Traducido por María Pons Irazazábal

I learned a lot of unexpected things from this book. It’s well written and well translated (although, understandably, most of the references are in Spanish). There had been an Inquisition since the 1200s (in fact, that Inquisition operated in Spain); however, the Spanish Inquisition was uniquely national – although theoretically under Papal control (like the regular Inquisition), it was actually founded by Isabella and Fernando, and administered by them and their successors. “Spain”, at the time, was the name of a geographic area, not a nation. The wedding of Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castille had united the two largest polities, and the rest of Spain was under their joint rulership due to various other titles they held (Fernando was Duke of Barcelona, for example). However, each region had its own laws and regulations, and there was no single entity that had authority over the entire region – except the Inquisition.

And the Inquisition had a lot of authority to wield. It was heresy to obstruct or interfere with its operations – a fact that attracted a lot of voluntary supporters. A layman could become a “familiar” of the Inquisition, which essentially gave him secret police powers – something that must have been an irresistible temptation to a lot of people with grudges against their neighbors. The Inquisition, of course, was supposed to be careful of such cases – and had written instruction to that effect. However, there were also written instructions that the Inquisition should never be in the wrong. It was possible to be acquitted, but that was a rare event – one or two cases a year perhaps. A more likely occurrence was an “adjournment”, in which the Inquisition had insufficient evidence to convict but didn’t want to let the defendant off completely. A person whose case was “adjourned” was still given a minor penalty – a fine, usually – and was under suspicion forever more.

For those found guilty, of course, things were much worse. At the minimum, you could expect confiscation of all your property, a fine (author Joseph Perez doesn’t explain how you were supposed to pay a fine with all your property confiscated), disbarment from public office and several professions to the third generation, and the requirement to wear the sambenito, a sort of tunic with your crimes written on it. The maximum, of course, was being burned. (Only victims who refused to repent were burned alive; the penitent were garroted first).

I had misunderstood something there, as well. The term auto da fe has entered the vernacular as synonymous with public burning, but according to Perez, the auto da fe was a public confession of sins, with the actual burning taking place elsewhere, under secular authority. There’s some confusion here; there are many paintings – including one on the front cover of this book – supposedly depicting an auto da fe with the condemned burning in the background, and Perez actually cites some of these. However, this may be due to the Renaissance painting convention of concatenating several events in a single illustration. There’s another inconsistency with the auto da fe; Perez mentions that the condemned were not told their sentences until just before they were applied, thus preventing appeals (in fact, troublesome heretics were gagged to prevent them from protesting, and it was specifically forbidden to forward an appeal to the Pope). However, in another place Perez notes the sentences were given three days before their application. Perhaps the custom changed.

Mel Brooks notwithstanding, the Spanish Inquisition never operated against Jews (who could not, after all, be heretics). The main victims were conversos – Jews or Moslems who had publicly converted to Christianity but privately continued to follow some or all of their former religious practices. This lead to some developments that would have been ironic if they weren’t so tragic. First, the Inquisition complained that the remaining Jews and Moslems in Spain were providing a source of inspiration and information to the conversos, so they were duly expelled from the country. Then priests were instructed to read a list of suspicious practices from the pulpit every Sunday – abstaining from pork and/or alcohol, not working on Saturday, engaging in fasts or special meals on certain days, etc. – so people could denounce their neighbors (concealing heresy was itself a heresy, meaning that if a relapsed converso family was found, all their friends and neighbors were arrested too, since it was assumed they must have known). However, the Inquisition eventually decided that this practice was counterproductive – by listening to a list of things that made you a Jew or a Moslem, Jews and Moslems were acquiring religious knowledge otherwise forbidden to them.

Lutherans – the generic term for any Protestant – were considered a special kind of Jews (presumably to avoid even the suggestion that there might be an alternative Christianity to Catholicism). Based on my memory of my Missouri Synod Lutheran grandparents, lumping them with Jews would, sadly, have been more insulting than burning them alive.

Oddly, the Spanish Inquisition treated witches relatively mildly – although a few witches were burned, most got lesser penalties since witchcraft was considered a superstition rather than a heresy. This is very different from many of the other Europeans, who burned witches in huge numbers.

The Spanish Inquisition went out not with a bang, but a whimper. There was a brief spurt of sentences to the galleys when the Spanish navy needed rowers, but the number of heretics, not surprisingly, rapidly diminished after the 16th century. The last burning (of a sorcerer) to place in the late 18th century, and the Spanish Inquisition was formally abolished in 1834.

Perez closes with an obvious but still well-stated comparison between the Spanish Inquisition and Soviet Stalinism. Both kept their proceedings completely secret; both assumed that any contact between the accused and foreigners were objective proof of heresy, and both extended punishment to the victim’s family and friends. Finally, one of the most intriguing similarities is the requirement for a “confession”, often with the full cooperation of the accused. Condemned heretics often asked just how to word their confessions to best serve the Holy Office (of course, the reward of being strangled before burning must have been an incentive); condemned communists were invited, and usually agreed, to perform one last service to the Party by admitting and detailing their errors. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1766771.html

I didn't know a lot about the Spanish Inquisition before reading this fairly comprehensive but also short (221 pages) account. Pérez gives plenty of detail on how it operated, as a powerful and brutal autnomous judicial system within the Spanish state, from 1480 to 1834 (admittedly rather gutted of its authority in its final decades). Several interesting points that arose for me:

1) Though run by Church officials, the Inquisition was more an arm of Madrid than of Rome; the Spanish king and government exercised control over it as far as anyone did. Though it was set up to extirpate heresy, this was heresy treated as a crime against the civil order.

2) The context of 1480 was that of the final victory of Christian rulers over Muslims in Spain, which of course could not be known to be final at the time; Pérez seems to consider that a fair amount of the Inquisition's persecution of backsliding converts from Islam or Judaism was a response to a real phenomenon rather than a witch-hunt of imaginary foes.

3) Speaking of which, the Inquisition rarely took charges of witchcraft per se seriously and tended to acquit accused witches brought before it.

4) Having said that, the Inquisition was far more brutal and violent than other judicial mechanisms dealing with religious difference, even in a bloodthirsty and bigoted period of history.

Two things would have helped me to appreciate the book more. The first, which is more my fault than Pérez', is that I have very little knowledge of Spanish history, and cannot really relate to any of its monarchs after Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V and Philip II, so rather than fitting the narrative from 1600 to 1800 into a framework that I already knew, I was trying to reconstruct the historical background from the intense details given by Pérez. The second is that, although Pérez does reflect a bit on the comparative dimension, we could have done with more of it; apologists mutter that even Calvin's Geneva burned Servetus (who had of course escaped the Spanish Inquisition himself), but to me the interesting question is, how come nothing like the Spanish inquisition developed in other Catholic countries, most notably in the Papal states?

I did have one laugh-out-loud moment, when zealots complained that the public reading of the edict of faith, which described heretical practices in some detail, was actually disseminating knowledge of the practices it was supposed to condemn. I doubt if it made much difference; I shouldn't think anyone was really listening.

Anyway, a cheap remainder purchase a couple of years ago which justified the £2 it cost me. ( )

I had been reading the Captain Alatriste series by Arturo Perez-Reverte and I became interested in the Spanish Inquisition. I just picked up a book from Borders that looked like the kind of information I was looking for. It was the correct information written in the most dry uninteresting way possible. I really felt like I was reading a thesis. How dry was it? It took 5 days to read this 225 page book. Boring! ( )