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Overview
A journey across centuries of religious conflict
Toby Green’s incredible new book brings a vast panorama to life by focusing on the untold stories of individuals from all walks of life and every section of society who were affected by the Inquisition. From witches in Mexico, bigamists in Brazil, Freemasons, Hindus, Jews, Moslems and Protestants, the Inquisition reached every aspect of society. This history, though filled with stories of terror and the unspeakable ways in which human beings can treat one another, is ultimately one of hope, underscoring the resilience of the human spirit. Stretching from the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella in the fifteenth century to the Napoleanic wars, The Inquisition details this incredible history in all its richness and complexity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429938532 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 686 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
TOBY GREEN is the author of three previous books, Saddled With Darwin, Meeting of the Invisible Man, and Thomas More’s Magician. He has traveled widely in Africa and Latin America, and now lives with his family in the west of England.
Read an Excerpt
Inquisition
The Reign of Fear
By Toby Green
Macmillan
Copyright © 2007 Toby GreenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3853-2
CHAPTER 1
THE END OF TOLERANCE
Who can doubt that what seems in this tribunal to be severity of justice is in fact a medicine, ordained by mercy for the health of the delinquents?
Teruel and Zaragoza 1484–1486
IN THE HOUSEHOLD OF Juan Garces de Marcilla, hatred coursed its prey. Marcilla was a local noble in the remote Aragonese town of Teruel. Ashamed of his indigence, he had married Brianda, daughter of a powerful local businessman, Jaime Martinez Santángel. Marcilla loathed his in-laws and this was an era in which such workaday odium could be taken to its extreme: he made sure that they would be burnt to death.
The new inquisitor, Juan de Solibera, arrived in Teruel in May 1484. There was no welcoming committee. In fact, the local authorities were appalled. They probably knew that there had been resistance in some parts of Castile to the introduction of the Inquisition there. They determined to follow suit. When there were so many great and elegant cities in the kingdom of Aragon, why had their remote settlement high in the bare hills been selected as the first calling point for the new institution? What were the implications of the sacking of the old inquisitors and the introduction of the new? The town leaders wrote that they feared the Inquisition would bring the same chaos as it had 'in Castile, and that [the inquisitors] would bring the very same heinous procedures that they had used there, in violation of all law'. Yet not everyone was as fearful; some, like Marcilla, sensed an opportunity in the interstices of hatred.
Initially, however, Marcilla was in the minority. The authorities held out. In resisting, they were not merely standing up for local autonomy; they perhaps sensed that the new Inquisition, designed to persecute people who were different, would destroy the delicate cultural fabric which made the town what it was. For the inhabitants of Teruel were a mixed bunch. In addition to the majority Christian population, there was a large community of people descended from Jewish converts to Christianity — conversos. Between 1391 and 1413 there had been many such conversions, some of them voluntary and some of them forced; the children and grandchildren of these converts were mostly sincere Christians, but they maintained some of the cultural practices of their Jewish ancestors. In addition to the conversos, Teruel had a large population of converted Muslims who had switched to Christianity along with the Jews after listening to the preaching of St Vincent Ferrer in the early 15th century. These converts — known as moriscos — had abandoned Moorish dress and no longer spoke Arabic; they had assimilated fully into society.
The arrival of the inquisitor caused panic. The Inquisition had been created in Spain within the past few years to target alleged bad Christians among the conversos, and three years previously the first auto had been staged, in Seville. The combination of fear and local official resistance meant that as soon as he appeared in Teruel Solibera was shut up in a monastery for three weeks and prevented from preaching his inaugural sermon. Eventually he had to move to a nearby hamlet, from which he righteously thundered excommunications at the town officials. They responded with gusto. In open mockery of inquisitorial procedure, they built a great fire with a stake in the middle. Yet instead of this serving as a place for the burning of heretics, they surrounded the fire with stones which were hurled at anyone who came to the town with royal letters or decrees supporting the Inquisition.
Marcilla organized the inquisitor's fightback. First he ensured that Solibera was given an armed guard. Then he used the guard to ensure that Teruel's rebellious officials were arrested. All of them were sacked. Marcilla was made captain of the town. He was instructed to seize Teruel, appoint new officials and install the new Inquisition.
In March 1485 Marcilla took the town and the Inquisition began work. In August the first auto was held and two converso effigies were burnt; in January 1486 there was another auto and nine conversos were burnt. The most important of them was Jaime Martinez Santángel, the brother-in-law of one of the officials who had resisted Inquisitor Solibera the year before. Two of Santangel's sons were burnt alive and one was burnt in effigy. Jaime Martinez Santángel, one recalls, was the father-in-law of Marcilla, and his sons were Marcilla's brothers-in-law. Through the Inquisition Marcilla had set about destroying his relatives by marriage. He had also given his support to an institution which the new monarchs of Aragon and Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella — known as the Reyes Católicos — had placed at the forefront of their domestic policy. This alone was enough to see him rise through the ranks even as his wife's family was destroyed.
Soon enough, in Zaragoza, the capital of the kingdom of Aragon on the banks of the Ebro river, events in Teruel would be echoed. Zaragoza was renowned for its nobility and the beauty of its women. Just eight years before the Spanish conquest of Granada in 1492, there was still a large Moorish quarter with an oil press and functioning mosque, while travellers often admired its houses of thin red Roman-style bricks and its bevy of churches.
Soon, however, there would be blood. Word of events in Teruel began to reach the town. Anger in the converso community grew. It was bad enough that the Inquisition had begun work in Castile, but now who was this Marcilla, to bring down Don Jaime Martinez Santángel of Aragon! Doubtless this doughty champion of the Inquisition had married Brianda for her converso money: he despised her, although perhaps her family had slighted him, flaunting their wealth in the face of his much-vaunted but straitened nobility.
Beneath the anger pulsed fear. For what Marcilla had really done was to effect a coup. With the Inquisition, there was the prospect of power.
SOLIBERA'S FELLOW inquisitor was Pedro de Arbues. Arbues had been born not far from Zaragoza in 1441. He had studied at Bologna in Italy and risen through the ranks of the Church before being made an inquisitor alongside Solibera in 1484. His attachment to the ideology of the times was revealed by the inaugural speech he made to the Council of the Inquisition in Zaragoza. 'Our purpose,' he said, 'is to watch over the vine of the Church as careful sentries, picking out heresies from the wheat of religion ... if it is carefully considered, it will be seen that all this, which seems horrible at first glance, is nothing but mercy ... Who can doubt that what seems in this tribunal to be severity of justice is in fact a medicine, ordained by mercy for the health of the delinquents?'
With Arbues and Solibera, the Inquisition set up shop in Aragon. As edicts of faith were read, people began to follow the initial rebellious example of Teruel. Both Catholics who had no Jewish or Islamic ancestry — the so-called Old Christians — and conversos started to murmur against the Inquisition in Zaragoza. The conversos were joined by members of the nobility and the richest people of the city, who complained that the new Inquisition acted in violation of the laws of Aragon, confiscating goods and keeping secret the names of witnesses, two things 'most new, and never seen before, and most prejudicial for the kingdom'. By February 1485 the indignation was such that some conversos decided to attempt something outrageous: the assassination of the feared Arbues.
The plot was hatched in the house of the leading converso Luis de Santángel. A bounty of 500 florins was placed on the head of Arbues, and a team of six assassins was chosen. The team was a mixture of conversos — the father of one of them, Juan de Esperandeu, had already been imprisoned by the Inquisition — and Old Christians, including Vidal Duranzo, the Gascon servant of Juan de Abadía, another of the assassins. The idea was that if Arbues was killed, no inquisitor would dare to fill his shoes.
Rumours were rife. The first auto in Zaragoza, with burnings, took place in May. Another followed in June. Indignation rose all the while among the converso community. Assuming a conspiracy, Arbues took to wearing a chain-mail undershirt and an iron helmet beneath his hat. One night, Juan de Esperandeu tried to cut away one of the bars of his window while Arbues was asleep in bed but he was discovered and ran off in the dark.
On the night of Wednesday 14 September 1485, the assassins gathered by the cathedral. Three entered by the main entrance, three by the sacristy. They knew that that night Arbues, a Dominican, would come to midnight mass. Towards midnight the cathedral canons assembled in the choir. Arbues entered from the cloisters in his canonical dress, bearing a lantern in his hands, and walked towards them. He knelt next to the pulpit on the left and began to pray. Charging from the shadows, Vidal Duranzo stabbed the inquisitor through the back with such force that he pierced the chain mail and cut his jugular vein; Esperandeu, probably overexcited at the prospect of gaining revenge on his father's nemesis, stabbed weakly and grazed Arbues's arm. Duranzo now struck again, the helmet pitched from Arbues's head and the inquisitor fell to the floor.
Arbues was carried back to his lodgings. He died before dawn. The news spread at once and the cry went up throughout the town: 'A fuego con los conversos!' — 'To the fire with the conversos!' It was only through the intervention of Don Alonso de Aragón, viceroy and archbishop of Aragon, who rode out into the mob to calm them, that the converso quarter was saved from being put to the torch. As it was, it was decided that the perpetrators would be punished by the Inquisition instead.
The investigations started at once. The famed inquisitor-general Tomás de Torquemada sent three replacement inquisitors in Arbues's stead, and the prime suspects were interrogated. One of those seized was Duranzo, who confessed after being tortured. Promised mercy if he would disclose the names of his accomplices, he revealed all; on claiming his mercy when he had finished, he was told that, unlike the other conspirators, he would receive the mercy of not having his hands severed before he was hung, drawn and quartered.
So began the fires in Zaragoza. In 1486 there were to be no fewer than fourteen autos there: forty-two people were burnt alive and fourteen in effigy. To increase the public fear and the impressiveness of the autos, Inquisitor-General Torquemada ordered that a fortnight before each auto the event should be proclaimed publicly across the city by a parade of mounted officials. This, for the first time, turned the Inquisition into a genuinely public affair. The terror of the converso community was total, and many of them fled. Among the victims were three ancestors of the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne: Juan Fernando López de Villanueva, his son Micer Pablo and their cousin Ramón López; the rest of the family escaped to France, Antwerp and London where the fear was distilled for several generations to come.
In general, following these events in Zaragoza, people's fury at the Inquisition rarely exceeded their fear. Yet even before their anger clouded their judgement, the conversos had not been alone in their distrust of the new institution, as the events in Teruel and the initial reactions in Zaragoza had shown. The suspicion and resistance with which the Inquisition had been greeted in Aragon had arisen because this was a new institution which represented a way of treating people which seemed excessive. Yet it would not take long for the excessive to appear normal, and for fear of the new institution to become a way of life.
SPAIN DURING THE REIGN of the Reyes Católicos was unique in Europe. The Jews had arrived before the birth of Christ, and with the Moorish invasion of 711 there had been large-scale migration from North Africa. Even after the Christian reconquest, which had its most decisive triumphs in the mid-13th century, Spain, with its blend of cultures, was more akin to a Muslim society than it was to the rest of Europe. Physical geography may have tied Iberia to the lands north of the Pyrenees but the importance of geographical ideas of space was limited then, and the fact that Spain felt like an Islamic sort of place was much more important: for visitors from northern Europe, the legacy of the convivencia — the centuries of shared Christian, Jewish and Muslim life in the peninsula — was a place with what seemed to their eyes to be confused categories.
There was, for instance, the way in which people dressed. Whether they were going to a party or doing the housework, women in Spain covered their heads with tocados, elaborate headdresses sometimes made of velvet or satin that wound down the neck. For most women's clothing, however, silk was the material of choice, something which went back to the manufacturing traditions of Moorish Andalusia.
Among men, the second half of the 15th century had even seen a growing fashion for Moorish dress. During the reign of Henry IV (1454–74) this was so prevalent that 'whoever imitated [the Moors] the best pleased the king the most'. And in 1497 King Ferdinand no less presented himself with his train of nobles dressed in Moorish style at Burgos to celebrate the betrothal of his son Prince John. Moorish fashion accessories for men included the sayo, a bodysuit over which other garments were worn, and two types of hooded cloak, the albornoz and the capellar.
For other Europeans, then, even Christian Spaniards seemed exotic. The secretary of the Baron de Rosmithal, visiting Burgos in the middle of the 15th century, described a Christian noble's house where the women were all 'richly dressed in the Moorish style, following Moorish customs in their dress, food and drink ... dancing very beautifully in the Moorish style, all of them dark, with black eyes'. Over seven centuries of Moorish presence — and for much of this time dominance — in Iberia had left deep marks which the conquest of Granada in 1492 would not erase; even the most widely recognizable of all Spanish phrases today, ¡Olé!, derives from the Arabic Wa-l-lah — For God.
Cultural crossovers were many. In Castile Jews often sponsored Christians at their baptisms, while Christians did likewise at Jewish circumcision ceremonies. In the 14th century Christians would bring Muslim friends to mass and even hire Muslim buskers to play music in churches during night vigils. As late as the 15th century Christians and Jews apprenticed their children to live among the other religious group for years while Jews converted to Islam and Muslims converted to Judaism. And although sexual relations between peoples of different faiths were taboo, they were common enough; in 1356 the king of Aragon granted a local monastery jurisdiction over Muslim women caught having sex with Christians in the locality, but the following year had to change this so that women who had had sex with the monks themselves were not included.
Yet in spite of all this sharing in one another's lives, the fault lines between the three faiths were always there, waiting to be exaggerated by extremists. Muslims and Christians used bath houses on different days, for instance, while neither Jews nor Muslims were permitted to convert Christians. By the late 15th century there was considerable pressure to separate Jews and Muslims in cities from Christians. The barriers were coming up.
Thus it was that by the end of the 15th century, when the furore around the Inquisition broke out in Aragon, the three communities performed quite different functions in Spanish society. The Christians were nobles, churchmen and fighters; Jews were craftsmen, financiers and intellectuals; and Muslims were predominantly agriculturalists and craftsmen. This was a society where activity was increasingly defined by faith — something which would have disastrous consequences for Spanish society when two of the faiths were excluded.
In Spain, the militarized nature of Christian society after the reconquest created a national character that was decidedly testy. 'They are proud, and think that no nation can be compared to their own,' wrote one Italian traveller, ... they do not like foreigners, and are very surly with them; they are inclined to take up weapons, more so than any other Christian nation, and are extremely good at using them, being agile and very expert, and very quick in moving their arms; they value honour to such a degree that they prefer to give little thought to their own deaths rather than stain it'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Inquisition by Toby Green. Copyright © 2007 Toby Green. Excerpted by permission of Macmillan.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Epigraph,
Glossary,
Chronology,
MAPS,
PROLOGUE,
Mexico City 1649,
Chapter One - THE END OF TOLERANCE,
Chapter Two - SPREADING THE FIRES,
Chapter Three - TORTURED JUSTICE,
Chapter Four - ESCAPE,
Chapter Five - THE ENEMY WITHIN,
Chapter Six - TERROR ENVELOPS THE WORLD,
Chapter Seven - THE ISLAMIC THREAT,
Chapter Eight - PURITY AT ALL COSTS,
Chapter Nine - EVERY ASPECT OF LIFE,
Chapter Ten - THE ADMINISTRATION OF FEAR,
Chapter Eleven - THE THREAT OF KNOWLEDGE,
Chapter Twelve - THE NEUROTIC SOCIETY,
Chapter Thirteen - PARANOIA,
Chapter Fourteen - THE FAILURE OF FEAR AND THE FEAR OF FAILURE,
Acknowledgements,
Also by Toby Green,
About the Author and Praise for INQUISITION,
Notes,
Bibliography,
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
Index,
Notes,
Copyright Page,