Beyond the Myth of The Inquisition VI

British historian Henry Arthur Francis Kamen has no apparent reason to defend the record of the Spanish Inquisition. He got his M.A. (Oxon.) in 1965, the same year he published his Spanish Inquisition. He specializes in Spanish history. Twenty years later he published another updated study on the Inquisition in the early modern period called Inquisition and Society in Spain.  Among the first things Kamen brings to our attention is that Llorente himself was astonished at the lack of any opposition to the Inquisition in Spain itself. This fact from the documentation can be interpreted variously, of course — were people just too afraid to speak out? But two additional facts are also necessary to consider. The first is that the civil variety of the Inquisition was a court alien to the older and more tolerant Spanish traditions and was introduced only in time of crisis. It was long unpopular in Aragon, for example, where local feudal freedoms from royal absolutism (“fueros”) resented its presence. Castilian inquisitors were also resented in Catalonia and elsewhere outside Castile, precisely because they were outsiders. But people can put up with just about anything when threatened with a crisis situation, and so the “early” Inquisition was tolerated, as were “later” ones when special crises obtained. Secondly, as noted above, it was supposed to be a temporary measure against judaizer-heretics who were then mainly the “converso” party of Jews (only later were ex-Muslims the object of the Inquisition) forced in 1391 and thereafter to be baptized or face exile or death. After the breakdown of the spirit of “convivencia,” the Old Christians actually feared for their blood lines, and so after 1480 tolerated the Inquisition at times more for the sake of “ethnic cleansing” than religious orthodoxy. All of this may be against our standards today, but it does have a precise understanding in Spanish social history. Here is what Kamen says of their tolerance. What did Spaniards themselves think of the Inquisition? There can be no doubt that the people as a whole gave their ready support to its existence. The tribunal was, after all, not a despotic body imposed on them tyrannically, but a logical expression of the social prejudices prevalent in their midst. It was created to deal with a problem of heresy, and as long as the problem was deemed to exist people seemed to accept it. The Inquisition was probably no more loved or hated than the police are in our time: in a society where there was no other general policing body, people took their grievances to it and exploited it to pay off personal scores. By the same token, it was on the receiving end of frequent hostility and resentment; but at every moment the inquisitors were convinced that the people were with them, and with good reason. Was Spain a closed or an open society? Kamen goes on to say these astonishing things. The image of Spain as a nation sunk in intellectual torpor and religious superstition, all of it due to the Inquisition, is one that Menendez Pelayo was right to controvert. Spain was in reality one of the freest nations in Europe, with active political institutions at all levels. Remarkably free discussion of political affairs was tolerated, and public controversy occurred on a scale paralleled in few other countries.
Let us not forget, either, that the works of Galileo were never put on the Spanish Index of Forbidden Books!
Anti-semitism after 1480 in Spain was local, and the monarchy continued, at least for a while, to be the traditional defender of the Jews, both those who remained Jews by religion and the “converso” communities. Kamen even points out that “converso” financing was partially responsible for outfitting the ships Columbus used to discover the New World^. Many rich or famous “conversos” were never troubled by the Inquisition. Others lived abroad to avoid it, such as Juan Luis Vives. The pattern is an uneven one. It was widely held that almost the whole of the nobility had Jewish blood. By the seventeenth century, the limpieza statutes had actually closed some government and academic posts to the nobility, but by reason of blood, opened them to common people! An outdated Catholic publication (1931) states that the last victim of the Inquisition in Spain was a schoolmaster hanged in 1826. Some limpieza statutes lingered for a few more decades into the nineteenth century. We should note that the thoroughly enfeebled institution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is hardly comparable to the one functioning under Ferdinand and Isabella at the close of the fifteenth century. “In rounded terms, it is likely that over three-quarters of all those who perished under the Inquisition in the three centuries of its existence, did so in the first twenty years.” This synthetic summary is the reasoned fruit of Henry Kamen’s painstaking analysis: The Inquisition was not the imposition of a sinister tyranny on an unwilling people. It was an institution brought into being by a particular socio-religious situation, impelled and inspired by a decisively Old Christian ideology, and controlled by men whose outlook reflected the mentality of the mass of Spaniards. The dissenters were a few intellectuals, and others whose blood alone was sufficient to put them outside the pale of the new society being erected on a basis of triumphant and militant conservatism.

Beyond the Myth of The Inquisition V

The discovery of the riches of inquisitorial documentation, and its exploitation first by Llorente and then by Henry Charles Lea, has helped to restore the balance of information but has also created new dangers. Scholars are in danger of studying the Inquisition in isolation from all the other dimensions of State and society, as though the tribunal were somehow a self-explanatory phenomenon: as a result old misconceptions are being reinforced and the Inquisition is once again being assumed to have played a central role in religion, politics, culture and the economy. Thus both the primary sources and an adequate interpretation of them are required if we are to get beyond The Black Legend. Peters, assuming all of the above, tries to help us understand how the myth of the Inquisition has been so successfully recycled and revived by various interest groups down through history and in our own time. Llorente himself held high office in the Inquisition during his own day, and he was one of the few afrancesados or collaborators with the occupying French during the Napoleonic-era in Spain. This is Chadwick’s summary of his career: The most interesting of the afrancesados clergy was Juan Antonio Llorente (1756-1823). A canon of Calahorra, the French Revolution found him Secretary General of the Inquisition in Madrid, as a result of which the reforming grand inquisitor gave him important materials for a history of the Inquisition. In the events of 1808 he accepted King Joseph Bonaparte and entered Madrid in his train. As one of the few Spanish churchmen to be serviceable, he was now heaped with honours and responsible work, especially the dissolution of the monasteries and the administration of confiscated goods, as well as the custody of the archives of the Inquisition. He used the time to gather materials for his history. Naturally he must retreat with the French and spend ten years in exile until the Spanish government gave him a reprieve. In 1817-1818 he published at Paris in four volumes his Critical History of the Spanish Inquisition , which scandalized many Spaniards and finally gave the Spanish Inquisition the blasted reputation which it kept. The History was instantly put upon the Index of prohibited books. The account was not impartial history. But it was the only account hitherto by anyone who had access to authentic documents and therefore held the field as indispensable. In the perspective of Church history, and the reputation of Spanish Catholicism for bigotry and fanaticism, Llorente’s book was the most weighty single outcome of the little afrancesado movement among Churchmen. Very few Spanish clergy betrayed their country, so Llorente was the exception. But this is not what made him famous. It was his possession of the documentation on the Inquisition that earned him a reputation and thus made him important for us. He held the evidence. And his biased presentation held sway for lack of any countervailing influence.

Beyond the Myth of The Inquisition IV

After the original crisis, more significantly, it just happened that the Inquisition outlived its purpose and lingered on. Some have always insisted that at any time the Catholic Church could re-activate this institution which they allege rests on torture and the extraction of confessions by coercion, among other ugly features. Honest students of history regard this assertion as mere propaganda. Note the following secular source. Reginald Trevor Davies, author of The Golden Century of Spain, writes the following in his article in volume 21 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Spanish church was wealthy and powerful because the people were intensely religious and because it was largely a national institution in which no foreigner might hold office and in which the crown was supreme (papal power having been reduced almost to the vanishing point). It was, consequently, a fact of serious political importance that during the anarchy of Henry IV’s reign (1454-1475) the Jews gained great power and influence. They might compel — sometimes by means of their usury — their debtors to renounce the Christian religion; and Marranos (baptized Jews) often preserved their old religious faith in secret. At the same time the power of the Moriscos (baptized Moors) had increased, and they were reviving ancient heresies such as the half-forgotten Manichaeism. The Catholic kings consequently consulted Pope Sixtus IV, who thereupon issued a bull (Nov. 1, 1478) authorizing them to choose two or three inquisitors notable for their virtue and learning, to whom he granted jurisdiction. The bull was put into force by a royal cedula (decree) issued in Medina del Campo (Sept. 17, 1480) ordering the establishment of the Holy Office in Castile. The original crisis was a real one. We can only regret that the “inquisitors notable for their virtue and learning” were not as often found to do the work as was originally intended by pope and king. If anything, inquisitors and their lesser employees (“familiars”) were more prone to pettiness, laziness, and greed, than to cruelty. Of these, greed was dominant. Church historians have been slow to study seriously this matter of the Inquisition. “Church history generally lagged behind other kinds of historical research, and confessional feelings still ran sufficiently high as to make the history of inquisitions a difficult and disputed topic.” Fortunately, all this has changed in our time, and three whose work is perhaps most helpful to us are not Catholics at all. Only one of them is a “church historian” properly speaking. Let us next look at the remarks of Owen Chadwick, and then continue with a more detailed presentation of the work of Henry Kamen, and Edward Peters, both already cited. No one could accuse any of these respected academics, the first two of them British, of any denominational pro-Catholic bias. Yet they show the Inquisition in a different light from that of the exaggerated misrepresentations the Spanish themselves call The Black Legend (La Leyenda Negra).