History of the Inquisition of Spain. Henry Charles Lea

of Moors and Jews comparable to that of the southern kingdoms and the refugees there doubtless hastened their departure as soon as the shadow of the Inquisition spread over the land, although one of the earliest orders of Ferdinand to Comares, December 21, 1513, had been to place guards secretly at all ports and passes to prevent their escape. How little material existed for the Holy Office is manifested by the fact that the confiscations did not pay the very moderate expenses and in May, 1515, it was necessary to transfer from Valencia two hundred ducats to enable Martin Adrian to meet the necessary charges. In September, 1514, we find the inquisitors making a visitation of their district and, in the following month, Fray Maya returned to the seclusion of his convent, but of the actual work of the tribunal we hear little. It is true that a letter of the Suprema, October 11, 1516, respecting the collection of a penance of 300 ducats imposed on Miguel de Sant Jaime shows that occasionally a lucrative prize was secured, but chances of this kind must have been few for, in 1521, Cardinal Adrian, in view of the necessities of the tribunal, ruthlessly cut down the salaries of all the officials. Its authority cannot have been well assured for, in 1518, the Viceroy, Duke of Najera, expresses doubts whether a sentence of sanbenitos, pronounced on Rodrigo de Osca and his wife, of Pampeluna, can be enforced, in view of their numerous kindred, to which the Suprema replies by instructing him to see that nothing is allowed to impede it. Little as it had to do, the business of the tribunal was delayed by its imperfect organization. In 1519 eight citizens of Pampeluna complained to the Suprema that, for trifling causes, their fathers and mothers, wives and brothers, were in the prison of the Inquisition, where three of them had died and the rest were sick. They had been detained for seven or eight months, although their cases were finished, awaiting consultores from Saragossa to vote on them, wherefore the petitioners asked that decisions be reached without further delay and that, when discharged, the prisoners should not be ruined by pecuniary penances greater than their substance, as had occurred on previous occasions. The Suprema, January 12, 1519, forwarded this petition to the inquisitors with instructions that, within fifteen days, one of them should bring to Saragossa all the cases concluded, to be duly voted on, while the remainder were to be finished as soon as possible and within fifteen days thereafter to be similarly brought to Saragossa for decision. As in this letter the Council describes itself as entrusted with the business of the Inquisition in all the kingdoms and lordships of the crown of Aragon and Navarre, it shows that the latter still remained subject to the section of the Suprema pertaining to Aragon.

      NAVARRE

      While the tribunal of Pampeluna was thus of little service for its ostensible objects, it was turned to account politically in the perturbations which followed the death of Ferdinand, January 23, 1516. Jean d’Albret, supported by France, naturally made an effort to recover his dominions, but his ineffective siege of Saint-Jean-Pied-du-Port, and the defeat and capture of the Marshal of Navarre at Roncesvalles, speedily put an end to the invasion. It was important for the Spanish government to ascertain the extent to which assistance had been pledged to him by his former subjects. The Inquisition was unpopular among them and would undoubtedly have been overthrown had d’Albret succeeded, so that an investigation into those concerned in the movement could come within an elastic definition of its functions, while its methods fitted it admirably to obtain the information desired. Accordingly a cédula of April 21, 1516, instructed the inquisitors to spare no effort, in every way, to discover the names of those engaged in the affair and to obtain all the information they could about the whole matter. This probably did not increase the popularity of the Holy Office and the French invasion of 1521 offered an opportunity, which was not neglected, of expressing in action the hostility of the people. After the expulsion of the enemy, reprisals were in order which Cardinal Adrian committed to the Precentor of Tudela. Apparently he was not sufficiently vigorous in the work for, in 1523, we find the Suprema stimulating him to greater activity.[604]

      Spanish domination being thus assured, the Navarrese tribunal became useful chiefly as a precaution to prevent the subject kingdom from continuing to be an asylum for heretics. It had been shifted from Pampeluna to Estella and thence to Tudela, where, in 1518, the Suprema instructs the inquisitors to find a suitable building, in order to relieve the monastery of San Francisco in which the tribunal was temporarily lodged. Some years later there was talk of returning it to Pampeluna, but finally it was recognized as having a district inadequate to its support, while the monarchy felt itself strong enough to disregard the old boundaries of nationality. At some time prior to 1540, Calahorra, with a portion of Old Castile, was detached from the enormous district of Valladolid and was made the seat of a tribunal of which the jurisdiction extended over Navarre and Biscay. About 1570 this was transferred to Logroño, on the boundary between Old Castile and Navarre, and there it remained, as we shall have occasion to see, until the dissolution of the Holy Office.[605]

      CHAPTER V.

       THE KINGDOMS OF ARAGON.

       Table of Contents

      THE Crown of Aragon comprised the so-called kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, the principality of Catalonia, the counties of Rosellon and Cerdana, and the Balearic Isles, with the outlying dependencies of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. Although marriage had united the sovereigns of Castile and Aragon, the particularism born of centuries of rivalry and frequent war kept the lands jealously apart as separate nations and Ferdinand ruled individually his ancestral dominions. What had been accomplished in Castile for the Inquisition had therefore no effect across the border and the extension of the Spanish organization there was complicated by the character of the local institutions and the fact that the papal Inquisition was already in existence there since its foundation in the middle of the thirteenth century.

      Aragon had not undergone the dissolving process of Castilian anarchy which enabled Ferdinand and Isabella to build up an absolute monarchy on the ruins of feudalism. Its ancient rights and liberties had been somewhat curtailed during the tyrannical reigns of Ferdinand of Antequera and his successors, but enough remained to render the royal power nominal rather than real and the people were fiercely jealous of their independence. The Córtes were really representative bodies which insisted upon the redress of grievances before voting supplies and, if we may believe the Venetian envoy, Giovanni Soranzo, in 1565, the ancient formula of the oath of allegiance was still in use: “We, who are as good as you, swear to you who are no better than we, as to the prince and heir of our kingdom, on condition that you preserve our liberty and laws and if you do otherwise we do not swear to you.”[606]

      In dealing with a people whose liberties were so extensive and whose jealousy as to their maintenance was so sensitive, Ferdinand was far too shrewd to provoke opposition by the abrupt introduction of the Inquisition such as he had forced upon Castile. His first endeavor naturally was to utilize the institution as it had so long existed. This, although founded as early as 1238, had sunk into a condition almost dormant in the spiritual lethargy of the century preceding the Reformation, and in Aragon, as in the rest of Europe, it appeared to be on the point of extinction. It is true that, in 1474, Sixtus IV had ordered Fra Leonardo, the Dominican General, to fill all the tribunals of the Holy Office and he had complied by appointing Fray Juan as Inquisitor of Aragon, Fray Jaime for Valencia, Fray Juan for Barcelona and Fray Francisco Vital for Catalonia, but we have no record of their activity.[607] So little importance, indeed, was attached to the functions of the Inquisition that in Valencia, where in 1480 the Dominicans Cristóbal de Gualbes and Juan Orts were inquisitors, they held faculties enabling them to act without the concurrence of the episcopal representative—an unexampled privilege, only explicable on the assumption that the archbishop declined to be troubled with matters so trivial. The archbishop at the time was Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, papal vice-chancellor, better known as Alexander VI, who speedily woke up to the speculative value of his episcopal jurisdiction over heresy, when the fierce persecution, which arose in Andalusia in January, 1481, with its attendant harvest of fines and compositions, showed that a similar prospect might be anticipated in his own province. Accordingly a brief of Sixtus IV, December 4, 1481, addressed to the inquisitors, withdrew their faculties of independent action and went to the other extreme by directing them in future to do nothing without the concurrence of the vicar-general, Mateo Mercader, senior archdeacon of Valencia.[608]