The United States of America in the twenty-first century is about as different from late-medieval Spain as a country can be. And yet a controversy during the summer of 2010 demonstrated how little effort is required to whip up popular fervor on issues of “otherness.” The controversy involved the matter of “birthright citizenship”—that is, whether people are American citizens simply by virtue of being born in the United States, or must be deemed eligible on the basis of other characteristics—for instance, having parents of the right sort, however that may be defined, or seeming to represent the kind of person the country “wants.”
Enshrined for more than two centuries in American practice, and for a century and a half in the Fourteenth Amendment, birthright citizenship suddenly found itself under powerful attack. The spark came in the form of charges that undocumented aliens in large numbers were coming to America to bear children, and then using the children as “anchors” to keep themselves legally in the country. The charges were themselves undocumented; under existing law, such children cannot apply for residency permits on behalf of their parents until they are twenty-one. The background, of course, was the unease, heightened by economic recession, over illegal immigration per se and, more broadly, over the nation’s changing demographic and cultural character—phenomena that have kindled deep anxiety and occasional violence throughout American history. But birthright citizenship was a new target. Politicians on the right began to stoke the issue. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called birthright citizenship “a mistake.” Other legislators demanded congressional hearings to give the Fourteenth Amendment a second look. Keith Larson, a Charlotte-based radio host, offered an analogy: “If a Catholic mom were to give birth in a synagogue, would the baby automatically be Jewish? It’s absurd.” Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas highlighted the national-security angle. “There are people coming into this country,” he said, “who want to destroy our way of life. I talked to a retired FBI agent who said that one of the things they were looking at were terrorist cells overseas who had figured out how to game our system. And it appeared that they would have young women who became pregnant, would get them into the United States to have a baby.”
Within a matter of weeks, birthright citizenship had moved from something that people took for granted to something that, according to opinion polls, nearly half of all Americans had decided they opposed. In January 2011, a group of state legislators unveiled a proposal to create what some described as a two-tiered system of birth certificates, one tier for babies born to citizens and legal immigrants, the other for children of illegal immigrants. Shortly afterward, two U.S. senators proposed a constitutional amendment that would deny birthright citizenship outright to children born to illegal aliens, regardless of the consequences. As one commentator pointed out, “Without the concept of birthright citizenship, it is possible for someone to be born without having citizenship in any country at all.”
The point is not to make a facile comparison between incomparable regimes. It is simply to note that dangerous passions—about social contamination, about religious incursion—can be found anywhere. It does not take much to arouse them. Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was acutely susceptible. One source of instability was the Black Death, which ravaged Europe beginning in 1348. Within two years, Spain’s population had been reduced by a third. Medievalists sometimes joke, if that’s the word for it, that the Black Death was good for one thing: it raised the minimum wage. That may have been true in the cities and towns of urbanized Europe, but in agrarian Spain the Black Death meant mainly . . . death. Iberia endured a degree of economic hardship it had not experienced in centuries.
Add to this the religious divisions. As a boy growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, I remember references in Catholic liturgy to the “blindness” of “perfidious Jews.” The references were mumbled and formulaic, but ugly and corrosive all the same. Within a few years, the Vatican would revise the liturgy somewhat, and would also formally abjure the charge of “blood guilt”—the charge that the Jewish people were to blame for the Crucifixion. Eventually, the Vatican would offer a guarded, defensive apology for the role that its teachings “may have played” in fostering anti-Semitism. But in fourteenth-century Spain, the anti-Semitic teachings of the Church were in full flower. They were distilled in the person of Ferrand Martínez, a priest in Seville, who identified Jews as the cause of economic misery and spent the 1380s carrying that message from town to town. The king of Castile tried to suppress Martínez, who responded that his work was authorized by a power higher than any earthly monarch. Martínez continued to preach.
In recent years, political writers have made note of a phenomenon they call “epistemic closure.” The term refers to the ease with which people can become caught in an information loop that offers a fully satisfying explanation of the way things are and presents no challenges to that perspective. The great practical advantage of free speech and a robust media, it has been said, lies in the way they enable a continual testing of propositions and ideas. But the Internet and social networking, which some tout as mainly a force for good, also allow people to confine themselves to a Möbius strip of the like-minded. Evangelicals and gay activists, Tea Partiers and jihadis, anarchists and Marines—any group can exist within an information membrane of its own devising, unchallenged by outside sources. The consequences for civility and public discourse are becoming all too clear.
Ferrand Martínez, a loud voice in a community of illiterates, had a closed loop to himself, and in 1391 his words incited anti-Jewish riots in Seville, Barcelona, Córdoba, and Valencia. Thousands of Jews were killed. In the aftermath, Jews were confronted by the authorities with a choice: convert to Christianity or suffer the consequences. Those who did not convert were confined to ghettos, forced to wear badges, and barred from traditional professions. Expulsion was not yet contemplated, but 1391 was a prelude. A significant proportion of the Jews of Spain converted at that time, adding a body of conversos—regarded with suspicion or hostility by Christians and Jews—to an already unstable situation. As Christians, the conversos could seek advancement in fields once closed to them—and they did. But the allegation that conversos were unreliable was never far from the surface. In the hands of people like Alfonso de Hojeda, this allegation was a powerful weapon. It was used to provoke paranoia and resentment, and led to frequent outbreaks of violence.
In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella sent a formal request to Rome for the establishment of an inquisition in Spain. Pope Sixtus IV granted the request and, in a break with precedent, allowed the secular authorities—the monarchs themselves—to have power of appointment and dismissal over the new inquisitors. Sixtus had little choice—he needed Spain’s military help against the Turks—and in any case, he had other distractions: the Sistine Chapel, the rebuilding of Rome, and the elevation of his many nephews to the cardinalate. For two years, the Inquisition remained quiescent, but in 1480, Ferdinand and Isabella named the first inquisitors, and within a few months, as Hojeda whipped up anti-converso fervor, that first auto-da-fé was held in Seville. The next several years were horrific, and the pope, getting wind of events from afar, succumbed to grave second thoughts. Sixtus expressed his reservations to the king and queen in writing, and soon thereafter issued a bull in which he spelled out his concerns and laid down strict guidelines for how the Spanish Inquisition should proceed. Referring to the confiscations that routinely followed convictions, he declared that the Inquisition in Spain “has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls but by lust for wealth.” True and faithful Christians, he went on, had been wrongly sent to their deaths, “setting a pernicious example and causing disgust to many.” Henry Charles Lea would call this document “the most extraordinary bull in the history of the Inquisition.”
It was also a dead letter. The king and queen resisted. They viewed the Inquisition as a royal prerogative—indeed, as an essential underp
inning of state power. In attempting to bind a patchwork of jurisdictions—each with its own customs, laws, and bureaucracies—into a unified Spanish kingdom, the monarchs had created a number of supercouncils, of which the Inquisition was one. Indeed, it was the only one whose prerogatives pushed royal power to every part of the kingdom. The Inquisition was an essential organ of state. One historian, stepping back, sees its role in surprisingly contemporary terms. Rather than being an “icon of premodern irrationality,” the Spanish Inquisition seems “remarkably modern” and an “unheralded ancestor” once you get to know its procedures:
Like state bureaucracies everywhere, the Inquisition was formally organized and regulated by protocols: inquisitors swore to follow universal norms and standards, to be fair and just in decisions, to be impartial in their practices, to work for the greater benefit of the public weal. Of course, like their twenty-first century counterparts, inquisitors learned to fudge.
In the end, Sixtus stood down, revoking his bull and effectively acquiescing in state control over the Inquisition, with the stipulation—never to be honored—that Rome had the right to review certain sentences if presented for appeal. The king and queen appointed Tomás de Torquemada to the position of inquisitor general of all Spain. When Sixtus died, his successors confirmed the existing arrangement, and even strengthened the royal prerogatives.
The Mastermind
The name Tomás de Torquemada is more closely linked to the Spanish Inquisition than any other—with cause—though at this point it is hard to disentangle fact and fiction. Not much fact survives to start with. Like Cleopatra, King Arthur, or the Marquis de Sade, Torquemada has achieved a form of meta-existence. He is a character in literature and a metaphor in polemics. He shows up in a poem by Longfellow, a play by Hugo, a rock song by Electric Wizard. Marlon Brando played him in the movies. The web comic Pibgorn features a demon who assumes the guise of a game-show host in hell and calls himself Tom Torquemada. If Kenneth Starr drew a blank on the name, he must not have been paying attention.
Torquemada was born in Valladolid, in the Kingdom of Castile, in 1420, and entered the Dominican Order in his teens. Whether he himself had Jewish ancestry is difficult to establish; his uncle, Juan de Torquemada, a powerful cardinal, certainly did. In any case, such ancestry would hardly have been unusual. Many of the great families of Spain, along with many ordinary ones, had over the years intermarried with converso families. Torquemada eventually became the prior of the Dominican monastery of Santa Cruz, at Segovia, and it was there that he met the young Isabella, daughter of the king, forging a close personal bond and becoming her confessor. He encouraged her marriage to Ferdinand, which united the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and in time became confessor to Ferdinand as well. After the Inquisition was set up under royal control, Torquemada was appointed as one of several inquisitors, and assumed the position of inquisitor general a year later. His habits were ascetic—he wore a hair shirt, shunned finery, ate no meat—but in the course of his tenure, Torquemada amassed a considerable fortune, which he used to embellish his old monastery and to found a new one, St. Thomas Aquinas, in Avila.
“Full of pitiless zeal,” writes the historian Henry Charles Lea, “he developed the nascent institution with unwearied assiduity. Rigid and unbending, he would listen to no compromise of what he deemed to be his duty, and in his sphere he personified the union of the spiritual and temporal swords which was the ideal of all true churchmen.” With allowances for Victorian high dudgeon, the assessment is not far off the mark. And Torquemada knew that many of his countrymen shared a dim view of him. He typically traveled with a large armed force. Upon his death, in 1498, his body was interred at the monastery of St. Thomas Aquinas. Documentation is elusive, but the story is told that Torquemada’s grave was opened by rioters in the 1830s, as the course of the Spanish Inquisition neared its end, and that his remains were exhumed and ritually burned, as if at an auto-da-fé.
By then, the Spanish Inquisition had been in existence for 350 years. Its basic procedures had been set out very early by Torquemada himself, in a work called the Copilación de las Instrucciones del Oficio de la Santa Inquisición. Torquemada’s manual built on the manuals of Eymerich and others. Inquisitors would come to a town and, following the practice of the Medieval Inquisition, preach a sermon, calling upon people to make a clean breast of their lapses—and, just as important, inviting them to point out lapses by others. Anyone who came forward and was “reconciled” within the period of grace would be treated gently. Anyone who failed to come forward and was later accused would be treated harshly. As had happened before, the very structure of the process encouraged confession and denunciation—not to mention false confession and false denunciation. One historian writes, “The edicts of grace, more than any other factor, served to convince the inquisitors that a heresy problem existed.” During the early years in particular, the numbers of people throwing themselves on the Inquisition’s mercy were very high. The prisons in Seville were filled. In 1486, some 2,400 people were reconciled in Toledo alone.
Now let’s put this group of people aside. They would have been given modest penances and gone on with their lives. For a second group—those who faced the judgment of a full tribunal, proclaiming their innocence or standing their ground—the future looked very different. The Inquisition did not bring a presumed heretic or judaizer to trial unless it was already convinced of the person’s guilt. A conviction was virtually guaranteed. And the deck was stacked heavily against the accused. To begin with, the proceedings of the tribunal were secret. The accused did not know, when initially charged, what the specific allegations against him were. He did not know, when presented with evidence, who his denouncers might be. Furthermore, the most persuasive denouncer often turned out to be the denounced person himself, because he confessed. The application of torture in the preliminary stages of an investigation, to determine if a confession might be forthcoming, always loomed as a possibility. In a departure from the Medieval Inquisition, the accused in Spain could be represented by a lawyer, but the gesture was an empty one: the lawyer was given no information. Conviction rates from place to place were uniformly high. During the first half century of the Inquisition in Toledo, for instance, acquittals averaged about two a year. As a practical matter, the main question for a person facing trial was not whether he would be found guilty but what the punishment would be.
The penalties varied. Almost everyone would be made to spend a period of time wearing the sanbenito, the penitential gown with its large red or yellow cross. For some, there was flogging; for others, imprisonment as well. For unrepentant or relapsed heretics, the unavoidable penalty was burning at the stake. Short of the stake, the most feared penalty was a sentence to serve as an oarsman on the galley ships of the Mediterranean fleet. Such a sentence, technically, came with a specified duration, which generally proved to be a legal nicety:
Disease could decimate a fleet in weeks. The galley was an amoebic death trap, a swilling sewer whose stench was so foul you could smell it two miles off—it was customary to sink the hulls at periodic intervals to cleanse them of shit and rats. . . . The oared galley consumed men like fuel. Each dying wretch dumped overboard had to be replaced—and there were never enough.
The use of galleys as punishment was a Spanish innovation, and a direct product of the Inquisition’s status as an agency not just of religion but of government. Spain was a maritime power, and would be engaged for centuries in contests against European rivals and the Ottoman Turks. The punishments levied by the Medieval Inquisition had been, at least in theory, penitential ones, designed to bring convicted sinners into a restored union with God. Sentencing prisoners to the galleys served a different purpose altogether—it was designed to bring convicted sinners into battle with enemies. Another example: horse-smuggling was a problem on Spain’s northern border, and corrupt local officials did nothing to stop it. The king put the matter into the hands of the Inquisition, which not only brought prosecutions bu
t also contrived to define horse-smuggling as a “crime of faith.” Where did the needs of the king leave off and the demands of God begin? In Spain, it became impossible to discern the answer.
Consider the group of people known as familiares, an essential adjunct of the Inquisition. The familiares were not clerics but laymen, chosen in every locale to provide the Inquisition’s administrative substructure—part informer, part functionary. They were thick upon the ground. At one point, Valencia had one familiar for every forty-two of his neighbors. There were so many familiares that people often complained about them to the king—as well they might, because it was he who determined their number. And in some sense they were already his men: they had been chosen because they were prominent in public life—local mayors, constables, merchants. Their service to the Inquisition gave them secular benefits, such as relief from taxation and the right to bear arms. By law, they both served the Inquisition and represented the local populace in dealings with the crown. The familiares, every one of them, straddled church and state.
“Oh Dear God!”
The five stages of dying, posited by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, run from denial and anger through bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We pass through similar stages when it comes to dealing with historical trauma—and then move on to new stages beyond. One of them might be called sanitation, or perhaps gentrification. Whatever the word, it reflects the fact that eventually history is safely caged and tamed. Any visitor to Antietam or Gettysburg or the Somme has seen how the bloodiest battlefields become landscapes of verdant serenity, primped with tasteful monuments. Romans walk their dogs among the umbrella pines that edge the quiet precincts of the Circus Maximus, where countless Christians went to their deaths.
God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World Page 9
