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TORQUEMADA AND ISABELLA—THE NEW TRIBUNAL—THE PENALTY OF UNSOUND OPINIONS—THREE CENTURIES OF SHAME

The history of Spain assumed a new phase when, at the fall of Granada, the attention of potentates and people ceased to be absorbed by the excitement of a great religious war. Then the past and the romance of it ended and the history of modern Spain began.

Before proceeding with the latter, a name and a tribunal detain attention. The one is Torquemada. The other is the Inquisition. Burke has described them both, as follows:

The Inquisition, established in Italy by Honorius III. in 1231, and in France by St. Louis in 1233, was formally introduced into Spain by Gregory IX. in 1235, by a Rescript of April 30th, addressed to Mongriu, Archbishop-Administrator of Tarragona, confirming and explaining previous Briefs and Bulls upon the subject of the repression of heresy; and prescribing the issue of certain Instructions which had been prepared at the desire of his holiness by a Spanish saint, the Dominican Raymond of Penafort. From this time forward, Bulls on the subject of the Inquisition into heresy were frequently issued; and the followers of Dominic were ever the trusted agents of the Holy See.

The first suggestion of the serious introduction of the Tribunal of the Holy Office into Castile, at the end of the fifteenth century, is said to have come from Sicily. An Italian friar bearing the suggestive name of Dei Barberi, Inquisitor-general at Messina, paid a visit to his sovereign Ferdinand at Seville in 1477, in order to procure the confirmation of a privilege accorded to the Sicilian Dominicans by the Emperor Frederic II., in 1233, by virtue of which the Inquisitors entered into possession of one-third of the goods of the heretic whom they condemned. This dangerous charter was confirmed in due course by Ferdinand on the 2d of September, 1477, and by Isabella on the 18th of October; and very little argument was required on the part of the gratified envoy to convince his sovereign of the various temporal and spiritual advantages that would follow the introduction of the Tribunal, that had so long existed in an undeveloped form in Sicily and in Aragon, into the dominions of his pious consort, Isabella of Castile.

In the middle of the year 1480 there was as yet no court of the Holy Inquisition established in Spain. At length, pressed by the Papal Nuncio, by the Dominicans, by her confessor, most of all by her husband, Isabella gave her consent; and at length, in August, 1483, the Inquisition was established as a permanent tribunal. Tomas de Torquemada was appointed Inquisitor-general of both Castile and Aragon. Subordinate tribunals were constituted; new and more stringent regulations were made; the victims smoked from day to day on the great stone altar of the Quemadero.

The life of Tomas de Torquemada is the history of contemporary Spain. Born of a noble family, already distinguished in the Church by the reputation of the cardinal his uncle, Tomas early assumed the habit of a Dominican, and was in course of time appointed prior of an important monastery at Segovia, and confessor to the young Princess Isabella. His influence upon that royal lady was naturally great; his piety pleased her; his austerity affected her; and his powerful will directed, if it could not subdue, a will as powerful as his own. Brought up far away from a court whose frivolities had no charm for her, and where, under any circumstances, she would have been considered as a rival if not a pretender, the counsels of her confessor, both sacred and secular, were the most authoritative that she could expect to obtain. It has been constantly asserted that the friar obtained from the princess a promise that, in the event of her elevation to the throne of Castile, she would devote herself to the destruction of heretics and the increase of the power of the Church. Such a promise would have been but one of many which such a confessor would have obtained from such a penitent, and would have been but the natural result of his teaching. Nor is it surprising that in the intrigues that preceded the death of Henry IV., and the War of Succession that immediately followed it, the whole influence of the priesthood should have been cast on the side of Isabella and against her niece Joanna. For ten years, says the biographer of his Order, the skillful hand of Torquemada cultivated the intellect of Isabella; and in due course the propitious marriage with Ferdinand of Aragon, far from removing his pupil from his sacerdotal influence, brought him a new and an equally illustrious penitent. Torquemada became the confessor of the king as well as of the queen.

If the establishment of the Inquisition was the fulfillment of Isabella’s vow, and the realization of the aspirations of her tutor, his appointment as Inquisitor-general, although it necessitated the choice of another confessor, did not by any means withdraw him from his old sphere of influence. He ceased not to preach the destruction of the Moslem, even as he was employed about the destruction of the Jew; and if Isabella was the active patroness of the war in Granada, there was a darker spirit behind the throne, ever preaching the sacred duty of the slaughter of the infidel and the heretic of every race and nation.

Torquemada was at once a politician and an enthusiast; rigid, austere, uncompromising; unbounded in his ambition, yet content to sacrifice himself to the cause that made him what he was. His moral superiority to the Innocents and Alexanders at Rome, his intellectual superiority to the Carrillos and the fighting bishops of Spain, gave him that enormous influence over both queen and king which his consuming bigotry and his relentless tenacity of purpose induced him to use with such dreadful effect. Aggressive even in his profession of humility, Torquemada was insolent, not only to his unhappy victims, but to his colleagues, to his sovereigns, to his Holy Father at Rome. He was, perhaps, the only man in Europe who was more masterful than Isabella, more bloodthirsty than Alexander; and he was able to impose his own will on both queen and pope. Rejecting in his proud humility every offer of the miter, he asserted and maintained his ecclesiastical supremacy even over the Primate of Spain. Attended by a body-guard of noble youths who were glad to secure at once the favor of the queen and immunity from ecclesiastical censure by assuming the habit of the Familiars of the Holy Office, the great destroyer lived in daily dread of the hand of the assassin.

Fifty horsemen and two hundred foot-guards always attended him. Nor was it deemed inconsistent with the purity of his own religious faith that he should carry about with him a talisman, in the shape of the horn of some strange animal, invested with the mysterious power of preventing the action of poison.

On the death of Torquemada in September, 1498, Don Diego Deza was promoted to the office of Inquisitor-general of Spain. Yet the activity of the Ecclesiastical Tribunal was rather increased than diminished by the change of masters, and an attempt was made soon afterward to extend its operations to Naples. But Gonsalvo de Cordova, who was then acting as viceroy, took upon himself to disregard not only the demands of the Inquisitors, but the orders of Ferdinand (June 30, 1504), and to postpone the introduction of the new tribunal into the country that he so wisely and so liberally governed. After the recall of his great representative, some six years later, Ferdinand himself made another attempt to establish the hated Tribunal in Italy in 1510. But even Ferdinand did not prevail; and Naples retained the happy immunity which it owed to the Great Captain.

If no error is more gross than to suppose that the establishment of the Inquisition was due to popular feeling in Spain, it is almost equally false to assert that it was the work of the contemporary popes. Rome was bad enough at the end of the fifteenth century; but her vast load of wickedness need not be increased by the burden of sins that are not her own. The everlasting shame of the Spanish Inquisition is that of the Catholic kings. It is not difficult to understand why the poor and rapacious Ferdinand of Aragon should welcome the establishment of an instrument of extortion which placed at his disposal the accumulated savings of the richest citizens of Castile. It is yet easier to comprehend that Isabella, who was not of a temper to brook resistance to authority in Church or State, should have consented to what her husband so earnestly desired. The queen, moreover, was at least sincerely religious, after the fashion of the day; and was constrained to follow the dictates of her confessor in matters judged by him to be within his spiritual jurisdiction, even while she was, as a civil ruler, withstanding the Pope himself on matters of temporal sovereignty.

It is the height of folly to brand Isabella as a hypocrite, because we are unable to follow the workings of a medieval mind, or to appreciate the curious religious temper—by no means confined to the men and women of the fifteenth century—that can permit or compel the same person to be devoted to Popery and to be at war with the Pope, and find in the punctilious observance of ceremonial duty excuse or encouragement for the gratification of any vice and the commission of any crime. But that the nobility and people of Castile should have permitted the crown to impose upon them a foreign and an ecclesiastical despotism, is at first sight much harder to understand. No one reason, but an unhappy combination of causes, may perhaps be found to explain it.

The influence of the queen was great. Respected as well as feared by the nobles, she was long admired and beloved by the mass of the people.[6] The great success of her administration, which was apparent even by the end of 1480; her repression of the nobility; her studied respect for the Cortes; all these things predisposed the Castilians, who had so long suffered under weak and unworthy sovereigns, to trust themselves not only to the justice but to the wisdom of the queen. The influence of the clergy, if not so great as it was in France or Italy, was no doubt considerable, and, as a rule, though not always, it was cast on the side of the Inquisition. Last and most unhappy reason of all, the nobility and the people were divided; and, if not actually hostile, were at least ever at variance in Castile.

The first efforts of the new tribunal, too, were directed either against the converted Jews, of whose prosperity the Christians were already jealous, and for whose interested tergiversations no one could feel any respect; or against the more or less converted Moslems, toward whom their neighbors still maintained a certain hereditary antipathy. The New Christians alone were to be haled before the new tribunal. The Old Christians might trust in the queen, if not in their own irreproachable lineage, to protect them from hurt or harm.

The number of subordinate or subsidiary tribunals of the Holy Office was at first only four; established at Seville, Cordova, Jaen, and Ciudad Real. The number was gradually increased, during the reign of the Catholic kings, to thirteen; and over all these Ferdinand erected, in 1483, a court of supervision under the name of the Council of the Supreme, consisting of the Grand Inquisitor as President, and three other subordinate ecclesiastics, well disposed to the crown, and ready to guard the royal interests in confiscated property.

One of the first duties of this tremendous Council was the preparation of a code of rules or Instructions, based upon the Inquisitor’s Manual of Eymeric, which had been promulgated in Aragon in the fourteenth century. The new work was promptly and thoroughly done; and twenty-eight comprehensive sections left but little to be provided for in the future.

The prosecution of unorthodox Spanish bishops by Torquemada on the ground of the supposed backslidings of their respective fathers is sufficiently characteristic of the methods of the Inquisition to be worthy of a passing notice. Davila, bishop of Segovia, and Aranda, bishop of Calahorra, were the sons of Jews who had been converted and baptized by St. Vincent Ferrer. No suspicion existed as to the orthodoxy of the prelates, both of whom were men distinguished for their learning and their piety. But it was suggested that their fathers had relapsed into Judaism before they died. They had each, indeed, left considerable fortunes behind them: and it was sought to exhume and burn their mortal remains, and to declare the property—long in the enjoyment of their heirs and successors—forfeited to the crown; and, in spite of a brief of Innocent VIII., of the 25th of September, 1487, the attempt was made by the Spanish Inquisitors. Both prelates sought refuge and protection by personal recourse to Rome (1490). Bishop Davila, in spite of the urgent remonstrances of Isabella herself, ultimately secured the protection of Alexander VI. and was invested with additional dignities and honors. Bishop Aranda was less fortunate. He was stripped of his office and possessions, and died a prisoner in the castle of St. Angelo in 1497.

It was not only living or dying heretics who paid the penalty of their unsound opinions. Men long dead, if they were represented by rich descendants, were cited before the Tribunal, judged, condemned, and the lands and goods that had descended to their heirs passed into the coffers of the Catholic kings. The scandal was so great that Isabella actually wrote to the Bishop of Segovia to defend herself against an accusation that no one had ever presumed to formulate. “I have,” said the queen, “caused great calamities, I have depopulated towns and provinces and kingdoms, for the love of Christ and of His Holy Mother, but I have never touched a maravedi of confiscated property; and I have employed the money in educating and dowering the children of the condemned.”

This strange apology, which seems to have to some extent imposed upon Prescott, is shown, by more recent examination of the State papers to be a most deliberate and daring falsehood, and would go far to justify the suggestion of Bergenroth that if Ferdinand never scrupled to tell direct untruths and make false promises whenever he thought it expedient, Queen Isabella excelled her husband in “disregard of veracity.”

If the Holy Office had existed in Aragon in an undeveloped state from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, and if it was actually introduced into Castile at the suggestion of an Inquisitor of the Aragonese island of Sicily, the old independence of the inhabitants once more asserted itself when the time arrived for the introduction of the brand-new Castilian Tribunal into the old kingdom that is watered by the Ebro. Saragossa, indeed, may be nearer to Rome than Toledo; but the Catalan has ever been less submissive than his brother or cousin in Castile; less obedient to authority; more impatient of royal and ecclesiastical oppression. Yet Aragon, which had defied Innocent at Muret, and vanquished Martin at Gerona, was no match for the inquisitors of Ferdinand the Catholic.

The Inquisition, as we have seen, had once before been established in Aragon; but in one most important particular the new institution differed from the old. In former days, even in the rare cases when the heretic paid the penalty of his heterodoxy with his life, his property passed to his heirs. The ecclesiastical tribunal of Ferdinand was not only more efficient in the matter of burning or otherwise disposing of accused persons; but the property of all doubtful Catholics, even of those who were graciously permitted to live after their trial, was absolutely forfeit to the crown. And the number of rich men, not only converted Jews but prosperous Christians, whose orthodoxy failed to come up to the new standard, was even in those days considered remarkable.