The Inquisition
I
King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella aim to rid their kingdoms of heretics
By Howard M. Sachar
People often misunderstand the purpose of the
Inquisition. The Inquisition was not against Jews; it was against heretics. It
was the conversos—the significant portion of the Jewish community that had
converted, whether by force or by choice—that the Inquisition scrutinized.
Large numbers of these “New Christians” had been forcibly converted and
continued to practice Judaism in secret. These individuals were the target of
the Inquisition. The following article, which outlines the origins of the
Inquisition in Spain, is reprinted with permission from Farewell Espana: The World of the Sephardim
Remembered, published by Alfred A. Knopf.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, the Catholic Monarchs
In 1469, Prince Fernando of Aragon married his cousin, the
Castilian heiress Isabel. Five years later, Isabel ascended her country's throne.
It was a formidable alliance, both of personalities and of political destinies.Although intensely pious, Isabel was described by her contemporaries
as a "mistress of dissimulation and simulation," a woman capable of
pursuing her goals without scruple or sentiment. Fernando, in turn, although a
dynamic and attractive figure, a brave soldier and respected commander, could
be as ruthless and duplicitous as his wife. When informed that Louis XI of
France complained of having twice been deceived by him, Fernando protested:
"The king of France lies. I deceived him not twice, but ten times."
Isabel and Fernando operated from a base of promising
strength. By law, Castile and Aragon remained separate and independent. In
actual fact, the linked resources of their kingdoms enabled the "Catholic
Monarchs” to transform Spain into a major European empire. During the 1470s
and 1480s, the two rulers conducted a vigorous, unrelenting campaign to break
the power of the nobility. To that end, they shrewdly discerned the political
advantage implicit in a joint campaign of reconquista. By pressing the
onslaught against Granada, Islam's last foothold on the peninsula, Fernando and
Isabel might harness the support of the church and the religious passions of
their subjects, including the fractious on behalf of "Christian civilization."
At the same time, under the mantle of reconquest, a second goal might be
achieved. This was an expedient and unifying crusade against heresy within the
Christian community itself.
For the Jews,
the new royal strategy was a matter of grave moment. On the one hand, such men
as Abraham Senior and Isaac Abravanel held important positions [as court Jews]
under Fernando and Isabel and enjoyed the warm esteem of their rulers. Indeed,
it was specifically the queen's political ambition that revived their historic
fiscal talents, and those of other Spanish Jews. “All the Jews in my
realm," Isabel declared as late as 1477, "are mine and under my care
and my protection and it belongs to me to defend them and keep justice."
Yet by then, her "care and protection" hardly could be reconciled
with the royal intention of manipulating the nation’s religious fervor. Within
the frontiers of Christian Spain, the issue of conversos was fast
becoming an inflamed public lesion. To treat that wound, and to foster their
subjects' ideological unity, Isabel and her husband turned to a mechanism of
vast latent potential. It was an “inquisition into heresy and backsliding.”
The Catholic Church establishes the Inquisition; Ferinand and Isabella
invite it to Spain
As early as the thirteenth century, the church itself had
established an Inquisition to deal with Christian schismatics. These were
Albigensians, Waldensians, and Pasagians, most of them in southern France.
Finding precedent in Roman law, the church's investigative machinery during
those years was administered by individual diocesan bishoprics. Dominican and
Franciscan monks acted as the principal inquisitors. If the operation was ill‑coordinated,
the threat of heresy was not particularly serious then.
But now, in fifteenth‑century Castile and Aragon,
suspected heretics no longer were isolated Christian apostates or Christian
deviants but large masses of former Jews, individuals in the tens of thousands
who appeared to be clinging suspiciously to their ancestral traditions. Popular
sentiment no longer would tolerate the anomaly, and the question therefore
arose of the appropriate means to correct it. An Inquisition based on the
practice of intermittent diocesan inquiries seemed incapable of rooting out
this vast Jewish netherworld. Equally unfeasible was an Inquisition centrally
directed from Rome; Fernando and Isabel were not prepared to forfeit royal
control.
To resolve the issues of both the structure and the
authority of the Inquisition, the Catholic Monarchs thereupon entered into
protracted negotiations with the Vatican. Finally, in 1478, they reached an
agreement with Pope Sixtus IV. To begin with, an Inquisition would be limited
initially to the diocese of Seville, embracing much of Castilian Andalusia.
Here a large and still affluent converso population lived directly
adjacent to the Moorish kingdom of Granada. Indeed, it was fear of this
lingering Moslem enclave that induced Pope Sixtus to accept the Spanish Inquisition's
new and unique status. Its personnel, although clerics every one, would be
answerable not to Rome but to royal, secular authority. Thus, the first
inquisitors were two Dominican friars, Miguel de Morillo and Juan de San
Martin; but it was the Crown of Castile that confirmed their appointment, as it
would those of all other inquisitors.
The rationale for the new enterprise was the need to root
out heretics who "daily return to the superstitious and perfidious sect of
the Jews. . ... Not only have they persisted in their blind and obstinate
heresy, but their children and descendants do likewise." To achieve this
goal of doctrinal cleansing, the Inquisition in the years after 1478 gradually
developed a set of procedures. It allowed a brief state of "grace"
for backsliding Christians‑-that is, former Jews--to turn themselves in.
By the same token, all others who possessed knowledge of secret judaizers were
obliged to transmit their information forthwith, on pain of excommunication.
Once the identity of the accused individuals was
established, they would be seized, thrust into inquisitional dungeons,
interrogated (occasionally under torture), and sentenced to a variety
punishments, ranging from terms of penitential service to imprisonment or to
“relaxation,” that is, death. Thus, even in its earliest phase, between 1479
and 1481, in a ferocious reign of terror, nearly four hundred individuals were
burned at the stake for heresy in the city of Seville alone. Throughout
Castilian Andalusia, some two thousand persons were burned alive, seventeen
thousand others were “reconciled,” that is, spared the death penalty but
subjected to such punishments as imprisonment, confiscation of property, and
debarment from all employment, public and private, Their wives and children
faced destitution.
Howard M. Sachar is a Professor of History and International Affairs at
George Washington University in Washington DC.
c. 1994 by Howard M.
Sachar
