The Triumph of Christianity (39 page)

So there it is. Contrary to the standard myth, the Inquisition made little use of the stake, seldom tortured anyone, and maintained unusually decent prisons. But what about its procedures? The remainder of the chapter examines the workings of the Inquisition, organized on the basis of the alleged offenses.

Witchcraft

P
ERHAPS NO HISTORICAL STATISTICS
have been so outrageously inflated as the numbers of those executed as witches during the craze that took place in Europe from about 1450 to 1700. Many writers have placed the final death toll at nine million, drawing comparisons with the Holocaust.
³⁰
And while it is acknowledged that Protestants burned a lot of witches too, historians have stressed the leading role played by the Inquisition; one prominent historian even claimed that the Inquisition began hunting witches because it had run out of heretics to burn.
³¹
Several others have blamed the whole thing on the dire effects of celibacy which inflamed priests to “a raging campaign of revenge and annihilation” against women.
³²
Finally, it is widely claimed that the witch hunts ended only when the “Dark Ages” of religious extremism were overthrown by the “Enlightenment.”
³³

Vicious nonsense, all of it.

Consider that the witch hunts reached their height
during
the so-called Enlightenment! Indeed, in his celebrated book
Leviathan,
Thomas Hobbes (1599–1679), the famous English philosopher and proponent of the “Enlightenment,” wrote that “as for witches... they are justly punished.”
³⁴
Another leading figure of the “Enlightenment,” Jean Bodin (ca. 1530–1596), served as a judge at several witchcraft trials and advocated burning witches in the slowest possible fires.
³⁵
In fact, many of the distinguished scientists of the seventeenth century, including Robert Boyle, encouraged witch hunts.
³⁶

As for the death toll, in recent years competent scholars have carefully assembled the evidence nation-by-nation and found the “accepted” totals to be utterly fantastic. For example, it had long been assumed that in England from 1600 to 1680, “about forty-two thousand witches were burnt,”
³⁷
but the most trustworthy figure turns out to be fewer than a thousand over a period of three centuries.
³⁸
In similar fashion, the best estimate of the final death toll is not nine million, but about sixty thousand!
³⁹
Even that is a tragic total, but it needs to be recognized that a mere handful of these victims were sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition—so few that the distinguished historian William Monter entitled a chapter in his statistical study of the Inquisition as “Witchcraft: The Forgotten Offense.”
⁴⁰
This was in response to data showing that during the century 1540–1640, when the witch hunts were at their peak in most of Europe, the Inquisition of Aragon (one of the two Inquisitions functioning in Spain) executed only twelve people for “superstition and witchcraft.”
⁴¹
This should have been acknowledged all along. Even the virulently anti-Catholic historian Henry C. Lea (1825–1909) agreed that witch hunting was “rendered comparatively harmless” in Spain and that this “was due to the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition.”
⁴²
Let us examine this wisdom and firmness in some detail.

To begin, it is important to recognize what sustained the charge of witchcraft since it is not the case that the accusations were nothing but unfounded hysteria—many people actually were “doing something” that led them to be charged. What they were doing was practicing magic. As would be expected in an era that was extremely deficient in medical knowledge, medical magic abounded in Europe and so did magical attempts to influence weather, crops, love, wealth, and other human concerns. As was noted in chapter 15, the critical distinction was between church and nonchurch magic.

Church magic was plentiful: sacred wells, springs, groves, and shrines abounded where supplicants could seek all sorts of miracles and blessings. In addition, priests had an extensive array of incantations, prayers, and rites available for dealing with many human concerns and especially for treating illness—there were many priests who specialized in exorcism. Parallel to this elaborate system of church magic was an extensive culture of folk or traditional magic, a substantial portion of which also was devoted to treating medical problems. Some of this magic dated from pre-Christian times and much of it was a somewhat jumbled adaptation of church magic. This nonchurch magic was sustained by local practitioners, sometimes referred to as “Wise Ones.” Often these practitioners performed nonmagical functions too, as in the case of midwives who combined their practical skills with magical spells to deliver babies. It should be mentioned that sometimes priests engaged in “corruptions” of church magic as in the case of a village priest who baptized coins in holy oil in hopes that they would be replaced as soon as they were spent,
⁴³
and the many priests who baptized various objects such as magnets in hopes of creating love potions, although love potions were vigorously condemned by the church.
⁴⁴
Even though performed by priests, such activities were regarded as nonchurch magic by the religious authorities.

All magic appears to work, some of the time. Thus some sufferers who turned to their local priest got well. But so did some who turned to their local “Wise One.” This posed a serious theological issue, and the attempt to find a logical explanation resulted in tragedy. The question was posed: If church magic works because God invests it with the power to do so, why does nonchurch magic work too? Surely, these powers do not come from God. The conclusion seemed obvious: nonchurch magic works because Satan empowers it! Hence, to practice nonchurch magic constitutes invoking Satan and his demons. That is the definition of witchcraft.
⁴⁵

Efforts to expose and suppress evil in the form of nonchurch magic soon led to public panics in many parts of Europe. All sorts of lurid tales and fears spread rapidly and, especially in places where governance was weak, mobs and local authorities were swept up in the witchcraft craze. These same fears and impulses arose among people in Spain too, but there they were effectively squelched by the Inquisition.

One reason that the Inquisition prevented a witch craze in Spain is because during its very first cases involving the use of nonchurch magic, the inquisitors paid close attention to what the accused had to say. What they learned was that magical practitioners had no intention whatever of invoking Satanic forces. In fact, many thought they were using church magic! This was because the practices and procedures involved were very similar to those authorized for use by the clergy—recitation of fragments of liturgy, appeals to saints, sprinkling holy water taken from a local church on an afflicted area, and repeatedly making the sign of the cross. As a result, the accused seemed sincerely surprised to learn they had been doing anything wrong.

In fact, the main reason these efforts did not qualify as church magic was because the accused were not ordained and therefore they were not authorized to conduct such activities. Hence if their magic worked, it was not God’s doing. That is, the Spanish inquisitors agreed with their colleagues elsewhere that nonchurch magic worked only because of Satanic intervention. However, because they had listened to the accused with a sympathetic ear, the Spanish inquisitors initiated a crucial distinction “between the implicit and explicit invocation of demons.”
⁴⁶
Thus they assumed that most accused of using nonchurch magic (including priests) were sincere Catholics who meant no harm and had been unaware of invoking demons. While it was wrong even to have implicitly invoked demons, it should be forgiven in the ordinary way, through confession and absolution. Consequently, nearly no witches were sent to the stake by the Spanish Inquisition and those who were usually had been convicted for the third or fourth time.

Even more important, the Inquisition used its power and influence to suppress witch hunting by local mobs or secular authorities. An example occurred in Barcelona in 1549, just as the most ferocious witch hunts broke out in other parts of Europe. Local officials accused seven women as witches and the official of the local branch of the Inquisition approved that they be burned. The members of the
Suprema
(the ruling body of the Inquisition) were appalled that such a thing could happen and sent the inquisitor Francisco Vaca to investigate. Upon arrival he sacked the local representative of the Inquisition and ordered the immediate release of two women still being held under sentence of death. After further investigation he dismissed all pending charges and required the return of all confiscated property to the families of the victims. In his report, Vaca dismissed the charges of witchcraft as “laughable” and wrote, “one of the most damning indictments of witch persecution ever recorded.”
⁴⁷
His colleagues on the
Suprema
agreed and thereafter turned their vengeance upon those who
conducted
unauthorized witch hunts, having several of them executed and sending others to serve long sentences in the galleys.
⁴⁸

Even so, in 1610 six persons were burned as witches by local officials in Logroño. When they heard of this, the
Suprema
dispatched Alonso de Salazar y Frias, who spent more than a year interviewing the local inhabitants and inviting them to repudiate their errors (mostly having to do with superstition and magic). At the end of his mission, Salazar reported that he had reconciled 1,802 persons to the church. He also reported the negative results of his investigation of witchcraft: “I have not found the slightest evidence that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred.”
⁴⁹
Salazar went on to suggest that efforts should be made to prevent public discussion and agitation concerning the topic; the preaching of sermons about witchcraft should especially be avoided, because he had discovered “that there were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about.”
⁵⁰

Salazar’s report soon circulated widely among clergy all across Europe. Many of them, including the Jesuit Friedrich von Spee, soon joined in denouncing witch hunts, and it was their influence, and especially their discrediting of evidence gained by torture, that brought witch burning to an end in Catholic areas—an effect that soon seeped into the Protestant areas as well. Some historians like to claim that witch hunting finally ended because it was attacked by participants in the “Enlightenment,” such as Balthasar Bekker. But none of these “enlightened” attacks on witch hunts appeared until nearly a century after efforts by Catholic clergy had discredited the witch craze and made it entirely safe to say such things.
⁵¹

Heresy

T
HE
S
PANISH
I
NQUISITION WAS
founded to deal with a social crisis concerning Jews and Muslims who had become Christians. The standard story misrepresents everyone involved. It portrays the Jewish and Muslim converts as overwhelmingly insincere, having only pretended to become Christians, while continuing to live as “crypto-Jews” (
Marranos
) or “crypto-Muslims” (
Moriscos
). And it portrays the Inquisition as brutally determined to unmask all these pretenders and burn them for heresy. The truth is that nearly all of the Jewish and most of Muslim converts were sincere, and the Inquisition was founded to suppress and replace the chronic outbreaks of mob violence against them with due process, as well as to expose those whose conversions were insincere. Soon after the Inquisition began to operate, Luther’s Reformation rocked the religious consciousness of Europe, soon joined by other Protestant movements. Although the Spanish crown was steadfastly Catholic, a small underground Lutheran movement arose in Spain (often involving priests and monks), and the Inquisition was directed to repress it.

Marranos

For more than a thousand years, more Jews lived in Spain than in “all the countries of medieval Europe combined.”
⁵²
It was in Spain that the renaissance of the Hebrew language was made possible by the creation of a Hebrew grammar—the Jews of the Diaspora had so completely lost the ability to read and write Hebrew that their scriptures had to be translated into Greek several centuries before the birth of Jesus. But in Spain, beginning in the tenth century there was a sudden flowering of Hebrew poetry and other writing.
⁵³
Moreover, the center of this Hebrew renaissance was in the Christian areas of Spain and as Christian forces slowly drove the Muslims south, Jews continued to migrate north. When Jewish minorities have enjoyed amicable relations with their social environment, a substantial amount of conversion often has occurred,
⁵⁴
and that is what happened in Spain. A wave of Jewish conversions to Christianity began in the fourteenth century, as tens of thousands accepted baptism, and came to be known as
conversos
.
⁵⁵
This caused immense bitterness in the Spanish Jewish community—Maimonides proposed that
conversos
be stoned as idolaters. Worse yet, since Jewish leaders in Spain presumed that no Jew would willingly abandon the faith, they concluded that these conversions somehow must have been forced and insincere—a falsehood that has lived on to corrupt historical accounts ever after.
⁵⁶
In fact, these conversions were so sincere that soon many of the leading Christians in Spain, including bishops and cardinals, were of
converso
family origins. Indeed, in 1391 the chief rabbi of Burgos had himself and his whole family baptized and eventually he became the bishop of Burgos.
⁵⁷
The sheer number of Jewish converts as well as their prominence (King Ferdinand had a
converso
grandmother),
⁵⁸
impeded assimilation and led to antagonisms between “old” and “new” Christians that eventually resulted in armed conflicts between the two. Not surprisingly, “old” Christians were inclined to accuse “new” ones of being insincere “crypto-Jews,” and too often some Spanish Jews were eager to support such charges. That turned out to be misguided because antagonism toward the
conversos
soon was expanded to include attacks on the Jews by “old” Christians.