Frontiers of heresy: the Spanish Inquisition from the Basque lands to Sicily 9781139085144, 9780521374682, 9780521522595

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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 horsesmugglers 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 Olwen Hufton, 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 will 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

BS]! RES] | uninersty of Cambridge

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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 Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://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 lands to Sicily / William Monter.

p. cm. — (Cambridge studies in early modern history) Includes index.

ISBN 0521374685) 1. Inquisition — Spain — Aragon.

2. Aragon (Spain) — History.

I. Title. II. Series. BX1735.M66 1989

272'.2'0946-de20 89-1023 CIP ISBN 0521 374685 hardback ISBN 0521522595 paperback

For Rosellen

oe BLANK PAGE

| Contents

List of tables X Preface xi

List of maps and figure page ix PART I THE HOLY OFFICE OUTSIDE CASTILE

1 The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 3 2 The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 29

3 The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces 55 PART 2 ARAGONESE TRIBUNALS

4 Saragossa: a royal fortress 79

5 Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms 105

6 Valencia: taming the magnates 125 7 Navarre: the four conspiracies 143 8 Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles 164

PART 3 ARAGONESE HERESIES

g Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain 189

10 The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon 209

11 Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration 231 PART 4 ‘‘MIXED CRIMES’? IN ARAGON

12 Witchcraft: the forgotten offense 255

13 Sodomy: the fateful accident 276 Vil

Contents - PART 5 RECESSIONAL

14 The eclipse of Aragon, 1630-1730 303

~ Conclusion: one king, one law, one faith 321 APPENDICES

1 Deaths at public autos de fein the Aragonese Secretariat, 1540-1640 326

2 Galley condemnations in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1560-1640 328 3 Executions in effigy in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1541-1640 331

Glossary 334 Index 337

viii

| Maps 1 Inquisitorial districts, 1570 page 46 2 Prosecution of Moriscos in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1566~—1609 194

1570-1610 200

3 Prosecution of Moriscos in the tribunal of Saragossa, 1558-1610 198 4 Inquisitorial prosecution of Morisco settlements in the Ebro basin,

| | Figure 1 French immigration at Barcelona, 1540-1660 107

, 1X

Tables

1 Inquisitorial executions in the Crown of Aragon, 1485-92 page 15

2 Inquisition deaths in the Crown of Aragon, 1493-1530 21

3 Andalucian and Aragonese autos, 1545 38

4 Saragossa autos defe,1540-55 38 5 Sicilian autos de fe, 1540-55 39 6 Deaths at Castilian autos, 1570-1625 48 7 Deaths at Aragonese autos, 1570-1625 49 8 Autos and defendants in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1560-1630 51

g 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 converts in Charles II’s Spain 252 18 Aragonese sodomy prosecutions, 1570-1630 288 1g Aragonese sodomy trials by decades, 1560-1640 289 20 Barcelona sodomy defendants, 1580-1630 2Q1 21 Sodomy and Aragonese Inquisitions, 1650-80 316

xX

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 Jo 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. xi

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 early 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 15408 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 disappearance 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 IT’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 condemnations 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 Reformation 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 pronounced its judgments more theatrically or perpetuated the memory of its condemnations more assiduously. To understand this institution and its fearsome 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 (Tomas 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 15g0-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. xiil

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 ‘Aveng (Nov. 1988). A draft of Chapter

IO 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

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I

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 Senior 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, VII, p. 507).

Grandissimo e antichissimo odio é poi fra castigliani e aragonesi, e lo vanno benissimo conservando; e se non fosse ... il gran timore di quest’offizio dell’Inquisizione, fra loro seguirano disordini di grande importanzia. Venetian relazione, 1563 (Firpo, Relazioni, vill, 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 Bernaldez, 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 T’orquemada and other Castilian Dominicans to persuade the queen to seek 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 _ ' Nicholas Lopez Martinez, Los Judaizantes castellanos y la Inquisicion en tiempo de Isabel la Catélica

(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 momentous 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 Ferdinand’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 Ramon de Penyafort; equally Catalan was the author of the great fourteenth-century handbook for Inquisitors, Nicholas Eymeric. Propagandists 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 Ferdinand’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

4,

2 Fernando del Pulgar, Cronica de los Reyes Catolicos, 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 Aragon,” in Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 67 (1959), pp. 549ff. 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 Christlichen Spanien. Erster Teil, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1936; reprint 1970), 1, pp. 437-44 (#392), and especially Archivo Histérico Nacional, Inq. Valencia, Legajo 537/#5 with fifteen trials from the 1460s, one of whom was condemned to death. See Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicién espanola. El tribunal de Valencia, 1478-1530 (Barcelona, 1976), p. 38 n. 7.

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 (moze) 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 importance 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 Aragonese 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 4 Baer, Die Juden im Christlichen Spanien, i, 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.° — 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 nearly half empty.” 5 Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York, 1906-08), I, p. 593, on Saragossa’s 1484 autos. For Teruel, see especially Antonio Floriano, “Teruel en el siglo XV. La vida economica y la cuestion monetaria,” in Boletin 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 communities in its comunidad.

6 The basic narrative of Teruel’s conflict with the Inquisition in 1484-85 is Antonio Floriano, “El tribunal del Santo Oficio en Aragén: Establecimiento de la Inquisicién en Teruel,” in BRAH, 86 (1925), pp. 544-605, 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, El establecimiento de la Inquisicién en Aragén (1484-1486) (Saragossa, 1987), #128-29, 137, 160, 175 (pp. 166, 174,

195-96, 211). ? 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 illegalities 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, mucer - Camajfias, Teruel pasted together its exceptiones de jure, or official legal complaints. 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

regrets.

Teruel’s Inquisition, meeting the expected polite refusal with hypocritical 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 Aragonese 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

,7

_ 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 [bid., p. 241.

The Holy Office outside Castile

as Captain of Teruel, with dictatorial powers. The Inquisitors had been collecting 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 converso 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.!0

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 9 See Sanchez and Monasterio, “Los judaizantes turolenses,” 32, pp. 308—12 (Francisco and Juan Martinez de Rueda); ibid., 33, pp. 111-14, 120-22 (Gonzalvo Ruiz and his son Gil de Gonzalvo),

330-33 (Berenguer Ram). See Lea, I, p. 594 (auto #5, case 6), for Juan Martinez’s ritual execution.

10 See Sanchez and Monasterio, “Los judaizantes turolenses,” 32, pp. 325-49 (esp. Santangel genealogy on p. 326); bid., pp. 118~19, for his daughter Violante, who abjured de levi 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—1502),” 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 (hereafter 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 Inquisicién de Aragon,” 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 Santangel, 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” responsible 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. !2 Ferdinand reprimanded Garces de Marcilla in January 1487 after learning © that Garces’ nephew had violently attacked the Inquisition’s jailer. This unfortunate 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. But it is impossible 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 Qn Joan, see Ramon Ferrer Navarro, “Aspectos economicos de la inquisicién turolense a fines del siglo XV,” in Ligarzas, 7 (1975), pp. 301 (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 neofito to serve as his agent in collecting debts: see Pietro Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon e i primi anni del Sant’Uffizio in Sicilia (1500-151 4),” in Archivio Storico Siciliano, 3rd ser., 20 (1970),

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 835 4bis, fols. 93, 13 1v. 13 Gil Gracian was tried and penanced at Saragossa in January 1489: Lea, “Memorial de diversos

autos,” #7 of auto 35.

9

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 confiscated properties of Teruel’s conversos, 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 see 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.!* _ ARAGONESE ASSASSINATION AND CATALAN CHICANERY

Inquisitor Solibera left Teruel for several months after his triumph in 1485 in 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 promoted 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.!>

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 conversos, 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 14 See J. Caruana Gomez de Barreda, ed., /ndice 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, Negoctacién de Roma 1381-1700 (Valladolid, 1936), p. 61 (Legajo g19), 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 Aragon, g vols. (Madrid 1974-77), Vill, pp. 501-07. For the legal opposition, see Jose Sesma

Mujfioz, La Diputacién del Reino de Aragon en la época de Fernando II (Saragossa, 1977), Pp. 329-54, 406-29, and Sesma’s Establecimiento, #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.

Aragon’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 Inquisition’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 Torquemada 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 conversos 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 asssassins were being hired. Attempts were made that spring and summer to throw a key inquisitorial official into the Ebro river and to enter the 16 Zurita, Anales de Aragon, Vill, p. §03 (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. '7 Sesma, Establecimiento, #74-75 (pp. 112-14, quote 112). 11

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 Cathedral 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 extradited 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 conversos. 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.!? , ,

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 Aragon, Vil, p. 506 (quote).

12

19 See Lea’s “Memorial de diversos autos” (partly printed by Lea, 1, pp. 592-611), and compare the abecedario printed in the Libro Verde, plus the less-complete Somario de relajados (pp. 111-33,

135-38).

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 conversos, 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 20 Zurita, Anales de Aragon, Vill, p. 503 (quote); for a somewhat inflated opinion of the Valencian opposition, see Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicién espanola, pp. 47-61. 21 The best account of Catalonia’s struggle with King Ferdinand over the Inquisition is in Jaime

Vicens Vives, Ferran II 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 converso 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 ambassador to Rome to have the February 1 486 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 introduction 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, Ferdinand held all the necessary legal powers, backed up by his prestige from the 22 Jbid., 1, pp. 376-77; Wl, pp. 130-31 (quotes). —

14

The Castilian Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1484-1530 : Table 1 [nquisitorial executions in the Crown of Aragon, 1485-92 |

Saragossa Teruel Valencia Tortosa

Relax in in effigy person46 5040 12[50] [10]329 Relax

conflict in Catalonia. ,

ongoing war in Granada and by his successful settlement of the Remensa 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.23 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 early 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 Regla Campistol, 2 vols. (Valencia, 1975), 1, pp. 173-88; and, for a fuller version, Jordi

Ventura, “Els inicis de la Inquisici6 espanyola a Mallorca,” in Randa, 5 (1977), pp. 67-116 (summarized by Henry Kamen, La /nquisictén espanola, 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 go%. 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 Etudes Juives, 143 (1984), pp. 334-35. For Tortosa, see AHN, Ingq., 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 resembling a Spanish-style attack on conversos; one of the oldest manuscripts in Palermo’s Holy Office bore the significant title, “First book when the Inquisition 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 1501.7° 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 quartercentury after she had been “executed” in two different places.7° 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 25 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. ro. 26 See Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon,” pp. 278-86. According to an eighteenth-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 Museos, 67 [1959], p. 558, #41) is bound together with those of many other conversos 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.””° 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, chicanery, 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

1511-12; 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 cvile del Regno di Napoli (1723); see also Luigi Amabile, // Santo Oficio della Inquisizione in Napoli, 2 vols. (Naples, 1893-97). 28 Ruiz Martin, “Expulsion,” pp. 59-65 (quote, p. 63).

17

The Holy Office outside Castile

provoking protests from the Sicilian Parliament because this tribunal “proceeded 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.*? 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.° 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.*! 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. 29 La Mantia, Origine e vicende, pp. 34-43, esp. 43 n. 38 (quote). 30 Tbid., pp. 44-49; D. J. Dormer, Anales de Aragon 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 los anales de Aragon, que prosigue los del Secretario Geronimo Curita, desde el aio MDXVI ... (Saragossa, 1630), Bk. 1, ch. 5

| 18

31 gr ta Sta, 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.

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 conversos 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 confiscations in Valencia helped Ferdinand equip a fleet 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 paralleled 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-

Castilian Inquisition.>7 |

ing both its personnel and its regulations from the Supreme Council of the

' _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 conversos had been killed at Barcelona than elsewhere in Ferdinand’s Spanish possessions, the survivors complained to Catalan authorities 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.73 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 Monzén, 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 32 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 conversos in 1488, see Jacqueline Guiral, “Convers a Valence 4 la fin du XVe siécle,” 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. Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicin espanola, 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 Inquisicion espanola y los judios conversos barcelonenses (siglo XV y XVI)

(Barcelona, 1975), p. 9 (quoted by Kamen, La [nquisicién espanola, p. 65). 1Q

.- 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. Accordingly, 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.** 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 |

20

version. Resolution came during the winter of 1520-21, with royal administration 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, I, pp. 269-82, provides the classical account of these maneuverings; see also Sesma, Diputacton, for additional details on the Aragonese side.

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

Saragossa 68 56 Valencia [75] [250] Barcelona 28 445 Mallorca 65 263 Saragossa 12 14 Valencia [140] [130] Barcelona 6 ? Mallorca 15 212 183 Sicily 128 A: 1493-1510

B: 1511-30

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 Saragossa in 1485, provided a moral legitimacy which greatly benefitted the entire

institution. For the next fifty years it prosecuted conversos 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 condemned 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, I, p. 283 (quote). |

, 21

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 Valencia, one must begin with the incomplete abecedario of relajados through 1594 used by Lea (History of the Inquisition, 1, p. 562), rather than the sprawling and often inaccurate appendix compiled by Garcia Carcel, Origenes, pp. 241-304; however, Lea’s source often fails to distin-

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 elite promised considerable wealth. In 1488, eighty prominent 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.?7

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 schoolguish 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 ¢ vicende, pp. 167-204; it has been tabulated chronologically by N. Giordano in Archivio Storico Siciliano, 3rd ser., 18 (1968), pp. 259-61. However, a 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

1865). |

Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon,” pp. 296~—300.

For the Balearic Islands, see the chronological series (AHN, Libro 866, fols. g2ff) printed by

Baruch Braunstein, 7he Chuetas of Mallorca: Conversos and the Inquisition of Mallorca (New York,

1936), pp. 167-78; for Barcelona, see 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 Coleccién de documentos inéditos del Archivo General de Aragon, xxvii (Barcelona,

37 The best introduction to Valencia’s conversos 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 conversos: see J. Garcia Mercadal, ed., Viajes de extranjeros por Espana y Portugal, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1962), 1,

pp. 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 4 Valence 4 la fin due XVe siécle.” On the episode of Vives’ synagogue, see Garcia, Els Vives, pp. 85-89, and Carbonell, in Coleccién de documentos, Xxvill, 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 Inquisition, 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 Dalmacio 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.*®

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 Mujioz, 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 Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicién espanola, pp. 171-73, for social status of Valencia defendants. On intellectuals, see Garcia, Els Vives, pp. 142, 170; Jordi Ventura, /nqussicid espanola i cultura renaixentista al Pais Valencia (Valencia, 1978), pp. 115-19 and passim. For Barcelona’s most notable converso victims, see Carbonell, in Coleccién de documentos, XXVI1, 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 (zalmedina) 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 1504.9? 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 condemned 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 Fragments of Don Alonso’s trial, stolen by J.-A. Llorente and preserved today in Paris as Bibliothéque 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 Chnistlichen Spanien, pp. 449-59. His brother Jayme’s trial is in the Paris Llorente collection, Ms. 84; see ibid., pp. 460-64.

40 Manual de Novells Ardits: Vulgrament Apel.lat Dietari del Antich Consell Barceloni, 28 vols. (Barcelona, 1892-1975), Il, p. 353 (July 18, 1524); Garcia Els Vives, pp. 187, 270-72; La Mantia, Origine e vicende, #2, 21, 33, 75, 87, 107, 151, 161, 225, 231, 248, 254, 291, 340, 353, 355, 389, 409, 413; Libro Verde, p. 128; see below, pp. 276-78, on Don Sancho de la Caballeria 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.*2

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.*9 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 artilleryman 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 , +1 Lea, “Memorial de diversos autos,” pp. 600 (#3 of auto 15), 608 (#4 of auto 25); the Libro Verde,

December 1487. ,

p. 133, confirms the date of his execution but lists him as executed in person. See also Ubieto “Procesos de la Inquisicié6n de Aragén,”, p. 564 (#70), for the trial of a baptized Morisco in 42 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 Inquisiaén espanola, PP. 244-45, 254, 270, 286, 301, 304; for Barcelona, see Carbonell, in Coleccién de documentos, _ p. 155; for Mallorca, see Braunstein, The Chuetas of Mallorca, p. 176 (#455). 43 See Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicién espanola, pp. 251, 258, 266, 273, 276, 288, 296 (the vistonaria), 300; Braunstein, The Chuetas of Mallorca, p. 172 (#256). For Aragonese witches tried

by the Inquisition, see below, n. 47. :

44 On Aragon’s first bigamist, see Lea, “Memorial de diversos autos,”, pp. §94—95 (auto 7, #3, and aulo 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 Aragén,” pp. 564 (#69, begun Dec. 1487),

25 |

567 (#85), 579 (#142), 580 (#143). See Carbonell, in Coleccién de documentos, XxvIIl,

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.* 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.”*° The tribunal of Saragossa executed twenty people between 1500 and 1540; only six of them were conversos, compared 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.4?

, 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 Inquisicion espanola, pp. 263, 281, and 251 (the married monk). 45 See Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicién espanola, pp. 246, 251 (blasphemer penanced in 1485), 252 (relaxed in 1515), 258 (sbid.), 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.” 46 On the 1528 auto, see F. Momblanch, ed., Dietario de Jeront Soria (Valencia, 1960), p. 124; AHN, Inq., Legajo 598 (2), exp. 7; on the 1531 auto, see Garcia, Els Vives, p. 280, and Momblanch, Dietario de Jeroni Soria, p. 148 (quote). 47 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 Aragon,” 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 conversos 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 grandfather 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.”*? Here was a simple and coherent explanation, employing 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 necessary with such authority and such severity in Spain,” adding that “although its 48 See Ricardo Magdaleno, ed., Archivo General de Simancas, Catalogo XIX: Estado, Virreinato de Sicilia (Valladolid, 1951), p. 30 (Legajo 1117, #66). 49 Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambascatori veneti al Senato, vi (Turin, 1981), pp. 406-07, 409-10 (quotes). For Guicciardini’s views on the Inquisition, see J. N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms,

1250-1516, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1978), Il, pp. 452~53. Sorzano’s opinions were closely echoed twenty-three years later by Vicenzo Gradenigo (Firpo, Relazioni, vil, 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, vii, pp. §77-78, 572-73 (quotes).

28

2

The Aragonese century of the Spanish Inquisition, 1530-1630 No es 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, 1, p. 233). C’est Inquisition qui les tient en bride, et ne scauriot estre trop rigoreuse envers eux, car sans la 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 Espana, |, pp. 484-85).

Il Consiglio d’Inquisizione ... é il pitt assoluto Consiglio della corona di Spagna perché, sotto capo di religione, s’ascondono le pit recondite massime del governo spagnuolo. Venetian ambassador, 1649 (Firpo, Relazioni, 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 Contreras’ 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. 100-29. Henningsen published an earlier version in the Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia, 174 (1977), Pp. 547-79, while Contreras presented an amended paper on “Las causas de fe en la Inquisicién espafiola (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 chronological 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 followed 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 [he 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 concluded 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 P Inquisition de Toléde (1483-—1820),” in Mélanges de la Casa de Velazquez, 14 (1978), pp. 143-71.

3 J.-P. Dedieu, “Les Quatre Temps de lInquisition,” in Bartolomé Bennassar, ed., L ‘Inquisition espagnole (XVe-XIXe siécle) (Paris, 1979), pp. 15-42 (quote, p. 26).

4 Tbid., p. 33.

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 Dedieu’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. Similar 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 IJ 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, > J. Pérez Villanueva and B. Escandell Bonet, eds., Historia de la Inquisicién en Espana y América, 1: El conocimiento cientifico y el proceso historico de la Institucién (Madrid, 1984), pp. 281, 427-40, 701-13,

g96—1001, 1204ff. Contreras is a major contributor to this work, as Dedieu was for Bennassar

(see n. 3). ,

31

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 conversos 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 6 Contreras and Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases,” p. 117-18 (Tables 2 and 3). 7 Ingq., Libro 898, fols. 203-11 (#6 of 1574 auto); Jerénimo Garcia Servet, El humanista Cascales y 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 II, 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 1540s. 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 eligible for the galleys, the Inquisitors began sending some convicted heretics to

join the cutthroats and gypsies. The initiative apparently came from the Barcelona tribunal, which ordered six Frenchmen and a local schoolmaster, all 8 See Felix Sevilla y Soldafia, Historia penitenciaria espanola (La galera) (Segovia, 1917), for an overview, and Gregorio Marajion, “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 cronologico de la coleccién de documentos inéditos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragon (Barcelona, 1973),

p. 341 (#6486). See also Inq., Libro 988, fols. 1-6v (#5 and 52 of 1549 auto), 55-56 (#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—9g (#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 Protestants 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, accompanied 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.!2 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 Inq., Libro 730, fols. g-10 (#1~7, 13, of 1552 auto). | 11 Ing., Libro 961, fols. 211-14, 250—52, 261-63, 290—94v; Libro 988, fols. 8-35 (#24-25, 36, 41, 43, 52-53, 64, 69, 84, go, 97, 101-03, 106-10 of 1559 auto); Libro 1234, fols 405—o6v. 12 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, #6~7). 13: Thompson, “A Map of Crime,” p. 251; Garcia Fuentes, La Inquisicién 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 autos between 1582 and 1587 by Granada’s Inqusitors; Rafael Gracia Boix, Autos de fe y causas de la Inquisicién de Cérdoba (Cérdoba, 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 IT 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 subsequently 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 Inquisition was theoretically identical everywhere; but in northern Spain, the social realities and political climate which surrounded it — and therefore its achievements — 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.'> 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. 15 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 l’Espagne de 1520 4 1536,” in Mélanges de la 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 confined 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 Protestant 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 '6 The most valuable account of these events is by Augustin Redondo, Antonio de Guevara (14802-1545) et l’Espagne de son temps (Geneva, 1976), pp. 217-62. 17 See ibid. pp. 296-302, The committee’s minority, who voted that witchcraft was an illusion,

ineruced Fernando de Valdés, who subsequently served as Inquisitor-General from 1546 to 500.

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.)!® 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 Inquisition.!? 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 1545 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.72 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. '9 See Ifaki Reguera, La Inquisicién espanola en el Pais vasco (El tribunal de Calahorra, 1513-1570)

(San Sebastian, 1985), pp. 143-47. 20 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 Inq., Libro 785, fols. 229-30 (Seville auto of June 11, 1545); Libro 988, 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 Sebastidn Cirac Estopafian, 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 II II Moriscos reconciled 25 25

Lutheransreconciled reconciled20 5 56 Judaizers Judaizers executed 2 1 (effigy)

Moriscos executed O I

| Table 4 Saragossa “autos de fe,” 1540-55 Cases tried (executed in person-executed in effigy)

Year Judaizers Moriscos Lutherans Sodomy Opposition

1540 7 51 O Oo O 1541 4 43 O I (1) I 1542 5 (2-0) 30 (2-0) O O O 1543 4 34 (1-0) O O O 1545 (o-1) 2§12(1-0) 1546 06 27 (1-0) (1-4)52Oo (2)O4 1549 4 5 (3) 2 1550 fo)3632 I (oO-1) 2 8 (3)

1554 3 0 I 2 (1) 7 (2)

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.*° 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 Oficio de Cuenca y Sigtienza, | (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 autos between 1553 and 1558.

23 See Inq., Libro 988, fols. 44-45 (1540 auto), 48-49 (1541 auto), 55-56 (1542 auto), 240-41 (1545 auto), 1-6v (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 g61, fols. g—11v (1550 auto), 295-95V (1554 auto).

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) o O I 1542 20 (O-3) 4 (1-0) 2 O

15474 22 (0-3) 9 (0-1) : 5 1547B 13 10 (0-2) 6 4

1549 (1-1) (0-4) 433 (1) 155111 O 1913,(2-4) I

1553 I 12 (1-1)5IOI 1555 O 2 (1-0)

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 Ingq., Libro 873, fols. 145-46 (1540 auto), 191-gIv (1542 auto); Libro 898,.fols. 13-13v (Feb. 1547 auto), 2-3 (Dec. 1547 auto), 6-7v (1549 auto), 10-11 (1551 auto); Carlo A. Garuf, Fatti e personaggi dell’Inquisizione in Sicilia (Palermo, 1917; reprint Palermo, 1978), pp. 27-29 (1553 auto); Libro 874, fols. 121-21Vv (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.*> 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 G[onzalez] Novalin, E/ inquisidor 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 II, 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 26 Entire memorandum printed by Lea, 111, 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 Inquisition 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.28 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 dangers of Protestant propaganda, urging confessors to cooperate fully with the

Inquisition and requiring new licensing standards for schoolteachers. Lea exaggerated only slightly when he asserted that “Spanish Protestantism was a

mere episode, of no practical moment save as its repression fortified the Inquisition and led to the segregation of Spain from the intellectual and industrial movement of the succeeding centuries.””2?

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 I[bid., pp. 437-47 (quote, p. 438, also esp. p. 444). 28 See his three-volume Beitrage zur Geschichte des Spanischen Protestantismus und der Inquisition im

16. Jahrhundert (Gitersloh, 1902), 11, pp. 41-106. 29 Lea, III, 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 Protestantism 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.3°

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.*! 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 inquisitorial edict drily ordered that “all business concerning Judaism which we have 30 J[bid., pp. §71-72. 31 Statistics taken from Frutos Baeza, Bosquejo histérico de Murcia y su Concejo (Murcia, 1934), p. 95,

43 )

but checked with relacténes of three important autos (1562, 1567, 1568) presented by Garcia Servet, El humanista Cascales, pp. 119-31.

The Holy Office outside Castile

had in this city shall be suspended until further proof arises.”32 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 conversos in Estremadura, 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 punishments, and particularly its confiscations, aggravated the deteriorating situation

of Granada’s Moriscos and contributed to the outbreak of rebellion in the Alpujarras in 1568.°9 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 32 Garcia Servet, El humanista Cascales, pp. 131-39; Lea, ml, p. 235; British Library, Egerton Ms.

33 ey. Fuentes, La Inquisicién en Granada, pp. 18~81. See also the study by Keith Garrad, “La Inquisicién 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 executed, with Protestants, who comprised three-quarters of the victims, outnumbering 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 nonheretical 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 compelled them to abjure”’ for permitting their vassals to live as Moslems. But when 45

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Bae uaestienen ooESAS SigeS BERNE GtestDe DEEDS SLIT rs Ets j eS ee, nag , Leake PER oe cee Lah SERENE RN pins Tes Pepe oe RN iesteERAN Bu Bee Rees Pee Se eefyzRe, eR hoes Beate LP Oekes eee See nd ae Fe Car cat ~ ¢aSe hae hom ear : ‘“iSsaaa ed nyHR ae oere bint? ea, . Le ae . ee SEER ae Vo ee fy/ #He tig 'ee. i ph i) oe FSRSS +s ees eee ee Cae Sage PR ao4 Shoe Paes Eeies oe Ag aSR PESRORE? DGS PRR ewe 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 Logrojfio 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.7° 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 34 Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambascatort veneti al Senato, VII (Turin, 1981), pp. 616-17

35 1p Dedieu, “La Défense du mariage chrétien,” in Bennassar, L’Inquisition 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, E/ Santo Oficio de la Inquisicién en Galicia 1560-1700 (Madrid, 1982), pp. §54—80, give well-deserved attention to fornicarios and related “heretical propositions.” 36 Inq., Libro 833, fols. 120 (#1 of 1570/71 despachadas), 134v (#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 auéos, starting in 1574.

47

The Holy Office outside Castile

Table 6 Deaths at Castilian “autos,” 1570-1625

Tribunal Judaizers Lutherans Moriscos Total

Llerena 2 O 21 23 Murcia 3 e) 8 II Galicia 9 3 O 12 Seville 2 18 4 24 Toledo 6 7 12 25 Cuenca 10 O 9 19 Granada 12 2 10 24

Cérdoba 10 %e) 3 13 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 executions 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 Castile’s list is incomplete, because all of Valladolid’s relaciones are missing and some other tribunals (e.g., Granada or Cuenca) have important lacunae, whereas the Aragonese figures are virtually complete. 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 places. 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 Ofe)O52 6 13 Valencia 3 22 17 Saragossa 6 80 O 114 200 Navarre 15 49 5 4 18 76 Sicily 8 7 3 fe) 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.3® Perhaps the greed of the Inquisition was better displayed in Castilian 38 Lea, Il, p. 553, counted ninety-one galley sentences at Toledo between 1575 and 1610. 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) provided 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 else 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.%? 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, 39 Lea, Ill, p. 220. Granada held nineteen of them between 1573 and 1600; Cérdoba held thirteen during the same period. 40 Quoted by Geoffrey Parker, Philip I] (Boston, 1978), p. 99; see Schafer, Beitrage, 1, 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 4/255 7/236 4/226 6/262 27/1,350 1570-79 7/482 9/399 7/227 7/318 = 5/133, 351,559

1580-89 9/677 8/591 Oo 8/490 6/226 = 31/1,984 1590-99 = 8/593 9/494 O 4/219 6/158 — 27/1,564 1600-09 7/584 6/307 1/29 4/106 9/211 = .25/1,237

1610-19 3/66 O O1/10 1/52O5/134 9/252 1620-29 O 3/67 3/68 9/145

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 auto, 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.* 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.43 Although evidence about how the Holy Office created public rituals in Philip II’s Spain is meager, tantalizing clues suggest an increase in pomp and solemnity around 1570. When the so-called ‘‘Navarrese” Inquisition held its first public auto in its new seat at Logronio, a large green cross decorated the platform, adorned with the king’s coat-of-arms 4! Inq., Libro g89, fol. 120—20Vv.

42 Manual de Novells 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 autos 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 Inquisicién en Granada, p. 421, and M.A. Bel Bravo, El “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, inquisitorial advertising may also have begun in Sicily; the first known printed pamphlet 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.*° 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 44 Inq., Libro 787, fol. 4, published by José Simén Diaz, “La Inquisicién de Logrofio (15701580),” in Bermeo, 1 (1946), p. 101. Also British Library, Add. Ms. 19,325, fol. 20~20v (diary of G. Perino, August 15, 1573); Inq., 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 ff, ignores this Sicilian printing; his oldest entry of this type (#668, p. 169) comes from Logrofio in 1611. 45 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, Iv, p. 129, 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 g 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 punishments 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 slightly 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 Secretariat, 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 Aragonese 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

3

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, II, p.§2).

Procedono con tanta taciturnita e segretezza, che degl’inquisiti e della cause loro non s’intende mai nulla, se non quanto é pubblicata la loro sentenza ... Ma con

giustificatissime. ,

tutto cid si dice che le sentenze sono nei condannati sempre giustissime e Venetian relazione, 1573 (Firpo, Relazione, Vill, p. $77).

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, 11, 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 pamphlet,! 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 1 | have not seen the eight-page pamphlet version of this auto 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 followed 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 (ébid., 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, 397). Putting a prominent Catalan in a public auto was always a difficult task: see below, Chapter 5.

3 Manual de Novells Ardits: Vulgrament Apel.lat 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.)° 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 absolution. 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, /a vergiuenza, 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 + Miquel Parets, De los 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 Feroni Pujades, wv: (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 J/etrados, normally specialists in canon law rather

than theology. Despite the towering figure of Torquemada in public imagination, 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 asa 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, 6 Julio Caro Baroja, Los judios en la Espana moderna y contemporanea. 3 vols. (Madrid, 1961), 11, pp. 51-67 (see below, p. 307). The citation from Pefia is taken from Bartolomé Bennassar, ed., L Inquisition espagnole (XVe—XIXe siécle) (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, Herejia y sociedad en el siglo XVI.

La Inquisicién en Valencia 1530~160g9 (Barcelona, 1980), pp. 127-30. Information about Aragonese Inquisitors taken from the incompleted thesis of Pilar Sanchez (University of Barcelona). 8 See, for example, Inq., 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 Sumptuous Festival” printed by Bartolomeo Bolivar (bound with Ing., Libro 736).

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 Carcel 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 Inq., 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, Herejta sociedad, p. 127; Inq., Libro 317, fols. 247~—48; Emilia Salvador, ed., Cortes valencianas del reinado de Felipe IT (Valencia, 1973), p. 89 (c. 37); Casas Homs, Dietari de Pujades, t, pp. 164-65 (Inquisitor Olivan died in office in November 1607: Libro 741, fol. 225).

'! Garcia Carcel, Herejta sociedad, pp. 128-30 (quote, p. 128). For the Toledo Inquisitors, see J.-P. | Dedieu, “L’Administration de la foi: L’ Inquisition de Toléde et les vieux-chrétiens, XVI-XVIle siécles” (Thése 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.!2 After the tribunal moved to Logrofio 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 Logrofio. None of them, including the famous “witches” advocate” Salazar y Frias, knew much Basque.!? 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. Fight 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 '2 See Ifaki Reguera, La Inguisicion espariola en el Pais 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. 1 See Pietro Burgarella, “Diego de Obregon e i primi anni del Sant’Uffizio in Sicilia (15001514),” in Archivio Storico Siciliano, 3rd ser., 20 (1970), pp. 275-77; also Vito La Mantia, Origine e vicende dell’Inquisizione in Sicilia (reprint, 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.!°

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. : 15 See Inq., Libro 323, fol. 103; Libro 736, fols. 116-20. For the first dozen Sardinian Inquisitors,

who served in Cagliari 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 Inquisicion (1478-1700) (Madrid, 1984), p. 120 (quote). 16 Roberto Lopez Vela, “Estructura y funcionamiento de la burocracia inquisitorial (1643—1667),” in Jaime Contreras, ed., [nquisicién espanola. Nuevas approximaciones (Madrid, 1987), pp. 178, 203,

206-7.

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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.'” 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 destroyed the Holy Office archives. Philip II settled this quarrel by ordering one count be tried by each court, by prohibiting the Inquisition from trying any of its '7 See Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York,

1906-08), 11, 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 Inq., Libro 327, fols. 79, g2v. By 1590 the Valencia tribunal had named a man who was both Italian-born and unmarried as a familiar: Ing., Libro 329, fol. 53. For the Englishman and the Moriscos, see below, pp. 131, 18 See Carlo A. Garufi, Fatti e personagg: dell Inquisizione in Sicilia (Palermo, 1917; reprint Palermo, 1978), pp. 301-07, and Vittorio Sciutti Russi, Astraea in Sicilia; 11 ministero logato nella socteta stciliana dei secoli XVI e XVII (Naples, 1983), pp. 40-42.

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.!9

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 themselves 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 absolution, 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, see also British Library, Add. Ms. 19,325, fol. 67v. The arguments of Sciutti Russi, Astraea in Sicilia, pp. 1 40ff, 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 officii Sanctae Inquisitionis (Madrid, 1598), esp. his sections

on Sicily (Bk. u, i, ch. 14). See also Garufi, Fatti e personaggi, 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 3p.m. on August 18, 1593, apparently started with a fire near the Inquisition’s kitchens. 21 Koenigsberger, Government of Sicily, pp. 169-70.

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The Holy Office outside Castile Table 10 Crimes of Sicilian familiars, 1595-1634

Offense (number accused) Galleys Banished Whipped

Homosexuality(151) (173) 18 ,1g 24 45 “Resistance” 21 Counterfeit money (44) 3 9 I Perjured testimony (107) II 13 I

count (both of whom received large fines and lengthy imprisonments), 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 Inquisitors had briefly copied Sicily’s custom of appointing large numbers of influential 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.”23 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 22 Inq., Libro 1236, fols. 44—45v, 89. Compare Garufi, Fatti e personaggi, pp. 308-15, on numbers of familiars and other unsalaried officials in Sicily c. 1575.

23 Garcia Carcel, Herejia 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 1552; Inq., Libro 328, fol. 376—76v; Libro 329, fols. 34v—36v.

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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.”*4 The overall picture is almost the reverse of Sicily’s familiars.

In Aragon, despite the nobility’s resistance to permit familiars in its patrimonial 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 Inquisition 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.”° 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, Herejia 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., Jnquisicién espanola y mentalidad inquisito-

rial (Barcelona, 1984), p.144 n. 39 (Navarre edict); J.H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans (Cambridge, 1963), pp.gg-1oo. 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

25 James Contreras, “La Inquisicién aragonesa en el marco de la monarquia autoritaria,” in Hispania Sacra, 37 (1985), pp. 508-12; Inq., Libro 323, fols. 166v-67, 172, 201. See below, pp. 85, 223, on the massacred familiars.

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The Holy Office outside Castile

_ [1568] agreement are now serving.” Afterwards, as the Suprema feared, even these modest numbers fell rapidly.”° 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 responsible for the visita would lose one third of his salary for that year. Reprimands 26 Inq., Libro 332, fol. 69 (carta acordada of May 9, 1604, with exceptions for Navarre). Foreign | familiars: ibid., fol. g5v (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, ll, pp. 238-41. For the Pamplona auto, see Ing., Libro 833, fols. 12v—13. For the execution of a Sicilian Protestant, Antonio Nicolini, at Messina (which upset the Suprema because they never saw his trial), see Inq. Libro 325, fol. 124, and Garufi, Fatti e 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 auto, see Salvatore Caponetto, “Origini e caratteri della Riforma in Sicilia,” in Rinascimento, 7 (1956), pp. 263-64; on Catania’s unwillingness to extradite any of its 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.7®

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 Sebastian, 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 thirteenmonth 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.2? 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 Inq., Libro 325, fols. 248-49; Garcia Carcel, Herejia sociedad, p. gt. The Toledo tribunal held thirty-four visitas from 1540 to 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 Toléde et la visite du district,” in Mélanges de la Casa de Velazquez, 13 (1977), pp. 235-56. 29 A convenient summary of pre-1570 Navarre visitations is in Reguera, La Inquisicién espanola, pp. 64-68; for Salazar’s fateful trip, see Henningsen, 7he Witches’ Advocate, pp. 227-305.

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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 visttador did not file his final report until 1544.°° 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 (Valencia, 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 I], 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 viszta 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.” 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 30 See Lea, il, pp. 227-30. For visitas to Navarre, see Reguera, La [nquisicién espatiola, pp. 59-64; for Barcelona visita of 1549, see Inq., Libro 323, fols. 8—8v, 15v, 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, fols.

223-31 (report from 1529 vista); Libro 322, fols. 208v—11 (instructions to 1538 visitador), 362-63 (his report). 31 See Garcia Carcel, Herejia sociedad, pp. 143-45 and 145 n. 6; and Inq., Libro 324, fols. 262~65v, 267~71v on Soto Salazar’s triangular inspection in 1567. Also Reguera, La Inquisicion espanola, pp. 62~63, and Garcia Carcel, Herejia sociedad, p. 129 n. 6, for the brief troubleshooting visitas to punish sexual misconduct. 32 See Garufi, Fatt e personaggi, pp. 188, 191-94, 198 on Quintanilla visit, and pp. 201-03 on the Bishop of Patti’s inspection in 1577; also Lea, i, 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 regulated. 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 sentenced prisoners to major punishments, from relaxation to public whippings, after trials conducted with gross irregularity.>4 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 condemned to die if she attended an auto — which reportedly happened in 1569, also in Sicily.?*

_ ‘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 judgments 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 33, See Lea, il, pp. 179-87, for the classical survey of this issue (quote, p. 181). 34 Jbid., p. 181; Garuh, Fatti e personaggi, pp. 112, 195. The original text of this 1568 acordada can be

found in Inq., Libro 325, fol. 60.

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The Holy Office outside Castile

too lenient, but also the cost of refreshments served during the auto was judged excessive!5>

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 questions 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 submitted to them in lengua siciliano and sent it back.” 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 Ingq., Libro 325, fols. 38-39, 144—46v, 240~41V. | 36 Ingq., Libro 324, fols. 160v (Valencia), 181v—82v, 184—84v (Aragon and Navarre); Libro 325, fols. 57-57v (Valencia), 59-59v (Sicily), 112v-13 (Aragon), 176v—78 (Sicily), 206v—07 (Valencia), 28ov-—82 (Sardinia); Libro 326, fols. 7o~71v (Sardinia). Quote from Inq., Libro 325, fol. 118v (Feb. 1569). At the following auto in 1570, three sodomites were burned, followed by twelve in January 1572. 37 Inq., Libro 325, fols. 110, 154; Libro 326, fols. 202, 203v—04, 293 (to Barcelona, Aug. 1574 and Sept. 1575); Libro 327, fol. 100 (to Sicily, July 15, 1577).

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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.2> 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 inspecting 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 of a 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.”’3? 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 verguenza, 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, Inq., Libro 737, fol. 345 (Barcelona served two meals at its 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 Logrofio’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 39 Ing. Libro 330, fols. 4, 17v, 33v; Libro 331, fol. 205; Libro 332, fol. r10v—11.

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The Holy Office outside Castile

rule was honored mainly in the breach; few such reports exist before the 169os.*9 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 acordadas, 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 40 Lea, 1, pp. 183-84; Ingq., Libro 347, fol. 80-80v, and Libro 945, fol. 115v, 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. 41 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

| 72 ,

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 abecedarios, 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.

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 courtappointed 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.*9

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 Inquisitors 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 investigations and avoid corruption. Secrecy precluded bribery and guaranteed fairness. 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 43 Inq., 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 courier). 73

The Holy Office outside Castile extremely just and very well justified. Those who hear them read (for it is the custom of this tribunal to read most of the trial solemnly in a public square at an announced time) say that its method of procedure is good, and that it has no opposition.**

When judging the Spanish Inquisition, we must recall that the quality of justice in Spanish secular courts had an extremely poor reputation. The most distinguished modern historian of penal procedure in Habsburg Spain concluded that the only rational response of a person threatened with arrest on criminal charges

was to flee as far and as fast as possible.4? One understands why prisoners attempted various stratagems, such as making outrageous blasphemies or claiming they were Protestants, in order to get themselves transferred from secular

prisons to the Inquisition. But, except for Antonio Pérez, they never tried to move in the opposite direction. Among the hoary myths surrounding the history of Spain’s Holy Office, none

is more difficult to eradicate than the fables about its refined and ferocious tortures. Museums from Lima to Leningrad purport to demonstrate the horrible tortures employed by the Spanish Inquisition. The instruments are sometimes real, but the attribution is always bogus. The truth is that the Spanish Inquisition, like any self-respecting legal system in continental Europe, employed torture and sometimes wrung important confessions from prisoners under torture. But Lea long ago pointed out that the Spanish Inquisition used torture less frequently and less severely than secular courts. And it did not obtain many confessions this way; as he noted, Spain’s Holy Office had more scientific methods for extracting admissions of guilt from its prisoners than such

crude ordeals. Although most of the people whom the Spanish Inquisition tortured withstood it successfully, most of its prisoners either confessed without torture or were convicted by accumulated testimony.*® Available evidence suggests that, between 1570 and 1610, torture was used against slightly over one fourth of all prisoners charged with major heresies, and

against a lower ratio of prisoners charged with homosexuality or sorcery.*’ 44 Firpo, Relazioni, Vu, p. 577. 45 Francisco Tomas y Valiente, E/ derecho penal de la Monarquia absoluta (Siglos XVI-XVIH-XVII)

(Madrid, 1969), esp. pp. 198-200. The author is presently (1988) chief justice of Spain’s most distinguished appellate court, the Tribunal Constitucional. 46 See Lea, 111, pp. 1-35, for the best introduction. For an overview of its use in Castilian courts, see Francisco Tomas y Valiente, La tortura en Esparia (Barcelona, 1973). 47 For the frequency of torture, compare the Toledo evidence of Dedieu, “L’ Administration de la

foi,” p. 169, with the Valencian and Aragonese Moriscos studied by Raphael Carrasco, “Le Refus d’assimilation des morisques, aspects politiques et culturels d’aprés les sources inquisi- — toriales,” in Les Morisques et leur temps (Paris, 1983), pp. 179-81. At Toledo between 1560 and 1620, torture was employed against roughly 25% of all suspects charged with major heresies, , against 9% of accused sorcerers, and against about 2% of those charged with minor heresies. The ratios for Moriscos in the Crown of Aragon were slightly higher, averaging about one third. At Valencia, sodomites were tortured less frequently than Moriscos: just over 20% of such suspects (many of whom were under the legal minimum age for torture) were tortured before

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The Aragonese Secretariat: public and private faces

Many prisoners underwent torture only after they had already confessed, in _ order to satisfy the Inquisitors about their “intentions,” in other words, about their sincerity of belief when making heretical remarks or performing heretical acts.

Torture simply does not correlate with inquisitorial punishments. When the Holy Office was at its most severe point, it rarely tortured anyone: for example, among more than 2,000 conversos tried at Valencia before 1530, only twelve were tortured, although hundreds of them were executed.*® The enormous majority of people whom the Inquisitors burned at their public autos after 1530 — even the homosexuals and witches — had not confessed under torture. At Saragossa,

over thirty Moriscos and five French Protestants were executed after they had successfully withstood the ordeal of torture; they were negativos convencidos, already convicted by testimony from at least four accomplices. At least twenty other Moriscos and seven Huguenots needed to be tortured under the Inquisition’s rules, but were judged physically unfit. Behavior under torture was one significant factor which influenced the final judgment of the Inquisition in the Aragonese Secretriat, but it was rarely the decisive factor. Inquisitorial skepticism about the efficacy of torture apparently increased

over time. In 1603, the Suprema complained about the poor record of the Logrofio tribunal; at their latest auto, “because none of those who had been tortured had confessed, you should see if this is due to the incapacity of the person administering it or of the instruments he uses, in which case you should take appropriate remedies.” But when local tribunals lost all power to inflict serious punishments on prisoners without the Suprema’s approval, they tortured without enthusiasm. Saragossa reported in 1625 that an Italian silversmith heavily charged with sodomy had been tortured with three turns of the strappado and later with the rack, but never confessed “because he is a very strong man, robust and heavy (de muchas carnes).” The Suprema grumbled that “the torture was very mild and his punishment very small,” considering the testimony against

him. A few years later, the same tribunal flatly refused to torture another sodomy suspect, a thirty-year-old Turkish millhand, “because he is such a strong lad that it would be of little profit”; their decision was not criticized.*? In the Crown of Aragon, jurists understood from thirteenth-century precedents that the Inquisition could use torture against heresy suspects, whereas local secular courts could not use it against sodomy suspects, although the Papal

grant of 1524 required the Holy Office to try such cases according to local law. Because few Aragonese jurists cared to defend the rights of suspected 1630, compared with 27% of Moriscos (see Rafael Carrasco, Inguisicién y represién sexual en Valencia {Barcelona, 1986], pp. 84-87).

48 Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicién espanola, El tribunal de Valencia, 1478-1530 (Barcelona, 1976), p. 184. 49 Ing., Libro 331, fol. 102; Libro gg1, fols. 824-26 (#22 of 1625 despachadas), 913-41v (#8 of 1628 despachadas).

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The Holy Office outside Castile

homosexuals, this legal quibble emerged only after half a century of torturing “‘sodomites” and quickly subsided. In April 1593, the Suprema assured Saragossa that custom alone now constituted sufficient warrant for continuing their practice.°? In order to understand the actual workings of the Inquisition across the various

tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat, we must remember that such local branches were constantly engaged both in public relations with their local environment and in diplomatic negotiations with their headquarters in Castile. Locally, the entire staff needed to sustain the institution’s prestige by making frequent arrests, maintaining secrecy, and holding spectacular public autos, while avoiding serious frictions with local officials or scandalous behaviour by

their appointed familiars. Nationally, Inquisitors needed to advance their careers, winning appointments to more prestigious tribunals, to the Suprema, or best of all to a bishopric. This was a peripheral bureaucracy, with its outward face turned towards local audiences and its inward face turned towards Madrid. 50 Inq., Libro 1234, fols. 454v-55v; Libro 1260, fols. 215v—16v.

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Aragonese tribunals

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4

Saragossa: a royal fortress

Ningun nacién se aventaja a los Aragoneses en la veneracion y respeto al Santo Oficio; honor de todos es el gloriarse de esto. Dormer, Anales de Aragon (1697), p. 118.

Los sefiores de vassallos ... en este Reyno son tan libres, ya que tienen oprimidos los Juezes reales y ecclesiasticos, querrian si pudiessen hazer lo mismo de los Inquisidores.

| Inq., Libro 962, fol. 127 (1565).

En esta tierra no se teme al Rey, en cuyo beneficio actuamos, y se teme a la Inquisicion. Saragossa to Suprema, 1550 (quoted by Contreras, in Hispania Sacra, 37 [1985], p. 507).

V. M. sea servido de tener cuenta con la auctoridad deste Oficio y lo mucha que importa el conserbarlo, no solo para los negocios de la fe, pero aun para servicio de V. M. To Suprema, 1560 (quoted by Carrasco Urgoiti, El problema morisco en Aragon, pp. 118-19).

The most famous event in the history of the Inquisition of Saragossa — the murder of Inquisitor Pedro Arbués in 1485 — had several important results. As Aragon’s greatest sixteenth-century historian noted, “Our Lord allowed, when they thought to extinguish this Holy Office, that .. . it was introduced with all the necessary vigor and authority.”! Perhaps the most significant consequence of Arbués’ death was not the bloody repression of Aragon’s conversos (many more Judaizers died at Valencia than at Saragossa during the next fifty years), but rather a little-noted decree of King Ferdinand in December 1485. He allocated the famous eleventh-century Moorish fortress and palace, the Aljaferia, to the Holy Office as its official residence in Aragon. Saragossa’s Inquisitors remained there until the eighteenth century, on the outskirts of the city, well protected by their thick walls and independent water supply. Except at Palermo, no other tribunal of the Aragonese Secretariat was lodged in a fortress; few of them ever needed to be. At one stroke, with remarkable foresight, Ferdinand had guaranteed the physical safety and freedom of action of the Aragonese Inquisition,

, 79

' Geronimo Zurita, Anales de Aragén, 9 vols. (Madrid, 1974-77), VI, p. 507.

Aragonese tribunals | admirably preparing it to serve as a vital element of royal control in an insubordinate land riddled with liberties and privileges. Any analysis of the

actual activities of the Saragossa tribunal after 1485 must begin with an awareness of its unique location, which explains its freedom from intimidation by local nobles or lawyers flaunting the vaunted fueros of Aragon. These paladins -

, of royal bureaucracy literally lived in a royal fortress. The Kingdom of Aragon clearly played a leading role in the history of the Spanish Inquisition. From 1540 to 1640 Saragossa’s Holy Office was the most active of the twenty tribunals, staging autos de fe at which over 250 people were executed and more than 1,000 were sent to the galleys. The Kingdom of Aragon was economically underdeveloped and sparsely populated; in Philip II’s time, it held less than 5% of the people in peninsular Spain. Nevertheless, from 1540 to

1640 every fourth person killed by the Holy Office died at Saragossa; this tribunal also provided every fourth person sent by the Inquisition to fill the benches of Philip II’s galleys. Despite its pious commemorations of the martyred Inquisitor Arbués, none of this tribunal’s activity was directed against Aragon’s conversos. After 1543, none of these Aragonese victims died as a Judaizer. Among more than 1,000 men sent to the galleys, only one had been condemned for Jewish practices. On the other hand, the Spanish Inquisition’s first condemnation for Moham-

medanism came from Aragon. It is ironic to contemplate these judges, now sitting in the greatest Moorish palace north of the Tagus, penancing Christobal de Gelba for eating with the Moors on his property, using an Arabic name when he spoke with them, praying in a mosque, and “Jewish ceremonies.”? He had plenty of company. By 1497 the Saragossa tribunal burned the skeleton of the city’s deceased alfaqui; by 1526, they had executed an unbaptized alfagui as a false prophet. During the century after 1540, the Saragossa tribunal sent nearly 100 Moriscos to death (about 40% of the entire Spanish total) and ordered 600 more to the galleys.

Safe behind their walls and conscious of their role as guardians of royal authority as well as orthodoxy, the Aragonese Inquisitors proved to be as inventive in extending their jurisdiction as they were active in enforcing it. Before Ferdinand’s death, they had pioneered inquisitorial jurisdiction over no fewer than four new types of offenses, not directly connected to formal heresy, which had previously been tried only by episcopal judges. Bigamy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and usury were first prosecuted by Inquisitors who sat in Saragossa’s

Aljaferfa. In the mid-1520s, when they abandoned their shaky grip on the “Jewish” crime of usury to episcopal courts, Saragossa successfully aquired inquisitorial jurisdiction over sodomy at the expense of those same courts.? And 2 See above, pp. 24-25. 3 On bigamy, first tried in conjunction with Judaizers in 1486 but separately as early as 1488, see

Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York,

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Saragossa: a royal fortress , in the 1560s, when their immediate northern neighbor became a Huguenot mini-state, this tribunal successfully claimed jurisdiction over horse-smuggling — surely the oddest form of heresy in the annals of inquisitorial repression. Only in Aragon did the Inquisition aggressively take business away from other kinds

of courts, both ecclesiastical and secular. Endowed by the Spanish crown with an unusually spacious prison, it could afford to acquire such additional responsibilities without reducing its pursuit of genuine heretics. ‘FUEROS’ AND INQUISITORS

Without some awareness of conditions in the Kingdom of Aragon we cannot grasp either the achievements or the limitations of the Saragossa Inquisitors. During the sixteenth century, guerrilla warfare persisted between the Saragossa Inquisition and Aragon’s representative assembly or its standing committee, the _ Diputados. After a long pause while everyone remotely connected with Arbués’

murder was indicted, the Aragonese opposition resumed action at the united Cortes of the Crown of Aragon, held at Monz6n in 1512, with a forceful and nearly successful assault against all the contrafueros of the Holy Office. From then until the invasion of Aragon by a Castilian army in 1591 and the sub_ sequent clipping of Aragonese autonomy, the constitutional sniping continued. Exasperated by legal quibbles where a debt could not be collected because the

contract had not been drawn up by an Aragonese notary, the Inquisitors grumbled to Madrid that “this kingdom has such peculiar laws and ordinances,

and the natives enforce their observation down to the letter even when they appear exorbitant.”’*

Aragon’s ruling class believed that their land needed its fueros. “We have always heard it said from olden times,” they remarked at their 1451 Cortes, “and we have found from experience that, given the great sterility of this land and poverty of this Kingdom, if it were not for our liberties the people would

move to other and more fruitful lands.” They had a point, because large portions of Aragon were entirely deserted; its population per square mile in 1600 was less than half that of Castile, and its capital and only sizable town ranked no higher than fifteenth among Spanish cities. This sparsely populated | kingdom contained two very sizable minorities, which together comprised more than one third of its adult male population by 1600. Moriscos alone accounted

for close to 20% of Aragon’s inhabitants. However, they enjoyed none of Aragon’s legal privileges; on the contrary, their lords claimed an absolute right 1906-08), Iv, pp. 316-17. On blasphemy, see ibid., tv, p. 328. On witchcraft, first noticeable in instructions from 1494, see ibid., Iv, p. 210 (the first known death and the oldest preserved trial,

both from Saragossa, date from 1498). On usury, first prosecuted in 1504, see sbid., IV, . PP. 372-73, 375, (only one such trial survives from Saragossa). , 4 Ing., Libro 962, fol. gv; Libro 963, fol. 447-47v; see also Libro 988, fol. 1o2v, on public observation of Ramadan.

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Aragonese tribunals , of life and death over them. But the many Frenchmen who poured into sixteenth-century Aragon may have been attracted as much by its liberties as by its high wages. At least the Inquisitors thought so; “to this kingdom, as a land of liberty, flock many Béarnese and Frenchmen,” they reported in 1561, immediately adding that “most of them are infected with the heresy of Lutheranism.”> Many reasons combined to make sixteenth-century Aragon an unruly place. Its wild mountains and barren deserts, its thickets of legal privileges, its excessively powerful landed nobility, and its large Morisco minority (totally bereft of legal rights but well armed) added up to an explosive mixture. By the late 1580s the kingdom seemed to be spiraling downwards into utter anarchy, thanks largely to a leadership vacuum. Aragon’s most distinguished medievalist paints a gloomy picture of a land “excessively dedicated to written legislation and archaic formu-

las,” with a medieval organization “sustaining itself by its own inertia, like ruined walls; its institutions rusted and lost all efficacy.’ Worst of all, he claims that “an attentive reading of documents from this age gives the impression of ruling minorities who were totally incapable of striking agreements or emitting even halfway sensible opinions.” These noblemen rallied around Antonio Pérez

in the name of Aragonese liberties, but their anarchy prevented them from making any effective stand against a Castilian army. It seems fitting that Gero-

nimo Zurita, sixteenth-century Aragon’s greatest humanist and municipal official (jurado) of his native Saragossa, spent his working life not in the service of Aragon’s peculiar institutions but as a high-level official of the Inquisition.® EXPANDING SPHERES OF JURISDICTION

In the 1520s the Holy Office of Saragossa acquired jurisdiction over three new offenses, which formed the backbone of their activities during their busy century after 1540. First came the brand-new threat of “Lutheranism” — or rather of Lutheran books, which they began burning by 1525. In 1524, they arrested an important converso politician on the charge of sodomy, and eventually obtained Papal confirmation of their jurisdiction after a sharp fight with the local archbishop. Finally, the forcible baptism of Aragon’s sizable Mudejar population in

1526 created a Morisco problem of formidable dimensions. By 1528 the Supreme Council urged Saragossa to punish dogmatizers and circumcisers “with all rigor, and all other offenses with moderation.”” However, any interference by the Holy Office with their Morisco vassals

, 82

5 Quoted in J. M. Lacarra, Aragén en el pasado (Madrid, 1972), p. 121; and Inq., Libro 988, fol. 84.

6 Zurita’s service with the Inquisition is usually downplayed by Aragonese biographers, but he began his duties in 1537 (see Inq., Libro 322, fols. 168ff) and was still doing important work for the Suprema in 1569 (see Libro 326, fol. 137); see also the abundant materials printed by J. F. Uztarroz and D. A. Dormer, Progresos de la Historia en Aragén (Saragossa, 1878). Quote from

Lacarra, Aragon en el pasado, pp. 180-81. .

7 See below, pp.276~78; also Inq., Libro 319, fol. ggv; quote from Libro 320, fols. 33-34.

Saragossa: a royal fortress provoked violent protests from Aragon’s great landowners. At the 1532 Cortes, Aragon’s deputies petitioned both the king and the Pope to permit them, rather than the Inquisition, to repress heresy among their Morisco serfs. Predictably,

both Castile and Rome flatly denied such claims. The Inquisitor-General, visiting Aragon in 1533, curtly dismissed their grievances as impertinent,

scandalous, and illegal, or else unworthy of reply; Saragossa’s inquisitorial , prosecutor tried to arrest four deputies of the Cortes. The king rejected the deputies’ complaint that Inquisitors should confine themselves to matters of faith by claiming that they did so, “except when under orders from their superiors.”’ Opposition to such a well-entrenched royal institution seemed futile

to the Aragonese, and for a quarter-century they usually let the Holy Office alone. The Inquisitors, however, did not let them alone: one of Aragon’s leading

magnates, the count of Belchite, was tried in 1538 for interfering with the Inquisition’s arrest of some Moriscos in one of his villages.8 In the 1530s the Inquisitors of Saragossa faced more serious problems from

their own headquarters than from Aragonese noblemen. They were caught completely unaware in the spring of 1532 when the Suprema asked them about an Aragonese named Miguel Servetus, who had published a scandalous book

attacking the Trinity, even sending a copy to Saragossa’s archbishop. High officials at court warned them that this matter “touches the honor of Spain,” and reported a rumor that heretical prophecies from Germany were being sold in Aragon. Saragossa’s Inquisitors denied that any Lutheran works had been printed in Saragossa, but they never did find out much about Servetus. In 1538 the Suprema was still asking them to locate “Miguel Reves alias Serveto” after his brother had failed to bring him back from Germany.? Servetus was not their only embarrassment in these years. After they reported _ executing a witch in 1534, the Suprema, which had adopted skeptical guidelines for witch-trials in 1525, ominously ordered them to send all trials of witches

who had been relaxed “with the first available courier.” It may be simple coincidence, but no more witches were ever killed by the Aragonese Inquisition. Two years later, the Suprema nagged them to collect more miracles attributable to their martyred colleague Pedro Arbués, in view of his beatification (a task they

were still working on a century later). In 1538 they warned one of Aragon’s Inquisitors not to meddle with the Bull of Crusade, because the Holy Office “receives much disrespect and political unrest” from it. Four weeks later, the other Inquisitor got an equally peremptory letter ordering him not to intervene in a quarrel between the clergy of Saragossa’s two principal churches. The 8 Ing., Libro 321, fols. 31-34v (consulta of king and Suprema’s letters to Rome and Saragossa, March 22 1532); Libro 322, fol. 228v. Compare Lea, I, pp. 286, 452. 9 Ing., Libro 321, fols. 54v—55, 67v-68, 104v—-05; Libro 322, fols. 190, 1g9v. This episode has been

masterfully told by Marcel Bataillon, “Honneur et Inquisition: Michel Servet poursuivi par I’ Inquisition espagnole,” Bulletin Hispanique, 27 (1925), pp. 5-17.

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Suprema soon sent a special inspector to Aragon to clean up this mess; both offending Inquisitors were rapidly transferred from Saragossa.!° Although the Suprema still complained to Saragossa in 1541 that “every day we increasingly feel the inconvenience which always ensues when the Inquisitors intervene in extraneous business,” this tribunal continued to pursue nonheretical offenses during the next few decades, avoiding major difficulties from either Aragonese noblemen or its own headquarters. It executed a priest for sodomy in 1541 and a Frenchman for Protestantism in 1546, along with a few Morisco alfaquis. Saragossa’s Inquisitors made extensive use of a 1515 Papal privilege allowing them to execute people for “opposition to the free and proper functioning of the Holy Office.” At its 1550 auto three men were executed, two for murdering a member of an inquisitorial posse and the other for murdering

his wife, who had accused him of bigamy before the Inquisition. Four years later, three men were executed by three different methods after another auto: one was burned for sodomy; another was hanged for murdering a member of an inquisitorial posse which was trying to arrest a bandolero named Don Bernardo de Castro; and the third was Don Bernardo himself, who as a hidalgo enjoyed

the privilege of being decapitated for “opposition to the free and correct functioning of the Holy Office,” after being penanced for bigamy. Four other thugs from his gang were sent to the galleys, while a priest who accompanied them was sent on pilgrimage to Rome. They had been trying to punish Don Bernardo for his “insult” to them for more than five years. Although nobody was executed or sent to the galleys on heresy charges by the Saragossa Inquisition during the decade after 1546, it had put two men to death for sodomy and five for “opposition” during this period, while sending nineteen men to the galleys: ten for sodomy (one of whom, a Frenchman, was also accused of heresy); seven for murdering people who were helping the Inquisition; one for impersonating an inquisitorial official; and one for marrying four women."! When Philip II returned to Spain in 1559, the menace of Spanish Protestantism obsessed the Inquisitors of Castile. Because Aragon lay directly across the border from the lands of Jeanne d’Albret, who officially turned Protestant in 1560, one would expect “Lutheranism” to preoccupy the Saragossa tribunal in

the early 1560s. Moreover, the Inquisitors possessed information that an Aragonese theologian, Dr. Morillo, had run a Protestant school in Paris for boys from his province in the early 1550s, and that the rector of Saragossa’s Estudio Mayor corresponded with Spanish Protestant exiles abroad. ‘There were even 10 Ing., Libro 322, fols. 18, 179, 199v-200, and esp. 202 (the nasty letter to Inquisitor Ubago, written by Geronimo Zurita), 205-06 (to Inquisitor Molon), 208v—11 (special visita by Dr. Alonso Pérez, who filed his final report only in 1544: ibid., fols. 362-63). Inquisitor Ubago was replaced by October 15,40 (fol. 297), and Inquisitor Molon left by summer 1542 (fol. 335). 11 Ing., Libro 322, fol. 313v (quote); Libro 961, fols. 6, g9—-11v (1550 auto), 127 (“insulto” of Don Bernardo de Castro, February 8, 1549), 295~-95v (1554 auto). At the 1550 auto, three men were sent to the galleys as accomplices in the other shooting incident. See above, p. 38.

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Saragossa: a royal fortress rumors from two different sources in 1563 that clandestine Protestant sermons had been preached in Saragossa itself.!2 Yet only one Aragonese was executed for Protestantism at the 1561 auto, while seven Huguenots perished between 1561 and 1567. At these same autos (1560-67), ten men died at Saragossa for Mohammedanism and five for sodomy. Obviously, the repression of Protestantism, either local or foreign, did not become the Aragon tribunal’s overriding concern in the years after 1559. ARAGON’S MORISCO PERIL

Instead, a sensational local incident in the summer of 1559 pushed both Aragon’s Protestant sympathizers and their Huguenot neighbors in Béarn into the background. After the Inquisitors had sent a group of three armed familiars to Plasencia del Monte, a small Morisco settlement about 50 miles north of

Saragossa, to arrest a suspected alfaqui named Juan Zamberel, they were surprised to find some peasants bringing in an empty cart and rounding up three

loose horses along the highway to Huesca the following day. Two days later other passers-by discovered the bodies of the three familiars, cut into small pieces and stuffed down a well, one with the head of a lance still piercing his heart. Nearby were the slaughtered remains of Plasencia’s vicar, a comisario of the Inquisition who had accompanied the posse of familiars, still blindfolded, with his throat cut. The result, understandably, was something like panic in the

tribunal’s actions across the next months and even years. Several of the murderers escaped to Béarn and could not be extradited, despite personal pressure by Philip II; only one of them died at the 1560 auto. Zamberel himself was recaptured, tortured to death in the Aljaferia, and executed in effigy at the 1561 auto, where three of his sons were ordered to the galleys and his wife, sister, daughters, daughter-in-law, and servant were also punished.!3 _ After the Zamberel murders, the Saragossa Inquisition attempted to prevent Aragonese Moriscos from using firearms. But Aragon’s sefores de vassallos prevented its application, after their sharpest confrontation with Saragossa’s

Holy Office in forty years. Less than a week before the 1560 auto, two noblemen, using the special Aragonese privilege of a “Manifestation” from the court of the Justicia, nearly succeeded in liberating some Moriscos who had been arrested by the Inquisition for bearing arms. The Suprema promptly wrote out arrest warrants for both men, who were serving as procurators for Aragon’s other lords of Morisco villages. In October 1560, one of them went to court with 12 See A. Gordon Kinder, “A Hitherto Unknown Group of Protestants in Sixteenth-Century Aragon,” Cuadernos de Historia de Jeronimo Zurita, 51-52 (1985), pp. 131-60; and below, p.232. 13 Qne needs to read Saragossa’s letters to the Suprema during the summer and autumn of 1559, at

the end of Ing., Libro 961, to appreciate the panic that seized them. See also Maria Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, El problema morisco en Aragon al comienzo del reinado de Felipe IT (Madrid, 1969),

pp. 146-48.

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a second Aragonese deputation to protest the Inquisition’s disarmament edict; he was arrested at Toledo by the Suprema. The other was arrested by thirty

armed familiars in the center of Saragossa in July 1561, after his term as Diputado had expired. Both were officially charged with blasphemy (a safe bet

with any Aragonese noblemen) in order to prevent liberating them through Manifestations. Both men had converso ancestry, though this was not charged

against them; Don Francés de Arifio, arrested in Saragossa, feared public , rumors that he had been charged with Protestantism. Each man was kept imprisoned about six months, then fined and banished from Aragon for “‘opposition to the free exercise of the Holy Office.”

In June 1562, the Saragossa tribunal boasted to the Suprema that “this business of the Manifestation is so flat after the arrest of these two gentlemen, that from here onwards no one will dare to talk about Manifestations in any inquisitorial case.”” But their victory proclamation was premature. Two “traitors” had been discovered among their own consultores, lawyers working in collusion with the Morisco lords. The Inquisitor-General pardoned each man

very soon after pronouncing sentence; both of them, plus the “traitorous” lawyers, sat as deputies in Philip II’s first general Cortes of the Crown of Aragon in 1563.'* While the Moriscos were successfully disarmed in the Kingdom of Valencia in 1563, those of Aragon kept their firearms for another dozen years.

The Manifestation would even be used against the Inquisitors much later, on behalf of Antonio Pérez. All the Inquisitors of Saragossa had really proved, as with the arrest of the Cortes’ notary in 1519, was that they could imprison Aragonese notables who interfered with them. But they eventually compromised with such people. INQUISITORS AND HORSE-SMUGGLERS

Another important episode from the 1560s underlined these basic truths, but also led directly to jurisdiction over Aragon’s final inquisitorial invention, the pasadores de caballos. The origins of this policy can be traced as far back as 1548, when the king ordered the Inquisitors of Aragon to reserve a cell in the Aljaferia

for prisoners who had smuggled horses into France, because he did not want

such men tried by Aragonese courts. In 1550, the Suprema informed the Aragonese tribunal about the new royal edict forbidding the export of horses to France and warned them that the worst local offender was their comisario for the Pyrenean district north of Jaca. Nothing further occurred until the end of 1559, '# Carrasco Urgoiti, E/ problema morisco en Aragon, pp. 49-69 and appendices, provides the best

narrative of this conflict. Recently, Jaime Contreras has called attention to the fact that both noblemen actively supported the Aragonese Inquisition in the 1570s and 1580s: “La Inquisicién aragonesa en el marco de la monarquia autoritaria,” in Hispania Sacra, 37 (1985), p. 536.

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when the Saragossa tribunal received orders to arrest Don Felipe de Bardaxi, who had a French mother, lived on the border, and who smuggled Spanish horses into France even during wartime, “very greatly to the king’s disservice.” The official charge, as with Morisco lords, was blasphemy. When the local priest attempted to read his arrest citation in church, Don Felipe’s brother appeared at the door with the fuse lit on his arquebus, so the summons was finally served 30 miles farther south. Eighteen months later the Inquisitors reported that they had been unable to confiscate Bardaxi’s house; his lackeys continued to live there and smuggle horses across the border. At the 1563 auto, Don Felipe was executed in effigy, ostensibly for “very great blasphemies and things resembling heresy of the Lutheran sect,” but in reality for dealing in contraband horses.!>

In.1566, Don Felipe petitioned to be released from the sentence which had confiscated his property. Next February the Suprema granted him a six-month delay before surrendering himself to their jurisdiction, prolonging this suspension of his sentence seven times until late 1570. Ultimately, in March 1571 Don Felipe de Bardaxi appeared before the Saragossa tribunal and made his formal defense against the charges. His sentence was annulled, his property

returned, and he was “restored in his honor and good reputation” after listening to a lecture from the Inquisitors, who imposed some spiritual penances and two years of banishment from Aragon ‘“‘at the pleasure of our Illustrious Lord Cardinal Inquisitor-General,” who of course quickly par-

doned him.!® |

Once again the royal government had employed the Inquisition to frame an Aragonese notable on a pasted-together charge of “heretical” blasphemy, and then released him before much real damage was done. But Don Felipe’s real crime of smuggling horses into Béarn became an offense to be judged by the Inquisition after he began negotiating to have his sentence annulled. In October 1568, Saragossa’s Inquisitors submitted an elaborate memorandun, arguing that 500 horses had been sold to French customers within the past year, almost all of them during the recent St. Bartholomew’s Day fair at Barbastro; “most of them,” they concluded, “are sold to Huguenots in Béarn.” A few months later the Suprema approved Saragossa’s edict against people who sold horses or IS Ing., Libro 323, fols. 75v-76; Libro 962, fols. gv, 72; Libro 988, fol. 246v (#58 of 1563 auto). See G. Colas Latorre and J. A. Salas Ausens, Aragén en el siglo XVI, Alteraciones sociales y conflictos

politicos (Saragossa, 1982), pp. 207-22, for a useful overview of Aragon’s horse-trade with France, and Castilian efforts to prohibit it. 16 Ing., Libro 988, fols. 131 (sentence of notary Pedro de Orus, who presented Don Felipe de Bardaxi’s petition in July 1566), 172 (Don Felipe’s second sentence, March 22, 1571); Libro 324, fols. 136v, 154v, 244-44v; Libro 325, fols. 26, 60v, 125v, 165, 191, 256v, 277v. Each extension from the Suprema explained that Don Felipe was absent in France doing business for the king.

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Aragonese tribunals munitions to Huguenots, and ordered it added to the Edict of Faith which was read in all Aragonese parish churches. Five months later the Barcelona tribunal was ordered to publish the new edict against pasadores de caballos y armas para Luteranos; by 1574 it was also extended to the Navarrese tribunal.!7 _ The Aragonese tribunal put very few pasadores de caballos on trial in the next few years. But after their comisario in the city of Jaca was physically assaulted by pasadores in the summer of 1573, they responded with more edicts and increased

arrests. New regulations stiffened the penalties for this crime (offenders could be sent to the galleys), increased the rewards offered to informers, and assimilated horse-smuggling to “crimes of faith” by requiring Inquisitors to take the genealogies of suspects and barring descendants of convicted offenders from holding public office in Aragon. By 1575 the first three penitents in Saragossa’s public auto de fe were Béarnese traders charged with selling horses to heretics. !® Philip II’s inquisitorial officials in Aragon had thus taken a far bolder step than

their predecessors who had annexed only “mixed” jurisdictional crimes like blasphemy or bigamy to the Holy Office. Their legal logic was unusually shaky,

_ but the perpetual menace of a Huguenot state directly across the pass of Somport had given the Inquisition a new type of offense which soon covered the __ entire Pyrenean frontier, and created whole new clusters of inquisitorial agents

responsible for patrolling the French border. ,

In their annual reports between the mid-1570s and the mid-1590s, Saragossa’s Inquisitors frequently boasted about the number of pasadores they had sentenced, and claimed sole credit for enforcing royal legislation, dating from

the 1550s, prohibiting the sale of horses to France. As late as 1609, the Vice-Chancellor of Aragon argued that the Inquisition should be entrusted with the deportation of its Moriscos, because only the Holy Office had been able to patrol Aragon’s French frontier effectively. Many horses were confiscated, but few Aragonese pasadores ever appeared in public autos de fe. Only four were condemned to the galleys in the late 1580s, and none was executed. A hidalgo and familiar, who had voluntarily confessed his past record as a pasador in 1574, was arrested in 1587 on charges that he had accepted bribes of 50 reales to let a

Béarnese passador escape (the unlucky smuggler was later recaptured and denounced him); he made a de /evi abjuration for heresy and was sentenced to four years’ service on the galleys as an unpaid gentleman-soldier, although he never appeared in an auto de fe. Another veteran horse-smuggler, convicted of a 17 Inq., Libro 325, fols. 32v, 15—-15v, 139V, 147; Libro 962, fols. 231-2 (quote), 235, 253—-53V.

18 Inq., Libro 326, fols. 131, 174, 193v-94, 196v, 292, 307v, for the August 1573 assault in Jaca and its multiple consequences. The new edicts of 1574-75 are also conveniently summarized in Ing., Libro 1234, fols. 377—77v, 730 (Suprema’s orders to Aragon to take genealogies of suspects, give half of profits from confiscated horses to informers, ordering new public edicts vs. pasadores, all in 1574-75); see also Libro 988, fol. 289 (#1-3 of 1575 auto). By 1591 the edict against pasadores de caballos would even be extended to Sardinia.

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half-dozen recent sales, received three years in the galleys at the 1588 auto, _ although he got no public whipping because he had “honorable relatives.”’!? HUGUENOT AND TURKISH CONSPIRACIES

One key reason for the Aragonese [nquisition’s vastly increased presence along the French border in the 1570s was to choke off possible meetings between the Huguenots of Béarn and the Moriscos of Aragon. Paranoid anxieties about such

rare and usually fruitless exchanges gnawed at the Saragossa tribunal and sometimes at Philip II, and there was just enough evidence about them to keep Castilian nerves on edge. An Aragonese spy in France insisted in 1570 that the Granadan Moriscos had sent envoys to the Huguenots, asking them to invade

Spanish Navarre and promising to rise in the north to aid them. What gave

substance to such reports was the arrest and death of a Morisco named Jeronimo Barbaz at Hecho, on the French border, in September 1570. Before the Inquisition could get its hands on him, local authorities hanged him for killing a border guard. Saragossa’s Holy Office reported to the Suprema that Barbaz “‘had said publicly that he had been in the mountains of Granada with

the Moors, and had made three or four trips to Béarn to talk with the Protestants.”’20

When the Béarnese made their only serious attempt to establish contact with

Aragonese Moriscos in order to plan some joint action against Spain, the Inquisition investigated the whole business rapidly and efficiently. Saragossa excitedly reported in January 1575 that they had uncovered secret negotiations between the Moriscos and the Béarnese. The Suprema promptly sent them a

copious eulogy and brought the matter to the king’s notice. In March they wrung a confession from the French courier hired by the plotters. By April they had received a report from their spy “who was sent to Béarn to learn more about

what [the courier] had declared against Francisco Nalias.” In May they managed to acquire more information by torturing Nalias’ principal contact in Aragon, an old Morisco named Lope de Arcos. Several months afterwards, they arrested one of Lope’s principal agents, who told them about a meeting on the plains between two Morisco villages, Alfamen and Almonacir de la Sierra. Thirty men had discussed the offer from the Béarnese governor M. de Ros, to invade Spain if Aragonese Moriscos would raise 8,000 or 10,000 ducats to support them. By September 1576 the Saragossa Inquisition told the Suprema 19 Inqg., Libro 989, fols. 321-34 (#20 of 1587 despachadas), fol. 354v (#7 of 1588 auto). The Vice-Chancellor’s opinion summarized in Joan Regla, Estudios sobre los Moriscos, 3rd edn. (Barcelona, 1974), pp. 88-89. 20 Inq., Libro 962, fol. 415 (Aragon to Suprema, September 11, 1570). A full copy of this letter is in Istituto Valenciana de Don Juan, Envio 62, pp. 172-76, forwarded by the Suprema to the king.

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that they had uncovered the entire “conspiracy of negotiations between the Protestants and Moriscos,” and had voted to execute Nalias, the principal Béarnese agent.?! The chief culprits in this conspiracy, ground in the exceedingly slow mills of the Holy Office, received their punishments only at the 1578 auto. In accordance with normal inquisitorial practice, only a few negativos who denied their participation in this plot were actually executed. Three Moriscos died, including the man who had first told them about the outdoor Morisco conference; he had susequently recanted his confession after others had confirmed it. Both lynchpins of the plot, Francisco Nalias and Lope de Arcos, made full confessions and got life sentences in the galleys (incidentally confirming M. de Ros’ opinion to

Nalias that his spies would not be executed). Lope de Arcos admitted he had organized the meeting to discuss the Béarnese offer, adding details about the military planning for the rising. Nalias’ courier, a disguised French cleric working as a druggist’s assistant in Saragossa, who had originally revealed the plot, got six years in the galleys. Some Moriscos from Daroca had begun laying

plans for the rising; two of them received life sentences in the galleys. A prominent Morisco from Villafeliche and another from Daroca both received. four years in the galleys for writing letters to the Sultan about the rising; an eighty-year-old Morisco from Almonacir de la Sierra who had done the same thing received only an “irremissible”’ penitental garment. In all, ten Moriscos and two Frenchmen received serious punishments. Soon after the Saragossa tribunal had unraveled this conspiracy, they heard even more alarming rumors about Turkish espionage in Aragon. In December 1576 an unnamed Morisco informant told an inquisitorial official about “a man named Duarte, born in Hijar, son of a Catholic father and a Morisca mother, who had moved to Turkey about ten years ago, taking his sister with him. This man,” continued the report, “now came as a Turkish envoy, bearing an official letter which was reportedly written in golden letters.”” Duarte was preparing a rising to coincide with a Turkish naval incursion into Valencia the following year. He had visited a half-dozen important Morisco communities in Aragon (avoiding his native village, where he might be recognized) and had already returned to Valencia a few months previously. The Inquisitors heard another rumor that Duarte had been accompanied by a son of Juan Zamberel, the alfaqui whose arrest had led to the 1559 murders of three familiars; young Zamberel 2 Ing., Libro 326, fols. 237-37v. There is a brief account of the business in Louis Cardaillac, -Moriscos y cristianos: Un enfrentamiento polemico (1492-1640) (Madrid, 1979), p. 132, using Inq., Legajo 4529, part 2, which contains a convenient summary of the principal confessions of March 17-19, 1575. See also Inq., Libro 963, fols. 228-30, 232, 343-43V, 352-52V, 387-—87V.

22 auto). ma Libro 988, fols. 349-49V, 352-53, 377-85 (#5, 14, 15, 28, 29, 36, 40, 43, 80-82 of 1578

go

| Saragossa: a royal fortress had supposedly traveled across Aragon “dressed like a Gascon with a white cap,” while Duarte had disguised himself as a pilgrim.”? Unlike the Béarnese effort two years before, this Turkish conspiracy was

, never satisfactorily investigated by the Saragossa Inquisition. Jugu Duarte and his companion had long since vanished, taking their golden letter with them; informants were scarce, clues were few, suspects refused to talk under torture.

At their 1578 auto they could produce only a few sad imitations of the real Turkish emissaries. A Turkish slave whom the Inquisitors had mistaken for a spy (because he was disguised as a pilgrim and carried some gold Ottoman coins) received five years in the galleys; another Turkish slave, who claimed to have seen the real Turkish spy, also got five years in the galleys; a third slave, who had falsely claimed to be Duarte’s emissary and spread misinformation

about coming Turkish invasions, received an identical sentence. It was an obvious case of rounding up the usual suspects but finding nothing important.?4

The Inquisitors subsequently learned a bit more about Duarte’s doings in Aragon. The 1579 auto included two Moriscos from Hijar and its vicinity, both

_ acquainted with the “Turkish Janissary spy” and his letters announcing the _ coming Ottoman naval invasion; they received eight and ten years in the galleys. The 1581 auto included a Morisco from Puebla de Hijar who had met Duarte in November 1576, and also met the Janissary “who had passed through this land five times”; although he confessed nothing under torture, he got a whipping and four years in the galleys. His neighbor and accuser, who had hanged himself in

' his cell after confessing that Duarte had stayed in his house, was burned in | effigy at this auto.*>

No matter how anxiously they regarded the Huguenot state of Béarn just across the pass of Somport, Saragossa’s Inquisitors obviously had more serious problems with their Moriscos during Philip II’s reign. Between 1570 and 1590 they executed three dozen Moriscos for heresy but only one French Protestant.

The Huguenot menace at its worst had been stated in 1576 by the penitent plotter, Francisco Nalias, who claimed that “if the Protestants joined with the Moriscos of this kingdom, they would ruin Christendom and every one would live

in his own sect.”© But the Béarnese could truly threaten Aragon only through military alliance with the Moriscos.

After the Zamberel murders and again after the conspiracies of the mid1570s, the Saragossa Inquisitors had failed to get the Moriscos of Aragon 23 Inq., Libro 963, fols. 428-29 (December 23, 1576). Compare the report of a spy sent by Aragon’s Viceroy through the Morisco communities of the kingdom earlier that year, dressed as a Turk: ibid., fols 361—69v.

24 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 377-85 (#31, 44, 56, 59 of 1578 auto). 25 Inq., Libro 988, fols,. 393-99 (#17~18 of 1579 auto); fols. 493Vv, 500, 519 (#20, 25, 78 of 1581

26 ww) Libro 988, fols. 352Vv (italics mine). auto).

gI

Aragonese tribunals disarmed. Refusing their petition for a new Edict of Grace in June 1581, Philip II admitted that the 1575 edict ordering them disarmed had failed in Aragon because of obstruction by their overlords. The Inquisitors, for their part, failed to open any windows into Aragon’s Morisco communities. They could crack the Béarnese conspiracy because a key participant confessed early and easily, and they could even send their own spies into Béarn to check his testimony; but they proved utterly incapable of subverting Jugu Duarte’s network. When in 1580 they found a possible Morisco collaborator, the Suprema told them to promise him 200 ducats if Duarte were ever arrested — but not to pay it.” THE FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT IN ARAGON (1585-91)

By the 1580s, the Saragossa Inquisition’s preoccupations with Moriscos and Huguenots became overshadowed by the virtual breakdown of law and order in the Kingdom of Aragon. When the Aragonese Cortes presented a giant bundle of sixty grievances against the Holy Office to Philip II in 1585, the Suprema reminded him that these malcontents had been trying the same thing since 1512. They lectured the king that the natural inclination of this people, what they hold as their motto and coat-of-arms, is an absolute and most extensive liberty in everything ... making laws, all designed to favor evildoers and bandits ... and with this intention they have managed as far as possible, in

all the Cortes they have held, that their laws never impede their unbridled liberty.78 ,

As the Inquisitors claimed, the luxuriant foliage of sixteenth-century Aragonese law offered many admirable loopholes designed to let the guilty escape, especially if they belonged to the privileged classes. On the other hand, the capital city of Saragossa had the right to execute people without trial. Overlaying

this potentially chaotic local pattern was frequent interference from royal government in Castile, acting principally through the Council of Aragon but occasionally, as with the pasadores de caballos, through the Inquisition. By 1585,

this chaos and meddling had led to civil war within Aragon’s largest fief, the County of Ribagorza, nestled in its remote and rugged northeastern corner along the borders with France and Catalonia.2? Ribagorza’s troubles defy easy summary. As early as 1554 its inhabitants had petitioned the king to replace their lord and become royal vassals. Castilian judges ruled in their favor, but Aragon’s appellate court upheld the current 27 Inq., Libro 327, fols. 254, 350—-5ov (March 10, 1580 and June 5, 1581). 28 José Martinez Millan, La Hacienda de la Inquisicién (1478-1700) (Madrid, 1984), p. 198 (quote). 29 See Colas and Salas, Aragon en el siglo XVI, pp. 98-122, for an interpretation of Aragon’s “time of

troubles” biased in favor of Aragonese separatism. For a detailed early version of Ribagorza’s troubles, see Vicenzio Blasco y Lanuza, Historias ecclesiasticas y seculares de Aragon, 2 vols. (Saragossa, 1622), i, Bk. 1, chs. 16-30; for a more recent version, Colas and Salas, Aragén en el siglo XVI, pp. 126-49. I have preferred the account of Lacarra, Aragén en el pasado, pp. 184ff.

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titleholder, the Duke of Villahermosa, who belonged to one of Aragon’s two | principal families. In 1572, a Count of Ribagorza who had strangled his wife was hounded by her cousin, the Count of Chinchoén, the leading member of the Council of Aragon. The Inquisition was pressed into service to help with his capture (he escaped to France and was finally caught in Italy), and then to help prepare a case against him for sodomy.*° He was tried and executed in Castile in 1573, where sodomy convictions were easier to obtain than under inquisitorial jurisdiction in Aragon. The County of Ribagorza soon exploded into a civil war between local malcontents, backed by royal officials, and partisans of the house of Villahermosa. It lasted for over a dozen years, with the malcontents hiring a Catalan bandolero and the count hiring a deserter from the king’s armies (and fugitive from inquisitorial justice) to do their respective killing. In 1588 the bloody anarchy in Ribagorza escalated into a ghastly crescendo.

Lupercio Latras, Villahermosa’s mercenary captain, intervened in a savage _ quarrel between some Aragonese mountaineers and two Morisco villages; it culminated in the massacre of an entire Morisco community and a threat of civil war throughout this kingdom. Afterwards, Latras led some of these mountain-

eers into Ribagorza and recruited more French mercenaries. While the count attempted to persuade the Justicia of Aragon to raise an army and impose order, Philip I] summoned Villahermosa to Madrid and ordered him to resign his fief.

Aragon’s Viceroy outlawed Latras, who retaliated by placing a price on the Viceory’s head. When the royal governor finally captured the castle of Riba-

gorza’s principal settlement in 1589, he failed to catch Latras, but he did manage to strangle without trial everyone he found there, including the village mayor. Latras’ chief associate in massacring Morisco woman and children took

refuge in Saragossa, where he surrendered himself to the archbishop on the promise that his life would be spared. Shortly thereafter he was murdered in his cell by a citizen posse, using the city’s dreaded right of summary justice, the Privilege of the Twenty. The archbishop produced a royal order not to kill him, while the Tribunal of Twenty produced a royal order to execute him at once: both documents were signed by the secretary of the Council of Aragon, the Count of Chinchén.?! THE TRIALS OF ANTONIO PEREZ

Such otherwise unedifying episodes illustrate the nature of “law and order” that prevailed in Aragon when Philip II’s longtime adviser and principal secretary, 30 Ing., Libro 962, fols. 548-49 (June 25 and July 24, 1572) on their failure to catch the count before he reached France; Libro 326, fols. 65, 121v, 155v, for their investigations of Juan de Camanas (Sept. 1572—Nov. 1573) and a prominent Morisco from Torrellas after the count’s ture. 31 Lacarra, Aragon en el pasado, p. 186. Fuller account in Colas and Salas, Aragén en el siglo XVI,

pp. 599-625. |

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Antonio Pérez, arrived there as a fugitive from Castilian royal justice in the spring of 1590, and inadvertently provoked the most notorious trial in the history of the Aragonese Inquisition. An illustrious student of these events,

Gregorio Marajion, claimed that “no other episode in the history of the Inquisition gives so clear an impression that the Holy Tribunal had been converted into an instrument with predominantly political ends, obscuring the religious ones for which it had been created.” Although this was by now an old | story in the Kingdom of Aragon, it had never before been played with so illustrious a defendant. The credibility and reputation of the Aragonese Inquisition had never before been put under quite so great a strain, nor had they ever faced such a formidable opponent. Because Pérez could claim the privileges of a native Aragonese, the king and his Castilian advisers encountered enormous difficulties with extraditing him to Castile, or even with upholding his Castilian conviction for murder and Jésemajesté in any Aragonese court. After a year of futile legal maneuvering, Phillip II’s advisers finally hit upon the idea of transferring Pérez to the Aragonese Inquisition on a pasted-up charge of heresy. Reasoning that “the two main points of this business are to secure Antonio Pérez’s prison and to bring him back to this kingdom,” the royal junta noted that because Pérez had wanted to escape to heretical Béarn, “‘the Inquisitors have begun to look into this matter as a question of faith.” By April 1591, obviously as a last resort and with the initiative clearly coming from Madrid, the decision had been made to use the

prestige and privileges of the Holy Office in order to ensure Pérez’s condem- , nation in Aragon and eventual extradition to Castile. At the same time Madrid urged the Aragonese Inquisition to open a case against Pérez’s noisiest supporter in Aragon, Don Diego de Heredia, as a notorious pasador de caballos to France; Pérez’s companion, a Genoese named Mayorini, was also indicted,

“being a pernicious person, who has greatly aided Antonio Pérez in all his

schemes.”

Philip II’s advisers faced a major legal problem trying to build a viable heresy charge against Pérez. The easiest route would be to find witnesses who could 32 There is a very large literature on Antonio Pérez’s inquisitorial trial. The most recent account is

by Joaquin Pérez Villanueva, “Un proceso resonante: Antonio Pérez,” in the collaborative Historia de la Inquisicién en Espana y América, I: El conocimiento cientifico y el proceso histérico de la

Instituctén, ed. J. Pérez Villanueva and B. Escandell Bonet (Madrid, 1984), pp. 842-76. The most famous account is still Gregorio Marafion, Antonio Pérez (el hombre, el drama, la época), 2 vols. (Madrid, 1948), 1, chs. 21-24, with numerous appendices, omitted from the abridged English translation (London, 1954) (quote from ibid., 1, p. 728). The most important documentary collection was published in Coleccién de documentos inéditos para la historia de Espana (hereafter

CODOIN), xu (Madrid, 1848; reprint Vaduz, 1964), although it contains neither the actual inquisitorial trial, preserved at Paris (on which Marajion relied), nor the key inquisitorial documents from 1591 to 1592 preserved at the British Library. 33 CODOIN, Xl, pp. 137-39.

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testify to some “heretical” blasphemies uttered by the former secretary; this method, after all, had worked in 1518 with Juan Prat and in 1561 with Lope de Francia. However, Pérez had not been in Aragon long enough to utter any serious blasphemies. The Inquisition had to begin with a very fragile thread, Pérez’s threat to escape to France; since the main route out of Aragon led to Béarn, this meant fleeing to a Huguenot state. But as Pérez often remarked, “‘to go to France and talk with a heretic like the Duke of Venddme [Henry IV, still Protestant at this time] does not constitute heresy.” Moreover, he had obviously

done no such thing, merely thought of doing it. Nonetheless, such objections were quickly overcome in the pliant minds of the Suprema’s consultants at court ~ principally the king’s confessor, Father Chaves, who had long ago denounced

Archbishop Carranza in another dubious heresy case. By mid-May the Suprema sent an official order for the arrest of Pérez and Mayorini and their transfer to the Aljaferia, which, as Philip II told his advisers, “has always been held to be a very convenient method.”’34 As Madrid had requested, Saragossa’s Inquisitors acted promptly. When they

presented their request to Aragon’s court of Justicia on the morning of May 24, 1591, Pérez’s supporters were apparently caught off guard. He and Mayorini were moved from the comfortable environment of Saragossa’s prison of the

Manifestados to the fortress of the Aljaferia within a few hours and without incident. But no sooner had the transfer had been completed than a major riot developed, fanned by Pérez’ supporters among the Aragonese nobility. By noon, Saragossa’s chief city offical and Aragon’s Viceroy warned the Inquisitors about the impending troubles. Leading the rioters was a group of Saragossa university

students, waving their swords and shouting “Long live liberty, and death to Castilian traitors!”’3> The mob split into two parts. One headed for the Aljaferfa

and threatened to burn it; the other assaulted the residence of Aragon’s military : governor, the Marquis of Almenara, who had been Madrid’s principal agent throughout the Pérez affair. Using a legal ruse, they broke into Almenara’s house, and badly wounded him as the Justicia of Aragon tried to escort him to the Manifestado prison. The other rioters, aided by three panicky notes from Saragossa’s archbishop and collusion by one of the three Inquisitors, persuaded the Holy Office to release both prisoners into the custody of Aragon’s two leading noblemen, the Count of Aranda and the Duke of Villahermosa. Pérez and Mayorini returned triumphantly to the prison of the Manifestados, where they remained under inquisitorial jurisdiction. Reporting to Madrid next day, Saragossa’s Inquisitors stressed that casualties had been few; apart from the governor (who died of his wounds two weeks later), only two lackeys had been 34 Ibid., pp. 149, 302. 35 Ibid., pp. 286, 305. See the careful assessment of the May 24 riot by Marafion, Antonio Pérez, 11,

pp. 538-48.

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killed. They claimed that “no official of the Inquisition had been killed or wounded, nor suffered any ill-treatment.”?° _ Despite such attempts to downplay its significance, the authorities in Madrid

understood that both the Holy Office and royal government had suffered intolerable blows to their prestige. Philip II’s decision to send an army into Aragon was sealed by Almenara’s death. After May 24, the king had no more reliable secular officials in Aragon, while a climate of fear pervaded the Saragossa Inquisition. In the four months between the first and second attempts to move Antonio Pérez to the fortress of the Aljaferia, a special branch of the Suprema collected additional evidence against him in Madrid. By early June, a royal official claimed that “although he never actually saw him committing a> nefando acto with any man or boy, he saw clear signs to indicate that he acted thus.” Pérez’s servants and acquaintances were questioned on this point, often

under torture, but little direct corroboration emerged. By early August the Suprema began questioning their most important Aragonese witness, Anton de Afion, a familiar who served Pérez his meals and had been won over by the __ ex-secretary’s considerable charm. Ajion fled to Madrid, where he revealed the identities of Pérez’s principal collaborators, explained how the riot of May 24 had started, confirmed the talk about fleeing to France, and added that Pérez had recieved three letters from the Prince of Béarn (Henry IV). However, the most blasphemous remark he could recall from Pérez was that “God is taking a very long time to work miracles on my business.”3’ After months of serious digging, bribery, and torture, Madrid still had an extremely weak heresy case

against him. .

Meanwhile, Pérez and his Aragonese supporters went on the offensive,

attempting to remove him from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office and stretching the claims of Aragonese liberties to their utmost. They persuaded one of the

Inquisition’s original witnesses against Pérez to retract his testimony and thereby open a perjury suit against the Inquisitors. At this point the elusive and ever-venal informer slipped away to Castile, where he recanted his recantations and was eventually given a sinecure in the army of Naples. Meanwhile, Pérez’s propagandists continued to whip up Aragonese patriotism through a series of clever pasquinades, while his most violent noble champion began recruiting supporters among Saragossa’s working class. Because he saw “much uproar and folly among the /abradores and common people,” Aragon’s Viceroy recommended 36 CODOIN, xu, pp. 182-85 (quote, p. 184). One of Saragossa’s three Inquisitors, who felt most directly threatened by Pérez’s pasquinades (and by a late-night gunshot against the door of the Aljaferia) asked the Suprema to leave for Madrid a few weeks later (ibid., pp. 202-03). 37 [bid., pp. 190-95, 224-30; see also pp. 298-307, 324-29, for Afion’s testimony. One of Pérez’s servants, Diego de Vargas, first denied but subsequently admitted the sodomy charges under torture in Madrid in early September: ibid., p. 392. Best narrative of events between the two riots is in Marafion, Antonio Pérez, ch. 22 (i, pp. §5 1-72).

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Saragossa: a royal fortress postponing any transfer of Pérez and Mayorini back to the Inquisition’s prison in late August.38 During the summer of 1591, public opinion in Saragossa seems to have been deeply divided over the respective claims of Pérez and the local Inquisition. Very few of Aragon’s titled nobility failed to show some sympathy for Pérez, while most of the city’s officials remained loyal to the king and the Inquisition. But one magnate, the Count of Morata, disliked Pérez vehemently, while Saragossa’s chief magistrate (who had opened his controversial perjury case against Pérez’s inquisitorial accusers against the opposition of his own legal adviser) favored

him. Most of the kingdom’s elected officials were vehement champions of provincial liberties, but one Diputado was a notary of the Inquisition and kept Madrid informed about all parliamentary developments. The upper clergy were divided, with the Prior of Saragossa’s cathedral chapter, together with a minority of his colleagues, supporting Pérez. Most merchants and businessmen favored the king and the Inquisition, but one wholesaler organized meetings to defend Pérez and claimed that “the Inquisition did much evil in this kingdom, because it never did anything worthwhile except punish Castilians.”3? Although some of

Saragossa’s labradores had been politicized by Pérez’s backers, city officials insisted that most ordinary citizens were not actively seditious, except the students and lackeys.

The divisions of 1591 ran deeper still. As another informant wrote, “it is public and notorious that Antonio Pérez has friends inside the Inquisition,” naming one of the three Inquisitors and one of the four secretaries. A later and more complete list of Holy Office “traitors” added three of their theological consultants, one of their official messengers, and at least two familiars to this group — not counting one of their notaries who fled Saragossa in midsummer, or

the former head jailer of the Inquisition, who had been “one of the most shameless in offending the Holy Office.” In this confused and divided city, a revealing conversation was reported in early August. When Don Juan de Luna, one of the most conscientious noblemen in Aragon, entered the kingdom’s archives in order to verify a rumor that the Inquisition had been established in Aragon for only 100 years, Saragossa’s city scribe complained to him that he found it a very disagreeable task “to seek evidence against the Holy Office.”

Don Juan replied that “the greatest good Spain had ever known was the Inquisition” and that they were not trying to remove it, but merely to discover | whether or not it had exceeded “what the Pope had ordained.” One wonders whether the chronicler Blasco de Lanuza, writing in 1622, was telling the whole truth when he claimed that “it never occurred to anyone in this kingdom (not 38 CODOIN, Xl, pp. 273, 279-81, 339, 399. 39 British Library, Egerton Ms. 1508, fol. 584v (Pedro Lépez de Arbalu, #58 of the 1592 auto).

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even the most evil man among the malcontents) to lose his respect for the Inquisition and its officials” during the 1591 crisis, “but only to keep our privileges and liberties inviolate.”*® The Inquisitors themselves seem to have been less certain about Aragonese motives. On September 24, after careful preparations with all-important local officials and under intense prodding from Madrid, the Saragossa Inquisitors made their second attempt to move Antonio Pérez into the Aljaferia. The results were even more disastrous than four months previously, since Pérez’s friends also had time to make careful preparations to foil them. Although the public authorities had assembled many more soldiers than Pérez’s allies could enlist, the latter had better leadership and more determination. At the crucial moment when Pérez and Mayorini, both shackled, were to be put in the carriage for the short trip from Saragossa’s central market to the old fortress, a few well-placed shots

killed all four horses. This was the signal for a wedge of bravos shouting “Liberty!” to storm into the market, fight their way past the guards, snatch both

prisoners away, and set fire to the carriage. The bodyguards of the royal governor were massacred and he lost his horse, putting him hors de combat. Several government soldiers either refused to fight or even joined the rebels. The chaos lasted barely an hour, and casualties were not very extensive; the . Inquisition counted sixteen deaths and twenty-two seriously wounded men, six

of them Frenchmen, mostly on the government side.*! ,

The damage to governmental prestige, however, was enormous. The Inquisition was less directly insulted than was the king, and to a lesser extent, the

authority of Aragon’s Court of Justicia. Aragon’s Diputados immediately offered a reward of 2,000 ducats for Pérez’s arrest and sent an exculpatory embassy to court. The Inquisitors stressed how little the attack was resisted “by the Viceroy and tribunals and the nobility, titled or otherwise, or by the people with them for the security of this business.”’ The affronts to the king always

- preceded those to the Holy Office, although in the matter of Antonio Pérez it had now become very difficult to distinguish between them. A week later, the Inquisitors wrote to the Suprema that “if His Majesty does not punish such grave excesses as these have been, then all the respect and obedience which is owed to his royal service, along with that owed to the Holy Office, is finished in

this kingdom.”** Philip II needed no such warnings. By now he had an army of 18,000 men poised at Agreda, on the Aragonese frontier, ostensibly in order to aid the Holy League in France by attacking through Henry IV’s hereditary lands in Béarn.

Three weeks after the September 24 riot, Philip ordered it into Aragon, 40 CODOIN, xu, pp. 269, 286, 296—97 (quotes); also Blasco y Lanuza, Historias de Aragon, il, p. 180 uote).

41 CODOIN XH, pp. 418-20. 42 Ibid., pp. 438, 441 (quotes).

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Saragossa: a royal fortress “desiring to maintain the respect due to the Holy Office” (now put in first place)

and to uphold the laws of Aragon. The Saragossa Inquisitors made feverish preparations to reinforce the Aljaferia, summoning sixty armed familiars from reliable rural districts, asking the governor for a garrison of 500 soldiers, and hiding away their most important documents. “We are resolved to die like another Pedro Arbués in defense of the Holy Office,” they boasted to the Suprema on November 8, adding that “because these are uprisings of the people, we have no security at all.”*3 Several Aragonese officials, led by the new Justicia, proclaimed the invasion illegal and tried to raise an army to fight it, but

the king’s troops met no actual resistance when they marched on Saragossa. Despite a few reported threats, nobody attacked the Aljaferia. Antonio Pérez, who had been hiding in Saragossa since soon after the second riot, fled to Béarn

while Philip II’s army occupied the Aragonese capital without incident on November 12, 1591. The repression now began in earnest. The visible head of the rebellion, the

young Justicia of Aragon, was summarily beheaded in front of his court. _ Aragon’s two principal noblemen, who had not joined the rebellion but waited too long to answer the commander’s summons to Saragossa, were imprisoned in

Castile, where they died a few months later. From the safety of Madrid, a once-terrified Saragossa Inquisitor, licenciado Molina de Medrano, plotted the Holy Office’s revenge. Punishing the guilty with maximum severity while the army occupied Saragossa, he wrote, “would provoke a marvelous effect of terror and consternation among the innocent, and consequently greater respect and reverence for the Holy Office than heretofore;”’ but his advice was not followed.

Meanwhile, during the winter of 1591-92, Antonio Pérez made a serious mistake by attempting to invade Aragon from Béarn. Its rapid annihilation cost him the lives of a few of his most dedicated supporters and, more importantly, a great deal of public support within Aragon.**

A fresh team of Inquisitors was sent to Aragon in order to conduct the repression with suitable impartiality, a task which occupied them during most of 1592. By late January, when the royal commander asked them to stop making

arrests, they had already imprisoned forty-two people. By June, when they. began their preparations for the auto de fe at which Pérez would be condemned, they reported to Madrid that about 120 men had been indicted for participating in the two riots of 1591, plus another thirty accused of other offenses. Sorting through the mass of testimony from frightened and discouraged men who had opposed the “free and correct functioning of the Holy Office” while Antonio 43 Ibid., pp. 460-61 (quote); British Library, Egerton Ms. 1507, fols. 217-21. 44 CODOIN, Xu, pp. 536-37 (quote). see Marafion, Antonio Pérez, ch. 25 (esp. 1, pp. 622-33) on Pérez’s ill-timed invasion, which came soon after the general pardon decreed by the king on January 17, 1592.

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Pérez had been struggling against it was often a difficult task, but no longer a dangerous one.* The trial summaries of these 1592 defendants, together with the lists of other culprits who had escaped the Inquisition’s grasp, provides a group portrait of the most active friends of Antonio Pérez and enemies of the Saragossa tribunal during 1591. Omitting about forty defendants from the rest of Aragon (most of whom were hired gunmen from the mountains) and a handful of foreigners like Mayorini, there remains a group of almost 100 residents of Saragossa, most of them identifiable by status and occupation. Over half were working-class men, mainly thirty-two /abradores but also twenty artisans such as butchers, woolcombers, shoemakers, including a silversmith and a dyer from France. Some were

semi-skilled boatmen and muleskinners. Ten men belonged to the “petty intelligentsia” of students, minor clergy, and low-level public servants. At least a dozen were urban notables, including five merchants, five notaries, and a few

_ City officials. Ten others, all excluded from the royal pardon of January 1592, were noblemen who ordinarily resided in Aragon’s capital. This opposition movement had both a sizable popular base and a sufficiency of “heads” among Saragossa’s nobility and civic elite; it was sustained by the propaganda of Pérez’s

| pasquinades, few of which have come down to us.*¢ On October 19 and 20, 1592, some of the principal Aragonese rebels received their punishments in consecutive public spectacles under the respective jurisdictions of the king and the Inquisition. First came five political and military leaders (four noblemen and a woolcomber), “all with admirable contrition and tears.” The obese and well-intentioned Don Juan de Luna died

exhorting the crowd to serve the king and begging everyone’s pardon; the hotheaded Don Diego de Heredia said little and was butchered “as badly as if enemies were killing him.” Next day the Inquisition held an elaborate auto

lasting from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., at which a rebel leader, captured during the ill-fated raid from Béarn, was sentenced to execution along with seven others who had been responsible for deaths during the rioting. “In effect,” reported an eyewitness, “except for a few Moriscos and woman bigamist, everyone was sentenced for having befriended Antonio Pérez, helping him escape from the

Inquisition, or having resisted the king’s army by words or deeds.” Their punishments, he thought, were generally mild: only a few penitents had to wear sanbenitos or corozas; most were banished, although some went to the galleys.*7 45 British Library, Egerton Ms. 1508, fols. 15-70, offers the best overview of the Saragossa tribunal’s work during 1592. 46 Ibid., fols. 215-46, 266-72, together with the “Memorial” of those who were seriously accused

but had fled (fols. 133-34v), depict both the popular and noble leadership of Aragonese opposition to the Inquisition in 1591. For an anti-royal pasquinade of September 1592, see ibid., fols. 65~68v.

47 CODOIN, xu, pp. 562-66, for the eyewitness description of these two consecutive “acts of justice” by the well-known poet and future chronicler of Aragon, Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola.

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Saragossa: a royal fortress The masterpiece of the spectacle, of course, was the official condemnation of Antonio Pérez. His effigy had been carefully made to resemble him as closely as possible. His sentence was even more carefully prepared. An eyewitness noted that it was read by a fresh secretary as loudly as possible, so that nobody could fail to hear it very well. It contained a million arrogant and bad-sounding remarks against God and the king, proofs of his friendship with the Prince of Béarn, treasons in his office of secretary, and serious presumptions of sodomy. Such misdeeds, together with his flight and disobedience to juridical edicts, plus a book he had

printed in France called ‘““The Adventures of Antonio Pérez” and the prosecutor’s assertion that he lived as a heretic in France, sufficed to convict him as a heretic and to presume that all his previous activities had tended towards this end and to uproot the Inquisition, considering that he was a descendant of Jews and great-grandson of a converted Jew named Anton Pérez who had been burned by the Inquisition, whose sanbenito still hung in the main church of Calatayud.

His effigy was thereupon burned, his descendants condemned to the usual

ended. |

infamy and ineligibilities reserved for heirs of convicted heretics, and the show

TRIUMPH AND FAILURE OF THE ARAGONESE INQUISITION

The elaborate autos of 1592, together with the Cortes of ‘Tarazona which substantially trimmed Aragonese autonomy, marked the end of a remarkably turbulent decade in this kingdom and the beginnings of subservient cooperation between the Aragonese ruling class and the Crown of Castile.*® Never again was the Saragossa Inquisition required to act as the most reliable instrument of royal policy in a turbulent province, although it had not yet heard the last of Antonio Pérez. Its first priority after 1592 was to disarm Aragon’s Moriscos — something it

had urgently desired since 1559, failed to achieve in 1560, and gotten onto Aragon’s lawbooks in 1576 but could not enforce because of the tenacious opposition of Aragon’s seriores de vassallos. Although the rebels of 1591 had not attempted to raise the Moriscos against the king’s army, the Saragossa Inqui-

sition took advantage of the pacification of Aragon to claim this reward for its indispensable help during 1591. Elaborate precautions were taken to ensure that Morisco disarmament would now be effective. In March 1593 the

Suprema issued an amnesty for past offenders, together with a new and “definitive” edict prohibiting Moriscos from carrying weapons, and despatched

one of its members to Saragossa with extremely detailed instructions for its

48 See the thesis of Xavier Gil Pujol, “From Revolt to Settlement: Crown, fueros and Politics in the Kingdom of Aragon, 1585-1648” (University of Barcelona, 1989).

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7 Aragonese tribunals enforcement.4? From 1594 until the expulsions of 1610, the Inquisitors of Aragon collected many fines from Moriscos caught with weapons.

However, after 1593 they encountered more serious problems than ever

before with Aragon’s “disarmed” Moriscos murdering informers or minor. officials connected with the Inquisition. Because their overlords could no longer

offer any effective protection from the Inquisition, the Moriscos resorted to increasingly desperate measures of self-defense. “Disarmament” meant that they lost their firearms, but every Morisco household still contained a lethal weapon: the knives used for slaughtering animals, carving meat, and now for stabbing informers. From 1599 to 1605, eleven Aragonese Moriscos were executed by the Inquisition for such murders, and only three for heresy. By May

1600, the Saragossa tribunal complained to the Suprema that five of their informers or officials had been killed with such knives within two years. They

asked for a law to limit the length and sharp points on knives owned by Moriscos. Although Madrid first told Saragossa that such an edict would be impossible to enforce, they soon relented and agreed to promulgate this edict.>° Signs of declining importance and frustrating circumstances beset the Ara-

gonese Inquisition after its apparent triumph in 1592. One of its proudest achievements had been to choke off the sale of horses to France; but after 1595, the Suprema ordered them not to put pasadores de caballos into their autos de fe. In

France the Wars of Religion were finally ending; although the Béarnese remained as heretical as before, prosecuting horse-smugglers ceased to be a major concern to Philip II in his declining years. By 1607 the Suprema had to ask Saragossa for information on how and why pasadores were prosecuted. In 1610 the son of a convicted pasador, condemned to formal penance, received permission to hold student office at the University of Huesca; in other words, conviction on these charges no longer carried the usual inquisitorial penalites imposed on descendants of convicted heretics.>! In 1610 Aragon’s Moriscos were expelled, costing the Saragossa Inquisition a great share of its revenues and most of its business. Soon afterwards came an even more serious setback. After Antonio Pérez died in Paris in 1611, his family

continued his efforts to overturn his 1592 conviction for heresy, thereby reclaiming both their honor and his estate. With influential allies in Madrid and 49 In the 1592 auto, a soldier and a civilian were sent to the galleys because they had rounded up contingents of Moriscos in Saragossa to fight against the king’s army; three Saragossa Moriscos got whippings for joining the rebel army: British Library, Egerton Ms. 1508, fols. 215-46 (#19—23 of auto). But there is no trace of rural Moriscos recruited by Aragonese nobles to fight against the Castilians, or even hired to help liberate Antonio Pérez. 50 Inq., Libro 329, fols. 224v-25, 231V, 235v, 240V-242, 254, for Don Pedro Pacheco’s instructions and two-month trip to Aragon. On the murders by Moriscos and the anti-knife edict, see Ing., Libro 330, fols. z2o1-o1v; Libro 331, fols. 6ov—61. 51 Inq., Libro 332, fol. 76; Libro 1234, fols. 377v. Because the laws against pasadores remained on the books, one finds occasional prosecutions on this charge at least until the 1620s — for example, in Inq., Libro gg1, fols. 938—41v (#11-13 of 1628 despachadas).

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supported by much evidence that, contrary to the prosecutor’s assertions in 1592, Pérez had never apostasized during his long exile abroad, his heirs | officially reopened his case in Saragossa in January 1613. After much legal maneuvering, Pérez’s heirs won his legal rehabilitation in a secret ceremony pronounced in the Aljaferia in May 1615. Pérez’s son Gonzalo (“a man of small

capacities,” complained the Saragossa tribunal) spoiled the event by printing 500 copies of the new sentence under the headline Victor Antonio Pérez, hiring a band, and nailing the announcements up across Saragossa. He spent some time in the special jail usually reserved for familiars of the Inquisition charged with civil crimes.>* Once again a great event which had begun as a tragedy had ended as a farce. The final important consequence of Antonio Pérez’s legal rehabilitation, and the most serious blow to the prestige of a tribunal which had been the flagship of the north, was the Suprema’s decision to investigate the most notorious secret weapon of the Aragonese Inquisition: the Libro Verde de Aragon. This careful genealogical compilation of the descendants of Aragon’s principal conversos had been begun in 1507 by one of the early prosecutors. It had been maintained and

updated, being employed by the tribunal in order to demonstrate the Jewish ancestry of many of their principal Aragonese opponents, including Antonio Pérez. Shortly before approving Pérez’s formal rehabilitation, in February 1615 the Suprema told Saragossa that “we wish to see the manuscript Green Book,” __ asking them to send two copies and to suggest remedies for “the damages which

result from many people having copies of it.”’>4 In Philip IV’s reign, Don Antonio Pérez, together with some other descendants of men condemned by the Saragossa tribunal for political crimes,

petitioned the Suprema for certificates of “pure blood.” In May 1623, the Suprema ordered under penalty of major excommunication that “within a short time, all copies of books circulating in the Kingdom of Aragon entitled Libro Verde, which discuss the state of purity of the houses and lineages of the said _

kingdom,” be collected by comisarios of the Inquisition. The master copy maintained by the tribunal must also be sent to Madrid “with all speed and security, verifying that it is the original, telling us what authority it has and what credit should be given to it.”” Three weeks later Saragossa answered that they

would have to hire a cart in order to ship all the collected copies to Madrid. Three months later they announced that they had collected sixty copies, which they were permitted to burn in the central market. A notarized copy of the original was finally sent to Madrid; it was eventually returned to Saragossa with

emendations in 1627.°* Because the Libro Verde was not destroyed, copies _ 32 Inq., Libro 334, fols. 1o-11Vv, 16v, 7ov, 109, 133V, 187, 197V, 279, 304V, 317, 326v-27; Libro 335, fols. 15, 16, 35v-38. See also Marafion, Antonio Pérez, , pp. 728-31. 53 Inq., Libro 334, fol. 307Vv.

103 | |

54 Inq., Libro 347, fols. 32, 33v, 35, 47-49, 135v—36; libro 973, fols. 41-41v, 46.

Aragonese tribunals , continued to be made from the emended original in Saragossa (from which a few. pages, probably referring to Pérez’s ancestry, had now been removed) and

probably in Madrid as well. The most notorious effort of the Saragossa Inquisition has continued to exist and to provide fuel for scandal into modern times. But it seems worth noting that the only serious attempt to curb its spread came from the central office of the Spanish Inquisition, as an indirect consequence of Antonio Pérez’s rehabilitation. The Holy Office of the Aljaferia had in the long run been punished more than it had been rewarded for its persistent and ingenious service to the Spanish monarchy.

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5

Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms Los desta ciudad ... de qualquier cosa quieren ser juezes y sefiores y toman la voz

por qualquiera particular. Nosotros contemporizamos con ellos lo mas que es posible. Barcelona to Suprema, 1570 (Inq., Libro 737, fol. 217Vv)

El dafio que crehemos questa tierra tiene y tiendra sin se remedia ... es por la mucha comunicacion que se tiene en Francia, y por los muchos franceses que an entrado y entran cada dia. Barcelona to Suprema, 1571 (Inq., Libro 737, fols. 267—68v).

Las causas de fee que ay en esta Inq’on de ordinaria son muy pocas y de facil digestion, porque aqui no ay Judaismo ni Moreria, y de ordinaria no passan de cinco o seis presos en las secretas ... De lo que aqui ay mucho que hazer es en causas civiles ... y las civiles en esta tierra son inmortales. Barcelona to Suprema, 1623 (Inq., Libro 744, fol. 146—46v).

After the great riots of March 1820, when Catalan mobs sacked the palace of the Barcelona Inquisition and threw its papers everywhere, an enterprising Yankee visitor named Andrew Thorndike managed to acquire a few of its trial records,

which he later had translated into English and published at Boston in 1828. Three trials dated from the 1630s; the others came from the eighteenth and even the early nineteenth centuries.! Two of the three defendants from the 1630s had been born in France, including one man accused of Protestantism by

his Catalan wife. The Yankee traveler had stumbled across a reasonably representative sample of Barcelona’s inquisitorial activity during the century after 1540: about two-thirds of its prisoners were Frenchmen charged with heresy or some type of “heretical propositions” (generally on flimsy evidence, as

with these two) and one third were Catalans charged with non-heretical offenses (in this case, witchcraft).

The Barcelona tribunal holds the unsavory distinction of being the most exclusively xenophobic branch of the entire Inquisition. Between 1540 and 1550 it executed ten Catalans — one converso and nine people convicted of either murder or witchcraft — and only one foreigner, an Italian turned Mohammedan ' Records of the Spanish Inquisition, Translated from the Original Manuscripts (Boston, 1828), pp. 9-113 (cases of Pierre Ginesta, 1635; Juan Duran, 1632; and Philippe Léonard, 1637).

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pirate. But from 1552 until 1627, the Barcelona tribunal produced a series of autos de fe at which forty-three people died. The victims included a hermit from

Andalusia (or perhaps Portugal: the sources are unclear), four Italians, and thirty-seven Frenchmen; the one Catalan in this group also happened to be the only person ever executed for bestiality by this tribunal.? Although the Saragossa Inquisition killed as many Frenchmen as did Barcelona and sent even more Frenchmen to the galleys, it was primarily preoccupied with local Moriscos; Frenchmen comprised less than 20% of its galley slaves, as compared with

. 60% at Barcelona. To a far greater extent than anywhere else in Spain during the “Aragonese century,” Frenchmen formed the core of inquisitorial business at Barcelona. If the arms of Catalonia’s Holy Office seemed short and its grasp feeble whenever it approached native malefactors, it was nonetheless strong enough to take a firm punitive grip on Catalonia’s French immigrants. THE FRENCH CONNECTION

The sheer scale of French immigration to Catalonia between the mid-sixteenth century and the rebellion of 1640 engendered widespread uneasiness among the Catalans; the Holy Office capitalized upon such attitudes and reflected them in their prosecutions. The classic work of Nadal and Giralt, based upon diverse sources, furnishes a coherent picture which has been little modified by subsequent research.? The French came to Catalonia, like other parts of the Crown of Aragon, as unskilled laborers seeking Europe’s highest wages; they were the sixteenth-century equivalent of today’s migrant workers.

In the mid-sixteenth century, nearly half the paupers registered at Barcelona’s hospital of the Holy Cross had been born in France; as late as 1620, Frenchmen still comprised one third of such vagrants. Such transients, mostly unskilled laborers, were less important to Catalonia’s economy than the French immigrants who settled and married there. At Barcelona, nearly one third of the bridegrooms registered from 1576 to 1585 had been born in France; this ratio declined to about one eighth after 1620. Only after 1650 did French immigrants account for under 10% of Barcelona’s hospital paupers or its bridegrooms (see Figure 1).* 2 The lone Catalan, March Puig, was executed in February 1609, along with the Andalusian (a hermit at Tarragona). On the other hand, both people executed by the provincial Inquisition of the

French-puppet government during the 1640s were Catalans. 3 J. Nadal and E. Giralt, La Population catalane de 1553 a 1717: limmigration francaise et les autres facteurs de son développement (Paris, 1960). They report (p. 159) the opinion of a prominent French official as late as the mid-seventeenth century that wages in northern Spain were twice as large as

in southern France. For a recent update on Catalonia’s population and French immigration, see Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Historia de Cataluna. Siglos XVI-XVII, z vols. (Barcelona, 1985), 0, pp. 101-08; I, pp. 201-07. _ 4 Graph drawn from Nadal and Giralt, Population catalane, pp. 218-19, 211-13, 61-62. A sample of 529 Barcelona marriage contracts in the city’s notary records between 1560 and 1700 turned up

106

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.eese re ¢ b] e * 4 e . . . *93 e e e e e***)e

Along the northern frontier, this influx of Frenchmen was truly massive as early as the mid-sixteenth century. In Catalonia’s second largest city, Perpignan, the military governor estimated in 1542 that more than a third of its residents had been born in France. He also claimed that “in all of Catalonia today, there

>3

are more than a thousand ... [bandoleros|, and among them there are no Catalans but only Gascons.”° A constant refrain of Spanish officials in Catalonia equated the foreign proletariat with the criminal element; one need only tune the scale slightly differently to hear the Inquisition’s attitude towards the religious culture of Catalonia’s French immigrants.

e*e3ea

sixty French grooms (11%), a result which fits fairly well with Nadal and Giralt’s figures, based on one parish: see James Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations,

1490-1714 (Princeton, 1986), p. 9. 5 Nadal and Giralt, Population catalane, pp. 91-92. As late as 1629 “toda la escoria de franceses,”’ who reputedly comprised three-fourths of the city’s proletariat, participated in a riot at Perpignan (p. 92).

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Table 11 Barcelona galley sentences, 1552-1639 :

Offense 1552-79 1580-99 1600-19 1620-39

“Lutherans” 81 (76) 18 (13) 5 (4) Oo Sodomy 13. (2) 22 (6) 18 (5) 6 (1) Bigamy 36 (25) 27 (11) 19 (13) 12 (5)

Islam (renegados) 6 (0) O I (1) 2 (1) “Opposition” 3. ) 5 (1) I (0) 2 (1) Miscellaneous 3. = (o) I (0) O 1 (0)

Totals 142 (104) 73 (31) 44 (23) 23 (8)

Note: numbers of Frenchmen are in parentheses.

Catalonia’s civil government harassed its French immigrants in numerous ways. They arrested tots els gavaigs i gascons in Barcelona in 1529. Twelve years later they prohibited all non-resident gascons, biarnesos, limosins, foxenchs e altres francescos from carrying weapons on pain of death. In 1571 they forbade anyone

born in France to teach in schools. They briefly imposed a special surtax on | foreign merchants (mainly French) in 1620, blaming them for Barcelona’s impoverishment, for the rise in banditry, and for corrupting Catalan women.® The Inquisition’s activities need to be seen against this background in order to be understood. Such gastarbeiters were frequently sentenced to the galleys by Barcelona’s

Holy Office during the Aragonese century (see Table 11). Nearly all the Frenchmen condemned to do “unpaid penance at the oars” had been convicted of holding Protestant beliefs, of contracting bigamous marriages in Catalonia, or

of sexually assaulting animals. In all three categories, French immigrants outnumbered native Catalans.

Protestantism furnished the Barcelona Inquisition with its first and most powerful weapon against the French. Unlike the district of Aragon, the Catalan tribunal did not have a Protestant mini-state directly across its border. But the huge flow of French immigrants into Catalonia came mainly from the Midi and Languedoc, including many regions thickly settled with Protestants. The antiProtestant campaign of the Barcelona Inquisition — in practice, an anti-French campaign — produced a series of public autos between 1561 and 1575 at which over thirty Frenchmen and one Italian were condemned to death. Although not identical, all these autos were similar in many respects. Perhaps

the best way to sample their flavor is to read the description of the auto of 6 Garcia Carcel, Historia de Cataluna, 1, pp. 278-81; 1, pp. 48, 57-58, 61; Nadal and Giralt, Population catalane, pp. 49-50.

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Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms October 27, 1566, by Barcelona’s municipal government.’ After noting that the auto was held in the customary place, the marketplace of the Born, and was attended by Catalonia’s Viceroy and the Audiencia judges, Barcelona’s magistrates began recording its main features: There were about forty people and some effigies. Nearly all of them were “Lutherans,” also some men with two wives and a woman with two husbands. Three men and seven effigies were burned, along with the bones and clothes of five others who had already died. Some of the books of the “Lutherans” were also burned. The other “Lutherans”

were condemned, most of them to be whipped and some to the galleys, either for a , certain time or else for life. Other people were condemned to perform penances and other punishments. At the same time a Frenchman was publically liberated, with a laurel

wreath on his head and a palm frond in his hand. He had been charged with “Lutheranism” by another man, and his accuser was condemned to be whipped and sent to the galleys. According to what was said, the “Lutherans” were all French. May God, in his infinite goodness and pity, be praised for holding this province in his hand, and spare everyone afflicted by such an evil pestilence.

At the next auto, in 1568, another man who had been falsely accused of Protestantism by his wife and by four other people appeared with the same costume of laurel wreath and palm frond to watch his accusers suffer public humiliation from the Holy Office. “‘May all such perjurers be discovered, and may God not permit the innocent to suffer,” intoned Barcelona’s magistrates.® But such colorful spectacles, like burning some Protestant books at an auto, were ultimately sideshows. What really mattered was the constant parade after

1552 of Frenchmen who were exhibited in the marketplace as Protestant heretics and, according to their degree of contrition, either killed, whipped, sent

to the galleys, or given less violent punishments. , Catalonia’s Holy Office had nobody available except the French to play starring roles in their public autos. As Barcelona’s senior Inquisitor told the Suprema in 1552, “in the books and registers of this Holy Office there is little trace of Jewish activities ... cases of this type are all finished (ya todo acabada). Concerning Moors there is no trace at all, as you know. Our business consists of

some blasphemers, some French or Gascon Protestants, and bigamists.” If anyone even rumored that the Inquisition was about to investigate them, he added, the local conversos all fled to France or even Italy.” With such a mediocre clientele, the Barcelona Inquisition candidly admitted that it had earned little respect from its Catalan audience. By 1557 Barcelona’s new Inquisitor summoned up the nerve to send two Catalans — men of notorious “evil life” in both Aragon and Catalonia — to the galleys for lengthy terms, but only at the specific request of Catalonia’s Viceroy. In 1559 he reported that “I 7 Manual de Novells Ardits: Vulgrament Apel.lat Dietari del Antich Consell Barceloni (hereafter Dietart), 28 vols. (Barcelona, 1892~1975), V, p. 61 8 [bid., Vv, p. 72. 9 Inq., Libro 736, fols. 219—19v, 206, 212—12v.

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Aragonese tribunals have some Lutherans in prison, men of small reputation and foreigners, who are

eating the king’s bread,” and promised to leave soon for the French border “from whence this evil comes.’”’ Next year, after the famous exposure of Protestants at Valladolid and Seville, he decided that “this Inquisition has got to put on an auto (and instill a little fear of its actions),” and figured he could collect

about twenty prisoners for it.'!© The parade of Frenchmen, begun in 1552, accordingly resumed and continued for about fifteen years. What slowed down this cycle of “French autos” was not any diminution in the

numbers of Frenchmen available for conviction; Catalonia continued to be inundated with French immigrants throughout the reign of Philip II. But Catalan legal fastidiousness finally began to work even in favor of French Huguenots. At the 1575 auto, Barcelona’s syndic protested against the Inquisition’s imposing the death penalty on such a man on the technicality that Catalonia’s military governor was not present, and in his absence no one could

be executed without prior approval from a jury of citizens. This execution proceeded on schedule. But three years later Barcelona’s civic officials mounted a far better organized campaign in favor of their legal privileges and caused a

last-minute change in the script of an auto: the Frenchman had to be moved outside the city in order to be killed, and most of their audience left the auto as soon as the execution had been announced, thus subverting its effect.'! After this embarrassment, the Barcelona Inquisition became reluctant to stage public autos de fe. Major problems confronted the Barcelona tribunal in its search to retain some of the respect it had briefly acquired when King Philip had attended one of its autos in 1564, or when Don Juan of Austria had visited them after Lepanto. Within three years of the king’s visit, Catalonia’s deputies had invaded the Inquisition’s private audience chamber and even imprisoned two

inquisitorial officials at Perpignan, while permitting an accused heretic to escape. In the early 1570s, a Venetian ambassador reported that the Catalans had wasted 100,000 ducats in a futile attempt to persuade the Papacy to enforce the abortive concordia of 1512; meanwhile, the prisoners whom the Barcelona Inquisition had arrested on charges of impeding its jurisdiction refused to leave prison unless the Inquisitors admitted that they had made a mistake. !2 The two most critical problems that bedeviled this tribunal were its inability to convict Catalans of any serious offenses and, for a long time after 1578, its inability to execute any resident of Catalonia for any reason whatsoever. In August 1569 the Barcelona Inquisition arrested a local lawyer, micer Andreu Ferrer, who had a copy of Luther’s New Testament. The Suprema exploded with indignation that someone of his background was “‘so ignorant as to claim 10 Ibid., fols. 312-13, 376-76v, 428. 1) Dietari, v, pp. 153 (May 23, 1575), 179-85 (May 19, 1578). 12 See Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York, 1906-08), 1, p. 469; Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambascatori veneti al Senato, vit (Turin, 1981),

PP. 572-73. | 110

Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms that he did not know that Martin Luther was a heretic” and ordered Barcelona to

examine him very carefully. But three weeks later news reached Madrid that micer Ferrer had been freed, and nothing more was heard about him. About six months later, enclosing a cover letter with the trial records of half a dozen Catalans sent to the Suprema for final rulings, the Barcelona tribunal cynically observed, “we are sorry for all the bother we are causing to Your Lordships, but since this concerns Catalans there is no chance that justice can be done with any

of them.” Later that year, forwarding other cases, the Barcelona Inquisitors remarked that local officials bothered them endlessly even in causas de fe, ‘because in every little thing they want to be judges and lords, and raise their voice on behalf of everybody,” adding that “we compromise with them as much as possible.”’!?

Therein lay the basic problem: litigiousness was the specific remedy for Catalonia’s distrust of all things Castilian which the Inquisition encountered. Every patriotic Catalan honored Ramon de Penyafort, their canonized thirteenth-century Inquisitor, and Barcelona’s magistrates always invited the Inqui-

sitors to dine as their official guests on San Ramén’s feast-day. But legal objections of all kinds handicapped the Holy Office in Catalonia. As late as 1620, the Inquisitor-General was still complaining that Catalonia had never complied with a Papal order of 1559 to suppress one canonicate in every Spanish cathedral

chapter and use its revenues to support the Inquisition. If Catalan lawyers insisted upon their right to veto or approve the execution of French Huguenots, it was difficult to imagine whom they would permit the Holy Office to execute and impossible to expect them to consent to the serious punishment of Catalans for heresy. The main thread of the Barcelona Inquisition’s history after 1575 lies

in its futile search for some type of malefactors it could prosecute publicly without stepping on the acutely sensitive toes of Catalan jurists. THE WAR OVER SODOMY

Between 1575 and 1600, Barcelona’s Inquisition tried very hard to execute people for sodomy. There was little room for secular judges to dispute their jurisdiction over this crime; the Inquisition’s claim, here as in the Kingdoms of Aragon or Valencia, rested upon an undoubtedly genuine Papal bull of 1524.

The Barcelona Inquisition had arrested several men for sodomy, and had exhibited sodomites occasionally at its autos, beginning in 1531. But for a long time they had never cared or never dared to condemn anyone to death for it. As they reported to the Suprema in 1574, “our Prosecutor, who has been in office for sixteen years, says that during his time we have never confiscated anyone’s property, nor have we relaxed anyone at all for this crime.” !* '3 Inq., Libro 325, fols. 155v—56, 164; Libro 737, fols. 211v—212, 217V. 14 Inq., Libro 738, fol. g8v.

III

Aragonese tribunals

In 1574, during the peak of inquisitorial preoccupation with sodomy trials throughout the Crown of Aragon, the tribunal of Barcelona arrested a man who should have inaugurated a series of public executions for sodomy.'> A Berber slave owned by a priest at Tarragona had been catechized and baptized under the name of Joan. After receiving an Arabic book from another slave, he was arrested as a relapsed Moslem. Joan was accordingly sentenced to formal reconciliation in December 1573 and ordered to make a pilgrimage to the famous shrine at Montserrat. At the shrine Joan was caught trying to rape a Catholic boy; the Abbot’s judge sentenced him to life in the galleys. Transferred to the royal jail at Barcelona to await assignment to his galley, Joan was again caught committing sodomy with a male prostitute named Pere Roig. The hapless and incorrigible Berber was thereupon transferred to the Inqui-

sition’s jurisdiction, where he received a second rapid trial (“without a legal defense because he didn’t want to make one,” the tribunal noted). The Barcelona Inquisition accordingly sentenced him to death and prepared to add him to the collection of Frenchmen and other offenders they were preparing for their 1575 auto. But the ever-vigilant Barcelona lawyers, those men who “want to be judges and lords of everything and will raise their voices on behalf of any individual,” rose up and blocked them. Not of course for any humanitarian reasons; if Barcelona’s lawyers let the Holy Office execute dozens of French Huguenots for opinions which a few of them partially shared, they were not about to defend the rights of a miserable African slave convicted as a child molester and active homosexual. What they were defending was their right to hang him themselves, rather than letting the Inquisition do it, regardless of any Papal bulls the latter might produce. Joan had been sentenced to death in October 1574, but by January 1575 a legal deadlock was blocking his execution. Informed by Barcelona that the criminal chamber of the local appellate court insisted on seeing all their sodomy trials carrying death sentences, the Suprema exploded with indignation. “We cannot tolerate such novelty,” they lectured Barcelona, “because in none of the Inquisitions which execute people for this crime ... nobody has ever requested

any trial records nor claimed any such thing.” Barcelona’s Holy Office was ordered not to comply with this demand by the royal Audiencia. Four months were wasted trying to work out some compromise through Catalonia’s Viceroy. The 1575 auto publico came and went, with one Huguenot executed under legal protest by Barcelona’s civic officials; however, the Berber slave stayed in jail while two great royal bureaucracies clashed over his person. By July 1575 the Suprema told the Barcelona tribunal that it had the right to 15 The relacién of this case is in Inq., Libro 730, fols. 196—g6v. Barcelona’s correspondence with the Suprema about him is in Inq., Libro 738, fols. 116—16v, 142—42v, 174~75; the Suprema’s orders

about him are in Inq., Libro 326, fols. 222v-23, 235~35v, 242v, 251-SIv, 258, 271v-72, 274V—75, 289.

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Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms execute Joan in an individual ceremony (auto particular) and ordered them to approach the Viceroy about this possibility. Barcelona first proposed to execute him “in a place ... three leagues distant from this city,” but backed off after

reading the Suprema’s warning to see if “any scandal will come from the remedy you propose.” Two months later, and almost a year after approving the death sentence of the Barcelona Inquisition, the Suprema reluctantly ordered its Barcelona tribunal to condemn this slave to 400 lashes and life in the galleys, pronouncing the sentence in the privacy of its audience chambers. Barcelona complied, but reported that “there has been much talk about this case among

the public; we have warned the Viceroy about it, but he says that the next Catalan Parliament will decide this business.”’ The bad faith and poor public impression left by this case continued unabated over the next several years. In autumn 1577, as it began preparing another auto

at which it planned to execute yet another French Protestant, the Barcelona tribunal complained that “there are some prisoners for the pecado nefando, whom it would be greatly inconvenient not to punish with execution, but in this place

the judges of the royal courts will not perform it without seeing the trial.” The Suprema promised to ask the king to intervene in their favor. Barcelona’s Holy Office then recorded a divided vote about executing a confessed heterosexual sodomite, a Frenchman accused by his wife at Perpignan; like the Berber slave, he had refused to make a formal defense. In October Barcelona again complained to the Suprema that “those who have been condemned to whippings and the galleys for sodomy have caused much scandal among the public and some opposition to actually executing our sentences.”’ Members of the Viceroy’s

Council, they added, “already know that if we do not execute anyone for this crime, it is because we refuse to hand the trial records over to the Audiencia Real; one of the judges, a consultor for us, said as much in his legal opinion on a case.” In January 1578, the Suprema sent them a copy of a recent Papal ruling which they hoped would permit the Inquisitors to execute sodomites themselves without requiring collaboration from other judges. However, Barcelona replied that only a special Papal bull would help. Ultimately, the Frenchman appeared in the 1578 auto to receive 200 lashes and life in the galleys.'®

This procedural deadlock lasted until after Philip II’s death; the matter crossed his desk in January 1579, but he did nothing about it. Barcelona’s Holy Office handled almost twenty cases of sodomy in which the ordinary rules of evidence mandated the death penalty, but all these prisoners received sentences of 200 lashes and perpetual service in the galleys. As the tribunal reported to the Suprema in June 1579, “in this Inquisition, although the accusations of heresy seem to have ceased altogether, more than is customary, charges of sodomy and bestiality have multiplied. We do not know,” they added, “if this is partly due to 16 Ing., Libro 738, fols. 316—-16v, 321, 322, 330; Libro 327, fols. 103v, 213v; Libro 730, fols. 305-14v (#5= Bonafé or Bonnefoy).

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be.”!7 |

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the perception that they are not punished by this tribunal as they deserve to

The inability in the Barcelona Inquisition to execute anyone during the last twenty years of Philip II’s reign was dramatically illustrated by a squalid event early in 1595: their jailer was murdered inside his own prison by their nuncio or official messenger. Even in this wholly intramural affair, where the Inquisitors

/ caught the culprit immediately and of course sentenced him to death, Barcelona wrote to the Suprema outlining their justifiable fears that the secular authorities would not consent to his execution. The Inquisitors managed to chop off the

nuncio’s right hand as he left their prison, but suffered the humiliation of watching Barcelona’s royal Audiencia conduct a whole new trial before finally executing the murderer.!® Perhaps Barcelona’s failure to execute the murderer of their jailer proved the final straw. In any event, by September 1596 the Suprema finally began serious

negotiations with Barcelona’s Audiencia over the issue of how to execute sodomites, using Catalonia’s Viceroy as mediator. Three months later, both sides had reached a provisional compromise which allowed three Audiencia judges (two of them named by the Viceroy) to vote on such cases alongside the

three Inquisitors; however, further complications arose and the deadlock per- , sisted. The dispute then moved to Madrid, where it provoked a group of consultas between the Suprema and the Council of Aragon. In 1601, the Suprema named a native Catalan as a Barcelona Inquisitor — the

first such instance in living memory — and relations quickly improved. By January 1602, the Suprema felt confident enough to order Barcelona to celebrate a public auto (at which no one was killed) in order to improve its image, “because none has been held for many years.” In July 1602 the final compromise was hammered out and approved by the king. By January 1603 two official copies of this consulta had been sent to Barcelona, timed to arrive at the offices of the Audiencia’s Vice-Chancellor and the senior Inquisitor on the same day. It

closely resembled the abortive compromise of 1598, with only one unsolved detail: the three Audiencia judges who voted on sodomy cases were all supposed to be official consultores of the Inquisition, but to date only two such judges were eligible. !9

The news provoked audible relief and eagerness in the Barcelona Inquisition. In August 1603 they requested the Suprema to re-vote their recent sentence on a convicted sodomite named Antonio Reus, a Benedictine monk physically unfit for the galleys. Fray Antonio was hard to place, since most Benedictine convents

in Catalonia held only three or four monks, and he had tried to escape twice, 17 Ingq., Libro 739, fol. 56. For another example from 1585, see Inq., Libro 328, fols. 287v—88. 18 Inq., Libro 329, fol. 398; Libro 731, fol. 24av.

'9 Inq., Libro 330, fols. 52v, 58v, 98, 133v, 239v-40; Libro 331, fols. 4-4v, 26v—29, 64-65. See also Ing., Libro 1260 (1642 handbook of the Suprema’s fiscal), fols. go—g5v (“Modo de proceder en los delictos de sodomia y bestialidad en la Inquisicién de Barcelona”).

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Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms

injuring his ribs and leg. ““We have such desire that this crime be punished in exemplary fashion that we will conform ourselves to vote it again” under the new

system, they concluded; “those who voted the first time said that they would relax him to the secular arm if they believed that he would actually be killed.” Although they got their wish, they ultimately reconfirmed their original sentence

that Reus be whipped, formally defrocked, and permanently imprisoned in a monastery. However, Fray Antonio had the last word by staging a successful jailbreak before he could be delivered to his prison.?° Under the Concordat of 1602-3, Barcelona’s Holy Office condemned five sodomites to death over the next six years. They were executed in two groups in the courtyard of the palace which the Inquisition shared with the Audiencia. A special scaffold was built with seats for the Inquisitors on one side and for the three Audiencia judges on the other; on both occasions, a few other Holy Office miscreants were added in order to make a small auto publico. But this moment of

peace and harmony between these agencies of the royal government was short-lived. In 1608 the native Catalan Inquisitor died; by 1610 this painfully achieved sodomy compromise lay in ruins, a casualty of another quarrel between Audiencia and Inquisition. It quickly escalated until the Audiencia formally banished the Inquisitors from Barcelona and the latter threatened to place the

city under an interdict. The Viceroy refused to implement the decree of banishment, and a royal letter officially resolved the issue in August 1613.7!

Meanwhile, Barcelona’s Inquisitors had arrested their most prominent sodomy defendant, indeed the most prominent Catalan who ever inhabited their

prison: Dr. Antonio Joan Astor, canon and vicar of the cathedral church of Barcelona, and absentee abbot at Perpignan. He had been denounced in February 1610 by a servant of the Abbot of Ripoll, Catalonia’s greatest Benedictine house. Dr. Astor was arrested outside Catalonia in September by order of the Suprema, while the Barcelona Inquisition was embroiled in its controversy

with the Audiencia. His principal accuser, whose employer had business at court, was interrogated in Madrid. The Suprema forbade any Audiencia judges , from voting on Dr. Astor’s case, on the technicality that both he and his accuser were clerics.2* The breach in the compact therefore came not from the Catalan Audiencia but from the angry Inquisitors and their Castilian supervisors. Dr. Astor’s trial, like those of other socially prominent inquisitorial defend-

ants, proceeded at a leisurely pace. By June 1611 Dr. Astor had presented his , defensas in no fewer than 160 articles and requested numerous witnesses to testify on his behalf. By February 1612, Barcelona forwarded his trial to the Suprema for a ruling, since Dr. Astor had requested a change of venue; in purely legal terms he had a good case, because he was neither tried under

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20 Inq., Libro 741, fols. 37-38; Libro 731, fol. 498v. 21 See Dietari, vill, pp. 332, 483; IX, pp. 23-25, 52-53, 57-66, 70-72, 111, 136, 219-22, 435-40. 22 Inq., Libro 333, fols. 12z0v—21v, 125v—26.

Aragonese tribunals

Barcelona’s current rules for sodomy defendants nor transferred to an ecclesiastical court. However, the Suprema denied his request, while telling Barcelona to “proceed with much care in this business,” to give the testimony against him

to the defendant, and to “speed up the trial in such a way that you may be excused the obstruction (embarazo) you have with him.” The Suprema also warned that they must find some way to deal with the Audiencia if they should condemn him to death.”

Knowing that they need not release Dr. Astor, the Barcelona Inquisition . counterattacked. They uncovered fresh accusations of sodomy against him. After he refused to answer this evidence and formally appealed to the Pope, Barcelona’s Holy Office received permission from the Suprema to torture him if necessary, but they remained acutely aware that they would be unable to execute this prisoner if they convicted him. They informed the Suprema in March 1613 that no ecclesiastical court in Catalonia had ever sentenced anyone to death for

this crime, adding that “doubtless our secular officials would not execute anyone without seeing the trial.”’** A solution had to be found. In April 1613 the Suprema petitioned the king for

permission to execute Dr. Astor without consulting the Catalan Audiencia. They were refused, because such action flagrantly infringed the 1603 consulta. The Suprema had to dictate a sentence retroactive to October 1612 condemning this defendant, who had been convicted of five actos consumados of sodomy, to

pay a fine of 300 /libres, to be verbally defrocked, stripped of all his benefices, perpetually banished from Catalonia, and confined for ten years ina monastery. _ They sent their decision secretly to the Bishop of Tortosa, since they did not trust the ordinary mails in Catalonia. In May 1613, the Suprema unsuccessfully ' approached the Pope for permission to remove any secular judge from voting on sodomy trials anywhere in the Crown of Aragon. After they had been definitively

refused this privilege by both the King of Spain and the Pope, the Suprema reluctantly closed its books on Dr. Astor and sent his final sentence to Barcelona

in January 1614.7 ,

HOLES ALONG THE BORDER

If the arms of the Spanish Inquisition were too short to frighten people effectively in Barcelona, they seemed even shorter whenever it had to defend the

_ Jong and porous Catalonian border from the many forms of “French disease.” The dangers coming from France extended well beyond the presence of many thousand immigrants who had been exposed to Protestant doctrines. The 23 Inq., Libro 333, fols. 272v-73v; Libro 742, fols. 28, 56, 68.

24 Inq., Libro 333, fols. 285-85v, 339v-40; Libro 334, fols. 4, 14; Libro 742, fols. 86-86v, 25 Ing, Libro 334, fols. 43v-44, 66, 151v-52 (Dr. Astor’s case therefore appears as #15 of Barcelona’s causas despachadas of 1614: see Libro 732, fols. 231—62v).

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Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms

Barcelona tribunal dealt with heretical merchandise as well as with heretical people. In August 1571 Barcelona’s Inquisitors sent the Suprema a strange artifact recently imported from France: a set of heretical salt and pepper shakers representing St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary, in which the salt was poured into Mary’s head and emerged through her feet. The Suprema advised Barcelona to be “very thorough in punishing those involved in this business,” but there is no evidence than any culprits were ever caught.”° Worse was to follow. In October 1571 Barcelona reported to Madrid that one of their officials had been arrested and imprisoned by French Huguenots while

gathering testimony for the Inquisition. Another comisario was immediately recalled from his mission to the Huguenot stronghold of Montpellier. But getting Canon Vidal released was no simple matter; he was still in jail in June 1572, having been moved to Narbonne. Finally, a full year after his arrest, he was exchanged for a French merchant whom the Spaniards had seized as a hostage in Perpignan. The Suprema understandably barred this tribunal’s officials from visiting France, although this prohibition made it much more difficult to prosecute Frenchmen accused of crimes like bigamy in Catalonia.27

The Barcelona Inquisition faced other problems when it tried to make an example of a famous outlaw who worked hand-in-glove with French Huguenots. Such people were difficult for the Holy Office to capture in Aragon, but impossible to lay hands on in Catalonia. In November 1569, the Inquisitors were ordered to arrest a bandolero named Escuderet, who “carries with him fifty Huguenots” and who had recently fled to France. By March 1571 they told the

Suprema that Escuderet had been formally charged with heresy, but “went around with so many men that no remedy can be found.” Eight months later they reported he was still at large, having recently stayed with “the greatest Luterano along the frontier.” Having finally seized a few of his followers, the Barcelona Inquisition formally sentenced Joan Escuderet to death in absentia at its 1572 public auto, charging him with helping Huguenots pillage a border town and helping to kill a priest. However, they reported a year later that Escuderet was still operating along the border and that “many of the leaders of this land show him favor.’’8 One of Escuderet’s good friends, a noble Benedictine monk from the great convent at Ripoll, narrowly escaped the Inquisition’s ambush at his border castle of Formiguera in 1576 because he had been forewarned. Three years later the Holy Office managed to capture him, after two inquisitorial officials had been wounded in the attempt; but they were still unable to dismantle his private fort. Fray Jorge Alemany de Callar finally became one of the few Catalans condemned 26 Inq., Libro 737, fols. 319v, 360; Libro 325, fol. 280. 27 Inq., Libro 737, fols. 281v, 355v, 377-77; Libro 326, fols. 69—69v. 28 Inq., Libro 737, fols. 8, 259, 305-05v, 424v; Libro 730, fol. 155v (#43 of the auto). See also #23, one of Escuderet’s followers who helped him escape from the Inquisition; he was returned to the secular judges who had originally arrested him, after abjuring de vehementi in the auto.

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Aragonese tribunals _ for smuggling horses to Huguenots; in 1581 he was fined 500 J/liures, deprived of his ecclesiastical revenues for five years, and ordered to be locked up in his convent. In 1583, both Catalonia’s viceroy and the Barcelona tribunal requested

the Suprema to transfer him to a Benedictine convent in another part of Aragon.??

Another challenge to the Inquisition’s authority along the French frontier

emerged in 1583, when an important witness in a heresy case was found murdered in his prison cell in the border town of Seo de Urgel. Guillem Marti alias “el Superbo” was an unsavory informer even by Holy Office standards and a man with many enemies. Nevertheless, the Suprema quickly demanded that Barcelona “do exemplary justice against everyone implicated in this death.” When the Barcelona Inquisition offered a reward of 100 ducats for identifying the murderer of “el Superbo,”’ it obtained some results. By September they had arrested Alemani Trago, military governor of Catalonia’s northwestern district, for complicity; in 1582, he had also been accused of smuggling horses to French

Protestants. By late 1583 the Barcelona tribunal had pieced together the outlines of Marti’s murder: acting on Trago’s orders, his deputy Fernando Bardaxi had kidnapped “el Superbo,” taken him to Urgel’s jail and shot him no fewer than sixteen times. By January 1584, Barcelona had paid the reward and arrested the deputy for the actual murder.*° In March 1584 Alemani Trago was released from prison under a huge bond _ Of 1,000 ducats. All of 1585 was spent on procedural matters and on torturing Bardaxi until he finally confessed to killing Marti. By March 1586 Barcelona voted to fine Trago 200 ducats beyond his bail and send him to the presidio at

Oran for ten years. Of the lesser fry, nine were sentenced (one had died in prison) and seven were freed. Bardaxi was to be executed for “opposition to the free and proper operation of the Holy Office.” But as usually happened in such

cases, the Audiencia refused to implement this sentence and demanded an entirely new trial for him. Trago never went to Oran. In November 1586, he pleaded illness and asked for a six-month extension; in January 1588, the Barcelona tribunal noted that he

still had not fulfilled his sentence; and by May 1590, the Suprema officially lifted his banishment. Bardaxi was never executed. In order to avoid handing

him over to the Audiencia, the Holy Office re-voted him to the galleys, a punishment rejected by the Suprema in March 1588 as “insufficient,” because “it is very convenient and necessary that there be an exemplary punishment.” But given the realities of Catalonia, the Barcelona tribunal finally persuaded them in May 1588 to agree to a sentence of lifelong service in the galleys, which __ 29 Inq., Libro 739, fols. 34-—34v, 215-16; Libro 730, fol. 363 (#17 of the 1581 despachadas). 30 Ing., Libro 739, fols. 156, 191-92, 244-44Vv, 252, 292; Libro 328, fols. 120v, 122v, 124v, 140, F4I.

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Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms Bardaxi entered on July 7, five years after the murder of “el Superbo.”3! Thus ended the Barcelona Inquisition’s final attempt to gain real respect along the French frontier. From their point of view, Catalonia’s border with France could never be satisfactorily policed anyway, because it contained two large holes. Just north of Seo de Urgel, where Marti had been murdered, lay the Principality of Andorra, then as now an autonomous enclave jointly governed by Spanish and French authorities and inhabited by a few thousand smugglers who took full advantage of their situation. The Barcelona Inquisition had no trouble appointing familiars

in Andorra (which belonged ecclesiastically to the Bishop of Urgel), but it was | never able to arrest any heretics there in the 1560s, because Andorra’s cosovereign was none other than the famous Huguenot princess Jeanne d’Albret. When she appointed a Catalan-speaking Protestant as her bailiff (veguer) in

1572, the Barcelona Inquisition collected testimony against him, but never dared arrest him. When they captured a Huguenot merchant in Andorra in June 1572, Princess Jeanne intervened vigorously, and the Andorrans themselves refused to let him be tried outside the valley. On several occasions between 1576 and 1584, the Barcelona Inquisition, which had six familiars in Andorra’s seven parishes, failed to order the arrest of other Huguenot veguers appointed by her Béarnese successor “because of being uncertain about the spirit of the people in that land.”’32

Andorra was probably a smaller headache to the Barcelona Inquisition than the Val de Aran, which was entirely under Spanish political control but totally beyond their grasp. This remote corner of Catalonia, Gascon-speaking and obeying a French bishop, refused all contact with the Spanish Inquisition. It became a serious problem in 1568, when a French merchant arrested there for smuggling was found to be carrying some Calvinist books. The valley’s inhabitants prevented any attempt by inquisitorial officials to investigate him on heresy charges, and the prisoner died after a few months. On learning of this event, Philip II petitioned the Pope to have Aran transferred to a Spanish diocese, and the bull duly arrived in Urgel in May 1569. But nobody in the Val de Aran paid any attention to it; Barcelona’s Inquisitors explained to the Suprema in 1576 that the Bishop of Urgel had never dared to publish it. Moreover, nobody in Aran had ever received the Bull of Crusade, “another type of tribute which is paid throughout this kingdom.” Worst of all, “no minister of the Holy Office dares to enter there, except at great risk and peril of his life.” In 1582, Aran’s officials informed a visiting Inquisitor that the valley’s well-armed clergymen had recently kidnapped one of their colleagues who favored introducing the 3! Ingq., Libro 739, fol. 323; Libro 328, fols. 152, 174v-75, 187v, 239, 281v, 287v-88, 317v-18, 391; Libro 329, fol. 22v; Libro 731, fols. 1-2, 24-25 (causas despachadas for 1586 and 1588). 32 Inq., Libro 327, fols. 72v, 177, 213v-14; Libro 328, fols. 144, 159v; Libro 737, fols. 289, 3319, 355v, and esp. 452-54 (a detailed memo on Andorra drawn up in December 1571); Libro 738, fol. 46—46v; Libro 739, fol. 1809.

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| Inquisition. Despite repeated pressure from Madrid, the Inquisition never established any reliable officials anywhere in this large but sparsely populated district.?°

Two types of inquisitorial offense, horse-smuggling and witchcraft, were confined to Catalonia’s border districts; the Barcelona tribunal had a predictably mediocre record in pursuing either of them. Catalonia had been the

_ first province outside the Kingdom of Aragon to receive instructions about prosecuting men for selling horses to French Protestants. Their sporadic attempts to implement these orders led to problems with bandolero smugglers like Escuderet and his Benedictine friend in the 1570s, and drew their attention to the military governor of Aran even before the “Superbo” murder. Some

prominent suspects were not tried in Catalonia: in 1579 an elderly French nobleman who had been arrested as a pasador de caballos was sent to the Suprema, while two merchants from Saragossa, arrested with him, were extradited to Aragon. In 1583 a familiar of the Inquisition was convicted as a pasador de caballos, stripped of his office, fined 200 ducats and perpetually barred from living near the French border; but his punishment was unique.3* In 1596 the Suprema demanded to know why several people who had been indicated as horse-smugglers in Rosellén during the 1593 visitation had not

been arrested and tried. A month later Barcelona sent in a rather lame reply about “‘the reasons that have moved us to stop prosecuting indiscriminately everyone charged as pasadores.” After listing the contradictory pieces of “‘clarification” which had been sent to them across the previous quarter-century about

this problem, they got to the real point: “Now that the Prince of Béarn [Henry IV] has been absolved by His Holiness and the greater part of France has been pacified,” and the whole district of the Parlement of Toulouse (to which the Val de Aran appealed law cases) was almost entirely Catholic, they had chosen to ignore such accusations as mere expressions of village malice.%> In other words, the Barcelona Inquisition wished to bury this problem.

Witchcraft, the other offense largely confined to the mountains along the border, had long interested the Barcelona tribunal. A witch had died at a Barcelona auto in 1522, while six others followed her in the widely publicized

1549 auto. However, only a few cases of witchcraft appear in Barcelona’s records after 1550. In 1574, near Seo de Urgel, an inquisitorial comisario 33 Inq., Libro 738, fols. 3~8v (a summary of 1568-74 events in Aran); Libro 737, fol. 144; Libro 325, fol. 85; Libro 326, fol. 214; Libro 327, fol. 17-17v; British Library, Egerton Ms. 1507, fol. 759, of Ing., Libro 738; Libro 739, fols. 176~—76v. Garcia Carcel, Historia de Catalutia, 1, p. 48, notes that the Catalan Parliament collected taxes in Andorra, but never in Aran, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 34 Ing., Libro 730, fols. 386, 395 (#2 of 1583 despachadas); Libro 936, fols. 200, 207v (#21, 28~29 of 1579 despachadas, which were filed with Valencian papers), fols. 246-53 (#10 of 1580 despachadas, also with Valencia).

35 Ingq., Libro 330, fols. 32-32v; Libro 740, fols. 125—25v. Recall that the tribunal of Saragossa stopped putting pasadores de caballos in its autos after 1596; see above, p. 102.

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Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms arrested a bruxa maléfica named Joana Salaverda on his own initiative. During a rare visit to Andorra, a Catalan Inquisitor reported that the bishop of Urgel had

punished three women who confessed pacts with the Devil, while the local governor had arrested six women and hanged three of them who had confessed

“after many tortures.” The Suprema encouraged them to proceed with Salaverda’s trial and ordered them to get jurisdiction over the other women in Urgel’s episcopal or secular prisons. By July 1576 the Barcelona prosecutor futilely requested the Suprema for permission to confiscate the property of convicted witches, which current rules forbade. By February 1577, all these women had made defensas which had to be verified in France, which the Barcelona Inquisition was unable to do. Widow Salaverda (who never confessed) and two other women were thereupon absolved of heresy charges, while another witch appeared in the 1577 auto to be formally reconciled and work for a year in Barcelona’s municipal hospital.?°

The only witch reserved for the auto had been born in France. From this point onwards, the history of witchcraft trials by the Barcelona Inquisition virtually reduces to another instance of prosecuting French immigrants to Catalonia, the only difference being that most of these immigrants were women. In 1615 an old witch named Joanna Ferrer, who had originally been arrested by

a local magistrate near Barcelona, admitted that she had learned the art of witchcraft in her native France, and maintained her charges against eleven other local women (nine of whom had also been born in France) under torture. She received a public whipping and permanent banishment from Catalonia; two of

her principal associates were interrogated, but released without being tortured.3”

When the most serious outbreak of witch-hunting in seventeenth-century Catalonia occurred a few years later, the “French connection” took a different form. This time the Barcelona Inquisition’s principal prisoner was male, but like the witches he had been born in France. Laurent Carmel, alias “el Bruxote”, — had an active career as a witch-finder in northern Catalonia in 1618 and 16109, claiming a special license for his work from a French cleric in Perpignan, until the Holy Office got its hands on him. He admitted that he had learned his art from

an older brother; he had sold his soul to the Devil four years before, and had attended at least four Sabbats where he had been sodomized by the Devil, who even visited him in prison. “El Bruxote” had identified about 200 witches in Rosellén, Cerdagne, and other parts of northern Catalonia; at least twenty of them had already been hanged by local officials. In October 1619 Barcelona’s Inquisitors sent him to the galleys for ten years. During the French occupation 36 Inq., Libro 326, fols. 202—02v, 203v—04; Libro 327, fol. 44; Libro 738, fols. 60—6ov, 208; British

} Library, Egerton Ms. 1507, fols. 265~—70, 279 (torn out of Libro 738); Libro 730, fols. 192v—93, 194v (#15, 16, 23 of 1576 despachadas), 207 (#21 of 1577 auto). 37 Inq., Libro 732, fols. 269v-70, 276-77 (#4—-6 of 1615 despachadas plus the nine who were never arrested, “casi todos franceses y viandantes’”’).

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Aragonese tribunals in 1645, a chapbook called the Wondrous History of the Witches’ Sabbath, printed

in Barcelona, narrated the adventures of a Gascon witch-finder who had identified over 3,000 French witches, including his own wife. Even as legends, Catalans expected their bruxotes to be French.*® SURVIVAL THROUGH INSIGNIFICANCE

Surveying the Barcelona tribunal’s situation in 1622, a pessimistic Inquisitor offered a bleak portrait to the Suprema. The Catalan parliamentary provisions of 1599 barring familiars from holding public office had deprived them from using locally prestigious men; there were now only six or eight familiars in Barcelona, all “tavernkeepers or owners of boarding houses,” and few reliable men served along the French border. The Val de Aran still had no familiars; Andorra had several, who, however, saw nothing and did nothing because they

considered themselves French subjects. “Many horses are smuggled into France without this tribunal’s learning of it,” he concluded. A few years later, near the Aragonese border, a local governor strangled a suspected witch on a mountaintop at midnight in order to avoid handing her over to the Inquisition;

he received only a fine and a warning.>? : Against such a bleak background, the Barcelona tribunal sought to establish some credibility. By July 1626 they decided to hold a public auto “during the meeting of the Cortes and at a time when the Inquisition is so little respected.” They played their show in July 1627, under a Viceroy who had once been an Inquisitor at Saragossa. But their official report grumbled that “all the people of this land, both ecclesiastical and secular, have always shown little affection for the Holy Office.” Soon afterwards, Barcelona’s lawyers confirmed this impression by printing an official pamphlet detailing Catalonia’s limitations on inquisitorial powers. However, local public opinion was not necessarily hostile towards

the Holy Office, as private diaries attest.*° Little wonder, then, that when the great Catalan rebellion broke out in 1640, 38 Inq., Libro 743, fols. 283, 305; Libro 732, fols. 426-28v (#1 of 1619 despachadas). “El Bruxote” had a notable Catalan predecessor in Cosme Soler, a traveling witch-finder arrested in May 1617 after considerable activity in both Aragon and Catalonia; at least ten women had been hanged in five different places after he identified a secret “rooster’s foot” on their backs (which was also Laurent Carmel’s tactic), but Cosme Soler walked away with a reprimand! See Libro 732, fols. 376-78 (#6 of 1617 despachadas). See also Garcia Carcel, Historia de Cataluna, 1, p. 415.

39 Ing., Libro 744, fol. 7-7v. See also Jaime Contreras, “El Santo Officio en el Principado 1568~—1640: Papel politico y analisis social,” in Primer Congres d’Historia Moderna de Catalunya, 2

vols. (Barcelona, 1984), 1, pp. 111-24. On the legal lynching of the witch, see Inq., Libro 745,

fols. 311-15v; Libro 733, fols. 237-56v (#1, 8-11 of 1627 despachadas). The neighborhood lawyer who advised the governor to avoid the Inquisition’s orders was fined and banished in

1628: thid., fol. 259—-59Vv.

40 See above, pp. 55-57. Although the official report in the Dietari, x, pp. 159-62, paints a relatively dramatic and effective portrait of the 1627 auto, an official pamphlet in May 1628 enumerated Catalonia’s anti-inquisitorial legislation: ibid., x, p. 267.

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Barcelona: Inquisitors with short arms the Barcelona Inquisition escaped the rioters’ notice. They seemed a relatively harmless part of Castilian administration, and their official purpose was scarcely objectionable in a land proud of its sainted native Inquisitor. The third clause of

Catalonia’s pact with King Louis XIII in 1641 stipulated that the Inquisition would be preserved in Catalonia, although under Papal rather than Castilian control. Aided by the timely arrival of 1,000 silver ducats from Madrid in October 1640 and fortified by Philip IV’s orders in May 1641 to remain at their posts and wear their Castilian robes of office even if Barcelona became French, the Inquisitors barricaded themselves in their palace and watched revolutionary events swirl by them. They were not hated so much as ignored during the first few years of French occupation. When a three-piece silver service was stolen from their palace, the revolutionary authorities promptly offered a reward of 100 llibres for the culprits’ arrest. A few clumsy attempts by the senior Inquisitor to

conduct pro-Spanish espionage led to his flight; as his colleague ironically reported, Dr. Cotoner merely followed his doctor’s advice to have a “change of air” and return to his native Mallorca in 1641. But only the arrival of Papal bulls

confirming the new Catalan Inquisitors in September 1643 led Barcelona’s authorities to deport the remaining Inquisitor, together with two faithful notaries, on a slow boat to Valencia.*! The Spanish Inquisition died a remarkably slow death in revolutionary Catalonia. Despite all the squabbling with local judges and Parliaments, the Castilian

| Inquisition possessed an undeniable authenticity which its local Catalan successor sorely lacked. When the new Inquisitors, “elected and installed by France,” decided to stage an auto general in February 1644, the tanner Miquel Parets reported that they did so in order to squelch the rumor that “they lacked the full powers of the others from Spanish times.” Parets believed they botched the job, using “less pomp and equipment than that of the year 1625 [séc].” Tickets were

sold, but there were many empty seats; the sermon, by an undistinguished Carmelite, was abbreviated; worst of all, only three miscreants were condemned.* The Catalan Inquisitors learned from their mistakes. When they held a second auto in November 1647, they copied the equipment and ritual of the 1627 show as precisely as possible. They held a traditional torchlight procession with green crosses on the night before. The actual ceremony began with a long 41 See Ing., Libro 340, fols. 257v—58, 260v; Libro 748, fols. 293, 306-11 passim. Compare Miquel Parets, De los muchos sucesos dignos de memoria que han occurido en Barcelona ... 1626-1660, ed. C. Parpal Marques, 6 vols. (Madrid, 1888-93), Bk. 1, ch. 149 (Vv, pp. 137-38) on the Inquisitors’

departures from Barcelona. See Dietari, xu, pp. 590, 629 for clauses about the Inquisition in Catalonia’s pacts with the French (January~May 1641); ibid., p. 582n, for the December 1641 : robbery and reward. For an overview, see Roberto Lopez Vela, “Inquisicién y guerra de Catalufia. La situacié6n del Tribunal de Barcelona,” in Primer Congrés d’Historia Moderna de

Catalunya, 11, pp. 539-48. |

Dietart, Xiu, pp. 296-98. |

42 Parets, De los muchos sucesos, Bk. 1, ch. 155 (V, pp. 147-49). Compare the official version in

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parade of familiars, clerics, and noblemen, all on horseback. The Prince of Condé sat in the Viceroy’s customary seat for jousts and tourneys. The local Dominican prior preached for a full hour. The Inquisitors had collected twelve defendants plus two effigies, and a sodomite was executed outside the city walls afterwards (‘‘as is customary,” noted Parets). The most noteworthy difference from earlier spectacles was that, with a French prince as Viceroy, two French heretics were sentenced only to imprisonment, while two Catalan heretics went to the galleys. Afterwards, the magistrates recorded that they gathered to dine at their closest colleague’s house, “‘as is customary in such events, as can be seen from the auto of 25 June 1627.”’*3 Imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, and no other agency of Castilian government was so carefully imitated during the rebellion. Despite all the harassment from Catalan lawyers and politicians,

the Spanish Inquisition retained an unshakable legitimacy. It was always accepted, but it was rarely feared by local residents as much as in most other parts of Habsburg Spain. 43 Parets, De los muchos sucesos, Bk. 1, ch. 18 (Vv, pp. 296—97); Dietari, xv, pp. 258-62, 619-21.

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6

| Valencia: taming the magnates Y procure que el Santo Oficio conozca destos Moriscos con toda brevedad, pues

debaxo del cielo no paresce que ay otro remedio mejor para que estos sean Christianos y vivan como tales, a lo menos en el publico. Archbishop of Valencia, 1561 (quoted by Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad, p. 55).

Que se diga a los tres Estados del Reino de Valencia que se dexen de pedir, que se les muestre los poderes que tienen los Inquisidores. Suprema to Valencia, 1540 (quoted by Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad, p.141).

Entendemos que esta prision sera de mucho importancia ... y que se seguiran de ella otros buenos effectos de que Nuestro Sefior y su Magestad se sirvan. Ing., Libro, 912, fol. 53. (to Suprema, after 1569 arrest of Admiral of Aragon)

In 1563 the Venetian ambassador claimed that the Inquisition punished malefactors throughout Spain except in the Kingdom of Valencia, “‘where in certain respects this Office has hitherto not had complete authority.” But a decade later one of his successors reported that “‘very recently in Valencia the Inquisition has forced some gentlemen to abjure as suspect of heresy; those,” he specified, “who for their greater profit had permitted their Moriscos to live almost openly as Mohammedans.”! The whole drama of the Holy Office in Valencia during the Aragonese century is compressed between these dates. In 1560 this tribunal was in disarray. Valencia was still recovering from its loss of prestige in the early 1540s, when many convicted Judaizers had successfully — revoked their confessions. Meanwhile, the Inquisition had been unable to assert any effective control over the Moriscos who had been forcibly baptized in the

1520s. But the reversal of their fortunes, which began as the first Venetian ambassador was making his report, was remarkable. Aided by the Protestant scare and later by the Granada rebellion, Valencia’s Holy Office was able to condemn and punish two grandees and even put a local magnate to death for heresy, all during a twelve-year span in Philip II’s reign, without provoking a murmur of opposition. ' Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambascatori veneti al Senato, vil. (Turin, 1981), pp. 345 (Tiepolo, 1563), 617-18 (Donato, 1573).

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Aragonese tribunals In the Kingdom of Valencia the Holy Office did not need to be encased in a fortress, nor was its authority challenged by secular judges. After the popular revolt of the Germanias had been suppressed in the 1520s, Valencia ceased to be troublesome to the Habsburg monarchy. Olivares, in a well-known remark from 1626, claimed that Valencians were softest on their fueros among the three parts of the Crown of Aragon. Constitutional historians explain that Valencia, unlike Catalonia or Aragon, never developed an effective standing committee or Diputacion to represent provincial interests while its Estates were not in session. Castilian Viceroys were installed as early as 1567, and even an Italian Viceroy in 1575, without provoking the political outrage that such “foreigners” generated _ elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon. Valencia’s representative assembly never remotely approached the state of political rebellion that rocked Aragon in 1591 or Catalonia in 1640.

Because of these political weaknesses, the Inquisition sometimes treated Valencia’s political elite with a degree of nonchalance rarely seen elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon. During the great revolt of the Germanias in 1520-22,

they held public autos de fe every year with clockwork regularity. Forcible baptism of Valencia’s Mudejars provoked enormous hostility among this king-

| dom’s nobility, but the Holy Office used the same tactics that had defeated opposition in Aragon in 1520 to break opposition in Valencia a few years later. In February 1525, after local nobles had tried to intimidate key witnesses and

had forcibly prevented an Inquisitor from leaving Valencia a few months earlier, the Supreme Council quickly imprisoned two emissaries of Valencia’s Parliament to the king, holding them captive for about six months. “Tell the. three estates of the Kingdom of Valencia,” arrogantly ordered the Suprema as

early as 1540, “to stop making requests, and show them the powers that. Inquisitors have.” In Valencia, the collapse of authority in the 1540s proved only a temporary setback. After 1563 the Inquisition’s authority went unchallenged, at least by the

_ QOld-Christian majority. Indeed, after 1570 it controlled magnates and noblemen more easily than it managed the kingdom’s huge Moslem minority. In

1492, Valencia contained the second largest group of Mudejars in Spain, ranking immediately behind Granada. After the forced conversion of Granada’s Moslems in 1502, Valencia held the largest Islamic community in the peninsula, which succumbed to mass baptism during and after the revolt of the Germanias. From 1526 until 1570 Valencia had the second largest Morisco community in Habsburg Spain; after Philip II crushed the Alpujarras rebellion and dispersed

the Granada Moriscos throughout the Crown of Castile in the early 1570s, 2 See Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicion espanola. El tribunal de Valencia, 1478-1530 (Barcelona, 1976), pp. 97, 111-13; and, for a radically different view of the 1525 imprisonments, Augustin Redondo, Antonio de Guevara (14802-1545) et l’Espagne de son temps (Geneva, 1976), p. 225, n. 40. Quote from Ricardo Garcfa Carcel, Herejia y sociedad en el siglo XVI. La Inquisicién en

Valencia 1530-1609 (Barcelona, 1980), p. 141.

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Valencia: taming the magnates Valencia became the largest and most important Morisco region of Spain until

the expulsions of 1609. Henri Lapeyre concluded that Moriscos comprised nearly one third of the population of the Kingdom of Valencia in 16009, compared with about one fifth of the Kingdom of Aragon and well under 5% of the rest of Spain. The Moriscos of Valencia were too important to ignore, too numerous to coerce, too segregated to assimilate.. According to the Contreras/Henningsen tabulations, Moriscos accounted for almost 75% of the Valencia tribunal’s business between 1540 and 1615; Valen-

cia provided the largest number of cases of Mohammedanism anywhere in Spain. But as Garcia Carcel warns, “this abundance of trials merely reflects Valencia’s extremely numerous Morisco demography,” and “the sanctions imposed in Valencia reflect a rather clear mildness in imposing the harshest penalties.” Although Valencia provided over 40% of the Moriscos expelled from Spain in 1610, its Inquisition executed barely 10% of all Mohammedans killed at public autos before 1610.*

, Perhaps Valencia’s Holy Office learned a lesson from Granada in the 1560s, when a sharp acceleration in prosecution of Moriscos contributed to the great

Alpujarras uprising. Neither of the two Moriscos condemned to death at Valencia’s only auto held during this rebellion was actually killed, and the four

men condemned to the galleys were similarly spared.° But after the Granadan ~ rebellion had been crushed, almost 300 Moriscos were sent to the galleys for religious offenses during the twenty years after 1576; twenty more joined them as Impedidores del libre y recto ejercicio del Santo Oficio, who were directly involved in murdering suspected informers. This rise in Morisco prosecution followed the Valencian Inquisition’s well-publicized punishment of a few magnates who had been excessively solicitious of their Morisco vassals, which the Venetian ambassador noted in this 1573 report. ‘“DANGEROUS CLASSES’’ IN THE CAPITAL

The Valencian Inquisition did not exhaust all its energies in dealing with Moriscos and noblemen; some of its peculiarities within the Aragonese section were due to the urban sophistication of its unusually large capital city. Boasting 12,000 households around 1600, Valencia was by far the largest city in Spanish 3 Henri Lapeyre, Géographie de l’Espagne morisque (Paris, 1959), pp. 29-32, 49-91. 4 From 1566 until 1609, only twenty-six Moriscos were executed at Valencia for strictly religious reasons; four more were executed for murdering witnesses who had denounced them. Aragon and Navarre combined executed almost 150 Moriscos on religious charges, while at least seventy-five Moriscos died on heresy charges in the Secretariat of Castile (see above, pp. 48, 49). Quote from Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad, p. 216.

_ > Ing., Libro 936, fols. 55-61. Both alfaguis condemned to death in 1570 were executed at Valencia’s next public auto in July 1571, after the Granada rebellion had been crushed: Inq., Libro ,

, 127

325, fols. 278-79. See also Emilia Salvador, Felipe 7 y los moriscos valencianos. La repercusién de la revuelta granadina (1568-1570) (Valladolid, 1987).

Aragonese tribunals

Aragon during the Habsburg era, almost half again as large as Barcelona and about twice as large as Saragossa. Though far behind sixteenth-century Seville in population, and lacking the amenities of a national capital like Valladolid or later Madrid, Valencia was nonetheless one of Spain’s most important cities. It contained few Moriscos but many unbaptized Moslem slaves; large numbers of French immigrants thronged its streets in search of high wages; and its univer-

sity was the oldest and most important center for learning of the Crown of Aragon. Each of these groups — the slaves, the immigrant workers, the - academic intellectuals tinged with Erasmianism — came under close surveillance from the local Holy Office for various reasons, together with many other

residents. } ,

As the largest city on Spain’s eastern coast, Valencia had a sizable converso population in the fifteenth century; a German traveler in 1494 estimated that converted Jews comprised one fourth of the city, including many important merchant dynasties. Before 1530, the Inquisition executed more “Judaizers” at Valencia than anywhere else in the Crown of Aragon. As late as 1539, three conversos from Alicante were executed for whipping a crucifix in their home. However, a backlash developed soon afterwards, when some prominent Valencian clerics urged other conversos to repudiate their confessions and protested to

the Inquisitor-General. The Suprema then appointed a special committee which spent three years investigating over forty people who had revoked their confessions. After this scandal, prosecutions of Judaizers seem to have dropped sharply in Valencia, although a few were still executed during the 1550s.° Because Valencia was both a publishing center and a major port, its Inqui-

sition became the first in Spain to attack both Luther’s writings and his followers. In September 1521, only four months after the first major inquisito-

rial edict against Luther, the Valencia tribunal had collected enough of his “books and writings” to be burned at the next public auto. The first person penanced for Lutheranism in Valencia, in 1524, was a German merchant, but a local Augustinian monk was also arrested on this charge as early as 1528. In 1528 a Flemish painter who denied the existence of Purgatory and the usefulness of confession became the first person to suffer formal reconciliation and “perpetual” (seven-year) imprisonment for Lutheranism, while next year an Anabaptist-style millenarian named Melchior of Wurttemberg, who admitted having visited Luther, received 100 lashes for prophesying that the world would be drowned in blood within three years. Such episodes merely demonstrate the 6 On the general situation of Valencia’s conversos, see Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicién espatiola, pp. 167-75; see also Miinzer’s account from 1494 in J. Garcia Mercadal, ed., Viajes de extranjeros por Espana y Portugal, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1962), 1, pp.322, 342. On the Alicante bleeding-crucifix scandal, see Juan B. Perales, Decades de la Historia de la ... ciudad y Reino de Valencia, 3 vols. (Valencia, 1880), 11, p. 776; the backlash from it is described by Henry Charles Lea. A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York, 1906-08), 1, p. 584.

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Valencia: taming the magnates cosmopolitanism of a great Mediterranean port city. More ominously, as early as _ 1552 there were warnings from a Seville (the only city in Spain twice as large as : Valencia) about the heretical leanings of a prominent Valencian nobleman.’ The city of Valencia harbored other sophisticated heresies such as materia-

lism or ecumenicism. At the 1567 auto, for example, a local student named Miguel Pérez was formally reconciled with confiscation of his property, whipped, and ordered to wear a penitential garment “perpetually” (i.e., for seven years) for saying that “there was nothing except birth and death,” denying all forms of an afterlife. Such cases were rare in Spain, compared with the urban

centers of late Renaissance Italy. In 1574, a Franciscan named Fray Jayme Sanchez had to perform a public abjuration in church and received two years of

confinement for a remarkable sermon opposing the doctrine of limpieza de sangre. Sanchez (whom the Inquisitors investigated unsuccessfully for converso

ancestors) had claimed that under current rules, Jesus could not become a canon at Toledo or even a city mayor, and added that many Jews had gone to heaven while many Christians roasted in Hell. Heretics of this type could rarely

be found outside large university cities like Valencia, where Erasmianism flourished into the reign of Philip II under the leadership of liberal clerics.® Even after Valencia’s converted Jews had been assimilated or exterminated, the city’s size and economic importance continued to attract ambitious newcomers, including Portuguese conversos after 1580. Such “New Christians,” mostly descendants of Sephardic Jews who had entered Portugal from Castile in 1492, turned up in the records of the Valencia Inquisition sooner than anywhere else in the Crown of Aragon. Valencia’s city council, which rarely commented on autos de fe, noted a spectacular performance featuring six executions in effigy

and four live victims on April 19, 1587. They ignored the Moriscos and sodomites who provided the ordinary menu at such events; what really caught their attention was the public penance of a Portuguese merchant named Hernan Vazquez “for the law of Moses, which caused great admiration in this city, since by the good grace of Our Lord such errors have not been seen in this city for many years.” Nine more Portuguese conversos appeared at Valencian autos during the next six years, with a haberdasher sent to the galleys and five fugitives executed in effigy. Numerically insignificant and economically peripheral, Portuguese conversos disappeared permanently from the records of Valencia’s 7 Lea, Il, pp. 421-22, provides the best introduction to Valencia’s precocious preoccupation with “Lutheranism.” See also Ing., Libro 317, fols. 263—63v; Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicién espanola, p. 203; Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad, p. 331. See Inq., Libro 911, fol. 30 for the 1552 warnings about Don Gaspar Centelles’ Protestant sympathies. 8 Ing., Libro g11, fols. 748-53v (#15 of 1567 auto); having escaped from Valencia’s House of Penitents, Pérez was executed in effigy in 1575 as a “relapsed Lutheran”: Libro 936, fol. 126v. See also ibid., fol. 115, on Sanchez.

12g

Aragonese tribunals Inquisition by 1595.? But in other parts of the Crown of Aragon, no Portuguese ‘“‘New Christians” appeared at autos de fe until forty years later.

NOBLE LAWBREAKERS AND HERESY | Philip II used Valencia’s Holy Office in order to punish some unruly magnates with more severity than his other royal courts could impose. Noble houses which were deeply stained with banditry (one of Valencia’s worst problems, making the

streets of the capital unsafe until the 1580s) provided the most illustrious prisoners for the Valencian Inquisition. Inquisitorial humbling of such noblemen began with the arrest of the most prominent native Protestant ever captured in the Crown of Aragon: Don Gaspar de Centelles. Sometime courtier

of Charles V, overlord of huge estates in Sardinia and member of one of Valencia’s most powerful families, he had been briefly banished by the Viceroy

in 1554 for his part in the feud between the Figuerola/Borja and Pardo de la Casta/Centelles clans. But his downfall came from his epistolary activities during his involuntary residence on his estates at Pedralba. Valencia’s Inquisitors knew even before his banishment that Don Gaspar had corresponded with crypto-Protestant circles in Seville and even with a philo-Protestant in Sardinia since about 1550; when his enemies denounced him for continuing his contacts with suspicious people, the Inquisitors received permission from the Suprema to arrest Centelles in the spring of 1563.!° Don Gaspar’s sizable property, much of it in Sardinia, was sequestered. His

; confiscated correspondence supplied adequate evidence of his guilt, despite testimony from many Valencian noble families and from important Valencian clerics. Friends provided him with copies of Erasmus’ works and even tried to find a copy of Rabelais’ Pantagruel (otherwise unknown in Spain) to lighten the boredom of his exile. Don Gaspar preserved letters that he had been asked to

burn in order to avoid the wrath of the “satraps” of the Holy Office. After several months of interrogation, he refused to sign his attorney’s statement recognizing the Pope as head of the church and abandoned the attempt at a formal defense. He was executed at the 1564 auto."! After Centelles’ trial, the Valencia tribunal attacked other prominent defend9 Salvador Carreras Zacares, ed., Libro de Memorias ... de Valencia, 2 vols. (Valencia, 1935), 0,

p. 1002 (quote); also Inq., Libro 937, fols. 1~44 (#82, 88), 69-109v (#44, 49, 50, 80, 81), 109v—23 (#40-42), 125-61v (#14), 255v-90 (#105), 468v-80 (#15). Only half a dozen different families were involved. 10 Sebastian Garcia Martinez, Bandolerismo, pirateria y control de Moriscos en Valencia durante el reinado de Felipe II (Valencia, 1977), pp. 19-20. 11 See Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad, p. 336. Centelles’ case deserves a special study, since he

was the most important philo-Protestant left in Spain after the elimination of the Seville and : Valladolid groups in 1559. For useful information about him, see Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l’Espagne (Geneva and Paris, 1937), pp. 770-75; see also Universitats- und Landesbibliothek Halle, Ms. Yc 2a, 20 (11), fols. 25-32.

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ants. Two of his brothers were arrested with him. One, also charged with ‘“Lutheranism,” was finally released in 1567 with a minor fine. The other, Don

Christobal de Centelles, received a fine of 400 ducats and six months of imprisonment for defending the rights of his Moriscos to wear Arabic clothes and practice consanguine marriages. By January 1567 Don Christobal was considered ‘“‘a very good penitent” and received the Inquisition’s permission to live among Moriscos.!4 Beyond the Centelles clan lay other important targets. In 1567 the Suprema permitted the Valencia tribunal to attack the powerful Benamir brothers of Benalguazil. They labeled Don Hernando and Don Cosme de Benamir “as good Moors as Mohammed himself,” even though both had the king’s permission to wear swords and had been made familiars of the Holy Office. Don Hernando had far overstepped the boundaries by polygamously marrying a North African ex-slave, who had borne him two or three children, in a Moslem ceremony. His mistress, who had previously been warned by the Inquisition to stay out of all Morisco communities, was executed as a relapsed heretic at the 1567 auto; Don Hernando appeared in the 1568 auto.'? Don Cosme, who had also been imprisoned, charged with reading the Koran to his household at dinner and with hiring a nadara or sorceress to find some buried pearls, was soon freed on a huge bail in the summer of 1568. He went to Madrid, where he purchased a pardon for himself and his brothers from the king and the Inquisitor-General, reportedly for the enormous sum of 7,000

ducats. After the Granadan revolt had been crushed, the Valencia tribunal attempted to revive his case in 1571, but the Suprema ordered them to drop it and send the papers to Madrid. In 1577, when the prosecution of. Valencia’s Moriscos entered its most acute phase, these documents were returned. Despite his complaints that after spending so much money in Madrid, he now “had to pay a second time for the lies of witnesses,” Don Cosme’s case was reopened, and he was formally reconciled in February 1578. When first interrogated in January 1568, Don Cosme de Benamir remarked that, although he had been baptized as a child, he did not consider himself a Christian but a Moor and had performed Moorish rituals all his life, even after he had become a familiar. At his final session a decade later, he was able to repeat all the major Christian prayers accurately, in both Latin and Castilian.'* The most important Morisco notable in Valencia had been tamed. Valencia’s Inquisitors next pursued a defendant whose rank as a Grandee 12 Inq., Libro g11, fol. 743; Garcia Carcel, Herejta y sociedad, pp. 336-39.

'3 On Don Hernando’s mistress, see Ing., Libro g11, fols. 424-24v and 748-53v (#59 of 1567 auto) for her execution. On the three Benamir brothers, see Inq., Libro 936, fols. 43-48v (#70 of 1568 auto); 50-52v (#35-36 of 1570 auto). On Morisco weddings in Valencia, see Bernard Vincent, Minortas y marginados en la Espana del siglo XVI (Granada, 1987), esp. pp. 55-57, 68—69. '4+ Basic documents on their trials printed by Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, Los Moriscos espanoles y su expulsion, 2 vols. (Valencia, 1901), 1, pp. 549-69, and summarized by Lea, 11, pp. 362-65.

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made him untouchable by most Spanish tribunals. With the outbreak of the Granadan rebellion in 1568, they finally struck an old nemesis, against whom _ they had been accumulating evidence for a quarter-century. They had first investigated Don Sancho de Cardona, Admiral of Aragon, for overt favoritism

towards his Morisco vassals back in 1542. Don Sancho, head of one of the greatest houses in the Crown of Aragon, had been denounced by a parish priest

for preventing his Moriscos from being baptized for sixteen years after the general conversion of 1526. The famous missionary Fray Bartolomeo de los Angeles added more testimony in 1544 about how the admiral’s agents tried to prevent him from baptizing or preaching at another of Don Sancho’s villages. !5 In 1563 the Valencia tribunal learned from the rector of the Val de Seta that the admiral had rebuilt a mosque at Guadalest for the use of his vassals, and

_ then threatened a neighborhood priest who had tried to paint crosses on the building. One of the admiral’s servants also testified that his patron had not made an Easter confession for at least twenty years, retreating to his Morisco estates during Holy Week each year. The most damaging testimony against him came from a Valencia lawyer, who claimed the admiral had protested to Rome

about the illegalities of forced baptisms among Valencia’s Moriscos. This informer, Dr. Tarrega, added that Don Sancho had once recommended to an Aragonese Morisco, reconciliado by the Inquisition, that he go to the Turk and persuade him to write a letter to the Pope warning that since they permitted Christians to live as Christians, so the Christians should allow the Moors to live as Moors, and that otherwise he would force all the Christians in Turkey to live as Moors, because in this way the novelties that [the Inquisition] wanted to impose would stop.

Nor was that all. On another occasion, added Dr. Tarrega, when talking about recent affairs in France, the admiral said that If I had lands along the French border, I would find a remedy for the Moriscos’ problems by letting in some of those [Frenchmen] who have revolted, whom they call Lutherans or Huguenots, because if they entered Spain and gave me some problems and stirred up revolts (revolviendose la tierra), nobody would say anything to us about the Moriscos.

Soon after the Granada rebellion broke out, the Valencia tribunal located the reconciliado whom Dr. Tarrega mentioned; he confirmed that the Admiral of Aragon had urged. Morisco leaders to protest their conversion to the Pope as well as to the king. Valencia’s most prominent Morisco prisoner, Don Hernando Abenamir, confirmed the admiral’s desire to protest the Moriscos’ condition to 15 Key documents about the arrest and trial of the Admiral of Aragon were published by Boronat, Moriscos y su expulsion, 1, pp. 443-69. See esp. pp. 446-48 (Tarrega’s charges) and 466—69

| (official sentence).

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Valencia: taming the magnates | the Pope and claimed that Don Sancho had actually begun by sounding out the Bishop of Segorbe. Don Hernando also blamed the admiral for the recent order to disarm Valencia’s Moriscos, because of the mosque he had recently rebuilt at Guadalest; his vassals paid him 10 bras each year as rent, “as they had been accustomed to do when they were Moors.” Armed with such evidence, the Valencia Inquisition requested permission to arrest the admiral after the outbreak of the great Alpujarras revolt in Granada.

By January 1569, after consulting with the king, the Suprema ordered him imprisoned in the house next door to the Inquisition’s palace. The admiral had to pay for the special guards around the house, and a new door was cut in the wall to connect with the Inquisition’s audience room. The old man — he was

then seventy-three — entered this “prison” on January 24, denying all the charges against him. His attorney took several months to prepare Don Sancho’s defense, while the Morisco revolt continued to rage in Granada. The admiral’s

official sentence was approved by the Supreme Court that December. They spared the old man from appearing at an auto, but imposed a private penance, levied a large fine of 2,000 ducats, and imprisoned him in a monastery in Castile. In October 1570, after the Granadan revolt had been crushed, the admiral was moved to a Valencian convent, but he was not released from

captivity until November 1572.!° | Although the admiral’s punishment and humiliation at the hands of the Inquisition was unparalleled among the aristocracy of the Crown of Aragon, lesser Valencian nobles had several brushes with the Holy Office immediately _ after his conviction. The Baron of Carlet, Don Francisco de Castelvi, was

imprisoned for accepting bribes to allow Moslems to practice consanguine , marriages and to “unmake” Christian weddings. Don Luis Pallas, Baron of Cortes, and the Abbot of Valldigna were fined and imprisoned in monasteries in 1571 for allowing the use of Islamic law among their vassals. Don Christobal

Mufioz, Baron of Ayodar, who had dared to shelter a notorious alfaqui con: demned to death by the Inquisition, was convicted in 1573; he received a year’s imprisonment, four years of banishment from his estates, and a fine equal to that

imposed on the admiral. The admiral’s family, who had escaped Valencian justice before his disgrace at the hands of the Inquisition, suffered afterwards: his son and successor was executed in 1577 for raping some nuns.!7 16 Ing., Libro 325, fols. 114, 117, 122, 160, 173v, 189—89v, 201v, 243, 259; Libro 326, fol. 58; Libro 936, fol. 52v; Libro 912, fols. 40—40v, 53-53v, 107, 131. Valencia dealt with the Suprema at least ten times during the admiral’s trial and imprisonment. 17 Raphael Carrasco, “Le Refus d’assimilation des morisques, aspects politiques et culturels d’aprés les sources inquisitoriales,” in Les Morisques et leur temps (Paris, 1983), pp. 201-02 n. 69, collects several references to noblemen’s trials. On Mufioz, see also Inq., Libro 936, fol. 114Vv. See Garcia Martinez, Bandolerismo, pp. 5 4, 66, on the violent deaths of both of the admiral’s sons.

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Aragonese tribunals } A GRANDEE CHARGED WITH SODOMY

Another grandee was arrested by the Valencia Inquisition while the Admiral of Aragon was still serving his sentence in Valencia. In May 1572, Don Pedro Luis Galceran de Borgia, Grand Master of the Valencian chivalric Order of Montesa and half-brother to St. Francis Borgia (the future Jesuit general), was arrested by the Valencia Inquisition on accusations of sodomy — the first man ever tried by the Valencia tribunal on this particular charge. He had been arrested after a

denunciation by one of his chivalric brothers, Don Miguel de Centelles, younger brother of Don Gaspar and himself a prisoner of the Inquisition on» heresy charges in the recent past. As Don Pedro Luis’ wife observed, “‘fire is not

more contrary to water than the Centelles to the Borgias.” They had been feuding for decades; together with Don Gaspar de Centelles, the Master of Montesa had been banished from Valencia in 1554.'° But the Master of Montesa also owed his arrest to his close friendship to the Count of Ribagorza, who was about to be executed in Castile — officially on charges of sodomy, but in reality from a personal vendetta by his brother-in-law the Count of Chinchon, secretary of the Council of Aragon, who was trying to avenge his sister’s murder by Ribagorza. Not only had the Master of Montesa given bond for Ribagorza in Madrid, but he had apparently shared Ribagorza’s passion for an amazingly insolent picaro and prostitute named Martin de Castro. This theatrical rogue blithely informed his judges that he “never rode on poor

men,.only on lords who gave him lots of money” and boasted to an Inquisitor , that he had made more money with his penis than the Inquisitor had with his church bells. The Supreme Council of the Inquisition extradited Castro from his secular prison in Madrid to Valencia only a few weeks after learning of

Centelles’ denunciation; Centelles, in turn, denounced his order’s Grand Master only after learning of Castro’s arrest in Madrid on charges of sodomy.!? The exclusively Valencian Order of Montesa was in a state of remarkable chaos, a consequence of vendettas among the local aristocracy which had led to the assassination of a duke’s son in 1554 and the public execution of a Borgia for this murder eight years later. The family politics of the Borgias had made Don

Pedro Luis Comendador Mayor of the Order of Montesa at age twelve and , Grand Master at seventeen, after a bitterly disputed election. Although the '8 ‘The best introduction to the trial of the Master of Montesa is by Rafael Carrasco, [nquisicién y represién sexual en Valencia (Barcelona, 1986), pp. 195-204 (quote, p. 200). He is, however,

uninterested in the procedural aspects of the Valencian Inquisition, which can be followed through the voluminous correspondence of the Suprema about this case. See Garcia Martinez, Pandaversi, pp. 19-20, for Don Pedro Luis’ banishment in 1554 along with his enemy Gaspar 19 Carrasco, Inquisicion y represion sexual en Valencia, pp. 196-97. See also Inq., Libro 326, fol. 24v.

where the Suprema told Valencia in March 1572 (before Montesa’s arrest) that they should collect a debt of the Count of Ribagorza from a bank draft of Montesa’s in their possession, because “‘el Maestre de Montesa ha dado en esta corte recaudo” for him.

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Valencia: taming the magnates : knights of Montesa supposedly observed vows of chastity, their Grand Master

had married one of the Queen’s Portuguese ladies-in-waiting in 1554.79 | As one might expect, the trial of a grandee who doubled as head of a chivalric

order proceeded at a leisurely pace and raised numerous procedural issues. Moreover, the fact that this was Valencia’s first sodomy trial made suitable precedents extremely difficult to find. The Master of Montesa had originally been put in the home of the Inquisition’s constable, but was soon ordered moved to the ordinary prison. Within a few months his wife, the Marquesa of Navarres, successfully petitioned the Suprema to move him to the Inquisitor’s apartments, because the ordinary prisons were full of “Frenchmen and relapsed Moriscos, and had a bad smell.” By July 1572 the Inquisition agreed that the Master could run his order’s business from prison, so long as they saw all his letters. Five months later they permitted him to talk to official visitors in the Inquisitors’ presence.*! During 1573 more problems arose. In April Don Galceran’s most important accuser, Martin de Castro, was ordered back to Madrid, “being needed there in

order to expedite the trial of the Count of Ribagorza.” The Valencia tribunal had finally obtained a copy of Aragon’s rules for conducting sodomy trials, which they were attempting to follow in most respects; but the Suprema agreed with them that in special cases like the Master of Montesa, they should not read , the full testimony of key accusers to the defendant. In June the Master finally obtained a copy of the 1524 Papal bull under which the Valencia Inquisition

, claimed jurisdiction over him. His lawyers, accompanied by inquisitorial officials, were permitted to go to Montesa and make copies of the special privileges and immunities he claimed, while he himself was moved back to the alguacal’s house. The next six months were spent on procedural matters, as his

lawyers prepared a brief which denied the Inquisition’s right to try him. In September the Valencia tribunal was ordered to spend no more than one day a week working on this case. The Suprema predictably denied the Master’s claim

to exemption in December.” :

His loyal and energetic wife submitted at least five petitions during the year 1574, aimed mainly at speeding up his trial, all of which the Valencia tribunal duly forwarded to the Suprema. The Master gained a few petty concessions. His guards were reduced to two, in order to lessen his expenses, and he was permitted to hear Mass from the Inquisition’s chaplain in the audience room. But the Suprema repeated its rulings that he, unlike ordinary sodomy defendants could 20 Carrasco, [nquisicién y represion sexual en Valencia, pp. 197-202. 21 Inq., Libro 326, fols. 31v, 35-35v, 36v, 41v (quote), 61, 77Vv. 22 Inq., Libro 326, fols. 108v, 111, 111v, 116, 122v, 130, 132V, 153-53V, 15gv. On Castro’s return,

_ see Inq., Libro 913, fol. 195; after incriminating the Count of Ribagorza, Castro was burned at Madrid in 1574: see Carrasco, Inquisicion y represion sexual en Valencia, p. 196. This author (p. 70)

fails to recognize that the Master of Montesa was correct when he told the Valencian Inquisition that he was the first person to be tried there for sodomy.

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Aragonese tribunals not be told the names of his accusers and that he could only perform his official business as Master of his order in the presence of an Inquisitor. By December 1574 Don Pedro finally saw a copy of the official charges against him and began preparing his official defense. This process filled the next three months. The Inquisition refused to allow his servants to testify in his defense, because they were unlikely to maintain secrecy; but they did allow him to take testimony at his

family seat. The Valencians earned an official reprimand from Madrid for illegally intercepting a letter from his sister, who was the abbess of a local Carmelite convent. Finally, goaded by more petitions from his wife, the tribunal wrapped up his case in June 1575 — slightly more than three years after his arrest — and sent a summary report to Madrid.?4

One major step remained, namely voting his official sentence in Valencia. More procedural problems now cropped up concerning who was allowed to vote on this sentence. In April, Don Pedro’s good friend the Archbishop of Valencia

(the future Saint Juan Ribera) had been barred from voting in person on a technicality. Confusion remained about whether or not the “ordinary judges” mentioned in the 1524 Papal brief, under which the Master of Montesa was being tried, included Valencia’s prelates, the head of the Order of Calatrava (a relative of Borgia’s), or the royal Audiencia of the Kingdom of Valencia. After another two months’ delay, goaded both from Madrid and from the defendant’s doctors, Valencia’s archbishop finally named an Augustinian monk and calificador as his representative. The official sentence of the Valencia tribunal arrived in Madrid on October 15, 1575; it was confirmed and returned to Valencia by special messenger within a month. Like the Admiral of Aragon, the Master of Montesa was not required to appear in an auto; but he was condemned to ten years of house arrest at the seat of his order at Montesa and fined 6,000 ducats (payable in six annual installments, since not even a grandee was expected to raise that much money at once).2* The case of the Master of Montesa did not end here. Two petitions from Don Pedro Luis had reached the Suprema by January 1576, accompanied by yet another petition from his wife. By July 1576, he was required to spend only two days each week at Montesa. In January 1577 the Suprema finally received satisfactory guarantees for payment for his fine, which he had tried to have underwritten by his wife. The following month he was granted two months’ leave in order to tour his estates and ten days more to visit his nephew, the

current Duke of Gandia. Eight months later he was permitted to reside wherever he wished within the lands belonging to the Order of Montesa. The

23 Inq., Libro 326, fols. 171, 178v, 180v, 185v, 206, 208, 209v, 221V, 222, 241-4 IV, 243V, 246, 252, 258, 260v. 24 Inq., Libro 326, fols. 271v, 277v, 279, 290, 291, 293V, 298—98v, 306. For his sentence, see Inq., Lib. 913, fol. 571-—71v, and Carrasco, [nquisicién y represion sexual en Valencia, p. 203.

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6,000 ducats were actually paid by June 1579, although three months later he reportedly violated his reclusion by going to the walls of Valencia city. Ten years after his arrest, the whole unpleasant episode was quietly buried. Early in 1582 the Suprema requested a copy of the entire proceedings against him, including his 1579 travels, as a preliminary to approving the Master of Montesa’s request to return to Madrid in February. Don Pedro Luis resumed a normal courtier’s life throughout the 1580s. He made his son Comendador Mayor and attempted to resign the Mastership in his favor in 1583. Philip II quashed this attempt and coerced Don Pedro Luis into resigning in the King’s

favor in 1587, thus incorporating the Order of Montesa into the crown alongside Spain’s larger chivalric orders. As his reward for this concession, the

last Master of Montesa was finally restored to full royal favor and became Viceroy of Catalonia in 1590. When the king visited Valencia in 1585, the Master of Montesa was among the very first of the dignitaries to greet him, and the only one whom Philip II embraced warmly.2° As one would expect, important consequences ensued from the long trial and eventual condemnation of the Master of Montesa. First, Valencia had belatedly joined the group of inquisitorial tribunals conducting sodomy trials. By January 1573 they received approval from the Suprema to include this offense in the annual Edict of Faith read in all Valencian churches during Lent. At their next

public auto four months later, two Trinitarian monks were defrocked and executed for sodomy, while a Morisco who had attempted to rape a Catholic boy was whipped and sent to the galleys for six years.2® Over the next sixty years

Valencia led all Aragonese tribunals in the pursuit and execution of homosexuals, largely because of the size and sophistication of its capital city. _ THE ASSAULT ON VALENCIAN MORISCOS

Moreover, the humbling of one of Valencia’s largest landowners reinforced the lesson already taught by the imprisonment and large fine levied on the Admiral of Aragon a few years before. If two grandees could be punished by this tribunal within five years, then nobody was immune from attack by the Inquisition of Valencia. Well-publicized punishments of lesser nobles like Mufioz demonstrated that it had now become dangerous to defend the rights of Moriscos. The events of 1568-75 formed the prelude to an accelerated inquisitorial campaign 25 Inq., Libro 326, fol. 310; Libro 327, fols, 3, 11, 34v, 72, 80, 114, 209, 226; Libro 328, fol. 10. In

the end, therefore, the Master of Montesa aged almost ten years between his arrest and his return to court, and paid his enormous fine in full. His warm reception by Philip II in 1585 was described by the Flemish archer Enrique Cock; see Garcia Mercadal, Viajes, p. 13.99. 26 Inq., Libro, 913, fol. 113; Ing., Legajo 502 (2), fols. 266~—70, gives Valencia’s modo de proceder against sodomites, copied from Aragonese rules in May and June of 1573. On the executions, see

Inqg., Libro 936, fols. 73-85. Both executed monks were Castilians from Seville; although another Trinitarian monk was killed for sodomy at the 1574 auto, no clerics died for this crime at Valencia after the trial of the Master of Montesa had been concluded.

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Aragonese tribunals against Valencian Moriscos during the next twenty years. Among nearly 1,000 Moriscos who appeared in the fifteen recorded autos between 1579 and 1596, only six died; but over forty fugitive Moriscos were executed in effigy and nearly 300 men were sent to the galleys. Between 1584 and 1587 the Valencia Inquisitors held only one auto at which only a handful of Moriscos received severe punishments. Valencia’s Holy Office spent much of this period dealing with a bogus conspiracy begun by an agent provocateur named Gil Pérez. A Morisco from the Aragonese city of Albarracin, he had found work at Valencia as a prison guard. Gil Pérez appears to have been a genuinely liminal character, someone capable of behaving either as a Catholic or as a Moslem, depending on the situation. On the one side he had gained the confidence of important Valencian clerics and had collaborated frequently with

the Inquisition. On the other side, he retained many Islamic objections to Catholic theology. As one of his Morisco denouncers noted, Pérez could make secret signals to Morisco prisoners at Valencia enabling them to die by Islamic precepts, “without anyone’s understanding what he was doing, because everybody thought he was a Christian.”’7 Gil Pérez appeared before the Valencia Holy Office early in 1582, excitedly

denouncing a complicated Turkish conspiracy to provoke a rising of the Valencian and Aragonese Moriscos, aided on one side by the Algerians and on the other side by the Protestants of Béarn; even the Portuguese were expected to help. Pérez described the Arabic letters sent from Algiers by three expatriate Valencians, outlining in gory detail a mass rising on Good Friday, “while the dogs assemble for their heresies, being unarmed and careless.”8 The Valencia Inquisition accordingly busied itself throughout 1582 and 1583 in collecting information about the expected rising. In all, more than two dozen Valencian Moriscos had been identified as ringleaders, and arrests began to be made in great secrecy, both at Valencia and at Saragossa. However, by mid-1583 the Saragossa tribunal had failed to find any confirmation whatever to his stories, although they had dutifully arrested Luis Moreno, whom Pérez claimed was the Moriscos’ principal liaison with the Béarnese. ‘The Archbishop of Saragossa told the Inquisitor-General that, contrary to Gil Pérez’s assertions, Moreno had not visited Béarn in the recent past. The Dean of Segorbe confirmed that none of _ the Saragossa prisoners had confessed anything about the rising, adding that the Aragonese Inquisitors mistrusted Pérez, an informer whom they already knew.?? 27 The best available introduction to the Gil Pérez conspiracy is in Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad, pp. 98-102 (quote, p. 102).

28 The fullest account of Pérez’s original story is in the report to the Suprema by the Valencian tribunal in January 1583: British Library, Egerton Ms. 1511, fols. gQ—29; quote from Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad, p.g9.

| 29 See “lo que resulta contra Gil Pérez” in British Library, Egerton Ms 1511, fols. 32—46, and the Archbishop of Saragossa’s letter of May 1583 about Moreno in ibid., fols. 47-48; also Inq., Libro 328, fols. 147, 151, 153V, 154, 156V—57.

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Valencia: taming the magnates | By January 1584, the Suprema anxiously made a second request to Valencia to “get to the bottom of the Gil Pérez business.” Two weeks later they ordered the arrest of seven or eight ringleaders in Aragon and Valencia, including Pérez himself, while pressing Valencia to act rapidly. In February 1584 the Supreme Council of the Inquisition formally approved the Valencia tribunal’s sentences against Pérez and his principal associates. But at this point the whole business finally unraveled. A key witness confessed that Gil Pérez had bewitched him

into giving perjured testimony about the rising. The other trials were then reopened on April 27; the Suprema admitted to Valencia that they simply could not get to the bottom of this business. But soon other witnesses also began to

retract their testimony, and in June the Suprema requested to send all these trials for revision. Between December 1584 and February 1585, everyone who had been accused by Gil Pérez was freed on bail.7° Meanwhile the Saragossa Inquisition had pursued its end of the investigation. Luis Moreno finally confessed to Moslem practices (of which he had not been accused) after spending thirty months in the Aljaferia of Saragossa. He therefore appeared at the 1586 auto to make a public recantation and spent two years in a House of Penitents; two years later this informer’s career reached a suitably

squalid end when he was put to death after a Logrofio auto as a relapsed

apostate.3!

Gil Pérez’s final sentence was approved by the Suprema in September 1586, and he accordingly appeared in Valencia’s 1587 auto along with his wife, his chief associate Alonso Cornejo (a tailor who had failed to become an alfaqui),

and half a dozen Moriscos who had given perjured testimony about this “conspiracy.” The three perjurors who had compromised themselves most deeply (including the one who had recanted first) received life sentences to the galleys, along with Pérez and Cornejo. Pérez’s wife, who knew many details of

his fabrications but refused to inform on him, received a whipping and a penitential garment. Pérez himself avoided execution by making a copious confession of his misdeeds, including his Morisco beliefs. Three other perjurors each received six years at the oars. This plot involved fourteen counts of bribery

by Pérez and had led to the detention of twenty-three wealthy Moriscos; all

eight of the principal authors and perjurors were jointly held responsible for | paying the costs of these false arrests.32 Overall, the bogus Morisco rising concocted by Pérez and Cornejo was the worst fiasco of the Valencian tribunal

in almost fifty years, ever since the conversos had begun repudiating their confessions in 1540.

30 Ing., Libro 328, fols. 174v, 182, 183, 197v, 227v, 233; Libro 915, fols. 184-87; Garcia Carcel, Herejta y sociedad, pp. 101-02.

31 Inq., Libro 989, fol. 228; on Moreno’s death, Libro 834, fol. 388 (#1 of 1588 Logrofio auto). 32 Inq., Libro 937, fols. 1-44 (#1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 79, 80).

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Aragonese tribunals PUNISHING HOMOSEXUALITY AT VALENCIA

If the trial and condemnation of the Admiral of Aragon helped the Valencia Inquisition to prosecute their Morisco population more forcefully than before, sentencing the Master of Montesa had an even more direct impact on their prosecution of homosexuals. But Valencia’s record here is a curious one. For about fifteen years after Don Pedro Luis Galceran de Borgia was arrested, they

pursued and punished a sizable contingent of sodomites, with two dozen executions divided almost equally between homosexuality and bestiality. From 1590 until 1620, the Valencia Inquisition averaged only two arrests per year for sodomy, and executed only four men in thirty years. After 1620 the pace of such trials increased. Five executions in four years preceded the remarkable frenzy of 1625, when twelve men were executed for sodomy at Valencia’s last spectacu-

lar auto de fe. ,

The savage outbreak of 1625 had two distinct causes. Part of the responsibility lies with the Suprema in Madrid, which had expressed strong displeasure in November 1624 about the way Valencia was handling and reporting its sodomy trials. Commenting on Valencia’s annual relacién de causas for 1623, which included no fewer than sixteen sodomy trials from 1622 and 1623 (but no executions), the Suprema claimed that “most of the trials for unnatural sin have been poorly substantiated, since many who should have been tortured for this were not.”?3 Armed with such instructions, the Valencia Inquisition proceeded to torture its sodomy suspects more energetically over the next few years.

The second cause for the 1625 outbreak was purely local. On May 1, 1625, | the Valencian Inquisitors arrested a twenty-year-old man in Orihuela. (Politically part of the Kingdom of Valencia but belonging to the Murcia Inquisition,

Orihuela extradited its sodomites to the city of Valencia.) Nicolas Gonzales turned out to be the same type of garrulous prostitute that Martin de Castro had been fifty years before. When Gonzales began talking, the carnage was specta-

cular. As the Valencia tribunal noted in summarizing his trial, he not only confessed to acting as paciente for the eight men who accused him, but also accused more than sixty other men and boys. Gonzales, they added, furnished boys for sex, renting them to off-duty slaves and freemen alike; as one of his accusers put it, he was e alcahuete de todos and bore sole responsibility for this panic. Despite his claim to be under the age of majority when he performed all his homosexual acts, Gonzales was executed because of such aggravating circumstances.°* Several slaves were arrested at Valencia in 1625. As one of them had pointed 33 Ing., Libro 945, fol. 1o1v; see Carrasco, [nquisicién y represion sexual en Valencia, p.85, for the almost identical marginal note on Libro 939, fol. 525. 34 Ing., Libro g40, fol. 50 (Gonzales’ sentence); also Carrasco, /nquisicién y represion sexual en Valencia, pp. 233-38, for testimony against him.

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| Valencia: taming the magnates out to Gonzales and repeated to the Inquisitors, “you people have freedom and even bosses who will look out for you and get you off, but with us slaves it is just

capture and burn straight away.” This forty-year-old Turk, who had been captured eleven years ago and had served four years in Valencia as coachman for the son of a Viceroy of Mallorca, was arrested five days after Gonzales. As he had predicted, he was burned within a few months. The dozen men sent to the stake after the unusual auto de fe of November 1625 included five slaves born in

Africa or Asia and two other slaves born in Spain but expelled in 1609; only three were Old Christians of working-class backgrounds.*° Only two of the other thirty men arrested for sodomy in 1625 and 1626 were slaves, both from Arabic lands. One of them unsuccessfully tried to escape early

in 1626 and then hanged himself in his cell, while the other confessed under torture. He failed to ratify it afterwards, but he was executed anyway later in 1626. Only one of the twenty-eight Catholics died with him. They included men

like Dr. Pedro de Carmona, an elderly archpriest who had previously been condemned for sodomy by the vicar of Madrid and tried for sodomy by secular judges at Zamora; the Inquisitors let him off with two years in a monastery and a fine of 200 ducats.?° As Valencia’s great sodomy hunt unfolded, both the Suprema in Madrid and

the secular judges in Valencia became visibly perturbed. On July 15, 1625, Valencia reported that many men of all estados had been accused; twenty-one were presently imprisoned on such charges, while others had fled to avoid arrest. Rumors soon spread:as far as Barcelona that no fewer than forty men, including “the flower of the city and some lawyers of the Real Consell,” had been arrested for their “unspeakable dealings” in a suburb of Valencia. On August 12, a judge of Valencia’s royal Audiencia and inquisitorial consultant provoked a scandal after voting on two sodomy cases by remarking that “anyone who comes to the Holy Office to denounce someone for pecado nefando commits a mortal sin.” Warned that his remarks savored of heresy, and that more than

seventy theologians could be cited to the contrary, he remained steadfast. _ Valencia’s Inquisitors asked the Suprema if he should be tried for defending an heretical proposition.>” The Suprema merely removed him from voting on sodomy cases. On August

25, they reminded Valencia that, according to their important new regulation, 35 Ing., Libro 940, fols. 56-62v; quote from Carrasco, /nquisicién y represién sexual en Valencia,

36 tng, Libro 940, fol. 122 (Dr. Carmona, who immediately follows a slave named Ahmed who

hanged himself); Libro 945, fols. 126, 135; and Libro g4o, fols. 76—89v, 116-3 1v. 37 Inq., Libro 945, fols. 114, 115; Libro 922, fols. 162~62v, 180~80v. By August 12, the Valencian

tribunal reported (fol. 181-81v) that they had twenty-six men under arrest on sodomy charges, with five adults presently convicted along with eight minors “‘convictos y confitentes.” These numbers almost exactly agree with the figure of forty reported in Catalonia that summer: see Josep M. Casas Homs, ed., Dietari de Jeroni Pujades, m1: (1621-1625) (Barcelona, 1976), pp. 225-26.

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Aragonese tribunals sentences condemning sodomites to whippings or the galleys had to be approved in Madrid. On September 10, they flatly told Valencia that sodomites might not be exhibited at public autos de fe. After an anguished protest from the Valencia tribunal, the Suprema reversed itself on September 30; but in the future, they

insisted, new rules would be followed. And so they were. Two men were executed for sodomy by the Valencian Inquisition in July 1626, but the Suprema ordered it done inside the Inquisition’s palace “‘without making noise,” in the presence of some royal judges. On one further occasion in August 1628, the Valencia Inquisition was permitted to hold a public auto at which a Spanishborn Morisco slave was executed for raping a young boy; a local chronicler reported that he died “with signs of repentance.”’ However, this same nobleman spent more effort describing the bullfights of Valencia than the auto in 1628.78 The real end of the Valencian Inquisition’s ability to impose strict punishments for sodomy can be read in the Suprema’s letter to them on October 9, 1634. “Please advise us,”’ it asked, “whether there is any fuero or constitution in

this kingdom which prohibits imposing the death penalty on anyone who commits the pecado nefando with animals, assuming the crime is proved and the culprit has passed the age of majority.”” Coming shortly after the Suprema had reluctantly permitted a death sentence for bestiality in Aragon, this terse note

ended any serious persecution of homosexuals and related sinners by the Valencia tribunal. By February 1635, the Suprema complained that Valencia had completed only sixteen inquisitorial cases during the previous year, “which is a very small number, considering the size of this district.”” Next month they urged Valencia to try to convert a stubborn Islamic renegade, because there was

no hope for a public auto at Valencia in the near future. The unrepentant Moslem was sent to Valladolid in November 1635 in hopes of an auto there; forty years later a convicted Italian Judaizer was despatched to Madrid to die in

the presence of the king. But no more public “acts of faith” were to be performed at Valencia until the 1720s.°? The Aragonese century, which opened with the repudiation of alleged sacrileges by Valencia’s conversos in 1540, ended quietly in this tribunal by the mid-1630s. 38 Inq., Libro 945, fols. 115, 115v, 117v, 118v (quote), 120. See also Inq., Libro 922, fols. 47—47Vv,

150—51v, for the arguments that Valencia used to make the Suprema change its mind: admittedly, “las causas de sodomitas son tan obscenas que no dizen bien con las de fe,” but if the

official sentences did not include too many details, it might help persuade informers to step forward, “lo que nadie hize ante la Justicia real.” They added that “el horror y miedo que se tiene a las execuciones ... causan algun genero de mas temor” about actually committing such a crime. See also Inq., Libro 945, fol. 138v (August 1626); Libro 940, fols. 183v—84 on the 1628 victim (the slave of a familiar) who died “dando vueltas de buen Christiano,” an opinion confirmed by a nobleman who witnessed the auto: D. Diego de Vich, Dietario valenciana (1610 a 1632) (Valencia,

39 oa toro as, fols. 376v, 382, 387, 406—o6v.

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7

Navarre: the four conspiracies Entendemos que Navarra, gloria a Dios, esta muy libre desta secta [Protestants]. Inquisitor Ybarra to Suprema, 1568 (Inq., Libro 786, fol. 364).

En lo que toca a la fe, los naturales estan buenos, que para ser raya de Francia, donde tanta mal ay, es de dar... y lo que requiere enmienda y castigo casi todo es del Ordinario por ser supersticiones, hechicerias, adevinaciones, opiniones vanas de bruxas, sin fundamento. Inquisitor Morel, after visita to Guipuzcoa, 1567 (Ing., Libro 785, fol. 404v).

When Francis I’s armies invaded Navarre in May of 1521, the local tribunal of the Inquisition fled west along the Ebro from Tudela to the nearest episcopal town, Calahorra, losing all of its prisoners and part of its records during the

hasty exit. The diocese of Calahorra was immediately detached from the Valladolid Inquisition and transferred to Navarre. Barely a month later, the French reeled back in unexpected defeat, but the Holy Office continued to reside outside Navarre. Both before and after the French invasion, the Cortes and Viceroy of Navarre had requested that the seat of their Inquisition be moved to Pamplona, capital of this small kingdom. In August 1521, the Supreme Council of the Inquisition laid down its rulings on the petitions of Navarre’s Cortes. They agreed that all ordinary voting judges, the consultores and letrados, should be Navarrese, but categorically rejected the demand that Inquisitors should likewise be Navarrese.

On other issues, the Suprema refused the Cortes’ request that the accusers should be made public; this would be “‘against the law and ancient custom of the

Holy Office.” Although they accepted the Cortes’ argument that confiscated property should not be sold to foreigners, they refused the demand that no prisoners be extradited from Navarrese soil. Negotiations broke down; by February 1522, the Suprema told the Viceroy of Navarre that their tribunal would not move to Pamplona.!

Thus began the oddest example of gerrymandering in the history of the Spanish Inquisition. Created in 1513 by King Ferdinand to service the newly ' Ifiaki Reguera, La Inquisicién espanola en el Pais Vasco (El tribunal de Calahorra. 1513-1570) (San Sebastian, 1985), pp. 17-20; Inq., Libro 317, fols. 247v—48, 250v—51.

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, Aragonese tribunals conquered Kingdom of Navarre, this tribunal had been staffed from the tribunal of Saragossa. But the seat of the new Navarrese tribunal had rapidly migrated

southward to the Ebro; by 1515 it had settled in Tudela. In 1521 it moved upriver into the Castilian province of La Rioja; in 1570 it moved even further upriver to Logrofio, midway between the Basque and Navarrese portions of its district. There it remained until the nineteenth century. Destined for a land whose constitution and fueros resembled Aragon more than Castile, this tribunal remained attached to the Secretariat of Aragon even after its hasty move to Castilian soil. Bureaucrats knew that this gerrymandered tribunal belonged to — the Aragonese branch of the Holy Office. Local officials reminded the Suprema in 1570, when asking Madrid to purchase houses for them in Logrojio: “this, as

Your Lordships know, is done in some of the Inquisitions of the Crown of _ Aragon, among which we are counted.”* Although every other tribunal of the Aragonese Secretariat corresponded fairly closely to a single Viceroyalty of the Spanish Empire, this district merely began with the small Viceroyalty of Navarre (which belonged to the Crown of Castile rather than Aragon). It contained the Castilian province of La Rioja, where its headquarters lay, simply by virtue of

| having moved there in the 1520s; it included a few bits of Old Castile which belonged to the diocese of Burgos; more importantly, it also included the three historic Basque provinces of Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa, and Alava. This territory, about average size for Spain’s thirteen inquisitorial districts, was remarkably heterogeneous; its ethnic diversity and mountainous terrain made it extremely difficult to supervise. As with other parts of the Secretariat of

Aragon, many people living in this inquisitorial district did not understand : Castilian. On today’s administrative map, the territory of this tribunal corresponds to three of Spain’s seventeen autonomous regions, including places as diverse as La Rioja and the Basque lands. While all the other Aragonese tribunals had been installed in the political and economic capitals of their

, districts, this branch was equally remote from both the Navarrese capital at Pamplona and the great Basque ports of Bilbao or San Sebastian. The location of this tribunal was always somewhat problematic. It had fled to Calahorra in 1521, according to a subsequent memoir, because several key officials were natives of that region and could find cheap accommodations there. By September 1562, the Suprema took official notice of a petition from the city

of Logrofio to move the Inquisition there, although Logrofio’s municipal officials denied sending any such document. A subsequent set of memoirs, one

favoring and the other opposing this move, outlined the peculiar needs and situation of this branch of the Holy Office. The arguments in favor of moving claimed that Calahorra was a town with “very little authority,” lacking enough jurists and theologians for consultation, off the main roads and isolated from the rest of the district. After forty years there, the Inquisition still rented its building, 2 Inq., Libro 787, fol. 45.

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Navarre: the four conspiracies

and even the executioner had to be imported for autos de fe. In contrast, it claimed that Logrofio was closer both to Madrid and to the Basque provinces where much of the tribunal’s business lay. Moreover, Logrofio was a larger and more important city, equipped with both a resident bishop (who had both legal and theological advisers) and a corregidor. Calahorra’s defenders pointed out that this city also had a corregidor and a cathedral, where an episcopal staff resided at

least four months of every year. They added that the Inquisition had been able

to rent a suitable home there quite cheaply. The move to Logrofio had apparently been decided upon by 1567; the principal opposition came from the aged Inquisitor Ybarra, who refused to go up river and had to be retired when the change finally occurred in 1570.3 Moving to Logrofio, however, caused new problems. A suitable building was created by joining two existing hospitals, while municipal authorities welcomed the additional “authority” that accrued to their city. But Logrofio’s municipal brothel was right next door; the new building, including repairs, had cost the Inquisition 4,000 ducats; and rents were high. The city of Logrofio agreed to

rent their brothel to the Holy Office, but soon bought a replacement only seventy paces away; the Suprema put pressure on the municipal authorities in 1572 to remove it further.* Worst of all, the expensive new inquisitorial palace, right at the Ebro’s edge, was excessively dank and unhealthy. As early as 1572 this tribunal’s prosecutor proposed buying the royal fortress in Logrofio for 5,000 ducats in order to have drier and healthier surroundings; as late as 1587, the Suprema agreed to sink 4,500 ducats into repairing Logrofio’s prison, where forty prisoners had fallen

ill within a year.» Many more prisoners died here than elsewhere in the Secretariat of Aragon — not because of torture, but because Logrojfio’s inquisitorial headquarters remained unusually unhealthy for employees and prisoners alike. Nevertheless, there was never any question about moving this tribunal into Navarre or the Basque lands, where so much of its sixteenth-century business lay.

Because the composition of this district was extremely heterogeneous, so was

its record. Its scale of repression was not remarkable. This tribunal was responsible for about ninety deaths between 1540 and 1640, placing it third in . , _the Aragonese Secretariat and fourth in all of Spain. However, the typological distribution of its clientele displayed unusual diversity. The tribunal of Logrofio was the only one in all Spain to uncover as many as four different kinds of 3 Reguera, La Inquisicion espatola, pp. 21-22; Inq., Libro 324, fol. 32v. The two counter-petitions are in Inq., Libro 786, fols. 182v-83 and 305—o05v. In May 1570, Ybarra was retired on an annual royal pension of 200 ducats “in his home,” since he refused to leave Calahorra: Ing., Libro 787, fols. 89—89v.

* Ing., Libro 325, fols. 169, 222v, 226, 228v—29; Libro 326, fols. 68v—69, 137; Libro 786, fols. 462,

487-92; Libro 787, fols. 40-41, 45, 50—5ov. 5 Inq., Libro 787, fols. 182~84v; Libro 328, fols. 340v-41 (May 16, 1587).

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Aragonese tribunals , heretical conspiracies between 1580 and 1610. Three of them were located within the Kingdom of Navarre: one in the capital, one near the French border, and one along the border with Alava. The other was found in the southeastern corner of La Rioja, near the Aragonese frontier, relatively close to their former

headquarters at Calahorra. Obviously, this district offers an ideal setting in which to observe the mechanics of complicidad, a term often used by the Holy Office. FOREIGN HERETICS IN THE BASQUE PORTS

In terms of inquisitorial offenses, the Basque provinces — which revealed none

of these major conspiracies — did not resemble Navarre, and neither place resembled La Rioja. The issue of Protestantism offers the simplest and most important way to understand the inquisitorial differences between Navarre and the Basque provinces in the sixteenth century. In 1539, this tribunal’s major sweep into the heart of the Basque lands set out in search of witches but found a cluster of English Protestants at San Sebastian, one of whom had already been arrested by local authorities. They ultimately burned a naturalized Englishman from Flanders, Spain’s first known Protestant martyr; he died at Bilbao, because no English interpreters were available elsewhere in this district. As the major port through which Castile’s fine wool was exported to northern Europe, Bilbao had a longstanding colony of English merchants within its walls. In 1546 the

| Bishop of Pamplona arrested a French Luterano, provoking a sharp jurisdictional conflict with the Holy Office and signaling a new national priority among heretics in this district. Between 1548 and 1552, only one third of the eighteen foreign Protestants penanced in the two great Basque ports were Englishmen; all but one of the remainder were French.’ Between 1565 and 1600, when we have continuous records for this tribunal, it executed twenty Protestants in person, twenty-eight more in effigy, and sent almost 100 others to the galleys. No Spanish Basques were executed, not even in effigy, although at least a dozen were condemned to the galleys. Many of the most prominent foreign victims resided in the various provincial capitals of this district, though far from the Riojan town where they (or their effigies) appeared _ at autos de fe during the reign of Philip II (see Table 12).

Among the three major cities of this district, Bilbao furnished the most unusual profile of Protestant prisoners. Its 1539 martyr was the first foreign Protestant executed anywhere in Spain, but he had been imported from San Sebastian: no foreign resident of Bilbao was ever killed by the Spanish Inquisition, and none of its sizable British or French colony was ever condemned to © Reguera, La Inquisicién espanola, p. 144; see above, p. 37. ? Reguera, La Inquisicion espanola, pp. 143-48; Inq., Libro 831, fols. 7-11; Libro 833, fols. 44-47,

54-55v, 61-62.

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Navarre: the four conspiracies | Table 12 Foreign Protestants of Navarre District, 1565-99, by place of residence when arrested

Location Executed Burn effigy Galleys

Bilbao O 3 E, D, F G San Sebastian E 6F,3E 8 F,2E,2D Pamplona 13 F 10 F 22 F Rest of district 5 F 5 F 44F

Note: D= Dutch; E=English; F=French; G=German

the galleys. When the Inquisition celebrated its first auto at Logrofio in 1570, no

fewer than nine fugitive Protestants were executed in effigy; in an elaborate symbolic pairing, two merchants from San Sebastidn (a Huguenot from La Rochelle and an Englishman from Bristol) were balanced by two others from Bilbao (a Huguenot sailor and his London friend). Testimony against the Bilbao fugitives included their remarks that they wanted to “put a penitential garment on the back of some Spaniard in England, and lock it on with four keys.” Subsequently, two Bilbao merchants appeared in the 1586 auto. One of them

had jokingly ordered a departing captain to capture some Spanish monks for Queen Elizabeth; and the other, anticipating Max Weber, claimed that England was richer than Spain because it followed Calvin’s system. Both men admitted that they had been practicing Protestants in Bilbao, one of them for twenty-six years.2 Such things were possible because Bilbao boasted the only English familiar of the Inquisition, and this experiment had not been a success. In 1572, the Suprema heard that John Cotton, one of their twelve familiars in Bilbao, was venal. ‘Twelve years later, when his widow unsuccessfully petitioned the Holy

Office to lodge foreigners in her house, they noted that Cotton had been accused of permitting an Anglican communion service and several sermons to be held in his home.? John Cotton was not the only corrupt inquisitorial official at Bilbao. The local comisario, Licenciado Juan de Fuyga, had to be suspended from office for taking

bribes. Chastened, he returned to duty in the late 1580s and sent sheaves of reports to Logrofio on news from his port, including the suspicious doings of a Moslem slave known locally as “Francis Drake.” But after arresting an Irishman and a Flemish Anglican in 1588 and then confiscating five crates of heretical © 8 Reguera, La Inquisicién espanola, pp. 152-53; Ing., Libro 326, fols. 5gv—60; Libro 328, fols. 167-67v, 223; Libro 833, fols. 113-19v (#39—40 of 1570 auto, subsequently executed in effigy in 1599 for fleeing from a monastery), 404v—09 (#1 of 1588 despachadas), 522-32v (#19 of 1590 auto), 636 (# of 1593 auto). 9 Inq., Libro 332, fol. g5v.

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books consigned to a French merchant in Bilbao from a Flemish Calvinist in France, comisario Fuy¢a generally left his foreign Protestants alone.!° Bilbao was distant from the seat of the tribunal, staffed with corrupt officials, and Vizcayan

prosperity depended on its British merchants; therefore the Inquisition never risked a test of prestige with Basque authorities by persecuting Bilbao’s foreign colony during Philip II’s reign.

Although it was even farther from the tribunal’s seat than Bilbao, at San Sebastian the Inquisition seems to have taken its mission somewhat more seriously. Perhaps it was Guipuzcoa’s proximity to France that mattered most;

in 1568, an Inquisitor lamented San Sebastidn’s huge amount of “trade and communication with La Rochelle, which is a second Geneva.” Together with its adjacent port of El Pasaje, the Guipuzcoan capital extradited many French and

some British heretics to La Rioja for punishment. Robert Dedon, a teenager from Exeter, behaved very badly after his arrest, scribbling Protestant slogans on his prison wall and sending notes to his countrymen in San Sebastian to keep their faith: he became the only native Englishman to be executed by any branch

of the Aragonese Secretariat, dying at the 1583 Logrofio auto. One of his correspondents, John Colyford, had been arrested in London in 1577 for hearing Mass in the Spanish embassy. He then moved to San Sebastian and married a Spanish woman, who in 1581 denounced him to the Inquisition as a Protestant because he never went to confession. Under torture, Colyford named five other practicing Protestants in Guipuzcoa, thereby earning himself five years in the galleys. Another British merchant languished in the debtors’ prison of San Sebastian in 1589 when he was transferred to the Inquisition because of two letters he had written (in English), poking fun at the Armada and incidentally insulting the Pope. He admitted having remained Protestant during eleven years in Spain, then abjured his errors, received a penitential hdabito, and

returned to debtors’ prison while the Holy Office debated the wisdom of confiscating his property.!!

Different patterns mark the seventeenth century, when the foreign Protestants found in the records of the Logrofio tribunal were voluntary converts confirming their new faith, rather than chained-up heretics awaiting sentencing.!2 French Huguenots, who had provided all but one of the Protestants 10 Fuyc¢a’s letters from the 1590s fill much of Ing., Libro 790, including reminders of his twenty-six

years of service. See also Inq., Libro 328, fol. 460—6ov, on the seizure of two French ships at Bilbao in 1589, including many heretical books, and Libro 329, fols. 373, 380, on the seizure of an Anglo-Dutch ship in 1594. 11 Ing., Libro 785, fol. 442v (quote); Libro 834, fols. 74-93v (#1, 10 of 1583 auto); Colyford’s case is also mistakenly included among the despachadas for 1581 (ibid., fol. 477v); ibid., fols. 420-36v (#18 of 1589 auto). Other Englishmen from San Sebastidn were executed in effigy between 1570 and 1574. Robert Inns, who died in Logrojio’s unhealthy prison during his second arrest in 1581 before being tortured, managed to escape posthumous condemnation and his Spanish property was allowed to pass to his heirs: ibid., fols. 441~73v (#46 of despachadas). 12 Table drawn from Inq., Libros 835—39 passim, missing only the years 1662-63.

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Navarre: the four conspiracies Table 13 Protestant converts of Logrono district, 1611-70, by place of residence.

Location English Dutch French

Bilbao 15 7 O Santander 3 I6Oo San Sebastian 2 I Alava fe) 2 I Navarre I I 7 La Rioja 2 3 O Totals 27 16 9

executed by this tribunal before 1600, now accounted for fewer than 20% of the seventeenth-century converts. Anglicans, who comprised only 5% of the Protestant martyrs and fewer than 5% of the foreign Protestants condemned to the

galleys in Philip II’s time, produced a majority of converts. In both centuries French Protestants were rarely found in Vizcaya, while Englishmen were remarkably scarce in Navarre. La Rioja, seat of the tribunal, played an insignifi-

cant role in locating either Protestant suspects or converts, because it was an economic backwater which attracted few foreigners. THE HUGUENOT CONSPIRACIES AT PAMPLONA

In the Navarrese captial of Pamplona, the Inquisition hunted French Huguenots almost exclusively, executing two large groups of them: four in 1565 and eight in 1592. T'en more were executed in effigy. Over two dozen Protestants, including three Navarrese Basques, were sent to the galleys after being arrested in Pamplona. The 1565 deaths resulted from an intensive round-up of active French Huguenots in Navarre’s capital, while the 1592 burnings represented the largest cluster of Protestant deaths anywhere in Spain after 1570. The Navarrese captial became the epicenter of anti-Protestant repression (if not of Protestant activity) for the entire district. The Huguenots of Pamplona were the first of this tribunal’s four major conspiracies or complicidades.

In March 1563, the Calahorra Inquisitors captured a Huguenot cleric and courier named Juan de Rojas, who had been working as a cantor in the cathedral at Logroni for eleven months. Rojas had carried messages from Béarn to Protestant

cells in San Sebastian, Saragossa, and Pamplona; his Navarrese contacts included two friars and a French physician or surgeon. Although the Inquisitors confidently asserted to the Suprema that “this is a business from which some accomplices will certainly result,” Rojas’ identifications were sufficiently vague 149

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and the physical mobility of the suspected monks and foreigners kept them beyond the Holy Office’s grasp. However, a year later they managed to learn the

identities of two French merchants from: Toulouse and Bordeaux, who were reputed ringleaders of Pamplona’s Huguenots. By August 1564 they had compiled a list of fifteen Huguenots to be arrested in Pamplona, “principal . heretics, so desirous of the growth of their new religion that they try to procure its increase by any method they can; this thread must be cut, because if Spain suffers either present or future harm, it will be due to them.” All fifteen were artisans (four were locksmiths); the Inquisitors knew the surname of only one of them, who lived at Arnedo, but this information sufficed to start their hunt.!3 Three of these artisans were burned at the 1565 auto, together with two other

Pamplona Huguenots not on the 1564 list. One of the others fled and was eventually executed in effigy at the 1566 auto, together with three more Hugue-

not artisans denounced by the original group, while a Huguenot muleskinner got three years in the galleys. Three other names on the original list got off with only de levi abjurations and brief terms of banishment from Navarre at the 1566

auto. When this tribunal held its first auto at Logrofio in 1570, it burned the

: effigy of a Huguenot merchant from La Rochelle, a “great Lutheran” who had fled from Pamplona after his public abjuration in 1567. At the next auto, the bones of a French-born cleric who had run a school for Pamplona’s French colony were dug up and burned, because a Protestant manuscript had been found among his possessions. !* Because the correspondence between Logrofio and Madrid seems unusually laconic in the early 1590s, we cannot reconstruct much of the internal history of Pamplona’s second Huguenot “conspiracy,” which produced the bloodbath of the 1592 auto. At the peak of inquisitorial hysteria about Henry IV’s possible designs to reconquer Spanish Navarre, seven French immigrants to Pamplona

eventually confessed under torture that they had maintained their Calvinist beliefs for several years while living in Spain. They named several of their fellow-countrymen as secret Protestants, including smaller groups at Puente la Reyna and Arcos. Nine of the Pamplona group, led by two merchant brothers,

refused to confess after two rounds of torture. All nine were condemned to death as negativos convencidos, although one of them died before the auto and had

to be relaxed in effigy. At the next year’s auto, those Frenchmen at Pamplona

and nearby villages who had been accused by fewer than five Huguenots received their punishments. Of the Pamplona group, one survived torture but died in prison; two more went to the galleys, following six of the confessed Huguenots of 1592; one was banished; and one managed to get the charges 13 Inq., Libro 786, fols. 321-22 (Rojas quote), 40-41 (1564 list). '4 Inq., Libro 831, fols. 134-37v (#1-5, 7, 14-17 of 1565 auto); Tellechea Idigoras, “Catolicismo postridentino,” pp. 196—201 (#2—5, 20, 34, 36 of this auto); also Libro 833, fols. 113—19v (#38 of 1570 auto); fol. 137 (#48 of 1571 auto).

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Navarre: the four conspiracies : against him dropped. As late as 1596, another Frenchman accused in this “conspiracy.” who had confessed after being tortured and subsequently revoked

his confession, was whipped and sent to the galleys, while charges against three | other prisoners from Pamplona’s French community whom he had accused were finally dropped.!°

In the Navarrese capital, a city of 10,000, French immigrants were comparatively numerous and Spanish authorities feared French irredentism. What | occurred in Pamplona during the 1560s was not greatly different from the Inquisition’s Francophobia at Barcelona or Saragossa; but Pamplona’s second great “conspiracy” of the early 1590s was unique. With Henry “of Navarre,” Jeanne d’Albret’s son and heir, claiming the French throne, anti-French tensions were understandably more acute in Navarre than elsewhere during the

peak of the French Wars of Religion. The true origins of this particular “conspiracy,” like much of the Inquisition’s anti-Protestant activities throughout the Aragonese Secretariat, must be sought in Franco-Spanish political rivalry. THE MORISCO CONSPIRACY OF AGUILAR

The second major “consipiracy,” which led to almost thirty executions at Logrofio autos in 1584 and 1585, originated in one of the three Morisco communities clustered near the southeastern corner of this district. Aguilar del rio Alhama, a Mudejar village with about 100 households, lay north of the main road from Old Castile to Aragon. According to a commemorative plaque in its parish church, Aguilar’s Moslems first received baptism from a visiting inquisitorial official only in 1529, accompanied by an Edict of Grace. The veneer of

Catholicism was as thin here as in the Morisco communities of Aragon or Valencia; but Aguilar’s residents were usually protected from the Holy Office by their local lord, as elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon.!® In 1563 Aguilar’s Moriscos submitted a petition against their familiar, which ended up in the Inquisition’s office even though the Count of Aguilar refused to endorse it. Early in 1574, the village harassed some local representatives of the

Inquisition and their few fellow-Catholics. That June, the Inquisitors held a public Edict of Grace in the parish church, where most of the community, bearing large wax tapers, were required to hear a Holiday Mass as penance for continuing their Moslem practices. The count supported his village mayor’s attempts to uncover the inquisitorial informers in August 1575. However, he could not prevent the Inquisition from arresting several Aguilar residents and 15 Inq., Libro 834, fols. 583-—g1v (# 1-9, 12-16, 19, 22 of 1592 auto), 622-36 (#12, 14, 32 of 1593 auto), 636-43 (#98, 100 of 1592 despachadas), 773-81v (#1, 27-29 of 1596 despachadas). 16 Aguilar’s great Morisco “conspiracy” will form a central chapter in the slowly maturing thesis of

José Luis Santa Maria y Garraleta on the Logrofio Inquisition. I wish to thank the author, who has studied Aguilar’s parish records, for several helpful remarks about this particular episode.

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a year in 1577.!7 |

executing two of them that December. The Holy Office banished the alcalde for

Such events form the prelude and background to the great conspiracy of the mid-1580s, when a variety of factors converged to unravel Aguilar’s Islamic cohesion. Several informers emerged. One woman told a Catholic bystander that a Theatine monk preaching in Aguilar was talking “nonsense”; threatened with arrest, she confessed to the comisario of Aguilar in December 1583 that she and several friends had continued Moslem ceremonies for a half-dozen years after taking the 1574 Edict of Grace. Arrests followed. A forty-year-old shoe- __ maker, Gaspar Ozen, confessed under torture that he had served for several years as an alfaqui or religious leader, and fingered several of his flock. Mean-

while, a middle-aged woman who had taken the 1574 Edict of Grace was rearrested. Threatened with torture, she named 202 people — virtually the entire

adult community of Aguilar — as unrepentant Moslems, and repeated her accusations before dying in Logrojio’s unhealthy prison.'® The names of several families involved in the anti-Catholic village riot and the collective amnesty of 1574 reappear a decade later. The confessed alfaqui of 1584, Gaspar Ozen, was related to Alexander Ozen, who had confessed under

torture in 1575 but who had named imaginary Moslem accomplices and received ten years in the galleys as a mal confitente. In 1585 another Ozen, a shoemaker like Gaspar and Alexander, was executed as a relapsed Morisco. Gaspar Ozen’s wife had been legally under-age when she took the 1574 Edict of

Grace; now accused by six women and her husband, she was arrested and tortured. Confessing that she had relapsed into Islamic practices for three years and naming a few of her accomplices, she died two days before the 1586 auto and was therefore reconciled in effigy.!? Although the Ozen clan played an important role within Aguilar’s Morisco community, they were probably less important than the Amillos. Two men, both

named Joan de Amillo, had been put to death by the Inquisition in 1575. Accused of teaching his wife from an Arabic book, the younger Amillo behaved as a martyr (in inquisitorial language, a simulado confitente who admitted his faith

but named no accomplices). Arrested with them was another Amillo named Diego, who admitted attending Islamic ceremonies after taking the Edict of Grace, but who then escaped from jail. He was burned in effigy at the 1575 auto, 17 Ing., Libro 786, fols. 319-20. The Inquisitors investigated the charges against Fuenmayor, noting that “ay pasion en el.” Also Inq., Libro 787, fols. 379, 419—-26v, 434; Libro 326, fols. 295v~-96; Libro 327, fols. 62v, 93. A description of the June 1574 Edict of Grace is in Inq., Libro 328, fol. 396v.

'8 Ing., Libro 834, fols. 1g6v (Catalina de Borja, #24 of 1584 auto), 194 (Isabel de Hati, #14 of 1584 auto); the alfagui Gaspar Ozen (#5 of 1584 auto) is on fol. 192. 19 See Inq., Libro 787, fols. 419-26v (#18 of 1575 auto for Alexander Ozen; Libro 834, fols. 262-70 (#11 and 40 of 1585 auto) for Ruy Diaz Ozen and his wife; and Libro 834, fols. 226-27 (#4 of 1586 auto) for Gaspar Ozen’s wife. Gaspar was a dozen years younger than Ruy Diaz.

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along with the effigy of a deceased ancestor, Rodrigo de Amillo, who had originally owned the Arabic book used by Joan the younger. Five other effigies of deceased Aguilar Moriscos were also burned at this auto, together with the bones of a young girl who had died in prison.

The family of the elder Joan de Amillo played an important role in the 1584-85 debacle. His sixty-year-old widow, known by the matriarchal nickname “la Decana,” complained that her husband had been killed without cause; but she was accused of helping to bury her relatives in Morisco fashion and quickly confessed. She died before she could be tortured and was exectued in effigy in 1584. A son of Joan and “la Decana” was burned at the 1585 auto; his wife died at the 1586 auto. A younger brother, who confessed to learning Islamic texts from Gaspar Ozen, got five years in the galleys as a mal confitente. Two

different Amillo brothers also appeared in this auto. The elder, caught after fleeing to Aragon, confessed rapidly and was judged confitente, thus escaping the galleys though not the confiscation of his property; the younger complained that

his aunt “had been killed without guilt in order to take away her property,” confessed only under torture and received five years in the galleys. A middle_ aged Amillo woman was among those executed in 1584; presumably the widow Maria de Amillo, who was killed at the 1585 auto, came from some collateral branch.2° The Amillo clan therefore provided not just the first two martyrs from Aguilar

in 1575, but also five of the Aguilar deaths in 1584-86, including Joan de Amillo’s widow and daughter-in-law. Other members of this family received three long terms in the galleys and two public reconciliations with confiscation of property. The religious reputation of the Amillo clan even extended beyond Aguilar; when a Morisca named Isabel Navarra, currently living with her second husband at Tortoles in western Aragon, was arrested for obras de Mora in 1577, two other women said she had been instructed by her brother. Isabel contradicted them, claiming that she had learned Islamic rituals from her first husband Diego de Amillo (the jailbreaker of 1575?), as an eighteen-year-old bride in Aguilar.*!

Although no other clan could match the Amillos’ record, other families also 20 Inq., Libro 834, fols. 192-94, 196—ggv, where #13 is “la Decana,” Joan de Amillo’s widow; #28

is a Diego de Amillo, age sixty; #41 is Diego de Amillo the younger, age twenty-seven. They were presumably related to fifty-year-old Catalina de Amillo (#6) who was killed at this auto, and to nineteen-year-old Isabel de Amillo (#39), who was reconciled. See also Inq., Libro 834 fols. 262~70, #13 (Francesco de Amillo, age forty, Joan’s son); #26 (Juan de Amillo, age thirty-five,

his brother, who was judged mal confitente and thus sent to the galleys); and #50 (another Francisco de Amillo, age twenty-one, son of Juan and “la Reddala”). The wife of the older Francisco de Amillo died at the 1586 auto (Inq., Libro 834, fol. 226); at the 1585 auto a Maria de Amillo, age thirty-six, was killed (#9).

21 Ing., Libro 834, fols. 227-49 (#19 of 1580 auto). She had her property confiscated, and was sentenced to wear a penitental hdbito for five years; her first husband had died.

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Aragonese tribunals | suffered during the great Aguilar “conspiracy” of 1584-85. Four times, both husband and wife died.2* On four other occasions, the wife was executed either

in person or in effigy while the husband went to the galleys. Five times a husband was executed while his wife suffered a public reconciliation and the confiscation of her dowry. Although wives were arrested every time an Aguilar Morisco was executed, six married woman died whose husbands apparently escaped arrest; a half-dozen widows also died. In a community of perhaps 100 households, these autos de fe struck like a tornado, killing over one tenth of the adult population outright and destroying much of the community’s property through confiscations. The terrified Moriscos of Aguilar tried different means of escape while their community disintegrated in the mid-1580s. Their most obvious alternative was flight, and undoubtedly some did slip away successfully. But a sizable group had the bad luck to be caught in 1583 just over the border in Aragon, where they were surprised while performing their ritual prayers. The matriarch of this group, Catalina de Alexandre, was accused of attending a meeting in Torrellas (the first Morisco village in Aragon on the main road east from Agreda) where “certain Moriscos from Aguilar had plotted to kill some officials of the Inquisition and flee to Barbary” with her and some others. Her group fled to a hill before being captured in September 1583. Catalina confirmed the talk about killing the officials, although she claimed to be fleeing to Rome for a Papal

pardon, rather than to the Ottoman Empire. As an admitted recidivist who had accepted the 1574 amnesty as an adult, she was executed at the 1584 auto.*3

Her companions were more fortunate. Her son had threatened to kill Aguilar’s inquisitorial comisario and notary “on account of the arrests they had made.” Although the Logrojio tribunal condemned him to death, the Suprema reduced his sentence to a second reconciliation with confiscation and penitential habito, because he had been legally under-age when he took the Edict of Grace in 1574. His teenage sister Isabel and her husband both confessed plotting to kill the Aguilar officials, but like the matriarch insisted that they planned to flee to Rome rather than Algiers. Isabel, young and confitente, got a relatively mild sentence; her husband, who had been a student of Aguilar’s famous alfaqui Gaspar Ozen, got ten years in the galleys. The other Aguilar Moriscos captured at Torrellas were also relatively young and confessed quickly. They all insisted that Rome was their destination and denied all talk of murdering anybody. One suspect, caught along with two cousins and his married teenage sister, claimed 22 ‘They included Lope Turienzo and his wife Inez de Montiel; an older couple, Rodrigo de Val de Agua and his wife Isabel de Ruy Diaz; Pedro de Val de Agua alias ““Marquessa,” and his wife Gracia de Val de Agua; and Gaspar Ozen with his wife Gracia Ayron. The Val de Agua clan contributed a total of five deaths, ranking second to the Amillos. 23 Inq., Libro 834, fols. 192-94 (#8 of 1584 auto).

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he was only escorting her as far as the French border; the Inquisitors believed him and absolved him.** When these Aguilar Moriscos insisted they were fleeing to Rome rather than to North Africa, they might have been telling the truth. Caterina Montera’s

husband had been whipped and sent to the galleys at the 1575 auto for organizing a rescue party at Torrellas to liberate the imprisoned Moriscos of Aguilar. The following year, after Caterina had accused her mother, both of them fled from Aguilar and both were accordingly executed in effigy at the 1577 auto (Catherine, legally under-age in 1574, was condemned not as a recidivist but as “‘falsely penitent’). By the time she reappeared in the 1585 Logrono auto, Caterina Montera was known in Aguilar as “la Romana.” She had acquired a

Papal letter of pardon, thereby annulling her condemnation and reclaiming ownership of her property from the [nquisition in July 1579. Swept up in the second wave of Aguilar’s great Morisco conspiracy, “la Romana” confessed that she had resumed Moslem practices for several months in 1582 and was burned

as a relapsed heretic.” Aguilar suffered worse destruction at the hands of the Inquisition than any other Morisco community in Spain. Its women were especially hard-hit. Includ-

ing three cases where condemned Moriscos died in Logrofio’s extremely unhealthy prison before they could be executed, women outnumbered men by three to one among Aguilar’s Morisco martyrs of 1584-86. Two dozen Moriscas from this one village were burned at those three autos and two more only avoided the same fate by dying in jail - more Moriscas than were ever executed by the Inquisitions of Aragon and Valencia combined throughout the sixteenth

- century. In important ways, the “conspiracy” at Aguilar was among Morisca | women, who were extremely active in its Islamic rituals. The vast majority of this damage was done within three years, when virtually all of Aguilar’s families were affected. However, the Holy Office had not quite finished with Aguilar’s Moriscos when the last members of the major complicidad had been punished at the 1586 auto. A sizable portion of the village’s adults now

lived in Logrofio’s House of Penitents, where they occasionally engaged in Islamic customs and ceremonies. At the 1589 auto, about a dozen Aguilar Moriscos, mainly women, were punished for recidivism. According to Holy 24 Ing., Libro 834, fols. 262-70 (#22, 23, 24, 25, 46 of 1585 auto); fol. 278 (#87 of 1585 despachadas).

25 Inq., Libro 833, fols. 169-70 (#4 of 1577 auto, where #3 is her mother, Maria Allde); Libro 834, fols. 262-70 (#15 of 1585 auto). See also Inqg., Libro 787, fols. 419—26v (#34 of 1575 auto)

on her husband Miguel Gomez, who was apparently never accused of obras de Moro by the Logrofio Inquisition, only of “opposition.” At least one other Aguilar Morisco traveled to Rome in the mid 1580s to receive a Papal pardon: Martin de Castejon, who was arrested and tortured on a new charge of recidivism after

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returning home, appeared in the 1589 auto and was banished for two years (Inq., Libro 834, fols. 474V-75, #36). His wife Maria Montera had been sentenced to the House of Penitents at the 1585 auto (#39).

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Office rules, they could have been killed as second offenders; instead, a half-dozen women received public whippings, while two men were sent to the galleys. The final martyr of Aguilar died in 1599. A Morisca, who had taken the 1574 Edict of Grace as a young adult, revoked her confession that she had relapsed into Islamic practices since 1578. She was the last Morisco executed by the Logrofio tribunal; her husband, a second offender, had accused her while being tortured. Two younger women from Aguilar appeared in the same auto

with them. Five more women and two men from Aguilar were reconciled privately in 1600-01, while another three men and three women saw the charges against them dropped.?¢ THE JEWISH CONSPIRACY AT GENEVILLA

The only “Jewish conspiracy” to be discovered anywhere in the Aragonese Secretariat after 1540 was a relatively minor event. It also marked the final investigation of native conversos anywhere in Spain, occurring at the outset of Philip III’s reign. Living in a small village on the border between Navarre and the Basque province of Alava, far distant from major commercial activity, these

people apparently had never seen a Portuguese converso. Yet the men and women arrested in the village of Genevilla in 1598 were descended from Navarrese Jews, and a few of them were apparently still able to read a little Hebrew. Like the Pamplona and Aguilar conspiracies, this one unfolded in two phases

many years apart. The story began in May 1573, at a banquet of the sixty members of Genevilla’s brotherhood (cofradia) of San Miguel. One of the three | priests associated with the brotherhood provoked an uproar by refusing to eat the meat on his plate. Because certain parts of the animal had been removed and clumsily replaced on his dish, and because the entire cofradia was composed of conversos, he suspected kosher butchering. Denunciations to the Inquisition and arrests followed. At Logrofio’s public auto on Christmas Day 1575, one of the fraternity’s butchers, who had revoked his confession, was executed. Three other Genevilla conversos (two of them women) were fined and briefly banished for hiding fugitives. Still others, who eventually confessed under torture, were punished at Logrofio’s 1577 auto. The other butcher was sent to the galleys; both mayordomos of the cofradia had their property confiscated and were sent to the House of Penitents, along with an old man who had been investigated many years before for defending Archbishop Carranza.?’ Genevilla had no further problems with the Holy Office for a quarter-century 26 Libro 834, fols. 474v—75, (sospechosos de Moros appended to the 1589 auto); also fols. 802-15 (#14~-16, 43 of 1599 auto); Libro 835, fols. 21v-23v (#22—28, 31-36 of despachadas). 27 Inq., Libro 787, fol. 419 (Diego Diez alias Medina, #3 of 1575 auto); Libro 833, fols. 171-75v,

184-84v (#6—9, 23 of 1577 auto). ) 156

Navarre: the four conspiracies after the 1573 scandals, but the next incident triggered a far more extensive net

of arrests and far more severe punishments. Before it ended, this second Genevilla “conspiracy”’ put a total of forty-eight conversos into Logrofio’s public autos between 1599 and 1601; four men died and fourteen went to the galleys.

The devastation was less extreme than among Aguilar’s Moriscos, because - women formed a relatively minor part of this group. Nonetheless, this ‘“conspiracy” reached into every important clan among Genevilla’s converso families. The merchant Andrés de Medrano, born around 15,46, was first accused by a Catholic neighbor of throwing a party with “others of his caste” on Good Friday,

playing his guitar and slaughtering a kid in kosher fashion, removing entrails. Other Catholics agreed that he had eaten meat in Lent, “and in church they

always noticed that he paid little attention.” But the real breakthrough, according to the Inquisitors, came from someone “of his caste, namely Isabel Ruiz, who shed light on the entire conspiracy.” She explained that Andrés always took the lead at their assemblies, reading and speaking from a Hebrew book, and encouraging others to do so. Under torture, four other Genevilla conversos confirmed her testimony, concurring that.he was “the first and the principal mover” at their gatherings. By the Inquisition’s rules, five accusers sufficed for a conviction. So Andrés de Medrano, his close relative Juan de Medrano, and the old tailor Domingo Ruiz died as negativos convencidos, despite

their denials. A fourth man, Diego Ruiz, had confessed under torture but revoked his confession afterwards; he may have been one of the officials of the unlucky brotherhood of San Miguel arrested after the 1573 scandal.?8

Because the Inquisition was convinced that Andrés de Medrano was the religious leader of Genevilla’s conversos in 1598, his family suffered. His younger

brother Francisco, a farmer living 20 miles from Genevilla in the Ebro valley, was tortured twice but never confessed; he was finally condemned to abjure de

vehementi and to serve five years in the galleys. His older brother Pedro, a university-trained physician living 15 miles away in the town of Los Arcos, began

to confess on the second turn of the garotte and subsequently, after additional evidence was brought against him, implicated some relatives and friends. The doctor was judged unfit for the galleys, but saw his property confiscated and was reconciled at the same auto where Andrés was killed. Andrés’ 26-year-old son, also named Andrés de Medrano, confessed under torture and corroborated the original testimony about his father’s party on Good Friday. As a cooperative witness, the younger Andrés was spared the galleys on the technicality that his offenses had been committed before his twenty-fifth birthday.? 28 Inq., Libro 834, fols. 811v—13 (#39—42 of 1599 auto). Compare Inq., Libro 833, fol. 175v: the Diego Ruiz reconciled in 1577 (who revoked his confession made under torture) was described as a pelaire aged between forty and forty-two; the Diego Ruiz executed in 1599 was described as a tailor aged sixty, accused by eight Catholics of attending several clandestine meetings of conversos and of being remarkably inattentive in church.

29 Inq., Libro 834, fols. 801-10 (#27, 36, 38 of 1599 auto).

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Interestingly enough, there is no evidence that the wife of Andrés de Medrano was accused. Their daughter Francisca, probably too young to have been arrested in 1599, was subsequently investigated on a minor charge in 1620, together with a few other Genevilla conversos. The woolcomber Juan de Gaona, who lived in the village immediately north of Genevilla, had married a sister of Andrés de Medrano. In 1599 he survived the Inquisition’s torture, was ordered to abjure de levi and banished for two years. His son Juan, a shoemaker,

was accused of chasing an Old-Christian accuser of his Medrano uncles through the streets of Genevilla, after attending a midnight Jewish gathering at their home. Juan de Gaona the younger also survived torture and received the same sentence as his father.?°

| His brother Diego de Gaona, a university-trained lawyer who had moved about 50 miles from Genevilla to the small town of Arnedo in La Rioja, was arrested in 1602 for trying to get his relatives out of the galleys. He hinted that

, his Medrano uncles were actually “martyrs,” and complained that he had not been allowed to act as his father’s lawyer. He too was tortured, eventually abjuring de vehementi, paying a sizable fine of 50 ducats, and leaving the Logrofio

district for four years. He had tried to rescue his cousin Domingo de Medrano, who had narrowly avoided execution in 1599 as a negativo convencido. Domingo was fined 50,000 maravedis and ordered to the galleys for seven years. At the collection-point of Soria, he claimed to be unfit to serve and hired the services of Diego de Gaona. What actually transpired next is obscure; but in September 1602 Domingo de Medrano was back in Genevilla, claiming that his galley had been captured by the English off Lisbon and destroyed, after which he went to St. Jean-de-Luz in France, to which many of his Genevilla relatives had fled.?! The “Jewish conspiracy” of Genevilla forms an unusual footnote to the long © history of inquisitorial anti-Semitism. In addition to its late timing and remote location, it differed from most of the pre-1550 “Jewish conspiracies” because women played a relatively minor role in it, apart from the informer Isabel Ruiz who first broke it open. Of the forty-eight people from this conspiracy exhibited at autos, only eleven were women. The activities which preoccupied the Inquisitors —- Andrés de Medrano’s Good Friday party, the “Saint Mazmarro” game (in which a kneeling “saint” was hit in the face with wet rags while the attacker chanted “Saint Mazmarro, may God free me from you as from the Devil”), and

particularly the reading of Hebrew books which were then interpreted into “Romance and Castilian tongues”?* — were basically masculine diversions, uniting fathers and sons more often than husbands and wives. 30 Inq., Libro 836, fols. 199-237 (#29 of 1620-21 despachadas); Libro 834, fol. 803v (#21 of 1599 auto); Libro 835, fol. 28 (#1 of 1601 auto). 3! Ing., Libro 835, fols. 70-72 (#13 of 1602 despachadas), 108—0g (#30 of 1602-03 despachadas). See Inq., Libro 834, fols. 801-10 (#23 and 32 of 1599 auto) for trials of Domingo de Medrano and his wife Gracia de Medrano. 32 Inq., Libro 835, fol. 28. On “Saint Mazmarro,” see Inq., Libro 834, fol. 810v.

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The last of the four great conspiracies to be investigated by this tribunal is both the best known and the strangest. The witches of Zugurramurdi, featured in the exceptionally well-publicized auto de fe of December 1610, were considered by the Holy Office as an authentic conspiracy of genuine apostates. A few of its

features resemble those of other conspiracies; for example, the fact that close , kinship to Zugurramurdi witches led to the earliest arrests outside the original

village. But other aspects separate it: not simply the apparently imaginary nocturnal Sabbats, but also the fact that no previous outbreak at Zugurramurdi

| had prepared the way for a second round of inquisitorial arrests including some recidivists.

The excellent account of Gustav Henningsen illustrates some of the major features of the Logrono witch-trials of 1610.33 In the first place, this final “conspiracy” provides the final example of a “French disease” spreading south from the Pyrenees. The settlements of Zugurramurdi and Urdax, which provided nearly all the defendants at the 1610 auto, were located along the French border. The first witch to confess and to accuse others, twenty-year-old Maria de Ximildegui, had returned to her childhood home in December 1608 after living three or four years in the Pays de Labourd. She had become a witch while in France, although she had finally been cured and absolved by a local priest.

After her return, she attended other Sabbats in Zugurramurdi where she identified a few of her neighbors. Moreover, the acceleration of these trials during 1609 paralleled the famous witch-hunt among the French Basques by Pierre De Lancre; the parish priest of a village west of Zugurramurdi who helped to spread this panic beyond its original confines was a French Basque, appointed by a French overlord who happened to be De Lancre’s host and patron.34

Although Maria de Ximildegui caused much uproar and scandal in Zugurra-

murdi around Christmas 1608, the whole affair was apparently resolved in January 1609, after several people had confessed to being witches and asked pardon of their neighbors in Zugurramurdi’s parish church. But at this point the officious and ambitious Abbot of Urdax, Fray Leon de Aranibar, sensing an opportunity to receive the coveted title of inquisitorial comisario, informed the Logrofio tribunal, which opened an investigation. Four of the Zugurramurdi witches who had confessed in their local church were summoned to Logrofio by the Holy Office, where they repeated their lengthy and rambling confessions.

Made nervous by this summons, six other confessed Zugurramurdi witches 33 Gustav Henningsen, 7he Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (Reno,

1980), esp. chs. 2, 4, and 8; he has also published a more elaborate version of ch. 2 as “Las victimas de Zugurramurdi: El origen de un gran proceso de brujeria,” in Satoak. Revista de Estudios Vascos, 2 (1978), pp. 182-95. 34 Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, pp. 30-32, 130-31.

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hired a guide and voluntarily presented themselves at Logrofio shortly afterwards, where they claimed that their confessions were false and made under duress. But testimony from local witnesses convinced the Logrofio Inquisitors that all six had in fact confessed voluntarily and moreover that two of them, eighty-year-old Graciana de Barrenechea and the wizened old shepherd Miguel de Goiburu, were the leaders of Zugurramurdi’s witches. After consulting with their theological calificadores, the Inquisitors imprisoned all six. By mid-July all

ten had confessed. By early September one of the Logrofio Inquisitors had set off to visit Zugurramurdi; but all the imprisoned witches had caught prison fever, the omnipresent risk of Logrojio, and three of them had already died.*> The autumn 1609 visitation, with a promised Edict of Grace, was a failure, as the Inquisitors had foreseen. Only five unmarried girls, all under age twentyone, came forward to confess voluntarily during a one-month stay. Before leaving, the Inquisitor arrested fifteen of the twenty-two people who had been accused by the original group of ten. They included a monk of Urdax, Fray

Pedro de Arburu, and his cousin, an assistant priest in the border town of Fuenterrabia. The Inquisitor then traveled west to San Sebastian, collecting more confessions from eleven child-witches and two adults, and discovering other “‘witch-conspiracies”’ at Lesaca, Vera, and other Basque villages. Near the Atlantic coast he also had to deal with official requests to extradite other accused

witches to France, since his trip followed soon after De Lancre’s famous witch-hunt in the French Pyrenees.?° These groups from Zugurramurdi and Urdax formed the basis for the famous Logrofio auto of November 1610, which was remarkably well advertised. The witches’ conspiracy was badly decimated, not by the terrors of the torturechamber but by prison fever. Of the original ten Zugurramurdi witches under

arrest in February 1609, only four were still alive in November 1610. The others, said the Holy Office, all died repentant and firm in their confessions, despite some problems with deafness and suspicious cases of intermittent delirium. But the second group of fifteen proved far less cooperative. Only four of them eventually confessed. However, only two prisoners — the monk from Urdax and his clerical cousin from Fuenterrabia — underwent extensive torture, which they withstood. Four of them died before the auto, including one of those who had confessed. According to the final report, a total of seventeen prisoners had eventually been arrested on the basis of denunciations originally made in

January 1609; but no fewer than twelve accused witches (over 40% of the Zugurramurdi—Urdax group) died before they could be shown to the public.3” 35 [bid., pp. 36, 49-50. In 1613, this zealous abbot and his prior proposed to go to France and convert the notorious Aragonese heretic Martin Bartox (an ex-Trinitarian monk living at La Rochelle as a Huguenot minister), on condition that the Suprema, who had ordered him relaxed in effigy at Saragossa in 1605, guaranteed his pardon: Inq., Libro 334, fols. 53v-54v. See also Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, pp. 52-57, 60-65.

36 Jbid., pp. 108-20. 37 [bid., pp. 143-54. 160

Navarre: the four conspiractes At the 1610 auto, six of the negativos who refused to confess were burned at the stake. ‘The three negativos from this group who died in prison were executed

in effigy, along with two people arrested after September 1609. A total of thirty-one witches were sentenced, including eight deceased but penitent witches who were reconciled in effigy. Five confessed witches (one of whom had

been born in Zugurramurdi and two in France) came from villages west of Zugurramurdi and had been arrested at the end of the 1609 visitation. In all, sixteen additional witches had been imprisoned in March 1610, at the request of local authorities.*®

Seven of the witches at this auto were related to the matriarch and reputed head witch Graciana de Barrenechea, whose daughter had married the son of the other chief witch, Miguel de Goiburu. Interestingly enough, neither Graciana’s husband nor Miguel’s wife was ever accused of witchcraft; the witches reportedly met in Graciana’s house only when her husband and her other son-in-law were away. Other, smaller witch-dynasties can also be traced, like the clerical Goiburu cousins. By the Holy Office’s estimates of March 1611, there were almost three dozen confessed witches among the fewer than 400 people in Zugurramurdi and Urdax, and close to 40% of the entire population had been accused.?? THE STRUCTURE OF COMPLICIDADES

Because the Calahorra/Logrofio tribunal experienced the richest variety of ‘heretical conspiracies” anywhere in Spain, it offers the best data from which to construct a typology for them. The mentality and methods of the Holy Office were uniform across Spain, but the social and religious habits of Huguenots, Moriscos, Judeoconversos, and witches varied considerably. What conclusions can be drawn about the Inquisition’s approach and expectations in dealing with such diverse groups of religious deviants?

1. Geographically, these “conspiracies” were firmly centered in a single location. The base community provided at least 75% of the suspects at the most important autos; kinship, friendship, and therefore suspicion radiated out from it to a few nearby places. Even the Huguenots of Pamplona, who were all men without local kinship ties, had “sociability networks” with other French immigrants at Puente la Reyna and nearby Mendigorria in 1590. The conversos of

Genevilla had kin living nearby at Santa Cruz de Campece as well as more distant places. The Moriscos of Aguilar reached out to their kin and religious

compatriots elsewhere in La Rioja, and as far as Torrellas in Aragon. The witches of Zugurramurdi-Urdax had relatives in the Five Towns along the Atlantic coast, and the original witch-panic followed them west.

2. Chronologically, most of these “conspiracies” developed in two widely 38 Jbid., pp. 186-202. 39 I[bid., pp. 34-36, 149, 198-200, 213. 161

Aragonese tribunals separated cycles. The first episode was smaller in scale, although it did result in some deaths (four Pamplona Huguenots in 1565, two Aguilar Moriscos and a

Genevilla converso in 1575). The second outbreak had different immediate causes from the first: Henry IV and the Wars of Religion lay behind the Pamplona outbreak of 1590, whereas Huguenot propaganda enterprises had caused the repression of the 1560s. A scandalous guild banquet provoked the first arrests at Genevilla in the early 1570s, while an equally scandalous Good Friday party led to the second wave a quarter-century later. The riots at Aguilar , preceding the 1574 Edict of Grace were absent from the far worse persecution a decade later. Only the Zugurramurdi witches of 1608 had no local predecessors,

because this tribunal had avoided witchcraft cases since the mid-1570s; it required “outside agitators” from France and a glory-seeking abbot to start this

outbreak. Oo

3. Sociologically, two important trends can be discerned. First, these ‘‘conspiracies” ordinarily centered around a single clan, who provided its leadership _ and at least a half-dozen of the principal defendants. The intermarried Bar, renechea—Goiburu families of Zugurramurdi, the Medranos of Genevilla, and the Amillos of Aguilar all fulfilled this role, with the arrests cutting across two generations. (Since the Pamplona Huguenots were all men, rarely married to local women, family connections played a minimal role in this affair: it was probably tavern sociability, the male bonding within a subculture among the 10,000 inhabitants of the Navarrese capital, that explains their mutual denun-

| ciations of “accomplices”.) The Inquisitors were well aware that no kin or sociability network was ever perfect. Each group contained some “outsiders”’: children or spouses who were not witches, relatives who refused to participate in Moslem or Judaic rituals. Most of the immigrant Frenchmen who worked and drank with the Huguenots were devout Catholics.

Secondly, the balance between male and female defendants was sharply unequal among all these groups. ‘T'wo of them were essentially fraternities and the other two essentially sororities. The Huguenots of the 1560s included only one woman; the even larger group of the early 1590s also contained only one Frenchwoman, a wandering beggar. The converso defendants of Genevilla were also predominantly male, unlike many crypto-Jewish groups in Castile. On the

| other hand, women comprised most of the Morisco defendants at Aguilar, unlike the situation in most other parts of Mudejar Spain.* It is, of course, no surprise to learn that most of the accused witches at the 1610 auto were women; in fact ten of the twenty-seven from Zugurramurdi and Urdax were men, a 40 In the district of Cuenca, the two villages of Arcos and Deza played a role comparable to Aguilar and Agreda in the district of Logrojio; half of their 188 defendants were women, including half of those executed, although women were rarely arrested in other parts of this district. See Mercedes

Garcia~Arenal, Inquisicién y moriscos. Los procesos del Tribunal de Cuenca (Madrid, 1978), pp. 26-29.

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percentage far above the usual proportion of accused witches in northern

Europe.4!

4. Juridically, these “conspiracies” led to a majority of deaths within each category of offense for this tribunal during its busiest period. Thirteen Luteranos were Huguenots residing in Pamplona, while eleven came from the rest of the district; five of the Judeoconversos executed after 1540 lived in Genevilla, | three elsewhere; all of the witches executed in 1610 came from Zugurramurdi or Urdax; and two-thirds of the Moriscos who died during these years came from Aguilar. Each group of convicted offenders depended upon a cluster of more or less “voluntary” confessions which implicated a sizable number of “accomplices,” several of whom remained negativos under torture. One real “canary”, like Isabel Hati at Aguilar, Isabel Ruiz at Genevilla, or Maria de Ximildegui at Zugurramurdi, would denounce the leaders within such groups with clarity and consistency. Once this threshold of four or five cooperative witnesses had been crossed, _ the Inquisitors had sufficient evidence to condemn the defendants who refused to confess under torture as negatives convencidos. Every death from Pamplona in

1592, from Genevilla in 1599 and from Zugurramurdi in 1610 falls into this schema. The Aguilar Moriscos of 1584-86 differ, because virtually the entire population of this village had accepted the Edict of Grace in 1574 and thus later became relapsos or second offenders. In such instances the usual rules were reversed; only those prisoners who confessed fully were killed, with one exception (the alfaqui Gaspar Ozen). Each conspiracy contained some “surplus” defendants, accused by the required five people but unwilling to confess, whom the Suprema decided not to execute; presumably they had been relatively passive participants (menos culpados, in Holy Office terminology). It seems as if a

quota had been filled. Certainly enough people were put to death at the principal auto for each “conspiracy” to impress bystanders. Overkill was

unnecessary.

*! For samples of sex distribution from northern Europe, see my Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Ithaca, 1976), pp. 119-21.

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Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles

Che cosa V.M. puo sperare da un Regno con un populo di varie nazioni cristiane: mori, turchi, greci di levante, ... pieno d’infedeli in tempi cosi calamatosi, di gente tanto lubrica? ... La Sicilia, la terra che pit: bisognerebbe unire alla Spagna, non deve farsi una pit grande Italia: basta la sua malvagita. Inquisitor Haedo to Philip II, 1579 (quoted by Garufhy, Fatti e personaggi, pp. 227-28, 231).

En este isla mas facilmente se hallaran cien testigos para provar una mentira que dos para provar una verdad. Archbishop of Cagliari, c. 1555 (quoted in Dionigi Scano, Sigismondo Arquer (Cagliari, 1933], p. 104, n. 1).

At the end of the public auto de fe celebrated at the Sicilian capital of Palermo in , December 1607, the cardboard effigy of a surgeon named Zosimo Cannata, who had died three years ago, was officially condemned. The Inquisition’s notaries solemnly warned that all his descendants for four generations would be

forbidden from holding any ecclesiastical benefices, forbidden to ride on horseback, forbidden to wear silk. On the morning after the auto, Cannata’s effigy was burned outside the gate of St. Agatha by order of Palermo’s Captain. ! Unlike the hundreds of people who shared his dubious honor of being executed

in effigy by the Spanish Inquisition after 1540, Cannata was not a baptized Catholic accused of practicing Judaism, Protestantism, or Islam. What had he done to deserve this unusual distinction?

His sentence outlined a peculiarly Sicilian catalogue of heresies. As the Inquisitors told the assembled crowd, Cannata had already stood trial before them three times since 1560. He was about to be arrested again when he died, at age seventy-three, in his village of Spaccafurno in the diocese of Saragossa. The

first time he had voluntarily presented himself as an escapee who had lived ~ almost fifteen of his twenty-six years among the North Africans, and now wished to be formally reconciled to his native Catholicism. But the surgeon continued

- to get into trouble. In 1574 he had been arrested on a variety of charges, including bigamy, blasphemy (calling the Virgin a whore), eating meat in Lent, ! Ing., Libro 899, fols. 230-34v; Vito La Mantia, Origine e vicende dell'Inquisizione in Sicilia (reprint Palermo, 1977 [originally in Rivista Storica Itahana, 3 (1886)]), pp. 74-75, nn. 102-03.

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and arguing that homosexuality was not sinful; but Cannata managed to get himself absolved on all charges by proving previous enmity on the part of his accusers. Seven years later he was less fortunate. He was formally reconciled at

another auto for a group of “heretical propositions,” two of which were especially important: first, that Adam’s original sin was actually sodomy (an odd

switch from the 1574 charges); second, that the Jews had not killed Christ, Moors were saved, and no one could truly judge which of these three religions was superior.? Now a convicted heretic, Cannata continued to be denounced for his outspoken opinions whenever the Inquisition’s local visitations reached his diocese.

, In 1593 he drew a fine and a warning for riding horseback, using weapons, wearing silk clothes, and doing other things prohibited to convicted heretics. Still worse was the testimony collected on later visitas that Cannata remained an impenitent freethinker and religious relativist. One witness described a banquet

at Cannata’s house during Lent when he not only continued to defend the opinion that Adam’s sin was sodomy, but also insulted his guests by ordering

them to eat the meat on his table (““comed, cornudos!” reads the Spanish translation). Perhaps worst of all was another witness’s charge that the old surgeon denied Mary’s virginity after childbirth, called the Eucharist in the Corpus Christi procession /a hosticella, and professed amazement that Christians worshiped something that they ate and then defecated afterwards. The impenitent freethinker, continued this witness, also told him, lifting up three fingers of his hand, “The world is split into three parts, Asia, Africa and Europe. I have traveled over the whole world. In Africa live Jews, Turks and Moors, and in Asia they also have Jews, Turks and Moors. In Europe, where we live, there are Turks, Moors, Christians and infidels. In this way there remain four Christians; do you think, or do you wish, that all those people go to Hell and the four Christians to paradise? I do not want to believe any of this.”

On such evidence, Cannata’s arrest was ordered, but news of this death arrived first. Undeterred, the Sicilian Inquisitors decided to try his “fame and memory,” and solemnly convicted him — despite the intervention of Cannata’s nephew, who vainly tried to protect his uncle’s good name and patrimony, since the property of relapsed heretics was invariably confiscated. Zosimo Cannata was unique; none of his fellow-Sicilians was posthumously executed for this

particular set of “heretical propositions.” But every one of the numerous charges against the old surgeon reappears elsewhere in the rich series of Sicily’s

inquisitorial trial summaries. Cannata’s cluster of “heretical propositions” 2 Because he voluntarily confessed his apostasy to Islam in 1560, Cannata was reconciled in private

105 :

and does not appear in the 1560 or 1561 autos . But see Inq., Libro 898, fol. 59, for the 1574 charges; ibid., fol. 249, for the 1581 auto. 3 See Inq., Libro 899, fol. 83, for testimony against him at the visita of 1601; and ibid., fol. 232, for other charges stemming from the visitas of 1593 and 1599,

Aragonese tribunals

tribunals.

illustrates the boldness, imagination, and inventiveness that distinguish the offenses of Sicily from those one encounters in trial summaries from Spanish In Sicily, unlike Spain, blasphemy was an art. Practicing it could be dangerous; at least 125 Sicilian blasphemers were sent to the galleys by the Spanish

Inquisition during the century after 1540, as compared with fewer than two dozen from the four mainland Aragonese tribunals combined. The Holy Office was not employing a double standard. At Palermo’s 1575 auto, for example, a tailor got six years in the galleys for calling the crucifix bardaxa cornudo (“cuckolded faggot’’); a baker got a shorter sentence for calling Christ a bujarrén cornudo

and the Virgin a whore. Two years later came another six-year sentence for adding “hanged” to another description of Christ as a cuckolded homosexual, while a year later an even more inventive oath merited an eight-year sentence. By 1585 a Palermo nobleman received three years on the galleys (serving, of course, as a gentleman soldier) for saying he had Christ by the balls; two years later a poor man got three years at the oars for calling Mary a witch and whore; in 1588 a peasant got five years for calling the Virgin a cheap whore “in front and in back,” similarly insulting the Annunciada of Trapani.* When such oaths had been translated out of Sicilian dialect, shocked Castilian Inquisitors invariably handed down long sentences to any man remotely capable of pulling an oar. Sicilian inventiveness persisted into the next century. At the 1609 auto five men were punished for blasphemy; their oaths included such phrases as “having

the Cross by the ass,” “death to God and his whore of a mother,” “God is a billy-goat,” and calling the Virgin a “notorious whore” (puta reputa). A few years

later (1617), a Carmelite monk habitually called his brothers “God’s vaginas” _ (potta de Dios), explaining to the Inquisitors that this was a common phrase in the Papal States where he had grown up. He did not appear in the auto that year; the

three blasphemers who did were convicted of saying that they worshiped the Virgin’s vagina, or that Mary was “a whore of a pig whom he had by the ass.” A

few originals appeared even later: a man who swore by “God’s liver and stomach” was not punished (1626), but two brothers who swore that they had

the Inquisition by the balls and had killed the Apostles got three years each in the galleys (1640). A man of action rather than words, who received seven years

in the galleys in 1633 and was forced to abjure on “vehement” suspicion of heresy (one level beyond the norm for blasphemers), had been convicted of throwing a crucifix into a latrine and wagging his penis at a picture of the Virgin.

In 1651, the Inquisitors reported that one defendant habitually swore by the “Holy Devil,” an oath which they claimed was “peculiar and very frequent among the Sicilians.”> The gamut of obscenities and blasphemies in Sicily ran 4 Inq., Libro 898, fols. 54v-55, 84v-85, 410v, 416v, 449, 474. 5 Inq., Libro 899, fols. 301v—03; Libro goo, fols. 6—7v (Fra Angelo Luizeti, a Carmelite born in the Roman Campagna), 16v, 17v, 373v; Libro gor, fol. 234; Libro go2, fols. 30-36, 202.

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Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles far beyond anything heard in Spain — but so did the frequency and the severity of their punishments. THE PROTESTANTS OF SICILY

However, the problem that truly preoccupied the Holy Office in Sicily after 1540 was not blasphemy, or even Cannata’s type of religious relativism, but the

spread of Protestant beliefs. Sicily’s “Lutherans” were not immigrants from _ France, as in northern Spain, but local men plus a sprinkling of Neapolitans and northern Italians. From 1542 to 1591, nearly thirty Protestants died at Palermo

autos and over thirty were executed in effigy. But only three victims were French, two burned in person in 1566 and 1569 and another in effigy at the 1569 auto. In contrast, four martyrs came from the Kingdom of Naples, two from Piedmont, and others from Padua (1561) or Lombardy (1586). Four of the Sicilians executed at autos were Franciscans; seven other monks, including two Franciscans and two Benedictines, were relaxed in effigy, as were six secular clergy, three school teachers and two jurists.° Only in Sicily can one find cases like the priest Joseph Pestano, a gentleman from Messina, first arrested in 1558 as a Protestant, tortured unsuccessfully, then fined and made to abjure de /evi at that year’s auto. Eleven years later, denounced by a Benedictine monk and eight other people, Pestano was rearrested and found in possession of a letter partly in cipher addressed to a convicted

Protestant. Tortured a second time, he confessed that he had been instructed in : many Protestant teachings twenty-five years previously: that images of saints should be removed from church; that priests should be married, because the Papal prohibition did not come from divine law and the Greeks permitted it; that reliquaries should not be made of gold or silver or kept on altars; that Purgatory did not exist, because Christ had redeemed all humanity with his blood; that good works were useless; that one should not confess specific sins to a priest, because priests had no power to absolve; that Papal bulls, jubilees, and excom-

munications were worthless; that monks ought to work rather than beg. _ Although he continued to observe his personal vow of chastity, he thought it was

immoral to impose it on others. Worst of all, Pestano admitted that he had attended several meetings in Messina where such questions were debated, Lutheran books were read, and once a letter from a Genevan minister was circulated. He showed “many signs of contrition,” so the Palermo Inquisitors only condemned him to public reconciliation with confiscation of his property, 6 See Carlo A. Garufi, Fatti e personaggi dell’ Inquisizione in Sicilia (Palermo, 1917; reprint Palermo,

1978), pp. 16-51, 136-40; La Mantia, Origine e vicende, pp.545-47; Inq., Libro 898, fols. 246-5 46v passim; Libro 325, fols. 123v—24v, for a “Lutheran” illegally executed during a visita in

1568, corroborated by Garufi, Fatti e personaggi, p.112. On Sicilian Protestantism, see the synthesis by Salvatore Caponetto, “Origini e caratteri della Riforma in Sicilia”, in Rinascimento, 7 (1956), pp. 219-341.

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although the Suprema’s clerk complained on the margin that Pestano should have been sentenced to life in the galleys.’ Most of the Italian Protestants who appeared in subsequent autos showed

even more contrition. In 1574 a Palermo shoemaker refused to confess until he

had a vision from Our Lady of the Annunciation in Florence; but his “Lutheran” errors and belated repentance gave him three years in the galleys. However, the final serious case turned out differently: a Piedmontese cleric

named Giacopo Bruto had been indoctrinated into Calvinism at Geneva at fourteen, but turned Catholic five years later. He was subsequently ordained, even though he did not believe in transubstantiation, and wandered over many

lands before he was arrested in 1589 because he wanted to go to Germany which was “a land of liberty.”” Because his faults were serious, Bruto received ten years in the galleys. Within a short time he changed his mind and revoked

his confession in a letter to the Inquisitors, for which he was returned to Palermo and burned alive at the 1591 auto.8 After 1580, foreigners from transalpine Europe increasingly dominated the history of Protestant doctrines in cosmopolitan Palermo. A Hungarian Dominican, converted to Catholicism at age fourteen, appeared among the reconciliados of 1582, convicted of saying that Martin Luther had been a great scholar who was correct about confession; he was declared unfit for the galleys and received a year’s reclusion in a monastery. In 1598, a young musician from FrancheComté was less fortunate. Arrested for claiming that sodomy was not sinful (a frequent charge in Sicily), he subsequently confessed under torture how he had heard in his country, “which is near Geneva,” that both Calvin and Erasmus

should have been made cardinals at the Council of Trent, but had been prevented from attending by the Popes! He was reconciled and given five years

in the galleys? __ Four years later a Polish church dignitary touring Sicily (Stanislas Zaleski, a canon of Culm cathedral) appeared at another auto on charges of claiming that

innocent heretics are saved — and that Poles, who legally tolerated three Protestant denominations, “are better Christians than Italians.”” He argued with his jailers, offering elaborate explanations for his beliefs; the Inquisitors decided to give him “mild” torture in order to learn his intentions. This distinguished representative from a land of religious toleration was sentenced to abjure his ecumenicism as “vehemently suspicious of heresy,” imprisoned in a Sicilian monastery for two years, and permanently banished from the island.!°

Not all foreigners tinged with Protestant doctrines escaped so lightly. Between 1617 and 1640, nine heretics died at Palermo autos. Six of them were 7 Ing., Libro 898, fol. 34; Garufi, Fatti e personaggi, p. 137.

8 Ing., Libro 898, fols. 279-80, 349v-3, 546v, 548v. See Carlo A. Garufi, “Segundo proceso de Jacopo Bruto, ... relaxado en Palermo al brazo seglar con sentenza de 10 Julio 1590,” in Bulletin de la Société d'Histoire Vaudoise, 36 (1916), pp. 68-96.

9 Inq., Libro 898, fols. 271v-72; Libro 899, fols. 27v-28. 10 Inq., Libro 899, fol. 115.

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| Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles easily identifiable foreigners representing well-known faiths: a German barber, described as a “pertinacious Lutheran, Calvinist and Anabaptist”; three French Huguenots; and two African slaves, relapsed “pertinaciously” to Islam. One of

the Huguenots had wavered dramatically in his beliefs. In 1618 perished “Brother Arnold of Toulouse’, a Gascon Huguenot who had turned Catholic at Palermo and joined an Augustinian convent. His Sicilian brothers complained

that he apparently regretted his conversion, since he had burned a picture of the Virgin and made fun of the Inquisition. Once he had even performed an experiment to see if the Host was truly miraculous by burning it. In prison he was overheard praying to stay Calvinist, but then recanted and pointed out he was unfit for the galleys. But after fleeing from his convent a second time, he was

executed.!! | The other three were authentic heretics, in the strict sense of the term,

because they truly selected their own beliefs. From Thuringia came David Chenic, descendiente de generacién Hebrea but apparently raised as a Lutheran. Arrested in 1614 because he refused to take an oath on a crucifix, he gave a long statement about his life and beliefs. Chenich had turned Catholic while serving as a soldier in Transylvania in 1607. After returning home, he had been expelled

by the Lutherans and decided to live as a wandering hermit. He described himself as a “Catholic Jewish Christian” and developed his system in the Palermo prison, thanks partly to eleven “revelations” from an angel. The most fascinating detail to emerge from his trial was the seventeen pages of prayers for the Rosary which he composed from David’s Psalms. Such stubborn eclecticism got him executed three years after his arrest.!2 Vincent Grandpierre came to Siracusa from Picardy and lived as a hermit. Arrested in 1618 for claiming that nobody who took communion could ever arrive at perfection, he told the Inquisitors that he had been chosen by God to enlighten the church. Grandpierre proposed to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he finally expected to receive communion and suffer martyrdom. He had kept a spiritual diary for ten tears, in which the Inquisitors learned that he called

the Eucharist “forbidden bread.” After two years they persuaded him to disavow his visions. But he changed his mind, reaffirmed his original opinions

about the Host, and was burned alive in 1621.!9 7 The final seventeenth-century heretic, Fra Carlos Tabolaro, came from Calabria. A longtime member of the Augustinian order, he was arrested in 1635

as the “heresiarch of a new faith which would save the world.” Tabolaro had been indiscreet enough to leave a whole pile of writings for the Inquisitors to

read, and their contents were far more damning than Grandpierre’s diary. He had described himself as the Messiah, the Son of God, and sent letters to disciples whom he called “Messianists.” Fra Carlos had composed an entire 11 Ingq., Libro 899, fols. 471-76; Libro goo, fols. 93-94. 12 Inq., Libro goo, fols. 31v-35. 13 Ingq., Libro goo, fols. 207—10v.

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collection of rites, ceremonies, and sacraments for his sect. Through five long years in prison he held to his beliefs. Finally sentenced to be burned alive, Tabolaro recanted on the scaffold and earned the privilege of being strangled before his body was burned in the presence of a huge crowd at Palermo’s 1640 auto.'4 ROGUES AND RENEGADES

Tabolaro’s case looks less isolated, if no less strange, when compared with that

of Don Giuseppe Lombardo, a priest sentenced in 1638 for seducing his penitents by promising them sainthood, and sleeping with two women in the same bed in order to make new saints without committing sin. Four years later, the Inquisition declared him a “relapsed impenitent” who still believed himself incapable of sinning, and announced a life sentence for him in the galleys. At the same auto appeared Sor Rosa Maria Comunali of Messina, an ex-Benedictine nun accused of bogus miracles and ecstacies. While having sex in a chapel, she had a vision of a teenaged angel who ordered her to found a new monastery. It was to contain exactly sixty-two nuns and nine conversas, all of them dressed in robes of her own design. Sor Rosa merely abjured de levi and performed three years of unpaid service in a Palermo hospital.!> Such people by no means exhaust the religious inventiveness of seventeenthcentury Sicily. For example, an old blind man was overheard remarking in 1601 that “Our Lord Christ had carnal knowledge of twelve women,” which is why he is called “Father”; he was sent to Palermo’s insane asylum. A Dominican friar, originally arrested as a highwayman, exhibited far greater inventiveness. He had been accused by no fewer than seventeen men of performing necromancy (using real virgins) and various blasphemies. Not content with baring his buttocks towards an image of Christ, Fra ‘Tomasso de Tudaro claimed that Christ was not really the Son of God, but rather a highwayman heading a gang of twelve robbers whom he called Apostles! He was condemned in 1634 to abjure de vehementi and row in the galleys for seven years.!®

Sicilians also erupted against buying the Bull of Crusade, that peculiarly Spanish indulgence permitting its owner to break certain fasts. In the Spanish parts of the Crown of Aragon, Frenchmen who made remarks against the Bull of Crusade were charged with Protestantism. But in Sicily public opposition to it was probably widespread and reached into sections of the population who never

faced such charges in Spain. For instance, a sixty-year-old woman (who was also accused as a Sicilian witch or dona de fuera) was arrested in 1589 for saying '4 Ing., Libro go2, fols. 118, 144v—51. 15 Ingq., Libro go1, fols. 398-440; Libro goz, fol. 162. 16 Inq., Libro 899, fol. 43; Libro goo, fols. 272-79v (Cristoforo Capillari); Libro go1, fols. 264v-68 (Fra Tomasso de Tudaro).

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Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles that she “would wipe her ass” with that particular bull. At the other end of the social scale, the Neapolitan-based inspector of the Augustinian order in Sicily admitted speaking against this bull at both Palermo and Messina, making the gesture of wiping his buttocks while talking. He earned himself a short round of torture in 1580, plus an abjuration de vehementi, two years of confinement, and six years’ deprivation of monastic office.!” Sicily was quite close to North Africa. As Cosimo Zannata’s case suggests, proximity to Moslems produced different religious deviations here than it did in Spain, where Moriscos abounded but African slaves were relatively rare outside of a few large cities. Sicily had large slave communities, where Moslem women

sometimes accepted baptism but later backslid and were whipped by the Inquisition. More importantly, Sicily contained many men who, like Zannata, had lived more or less voluntarily under Moslem rule. “What can Your Majesty expect,” observed Inquisitor Haedo to King Philip II in 1579, “from a kingdom with people from various nations ... with their own laws. and ceremonies, filled with infidels in such calamitous times, with such a slippery people who, without

any better reasons than the desire to live as they please, go to Barbary to renounce their faith?”!8 In the age of Philip II, only five Moslems were ever killed by the Sicilian Inquisition while two more were executed in effigy. Four of them perished in a

' special auto held at Messina’s waterfront in 1572, in the aftermath of Lepanto

' and in the presence of Don Juan of Austria and a Papal legate. Three were Christian renegades from Calabria, Corsica, and Venice, led by a physician from Granada who stiffened their resolve. This man, described by the Inquisitors as

‘“‘a descendant of Jews and Moors,” had adopted the name Perabana while serving with the Turkish fleet. After being captured, he observed all Islamic ceremonies and haughtily told Catholic priests that their sacraments were nonsense. The firmness of his example convinced only a few among the dozens of renegade Christians captured in this famous victory to become martyrs for their adopted faith.!? Most captured North Africans and Christian renegades who passed through Palermo, often bound for the galleys, had no dealings with the Holy Office unless they wished for genuine reconversion to Christianity. For many renegades, Palermo marked their first conversion to Roman Catholicism. After 1600 almost eighty Greek Orthodox converts to Islam passed through the protocols of

the Palermo Inquisition; some of them accepted re-baptism and returned to slavery in the galleys. Other renegades appearing in the Palermo Inquisition’s records after 1600 had been baptized by Protestants. During the period after the _ '7 Inq., Libro 898, fols. 238, 351, 504 (Angela de Plaza). 18 Quoted by Garufi, Faiti e personaggi, pp. 227-28. 19 [bid., p.§5; La Mantia, Origine e vicende, 69~70; see also Inq., Libro 898, fols. 35, 251, for the effigy executions (the latter a Spanish Morisco from Murcia).

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Aragonese tribunals Table 14 Sicilian converts and renegades, 1606-40

Country Prot. converts Prot. renegades Cath. renegades

England 8 12 2 German Empire 513 56 France 14 I Totals 27 18 21

truces with England and Holland, most Anglicans and Lutherans converted to Catholicism via Islam (See Table 14).2° But many renegades, like Zannata, were Sicilians. In 1602 a man from the district of Girgento was accused of “Lutheran propositions” about confession, but was really guilty of Islamic opinions and practices. He had been rowing with several Turks on a galley, where he had learned to blaspheme against Mary’s virginity, to claim that Hell did not exist, and to sodomize his fellow oarsmen and do “penance” afterwards by washing his hands in the sea like a Moslem. Vicenzo lo Restivo was condemned at the 1602 auto to wear the special garments of a reconciliado and to remain ashore for

the rest of his life. A year later he reappeared in another auto because he had returned to the Malta galleys. Although he earned himself a public whipping, Lo Restivo was now permitted to resume his service on the galleys.?! Other Sicilians showed even more liking for Islamic customs. Fray Eliseo de

Benevento, an ex-Carmelite, married a Greek woman while living in Turkey and had three children. He became a Moslem and forced his wife to convert also. After being recaptured and repatriated to Sicily, he deliberately broke his arm in order to avoid being tortured by the Inquisition. His injury did not prevent him from trying to escape, nor did it prevent them from condemning him in 1618 to abjure de vehementi and to serve ten years in the galleys. A year earlier, an ex-Franciscan friar named Vicenzo Calandrini had been reconciled and confined to a convent for five years for his adventures in the Ottoman Empire. Captured at Tunis, he was about to be exchanged for a Turk held by the Italians; but he chose instead to stay in Africa and convert, “making himself into a Janissary” and proselytizing other Christian captives. Six years later he returned to Sicily, claiming that he had only converted in order to marry his 20 Table drawn from Ingq., Libro 899, fols. 258-537 passim; Libros goo—o1 passim. Sicily’s “renegados” included two dozen Hungarians, several Poles, and even a few Portuguese (the twenty-year-old son of the governor of Goa, a fugitive from a Franciscan convent, 1620; a negro born in Lisbon, 1628). Professor Bartolomé Bennassar has undertaken a comprehensive investigation of all known renegades in the files of Mediterranean inquisitions, including Portuguese and Roman tribunals. 21 Ing., Libro 899, fols. 119—19v, 186.

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, Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles captor’s sister and was now disillusioned with Islam. His sentence was very severe if one considers him as a defecting Janissary, but quite lenient if one considers him as an apostate monk.?2 FREETHINKERS AND SEXUALITY

Beyond their flirtations with Protestantism or Islam and their inventive blasphe-

mies, Sicilians upheld other distinctive doctrines which set the Spanish Inqui- , sition’s teeth on edge. One such deviation, almost never found in Spain, they labeled “materialism”’: the belief that the afterlife does not exist. Traces of such attitudes can be found among the very earliest Sicilian relactones: in 1540, an Old

Christian was reconciled because “he did not believe in either Hell or Paradise.” A Florentine silkworker named Bernardo Moreto was condemned to be strangled and burned at Palermo’s 1573 auto because he “‘said that the soul dies

with the body, denying Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell.” Although Moreto recanted at the last minute and avoided execution, another materialist had died at a Sardinian auto a few months earlier for saying that “when the body dies, everything dies.”23 Prosecutions for materialism seem especially frequent in the early 1570s, shortly before a devastating attack of the plague at Palermo in 1575-77. A local schoolteacher who maintained that the soul dies with the body confessed under

torture and appeared at the small 1575 auto; he was fortunate to escape the galleys. At the same spectacle, a surgeon from the mainland, already tried twice before by the Inquisition, was convicted of teaching materialism to a medical student and received a life sentence in the galleys. Two other freethinkers arrested at the same time, a small-town notary and his associate, underwent torture but managed to escape both the 1575 auto and the galleys. Materialist opinions could even be found among a few Sicilian women; for instance, a sixty-year-old widow received a public whipping and two years of banishment at the 1610 auto for claiming that “there was no Hell and no Paradise.”’2*

Subsequent punishments of materialists were rare, but the race of village atheists had not died out in Sicily. At the 1633 auto two defendants were charged with materialist propositions. An artisan from Messina was convicted of 22 Ing., Libro goo, fols. 31-32, 83-84. 23 La Mantia, Origine e vicende, p.70, claims that Moreto, a silkworker living at Messina, was executed at the 1573 auto; but he appears among the despachadas afterwards, having been reconciled and condemned to ten years in the galleys for his last-minute confession on charges of

materialism: Ing., Libro 898, fols. 287v, 626v. For the Sard, who was executed as a negativo convencido, see Inq., Libro 782, fol. 3v; also Garufi, Fatti ¢ personaggi, p. 14.

24 Inq., Libro 898, fols. 54, 56 (Francesco Lanzafame), 58, 59; a surgeon from the same town was also accused of materialism, which he denied under torture — but admitted that he had “believed that unnatural carnal acts were not sinful” (ibid, fol. 5gv); also Libro 899, fol. 378 (case #14 at 1610 auto).

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denying the existence of Hell or devils, plus habitual blasphemies: he was reconciled and sent to the galleys for seven years. Don Francesco Benfatto, a local notable in minor orders, was convicted on charges of necromancy, using

prohibited books, and doubting the immortality of the soul. He abjured de vehementi and got four years in the galleys; his associate in magic, who had no doubts about the immortality of the soul, escaped the galleys. The last man to achieve the distinction of being burned in effigy by the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily was a village priest, who had been condemned to five years’ confinement plus three years in the Inquisition’s penitential prison in 1642 for denying the incarnation of Christ and the immortality of the soul. When he fled to Turkey, the Holy Office gave him a ritual execution in 1646.

Just as Spain lacked Sicily’s breed of materialists, it also ignored the rich _ gamut of heresies connected with Sicilian beliefs about sexuality. In Castile, as

we know from the fine study by J.-P. Dedieu, the Inquisition launched a vigorous campaign shortly after the conclusion of the Council of Trent, designed to make examples of people who claimed in public that fornication was not sinful.2° Sicily had extremely few cases of “simple fornication”; however,

the Holy Office confronted the erroneous but widespread Sicilian belief that sodomy was an unimportant type of sin. A nobleman from Mallorca, on trial by the Balearic Inquisition in 1620 for claiming that anal intercourse with another man was not sinful, explained to his judges that “in Italy the pecado nefando was widely practiced and very ordinary, but nobody claims that it is not sinful.”2’ But

in fact his assertion seems debatable. In Sicily several men reportedly argued that sodomy was not sinful; it even became a favorite charge with which to frame an enemy. Sodomy was usually defended within heterosexual relations. For instance, in

1586 a merchant was fined 100 ducats for asserting that “St. Peter, before he was ordained, made unnatural love to his wife.”” A few months later, a Palermo

artisan was whipped and abjured de /evi for claiming to his wife (during intercourse) that anal sex was not sinful, “even if it was done on the high altar at Rome.”’2° Other well-educated Sicilians defended heterosexual sodomy under special conditions. In 1576 a Mass-priest admitted saying that it was not sinful if your wife was pregnant; he was deprived of his benefice. A doctor (of laws, not

medicine) arrested in 1584 denied saying that this practice was licit after childbirth. In 1584 a rather naive defendant admitted under torture that he learned about the licitness of heterosexual sodomy from a theologically un) 25 Ing., Libro go1, fols. 231v-32 (cases #29-30); Libro goz, fols. 162v, 180Vv. 26 J.-P. Dedieu, “La Défense du mariage chrétien,” in Bartolomé Bennassar, ed., L Inquisition espagnole (XVe-XIXe siécle) (Paris, 1979), pp. 326-38. 27 Inq., Libro 861, fols. 188—89v.

28 Inq., Libro 898, fols. 424, 415v (Lucas Daniel, a local tanner, was already in Palermo’s royal prison on another charge).

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Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles reliable source — a Neapolitan whore — and that he practiced it often; the — Inquisitors ordered him to serve three years in the galleys.2? In Sicily, such defendants. were frequently ordained clergymen. As early as 1575 a Mass-priest from the diocese of Catania argued the harmlessness of sodomy to some beatas whom he wanted to seduce. As late as 1644, another priest publicly defended the proposition that “fornication was not sinful, or ~ even sodomy”; he received five years in the galleys for his opinions. Between them came several other defendants, including an Augustinian monk accused of attempted anal rape on a female penitent. A Latin teacher, arrested in 1608 and imprisoned for two years, had defended the use of anal sex with women, “because woman is the garden of man.” Asked why the law prohibited it, he responded that “Justice did it in order not to deprive women of their marital

rights, and to promote procreation.””2° :

The pragmatic defense of anal sex with women was of course that it avoided all risk of pregnancy, which explains its popularity among Sicilian clerics. But at least two of them went further and reportedly defended the licitness of abortion. In 1578 a priest managed to clear himself of the charge that he had persuaded a pregnant woman to take an abortifacient by claiming it was not sinful. In 1590 another cleric was sentenced to three years’ labor in a hospital and six years of banishment on unproved charges that he seduced women in the confessional; he reputedly gave them laurel and saffron to drink afterwards in order to produce miscarriages, telling them that “since the embryo had no soul yet, it was no sin to provoke an abortion.”’3!

Other well-educated Sicilians publicly defended the innocence of homosexual sodomy. A lackey from Lombardy reportedly quoted a doctor in defense of this idea when arguing with some Spaniards in 1607: “it could not be sinful,

because nature permitted it.” Far more extravagant claims were made by a nobleman from Catania, who said that “if a boy is asked to commit sodomy and

refuses, he commits a mortal sin”; he got five years’ imprisonment. A Franciscan received a public whipping and a year’s confinement for remarking that sodomy was not sinful and “fornicating with boys was something holy and just,” pretending to support his opinions from Scripture.*2 29 Inq., Libro 898, fol. 58v (Don Antonio Collura); Libro go2, fol. 166 (Don Pablo Cannata); Libro 899, fols. 2v, 228v (Sebastiano de Vizzini, who was also convicted of blasphemy — “no ay Dios” — and got ten years in the galleys), 334v (Antonio de Agostino). 30 Inq., Libro 898, fols. 64, 382—82v, 385v (Dr. Jacobo Cachopo). _ 31 Ing., Libro 898, fols. 117, 538-38v.

32 Inq., Libro 898, fols. 447v, 473; Libro 899, fol. 227; Libro 898, fols. 346v, 547 (a monk who avoided worse punishments “‘por justos respectos”). In 1595, a cleric in minor orders was arrested for saying that “whoever practices sodomy goes to Heaven” (Inq., Libro 898, fol. 320); but all three of his accusers were soon arrested for perjury. At the 1618 auto, another cleric claimed that “sodomy was only a venial sin” and boasted that he had sodomized some boys: Ingq,.,

Libro goo, fol. 149v. Shortly afterwards, a scion of one of Catania’s leading families was imprisoned for saying that some theologian had taught him “whoever had carnal knowledge of

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Aragonese tribunals At the opposite theological extreme from him stood a cluster of Sicilians who like Cosimo Zannata claimed that heterosexual sodomy was not only sinful, but

was in fact Adam’s original sin. This opinion appears as early as 1563 and recurs ten years later, when a rural priest explained that the phrase “do not eat , the apple” actually refers to Adam’s sodomizing Eve. In 1583 a Milanese artisan

' repeated the same belief, claiming that he had learned it in Spain. His explanation seems implausible, because in the only such instance recorded from mainland Spain (Barcelona, 1598) the defendant was a Sicilian sailor. The story about Adam and the real meaning of “forbidden fruit” was repeated by a priest at Messina in 1601, who claimed he had told it as a joke. A year later a minor

inquisitorial officer in Palermo claimed to have heard it from a “great theologian”; he got a large fine and six months’ imprisonment. In the 1620s a rural priest was still telling one of the many women he tried to seduce, “Do you really think Adam was thrown out of Paradise because of an apple? His real sin was

sodomy.” SICILIAN CLERICS AND ILLICIT MAGIC

Clerics appear prominently among Sicilian defendants who either doubted the sinfulness of sodomy, or else argued that it was Adam’s original sin. And they have appeared elsewhere, among the most bizarre cases. It was a Dominican, himself a highway robber, who proposed that Christ was a highwayman leading a gang of twelve Apostles; but it was a Franciscan who fell in love with the sister of his Tunisian captor and lived for six years as a Janissary before deserting from a raiding party. Such men simply form the outer fringe for an immense tapestry of clerical miscreants who appear constantly in the records of the Palermo Inquisition. After 1540, clerics formed the backbone of the early Protestant movement in Sicily when it was the Holy Office’s principal concern. After 1600, they formed the core of a small army of sacrilegious magicians whom the Holy Office attacked with no less vigor.

At each of Palermo’s seven public autos de fe between 1601 and 1610, someone with clerical status was condemned to the galleys. In all of Spain, one cannot equal the range of offenses committed by these sixteen Sicilian clerics. Seven of them were convicted of practicing various forms of illicit magic. Two monks, an Augustinian and a Dominican, had married under fictitious names. A secular cleric, already in the royal prisons on a charge of sodomy, ended up at an handsome boys did not commit any sin” (Inq., Libro goo, fol. 133); he managed to disqualify his accusers, but was reprimanded for singing obscene songs. 33 Garufi, Fatti e personaggi, p.37; Inq., Libro 898, fols. 37—5o0v, 265; Libro 731, fol. 330v (Tifanio

de Oriu, a surgeon from Palermo, arrested at Barcelona for sodomy: “Adam nuestro primer padrono se lo hizo a su muger por la parte trasera, y si Dios no hubiera hecho el culo, no se alegrerian con el”); Libro 899, fols. 37, 110, 388; Libro goo, fol. 379—79v (secular cleric, convicted of solicitation but absolved on this proposition).

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Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles auto on charges that he was married and practiced necromancy. Three men (a monk, a cathedral canon and a priest) were sent to the galleys for soliciting penitents in the confessional. Each case had some aggravating circumstances: the monk was accused of seducing twenty-two women and two boys, plus practicing love magic; the canon was accused by twenty women, including his longtime mistress whom he habitually sodomized and who accused him on her deathbed; the parish priest was accused by only six women, but he had tried to

rape one of them in the confessional. All three men also stood accused of absolving the women and boys whom they had seduced. The prior of a small rural Carmelite convent got ten years in the galleys for blasphemy, materialism,

and boasting about having impregnated three women; he explained in his defense that he had once thrown his Breviary at a dog who was urinating in the Holy Water font. At the 1610 auto, a cleric in minor orders received five years in the galleys for blasphemy, aggravated by the suspicion of murdering a fellowprisoner.** All in all, an impressive rogue’s gallery of clerical miscreants for a

single decade. , Among the large contingent of magicians who pepper the records of the

Sicilian Holy Office, some were far more incorrigible than others. Gregorio de

Rossa, an astrologer, first appeared at the 1582 auto (which preceded the famous bull of Sixtus V against astrology by five years), charged with the heretical proposition that saints could only work miracles at times which were

astrologically determined, and with speaking to demons. He was formally

reconciled and sentenced to five years in the galleys. After completing his sentence, he reappeared at another auto in 1589, charged this time by eighteen men with practicing chiromancy in the galleys; he confessed and got five more

years at the oars. Then he returned to a third auto in 1596, charged with

offender.*> ,

trafficking in Kabbalistic manuscripts. This time he earned a public whipping and ten more years — but nobody discussed a death sentence, even for a third An even more famous magus, Don Geronimo de Alessandro, came closer to being executed. This priest from Messina had already drawn six years in the galleys back in 1586 for practicing illicit magic. Almost two decades later, he appeared at another auto, charged with “veneration of demons and ceremonies with virgins”; he abjured de vehement: and received a life sentence to the galleys. But he soon managed to escape by judicious use of bribery and magical advice. 34 Ingq., Libro 899, fols. 60, ro1-o1v, 186v (#16-17 of 1603 auto, the Dominican also being charged with counterfeiting money); 173-76v (Don Filippo de Alexi, who produced seventyeight defense witnesses but still got seven years in the galleys for solicitation plus sodomy), 192—209V (#19, 20, 23-25), 243-57v (#21-23, the second wave of magicians, 1606), 218—34v (#6: Don Filippo de Alexi returns, having been moved to a hospital after only one year in the galleys; for sabotaging working conditions at the hospital, he was ordered back to the oars for two

more years), 369—-87v (#8, also #19, another recidivist). |

35 Inq., Libro 898, fols. 252, 621, 626, 348v—49. 177

Aragonese tribunals Three of the men who rescued him, and one of his partners in magic, were sent ' to the galleys at the 1609 auto. Don Geronimo himself was recaptured in time to reappear at the 1610 auto, where he was condemned to abjure de vehementi for the third time, formally defrocked, and ordered to be walled up (murado) for the rest of his life.*° Don Geronimo’s associate at his first two trials was Don Andrés lo Restivo, a native of Palermo in minor orders, who similarly received six years at the oars the first time and seven years the second time, plus deprivation of his ecclesiastical benefice (this was actually his third trial, since the Roman Inquisition had also arrested him in 1596). Don Andrés, however, was far luckier than his old partner. After a few years he was discharged from the galleys and confined to Palermo’s hospital, but regained his freedom by 1610. He found employment as the fi/ésofo of a cardinal by means of a successful astrological prediction (this was about the time that Galileo became an official filésofo at Florence). However, after he returned to Palermo the Holy Office again picked him up for practicing astrology and put him in the 1621 auto, where he made his third de vehementi abjuration and departed for eight years of exile on a remote island near Africa.3’ Third offenders were rare anytime and anywhere in the history of the Spanish Inquisition, but these black-sheep Sicilian clergy were a hardy race. Although they stayed out of the spotlight at most of Palermo’s autos for a generation after 1610, they returned to play a major role in every public auto during the 1640s, following the execution of the Dominican pseudo-Messiah. In 1642, the principal culprits were both priests: a recidivist guru of the “sect of the [lluminados,” still persuaded of his inability to commit sins, now given life in the galleys; and a skeptic about the immortality of the soul but a believer in necromancy, who received only three years in the Inquisition’s House of Penitents. In 1644 two clerics went to the galleys, one for marrying under a pseudonym and the other for arguing that sodomy was not sinful. In 1647 the outstanding defendant was a Franciscan tertiary whom the Inquisitors described as “‘the inventor of a new sect.” At the next general auto the starring role went to a monk who had written a pact with the Devil using his own blood: he was sentenced to perpetual confinement and had his right hand cut off. Later in 1648, the featured culprits at another auto were two priests holding offices with the Inquisition, who had fabricated testimony against one of their clerical colleagues and received a total of seventeen years in the galleys.3° 36 Ing., Libro 898, fols. 404~09 (#20-21); Libro 899, fols. 19g2—209v (#25), 369—87v (#19); see also 299-31 2v (#5, 6, 25, 26), for galley sentences of people who helped him escape from the

37 Pa Libro 899, fols. 192—209v (#24); Libro goo, fols. 168-2 10v (#26). 38 Ing., Libro go2, fols. gtv-103 (Fra Marcello de Patti, a Franciscan charged with instructing novices, convicted of fifty-two heretical propositions, given three years in the galleys); also ibid., fols. 162—62v, 166 (Don Pablo Cannata), 190 (Jacopo de Blasi), 190v (Fra Jacopo de Terminis), 196 (Fra Giuseppe Gatto), 198-200v (#1, 2, 43, also #37—42 on lesser clerical magicians). The Palermo tribunal reported that in addition to the four clerics who appeared at the 1647 auto, they

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Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles For ten years Palermo held no known autos. But in 1658 Fra Diego LaMattina, an Augustinian previously convicted of heresy, managed to kill the Inquisitor Juan Lopez de Cisneros by beating him over the head with the ends of his broken chains while Cisneros was interrogating him privately in prison. One

understands why Fra Diego was publicly defrocked and burned alive for “opposition to the proper functioning of the Holy Office.” The Palermo Inquisitors commissioned a painting of their colleague’s martyrdom to decorate their offices; but unlike the assassinated Aragonese Inquisitor of 1485, Cisneros

was never promoted as a candidate for sainthood by the Holy Office.2? No Sicilian layman was ever killed by the Palermo Inquisition after 1582, although two Sicilian clerics were subsequently executed in person and another in effigy. STRIFE WITH SICILIAN VICEROYS

The political history of the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily offers a vivid example of how “colonialism” worked within early modern Europe. Nowhere else, not even

in Catalonia, was the Holy Office so obviously an alien import from Castile. Sicilians might well look enviously at Naples, where a vertical social alliance reaching from nobles to plebeians had prevented Viceroys from installing the Spanish Inquisition in 1509. The Sicilians had tried violence, in 1516, but succeeded only in removing the tribunal from Palermo for about three years. All

that the Sicilians finally gained was permanent exemption from the standard Castilian practice of hanging the sanbenitos of condemned heretics in the major parish church or in the local Dominican convent; even the most hard-bitten Castilian Inquisitor never dared to introduce it at Palermo.*° Twenty years after rioting had failed to uproot the Inquisition, the Sicilian Parliament attempted to hamstring it through negotiation tempered with judicious bribery. Emperor Charles V, in urgent need of Sicilian money after his expedition to Tunis, granted the petition of the Sicilian Parliament to clip the Inquisition’s wings in exchange for a fat gift of 250,000 ducats: “we have commanded that the Inquisitors of the said Kingdom [Sicily] may not take jurisdiction, for a term of five years, of any thing which carries a death penalty against any person born in the said Kingdom.” In fact, nobody was killed at Palermo’s next two autos in 1537 and 1540, and Charles seemed willing to

extend the Sicilians’ privileges for five more years.*! , had also penanced four other priests secretly for solicitation, including a Benedictine who qualified as a “formal heretic”: Inqg., Libro go2, fol. 184. 39 La Mantia, Origine e vicende, pp. 84-86, esp. 85, n. 132. The printed account of the 1658 auzto, which he summarizes, ran to forty-six quarto pages. Another monk was penanced for illegally entering the private apartments of Sicily’s remaining Inquisition, Don Marco Antonio Cotoner. 40 Luis de Paramo, De origine et progressu officti Sanctae Inquisitionis (Madrid, 1598), p. 43 (H.C.

Lea, The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, (Philadelphia, 1908), p.24 n. 1, corrects Paramo’s date from 1543 to 1516). 41 Lea, Spanish Dependencies, pp. 22-24; Garufl, Fatti e personaggi, pp. 13-15.

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| Aragonese tribunals But the Palermo Inquisitors had the good luck to arrest a Franciscan tertiary in_Messina in 1541 who proved to be a stubborn Protestant. As soon as the news

reached Charles, he quashed the 1535 privileges. By January 1543, the Inquisitor-General ordered a major visitation of the whole island, which had not

happened for a long time, and a new Inquisitor was sent from Spain to implement it. A month later came a letter from Emperor Charles, ordering all Sicilian officials not to interfere with the Inquisition in any way under penalty of an enormous fine.** The age of neofiti soon gave way to the age of Luteranos. By

mid-1550s, a Venetian ambassador related that Sicily’s Inquisitors had been extremely busy hunting Protestants in recent times, and “without prejudice to the good [Sicilians],”’ he retold St. Paul’s anecdote that “‘all people who live on islands are bad, but Sicilians are the worst.”*? From this point onwards the Sicilian Inquisition grew in authority and soon in autonomy from the other parts of Spanish royal administration. When Sicily’s

Viceroy moved to a new palace in 1556, he left his old headquarters at Castellamare to the Inquisition. A few years later, when Palermo erupted in a bread riot during the absence of the Viceroy and his soldiers, the local counts and barons who were familiars of the Inquisition took refuge in this fortress; using Castellamare as a base, they quickly smothered the revolt and hanged some of its leaders on the following day. By 1573, one finds the island’s Viceroy,

the Senate, many notables and a huge crowd attending a well-prepared auto at which three heretics were to be relaxed, each for a different offense; Protestantism, Islam, and materialism. Eight effigies were also burned, and three beatas reconciled for illuminism. A Palermo patrician noted the many gentlemen in attendance and seemed delighted by a preliminary solemn procession with the green cross and the beautiful altar, entirely decorated in green and replete with a green baldacchino, beneath which the two Inquisitors sat. The Spanish Inquisition reached the apotheosis of its Sicilian style in the early 1570s, although its prosperity and popularity proved ephemeral. As we

have seen, renewed strife with the Sicilian Parliament over the issue of noblemen serving as inquisitorial familiars led to nasty incidents of ‘‘accidental”’ fires and explosions at their Palermo fortress in the early 1590s, and strife with

the Viceroy led to a comic-opera attack on their palace by Spanish troops in 1600.*4 But through all these tribulations, Sicily’s Holy Office continued to maintain an impressive level of arrests and public punishments at well-attended autos de fe. 42 Lea, Spanish Dependencies, pp. 24-25; Garufi, Fatti e personaggi, p. 16, corrects Lea’s date of the first “Lutheran” death in Sicily to 1542, confirmed by Inq., Libro 873, fol. 191-g1Vv. 43 Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambascatori veneti al Senato, vu (Turin, 1981), p. 182 (G. Badoer, in

44 Lie Fatti e personaggi, pp. 176-77, on the Inquisition’s palace and the 1560 riot. See the eyewitness description of the 1573 auto in Don Francesco Perini’s diary: British Library, Add. Ms. 19,325, fol. 20—-2o0v. On the troubles of the 1590s, see above, pp. 62-63.

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Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles BETWEEN ARAGON AND ROME

In its abrupt transition from Judaizers to Protestants before 1550, and in the complicated history of parliamentary opposition to its legal privileges, the Sicilian Inquisition fits well with our general picture of the Aragonese Secreta_riat. Native Judaizers vanished permanently from its records after 1550, as they did in the Spanish parts of the Crown of Aragon. Two foreigners appeared in Palermo’s 1597 auto: a Portuguese of Jewish descent was reconciled and confined for seven years for having apostasized and lived as a Jew at Salonica; a

converted Jew from Bologna abjured de /evi and was banished from Sicily forever for “having exercised the art called Kabbalism, with ceremonies and superstitions to find buried treasure.” Both were treated exactly like apostates to Islam, or Old-Christian magicians. By the 1590s in Sardinia we even find the remarkable example of Gaspar Pomar, a Huguenot who invented a Jewish past for himself in order to reduce his sentence; “if I had said I was a Protestant,” he explained afterwards, “they would have punished me more rigorously.”* His case provides the clearest illustration of the seriousness of Protestantism and the irrelevance of Judaism under Philip II anywhere in the Aragonese Secretariat. In other important ways, as befits a tribunal in Italy, Sicily’s history fits closely

with important general patterns of the Roman Inquisition. First and foremost, the Protestant monk discovered by the Sicilian Holy Office in 1541, just in time to restore their privileges, coincides almost exactly with the famous incidents which goaded the Papacy into creating the Roman Inquisition in 1542. During

the sixteenth century, Protestantism in Sicily was simply part of Italian Protestantism, and its chronology corresponds closely to the outline proposed by Delio Cantimori: a “crisis of Evangelism” from 1540 to c. 1560, followed by a “second generation” from 1560 to 1580 (in Sicily, this was when persecution

peaked, as it did elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon), and ending with isolated individuals (in Sicily, four scattered deaths from 1582 to 1591).*© Sicily may

have been far distant from Protestant Europe, but it sent more refugees to Calvin’s Geneva than all of Spain. One of Sicily’s Protestant martyrs had lived in

Geneva before departing on an ill-fated mission, and the final one had spent several years in Geneva as an adolescent. Most of its sixteenth-century Protestant martyrs were native Sicilians and almost all of them came from various parts of Italy (Piedmont and Tuscany were well represented, Calabria even more so), but few were foreigners. In the Spanish parts of the Crown of Aragon, these ratios were exactly reversed.

A second major way in which Sicily resembled the Roman rather than the 45 Luigi Amabile, // Santo Oficto della Inquisizione in Napoli, 2 vols. (Naples, 1893-97), 1, Documents, pp. 92, 94. Also Inq., Libro 782, fols. 544-46; Libro 783, fols. 49v-50 (Pomar was tried a second time for inventing a Jewish past in order to conceal his Huguenot background). 46 Delio Cantimori, Prospettive di storia ereticale italiana del Cinquecento (Bari, 1960), pp. 28-31.

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Spanish Inquisition lies in its shift from Protestants towards magicians in the 1580s. Such a development, which can be traced in regions as diverse as Venice or Naples, affected the Palermo tribunal — but no other part of the Crown of Aragon — after 1580.*? At each Sicilian auto from 1582 to 1591, interesting and

novel practitioners of illicit magic were exhibited to the public. First came the astrologer Gregorio de Rossa, sent to the galleys for his “heretical propositions” about astrology. Next came a hechicera famosa, a well-known local practitioner of harmful spells, given perpetual banishment. Two years later, a couple of clerics

and their student assistant were tortured for their blasphemous magical spells and condemned to the galleys. In 1587 a Palermo surgeon was convicted of casting death spells and sent to the galleys; a Franciscan tertiary who practiced

diabolical invocations joined him at the oars. In 1588 appeared the first of Sicily’s flying witches or donas de fuera, a local woman who falsely claimed the

Inquisition had given her permission to perform divinations; she received a public reconciliation, a whipping, six years of confinement, and banishment. In 1591, nine years after Gregorio de Rossa’s first appearance, we encounter an

Augustinian friar charged with baptizing a stone for magical purposes (a frequent practice in seventeenth-century accusations). Perhaps more significantly, we find a cluster of four women magicians, including two second offenders. A Palermo woman was even convicted “for owning and reading astrology books” — a unique instance in the Crown of Aragon, and probably in all Spanish tribunals.*® VENDETTAS AND PERJURY

In some important ways, the Sicilian Inquisition seems to have differed from both Aragon and Rome. Reading its trial summaries leaves the impression that here the Holy Office was frequently manipulated by local residents in order to revenge themselves on private enemies, and that perjured testimony to the Inquisition was far more common here than in Spain. Consider, for example, the enmity defense. Every Spanish tribunal gave defendants the right to disqualify accusers on grounds of previous enmity which could be easily demonstrated by naming anyone with whom one had litigated in court; in every tribunal, a few clever defendants were able to disqualify all their accusers by such means. But in Sicily, especially in the smaller villages, the Inquisition sometimes found it 47 See William Monter and John Tedeschi, “Towards a Statistical Profile of the Italian Inquisitions, 16th to 18th Centuries,” in G. Henningsen and J. Tedeschi, eds., The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Sources and Methods (DeKalb, Il. 1986), pp. 134-35.

48 See above, nn. 36-37; Inq., Libro 898, fol. 389 (#5 of 1584 auto), 417v (417-18 of 1587 auto),

438 (Laura de Pavia, “que iba con las mugeres de fuera, que en Espafia se llaman brujas’’), 547-48v (#21-24, 26 of 1591 auto, esp. #23). On the donas de fuera, see Gustav Henningsen, “The Ladies from Outside’: An Archaic Pattern of the Witches’ Sabbath,” in B. Ankarloo and G. Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1989).

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Sicily: Italian wine in Spanish bottles impossible to put together a valid case against defendants they knew to be guilty, for precisely this reason. One exasperated Inquisitor, after summarizing the 1627 trial of a rural priest

who had been arrested for an “heretical proposition” but absolved because of | such disqualifications, noted that “among the people of this kingdom, especially

in the smaller towns and in the mountainous parts, there are ordinarily many enmities and occasions for lawsuits, so that claims [to mortal enmity] are easily proved, though more often in defenses of criminal charges than in cases like this.”*? This particular cleric had made a voluntary confession of solicitations in the confessional — eight of them, in fact, some successful, spread over nineteen years. But only three names matched those of seven people who had accused him. As the guilty priest carefully noted, all three cases preceded a Papal bull of 1622 which mandated galley sentences for multiple offenders; so he suffered only a de levi abjuration and two years of banishment. A Benedictine monk, tried the same year on the same charge and accused by three nuns, with whom he reputedly promised to use birth control, had fled to Rome in the Jubilee year of 1625 to get Papal absolution. He then returned to Sicily and presented himself “spontaneously,” claiming in defense that he had been seduced by one of them (he admitted the contraception promise, claiming it was a joke). He abjured de levi, received three years of confinement, and was permanently banished from the place the nuns lived. A Franciscan at Messina, also tried on the same charge that year, was less fortunate. The instances proved

against him, where he had absolved the women he seduced, had occurred before Gregory XV’s bull; but because he had made love to one woman three times inside a church, he got five years in the galleys. Like many other Sicilian

clergymen arrested by the Inquisition, they did their utmost to bend the complicated and cumbersome rules of Holy Office procedure in their favor — and frequently succeeded.°° Many other Sicilians did not bother to bend the Inquisition’s rules, but simply gave perjured testimony. Of course this happened elsewhere in the Spanish system, but Sicilians got ten times as many condemnations to the galleys for

perjury as any Spanish tribunal. Prominent defendants rounded up large numbers of character witnesses, who cheerfully perjured themselves on their patron’s account. For example, Don Benito Cavallieri, Doctor of Theology and high-ranking Messina cleric, had originally been charged with soliciting women in the confessional. By the time he appeared at the Palermo auto of 1593, Don

Benito had also been charged with jailbreak and bribery, a package which earned him ten years in the galleys plus a de /evi abjuration for solicitation. Four of his numerous defense witnesses were convicted of perjury and condemned to three years of unpaid labor in Palermo’s hospital; Don Benito’s negro slave and 49 Inq., Libro goo, fol. 423v. 59 Ibid., fols. 410-24 passim. 183

Aragonese tribunals his page boy had each perjured themselves into three years on the galleys, while a scribe convicted of forgery on this case drew seven years at the oars. A decade earlier, two noblemen had appeared at the same auto, each charged with making false accusations of heresy against monks. Both men received life sentences to the galleys. In each instance, three witnesses whom they had enlisted to support

their testimony also got sentences to the galleys, ranging from three to ten

years.>! |

Some conspiracies were remarkable. Perhaps the most nearly successful one, uncovered only after the Inquisitors had condemned the defendant to death but

before they actually executed him, occurred in a Sardinian hamlet called Modula. Antiogo Cucuro had been accused of heresy by the village sacristan and by six of his neighbors, in a settlement of about forty households. But the

case against him finally unraveled, as he persuaded the Inquisitors of his innocence. He therefore appeared at the Sardinian auto of June 1585 in order to be publicly absolved. Modula’s vicar was stripped of his benefice, defrocked,

and given a life sentence in the galleys. Five of the six neighbors who had accused Cucuro got eight years at the oars, while the other, who was too old for galley service, received six years at forced labor on the fortifications of Sassari.

At the same auto, another conspiracy against a small-town canon named Mazzuzi was also exhibited to the public, immediately preceding the Cucuro case. Five of Mazzuzi’s accusers got six years in the galleys, another got a huge fine and a year of forced labor, and one who was judged too decrepit to work on Sassari’s fortifications was simply banished. At the same auto, five men were sent to the galleys for bigamy, while two men who had given perjured testimony

in favor of the bigamists got off with short periods of banishment. Another perjurer in a different heresy case got six years in the galleys, while another Sard

who had impersonated an inquisitorial official received fifty years in the galleys.°* Thus at this single auto seventeen men were punished for perjury, one for impersonation, five for bigamy, and only five for petty heresies.

Many aspects of inquisitorial business seem stranger in Sardinia than in Sicily, including conspiracies of perjurors. Sicily, land of omerta and mafiosi, created special obstacles which sometimes baffled the conscientious Spanish bureaucrats trying to administer the often meticulous rules of the Inquisition. As

these officials complained, the island was too close to the Islamic states of northern Africa. It was also too close to Rome and a rival Inquisition. Castilian officials obviously had some problems understanding Sicilian dialect, but the cultural differences from Castile were what really made Sicily an impossible place for the Inquisition to control effectively. Whether or not they could employ noblemen as familiars was ultimately beside the point. What mattered was that 51 Ing., Libro 898, fols. 5 70—79v (#11-17 of 1593 auto), 246-51 (#6-9, 24-27 of 1583 auto). 52 Inq., Libro 782, fols. 281-351 (#1-8 on Mazzuzi case, #9~16 on Cucuro case; #17, 19-20 are other perjury cases).

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they could not count on the Sicilians to give much honest testimony, and ultimately the Holy Office had to rely on the honesty of people making denunciations. Many people besides Spaniards have found that Sicily was easier to conquer than to govern.

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PART 3

Aragonese heresies

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9

Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain Los moriscos de Aragon no valian nada, pues consentian la Inquisicién, que con una docena de hombres se atrevarfa apoderarse della y hacerles levantar como los de Granada. Ing., Libro 988, fol. 355 (1575)

Son gente muy astuta y ladinos, como estan en puerta y ... entran en Aragon muy de ordinario, y tenemos mucha sospecha que estan ... ensefiados de los moriscos que ay alli reconciliados.

, Report on Moriscos of Arcos, 1575 (quoted by Carrasco, in

Meélanges de la Casa Velazquez, 22 {1986}, p. 221).

Los deste lugar jamas usaron el habito de moros ni la lengua, antes bien ensefian a sus hijos de scrivir y leer a la spafiola; y como han procurado lo susodicho, hizieron lo demas que es necesario para qualquier pefecto christiano. Gea petition to Suprema, 1566 (British Library, Egerton Ms. 1833, fol. 56).

After 1570, the Kingdom of Valencia contained the largest concentration of Moriscos in Spain, and the Kingdom of Aragon ranked a distant second. During

the sixteenth century, the Morisco population grew rapidly in both areas, reaching 14,000 households in Aragon and more than twice that in Valencia by 1609. Moriscos comprised at most one fifth of Aragon’s population, compared to one third of Valencia’s. At their compulsory conversion in 1525, and again at their expulsion in 1609, Valencia’s Moriscos staged desperate risings against the policies of Castile’s government. Although Aragon’s Moriscos muttered threats, they never rose in defense of their faith. “Concerning the Crown of Aragon,”

, Spain’s Council of State was told in 1607, “the Moriscos of that kingdom [Aragon] are held to be a lesser evil than those of Valencia.””! | Yet the Inquisition prosecuted Aragon’s Moriscos more severely than those of Valencia. Although about 2,000 Moriscos appeared in public autos in both places, the punishments of the Holy Office were far harsher in Aragon. Three Moriscos died at Saragossa’s autos de fe for every one killed at Valencia during the fifty years before the expulsion. Because Valencia held twice as many Moriscos as Aragon, inquisitorial execution rates were six times higher in ' Quoted in Henri Lapeyre, Géographie de l’Espagne morisque (Paris, 1959), p. 93.

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Aragon than in Valencia. For every two Moriscos condemned to the galleys at Valencian autos, three were sent from Saragossa. Moriscas formed a negligible share of Valencian prisoners until the last few years before expulsion, whereas hundreds of these women were sentenced to public whippings and lengthy terms of imprisonment in Aragon. Regardless of the yardstick used to measure, the Moriscos of Aragon suffered significantly more at the hands of the Inquisition than did those of Valencia.

Throughout northern Spain, inquisitorial geography did not correspond precisely with Morisco settlements. During the sixteenth century, the great concentrations of Moriscos, as Lapeyre’s maps show, were scattered across several parts of the Kingdom of Valencia. Many Morisco villages lined the banks

of the Ebro river and its southern tributaries, as far upriver as Navarre. In Catalonia, about a dozen small Morisco communities edged the Ebro from Lérida to Tortosa. None of them, however, was under the jurisdiction of the Barcelona tribunal; the westernmost of them belonged to Saragossa and the remainder to Valencia. The few Morisco communities in the district of Teruel, Aragon’s southernmost sector, were also assigned to the tribunal of Valencia.

But even while it acquired Moriscos from Catalonia and Aragon, the Valencia , Inquisition lost jurisdiction over Moriscos in its southernmost district to Murcia. A handful of Morisco settlements at the southern and western edges of the Ebro basin concentration, located on the Castilian side of the Aragonese frontier, fell under the jurisdiction of tribunals based in the Castilian cities of Cuenca and Logrofio. In both Valencia and Aragon, Moriscos dominated inquisitorial caseloads after 1570. The statistics of Contreras and Henningsen suggest that well over

half of all Moriscos tried by the entire Inquisition between 1560 and 1614 (4,836 of 8,911) appeared before these two tribunals. In Valencia, Moriscos comprised almost three-fourths of the Inquisition’s business during this period;

at Saragossa, which was the busiest tribunal of the entire system, Moriscos constituted well over half (56%) of all defendants. However, they were not so predominant among prisoners subsequently executed at public autos. At Valencia, even including unbaptized slaves executed for sodomy, practicing Moslems accounted for barely half of all executions; at Saragossa, only 40% of those executed were Moriscos. Among defendants sentenced to the galleys, Moriscos were relatively more important. At Valencia three of every four men sent to do

“unpaid penance at the oars” were Moriscos (446 of 600); at Saragossa, Moriscos comprised close to 60% (611 of 1043).

The Inquisition never arrested anyone until it had collected a sufficient 2 Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, “Forty-Four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1§40—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), p. 114. 3 See Appendix 3.

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Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain amount of reliable testimony against him. But without peculiar circumstances or copious amounts of torture (which the Inquisitors rarely employed), Moriscos simply would not testify against other Moriscos in front of a tribunal which they loathed so wholeheartedly. Such behavior affected the Inquisition in Aragon as much as Valencia. When arrested, all Moriscos attempted to discover the exact nature of the charges against them, relying on inferences from the interrogator’s

questions, bribery, and especially on gossip from fellow-prisoners. If the charges involved routine observance of Islamic precepts, they usually confessed without much difficulty, while avoiding implicating other people. A handful of

Moriscos arrested by the Inquisition in cases of mistaken identity even confessed to Moslem practices before being charged. Many Moriscos claimed to have learned Islamic practices from a relative who was already dead or from foreigners. Others claimed to have been practicing Moslems only for short

periods, but subsequently lengthened the duration of their apostasy after learning that someone else had so accused them. The rules of this game were intricate, and false steps had dangerous consequences, but many Morisco men and women played it brilliantly. VALENCIA: SURVIVAL THROUGH SEGREGATION

Several different factors, ranging from patterns of settlement to the linguistic gulf, combined to render many Valencian Moriscos practically immune to successful inquisitorial prosecution. First and foremost, Valencia’s Moriscos rarely lived in close contact with its Old-Christian population. Thirty years ago, Henri Lapeyre pointed out that the two groups had coexisted in Valencia much as they did in Algeria of the 1950s, with the Europeans concentrated in cities and in the most fertile irrigated lands and the Moslems mostly segregated in small rural hamlets. With painstaking erudition, he identified more than 450 Morisco settlements in the Kingdom of Valencia, most of which held fewer than 250 people. Only in two dozen of them could he locate mixed Catholic and Morisco populations.* After the revolt of the Alpujarras was crushed and the Granadan Moriscos scattered, these rural corners of the Kingdom of Valencia were the only places in Spain where Islamic civilization could survive with minimal interference from the Holy Office. It was no longer possible to maintain mosques overtly in rural Valencia, but most other features of Moslem life were preserved. Many of these Morisco hamlets never had parish churches, especially the new farmsteads (alquerias) opened by the rapidly growing Morisco population. As the Holy Office knew, dozens of alfaquis were arbitrating community disputes according to Koranic law or celebrating Moslem marriages in such places; it was even

possible, with a bit of dissimulation, for a baptized Valencian Morisco to 4 Lapeyre, Géographie de l’Espagne morisque, pp. 33-47.

1g!

Aragonese herestes

maintain three wives.” In the vast majority of these 450 Morisco settlements, the

Valencia Inquisition never made any arrests. | Valencian subsistence farmers often spoke nothing but Arabic and rarely mixed with Catholics, whereas many Aragonese Moriscos, even those who lived

in segregated villages, were deeply involved in the market economy of their region and thus maintained more intensive daily contact with local Catholics. The occupations of Moriscos arrested by the Inquisition in both kingdoms reveals the dimensions of this contrast: at Valencia, over two-thirds (68%) of a sample of 964 Morisco prisoners were farmers or labradores, while in an Aragonese sample of 903 Morisco prisoners, only 28% identified themselves as

farmers. Close to 40% of the Aragonese sample identified themselves as artisans; another sixty men were shopkeepers, while fifty more were carters. Only seventeen Aragonese Morisco prisoners were shepherds, and just eight (two of whom worked for Morisco masters) were slaves, compared with two dozen notaries and several other professionals.® The problem of circumcision exemplifies the differences among Moriscos in

Valencia, Aragon, and Castile. A Castilian Morisco who had returned from Algiers explained to the Inquisition in 1630 that “all the Moriscos from the Kingdom of Valencia were entirely circumcised, those from Aragon about half

so, and those from Castile and Andalusia never were.” Evidence from the Inquisition largely bears him out, though he may have been a bit optimistic. In effect, every Valencian Morisco arrested by the Holy Office before 1580 was invariably circumcised. Even after Valencia’s Inquisitors executed a few professional circumcisers during the 1580s, about half of the Moriscos whom they arrested were circumcised. In Aragon, after a royal edict of 1560 threatened circumcised Moriscos with the galleys, only a handful among the thousands of ‘Moriscos they arrested had been professionally circumcised; most of these had

been born in Valencia. In the villages just across the Castilian border from Aragon, where entire Morisco communities were occasionally arrested by the Inquisition, no locally born men were ever circumcised.’ In 1528 twelve Valencian alfaquis, with support from Valencia’s lords, negotiated an important agreement with Castilian authorities. It copied some of the provisions imposed on Granada in 1502, including a forty-year moratorium 5 Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad en el siglo XVI. La Inquisicién en Valencia 1530-1609

(Barcelona, 1980), pp. 86, 149 (quote); Pedro Longas, Vida religiosa de los Moriscos (Madrid,

6 Cuan. “Raphael Carrasco, “Le Refus d’assimilation des morisques, aspects politiques et culturels d’aprés les sources inquisitoriales,” in Les Morisques et leur temps (Paris, 1983), pp. 193,

211, with Jacqueline Fournel-Gterin, “Les Morisques aragonais devant l’Inquisition de Saragosse (1540-1622)” (thése de Ile cycle, Univ. of Montpellier, 1980), pp. 87-124. 7 Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, [nquisicion y moriscos. Los procesos del Tribunal de Cuenca (Madrid, 1978),

p. 59 (quote); Carrasco, “‘Refus,” p. 212. After 1580, Carrasco found three Aragonese and 239 Valencian prisoners listed by the Inquisition as circumcised. See also Bernard Vincent, Minorias y marginados en la Espana del siglo XVI (Granada, 1987), pp. 88-94.

192

Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain

from inquisitorial harassment. Throughout this period, the Holy Office was restrained from punishing anything except the most outrageous insults to Spanish Catholicism, such as rebuilding mosques or holding public fasts in support of the Turkish fleet. Only a handful of tagarinos, foreign Moriscos from Aragon, were executed at public autos; five Moriscos died after an Aragonese

familiar had been killed in Valencia in 1538 while attempting to extradite a Morisco prisoner to Aragon.®

Prolonged negotiations during the 1560s finally increased the Inquisition’s ability to inflict both monetary and physical punishments on Valencia’s Moriscos, and the Granada revolt of 1568 made its task of repression at once more

urgent and more delicate. From 1566 until 1573, the Valencian tribunal arrested some of the Christian lords who had given excessive religious concessions to their Morisco vassals; it also hunted down and executed a dozen of the most notorious and troublesome a/faquis during these years. However, by the

mid-1570s a new modus vivendi had taken effect, whereby Valencia’s Holy Office promised not to confiscate the property of convicted Moriscos, and tacitly permitted Valencian al/faguis to work undisturbed, on condition that a sizable tribute of 50,000 sueldos was paid punctually.?

During the decade after 1586, while the Valencian tribunal strained its resources to the limit putting Moriscos on trial and condemning record numbers of them to the galleys, it executed only four professional circumcisers. Afterwards, during Philip III’s reign, it arrested fewer Moriscos and executed only five recidivists, all but one from the village of Mislata. Thus, during the final forty years before the expulsion, with cooperation from Valencia’s lords of Morisco vassals (some of whom had been punished by the Holy Office around 1570), the Valencia Inquisition examined 2,000 Moriscos but executed only a handful, none of them alfaguts. These arrests were not randomly distributed; some of Valencia’s Morisco communities were far more vulnerable than others to inquisitorial surveillance.

In order to discover where the Valencian Inquisition struck hardest against Moriscos, let us examine the Valencian villages which provided three or more Moriscos to be executed (either in person or in effigy) or sent to the galleys. Three places provided about 40% of these heavily punished Moriscos. All three contained mixed Catholic and Morisco populations, and were located near 8 H. C. Lea, The Moriscos of Spain (London, 1901), pp. 95—103; Garcia Carcel, Herejia e sociedad,

Pp. 25-33, 52-60; Ing., Libro 322, fols. 34v-35, for the Suprema’s orders to Valencia in May 1536 to use “todo el rigor que derecho obiere” against Valencia’s Moriscos convicted of “ayunos que se hizieron por la vitoria de Barbaroxa”; the same problem recurred in September 1537 (fols. 152v--56). For the murder of two inquisitiorial officials by Valencian Moriscos in May 1538 and the subsequent auto of October 15 at which five Moriscos were drawn and quartered and many more sent to the galleys, see F. Momblanch, ed., Dietario de Jeroni Soria (Valencia, 1960),

pp. 186-87. |

9 See Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, Los Moriscos espanoles y su expulsion, 2 vols. (Valencia, 1901), I,

pp. 569-79.

193

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the coast. Th ictl thety : city of Valencia: Mi | WwW an forty orisco households at the : . e€ one wnhicn provided most victims was situated dangerously near e city of Valencia: Mislata held fewer than forty Mori .

’ p Obut e men ed at and| end of the sixteenth century, it provided fiveautos of th killed thirty-three others who were sent to the gallwas Miterrorized ‘orizedby the paeys. islata ° * * . nquisition on a scale never remotely approach db!Viorisco fori Ccommuy approached by any other LJ

,

Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain nity in Valencia. Virtually its entire adult Morisco population was imprisoned in 1588, and many of them were rearrested thirteen years later.!° Since Valencia

itself had no Morisco quarter in Philip II’s time (four men were sent to the galleys from the suburb of Benimamet, which held about thirty Morisco households), Mislata was the closest location to the capital where some semblance of Moslem community life was maintained — at least until a professional circumciser was caught there in the 1580s.

The other two places, Gandia and Oliva, were towns with much larger Morisco populations (though most of Gandia’s prisoners lived in its suburbs). In both places, men had been murdered around 1590 for providing information to the Inquisition. At Gandia, the actual killer was probably a Catholic soldier who was bribed by local Moriscos.!! The resulting investigations tracked the conspiracy into the surrounding villages. At the autos of 1590 and 1591, fifty Moriscos from Gandia or its immediate environs, nearly all of them serfs of the Duke of

Gandia, were sent to do unpaid penance at the oars. When another informer

was killed at nearby Oliva a few years later, eighteen Moriscos from that place : went to the galleys; four of them served life sentences, while another drowned himself in the well of the Inquisition’s prison in order to avoid a similar fate. The Inquisitors had arrested not only everyone implicated in the murder, but also everyone who had been accused by the informer before his death.!* These three towns (Mislata, Gandia and suburbs, Oliva) accounted for one third of the Valencian Moriscos sent to the galleys by the Inquisition, although they held less than 2% of Valencia’s Morisco population. Thirty other places accounted for half of those sent to the galleys; together with the first three, they also accounted for about two-thirds of Valencian Moriscos executed in person or in effigy. But from the remaining 400 Morisco settlements in Valencia, only fourteen Moriscos were executed (usually in effigy) at Valencian autos, and only

sixty others were condemned to the galleys during forty-five years of unhampered prosecution. Thus five of every six Valencian Moriscos lived in places which the Inquisition rarely if ever reached. Among the thirty places where Moriscos risked serious punishment from the

Holy Office of Valencia, eleven were either ghettos (morerias) or suburbs of Catholic towns; seven others were located in the immediate environs of Gandia.

Together they contained about 6% of Valencia’s Morisco population, but produced one third of the major Morisco victims of the Inquisition. Only two 10 At the 1589 auto, a total of eighty residents of Mislata were sentenced to public reconciliations and twenty men were sent to the galleys. In the 1572 Valencian census, Mislata contained only forty households of Catholics and Moriscos combined, so the entire adult Morisco population was thus condemned all at once. '! Inq., Libro 987, fol. 366v (#5 of 1591 auto, who got three years in the galleys). He was certainly central to this plot, but his Morisco associates may have tried to increase his share of the guilt. A hired assassin from Granada tried to kill a Morisco informer at Teruel in 1583 (sbid., fol. 414, #5 of 1584 despachadas).

12 Inq., Libro 987, fols. 534-53v (#1~-6, 16-18, 24, 28, 29, 32, 35, 45-48, 56 of 1593 auto).

195

Aragonese heresies

Morisco villages remote from Valencia’s large Catholic settlements produced more than six death or galley sentences, and both had been intensively investigated by the Holy Office for similar reasons: in Cortes de Pallas on the upper Jucar, a key inquisitorial witness had been murdered in 1576, while a familiar had been murdered just outside Jarafuel in 1603. Athough Valencia contained few places where Catholics and Moriscos lived side by side, the Inquisition made most of its arrests in such places, or just outside them. Apart from Mislata, the Kingdom of Valencia contained eleven villages where a Morisco community of fewer than 100 households coexisted with an Old-Christian settlement; in eleven other towns, larger Morisco settlements coexisted with and sometimes dominated Old-Christian inhabitants. In ten of the eleven larger mixed settlements, 142 Moriscos died or went to the galleys; overall, Valencia’s mixed settlements (excluding Mislata) averaged one death or galley sentence from every twenty Morisco households.!? But in the solidly Morisco villages of the Kingdom of Valencia, only about one household | in 450 suffered major punishments at an auto de fe. Because of the Inquisition’s need for reliable denunciations (and its desire to protect its officials) before arresting Moriscos, relatively few arrests were made outside mixed settlements, except in a handful of cases where key informers or officials had been murdered. Considering the Inquisition’s ignorance of spoken Arabic, its preference for arresting Moriscos who lived in daily contact with Valencian Catholics becomes even more evident. The small share of Valencia’s Moriscos who dwelled in such coexistence were far more vulnerable to the , Inquisition than their segregated cousins, because the former were much better assimilated into Valencia’s dominant culture. ARAGON: REPRESSION AT RANDOM

Unlike Valencia, the Kingdom of Aragon contained many mixed settlements of

Mudejars and Catholics during the days of Ferdinand and Isabella. Around 1600, the Inquisitors calculated that most of Aragon’s 130 Morisco settlements also contained a significant Old-Christian population. Familiars of the Inquisition resided in every mixed community and in several of the exclusively

Morisco settlements. Aragon therefore contained very few places where a thoroughly Moslem lifestyle could be maintained without frequent interference from the Holy Office. The cycle of massive arrests of Moriscos began much earlier in Aragon than

in Valencia, since there had been no statutory forty-year moratorium in the 13 Calculated from 1602 Morisco census and list of mixed settlements in Lapeyre, Géographie de l' Espagne morisque, pp. 33-47 (Gandia’s suburbs of Alcodar and Benieto have been added to the

city’s moreria, as has Jativa’s suburb of Torre de Lloris, Cocentaina’s suburb of Fraga, and Valencia’s suburb of Benimamet).

196

Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain northern kingdom. At seven Saragossa autos held during the 1540s, no fewer than 232 Moriscos were condemned and four a/faquis were executed, along with a monk from Granada who had converted to Islam. They comprised 82% of those condemned for major heresy during this decade, dwarfing the twenty-nine Judaizers and twenty-two Protestants who also appeared in these autos. Equally important, the Moriscos sentenced by the Inquisition during the 1540s came from over sixty different Aragonese villages, including every important former

Mudejar settlement in the kingdom. !* From 1550 to 1557 the Aragonese tribunal was negotiating a general Edict of Grace with its Moriscos and their lords, which was finally proclaimed in the summer of 1556. By early October, Inquisitor Cervantes told the Suprema that

he and two Dominicans had completed a whirlwind tour of fifty Morisco communities in fifty days, signing up over 5,000 adult men and women as admitted apostates. They left two or three spies planted in each place to ensure that no serious relapses would occur. In one village that refused to accept the Edict of Grace, he had arrested forty-four Moriscos and fined them a total of 500 ducats, thus encouraging the others to sign up in respectable numbers. This amnesty probably registered close to one fourth of Aragon’s adult Moriscos,

making it by far the most successful operation of its kind in the Crown of Aragon. It was combined with the first major scheme of collective protection money ever implemented by the Inquisition, after being approved by Inquisitor-

General Valdés in May 1555. In exchange for not having their property confiscated on heresy charges and thus inconveniencing their overlords, the Moriscos of Aragon (who then comprised about 10,000 households scattered over 120 settlements) agreed to pay an annual tribute of 35,000 sweldos to the Saragossa tribunal in order to help meet the salaries of its officials. After the Granadan revolt of 1568, the Inquisitors and Morisco landlords of Valencia hastened to copy the Aragonese system.!° While negotiations for this agreement and its accompanying annual tributemoney were in progress, the harassment of Aragonese Moriscos by Saragossa’s Inquisition almost came to a halt. Only six Moriscos appeared in the 1550 auto and none at all were in the next one four years later.'© But starting with the 1558 auto, the older pattern of large numbers of randomly scattered Morisco arrests 14 Ing., Libro 988, fols. 44-45 (1540 auto, with fifty-one Moriscos), 48-49 (1541 auto, with forty-one Moriscos), 55—56 (1542 auto, with thirty Moriscos); Libro 736, fols. 21-22 (1543 auto,

with thirty-four Moriscos); Libro 988, fols. 240-41 (1545 auto, with twenty-six Moriscos); Archivo General de Simancas, Patronato Real, Legajo 28, p. 56 (1546 auto, with twenty-seven Moriscos); Libro 988, fols. 1-6v (1549 auto, with thirty-two Moriscos). 15 On the Edict of Grace, see Ing., Libro 761, fols. 377, 411-12; for the system of annual tribute-money from Aragon’s Moriscos (also copied in Old Castile), see José Martinez Millan, La Hacienda de la Inquistcién (1478-1700) (Madrid, 1984), pp. 178-83. 16 Inq., Libro 761, fols. gq—11v (1550 auto), 295—95v (1554 auto). In between (see ihid., fols. 211-14 and 2go~—94v), more than three dozen Aragonese Moriscos were arrested and eventually abjured,

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Map 3 Prosecution of Moriscos in the tribunal of Saragossa, 1558-1610 9

| resumed. It persisted across the last fifty years of Morisco Aragon. The

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Inquisition reached into better than g0% of Aragon’s Morisco settlements to provide Moslem heretics for its autos de fe. The overall punishment rate for deaths or condemnations to the galleys was closely comparable to that for the mixed settlements of Valencia. The number of Moriscos appearing in Sara198

Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain gossa’s autos de fe equaled about 10% of the total number of Morisco households in the Kingdom of Aragon in 1609. This is almost four times higher than the analogous rate for the Kingdom of Valencia. In Aragon as in Valencia, the Morisco community located closest to the seat of the Inquisition was kept under tight surveillance and suffered inordinately severe punishments. Unlike the city of Valencia, Saragossa still contained a moreria, El Azoque, inside its walls; it held about 150 households or perhaps 3% of the city’s population. Here the numbers of deaths or galley sentences between 1570 and 1610 virtually equaled the adult male Morisco population, while three-fourths of the total adult Morisco population appeared at autos. Both statistics closely match those from the smaller Valencian settlement at Mislata and far exceed those from any other Morisco community in Aragon. Aragon’s Moriscos were distributed more evenly over the whole fifty-year spectrum than Valencia’s, just as they were scattered more randomly across the map of Morisco settlements. Moriscos were executed in person at seventeen of Aragon’s nineteen autos de fe between 1560 and 1586, and in effigy at the other two. Although Moriscos were burned for heresy at only three of Saragossa’s next ten autos, some died at each of the final nine autos held between 1599 and the expulsion. But only once, in 1607, were more than seven Moriscos ever

killed at a Saragossa auto, even including executions in effigy. | At least ten Moriscos were sent to perform “unpaid penance at the oars”’ at all but one of Saragossa’s twenty-seven public autos held between 1575 and 1610. But the tribunal rarely sent more than twenty-five men at one time; and only in

the final two years before the expulsion did these totals approach fifty. The Valencian tribunal sent many fewer Moriscos to the galleys, but holds the single-year record of seventy-two in 1591 (when it also executed fifteen Mori- scos, all but one of them in effigy). Six of the nine largest Morisco communities in Aragon produced six of the nine largest groups of defendants at autos (Saragossa and Fuentes de Ebro were

overrepresented). Four of these six Morisco strongholds contained no significant Catholic population. In the other two, Belchite and Villafeliche, the Catholic minority rarely dared enter the Morisco section.'” Effectively, all six places were segregated, and probably none of them had much everyday contact with Aragon’s Christian population. But none was inaccessible to inquisitorial officials. ROADS TO AND FROM ARAGON

Most of the Moriscos of northern Spain lived in the districts of either the Valencian or Aragonese tribunals. But a few of them, at the western edges of the Mudejar settlements in the Ebro river basin, lived in Castile and belonged to the 17 See evidence from Villafeliche in Fournel-Guérin, “Les Morisques aragonais,” p. 5.

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tribunals of Cuenca or Logrofio. Studying the punishment of Moriscos by the Inquisition in northern Spain, one sees that this handful of Castilian settlements, especially those located on the main roads to Aragon, suffered disproportionately from the attentions of the Holy Office. Such places were close enough to maintain constant contact with Aragon’s outermost Morisco communities. At the same time they were the only large concentrations of Moriscos in their inquisitorial districts and thus received extremely close attention during peak periods of Morisco repression. Two Morisco communities on the edge of Aragon provided nearly all the

Moslem martyrs in the district of Cuenca. In the district of Logrono, two Morisco communities very close to Aragon provided 90% of the Islamic martyrs.'® All four places sent sizable shares of their adult Morisco populations '8 At Logrojio, thirty-six of the forty indigenous Moriscos executed by the Inquisition came from

Aguilar (thirty-two) or Agreda, as did all thirty-two of those executed in effigy; another

200

Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain to various public autos, a level of punishment matched by fewer than a dozen Morisco communities in Aragon or Valencia. In both cases, one village (Deza in Cuenca and Aguilar in Logrofio) was an isolated place with about 100 Morisco households and a few Catholics, while the other was the first sizable town on the

main road from Saragossa to Castile. Arcos de Jalén lay on the main road to Madrid, and Agreda on the main road to Valladolid and Segovia. Antonio Pérez escaped to Aragon via Arcos, while Philip IIT subsequently sent his army via

Agreda. Both entrances to Aragon had already preoccupied their respective

Castilian tribunals long before these events. ,

From the Morisco point of view, all these places were extensions of Aragon, whose Morisco brethren supplied their religious needs. Just before the general conversion of 1526, the alfagui of the nearest Aragonese community at Ariza held a religious revival for the ““New Christians” at Arcos, who had been forced to convert along with other Castilian Mudejars in 1502. When a pious Morisco in Deza wanted to arrange an Islamic wedding, he also invited the alfaqui from Ariza. Many of his fellow-townsmen married Aragonese Moriscos, and those

who had managed to learn much Islamic lore had generally acquired it in Aragon. The only Morisco prisoner in the Cuenca district who understood the orthodox Moslem doctrine on Mary’s virginity — that it endured until she gave birth, but not afterwards — was an immigrant from Aragon who had settled in Arcos.!?

The Catalan village of Ascd, located directly south of Lérida, was the easternmost Morisco stronghold on the Ebro. It belonged to the Inquisition of Valencia, who found it impossible to supervise, with fewer than three dozen Catholic families mixed among its 200 Morisco households. No Morisco from Ascé was ever executed or even sent to the galleys, even after three crosses were

destroyed there one Christmas and the local familiar was murdered soon afterwards. When the Valencian tribunal arrested the African-born village boss

(cacique) of Asc6é as a prime suspect in this murder, an Arabic book was discovered in his house; but he was never tortured and received a remarkably light sentence. Valencia extradited him to Saragossa, who questioned the cactque about his dealings with French Protestants. Although the Saragossa tribunal failed to convict the cacique of conspiracy with Huguenots, the Suprema finally

ordered him to be sent to the galleys for three years.7° , twenty-nine men were sent to the galleys from these two places. At Cuenca, Arcos and Deza provided ten of the twelve Moriscos to be executed: see Garcia-Arenal, /nquisicién y moriscos,

19 ae between Arcos and Deza and Aragonese Moriscos are discussed by GarcfaArenal, ibid., pp. 59-60, 79-82 (where she notes that contacts of the Mudejars in the southern part of the district with Valencia were “not so close or constant” as those of the northerners with Aragon), 95, 108. 20 Ing., Libro g89, fols. 796-g7v (#2 of Aragon 1591 auto); Libro 987, fol. 175 (#4 of Valencia 1589 auto). See also Inq., Libro 936, fols. 43-—48v (#59—61 of 1568 auto), 179-88 (#23 of 1578 auto); Libro 987, fols. 1-44 (#17 of 1587 auto), 174-211 (#21 of 1589 auto, another artisan who

201

| Aragonese heresies , As this case shows, there was much interchange of Moriscos among the tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat. The Moriscos of the Ebro basin, who

included many artisans, peddlers, and carters, were a mobile group. The | | Morisco martyrology within the Aragonese Secretariat shows the extent of their _ mobility and their vulnerability. Six Moriscos from Aragon were executed at Logronio autos de fe in 1588~89; in exchange, a Morisca from the Logrofio _ district was executed at Saragossa in 1607, following two sisters from Avila who were killed in 1561. The Aragonese tribunal burned Valencian Moriscos in 1579, 1581, and 1606. Meanwhile, the Valencian tribunal executed three Aragonese Moriscos in the 1530s, a North African immigrant from Murcia in

1566, and a Tunisian-born immigrant from Sicily in 1567; they added a Castilian Morisca in 1573 and two Aragonese immigrants in 1578.2! Sometimes native-born Moriscos executed by these tribunals should actually be counted as immigrants. In 1578, Saragossa executed a man from Villafeliche

who had been raised in Algiers. He returned to Spain in 1569 to fight with Granadan rebels, was captured, enslaved, and reconciled by the Inquisition in Toledo before being ransomed and returning to Aragon, where he eked out a living as a wandering teacher of Islam. Next year Saragossa executed another native Morisco who had been circumcised at Salonica thirty years previously. He had made three trips to Spain in order to smuggle more than thirty Moriscos to safety in Africa. While in prison he observed all Moslem rituals, praying to Mecca alongside an alfaqui from Belchite, and wrenched the crucifix from the

hands of a monk just before being hanged. A more fortunate Aragonese Morisco, who had lived in Africa for eighteen years, got only ten years in the galleys after being arrested in Aragon while trying to capture a Christian boy to sell in Algiers.?2 GEA DE ALBARRACIN: A MORISCO OASIS

In all these interchanges between the Moriscos of Aragon and those of Valencia,

the main road went southeast from Daroca via Teruel to Segorbe. Almost midway along the 110 miles between Daroca and Segorbe, both of which had sizable morerias, lay the region’s only Morisco stronghold, an Islamic oasis in a barren windswept terrain fit only for Christian shepherds: Gea de Albarracin. It belonged to the Count of Fuentes, one of Aragon’s great noblemen. Gea was a sizable place, “about 400 houses,” according to a visiting Valencian Inquisitor in had lived in Fez and was suspected of complicity in the murder of Ascé’s familiar Pedro Salvador). Lapeyre, Géographie de l’Espagne morisque, p. 113, found 154 Morisco households

expelled from Ascé in 1609, and eleven others allowed to remain; it was by far the largest Morisco community in Catalonia. 21 Inq., Libro 834, fols. 388-89, 420-22; Libro 988, fols. 98, 399, 519; Libro ggo, fols. 399, 388; Libro 936, fols. 20v, 81v, 188; Libro g11, fol. 753Vv.

22 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 385 (#83 of 1578 auto), 469v (#81 of 1579 auto); Libro ggo, fol. 215 (#72 of 1603 auto).

, 202

Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain 1563, who added that “‘almost everyone in this village lives like Moors.” In 1610 it produced 2,083 Morisco refugees, the second largest total in the Kingdom of Aragon, to which it belonged.*3 During the previous fifty years, it had produced prisoners at fifteen different autos of the Valencian Inquisition and had seen fifteen of its residents executed in effigy. Both totals were records. Gea first emerged as a serious problem for the Inquisition about a decade

after its forced conversion. In the summer of 1536 the Suprema ordered Valencia to arrest its Moriscos who refused to have their children baptized as Christians. The villagers obligingly produced the culprits, but flatly refused to have their trials conducted outside their village. Such attitudes caused enormous problems for the Valencians, who suggested transferring the place to

Aragon’s Holy Office. By January 1538, Gea’s Moriscos petitioned the Supreme Council for a full-time priest and a larger parish church while requesting the Holy Office to use “moderation and restraint” in dealing with them. The Inquisitor-General granted them an official pardon in March 1538, but only after some Gea Moriscos had publicly abjured their errors and one of them, Luis Ben-ala alias Mohammed Alcocer, had been executed.7* Gea was quiet for almost a decade. In April 1547, another visitation by the Valencia tribunal led to more trials. The defendants readily admitted their guilt, but claimed they were too poor to pay the costs of their trials without having their property confiscated, which ran counter to the privileges of Valencia’s Moriscos under their current agreement with the Inquisition. Six years later, Gea’s overlord tried to negotiate a new amnesty for its Moriscos, who had killed

some of their Christian neighbors. The Valencian Inquisition arrested thirty men from Gea, but closed the affair in October 1553 after the community paid 30,000 sueldos for another general pardon.”

By August 1560 the Valencian Inquisition learned that Juan Cayete, a Morisco from Gea who had been reconciled in 1538, had relapsed into flagrantly Moslem practices. After a delay of thirteen months, they arrested him and asked the Supreme Council for advice on sentencing him, because this was a negocio de calidad on which other cases depended. By the winter of 1562-63, the Valencian Inquisition returned to Gea for a thorough investigation, during which its officials noted that Gea’s Moriscos “lack the caution and wariness of the Jews and other heretics, who try to cover up what they have done.” Because it was impossible to send them all to Valencia for trial, the Supreme Council told

the Valencian Inquisitor to “act with the least possible scandal” and stop making arrests. ““The worst part,” noted the visiting Inquisitor, was that “the count knows that they all live like Moors and tries to stop the remedy.” Nine 23 British Library, Egerton Ms. 1833, fol. 18; Lapeyre, Géographie de l'Espagne morisque, p. 112. The largest Morisco community in Aragon was Brea, with 2,700 emigrants (ibid., 109). 24 Inq., Libro 322, fols. 54—54v, 56, 69—69v, 173, 188, 196. 25 Ibid. (2nd pagination covering 1547-48), fol. 7-7; Libro 323, fol. 202; Libro 961, fols. 221-23, 225Vv, 229, 233-35v (Saragossa to Suprema, Sept.—Oct. 1553).

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Aragonese heresies

Gea Moriscos were finally shipped to Valencia, appearing in the 1563 auto to be

reconciled for a second time and, more fatefully, assessed the costs of their trials.26

In order to pay for the 1563 trials, the Valencian tribunal had confiscated the

| property of a dozen residents of Gea. By December 1565 the Count of Fuentes had lobbied the Saragossa Inquisitors into supporting his petition to the Supreme Council to transfer Gea to the Aragonese district. At the same time, Fuentes also requested the Inquisitor-General to convert the fines of Gea’s Moriscos into whippings, at a fixed rate of lashes per ducat, because of their poverty. Meanwhile, Gea’s officials repeated their tactic of 1538 and petitioned for better religious instruction and a transfer to the Aragonese Inquisition.’

The maneuvering provied futile. Six men from Gea appeared in the 1568 Valencian auto, followed by three more in 1572. By September 1573, after another visitation to the village, more complaints about Gea reached the desk of the Inquisitor-General. Gea’s parish priest, in office since the early 1560s, had

: his own style of convivencia with his parishioners: he absolved all their sins in exchange for a load of firewood, closed his eyes when their Ramadan practices . conflicted with his Easter precepts, and allowed them to bury their dead deep in

virgin soil with fresh linen. He cooperated minimally with the Inquisitors, accusing all of his parishioners globally without naming anyone in particular except two immigrant weavers from France, whom he suspected held Protestant

beliefs. The Count of Fuentes made fresh demands to transfer Gea to the district of Saragossa, while the Valencian Inquisition began demanding that the count disarm Gea’s Moriscos. (At this point, the Moriscos in the Kingdom of

Valencia had been disarmed for a dozen years, but those of the Kingdom of Aragon remained unaffected.) A fresh Edict of Grace was proclaimed for Gea and signatures collected in the spring of 1575, but the transfer to Aragon was definitively rejected. A few months later seven defendants from Gea appeared at —

a Valencian auto. One of them was executed, because he had revoked his confession and prayed to Mecca while imprisoned; two others who had confessed under torture were sent to the galleys; another man, who had knifed a witness testifying against him in the city of Albarracin, escaped with a whipping and payment of his victim’s medical bills, although the Suprema noted that he should have been sent to the galleys; and an Old-Christian woman married to a

| Gea Morisco was forbidden to live in morertas.?8 By 1580 Valencia’s Inquisitors arrested the governor of Gea and nephew of 26 Inq., Libro 911, fols. 195v, 381v, 408; British Library, Egerton Ms. 1833, fols. 12v—15; Libro

324, fols. 34v-36, 43; Lea, Moriscos, p. 103. :

27 British Library, Egerton Ms. 1833, fols. 31-35, 56; Inq., Libro 324, fols. 85v, 93v, 105v, 108v. 28 Inq., Libro 936, fols. 43-48v (#36—41 of 1568 auto), 65-72 (#39-41 of 1572 auto), 119-26v (#1, 33-35, 38, 40, 41 of 1575 auto); Libro 326, fols. 85v, 137v, 158, 169v, 185v, 201, 252v—53, 259, 266—66v, 270; British Library, Egerton Ms. 1833, fols. 74—74v; Ing., Legajo 549/2, quoted by Jeanne Vidal, Quand on brilait les morisques (Nimes, 1986), pp. 64—65.

204

| Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain the Count of Fuentes, because a Morisco prisoner whom he held in his house had been allowed to escape. The Supreme Council ordered them to proceed with moderation against the other Gea Moriscos whom they held, while they arrested the guarantor of the prisoner’s large bail, who had also helped him escape. The governor was released on bail after four months in prison, and ten more Moriscos from Gea populated the 1581 auto. The original prisoner, Juan de Heredia, was never recaptured and was executed in effigy along with his wife.

His son-in-law, a gunsmith who owned a manuscript mocking Christian doctrine, was sent to the galleys. Five other men, including Heredia’s son and the village notary, were tortured and fined heavily for abetting the escape.?° A few years later, resistance to the Inquisition became more violent in Gea.

A local Morisco who had already committed perjury before the Valencia Inquisition then escaped from jail and lived as an outlaw near his home town, killing one of the posse who tried to recapture him. He was finally caught,

sentenced to a whipping and ten years in the galleys for perjury by the Inquisition at their 1588 auto, and returned to Gea to stand trial for murder. But when the Inquisition tried to arrest Gea’s town messenger and jailer in June 1589, collective violence erupted against the “dogs who have come daily to pull us from our homes.” Armed with swords and muskets, a crowd of Moriscos

prevented the arrest. Soon afterwards, a traveling peddler of rosaries from Catalonia, who had tried to help the Inquisition’s officials in this melee, was found hanged near Gea. The Holy Office took swift revenge. At two Valencian autos in 1591, seven of ten Morisco prisoners from Gea were sent to the galleys (one of the others was too young, one had lost an arm and was unfit to serve, and

one had hanged himself in prison after being sentenced to the galleys). A blacksmith finally broke under torture and named fifty of his fellow-villagers who had participated in the riot. “He had not confessed at the outset,” said the summary of his trial, “because the other Gea Moriscos made signs that they would tear him to pieces if he confessed.” As in 1580, the original defendant got clean away. A widow who was paid by the village to prepare its dead for Morisco

funerals also managed to escape; both of them were executed in absentia, together with six other Gea Moriscos charged with a variety of offenses. The parade of effigies continued at the 1592 auto, with seven more fugitive Gea Moriscos subjected to ritual burnings.?° After this eruption, Gea de Albarracin was relatively quiet until the expulsion. However, another Gea Morisco went to the galleys in 1598, because he refused to confess to Islamic practices although he had been wearing a magical amulet in Arabic script when he was arrested. In 1607, Gea’s public midwife was removed 29 Inq., Libro 327, fols. 282v-83v, 288v—290, 303, 315, 321, 327v—28; Libro 936, fols. 2g7—3 10v

(#5-9, 21, 26, 42, 48—49 of 1581 auto).

30 Ing., Libro 987, fols. 69 (#1 of 1588 auto), 360-95 (#39-43, 120-27 of second 1591 auto), 408-31 (#10, 27, 29, 60, 102 of first 1591 auto), 467v—-68v (#83—89 of 1592 auto); Vidal, Quand on brilait les morisques, p. 64 (quote).

205

Aragonese herestes

from office by the Inquisition for circumcising newborn boys and failing to report births to the parish priest; three other Moriscos from Gea, including an old man born in Africa, were also sentenced with her. At the final auto before the expulsion, a Gea Morisco was sent to the galleys for three years for owning two

recapture Spain in 1612.3! |

books in Aljamiado script, one of which predicted that the Arabs would

Right to the end, Christianization had been a total failure in Gea. At an auto

hastily held in Saragossa during the expulsion in 1610, one of the three ~ Moriscos actually killed was a young immigrant from Gea, a second offender who had been observed by several of his fellow-prisoners performing Moslem prayers both in prison and in the Inquisition’s new House of Penitents. The town’s chief magistrate could tell the Inquisitor-General in 1566 that he and his fellow-villagers “never used Moorish dress or speech” since their conversion, _ but both of them knew that Gea’s Moriscos routinely followed orthodox Islamic practice on all major rituals of passage from circumcision to burial. Apart from Gea, the only other Moriscos on the highway between Aragon and Valencia lived in the old moreria of Teruel. After its mosque had been closed in 1502, this Islamic community remained far smaller than Gea, and much less hostile towards Catholicism. Eight of its prominent Moriscos, led by a cathedral canon, had presented themselves for absolution at Valencia in the mid-1550s.In | 1578 a leading Morisco, Lorenco Polo, took the Edict of Grace together with

his relatives. Not long afterwards he provided evidence against his distant relative Juan Companero, the Morisco kinglet (reyecillo) of Saragossa. When another Teruel Morisco was later arrested by the Inquisition, his neighbors blamed Polo. In 1581 a group of twenty armed Moriscos tried to kill him one night and wounded his companion, a notary who worked for the Inquisition. At Valencia’s 1583 and 1584 autos, ten Moriscos from Teruel were sent to the galleys. One man, who revoked the confession he made under torture, was burned; another, who refused to confess despite being accused by seventeen witnesses, died in prison and was executed in effigy. The mother. of the man

who began the attack, a widow known as “la Renegada,” had served as treasurer of Teruel’s aljama (an unheard-of distinction for a Moslem woman)

and owned a Moslem parody of a saint’s statue. The Inquisitors gave her “moderate” torture, a hundred lashes, six years in a convent, and a large fine. Three other women who refused to confess were fined or imprisoned.*? The resistance of Teruel’s Moriscos was broken by this episode. Between 31 Ingq., Libro 938, fols. 65-70 (#14 of 1598 auto), 343-82v (#13, 16, 22, 25, 32 of 1607 auto); Libro 939, fol. 16v (#19 of 1609 auto). 32 Inq., Libro gg1, fols. 5-6 (#5 of 1610 auto); British Library, Egerton Ms. 1833, fol. 56. 33 Ing., Libro g11, fols. 245v—45v (Valencia despachadas for 1555/56); Libro 936, fols. 349-53, 357v (#22-34, 43-44, 50 of 1583 auto), 395-415 (#4, 22-27, 54 of 1584 auto), 451 (#78-79 of

ae5British ‘ Library, Egerton Ms. 1511, fols. 53-104 (méritos of Lorenco Polo, June 206

Patterns of Morisco persecution in northern Spain 1584 and 1587 a large part of Teruel’s moreria appeared in Valencia to abjure their errors. Many had not yet been accused; only a few of them were punished, none seriously. Eleven of them came from the Gamir family, who had been active leaders against royal intervention in the 1570s before participating in the

attack on Polo. The Polos ruled Teruel’s moreria afterwards. The town’s reputed alfaqui fled to avoid arrest and was burned in effigy in 1587, but the Holy Office made no further arrests here. Although Valencia’s Inquisition counted about 150 Morisco households in Teruel in 1594, only forty-two households left for Africa in 1610.54

MORISCO ESCAPE ROUTES , In the geography of Morisco persecution in northern Spain, all roads led to or

from the Kingdom of Aragon. One of them ran north from Saragossa into France via Somport. It had been the most important all-weather pass across the Pyrenees since Roman times, and often became the simplest escape route for Aragonese Moriscos fleeing to Africa, since they were perfectly safe once they had crossed the border. Any doubts on this score had been erased as early as 1559, when a group of Spanish merchants and students in Languedoc arrested thirteen Moriscos who had recently escaped from Aragon after the sensational

murders of three familiars and a priest on a main highway. The Spaniards charged them with murder; but the Parlement of Toulouse quickly released them and imposed a heavy fine on the Spaniards. There was already a small community of Aragonese Moriscos living in the Béarnese city of Oloron, who

helped send their compatriots on to French ports.*° : A few months before the 1559 murders, a half-dozen Catholic mountaineers had been whipped at an auto de fe for helping some Morisco families escape from

the Inquisition after being arrested near the border. Several other Moriscos who had been captured before reaching France were punished along with them. Fifty years later, on the eve of expulsion, Aragonese Moriscos were still being captured along the French border. Some of these arrests involved up to twenty people at a time, or women disguised as men. But for every one who got caught,

many escaped. Some of the numerous Frenchmen in Aragon earned extra money through this form of smuggling. When Aragon’s Viceroy sent a spy in Turkish costume to tour Aragon’s Morisco communities in 1576, one of the few 34 Inq., Libro 936, fols. 395-415 (#34-51 of 1584 auto), 421v—51 (#11-65 of 1586 auto); Libro 937, fols. 1-44 (#46—51, 87 of 1587 auto); Lapeyre, Géographie de l’Espagne morisque, p. 112. On

the Gamirs and the political struggles of Teruel in the 1560s and 1570s, see G. Colas Latorre and J.A. Salas Ausens, Aragon en el siglo XVI. Alteraciones sociales y conflictos politicos (Saragossa,

1982), pp. 459-84. 35 Inq., Libro 961, fols. 623—23v; Libro 962, fol. 15v; Libro 988, fols. 8-35 (#6—12, 42, 49, 53,55, 59, 64 of 1559 auto).

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people who gave him candid information was a Frenchman who boasted about how easy it was to pass Moriscos into France.?°

A less-used Morisco escape route led west along the Ebro to Tudela and north through Navarre, across difficult passes, and down to the French Basque ports of the Atlantic. Only in 1579 did the Navarrese Inquisition become aware

of this route and arrested two Aragonese Moriscos working in Pamplona, sending both to the galleys. Five years later the Logrofio tribunal arrested two

Frenchmen for smuggling Moriscos into France. They were curtly told by Madrid that they had no jurisdiction over this offense; in any event, added the Suprema, most Moriscos from their district who escaped to France traveled via Aragon.??

The geography of Morisco expulsion provides an odd reflection of the geography of inquisitorial persecution. After more than fifty years of risking arrest when trying to escape into France, many of Aragon’s Moriscos were now required to take this road, with a few smaller contingents from the west being expelled via Navarre. As Lapeyre noted, the Kingdom of Aragon was more completely cleansed of its Moriscos than any other part of Spain. But the few Morisco communities on the Castilian side of the border with Aragon, places which had suffered disproportionately during the previous quarter-century, were still sitting in their homes in 1611. Many had bought certificates of good conduct from ecclesiastical officials, which gave them a fragile protection. The

surviving residents of Aguilar del rio Alhama, one of the oldest Mudejar settlements in Castile and the one most heavily martyrized by the Inquisition after 1570, were among the very last to leave.38 36 Inq., Libro 963, fols. 361-69v; Libro gg1, fols. 93—141v (#15-16, 91 of 1609 auto).

37 Ing., Libro 327, fol. 233; Libro 328, fol. 176-76v; Libro 833, fol. 486-86v (#25-26 of 1580 38 Taper, Géographie de l’Espagne morisque, pp. 105, 118, 163, 187.

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The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon Eran torpes en sus razones, bestiales en su discurso, barbaros en su lenguaje, ridiculos en su traje,... brutos en sus comidas. Pedro Aznar Cardona, Expulsion justificada de los moriscos (1612) (cited by Caro Baroja, Razas, pueblos y linajes, p. 87n).

Que es harta falta no entenderlo [Arabic] vosotros, y ansi os escribimos de mi letra en algamia Valencian Morisco to Aragon (quoted by Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad, p. 239).

God wished to withdraw us from among those raving dogs, those enemies of truth, who in the blindness of their false sect nail their God to a piece of wood, calling it

son, father, and mother, and making a thousand other lies. With their cruel Inquisition, they held us subjected and annihilated through the force of their punishments ... A thousand praises to Allah, who has delivered us from among them. Tunisian refugee, late seventeenth century (quoted in Epalza and Petit, Moriscos andalous en Tunisie, p. 131).

The Morisco minority in the Kingdom of Aragon was the smallest among the three viable centers of Islamic culture in sixteenth—century Spain. At most they comprised only one fifth of the sparse population of the Kingdom of Aragon, compared with almost one third in the Kingdom of Valencia and over half in the

Kingdom of Granada until 1570. Understandably, the abundant modern scholarship on Spanish Moriscos has concentrated on their history in Granada and to a lesser extent in Valencia,' since these were the places where Christian missionary activity was concentrated and where desperate but futile uprisings by the ‘‘New Converts” occurred. Aragon saw no attempts to train a native Morisco clergy, nor any serious Morisco rebellions. An Aragonese chronicler, writing in

1622, refused to discuss the history of his kingdom’s Moriscos after their forcible baptism in the late 1520s, explaining that he found the subject unedifying. ““One can scarcely advance a single step here,” he claimed, “without ' The best recent general introduction, Antonio Dominguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, Historia de los Moriscos (Madrid, 1978), discusses Granada almost exclusively; the most famous of the older works, Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, Los moriscos espanoles y su expulsion, 2 vols. (Valencia, 1901),

devotes most of its attention to Valencia.

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| Aragonese heresies scandals, superstitions and wickedness, making it loathsome to tell and fruitless to read.””? However, the history of Aragon’s Moriscos was distinctive in two important ways. First, as we have seen, they were the most vulnerable of the three major areas to inquisitorial persecution. If we include Aragonese Moriscos killed by the

Valencian or Navarrese tribunals and those living just across the Aragonese frontier with Castile, we find that this region provided well over half of Spain’s Morisco martyrs during the fifty years preceding their expulsion. The Holy Office sent more Moriscos to the galleys from Aragon than from Valencia and Granada combined. Morisca women from Aragon and its border communities were arrested, tortured, and put in autos de fe in vastly greater numbers than in the rest of Spain. By any yardstick one chooses, the Saragossa tribunal was the most energetic in Philip II’s Spain in punishing Moriscos. The second distinction of Aragon’s Moriscos is that they, rather than their more numerous confreres in Granada or Valencia, preserved almost all of

Spain’s surviving Morisco literature. The Koran was first translated into Spanish under the patronage of an Aragonese Inquisitor, who returned home from Granada in 1504. The best-known Koranic commentary in sixteenth-

century Spain, the Jafcir, was composed by a Castilian Mudejar after a pessimistic meeting with Saragossa’s Moslem elders about this time; it is known to us through copies made by Aragonese Moriscos. The only important chivalric romance by a Morisco survives in a single copy, which was hidden in the hollow

wooden pillar of a house in rural Aragon and accidentally discovered in the eighteenth century. The only known pilgrimage to Mecca by a sixteenth-century Spanish Moslem was made by an Aragonese, who described his experience in rhymed couplets. Spain’s last important Morisco author, Mohamed Rabadan, was an Aragonese who composed some of his major works in Castilian after his

expulsion. In other words, if there had been no Morisco community in sixteenth-century Aragon, we would be almost totally ignorant of Morisco literature. In order to understand why Aragon, rather than Valencia or Castile, preserved

a specifically Morisco literary culture, we need to look at some crucial 2 Vicenzio Blasco y Lanuza, Historias ecclesiasticas y seculares de Aragon, 2 vols. (Saragossa, 1622), I,

Bk. 1, ch. 4 (pp. 260-63). 3 See L. P. Harvey, “Un manuscrito aljamiado en la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Cambridge,” in Al-Andalus, 23 (1958), pp. 49-74; A. Galmés de Fuentes, ed., El libro de las batallas, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1975); and M. de Pano y Ruata, ed., Coplas del peregrino de Puey Moncon. Viaje a la Meca en

el siglo XVI (Saragossa, 1897). For the most recent discoveries, see Ana Labarta, “Una pagina aljamiado hallada en Torrellas (Tarazona),” in Turiaso, 3 (1982), pp. 225-33, and the discovery during the mid-1980s of an Aljamiado text hidden in a chimney at Almonacid, mentioned by Maria del Anson Calvo in Destierro aragoneses, 1: Judios y Moriscos (Saragossa, 1988), p. 305 n. 11.

On Mohamed Rabadan, see L. P. Harvey, “Textes de littérature religieuse des Moriscos tunisiens,” in M.de Epalza and R. Petit, eds., Receuil d'études sur les moriscos andalous en Tunisie (Madrid and Tunis, 1973), pp. 202-04.

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The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon differences between Aragonese and Valencian Moriscos. The first is linguistic. Most of Valencia’s Moriscos continued to speak and even write Arabic up to the moment of the expulsion. If the men learned a Christian language it was more likely to be the Catalan dialect of Valencia’s peasantry than the Castilian of its ruling elite. Consequently, nearly all the surviving documents of Valencian Moriscos are written in Arabic. Among three dozen samples of Morisco writings confiscated by Valencia’s Inquisition, including a tiny notebook with nine love

poems, only four small collections of prayers were in Aljamiado (Castilian written in Arabic script).t Thus, on the Inquisition’s own evidence, even Valencia’s most assimilated Moriscos only learned Castilian as a new “sacred” language in which to pray. In Aragon, on the other hand, the Arabic language disappeared from everyday use long before its Moslems were forcibly baptized. This is a fairly common cultural phenomenon among partly assimilated religious minorities in everyday contact with the dominant tongue, who preserve only their distinctive alphabet and religious lexicon. Because Aragon’s Mudejar communities contained a larger share of artisans than those of Valencia, they were better integrated into

their regional market economy. The Mudejar villages of Aragon often had artisan specialties, like the jarmakers of Muel, the leatherworkers of Brea, or the munitions-makers of Villafeliche; skilled construction workers composed the backbone of the moreria in Aragon’s capital. Such people mastered Castilian rapidly; the earliest known examples of Mudejar texts in Aljamiado come from

fourteenth-century Aragon, not Castile. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, Aragon’s Mudejars spoke Castilian as well as the Christians or Jews. Long before conversion, they were cultural hybrids. Notarial documents from the Aragonese village of Illuecas show a double form of dating (e.g., 903/1498

and 939/1532/33) in use both before and after the official “conversion.” Constant business dealings with Christians molded the habits of Aragonese Moriscos, inducing them to adopt the calendar as well as the costume of their dominant culture. Experts have demonstrated that Aragon’s Morisco scribes had lost much of their mastery over the language of Islam. They abbreviated Arabic characters, made rudimentary mistakes in spelling and grammar, and even wrote from left to right. Even before 1500, when an Aragonese Mudejar village hired a cadi and teacher of Arabic, they had to import him from Valencia.° 4 See Ana Labarta, “Inventario de los documentos contenidos en procesos inquisitoriales contra los

moriscos valencianos, conservados en el Archivo Histérico Nacional de Madrid (Legajos 548—556),” in Al-Qantara, 1 (1980), pp. 115-64; also L.P. Harvey, “The Arabic Dialect of Valencia in 1595,” in Al-Andalus, 36 (1971), pp. 81-115, and Ana Labarta, “Las cuentas del tendero morisco Geronimo Hoix (Gandia 1587),” in Al-Qantara, 3 (1982), pp. 135-72. 5 See the valuable survey by Othmar Hegyi, “El uso del alfabeto arabe por minorias musulmanas y otros aspectos de la literatura aljamiada,” in Actas del coloquio internacional sobre literatura aljamiada

y morisca [1972] (Madrid, 1978), pp. 147-64. For the 1499 contract to hire a cadi, see J. Ribera 6 3). Asin, eds., Manuscritos arabes y aljamiados de la Biblioteca de la Junta (Madrid, 1912), p. 238

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Aragon’s dominant Christian culture removed other things besides spoken Arabic from its Moslem minority. Like the small Mudejar remnant in Castilian cities, the male Moriscos of Aragon dressed no differently from the Catholic

majority during the sixteenth century. Inventories show that the wealthiest Moriscas also copied the skirts and gowns of Old-Christian ladies, although their poorer sisters continued to wear more traditional Arabic clothes. Literary scholars even note signs of Aragonese patriotism when a Morisco from Cadrete composed a handbook of Islamic practices eight years after his forced baptism. In it, he referred to Aragon as “this golden isle,” and blamed the French for his religious difficulties. Aragon’s Moriscos remained fiercely Moslem after 1526, as their record before the Inquisitors testifies; but a German professor exagger-

ated only slightly when he claimed that “the [Aragonese] Morisco accepted being Spanish in everything but his religon.”® MORISCO LITERACY IN ARAGON

However, these culturally assimilated Aragonese Moriscos became, to a greater extent than their Valencian or Granadan brothers, a “people of the book” after

their forced conversion. The Inquisitors confiscated more Islamic books and writings from the Aragonese than from the Valencians, who were twice as numerous. In Aragon, over three-fourths of the owners of Islamic manuscripts were artisans or merchants, with a sprinkling of liberal professions (thirty-three healers, twenty-one notaries, seven physicians, in addition to a few alfaquis and professional teachers). No Valencian alfaqui is known to have kept a library of more than eleven books, scarcely more than some Aragonese artisans. Morisca women, who never appear in connection with Arabic writings in Valencia, turn up in Aragonese records as owners and sometimes as fluent readers of Aljamiado

- texts; the only Morisca accused of owning an Islamic book by the Valencia tribunal was a tagarina from Aragon, and her book was in Aljamiado.’ , Aragonese texts circulated into the few Morisco settlements just across the Castilian border, only a few hours’ journey from important Morisco villages in southern and western Aragon. At Arcos de Jalén, on the main road from Madrid to Saragossa, the Inquisitors found only one Islamic handbook owned by a local Morisco. It was written entirely in Castilian script, except for the names of Allah or Mohammed. On the other hand, a visiting Aragonese had been captured in Arcos in 1557 wearing an Arabic amulet containing verses from the Koran. In the district of the Inquisition of Cuenca, Aragonese immigrants had a far better 6 See W. Hoenerbach, “Los moriscos a la luz de sus documentos,” in Actas de coloquio, pp. 49-106 (quote, p. 54).

? Compare Raphael Carrasco, “Le Refus d’assimilation des morisques, aspects politiques et culturels d’aprés les sources inquisitoriales,” in Les Morisques et leur temps (Paris, 1983), p. 212, with Jacqueline Fournel-Guérin, “Le Livre et la civilisation écrite dans la communauté morisque aragonaise (1540-1620),” in Mélanges de la Casa de Velazquez, 15 (1979), p. 243.

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The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon grasp of Koranic texts than descendants of local Mudejars, or even Granadans. Morisco literacy improved a bit west of Aragon. A man from Aguilar in La Rioja had been sent to the galleys in 1569 for possessing an Aljamiado manuscript; in

, the border town of Agreda, on the main road to Old Castile, an Aljamiado text was confiscated as late as 1594. We do not know if either document came from

Aragon. Even their bitterest enemies admitted that Aragon’s Moriscos possessed a

remarkable amount of Moslem writings. Pedro Aznar Cardona, a rustic _ _ intellectual raised in the heavily Morisco Jalén valley, remarked in his Justified

Expulsion of Spanish Moriscos (Huesca, 1612) that |

The books of this sect and its rituals and superstitions is a bottomless sea. In every house, in every corner, they have some, right down to little cards and alphabets for children with Mohammed’s commandments, put into rhymed couplets, along with the other heresies of

his poisonous doctrine. At Plasencia, Urrea de Jalon, and Lumpiaque, many of these books and little cards have been found. I saw part of them myself, before the Vicar of Urrea burned them.?

It is likely that Aragon’s Moriscos could boast more book-owners per thousand

population than Aragon’s Old Christians. The fact that all these Morisco writings were highly illegal makes the contrast even greater.

Aragon’s underground Morisco “press” produced works as diverse as chivalric romances or rhymed accounts of pilgrimages during the sixteenth century; but the vast majority of its output was directly religious in content, consisting of Koranic texts with commentaries, or summaries of essential Islamic

practices. In the absence of anything remotely resembling a professionally trained clergy, Aragon’s Moriscos bear an odd resemblance to the early Protestant movement with its famous slogan of the “priesthood of all believers.”

Every head of household was enjoined to read the Holy Scriptures (though unable to read them in the sacred tongue in which they were originally written), and then to interpret them and live out their precepts according to the best of his abilities. These Moriscos faced an even greater handicap than the Protestants, because Islamic tradition strongly opposed any translation of the Koran. Thus Aragon’s first Koranic translation was made under inquisitorial patronage, and their Aljamiado handbooks often included interlinear Castilian translations of Koranic texts. Morisco literacy was used to record much prophetic or even magical thinking. Aragonese Moriscos frequently carried amulets; the Inquisitors of Saragossa 8 Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, /nguisicién y moriscos. Los procesos del tribunal de Cuenca (Madrid, 1978),

pp. 53-55, 81, 107-08. See also Inq., Libro 833, fols. 94, 104 (#2 of 1569 auto); Libro 329, fol. 305: in January 1594 the Logrofio tribunal submitted a text in Aljamiado, confiscated at Agreda, to the Suprema because they had nobody capable of translating it. 9 Quoted in Julio Cara Baroja, “Los Moriscos aragoneses seguin un autor de comienzos del siglo XVII,” in his Razas, pueblos y linajes (Madrid, 1957), p. 92 n. 30.

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Aragonese heresies | caught almost 100 of them with alherces or loose papers in Arabic script on their

persons. (One unlucky Morisco was denounced by a Catholic tailor who discovered an alherce while mending his shirt.) Most such amulets contained Koranic verses, but their purpose was to bring the bearer good luck, not help him learn his prayers. On two occasions, Aragonese Moriscos literally ate the Arabic papers they were carrying before the Inquisition could examine them; one man was probably trying to destroy some incriminating evidence, but the other was performing a magical ritual.!°

Various political prophecies, both oral and written, circulated through Aragon’s Morisco settlements throughout the sixteenth century. A spy in Turkish dress, sent by Aragon’s Viceroy to gather information in its Morisco strongholds about this time, reported that he had heard in many places “that when the Huguenots began a war for [Spanish] Navarre, this would be the start of Spain’s undoing.” But it was to the Ottoman Empire, not to anti-Spanish Christian powers, that Aragon’s Moriscos habitually looked for deliverance. One Morisco tried to persuade his fellow-prisoners in the Aljaferia in 1589 that Drake’s fleet only pretended to be English: “although the Armada came in the queen’s name, it was really from the Sultan.”!! Even at the edge of expulsion, such political prophecies did not cease. A

Morisco from Gea was sentenced in 1609 for owning a manuscript which predicted an Ottoman conquest of Spain in 1612. From the same village at the same time, another rumor spread across the Kingdom of Aragon; letters were sent to alfaguis in various Aragonese communities, advising the Moriscos to sell all their property and buy weapons, because Ottoman help would soon arrive.

Another Aragonese Morisco specified that “the Turk had to pass through Aragon and Valencia on a white horse,” adding that his fellow-townsmen had a’ cache of arms ready to help him.!2 ATTACKING MORISCO LEADERSHIP

Three of the plotters behind these January 1609 meetings, including the Morisco bayles of Brea and Ambel, were sent to the galleys by the Inquisition; they were the last in a long series of Morisco leaders arrested by the Saragossa Inquisitors. The headman of Brea, Aragon’s largest and probably wealthiest Morisco community, had previously been condemned to the galleys ten years before. While he was serving as village judge, he had. opposed the Inquisition’s 10 Ing., Libro 962, fol. 358 (this Morisco, from Almonacir de la Sierra, claimed the paper was only a contract to sell a mule); also Libro ggo, fols. 336—76v (#18 of 1605 auto).

'! Quoted by Louis Cardaillac, Moriscos y cristianos: Un enfrentamiento polemico (1492-1640) (Madrid, 1979), p. 62; Inq., Libro 963, fols. 361-—69v, on spy’s report (quote, fol. 366); Libro 989, fol. 427v (#5 of 1589 auto, quote on Drake). 12 aulo). ma Libro gg1, fols. 39v, 45v (#56 and 66 of 1610 despachadas), 96-97, 141v (#6-8, 92 of 1609

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rule requiring that all butchers be Catholics, and had been arrested for blaspheming against the Virgin. Under torture, he confessed to being an observant Moslem; the Inquisitors of Saragossa gave him a whipping and eight

years in the galleys at the 1598 auto. By January 1600, he became the first Aragonese Morisco to bribe his way out of the galleys by offering the Inquisition 700 ducats for “pious works” and a slave to row in his place.!? In order to help the Spanish government maintain some control over Aragon’s Moriscos, who were almost all vassals of private lords rather than the king, the Inquisition had arrested some of their mayors and judges on several occasions since the 1540s. As visible leaders responsible to and protected by their feudal overlords, such village headmen were often indifferent towards royal authority, including the Holy Office. When the Moriscos in the mixed village of Hijar held a riotous festival soon after the Turkish fleet had sacked Minorca and menaced Barcelona in 1558, the Inquisitors arrested the teniente of its Morisco section. He

tried to convince them that his neighbors had put on masks and painted blue

moons on their arms in honor of a traditional holiday; unpersuaded, the Inquisitors tortured him and gave him one of the first galley sentences imposed on an Aragonese Morisco. Other Catholic military setbacks provoked similar cultural responses among the Moriscos subject to the tribunal of Saragossa. In 1574, a Lérida Morisco composed a romance celebrating the Spanish loss of Tunis. Several of Aragon’s Morisco villages organized bullfights ‘and other rejoicings”’ after learning of Portugal’s disaster in Morocco in 1578. There were no further episodes of this type, but only because there were no more major Moslem victories in the Mediterranean before the expulsion. !* Aragon’s Moriscos behaved in this way because their leaders expected their overlords to provide some protection from the Inquisition — and until Philip II

sent his army into Aragon in 1591, they usually received it. When the Holy Office arrested the bayle of Xarque in 1580, he bragged that “the Inquisition would do nothing with him, because the Count of Aranda, whose vassal he was, would free him by offering them 20,000 ducats.” The mayor had married his son

off during Lent, holding a traditional Islamic feast and parading a banner in Arabic script through his village. In prison, when a cellmate mentioned Christ, the bayle exploded: “What Christ, what shit, our lord the count is greater!” But he was unable to reach Aranda after his arrest. Under torture, he confessed his misdeeds and was sent to the galleys for six years.!> '3 Inq., Libro ggo, fols. 37-74 (#5 of 1598 auto); Libro 330, fols. 187v, 194v (another wealthy Aragon Morisco did the same thing less than a week later); Libro gg1, fol. 141v (#92 of 1609

I4 rat Libro 988, fols. 9-35 (#41 of 1559 auto). The bayle of Morata had been publically reconciled at the 1543 auto, while three Morisco judges were reconciled at the 1546 auto. See also Ing., Libro 989, fol. 35v(#41 of 1583 auto); Libro 327, fol. 179, when the Suprema ruled that there was insufficient evidence to make arrests for heresy because of the pro-Moroccan festivities.

15 Ing., Libro 988, fol. 507 (#53 of 1581 auto).

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Only one headman of a Morisco village in Aragon was killed by the Inquisition. He had illegally become a judge nine years after appearing in a Saragossa auto; rearrested, he was executed in 1593 as a relapsed heretic who had tried to instruct his fellow-prisoners in Islamic doctrine. Two other bayles were condemned to the galleys in the 1590s, but others were luckier. One village

judge learned that he had been accused and rushed to confess before being arrested; he got off with six months of religious instruction. An octogenarian _ patriarch in a small hamlet was still using Islamic oaths in his court in the 1590s; considered too old for torture or the galleys, he was sentenced to live in the Christian section of Saragossa for three years. The sixty-eight-year-old judge of one of Aragon’s largest Morisco communities was charged with owning an Islamic book. He was able to prove that it was only part of his financial ledger (which opened with a ritual invocation to Allah, like a Christian merchant’s /n

Nomine Det). But he got into more trouble by complaining to the Flemish Calvinist who shared his cell about the ill-treatment of Aragon’s Moriscos. He was judged unfit for torture and escaped with a whipping plus a large fine for illegal possession of weapons, despite continuing to pray towards Mecca while

imprisoned. !° ,

Aragon’s Morisco notaries, who represented Islam’s strong legal tradition, also drew the Inquisition’s attention. As with the village judges, one notary was executed as a relapso; he admitted owning a copy of the Koran forty years after abjuring Islam in 1559. At least five others were sent to the galleys. Searches of their homes usually turned up Morisco books, and even an occasional collection of Spanish poems. One notary went to the galleys because he refused to burn his Islamic books after being warned by his local priest. Another masterminded a plot to frame the Inquisition’s chief representative in the Navarrese capital of Pamplona, and later tried to escape from an understaffed prison during an auto de fe. Still another notary, who had visited Istanbul, was condemned to the galleys; but he escaped from them six months later to visit Rome and then Madrid, attempting to get pardoned. Just as one judge was charged with using _ Islamic oaths in court, one notary was accused of using Islamic rather than Aragonese law when drawing up dowry contracts and testaments.!/ The Inquisition attacked the professionals behind Morisco literacy in Aragon together with its literate Morisco leadership. Aragon contained few professional alfaquis, but its high literacy rate in Aljamiado required an infrastructure of 16 Ingq., Libro 988, fols. 479-519 (#55 of 1581 auto); Libro 989, fols. 653-70 (#30 of 1595 auto), 602 (#2 of 1593 auto); Libro 988, fols. 377-85(#57 of 1578 auto); Libro 989, fols. 733-53 (#65 of 1596 auto); Libro 968, fols. 432-66 (#55 of 1599 auto). 17 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 33-39 (#63 of 1583 auto, who reappears as #12 of 1585 auto): Libro 989, fols. 264-305 (#61 of 1587 auto), 338-47 (#28 of 1588 auto), 795~823 (#16 of 1591 auto; see #22 of 1578 auto for the unsuccessful charges against the Pamplona official); Libro ggo, fols. 188-216 (#33 of 1603 auto), 399-366v (#22 of 1606 auto); and Libro 968, fol. 432 (#1 of 1599 auto), for the executed notary.

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The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon humbler pedagogues and scribes. The Holy Office increased its attacks on both groups after the Castilian invasion of 1591. When a new Edict of Grace was

promulgated after finally disarming Aragon’s Moriscos in 1593, those who refused to hand in their Aljamiado books were specifically excluded from its’ benefits. Saragossa’s Inquisition arrested its first professional Islamic schoolteacher in 1590; he admitted charging his pupils a flat fee of 25 reales and boasted that one of his. former students had been executed by the Inquisition. Soon afterwards they caught a teacher with a classroom of twenty-three pupils in the village of Botorrita. He refused to confess, but was executed as a negativo convencido after several of his older students admitted what they were doing. The Inquisitors also began to seek out professional copyists about this time. In 1599,

, they captured a Morisco scribe whom they had been seeking since 1582, and sent him to the galleys. In the last five years before the expulsion, three more scribes were captured, only one of whom went to the galleys. Only one other

teacher of the Arabic alphabet was caught and sent to the galleys in 1598, although the large numbers of Arabic primers which Aznar saw in the Morisco villages of the Jalon valley in 1610 suggests that a clandestine educational system

was still functioning, and the large number of Aljamiado texts we possess suggests that the scribes also kept busy up to the time of expulsion.!® When the Holy Office of Saragossa began to move against Morisco teachers, it simultaneously accelerated its prosecution of Morisco healers, all of whom were highly literate in Aljamiado. These men frequently used Koranic texts in their work, applying written prayers to the forehead in order to cure headaches, or reading from the Koran in order to drive out evil spirits, in exactly the same way as Christian priests performed exorcisms. One well-known Morisco curandero was arrested for using books of Islamic magic after he had lifted a magical spell from an inquisitorial official in a nearby village. Even some of the Morisca women arrested by the Inquisition for illicit magic used Aljamiado books in their craft. In 1598, for instance, they caught a Morisca fortune-teller who owned a “book with figures in all different colors,” which flew back to its resting place _ after she consulted it. Unlike curanderos, Morisco physicians did not mix religion with medicine and thus were rarely prosecuted by the Inquisition, even if one of them carelessly bragged that he had killed twenty priests.!? 18 On teachers, see Inq., Libro 989, fols. 795-823 (#36 of 1591 auto), 602-15 (#1, 7, 9-11, 14, 21 and 33 of 1593 auto); Libro ggo, fol. 41 (#4 of 1598 auto). On scribes, see Ing., Libro 989, fol. 664v (#49 of 1595 auto); Libro ggo, fols. 37-74 (#37 of 1598 auto), 336—76v (#28, 52-53 of 1605 auto), 488-561 (#36 and 39 of 1608 auto); Libro gg1, fols. 93-141v (#36 of 1609 auto).

Fournel-Guérin, “Livre,” pp. 257-58, prints the relacién of #39 from the 1608 auto. , _ 19 See Jacqueline Fournel-Guerin, “La Pharmacopée morisque et l’exercice de la médicine dans la

communauté morisque aragonaise (1540~1620),” in Revue d'histoire Maghrébine, 6 (1979), pp. 53-62. From 1570 until disarmament, she found only ten Morisco healers sentenced at nine scattered Aragonese autos; but from 1596 until 1608, she found eighteen healers condemned at autos, including several sent to the galleys and four men executed as relapsos in 1606—08. See Ingq.,

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Aragonese herestes THE KINGLET OF SARAGOSSA AND THE FOX OF TORRELLAS

In the 1570s, disturbed by rumors of Morisco uprisings and distressed by its inability to capture the Turkish spies who visited Aragon, the Holy Office decided to eliminate the leadership of the Morisco ghetto in Aragon’s capital. Its

principal target was the wealthiest Morisco merchant in Aragon and unquestioned kinglet (reyecillo) of El Azoque, a man widely known throughout Aragon and Valencia. The humbling of Juan Compajfiro, his family, and his best friend in the Kingdom of Valencia became a top priority for the Aragonese Inquisition around 1580.78 In a land where true alfaquis were scarce, this was a plausible tactic to cripple the Morisco elite of the entire kingdom. The head of this clan had been born at Huesca in 1531. He first came to the

Inquisition’s notice in May 1574, when the Supreme Council permitted the Saragossa tribunal to arrest him for bribing a Morisca to change her testimony. Soon afterwards, his Algerian slave was caught collecting money from Moriscos in the Jalén valley to ransom Compafiero’s nephew, who had been captured by Christians in Sicily. In November 1575, a Béarnese Protestant asked his female cousin whether Juan Companero had been freed, because he was to be named king by the Moriscos at their next rising. Despite such news, Compafiero was released on bail in February 1576.?! By the summer of 1577, the Saragossa tribunal told the Suprema that both he and a saffron merchant from Segorbe named Jayme Izquerdo, “the richest and most honored among the New Converts of this kingdom and of Valencia,” were involved in the projected rebellion of northern Moriscos being stirred up by elusive Turkish spies. A Granadan refugee, who worked as a wandering healer and Arabic teacher in Aragon, admitted under torture that Companero had told him he had personally seen Jugu Duarte’s famous golden letter with its Ottoman

seals, “and when the Turkish fleet came they would no longer fear the Inquisition and could practice their religion freely.” The Saragossa Inquisition promptly rearrested Companiero.

When he reentered the Aljaferia, his friend Izquerdo conducted special prayers with Koranic readings in Companero’s house in order to obtain his freedom. This tactic failed. The Inquisitors arrested his entire family, including six servants, and questioned scores of his Morisco acquaintances in Saragossa. They had no trouble convicting Compafiero of practicing Islam, since he was circumcised (though born five years after the 1526 conversion); in addition, Libro go, fols. 488-561 (#40 of 1608 auto), for the unlucky curandero who successfully treated a comisario at Fuentes de Ebro but nonetheless got six years in the galleys.

20 See Jacqueline Fournel-Guérin, “Une famille morisque de Saragosse: les Compaifiero,” in Awragq, 4 (1981), pp. 179-84. All information in the following eight paragraphs which is not taken

from this article is footnoted. 21 Ing., Libro 326, fol. 186v; Libro 963, fol. 183 (Compafero “voted in discord” in May 1574); Libro 327, fol. 3.

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thirty copies of the Koran were found in his home, and fifty-three witnesses praised him as a model Moslem. There was even some correspondence in cypher which the Inquisitors thought pertained to the projected rebellion of 1576. Despite the Inquisitors’ claims, they could never prove Compajiero’s direct participation in any planned rising of Aragon’s Moriscos. Even under torture, he confessed nothing important. In the end, Saragossa’s Inquisitors decided to treat Juan Compafiero as a routine case of obras de Moro, putting him into the March 1581 auto as defendant

#63, sentenced to public recantation of his errors and “perpetual” reclusion (which usually meant seven years) as a confessed heretic. A marginal note from

the Supreme Council said that he deserved the galleys, but the Saragossa tribunal preferred him as a hostage rather than a martyr. That honor was reserved for his younger friend Izquerdo, who was executed as a relapsed heretic and died flamboyantly, “praying in Arabic, calling upon Allah, raising his finger in the air” in answer to three Moriscos who made the same signal to him.?? The Inquisitors were unable to prevent some angry spectators from stoning him. Most of Compajfiero’s family were sentenced with him. His wife, who had

_ originally been voted for execution because of her refusal to implicate her husband, received ten years in a convent. Her younger sister, who was the widow of Compafiero’s brother, read Arabic “like an alfaqui”’ and managed to escape

| from the Aljaferfa; she was discovered hiding in a cave many miles from Saragossa, hampered by a broken leg. She made a full confession and also got

_ ten years imprisonment. Another sister-in-law, who had tried to hide the compromising books and documents, got off with two years of confinement and two more years of wearing penitential garments in public, as did Compajfiero’s sister. Compaiiero’s son, who had fled to Algiers after his parents’ arrest but later returned, received only one year of imprisonment. One of his servants was sent

to the galleys. The other five got minor sentences; two of them were spared appearing in the 1581 auto because of their youth and their cooperation with the | Holy Office. Reporting this auto, Saragossa’s Inquisitors smugly observed that ‘having executed the one who was regarded as chief of the Moriscos [Izquerdo]

and punished Juan Compafiero and his household ... we can see that the Moriscos are quieter than usual.” Housing these hostages was a difficult matter. After tedious negotiations, Inquisitor-General Quiroga ordered that Compafiero and his wife should be moved to Cuenca, in Castile, to serve their sentences. His wife’s two sisters, whom all the nunneries of Saragossa flatly refused to admit inside their walls, were finally moved to Logrofio, the nearest Castilian tribunal with a special House of Penitents. By the spring of 1587 his wife petitioned the Suprema to 22 Ing., Libro 988, fol. 325. The official sentences against Compajiero and his wife had been approved by the Supreme Council in the summer of 1579, long before his library was discovered: Ing., Libro 327, fols. 216, 223.

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release him, but was refused. Finally in November 1589 Juan Compajiero was released from Cuenca, under bail of 2,500 ducats (most of it officially earmarked _ for “pious works”), which would be forfeited if he fled from Spain.?3 His relatives and dependents suffered worse fates. The servant who had been sent to the galleys in 1581 was executed two years later as a relapsed heretic. His brother-in-law from Huesca died in the Aljaferia and was executed in effigy at the 1582 auto. His wife’s two sisters and his sister vainly petitioned for release in 1587; shortly afterwards, the Logrofio tribunal accused them of attempting to

flee abroad and executed all three women as relapsed heretics in December 1588.2* This persecution continued even after Compajiero’s death. His widow helped arrange a proper Islamic funeral for one of her relatives in Saragossa, and was executed as a relapsa in 1609. Compajfiero’s niece and nephew, children of his brother and his wife’s erudite sister, both had two brushes with the Saragossa Inquisition, once in the late 1580s and again shortly before the expulsion. His niece married a Moroccan from Fez and was condemned to death as a relapsed heretic in 1609; but she confessed on the scaffold, and the Supreme Council permitted her to accompany her husband to North Africa. His nephew, who

maintained an elegantly furnished prayer room in his home, was executed together with his wife at Saragossa’s 1608 auto. Worst of all was the fate of Juan Compafiero junior. When his parents and household were arrested, he was in Barcelona on business and immediately fled to Algiers, where his uncle’s brother lived. Although he had learned much about Islam at age seven from his grandmother, he experienced some culture shock in North Africa thirteen years later. His friends ridiculed him because he was not circumcised, while he claimed to be scandalized by the way Moslems practiced homosexuality in public. Feeling homesick, he questioned a Spanish monk about returning home to face the Inquisition. He pestered his host into getting him a copy of the Bible (which was finally located in Fez), reading it through cover to cover. Sent to Istanbul on business by his host, he caught a return boat to Venice and returned to Aragon via France, in time to be imprisoned with the rest of his household and exhibited at the 1581 auto.

Sent to a monastery for a relatively short confinement, young Compajiero soon apostasized and was executed thirteen months after his first condemnation.

When his sentence was pronounced, he threw his crucifix to the ground and raised his finger in the air, as Izquerdo had done the year before. And like Izquerdo, he died next day amidst considerable disorder: “since he was trying to

die as a Moor,” reported the Inquisitors, “some wicked boys and other spectators threw stones at him, dragged him along the ground, and gave him 23 Ing., Libro 327, fol. 355; Libro 328, fols. 335, 511v-13; also Archivo Diocesano, Cuenca, Inquiscién, Legajo 316, exp. 4567. 24 Inq., Libro 328, fols. 369v, 400, 423, 428v—29, 441v; Libro 834, fols. 420-22 (#4, 5, and 7 of 1588 auto).

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The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon other torments, assaulting him for his pertinacity without anyone being able to prevent them.” They added that “it was clear with what motives he returned from Algiers and how well-deserved his punishment was . .. and it seems that the populace has remained very satisfied, and the Moriscos of this kingdom very afraid.”

Thus the Inquisition’s assault on Saragossa’s Morisco leadership produced | rather peculiar results. The biggest fish of all, the “kinglet” of Aragon’s Moriscos, died in bed in Saragossa not long after his near-contemporary Philip II. After his return from Cuenca, his only dispute with the Inquisition concerned his alleged diversion of irrigation water for their garden to his olive grove.?> But around him the Holy Office slaughtered his household and kin, even after his death. Perhaps he was more valuable to them as a hostage in Saragossa, whereas his relatives were expendable. We know that people were arrested simply for defending their memory. As early as 1584, a young Granadan exile described a vision of Juan Compaifiero sitting at the right hand of God. As late as 1620, the widow of a Morisco (allowed to stay in Aragon because she had been born an Old Christian) was arrested and fined 30 ducats for complaining that Juan Compafiero had been killed despite his innocence; she claimed that she had been talking about the wife of Juan Compaifiero’s cousin, who had died as a penitent Christian in 1609.7° The Holy Office of Saragossa also played a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse

with another Morisco leader, described in 1608 as a man “who holds much credit and authority with all the Moriscos of Aragon.”?” Gaspar Zaydejos, who lived in the largest Morisco settlement near Aragon’s western frontier, was first questioned by the Inquisition in 1572 as a rumored homosexual playmate of one of Aragon’s leading magnates, the Count of Ribagorza, whom the Council of Aragon wished desperately to condemn. No arrest was actually ordered untl several years later when Zaydejos, like Compafiero, was charged as a suspected leader of Aragon’s projected Morisco rising. Although Compaijiero, surrounded by sixty familiars in Aragon’s capital, could :

be arrested whenever they wished, the Inquisitors lacked the resources to surprise a prominent man in an all-Morisco village. Zaydejos fled to Rome with

his daughter to seek a pardon from the Pope. In the summer of 1580 the Saragossa tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia. However, the Supreme Council ordered them not to pronounce it, while they wrote to Rome for more information and upbraided Saragossa for not torturing him properly back in 1572 or investigating how he had married his cousin without a dispensation. The Aragonese tribunal did manage to arrest his wife, whom they tortured “‘without 25 Inq., Libro ggo, fol. g7v (#127 of 1597/98 despachadas). The Inquisitors fined him 24 ducats. 26 The Granadan’s vision quoted by Carrasco, “‘Refus,” p. 200 n. 46; also Ing., Libro gg1, fol. 505 (#7 of 1620 despachadas). In 1610, another Morisca had been whipped and fined for calling Compajfiero’s nephew and his wife martyrs: Inqg., Libro gg1, fol. 66 (#96 of 1610 despachadas). 27 See Boronat, Los Moriscos espanoles, i, p. 457.

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rigor,’ and the man who had helped Zaydejos escape, whom they tortured thoroughly and sent to the galleys.28 While in Rome, Zaydejos corresponded in cypher with Juan Compajfiero. He

returned in the summer of 1581, carrying a Papal absolution for his Moorish practices. Undeterred, the Supreme Council ordered him arrested as a persona principal among Aragon’s Moriscos, and ordered all evidence against him sent to

them with the utmost speed and secrecy. After studying his dossier, they concluded that there was “little with which to make a case against him” either for

sodomy or for subversion, but they urged Saragossa to investigate him for routine apostasy to Islam. His case dragged on. The Inquisitors offered to release him on an enormous bail of 4,000 ducats, which he refused to raise. Finally he agreed to confess his apostasy “spontaneously,” thus avoiding a public

auto and confiscation of his property. After a few minor procedural problems, the _ Supreme Council ordered him sent home in November 1583.2? His case, however, was not quite closed. In 1609, with Morisco expulsion a foregone conclusion, Gaspar Zaydejos was finally convicted by Saragossa’s Holy Office on charges that he read passages from a biography of Mohammed to his

family. His nephew was also arrested and tortured before being sent to the galleys in 1608. After Zaydejos was again accused in 1604, all the old charges

dating back to 1572 were passed in review. He was condemned to a public whipping, fined 100 ducats, and sentenced to eight years in the galleys. Because

he was now sixty-nine years old and the Inquisition had a well-developed practice of commuting galley sentences to a large fine if a slave could be bought

to replace the condemned man, this last detail looks like a thinly disguised shakedown.?°

Zaydejos’ capture came at the end of a chain of tragedies in his village of Torrellas, which had begun with the arrest of a young Morisco healer in 1598. Jeronimo Espinel, educated in both Latin and Aljamiado, undertook to exorcise a fellow-villager who was afflicted by demons. But the exorcist was imprisoned

by a zealous Catholic from a nearby village, who worked in Torrellas as the guarda responsible for seeing that its Moriscos attended Mass in their parish church. Under questioning by the Inquisition, this apprentice magus explained that he had picked up his exorcistic techniques from fellow-students in Castile. He had recited the “Psalm of Magnus Dominis” on his knees seven times, adding the phrase “Inri, Inri” three times, but it had not worked, even after he | 28 Inq., Libro 326, fols. 65, 121v; Libro 327, fols. 286v—87, 323-24v; Libro 9809, fols. 17v, 22 (#18 and 42 of 1582 auto). 29 Inq., Libro 327, fols. 374Vv, 376-76v, 396v, 400, 403; Libro 328, fols. 39v, 113v—46. 30 Inq., Libro 991, fols. 93-141v (#77 and 89 of 1609 auto). In September 1607 the Suprema gave Zaydejos permission to come to Madrid on business for one month: Inq., Libro 332, fol. 105v. But in January 1609 they sent to Rome for a copy of Zaydejos’ absolution from March 1581: ibid.,

fols. 233V-34. | 222

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applied a little Easter wax to his patient. He had read much in Castilian | universities, including the Pentacles of Solomon and even a “book which included the opinions of Sergius and Calvin on such invocations.” Espinel had also acquired some practical experience by working with two Frenchmen (one of whom he believed was a Protestant) who found buried treasures. After being tortured, he made a public reconciliation of his errors and was sentenced to eight years in the galleys at the 1599 auto.3!

Espinel’s arrest ignited a chain of assassinations. First, the guarda was

murdered in Torrellas in broad daylight. The assassin made a farewell promenade around the village square, to general applause, before he fled into

Castile and sold the murder knife in another city. The Inquisitors found a Torrellas Morisco who agreed to hunt the murderer down for a bounty. He eventually located him in Granada and brought him back alive to Aragon. But the sleuth did not enjoy his reward, since the murderer’s brother soon stabbed him to death in another part of Aragon. A second suspect, who lived in a village near Torrellas, had joined the first man in the triumphal procession after the guarda’s death. When a familiar tried to arrest him during Sunday Mass, he was stabbed to death and the killer was captured by nine Catholic eyewitnesses. The third prime suspect in the original murder, Miguel Valenziano, got clean away.

Thus when the Inquisitors tried to tidy up this mess at their 1603 auto, they | executed three men for three different murders, all involving “‘opposition to the

proper and unimpeded functioning of the Holy Office.” They donated 1,500 reales from confiscated property of the murderers to the widow and children of the murdered guarda.3* Thus the simple story of the arrest of a Morisco exorcist

ended with a nervous widow and a besieged community rocked by dozens of arrests which after six years finally implicated its long-untouchable caudillo, Gaspar Zaydejos. THE PERILS OF INTERMARRIAGE

Because they lived in regular contact with the Old-Christian majority, Aragon’s Moriscos appeared thoroughly Hispanicized in their clothes and speech. But did

they pass the ultimate test of assimilation and intermarry with their OldChristian neighbors? Liberal intellectuals sometimes proposed this as a major long-term solution for Spain’s Morisco problem. In Aragon we have just enough evidence from historical demographers and from Inquisition records to assess both the process of intermarriage and its religious results. Apparently mixed

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3! Inq., Libro 968, fols. 440v—41 (#30 of 1599 auto). Fournel-Guérin, ““Pharmacopée,” overlooked this case. The exorcist explained that he had picked up the invocation “Inri” from inscriptions on crucifixes, which raises huge doubts about how well he had mastered Latin culture in Castile.

32 Inq., Libro ggo, fols. 188-216 (#3-5, 13, 14, 62-69 of 1603 auto), 221-26 (#97-101 of 1602/03 despachadas); Libro 331, fols. 76—-76v, 83v.

Aragonese heresies

marriages were no more common here than they were in a Castilian city like Valladolid; nevertheless, a few of them occurred almost anywhere in Aragon wherever Catholic and Morisco populations lived side by side.*? The phenomenon was common enough for Aznar to complain about it in his Justified Expulsion of the Moriscos. After first noting that absolutely all Moriscos

married at very young ages, unlike Aragon’s Old Christians who made their younger sons into clerics or soldiers overseas and their younger daughters into beatas, Aznar grumbled that “the worst thing was that some Old Christians, even those with some claim to being /Aidalgos,... married Moriscas and sullied the pure blood of their lineage, and may it please God that the stain did not extend to their souls.” Most mixed marriages occurred in Aragonese villages like the ~ one where Aznar grew up, places where both groups shared the parish’s pasture

and meadowlands, public wells, and woods; “the good and the bad were common to both,” he noted, “and the New Christians were householders, born in that place, and Christians on the outside.” Worst of all, Aznar thought, ‘was the inordinate concupiscence of Aragon’s Moriscas, which led to much interfaith concubinage: “from this came many evils and long-lasting sins among Old

Christians, and many headaches and sorrows for their women, to see their husbands or brothers or relatives blindly living in sin with heartless Moriscas

who considered such things licit.”3* | The records of the Aragonese Inquisition suggest that Aznar was telling only part of the truth. They show about 100 examples of mixed marriages, divided in two unequal ways. Until a few years before the expulsion, the vast majority of such couples consisted of Morisco men and Catholic women. After 1605 these proportions are reversed, with 75% of such couples now consisting of Catholic men and Morisca women. During the sixteenth century, Catholic girls married Moriscos because Catholic grooms were hard to find, for the reasons given by Aznar. After 1605, many Morisco families saw the handwriting on the wall and _ recognized that the legal status of an Aragonese household depended on its

male head; if deportation came, all dependents of Morisco men, but no dependents of Catholic men, would be forced to leave. Only in 1606 does one > find an unmarried Morisca aged twenty-six (a normal age for Catholic brides, but a hopeless old maid in the Islamic world) arrested by the Inquisition for 33 See P. Rico Lacasa and M.J. Lapefia Lahera, ‘“Aproximacién a la poblacién de Tarazona, 1561-1715,” in Turiaso, 1 (1980), pp. 155-238, and J. Maiso, “La cuestién morisca en Bul| buente,” in Estudios del Departimiento de Historia Moderna (Saragossa, 1976), pp. 247-76.

Compare Bartolomé Bennassar, Valladolid au siécle d’or (Paris, 1967), pp. 418-19 (three examples among 325 Morisco households), or Bernard Vincent, Minorias y marginados en la Espana del siglo XVI (Granada, 1987), p. 229 (4 examples among more than 2,000 Morisco households in Estremadura in 1594). 34 Aznar, quoted in Caro Boraja, ‘Los Moriscos aragoneses,” pp. go—g1, 8gn.

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The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon | complaining that Old-Catholic men refused to marry them, “although our

customs are as good as yours.”>> |

Numerous cases of concubinage between Old Catholics and Moriscos in the Inquisition’s records show that most concubines were Old-Catholic women, rather than Aznar’s lascivious and heartless Moriscas. Indeed, given the different rates of female celibacy between these groups, plus the relative segregation and alien dress of Aragon’s Moriscas, it would be astonishing if Aznar proved correct about concubinage. We can find only one unwed Morisca mother among

thousands of inquisitorial defendants; and she is more than matched by the Navarrese Catholic woman arrested in Aragon for swearing by Allah, who had two Morisco lovers and two illegitimate children by them. The most bizarre case involved the Morisco manager of Saragossa’s public brothel, who had married

one of his Old-Catholic employees. She denounced him to the Inquisition, claiming that he was trying to have her murdered in order to marry a different Old-Catholic employee — someone who had promised to raise his existing children as Moslems.*°

Most mixed marriages involved Old-Christian wives, and here the Inquisition , intervened in a variety of ways. The most common occurrence, which set the Holy Office’s teeth on edge, saw the wife adopt her husband’s religion. An OldChristian wife, living in the Morisco ghetto of Saragossa, caused gossip among Catholic women by wearing Arabic clothes; she finally drew the Inquisition’s wrath by refusing her husband’s offer to find a Franciscan to comfort her during an illness. In 1591, the Old-Christian widow of a Morisco quarreled with one of her acquaintances, a Morisca who had married a Catholic and converted to her husband’s religion; the Morisca informed the Inquisition, who sentenced the other woman to public reconciliation plus six years of imprisonment at an auto de fe. Ina landmark case from 1578, the Old-Christian wife of a Morisco was prohibited by the Inquisition from working as a midwife in her husband’s village, since Moriscas were forbidden to practice midwifery in Aragon. Such women converts were, as a witness said of one of them, “as much a Moor as those in Algiers.” Of course, if the wife failed to convert, another kind of trouble brought in the Inqui-

sition. One such husband refused to live with his “Christian bitch” (recall that for Moslems, dogs are not man’s best friends). He was arrested, subsequently confessing under torture to Islamic practices, and was sent to the galleys.’ , 35 Jacqueline Fournel-Gueérin, “Les Morisques aragonais devant l’Inquisition de Saragosse (1540— 1622)” (unpublished thése de [IIe cycle, Univ. of Montpellier, 1980), pp. 252-67, provides an excellent study of this problem. Quote from Inq., Libro ggo, fols. 399—66v (#41 of 1606 auto). 36 Inq., Libro ggo, fols. 37-74 (#40 of 1598 auto); Libro 988, fols. 393-99 (#10, 62, and 64 of 1579 auto). The brothelkeeper and his accomplice got long terms in the galleys, while the “other woman” got a whipping and six years’ imprisonment. 37 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 384-85 (#78 of 1578 auto, whose husband, #52, was sent to the galleys); Libro 989, fols. 160—-79v (#73 of 1585 auto), 795-823 (#49 of 1591 auto); Libro 968, fols. 432-54 (#7 of 1599 auto).

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Old-Christian husbands of Moriscas, especially men who immigrated to all-Morisco villages, ended up adopting their wives’ religion. A butcher from a

village in the Pyrenees moved to Urrea de Hijar, where he learned to read Aljamiado and once posted a notice in Arabic script on the parish church. A familiar of the Aragonese Inquisition married his Morisca mistress, who had been publicly reconciled for apostasy; the Saragossa tribunal protested his dismissal by the Suprema for such a peccadillo. In the strangest episode of this sort, a Morisca denounced her own father to the Inquisition for apostasy after

he had publicly accused her of carrying on an adulterous affair with a

Frenchman.*®

Because our documentation comes from the Inquisition, we cannot learn much about mixed marriages where the Morisco husband adopted the faith of his Old-Christian wife. If he converted her, both risked the Inquisition’s wrath; but if she converted him, both assimilated to Aragon’s dominant faith. However, after 1593 we can discover some instances where such social-climbing couples or their children ran afoul of the Holy Office because they owned firearms, which were now forbidden to Aragon’s Moriscos. Even worse than the fines such

men had to pay was the deep insult of being treated as Moriscos. The most successful strategy, adopted by more than one such family, was for the sons to

adopt their mother’s surname. Thus the descendants of a Morisco named Romeu from the village of Terrer adopted their maternal name of Pariente. By the second generation they had become clergymen and public officials, holding several positions for which “purity of blood” was required. Only the jealousy of neighbors with long memories finally betrayed them to the Inquisition.° Such examples suggest that in sixteenth-century Aragon, the religion of the mother, not the father, determined the religion of the children. The Turkish spy who frustrated the Saragossa Inquisition in the mid-1570s by traveling incognito over much of Aragon, carrying an official letter written in gilded letters which

announced an imminent Turkish invasion, was the son of an Old-Christian father and a Morisca mother, born in the mixed village of Hijar — one of the few

| Morisco communities he avoided on his travels. In extreme cases, a Morisco might be father to a priest, or a Catholic the father of a Janissary, but no sons of Moriscas became clergymen. FEMALE AND MALE DEFIANCE OF CATHOLICISM

Precisely because Aragonese Moriscos generally lacked a trained priesthood, women played an unusually vital religious role within this particular Islamic society. They assumed religious roles that they would never have undertaken in 38 Ing., Libro 990, fols. 399-366v (#69 of 1606 auto); also Fournel-Guérin, “Les Morisques aragonais,” pp. 194 n. 68, 256-57. 39 See Fournel-Guérin, “Les Morisques aragonais,” pp. 261-62.

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, The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon places where Islam was tolerated — even to the extent it was in rural Valencia,

where the Inquisition rarely penetrated. In the home of Saragossa’s richest Morisco merchant, the principal religious expert — the person who could read his thirty copies of the Koran most easily — was his widowed sister-in-law. In one of Aragon’s largest Morisco villages, Belchite, lived a woman alfagui who taught

Islamic doctrine for money. In the southern Aragonese town of Teruel, a matriarch served as treasurer of the aljama. Dozens of Aragonese Moriscas appeared in autos de fe because they had taught Moslem rituals to their children, their spouses, or to Old-Christian women who were about to marry Moriscos. Such women filled part of the institutional gap caused by the absence of mosques and the rarity of trained clergy. But they paid a price, with 700 of them subjected to public humiliation of wearing penitential garments, over 100 suffering public whippings, and twenty martyred at autos de fe.*°

Although Aragon’s Morisco men came into everyday contact with Old Catholics, their female kin lived a more segregated life, carrying out their daily routines inside houses which were physically separate from the Old-Christian parts of mixed villages, and often connected with each other in one gigantic labyrinth. Thus they could evade observation by their Christian peers and better maintain Islamic customs than their men. Saragossa’s Inquisitors informed the Supreme Council in the 1560s that “the Moriscas of this kingdom are worse than the men, many of whom do not dare drink wine or eat bacon or do other Christian things from fear of their wives.” Women were intimately involved in

observing Ramadan and performing daily prayers, and they often managed Moslem funerals or zahedars.*! In Aragon’s mixed villages, Moriscas argued points of theology with Catholic women at public fountains, mills, or bakeries. The remarks that brought them into trouble with the Holy Office were occasionally confrontational, but more often ecumenical in intent. A Morisca widow was probably facetious when, by a “slip of the tongue,” she referred to the Agnus Dei as “Asnos Dei’”’; but she was probably serious when she claimed that the Gospel had been translated from the

Koran. On another occasion, two Morisca spinsters told their priest that Mohammed was the son of the Virgin Mary. Their feminine form of ecumenicism contrasts violently with the claim of a Morisco in 1570 (which earned him three years in the galleys) that “Jesus Christ committed the sin of sodomy with Mohammed.’’*? - Morisco men were more likely to ridicule Christian doctrine. As Aznar noted, 40 See Jacqueline Fournel-Guérin, “La Femme morisque en Aragon,” in Les Mortsques et leur temps (Paris, 1983), pp. 523-38, for a valuable overview. She missed the matriarch of Teruel, Catalina Martinez Buja alias “la Renegada,” who was tried twice by the Valencian tribunal: see Inq., Libro 936, fols. 352v (#34 of 1583 auto), 450 (#65 of 1586 auto).

41 Quoted by Fournel-Guérin, “Femme morisque,” p. 529. 42 Inq., Libro 989, fol. 21 (#41 of 1582 auto); Libro ggo, fol. 56v (#41 of 1598 auto); Libro 968, fol. 446 (#45 of 1599 auto); Libro 989, fol. 142 (#9 of 1570 auto) for quote on interfaith sodomy.

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the worst sacrileges tended to occur in solidly Morisco villages where the chance of immediate reprisals was remote. He described a few remarkably sacrilegious events which he had heard about in such places. When forced to attend Mass,

the Moriscos of Puebla de Hijar or Urrea de Jalén turned their backs at the elevation of the Host or made obscene gestures. After Mass in Aznar’s own village, a Morisco summoned his friends, put a gold coin on top of his head, and

ordered them to worship it. Inquisitorial records reveal other behavior that Aznar never heard about, like the ninety-year-old man who was observed by five Catholics and the priest while washing his penis in the Holy Water font.*?

Outrages to the crucifix were often alleged against Jews, but more often practiced by Moriscos. Like the virgin birth, the crucifixion was a cornerstone of

Christian doctrine which Moriscos flatly refused to accept. As one Morisca argued to a Catholic woman, “If Christ was as powerful as you say, why did he let himself be crucified?” In Aragon, insults to crucifixes seem less flamboyant than in Valencia, where a/faquis whipped them as a catharsis or women threw them on the ground, stood over them and raised their skirts. But roadside crucifixes near Aragon’s mixed villages were vulnerable to defacement. In 1574, four Moriscos from Ricla were tortured unsuccessfully and banished for throwing manure on one. The Inquisitors also required them to build a new cross at the site with their own hands, “which gave much satisfaction and happiness to the nearby villages and hamlets, which had heard about the crime and were scandalized by it.”’** Given such behavior, the only question was how far the Holy Office and other

Aragonese authorities could coerce Aragon’s Morisco minority into some semblance of Catholic behavior, regardless of how they felt in their hearts. They tried not to make the Moriscos whom they punished into local celebrities. To

this end, they decided in 1559 to place their “penitent” Moriscos in Catholic homes in Saragossa, trusting that this would improve their religious education; “it will be seen whether they go in darkness or in light,” concluded the Inquisitors. In practice it was impossible to keep them away from Saragossa’s Morisco

ghetto, so that none of them was enlightened by the experience. Later, condemnations to the galleys solved their problem for many male Moriscos. But the lack of any special facility in which to keep old men and Morisca women after autos eventually persuaded the Saragossa Inquisition to build a special House of Penitents like those operated by several other tribunals. Serious planning began

in 1597, but construction only got underway in the summer of 1606. The problem of separating the men’s and women’s quarters led the royal architect to

redesign the building, and it did not open its doors until midsummer 1607. Three years later Aragon’s Moriscos were expelled and customers for the House

| of Penitents became scarce. The building became a hopeless white elephant for 43 Aznar, quoted by Caro Baroja, “Los Moriscos aragoneses,” p. 86; Inq., Libro 989, fols. 142 (#9 of 1570 auto), 264-305 (#20 of 1587 auto). 44 Carrasco, ‘“Refus,” p. 216; Inq., Libro 988, fols. 317v-19 (quote, Nov. 1574).

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The survival of Morisco culture in Aragon the impoverished Aragonese Inquisition, who finally managed to sell it to the city of Saragossa in 1635.*° Despite increased pressure by the Holy Office on the leadership of Aragon’s disarmed Moriscos after 1593, and despite some signs after 1605 that Moriscas were finally willing to marry Catholic men, the religious assimilation of Aragon’s ‘“‘New Converts” into its dominant faith continued to be negligible right up to the

expulsion. As late as 1597, a group of four Aragonese Moriscos traveled to Segovia in order to consult a famous a/faqui and acquire new copies of Islamic

classics like the Muga. Their ability to proselytize reached all the way into Aragon’s Catholic clergy. One parish priest, who bragged about his knowledge of Koranic prayers and admitted following some Morisco customs, fled to Rome

after he had been denounced to the Inquisition by his parishioners for solicitation in the confessional. Only after the expulsion did the Holy Office learn about the vicar of Roden, who taught morality from the Koran, loaned money to Moriscos but never to Catholics, “lived like a Moor” according to twelve witnesses, and joined his parishioners in 1609 to discuss strategies in the event of expulsion. He had held his post for many years, but since he left Morisca women alone, nobody bothered him.*° Saragossa’s Inquisitors entertained few illusions about their failure to coerce Aragon’s Moriscos into thinking like Christians, even though they had punished more of them more severely than any other inquisitorial tribunal. A Navarrese

monk, writing soon after the expulsion, recalled the words of an Aragonese Inquisitor fifteen years earlier: “I never met a New Convert who gave any proof that he was a Christian.” His words found an odd echo from an Aragonese Morisco, commenting on their situation in 1609: “We are Moors and have always lived as Moors; it would have been better if we had never been baptized,

because we would not have been subjected to this thing (meaning the Inquisition), and they make us do what we would not have done if we were not baptized.”’*7

In the long run — the very long run — Aragon’s Moriscos got their revenge. Those who settled in Tunis enjoyed the symbolic vengeance of watching an Italian priest burned alive in 1612 by order of the diwan for engaging in religious disputation with them in Spanish — a kind of auto de fe in reverse. During the first generation of residence in North Africa, Aragonese tagarinos like Mohamed Rubio of Villafeliche paid to have their religious works translated into Castilian 45 Inq., Libro 988, fol. 2ov (postscript to report on 1559 auto); Libro 330, fol. 89v; Libro 331, fols. 264v, 278; Libro 332, fols. 12, 49v-50, 67—67v, 69v,.94; Libro 347, fols. 235v, 236v, 239Vv. 46 Inq., Libro 989, fols. 391v—93 (#13 of 1588/89 despachadas); Libro gg1, fols. 185v—96 (#30 of 1610/11 despachadas). The first priest deliberately injured himself to avoid strenuous torture, and

| got off with a de levi abjuration and three years’ banishment, the standard punishment for solicitation; the second withstood it, but was still suspended from his benefice for four years. 47 Fray Marcos de Guadalajara, quoted by Cardaillac, Moriscos y cristianos, p. 92; Inq., Libro 991, fol. 39—39v, quoted by Carrasco, “Refus,” p. 195 and n. 104.

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Aragonese herestes script “in order that those of his community (¢ayfa) might profit from it.”*8 Their descendants soon mastered Arabic and subsequently sold some of their Castilian

' and Aljamiado manuscripts to a British traveler in 1719, thus opening Morisco scholarship to European scholars outside Spain. But their greatest posthumous victory came exactly 274 years after their departure, when a construction worker in the village of Almonacir de la Sierra removed a false basement and uncovered

the remains of Aragon’s largest Morisco bookstore, complete with bindery implements. Its owner had been imprisoned by the Inquisition in 1608 or 1609,*? but had been able to emigrate with his neighbors, leaving behind a business stock which he doubtless expected to recover one day. Instead it became a time capsule which the modern world opened, and whose ramifi-

cations we are still exploring. | 48 See Miguel de Epalza, “Moriscos et andalous en Tunisie au XVlle siécle,” in Epalza and Petit, Moriscos andalous en Tunisie, pp. 176-77, on the 1612 burning (Moslem authorities were usually able to avoid invoking the letter of Koranic law either by claiming that no one understood their barbarous language, or else that they were insane; but this time, pressure from Spanish Moriscos

forced them to make an example). Rubio’s manuscript has been studied by Juan Penella, “Introduction au manuscrit D.565 de la Bibliotheque Universitaire de Bologne,” in ibid., pp. 259-63 (quote, p. 261). 49 The cache of manuscripts at Almonacir included items written by “Mohamed Escribano”; see Ribera and Asin, Manuscritos, pp. 11, 34, 72-73. Shortly before the expulsion, Aragon’s Inquisition arrested two men from Almonacir named “Escribano” (the very surname is a transparent clue), both of whom were probably professional scribes. Felipe Escribano, age forty, had three Arabic books seized in his home and taught the language; he admitted nothing under torture and gota relatively mild sentence (Inq., Libro ggo, fols. 488-561, #36 of 1608 auto). Luis Escribano, age thirty-one, admitted owning many Aljamiado books, which he claimed he had inherited from

his father; he also admitted learning Aljamiado script from Luis Barbaca, a scribe whom the Inquisition had finally caught at Almonacir after sixteen years in hiding and executed in 1599. He was fined 50 ducats and sentenced to ten years in the galleys, largely for teaching Islam to a young fellow-prisoner with a Catholic father and a Catholic wife (Inq., Libro gg1, fols. 93-1 41v, #36 of 1609 auto). Either or both could have been the heir of the “Miguel” who had owned this Moslem scriptorium.

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Il Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration

nacion francesa.

Se va esteniendo esta macula luterana, de la qual sentimos que esta algo tocanda la | Saragossa to Suprema, 1546 (Archivo General de Simancas, Patronato Real, Legajo 28, p. 56).

Calificose este hecho, que attenta que eran franceses, parecia sospechosissima de heregia. Barcelona relacion, 1576 (Inq., Libro 730, fol. 197v).

Con las franceses habeis de hacer llanamente justicia, sin atender el capitulo de los paces. Suprema to Santiago, 1618 (Contreras, Galicia, pp. 623-24).

On May 23, 1563, a vengeful French Dominican named Fray Jacques Alberti

made a lengthy denunciation of his compatriots before a comisario of the Inquisition in Madrid.!' He began, not uncommonly for key witnesses, by sketching his own biography. Born about 1532 at Carcasonne in Languedoc, he had become a lay brother of St. Dominic at their Montpellier convent around 1549. Except for three years at the convent of St. Maximin in Toulouse, he had

lived quietly in his home convent until the Wars of Religion erupted in Montpellier. (Although surrounded by members of a great teaching order, Alberti was illiterate and could only mark his deposition with a cross.) About a year ago, he continued, his convent was sacked, its custodian killed, and he had fallen into the hands of the Huguenots. Seven monks captured with him were martyred because they refused to convert or to tell where the body of St. Roch

and its accompanying treasures were hidden. Alberti had saved his life by revealing the location of a few minor decorations. Nonetheless, the Prince of Condé’s troops had him whipped through the streets of Montpellier, tied to a horse’s tail, with an illustrated paper hat on his head, proclaiming that Alberti had remained with the “Babylon of the Satan of Rome” instead of receiving the gift of the Gospel. (Such atrocities read at times like Protestant parodies of autos de fe.)

Banished, he returned briefly to Carcasonne. Alberti then wandered towards Paris, where he encountered the entourage of the Queen of Navarre and ran a ! British Library, Egerton Ms. 1507, fols. 26-3 1v.

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second gauntlet. In order to save his life, he pretended to convert and joined a group of two dozen ex-monks whom Jeanne d’Albret had collected to testify before the king’s Privy Council. One of them, an ex-Dominican called “Maitre Henri,” had become a court preacher for the queen. He told Alberti that even Spain was ripe for the Gospel, and boasted that he had preached three times in the suburbs of a major Spanish city, namely Saragossa. The first time, said Henri, he had an audience of twenty people; the second time, forty; the final time, three hundred. When the ex-monks were finally summoned before the Privy Council, Fray Alberti gave strongly pro-Catholic testimony and immediately fled to Spain in order to avoid Huguenot reprisals. Landing in Bilbao, he

went straight to the court at Madrid, where he settled into the Dominican convent at Atocha early in 1563.

The Inquisition, of course, wanted to learn more about “Maitre Henri’s” actions and contacts in Saragossa. Alberti remembered only that this immigrant missionary claimed to have celebrated Protestant communion one night in a house along the wall, near the bridge over the Ebro, during a holiday. Unfortunately, Fray Alberti could give no names of Aragonese associates, nor could he provide more than a thumbnail physical sketch of “Maitre Henri.” But he did recall that this preacher claimed to have converted a high-ranking Dominican of the Aragonese province, Fray Satorres, to Protestantism. Alberti had never met Satorres, but believed he was presently in Barcelona. When the Madrid comisario then asked Alberti if he knew of any other

heretics in Spain, the witness immediately pointed to the current French ambassador, who had been named to his post through the influence of the famous heretic M. de Vendéme. Alberti had visited the embassy twice while in Madrid, but could only report that the ambassador had tried to send him back to

France. On the other hand, Alberti denounced some French servants of the queen’s head cook, whom he had overheard singing a well-known Huguenot Psalm out of a book. Alberti explained to the comisario that such songs were “one of the main things that Lutherans do in their sect.” At court he had complained

to the French-born queen, who told him to go to the Inquisition next time and immediately dismissed her cook. On another visit to the palace, Alberti had overheard a Burgundian halbardier mutter to his companion that they should never have gone to “this Babylon,” which he immediately recognized as a Huguenot codeword. In this instance, as with the cook’s helpers, Alberti was the

' only witness present who understood French, so it is probable that no arrests stemmed directly from his denunciations. Alberti’s testimony — secondhand descriptions of Huguenots preaching clandestinely in Aragon, mixed with glimpses of Huguenot whisperings among the entourage of Philip II’s French queen — perfectly captures the mood of the early

1560s, when the Inquisition devoted a great deal of its energies throughout Spain to tracking down all signs of Protestant behavior. It is well known that 232

Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration Philip II’s obsession with uprooting Protestantism in Spain stemmed from the discovery of Protestant groups at Valladolid and Seville in 1558. Three dozen Spanish Protestants had been killed at autos de fe in those cities during 1559, including one with the king present.2 The Inquisition’s hunt for Protestants continued at peak intensity throughout the 1560s, in virtually all corners of Spain.

But by the time Fray Alberti began testifying in Madrid, two things had changed this picture. The meager supply of Protestants in Spain was almost exhausted, and the Wars of Religion had broken out in France. Only Valencia,

where an important nobleman was arrested in 1563, provided some native heretics to keep the Holy Office busy for a few more years.? In Seville, where thirty-seven Spaniards and eleven foreigners had been executed as Protestants since 1558, only foreigners died at autos after 1562. At Valladolid, the change came even sooner, with two foreigners but no Spaniards dying at the 1561 auto. Over fifty Spaniards, many of them women, had been killed as Protestants by the Inquisition during the 1558 panic and its immediate aftermath,* but only a handful died after 1562. The great Protestant hunt continued unabated, but it now turned almost exclusively against foreigners. During the 1560s, foreign “Lutherans” were executed throughout the Inquisition’s districts. In Castile they were a miscellaneous lot: a Sicilian monk at

Granada, a German silversmith at Cordoba, a German mining engineer at Llerena, a Frenchman at Cuenca, a French and a German student at Valladolid.> At cosmopolitan Seville, the public watched a collection of sailors — an Englishman, a Dane, a Pole, a Frenchman, two Burgundians, and thirteen Flemings — die as “Lutherans” at public autos between 1562 and 1569. The tribunal of Toledo, whose district included both the new capital at Madrid and the famous humanist University of Alcala, executed two monks and two foreign-

ers in March 1561; two Frenchmen, one a bookseller, in August 1561; a Frenchman and an Englishman in 1563; several people in 1565, including two Frenchmen (one a manufacturer of playing cards) and an Italian; a German, serving as page at the court, died in 1566 after previous appearances in the 1561 and 1563 autos. An unnamed foreigner perished in 1568. In June 1570, two 2 The most famous comment about the degree of Protestantism among these victims is Marcel Bataillon’s denial that they were anything more than Erasmians: see his Erasme et l’Espagne (Geneva and Paris, 1937). For a lucid summary of the abundant bibliography, see Jesus Alonso Burgos, E/ Luteranismo en Castilla durante el siglo XVI (E| Escorial, 1983), pp. 125-27. 3 See above, p. 130. + On the Seville and Valladolid “conspiracies” of 1559, the fundamental source remains Ernst Schafer, Beitrage zur Geschichte des Spanischen Protestantismus und der Inquisition im 16. Jahrhundert,

3 vols. (Giitersloh, 1902), 11, pp. 282ff; 11, pp. 48-78. One finds twenty-three women among fiftyseven Protestant relajados and twenty-five women among the forty-two reconciliados from these conspiracies, although women are otherwise practically invisible among inquisitorial defendants for Protestantism. 5 Schafer, Beitrage, u, pp. 41-78 passim.

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Flemings and another Frenchman were relaxed in person, closing an extremely xenophobic decade at Castile’s most important tribunal.© An equally heterogeneous mixture of “Lutherans,” predominantly foreigners of various nationali-

ties, were relaxed in effigy by Castilian tribunals. | THE ‘DOUBLE STANDARD’ AND PROTESTANTISM

_ Across northern Spain, the great Protestant hunt of the 1560s involved little more than tracking down Frenchmen. The three tribunals along the frontier

(Barcelona, Saragossa, and Navarre) executed a total of forty-three “Lutherans” at public autos during the 1560s. Forty of these Protestant martyrs had been born in France. An Italian was executed at Barcelona in 1563. Only

Martin de Andosilla, executed at Saragossa’s 1561 auto, was Spanish. In Navarre a Turkish slave was killed as a “Protestant” in 1566, convicted as negativo y pertinaz for calling the Pope an ass, claiming that Lent was invented by

a fisherman, that baptism was worthless, and that confession was useless because priests had no power to absolve sins.’ Only the peculiar taxonomy of the

Holy Office in the 1560s could possibly have classified this man as a “Lutheran.” In fact, because none of these forty-three victims came from the Empire or the Low Countries, we can say that in Protestant terms none of these Luteranos was a Lutheran. The virtual absence of Spaniards among the flood of suspected Protestants in northern Spain in the 1560s is curious, particularly in the Kingdom of Aragon,

where ‘Maitre Henri” claimed to have preached with such success. This district had already produced Miguel Servetus, the only Spaniard with truly international stature (or rather, notoriety) among Protestants. But when the Suprema sent out a general circular in 1558 to unearth all traces of Protestant activities among Spaniards, the Saragossa tribunal merely reported that they had located only one suspect (the rector of Saragossa’s new Estudio Mayor), who possessed some compromising letters from a known heretic in Paris. The leader of the Paris circle, Dr. Juan Morillo, was a native of Aragon or Navarre, who apparently taught Aragonese students in the French capital.® Despite such promising information, no major Aragonese Protestant ‘‘conspiracy” was ever discovered. Only licenctado Andosilla, described as a friend of several key Spanish Protestants, lost his life. Only a handful of others, like the student Jayme Sanchez or an aged widow who was Dr. Murillo’s cousin, had to © Tbid., U, pp. 79-106 (Toledo), 282-342 (Seville).

7 J.1. Tellechea Idigoras, “Catolicismo postridentino: Auto de fe en Calahorra (1566),” in Salmantacensis, 13 (1985), p. 196.

8 See A. Gordon Kinder, “Two Previously Unknown Letters of Juan Pérez de Pineda,” in Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 49 (1987), pp. 111-20, and Kinder’s more general survey, “A Hitherto Unknown Group of Protestants in Sixteenth-Century Aragon,” in Cuadernos . de Historia de Jeronimo Zurita, 51-52 (1985), pp. 13 1-60.

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Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration

appear at autos de fe. A schoolteacher, distantly related to the well-known Spanish Protestant Dr. Egidio and caught with a Protestant book, escaped with a de levi abjuration made in the courtyard of the Inquisition’s palace. When Fray Alberti made his sensational charges a few years later about clandestine sermons

in Saragossa, nobody was arrested in Aragon. The Inquisitors did lose their patience with a draper from Calatayud, who persisted in writing heretical memoranda during his defensas. They condemned him to the galleys for life in

February 1564 and threatened him with death if he ever wrote, read, or discussed theology afterwards.? But foreigners were killed for much less. In Navarre, the Inquisition’s only opportunity to unearth a major international

Protestant conspiracy also foundered in 1563. That March, the Inquisition caught a French Protestant spy and courier named Juan de Rojas. A married priest and sometime student of Calvin’s in Geneva, Rojas had served four years as a Huguenot pastor in Béarn. His patron, the Bishop of Lescar, then sent him on an underground mission to northern Spain. Rojas had lived for more than

two years in San Sebastian, Tudela, and Logrofio before being arrested at Pamplona. During fifty-four interrogations, he told the Inquisitors about his principal contacts. In San Sebastian, he had met an ex-Dominican, “Fray Arnaut”, who dressed as a layman and told Rojas that “in this land one must

preach in secret.” In Pamplona, he knew two monks (an Augustinian and a Carmelite) and a French surgeon; in Saragossa, he encountered another Car-

melite monk and clandestine Protestant minister. “We are certain that a conspiracy will emerge from this business,” confidently asserted the Navarrese

Inquisitors that summer.!° However, when their auto was finally held in December 1563, only one other foreign Protestant died with Rojas, while many of the people they sought had fled to France. No Basque or Spanish laymen had been mentioned in Rojas’ testimony. Along the French border from San Sebastian to Barcelona, the Inquisition ordinarily equated “Protestant” with “Frenchman,” even during the hunt for Spanish heretics. The four mainland tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat all contained sizable numbers of French immigrants. They accordingly prosecuted large numbers of Frenchmen as Protestants during the sixteenth century, and gave them their most severe condemnations — death, execution in effigy, or a term in the galleys. In the four northeastern tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat, enormous numbers of Frenchmen were executed or condemned to do 9 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 67—69 (#21-22 of 1560 auto), 70-71v (#3 of 1559~—60 despachadas, who abjured inside the Inquisition’s prison but with the doors open, paid a fine, and was sequestered

in a convent), g8v on death of Andosilla (#73 of 1561 auto), and 243-52 (#7 of 1563-66 despachadas, who would have appeared in an auto except for a severe outbreak of plague in | Saragossa). On the other hand, it is important to realize that no one has yet located the relacién of Saragossa’s auto de fe of September 1562 (noted in Inq., Libro 324, fols. 33), which could contain other Aragonese Protestants.

10 Ing., Libro 786, fols. 321-22. The full discurso de su vida filled twenty-five pliegos of paper; see | Rojas’ méritos in Ing., Libro 831, fols. 36—42v.

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Table 15 “Lutherans” and Frenchmen, 1560-1600

Tribunal Death (Fr) Effigy (Fr) Galleys (Fr)

Barcelona 12 35 (9) (34)1545 (43) go(121) (83). Saragossa (13) 127

Navarre 2210 (18) 95 (60) (75) Valencia (7)295 (24) (3) 66 (Total northeast) 79 (68) 94 (83) 378 (339) . Seville 65 (11) 13 (3) 75 (15) (Rest of Castile) 33 (15) 18 (11) 81 (58)

“unpaid penance at the oars” as Protestants. Across the rest of Spain, only the cosmopolitan port of Seville continued to display an international mixture of foreign Protestant sailors in its autos until the end of the century. After 1560, the Aragonese tribunals, which held under 20% of Spain’s peninsular population during Philip II’s reign, clearly dominated the history of anti-Protestant (from

another standpoint, anti-French) activity by the Inquisition.

French Huguenots sometimes dominated the history of inquisitorial “Lutherans” well beyond these Aragonese districts. In the landlocked tribunal of Cuenca, which contained few major commercial centers and thus relatively few foreigners, the two Protestants reconciled by the Holy Office in 1558 were both French. One of them, a resident of Spain for twenty years and a familiar of the Inquisition, pointed out while giving his genealogy that “in France we do not know what a confeso is,” since in his country “there are no Jews, no Moors, and no slaves”; but both he and the Holy Office knew that every Frenchman had heard about Protestantism. Among the forty-six “Lutherans” arrested by the Cuenca Inquisition between 1561 and 1576, twenty-six were French. Only one

was executed in person and three in effigy, all French; those sentenced to reconciliation included eight Frenchmen, two Flemings, an Italian, and a Catalan from Perpignan. As late as 1578, three French Catholic merchants were

arrested at Cuenca because they owned vernacular Bibles.'! As far south as Murcia, where the Protestant hunt played a relatively minor role in the Inquisition’s activities, eight Frenchmen were sentenced to the galleys between 1563

and 1573 for Protestant opinions, outnumbering the two local “gran Luter'l See Sebastian Cirac Estopafian, ed., Registro de los documentos del Santo Oficio de Cuenca y Sigienza, |, pp. 175 (#2630), 179-213 (#2735-3665 passim), 215 (#3735), 217 (#3790-91), 221 (#3889); also Dimas Pérez Ramirez, Catologo del Archivo de la Inquisictén de Cuenca (Madrid, 1982), pp. 104 (#116), 107 (#174), and J. Dominguez Bardona, ed., Proceso inquisitorial contra el escultor Esteban Jamete (Madrid, 1931), pp. 26-27 (quote).

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Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration anos,” two Piedmontese (a monk and a silk-miller), a Portuguese monk, and a Flemish tailor. In Spain’s northwestern corner, the new Galician tribunal at Santiago executed three French Protestants in the 1570s and later sent fifteen French pirates and eight Englishmen to the galleys.!2 In the Crown of Aragon, Frenchmen had become firmly identified as the most dangerous Protestants long before the great hunt of the 1560s. We can obtain a fascinating and significant glimpse of the differences between Aragon and Castile by comparing the reports from two autos de fe held in 1545. One took place in Seville, where Dr. Egidio would be arrested five years later; the other in

Saragossa, which had failed to locate Servetus a dozen years before and would : produce the most active group of northern Protestants a dozen years later. In each auto exactly five foreigners were publicly reconciled for Protestantism. They represented only a small share among fifty or sixty defendants: Protestant-

ism was then a distant menace, an exclusively foreign disease. Seville’s five Luteranos consisted of four Flemish barrelmakers and an Englishman; Saragossa’s consisted of four French booksellers and a Genoese craftsman.}9 It is

an uncanny prefiguration of post-1560 developments, after the “Spanish parenthesis” of 1559. At Seville, Flemings and British Protestants accounted for nearly three times as many prisoners as the French after 1562; at Saragossa, the French provided about 90% of all major Protestant defendants after 1560. _ The French emphasis visible at Saragossa in 1545 can be seen throughout the

_ Aragonese Secretariat from then until 1560. In 1546 a dozen foreign Protestants appeared in Saragossa’s next public auto. Two Frenchmen abjured de vehementi and received public whippings; a Fleming, two jewellers (a German and a Pole), and two Frenchmen were reconciled and banished from Aragon; four more French artisans (a hatmaker, locksmith, saddler, and bookbinder) had already fled from Aragon and were executed in effigy. Yet another Frenchman,

Maitre Antoine Boerio, became the first known Protestant martyr from this district. Surveying these miscreants, the Aragonese tribunal reported to the Suprema that from this document one could understand “how rapidly this Lutheran stain was spreading, which we feel is something affecting the French nation.” They added that “we must take care to prevent its entry through the

frequency of French and Béarnese in this kingdom.”!* It was a prophetic assessment, because in 1546 France had no organized clandestine Calvinist churches, nor had the Parlement of Paris yet created its special branch against heresy, the Chambre Ardente. The menace of French “Lutheranism” increased gradually after 1546. The Protestants condemned to death in the three Pyrenean districts between 1545 12 Schafer, Bettrage, u, pp. 61-72 (Murcia), 72~78 (Santiago). 13 Inq., Libro 785, fols. 229—30 (Seville); Libro 988, fols. 240-41 (Saragossa). 14 Archivo General de Simancas, Patronato Real, Legajo 28, p. 56. The Suprema forwarded this memoir to another Council, since it is the only relacién of an auto de fe preserved at Simancas.

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| Aragonese herestes and 1560 were all French: a suspect who died in prison, afterwards executed in effigy at Saragossa in 1550; a second offender, who often defended Protestant opinions in public, killed at Barcelona in 1552; another recidivist, executed by the Navarre Inquisition in 1556.!> At Valencia, a group of seven Frenchmen (mostly fugitives whom they executed in effigy) were condemned to death at the 1554 auto. Similarly, most of the forty “Lutherans” who received significant _ punishments during these years were also Frenchmen. At Saragossa, from 1547 through 1558, two of the three “Lutherans” who abjured de vehementi were French, as were eight of the fourteen men reconciled for this heresy (one was German, the others Spaniards).!© The Navarrese tribunal, which had executed the first foreign “Lutheran” in all Spain in 1539, was somewhat more active.

From 1546 to 1560 eight Frenchmen, five Englishmen and five Basques abjured de vehementi for Protestant beliefs. Ten Frenchmen, five Flemings or Germans, three Englishmen and one Basque were reconciled after confessing

to “Lutheranism.”!” The tribunal of Valencia, which had put Flemish and German Protestants on trial in the late 1520s, also began identifying Frenchmen

as its principal Protestant suspects around 1545, convicting at least seven of them in the next four years. Barcelona, at its 1552 auto, sent seven “Lutherans” to the galleys — the Inquisition’s first use of this particular punishment against Protestants. One was a Catalan schoolmaster, the other six (including two more schoolmasters) French.'® Thus from 1547 to 1559, 60% of these frontierdistrict Protestants were Frenchmen and only seven men were Spaniards. In the Pyrenees, the great panic of the early 1560s merely repeated an existing pattern with far greater intensity. The Inquisition’s concern with the “stain” of Protestantism involved books as well as people; in the Aragonese Secretariat, this problem also seems to have

originated in France. When the Saragossa tribunal complied with a general circular to confiscate all unauthorized editions of the Bible in March 1553, they announced to the Suprema that they had collected a total of 218 illegal Bibles,

all but one (a Greek text of 1526) published since 1530. Twenty of the thirty-two editions came from Lyon. Most of the remainder, including the most

popular item (Robert Estienne’s 1545 edition, with thirty-three copies) had been printed in Paris. Only three editions were Swiss; one each came from Venice and Antwerp. Over 97% of these confiscated Bibles, therefore, had been 15 Blas Pradal, Saragossa 1550 (Inq., Libro 761, fols. 9-11v); Guillen Dayner, Barcelona 1552 (Libro 730, fols. 9-10); and Lauri de Triart, Calahorra 1556 (Libro 833, fols. 82—85v). 16 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 1-6 (auto, June 7, 1549); Libro 961, fols. g—11v (auto, September 9g, 1550), 211-14, 261-63v (auto, August 31, 1558), 250-52, 290~94v, 295—95v (auto, December 109,

7 1354 bro 831, fols. 7-8v, g—11v, 53-57; Libro 833, fols. 44-47, 54-55v, 61-62v, 65-73, 76-81v, 82-85v, go—g2v.

18 See Lea papers, Philadelphia, copy of old Legajo 98, for French Protestant defendants at Valencia 1545-48, and copy of old Legajo 300, for Frenchmen executed at Valencia in 1554; also

Ing., Libro 730, fols. 6-10, on Barcelona prisoners of 1552.

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manufactured in France. During the previous twenty years, more than 200 of these impure French Bibles had found their way to Saragossa, a city which had just obtained a charter for its fledgling university.!° By 1559 the Saragossa tribunal had copied Barcelona’s device of sending stubborn young French Protestants to the galleys. They explained that “these two, with no family or property [in Aragon], would soon escape to France afterwards, for which reason we threw them in the galleys.” But they quickly ran into different problems with two other young men who appeared in their 1561

auto. One, born in Saxony, had been raised as a Lutheran; the other, born in

Scotland, had learned Protestant doctrines as a teenage schoolboy. The German was originally sentenced to wear a sanbenito for a year; the Scot was condemned to a whipping and two years in the galleys. The Suprema found their punishments excessive, and both were simply confined to Saragossa for re-education in Catholic doctrine.2° Throughout the 1560s a steady stream of able-bodied French Huguenots were sent to the galleys by the Aragonese Inquisition, who regularly boasted to the Suprema about this service. Their report on the 1567 auto, for example, noted that their fifty-six penitents included “many men punished as Lutherans,

all of them foreigners from France, Gascony, and Béarn. They were con-. demned to serve His Majesty in the galleys, because this seems to us the penalty which frightens them most and discourages them from coming to these king-

doms of His Majesty’s.”2! Apparently not enough of them were frightened, since the Saragossa Inquisition sent about 100 more Frenchmen to the galleys during the next thirty years for holding Protestant beliefs. In the 1560s, a double standard was clearly in effect across northern Spain; Frenchmen automatically went to the galleys for any clearly Protestant beliefs, but Spaniards with heretical leanings were treated with relative leniency. In the Saragossa auto of 1566, three Frenchmen were burned and nine more sent to

the galleys. However, the most impressive Protestant suspect was an Aragonese notable, licenciado Miro, who had returned home loaded with prohibited books after many years as a student in Paris. Some of them contained

“‘manuscript commentaries in his own hand on the Psalms and other parts of Scripture, some heretical, some suspect of heresy, others smelling of heresy.” His books and notes were burned at the auto, but Miro got off with a de vehementi 19 Ingq., Libro 761, fols. 299, 356—57v. The Suprema’s orders to collect all Bibles “en romance,” sent in May 1552, are in Ing., Libro 323, fols. 177v-78, 183. Compare J. I. Tellechea Idigoras,

“Biblias publicadas fuera de Espaiia, secuestradas por la Inquisicién de Sevilla en 1552,” in Bulletin Hispanique, 64 (1962), pp. 236-47. At Valencia, where the Inquisitors merely inspected the Bibles owned by the university, their consultores found twenty-three editions “with errors”: eight editions had been printed at Lyon, five at Paris, five at Basel, four at Antwerp, and one in Venice. See their report to the Suprema in July 1552: Inq., Libro g11, fols. 43-44Vv. 20 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 8—17 (#33-34 of 1559 auto, both given four-year terms in the galleys), 84v (cover letter for 1561 auto). 21 Inq., Libro 988, fol. 134.

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abjuration and ten years of confinement in his native city. In Barcelona a local merchant escaped with a large fine in 1569 for owning Martin Luther’s New Testament, while Frenchmen went to the galleys for far less.22 At Navarre’s 1580 auto, where two young Frenchmen got galley sentences, appeared a Benedictine monk named Andrés Martinez, who had spent the year

1571 in Flanders. He had turned himself in voluntarily for doubting the existence of devils or Hell. After the Inquisitors discovered that Fray Andrés

had been plotting with two Moriscos to flee to France, he was tortured and confessed several heresies, including a defense of Luther (‘‘a great scholar’’) and his doctrine of consubstantiation. He further held that Jerome had been the last true saint, and even admitted that he had committed sodomy in his convent. The Holy Office merely condemned Fray Andrés to public reconciliation, defrocking, and confinement in his monastery wearing his penitential garment.23

_ THE HOLY OFFICE TAXONOMY OF ‘LUTHERANISM’

As the great Huguenot hunt persisted into the 1570s and 1580s throughout northern Spain, one begins to catch glimpses of the types of heretical behavior which brought these unlucky Frenchmen into the Inquisition’s clutches. Protestantism, like any other major heretical category the Inquisition encountered, was reduced to a handful of easily identifiable ingredients. Since Protestants ate

pork, were not circumcised, and never considered Saturdays holy, theirs _ became a heresy primarily of speech rather than behavior. By the 1560s the Holy Office had reduced it to seven cardinal errors, or more precisely to seven doctrinal positions which “Lutherans” opposed. Protestants were people who denied the existence of Purgatory; who opposed the worship of saints, especially the Virgin Mary; who ridiculed the authority of the Pope and his bulls (especially

the Bull of Crusade, which was sold to virtually every adult in Spain); who denied that clerics should practice celibacy; who refused to confess to a priest; who refused to fast during holidays, or during Lent; and who denied the real presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist. Only a few suspects managed to be total “Lutherans,” guilty of all seven errors. Moreover, several of these points overlapped with Moslem and even Jewish objections to Catholicism, which explains why a slave born in Algiers could be executed as a “Lutheran” in 1566

at Calahorra, or why a Portuguese of Jewish descent was condemned to the galleys at Saragossa in 1579 as a “Lutheran and Morisco.”’2* By the 1560s, any 22 Inq., Libro 988, fols 253-57 (#18 of 1566 auto); Libro 730, fol. 95 (#33 of 1568—69 despachadas).

23 Inq., Libro 833, fols. 481ff (#13 of 1580 auto). 24 See above, n. 7; Ing., Libro 988, fols. 393-99 (#26 of 1579 auto). The only “Lutheran” kiilled at Saragossa in the 1570s was a Carmelite monk from Portugal, who revoked his confession and thus became a /icto confitente; it is not clear if he had Jewish ancestors. See Inq., Libro 988, fol. 293 (#41 of 1575 auto).

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of these seven points, if defended in public, sufficed for a conviction as a “Lutheran” and sometimes for a term in the galleys. In order to put some flesh on these theological bones, let us examine the eighteen “Lutheran” defendants at the 1577 Barcelona auto.*> All eighteen had been born in France; all were between the ages of twenty and forty; and all of them were unskilled laborers, shepherds, or humble artisans. Fifteen of them were given some sort of torture (in three cases, where defendants were unfit for the strappado, water torture was used); of these, nine were given the full gamut, but only two of them confessed. Four defendants escaped with de levi abjurations and short periods of confinement in a convent. Ten men abjured de

vehementi; five of them were sent to monasteries to learn proper Catholic lifestyles, while the other five went to the galleys. The two who had confessed under torture, both of whom were accused of serving with Huguenot armies, were reconciled and given life sentences in the galleys. An armless beggar who

spoke favorably about the Huguenots denied his guilt but was convicted and sentenced to death; he died in prison and was executed in effigy. A shepherd

- who denied transubstantiation tried to clear himself by naming two of his accusers, but remained “pertinacious” in upholding his opinions and became the only person killed at this auto.

Comparing specific charges with final sentences, it is hard to discover any clear hierarchy among the various types of “Lutheran” behavior. The four men who. received the mildest punishments were charged with denying the full powers of the Pope; with lack of respect for Catalonia’s patron, the Black Virgin of Montserrat; with denying the validity of Papal bulls; and with doubting the

existence of Purgatory. The large group in the middle, the de vehementis, included one man who had served as butcher to a group of Huguenot marauders

(he went to a monastery), and another who had been a servant and spy for a Huguenot warlord who lived along the frontier (he went to the galleys). ‘Two others had been accused of serving with Huguenot armies. Two more were accused of defending Huguenot behavior in public discussions; one got only a year in a monastery, but the other, who admitted that he sometimes ate meat on Fridays, went to the galleys. The Frenchman who argued that the King of France had more power than the Pope went to a monastery, while the one who refused to host his religious confraternity and was overheard singing Psalms in French went to the galleys. One Frenchman was sent to the galleys for denying the validity of Papal bulls, and another for insulting the saints and refusing to | confess to a priest — offenses which earned only mild sentences for Catalan defendants. 25 Ing., Libro 730, fols. 198v—z10 (a second copy on fols. 230-46v). Seven of the twenty-five penitents faced other charges, including two who were sent to the galleys, one for bigamy (#3) and the other (#9) for saying Mass without being ordained. A Frenchman (#2) was condemned for denying that fornication was a mortal sin, while a Frenchwoman (#21) was convicted as a witch and sentenced to work a year without pay in Barcelona’s hospital.

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The eighteen French “Lutherans” who appeared in the Saragossa auto of 1588 had much more contact with organized Protestant churches in France than the Barcelona group. No fewer than six of them admitted serving in Huguenot armies; one ex-soldier was captured with a copy of the Psalms in Béarnese dialect in his pockets. One old man got four years in the galleys when the Inquisitors learned that he had been a deputy bayle in a Béarnese village. Although only three admitted they had taken communion at Calvinist churches, and only two others admitted they had been married by Huguenot ministers, most of them admitted hearing some sermons from Huguenot preachers. An old peddler, who claimed that confraternities were worthless and expressed doubts about Mary’s virginity, admitted he had heard sermons in France from “the

Aragonese monk.” A Spanish Basque living in eastern Aragon, arrested for saying that “‘all priests and all donkeys bray the same way” and for refusing to

take the Bull of Crusade, confessed that he had listened to some Huguenot sermons while living in Béarn.*°

Most of the Frenchmen investigated for “Lutheranism” in the four northeastern tribunals had come under scrutiny for indiscreet remarks about the Pope, the saints, Purgatory, or perhaps the Eucharist. But a significant minority, as we have seen, were arrested for what they sang. Back in 1563, Fray Alberti explained to the Madrid comisario that the French Psalm he overheard near the queen’s kitchen (“My God, why has Thou forsaken me?”’) was an essential part of Huguenot worship. By 1570 informers in the Crown of Aragon knew this; one of the penitents at Barcelona in 1577 had been caught in this way, as had

another French artisan who sang them at work in Aragon in 1572. In 1584, a tailor from Anjou was overheard singing “‘the Psalms of David translated by , Calvin” in the Logrofio Inquisition’s prison and ended up with six years in the galleys. In 1579, yet another French artisan in Catalonia defended Clément Marot’s translation of the Psalms; he also owned a vernacular Bible (by a Catholic printer) with underlined passages.*7 Marot’s version of the Psalms was not the only thing Frenchmen sang that got them into trouble with the Inquisition. Even worse were satirical songs, like the obscene parody of Mary’s virginity which an unlucky Frenchman was overheard singing at Valencia. He was tortured three times, finally admitting that he had learned it from some Huguenots, and received a whipping in addition to three years in the galleys. In Catalonia, two French artisans were arrested for singing a sacrilegious song at work, which “tended towards Judaism or paganism”’; they escaped with de /evi abjurations and short periods of re-education in the famous 26 ns Libro 989, fols. 338—47v (a second copy on fols. 351-67v). The “Lutherans” are #9—-14 27 tna, Lins 988, fols. 177-84v (#10 of 1572 auto, who claimed that they were “muy buenas”); Libro 834, fol. 195v (#19 of 1584 auto); Libro 936, fols. 192-207v (#23 of 1578-79 despachadas); Dominguez Bardona, Proceso contra Esteban Jamete, pp. 23, 35.

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Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration Montserrat monastery. Perhaps the most daring song of all was overheard in the small town of Logrofio, where the Navarrese Inquisition sat. Two Burgundian artisans warbled a tune with the line ‘““Ha Mariquita, as visto a Juan Blanco?”

The older one, who had abjured Calvinism at Milan but obviously retained some Protestant baggage, tearfully explained to the Inquisitors that “Jean Blanc” was a Huguenot euphemism for the Eucharist, suggesting it was only white bread, while “Mariquita” referred to the Virgin; they had learned this song in Lyon. As a cooperative witness, he got off with five years in the galleys. His companion, who had started to confess his Huguenot past but changed his mind, was executed as a ficto confitente in 1584, thus becoming Spain’s only Protestant martyr to be killed for a song.78 GALLICANISM, PROTESTANTISM AND HENRY OF NAVARRE |

Several Frenchmen put on trial as “Lutherans” were merely expressing French patriotism in forms which the Inquisition found “offensive to pious ears.”’ Many French Catholics were profoundly irritated by the Spaniards’ insistence that

they purchase the Bull of Crusade. At least two Frenchmen were arrested because they told a Spaniard that they used it for toilet paper, and one of them went to the galleys. Others were much more innocent about it: in Sardinia, a Burgundian who made rosaries for a living explained to the Inquisitors that this particular bull was worthless, because a French Catholic silversmith had taught him so in Marseilles. In Catalonia, a French barber remarked while shaving a

priest that this bull was “an abuse that does not exist in France” and was promptly arrested.2?

Tensions between Frenchmen and Spaniards, escalating into innumerable arguments, led some French Catholics to claim (in Holy Office jargon) that the “law of the Lutherans was superior to that of the Christians,” which probably

meant that they claimed even Huguenots behaved better than Spaniards. A French beggar was accused by a female colleague in Navarre of preferring Huguenots to Spaniards because they gave more and better alms. A more original version came from a Frenchman in Valencia, disgusted by endless holy days and the Bull of Crusade. “In Spain,” he said, “everything is hypocrisy,” and only St. Francis of Assisi had understood how to be a proper Christian. He 28 Ing., Libro 937, fols. 345-57v (#35 of 1583 auto); Libro 730, fols. 348-54 (#14-15 of 1581 despachadas); Libro 834, fols. 194-95 (#1516 of 1584 auto). Another reference to “Mariquita la carpintera” turns up in the trial of a Flemish artisan, who also sang some Huguenot Psalms at his farewell banquet before leaving Spain. The Navarrese Inquisitors put him in the 1602 auto to be reconciled as a “gran Luterano” but did not send him to the galleys because he was below the age of majority: Ing., Libro 835, fol. 76 (#23 of 1602 auto).

29 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 393-99 (#14 of 1579 Saragossa auto, three years at the oars); Libro 938, fols. 47—bov (#5 of 1599 Valencia auto); Libro 783, fols. gq—-gv (#4 of 1593 Sardinian despachadas); Libro 730, fols. 186—98v (#24 of 1575-76 Barcelona despachadas).

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“wanted to go to Italy where there was no Inquisition [sic],” because “here one lives in danger.”?° Gallic patriotism took many forms. A French hatmaker faced a variety of charges at Valencia in 1587, including kicking pictures of saints and provoking abortions, but the oddest charge was that he had defended Francis I’s alliance with the Turks. In 1577 a young Béarnese living in Saragossa was fined 30 reales

by the Holy Office for denying that the Pope had any right to bestow the Kingdom of Navarre on Philip II, who held it by force of arms alone. A far more exalted brand of Gallicanism came from a French surgeon in Mallorca, who told

the Inquisitors that the Pope had no power to excommunicate the King of France, who could “consecrate another Pope in France” if he so desired. This defendant had lived in Avignon, where the Pope was considered superior to the French king, but had learned the other doctrine in Marseilles.?!

After 1590, several Frenchmen were denounced to the Inquisition for defending Henry IV’s claims to the French throne or the sincerity of his conversion to Catholicism in 1593. The Spanish Inquisition, faithful tool of Philip II’s policy, was careful never to refer to King Henry IV of France by that title, let alone call him “King of Navarre”; he invariably appears in their records disguised as ‘“‘Bandoma,” after his northernmost French possession, the Duchy of Vendéme. In every tribunal of the Aragonese Secretariat one finds French Catholics arrested and convicted for supporting Henry IV. At Valencia, a young

coachman went to the galleys in 1591, and a skilled glazier in 1598, while a glovemaker was simply banished in 1597. At Barcelona a ship’s captain was fined and banished in 1594 for supporting Henry IV just before his conversion, but after he had started hearing Mass. At Logrofio an accused Huguenot, who admitted defending Henry’s title as King of France, went to the galleys in 1593;

another Frenchman who ridiculed the Duke of Guise’s claims to the French throne was banished next year. As far away as Sardinia, the apprentice to a French merchant was arrested in 1591 for saying that Henry was a “good Christian” who ought to be king.32 Directly across the border from Henry’s native Béarn, the Aragonese tribunal

encountered some interesting “heretical propositions” about him. In 1593 a 30 For examples of this bit of jargon, see Inq., Libro 936, fols. 390—93v (#3 of 1584 despachadas);

Libro 937, fols. rogv—23 (#31 of 1588 despachadas); Libro 988, fols. 177-84v (#10 of 1572 auto). None of these three received particularly severe punishments. See also Inq., Libro 833, fol. 392 (#4 of 1579 despachadas) for the beggar; also Libro 936, fol. 353v (#36 of 1583 auto). This

, last suspect confessed very little under torture and eventually escaped with a de vehementi abjuration and a sentence of perpetual banishment from Valencia — which apparently suited him.

31 Inq., Libro 937, fol. 47v (#10 of 1587 despachadas); Libro 988, fols. 328-43v (#7 of 1577 despachadas); Libro 860, fol. 155-55v (#1-2 of 1589 Mallorca despachadas). 32 Ingq., Libro 937, fol. 410 (#3 of 1591 auto), and Libro 938, fols. 44-55 (#4 of 1597 despachadas),

— 65-70 (#10 of 1598 auto), for Valencia; Libro 731, fols. 196-227 (#18 of 1594 despachadas), 322-33 (#8—9, 12, 14 of 1598 despachadas), for Barcelona; Libro 834, fols. 622-36 (#12 of 1593 auto), 738-56 (#42 of 1594 despachadas), for Logroiio; and Libro 782, fols. 545-46 (#11 of 1591-92 despachadas), for Sardinia.

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Gascon, obviously Catholic, was banished for approving Henry’s policy of religious toleration; he also proposed a public disputation between twelve Béarnese theologians and twelve Catholics chosen by the Pope, with the winner allowed to convert all of France. Five years later, an old linen-weaver who had

lived in Aragon for fourteen years got a milder punishment for claiming that Henry was a better Catholic than Philip II, pointing out that the Pope tolerated Jews in Rome, and bragging about the French king’s thaumaturgical powers, which no Spanish king ever claimed.? Opposing the Bull of Crusade or supporting Henry IV were not the only reasons for which French Catholics found themselves caught in the Inquisition’s nets. Even French priests were arrested for any number of “Lutheran

propositions.” In 1587, for example, a French priest touring the famous battlefield of Roncesvalles stopped to admire the relics at the local monastery. Although his Castilian was so poor he needed an interpreter, the local monks had him arrested for doubting the authenticity of some of their miracles and were convinced that he doubted the doctrine of transubstantiation. He made a partial confession under torture, then revoked it and withstood a second round of torture before abjuring de vehementi and serving two years in a Navarrese monastery. Six years later, a French Capuchin working in Catalonia received an even stiffer penalty for defending clerical marriage in public arguments. As late as 1607, the young Basque chaplain of a remote hamlet in Alava was arrested for

defending the doctrine that Mary had given birth more than once, an error described by the Inquisitors as specifically “Calvinist.” The Inquisitors discovered that not only had he learned this opinion while listening to Huguenot sermons in Béarn, but that he had also forged his French ordination papers; he was given a penitential garment and five years in the galleys, the usual penalty for saying Mass without official ordination.*+

The mutual dislike between the Aragonese Inquisitions and French immi-

grants surfaced in some visceral, elementary forms. It was usually a real Huguenot who told an Inquisitor to “kiss his arse,” or who renamed this institution the “Holy Devilment” (Santa Endiablacon); such men truly earned their condemnations to the galleys. But it was often Catholics who, like Guillaume Francois in 1580, were considered “highly suspect of heresy, especially because the defendant is French.” Such examples could easily be multiplied.7> In a more sinister twist, a suspect was picked up for mocking the Spaniards’ use 33 Ing., Libro 989, fols. 614 (#65 of 1593 auto), 653-70 (#57 of 1595 auto); Libro ggo, fol. 72v (#81 of 1598 auto).

34 Inq., Libro 834, fols. 357-70 (#39 of 1587 auto); Libro 731, fols. 164-76 (#20 of 1593 despachadas); Libro 835, fol. 258v (#14 of 1606-7 despachadas). 35 Inq., Libro 730, fols. 254—64v (#19 of 1575 Barcelona auto); Libro 835, fols. 189v, 245 (#38 of

Navarre 1604-5 despachadas, who was sent to the galleys after an unsuccessful escape from

Logrofio’s House of Penitents). See also Ing., Libro 833, fol. 446 (#5 of 1581 Navarre despachadas). See also Ing., Libro 834, fol. 692 (Navarre, 1593); Libro gg1, fol. 208 (Saragossa, 1612) or fol. 506 (“‘sospechoso en la fe por ser Gascon,” Saragossa, 1620).

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: Aragonese heresies of rosaries and subsequently “put to the torture because he is French” by the Barcelona Inquisition. Simple peasant shrewdness led a young defendant at Valencia to claim that he was born in the Catalan town of Puigcerda rather than in Andorra; as he later admitted, “he had not declared that he was French because he would be damaged by it’ (as indeed he was, since a Huguenot uncle had taught him that purgatory and transubstantiation were myths).?° INQUISITORS AND THE DAWN OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION

Soon after 1600, peace had broken out between Spain and England, and the Inquisition’s whole attitude towards “Lutherans” slowly began to change. As Dominguez Ortiz pointed out in a recent short essay, the commercial treaty with

England in 1604 inaugurated the “first sketch of religious toleration in Spain.”3’ The sufferance of Anglican practices, so long as they were done privately and without scandal, was extended to Dutch Calvinists after the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1609, signed at the same time that Philip III decided to expel the Moriscos. Seen from Seville, where large numbers of Englishmen and

Flemings had been executed or sent to the galleys by the Inquisition during Philip IPs reign, such changes were indeed dramatic and decisive. But Seville was exceptional. In the rest of Spain, Englishmen accounted for about 5% of the foreign Protestants killed or sent to the galleys, and Dutchmen for even less. Protestant martyrs had become so scarce in Castile by 1591, when Philip II attended his final auto de fe, that the tribunal of Toledo had to import a Scotsman from Seville in order to have someone to kill.5® In the Aragonese Secretariat,

where English and Dutch Protestants had never been important, the seven-

teenth-century trend towards toleration of “Lutherans” developed very gradually.

The principal reason was that Spain never signed a commercial treaty with

? France between 1600 and 1659. The massive immigration of Frenchmen into northern Spain continued well into the seventeenth century, slacking off by the 1630s in Catalonia and perhaps slightly later in Aragon. Béarn, directly north of the Kingdom of Aragon, continued to be officially Protestant until 1620, and Huguenots benefited from legal toleration throughout France after 1598. Many Huguenots and ex-Huguenots entered northern Spain during the early decades of the seventeenth century, without the official protection given to English and

: Dutch Protestants. A twenty-six-year-old Huguenot from Bayonne, originally arrested at Saragossa’s municipal hospital, was executed by the Aragonese , Inquisition in October 1606 as a “pertinacious” and well-educated apostate, 36 Inq., Libro 936, fol. 84v (#22 of 1573 Valencia despachadas); Libro 938, fol. 430 (#101 of 1591 auto) (“No avia declarado ser frances porque no le dajiase’”’).

37 Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, “El primer esbozo de tolerancia religiosa en la Espafia de los Austrias,” in his Jnstituctones y sociedad en la Espana de los Austrias (Barcelona, 1985), pp. 184-91.

38 Schafer, Beitrage, n, 106.

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Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration thus becoming the last Protestant martyr in mainland Spain.?? From 1604 until

1620, the four northeastern tribunals sent eighteen men to the galleys for “Lutheran” errors. Except for two Basques, they were all Frenchmen. A twenty-six-year-old Gascon locksmith, who admitted under the threat of torture

that he had held a Calvinist interpretation of the Eucharist for three years, including a few months in Spain, became the last Protestant to be publicly condemned to the galleys at the Saragossa auto of December 1619; but the Suprema found his sentence excessively rigorous and later requested the Aragonese tribunal to convert it to five years of banishment.*° A Huguenot sailor and courier from Bayonne, Martin de Ocaso, became the last Protestant to be tortured by a mainland Inquisition after he escaped from prison twice. The Logrofio tribunal sentenced him to five years in the galleys; but after Ocaso finally decided to recant his errors in October 1631, he was simply absolved,

without further punishment.*! Sometimes during the 1620s, the Pyrenean

Huguenot hunt finally ended. :

The uncertain situation of French Protestants in these northeastern tribunals in the early 1600s can be seen statistically in Table 16. Barcelona, where no Huguenot had been killed since 1578, showed an extremely mild profile, with

only one condemnation to the galleys. This tribunal simply dropped most charges against French Protestants, while welcoming large numbers of new converts from north of the border. But the other three tribunals successfully prosecuted 78% of the French “Lutherans” whom they arrested, and punished them far more often than they welcomed them as converts to Catholicism.

. Even the English and the Dutch did not benefit immediately or unreservedly from their legal privileges. For example, the Sicilian Inquisition had arrested several English pirates shortly before the 1604 treaty was signed. Subsegently, nine Englishmen — those who had lived in Catholic countries and were therefore _“pertinacious” heretics — appeared in the Palermo auto of February 1605 to be reconciled and placed in convents for two years of religious education. News of the peace treaty had meanwhile reached Sicily but had not yet been officially proclaimed there; so after much consultation with theologians and jurists, the Sicilian Inquisitors decided to free the other twenty-three pirates after paying bail, “in case the treaties were not confirmed.” In August 1605 the Suprema commented that the Sicilians should have absolved the other nine pirates also,

because none of them had ever learned Catholic doctrine. In 1606 the nine pirates escaped from the convent in which they were being kept; putting to sea, 39 Ingq., Libro ggo, fol. 399 (#2 of 1606 auto). 40 Inq., Libro 991, fol. 455-55v (#1 of Dec. 1619 auto). The Suprema showed no such indulgence

to Dominique Labarthe, who had lived ten years in Spain when he told his local rector that Huguenots were saved in their faith, just like Catholics: Labarthe was given six years in the galleys at the Aragonese auto of March 1619 (Ingq., Libro 991, fols. 403-37v, #4 of this group). 41 Inq., Libro 836, fols. 497 (pendiente, July 1631), 506—07v (#10 of 1631-32 despachadas). See also

Ing., Libro 822, fols. 401v, 405v, 408v (Suprema to Navarre, esp. November 25, 1631).

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Table 16 Huguenots and “Toleration”, 1604-30

Tribunal Penanced (Fr) Suspend (Fr) Converts (Fr)

Barcelona 11 (8) 25 (20) 70 (59) Saragossa 32 (30) 12 (12) 39 (33)

Valencia 30(15) (26)10 7 (5) Navarre 19 (3) 17 22 (15) (16)

they were picked up by a French ship, which promptly returned them to the Palermo Inquisition. The Sicilians ordered their sentences increased to ten years, but this time the Suprema overruled them and the sailors were finally released in 1607. Meanwhile, an English merchant in Palermo was arrested for criticizing the presence of the nine sailors at the 1605 auto. “Out of respect for the treaties,” explained the local tribunal, they merely imprisoned him for six months. Finally, the English ambassador protested to Philip III in 1607 that the Sicilian Inquisition had imprisoned the owners of a London ship for fifty-two days and impounded their cargo, in flagrant violation of the peace treaties.** Old habits died hard, and the new rules were harder to enforce outside mainland

Spain. :

A delegation of Béarnese merchants petitioned Spain’s Council of State in August 1612 “that they be allowed to do business in these kingdoms on the same footing as the English, French, and Dutch, not being arrested for matters

of conscience unless there is public scandal.” The Suprema referred the problem back to the tribunals of Aragon and Navarre, who after much discuss-

ion neither accepted nor rejected it. In any event, Béarn’s merchants were deliberately incorrect in equating the treatment of French traders with that accorded to the English or Dutch. The Suprema’s ordinary policy was clearly outlined in a letter to the tribunal of Galicia in 1618. “With the French,” they said, “you judge cases on their merits, without bothering about the clauses in the English or Dutch treaties.”*9 Vivid proof that Huguenot merchants were not judged by English or Dutch rules came with the discovery of the last important Protestant “conspiracy” in

Spain in the summer of 1621. At the Valencian auto of 1622 appeared six French merchants, all citizens of the Huguenot strongholds of Nimes and Montpellier, businessmen who shuttled back and forth between Languedoc and Valencia. Hardened Nicodemites, they lived as Huguenots in France and as

241; Libro 332, fol. 48v

42 Ing., Libro 899, fols. 202-04, 217v, 266v, 276-78; Libro 331, fols. 1g2v, 211v: Libro 899, fol. 43 Ing., Libro 333, fols. 318v, 327-27v; Jaime Contreras, E/ Santo Oficto de la Inquisicién en Galicia

1560-1700 (Madrid, 1982), pp. 623-24.

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Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration Catholics in Valencia. All six, even Jean Masel who shed “many tears ... signs of

his reduction,” had their property confiscated and were sent to Valencia’s House of Penitents. A seventh merchant managed to escape and thus earned the

honor of being the final “Lutheran” executed in effigy by the Inquisition in Spain, at Valencia’s 1625 auto.**

The arrest of five French merchants and the seizure of their property prompted the French ambassador to complain to the Council of State. “Even if they were heretics,” he argued, “the freedom of the agreements gives them the right to do business in these kingdoms, since they are no worse than the English or the Dutch.” He claimed that no Huguenot merchants had been molested in Spain for many years and added that an English merchant had lived openly in Valencia as a Protestant for more than twenty years. His protest was passed to the Suprema, who assured the Valencians in August 1621 “that no astento about religious matters had been made with the French, nor do the clauses of the English and Dutch treaties extend to them.” But they also asked Valencia to prepare a list of precedents in order to reassure the Council of State. Twelve days later Valencia’s answer reached Madrid in the form of a thirteen-page letter. Since 1604, they said, ‘‘when the peace with the English went into effect, from then until now we have completed thirty-two cases of this kind, and we have not been faulted once about our procedures.” The French ambassador

repeated his protests in October, but Valencia cut his arguments short by observing that “it is indecent to defend in Spain the very people that his king __ persecutes in France.”* Moreover, a Valencian Inquisitor with long experience in Navarre added that up north he had heard “many and continual accusations against Frenchmen,” especially in the major Basque ports. He recalled, about 1613 or 1614, some petition from Calvinist merchants in Languedoc to obtain the same rights as the English or Dutch; the matter had caused much “pain and disagreement” when it was discussed at Logrofio. This Inquisitor was sent back to Logrofio in April

1622, after playing a major role in prosecuting Valencia’s “conspiracy” of Huguenot merchants. Don Alonso Salazar y Frias, the famous “‘witches’ advocate” of Navarre, was also the last great Huguenot hunter among the Inquisitors of the Aragonese Secretariat.*© Salazar’s Valencia, however, was not the last tribunal in this Secretariat to condemn a Huguenot to death. Inquisitorial toleration came last of all to Sicily, an island full of pirates of various nationalities and religious persuasions. We have seen that Englishmen were imprisoned here long after the 1604 treaty was signed in Spain. A Dutch sailor, originally arrested as a smuggler on a German 44 Inq., Libro 939, fols. 461-67; Libro 940, fols 52~53v. 45 Inq., Libro 945, fols. 41-48, 54, 57-58, 63, 67v; Libro 921, fols. 121—21v, 125-26, 132, 135-39,

146, 152, 154, 157~58v. |

*6 Ing., Libro 921, fols. 162v-75.

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Aragonese heresies

ship, was transferred to the Inquisition as a “pertinacious Calvinist” and condemned to death in June 1630, but the Suprema finally managed to get him released a year later. A French Calvinist who had already been convicted twice before was executed at Palermo in 1628. Another Frenchman, a glover named Jean-Baptiste Vernon, was recaptured in Malta after fleeing from the Sicilian

convent where he was serving his penance. He died at the Palermo auto of September 1640, the final Protestant martyr in the history of the Spanish Inquisition.*’ PROTESTANT ‘ESPONTANEOS’ AND THE INQUISITION

However, much of the Inquisition’s dealings with “Lutherans” during the 1600s involved nothing more than registering voluntary converts to Catholicism, who made pro forma appearances before the Holy Office in order to be officially absolved of their errors ad cauthelam and were then released without punish-

ment of any kind, or even given specific provision for their religious reeducation. One finds occasional cases of this type in the later sixteenth century, but inquisitorial procedures for handling voluntary converts were not stabilized

until Philip III’s reign, when such cases became frequent. In most parts of Castile, these espontaneos were the only type of Protestant whom the Inquisitors encountered after 1600. In Barcelona, as we have seen, espontaneos outnumberd other kinds of Protestant business after 1605. In other Aragonese districts, they became increasingly common during the 1620s and finally monopolized cases of “Lutheranism” after 1630, except in Sicily. In the first half of the seventeenth century, as Table 17 shows, many converts in the Aragonese relaciones were French Huguenots. Several of them told the Holy Office they had been born in Geneva, something which never happened

with the sixteenth-century “Lutherans.” In 1610, a Genevan-born mercenary soldier for the Dutch was led “by gentle means”’ to the Barcelona tribunal while

on a pilgrimage to Montserrat; being “received with much kindness,” he explained that he had been converted about the time of the 1609 truce by witnessing some miracles among Dutch Catholics, and was duly absolved ad cauthelam. Fifteen other Genevan-born converts appear in seventeenth-century relaciones, including a Dutch naval officer who had kept his faith throughout years of captivity in Africa but subsequently converted in the Netherlands about 1650, and an assistant pastor who converted near the end of Philip IV’s reign.*® 47 Inq., Libro gor, fols. 54-55 (#9 of 1630 despachadas); Libro goo, fol. 536v (#21 of 1628 auto, who had previously appeared in the 1621 and 1625 autos and had also been formally reconciled at Rome); Libro go2, fol. 117v (#58 of 1640 auto). 48 Inq., Libro 732, fol. 110-10v; Libro 995, fols. 113-—20v (#5 of 1654 Saragossa despachadas), for the remarkable story of Theodore Chevalier; Libro 997, fols. 135v—44v (#2-3 of 1662 Saragossa despachadas), for Antoine de la Fontaine, “de profesione ayudante de un predicante en Ginebra,”

a 250

| and his young Genevan-born wife, who had persuaded him to turn Catholic after being herself

Protestants, Frenchmen, and toleration

Although most of these new Catholics were honest converts, a few clearly were not. In 1620 the Navarrese tribunal proudly announced the conversion of ‘‘Aminado de Beza,”’ twenty-five years old, from Lausanne, “grandson of Theodore Beza and on his mother’s side great-grandson of Zwingli, famous

heresiarchs.” The Suprema, impressed by this genealogy and apparently unaware that Beza died childless, asked them to report on the new proselyte’s religious development. A month later, Logrono ruefully reported that his real name was Pierre Antoine de la Grange; in another month, they reported that this Swiss picaro had fled, and the Suprema told them not to look for him.*? In 1627 the Valencia tribunal registered the conversions of a Genevan-born

jeweler named Abraham Babat and his journeyman from Franche-Comté named Louis Rochereau, who explained that he had converted to Calvinism at Geneva four years previously in order to find work. Two years later both men reappeared in Valencia’s annual report. Babat, who had left his wife in Geneva, confided to another Genevan craftsman that he had pretended to convert in order to avoid arrest while working in Spain. The Inquisitors arrested him, confiscated his property, and sentenced him to six months of imprisonment in a convent; but Babat got the last word by feigning madness and escaping from Valencia’s public hospital. His frightened journeyman, arrested with him for opposing belief in Purgatory, admitted that his real name was Louis Trottier and that he came from Nantes rather than Besancon. He received six months of Jesuit instruction, which he actually fulfilled.°° Many of the early seventeenth-century converts, at least those registered by the Aragonese tribunals, were Huguenots; but as the century advanced, this situation changed.°! At Barcelona, where Frenchmen had comprised 90% of the “Lutherans” condemned under Philip II and over 80% of the Protestants who converted under Philip III, they accounted for barely a third of the converts during Charles II’s reign. At Madrid, one finds a plurality of actual Lutherans (46% against 41% Calvinists, 12% Anglicans, and 1% Anabaptists) among the so-called “Lutheran” converts. In other words, only with the arrival of genuine religious toleration during the final third of the seventeenth century did the Inquisition’s Protestant clients stop being predominantly French. converted by a Jesuit. One finds Genevan-born converts in every major Aragonese tribunal, including Sicily, during Philip III’s reign. On the other hand, the only sixteenth-century Huguenot to claim Geneva as his home town was a printer, Jean de la Rue, reconciled at Barcelona in 1564: Inq., Libro 730, fols. 59—61v (#25 of 1564 auto). 49 Inq., Libro 836, fols. 233v-34 (#34 of 1620/21 despachadas); Libro 822, fols. 49v, 50Vv, 53Vv. 50 Inq., Libro 940, fols. 160v—61v, 162—62v (#16 and 18 of 1627 despachadas), 204-06 (# 11-12 of 1629 despachadas).

5! Drawn from Inq., Libro 735, passim; Libro 836, fols. 1g0-215; and Legajo 2156 [1], for Barcelona, which together include the years 1672-77, 1680-82, 1686-88 and 16g0—g1. The Madrid figures come from Inq., Libros 1150~52, the separate “espontaneos de Corte,” which appear to be complete for the period 1665-1700. A twelve-page set of printed instructions for comisarios about voluntarily converted Protestants, dating from the mid-seventeenth century, is

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Aragonese herestes Table 17 Protestant converts in Charles II’s Spain

Barcelona (annual av. = 19) Madrid (annual av. = 3.7)

Germans = 94 (36%) Germans = 57 (43%)

French = 93 (35%) French = 17 (13%) Swiss = 43 (16%) Swiss = 21 (16%) . Dutch = 14 (5%) Dutch = 12 (9%) English = 9 (3%) English = 18 (14%)

Scandinavians = 8 (3%) Scandinavians = 7 (5%)

Poles = 3 (1%)

Even in the 1690s the Inquisition’s toleration of Huguenots was far from perfect. Consider Jean de la Bellette, who escaped from Languedoc long after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes but was unlucky enough to be arrested by the Barcelona Inquisition in January 1690. By August 1690 they had sentenced him to death as a “pertinacious’” Huguenot, but the Suprema ordered that he be

given additional time to change his mind. Over the next sixteen months La Bellette resisted conversion during several interviews and made five attempts to - commit suicide. By April 1692 even the Suprema lost patience and ordered him

relaxed, but then postponed his execution until after Catalonia’s Viceroy returned from a lengthy absence. At this point the record breaks off, leaving us uncertain whether this stubborn Huguenot outlasted the bureaucratic routines of the Spanish Inquisition to earn his martyrdom, or whether they let him rot in - prison until he either died or killed himself.>2 owned by the Union Theological Seminary: see Emil Van der Vekene, Bibliotheca Bibliographica Historiae Sanctae Inquisitionis, 2 vols. (Vaduz, 1982), 1, p. 76 (#256).

52 Inq., Libro 735, fols. 415-18, 421-23V.

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PART 4

“Mixed crimes” in Aragon

BLANK PAGE

I2

Witchcraft: the forgotten offense There are no pages of European history more filled with horror than those which record the witch-madness of three centuries, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth. No land was more exposed to the contagion of this insanity than Spain ... That it was repressed and rendered comparatively harmless was due to the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition Lea, IV, p. 206.

No vemos como acusandolos como a hereges y admitiendolos a Reconciliacion, no se deben confiscar los bienes. Barcelona prosecutor to Suprema, 1576 (Inq., Libro 738, fol. 208).

Estas negocios de bruxas suelen ser en las inquisiciones de mucho trabajo, gasto y pesadumbre, y sacase dellos poco fruto, como la experiencia lo a mostrado.

: Navarrese Inquisitor to. Suprema, 1595 (Idoate, Brujeria en Navarra, p. 357).

On February 12, 1498, the prosecutor’s office of the Saragossa Inquisition began taking testimony against Narbona Dorcal, wife of Joan de Portafia of the mountain village of Cenorbe, north of Huesca. Two of her fellow-villagers, Domingo Ferrer and Pedro Jimenez, offered general and particular testimony about both her general reputation for witchcraft and her specific misdeeds. “For

more than twenty years,” said Domingo, Narbona “had been reputed as a pozonyera, fetillera, and broxa” both in her village of Cenorbe “and in other parts

where she had been known.” Thus begins the first preserved witchcraft trial by | the Spanish Inquisition.! Domingo went on to describe the troubles of a neighbor, his brother, and his wife with Narbona, all episodes between six and twelve years old, all instances of mysterious spells, sometimes lifted and other times causing disaster to those who had angered her. Both her sister and brother Joan were also reputed experts in illicit magic. By early April she was arrested. Soon the Inquisition’s prosecutor charged her with poisoning many people, killing some and crippling others; with killing

dogs and other animals, with avoiding taking communion in church; with ' Trial preserved in Archivo Histérico Provincial, Saragossa, Ing., Legajo 23, #1 (11 folios).

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“Mixed crimes” in Aragon

tasy to the Devil. ,

necromancy, invoking devils from behind magical circles, and with formal aposJoining herself with others, anointed with ointments and poisons on certain parts of her body, she invoked the demons by pronouncing these words: “sobre garro y sobre espina, al amo de boch” to reach the boch de biterna. Everyone kissed his anus and did him honor. He copulated with them, and gave them some coins in payment. After dancing and celebrating in this field with many other bruxas, she returned home later that night. While there,

they could not mention the name of our Saviour Jesus Christ, because otherwise they couldn’t do any of these bruxeryas.

The first surviving description of a Spanish Sabbat conforms closely to con-

temporary models from other parts of Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, the age of the famous Malleus Maleficarum.’ The Inquisition’s prosecutor added other charges and other details as well.

Narbona had poisoned trees and streams, and recruited other women to become bruxas. “All the above things,” he concluded, “had been, were, and are

true for manifest and notorious reasons,” having been attested to by the defendant in the presence of many trustworthy people. He demanded a “suitable punishment” for her as a bruxa herética and apostate. Further questioning in June 1498 wrapped up her case; and it seems possible that Narbona Dorcal was the “‘Navarma” recorded in the Libro Verde as executed for witchcraft on January 16, 1500, by the Aragonese Inquisition. Two days later another witch, a widow identified only as ‘“Estafabreta” (Elisabeta?), was also executed for witchcraft, and a third woman, Marieta Pérez, followed them later that month.

Two other witches had already been executed at Saragossa in September 1498.3

Of course, legends about witches had flourished in the Spanish Pyrenees long before the Aragonese Inquisition took cognizance of them. A fifteenthcentury canon of Pamplona, Martin de Arles, composed a Treatise on Superstitions (printed at Lyon in 1510), which mentioned the “false beliefs about women who cast malevolent spells, many of whom inhabit the Basque region, in

the northern part of the Pyrenees, and whom the common people call broxe; beliefs that they can move from place to place through real changes.” The Pamplona canon heard how one of these broxe once told a priest in confession about riding across fields on donkeys in her sleep, and copulating with the Devil, “feeling an intense pleasure in the act.”” Basque women had been exe2 Right down to the details! Narbona’s invocation before going to the Sabbat recalls one from Geneva 1539, similar in rhythm and images (see my Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Ithaca,

256 ,

1976], p. 57). The “boch de Biterna” appears in Jaime Roig’s Spill of 1460 and reappears in Catalan trials around 1550: Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York, 1906-08), Iv, p. 219 (“bach de Viterna’’). 3 See Libro Verde de Aragén, (hereafter Libro Verde) ed. Isidro de las Cagigas (Madrid 1929), pp. 111-33. Using a previous published version, Lea (Iv, p. 211) spells her name “Nanavina.”

Witchcraft: the forgotten offense

cuted for malevolent sorcery as early as 1329, although the specific Basque noun for “‘witch,” xerguina, only appeared in texts a century later.*

From another zone of the Pyrenees, the fifteenth-century Valencian poet Jaume Roig, in his Libre de les dones or Spill (1460) noted that many bruxes assembled at night to renounce God and worship a goat in a cavern called Biterna, where they feasted and flew home afterwards; several of them, he asserted, had been burned “after good trials in Catalonia for these excesses.” Unlike Martin de Arles, Roig believed that the Devil deceived the bruxes only

about their chances of escaping from justice; to this author, witches simply illustrated a particularly dangerous side of women’s nature.° WITCHES, MAGICIANS AND INQUISITORS BEFORE 1525 By 1494, the Spanish Repertorium Inquisitorum noticed the existence of witches,

calling them by their Basque name of xorguinas. Its policies towards them already seemed contradictory. On the one hand, the Holy Office took the same position as Martin de Arles, namely that witches’ beliefs were only an illusion provoked by the Devil. On the other hand, it insisted that witches should be

tried by the Inquisition, because their erroneous beliefs were worse than paganism and could be considered a form of heresy.© This ruling came shortly after the publication of a famous handbook on witches, the Malleus Maleficarum, which, although composed by German Inquisitors, claimed that either secular or ecclesiastical judges might prosecute people for witchcraft. Armed with such opinions, the Holy Office of Saragossa, the most aggressive in northern Spain, proceeded to arrest and condemn witches after 1495, at a time when the secular courts of Pyrenean Spain were not particularly active against them. For over twenty years, Aragon alone maintained inquisitorial jurisdiction over witchcraft. The Catalan tribunal was long inactive in this area, while the fledgling Inquisition of Navarre, created in 1513, busied itself with other matters during its first decade.’ 4 See Julio Caro Baroja, Brujeria Vasca, 4th edn. (San Sebastian, 1985), pp. 16—17, for best quotes from Martin de Arles; and Florencio Idoate, La Brujerta en Navarra y sus Documentos (Pamplona, 1978), pp. 11-19, on early Basque trials.

> Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Historia de Cataluna. Siglos XVI-XVII, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1985), 1, pp. 411-12. 6 Lea, IV, p. 210.

7 In the mountains of Vizcaya (more specifically, in the Sierra de Amboto) there were apparently some witch-trials around 1500: see Caro Baroja, Brujeria Vasca, pp. 13-14. But the long-lived myth of thirty witches executed in Navarre in 1507 with 150 others penanced by the Inquisition was created by J.-A. Llorente (Histoire critique de la Inquisition d’Espagne, 4 vols. (Paris, 1817], n,

Pp. 453-54). He apparently misdated his source, since there was no Spanish Inquisition in Navarre in 1507 (it was introduced in 1513 after Ferdinand’s conquest). Several famous

257 ,

authorities, including Lea, his great enemy Menendez y Pelayo, and Caro Baroja, have continued to perpetuate Llorente’s error; it is even in the 1985 revision of Kamen’s fine survey.

“Mixed crimes” in Aragon

By 1510 the Saragossa Inquisition had branched out from witchcraft to investigate related areas of superstitious and illicit magic. An Italian merchant was sentenced to public reconciliation, with confiscation of his considerable property, for consulting an astrologer (a small piece of paper containing an astrological recipe was found among his records). His expert, a Catalan priest, owned a small book about necromancy and a larger work on astrology. Together | they had conducted experiments showing how to win at gambling, how to become irresistible to women, and even how to find gold which had been lost at

sea.8 |

In January 1511, the network of accused magicians in Saragossa reached up to a beneficed priest, who owned a copy of the Clavicula Salomonis, the most famous handbook of Renaissance practical magic. Mossen Joan Vicent had performed magical experiments together with a notary and two artisans, one of whom revealed their practices to the Inquisition. Their magic involved animal sacrifices, sacrilegious use of Holy Water, and a “ring of Solomon in order to dominate the spirits.” Before being arrested, Vicent had managed to burn the magical books and manuscripts in his associates’ possession; he later managed to escape from the inquisitorial prison in Saragossa’s Aljaferia and earned himself an execution in effigy on March 19, 1511. On June 16 of that year, two of his unlucky associates, an artisan and a priest, died at a public auto; the notary, who had also escaped, was executed in effigy.” The Inquisition prosecuted Renaissance high magic only sporadically. Saragossa’s 1511 auto was the last of its kind, although this tribunal executed a monk

for “heretical necromancy” in 1528 and a priest for the same offense in 1537 (the last magician ever killed by the Spanish Inquisition). In 1523 the Inquisition of Navarre confiscated the magical books of a recently deceased sorcerer who reputedly knew how to fly. The Suprema prevented the Navarrese tribunal from executing his corpse and simply ordered his heirs to pay a fine before recovering the remainder of his property.!°

Although two rural witches died at a Saragossa auto in 1512, no others followed them for twenty years. Learning in 1521 that “in the mountains around Ribagorza and Jaca there are broxas and broxos who do much damage to children and in other things,” some of whom wished to confess to the Holy Office, this

tribunal, with the Suprema’s permission, proclaimed an Edict of Grace for penitent witches, giving them six months in which to come forward and confess without punishment. By October, at least twenty-two voluntary confessions had 8 Archivo Hist6rico Provincial, Saragossa, Ing., Legajo 28, #5. 9 Ibid., #7 (Vicent), a huge dossier of over 100 folios, probably our best source on high magic in Renaissance Spain. See also Libro Verde; Lea, Iv, p. 183, notes that the Saragossa tribunal had to go to King Ferdinand for permission to confiscate the property of these convicted magi.

, 258

10 Inq., Libro 319, fols. 8—8v, 28-28v, 51v; see also Ifiaki Reguera, La Inguisicién espanola en el Pais Vasco (El tribunal de Calahorra, 1513-1570) (San Sebastian, 1984), pp. 194—-95.

: Witchcraft: the forgotten offense been recorded in this district. Three years later, other witches were burned in this same region, but the Inquisition was unable to intervene.!! Meanwhile, cases of witchcraft began to dot the records of tribunals outside the Kingdom of Aragon. A bruja was tried by the Toledo tribunal in 1513; two years later, the Cuenca tribunal heard stories about children who had been kidnapped “‘and were believed to have been wounded or killed by xorguinos and _ xorguinas.” \n June 1517 the Suprema ordered Barcelona to proceed at once to

the Pyrenees to investigate the local bruxas and provide for the “punishment of | those who live evilly and good administration of justice, as we have written to you.” They sweetened the order by adding that all special expenses would be paid. We do not know the results of this initiative, but in 1522 a dona bruxa was burned at the stake at a Barcelona auto.’ NAVARRE WITCHES AND THE 1526 GUIDELINES

However, the stimulus which goaded the Supreme Council of the Inquisition into adopting major policy rules about witchcraft cases came from the recently

pacified Kingdom of Navarre. During the first eight months of 1525, an itinerant magistrate from Navarre’s appellate court, /icenciado Balanza, fulfilled

his commission to prosecute witches in the northern valleys of Roncal and Salazar. Balanza arrested at least forty witches and executed most of them in their native villages, with the full consent of his Pamplona colleagues. The Navarrese Inquisition, which had emigrated to the Riojan town of Calahorra, had visited the Navarre mountains in the autumn of 1524. They spent the summer of 1525 trying to get their hands on some of these witch-trials, finally

visiting a few of the afflicted districts and arranging with the local bishop for | some sermons to be preached in Pamplona, “with a large audience and popular satisfaction.”” Meanwhile, in September 1525 the Suprema had learned that in far-off Sardinia “there are many bruxos and bruxas who do much damage.” They urgently ordered their Sardinian tribunal “not to delay this visit, because great

benefits will ensue.” !+ | Fresh from trying to resolve the problems of Morisco baptisms in the Crown of Aragon and not yet preoccupied by the orthodoxy of Erasmus, the Supreme

11 See Libro Verde for 1512 executions; and Inq., Libro 317, fol. 215v, for the Edict of Grace; Libro.

319, fols. 96—g6v, 126v. (Lea, Iv, p.211, noted that the Renaissance Papacy was encouraging

witch-hunts in the Italian Alps at the time the Saragossa Inquisition promulgated this Edict of | 12 Gebesgan Cirac Estopafian, Los procesos de hechicerias en la Inquisicién de Castilla la Nueva (tribunales de Toledo y Cuenca) (Madrid, 1942), p. 196; Inq., Libro 318, fol. 50v; Manual de Novells

Ardits: Vulgrament Apel.lat Dietari del Antich Consell Barceloni (hereafter Dietari), 28 vols. (Barcelona, 1892-1975), V, p. 331. '3 See Idoate, Brujeria en Navarra, pp. 23-45, for Balanza’s 1525 witch-hunt, plus documents on pp. 249-71; also Reguera, La Inquisicién espaniola, pp. 195-96, and Inq., Libro 319, fols. 124V, 184, 219V—20, 225—25v, 231v, on the Navarrese Inquisition’s limited intervention.

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Council of the Inquisition determined to create a clearer and firmer set of inquisitorial policies towards witchcraft. First, in December 1525 the Navarre tribunal sent a report to show that the witches went to Sabbats in person, an opinion they had discussed with the local appellate court at Pamplona. The Suprema cautioned that “we have always had some doubts that these bruxos and

bruxas go in person and do the things they say in their confessions, but nonetheless it seems to us that you should ... have jurisdiction over such trials, handling the trials according to the law and administering justice in the manner that the Consejo votes.” They added that “it would be good if, after starting some trials, you sent us some of them so that we could see better and understand

the truth of this situation.” !4 :

By February 1526 the Suprema had received four witch-trials from Navarre, accompanied by some theological opinions, but expressed some nervousness about the legal procedures used and pressed the Navarrese tribunal for “more verifications.” Three months later they despatched an investigator to Navarre with a special commission as third Inquisitor, “in order to help you with the trials and other business of the bruxas which is going on in this Holy Office.” By December 1526 the Suprema’s special committee on witchcraft had completed its work, and its decisions were forwarded to Navarre, while their inspector returned to Murcia.!°

The ten-man panel, including the future Inquisitor-General Fernando de Valdés and several other famous names, wrestled first with a central issue: did

witches really go to the Sabbat in person, or was it all a figment of their imagination? This problem had preoccupied jurists and theologians throughout Renaissance Europe, and it was central to both the Inquisition’s and secular officials’ claims to judge witchcraft. As the Suprema’s experts noticed, “most of the jurists of this kingdom [Castile] have held for a certainty that there are no witches.” Nonetheless, they finally decided by a narrow six to four majority (with the future Inquisitor-General among the minority) “that they really go” rather than “go in imagination.” Perhaps the decisive consideration was that, if witches attended Sabbats only in imagination, their apostasy would also be imaginary, and the Inquisition’s legal claim to try them as heretics and apostates would

evaporate.

The committee also ruled on the issue of witches’ maleficia or evil deeds. Because many homicides confessed by witches might be illusory (even if their 14 Inq., Libro 319, fol. 255v. Balanza also sent a personal report to the Suprema in December 1525 about Navarre’s bruxas and the way they had been tried heretofore, urging the Inquisition to work closely with the Consejo “sobre tan gran delicto”: ibid., fols. 269v—61.

15 Ing., Libro 319, fols. 270-71v, 280-80v. See Reguera, La Inquisicién espanola, pp. 197-98; Henry Kamen, La Inquisicién espanola, rev. edn. (Barcelona, 1985), pp. 275-76; and Augustin Redondo, Fray Antonio de Guevara (14802-1545) et l’Espagne de son temps (Geneva, 1976), pp. 296-302, on the Granada committee and its resolutions. Kamen found the committee’s deliberations in Ing., Libro 1231, fols. 634-37; the instructions themselves are in Inq., Libro 319, fols. 341, 348—49Vv.

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trips to the Sabbat were real), such maleficia should be judged by Inquisitors rather than by secular authorities; but if the civil authorities could prove that a homicide had really been committed by an accused witch, they retained full jurisdiction to punish her for it. After taking these basic decisions, the junta proceeded to lay down ten specific guidelines for the Navarre tribunal to follow in judging witchcraft accusations: ©

(1) no one who confesses voluntarily, or shows signs of genuine repentance, shall have her property confiscated; (2) anyone who shows contempt for the sacraments of the church must be punished more severely; (3) The Inquisitors and their advisers must decide the length of time such people must wear special penitential garments and the type of abjuration they must perform;

(4) no one shall be arrested or condemned solely through the confessions of other witches;

(5) the Inquisitors must learn if the people they arrest have already been tortured by secular justice; (6) they must consult with the Suprema before passing sentence on anyone convicted of witchcraft a second time; (7) they must also consult the Suprema before sentencing any prisoners who refuse to confess their faults; (8) given the doubts and difficulties of witchcraft cases, they must be decided

by both Inquisitors jointly, accompanied by an ecclesiastical judge, | lawyers, and theologians; (9) some new edicts about witchcraft should be considered; and (10) careful examination is needed to verify whether people who attend Sabbats or gatherings of witches do so really, or if they stay in their beds. Finally, the blue-ribbon junta of 1526 spent almost as much time discussing how to re-educate witches as how to punish them. They had sent their special agent to Navarre in order to preach, rather than to tell the other Inquisitors how to vote on witch-trials; and they accompanied their ten rules on legal procedures with five regulations designed to prevent recurrences of witchcraft in afflicted areas: (1) that ecclesiastical officials visit the most afflicted areas in person;

(2) that a hermitage be built on the spot where Sabbats were reportedly _ celebrated, and that Mass be celebrated there; (3) that local people go to Mass every holiday and some day during the week; (4) that they always wear crosses, even wooden ones, to repulse the temptations of the Devil; and, most importantly, (5) that sermons be preached in the local dialect, condemning their erroneous beliefs.

These rules and remedies for witchcraft form an attractive unit, when placed 261

“Mixed crimes” in Aragon

against the record of most other Renaissance authorities, whether secular or ecclesiastical. The provision that the property of repentant witches (unlike that of other repentant heretics) could not be confiscated removed a major stimulus to witch-hunting by inquisitorial tribunals. Similarly, the guideline that second convictions for witchcraft (unlike second convictions for major heresies) did not

automatically entail the death penalty removed a major potential source of executions for witchcraft. So did the rule that negatives who refused to admit their guilt were to be judged not by the tribunal who had arrested them but by the Suprema. The Inquisition’s headquarters had the foresight to adopt policies designed to reduce the possibility of future outbreaks. Henry Charles Lea, the first historian of the Inquisition who also investigated European witchcraft,

emphasized the consistently lenient position of Valdés — one of the most important figures in the history of the sixteenth-century Inquisition — within the 1526 panel of experts and asserted that only the “wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition” made the witch-craze “comparatively harmless” in Spain.!® According to all major historians of the Inquisition, these enlightened 1526

instructions failed to prevent a fresh outbreak of witch-hunting in Navarre during the next few months. Nearly fifty people were executed by the Consejo Real on denunciations by two girls aged nine and eleven, who claimed to identify witches on sight, and the Navarrese Inquisition imposed penances on nearly 150 people whom they had accused — or so, at any rate, claimed a purported letter to the Constable of Castile from a Navarre Inquisitor. This story found its way into Sandoval’s widely read History of the Emperor Charles V. However, the whole episode is bogus and the letter a forgery. No trace of a witch-hunt appears either in the extant correspondence between the Suprema and Navarre in 1527 or in the abundant records of Navarre’s appellate court. After the December 1526 instructions arrived in Navarre, no sane Inquisitor would have collaborated in a fresh witch-hunt at so short an interval since 1525.!” 16 Lea, IV, p. 206.

17 The fullest discussion of the literary sources of this imaginary 1527 witch-craze is in Caro Baroja, Brujerta Vasca, who devoted his second chapter (pp. 25—47) to it. The “Avellaneda letter,”

as Caro Baroja notes, exists in three manuscript copies at Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional, but this does not make it an authentic source. Not even Ifiaki Reguera (whose doctoral thesis [published

in 1985] was approved by Caro Baroja), who read carefully through Libros 319 and 320 at Madrid’s Archivo Histé6rico Nacional Inquisition section which detail the Suprema’s correspon-

dence with Navarre during 1527 and failed to find any mention of this episode, ever seems to have considered that the whole story was fabricated from bits and pieces of the 1525 Balanza witch-hunt. Another Navarrese scholar, Florencio Idoate, who located several key documents about the 1525 witch-hunt in Pamplona’s Archivo General de Navarra, found nothing from any 1527 hunt among the massive pile of papers from the Consejo Real; in his Brujeria en Navarra, pp. 38-42 and 51, he offers the best clue about this noteworthy letter, suggesting that it might have been written from /icenciado Balanza (abusively styling himself an “Inquisitor”) to the Constable of Navarre, Luis de Beaumont (not the Constable of Castile), about the events of 1525

(not 1527). |

The evidence against the existence of any 1527 witch-hunt in Navarre is considerable. No independent confirmation for the events of the “Avellaneda letter” has been found either among

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Meanwhile, the Calahorra Inquisition was soon investigating witchcraft in the Basque country. By April 1528 a new Inquisitor was allowed to undertake “the business of the Vizcaya witches,” partly in order to impose the Holy Office’s presence in a province which had scarcely seen it in thirty years. Armed with detailed instructions from the Suprema, they spent many months there and held

an auto at Bilbao that December. Another Navarrese Inquisitor spent part of 1530 working on witchcraft cases in Guipuzcoa, after that Basque province named a special committee to prosecute witches at its 1530 diet. He soon died, reputedly poisoned by witches, and his successor finished work in Guipuzcoa in 1531. A very different light is shed on these activities by a petition for back pay

by the official physician to the Navarre Inquisition a few years later: he had stayed at his post in Calahorra from 1529 until 1531, “while the Inquisitors fled from the plague and investigated witches in the mountains.”!® For him, and doubtless for others, the Inquisition’s role in Navarrese witchcraft was peripheral to its real mission. AFTERMATH OF THE 1526 GUIDELINES

Witchcraft business continued brisk in Navarre and the Basque country, while jurisdictionally things were firmly under the Inquisition’s control. In January

1532, they held an auto at Pamplona at which the Vicar-General of the archdiocese was an honored guest, “because he had personally seen the trials of the witches and voted on them.” Next year, when a fresh outbreak of witchcraft was reported, Navarre’s Consejo Real informed local authorities that they were forbidden from investigating such “homicidal and poisoning” people by the claims of the Inquisition. In 1538, another Navarre Inquisitor, armed with the

Suprema’s warning that “although people think that all witches have to be burned, you must ignore public opinion,” departed for Bilbao to investigate thirty witches who had already confessed to municipal judges. After penancing Bilbao’s witches in May 1539, he became the first Inquisitor to execute a foreign Protestant. Meanwhile, his colleague hurried to Pamplona in October 1539 to judge the cases of thirty-four witches arrested by order of Navarre’s Consejo Real and obediently handed over to the Holy Office; another public auto was the Suprema’s correspondence (which appears to be complete for 1527 and contains a few letters to Navarre on other subjects) or in Pamplona. Moreover, with the detailed instructions from the

Suprema arriving in Navarre in January 1527, it would have been a remarkably unpropitious moment to start hunting witches — especially for Inquisitor Avellaneda! But somehow all the greatest scholars who have studied the Inquisition, from Llorente to Lea to Caro Baroja to Kamen, have plodded along repeating the same hair-raising tales out of Sandoval’s History without asking themselves if these events really happened. 18 Ing., Libro 320, fols. 49v-51, 53, 109Vv—-10, 297V—98, 342v, 362v-62, 372-73, 381v-82, 387, 399-99V, 440-40v, 448 (an auto was held in Guipuzcoa in October 1531, the first in a territory which had long prided itself on not permitting the Holy Office to enter its land: witchcraft proved to be the cutting edge of heresy).

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‘Mixed crimes”’ in Aragon held in the Navarrese capital early in 1540, at which a Judaizer was executed and nineteen women were penanced as witches.!?

The situation was much the same in other parts of the Crown of Aragon. Far-off Sardinia, which had begun investigating witches in 1525 at the Suprema’s orders, had already imprisoned several of them when the Suprema told

them in November 1526 to proceed slowly with their trials, because new regulations would be forthcoming soon. By August 1527, the Supreme Council

learned that Sardinia had held its auto of witches, and encouraged them to continue visiting the afflicted parts of their island. “You should work hard to ensure that in those places which have had and still have bruxas, people are taught and indoctrinated ... Experience has shown,” they continued, “that chiefly from lack of this, similar crimes, damages and evils have befallen parts of the Kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre.” The Suprema gave further encouragement to Sardinia during the winter of 1529-30, reminding them twice that “this business of bruxas is very difficult and there are diverse opinions about it, as we have written to other Inquisitions,” and enclosing a copy of the 1526 Navarre resolutions to guide them. Preaching and indoctrination, not physical punishments, were obviously the Inquisition’s main weapons in dealing with witchcraft.7° In the Kingdom of Aragon, a local bishop refused to transfer an accused witch

to the Holy Office in 1531; but next year, four women who had confessed to secular judges at Monz6n were tried by the Aragonese Inquisition. In October 1535, this tribunal executed a bruja — the first known death for witchcraft by the

Spanish Inquisition after 1526, and the last witch ever executed by the Saragossa tribunal. The Suprema sent a copy of their recent instructions to Saragossa, ordering them to send along the trials of all their bruxas relaxadas with their next letter. In May 1536, the Suprema ruled that any witch condemned to death by majority rather than unanimous vote must be sent to them for final decision; and there the matter ended.?! Only in March 1532, after they took custody of seven women and two men accused of witchcraft, did the Barcelona Inquisition receive its copy of the 1526

instructions. A few months later, the senior Barcelona Inquisitor had to be reprimanded for confiscating the property of convicted witches, which infringed

the new rules. Five years later this tribunal again confiscated the estate of a 19 Ing., Libro 321, fol. 18; Reguera, La Inquisicién espanola, pp. 203-10; Inq., Libro 322, fols. 215-18, 226-27, 258—5qv, 267v. | 20 Inq., Libro 319, fols. 336-36v, 431-31v; Libro 320, fols. 253, 294-95, 330. 21 See Inq., Libro 320, fols. 388v, 401; Libro Verde for 1528 and 1537 necromancers and 1535 witch; José Gomez Pérez, “Manuscritos espafioles en Burdeos,” Revista de Archives, Bibliotecas y

Museos, 60 (1954), pp. 477-510, #82 (manuscript #1,352 of Bordeaux’s Municipal Library, a seventy-page inquisitorial trial of the four Monzén women); Archivo Histérico Provincial,

Saragossa, Ing., Legajo 31, #2 (trial of Domenica la Coxa, transferred from secular to inquisitorial courts in 1534 and condemned to relaxation in October 1535); and AHN, Ingq.,

Libro 322, fol. 18; Libro 1234, fol. 396v. : a 264

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convicted witch. This time the Suprema warned Barcelona that although they had “seen many trials on this matter and very abominable confessions, we have not been entirely satisfied that the crimes have actually been committed.” The relevant trials were returned to Barcelona a few months later, heavily annotated,

with special censures for arresting women “solely on their reputation as bruxas.”22

THE CATALAN WITCHCRAFT CRISIS OF 1549

Twenty years after the Suprema promulgated their 1526 instructions, witchcraft appeared to be under control within the Pyrenean districts. The Pamplona auto

of May 1540 concluded the long cycle of witch-hunting in Navarre and the Basque country dating from 1525. The Saragossa auto of November 1546

included six women publicly reconciled as witches, two of whom were , whipped and banished from Aragon; it too was the last episode in a longer and more sporadic cycle stretching back almost fifty years.2? The real inquisitorial problem with witchcraft during Valdés’ lengthy tenure as Inquisitor-General (1542-66) came from Barcelona, which had hitherto played a relatively minor role. In the summer of 1548, the Suprema learned that Dr. Sarmiento, Catalonia’s

senior Inquisitor, had arrested some witches in the southern coastal city of Tarragona, far from Catalonian Pyrenees where all such instances had hitherto occurred. This panic had been started by a local witch-finder, a Morisco named Juan Malet, who had learned this art from a witch who had been his mistress. Aggravated by bad weather, popular discontent had produced a house-by-house search for witches in Tarragona, and several people had already been hanged

by local authorities. After Tarragona’s bishop ordered his judges to release some women whom they had arrested, the municipality asked the Inquisition to

intervene, offering to pay the prisoners’ expenses. On June 20, Sarmiento convoked a consulta of eight theologians and seven jurists at Barcelona. They unanimously agreed “that these witches could go to their assembly in person, carried by the Devil, and could cause the evils and deaths that they confessed, and should be very well punished, and that the Devil persuaded the judges that

itBywas imaginary.”2* | October the Suprema again sent their 1526 witchcraft instructions to

Barcelona, accompanied by the usual reservations based on their “previous experience with other business of this kind,” ordering the most complete trials 22 Inq., Libro 321, fols. 29v-30, 44-45v; Libro 322, fols. 102—02v, 144—44Vv, 146.

23 Three women were penanced at Calahorra’s 1546 auto for “heretical superstitions”; see _ Reguera, La Inquisicién espanola, pp. 213, 215. Also Archivo General de Simancas, Patronato

Real, Legajo 28, p. 56.

24 Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Ms. 2.440, fols. g7—g8v; Ing., Libro 736, fol. 119—19v. Several pamphlets describing the feats of “En Maler” are in Barcelona’s Municipal Library.

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“Mixed crimes” in Aragon sent to them, and forbidding any further arrests. But their advice and warnings

were blithely ignored. On December 7, Sarmiento told them that the witches’ : cases had all been decided, and asked for a quick confirmation. His letter crossed with the Suprema’s order to arrest and interrogate Malet. In early January 1549 Barcelona’s prosecutor answered with two long letters, complain-

ing that “as seen by the local lords, the Holy Office has done nothing with witches, and now they see that we are being very merciful with them”; he insisted that “‘it is certain that there are witches, and in their trials (at least in most of them) it happened in reality and was not an illusion.”’?> A week after the prosecutor sent his second letter, the Barcelona Inquisition held an auto publico at which six women, including one who had already died, were handed over to secular officials to be executed as witches. “There were many people present,” noted Barcelona’s municipal council, “because it was a new thing about bruxas which the public awaited, desiring to see their execution for the great harm they had done.” On February 11, the Barcelona tribunal announced that “this matter of witchcraft ... continues to pullulate and produces frightful cases every day.” Sarmiento airily informed them “there is no need to take the trouble of seeing the trials” of the thirty-three witches he had sentenced, adding that he had confiscated the property of approximately twenty witches whom he had condemned as heretics.7° To Barcelona’s air of satisfaction and prospects of further trials Valdés and the Suprema reacted angrily. They counterattacked in April 1549 by reducing the sentences he had imposed ‘on the remaining witches, and informed Barcelona that a special inspector was being sent to help Sarmiento with witchcraft cases. Within a month, this visitor reported from Barcelona that “the trials |

have been able to examine, chiefly those of the witches, ... are all a joke.” Suspects had been tortured, and sometimes executed, on grossly inadequate evidence. He recommended that all penitential garments be removed from the convicted witches and their confiscated property be returned to them.2? The Suprema asked the king for total jurisdiction over all pending cases of Catalan witches. The moment they received it, they ordered Sarmiento, his prosecutor, and three other officials of Barcelona’s Holy Office to come to court immediately in order to “give order” to their cases of witchcraft. Sarmiento delayed, claiming his leg needed surgery. He continued to avoid obeying his

summons for a full year, despite increasingly threatening orders from the Suprema, reports of the Inquisitor-General’s “discontent,” and even an open hint that he was about to be deprived. In reality, the Suprema was powerless to remove an Inquisitor for insubordination, and had to wait until the king could appoint Sarmiento to a vacant Catalan bishopric in genteel retirement; all they 25 Ingq., Libro 322, fols. sov—51, 54—57v; Libro 323, fol. 4v; Libro 736, fol. 117, 32-32v, 26-29. 26 Dietari tv, p. 197; Ing., Libro 736, fols. 24, 25-25v, 116—-16v. 27 Ing., Libro 323, fols. 8—8v, 15v; Libro 736, fols. 55-56, 148—48v, 192, 193V.

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could do was appoint a second Barcelona Inquisitor and prohibit Sarmiento from handling witch-trials.28

Barcelona’s ‘“‘witches’ auto” of 1549 proved a fiasco on both sides. For Sarmiento, it had drawn unusually large crowds and momentarily boosted the popularity of the Holy Office in Catalonia; but interference from the Suprema prevented him from making witchcraft into a profitable business for an impover- '

ished tribunal. For Inquisitor-General Valdés, the incident demonstrated that the 1526 guidelines could not prevent a determined local tribunal from executing witches or from confiscating their property, and that Inquisitors in the more remote corners of the Crown of Aragon could evade his orders with virtual impunity. As Barcelona’s prosecutor noted, the Inquisition’s official policies clearly affirmed the reality of witchcraft, including the reality of the witches’ flights to Sabbats. It was inconsistent for the Suprema to confiscate the property of a repentant converso or Protestant, but not the property of a penitent witch. Legal and logical loopholes remained for capital prosecution; two generations later, Barcelona’s actions in 1548-49 provided vital precedents during a more famous cluster of inquisitorial witch-trials.

THE FORGOTTEN OFFENSE (1550-1600) After the Barcelona executions of 1549, witchcraft faded into the background of the Inquisition’s concerns. From 1550 until 1600, precisely during the heart of

the Aragonese preponderance within the general history of the Inquisition, witchcraft became the forgotten offense among the tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat. After 1550 witchcraft appeared very sporadically, usually in the context of affirming the Inquisition’s partial jurisdiction over this “mixed” crime

with secular courts. No orders from the Suprema directly discouraged local | tribunals from prosecuting witches, but very few actual cases dot the records of the Aragonese Secretariat during this period. Nowhere was the status of witchcraft as the forgotten crime clearer than in

the Kingdom of Aragon. Here, where the Inquisition had first prosecuted - witches and where it had executed the most witches before 15,40, only one witch appeared among more than 2,000 prisoners exhibited at Saragossa’s public autos

between 1550 and 1600, when this was by far the most active branch of the entire Spanish system. Serious cases of any kind of illicit magic appearing in these autos could be counted on one’s fingers: a man went to the galleys in 1568 for teaching “many superstitions and spells” (another necromancer from Valencia escaped the galleys only because he was too old and unfit); a soothsayer was whipped in 1574; a magician was sent to the galleys in 1596, while his younger

brother was banished; a teenaged widow and her servant were publicly 28 Inq., Libro 323, fols. 26—-26v, 41; Libro 736, fols. 83~84v; Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, MS. 2.440, fols. 93-96.

267 ,

“Mixed crimes’’ in Aragon whipped and banished in 1586 for practicing love magic worthy of La Celestina, which they claimed to have learned from an Italian woman in Barcelona (one of

their cronies survived torture and avoided the auto). But only one woman charged with maleficient witchcraft or brujeria appeared at a public auto in Saragossa between 1550 and 1600: a thirty-year-old woman who “who had killed many animals and people” during her ten years as a witch was sentenced to abjure de levi, whipped, and banished for four years in 1581.2? Barcelona, whose fingers had been burned in 1550, arrested a few witches in

1574, in and near the valley of Andorra (where they were unable to arrest Protestant officials for heresy, but needed to make some show of activity). After

the Suprema rejected their request to confiscate witches’ property in August 1576, three suspects were released; a fourth witch (who had the bad luck to be born in France) appeared at the 1577 auto and was sentenced to a year’s unpaid labor in Barcelona’s municipal hospital.7°

Only the Inquisition of Navarre remained sporadically concerned with hunting witches after 1550, engaging in serious episodes of this type at irregular intervals. In October 1555 the Suprema inspected five confessions from Guipuzcoa and ordered all five witches released, regardless of whether or not they

could post bail, explaining that the Inquisition should not return accused witches to secular justice after sentencing them. When a cleric in the Navarrese mountains was charged with witchcraft in 1569, he was tried by the Bishop of Pamplona, not by the Inquisition; the village prosecutor vainly tried to get the Holy Office to try a few of the women whom he accused.?! A far more important outbreak of witch-hunting affected several Navarrese districts in 1575 and gave much more work to the Inquisition. A rural priest

denounced three witches to the secular authorities; all three were tortured, condemned to death, and executed. These three in turn accused several others, one of whom appealed to the Inquisition in order to avoid a sentence of torture. Thus began a major jurisdictional fight between Navarre’s Consejo Real and the Inquisition, until thirty witch-trials (including three men) were handed over to the latter in March 1576. Several more suspected witches followed them into the Inquisition’s grasp that summer; the Holy Office also undertook a long visita to the most afflicted places. The Logrofio tribunal subsequently noted that it | had received the confessions of fifty-one witches arrested by secular courts, inspected the testimony of 160 witnesses in witchcraft cases and had consumed 29 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 203-11 (#7 of 1574 auto), 258—62v (#12 of 1568 auto), 486 (#13 of 1581 auto); Libro 989, fols. 188—94v (#19 of 1585/6 despachadas), 204-33v (#7-8 of 1586 auto), 727-30 (#85-86 of 1596 auto). In 1591, the Archbishop’s court in Saragossa held an elaborate witchcraft investigation without informing the Inquisition: see Maria Tausiet, Un proceso de brujeria abierto en 1591 por el Arzobispo de Zaragoza (Saragossa, 1988).

30 See above, pp. 120-21; Inq., Libro 327, fol. 44. : 31 Ing., Libro 323, fols. 222-22v, 226-27; Lea, Iv, pp. 221-22; Idoate, Brujeria en Navarra, PP. 74-77; 79-83, 299-300.

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more than 1,500 sheets of paper on this business. Their official annual report for 1576 included forty-five suspected witches, seven of them men, released on bond. After all this activity, only three witches appeared at an auto de fe in November 1577, to be publicly whipped and banished from Navarre. During 1577, five other women had died while under the Inquisition’s custody; thirtyseven more women were absolved of heresy and released.>?

The alcaldes of the Corte Mayor of Navarre protested the Inquisition’s behaviour to the king. Three Navarre judges explained that the Inquisition should not have cognizance of such cases after the royal courts had convicted many witches of murder, because “the Inquisitors were outside the kingdom, and the delinquents all inside it; they are numerous, and speak no Romance, but only a very strong vascongada different from ordinary Basque.” Since the Holy Office could not possibly proceed with appropriate speed, the king’s officials would waste much money and time. Worse yet, the a/caldes pointed out that any

inquisitorial sentence that failed to hand a convicted witch back to secular justice “impedes the execution of any death penalty the alcaldes pronounce” for such things as proven homicides.33 But Navarre’s appellate court was unable to persuade Philip II to let them hang their witches, either before or after the Holy Office got its hands on them. On this occasion, the Spanish Inquisition probably saved the lives of at least forty women.

Twenty years later, more Navarre witches were discovered in the Val de Araiz, arrested, and handed over to Navarre’s Real Corte. But this time the Inquisition declined to intervene. The Logrofio tribunal wrote to the Suprema that, despite their letters of 1538 and 1575-76, “so far we have proceeded very

carefully in this business,” because, they claimed, “this witch business has ordinarily given the Inquisition much work, expense, and bother, but little benefit comes from it, as experience has shown.” They offered to take two cases; but the Suprema, under a different Inquisitor-General, told them that they need not intervene, and the Navarre judges received the news with evident relief.34

From 1550 to 1600, the Inquisition — except for the Navarrese tribunal’s ninety cases in 1575-77 — intervened only sporadically in witchcraft trials across

Pyrenean Spain. Exactly five brujas appeared in public autos of these three tribunals during their most active phase. But around 1605 witches began to 32 Ing., Libro 833, fols. 168v, 169-95v (#31-33 of 1577 auto), 206v-10 (#18-63 of 1577 despachadas), 290-310 (#24-68 of 1576 despachadas); Idoate, Brujeria en Navarra, pp. 89-103; Ing., Libro 326, fols. 2ggv-300, 31 1v-12; Libro 327, fols. 1, 4v, 7, 19v, 20v, 24Vv, 34V-36v, 47V, 50v—51, 76v, 85v.

33 Archivo General de Simancas, Patronato Real, Legajo 28, #65—66 (November 22, 1575). Foran overview, see Idoate, Brujeria en Navarra, pp. 103-30, 310-53 (documents). 34 Idoate, Brujeria en Navarra, pp. 131-45, 354-71 (quote, p. 357); Inq., Libro 329, fol. 398v. When the provincial assembly of Guipuzcoa complained of the abundance of witches in their land, they

appealed directly but unsuccessfully to the Logrofio Inquisition for assistance: Caro Baroja, Brujeria Vasca, p.70.

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appear once more in the annual trial summaries of northern tribunals. In 1604 “Ta Luca,” an old woman who had fled from Huesca in 1592 to avoid being hanged along with two other women who had accused her, abjured de vehementi

at Saragossa and was banished for ten years. In 1609 another old woman - appeared in a Saragossa auto, charged with treasure-hunting and “binding” married couples to prevent them from having sexual relations; she was also reputed a bruja with a diabolical pact. She got a whipping and four years’ banishment, although the Suprema warned Saragossa that they had exceeded customary limits in torturing such a suspect. In 1607 Barcelona’s official council notary described with obvious fascination the deeds of another bruixa from Rossellén, who was also whipped and condemned to serve in the municipal hospital after a one-person autillo.>> Interest in witchcraft cases had revived a bit. THE TRAGEDY OF LOGRONO

Just as the Moriscos were being expelled, the most famous witchcraft episode in the history of the Spanish Inquisition unfolded in Navarre. The greatest riddle surrounding the Zugurramurdi witches of 1609 is to explain their execution at Logrofio’s memorable auto of 1610. Given its previous attitude towards witchcraft, why did the Suprema permit the killing of six witches in person and five

more in effigy, with maximum publicity (they even tried to get the king to attend)? Unlike the situation in Barcelona in 1549, when a lone Inquisitor could defy the obvious intentions of the Suprema and order witches to be executed on his own authority, by 1610 no provincial tribunal dared to execute anyone for any reason without Madrid’s explicit approval. We must briefly re-examine this famous episode one more time, concentrating less on the events in Navarre than

| on the Suprema’s role in this sorry business. What explains their momentary plunge into witch-burning which repudiated the durable legacy of InquisitorGeneral Valdés? How could such a rule-conscious bureaucracy ignore its own precedents? One tantalizing clue only deepens the mystery of the Suprema’s encouragement of the Navarrese witch-hunters in 1609-10. A brief letter in February 1608 ordered an overzealous comisario in Bilbao to release seventy-six copies of the newly-reprinted Malleus Maleficarum, the most famous handbook of witchhunting, which he had confiscated; they belonged to a Madrid bookseller named Francisco de Robles, who may well have sold a few copies to inquisitorial policy-makers later that year. The Suprema had warned the Navarre Inquisitors 35 Ingq., Libro 990, fol. 309—o9v (#51 of 1604 auto); Libro gg, fol. 135 (#84 of 1609 auto); Dietari, Vill, pp. 281-82, 375-76; Ingq., Libro 732, fols. 341v—43, (relacién of Margarita Denissa, who had

killed six pigs in one night, and confessed under torture that she concocted her unguents from snakes and salamanders). Four more witches from the Pyrenean districts were banished at Barcelona in 1608: ibid., fols. 22-46 (#27-30, 38 of despachadas).

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about the Malleus Maleficarum seventy years previously: do not believe every- _ thing in it, they had said, “even if he [the authors] writes about it as something he himself has seen and investigated, for the cases are of such a nature that he may have been mistaken, as others have been.”’36 Moreover, given the Inquisition’s inordinate suspicion of everything coming from France, it is hard to see why the Suprema should have been impressed by

the noisy witch-hunt staged in the Pays de Labourd, the Basque-speaking French territories immediately north of Navarre and Guipuzcoa, during the summer of 1609. It was true that some suspected witches had fled for safety into

Spanish territory, but that was none of their concern. As Bishop Venegas of

Pamplona (a former Inquisitor in Granada and onetime member of the _ Suprema) told them in March 1611, the whole business began when a French nobleman seized certain old women on his own authority and extorted confessions from them, implicating his personal enemies as witches. This seigneur had persuaded the Parlement of Bordeaux to send a judge (Pierre De Lancre, who later described the whole affair in a demonology) to sentence these and other witches in Labourd; about eighty people were killed. However, added Bishop Venegas, “‘it seemed that the judge who was holding the said witch trials was condemning them without due process of law,” so the Parlement suspended the judge’s commission and ordered him home.*’ Such things and even worse had happened in France. However, the French seigneur’s witch-hunts had led to four arrests in the border settlement of Zugurramurdi by February 1609; long before the Parlement of Bordeaux intervened, the Suprema received the confessions of all four women. At a moment when it was preoccupied by the impending expulsion of the Moriscos from the Crown of Aragon, the Suprema told Navarre in March 1609 to arrest the other witches who were most heavily charged. They enclosed

a set of guidelines, reminded the Navarre tribunal that witches’ properties should not be sequestered, referred to the ancient rules of 1526, and told them to check their records of other witchcraft cases since then. A few weeks later, the

Suprema also requested the Barcelona tribunal to send them its preserved regulations governing witchcraft trials.>® In about six weeks a cluster of regulations concerning witch-trials arrived in

Madrid from Barcelona. They included undated copies of two old Navarre guidelines, two other old questionnaires addressed to them, and only one

document with a specific date: Inquisitor Sarmiento’s consulta of June 20, 1548, which ringingly affirmed the reality of witches’ maleficia and Sabbats, and 36 Inq., Libro 332, fol. 150v; compare Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (Reno, 1980), p. 347, where Inquisitor Salazar quoted a letter from the

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Suprema to the Navarre tribunal in November 1538, whose original is in Ing., Libro 322, fols.

37 oad b Henningsen, Zhe Witches’ Advocate, pp. 130-31, 25. 38 Inq., Libro 332, fols. 230, 23 1v-32, 234.

“Mixed crimes”’ in Aragon

called for their extermination by the Inquisition. The most recent document was a ruling of 1550 ordering that any vote to execute a witch must be sent to the Suprema. Two months later the Logrono tribunal forwarded six old witch-trials and a cluster of ancient memoranda.?? The Suprema had armed itself with an oddly matched set of precedents; on the one side, Valdés’ repeated preachments

of caution and more caution; on the other, Sarmiento’s loud blast on the trumpet of persecution, plus a handful of detailed confessions by authentic witches. This time, sixty years after their original confrontation, Sarmiento scored a posthumous triumph over Valdés. In late July 1609, while De Lancre was executing dozens of witches on the French side of the border, the Suprema ordered its second-ranking Logrono Inquisitor to visit the afflicted areas of Navarre, repeating its previous instructions about how to proceed against accused witches. They added more emphasis on seeking out the “instruments which they use, such as powders, unguents, or

toads ... and after they are found, let them be examined by physicians and , apothecaries to declare how they are made.” In conclusion, they exhorted him to verify such things carefully, “because the principal judgement about such matters consists in the proof and verification which is made of these deeds [e.g., killing babies, digging up unbaptized infants and eating them] and of visible and permanent things [e.g. powders, unguents and toads].”’*° The Navarre Inquisitor, /icenctado Valle, seems to have ignored the letter and much of the spirit of these instructions, but nothing was done to curb him. Over the crucial span between autumn 1609 and autumn 1610, the Suprema did very little about Navarre’s witch-hunt. They were understandably preoccupied with

various issues resulting from the expulsion of the Moriscos, including its financial consequences on two other tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat. For

many months they heard nothing about the witches of Navarre, except an occasional plea for financial assistance. The Suprema also received some brazen

misinformation from Navarre’s inquisitorial prosecutor, who sent them a memorandum after the trials had been concluded in 1610, arguing that all of the

accused witches should be executed and their property confiscated. A large number of witches had been burned in 1508 and 1509, he said, “with far less evidence than we have now”; both the prosecutor and the Suprema overlooked the fact that Navarre had no Inquisition in 1508 and 1509. Logrofio sent the records of thirty-one completed witch-trials to the Suprema in July 1610. They were returned in early September, with nearly all the original sentences approved. Of the thirteen people condemned to death by the Navarre

Inquisition (including five who had already died in prison), only two were reprieved by Madrid: both were priests. The Logrofio prosecutor, in his long memorandum, pointed out that the French witch-hunters had not hesitated to 39 Ingq., Libro 741, fols. 293-300; Libro 332, fol. 250. 40 See Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, pp. 166-70, for the basic narrative. |

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execute a couple of Basque priests, and thought the Spaniards needed to be equally severe in order not to lose public respect. He was overruled. The Suprema temporized on the prosecutor’s request to confiscate the property of convicted witches, passing the request along to the king. But they easily agreed to his most important demand, the burning of six negative witches who had refused to confess their guilt, thus apparently contradicting their own 1526 rules about negattvos.

After the notorious Logrofio auto of November 1610, the Suprema reverted to ancient precedents and tried to combat witchcraft through energetic preaching in the mountains of Navarre — organized by outside groups, not by the Logrono Inquisition. Goaded by the departing Bishop of Pamplona (a former member of the Suprema), they decreed an Edict of Grace for witches by the summer of 1611 and sent out the youngest and most skeptical Navarre Inquisitor, Salazar y Frias, to proclaim it. Whether by accident or design, the Suprema’s actions effectively froze further prosecution of witches during the next two years, despite the continuing enthusiasm of the two senior Logrofio Inquisitors. Only after the total deadlock between them and their junior colleague threat-

-ened to paralyze all the workings of this tribunal did the Suprema again intervene decisively in 1614.

On this occasion, the Suprema took the unprecedented step of summoning two convicted Basque witches to Madrid “‘with much secrecy” as live exhibits, “in order better to resolve the doubts that have arisen on these matters.” Only one of them actually arrived in Madrid a month later, and we do not know what

the Suprema learned from him. But a few months later they gave fresh instructions to Inquisitor Salazar, which effectively ended any further attempts by the Logrofio tribunal to prosecute people for witchcraft.*! A month later, in answer to its specific request, the Suprema received a very pessimistic report from Logrofio’s treasurer on the expenses entailed by the major witch-trials in 1609-11. Despite the royal award of confiscations, they had spent about 40,000 reales on feeding prisoners, visiting the afflicted regions, and holding the auto, but had received barely 14,000 reales from all sources. In

only three of seventy-seven cases did they receive more from a prisoner in confiscations than they spent on her or his upkeep; over half of these prisoners

had paid absolutely nothing.*2 At a time when the Suprema was gloomily pondering how the tribunals of Valencia and Saragossa might best be compensated for the loss of their annual protection money from Moriscos, this bookkeeping exercise demonstrated how ruinous witch-hunting could be. 41 Ing., Libro 334, fols. r20v, 59v, 188-89, 198; see also Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, pp. 358, 362-64. 42 Inq., Libro 832, fols. 159-62 (“Gastos de Brujas,” dated September 27, 1614 by Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, p.381); Inq., Libro 334, fols. 270v-71, shows the Suprema urging Logrojio to collect more money from the monastery of Urdax, whose abbot had become a comisario during the witch-hunt.

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“Mixed crimes” in Aragon THE AFTERMATH OF 1610 The excitement caused by the Logrofio auto of 1610 took nearly a decade to die down. The comisario at Bilbao, the same man who had tried to impound copies of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1608, reported in October 1615 that Vizcayan authorities were busily arresting witch-suspects; he was blandly told to follow

the 1614 instructions. Eventually, these Bilbao witch-trials were appealed to Madrid, where the Suprema wrested jurisdiction from the Council of Castile in November 1616, and began revising the sentences. Alarmed, the Vizcayans sent an embassy to court, pleading for some remedy against the bruxas who infested

their land; they were merely referred to the Suprema, who gave them a discouraging answer. Inquisitor Salazar made a special trip to Bilbao in 1617 to dissolve this panic, and reported that he had absolved a total of 289 witches who

had been put on trial by Basque authorities. Meanwhile, in the town of Pancorvo, in the diocese of Burgos but part of the Logrofio district, eight witches were burned by secular authorities in 1621.* After 1610, the worst witch-panic in northern Spain broke out in Catalonia, but the Holy Office had virtually no involvement with it. By the time King Philip urged Catalonia’s Viceroy to decree a general pardon in late 1620, nearly 100

people had been hanged as witches and probably another 100 had been arrested. A wandering witch-finder named Tarragé was hired by some important Catalan towns in 1618, starting a snowball that produced other witchfinders. One of them, a Frenchman who had provoked about forty trials and twenty executions in Rosselldén, was eventually arrested by the Inquisition. This was a grassroots movement, where some rural communities stood bond collectively in order to withstand the “excessive expense” which was “necessary in order to expel such an evil root,” and where some key suspects were gavatxos born in France.*4

After the French witch-finder had been sent to the galleys, an undated memorandum from the Barcelona Inquisition proposed that they obtain some kind of concordia between themselves and royal judges on witchcraft cases,

similar to the jurisdictional agreement operating in Catalonia on another “mixed” crime, sodomy: royal judges could investigate the murdered children 43 Inq., Libro 335, fols. 46v, 49v, 123v, 134-35, 148v-49; Libro 822, fols. 14, 15v. See also Henningsen, 7he Witches’ Advocate, pp. 387-88. A Guipuzcoa priest who complained in 1619 about “damages caused by witches” petitioned to be named a comisario in January 1620, but was refused by the Suprema: Ing., Libro 822, fol. 31. However, he eventually received this honor on

March 29, 1628 — about the time Inquisitor Salazar, the great skeptic of Logrojio, was finally promoted to the Suprema; ibid., fol. 280v, and Henningsen, 7he Witches’ Advocate, p. 386. 44 The best source on this panic is Antoni Pladevall i Font, Persecucié de bruixes a les comarques de Vic

a principio del segle XVII (Barcelona, 1974); see esp. pp. 33~35 (quote), or 73 on the French-born

| “old monk of Rupt,” Joan Boherts, who also figures prominently in N. del Molar, ed., Procés d'un _ bruixot (Olot, 1968), pp. 62, 65, 67. Some key documents quoted by Joan Regla, Els Virreis de Catalunya (Barcelona, 1956), pp. 81-82.

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and other malefica, while the Inquisitors would investigate the Sabbats and diabolical pacts. Nothing came of this suggestion, although in April 1621 the Suprema told Barcelona of the Viceroy’s complaint about “apparent excesses in the punishment of witches” and ordered them to visit the most afflicted areas.

But witches continued to die in Catalonia, whether hanged by municipal | authorities in 1628, or murdered by order of a famous bandit in 1624 for killing a dozen of his pigs. As far south as Uldecona, on the border between Catalonia and Valencia, five bruxes were killed in 1627.*

In the Kingdom of of Aragon, where the Inquisition had first pursued witches, no major panics erupted during the seventeenth century. The Holy Office of Saragossa occasionally confronted accused witches, but only once, in 1626-27, did the Suprema become involved in supervising their witch-trials. On this occasion, two widows from a village where seven witches had recently

been hanged appealed to the Inquisition after they had been condemned to death. After obtaining jurisdiction, the Holy Office sentenced both of them to short-term confinements in their House of Penitents. Another widow, arrested with them and also condemned to death, was imprisoned for two years; a fourth widow died in Saragossa’s hospital in December 1627, having been condemned

to further torture by the Inquisition after nine previous torture sessions from secular judges.*¢

Other witchcraft .episodes in upper Aragon reached the Inquisitors only occasionally, although the extant Holy Office cases reveal that many witches were hanged by Aragonese secular courts in rural areas between 1600 and 1650. A local witch-finder from Saragossa, who had caused the arrest of five witches and executions of four at rural Bielsa, voluntarily confessed that he had done it for money, and was absolved in 1622; other witch-finders, arrested in 1636 and 1657, fared no worse than he.*’ After the exploits of Dr. Salazar, the ‘witches’

advocate,” the Spanish Inquisition no longer persecuted witches itself. However, it did little to prevent witch-hunting in the Crown of Aragon. This story closes not on a high note of inquisitorial “enlightenment” towards witches

after 1614, but on a return to the inactivity and non-intervention that had characterized its record throughout northern Spain since 1550. 45 Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Ms. 2.440, fols. 85-88; Pladevall, Persecucié de bruixes, pp. 31, 54; Vicente Castafieda Alcover, ed., Coses evengudes en la ctvtat y regne de Valencia. Diario de Mosén Juan Porcar, capellan de San Martin (1589-1629), 2 vols. (Madrid, 1934), I, p. 244 (#3100). See also Inq., Libro 340, fols. 19-20, on the Inquisition’s intervention in April 1621. 46 Ingq., Libro 347, fols. 102, 116v, 123v-24; Libro gg1, fols. 886—go1v (#9g—-10 of 1626 despachadas); Inq., Legajo 4972, exp. § (#12-15 of 1627 despachadas).

47 See Angel Gari Lacruz, “Variedad de competencia en el delito de brujeria en Aragén (16001650),” in J.Pérez Villanueva, ed., La Inquisicién Espanola: Nueva vision, nuevos horizontes (Madrid, 1980), pp. 319-28, for an overview. See also Inq., Libro gg1, fols. 574-75v (#10 of 1622 despachadas); also Libro 995, fol. 632v (#14 of 1657 despachadas, a Béarnese); and Libro 992, fols. 251ff (#15 of 1636 despachadas), for other witch-finders. See Inq., Libro 996, fols. 106ff, 113ff (#19, 21 of 1658 despachadas), for accused witches who refused to confess and were whipped. In most cases, the charges of brujeria were simply dropped.

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13

| Sodomy: the fateful accident Sin duda el pecado-delito que ... quizd en general, mas horrorizaba y escandalizaba, sobre todo durante los siglos XVI y XVII, era el de sodomia ... Se le llamaba comunmente el “pecado nefando” o simplemente “el pecado,”’ como si se tratase del pecado por antonomasia. Tomas y Valiente, Derecho penal, pp. 226-27

De este nefando delito, indigno de nombrar, destruidor del orden natural, castigado por el juicio divino, por el cual la nobleza se pierde, el corazén se acobarda y se engendra poca firmeza en la fé ... y nace del mucho denuesto y oprobrio a las gentes y tierra donde se consiente. Fray Pedro de Leén, SJ (quoted by Herrera Puga, Sociedad y

, delincencia, p. 262). :

Aunque sabia que es gran pecado, no sabia que esto fuese del conocimiento del Santo Officio. Forty-seven-year-old Catalan defendant in Aragon, 1630 (Inq., Libro 992, fol. 71Vv).

In January 1524, the Suprema received a petition from a prominent citizen of Saragossa, Don Sancho de la Caballeria, alleging that the Fiscal or prosecutor of

, the Aragonese Inquisition had formally charged him with the “unspeakable sin of sodomy” through the machinations of his personal enemies. Don Sancho complained that his arrest was patently illegal, “this charge not belonging to your jurisdiction, and such crimes never having been tried by you nor other Inquisitors.” The Suprema ordered the Saragossa tribunal to send the trial records to them and do nothing until further notice, but not to release Don Sancho.! Thus began a chain of events which led to the strangest chapter in the history of the Spanish Inquisition: its acquisition of jurisdiction over the “crime against nature,” its punishments of homosexuals and related offenders, in the Crown of Aragon (but never in Castile).

Who was Don Sancho de la Caballeria, and why was the Holy Office of Saragossa so eager to catch him that they had arrested him on a charge over which they had no jurisdiction? According to the Libro Verde, Don Sancho was

the grandson of a converted Jew named Boniface and the eldest son of King ! Inq., Libro 319, fol. 58v.

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| Sodomy: the fateful accident Ferdinand’s Vice-Chancellor for the Kingdom of Aragon. The Libro Verde could find no heresy convictions against his direct ancestors, but also noted that Don Sancho was “‘very well known in this kingdom and beyond for his works and his speeches.” More specifically, an Aragonese chronicler noted that Don Sancho de la Caballeria had been chosen from among the kingdom’s deputies as

their ambassador to the king to protest the Inquisition’s arrest of Aragon’s official parliamentary notary in 1518.7 A prominent converso and an outspoken

enemy of the Inquisition, Don Sancho was apparently as orthodox as his Old-Christian mother; the Saragossa tribunal, who had been trying to lay hands

on him for over five years, finally saw their opportunity when they found witnesses who accused him of homosexuality.

After January 1524 a complicated legal ballet ensued, with the Saragossa Inquisitors seeking support from the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, Don Sancho relying on the Archbishop of Saragossa, and finally both appealing to

the Pope. As usual, the Suprema supported a local tribunal’s claims, and immediately extorted from the ever-pliant Renaissance Papacy a remarkable breve which granted the Holy Office jurisdiction over the crime of sodomy throughout the Crown of Aragon. “Since the world is running continually towards the worse,” said Clement VII’s hunting license, “the horrible and detestable crime of sodomy has begun to spread — 0 dolor! — among some sons of infidelity.”” He empowered them to uproot this crime among laymen and clerics

alike, but required them to try such cases according to secular laws and municipal statutes, rather than following ordinary inquisitorial practice. In order to revenge themselves on this converso troublemaker, the Saragossa tribunal had inadvertently opened a veritable Pandora’s box of legal problems which would

soon reach beyond the boundaries of their district. But at first they held the initiative, especially after the Fiscal who had charged Don Sancho was elected one of Aragon’s official parliamentary deputies in June 1524.° Their prosecution of Don Sancho creaked slowly along. By October 1524 the Suprema ordered that both Inquisitors must judge the case together. In January

1525, after one of them had died, Don Sancho sent another petition to the Suprema, complaining of injustices resulting from their methods. Saragossa was warned to administer justice “according to the breve of His Majesty,” a genuine bureaucratic felix culpa which the scribe soon replaced by “His Holiness.” They also specified that he be segregated from other prisoners who were being held 2 Libro Verde de Aragon, ed. Isidro de la Cagigas (Madrid, 1929), pp. 32-33; on Don Sancho’s 1518

embassy to Barcelona, which followed immediately on a term as Diputado, see Bartolome Leonardo de Argensola, Primera parte de los Anales de Aragon, que prosigue los del Secretario Geronimo

Curita, desde el aio MDXVI ... (Saragossa, 1630), Bk. 1, ch. 72 (pp. 659-68). 3 The breve itself is in Ing., Legajo 502 (2); see the hilarious commentary on it in Rafael Carrasco, Inquisicion y represion sexual en Valencia (Barcelona, 1986), p. 58. See Inq., Libro 319, fol. ggv, for

the election of Saragossa’s Fiscal as a Diputado and his temporary replacement by his son.

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“Mixed crimes” in Aragon

on heresy charges, and promised that a copy of the Roman bull would arrive shortly. They warned Saragossa, not for the last time, that “although you may try Don Sancho and others of this type, you must not forget about crimes of heresy and apostasy, since this is the main business of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.” A month later, they again upbraided Saragossa for proclaiming edicts and ordering sermons preached about sodomy. By May 1525, when Saragossa requested more advice on how to conduct Don Sancho’s trial, the Suprema responded with visible irritation that he was being tried under the laws of Aragon, which the locals understood far better than they.*

As his case dragged on, Don Sancho appealed to Saragossa’s archbishop, with some success. More maneuvering by both sides led to a compromise in 1526 to have him released from the Aljaferia to the prison of the Abbot of Santa

Fe, who was to try the case by joint commission from the Suprema and the archbishop. In August 1527, over thirty months after Don Sancho’s original . arrest, the Suprema congratulated the Saragossa tribunal on having concluded his trial, although the whole business was not yet ended. In 1529 Don Sancho’s friends among the Aragonese nobility apparently inquired about his case; the Aragonese Inquisitors were unhappy with the interference from other courts, and claimed his sentence was excessively lenient. Both sides ultimately appealed to the Pope, who in the summer of 1530 confirmed the Inquisition’s jurisdiction against the archbishop at the persuasion of the Suprema’s agent in Rome. Only with Don Sancho’s death in April 1531 did the conflict end, with the Saragossa Inquisitors upholding their jurisdictional claims, despite the Suprema’s obvious lack of enthusiasm for the whole project.° A fateful step had been taken, more or less by accident, and its consequences

had spread beyond the Kingdom of Aragon. In September 1531, during a serious outbreak of the plague, the Barcelona Inquisition held an auto de fe at | which several men were sentenced for sodomy under the newly confirmed 1524 breve. The Suprema had advised them that such men should not be put into an auto with ordinary heretics, and ordered them to cooperate with the Audiencia

judges “who wished to see the trials of those whom you [Barcelona’s Holy Office] say should be relaxed for this unspeakable crime.” In this way, they said, you will fulfill the Pope’s orders “‘and thus the Holy Office will avoid loss of

reputation, since this is not a business which concerns you.” Eager to extend their competence and draw larger crowds to the auto, the Barcelona Inquisition plunged ahead, avoiding conflict with the Audiencia by executing only effigies of

absentees. The most prominent defendant, Joan Miro of Girona, had fled to

278 |

4 Ing., Libro 319, fols. 134, 1g0v, 152v-53 (quote, p. 153), 159-60 (quote, p. 160), 168v, 185v. > Inq., Libro 319, fols. 22g—29v (which is mostly one long complaint that the Saragossa tribunal is neglecting its causas de fe “para atender a un proceso de sodomia’’), 260v, 262, 283-84, 333V—34, 424~24v; Libro 320, fols. 143-44, 211, 311V-13, 343, 40IV.

Sodomy: the fateful accident Rome, where the Suprema effectively blocked his pardon in the spring of 1532: a second test case again upheld the fateful precedent of 1524.° PROCEDURAL MATTERS

With the grudging acquiescience of the Suprema, the most fateful accident in the internal history of the Spanish [Inquisition had become an accomplished fact by the 1530s. Acquiring jurisdiction over the “unspeakable sin” produced at least two remarkable aberrations within the operations of the Holy Office. First, it destroyed geographical unity of operation throughout Spain, since jurisdiction over sodomy was upheld only in the Crown of Aragon (but not in all parts of the Crown of Aragon, only those on mainland Spain); in the Crown of Castile, the Inquisition had refused to claim jurisdiction over this offense in 1509 and never

changed its mind. There was at least one other juridical sphere, namely witchcraft (in the sense of brujeria rather than hechiceria), where the Inquisition’s

activity was confined to some tribunals within the Aragonese Secretariat, but this restriction had cultural rather than political causes: genuine brujas were rarely found south of the Pyrenean districts, except perhaps in the mountains of Sardinia. “Sodomy” provides the only instance where an important offense (which accounted for at least 10% of the Inquisition’s prisoners wherever it claimed jurisdiction) was treated totally differently in Aragon and in Castile.

Moreover, the numerous trials for “sodomy” destroyed the well-known procedural. uniformity of the Spanish Inquisition. Because the Papal license of

1524 required them to judge such cases according to local secular laws, Inquisitors reversed several of their ordinary procedures when confronted by sodomy defendants. Their famous custom of protecting informers by preventing defendants from learning who had accused them disappeared in sodomy cases.

Not only did most such defendants learn at their first interrogation who had accused them, but they were often physically confronted with their accusers and

given ample opportunity to cross-examine them. Moreover, several of the Inquisition’s ordinary habits were preserved in sodomy trials; for example, torture was frequently employed, and all defendants were automatically given a court-appointed lawyer. Nevertheless, from a lawyer’s point of view the sodomy trials in the Crown of Aragon constitute the strangest aspect of the Holy Office’s operations. At the same time they provide our fairest opportunity to compare the severity of inquisitorial justice with Spanish secular justice, in a situation where different courts were trying the same crime and using the same procedures.

By the time Pope Clement VII granted this jurisdiction to the Aragonese 6 Ing., Libro 320, fols. 426-28; Manual de Novells Ardits: Vulgrament Apel.lat Dietari del Antich Consell Barcelont (hereafter Dietari), 28 vols. (Barcelona, 1892—1975), Ul, p. 443. Shortly afterwards, the worried Suprema asked Barcelona about “the manner in which you proceed against the pecado nefando,” and ordered an immediate report: Inq., Libro 321, fol. 7. On Joan Miro, see ibid., fols. 36, 63.

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Inquisitions, Spanish law and practice concerning sodomy were both well developed. In 1495, a German traveler saw six Italians executed for this offense at Almeria, hanging upside down with their genitals around their necks; he later found two Castilians executed in the same manner at Madrid. An edict of the Catholic Kings in 1497 specified that convicted sodomites were to be burned at the stake, and all their property escheated to the crown. The prosecution did not need to prove a “completed and consummated act” in order to secure conviction, merely “acts which were very proximate and close to its conclusion.” In

1598, Philip II added that accusations by three adult witnesses (or four, including sexual partners) sufficed for conviction, if backed up by “presumptions which made such depositions plausible.” These laws remained on the statute books until the nineteenth century. Even noblemen could be (and were) tortured on such charges, if there was sufficient testimony against them.’ Moreover, legal precedents existed for executing sodomites in lands outside the Crown of Castile, where the 1497 edict had no force. In medieval Navarre, for example, a Moor and two Jews were killed for homosexual practices as early as 1290, and several ordinary Catholics were executed for similar reasons in the fourteenth century (one was described as “committing heresy with his body”). In the Crown of Aragon, one finds five men burned for sodomy by Barcelona’s municipal authorities during an attack of plague in 1476, followed by other cases in 1493 and 1501. In the city of Valencia, we know of eight executions for sodomy between 1446 and 1466; later, in 1519, a mob fanned by preachers compelled the authorities to execute six men for sodomy.® The Aragonese Inquisitors had to fight to get their jurisdiction accepted against such competing claims; but at least Spanish secular authorities, including those in the Crown of Aragon, offered them multiple precedents for executing convicted sodomites. Very slowly, the Inquisitions of Saragossa and Barcelona extended their

competence over sodomites. In 1534, the Suprema ordered Barcelona to prosecute a homosexual friar according to the ordinary rules for laymen, since

he had not been wearing clerical garb when arrested. A more important precedent was set in 1541, when the Saragossa tribunal condemned an unlucky rural priest, mosén Salvador Vidal, to be relaxed to the secular arm during an auto de fe as a sodomita calificada. The next known sodomite to be executed at a Saragossa auto, five years later, was a layman. By 1550 an Aragonese caballero, who had voluntarily confessed to the Inquisitors before being charged, was let 7 See J. Garcia Mercadal, ed., Viajes de extranjeros por Espana y Portugal (Madrid, 1962), I, pp. 350-51, 408 (Thomas Miinzer); and especially Francisco Tomas y Valiente, E/ Derecho penal de la Monarquia absoluta (Siglos XVI-XVII-XVIII) (Madrid, 1969), pp. 226-31, 284-85, 426-28, for the best introduction to Castilian legal theory and practice with respect to sodomy. 8 See Fernando Videgain Agos, Crénica negra medieval del reino de Navarra (Pamplona, 1982), p. 116; Esteve Gilabert Bruniquer, Rubriques de Bruniquer: Ceremonial dels Magnifichs Consellers y

Regiment de la Ciutat de Barcelona, 5 vols. (Barcelona, 1912-16), Il, pp. 43, 63-64; I, pp. 127-28; Dietari, m, p. 103; Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la Inquisicion espanola: El tribunal de Valencia, 1478-1530 (Barcelona, 1976), p. 211; Carrasco, Inquisicion y repression sexual en Valencia, p. 18.

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Sodomy: the fateful accident off with a sizable fine of 200 /ibras, despite the opinion of Saragossa’s official consultants that he should be banished. As Aragon’s Inquisitors noted to the Suprema “in these cases of sodomy we proceed with more freedom” than in heresy cases. At the same time, they exhibited two other homosexuals in a public auto and condemned both of them to serve five years in the galleys, while a year later they executed a Castilian soldier on this charge without waiting for a public auto. More executions followed; by 1558, on the eve of the Inquisition’s nation-

wide hunt for Lutherans, the Saragossa tribunal held an auto at which four sodomites (a Castilian jurist, two priests, and a French shepherd boy) were executed. Barcelona, meanwhile, executed no sodomites although one blacksheep cleric, accused of both necromancy and sodomy, escaped from the Inquisition’s prison and thus earned the dubious honor of being executed in effigy at their 1552 auto.’ While Saragossa led and Barcelona followed in prosecuting for the “unspeakable sin,” other tribunals in the Secretariat of Aragon tried to imitate them. In June 1547, a Navarrese Inquisitor wrote the Suprema from Bilbao that he had listened to several spontaneous confessions of the “unspeakable sin” during his recent visitation of the Basque country, but had not punished anyone because he lacked the authority to do so, “which certainly is very necessary.”” Next month he

returned to this theme, specifying that he had collected eighteen voluntary admissions of this sin and petitioning for inquisitorial jurisdiction like that in the Crown of Aragon, “‘so that such enormous crimes do not remain unpunished.” The Suprema, however, turned down Navarre’s request in April 1548 with curt orders to make no innovations.!° Meanwhile, the Valencia Inquisition, which already had authority to prosecute sodomites, did nothing. In March 1554 they wrote to the Suprema that “we have a breve to try sodomites and have been told that in Saragossa and Barcelona the Inquisitors use it; we enclose a copy and request your advice on what to do about it.”’ No evidence survives that they ever

did use it before 1572, whereas the Royal Audiencia continued to execute sodomites at Valencia.!! In the 1560s two further precedents were set at Saragossa. In May 1560 the

Aragonese tribunal informed the Suprema that they had encountered a novel problem with their sodomy jurisdiction. From an Aragonese town came a denunciation of Lesbian practices among several women, performed “without any instrument.” After several consultations with jurists and theologians, Saragossa’s 9 Inq., Libro 321, fols. 274—74v, 277v; Libro 988, fol. 49 (#57 of 1541 auto); Libro 961, fols. g-1iv (#14-15 of 1550 auto), 43 (probably referring to Miguel Cerdan, #36 of the 1549-50 despachadas), 211-14 (#100 of 1550-51 despachadas), 263v (#52-55 of 1558 auto); Libro 730, fol. 9 (#15 of 1552 Barcelona auto).

10 Inq., Libro 785 fols. 301, 247-48; Libro 322, fols. 25v, 35v. . 1! Inq., Libro g11, fol. 130. For sodomites executed by Valencia’s Audiencia after 1530, see Vicente Graullera Sanz, “El verdugo de Valencia en los siglos XVI y XVII,” in Estudios de Historia

de Valencia (Valencia, 1978), p. 210 (1543); Archivo del Reino de Valencia, Real 1324, fol. 7 (1553); Real 1325, fols. 45-46 (1555); Real 1330, fols. 161-64 (two cases in 1566).

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, “Mixed crimes” in Aragon Holy Office could not decide whether or not this offense was included under the

1524 Papal letter. By return mail the Suprema told them not to prosecute: lascivious behavior among women who used no artificial phallus did not constitute sodomy.'* Their second precedent was more sinister. By 1567, as can be seen from its report of its annual public auto de fe, the Aragonese tribunal had

added bestiality to its sodomy jurisdiction. Five of the six men who were sentenced to the galleys for the pecado nefando had been caught raping donkeys, and one of the two men executed had been convicted of three “consummated

acts of sodomy with an animal.” Four of the five were under the legal age of majority; two of these boys, plus the executed animal rapist, were immigrants from France.!? Both patterns, boys and Frenchmen, would recur frequently throughout the heyday of bestiality trials by the Saragossa Inquisition. By 1570, therefore, effective inquisitorial jurisdiction over the sin/crime of “sodomy” was still restricted to two tribunals, Saragossa and Barcelona. The abundant relaciones de causas from the 1560s show how the Holy Office was actually handling this offense. Barcelona, which still confined itself to cases of homosexuality, tried at least sixteen men during this decade, half of whom they freed for lack of proof. Only two foreigners, one from France and the other from

Ragusa, were condemned to the galleys; none of the Catalans whom they arrested on such charges was convicted. Saragossa was far more severe. Between May 1560 and June 1570, five men, including a Frenchman and a Castilian, were executed at autos de fe. Another dozen were condemned to the galleys, including five Frenchmen, a Castilian, and a Morisco, while two others (a local cleric and a Castilian) had public whippings. At private ceremonies, eight more men, including three Frenchmen and a Basque, were ordered to the galleys; another seventeen (almost half of them foreigners from outside Aragon) were whipped and/or banished; four more (including two clerics) were fined;

while only five men, all but one natives of Aragon, were freed after being arrested. Their most prominent prisoner was Don Juan de Granada y de la Cerda, a nobleman related through his mother to the Duke of Medinaceli, who had been accused by a servant of the Duke of Villahermosa. After his conviction in November 1569, the Aragonese tribunal asked the Suprema for a ruling; in January 1570, by their command, Don Juan was fined 100 ducats for blasphemies uttered in prison and ordered to serve the king perpetually without pay in the presidio of Oran.!* By May 1571 the Suprema was warning Saragossa “that in sodomy trials, the prisoners should not be promised mercy.” The Aljaferia was filling up with men

charged with the “unspeakable sin,” but mercy was neither promised nor | 12 Inq., Libro 962, fol. 8-8v; Libro 1234, fol. 454Vv.

13 Inq., Libro 988, fol. 126 (#3~-8 of 1567 auto). | 14 See Ing., Libro 962, fol. 330, and Libro 988, fols. 148—54v (#10 of 1569-70 despachadas) on Don Juan de Granada.

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Sodomy: the fateful accident delivered. At the 1572 auto a record of sorts was set with twelve executions for sodomy, nine of them being Aragonese peasants charged with raping mules or

donkeys, while the three men convicted of homosexual practices were all foreigners. The Holy Office experienced problems collecting enough wood to

burn everyone at once.!> | , :

From 1571 through 1579 the Saragossa Inquisition executed at least three

dozen men for sodomy, its highest total for a single decade and a single offense . since the heyday of converso repression after Arbués’ murder. The vast majority of death sentences handed down by the Aragonese Inquisition in the 1570s were for bestiality rather than homosexuality; few genuine heretics died at these autos. Although the Saragossa Inquisitors were reluctant to reduce the dignity of such spectacles by executing the “guilty” animals along with the men, the Suprema

| ordered in October 1573 that “the animal must die, as the [local] law requires.” Between bestiality and homosexuality, the Aragonese tribunal tried over 100 men on sodomy charges during the 1570s. Only three of them were Moriscos, although at least twenty were Frenchmen, six of whom died. Nine defendants were Castilians, five were Navarrese or Basques, and three others came from Italy. Nine of the fourteen men lucky enough to have the charges against them dropped were natives of Aragon. By 1579, when this particular drive seems to have passed its peak, the Suprema ordered the Aragonese tribunal not to clutter up its autos with sodomites unless they were to be executed.!©

| | EXPANDING HORIZONS While the Aragonese Inquisition was punishing sodomites in record quantities during 1572, the powerful secretary of the Council of Aragon, the Count of Chinchon, decided to arrest his former brother-in-law and executioner of his sister, the Count of Ribagorza, on charges of sodomy (which permitted him to torture a nobleman). Chinchén began with denunciations from a boastful picaro and male prostitute in Madrid, but soon sought additional evidence from the Saragossa Inquisition. In June 1572, the Count of Ribagorza fled to France before the Aragonese Inquisition could lay hands on him. Two of the possible witnesses against him, including a prominent Morisco from Torrellas, were soon captured by the Inquisitors. Ribagorza himself was subsequently captured in Italy and extradited to Castile, where he could be tried under more rigid rules than those employed by the Holy Office; he was ultimately executed in 1573.!7 15 Ing., Libro 1234, fol. 454v, on 1571 rulings; also Libro 988, fols. 177—84v on the auto of January 1572, where #35—45 were sent to the galleys and #46—57 were executed; and Libro 326, fols. 17, 21, on problems with finding wood. 16 See Inq., Libro 326, fol. 15 1v, for the Suprema’s orders to execute animals in Aragonese sodomy trials; Libro 1234, fol. 454v, on the 1579 ruling.

'7 Inq., Libro 962, fols. 548-49; Libro 326, fols. 65, 121v, 155v, on Ribagorza’s close friends. There is no worthwhile modern account of the trial and death of the Count of Ribagorza, which

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Repercussions from his prosecution quickly spread into all parts of the Secretariat of Aragon. Oddly enough, its direct impact was least at Saragossa; no associate of Ribagorza’s appears in their records between 1572 and 1574,

although they did arrest an Andalusian nobleman and a professor at the University of Saragossa. On the other hand, its consequences were direct and

momentous at Valencia. Ribagorza’s great friend at court, the Master of Montesa, was accused by the same male prostitute, whose denunciations were soon reinforced by a prominent Valencian nobleman, himself a former inquisitorial defendant on heresy charges. On the strength of these two accusations, and using the 1524 Papal letter, the Valencian Inquisition arrested a grandee as their first defendant on sodomy charges.!®

As they struggled to discover the proper way to conduct the Master of Montesa’s trial (and those of others denounced soon afterwards), the Valencian Inquisitors repeatedly turned to the Suprema for advice. The Suprema finally ordered them to get a complete copy of the Saragossa tribunal’s modo de proceder

together with its version of the Edict of Faith proclaimed annually in all parishes, which included sodomy among the crimes to be denounced to the Holy Office. By May 1573 the Suprema expressed its satisfaction that Valencia was copying Saragossa’s system of trying homosexuals, adding that they should

also copy Saragossa “against those who have committed [sodomy] with animals.” Denunciations and trials for bestiality accordingly followed. By January 1574, the Suprema ordered that a man from the district of Orihuela (which belonged to the Kingdom of Valencia but to the Inquisition of Murcia), accused of heterosexual sodomy by his wife, should be tried by Valencia’s Holy _ Office.!? Despite its late start, Valencia’s Inquisition was thus judging all forms of sodomy soon after Ribagorza’s execution. A quarter-century after failing to add sodomy to their dossier of offenses, the

Navarrese tribunal, now located in Logrofio, made a second attempt during 1573. In March they reported to the Suprema that their current visitation of Navarre had unearthed several instances of pecado nefando and crimen contra natura, mostly against clerics and thus beyond the reach of secular justice. The remains caught between Aragonese indignation and Castilian prudery, despite its importance for the political relations between Aragon and Castile under Philip II. 18 See Inq., Libro 988, fols. 220, 209 (#26 of 1572-74 despachadas), Dr. Domingo Pérez, who was ‘“atormentado gravamente” but refused to confess, escaping with banishment and a fine; and #47 of the 1574 auto, Don Luis de Guzman, who made a copious confession, but “de manera que se tuvo mucha duda si dezia verdad,” and was therefore given a public whipping and life in the galleys. See above, pp. 134-37, on the Master of Montesa’s trial. 19 Inq., Libro 326, fols. go, 108v, 167v. Valencia’s first defendants charged with bestiality appeared in the June 1574 auto: an African slave serving in Valencia was executed, while an Old-Christian peasant from the Aragonese town of Albarracin (which belonged to the Valencian Inquisition) got three years in the galleys plus 100 lashes (Inq., Libro 936, fols. 105—16v, #28, 54). In the August

1575 auto, the first defendant was a Morisca who had retracted her charges of heterosexual sodomy against her husband, from whom she wanted a separation; she got 100 lashes instead (ibid., fol. 119).

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Suprema curtly advised them that anyone who confessed voluntarily could receive his penance secretly from the Inquisitors, but “you presently have no jurisdiction to investigate this crime.”’ Nine months later, still trying to seize this

opportunity, the Logrofo tribunal became more specific. They informed the Suprema that a local comisario had arrested an “Italian” cleric after his ten-yearold companion complained that his employer had molested him. ‘The Suprema

commented that they were “much displeased” by the facts, but repeated that this tribunal lacked the right to try such cases. “As for the Italian cleric whom you are holding,” they added, “the prosecutor could pay attention to it in order , to demand a more serious penalty for the other charge; and as for the boy with whom he committed this unspeakable sin, release him at once.” The accused cleric, who was actually from Seville but had lived in Florence for a long time, duly appeared at the 1574 auto, where he received a five-year banishment and a secret whipping inside the Inquisition’s palace, after reading a sentence which never mentioned the one offense of which he was genuinely guilty.2° After this

second defeat, the Navarrese Inquisition abandoned all hope of sharing the

privileges of their eastern neighbors and. prosecuting large numbers of

sodomites.

At Barcelona, which had its own customs of prosecuting sodomites and its own problems with punishing them, the Inquisitors decided in November 1569 to observe the rules governing sodomy prosecutions more rigorously than heretofore, and finally began copying Aragon’s system of face-to-face confrontations between accuser and accused. But only in 1574 do we find the Catalan Inquisitors prepared to execute a baptized slave who had been caught trying to rape a boy while on a pilgimage to Montserrat and again in the Inquisiton’s prison. Because Catalonia was not Valencia, a jurisdictional deadlock prevented

the Barcelona tribunal from executing him, or anyone else, for sodomy. However, the Holy Office of Catalonia did extend its definition of “sodomy” later in this decade. By 1578 they had sentenced a Frenchman to life in the galleys for heterosexual sodomy on his Catalan wife, and by 1581 they had condemned two men to the galleys for bestiality.*! Beyond mainland Spain, other branches of the Aragonese Secretariat were also influenced by the Holy Office’s increasing interest in sodomy cases during the 1570s. The small and generally inactive tribunal for the Balearic Islands (whose preserved relaciones de causas begin only in 1579) held one of its rare autos

de fe in 1581. A local farmer, charged with a relatively minor set of “heretical propositions,” was condemned to the galleys for three years; the Inquisition’s

prosecutor, “in order to show his evil manner of life,” added that he had 20 Inq., Libro 787, fols. 283, 333v-34; Libro 326, fols. 100, 163-64; Libro 833, fols., 155—61 (#11 of 1574 auto). 21 Ingq., Libro 737, fols. 7-8; see above, pp. 111-13, on developments in the mid-1570s; see also Libro 730, fols. 305—14v (#5 of 1578 auto), 348-54 (#2—4 of 1581 despachadas).

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| confessed to committing sodomy with his own brother and with assorted animals. This method, which closely imitated the Navarrese precedent of 1574, initiated a series of cases across the following decades where, in their summaries, the Mallorcan tribunal reported confessions of sodomy (sometimes from men who were being tortured on other charges) in order to justify relatively severe sentences. One young Frenchman living in Mallorca was arrested for

telling a remarkably scabrous joke about Jesus surprising St. Peter in the act of fornicating with a donkey; he also admitted to practicing homosexuality. When

questioned about his intentions, in accord with the Inquisition’s invariable _ practice on “heretical propositions,” he naively answered that “he had heard the story about St. Peter and thought it was true, but he did not think that believing it was against the teachings of the Holy Roman Church.”22 After 1600 the Mallorcan tribunal rarely sought evidence of sodomy from its prisoners, although the problem of homosexuality occasionally surfaced in trials. In 1606 they sentenced a Dominican monk who had propositioned several boys in the confessional; the good friar disingenuously remarked that “he did not think this was any of the Inquisiton’s business, because the Edict of Faith spoke only about seducing women in the confessional.” In 1620 they arrested a local

: nobleman who talked about becoming a Moslem and reportedly claimed that homosexuality was not sinful. He admitted adopting a Turkish name while in secular jails, but denied the latter charge, explaining that “in Italy the pecado nefando was very common and ordinary, but he had not said that it was not sinful.’ (In corroboration of his point, the most recent Italian prisoner of this tribunal was also the last to confess voluntarily to homosexual practices, after being arrested on another charge). A few years later a Moslem freedman was arresting for mocking Catholics; what apparently happened was that “when a man was executed for having sex with a goat, he was extremely happy and satisfied ... because he had seen an Old Christian burned.”3 But in Mallorca the Inquisitors’ dealings with sodomy had definitively ended.

The Sardinian Inquisition also decided to involve itself in sodomy cases during the 1570s. One of their comisarios arrested a nobleman whom he had caught in flagrante sodomizing a Morisco slave. The Sassari tribunal decided that the legal proof was inadequate and also pointed out “that this Inquisition has no special breve to investigate this crime.” They therefore released the nobleman, but kept the slave imprisoned. “We began some interrogations, because of the ugliness of the crime and also for having dealings with Christians.”’ (Analogous logic was never applied to the nobleman.) Thereupon plague broke out in Sardinia; the nobleman died, and the slave fell sick but recovered. 22 L. Pérez, LI. Muntaner and M. Colom, eds., El Tribunal de la Inquisicién en Mallorca: Relacién de causas de fe 1578~1806, t (Palma de Mallorca, 1986), pp. 21, 68, 75, 86 (quote), 113, 158, 169.

23 [bid., pp. 269-72; Ing., Libro 861, fols. 83-83v (#1 of 1613 auto), 188—89v (#2 of 1621 despachadas), 23,7v (#4 of 1624 despachadas). |

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By this time the Suprema had warned Sardinia that, until they got Papal permission, such arrests were clearly illegal; so the slave was finally released. Two more men were arrested for sodomy by Sardinia’s Inquisition in 1582. Both were eventually released because the testimony against them was inadequate, but only after one prisoner had been tortured and the other, a Genoese, had been “detained for three years in a dungeon.”* Sardinia never copied the Navarrese and Mallorcan pattern of voluntary confessions which the prosecutor could use to demand a stiffer penalty on a heresy charge. In the largest and most important of the eastern Aragonese tribunals we find little inquisitorial preoccupation with the “‘unspeakable sin.”’ Only at the very end of Philip II’s reign do we find a Sicilian Concordat which attempted to move sodomy from secular to inquisitorial jurisdiction. However, pressure from the Viceroy and from influential Sicilians after Philip II’s death persuaded Pope Clement VIII to refuse the necessary permission. In 1599 the Suprema received a copy of the official refusal and reluctantly realized that their project was unworkable.*° Apparently they made no further attempts to extend their grasp

in this direction. Inquisitorial jurisdiction over sodomy in Sicily therefore remained confined to charges of homosexuality against their own familiars; however, surviving records list no fewer than 173 such accusations during the forty years after 1595. More than two dozen of the most important sodomy cases involving familiars were sent to Rome — not Madrid — for confirmation. The defendants included a baron and a count, who were each fined 6,000 scudi and received long prison terms in Sicilian castles.2° In other words, the Sicilian Inquisition, which lacked formal jurisdiction over sodomy, nonetheless handled more sodomy trials per year during the first third of the seventeenth century than did the Barcelona Inquisition, which had full jurisdiction over this offense.

One understands why the Mallorcan nobleman claimed in 1620 that the practice was remarkably widespread in Italy, or why the Andalusian cleric arrested in Navarre in 1573 was assumed to be Italian.

PATTERNS OF PERSECUTION, 1570-1630 Preoccupation with all forms of “unnatural” sin increased greatly throughout the various tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat during the last three decades of the sixteenth century and the first three of the seventeenth. In the end, the

legal situation which had been created by fits and starts during the 1520s remained unchanged. No more tribunals were able to claim jurisdiction over this “mixed” crime, although many tried; even the tribunal of Mexico had to be 24 Ing., Libro 782, fols. 67—69v (#2 and 7 of 1575 despachadas), 176v-77 (#7 and 16 of 1582/3 despachadas).

25 Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York, 1906-08), Iv, pp. 364-65; Inq., Libro 330, fols. 161, 177. 26 Inq., Libro 1236, fols. 44-45v, 60-84, 89.

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“Mixed crimes” in Aragon Table 18 Aragonese sodomy prosecutions, 1570-1630

Tribunal Trials (H/B) Deaths (H/B) Galleys (H/B) Saragossa 543 (187/245) 102 (27/64) 196 (82/114)

Valencia 224 (156/68) 48 (34/14) 51 (32/19) Barcelona 156 (102/54) 20 (14/6) 41 (29/12)

Note: for 111 sodomy trials, including 11 deaths, it is not known whether the specific charge was homosexuality or bestiality

warned in 1580 that Rome would never permit them to judge either sodomy or incest, despite the Aragonese precedent.”’ In the three mainland tribunals of the Crown of Aragon, prosecutions for sodomy peaked between 1570 and 1630. Nearly 1,000 trials were held in these sixty years, and more than 150 men died. In fact, in these tribunals during this period, as many men were executed on sodomy charges as on heresy charges. _ The almost complete and detailed series of annual relaciones provides a clear picture of whom the Inquisitors arrested and how they punished the guilty. Each

of these three tribunals showed strikingly different patterns of activity (see Table 18).28 Saragossa maintained its tradition of leadership among the Aragonese tribunals in the repression of pecado nefando throughout this period. It conducted twice as many trials for bestiality as the other two tribunals combined

and pronounced over three-quarters of all inquisitorial death sentences for this particular offense. Comparisons among these three tribunals chronologically, decade by decade,

reveal other divergences (see Table 19). Each profile differs. Saragossa reached a plateau with nine or ten trials every year until the end of the sixteenth century, followed by a steady decline until late in Philip IV’s reign. Barcelona shows little variation throughout the period, beyond participating in the general

rise during the 1570s. However, Valencia experienced two periods of peak activity (1573-88 and 1616-28), separated by a quarter-century when few trials were held and fewer than one person per year was actually punished for sodomy. 27 Inq., Libro 327, fol. 276v. 28 Missing years include, for Barcelona, despachadas from 1604, 1625 and 1630; for Valencia, despachadas for 1585, 1594-95; for Saragossa, incomplete information on the auto of 1576 (eight executions, at least three of them for sodomy, and dozens of condemnations to the galleys, several for sodomy), and missing despachadas for 1576 and 1600-01. Our information is therefore about 95% complete. Eight of the executions at Saragossa in the 1580s cannot be specified as either homosexuality or bestiality. Fourteen of the men listed as “executed” at Barcelona between 1570

and 1600 were actually condemned only to life in the galleys, since the tribunal was legally prevented from pronouncing death sentences against sodomites throughout this period (see above, pp. 112-15).

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Sodomy: the fateful accident Table 19 Aragonese sodomy trials by decades, 1560—1640

Decade Saragossa Barcelona Valencia

1560-69 42 (5) 16 (0) Oo 1570-79 101 (35) 33 (6) 29 (14)

1580-89 94 (15) 20 (7) 58 (11) 1590-99 90 (16) (13)25 27(5) (2)25 7 (1) 1600-09 68 (1) 1610-19 40(2) (10) (2) 1620-29 |48 2229(0)(0)8223(19)

1630-39 31 (1) 20 (0) 18 (0)

Note: numbers of deaths are in parentheses.

Such numbers acquire more significance when we compare them with the repression of sodomy by secular tribunals throughout Spanish dominions. In Sicily, Philip II tried to move sodomy trials to inquisitorial jurisdiction in 1597, because he felt that compliance with his orders of 1569 to punish this crime with due severity was slack. However, surviving records show at least forty-five public executions for homosexuality in the capital city of Palermo between 1567 and 1599, followed by thirty-eight more between 1600 and 1640. Considering the

incompleteness of available evidence, it seems probable that about 100 men were executed for homosexuality during these seventy years.?? All three tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat combined executed fewer men for homosexuality, and they drew their prisoners from entire provinces. Castilian evidence confirms these impressions from Sicily. Reasonably accurate estimates of sodomy executions exist for the two largest cities in the Crown of Castile, Seville and Madrid, between 1575 and 1640. In each, the totals equal

or surpass those from Palermo, which was also an extremely large city by contemporary standards. For Madrid a “minimum estimation,” based on secondary sources, calculated 100 to 150 deaths in sixty-five years, or an average

of two deaths per year. For Seville, the estimate for a shorter period (15751620, which probably coincides with the apex of repression) “easily surpasses 100,” averaging close to three executions per year. Miniature holocausts, with ten or fifteen men executed at a time for this “unspeakable sin,” occurred in both places. The typical victims were much the same everywhere. At Seville 29 Lea, IV, p. 363; Antonio Cutrera, ed., Chronologia dei giustiziati di Palermo 1541-1819 (Palermo,

1917), pp. 129-203 passim. At least nine men burned to death before 1600 for unspecified reasons should probably be added to the eighty-three “definites”; four other men were killed for making false accusations in sodomy cases; and no sodomy executions were recorded between 1575 and 1579.

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“there appeared noblemen, clergymen, monks, schoolteachers, soldiers, artisans, and several foreigners — Italians, Frenchmen, mulattoes, Turks, Negroes, Berbers.”2° The picaresque world of Spain in its “golden century” created several all-male subcultures which were prone to this form of recreation and vulnerable to the rigors of Castilian law. If the Inquisitors were required to judge sodomy cases by local secular law, their record should not have differed substantially from that of secular judges. At Valencia, a city perhaps half the size of Seville, they executed one third as many homosexuals as did the royal judges of Andalusia. The same social groups mentioned among the Seville victims also populate the records of the Aragonese Inquisitions, from noblemen and clerics down to slaves. The very first people to be executed were often clerics, as at Saragossa in 1541 or Valencia in 1573; the very last were either slaves (Valencia 1628) or foreigners (Saragossa 1633). Some groups, particularly adolescents and foreigners, were more prominent than others among the 1,000 plus inquisitorial defendants charged with sodomy. The details of homosexual activity revealed by several hundred relaciones de causas almost never involved couples of consenting male adults. As even its most sympathetic historian admits, the nearly invariable pattern of relationships was between older men and adolescents, between dominator and dominated, “whose

sine qua non condition was the absolute submission of the dependent and paid subject to the will of his overlord.”3! Power rather than eroticism dominated these relationships. Many boys prostituted themselves to older men, alleging to the Inquisitors that they needed the money in order to feed or clothe themselves. Other adolescents were aggressors against even younger boys. Combining violence from teenagers and older men, perhaps 100 cases clearly involved child abuse. Many other adolescent boys took out their libidos on animals, which were even more defenceless than children. For all these reasons, nearly half of all sodomy defendants tried by the Inquisition were under the legal age of majority, and thus could not be executed regardless of their degree of guilt. PROFILES OF SODOMY DEFENDANTS

Foreigners of all kinds — anyone born outside the province in which he was tried — were greatly overrepresented among Aragonese sodomy defendants. By far the

most important group of immigrants in the territories of the Crown of Aragon 30 For Madrid, see Carrasco, [nquisicion y represion sexual en Valencia, p.77; for Seville, see Pedro Herrera Puga, Soctedad y delincuencia en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1974), p. 247. Fifteen men were killed for sodomy on one day at Seville in 1588 (ibid., p. 239), surpassing the Inquisition’s peak of twelve (Saragossa 1572 and Valencia 1625). 3! Carrasco, [nquisicion y represion sexual en Valencia, p. 188. The only clear example of a couple of

consenting adults occurred in rural Aragon, when a French weaver, aged thirty-five, and an Aragonese fieldhand, aged thirty-four, were surprised making love in a false closet they had built

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for privacy: Ing., Libro ggo, fols. 188-216 (#10-11 of 1603 auto).

Sodomy: the fateful accident Table 20 Barcelona sodomy defendants, 1580-1630

Type of sodomy Catalans French -_sItalians Others

Homosexuality 33 6 25 7 Bestiality 24 26 2 O between 1570 and 1650 was French. They were superabundant among defend-

ants charged with bestiality. In Catalonia Frenchmen actually outnumbered Catalans among such defendants between 1580 and 1630; at Valencia, whose population was one third Morisco, Frenchmen outnumbered Moriscos among bestiality defendants by more than two to one. At both tribunals, half of all men

condemned to the galleys for bestiality had been born in France; only the African slaves arrested at Valencia suffered proportionately worse treatment.

The Kingdom of Aragon held the most trials for bestiality; here French immigrants outnumbered native Aragonese among these defendants between _ 1590 and 1610, and they were not far behind at other times. Both the first and the last man to be burned for bestiality by the Saragossa tribunal were French, and Frenchmen accounted for approximately one third of all Aragonese bestiality defendants. Between 1560 and 1660, exactly 100 Frenchmen were charged with this crime by the Aragonese Inquisition; twenty-two of them were executed, while another forty-seven were condemned to the galleys. At Saragossa, the Inquisition executed more Frenchmen for bestiality than for Protestantism. Even more remarkably, the Spanish Inquisition executed nearly half as many

Frenchmen for bestiality between 1570 and 1640 as did the Parlement of Paris.°”

Despite their preponderance among bestiality prisoners, Frenchmen were relatively rare among inquisitorial defendants charged with homosexuality.

Here, Italians were vastly overrepresented. This trend can be seen most dramatically at Barcelona, where the first men executed by the Inquisition for the “unspeakable sin” were two Neapolitans, who had been caught in flagrante in a small French carriage (tartana). Three years earlier, the Viceroy’s cook had been arrested on the same charge and requested to be sent to the galleys, thus avoiding the Inquisition — an episode which prompted a Catalan diarist to reflect

on the “evil Italian race which comes to infect us with something of which, by 32 Alfred Soman, “Pathologie historique: le témoignage des procés de bestialité aux XVIe—XVlle siécles,” in 107e Congrés National des Sociétés Savants: Philologie et Histoire jusqu’a 1610, 1 (1982),

pp. 149-61, counted fifty-five death sentences upheld by the Parlement of Paris between 1564 and 1640; the combined total from Aragon (twenty-two) and Valencia (five) amounts to half as many victims among an incredibly smaller French population.

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God’s grace, Catalonia is pure.”?3 The Inquisition’s books do not paint such a black-and-white picture, but do corroborate his impression that Italians were

the stereotypical homosexuals of this province (see Table 20). An almost identical picture emerges from Valencia’s records, where Italians outnumbered Frenchmen twenty-six to eight among men charged with homosexuality, but Frenchmen outnumbered Italians twenty-one to one among bestiality defendants. Even far inland, at Saragossa, Italians outnumbered Frenchmen by seventeen to eleven among homosexuality defendants between 1590 and 1660, while the French outnumbered Italians seventy-five to nil among bestiality defendants. Considering that even in the great port cities along the Mediterranean, Frenchmen were vastly more numerous than Italians throughout the Crown of Aragon, these figures demonstrate just how vulnerable Italians were in Spain to charges of pecado nefando. (Not surprisingly, in Italy the shoe was on the other foot. Papal judges burned eight Spaniards for homosexuality at Rome in 1578, while the Spanish ambassador refused to intervene on their behalf.)3+

If Catholic foreigners from Italy or France were hugely overrepresented

among Aragonese sodomy defendants, a different group of native-born

, “aliens,” the Moriscos, were surprisingly underrepresented, despite their reputed addiction to such practices. In the Kingdom of Aragon, where Moriscos

comprised perhaps 20% of the native population in 1600, they accounted for only 11% (20/184) of all native-born sodomy defendants between 1570 and their expulsion in 1610. In the Kingdom of Valencia, about one third Morisco, they seem to have been represented proportionately to native Old Christians among such defendants before 1610. Turkish and African slaves were brutally and disproportionately harassed on such charges, but Spanish Moriscos were

not. The most likely explanation is that the Inquisition simply could not ~ command sufficient cooperation from local authorities in Morisco communities even to learn about adolescent boys caught in flagrante, who comprised so many

of their prisioners on such charges. | A vital bit of evidence comes from the trial of the Morisco bayle of Algar

(Valencia) in 1608. The old man stood accused of many religious crimes, including using his house as a mosque, hosting circumcision parties, and murdering two traveling Christian peddlers whom he had proselytized but failed

to convert. One witness charged that this zealous Morisco notable had once caught one of his servants apparently committing bestiality with a mule. The 33 Josep M. Casas Homs, ed., Dietari de Jeroni Pujades, 1: (1606-1610) (Barcelona, 1975), p. 453

ibid., 1: (600-1606) (Barcelona, 1975), p.292. The cook may have known about the new concordia between the Audiencia and the Inquisition on sodomy trials (see above, pp. 114), and would thus be anxious to avoid Holy Office jurisdiction: few foreigners ever petitioned to go into the Spanish galleys. 34 In Saragossa’s largest parish, 483 Frenchmen and ten Italians were married between 1600 and 1650: see Maria del Carmen Anson Calvo, Demografia y sociedad urbano en la Zaragoza del siglo XVII (Saragossa, 1977), pp. 134-40, 191-95. See also Archivo General de Simancas. Catalogo XIV: Estado, Negociacién de Roma 1381-1700 (Valladolid, 1936), p.71 (Legajo 933).

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Sodomy: the fateful accident bayle reportedly sold the mule extremely cheaply and summoned some neigh-

boring alfaguis to determine a suitable punishment for his servant. They recommended that he undergo a fast called a/cavarin, requiring him to go three days without either eating or drinking, “which is a very great penance among Moors.” If the servant survived, he was innocent; if he died during the ordeal, he went straight to Hell. After his arrest, the bayle flatly denied the story about the mule, and was judged too old to be tortured.*° Other evidence suggests that “unnatural’’ sex really was widely practiced among the Moriscos, although the Holy Office was unable to discover much of it

except when the practice crossed religious lines. In other words, Moriscos became vulnerable to sodomy charges only when they were observed by Old Christians, or when they attempted such practices with Old-Christian boys. Our most valuable bit of information comes from the 1607 trial of a Morisco from Lonbay (Valencia), who tried to seduce a Catholic teenager by claiming that “when an Old Christian did such a thing with another Old Christian it was sinful, but not when a New Christian [Morisco] did it with an Old Christian.”’3® Abundant testimony from galley slaves illustrates the widespread practice among Moslems of “purifying” oneself after such activity by washing the hands immediately afterwards. In 1584, a teenaged Aragonese Morisco who had just

been punished for heresy at a public auto was caught making love in the Inquisition’s jail immediately afterwards; he went to the galleys, while his slave partner was executed. Perhaps the most poignant testimony came from a young and wealthy Aragonese Morisco, Juan Compafiero the younger, who had fled to Algiers when his relatives were arrested by the Inquisition. He explained that he had decided to return to Saragossa after experiencing culture shock, “since he saw how the Moors practiced sodomy in public.”37 As with so many other criminal statistics, the evidence about men charged with sodomy by the Aragonese Inquisitions tells us not who was doing such things, but rather about whom the Holy Office was able to catch and willing to convict.

The register of accusations (testificados) kept by the Saragossa Inquisition survives for only one year, 1620.38 Nineteen of forty-five accusations were for

the pecado nefando; they included seven cases of self-denunciation (which occurred only once in the other twenty-six instances). All but one of these espontaneos confessed acts of bestiality, which apparently had not been seen by any witnesses; one of them, a local sculptor, had previously made pilgrimages to

Santiago de Compostela and to Rome in order to purge his conscience. All seven were simply reprimanded by the Inquisitors and released, in accordance 35 Inq., Libro 938, fol. 457v (#48 of 1608 auto). 36 Inq., Libro 938, fol, 349-49v (#9 of 1607 auto). 37 Ing., Libro 988, fol. 518 (#72 of 1581 auto); Libro 989, fol. 158v (#79 of 1585 auto), 116-18 (#9 of 1584-85 despachadas). 38 Ing., Libro gg1, fols. 486—g9v.

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“Mixed crimes” in Aragon with Aragonese policy since 1600.°? Five of the charges were deemed unworthy of investigation, because evidence was too old, too poorly substantiated, or too

oo incomplete. Arrests were ordered for the other seven men, two of whom were apparently never found. In other words, five trials were eventually generated from these ninteen denunciations; over the next two years, four men were sent to the galleys (three for bestiality, one for sodomizing his wife) and one case was dropped. Charges of heterosexual sodomy, like this 1621 case involving a blacksmith and his wife, were rarely prosecuted by the Aragonese Inquisitions, but convictions carried stiff penalties. A man had been burned at Saragossa for this form of

heterosexual sodomy as early as 1583; as recently as 1619, another man had been executed by the same tribunal on the same charges.*° In this instance,

“moved by hearing the Edict of Faith” in June 1620, both spouses had voluntarily appeared before the Inquisitors “with the intention of discharging his conscience”’; but the husband failed to satisfy them and was arrested seven months later. After a four-month trial, he was sentenced to 100 lashes, five years of “unpaid penance at the oars,” and three additional years of banishment from Aragon.

Prosecutions were so rare because most charges of heterosexual sodomy came not from outside denunciations, but from marital strife between husbands and wives. Under such circumstances, the husband had only to allege malice against his wife in order to get her testimony rejected as tainted.*! Moreover, the Inquisitors usually took meticulous care to temper justice with mercy in such

cases. For example, a middle-aged Aragonese fieldhand was imprisoned in September 1624, after his estranged wife testified that he had forced her to commit both oral and anal sex by beating her. During their highly-charged confrontation, it transpired that they had not lived together for thirteen years. After much hesitation, the Suprema ordered that he be given “mild” torture. Before his ordeal began, he confessed everything his wife had charged and even added some serious blasphemies. But between his torture (December 19, 1624) and his official sentence (February 25, 1625) the Saragossa tribunal did some research in his home parish; they learned that he had been baptized in February 39 Inq., Libro 1260, fol. 197 (Suprema’s decree of September 16, 1600, followed by annotation that “no lo ay en Valencia y aun los castigan’’). 40 Inq., Libro 989, fols. 39 (493 of 1583 auto), 25-31 (#36-37 of 1583 despachadas); this Catalan had sodomized both his mother-in-law and his wife, both of whom were whipped and banished. See also Inq., Libro 991, fols. 455-83v (#9 of 1619 despachadas). He was accused by two men, to

whom he had been boasting, and was overcome by his wife’s testimony into confessing after originally denying his guilt; allegations of group sex aggravated his circumstances. 41 Ing., Libro gg1, fols. 501-18v (#23 of 1620 despachadas), where a middle-aged dyer from the village of Afion was accused by nine of his neighbors (seven of them women) of practicing heterosexual sodomy for fifteen years; his wife tried to defend him, and suffered the humiliation of being inspected by Holy Office surgeons for signs of anal lesions. After doctors testified that “natural” sex was physically impossible in the positions the neighbors had seen, the defendant was condemned to 100 lashes and five years in the galleys. But his wife was never arrested.

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1585 and married in February 1608. Since his wife had left him after approximately two years of marriage, the Inquisitors decided that he had probably been under the legal age of majority in Aragon (twenty-five) when he had sodomized

her for the last time. They accordingly sentenced him to ten years in the galleys.*2

Inquisitorial meticulousness influenced the outcomes of other sodomy trials also. For example, every defendant had a court-appointed lawyer, who functioned exactly as in heresy trials and whose influence could either help or hurt a

prisoner. At Valencia, a prominent physician and university professor, Dr. Joseph Pérez, was arrested in July 1613 after being charged with homosexual advances by two of his students. During more than three years in prison, he first feigned madness and then returned to rational behavior, “trusting that in this Holy Office they would see that justice was done to him.” When the [nquisitors | voted to fine him 100 ducats and banish him from Valencia, Dr. Pérez decided to appeal to the Suprema and accordingly consulted his /etrado. But he made a fatal mistake by boasting to him that not only was all the evidence against him completely true, but that he had also been able to make love to another man eight times while imprisoned by the Inquisition. His partner was the physician whom the Inquisition had appointed to treat Pérez’s apparent insanity. Because

inquisitorial attorneys were required by their oath of office to report all . incriminating evidence to their employers, the outraged Inquisitors quickly arrested the other physician, who confirmed Dr. Pérez’s claims. Both of them were burned at a special auto, during which Dr. Pérez tried to interrupt the reading of his sentence and, reported a spectator, “never seemed to be in his

right mind or to speak appropriately.”’*> |

This defendant lost his life by confiding in the Inquisition’s defense attorney; but twenty years later in the same tribunal, another sodomy defendant owed his life to his attorney’s vigorous intervention. A Mallorcan-born cleric in minor orders was accused of homosexuality by a teenager and arrested in May 1635. Believing that he had been charged with something else, he confessed to buying. a magical talisman and then quickly confessed the sodomy charge also. At this point, his /etrado petitioned to consult with him “in order to defend him and verify his capabilities.” Thereupon the lawyer filed a petition that his client had confessed “ignorantly and without knowing what a consummated act of sodomy was.” Both the Mallorcan and his accuser, it transpired, were guilty of various “effiminacies (molicies)” and “‘pollutions,” but not of genuine anal intercourse. The defendant was accordingly sentenced to ten years’ banishment (the first four to be spent in a monastery) and a fine. However, the Suprema raised his 42 Inq., Libro gg1, fols. 834-36 (#24 of 1625 despachadas). 43 Inq., Libro 939, fols. 252v-55 (#16—-17 of 1616 despachadas); Vicente Castafieda Alcover, ed., Coses evengudes en la civtat y regne de Valencia. Diario de Mosén Juan Porcar, capellén de San Martin

(1589-1629), 2 vols. (Madrid, 1934), I, p. 249.

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“Mixed crimes” in Aragon punishment to six years in the galleys, complaining that “it seems a novelty that a lawyer talks to his client alone, not in the presence of the tribunal.’’** THE DECLINE OF SODOMY PROSECUTIONS

Despite its action in this case, the Suprema rarely increased a tribunal’s punishment for sodomy after 1625; it was much more common for them to reduce it, and especially to overrule death sentences from Aragonese Inquisitors. In fact, only two men were executed for sodomy by the Spanish Inquisition after 1626: a slave, employed by a familiar in a rural Valencian village, who had

sexually molested a Catholic boy; and a French-born shepherd in Aragon, arrested for raping his sheep-dog, who soon confessed more than three dozen similar deeds, “showing great pain and repentance” while shedding copious tears; he was publically executed in April 1633. By 1635, an Italian immigrant who had tried to escape and who later, under torture, made a full confession of consummated homosexuality was sentenced to be executed at Saragossa’s next auto, “if we have one soon.” But the Suprema coolly overruled them, reducing his sentence to only four years in the galleys. A similar case occurred in 1639, | when a blacksmith was condemned to death by the Saragossa tribunal, but the Suprema reduced his punishment to 100 lashes and ten years in the galleys.*° Times had obviously changed. After 1625, when the Suprema had reluctantly permitted the Valencia tribunal to stage a virtual massacre of homosexuals, it became extremely difficult, and after 1633 it became impossible, for Aragonese Inquisitors to execute men for any form of sodomy. A careful look at the Suprema’s precedent-rulings in Aragonese sodomy cases shows how they gradually relaxed the stringency of punishments and reduced the publicity surrounding sentencing. Silence eventually replaced shame. As we saw, they had removed all sodomites from public autos as early as 1579, unless they were condemned to be executed. Ten years later, upset by the executions of

seven adolescents under the age of twenty-one in 1587 and two more seventeen-year-olds in 1588, they raised the minimum age for sodomy executions in Aragon to twenty-five. By 1600 they refused to prosecute anyone who confessed voluntarily before being formally accused (a rule which was not followed at Valencia). In 1608 they repeated their earlier ruling that sodomites could not appear in public autos except to be executed; two years later they refused to allow the Saragossa tribunal to publish or proclaim a death sentence against a sodomite in a church, because there were too few miscreants for any 44 Inq., Libro 40, fols. 378-80 (#4 of 1636 despachadas); Libro 945, fols. 40g—10 (Valencia denied this was an innovation).

45 Ing., Libro 940, fols. 183v-84 (#1 of 1628 auto); Castafieda, Diario de Juan Porcar, i, p. 266; Ing., Libro 992, fols. 127v--29, 143v (#10 of 1632 despachadas), 211~18v (#17 of 1635 despachadas), 464-76 (#12 of 1639 despachadas).

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Sodomy: the fateful accident _ type of public auto.*° Local tribunals still wanted maximum publicity for such

events, but the Suprema became visibly unwilling to grant it to them: the logical , end of this development was to prohibit death sentences for sodomy. Spain’s Holy Office was run by bureaucrats and canon lawyers, who were not able to admit that they no longer executed anyone for the pecado nefando by the mid-1630s. However, we can follow their actual methods through the handbook

used by Don Miguel Lopez de Vitoria y Equinoa, a former Inquisitor at , Saragossa, when he served as head prosecutor for the Suprema in 1642.4” Don Miguel provided the most careful and revealing guidelines to Holy Office procedures on sodomy trials that we possess, and he worked during the period when executions effectively ended. He explained that if the accused was under the ago of twenty-five when he committed this crime, or if he had done only a

“close attempt” rather than fully consummated anal sex, he could not be executed. “I have seen many other trials both ancient and modern,” he added, in which copiously detailed confessions had not led to executions because of minuscule extenuating circumstances, or because the Suprema had overturned death sentences from local judges. One suspect confessed tearfully to “complete” bestiality as soon as he was formally charged, but was not executed,

because “in my memory, his contrition and simplicity provoked much | clemency.” Commenting on the stringency of Castilian sodomy laws, Lopez de Vitoria remarked that “I never saw these rules followed by the Inquisition,” adding that “the Inquisitors use more clemency than rigor.” Although very few sodomites were sentenced in public, he said, “perjurors who accused people of

this offense were sentenced in public as an example to others, as I saw in Saragossa.” The unspeakable sin was now being treated with unspoken mildness. Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, most secular courts throughout Europe were still burning men for sodomy long after Don Miguel composed his handbook. For instance, Calvinist Geneva burned an Italian gentleman at the stake in 1662 for sodomizing his valet, while the Belgian city of Ghent executed a sculptor for

this offense in 1654. The Parlement of Paris, the largest and most famous appellate court in western Europe, was still routinely burning men for bestiality in the 1670s, and was even capable of executing a couple of homosexuals as late as the 1750s.*8 Such ultra-progressive nations as England and the Netherlands executed their largest numbers of homosexuals as late as the 1730s. #6 See the sketch of such legislation for Aragon in Inq., Libro 1234, fols. 416v, 454v—-55v; also

Libro 989, fols. 304-5 (#75-81 of 1587 auto) and 385v (#72-73 of 1588 auto), for the executions of young men that provoked the 1589 ruling. After 1625, the Suprema required that any condemnations to the galleys or public whippings for sodomy be approved by them: see above, p. 72 n. 40.

#7 Inq., Libro 1260, fols. 79-82. 48 See William Monter, “Sodomy and Heresy in Early Modern Switzerland,” Journal of Homosexuality, 6 (1980/81), p.55; Geert Debeuckerlaere, “‘Omme dieswille dat Gij, Hieronymous Duquesnoy ...’,” in Tydschrift voor Hemogeschiednis, 1 (1984), pp. 5-22; Soman, “Pathologie

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Castile was not remarkably different. At Madrid, homosexuals were frequently burned throughout the 1630s and 1640s, precisely when the Inquisiton’s Supreme Council (which sat in Madrid) was preventing its Aragonese branches from executing any type of sodomites. One understands the reactions of a teenaged Neapolitan soldier imprisoned in Valencia’s city jail in 1640, who

tried to escape as soon as he learned that some Italian fellow-prisoners had denounced him as a male prostitute; he was completely innocent, but terrified “because he had seen a man burned at Madrid as a sodomite.” Fifteen years later, a gardener from a Madrid suburb was burned alive for bestiality. As late as 1751, Madrid’s magistrates sentenced a man to ten years at forced labor merely for attempted sodomy — exactly the same sentence that they gave to a convicted murderer.*? Moreover, the other Iberian Inquisition with jurisdiction over homosexuality (though not over bestiality) was slower to abandon burnings than the Spanish Suprema. The Portuguese Holy Office, whose archives hold the largest collec-

- tion of denunciations for the “unspeakable sin” anywhere in western Europe, executed only about thirty men for homosexuality, fewer than half the totals from the Aragonese tribunals. However, many of these deaths occurred after , 1640, when Portugal regained its independence from Spain, and therefore after the Spanish Suprema had ended its executions of sodomites.>°° The Spanish Inquisition has been given much credit — perhaps undue credit — for its precociously enlightened policies towards maleficient witchcraft, but neither its enemies not its admirers have ever labeled it as a precursor of Gay Liberation. The principal reason, of course, is that they have never begun to investigate the problem. It is-curious to contemplate that the Spain of Olivares, its reform proposals thwarted by bureaucratic routines and stumbling towards political catastrophe, was nevertheless developing within its ideological police an apparently “enlightened” policy towards the most horrifying sin they knew. But this is an anachronistic and unfruitful approach to the Inquisition’s record on sodomy. Don Miguel Lopez de Vitoria y Equinoa and his contemporaries were emphatically not pioneers of sexual enlightenment; but they were unusually

tolerant men, in the old-fashioned and literal sense of the word, suffering behavior which they found highly distasteful. In dealing with this offense, they historique”; “Dr. Ludovico Hernandez” [pseudonym for F. Fleuret and L. Perceau], Les Proces de bestialité aux XVIe et XVIle siecle (Paris, 1920); and Michael Foucault, Histoire de la folie a l’age classique (Paris, 1961), pp. 108—10. 49 See Inq., Libro 941, fol. 126 (#2 of 1640 despachadas); Tomas y Valiente, Derecho penal, p. 229 n. 65; Henry Kamen, Spain in the Later Seventeenth Century, 1665-1700 (London, 1980), p. 175. In

the medium-sized city of Granada, a man was burned for sodomy in 1640: Francisco Hernandez de Jorquera, Anales de Grenada, 2 vols. (Granada, 1934), Ul, pp. 878-79. 50 See Luiz Mott, “Pagode portugiies: a subcultura gay em Portugal nos tempos inquisitorais,” in Ciencia e cultura, 40 (1988), pp. 120-39 (esp. pp. 122ff). For an introduction from the viewpoint of legal history, see Arlindo Camilio Monteiro, // peccato nefando in Portogallo ed il Tribunale dell'Inquisizione (Rome, 1927), an offprint from the Rassegna di studi Sessuali e di Eugenica.

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Sodomy: the fateful accident spoke about pity and mercy, and they practiced much of what they preached. In addition to being tolerant, they were increasingly embarrassed by having to deal with the “unspeakable sin”; their punishments became more secret as well as milder. Their silence and prudishness were the most “modern”’ aspects of their behavior.

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PART 5

Recessional

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14

The eclipse of Aragon, 1630-1730 | Tres dias ha prendieron también por la Inquisicién a siete u ocho portugeses por lo que suelen. Jesuit letters, 1646 (quoted by Caro Baroja, Judios en la Espana, 1, 341 n. 13)

Je n’ai pas eu le courage d’assister a cet horrible execution des juifs ... mais pour la

semaine du jugement, il fallut bien y étre, car autrement on eiit passé pour hérétique. Wife of French ambassador, 1680 (Caro Barojo, Judios en la Espana, Wl, p. 20n).

The two most important autos de fe held in Spain in 1625 took place less than a month apart. On November 6 in Valencia an era ended when a record total of twelve homosexuals were sentenced to death, along with the effigy of the last French Huguenot ritually executed by the Inquisition in Spain. Apart from the cluster of death sentences, only seven men were condemned. The audience was treated to the unprecedented spectacle of a dozen men dressed in purple shirts, wearing the usual white miters on their heads, but with reddish collars and a sign labeled with the single word sodomita. An eyewitness reported that it took 128 quintals of wood to burn them and seven hours to finish the job, “something never seen or heard of in Valencia.” One slave decided to convert during his execution and was therefore baptized before being burned. The whole event

was so famous that a few years later, a Catalan lawyer ranked Valencia’s sodomites with the “illuminists” of Seville and heretical sermons at the English embassy as the worst of God’s recent evil omens in Spain.! On December 2 in Cordoba, a different era began when two men and three women, all Portuguese, were executed as relapsed Judaizers. This spectacle boasted fifteen effigies and sixty-one live prisoners; but it was as monotonous as the Valencian auto, because all but six of the prisoners were charged with the same offense, namely “Judaizing.” Nearly all of them were either immigrants ' See Inq., Libro 940, fols. 41~53v; Vicente Castafieda Alcover, ed., Coses evengudes en la civtat y regne de Valencia. Diario de Mosén Juan Porcar, capellén de San Martin (1589-1629), 2 vols. (Madrid,

1934), Il, pp. 175-77; for the fame of this auto in Catalonia, see Josep M. Casas Homs, ed., Dietari de Jeroni Pujades, 1v: (1626-1630) (Barcelona, 1976), p. 95.

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from Portugal or else born in Spain of Portuguese parents.” This was certainly not the first time that Portuguese Judaizers had been executed by the Castilian Inquisition, nor was it the last time that people were executed for other offenses by the tribunals of the old Aragonese Secretariat. But it marks the moment when the Inquisition’s primary momentum swung from the Crown of Aragon back to Castile and back to conversos accused of Judaizing.

In that same year of 1625, the Suprema tightened its control over local tribunals. Now, all serious physical punishments — the galleys, public whippings, public vergiienzas — had to be approved in Madrid. But tighter control did not

mean greater strictness. Alvise Mocenigo, Venice’s Spanish ambassador from

1626 to 1631, lamented the growth of factionalism and corruption in the Suprema during the Olivares era, which he saw as a form of divine punishment on Spain. “In recent times,” he reported, “with the changes in government” it

had acted “with excess and obvious weakness. Respect for this tribunal has greatly diminished in Castile, many trials are judged without their customary rigor, and many people live with greater freedom than in the past.” The problems identified by Mocenigo undermined the entire institution, but their consequences affected Aragonese tribunals even more than Castilian ones. In the north, they induced lethargy as well as disrespect.

The special problems facing the Aragonese Inquisitions dated back well before 1625. The expulsion of Spain’s Moriscos, begun in Valencia in 1609 and

completed in Aragon next year, damaged the finances of the Holy Office tribunals in Valencia and Saragossa. It also interrupted the series of annual autos generales de fe in the Kingdom of Aragon, which punished their final twenty-nine Morisco prisoners at an auto early in 1611. The tribunal of Logrofio, which had held no public autos since 1603, failed to create a new priority with its notorious persecution of Basque witches in 1610. From then until 1619, no public autos

were held anywhere in the Spanish parts of the Aragonese Secretariat. The abrupt decline in its activities may explain why the special Secretariat was itself disbanded at the end of 1618.* Sodomites kept the public autos going a bit longer, aided by a few Moriscos who had returned illegally to Aragon or Valencia. Saragossa held two small autos 2 Rafael Gracia Boix, Autos de fe y causas de la Inquistcién de Cordoba (Cordoba, 1983), pp. 380-94.

3 Inq., Libro 347, fol. 80~80v, for Saragossa’s copy of the carta acordada of September 2, 1625, specifying that these new rules about Madrid’s approval for whippings, galleys and vergtienza also applied to cases of sodomy and other non-heretical business; Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambascatori veneti al Senato 1X (Turin, 1978), pp. 627-30 (quote, pp. 629-30). + The final entry in the Suprema’s log of correspondence with the Aragonese Secretariat, in Inq., Libro 325, is dated December 24, 1618. On the losses sustained by Valencia after 1610, see the document published by José Martinez Millan, La Hacienda de la Inquisicién (1478-1700) (Madrid, 1984), pp. 293-97, and Ricardo Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad en el siglo XVI. La Inquisicién de

Valencia 1530-1609 (Barcelona, 1980), pp. 170-76; on Saragossa’s situation, see José Antonio Escudero, “Repercusiones econdémicas de la expulsién de los moriscos en la Inquisicién aragonesa,” in Homenaje al Profesor Torres Lépez, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1980), IL.

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in 1619, at which three sodomites and a Morisco were executed; Valencia relaxed five sodomites and two Moriscos at its next public autos in 1621 and 1622, although the major attractions at the latter event consisted of several Huguenot merchants. But the scale of Valencia’s 1625 sodomy prosecutions alarmed the Supreme Council, who approved the executions but decided to prevent any recurrence by removing all sodomites from public autos. Consequently, public autos all but disappeared from the tribunals of the Crown of Aragon after 1625. Meanwhile, as Caro Baroja and others have noted, the dynastic union of Spain and Portugal in 1580 had important consequences for the history of the Spanish Inquisition. Thousands of Portuguese, many of them descended from Jews who

had left Spain in 1492 only to be forcibly baptized in Lisbon five years later, flocked into Spain in search of fortune. The Inquisition soon acquired much information about their religious customs, since Portugal’s “New Christians” practiced Judaic rituals far more openly than their Spanish counterparts. ‘They were also disliked as ostentatiously wealthy foreigners, the way Genoese or Flemings had been disliked in Charles I’s time. Under these circumstances, the Holy Office’s prosecution of Portuguese Judaizers had been slowly gathering momentum since the 158os.° The last important condemnations of Castilian Judaizers took place at an August 1590 auto in Cuenca. The first executions of Portuguese conversos began shortly thereafter, in various tribunals of the Castilian Secretariat. Both Granada and Cérdoba began executing Judaizers of Portuguese background in the mid1590s; Cuenca had changed from Castilian to Portuguese Judaizers by 1595. At

Seville, where foreign Protestants continued to provide obstinate heretics for public autos until the start of Philip III’s reign, Portuguese Judaizers were first executed in 1604; Santiago, which bordered Portugal, began to execute Portuguese Judaizers at the same time. As far aheld as America, one can detect this same shift. The tribunal of Mexico, which had executed a French pirate in 1579,

began to execute Portuguese Judaizers in 1596; Lima, which had relaxed a Flemish Protestant in 1581, burned four Judaizers at its 1595 auto.® THE ‘‘PORTUGUESE CENTURY’ OF THE INQUISITION,

1630-1730 Although there were many signs that Aragonese tribunals were losing their relative importance within the Spanish Inquisition after 1610, it was not clear what

would replace them. By 1630, however, Portuguese “New Christians” had 5 The best introduction to the “Portuguese century” of the Spanish Inquisition is Julio Caro Baroja’s three-volume work on Los judios en la Espana moderna y contemporanea (Madrid, 1961). See in particular Part 1, ch. 7; Part u, chs. 2—8; Part m1, chs. 3-5, 8; Part v, chs. 2-5. © See Gracia Boix, Autos de fe, pp. 309-10, 316-19; José Maria Garcia Fuentes, La Inquisicadén en Granada en el Siglo XVI (Granada, 1981), pp. 432-35; Francisco Hernandez de Jorquera, Anales

de Granada, 2 vols. (Granada, 1934), ll, p. 550; Rafael Carrasco, “Preludio al ‘Siglo de Por-

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become the primary targets of the Holy Office, replacing the Moriscos and Frenchmen who had filled its records during the previous half-century. Franci-

sco Corner, Venetian ambassador to Spain in 1631-34, departed from the opinions of his predecessors by remarking in his final relaztone that the Council

of Inquisition “helps keep Spain purged from the seeds of Judaism in particular.”’ The Olivares government’s attack on limpieza de sangre statutes, and

especially its increasing reliance on Portuguese financiers in the later 1620s, gave these “New Christians” unparalleled incentives and unparalleled visibility

in Madrid and Seville, the seats of Spanish government and empire. But increased visibility also brought increased risks. Economic opportunities attracted many Portuguese of converso backgrounds into Spain after the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580, and

sometimes brought them into the clutches of the Inquisition. A Portugueseborn physician, arrested by the Toledo tribunal in 1608, confided to his Morisco cellmate that Portuguese conversos, descendants of Jews who had fled Spain in

1492 in order to avoid conversion, “only came to Madrid and other parts of Castile in order to acquire a fortune and then move to France, for fear of the Holy Office, because,” he explained, “the Holy Office is the very devil.”

Repeating an old charge from Queen Isabella’s day, he added that “the Inquisitors arrested Portuguese for childish reasons (niriertas) in order to seize their property for the king.”® The Portuguese believed that in La Mancha the descendants of conversos no longer practiced any Jewish rituals whatsoever. The influx of Portuguese inundated the Crown of Castile with less assimilated but more observant Jews, who soon provided the Inquisition with a fresh harvest of Judaizers.

The true ceremonial opening of the Inquisition’s “Portuguese century” _ occurred in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor on July 4, 1632. The first auto de fe ever held in the Spanish capital, presided over by the Inquisitor-General, under the eyes of the royal family, the courtiers, the great councils of state and thousands of } lesser folk, was a moderate-sized affair with forty live prisoners and four effigies.

Although fewer than half of them were Portuguese Judaizers, they clearly formed its major attraction; six of the seven people condemned to execution in person were immigrants from Portugal, as were the four represented by effigies. They had been arrested in Madrid in 1630 on charges that they had gathered every week in order ritually to whip an image of Christ crucified. The statue bled and wept on several occasions, we are told, asking his tormentors why they mistreated him; it thereby became known as the “Christ of Patience.” Several of tugeses’: La Inquisicién de Cuenca y los Judaizantes lusitanos en el siglo XVI,” Hispania, 166 (1987), pp. 503-59; Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Autos de la Inquisicién de Sevilla (Siglo XVID) (Seville, 1981), p. 78; Seymour Liebman, The Jews in New Spain (Coral Gables, Fla., 1970), pp. 217-66, 305-33. 7 Firpo, Relazioni, x, pp. 30-31. 8 Caro Baroja, Judios en la Espana, il, pp. 197-206 (quote, p. 201).

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, The eclipse of Aragon, 1630-1730 the Portuguese, including at least three girls aged between twelve and sixteen, had confessed their crime and implicated others. The house where the sacrilege occurred was torn down two days after the auto, and a Capuchin convent called La Paciencia was built on the site.? It was the most important charge of ritual whipping of a crucifix made against Jews in Spain for several generations. Whereas the “sacrilege” of Alicante in 1539 soon backfired, with defendants retracting their confessions under advice from humanist clerics, the “sacrilege” of Counter-Reformation Madrid opened a new and fateful phase in the Inquisition’s history. As Caro Baroja noted, from the late 1620s until Portuguese independence in

1640, “the history of negotiations between the state and the traditional prey of the Inquisition is confused and the data contradictory; anti-Semitic literature flourished, autos multiplied, but on the other hand the Judaizers were much more visible and active than before.” !° In 1628 Philip IV convoked a conference in Madrid which urged reform and reduction of the limpieza de sangre statutes prohibiting descendants of converted Jews from holding various posts in the Spanish church or government. Five years later Olivares began negotiations to admit Levantine Jews into Spain, dangling an offer to open a synagogue in Madrid as they had in Rome. Soon thereafter, in 1637, one of the major Portuguese financiers appeared in a Toledo auto de fe where he abjured de vehementi and was fined the huge sum of

20,000 ducats. Rumors claimed that he had offered 12,000 ducats merely in order to avoid appearing in a public auto. His huge fortune of 500,000 ducats could not be confiscated by the Inquisition, because of an old arrangement with the king which assured this privilege to his Portuguese creditors. From 1635 to 1638 the Llerena Inquisition busied itself with the so-called “Badajoz conspiracy” in which about 150 Portuguese Judaizers were implicated. At the same time the Peruvian Inquisition was busily unraveling its own “great conspiracy”

of Portuguese Judaizers, whom it punished at its largest-ever auto in 1638 (eleven deaths, fifty-one Judaizers, and ten others penanced); its relacién was — soon printed as a chapbook in Madrid.!! For all of Olivares’ pressing need to accommodate Portuguese bankers, the Spanish Inquisition had asserted itself vigorously against the Jewish menace in the 1630s, reaching as high as a court financier and as far as Lima. From this point until Madrid’s next great public auto in 1680, the persecution

of Portuguese Judaizers by the Spanish Inquisition continued throughout 9 The most extensive and accessible account of the 1632 auto is in Yosef H. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso, a Study in 17th-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York, 1977), pp. 105-22. 10 Caro Baroja, Judios en la Espana, 1, p. 347. 11 [bid., 1, pp. 51-67; Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (hereafter Lea), 4 vols. (New York, 1g06—08), 111, p. 297; Boleslao Lewin, El Santo Oficio en America y el mas grande proceso

inquisitorial en el Peru (Buenos Aires, 1950), esp. pp. 155-89.

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Castile and America. “The pertinacy of the crypto-Jews is as amazing as that of the Inquisitors,” commented Caro Baroja; “both seem caught up in a kind of clockwork mechanism, always doing the same thing, repeating the crimes or supposed crimes and repeating the punishments or sanctions like a bunch of robots — robots who believed on both sides that they were motivated by the divinity.”!* The fall of Olivares in 1643 brought to power a new InquisitorGeneral, Don Diego Arce y Reinoso. His biographer claimed that during his twenty-two years in power, seventeen general autos were held and 13,000 people

penanced, overwhelmingly Judaizers. He also boasted that under Arce y Reinoso 12,000 families, presumably Portuguese, fled from Spain.!3 General autos remained relatively rare and tended to include prisoners from all parts of Castile; only in Mexico did they have to rely exclusively on local residents. They became even more elaborate affairs than those of a generation before, because there were fewer of them. At Seville, for example, the local tribunal requested to be given a Judaizer to kill in 1648, pointing out that they had held no public spectacles for over twenty years despite the size of their city, with “such variety of people from different nations.” When they discovered a major conspiracy of Portuguese Judaizers and asked to hold another general auto twelve years later, they were given another Portuguese to execute besides their own six, and dozens of effigies of fugitive Portuguese to execute along with them. Afterwards, the Suprema even asked them to commission a picture of the event. !4

The first phase of the “Portuguese century” ended with a truly spectacular auto in Madrid in 1680 to celebrate the marriage of Charles II to a French princess. No fewer than 118 defendants were collected for this spectacle, including 104 Judaizers, nearly all of them from Portuguese backgrounds. The

king presided in person over the proceedings, which lasted from 7 a.m. to g p.m. The inaugural procession for this auto was led by twenty-five grandees, thirty-seven ¢itulos and twenty-three other eminent people. Nineteen people

were executed afterwards, along with effigies of thirty-two others, mostly fugitives. The first fagot for the bonfire had been carried by a grandee to the king, in whose name it was thrown onto the pyre.!> This “‘monster auto” was

fittingly commemorated by a more elaborate painting than at Seville, and accompanied by the second Spanish edition of a Portuguese Discourse against Jews (the first translation dated, significantly, from the time when the crucifix was reportedly whipped in Madrid). It was a spectacular event, but also the last of its kind. Within a decade, the Supreme Council of the Inquisition sent a memorandum to the king explaining

'2 Caro Baroja, Judios en la Espana, 1, p. 461. , 13 Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Los judeoconversos en Espana y America (Madrid, 1971), p. 76. 14 Dominguez Ortiz, Autos de Sevilla, pp. 67, 97. 15 J. del Olmo, Relacién historica del Auto General de Fe, que se celebré en Madrid este ario de 1680

(Madrid, 1680), a lengthy pamphlet.

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The eclipse of Aragon, 1630-1730 that it lacked the resources to celebrate general autos, and also sent a circular letter to its branches urging them to avoid holding such spectacles. Moreover, as the French ambassador noted after the 1680 auto, “these punishments do not significantly diminish the numbers of Jews in Spain and above all at Madrid where, while some are punished with great severity, one sees several others esteemed and respected, although known to be of Jewish origin.” He cited the example of a Portuguese who had recently purchased the title of Marquis for 50,000 crowns, although his uncle ran a synagogue in Amsterdam.!° During the forty years after the 1680 auto, there was only one major outbreak of inquisitorial fury against Judaizers, located in one of the most remote corners of Spanish possessions. The descendants of Mallorca’s converted Jews, living in quiet segregation in the island’s capital, had their religious zeal powerfully reinforced by a Jewish martyr from Madrid, burned alive at Mallorca in 1675. He was the first Judaizer actually killed at any tribunal in the Crown of Aragon for 125 years, and his death had peculiarly tragic consequences for Mallorca’s chuetas. They began organizing a synagogue outside the city’s walls, which led to over 200 public reconciliations in 1679. Nine years later many chuetas tried to escape on an English ship, but had to return after setting out. They fell into the

hands of the Inquisitors, who executed forty of them in 1691, including three who had died in prison.!’ By the standards of the Balearic Islands, or those of _ the Crown of Aragon, it was a fantastic and utterly unparalleled tragedy. When the Bourbon dynasty acquired Spain, the new king refused to attend a general auto proposed in his honor in 1701 and the idea was dropped, perhaps with some relief on the part of the Suprema. During the bleak dozen years of civil warfare which followed, the colony of Judaizers in Madrid benefited from the support of Philip V’s principal advisers, above all the Princess des Ursins and his leading minister Macanaz, who was himself put on trial by the Inquisition after his downfall.'® In a time of political stress and relaxed persecution, twenty families of the Madrid colony formed themselves into a proper synagogue and even wrote to Livorno in 1714 in order to learn if an uncircumcised man could serve as their rabbi. Their apparent freedom brought more reckless

behavior than under the previous dynasty, and testimony collected by the | Inquisition told of their playing guitars and dancing during Christian holidays.

Under a new and little-known Inquisitor-General, Don Juan Camargo, Bishop of Pamplona, the Spanish Inquisition launched its final general prosecution of Judaizers from 1720 to 1730, beginning with its most visible sector in

Madrid. If the Bourbon king continued to avoid patronizing public autos in 16 Lea, HI, pp. 224-25; Henry Kamen, Spain in the Later Seventeenth Century, 1665-1700 (London, 1980), p. 304 (quote). 17 See Baruch Braunstein, The Chuetas of Mallorca: Conversos and the Inquisition of Mallorca (New

York, 1936), chs. 3-4 and appendices. The most recent treatment is by Angela Selke, Vida y muerte de una minoria: Las Chuetas de Mallorca (Madrid, 1972). ~ 18 See Carmen Martin Gaite, El proceso de Macanaz (Madrid, 1970).

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person, he saw no inconvenience in giving the Holy Office carte blanche to pursue its traditional prey. For the last time in Spanish history, many public autos were held across the country, including several in Andalusia with thirty or

more defendants. Approximately 100 Judaizers were executed in person at seventy-five public spectacles between 1720 and 1727, while another 100 were executed in effigy; nearly 1,000 more were publically reconciled or penanced.

Apart from the catastrophe in Mallorca, nothing remotely comparable had happened during the previous forty years, and after 1727 this cycle of prosecutions virtually ground to a halt.!° Several commentators who have examined the wave of persecutions in the 1720s have noted its peculiar geography. During the peak phase (1721-25),

sixty-six autos were reported throughout Spain, with ninety-three Judaizers executed in person and eighty-three more in effigy. But only six of the autos and only two of the 176 executed Judaizers were reported from the five tribunals of

the old Crown of Aragon and Navarre, with both deaths occurring at a Valencian auto in 1723. There was some inquisitorial activity in the north and east during Camargo’s era. For example, a Portuguese Judaizer was executed at Logrofio in 1719; another Portuguese, a surgeon, died at Barcelona in 1726 as a relapsed Judaizer, having been previously reconciled at Logrofio in 1700. But as Caro Baroja noted, by 1726 the public auto at Valencia was “without interest, since enough people were punished at it, but all of them foreign to Judaism.”2° In other words, the Inquisitions of the old Crown of Aragon had reverted to type, just as the Granadans reverted to type by executing seven fugitive Moriscos in effigy in 1731, along with one deceased Judaizer. ARAGONESE TRIBUNALS IN THE PORTUGUESE CENTURY

The Kingdom of Aragon was tangential to the problem of Portuguese Judaizers throughout the seventeenth century. In May 1619, the commissioner for the Pyrenean portion of Aragon was ordered to locate some Portuguese believed to be fleeing to France; but none was ever found. Nor is there any evidence that the Saragossa tribunal ever lifted a finger to disturb any Portuguese conversos even after the great Madrid auto of 1632. In December 1633, the Supreme Council ordered them to arrest a merchant named Ruy Pereira or Ruy Lopes Chillon, who had been based in Saragossa for some time and had been denounced by other Portuguese who had been captured in Castile, but he too got away. In June 1635, the Suprema sent a circular letter to all tribunals in order to coordinate its '9 The best introduction to the 1720-27 persecution is now by Teofanes Egidio, in J. Pérez Villaneuva and B.Escandell Bonet, eds., Historia de la Inquisicién en Espana y América, 1: El conocimiento cientifico y el proceso histérico de la Institucién (Madrid, 1984), pp. 1380-404.

20 See ibid., especially Tables 6 and 7, pp. 1397-98; Caro Baroja, Judios en la Espana, m, chs. 2-5, especially p. 112 (quote); Fidel Fita, “La Inquisici6n de Logrofio y un judaizante quemado en 1719,” in Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia, 45 (1904), pp. 451-60.

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mushrooming set of denunciations of Portuguese Judaizers, who formed a notoriously mobile and volatile group which frequently changed both their residence and their names. They found it difficult to believe that the Aragonese — who after all were still pursuing the canonization of Pedro Arbués, and had been condemned not long before for maintaining genealogies of descendants of

converted Jews in their Libro Verde — could not produce a single name of someone denounced for Judaizing since the year 1600. Madrid therefore requested a complete set of annual trial summaries for the previous thirty-five years, which in fact included no Judaizers.?! In September 1637 the Supreme council ordered Saragossa to arrest Franci-

sco Pineiro, a Portuguese trader based in France but working regularly in Aragon. By October he had been captured while carrying a rich haul of letters from Portuguese Jews in France to their fellow-countrymen in Castile. Pineiro quickly admitted to practicing Judaism, but the Suprema warned Saragossa to “follow this case carefully” despite his claim to be a French subject. All of 1638 was spent following up the ramifications of his arrest, with Saragossa deciding to build a public auto around him, since they had held none for almost twenty years. They therefore requested the tribunal of Toledo to extradite Pineiro’s brother Simon, who had been arrested there; they also asked the tribunal of Valladolid to send them an unrepentant Morisco, who had been transferred there from Valencia in order to be executed at a forthcoming auto. The Suprema handed them four cases of fugitive Portuguese Judaizers, already condemned to be executed in effigy by the tribunal of Toledo. Assembling the raw material was expensive, since Simon Pineiro had to be escorted from Toledo by two familiars. Valladolid, miffed by the loss of their prize prisoner, refused to send the Morisco’s trial along with his person. The

Suprema found fault with their original list of defendants prepared for the event. But at last the Aragonese tribunal held a public auto on February 21, 1639, with nine Judaizers, plus a Castilian who had accepted bribes from the

Portuguese to moderate their torture, among thirteen defendants. All five executions had been imported from other districts, as had most of the five live

Portuguese.*3 Only under such conditions could the Aragonese tribunal manage to scrape together enough prisoners to hold a pale imitation of their old-time public autos.

During the next hundred years, the Saragossa tribunal managed to hold exactly two so-called public autos, each time with fewer than five defendants. In

1675 they felt the need to offer a spectacle in honor of Aragon’s remarkably popular governor, Don Juan of Austria; but from their local resources they could

collect only four defendants, three of them women, guilty of minor offenses. Their. most important prisoner was a tramp from Catalonia who had been 21 Inq., Libro 347, fols. 4v, 219. 22 Inq., Libro 347, fols. 240v, 261v—64. 23 Inq., Libro 347, fols. 266, 274v-75v, 279v—80v, 286v, 289, 2g2v; Libro gg2, fols. 411-29.

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convicted of sodomy and would be sent to the galleys. Because the rules long ago forbade putting such defendants in public autos, they were forced to end the spectacle by sentencing him inside their audience chamber — but with the doors open so the crowd could hear.?* During the last great burst of autos during the Camargo era of the early 1720s, Saragossa managed to produce one autillo with three defendants, none of whom was executed.

Throughout northern and eastern Spain, the local tribunals played an extremely peripheral role in the great hunt for Portuguese Judaizers that remained the Inquisition’s top priority throughout the century after 1630. Relatively few Portuguese settled in the lands of the Crown of Aragon during the seventeenth century. The depressed economy of the entire region, which struggled unsuccessfully to overcome the consequences of Morisco expulsion and which suffered even more acutely than the rest of Spain from the general Mediterranean depression of the seventeenth century, offered fewer opportunities for making a rapid fortune than did the heartland of Castile. Few Portu-

guese meant few Judaizers. Apart from the people in the 1639 auto, the Aragonese tribunal convicted only one Portuguese Judaizer during the seventeenth century. The Barcelona tribunal convicted four Judaizers in 1668, but this was their only brush with the “Portuguese century” until after 1720.”

The tribunal of Logrofio forms a partial exception to this rule, for geographical rather than economic reasons. Portuguese conversos found a haven to

practice Judaism at Bayonne, just across the French frontier from the great

| Basque port of San Sebastidn. For the Inquisition, guarding the northern frontier had meant catching horse-traders along the Pyrenees in Philip IT’s day, but it came to mean catching fugitive Portuguese in his grandson’s reign. The Logrojfio tribunal arrested several Portuguese as suspected Judaizers in 1619, at the same time that it was pursuing some descendants of local Judaizers who had

been punished twenty years earlier. The Supreme Council ordered all the Portuguese freed in November 1619. Nonetheless, Logrofio became the first tribunal in the old Aragonese Secretariat to impose severe punishment on a Portuguese when it sentenced the unlucky Alvaro Mendez, arrested in 1625, to public reconciliation and six years in the galleys at an auto particular in 1631.*° From then until the great Madrid auto of 1680, the Logrofio tribunal imposed

public penances on at least twenty more Portuguese, nearly all of whom had been caught either fleeing to or returning from Bayonne. (Of course, we have no

24 Inq., Libro 998, fols. 563—-63v. |

25 Inq., Libro 998, fols. 205-07 (#2-3 of 1680 Saragossa despachadas, a couple from Bordeaux : where the wife was released but the husband punished); Libro 735, fols. 267-70 (#1—4 of 1668

Barcelona despachadas).

26 Inq., Libro 822, fols. 15v, 16v, 18, 19, 26v (Suprema to Logrofio, June—Nov. 1619); Libro 836,

fols. 191-95 (#41~43 of 1619/20 despachadas), 199-237 (#29 of 1620/21 despachadas, three conversos from Genevilla including the daughter of a man executed in 1599), 587—gov (1631 one-man auto).

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The eclipse of Aragon, 1630-1730

. idea how many Portuguese Judaizers passed safely through this district in either direction.) There was one other condemnation to the galleys, a jeweler captured on a Dutch ship in 1640 while trying to flee to Holland. Two other small-scale public autos, at which Portuguese Judaizers were punished, were held in Logrofio. In 1634, four of them were penanced together, although two Portuguese brothers whom they had arrested in 1632 had to be returned to Madrid for interrogation. Two men were executed in effigy at a 1662 auto. The Logrojfio tribunal remained extremely busy afterwards, condemning nine more Portuguese Judaizers to public reconciliations between 1664 and 1671.27 Among the three main parts of the Crown of Aragon, Valencia (which had punished a Portuguese merchant for Judaism as early as its 1587 auto) continued to shelter the largest groups of Portuguese immigrants in the seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, this tribunal also pronounced the strongest sentences against them. Two fugitives who had been residing in Valencia were condemned to death in absentia as Judaizers during the early phase of the Catalan revolt (1641-45).

Two other Portuguese fugitives were eventually recaptured and returned to Valencia for interrogation and punishment in the early 1660s. However, the three

Jews who were imprisoned at Valencia in 1672, sentenced to relaxation after unusually languid trials, and finally burned at the great Madrid auto of 1680 were Italians who had accepted baptism in Madrid and later repeated the process at Valencia, using aliases, in order to obtain more largesse.28

OBSOLESCENCE OF THE “‘ARAGONESE PATTERN’ The tribunals of the old Aragonese Secretariat were unable to adopt the new priorities of the Spanish Inquisition after 1630, but they also failed to maintain the kinds of activities that had kept them so busy during the previous century.

: At the same time that their supply of indigenous heretics disappeared, they were also brought under tighter control by the Supreme Council. After the 1620s, the tribunals of the old Aragonese Secretariat lost much of their ability to punish prisoners, as well as their separate collective existence. The combination of these changes produces an impression of insignificance and decadence. 27 Inq., Libro 822, fols. 188, 194v, 19gv (Portuguese arrested and released, Nov. 1625—-Feb. 1626),

377V, 420, 421v (arrests ordered by Suprema 1630-32); Libro 836, fols. 653-78 (#11-14 of 1634/35 despachadas); Libro 837, fols. 183-85 (#1—2 of 1640/41 despachadas); Libro 839, fols. 44~49 (#21-—23 of 1661 despachadas, two of whom were relaxed at a 1662 auto which has not been preserved among these relaciénes), 52~65 (#3 of 1664 despachadas), 81 (#2 of 1666 despachadas), 146-65v (#3-5 of 1667 despachadas), 166 (#1 of 1669 despachadas), 99-141 (#1-—3 of 1668-71 despachadas); Caro Baroja, Judios en la Espana, 1, p. 337, on Villegas; Ing., Libro 839, fols. 260—53

| 313

(# 2 of 1677 despachadas). After 1681, there are no more relaciones preserved from this tribunal 28 ina, Lites 941, fols. 175 (#18 of 1641 despachadas), 278 (#15 of 1645 despachadas); Libro 942,

fols. 472-93 (#7 of 1662 despachadas), 510-11 (#1 of 1664 despachadas); Libro 944, fols. 224-26v (#1-3 of 1680 despachadas).

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The northeast was simply not synchronized with the Castilian Inquisition after 1625. As we have seen, it participated only peripherally in the great hunt for Portuguese Judaizers. Perhaps 200 Portuguese were condemned to death either in person or in effigy between 1630 and 1680, but the contributions of the four tribunals in northern and eastern Spain to this great hunt can be counted on one’s fingers. At the same time, the Moriscos who had formed their most important staple of business between 1530 and 1610 were well and truly gone from the Crown of Aragon. Even Frenchmen, who were still abundant, could no longer be threatened with the galleys for Protestantism.

Occasionally, these tribunals could still muster up a bit of their former ferocity towards old enemies. In 1661, the Saragossa tribunal arrested an argumentative Huguenot who was studying law at Lérida. When he continued arguing with them, they first tortured him ad arbitrium, then had him checked by physicians for signs of insanity, and finally waited until he sickened and died in the Aljaferfa in 1664. The tribunal of Barcelona was still capable of keeping an argumentative English Protestant imprisoned for four years until

he died in 1687, and then voting to relax him in effigy. They were even

stricter with a fugitive Huguenot who tried to commit suicide five times — during his imprisonment, and whom they formally condemned to death in 1692.2? There was, however, more bark than bite in such sentences at a time when the Inquisitor-General warned local tribunals to avoid public autos at all

. costs.

The non-heretical parts of the old “Aragonese pattern” continued to be pursued with fewer changes in strategy. The Inquisition intervened sporadically in witchcraft trials for a long time; more than forty cases of genuine brujeria lie _ scattered among the fragmentary records of the three Pyrenean tribunals after

1630, providing grim glimpses of local hatreds and fears. Everywhere the

did not intervene often. | , | Inquisition maintained its reputation for clemency whenever it intervened; but it

, Sometimes the Inquisition arrived too late. The family of a farmer, who had

reputedly sent 5,000 devils into one of his neighbors, had already been lynched in the public jail of Huesca by the time he reached their custody in 1645; his wife had been killed by a gunshot, his daughter died after being whipped, and he

himself died in the Aljaferia only a few days after they received him. The Logrofo tribunal had no better luck at Pamplona, where two local widows accused of bewitching children were jailed in 1648 by municipal authorities. One died before she could be moved to the Inquisition’s custody; the other died in a hospital after three months under Holy Office jurisdiction. On one occasion

the Inquisition inadvertently promoted the public lynching of a witch. A French-born widow, who had lived in Aragon for twenty years, was tried twice 29 Inq., Libro 997, fols. 504-73 (#15 of 1665 despachadas); Libro 735, fols. 415-18, 421-21v

(Barcelona pendientes in Dec. 1691 and Aug. 1692). 314

The eclipse of Aragon, 1630-1730

for witchcraft at Saragossa. The second time, in 1677, she received a public verguenza (being paraded through town backwards on a burro) before being banished once again; but she was so badly mistreated during her verguenza that | the Inquisitors had to put her in Saragossa’s hopsital, where the sixty-threeyear-old woman soon died.°° Usually the Inquisition was able to prevent such tragedies. In 1641 the Logrofio tribunal imprisoned a witch who stood accused by twenty-eight adults of a variety of maleficia, including causing two men’s penises to disappear; she had also been the victim of a midnight knifing by the regidor of her village. She

was merely given a formal warning and released. Twelve years later she was again accused of “having removed a boy’s natural parts.” The Supreme Council ordered her rearrested, and she was finally imprisoned in 1657; but even as a recidivist, she received only a de /evi abjuration and four years of banishment. An elderly spinster from the Basque country, who had been reconciled on November 26, 1611, by the famous “witches” advocate,” Inquisitor Salazar y Frias, was

again charged with witchcraft by her neighbors fifty-four years later; the seventy-eight-year-old woman again confessed and was sentenced to two years’ confinement in Logrofio’s hospital in order to keep her away from her neigh-

bors. Another Basque woman, who had first confessed her witchcraft to the Inquisition during a 1630 amnesty, was absolved after a subsequent arrest; she again faced the Inquisitors in 1658, receiving 100 lashes and six years of unpaid

service in Bilbao’s municipal hospital.?! | Occasionally the Aragonese Inquisition had to deal with major scoundrels. Pedro de Arruebo, who had been penanced as a witch by the Bishop of Jaca in 1634, was then banished by the Inquisition after a de /evi abjuration. Four years later he was back, accused of witchcraft by fifty-three witnesses and condemned

to death by a secular court. This time he was tortured, during which he confessed to an act of bestiality but denied the witchcraft. He received 100 lashes and five years in the galleys. They gave a slightly stiffer punishment in 1658 to an “exorcist” who treated demonically possessed women through sexual intercourse, claiming that he ‘“‘possessed grace in his semen as in the rest of his person, in order to lift magical spells.” Saragossa’s Inquisitors prescribed 200

lashes and six years in the galleys. |

30 Ing., Libro 993, fols. 57—120v (#13 of 1645 despachadas); Libro 838, fols. 4-25 (#10-11 of 1648/49 despachadas); Libro 998, fols. 161-62 (#8 of 1674 despachadas), 172 (#3 of 1678 despachadas).

31 Inq., Libro 837, fols. z2ogv-10 (#2 of 1641/42 despachadas); Libro 838, fols. 493~94v (#4 of 1656/57 despachadas); Libro 839, fols. 66v-67v (Francesca Palear Fratin, #2 of 1665 despachadas), on Maria de Santa Coloma, see Libro 836, fol. 482v (#23 of 1629/30 despachadas); Libro 838, fols. 529-34Vv (#5 of 1657/59 despachadas).

32 Qn Arruebo, Ing., Libro 992, fols. 193-221 (#5 of 1635 despachadas), 499-544 (#1 of 1640 despachadas); in 1643, the Suprema reviewed his previous trials and increased his punishments to

ten years in the galleys (five for sodomy, five more for blasphemy) followed by perpetual | banishment: Libro 347, fol. 353. Also Inq., Libro 996, fol. 68 (#17 of 1658 despachadas).

315

Recessional Table 21 Sodomy and Aragonese Inquisitions, 1650-80

Tribunal (years) Galleys Banished Suspended/ reprimanded

Saragossa (26) 10825 15 Barcelona (23) 5 25 Valencia (27) 8 oc 8 6 Illicit sex, occasionally heretical as in this case, continued to occupy the northern tribunals throughout the seventeenth century. As we have seen, no one was executed for sodomy by the Inquisition after 1633. But men continued to be

tried for all forms of sodomy, and the unluckier ones continued to be condemned to the galleys, although we have no evidence that suspects were tortured on these charges after 1650.7? Two men narrowly avoided death sentences. Valencia voted to execute a Sicilian for this crime in 1651; he was convicted of sacrilegious blasphemy in addition to multiple acts of consummated homosexuality. However, the Suprema ordered that he be given 200 lashes and ten years in the galleys, adding that “the sentence of this culprit and others like

him may not be read in a public auto nor even in a church.” The restored tribunal of Barcelona had a comparable experience fourteen years later. They wrung a full confession from an old farmer, who had been accused of raping animals on four occasions before being caught in flagrante in 1663. He had no defense except to claim that he had been bewitched, and he was too old to be — sent to the galleys (the Inquisitors had verified his age). They therefore sentenced him to death in September 1664 and awaited confirmation from the Suprema; but he died in Barcelona’s municipal hospital before Madrid ruled on his punishment.3* The tribunal of Saragossa, which had seen two death sentences for sodomy overturned in the late 1630s, voted none after 1640. In one peculiar instance, the Aragonese tribunal even forgot its own precedents about what constituted “sodomy.” ‘Two women were condemned on these charges in the mid-1650s. A widow and a laundress had been denounced as lesbians by their prying neighbors in Saragossa; they denied their guilt, but were 33 See Rafael Carrasco, /nquisicién y represion sexual en Valencia (Barcelona, 1986), pp. 84-85, on

tne relative scarcity of torture against such defendants, with the last known instance coming in a4 Ing. Libro 941, fols. 371, 382 (#6 and 11 of 1651 despachadas both refer to Carlo Charmarinero, on separate charges of sodomy and blasphemy, for which he had a de /evi abjuration, spiritual penances, and five years of exile added to the lashes and galleys of his other sentence; see also #7-9, who were three of his pacientes). Carrasco, Inquisicién y represioén sexual en Valencia, pp. 148-52, prints parts of Charmarinero’s trial. See also Inq., Libro 735, fols. g—-10 (#10 of 1665 despachadas).

316

The eclipse of Aragon, 1630-1730 convicted by the weight of testimony. Almost a century before, the same tribunal

had decided after much soul-searching that female homosexuality was not covered by the Pope’s letter of 1524. The Inquisition normally had an infallible memory, and kept many registers of precedents; such errors were rare.°> Reading the erratically preserved reports of these tribunals after 1640, one has the impression of watching a bureaucratic machine surviving on sheer inertia. Officials paid by assured revenues from the Spanish church found it difficult to recruit familiars to help them, while they lethargically pursued half-forgotten offenses with increasingly obsolete punishments. Smaller numbers of prisoners

spent longer amounts of time in the Inquisition’s prisons, but were never exposed to the public at autos de fe. Representative institutions in parts of the Crown of Aragon renewed their attacks on the privileges of familiars, and won significant concessions in Sardinia in 1632 and Aragon in 1646. Consequently, the numbers of active familiars declined precipitously, even faster than the number of inquisitorial prisoners. Aragon, for example, had 419 familiars in 1645 but only twenty-five by 1703. In Sardinia, two-thirds of the familiars’ posts were vacant by 1666. In Mallorca, the Inquisitors were allowed to appoint 225 familiars, but had only thirty in 1666; worse yet, no one had even applied for this honor for five or six years. The lack of interest in inquisitorial honors even prevented the Spanish crown from selling many minor posts in Aragonese districts; in Sicily, even the usually lucrative post of receptor found no bidders when it was put on sale in the 1640s.°° Only a few fresh items of heretical business turned up to disturb these musty

routines. The most peculiar episode was the history of Pedro Isabal, a shepherd | from the Aragonese mountains, known as the “Anointed King” and locally famous for his gifts of prophecy. Although he escaped to the Kingdom of Granada, the “King” left behind a network of disciples headed by an Aragonese

priest and his brother; nine of Isabal’s associates were publically penanced between 1648 and 1651. Apparently the strains of the long war in Catalonia produced other episodes of visions and prophecies in Aragon during these years: a Dominican had to be confined to his convent for several years on account of his

visions, while a Castilian silversmith was sent to Saragossa’s hospital as a madman after he began attacking local preachers for lacking an “inner light.”’37 35 Inq., Libro 995, fols. 405-g1v (#21-22 of 1656 despachadas), Castilian secular justice was capable of sentencing recidivist lesbians to death under Philip III, although on appeal such a condemnation was reformed to 400 lashes and perpetual banishment, which in turn was finally pardoned in 1625: see Archivo General de Simancas, Camara de Castilla, Legajo 2755, # 9 (1 wish to thank Richard Kagan for this reference). 36 Roberto Lopez Vela, “Estructura y funcionamiento de la burocracia inquisitorial (1643-—1667),” in Jaime Contreras, ed., Inquisicién espanola. Nuevas aproximaciones (Madrid, 1987), pp. 183,

191-93. (In Sardinia, which had an appointed receptor, no accounts had been sent to Madrid between 1636 and 1644: 1bid., p. 181.)

37 See the Suprema’s vain attempts to hunt down the “Anointed King” in Ingq., Libro 347, fols. 388—g0, 393, 415-I15v, 417; also Libro 993, fols. 546-612 (#10—15 of 1648 despachadas); Libro

, 317

Recesstonal

From Aragon came Spain’s only important new heresy during the reign of Charles II. Miguel de Molinos was an expatriate Aragonese in Rome, author of a famous Spiritual Guide for which he was ultimately arrested by the Papal Inquisition in 1685. Fittingly, the first Spanish denunciations of Molinos came | from the Aragonese tribunal later in 1685, and the first ““Molinist” condemned by the Spanish Inquisition was a canon of Huesca who had been Molinos’ disciple in Italy. The primal network of Molinists was quickly tracked into Navarre and Catalonia, where a monk and a layman were formally reconciled on these charges in 1691. The whole “movement” was oversimplified by the Holy

Office into still another branch of Illuminism; its critical offense became the seduction of women by spiritual advisers who believed that a superior state of grace removed any taint of sin from sexual intercourse. ‘The pursuit of Molinists endured through the war of succession and most of Philip V’s reign, with trials throughout Spain (since the Archbishop of Seville became the leading advocate of Molinos) but continuing to include a sizable contingent of defendants from northern Spain.*®

AFTERGLOW OF THE ARAGONESE CENTURY IN SICILY : While the Spanish branches of the old Aragonese Secretariat, deprived of their most important victims, gradually retreated into lethargic routines after 1625,

the Sicilian Inquisition continued to operate at a relatively rapid tempo. At Palermo, public autos continued to be held regularly until 1650, and some of them were spectacular affairs. In September 1640 occurred the death of the last French Protestant and the last baptized Moslem at the hands of the Inquisition; .

but most spectators had come to see the condemnation and punishment of a Sicilian monk who had proclaimed himself the Messiah and had completely revised Christian rituals. During the following decade six more public autos were staged by this tribunal, each with a minimum of thirty penitents, all featuring priests or monks charged with spectacular forms of heresy: denial of | the immortality of the soul, arguing publicly that sodomy was not sinful, flight to Turkey after being indicted for necromancy, magical pacts with the Devil written in one’s own blood. None of them was quite so remarkable as the monk who was defrocked and executed in 1658 for murdering an Inquisitor with his

bare hands in his prison cell. Three years later their principal villain was a 994, fols. 240-65 (#12-13 of 1650 despachadas), 500-05 (#18 of 1651 despachadas), for trials of his Aragonese followers. On the other episodes, see Inq., Libro 994, fols. 1-97v (#8—9 of 1649 despachadas), 202—09 (#9 of 1650 despachadas). After the recapture of Barcelona by Don Juan in 1652, such episodes disappear. 38 See Inq., Libro 998, fols. 304—o06v (#2 of 1688 despachadas) and Libro 735, fols. 397-99 (#4—-5

of 1691 despachadas), for Spain’s first convicted Molinists. On the phenomenon, see J.1. Tellechea Idigoras, “El molinismo,” in Pérez Villanueva and Escandell Bonet, Historia de la Inquisicién en Espana, 1, pp. 1113-24, and J. Ellacuria Beascoechea, Reaccién espanola contra las ideas de Miguel de Molinos (Bilbao, 1956), on the Inquisition’s prosecutions.

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The eclipse of Aragon, 1630-1730 layman, an official of Palermo’s municipal court, undoubtedly guilty of illicit magic and sacrileges with the Host; he was punished by having his right hand cut off and given life imprisonment. But it was surely hyperbolic to charge him as “suspect of the Anabaptist sect,” in addition to being a Lutheran, Calvinist,

| and Jew.°? Sicily held no more spectacular public autos during Charles II’s reign, although the newer forms of heresy quickly appeared on the island. The principal cases pending in the summer of 1693 were a cabal of Quietists, involving four priests and five female Franciscan tertiaries. A few years later the

fashionable heresy had become a Molinist conspiracy centered on Palermo’s Augustinian convent, which grew to such dimensions that in May 1696 the tribunal had to compile an alphabetical index of suspects and accomplices, including eighty-two men and thirty-one women. One of the principal suspects,

a nun, was penanced with thirteen other Molinists in 1703 but remained impenitent; she was sentenced to relaxation in 1705, although her execution was never carried out. The leader of this group proved similarly recalcitrant after his

public penance, and was heard to mutter in 1706 that the Inquisition was a “deceit of the Devil’ and the monk who had killed an Inquisitor in 1658 was a holy martyr. He too was condemned to execution as a relapsed heretic in 1709,

but the Suprema was still seeking his conversion when the island of Sicily

passed out of Spanish control in 1713.*° : Under Victor Amadeus of Savoy, the Sicilian Inquisition held a typical public auto in 1715, with twelve defendants including two more Molinists. The new

governor complained that its punishments were too slight. Three years later came another small auto with ten prisoners; then Sicily fell under the control of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, sometime claimant to the Spanish throne and a nostalgic champion of the language and institutions of Castile. Under him the Sicilian Inquisition mounted its final group of public spectacles, following the orders of an Inquisitor-General located in Vienna rather than Madrid. The ‘aging Molinist monk and nun, impenitent as ever, were again condemned to death in 1720. Both were finally strangled and burned at an old-fashioned general auto in 1724, accompanied by twenty-four lesser offenders, including a layman who was sentenced to the galleys for celebrating Mass and hearing

confessions. Annual public autos continued for three years, followed after a | short interruption by others. In 1730 the Palermo public was treated to the spectacle of penitent atheists. In 1731 an impenitent heretic, who had escaped from the Holy Office after five years of imprisonment, was executed in effigy. A 39 Ingq., Libro go2, fols. 160-66v, 178-83, 188—2z00v, 388—g0, 392-97 (autos of March 1642, June

1644, June 1646, June 1647, January and December 1648, March 1658, and March 1661). 40 Ing., Libro go2, fols. 265~71v (pendientes of 1693), 274-85 (principal Molinists pending in 1698), 293-333V (index of Molinist suspects, followed by index of accusers correlated with accused). See Vito La Mantia, Origine e vicende dell’'Inquisizione in Sicilia (reprint Palermo, 1977),

pp. 88-89.

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Recessional

court bailiff, also convicted of atheism, relapsed into heresy after being recon-

ciled on the scaffold and was duly burned in March 1732.*! | During the century after 1630, the Kingdom of Sicily held more public autos de fe and accounted for more deaths and galley sentences than all four tribunals of northeastern Spain combined. The Sicilians relied on their local resources of heretics, magicians, blasphemers, and bigamists to compile this record; they

found no Portuguese or other Judaizers. But most intriguing of all is the observation that Sicily, like Catalonia after 1640, preserved the forms of the

Spanish Inquisition after the region had passed out of Spanish control. Moreover, the public autos held under Austrian or French suzerainty sometimes

showed greater cruelty than the Castilians managed. Barcelona executed a

sodomite for the Prince of Condé long after the Supreme Council and Inquisitor-General had prevented such deaths elsewhere; Palermo burned two Molinists whom the Spanish Inquisition had sentenced to death but obviously refused to kill. Right to the very end, the Spanish Inquisition operated differently in the old Aragonese lands — especially when it was no longer under Spanish control. 41 La Mantia, Origine e vicende, pp. 89-101.

320

Conclusion: one king, one law, one faith The best recent synthesis describes the Spanish Inquisition in 1520 as an “instrument of royal policy, effective agent of centralization and defense against

the centrifugal action of the fueros” which had deployed its tribunals for a “satisfactory occupation of the political and social space” capable of imposing its

presence throughout Spain. The Holy Office succeeded in making itself respected everywhere, enforcing strict obedience to orthodox Catholic doctrine

without employing excessive physical cruelty.! Nowhere was its task more difficult than in the various parts of the Crown of Aragon. When King Ferdinand first introduced the new Inquisition into his hereditary domains in the 1480s, it had exactly the same goals as in Castile: the eradication of Jewish practices among the conversos. But the political context of the Holy Office was vastly different in the Crown of Aragon, a federation of states which cherished their extensive liberties and where converted Jews had intermarried

with prominent Old-Christian families. Here the tradition of coexistence or convivencia, like other medieval relics, was still alive in 1480. Opposition to the

new Holy Office was therefore intense in the Aragonese lands, particularly among the political elite who feared its infringement on their fueros and therefore on their ability to govern themselves with minimal royal interference. It survived only because of King Ferdinand’s iron will and proverbial shrewdness.

He was able to extend it eastward into Aragon’s hereditary Mediterranean possessions, the islands of Sardinia and Sicily; but even Ferdinand was unable to impose it on his most important Mediterranean conquest, the Kingdom of

Naples. He had much less trouble introducing the new Inquisition into his northern Spanish conquest, the Kingdom of Navarre, in 1513. Because it had to overcome considerable opposition in these Aragonese districts, the Spanish Inquisition sought legitimacy by broadening its mission beyond the powerful conversos. Beginning in the Kingdom of Aragon, the Holy Office soon extended its jurisdiction over a variety of offenses which it rarely encountered in Castile. Only the Aragonese Inquisitions exercised authority over such “mixed-jurisdiction” crimes as ritual witchcraft or sodomy. Only in these lands, where fueros and vigorous representative institutions seemed to help criminals more than victims, did the Inquisition need to use a Papal privilege of 1 Bartolomé Bennassar, ed., L Inquisition espagnole (XVe—XIXe siécle) (Paris, 1979), pp. 50-51, 122.

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Conclusion: one king, one law, one faith 1515 to execute people who had murdered its officials or informers. Later in the sixteenth century, extending its claims politically rather than theologically, the Holy Office even arrested men who smuggled horses across the Pyrenees into France. After 1530 the Inquisition’s prosecution of conversos declined almost everywhere in Spain. Its primary mission shifted to other forms of heresy: Moslems and Protestants dominated most of its public autos de fe during the following century. During this period, especially between 1570 and 1610, the tribunals of the Aragonese Secretariat became the most active in all Spain. Every fourth person killed by the entire Spanish Inquisition between 1540 and 1640 died at Saragossa — and there were twenty tribunals in all, spread from Peru to Sicily. Among the overseas possessions of Spain, the Inquisition handled more cases

between 1570 and 1640 from its two Italian tribunals than from its three American tribunals. The Crown of Aragon, where opposition to the new : Inquisition had been so extensive before 1520, became its most important sector during the following century.

Throughout this hodgepodge of Viceroyalties with their various laws and parliamentary bodies, the ruling classes reluctantly accepted the Spanish Inquisition as a religious necessity. Even when its authority was blatantly abused for political ends by the royal government, most notably with the arrest of Antonio Pérez at Saragossa in 1591, the Holy Office was never attacked directly. As the Inquisition implied to Philip II during the peak of this crisis, they received more

soldiers. | :

“respect and obedience” than the king himself, unless he sent along 18,000

The Holy Office enjoyed general respect among ordinary Catholics in these | quasi-autonomous regions after 1520 because it usually concentrated on prose-

cuting Moriscos, homosexuals, and foreigners. Such people were willingly denounced to the Holy Office by Old Catholics. Equipped with such prisoners, it staged numerous morality plays, at which large numbers of outsiders, dressed in penitential costumes, underwent public humiliation, acknowledging their guilt while prostrate before the green cross of the Inquisition. Many prisoners were given severe physical punishments; more than 3,000 were either put to death or sent to the galleys during a separate, subsequent ceremony. For the

average Spaniard these autos de fe were rituals of social cohesion, where evildoers were separated from the Christian community. During its heyday in the Crown of Aragon, the Inquisition appeared to be a government service which provided free edifying entertainment. The chief victims at northern public autos were nearly always people for whom the general public had little sympathy. Among almost 550 people killed in the Aragonese Secretariat between 1540 and 1640, nearly 200 were Moriscos

and another 100 were Frenchmen. One finds African slaves executed for sodomy at Valencia, Italians dying for the same reason at Barcelona, even a Turk |

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Conclusion: one king, one law, one faith

and a Portuguese executed as “Lutherans” in Navarre and Aragon. Only about one third of the selected victims of the Inquisition in these seven tribunals were native-born Old Christians, most of whom had been convicted of raping boys or animals. A dozen Catalan and Basque women were executed as witches; a dozen

local men from Aragon to Sicily died for murdering people who helped the Inquisition. After 1550, exactly four Spanish Old Christians were executed for heresy in these tribunals: an Aragonese doctor, a Catalan teacher, a Valencian nobleman, and a minor Valencian official died as Protestants during the 1560s. Although the tribunals of the Crown of Aragon prosecuted record numbers of defendants, they never punished descendants of local conversos after 1550. This paradox seems all the more baffling, because the tribunal of Saragossa (the most active in all Spain between 1560 and 1615) not only venerated an Inquisitor who had been assassinated by conversos, but also created and maintained the notorious Libro Verde, the ““Green Book” which carefully catalogued the descendants

of the principal converted Jews of Aragon. However, neither the sporadic attempts to secure the beatification of Pedro Arbués nor the wide diffusion of the “Green Book” (over fifty copies were burned in 1622, although the original was preserved) ever led to arrests of conversos in Aragon. ASSIMILATION AND VULNERABILITY

Why were descendants of conversos immune from arrest by the Inquisition after

1550, while Moriscos and Frenchmen were so vulnerable? Moriscos were of course numerous and religiously intractable in both Valencia and Aragon. — French immigrants were also remarkably numerous throughout northeastern Spain in the sixteenth century. Both groups were partially assimilated into

Old-Christian society. The Moriscos (at least in Aragon and its Castilian fringes) dressed like Spaniards and spoke Castilian. The French often spoke poorer Castilian than the Moriscos, but they intermarried more readily with the Old-Catholic majority: over 10% of all bridegrooms at Barcelona or Saragossa around 1600 had been born in France. But both groups remained vulnerable to

the Inquisition because their integration into Aragon’s dominant culture

remained incomplete. :

To put their vulnerability into context, we must compare the Moriscos and Frenchmen to two other groups, both of which eluded the Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon. The gypsies were total pariahs who never intermarried with Old Christians; their mobility and their private language protected them from the Holy Office, who found them impenetrable. Consequently, only a handful of

them were ever arrested and none was executed, despite their well-earned reputation for blasphemy, irreligion, and superstition.* At the opposite end of 2 See the recent detailed study by Maria H. Sanchez Ortega, La Inquisicién y los gitanos (Madrid, 1988).

323

Conclusion: one king, one law, one faith society stood the descendants of Aragon’s converted Jews, who had become so

well integrated into its dominant culture that the Inquisition found them . impossible to prosecute successfully, despite its intimate knowledge of their genealogies. Only groups in between these extremes could be denounced,

arrested, and eventually convicted by the slow but thorough methods of the | Holy Office. One can therefore construct a social model of Habsburg Aragon, with gypsies

and Valencian Moriscos at the bottom, both utterly alien to Spanish Catholic _ society but also relatively immune from serious prosecution by the Inquisition.

Above them were Spanish-speaking Moriscos, who remained extremely vulnerable to it. Next came French immigrants, who were also at considerable risk because they came from a traditionally hostile kingdom and had usually emigrated from the Midi, where Protestantism was ubiquitous. Most French immigrants understood Protestant doctrine better than did Spaniards, and even the most zealous Catholics among them found parts of Spanish Catholicism strange. Above all these groups stood the descendants of converted Jews, who now enjoyed permanent immunity from the Inquisition because of their connections to other politically privileged sectors of society in Spanish Aragon.

, THE PERSISTENCE OF OPPOSITION Although the Spanish Inquisition enjoyed general acceptance throughout the Aragonese periphery, local elites never lost their jealousy of its special privileges and never succeeded in “nationalizing” it with native Inquisitors. Local politicians circulated rumors in Aragon and Catalonia around 1590 that the _ new institution had been created for only 100 years. Catalan officials managed to reduce the privileges of inquisitorial familiars by 1600, and other regions _ (Aragon, Sardinia) followed after 1625.

| Opposition to the Inquisition remained much stronger in Sicily than in the Spanish parts of the Aragonese Secretariat. Here the Holy Office was simply one more aspect of life under Spanish imperialism; here the chief victims at public autos were often local heretics or native clergymen. In order to survive, the Inquisition coopted large numbers of Sicilian noblemen as familiars — and thereby acquired an impressive criminal element among its auxiliaries. In Sicily the local population made a great many denunciations to the Inquisition in

order to carry out local vendettas, thereby insuring sizable numbers of prisoners (including many informers subsequently arrested for perjury). But they also exploded the Inquisition’s palace in 1592, something Antonio Pérez’s supporters dared not attempt; an imprisoned Sicilian monk even managed to

murder a Spanish Inquisitor with his bare hands long after the final anti-

, 324

Spanish rising — something inconceivable in the Spanish parts of the Crown of Aragon.

Conclusion: one king, one law, one faith Despite misgivings among local elites, the machinery of inquisitorial prosecution worked extremely well in the Aragonese Secretariat until the Moriscos were expelled in 1609-10. Other disasters further eroded its authority: the attempt to revive the prosecution of witches proved a fiasco, and the peace treaties with Protestant states gradually reduced its harassment even of French “Luteranos.” |

By 1619 the special Aragonese Secretariat had disappeared. Public autos became extremely rare, except in Sicily. The Holy Office survived in the northeast from sheer bureaucratic inertia. It lived on bygone glories, while the Inquisition’s center of activity shifted back to Castile and back to prosecuting Judaizers, this time from Portugal. During its heyday in the Crown of Aragon, the Spanish Inquisition made itself the most deeply respected agency of royal authority. After forty years of harassing prominent conversos and battling their political allies in these largely

autonomous regions, the Holy Office operated at full capacity during the following century by extending its definition of “heresy” and by concentrating its activities against the most vulnerable parts of local society. Unlike Castile, where the Inquisition concentrated much of its energy after 1570 on disciplining ordinary Old Christians into post-Tridentine Catholic orthodoxy, it maintained its authority along the periphery of Spain by public shows of severity against

various types of outsiders. | The political record of the Holy Office varied enormously from place to place

within the Crown of Aragon. In the Kingdom of Aragon it achieved several triumphs, even doing a respectable job of controlling horse-smuggling and risking all its authority (with mixed success) to help the king against Antonio

Pérez. In the Kingdom of Valencia, it learned to flex its muscles against turbulent magnates engaged in the sport of noble banditry. From Basque and Navarrese towns it extradited foreign heretics to die in Castile. Elsewhere it seems far less successful. In the minor tribunals of the Balearics and Sardinia it simply lacked the resources to make its presence adequately felt. In Catalonia it was hamstrung by 1580 by local lawyers, while the Sicilians tried to subvert it with explosions and perjury. Yet it was precisely in Barcelona and Palermo that the forms of the Spanish Inquisition outlasted Spanish government. Both French-ruled Catalonia in the 1640s and Austrian-ruled Sicily after 1720 maintained all the external trappings of the Spanish Inquisition, merely replacing the Spanish Inquisitors with local men: a truly remarkable homage to the legitimacy of this peculiar institution, even at the most turbulent edges of Habsburg Spain.

325

Appendix 1

Deaths at public autos de fe in the Aragonese

Secretariat, 1540-1640 | “‘Relajados en persona,” 1540-1640 Tribunal Jews Moslems Protestants Sodomy Witches Opposition Total

Saragossa[4] 2 26 95 [13] 14 115 O /21 250 Valencia 47 O 4 [94] Navarre 8 50 23 fo) 6 I 88

Barcelona 1 2 36 5 6 3 53 Sicily I 8 36 9) fe) 2 50

Totals 16 181 122 167 12 31 535

Totals for Saragossa include three deaths at the 1576 public auto for undetermined causes (at least three sodomites and two Moriscos were executed among a total of eight people). Sicilian totals include four “miscellaneous” heretics executed between 1618 and 1640, who cannot be fitted into any of these categories. These statistics also include deaths reported from several autos (such as Saragossa 1576, Valencia 1563 and 1564, Navarre 1563, Barcelona 1549, 1566, and 1568, or Sicily 1564, 1566, and 1573) for which we possess summary information about relajados en persona, but lack the relactones de causas. Although these statistics approach completeness ~— they represent over 95 % of

the general public autos held in the Aragonese Secretariat between 1540 and 1640 — in a few instances we still have no usable information about them. Among

the missing public autos are one from Navarre (1562) and one from Saragossa

(1562). The one major lacuna concerns Valencia, where we lack specific information about five public autos held between 1540 and 1560. The copy of the

old Simancas Legajo 300 in the Lea papers (abstracted in his History, m, pp. 561~63) fills this gap very imperfectly; but it does suggest that at least two Judaizers and three foreign Protestants died at the 1554 auto, along with several executions in effigy.

Divided chronologically, these executions present the following patterns

shown in the table opposite. Nearly everywhere the greatest number of | executions occurred between 1560 and 1580: at least 200 deaths have been 326

Deaths at public “autos de fe’ in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1540-1640

Period Barcelona Saragossa Valencia Navarre Sicily

1540-5935 1284 2442[5]13327 II 1560-79 1580-99 O 70 19 68 4

1600-19 I5468 6 36 1620-40 2250) recorded for these five tribunals within twenty years, even excluding two public autos when the Protestant scare was at its peak in 1562. But from 1641 to 1700, the Spanish Inquisition executed only one man anywhere in these five districts,

and he had killed an Inquisitor. Of course, the Mallorca tribunal, which had been virtually dormant since 1535, executed three dozen chuetas in the single year 1691.

327

Appendix 2

Galley condemnations in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1560-1640 Galley sentences in the Secretariat of Aragon, 1560-1640

Offense Saragossa Barcelona’ Valencia Navarre Sicily

“Lutherans” 132 93 71 99 20 (French Protestants) 125 84 64 76 12

(German Protestants) 3 I O 5 2

Jews I e) | I 17 fe) Sodomy 232 58 53 %e) 6) } (French sodomy) 57 14 ike) O O Moriscos/Renegados 593 9 420 61 52

(Morisco 30 sodomy) 1296 I 9 185 OO Bigamy 94 17 Married clerics 4 I 2 4 IO Blasphemy/sacrilege 9 O 8 2 III

Magic/witchcraft 4 I 3 I 48 “Opposition” 43 II O25173 56 I! False testimony 7 Oo Unordained Mass O I 2 2 3 Smuggling horses 4 O O O O

“Heretical proposition” O I O fo) 27

Totals 1,059 269 602 302 523 (Moriscos) 446 (Frenchmen)611 203 6 157 8861 83 45 18

(Italians) 6 12 3 Oo n/a (Englishmen)3 OI O 3 I52 4I (Germans)

Because condemnations to the galleys were an accidental by-product of the Inquisition’s activities, a way of supplementing the insufficiencies of royal courts

(especially in the Crown of Aragon), one finds few regulations about this practice in the cartas acordadas and other collections of inquisitorial legislation.

The most important decree ordered tribunals in 1568 to make all such sen328

Galley condemnations in the Aragonese Secretariat 1560-1640 tences for a minimum of three years, since for lesser periods the cost of food and transportation was deemed excessive. All the tribunals of the Crown of Aragon tried to inflict this punishment on “foreigners” whenever possible. The tribunal

of the Balearic Islands, which executed one person in effigy and nobody in person between 1540 and 1640, sent thirty-two men to the galleys between 1579 and 1606; only six of them were natives, mostly convicted of sex crimes over which this tribunal lacked direct jurisdiction. ! The Aragonese tribunals occasionally encountered men whom they wished to condemn to the galleys but who were physically unfit, especially the guebrados

who had lost an arm. A 1576 ruling sent such men to the royal shipyards at Barcelona for several years of unpaid service. This penalty was rarely specified in official sentences, except by the Barcelona tribunal.? The Inquisition also adapted galley sentences in the light of other extenuating circumstances. For example, a teenager was condemned to serve his first year as a mozo before

starting to pull the oars. More often, the prisoner’s social rank changed the modality of his service. In Aragon, a barber convicted of bigamy proved he was a hidalgo and was thus sentenced to serve his five years on the galleys as an unpaid soldier, not an oarsman; the lord of a Pyrenean fief, convicted a second time of smuggling horses to Huguenots, was sentenced to four years of unpaid service as a gentleman soldier.?

It would be naive to assume that all condemnations by the Inquisition were

actually served by its prisoners for those exact terms. Large numbers of documents scattered through the records of these tribunals testify to numerous adjustments of actual galley service, usually (though not invariably) downwards. For example, an Aragonese peasant convicted of raping a boy was sentenced to life in the galleys by the Saragossa Inquisitors in March 1576. By June 1590 he

had returned to Aragon, claiming that his captain had liberated him. After consultation with the Suprema, the Saragossa tribunal ordered him back to the oars that winter. A printer from Paris appeared in a Logrofio auto in 1592 and

was sentenced to five years in the galleys as a Huguenot, after having been originally condemned to death. He petitioned the Suprema to alter his sentence

because of a bad arm and gout. Apparently he spent five years living in 1 Drawn from L. Pérez, Ll. Muntaner and M. Colom, eds., E/ Tribunal de la Inquisicton en Mallorca:

Relacién de causas de fe 1578-1806, 1 (Palma de Mallorca, 1986). Local men included two bigamists, three homosexuals, and one guilty of incest (who had all been convicted on minor heresy charges). See Inq., Libro 325, fol. 23v, for the 1568 edict. 2 Inq., Libro 1260, fol. 182, and Libro 1234, fol. 406, cite the same edict from Saragossa, dated 1576; but sentences from this tribunal rarely specified the ataracanas (see #53 of the 1597 auto, a Bearnese glassmaker given three years in the shipyards). Instances from Barcelona are more numerous, e.g., #1 of 1585 despachadas, #35 of 1594 despachadas, #21 of 1595 despachadas, #31 of 1596 despachadas.

3 Inq., Libro 988, fols. 289-93 (#14 of Saragossa’s 1575 auto), for the barber who proved his nobility; Libro 989, fols. 95-103 (#17 of 1583/84 despachadas), for the apprentice oarsman; and ibid., fols. 321-34 (#20 of the 1587/88 despachadas), for the recidivist smuggler.

329

Appendix 2

Logrofio’s House of Penitents and was discharged in 1598 a free man. On the other hand, one finds a pathetic case of another Frenchman sentenced to five

years in the galleys “and more at the discretion of the Inquisitor-General” finally petitioning the Suprema for discharge twenty-three years after his original conviction: he had simply been forgotten by the bureaucracy.* The entire subject badly needs thorough investigation. 4 Inq., Libro 989, fol. 782 (#56 of 1589/91 despachadas, whose original condemnation in 1576 has been lost). See Inq., Libro 832, fols. 47—49v, for the méritos of Jean Ruelle; Libro 967, fol. 373, for the forgotten Gascon, Paul de Mun.

330

Appendix 3

Executions in effigy in the Aragonese

Secretariat, 1541-1640 This book has deliberately paid little attention to the people whom the Spanish Inquisition executed in effigy rather than in person, concentrating instead on the most severe physical punishments inflicted on live prisoners. In the sixteenth century as in the twentieth, it made a great deal of difference to the spectators

whether people or statues were being burned after a public auto. From the prisoner’s point of view, it was far better to learn from a safe distance that you

had been executed in effigy than to be sent to the galleys. But from the spectator’s point of view, watching an effigy burn provided an extremely satisfy-

| ing catharsis, far better than watching chained prisoners straggling away to the galleys, leaving their sanbenitos at the water’s edge. From the king’s point of view, imposing galley sentences was a great public service, but burning effigies (except

that of Antonio Pérez) was simply an administrative expense. In the Crown of Aragon after 1540, virtually no one was executed in effigy for financial reasons; the vast majority of these victims were penniless.

“Relajados en estatua,”’ 1541-1640 | Type of victim Barcelona Saragossa Valencia Navarre Sicily

Fugitive OO 7 DeceasedIO4 I[7] OO

Judaizer

Fugitive 42 18 Deceased II 3[11] Oo283234

Protestant

Fugitive IO2 6568 31 II Deceased 20 Miscellaneous | Fugitive Deceased IO2OOOO5O 2 Morisco

Totals 56 36 82 87 38 331

Appendix 3 To the Holy Office itself, an execution in effigy was the moral equivalent of an

execution in person. At the implementation of sentences which followed the public auto, effigies were burned at the same time as living bodies. Either penalty

carried the dubious distinction of hanging a sanbenito in a nearby church, decorated with the victim’s name and a set of flames. As the commentator to Eymeric’s inquisitorial handbook remarked in 1578, putting such effigies in general public autos produced a healthy amount of terror among the public. With such caveats in mind, here are the tabulations for 300 effigy executions (adding a fugitive Moslem apostate burned in effigy at Mallorca in 1581 and two fugitive Protestants similarly executed in Sardinia in 1588) from the Aragonese

Secretariat during its most active century. The “Miscellanous” include a fugitive charged with both magic and sodomy (Barcelona, 1552); two political rituals played out in Aragon (Don Felipe de Bardaxi in 1563 and Antonio Pérez in 1592); the multifaceted heretic Zosimo Cannata and an alumbrada who had committed suicide (Sicily, 1607 and 1640); and five witches from Navarre who

were negativos convencidos (Logrofio, 1610). , Divided chronologically, these ritual executions exhibit the pattern shown in the table below.

Period Barcelona Saragossa Valencia Navarre Sicily

1541-59 3 7 [7] 0 25 | 1560-79 45 20 8 37 8

1580-99 ) 3 63 45 3 1600-19 O 7 24 I2 O5 II 1620-40

The incidence of such ritual executions was very uneven throughout the Aragonese Secretariat. With respect to Protestantism, a relatively constant picture emerges, with executions in effigy concentrated between 1560 and 1580 and somewhat outnumbering those in person. Fugitive Frenchmen provided the vast majority of these effigies, just as they did of living victims. Ritual executions of Moriscos were concentrated between 1575 and 1595, with each of the three

principal tribunals following a different tactic. Saragossa executed many Moriscos in person but very few in effigy; Valencia followed the reverse policy (it

even burned more effigies of Aragonese Moriscos than did the tribunal of Aragon); Logrofio burned more skeletons but fewer cardboard statues than Valencia.

On the rare occasions when someone who had been executed in effigy reappeared before the Aragonese tribunals of the Holy Office, anything could happen. A young Morisca from Aguilar returned to her native village after 332

Executions in effigy in the Aragonese Secretariat, 1541-1640 receiving a pardon from Rome, but was executed as a recidivist eight years after

her first conviction. A Castilian student, penanced in 1559 and executed in effigy as a fugitive in 1562, was captured twenty years later while serving with the Spanish army in Italy under an assumed name. After many tribulations, he

was returned to Saragossa and finally condemned to serve four years in the galleys as an unpaid soldier, on condition that he purchase a slave to row in his _ place. And finally, the same tribunal of Saragossa let Don Felipe de Bardaxi off with an official reprimand when he surrendered himself eight years after his effigy had been burned in 1563.! It seems worth noting that the Saragossa tribunal, which had the lowest totals of executions in effigy after 1540, was sometimes prevented by the Suprema from performing such rituals against fugitives after it had voted them. Such happened with the prominent Morisco Gaspar Zaydejos in 1581, and with three of Antonio Pérez’s most important followers in 1593.” ' See above, pp. 155, 87; and Inq., Libro 328, fols. 39—39V, 55, 57V, 71V, 89, 90, 95V, 110, IIV, 114,

117, 132-32v, 185, 206v, 219-20 (Jayme Sanchez alias Juan de Berri) 2 Inq., Libro 327, fols. 286v-87 (Zaydejos); British Library, Egerton Ms. 1508, fol. 267.

333

Glossary alfaquis: Muslim clergy serving Spanish Mudejars and later Moriscos. aljama: Arabic term for ghettos segregating Jews or Moors; the corresponding Castilian words were juderia or moreria. “Audiencia”: royal appellate courts for Catalonia and Valencia, frequently in conflict with the Inquisition; the supreme tribunals of Aragon (the Court of

Justicia) and Sicily (the Gran Corte), even more hostile to it, were locally elected. auto de fe: “act of faith,” or public ceremony at which Inquisition announced its

sentences. They could be particular, with only one prisoner, or general, with | several; if held with maximum solemnity in a public square, rather than a parish church, it was an auto piublico general.

| beata: religious woman, not belonging to any cloistered order. comisario: local representative of the Inquisitors, usually a cleric (unlike the familiars), responsible for taking testimony and collecting denunciations in remote parts of a district. calificadores: inquisitorial consultants who read testimony or books in order to assess the type and amount of heresy in their remarks. conversos: “converts,” a more polite term for baptized Jews or Moslems. convivencia: “living together,” usually applied to the coexistence of Christianity, Judaism and Islam in medieval Spain.

de levi: formal abjuration by people “lightly” suspect of heresy, the lowest category employed by the Holy Office. de vehementi: formal abjuration by people “vehemently” suspect of heresy, an intermediate stage between “light” (de levt) suspicion and “reconciliation” for

formal heresy. ,

“Diputacién’’: standing parliamentary committees in the Iberian provinces of the Crown of Aragon, comprised of deputies (“Diputados,” ““Diputats”) from each

estate, who conducted business when the provincial estates were not in

session. In Catalonia it was also known as the ‘“‘Generalitat.” , “Fiscal”: chief prosecutor of inquisitorial or secular court. fueros: customary legal privileges of all non-Castilian provinces, each of which had a different set.

: 334

Glossary

““Germanias’’: “brotherhood,” or confederation of rebels in Valencia during the 1520. letrado: university graduate in law, ordinary background for senior Inquisition staff.

licenciado: owner of advanced university degree, often a mark of status.

limpieza de sangre: “purity of blood,” freedom from any Jewish or Morisco ancestry. ‘““Mudejar’: Moslems living under Christian rule; when baptized, they became Moriscos. reconciliado: penitent heretic who had been formally “reconciled”’ to the church

by the Holy Office; the punishment normally included confiscation of property and wearing of sanbenitos. relajado: heretics “relaxed” to the secular arm to be executed, either in person or in effigy. sanbenito: ‘“‘sacred cloth” or penitential garment imposed by the Inquisition on convicted heretics; after expiration of sentence or death, they were hung in the major church of the heretic’s city.

335

BLANK PAGE

Index

abortion and Inquisition, 175, 244 Cortes (parliament) of, 19-20, 81, 86, 277,

Agreda (Castile), 98, 154, 201, 213 - 317

Aguilar del rio Alhama (Rioja), 151-56, Aragon, Kingdom of, 4, 10, 32, 36, 39, 44-45,

161-63, 201, 208, 213, 332-33 48, 50, 53, 59, 65, 71, 80-104, 111, 127, Alava, Basque province of, 144, 146, 149, 156, 142, 189-90, 196-201, 209-30, 264, 267,

245 275, 292; appellate court, see Justicia, court

Albret, Jeanne d’ (Princess of Béarn, of; Cortes (parliament) of, 6-8, 11-13, 23, 1555~72), 84, 119-20, 151, 231-32 81, 83, 92, 97-98, 101; Viceroys of, 50, 93,

alchemy and Inquisition, 71 96-98, 207, 214

alfaquis (Moslem religious leaders), 133, 152, Aragonese Secretariat of Inquisition, xii-xiii,

154, 163, 191-93, 201-02, 207, 212, 216, 19, 26-27, 31, 35, 36-38, 43, 45, 47-50,

227-29, 293 53, 66, 69-72, 144-45, 148, 156, 237, 244,

Algeria, 191 279, 284, 288-89, 304, 318, 324, 332 Algiers, 138, 154, 192, 202, 219-21, 225, 240, Aran, Val de (Catalonia), 119-20, 122 293 Aranda, Count of (Aragonese magnate), 95, Alicante (Valencia), 128, 307 QQ, 215

Aljaferia (Moslem palace-fortress at Arbués, St. Pedro (martyred Aragonese Saragossa), 12, 20, 24, 79-80, 85-86, 95, Inquisitor, 1484-85), 11-12, 15, 23, 51, 58,

98-99, 103, 139, 219, 258, 278 79-80, 83, 99, 311, 323

aljama (Moslem or Jewish ghetto), 13, 206 Arce y Reinoso, Diego de (Inquisitor-General, Aljamiado (Morisco script), 211-13, 216-17, 1643-65), 308

226, 230 Arcos de Jalon (Castile), 201, 212 1591), 95-96 inquisitorial official), 72

Almenara, Marquis of (Governor of Aragon, Arguello, Gaspar (seventeenth-century Almonacir de la Sierra (Aragon), 89-90, 230 Arles, Martin of (fifteenth-century Navarrese Alumbrados or Illuminists, 57, 178, 180, 303, author), 256-57

318 Armada, English, 214

America, inquisitorial tribunals in, 31-32, 35, Armada, Spanish, 148

48, 287-88, 305, 307-08; see also Lima; Arnedo (Rioja), 150,158 || Amillo Mexico Ascé (Catalonia), 201 family (Moriscos of Aguilar), 152-53, Astor, Dr. Antonio (Barcelona canon), 115-16

162 astrology and Inquisition, 177-78, 182, 258

Amsterdam, 309 Augustinian Order, 11, 136, 235; aS prisoners, Anabaptism, 128, 169, 251, 319 128, 169-71, 175-76, 179, 182, 319 Andalusia, 106, 192 autos de fe, xii, 8-10, 12, 16-18, 24, 26-27,

Andorra (Catalonia), 119, 121-22, 246, 268 34-35, 37-41, 43-45, 47-52, 54-58, 66, _ ,

Antwerp, 41, 238 69-71, 87-89, 99-102, 106, 108-12, Cardona family 150, 154, 156, 160, 167, 170-74, 177,

Aragon, Admiral of, 132-33, 137; see also 114-15, 123-24, 127, 129-30, 139-42, Aragon, Council of, 64, 92-93, 114, 134, 179-84, 189-90, 197-99, 202~03, 205,

283 207, 219, 233-35, 237, 239-42, 247,

Aragon, Crown of, 4—5, g—10, 12, 14-15, 258~59, 263, 265-70, 278-83, 285, 22-25, 27-28, 31, 35, 39, 48-49, 60, 65, 295-97, 303-04, 307-11, 313, 316, 112, 189, 237, 271, 275-77; 279; 312; 318-20, 326-27, 33 1-33; prisoners

337

Index

autos de fe cont. Bologna (Italy), 181 liberated as, 109, 184; sermons as, 51, books, Arabic, 112, 152, 205-06, 211-13, 222, 55-57 229-30 (see also Aljamiado); burning of, 22, Avignon (France), 244 35, 103, 109, 128, 213, 239 (see also Bible;

Aznar Cardona, Pedro (seventeenth-century Koran); other heretical, 35, 40, 67, 82-83,

Aragonese author), 213, 224, 227-28 103-04, 109, 119, 128, 130, 148, 150,

7 157-58, 167, 182, 270

Balearic Islands, 15, 19, 25, 60-61, 71, 123, Bordeaux (France), 150; Parlement of, 271

215, 309 Borgia family (Valencian magnates), 134-37,

bandoleros (bandits), 84, 93, 107-08, 117-18, 284; see also Gandia, Duke of; Montesa,

130, 241, 275 Order of

Barbastro (Aragon), 87 Brea (Aragon), 211, 214-15 Barcelona, city of, 13-14, 32, 54, 64, 108-10, Bull of Crusade, 83, 119, 170-71, 240,

121, 128, 141, 215, 220, 232, 266, 268, 242-43 280, 329; bishop of, 56; Inquisition tribunal Burgos, diocese of, 144, 174 of, 14, 19, 23, 25-26, 33-34, 36-37, 49-52, | Burgundian heretics, 25, 232-33, 243 55-57, 64-65, 67-69, 71, 73, 88, 105-24,

176, 190, 234, 236, 238, 240, 242, 244, Calabria (Italy), 169, 171, 181 |

246-48, 250-52, 259, 264-68, 270, Calahorra (Rioja): Inquisition tribunal of 278-82, 285, 287-89, 310, 312, 314, 316, (1521~70), 67, 143-45, 149, 259; plague at, 318, 320, 326-27, 331; plague at, 278, 280 263; see also Navarre, Inquisition tribunal of Bardaxi, Antonio (Aragonese royal official), 14 | Calatayud (Aragon), 101, 235

Bardaxi, Felipe (Aragonese nobleman), 87, Calatrava, Order of, 136

332-33 ] Calvin, John, 168, 223, 235, 242

Basque lands, xi, 6, 36, 47, 59-60, 67, 144, Camargo, Don Juan (Inquisitor-General,

281; see also Alava; Guipuzcoa; Vizcaya 1720-33), 309-10 Basques as prisoners, 47, 50, 146, 149, Cannata, Zosimo (Sicilian surgeon), 164-66, 159-61, 238, 242, 245, 247; 273; 282-83, 332

315; see also witchcraft canonries, revenues used by Inquisition, 40,

Bayonne (France), 246, 312 52n, 111

Béarn, Principality of, 81-82, 84-85, 87, 89, canons as prisoners, 23, 115-17, 168, 177,

gi-g2, 94-96, 98-102, 108, 119-20, 138, 184, 206, 318 149, 207, 218, 235, 237, 239, 242, 244-46; | Cantimori, Delio, 181

see also Albret, Jeane d’; Henry IV Capuchin as prisoner, 245 Béarnese prisoners, 33, 88-91, 242, 244 Cardona family (Valencia magnates),

Belchite (Aragon), 199, 202, 227; Count of 132-33 (Aragonese nobleman), 51, 83 Carmelite Order, 123, 235; as prisoners, 166, Benamir family (Valencian Moriscos), 13 1-33 172, 177 Benedictine Order, as prisoners, 114-15, Caro Baroja, Julio, 305, 307-08, 310

117-18, 167, 170, 183, 240 Carranza, Bartolome (Archbishop of Toledo,

Bernaldez, Andrés (Seville chronicler), 3 1559-76), 41, 45, 49, 95, 156

bestiality and Inquisition, 106, 108, 113, 140, Castile, Council of, 274 142, 282-84, 288, 291-94, 296-98, 315; see Castile, Crown of, 5, 35-36, 44, 65, 94, 101,

also sodomy 200, 275, 279-80

Beza, Theodore (successor of Calvin), 251 Castilian Secretariat of Inquisition, xil, 4, 13, Bible and Inquisition, 6, 22, 40, 110, 220, 236, 19, 35, 41, 45, 53, 67

238-40, 242 Catalan: as Inquisitor, 59; language, 70;

bigamy and Inquisition, 25, 34-35, 39, 53, 55, prisoners, 55, 57, 109-11, 236, 238, 258,

69, 80, 84, 100, 108-09, 117, 164, 184, 291-92, 311

328-29 , Catalonia, Principality of, 4, 13-14, 19, 23, 45, |

Bilbao (Vizcaya), 43, 62, 66, 144, 146-49, 232, 59, 64, 73, 105-24, 245, 274-75; Audiencia

: 338

263, 270, 274, 281, 315 (appellate court) of, 56, 109, 112-16, 118,

blasphemy and Inquisition, 25-26, 40, 47, 53, 278; Corts (parliament) of, 56, 110, 113, 80, 86-87, 95, 109, 164, 166-67, 170, 173, 122, 324; Viceroys of, 13-14, 56, 58, 109, 177, 282, 294, 316, 328; see also Christ 112-15, 122, 124, 137, 252, 274-75, 291

Jesus; Virgin Mary Catania (Sicily), 66, 175

| Index Catholic Reformation: see fornicarios; Trent, Daroca (Aragon), 90, 202

Council of ) De la Caballeria family (Aragon conversos),

Centelles family (Valencian nobles), 128-31, 23-24, 276-78

134 Dedieu, Jean-Pierre, 30-31, 53

Cervera, Mateo (Sicilian Inquisitor, 1512-20), Dominguez Ortiz, Antonio, 246

18 Dominican Order, 56, 179, 197, 231-32, 235;

Charles I, King of Spain (1516-55), 18, 24, and Inquisition, 6, 15-16, 56, 66, 124 (see 31, 33, 35; see also Charles V, Holy Roman also Torquemada, Tomas de); as prisoners,

Emperor 168, 170, 176, 286, 317

Charles II, King of Spain (1665-1700), Drake, Francis, 148, 214

251-52, 308 Duarte, Jugu (Aragonese Morisco), go-92, 219

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1519-55), Dutch prisoners, 147, 149, 246, 249-50, 252 20, 26-27, 40-41, 130, 179-80; see also

Charles I, King of Spain Ebro River, 11-12, 143-45, 190, 199, 201, Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor (1711-40), 208, 232

319 ecumenicism and Inquisition, g1, 129, 165,

Chinchén, Count of, 93, 134, 283; see also 168

Aragon, Council of Edict of Faith (annual parish proclamation

Christ Jesus, heresies about, 129, 166-67, by Inquisition), 10, 47, 88, 137, 284, 286,

170, 174, 215, 227, 286, 306 294

circumcision and Inquisition, 82, 192-93, 206, | Edict of Grace (amnesty by Inquisition for

218, 220, 292, 309 voluntary confessions), 13, 16, 92, 151-52,

Cisneros, Cardinal (Inquisitor-General of 154, 156, 160, 162-63, 197, 203-04, 206,

Castile, 1507-16), 18 217, 258-59

Clement VII (Pope, 1523-34), 36, 277 effigy executions by Inquisition, 8, 16, 21, 32, Clement VIII (Pope, 1592-1605), 287 39, 43-44, 48, 87, 101, 109, 117, 124, 129, comisarios (local commissioners of Inquisition), 138, 146, 149-50, 152—54, 164-65, 167, 40, 66, 86-88, 120-21, 147-48, 154, 159, — 171, 174, 179, 195, 203, 205-06, 221,

231-32, 270, 274, 285 236-38, 241, 249, 258, 281, 303, 306, 308,

Compajfiero family (Aragon Moriscos), 206, 3Z1O—11, 313-14, 319, 331-33; effigy

218-22, 293 reconciliations by Inquisition, 152, 161

Concordats between Inquisition and officials in _ Elizabeth I, Queen of England (1558-1603),

Crown of Aragon, 19-21, 27, 64, 68, 110, 147

114-15, 197, 274-75, 287 England, 158, 246, 297, 309

Condé, Prince of (French Viceroy of English: as familiars, 62, 147; as prisoners, 71,

Catalonia), 124, 320 146-49, 172, 233, 237-38, 246-47, 252,

confiscations by Inquisition, 8—9, 11, 19, 21, 314, 328 44, 50, 121, 143, 153-54, 165, 167, 193, Erasmus, Desiderius, 130, 168 197, 204, 262, 264-65, 267-68, 273 Espina, Alonso (Barcelona Inquisitor,

Contreras, Jaime, 29-32, 127, 190 1487-92), 14

conversos, 3-26, 30, 32-33, 35-37) 48, 50, 53; Espinosa, Diego de (Inquisitor-General,

62, 75, 79, 86, 101, 105, 109, 128~29, 1566-71), 45, 68-71 156-58, 161-63, 181, 240; see also Judaizers | Estado, Consejo de: see Council of State,

Cordoba, Inquisition tribunal of, 34, 48, 233, Spanish

303-05 estados as inquisitorial offence, 47

Corpus Christi procession, 68, 71, 165 Estremadura, province of, 44-45, 54, 307 corregidores (municipal regents), 3, 41, 145 Eucharist, heresies about, 165, 169, 228, 240, corruption by Inquisition, 58, 68, 73, 88, 114, 243, 247, 319

131, 215, 311 Exeter (England), 148

Corsica, 171 Eymeric, Nicolas (fourteenth-century Council of State, Spanish, 189, 248-49 Inquisitor and author), 4, 58 crucifix, sacrileges with, 128, 166, 220, 228, 306-07 familiars of Inquisition, 56, 67-66, 88, 97, 99,

305 324

Cuenca, Inquisition tribunal of, 37, 48, 190, 103, I1Q—20, 122, 124, 151, 180, 196, 201, 200-01, 212-13, 219-20, 233, 236, 259, 207, 221, 223, 226, 236, 287, 296, 317,

339

Index Ferdinand I, King of Aragon (1479-1516), Germanias (Valencian revolt 1520-22), 36,

280 Germany, 83, 168 Ferrer, St. Vincent, 22 | Ghent (Belgium), 297 375s 7) 10-20, 22-24, 79-80, 143, 276-77, 126

finances of Inquisition: see canonries; Gran Corte (Sicilian appellate court), 62-63 confiscations; corruption by Inquisition Granada: Inquisition tribunal of, 34, 48, 59, Fiscal (prosecutor) of Inquisition, 59-61, 111, _ 127, 233, 271, 305, 310; Kingdom of, 13,

267, 272, 276-77, 287, 207 36, 44-45, 89, 126, 171, 191-93, 209-10,

Flanders, 18, 35, 240 223, 317

Flemish prisoners, 43, 128, 146, 148-49, 216, | Greek prisoners, 171-72

233-34, 236-38, 305 Gregory XV (Pope, 1621-23), 183

Florence (Italy), 168, 173, 178, 285 Guipuzcoa, Basque province of, 67, 144, 263,

fornicarios as prisoners, 47, 53-54, 174 268

France, 73, 86, 101-02, 109, 121-22; as gypsies, 33, 323-24 refuge from Inquisition, 14, 93, 155,

207-08, 240, 283 Henningsen, Gustav, 29-32, 127, 159-60,

Franche-Comté, 168, 251; see also Burgundian 180

heretics Henry IV, King of Castile (1454-74), 3

Francis I, King of France (1515-47), 143, 244 | Henry IV, King of France (1589-1610) and

Francis of Assisi, St., 243 Navarre (1572-1610), 95, 98, 120, 150-51, Franciscans as prisoners, 129, 167, 172-73, 244~45; see also Vendéme, Duchy of

175, 178, 180, 182-83, 319 Heredia, Don Diego (Aragonese nobleman),

French: as familiars, 62, 66n; immigration to 94, 100 Spain, 82, 98, 100, 106-08, 121, 128, 159, hermits as prisoners, 106, 169

161, 204, 223, 226, 246; as prisoners, Hijar (Aragon), go, 215 32-34, 39, 43, 45, 50, 53-57, 75, 84, homosexuality and Inquisition, 34, 39, 47, 8g—90, 105-06, 108-10, 113, 120-21, 135, 63-64, 74-75, 112, 137, 140, 165-66, 146, 161, 167, 172, 233-52, 274, 281-83, 174-76, 220, 277, 280, 282-83, 288, 291, 285, 291, 296, 305, 314-15, 328, 332 295; see also sodomy Fuentes, Count of (Aragonese nobleman), horse-smuggling and Inquisition, 69, 80,

202~04 : 86-89, 92, 94, 102, 117-18, 120, 122,

fueros (legal privileges), in Crown of Aragon, xi, 328-29 5-6, 10-13, 80-81, 126, 142, 144, 321 Huesca (Aragon), 85, 218, 220, 270, 314, 318; University of, 102

Galicia, Inquisition tribunal of, 41, 48, 248 Huguenots, 57, 75, 80, 85, 87, 89, 91, 110,

Galileo, 178 117-18, 132, 148-51, 161~63, 169, 181,

: galleys, Inquisition condemnations to, 32-35, 201, 214, 303, 314, 329; see also Béarn, 44, 49-50, 55, $7, 64, 68-69, 71, 80, 84, Principality of; French, as prisoners

88-91, 100, 106, 1o8—og, 112-14, 118-19, | Hungary, 168, 172n 121, 124, 127, 129, 137-39, 142, 146-48, 150-51, 153~-58, 166, 168, 170, 177-78, Index of Prohibited Books, 40 182-83, 190, 192-96, 201, 215, 217, 219, Innocent VIII (Pope, 1484-92), 4 222~23, 225, 236, 238-42, 245, 247, 267, Inquisitor-General: see Supreme Council of

281-82, 288, 293-94, 311, 315-16, 319, Inquisition

328-30, 333 Inquisitors: attacks on, 11-12, 63, 99, 179; as Gandia (Valencia), 136; Duke of, 195; see also bishops, 56, 58, 63, 267, 273; careers of, Borgia family 58-61; misconduct by, 67—69, 83-84, 264, Garces de Marcilla, Juan (Captain of Teruel, 266—67; natives as, §g—60, 143; pensioned

1485-87), 7-9 off, 145n

Garcia Carcel, Ricardo, 22, 59, 127 Isabella I, Queen of Castile (1474-1504), 3-5,

Gea (Aragon), 202-06, 214 11, 13, 16, 22, 280, 306

Geneva (Switzerland), 148, 167-68, 181, Italians: as familiars, 66n; as prisoners, 40—41,

250-51, 297 44, 75, 94-95, 98, 100, 105-06, 108, 142,

Genevilla (Navarre), 156-58 164-88, 233-34, 236-37, 258, 280, 283, German prisoners, 43, 128-29, 147, 169, 172, 285, 287, 291-92, 296-97, 313, 316, 328

233, 237-38, 252, 328 Italy, 93, 168, 244, 283, 286, 333 340

Index

Jaca (Aragon), 88, 258, 315 312-15, 318, 329; see also Navarre,

Janissaries, 91, 172, 176 Inquisition tribunal of

Jerome, St., 240 Lombardy (Italy), 167, 175

Jesuit Order, 134 London, 147-48

Juan of Austria, Don (sixteenth-century Lopez de Cisneros, Juan (Sicilian Inquisitor,

Spanish royal bastard), 110, 171 1658), 179

Juan of Austria, Don (seventeenth-century Lopez de Vitoria y Equinoa, Miguel

Spanish royal bastard), 311 (prosecutor of Supreme Council of

Juana, Princess, Regent of Castile (1555-59), Inquisition, 1642), 297-98

4! Louis XIII, King of France (1610-43), 123

Judaizers, xii, 7-27, 32, 37-39, 41, 43-44, 48, Luna, Don Juan de (Aragonese nobleman), 97,

50, 52, §4, 67-68, 109, 125, 128, 142, 100

156-58, 161-63, 169, 181, 203, 264, Luteranos: see Protestantism 303-13, 326, 328, 331; see also conversos Luther, Martin, 20, 35, 41, 110-11, 168, 240 Justicia, court of (Aragon appellate court), 11, Lutheranism, 37, 128, 169, 239, 251

85, 92-93, 95, 98-99 Lyon (France), 238, 243,256 Kabbala, 177, 181 Macanaz (Philip V’s minister), 309

Koran, 131, 210, 212-13, 216, 218-19, 227, Madrid, city of, 54, 70-71, 81, 93, 115, 128,

229 134, 137, 141-42, 145, 216, 231-32,

Kosher butchering and Inquisition, 126-27 251-52, 270, 280, 289-90, 298, 306-09, 313

La Rochelle (France), 147-48, 150 magicians and Inquisition, 25-26, 74, 170, - Lancre, Pierre de (French judge), 159—60, 174, 176-79, 181-82, 258, 267, 281, 315,

271-72 318-19, 328, 332; Moslem magicians, 131,

Languedoc (French province), 108, 207, 231, 205-06, 213-14, 217, 222-23; see also

248-49, 252 astrology; witchcraft

Lanuza, Blasco de (Aragonese chronicler), Malleus Maleficarum (handbook on witchcraft),

97-98, 209-10 256, 270, 274

Lapeyre, Henri, 127, 190-91, 208 Mallorca, Inquisition tribunal of, 23, 25, 39, Laporta, Tristan (Aragonese judge), 11 60-61, 71, 174, 244, 285-86, 309, 317, lawyers as prisoners, 16, 20, 23, 110-11, 158, 327, 329, 332

167, 174, 216, 281, 314 Malta, 172, 250

Lea, Henry Charles, xi, 20-21, 29, 42, 68-69, = Mararion, Gregorio, 94

72-74, 262 : Marot, Clement, 242

Leo X (Pope, 1510-21), 20 Marseilles (France), 243-44

Leon, Luis de, 49 materialism and Inquisition, 129, 173-74, 177, Lepanto, battle of (1571), 110, 171 180, 319-20

Lérida (Catalonia), 11, 23, 190, 215, 314 Mayorini, J.-P. (Italian crony of Antonio

Libro Verde de Aragon, 71, 103~04, 256, Pérez), 94-95, 98, 100

276-77, 311, 323 ““Mazmarro, Saint,” game, 158

306-07 162

Lima, Inquisition tribunal of, 305, 307 Mecca, 210

limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”), 129, Medrano family (Navarrese conversos), 157-58,

Lisbon, 158, 305 merchants as prisoners, 22-23, 37, 55-57, 973 Livorno (Italy), 309 120, 128-29, 147, 150, 174, 212, 218-20,

Llerena, Inquisition tribunal of, 48, 233, 307 227, 236, 240, 248-49, 258, 310-11; Llorente, Juan Antonio (Inquisition official and kidnapped by order of Inquisition, 117

historian), 29 Messiah, bogus, 169-70, 318

Logrofio (Rioja), city of, 60, 144-45, 147, 235, Messina (Sicily), 16, 18, 60, 66, 167, 170-71,

243; deaths in prison of, 145, 150, 152, 173, 176-77, 180, 183 155, 160~61, 269; House of Penitents, 139, | Mexico, Inquisition tribunal of, 287-88, 305,

155-56, 219, 330; Inquisition tribunal of 308 (1570-1820), 47-49, 51-52, 75, 139, 190, Milan (Italy), 176, 243 200-02, 208, 219-20, 240, 242, 244, 247, Mislata (Valencia), 193-96, 199

249, 251, 268-74, 284-85, 304, 310, Mohammed, 222, 227 341

Index Molinism and Inquisition, 318-20 notaries of Inquisition, 61, 68, 97, 123 monks as prisoners, 16, 23, 25, 43-44,

176-79, 237, 258, 280, 290; see also Oliva (Valencia), 195 Augustinian Order; Benedictine Order; Olivares, Count-Duke of, 65, 126, 304,

Capuchin as prisoner; Carmelite Order; 306-07 Dominican Order; Franciscans as prisoners; “opposition to the free and correct functioning

Trinitarians as prisoners of the Holy Office,” 20, 33, 38-40, 44,

' Montesa, Order of (Valencia), 134-37 49-50, 53, 64, 84, 86, gg—100, 102, 108, Montpellier (France), 117, 231, 248 110, 118, 126-27, 223, 321-22, 326, 328; Montserrat, shrine of (Catalonia), 112, 241, see also Inquisitors, attacks on; Moriscos,

243, 250 killing familiars; perjury

Monzé6n (Aragon), 19, 264 Oran (Algeria), 118, 282

Moriscos, xii, 10, 36, 41, 44, 50, 81, 109, Orihuela (Valencia), 140, 284 125—27, 131; baptism of, 36, 132, 151, 203; | Orthodox church: see Greek prisoners

disarmament of, 85—86, 91-92, 101-02, Ozen family (Rioja Moriscos), 152-54, 163 204; expulsion of, 88, 203, 207, 229, 304;

as familiars, 62, 131; killing familiars, 65, Padua (Italy), 167 85, 102, 193, 196, 201, 207; laws of, 133, Palermo, city of, 16, 18, 43, 64, 73, 164,

IQI-—Q2, 216; mosques, 132-33; as 168-71, 176, 178-80, 248, 289, 319;

prisoners, 26, 30, 33-35, 38-39, 43, 48-49, Archbishop of, 60, 63; plague at, 173

, 52, 54, 74n, 75, 80, 82-85, 100, 102, 132, Pamplona (Navarre), city of, 66, 143, 147,

135, 137-39, 151-56, 161-63, 171, 149-51, 161-63, 208, 235, 256, 259, 189-230, 282-83, 291-93, 304-05; | 263-65, 314; Bishop of, 146, 216, 259, 263, 310-11, 326, 328, 331-33; rebellions by, 268, 271, 309 44-45, 89, 93, 127, 131; suicides of, 195, Papacy and Spanish Inquisition, 4-5, 10, 20,

205 24, 36, 40-41, 43, I1O—11, 113, 116, 119,

Morocco, 215, 220 123, 132, 135, 154-55, 183, 244, 277-78, Mudejars (Moslems under Christian rule), 6, 287 10, 36, 126, 151, 196, 199, 210, 280 Paramo, Luis de (Sicilian Inquisitor), 63 Murcia, city of, 43-44, 202; Inquisition Paris, 84, 102, 234, 238-39, 329; Parlement tribunal of, 43-45, 48, 53, 140, 190, 236, of, 237, 297

284 pasadores de caballos: see horse-smugglers Paul IV (Pope, 1555-59), 40-41, 44

Naples: city of, 16-17, 175, 179, 182; Penyafort, St. Ramon (thirteenth-century Kingdom of, 16-17, 20, 96, 167; Viceroy of, Catalan), 4, 111

16-17 Pérez, Antonio (secretary to Philip II), 28, 49,

Narbonne (France), 117 73-74, 82, 86, 93-103, 322, 331-33

Navarre, Inquisition tribunal of, 36, 49, 51-52, | Pérez, Gil (Valencian Morisco), 138-39

| 58, 60, 66-68, 70, 88, 143-63, 234, 236, perjury and Inquisition, 17, 38n, 138-39, 178,

238, 248, 258-60, 263-64, 268, 281, 182-85, 205, 328

326-28, 33 1-32; see also Calahorra, Perpignan (Catalonia), 9, 24, 64, 107, 110, Inquisition tribunal of; Logrofio, Inquisition 113, 115, 117, 121, 236

tribunal of Peter, St., and sodomy, 174, 286

Navarre, Kingdom of, xi, 12, 20, 38, 47-48, Philip II, King of Spain (1555-98), 27, 33-34, 50, 59, 73, 143, 146, 149, 190, 208, 244, 41-42, 47, 49-51, 60, 62-63, 70, 73, 80, 249, 259-60, 264, 280; appellate court of, 85-86, 89, 92-96, 102, 110, 113, 119, 126, 260, 263, 268-69; Cortes (parliament) of, 137, 171, 201, 215, 232—33, 244-45, 269,

59, 64, 143; Navarrese prisoners in other 280, 287, 289, 322 tribunals, 32, 225, 283; Viceroy of, 143 Philip III, King of Spain (1598-1621), 63,

Netherlands, 298, 309, 313 114, 156, 246, 248, 250, 274 Nimes (France), 248 Philip IV, King of Spain (1621-65), 31, 65, noblemen: at autos, 50-52, 306, 308; as 123, 306-07

familiars, 62-65, 180; as prisoners, 16, Philip V, King of Spain (1701-45), 309 23-24, 45, 52, 63-64, 83, 86-88, 120, physicians as prisoners, 16, 18, 157, 171, 173, . 125-26, 130-37, 166-67, 174-75, 183-84, 212, 217, 234, 295, 323; surgeons as

193, 204-05, 280-82, 284, 286-87, 329 prisoners, 164-65, 173, 182, 244, 310 : 342

Index

Picardy (France), 169 San Sebastian (Guipuzcoa), 67, 144, 146-49, Piedmontese prisoners, 167-68, 181 160, 235

Pius IV (Pope, 1559-64), 41 sanbenitos (penitential garments), 101, 179, Poland, prisoners from, 168, 172n, 233, 237, 331-32

252 Sanchez, Alonso (Ferdinand’s treasurer), 16

Portugal, 135, 138, 215; Inquisition of, 298; Sanchez, Gabriel (Ferdinand’s treasurer), 11 prisoners from, 30, 38, 48, 53-54, 58, 106, | Santander (Cantabria), 149

129-30, 172n, 181, 240, 303-13 Santangel family (Teruel conversos), 8-9 Prat, Juan (Aragonese parliament official, Santiago de Compostela (Galicia), 293

1518), 20-21, 95 Saragossa, City of, 5, 7-14, 23-24, 64-65, 82,

priests as prisoners, 23, 25, 34, 44, 84, 141, 85, 92—93, 120, 128, 149, 199, 210-11,

149-50, 160, 167-68, 170, 174-79, 218, 225, 227-29, 232, 239, 275; 183-84, 229, 245, 258, 268, 272-73, Archbishop of, 12, 50, 83, 93, 95, 138, 280-82, 284-85, 295, 317, 319 277-78; Inquisition tribunal of, 5, 10-12, Protestantism and Inquisition, 27, 34-36, 15-16, 19, 25-26, 32-33, 36-38, 45, 38-39, 41-45, 48-49, 67, 69, 71, 82, 49-52, 56, 59, 65, 67-68, 70, 75-76, 84-87, 89, 105, 108-10, 128-31, 167-69, 79-104, 122, 135, 138-39, 144, 155, 190, 171-72, 180, 204, 231-52, 326, 328, 332; 192, 197-99, 202, 204, 213-14, 220, 234, | Protestant converts, 148-49, 172, 239, 236-38, 240, 242, 246-48, 255-58, 264, . 250-52; Protestant songs, 232, 241-433 see 267-68, 270-75, 277, 280-84, 288-90, also Anabaptism; Huguenots; Lutheranism 292, 294, 296-97, 310-12, 314-18, Pulgar, Fernando (Secretary to Isabella I), 3-4 326-29, 331-33; University of, 84, 234, 284 Sardinia, 130, 164, 317; Inquisition tribunal

Quietism, 319 of, 15, §9-61, 70n, 71, 73, 173, 181, 184, Quiroga, Gaspar de (Inquisitor-General, 243-44, 259, 264, 286-87, 317, 332

1573-94), 70, 73, 219 Sarmiento, Diego (Barcelona Inquisitor), 265-67, 271-72

Rabadan, Mohamed (seventeenth-century Scandinavian converts, 233, 252

Morisco author), 210 Schafer, Ernst, 42

Rabelais, Francois, 130 schoolteachers as prisoners, 22-23, 33, 42; Ragusa, Republic of, 282 108, 150, 167, 173, 175, 212, 217, 235, relaciones de causas (annual summaries of cases 238, 290 judged), 29-32, 40, 43, 48, 55, 69-70, 173, | Scots prisoners, 50, 55, 239, 246 282, 285, 288n, 311; monthly summaries, secrecy and Inquisition, 72-74, 143

q1—72 Segorbe (Valencia), 138, 202, 218; Bishop of,

Remensa (Catalan peasant revolt), 14 133

renegados (apostates to Islam), 16-17, 24-25, Segovia (Castile), 229 | 55-57, 105-06, 108, 142, 164, 171-73, 328 | Servetus, Michael (Aragonese Protestant), 83,

_ _Ribagorza, County of (Aragon), 92-93, 258; 234 Count of, 93, 134-35, 221, 283-84 Seville, city of, 3-4, 11, 13, 130, 285, 289~g0, Ribera, St. Juan (Archbishop of Valencia), 136 303; Archbishop of, 40, 318; Inquisition

Rioja, province of, 144, 146, 149 tribunal of, 37-38, 41-42, 44-45, 48-50, Roig, Jaume (Valencian poet), 257 59, 129, 233, 236-37, 246, 304, 308 Rome, city of, 5, 8, 11, 14, 20, 41, 45, 49, 52, Sicily, 130, 164, 317; appellate court, see Gran

63, 84, 154-55, 183, 216, 221-22, 229, Corte; dialect of, 70; familiars in, 62-64, .245, 278-79, 287, 292-93, 307, 333; 180; Inquisition of, 15-18, 24, 26, 31-33, Roman Inquisition, 178, 181-82; see also 38-39, 49-52, 54, 59-64, 66, 68, 79,

Papacy and Spanish Inquisition 164-85, 247-50, 287, 317-20, 326-27,

Ros, M. de (Governor of Béarn), 89—g0 331-32; Kingdom of, xi, 15, 47, 59, 202, Rosellén (Catalan district), 120-21, 270, 274 218; Parliament of, 18, 26-27, 62-63, 179-80; Viceroys of, 17-18, 27, 60, 62-63,

St. Jean-de-Luz (France), 158 69, 180, 287; see also Palermo Salazar y Frias, Alonso (Inquisitor at Logrofio —_— Sixtus V (Pope, 1585-90), 177

and Valencia), 60, 67, 249, 273-74, 315 slaves as prisoners, 39, 75, 112-13, 131,

Salonica, 181, 202 140-42, 171, 183, 192, 234, 286-87, salt shakers, heretical, 117 290-91, 296, 303 343

Index sodomy and Inquisition, 32-33, 36-38, 46, Urgel, Seo de (Catalonia), 118, 121; Bishop

48-50, 52-54, 70, 75-76, 82, 84-85, 96, of, 119-21 108, 111-16, 124, 134-37, 140-42, 165, usury and Inquisition, 53, 80 168, 172, 174—76, 221-22, 240, 276-99,

303, 311-12, 315-17, 326, 328-29, 332; Valdés, Fernando de (Inquisitor-General, Adam and, 165, 176; heterosexual, 112-13, 1547-66), 29, 40-45, 69, 197, 260, 262, 174~75, 284-85, 294-95; see also bestiality; 265-67, 272

homosexuality Valencia, city of, gq-10, 20-21, 64-65, 123,

Solibera, Juan (Teruel Inquisitor), 6-8, 10, 12 127-29, 137, 195, 248-49, 280-81, 298; solicitation in confessional, 175, 177, 183, 286 Archbishop of, 125, 136; cathedral of, 22; Supreme Council of Inquisition (Suprema), 5, Inquisition tribunal of, 7, 10, 15, 19, 21-27, 35-37; 40-45, 55, 59-60, 64-66, 68-73, 36, 43, 45, 48-52, 54, 59, 62, 64, 67-68, 75-76, 81-86, 92, 94-96, 98-99, 101-04, 71, 75, 79s 125-42, 1§5,.190-97, 201-02, 109, 111, 118-23, 126, 128, 131, 133-37, 211, 233, 236, 238, 244, 246, 248, 281, 139-42, 143-45, 163, 168, 197, 197, 203, 284, 28-92, 295-96, 303, 310, 313, 316, 208, 218-20, 234, 238-39, 247-50, 252, 326-27, 331-32; University of, 128 258-62, 264, 266-75, 277-78, 280, Valencia, Kingdom of, 4, 7, 12-13, 24, 36, 282~85, 287, 295-96, 298, 304, 308-12, 44-45, 86, go, 111, 189—g0, 218, 267, 284,

315-16, 330, 333 292; Audiencia (appellate court) of, 136,

Swiss converts, 238, 251-52 141, 281; Corts (parliament) of, 59, 126; Viceroys of, 126, 130

Tarazona (Aragon), 13 Valladolid, city of, 128, 224; Inquisition

Tarragona (Catalonia), 56, 112, 265 tribunal of, 41-42, 44-45, 48, 142-43, 233,

Teruel (Aragon), 3, 5-12, 14-15, 19, 25, 190, 311 ,

206-07, 227 Vendéme, Duchy of (France), 232, 244; see Theatine Order, 152 also Henry IV, King of France Thorndike, Andrew (Yankee merchant), 105 Venice, 171, 182, 220, 238; Venetian

Thuringia (Germany), 169 , diplomats on Inquisition, 3, 27-29, 35, Toledo, city of, 86; Archbishop of, 40 (see also 45-47; 55, 73-74, 110, 125, 180, 304,

Carranza, Bartolome); Inquisition tribunal 306 of, 30, 32, 37, 42, 48-50, 58-59, 67n, 74n, vergienza, punishment of, §7, 71, 315

202, 233-34, 246, 259, 306-07, 311 Vich (Catalonia), Bishop of, 56 .

Toro (Castile), 41 | Victor Amadeus, King of Sardinia (1713-30),

Torquemada, Tomas de (Inquisitor-General, 319 | 1480-98), 4-5, 7, IO-11, 13-15, 35, 58, Vienna, Inquisitor-General at, 319

68-69, 72 Villafeliche (Aragon), 90, 199, 202, 211

Torrellas (Aragon), 154-55, 161, 221-23 Villahermosa, Duke of (Aragon magnate), 50, Tortosa (Catalonia), 15, 190; Bishop of, 116 93, 95, 99, 282 torture by Inquisition, 72, 74-76, 85, 116, Virgin Mary, heresies about, 117, 164-66,

118, 140, 150-52, 156-58, 160, 167, 191, 169, 172, 201, 215, 227, 240, 242—43, 206, 215-16, 219, 221-23, 225, 241, 245, 245 247, 268, 275, 287, 294, 296, 311, 314-15 visitations by Inquisitors, 40, 66-69, 160, 180 Toulouse (France), 150, 169; Parlement of, Vives family (Valencian conversos), 22, 24

12, 120, 207 Vizcaya (Basque province), 144, 149, 263, Transylvania, 169 274 Trent, Council of, xii, 40-41, 47, 53-54, 168,

174 witchcraft and Inquisition, 25-26, 36, 39, 46,

Trinitarians as prisoners, 137 49-50, 55-58, 67, 74-75, 80, 83, 105,

Tudela (Navarre), 12, 38, 143-44, 208, 235 120-22, 159-63, 170-71, 182, 255-75,

Tunis, 172, 179, 209, 215, 229-30 | 314-15, 326, 328; and secular courts,

: Turkey, 90-92, 132, 172, 174, 193, 214-16, 256-57, 259, 269, 274-75; witch-finders, 218, 220, 244, 286, 318; prisoners from, 75, 121-22, 265, 274-75

QI, 141, 234 witnesses: murder of, 118-19, 195-96; and secrecy, 72-73

Uldecona (Catalonia), 275 women as prisoners, 139, 170-71; alumbradas, Urdax, Abbey of (Navarre), 159-61 180, 319; astrologers, 182; bigamists, 39, 344

Index 100, 109; Judaizers, 16, 43, 156-58; Ybarra (Calahorra Inquisitor), 145 materialists, 173; Moriscas, 131, 152-56,

190, 204-06, 217, 219, 224-28; Zamberel family (Aragon Moriscos), 85, go—91 Protestants, 162, 233; sodomites, 281-82, Zamora (Castile), 141 316-17; witches, 121, 159-61, 255-57, Zaydejos, Gaspar (Aragon Morisco), 221-23,

264, 268-69, 314-15 333

Worms, Diet of, 35 Zugurramurdi (Navarre), 159-63, 271 | Zurita, Geronimo (Aragonese historian), 3,

xorguinas (Basque witches), 257, 259 10-13, 79, 82

345

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