CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN HISTORY Frontiers of Heresy Frontiers of Heresy is among the first major English-language contributions to the history of the Spanish Inquisition since Henry Charles Lea completed his classic survey eighty years ago. Focusing on the lands beyond Castile, Professor Monter analyzes the activities of the Holy Office during an “Aragonese Century” (1530-1630) when these frontier tribunals were its most active elements. This “other” Spanish Inquisition virtually ignored converted Jews and their descendants, but brutally harassed Moriscos and immigrant workers from France; it executed nearly as many people for sodomy as for heresy. Despite opposition from local elites, the Inquisition performed many services for the king, sending thousands of heretics to the galleys and even capturing horse- smugglers along the Pyrenees. Frontiers of Heresy is based upon an immense variety of archival sources, and represents a significant reappraisal of one of the most important yet misunderstood institutions of early modern Europe.CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN HISTORY Edited by Professor J. H. Elliott, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Professor Oliwen Hujton, Harvard University, and Professor H. G. Koenigsberger The idea of an “early modern” period of European history from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century is now widely accepted among historians, The purpose of the Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History is to publish monographs and studies which vill illuminate the character of the period as a whole, and in particular focus attention on a dominant theme within it, the interplay of continuity and change as they are presented by the continuity of medieval ideas, political and social organization, and by the impact of new ideas, new methods and new demands on the traditional structures. For a list of titles in the series, please see the end of the volume.Frontiers of Heresy The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily WILLIAM MONTER Professor of History, Northwestern University CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge New York Port Chester Melbourne SydneyPUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE ‘The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS ‘The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarc6n 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa hutp:/www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 1990 ‘This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1990 First paperback edition 2002 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Monter, E. William, Frontiers of heresy: the Spanish Inquisition from the Basque ands to Sicily / William Monter. p. _om.—(Cambridge studies in early modern history) Includes index. ISBN 0521 374685 1. Inquisition — Spain — Aragon. 2. Aragon (Spain) - History. L Title. IL Series. BX1735.M66 1989 27Y.210946-de20 89-1023 CIP ISBN 0521 37468 5 hardback ISBN 0521 522595 paperbackFor RosellenContents List of maps and figure List of tables Preface PART I THE HOLY OFFICE OUTSIDE CASTILE 1 The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 2. The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 3, The Aragonese Secretariat: publicand private faces PART 2 ARAGONESE TRIBUNALS 4 Saragossa: a royal fortress 5, Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms 6 Valencia: taming the magnates 7 Navarre: the four conspiracies 8 Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles PART 3 ARAGONESE HERESIES g Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain 10 Thesurvival of Morisco culture in Aragon 11 Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration PART 4 “‘MIXED CRIMES”’ IN ARAGON 12 Witchcraft: the forgotten offense 13 Sodomy: the fateful accident vii page ix 29 55 79 105 125 143 164 189 209 231 255 276Contents PART 5 RECESSIONAL 14 The eclipse of Aragon, 1630-1730 Conclusion: one king, one law, one faith APPENDICES 1 Deathsat public autos dee in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1540-1640 2 Galley condemnations in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1560-1640 3, Executions in effigy in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1541-1640 Glossary Index 303 321 326 328 331 334 337Maps 1 Inquisitorial districts, 1570 page 46 2 Prosecution of Moriscos in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1566-1609 104 3, Prosecution of Moriscos in the tribunal of Saragossa, 1558-1610 198 4 Inquisitorial prosecution of Morisco settlements in the Ebro basin, 1570-1610 200 Figure 1 French immigration at Barcelona, 1540-1660 107Tables 1 Inquisitorial executions in the Crown of Aragon, 1 485-92 page 15 2. Inquisition deaths in the Crown of Aragon, 1493-1530 a1 3 Andalucian and Aragonese autos, 1545 38 4 Saragossa autos defe, 1540-55 38 5 Sicilian autos defe, 1540-55 39 6 Deaths at Castilian autos, 1570-1625 8 7 Deaths at Aragonese autos, 1570-1625 49 8 Autos and defendants in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1560-1630 51 9 Stages of inquisitorial activity, 1480-1730 53 10 Crimes of Sicilian familiars, 1595-1634 64 11 Barcelona galley sentences, 1552-1639 108 12 Foreign Protestants of Navarre district, 1565-99, by place of residence when arrested 147 13 Protestant converts of Logrofio district, 1611-70, by place of residence 149 14 Sicilian converts and renegades, 1606-40 172 15 “Lutherans” and Frenchmen, 1560-1600 236 16 Huguenots and “toleration,” 1604-30 248 17 Protestant convertsin Charles II’s Spain 252 18 Aragonese sodomy prosecutions, 1570-1630 288 19 Aragonese sodomy trials by decades, 1560-1640 289 20 Barcelona sodomy defendants, 1580-1630 291 21 Sodomy and Aragonese Inquisitions, 1650-80 316Preface Spanish history has never had any attractions for me, but I cannot help taking it up, for the Spanish Inquisition is the controlling factor in the career of modern persecution. H.C. Lea to W. E. H. Lecky. ‘The last dozen years have witnessed a remarkable renaissance in scholarship about the Spanish Inquisition, both inside and outside Spain itself. This phenomenon seems appropriate to an age when Spain has joined the European community, and when the history of modern persecution appears darker than in Lea and Lecky’s day. Most of the important results of this renaissance have appeared in one of three forms: either as collections of papers delivered at a steady stream of international congresses, as general histories of the entire institution from its fifteenth-century foundation to its nineteenth-century abolitions, or as monographs on individual tribunals. ‘The present work, however, fits none of these categories, because I believe that none of them represents the optimal way to study and understand that hoary old monster called the Holy Office. Although many of its basic rules remained constant, the entire institution changed remarkably between its foundation and its dissolution; different types of victims predominated at different times. The study of individual tribunals provides a better canvas on which to portray such changes over time; but no two tribunals behaved alike, and there were usually twenty of them operating at once. Its long-term operations ultimately depended upon what Inquisitors called /o que se ofrece, the kinds of denunciations supplied to them by outside informants. I have chosen to study one phase in the overall history of the Spanish Inquisition, based on a group of tribunals which together provided most of lo que se ofrece during that phase. These seven tribunals, comprising the special Aragonese Secretariat of the Inquisition, stretched across northeastern Spain and the Mediterranean from the Basque lands to Sicily. Six of them represented the hereditary states of King Ferdinand in Spain and Italy, while the seventh operated in the Kingdom of Navarre, which he conquered in 1512. Seen from Madrid, these were all regions of fueros, of significant liberties, privileges, and exemptions. Each had its own laws, its own Viceroy, and vigorous representative institutions.Preface Within Habsburg Spain, historians always notice the distinctiveness of these lands; but the Spanish Inquisition, the “peculiar institution” of early modern Spain, has not yet been studied in conjunction with Aragonese particularities. ‘The Holy Office always maintained its headquarters in Castile. Even from 1506 to 1518, when the Aragonese Inquisition was legally separate from its Castilian twin, the governing council for Aragon’s Holy Office remained at the Castilian court. The Inquisition’s uniformity of practice throughout Spain and Spanish ‘America merely constitutes a very carly example of “Castilianization,” of reducing local idiosyncracies to a Castilian norm. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, Castile does not equal Spain and the Spanish Empire was not confined to America. Even after the two parts of the Spanish Inquisition were formally reunited in 1518, the Holy Office continued to maintain separate branches for ‘Aragon and Castile. This distinction endured for exactly 100 years, being dismantled at a time when the Aragonese tribunals were rapidly losing their relative importance within the general institution. Although the separation into Aragonese and Castilian Secretariats may have been only a bureaucratic formality, the real differences between Aragon and Castile remain fundamental for a proper understanding of the history of the Spanish Inquisition. More specifically, this book argues three main theses about the history of Spain’s “peculiar institution” under the Habsburgs: 1. An Aragonese pattern, distinctive from that in Castile, had emerged by the 1540s and persisted for about 100 years. Its single most important feature was negative - the permanent disappearance of “Judaizers” as the primary concern of the Holy Office. “Judaizing” was replaced by a group of major offenses, some of which bore little resemblance to conventional notions of heresy. 2. After 1570, with the dispersal of Granada’s Moriscos and the dis- appearance of Spanish Protestants, the Crown of Aragon became the center of serious inquisitorial activity and maintained this primacy for over half a century. Although Castilians outnumbered Aragonese by at least six to one during Philip II’s reign, the four mainland tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat provided well over half of all known inquisitorial deaths in Spain, and most of its condem- nations to the galleys, between 1570 and 1625. The relative importance of the Aragonese tribunals declined after 1610 and, as a group, they became insignifi- cant after 1625. 3. In the Crown of Aragon, the Inquisition fulfilled an important political role under the Habsburgs. Its numerous and popular autos de fe (popular because the people being punished were nearly always “outsiders”) provided valuable prestige for Castilian government. In Castile, where such assistance was unnecessary, the Inquisition helped the church enforce the Catholic Reforma- tion after the Council of Trent by imposing many relatively mild punishments on Old Christians. Balancing my theses are a few disclaimers. First, I wish neither to exonerate xiiPreface nor to condemn Spain’s Holy Office. By the standards of the rest of Christendom (except Portugal), it was indeed a peculiar institution; both its purpose and its methods seem utterly alien to Anglo-Saxon law and custom. The terror which it consciously and successfully inspired depended more upon the publicity than the severity of punishment. Most secular European legal systems punished their prisoners more severely than the Inquisition, but none pro- nounced its judgments more theatrically or perpetuated the memory of its condemnations more assiduously. To understand this institution and its fear- some reputation is not necessarily to forgive it, and detachment should not be construed as indifference. Second, despite its length, this book does not set the Inquisition into its full political context as part of the Spanish crown, since the Crown of Castile remains in shadow throughout. Neither does it compare the Holy Office with other parts of Spain’s judicial system; despite a few excellent examples (Toms y Valiente or Kagan on Castile and Sciuti Russi on Sicily), we still know far too little about legal culture and practice in the Iberian parts of the Crown of Aragon, or Navarre and the Basque lands. My most important documentary sources for studying these tribunals during this period are two complementary series, well known to specialists, preserved at Spain’s Archivo Histérico Nacional in Madrid. First, the annual reports of completed trials or relaciénes de causas from each tribunal: these are relatively more abundant from the Aragonese than from the Castilian Secretariat, and survive at a rate better than 95% for all the major Aragonese tribunals between 1560 and 1660. Second, the almost unbroken series of correspondence from the Supreme Council of the Inquisition to the various branches of the Aragonese Secretariat (created in 1517 and abolished in 1618), collected in nineteen volumes at the AHN as Libros 317-35. The only important lacuna in this series is folios 79-216 of Libro 329, which cover the period July 1590-September 1592. They were ripped violently from their bindings during the Napoleonic era and rest today in the British Library, where they have been re-bound with other stolen inquisitorial materials as Egerton Ms. 1507. Thanks to the generosity of the Comite Conjunto Hispano-Norteamericano and the Fulbright Program, I was able to spend the 1985-86 academic year in Madrid, exploring the riches of the AHN’s Inquisition section and sampling other archival collections in Madrid, Simancas, and Saragossa. Without the CCHN’s faith in a neophyte Hispanist, this project could never have attained its optimum dimensions. I have also benefited from ever-helpful library and archival staffs at such places as Chicago's Newberry Library, the libraries of Northwestern and Princeton Universities, the British Library, and the Henry Charles Lea Library of the University of Pennsylvania, whose curator, Professor Edward Peters, showed unusual generosity by opening Lea’s own copies and notes for my use. xiiiPreface Portions of this work have appeared elsewhere. An earlier draft of Chapter 11 was published in Castilian in Hispania Sacra, 39 (1987), p. 95-116; portions of Chapter 5 have appeared in Catalan in L Avene (Nov. 1988). A draft of Chapter 10 was presented to the Davis Center at Princeton University in 1988, and a draft of Chapter 13 at Northwestern University in 1985; in both cases I have benefited greatly from the criticisms of colleagues and friends. Over the past few years I have accumulated more than the customary amount of indebtedness to the scholarly community of Inquisition experts and other Hispanists. My greatest appreciation goes first to Gustav Henningsen, who encouraged me in several ways to try my hand at inquisitorial scholarship. No less is my debt to John Elliott, who helped me to spend the 1987-88 year at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study as a J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow in order to complete this work under optimal conditions. Behind them come a cluster of other people, who provided invaluable pieces of information and advice to help make sense of a complicated picture. In Spain, they include Jaime Contreras, my paleographic instructor Vicenta Cortes, and Xavier Gil — and by extension, such Hispanized Frenchmen as Jean-Pierre Dedieu or Bartolomé Bennassar. In the English-speaking world, apart from Henningsen and Elliott, I have learned most from James Amelang, Geoffrey Parker, and Richard Kagan. To each of them my special thanks, and the customary warning that none of them individually or collectively has been able to dispel all my errors. My debts to my family are even greater. Not just to those of our children who endured unusual amounts of dislocation during the four years which have gone into this project, but also to my mother, Florence Monter, who has provided enormous encouragement across these and other years. My greatest debt is to my wife Rosellen, who has shared almost every detail used in composing this mosaic, painstakingly improved the words in which they were recorded, and furnished excellent maps. xivPART 1 The Holy Office outside CastileThe Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 Venian a fer la Inquisicién con el deshorden que lo han fecho en Castilla, y aquellas mismas reglas y estremos trayan inquisimas y contra toda disposicion de derecho. City of Teruel to Saragossa, 1484 (Floriano, in BRAH, 87 (1925), p. 241). Asi permitié Nuestro Seftor que cuando se pensaba extirpar este santo oficio para que se resistiese y impidese tan santo negocio, se introdujese con la autoridad y vigor que se requeria. (Zurita, Anales de Aragon, Vit, p. 507). Grandissimo ¢ antichissimo odio é poi fra castigliani e aragonesi, e lo vanno benissimo conservando; e se non fosse ... il gran timore di quest offizio dell’In- quisizione, fra loro seguirano disordini di grande importanzia. Venetian relazione, 1563 (Firpo, Relazioni, vitl, p. 410). ‘The Spanish Inquisition, like such other important innovations of Ferdinand and Isabella as the Santa Hermandad or the corregidores, was born in Castile. The chroniclers of the Catholic monarchs, whether Old Christians like Bernal- dez, conversos like Pulgar, or Aragonese like Zurita, all agreed on this point. Indeed, a careful search uncovers signs that Castilian prelates and noblemen had proposed a concordia with Isabella’s predecessor Henry IV, “the Liberal,” enabling the king to sponsor the pursuit of converso heretics, and to confiscate their property, as early as 1464-65. Early in Isabella’s reign, before any bulls had been sought in Rome to create an Inquisition under royal control, the episcopal vicar at Llerena burned two Judaizers alive for heresy, penanced two women and ordered their house destroyed. As Bernaldez remarked, “in the first years of the reign of the very Catholic and Christian Ferdinand and Isabel, this heresy was so exalted that educated men were on the point of preaching the Mosaic law, and ordinary men could not hide being Jewish.”! Such precedents made it easier for Torquemada and other Castilian Dominicans to persuade the queen to seck inquisitorial powers from the Papacy in 1478. The public Judaizing of conversos in Seville, which was much discussed when the royal couple visited the Andalucian capital for the first time in 1478, led 1 Nicholas Lopez Martinez, Los Judaizantes castellanos y la Inquisicion en tiempo de Isabel la Catolica (Burgos, 1954), pp. 162, 203, 241-42, 413-14. 3The Holy Office outside Castile Isabella and Ferdinand to put these powers into effect. They rapidly created and staffed a royal Inquisition for Castile; because the monarchs rather than the Pope named the Inquisitors, Castile’s Holy Office marked a new and momen- tous departure in both Spanish and Christian history. During its first years this organization remained exclusively Castilian in scope and personnel. Its first tribunal set to work in Seville, quickly earning a reputation for exceptional ferocity. The converso chronicler Pulgar complained that the new institution was directed exclusively against baptized Jews and spoke of 300 people killed in Seville, including several first offenders who had made full confessions. He added that most of the 3,000 converso householders in the archdiocese of Seville had fled to foreign lands, but noted that the queen, when notified of the enormous damage to Seville’s prosperity, “‘paid very little attention to the diminution of her income and wished to cleanse her kingdom of that sin of heresy ahead of all private interests, because she understood that it was in the service of God and herself.”? Similar language would soon be heard in Ferdi- nand’s hereditary domains. In 1483 the Catholic monarchs decided to extend this new institution to the lands collectively known as the Crown of Aragon. These territories possessed some of the oldest Inquisitions in Europe, dating from the thirteenth century. From the Crown of Aragon had come the thirteenth-century inquisitorial adviser and saint Ramé6n de Penyafort; equally Catalan was the author of the great fourteenth-century handbook for Inquisitors, Nicholas Eymeric. Propa- gandists for Ferdinand and Isabella insisted that these venerable institutions had become almost totally inert by the mid-fifteenth century; but it is undeniable that the Popes continued to appoint Inquisitors for the various parts of the Crown of Aragon - the Kingdom of Aragon, the Principality of Catalonia, and the Kingdom of Valencia - in the 1400s. It is equally certain that these papally commissioned Inquisitors continued to conduct heresy trials in King Ferdi- nand’s day. Indeed, stimulated by recent developments in Castile, they may even have increased their activities a bit.> When the Catholic monarchs obtained permission from Innocent VIII to name Torquemada as Inquisitor-General for the Crown of Aragon in addition to that of Castile, they therefore anticipated - and got - far stiffer political 2 Fernando del Pulgar, Cronica de los Reyes Catdlicos, ed. J.de Mata Carriazo, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1943), ch. 120 (1, pp. 430-40; quote, p. 440). 3 A. Ubieto Arteta, “Procesos de la Inquisicién de Aragén,” in Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y ‘Museos, 67 (1959), pp. 540ff. Scattered among the trials conducted by the Diputacién of the Kingdom of Aragon, whose notaries also worked for the Inquisition, is one inquisitorial trial from the 1470s and four from 1482 to 1483, followed by ten from 1484 to 1485 as the new institution began work. For Valencian trials from the mid-1460s, see Ytzhak Fritz Baer, Die Juden im Chiristlichen Spanien, Brster Teil 2 vols. (Berlin, 1936; reprint 1970), 1, pp. 437-44 (#392), and especially Archivo Histérico Nacional, Ing. Valencia, Legajo 537/#5 with fifteen trials from the 1460s, one of whom was condemned to death. See Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicion espaiola, El tribunal de Valencia, 1478-1530 Barcelona, 1976), p. 38 n. 7. 4The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 resistance than in Castile. A prominent Aragonese converso complained that “this Inquisition was only made to in order to steal people’s property; the queen and the Castilians created this Inquisition in order to destroy this kingdom, although our king is a good guy (mozo) and a good Christian.” His bewildered indignation was shared by many Aragonese Old Catholics, who generally admired their ruler’s energy and shrewdness but could not understand this particular policy. King Ferdinand knew exactly what objections to expect from his hereditary subjects. First and foremost, they put forth the argument that a royal Inquisition was totally unnecessary, since the Papal Inquisition had kept heresy under control for the previous two centuries, Secondly, they claimed that the new tribunals introduced dangerous legal innovations. At first glance, the second objection resembled complaints from Isabella’s kingdom; but in the Crown of Aragon such complaints carried more force, because of the import- ance of local legal privileges, the famous fueros of its component territories. The first objection was the more serious, but also the more easily overcome by diplomacy in Rome. Ferdinand did not try to by-pass the established Inquisitors in the north, or to subject them to orders from his new royal Council of the Inquisition. Instead, he profited from his credit with the Papacy, stem- ming from his long and expensive wars against the Moors, to have the old commissions revoked and clear the way for Torquemada (rather than the Pope) to name new Inquisitors. By the spring of 1484, Torquemada had attended a meeting of the Aragonese Cortes and had named new Inquisitors for all three parts of the Crown of Aragon. He even found time to attend a small public auto de fe in Saragossa, during which four heretics were penanced, before returning to his duties in Castile. EARLY ARAGONESE OPPOSITION AT TERUEL Ferdinand and his new Inquisitors understood both the importance of legal privileges (fueros) and the public success of converted Jews throughout the Crown of Aragon; Ferdinand himself employed several well-educated Ara- gonese conversos in important offices at his court. They decided to begin their operations suddenly, before the conversos and their political allies could organize resistance to the new institution. Although Torquemada’s new appointees held two quick autos in Saragossa and even managed to hang a Judaizer in June 1484, by mid-summer public displays of hostility had brought their public activities to a standstill in Aragon’s capital. In fact, the first major effort of the new Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon was to be made in the small city of Teruel, located in the most remote southern corner of the Kingdom of Aragon, to which it claimed only a tenuous attachment (when circumstances warranted it, Teruel’s officials claimed they were autonomous or even part of Castile). Here + Baer, Die Juden im Christlichen Spanien, 11, p. 466 (#397). 5The Holy Office outside Castile about 600 households of Mudejar artisans, Jewish and converso traders, and Old Christians lived in turbulent coexistence. Although Teruel’s fifteenth-century riots and guerrilla wars had political rather than religious motives, such fratricidal quarrels had caused many conversos to flee only seven years before the Inquisitors first arrived in May 1484.5 Given its remoteness, its size, and its sizable Jewish population, Teruel may have looked like an ideal place for the new Inquisition to start its work in Aragon; but choosing it proved to be a serious mistake.° Surprise favored the Inquisitor and his official staff, who arrived in Teruel only three days after the city’s delegate to the Aragonese Cortes of 1484 ~ himself a lawyer of Jewish ancestry — had returned and reported that new Inquisitors had been appointed for Aragon. Local reactions were therefore spontaneous, but also dominated by lawyers (several of them conversos) who were highly suspicious of all outside interference. ‘Their first official public meeting with the young Basque Dominican, Fray Juan Solibera, prefigured the rupture which soon ensued. “The whole council, unanimously and concordantly, answered that it was a just and holy thing,” but immediately added “that the Inquisition be done on the articles of faith and on the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures (if there be anyone who interprets them in another way than the Holy Ghost interprets them), and not over any other thing in any manner.” Moreover, “the said Inquisition must be done properly, according to the pure style of canonical constitutions, by suitable, good, honest, upright and just ministers.” Finally and most importantly, “they may not pass one iota beyond, or do anything repugnant to the liberties, fueros, privileges, usages and good customs of the present city.” With slight variations, this tune was played by local authorities throughout Ferdinand’s lands, though usually by more exalted representatives with much more time to prepare their remarks. Teruel’s officials could not understand why their city had been chosen for this dubious honor, since Aragon contained “other greater cities with more people than this, ... which is at the very end of the kingdom and neatly half empty.” 5 Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereatter Lea), 4 vols. (New York, 1906-08), 1, p. 503, on Saragossa’s 1484 autos. For Teruel, see especially Antonio Floriano, “Teruel en el siglo XV. La vida economica y la cuestion monetaria,” in Boletn de la Real Academia de Historia, (hereafter BRAH), 88 (1926), pp. 785-824. We still need a comparable work on Teruel’s violent political history, particularly its quarrels with the smaller surrounding communi- ties in its comunidad. © The basic narrative of Teruel’s conflict with the Inquisition in 1484-85 is Antonio Floriano, “El tribunal del Santo Oficio en Aragon: Establecimiento de la Inquisicion en Teruel,” in BRAH, 86 (1925), pp. 544-695, followed by a documentary appendix in ibid., 87 (1925), pp. 173-260. As municipal archivist, Floriano never left Teruel, so his work must be complemented by Legajos 533-46 of the Valencian Inquisition trials at the AHN. See Manuel Sanchez Moya and Jasone Monasterio, “Los judaizantes turolenses en el siglo XV,” in Sefarad, 32 (1972), Pp. 105-40, 307-40; 33 (1973), PP. 111-44, 325-56; also J. Angel Sesma Mujioz, E/ establecimiento de la Inquisicién en Aragin (1484-1486) (Saragossa, 1987), #128-29, 137, 160, 175 (pp. 166, 174, 195-96, 211). 7 Floriano, “Teruel,” in BRAH, 87 (1925), pp- 175, 181 (quotes). 6The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 Within three days, Teruel’s government had hamstrung their new Inquisitor by questioning his credentials. They claimed a dozen irregularities and illegali- ties in his official powers, and were adamant that they would do nothing until all their complaints had been settled. Led by its most eloquent lawyer, micer Camafias, Teruel pasted together its exceptiones de jure, or official legal com- plaints. As Teruel remarked next month to Saragossa’s city officials, indignantly denying they had arrested any servants of the Inquisitors, “the defense of this city is ink and paper and laws.”® But with such weapons Teruel’s lawyers had intimidated Fray Solibera from preaching his official inaugural sermon and thus starting his Inquisition. For three weeks he remained immobilized in a convent, then abruptly moved his base to a nearby hamlet called Cella. From here he thundered excommunications against Teruel, while the city sent secret agents to other parts of Aragon and a public embassy to their king. Within two weeks of his departure, Torquemada’s new Valencian Inquisitors passed through Teruel and were lavishly entertained. Municipal officials even invited them to conduct Teruel’s Inquisition, meeting the expected polite refusal with hypocritical regrets. By July 1484 stalemate had set in. Although Solibera’s excommunication was soon lifted by rival authorities, he had acquired an invaluable ally: a Teruel hidalgo named Juan Garces de Marcilla, scion of one of the region’s principal families, now provided him with an armed guard and a safe base in the rural comunidad, which had waged bloody wars against its capital only a generation ago. The city’s ambassadors met violent refusals at court, where they were unable to present their petition and fled in order to avoid arrest; Teruel’s agent in Saragossa was arrested by order of the Inquisition and kept imprisoned for a month. In October 1484 Ferdinand deposed Teruel’s municipal officials and rebuffed protests from Aragonese parliamentary deputies. But the legal war escalated slowly and bloodlessly during the next few months. Inquisitor Solibera formally appealed to the secular arm, and King Ferdinand responded in February 1485 by outlawing Teruel’s officials, ordering all Ara- gonese officials to assist in their capture, and naming a commander — none other than Juan Garces de Marcilla - to seize Teruel and install the new Inquisition. Garces de Marcilla ambushed one of Teruel’s former ambassadors to the court, who had been attending a wedding across the border in Valencia. After learning this news, some of Teruel’s jurists finally counselled obedience to the king, because their legal obstructions had been exhausted. But it took another seven weeks and a peculiar exploit by Garces de Marcilla, who paid a nocturnal visit to the city in order to visit his sick wife, to end Teruel’s resistance. Inquisitor Solibera made his second entry ten months and two days after his first, as most of Teruel’s leading conversos fled. After capitulation came repression. Ferdinand appointed Garces de Marcilla 8 Ibid, p. 241. 7The Holy Office outside Castile as Captain of Teruel, with dictatorial powers. The Inquisitors had been collect- ing testimony from Catholic servants of Teruel’s conversos during their exile at Cella; now they set to work in earnest. By August 1485 they held their first public auto de fe, at which they burned the effigies of micer Gonzalo Ruiz, the city’s deputy at the 1484 Cortes, and his son, together with the bones of a well-known converso merchant who died recently. Gonzalo’s wife was the sister of Jaime Martinez Santangel the elder, Teruel’s richest converso usurer. This man, who boasted that one of his relatives had become a Cardinal, had engineered Teruel’s appeal to the Pope in August 1484. Appeals to Rome were frequent at this phase of inquisitional history; the first important comverso to be arrested by Garces de Marcilla in September 1484 asked his lawyer son (Teruel’s secret agent whom the Inquisition had arrested at Saragossa) to carry his appeal to the Pope. The father was finally executed at Teruel in January 1486; the son was never captured, although he was executed in effigy at Saragossa a month later.? ‘The Santangel patriarch stayed in Teruel and was arrested in May 1485. He became the star heretic executed at Teruel’s greatest public auto on January 7, 1486, burned together with six other men, two women, and two effigies. Santangel’s four sons experienced remarkably different fates. One of them, Luis, was arrested with his father; despite his appeal to Rome, he was ultimately executed in person, together with his wife, at Teruel’s next public auto two months later. Another son, Alfonso, fled when his father was burned and was later executed in effigy at Teruel’s final auto in July 1487, together with many other fugitive or deceased conversos. A third son, Jaime the younger, fled from Teruel when the Inquisitors attempted to arrest his wife; he was subsequently captured at Saragossa, where he was tried and finally burned at an auto in May 1488.10 ‘A fourth son, Joan, remained in Teruel and by 1488 had been coopted by the Inquisition’s receiver of confiscated property to collect various debts owed to local conversos who had been killed. As his royal patent noted, Joan “had many relatives and friends in the said city,” making him an ideal person to track down terio, “Los judaizantes turolenses,” 32, pp. 308-12 (Francisco and Juan id., 33, pP. 111-14, 120-22 (Gonzalvo Ruiz and his son Gil de Gonzalvo), 330-33 (Berenguer Ram). See Lea, 1, p. 594 (auto #5, case 6), for Juan Martinez’s ritual execution, ' See Sanchez and Monasterio, “‘Los judaizantes turolenses,” 32, pp. 325-49 (esp. Santangel genealogy on p. 326); ibid, pp. 118-19, for his daughter Violante, who abjured de leo’ on March 3,, 1486, the day one of her brothers was burned. For Jaime Martinez Santangel the younger, mistakenly identified by Sanchez and Monasterio (ibid, 33, p. 118) as never arrested but in reality executed at Saragossa in May 1488, see the mid-seventeenth-century “Memorial de diversos autos celebrados en Saragossa (1482-1 502),” purchased by H.C. Lea and preserved among his papers at the Lea Library in Philadelphia (auto 30, #1), confirmed by the Libro Verde de Aragon (hereatter Libro Verde), ed. Isidro de las Cagigas (Madrid, 1929), p. 137. His trial, opening in May 1487, is also preserved at Saragossa: see Ubieto, “Procesos de la Inquisicion de Aragén,” p. 554 #23. 8The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 such hidden assets; he was therefore permitted to travel as far as Perpignan, to which many of Teruel’s conversos had fled, and was promised half of all such debts he was able to collect. History records that he collected a great deal during the next fourteen months, much of which had been owed to his father and brother." What makes the tragedy of the Santangel clan so poignant is that the sick wife whom Garces de Marcilla visited secretly in March 1485 was Brianda San- tangel, daughter of Jaime Martinez Santangel the elder. In other words, the fanatical supporter of the Inquisition and virtual dictator of Teruel had married into the city’s richest converso family, thus becoming the “secular arm” respon- sible for carrying out the Holy Office’s death sentences against his wife’s father and brother. Garces’ wife was also accused but never convicted, at least not until 1518 when she was imprisoned by the Valencian Inquisition.12 Ferdinand reprimanded Garces de Marcilla in January 1487 after learning that Garces’ nephew had violently attacked the Inquisition’s jailer. This unfor- tunate man was trying to arrest the daughter of Gonzalo Ruiz (the 1484 deputy to the Cortes), who was also the wife of Jaime Santangel the younger; Garces’ nephew was married to their daughter, who was therefore the niece of Garces’ own wife. The young man fled to his Santangel in-laws in Valencia in a futile attempt to escape arrest by the Inquisition. Flight brought no guarantee of safety for Teruel’s prominent conversos, some of whom were condemned either in Saragossa or in Valencia.!3 One hears much about intermarriage between Old-Christian noblemen and daughters of converso lawyers and merchants (Teruel’s principal conversos often combined both functions), and also about the narrowness of urban elites. Both phenomena occurred throughout the Crown of Aragon. Bui possible to imagine them so vividly combined as at Teruel, where the Inquisition became a lethal and ultimately double-edged weapon in settling family quarrels. The duration of repression in this small city was relatively brief: a dozen public executions, another twenty public recantations, many condemnations of dead and fugitive conversos, affecting Teruel’s principal converso clans. Four public autos, held between August 1485 and July 1487, formalized the Inquisition’s 11 On Joan, see Ramon Ferrer Navarro, “Aspectos economicos de la inquisicion turolense a fines, del siglo XV,” in Ligarzas, 7 (1975), pp. 30% (his patent, dated January 15, 1488), 280-83 (assets owed to his father collected by him), 288-89 (assets of his brother Luis collected by him). A similar case occurred in Sicily in 1502, when a receptor employed the son of a condemned Jewish neofio to serve as his agent in collecting debts: see Pietro Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon ¢ primi anni del San¢Urizio in Sicilia (1500-1514),” in Archivio Storico Siciliano, 3rd ser., 20 (1970), p.271. 12 Brianda Santangel’s trial, with others, has been published by Manuel Sanchez Moya, “La Inquisicién de Teruel y sus judaizantes en el siglo XV,” in Teruel, 20 (1958), pp. 145-200; also Archivo del Reino de Valencia, Maestre Racional 8354bis, fols. 93, 1310. 13 Gil Gracian was tried and penanced at Saragossa in January 1489: Li autos,” #7 of auto 35. ‘Memorial de diversosThe Holy Office outside Castile actions. Barely two years after his triumph in early 1485, Garces de Marcilla fell from power, while at the same time Solibera and his staff abandoned Teruel for a more permanent base in Valencia. By 1502 King Ferdinand had declared a moratorium of debts from con- fiscated properties of Teruel’s converses, while closing its mosque that year in accordance with Castilian policy (no other mosques were closed in the Crown of Aragon). The forced baptism of Teruel’s Moslems changed the face of local heresy. By 1504 the Valencian tribunal negotiated a financial agreement with representatives of Teruel’s newest group of terrified nuevos conversos; the city which had the sad distinction of being the first part of the Crown of Aragon to sacrifice its Jewish conversos to the new Inquisition was also the first to sec its Moriscos harassed. Teruel’s fratricidal political quarrels persisted after 1500, and the Holy Office continued to profit from them. The Papacy displayed polite concern to the Spanish ambassador about the Inquisition’s activities in Teruel as late as 1572; the city’s Moriscos were still using the Inquisition to settle their domestic rivalries during the 1580s.!4 ARAGONESE ASSASSINATION AND CATALAN CHICANERY Inquisitor Solibera left Teruel for several months after his triumph in 1485 order to help with an emergency in Aragon’s capital. At Saragossa the main conflict between the Inquisition and Aragonese liberties took a sudden and dramatic twist late in the summer of 1485, because of events which completely changed the Inquisition’s entire history in the Kingdom of Aragon and pro- moted its acceptance throughout Ferdinand’s territories. What began as a sharp constitutional conflict between closely matched rivals ended with a decisive victory for the Holy Office in its new form, all because of a catastrophic miscalculation by Aragon’s conversos.15 ‘After Torquemada’s return to Castile, the new Inquisition was scarcely more successful in Saragossa than it had been in Teruel. The great Aragonese chronicler Geronimo Zurita (himself a longtime official of the Inquisition) admitted that public riots broke out in Aragon’s capital after the Edict of Faith was first proclaimed. The malcontents were of course led by converses, but they also included “many gentlemen and leading citizens, publishing that its mode of procedure was contrary to the laws of the kingdom.” Specifically, they objected 44 See J. Caruana Gomez de Barreda, ed., Indice de pergaminos ...en el Archivo de la cuidad de Teruel (Madrid 1950), p. 231 (perg. #278, doct. 489), on the 1504 acordados; Archivo General de Simancas. Catélogo XIV: Estado, Negociacion de Roma 1381-1700 Valladolid, 1936), p. 61 (Legajo 919), on the 1572 issues; and below, pp. 206-7, on Teruel’s Moriscos in the 1580s. 15 The classical account of the Inquisition in Aragon in 1484-85 is in Geronimo Zurita’s Anales de Aragin, 9 vols. (Madrid 1974-77), Vill, pp. 501-07. For the legal opposition, see Jose Sesma Mulioz, La Diputacién del Reino de Aragin en la época de Fernando Hl (Saragossa, 1977), PP. 329-54, 406-29, and Sesma’s Establecimienta, #48, 51-63 (pp. 85-87, 89-102). 10The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 to the Inquisition’s confiscation of property of convicted heretics and the secrecy of prosecution witnesses, “which were two very new things, never practiced, and very prejudicial to the kingdom.” They immediately decided to persuade the Justicia, the appellate court of Aragon, to declare any confiscations invalid. Meanwhile they attempted to offer a large donation to the monarchs, especially the queen since “‘she was the one who showed most favor to the general Inquisition.” However, both tactics failed. Asagon’s acting chief justice, Tristan de Laporta, refused to accept their arguments; to try to bribe Isabella on such a matter was utterly useless. Accordingly, by December 1484 the malcontents shifted their bribery to the court of Rome, where money spoke more loudly. At the same time, they sent an embassy from the Diputados of the Aragonese Parliament to the Spanish court, choosing an Augustinian monk and an Old-Christian lawyer to present their complaints. Although King Ferdinand treated these Aragonese deputies with far more courtesy than he had shown to Teruel’s agents a few months earlier, he still remained inflexible on this issue. His official answer, dated from Seville in January 1485, refuted their arguments point by point, denying that the Inqui- sition’s procedures were novel and claiming that the repression of heresy overruled ordinary Aragonese legal privileges. Unveiling an ironic argument which he would also employ elsewhere in his hereditary lands, Ferdinand observed that “if there are as few heretics in this kindgom as you say, we marvel all the more that the Inquisition is so feared and that they oppose it by calling it unconstitutional (contrafuero).”"7 Legal deadlock therefore ensued. The new Inquisition itself displayed little more activity than its predecessor; one of the two Inquisitors named by Torque- mada died in Lérida, reportedly poisoned by conversos. The Justicia’s court still refused to overrule the Inquisition, and the king’s support for the Holy Office was certain. However, in the late spring of 1485 matters took a new and fatal turn. Advice reportedly came from one of Aragon’s leading comversos at court, treasurer Gabriel Sanchez, in a coded letter to his brother in Saragossa claiming that the Inquisition would be finished in Aragon if a few of its prominent officials, particularly Pedro Arbués, the remaining Inquisitor, were killed. Strategy meetings were held at the homes of prominent Saragossa merchants, lawyers, and priests of converso ancestry, attended by the abbot of Aragon’s leading monastery and some other prominent Old Catholics. Rumors reached Ferdinand that assassins were being hired. Attempts were made that spring and summer to throw a key inquisitorial official into the Ebro river and to enter the 1 Zurita, Anales de Aragén, VIM, p. 503 (quote). As Lea remarked (1, p. 245), both confiscation and secrecy were the “veriest commonplaces” of the medieval Inquisition, so that the startled and earnest reaction of Aragonese lawyers in 1484 indirectly proved just how moribund the old Inquisition had actually become. 17 Sesma, Establecimiento, #74~75 (pp. 112-14, quote 112). IrThe Holy Office outside Castile Inquisitor’s room at night. Despite such ominous warnings, Arbués, a native ‘Aragonese, refused to take special precautions. He proved a fairly easy target for the half-dozen masked assassins, led by the French servant of a recently arrested artisan, who surprised him at midnight prayers in Saragossa’s Cathe- dral on September 14, 1485. They wounded him so badly that he died three days later. Saragossa’s conversos had committed the worst blunder imaginable. Instead of eliminating the Inquisition, they had given it unshakable legitimacy by providing it with a martyr and possible saint (Pedro Arbués was finally canonized in the nineteenth century, after the Inquisition had been abolished). They had managed the difficult task of making the Inquisition momentarily popular in ‘Aragon and provoked the worst anti-Semitic riots in the city’s history, which the local archbishop (King Ferdinand’s illegitimate son) finally managed to calm. Constitutionalism evaporated; the assassins were to be hunted down “with utmost rigor, ignoring the fueros and customs of the kingdom,” with the full consent of Aragon’s Parliament.'® Solibera was summoned from Teruel to serve as interim Inquisitor. Last but far from least, Ferdinand moved the Inquisition to new quarters in Saragossa’s royal fortress of the Aljaferia, where it would be well protected against future threats. The backlash from this single act lasted for years. Fourteen different public autos were held in Saragossa during 1486, ten more in 1487, seven more in 1488. Several of the principal plotters behind Arbués’ murder fled up the Ebro to Tudela in the independent Kingdom of Navarre, only to be forcibly extra- dited by Aragonese officials; several notables from Tudela were captured with them and forced to appear in an auto late in 1487. One of the major plotters managed to escape to France. Despite attempts by Aragonese students to have him arrested by the Parlement of Toulouse, he was freed through written testimony from other Saragossa converses. He soon died; but his son was required to make an expiatory pilgrimage to Toulouse to exhume his father’s body after he had been executed in effigy, while five Saragossa conversos whose testimony had helped gain his release were heavily fined and publically pen- anced. The principal assassins were all captured alive and given suitably frightful executions.?9 Elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon, legal opposition to the new Inquisition followed the same general lines as in the Kingdom of Aragon, insisting on its radical incompatibility with local fueros. In the Kingdom of Valencia, which had no standing committees of deputies, the struggle was sharp but brief. “There was great opposition by the military branch [nobility] to admit the Inquisitors,” 18 Zurita, Anales de Aragén, Vill, p. 506 (quote). 19 See Lea’s “Memorial de diversos autos” (partly printed by Lea, 1, pp. 592-611), and compare the abccedario printed in the Libro Verde, plus the less-complete Somario de relajados (pp. 11133, 135-38). 12The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 noted Zurita, adding immediately that their resistance “lasted three months.” Although the Valencians, like the Aragonese, sent an embassy to Ferdinand in the autumn of 1484, the Inquisition was able to start its official operations with an Edict of Grace in November 1484 and a more successful one next summer at which 350 conversos confessed their heresies. These amnesties served as a form of indirect taxation on Valencian comversos, who were exempt from the heavy direct taxes imposed on Jewish aljamas to help finance the Moorish campaigns of the Catholic kings. The fines imposed at Valencia were applied directly to the expenses of the war against Granada, as Isabella had done previously with the money collected from conversos in Seville.2° In 1486 another 350 Valencian conversos were reconciled in a new Edict of Grace, while others were denounced by frightened conversos in Saragossa during the aftermath of the Arbués murder. In Valencia, effective resistance to the introduction of the new Inquisition lasted about three months; Catalonia employed the same kind of legalistic objections but kept Ferdinand’s Holy Office out for three years. The Catalans, proverbially shrewd legalists, had two advantages over their neighbors: first, they had a special Papal bull, dated 1461, appointing their own Inquisitor, who was still nominally at work a quarter-century later; second, unlike the Valencians, they had not sent deputies to the Tarazona Cortes in April 1484. Thus when they heard in the summer of 1484 that Torquemada had named new Inquisitors for Barcelona, they reacted swiftly against the proclamations of the new institu- tion which “have reportedly been made in Valencia and attempted in Saragossa and other places in Aragon.” By July they sent a special embassy to their king; a month later they had created the first of several special committees to coordinate their resistance to Ferdinand’s new Inquisition.”! Catalan authorities insisted that the threat of a Castilian Inquisition would provoke the “total depopulation” of Barcelona, although it had no ghetto and its conversos were not heretics. Their fourth letter to Ferdinand in December 1484 claimed that “everyone is frightened by the news we have of the executions and procedures which have reportedly been done in Castile, which causes a justified fear and flight from such rigor.” But Ferdinand’s earlier answer to them outlined his inflexible policy: if they had a legal right to prevent foreigners from becoming Inquisitors, they had to show it to him; if they had no heretics anyway, they need not fear the Inquisition; and if the new institution would cripple Barcelona’s commerce, that was an unfortunate necessity. As he told his son and Viceroy, “before we decided to establish this Inquisition in any city of our kingdoms, we carefully considered all the damages and inconveniences which might ensue to our royal rights and incomes. However, our firm intention and 2 Zurita, Anales de Aragén, Vi, p. 503 (quote); for a somewhat inflated opinion of the Valencian opposition, see Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicion espaiola, pp. 47-61. 21 The best account of Catalonia’s struggle with King Ferdinand over the Inquisition is in Jaime Vicens Vives, Ferran Il i la ciutat de Barcelona 1479-1516, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1936), 1, PP. 373-424 (quote, p. 373)- 13The Holy Office outside Castile desire is to place the service of God before our own.”?? The Catalans could not invoke such lofty principles, but they complained that several hundred of their wealthier converso households had left Barcelona for France in November and December 1485. In fact, from late 1484 until spring 1486 both Ferdinand and the Catalans, including the worried conversos, were more preoccupied by the peasant revolt of the Remensa than by the Inquisition. The king did find time to put pressure on the Papacy, which revoked the powers of all ecclesiastical troublemakers in all three parts of the Crown of Aragon in July 1485. Next year Ferdinand’s efforts bore further fruit in a new Papal letter which revoked Barcelona’s 1461 privileges and directed Torquemada to name a new Inquisitor for Catalonia. Momentum now shifted away from the obstructionists: to Barcelona’s relief, the Remensa affair was finally settled; news of Arbués’ murder turned the Catalan clergy in favor of the new Inquisition; and the king sent a violent letter to his Viceroy, peremptorily ordering the Holy Office installed. The incumbent Inquisitor, after decades of inactivity, decided to condemn a dead Castilian converse and confiscated his property, held in trust by Barcelona’s municipal bank, thereby raising issues which kept local lawyers busy for months. The Catalans tried one final delaying action by sending an ambassa~ dor to Rome to have the February 1486 letter revoked, but they lacked sufficient money or influence to obtain any concessions. In March 1487 Antonio de Bardaxi, regent of Ferdinand’s Aragonese chancellery and Catalonia’s most prominent converso, hitherto a faithful supporter of his king’s inquisitorial policies in Catalonia, suddenly fled to France with his family. It was the final augury that all legal opposition was fruitless. On July 5, 1487, Alonso de Espina made his formal entry into Barcelona as Torquemada’s new Inquisitor. It had taken Ferdinand and Torquemada twenty-seven months longer to by-pass the legal chicanery of the Catalans than to overpower tiny Teruel. Everywhere in the Crown of Aragon the essential dynamics of opposition had been the same. A well-placed legal elite, including many conversos who still coexisted comfortably with their Old-Christian neighbors, fought the intro- duction of the “disorderly” Castilian Inquisition with every weapon at their command. They recognized that it posed a menace to the social structures of Aragon and Catalonia, that its procedures threatened to overturn many local laws and immunities which were a great source of regional pride, and that its confiscations would disturb the commercial prosperity of the region’s cities. Such malcontents got little help from the high-ranking converso officials at Ferdinand’s court and absolutely none from the venal Renaissance Papacy; when the king ordered a show of force at Teruel he succeeded, while the Aragonese coup de main in Saragossa backfired disastrously. In the end, Ferdi- nand held all the necessary legal powers, backed up by his prestige from the 22 Tbid.,1, pp. 376-775 I, pp. 130-31 (quotes). 14The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 Table 1 Inguisitorial executions in the Crown of Aragon, 1485-92 Saragossa Teruel Valencia Tortosa Relax in person 50 2 [10] 9 Relax in effigy 46 40 [50] 32 ongoing war in Granada and by his successful settlement of the Remensa conflict in Catalonia. By 1488 Torquemada’s Inquisitors had abandoned Teruel, but they were now conducting business in all four Viceroyalties of the Crown of Aragon, including the Balearic Islands. Until this point they had done nothing in Catalonia; they had collected large fines and executed a few people in Valencia; and they had decimated the converso elite of Teruel. Their early fame and visible activities in Ferdinand’s domains rested mainly upon thirty public autos held in Saragossa within three years of Arbués’ murder.”* Arbués’ assassins had been killed with exemplary cruelty, while several prominent Saragossa conversos who had planned and financed his assassination had been imprisoned and tortured; two of them committed suicide on the eve of public humiliation. The decline and fall of the conversos in the Crown of Aragon had already begun. THE SPANISH INQUISITION INVADES ITALY Under King Ferdinand, the Castilian Inquisition gradually crept east into Aragon’s Mediterranean possessions. Although Torquemada was naming local Dominicans as Inquisitors for Sicily as early as 1487, and for Sardinia as carly as 1492, they were practically inactive. Sicilian authorities protested against the expulsion of their Jews in 1492, and alleged that their “exact and most diligent” Inquisitor “had not found any errors or scandals against the Catholic faith” among them. Most Sicilian Jews accepted baptism as neofiti and paid 45% of their estates to the authorities in order to avoid banishment, but were not much 23 See Alvaro Santamaria, “La instauracién de la nueva Inquisicién en Mallorca,” in Homenaje al Dr. D. Juan Reglé Campistol, 2 vols. (Valencia, 1975), 1, pp. 173-88; and, for a fuller version, Jordi Ventura, “Els inicis de la Inquisicié espanyola a Mallorca,” in Randa, 5 (1977), pp- 67-116 (summarized by Henry Kamen, La Inquisicion espatiola, rev. edn. (Barcelona, 1985), pp. 61~62). 24 Saragossa estimates come from cross-tabulating the names and dates of executions given in Lea’s “Memorial de diversos autos” with those in the Libro Verde, pp. 111-37. The overlap between them is close to 90%. For Teruel, see Sanchez. and Monasterio, “Los judaizantes turolenses,” 32-33; slightly different totals are given by John Edwards, “Jewish Testimony to the Spanish Inquisition: Teruel 1484-87,” in Revue des Bludes Fuives, 143 (1984), pp. 334-35- For Tortosa, see AHN, Ing., Legajo 598 (2), exp. 2; for Valencia, see below, n. 36. 15The Holy Office outside Castile bothered by the Holy Office. Not until a Spanish Dominican (who was also Archbishop of Messina) became Inquisitor in 1500 was there anything resem- bling a Spanish-style attack on comversos; one of the oldest manuscripts in Palermo’s Holy Office bore the significant title, “First book when the Inqui- sition was founded in the year 1500,” and the records of the treasurer or receptor begin in November 1500. An Edict of Grace was finally proclaimed in all of Sicily’s principal cities in 1500 and again in 1502, after which many Jewish neophytes made formal reconciliations; a small auto de fe was held in 1501.25 During the first decade of the sixteenth century, Ferdinand’s Inquisition functioned rather carefully in Sicily. It apparently executed no one except a “renegade Christian” who had apostasized to Islam, in 1506. A small public auto was held at Messina early in 1505, apparently in honor of the late Queen Isabella, with nine penitents including a knight, two monks, a jurist (penanced for his “superstitions and diabolical invocations”), a rich physician, and two prominent widows with the prefix of magnifica. One of them, Eulalia Tamarit, had already been “executed” at Saragossa in 1487 but had obtained a Papal pardon. She was the widow of Ferdinand’s treasurer Alonso Sanchez, who had settled his twelve children and wife in Palermo, where they acquired such honors as Vice-Admiral, Captain and Royal Protonotary for Sicily while running the island’s largest bank, advancing money to the Inquisitors, and making enormous profits from supplying grain to Spanish expeditionary forces. Eulalia herself was signing legal documents as late as 1513 — more than a quarter- century after she had been “executed” in two different places,?6 With his new-style Inquisition finally functioning in his hereditary Italian possessions, Ferdinand decided to extend it to the recently conquered Kingdom of Naples on the mainland, which he visited from November 1506 to June 1507. Many Jews had fled here from Spain in 1492, and many more baptized Jews soon joined them in Naples, fleeing from the Inquisition. On August 31, 1509, the king sent the official powers to create this tribunal to Naples, accompanied by instructions to the Viceroy, to the Archbishop of Naples, his royal officials, the magistrates of Naples, the barons of the kingdom and with a proclamation for ordinary subjects. The Inquisitor-General for Aragon (at this date separate from Castile) soon appointed two Spanish Inquisitors and the key subordinate 28 See the well-documented essay by Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon,” pp. 257-327; also Vito La Mantia, Origine e vicende dell inquisizione in Sicilia (reprint Palermo, 1977), pp. 27 N. 8, 28 n. 10. 2% See Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon,” pp. 278-86. According to an cighteenth-century Sicilian Inquisitor, Eulalia Tamarit died at Palermo on August 18, 1487 (La Mantia, Origine e vicende, p. 204 (#449), although the Libro Verde (p. 132) records her execution on the same day in Saragossa and her trial (Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Muscos, 67 {1959], P- 558, #42) is bound together with those of many other conversas executed in effigy that same day, including her sister Valentina. 16The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 staff. One Inquisitor arrived from Sicily in October 1509, the other from Spain a few months later.?7 The new Castilian Viceroy immediately reported to Ferdinand that the Neapolitans were prepared to risk their lives in order to prevent the installation of the Spanish Inquisition. He authorized them to send an embassy to Castile on this issue, and refused to begin implementing the establishment of the Holy Office until after it returned. Ferdinand received the ambassadors politely and stalled for time, meanwhile ordering the Viceroy in August 1510 to give the Inquisitors better quarters. At this point the Neapolitans took matters into their own hands, staging an impressive riot and then forming a remarkable sworn coalition against the new Inquisition, reaching from barons down to shop- keepers. The Viceroy warned Ferdinand in October 1510 that “if he was determined that the Inquisition be created and function in this kingdom as it did in Spain, it would have to be after a new conquest”; the Neapolitans, he insisted, would “resist or give themselves to your enemies sooner than admit the Holy Office, so great was their obstinacy and pertinacity.”2 Ferdinand yielded and told his Viceroy to pacify Naples as best he could. Accordingly, the Viceroy revoked the establishment of the Inquisition in November 1510 on the specious grounds that Naples was now free from heresy. Simultaneously, he expelled all Jews and all Spanish conversos who had fled the Inquisition from the Kingdom of Naples, retrospectively justifying his claims. One measure provoked popular jubilation, the other created subversion, chi- canery, and bribery. The Neapolitans had scored a major triumph and learned a major lesson: when Ferdinand’s successor made another attempt to introduce the Spanish Inquisition in 1542, further rioting and manifest subversion quickly destroyed the project. No sooner had Ferdinand abandoned his plan to bring his royal Inquisition to Naples than he decided to reinforce it in Sicily. He approved the nomination of two Spanish secular prelates (one of them Aragonese) as Sicily’s Inquisitors in 151112; as he had tried to do in Naples in 1510, he finally endowed the Palermo Inquisition with a proper location in the Viceroy’s palace. Only then were public autos held in Palermo with sizable numbers of Jewish converts condemned to death, usually as second offenders or relapsos. From June 1511 through January 1516, over seventy people were killed at Palermo autos. One of them was a Moslem renegado, and one other died for giving false testimony; all the remainder were neofiti. Most of them died during the summer of 1513, 27 Felipe Ruiz Martin, “La expulsion de los judios del reino de Napoles,” in Hispania, 9 (1949), esp. pp. 54-59. The classical account of these disturbances is in Pietro Giannone’s [storia cvtle del Regno di Napoli (1723); See also Luigi Amabile, i! Santo Ofcio della Inquisizione in Napoli, 2 vols. (Naples, 1893-97). 28 Ruiz Martin, “Expulsion,” pp. 59-65 (quote, p. 63). 7The Holy Office outside Castile provoking protests from the Sicilian Parliament because this tribunal “pro- ceeded with more rigor than was stipulated by canonical laws and the style of other magistracies of this kingdom”; worse still, complained the Parliament, many of those about to be executed had publically repudiated their confessions, “saying that they had confessed from fear of torture or for other causes.” Next year the Parliament protested against the abuse of confiscating property from convicted heretics and against the use of weapons by clergymen serving the Inquisition.2° But so long as Ferdinand or Cardinal Cisneros lived, the Sicilian Viceroy overrode such parliamentary protests, and Sicilian opposition to the Inquisition remained merely verbal. But when news of Cardinal Cisneros’ death reached Palermo in March 1516, Sicily’s capital exploded with rioting that forced the hated Viceroy to flee secretly to Messina to save his life. The Inquisition, located in the Viceroy’s palace, could scarcely escape popular wrath, although the Aragonese Inquisitor Cervera managed to frustrate the mob for three days. Finally they sacked everything in the palace, carrying off even windows and doors and liberating the Inquisition’s prisoners. They threatened Cervera, who protected himself by holding the Eucharist in his hands and finally escaped to a ship. He went to Flanders, where he argued against the Sicilian embassy who proposed the abolition of the Inquisition to their new prince, Charles.5° It is clear to whom the young monarch listened. Cervera was awarded full pay during his absence, finally returning to Palermo in 1518. The revived Inqui- sition soon held more public autos at which many victims had been involved in the 1516 rioting. Some were luckier than others; of the two neofiti who had been sentenced to death in January 1516 and were awaiting execution when the riot struck, one was actually executed at the next auto forty-one months later while the other, a physician from Messina, escaped during the rioting and was never recaptured, being executed in effigy in 1520. From 1519 through 1527, the Holy Office of Palermo condemned at least 175 people to execution in effigy and executed about three dozen in person; at least eight of those burned in effigy were later recaptured and executed in person at the 1529 auto.3! The Spanish Inquisition finally took root in the two great Italian islands which Ferdinand had inherited, but it could not be planted anywhere in the Italian territories he conquered. 2 La Mantia, Origine e vicende, pp. 34-43, esp. 43 n. 38 (quote) 30 Ibid, pp. 44-493 D. J. Dormer, Anales de Aragén desde el aio MDXXV hasta MDXL.... (Saragossa, 1697), pp. 9-12, gives a vivid account of the 1516 rioting, stressing the heroism of his compatriot Cervera. Compare Bartolome Leonardo de Argensola, Primera parte de las anales de Aragén, que prosigue los del Secreario Geronimo Curita, desde el ako MDXVI.... (Saragossa, 1630), Bk. 1, ch. 5 (pp. 42-54). 3 See La Mantia, Origine e vicende, pp. 182 (#156), 201 (#402) on the men awaiting execution in. ‘January 1516, and 167-68, 178-79, 191 (#6, 12, 112, 116, 129, 146), on those executed in effigy in 1527, subsequently recaptured and executed in person in 1529. 18The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 THE LAST STAND OF ‘CONVERSO’ OPPOSITION, 1510-20 From the murder of Inquisitor Arbués in 1485 until the riots in Naples a quarter-century later, the comversos remained on the defensive throughout Ferdinand’s territories. The Inquisitors hunted them with minimal opposition and maximum profit in the late 1480s, when income from fines and con- fiscations in Valencia helped Ferdinand equip a flect for Italy, and a few windfall confiscations from the far poorer converso community of Teruel netted him over 100,000 sueldos in 1488-89. Meanwhile, the royal Inquisition spread from its Saragossa stronghold into Barcelona, Mallorca, and finally into Italy. It was a measure of routine prudence for Ferdinand, when contemplating remarriage in 1507, to undo the master plan of 1483 and separate the royal Inquisitions of his territories from those of the Crown of Castile. Their separation exactly paral- Ieled the separation of the two crowns, enduring for over a decade until King Charles arrived in Spain. This division was largely nominal: the “Aragonese” headquarters remained in Castile, a dependency of the Royal Council, borrow- ing both its personnel and its regulations from the Supreme Council of the Castilian Inquisition.>2 However, in Catalonia the Holy Office had become so unpopular that the deputy governor had to issue a special royal safeguard for its officials in 1508. Although many fewer comversos had been killed at Barcelona than elsewhere in Ferdinand’s Spanish possessions, the survivors complained to Catalan authori- ties in 1510 that they had formerly been a flourishing community, “more than 600 families including over 200 merchants,” before the Spanish Inquisition arrived; now, they claimed, they were reduced to merely fifty-seven families, mostly ruined by confiscations.>> Thus began the last stand of convivencia in the Crown of Aragon, the final attempt by conversos and their political allies to conjure away the horrors of Ferdinand’s creation. In 1512 the united Cortes of the Crown of Aragon, meeting in Monz6n, made a frontal attack on the Inquisition’s privileges. Their goal was not to abolish the Holy Office, but simply to turn the clock back to 1482, when episcopally controlled Inquisitions rarely prosecuted anyone and followed the ordinary procedures of canon law. At this moment Ferdinand was in no position to refuse their wishes, because he needed massive Aragonese support in order to complete % On the artificiality of the 1507-18 separation, see José Martinez Millan, “La formacién de las estructuras inquisitoriales: 1478-1520,” in Hispania, 153 (1983), pp- 31-33, 48-49, 61-62. On the huge composition paid by Valencia’s conversas in 1488, see Jacqueline Guiral, “Convers & Valence a la fin du XVe sigcle,” in Mélanges de la Casa de Velazquez, 11 (1975), pp. 81-98, and Ferrer Navarro, “Aspectos economicos de la inquisicién turolense,” pp. 275-302, on profits at ‘Teruel. Garefa Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicion espariola, p. 174, Seems not to realize that four of the five conversos who lost most through confiscations had been arrested at Teruel in 1485; Valencia’s merchants, arrested afterwards, did a far better job of hiding their assets. 33 Jordi Ventura Subirats, La Inquisicién espaiiola y los judios conversos barcelonenses (sigio XV y XVI) (Barcelona, 1975), p. 9 (quoted by Kamen, La Inguisicién espatiola, p. 65). 19The Holy Office outside Castile his conquest of the Kingdom of Navarre; moreover, both sides were well aware that Ferdinand had recently withdrawn his Inquisitors from Naples. Accord- ingly, the Catholic king cheerfully pledged to uphold the new agreements or concordias which the Catalan and Aragonese deputies had proposed, and to obtain Papal confirmation for them.3+ But as soon as Navarre was safely occupied by his troops, King Ferdinand obtained a dispensation from Pope Leo X in 1513 which freed both himself and his Inquisitor-General from their oaths to obey the new concordia. A decade of serious constitutional skirmishing ensued, in a complicated legal ballet involving Aragonese and Catalan parliamentarians, the monarchy and its Inquisitors, and the pliant Renaissance Papacy. The initiative ebbed and flowed. For example, the Inquisitors won an important privilege at Rome in 1515 when Leo X empowered them to try anyone who assaulted an official of the Inquisition and to impose the death penalty if necessary. The Aragonese and Catalans had apparently won an even greater victory when the dying Ferdinand vowed to uphold the 1512 concordia, which Leo X duly confirmed in a 1516 letter. However, the Inquisitors claimed the new bull was spurious and refused to obey it. When the new king of a reunited Aragon and Castile came to Spain, he soon reunited their royal Inquisitions and summoned another general Cortes of the Crown of Aragon. This assembly proved even more radical than its 1512 predecessor, proposing reforms which would have eliminated all significant differences between inquisitorial and secular courts. Confusion reached its climax in 1519-20, as the king left Spain to become Emperor in Germany and his Castilian subjects exploded in the revolt of the comuneros. At the same time, the Aragonese Cortes sent the new concordia and Charles’ oath to enforce it to Rome, using a Castilian converso as courier. Meanwhile, Charles’ officials formed a special committee to scrutinize the articles agreed upon in 1518 and finally produced an amended version. Finally, the Saragossa Inquisitors arrested Juan Prat, the notary of the 1518 Cortes, and imprisoned him in the Aljaferia on charges that he had falsified the official copy of the new articles which had been sent to Rome. Ever vacillating, Leo X reversed himself with contradictory rulings during 1519. In December 1520 he finally confirmed the 1518 concordia, with a letter so carefully drawn as not to commit himself to either the Aragonese or the royal version. Resolution came during the winter of 1520-21, with royal administra- tion paralyzed by the comunero revolt in Castile and King Charles confronting Martin Luther in Germany. The imprisoned notary of the Cortes was released without punishment, while the king ordered his version of the concordia enforced. As Lea noted, the Aragonese Inquisitors “went on imperturbably with 34 Lea, 1, pp. 269-82, provides the classical account of these maneuverings; see also Sesma, Diputacién, for additional details on the Aragonese side. 20The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 Table 2 Inquisition deaths in the Crown of Aragon, 1493-1530 Location Relax in person Relax in effigy A: 1493-1510 Saragossa 68 56 Valencia ts [250] Barcelona 28 445 Mallorca 65 263 B: 1511-30 Saragossa 2 “4 Valencia [ago] [130] Barcelona 6 : Mallorca 15 183 Sicily 128 212 their work; not only was the Concordia of [1518] never observed but that of [1512] was treated as non-existent.”35 Probably the most important precedent was that the Saragossa Inquisitors could hold an important public official prisoner for almost two years without any inconvenience to themselves. During its first forty years of existence in various parts of the Crown of Aragon, the Castilian-born Inquisition managed to overcome various forms of opposition from the defenders of convivencia. It had encountered enemies from Teruel to Palermo, but by-passed them with the unfailing support of the monarchy; the only attempt to destroy the new Inquisition physically, at Sara- gossa in 1485, provided a moral legitimacy which greatly benefitted the entire institution. For the next fifty years it prosecuted comversos throughout the hereditary territories of the Crown of Aragon. We do not know exactly how many people made voluntary confessions to the Inquisitors during these first fifty years, how many were imprisoned or con- demned or executed. It is important to realize that most of those “executed” by these Inquisitions before 1530 had never been arrested; already dead or else fugitives, they had been convicted in absentia in order to enable the Inquisitors to confiscate as much property as possible from the victims’ heirs. Table 2 summarizes our information about executions, the most dramatic and invariably public form of punishment.*¢ Although our information about Valencia is both 35 Lea, 1, p. 283 (quote). 36 Sources for Saragossa, as in Table 1, are Lea's “Memorial de diversos autos,” which stops in 1502; the Libro Verde, which overlaps about 80% with it, gives relaxations up to 1570. For i one must begin with the incomplete abecedario of relajadus through 1594 used by Lea History of the Inquisition, wa, p. 562), rather than the sprawling and often inaccurate appendix compiled by Garcia Carcel, Origencs, pp. 241-304; however, Lea’s source often fails to distin- 21The Holy Office outside Castile abundant and unreliable, it is certain that this city, the largest in all of Spain around 1500, witnessed far more deaths of conversos than other parts of the Crown of Aragon. Valencia’s Jewish community had been converted by St. Vincent Ferrer and municipal rioting in 1391; around 1500, foreign visitors claimed that a quarter of its inhabitants were conversos. Sheer numbers of suspects ensured a much larger supply of Judaizers for the Valencian tribunal than for any other part of the Crown of Aragon, while the prosperity of Valencia’s converso clite promised considerable wealth. In 1488, eighty promi- nent conversos paid an enormous special tax in a collective attempt to avoid some of the legal penalties imposed on convicted Judaizers. By November 1491, more than 600 penitent Valencian conversos marched in a special inquisitorial proces- sion. But the worst was yet to come. On a Friday evening in March 1500, Valencia’s Inquisitors raided a fully equipped clandestine synagogue which had been operating in the home of Miquel Vives (an uncle of the famous humanist Juan Luis Vives); the secret temple (which the Inquisition soon tore down) drew large crowds of curious Catholics. This sensational event provoked Ferdinand’s outrage when he heard about some “diabolical prayers against the King and Queen” made at this synagogue; it legitimized the great converso hunt which preoccupied Valencia’s Holy Office during the next thirty years.37 Although Garcia Carcel has demonstrated that over three-fourths of the Inquisition’s early victims at Valencia were merchants, shopkeepers, or artisans, intellectuals also suffered. The Inquisitors burned manuscript and printed Bibles in front of Valencia’s cathedral as early as September 1483; a school- guish between executions in person and executions in effigy. Although more light will be shed by Stephen Haliczer’s forthcoming book on the Valencia tribunal, this whole problem needs to be re-examined, year by year between 1484 and 1540, from the sizable fund of documents available at Valencia and Madrid For Sicily, see the abecedario de relajados from Palermo’s civic library published by La Mantia, Origine e vicende, pp. 167-204; it has been tabulated chronologically by N. Giordano in Archivio Storico Siciliano, 3ed set., 18 (1968), pp. 259-61. However, 2 more complete search based on confiscation records yields ten more victims from 1510-1514 in addition to the seventy-two on La Mantia’s list, suggesting a 10-12% underrepresentation here (and perhaps elsewhere): see Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon,” pp. 296~300. For the Balearic Islands, see the chronological series (AHN, Libro 866, fols. g2ff) printed by Baruch Braunstein, The Chuetas of Mallorca: Comversos and the Inquisition of Mallorca (New York, 1936), pp. 167-78; for Barcelona, sce the notes taken by Pere Miquel Carbonell, royal archivist. of the Crown of Aragon, (Archivo de la Corona de Aragon, Barcelona, Reg. 3684, fols. 105-99) and published in Coleciin de documentos inéditos del Archivo General de Aragon, xxvii (Barcelona, 1865). 37 The best introduction to Valencia’s converses is Angelina Garcia, Els Vives: una familia de jueus valencianas (Valencia, 1987). A German traveler in 1494, who reported seeing 1,000 sanbenitos in Valencia’s Dominican convent, claimed that one fourth of Valencia’s people were converos: see J. Garcia Mercadal, ed., Viajes de exiranjeros por Espaita y Portugal, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1962), 1, p- 322, 342. For the procession of November 4, 1491, see AHN, Ing., Legajo 598 (2), exp. 4. On the huge composition paid by Valencia’s conversos in 1488, see Guiral, “Convers a Valence & la fin due XVe sigcle.” On the episode of Vives’ synagogue, see Garcia, Eis Vives, pp. 85-89, and Carbonell, in Colecciin de documentos, XVI, pp. 160-64, 22The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 master died in the Inquisition’s prisons and his corpse was burned in 1488; a Valencian professor of medicine was executed in 1489. Virtually no converso in the Crown of Aragon was untouchable in these early years. Barcelona’s Inqui- sition, for instance, began its work with remarkable caution; in 1497 they were still imposing a second “perpetual” penance on a prominent local merchant, Gabriel Ballester. But by 1501 they had burned a monk from Poblet, and four years later they killed two of Catalonia’s most prominent conversos at the same auto: Jaume de Casafranca, assistant to Catalonia’s royal treasurer, and Dalma- cio de Tolosa, an officer of Lérida’s cathedral canons. Barcelona’s Inquisitors imposed a public penance on the regent of Catalonia’s royal chancery two months later for his outspoken defense of Casafranca.*8 The Kingdom of Aragon had the largest numbers of prominent conversos among its defendants, particularly in the aftermath of Arbués’ murder. Both the “Memorial de diversos autos” and the Libro Verde record such names as Saragossa’s episcopal vicar, Pedro Monfort, executed in effigy in April 1486 “for having opposed the Inquisition in both Mallorca and Saragossa, and for saying that good Jews could be saved just like good Christians”; mosén Pedro Muijfioz, caballero, whose effigy was displayed alongside Monfort’s; mosén Luys de Santangel, knighted by King Ferdinand’s father, who had hosted some of the plotters’ meetings, beheaded and burned in August 1487; micer Jayme Montesa, official parliamentary attorney for Aragon’s Diputados, beheaded and burned for the same reasons two days later; Jayme Sanchez del Romeral, notary of Aragon’s Diputados, penanced in 1488 for aiding heretics; mosén Luis de la Caballeria, an official of Saragossa’s cathedral canons, penanced in 1492; micer Joan Sanchez, jurist, penanced twice in 1491 and 1492; Luis Gonzalez, “father of another with the same name who was secretary to King Ferdinand the Catholic,” penanced in 1492. Samples from a long and impressive list. The greatest converso family in Aragon, so prestigious that they kept their Jewish surname even after baptism, suffered along with the rest, even though none of them was implicated in the plot against Arbués. Beyond any reasonable doubt, Aragon’s most important converso in 1485 was Ferdinand’s veteran Aragonese Vice-Chancellor, Don Alonso de la Caballeria. If there was an untouchable converso, he was it. Of course, Don Alonso was no more immune to slander than any other prominent /etrado or any other member of his clan. In fact, the Inquisitors heard scraps of testimony against him as early as 1485-86, adding more in 1488. But when arrest threatened, Don Alonso managed to 38 Garcia Cércel, Origenes de la Inguisiciin espatola, pp. 171-73, for social status of Valencia defendants, On intellectuals, see Garcia, El Vives, pp. 142, 170; Jordi Ventura, Inguiscié espariola i cultura renaixentsta al Pais Valencia (Valencia, 1978), pp. 115-19 and passim. For Barcelona’s most notable corrverso victims, see Carbonell, in Coleccién de documentos, xXvit, pp. 149 (Ballester), 165-67, 170-201 (Casafranca and Tolosa, plus Franch, whose official sentence is on 214-21). The somario de penetenciados printed with the Libro Verde, p. 140, lists Jaime de Casafranca as penanced at Saragossa on January 20, 1489. 23The Holy Office outside Castile procure a Papal brief in August 1488 forbidding ordinary Inquisitors to judge his case and evoking it directly to Papal judgment, a privilege ordinarily restricted to bishops. In 1499 he was charged with helping prevent a young Jew from turning Christian ten years previously, and not even Papal protection could prevent him from being tried for Judaizing. However, Don Alonso was able to persuade a special Papal commissioner that his most dangerous accuser was a notorious malsin, or professional informer, who had frequently perjured himself. He was cleared of all charges and formally absolved in 1501. His brother Jayme, sometime chief magistrate (sa/medina) of Saragossa, was less fortunate; the Inquisitors had much testimony that he had publicly visited synagogues and kissed the Torah, and he was eventually given a public penance in 1504. Forty years after the Castilian Inquisition first entered the Crown of Aragon, the hunt for heretical conversos still continued. That year, the Catalan Inquisitors were following up the aftermath of an ugly riot in their second largest city, Perpignan, after “three or four secret synagogues” had been discovered there in 1523. King Charles reported to the Pope in 1524 that Valencia’s nobles had joined with its conversos, claiming that “the time had come to throw out the Inquisition and revenge themselves on its officials.” In 1524 Barcelona held a public auto at which seventeen of Perpignan’s rioters and rabbis were exhibited and four of them burned; Valencia’s Inquisitors executed at least a dozen people, including Juan Luis Vives’ parents; Sicily’s Inquisitors burned four neofiti in person and ten in effigy; Aragon’s Inquisitors only executed one Judaizer in effigy, but they also arrested the son of Don Alonso de la Caballeria on a charge of sodomy, thus starting a new speciality for the northeastern tribunals.*° Throughout the Aragonese Secretariat, a handful of prisoners were con- demned for reasons other than “Judaizing.” By the time Ferdinand died, each of the five operative tribunals in his Aragonese lands had executed men for Mohammedanism, either in person or in effigy. This habit began in the 1480s and continued sporadically. Saragossa’s Inquisitors, now sitting in the greatest Moorish palace north of the Tagus, penanced a convertido named Cristébal de Gelba in 1486 for eating with Moors, “saying that he was a Moor and calling himself Alfans, praying in the mosque like a Moor and,” they added in an 39 gments of Don Alonso’s trial, stolen by J.-A, Llorente and preserved today in Paris as Bibliothque Nationale Collection Lorente, Ms. 75, fols. 18-63, 97-99 (the 1488 Papal bull exempting him from inquisitorial jurisdiction), 124-38, 344 (final sentence liberating him), were printed by Baer, Die Juden im Christlichen Spanien, pp. 449-59. His brother Jayme’s trial isin the Paris Llorente collection, Ms. 84; see ibid., pp. 460-64. * Manual de Novells Ardits: Vulgramemt Apel.lat Dietari del Antich Consell Barceloni, 28 vols. (Barcelona, 1892-1975), ml, p. 353 Guly 18, 1524); Garcia Els Vives, pp. 187, 270-72; La Mamtia, Origine ¢vicende, #2, 21, 33, 75, 87, 107, 151, 161, 225, 231, 248, 254, 201, 349, 353, 355: 389, 409, 413; Libro Verde, p. 128; see below, pp. 276-78, on Don Sancho de la Cabalieria and his troubles with the Saragossa Inquisition. 24The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 afterthought, “Jewish ceremonies.” Nine months later he fled from his imprisonment in a Saragossa hospital, “Judaized and passed to the law of Mohammed ... as a relapsed heretic,” and was executed in effigy at another public auto.*! The Sicilian Inquisition, as we have seen, executed no native Judaizers before 1510, but did burn a renegade Moslem in 1506. Mallorca did not execute live Moorish apostates until 1535, though it had burned a fugitive apostate in effigy in 1514. Even Barcelona’s tribunal, whose district included no Moorish enclaves, burned a fugitive renegade Moslem in effigy in 1503. Logically, Valencia was the second Aragonese tribunal to execute apostate Moslems, as early as 1499. Although such executions set important precedents throughout greater Aragon, they still amounted to barely a dozen instances before 1530." Most Aragonese Inquisitions were also investigating cases of illicit magic at very early dates. The short-lived Teruel Inquisition seems to have convicted a local canon for black magic and penanced a few old women as hechicheras in the 1480s. The Saragossa Inquisition executed at least four witches at an auto in 1500, while Mallorca executed a woman “recidivist on invoking demons” in 1499. Valencia, which had executed an Aragonese woman as a prophetess (visionaria) in 1495, punished a priest and another man for necromancy in 1512, a time when Saragossa’s Inquisition was also investigating a Faustian conspiracy of magicians. Barcelona’s tribunal was investigating witches in the Pyrenees by 1517 at the latest.*3 In a Saragossa case from 1486, a converso innkeeper named Felipe de Moros was penanced for bigamy, seducing an Old-Christian woman, and “Jewish ceremonies”; he was executed thirteen years later as a relapsed Judaizer. Bigamy rarely had such lethal consequences, but the Inquisitors also picked it up relatively quickly. By 1495 Saragossa had sentenced a Burgundian artil- leryman for this offense; Barcelona followed suit by 1503, Valencia by 1508 (they had also penanced a monk in 1507 for marrying).** Heretical blasphemy and “heretical propositions,” more elastic and more serious charges, also 11 Lea, “Memorial de diversos autos,” pp. 600 (##3 of auto 15), 608 (#4 of auto 25); the Libro Verde, p. 133, confirms the date of his execution but lists him as executed in person. See also Ubieto “Procesos de la Inquisicién de Aragén,”, p. 564 (#70), for the trial of a baptized Morisco in December 1487. +2 For “renegades” executed in Sicily, see La Mantia, Origine e vicende, pp. 186-87, 192 (#215-16, 220-23, 236, 293); for Valencia, see Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicién espatola, PP. 244-45, 254, 270, 286, 301, 304; for Barcelona, see Carbonell, in Colecién de documentos, p. 155; for Mallorca, see Braunstein, The Chuetas of Mallorca, p. 176 (#455). #8 See Garcia Carcel, Origenes dela Inquisiiin espanola, pp. 251, 258, 266, 273, 276, 288, 296 (the visionaria), 300; Braunstein, The Chuetas of Mallorca, p. 172 (#256). For Aragonese witches tried by the Inquisition, see below, n. 47 “4 On Aragon’s first bigamist, see Lea, “Memorial de diversos autos,” pp. 594-05 (aulo 7, #3, and ‘auto 9, #2), and Ms, auto 61, #3, confirmed by Libro Verde, p. 119. The early bigamy trials are identified by Ubieto, “Procesos de la Inquisicién de Aragon,” pp. 564 (#69, begun Dec. 1487), 567 (#85), 579 (#142), 580 (#143). See Carbonell, in Coleaién de’ documentos, xxvii, 25The Holy Office outside Castile appear relatively early. In August 1488 Saragossa’s Inquisitors penanced an Old-Christian farmer as a habitual “renegador” or blasphemer who had argued that “not God but the Devil created hunger.” Barcelona had such cases by 1502; Valencia apparently executed two men for blasphemy in 1515, and others followed.*5 By 1530 there were signs that the great hunt for conversos was finally ebbing in the Crown of Aragon. The tribunal of Valencia, which executed thirteen Judaizers in 1528 at an auto graced by the presence of the Emperor, killed five more at another auto in 1531, but a local diarist only noted that “there were many sorceresses and many Moriscos.”46 The tribunal of Saragossa executed twenty people between 1500 and 1540; only six of them were converses, com- pared with eight witches, four magicians, and two Moslems. Between 1510 and 1535 three Judaizcrs and three other culprits had been executed by Mallorca’s Inquisitors. The Sicilian tribunal continued its anti-Judaic crusade until 1535, when Sicily’s Parliament persuaded their visiting monarch to suspend the Holy Office's privileges for five years, thereby bringing its activities to a virtual standstill.47 LEGACIES OF THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS, For all their temporary setbacks, the various tribunals of the royal Spanish Inquisition had become an accepted part of life in the various parts of the Crown of Aragon by Charles? reign. Their record during their first half-century of activity was relatively impressive both in quality and quantity. Over 500 conversos (and a few dozen offenders of other sorts) had been executed in public, while thousands more had been publically penanced and heavily fined. Because these tribunals, conveniently grouped in a separate Secretariat after 1518, had begun to branch out beyond converso Judaizers in their constant search for heretical delinquents, they were able to adapt and prosper anew in the latter part of pp. 153-54, for Barcelona’s first known cases; and Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inguisicion expatiola, pp. 263, 281, and 251 (the married monk). See Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inguisicion espaiola, pp. 246, 251 (blasphemer penanced in 1485), 252 (relaxed in 1515), 258 (ibid.), 276 (ibid), 288. The early Aragonese evidence is indeed sketchy; Martin Daro, penanced in August 1488 (Lea, “Memorial de diversos autos,” auto 32, #1) as'a “renegador,” but the earliest preserved blasphemy trials date from 1509 (Ubieto, “Procesos de la Inquisicién de Aragon,” p. 591, #196-97). Barcelona’s Inquisitors charged people with “heretical propositions” by 1503, but avoided the term “heretical blasphemy.” * On the 1528 auto, see F.Momblanch, ed., Dietario de Jeroni Soria (Valencia, 1960), p. 124; AHN, Ing. Legajo 598 (2), exp. 7; on the 1531 auto, see Garcfa, Els Vives, p. 280, and Momblanch, Dietario de Jeroni Soria, p. 148 (quote). See Libro Verde, pp. 118, 123, 126-27, 129-32 (most of those recorded as relaxed in effigy were still Judaizers, however); Lea's “Memorial de diversos autos” fails to mention the witches who were executed in January 1500, but see Ubieto, “Procesos de la Inquisicién de Aragén,” p. 583 (#159), for one of their trials. On Mallorca, see Braunstein, The Chuetas of Mallorca, p. 178 (#522, 537-38, 542); on Sicily, see below, pp. 179-80. 26 ”The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 Charles’ reign, after heretical conversos became scarce. By 1546 the Sicilian Parliament and their Italian Viceroy, who had bribed the Emperor into halting the prosecution of Sicilian converses a decade earlier, failed completely in their attempt to block the new Castilian Inquisitor from prosecuting Sicilians accused of Protestantism, or to obtain copies of the denunciations against them.** As they became part of everyday life, these Inquisitions also became integral parts of Castilian government throughout the Crown of Aragon. This aspect of their importance was dimly grasped by the young Habsburg king while he was still living in the Low Countries, as he forced his grandfather’s Inquisition back down the throats of the Sicilians and began maneuvering to let the Inquisitions of Aragon and Catalonia by-pass the 1512 concordias which his dying grand- father had promised to uphold, By 1528 Charles became the first Spanish ruler to attend an auto de fe staged in his honor, not in Castile but at Valencia. Under Charles’ son Philip II, the political role of the Castilian Inquisition became more apparent within the crown of Aragon. Italian ambassadors ~ who had always accepted the official Spanish version of the necessity for the Inquisition - permitted themselves to discuss this aspect with far more candor than Spaniards could. Giovanni Sorzano, Venetian ambassador to Spain from 1562 to 1564, explained in his final report that the Inquisition had “such authority that it was incomparably superior to the king’s personal majesty.” Everyone feared its severity and acknowledged its necessity in order to prevent “very great and very dangerous risings.” But when he had to explain the extremely loose royal control of the lands beyond Castile, who “profess to have many liberties and live as a republic,” Sorzano observed that “the king seeks every opportunity to strip them of so many privileges, and realizing that he has no easier or surer method than the tribunal of the Inquisition, he continually increases its authority.”"#9 Here was a simple and coherent explanation, employ- ing the Italian penchant for discovering “reason of state” everywhere, in which the difficulties of governing Aragon from Castile could be alleviated through the remarkable prestige of the Spanish Holy Office. Sorzano’s explanations were repeated regularly by his successors for more than twenty years. Leonardo Donato, ambassador from 1570 to 1572, was unusually interested in Spanish religion and observed the workings of the Inquisition with particular care. He insisted that “this tribunal is greatly neces- sary with such authority and such severity in Spain,” adding that “although its 48 See Ricardo Magdaleno, ed., Archivo General de Simancas, Catdlogo XIX: Evtado, Virreinato de Sicilia (Valladolid, 1951), p. 30 (Legajo 1117, #66). + Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambascatori veneti al Senawo, vin (Turin, 1981), pp. 406-07, 409-10 (quotes). For Guicciardini’s views on the Inquisition, see JN. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250-1516, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1978), 11, pp. 452-53. Sorzano’s opinions were closely echoed twenty-three years later by Vicenzo Gradenigo (Firpo, Relazioni, vit, pp. 836-37). The only Italian ambassador to express his dislike of the “genuine tyranny” which the Inquisition exercised over conversos was the famous Venetian humanist Gasparo Contarini, in 1525. 27The Holy Office outside Castile justice is severe and its mode of procedure is extraordinary, nonetheless experience has approved it as good and necessary for a quiet Catholic life in the provinces.” But in the lands of the Crown of Aragon it was necessary in a different way. “The king,” noted Donato, “having thought to acquire somewhat greater rights and superiority in the governo of criminal justice in these kingdoms through the tribunal of the Inquisition,” found that ‘sometimes it was possible by using the rigor and the tremendous authority of that tribunal to achieve some of his designs and punish some offenses which he could not have done by ordinary means.”°° Donato’s unusually detailed report virtually predicted the notorious trial of Antonio Pérez by the Inquisition fifteen years before it occurred. The Holy Office had learned to survive, and even thrive, in the Crown of Aragon, as an instrument of monarchical authority, long after it had finished with conversos. 50 Firpo, Relazioni, vin, pp. 577-78, 572-73 (quotes). 28The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 Noes mas rey Vuestra Majestad en Espafia de cuanto fuere favorecido el Oficio de la Inquisicién con rigor. Inquisitor-General Valdés to Philip II, 1559 (Novalin, Valdés, I, p. 233). Cest Inquisition qui les tient en bride, et ne scauriot estre trop rigoreuse envers eux, car sans a terreur et la crainte d’icelle, il y auroit plus grand nombre de Marranos en Espagne que de Loutheranos en France. André Favyn, Histoire de Navarre (1610) (cited by Caro Baroja, Judios en la Espatia, l, pp. 484-85). Il Consiglio d'Inquisizione ... 2 i pit. assoluto Consiglio della corona di Spagna perche, sotto capo di religione, s’ascondono le pitt recondite massime del governo spagnuolo. ‘Venetian ambassador, 1649 (Firpo, Relasioni, X, p. 152). Nowhere in the meticulous and distinguished work of Henry Charles Lea can one find any attempt to break the long history of the Spanish Inquisition into separate periods. Neither he nor lesser historians ever tried to identify distinct phases of greater or lesser inquisitorial activity, or show shifts in the priorities preoccupying the Holy Office. Both Lea and his critics argued passionately about the total number of people ever put on trial or executed by the Inquisitors; but everyone had to begin by manipulating or criticizing the same figures, originally proposed by the renegade inquisitorial official Juan Antonio Llorente in the early nineteenth century. Today, Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Con- treras’ tabulations of the annual trial summaries or relaciones de causas of the Spanish Inquisition, begun in the early 1970s, provide different and more accurate statistics covering almost the entire period of the Spanish Habsburgs. ‘They have made a preliminary classification for about 44,000 trial summaries. ! 1 See Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540-1700): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank,” in G. Henningsen and J. Tedeschi, eds., The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods (DeKalb, Il., 1986), pp. to0-29. Henningsen published an earlier version in the Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia, 174 (1977), pp. 547-70, While Contreras presented an amended paper on “Las causas de fe en la Inquisicién espafola (1540-1700): Analysis de una estadistica” at Copenhagen in 1978. Their joint project was begun in 1972-73 under the sponsorship of Denmark’s national Research Council for the Humanities. 29The Holy Office outside Castile However, the most detailed set of trial statistics has come from Jean-Pierre Dedieu’s exhaustive survey of the well-preserved records for the tribunal of Toledo. From 1483 until 1820 Dedieu counted 7,216 trials, but also found traces of several thousand other defendants judged before 1575; he estimated about 12,000 cases in all, with small margins for error.” Dedieu’s profile covers the entire existence of one major tribunal, located in the very heart of Castile, whereas Henningsen and Contreras cover the entire range of twenty tribunals over a century and a half. Because Dedieu adopted Henningsen and Contreras’ classification system for inquisitorial cases, their statistics interlock: one set expands chronologically, the other geographically. Dedieu has also provided the first attempt to establish distinctive chrono- logical periods within the history of the Spanish Inquisition by using both sets of statistics. A decade ago he proposed “four seasons” for the Inquisition. His first phase, lasting from about 1480 until the mid-1520s, was devoted almost exclusively to hunting down insincere Jewish converts. From 1525 until 1630, Dedieu found a vast crowd of Catholics pursued for relatively minor offenses; the Holy Office spent only about one third of its time on genuine cases of heresy. After 1590, however, the Judaizers began to return. By 1630 they had begun to dominate, creating a third phase which lasted until 1720-25. The fourth “season,” covering the final century, showed very few cases and had no dominant motif. As he summarizes his schema, two essentially anti-Jewish periods framing a century of “scandalous speech,” all fol- lowed by an eighteenth century when the tribunal dragged out a languid existence before dying of old age early in the nineteenth century. An anti-Jewish institution, therefore, except for a central window where, during a century, it turned its attention on the Old Christians. And this fhe concludes] was precisely the time of its greatest activity? Henningsen and Contreras divided their mountain of trial summaries into three parts: 1540-59, when such evidence is still relatively scarce; 1560-1614, the apogee of known trials and sentences; and 1615-1700, a period of declining activity. Trying to fit their evidence into his long-range schema, Dedieu con- cluded that “by and large, the four seasons of the Inquisition such as we have defined them for Toledo are valid for the whole peninsula in any tribunal where the Moslem problem was minor.” Large numbers of Moriscos, he admitted, introduced major changes in his pattern during the second half of the sixteenth century. “For the seventeenth century,” he concluded, “our conclusions are identical, because Portuguese converso immigration dominates the immediate scene.”* 2 Jean-Pierre Dedieu, “Les Causes de foi de I'Inquisition de Tolede (1483-1820),” in Melanges de Ta Casa de Velazquez, 14 (1978), pp. 143-73. 3 J.-P. Dedieu, “Les Quatre Temps de Inquisition,” in Bartolomé Bennassar, ed., L Inquisition ‘espagnole (XVe-XIXe siecle) (Paris, 1979), pp- 15-42 (quote, p. 26). 30The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 Another periodization, based on political criteria rather than trials, has been proposed in the first major collaborative history of the Inquisition published under Spanish auspices. In this schema, the first demarcation falls in 1517, with the arrival of Habsburg rulers and the reunification of the Inquisition’s Aragonese and Castilian branches. The next period begins in 1569, with the opening of tribunals in Spain’s American colonies, marking the apogee of its activities. A new section begins in 1621, when the crisis of Spanish power under Philip IV was reflected in the history of the Holy Office. The final phase begins with the Bourbon dynasty in 1700, signaling the decline of the institution. Because the Spanish Inquisition was politically dependent on the king, such a characterization is not without merit. For example, it stresses the Inquisition’s bureaucratic consolidation in the mid-sixteenth century, when Spanish “Judaizers” had been almost exhausted and thousands of Old Christians were being arrested on minor charges. Moreover, its beginning overlaps with Dediew’s first “season,” and its conclusion is largely congruent with his final phase. Both Dedieu’s “four seasons” pattern of inquisitorial activity and the Spanish political model implicitly assume that Castilian experiences were normative for all of Spain. assumptions underlie most other historical writing about early modern Spain, and for very sound reasons. In the sixteenth century, the Crown of Castile held at least five-sixths of the population of peninsular Spain. Its economic predominance paralleled its demographic hegemony. Nobody doubts that Castilian resources fueled Spanish imperial designs, that Castile provided the soldiers and taxpayers who supported grandiose schemes from Flanders to the Philippines. However, Castilian dominance does not necessarily extend to the activities of the Spanish Inquisition. Evidence from the Henningsen—Contreras statistics, which both Dedieu and the Spanish “political” interpretation have attempted to incorporate into their respective periodizations, suggests a different interpretation: namely, that the Crown of Aragon, rather than Castile, gradually became the most important part of the Spanish Inquisition early in the reign of Philip IT and long remained so. Even under Charles V, relaciones de causas have been better preserved for the tribunals of the Secretariat of Aragon. From 1540 to 1559, most surviving relaciones came from these tribunals. Afterwards, when Castilian totals are better represented, the five major tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat (Aragon, Valencia, Navarre, Catalonia, and Sicily) provided half of the cases recorded for the entire system during its busiest phase (1560-1614). During these years the Inquisition did more business overseas in Aragon’s main “colonial” possession, 5 J, Pérez Villanueva and B. Escandell Bonet, eds., Historia dela Inquisicién en Espanta y América, 1: El ‘conacimientocienifcoy el proceso histrico de la Institucian (Madrid, 1984), pp. 281, 427-40, 701-13, 996-1001, 1204ff. Contreras is a major contributor to this work, as Dedieu was for Bennassar Gee n. 3). 3hThe Holy Office outside Castile Sicily, than in its American tribunals, which were colonies of Castile. The Kingdom of Aragon, which held less than 4% of the population of peninsular Spain in 1600, produced 18% of the Inquisition’s recorded cases in peninsular Spain between 1560 and 1615.° Moreover, these massive tabulations of inquisitorial trials have paid minimal attention to how Spain’s Holy Office punished its prisoners. Henningsen and Contreras have established that it was not particularly bloodthirsty, at least not after 1540. They tabulated only 637 executions in person among almost 28,000 sentences from 1560 to 1614, a paltry 2.3%, and another 545 executions in effigy for another meager 2%. An amazing 29% of the live executions occurred in the Kingdom of Aragon. Unfortunately, their statistics (which, as they admit, are extensive but far from complete) say nothing about the reasons behind these executions. We learn something about quantities of various crimes punished by the Holy Office after 1540, but practically nothing about the relationship between crime and punishment. Why were so many people put to death at Saragossa? And who were they? In Aragon, at any rate, they could not have been comversos charged with Judaizing, since virtually none were put on trial there after 1560. UNPAID PENANCE AT THE OARS The question of inquisitorial punishments has another important dimension, which none of the available models has yet begun to address. Short of actual execution, the most dreaded punishment imposed by the Inquisition (or by Spanish secular courts) was a term in the galleys, Many prisoners in secular jails tried to get into the Inquisition’s prisons in order to avoid the galleys. In 1574 the Aragonese Holy Office took custody of a Saragossa fisherman named Francisco de Layda, who had twice been convicted of blasphemy by secular courts and condemned to the galleys. While awaiting assignment in Barcelona, he had sought out the Inquisition and confessed that he had committed sodomy many times with both boys and animals, The Catalans accordingly returned him to Saragossa, where he denied everything, explaining that he would rather be killed than sent to the galleys; the Aragonese found his sodomy confessions “vague and impossible to confirm” and sent him back to the oars. Three years earlier a French printer, who was already serving in the galleys by order of the Toledo Inquisition, vainly tried to pass himself off as an atheist, blasphemer, or Jew in order to get a new trial at Murcia.” Originally this was none of the Holy Office’s concern. None of their medieval predecessors ever sent convicted heretics to the galleys, nor did Torquemada © Contreras and Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases,” p. 117-18 (Tables 2 and 3). 7 Ing., Libro 898, fols. 203—11 (#6 of 1574 auto); Jeronimo Garcia Servet, El humanista Cascalesy la Inquisicién murciana (Madrid, 1978), pp. 136-37. 178-79. 32The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 send any Castilian conversos there. Christian doctrine demanded that repentant sinners be fortified in their faith; the galleys were one of the worst places imaginable to receive spiritual nourishment. But the Spanish Inquisition served the king as much as it served the church, and the king needed rowers. Spain’s galley fleet had grown until it required more than 8,000 men under Philip I, and volunteers were understandably scarce. Charles V, and especially Philip II, put increasing pressure on secular courts to sentence prisoners to the galleys whenever feasible. As early as 1539, all male gypsies between the ages of twenty and fifty were ordered to serve at the oars for six years. In 1552 new edicts decreed that highway robbers, people who resisted the king’s justice, or sturdy vagabonds should be sent to the galleys. Catalan Inquisitors, who worked in a city responsible for keeping galleys ready for service at all times, had stumbled onto the expedient of sending nineteen “presumed heretics” to serve in the royal galleys as early as January 1505, commuting their official punishments of “perpetual” imprisonment. Aragonese Inquisitors began sending a few of their prisoners to the galleys in the 15405. In 1542 a Navarrese man who had married eight wives was condemned to the galleys by the Saragossa Inquisitors, along with three Moriscos convicted of conspiracy; four years later they sent the mayor of an Aragonese village to pull the king’s oars for resisting their orders. In 1549 a university graduate who had arranged the death of an inquisitorial official was ordered to the galleys for the rest of his life; he was joined by an immigrant from Béarn, below the age of majority, whom the Inquisitors originally voted to execute for sodomy but commuted to perpetual service in the galleys. None of these, however, were cases of heresy. Among the other tribunals only Sicily was sending prisoners to the galleys before 1550, for assassinating inquisitorial officials or else for “most horrible blasphemies.”? By 1552, when King Charles was expanding the number of secular prisoners cligible for the galleys, the Inquisitors began sending some convicted heretics to join the cutthroats and gypsies. The initiative apparently came from the Bar- celona tribunal, which ordered six Frenchmen and a local schoolmaster, all ® See Felix Sevilla y Soldaia, Historia penitenciaria espaiola (La galera) (Segovia, 1917), for an overview, and Gregorio Marafon, “La vida en las galeras en tiempo de Felipe Ii,” in his Vida e historia (Buenos Aires, 1937), for a lively introduction. The only quantitative survey of galley rowers (which completely ignores the role of the Inquisition) is by I. A. A. Thompson, “A Map of Crime in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 21 (1968), pp. 244-67. ° For the 1505 precedent, see J. Ernesto Martinez Ferrando and F.Udina Martorell, eds., Indice cronoldgico de la colecin de documentos inéditos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragén (Barcelona, 1973), P-341 (#6486). See also Ing., Libro 988, fols. 1~6v (#5 and 52 of 1549 auto), 55-36 (#4, 16, 24, and 30 of 1542 auto); Archivo General de Simancas Patronato Real, Legajo 28, p. 56 (#53 of 1546 auto). For Sicily, see Ing., Libro 898, fols. 6-7v (#33-35, 37 of 1549 auto), fols. 8-9 (#50-55 of those punished on Visitation in 1549). The other tribunals with numerous sentences preserved before 1550 (Navarre, Toledo, Cuenca) offer no known examples of condemnations to the galleys. Aragon was the most aggressive tribunal in seeking out new spheres of jurisdiction, and presumably in finding new punishments as well. 33The Holy Office outside Castile convicted Protestants, to the galleys, as well as a convicted homosexual.!° Because Catalonia spent almost all of the taxes it collected in the king’s name on maintaining its own galleys within the royal navy, putting a few foreign Prot- estants into their benches was a ploy for popularity by the Inquisitors. The Holy Office soon acquired a new phrase, “unpaid penance at the oars,” to describe and rationalize their campaign to help fill the royal galleys. With convicted heretics joining other types of offenders, the Holy Office slowly increased its contribution of oarsmen for the galleys. Aragon continued to lead the way, providing a polygamist, a bogus officer of the Inquisition, seven murderers (one of them a French cleric), and ten sodomites between 1550 and 1557. In 1558, before they knew about the sensational discoveries of Protestant groups in Castile, the Inquisitors of Saragossa copied the Barcelona tribunal's idea and sent a dozen French Protestants to the galleys in Bacelona, accom- panied by two Moriscos convicted of crimes against the faith. In 1559 they sent only three Frenchmen (one a polygamist) to the galleys, but accompanied them with seventeen Moriscos. Proudly filed among Aragon’s cartas acordadas was a letter from King Philip in August 1560, ordering that “Moriscos be sent to the galleys, as is customary in Saragossa.”"! The Inquisition of Granada, whose district contained many more Moriscos than Aragon, condemned twenty of them to the galleys that year.!? In 1562 Philip II decreed that all men convicted of bigamy be sent to the galleys. The Inquisition, which disputed control over such cases with secular courts, hurried to conform to the new regulations. Over the remainder of his reign, a few bigamists were sentenced to de /evi abjurations at almost every public auto across Spain, and unless they were too old or disabled, they were ordered to perform their “unpaid penance at the oars” for a minimum of three years. In the various parts of Castile, almost as many bigamists as heretics were sent to the galleys by Inquisitors during Philip II's reign; but both groups combined filled only an insignificant share of the seats in the king’s galleys. For example, the inquisitorial districts of Granada and Cérdoba provided close to 1,500 men for the galleys in the late 1580s, but fewer than two dozen of them had been sent by the Inquisition." On the other hand, the inquisitorial tribunals of the Crown of Aragon 10 Ing., Libro 730, fols. ¢-10 (#1-7, 13, of 1552 auio) Libro 961, fols. 211-14, 250-52, 261-63v, 290-94v; Libro 988, fols. 8-35 (#24~25, 36, 41, 43, 52-53, 64, 60, 84, 90, 97, 101-03, 106-10 of 1559 auso); Libro 1234, fols 405~06v. '2 José Maria Garcia Fuentes, La Inquisicion en Granada en el Siglo XVI (Granada, 1981), PP. 17-41. Previously, only two men, neither convicted of heresy, had been sent to the galleys in 1552 by Granada’s Holy Office (ibid., p. 10, #67). 13 Thompson, “A Map of Crime,” p. 251; Garcia Fuentes, La Inquiscién en Granada, pp. 253-378, shows eleven bigamists, six Moriscos, a blasphemer, and a Frenchman who murdered his cellmate condemned to the galleys at annual auios between 1582 and 1587 by Granada’s Inqusitors; Rafael Gracia Boix, Autos de fe y causas de la Inguisicién de Cérdoba (Cordoba, 1983), pp. 172~215, shows only five bigamists sent to the galleys by this tribunal during the same years. 34The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 provided a sizable share of the men ordered to the galleys from those regions. ‘Across the last forty years of Philip II’s reign, the four mainland tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat (Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia) sent almost 2,000 men to row for the king without pay. About half were Moriscos; only about 10% were convicted bigamists, and one third of the bigamists were not Spaniards. Fifty men a year, serving sentences averaging over five years, provided a goodly portion of the thousand or so men from northern Spain who rowed in the galleys of Philip II at the time of the Armada.'* Like almost every other significant extension of the Inquisition’s activities, the custom of sending Holy Office prisoners to the galleys both began and sub- sequently reached its fullest development in Aragon rather than Castile. After the first great converso hunt had died down, the Crown of Aragon provided most of the important business of the Spanish Inquisition. At the same time, Aragon’s Holy Office tribunals provided tangible services to the royal government — services that the Inquisition never performed in Castile or in America. This was a national institution, with uniform rules of procedure throughout Spain and interchangeable personnel staffing its senior positions. Although it was never perceived as an alien institution anywhere in the Crown of Castile, in the Crown of Aragon Torquemada’s Holy Office had originally been viewed as an intrusion from Castile; shrewd Venetian diplomats insisted that such attitudes were still common in Aragon a century later. The modus operandi of the Spanish Inqui- sition was theoretically identical everywhere; but in northern Spain, the social realities and political climate which surrounded it - and therefore its achieve- ments — were different. CREATING AN ‘ARAGONESE’ PATTERN During the 1520s the Supreme Council of the Inquisition adopted new policies to deal with the four major offenses which replaced Judaism as the principal concerns of the Holy Office in northern Spain during the “Aragonese century.” First came the new problem of Lutheranism, which King Charles made a priority of the Inquisition immediately after he had encountered Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Shrill letters from the Low Countries ordered that people entering Spain from “infected” places like Flanders must be checked for this contamination, and Lutheran writings must be burned at public autos.!5 14 Compare Thompson, “A Map of Crime,” p. 251, with Appendix 2, Many of the 268 Frenchmen ‘on Thompson's galley lists (p. 248) had been’ sent from Aragonese inquisitorial and royal tribunals; they should be added to the figures from Aragon, Navarre, the Basque country, and Catalonia on p. 251 45 See Ing., Libro 317, fol. 182-82v, for Aragon’s copy of the famous carta acordada of April 1, 1521. This marked the Inquisition’s first attempt to collect and burn foreign books. The best survey of this problem is Augustin Redondo, “Luther et Espagne de 1520 3 1536,” in Mélanges dela Casa de Velazquez, 1 (1965), Pp 109-65. 35The Holy Office outside Castile Since virtually all such people and merchandise entered Spain either through Basque ports or overland from France, “Lutheranism” remained largely con- fined to the Aragonese Secretariat until the 1550s, when serious Protestant movements were discovered in two of Castile’s leading cities. After a vigorous but brief parenthesis of prosecuting Castilian “Lutherans,” by 1563 the Prot- estant problem had again returned to its original base in northern Spain. After thousands of Valencian Mudejars had been forcibly baptized during the revolt of the Germanias (1520-22), the king appointed a blue-ribbon panel based on the Inquisition to study Spain’s policies towards its remaining Moslems. They recommended universal baptism, thereby creating another new priority for the Holy Office in two tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat, the Kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon. The Kingdom of Granada contained Spain’s largest collection of baptized Moors; its precedent of a forty-year moratorium on inquisitorial prosecution in order to enable these new converts to learn Christian doctrine and habits, was soon extended to the Crown of Aragon. However, the problems were significantly different in Valencia and Aragon; there, noble overlords had hitherto prevented any attempt to convert their Mudejar vassals to Christianity, and continued to oppose any Holy Office intervention in the religious affairs of their “New Converts.”!¢ A year after this attempt to resolve the Moorish question in the Crown of Aragon, another special panel was created to revise the Holy Office’s policies on malevolent witchcraft, which was then preoccupying Navarre, the newest tribu- nal in the Aragonese Secretariat. In a close vote, the committee ruled that witches went to the Sabbat in reality rather than imagination; this ruling allowed Inquisitors to judge them for apostasy. But at the same time they adopted such difficult rules for verifying this crime that Inquisitors could rarely obtain convictions. Furthermore, they refused to confiscate witches’ property, which discouraged any inquisitorial investigations.” Last but not least, the tribunal of Saragossa arrested Aragon’s most politically prominent converso on a charge of sodomy in 1524, and successfully maneuvered the Supreme Council into obtaining an official letter from the Pope granting the Inquisition jurisdiction over the “unspeakable sin” (pecado nefando) in the three main parts of the Crown of Aragon. Oddly, Clement VII required Inquisitors to. investigate such suspects according to local secular laws, instead of following their normal procedures for trying heretics. Sodomy cases soon comprised a significant share of the activities of the Saragossa tribunal; its example was followed rather lamely by Barcelona and, many decades later, by Valencia. (The 16 The most valuable account of these events is by Augustin Redondo, Antonio de Guevara (148021545) et 'Espagne de son tensps (Geneva, 1976), pp. 237-62. 17 See ibid. pp. 296-302, The committee’s minority, who voted that witchcraft was an illusion, included Fernando de Valdés, who subsequently served as Inquisitor-General from 1546 to 1568. 36The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 Castilian Inquisition had decided not to seek jurisdiction over sodomy in 1509, and apparently saw no reason to change its policy.)!8 ‘Thus between 1521 and 1526, policies were initiated which ultimately shaped the special contours of the Inquisition’s operations in the Aragonese Secretariat. At this time, of course, conversos continued to occupy most of the Holy Office’s attention. In 1539, two events in different corners of the Aragonese Secretariat marked the beginnings of a real sea change. At Bilbao, a Navarrese Inquisitor held a public auto (a rarity in the Basque lands), at which a Flemish Lutheran, now a naturalized Englishman, was burned as a relapsed heretic. John Tack was the first Protestant and first known foreigner ever killed by the Spanish Inqui- sition.!9 Meanwhile, in Valencia a converso family confessed to whipping a crucifix in their home; but this “conspiracy” soon unraveled after more than twenty prisoners retracted their confessions in 1540, requiring a lengthy special investigation by the Suprema. Tack’s execution inaugurated a series of foreign Protestants killed by the Inquisition during the following century, while the Valencian fiasco proved to be the final important “atrocity” charged against conversos in the tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat. A Castilian converso named Pedro de Toro was executed at Barcelona’s 1540 public auto, burned together with the effigies of two Catalan merchants also condemned as Judaizers. He was the last Spaniard to be killed at Barcelona for Judaic practices. At Saragossa, the Inquisitors executed two Aragonese conversos in their 1542 auto, who also proved to be the last Judaizers ever killed by that tribunal. In the mid-1540s differences between the Inquisition’s policies in northern and southern Spain were still relatively small, as a comparison of two 154§ autos from Seville and Saragossa demonstrates (see Table 3).2! Three times as many Judaizers were punished at Seville as at Saragossa, although in other respects these autos had an identical structure. It is difficult to tell how general was the decline in persecution of Judaizers which can be seen in the Aragonese Secretariat. The only Castilian tribunals with large collections of preserved trials show radically different patterns for these decades. At Toledo, trials of Judaizers dropped even more sharply than they did in Aragon; but at Cuenca, conversos continued to monopolize major inquisitorial punishments in the 1540s and 1550s.?? 18 See below, pp. 277-79; Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York, 1906-08), Iv, p. 362. 19 See Iniaki Reguera, La Inguisiciin espanola en el Pais vasco (El tribunal de Calahorra, 1513-1570) (San Sebastian, 1985), pp. 143-47. 2 On Valencia’s bogus conspiracy of the whipped crucifix, see esp. AHN, Inq., Libro 322, fols. 295-97, 314-20, 322-25; Legajo 598 (2), exp. 3 (alphabetical index of retractions made by 21 prisoners, some of whom had accused more than 100 people). 21 Ing., Libro 785, fols. 229-30 (Seville auro of June 11, 1545); Libro o88, fols. 240-41 (Saragossa ‘auto of March 21, 1545). 22 Compare Dedieu, “Causes de foi,” p. 171 (only twenty-six Judaizers among 1,300 preserved cases from 1541 until 1560 at Toledo), with Sebastian Cirac Estopaian, ed., Registro de los 37The Holy Office outside Castile Table 3 Andalucian and Aragonese “autos,” 1545 Offense and punishment Seville (N=63) Saragossa (N=49) Minor penances " 11 Moriscos reconciled 25 25 Lutherans reconciled 3 5 Judaizers reconciled 20 6 Judaizers executed 2 1 (effigy) Moriscos executed ° 1 Table 4 Saragossa “autos de fo,” 1540-55 Cases tried (executed in person-executed in effigy) Year‘ Judaizers— Moriscos_ ~— Lutherans. © Sodomy Opposition 1540 7 51 ° ° ° 1541 4 43 ° 1) 1 1542 5 (2-0) 30 (2-0) ° ° ° 1543 4 34 (1-0) ° ° ° 1545 6 (0-1) 25 (1-0) 5 ° ° 1546 ° 27 (1-0) 12 (1-4) 2(2) 4 1549 3 32 4 5G) 2 1550 ° 6 1 (1) 2 8G) 1554 3 ° 1 2(1) 7) In the Secretariat of Aragon, abundant records illustrate the eclipse of Judaizers. Table 4 shows the kinds of prisoners exhibited at public autos from the Aragonese tribunal between 1540 and 1555.23 Twenty people died at these nine autos, but only eight of them had been charged with heresy. After 1545, Saragossa’s Judaizers were immigrants: a Portuguese family was penanced in 1549, and a family of artisans from Tudela in Navarre was punished five years later. ‘The Palermo Inquisition provides a variant of this theme. Here, native documentos del Santo Ofcio de Cuenca y Sigienza, 1 (Cuenca and Barcelona, 1965; reprint Madrid, 1982), pp. 148-75 (320 Judaizers among 600 preserved trials for same period); but compare Archivo Diocesano, Cuenca, Inq., Legajo 751, exp. 3, which shows only four converso deaths, including one for perjury, at Cuenca’s four public aufos between 1553 and 1558 23 See Ing., Libro 988, fols. 44-45 (1540 auto), 48-49 (1541 aulo), 55-56 (1542 auto), 240-41 (1545 auto), 164 (two copies of 1549 auto); Libro 736, fols. 21-22 (1543 auto); Archivo General de Simancas, Patronato Real, Legajo 28, p. 56 (1546 auto); Libro 961, fols. g-r1v (1550 ato), 295-95v (1554 auio). 38The Aragonese century of the Spayish Inquisition, 1530-1630 Table 5 Sicilian “autos de fe,” 1540-55 Cases judged (executed in person-executed in effigy) Year Judaizers Protestant Moslems Opposition 1540 34 (0-15) ° ° : 1542 20 (0-3) 4 (1-0) 2 ° 15474 22 (0-3) 9-1) ° 5 1547B 3 10 (0-2) 6 4 1549 11 (1-1) 13 (0-4) 4 3@) 1551 ° 19 @-4) 3 1 1553 1 12 (1-1) 1 1 1555 ° 2 (1-0) 5 ° Protestants had replaced Judaizers as the most important heretics by 155074 (see Table 5). At Palermo, the woman executed for the second time in 1549 (her effigy had been burned nine years earlier) was the last Judaizer who died anywhere in the eastern possessions of the Crown of Aragon until the miniature holocaust at Palma de Mallorca in 1691. After her death, Jewish neofiti abruptly disappeared from the records of the Palermo Inquisition. By 1555 Sicilian defendants included a dozen people, mostly slave women, who were charged with bigamy and another five women accused of witchcraft. ‘The pattern which emerged in Aragon during the 1540s, and endured for a century in these northern and eastern inquisitorial tribunals, involved first and foremost the permanent disappearance of Judaizers as major targets of Holy Office concern. The defendants who replaced the conversos in autos de fe were a varied lot. Sicily had native Protestants, but its Moslems were almost always foreigners. The Kingdom of Aragon had plenty of native Moriscos, whereas its Protestants were foreigners. In its fully developed form, the “Aragonese pattern” included an extremely wide range of defendants. By 1546 Saragossa’s public auto featured the execution of a Frenchman for Protestantism, a Morisco alfaqui for Mohammedanism, and two local Catholics for homosexuality. Four more Frenchmen who had fled Aragon were executed in effigy as Protestants. The sixty-four people in this auto included seven other foreign Protestants, dozens of Moriscos, six witches, three bigamists, and five men condemned for opposition to the Holy Office, including a village headman sent to the galleys 24 See Ing., Libro 873, fols. 145-46 (1540 auta), 191-91v (1542 auto); Libro 898, fols. 13-13¥ (Feb. 1547 auto), 2~3 (Dec. 1547 auto), 67v (1549 auto), 10-11 (1551 auto); Carlo A. Garufi, Fauti ¢ personaggi dell’Inguisizione in Sicilia (Palermo, 1917; reprint Palermo, 1978), pp. 27-29 (1553 auto); Libro 874, fols. 121-21v (1555 auto). 39The Holy Office outside Castile and a priest stripped of his benefice. It even included an Italian, penanced and whipped for “great blasphemies,” but no conversos. THE IDENTITY CRISIS OF CASTILE’S INQUISITIONS (1559-68) Many historians have emphasized the importance of the period from 1546 to 1566, when Fernando de Valdés served as Inquisitor-General.25 A skilled canon lawyer and consummate bureaucrat, Valdés instilled a new esprit de corps into the Inquisition through more frequent inspections of each tribunal by the Supreme Council; in addition, one Inquisitor was required to spend three months each year traveling through the more remote parts of his district. He extended the Holy Office’s eyes and ears by making many clerics into local comisarios, in effect opening branch offices so that witnesses could testify more conveniently. Under him the system of annual reports of completed trials, the relaciones de causas, was extended to the entire Inquisition. Moreover, a large bonus was paid every year in which a public auto de fe was reported. Under Valdés the Spanish Inquisition also published its first two Indices of Prohibited Books and carried through a major collection and revision of Bible editions in 1552. Most important of all, under Valdés the Spanish Inquisition confronted its only serious challenge from the Protestant movement in Spain. Not only was the challenge successfully met and the heretics punished with the severity which the aging Emperor Charles and his son demanded, but Valdés was also able to seize this opportunity to persuade a notoriously anti-Spanish Pope (Paul IV) to grant many important privileges to the Spanish Inquisition. A skillfully drafted memo- randum of September 1558 emphasized the scope and importance of the recently discovered Protestant threat; it elicited three important Papal bulls early in 1559. First and foremost was something the Holy Office had long sought, namely the right to collect the revenues of one canonry in every cathedral chapter in order to provide salaries for Inquisitors and other top officials: this became the base of the Inquisition’s financial stability until its final abolition in the nineteenth century. Other bulls enabled the Inquisition to execute even penitent heretics in certain cases of special severity, including people of high social standing. Inquisitors were also permitted to override some ecclesiastical privileges and immunities. The high-ranking clerics who occupied seats on the Suprema avoided the Council of Trent’s requirement to reside in their dioceses. Valdés himself, as Archbishop of Seville, set the example by refusing to visit his see during the Protestant crisis, alleging that he could best direct the Inquisition’s repression by remaining at court. In the summer of 1559 Valdés overreached himself by engineering the arrest 25 The basic biography is by José Luis Glonzalez] Novalin, £1 inguisidor general Fernando de Valdés (1483-1568), 2 vols. (Oveido, 1968-70). 40The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 of Bartolomé Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo, on charges that several “heretical propositions” had been found in his Christian Catechism, published at Antwerp in 1558. Carranza’s trial began in an atmosphere of shock and gradually developed into a festering scandal. It became a test of strength between the Supreme Council of the Inquisition and the Papacy, lasting seventeen years in all. By February 1560, Pius IV had barred Valdés from acting as judge because of his partiality. After the close of the Council of Trent, another Papal decree revoked Carranza’s trial to Rome and concluded the downfall of the aged Inquisitor-General, who was effectively replaced in 1566. ‘The Suprema’s successful memorandum to Paul IV began by stressing that hitherto Luther’s errors and heresies had spread to many parts of Christendom, but “the province which by God’s grace has been freest of this stain has been the very heart of Spain, thanks to the great care and vigilance of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.” Three long paragraphs followed, detailing the discovery of Protestant groups, first at Seville and later in the district of Valladolid, during the past year. Three more paragraphs detailed the Inquisition’s fight to keep out prohibited books, “which have been the principal cause of this damage,” its economic difficulties springing from a shortage of confiscated properties, and the insolence of some clerics, who claimed Papal permission to read prohibited books and had powerful secular connections. At the very end came two short paragraphs outlining the Supreme Council’s continuing struggles against Judaizers and Moslems.¢ This memorandum offered an excellent outline of the Inquisition’s priorities as it entered one of the most crucial decades in its history. Over the next ten years, while the Supreme Council became increasingly obsessed with Carran- za’s trial, the local branches of the Holy Office continued to function at peak levels against all major forms of heresy, with “Lutheranism” usually at the top of their agenda. From 1559 to 1568, Castile’s eight tribunals (which were soon increased to nine by the creation of a new district in Galicia to combat the Protestant menace in northwestern Spain) sought heretics approximately according to Valdés’ agenda of September 1558, in a descending hierarchy of Spanish Protestants, foreign Protestants, Judaizers, and Moriscos. By 1568 the first three groups had been exhausted, while prosecuting Moriscos had become dangerous. Let us begin as Valdés did, with the crypto-Protestant groups of Seville and Valladolid. In the presence of Spain’s regent, the Princess Juana, and then of her brother Philip Il, two famous public autos at Valladolid in May and October 1559 took the lives of twenty-five “Lutherans,” including the Italian-born corregidor of the city of Toro. Seville had a larger group of Protestants. Eighteen “Lutherans” were executed at its 1559 auto and another fourteen in December 1560. Nine more perished at the April 1562 auto, followed by another nine 2 Entire memorandum printed by Lea, ut, pp. 566-72 (quotes, pp. 567, 569). 41The Holy Office outside Castile (three of them foreign sailors) in October 1562. More autos were celebrated at Seville throughout the remainder of the decade, but the prisoners accused of Protestantism were exclusively foreigners. Thus, as Emperor Charles had wished, Castile’s nascent Protestant movement was extirpated with exemplary violence. Without the special Papal bull of January 1559, which permitted the Inqui- sition to execute penitent heretics in certain cases, only a handful of Castilians would have died for the heresy of Protestantism. At both Valladolid and Seville, some Protestant leaders demonstrated exemplary repentance, attempted to convert their fellow-heretics, and one of them even kissed his sanbenito as it was being put on his head. Almost all the accused Valladolid Protestants retracted their errors publicly, presumably in hopes of some kind of mercy. “Under the law,” noted Lea, “with perhaps two or three exceptions, ... they would have been entitled to reconciliation, but the brief of January 4 had placed them at the mercy of the Inquisition and an example was desired.” At Seville the story was similar: the most useful source reported that of the forty or fifty “Lutherans” executed between 1559 and 1562, only four or five failed to confess their errors and had to be burned alive.?7 Throughout Castile, the Inquisition continued to hunt Protestants during the 1560s. But after the extermination of the Seville and Valladolid groups, they nearly always found foreigners. Because Valdés’ system of annual reports was still imperfectly observed, we do not know exactly how many foreign Protestants died at the hands of Castile’s Inquisitions during the 1560s. The careful work of Ernst Schafer has unearthed about two dozen such instances, most of them at the important tribunal of Toledo. The great Protestant scare of 1558 had enduring consequences, not least in the mind of Philip II. In 1559 he issued his famous decree forbidding Spaniards from studying at foreign universities. In November 1563 he sent a circular letter to Spain’s bishops, warning them of the of Protestant propaganda, urging confessors to cooperate fully with the mn and requiring new licensing standards for schoolteachers. Lea exaggerated only slightly when he asserted that “Spanish Protestantism was a isode, of no practical moment save as its repression fortified the n and led to the segregation of Spain from the intellectual and industrial movement of the succeeding centuries.”?° Within the longer history of the Inquisition’s concern with Protestantism, which lasted more than a century after 1521, the discovery of Castilian “Lutherans” in 1558 constituted a Spanish parenthesis in a hundred-year pursuit of foreigners. When serious cases of “Lutheranism” emerged in the 27 Ibid., pp. 437-47 (quote, p. 438, also esp. p. 444). 28 See his three-volume Beirige zur Geschichte des Spanischen Protestantism und der Inquisition im 16, Jahrhundert (Giitersloh, 1902), 1, pp. 41-106. 29 Lea, Ill, p. 448. 42The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 records of Valencia’s Inquisition in the later 1520s, the defendants were Flemish or German. The first “Lutheran” killed by Spain’s Holy Office was Flemish; the last, who died more than a century later, was French. The first foreign Protestant died at Bilbao, the last at Palermo — at opposite ends of the Aragonese Secretariat. From beginning to end, the prosecution of Protestant- ism by the Spanish Inquisition was primarily an exercise in xenophobia, carried out mainly in the possessions of the Crown of Aragon. When the Supreme Council of the Inquisition sent its September 1558 report to the Pope, it did not entirely forget the Jews. For several years [began the penultimate paragraph] only a few people have been convicted of the errors of the law of Moses. But a few days ago the Inquisition of Murcia has discovered many people tainted with Judaism; although some of them have been punished in a solemn act of faith, more have been arrested and other people of quality are being sought. This is [they concluded} no less important than the other business on hand. Thus begins the public chronicle of the last great converso hunt in the Crown of Castile, conducted by a tribunal which had hitherto been among the least active in all Spain. Murcia’s Judaizers, like Seville’s Protestants, were led by a friar and their ranks included at least two of Murcia’s magistrates in addition to many other prominent citizens. The special powers of 1558 may have been used against them also, since large numbers of Judaizers perished at Murcia between 1558 and 1568. Local historians have found traces of nine autos held at Murcia during these years in which 603 defendants were condemned, including over a hundred people executed in person and at least fifty more in effigy. In the first three autos of 1558-60, sixty Judaizers were reported killed in person and another thirty-five in effigy. We possess enough relaciones to know that another four dozen Judaizers were probably executed by Murcia’s Inquisitors across the next decade, together with a half-dozen Moriscos and one French Protestant.3! By 1567 Murcia’s Inquisitors held Papal provisions enabling them to absolve Judaizers privately and to impose fines in place of other penances. Three years later the whole business had largely wound down. One conversa was strangled and burned as a relapsed Judaizer at that year’s auto, but none of the other sixteen prisoners had any connection with the “law of Moses.” In 1571 Murcia’s Inquisitors executed only a Valencian Morisco, and none of the defendants was charged with Judaizing. By the following January a local inquisi- torial edict drily ordered that “all business concerning Judaism which we have 30 [hid., pp. 571-72. 31 Statistics taken from Frutos Baeza, Bosquejo historico de Murcia y su Concgjo (Murcia, 1934), P- 95> but checked with relaciénes of three important autos (1562, 1567, 1568) presented by Garcia Servet, El humanista Cascales, pp. 119-31 43The Holy Office outside Castile had in this city shall be suspended until further proof arises.”>? None ever did. Murcia’s Judaizers faded away more slowly than Seville’s Protestants, after providing a larger harvest of prisoners and executions. This episode, paralleled by another serious although less bloody “conspiracy” of comversos in Estrema- dura, marked the last great persecutions of Spanish conversos in the Crown of Castile, the point at which the Inquisition’s original raison d’étre exhausted itself. The famous memorandum of 1558 to Pope Paul had little to say about Moriscos in its final paragraph, claiming that the Holy Office had “given the best order possible to assure them that they would be treated with clemency, as the most suitable way to keep them calm” and improve their behavior and knowledge of doctrine. When this was written, Valdés had no idea that a massacre of inquisitorial officials by Aragonese Moriscos in 1559 would cause many of them to be sent to the galleys. Perhaps the Suprema wanted to impress Rome by pointing to one large group of Spanish dissidents whom they did not propose to terrorize. In fact, the Inquisition increasingly harassed Moriscos during the decade after 1558, stepping up prosecution not only in the Kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia but also in Granada. A few Moriscos were executed for heresy at various Castilian autos during the critical decade 1559-68 (for instance, three at Seville’s famous auto of 1559 and one at Valladolid’s second auto of 1559 with the king present). In the Kingdom of Granada, Moriscos still comprised the majority of the population in the 1560s. Granada’s Inquisition apparently had not dared to execute them for heresy until their 1560 auto, when three relapsed Mohammedans accompanied a Sicilian monk who was relaxed for Protestant- ism. From 1560 through 1568, Granadan autos averaged 100 penitents each. Close to 70% were Moriscos whose property was confiscated after public renconciliations or executions in effigy. Only thirteen were relaxed in person, six of them in February 1568. However, the Inquisition’s numerous public punish- ments, and particularly its confiscations, aggravated the deteriorating situation of Granada’s Moriscos and contributed to the outbreak of rebellion in the Alpujarras in 1568.35 We can now tabulate the activity of the Castilian Inquisition during the hectic final decade of Valdés’ tenure as Inquisitor-General (a title he continued to hold until his death in 1568, despite his de facto eclipse in 1566). The expectations embedded in his crucial 1558 letter to the Pope had been only partially fulfilled. The Protestant scare had blown over, leaving about sixty Spaniards and at least half as many foreigners dead. By 1570 only cosmopolitan Seville and the northern tribunals continued to find foreign Protestants willing to court 3 Garefa Servet, El humanista Cascales, pp. 131-39; Lea, m1, p. 235; British Library, Egerton Ms. 458, p. 141- 83 Garcia Fuentes, La Inguisicién en Granada, pp. 18-81. See also the study by Keith Garrad, “La Inquisicion granadina y los moriscos,” in Bulletin Hispanique, 67 (1965), pp- 63-77. 44The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 martyrdom, By 1570 the Jewish scares were also ebbing both in Murcia and in Estremadura, leaving over 100 conversos dead, and no comparable affairs loomed on the horizon. Last, but far from least, by 1570 the Holy Office’s attempts to increase pressure on Granada’s Moriscos had contributed to a bloody civil war that lasted for two full years. When Valdés’ successor, Diego de Espinosa, officially assumed his duties as Inquisitor-General, no major new conspiracies by intransigent disciples of Luther, Moses, or Mohammed were occurring anywhere in the Crown of Castile. THE PERIOD OF ARAGONESE PREPONDERANCE (1570-1625) The various tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat had also been extremely active during the 1560s. Although they uncovered no spectacular conspiracies of socially prominent Protestants or Judaizers led by clerics, Aragon’s five principal tribunals held approximately thirty public autos during the 1560s, at which about 1,500 defendants were sentenced. Nearly 100 people were exe- cuted, with Protestants, who comprised three-quarters of the victims, out- numbering Moriscos even at Valencia. Unlike the Castilian tribunals, the Inquisitions of the Crown of Aragon had not exhausted their supply of major heretics by 1568. They continued to discover an abundant supply of Protestants among the thousands of immigrants constantly arriving from France in search of Spanish wages. Two tribunals, Saragossa and Valencia, contained a superabundant cohort of Moriscos, who had not risen in 1568 to support their Granadan brethren. Moreover, the Aragonese Secretariat had a long-established pattern of prosecuting non- heretical offenses; some of them, like sodomy, frequently resulted in death sentences. Equipped with such advantages, the tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat clearly surpassed those of Castile after 1570 in the pace of their activities. By 1570 Castile’s great business had almost come to a halt. Archbishop Carranza had been moved to Rome; Judaizers had been eliminated at Murcia and seemed invisible elsewhere; Protestants, even foreign ones, had also been virtually exhausted everywhere except Seville; and Granada’s Moriscos, goaded into revolt, had subsequently been dispersed across all of Castile. When Leonardo Donato, Venetian ambassador in Spain from 1570 to 1572 made an unusually detailed report on the Inquisition in his final relazione, he justified its notorious severity by pointing to the revolt of Granada and the Protestants of Valladolid; but when he discussed its present activities, he began in the north. “In the Kingdom of Aragon and in Catalonia,” he noted, “the Inquisition is always capturing many suspected heretics; moreover, recently in the Kingdom of Valencia the Inquisition discovered some noblemen and com- pelled them to abjure” for permitting their vassals to live as Moslems, But when 45a rtents raeewng Witbe, 1590 — 1650 {TIT trina exec Sed, 190 — 180 Map 1 Inquisitional districts, 1570The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 discussing current Holy Office business in Castile in the early 1570s, Donato noted with some embarrassment that in its annual sentences, “someone was almost always punished for having believed that simple fornication is not a mortal sin.”*+ It is widely recognized that by the late 1560s, the Castilian Inquisition turned its energies to implementing portions of Tridentine doctrine. After 1565, more than 1,000 ordinary Old Christians had been condemned by these Castilian tribunals as fornicarios. The Holy Office usually punished people for what they said, not what they did; the crime of the fornicario was to claim in public that sexual intercourse outside marriage was not sinful. In 1573 and 1574, the Supreme Council sent circulars to all tribunals, ordering that this offense be added to the Edict of Faith which was read annually in every parish. For the rest of Philip II’s reign, in the best-studied Castilian tribunals, such fornicarios provided a large share of the Holy Office’s routine business; this was one doctrinal error which male Spaniards abandoned only with extreme reluc- tance.35 A related offense, more common among women than men, was called estados by the Holy Office: it involved the claim that marriage was a holier state than celibacy. However, the campaigns against fornicarios or estados never accounted for many arrests in the tribunals of the Crown of Aragon. This was not for any lack of material. The Logrofio tribunal, located in Castile but responsible mostly for the Basque country and Navarre, was the only part of the Aragonese Secretariat where fornicarios were actively pursued. The Basques were obviously not ready for Tridentine dogma: one claimed that fornication was not sinful unless it was done seven times in one night, while another said that God’s grace had come through his penis. During the 1580s an average of ten men a year were arrested as fornicarios by the Navarrese tribunal, but then the campaign stopped abruptly. Elsewhere in the Aragonese tribunals it never seems to have begun. Sicily, which produced the most hair-raising blasphemies of any tribunal in the Spanish Inquisition, never bothered with petty matters like fornicarios; here, in order to be arrested by the Holy Office for sexual heresies, one had to claim that homosexuality was not sinful. The clearest contrast between major inquisitorial business in the Crown of Castile and that in the Crown of Aragon comes from a comparison of people 3 Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambascatori veneti al Senato, VIII (Turin, 198r), pp. 616-17 38 {iP Bedi, “La Défense du mariage chrétien,” in Bennassar, L'Inguisition espagnole, pp. 326-36. The work of S.’T. Nalle on the Inquisition’s role in implementing the Catholic Reformation in Cuenca, and Jaime Contreras, £! Santo Oficio de la Inquisiciin en Galicia 1560-1700 (Madrid, 1982), pp. 554-86, give well-deserved attention to fornicarios and related “heretical propositions.” 36 Inq., Libro 833, fols. 120 (#1 of 1570/71 despachadas), 13.4v (#12 of 1571 auto). At the tribunal ‘of Saragossa, the most active in the entire system during this period, only a handful of fornicarios were put on trial or exhibited at aucos, starting in 1574. 47The Holy Office outside Castile Table 6 Deaths at Castilian “autos,” 1570-1625 Tribunal Judaizers Lutherans Moriscos Total Llerena ° 21 23 Murcia ° 8 u Galicia 3 ° 12 Seville 18 7 24 Toledo 7 2 25 Cuenca ° 9 19 Granada 2 10 24 Cordoba ° 3 3 Valladolid ? ? ? Totals 54 30 67 151 killed by the Holy Office at public autos de fe. Although arrests and trials continued at a brisk pace at all Castilian tribunals, public autos were now far more frequent in Aragon. In an age when relaciones de causas provide a nearly complete picture of the overall activity of the Spanish Inquisition, we can see the preponderance of Aragonese over Castilian tribunals (see Tables 6 and 7). In Castilian tribunals, Judaizers no longer provided the largest single group of prisoners actually killed, as they had in the 1560s, although every tribunal executed a few of them in person and many more in effigy. But in the Aragonese Secretariat, all five Judaizers executed came from one small Navarrese village and they died at Logrofio, on Castilian soil. In the Crown of Aragon, a handful of Portuguese conversos were executed in effigy at Valencia between 1588 and 1593, but none was ever put to death at an auto. In other words, more than 70% of the known executions occurred in the five tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat. The thinly populated Kingdom of Aragon executed more victims at public autos than did the entire Castilian Secretariat, even including its American tribunals.>” Moreover, very different types of crimes were being prosecuted in Aragon and Castile after 1570. As we have seen, the most ubiquitous cause of execu- tions at Castilian autos was totally absent in the Crown of Aragon. And vice versa: the leading inquisitorial offense within the Crown of Aragon was sodomy, 37 Castle's list is incomplete, because all of Valladolid’s relaciones are missing and some other tribunals (¢.g., Granada or Cuenca) have important lacunae, whereas the Aragonese figures are virtually compiete. Perhaps another twenty deaths should be added for Valladolid, with a majority of Judaizers and a minority of Moriscos, and another handful added from other piaces. However, the overall impression that more than two-thirds of all executions between 1570 and 1625 took place in Aragonese tribunals remains unaffected by such adjustments 48The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 Table 7 Deaths at Aragonese “autos,” 1570-1625 Tribunal Lutherans. Moriscos_-—- Other heresy Non-heresy Total Barcelona 7 ° ° 6 13 Valencia 3 22 ° 52 ah Saragossa 6 80 ° 114 200 Navarre 15 49 5 7 76 Sicily 8 7 3 ° 18 Totals 39 158 8 179 384 responsible for just over 150 deaths in this period; Castilian tribunals, however, had no jurisdiction over it. Aragonese tribunals also executed people for other types of offense which were very rarely punished in the Crown of Castile. It is well known that six Navarrese witches died at Logrofio in 1610, but few people know that two dozen men were also killed by these four northeastern Spanish tribunals after 1570 for “opposition to the correct and proper functioning of the Holy Office.” Seven of these men died at Saragossa’s 1592 auto for their participation in the bloody rioting during two unsuccessful attempts to move Philip II’s ex-secretary, Antonio Pérez, from his downtown prison to the Inquisition’s fortress on the outskirts of Saragossa. If Carranza’s arrest was the most important business of the Spanish Inquisition in the 1560s, surely the trial of Antonio Pérez was its most important and most notorious affair during the next fifty years. Carranza’s case, in the technical language of the Inquisition, was one of “heretical propo- sitions,” not radically dissimilar from thousands of others tried in Castile during Philip II’s reign, including other famous cases like Fray Luis de Leon. On the other hand, Pérez’s trial involved a defendant relatively invulnerable to all forms of heresy charges, but clearly guilty of obstructing the Inquisition’s attempts to imprison him. In the end, both Carranza and Pérez escaped from the grasp of the Spanish Inquisition, although Carranza had to spend the rest of his life confined in Rome and Pérez passed the rest of his in exile. As we have seen, the greater severity of the Aragonese tribunals after 1570 extended beyond executions into other categories of physical punishments, most notably condemnations to the galleys. The most active Castilian tribunals, such as Toledo or Seville, sent scarcely 100 men to the galleys between 1570 and 1625, while the five major Aragonese districts sent close to 2,500 during this period.38 Perhaps the greed of the Inquisition was better displayed in Castilian 38 Lea, my p. 553, counted ninety-one galley sentences at Toledo between 1575 and 160. Granada recorded eighty-five such sentences between 1570 and 1600 (see n. 12); Cordoba recorded fifty-six during those same years (see n. 13). Compare the Aragonese totals in appendix 2. 49The Holy Office outside Castile districts, where some convicted Judaizers (including those who had fled) pro- vided a rich harvest of properties to be confiscated. But for severe physical cruelty, the record of the Aragonese Secretariat after 1570 was truly remarkable. This physical cruelty was largely restricted to outsiders. Except for the small group of Judaizers from rural Navarre, no Spanish Christians were executed for heresy in this Secretariat after 1570. Even the Protestants condemned at Palermo were now immigrants from other parts of Italy or, after 1600, from transalpine Europe. Native Moriscos, outsiders of a different kind, were punished with unparalleled savagery in Navarre and with great severity in Aragon. A handful of Basques were executed as witches. They were far outnumbered by the French, who comprised all but two of the Protestants executed after 1570. Local men comprised about one third of those put to death or sent to the galleys by the Aragonese tribunals; however, virtually all these men had been convicted of raping young boys or animals, or clse of murdering people allied with the Inquisition. They generated little public sympathy. After 1570 great public autos de fe were rarely held in most parts of Castile. Toledo, one of Spain’s more important and busier districts, held only twelve autos between 1575 and 1610; just over two-thirds of its official judgments were pronounced outside of them.3? In the 1580s Philip II urged his secretary to see one if possible, because the spectacle was as edifying as a pontifical Mass; yet he himself | had no opportunity to see one until 1591. It says much about the Inquisition’s situation in Castile at this moment that the heretic to be relaxed at this auto was a Scotsman who had to be “borrowed” from Seville in order to provide the king with a plato fuerte. Except at Barcelona, the public auto flourished mightily throughout the Aragonese Secretariat until 1610 (see Table 8). The principal problem faced by the Aragonese tribunals was not that of collecting enough important prisoners to make a suitably edifying public spectacle. Rather it was a question of protocol, of ensuring that the principal secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries attended. The provincial nobility were mostly notable by their absence at the Crown of Aragon’s public autos. Only gradually and under royal prodding were Viceroys and archbishops persuaded to attend regularly. At Saragossa, the Inquisitors proudly reported to the Suprema that one of kingdom’s two leading magnates, the Duke of Villahermosa, had attended their 1584 auto. As they explained, the Viceroy and archbishop were always invited but, by local custom, never attended. This time they had extended personal invitations to all of Aragon’s principal nobles. However, the other leading magnate and some of his friends, 2 Lea, it, p. 220. Granada held nineteen of them between 1573 and 1600; Cérdoba held thirteen during the same period. + Quoted by Geoffrey Parker, Philip I! (Boston, 1978), p. 99; see Schafer, Beitige,u, p. 106. 50The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 Table 8 “Autos” and defendants in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1560-1630 Decade Saragossa_Valencia- Barcelona. Navarre Sicily Total 1560-69 6/371 4/285 7/236 4/226 6/262, 27/1,350 1570-79 7/482 9/399 227 V/318 — $/133, 35/1,559 1580-89 9/677 8/591 oo 8/490 6/226 31/1,984 1590-99 8/593 9/494 ° 4/219 6/158 27/1,564 1600-09 7/584 6/307, 1/29 4106 7/211 25/1,237 1610-19 3/66 ° ° 1/52 5/134 9/252 1620-29 0 3/67 1/10 ° 3/68 7/145 notably the Counts of Belchite and Morata, failed to attend although they were in town.*! Only after the king’s army occupied Saragossa in 1591-92 did Aragon’s leading noblemen and officials attend public autos en masse. This problem was worst in Catalonia, where the difficulties of getting local dignitaries to attend, together with the impossibility of executing anyone at them, explain why the Barcelona tribunal held only one general auto every quarter-century after 1578. If a crowd of notables attended Barcelona’s 1564 auio, the explanation is that the king was watching it from a window. However, by 1570 only four magistrates attended the general auto and in 1575 the city’s chief judicial officer failed to attend. But when general autos happened only once in a generation, they were described with an understandable luxuriance of ceremonial detail by seventeenth-century city magistrates whose predecessors had paid them scant attention.*2 In Aragon as in Castile, public autos became much more solemn and splendid ceremonies as they became rarer. There had always been public sermons at such events (the one preached at the execution of Arbués’ assassins was printed as early as 1487), but under Philip II the processions and advance publicity became more elaborate, until by the seventeenth century the general auto had become a kind of baroque festival.*? Although evidence about how the Holy Office created public rituals in Philip II's Spain is meager, tantalizing clues pomp and solemnity around 1570. When the so-called ion held its first public auto in its new seat at Logrofio, a large green cross decorated the platform, adorned with the king’s coat-of-arms 41 Ing,, Libro 989, fol. 120-20. 42 Manual de Nowells Ardits: Vulgrament Apel.lat Dietari del Antich Consell Barceloni, 28 vols (Barcelona, 1892-1975), V, pp. 25, 108, 153; X, pp. 159-62. 43 At Granada, where general autas were recorded every year between 1574 and 1590, after a three-year interval the next one (which was also the first auto since 1550 at which Judaizers were to be executed) was described with elaborate ceremonial details: Garcia Fuentes, La Inguisicion en Granada, p. 421, and M. A. Bel Bravo, Bl “Auto de Fe” de 1593 (Granada, 1988). 51The Holy Office outside Castile on one side and those of the Inquisitor-General on the other. The most intriguing evidence comes from Italy. A nobleman’s diary records that at Palermo’s 1573 auto the “spectacle of the Inquisition was performed, and for the first time a solemn procession headed by the green cross, with a crowd of noblemen and lesser people, with a beautiful altar... entirely decorated in green, with a green baldacchino.” In addition to such ceremonial pomp, inquisi- torial advertising may also have begun in Sicily; the first known printed pamph- let reporting the prisoners, offenses, and punishments at a public auto appeared at Palermo in 1591. Each of the principal tribunals in the Aragonese Secretariat had its individual traits, its distinctive features. Between 1540 and 1640 the tribunal of Saragossa was by far the most severe in its punishments of the entire Spanish system; at the same time it performed outstanding services for the royal administration. The tribunal of Barcelona, by contrast, is instructive mostly for the handicaps faced by the Holy Office, which shared the weaknesses of other parts of royal administration in Catalonia. The tribunal of Valencia was generally able to ride roughshod over local laws; it established a record by arresting and punishing two grandees within five years. The so-called tribunal of Navarre, which fled from Navarre after the French invasion of 1521, offers a unique glimpse of internal Spanish colonialism: an inquisitorial district carefully relocated on Castilian soil in order to minimize friction with Basque and Navarrese officials. On the other hand, the Sicilian Inquisition was overtly colonial and resented as such. It was also located uncomfortably close to Rome, which made a few of its habits and even its finances different from the Inquisition’s customs in Spain.*5 Beneath the diversity of the Aragonese Secretariat lay certain uniformities. The tribunals of the Crown of Aragon (including its Italian possessions) permanently abandoned the prosecution of Judaizers after 1550. They found many other types of offenses to replace the “errors of the law of Moses” during the next eighty years. A mixture of non-Jewish heresies and non-heretical trials distinguishes the entire region. Moriscos and sodomites provided most of the people to be executed during the long half-century when Aragon rather than + Ing., Libro 787, fol. 4, published by José Simén Diaz, “La Inquisicién de Logrofo (1570- 1580),” in Bermeo, « (1946), P. 101. Also British Library, Add. Ms, 19,325, fol. 20~20v (diary of G. Perino, August 15, 1573); Ing., Libro 898, fols. 547-48v, is a printed copy of Palermo’s auto held on October 28, 1591. Emil Van der Vekene, Bibliotheca Bibliographica Historiae Sanctae Inquisitionis, 2 vols. (Vaduz, 1982), 1, pp. 151 ignores this Sicilian printing; his oldest entry of this type (#668, p. 169) comes from Logrofio in 1611 +5 For example, Pius V refused to grant revenues from Sicilian canonries to the Inquisition and - unlike other tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition — Sicily sent at least six clerics convicted of solicitation to the galleys. Contrast Lea, v, p. 12g, who found only one Spanish condemnation to the galleys, for a recidivist in 1691. Gregory XV's edict of 1622 (ibid., p. 101) threatened priests who solicited in the confessional with the galleys, and even with execution for second offenders, but it was never officially promulgated in Spain. 52The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 Table 9 Stages of inquisitorial activity, 1480-1730 Phase (duration) Number killed % Judaizers “Converso’ (1480-1530) 1,500 95 “Aragonese? (1530-1630) 1,000 20 “Portuguese? (1630-1730) 250 95 Castile stood at the heart of the Holy Office’s activity. Many French immigrants with some knowledge of Protestant doctrines were available for investigation throughout the Aragonese Secretariat. There were also witches in the Pyrenean districts, on those rare occasions when the northern tribunals took an interest in such matters. In each of these five tribunals, someone was executed between 1540 and 1640 for “opposition to the proper functioning of the Holy Office” — a punishment never inflicted for this offense by any Castilian Inquisition after 1540, because in Castile people did not knowingly murder minor inquisitorial officials or key informers. Returning to the original problem of periodization, Dedieu’s “four-seasons” model can now be rearranged according to the seriousness and form of punish- ments meted out by Spanish Inquisitors. If one begins by studying public autos and executions, rather than total numbers of trials, three of his seasons remain basically unchanged. Only Dedieu’s second phase, the century of “scandalous speech,” disappears. What replaces it is an “Aragonese century,” which can be dated from 1525 to 1625 if one places primacy on inquisitorial policies, or slighty later if the implementation of those policies is most important. The overall pattern can be seen in Table 9. This middle period or “Aragonese century” was thus the only time in the Inquisition’s history when Judaizers were relatively unimportant. Replacing the Jewish conversos were a different kind of “New Converts,” namely Moriscos, followed by sizable groups of Protestants who were almost always foreigners. Behind them came not only the scapegoats of Tridentine morality, but also a variety of non-heretical offenses which the Inquisitors disputed with secular or episcopal courts: bigamy, blasphemy, sodomy, witchcraft, usury. All of these had been annexed to the Holy Office’s domain in the Kingdom of Aragon by 1525. Witchcraft and sodomy, the only two offenses in this group for which people were ever executed by the Spanish Inquisition, remained confined to the Aragonese Secretariat. When the Castilian Inquisitions attempted to apply this mixed pattern of major offenses in the 1560s, they rapidly ran into major problems. First, their supply of native and even foreign Protestants was quickly exhausted, and then Granada’s Moriscos exploded in revolt. The groups of Judaizers in Murcia and 53The Holy Office outside Castile Estremadura were also exhausted by 1570. Castile’s tribunals accordingly busied themselves with ‘scandalous speech” among Old Christians and tried to implement the reform decrees of the Council of Trent, particularly those on sexual morality. They adopted these priorities only because they had nothing more important to do. Meanwhile, the Inquisition’s center of gravity shifted to its Aragonese Secret- ariat, where it remained until 1625. The “Aragonese pattern” remained in full force until the Moriscos were expelled. Its activities dropped thereafter, despite an attempt by Navarre to make witchcraft into a major concern. However, the continuing persecution of sodomites and French Protestants kept the Ara- gonese tribunals busy through the mid-1620s. A spectacular general auto at Valencia late in 1625 announced the execution of twelve sodomites, but it proved to be the last great public spectacle of its kind in the Crown of Aragon. Within a decade the Supreme Council made it impossible to execute men for sodomy. The last Moslem and the last French Protestant ever executed by the Spanish Inquisition died together at a general auto in Palermo in 1640. By this time the Inquisition’s center of gravity had shifted back to Castile. Portuguese conversos, attracted to Castile’s economic opportunities, now fur- nished a new and vulnerable subspecies of the Inquisition’s original prey. Madrid’s spectacular auto of 1632, attended by the king and court with all the pomp that a baroque age now lavished on such rare spectacles, featured the executions of seven Portuguese on the ancient charge of whipping a crucifix. It inaugurated a new phase, which finally concluded with another rash of public autos in the 1720s at which almost 100 Judaizers died. 54The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces Vingueren a aquest spectacle casi la mitat de la gent de tot lo reyne. Valencian priest, describing public auto of 1621 (Castafieda, Diario de Juan Porcar, Il, p. 52). Procedono con tanta taciturnita e segretezza, che deg!’inquisiti e della cause loro non s‘intende mai nulla, se non quanto & pubblicata la loro sentenza ... Ma con tutto cid si dice che le sentenze sono nei condannati sempre giustissime e giustificatissime. Venetian relazione, 1573 (Firpo, Relazione, vill, p.577) Como en el secreto del Santo Oficio consista todo su poder y autoridad, y la reputacién de las personas que en el sirven ... pues quanto mas secretas son las, materias que se traten, tanto mas son tenidos por sagrados y estimadas de los que no tienen noticia de ellos. Preamble to 1607 carta acordada (Lea, n, p.607). On June 21, 1627, the Barcelona Inquisition staged a public auto de fe in the Born, the largest public square of the city. Only ten prisoners were punished: five bigamists, a witch, a Catalan merchant who had compromised himself with Huguenots in France, and three Moslem pirates from France and Scotland. Five were whipped and sent to the galleys, four were banished, and one pirate was condemned to be burned as a pertinacious heretic. This was Barcelona’s first full-dress or “general” auto in twenty-five years, and we possess five different descriptions of it: three official accounts, including a printed pamph- let,! and two private diaries. No other event portrayed in the abundant records of the Aragonese Secretariat provides such a clear image of the public face of the Holy Office along Spain’s northern periphery. The Inquisitors themselves reported it in their annual relacién de causas despachadas for 1627; but they added a litany of complaints in an accompanying letter to the Suprema. They should have had at least two other Moslem renegades, whom they had reluctantly returned to the Papal galleys during the previous summer. They had a difficult time preparing the wooden stage for the [have not seen the eight-page pamphlet version of this auio listed by Emil Van der Vekene, Bibliotheca Bibliographica Historiae Sanctae Inquisitionis, 2 vols. (Vaduz, 1982), 1, p. 152 (#611). 55The Holy Office outside Castile auto, because the man who had made the previous one had long since died and no one remembered its exact design. Although Barcelona’s bishop had promised to attend this event, he failed to come; worse still, he had prevented the Bishop of Vich from attending. Neither the abbots nor the prebendaries of Barcelona attended, because they could not agree on which of them marched first in the official procession. Only four or five members of the great chivalric orders came, since they too had quarreled with the abbots over matters of precedence. Still, not everything went wrong. The Viceroy of Catalonia, a bishop who had once served as Inquisitor at Saragossa, presided over the event. Both provincial and municipal officials attended en masse, despite their attempts to curb the Inquisitors’ powers in the recently concluded parliamentary Corts of Catalonia. ‘The appellate judges of the Royal Audiencia sat on the Inquisitors’ left. About 600 mounted familiars were on hand, together with the Bishop of Tarragona.” For their part, Barcelona’s municipal council made a succinct report which noted both the length of the auto (from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.) and the hour-long opening sermon by Fra Crisostomo Bonamich, a Dominican holding a master’s degree in theology. However, they mentioned only two of the penitents: the witch and the French-born Moslem who preferred to be called “Zaffar.”> The two diarists recalled different things. Miquel Parets, a sixteen-year-old master tanner, was understandably awed by the richness of the spectacle, Beyond the auto itself, he recorded the ceremonies which preceded and fol- lowed it. At the public announcement three weeks beforehand, various officials of the Holy Office had paraded on horseback through the city. On the previous day, forty familiars carrying batons and 500 others with lit green candles, all wearing the insignia of the Holy Office on their chests, followed by the parish clergy carrying a huge cross, paraded through Barcelona to the Born, where they extinguished their candles at the end of the afternoon. At the actual auto, Parets noted that the Viceroy and other government officials were in their places by 7 a.m., when the Dominicans of Barcelona, carrying a crucifix and whips, left their convent and escorted the prisoners to the Born. He described the sins and punishments read out for all ten. Afterwards, the old renegade was handed directly to royal officials and hurried outside the city for immediate execution, Meanwhile, the other nine prisoners lay prostrate before the Inquisitors, who granted them absolution and returned them to prison. On the following day they 2 Inq, Libro 745, fols. 142, 225~26v. The Manresa merchant Gabriel Comas had originally been charged with heterosexual sodomy as well as Huguenot heresy, although the former charge was dropped before he appeared in the auto (ibid, fol. 111). Comas’ family made several petitions afterwards to overturn his conviction or at least reduce his punishment; he himself pretended insanity and thereby delayed his reclusion for over a year; and his trial was back in the hands of the Suprema almost two years after the public auto (see ibid, fols. 338-9v, 307). Putting a prominent Catalan in a public auto was always a difficult task: see below, Chapter 5. 3 Manual de Novells Ardits: Vulgrament Apellat Dietari del Antich Consell Barceloni, 28 vols, Barcelona, 1892-1975), X, pp. 159-62. 56The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces were publicly transferred to the appropriate secular officials in order to receive their respective scourgings, banishments, or assignments to the galleys.* Older and more jaded, the lawyer Jeroni Pujades simply noted that this auto was held “in the customary form and with the ceremony which I described in September 1602, although the bishop did not attend this auto as he had the other one.” Pujades could not remember the preacher’s name and recalled only a few of the prisoners, including the witch. The Catalan merchant had lived “in some place in France that I cannot recall, and gone to the Huguenot church for love of a Frenchwoman whom he could not have. He made love to her twice there, and thus fell into the sect of the Alumbrados.” The Dominican monks who had accompanied the old French renegade told Pujades afterwards that he had finally repented at the foot of the scaffold and was reconciled. (This would have been news to the Suprema, who were ordinarily informed whenever someone originally condemned to death repented during an auto.)5 Regardless of the actual details, such events provided splendid entertainment, spread over three days. Crowds of familiars gathered from all over the district, dressed in the uniform of the Holy Office. Solemn processions with gigantic crosses and green candles advertised the main event. Specially dressed prisoners, sometimes with their crimes identified by placards around their necks, prostrated themselves before the Inquisitors in order to receive absol- ution, Actual physical punishments, including a handful of death sentences in order to reinforce the seriousness of the occasion, were either removed from the spectators’ sight as in this case, or more often postponed for a separate ceremony the following day under the aegis of secular officials. The general public auto, seen here in full baroque flower, was a truly remarkable event. It was etched deeply into spectators’ memories; the tanner would recall this event clearly when recording the next comparable scene of twenty years later, while the lawyer was drawing on his own memories from twenty-five years before. The public face of the Inquisition, then, could be extremely impressive. At best, this bureaucracy was capable of staging the most elaborate form of edifying public entertainment ever devised in early modern Europe. Nowhere else can ‘one find thousands of spectators attracted to a day-long spectacle where the actual entertainment included a parade and a lengthy sermon, but which mostly consisted of some scribe reading aloud a large number of official sentences, all of them selected histories of sin and punishment. In a society where public shame, Ja vergiiensa, was itself a major form of punishment, the Inquisition carried the act of punishment almost to the level of art. The ultimate purpose of the general public auto was clearly to instill salutary fear; as the Castilian 4 Miquel Parets, De as muchos sucesos dignos de memoria que han occurido en Barcelona ... 1626-1660, ed, C. Parpal Marques, 6 vols. (Madrid, 1888-93), 1, pp. 17-20 (Bk. 1, ch. 3) 5 Joseph M. Casas Homs, ed., Dietari de Jeroni Pujades, 1: (1626-1630) (Barcelona, 1976), Pp. 92-93 (compare his recollections of the 1602 auto in ibid., 1: (1600-1606) (Barcelona, 1975), PP. 201-04). 57The Holy Office outside Castile glossator of Eymeric’s ancient handbook for Inquisitors remarked in 1578, “there is no doubt that to instruct and terrify the people by proclaiming the sentences and imposing the sanbenitos is a good method.” A Portuguese banker reportedly offered an enormous bribe to the Toledo Inquisition to avoid appearing in a similar public auto.° INQUISITORS AS ECCLESIASTICAL BUREAUCRATS Most of the time, when the Inquisition was not staging its famous autos, its public face was far less imposing. The Inquisitors themselves, as we have learned from recent scholarship, were a relatively faceless group of ecclesiastical careerists. They were all well-educated letrados, normally specialists in canon law rather than theology. Despite the towering figure of Torquemada in public imagin- ation, few Inquisitors were monks. Some of them, usually men who worked in the most prestigious Castilian tribunals such as Toledo or Seville, were famous for their learning and capable of filling top posts in various branches of royal government. One finds former Inquisitors presiding over the Council of the Indies or the great civil appellate courts at Valladolid or Granada. Large numbers of them acquired bishoprics and higher dignities within the Spanish church; we have seen that the Viceroy of Catalonia who attended the 1627 auto was a former Inquisitor who had become a bishop.” ‘Almost none of them, however, was famous for his piety. Only one was canonized, almost 400 years after his death, and he had been assassinated while praying in a cathedral. His miracles accumulated very slowly, despite sporadic prodding from the Suprema to collect them.® We learn more often about the notorious concubinage of a few Inquisitors whose mistresses lived in their private apartments. Perhaps their most common shortcoming was a stiff-necked arrogance which could prevent even a group of three from functioning as a unit. During the great witch-hunt in Navarre after 1610, such quarrels paralyzed a tribunal for over a year. More often, this arrogance was directed outwards, © Julio Caro Baroja, Los judios en la Espaita moderna y contemporanea. 3 vols. (Madrid, 1961), 11, pp. 51-67 (see below, p.307). The citation from Peiia is taken from Bartolomé Bennassar, ed., L'Inquisition espagnole (XVe-XINXe siecle) (Paris, 1979), pp. 105-06. 7 See, for example, the profile of Inquisitors from the prestigious tribunal of Toledo assembled by J.-P. Dedieu, summarized by Bennassar, L'Inquisition espagnole, pp. 82-91. In the Aragonese Secretariat, the most valuable study is by Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Hergja y sociedad en el siglo XVI. La Inquisiciin en Valencia 1530-1609 (Barcelona, 1980), pp. 127-30. Information about Ara~ gonese Inquisitors taken from the incompleted thesis of Pilar Sanchez (University of Barcelona). 8 See, for example, Ing., Libro 347, fols. 3v, 420v: in 1619, the Aragonese cofradia of San Pedro Martir, commemorating a thirteenth-century Italian Inquisitor who had been assassinated, asked the Suprema to start beatification proceedings for their own “San Pedro,” the Dominican Pedro Arbués who had been assassinated in 1485. But the evidence of Arbués’ miracles was not sent to the Roman ambassador until 1647, and he was not beatified until 1664. A great fiesta was held to celebrate the event in Granada: see the fourteen-page description of the “Solemn and Sumpruous Festival” printed by Bartolomeo Bolivar (bound with Inq., 58The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces towards other parts of the civil or ecclesiastical hierarchy — appellate judges, elected provincial officials, or local bishops. ‘The Suprema believed that all Inquisitors were interchangeable. ‘These men could be drawn from anywhere in Spain, but in practice most of them were Castilians, The Suprema flatly refused the demand of the Navarrese estates in 1521 that all their Inquisitors be natives, because “outsiders can judge with more freedom, and for this reason foreign-born Inquisitors have been appointed in Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, and Sicily.”? In the tribunal of Valencia, only two of the forty-two Inquisitors who served between 1530 and 1610 had been born in the district; one understands why the non-nobles at the Valencian Parliament of 1585 politely requested more places for native Valencians “in the Council of the holy and general Inquisition.” The situation was similar in the Kingdom of Aragon, where only six of the forty-five Inquisitors who served at Saragossa between 1568 and 1646 were natives. The Catalan lawyer Pujades noticed the appointment of Don Francisco Olivé de Alvernia, a local canon, as one of Barcelona’s Inquisitors in 1601; “for a long time,” he remarked, “no Catalan had been named to the office of Inquisitor.”!° Under the Habsburgs, Sicily and Sardinia never had native Inquisitors. Such men, being interchangeable careerists, were not expected to remain on duty indefinitely at one post. In the tribunal of Valencia after 1530, the average duration of an Inquisitor’s service was about five years; at Saragossa, the median term of service between 1568 and 1646 was also five years. At Toledo, half of the thirty-eight Inquisitors appointed between 1530 and 1610 served between four and six years. As Ricardo Garcia Cércel noted, the office of Inquisitor in Valencia was ... generally the first step in the professional curriculum of such men. Before assuming their duties in Valencia, the Inquisitors were canons of unimportant cathedrals, or occupied some other inquisitorial position like Fiscal or consultant in less prestigious tribunals. Their next appointments were as Inquisitors in more important tribunals (Saragossa, Granada, Seville, Toledo), a step towards nomination to bishoprics or to membership in royal councils like the Suprema or the Indies.” The Suprema expected that the men whom they appointed as Inquisitors needed no special linguistic skills, with one notable exception: the Basque lands. Despite their remarks to the Cortes of Navarre in 1521, the Suprema in fact 9 Ing., Libro 317, fols. 250-5 1v. (They did promise to appoint a local man as Inquisitor in a year or two, and until 1570 Navarre had the largest concentration of native Inquisitors of any tribunal in the Aragonese Secretariat.) 10 See Garcia Carcel, Herejia sociedad, p. 127; Inq., Libro 317, fols, 247-48; Emilia Salvador, ed., Cortes vatencianas del reinado de Felipe IT (Valencia, 1973), p-89 (c. 37); Casas Homs, Dietari de Pujades, 1, pp. 164-65 (Inquisitor Olivan died in office in November 1607: Libro 741, fol. 225) 18 Garcia Carcel, Hergja saciedad, pp. 128-30 (quote, p. 128). For the Toledo Inquisitors, see J.-P. Dedieu, “L’Administration de la foi: L"Inquisition de Tolede et les viewx-chrétiens, XVI-XVIle sitcles” (Thase d’Etat, Toulouse, 1987), pp.753-55- 59The Holy Office outside Castile appointed mostly native-born men as Inquisitors in this district. Because relia- ble men who had mastered both canon law and Basque were scarce, such Inquisitors tended to remain with this tribunal for remarkably long times. Over its first fifty years of existence, two men served twenty-seven years each, including seventeen years together when they comprised its entire staff of Inquisitors; the official prosecutor or Fiscal spent thirty years at his post.!? After the tribunal moved to Logrojio in 1570, however, these customs changed. The three Inquisitors who mismanaged the great witch-hunt of 1609-10 were all typical careerists from outside the district, serving an average of eight years at Logrono. None of them, including the famous “witches’ advocate” Salazar y Frias, knew much Basque.'3 Sicily was another important tribunal which needed special arrangements. Because of the island’s remoteness from Spain and the relatively low revenues of this tribunal, several Sicilian bishops and archbishops doubled as Inquisitors. By 1504, the Spanish-born Archbishops of Palermo and Messina held the two inquisitorial posts; the Inquisitor-General permitted them to operate separately, although all prisoners were kept in Palermo and both had to vote on sentences. Eight of the fourteen Spaniards named to Palermo between 1546 and 1580 acquired bishoprics on the island. The first of this group (who also served frequently as interim Viceroy for Sicily) had been named to a Sicilian diocese jointly with his nomination as Inquisitor. By the second half of Philip II’s reign, a different pattern emerged, with Inquisitors serving much longer periods in Palermo ~ one remained for twenty-one years — and dying in office.'* The two minor tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat, Sardinia and the Balearic Islands, also employed locally beneficed clerics in the offices of Inquisitor and Fiscal until well into Philip II’s reign. The four Inquisitors who were based at Cagliari’s Dominican convent between 1513 and 1561 all held bishoprics in Sardinia. In the Balearics the situation was even worse. The Suprema complained to Philip II in 1578 that “until now in the Inquisition of the Kingdom of Mallorca there has been only one Inquisitor, and he and the ministers of that Inquisition are all natives who serve in these offices without any salary.” Not surprisingly, “these officials use their offices badly and lack the honesty and style of life which are required for such a holy ministry.” But without any reliable sources of revenue other than ecclesiastical benefices, such problems were chronic everywhere in the Crown of Aragon from Barcelona eastwards: only local bishops could be made Inquisitors, a circumstance which 12 See liaki Reguera, La Inquisicion espaiiota en el Pats Vasco (El tribunal de Calahorra, 1513-1570) (San Sebastian, 1985), pp. 35-41. 13 See Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (Reno, 1980), pp. 46-49, 384-86. 44 See Pietro Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon e i primi anni del Sant'Uffizio in Sicilia (1500~ 1514),” in Archivio Storieo Siciliano, 3rd ser., 20 (1970), PP-275~77; also Vito La Mantia, Origine ce vicende dell nquisizione in Sicilia (ceprint, Palermo, 1977), p-220. 60The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces greatly limited the Suprema’s freedom of action and its desire to impose a truly uniform policy throughout Spain.'5 The difficulties of staffing remote and obscure tribunals like Mallorca or Sardinia persisted throughout the Inquisition’s history. Unlike the situation in Castile, qualified natives were hard to recruit for service in the Holy Office. In 1666, a former Inquisitor in Sardinia lamented that “there is an enormous shortage of natives of this kingdom for the office of Inquisition notary; my colleague and I, after much searching, found only one suitable man, but we could not persuade him to take the job.” In 1644, two senior officials at Valladolid flatly refused to serve as Inquisitors in Sardinia or Sicily, alleging “poor health.” © On the one hand, representative institutions in various parts of the Crown of Aragon repeatedly petitioned to open more inquisitorial posts to natives; while on the other hand, qualified Castilians were sometimes reluctant to serve there, even in order to obtain promotions. The men who actually served were usually transplanted Castilians, working amidst indifferent or sometimes hostile local officials. FAMILIARS: A NECESSARY EVIL? Behind the Inquisitors lay their basic salaried support staff - a collection of anywhere from six to eighteen people, ranging in rank from the prosecutor or Fiscal (who was usually a /etrado like them and might expect eventual promotion to the rank of Inquisitor) through notaries, revenue collectors, and jailors, down to their official doorkeepers and messengers. Few of these people caught the public eye, although the Fiscal did carry the official banner of the Holy Office at public autos. He was, however, inconspicuous alongside the hundreds of mounted familiars dressed in green, who became the visible “support staff” of the Inquisition at such moments. Much evidence, scattered among the voluminous papers of the Aragonese Secretariat, suggests that these familiars were at best a necessary evil and at worst a serious embarrassment in the various tribunals outside Castile. They were a legacy of the medieval Inquisitions, who had found it necessary to recruit laymen to do much of the dirty work of arresting prisoners. Contrary to popular belief, familiars were not responsible for denouncing wrongdoers or collecting evidence against suspects; they merely implemented Holy Office orders. 5 See Ing,, Libro 323, fol. 103; Libro 736, fols. 116-20. For the first dozen Sardinian Inquisitors, who served in Cagiiari before this tribunal moved to Sassari in 1563, see Giancarlo Sorgia, “Note sul tribunale dell’Inquisizione in Sardegna dal 1492 al 1563,” in Studi Sardi, 12-13 (1952-54), pp. 313-20. On the underdevelopment of the Mallorca tribunal in 1578, see José Martinez Millan, La Hacienda de la Inquisicién (1478-1700) (Madrid, 1984), p- 120 (quote). 16 Roberto Lopez Vela, “Estructura y funcionamiento de la burocracia inquisitorial (1643-1667),” in Jaime Contreras, ed., Inguisicién espatiola. Nuevas approximaciones (Madrid, 1987), pp- 178, 203, 206-7. 61The Holy Office outside Castile Familiars were appointed everywhere that the Inquisition functioned; the greatest numbers were always needed at the seat of the tribunal, to which prisoners were escorted and at which public autos were held. The difficulties of finding and appointing suitable familiars caused constant headaches throughout the Aragonese Secretariat. Such men could not be clerics, because they had to carry weapons. Familiars also claimed exemption from ordinary royal justice, perhaps their greatest and most-envied privilege. ‘The rules therefore specified that familiars had to be at least twenty-five years of age, married, uncontaminated by Jewish ancestry, and of pious and disciplined manners. There were major problems over whether or not foreigners — par- ticularly Frenchmen, who were so numerous throughout the Crown of Aragon — should become familiars. The tribunal of Valencia brought this problem to the Suprema in 1577, but received no advice. The most radical experiments in this direction, naming an Englishman at Bilbao and naming some Moriscos in Valencia, proved disastrous failures.!7 However, the problem of unsuitable familiars was clearly worst in Sicily, where from the Inquisition’s point of view they were all “foreigners.” In order to increase its authority throughout an island where it was deeply mistrusted as part of Iberian imperialism, the Holy Office adopted a policy of making rural noblemen into familiars; they eagerly grasped at a title which guaranteed immunity from arrest by royal officials and punishment by royal courts, Guer- rilla warfare over this issue continued sporadically between Sicilian Viceroys and Inquisitors for at least thirty years. In 1567 the Sicilian supreme court claimed they had evidence of more than 100 murders committed by familiars, while the Inquisitors admitted to at least thirteen.'® In 1580 an agreement between the Suprema and the Council of Italy redefined the privileges of familiars, but the Viceroys and the Gran Corte of Sicily continued to find the situation intolerable. Two Sicilian counts, both familiars, were soon arrested for separate murders. Jurisdictional quarrels dragged on for several years and finally degenerated into ‘a public scuffle in front of the Inquisition’s palace in 1590, when the Captain of the Viceroy’s guard seized one count and removed him to the royal prison. The Inquisitors excommunicated the Captain, whereupon a mysterious fire des- troyed the Holy Office archives. Philip Il settled this quarrel by ordering one count be tried by each court, by prohibiting the Inquisition from trying any of its 17 See Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York, 1906-08), 1, pp. 272-85, on general conditions of familiars. The case of French-born Claude Martin, who was ultimately named a familiar at Valencia in 1577, is in Ing., Libro 327, fols. 79, 92v. By 1590 the Valencia tribunal had named a man who was both Italian-born and unmarried 3s a familiar: Inq., Libro 329, fol. 53. For the Englishman and the Moriscos, see below, pp. 131, 147- 18 See Carlo A. Garuli, Fatt e personaggi dell'Inquisizione in Siclia (Palermo, 1917; reprint Palermo, 1978), pp. 301-07, and Vittorio Sciutti Russi, Asiraca in Sicilia; i ministero togato nella societa siciliana dei seoli XVI e XVII (Naples, 1983), PP- 49~42- 62The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces familiars for assassination, and by forbidding anyone above the rank of simple gentleman from becoming a familiar. Inquisitor Luis de Paramo then escalated this quarrel by encouraging the Sicilian baronage to refuse subsidies which the Viceroy required in 1591 unless they were again allowed to become familiars. Two years later, after warnings that an “accident” was imminent, a tremendous explosion destroyed the Palermo castle where the Inquisition worked (it was also used to store powder). Over 100 people were killed and both Inquisitors, Paramo especially, were badly wounded. He was summoned to Spain, where five years later he published the first history of the Spanish Inquisition. Paramo returned to Sicily to die in bed fifteen years after the explosion, having remained a Palermo Inquisitor longer than anyone else.2 The final incident in this comic-opera war occurred early in the reign of Philip III. Viceroys and Inquisitors again disputed the right to judge a familiar, this time a Spanish soldier who had killed two fellow-soldiers. The Inquisitors excommunicated the judges of Sicily’s appellate court; the Archbishop of Palermo (himself a former Inquisitor of Sicily) then nullified their excommuni- cation and excommunicated them in turn. The Inquisitors barricaded them- selves in their palace with 200 familiars and defied him. The Viceroy thereupon sent a company of Spanish soldiers to storm their palace, an unprecedented (and disastrous) move. The familiars fled as the soldiers entered the courtyard, but the Inquisitors stayed and dropped notices of excommunication onto the soldiers from the windows. The soldiers stopped, knelt and begged for absol- ution, which the Inquisitors immediately granted.?! Subsequent Inquisitors and Viceroys reached some semblance of peaceful coexistence over the thorny issue of Sicily’s familiars, who maintained an impressive level of criminal activities. Across the forty years after 1595, the records of Palermo’s inquisitorial jailer show almost 500 familiars imprisoned on serious charges (see Table 10). Considering that Sicily contained 1,572 familiars at its peak census in 1575, these internal records offer eloquent proof of the Inquisition’s difficulties in obtaining suitable men of peaceable conduct on this island. More than two dozen of the most prominent familiars charged with homosexuality were sent to Rome for judgment, including a baron and a 19 H. G, Koenigsberger, The Government of Sicily under Philip II of Spain (London, 1959), pp. 166-68; on the fire, sce also British Library, Add. Ms. 19,325, fol. 67v. The arguments of Sciutti Russi, Asraca in Sicilia, pp. 140ff, against Koenigsberger overestimate the authority of the Sicilian Inquisition, while those on pp. 186-88 underestimate the antagonism between Sicilian judges and Castilian Inquisitors. 20 Luis de Paramo, De origine et progressu offici Sanctae Inquisitionis (Madrid, 1598), esp. his sections ‘on Sicily (Bk. t, i, ch. 14). See also Garufi, Fatti e personagei, pp. 269-87; Koenigsberger, Government of Sicily, p.168; Perini’s diary (British Library, Add. Ms. 19,325, fols. 73v-74) notes that the explosion of 3 p.m. on August 18, 1593, apparently started with a fre near the Inquisition’s kitchens. 21 Koenigsberger, Government of Sicily, pp. 169~70. 63The Holy Office outside Castile Table 10 Crimes of Sicilian familiars, 1595-1634 Offense (number accused) Galleys Banished Whipped Homosexuality (173) 18 24 5 “Resistance” (151) 21 19 4 Counterfeit money (44) 3 9 f Perjured testimony (107) 1 B3 1 count (both of whom received large fines and lengthy imprisonment), six Dons and seven dottores.? Because its Inquisitors desperately needed noblemen in this position, Sicily’s difficulties with criminal familiars were unique. Nonetheless, Valencia’s Inqui- sitors had briefly copied Sicily’s custom of appointing large numbers of influen- tial men as familiars. As early as 1550, the Suprema contemplated revoking the titles of all Valencian familiars before the local Parliament could complain, “and with reason,” of their excessive numbers. A concordat between the Inquisition and the Council of Aragon in 1554 permitted 180 familiars in the capital, three times as many as at Barcelona or Saragossa (even Palermo, a much larger city, had only 100 familiars). But a detailed census in 1568 showed that only sixty-nine of Valencia’s 1,638 familiars were noblemen, seventeen of whom lived in the capital. In 1590, when Sicilian government was paralyzed by the issue of noblemen as familiars, the Suprema reminded Philip II of their refusal to create familiars at Valencia who were “powerful, unruly, or defendants on any charge in the royal courts.”?3 The Holy Office ultimately earned greater respect in Valencia by punishing a few noble lawbreakers in the 1560s than its Sicilian branch did by coopting them. By June 1578 a new problem had surfaced in Catalonia. The city of Perpignan had made a jurist ineligible to hold any municipal office because he was a familiar of the Inquisition. The idea of making familiars ineligible for political office had actually begun with the Cortes of Navarre in 1556; but their legislation was promptly revoked by royal edict. In Catalonia it was impossible to. overrule local lawmakers in such cavalier fashion, and the provincial estates formally approved the idea by 1599. Stung by this development - which reversed the Inquisition’s rule making descendants of people whom they had Ing» Libro 1236, fos. 44-45 80, Compare Gari, Fae ponagy pp. 308-15, on numbers and other unsalaried officials in Sicily c. 1575, B Coa Carcel, Herejta sociedad, pp. 146-50, 141-42; Ing., Libro 323, fol. 182; the Suprema thanks Valencia for news about the “reduction and moderation of familiars” in August 15525 Ing., Libro 328, fol. 376-76v; Libro 329, fols. 34¥-36v, 64The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces punished ineligible for public office ~ the Suprema ordered a detailed survey of familiars from the Barcelona Inquisition in 1600. Their report showed an overall density of approximately one familiar per hundred households (lower than Valencia’s in 1568); Barcelona had only nineteen, vastly below its official quota of fifty. Several men have the annotation “poor” after their names; a few are described as “restless” or “litigious.”?* The overall picture is almost the reverse of Sicily’s familiars. In Aragon, despite the nobility’s resistance to permit familiars in its patri- monial villages and the Suprema’s repeated insistence that the Saragossa tribunal reduce their numbers, the Holy Office managed to raise its total of familiars from 145 in 1552 to 257 in 1559. (Almost eighty lived in Saragossa, half of them prominent citizens serving “on horseback,” the other half doing most of the actual work.) With considerable justification, the Aragonese Inqui- sition insisted that familiars provided an ideal counterweight in the excessive influence of local nobles and the only practical way to arrest suspects in Morisco villages; their numbers continued to grow. In fact, Aragon was one of the few places where familiars faced physical risks in their work for the Inquisition. Local Moriscos massacred three familiars within a few months of the 1559 census; forty years later, another familiar was stabbed to death while trying to arrest a Morisco during Sunday Mass.25 By the seventeenth century, the Inquisition recruited fewer familiars than before, and chose them from a narrower social range. With rare exceptions, noblemen were discouraged. A general edict in 1604 forbade men from many “mechanical” trades from being appointed familiars; but a codicil exempted the tribunal of Navarre, because “in these mountains very honourable and even noble people often practice such trades.” With the decline in arrests and general inquisitorial activity in the Aragonese Secretariat after 1610, fewer familiars were needed. After the great war efforts of the Olivares era reduced the fiscal exemptions of familiars, their numbers declined sharply throughout the Crown of Aragon. In 1646, the Suprema informed the king that “it is certain that the title of familiar is more sought after in Castile ... in the kingdoms of the crown of Aragon, it is notorious that they are not desired. Even with the exemptions and privileges they now enjoy, fewer than half of the familiars permitted by the 24 Garcia Carcel, Hergjia sociedad, pp. 146-47; Inq., Libro 730, fol. 1 (#2 of March 1540 auto); Libro 322, fol. 347; Libro 739, fol. 41; Jaime Contreras, “‘La infraestructura social de la Inquisicién: comisarios y familiares,” in A. Alcala, ed., Inquisicion espaiiola y mentalidad inguisito- rial (Barcelona, 1984), p. 144 n. 39 (Navarre edict); J.H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans (Cambridge, 1963), pp.99-100. The report is in Inq., Legajo 2155, part 2: see Contreras, “Infraestructura,” pp. 133-46, for a detailed comparison of Catalonia’s familiars in 1567 and 1600. 2 ee Contreras, “La Inquisicién aragonesa en el marco de la monarquia autoritaria,” in Hispania Sacra, 37 (1985), pp. 508-12; Ing., Libro 323, fols. 166v-67, 172, 201. See below, pp. 85, 223, on the massacred familiars. 65The Holy Office outside Castile [1568] agreement are now serving.” Afterwards, as the Suprema feared, even these modest numbers fell rapidly.2 EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL VISITATIONS The notion of on-site inspections, or visitas, was extremely important for both the external and internal workings of the Inquisition. In the sixteenth century, the Suprema realized that a handful of sedentary Inquisitors could not control religious sedition over an entire Viceroyalty, even with the help of a few dozen comisarios to record testimony in distant places and hundreds of familiars to arrest distant malefactors and transport them to the seat of the tribunal. The necessity for frequent inspections by a district Inquisitor, accompanied by a skeletal support staff of notaries and messengers, was therefore obvious, The first edict requiring Inquisitors to travel through their districts dated from 1500, and the practice was well established by 1530. At least two tribunals of the ‘Aragonese Secretariat, Navarre and Sicily, even held public autos de fe on their most important visitations, in cities which were regional capitals but not seats of the tribunal. Besides Bilbao in 1539, general autos were held at Pamplona in 1540 and at Messina in 1567. Each time, one prisoner was executed on the sole authority of the visiting Inquisitor. The Sicilian city of Catania, which long refused to extradite its heretics to the Inquisition’s seat, arranged a very strange public auto in 1568 with the connivance of a visiting Inquisitor. Fifty-two heretics were condemned after the customary sermon by a local Dominican; but at the moment of implementing the sentences on the day after the auto, the Inquisitor, “at the request of the magistrates of the said city and many other lords,” pardoned everyone.?” The most important general regulation from the Suprema concerning these visitations appeared in 1570. Henceforth, every tribunal was required to send one of its three Inquisitors traveling through some part of its district for at least four months of every year. Each Inquisitor would serve in turn, beginning with the most junior; if no such trip was made and reported, the Inquisitor respon- sible for the visita would lose one third of his salary for that year. Reprimands 2 Ing., Libro 332, fol. 69 (carta acordada of May 9, 1604, with exceptions for Navarre). Foreign familiars: ébid., fol. 95v (Irishman at Navarre, 1607), 79 (Béarnese at Saragossa, 1607); Libro 340, fol. 167v (Genoese at Barcelona, 1633); Libro 347, fols. 101, 204v (Frenchmen at Saragosa, 1626 and 1631). On the difficulties of finding familiars in the mid-seventeenth century, see Lopez Vela, “Estructura y functamiento de la burocracia inquisitorial,” 206, and below, p. 317. 27 Lea, i, pp.238-41. For the Pamplona auto, see Inq., Libro 833, fols. 12-13, For the execution of a Sicilian Protestant, Antonio Nicolini, at Messina (which upset the Suprema because they never saw his trial), see Ing. Libro 325, fol. 124, and Garufi, Fatti ¢ personaggi, p. 112. Another ‘auto was held at Messina after the great victory at Lepanto: see Inq., Libro 898, fols. 23~26v. On the Catania auta, see Salvatore Caponetto, “Origini e caratteri della Riforma in Sicilia,” in Rinascimento, 7 (1956), pp. 263-64; on Catania’s unwillingness to extradite any ofits heretics, see also Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon,” p.277. 66The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces were occasionally handed out if the Inquisitor making the visit returned within the allotted four months. By 1607 the Suprema required each tribunal to divide its district into thirds and inspect one section every year, but this routine was abandoned under Philip IV. After 1620 the Inquisitors of northern Spain, like their colleagues in Castile, routinely asked and received exemptions from making visitas.?8 In the particular case of Navarre, where the tribunal was located safely in Castile but far from most of its business, visitations were truly of crucial importance, Within two years of settling in Calahorra in 1521, a Navarrese Inquisitor spent three months visiting the port of San Sebastin, in Guipuzcoa, in order to investigate a captured shipment of Lutheran writings. Three other visitations between 1528 and 1531 ventured into the Basque provinces in order to hunt witches, During a ten-month visitation of the entire Basque country in 1538-39, the Navarrese Inquisitors imposed formal penances on no fewer than 187 people, including fifty-one witches. Another visitation of the southwestern corner of this district in 1544 also lasted ten months, A seven-month sweep along the coast in 1546-47 was also followed by a record-breaking thirteen- month return in 1549-50, inspecting Protestant infiltration in the Basque ports. Another visitation of the coastal zone during the height of the Protestant scare in 1567 lasted exactly one year. After 1570 the tribunal of Navarre became more routine in the number and length of its official visitations, just as it became more ordinary in the backgrounds of its Inquisitors. Nevertheless, at least one of its subsequent visitations — that undertaken by the “witches” advocate,” Inquisitor Salazar y Frias in 1611 — affected the general history of the entire institution. 29 Provincial Inquisitors not only made official visitations; they sometimes had to receive official inspectors from the Suprema, who themselves ordered a very different type of visita at irregular intervals, whenever rumors of gross mis- conduct in some local tribunal reached their ears. One finds a few such inspections in virtually every tribunal. They occurred at Navarre in 1527, during the peak of confusion over how to conduct witch-trials, and at Barcelona both in 1537 and in 1549 over similar issues. At Valencia, a sudden rash of retracted confessions by Judaizers in 1540 provoked major intervention by the Suprema; in an unprecedented action, two of its six members had to be sent to Valencia in order to clean up the resulting chaos. Saragossa’s 1529 visitas resulted from rumors that the Inquisitors had illegally sold numerous patents allowing descendants of convicted Judaizers to hold public office, and pocketed the fines 28 Text of the 1570 acordada in Ing., Libro 325, fols. 248-49; Garcia Carcel, Herejia sociedad, p.9t ‘The Toledo tribunal held thirty-four visitas from 1540 t0 1579, covering its entire district several times, but only half as many during the following forty years; after 1620 they virtually stopped altogether, See J.-P. Dedieu, “Les Inquisiteurs de Tolede et la visite du district,” in Meélanges de Ja Casa de Velazquez, 13 (1977), Pp. 235-56. 29 A convenient summary of pre-1570 Navarre visitations is in Reguera, La Inquisicién espaiola, pp. 64-68; for Salazar’s fateful tip, see Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, pp. 227-305. 67The Holy Office outside Castile directly. Nine years later, the Suprema’s prosecutor conducted another visita after both of Saragossa’s Inquisitors had arrested some canons in a precedence quarrel between the city’s two principal churches during the Corpus Christi procession. Both Inquisitors were rapidly transferred from Saragossa to other parts of Spain, although the visitador did not file his final report until 1544.2 The most comprehensive and important visitation of the entire Aragonese Secretariat was carried out under the new Inquisitor-General Espinosa in 1567. The Suprema’s agent, Dr. Soto Salazar, visited three different tribunals (Valen- cia, Barcelona, Saragossa) in order to prepare a general concordat between the Inquisition and representatives of the united Crown of Aragon, which was finally signed in 1568. This visita focused on the number and condition of inquisitorial familiars throughout Spanish Aragon. Espinosa also sent a future Inquisitor-General to Valencia in 1566 in order to censure and remove an Inquisitor who had fathered a bastard child with a female prisoner; three years later the same inspector visited Navarre in order to condemn a senior official (a notary of the Secreto) to the galleys for abducting a local married woman." Another visitor traveled to Sicily in 1567 in order to enforce the Suprema’s decision, endorsed by Philip II, to fine the acting Viceroy for interfering with the Inquisition’s right to judge familiars. This inspector remained in Palermo for several years, uncovering many serious irregularities, overruling local decisions, finally recommending the replacement of one Inquisitor and a heavy fine for the other before returning to Spain. Nine years later, different complaints led to another inspection at Palermo after which a veteran Inquisitor was replaced. But this Sicilian visita proved to be the last major episode of its kind in the Aragonese Secretariat. As Henry Charles Lea astutely noted, “the necessity for these visitations diminished in proportion as the tribunals were subordinated to the Suprema.””3? THE ‘SUPREMA’ TIGHTENS CONTROLS From the age of Torquemada until the tenure of Diego de Espinosa as Inquisitor-General (1567-71), the Suprema rarely attempted to supervise the routine operations of local tribunals. Individual Inquisitors and lesser officials 39 See Lea, 1, pp. 227-30. For visitas to Navarre, see Reguera, La Inquisicion espatiola, pp. 50-643 for Barcelona visita of 1549, see Ing., Libro 323, fols. 8&-8v, 150, 26-26v, g6v; Libro 736, fols. 55-56, 148-48v; for Valencia after 1541, see Lea, 1, pp. 584-85; for Aragon, see Libro 320, fobs 223-31 (report from 1529 vista); Libro 322, fols. 208-11 (instructions to 1538 visilador), 362-63 (his report). 31 See Garcfa Carcel, Herejia sociedad, pp. 143-45 and 145 n. 6; and Ing., Libro 324, fols. 262~65v, 267-710 on Soto Salazar’s triangular inspection in 1567. Also Reguera, La Inguisicion espariola, pp-62-63, and Garcia Carcel, Hergjia sociedad, p. 129 n. 6, for the brief troubleshooting risivas to punish sexual misconduct. 32 See Garul, Fatti ¢ personagei, pp. 188, 191-94, 198 on Quintanilla visit, and pp.201-03 on the Bishop of Patti's inspection in 1577; also Lea, it, p.230 (quote) 68The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces were appointed, transferred, and occasionally recalled. Difficulties with secular authorities, which involved the prestige of the institution, were carefully regula- ted. Cases of discordia, where decisions of local Inquisitors were not unanimous, had been routinely submitted to the Suprema for arbitration ever since 1509. Any prisoner of special importance, or any unprecedented problems, immedi- ately came to their attention. But local Inquisitors had enormous latitude in their actions and judgments. As Lea pointed out, the successive inspections of the Barcelona tribunal in the mid-sixteenth century proved that local Inquisi- tors “were virtually a law unto themselves.” Official instructions were unenforceable; during his general visitation of the Crown of Aragon in 1567, Soto Salazar discovered dozens of cases where the Barcelona tribunal had sen- tenced prisoners to major punishments, from relaxation to public whippings, after trials conducted with gross irregularity.33 The gradual tightening of controls over local Inquisitors had already begun under Espinosa’s famous predecessor, Fernando de Valdés. Not only did Valdés promulgate in 1561 the first revised set of regulations for conducting inquisitorial trials since the age of Torquemada, but he also increased the rewards for submitting annual reports of these cases concluded and autos held. However, the most crucial innovation came under his hand-picked deputy and successor. A general regulation of June 19, 1568, required all death sentences for any cause to be sent to the Suprema for its approval. No longer could an individual Inquisitor, off on a visita, execute a heretic on his own initiative — as had happened in Sicily as recently as 1567. No longer could a local Inquisitor promise the wife of a Viceroy that she could pardon the least guilty man con- demned to die if she attended an auto — which reportedly happened in 1569, also in Sicily.34 The correspondence between the Suprema and the various tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat during Espinosa’s tenure bristles with lengthy glosses on these annual reports, Comments and queries reached down to minute points. After Barcelona had reported on its public auto of March 1568, the Suprema sent three pages of comments, asking why four convicted bigamists had not been sent to the galleys, ordering them to reduce the punishment inflicted on another prisoner, and requiring them to specify the charges against three other prisoners in greater detail. When the next Barcelona auto was reported in May 1569, the Suprema filled five pages with its glosses; they found several judg- ments too lenient but one too harsh, and ordered Barcelona to publish some new edicts against people who sold horses or weapons to Protestants. Barcelona’s next public auto was reported after October 1570: once more the Suprema sent four pages of comments. Not only were several of the punishments 35 See Lea, i, pp. 179-87, for the classical survey of this issue (quote, p. 181). ¥ hid. p. 181; Garafi, Fate personaggi, pp. 112, 195. The original text of this 1568 acordada can be found in Ing., Libro 325, fol. 60. 69The Holy Office outside Castile too lenient, but also the cost of refreshments served during the auto was judged excessive!35 The Suprema handled other tribunals just as harshly. In November 1567, both the Aragonese and Navarrese tribunals received similarly minute scrutiny of their current reports, demanding explanations for particular decisions, order- ing certain punishments reduced and others increased, and threatening to withhold salaries unless complete trials were sent. Virtually every tribunal in the Secretariat received at least two such stinging rebukes between 1569 and 1571. In one fateful instance, the Suprema sternly lectured Saragossa that, after a previous complaint, their summaries still failed to explain why some convicted sodomites were executed and others not. “This has greatly displeased both the Inquisitor-General and the Supreme Council,” they warned, adding that “you must pay great attention to this admonition.” Indeed they did: within a few years, Saragossa executed a record number of convicted sodomites.°° The demand for precision during the Espinosa era extended even to ques- tions of language. Among the seven tribunals in the Aragonese Secretariat, only Saragossa was located in a district where the vast majority of its prisoners understood Castilian Spanish. Nevertheless, the Suprema insisted that all reports submitted to them, including testimony, be in Castilian. This issue was particularly acute in Catalonia, whose tribunal had to be warned as early as 1568 that “henceforth ... trials may not be conducted in Latin or in Catalan.” When the Barcelona tribunal again sent some testimony in Catalan against an accused witch in the summer of 1574, the Suprema requested a translation but agreed the evidence justified her arrest; next year, when another trial was sent in Catalan, the Suprema returned it unread. In 1577, they complained that the annual report of Palermo’s causas despachadas included some testimony submit- ted to them in lengua siciliano and sent it back.37 ‘The minute surveillance of the Espinosa era extended even to the expenses for food served to Inquisitors during lengthy public autos; this is the only period of the Inquisition for which we can reconstruct several such menus. Under Espinosa’s successor, Cardinal Quiroga, such details no longer needed to be reported. The essential lessons had been learned and local autonomy decisively trimmed. The Suprema had finally enforced an automatic appeal to itself of every death sentence proposed by a local tribunal, no mattter how distant from. Madrid. As long as Philip II ruled, the mails between Madrid and the various 35 Ing,, Libro 325, fols. 38-39, 144-46v, 240-419. 36 Ing., Libro 324, fols. 160v (Valencia), 1815-2v, 184-8qv (Aragon and Navarre); Libro 325, fols, 57-57 (Valencia), 59-sqv (Sicily), 112-13 (Aragon), 1761-78 (Sicily), 206v-07 (Valen 2Bov-B2 (Sardinia); Libro 326, fols. 70~71v (Sardinia). Quote from Inq,, Libro 325, fol. 118. (Feb. 1569). At the following auto in 1570, three sodomites were burned, followed by twelve in January 1572. 37 Ing,, Libro 325, fols. 110, 1543 Libro 326, fols. 202, 2030-04, 293 (to Barcelona, Aug. 1574 and Sept. 1575); Libro 327, fol. 100 (to Sicily, July 15, 1577). JoThe Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat busily transported trial records of major inquisitorial offenders back and forth. The Suprema normally upheld the locally decreed death sentences, sometimes modifying them in the direction of greater leniency. The system of annual reports functioned very smoothly, even in unimportant places like Mallorca or Sardinia.58 The Aragonese periphery of the Inquisition was now adequately controlled from the center. ‘The status quo attained around 1570 remained undisturbed for over half a century. From time to time the Suprema increased its demands for greater precision in the information supplied to them, though never with the insistence of the Espinosa era. In 1596, they rebuked both Valencia and Barcelona for failing to specify the age and gender of witnesses who supplied denunciations, while Sardinia was required to submit more details of the heretical propositions charged against an alchemist whom they had arrested. Nine years later the Saragossa tribunal was upbraided because “for several years no public autos have been held, nor has routine business been dispatched with the accustomed punctuality”; people who had been accused were not arrested, and prisoners whose trials had been concluded were not judged promptly. A few years later, the Suprema berated the Barcelona tribunal because they had stopped inspec- ting Protestant ships and had failed to arrest an Englishman who kept his hat on during the Corpus Christi procession. Worse yet, the Suprema learned that Barcelona had used some mysterious Libro Verde in order to check the ancestry ofa candidate for employment who had been born in Aragon. They immediately became suspicious: “you must find a way to see this Green Book ... and learn what authority it has and who is its author.”?° Such sporadic rebukes showed that the Suprema now exercised total control over executions, but not yet over all other aspects of local operations. Early in the reign of Philip IV, the Suprema attempted to smother the remaining vestiges of autonomy in its local tribunals. In 1625 another epochal regulation circulated throughout the entire Spanish Inquisition, requiring the Suprema to approve any sentence entailing physical punishment, such as condemnations to the galleys, whippings, public vergiienza, or banishment. It now became impossible for local Inquisitors to judge any but the most trivial cases without sending them to Madrid. In 1632, the Suprema attempted to achieve a truly stultifying centralization by ordering each tribunal to submit monthly reports on the state of its business. Surviving records suggests that this 38 From 1570 until 1620, there were virtually no lacunae in the series of annual reports (Mallorca’s only start in 1578, when a veteran Inquisitor was finally appointed from outside). For the menus, see, for example, Ing., Libro 737, fol. 345 (Barcelona served two meals atits 1572 auto, the first with nine courses and the second with twelve, including breaded fish, figs, nuts, and large amounts of wine) or Libro 787, fols. 3-5 (at Logroio’s first auto in 1570, the Inquisitors served a dozen birds, two types of wine, roast lamb, bread, jam, lemons, and cheese and hired two women cooks). 39 Ing,, Libro 330, fols. 4, 17v, 33v; Libro 331, fol. 205; Libro 332, fol. x10v—11, 7The Holy Office outside Castile rule was honored mainly in the breach; few such reports exist before the 1690s." But the general drift of legislation was clear, The essential result was the complete erosion of local autonomy after 1625 in deciding punishments of significant prisoners, since that regulation (unlike the one requiring monthly reports) was enforceable. INSIDE THE TRIBUNALS: SECRECY AND TORTURE In popular folklore, the two most notorious features of the Spanish Inquisition were the secrecy of its operations, above all the secrecy of denunciations, and its extravagant use of torture. Twentieth-century scholarship, ever since Henry Charles Lea, has endorsed half of this picture and rejected the other half. The accurate perception concerns inquisitorial secrecy. As Lea said, “The most marked distinction between the procedure of the Inquisition and that of other jurisdictions was the inviolable secrecy in which all its operations were shrouded. They were, indeed, other evil peculiarities, but this it was which inflicted the greatest wrong on its victims and exposed the Inquisitor to the strongest temptation to abuse his power.”*! The blanket of absolute secrecy began with the officials of the Inquisition. It reached down to its official messengers and out to its official consultants, who attempted to measure the amount of heresy in each accusation or each unorthodox book. We possess printed copies of the regulations of the Spanish Inquisition, beginning with a 1536 edition of Torquemada’s rules of 1494 and capped by the two-volume version published by Gaspar Isidro de Arguello in 1627-32. But they were never sold publicly, being designed for the internal use of the Holy Office and its officials. Moreover, these general regulations were constantly supplemented by additional secret instructions, called cartas acordudas, sent by the Suprema to several and sometimes to all tribunals. Each tribunal maintained its own updated procedural manual based on the cartas acordadas addressed directly to it.4? As early as 1531, witnesses were threatened with excommunication and huge 4° Lea, 1h pp. 183-84; Ing., Libro 347, fol. 80-8ov, and Libro 945, fol. 115%, spell out the same point for Saragossa and for Valencia, namely that the new 1625 regulations applied to sodomy trials as well as heresy cases. The tribunal of Saragossa apparently continued to send annual rather than monthly reports until 1693; Navarre’s monthly reports begin after 1696; Barcelona's, in 1691; Valencia’s, only in September 1702. 1 Lea, Il, pp. 470-78 (quote, p. 470). 42 See Inq., Libro 1234, fols. 367-483, for an abecedario of cartas acordadas to Saragossa from 1522 to 1636, which is not identical with the abecedario from Saragossa in Libro 1260, fols. 143-226; then compare the fragmentary modos de proceder from the tribunals of Sardinia and Navarre in Libro 1254, fols. 291-306 and 307-21v. The most elaborate of these abecedarias, like the Codex Moldenhawer in Copenhagen, belonged to the Suprema, but they give an inadequate picture of local peculiarities. Printed manuals like Arguello’s remain valuable, but similarly flatten out the distinctive estilos of the Aragonese tribunals, which tried several types of offenses unknown in Castile 72The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces fines if they revealed what they had testified. Elaborate precautions ensured that every written order of the Inquisition was returned with a note that it had been performed. Not only denunciations were secret; the accused and his court- appointed attorney were also required at the first hearing to keep silence about whatever they heard or said, not only about their own case but even about anything they might overhear pertaining to other prisoners. Very rarely was this secrecy breached. Both the Palermo uprising in 1516 and the unexpected French invasion of Navarre in 1521 caused the Holy Office to flee so rapidly that some of its records were stolen. During the worst of Saragossa’s rioting in favor of Antonio Pérez in 1591, elaborate instructions told the Aragonese Inquisition how to hide their most essential records if their headquarters should be invaded. During the Catalan rebellion in 1640, the Barcelona tribunal reported that one of their couriers had been robbed; although two letters to the Suprema from the tribunal of Sardinia were returned to them unopened, their own letters - containing current political news — had been lost.*3 Secrecy undoubtedly contributed much to the unusually high espirit de corps within the Spanish Inquisition. Unlike most early modern bureaucracies, it had both a mission and a mystique. No other organization conducted most of its business in a Sala del Secreto. Stories circulated within the Holy Office that Inquisitor-General Quiroga twice refused to even acknowledge, let alone grant, Philip II's requests to learn the whereabouts of a well-known surgeon who had been arrested by the Inquisition. Outsiders were ruthlessly excluded from any knowledge of its workings. Only a remarkably resourceful and famous prisoner like Antonio Pérez could manage to corrupt some of its officials. Although they prided themselves on their impenetrable secrecy, the Inquisi- tors also boasted of the exquisite justice of their decisions. They believed, unlike Lea, that these two aspects were interconnected: the Inquisition’s freedom from outside intervention, they claimed, enabled them to make unbiased investi- gations and avoid corruption. Secrecy precluded bribery and guaranteed fair- ness. The Venetian ambassador Leonardo Donato, who observed the Spanish Inquisition with more care than most of his colleagues, remarked on its astonishing secrecy — nobody, he said, ever learned anything about a prisoner’s case after he was arrested until he was sentenced: ‘The accusations and the names of witnesses remain secret; and from what I have heard, they also receive the defense and whatever else the prisoner wishes to produce to justify himself. But with all this, they say that the sentences of condemnation are always 48 Ing,, Libro 317, fol. 210v (the Saragossa tribunal was given power to prosecute those who had stolen inquisitorial records from Tudela in 1521); British Library, Egerton Ms. 1507, fol. 116v (the Suprema instructs Saragossa where to hide its “genealogias, abecedarios y otras cosas de sustancia” plus “los papeles mas importantes” in October 1591); Libro 748; fol. 306 (Barcelona to Suprema, Aug. 1640: this letter was sent via the Viceroy’s special courrier). 73