Seville, 1480–1481
Ferdinand and Isabella named the first inquisitors for the district of Seville in September 1480. Many of the converts of Seville fled to the countryside and appealed to feudal lords for protection. The lords were willing to shelter the refugees, but the inquisitors threatened them with excommunication and confiscation of their property, and the lords, in fear, handed the fugitives over. Within the city some converts decided on armed resistance, but their secret was discovered, those involved were seized, and soon the dungeons were full.
Trials began in angry haste, one after another, and the first burning of the Spanish Inquisition took place on February 6, 1481, when six men and women were put to death. By November 4 of that year 298 people had been burned and 79 sentenced to life imprisonment.
Torquemada
In 1483, at Ferdinand and Isabella's request and nomination, Pope Sixtus IV appointed a Dominican friar, Tomás de Torquemada, head of the Inquisition throughout Spain. He was an incorruptible, fanatical ascetic who despised luxury and pleasure, worked with fervor, and was glad to serve Christ by hunting down and uprooting heretics. He berated the inquisitors for their leniency and moderation, summoned many acquitted persons to trial again, and ordered that the rabbis of Toledo be pressed by torture, even to the point of death, to name converts who had returned to Judaism.
Pope Alexander VI, who at first admired his zeal and absorption in his work, was soon alarmed by his severity and in 1494 ordered him to share his work with two other inquisitors-general. Torquemada kept his influence over these two assistants and remained the determined head of the Inquisition, making it "an empire within an empire" whose power stood beside that of Spain's rulers. At his urging the Inquisition in Ciudad Real, in two years (1483–1486), burned 52 people, confiscated the property of 220 fugitives and punished 181 penitents.
When the inquisitors moved their seat to Toledo, within a year they arrested 750 baptized Jews and seized a fifth of their property. Those condemned were made to walk through the town in penitents' dress on six Fridays, scourging themselves with cords of hemp (1486). That same year an auto-da-fé was held at Toledo and 1,650 more people were added to the list of penitents. The same was done at Valladolid, Guadalupe and other Castilian towns.
Resistance in Aragon
Aragon resisted the Inquisition with the courage of despair. The magistrates of Teruel shut the gates against the inquisitors; the Church responded by forbidding priests to perform religious rites in the town; Ferdinand withheld the municipality's salaries and pensions and sent troops to force obedience. The peasants of the surrounding country, always hostile to the townsmen, came to the Inquisition's aid, having been promised that by accusing their landlords they would be relieved of rents and debts. Teruel gave way, and Ferdinand authorized the inquisitors to banish from the town anyone they thought had taken part in the opposition.
In Saragossa many "Old Christians" joined with "New Christians" in protesting against the Inquisition. When, despite their protests, it set up its tribunal, some converts killed one of its members (1485). It was a fatal mistake, for the terrified populace rushed into the streets crying "Burn the converts!" The local archbishop calmed the people with a promise of swift justice. Almost all the conspirators were arrested and punished; some of them died in prison, in desperate circumstances. The Cortes of Valencia refused to permit the inquisitors to operate; Ferdinand ordered his officers to arrest all obstructers, and Valencia too gave way. Backed by the Inquisition, the king overran the independent elements of Aragon one after another; the union of Church and crown, with the weapon of excommunication and the sword of soldiers, was too strong for any province or city to resist alone. In 1488, in Valencia alone, 983 people were condemned for heresy and hundreds burned.
The Popes and the Inquisition
How did the popes regard the use of the Inquisition as an instrument of the state? Undoubtedly they disliked the control of state officials over it, and by all accounts their pity was stirred and they could not stay silent in the face of the heavy payments made to the crown to be cleared of the Inquisition's judgments. Several popes tried to check its advance, and in some cases took its victims under their protection.
In 1482 Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull which, had it been enforced, would have removed the Inquisition from Aragon. He complained that its officers, more in love with gold than concerned for religion, were imprisoning, torturing and burning good and faithful Christians on the doubtful testimony of their enemies and slaves. He ordered that henceforth no inquisitor was to act without the presence and consent of the local bishop's representative; that the names and charges of accusers be made known to the accused; that the Inquisition's prisoners be kept in jails run by the bishoprics; that those who objected to a verdict be allowed to appeal to the pope, with proceedings suspended until his decision; and that all accused of heresy who confessed and repented be pardoned and thereafter safe from prosecution. All past trials and sentences contrary to these rules were annulled, and those who disobeyed them in future were declared excommunicate.
It was an enlightened decree, and its completeness suggests it was issued in sincerity. Yet we must note that it applied only to Aragon, a place whose converts had stood up manfully to win it. When Ferdinand refused to carry it out, arrested the man sent to deliver it and ordered the inquisitors to go on as before, Sixtus did not press the matter and five months later suspended his own bull.
Desperate converts sent floods of money to Rome and asked protection and pardon from the Inquisition's summonses and sentences. Rome accepted the money and sent them safe-conducts and absolutions, but the Spanish inquisitors, backed by Ferdinand, ignored them; and the popes, who sorely needed Ferdinand's friendship and Spain's annual tribute, did not insist on enforcing their rulings. Absolutions for which people had paid were issued and then revoked. Now and then the popes stood by their decrees and summoned inquisitors to Rome for failing to obey them. Alexander VI tried to soften the severity of the Inquisition's tribunals. Julius II ordered an inquisitor named Lucero tried for misconduct and also excommunicated the inquisitors of Toledo. Pope Leo X, that honorable and learned man, declared the belief in burning heretics a blameworthy error (as the book puts it).
How Spain Reacted
How did the Spanish people react? The upper classes and the educated minority offered a little resistance and opposition; the mass of Christians approved of its operations. The crowds who came to watch the burnings showed no pity but only hostility toward the condemned. In some places the spectators themselves attacked the victims so that they might not escape burning by confessing and asking pardon. Christians scrambled to buy the condemned's property at auction.
The Numbers, and the Fear
How many were the victims? Llorente estimates that between 1480 and 1488 there were 8,800 burned and 96,496 sentenced to other penalties, and between 1480 and 1808 31,912 burned and 291,450 given heavy punishments. These figures are often guesses, and today Protestant historians regard them as entirely garbled and exaggerated. One Catholic historian puts the number burned between 1480 and 1504 at two thousand, and from then until 1758 at another two thousand. Hernando del Pulgar, Isabella's private secretary, estimates the number burned before 1490 at two thousand. Zurita, one of the Inquisition's secretaries, boasted that in Seville alone four thousand had been given to the flames. Of course the Inquisition's victims were numerous in most cities and even in the territories subject to Spain, such as the Balearics, Sardinia, Sicily, the Netherlands and America. After 1500 the number burned declined.
But no statistic can show the fear in which the Spanish people lived in those days and nights. Men and women, even within their own families, watched every word they said lest some critical remark by chance send them to one of the Inquisition's prisons. The Inquisition was a mental and intellectual pressure without parallel in history.
Did It Succeed?
Did the Inquisition succeed in what it wanted? Yes, in the goal it declared: freeing Spain from open heresy. Those who think the Inquisition is always useless and fruitless are mistaken and deceive themselves. The same instrument destroyed the Albigensians and the Huguenots in France, Catholics in Elizabethan England and Christians in Japan, and in the sixteenth century crushed the small groups in Spain that leaned toward the Protestant movement. On the other hand, it was probably the same Inquisition that strengthened the Protestant movement in Germany, Scandinavia and England by the fear it created there of the establishment of Catholicism.
It is hard to say what part the Inquisition played in ending the brilliant, golden age of Spanish history, an age that ran from Columbus to Velázquez (1492–1660). Its peak came with Cervantes (1547–1616) and Lope de Vega (1562–1635), a hundred years after the Inquisition was established and spread in Spain. The Inquisition was both effect and cause of the Spanish people's exclusive and intense devotion to Catholicism, a mood bred in them by centuries of struggle against the "infidel" Moors.
Perhaps Spain's weakening through the exhausting wars of Charles V and Philip II, its economic decline from British victories at sea, and the money-loving policy of its government did more to bring about its decay than the Inquisition did. The persecution of witches among the Protestants of northern Europe and New England had much in common with the Inquisition's practice in Spain; and it is remarkable that in the eyes of the Spanish Inquisition witchcraft was a delusion more deserving of pity than punishment. The Inquisition and the hunting and burning of witches both show an age in which theology considered such killing necessary, just as the patriotic massacres of our own time arise from the supposed necessity of killing for political and racial beliefs. We must try to understand such movements in the setting of their times, or today they are nothing but unforgivable historic crimes. For the human mind there is no enemy more dangerous and deadly than a rigid and unquestionable faith.