Chapter III: The Inquisition and the Index (1)

Different Spirit in the Holy Office and the Company of Jesus--Both
needed by the Counter-Reformation--Heresy in the Early
Church--First Origins of the Inquisition in 1203--S. Dominic--The
Holy Office becomes a Dominican Institution--Recognized by the
Empire--Its early Organization--The Spanish Inquisition--Founded in
1484--How it differed from the earlier Apostolical
Inquisition--Jews, Moors, New Christians--Organization and History
of the Holy Office in Spain--Torquemada and his Successors--The
Spanish Inquisition never introduced into Italy--How the Roman
Inquisition organized by Caraffa differed from it--_Autos da fe_ in
Rome--Proscription of suspected Lutherans--The Calabrian
Waldenses--Protestants at Locarno and Venice--Digression on the
Venetian Holy Office--Persecution of Free Thought in
Literature--Growth of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum--Sanction
given to it by the Council of Trent--The Roman Congregation of the
Index--Final Form of the Censorship of Books under Clement
VIII.--Analysis of its Regulations--Proscription of Heretical
Books--Correction of Texts--Purgation and Castration--Inquisitorial
and Episcopal Licenses--Working of the System of this Censorship in
Italy--Its long Delays--Hostility to Sound Learning--Ignorance of
the Censors--Interference with Scholars in their Work--Terrorism of
Booksellers--Vatican Scheme for the Restoration of Christian
Erudition--Frustrated by the Tyranny of the Index--Dishonesty of
the Vatican Scholars--Biblical Studies rendered nugatory by the
Tridentine Decree on the Vulgate--Decline of Learning in
Universities--Miserable Servitude of Professors--Greek dies
out--Muretus and Manutius in Rome--The Index and its Treatment of
Political Works--Machiavelli--_Ratio Status_--Encouragement of
Literature on Papal Absolutism--Sarpi's Attitude--Comparative
Indifference of Rome to Books of Obscene or Immoral
Tendency--Bandello and Boccaccio--Papal attempts to Control
Intercourse of Italians with Heretics.

In pursuing the plan of this book, which aims at showing how the spirit of the Catholic revival penetrated every sphere of intellectual activity in Italy, it will now be needful to consider the two agents, both of Spanish origin, on whose assistance the Church relied in her crusade against liberties of thought, speech, and action. These were the Inquisition and the Company of Jesus. The one worked by extirpation and forcible repression; the other by mental enfeeblement and moral corruption. The one used fire, torture, imprisonment, confiscation of goods, the proscription of learning, the destruction or emasculation of books. The other employed subtle means to fill the vacuum thus created with spurious erudition, sophistries, casuistical abominations and false doctrines profitable to the Papal absolutism. Opposed in temper and in method, the one fierce and rigid, the other saccharine and pliant, these two bad angels of Rome contributed in almost equal measure to the triumph of Catholicism.

In the earlier ages of the Church, the definition of heresy had been committed to episcopal authority. But the cognizance of heretics and the determination of their punishment remained in the hands of secular magistrates. At the end of the twelfth century the wide diffusion of the Albigensian heterodoxy through Languedoc and Northern Italy alarmed the chiefs of Christendom, and furnished the Papacy with a good pretext for extending its prerogatives. Innocent III. in 1203 empowered two French Cistercians, Pierre de Castelnau and Raoul, to preach against the heretics of Provence. In the following year he ratified this commission by a Bull, which censured the negligence and coldness of the bishops, appointed the Abbot of Citeaux Papal delegate in matters of heresy, and gave him authority to judge and punish misbelievers. This was the first germ of the Holy Office as a separate Tribunal. In order to comprehend the facility with which the Pope established so anomalous an institution, we must bear in mind the intense horror which heresy inspired in the Middle Ages. Being a distinct encroachment of the Papacy upon the episcopal jurisdiction and prerogatives, the Inquisition met at first with some opposition from the bishops. The people for whose persecution it was designed, and at whose expense it carried on its work, broke into rebellion; the first years of its annals were rendered illustrious by the murder of one of its founders, Pierre de Castelnau. He was canonized, and became the first Saint of the Inquisition. Two other Peters obtained the like honor through their zeal for the Catholic faith: Peter of Verona, commonly called Peter Martyr, the Italian saint of the Dominican order; and Peter Arbues, the Spanish saint, who sealed with his blood the charter of the Holy Office in Aragon.

In spite of opposition, the Papal institution took root and flourished. Philip Augustus responded to the appeals of Innocent; and a crusade began against the Albigenses, in which Simon de Montfort won his sinister celebrity. During those bloody wars the Inquisition developed itself as a force of formidable expansive energy. Material assistance to the cause was rendered by a Spanish monk of the Augustine order, who settled in Provence on his way back from Rome in 1206. Domenigo de Guzman, known to universal history as S. Dominic, organized a new militia for the service of the orthodox Church between the years 1215 and 1219. His order, called the Order of the Preachers, was originally designed to repress heresy and confirm the faith by diffusing Catholic doctrine and maintaining the creed in its purity. It consisted of three sections: the Preaching Friars; nuns living in conventual retreat; and laymen, entitled the Third Order of Penitence or the Militia of Christ, who in after years were merged with the congregation of S. Peter Martyr, and corresponded to the familiars of the Inquisition. Since the Dominicans were established in the heat and passion of a crusade against heresy, by a rigid Spaniard who employed his energies in persecuting misbelievers, they assumed at the outset a belligerent and inquisitorial attitude. Yet it is not strictly accurate to represent S. Dominic himself as the first Grand Inquisitor. The Papacy proceeded with caution in its design of forming a tribunal dependent on the Holy See and independent of the bishops. Papal Legates with plenipotentiary authority were sent to Languedoc, and decrees were issued against the heretics, in which the Inquisition was rather implied than directly named; nor can I find that S. Dominic, though he continued to be the soul of the new institution until his death in 1221, obtained the title of Inquisitor.

Notwithstanding this vagueness, the Holy Office may be said to have been founded by S. Dominic; and it soon became apparent that the order he had formed, was destined to monopolize its functions. The Emperor Frederick II. on his coronation, in 1221, declared his willingness to support a separate Apostolical tribunal for the suppression of heresy. He sanctioned the penalty of death by fire for obstinate heretics, and perpetual imprisonment for penitents--forms of punishment which became stereotyped in the proceedings of the Holy Office.[78] The tribunal, now recognized as a Dominican institution, derived its authority from the Pope. The bishops were suffered to sit with the Inquisitors, but only in such subordinate capacity as left to them a bare title of authority.[79] The secular magistracy was represented by an assessor, who, being nominated by the Inquisitor, became his servile instrument. The expenses of the Court in prosecuting, punishing and imprisoning heretics, together with the maintenance of the Inquisitors and their guards, were thrown upon the communes which they visited. Such was the organization which the Popes, aided by S. Dominic, and availing themselves of the fanatical passions aroused in the Provencal wars, succeeded in creating for their own aggrandizement. It is strange to think that its ratification by the supreme secular power was obtained from an Emperor who died in contumacy, excommunicated and persecuted as an arch-heretic by the priests he had supported.

[Footnote 78: See Cantu, _Gli Eretici d'Italia_, vol. i. Discorso 5, and the notes appended to it, for Frederick's edicts and letters to Gregory IX. upon this matter of heresy. The Emperor treats of _Heretica Pravitas_ as a crime against society, and such, indeed, it then appeared according to the mediaeval ideal of Christendom united under Church and Empire. Yet Frederick himself, it will be remembered, died under the ban of the Church, and was placed by Dante among the heresiarchs in the tenth circle of Hell. We now regard him justly as one of the precursors of the Renaissance. But at the beginning of his reign, in his peculiar attitude of Holy Roman Emperor, he had to proceed with rigor against free-thinkers in religion. They were foes to the mediseval order, of which he was the secular head.]

[Footnote 79: Sarpi, 'Discorso dell'Origine,' etc. _Opere_, vol. iv. p. 6.]

This Apostolical Inquisition was at once introduced into Lombardy, Romagna and the Marches of Treviso. The extreme rigor of its proceedings, the extortions of monks, and the violent resistance offered by the communes, led to some relaxation of its original constitution. More authority had to be conceded to the bishops; and the right of the Inquisitors to levy taxes on the people was modified. Yet it retained its true form of a Papal organ, superseding the episcopal prerogatives, and overriding the secular magistrates, who were bound to execute its biddings. As such it was admitted into Tuscany, and established in Aragon. Venice received it in 1289, with certain reservations that placed its proceedings under the control of Doge and Council. In Languedoc, the country of its birth, it remained rooted at Toulouse and Carcassonne; but the Inquisition did not extend its authority over central and northern France.[80] In Paris its functions were performed by the Sorbonne. Nor did it obtain a footing in England, although the statute 'De Haeretico Comburendo,' passed in 1401 at the instance of the higher clergy, sanctioned the principles on which it existed.

The wide and ready acceptance of so terrible an engine of oppression enables us to estimate the profound horror which heresy inspired in the Middle Ages.[81] On the whole, the Inquisition performed the work for which it had been instituted. Those spreading sects, known as Waldenses, Albigenses, Cathari and Paterines, whom it was commissioned to extirpate, died away into obscurity during the fourteenth century; and through the period of the Renaissance the Inquisition had little scope for the display of energy in Italy. Though dormant, it was by no means extinct, however; and the spirit which created it, needed only external cause and circumstance to bring it once more into powerful operation. Meanwhile the Popes throughout the Renaissance used the imputation of heresy, which never lost its blighting stigma, in the prosecution of their secular ambition. As Sarpi has pointed out, there were few of the Italian princes with whom they came into political collision, who were not made the subject of such accusation.

[Footnote 80: See Christie's _Etienne Dolet_, chapter 21.]

[Footnote 81: Visitors to Milan must have been struck with the equestrian statue to the Podesta Oldrado da Trezzeno in the Piazza de'Mercanti. Underneath it runs an epitaph containing among the praises of this man: _Catharos ut debuit uxit_. An Archbishop of Milan of the same period (middle of the thirteenth century), Enrico di Settala, is also praised upon his epitaph because _jugulavit haereses_. See Cantu, _Gli Eretici d Italia_, vol. i. p. 108.]

The revival of the Holy Office on a new and far more murderous basis, took place in 1484. We have seen that hitherto there had been two types of inquisition into heresy. The first, which remained in force up to the year 1203, may be called the episcopal. The second was the Apostolical or Dominican: it transferred this jurisdiction from the bishops to the Papacy, who employed the order of S. Dominic for the special service of the tribunal instituted by the Imperial decrees of Frederick II. The third deserves no other name than Spanish, though, after it had taken shape in Spain, it was transferred to Portugal, applied in all the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and communicated with some modifications to Italy and the Netherlands.[82] Both the second and third types of Inquisition into heresy were Spanish inventions, patented by the Roman Pontiffs and monopolized by the Dominican order. But the third and final form of the Holy Office in Spain distinguished itself by emancipation from Papal and Royal control, and by a specific organization which rendered it the most formidable of irresponsible engines in the annals of religious institutions.

[Footnote 82: Sarpi estimates the number of victims in the Netherlands during the reign of Charles V. at 50,000; Grotius at 100,000. In the reign of Philip II. perhaps another 25,000 were sacrificed. Motley (_Rise of the Dutch Republic_, vol. ii. p. 155) tells how in February 1568 a sentence of the Holy Office, confirmed by royal proclamation, condemned all the inhabitants of the Netherlands, some three millions of souls, with a few specially excepted persons, to death. It was customary to burn the men and bury the women alive. In considering this institution as a whole, we must bear in mind that it was extended to Mexico, Lima, Carthagena, the Indies, Sicily, Sardinia, Oran, Malta. Of the working of the Holy Office in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies we possess but few authentic records. The _Histoire des Inquisitions_ of Joseph Lavallee (Paris, 1809) may, however, be consulted. In vol. ii. pp. 5-9 of this work there is a brief account of the Inquisition at Goa written by one Pyrard; and pp. 45-157 extend the singularly detailed narrative of a Frenchman, Dellon, imprisoned in its dungeons. Some curious circumstances respecting delation, prison life, and _autos da fe_ are here minutely recorded.]

The crimes of which the second or Dominican Inquisition had taken cognizance were designated under the generic name of heresy. Heretics were either patent by profession of some heterodox cult or doctrine; or they were suspected. The suspected included witches, sorcerers, and blasphemers who invoked the devil's aid; Catholics abstaining from confession and absolution; harborers of avowed heretics; legal defenders of the cause of heretics; priests who gave Christian burial to heretics; magistrates who showed lukewarmness in pursuit of heretics; the corpses of dead heretics, and books that might be taxed with heretical opinions. All ranks in the social hierarchy, except the Pope, his Legates and Nuncios, and the bishops, were amenable to this Inquisition. The Inquisitors could only be arraigned and judged by their peers. In order to bring the machinery of imprisonment, torture and final sentence into effect, it was needful that the credentials of the Inquisitor should be approved by the sovereign, and that his procedure should be recognized by the bishop. These limitations of the Inquisitorial authority safeguarded the crown and the episcopacy in a legal sense. But since both crown and episcopacy concurred in the object for which the Papacy had established the tribunal, the Inquisitor was practically unimpeded in his functions. Furnished with royal or princely letters patent, he traveled from town to town, attended by his guards and notaries, defraying current expenses at the cost of provinces and towns through which he passed. Where he pitched his camp, he summoned the local magistrates, swore them to obedience, and obtained assurance of their willingness to execute such sentences as he might pronounce. Spies and informers gathered round him, pledged to secrecy and guaranteed by promises of State-protection. The Court opened; witnesses were examined; the accused were acquitted or condemned. Then sentence was pronounced, to which the bishop or his delegate, often an Inquisitor, gave a formal sanction. Finally, the heretic was handed over to the secular arm for the execution of justice. The extraordinary expenses of the tribunal were defrayed by confiscation of goods, a certain portion being paid to the district in which the crime had occurred, the rest being reserved for the maintenance of the Holy Office.

Such, roughly speaking, was the method of the Inquisition before 1484; and it did not materially differ in Italy and Spain. Castile had hitherto been free from the pest. But the conditions of that kingdom offered a good occasion for its introduction at the date which I have named. During the Middle Ages the Jews of Castile acquired vast wealth and influence. Few families but felt the burden of their bonds and mortgages. Religious fanaticism, social jealousy, and pecuniary distress exasperated the Christian population; and as early as the year 1391, more than 5000 Jews were massacred in one popular uprising. The Jews, in fear, adopted Christianity. It is said that in the fifteenth century the population counted some million of converts--called New Christians, or, in contempt, Marranos: a word which may probably be derived from the Hebrew Maranatha. These converted Jews, by their ability and wealth, crept into high offices of state, obtained titles of aristocracy, and founded noble houses. Their daughters were married with large dowers into the best Spanish families; and their younger sons aspired to the honors of the Church. Castilian society was being penetrated with Jews, many of whom had undoubtedly conformed to Christianity in externals only. Meanwhile a large section of the Hebrew race remained faithful to their old traditions; and a mixed posterity grew up, which hardly knew whether it was Christian or Jewish, and had opportunity for joining either party.

A fertile field was now opened for Inquisitorial energy. The orthodox Dominican saw Christ's flock contaminated. Not without reason did earnest Catholics dread that the Church in Castile would suffer from this blending of the Jewish with the Spanish breed. But they had a fiery Catholic enthusiasm to rely upon in the main body of the nation. And in the crown they knew that there were passions of fear and cupidity, which might be used with overmastering effect. It sufficed to point out to Ferdinand that a persecution of the New Christians would flood his coffers with gold extorted from suspected misbelievers. No merely fabled El Dorado lay in the broad lands and costly merchandise of these imperfect converts to the faith. It sufficed to insist upon the peril to the State if an element so ill-assimilated to the nation were allowed to increase unchecked. At the same time, the Papacy was nothing loth to help them in their undertaking. Sixtus V., one of the worst of Pontiffs, sat then on S. Peter's chair. He readily discerned that a considerable portion of the booty might be indirectly drawn into his exchequer; and he knew that any establishment of the Inquisition on an energetic basis would strengthen the Papacy in its combat with national and episcopal prerogatives. The Dominicans on their side can scarcely be credited with a pure zeal for the faith. They had personal interests to serve by spiritual aggrandizement, by the elevation of their order, and by the exercise of an illimitable domination.

It was a Sicilian Inquisitor, Philip Barberis, who suggested to Ferdinand the Catholic the advantage he might secure by extending the Holy Office to Castile. Ferdinand avowed his willingness; and Sixtus IV. gave the project his approval in 1478. But it met with opposition from the gentler-natured Isabella. She refused at first to sanction the introduction of so sinister an engine into her hereditary dominions. The clergy now contrived to raise a popular agitation against the Jews, reviving old calumnies of impossible crimes, and accusing them of being treasonable subjects. Then Isabella yielded; and in 1481 the Holy Office was founded at Seville. It began its work by publishing a comprehensive edict against all New Christians suspected of Judaizing, which offense was so constructed as to cover the most innocent observance of national customs. Resting from labor on Saturday; performing ablutions at stated times; refusing to eat pork or puddings made of blood; and abstaining from wine, sufficed to color accusations of heresy. Men who had joined the Catholic communion after the habits of a lifetime had been formed, thus found themselves exposed to peril of death by the retention of mere sanitary rules.[83]

[Footnote 83: See Lavallee, _Histoire des Inquisitions_, vol. ii. pp. 341-361, for the translation of a process instituted in 1570 against a Mauresque female slave. Suspected of being a disguised infidel, she was exposed to the temptations of a Moorish spy, and convicted mainly on the evidence furnished by certain Mussulman habits to which she adhered. Llorente reports a similar specimen case, vol. i. p. 442. The culprit was a tinker aged 71, accused in 1528 of abstaining from pork and wine, and using certain ablutions. He defended himself by pleading that, having been converted at the age of 45, it did not suit his taste to eat pork or drink wine, and that his trade obliged him to maintain cleanliness by frequent washing. He was finally condemned to carry a candle at an _auto da fe_ in sign of penitence, and to pay four ducats, the costs of his trial. His detention lasted from September, 1529, till December 18, 1530.]

Upon the publication of this edict, there was an exodus of Jews by thousands into the fiefs of independent vassals of the crown--the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the Count of Arcos. All emigrants were _ipso facto_ declared heretics by the Holy Office. During the first year after its foundation, Seville beheld 298 persons burned alive, and 79 condemned to perpetual imprisonment. A large square stage of stone, called the Quemadero, was erected for the execution of those multitudes who were destined to suffer death by hanging or by flame. In the same year, 2000 were burned and 17,000 condemned to public penitence, while even a larger number were burned in effigy, in other parts of the kingdom.

While estimating the importance of these punishments we must remember that they implied confiscation of property. Thus whole families were orphaned and consigned to penury. Penitence in public carried with it social infamy, loss of civil rights and honors, intolerable conditions of ecclesiastical surveillance, and heavy pecuniary fines. Penitents who had been reconciled, returned to society in a far more degraded condition than convicts released on ticket of leave. The stigma attached in perpetuity to the posterity of the condemned, whose names were conspicuously emblazoned upon church-walls as foemen to Christ and to the State.

It is not strange that the New Christians, wealthy as they were and allied with some of the best blood in Spain, should have sought to avert the storm descending on them by appeals to Rome. In person or by procurators, they carried their complaints to the Papal Curia, imploring the relief of private reconciliation with the Church, special exemption from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, rehabilitation after the loss of civil rights and honors, dispensation from humiliating penances, and avvocation of causes tried by the Inquisition, to less prejudiced tribunals. The object of these petitions was to avoid perpetual infamy, to recover social status, and to obtain an impartial hearing in doubtful cases. The Papal Curia had anticipated the profits to be derived from such appeals. Sixtus IV. was liberal in briefs of indulgence, absolution and exemption, to all comers who paid largely. But when his suitors returned to Spain, they found their dearly-purchased parchments of no more value than waste paper. The Holy Office laughed Papal Bulls of Privilege to scorn, and the Pope was too indifferent to exert such authority as he might have possessed.

Meanwhile, the Inquisition rapidly took shape. In 1483 Thomas of Torquemada was nominated Inquisitor General for Castile and Aragon. Under his rule a Supreme Council was established, over which he presided for life. The crown sent three assessors to this board; and the Inquisitors were strengthened in their functions by a council of jurists. Seville, Cordova, Jaen, Toledo, became the four subordinate centers of the Holy Office, each with its own tribunal and its own right of performing _autos da fe_. Commission was sent out to all Dominicans, enjoining on them the prosecution of their task in every diocese.

In 1484 a General Council was held, and the constitution of the inquisition was established by articles. In these articles four main points seem to have been held in view. The first related to the system of confiscation, fines, civil disabilities, losses of office, property, honors, rights, inheritances, which formed a part of the penitentiary procedure, and by which the crown and Holy Office made pecuniary gains. The second secured secrecy in the action of the tribunal, whereby a door was opened to delation, and accused persons were rendered incapable of rational defense. The third elaborated the judicial method, so as to leave no loophole of escape even for those who showed a wish to be converted, empowering the use of torture, precluding the accused from choosing their own counsel, and excluding the bishops from active participation in the sentence. The fourth multiplied the charges under which suspected heretics, even after their death might be treated as impenitent or relapsed, so as to increase the number of victims and augment the booty.

The two most formidable features of the Inquisition as thus constituted, were the exclusion of the bishops from its tribunal and the secrecy of its procedure. The accused was delivered over to a court that had no mercy, no common human sympathies, no administrative interest in the population. He knew nothing of his accusers; and when he died or disappeared from view no record of his case survived him.

The Inquisition rested on the double basis of ecclesiastical fanaticism and protected delation. The court was _prima facie_ hostile to the accused; and the accused could never hope to confront the detectives upon whose testimony he was arraigned before it. Lives and reputations lay thus at the mercy of professional informers, private enemies, malicious calumniators. The denunciation was sometimes anonymous, sometimes signed, with names of two corroborative witnesses. These witnesses were examined, under a strict seal of secrecy, by the Inquisitors, who drew up a form of accusation, which they submitted to theologians called Qualificators. The qualificators were not informed of the names of the accused, the delator, or the witnesses. It was their business to qualify the case of heresy as light, grave, or violent. Having placed it in one of these categories, they returned it to the Inquisitors, who now arrested the accused and flung him into the secret prisons of the Holy Office. After some lapse of time he was summoned for a preliminary examination. Having first been cautioned to tell the truth, he had to recite the Paternoster, Credo, Ten Commandments, and a kind of catechism. His pedigree was also investigated, in the expectation that some traces of Jewish or Moorish descent might serve to incriminate him. If he failed in repeating the Christian shibboleths, or if he was discovered to have infidel ancestry, there existed already a good case to proceed upon. Finally, he was questioned upon the several heads of accusation condensed from the first delation and the deposition of the witnesses. If needful at this point, he was put to the torture, again and yet again.[84] He never heard the names of his accusers, nor was he furnished with a full bill of the charges against him in writing. At this stage he was usually remanded, and the judicial proceedings were deliberately lengthened out with a view of crushing his spirit and bringing him to abject submission. For his defence he might select one advocate, but only from a list furnished by his judges; and this advocate in no case saw the original documents of the impeachment. It rarely happened, upon this one-sided method of trial, that an accused person was acquitted altogether. If he escaped burning or perpetual incarceration, he was almost certainly exposed to the public ceremony of penitence, with its attendant infamy, fines, civil disabilities, and future discipline. Sentence was not passed upon condemned persons until they appeared, dressed up in a San Benito, at the place of punishment. This costume was a sort of sack, travestying a monk's frock, made of coarse yellow stuff, and worked over with crosses, flames, and devils, in glaring red. It differed in details according to the destination of the victim: for some ornaments symbolized eternal hell, and others the milder fires of purgatory. If sufficiently versed in the infernal heraldry of the Holy Office, a condemned man might read his doom before he reached the platform of the _auto_. There he heard whether he was sentenced to relaxation--in other words, to burning at the hands of the hangman--or to reconciliation by means of penitence. At the last moment, he might by confession _in extremis_ obtain the commutation of a death sentence into life-imprisonment, or receive the favor of being strangled before he was burned. A relapsed heretic, however--that is, one who after being reconciled had once again apostatized, was never exempted from the penalty of burning. To make these holocausts of human beings more ghastly, the pageant was enhanced by processions of exhumed corpses and heretics in effigy. Artificial dolls and decomposed bodies, with grinning lips and mouldy foreheads, were hauled to the huge bonfire, side by side with living men, women, and children. All of them alike--_fantoccini_, skeletons, and quick folk--were enveloped in the same grotesquely ghastly San Benito, with the same hideous yellow miters on their pasteboard, worm-eaten, or palpitating foreheads. The procession presented an ingeniously picturesque discord of ugly shapes, an artistically loathsome dissonance of red and yellow hues, as it defiled, to the infernal music of growled psalms and screams and moanings, beneath the torrid blaze of Spanish sunlight.

[Footnote 84: The Supreme Council forbade the repetition of torture; but this hypocritical law was evaded in practice by declaring that the torture had been suspended. Llorente, vol. i. p. 307.]

Spaniards--such is the barbarism of the Latinized Iberian nature--delighted in these shows, as they did and do in bull-fights. Butcheries of heretics formed the choicest spectacles at royal christenings and bridals.

At Seville the Quemadero was adorned with four colossal statues of prophets, to which some of the condemned were bound, so that they might burn to death in the flames arising from the human sacrifice between them.

In the autumn of 1484 the Inquisition was introduced into Aragon; and Saragossa became its headquarters in that State. Though the Aragonese were accustomed to the institution in its earlier and milder form, they regarded the new Holy Office with just horror. The Marranos counted at that epoch the Home Secretary, the Grand Treasurer, a Proto-notary, and a Vice-Chancellor of the realm among their members; and they were allied by marriage with the purest aristocracy. It is not, therefore, marvelous that a conspiracy was formed to assassinate the Chief Inquisitor, Peter Arbues. In spite of a coat-of-mail and an iron skullcap worn beneath his monk's dress, Arbues was murdered one evening while at prayer in church. But the revolt, notwithstanding this murder, flashed, like an ill-loaded pistol, in the pan. Jealousies between the old and new Christians prevented any common action; and the Inquisition took a bloody vengeance upon all concerned. It even laid its hand on Don James of Navarre, the Infant of Tudela.

The Spanish Inquisition was now firmly grounded. Directed by Torquemada, it began to encroach upon the crown, to insult the episcopacy, to defy the Papacy, to grind the Commons, and to outrage by its insolence the aristocracy. Ferdinand's avarice had overreached itself by creating an ecclesiastical power dangerous to the best interests of the realm, but which fascinated a fanatically-pious people, and the yoke of which could not be thrown off. The Holy Office grew every year in pride, pretensions, and exactions. It arrogated to its tribunal crimes of usury, bigamy, blasphemous swearing, and unnatural vice, which appertained by right to the secular courts. It depopulated Spain by the extermination and banishment of at least three million industrious subjects during the first 139 years of its existence. It attacked princes of the blood,[85] archbishops, fathers of the Tridentine Council. It filled every city in the kingdom, the convents of the religious, and the palaces of the nobility, with spies. The Familiars, or lay brethren devoted to its service, lived at charges of the communes, and debauched society by crimes of rapine, lust, and violence.[86] Ignorant and bloodthirsty monks composed its provincial tribunals, who, like the horrible Lucero el Tenebroso at Cordova, paralyzed whole provinces with a veritable reign of terror.[87] Hated and worshiped, its officers swept through the realm in the guise of powerful _condottieri_. The Grand Inquisitor maintained a bodyguard of fifty mounted Familiars and two hundred infantry; his subordinates were allowed ten horsemen and fifty archers apiece. Where these black guards appeared, city gates were opened; magistrates swore fealty to masters of more puissance than the king; the resources of flourishing districts were placed at their disposal. Their arbitrary acts remained unquestioned, their mysterious sentences irreversible. Shrouded in secrecy, amenable to no jurisdiction but their own, they reveled in the license of irresponsible dominion. Spain gradually fell beneath the charm of their dark fascination. A brave though cruel nation drank delirium from the poison-cup of these vile medicine-men, whose Moloch-worship would have disgusted cannibals.

[Footnote 85: Llorente, in his introduction to the _History of the Inquisition_, gives a long list of illustrious Spanish victims.]

[Footnote 86: See Llorente, vol. i. p. 349, for their outrages on women.]

[Footnote 87: For the history of Lucero's tyranny, read Llorente, vol. i. pp. 345-353. When at last he had to be deposed, it was not to a dungeon or the scaffold, but to his bishopric of Almeria that this miscreant was relegated.]

Torquemada was the genius of evil who created and presided over this foul instrument of human crime and folly. During his eighteen years of administration, reckoning from 1480 to 1498, he sacrificed, according to Llorente's calculation, above 114,000 victims, of whom 10,220 were burned alive, 6,860 burned in effigy, and 97,000 condemned to perpetual imprisonment or public penitence.[88] He, too, it was who in 1492 compelled Ferdinand to drive the Jews from his dominions. They offered 30,000 ducats for the war against Granada, and promised to abide in Spain under heavy social disabilities, if only they might be spared this act of national extermination. Then Torquemada appeared before the king, and, raising his crucifix on high, cried: 'Judas sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver. Look ye to it, if ye do the like!' The edict of expulsion was issued on the last of March. Before the last of July all Jews were sentenced to depart, carrying no gold or silver with them. They disposed of their lands, houses, and goods for next to nothing, and went forth to die by thousands on the shores of Africa and Italy. Twelve who were found concealed at Malaga in August were condemned to be pricked to death by pointed reeds.[89]

The exodus of the Jews was followed in 1502 by a similar exodus of Moors from Castile, and in 1524 by an exodus of Mauresques from Aragon. To compute the loss of wealth and population inflicted upon Spain by these mad edicts, would be impossible. We may wonder whether the followers of Cortez, when they trod the teocallis of Mexico and gazed with loathing on the gory elf-locks of the Aztec priests, were not reminded of the Torquemada they had left at home. His cruelty became so intolerable that even Alexander VI. was moved to horror. In 1494 the Borgia appointed four assessors, with equal powers, to restrain the blood-thirst of the fanatic.

[Footnote 88: Llorente, vol. i. p. 229. The basis for these and following calculations is explained _ib._ pp. 272-281.]

[Footnote 89: _Ibid._ vol. i. p. 263.]

After Torquemada, Diego Deza reigned as second Inquisitor General from 1498 to 1507. In these years, according to the same calculation, 2,592 were burned alive, 896 burned in effigy, 34,952 condemned to prison or public penitence.[90] Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros followed between 1507 and 1517. The victims of this decade were 3,564 burned alive, 1,232 burned in effigy, 48,059 condemned to prison or public penitence.[91] Adrian, Bishop of Tortosa, tutor to Charles V., and afterwards Pope, was Inquisitor General between 1516 and 1525. Castile, Aragon, and Catalonia, at this epoch, simultaneously demanded a reform of the Holy Office from their youthful sovereign. But Charles refused, and the tale of Adrian's administration was 1,620 burned alive, 560 burned in effigy, 21,845 condemned to prison or public penitence.[92] The total, during forty-three years, between 1481 and 1525, amounted to 234,526, including all descriptions of condemned heretics.[93] These figures are of necessity vague, for the Holy Office left but meager records of its proceedings. The vast numbers of cases brought before the Inquisitors rendered their method of procedure almost as summary as that of Fouquier Thinville, while policy induced them to bury the memory of their victims in oblivion.[94]

[Footnote 90: Llorente, p. 341.]

[Footnote 91: _Ibid._ p. 360.]

[Footnote 92: Llorente, p. 406.]

[Footnote 93: _Ib._ p. 407.]

[Footnote 94: I know that Llorente's calculations have been disputed: as, for instance, in some minor details by Prescott (_Ferd. and Isab._ vol. iii. p. 492). The truth is that no data now exist for forming a correct census of the victims of the Spanish Moloch; and Llorente, though he writes with the moderation of evident sincerity, and though he had access to the archives of the Inquisition, does not profess to do more than give an estimate based upon certain fixed data. However, it signifies but little whether we reckon by thousands or by fifteen hundreds. That foul monster spawned in the unholy embracements of perverted religion with purblind despotism cannot be defended by discounting five or even ten per cent. Let its apologists write for every 1000 of Llorente 100, and for every 100 of Llorente 10, and our position will remain unaltered. The Jesuit historian of Spain, Mariana, records the burning-of 2000 persons in Andalusia alone in 1482. Bernaldez mentions 700 burned in the one town of Seville between 1482 and 1489. An inscription carved above the portals of the Holy Office in Seville stated that about 1000 had been burned between 1492 and 1524.]

Sometimes, while reading the history of the Holy Office in Spain, we are tempted to imagine that the whole is but a grim unwholesome nightmare, or the fable of malignant calumny. That such is not the case, however, is proved by a jubilant inscription on the palace of the Holy Office at Seville, which records the triumphs of Torquemada. Of late years, too, the earth herself has disgorged some secrets of the Inquisition. 'A most curious discovery,' writes Lord Malmesbury in his Memoirs,[95] 'has been made at Madrid. Just at the time when the question of religious liberty was being discussed in the Cortes, Serrano had ordered a piece of ground to be leveled, in order to build on it; and the workmen came upon large quantities of human bones, skulls, lumps of blackening flesh, pieces of chains, and braids of hair. It was then recollected that the _autos da fe_ used to take place at that spot in former days. Crowds of people rushed to the place, and the investigation was continued. They found layer upon layer of human remains, showing that hundreds had been inhumanly sacrificed. The excitement and indignation this produced among the people was tremendous, and the party for religious freedom taking advantage of it, a Bill on the subject was passed by an enormous majority.' Let modern Spain remember that a similar Aceldama lies hidden in the precincts of each of her chief towns!

[Footnote 95: Vol. ii. p. 399.]

I have enlarged upon the details of the Spanish Inquisition for two reasons. In the first place it strikingly illustrates the character of the people who now had the upper hand in Italy. In the second place, its success induced Paul III., acting upon the advice of Giov. Paolo Caraffa, to remodel the Roman office on a similar type in 1542. It may at once be said that the real Spanish Inquisition was never introduced into Italy.[96] Such an institution, claiming independent jurisdiction and flaunting its cruelties in the light of day, would not have suited the Papal policy. As temporal and spiritual autocrats, the Popes could not permit a tribunal of which they were not the supreme authority. It was their interest to consult their pecuniary advantage rather than to indulge insane fanaticism; to repress liberty of thought by cautious surveillance rather than by public terrorism and open acts of cruelty. The Italian temperament was, moreover, more humane than the Spanish; nor had the refining culture of the Renaissance left no traces in the nation. Furthermore, the necessity for so Draconian an institution was not felt. Catholicism in Italy had not to contend with Jews and Moors, Marranos and Moriscoes. It was, indeed, alarmed by the spread of Lutheran opinions. Caraffa complained to Paul III. that 'the whole of Italy is infected with the Lutheran heresy, which has been embraced not only by statesmen, but also by many ecclesiastics.'[97] Pius V. was so panic-stricken by the prevalence of heresy in Faenza that he seriously meditated destroying the town and dispersing its inhabitants.[98] Yet, after a few years of active persecution, this peril proved to be unreal. The Reformation had not taken root so deep and wide in Italy that it could not be eradicated. When, therefore, the Spanish viceroys sought to establish their national Inquisition in Naples and Milan, the rebellious people received protection and support from the Papacy; and the Holy Office, as remodeled in Rome, became a far less awful engine of oppression than that of Seville.

[Footnote 96: Naples and Milan passionately and successfully opposed its introduction by the Spanish viceroys. But it ruled in Sicily and Sardinia.]

[Footnote 97: McCrie, p. 186.]

[Footnote 98: Mutinelli, _Storia Arcana_, vol. i. p. 79.]

It was sufficiently severe, however. 'At Rome,' writes a resident in 1568, 'some are daily burned, hanged, or beheaded; the prisons and places of confinement are filled, and they are obliged to build new ones.'[99] This general statement may be checked by extracts from the despatches of Venetian ambassadors in Rome, which, though they are not continuous, and cannot be supposed to give an exhaustive list of the victims of the Inquisition, enable us to judge with some degree of accuracy what the frequency of executions may have been.[100]

[Footnote 99: McCrie, p. 272.]

[Footnote 100: Mutinelli's _Storia Arcana_, etc. vol. i., is the source from which I have drawn the details given above.]

On September 27, 1567, a session of the Holy Office was held at S. Maria sopra Minerva. Seventeen heretics were condemned. Fifteen of these were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, the galleys for life, fines, or temporary imprisonment, according to the nature of their offenses. Two were reserved for capital punishment--namely, Carnesecchi and a friar from Cividale di Belluno. They were beheaded and burned upon the bridge of S. Angelo on October 4. On May 28, 1569, there was an Act of the Inquisition at the Minerva, twenty Cardinals attending. Four impenitent heretics were condemned to the stake. Ten penitents were sentenced to various punishments of less severity. On August 2, 1578, occurred a singular scandal touching some Spaniards and Portuguese of evil manners, all of whom were burned with the exception of those who contrived to escape in time. On August 5, 1581, an English Protestant was burned for grossly insulting the Host. On February 20, 1582, after an Act of the Inquisition in due form, seventeen heretics were sentenced, three to death, and the rest to imprisonment, etc. We must bear in mind that Mutinelli, who published the extracts from the Venetian dispatches which contain these details, does not profess to aim at completeness. Gaps of several years occur between the documents of one envoy and those of his successor. Nor does it appear that the writers themselves took notice of more than solemn and ceremonial proceedings, in which the Acts of the Inquisition were published with Pontifical and Curial pomp.[101] Still, when these considerations have been weighed, it will appear that the victims of the Inquisition, in Rome, could be counted, not by hundreds, but by units. After illustrious examples, like those of Aonio Paleario, Pietro Carnesecchi, Giordano Bruno, who were burned for Protestant or Atheistical opinions, the names of distinguished sufferers are few. Wary heretics, a Celio Secundo Curio, a Galeazzo Caracciolo, a Bernardino Ochino, a Pietro Martire Vermigli, a Pietro Paolo Vergerio, a Lelio Socino, escaped betimes to Switzerland, and carried on their warfare with the Church by means of writings.[102] Others, tainted with heresy, like Marco Antonio Flaminio, managed to satisfy the Inquisition by timely concessions. The Protestant Churches, which had sprung up in Venice, Lucca, Modena, Ferrara, Faenza, Vicenza, Bologna, Naples, and Siena, were easily dispersed.[103] Their pastors fled or submitted. The flocks conformed to Catholic orthodoxy. Only in a few cases was extreme rigor displayed. A memorable massacre took place in the year 1561 in Calabria within the province of Cosenza.[104] Here at the end of the fourteenth century a colony of Waldensians had settled in some villages upon the coast. They preserved their peculiar beliefs and ritual, and after three centuries numbered about 4000 souls. Nearly the whole of these, it seems, were exterminated by sword, fire, famine, torture, noisome imprisonment, and hurling from the summits of high cliffs. A few of the survivors were sent to work upon the Spanish galleys. Some women and children were sold into slavery. At Locarno, on the Lago Maggiore, a Protestant community of nearly 300 persons was driven into exile in 1555; and at Venice, in 1560-7, a small sect, holding reformed opinions, suffered punishment of a peculiar kind. We read of five persons by name, who, after being condemned by the Holy Office, were taken at night from their dungeons to the Porto del Lido beyond the Due Castelli, and there set upon a plank between two gondolas. The gondolas rowed asunder; and one by one the martyrs fell and perished in the waters.[105]

[Footnote 101: It is singular that only one contemporary writes from Rome about Bruno's execution in 1600; whence, I think, we may infer that such events were too common to excite much attention.]

[Footnote 102: The main facts about these men may be found in Cantu's _Gli Eretici d'Italia_, vol. ii. This work is written in no spirit of sympathy with Reformers. But it is superior in learning and impartiality to McCrie's.]

[Footnote 103: For the repressive measures used at Lucca, see _Archivio Storico_, vol. x. pp. 162-185. They include the prohibition of books, regulation of the religious observances of Lucchese citizens abroad in France or Flanders, and proscription of certain heretics, with whom all intercourse was forbidden.]

[Footnote 104: An eye-witness gives a heart-rending account of these persecutions: sixty thrown from the tower of Guardia, eighty-eight butchered like beasts in one day at Montalto, seven burned alive, one hundred old women tortured and then slaughtered. _Arch. Stor._, vol. ix. pp. 193-195.]

[Footnote 105: McCrie, _op. cit._ p. 232-236. The five men were Giulio Gherlandi of Spresian, near Treviso (executed in 1562), Antonio Rizzetta of Vicenza (in 1566), Francesco Sega of Rovigo (sentenced in 1566), Francesco Spinola of Milan (in 1567), and Fra Baldo Lupatino (1556). McCrie bases his report upon the _Histoire des Martyrs_ (Geneve, 1597) and De Porta's _Historia Reformationis Rhaeticarum Ecclesiarum_. Thinking these sources somewhat suspicious, I applied to my friend Mr. H.F. Brown, whose researches in the Venetian archives are becoming known to students of Italian history. He tells me that all the above cases, except that of Spinola, exist in the Frari. Lupatino was condemned as a Lutheran; the others as Anabaptists. In passing sentence on Lupatino, the Chief Inquisitor remarked that he could not condemn him to death by fire in Venice, but must consign him to a watery grave. This is characteristic of Venetian state policy. It appears that, of the above-named persons, Sega, though sentenced to death by drowning, recanted at the last moment, saying, 'Non voglio esser negato, ma voglio redirmi et morir buon Christiano.' Mr. Brown adds that there is nothing in the archives to prove that he was executed; but there is also nothing to show that his sentence was commuted. Two other persons involved in this trial, viz. Nic. Bucello of Padua and Alessio of Bellinzona, upon recantation, were subjected to public penances and confessions for different terms of years. Sega's fate must, therefore, be considered doubtful; since the fact that no commutation of sentence is on record lends some weight to the hypothesis that he withdrew his recantation, and submitted to martyrdom. I will close this note by expressing my hope that Mr. Brown, who is already engaged upon the papers of the Venetian Holy Office, will make them shortly the subject of a special publication. Considering how rare are the full and authentic records of any Inquisition, this would be of incalculable value for students of history. The series of trials in the Frari extends from 1541 to 1794, embracing 1562 _processi_ for the sixteenth century, 1469 for the seventeenth, 541 for the eighteenth, and 25 of no date. Nearly all the towns and districts of the Venetian State are involved.]

The position of the Holy Office in Venice was so far peculiar as to justify a digression upon its special constitution. Always jealous of ecclesiastical interference, the Republic insisted on the Inquisition being made dependent on the State. Three nobles of senatorial rank were chosen to act as Assessors of the Holy Office in the capital; and in the subject cities this function was assigned to the Rectors, or lieutenants of S. Mark. It was the duty of these lay members to see that justice was impartially dealt by the ecclesiastical tribunal, to defend the State against clerical encroachments, and to refer dubious cases to the Doge in Council. They were forbidden to swear oaths of allegiance or of secrecy to the Holy Office, and were bound to be present at all trials, even in the case of ecclesiastical offenders. No causes could be avvocated to Rome, and no crimes except heresy were held to lie within the jurisdiction of the court. The State reserved to itself witchcraft, profane swearing, bigamy and usury; allowed no interference with Jews, infidels and Greeks; forbade the confiscation of goods in which the heirs of condemned persons had interest; and made separate stipulations with regard to the Index of Prohibited Books. It precluded the Inquisition from extending its authority in any way, direct or indirect, over trades, arts, guilds, magistrates, and communal officials.[106] The tenor of this system was to repress ecclesiastical encroachments on the State prerogatives, and to secure equity in the proceedings of the Holy Office. Had practice answered to theory in the Venetian Inquisition, by far the worst abuses of the institution would have been avoided. But as a matter of fact, causes were not unfrequently transferred to Rome; confiscations were permitted; and the lists of the condemned include Mussulmans, witches, conjurors, men of scandalous life, etc., showing that the jurisdiction of the Holy Office extended beyond heresy in Venice.[107]

[Footnote 106: See Sarpi's 'Discourse on the Inquisition,' _Opere_, vol. iv.]

[Footnote 107: I owe to Mr. H.F. Brown details about the register of criminals condemned by the Holy Office, which substantiate my statement regarding the various types of cases in its jurisdiction.]

The truth is that the Venetians, though they were willing to risk an open rupture with Rome, remained at heart sound Churchmen devoted to the principles of the Catholic Reaction. The Republic conceded the fact of Inquisitorial authority, while it reserved the letter of State-supervision. Venetian decadence was marked by this hypocrisy of pride; and so long as appearances were saved, the Holy Office exercised its functions freely. The nobles who acted as assessors had no sympathy with religious toleration, being themselves under the influence of confessors and directors.