Carlos III nevertheless imposed some reforms on the elite schools known as the Colegios Mayores, which supplied his regime with its upper bureaucracy. It would no longer be necessary, for instance, for an undergraduate, or visitador, to supply proof of his “purity of blood”: a necessary change, since these colleges had degenerated into closed shops for offspring of the nobility.
Before speaking at all of Spanish “enlightenment,” one must first remember the absolute spiritual dictatorship of Spanish Catholicism. Other countries touched by the Enlightenment had also been affected by religions in rebellion against the power of Rome: the northern European Enlightenment would hardly have been possible without the earlier Reformation, the weakening of Roman absolutism by Luther and his descendants. There was, in other words, living space for other religions north of the Pyrenees, hideously spattered though it had often been by the blood of sectarian wars. But for Spaniards in the eighteenth century, no less than in the seventeenth and the sixteenth, the one and only religion was Catholic: luteranos, being heretics, were scarcely even regarded as Christians, and were placed on a level with Jews and Muslims. There was not one Spanish institution that could truthfully have been called secular; all public life was permeated and enlaced by the dictates and desires of what was called the One, Holy, Roman, Catholic, Universal, and Apostolic Church. And its chief instrument was the Inquisition, otherwise known as the Holy Office, the inflexible and dedicated enemy of the Enlightenment.
To say that posterity gave the Spanish Inquisition a bad name is, of course, to put it very mildly. It became the archetype of Protestant conceptions of Catholic cruelty, deceit, and viciousness; its image lurks behind so much Gothick fiction and pseudo-history that it became one of the master images of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To some, saying that the Inquisition was not actually as bad as it has been painted is like saying that Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, was kind to stray cats. This detail from the absurdly bloodcurdling introduction by a Protestant divine, the Rev. Ingram Cobbin, M.A., to a Victorian edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs describes, most imaginatively, the instruments of torture French occupying troops found when they burst into the dungeons of the Holy Office in Madrid:
The third was an infernal machine, laid horizontally, on which the victim was bound: the machine then being placed between two scores of knives so fixed that by turning the machine with a crank the flesh of the sufferer was all torn from his limbs into small pieces. The fourth surpassed all the others in fiendish cruelty. Its exterior was a large doll, richly dressed, and having the appearance of a beautiful woman with her arms extended ready to embrace her victim. A semicircle was drawn around her, and the person who passed over this fatal mark touched a spring which caused the diabolical engine to open, its arms immediately clasped him, and a thousand knives cut him in as many pieces.5
Rarely can inventive bigotry have coexisted so happily with the Victorian love of fanciful automata.
The Spanish Inquisition was first authorized by Pope Sixtus IV at the request of the rulers of Spain, Fernando and Isabel, in 1478. These “most Catholic monarchs” were perplexed and disturbed by the relative tolerance of faith that had developed in their country. Alliances had been formed between Christian and Muslim nobles. Catholic families, including some of the highest in the land, had intermarried with Jewish ones. Desirable as this may seem to a modern eye, to Fernando and Isabel it was intolerable. By 1492, the year Columbus reached the Caribbean, the bigotry fanned by the royal couple had reached a point where Spanish Jews were forced to choose between conversion and exile. Those who chose the former were named, along with their descendants, conversos or, more insultingly, marranos (pigs). Members of Muslim families who made a similar choice were known as moriscos. It was part of an intensive drive to burn all competing faiths out of the kingdom, which involved the forced or merely nominal conversion of the moros, or Muslims, who had been beaten down in the reconquista, the Christian “reconquest” of Spanish territory, and the complete eradication—at least in name—of Spanish Judaism. (It is a curious fact that neither Fernando nor Isabel was as personally anti-Semitic as one might assume from their appalling political conduct toward Jews. Ferdinand’s own doctor, David Abenasaya, was a Catalan Jew, and the monarchs relied on Jews for financial advice.6) Since both Jews and Arabs were deeply implanted in Spanish society and had lived in a remarkable degree of harmony with Christians until the fifteenth century, this was a difficult and even a preposterous task; carrying it out involved savage extremes of cruelty and injustice, all of which were fully supported by the Catholic Church. There was, in fact, something suicidal about the effort. When Felipe III, egged on by the shortsighted duke of Lerma, managed in 1609-11 to expel nearly all the remaining descendants of the “Moors,” or Spanish Arabs—about half a million people—he did so in full awareness of the melancholy fact that he was cutting his realm’s own economic throat by getting rid of many of its shrewdest and most industrious citizens. The Inquisition embroiled Spain in endless internecine denunciations; it ruined civil liberties by plunging the realm into an obsessive pattern of denunciation and the settlement of personal scores in the name of religion; it populated the peninsula with imagined witches and their hunters, with infidel chasers and would-be heretic burners. To state that this loathsome institution was not always as bad as it was painted by the propaganda of indignant Protestants is not to whitewash it. It was meant to be a tribunal of faith. It ended up as a mechanism of social control, including sexual control.
The Inquisition was not equally active at all times. After a period of high activity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, its enquiries and persecutions began to taper off in the final quarter of the seventeenth. The last big ceremonial demonstration of its power and presence was the immense auto-da-fé (literally, “act of faith”) staged in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid in 1680.
The Inquisition had been created by papal order, but it was far from being a purely religious organization; its ultimate control lay with a royal council, the Suprema, which was appointed by the reigning monarch, as were all officials of the Inquisition. The crucial issue before the Holy Office was always twofold: purity of blood, and loyalty to the Church. Purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) was, of course, a deeply vexatious question, especially since records were not always good and hundreds of years would pass before any sort of genetic testing would become even notionally possible. But it was an obsessive issue, especially since from the sixteenth century on no one could aspire to any sort of official career without a certificate of purity of blood, of non-Jewishness. (In the eighteenth century the old and certified gentile families of Palma de Mallorca, capital of the Balearic Islands, were for this reason glad to be known by the otherwise rather derisive name of butifarras, “pork sausages.”)
From time to time traveling Inquisitors would descend on a city or village and conduct enquiries into the religious correctness of its citizens; these would be set in motion by suspicion or outright denunciation. The penalty for heresy, or for being a “Judaizer” (one who, having abjured his Jewish faith, continued to practice it in secrecy) or an alumbrado (an illuminist who, in contravention of Catholic doctrine, minimized the importance of Church ritual, or any one of a number of other contraventions), was death—usually by burning at the stake.
The Inquisitors were not allowed to torture people to death, but torture could be used to extract evidence by confession. Of the three main forms of torture, the most common was the garrucha, in which the victim, arms tied behind his back, was lifted by a hook and chain attached to the wrists, then suddenly dropped, which would usually dislocate the shoulders and rip apart the main tendons. In the toca, or water torture, the accused was tied down on a rack, his mouth forced open, and a toca, or linen cloth, pushed down his throat. Water was then dripped onto the cloth to simulate the sensation of drowning. The potro was a method of torture in which cords wrapped around a victim’s body were slowly tightened. All these techniques,
in experienced hands, were so effective that there was no need for clockwork maidens and other figments of the Victorian imagination. Kamen quotes from one of the abundantly detailed trial transcripts, involving a luckless woman who, in the sixteenth century, was accused of refusing to eat pork and of changing her linen on the Jewish sabbath:
She was ordered to be placed on the potro. She said, “Señores, why will you not tell me what I have to say? Señor, put me on the ground—have I not said that I did it all?” She was told to talk. She said, “I don’t remember—take me away—I did what the witnesses say.”…She was told to talk. She said, “Señores, it does not help me to say that I did it and I have admitted that what I have done has brought me to this suffering.—Señor, you know the truth.—Señores, for God’s sake have mercy on me. O Señor, take these things from my arms—Señor, release me, they are killing me.”7
It may seem strange that the power of the Inquisition at its height had little or no effect on the creativity of Spanish writers, but it is nevertheless true. The Inquisition wielded its greatest power at precisely the time (from about 1500 to 1680) that the greatest works of Cervantes, Quevedo, Juan de la Cruz, Juan de Valdés, Góngora, Tirso de Molina, and a dozen others were produced. There is, perhaps, an analogy here with the flowering of creative dissident literature in revolutionary Russia. But the effect of the Inquisition on intellectual and academic life in Spain was, by contrast, catastrophic. In 1770, about the time when Goya was getting ready to move to Madrid, the spirit of enquiry at Spanish universities had been brought so low by the interventions of the Holy Office that out of thirty-three professorial chairs in Spain, twenty-nine were empty.
At the outset, Spanish ilustración had a derivative and secondhand character. This was particularly visible in the domain of scientific thought—for the northern European Enlightenment was firmly planted on a belief in the primacy of scientific reason and discoverable Natural Law. There was no Spanish equivalent of Diderot’s Encyclopedia—hardly a surprise, there being no Spanish equivalent of Diderot himself. Not one of the technological advances that we now associate with the so-called Age of Reason was made first in Spain, or came there soon or easily: not smallpox vaccination, not the steam engine linked to a flying shuttle that revolutionized fabric production in England but didn’t reach Spain for half a century, not the thermometer, the mechanical seed drill, the train, or the simplest electrical generator—none of these things reached Spain, except sometimes Cataluña, for at least a generation after their use in northern Europe became commonplace. Hence eighteenth-century Spain had no governing metaphor of “invention” or “modernism” in daily life, and the thought of “advanced” ideas—even with a metaphor of scientific progress to back them up—meant very little to most people.
The same held largely true in the theoretical sciences. Eighteenth-century Spain contributed nothing to the progress of physics, mathematics, or astronomy. Its sparse population of savants took note of the fundamental revolution in chemistry achieved by Lavoisier and others but could add very little to it. Being so much an agricultural nation, though, Spain did take account of recent developments in natural history. By the 1780s, the works of the Comte de Buffon were obtainable in Spanish translation (at a price), local botanists like Antonio Palau and Antonio José Cavanilles had done much to describe and classify the flora of mainland Spain, while a good deal of work had been done on the corresponding exotica of its American colonies by such botanists as Hipólito Ruiz, José Pavón, and especially José Celestino Mutis. Mutis was a most singular figure. Perhaps more than any other natural historian of the eighteenth century, he had managed to involve the crown directly in his projects—a feat of funding and patronage that not even Joseph Banks or the great Linnaeus had managed to bring off. This was one of the areas in which Carlos III was an ilustrado. Part of the motive for this underwriting was medical: for instance, in the study and classification of numerous species of Cinchona, the plant from which quinine was extracted. Without this anti-malarial drug, the exploitation of Spain’s colonies in South America would hardly have been possible. Mutis kept Carlos III’s interest by means of magnificently illustrated reports and such eloquent, heart-wringing descriptions of the perils of his work as this:
My Lord, the inconveniences that accompany the laborious study of nature do not horrify me. Academics, in their studies or schools, pass whole days in complete comfort, gathering with quiet footsteps the fruit of their efforts. A naturalist must spend a great part of the night in sorting and arranging what he has gathered by day in the field, after having suffered … the injuries of the insects that gnaw and sting him, the perils of the many poisonous and horrid animals that terrify him, under the austerity of a penitent life that mortifies his body.
Nevertheless, the well-attested principle that scientific inquiry expands with the spread of empire was less true in Spain’s dominions than in those of any other eighteenth-century imperial power. There would be no great ornithological works, for instance, arising from Spanish possessions in South America until those colonies, such as Venezuela, had rebelled and won their own nationhood in the nineteenth century.
Carlos III did his best to embark on what had previously been thought of as the luxury of social reform by pulling down some of the more pointless class divisions of a too-divided Spain. He abolished the old rule whereby the minor, impoverished nobles called hidalgos were forbidden to work with their hands, for fear of “letting the side down.” He tried to reduce the power of town councilors, who were apt to run their towns like oligarchies. He decreed that municipal offices should be open to commoners—the “vile mechanicals,” carpenters, cobblers, smiths. He concerned himself with workers’ rights, including the right to a safe workplace and to freedom from tyrannous employment conditions.
Carlos III also wanted to see an internal colonization of Spain. Huge tracts of its land, notionally fertile but wretchedly neglected for generations, remained uncultivated and barren—victims of large-scale Church and aristocratic ownership, which did nothing to develop them but would not sell them to anyone who might. It is hard to exaggerate the extent of Church power in Bourbon Spain. At the end of the eighteenth century, out of a population of some 10.5 million, the country contained about 200,000 priests, nuns, monks, and other persons under direct ecclesiastical control—one in fifty, three times the Church population of France and twice that of Italy. The disproportion of nobles and their aristocratic holdings, too, was vast. “The poorer the land, the more nobles on it,” ran the saying, and in 1800 there were approximately 400,000 heads of families with some kind of noble lineage—one aristocrat for every twenty-seven inhabitants. In one area, the Basque territory of Guipúzcoa, everyone was supposed to be a noble of some kind, and aristocrats formed some 10 percent of the populations of Navarra, Burgos, and León. Out of some 22,000 pueblos (inhabited village communities) throughout Spain, no less than 10,600 belonged to secular nobles, most of whom contributed nothing whatsoever to their maintenance, let alone to any notion of development.
This rule by lazy, incompetent, and insignificant parasites, lay or religious, was the root of the “agrarian question” over which the “enlightened” economists of Carlos’s reign, such as the conde de Campomanes and Jovellanos, spilled such rivers of ink: how could one get the miserably stagnant Spanish agrarian economy, so fettered by seasonal worries and shortages of investment capital and labor, to kick over and start producing? How to raise the giant farms, with their absentee landlords and chronic lack of economic impetus, above the condition of latifundiae worked by men who were hardly better off, and sometimes worse off, than slaves? One way, Carlos and his advisers theorized, would be to ship thousands of workers into selected areas, not only from other parts of Spain but, as in their project in the Sierra Morena, from Holland and Germany as well. These immigrants would be settled in colonias, purpose-built new towns, where they would be free of the self-serving tyranny of large landowners and religious orders. As a bonus, their presenc
e would (the authorities hoped) reduce the ever-present problem of brigandage and highway robbery. These small communities would police the wild wasteland. So they did, to a small extent, but the idea that the general ills of rural Spain could be cured by resettlement was a chimera. The man Carlos III had put in charge of the project, Pablo de Olavide, had too many enemies, mainly in the Church. Olavide’s activities in the new “colonies,” which reduced the power of the Church in their lands, were bitterly resented by the clergy. Denounced and arrested by the Holy Office, he was imprisoned for heresy at the end of the 1770s. Part of the “evidence” against him was his correspondence with Voltaire and Rousseau. His property was confiscated. He was banished for life from Madrid, Sevilla, the colonies he had helped create in the Sierra Morena, and—just in case he thought of going into exile there to think his heretical thoughts—from Lima as well, though what threat he might have posed to Catholic orthodoxy from that remote colony was not made clear. Olavide was a human sacrifice who had to save his skin, after eight years’ imprisonment in a monastery, by escaping to France, another ilustrado who was too advanced for his “liberal” monarch.
Anton Raphael Mengs, Don Pedro Rodríguez, Conde de Campomanes. Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid. (illustration credit 3.4)
Goya Page 8
