Read God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World Online
Authors: Cullen Murphy
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #Research, #Society, #Religion
A friend of my family, Fray Angélico Chávez, a Franciscan priest, served for many years as the official historian of the state of New Mexico. He died in 1996. Chávez was a small man with nut-brown skin and an aquiline nose. He spoke quietly and often slyly. A statue of him stands today outside the library at the Palace of the Governors. Chávez could trace his family back fifteen generations or so, to the original Spanish settlers. In his later years, he would repair in the afternoon to a bar near the plaza, wearing a beret and sipping an old-fashioned under the gaze of provocative but badly painted nude odalisques on the dark-paneled walls. He left the priesthood for a time, returning before his death. His work explored many problematic seams in New Mexico’s history, but he was proud of his heritage. He was fond of quoting William Faulkner’s observation: “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”
It was Chávez who pointed out to me, during a conversation among the odalisques, that although Americans never think of the Inquisition as something that took root in what is now the United States (“We don’t really think of America as having a Spanish history at all,” he said), in fact the Spanish Inquisition played a role in the early history of New Mexico. He nodded in the direction of the Palace of the Governors. Right there, in the middle of the city, a governor had been murdered as the result of a dispute with the religious authorities. People had been beheaded in the plaza, where Indians today lay out jewelry on blankets. For historians, he went on, the Inquisition would prove to be a blessing. Virtually the only written records we have from New Mexico before 1680 are Inquisition documents; they were routinely sent for safekeeping to Mexico City, the capital of New Spain, and therefore survived the Pueblo Revolt. Everything else was destroyed. So we should be grateful to the Inquisition for something! Of course, Chávez added, after enjoying his joke, we must not forget that the Inquisition was partly to blame for the uprising in the first place.
Soft Power
Christopher Columbus was a man of worldly ambitions—he harbored dreams of wealth and influence. His contract with the Spanish monarchs stipulated that if his expedition proved successful, he would be knighted, would be made the governor of any new lands, and would be awarded the title Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Also, he was to receive 10 percent of any gold that was found. He haggled mightily over these terms. Columbus owned a copy of the
Book of Marco Polo,
and his highlights, marginal notations, and underlinings—“perfumes,” “gold mines,” “pearls, precious gems, golden fabric, ivory”—reveal a man with an eye for earthly gain.
At the same time, he was deeply religious, even obsessively so. In later life, he compiled the
Book of Prophecies,
a collection of apocalyptic writings. He entertained the idea that his voyages would reveal the site of the Garden of Eden. He came to see his mission, at least in part, as messianic destiny: carrying Christ to a larger world. His very name played into this vision, and in penning his signature he would eventually render Cristoforo as
Christo-ferens,
its Greco-Latin root, meaning “Christ-bearer.”
In describing his needs to Ferdinand and Isabella, he made specific provision for “parish priests or friars” to set up churches and convert the Indians.
No one knows for sure how to weigh the importance of one motive relative to another in the mind of Columbus. That said, when he set sail in 1492—scribbling a note in his log about the expulsion of Spanish Jews—he neither considered nor foresaw that his efforts would enable the Inquisition to circumnavigate the world. But that would be one result, and in very short order.
“Globalization” did not become a widely used term until the late twentieth century—popularized by a Harvard Business School professor—but it started to become a reality in the fifteenth, as the age of exploration opened an entire planet to conquest and trade.
“The sun never sets on the British Empire,” the old saying had it; during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it very nearly didn’t set on the Inquisition either. Depending on the time of year, there would have been just a short interval after the sun had set on the Inquisition’s outpost in Mexico City before it rose on the outpost in Manila—a few brief moments when the Inquisition was in darkness everywhere.
The Inquisition was able to spread so rapidly for two main reasons. One of them was simply the revolution in communications—communications understood broadly, as the projection of ideas and power over distance. A disciplinary enterprise like the Inquisition must be able to transmit messages over both short distances (down the hall) and long ones (across the mountains, across the sea). All that secretarial machinery would be of little consequence if words and authority, and the people who embodied them, could travel only with great difficulty, or not at all. The sophisticated communications networks of ancient Rome fell into decay with the end of the empire. It had once been possible for a messenger to make the trip from Rome to Alexandria and back—by land and sea, under perfect conditions—in about three weeks.
Such feats were impossible in a medieval world in which roads had crumbled, “law” was local and unpredictable, and the waters were swept by roving marauders. In the early Middle Ages, communication was essentially oral, and neither words nor people traveled very far. Most journeys were made on foot, which in practice meant that one could cover about ten miles a day.
But over time, and very gradually, conditions began to improve. Monasteries and then universities revived the art of making and distributing books. The Carolingian rulers set up a system of
missi domini
—“messengers of the lord”—to bring a semblance of administrative control to their domains.
Religious orders created their own networks of messengers. The Cistercian system, probably the best, linked 6,000 establishments throughout Europe. The development of pilgrimage routes—chief among them, the ones that led from all over the continent to the holy sites in Rome—and then of the routes employed by those who joined the Crusades, opened up well-trod pathways with an infrastructure of inns, stables, blacksmiths, and cobblers to support them.
By the fifteenth century, transport by sea could occur over longer distances and with greater safety and accuracy than ever before. For one thing, ships were better. Interactions between northern and southern Europe, and between Europe and the Islamic lands, had led to the development of well-designed, smooth-hulled caravels, with two or three masts and a rudder at the stern—a more robust and reliable vessel than the old clinker ships. The caravels combined lateen-rigged and square-rigged sails—they could make headway running into the wind as well as before the wind. The technology of navigation had advanced. The magnetic compass, floating in a bowl, was now widely in service, providing a general sense of direction, and so were the quadrant and the astrolabe, which allowed navigators to fix a ship’s latitude.
The other reason the Inquisition went global was that like anything else based on organizational principles, it was highly portable. The “soft” power of an influential state is the power that derives from culture, religion, technology, and methods of administration, as opposed to simple violence or its threat. Portability is the hallmark of any empire. As different as one city may have been from another in the Roman Empire, its public center bore the unmistakable imprint of Roman rule: the temples of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva; the imposing basilica; the public latrines. One would have felt, as Edward Gibbon wrote, that imperial authority was being exercised “with the same facility on the banks of the Thames, or of the Nile, as on those of the Tiber.”
In any British colony during the high noon of empire, you would find a starchy Government House, schoolchildren in tartans, judges in wigs, toasts to the monarch. The Spanish Empire was no different, though its bureaucratic machinery was relatively modest. The institutions of crown and church—strongly linked to Madrid, sometimes to the point of punctilious micromanagement—were transplanted wholesale.
Spain and Portugal changed the places they colonized in many ways. The most successful transplants were language and religion. In time, after centuries, the imperial powers would retreat. The Church itself would lose its tenuous hold on temporal authority. But it would never shed its new, planetary character. The Church became the world’s first truly globalized institution. Its effort to regulate how people think and behave became global too.
“Mission Creep”
The Inquisition followed the flag, and its targets at first were those who arrived under that flag, rather than people already living where the flag was planted. The Inquisition was always a tool for use primarily on Christians, including
conversos
suspected of backsliding; it did not, for instance, haul Indians into tribunals unless they had previously embraced the faith. There were many
conversos
in the New World and elsewhere in the empires of Spain and Portugal. Columbus numbered at least five men of Jewish ancestry among the crew on his first voyage. One of them served as the expedition’s physician, another as its surgeon. A third served as bursar. A fourth, Luis de Torres, baptized the year Columbus set sail, was brought along as a translator—he knew Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic, and Columbus believed those languages might come in handy.
Life in Iberia was at best conditional for
conversos,
at worst dangerous, and many chose to seek opportunities in Asia, Africa, and America. Jews who had not converted did the same. The new imperial colonies offered hope of a fresh start, far from the prying eyes and heavy hands of kings and bishops.
It was a sensible choice, and paid off for large numbers. Many of them were from Portugal. Their families may have fled from Spain to that temporarily freer kingdom—only to flee again when the Portuguese commenced their own inquisition. No place in Iberia seemed reliable in the long run. Portugal sometimes encouraged
converso
emigration; technically,
conversos
were not allowed to emigrate from Spain, but the looser reality of a beckoning frontier, and the need for manpower, made the prohibition largely a dead letter.
The Inquisition took note. As early as 1532, a
converso
family was plucked from Mexico and returned to Spain on orders issued by a faraway tribunal. Before long, clerics in the colonies—mainly members of the Franciscan Order, with their hooded brown habits and belts of knotted cord, but also Dominicans—were given explicit inquisitorial powers. Within the span of a lifetime after Columbus, tribunals of the Inquisition had been put into place in cities around the world—functioning replicas of the tribunals back home. Spain established a tribunal in Mexico City in 1569 and in Lima that same year. An Inquisition office was set up in Manila in 1583 (subject to the jurisdiction of the tribunal in Mexico City) and a full tribunal was established in Cartagena in 1611.
Under the Portuguese, the Inquisition was established in Goa in 1560, where its activity was intense. The hand of the Portuguese Inquisition can be seen in places as far-flung as Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, the Cape Verde Islands, and Macau, though its touch in some of these places was light.
“The Holy Office of the Inquisition,” writes the historian France V. Scholes, “was the most important ecclesiastical court in the New World.” He goes on:
The jurisdiction of the Inquisition was wide and elastic. Heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, bigamy, the practice of superstition, sorcery and demonology, propositions subversive of the faith, denial of ecclesiastical authority, lack of respect for ecclesiastical persons, institutions, and censures, solicitation in the confessional, evil-sounding words—these were some of the causes for prosecution by the tribunal. No member of the non-aboriginal community was exempt.
Some years ago, the Bancroft Library at the University of California came into possession of sixty-one volumes of manuscript records from the Mexican Inquisition spanning the years 1593 to 1817. Each of the volumes is devoted to the case of a single individual. Some of them run to hundreds of pages. Sewn into the middle of one volume—the case of a man accused of not believing in the Virgin Mary—is the rope he used to hang himself while in prison, in 1597.
Looking at the accusations, one gets a vivid sense of the range of transgressions that came before the Inquisition, and of the phenomenon that in our time goes by “mission creep”:
And, as usual, there was the crime of “practicing Judaism.” This accusation would always get the Inquisition’s attention, but in terms of numbers, the prosecution of alleged crypto-Jews was concentrated in two great waves of zeal.
The first occurred in the 1590s, in the wake of an influx of
converso
colonists into Mexico, when some two hundred people were investigated for activities that marked them, in the Inquisition’s view, as crypto-Jews.
The most celebrated among the victims was Luis de Carvajal, the nephew of a prominent conquistador. In 1596, Carvajal was burned at the stake along with his mother, three sisters, and three other convicted judaizers. He left behind a deeply personal and affecting memoir, a testament to his Jewish faith composed between periods of imprisonment. Additional fragments of Carvajal’s writing survived in the form of letters he sought to smuggle to his siblings as he awaited execution, written on eggshells or the skins of fruit, or engraved with a pin on an avocado pit. The last entry in his memoir is dated according to the Hebrew calendar: “the fifth month of the year five thousand three hundred and fifty-seven of our creation.”