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The Spanish Inquisition: Fact Versus Fiction |
Marvin R. O'Connell
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"Even while I breathed there came to my nostrils the breath of the
vapor of heated iron. A suffocating odor pervaded the prison. A deeper
glow settled each moment in the eyes that glared at my agonies. A richer
tint of crimson diffused itself over the pictured horrors of blood. There
could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors. Oh, most unrelenting!
Oh, most demoniac of men! 'Death,' I said, 'any death but that of the
pit.'"
And so on for twenty pages reads the most familiar literary indictment
of the wickedness of the Spanish Inquisition. Edgar Allen Poe's short
story, "The Pit and the Pendulum," is, to be sure, a piece of
fiction, its author a specialist in creating scenes of horror and dread,
as the titles of some of his other works suggest: "The Murders in
the Rue Morgue," "The Haunted Palace," "The Conqueror
Worm." Yet Poe's hideous image of the red-hot poker being prepared
as an instrument of torture by grinning Spanish sadiststhe "most
demoniac of men"did not strain the credulity of his readers
a century and a half ago, nor does it today. We may indeed express our
abhorrence a little more light-heartedly - when Professor Higgins, in
My Fair Lady, wishes to evoke the most frightful of possible alternatives,
he sings, "I'd prefer a new edition/Of the Spanish Inquisition,"
and, with the shivers running up and down the spine, we know exactly what
he means.
At a rather more sophisticated level was the picture drawn by Dostoyevsky
who, in The Brothers Karamazov, imagines the Grand Inquisitor,
with "his withered face and sunken eyes," in confrontation with
Jesus on the streets of Seville, where the Savior has just restored life
to a dead child. "The Inquisitor sees everything; he sees them set
the coffin down at Jesus' feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens.
He knits his thick grey brows, and his eyes gleam with a sinister light.
He holds out his finger and bids the guards arrest Jesus. And such is
his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling
obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards,
and in the midst of a deathlike silence they lay hands on Jesus and take
him to the Inquisitor who says: 'Tomorrow I shall condemn thee and burn
thee at the stake as the worst of heretics.'"
Once more, suspension of disbelief is not so difficult, because it is
a given that the officers of the Spanish Inquisition were so glutted with
pride and blood-lust that they would not have stopped at deicide to gain
their ends. Does not the very name of Torquemada summon up visions of
ruthlessness and cruelty?
And then of course there is the cinematic conception of the era of the
Inquisition, brought to the silver screen in dozens of swashbuckling melodramas,
in which the upright, truthful, intelligent, compassionate, handsome,
brave Anglo, with his light complexion and buff-colored hair this
last constituent sends a strong ethnic messagecrosses swords with
the cruel, devious, lustful, foppish, superstitious, cowardly Spaniard
withplease notice his swarthy skin and greasy black hair and
mustache. Needless to say, North Atlantic virtue always triumphs over
Mediterranean depravity in these contests, Protestant blue-eyed heroism
over intrinsically inferior Catholic dark-eyed perfidy, and the audience
goes home contented, having seen the Spanish galleon, all afire, sink
beneath the waves, while the gallant Erroll Flynn (or someone like him)
stands coolly self-possessed on the main deck of his ship, his protective
arm around the waist of the beautiful blonde lady he has just rescued
from the clutches of villainous Latins.
These pulp-fiction romances seldom advert directly to the Inquisition;
movie moguls make it a rule to keep their plots uncomplicated. But they
do trade in a deep-seated prejudice that has been so carefully cultivated
over so long a time that it has become an integral part of our culture.
It was not only Poe and Dostoyevsky and even Professor Higgins who assumed
that the Spanish Inquisition was wicked because it was Spanish; the rest
of us, the hoi polloi, concluded the same. To assert that conclusion
was enough to establish its truth; no evidence was required and no rebuttal
allowed. In one of the most enduring public relations victories ever accomplished,
the history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spain's Golden Age,
was consciously and methodically distorted by what scholars now candidly
call "the Black Legend." This collection of bitter fables, with
their overtones of bigotry and racism, proves once moreif proof
were necessarythat a lie told often enough and convincingly enough
will in the end be accepted as gospel. "One of the great conditions
of anger and hatred," the wryly cynical Thackeray observed, "is
that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object in order
to be consistent." The lies in this instance about the Spanish character
and about the Catholicism practiced in the Spain of Queen Isabella, St.
Teresa of Avila and Cervantes, were told in order to promote a Protestant
and particularly an English Protestant ascendancy, which in due course
crossed the Atlantic with the colonists who eventually founded the United
States; the sad irony is that though any serious commitment to that cause
has long since vanished from the old world and the new, the racist and
bigoted distortions put on the record in its behalf by the concoctors
of the Black Legend have proved to have a life of their own.
But perhaps the Spanish Inquisition was indeed a wicked institution. If
so, that judgment should be made on the basis of those discernible facts
an honest examination is able to reveal, and not upon the fevered testimony
of self-interested politicians, biased preachers, witless pamphleteers,
orderiving from one or more of thesenaive writers of fiction.
And, as is the case with any historical reconstruction of a phenomenon
now passed away, to understand the contextual framework is a condition
for understanding the phenomenon itself. An organization as consequential
as the Spanish Inquisition could not have taken shape in a vacuum, nor
could its activities have been divorced from the circumstances of its
time and place. The same principle therefore holds good in its regard
as it does in analyzing other events contemporaneous with the early years
of the Inquisition. Thus, for example, we need to know what political
and social as well as theological concerns persuaded Queen Elizabeth I
of England to treat her Catholic subjects with such barbarity; similarly,
we need to recognize that the fanaticism that drove Dutch Calvinists to
hang all the priests and vandalize all the churches that fell under their
control was not unrelated to a primitive nationalism and even to a primitive
capitalism.


As far as the Spanish Inquisition is concerned,
one must look for context to chronology and geography. Chronology first.
The Holy Office, as it was popularly called, was founded in 1478 on the
strength of a papal rescript requested by the sovereigns of a newly united
Spain, the wife and husband, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.
For precedent they cited the functioning of the Roman Inquisition during
the thirteenth century when, under this rubric, the popes established
special circuit courts to investigate and, when possible, to root up various
heterodox movements, especially in southern France and northern Italy.
These movementslumped together under the rather sinister-sounding
label "Cathari"had alarmed the lords temporal of the time
no less than the lords spiritual, because the Manichaean doctrines and
life-style proposed by the Cathari were deemed as subversive of civil
well being as of ecclesiastical. Over the course of a hundred years or
so the Cathari were pretty well stamped out or driven underground through
the cooperative efforts of Church and State. The inquisitors' job had
been to establish the juridical facts in each case, and if, as a result,
an individual were judged to be an unyielding heretic, the government's
job had been to exact punishment from that person, up to and including
death.
Yet in many respectsand here is a truth extremely difficult for
us at the end of the twentieth century to comprehendto speak of
"Church and State" during the Middle Ages, and indeed much later,
is to draw a distinction without a difference. That the civil and ecclesiastical
entities represented essentially separate spheres, that religion should
be a strictly private matter left to the choice of each individual, that
persons of conflicting religious views or with no religious views at all
could live in fruitful harmonythese ideas were unknown during the
time the Roman inquisitors were harassing the Albigensians in the south
of France, and unknown also when, two centuries later, Ferdinand and Isabella
asked for the establishment of an Inquisition unique to Spain. Pope Sixtus
IV, in granting their request, explicitly testified to the principle that
it was the first duty of kings to nurture and defend the faith of their
people, and implicitly he professed what was for him and his contemporaries
a truism, that no society could exist without religious uniformity, thatto
appropriate a celebrated statement of another era"a house divided
against itself cannot stand." Here was a conviction fully appreciated,
incidentally, by the likes of Elizabeth I and the Dutch Calvinists, who
gave it full rein in their own persecution-policies.
The organization of the Spanish Inquisition differed markedly from its
Roman predecessor. The former, with its emphasis upon centralization and
royal control, reflected the emergence of the nation-state and the responsibility
the monarchy now assumed to guarantee religious orthodoxy. Thus the Grand
Inquisitor was appointed by the king and answerable to him, with only
the nominal approval of the pope. The Inquisitor in turn appointed the
five members of the High Council over which he presided; this body, with
its swarm of consultants and clerical staff, exercised ultimate power
within the Inquisition's competence. It decided all disputed questions
and heard all appeals from the lower inquisitorial courts, which by the
middle of the sixteenth century numbered nineteen scattered across Spain
and several more in Spanish-occupied territories in Italy and America.
Without the permission of the High Council no priest or nobleman could
be imprisoned. An auto-de-fe, the religious ceremony which included
the punishment of convicted heretics and the reconciliation of those who
recanted, could not be held anywhere without the sanction of the High
Council. Control was also enhanced by the requirement that the lower courts
submit to the Council yearly general reports and monthly financial ones.
As far as procedure was concerned, the Spanish Inquisition pretty much
followed the precedent established in the thirteenth century and the models
provided by secular tribunals. The legal machinery was put into motion
by sworn denunciation of an individual or, on occasion, of a particular
village or region. In the latter instance, prior to the formal inquiry
a "term of grace" of thirty to forty days was routinely issued,
during which period suspected dissidents could recant or prepare their
defense. Once accused, a defendant was provided the services of a lawyer,
and he could not be examined by the officers of the court without the
presence of two disinterested priests. The identity of the witnesses of
his alleged crime, however, was not revealed to him, and so he could not
confront them. This was a severe disadvantage, even though harsh punishment
was meted out to those revealed to have been false accusers. Judges, not
juries, decided questions of fact as well as of law, and in effect the
Spanish Inquisition combined the functions of investigation, prosecution,
and judgment. Indeed, anyone arrested by the Inquisition was presumed
guilty until proven innocent, a circumstance very unsettling to us who
have enjoyed the blessings of the English common law tradition. Torture,
a commonplace with secular jurisdictions, had been forbidden at first
in the old Roman Inquisition, but then it had gradually come into use,
with the provisos that it be applied only once and that it not threaten
life or limb. In Spain these rules were adopted from the start, but early
on Sixtus IV, deluged with complaints, protested to the Spanish government
that the Inquisition was employing torture too freely. Unhappily the pope's
remonstrances fell on deaf ears.
But to return to the chronological consideration, with a bit of geography
thrown in for good measure. In 1478, at the moment the Inquisition was
set up, the Christians of the Iberian peninsula had been engaged in a
crusade for nearly seven hundred years. The fighting had not been constant,
to be sureit took our enlightened epoch to develop the fine art
of total warbut ever since the eighth century, when the Arab Muslims
had stormed across the straits of Gibraltar from Africa and with fire
and sword had subjugated the peninsula as far north as the Ebro River,
the native resistance to their occupation had been constant. And, by fits
and starts, with frequent intervals of inactivity, resistance had gradually
evolved into counter-attack, into a growing determination to win back
what had been lost to the alien invaders. Little by little this relentless
process of reconquestla reconquistadrove the descendants
of those invaders, the Moors, ever farther into the south until, in 1478,
they had left to them only a small enclave around the city of Granada.
The end of the crusade was in sight.
It would be difficult to exaggerate how profound an impact this extraordinarily
long and all-consuming cruzado had upon the formation of Spanish
public policy. Comparisons are impossible to draw, because no other Christian
people had experienced anything even remotely similar. As suggested above,
a Europe-wide consensus had indeed developed during the Middle Ages that
religious dissidents could not be tolerated if true religion and harmonious
society were to endure. Add to this the universal conviction that heretics
adhered to their objectionable opinions not out of conscience but out
of bad will, and it comes as no surprise that increasingly stringent laws
were enacted throughout Christendom against those who refused to conform.
Since such a refusal was judged the worst possible crime, the ultimate
penalty for it everywhere was the worst form of capital punishment imaginable,
burning at the stake. Though this ferocious sentence was carried out relatively
rarely, the prospect of it did act as a deterrent and did induce all except
the most stout-hearted to disavow their heterodoxies once brought to light
by a judicial process. Still, the troublesome possibility remained that
those who had formally recanted might have done so out of fear rather
than conversion of mind, and that they continued to practice their subversive
heresies in secret, waiting for a more propitious day.
In the Iberia of the reconquista a scenario of this kind presented
a danger profoundly more serious than elsewhere. As the Christians slowly
reestablished their hegemony over the peninsulaexpressed in the
two distinct political entities, Portugal and Spainthe potential
antagonists of religious uniformity they were determined to impose were
not indigenous eccentrics, as was the case in other European countries
(bear in mind that the Protestant Reformation was at this moment still
forty years in the future), but a conquered population linked by ties
of race and religion to the Muslims living in the principalities of North
Africa, which at Gibraltar lay only sixteen watery miles away. Even more
ominous from the Spanish point of view was the fact that these so-called
barbary statesthe modern nations of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisiaformed
part of a vast imperial system established by the Muslim Turks, a system
as powerful and menacing to western Europe as the Soviet bloc was conceived
to be in our day. As the reconquista proceeded, therefore, and
especially after Granada and the last remnant of Spanish Islam fell to
the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, policy-makers had to decide
how to treat the Moors and the relatively small but influential Jewish
community which, in marked contrast to what our century has witnessed,
had flourished within a larger Islamic society. The Christian victors,
fearful of Muslim sympathizers in their midst, offered no compromise:
Moors and Jews had to accept baptism or face expulsion from the country
now defined as entirely Catholic.
What this decision amounted to, of course, was a policy of forced conversion,
something quite incompatible with traditional Catholic teaching. This
fact was pointed out by several popes and numerous Spanish theologians
over a long period, but the sentiment expressed by one of Ferdinand of
Aragon's royal predecessors was the one that prevailed: "The enemies
of the cross of Christ and violators of the Christian law are likewise
our enemies and the enemies of our kingdom, and ought therefore to be
dealt with as such."
Predictably, however, the stark choice between conformity and exile invited
pretense and hypocrisy on the part of those dragooned into a faith not
of their own choosing. The Jews and Moors who conformed rather than depart
the land in which they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years
did so with varying measures of reluctance, merging often into downright
dissimulation. And this is precisely why the Inquisition was created by
the Spanish monarchs: as the etymology of the word implies, the first
task of this new judicial body was inquiry, specifically inquiry into
the authenticity of the conversion of the Moors and Jews who had come
under the sway of those monarchs.
But once again we must stress the chronological track, because the bloody
reputation of the Spanish Inquisitionthough it formally existed
for more than three centurieswas earned during its first decade
and a half, even before, that is, the capture of Granada. During this
unhappy period perhaps as many as 2000 persons were burnt as heretics.
Though this number is only a small fraction of what the Black Legend routinely
alleged, it is nevertheless sobering enough. Almost all those executed
were conversos or New Christians, converts, that is, from Judaism
who were convicted of secretly practicing their former religion. It should
be borne in mind that the Inquisition, as a church-court, had no jurisdiction
over Moors and Jews as such. But, ironically, once such persons accepted
baptism they became capable of heresy in the technical sense of the word.
Thus the early savagery of the Spanish Inquisition contributes another
chapter to the sad history of anti-Semitism, motivated on this occasion,
however, more by politico-religious expediency than by racial hatred.
It was in any event an enormous and unforgivable miscalculation. Far from
constituting a danger to the nation, the Jewish conversos of previous
decades had already been admirably blended into the larger community.
As Professor William Monter has pointed out, the New Christians "represent
the first known large-scale and long-term assimilation of Jews into any
Christian society. Although the process included many painful adaptations,
some severe backlash and even a decade of brutal persecution under the
Inquisition, it ended with their general integration into Spanish society.
Their descendants quietly flouted racist codes and contributed to the
vibrant Catholicism of Golden Age Spain; St. Teresa of Avila was the granddaughter
of a New Christian penanced by the Inquisition."
It seems as though the violence with which the Spanish Inquisition began
its tenure exhausted or perhaps shamed it into a moderation which the
purveyors of the Black Legend stonily ignore. But the facts cannot be
gainsaid. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Spanish
sovereignty extended from Italy to most of Latin America, on average less
than three persons a year were executed by the Inquisition, which was
formally constituted in all those places as well as at home. Or, to give
the Spaniards the benefit of the doubt, perhaps as the bitter struggle
of the reconquista gradually faded from their collective memory,
even as the Muslim threat itself receded, they exercised a restraint consistent
with their principles. However that may be, for my part I am glad there
is no longer in existence an Inquisition that might have me arrested on
the basis of charges lodged by persons unknown to me, as happened to St.
Ignatius Loyola. Yet as one who has lived through most of a century in
which cruelty and atrocity and oppression have reached a pitch, quantitatively
and qualitatively, inconceivable to our ancestorsinconceivable even
to TorquemadaI think a measure of discretion would be appropriate
when bemoaning the wickedness of the Spanish Inquisition, more discretion
anyway than that exercised by Poe and Dostoyevsky.
This article originally appeared in the
November/December 1996 issue of Catholic Dossier.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles:
The Crusades 101 | Jimmy Akin
Were the Crusades Anti-Semitic? | Vince Ryan
Crusade Myths | Thomas F. Madden
Urban II: The Pope of the First Crusade | Régine Pernoud
Mistakes, Yes. Conspiracies, No. | The Fourth Crusade |
Vince Ryan
Marvin
R. O'Connell is professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre
Dame and a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul.
He is the author of John Ireland and the American Catholic Church
(St. Paul, 1988), a prize-winning biography of the redoubtable John Ireland,
and several other books, including Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart
(Eerdmans, 1997).
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