God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (12 page)

Like state bureaucracies everywhere, the Inquisition was formally organized and regulated by protocols: inquisitors swore to follow universal norms and standards, to be fair and just in decisions, to be impartial in their practices, to work for the greater benefit of the public weal. Of course, like their twenty-first century counterparts, inquisitors learned to fudge.

In the end, Sixtus stood down, revoking his bull and effectively acquiescing in state control over the Inquisition, with the stipulation—never to be honored—that Rome had the right to review certain sentences if presented for appeal. The king and queen appointed Tomás de Torquemada to the position of inquisitor general of all Spain. When Sixtus died, his successors confirmed the existing arrangement, and even strengthened the royal prerogatives.

The Mastermind

The name Tomás de Torquemada is more closely linked to the Spanish Inquisition than any other—with cause—though at this point it is hard to disentangle fact and fiction. Not much fact survives to start with. Like Cleopatra, King Arthur, or the Marquis de Sade, Torquemada has achieved a form of meta-existence. He is a character in literature and a metaphor in polemics. He shows up in a poem by Longfellow, a play by Hugo, a rock song by Electric Wizard. Marlon Brando played him in the movies. The web comic
Pibgorn
features a demon who assumes the guise of a game-show host in hell and calls himself Tom Torquemada.
If Kenneth Starr drew a blank on the name, he must not have been paying attention.

Torquemada was born in Valladolid, in the Kingdom of Castile, in 1420, and entered the Dominican Order in his teens.
Whether he himself had Jewish ancestry is difficult to establish; his uncle, Juan de Torquemada, a powerful cardinal, certainly did.
In any case, such ancestry would hardly have been unusual. Many of the great families of Spain, along with many ordinary ones, had over the years intermarried with
converso
families. Torquemada eventually became the prior of the Dominican monastery of Santa Cruz, at Segovia, and it was there that he met the young Isabella, daughter of the king, forging a close personal bond and becoming her confessor. He encouraged her marriage to Ferdinand, which united the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and in time became confessor to Ferdinand as well. After the Inquisition was set up under royal control, Torquemada was appointed as one of several inquisitors, and assumed the position of inquisitor general a year later. His habits were ascetic—he wore a hair shirt, shunned finery, ate no meat—but in the course of his tenure, Torquemada amassed a considerable fortune, which he used to embellish his old monastery and to found a new one, St. Thomas Aquinas, in Avila.

“Full of pitiless zeal,” writes the historian Henry Charles Lea, “he developed the nascent institution with unwearied assiduity. Rigid and unbending, he would listen to no compromise of what he deemed to be his duty, and in his sphere he personified the union of the spiritual and temporal swords which was the ideal of all true churchmen.”
With allowances for Victorian high dudgeon, the assessment is not far off the mark. And Torquemada knew that many of his countrymen shared a dim view of him. He typically traveled with a large armed force. Upon his death, in 1498, his body was interred at the monastery of St. Thomas Aquinas. Documentation is elusive, but the story is told that Torquemada’s grave was opened by rioters in the 1830s, as the course of the Spanish Inquisition neared its end, and that his remains were exhumed and ritually burned, as if at an auto-da-fé
.

By then, the Spanish Inquisition had been in existence for 350 years. Its basic procedures had been set out very early by Torquemada himself, in a work called the
Copilación de las Instrucciones del Oficio de la Santa Inquisición.
Torquemada’s manual built on the manuals of Eymerich and others. Inquisitors would come to a town and, following the practice of the Medieval Inquisition, preach a sermon, calling upon people to make a clean breast of their lapses—and, just as important, inviting them to point out lapses by others. Anyone who came forward and was “reconciled” within the period of grace would be treated gently. Anyone who failed to come forward and was later accused would be treated harshly. As had happened before, the very structure of the process encouraged confession and denunciation—not to mention false confession and false denunciation. One historian writes, “The edicts of grace, more than any other factor, served to convince the inquisitors that a heresy problem existed.” During the early years in particular, the numbers of people throwing themselves on the Inquisition’s mercy were very high. The prisons in Seville were filled. In 1486, some 2,400 people were reconciled in Toledo alone.

Now let’s put this group of people aside. They would have been given modest penances and gone on with their lives. For a second group—those who faced the judgment of a full tribunal, proclaiming their innocence or standing their ground—the future looked very different. The Inquisition did not bring a presumed heretic or judaizer to trial unless it was already convinced of the person’s guilt. A conviction was virtually guaranteed. And the deck was stacked heavily against the accused. To begin with, the proceedings of the tribunal were secret. The accused did not know, when initially charged, what the specific allegations against him were. He did not know, when presented with evidence, who his denouncers might be. Furthermore, the most persuasive denouncer often turned out to be the denounced person himself, because he confessed. The application of torture in the preliminary stages of an investigation, to determine if a confession might be forthcoming, always loomed as a possibility.
In a departure from the Medieval Inquisition, the accused in Spain could be represented by a lawyer, but the gesture was an empty one: the lawyer was given no information. Conviction rates from place to place were uniformly high. During the first half century of the Inquisition in Toledo, for instance, acquittals averaged about two a year.
As a practical matter, the main question for a person facing trial was not whether he would be found guilty but what the punishment would be.

The penalties varied. Almost everyone would be made to spend a period of time wearing the
sanbenito,
the penitential gown with its large red or yellow cross. For some, there was flogging; for others, imprisonment as well. For unrepentant or relapsed heretics, the unavoidable penalty was burning at the stake. Short of the stake, the most feared penalty was a sentence to serve as an oarsman on the galley ships of the Mediterranean fleet.
Such a sentence, technically, came with a specified duration, which generally proved to be a legal nicety:

Disease could decimate a fleet in weeks. The galley was an amoebic death trap, a swilling sewer whose stench was so foul you could smell it two miles off—it was customary to sink the hulls at periodic intervals to cleanse them of shit and rats. . . . The oared galley consumed men like fuel. Each dying wretch dumped overboard had to be replaced—and there were never enough.

The use of galleys as punishment was a Spanish innovation, and a direct product of the Inquisition’s status as an agency not just of religion but of government. Spain was a maritime power, and would be engaged for centuries in contests against European rivals and the Ottoman Turks. The punishments levied by the Medieval Inquisition had been, at least in theory, penitential ones, designed to bring convicted sinners into a restored union with God. Sentencing prisoners to the galleys served a different purpose altogether—it was designed to bring convicted sinners into battle with enemies. Another example: horse-smuggling was a problem on Spain’s northern border, and corrupt local officials did nothing to stop it. The king put the matter into the hands of the Inquisition, which not only brought prosecutions but also contrived to define horse-smuggling as a “crime of faith.”
Where did the needs of the king leave off and the demands of God begin? In Spain, it became impossible to discern the answer.

Consider the group of people known as
familiares,
an essential adjunct of the Inquisition. The
familiares
were not clerics but laymen, chosen in every locale to provide the Inquisition’s administrative substructure—part informer, part functionary. They were thick upon the ground. At one point, Valencia had one
familiar
for every forty-two of his neighbors.
There were so many
familiares
that people often complained about them to the king—as well they might, because it was he who determined their number. And in some sense they were already his men: they had been chosen because they were prominent in public life—local mayors, constables, merchants. Their service to the Inquisition gave them secular benefits, such as relief from taxation and the right to bear arms. By law, they both served the Inquisition and represented the local populace in dealings with the crown. The
familiares,
every one of them, straddled church and state.

“Oh Dear God!”

The five stages of dying, posited by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, run from denial and anger through bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
We pass through similar stages when it comes to dealing with historical trauma—and then move on to new stages beyond. One of them might be called sanitation, or perhaps gentrification. Whatever the word, it reflects the fact that eventually history is safely caged and tamed. Any visitor to Antietam or Gettysburg or the Somme has seen how the bloodiest battlefields become landscapes of verdant serenity, primped with tasteful monuments. Romans walk their dogs among the umbrella pines that edge the quiet precincts of the Circus Maximus, where countless Christians went to their deaths.

Sanitation has taken hold in the old Jewish Quarter of Córdoba—still called the Judería, despite the fact that Jews have been largely gone for five hundred years. Wandering through the narrow, winding streets, a few blocks from the Mezquita, one can’t help recalling Peter De Vries’s remark about how so many places are named for what had to be removed in order to make them what they are. De Vries had suburban subdivisions in mind (Orchard Hills, Fox Run), but he could have been talking about any U.S. state with an Indian name—or about the Judería of Córdoba. At one time, as many as 10,000 Jews lived here. They supported more than twenty synagogues. Today, the walls of dwellings are freshly whitewashed, flowers bloom in window boxes, and souvenir shops sell small brass menorahs. The sole medieval synagogue that escaped destruction has been restored. Not far away, in a public space, a bronze Maimonides sits contemplatively, a book open in his lap.

And then, right around the corner, you come upon the Galería de la Tortura—the museum of torture. This sort of commercial showcase seems obligatory in cities where religious persecution was once endemic—it’s part of the taming process. Someday, when strife has subsided and memories have cooled, there will no doubt be an Abu Ghraib museum, at the prison outside Baghdad, with a waxen figure of the hooded man on the box, electrodes trailing from his fingertips. At the museum in Córdoba, the devices of torture are all on display. But the effect is oddly Disneyfied—a theme-park version of inhumanity. The same is true of exhibits of torture instruments that from time to time go on tour. The names the instruments have been given reinforce the sense of distant fantasy: Brazen Bull, Iron Maiden, Pear of Anguish, Judas Cradle, Saint Elmo’s Belt, Cat’s Paw, Brodequins, Thummekins, Scavenger’s Daughter, Pilliwink, Heretic’s Fork, Spanish Tickler, Spanish Donkey, Spanish Spider, Scold’s Bridle, Drunkard’s Cloak.
They could just as easily be the names of pubs, or brands of condoms, or points of ascent on a climber’s map.

The failure to shock lies as much in the times as in the curators. These days, the reality of torture is graphically accessible to everyone—in grim color photographs, in macabre videos posted online, in voluminous interrogation transcripts pried from intelligence agencies. The public profile of torture is higher than it has been for many decades, and arguments have been mounted in its defense with more energy than at any other time since the Middle Ages. In the so-called Bybee memo (later modified), the Bush administration argued that interrogators could not be prosecuted for their deeds if they were acting in good faith: “The absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture.” (Following Aquinas, the inquisitors, too, cited the cleansing power of good intentions.) The administration also asserted a very narrow definition, arguing that for an action to be deemed torture, it must produce suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”
To put this standard in perspective: the Bush administration’s threshold for when an act of torture
begins
is the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that an act of torture must
stop.

The legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, though not a proponent of torture, has argued that democratic governments should make provision for the issuance of official “torture warrants” that would sanction the use of torture in extreme cases—his argument being that torture is employed clandestinely in any event, and it would be better to subject it to legal regulation. “The major downside of any warrant procedure,” Dershowitz writes, “would be its legitimation of a horrible practice, but in my view it is better to legitimate and control a specific practice that will occur, than to legitimate a general practice of tolerating extra-legal actions, so long as they operate under the table of scrutiny and beneath the radar screen of accountability.”

The Spanish Inquisition is not what Dershowitz had in mind, but it, too, sought to legitimate and control a regime of torture, just as the Medieval Inquisition had. Torture might once have been limited to
crimina excepta
—crimes of the utmost gravity—but over time that category was broadened, and the threshold of permissibility was lowered.
The phenomenon is sometimes known as torture creep. It comes in various forms. In the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, in May 2011, a number of commentators asserted that the Al Qaeda leader’s hideout had been discovered owing mainly to information gleaned from torture—demonstrating just how worthwhile torture can be. The claim was not true, but the fact that it was made illustrates a moral slide: where once torture was seen as justified only by some “ticking time bomb” scenario, now it was seen as justifiable for obtaining useful intelligence of a lesser kind.