Beyond the Myth of The Inquisition III

The Spanish institution of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, modelled after the original French, was intended to have been a more temporally limited politico-national project to deal with the problem of the “conversos” (“New Christians”). Some of them were indeed only feigning Christianity, sometimes because they had never been taught much about it, or because they belonged to “underground” communities that were scattered around the peninsula. It was the case in pre-Counter Reformation Spain that many rural and mountainous areas of the country were only superficially Christianized anyway, and gross ignorance was the norm for clergy and people. The judaizers tended to live in the cities, though, as did the Jews generally. The “false Christians” stirred up a dissent which alarmed the upholders of civic order, when church and state in an integral society were legally and psychologically inseparable. The Inquisition just sharpened old ethnic tensions, and did not invent them. They had long existed, despite “convivencia". Muslims and Jews did not fall under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition because they were not baptized. On the other hand:
All properly baptized persons, being ipso facto Christians and members of the Catholic Church, came under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Foreign heretics, therefore, appeared from time to time in autos held in Spain. The burning of Protestants at Seville in the mid-1500s shows a gradual increase in the number of foreigners seized, a natural phenomenon in an international seaport. The partly hidden issue was in effect racial, not doctrinal at all, because the Old Christian elite sometimes felt outdone by the New Christian elite. This whole topic was called limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). The notion of honor (more akin to what we might call “pride”) was also a cultural one, and honor went along with the lineage of being an Old Christian. Racialism grew, and Old Christians developed more and more anxiety about their own race. “Anti-semitism obviously existed, but the discriminatory statutes of limpieza did not begin to gather force until after the statute of Toledo in 1547.” It became a question of national security. The dark side of this racialism only served to weaken Spain, and by the seventeenth century considerable opposition had grown to the cult of limpieza. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, there were actually “new conversos” and “old conversos,” too, who further complicated this issue in Spanish society. Conversos were well-placed in Rome to lobby the papacy in their favor, and the practice on occasion worked out well for them. Popes regularly were in conflict with Spanish monarchs over these and other issues.

Beyond The Myth Of The Inquisition II

But setting up a tribunal was nothing new, and the majority of dioceses had courts authorized by the bishops to judge a variety of cases and subjects according to canon law. Heresy was only one field of their inquiry; an “inquisition” was just a more particularized juridical entity akin to what we might call the office of “special prosecutor” today. For the most part no other judicial system existed other than the ecclesiastical, and it took centuries for the European secular state to emerge with its own totally separate system of law enforcement and justice. As a matter of fact, many inquisitors were laymen trained in law, and denunciations were routinely made by ordinary citizens, not special spies. The gothic image of the “mad monks” whose espionage network extended everywhere goes against the abundant authentic documentation we have available. The Inquisition was never as efficient as it would have liked to be, and as the decades wore on it became a sclerotic bureaucracy like any bureaucracy. It had always depended upon being itinerant, and when this ceased or was slowed down, even greater inefficiency ensued. As to the severity of the Inquisition, the following is informative for the contemporary reader: The proportionately small number of executions is an effective argument against the legend of a bloodthirsty tribunal. Nothing, certainly, can efface the horror of the first twenty holocaust years. Nor can occasional outbursts of savagery, such as overtook the Chuetas in the late seventeenth century, be minimized. But it is clear that for most of its existence the Inquisition was far from being a juggernaut of death either in intention or in capability. The figures given above for punishments in Valencia and Galicia suggest an execution rate of well under 2 per cent of the accused. It has been estimated that in the nineteen tribunals analysed above, the execution rate over the period 1540-1700 was 1.83 per cent for relaxations in person and 1.65 per cent for relaxations in effigy. If this is anywhere near the truth, it would seem that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less than three people a year were executed by the Inquisition in the whole of the Spanish monarchy from Sicily to Peru — possibly a lower rate than in any provincial court of justice. A comparison, indeed, of secular courts and the Inquisition can only be in favor of the latter as far as rigour is concerned. In 1573, for instance, the corregidor of Plascencia handed over to the Holy Office in Llerena a Morisco condemned by his jurisdiction to be hanged and quartered for allegedly smashing an image of the Virgin, but the Inquisition found the case unproven and set him free. It must be remembered, of course, that although the death rate was low it was also heavily weighted against people of Jewish and Moorish origin. The relative frequency of burnings in the earlier years disappeared in the eighteenth century, and in the twenty-nine years of the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only four people were burned.

Beyond The Myth Of The Inquisition I

Long did old-fashioned English Protestants and other anti-Catholics put their attention upon words such as “jesuitical,” “popish,” “jansenistic,” and “inquisitorial” in their polemics. But possibly the most odious, and the most successfully repromoted, is the idea of the hated Inquisition as the cruel tool of the Catholic Church to crush its enemies. By this means, especially for English-speakers, Catholic Spain was portrayed as the arch-enemy of all Protestantism. In the United States, whether it be the vulgarized Chick comics, or the sophisticated Ivy League intellectuals in 1960 who feared the Kennedy campaign, the Inquisition is generally assumed to be the Roman part of the triad denounced by clergyman Samuel Dickinson Burchard in 1884 in the famed expression “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” American Know-Nothings and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs constantly reprinted, or even the purveyors of the post-1968 sexual revolution or abortion-on-demand today, bring up the ghost of the Inquisition to suit their diverse purposes. But what do they know of its history? Are they aware the Inquisition was never primarily an anti-Protestant body, and that Philip II of Spain never had a consistently anti-Protestant foreign policy? Is it clear that most countries had their own equivalent structure for judging heresy, with no need to import anything similar from Spain, whether the would-be importer were Catholic or Protestant? How many remember that anti-Spanish feeling ran high in Italy where the Spanish Inquisition was ridiculed — and where Italian Catholics scorned the idea of racial purity? “It is one of the features of inquisitorial history that its practitioners have consistently failed to compare the Spanish Inquisition to comparable courts elsewhere in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe.”Distinctions are still often not made between the Roman (and purely ecclesiastical) Inquisition, and the Spanish secular-ecclesiastical “dual” Inquisition whose famous administrator was the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada. His career as Grand Inquisitor (sole control was never his — he shared it with other “heads”) ended with his death in 1498, well before the advent of Luther and Calvin. Most often with no elucidating context, the Inquisition is assumed to be a weapon of the Catholic Church against all heretics, in whatever age, even though its somewhat mild ecclesiastical form was originally set up after 1232 to deal with the Cathars or Albigensians in late medieval France. Or, it is seen as the sole reason for the downfall of Spain itself in later centuries.