Article VI

Inasmuch as heretics and apostates (although they return to the Catholic Faith and become reconciled) are infamous at law, and inasmuch as they must perform their penances with humility and sorrow for having lapsed into error, the inquisitors shall order them not to hold any public office or ecclesiastical benefice, and they shall not be lawyers or brokers, apothecaries, surgeons or physicians, nor shall they wear gold or silver, coral, pearls, precious stones or other ornaments, nor dress in silk or camlett, nor go on horseback nor carry weapons all their lives, under pain of being deemed relapsed (relapsos) into heresy, as must all be considered who after reconciliation do not carry out the penances imposed upon them.

This decree was no more than the revival of the enactment made a century and a half earlier by Alfonso XI in the code known as the Partidas, which had mercifully been allowed to fall into desuetude. It was, Llorente tells us, a considerable source of wealth to the Roman Curia. Frequent appeals for “rehabilitation” were made in consequence, and accorded under an apostolic brief whose heavy charges the appellants were required to defray.

Torquemada mercifully stops short of ordering the self-delators to wear the sanbenito. Even so, however, by decreeing that they must wear no garments of silk or wool, and therefore none but the very plainest raiment, unadorned by any precious metal or jewel—not to mention the prohibition to use weapons or go on horseback—he imposed upon them a garb that was only some degrees removed from the penitential sack and served the same purpose of marking them out for infamy.

The wearing of the sanbenito, too, was a custom that had fallen somewhat into desuetude. But the ascetic Torquemada was not the man to allow a form of penance accounted so very salutary to continue neglected. He revived and extended the use of it, adding innovations of his own, so that it came to be imposed not only upon condemned heretics, but upon the reconciled—other than self-delators—and upon suspects, who were required to wear it during the abjuration ceremony.

This odious garment, its origin and history, shall presently be more fully considered.