The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision, by Henry Kamen, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 369 pp, £25 in UK
It is one of the innumerable ironies of history that - in the Anglo-American world in particular - the Spanish Inquisition is identified mainly with the persecution of Protestants, and above all with the persecution of Protestants in the Low Countries. This is wrong on virtually all counts. In the first place, the Spanish Inquisition had no jurisdiction in the Netherlands, which were hereditary Habsburg lands and not a possession of Spain. The repression of Calvinism there was carried out by the Flemish Inquisition, a very different body and a notoriously tough one, which had been founded by the Emperor Charles V who had a horror of heresy in his lands. Secondly, the Inquisition in Spain was not directed against Protestants, since it was founded at a time (1480) when the Reformation was still decades away, and Luther and his doctrines were scarcely heard of in the Peninsula for another half-century. Even then, Protestantism simply did not appeal to the bulk of Spaniards; such Protestant or cryptoLutheran sects as did take root were insignificant in numbers. The Inquisition did, however, persecute the followers of Erasmus, whose books for a time were banned and who was considered too ambivalent in his loyalty to Rome - too "liberal", as we should say today.
The real targets of the Inquisition were, firstly, the Jews and, rather later, the Moriscos (nominally Christianised Arabs or Moors, who in fact were often native Iberians by blood) as well as the actual Moors of Granada, who stuck to their religion and customs after the capture of their kingdom in 1492. Spain's Jewish community, or communities, had a long history in the Peninsula, where they had first come in the third century. In the Middle Ages they were at the peak of their affluence and influence, as merchants, scholars, money-lenders and doctors (virtually every petty king in Spain, Christian or Moorish, and many leading clerics, had a personal Jewish physician). The crusading spirit of the Reconquista, however, killed off much of the old system of coexistence (convivencia). It had lasted longer in Spain than in most other European nations; England expelled its Jews in 1290, France did the same in 1306, and later there were strong anti-Semitic currents in Germany. In Spain, mass intolerance showed itself late in the 14th century, often based on the belief that Jews were usurers and tax collectors (as many of them were, but only a privileged minority). In 1480, Ferdinand and Isabella set up the Inquisition under a virulently anti-semitic Dominican prior, Tomas de Torquemada, to establish religious unity in their lands. It seems to have been he who largely persuaded them to expel the Jews, though neither of the Reyes catolicos was particularly anti-Jewish, and Ferdinand knew that he stood to lose revenue by their expulsion. Given the choice between conversion and expulsion, about half of Spain's 80,00 Jews opted for the former, while a number rejected either alternative and usually suffered for it. The Inquisition, however, also came down heavily on the suspected con versos, descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity, though these numbered many eminent Spaniards among them. Teresa of Avila, for instance, was of Jewish ancestry, while Torquemada himself seems to have had some Jewish blood. St Teresa escaped any kind of prosecution, though her famous biography was for a time banned from publication; but she came on the scene when the worst of the wave of persecutions was already past. In the years between 1480 and 1530, probably about two thousand people were burnt at the stake. Contrary to the usual belief, the Inquisition or Holy Office (Santo Officio) was not primarily a Church tribunal, and the Popes gave it only reluctant approval. To a great extent it was a State body or instrument, though Henry Kamen discounts the facile explanation that Ferdinand and Isabella saw it purely as a means of imposing an artificial political unity on a regional and divided country. Perhaps, after the long, bitter centuries of reconquest, Christian Spain yearned instinctively to expel the remaining foreign bodies from its midst, and there was an obsession with racial limpieza (cleanliness, purity) which anticipated the ethnic cleansing of our century.
Certainly, a strong element of xenophobia is evident, since some of the inquisitors refused to admit that even France was also a Catholic nation. To them virtually all other countries were paises herejes, heretic lands. Even the Jesuits came under suspicion as a new-fangled order whose orthodoxy was uncertain (and to do them credit, the Jesuits did resist the worst of the anti-Semitic wave; Loyola, their founder, confided in a friend that he would have been glad of Jewish ancestry, since it would allow him to share a common blood with Christ and his Mother). The Inquisition was, in effect, more Catholic than the Pope, with whose jurisdiction it sometimes clashed. Just how many people the Holy Office did burn seems hard to answer, though its early years were its worst. Later, it probably burnt about three people a year - not necessarily for heresy, since it was also empowered to try cases of bigamy, sodomy, blasphemy, bestiality and witchcraft. Death penalties amounted to less than two percent of its punishments, which included confiscation of goods, terms of imprisonment, whipping, penitential exercises, etc. Even then, a high percentage of those condemned to die at the stake managed to escape abroad, and were merely burnt in effigy. In the later 17th century burnings fell off sharply, until in the 18th century they dwindled to a few isolated cases. Finally, the Pope abolished the death penalty for all Church tribunals. In spite of the grisly legends - some of which, incidentally, date from as late as the 19th century - the tribunals were relatively sparing in the use of torture, which in any case was part of the judicial process in most countries until well into the 18th century. The Inquisition's prisons were also clean and well maintained by the standards of the time; their major abuse was that people were sometimes kept years in them awaiting trial. And, worst of all, a man or woman brought before one of the tribunals could not confront his or her accuser, who did not appear at the hearing, though it was legitimate to call witnesses for the defence.
The stigma of being summoned before such a tribunal was a public shame which might dog a family for entire generations. The Inquisition ruled by moral pressures more than physical ones, while plainly the mass of the population either tacitly supported it, or cared very little either way. And there were always large tracts of Spanish territory where its power was almost unknown, or simply ignored. In fact, the common man's or woman's ignorance of even the basic tenets of Christianity often shocked its churchmen and lay jurors, particularly the traditional folk belief that "simple fornication" (i.e. copulation between consenting unmarried partners) was natural and blameless.
Traditionally the effect on Spanish intellectual and cultural life is supposed to have been disastrous, but the facts do not bear this out. Literary censorship was largely directed at theological works, many or most of them written in Latin, and the 16th and 17th centuries were the Golden Age of Spanish literature. Isolated writers suffered, such as the great poet Luis de Leon, an Augustinian and a lecturer in theology, who was denounced by a jealous colleague and spent some years in prison; eventually he was released and went back to his university post in Salamanca. But the intellectual decay of Spain was caused by a variety of factors which apparently had little to do with the Inquisition. It can be seen as part of an overall national exhaustion and loss of self-belief from which Spanish culture has only recovered in the last hundred years.
In 1876, the novelist Juan Valera identified the source of the Holy Office as "a fever of pride, a delirium of vanity . . . We thought we were the new people of God, and confused religion with patriotic egoism . . . Hence our divorce and isolation from the rest of Europe." Others have traced it to a continuous struggle between Two Spains - European Spain and African Spain, or isolationist and international Spain, or liberal and reactionary Spain. Professor Kamen's own verdict is that the Inquisition "helped to institutionalise the prejudices and attitudes that had previously been commonplace in society. Like all police forces that operate in secrecy and are not publicly accountable, it began to enjoy the arrogance of power." Our own century, whose racial and ideological persecutions have been on a scale which dwarfs those of the misnamed Holy Office, can hardly afford to throw the first stone.