Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  The way was now clear for action.

  On May 10, the first auto-da-fe in Aragon was held in the Cathedral of Saragossa, with Gaspar Juglar, one of the two inquisitors for Aragon, delivering the lesson. At this inaugural event, four men were penanced, or “reconciled” to the Church, after their property was confiscated. Then, on June 2, in the courtyard of the episcopal palace in Saragossa, the second auto-da-fe was held. This time, the second inquisitor, Pedro Arbués, preached. Two heretics were burned, and a woman was burned in effigy. Within a few days, Gaspar Juglar was poisoned after eating some sweet doughnuts called rosquillas. The matter would have to be left to the ecclesiastical police, for Ferdinand and Isabella had left Aragon for Córdoba, where they turned their attention again to the War Against the Moors.

  There would not be another auto-da-fe in Aragon for eighteen months. A wave of repugnance swept through the populace. Even without additional autos-da-fé, the anger against the surviving inquisitor in Aragon, Pedro Arbués, remained high. In lieu of more burnings, influential conversos were forced to take an oath that they would do all in their power to ferret out lapsed Christians. Moreover, attractive offers of vast sums were offered to the crown by wealthy nobles, if the Inquisition would suspend all confiscations.

  During the summer of 1484, plague broke out in Rome. In the midst of the public panic over the epidemic, Sixtus IV died. In the election that followed, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia was narrowly defeated by an Italian cardinal, who took the name of Innocent VIII. But as head of the College of Cardinals and vice chancellor of the Vatican, Borgia’s power remained considerable. His day would come.

  On November 29, 1484, the Grand Inquisitor gathered the Suprema and his appointed inquisitors together in Seville for the purpose of issuing broad guidelines for their future conduct. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were present at this plenary session, and Torquemada made clear that the guidelines were crafted with the involvement and sanction and ultimately for the benefit of the Spanish crown.

  Taken together, the “Instructions” laid out an elaborate system for entrapping suspected heretics. They encouraged voluntary self-incrimination by making punishments progressively more severe for those who did not incriminate themselves speedily in the initial thirty days of the local Inquisition’s existence. To allow the thirty-day grace period to elapse without a voluntary confession was to risk being accused later by others. The right to confront one’s accuser was denied, and the accused was not permitted to see the evidence that was gathered against him. The articles vested the inquisitors with the discretion to decide whether confessions were sincere and complete. If the inquisitors found a confession to be less than the whole truth, the accused could be declared a “false penitent.” For that, the punishment was rigorous and extreme. The fifteenth article authorized torture to be administered to an accused person who confessed partially, or persisted in denial, and the eighteenth commanded the inquisitors to be present at the torture.

  The Instructions contained elaborate provisions to confiscate land and property from the accused, since this was to become a vast land grab from wealthy and prominent landholders. A system of treasurers was set up to seize and to record such property. The testimony of slaves and vassals against their lords was protected and kept secret.

  “If persons have sold or gotten rid of all their other lands in fear of the Inquisition and are on the run from the Inquisition,” the seventh article read, “those people are liable for the amount that they received from the sale of the lands and possessions. This applies to people unless they are treasurers. This is for the reason that the treasurers are the ones responsible for the collection, liquidation, and transfer of the property to the Inquisition.”

  Confiscation did not apply only to the living. “If it is proven that any person died a heretic, by writings or conduct, he shall be condemned, his body disinterred and burnt, and his property confiscated.” Nor were the children and grandchildren of the condemned excluded. They could not hold public office, or join the holy orders or be accorded any honors. “If a man, burnt as a heretic, left children under age,” went the twenty-second article, “a portion of their father’s property should be grant to them as alms, and the inquisitors shall be obliged to consign their education to appropriate persons.”

  The process placed great emphasis on efficiency. Any matter not specifically covered by an Instruction was left to the discretion and “prudence” of the inquisitors to determine guilt. Innocence became a near impossibility for anyone accused. The best one could hope for was to be “reconciled” to the Church and merely lose land and property, or to be jailed indefinitely in an ecclesiastical prison.

  In January 1485, Torquemada issued a few refinements to the initial Instructions. For “reconciled” persons, the following provision was crafted. “If any person comes to be reconciled and does not tell the truth of their errors as well as of those who took part in said errors with them, and later evidence shows they were lying, proceedings against them will take place with all possible severity and rigor.”

  Of the sections of Spain where the bureaucracies of the Inquisition had been introduced by 1484, Aragon remained the stiffest in its resistance. After the first auto-da-fe in Saragossa in May 1484, one of the two inquisitors for the kingdom had been poisoned, leaving the other, Pedro Arbués, to carry on the detested work alone. Because the resistance was so great, Arbués began the practice of paying for incriminating testimony, and resentment against him exploded. In the south of Aragon, where horseshoe-shaped hills with flat tops, deep ravines, and limestone outcroppings distinguished the grim landscape, the resistance was fiercest. In the fortified town of Teruel, all the town fathers were in open mutiny. When the inquisitor’s representatives showed up at the town gates, they were turned away. This defiance led to a series of actions both by the Inquisition and by King Ferdinand himself. The king fired Teruel’s magistrates and blocked the flow of royal money to the town, while the inquisitor used his power of excommunication to bring the town to heel. Ferdinand installed an overlord who wielded dictatorial powers. Eventually, over many months, these powerful forces wore down the rebellion; but something more dramatic was needed if the opposition in this fiercely independent section was to be stifled altogether.

  In Saragossa, the resistance took on a more desperate shape. A secret conspiracy of the wealthy and influential conversos got under way with a plan to sabotage the Inquisition, violently. If Arbués could only be assassinated, the conspirators argued, no one would dare replace him, and Aragon would be safe. Through the winter of 1484–85, the planning went forward. Secret meetings were held in the homes of the conspirators and in the churches of Saragossa. Assassins were hired, paid a modest fee, and sent out to look for a propitious moment. Several chances presented themselves, but the operations were aborted when Arbués was found accompanied by guards.

  On September 15, 1485, the word came that the inquisitor was praying alone at matins in the cathedral. The assassins raced to the church and entered by the chapter door. There, they found the inquisitor kneeling near the altar. He wore a coat of mail and a steel cap, and his lance was propped against a pillar. The assassins fell upon him viciously, plunging their knives into his neck, and leaving him dying in a pool of blood.

  The alarm was immediate and shrill. The Holy Brotherhood spread out to apprehend the villains. Some of the assassins were caught immediately, and retribution was swift. Several others fled north to Navarre, where they hoped to find refuge. Fiercely, Ferdinand threatened war against Navarre if the murderers were not turned over.

  Both Ferdinand and Torquemada appreciated immediately what a gift they had been given. Contrary to the hopes of the conspirators, public sentiment swung dramatically against the conversos and in favor of the Inquisition. Within a few months the first auto-da-fe in eighteen months was celebrated in Saragossa, where a man and a woman were burned for practicing Jewish rites and supping the Jewish broth called hamin. Torquemada quickly appointed replacem
ents for his deceased inquisitors and expanded the sweep of the Inquisition in the kingdom.

  Over time, Arbués’s assassins were caught one by one. The leaders were literally butchered. One was dragged to the altar where the murder was committed. There, his hands were cut off. He was then taken to the market square to be beheaded, quartered, and burned. The hands of his accomplice were also cut off and nailed to the door of the House of Deputies, after which he too was butchered.

  Rumors of great miracles spread immediately through the kingdom, as the canonization of Pedro Arbués was begun. Upon the stones of the cathedral where the inquisitor was murdered, it was said that his blood dried, but then after two days, inexplicably became liquid once again. For the sick who dipped their garments in it, remarkable cures happened. Two days after the assassination, it was reported, the bells of the cathedral rang without their ropes being pulled. Yet another story circulated that the assassins who fled to Navarre became dazed and disoriented at the border, allowing their pursuers to catch up. Lastly and perhaps best, a rumor spread that as the villains were being interrogated by the Inquisition, their mouths turned black and they were unable to speak.

  The repercussions from the murder of Arbués were to last for five years in Aragon, time enough to terrify the populace and bludgeon it into submission. Ferdinand manipulated the public’s terror skillfully. The traditional independence of the Aragonese nobility faded with each trial and grotesque execution. With its demise, the king’s central authority grew stronger.

  If the resonance of the assassination had immediate effect in Aragon, it was to last several centuries in the lore of the Roman Catholic Church. A year after the murder of Pedro Arbués, a magnificent tomb was built for his remains. On its side, a bas-relief depicted the scene of the murder. The yellow garments of the heretic, which the assassins were forced to wear temporarily before they were dispatched, were put on public display in the cathedral. The purpose, of course, was to perpetuate the memory of a heinous crime by a group the Church historians called “sham Christians.”

  Over the next 180 years, a series of attempts ensued at the Holy See in Rome to make Pedro Arbués a full-fledged saint and an official martyr. The notion was controversial. Finally, in 1668, with his beatification, Pedro Arbués was inducted into the pantheon of heroes. His martyrdom and miracles were officially “approved.” His relics, though presumably not the instruments of torture, could be put on public display for veneration, although, in a gesture of restraint, the Church barred them from being carried in procession.

  Two hundred years after that, in 1866, the infamous Pius IX canonized Arbués as a saint. The inquisitor’s canonization fit well into the spirit of the weak, corrupt, and reactionary reign of that pope, who presided over the demise of the Papal States in Italy; who sanctioned, without trial or verdict, the jailing of any dissident against papal authority; and who propounded the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and the Infallibility of the Pope.

  San Pedro’s canonization document read: “The divine wisdom has arranged that in those sad days, when Jews helped the enemies of the church with their books and money, this decree of sanctity has been brought to fulfillment.” September 17 was declared to be San Pedro’s feast day. In the Cathedral of Saragossa, an ornate chapel is dedicated to his memory.

  “His name has been associated with acts of wanton cruelty and inhumanity in the fulfillment of his office as Inquisitor,” reads his biography in Catholic annals today, “but these have never been substantiated.”

  10

  Spices and Black Gold

  LISBON

  In the year 1483, Portugal was the most progressive, visionary, affluent country in all of Europe, and Lisbon was the continent’s most vibrant port. In its lovely circumstance, built upon low hills above the broad estuary of the Tagus River, sparkling with white villas and perfumed with jasmine and orange blossom, the city was a breathtaking mixture of Hispanic, African, Moorish, Mediterranean, and Northern European culture. Along the narrow alleys of its Moorish section, called the Alfama, and in its great Alcazar, the remnants of 500-year-long Moorish rule, which had ended four hundred years earlier, were still conspicuous.

  On September 7, 1479, Portugal and Spain had formally ended the War of Succession with the Treaty of Alcáçovas. It ended the Portuguese claim to the Castilian throne, but more importantly, it defined the spheres of influence in foreign exploration between the two countries. Portugal would rule the African coastline, and any Spanish vessel had to receive Portuguese permission to trade as far as Cape Bojador. Castile gave up any claim to the Cape Verde Islands, Madeira, and the Azores. But it retained the Canaries, those volcanic islands off the African coast that were named by the Romans for their big dogs.

  For two centuries, Lisbon had had a special relationship with Italian merchants. With the emergence of the Ottoman Empire, traders from Florence and Genoa had lost their trading posts in the eastern Mediterranean and had flocked to the western Mediterranean, establishing significant colonies in Seville, Cádiz, Puerto de Santa María, Jerez, and Lisbon, as well as in the newly discovered archipelagos of Madeira, the Azores, and the Canaries. Wealthy Genovese became the financiers of the Portuguese crown. In their less flattering avocation, they were also the principal slave traders in the Mediterranean during the fifteenth century, a trade that included a sizable number of white slaves from Russia and the Balkans. (African slaves were preferred, “black Moors” as they were called, for they worked harder, were easier to convert to Christianity, and were less likely to accomplish a successful escape.) In the shops of the Street of the Genovese in Lisbon, Italian expatriates plied their craft as the best mapmakers in the world.

  From its warren of quays along the banks of the Tagus estuary, caravels sailed north to the British Isles and Iceland for fish and to Flanders for cloth, south to Madeira for sugar and timber, to the far reaches of Africa for gold, slaves, and myrrh, west to the Azores for wool and wine, and east to the Mediterranean for almost everything. In dockside foundries, black slaves from Saharan Africa toiled, making heavy iron anchors for the galleys that crowded Lisbon harbor. Within the walls of the royal palace, the Castelo de São Jorge, lions prowled the royal gardens, while garish African macaws and parrots perched on windowsills.

  Several generations after the slave trade had begun in the 1440s, blacks comprised about one tenth of Lisbon’s population. The business of acquiring and selling slaves was conducted in the Casa dos Escravos de Lisboa—the Slave House of Lisbon. “Slaves swarm everywhere,” a Belgian traveler of the time would write. “Rich households have slaves of both sexes, and there are individuals who derive substantial profits from their sale of the offspring of their house slaves. In my view they raise them much in the same way as one would raise pigeons for sale in the market place.”

  The great Prince Henry the Navigator had died in 1460, but his crusading spirit lived on, vibrantly, inspiring Portuguese mariners to press farther and farther south for the magical passage around Africa to the spice kingdoms of India and Goa. That spirit trumpeted the motto: “Crusade, Knowledge, Power.” Of these, “Crusade” was the first and most important commandment. The cult of Prince Henry the Navigator was the seagoing offspring of the Templars, the military monks who had fought the Crusades three hundred years earlier to recover the Holy Land from the infidels. The square red cross on the sails of Henry’s caravels was the emblem of the Order of Christ and the equivalent of the red cross on the Templar’s cloak.

  Evangelizing infidels was the highest of Christian callings, and could cover up a multitude of sins. The search for the gold of Black Africa and the muscle of black slaves was always subsumed in the higher and more noble-sounding goal of Christianizing the infidel and attacking heretical Islam. The theology of crusade expressly encompassed slavery. Its pre-Christian roots lay in Aristotle’s concept of natural law about the master and the slave. St. Augustine sanctioned the concept when he argued that slavery was a form of divine puni
shment for man’s original sin. St. Thomas Aquinas had expanded this theology still further with the argument that slavery provided a valuable service for both master and slave, for the weak supposedly benefited from being dominated by the strong. A series of papal bulls had given the Church’s blessing. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V had issued his bull which specifically authorized the King of Portugal to make war on the infidels, to conquer their lands, and to enslave their natives. Conventional medieval thinking saw blacks as the descendants of the accursed biblical figure of Ham and therefore subject to eternal slavery, and this was melded with the lore of Cain. Medieval observers could recoil at the suffering of blacks at the same time as they rejoiced at the prospect that black souls were being saved from eternal damnation.

  Not everyone was fooled by this hypocrisy. The medieval historian Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote of Portuguese slave trading: “To be marveled at is the manner in which the Portuguese historians glorify as illustrious such heinous deeds, representing these exploits as great sacrifices made in the service of God.”

  The Portuguese caravel was the wonder of the fifteenth-century ocean. Constructed with a frame of dense and hard cork and holm oak wood, covered with a skin of wild pine, manned by a crew of twenty including the captain, the pilot, and the scrivener (who counted the money and served as the prince’s watchdog), its draught was shallow so that it could slip across the deltas of African rivers. Except for the captain and the scrivener, who had private closets, the crew slept on deck, lashed down with ropes in bad weather. Through most of the fifteenth century the caravel’s sails were triangular, a design well suited for tacking north against the ever strong trade winds. In the best of conditions, caravels sped along at a clip of six knots. One of Henry’s most famous captains, a Venetian named Luigi da Mosto (known in Portugal as Cadamosto), wrote in the 1450s that he made the journey of 1,750 miles between the Cape Verde Islands and Lisbon in twelve days. The way down was quicker. Driven before the northeast trade winds, he had covered the distance of 600 miles between Lagos and Porto Santo in three days.