I. THE SENTENCE
In the infliction of punishment, the Inquisition differed from secular courts in one important respect. Public law provided for impenitent heresy death by fire and confiscation, and visited on the penitent and on descendants certain disabilities, but apart from these, in its extensive field of jurisdiction over penitent heresy, suspected heresy and other offences, the Inquisition had full discretion and was bound by no rules. It was the only tribunal known to the civilized world which prescribed penalties and modified them at its will. In this, as in so much else, it combined the legislative and the executive functions.[245]
* * * * *
The culmination of the work of the tribunal was the sentence which embodied the result of its labors and decided the fate of the accused. In all cases that appeared in public autos de fe, the sentence was publicly read, and the opportunity was not lost of impressing on the minds of the people the lofty duties of the Holy Office and the enormity of the guilt which merited such chastisement. It afforded an occasion for the display of power, which was turned to the best account.
There were two forms of sentence--con meritos and sin meritos. The former recited at length the misdeeds of the culprit; the latter was briefer and merely stated the character of the offence. The consulta de fe, when it agreed upon a verdict, usually defined which form should be used, and also whether or not the culprit should appear in a public auto. This, in itself, was a severe infliction, aggravated by the reading of a sentence con meritos. For lighter cases the sentence was read in an auto particular, in the audience-chamber, of which there were several varieties, as will be seen hereafter.
The sentence con meritos commenced with a full recital of the details of the trial, through all the various steps of the cumbrous process, represented as a suit between the fiscal and the accused, and it specified the crimes proved against or confessed by the culprit. It was thus sometimes enormously long. In the famous case of Magdalena de la Cruz, a fraudulent beata revelandera, whose fictitious sanctity and miracles had deceived all Spain throughout a long career, the reading of the sentence at Córdova, May 13, 1546, occupied from six in the morning until four in the afternoon.[246] In the sentence of Don Pablo de Soto, convicted of bigamy at Lima, in 1761, all the examinations are detailed at full length, including information volunteered by him concerning persons and matters in no way connected with the case; the secretary appears to have copied verbatim the records of the successive audiences, as though to prolong the shame of the penitent.[247] After these prolix recitals there followed the verdict "Christi nomine invocato," in which, if the trial had resulted in conviction, the inquisitors found that the fiscal had duly proved his charges, wherefore they must declare the accused guilty of the heresy alleged, with its corresponding penalties.[248]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: DELAYED UNTIL THE AUTO DE FE]
As a rule, prisoners were left in ignorance of their fate until, on the morning of the auto de fe, they were prepared for it by being arrayed in the insignia which designated their punishments. So jealously were they kept in the dark that, when the customary proclamation was made of an auto, fifteen days in advance, with drum and trumpet, the officials were not allowed to approach the Inquisition, lest the inmates should hear the sounds and guess what was in preparation. At the great auto of Lima, in 1639, we are told that, when the proclamation was made, the negro assistants of the gaoler were shut up in a place where they could not hear it, so that they might not carry the information to the prisoners, and the workmen employed in making the mitres, sanbenitos and crosses were assigned a room in the Inquisition where they could labor unseen, under an oath of secrecy.[249] The effect of the sudden revelation, when it came, is indicated in the advice that it was better to give to those who were to appear their breakfasts in their cells than to wait until they were all brought together for the procession, for then there was shame and confusion and suffering, the fathers seeing their sons and the daughters their mothers in the sanbenitos and other insignia that designated their punishments.[250] The despair induced by the preceding long-drawn suspense occasionally found expression, as in the case of Diego González, who was reconciled for Judaism in the Valladolid auto of July 25, 1644. On the morning of that day, when the gaoler entered his cell to give him breakfast, he was found pale and faint, with the blood flowing freely from a wound in his arm, made with a nail from his bedstead, under the impression that he was to be burnt, and he had to be carried to the solemnity in a sedan-chair. Llorente recounts a similar case, of which he was an eyewitness, in 1791, when a Frenchman named Michel Maffre des Rieux hanged himself in consequence of being thus kept in ignorance.[251]
The object of the delay in thus communicating the sentence was to prevent appeals to the Suprema. We have seen how, in opposing appeals to Rome, the Inquisition and the monarchs argued that they were wholly superfluous, in view of the appellate jurisdiction of the inquisitor-general, who was always prompt to rectify injustice committed by the tribunals, but this nominal opportunity was rendered for the most part illusory by this device of withholding knowledge of the sentence until appeal was impossible. This came about by degrees. Originally it would seem that the tribunals exercised discretion as to withholding the sentence until the auto, although exceptions were rare. The Instructions of 1561, while admitting a right of appeal in some cases, nullified it by ordering, in such cases, the tribunals to send the proceedings in advance to the Suprema, without allowing the accused to know of it.[252] There evidently were contending influences, of justice on one side and convenience on the other, for in 1568 it was ordered that, in cases not of heresy, when the penalty was arbitrary, the culprit should be notified in advance of the auto de fe, and this was extended, in 1573, by instructions that, in cases admitting appeal, the parties should be notified in time to enable them to do so. This concession to justice caused trouble and, on April 11, 1577 the tribunals were ordered to report on the evils arising from it. Apparently the inquisitors reported adversely for, on September 18th, they were ordered to return to the former practice of not notifying culprits prior to the auto de fe.[253]
There was, however, quite an extensive class of cases in which the right of appeal was not completely cut off by this. These were the more trivial ones, in which the sentence was rendered in the audience-chamber, and in these both parties, the culprit and the fiscal, were required to assent on the spot, when either could appeal, for the fiscal had the same right as his opponent; it was included, in the commission issued to fiscals, in the long enumeration of their powers and duties, and was a right not infrequently exercised.[254] Although the culprit thus had an opportunity to appeal, he was obliged to act without advice. In the case of María Cazalla, in Toledo, December 19, 1534, when called upon to assent to her sentence in the audience-chamber, she asked for delay; then, in the afternoon, she begged to be allowed to consult her husband or her counsel and, on this being refused, she accepted the sentence.[255] Still, as public autos diminished and private autillos multiplied, the opportunity for appeals became more frequent and were sometimes successful.
[Sidenote: APPEALS]
This was more apt to benefit ecclesiastics than laymen for, except in cases involving degradation, they were never exhibited in public autos; their sentences were read in the audience-chamber, and they were more likely than the ordinary culprit to possess the education and intelligence requisite to profit by the opportunity. Cases of appeal by them are consequently not infrequent. Fray Lucas de Allende, Guardian of the Franciscan convent of Madrid, was one of the dupes of Lucrecia de Leon, an impostor who pretended in dreams to have converse with God and the saints. He busied himself in writing out her revelations and was tried at Toledo, where he lay in prison from June, 1590, until April, 1596. He was sentenced to a reprimand and warning not to meddle with such matters, to accept certain definitions laid down by the tribunal, and to strict reclusion in a convent for a year. He vigorously protested that the sentence was absurd and he appealed from it, to which the fiscal retorted by likewise interjecting an appeal. The Suprema heard both appeals and decided, July 30, 1596, by confirming the sentence as to reprimand and warning, and omitting the rest. Even this did not satisfy the obstinate Franciscan for when read to him, August 2d, he refused to accept it and appealed to the pope, but, on being warned to reflect well, he on the same day withdrew this appeal and submitted. There can be little doubt however that the inquisitors suppressed the revocation of part of the sentence, for there follows a petition from him to be allowed to visit his native Villarubia before entering upon his reclusion, deceit of this kind being perfectly practicable in the profound secrecy of the tribunals.[256] More successful was the Geronimite Fray Martin de Cazares, prosecuted in Valladolid for superstitious curing of the sick and sentenced, in 1655, to reprimand and four years' exile from certain places. The Suprema had confirmed the sentence and yet on appeal from him it remitted the exile.[257] By this time the Suprema was supervising all action of the tribunals and, as it gradually became the whole Inquisition, appeals grew to be superfluous, yet the custom of withholding the sentence was persistent.
There was one class of cases, however, in which notification of the sentence was always made prior to the auto de fe--those in which the culprit was condemned to relaxation. The object of this was to give him a chance of saving his soul by confession and conversion; in the earlier period the notification was short, being only at midnight before the auto, but this, as we shall see hereafter, was subsequently extended to three days.
* * * * *
In the medieval Inquisition, the inquisitor, when rendering sentence, always reserved the right to modify it, in the direction either of mercy or of severity, or to remove it wholly. He could do this, for he was practically independent and irresponsible to any superior, the only authority over him being the distant and almost inaccessible Holy See. The Spanish inquisitor occupied a wholly different position, being held in strict and constantly increasing subordination to the Suprema and, as commutations early became a source of large revenue, it is easy to understand that the tribunals were not permitted to participate in the proceeds. Already in 1498, the Instructions thus undertook to limit the power of inquisitors to modify sentences, by ordering that they should not grant commutations for money or favor or without just cause and, when such existed, the commutation must be into fasts, almsgiving and other pious uses; there could be no release from wearing the sanbenito and the rehabilitation of descendants was reserved for the inquisitor-general.[258] It was difficult to enforce restrictions which recognized any right of inquisitors to modify sentences and, in 1513, Ximenes deprived them of it wholly and concentrated the power in the hands of the inquisitor-general.[259] It was wholly a matter of finance and we have seen (Book <small>V</small>, Chap, iii) how it was thenceforth utilized. The tribunal was recognized to have no power to modify a sentence when once pronounced; as an experienced writer says, although by common law inquisitors and Ordinaries can change or mitigate sentences, it is otherwise under the Instructions which declare that this is reserved for the inquisitor-general, the reason being that they have exhausted their powers.[260]
[Sidenote: SEVERITY OR BENIGNITY]
In the Indies, where distance rendered application to the Suprema virtually impossible, the tribunals seem to have retained the power of modifying sentences, even though they may rarely have exercised it. In 1663 an old woman, known as Isabel de Montoya, tried for sorcery in Mexico, was sentenced to appear in an auto de fe with the sanbenito, to receive two hundred lashes and to serve for life in a hospital. In the audience-chamber, November 5th, the sentence was read to her, in presence of the fiscal and her advocate. With the assent of the latter, she begged that the sanbenito and the scourging be omitted; she had only been an impostor and had had no pact, expressed or implied, with the demon, and in view of her age and sickness and crippling in the torture she supplicated mercy. On November 7th the fiscal replied to this, asking an aggravation of punishment because it proved her to be an impenitent in denying her pact and intention. November 21st the consulta de fe assembled and unanimously confirmed its former sentence.
The auto de fe was not celebrated until May 4, 1664; on the 6th she was duly scourged through the streets and on the 15th she was delivered to the Hospital del Amor de Dios. Her pitiful prayer, urging age and sickness, was justified for, on June 17th, a messenger from the hospital announced her death, and the inquisitors briefly ordered it to bury her.[261]
* * * * *
As regards cruelty, it is impossible to generalize, where in the earlier periods so much discretion was allowed to the tribunals, and so much depended on the temper of the inquisitors, who might be stern or humane. In the case of the obstinate heretic or of the impenitente negativo there was no question; the law of the land and universal public opinion alike condemned him to the stake but, in the wide sphere of the penitent heretic and of the numerous offences of which the Inquisition had cognizance, there was an ample field for the display of severity or benignity. Against the barbarity of a case like that of Isabel de Montoya, which had too many parallels, may be set the tendencies of the Toledo tribunal about 1600. In its reports to the Suprema at that period there, frequently occur explanatory remarks, as though to apologize for the mildness of the sentences, which indicate its readiness to temper its judgements--such expressions as "she was a poor and ignorant woman," "she was simple and ignorant," "she was spared heavier penance because she was only sixteen years old," "she seemed a very simple and a very good woman," "recent baptism and drunkenness." Occasionally, in bigamy cases, involving scourging and the galleys according to rule, the omission of these is justified by the age or weakness of the culprit. Sometimes, but not often, the suffering which the prisoner has endured during prolonged imprisonment is taken into consideration, and is admitted as part of the punishment.[262] This tendency towards mercy becomes more marked in the period of decadence, when the humanitarian development of the age made itself felt even in the Inquisition, and it offers a suggestive contrast to the savage fanaticism of the secular courts of a land which claimed to be more enlightened than Spain. In 1765 a wooden crucifix on the bridge at Abbeville was mutilated and the Bishop of Amiens published a monitoire ordering, under pain of excommunication, any one having knowledge of the matter to denounce the offender. Duval de Saucourt, a counsellor in the court of Abbeville, who was inimical to the Abbess of Villancourt, accused her nephew, the Chevalier de la Barre, a youth of nineteen. The only evidence was that he had once passed a procession without lifting his hat, that he had talked against the Eucharist and had sung impious and licentious songs. He was doubtless irreligious and debauched, and his evil reputation sufficed, in the court of Abbeville, to justify a sentence of amputating his tongue and right hand and burning him alive. Appeal was made to the Parlement of Paris which, by a vote of fifteen to ten, confirmed the sentence, with the mitigation of beheading before concremation and this was duly executed, July 1, 1766.[263] The annals of the Spanish Inquisition offer nothing more hideous than this, and the comparison is the more instructive in that its penalty for sacrilegiously outraging an image of Christ, the Virgin or the saints, with aggravating circumstances, was merely appearance in an auto de fe with the insignia of a blasphemer, abjuration de levi and a hundred lashes or vergüenza or exile, according to the character of the offence and of the culprit.[264]
The Inquisition boasted that it was no respecter of persons and, in one point at least, its rules offer a favorable contrast to those of the secular law. In Spanish law the privileges of gentility were fully recognized and, for many crimes, the penalties assigned to gentle blood were much milder than those inflicted on the commonalty. This was reversed in the Inquisition, where it was prescribed that, in matters of faith, nobles should be punished more severely than plebeians.[265] This was doubtless owing to the assumption that they were more intelligently trained and less exposed to error, besides the fact that their example was more impressive. On the other hand, however, the clergy, for whom less excuse could be found, were treated with much greater leniency than the laity and, far from being utilized as examples, their frailties and errors were shielded as much as possible from public view, in order not to diminish popular reverence for the Church.
[Sidenote: NON-PERFORMANCE]
The penal resources of the Inquisition, as we shall see, were endless. While, for certain well-defined offences, certain penalties were customary, the discretion of the consultas de fe was bound by no definite limitations as to what were known as penas extraordinarias, and they could devise whatever seemed appropriate to special cases. Infinite gradations and intricate combinations were resorted to in the effort to fit the penalty to the offence of each individual, and also doubtless often to secure unanimity in the consulta de fe, so that not infrequently there are six or eight separate and distinct inflictions in a single sentence. It would be too much to expect that, in so composite an institution, during more than three centuries of existence, there should have been strict consistency in the exercise of this discretional power, but, making allowance for the infirmities of human nature under the temptation of irresponsibility, it can scarce be said that it habitually abused its authority, according to the barbarous standard of the times, except in the infliction of pecuniary penalties on which its finances depended, and in the vindication of its authority against all who dared to question its supremacy. It was callous to the sufferings of those whom it prejudged as guilty; it devised the most atrocious formulas of procedure; but, when it had secured confession or conviction, it was not systematically and ferociously cruel as has so often been asserted.
* * * * *
As regards the enforcement of the sentence, it is to be observed that the penalties divide themselves into two classes. Some, such as relaxation, confiscation, fines, scourging, the galleys, reconciliation and abjuration, were within the power of the tribunal. Others, like imprisonment, the sanbenito, exile and reclusion, depended to a greater or less degree on the will or the fears of the penitent. Theoretically, as we have seen, punishment was regarded as penance, voluntarily accepted by the penitent for the salvation of his soul, but the Inquisition, unlike the father confessor, did not rely wholly on the penitential ardor of the sinner. Punishment retained enough of the character of penance to justify the theologian in treating its non-performance as a proof that repentance had been feigned, and that the offender had relapsed into heresy, the penalty for which, under the canons, was death by fire without trial. In the earlier time this was enforced in so far as was possible. Thus, in 1486, at Saragossa, Rodrigo de Gris, who had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment in a designated house, with the penalty of relapse for leaving it, escaped and was burnt in effigy as a relapsed and, in 1487, Cristóval Gelva, to whom the Hospital of Nuestra Señora de la Gracia was assigned as a perpetual prison, was burnt in effigy for escaping.[266] This continued for some time to be the theory but, in practice, while summoning the fugitive as an impenitent relapsed, to appear for judgement, it was deemed safer to proceed against him in the ordinary way in absentia, waiting for a year and prosecuting him for contumacy. Such a case appears to be that of Bartolomé Gallego, who escaped in 1525 from the penitential prison of Toledo and was condemned to relaxation in effigy, November 3, 1527.[267] Some forty years later, Pablo García explains that the suspicion arising from flight, joined with that of remaining under excommunication for a year, afforded sufficient proof for declaring the fugitive a relapsed heretic and relaxing his effigy. It was only when evidence could be had of subsequent acts of heresy that direct proceedings for relapse were justified, and this was decided in a case where a fugitive was relaxed in effigy, and the Suprema revoked the sentence and rescinded the confiscation.[268]
[Sidenote: NON-PERFORMANCE]
The theory of relapse was evidently giving way. Simancas tells us that, although supported by high authorities, it is cruel and false and not founded in law; the fugitive is impenitent, not relapsed; if he returns or is captured he is to be heard, and if prepared to obey the Church, his flight only deserves an increase of penalty.[269] How rapidly the ancient severity was disappearing is manifested by a case in Valencia, in 1570. Pedro Luis Verga was prosecuted for Protestantism on a vague accusation that, when studying in Paris in 1555, he had consorted with the dreaded Juan Pérez and had shared his opinions, for which he was reconciled and sentenced not to leave the kingdom. He disobeyed and, in 1570, he was heard of in Genoa, giving utterance to heretical opinions. Now this was a case of relapse, as well as of non-fulfilment of penance, but he was prosecuted for contumacy as a simple fugitive.[270] It was an evidence that the old rule had become obsolete when inquisitors sometimes prescribed in their sentences that the penance was to be performed under pain of impenitent relapse, as in the case of Juan Franco, condemned at Toledo, in 1570, to eight years of galleys for Protestantism, and of Juan Cote, by the same tribunal, in 1615, to irremissible perpetual prison for the same heresy.[271] Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, Alberghini gives the various opinions held on the subject, and concludes that that of Simancas was commonly accepted.[272]
Cases of non-fulfilment were not infrequent for, as we shall see, the discipline of the penitential prisons was exceedingly lax; any penitent could absent himself and then throw off the sanbenito, which was the customary accompaniment of imprisonment, but, although this was canonically relapse, such cases were treated with what in those days might be considered as mercy. Thus Diego González, reconciled for Judaism at Valladolid, in 1644, and condemned to prison and habit, was recognized in 1645, at Medina de Rioseco, without the sanbenito. On being tried for this, the consulta de fe was not unanimous and the Suprema sentenced him to a hundred lashes.[273] It was the same with sentences of exile. In 1667, at Toledo, Francisco López Rodríguez, who had been reconciled in 1665 and had already been prosecuted for non-fulfilment of penance, was tried for doing so again, and was condemned only to a hundred lashes and two years more of exile. So in 1669, Juan López Peatin, for infraction of exile, had only two years added to the original term.[274]
A curious case, however, in 1606, shows how penitents were expected to fulfil their penances. Gaspar Godet, a Morisco, had been condemned at Valencia to reconciliation, a hundred lashes, and perpetual prison, of which the first eight years were to be passed in the galleys. After five years' service, his galley was captured by the English, near Lisbon, and he was set free. He ought strictly to have conveyed himself on board of another galley to serve out his term, but he seems to have imagined that he was released from his sentence; he quietly returned to his native Torre de Llovis and resumed his profession of surgeon. He was, of course, reported to the tribunal, which seized him in August, 1606, and condemned him not only to complete his sentence but to undergo a hundred lashes and to pay a fine of two hundred libras, although the maximum fine that could legally be imposed on a Morisco was ten ducats.[275]
The renewed activity of the Inquisition, in the early eighteenth century, seems to have been accompanied with a recrudescence of severity in these cases. In the Valencia auto de fe of February 24, 1723, Antonio Rogero was reconciled and condemned to irremissible prison and sanbenito. He escaped but was captured and, in the auto of March 12, 1724, he was condemned to two hundred lashes and five years of galleys, after which he was to be returned to prison, but the inquisitor-general mercifully commuted the scourging and galleys to five years of presidio, or labor in an African garrison. So, in the Valencia auto of June 25, 1724, Joseph Ventura, of Fez, a Moorish convert, had been reconciled with three years of prison and sanbenito; he fled, was captured and, in the auto of July 1, 1725, his prison was made perpetual and irremissible; again he fled, to be again caught and, in the auto of September 17, 1725, he was condemned to five years of galleys, after which he was to be returned to prison.[276]
[Sidenote: NON-FULFILMENT OF PENANCE]
All these were cases of formal heresy, for relapse in which the canonical punishment was burning. For offences less heinous, which inferred only suspicion of heresy, there was an occasional practice of including in the sentence a penalty for non-fulfilment of the penance. This was in every respect an arbitrary matter, concerning which no generalization can be formulated, for it is frequently impossible to divine why, in a group of similar cases, some sentences should carry this threat and some should not. This apparently objectless diversity is markedly exhibited in the auto of May 13, 1565, at Seville, where there were a large number of penitents thus arbitrarily differentiated. In the cases where the threat was employed, there was slender indication of mercy, for where exile for life or for a term of years was imposed, the penalty for non-fulfilment was that it should be completed in the galleys. In one case, that of Abel Jocis, for conveying arms to Barbary, the sentence was merely a prohibition to sail to Barbary, but a violation of this was visited with the galleys for life.[277] It should be added, however, for the credit of the Inquisition, that it not infrequently made threats which it had not the cruelty to execute. Thus the tribunal of Toledo, on a charge of divination, banished from Spain a priest named Fernando Betanzas, with a threat of the galleys for disobedience. Not long afterwards the Bishop of Salamanca found and arrested him, and the Suprema, December 22, 1636, ordered the tribunal of Valladolid to investigate the case, after which the Suprema contented itself with deporting him to Portugal, and warning him that, if he returned again, he should be sent to the galleys.[278]
The case of the Augustinian Fray Diego Caballero, in 1716, indicates how non-fulfilment of penance might convert into formal heresy that which was mere suspicion. For uttering unacceptable propositions, he had been sentenced by the tribunal of Córdova to reclusion for four years in the convent of Guadix. He fled from there and continued to repeat his erroneous utterances, for which the Toledo tribunal pronounced him to be relapsed in grave crime and sentenced him to abjure de vehementi, to be suspended from his orders for a year, to perpetual deprivation of preaching, confessing and the right to vote and be voted for, to ten years' exile from a number of places, to four years' reclusion in a designated house, where for six months he was to be confined in a cell. He was also to wear a sanbenito, while his sentence was read in the audience-chamber, and the next day it was to be read to the assembled brethren of his Toledo convent, who were to administer to him a circular discipline, and he was to forfeit half his peculium--and all this under pain of being held as an impenitent relapsed.[279] What is noteworthy here is not only the severity of this long accumulation of penalties, but also the abjuration de vehementi which rendered reincidence in the abjured errors a matter for the stake.
* * * * *
In the medieval Inquisition it may be said that acquittal was virtually prohibited--a sentence of not proven might possibly be rendered, but acquittal was an admission of fallibility and was regarded as a bar to subsequent proceedings in case further evidence was obtained.[280] This principle was maintained in the Roman Inquisition, although, in the eighteenth century, exception was made in cases where the adverse evidence was clearly proved to be fraudulent.[281] The Spanish Holy Office was not quite so sensitive, and had no hesitation as to repeated prosecutions, so that to it acquittal was a less serious matter. Moreover, while sentences of not proven were not unknown, there was an equivalent device by which the accused could be dismissed without admitting his innocence--suspending the case and discharging him, subject to the liability of its being reopened at any time.
The furious zeal of Torquemada rendered acquittal peculiarly distasteful to him, and we have seen above (Vol. I, p. 175) a case in which he set aside acquittals at Medina del Campo, and insisted on conviction although, at his instance, the parties had been tried twice and had been tortured without confession. This temper on his part could not but impress itself on his subordinates, and yet we occasionally meet with acquittals in this early time--acquittals, however, which manifest a strange mental confusion, and betray the unwillingness to admit the prosecution of the innocent, for they couple acquittal with punishment. Thus at Guadalupe, in 1485, in the case of Andrés Alonso of Trogillano, the sentence recites that the fiscal had not proved his accusation as fully as he ought, wherefore the inquisitors absolved the accused but, as the evidence aroused some suspicion in their hearts, for the satisfaction of their consciences and his, they sentenced him to abjure de levi and, as some infamy had accrued to him from the accusation, they removed it and restored him to his former good repute, and lifted the sequestration on his property. Whereupon he duly abjured de levi, renouncing all manner of heresy, and especially that of which he was accused, promising to be always obedient to the Church, after which he was absolved ad cautelam from any excommunication which he might have incurred, and of all this he asked to have a certificate.[282] All the acquittals that I have met, of this period, bear this illogical character, sometimes even requiring abjuration de vehementi and inflicting penalties for the offence of which the accused is pronounced innocent.
[Sidenote: ACQUITTAL]
In Barcelona, the Inquisition had been established twelve years before the first acquittal was granted, and, from such record as we have, it would appear that there were acquittals of more than one kind--conditional and unconditional. Thus, in 1499, Jayme Castanyer and Eufrosina Pometa were acquitted, but were required to abjure publicly on May 2d, and, on October 5th, Luys Palau was acquitted. In 1500, on September 18th, four women were acquitted absolutely, two men were acquitted with penance, and two women and a man were acquitted with abjuration. Then, on October 5th, the memory and fame of Juan de Ribes Altes were cleared and, on December 20, 1501, Blanquina Darla was acquitted absolutely.[283]
In a record of the Toledo tribunal, from 1484 to 1531, there are eighty-six cases of acquittal, or an average of somewhat less than two per annum which, in view of the intense activity of the earlier period, indicates how few escaped when once the Inquisition had laid its hand upon them. Some of these cases show how long the conditional acquittal persisted. Thus of those acquitted, Hernando Parral was required to abjure, and Francisca Ramírez and Catalina beata negra abjured de vehementi. Unless there is a mistake by the scribe, Leonora de la Oliva of Ciudad Real was acquitted and scourged, October 3, 1521, and again had the same sentence October 13, 1530. In 1520 Alonso Hernández was acquitted with public penance and, in 1513, Sancho de Ribera was acquitted with confiscation. One entry is difficult of comprehension--that of Inez González, who was voted to acquittal with reconciliation and confiscation, but the confiscation was remitted.[284]
Practically acquittal amounted only to a sentence of not proven. In the formula for it, Pablo García calls special attention to the omission of the word "definitive," pointing out that it is not final, for the case could be reopened at any time that fresh evidence was obtained--and even without it, as we have seen in the case of Villanueva. In matters of faith there was no finality, no cosa juzgada, and it was so declared by Pius V, in the bull Inter multiplices, invalidating all letters of absolution and acquittal issued by inquisitors and other spiritual judges.[285] In strict accordance with this principle was the rule that sentences of acquittal of the living were not to be read at the autos de fe, unless at their especial request, while acquittals of the dead were read; in either case, the sentence simply stated that he had been accused of heresy and no details were given; if living he did not appear at the auto and if dead there was no effigy.[286] All this was in direct contradiction to the glowing eulogy of Páramo who, as we have seen, states that the inquisitors used every means to prove the innocence of the accused and, when they succeeded, took care that he should go forth like a conqueror crowned with laurel and the palm of victory.[287] Yet Páramo had some justification in the fact that there were rare exceptional cases in which the acquitted was thus honored. The only instance of this that I have met in Spain was that referred to above (Vol. II, p. 561), where fourteen residents of Cádiz were falsely accused. In Peru, however, several cases are recorded. In the Lima auto of 1728 Doctor Agustin Valenciano appeared in the procession on a white horse, with a palm, and proclamation was made of his innocence. In the great auto of January 23, 1639, there were seven thus honored after their three years of incarceration, and in that of October 19, 1749, the effigy of Don Juan de Loyola, who had died in prison in 1745, headed the procession, bearing a palm. This last case is perhaps explicable by Jesuit influence, for he was of the family of St. Ignatius, and further reparation was made by creating his brother, Don Ignacio de Loyola y Haro alguazil mayor of the tribunal, while three nephews were made familiars.[288]
The reluctance of the tribunals to pronounce a sentence of acquittal is illustrated in the case of Francisco Marco, tried at Barcelona for bigamy, in 1718. Unable to prove the charge, which was punishable with scourging and galleys, the tribunal sentenced him to have his sentence con meritos read in the audience-chamber, to be reprimanded and threatened, and to be banished from Barcelona and Madrid for six years. In the earlier period this sentence would have stood, but by this time the Suprema was in full control and it expressed great surprise at so unjust a decision, inflicting so foul a stigma on the accused. It declared null and void all the acts of the process, it ordered Marco to be discharged at once, and that the inquisitors should defray out of their salaries all the cost of his imprisonment.[289]
[Sidenote: SUSPENSION]
The indisposition to acquit found expression in the device known as suspension. When the effort to convict failed, the case could be suspended, thus leaving matters as they stood; the accused was neither acquitted nor convicted, the case could at any moment be reopened and prosecuted to the end, and it hung over the unfortunate victim while it saved the infallibility of the tribunal. The earliest allusion to it that I have met occurs in the Instructions of 1498, which show that it was a usage already established and abused, for it is forbidden in prosecutions of the dead, except when further evidence is expected, and acquittal is ordered when the proof is imperfect, because there are many cases of suspension that inflict hardship through the sequestrations continuing in force.[290]
Suspension was a convenient resource for a tribunal, unable to convict yet unwilling to acquit, and desirous to conceal its failure. At first it was comparatively rare, but in time it became a favorite method of escaping a decision and, as it gradually, for the most part, replaced acquittal, in its development it might even remove the stigma; in the great majority of cases it was practically the end of the matter, and it was usually accompanied with lifting the sequestration. Some authorities held that a case could not be entered as suspended, if there was enough in it to justify a reprimand, or even when the offence was trivial and the defendant was cautioned not to speak or act in that fashion, but this rigidity of definition was not observed in practice. When suspension was decided upon, the accused was not permitted to know it. He was simply brought into the audience-chamber; if he had been confined in the secret prison he was put through the customary inquiries as to what he had seen and heard, and was sworn to secrecy; he was told that for just reasons he was granted the favor of returning home and that he must seek to discharge his conscience for his case was still pending.[291] This mystery served to keep him in suspense, but, after he found the sequestration or embargo lifted from his property, he could doubtless fathom its meaning. If he demanded a definite sentence of conviction or acquittal, he had the right to do so, but I have met with no instance of this, and few could have been hardy enough thus to tempt their fate. If he asked for a certificate that he was freely discharged, or that his case was suspended, it was not to be given, but the Suprema might grant him one to the effect that he was discharged without penance or condemnation.[292]
Suspension wholly without penance was, however, unusual, for the infallibility of the Inquisition was commonly emphasized by accompanying it with some infliction, more or less severe. The lightest of these was the reprimand and warning administered when discharging the accused. In 1650 the tribunal of Toledo summarily got rid of quite a number of cases in this fashion--four on June 18th, two on the 25th and three on the 30th, and those were fortunate who escaped so lightly. About the same time, Doña Gabriela Ramírez de Guzman, accused of superstitious sorcery, was not only reprimanded, when her case was suspended, but was banished for a year from Toledo and Madrid, and the same penance was assigned to Domingo de Acuña, when his trial for propositions was suspended.[293] How little incongruity was recognized in this is illustrated by the case of Martin Mitorovich, at Madrid, in 1801, when one of the inquisitors voted to suspend the case and confine him for life in the hospital of Ceuta.[294] In fact, as suspension grew more frequent in the closing years of the Inquisition, it was often coupled with severe inflictions. Thus, August 30, 1815, the tribunal of Llerena suspended the case of María del Carmen Cavallero y Berrocal, but sentenced her to reprimand, two hundred lashes and three years' seclusion in a hospital; at the same time, in view of her ingenuous confession, the scourging was suspended until her amendment should earn its forgiveness, and the same phrases were used with her accomplice, Nicolás Sánchez Espinal, who was sentenced to reprimand, certain spiritual exercises and perpetual exile from the province.[295]
[Sidenote: ADMISSION TO BAIL]
In cases like these, however, suspension had somewhat outgrown its original purpose of a substitute for acquittal, and was a more than doubtful mercy, for the case remained unconcluded, though visited with full penalties, and could at any moment be reopened. That originally it was merely a convenient device for escaping the admission of having prosecuted the innocent is manifested by cases of which the records are full. Thus, in 1607, Francisco Dendolea, a Morisco of Xea, was tried at Valencia on the evidence of a witness that, when limosnero or almoner of Xea, he had, under pretext of begging for the poor, used his office to serve notices of the commencement of the fast of Ramadan and give other ceremonial instructions. He proved that he never was limosnero and the charge fell to the ground, but the case was merely suspended. So, in 1653, Doña Isabel del Castillo was prosecuted for Judaism at Toledo. She had previously been reconciled at Valladolid, and it was found that the evidence related to a period prior to the reconciliation. She of course ought to have been acquitted, but the case was suspended.[296] Even more self-evident is the case of the Benedictine Padre Francisco Salvador, tried at Valladolid, in 1640, for sundry propositions presented in a competition for a professorship. The consulta de fe voted to suspend the case and the Suprema, in confirming the sentence, added that a certificate should be given to him that no offence had been found that would in any way prejudice him.[297]
There was also a kind of imperfect or informal acquittal, which consisted in admitting the accused to bail at the end of the trial. It saved the tribunal from the trouble of a decision and of an acknowledgement that the prosecution had been in error, but it was cruel to the party involved, as it left him but partly liberated and with the stigma of heresy. Its working is fairly exemplified by the case of Petronila de Lucena, tried in 1534, at Toledo on a charge of Lutheranism. After nearly a year's incarceration, her brother, also under trial, revoked in the torture the evidence which he had given against her. There was no other testimony, yet she was not acquitted but merely released, March 20, 1535, under bail of a hundred thousand maravedis, to present herself when summoned. The security was furnished and she was delivered to the bondsmen as her gaolers. On June 27th, she petitioned for release, for the discharge of the bondsmen and for the removal of the sequestration, which included some articles of personal necessity in the hands of the gaoler; she was, she pleaded, poor and an orphan, she needed the property and wished to be free to dispose of herself. No notice was taken of this and, sixteen months later, on October 20, 1536, she applied again; this time an order to lift the sequestration was issued, but there is no record of her having been released from subjection to bail. She thus remained under the ban and, at the age of 25, the two careers open to a Spanish woman--marriage and the nunnery--were virtually closed to her.[298]
There was yet another kind of acquittal, still more informal, in which the accused was simply discharged and bade to be gone, without a sentence, leaving him under the dreadful uncertainty of what might be his position. An instance of this is the case of Miguel Mezquita, tried for Lutheranism at Valencia, in 1536. The evidence was of the flimsiest, and the inquisitors merely ordered him to be released from prison without making further provision.[299]
The comparative frequency of these various forms of release, in the earlier period, may be inferred from the record of the Toledo tribunal from 1484 to 1531, in which there are eighty-six cases of acquittal, to only four of suspension, four of release under bail, and two of simple discharge--the latter forms thus being negligible quantities.[300] The proportions changed rapidly with time, showing how much more in harmony with the spirit of the institution were the forms which evaded acknowledgement of error. A record of the same tribunal, from 1575 to 1610, contains an aggregate of eleven hundred and seventy-two cases of all kinds, in which there were fifty-one acquittals, ninety-eight suspensions and thirty simple discharges.[301] This tendency continued with increasing development. A Toledo record from 1648 to 1694, comprises twelve hundred and five cases, of which but six ended in acquittal, one in discharge for mistaken identity, and a hundred and four in suspension, nearly all of the latter coupled with a reprimand in the audience-chamber--apparently a scolding for having given the tribunal so much bootless trouble. The suspensions were, in nearly every case, ordered by the Suprema, as though the inquisitors shrank from the admission which it involved.[302]
[Sidenote: COMPURGATION]
This repugnance existed to the last. In 1806, Don Matias Brabo, an ex-Agonizante and calificador of the Saragossa tribunal, was tried in Madrid on the charge of uttering certain propositions; he was acquitted but, in view of his disorderly life, especially in regard to the sixth commandment, he was sentenced to a reprimand, to fifteen days of spiritual exercises, and to make a general confession at such time as he could do so without disrepute.[303]
The same spirit is seen in the instructions of the Suprema, October 14, 1819, to the Cuenca tribunal, authorizing the arrest and trial of María Martínez for propositions. In case, it says, the trial shows that she has not erred in the matters charged, or in anything else, she is to be reprimanded and warned and told that the tribunal is keeping a watch over her acts.[304]
There was another kind of suspension, by far the most frequent of all. It often happened, especially in the later periods, that the sumaria, or collection of evidence against a presumed offender, proved insufficient to justify prosecution. In such cases it would be quietly voted to suspension; it was filed away in its place among the records, ready to be exhumed at any time, when further information might supply deficiencies and induce active proceedings. Thousands of these abortive processes reposed in the secreto of the tribunals, the subjects of which were unconscious of the dangers which had threatened them, or that their names were on the lists of suspects of the dreaded tribunal. That they were kept under surveillance is indicated by an occasional note, such as one respecting a certain Johann Wegelin, a Calvinist--"there is a sumaria which has been withdrawn because he became insane and returned to his own country," or in another case "suspended because he died in 1802."[305]
* * * * *
Yet, taking it as a whole, when we consider that the inquisitorial system was so framed as to put every temptation in the way of the judges to condemn, for the sake of confiscations, fines, penances, dispensations and commutations, it is rather creditable that acquittals and suspensions should occur in the records even as frequently as we find them there, though of course we have no means of knowing whether those who thus escaped were among the wealthy or the poor.
* * * * *
There was still another possible form of sentence. The Barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire brought with them an ancestral custom, known as compurgation or, in England, as the Wager of Law, by which a defendant, in either a civil or criminal action, could maintain his title or his innocence by taking an oath and bringing a specified number of men who swore to their belief in its truth. They were known as conjurators or compurgators and were in no sense witnesses; they pretended to no knowledge of the facts but only to their confidence in the veracity of their principal. This crude method of establishing the truth was maintained in all the lands occupied by the Teutonic tribes except in Spain, where the Wisigoths early yielded to the influence of the Roman law. It was eagerly adopted by the clergy, who found in it a convenient means of escaping from the harsher expedients of the ordeal or the wager of battle, so that it acquired the name of canonical purgation.[306] In the thirteenth century, the Inquisition found it used in the trial of heretics and necessarily included it among the resources for doubtful cases, although inquisitorial methods were too thorough to call for its frequent employment.
The Spanish Inquisition naturally inherited compurgation among the other traditions of the institution. When conviction could not be had by evidence or torture, and yet the suspicion was too grave to justify acquittal, it could sentence the accused to undergo compurgation. He could not demand it, nor could he decline it, though he might appeal from the sentence; and failure in compurgation was equivalent to conviction, while success was not acquittal but required abjuration and penance at the discretion of the tribunal, because, although legally shown not to be a heretic, the accused had to be punished for "suspicion."
[Sidenote: COMPURGATION]
The early Instructions are silent on the subject, and such cases of the period as I have met indicate that there was no rigidly prescribed method of procedure, although, in the main, they accord in showing it to be a kind of trial by jury, after the tribunal had failed to reach a decision. The general features of the process can be gathered from the case at Saragossa of Beatriz Beltran, wife of the Juan de la Caballería, accused of complicity in the murder of San Pedro Arbues, who died in prison and was relaxed in effigy in the auto of July 8, 1491. She was put on trial for Judaism in 1489; the evidence against her was by no means decisive, while the defence discredited the witnesses and proved by abundant testimony her devotion to the Church, her regular attendance at mass and confession for more than twenty years, her liberality in the celebration of masses and her long hours spent in daily prayer. She could not be tortured in view of her advanced age and severe infirmities and, on August 9, 1492, the consulta de fe voted unanimously that, as torture was out of the question, she be sentenced to canonical purgation, at the judgement of the inquisitors when, if she should purge herself, she should abjure publicly as vehemently suspect of heresy and of Judaizing, and should perform penance at the discretion of the tribunal. The next day the inquisitors pronounced that she was not convicted but vehemently suspect, wherefore she should purge herself with twelve conjurators. They were duly selected and a term of three days was assigned, within which the ceremony should be performed. They assembled in the Aljafería on August 23d, when the publication of evidence and the defence were read to them. She was sworn to tell the truth and was asked whether she had committed these crimes, to which she replied in the negative and was then removed from the room. The inquisitors again read the accusatory evidence and the defence, the compurgators were sworn to tell the truth, and the inquisitors polled them. The first one, Pedro Monterde, said that he believed Beatriz to have sworn truly, for he had known her for fifteen years and had always held her to be a good Christian, the rest unanimously concurred and the purgation was successful. Then, on September 8th, she appeared in an auto as a penitent and, on the 17th, she abjured all heresies and especially those of which she was vehemently suspected, after which the inquisitors rendered sentence, declaring her to be vehemently suspect of the crimes which she had abjured and, as these suspicions and crimes could not be left unpunished, they penanced her with forbidding her to commit these crimes, with the payment of all costs of her trial, the taxation of which they reserved to themselves, and with performing such penance as they might impose on her. The record fails to inform us what was that penance, but it probably transferred to the tribunal a large portion of the property that had escaped her husband's confiscation.[307]
The threat that failure would imply condemnation was by no means an idle one. About this time, Fray Juan de Madrid was tried before the tribunal of Toledo; there was much adverse evidence in full detail, and the only defence lay in disabling the witnesses. This was partially successful, but enough remained to justify the inquisitors in saying in the sentence that he could have been condemned on it but that, in benignity and mercy, he was offered compurgation. He willingly accepted it and named his compurgators, but half of them refused to sustain his oath of denial, declaring that through their knowledge of him they held him as suspect. This was conclusive; he was considered to be convicted of the charges and the consulta de fe had no hesitation in voting him to relaxation. In like manner, on February 3, 1503, Jayme Benet was burnt at Barcelona because he failed in the compurgation enjoined on him.[308]
A change, probably attributable to the growing desire for absolute secrecy, prescribed by the Instructions of 1500, altered profoundly the prevailing theory of compurgation, for it prohibited the reading to the compurgators of the evidence and defence. In their presence the accused was to deny under oath the charges which were recapitulated by the inquisitors, and the compurgators were simply to be asked whether they believed that he swore the truth, and no other questions.[309] There seems to have been some trouble in abrogating the custom of reading the evidence, for the prohibition had to be repeated in 1514.[310]
[Sidenote: COMPURGATION]
In the project presented to Charles V, in 1520, by the Conversos, with the object of rendering the inquisitorial process less effective, there was included a modification of compurgation in such wise as to facilitate escape.[311] Of course no attention was paid to this, but that some alteration of the process was required by justice is manifest from one or two minor reforms soon afterwards. In 1523 it was ordered that the fiscal should not be present after the compurgators were sworn, which is suggestive of his influencing them adversely. Still more essential was a regulation of 1529, forbidding those who had testified against the accused from serving as his compurgators.[312] Apparently it was one of the results of suppressing the names of witnesses that the poor wretch, in his ignorance, would sometimes call upon those to save him who had been procuring his destruction, and the inquisitors had not sufficient sense of justice to exclude them, although they had power to refuse admission to any one supposed to be friendly to him. There was also a favorable modification of the ancient practice requiring unanimity on the part of the conjurators, for Simancas tells us that the inquisitors, when specifying the number to act, could also designate how many defections would be allowed without prejudicing the result.[313]
Yet by the middle of the century, when Simancas wrote, compurgation was becoming obsolete. He denounces it as blind, perilous and deceitful, and says that it especially should not be forced upon those of Jewish or Moorish descent, for it is equivalent to sending them on the direct road to the stake, since no one could help thinking ill of them, or at least doubting their innocence. Besides, nearly all men are now so corrupt, and Christian charity is so cold, that scarce any one can be found who will purge another, or who will not have an evil suspicion and interpret matters for the worst. To defeat the accused it suffices for the conjurators to say that they do not know, or that they doubt whether he has told the truth, and who is there who will not feel uncertain when he knows that no one is exposed to purgation unless he is vehemently suspected.[314]
This is echoed by the Instructions of 1561, which indicate how compurgation was passing out of use by the brief allusion vouchsafed to it. It is to be performed in accordance with the Instructions, with such number of compurgators as the consulta de fe may prescribe, but inquisitors must bear in mind that the malice of men at the present time renders it perilous, that it is not much in use, and that it must be employed with the utmost caution.[315]
Still, subsequently to this, Pablo García gives full and curious details as to procedure, which show how it had become hedged around with limitations that rendered it a desperate expedient for the accused. The compurgators had to be Old Christians, zealous for the faith, who had known the accused for a specified number of years, and were not of kin or well disposed towards him. He was required to name more than the number designated, so as to allow for those who might have died or be absent, showing that he had to act in the solitude of the cell where perhaps he had been confined for years. When the sentence of compurgation was announced to him, he was given a certain term in which to make his selection and, if he allowed this to elapse, he was at the discretion of the tribunal. No communication with the compurgators was allowed, and when they were assembled each one was separately and secretly examined to ascertain whether he lacked any of the necessary qualifications, what were his relations with the accused, whether he would give anything to secure his discharge, whether any one had spoken with him and asked him to serve, or whether he had intimated to any of the kindred that he was willing to act. While thus carefully guarding against possible friendship, it is significant that there is no instruction to inquire into possible enmity.
The ceremony was performed with considerable impressiveness. On the table of the audience-chamber there were placed with much solemnity a cross, the gospels, and two lighted candles. The prisoner was brought in, his list of selections was read to him and he was asked if he recognized them, to which he assented and said that he presented them as his compurgators. They were then asked if they wished to serve or not; if they accepted, a solemn oath was taken by the prisoner to tell the truth and not to conceal it for fear of death or of loss of property or of honor or for any other reason. The inquisitors then recited the charges which created vehement suspicion and asked him, under his oath, whether he was guilty of them and, after he had answered, he was led back to his cell. Then, if necessary, the nature of compurgation was explained to the compurgators and they were sworn to answer truly and not to deny the truth for hate, or love, or fear, or affection, or other motive. They were kept apart, without communication with each other, and each was examined separately and in secret whether he understood what had passed and whether, in accordance with what he knew of the accused, he believed that he had told the truth, and after replying he was made to promise secrecy under pain of excommunication. The answers were carefully taken down and were signed by the compurgators.[316]
[Sidenote: COMPURGATION]
Conducted after this fashion it is easy to understand why compurgation should be characterized as blind and perilous. The accused had to make his selection blindly, and the qualifications required of conjurators almost insured their unfavorable opinion, at a time when the operations of the Inquisition had caused every man to look upon his neighbor with suspicion, especially when that neighbor was one whom the tribunal required to undergo compurgation. Yet, although the Inquisition thus risked little in subjecting doubtful cases to it, there was ample reason for allowing it to fall into desuetude. Secrecy had become a cardinal principle in all inquisitorial proceedings and it was violated by calling in a dozen laymen to see the prisoner, to hear the charges against him and to participate in the judgement to be passed upon him. Besides, it was an acknowledgement that there were cases in which the assumed omniscience and infallibility of the Holy Office were at fault, and had to be supplemented by the random opinions of a few men selected by the accused. As practised for centuries in the ecclesiastical courts, it had been an easy method for the guilty to escape merited chastisement; as modified by the Inquisition, it became a pitfall for the innocent; it was wholly at variance with the inquisitorial process as developed in Spain and, while its place in the canon law prevented its formal abolition, the tribunals had exclusive discretion as to its employment, and that discretion was used to render it obsolete. Still, it maintained its place as a legal form of procedure. Even as late as 1645, among the interrogatories provided for a visitation, the question was still retained as to whether the forms of the Instructions were observed in canonical compurgation, although a writer of the same period tells us that it is not to be employed because, if the accused overcomes sufficient torture, he is to be discharged.[317]
In the Roman Inquisition we find compurgation ordered as late as 1590, in the case of a priest of Piacenza, accused of certain heretical propositions; the compurgators were to be five beneficed priests of good character and acquainted with the life of the accused. If the purgation was successful he was to be proclaimed of good repute as to the faith, and was to perform salutary penance for the imprudence of his utterances.[318] By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, Carena tells us that it had been virtually disused by the Congregation, as most perilous, fallacious and uncertain.[319]
* * * * *
From this brief review of the various characteristics of the sentence, it will be seen that the Inquisition had at hand formulas adapted to every possible exigency, in the administration of its extensive and highly diversified jurisdiction. Until the development of the authority of the Suprema over the local tribunals, the use made of these formulas depended on the temperament of the individual inquisitors, shielded as they were from responsibility by secrecy and by the virtual suppression of the right of appeal, except in trivial matters. It must be borne in mind, moreover that, even when their sentences may seem merciful, there was always behind them the most grievous infliction of an infamy which affected the honor and the fortunes of a whole lineage.
II. MINOR PENALTIES
In the preceding chapter the general penal system of the Inquisition has been considered, but for its proper comprehension a brief exposition of its several penalties is requisite. In this it is unnecessary to treat of confiscation and pecuniary penance which have already been discussed as constituting the financial basis of the existence of the Holy Office.
REPRIMAND.
Of the minor inflictions, the most nearly universal was the reprimand. It is naturally absent from the severer sentences of reconciliation and relaxation but, with these exceptions, scarce any defendant escaped it, no matter how groundless the accusation was proved to be, or how plainly his innocence was manifested. The freedom with which it was administered is evidenced in a phrase of frequent occurrence in the reports of the Toledo tribunal--"as no offence was proved, he was reprimanded and warned for the future."[320] We have seen that some strict constructionists held that reprimand was incompatible with suspension, but that this principle was universally disregarded. The same authority asserts that no reprimand was to be administered without a formal sentence, but cases are numerous in which it is expressly recorded that the party was reprimanded without a sentence, and sometimes this was by the special command of the Suprema. In the Valladolid tribunal there were eight such cases in the year 1641.[321] To scold the defendant was one of the prerogatives of the inquisitor, from the use of which he rarely abstained, especially as it afforded the opportunity of expatiating on the benignity which imposed penalties so incommensurate with the offences.
The severity of the infliction varied with his temper and power of invective, but constant practice rendered him skilful in detecting the sensitive places, and in applying the lash where it would be most keenly felt. There were those among the victims who regarded this as a severer penalty than a pecuniary penance, and it is not surprising that it occasionally drew forth remonstrance and retort, which were promptly suppressed by the infliction of a fine for the expenses of the tribunal.[322] No record was made of reprimands, beyond the fact of their utterance, but there is one which chances to have been preserved as it seems to have been carefully elaborated and reduced to writing. It was administered by the Licentiate Juan de Mañozca, who had been President of the Chancellery of Granada, to an unlucky gentleman prosecuted for having said that belief in matters of faith was good breeding. He had made the case worse by arguing, in his defence, that he could conceive of no word more applicable to the matter than cortesía, and that his long residence at the court had familiarized him with all the niceties of the Castilian tongue. For this, as a proposition ill-sounding and savoring of heresy, Mañozca belabored him through ten closely-written pages of savage ridicule. "In the Andalusian tunny fishery" he said "there may be seen an infinity of tunnies, the smallest of them as big as you, and yet not one of them will show the least particle of salt, although they have lived in the midst of salt." So he went on, quoting the Scriptures, the classic poets and Plato, to prove that the unfortunate culprit was an ignoramus, closely approaching a heretic. Such ignorance was likened to the unfruitful ears of corn which, according to Christ, are only fit to be swept up and burnt, and the diatribe concluded with the significant warning that it was the Inquisition which gathered such worthless stocks and delivered them to the secular arm, that they might pass through temporal to eternal flame.[323] Doubtless the culprit was a fool, but his folly merited no such terrific warning.
ABJURATION.
Suspicion of heresy, as we have seen, was, in itself, a crime requiring punishment. In accusations of formal heresy which failed of proof, there remained, as a rule, at least suspicion, and there was besides a number of offences which, though not in themselves heretical, were brought under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition by a more or less forced assumption that they inferred suspicion of heresy--that no one who believed rightly as to sacraments and points of doctrine could be guilty of them. In the Old Inquisition, this suspicion was classified as light, vehement or violent and these distinctions were retained in the New. Violent suspicion, however, may be discarded from consideration here, for it sufficed for condemnation and, in practice, it admitted of no disproof or explanation for, although theoretically it might be explained away, this was but a bare possibility. As Peña says, it created presumption of law, as when a man remained for a year under excommunication.[324]
The distinction between light and vehement suspicion was somewhat nebulous. Like everything else in the vague region of morals, it was incapable of accurate definition, and each case had to be decided on its own merits, according to the temper of the judges. Alberghini's attempted test of infrequent or habitual performance of acts inferring suspicion fails utterly in practice and moreover leaves unsettled the more important and common class of cases where testimony was insufficient for conviction and yet too strong for acquittal.[325] Moreover, suspicion might be modified by exterior circumstances, as when Miguel Calvo tells us that, with Moriscos, however slender may be the suspicion, it must be treated as vehement.[326] It was evidently impossible to prescribe any absolute rule, and it is to the credit of the Inquisition that it rarely pronounced suspicion to be vehement, while light suspicion occurs in almost all sentences short of reconciliation. Thus, in the Toledo record from 1648 to 1794, there are three hundred and fourteen abjurations de levi and only fifty-one de vehementi--or about an average of one every three years.[327]
Whatever other punishment might be visited on suspicion, abjuration of heresy in general, and especially of the heresy suspected, was indispensable. This could be administered either in the audience-chamber, or in a public auto de fe, and was an impressive ceremony. In the face of a cross and with his hand on the gospels, the culprit swore that he accepted the Catholic faith and detested and anathematized every species of heresy, and especially that of which he was suspect. He pledged himself always to keep the faith of the Church and to be obedient to the pope and the papal decrees. He declared that all who opposed the Catholic faith were worthy of condemnation, promising never to join them, but to persecute them and denounce them to prelates and inquisitors. He swore to receive patiently and humbly all penance imposed on him, and to fulfil it with all his strength. If the abjuration was for light suspicion, he consented and desired that, if he failed in any part of this, he should be held as impenitent and he submitted himself to the correction and severity of the canons, so that the penalties prescribed in them should be executed on his person, and finally he called upon the notary to record it and on all present to serve as witnesses. If the abjuration was for vehement suspicion, he consented and desired that, if he failed in his promises, he should be held and considered as a relapsed and suffer the penalties provided for relapse. This was the difference between abjuration de levi and abjuration de vehementi, so often alluded to above, and it was of no small import under the canons. After the former, reincidence in the offence entailed no special penalty; it was at the discretion of the tribunal merely to repeat the previous sentence, or to aggravate it, as the case might appear to deserve. But, after the latter, reincidence was relapse, for which the canons decreed irrevocable burning, ipso facto and without trial. To impress this on the penitent, his abjuration de vehementi was written out and he was made to sign it. Then, on the next day after the auto de fe, he was brought into the audience-chamber, it was read to him and he was warned to observe its conditions for, if he should again fall into any heresy whatever, he would be treated as a relapsed without mercy, and it would be the same if he did not perform the penance imposed.[328]
[Sidenote: ABJURATION]
In spite of these impressive formalities, I think it doubtful whether, after the first furious rush of persecution was past, the extreme penalty of relaxation, for reincidence after abjuration de vehementi, was customary. As a rule, in the later periods, inquisitors rather endeavored to avoid relaxation and, while they were callous, they were not apt to be unnecessarily cruel. I have not happened to meet with such a case, while I have found more than one in which the canons were not observed. In fact, a learned writer of the second half of the seventeenth century argues elaborately, with the citation of many authorities, to show that reincidence after abjuration de vehementi does not incur the punishment of relapse, despite the penalties expressed in the formula, and this would appear to have been tacitly accepted, for a custom arose of specifying in the sentence whether or not the abjuration should entail the penalty. Thus, in 1725 at Cuenca, Doctor Zapata, accused of Judaism, was required to abjure de vehementi with liability to relaxation, while in 1794, at Toledo, Damaso José López de Cruz, for heretical propositions, was sentenced to similar abjuration without such liability.[329] There was another distinction between the two forms of abjuration, for those who abjured de vehementi were subject to the disgrace of appearing in an auto de fe and of wearing a sanbenito de media aspa--or with one band of color across it, before and behind.[330]
The Instructions of 1561 state that, when there is semi-proof, or such indications that the accused cannot be acquitted, there are three remedies, compurgation, torture or abjuration; but this is scarce correct, for those who succeeded in compurgation were always, and those who overcame torture were generally, required to abjure. The Instructions add that abjuration, whether for light or vehement suspicion, is rather a measure to inspire fear for the future than a punishment for the past, and therefore it is usually accompanied with pecuniary penance.[331] In fact, it was only in trifling cases, or in suspensions, that abjuration was not associated with much severer penalties. This was inevitable in the large class of offences which, by a strained construction, inferred suspicion of heresy. In these, when guilt was proven, it received its appropriate punishment, perhaps of scourging or the galleys, and the abjuration was a mere formality to satisfy the artificial ascription of heretical belief. In cases of suspicion of real heresy, abjuration, whether de levi or de vehementi, was a necessary adjunct to the punishment. Thus in the Toledo auto of February 7, 1694, Luis de Vargas, for "suspicions of Judaism," was sentenced to abjure de levi, to pay a fine of two hundred ducats and to be exiled for six years from various places. So, in 1715, at Toledo, the Carmelite Fray Francisco Martínez de Salazar, "for crimes vehemently suspect of heresy," appeared in the audience-chamber with a sanbenito de media aspa, in the presence of twelve priests; he abjured de vehementi, was sternly reprimanded and threatened, and sentenced to a long list of penalties, including deprivation of functions, reclusion for six years in a convent and a circular discipline in the Carmelite house of Toledo.[332] On this composite sentence the consulta de fe had evidently exhausted its ingenuity, and the abjuration was merely a formal necessity to justify the rest. Yet, while abjuration in itself can scarce be termed a punishment it was, even when only de levi, an infliction of no little severity, in consequence of the infamy which it entailed, as we have seen in the Villanueva case, where the victim and his kindred struggled for so many years in Rome to have it removed.
EXILE.
[Sidenote: EXILE]
Frequent allusions above to exile as occurring in sentences indicate how customary a feature it was in the penal system of the Inquisition. By itself, or in combination with other penalties, it was an unfailing resort in offences that did not incur the graver punishment of imprisonment. It could be varied indefinitely, to suit the peculiarities of each case, and the tribunals exercised the widest discretion in its employment. In its usual form it designated certain places and a fixed number of leagues around them, which the penitent was forbidden to enter. The list of proscribed localities as a rule included Madrid, or rather the royal residences, the seat of the tribunal, the dwelling-place of the culprit, if this was not comprised in the others, and any other towns, sometimes amounting to four or five, where he had been known in his guilty career. Although this was a convenient resource to the tribunal, it was a somewhat irrational penalty, the severity of which could hardly be guessed at, for while it might be scarce more than an inconvenience to one offender, it might be the destruction of a career to a merchant established in business, or to a professional man with an assured clientèle. Considerations of this kind, however, rarely influenced the tribunals and, in the Toledan record of 1575-1610 we find exile included in a hundred and sixty-seven sentences.
The length of exile was always specified, and varied from some months to a life-time, but it usually was a term of a few years. Sometimes it was divided into two portions, the first preciso or absolute, the second voluntario or dependent upon the will of the tribunal--apparently as an incentive to amendment. A variant of this occurs in the case of Diego de Toro, sentenced for bigamy at Toledo in 1652, to four years of exile absolutely and four years more which he was to fulfil whenever the tribunal should see fit to order it, thus holding it over him indefinitely.[333]
It was not often that the Inquisition exercised the power of banishment from Spain, but it did not hesitate to assume such authority when it saw fit, and a converse to this was the occasional prohibition to leave Spain, of which an instance is cited above (p. 102). Another form, in which the wide discretion of the tribunals was exhibited, was forbidding the penitent to approach within a specified distance of the sea-coast. This was not infrequent in sentences on Moriscos, whose relations with Barbary always excited apprehension, but it is not apparent why the Valladolid tribunal, in 1659, when sentencing Diego de la Peña for Jewish tendencies, should have included an inhibition to approach within eight leagues of any sea-port without a special licence.[334]
Again, we sometimes find a penitent exiled to some particular place for a term of years, and this is frequently combined with provisions for keeping him under surveillance. Thus the Valladolid tribunal, in 1659, sentenced Isabel Rubía and María Martin, for sorcery, to reside for four years in a place to be designated, where there was an official to whom they must present themselves monthly and who would report as to their amendment.[335] This was sometimes a form of commutation for imprisonment, as in the case of Isabel Núñez, sentenced at Cuenca to prison and Sanbenito, which was modified to four years' exile at San Clemente. December 24, 1657, she presented a notarial certificate of her being there and begged that, as she was 74 years old and very poor and miserable, she might be released, in honor of the birth of the prince (Felipe-Prosper) or at least have the place changed to Alcalá, Guadalajara or Pastrana, where there were people who would help her. This pitiful petition was simply endorsed to be filed with the papers of the case, which indicates that it was refused.[336] A more rigorous example of this, which shows that no limit was placed on the discretion of the Inquisition, was the banishment for life to the Philippines, in 1802, of two frailes concerned in the imposture of Isabel María Herraiz, known as the Beata of Cuenca.[337] Conversely, a penitent might be prohibited to leave a designated place, as when, in 1599, Rodrigo Ramírez, a Morisco of Yepes, was forbidden for three years to leave Yepes without licence.[338]
As the ordinary form of exile was easily violated, the sentence, as we have seen above, was frequently accompanied with a threat of increased penalties for non-fulfilment. In Toledo this seems ordinarily to be a doubling of the original term, but frequently it was more severe as, in 1604, at Valencia, the sentence of Bartolomé Posca added to this a hundred lashes and, in 1607, Francisco Xiner, condemned to five years' exile, was threatened with three years of galleys.[339] It was probably to check, in some degree, the facility for evasion that the Suprema, in 1665, required the tribunals to furnish it with a description of the culprit whenever they pronounced a sentence of exile. As this always comprised Madrid and, as the capital was likely to attract the homeless waifs, details which might assist in their identification were useful.[340]
RAZING HOUSES.
[Sidenote: RAZING HOUSES]
In the imperial jurisprudence, houses in which heretics held their conventicles were forfeited to the Church and this provision was adopted in the legislation of Alfonso X.[341] When prosecution was systematized in the thirteenth century, this was modified to tearing down all houses in which heretics were found, the site remaining forever accursed and unfit for human habitation. This was accepted by the Church and found its way into all the lands that admitted the Inquisition.[342] Aragon adopted it and when, about 1340, the Spiritual Franciscan Fray Bonanato was burnt, and his disciples were scattered, the building which they had occupied at Villafranca del Panadés, near Barcelona, was levelled to the ground.[343]
In the early days of the Spanish Inquisition, the strict enforcement of the rule would have led to great destruction and serious impairment of the value of confiscations. It seems therefore to have been reserved for buildings in which the heretics or apostates had been accustomed to assemble, and then the king, as the recipient of confiscations, decided the matter. A letter of Ferdinand, May 23, 1501, to Aliaga his receiver at Valencia, states that the inquisitors have asked him to decree the destruction of a house in which a synagogue had been found, to which he assents with the suggestive addition that the civic authorities must be ordered to offer no opposition. It turned out that Ferdinand had already given the house to Juan Pérez, the scrivener of sequestrations, whereupon he ordered Aliaga to have it appraised and to pay the value to Pérez.[344] He seems to have offered no opposition to Lucero's operations in Córdova, where a number of houses were torn down as having served as synagogues, and he ordered them rebuilt when the Congregacion Católica assembled at Valladolid, in 1509, pronounced the prosecutions fictitious.[345]
When the confiscations passed to the Inquisition, financial considerations apparently got the better of zeal, for when, in 1539, at Valencia, trials of a number of Judaizers revealed that a crucifix had been maltreated in a house used for their assemblies, and the tribunal desired authority for its destruction and the erection of a memorial chapel, the Suprema replied cautiously with a number of questions as to value, location and expense, as there were no funds for the purpose, and it ordered the auto de fe to be held, reserving decision as to the house.[346] The subsequent proceedings against the convicts, who revoked their confessions, show that the house was still standing four or five years later.
There was no such hesitation in the stimulated excitement following the discovery of Protestantism in high places in 1559. When, in the Valladolid auto de fe of May 21, the Cazalla family were nearly exterminated, the house of the mother, Leonor de Vibero, where the little group used to assemble, was razed, and a pillar was erected on the spot, with an inscription that can still be read--"During the pontificate of Paul IV and the reign of Philip II, the Holy Office of the Inquisition condemned this building of Pedro de Cazalla and Leonor de Vibero his wife to be torn down and levelled with the ground, since here the Lutherans assembled to hold meetings against our holy Catholic faith and the Church of Rome, May 21, 1559." Similarly in the great auto of Seville, September 24, 1559, the houses of Luis de Alerego and Isabel de Baena, which had served as Protestant conventicles, were destroyed.[347]
[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL PENANCES]
A thrifty disposition to restrain inconsiderate zeal for obliterating the receptacles of heresy was manifested by the Suprema, in 1565, when it forbade the razing of a house unless it belonged to the delinquents and thus would not have to be paid for.[348] This restriction, however, was not observed on an occasion which was perhaps the latest as well as the most conspicuous example of the practice. In the great Madrid auto of July 4, 1632, which was honored by the presence of Philip IV, among those who were burnt were Miguel Rodríguez and his wife Isabel Núñez Alvárez, in whose house not only were held Jewish meetings, but an image of Christ had been scourged and when it shed blood and thrice spoke to them they consumed it with fire. Of course it was doomed and on the day after the execution the Inquisition ordered it to be appraised in order that the owner might be compensated. He was the Licentiate Barquero, a highly respected jurist, who protested against its destruction until he received good security for its value. No time was lost. On the 6th the Inquisitor Cristóval de Ibarra, accompanied by the Admiral of Castile, the Duke of Medina de la Torres and other gentlemen, many familiars and a crowd of workmen, and preceded by a guard of halberdiers with banner and drums, marched to the spot, where a secretary read a proclamation of the Toledo tribunal to the effect that it ordered the demolition of the house where a holy Christ had been scourged and maltreated. Then the drums beat and the workmen assailed the structure so zealously that by nine o'clock that night there was not a vestige of it left, the populace eagerly aiding them in tearing the stones from the walls and carrying off the timbers. The site was not left, as the canons direct, to be a receptacle of filth. Money was raised and a Capuchin convent was erected, known as La Paciencia, in remembrance of the patience with which Christ had borne the indignities heaped upon him.[349]
SPIRITUAL PENANCES.
It might be presupposed that, in dealing with spiritual offences, and professing that its main object was the salvation of souls, the Inquisition would incline rather to spiritual exercises than to pecuniary and corporal punishments--that it would seek to instruct and elevate the spirit rather than to afflict the body. Religious persecution, however, has always preferred the harshness of coercion, and has held that the surest way to bring conviction to the soul was to torment the flesh. We need therefore not be surprised to see how insignificant a place spiritual penances held in the sentences of the Holy Office, and it would scarce be worth while to consider them except to note how little was the importance attributed to them by the tribunals.
Except in trifling cases, which merited no real punishment, such spiritual penances as we occasionally meet with are conjoined with material penalties. A man sentenced to imprisonment may perhaps be required to fast on Fridays for six months or a year, and to recite on those days a prescribed number of Ave Marias and Paternosters or other prayers. Pilgrimages to shrines as distant as St. Thomas of Canterbury or St. James of Compostela, so frequently prescribed in the medieval Inquisition, were unknown. It is true that the formula of sentence on the reconciled, condemning them to prison, requires them on Saturdays to make a pilgrimage to some designated shrine in the vicinity, where on their knees they must repeat with devotion five Paters, Ave Marias, Credos and Salve Reginas, but this was not often used in practice.[350] Clerical offenders, sentenced to reclusion in convents, frequently had spiritual exercises included among numerous other inflictions. While this moderation was the rule, occasionally of course the unlimited discretion of the tribunals made exceptions, as in a singularly ill-judged penance imposed at Toledo, in 1653, on Gerónima Mendes, a child ten years of age, convicted of Judaism, who was sentenced to a month's instruction in the faith and the daily recitation of the rosary for a year. Seeing that the rosary consists of seventeen Paternosters, sixteen Gloria Patris, a hundred and fifty-three Ave Marias and the Apostles' Creed, one can estimate the burden imposed on a child of such tender years and how little it would conduce to training the youthful penitent in a love for the faith.[351] Such an infliction however was exceptional, and it frequently happens, in the reports of the tribunals, after detailing the material portions of a sentence, that there is a mere general allusion to "some spiritual penances," which suggests how slender was the consideration bestowed on them. There is one type of better promise, not infrequent in the later period, such as a sentence pronounced at Toledo, in 1777, on Antonio Rubio and Diego González, condemned for heretical acts and blasphemy, the former to five years' labor in the arsenal of Cartagena and the latter to three years in the presidio of Ceuta, both of whom were required, before leaving prison, to perform fifteen days of spiritual exercises under a director who would instruct them.[352]
The hearing of mass as a penitent, which was a very frequent infliction, cannot be classed as a spiritual penance--it was a simple humiliation and was so intended, especially when performed publicly in church.
UNUSUAL PENALTIES.
[Sidenote: UNUSUAL PENALTIES]
A few instances will indicate how the tribunals sometimes used their wide discretion in adapting to any given case what was deemed an appropriate penalty. It is true that when Valencia, in 1539, made Fray Torres, a priest, appear in a public auto de fe, with a bridle in his mouth and a pannier of straw on his back, the Suprema rebuked it and forbade such eccentricities for the future.[353] So when, in 1568, Inquisitor Morales reported that, during his visit to San Sebastian, he had condemned certain offenders to have sermons preached at their expense, the Suprema mildly remarked that this was a novelty.[354] In an auto de fe at Llerena, in 1579, there was a negress named Catalina, the slave of a man of Zafra. It was doubtless through consideration of his interests that she was spared the corporal chastisement visited on her accomplices, but there was a distinct invasion of his rights in a prohibition to him to sell her without licence from the inquisitors.[355] In 1607, at Valencia, a single witness accused María Tubarri, a Morisca midwife, of using Moorish ceremonies in baptising infants, and of circumcising the males; the proof, against her denial, was not thought sufficient to justify torture and she was required only to abjure de levi, but she was deprived for life of practising her profession.[356] There was wisdom, if a trifle arbitrary, in a sentence at Toledo, in 1685, on Lucas Morales for blasphemy, for it included, among other penalties, a prohibition to gamble--a sensible provision against relapse, for gaming was recognized as the most prolific source of blasphemy.[357]
There was the same latitude in vindictive as in deterrent punishments. At Valladolid, from 1635 to 1637, there were several Judaizers convicted of maltreating an image of Christ. The consultors voted for relaxation, but the Suprema approved the decision of the inquisitors that they should have the right arm nailed to a stake in the form of a cross, while their sentences were being read in an auto de fe.[358] Less symbolical and still more original was a spectacle devised for the Mexican auto of December 7, 1664, where one of the penitents was stripped to the waist, while two Indians smeared him with honey and covered him with feathers, in which guise he was made to stand in the sun for four hours on the staging.[359] Even recruiting for the army was not beneath the dignity of the tribunal as when, in 1650, Toledo condemned Andrés de Herrera Calderon, for blasphemy, to serve for four years in the campaigns against Portugal and Catalonia, where doubtless he enriched his vocabulary of expletives.[360]
There evidently was no defined limit to the power of suiting the penalty to the inquisitorial conception of the offence, and the tribunals made ample use of their prerogative.
III. HARSHER PENALTIES
THE SCOURGE.
Although at first sight the use of the lash, as a persuasive to correct religious belief, may appear somewhat incongruous, it must be borne in mind that, under the euphemy of the discipline, it has always formed a prominent feature of penance, especially among the monastic orders where, in the daily or weekly chapters, it was liberally administered for all infractions of the Rule or other sins, as a preliminary to absolution. In fact, the touching of the penitent's shoulder with a wand by the priest in absolution from excommunication, is a symbol of the discipline which was anciently indispensable. In the Old Inquisition it was in frequent use, although there it was rendered a matter of edification, through its infliction by priests during divine service or in religious processions. That it should form part of the penal resources of the Spanish Holy Office was therefore natural, although it lost its penitential aspect and became purely punitive and vindictive.
It was no longer the priest who wielded the discipline with an indeterminate number of strokes during an indeterminate series of feast-days. The tribunal prescribed the number of lashes and they were laid on by the vigorous arm of the public executioner. The penitents who had to suffer appeared in the auto de fe with halters around their necks; if there was one knot in the halter, it signified a hundred lashes, if two, two hundred and so on, one hundred being the unit and the minimum number. The next day the populace was treated to the spectacle. Mounted astride of asses, bared to the waist, with halter and mitre bearing inscription of their offences and a pié de amigo holding the head erect, they were paraded through the accustomed streets, with a guard of mounted familiars and a notary or secretary to make record, while the executioner plied the penca, or leather strap, on the naked flesh, until the tale was complete, and the town-crier proclaimed that it was by order of the Inquisition for the crimes specified. A clause in the proclamation, after the great Madrid auto of 1680, forbidding, under pain of excommunication, any one to throw stones at the penitents, indicates that the populace had a playful habit of thus manifesting its detestation of heresy.[361]
In 1568 the Suprema rebuked the Barcelona tribunal for condemning to public scourging penitents reconciled for heresy. This, it said, was contrary to the estilo of the Inquisition, and in future the lash was not to be used unless there was some other crime than heresy.[362] This indicates how completely the scourge had become punitive and how it was dissociated from the ancient discipline, but if such regulation existed it met with scant recognition. All the offences subjected to the Inquisition were constructively heretical, and there never seems to have been any discrimination exercised between them. Indeed, we have seen that the lash was especially indicated for heretics who were tardy or variable in their confessions, and Judaizers are constantly seen to be subjected to it.
[Sidenote: SCOURGING]
Scourging was a favorite penalty which was lavishly and often mercilessly employed. In the Saragossa auto of June 6, 1585, out of a total of seventy-nine penitents, twenty-two were scourged; in that of Valencia, in 1607, of forty-seven penitents, twenty-four received the lash.[363] This, however, exceeds the average. The Toledo reports, from 1575 to 1610, present a hundred and thirty-three cases of scourging which, allowing for a break in the record, give about four per annum.[364] On the other hand, a collection of autos de fe celebrated between 1721 and 1727, embracing in all nine hundred and sixty-two cases, affords two hundred and ninety-seven sentences of scourging, or about thirty per cent.[365] When we recall that, in the list of officials reported by Murcia, in 1746, there figures Joseph García Bentura as notario de açotaciones--a notary of scourgings--to keep record of the stripes, with a salary of about 2500 reales, we realize how prominent a feature it was in inquisitorial penology.[366] The brutalizing effect on the populace of these wholesale exhibitions of flogging, especially of women, can readily be estimated.
The usual number of lashes prescribed was two hundred, though in occasional cases a hundred sufficed. In the two hundred and ninety-seven just alluded to, two hundred and ninety were of two hundred lashes and only seven of one hundred. It was rare that two hundred were exceeded in any one infliction, though sometimes it was mercilessly duplicated, as in the Seville auto of September 24, 1559, Martin Fernando Saldrian, a shepherd, for blasphemy was scourged in Seville and again in his native town; Alonso Martin of Carmona, for Lutheranism, was scourged in both Seville and Carmona and Juan de Aragon of Málaga, who had pretended to be a familiar, was scourged in Málaga and again in the scene of his offence.[367]
Probably two hundred lashes were about the limit of safety, especially with those enfeebled by prolonged incarceration, for the infliction was excessively severe. We hear of Margarita Altamira reduced to such extremity after a scourging that the viaticum was administered to her.[368] There was no mercy for age or sex. In the Valencia auto of January 7, 1607, Isabel Madalina Conteri, a Morisca girl of 13, after overcoming torture, had a hundred lashes, Jayme Chulayla, a Morisco of 76, who had been tortured, had a hundred and the same was administered to Francisco Marquino, aged 86 for sorcery in treasure-seeking, while Magdalena Cahet, aged 60, who had escaped torture on account of heart-disease, was not spared a hundred.[369]
As the eighteenth century advanced there appears to be more readiness to remit the execution of sentences of scourging on account of age and infirmities and of "accidentes," which probably mean crippling by torture. Then there developes a tendency to spare women and finally men; the sentences continue to be pronounced, but they are remitted by the inquisitor-general. In 1769, at Toledo, Gerónimo Clos, for bigamy, was pardoned the two hundred lashes of his sentence, which could not have been for infirmity, as he was not released from hard labor for five years in the royal works at Cartagena.[370] From this time scourging may be regarded as obsolescent and soon to become obsolete. Under the Restoration, from 1814 to 1820, in the votos secretos, there is not a case in which the lash was inflicted, for when included in the sentences, it was always remitted by the Suprema.[371]
The clergy, of course, were not subjected to the disgrace of public scourging. In their cases it took the form known as a circular discipline, administered in a convent by all the inmates in turn.
VERGÜENZA.
Vergüenza, or shame, was the same as scourging, with the lashes omitted. The culprit, stripped to the waist and with the pié de amigo, was paraded through the streets, with the insignia of his offence, while the town-crier proclaimed his sentence. It was naturally regarded as less severe than scourging and was sometimes substituted for the latter, when the penitent was too aged or feeble to endure the lash. For the beldams and ruffians who were often its subjects it could have had but few terrors, but it was greatly dreaded by those of sensitive nature. The inquisitors took little count of this, when dealing with Judaizers and Moriscos, who had a keen sense of personal dignity, and Pedraza informs us that those exposed to it regarded death as a mercy, preferring to die rather than to endure a life of infamy.[372] To young women the exposure was especially humiliating, yet, on the whole, it may be regarded as more humane than the pillory of our forefathers, for the penitent was not exposed to the missiles of a brutal populace.
Vergüenza was a comparatively infrequent punishment. In the Toledo reports of 1575-1610 it occurs in but twenty-six sentences, which may be compared with the hundred and thirty-three scourgings, and the records of the same tribunal from 1648 to 1794 present but ten vergüenzas to ninety-two scourgings. In the very severe series of autos de fe between 1721 and 1727, the comparison is thirteen to two hundred and ninety-seven.
[Sidenote: THE GAG--THE GALLEYS]
MORDAZA.
The mordaza or gag, as we have seen, was regarded as increasing greatly the severity of the infliction of which it formed part. It was sometimes used in scourging and vergüenza, when the so-called penitent was a hardened blasphemer or likely in some way to create scandal. It was likewise employed in the autos de fe, on pertinacious and impenitent heretics of whom it was feared that they might on their way to the stake produce an impression on those not firm in the faith.[373] Its use was not frequent, although, in the dread inspired by Protestantism, in 1559, at the great Seville auto of September 24th, twelve of the victims wore the mordaza. There were also twelve thus gagged in the Madrid auto of 1680, but these numbers were exceptional.[374]
THE GALLEYS.
Enslavement in the galleys, to labor at the oar, would appear to be even more incongruous than scourging as penance for spiritual offences. It was a Spanish device, unknown to the elder Inquisition, and had its origin in the thrifty mind of Ferdinand. We shall presently see how exercised were the monarch and the Holy Office over the problem presented by the maintenance of those condemned to the canonical penalty of perpetual prison, and Ferdinand, whose Sicilian possessions required a powerful navy, bethought him of the expedient of utilizing his able-bodied prisoners to man his galleys--the galley propelled by oars being as yet the equivalent of the modern battle-ship. Galley-service was recognized as so severe that the old fueros of Aragon forbade it under heavy penalties, except with the free assent of the individual, and it was not until the curtailment of ancient privileges, in the Córtes of Tarazona in 1592, that judges were permitted to use it as a punishment for robbers.[375] In Castile, the pressure for slaves to man the galleys is indicated by a royal cédula of November 14, 1502, commuting the death-sentence of criminals in the secular courts, and ordering them to be sent to the galleys.[376] It was probably about this time that Ferdinand turned to the Inquisition, which was bound by no laws, for relief from overcrowded prisons and undermanned galleys. Even the callous morality of the age seems to have been shocked at this and, as usual, the sanction of the Holy See was sought for the iniquity. It was of course granted, and Alexander VI, in a brief addressed to the inquisitors, May 26, 1503, recited that Ferdinand and Isabella had represented to him that those condemned to perpetual prison relapsed into heresy; that there was a lack of prisons in which they could be confined without perverting others, and that multiplication of prisons would lead to dissemination of heresy; that their power to commute imprisonment into other perpetual punishment had been called into question, and that they had asked him to provide a remedy. As the chief solicitude of the inquisitors should be the prevention of relapse, he therefore empowered them to change the perpetual prison of penitents into other penalties--deportation to the colonies, or imprisonment in the royal galleys, where, in perpetual confinement, they might render enforced service, or to any other perpetual punishment, according to their quality and offences.[377]
[Sidenote: THE GALLEYS]
That full advantage was taken of this there can be no doubt, to the relief of the prison funds and the facilitation of the conquest of Naples. We chance to hear of the transfer at Barcelona, January 24, 1505, of nineteen prisoners from the gaol of the Inquisition to the galleys of Ramon de Cardona, which we may fairly accept as an example of what was on foot everywhere.[378] In fact, the eagerness of the tribunals to disembarrass themselves of their prisoners seems to have led to their discharging on the galleys those in every way unfit for the service, for the Suprema was obliged, in 1506, to declare that men over 60, clerics and women were exempt from the punishment of the galleys.[379] Even Ferdinand himself, towards the close of his career, seems to have shrunk from the responsibility of openly authorizing an extension of this heartless business for when, in 1513, the Inquisitor of Sicily asked permission to send to the galleys those condemned to perpetual prison, Ferdinand threw the decision back on him; to build prisons will cost much money, he said, but the galleys may deter men from confessing their heresy; the inquisitor is therefore to think the matter over and do what he deems best.[380] The conclusion reached is unknown, but we may reasonably surmise that the Palermo tribunal did not waste its funds in constructing prisons.
Ferdinand's hesitation seems to have been shared by Charles V for, in 1527, the Suprema ordered that penitents should not be sent to the galleys but should have other penances.[381] The motive for this humane provision, however, did not long withstand the more pressing economical considerations. In 1529, Rodrigo Portuondo, captain-general of the galleys, was instructed that no one sent to them by the Inquisition should hold any office or administration, or have charge of the rations, showing that the prohibition had been rescinded.[382] Apparently the superior intelligence of the penitents had rendered them more useful as petty officers and accountants than as slaves of the oar, but this alleviation of their misery did not satisfy the spirit of persecution and it was probably to prevent it that the formula of the sentence was service at the oar without pay--unless, indeed, the penitent was of gentle blood, in which case he could be sent to serve as a gentleman or as a soldier.[383]
We have already seen to what profitable account the Inquisition turned the power which it had assumed to grant dispensations from this abhorrent servitude, and a case in 1558 indicates how it guarded against any invasion of its prerogative. Philip II was led to interest himself in the case of Andrés de Frias, condemned to the galleys, and asked to have him dispensed from the remainder of his term. To this the Suprema demurred, saying that the statement of Frias was untrue, for in Rome he had treacherously stabbed to death the procurator of the Inquisition, Doctor Puente, after dining with him and promising to sup with him; moreover the seventeen months which he claimed to have served had not been as a galley-slave, as required by his sentence. Still, if he would present himself and manifest repentance there might be opportunity for the king to show him mercy, but otherwise it would greatly impair the authority of the Inquisition.[384]
Philip was not given to interceding for those sent to his galleys, for galley-slaves continued to be in great demand. In 1567 the Venitian envoy, Antonio Tiepolo, explains the weakness of the Spanish navy by the fact that its galleys were manned with slaves and forçats, who were not numerous enough to keep many galleys at sea. It would be, he says, impossible to man them with free-men, as in Venice, for no one would serve voluntarily, as the ill-treatment of the crews is notorious and their dying for lack of the necessaries of life.[385] It is true that there was a curious source of supply, besides the ordinary criminals and heretics, for the prelates of the religious Orders were accustomed to condemn their peccant brethren to the galleys, from the same economical motive that had actuated Ferdinand--to save the expense of maintaining them in prison.[386] Still, the needs of the armadas were pressing; Philip turned to the Inquisition for aid, and, in 1567, the Suprema issued two decrees intended to assist in manning the royal galleys. One bore that sentences must not be for less than three or four years, for otherwise the penitents cost the king more than the service he got from them, and this was enforced by a royal cédula of 1584.[387] The other suggested--suggestion being equivalent to an order--that sentences to the galleys could be substituted for those to prison and sanbenito. The practical deduction drawn from this is expressed by a writer of the period, who says that, if the accused confesses but does not satisfy the evidence, he is to be tortured and, if he still fails to satisfy the evidence, it is customary to send him to the galleys, but this must be for not less than three years.[388] To appreciate fully this atrocity, it must be borne in mind that torture could only be used in cases of doubt where the evidence was defective, so that, besides the torture the victim was sent to the galleys for suspicion of heresy.
[Sidenote: THE GALLEYS]
Even this did not satisfy the royal exigency and a further inexcusable step was taken. We have seen that tardy and imperfect confessions were visited with scourging and sometimes with the galleys, while the buen confitente, who confessed promptly and freely, was allured with promises of special consideration and mercy. Yet, in 1573, the Suprema issued a carta acordada ordering that Conversos, even when buen confitentes, should be sent to the galleys, and this it repeated in 1591, with injunctions for its enforcement.[389] The name of religion has not often been more brutally prostituted than in these provisions, and their success may be measured by a report of the inquisitors of Saragossa to Philip, of an auto celebrated June 6, 1585, in which they call his special attention to their zeal in furnishing him with twenty-nine galley-slaves for six years, besides three left over from a previous auto--and this in Aragon, which forbade galley-service as a punishment for the most heinous crimes.[390]
The galley-captains naturally were not punctilious in discharging the men when their terms had expired, giving rise to perpetual friction. The sentence ordinarily was to a term of prison or exile, of which the first three years or more were to be passed at the oar, and this was set forth in the certificates given to the penitents. The tribunals kept watch over them, and demanded their return to serve out the rest of their sentences, but this was not an easy task. The vigilance exercised is illustrated by a royal cedula addressed to the captain of a galley, ordering him to release two men whose terms had expired, and warning him that in future all such persons were to be returned to the tribunal that had sentenced them.[391] This was followed, in 1568, by general instructions to Don John of Austria, as Captain-general of the Sea, and to all captains of galleys, reciting the complaints of the Sicilian tribunal that its reclamations of its penitents were not complied with, and ordering their restoration to their tribunals without waiting for demands.[392] This was ineffectual and, in 1575, we find the Barcelona tribunal instructed to prosecute the captains who impede the discharge of those who had served out inquisitorial sentences.[393] The trouble was perennial and, in 1645, we have a formula of requisition for the return of the party specified, under pain of excommunication and of five hundred ducats, and the tribunal of the port where the galleys lie is requested to see to its execution. A significant note however adds that this is scantly courteous to such great men as the generals of the galleys, and that it is better to ask the tribunal of the port to procure the release by friendly negotiation.[394]
The cases could not have been infrequent in which men, utterly unfit for the privations and ill-usage of the galley-slave, were condemned to this hard service, and no doubt many perished in consequence. Yet exemptions on this ground were reluctantly admitted, if we may judge from a rebuke administered, in 1665, by the Suprema to the Barcelona tribunal, in a case where this was asked; the opinions of the physician and surgeon were insufficient; other professionals must be called in and examination be made as to the penitent's condition when, if it appears that he is unfit for the service, the sentence can be commuted to eight years of exile as proposed.[395] It is a marked expression of the humanitarian development of the eighteenth century that, even in the fierce persecution of its first quarter, in 1721 it was ordered that, before imposing a sentence to the galleys, the delinquent should be examined by the physician and surgeon and, if incapacitating weakness appeared, it should be mentioned in the vote of the consulta de fe that, in consequence of it, the sentence was commuted to irremissible imprisonment.[396] The succeeding autos show that this bore fruit in sundry commutations, although the alternative of irremissible prison was not observed, and less severe penalties were sometimes substituted.[397]
[Sidenote: THE GALLEYS]
In the sixty-four autos de fe between 1721 and 1727, of which we possess details, there were ninety-two sentences to the galleys and seven to service in the presidios. There was a certain relation between the two. In the seventeenth century legislation on offences connected with the coinage, the galleys were provided for commoners and presidio service for gentlemen and, as the century drew to a close, we find the Inquisition no longer sending gentlemen to serve as soldiers on the galleys but to Oran, Ceuta, Gibraltar, Badajoz, Peñon and other royal works and garrisons.[398] In the eighteenth century Inquisition, the galleys for all classes were gradually supplanted by the presidio, if we include in the term enforced labor in the royal dock-yards and arsenals as well as in the African garrisons. Galleys were disappearing from the sea and, in the Inquisition, they were superseded by the bagne, in its various forms of hard work. In 1742, the Toledo tribunal condemned Rafael Nuñez Hernández, for certain errors, to eight years of exile of which the first five were to be passed serving the king in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of Almaden, and the last sentences to the galleys that I have met occur in 1745, when Nicholas Serrano was condemned at Toledo for bigamy to eight years of service in them, and Miguel Gutiérrez and Francisco García, at Valladolid, for relapse into Judaism, to ten years. After this the galleys may be said to be obsolete, even for bigamy, as is seen in a sentence of the Valencia tribunal in 1781.[399]
The presidio continued as a punishment under the Restoration, but cases were so rare that there was question as to the reception of the convicts in their places of destination. In 1818, the Seville tribunal sentenced three persons--two for propositions and one for bigamy--to two years' service in Ceuta or Melilla, and it asked the Suprema to get the minister of war to issue orders to the governors to receive them. The Suprema replied that this was the business of the tribunal; it must do as on former occasions, and if necessary could write to the governors. The forçats were duly received and, it is pleasant to add that, in six months, the Suprema humanely remitted the punishment in order that they might return and support their families. For this an order from the secretary of the Council of War was required and procured.[400]
For women, the equivalent of the galleys was service without pay in hospitals, houses of correction and similar institutions. Apparently these female convicts were not always regarded as desirable inmates and though, in the pre-revolutionary times, no opposition was ventured, under the Restoration there was sometimes difficulty in securing their admission. In 1819 the Seville tribunal appealed to the Suprema, representing that it had been unable thus to dispose of Juana de Luna, for the same reasons which it had experienced in the cases of Ana Barbero and Leonor Macias. The Inquisition inspired no such terror as of old, for the Suprema could suggest no means of overcoming the difficulty, and could only instruct the tribunal to devise some method of executing its sentences.[401]
* * * * *
It is not to the credit of the Roman Inquisition that it followed the example of the Spanish and included the galleys in its list of punishments. Carena, indeed, tells us that it was the most usual of all and was the customary penalty in a wide variety of offences.[402]
RECONCILIATION.
That reconciliation to the Church, which was represented as a loving mother, eager to welcome back to her bosom her erring children, should be regarded as a punishment, seems a contradiction in terms, yet so it was, and the Suprema did not hesitate to speak of those "who had been condemned to reconciliation."[403] It would not be easy to invent a more emphatic illustration of the perversion of the spirit of religion by persecuting fanaticism.
The apostate or the heretic, who had abandoned the Church after admission through the waters of baptism, could only be reincorporated by abjuring his errors and applying for reconciliation. In the case of Conversos, who secretly adhered to the Mosaic or Mahometan law, there could be no question as to this, nor was there with such heretics as Protestants. To what extent other errors might constitute formal heresy requiring reconciliation, or might infer suspicion of heresy, light or vehement, was a problem for the calificadores, and sometimes was an intricate one, for the gradations of theological error are infinite and subtile.
[Sidenote: RECONCILIATION]
In the tumultuous proceedings of the early period when, under Edicts of Grace, penitents came forward by the thousand, confessing their errors and begging for reconciliation, the ceremony was naturally simple. Under the Instructions of 1484, the form described by Joan Andrea was to be used: the inquisitors declared that the penitent had been an apostate heretic, who had followed the rites and ceremonies of the Jews and had incurred the penalties of the law but, as he now says that he has been converted and desires to return to the faith, with a pure heart and faith unfeigned, and is ready to accept and perform the penances to be imposed, they must absolve him from the excommunication incurred through the said crime and must reconcile him to Holy Mother Church, if, as he says, he is converted to the holy faith truly and without fiction.[404]
No mention is made here of any subsequent ceremonies, although at least abjuration must probably have followed. When procedure was less hurried and there had been time for its elaboration, the process became impressive. The sentence recited that the penitent was admitted to reconciliation; that as penance he was to appear in an auto de fe, without girdle or cap, in a penitential habit of yellow cloth, with two red aspas or bands forming a St. Andrew's cross, and a candle in his hand when, after his sentence is read, he should publicly abjure the errors confessed and all other errors and apostasy, after which "we order him to be absolved and we absolve him from any excommunication which he has incurred and we unite and reincorporate him in the bosom and union of the Holy Mother Catholic Church, and we restore him to participation in the holy sacraments and communion of the faithful"--to which was appended a recital of the various punishments to which he was condemned. After the auto de fe was ended, the abjuration was administered. This was similar to the abjuration de vehementi already given and in it he consented, in case of relapse, to submit to the penalties of the canons. On the conclusion of this, he was formally absolved and the next day his abjuration was read over to him, with a warning that in case of relapse he would be burnt.[405]
As described in an account of the Madrid auto de fe of 1632, this ceremony was imposing. The penitents to be reconciled were brought before the inquisitor-general who was presiding. While they kneeled before him he read a short catechism, comprising the creed with some additions, to each question of which they answered "Yes, I believe." Then the secretary recited the abjuration, in which they followed him. The inquisitor-general then pronounced the exorcism and the customary prayers and the royal chapel chanted the Miserere, during which the chaplains of the Inquisition struck the penitents with rods on the shoulders. After this the inquisitor-general recited the customary verses and prayers and the royal chapel sang a hymn, while the black cloth was removed from the cross, which had been covered as a sign of mourning, and the inquisitor-general concluded the solemnities with a hymn.[406]
Superficially, there is nothing formidable in this reception of a wandering sheep back into the fold, but the serious aspect of reconciliation, justifying its characterization as a punishment, lay in the penalties which were virtually inseparable from it, and were customarily included in the sentence--imprisonment, sanbenito, confiscation and disabilities, with occasionally scourging and the galleys, some of which we have already considered while others will be treated hereafter. There was further the fact that the canons pardoned the heretic but once. If, after reconciliation, he was guilty of reincidence, there was no mercy for him on earth, although the Church in its kindness, would not close the portals of heaven on him and, if truly contrite, would admit him to the sacraments, although it would not spare him the stake.[407] The crucial question of relapse, however, will be considered in the next chapter and meanwhile it should be said that the Spanish Inquisition did not always enforce this cruel precept. In the later period second reconciliations were by no means infrequent, and, even in the earlier time, men sometimes shrank from the holocausts which the strict enforcement of the rule would have caused amid a population terrorized into suddenly forswearing their ancestral faith. In Majorca, under the Edict of Grace, there were three hundred and thirty-eight reconciliations, August 18, 1488, followed by ninety-six on March 26, 1490. Soon after this an Edict of Mercy was published, under which there were reconciled a second time no less than two hundred and eighty-eight of the previous penitents. One of these, Antonia, wife of Ferrer Pratz was even reconciled a third time, June 28, 1509. Scattering cases of second reconciliations can also be found elsewhere.[408]
[Sidenote: RECONCILIATION]
There was a rule that the reconciled were not to be subjected to scourging or the galleys, even though they might have deserved them by varying and revoking confessions, but I cannot find that this was observed for, in both the earlier and later periods, cases as we have seen were numerous in which reconciliation was accompanied with these corporal punishments.[409] On the other hand, although the principle was absolute that reconciliation carried with it confiscation and perpetual prison, cases sometimes occur in which these penalties were lightened. In the Toledo auto of November 30, 1651, there were nine reconciliations, in which the accompanying punishments were mostly trivial--in one case the sanbenito was removed immediately on return to the Inquisition.[410]
It seems almost a travesty on solemn religious observances that effigies of the dead should be admitted to reconciliation but, as the grave afforded no refuge from the Inquisition, this was a logical outcome of the system, when a defunct heretic had recanted and sought reincorporation with the Church. As he could not be reconciled in person he had to be reconciled in effigy, especially as the sentence was necessary to secure confiscation of his estate. The only occasion of this was the death, during trial, of a prisoner who had confessed, professed conversion and received sacramental absolution on his death-bed. His trial would necessarily be continued and result in reconciliation, and the Inquisition saw no incongruity in parading his image before the people, and performing with it the solemn farce of reconciliation. There was a somewhat inexplicable instance in Majorca of three Judaizers, who had died in prison during their trials, in 1678, after manifesting the necessary signs of repentance; they were not included among the two hundred and twelve reconciliations, in the autos de fe of 1679, but, thirteen years afterwards, their effigies were reconciled in the auto of July 2, 1691 and no theologian seems to have asked himself what was their spiritual condition during this prolonged interval.[411] This reconciliation in effigy, was not, as Llorente states, an innovation introduced under Philip III, but was practised from the beginning, for there was an instance of it in Beatrix Sener, deceased, thus reconciled May 2, 1499, at Barcelona.[412]
Apparently the age of responsibility was the only minimum limit in reconciliation. In the Madrid Auto of 1632, Catalina Méndez, a child of 12, was reconciled with sanbenito and six months' imprisonment. At Toledo, in 1659, Beatriz Jorje and Ana Pereira, Portuguese Judaizers each ten years old, were reconciled; the former had her sanbenito removed at once; the latter was sentenced to confiscation and four months of prison.[413]
Reconciliation brought with it one alleviation, for the reconciled, as penitents, were entitled to the fuero of the Inquisition. This was derived from the penitential system of the Middle Ages, which deprived the penitent of bearing arms during the long series of years for which penance was imposed, and no one could be expected to assume it unless protected by the Church against his enemies. In this the Inquisition stood in the place of the Church, and cast its jurisdiction over its penitents during their term of penance. In 1501, we find a certain Pan Besante of Teruel, a reconciliado, to whom Ferdinand had restored his confiscated property, complaining to the king that he was persecuted and maltreated by his debtors and his neighbors, and that the inquisitors, to whom he had appealed for protection, neglected to aid him, whereupon Ferdinand promptly ordered them to come to his assistance, to enforce, by their officials, the payment of his just claims and to punish the aggressors.[414] So far was this carried that at Granada, in 1654, the reconciled penitents had an advantage in trade over the faithful, by claiming exemption from the alcavala, or royal tax on sales. When the citizens complained of this discrimination, the fiscal of the tribunal admitted that the question was a difficult one; to subject the penitents to the royal jurisdiction would give rise to great embarrassments, yet at the same time the inquisitorial jurisdiction ought to be a punishment and not a reward.[415] That it was a reward we have seen from the eagerness with which it was claimed by all who could put forward the slenderest pretext.
[Sidenote: THE PENITENTIAL PRISON]
THE PERPETUAL PRISON.
Imprisonment for life was the penance imposed by the canons on the heretic who, under the persuasive methods of persecution, sought reconciliation to the Church. It was so decreed, indeed, by pope and emperor before the Inquisition was organized, and that institution relentlessly enforced the laws. That the Spanish Holy Office should accept it was a matter of course. Its expense, however, had proved a source of tribulation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it was none the less so in Spain for, large as were the confiscations and pecuniary penances, they were squandered as fast as they accrued. In Torquemada's supplementary Instructions of December, 1484, the receivers are ordered to provide for the maintenance of the prisons, which shows that the sovereigns admitted their responsibility,[416] but, in the chronic financial disorder of the time, no regular provision was made, either for their establishment or support. It is true that, in 1486, at the earnest request of the inquisitors of Saragossa, Ferdinand ordered the receiver to construct a perpetual prison, in accordance with their desires, but it is safe to assume that he prudently postponed replying to their inquiry as to the maintenance of the captives.[417] In 1492, when the tribunal sentenced Brianda de Bardaxí to five years' imprisonment, it was to the tower of Saliana and this, in a few days, was changed to the convent of Santo Sepolcro in Saragossa.[418] In fact, for want of prisons, the custom was general of consigning reconciled penitents to strongholds, hospitals, convents, or even to their own houses--the latter presumably being such shelter as friends or kindred could afford to those who had been stripped by confiscation. The Instructions of 1488, indeed, authorize inquisitors, in view of the multitudes condemned to perpetual imprisonment and the lack of prisons, to designate to the penitents their houses, where they must confine themselves under the penalties provided by the laws. But this, it was added, was only meant to be temporary, and the sovereigns were supplicated to order that, at each tribunal, the receiver should provide a large enclosure with little huts and a chapel, where the prisoners could hear mass and could each work at his trade and earn his living, and thus relieve the Inquisition from heavy burdens, due care being taken to keep the sexes apart.[419] The only answer to this prayer seems to have been the device of relieving the prisons for the benefit of the galleys.
The laxity of quartering penitents on public institutions or in private houses led to impracticable rules in the effort to counteract its evils. An instruction issued about this time by the Suprema orders that no one be admitted to reconciliation without condemning him to confiscation and perpetual prison, if he has been a heretic, and those thus condemned must perform their penance most rigidly, not speaking with any one except on the days when they go to mass and hear sermons; on other days, both in going out and in eating, they must show themselves true penitents, holding no intercourse with wives and children.[420] This seems to have received scant obedience and, in 1506, the Suprema ordered that sanbenitos be placed on all prisoners, and that they must not leave their houses and then, in 1509, it prescribed that perpetual prisons must be provided. Apparently this was partially successful, for it was followed by instructions that all who had been or should be condemned must be placed in them, where they can ply their trades, or their kindred can supply them with food, or they may beg alms for their support. Thus, in 1510, Llerena selected two pairs of houses for the purpose, which Ferdinand ordered the governor of Leon to have appraised. Cuenca also seems to have obtained a prison, but an inadequate one, for in 1511 the Suprema authorized the tribunal to permit all the sick, and all who had been confined for two years, to betake themselves to their homes. Where such prisons existed the discipline must have been exceedingly lax for, in 1512, the Suprema issued a general provision empowering the tribunals to allow the destitute occupants of the perpetual prisons to go out by turns to beg in the cities, but they must wear their sanbenitos and return by nightfall, under penalty of relapse, and this was repeated in 1513. Then the further effort to provide prisons seems to have been abandoned for, in 1514, Ximenes issued an order permitting the reconciled to fulfil their penances in their own homes.[421]
[Sidenote: THE PENITENTIAL PRISON]
This fluctuating policy and the extraordinary laxity which it reveals were not due to any humanitarian impulses. It was simply a continuous effort to shirk the responsibility of maintaining those whose property had been confiscated, and who were required by the canons to be incarcerated for life. The Inquisition obtained the plunder, it inflicted on its victims disabilities, which increased enormously the difficulty of self-support, it rendered them odious to the population by making them wear the sanbenito, it was in duty bound to provide prisons where they could be immured and prevented from infecting the community, but it neglected this duty and virtually told them that they might beg or starve. That death by starvation, indeed, was not uncommon is asserted in the project of reform drawn up, in 1518, by order of Charles V.
Still the tribunals seem to have made some progress in providing themselves with penitential prisons for, in 1524, the Suprema deemed it worth while to order that they should be inspected monthly, and the results be recorded in a book to be kept for that purpose.[422] By no means all had done so however. Barcelona, which occupied the royal palace, had found room there, in 1489, for its penitents, and in 1544 we hear of Gerónimo de Quadras as alcaide, on a salary of fifty ducats, out of which he was to pay for a person to conduct the prisoners to mass and to bring them back. Valencia was less advanced, for it could have had no prison in 1540, when it sentenced three women to keep as a prison such place as should be designated to them, but in 1546 it secured the services of Gerónimo de Quadras as alcaide, at a salary of thirty ducats. In 1550, however, he complained that he had never received his pay and, in 1554, we find the perpetual prison of Brianda de Garcete commuted to confinement in her own house, or other designated place, which would indicate that the attempt to establish a prison had been abandoned.[423] In 1553, Logroño apparently had none, for it assigned, to Juan Prebost, Bilbao and two leagues around as a prison, with the sanbenito.[424] This need not surprise us for, if in some tribunals there was an attempt to provide a perpetual prison, it was exceptional. In 1537 the Suprema had formally declared that it would be a novelty to support the penitents at the cost of the fisc; this could not and ought not to be done; there was no objection to their performing their penance in their own homes and the tribunals could arrange it accordingly. A few months later this was repeated; the reconciled could be sent to their houses to perform their penance, if they had no other means of support.[425]
At length the Instructions of 1561 endeavored to introduce some system in this scandalous state of things. The sentence of reconciliation condemned the penitent to prison and sanbenito for a specified term, during which he was to wear the abito publicly over his other garments; he was to be confined in the perpetual prison, going to mass and sermon on Sundays and feast days, and on Saturdays performing certain devotions at a designated shrine.[426] To enforce this discipline the Instructions stated that, as many tribunals had no perpetual prison, houses should be bought for the purpose as, without them there were no means of knowing whether the reconciled performed their penance. The alcaide should help them in their necessity by giving them materials to work at their trades and help to support themselves, and the inquisitors should visit the prison several times a year.[427] This seems to have been followed by an effort to induce the tribunals to provide prisons, for, in 1562, Toledo was taken to task for having none. It not only did not supply the deficiency but demurred to the suggestion that it should at least furnish a person to see that the penitents performed their penance, and it was told that for three or four thousand maravedís of extra pay the portero could attend to this.[428]
[Sidenote: THE PENITENTIAL PRISON]
In 1570 the Suprema resumed the attempt to bring about this much needed reform. It told the tribunals that they could rent houses until they should be able to purchase, and they must appoint proper persons as alcaides to keep watch over the penitents.[429] The result of this pressure was gradual. In 1577 the Cistercian convent of Santa Fe, in Saragossa, made formal complaint to the pope of the number of penitents quartered upon it, and Cardinal Savelli, the head of the Roman Inquisition, interposed with the Suprema to relieve it of this oppression.[430] It was not until 1598 that the Mexican tribunal, nearly thirty years after its foundation, built a capacious prison adjoining its own structure.[431] In 1600, for the first time, there is an allusion in the Toledo record to a "carcel de la peniténcia" and, in 1609, Valencia was busy in erecting one at a cost of 5110 libras; it had been planned to have three floors, but was economically reduced to two.[432] Whether all the tribunals yielded to the pressure and established penitential prisons it would be impossible to say, but they probably did so, if only in some perfunctory fashion that justified the appointment of an alcaide. Simultaneously with this there came a change in the name, and the carcel perpetua was known as the casa de la peniténcia or de la misericórdia.
It does not follow that the establishment of prisons was attended with any increased strictness of discipline. The Inquisition persistently refused to accept the burden of supporting its prisoners and left them to shift for themselves. Where prisons existed there were few penitents in them, although condemnations to imprisonment were frequent and, in 1641, Philip IV conceived the idea of liberating them all. The Suprema sent his decree to the tribunals with orders to report whether they had any prisoners and what were their cases, to which Valencia replied that it had one, imprisoned for persistent sorcery, whereupon the Suprema ordered the sentence to be commuted and the prisoner to be discharged.[433]
The royal project fell through. All prisons were not as empty as that of Valencia and a discussion occurring, in 1654, at Granada, to which allusion has already been made, illustrates the character of the imprisonment rendered necessary by the refusal to support the prisoners. They gained their living chiefly by hawking goods around the city; this at length aroused the shopkeepers, and the corregidor represented to the tribunal that scandals were occasioned by their entering houses and committing indecencies; there was loss to the king for, as penitents, they were not subject to the alcavala and other imposts; thus favored they undersold the shopkeepers, who had lost half of their trade, while the penitents grew rich, for they came almost naked from the secret prison and, in a short time, they were well clothed and enriched. The tribunal admitted the force of this and, on December 24, 1654, issued an order that, for two weeks, they might cry their wares through the streets, but not enter houses, and subsequently be restricted to selling in shops. At this the prisoners complained bitterly of the deprivation of a privilege of long standing in all places where there was a tribunal, for without it they could not earn a living or support their wives and families. Thereupon the fiscal, Doctor Joseph Francisco Cresco de Escobar, seeing that both sides would appeal to the Suprema, printed for its enlightenment a memorial which reveals to us the character of penitential imprisonment. He states that, in accordance with the Instructions of 1488, the tribunals had provided penitential prisons, the one at Granada being of ample capacity for the observance of the Instructions of 1561. He quotes the canons and conciliar decrees to show that recanting heretics are to be immured for life, whence he argues that the prison should be afflictive and penal. Now, however, it is only nominal; the so-called prisoners go out at all hours of the day, without restriction, without a companion, without labor save what they voluntarily undertake, all of which is liberty and not captivity. They wander at will through the city and suburbs, they amuse themselves at the houses of their friends, they spend, if they choose, only part of the night in the prison, which serves them as a comfortable lodging-house, free of rent. The Instructions require that the alcaide shall see that they perform their penance, but this has become impossible, and there are no means of restricting their intercourse with the faithful. As for their plea that they leave the secret prison broken in health and stripped of their property, that they have no chance to learn trades and must support their families by trading, the answer is that only through the mercy of the Holy Office do they escape burning, and they should be thankful that their lives are spared; their poverty is a trifling penalty for their crimes, and their children only share the punishment of paternal heresy.[434]
[Sidenote: THE PENITENTIAL PRISON]
With all this laxity, there was a pretence of maintaining the old rigor, which regarded prison-breaking as relapse, but the real offence lay in the fugitive throwing off the sanbenito. There seems to have been little desire to recapture those who absented themselves, for the formula of the mandate to search for and arrest fugitives only concerns itself with those who escape from the secret prison and who thus are still on trial,[435] but when from any cause penitents were returned to the tribunal, their treatment is exemplified in the case of Juan González, who escaped from the casa de la peniténcia of Valladolid, July 3, 1645. His story was that, having gone out to collect some money due to him, he gambled it away, got drunk, went to sleep under the walls of the Carmelite convent in the suburbs and, on awaking next morning and fearing punishment, he wandered away, throwing off the sanbenito and seeking work. Thus he reached Irun and designed passing into France, but was recognized by a priest who had seen him in Valladolid; he was handed over to the commissioner and was passed from familiar to familiar till he was lodged in the secret prison of Valladolid. The fiscal claimed that his flight and throwing off the sanbenito proved him to be an impenitent and pertinacious relapsed into Judaism who must be relaxed; but his sentence was only two hundred lashes and irremissible prison.[436]
Sentences to imprisonment continued as usual, but growing indifference as to providing for their execution is indicated by a correspondence between Barcelona and the Suprema in 1718. At that time the tribunal had but four cases under trial; it still occupied the ancient royal palace but, after it had condemned for Judaism María Meneses to irremissible, and her daughter Catalina de Solis, to perpetual prison, it did not know what to do with them and applied for instructions. There was, it said, no penitential prison nor could it find that there ever had been one, neither was there an alcaide; it possessed no house that could be used for the purpose, and no official could be spared from his other duties. The Suprema replied by inquiring whether there was a prison for familiars in which a room could be used for the women, or whether some little house near the palace could be had and some official or familiar could serve as alcaide. The tribunal rejoined negativing the proposed use of the prison for familiars; it would see whether a house could be had, but there was no money for the purpose; as for the officials, they were all fully occupied and no one would take the position without salary. This the Suprema met with a peremptory order to rent a little house and appoint an alcaide at the ordinary wages. Under this pressure some kind of provision must have been made for, in an auto of January 31, 1723, the tribunal condemned four Judaizers to irremissible prison.[437]
During the recrudescence of persecution at this period, the number of condemnations to imprisonment was large; in the Granada auto of December 21, 1720, there were twenty-seven and, in sixty-four autos between 1721 and 1727, there were seven hundred and forty.[438] How these numerous prisoners were accommodated it would be difficult to guess, for the neglect of the penitential prisons was progressive and, in the census of all the tribunals, about 1750, but three reported to have alcaides--Córdova, Granada and Murcia.[439] It does not follow that others had not prisons, but only that they had no prisoners and cared to have none. For instance, in 1794, when the Suprema inquired of Valencia whether its prison would suit for the priest Juan Fernández Sotelo, whose health required a change from the convent where he was recluded, the tribunal craftily replied that its prison was constructed with cells and dungeons and that, in the eyes of the people, confinement in it produced infamy, so that quarters for Sotelo had better be found in some convent in the suburbs. Apparently it forgot all this when, in 1802, it complained that the salaries of its secretaries had not been raised in 1795, while that of the alcaide of the penitential prison had been increased from a hundred and twenty to twenty-two hundred reales, although he had nothing to do, and enjoyed the use of a house in the prison as good as those of the inquisitors.[440]
[Sidenote: DURATION OF IMPRISONMENT]
In fact, by this time penitential imprisonment was virtually obsolete. After the subsidence of the active persecution of Judaism, the Toledo tribunal which, in 1738, pronounced twelve sentences of prison, did not utter another until 1756. Then a long interval occurs, of thirty-eight years, before the next one, which was for heretical propositions.[441] It would not, perhaps, be safe to say that, in the concluding years of the Inquisition, this form of punishment was wholly unknown, but no cases of it have come under my observation.
* * * * *
There was the same reduction in the duration of imprisonment as in its severity, owing presumably to the same economical motive. As we have seen, the medieval Church recognized only lifelong imprisonment as the fitting penalty for the heretic who saved his forfeited life by recantation and, in recognition of this, the penitential prison in Spain was officially known as the perpetual prison, the sentences being always for perpetual imprisonment. At a very early period, however, it was clearly recognized that the literal enforcement of this was a physical impossibility. Bernaldez tells us that in Seville, up to 1488, there had been five thousand reconciled and condemned to perpetual imprisonment, but they were released after four or five years with sanbenitos and these were subsequently removed to prevent the spread of infamy throughout the land.[442] At Barcelona the tribunal had scarce been established, when we find it drawing a distinction in its sentences to perpetual imprisonment, some being cum misericordia and others absque misericordia--thus anticipating the so-called "irremissible" perpetual prison--and from the sentences it would appear that "without mercy" was exceptional.[443]
This inevitable laxity provoked opposition on the part of the more rigid authorities and, in 1509, while Ximenes was in Oran, there was a discussion on the subject in the Suprema, when we are told that his temporary representative, Rojas Archbishop of Granada, stood alone against the other members.[444] What was the nature of the decision is not recorded, but it probably favored the laxer view, for Ximenes and the Suprema, in 1516, deemed it necessary to order that all sentences to prison and sanbenito must be perpetual, in accordance with the canon law; if, in any case, the inquisitors thought there should be a remission it must be left to the discretion of the inquisitor-general.[445]
The tendency to shorten the term was irresistible; the conservatives had to yield and, by the middle of the sixteenth century, Simancas tells us that perpetual prison was customarily defined to be three years, if the penitent was repentant, while those condemned to irremissible prison were usually released after eight years.[446] So purely technical did the term "perpetual prison" become that inquisitors saw nothing incongruous in such sentences as "perpetual prison for one year" or "for six months," which are constantly met with, as well as "perpetual prison" followed by terms of exile. The real infliction was therefore much less severe than it appears on the records, and when periods longer than eight years were intended, they were specified, as when Salvador Razo, for Molinism, was sentenced, in the Granada auto of July 4, 1745, to ten years, of which the first five were to be spent in the galleys--a hardship remitted on account of his infirmities.[447]
[Sidenote: DURATION OF IMPRISONMENT]
The terms of imprisonment were frequently shortened, moreover, sometimes, from humane motives, but more often from financial considerations, for the dispensing power in this, as in the other penalties, was a source of profit. Thus Mayor García, a Morisca of Daimiel, condemned in the Toledo auto of September 21, 1550, to perpetual prison for six months, on January 13, 1551, petitioned the tribunal for release "as was customary with others," saying that her husband would pay what the inquisitors should demand. The matter was promptly arranged with Inquisitor Alonso Pérez for four ducats, to help to build the staging for an auto de fe--a somewhat heavy payment for two months' relief.[448] This dispensing power was the subject of a prolonged struggle between the tribunals and the Suprema. In the early period, at Barcelona, the former endeavored to secure it by the device of discretional sentences, which inquisitors could curtail or extend at will, and this was recognized in a letter of the Suprema, October 4, 1499, authorizing them, under such sentences, to dispense with the imprisonment but not with the sanbenito.[449] In 1513, however, Ximenes forbade this without his consent and the repetition of the order in 1514 and 1516 shows that it was difficult of enforcement.[450] In spite of this when the Valencia tribunal, February 25, 1540, condemned five Moriscos to "habit and prison for as long a time as we shall determine," the Suprema insisted that, when discretion was specified, it must alone be that of the inquisitor-general, a mandate that had to be repeated more than once, even as late as 1592.[451]
The question of this, as of all other commutations, was inevitably settled, as we have seen, in favor of the inquisitor-general. In many cases there was no concealment that it was purely an affair of bargain and sale, but it is pleasant to record that often it was prompted by humanity. Petitions for abridgement of the penance were numerous and were usually sent in at the time of the greater feasts, which are alleged as a reason for mercy, in addition to the misery of the penitent. As an example of these petitions may be mentioned the case of Violante Rodríguez who, with her husband Duarte Valentin, was arrested for Judaism March 15, 1664. After a three years' trial, she was sentenced at Granada, February 24, 1667, to two years' imprisonment, while her husband was similarly sentenced at Cuenca. About August 10th she petitioned for commutation, alleging that she had eight little children, deprived of both parents. The Suprema promptly sent to Granada for the details of the case, but the tribunal delayed until October 8th, when it accompanied its report with the suggestion that she should be released with spiritual penances after the expiration of the first year, as she had manifested true repentance. Growing impatient, on December 24th, she again petitioned the Suprema, alluding to her seven children, thus showing that one had meanwhile died. That she was duly discharged in February there can be no doubt, and there is no trace in the correspondence of any pecuniary consideration. Some of the petitions for release, in truth, were well calculated to inspire compassion, such as that of Simon Méndez Soto, in 1666, wherein he describes himself as 84 years old, blind, deaf, crippled on both sides with many infirmities and penniless, and he supplicates release that he may seek for cure.[452]
There would appear to have been no minimum age for imprisonment short of irresponsibility. The Toledo tribunal condemned for Judaism García son of Pedro the potter of Aguda, a boy eleven years of age, to perpetual prison. In the Cuenca auto of June 29, 1654, for the same offence, Escolástica Gómez, aged 12 and Isavel Díaz Jorje, aged 14 had the same penalty and, in the Toledo auto of October 30, 1701, José de Leon, a boy of 16 was sentenced to irremissible prison.[453]
THE SANBENITO.
The sanbenito, or penitential garment, was the invariable accompaniment of reconciliation and prison, constituting together the "carcel y abito" of the sentences, although it was not exclusively reserved for such cases. It was not invented by the Spanish Inquisition, even though we can scarce agree with an enthusiastic writer, who traces its origin to the Fall, when God made the delinquents put on penitential habits of skins, corresponding with the sacos benditos now used in the tribunals.[454]
[Sidenote: THE SANBENITO]
The penitential habit of sackcloth sprinkled with ashes, customary in the early Church, has passed into a proverb. That the penitents of the Inquisition should be required to wear such a garment was inevitable and, from the foundation of the institution, in the thirteenth century, they were distinguished from other penitents by two yellow crosses, one on the breast and the other on the back. From Eymerich we learn that in Aragon this garment was like the scapular worn by the religious Orders.[455] This saco bendito became known as the sanbenito or, more commonly, abito and was necessarily inherited by the new Inquisition. In 1486, at the Toledo auto of December 11th, two hundred penitents, reconciled under the Edict of Grace, were required to wear in public such a garment for a year, under penalty of relapse.[456] For those reconciled after trial, the infliction was more severe. In 1490, Torquemada ordered that they should wear during life a sanbenitillo of black or gray cloth, eighteen inches long and nine inches wide, like a small tabard, hanging on breast and back, with a red cross before and behind, occupying nearly the entire field. This was hung over the outer garment, and was a conspicuous indication to all beholders of the shame of the wearer, rendering it a punishment regarded as exceedingly severe.[457] In 1514, Ximenes changed the cross to an aspa de San Andrés, a St. Andrew's or oblique cross, of which the bars traversed diagonally the breast and back.[458] Finally the Instructions of 1561 describe the abito penitencial as made of yellow linen or cloth, with two red aspas, although in some parts of Aragon there are particular customs as to colors which must be observed--referring probably to the use of green cloth in place of yellow, which seems to have been the case in Valencia and Sicily.[459] In some tribunals there was also in use, for those who abjured de vehementi, a sanbenito de media aspa, or half cross, consisting of a single diagonal band. Those who were to be relaxed appeared in the auto de fe in a black sanbenito, on which were painted flames and sometimes demons thrusting the heretic into hell.[460] Llorente tells us that abjuration de levi was performed in a zamarra, or yellow sanbenito without aspas, but I have met with no allusion to its use.[461] The distinction between the sanbenito de dos aspas and the one de media aspa was maintained, and the former was understood to indicate that the wearer had been guilty of formal heresy, that he and his children were subject to the consequent disabilities, and that he was liable to the stake in case of relapse. The latter was worn only during the auto de fe, after which it was laid aside.[462]
Although, in the early period, the sanbenito was imposed perpetually, the expression is to be taken in the same sense as imprisonment. As a rule, the two were coterminous and the sentences are almost invariably "habit and prison for two years," or perpetual or irremissible as the case may be. Where, indeed, the heresy was trivial or technical rather than real, or the conversion seemed genuine and spontaneous, the sanbenito was merely a symbol, to be worn only during the auto, or even for a briefer period, although it none the less left its ineffaceable stigma. There were gradations suited to every case, as is well illustrated in the Granada auto of May 27, 1593, where, in three cases, it was removed after reading the sentence, in two, after returning to the Inquisition, in two, after twenty-four hours (one of these being the Licentiate Juan Fernández, who had Judaized for thirty-six years), in one case it was imposed for two years and in another for three, and Leonor Fernández had two years of sanbenito and four of prison. It was even put on the effigy of Doña Inez de Tórres, from which it was removed after reading the sentence, because she had confessed and died as a Catholic, with ample signs of contrition.[463] Thus the tribunal could vary the penalty at its discretion, and was not bound to the rule of coterminous abito y carcel. In the Toledo auto of March 15, 1722, two girls of 14, Manuela Díaz and María de Mendoza, were sentenced to six months of prison and two months of sanbenito, while in that of February 24, 1723, Manuel Ximenes had perpetual prison and one year of sanbenito.[464]
From the fact that, in the sentences, the penitents are told that they are not to go out of their prisons or their houses without the sanbenito, it is inferable that it was not worn within doors. Discarding it, as we have seen, was a grave offence, punishable as non-fulfilment of penance and, in the Edicts of Faith, the denunciation of this, as of other infractions, was required. There was one occasion, however, in which this was done on a large scale with impunity, for in the Palermo rising of 1516 against the Inquisition, there was a universal throwing off of sanbenitos. When order was restored and the tribunal was re-established, there was a fruitless effort made to reimpose them. In 1522 the Suprema wrote to Inquisitors Calvete and Cervera calling attention to this as a great disservice to God and a heavy charge on the souls of the penitents, who must be compelled to resume them, and all secular and ecclesiastical authorities were commanded to assist. Then again, in 1525, Inquisitor-general Manrique insisted on the resumption of the sanbenitos, but at the same time he cautioned the inquisitors not to cause scandal or trouble, and we may assume that the attempt was practically abandoned.[465]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: SANBENITOS IN CHURCHES]
Cruel as was the imposition of the sanbenito, it was a punishment inherited from the elder Inquisition, but Spanish ingenuity invented a still more cruel use of it to stimulate the detestation of heresy. This was the preservation of the sanbenitos, with suitable inscriptions, conspicuously displayed in the churches, thus perpetuating to future generations the memory of the crime and punishment of the delinquent. The origin of this may perhaps be traceable to the ceremonies observed in the early period, when penitents were relieved of the abito. As described, in 1490, at Barcelona, they were assembled in the Inquisition and preached to by the inquisitor. A fortnight later they gathered in the parish church of Santa María del Pino and heard mass; then they marched in procession to the chapel of Our Lady of Monserrat, again heard mass, offered twelve dineros apiece to the Virgin, and passed the night, after which their sanbenitos were taken off and hung in a prominent place near the door.[466] Of course, in the case of those who were burnt, the sanbenito was hung up at once, and this remained the rule, as we learn from the Instructions of 1561--the sanbenito of the reconciled was hung when it was removed, whether during the auto or after years of prison; that of the relaxed, immediately after the auto.[467]
The custom must have been of gradual growth. There is no allusion to it in the Instrucciones antiquas, nor have I found any indication as to the time when it became imperative except that, in 1512, there is a decision of the Suprema expressing the will of the king and the cardinal that the sanbenitos of the relaxed and reconciled of the Campo de Calatrava shall be hung in the churches, except those of the reconciled in the Time of Grace, and that, if any of the latter have been hung, they are to be removed.[468] This indicates a custom favored by the authorities, spreading, but as yet subject to question. It had already passed to Sicily, where one of the incidents of the rising of 1516 was the tearing down of the sanbenitos in the churches, and so great was the popular detestation of it that, at the end of the century, it had not been possible to restore the practice.[469]
It mattered little to the descendants that the sanbenitos of the victims in the early years had escaped this publicity. The perversity which inspired it developed into such malignity that, in 1532, the Suprema ordered the tribunals to make from their records lists of all burnt or reconciled, even under Edicts of Grace, and to suspend in the churches whatever sanbenitos were found to be lacking. The inexcusable cruelty of including the voluntary reconciliados under Edicts of Grace caused this portion of the order to be revoked in 1538, but, in 1539, this was declared inapplicable to those which had already been hung--if they had been removed, they must be replaced. The question was revived, in 1552, and opinions were divided, but the decision to retain them prevailed. Meanwhile, in 1548, the Suprema stimulated the tribunals to fill all vacancies, whether arising from omissions or the surreptitious removal of old ones, and it ordered the hanging of new ones as soon as the autos were held, in order to anticipate the complaints and importunities of the sufferers and their kindred. Then, as though the tribunals were slack in their duty, in 1555 the order of 1532 was revived and repeated.[470] The wilful viciousness of this is indicated by the Instructions of 1561, which point out that, as those reconciled in Time of Grace are exempt from wearing the sanbenito, so their sanbenitos ought not to be suspended in the churches.[471]
[Sidenote: SANBENITOS IN CHURCHES]
The object was the cruel one of perpetuating the infamy of the victim and rendering it as galling as possible to his kindred and descendants. As the sanbenitos wore out or became illegible with time, they were replaced, and finally superseded by yellow linen cloths, bearing full details of the name, lineage, crime and punishment of the culprit.[472] Originally they were hung in the cathedral of the city of the Inquisition, but this did not bring the disgrace sufficiently close to the descendants and, in some places at least, they were ordered to be transferred to the parish churches of the delinquents, whose infamy was thus kept alive in the memory of their neighbors. A single instance will illustrate the spirit actuating this. In 1519 the Suprema ordered this transfer made by the tribunal of Cuenca, but the command was slackly obeyed and was repeated in 1529. Then the descendants of Lope de Leon and Alvar Hernández de Leon, residents of Belmonte, petitioned the Suprema, saying that the wives of Lope and Alvar had been reconciled; they were natives of Quintanar, where they had committed their heresy, and the descendants now begged that the sanbenitos be hung in the church of Quintanar and not of Belmonte. To this the Suprema replied, April 15, 1529, by instructing the tribunal to hang the sanbenitos in the residence of the descendants, in a place so public that the reconciliation of the women should be notorious to all. It is true that the descendants secured delay until the pressing orders came of 1548, when, on November 9th the sanbenitos of the women were hung in the church of Belmonte.[473]
This policy of distribution cannot have been universal for, when the Toledo cathedral desired to be relieved of the great accumulation of sanbenitos, the Suprema forbade it, adding that if it was desired to have them in the parish churches it must be done with new ones, leaving the originals in the cathedral. At length, in 1538, the inquisitors Yáñez and Loaysa distributed them among the parish churches, when Sebastian de Orozco tells us that it caused infinite misery to the descendants, leading them all or nearly all to change their family names, so that in Toledo the names actually borne by the Conversos disappeared.[474]
Change of name was not the only device resorted to by the descendants, for they were constantly at work removing surreptitiously the evidence of their infamy. As early as 1518, the Saragossa tribunal was ordered to prosecute with rigor those who had abstracted them from the Dominican church.[475] Their zeal was stimulated by the fact that the inquisitors, in making up the records, included all who had been reconciled under Edicts of Grace, thus affording legitimate ground of complaint, as shown by a long-continued struggle at Frejenal. In 1556, Doctor Ramírez, Inquisitor of Llerena, protested to the Suprema against the efforts of the people of Frejenal for the removal of the names of those reconciled in Time of Grace; it would leave but few for, in 1491, there had been three hundred and fifty-seven reconciliations there, of which three hundred and fifty-four had been under the Edict. To render ancestral infamy more accessible to the public, besides the sanbenitos, the names and details were inscribed on a tablet of parchment. This became torn and nearly illegible and, on August 23, 1563, it was solemnly replaced by another, written in large letters, with printer's ink, and varnished to insure its preservation. The secret warfare waged against this perpetuation of infamy is described, in 1572, in a deposition of the familiar Rodrigo Carvajo. The people of the town, he said, were mostly descendants of Conversos, resorting to perjury and every other means to conceal their origin. The sacristans were generally Conversos, who connived at the methods employed to destroy the evidence, and the sanbenitos were stolen; there used to be five hundred and ninety-nine, and now there were only ten or a dozen, worn and torn and so placed that they could not be read, while the tablet with the names was gradually being defaced and rendered illegible. Thus it continued until 1576, when Inquisitor Montoyo brought to Frejenal a new set of sanbenitos prepared from the records, which were duly suspended, and a tablet containing names and details was placed where all could read it. This list shows the obstinate persistence with which the names of the spontaneously reconciled were retained. It contained a hundred and sixty-two relaxed and four hundred and nine reconciled, all, with very few exceptions, in the years from 1491 to 1495. There were none between 1499 and 1511, and none later than 1511.[476] Struggles similar to this were doubtless on foot in numerous other places.
[Sidenote: SANBENITOS IN CHURCHES]
The churches themselves do not seem to have looked with favor on this desecration of their sacred precincts. At Cuenca, there was apparently an attempt to hide the sanbenitos of which the tribunal complained in 1571, when the Suprema ordered it to see that nothing was put before them, even on feast-days.[477] The parish church of San Salvador, at Cifuentes, went further and, in 1561, appealed to Pius IV, explaining to him the Spanish custom, and representing that not only was the attractiveness of the church marred by the prominence assigned to the sanbenitos, but that they led to many scandals, all of which would be prevented if they were removed to some less prominent place or laid away altogether, but that licence from the Holy See was requisite for this. The pope gave the required licence, subject to the assent of the Inquisition to the removal, which of course rendered it inoperative.[478] The cathedral of Granada was more fortunate for when, in 1610, Inquisitor-general Sandoval consecrated as archbishop Pedro González de Mendoza, the latter asked him, as a special favor to his bride, that she should be relieved of the sanbenitos. Sandoval assented and the permission came soon after Mendoza had reached Granada. It was celebrated with great rejoicings and ringing of bells; the sanbenitos of the Moriscos were transferred to the church of San Salvador, in the Albaycin, while those of the Judaizers were hung in the church of Santiago, which was the parish church of the Inquisition.[479] Even when there was not this open antagonism, there was apt to be neglect which was practically more damaging. In 1642, the Valencia tribunal learned that some of those in the cathedral had fallen and were allowed to lie. It made an investigation and, from the report, it would seem as though every available spot was thus decorated and that all required attention for their preservation. The sacristans promised to do what was necessary, but apparently they had been quite willing to see them disappear.[480]
Conscious of this ecclesiastical indifference and of the constant effort of those interested to make way with the visible records of their infamy, the Suprema was incessantly active to counteract the results. The Instructions of 1561 insist imperatively on the duty of hanging the new sanbenitos and renewing the old, so that the memory of the infamy of heretics shall be preserved forever, and inquisitors on their visitations are commanded to see that the parish churches are kept with unbroken lines of the mantetas y insinias of their culprit parishioners.[481] Philip II was no less urgent. In his instructions of 1595 to Manrique de Lara, he calls special attention to the subject; there are sanbenitos now to be hung and others which have never been hung, apparently through favoritism, for which the inquisitors deserve rigorous punishment, for this is the severest penalty which the Holy Office can inflict on heretics and their descendants, and Manrique is to see that all deficiencies are made good.[482]
In fact, the most pressing business of the inquisitor in visiting his district was to attend to this. In 1569 the Suprema ordered every one, before starting, to have full lists made out of the relaxed and reconciled of the region to be traversed and, in each place, these lists were to be compared with the existing sanbenitos and all that had disappeared were to be replaced. In 1600 and 1607 these instructions were repeated with still greater urgency, as a matter not to be neglected for a single day, in view of the evils that would follow.[483] That nothing was to be allowed to interfere with this pious duty is seen when Valencia had no money wherewith to defray the expense of renewals and was told to borrow it from the Depositario de los pretendientes--the sacred deposits of those seeking to prove their limpieza, which were thus used to preserve the muniments that might destroy their hopes.[484]
How, in fact, the sanbenitos were employed for this purpose is indicated in a perquisition conducted at Tortosa, in 1577, by the inquisitor, Juan de Zúñiga. The sanbenitos were carefully examined and lists were made out, classified firstly into those of which the trials could be identified and those of which no trace could be found in the records, and secondly into the penalties inflicted. Then two of the oldest residents--a notary and a priest--were summoned; the lists were gone over with them and their evidence was taken as to the descendants of the culprits, especially whether any had changed their names so as to elude disabilities. Thus a close watch was kept on them and every care was taken that the infamy of their ancestors should be lasting.[485]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: SANBENITOS IN CHURCHES]
As the seventeenth century wore on, it would seem that the zeal of the tribunals in the matter of sanbenitos was flagging. A general carta acordada of February 27, 1657, assumes this, in calling their attention to the Instructions of 1561 and to subsequent orders of similar import. As many autos de fe had recently been held, and as it was understood that, in some places, the sanbenitos had not been hung in the churches, the tribunals were commanded forthwith to make out lists of the relaxed and the reconciled, and to have corresponding sanbenitos suspended in the churches, as well as to renew the old ones which were worn out. In view of the importance of this to the service of God, a full report in detail was imperatively required to be furnished within four months. This may have excited the tribunals to spasmodic activity but, if so, its influence was but temporary for, in 1691, we find the Suprema ordering reports as to the length of time that had elapsed since sanbenitos had ceased to be hung in the churches; lists of deficiencies were called for; the old sanbenitos were to be examined and statements were to be rendered as to what were lacking and what had become illegible, so that the Suprema might take requisite action.[486]
This looks as if the custom had been falling into desuetude, but it was by no means abandoned and, as late as August 26, 1753, when a deceased delinquent named Horstmann was burnt in effigy at Valencia, two sanbenitos were ordered to be suspended, one in the cathedral and one in the parish church of San Lorenzo.[487] Still the same tribunal furnishes, in 1783, a refreshing evidence of the decline of intolerant zeal in the gradual diffusion of enlightenment. The cathedral had been undergoing restoration, during which the sanbenitos had been carefully stored in a room of the Inquisition. On the completion of the work, the tribunal suggested to Inquisitor-general Beltran that it would not redound to the service of God or of the public to hang them up again, to which Beltran assented; if the chapter did not ask for them, the tribunal was not to raise the question, or to do any thing in the matter and, from an endorsement on the letter, it is to be inferred that the sanbenitos were allowed to repose undisturbed.[488]
It is not to be supposed that, when the Córtes of Cadiz, February 22, 1813, abolished the Inquisition, it was satisfied to permit the continued existence of the sanbenitos which perpetuated so many dreadful memories. A decree of the same day recited that Article 305 of the Constitution provided that no punishment should extend beyond the criminal to his family; that the means by which, in public places, the memory of penalties inflicted by the Inquisition was preserved, brought infamy on families, and even exposed to evil repute persons of the same name. Therefore all portraits, pictures, or inscriptions, recording the punishments imposed by the Inquisition, existing in churches, cloisters, convents and other places, were to be removed or blotted out within three days after receipt of the decree.[489]
The condition of Spain was not such as to insure any wide obedience of this decree, although it is scarce likely that the French armies had left many sanbenitos hanging in towns occupied by them during the war. What occurred elsewhere may probably be guessed by the example of Majorca, when the Constitution of Cadiz was enthusiastically received and the sanbenitos were removed from the church of San Domingo, but they were providently stored away and were again hung up after the Restoration in 1814. In the Revolution of 1820, however, they were torn down and burnt and the Inquisition was levelled to the ground.[490]
The custom of suspending in the churches the habitelli or sanbenitos of the reconciled and relaxed seems to have been borrowed by Italy from Spain, at least in some places. It is to the credit of the Roman Inquisition that it disapproved this barbarous practice, as appears from a decree of 1627 ordering them to be removed from the cathedral of Faenza and to be secretly burnt.[491]
DISABILITIES.
Disabilities have already been considered in their relation to the finances of the Inquisition, arising from the sale of dispensations, but they formed too important a portion of the penal system not to require further treatment in this connection. They differed however from other punishments in that, although specified in the sentences, they were the inseparable consequences of condemnation for heresy and thus, in some sense, self-operative, for the severity of the laws for the suppression of misbelief was not content with confiscating the property of those whose lives were spared. The reconciled heretic was not only turned adrift penniless, but was subjected to restrictions incapacitating him from earning a livelihood. As this refinement of cruelty could not be applied to those who were burnt, it was visited on their descendants.
[Sidenote: DISABILITIES]
This latter provision was derived from the imperial legislation against treason, which disabled children of traitors from holding office and succeeding to collateral estates.[492] Frederic II, in his Ravenna decree of 1232, made this applicable to the children and grandchildren of heretics, which was eagerly incorporated into the legislation of Alexander IV and Honorius IV, although Boniface VIII mitigated it slightly by exempting grandchildren in the female line.[493] As part of the canon law this of course governed the Spanish Inquisition and, if there were those who questioned the justice of punishing orthodox children for their parents' heresy, they were triumphantly silenced by Alfonso de Castro, who pointed to Original Sin as an irrefragable proof that this was in accordance with the law of God.[494]
The application of these restrictions to reconciled penitents apparently originated with the Council of Béziers, in 1246, which ordered that penitents should not hold public office, or serve as physicians or notaries, or wear silk garments or gold and silver ornaments or other vanities--in short, that their apparel should befit those whose lives constructively were to be passed in repentance.[495] These provisions were not carried into the canon law but apparently became traditional in the Holy Office.
In the Instructions of 1484 there is nothing said as to the disabilities of descendants, but inquisitors were instructed to order penitents, after completing their penance, never to hold public office or benefices or to serve as procurators, tax-collectors, farmers of the revenue, grocers, apothecaries, physicians, surgeons, bleeders or brokers, thus prohibiting the professions which they had specially made their own. Moreover, they were not to wear gold or silver, coral, pearls or other precious stones or garments of silk or camlet or other finery or to ride on horse-back or bear arms, and all this during life, under penalty of relapse.[496]
There was evidently doubt as to the application of these restrictions to the descendants of those relaxed, but that there was an effort made in that direction is shown by their procuring, in 1486, from Innocent VIII, a brief enabling them to farm the revenues of churches.[497] In the assembly of inquisitors, in 1488, the matter excited considerable debate, resulting in instructions that each tribunal in its own district should enforce, under heavy penalties, the disability of children and grandchildren to hold any office or dignity that could be considered public, and the list of prohibited callings was enlarged by including those of merchants, notaries, scriveners, advocates, farmers of revenues and some others. The sumptuary restrictions were not extended to them, for they were not penitents, but they were forbidden to wear the insignia of any dignity, secular or ecclesiastic.[498] The omission was made good in a decree issued by Torquemada, April 22, 1494, but it was so slackly obeyed that when, in 1502, the sovereigns ordered its enforcement, they allowed a certain time for those affected to become acquainted with its provisions.[499] Ferdinand himself had had occasion to recognize the hardship of the rule for, in 1500, the mother of Pero Rúiz, a member of his royal guard, was condemned and consequently he was incapacitated from riding and bearing arms. Unwilling to lose him, Ferdinand wrote to Torquemada for letters of dispensation to be brought back by the messenger.[500]
We have seen how, in the struggle over the profits of dispensation, the sovereigns abandoned to the Inquisition the cosas arbitrarias, or sumptuary restrictions, and assumed to themselves, by the pragmáticas of 1501, control over the disability to hold office and to follow certain professions and trades, which limited so greatly the ability of the reconciled and of the children and grandchildren of the condemned to support themselves.[501] A humane exception was made however, in 1502, under which children reconciled below the age of 14 were exempted from the operation of the pragmáticas.[502] As these were municipal laws they were subject to the secular officials, who were ordered to enforce them under pain of confiscation and loss of office for negligence.
[Sidenote: DISABILITIES]
It was easier to publish edicts than to get them executed. The civil magistrates seem to have paid little attention to the pragmáticas, while the Inquisition did what it could within its allotted sphere. The Suprema issued orders to the tribunals to punish with all rigor those who disregarded the sumptuary restrictions, who were said to be numerous, in great contempt of the Holy Office. It was probably to stimulate zeal that, in 1509, it modified the penalty of relapse to a pecuniary penance, which it authorized the inquisitors to impose at discretion, bearing in mind the gravity of the case and the wealth of the offender.[503] The sums thus realized were considerable enough to tempt the cupidity of the courtiers for, May 9, 1514, we find the king making over to four of his ushers the penalties levied on the sons of Alonso Gallo of Toledo, and on April 1st he ordered Vázquez de Busto, alguazil of Toledo, to collect all the penances of this kind, to pay one-half to the receiver for the tribunal, and divide the other half between the fiscal, Martin Ximenes, and a servant of secretary Calcena.[504] The punishments decreed in the pragmáticas were also modified to fines, as we learn from a letter of June 20, 1515, dividing those incurred in Seville between Calcena and Aguirre, after setting aside one-third for the tribunal, and from another letter of January 8, 1516, bestowing on Fernando de Hoyos, portero of the Cuenca tribunal, the penalties incurred by the wives of Pedro de Vaguera and of Quiros and Jayme Boticario, for exercising the profession of apothecary.[505]
At length it was recognized that the Inquisition was the only instrumentality to be depended upon for the enforcement of the pragmáticas and Charles V, in a cédula of March 30, 1528, placed the whole business in its hands. He recited the laws of Ferdinand and Isabella, with their severe penalties for negligent officials, in spite of which he was informed that, in many places, they were disregarded, wherefore he granted to the Inquisition all necessary powers and ordered it to see to the execution of the law. Possibly there may have been some opposition by the secular authorities to this invasion of their jurisdiction, which called for a repetition of the cédula, March 2, 1543. In pursuance of this the Suprema, in cartas acordadas of 1548, 1549 and 1566, called the attention of the tribunals to the number of persons engaged in prohibited callings or wearing forbidden articles, and it urged them to be active in detecting and punishing the offenders.[506]
The construction of the laws was rigorous. There was a nice question whether, when a parent was condemned in absentia as contumacious, the children were subject to the disabilities, for the heresy was presumptive and not proven. Farinacci held that they were not, for the absentee, even though burnt in effigy, could always return and prove his innocence. Peña represents the stricter Spanish view, that the fugitive was condemned as a heretic and his children were incapacitated. The matter was threshed out in the case of the son of Antonio Pérez, who was deprived of a pension on the church of Cuenca. This was the final decision of the Rota after full argument; it served as a precedent, and the sentence of the absent contained the same enumeration of disabilities as that of one who was burnt in person.[507] Some doubts arose as to whether the pragmáticas prohibited trade in general; all such points were reserved to the king and when, in 1566, it was proposed to prosecute some merchants, the Suprema ordered the cases to be suspended until he should be consulted. It was less cautious when, in 1542, it forbade all reconciled penitents to keep schools, or even to teach children their letters. A question arose whether the prohibition to ride on horseback comprehended mules, but Simancas decides it in the affirmative, and even desires to include vehicles, as it is fitting that all such persons should walk on foot.[508] Even the limits of the canon law were disregarded in the panic occasioned by the discovery of Protestantism in 1559, for in the Seville auto of September 24th, when Juan Ponce de Leon was burnt, the disabilities of his descendants in the male line were extended to the fourth generation.[509]
An ecclesiastical career was closed to penitents and their descendants, who were forbidden to enter holy orders. There was some question raised whether those who were in orders could obtain or retain benefices, but it was decided in the negative. The practice, as stated about 1640, was that on their visitation the inquisitors dealt summarily with cases concerning the cosas arbitrarias while those which involved the holding of benefices or public office were sent to the tribunal for trial.[510] In the Edicts of Faith which they published, denunciations were invited, and all persons were required to give information as to any infractions of the laws of which they were cognizant.[511]
[Sidenote: DISABILITIES]
As everyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Inquisition was a marked man thereafter, and was liable to the suspicion that he had incurred disabilities--a suspicion apt to grow stronger with time and to affect his descendants--it became important for those who were not thus affected to have some evidence of the fact. In the earlier time the Inquisition was chary about affording this relief, but did not absolutely refuse it when the sufferer applied to the Suprema. It was not everyone however who could obtain the intervention of the Suprema; popular prejudice was strong, and no one knew what took place within the precincts of the tribunals. Blighted careers were thus numerous. Escobar, in his work on Limpieza, tells us that, at the origin of the Inquisition it punished the lightest offences with extreme severity and this, after the lapse of a century and a half, was still disastrously affecting the descendants; it was inhuman that a word inadvertently spoken through levity, or anger, or in jest should bring infamy on the delinquent and his posterity without limitation of time.[512] The memorial of 1623, by a member of the Suprema, discusses the same evil. The writer says that the Inquisition is surrounded by enemies who are daily multiplied through those afflicted by the tribunals. It is not merely those who are relaxed or reconciled or compelled to abjure de vehementi, but there are many well-affected Old Christians, punished with lighter penalties who, if they remain defamed and their posterity disabled from honors, must necessarily add to the number of enemies and it is pitiable thus to afflict them for trivial causes.[513]
The tribunals did not cease to afflict the people, but some relief was afforded by a practice, which gradually came into use, of including, in a sentence for light offences or of acquittal, a clause declaring that the party and his descendants were not subject to disabilities and that he could have a certificate to that effect. Two examples of this, occurring in Valladolid in 1638 will suffice. In the case of Agustin López, tried for blasphemy, the consulta de fe could not agree and the Suprema sentenced him to reprimand and exile, adding that the sentence should be no bar to offices of honor or in the Inquisition. So a sentence, acquitting Miguel Rúiz of a charge of sorcery, says that his imprisonment shall not be an obstacle to him and his children, and that he shall have a certificate to that effect. That Rúiz had not even been confined in the secret prison but in the public gaol shows how sensitive was the popular mind.[514] These certificates de no obstancia, as they were called, would appear, as a rule, not to be issued unless specially applied for, and yet how important they were to the individual and his posterity is manifested by a petition presented, January 17, 1818, by the Licenciate Mariano de Santander y Alvárez setting forth that, twenty years before, in 1798, his father had been arrested and prosecuted by the Valladolid tribunal because, in his trade as a bookseller, he had sold prohibited books. In the final sentence it was declared that his imprisonment and prosecution did not prejudice him or his descendants in the enjoyment of their civil rights, but the secrecy of the Inquisition, and the loss of the certificate given to the father, prevented the petitioner from furnishing the proofs necessary to his admission as an advocate in the royal chancellery, wherefore he begged for a proper testimonial. The Suprema had the statement verified and ordered a certificate to be duly issued.[515]
From this, as well as from the memorial of 1623, it appears that not merely reconciliation but even abjuration or lesser penalties inflicted disabilities, if not as to the cosas arbitrarias at least as to the attainment of an honorable career. In the closing years of the Inquisition this sometimes led to a merciful moderation of the sentence, as in that pronounced, August 27, 1817, on Francisco Mosquera Villamarino, of Santiago, "Bachiller clasico y Profesor del 6º Cuerpo de Canones en su Real Universidad," for certain propositions. He escaped with a reprimand in the audience-chamber and without abjuration, it being expressly stated that he was treated with this benignity in order not to prejudice him in his career, though he was warned that the Inquisition would keep a watch on him.[516]
[Sidenote: DISABILITIES]
Popular prejudice, as we have seen, intensified the cruelty of the cruel laws. How inveterate was this is manifested in the case of Josef Calot who, in 1791, sought in marriage the daughter of Pablo Bordo, a merchant of Valencia. The parents refused assent and the lovers eloped. Bordo brought the matter before the royal Audiencia, showing that Calot was the great-grandson of Clara Muñoz who, at the age of 19, was reconciled for Judaism in the Barcelona auto de fe of April 2, 1724, and was sentenced to irremissible "carcel y abito," though after two years her husband, Antonio Antonelli, obtained her release. In view of this descent the Audiencia decided that Bordo's opposition to the marriage was reasonable and just, thus inflicting an indelible stigma on Calot and his posterity. In some way the affair reached the Suprema, which wrote to Valencia for details and, in transmitting them, the inquisitors added an expression of sympathy for Calot in the dishonor cast upon him; the punishment of his great-grandmother did not disable him from the professions, but it would be difficult to restore him to his good fame without calling in question the justice of the sentence of the Audiencia.[517] Even the Inquisition did not venture to repair an injustice caused by its assiduous training of the population in an unreasoning abhorrence of heresy.
* * * * *
The penalty for disregarding the disabilities settled down to the thrifty one of a fine. As regards those imposed by the pragmáticas, the Suprema, in 1531, replied to an inquiry from the tribunal of Avila and Segovia that, although the laws prescribed confiscation for infractions, yet the practice was to penance culprits in accordance with their wealth and station and the degree of the offence. So, in respect to the cosas arbitrarias, it decreed in 1536, that although the Instructions of 1484 provided the pain of relapse, they did not require the inquisitors to condemn the infraction as such, and the practice was to impose pecuniary and spiritual penances.[518] Cases of prosecution for infraction are not very numerous in the records, chiefly owing, we may presume, to the customary sale of rehabilitations; in the tribunal of Toledo they amount only to ninety-one and of these it is noteworthy that there are only three posterior to 1586--two in 1600 and one in 1616.[519] When they occurred, the penalty was at the discretion of the tribunal, and Toledo exercised this with great moderation, in 1579, when Bernardino de Aldana, a ribbon-weaver, spontaneously denounced himself. His mother, Isabel Alvárez, had been burnt by the Cuenca tribunal, yet he had worn a velvet cap, had carried a sword and had ridden on a mule with a saddle; he was married and had done this to satisfy his wife and her kindred, and besides his brother had told him that they had been rehabilitated. His artless story seems to have moved his judges, for he escaped with a reprimand and a fine of two ducats.[520] In 1703 the tribunal of Madrid was more severe with Simon de Andrade, a reconciled penitent, who had worn the prohibited articles. He was harshly reprimanded, was fined in fifty ducats, was banished for a year and was required to surrender the cosas arbitrarias, but we are told that he was permitted to keep the garments which he had on to cover his nakedness, especially as they were of ordinary cloth.[521]
CLERICAL OFFENDERS.
In a land where theocratic influence was so strong, it was inevitable that there should be especial favor shown to erring ecclesiastics. The Church has ever sought to conceal from the public the knowledge of weaknesses that might diminish veneration for its ministers, and scandal has been more dreaded than sin. The Inquisition established its jurisdiction over both the secular and the regular clergy, but it exercised that jurisdiction in accordance with the general policy of the Church. Every care was taken to keep clerical offences from public knowledge, except in cases of formal heresy or of administering the sacraments by those who held only the lower orders. As a rule, in place of being confined in the secret prison during trial, they were housed in some convenient convent, where their presence need excite no surprise. When convicted, they were not exposed in the public autos de fe, but their sentences were read in the audience-chamber with closed doors, though in certain cases a prescribed number of other clerics were summoned to be present as witnesses; even then they did not wear the penitential habit as did laymen.[522]
[Sidenote: CLERICAL OFFENDERS]
For aggravated offences, the ordinary punishment was reclusion in a designated convent for a specified term, a penalty which might be infinitely varied. Perhaps six months or a year was to be passed in a cell; the culprit was to be last in choir and refectory; he might be suspended for a term or perpetually from some or all of his functions and of the right to vote or to be voted for; spiritual penances might be superadded or, at his entrance, he might be subjected to a zurra de rueda, or circular discipline, in which all the members of the house, including the lay-brethren, took a hand. All these greater or less aggravations could be varied or accumulated to meet the exact shades of guilt. This conventual reclusion was adopted, perhaps, partly for concealment and partly as a milder form of incarceration, but the mercy was doubtful if we may trust the story told by Llorente of a Capuchin guilty of aggravated abuse of the confessional who, when condemned to five years' reclusion in a convent of his Order, begged to have it changed to incarceration in the secret prison; he had been, he said, provincial and guardian, he knew how the brethren treated those thrust upon them as criminals, and it would cost him his life. His prayer was refused and his prevision was correct, for he died within three years.[523] I have met, however, with cases in which the recluded fraile survived longer terms; as a rule, no doubt, life was not rendered pleasant, but it depended on circumstances. The Franciscan, Francisco Ortiz, sentenced to confinement for two years in a cell in the convent of Torrelaguna, without intercourse with his brethren, refused to leave his retirement on the expiration of the term and remained there till his death, twelve years later, the object of veneration to all around him.[524] There might or might not be sympathy for the penitent and his treatment naturally corresponded.
When, however, the offence was formal heresy, entailing reconciliation or relaxation, the cleric was obliged to appear in an auto de fe, like any other culprit. Cases of the kind were common enough in the early period, when many Conversos had entered the Church but, after the thorough weeding out by the Inquisition, they became rare. An essential preliminary was degradation from the priesthood, which was of two kinds, verbal and formal--the former sufficing for cases of reconciliation, while relaxation required the latter. Verbal degradation effaced the orders, but not the priestly character and, in the later period, publicity was often avoided by executing the sentence in the audience-chamber, as in the Toledo cases of Jacinto Vásquez Aranso, a priest convicted of Judaism and condemned to the galleys, December 4, 1688, and of Buenaventura Frutos, cura of Mocejon, sentenced February 19, 1722.[525] Originally the ministration of a single bishop sufficed for verbal degradation, while two were required for formal, until Gregory IX, to facilitate the operations of the Inquisition, decreed that, in cases of heresy, the bishop of the culprit could perform the ceremony, in the presence of some abbots and other learned men, and finally, in 1551, the Council of Trent permitted a single bishop to officiate in all cases of formal degradation, and his vicar-general in verbal degradation.[526]
The ceremony of public formal degradation was impressive. The culprit marched in the procession bearing the mitre and sanbenito of relaxation, which were removed on the staging in order that he might be seen in his priestly vestments and tonsure. In the case of Fray Joseph Díaz Pimiento, a relapsed Judaizer, burnt at the Seville auto de fe of July 25, 1720, we are told that an immense crowd was assembled, for no degradation had been witnessed there since 1623. The auto was celebrated in the church of San Pablo but, as soon as Fray Joseph's sentence was read, he was taken by a number of officials to a scaffold in the Plaza de San Francisco, where the Bishop of Lycopolis, the assistant of the archbishop, performed the ceremony. His tongue, the palms of his hands and finger tips were scraped and rubbed with tow, the tonsure was erased by cutting his hair and he was deprived of his orders one by one in the reverse order of their bestowal. He was then handed over to his superiors of the Mercenarian Order, who stripped him of the habit, after which the mitre and sanbenito with painted flames were replaced on him and he was taken to the juzgado, or secular court, and delivered to the deputy Assistente of the city to be formally sentenced and conducted to the brasero.[527]