Some Recent Work on the Inquisition in Spain and Italy

Some Recent Work on the Inquisition in Spain and ItalyAuthor(s): Geoffrey ParkerSource: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Sep., 1982), pp. 519-532Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1906231 .

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Review Article

Some Recent Work on the Inquisition in Spain and Italy*

Geoffrey Parker St. Andrews University

The recent publication of detailed catalogues of Inquisitorial archives in Spain and Italy has made it possible, for the first time, to investigate the activities of the Holy Office at a deeper level than the classic studies of Kamen, Lea, Cechetti, and others. In Spain, the surviving records have been pieced together and some 49,000 trials have been analyzed.' This is no mean feat, for the Spanish Inquisition in its prime could boast twenty- one regional tribunals under a central supreme court, the Suprema, which was also a royal council responsible directly to the king (who appointed its members and fixed the times of its meetings). It is to this centralized struc- ture that historians owe their newfound knowledge of the Spanish Inquisi- tion. Although the archives of many of the individual tribunals have been destroyed-those of Palermo were ceremonially burnt in 1782; those of Ga- licia were turned into cartridges during the Napoleonic wars-their regular reports to the Suprema have survived and today form a collection of some 1,200 volumes and over 4,000 bundles of manuscript. The collection is far from complete. Although 49,000 cases have been reconstituted and analyzed from the period 1540-1700, it is estimated that the twenty-one tribu-

* I gratefully acknowledge the helpful advice of Nicholas Davidson, Julius Kirsh- ner, and John Tedeschi in the preparation of this article. I also thank the Newberry Library and the British Academy for awarding me a fellowship which enabled me to prepare this review essay in Chicago during the spring and summer of 1981.

' Pioneering work on the Spanish Inquisition has been undertaken by several scholars. First in the field was Gustav Henningsen, who has worked closely with a young Spanish scholar, Jaime Contreras. Their analysis of the surviving cases of the tribunals of the Holy Office in Spain and the Spanish empire was first published in: Gustav Henningsen, "El 'Banco de datos' del Santo Oficio. Las relaciones de causas de la inquisicion espafiola, 1550-1700," Boletz'n de la real academia de la historia 74 (1977): 547-70. Henningsen also organized a Simposium interdisciplinario de la inquisicion medieval y moderna, in Denmark, in September 1978, at which he and Con- treras circulated an extremely detailed report of their unpublished research. These results have been extensively plundered, with a minimum of acknowledgment, by B. Bennassar and his collaborators in their collective work, L'Inquisition espagnole, XVe-XIXe siecles (Paris, 1979). The contributions of the French researchers on their own smaller terrain-Toledo, Granada, and so on-are admirable in themselves; but they are only set in their proper context through the extensive exploitation of the patient labors of Contreras and Henningsen. It is perhaps significant that the publishers of L'Inquisition espagnole, Hachette of Paris, refused to send a review copy of the book to this journal, even going so far as to deny that they had published such a work!



520 Parker

nals probably actually handled 145,000 cases or more during these years, to say nothing of the large number judged between 1481 and 1539. So we may only have 25 percent of the total to work with today.

But quantity is not everything. The relaciones de causas may be supple- mented by the personal archives of individual Inquisitors, and the general reports sent to the king every week (and sometimes more often) by the Inquisitor-General. Already, certain broad truths are evident. For example, it may be affirmed that the principal concern of the Holy Office was the laity: their chief aim was to inculcate a sense of the correct behavior and the correct beliefs expected of a Christian. Between 1560 and about 1630 it seems clear that a campaign of social control was under way. One obvious objective toward which this campaign was directed was the confinement of all sexual liaisons within legitimate marriage. Punishment of all who en- gaged in bigamy, adultery, incest, or fornication-and, more significantly, punishment even of those who claimed that these activities were not sins- was clearly part of a concerted attempt at social engineering. And there is some external evidence that it worked. Illegitimate births in Spanish communities-which is a convenient and independent measure of some ex- tramarital sexual liaisons-seem to have fallen continuously from the 1590s until the eighteenth century.2

Of course the Inquisition did not act alone in this work. The secular courts, too, were keen to bridle the careless speech and sexual promiscuity which could so easily erupt into blows and even riots. But the courts lacked the ubiquity of the Holy Office, with its familiars, its loyal clergy, and its itinerant judges. Although there were inevitably some remote parts of the Spanish world where even the familiars were few, they were insignif- icant compared with the "dark corners of the land" where no secular court could exercise its authority. And in its work, the Inquisition could count on the whole-hearted support of almost every person of importance, from the Toledo painter El Greco, who occasionally appeared before his local tribunal as a translator when Greek travellers were arrested for suspected Moorish practices, up to the king himself.3 Philip II, at least, carefully read and annotated the reports sent to him on the work of the Holy Office by the Inquisitor-General. On the whole he did not interfere: "I shall always favor and assist the affairs of the Inquisition," he wrote to the Inquisitor- General in 1574, "because I know the reasons and obligations which exist for doing so, and for me more than anyone." In 1578 he dismissed an ap-

2 See, by way of example, the tables of illegitimacy in M. del C. Gonzalez Mu- hoz, La poblaci6n de Talavera de la Reina (siglos XVI-XX). Estudio sociodemografico (Toledo, 1974), pp. 109, 196; A. Marcos Martin, Auge y declive de un nucleo mercan- til y financiero de Castilla la Vieja. Evolucion demogra~fica de Medina del Campo du- rante los siglos XVI y XVII (Valladolid, 1978), pp. 118-29; and J. G. Casey, The Kingdom of Valencia in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 26-7.

3 For some villages that even the Inquisition forgot, see B. Bennassar, L'Inquisi- tion espagnole, pp. 58-65. On El Greco's services to the Inquisition see J. Caro Bar- oja, El Senor inquisidor y otras vidas por oficio (Madrid, 1968), p. 155.



The Inquisition in Spain and Italy 521

peal against a sentence passed on a prominent nobleman with characteris- tic firmness: "Let the same justice be done which is usual and which is carried out in the rest of the affairs of the Holy Office." But there were occasions when an abuse or disorder was brought to his attention, and he insisted on remedial action being taken. Thus in 1574, when criticisms of the tribunal at Valencia were reported to him, he refused to accept the reassurances and excuses of the Suprema because, he said, on a previous visit to the province "I saw it with my own eyes." However, such outbursts were rare, and they were never made manifest. In public, the king went out of his way to show his support for the Holy Office, even attending in person five major autos daft-in 1559, 1560, 1564, 1582, and 1591. He also wanted to attend another auto daft at Toledo in 1586, telling his secretary, "It is really something worth seeing." But, alas, the Inquisition at Toledo was unable to provide sufficient victims.4

But penitents were rarely lacking in this way. Authorized by papal bull in 1478 and approved by the Castilian parliament in 1480, the tribunal of Seville began work almost immediately, holding its first auto daft the following year. By 1492, the year in which all Jews and Moors in Spain were ordered either to become Christians or to leave the peninsula, there were fourteen tribunals under the control of the Suprema. By 1638, with the foundation of the last tribunal, in Madrid itself, there were twenty-one. Eleven of them covered Castile and the Canary Islands, and were con- trolled from Madrid by the "Castilian secretariat" of the Suprema. The other ten were administered by the "Aragonese secretariat" and were spread all around the Hispanic world: Logrofio in Navarre; Barcelona, Va- lencia, and Zaragoza in the crown of Aragon; Palma de Mallorca (in the Balearics); Sassari (in Sardinia) and Palermo (in Sicily); Mexico, Cartagena de Indias, and Lima (in America).' There were also three further tribunals in the dominions of the Spanish Habsburgs which did not come under the control of the Suprema. At Naples, after three unsuccessful attempts to establish a regular tribunal of the Holy Office (in 1509, 1524, and 1564), the

4Quoted in Geoffrey Parker, Philip II (Boston, Mass., 1978), pp. 100-101, 125. These particular examples are not mentioned by R. Garcia Carcel, Herej]a y sociedad en el siglo XVI. La inquisici6n en Valencia (Barcelona, 1980); but he in turn pro- vides details on the "previous visit," which occurred in 1554 (see p. 43) and on the subjects for criticism (see pp. 37-8 and 136). For another example of the king's ire, concerning the tribunal of Murcia in 1558, see A. W. Lovett, Philip HI and Mateo Vazquez de Leca (Geneva, 1977), p. 172.

5 See the map of the Spanish Inquisition in G. Henningsen, The Witches' Advo- cate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (Reno, Nevada, 1980), p. 361. On the reconstitution of the dispersed archives of the Inquisition see G. Henningsen, "Los archivos y la historiografia de la inquisicion espaniola," paper given at the Simposium interdisciplinario de la inquisici6n medieval y moderna (Denmark, Sep- tember 1978). Only two tribunals have so far been the subject of a detailed published study: that of Logrofno, studied by Henningsen (The Witches' Advocate) and that of Mexico: W. H. Greenleaf' The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century (Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1969). Studies are expected shortly from J.-P. Dedieu on Toledo and from J. Contreras on Galicia.



522 Parker

papacy sent a special secret agent to direct the operations of the episcopal Inquisition; his orders arrived under plain cover from the Congregation of the Inquisition in Rome. In Portugal, the tribunals at Coimbra and Lisbon operated independently of both Rome and Madrid.6

Research so far has indicated that the work of the various tribunals con- trolled from Madrid underwent four distinct phases: the initial period to about 1540; the time of maximum activity from 1540 to about 1615; the phase of decreasing vitality until 1700; and the torpor of the eighteenth century until dissolution in 1808. During the first period, which lasted about two generations, the principal target of the Inquisition was the Jews-or, more precisely, Jews who claimed to be Christians while still practicing the Jewish faith and customs. Of the 352 persons arraigned by the Toledo Inquisition, 1481-1505, all but two were Jews; 91 percent of those tried at Valencia during this period were also Jews. Until 1525, few other types of offence were considered by any tribunal.

This preoccupation with Jews during the first half-century of the Inquisi- tion is easily explained. Until 1391, Jews were allowed to practice their faith openly both under Christian and Moslem governments, and they became leading financiers to the crown. They were, however, barred by their religion from accepting public office. Then came the anti-Jewish massacres of 1391, which led many Jews to become converts to Christianity-known as conversos or "New Christians"-and as such they took up public office and soon achieved prominence in both local and central government. This development naturally irritated many Old Christians, and from the 1440s on there were riots in several cities against the converso magistrates appointed by the crown (appointed because they alone possessed the money and education to aid the crown to conquer Granada). The Old Christians also accused the conversos of being insincere converts who continued to practice their ancient religion in secret while enjoying the benefits of having renounced it in public. It was to test these accusations that the crown introduced the Inquisition, with its severe penalties for conversos convicted of Jewish leanings. Surprisingly, the conversos adapted to this threat well, directing the new institutions against those who remained Jews, and-accus- ing the faithful Jews of causing trouble in "their" towns. First they had Jews moved into special areas (1481); then sent out of towns altogether (1488); and finally expelled from Spain (1492). Every stage was engineered by the conversos. Perhaps 150,000 of the 200,000 Jews in Spain emi- grated-to Portugal (until 1497), the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey. The

6 For the curious situation in Naples, see A. Borromeo, "Contributo allo studio dell' inquisizione e dei suoi rapporti con il potere episcopale nell' Italia spagnola del' 500," Annuario dell' Istituto Storico Italiano per l'etai moderna e contemporanea 29-30 (1977-8): 219-76; for some published data on the Portuguese tribunals see I. S. Revah, "Les Marranes portugais et l'inquisition an XVIe siecle" in The Sephardic Heritage: Essays on the History and Cultural Contribution of the Jews of Spain and Portugal, ed. R. D. Barnett (London, 1971), 1: 479-526.




rest became, perforce, conversos; and, as such, also became a source of constant concern to the Inquisitors.7

By the 1540s, however, the converso problem was largely solved. Those convicted of Judaism were severely punished and their descendents for three generations were declared incapable of holding public office-"in- habil," to use the language of the Inquisitors. Throughout the sixteenth century, inhabiles continued to be found in positions of authority, and suf- fered degradation and fines; but increasingly the Holy Office issued certifi- cates of habilitacion which lifted the disqualifications from respectable New Christians. Now the Inquisitors became primarily interested in the mistaken beliefs and practices of Old Christians. Although each tribunal had only two or three judges, regular tours of inspection (or "visitas") were organized. In principle, one judge was required to undertake one visitation for four months per year through a part of the tribunal's jurisdiction, travelling to each area in rotation so that none was overlooked. Before the In- quisitor's arrival, an eight-page document known as the Edict of Faith was read from every pulpit in the visitation area: it listed every form of hereti- cal thought and deed. Jewish, Moslem, and Protestant practices were described in detail; various forms of blasphemy were given in full; forbidden books and opinions were noted. The Edict, which must have taken half an hour or more to read out, then called upon all who knew, or had heard it said, that any person had written, spoken, thought, or done anything that conflicted with the tenets of the Holy Catholic Faith, to denounce the same to the Inquisitors. All denunciations were copied down in a special visitation book, and in the case of minor offences, the accused was called in, interrogated, and sentenced at once to a penance and fine. Only the serious cases were removed to the central court for more detailed considera- tion. The Toledo Tribunal's visitation in 1556, for example, handled 163 cases, dismissed twenty-four of them, and only continued ten to the central court. For many of the rest, the whole process must have resembled a con- fessional rather than a court.

But, of course, the Holy Office was not particularly interested in these small fry. Much more rewarding, financially speaking, were the inhabiles found to have accepted office (twenty-three of the 163 cases of the Toledo visitation were of this sort, and their fines made up the greater part of the 1,000 ducats collected by the visiting judge). And much more interesting, intellectually, were the gross theological errors that required referral to the central court. The famous local reminder of these serious cases was the

I See S. H. Haliczer, "The Castillian Urban Patriciate and the Jewish Expulsions, 1480-1492," American Historical Review 78 (1973): 35-62; and J.-P. Dedieu, "Les filets de l'inquisition: Les archives du Saint Office de Tolede comme source pour l'ethnologie historique" (paper given at Simposium interdisciplinario de la inquisicwon medieval y moderna, Denmark, September 1978). The anti-Semitic phase in Valencia is described and analyzed in R. Garcia Carcel, Origenes de la inquisici6n espanola. El Tribunal de Valencia 1478-1530 (Barcelona, 1976).



524 Parker

sambenitos (or sackcloth garments) of those whom the Inquisition had burned or condemned to prison. They hung in the local churches, complete with labels, and any that became old and dilapidated, or that disappeared, were replaced. A visitation book from Navarre in 1611, which contained a gazeteer of the sambenitos to be found in each church in the region, showed that some were over a century old: the visiting Inquisitor was required to check that every one was present and correct.8

Not surprisingly, therefore, the Inquisitors disliked going on tours of inspection. The harvest of penitents was uninteresting; the discomforts of travelling about in the heat of summer were considerable; and the costs were substantial-especially since the tribunals were not rich (in 1573 the tribunal of Barcelona had to advance the date of an auto da ft in order to economize on food for some of the prisoners!).9 According to a balance sheet drawn up in 1618, two-thirds of the tribunals of the Holy Office had overspent their budgets, several of them seriously.'0 Increasingly, the judges preferred to stay at home and rely on the activities of the local clergy, and of their paid informers in each locality, the familiars, to denounce any serious offenders. No one has yet been able to establish the global total of familiars in Habsburg Spain, but fragmentary figures suggest that by the later sixteenth century about 1,000 per tribunal was the average, even though some might have considerably less (Granada only had 554) and others might have rather more (Zaragoza employed 1,215). In the kingdom of Valencia, a census of 1567 revealed that there were no less than 1,638 familiars, a density of one per ten square miles, or one per forty-two fami- lies. As might be expected, the distribution of this corps of informers was uneven. Although they lived in 406 separate communities of the province, the majority of the familiars were to be found either in the towns (Valencia had 183) or in the smaller villages. That over half of all the familiars re- sided in settlements of less than 1,000 persons may seem, at first sight, sur- prising; but it was precisely here, in the sparsely populated countryside, where other forms of social control were at their weakest, that the Inquisi- tion felt the greatest need to marshal its forces. " I

To be sure, the number of familiars did not remain for ever at this high level-by 1749 there were only 153 in the entire kingdom of Valencia-but for the Habsburg period, at least, these obscure servants of church and state exercised a most important role. Yet they were often men of humble backgrounds. In Valencia, where their identities are partially revealed by

8 Visitas, which feature little in the standard works concerning the Inquisition, are described in J.-P. Dedieu, "Les Inquisiteurs de Tolede et la visite du district," Melanges de la casa de Velasquez 13 (1977): 235-56; G. Henningsen, The Witches' Advocate, pp. 95-105; B. Bennassar, ed., L'lnquisition espagnole XVe-XIXe siecles, pp. 58-65; and Garcia Carcel, Herejfa y sociedad, pp. 91, 188-9.

A. W. Lovett, Philip 11 and Mateo Va6zquez, p. 24. 0 Garcia Carcel, Herejz'a y sociedad, p. 177.

Totals of familiars in L'lnquisition espagnole, pp. 96-8; and Garcia Carcel, pp. 140-55.




the census of 1567, some 44 percent were farmers, 31 percent artisans, 10 percent merchants, 6 percent gentry or nobles, 4 percent professional men, and 3 percent clergy. Three-quarters of the familiars were thus "lower class" and a further census in 1602 still gives a figure of two-thirds. In this respect Valencia may have been unrepresentative. Reports from other areas of Castile, although admittedly less complete, suggest a far greater pre- ponderance of noble familiars, some of them using their position to build up a sort of mafia; but even in some areas of Valencia, nobles such as the duke of Segorbe ensured that their own nominees became the servants of the Holy Office. 12

As the sixteenth century advanced, the Inquisition appears to have placed increasing reliance upon the familiars, and although the total number of cases fell, in comparison with the years of maximum activity (1540-80), those who were denounced were now investigated with far more care and persistence. The classic trials of Archbishop Carranza of Toledo, which lasted seventeen years, or of Fray Luis de Leon, which lasted for five, were typical of the new pattern. And although both these men were finally acquitted, they were forced to pay for their own captivity (the sum was deducted from their own property, which was sequestered on arrest). Others were less fortunate-total acquittal was extremely rare.'3 More common was the "conditional discharge," the fine, the public humiliation, the loss of office and goods. For a few there was torture, and the obdurate were burned at the stake: but the number, as a proportion of the total heresy cases tried, was small both in the tribunals of the Spanish Monarchy and elsewhere (see Table 1).

These victims of the Inquisition included many famous names-Gior- dano Bruno, extradited from Venice to be burnt in Rome in 1600; Don Carlos de Seso, chief magistrate of Toro, who had protected the Protestant cells in the area during the 1550s-but they were all people who either refused to repent or who, having repented, relapsed. Punishments were meted out by the Inquisitors more for disobedience than for error, for knowingly and deliberately holding opinions opposed to the teachings of the Church. Thus a Jew living in a state that granted toleration (such as Venice) was not a proper subject for inquisitorial attention-unless he abandoned his faith, became a Christian, and maintained heterodox views about his new creed. The case of a Jew, Abraham Righetto, tried by the

12 Ibid., pp. 149-51. See also B. Bennassar, "Aux origines du caciquisme: Les familiers de l'inquisition en Andalousie au XVIIe siecle," Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-bresilien, 27 (1976). Philip II opposed the appointment of noble familiars as a matter of principle after an embarrassing case in Sicily in 1589 which involved street riots. See A. W. Lovett, Philip 11, pp. 173-6.

13 Complete acquittal was rare because, according to the principal Inquisitors' manual of the period (by Francesco Pegna, d. 1612), few denunciations were taken up without due cause, and the deceptions of the Devil were infinite. Rather than dismiss a case, Pegna advised his fellow Inquisitors to release suspects on bail, or "on probation" for lack of evidence.



526 Parker

TABLE 1 14

TOTAL TOTAL CONDEMNED

KNOWN TO DEATH

TRIBUNAL PERIOD TRIALS IN PERSON IN EFFIGY %

Spanish Monarchy 1540-1700 49,092 776 707 3 Venetian Inquisition 1541-1592 1,560 18 4 1 Toulouse Parliament 1500-1560 1,074 62 6 Bordeaux Parliament 1541-1559 477 18 4 Chambre Ardente (Paris) 1547-1550 557 39 7 Coimbra Inquisition 1567-1631 3,837 253 7

Venetian Inquisition between 1570 and 1573, has recently been the subject of a detailed study which reveals that the chief point at issue was whether Abraham had been born at Ferrara (where Jews were tolerated) as he claimed, or in Lisbon (where they were not); for if he was in fact Portu- guese, he must have been born a Christian and thus "lapsed" into Juda- ism, which was a punishable offence. '5

During Righetto's trial, one of the witnesses against him described the Christians of Jewish descent in the evocative phrase "ships with two rudders." When pressed as to what this meant, the witness argued that the "New Christians" had two standards of behavior: one among Christians and another among Jews. The policy of the Spanish and Italian tribunals was consistent in this respect: the Holy Office in both peninsulas punished such ambiguity rigorously. They were also consistent in their treatment of moriscos (as Christians of Moorish descent were termed) and Protestants; but the incidence of these cases varied from one tribunal to another, according to considerations of time and place. Naturally the trial of moriscos suspected of lapsing into Islamic practices was more common before their expulsion from Spain in 1609-14: the aggregate figure for the entire Habs- burg period-23 percent-is thus highly misleading. For the Tribunal of Granada, the aggregate is more misleading still, for there the moriscos were expelled after the second revolt of the Alpujarras in 1568-71. In the 1560s,

14 I. S. Revah, in The Sephardic Heritage, p. 515; Jaime Contreras, Las Causas de fe en la inquisici6n espanola 1540-1700. Analisis de una estadz'stica (paper given at the Simposium interdisciplinario de la inquisici6n medieval y moderna, Denmark, Sep- tember 1978); R. A. Mentzer, Heresy Proceedings in Languedoc 1500-1560 (forthcoming); P. F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 (Princeton, 1977), pp. 57-8. Victims were only burnt in effigy for lack of the real thing-because they had either died or (more rarely) escaped before sentence could be inflicted.

15 B. Pullan, " 'A Ship with Two Rudders': 'Righetto Marrano' and the Inquisi- tion in Venice," Historical Journal 20 (1973): 25-58. Nicholas S. Davidson of Leices- ter University has suggested to me that Righetto escaped the clutches of the Inquisi- tion in one of the numerous jailbreaks countenanced by the notoriously corrupt prison service. He could certainly afford to pay a large bribe.




72 percent of the cases heard by the Tribunal involved moriscos; in the 1570s, 66 percent; but in the 1590s, only 9 percent.'6 Garcia Carcel's detailed study of the Valencia Tribunal reveals an even more complex chro- nology of morisco persecution, dominated by the radical differences among those in power concerning the correct solution to the Moorish problem. Some advocated mass castration (two bishops in 1587: p. 107); others de- sired a major spiritual offensive by Arabic-speaking preachers already fa- miliar, if possible, with missionary work in the Indies (this view was most common in the 1590s); but, gradually, general expulsion gained favor as the only practicable remedy. Moriscos in some villages were seen to jeer openly at visiting Inquisitors; in 1574, after the disgraceful loss of the for- tress of La Goletta to the Turks, it was said that the moriscos boasted of their co-religionists' success; more generally, they seemed to be the habitual friends and abettors of pirates and bandits, a "fifth column" in the heart of Habsburg Spain. These varying pressures determined the overall activity of the Tribunal at Valencia (and ensured that it differed significantly from its Castilian fellows, for some 60 percent of the Valencian cases concerned those suspected of Islamic practices). The records show a modest level of prosecutions until 1566, when the Madrid government's morisco policy hardened (producing a revolt in Granada). Persecution rose steadily to a crescendo in 1589-92, when over 1,000 moriscos were tried, followed by a decade of largely unsuccessful attempts at reconciliation and evangeliza- tion. Then, from 1602 on, the trend again moved upwards until after the edict of expulsion.'7

If some tribunals in Spain seemed to "specialize" in moriscos, others seemed to concentrate throughout the sixteenth century on Jews-especially in the Castilian heartland. It was the same in Portugal. Other tribunals still, chiefly those close to the Atlantic coast or the French frontier, tried more than the average number of Protestants, for most suspects were foreigners or had lived abroad.

It is less easy to extend these generalizations to areas under the jurisdiction of the Roman Inquisition, whether directly (as in the Papal States) or indirectly (as in Venice, the Friuli, and Naples), since the archives of the Holy Office were dispersed, and partially destroyed, in the early nineteenth century. Many provincial records are today housed in Trinity College, Dublin; many more have only recently been catalogued (such as those of Udine and Naples); those of Pisa and Siena have just been discovered; and

16 Figures from the seminal article by Jaime Contreras (see note 14 above); see pp. 26, 37, 48, and general table. His figures supersede those of the otherwise useful article by K. Garrad, "La inquisici6n y los moriscos granadinos, 1526-80," Bulletin hispanique 67 (1965): 63-77.

17 See the graph in R. Garcia Carcel, Herejia y sociedad, p. 210. On the morisco threat, as perceived by the Spanish government, see the classic article of A. C. Hess, "The Moriscos: An Ottoman Fifth Column in Sixteenth-Century Spain," American Historical Review 74 (1968): 1-25.



528 Parker

doubtless others still remain to be found. It will be many years before a proper history of the Roman Inquisition can be published.'8

Nevertheless, the archive catalogues of the tribunals of Venice, the Friu- li, and Naples permit some comparisons with the better-processed Spanish data. To begin with, it is clear that the pattern of prosecution in Venice closely resembled that of the Spanish Inquisition. The busiest years were from 1547 to 1650, with twenty-nine defendants on average per year, fall- ing to thirteen in 1651-1720 and only three in 1721-94; and the busiest decade for all tribunals-Venetian and Spanish-was 1585-94.'9 It is notable that, between 1560 and about 1630, the number of cases heard by all tribunals covering a major area-Sicily, Venice, Naples, Valencia, Toledo, and so on-averaged about thirty cases a year. This suggests that the chief lim- itation on each tribunal's activity was not so much the size of the popula- tion in its jurisdiction (400,000 in Valencia; 1 million in Sicily; 2.5 million in Naples) as the small number of judges available.

But if there were parallels, there were also contrasts. For example, whereas the Spanish tribunals were deeply concerned with Jews and moriscos for most of the early modern period, the Italian Inquisition paid little attention to either. Again, the Italian tribunals were little interested in "moral offences." In Venice there was, from the 1530s on, a special secular court which dealt with blasphemy, gambling, and morals (the Esecutori contro la bestemmia), and the secular courts also dealt with gross moral offences. But in the Friuli and Naples, the tribunals likewise considered such actions sel- dom. Of the 3,000 or so surviving cases tried by the Inquisitors of Naples from 1564-1744, under 10 percent concerned bigamy, and less than 1 percent arose from other forms of sexual misconduct. In the Friuli, Luigi di Biasio's invaluable calendar of 2,129 cases decided by the Inquisitors between 1557 and 1786, shows that less than 1 percent concerned sex.20

18 See J. A. Tedeschi, "La dispersione degli archiva della inquisizione romana," Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 9 (1973): 298-312; and "Preliminary Observa- tions on Writing a History of the Roman Inquisition," in Continuity and Discontinui- ty in Church History. Essays in Honour of G. H. Williams, ed. F. F. Church and T. George (Leiden, 1979), pp. 232-49. Tedeschi, at the Newberry Library in Chicago, is compiling a general history of the Roman Inquisition, and several other scholars are also at work on the records; but no synthesis seems imminent.

19 Figures computed from Archivio di Stato, Venice, Indice 303, "Santo Uffizio," compiled in 1870 by the archivists L. Pasini and G. Giomo. Their list includes 2,864 separate trials, involving some 3,600 named individuals, and covering the years 1547-94 and 1606-1794. There are a further twenty-five undated trials, and a serious lacuna for 1595-1605. But other omissions also exist, especially for the sixteenth century, since Nicholas Davidson has discovered in the Venetian archives a number of Inquisition cases which are not mentioned in Indice 303. 1 am most grateful to him for sharing with me his information on the Venetian tribunal. His doctoral dissertation will provide an important addition to Inquisition studies.

20 The calculation comes from the forthcoming paper of E. W. Monter and J. A. Tedeschi, "A Statistical Profile of the Venetian Inquisition." It is based in turn on Indice 303 for Venice; G. Galasso and C. Russo, eds., L'archivio storico diocesano di Napoli (Naples, 1978), 2: 627-914 for Naples; and L. di Biagio, 1000 processi dell'




The Spanish Inquisition took a very different view. Of the 29,000 recorded cases from 1560-1614, fully 50 percent concerned mistaken moral beliefs and practices, blasphemy, or swearing; of the 15,000 surviving cases from 1615-1700, 40 percent involved such matters.2' Sodomy and bestiality were only handled by the Inquisition in the crown of Aragon-in Castile it was a matter for the secular courts-but, even so, totals of 379 for Valen- cia, 453 for Barcelona, and 791 for Zaragoza, are reported for the period 1540-1700: totals that are substantially higher than those known for other lands, such as France or Scotland. Perhaps the explanation for this lies in the mild penalties: whereas most secular courts regarded offences "contra natura" as capital, the Inquisition normally handed down sentences of ban- ishment for two or three years, occasionally adding a flogging. Only moriscos convicted of sodomy were habitually executed. The Inquisitors of Va- lencia freed even Bartholome Xuimez, 21 years old, who confessed to having been sodomized by his master, two priests and a friar, a slave, a morisco, a boy of twelve "who begged it for God's sake," another boy-all of them named and described-and "others whose identity and circum- stances he did not know."22

A final area of contrast between the Spanish and Italian tribunals concerned the treatment of superstition and witchcraft, on the one hand, and of Protestant heresy on the other. In Spain, the number of persons cited before the Inquisition for witchcraft rose sharply in the seventeenth century-from 1,126 respondents, or 4 percent of the total, in 1560-1614, to 2,561, or 17 percent of the total, in 1615-1700. Over the same period, the number of Protestant suspects fell from 2,272 (or 8 percent) to 1,200 (or 7 percent). But in the three tribunals of mainland Italy for which figures are available-Venice, Naples, and the Friuli-a similar shift of activity is far more marked. Put crudely, trials for sorcery or superstition were rare until the 1580s, while those for heresy made up between 40 and 50 percent of the total; but, thereafter, heresy cases fell to around 10 percent, while each of the three courts spent almost half of their time searching out and perse- cuting superstition, magic, and sorcery. In the well-known case of the Ben- andanti of the Friuli, studied by Carlo Ginzburg, the Inquisitors eventually labelled as witches the participants in a fertility ritual originally considered to be beneficial to the community.23

inquisizione in Friuli (Udine, 1976) and ibid., I processi dell' inquisizione in Friuli dal 1648 al 1798 (Udine, 1978) for Friuli. I am most grateful to Monter and Tedeschi for permission to read and to cite their article in advance of publication.

21 Contreras; Garcia Carcel, Herejz'a y sociedad, pp. 209-11 and 261-94, and the article by J.-P. Dedieu, "Le Modele sexuel: La D&fense du mariage chretien," in L'Inquisition espagnole, ed. B. Bennassar, pp. 313-26: an analysis of the eighty-one persons accused of fornication before the Toledo tribunal, 1561-1615.

22 Garcia Carcel, pp. 288-94. The confession of the ever-willing Bartholome- surely a male prostitute?-appears on p. 291.

23 Detailed calculations will appear in the article by Monter and Tedeschi cited in note 20 above. On Friuli, see C. Ginzburg, I Benandanti. Ricerche sulla stregoneria e



530 Parker

One reason why the Inquisitors of Spain did not conform to this pattern has recently been illuminated in great detail. In 1609-10 the two senior Inquisitors at Logronio, the capital of Navarre, discovered (to them) ir- refutable evidence of a witch religion in the remote high valleys of the Pyrenees-some of the locations being so inaccessible that mounting a broomstick was by far the easiest way to reach them. Eleven witches were burnt at the stake, and twenty more were imprisoned; 1,802 confessions were obtained, incriminating over 5,000 persons. Navarre seemed poised to become the forum of the greatest witch trial of all time. But at this point a third Inquisitor, Don Alonso de Salazar y Frias, arrived at Logronio. He was profoundly skeptical about the evidence collected, and decided to in- terrogate the suspects again. His colleagues had presumed guilt and demanded proof of innocence-so an accusation that a person had been seen at a midnight sabbat, when the world was asleep, could hardly be dis- proved. But Salazar began by presuming innocence and required concrete proof of guilt. A person had confessed to his colleagues that he had passed through a keyhole: Salazar wanted to know how, precisely, it had been done. A group of suspects admitted to being at a sabbat in a certain field: Salazar took each one, separately, to the field and asked him to identify the exact spot (all, of course, chose a different one). A supposedly "magic potion" was found by Salazar's analysts to contain nothing but animal ex- crement: why had the suspects made such extravagant claims for ordinary dung, Salazar demanded? Inexorably, the junior Inquisitor established that leading questions at his colleagues' interrogation, inflammatory and detailed sermons by the local clergy, and the imprisonment of many suspects in the same cell (allowing them to concert their story) had created a totally fictitious "world of the witches," and he sent off a damning report to his superiors in Madrid about the whole matter:

It is clear that the witches themselves are not to be believed, and that the judges should not pass sentence on anyone, unless the case can be proven by external and objective evidence sufficient to convince everyone who hears it. And who can accept the following: that a person can frequently fly through the air and travel a hundred leagues in an hour; . . . that a person can make himself invisible; that he can be in a river or in the sea and not get wet; or that he can be in bed and at the sabbat at the same time? . .. For these claims go beyond all human reason and may even pass the limits permitted by the Devil.

Naturally, Salazar's colleagues did not take this slight on their professional competence lying down, and an unseemly row ensued which lasted three years. Eventually Salazar won-not for nothing was he the protege of the Inquisitor-General-and the charges against all witchcraft suspects were dropped. But the Suprema had been shaken, and a general warning

sui culti agrari (Turin, 1966: an English translation by John and Anne Tedeschi is in preparation).




was issued to all tribunals that extreme caution should be observed in han- dling accusations of sorcery and magic. The Inquisitor-General referred to the business as "the most regrettable affair in the history of the Inquisi- tion."24

These variations in the activities of the numerous organs of the Holy Of- fice raise certain general questions. What were the Inquisitors trying to do? Did they have some kind of broad vision, perhaps even a mental "list of priorities," concerning their objectives? Was the pragmatic and legalistic approach of Salazar, with its insistence on hard evidence and a healthy skepticism about motive, the norm among Italian Inquisitors, as some Venetian and Friulian evidence suggests? What was the impact of the inquisitorial deterrent, maintained for more than three centuries in some parts, upon Mediterranean society?

The last question, at least, can be answered, but only as far as the intellectual community is concerned. Clearly the life of scholars was enormous- ly complicated by the activities of the Inquisition. In Italy, the creation of the Roman Holy Office in 1542 was responsible for the collapse of the spir- ituali, or moderate Catholic reformers: as Cardinal Caraffa impatiently purchased the locks and chains for the new prison of the Inquisition at his own expense, the leader of the "spiritual party," Bernardino Ochino, fled to Geneva. Although sometimes moderate in its early years, before the century was out, the Inquisitors had burnt the free-thinking Giordano Bruno and forced Veronese to retitle his great painting of the Last Supper "Dinner at the House of Levi," because it contained Negroes, dogs, and other distracting figures. Before long, Galileo would be confined to his house and forced to cease publishing. It has been claimed that the atten- tions of the Inquisitors encouraged Italian scholars to specialize in the less sensitive fields of music and mathematics rather than in art and philos- ophy.25

Spanish intellectual life was also seriously blighted. On the one hand, the threat of pursuit by the Holy Office forced many Spanish and Portuguese scholars to flee abroad; on the other, it discouraged many foreigners from coming. The Scottish humanist George Buchanan taught at Coimbra Uni- versity for a year (1550-1551) before the Inquisition there called him in for questioning and he found it prudent to leave (perhaps wisely, because he was already moving toward the Calvinism which he helped to establish in his native kingdom a decade later). The reputation of the Spanish Inquisi- tion also helped to discourage Erasmus from visiting the peninsula: "Non placet Hispania" was his lapidary reply to an invitation to go there in 1516.

24 See G. Henningsen, The Witches' Advocate, and "The Greatest Witch-Trial of All: Navarre 1610-1614," History Today (November, 1980), pp. 36-39.

25 See P. Partner, Renaissance Rome, 1500-1559. A Portrait of a Society (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 220-4; P. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 (Princeton, 1977); H. G. Koenigsberger, Estates and Revolutions: Essays in Early European History (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1971), pp. 278-97.



532 Parker

Later on, in the 1530s and '40s, the future of Spanish intellectuals indeed seemed bleak, with the rapid spread of Protestantism at a stage when the Catholic church had still not defined its own position. "We live in such difficult times," wrote Juan Luis Vives to Erasmus in 1534, "that it is dan- gerous either to speak or to be silent."26

This, however, was a problem which affected only a few of the millions of subjects of the Habsburg kings. For the rest, and for most Italians, the impact of the Inquisition is, as yet, impossible to assess. There is such a wealth of cases-all (after 1560) including a brief biography of the accused and a verbatim transcript of his or her religious and social norms of behavior-that all sorts of reconstructions can be attempted: migratory patterns (since the accused had to report every place of residence since birth), family patterns (parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles-whether dead or alive-were all recorded), dissenting patterns (all previous dealings of the family with the Inquisition were noted), behavioral patterns (every gesture, phrase, and action is explained in terms of the social conventions that occasioned them). The records of the Inquisition in the early modern period thus represent, for Catholic countries, a source on the historical ethnology of Europe which is at least as valuable as the documents left by the Protestant church courts. All it needs is systematic analysis and sympathetic study.

26 H. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (London, 1965), p. 67. On the censorship of ideas in Valencia, see Garcia Caircel, Herejia y sociedad, pp. 295-344.



Documents

Some Recent Work on the Inquisition in Spain and Italy