Henry Charles Lea

“ As Inquisitor Valera says, in his report of the case, “She, who was the common sewer of errors, was regarded as a paradise of perfections. In the mistaken apprehensions of men she was the saint of the age, the wonder of the world, the mistress of mysticism, the advocate of the people; so frequent were the accepted miracles, ecstasies, trances, intelligences and revelations that heaven was regarded as condensed in her.... Rosaries and beads were taken to her house not one by one but in whole chests and they passed to Spain and even to Rome with her renown.... ”

“ He reported to the Suprema that the condition of the tribunal was deplorable; unless some action was taken there would be no Inquisition, but only a gang of men obeying a will the most obdurate and most terrible that he had ever met, under which the tribunal was diverted from its proper functions to serve Gaitan’s interest or caprices, for good or for ill. There was nothing with which he did not interfere, and that with such violence that he offended all good men, and even his own faction followed him rather through force than willingly. The fiscal was a coward ”

“ The commissioner quietly summoned his alguazil mayor and a sufficient number of familiars, sailed for the province, surprised the governor in his bed, carried him off and imprisoned him in a convent until there should be a vessel sailing for Acapulco. Fajardo was an irritable and passionate soldier, whose governorship was a continuous broil with the warring jurisdictions of the colony, and who could appreciate the risk of depriving a fortified place of its commander, at a time of perpetual warfare with the Dutch and the natives. ”

“ The edict is a singular medley of politics and religion, illustrating the dual character of the Inquisition of the period and the enormous advantage to the Government of possessing control over the ecclesiastical establishment, whereby an attack on the civil power could be made to assume the appearance of an assault on the faith. All the heretical utterances, discredited nine years before by the action of the tribunal, are put forward as absolute facts. It is impiety that has led him to raise the standard of revolt and to seduce numbers of unhappy dupes to follow him. ”

“ Passions had not yet exhausted themselves and the struggle for supremacy had not been decided. A new element of discord came with the arrival in November, 1684, of another inquisitor, Juan Ortiz de Zárate, who regarded Valera as having been timid and irresolute in the quarrel and boasted of his own unyielding firmness. Causes of dissension were not lacking and open war broke out when Benavides removed, perhaps with unnecessary violence, seats which the inquisitors had placed in the church, giving as a reason the “tertulia” or talkative crowd thus attracted. ”

“ Its position and its safe and capacious harbor, easily defensible by fortifications, rendered it the entrepôt of the trade with the Pacific, and the place where the treasures of the colonies were gathered for transhipment to Spain, while the pearl fishery of Margarita and the productions of a province rich in mineral and agricultural wealth gave it a large and lucrative commerce. As the seat of a tribunal it had the advantage that, unlike Lima and Mexico, it was not a capital where the humors of inquisitors could be in some slight degree controlled by a viceroy and a royal Audiencia. ”

“ His ceaseless labors to reform his people, both clergy and laity, his self-devotion, his charity, earned for him the honors of canonization and the admiration even of Jansenists, but the zeal displayed in the enforcement of discipline upon unwilling ecclesiastics found equal expression in the persecution of heretics. He was, in fact, the incarnation of the Counter-Reformation, in combating heresy by force as well as by depriving it, as far as possible, of its raison d’être. ”

“ To this the Inquisition contributed not only as a leading factor in internal misgovernment, but also by its hideous system under which the affluence of the tribunals depended upon the confiscations which they could levy. We have seen how large a part this played in their financial vicissitudes and how it was regarded on all hands with eager expectation, and it is doing no injustice to the kind of men sent out as inquisitors to assume that it was a motive far more potent than the desire to maintain the faith with exact justice. ”

“ The inquisitor evidently magnified his office and the result soon showed how much more efficient was a tribunal of which the energies were concentrated on a single object, than the desultory action of the episcopal provisors. He had, on his arrival, lost no time in filling up his staff by appointing an alguazil mayor, an alcaide of the secret prisons, a portero or apparitor and a messenger, as well as a receiver of confiscations, to whom he assigned the handsome salary of six hundred ducats, not anticipating how slender, for some time, were to be the receipts from that source. ”

“ Accustomed as the people had been for centuries to the existence of the Inquisition, the Spanish institution was a very different affair, not only as to activity and severity but still more from the privileges and immunities claimed and enforced by its officials and their servants and familiars, especially their exemption from taxes and import dues and their fuero or right to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, whether as plaintiffs or defendants, giving rise to perpetual irritation through the oppression and injustice thus rendered possible. ”

“ Pius V, notwithstanding his fierce inquisitorial activity in Italy, could give Philip II the sanest and most temperate advice about the colonies. On learning that the king proposed to send thither officials selected with the utmost care, he wrote, August 18, 1568, to Inquisitor-general Espinosa to encourage him in the good work. The surest way, he says, to propagate the faith is to remove all unnecessary burdens and to so treat the people that they may rejoice more and more to throw off the bonds of idolatry and submit themselves to the sweet yoke of Christ ”

“ Birch afford to the student of folk-lore an inexhaustible treasury of curious details. No matter what might be the industry of the tribunal in prosecuting and punishing the practitioners of these arts, it could effect nothing in repressing them, or in disabusing popular credulity, for its very jurisdiction was based on the assumption that the powers attributed to the sorcerer were real, and he was punished not as an impostor but as an ally or instrument of the demon. ”

“ He rehearsed the services of his ancestors to the monarchy, while of his children five sons had been killed and one crippled in the king’s wars with heretics and infidels, two more were then serving and two were in training for service, while two had died in the priesthood. His fears were probably groundless for the Suprema, in a letter to Prado, blamed him for the dissensions in the tribunal which it attributed to his favor for Salinas, a man of such evil life and tortuous methods that he alone would throw any republic into discord. ”

“ On the other hand, if we may believe the Consulta Magna, drawn up, in 1696, by a special junta composed of representatives of all the royal councils except the Suprema, the Sicilian tribunal paid no respect whatever to the Concordias, held itself as wholly independent of all rules and enforced its arbitrary acts by the constant abuse of excommunication, which rendered the condition of the island most deplorable. ”

“ In spite of this enormous influx of wealth, the Inquisition still maintained its grip on the royal subvention of 10,000 pesos per annum, though for how long it is impossible to determine with positiveness. In the prolonged controversy which raged between the Suprema and the Council of Indies over the relations of the colonial tribunals, the former, in 1667, positively declared that, after 1633, there had been no subvention paid in Mexico or Lima and this assertion was repeated in 1676, but the statements of the Suprema are so full of duplicity that no reliance can be reposed in them. ”

“ The Suprema was not kept in ignorance of the derelictions of its appointees, for the inquisitors rarely worked in harmony. Deadly quarrels arose between them and they abused each other without stint in their communications to headquarters, while their subordinates were equally free in exposing the malfeasance of their superiors. The publication of much of this secret correspondence and of complaints of aggrieved parties by Señor Medina thus gives us an exceptional opportunity to gain an insight into the interior life of a tribunal and into its use of the enormous power which it enjoyed. ”

“ Yet so far from being an advocate of toleration, Capasso commences by arguing against it at much length. Religion, he says, is the foundation of social order and the principle of toleration infers toleration of irreligion. Protestants are intolerant between themselves and the Catholic system cannot endure toleration. That which is taught by the philosophers is chimerical, and a community to be stable must be united in faith, but the enforcement of this unity is a matter for the secular power. Punishment must be corporal and the Church has authority over the spirit alone, not over the body. ”

“ A commissioner would not answer, for he had to send seven hundred leagues to Lima, with as many in return, before he could act, while a tribunal could take note of every passenger landing or departing, and not only defend the faith but avert the political dangers threatened by the correspondence of these foreigners with the enemy. Besides, it was a great hardship when a man, for a slight offence such as blasphemy, had to be taken under guard for seven hundred leagues, at great cost, to be sentenced perhaps to abjure de levi and to hear a mass. ”

“ How little was required to arouse inquisitorial vigilance was shown in 1683, when Agostino Mazza, a priest employed in teaching philosophy, was thrown in prison by the Commissioner of the Inquisition and humiliated by having to abjure in public two abstract propositions which to the ordinary mind have the least possible bearing on the faith—“The definition of man is not that he is a reasoning animal” and “Brutes have a kind of imperfect reason.” ”

“ The men who were at the head of the tribunal, whatever may have been their reputation at home, were not, as a rule, able to resist the demoralizing influences around them, intensified by the irresponsible autocratic power conferred by their position. The only effective control possible to the Suprema lay in the appointment of a visitador or inspector, clothed with superior authority, and this was an expedient rarely resorted to, especially as the inspector was exposed to the same temptations and was apt to yield to them. ”

“ In an age of faith, it is easy to see how profound was the impression made when the population of every parish and mission was assembled in its church and listened to such utterances in the name of Christ and the pope, with their reduplication of threats and promises, and each one was required to raise his right hand and solemnly swear on the cross and the gospels to accept it all and obey it to the letter. ”

“ There were Piazze in other cities but when, under Charles V, the national Parliament was discontinued, the Piazze of Naples arrogated to themselves its powers and framed legislation for the whole kingdom. A Spanish writer, in 1691, informs us that no viceroy could govern successfully who had not dexterity to secure the favor of a majority of the Piazze, for the people were obstinate and tempestuous, easy to excite and difficult to pacify, and, if the nobles and people were united, God alone could find a remedy to quiet them. ”

“ The only field of inquisitorial activity lay in reckless speeches which might savor of irreligion, in the blasphemy through which anger or despair found expression, in the superstitious arts of wise-women, in burning clerics who administered sacraments without having received the requisite orders and in such offences as bigamy and seduction in the confessional, all of which could only by a strained construction be deemed as savoring of heresy, and could readily be disposed of by the ordinary spiritual or secular courts. ”

“ As for the great mass of the culprits, it would be impossible for the tribunal to arrest and try them—the cost would be enormous and the result, according to law, would be to set them free, which would fill the land with demons, nor would the owners permit their capture, in the certainty of losing them. To meet these difficulties Mañozca therefore suggests a general pardon, after which the civil authorities shall have cognizance of their crimes and punish them otherwise than with the benignity habitual with the Inquisition. ”

“ The Audiencia rudely intervened by throwing in prison Bartolomé Alonso, the luckless master of a boat selected, and threatening to scourge him through the streets. He managed to convey word to the tribunal, which at once sent its secretary Aguilera to the Audiencia, with a message asking the release of Alonso, but the Audiencia refused to receive anything but a written communication and Aguilera came back with a mandate requiring obedience under pain of two hundred ducats, but he was received with insults and Alonso was publicly sentenced to a hundred lashes. ”

“ The history of the tribunal is to be found not so much in its autos de fe as in the guerrilla war which for a century it maintained with the authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, rendering decent and orderly government impossible and going far to explain the decadence and decrepitude of the colony. ”

“ Bigamists furnished a large proportion of penitents—the adventurer who left a wife in Andalusian Córdoba was apt to take a new one in Córdova de Tucuman and chance might at any time bring detection, while, even in Peru itself, distances were so great and intercommunication so difficult, that the seeker after fortune was easily tempted in his wanderings to duplicate the sacrament of matrimony. Blasphemy was another prolific source of prosecution, for the gambling habit was universal and lost none of its provocative character in crossing the ocean. ”

“ Little remains to be said as to the activity of the tribunal in its appropriate sphere, although its contributions from time to time to the Suprema show that it occasionally obtained some wealthy penitent to strip, among the inconspicuous mass of blasphemers, bigamists and sorceresses. Its energies became more and more devoted, during the remainder of the century, to internal dissensions and quarrels with the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, leaving small leisure for its proper functions. ”

“ In these cases, the accusation of the fiscal and the exordium of the sentence are eloquently rhetorical as to the heinous guilt in one, clothed with the awful power of the priesthood, using that power to lead astray the souls seeking salvation through him, but when it came to defining the penalty there is a tenderness which suggests that in reality the offence was regarded as much less important than aberration on some minute point of faith. ”