The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (35 page)

All these motives combined to produce the obsession that distinguishes the Spanish version of the Inquisition from all others—the self-appointed mission of purging the Spanish population of Jewish and, later, Muslim contamination through the doctrine of
limpieza de sangre
(purity of blood). The medieval and Roman inquisitors had been concerned only with the purity of one’s faith, and they were willing to spare accused heretics from the worst penalties if they repudiated the beliefs that the Church called heretical and embraced the ones that the Church prescribed for all good Catholics. The Spanish inquisitors, by contrast, were dubious that any New Christian was capable of authentic conversion or repentance if his or her blood was tainted by Jewish or Muslim ancestry, no matter how slight or how remote. Here begins a dangerous and deadly idea—the punishment of human beings for the crime of having been born with the wrong blood in their veins—that would reach its most horrific expression in the twentieth century.

One’s blood was deemed to be pure, in fact, only if it was wholly untainted by Jewish or Muslim forebears, and only those whose blood was pure were entitled to the official designation of Old Christian. One important function of the Inquisition—and a source of revenue to fund its more brutal operations—was performing elaborate genealogical studies and issuing certificates that attested to one’s purity of blood. Since New Christians came to be excluded from various posts and professions by a body of Spanish law called the Strictures of Purity of Blood, such a certificate was sometimes required to secure a professorship or a government job, to win a place in a military academy or the officer corps, to reassure the family of a prospective husband or wife, or to satisfy the curiosity of a suspicious inquisitor.

If one’s purity of blood could not be documented, the label of New Christian would be imposed by law. Depending on the number and nearness of Jewish or Muslim relatives, one might be described as a Half New Christian, for example, or a Quarter New Christian. The quanta of tainted blood were measured and registered all the way down to a fraction of one-sixteenth, but even a single Jewish or Muslim relation on a distant branch of one’s family tree was enough to mark one as “a part of the New Christian” and expose one to all the risks and disabilities imposed on
conversos
by the Strictures of Purity of Blood. Even if a man or woman escaped the Inquisition, he or she was still subject to the Spanish version of apartheid whenever and wherever the blood laws were in effect.
⁶¹

The enemies of Spanish Jewry included deeply racist elements among the Old Christians who eventually recruited Ferdinand and Isabella to their radical program of ridding Spain of its Jewish population, not only all practicing Jews but anyone with even a trace of Jewish blood. “Old Christians came to treat the conversos as carriers of a lethal disease,” explains Netanyahu. “What the racists proposed, then, was a large-scale bloodbath, mass extermination or, to use the language of our time, genocide.” No such genocide took place, but the enactment of the blood laws, the expulsion of professing Jews, and the persecution of converted Jews by the Spanish Inquisition were all measures that were intended to achieve the same goal. Whenever a
converso
was sent to the stake by the inquisitors, it was another victory in the war of extermination against Judaism that began in Spain but did not end there.
⁶²

The burning of condemned heretics had been the occasion for a display of pomp and circumstance throughout the long history of the Inquisition, but the Spanish Inquisition aspired to new heights of grandeur and eventually raised the auto-da-fé to “a true art-form of the Baroque.” A certain high point was reached on June 30, 1680, when King Charles II and his bride, Marie Louise, along with some fifty thousand other spectators, gathered in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid to enjoy an auto that started at 6:00a.m. and ended more than twelve hours later. A total of 118 condemned heretics were paraded in front of the crowd to receive their penances, and 51 of them were “relaxed”—that is, burned at the stake.
⁶³

Some autos were small in scale and took place in private, but the celebrated spectacles of the Spanish Inquisition were elaborate events that required much preparation. A Sunday or a feast day would be chosen in order to build a suitably large crowd, and—for the same reason—the auto would be announced in advance from pulpits throughout the district. Carpenters and masons were summoned to build the platforms where the invited guests would sit and where the victims would be burned alive. A rehearsal might be held on the day before the big event. At dawn on the morning of the auto, the victims would be offered a last meal, perhaps a beaker of wine and a slice of fried bread with honey. With the tolling of church bells across the city and a solemn processional, the high ceremonial would finally begin.

Local priests and visiting prelates were invited to join the friar-inquisitors and other inquisitorial personnel in the parade, sometimes carrying lighted white tapers, and they were accompanied by soldiers, heralds, flag bearers, drummers, and trumpeters. On especially grand occasions, the procession would include a band and a choir to perform solemn hymns. The accused heretics followed behind, barefoot and bareheaded, and sometimes shaved down to bare skin. All of them assembled at the Palace of the Inquisition and formed up in ranks for the march to the place of judgment and then the place of burning, the dreaded
quemadero.

Some of the accused wore ropes around their necks as signs of their imminent punishment, and the most defiant among them were gagged to prevent them from calling out to the crowd. The accused heretics were dressed in a loose-fitting yellow smock called a
sanbenito
—a corruption of
saco bendito
or “sacred sack”—and they wore the
coroza,
a tall dunce’s cap fashioned out of yellow pasteboard. Crowds of spectators numbering in the tens of thousands might attend a well-orchestrated auto, and an elaborately printed program (known as a
lista
) was sometimes prepared to record the names and crimes of the condemned men and women.

According to the
lista
for an auto that took place in Lisbon on Sunday, June 17, 1731, for example, there were eighty-three victims, ranging from “persons who wear the
sanbenito
” to “persons handed over in the flesh”—that is, condemned heretics who had refused to confess, or had offered an insufficient confession, or had recanted and then later relapsed into heresy, and were now turned over to the civil authorities for burning. Thanks to the
lista,
we know that case 11 was a twenty-nine-year-old woman named María Méndes, native of Beja and resident of Moncarapacho, a New Christian who was described in the program in an urgent shorthand: “Convicted, refused to confess and obstinate.” By contrast, a mule driver from Tondella named João Pereyra, age thirty-two, described as “half New Christian,” was charged with “Judaizing and other sins” and sentenced to “perpetual wearing of the
sanbenito
and imprisonment without remission” as well as a five-year exile in the Portuguese colony of Angola.
⁶⁴

The
sanbenito
and the
coroza
were Spain’s unique contributions to the iconography of the Inquisition. On the
sanbenitos
were painted scenes and figures that indicated the crime and fate of the wearer. For example, if a man or woman had been convicted of “formal” heresy, the
sanbenito
was decorated with a black cross with one transverse arm; two arms were reserved for more egregious forms of heresy. The
sanbenito
worn by those condemned to die was black, and the others were yellow. Also painted on the
sanbenito
and the
coroza
were garish scenes of devils and flames; if the flames climbed upward, the wearer was condemned to die; if the flames pointed downward, the wearer had confessed and faced a lesser penance. Sometimes the garment or headgear was made to fit a specific crime, as when a bigamist who had taken fifteen wives was required to wear a
coroza
on which were painted the figures of fifteen women. “The procession presented an artistically loathsome dissonance of red and yellow hues,” wrote one English propagandist in the nineteenth century, “as it defiled to the infernal music of growled psalms and screams and moanings, beneath the torrid blaze of Spanish sunlight.”
⁶⁵

The ranks of the processional often swelled with various functionaries and honorees. At the famous Madrid auto of 1680, for example, the Company of Coal Merchants, all of them bearing pikes and muskets, were invited to join the procession in recognition of their crucial contribution to the festivities—“the Wood with which the Criminals are burnt.” On that occasion, the Duke of Medina-Celi was given the honor of carrying the official banner of the Inquisition, which depicted a cross, a branch, and a sword to symbolize the heretic’s choice between the Church and the pyre, and the words
Justitia et misericordia
(Justice and Mercy). Other participants carried pasteboard effigies of escaped or missing heretics who were to be burned in absentia, or trunks containing the remains of defunct heretics who had been posthumously condemned to the stake.
⁶⁶

The inquisitorial parade eventually arrived in the public square where two platforms had been erected, one to accommodate the accused heretics, the attending priests, and the guards, the other for the comfort of honored guests from both the Church and the royal court, assorted nobles of various ranks, public officials, and the occasional ambassador, although the highest chair was reserved for the grand inquisitor, who dressed for the occasion in a purple robe. Between these two stages was a pulpit from which a Mass was conducted and a sermon preached to the crowd by one of the inquisitors, always an occasion for excoriating the accused heretics and sternly cautioning everyone else against the crime of heresy. Then, as the accused heretics were brought to the pulpit, sometimes one by one and sometimes in groups, the inquisitor recited the charges, announced the verdict, and pronounced the sentence against each, including the effigies and corpses as well as the flesh-and-blood victims.

The lesser punishments might include the obligation to wear the
sanbenito
to church services every Sunday—a Spanish variant on the medieval practice of requiring heretics to wear yellow crosses—but more severe penances were more commonly imposed, including a public lashing of up to two hundred strokes, forced labor as a galley-slave aboard one of the royal men-of-war, or “perpetual and irremissible” imprisonment. Sometimes the inquisitors devised a punishment that was, at once, both painful and whimsical, as when one victim of the Inquisition in Mexico was anointed with honey, covered with feathers, and left to stand in the sun for four hours.
⁶⁷

The climax of the auto-da-fé, of course, was the execution of condemned heretics. At the auto attended by King Charles II and Marie Louise, the ceremonies began early in the day and it was not until midnight that the burnings began. Still, it was a much-sought-after spectacle. According to the time-honored legal fiction of the Inquisition, the burnings were conducted by the public executioner rather than the inquisitors, and the actual conflagration took place at a site outside the city walls known as the
quemadero
(place of burning). The victims were conducted from the public square to the
quemadero
on the backs of donkeys; the friar-inquisitors were close at hand, urging them to recant while it was still possible, and the crowd followed behind. A high scaffold had been erected at the place of execution to improve the sightlines, and the owners of houses overlooking the pyre are said to have sold window seats at a handsome price.

The victims mounted the platform, followed by the priests who continued to encourage them to confess. At some autos, the victims were made to climb a ladder and seat themselves on a small wooden board affixed at the top of the stake—another effort aimed at improving the view and thus enhancing the pleasure of the crowd. The priests would follow the victims up the ladder, but if the victims still refused to recant, the priests withdrew and the executioners took their place, binding each of the victims to the stake with ropes or chains. Then the priests mounted the ladder again for one last effort at conversion, and if the final plea was rebuffed, “they leave them to the Devil,” wrote one contemporary observer, “who is standing below ready to receive their souls and carry them with him into the flames of hell-fire, as soon as they are out of their bodies.” To taunt the victims—and to encourage a confession before it was too late—some executioners would playfully burn off the beards of the male victims with a torch before touching it to the pyre.
⁶⁸

If, on the other hand, a condemned heretic offered a satisfactory confession at the last moment, he or she was granted what the inquisitors apparently regarded as a final act of mercy: the victim would be strangled with a garrote before being burned. Sometimes a bag of gunpowder might be hung around the neck of the victim, both as a gesture of mercy—once ignited by the mounting flames, the resulting explosion would bring his ordeal to a quick end and possibly even take off his head—and as a pyrotechnic effect to please the crowd. Then, at last, the executioner put the torch to the brushwood and charcoal that had been neatly arranged around the stakes, igniting the fuel at each of the four corners to ensure that the flames burned evenly on all sides. As a final theatrical touch, the corpses and effigies, also dressed in the
sanbenito
and the
coroza,
were burned along with the living victims.