Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (99 page)

Such tensions remained particularly lively in Castile, the area still on the front line against Islam. Isabel's hold on the Castilian throne had initially been shaky, and her early political calculations established strategies through what became a long reign: first a new assault on Judaism, and later, after Granada's fall in 1492, a parallel assault on Islam.
⁵²
The agent of her campaign was a newly constituted version of an inquisition, a body not previously present in Castile. Although it imitated the many local inquisitions which had investigated heresy in Europe since the thirteenth century (see pp. 407-8), now it was organized by the monarchy, and after complicated royal haggling with Pope Sixtus IV between 1478 and 1480 to create its legal framework, it settled down to work against 'Judaizers' in the kingdom of Castile, burning alive around seven hundred between 1481 and 1488. In the middle of this came another momentous development: Pope Sixtus finally yielded to royal pressure in 1483 and appointed the Dominican friar Tomas de Torquemada as Inquisitor-General of all Fernando and Isabel's peninsular dominions.

When Granada fell, Isabel gave Jews in Castile the choice of expulsion or conversion to Christianity. The excuse was yet another blood-libel accusation, this time from Toledo in 1490, that Jews had murdered a Christian boy, who has become known to his devotees as the Holy Child of La Guardia and was later attributed the significant name Cristobal - Christ-bearer. Perhaps 70,000 to 100,000 Jews chose to become refugees abroad rather than abandon their faith, forming a European-wide dispersal which has been called Sephardic Judaism (since the Jews had applied the Hebrew word
Sefarad
to Spain). Yet more Jews chose to convert rather than leave their homes, and the authorities were determined that their conversion should not be a token one.
⁵³
By contrast, at first there was an official agreement to allow the continued practice of Islam in Granada, but harassment by the Church authorities led to rebellion. In 1500 this provided the excuse for Isabel to insist on conversion of all Granada's Muslims to Christianity; she extended this requirement throughout Castile two years later. For the time being, King Fernando stood faithful to his coronation oath to preserve the liberties of his remaining Islamic subjects (
mudejars
), but the attitudes fostered by Isabel in Castile set patterns for the future. Her expulsions of Jews were imitated in Portugal, when in 1497 King Manoel (who was hoping to marry her daughter) ordered mass conversion of the Jewish population, many of whom had only just fled from Spain.
⁵⁴

So Latin Christianity, in an especially self-conscious version of its traditional form, became the symbol of identity for Iberia's kingdoms, and Protestantism would stand little chance of making any headway there against the project of building a monolithic Catholic Christian culture. Indeed it is possible to talk of an Iberian Reformation before the Reformation: well in advance of the general Protestant Reformation in Europe, Spain tackled many of the structural abuses - clerical immorality, monastic self-indulgence - which elsewhere gave Protestant Reformers much ammunition against the old Church. This Reformation was promoted by the monarchy, which increasingly excluded any real possibility of interference in the Church from the pope. A series of papal concessions allowed the Crown to appoint bishops, and by 1600 a third or more of the yearly income of the Castilian Church disappeared into the royal treasury.
⁵⁵
The pope tolerated being thus kept at arm's length partly because he had little choice, but partly because Spanish royal power was consistently exercised to create a 'purified' and strong Latin Christianity free from heresy or non-Christian deviation, and indeed to spread it throughout the Spanish Empire overseas. Such a satisfactory deal for the Iberian monarchies meant that they had no reason to sympathize with any other challenge to papal authority.

The first chief agent of the royal programme in the Church was Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, a Castilian who gave up a distinguished career in Church administration to join one of the most rigorous religious orders, the Observant Franciscans, within which he sought to escape the world as a hermit. Yet when the fame of his single-minded spiritual activism forced him, against his better judgement, to become confessor to Queen Isabel in 1492, he found himself in Castile's highest offices in Church and commonwealth, Archbishop of Toledo (Spain's primatial see) and eventually, from 1516, regent of the kingdom during the minority of Charles Habsburg. In his austere, focused piety and his determination to proclaim his vision of Christian faith to the peoples of the Spanish kingdoms, he was much more like Luther, Zwingli or Calvin than his Spanish contemporary Pope Alexander VI, yet many of his reforms anticipated what the Council of Trent was to decree many decades later. He used his unequalled opportunities for action in ways which do not now seem entirely consistent, but which sum up the main themes of the Spanish religious revolution. An advocate of apostolic poverty who was also the premier statesman in Spain, he spent money lavishly as a major patron of the most advanced scholarship of his day: he founded the University of Alcala out of his own resources, and funded the printing of a great number of books particularly aimed at introducing the writings of his favourite mystics to a literate public. At the same time, he was responsible for burning thousands of non-Christian books and manuscripts, and he became Inquisitor-General in 1507, the same year that he was made cardinal.

In the aftermath of the fall of Granada the Inquisition became central to the programme of eliminating the rival civilizations of the peninsula. It was not going to let up on the
converso
population just because
conversos
claimed to be Christian. This illogicality was aided by a sinister feature of the supposed martyrdom of the 'Holy Child of La Guardia' in 1490: the alleged perpetrators had been a mixed group of professed Jews and New Christians.
⁵⁶
The Inquisition not only sought out evidence of continued secret practice of Islam or Judaism, but reinforced an existing tendency in Spanish society to regard heresy and deviation as hereditary. So it became increasingly necessary for loyal Spanish Catholics to prove their
limpieza de sangre
(purity of blood), free of all
mudjar
or Jewish taint. Evidence of
converso
descent ended one's chances of receiving major promotion in the Church, such as a canonry in the chapter of Spain's premier cathedral, Toledo. The main religious orders started insisting on
limpieza de sangre
, starting in 1486 with the influential native order much patronized by the nobility, the Jeronimites, closely followed by the Franciscans and Dominicans, as well as the secular clergy - in the end the Inquisition even required this assurance for its 'familiars', its network of spies and helpers. The authorities in Rome never liked the custom and did their best without much success to dismantle it, and there were ironies in this ideological use of genealogy: few of the higher Spanish nobility could claim such purity of blood, and they found themselves excluded from high office in the Church in favour of social inferiors who could prove their lack of taint.
⁵⁷

The Inquisition's work was justified in the eyes of the reliably Catholic population, and led to a steady stream of spontaneously volunteered information, because there were real continuing challenges to Christian Spain, both internal and external. The general perception of Spain in the rest of Europe was that it remained an exotic place, full of Moors and Jews: a mortifying image for hypersensitive Catholic Spaniards (and so for the many in Europe who came to loathe Spanish power, also a useful theme with which to annoy them). Rebellions from the Morisco population continued well into the sixteenth century, and in 1609 there was finally a general expulsion order against 300,000 Moriscos, more than a century after Granada had fallen, the largest population expulsion anywhere in early modern Europe. After 1492, the Christianity of much of the newly converted Jewish population was at best confused and at worst a cloak for their older faith. One of them described their unhappy situation as floating aimlessly 'like a cork on the water'.
⁵⁸
Disoriented, leaderless and caught between two conflicting religions,
conversos
were easy prey for prophets proclaiming that the Last Days were coming. Such uncontrolled religious energy spilled over into the population at large, itself disturbed by the sudden change in the peninsula's religious balance; around 1500 Spain was in a ferment of expectation of a universal monarchy, and avid for any dramatic manifestation of God's plan for the future. By the second quarter of the sixteenth century, the Inquisition was making it clear that sudden conversions, sightings of messengers from Heaven or reports of statues that bled were no longer to be treated with respect, and it was bringing a new discipline to Spanish religion.
⁵⁹

17. Spain and Portugal in 1492

The Spanish version of Catholicism thus presents a complex set of features. It fostered deep personal yearnings for closeness to God, linked to mystical spirituality in Judaism and Islam and later bearing rich fruit in the mystical experience of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross (see pp. 673-5). Alongside official and unofficial moves to remove corruption from Church institutions, churchmen revealed a paranoid suspicion of any rival culture, which found increasing support from the secular authorities. After official Spain decisively rejected the peninsula's multicultural past, it is not unfair to see subsequent Spanish Christianity as a major exponent and practitioner of ethnic cleansing. That led to major complications, for instance in the renewal of Spanish monastic life: Ximenes, as an Observant Franciscan, was energetic in promoting reform, but some monks and friars most enthusiastic for change came from
converso
circles, and their tendency to draw their spiritual intensity from the defeated religious cultures in the peninsula provoked much suspicion from Ximenes in the Inquisition.

The independent forces in Spanish Christianity produced a movement of mystical and spiritual enthusiasm in which friars,
conversos
and pious women (
beatas
) came to be styled by their admirers as
alumbrados
('enlightened ones'). It is now difficult to recover what the movement believed, if indeed it should be regarded as a movement rather than a label by a paranoid Inquisition, for the
alumbrados
never had a chance to express themselves publicly in complete freedom, and their fate was sealed when some of them began taking an interest in a new import of northern European spirituality, the writings of Martin Luther. The
alumbrados
were formally condemned in September 1525, scattered, cowed or executed. Quite apart from their legacy in later-sixteenth-century Spanish mysticism, as the
alumbrados
were dispersed, they had far wider impact first through the
Spirituali
of Italy and then throughout Europe, as we will discover (see pp. 655-62 and 778-9).

Contemporary events in Italy made it equally easy for Italians to see the Last Days arriving. Two years after Granada had fallen, French armies invaded the Italian peninsula, sparking warfare and miseries of half a century's duration. A terrifying and hitherto unknown disease also broke out. Although apparently as fatal as the plague, it played with its victims for months or years, destroying their looks, their flesh and sometimes their minds. Equally seriously, it brought public shame, because very quickly people realized that it was associated with sexual activity. Naturally the Italians in their double affliction called the new scourge the French pox, a name which soon caught all Europe's imagination, much to French annoyance; France's attempt to relabel the pox as the Neapolitan disease was not an especially successful ploy. The title of a poem about the pox published in 1531 by an Italian doctor, Girolamo Fracastoro, has given the modern descendant of this disease the name syphilis.
⁶⁰

These disasters gave public credibility to the message of a charismatic Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola. First brought by his order to Florence in 1482, from the early 1490s Savonarola began to preach in the Church of San Marco about the Last Days, and his preaching was soon accompanied by visions and announcements of direct communications from God. The Medici family's grip on the former republic was faltering, and the extraordinary flowering of art and culture which they had fostered in Florence seemed mocked by the growing misery of the situation throughout Italy: perfect conditions in which Savonarola could thunder apocalyptically about the dangers of rampant sexuality, especially sodomy, and demand radical political and moral reform in the name of God. To the existing Florentine secular republican resentments against tyranny was added the dangerously potent idea that divine action would bring a total transformation in existing society: it was to be a theme of militant religious radicalism in Europe over the next two centuries. Accordingly the Medici, humiliated in battle by King Charles of France in 1494, were expelled and a rigorously regulated republic proclaimed, in which Savonarola's reorganization of society could begin. The message of his oratory was that his audience could rule supreme, or, if they remained stubborn, they would lose everything: