The young Compañero became homesick and eventually obtained permission to return to Aragon, after professing his desire to be a Christian. Shortly after his return, he was charged with apostasy and “relaxed to the secular arm.” On the way to the stake, he was overheard praying in Arabic and was stoned and beaten by the crowd before the officials were able to prize him loose and burn him. Despite these indecorous proceedings, the Inquisition reported with satisfaction that the execution had left “the populace . . . very satisfied, and the Moriscos of this kingdom very afraid.”
9
The Holy Office had still not finished with the Compañero household. Three of Compañero’s sisters-in-law were subsequently burned as heretics, one of his brothers-in-law died in an Inquisitorial prison, and a servant was sent to the galleys and later executed. In 1609 Compañero’s widow was burned at the stake after she was found guilty of arranging an Islamic funeral for a relative and maintaining a prayer room in her house.
Such protracted generational punishments were part of the Inquisition’s modus vivendi. The Holy Office had a long memory, and the targeting of powerful Morisco families was part of a systematic assault on Morisco community leaders,
alfaquis
, and “dogmatizers.” But Inquisitorial persecution could also be meted out to entire communities, such as the remote Morisco settlement of Aguilar del río Alhama, a village of some hundred households in the mountains of La Rioja, adjoining Castile and Aragon. In December 1583, a Morisca from the village was denounced to the Logroño Inquisition because she dismissed the preachings of a local monk as “nonsense.” Her interrogation ushered in a spate of arrests, confessions, and denunciations that eventually implicated almost all her neighbors. Over the next two years, nearly thirty Moriscos from the village were burned at the stake or died in prison. Dozens of others were tortured and punished with floggings, confiscation of property, or “unpaid penance at the King’s oars” in one of the most devastating Inquisitorial investigations inflicted on any Morisco community.
The Spanish Inquisition has tended to inspire a certain macabre fascination in the outside world, ever since Protestant anti-Spanish propaganda first began to depict it as a uniquely bloodthirsty and grotesque instrument of Catholic tyranny. By the prevailing standards of the time, however, the Holy Office was relatively restrained in its violence. More people were killed for their faith in other European countries than in Catholic Spain, where the death toll did not even begin to compare with the number of women burned for witchcraft. Despite the reputation of the Holy Office for spectacularly macabre cruelty, the methods of Inquisitorial torture were less savage than those inflicted on heretics and traitors in the Tower of London. The Inquisition favored the use of ropes that tightened around the arms and legs, stretching, and the “toca y agua” (cloth and water)—a version of what is now called waterboarding—rather than burning irons or the thumbscrew. Unlike French judges, they did not order the tongues of heretics to be cut out before their executions to prevent them from preaching, but gagged them instead.
The more outlandish fantasies about the Inquisition woven by Edgar Allan Poe and other nineteenth-century writers have tended to obscure the peculiar combination of piety, legalistic punctiliousness, bureaucratic malice, and relentlessness that characterized the Holy Office. These qualities often had devastating consequences for Spain’s former Muslims. Consider the disastrous events that befell the inhabitants of Arcos de Medinaceli, a predominantly Morisco town in the district of Cuenca in the last quarter of the century. In 1575, inquisitors arrived in the town and read out the edict of faith, which urged all Moriscos to willingly report or confess to any of the listed trangressions. When no one came forward, the Inquisitorial commissioner, Doctor Aranda, urged Antonio Moraga, a respected Morisco community leader in the town, to use his influence to ensure that confessions were made—or risk arrest himself. The following year, a number of Moriscos did come forward, including Beatriz de Padilla, the twenty-five-year-old wife of a local basketmaker, who confessed to fasting, performing Islamic prayers, and “willfully and consciously observing the sect of the Moors.” Because she had confessed voluntarily, Padilla was “reconciled” and sentenced to “certain spiritual punishments,” but these confessions nevertheless confirmed Arcos as a “nest of heretics” that required further investigation.
In June 1581, the Inquisition visited the town again, and Antonio Moraga was arrested and accused of having celebrated the defeat of the Portuguese king Sebastian in Morocco with a bullfight, inciting local Moriscos not to pay tithes to the Church, and calling his children “little Moors.” The source of these denunciations appears to have been the local priest, Marco Fernández de Almanza, who took up his position in 1578. A drunkard, gambler, and womanizer, Almanza routinely bullied both married and single Morisca women to have sex with him, and was not averse to climbing on the roofs of their houses and trying to force his way into their homes.
One of the lecherous priest’s objects of desire was Beatriz de Padilla, who by this time had become the lover of Antonio Moraga and lived with him in his home with her young daughter, Leónor, after his wife’s death. The attitude of Padilla’s husband to this arrangement is not known, but Padilla was clearly passionately devoted to her older lover. On hearing of his arrest, she defied orders not to visit him and slipped into the house where he was awaiting removal to Cuenca in order to bring him a clean shirt, only to be caught and imprisoned herself. Questioned by Doctor Aranda, she denied that the clean shirt had any religious significance but admitted to living
amancebado
—in an unwed relationship—with Moraga and “knowing him carnally.” Things got worse for Padilla when a friend and neighbor named María Zamorana was arrested by the Inquisition and subjected to the full panoply of ropes, stretching, and water torture.
Zamorana accused her friend and a number of her neighbors of clandestine Islamic practices. Such denunciations now defined Padilla as an
impenitente relapsa
, a relapsed impenitent, a category that was liable to excommunication and death. As a result of Zamorana’s denunciations, one of her neighbors was burned at the stake, and another was arrested and died in prison. Padilla was fortunate to escape a similar fate, when the other witnesses against her were found to be unreliable. Instead she was punished with a hundred lashes and led through the town stripped to the waist on a mule while an official proclaimed her offenses to the population.
Her lover, Moraga, was eventually released from prison after two years, for lack of evidence, and he and Padilla resumed their live-in relationship and attempted to rebuild their lives. In 1585 the “bad priest” Almanza was denounced to the local ecclesiastical authorities by a deputation of Moriscos from the town, with the support of a local priest. One Morisca described how Almanza had threatened her with the Inquisition during confession unless she “favored him with the ugly act.” Other witnesses reported that the “vicious and carnal” priest was prone to drunken rages in which he abused the population as “whores and Moors who should be burned.” As a result of these complaints, Almanza was stripped of his position and imprisoned on the orders of the local bishop. But these charges were subsequently overturned when he managed to convince the bishop of Cuenca that the charges were a Morisco plot in response to his zealous defense of Catholicism, and he returned to torment his Morisco parishioners until his death in 1594.
By this time, Beatriz de Padilla’s daughter Leónor had married the son of her lover Antonio Moraga, and both families had reason to feel relatively optimistic after the traumatic events of the last twenty years. But the Inquisition had not yet finished with the inhabitants of Arcos. In 1595, the implacable Doctor Aranda returned to the town and arrested another group of Moriscos, including Francisco Zacarias, whose father had been burned in 1583. Under torture, Zacarias confessed to having entered Beatriz de Padilla’s house and finding her “washing her shameful parts.”
In September 1596, Padilla was arrested again, together with her pregnant daughter Leónor, her son-in-law, a friend named Ana López, and various neighbors. The Moriscos were charged with a number of serious offenses, including performing the
guadoc
, reciting Muslim prayers, and allowing a sick relative to die at home without calling for a priest and helping the deceased to a “good death as Catholics do.” In October 1596, Padilla was tried at the Inquisitorial headquarters in Cuenca, where the prosecution claimed that witnesses had seen her, together with “others of her caste and profession,” eating on the floor of her house “in the manner of the Moors.” Padilla’s terrified daughter Leónor told the tribunal that her mother had observed the Ramadan fast and regularly performed the
salat
(Islamic ritual prayer), before falling on her knees to beg the inquisitors to be merciful toward her.
Padilla herself was tortured until she confessed and denounced her daughter, her friends, and her relatives, all of whom denounced her. These offenses, the prosecution argued, constituted irrefutable proof that Padilla’s previous confessions had been made “fictitiously and dishonestly” and that she had failed to take advantage of the “mercy with which she was treated” on those occasions. As an “author and concealer of heresies,” Padilla was sentenced to death, her property and goods were confiscated, her children and descendants were banned from secular or ecclesiastical offices or any similar positions “of honor” and prohibited from wearing jewelry or silk or riding on horseback. On the morning of December 13, 1598, Padilla and her friend Ana Lopez were paraded in the main square of Cuenca in an auto-da-fé that included her son-in-law and her daughter Leónor, whose baby had been born in the Inquisitorial dungeon and died there shortly afterward.
A large crowd had gathered to observe the proceedings, together with the assembled dignataries and Inquisitorial officials in their purple robes, who watched from raised benches as mass was said and the list of charges read out in exhaustive and tedious detail throughout the morning. In the afternoon, Padilla and her friend Ana Lopez were handed over to the secular authorities for execution along with five other prisoners who had been sentenced to death. The terrified women were then taken by mule to the
quemadero
(place of burning), where they were stoned by members of the crowd before the case of “Beatriz de Padilla Morisca” finally reached its horrific conclusion.
10
Whatever its specific local circumstances, the ruthless persecution of the Moriscos of Arcos was another indication of the new determination of Spain’s rulers to impose their authority over Morisco Spain as a whole. Inquisitorial repression in Counter-Reformation Spain was directed not only against Moriscos. Old Christians were also prosecuted in large numbers for “scandalous propositions,” such as expressing doubt about the existence of God, or offenses against Catholic morality, but the punishment of individual Moriscos, unlike that of Old Christians, was aimed at a religious and ethnic
group
whose members were considered to be collectively hostile to Catholicism.
Moriscos were prosecuted not only for plots and conspiracies or contacts with foreign powers, or even for Islamic practices per se. Morisco doctors, herbalists, and healers could be charged with Mohammedanism because they used amulets inscribed with Arabic or written verses from the Koran in the course of their treatments, but they could also find themselves accused of sorcery because they allegedly conjured up spirits or familiars to assist them in the healing process. One Morisca healer was charged with possessing a magical book of cures that flew to her when she summoned it. In 1580 a Valencian Morisco doctor named Hieronymo Padet confessed under torture to consorting with two diabolical familiars and having “consulted the Devil on how to cure illnesses and the properties of herbs and urine.”
Inquisitorial persecution of the Moriscos was driven by a number of complicated and sometimes contradictory motives, but the new emphasis on fear and coercion was partly intended to speed up the process of Morisco assimilation—an objective that was given new urgency in the post-Granada era. There is no evidence that these methods succeeded. On the contrary, the Holy Office was feared and hated by the Moriscos, who called it the Devil’s Tribunal and regarded it as the incarnation of Catholic oppression and hypocrisy. One Morisco manuscript describes inquisitors as “thieving heartless wolves, whose trade is arrogance and greed, sodomy, lust and blasphemy . . . tyranny, robbery and injustice.”
11
In the introduction to his
Guide to Salvation
, the exiled Aragonese Morisco writer Juan del Rincon denounced the “tyranny of the Christians” in his native land, where “the Inquisition displays against us its utmost fury and oppression, so that few parts of the kingdom are free from fire and faggot; the newly baptized Moors are everywhere seized and punished with galleys, rack and fire, and other chastisements best known to God, the master of all secrets.”
Hatred of the Inquisition was expressed not only in words. Moriscos also attacked and sometimes killed Inquisitorial officials, particularly in Aragon, where they could often count on the support of Christian lords who detested the Holy Office as much as they did. For the most part, however, resistance was more oblique. Moriscos learned how to outwit inquisitors and evade serious punishment by admitting to only minor offenses, by denouncing friends or neighbors who had already died, or by pleading ignorance. In some Morisco communities, arrest by the Inquisition was considered a badge of honor. But such repression also made many Moriscos wary of Christian company, since it was not unknown for Christians to offer wine and pork to their Morisco companions or guests so that they could denounce them to the Inquisition when they refused them.