Brian Van Hove, S.J.
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 Burchard1 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."2
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.3 Or, it is
seen as the sole reason for the downfall of Spain itself in later
centuries.
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.4 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.5 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 burnt.6
The Spanish institution of the Holy Office of the
Inquisition, modelled after the original French,7 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."8
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.9
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."10
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.
After the original crisis, more significantly, it
just happened that the Inquisition outlived its purpose and lingered on.11
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.12
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.13
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."14 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,15 and Edward Peters,16 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).17
Chadwick simply says that no primary documentation
on the Spanish Inquisition was concretely in hand until the time of
Llorente early in the nineteenth century. Kamen goes beyond. After paying
respects to Llorente, Fidel Fita who did original research in the 1890s,
and Henry Charles Lea whose four-volume history was published between
1906 and 1908 and is still considered indispensable, he goes on to insist
that even this type of research into the primary sources outside their
proper context can be and is misleading, "rather as if one were to
attempt a history of the police without knowing much about the society,
the laws or the institutions within which the police work."18
Again he puts it nicely for us:
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.19
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.20 This is Chadwick's summary of his career:
The most interesting of the afrancesado
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.21
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.
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.22
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.23 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.24 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.25
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.26 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.27
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.28
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,29 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.30 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.31 "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."32 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.33
This new society is the "conflict society" referred
to above, the one gradually replacing the older medieval "convivencia."
The Inquisition must be understood in the broader terms of Spanish
social history and the development of its institutions. The lack of
perspective of earlier English Protestant propagandists or even modern
Jewish apologists is insufficient, for it often had less to do with
religion taken for itself than with politics and fratricidal rivalries.
The papacy tried at times, and sometimes failed, to mitigate the effect
of the Spanish Inquisition.34 Economics, too, played its part,
especially when we recall that the inquisitors, forever in search of
revenue, were usually paid out of their confiscations, not by a salary
meted out by the crown from other sources or taxation.35 Until
the themes of the evolution of Spanish "conflict society," "closed
society," and "conservative xenophobia society," are explored fully, and
the Inquisition is not excised from the whole to be looked at in
distorted isolation
— and
Kamen insists the work has just begun
— we
will not have an adequate appreciation of the phenomenon of the
Inquisition. The word "appreciation" is operative, because it is a
departure from the stereotype of The Black Legend. This is no mere
revisionism, either. What can increasingly be understood and appreciated
by specialists of Spanish history must be popularized to prevent it from
becoming one of those "best kept secrets" of Church history or even world
history.
While Henry Kamen is the type of historian who
"tells the story" so the record can be clarified, Edward Peters is more
concerned with The Black Legend aspect of the Spanish Inquisition. One of
the reasons for the legend is the secrecy of the Inquisition when it
came to procedures:
Judicially, the courts of the Inquisition were no
worse and no better than the secular courts of the day. Faults existing
in the procedure of the Holy Office would be no less evident in the royal
courts where reforms were instituted by the famous Cortes of Toledo in
1480. The distinguishing feature of the Inquisition
—
its absolute secrecy
— was
the one which made it more open to abuses than any public tribunal. This
secrecy was not, it seems, originally a part of the inquisitorial
framework, and early records refer to public trials and a public prison
rather than a secret one. But by the beginning of the sixteenth century
secrecy became the general rule and was enforced in all the business of
the tribunal. Even the various Instructions of the Inquisition, although
set down in print, were for restricted circulation only and not for the
public eye. What this necessarily involved was general public ignorance
of the methods and procedure of the Inquisition
— an
ignorance which in its earlier period helped the tribunal by creating
reverential fear in the minds of evildoers, but which in its later period
led to the rise of fear and hatred based on a highly imaginative idea of
how the tribunal worked. The Inquisition was therefore largely to blame
for the unfounded slanders cast upon it in the eighteenth century or
before. The natural outcome of this enforced ignorance is shown by the
debates of the Cortes of Cadiz in 1813, on the projected decree to
abolish the Inquisition. If the defenders of the tribunal relied on the
argument of a mystical and mythical unity given to Spain by the
Inquisition, its detractors relied almost completely on legendary
misapprehensions about the entire structure and function of the
institution.36
We see from this that the Inquisition, in a later
age, was its own worst enemy and that it opened itself to
misunderstanding precisely on grounds of procedure which had been secret,
often to protect the witnesses who had come forward. For example, a
sufficient number of them had been assassinated to warrant their
protection, so thought the tribunals.
Edward Peters employs terminology which is useful
for us in making distinctions:
When I use the term inquisition (lower case), I
address the function of institutions that were so called, as historical
research has described them. When I use the term Inquisition (upper
case) I always refer in shorthand to a particularly constituted, specific
institution (such as the Spanish Inquisition or the Venetian
Inquisition). When I use the term The Inquisition, I am referring
in one form or another to an image, legend, or myth, usually in polemic.
These decisions will not satisfy everyone, but they at least make an
honest attempt to remove some of the dangerous presuppositions that often
creep into even the most evenhanded attempts at historical neutrality.37
For our purposes here, Peters' treatment of "an
image, legend, or myth, usually in polemic" is what interests us.
The construction of The Inquisition,
according to Peters, begins with the need of the Protestant Reformers to
fill in the gap of Church history from the time of the early martyrs in
the Roman empire up to their own time in the sixteenth century. What had
happened during all those intervening centuries when the Roman Church
held sway? Luther and others posited a "hidden church" that was indeed a
continuity from the ancient Christians, especially the martyrs, through
those persecuted by the medieval inquisitions, and up to the Protestant
martyrs of his own day. The Inquisition was the instrument of
their martyrdom. Later, the historian Flaccius Illyricus developed this
further:
Protestant Church history and martyrology were first
fully developed in the work of Matthias Flaccius Illyricus (1520-1575),
the greatest Protestant historical scholar in the sixteenth century. In
1556 Flaccius published his Catalogue of Witnesses to the Truth,
in which the "hidden" Church of Luther and the early Calvin took on
visibility and specificity, turning the Catholic attack on its head by
claiming medieval heretics, not as "heretics of old," but precisely as
continuing witnesses to the apostolicity and authenticity of the hidden
church from the fourth century to the sixteenth.38
A new Protestant vision of Church history had
emerged and became codified. The Cathars/Albigensians, Waldensians,
Hussites, and others were reinterpreted in the light of the theory of the
"hidden" church of the pure Word. And it was The Inquisition
which persecuted the "hidden" church in every age, even, as noted above,
potentially in our own.
Definite elements went into the construction of The
Black Legend. The hatred of the pope, the anti-cult of St. Dominic, the
Spanish king, and the inquisitorial tribunals all coalesced into a martyrological
whole.
For both Catholics and Protestants the Revolt of the
Netherlands in the sixteenth century provided a useful political rallying
point for anti-Spanish feeling translated into the anti- Inquisitorial
symbol. The Low Countries could see in the foreign emperor the source of
their deprivation of liberty, and the literary supports especially in
this region of much publication and traditionally free presses helped
immensely.
Highly influential was the work of Antonio del Corro
(writing under the pseudonym "Reginaldus Gonsalvius Montanus") A
Discovery and Plaine Declaration of Sundry Subtill Practices of the Holy
Inquisition of Spain which appeared in Latin in Heidelberg in 1567.
Within a year it was translated into Dutch, English, French, and German.39
For reasons which varied, the audiences of those language regions
enthusiastically welcomed the ideas of Montanus.
More than one major forgery also helped the legend's
growth:
Along with Les subtils moyens, Montanus, and
the Augsburg Petition, several forged accounts of the Spanish
Inquisition's alleged machinations for the destruction of the Netherlands
also circulated in the 1570s. Some of them, added to Adam Henricpetri's
history of the revolt of the Netherlands, were also translated into
English in A Tragicall Historie of the Troubles and Civile Warres of
the Lowe Countries in 1583. One forgery, composed shortly after 1570,
purported to be a decree of the Spanish Inquisition dated 16 February,
1568 and confirmed by Philip II. . . . The determination of this decree
as a forgery was not made until the beginning of the twentieth century,
and the forgery survived unquestioned in the work of all major historians
of the Dutch Revolt and of the history and character of the Inquisition.40
Finally, only one more document need be mentioned,
and, according to Peters, it synthesized forty years of anti-Inquisition
propaganda. It is the Apologie published by William of Orange. It
completes the "portrait" of Montanus, and lays stress upon the Spanish
Inquisition as the enemy of all political liberty, thus validating the
Dutch Revolt. The Spanish king was merely the dupe of the Inquisition,
and so legitimacy was not itself directly attacked in the political
realm. Needless to say the Apologie, written by a French Huguenot,
found wide audiences in France, England, and even Germany.41
There were other writings produced by this barrage
of propaganda, but it is enough here to say that the materials printed
between 1548 and 1581 themselves became the sources for the later
historians, including Gerhard Brandt's History. Peters adds:
Many people who found it difficult to agree with
each other on many issues found it easy to agree upon The
Inquisition. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, they had
invented a new and potent idea of the western imagination.42
It was not until the time of Llorente that hard
reliance upon the primary sources was assured, and then with his furious
bias which earned the Spanish exile some notoriety. The mood of the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution would hardly have produced
someone whose goal was to rehabilitate the Inquisition! Undoubtedly fame
was more important for him than the impartial truth, because contemporary
scholars credit Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909) with far more fairness.43
And as Chadwick also said above, Llorente himself interpreted those
documents in a way that "gave the Spanish Inquisition the blasted
reputation which it kept." But this is not quite the case, as we have
seen. The pre- existing mythology was reinforced by Llorente on a
different basis, the evidence of the primary sources. Llorente did not
invent the mythology, but he did his part to help it continue.
The Enlightenment made use of The Inquisition
mostly to contrast it with its own program of reason and reform. The myth
had long passed into art and literature, in many ways more impressive and
moving than the polemical writings of the time of the Dutch Revolt and
the Protestant historians. Even traditionalist writers in the nineteenth
century such as Dostoyevski delved into the Black Legend by giving us a
portrait of The Grand Inquisitor.
Catholics were not exempt from contact with the
myth, either, and Peters refers to a "White Legend":
If Paramo may be said to have created a Catholic
"White Legend" of The Inquisition intended to offset the
Protestant and anti- Spanish "Black Legends," then certainly not all
Catholic historians of the inquisitions participated in the White Legend.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, other Catholic historians
tended to align themselves with the methods of historians of other
confessions, or of no confessions at all, although the Paramo strand
remained obvious in the most conservative and ideological of Catholic
historians through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. In
Catholicism itself, myth survived along with the beginnings of history.44
And again:
From Acton's day to our own, however, most Catholic
and non- Catholic historians have tended to use identical historical
methodology and to have ceased to approach the history of inquisitions
from the perspective of Black or White legends. Although there have been
several exceptions to this generalization on both sides of the
confessional line, the historical achievements of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries have made a return to the myths, among professional
historians of any creed at least, virtually impossible.45
With the publication of Henry Charles Lea's A
History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages in 1887, "the golden
age" of inquisition history was barely opened. We are now enjoying it
more fully, and it is still in its early stages. Sources and methods
have been improved, confessional bickering has been bypassed, and legends
have been set aside. But in the popular imagination, the old myth
lingers, in Europe as well as in America. Until the work of Chadwick,
Kamen, Peters, Henningsen, and their associates is made more widely
known, we will not be able to appreciate that ours is such a "golden
age."46 As Albert Shannon hopes, the fruit of Inquisition
studies should not remain the possession of the specialists.47
ENDNOTES
1 Burchard (1812-1891) was speaking for a deputation
of clergy calling upon James G. Blaine, the Republican Presidential
candidate, New York.
2 Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), 87.
3 Before this papal inquisition, jurisdiction over
heretics belonged exclusively to the bishops. A well known work using the
papal registers which documents this newer system and interprets it
according to the "Annales" School is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou:
village occitan de 1294 a 1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). An English
translation was done by Barbara Bray, Montaillou: The Promised Land of
Error (New York: George Braziller, 1978). Montaillou was the last
village which actively supported the Cathar heresy. Furthermore: ". . .
the Spanish Inquisition is one of the few early modern institutions about
whose organization and procedure an enormous amount of documentation is
available. In part the Inquisition, like any judicial court, needed
paperwork in order to survive: the struggle to establish precedents and
to keep written evidence of privileges forced officials to record
everything." See Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985), 169. The papal inquisition itself may be said to date from
1184 when Pope Lucius III issued the decretal Ad abolendam, which
confirmed an agreement of 1177. See Peters, ibid., 47. The limited scope
and non-universality of the inquisition can be summarized in these words:
"Thus the Spanish Inquisition must be considered essentially as an
incident in the history of Christianity in fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Spain and understood in those terms. Erected in the
late fifteenth century, it lasted for three hundred and fifty years, and
its history is the history of an early modern European religious and
judicial institution whose purpose was to preserve Spanish Catholicism by
visibly and publicly reasserting the religious orthodoxy of Spanish
society." Ibid., 101-102.
4 For the legal history and the roots of
inquisitio in Roman law, see Peters, ibid., 11-17.
5 Kamen, 142-143. See for example The Inquisition
in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, ed. Gustav Henningsen
and John Tedeschi with Charles Amiel (Dekalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1986). The enormous quantity of the material and the
work to be done is evident.
6 Ibid., 189. "The best estimate is that around 3000
death sentences were carried out in Spain by Inquisitorial verdict
between 1550 and 1800, a far smaller number than that in comparable
secular courts." Peters, ibid., 87.
7 See Kamen, 24; 136-137. The medieval Inquisition
was under the jurisdiction of the pope, while authorization for the new
Spanish Inquisition was mediated through the pope to the king who
therefore exercised his jurisdiction as he saw fit. In one place, Kamen
affirms that the Inquisition's authority was never defined, and that it
was "dual," both ecclesiastical and civil in Spain: "The truth is that
the Inquisition itself always refused to define its own jurisdiction
clearly, since that would have been to set clear limits to its power."
Ibid., 240.
8 In Spanish history this referred to the
pluralistic and harmonious coexistence of the Christian, Jewish, and
Islamic communities in the Middle Ages. Gradually, Spain moved away from
harmony to a "conflict society."
9 Ibid., 216. If anything, the Inquisition was
highly "legalistic" and it abided by the precise boundaries provided by
church and civil law.
10 Ibid., 219. Kamen tells us that even after the
Inquisition had ceased to exist there was a legacy of anti-semitism
—
"anti- semitism with neither Jews nor crypto-Jews"
— in
the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. See ibid., 235-237.
11 In 1495 there were sixteen tribunals, but by 1507
only seven were left, so much had the judaizing threat decreased. The
appearance of Protestantism outside Spain had stirred Charles V to be on
guard lest it invade the Spanish peninsula. This gave the Inquisition a
new target and a new focus
— to
root out Erasmianism, Lutheranism, and any other Protestant tendencies.
The expulsion of the Mariscos, 1609-1614, was not the decision of the
Inquisition. See ibid., 113. ". . . it may be more informative to divide
the activity of the tribunal into five main phases: i) the period of
intense anti-converso persecution after 1480; ii) the relatively quiet
early sixteenth century; iii) the great period of activity against
Protestants and Moriscos, 1560- 1614; iv) the seventeenth century, when
most of those tried were neither of Jewish nor of Moorish origin; v) the
eighteenth century, when heresy was no longer a problem. Ibid., 184.
Despite this, there were two other "waves" of anti-judaizing
persecution, one in the mid-to-late seventeenth century (conversos of
Portuguese origin) and one in the 1720s. Ibid., 219-237. Also see Peters,
ibid., 88.
12 It may not console too many, but those condemned
to the auto-de-fé
(death by burning at the stake) could renounce their errors and receive a
lighter sentence. It is also possible there were dissimulators who did
what they had to do in order to live. Those who begged for mercy, and had
their confession accepted, were pardoned with a light penance if it was
the first offense (relapsed heretics were not pardoned easily).
Ibid., 75. Also, an "edict of grace" was read in church in the early
years, and it was followed by a "period of grace" of usually thirty or
forty days. Those who turned in both themselves and their accomplices
were pardoned. Self-denunciation under such benign terms was common.
Ibid., 161-162. For prison conditions and the subject of torture, see
ibid., 171-177, and Peters, ibid., 92-93. The Inquisition actually
compares quite favorably with secular penal institutions in Spains and
elsewhere in Europe. What about burnings? "The central features of the
auto were the procession, the mass, the sermon at the mass and the
reconciliation of sinners. It would be wrong to suppose, as is commonly
done, that the burnings were the centrepiece. Burnings may have been a
spectacular component of many autos but they were the least necessary
part of the proceedings and scores of autos took place without a single
faggot being set alight. The phrase auto-de-fé
conjures up visions of flames and fanaticism in the mind of the average
Protestant reader. A literal translation of the phrase would bring us
nearer to the essential truth." Ibid., 194. "The public sentencing of
convicted heretics came to be known as the auto-de-fé,
the 'act of faith'." Peters, ibid., 85. In other words, auto pageantry
(remember how much Spaniards like bullfights!) was designed to instruct,
impress, and inspire the crowds in the direction of religious orthodoxy.
This was a form of popular education, in other words.
13 See Encyclopaedia Britannica, art.
"Spain," vol. 21 (London: William Benton, Publisher, 1960), 121-122.
14 See Peters, ibid., 287.
15 He advises to look beyond his own writing on the
subject, too. Other works he recommends include Emil van der Vekene's
list of source material in Bibliotheca Bibliographica Historiae
Sanctae Inquisitiationis (2 vols., Vaduz 1982-1983), and Angel Alcalá
(ed.) Inquisición española y mentalidad inquisitorial (Barcelona,
1984). This work brings together all the proceedings of a symposium on
the Spanish Inquisition held at Brooklyn College, New York, in 1983.
Probably the most complete research tool came out after Kamen published,
however. It is The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on
Sources and Methods, ed. Gustav Henningsen, etal. (Dekalb: Northern
Illinois University Press, 1986).
16 His valuable Inquisition came out after
Kamen had published. In his bibliographical essay Peters lists Kamen's
history just after the work of Henry Charles Lea.
17 "The juridical base of the Inquisition's first
auto-de-fé
against Protestantism was the Tridentine decrees on justification of
1547. Philip himself was in the royal gallery at the great auto-de-fé
at Valladolid on October 8, 1559, which meant that these decrees had been
confirmed by fire. Whereas Charles had done what he could to obstruct the
decrees, Philip would be one of their most vocal exponents. More than
orthodoxy was now involved: the honor of the Inquisition was concerned as
well as that of the Catholic King himself. Spain was now irrevocably
committed to the Council of Trent. This is by no means to suggest that
the grotesque portrait of Philip of the black legend has not been
properly discredited. He enjoyed no particular monopoly on intolerance."
Donald Nugent, Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation: The Coloquy of
Poissy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 41.
18 Kamen, Preface viii.
19 Ibid., 259. Kamen concludes that the Inquisition
was actually a marginal phenomenon in the evolution of Spain, and that it
touched the lives of relatively few ordinary Spaniards.
20 Chadwick says: "At the time the Spanish
resistance called them simply by the name traitors. History gave
them the name afrancesados, the Frenchified. . . ." See Owen
Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1981), 530.
21 Ibid., 530-531. See also Peters, ibid., 278-287.
22 See note 3 above.
23 Kamen, 44.
24 Ibid., 243.
25 Kamen says: "The deliberate stimulation of a
feeling of crisis (aggravated by converso plots, by the murder of Arbues,
by the episode of the La Guardia infant), and the universal response to
the great twelve-year-long crusade against Granada pressurized public
authorities to conform and stilled the protests of individuals. Because
the Inquisition was a crisis instrument, it may be that Ferdinand never
intended it to be permanent (no steps, for example, were taken to give it
a regular income). This certainly was the feeling of the Toledo writer
who commented in 1538 that 'if the Catholic kings were still alive, they
would have reformed it twenty years ago, given the change in conditions'.
The unprecedented activities of the Holy Office were deemed to be
acceptable only as an emergency measure, until the crisis had passed."
Ibid., 46. Possibly many of the converso heretics had never been properly
catechized, and this explains the continued existence of judaizing
practices. Some prominent Spaniards called for evangelization, not
Inquisition. Ibid., 46-47.
26 We learn this about what the Inquisition really
discovered: "In the early years of the Inquisition, considerable evidence
came to light not simply of judaizing but also of messianism on one hand
and irreligious scepticism on the other; many conversos, indeed, were
ironically condemned for beliefs that orthodox Judaism would have
regarded as heretical, such as denying the immortality of the soul.
Dissent among the conversos did not, therefore, necessarily imply any
drift towards Judaism. There was nothing remotely Jewish about the
beliefs of the alumbrados: the root influence was Franciscan
spirituality, the environment was the comfortable patronage afforded by
Old Christian nobility." Kamen, 67-68.
27 Ibid., 256. There is also evidence that some of
the most sophisticated people of Spain condemned the Inquisition and its
practices. See ibid., 47-49.
28 Ibid., 99.
29 Since the expulsion of the Jews and Moors was not
the business of the Inquisition, we will not treat of it here. The
monarchy did approve, but the circumstances are complex.
30 Columbus himself may have descended from "converso"
stock. See ibid., 21.
31 See The Catholic Encyclopaedic Dictionary,
entry "Inquisition, the Spanish," second edition revised, ed. Donald Attwater
(London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1951; first published 1931), 256.
Kamen says the Inquisition was suppressed in 1820 (ibid., 235) and again
finally suppressed in 1834 (ibid., 250). "From 1808 to 1834, the
Inquisition had virtually ceased to function, its existence chiefly a
symbol of Spanish resistance to any reform
—
whether externally imposed or internally directed
—
that seemed to stray too far from Spanish ideas. Its victims had long
since disappeared, its powers of censorship had been greatly curtailed,
and its use as a political device had long since ceased to be needed. It
became in itself an auto-de-fé
— a
ritual institution whose existence had come to symbolize the civil
Christian life of the Spanish people. Few had any notion of its history
or any knowledge of its actual operation." Peters, ibid., 104.
32 See Kamen, 42. And on the matter of terror:
"Because the holocaust years of the late fifteenth century were by no
means typical of the atmosphere during the remaining three centuries of
inquisitorial history, any emphasis on the fear induced by the tribunal
must take account of the fact that over long periods there was no fear in
the sense of universal anxiety." Ibid., 164.
33 Ibid., 61.
34 For example, "In 1546 the pope intervened and
decreed that for a minimum period of ten years the Inquisition should not
confiscate any property from the Moriscos." Ibid., 105.
35 This is how the system worked: "There were
certainly no financial problems in the first years. Because the
Inquisition, despite its ecclesiastical appearance, was an exclusively
royal tribunal, all revenue from confiscations and fines went directly
to the crown, which in turn paid out for the salaries and expenses of
the inquisitors; under the Catholic Kings, the Holy Office was totally
subject to the crown for finance. As late as 1540 the Suprema reported
that orders for salaries of inquisitors in the crown of Aragon were
always signed by the king and not by the Inquisitor General. The crown,
however, helped itself to so much inquisitorial income that very soon it
had to find extra money for salaries, and Ferdinand therefore turned to
the Church." Ibid., 149. This led to an abuse that might have been
predicted: "The dangers of this situation were certainly in the mind of
the anonymous converso of Toledo who in 1538 directed a memorial to
Charles V: 'Your Majesty should above all provide that the expenses of
the Holy Office do not come from the property of the condemned, because
it is a repugnant thing if inquisitors cannot eat unless they burn.'
Unfortunately, this is exactly what the inquisitors of Llerena were
forced to do." Ibid., 150.
36 Ibid., 168-169. Even prisoners upon leaving were
bound to secrecy: "On finally leaving the gaol they were obliged to take
an oath not to reveal anything they had seen or experienced in the
cells: small wonder if this absolute secrecy gave rise to the most
blood-curdling legends about what went on inside." Ibid., 173.
37 Peters, ibid., 7.
38 Ibid., 128.
39 Ibid., 133.
40 Ibid., 152.
41 Ibid., 153.
42 Ibid., 154.
43 Philip van Limborch's History of the
Inquisition of 1697 was also a pioneering work of care and fairness,
beyond polemic, but he did not have access to the same primary sources as
did Lea. See ibid., 275. For the opposite assessment of Lea's fairness,
and especially a criticism of his competence, see Albert C. Shannon,
The Medieval Inquisition (Collegeville: Michael Glazier/The
Liturgical Press, 1991) esp. Appendix II, 152-156.
44 Ibid., 271-272.
45 Ibid., 273-274.
46 See ibid., 288. In the French-speaking world, the
work of Henri Maisonneuve should also be mentioned. See Etudes sur les
origines de l'inquisition (Paris, 1960), and "Le droit romain et la
doctrine inquisitoriale," Etudes d'histoire du droit canonique,
dediees a Gabriel Le Bras (Paris, 1965).
47 Shannon, ibid., Foreword, xii.
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