Violencia

by Jason Webster

  The result was the emergence from the Spanish crucible of a new creative burst which sprang from the darkness, much in the way of the Toledo School of Translators or the court of Abd al-Rahman III centuries before. And like its predecessors, the Columbus voyage would leave an indelible imprint on the world, marking a very clear ‘before’ and ‘after’. Our world today is unthinkable without the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa María arriving back from the Caribbean with news of their famous discovery.

  Yet with the white comes the black, Spain’s checkerboard history in evidence once more in the Columbus story. The conquering spirit which brought about the end of Moorish Spain – thereby creating the possibility for Columbus’s voyage – was now translated to the New World. It is estimated that in 1491 around 145 million indigenous people lived in the Americas; two hundred years later that number had fallen by some 130 million, or by around 90 to 95 per cent. Massacres, forced labour and new diseases meant that Columbus’s arrival and the wave of discovery which followed was anything but a moment of enlightenment for many. Spanish culture, with its ages-long Manichaean struggles between good and evil, arrived in the New World with explosive force. It changed the world, but only at very high human cost.

  NO MISTAKE

  The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the subsequent events of 1492, did not create Spain, but they made Spain a possibility. Castile and Aragon did not become a single nation or kingdom at this time. In fact they would continue to have different laws, customs and even currencies for centuries to come. But following the Catholic Monarchs’ deaths and the accession of their offspring, the crowns of the two kingdoms would henceforth be held by the same person, who, despite not being officially the ‘King of Spain’, would now begin, in part, to be considered as such. ‘Spain’ itself, however, was still a difficult thing to define, and over the next few hundred years monarchs would commonly be referred to as the king of las Españas, ‘the Spains’, plural: Spain as a single coherent political entity was still a very distant proposition (and, arguably, has yet to be fully realised to this day).

  Marriage, however, was one thing. Kingdoms had been joined in the past through the same practice only to break apart again – indeed, this had happened in the case of Castile and León several times. What helped to seal the possibility of unity that 1492 represented was the emphasis on the one thing around which Spaniards could theoretically be joined: the Catholic faith. The conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews need to be seen in this context: Catholicism would provide the common culture which could unite Castilians and Aragonese (and others). In a land of many different languages and traditions, a single faith would be the unifying factor. Which is why Ferdinand and Isabella became known jointly as los Reyes Católicos – the Catholic Monarchs. There was still no ‘Spain’ in a political sense, but through unity of belief such a state might be brought about. Hence the need to bring an end both to the last Muslim kingdom as well as the large, and powerful, Jewish community. From now on, to be ‘Spanish’ would be synonymous with being ‘Catholic’ (the remaining Muslims, the Moriscos, would have to wait until 1609 for their own expulsion, but as mere artisans and farmers they were, for the time being, seen as less important).

  A single faith, then, provided the ideological basis needed for the creation of ‘Spain’, and this was reinforced by Ferdinand and Isabella working closely together in matters of state. Spanish schoolchildren are taught that the phrase which encapsulated this collaboration was ‘Tanto monta, monta tanto’, meaning that the one and the other acted in unison. And although this is true to an extent, the motto was in fact Ferdinand’s, a reference to the Gordian Knot and to Alexander the Great, whom Ferdinand liked to emulate. The phrase was first suggested to the Aragonese king by a scholar, Antonio of Lebrija, who has an interesting postscript to the story of 1492, for it was in that same year that the Andalusian presented Queen Isabella with a curious new kind of book he had written, La gramatica de la lengua castellana.

  Grammars of Latin existed aplenty, but not of any ‘vulgar’ tongue. When handed it, Isabella looked at the book and, perplexed, asked Antonio what it was for. In attendance was the Bishop of Avila, Hernando de Talavera, a relatively open-minded churchman ensuring, temporarily, that the Moors of conquered Granada were being treated fairly under the terms of their capitulation. A policy soon to be changed by the arrival in Granada of Cardinal Cisneros, who favoured forced conversions and the burning of thousands of Arabic books. He stepped in and answered on Antonio’s behalf:

  Now that Your Highness has made subject barbarous peoples and nations of many tongues, with conquest comes the need for the conquered to accept the laws of the conquerors, among them our own language. With this book they will be able to learn it, just as we learn Latin through works of Latin grammar.

  The queen was impressed by his answer, and gave her royal approval. She was the ruler of something new: the first Western European empire, a precursor to the French and British, and other European empires which would follow centuries later in Spain’s wake. Such tools would come in useful. Not only faith, but eventually a common tongue, would help to unite the many peoples now living under the joint rule of the Catholic Monarchs.

  Did Isabella read Antonio’s preface to his historic tome? We don’t know. But as the Spanish Empire burst violently into life, with many more bloody battles ahead of it, she might well have been surprised to come across the author’s words:

  The old wars have been won, the old religions put aside, and the old languages translated. The only thing left to cultivate is peace.

  Castile and Aragon were joined, but very separate. It would take centuries for the two kingdoms to be administratively combined. With so much emphasis on religious unity, however, there was one state organisation which bucked the trend and acted in both nations as one body: the Inquisition.

  INTERLUDE

  SCENE ONE

  THE INQUISITION

  The Spanish Inquisition operated as a state-run thought police, persecutor of minorities and censor throughout the Peninsula from the late 1400s until 1834. During this time it prosecuted as many as one hundred and fifty thousand people, sentencing anywhere between two thousand and five thousand of them to death. The initial targets of the inquisitors were Jewish converts to Christianity who secretly remained true to their original faith. But with time this remit was extended. ‘Crimes’ investigated by the Inquisition included all forms of heresy, as well as blasphemy, homosexuality, witchcraft and Freemasonry. During interrogation, a prisoner was kept in the dark about what they were accused of, and who their accuser was. Torture was sometimes used to extract a confession. Sentencing was carried out in highly popular and well-attended public ceremonies – autos da fé – in which victims were humiliated by being paraded in special robes and tall, conical hats. Those who were sentenced to death were handed over to the civil authorities, who carried out executions usually on the outskirts of the town or city later the same day. The preferred execution method in the earlier years was burning victims alive. Later, if prisoners ‘confessed’ at the last minute, the executioner would strangle them to death to spare them the agonies of the flames. Other execution methods included the garrotte and hanging, which became more common in later years. All the assets of a condemned person passed automatically to the Inquisition itself.

  These are the recognised facts about the Spanish Inquisition. Intense debate continues to this day, however, about the finer details, and about the ‘uniqueness’ or otherwise of the organisation in its historical context. The Spanish Inquisition has got a lot of bad press over the centuries – justifiably so, for it was a wicked institution which had an enormously negative effect on Spanish life and culture. But was it any worse than other similar ‘inquisitions’ in existence at the same time? Is it fair that Spain’s image abroad should have been so badly degraded because of its own inquisition’s activities? The answer to these questions is, no.

  Historians trying to place the Spanish
Inquisition in context emphasise other persecuting movements in the rest of Europe of the same period, principally the witch-burning craze which saw tens of thousands of innocent people executed across much of the Continent over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, numbers which far exceed the Inquisition’s death toll in Spain. Less mention is given, however, to the long tradition of persecuting unorthodox and minority beliefs within the Peninsula itself. The Spanish fourth-century bishop Priscillian, as already mentioned, was the first person ever to be executed by the Church for heresy, while anti-Semitic persecution, in particular, was anything but new: the Visigoths had introduced anti-Jewish laws in the sixth century, almost a thousand years before the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition. The creation of a Muslim state in the Peninsula brought a pause in anti-Semitic violence, but with time it resurfaced. In 1066 Jews were massacred in Muslim Granada as the more tolerant atmosphere of the Umayyad era gave way to more hard-line tendencies. A less open-minded attitude then became more entrenched over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, first under the Almoravids, and later the Almohads, who introduced specific anti-Jewish measures, such as closing down synagogues and forcing Jews to wear distinctive clothes or badges. It was as a direct result of this persecution that Maimonides, the most celebrated Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, author of The Guide for the Perplexed and native of Cordoba, fled Spain, eventually settling in Cairo. Ironically, it was his teaching that it was acceptable for Jews merely to pretend to convert while secretly remaining faithful to their religion which caused many Jews still living in Spain grave problems over the centuries to come.

  With Al-Andalus on the back foot, it didn’t take long for a persecuting mindset to re-infect Christian Spain. Fernando III, the conqueror of Cordoba and Seville, imposed harsh penalties on heretics, having them branded with hot irons or even, according to some sources, boiled alive. Then came the pogroms of the 1300s. These in turn served to strengthen anti-Semitism on the Peninsula so that, by the late 1400s, with Granada conquered and the possibility in sight of a purely Catholic realm, it was almost inevitable that an organisation such as the Inquisition, focused on rooting out anything but State-sanctioned belief, should come into being. As a tool of persecution, the Papacy had already used it to great effect against the Cathars in France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

  And in some ways the Inquisition continued the tradition established over centuries of ‘Reconquest’, in which Christian Spain saw itself embodied in Santiago Matamoros, the Slayer. Notwithstanding his nickname’s emphasis on ‘Moors’, the point was to eradicate nonconformists of any description. The inquisitors became, in effect, the frontline troops of what might be seen as Spain’s Terreur, ‘Purges’ or ‘Cultural Revolution’: the initial war had been won, but the process it had been built on – the Christianisation of the Peninsula – was viewed as far from complete. The battles no longer took place out on the field, but in people’s homes, and in their minds. Anything from what you ate to the clothes you wore became the focus of State attention, as these were often clear and powerful signifiers of belonging to one or other group. A very easy way to tell if a seeming convert was secretly following Jewish or Muslim rites was to check whether in the larder there was any pork, forbidden to both religions. Consequently, the public consumption of pork and the annual slaughter of a pig by each family (traditionally on the Feast of St Martin, 11 November), became well rooted in Spanish culture, and is still very much in evidence today, as anyone who has spent time in the country can testify.1

  The Inquisition was not only about rooting out heretical belief, however. It was also about power. Mob suspicion of Jews, Muslims and ‘crypto-Catholics’ was rife, and by creating an organisation specifically to persecute such people, the State was winning itself much public support. And herein lies the fundamental difference between the Spanish Inquisition and other similar bodies which had existed before: rather than being controlled by the Papacy, it was directly under the control of the monarchy, in other words, the State. All Spanish Inquisition documents begin with the same formula: Su Majestad manda . . . – ‘His Majesty commands . . .’ The Inquisition as an organisation was active in both Castile and Aragon (and, later, Navarre, following its conquest in 1512), had a single director in the shape of the Inquisitor General, and was effectively a State ministry answerable to the monarch alone. Which in turn gave the monarch much greater power over his dominions.

  And a large part of its popular appeal was drawn from the fact that many Jews and conversos held positions of political power and influence. A culture which valued education and which taught its children diligently to read and write was always going to have an advantage, no matter how small, over the illiterate majority among whom it lived. Ordinary Christians of low social standing had formed the foot soldiers of the ‘Reconquest’, but they saw ‘heretics’ enjoying the fruits of victory, through intermarriage with aristocrats, and by exercising influence through their wealth and moneylending. Sheer envy drove much of the early persecuting zeal, and the monarchy, forever keen to curb the power of its aristocratic rivals and enrich itself in the process, happily provided the process by which this emotion could be channelled.

  And the lower classes could be satisfied with themselves. They were largely ‘clean’; they weren’t ‘stained’ with Jewish blood. So began an obsession which would dominate much of Spanish public and private life for well over a century, that of pureza de sangre, ‘purity of blood’. Under the influence of the Inquisition, anyone wishing to obtain a position within the State or Church administrations had to provide a document proving that they had no Jewish or Morisco family. The measure had an element of class war about it, as it was generally easier for the lower classes to satisfy the authorities on this point than it was for those higher up.

  But by the mid-1500s the Spanish Inquisition was morphing into something else. Within fifty years it had managed to eradicate most false Jewish converts, either by exposing and executing them, or by forcing them into exile through a climate of fear. New targets were required to justify the organisation’s continued existence, and so other heretics such as Protestants or Illuminado mystics came under suspicion. And as the Inquisition was mostly self-funded, the emphasis on execution began to wane in favour of fines and other measures which helped fill the organisation’s coffers.

  How true are the stories about the horrors of Spain’s Inquisition? It’s clear now that they have been exaggerated: close analysis of Inquisition records shows that, for example, torture was used quite sparingly, and that the numbers of those executed were far lower than has been stated in the past. Inquisition jails, in fact, were considered to be superior to those housing ordinary criminals, who, on occasion, would deliberately blaspheme in order to be moved to the slightly more salubrious accommodation provided by the Holy Office. But while it’s important to get a more exact idea of what the Inquisition did, its effect on Spanish culture and society was immense. In the end it wasn’t so much about the precise number of people burnt at the stake as the climate of terror and suspicion which it promoted and extended for some three hundred and fifty years. And with time this got worse: Spain during the late 1400s and early 1500s had a vibrant intellectual culture, but by the reign of Philip II, when the Inquisition began widening its gaze beyond mere Jewish conversos, this had all but ended. Protestantism was now viewed as a major political threat in Europe, and so the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule, with tensions over the new religious ideas at its heart, naturally placed Spain at the vanguard of the pan-European faith-driven wars of the period. And yet at the same time, Spain in the latter half of the sixteenth century became, in the words of the twentieth-century writer Ortega y Gasset, the ‘Tibet of Europe’, isolated and paranoid. Philip drew the Inquisition closer to the crown, relying on it to strengthen his own power,2 and as a result all forms of intellectual endeavour came under threat: Spanish students were forbidden from travelling abroad (although some still managed to do so) and the impo
rt of foreign books was banned.

  Previously, in the Middle Ages, intellectually curious Europeans had flocked to Spain. Now they avoided a country in which religious fanaticism and obsession with racial purity became State policy.

  But the overriding pattern of Spanish history once more comes into play: the black and the white coexisting in explosive and often creative tension. At this time of great darkness appear new powerful and influential lights, seen clearly in literature and painting produced during this period, some of the finest ever made anywhere in the world. Yet even still the sombre backdrop to this cultural flourishing can be gleaned from the masterpiece of the period, Don Quixote, for example in the famous book-burning scene. Or in this line by the Morisco, Ricote, reporting on his observations of life outside Spain:

  I arrived in Germany, and there it seemed I might live in greater freedom because its inhabitants do not trouble themselves with the details of others’ lives: each one lives as he chooses because, in the most part, they have freedom of conscience.