CHAPTER VII THE PRIOR OF HOLY CROSS

If ever a name held the omen of a man’s life, that name is Torquemada. To such an extraordinary degree is it instinct with the suggestion of the machinery of fire and torture over which he was destined to preside, that it almost seems a fictitious name, a nom de guerre, a grim invention, compounded of the Latin torque and the Spanish quemada, to fit the man who was to hold the office of Grand Inquisitor.

It was derived from the northern town of Torquemada (the Turre Cremata of the Romans), where the illustrious family had its beginnings. This family first sprang into historical distinction with the knighting by Alfonso XI of Lope Alonso de Torquemada (Hijodalgo a los Fueros de Castilla), and thereafter was maintained in prominence by several members who held more or less distinguished offices. But the most illustrious bearer of the name was the cultured Dominican Juan de Torquemada (Lope Alonso’s great-grandson), who was raised to the purple with the title of Cardinal of San Sisto. He was one of the most learned, eminent, and respected theologians of his age, an upholder of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and the most ardent champion since Thomas Aquinas of the doctrine of papal infallibility. He enriched theological literature by several works, the best known of which is his “Meditations.”

Fr. Tomás de Torquemada was the son of the Cardinal’s only brother, Pero Fernandez de Torquemada. He was born at Valladolid in 1420, and after a scholastic career of some distinction—if Garcia Rodrigo is to be believed in this particular58—he followed in his uncle’s footsteps, soliciting the habit of the Order of St. Dominic, which he assumed in the Convent of St. Paul of Valladolid upon completing his studies of philosophy and divinity, and receiving a doctor’s degree.

He filled with distinction the chair of canon law and theology, and in the fullness of time was elected Prior of the Convent of Santa Cruz of Segovia. He so distinguished himself in the discharge of the duties of this office by his piety, his learning, and his zeal, that he was repeatedly re-elected, there being at the time no rule of the order to inhibit it. Such was the austerity of his character that he never ate meat, or used linen either in his clothing or on his bed.59 He observed the rule of poverty imposed by his order so rigorously that he was unable to provide his only sister with an endowment suitable to her station, and could allow her no more than would permit her to live as a nun under the rule of the tertiary order of St. Dominic.

At what epoch the Prior of Holy Cross first became the confessor of the Infanta Isabella it is not now possible to ascertain. Jaime Bleda tells us that in the fulfilment of this office he had extracted from her, during her youth at the Court of her brother King Henry IV, a promise that should she ever come to the throne she would devote her life to the extirpation of heresy from her realm.60

This may be dismissed as one of those popular fictions that arise concerning the intimate affairs of princes, for it cannot be said that it is borne out by the circumstances under consideration.

Isabella’s reluctance to proceed to extreme—or even vigorous—measures against those of her subjects accused of Judaizing is admitted by every serious student of her reign, however opinions may vary as to the motives that swayed her in this course.

There remains, however, out of Bleda’s anecdote, the fact that Torquemada had been Isabella’s confessor in early years—which in itself bears out the statement that the Dominican had achieved distinction. It follows by virtue of his having occupied this office that he must have acquired over the mind of a woman so devout a considerable ascendancy where matters connected with the Faith were concerned.

This influence he came now to exert.

To support it he brought an indubitable sincerity and disinterestedness of motives; he brought a reputation for sanctity derived from the rigid purity of his life and the stern asceticism which he practised—a reputation which could not fail to act upon the imagination of a woman of Isabella’s pious temperament; and, finally, he brought the dominant, masterful personality and the burning eloquence that were his own.

When all this is taken into account it is not surprising that the Queen’s resistance, weakened already by the onslaughts of Ojeda and his associates, the King and the papal legate, should at last have broken down; and that under the compelling persuasion of the Prior of Holy Cross she should reluctantly have consented to the establishment of the Holy Office in her dominions.

Thus it befell that by order of the Catholic Sovereigns their Orator at the Pontifical Court, D. Francisco de Santillana, applied to Sixtus IV for a bull that should empower Ferdinand and Isabella to set up the tribunal of the Inquisition in Castile, to enable them—as Bernaldez puts it—to proceed to the extirpation of heresy “by the way of fire”—por via del fuego.

This bull was duly granted under date of November 7, 1478.

It gave the Sovereigns the faculty of electing three bishops or archbishops or other God-fearing and upright priests, regular or secular, of over forty years of age, who must be masters or bachelors of divinity and doctors or licentiates of canon law, to make inquisition throughout the kingdom against heretics, apostates, and their abettors.

His Holiness accorded to the men so elected the requisite jurisdiction to proceed according to law and custom, and he further empowered the Sovereigns to annul such nominations as they might make and to replace their nominees as they saw fit.61

The Sovereigns were in Cordova when the bull reached them in the following month of December. But they did not at once proceed to act upon it. Before doing so, Isabella made one last effort to repress the Judaizing and apostatizing movement by the gentler measures concerted with the Cardinal of Spain in 1477.

To the task of continuing with increased vigour the teachings of the “catechism” drawn up by Mendoza she now appointed Diego Alonso de Solis, Bishop of Cadiz, D. Diego de Merlo, Coadjutor of Seville, and Alonso de Ojeda, to whom these royal orders must have been a fresh source of disappointment and chagrin.

Torquemada, we must assume, had withdrawn once more to his convent of Segovia, and perhaps the removal of his stern influence enabled the Queen to make this last effort to avoid the course to which he had all but constrained her.

Having concluded these arrangements, the Sovereigns repaired to Toledo. There, in the spring of the year 1480, the Cortes assembled to make oath of fealty to the infant Prince of Asturias to whom Isabella had given birth in June of 1478. Whilst this oath was the chief motive of the assembly, it was by no means the only business with which it had to deal. Many other matters received attention; amongst them the necessity for remedying the evils arising out of the commerce between Christians and Jews was seriously considered.

It was decreed that the old laws concerning the Jews, which lately had been falling into partial desuetude, should be re-enforced, particularly those which prescribed that all Jews should wear the distinguishing badge of the circlet of red cloth on the shoulders of their gabardines; that they should keep strictly to their Juderias, always retiring to these at nightfall; that walls to enclose these Juderias should be erected wherever they might still be wanting, and that no Jew should practise as a doctor, surgeon, apothecary, or innkeeper.

Beyond that, however, the Cortes did not go; and the institution of the Inquisition to deal with Judaizers was not so much as mentioned, which circumstance Llorente accepts as a further proof of the Queen’s antipathy to the Holy Office.

Coming at a time when the Jews were once more beginning to taste the sweets of freedom, there can be little doubt that these provisions, which thrust them back into bondage and ignominy, must have been extremely galling to them. It is possible that these measures against the men of his race spurred a New-Christian to the rash step of publishing a pamphlet in which he criticized and censured the royal action in the matter. Carried away by his feelings, the writer—intentionally or not—fell into heresy in the course of his writings, to which the Jeronymite monk, Hernando de Talavera, published a reply.

Rodrigo62 assumes that this heretical pamphlet put an end to the Queen’s patience. It may very well have been the case, or at least it may have afforded Ferdinand and the others who desired the Inquisition a final argument whereby to overcome what reluctance still lingered with her.

Be that as it may, it was very soon after this—September 27, 1480—that the Sovereigns, who at the time were at Medina del Campo, acted at last upon the papal bull which had now been in their hands for nearly two years, and delegated their faculty of giving inquisitors to Castile to the Cardinal of Spain and Fr. Tomás de Torquemada.

Mendoza and Torquemada proceeded at once to carry out the task entrusted to them, and appointed as inquisitors of the faith for Seville—where Judaizing was represented to be most flagrant—the Dominican friars Juan de San Martino and Miguel Morillo. The latter was the Provincial of the Dominicans of Aragon, and was already a person of experience in such matters, having acted as inquisitor in Rousillon. To assist them in the discharge of their office, the secular priest Juan Ruiz de Medina, a doctor of canon law, and Juan Lopez de Barco, one of the Queen’s chaplains, were appointed, the former to the position of assessor, the latter to that of fiscal.

It is necessary, in view of the much that has been written, and although the danger be incurred of labouring the point, to examine more closely the attitude of the Sovereigns towards the tribunal which they now sanctioned.

Isabella’s zeal, both pious and political, urged her, as has been said, to proceed in such a way as should set a term to the unrest arising out of the public feeling against Judaizers and apostatizing Moriscoes (baptized Moors). Ferdinand not only shared her feelings, but pious zeal in him went to the lengths of bigotry, and he aimed essentially at a political unity that should be inseparably allied and interwoven with religious unity.

Isabella would have laboured slowly, preferring, even at the sacrifice of time, to achieve her ends by gentle means and the exercise of that patience which was so very necessary if good results were to be obtained. Ferdinand, perhaps less pitiful, perhaps—to do him full justice—less hopeful of the power of argument and indoctrination, lending an ear to the priestly assertion “contra negantes veritatis nulla est disputatio,” would have proceeded at once to the introduction into Castile of the stern repressive measures already being exerted in his native Aragon.

On the score of their different attitudes the Sovereigns might have found themselves in conflict, but that in this matter they had a ground of common interest. Both were agreed that in no case should Spain be brought under the ecclesiastical sway which the establishment of the usual form of Inquisition must set up. If this were to be—as usual hitherto—under pontifical control, its officers would be appointed by the Pope, or, vicariously, by the Dominican provincials, and a proportion of the confiscations consequent upon conviction would be gathered into the pontifical coffers.

For all his bigotry and his desire to see the Holy Office instituted in Castile, Ferdinand was as averse as Isabella to its introduction in a form that must restore the clerical usurpations they had been at such pains to repress.

If Isabella admitted the Inquisition as a last means of quelling the disturbing elements in her kingdom, it must be an Inquisition on lines entirely different from those which hitherto had obtained elsewhere. The appointment of its officers must no more rest with the Pope than the bestowal of Spanish benefices. It must be the prerogative of the Sovereigns themselves, and it must carry with it the power to depose and replace, where necessary, such inquisitors as they might appoint. Further, Rome must have no share in the property confiscated from Spanish subjects, the disposal of this being entirely controlled by the Sovereigns.

It has been argued that here was the cause of all Isabella’s hesitancy: that greed and statecraft were the mainsprings of her conduct in the matter, and that humanitarian considerations had no part in it; that the bull had been applied for earlier than has been generally supposed, and that the delay had resulted from the Pope’s disinclination to grant any such terms as were demanded.

The latter statement may not be without foundation. But to say deliberately that no humanitarian considerations governed the Queen’s conduct is to say a great deal more than the circumstances warrant. To establish this hypothesis it would be necessary to advance some adequate reason for her reluctance to act upon the bull when once it was in her hands. For the bull of November 1478 conceded all that the Sovereigns demanded, all that they desired. Yet Isabella allowed nearly two years to pass before proceeding to exercise the faculties conferred by it, and during that time Cardinal Mendoza and his co-operators diligently pursued the work of effecting conversions by means of his “catechism.”

The conclusion that this was dictated by humane considerations on the part of the Queen is the only one that appears reasonable, nor is any alternative put forward to account for the delay of nearly two years.

When the Cardinal of Spain and the Prior of Holy Cross, acting jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns, appointed the first inquisitors for Castile, they instructed these to set up a tribunal in Seville, which of all the cities of Spain was the one where Judaizing was alleged to be most flagrantly conducted.63

The Sovereigns issued on October 9 a command to all loyal subjects to afford the two inquisitors every assistance they might require on their journey to Seville and all facilities there for carrying out their mission.

The subjects, however, were so little loyal on this occasion that upon the arrival of the inquisitors at Seville, these found a reception of all solemnity awaiting them and every respect accorded to them, but no assistance. To such an extent was this withheld that they found it quite impossible to set about the business upon which they came. They complained of this state of things to the King, and as a result he sent special orders on December 27 to the Coadjutor of Seville and the civil authorities of the district, commanding them to lend the inquisitors every support.

In consequence of this they were at last enabled to establish their court and proceed to the business upon which they came.64

The very rumour of their approach had filled the New-Christians with anxiety, and a glimpse of the gloomy funereal pageant—the white-robed, black-hooded inquisitors, with their attendant familiars and barefoot friars, the procession headed by a Dominican carrying the white cross—on its way to the Convent of St. Paul, where they took up their quarters, was enough to put to flight some thousands of those who had cause to fear that they might become the objects of the attention of that fearful court.

These fugitives sought refuge in the feudal lordships of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, of the formidable Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, Marquis of Cadiz, and of the Count of Arcos.

But in all ages it had been the way of the Inquisition not only to suspect readily, but to allow suspicion to usurp the place that elsewhere is reserved for proof. And so they proceeded to construe into evidence of guilt this flight of the timorous, as is shown by the edict they published on January 2 of 1481.

In this—having set forth their appointment by the Sovereigns, and the terms of the bull under which such appointment had been made—they announced that, inasmuch as it had come to their knowledge that many persons had departed out of Seville in fear of prosecution upon grounds of heretical pravity, they commanded the Marquess of Cadiz, the Count of Arcos, and the other nobles of the Kingdom of Castile, that within fifteen days of the publication of this edict they should make an exact account of the persons of both sexes that had sought refuge in their lordships or jurisdictions; that they should arrest all these and bring them safely to the prison of the Inquisition in Seville, confiscating their property and placing this together with an inventory in the hands of some person of trust, to be held by them at the disposal of the inquisitors; that none should dare to shelter any fugitive, but comply exactly with the terms of this edict under pain of greater excommunication and the other penalties by law established against abettors of heretics, amongst which penalties was that of the annulment of their dignities and offices, their subjects and vassals being absolved of all vassalage and subjection; and the inquisitors reserved to themselves and their superiors the power of absolution from the ecclesiastical censure incurred by all who might fail to obey the terms of this edict.