save in such a sporadic instance as Diego Deza's prosecution, in 1504, of the foremost scholar of his time, Elío Antonio de Nebrija, for venturing to correct the errors of the Vulgate for the Complutensian Polyglot, in the service of Ximenez who protected him and, when inquisitor-general, allowed him to resume his labors.[1175] With the advent of Lutheranism there gradually commenced the search for errors; crude Indexes of condemned books were compiled, reading and investigation became restricted; the pragmática of 1559 forbade education at foreign seats of learning and an elaborate system was gradually organized for protecting Spain from intellectual intercourse with other lands, while at home every phrase that could be construed in an objectionable sense was condemned. For awhile the men whose training had been free from these trammels persisted, in spite of persecution more or less severe, but they gradually died out and had no successors. In 1601 Mariana explained that he translated his History from the original Latin because there were few who understood that language; such learning brought neither honor nor profit and he feared the unskilfulness of those who threatened to undertake the task.[1176] It is true, however, that Latin was widely studied as essential to gaining place in Church or State, but to the neglect of everything else. Fray Peñalosa y Mondragon, in 1629, while boasting of the thirty-two universities and four thousand Latin schools and of Spanish pre-eminence in the supreme science of theology, for which there were infinite rewards, admits that there were none for the other sciences and arts, which were not regarded with favor or estimated as formerly.[1177] The intellectual energy of the nation, diverted from more serious channels, continued through another period to exhibit itself in the lighter fields of literature, where the names of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderon de la Barca, Quevedo de Villegas and others show of what Spanish intellect was still capable if it were allowed free play. Even these however passed away and had no successors in the growing intellectual torpor created by obscurantist censorship, and a dreary blank followed which even the stimulation attempted by Philip V could not relieve.

[Sidenote: _INFLUENCE FOR EVIL_]

To produce and preserve this torpor, by repressing all dangerous intellectuality, Spain was carefully kept out of the current of European progress. In other lands the debates of the Reformation forced Catholics as well as Protestants to investigations and speculations shocking to Spanish conservatism. The human mind was enabled to cast off the shackles of the Dark Ages, and was led to investigate the laws of nature and the relations of man to the universe and to God. From all this bustling intellectual movement Spain was carefully secluded. Short-sighted opportunism, seeing the turmoil which agitated France and England and Germany, might bless the institution which preserved the Peninsula in peaceful stagnation, but the price paid for torpidity was fearfully extravagant, for Spain became an intellectual nonentity. Even the great theologians and mystics disappeared from the field which they had made their own, and were succeeded by a race of probabilistic casuists, who sought only to promote and to justify self-indulgence. How intellectual progress fared under these influences may be estimated by a single instance. When, in England, Halley was investigating the periodicity of the comet which bears his name, in Spain learned professors of the universities of Salamanca and Saragossa were publishing tracts to reassure the frightened people, by proving that the dreadful portent boded evil only to the wicked--to the Turk and the heretic.[1178] The perfect success of the Inquisition in its work is manifested in the contrast between the eighteenth and the early sixteenth century, as illustrated by the statement of Juan Antonio Mayans y Siscar, that a cartload of the precious MSS. bestowed by Ximenes on his University of Alcalá was sold to the fire-works maker Torrecilla, for a display in honor of Philip V, and that several other similar collections had shared the same fate.[1179] Even after half a century of Bourbon effort to revitalize the dormant intellect of Spain, Father Rábago, the royal confessor, grudged the money spent on historiographers and academies; it was a pure gift, he says, for it yields no fruits.[1180] In fact, the awakening from intellectual stupor was slow, for Dom Clemencin tells us that there was less printing in Spain at the commencement of the nineteenth century than there had been in the fifteenth under Isabella.[1181]

It is impossible not to conclude that the Inquisition paralyzed both the intellectual and the economic development of Spain and it is scarce reasonable for Valera to complain that, when Spain was aroused from its mental marasmus, it was to receive a foreign and not to revive a native culture.[1182]

That science and art and literature should thus be submerged was a national misfortune, but even more to be deplored were the indirect consequences. Material progress became impossible, industry languished, and the inability to meet foreign competition assisted the mistaken internal policy of the government in prolonging and intensifying the poverty of the people. Nor was this the chief of the evils that sprung from keeping the mind of the nation in leading-strings, from repressing thought and from excluding foreign ideas, for the people were thus rendered absolutely unfitted to meet the inevitable change that came with the Revolution. To this, in large measure, may be attributed the sufferings through which Spain has passed in the transition from absolutism to modern conditions.

* * * * *

We have thus followed the career of the Spanish Inquisition from its foundation to its suppression; we have examined its methods and its acts and have sought to appraise its influence and its share in the misfortunes which overwhelmed the nation. The conclusion can scarce be avoided that its work was almost wholly evil and that, through its reflex action, the persecutors suffered along with the persecuted. Yet who can blame Isabella or Torquemada or the Hapsburg princes for their share in originating and maintaining this disastrous instrument of wrong? The Church had taught for centuries that implicit acceptance of its dogmas and blind obedience to its commands were the only avenues to salvation; that heresy was treason to God, its extermination the highest service to God and the highest duty to man. This grew to be the universal belief and, when Protestant sects framed their several confessions, each one was so supremely confident of possessing the secret of the Divine Being and his dealings with his creatures that all shared the zeal to serve God in the same cruel fashion.

Spanish Inquisition was only a more perfect and a more lasting institution than the others were able to fashion--as regards witchcraft, indeed, a more humane and rational one, for no one can appreciate the service which in this matter it rendered to Spain who has not realized the horrors of the witchcraft trials in which Catholic and Protestant Europe rivalled each other. The spirit among all was the same, and none are entitled to cast the first stone, unless we except the humble and despised Moravian Brethren and the disciples of George Fox. The faggots of Miguel Servet bear witness to the stern resolve of Calvinism. Lutheranism has its roll-call of victims. Anglicanism, under Edward VI, in 1550 undertook to organize an Inquisition on the Spanish pattern, which burnt Joan of Kent for Arianism, and the writ _De hæretico comburendo_ was not abolished until 1676.[1183] Much as we may abhor and deplore this cruelty, we must acquit the actors of moral responsibility, for they but acted in the conscientious belief that they were serving the Creator and his creatures. The real responsibility can be traced to distant ages, to St. Augustin and St. Leo the Great and the fathers, who deduced, from the doctrine of exclusive salvation, that the obstinate dissident is to be put to death, not only in punishment for his sin but to save the faithful from infection. This hideous teaching, crystallized into a practical system, came, in the course of centuries, to be an essential feature of the religion which it distorted so utterly from the love and charity inculcated by the Founder. To dispute it was a heresy subjecting the disputant to the penalties of heresy, and not to enforce it was to misuse the powers entrusted by God to rulers for the purpose of establishing his kingdom on earth.

[Sidenote: _RETRIBUTION_]

In Spain, under peculiar conditions, this resolve to enforce unity of belief, in the conviction that it was essential to human happiness here and hereafter, led to the framing of a system of so-called justice more iniquitous than has been evolved by the cruellest despotism; which placed the lives, the fortunes and the honor, not only of individuals but of their posterity, in the hands of those who could commit wrong without responsibility; which tempted human frailty to indulge its passions and its greed without restraint, and which subjected the population to a blind and unreasoning tyranny, against which the slightest murmur of complaint was a crime. The procedure which left the fate of the accused virtually in the hands of his judges was rendered doubly vicious by the inviolable secrecy in which it was enveloped--a secrecy which invited injustice by shielding its perpetrators and enabling them to make a parade of benignant righteousness. It was the crowning iniquity of the Inquisition that it thus afforded to the evil-minded the amplest opportunity of wrong-doing. History affords no parallel to such a skilfully organized system, working relentlessly through centuries.

The inquisitors were men, not demons or angels, and when injustice and oppression were rife in the secular courts it would be folly not to expect them in the impenetrable recesses of the Holy Office. If we have occasionally met with instances of kindliness and genuine desire to do right, we have incidentally encountered the opposite too often for us to doubt its frequency. That the rulers of the Inquisition recognized the danger of this and sought to diminish it by moral influences is evident from the admirable prayer the utterance of which, by a carta acordada of April 13, 1600, was ordered daily after mass at the opening of the morning session. This implored the Holy Spirit to fill their hearts and guide their judgements, so that they might not be misled by ignorance or favor, or be corrupted by gifts or acceptance of persons; that their decisions might be in unison with His will, so that in the end they might earn eternal reward by well-doing.[1184] Yet we might feel more confidence in the sincerity of this attempt to curb by moral influence the evil tendencies fostered by the system if there had been stern repression and punishment of official wrong-doing, instead of the habitual mercy which served as an encouragement.

After all, the great lesson taught by the history of the Inquisition is that the attempt of man to control the conscience of his fellows reacts upon himself; he may inflict misery but, in due time, that misery recoils on him or on his descendants and the full penalty is exacted with interest. Never has the attempt been made so thoroughly, so continuously or with such means of success as in Spain, and never has the consequent retribution been so palpable and so severe. The sins of the fathers have been visited on the children and the end is not yet. A corollary to this is that the unity of faith, which was the ideal of statesman and churchman alike in the sixteenth century, is fatal to the healthful spirit of competition through which progress, moral and material, is fostered. Improvement was impossible so long as the Holy See held a monopoly of salvation and, however deplorable were the hatred and strife developed by the rivalry which followed the Reformation, it yet was of inestimable benefit in raising the moral standards of both sides, in breaking down the stubbornness of conservatism and in rendering development possible. Terrible as were the wars of religion which followed the Lutheran revolt, yet were they better than the stagnation preserved in Spain through the efforts of the Inquisition. So long as human nature remains what it is, so long as the average man requires stimulation from without as well as from within, so long as progress is the reward only of earnest endeavor, we must recognize that rivalry is the condition precedent of advancement and that competition in good works is the most beneficent sphere of human activity.