Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  The Cortes of Toledo in 1480 became a turning point. With the national police, Santa Hermandad, in place, the tax collection and justice systems restructured and centralized, and the military orders subjected to central command and control, the path to an absolute monarchy was begun.

  Left hanging only was the question of an Inquisition. And not an Inquisition like the one of old, but a modern, ferocious, awe-inspiring Inquisition that would be taken very seriously indeed.

  After the Cortes had been meeting in Toledo for several months, it finally turned to the Jewish question. It was quickly agreed that the harsh laws of 1412, known as the Laws of Valladolid, had never been enforced. These laws of separation were the fulfillment of the anti-Jewish campaign that had begun with the massacre of Jews in 1391, and the conversion of tens of thousands of Jews to Christianity. At their core, the laws were a bludgeon for conversion, for to remain a Jew afterward was to be isolated and impoverished, humiliated and degraded. Their intent was to separate the remaining Jews from the rest of the population. Jews were to be confined to a ghetto, forced to wear red badges identifying their lineage, to wear their beards long and uncut, to be barred from holding important governmental positions, from having their own markets and from selling the food Christians ate and the clothes they wore, to cease to minister to Christians as physicians or apothecaries.

  Now, the Cortes decided, with the connivance of Ferdinand and Isabella, these laws were to be dusted off and rigorously enforced. The delegates granted a period of two years for the ghettos to be built. After that, a Jew would be given eight days to move. If he did not, he was subject to the whip and to the loss of all his property. Jews were to wear the badges on their shoulders in the daytime. They were not to be seen on the streets after dark.

  With the Jews thus well separated in what a nineteenth-century historian called an “iron ring,” the crown could deal cleanly and efficiently with the heresy of the hollow Christian. But that would be a matter not for the Cortes but for the commission that Isabella had set up two years earlier.

  In these apocalyptic days, the time had arrived to join the battle with the Antichrist and his master, the Devil. For, it was said, the Devil speaks with a Toledan accent.

  7

  A Glimpse of Hell

  SEVILLE

  On September 17, 1480, Friar Alfonso de Ojeda presented the report of his two-year commission to Isabella and Ferdinand. On the same day, with royal blessing, Cardinal Mendoza and Tomás de Torquemada appointed two Dominican friars as the first inquisitors of the revitalized Holy Office. They were ordered to depart at once for Seville and take up their duties in the city regarded by the purifiers of the faith as the hotbed of heresy in Spain. Ironically, as the inquisitors were making their way to Seville to root out insincere Christians, the council of that city appointed twenty-three conversos to collect the taxes for the region. Thus, prominent members of the suspect class were being rewarded for their skill and their value to the kingdom at the same time as they were being investigated for heresy.

  Ten days later, Isabella and Ferdinand issued a sweeping proclamation which set the stage for the first inquisitional trials. “In our kingdoms there are some bad Christians, both men and women, who are apostates and heretics,” the document read. “Although they have been baptised in the True Faith they bear only the name and appearance of Christians, for they daily return to the superstitions and perfidious sect of the Jews. Scornful of the Holy Mother Church, they have allowed themselves to incur the sentence of censure and excommunication, together with other penalties established by the Apostolic laws and constitutions. Not only have they persisted in their blind and obstinate heresy, but their children and descendants do likewise. Those who treat with them also are stained by that same infidelity and heresy.”

  By mid-October, after its solemn processions through the streets on the Sabbath were met with glowering hostility, the Inquisition became operational in Ojeda’s Monastery of San Pablo. At first, the inquisitors met such resistance that the crown felt compelled to issue an order to all the governors of the realm to assist and facilitate the work of the Holy Office, or else.

  Its presence in Seville caused an immediate panic in the city. More than eight thousand people fled south into the province of Cádiz, and west into the Extremadura, where they hoped for protection from the powerful magnates of the provinces, Rodrigo Ponce de León and the count of Medina-Sidonia. Yet the inquisitors would not be trifled with. On January 2, 1481, in a proclamation that bore the royal imprimatur, they demanded of the marquis of Cádiz and the count of Medina-Sidonia that all refugee conversos be seized and returned to Seville within fifteen days. Any defiance would be greeted with excommunication and the loss of property. This was stiff language, and the magnates minded it. The refugees were dutifully returned and placed in the custody of the Inquisition. Their very act of fleeing placed them under grave suspicion of heresy. Flight was itself an admission of guilt. Their property was sequestered.

  Thus, within the first several months of its existence, the Inquisition was provided with an immense pool of suspects, ripe for interrogation. So great was their number that the Inquisition felt compelled to shift its headquarters from the Monastery of San Pablo, across the wooden pontoon bridge over the Guadalquivir River, to the expansive Castle of Triana, where the dungeon capacity was greater.

  Shortly after their demand for extradition, the inquisitors issued their second proclamation. Called the Edict of Grace, this insidious proclamation stipulated a period of thirty to forty days to allow all persons who knew or suspected that they might be guilty of any heresy or apostasy, of practicing or observing Jewish rites or ceremonies, to turn themselves in to the Inquisition. At that time they should confess their errors in full and graphic detail. And then they must demonstrate a sincere and complete repentance. In a written confession, they must express the understanding that their heresy was a sin against Jesus Christ himself, and that through sincere repentance they would be escaping their “just due.”

  The test of true repentance upon which their life depended would be their sincerity. The best way to prove sincerity was to name other Christian converts whom they knew to be secret Jews. As this edict was later refined, children who turned in their own parents would be rewarded with lesser punishment. The matter was then turned upside down, as it was decreed that the children of any convicted heretic would suffer disgrace and impoverishment for the sins of their fathers. If the heretic did not turn himself in within the grace period, and this was found out later, the matter would go especially badly for him.

  The inquisitors would do all in their power to help the relapsed and the benighted to recover their faith through repentance. Judgment would be swift; its severity, financial or corporal, left to the discretion of the inquisitors. If the inquisitors failed in their manifold effort to show the heretic the error of his ways and to bring him to the glory of full repentance, the accused would, in sadness, be turned over to the secular arm. Of such hopeless recalcitrants the earth must be purified, and that unpleasant task was reserved for the layman. For a priest was forbidden to shed blood. His lay accomplice must accomplish the execution bloodlessly, by burning. As the crime was heresy, and heresy was evil incarnate, the punishment must mimic the fires of Hell.

  While many conversos had fled Seville at the Inquisition’s pronouncements, braver souls had remained in the city to plan a stiffer resistance. Their ringleader was one of the most prominent and wealthy conversos of Seville, Diego de Susan, who was also the regidor, or alderman, of the city. He convened a secret meeting of judges, lawyers, and other influential figures in the parish of San Salvador and gave a rousing call to arms.

  “How do these Inquisitors dare come against us? Are we not the leading citizens of this city? Are we not well liked by the people? Let us gather our men. You and you and you,” he said, pointing to his eminent friends, “have many of your men ready. Let’s divide the arms, people and money among our leaders, and anything
else that is necessary for our purpose. And if they come to seize us, let’s cause a brawl. We shall kill them all, and avenge ourselves of our enemies.”

  This was bold talk. And in the gathering such assertions were rare. “Having men ready appears to be a good idea,” said a nervous old man on the fringe. “But how? Where are the bravehearts?” Where indeed? The plot faced the power of both Crown and Church.

  In the days that followed, the resistance sought to mobilize its forces. But it could not think of everything. Diego de Susan had a sensuous and flirtatious daughter, so beautiful that she was known as hermosa hembra, “beautiful female.” And she was carrying on a secret liaison with a Christian cavalier. In an unguarded moment, she revealed her father’s secret to her lover, who immediately passed the word to the inquisitors.

  Diego de Susan was seized instantly, as was the caretaker of Seville, in whose house a cache of weapons for one hundred men was discovered. The two men were packed across the river to the dungeons of Triana. There, the firebrand of the Inquisition, Alfonso de Ojeda, the prior of the Dominican monastery of San Pablo, took personal charge of the case. De Susan’s considerable estate was marked for confiscation, but he would not have long to grieve over its loss. (Nor would hermosa hembra, for her indiscretion redounded to extreme prejudice against her father. In disgrace she entered a convent, where her beauty quickly faded. And at her death, so the story goes, she requested that her skull be mounted over the door of the house of her indiscretions and betrayal near the Alcazar of Seville, with the inscription: “Where I lived badly, as an example and punishment of my sins.”)

  As the religious police fanned out in Seville, the uncovering of the nascent resistance increased the terror in an already terrorized city. Upon the representations of Friar Talavera, the most prominent, wealthy, and learned of the city’s converso community were rounded up, and further resistance evaporated. In the dungeons of the Triana Castle and the crypt of the Monastery of San Pablo, the hasty trials went forward with little or no evidence, unless it had been extracted by torture. In one case, Friar Ojeda accomplished the miracle of providing testimony against a suspect from a witness who had been in the grave for twelve years. To the critics of their process, the Dominicans repeated the cry of the Crusaders: “!Dios la Quiere!—God wants it!”

  While Friar Ojeda supplied the passion, and Cardinal González de Mendoza contributed the political muscle, Friar Talavera became the Inquisition’s early theologian. Prodded by Queen Isabella, Talavera wrote an apologia for the Holy Office in 1481. In it he declared his scorn for Jews and all things Jewish, for they were aberrations and anachronisms of history. The true Israel belonged to the passionate and evangelizing Christian. The Law of Moses was obsolete, and any who adhered to it served Satan.

  On February 6, 1481, the first executions took place. Their grisly spectacle was dubbed an auto-da-fe, or Act of Faith. To the faithful, it was an occasion of both joy and hate, ratifying one’s own faith as it eliminated one who had betrayed baptism, the gift of God. From the beginning, the auto-da-fe was organized as a theatrical extravaganza of major interest. On this first occasion the condemned were seven influential conversos of Seville, six men and a woman, who had been secretly denounced and swiftly tried.

  At the Cathedral of Seville, the procession gathered. At its head was a company of Dominicans, in their rough woolen black and white cowls, walking barefooted, and holding aloft the banner of the Inquisition. Its centerpiece was a green cross of knotted wood, flanked by an olive branch signifying forgiveness and reconciliation, and a sword signifying eternal justice. Encircling the knotted cross was the phrase “Exurge Domine et Judica causam tuam—Rise up, Master, and Pursue Your Cause!” Psalm 73:27 about the destruction of the wicked was the watchword: “For lo, they that are far from Thee shall perish: Thou hast destroyed all them that go a whoring from Thee.”

  Leading these dogs of God was the head dog, Friar Alfonso de Ojeda, radiant in the realization of his life’s passion. Behind the Dominicans came local magistrates, followed by soldiers carrying the wood for the fires. After them came the heretics, nooses around their necks, holding devotional candles, and dressed in yellow gowns of shame. Flanking the condemned were halberdiers, carrying their ax lances, vigilant lest any of the apostates should bolt and run. And behind them came other hooded friars, chanting admonitions to repentance and invocations to salvation. And finally came the drummers, beating a slow beat of impending death on their kettledrums.

  From the cathedral this grim procession snaked through the narrow streets, so that all could see and taunt. A frenzied mob quickly gathered, eager for blood and the smell of burning flesh. In due course, the procession passed through a city gate and came into an open field outside the walls. This was appropriately called the Tablada, or stage, although later it would be better known as the quemadero, or burning place. For this first Act of Faith, there were merely wooden posts for the victims. Later, as a conservation measure, the wooden posts would be transformed into an expansive stone scaffold, with reusable stone pillars. The place was delineated on its four sides by plaster statues of four prophets. One chronicler of the time gave the impression that the statues of the prophets were actually hollow, and the heretics were enclosed inside for their slower burning, in the manner of Phalaris, the Sicilian tyrant of the fourth century B.C. He had encased his victims in a brass bull for roasting, so their screams would mimic a braying bull. Of this place, the chronicler of the monarchs would write that it was “where heretics are burnt and ought to be burnt as long as any can be found.”

  Once the mob gathered at the quemadero, Alfonso de Ojeda stepped forward to deliver a lengthy, passionate sermon. This was the culmination of his long and frustrating campaign of public advocacy and of private prodding of the royals. The process of purification had begun in the hellfire of Seville. The evildoers who defiled and polluted the world were to be liquidated. Ojeda was jubilant, radiant with his love of God and hate for the traitors of his faith.

  His florid, apocalyptic oratory rolled over the mob. His text was: “The jealousy of the faith of Jesus Christ has inspired this Inquisition.” In Revelation (20:12–15) the books from the Day of Judgment were kept, listing the judgments for all. The prophet St. John of the Apocalypse “saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the book according to their deeds… And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”

  More frightening still were the uses of the apocryphal preaching of St. Peter (generally agreed by scholars to have been written for the Apocrypha in the second century): “Some were hanging by their tongues and these were they that blasphemed the way of righteousness, and under them was laid fire flaming and tormenting… And there were also others, women, hanged by their hair above that mire which boiled up; and these had adorned themselves for adultery… And in another place were gravel stones sharper than swords or any spit, heated with fire, and men and women clad in filthy rags rolled upon them in torment.”

  When Friar Ojeda finished his oratory, a notary read out the details of the crimes of each. Of a heretic, the details were almost boilerplate: he had engaged in Jewish rituals; he had eaten unleavened bread and kosher meat; he had removed leg tendons from lamb in accordance with the scriptural passage in Genesis 32:32 after Jacob wrestles with the Lord: “Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day; because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew that shrank”; he had attended secret services in the house of Jews; he disbelieved the concept of a Christian Paradise and scoffed at the Host as the body and blood of Christ; he had profaned the sacred rites of true Christians.

  A bombastic accusation concluded this recitation. The confession of the apostate, however it was extracted, was read out. Then the sentence was prono
unced. The penitents were given one last chance for a full admission of guilt and to repent sins and misdeeds before they met their maker. For a conversion on the scaffold, the accused had the privilege of being strangled before he was burned. Most, kneeling before the expressionless inquisitors, did so.

  The true faith was satisfied. Repentance constituted the final victory of the Church. When the climactic moment came, ardent parishioners lit the pyre in the certain knowledge that they would be rewarded with indulgences for their pious deed. As the flames leapt upward, the Dominicans could be certain that no blood was being shed. The purity of their oath to their order had been respected. In Ojeda’s mind, they were acting out the earthly version of Judgment Day as the Gospel of St. Matthew (25:31–32) had described it: “When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory; and before him shall be gathered all the nations and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.”

  As the flames licked heavenward, the crowd gasped at the horrible spectacle. Women wept and rejoiced, screamed in horror and fell to their knees in prayer and pity, fear and thanksgiving. All were experiencing the uncertainty between salvation and damnation on the Day of Judgment.