Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Isabella reluctantly agreed that a preliminary investigation should be done to determine the extent of Judaizing among the new Christians, and in 1477 she asked Cardinal Pedro Mendoza to begin alerting the populace to the issues. Cardinal Mendoza ordered the preparation of an instruction manual explaining the rules and rituals of Christianity for those who were unfamiliar with them or had forgotten them. It has been described as a sort of catechism, with explanations of baptism, confession, and the basic beliefs of the faith. Mendoza ordered this instruction to be preached in every church in Spain, in pulpits and in schools. Others advocated more strenuous means of purifying the church of nonbelievers, but initially Isabella and Cardinal Mendoza were not inclined to use aggressive methods.

  But something happened that started a downward spiral of events. During Holy Week of 1478, a young Castilian, of the famous Guzmán family, was courting a young converso woman. He claimed that while he was at her house, he overheard her father blaspheming the name of Jesus and disparaging Christianity. He went to a Dominican priest to inform him of what he had heard. Hojeda heard of the incident and quickly called an inquiry into the home of the accused man. He and five friends confessed and they were forgiven. But the fanatical prelate said this was not adequate recompense for the sins the men had committed, and he redoubled his efforts to call the queen’s attention to what he considered dangerous religious lapses. According to the church historian Sabatini, the queen again resisted, at least for a while.22

  But the advocates of an Inquisition had by now gained a powerful ally. Tomás de Torquemada had been the prior of the Dominican convent in Segovia and a respected cleric for decades. He had known Isabella since childhood and had traveled from place to place with Ferdinand as his spiritual counselor and confessor. Moreover, as the nephew of a former cardinal, his word carried great weight, and now he brought it to bear against the conversos.

  Queen Isabella reluctantly agreed to seek a papal bull, or official legal document, authorizing an Inquisition in Spain. Pope Sixtus IV granted permission to establish an Inquisition on November 7, 1478. It gave the sovereigns the right to select three bishops, archbishops, or priests to serve as inquisitors throughout their kingdoms. But Isabella remained hesitant to initiate the kind of fierce inquiry that some were demanding of her. Instead she redoubled her educational efforts to ensure that people were instructed about possible religious lapses rather than punished for them. Meanwhile she and Ferdinand traveled to Toledo, where the Cortes of Castile assembled to swear an oath of fealty to their infant son and heir, Juan; there Isabella gave birth to another child, Juana. Two years passed, and nothing more was done to follow through on an Inquisition.

  But the discussions about a prospective inquisitorial panel naturally incited fear among conversos. One New Christian wrote a pamphlet criticizing the sovereigns for even considering it.23 Attacking the throne is always a perilous affair, and some took this critical pamphlet as confirmation that a serious and dangerous affront to royal power was brewing. It began circulating at a bad time, right after the Ottoman conquest of Otranto.

  In September 1480 the sovereigns decided to put the papal bull into effect and named two senior inquisitors to head it, Mendoza and Torquemada. The two men appointed others to initiate the work, establishing a base in Seville, where people had complained the problem was worst. Soon a group of white-robed, black-hooded inquisitors were marching in procession from northern Castile to Seville. People were told to either confess their offenses and receive absolution, or face the consequences.

  Some converso families panicked and abruptly fled Seville. Their hasty departures made them appear suspicious to the inquisitors, and soon the crown sent out notices seeking to identify all the people who had moved and where they had gone across the land. The Inquisition’s tentacles reached out geographically. The inquisitors announced that they would arrest anyone who had fled Seville in that way. Nobles around the kingdom assisted in rounding up the suspects. Conversos began to be tried, and some were found guilty.

  The first public execution, an auto-da-fé, took place in Seville on February 6, 1481, only months after the Inquisition was begun. Six people were burned at the stake. The priest Alonso de Hojeda triumphantly preached the sermon that day, but within weeks he was dead of a plague himself. In other times, the disappearance of the most vocal advocate of the Inquisition might have put an end to the enterprise. But Hojeda had unleashed something very big and very ugly. The fact that scores had fled meant that they had to be tracked down and investigated. Hundreds of people came forward in Seville to confess past offenses, filling the prisons to overflowing while they awaited fuller investigations of their deeds or misconduct. More clerics were needed to handle the workload. Seven more were hired, according to a papal brief of February 1482. This happened as religious fervor was mounting and in the same month when Isabella issued a call to all knights in Spain to lend support for the war on Granada.24

  Reports of more widespread problems with conversos led to the creation of similar inquisitorial tribunals in Córdoba and Jaén, the two other military bases of the Reconquest. In 1485 a panel was established in Toledo. Soon active Inquisitions were operating across the kingdom in Ávila, Medina del Campo, Segovia, Sigüenza, and Valladolid. Ferdinand opened similar operations in Barcelona, Zaragoza, and Valencia.

  The Inquisition in Ferdinand’s domains almost immediately acquired an even more unsavory reputation than that in Castile. In a papal bull of 1482, Pope Sixtus IV protested strenuously about what was reportedly happening there. He charged that the Inquisition in Ferdinand’s realm was

  moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls, but by lust for wealth, and that many true and faithful Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves and other lower and even less proper persons, have without any legitimate proof been thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned as relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the secular arm to be executed, to the peril of souls, setting a pernicious example and causing disgust to many.25

  Ferdinand responded quickly, expressing his “astonishment” that the pontiff had been taken in by the “persistent and cunning persuasion of the said conversos” and warned him to “take care therefore not to let the matter go further.”26

  Within weeks, the pope backed down. But opposition continued among the citizens in Ferdinand’s kingdom, many of whom thought the process was unfair and contrary to traditional laws. There was an uprising against the Inquisition in Teruel, near Zaragoza, but troops put it down. Then on the night of September 15, 1485, the inquisitor Pedro Arbués was stabbed to death while praying at the altar at the cathedral in Zaragoza, by assassins who were either conversos or paid by conversos. The assassination ended up making things worse for the conversos because Arbués, killed while kneeling in prayer, quickly came to be viewed as a saint. The conspirators were executed, and the public mood in Aragon shifted to support the Inquisition.

  At the opening of each new tribunal, an “edict of grace” would be issued that called upon the faithful to come forward to confess their sins and be forgiven. They were told that if they came forward with sincere repentance, they would be forgiven, but if they did not, their sins would be exposed later, with judgment all the harsher for the lapse. The Vatican historian Sabatini believed that Queen Isabella and Cardinal Mendoza intended to use this process to get people back into the good graces of the church without bloodshed.

  But the implementation of the edict resulted in more people being accused. Many came forward to seek amnesty and confess their heretical misdeeds. But to prove their sincerity, the people who confessed were required to denounce others who were still engaged in Judaizing. If they denounced anyone, they subjected that person to terror and possible death; if they did not, their confession would be deemed incomplete and insincere. “The wretched apostates,” wrote Sabatini, “found themselves between the sword and the wall. Either they must perpetrate the infamy of betrayi
ng those of their race whom they knew to be Judaizers, or they must submit not only to the cruel death by fire, but to the destitution of their children as a consequence of the confiscation of their property.”27

  Many possible misdeeds were identified as marking the insincere Christian: saying that the Messiah had not yet come; saying that the law of Moses was as good as that of Jesus Christ; keeping the Jewish Sabbath by wearing clean shirts or refraining from work on Friday evening; following Hebraic dietary codes; eating meat during Lent; keeping the Fast of Esther or other fasts required by Judaism; reciting the Psalms of David without adding the words “Gloria patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto”; refraining from going to church for forty days after childbirth; circumcising one’s children or giving them Hebrew names; marrying in the Jewish manner; holding a valedictory supper before setting out on a long journey; carrying Jewish religious items; turning one’s face to the wall to die; washing a corpse with warm water; mourning in the Jewish manner; burying the dead in a Jewish cemetery.28

  Of course, many of these practices could have been carried out by conversos as a matter of family custom without intentional religious significance. Some were common in traditional Christian households as well, which meant that even people who engaged in no heresy at all, even the most adamant of Catholic believers, could be found guilty. The Spanish historian Juan Antonio Llorente, reviewing the record, believed the rules had been established “with deliberate malice,” to cast as wide a net and catch as many people as possible.29 Some inquisitors did their work with maniacal zeal.

  Patently ridiculous allegations were made in some cases to justify executions. A long-standing medieval folk legend had it that Jews would kidnap a Christian infant and kill it, in a twisted reprise of the death of Jesus Christ. Now a story surfaced about a child, known as the Holy Child of La Guardia, who was allegedly murdered in just such a sacrificial ceremony in Spain. As a result of an investigation into this purported sacrificial murder, six conversos and five Jews were sentenced to death in Ávila in 1491. Some had confessed after being tortured; but no child was reported missing, and no child’s body was ever found.30

  The financial aspect of the Inquisition gave further impetus to its escalation because it was generating money for the government. As the historian José Martínez Millán has shown, the Inquisition was designed to be financially self-supporting: inquisitors and incarceration costs were paid from the estates of people accused of heresy.31 This was long-standing tradition. In 1477 Pope Sixtus IV had given Isabella permission to collect any goods or money confiscated by the Inquisition, with the money going to the royal treasury. This rule was incorporated into the Instructions of Seville in 1484.

  The specified procedures followed three steps: sequestration, confiscation, and sale. Sequestration occurred when someone was first arrested for heresy. The prisoner was called for a hearing and told to declare all his or her possessions. An inventory was prepared and completed and read aloud to the prisoner for signature. Records were prepared in triplicate, and court officials noted whether the prisoner had attempted to hide anything. The prisoner was kept in jail to await hearing; his or her goods were confiscated and held by the state. Any outstanding debts were paid to creditors; the Inquisition office then maintained the goods and property in the name of the prisoner. If the prisoner was not convicted, his or her goods and property were returned. But if the person was convicted, the property was given to the Inquisition treasury. The goods were appraised, and then the crown put them up for auction. Relatives of the convicted person were not allowed to purchase them.

  Obviously this created a financial incentive to find people guilty. Sometimes rich and powerful people were able to pay off the Inquisition to spare some portion of their goods from confiscation, but many victims of the Inquisition were poor and had little to seize. Consequently, many impoverished families lost even their meager belongings.

  But because many of those prosecuted were poor, revenues were often insufficient to cover the costs of feeding and housing all these prisoners, and so the crown sometimes had to subsidize its work. Ferdinand tried to find ways to cover the financial shortfalls, but Inquisition officials often went without being paid in a timely manner. Church officials were often selected for these jobs because their ecclesiastical salaries could be expected to cover their cost of living.

  As a result of the Inquisition, many formerly Jewish families faced impossible choices. Some had become devout Christians. But as Pulgar had warned, religious instruction typically begins during a person’s early youth, and so a great many people who had changed faiths were poorly instructed in the basic sacraments and rituals of Christian life. Others had converted in name only and maintained their internal allegiance to Judaism. Some mixture of these attitudes existed in almost every converso home, each with its own set of tensions.

  For example, if a converso family’s Jewish cousins came to visit, how would their food be prepared? Regardless of how the host family ate, they would naturally cook according to Jewish custom for their guests; but in so doing, the converso woman would put herself at risk of heresy, charged with maintaining Jewish customs. If a disgruntled servant were to report the incident, the housewife could be prosecuted.

  Similarly, if the converso family accepted hospitality from the Jewish cousins, and was served a meal prepared according to Jewish guidelines, the converso family was open to prosecution. If a baby was born and the family—even one that was regularly attending mass—turned to traditional customs to celebrate the birth, they could be prosecuted.

  There were so many ways to go wrong. Giving charity to Jewish beggars was a sin. Visiting a synagogue on a Jewish holy day was a sin. Not eating pork was suspicious.

  Jealousy and spite quickly came into play, along with the belief that Jews had obtained riches improperly. Riots in Córdoba in 1473, for example, erupted because of anger that “the great wealth of the Cordovan conversos… enabled them to buy public offices,” wrote the chronicler Diego de Valera. The new officials used their positions in an “arrogant” way, which aggravated Old Christians.32 Sometimes Jews gave testimony against their former coreligionists who they believed had converted only to obtain financial advantage.

  Another problem for conversos was that many were employed in professions that by their nature made them unpopular. Moneylending, a risky endeavor that often involved charging high interest rates that left debtors in financial distress, was viewed as a sinful occupation for Christians but one that was permissible for Jews. Tax collectors are seldom loved by their fellow citizens, but many conversos had concentrated in that field of work, placing themselves in the position of seeking to maximize tax collections at a time of growing financial strain among the lower classes. In 1480, Seville, for example, had twenty-one tax farmers and two treasurers, and all of them were conversos.33

  Jews and conversos similarly dominated the top jobs in the royal treasury and tax-collecting enterprises of the Castilian monarchy. The converso Diego Arias Dávila, for example, was the kingdom’s foremost treasurer under King Enrique; the converso Andrés de Cabrera performed this function in Segovia, first for Enrique and then for Isabella.

  Inquisition records in the city of Toledo suggest that the people who were actually prosecuted there, certainly in the early days, were middle-class people, not the elite. Among the people marked for death were shoemakers, butchers, weavers, and merchants and their wives. But wealthier people were ensnared in the net as well.

  Much about the Inquisition, unfortunately, remains unknown. Were the people who were burned at the stake for heresy actual heretics to Catholicism, or had they truly converted to Christianity and merely retained some Jewish customs? Scholars who have reviewed the plentiful trial testimony and surviving chronicles disagree. The Israeli scholar Benzion Netanyahu came to believe most were actually Christians, because of the disdain and hatred heaped upon them by practicing Jews who saw them as opportunistic turncoats. Contemporary Jewish writers, he notes, initiall
y expressed “open manifestations of glee” as they watched the travails of the New Christians. The Hebrew scholar Jabez called the conversos “enemies of God,” and Ibn Shuaib said “the wickedness” of the conversos “is greater in our eyes than that of the gentiles.”34

  But other historians believe the convicted people were “crypto-Jews,” secretly Jewish and maintaining that faith underground in the face of intense pressure. Renée Levine Melammed, who has reviewed many of the court transcripts, believes that many women of Jewish descent were trying valiantly to maintain a core Jewishness within their families, even as they outwardly conformed to Christian requirements:

  All of these women, the mothers, aunts, sisters and wives, who had Judaized and had taught or been taught, were identifying with their Jewish heritage. All of them were taught to consider themselves as daughters of Israel, knowing fully well that they were taking the risk of their lives. All were willing to silently subvert the teaching of the Catholic Church and to ignore the threat of a fate in the inquisitorial prisons or on the scaffold. All had a clear consciousness of what they were doing.35

  If Melammed is correct that large numbers of Jews were merely pretending to be Christians, then it is not surprising that many Christians at the time were suspicious of them. A number of priests and nuns were conversos, and some had risen to top positions within the church. Did that mean they were preaching what they did not believe? The trials found some reason to think they were. In Toledo, in the first ten years of the Inquisition, two priests and a nun were accused of Judaic heresy; the men were absolved and the woman was condemned to death.36

  A prominent case was that of Juan Arias Dávila, the bishop of Segovia and head of one of the most important churches in Spain. His family had converted from Judaism to Christianity as a result of the persuasive preaching of Saint Vincent Ferrer in that city in 1411.37