An Age of Certainty
Today we are so unsure about the origin and purpose of the world and of man, and our beliefs differ so widely, that in most places we have given up persecuting people for holding other religious views. Our present intolerance falls more on those who attack our political and economic principles, and we justify our fear of unorthodox thought by saying that any doubt about these settled assumptions endangers national unity and survival.
Until the middle of the seventeenth century, Christians, Jews and Muslims cared about religion with greater intensity than we do. Their creeds and theology were their most admired and most trusted possessions, and those who challenged them were regarded as people hacking at the foundations of social order and the roots of human life. Each group, hardened in the dogmatism of its beliefs, branded the others with the mark of unbelief.
The Inquisition spreads fastest among peoples whose religious beliefs have been kept from the influence of education and travel and whose reason is bound by habit and superstition. Almost all medieval Christians, under the influence of childhood teaching and surroundings, believed that the Bible was God's word for word and that Jesus, the Son of God, had directly founded the Christian Church. From these two premises it followed that God wanted all nations to be Christian, and that following non-Christian, and especially anti-Christian, teaching was a grave insult to the Almighty. Moreover, since heresy deserved eternal punishment, those who punished it could believe (and some truly did believe) that by finding and punishing heretics they were saving a number of potential unbelievers, and perhaps themselves, from the everlasting torments of hell.
The Bull of 1478
Isabella, who lived under the teaching and company of the devout, probably shared these beliefs. Ferdinand, a man of the world who had known hardship, may have doubted some of them, but he evidently believed that unity of religious belief would make Spain easier to govern and richer in strength against its enemies. At their request Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull on November 1, 1478, authorizing them to appoint six priests with degrees in canon law and theology as a tribunal to seek out, question and punish heretics.
An important feature of the bull was that it gave the rulers of Spain the right to choose and appoint the members of the Inquisition, which had earlier been within the local powers of the heads of the Dominican or Franciscan orders. Here, as in Protestant Germany and in England in the next century, religion for three generations became the servant and instrument of the state. Formally, Ferdinand and Isabella named the inquisitors and the pope issued their commissions; the Inquisition's authority came from this papal act. It was thus a religious institution, a member of the Church, which was itself a member of the state. The government paid its costs and received all its income. Ferdinand and Isabella oversaw its details, and its judgments could be appealed to them.
Of all the instruments of government, this was Ferdinand's favorite. His motive, in origin, was not money. The property of the condemned was confiscated and came into his hands, but he refused the large bribes rich defendants offered to have a sentence reversed. His aim was not material gain but the unity of Spain.
Organization and Jurisdiction
The inquisitors were allowed to choose assistants, clerical and lay, as investigators and officers. After 1483 the whole system was put under a royal official, the head of the Inquisition, usually called the Inquisitor General.
Its jurisdiction covered all Christians in Spain. It had nothing to do with Jews or Moors who had not been converted; its threats fell on converts suspected of returning to their old religion, Judaism or Islam, and on Christians accused of heresy. Until 1492, unconverted Jews were safer than the baptized. Priests, monks and friars asked exemption from the Inquisition and were refused; the Jesuits resisted its jurisdiction for half a century but in the end gave way. The only power above the Inquisitor General was the crown, and in later centuries even that power was ignored. The Inquisition demanded help and cooperation from every secular official and usually received it.
The Edict of Faith and the Informers
The Inquisition had its own laws and procedure. Before its tribunal sat in a town, it had the "edict of faith" read from church pulpits, calling on everyone to report any heretic they knew, and encouraging informing against neighbors, friends and relatives. (In the sixteenth century accusations by close kin were not accepted.) Informers were promised complete secrecy and protection, while anyone who knew a heretic and did not expose him, or hid him in his house, was threatened with excommunication and curses.
If a baptized Jew still hoped for the coming of another Messiah; kept the Jewish dietary rules; treated the Sabbath as a day of rest and worship or changed his underclothes for it; celebrated Jewish holy days in any way; circumcised his children or gave them Hebrew names, or blessed them without making the sign of the cross; prayed with a swaying of the head, or read a psalm without adding the Christian doxology; or turned his face to the wall at death: these and similar acts, which inquisitors counted as marks of secret heresy, had to be reported to the Inquisition at once.
Under a rule called the "edict of grace," anyone who felt himself suspected of heresy was to come forward and confess. He would then be fined or given penance, but if he named another heretic he was pardoned.
Arrest and Trial
The inquisitors examined the documents provided by informers and investigators. When the members of the tribunal agreed that someone was a heretic, they issued an order of arrest. The accused was held apart, and no one but the tribunal's officials was allowed to see or speak with him. He was usually chained. He had to bring his own bed and pay the costs of his imprisonment; if he did not pay enough, enough of his property was sold, and the rest of his property was seized by the Inquisition's officers lest he hide it or sell it to escape confiscation. In some cases part of his property was sold to support family members unable to work.
When the prisoner was brought to trial, the tribunal, which had already formed its opinion and found him guilty, required him to prove his innocence. The trial was secret, and the accused was made to swear a solemn oath that, if released, he would reveal nothing of it. He was not told what the witnesses had said against him, or who they were; the inquisitors considered themselves justified in this by the need to protect informers.
At first the accused was not told what charges were brought. He was only asked to confess his failures in prescribed belief and worship and to name everyone he knew to be a heretic. If his confession satisfied the court, his punishment was something other than death. If he refused to confess, he was allowed to choose an advocate to defend him, and meanwhile was kept in solitary confinement. In many cases torture was used to extract a confession. The trial was usually dragged out over months, and solitary confinement and chains were often enough to bring the accused to confess what the judges wanted.
Torture and Its Rules
The accused was tortured only when a majority of the tribunal agreed that the evidence showed probable but not certain guilt. Often even after the decision, torture was postponed, in the hope that fear of it would bring a confession. The judges seem sincerely to have believed that torture was in the interest of an accused already judged guilty, since by forcing confession it earned him a lighter penalty; even if he was later condemned to death, he could receive the Church's pardon at the hour of dying and save his soul from hell. In any case, confession was not enough; torture was also used to force the accused to name his accomplices. Contradictory witnesses were tortured to learn which told the truth; slaves and servants were tortured to testify against their masters.
Age was no protection: a girl of thirteen and a woman of eighty were treated alike. But the rules of the Spanish Inquisition normally forbade torturing nursing mothers, the frail, or those accused of minor heresies such as the belief that fornication was a venial sin. Torture was not to continue until it crippled or disabled the victim, and was to stop whenever the physician present ordered it. It was to take place only in the presence of the inquisitors in charge of the case, a chief clerk, a scribe and a representative of the local bishop. Methods varied by place and time. It is said that the torments the Spanish Inquisition applied were milder than those earlier used by the papal inquisitions and by secular courts of the time. The main and chief torture was long imprisonment itself.
Penalties
The Inquisition was prosecutor, judge and court at once, and also issued moral and religious rulings and fixed degrees of punishment. In many cases it reduced part of the penalty because of age, ignorance, poverty, drunkenness, or the good name or repentance of the accused. The lightest penalty was a formal reprimand. Above it was forcing the accused to renounce his heresy publicly, which marked even an innocent person for life. Usually the penitent had to attend Mass regularly and wear a garment, called the sanbenito, marked with a cross of fire.
He might be paraded through the streets with his upper body bared and his sins written on it; sometimes his descendants were permanently barred from public office. He might be banished from the city, and rarely from Spain; flogged, "to the degree that his health was not harmed," a punishment applied to women as to men; sentenced to prison or hard labor, the latter being more useful to the state in Ferdinand's view; or fined heavily or deprived of his property. In several cases where dead persons were accused of heresy, the accused were tried after death and their property forfeited, so that their heirs lost their inheritance. Informers who reported heresy among the dead were given thirty to fifty percent of what the Inquisition collected. Families who feared such retroactive judgment paid the inquisitors "settlements" as insurance against confiscation of their estates.
Wealth was a curse to its owner and a temptation to informers, inquisitors and government. Once money flowed into the inquisitors' purses, they showed less zeal for preserving religion than for acquiring gold, and corruption spread everywhere under the cover of piety.
The Ultimate Penalty and the Auto-da-Fé
Burning at the stake was the final penalty. It was reserved for those accused of grave heresies, found guilty, and unrepentant before the court's final sentence; or for those who had confessed in time and been reconciled and cleansed, and then lapsed into heresy again. The Inquisition claimed it killed no one itself but handed the condemned over to the state authorities. It knew, however, that the criminal law of the country made burning the penalty for serious heresy if the offender had not confessed and repented.
The official presence of Church officers at the burnings shows the Church's responsibility and part in them. The "act of faith" (auto-da-fé) did not mean the burning alone but the whole dreadful and effective procedure of conviction and punishment of the heretic. Its aim was not only to frighten potential offenders but to show something of the Last Judgment and to teach the people a moral lesson.
At first the procedure was simple: the condemned were taken to the main square of the town, and the inquisitors sat on a platform opposite them with great pomp. The condemned were given a last chance to confess, then the sentence was read, and the fires were lit. But as these burnings became frequent and lost much of their psychological force, the ceremony grew more elaborate and imposing and became a grand, theatrical spectacle. Whenever possible it was timed to coincide with a coronation, a wedding, or the visit of a Spanish king, queen or prince. Members of the government and the city council, the inquisitors, local priests and monks were invited and so obliged to take part.
On the evening before, these dignitaries gathered and marched in solemn procession through the main street to set the green cross of the Inquisition on the altar of the cathedral or principal church. One last attempt was made to obtain confessions from the condemned; many gave way, and their sentences were reduced to life imprisonment or a term of years. The next morning the prisoners, who included impostors, blasphemers, men with two wives and women with two husbands, heretics, apostates and later Protestants, were led through dense crowds to the square. Sometimes effigies of absent convicts and the chests of bones of persons condemned for unbelief after death were brought with the prisoners.
In the square, on raised platforms, sat the inquisitors, priests and monks, and civil and state officials; from time to time the king himself attended. A sermon was delivered, after which all present were made to swear loyalty to the holy Inquisition and promise to pursue and report heresy wherever and in whatever form it appeared. Then the prisoners were brought one by one before the court, and the sentences read. We would be wrong to imagine the condemned boldly defended themselves; at this stage they seem to have been so worn down in body and spirit that they could not.
Even now, a confession could save life; in that case the Inquisition was content with flogging, confiscation and life imprisonment. If a guilty person confessed after sentence was pronounced, he was, out of mercy, strangled before being burned. Since such last-minute confessions were frequent, it was rare for a condemned person to be burned alive. Those whose crime was grave heresy and who denied it to the end were refused the last sacraments and so, in the Inquisition's view, were doomed to suffer in hell forever. Penitents were returned to prison; the unrepentant were handed to the civil authorities, who, out of piety, were urged by the Church not to shed blood.
The officers led the condemned through the crowds that had gathered from all around to see the spectacle, to a place outside the city. The sentences were carried out there, and the ashes were scattered over fields or streams. Priests went back to their churches and spectators to their homes, believing that they had offered God a suitable gift in atonement for insulting heresies. Human sacrifice, the author comments bitterly, had come back.