Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  3. THE CHURCH AND THE FAITH

  By curbing the aristocracy, by planting their own officers in the towns, and by overhauling the judicial system, Ferdinand and Isabella had gone a long way towards ensuring the primacy of the Crown in Castile. But control of secular institutions was not enough. They could never be absolute masters in their own land until they had brought under royal control the immensely powerful Spanish Church. The power of the Church in Spain was reinforced by its vast wealth and by the extent of its privileges. There were seven archbishoprics and forty bishoprics. The joint annual income of Castile's bishoprics and its four archbishoprics (Toledo, Granada, Santiago, and Seville) in the reign of Charles V was nearly 400,000 ducats, while the Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain, who ranked second only to the King in power and wealth, enjoyed a personal income of 80,000 ducats a year. The Church as a whole had an annual income of over 6 million ducats, of which 2 million belonged to the regular clergy, and 4 million to the secular. These were enormous figures, especially in view of the fact that tithes (which were traditionally paid in kind) had been widely impropriated by laymen in return for fixed payments in a depreciated currency.

  The privileges of the clergy were formidable. The regular and secular clergy shared with hidalgos the privilege of exemption from the taxes levied by the Crown, and they were more successful than the hidalgos in evading the payment of municipal dues. They accumulated large quantities of property in mortmain, and made strenuous attempts to extend their privileges to their servants and dependents. Moreover, bishops, abbots, and cathedral chapters owned large demesnes, over which they exercised full temporal jurisdiction. The bishops of fifteenth-century Castile were not slow to exploit these advantages. Members of aristocratic families, and sometimes themselves the sons of bishops, they were a warrior race who found themselves perfectly at home in the struggles that surged round the throne. They had their own fortresses and private armies, and they were not unduly reluctant to lead their own troops into battle. The formidable primate of Spain, Don Alfonso Carrillo (1410–82), who helped Ferdinand forge the papal dispensation which made possible his marriage, changed sides and took the field with the Portuguese against Isabella at the battle of Toro in 1476; while the great Pedro González de Mendoza, Archbishop of Seville, faced him in the opposing camp.

  The activities of these bellicose prelates perhaps not unnaturally suggested to Ferdinand and Isabella the desirability of a counter-offensive by the Crown as soon as the War of Succession was brought to an end. The Church was far too powerful to give them any hope of being able to strip the bishops of their temporal powers, but they compelled Carrillo and his colleagues to place their fortresses in the hands of royal officials, and insisted (although never with complete success) that the Crown's right to superior jurisdiction throughout the realm extended even to the lands of the Church. But the key to any lasting success was clearly to be found in the vexed question of appointments to bishoprics, and it was to this in particular that they addressed their attention.

  The position over the filling of ecclesiastical benefices in fifteenth-century Castile was delicate and involved. While the right of patrons to present to the lesser benefices was by now well established, presentation to the more important benefices was a source of constant dispute. Cathedral chapters, which traditionally enjoyed the right to elect bishops of their choice, had for long been fighting a losing battle to preserve this right in the face of challenges by the Papacy on the one hand and the Crown on the other. During the years of anarchy of the mid-fifteenth century the Papacy had made frequent attempts to appoint its own candidates to bishoprics – a practice that Isabella was determined to resist, as she made clear when the Archbishopric of Zaragoza fell vacant in 1475. She based her resistance to the papal policy of provisions on ‘ancient custom’, whereby the Crown in Castile allegedly possessed the right of ‘suplicating' in favour of its own candidate, whom the Pope would then duly appoint. If Ferdinand and Isabella were to challenge the Papacy successfully over the question of papal provisions, they needed the full support of the Castilian Church, and this led them in 1478 to summon an ecclesiastical council at Seville, which proved as important for the definition of the Crown's ecclesiastical policy as the Cortes of Toledo of 1480 were important for the definition of its administrative intentions. The programme laid before the council for discussion made it clear that the Crown was determined to secure control over all benefices in Castile, and that it expected clerical ratification for its defiance of Rome. The council duly agreed to intercede with the Pope, but the delegation which it sent to Rome met with no success. A vacancy in the see of Cuenca in 1479, however, gave Ferdinand and Isabella a chance to insist on their alleged royal prerogatives; but while Sixtus IV eventually capitulated in the bitter dispute which followed, he made no concessions which would prejudice future papal action on the fundamental issue of provisions.

  The very limitations of the agreement negotiated between Crown and Papacy in 1482, over the Cuenca dispute, suggested the need for an alternative line of approach. The opportunity came with the near-completion of the Reconquista. The Spanish Crown surely deserved some signal reward for its untiring efforts to expel the Infidel, and what more fitting reward could be imagined than a royal Patronato – patronage – over all the churches to be established in the recon-quered kingdom of Granada? This was now the prime object of the Crown's ecclesiastical policy – an object which was triumphantly achieved in 1486. By a papal bull of 13 December 1486, Innocent VIII, who needed Ferdinand's help in furthering the Papacy's Italian interests, gave the Spanish Crown the right of patronage and presentation to all the major ecclesiastical benefices in the newly conquered kingdom.

  The securing by the Crown of the Granada Patronato was a momentous achievement, because it provided not only an ideal solution which Ferdinand and Isabella hoped to extend by degrees to all their dominions, but also a practical model for the Church in the New World. In the twenty years after the discovery of America, Ferdinand manoeuvred with extraordinary skill to obtain from the Papacy absolute royal control over all ecclesiastical foundations in the overseas territories. Exploiting to the full the alleged or real similarities between the recovering of South Spain for Christendom and the conquest of the Indies, he first proceeded to obtain from Alexander VI, in the bull Inter caetera of 1493, exclusive rights for the Spanish Crown in the evangelization of the newly discovered lands. This was followed in 1501 by a further bull conceding the Crown in perpetuity all tithes levied in the Indies. The climax came in the famous bull of 28 July 1508 by which Julius II (who, like his predecessors, urgently needed Ferdinand's help in Italy) gave the Spanish Crown the coveted universal Patronato over the Church in the New World, which included the right of royal presentation to all ecclesiastical benefices. The Patronato, rounded out by further concessions in the following years, conferred on the Spanish monarchy a unique power over the Church in its American possessions. Outside the kingdom of Granada, nothing comparable existed in Europe. It was true that, following on the concordat between France and the Papacy in 1516, Charles V obtained from Adrian VI in 1523 the right to present to all bishoprics in Spain, so that the major object of Ferdinand and Isabella's ecclesiastical policy was at last achieved in the peninsula itself; but disputes over non-consistorial major benefices and over simple benefices continued until the concordat of 1753. In the New World, on the other hand, the Crown was absolute master, and exercised a virtually papal authority of its own. No cleric could go to the Indies without royal permission; there was no papal legate in the New World, and no direct contact between Rome and the clergy in Mexico or Peru; the Crown exercised a right of veto over the promulgation of papal bulls, and constantly intervened, through its viceroys and officials, in all the minutiae of ecclesiastical life.

  Even if Ferdinand and Isabella never secured in Spain as absolute a control over the Church as was eventually secured in America, they still obtained in practice, if not in theory, a large part of what they w
anted. By the exercise of diplomatic pressure they ensured that Spanish benefices were no longer given to foreigners and that the Papacy agreed to appoint the Crown's own nominees to bishoprics. They were successful, too, in preventing the sending of appeals in civil suits from the Valladolid chancilleria to Rome. Above all, they obtained for the Crown in perpetuity a sufficient degree of control over the wealth of the Church to deprive their successors of any financial inducement to follow the example of a Gustavus Vasa or a Henry VIII and break violently with Rome. Contributions by or through the Church came, in fact, to constitute an extremely important part of the Crown's income during the sixteenth century. Of these contributions, two became regular sources of revenue under the Catholic Kings. The first consisted of the tercias reales – a third of all the tithes paid to the Church in Castile. For centuries these had been paid to the Crown, but merely on a provisional basis, and it was only by a bull issued by Alexander VI in 1494 that the tercias reales were vested in the Crown in perpetuity. The other, and much more valuable, contribution was the cruzada. Bulls of the cruzada had originated in the need to finance the Reconquista: indulgences were sold at a fixed rate to every man, woman and child willing to buy one. In spite of the fact that the Reconquista was completed during the reign of the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand contrived to secure the perpetuation of the bulls of the cruzada as a source of royal income, and one which, in the nature of things, came to be diverted to purposes far removed from those originally intended.

  The interest displayed by the Catholic Kings in the Church was not, however, confined to its financial resources, attractive as these were. Isabella's faith was fervent, mystical, and intense, and she viewed the present state of the Church with grave concern. It suffered in Spain from the abuses commonly ascribed to it throughout fifteenth-century Europe: pluralism, absenteeism, and low standards of morality and learning in secular and regular clergy alike. Concubinage in particular was accepted as a matter of course, and was no doubt further encouraged by a practice apparently unique to Castile, whereby the child of a cleric could inherit if his father died intestate. In some sections of the Church, however, and especially in the Religious Orders, there was a deep current of discontent at the prevailing laxity; in particular, the Queen's Jeronymite confessor, Hernando de Talavera, constantly urged upon her the need for total reform. Under Talavera's guidance, the Queen devoted herself wholeheartedly to the work of raising the moral and intellectual standards of her clergy. As effective nomination to bishoprics came to be increasingly exercised by the Crown, the morals and learning of candidates ceased to be regarded as largely irrelevant details, and high social rank was no longer an essential passport to a diocese. As a result, the standard of the Spanish episcopate rose markedly under the Catholic Kings, although some of Ferdinand's own appointments still left a good deal to be desired. Cardinal González de Mendoza, who succeeded Carrillo at Toledo in 1482, hardly conformed to the model of the new-style prelate; but the remarkable munificence of his patronage no doubt did something to atone for the notorious failings of his private life. In 1484 he founded at Valladolid the College of Santa Cruz, which set the pattern for further foundations designed to raise educational standards and produce a more cultivated clergy; and he probably did more than any other man to foster the spread of the New Learning in Castile.

  While the Queen and her advisers worked hard to raise the standards of the episcopate and the secular clergy, a movement was gaining ground for reform of the Religious Orders. The Franciscan Order had long been divided between Conventuales and Observants, who wanted a return to the strict simplicity of the Rule of St. Francis. Among the Observants was the austere figure of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, whom the Queen regarded as a providential substitute for her confessor Talavera, when the latter became first Archbishop of Granada in 1492. Already in 1491 Alexander VI had authorized the Catholic Kings to take in hand the reform of the monastic orders, and two years later Cisneros launched himself with characteristic energy into the work of reform, and continued to direct it with unflagging vigour after his appointment to Cardinal Mendoza's see of Toledo on the cardinal's death in 1495. Starting with his own Order, the Franciscans, he set about imposing a strict observance of the Rule in face of the most intense opposition. The Franciscans of Toledo, expelled from their convent, came out in procession beneath a raised cross, intoning the Psalm In exitu Israel Aegypto, while four hundred Andalusian friars preferred conversion to Islam and the delights of domesticity in North Africa to a Christianity which now suddenly demanded that they adandon their female companions. Slowly, however, the reform advanced. It spread to the Dominicans, the Benedictines, and the Jeronymites, and by the time of Cisneros's death in 1517 not a single Franciscan ‘conventual’ house remained in Spain.

  While differing profoundly from his predecessor in the conduct of his personal life, Cisneros was a worthy successor to Mendoza in his patronage of learning. His determination to raise cultural standards in Castile gave rise to two great achievements, neither of which Isabella herself was destined to see: the founding in 1508 of the university of Alcalá for the promotion of theological studies, and the publication of the great Complutensian Polyglot Bible, in which the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin texts were printed in parallel columns. These achievements emphasized one of the most important characteristics of the Isabelline reform movement: its willingness to adapt itself to contemporary requirements. Cisneros, if not himself strictly a humanist, at least grasped the urgent need to harness the new humanistic studies to the service of religion. Under his leadership, the reformers, instead of rejecting the New Learning, used it to further the work of reform.

  Admittedly the reform movement under Ferdinand and Isabella was no more than a beginning, and there seems to have been a decline in the standards of the episcopate during the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, but at least something of permanent importance had already been achieved. Moreover, the timing of the reform was perhaps more important than its extent. Cisneros helped give the Spanish Church a new strength and vigour at the very moment when the Church was everywhere under heavy attack. At a time when the desire for radical ecclesiastical reform was sweeping through Christendom, the rulers of Spain personally sponsored reform at home, thus simultaneously removing some of the worst sources of complaint and keeping firm control over a movement which might easily have got out of hand. Here, as in so many of their governmental activities, Ferdinand and Isabella displayed an uncanny ability to take the initiative and give visible shape to their subjects' ill-defined aspirations.

  But if the Catholic Kings usually contrived to retain the leadership, they were subject to strong pressures, and the routes they followed took some strange and unexpected turnings. They ruled a country whose religious sensibilities had been heightened almost to fever pitch by the miraculous achievements of recent years. As the Castilians saw the kingdom of Granada crumble before them, and the hopes of centuries realized at last, it was natural that they should think of themselves as entrusted with a holy mission to save and redeem the world, threatened as it was by the new advance of Islam from the east. But to be worthy of their mission they must first cleanse the temple of the Lord of its many impurities; and of all sources of pollution, the most noxious were universally agreed to be the Jews. The reign of the Catholic Kings was therefore to see the final act in a tragedy which had begun long before – a tragedy in which the sovereigns themselves both led, and were led by, their people.

  During the Middle Ages the Jewish community had played an outstanding part in the cultural and economic life of both Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Where other west European states had expelled their Jews, they continued to be tolerated in Spain, partly because they were indispensable, and partly because the existence of a tolerant Moorish kingdom on Spanish soil would have reduced the effectiveness of any general measure of expulsion. During the plague-stricken and insecure years of the mid-fourteenth century, however, their position began to grow difficult. Popular
hatred of them was fanned by preachers, and mounted to a terrible climax in anti-Jewish riots which swept Castile, Catalonia, and Aragon, in 1391. To save their lives, many submitted to baptism; and, at the end of the fourteenth century, these converted Jews – known as conversos or marranos – equalled and perhaps outnumbered those of their brethren who had survived the massacres and remained true to the faith of their fathers.

  In the first decades of the fifteenth century the conversos, or New Christians, led uneasy, but not unprofitable, lives. Their wealth gave them an entry into the circle of Court and aristocracy; contending political factions jostled for their support, and some of the leading converso families intermarried with those of the high Castilian nobility. But their very power and influence as financiers, administrators, or members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, naturally tended to breed resentment and suspicion, for the rise of a rich converso class seemed to threaten the whole social order of Castile, based on hereditary status and on the possession of landed wealth. While churchmen questioned the sincerity of their conversion, aristocrats expressed resentment at finding themselves dependent on the loans of wealthy conversos; and the populace at large, especially in Andalusia, hated them for their activities as tax-collectors or as fiscal agents of the nobility. Anti-semitism, fanned by social antagonisms, was therefore dangerously close to the surface, and occasionally erupted in savage outbursts, like the Toledo riots of 1449. These riots had the most sinister consequences, for they provoked the first decree of limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, excluding all persons of Jewish ancestry from municipal office in Toledo.