FOURTEEN
During these years when religious hatreds were on the forefront of everyone’s mind, when Muslims and Christians were at war in Spain and in eastern Europe, and when both sides in both places justified their actions by calling it devotion to God, Queen Isabella authorized the creation of a joint church and state initiative called the Inquisition.
The Inquisition applied only to people who had formally identified themselves as Christians but whose behavior caused others to doubt the sincerity of their beliefs. In Isabella’s lifetime, the Inquisition focused primarily on conversos, people of Jewish descent who had publicly converted to Christianity and were calling themselves Christians. It did not initially apply to Muslims or Jews. Its goal was to ferret out insincere Christians and, if they were found guilty, to correct them, and if they were deemed unrepentant, to kill them by burning them at the stake, the traditional penalty for heresy. But when Isabella and Ferdinand decided that the presence of practicing Jews in the kingdom was leading conversos astray, they decided to try to force all the Jews in Spain to convert to Christianity. Those who did not accept baptism were compelled to leave. Later the same thing happened to the Muslims, despite the specific promise made to them at the surrender of Granada that they could keep their faith. Both policies increased the number of reluctant Christians who would become subject to the Inquisition.
The queen is known to have begun pondering the idea of an inquisitorial panel when she was in Seville for the first time in 1477. She formally launched it in 1480, the year the Turks seized Otranto and as the war with Granada was on the verge of breaking out. She did it, though reluctantly, as a result of intense lobbying by clerics in Seville and elsewhere who told her that heresy among conversos in Andalusia was epidemic, was jeopardizing souls, and was undermining security. The Spanish Inquisition therefore owed its origins in part to the strains of wartime, when suspect loyalties were less tolerated than usual and suspicions were running high. But it turned out to be such an effective tool for government repression and control that it survived as an institution for three hundred years, giving successive rulers a convenient way to suppress enemies and punish various kinds of social nonconformity that the majority of the population found irritating.
Its first victims were Christians of Jewish descent who had continued to follow some Jewish customs, a practice called “Judaizing,” which made it difficult to tell if they had sincerely converted to Christianity. But as time wore on, homosexuals, people of Muslim descent, Protestants, and divorced people all came under the same type of scrutiny. So did political enemies of the government, or people accused of various kinds of unconventional thinking.
Nonetheless the Spanish Inquisition, also known as the Holy Office, was a popular institution with the wider population, because they believed it was needed. After years of civil unrest, many people welcomed evidence that a strong authoritarian central government was eliminating social discord. The Spaniards had come to value religious orthodoxy. Bigots, or even the ordinary narrow-minded and pedantic, were the Inquisition’s most enthusiastic proponents; its victims or prospective victims hated and feared it. It became, in the historian Henry Kamen’s words, “a standard feature of the Spanish landscape.”1
Nobody knows for sure what Isabella had in mind when she started the Inquisition. And nobody knows for sure how many people it affected. The scholars who have studied it have often brought their own personal biases to their work. It has been depicted so frequently in fiction that truth and perception have become confused and intermingled. Propagandists from England cited the existence of the Inquisition as evidence of their kingdom’s moral superiority to Spain, even while English authorities were cruelly oppressing their own religious minorities at home. Sultan Bayezid II is said to have roundly criticized the Inquisition shortly before the Ottoman Empire killed tens of thousands of its own heretics—those following a mystical Sufi variant of Shia Islam, instead of the government-authorized Sunni teachings. In other words, religious oppression is nothing new and is not uniquely Spanish.
In more recent decades, hundreds of scholars have pored over the surviving fragments of documentary evidence of what the Inquisition was and did. Historians once believed that immense numbers of people were burned at the stake, but more recent scholarship has cast doubt on those assertions, and the estimates of actual deaths have been substantially reduced. Claims that hundreds of thousands of people were killed have been proved to be erroneous.
But there is no question that during Isabella’s reign, hundreds of people were put to the flame, probably at least 1,000 and perhaps as many as 2,000. In the religious capital, Toledo, for example, the inquisitors killed 168 people during Isabella’s lifetime.2 About 85 in that same district were tried and found innocent. Another 120 were tried in absentia, having fled elsewhere or having already died. One reason the numbers are hard to determine is that inquisitors often tried people who were already dead, using the inquisitorial mechanism of documents as testimony, then burning their bones. People who ran away were tried in absentia and burned in effigy, much as a puppetlike figure of King Enrique had been constructed and then symbolically dethroned in Ávila when Isabella’s brothers were fighting over the throne. In those days, wax, wood, or cloth representations of people were viewed as having ritual significance.
The Spanish Inquisition was not a new idea conceived by Ferdinand and Isabella. Through most of recorded history, and before the concept of a separation of church and state was invented, government and religion were inextricably linked. In most cultures, opposing religious doctrine has been tantamount to defying political authority. Therefore the Inquisition was an institution with very old roots and a prescribed set of rules, although the Spaniards introduced many new twists.
The governing principle of an Inquisition is that failing to conform to religious and political norms is treason. In Isabella’s age, church and state were one—religious authority and secular power were intermingled. Threats to religious orthodoxy were seen as threats to the political establishment. Kings and queens assumed their thrones, they believed, by the will of God, and questioning God was tantamount to questioning royals’ political legitimacy. Moreover, kings and queens were viewed as spiritually responsible for the guardianship of their subjects’ lives and souls. A failure to root out heresy put the souls of the king and queen at risk as well.
The word Inquisition comes from the Latin noun inquisitio, or “investigation,” and the Spanish Inquisition followed specific Roman codes of law. The Romans had authorized the use of torture to gain confessions, for example, believing that most wrongdoers would not voluntarily share information that would place them at risk of punishment. But they knew that confessions obtained under torture were often unreliable, and they required officials to obtain statements afterward from the suspect confirming what he or she had said under intense duress. The Roman emperors found torture effective in achieving the desired goals. In later centuries, writes the historian Lu Ann Homza, “the use of torture for the purpose of interrogation also became more widespread… especially in cases of treason.”3 Torture became a customary tool of law enforcement in Spain, too: victims were forced to experience the sensation of drowning by having water poured into their mouths, or were dangled from overhead beams to dislocate their shoulders.
Over the years, a number of kings and popes had called for Inquisitions against various kinds of heresies, and burning heretics at the stake was the traditional punishment. Joan of Arc, for example, had been convicted of breaking church rules by wearing men’s clothing and was burned at the stake. The nine former Christians found in Granada at the Reconquest who had converted to Islam were deemed apostates and were sentenced to death.
The biggest single previous Inquisition had involved the Cathars, a Christian religious splinter group that spread in western Europe between the 1100s and 1300s. They deviated from church orthodoxy by permitting women to be religious leaders, criticizing the moral corruption of the Vatican and clerical hierarchy, and following a special diet that made them very thin. They said their beliefs made them special; they called themselves “Perfects.” In 1234 Pope Innocent III authorized an Inquisition to suppress them and kill those who would not renounce their beliefs. On a single day in March 1244, about two hundred Cathars were burned on a funeral pyre in France. Those who were not willing to die for their unorthodox beliefs pretended to have seen the errors of their ways and went underground.
In those days, there was no presumption of innocence for people accused of crimes; they were simply assumed to be guilty. Under the Inquisition, people who were accused of practicing unorthodox customs but who admitted their sins and confessed were forgiven but were still punished in some way: they were made to wear a pointed hat or a special shirt, or were forced to walk barefoot or naked, or were made to do some other kind of penance. Those who returned to their previous errors received the death penalty.
Under the inquisitorial system, informants were encouraged to come forward and anonymously identify people whose seemingly innocent habits might reflect an insincere commitment to Christianity—things such as avoiding pork, wearing clean clothes on theJewish Sabbath, or lighting candles on Jewish holidays. Large numbers of people, it turned out, were willing to anonymously finger their friends, employers, and associates. The ability to denounce people without incurring personal risk brought out the worst in the human character.
On the basis of such testimony, people were hauled into jail and sometimes tortured until they confessed. If they confessed wholeheartedly, they might escape death and be given limited punishment. But if they relapsed or if their heresies were viewed as persistent, church officials would “relax,” or turn them over, to government officials, who would perform the executions.
How did a ferocious outbreak of such injustice erupt in Spain? Answers to this complex and paradoxical question go back to the origins of Christianity. Jesus, the preacher whose teachings are the foundation of Christianity, was born a Jew. He was killed by Roman officials in Judea with the acquiescence of Jewish leaders, who may have feared that his unconventional proselytizing would cause them political problems with the Roman overlords, and who may have seen it as a challenge to their own authority as well. There is only limited secular history on these events, but they are a core article of faith for Christians.
Jews of the first century had had good reason to be concerned about the Romans and their methods for maintaining order, for within a few decades of Jesus’s death, they were forced from their homes in Judea as a result of another rebellion. Some moved toHispania, an important part of the Roman Empire, where other Jews had already made their homes. By Isabella’s day, some Jewish families had been living on the Iberian peninsula for more than fifteen hundred years.
The Hebrew historian and financier Isaac Abravanel, one of Iberia’s most influential Jews at the time of the Inquisition, wrote that his family had lived in Seville during the time of the Second Temple in Israel.4 More Jews came after the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70. In the period after the “flames had reduced the beautiful Jerusalem to ashes,” writes one scholar, some Jews went to Babylon, and some to Egypt, but “the families of greatest consideration were brought to Spain, among whom were the remnants of Benjamin and Judah, descendants of the house of David.”5 In fact, the word don as an honorific may have originated in the Hebrew word adon, meaning “lord or master,” although others say the word originated from the Latin dominus.
Displaced Jews prospered in Spain under the Roman Empire, and some became great scholars across many fields of inquiry—philosophy, medicine, literature, astronomy, and science. When the Roman Empire disintegrated, they experienced a period of oppression during the Visigothic era but were not forced from their centuries-old home. Their alliance with the Muslims allowed them to maintain comfortable lives, and they experienced a cultural zenith in sophisticated Córdoba about A.D. 1000. Many became Arabic speakers and grew comfortable with Arab customs. The close association of Jews with Arabs, however, made them suspect in Christian eyes, because there was still a cultural memory among Spanish Catholics that Jews had aided the Muslims in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula.
During the centuries of Islamic dominance, Jews were forced to essentially buy tolerance from the Muslims by paying special taxes and by submitting to regulations directed against them. Their lives were not entirely serene because of periodic surges in Islamicfanaticism. In December 1068, for example, a Muslim mob killed some fifteen hundred Jewish families in Granada.6 They also suffered periodic persecutions at the hands of Christians, who were gradually recovering the peninsula from the Muslims. Jews frequently found themselves caught between warring bands from these two faiths and survived by adapting themselves as best they could.
During these centuries, the Spanish royal family generally saw itself as holding a legal and moral obligation to act as protectors of the Jews. It was difficult to do this consistently in the face of ancient hatreds. In 1391, about sixty years before Isabella was born, a rising tide of Christian fanaticism directed itself against Jews. Anti-Semitic preachers roamed the kingdom, delivering fiery speeches about the death of Jesus, warning of the dangers of Judaism, and urging the rabble to attack Jews and destroy synagogues. Many people were killed, many thousands of Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity, and temples were converted into churches. The epicenter of this violence was Seville; thereafter Seville became the home of many Jews who had embraced Christianity for survival. Other Jewish families, like the Abravanels, moved to Portugal to escape the oppression.7 Others migrated to Granada or North Africa. Many families splintered: some accepted baptism, while others courageously clung to their Jewish faith. Another spasm of intense proselytizing led to mass conversions of Jews to Christianity in 1411.
These episodes of anti-Jewish fanaticism usually occurred at times when the central government was weak. The persecutions of 1391, for example, broke out the year after eleven-year-old Henry III, known as Henry the Sick or Henry the Feeble, became king. He attempted to punish people who had abused Jews, but he also bent to political pressure and permitted new restrictions to be imposed on Jews. By the time Isabella took the throne, the total number of Jews in Spain had fallen to about eighty thousand, in a population of about six million Christians.
People who had been forced to convert to Christianity, both in 1391 and 1411, were given the right to renounce vows taken under duress, and once the danger was past, they could have reverted to Judaism without further persecution. But for a variety of reasons, some chose to retain their new affiliation with Christianity. Some had wholeheartedly converted. Others saw that converting opened up jobs and opportunities that had been closed to them as non-Christians. This latter group converted as a matter of convenience. The end result was that during Isabella’s lifetime, there were many elderly people who had practiced Judaism in their own childhoods but had changed religions. These people, and their children, were known as conversos. There were tens of thousands of them, and many lived between two worlds.
After 1390 many conversos moved into lucrative and influential jobs in the government. Their success, both financially and professionally, stirred jealousy among longtime Christians, who faced new competition for positions that had once been granted almost as a matter of inheritance, from Christian father to Christian son.
Conversos also entered the religious hierarchy of the church, becoming priests and bishops. It was understandably an issue of concern if people who did not hold sincere Christian beliefs were placed in positions of providing pastoral care to Christians. In Castile during Isabella’s lifetime, at least four bishops were conversos, and according to the Inquisition historian Henry Kamen, so was Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, who represented Spaniards at the Vatican.8
Certainly anti-Semitism was at work among some proponents of the Inquisition. However, the situation in Spain was more subtle and complicated than the blatant bigotry found in northern and eastern Europe. Relations between Christians and Jews had usually been better in Castile than elsewhere on the continent. Jews had been expelled from England in 1296 and from France in 1394, but this had not happened in Iberia, and many of the refugees from those countries had settled there. Jews and Christians in Iberia had been tied together with bonds of affin-ity and proximity for centuries.
There does not appear to be any evidence that Isabella was anti-Semitic. She had close and friendly relationships with a number of practicing Jews. One was Castile’s most prominent rabbi, Abraham Senior, from Segovia, a longtime supporter of the queen. In addition, Isaac Abravanel, whose family had been in Iberia for more than one thousand years, served as financial adviser to the queen and to her Portuguese cousins. Their families had worked together for years. Abravanel had been forced to flee Portugal when King João began persecuting Isabella’s relatives there after the war over the Castilian succession, so Abravanel relocated back to Castile with trusted references. For the same reasons, Isabella’s own cousins fled to Castile at the same time. By 1491, Abravanel was the queen’s personal financial representative.9
The queen also relied personally on a number of people of Jewish descent. She surrounded herself with conversos. Her confessor, Hernán de Talavera, was a converso. The man she hired to write the history of her reign, the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar, was a converso. And she immortalized Andrés de Cabrera, the treasurer of Segovia, with a stone carving celebrating his help in securing her kingdom.
And there was likely Jewish blood closer to home as well. Spanish Jews believed that Isabella’s husband, Ferdinand, was a converso through his mother. According to Rabbi Eliyahu Capsali, who spoke to a number of Sephardic Jews who fled Spain, they believed that Ferdinand’s Castilian great-grandfather, Fadrique Enríquez, had fallen in love with a beautiful young Jewish matron named Paloma, with whom he had an affair and who became pregnant. The son they produced together was so admirable that he was taken into Enríquez’s home from his boyhood and raised among the other Enríquez children. This boy became the admiral of Castile, one of the highest-ranking nobles, and the father of Juana Enríquez, who married King Juan of Aragon.10
But by the time Isabella became queen, conversos had become unpopular, and simmering animosities were erupting between them and longtime Christians. There had been pressure for decades for some sort of ecclesiastical investigation into whether some conversos were actually Christians or were practicing a subterfuge that allowed them to hold lucrative positions historically restricted to Christians. Isabella’s brother Enrique at one point had requested permission from the pope for his own Inquisition but did not pursue the matter. Later, as Isabella was doing all she could to mobilize a united front against Granada, the issue reached the boiling point.
The man who most scholars believe instigated the Inquisition was a priest known as Alonso de Hojeda, the prior of the Dominicans in Seville and a man with a public reputation for holiness. He had come to believe that many people who had converted had done so dishonestly. When Isabella settled in Seville in 1477–78, Alonso de Hojeda pressed her hard with reports of insincere conversions in the local community. She was not from Seville, so she might have been inclined to listen to him as someone who knew the local community better than she did.
Not everyone agreed with the need for the Inquisition. In fact, Isabella’s confessor and closest religious adviser, Hernán de Talavera, was “opposed to the founding of the Inquisition.”11 Her converso chronicler, Pulgar, also objected to it, saying it would unfairly penalize people in Andalusia whose only error was that they had not been properly schooled in Christian theology. “I believe my lord,” Pulgar wrote in 1481 in an open letter of protest to Cardinal Mendoza,
that there are some there who sin because they are bad, but the others, who are the majority, sin because they follow the example of those who are bad, whereas they would follow the example of the good Christians if there were any of them there. But since the Old Christians there are such bad Christians, so the New Christians are such good Jews. I am certain, my lord, that there are ten thousand young girls between ten and twenty years of age in Andalusia, who from the time they were born have never left their homes or heard of or learned any [religious] doctrines save that which they have observed of their parents indoors. To burn all these people would be a very cruel thing.12
But soon anonymous reports began questioning Pulgar’s own religious sentiments and loyalty to the crown, causing him to retreat from public discussions of the issue. He believed, however, that Isabella’s intentions had been understandable when she established the Inquisition—or at least that was what he said at the time.13
Without question, Isabella was feverently religious herself and spent many hours in prayer at her private altar seeking to divine God’s purpose for her life, obsessively attending mass, even living inside a suite of rooms positioned above the choir at the Cathedral in Toledo when she was visiting Castile’s spiritual center. When she wasn’t at worship, another favorite pastime was embroidering altarcloths to be used in churches in her kingdom and in Jerusalem. When she sought a break from the rigors of court life, she retreated to the monastery at Guadalupe, which she called her “paradise.”
Her religiosity had a dark side. She feared unknown and dangerous things in the spiritual realm. It’s no coincidence that she commissioned the large family portrait that showed her sheltering under the arms of the Virgin Mary while menacing demons danced above their heads.
At the time the converso question erupted, the queen was especially vulnerable to the arguments of churchmen. Her daughter Isabel was seven years old, and Queen Isabella had been unable to produce another child. She was under intense social and political pressure to conceive and give birth to a male heir who could inherit the thrones of both Castile and Aragon and permanently unite the two realms. She had become concerned that her infertility might be a sign of God’s disfavor, and she was open to suggestions on what she might do to restore herself in the eyes of heaven.
In addition, news accounts of invasions by the Ottoman Turks frequently contained credible and factual reports that the Turks had been assisted by insincere converts to Christianity who gave them material assistance—maps, advice, and inside information—that allowed them to conquer Christian communities. Certainly a number of such incidents occurred during the reconquest of Granada. Moreover, some Jews in Christian Europe were secretly cheering the successes of the Ottoman Empire, as part of a messianic belief that the fall of Christendom “was preliminary to the deliverance of the Jews” and was spurring the “advent of the messiah.”14 Rabbi Capsali, in Crete, clearly articulated such a belief in his Seder Eliyahu Zuta, which portrayed Mehmed the Conquerer as a hero who was cruel only to the wicked.15
An obsessive concern with religious treachery was developing across Europe.
The controversy over conversos came to a head in the late 1470s, just as Isabella was engaged in an aggressive law-and-order campaign. She was headed toward Seville, arguably the kingdom’s most important city and a hub of international commerce, for her first visit. It was in disarray and disunited, and she was trying to prove that central government authority could reduce anarchy. On her way south, in the medieval town of Cáceres, for example, she paused long enough to make a personal effort to reestablish justice and peace, punishing criminals and setting things right. The rule of law was reestablished and everyone in the town was left “very content,” Pulgar wrote. She did this while she simultaneously engaged in an inspection tour of the kingdom’s frontier defenses, making a side trip to Badajoz on the Portuguese border.
When Isabella got to Seville, she found it in a state of chaos, with “scandals and dissensions and wars,” in Pulgar’s words, that had left many dead or injured.16 She immediately initiated a replay of the pattern that had won her the support and adoration of her people elsewhere—she set out to restore justice.
Each Friday she held a public audience in the Alcázar for people to bring their grievances and complaints about events that had occurred. She sat in a great room in a high chair covered with cloth of gold, her courtiers and legal advisers surrounding her and helping her ascertain the facts in each case. Then she would issue a judgment. Criminals were sentenced, many receiving the death penalty; victims received prompt recompense. Within two months she had accomplished much; street crimes and robberies had largely disappeared. Seeing her seriousness of purpose, many criminals and those accused of wrongdoing fled Seville. “And because of the justice she had brought forth,” Pulgar wrote, “she was very loved by the good people, and feared by the bad.”17
But her methods, while effective and perhaps necessary, were also harsh and arbitrary. Eventually the residents of Seville began to feel terrorized. Don Alonso de Solís, bishop of Cádiz, pleaded with her to show more mercy to miscreants, urging that God valued those with “humility of heart” who showed mercy.18
The queen relented. “Seeing the multitudes of those men and women tribulated by the fear of justice, moved to compassion by their tears and moans,” she decided she would issue a general pardon for ordinary crimes.19 The word spread, and soon more than four thousand people came home to the Seville area. Isabella’s fierce justice had been roundly applauded.
It wasn’t a great step to expand this kind of inquiry to the religious realm. Soon Hojeda had more supporters for his quest to start an Inquisition. One enthusiast was Friar Filippo de’ Barberi, the Sicilian inquisitor, who had recently arrived in Castile. He was seeking to confirm an ancient decree, from 1223, that permitted an Inquisition in Sicily to drive out heresy; it also permitted one-third of the possessions of any heretics to become property of the Inquisition. The papal legate Niccolò Franco, bishop of Treviso, shared these views, and soon all three were importuning Isabella for action.20
Then they found another ready ear in King Ferdinand. An Inquisition, once established, promised to be a useful mechanism for rooting out all kinds of dissent and also for collecting money from people accused of heresy—money that could be diverted for other purposes. The king soon joined the chorus. He already had picked out just the right man for the job of running the Inquisition—his longtime confessor, the rigid and ascetic Tomás de Torquemada, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada’s nephew.
“To Ferdinand it is probable that the suggestion was not without allurement,” writes the historian Rafael Sabatini,
since it must have offered him a way at once to gratify the piety that was his, and—out of the confiscations that must ensue from the prosecution of so very wealthy a section of the community—to replenish the almost exhausted coffers of the treasury. When the way of conscience is also the way of profit, there is little difficulty in following it. But after all, though joint sovereign of Spain and paramount in Aragon, Ferdinand had not in Castile the power of Isabella. It was her kingdom when all was said, and although his position there was by no means that of a simple prince-consort, yet he was bound by law and by policy to remain submissive to her will. In view of her attitude, he could do little more than add his own to the persuasions of the three priestly advocates, and amongst them they so pressed Isabella that she gave way to the extent of a compromise.21
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 betraying 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, initially 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
Juan’s father, Diego Arias Dávila, and his mother, Elvira, had consequently prospered: Diego became treasurer under King Enrique. But rumors circulated that the family had only pretended to convert, in order to gain financial advantage, and that they privately practiced Judaism and ridiculed Christianity. The whispering about the family grew louder when Diego and Elvira’s son Juan joined the priesthood and then became bishop of Segovia at twenty-four.
Years after the deaths of Juan’s parents, the inquisitors came, and the questions became more pointed. The bishop of Segovia protested about the Inquisition, then took his complaints directly to the pope at the Vatican; he first took the precaution of digging up the bones of his relatives, including his parents, and transporting them with him to Rome. Some people thought he was appropriately protesting the Inquisition’s heavy-handed techniques, and others thought his actions were proof of his own family’s deceitfulness. The bishop of Segovia never came home to Spain and ended up dying in Rome in 1497.
Back in Castile, a prolonged investigation was under way into his family’s activities. According to the historian David Martin Gitlitz, “scores of witnesses testified about the family from 1486 to 1490,” reporting that during the years when the Diego Arias Dávila family had been pretending to be Christian, they had in fact kept the Jewish Sabbath, observed major festivals, set a kosher table, supported the synagogue, and avoided going to church. Moreover, Juan’s father had “frequently disparaged the trappings of Christianity, particularly the saints.”38 This testimony, naturally enough, raised questions about the religious sincerity of his son, the bishop of Segovia.
One particular scandal at the heart of Catholicism in Spain likely contributed to the growing sense that the church itself was being undermined by nonbelievers. The single most important pilgrimage location in Spain, after Santiago de Compostela, was the shrineof Guadalupe, the site that was also the most sacred to Queen Isabella, who visited it almost annually.
The spiritual focus was a dark-complected statue of the Virgin Mary, which legend said had been carved by Saint Luke, and that was buried to keep it out of the hands of the Muslims after the invasion of 711. Once Christians succeeded in winning back the territory, the statue was rediscovered as a result of a vision by a local peasant, who told priests where to go to dig it up. A popular shrine sprang up at the site.
The statue was an object of veneration to the faithful, who associated it with a number of miracles, including helping Christian slaves escape Muslim captors. Spanish Catholics from all over the peninsula made the difficult journey to Guadalupe to pray or seek penance, confess their sins, and receive absolution from a small clerical community of about 130 friars who lived there.
Guadalupe was the holiest shrine in the holiest diocese of Spain, under the ecclesiastical control of Toledo. That was the spiritual seat of the most powerful prelate in Spain, the archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Mendoza, Isabella’s close friend and adviser.
All these valuable associations brought wealth to the shrine, and allowed the friars living there to reside in comfortable affluence and devote themselves to scholarly works and artistic endeavors such as illuminating manuscripts. They ate well, and there was hot and cold running water at the priory.
The town also feasted on spiritual tourism, with restaurants, hotels, and merchants prospering by selling goods and services to the hordes of pilgrims who arrived each year. About 10 percent of the local population was converso, according to scholar Gretchen Starr-LeBeau.39
Once the Inquisition got rolling, reports began circulating that converso priests at Guadalupe were favoring converso businessmen in town, dispensing advice about how to retain Jewish customs, encouraging them to maintain the kosher dietary laws, and finding ways to trick Christians into thinking they shared their beliefs. King Ferdinand visited Guadalupe in September 1483, according to Starr-LeBeau, and soon both community residents and the shrine’s friars were under investigation.
Some converso families fled from Guadalupe. One large, extended family moved to Muslim-controlled Málaga, which was at war with Castile, and began living openly as Jews.
In 1485, seventy-one of the townsfolk of Guadalupe were found guilty of Judaizing and burned at the stake in autos-de-fé, and another forty-five were found guilty posthumously or in absentia, writes Starr-LeBeau. Other conversos were exiled from the town.40
A super-secret council of the Inquisition then met to probe claims that the priests at Guadalupe were also heretics, Starr-LeBeau reports, and soon credible evidence emerged that the allegations were true. One converso, Friar Diego de Marchena, for example, a confessor, was reported by several witnesses to have given specific guidance on how to avoid Christian rituals, such as eliminating meat from the diet during Lent. He told his fellow friars that they could avoid detection by eating boiled rather than roasted chicken on Good Friday, so that no one would know. He also publicly questioned whether the Virgin Mary was in fact a virgin, something that was an article of faith to Spain’s pious Catholics, and told people he had never been baptized.
Witnesses said another converso cleric, Prior Gonzalo de Madrid, pretended to be vomiting on his deathbed so he did not have to take a communion wafer when he received extreme unction at his death. Friar Luis de Madrid, a converso, had talked openly in the priory saying that he knew of two converso friars who were refusing to consecrate the host during holy communion, but he refused to say who they were. Three friars were found to be circumcised. Several more were reported to have feigned illness to avoid attending mass or singing in the choir.
Ultimately, 21 friars of 130 employed at the holiest site in the center of Spain were censured for their purported Jewish activities. One was jailed for life, and Diego de Marchena was burned at the stake, according to Starr-LeBeau.41
The Catholic Church in Spain attempted to keep the scandal under wraps by concealing the documentation they had gathered about the activities of the converso friars inside the monastery. But some of the documents were never destroyed and were analyzed at length by Starr-LeBeau for her 2003 book, In the Shadow of the Virgin.
What had happened was widely known in Spain, however, and fueled speculation about which other religious orders might be similar magnets for nonbelievers.
Queen Isabella, meanwhile, was most assuredly aware of the situation in Guadalupe, for she ordered that 1 million maravedis in moneys seized from conversos in that town should be used to build a hospital for pilgrims. She then contributed the same amount herself to pay the remainder of the costs of construction.
Even those Spanish conversos who were devout Christians sometimes aggravated the tensions within the community by holding themselves apart or viewing themselves as superior. The concept of lineage loomed large in their minds, as it did in the minds of the longtime Christians. In Barcelona and Valencia, they worshiped as a group within former synagogues that had been converted to churches. Some claimed direct lineage from Jesus’s family. Alonso de Cartagena, the bishop of Burgos and son of Rabbi Selomah haLevi, who became Paul of Burgos after he converted, was said to have recited the Hail Mary in this manner: “Holy Mary, Mother of God and my blood-relative, pray for us.” In Aragon, they called themselves “Christians of Israel.”42
“These converso attitudes were probably created by self-defensiveness rather than arrogance,” writes Henry Kamen, a noted historian of the Inquisition. “But they contributed to the wall of distrust between Old and New Christians. In particular, the idea of a converso nation, which rooted itself irrevocably in the mind of Jewish Christians, made them appear as a separate, alien and enemy entity. This had fateful consequences.”43
In the end the conversos found themselves without sincere friends in either the Jewish or the Christian community, at a time when Castile and Aragon were plunging into war. By now, suspicion had been aroused almost everywhere. In the 1440s, writes Netanyahu, only “a minority” of conversos had been viewed as possibly heretical, but in the next few decades public opinion among Old Christians shifted to the point where they viewed their suspicions as “certainties about the overwhelming majority.”44
Whatever the underlying reality, the conduct of the Spanish Inquisition was extraordinarily un-Christian, fierce, and hateful. It was at odds with another strong principle in Spanish thought, once articulated by Isabella’s older brother Enrique, that forgiveness was an essential hallmark of Christianity. Once pressed to punish a nobleman who had repeatedly betrayed him, Enrique had the man brought into his presence and released him, saying that forgiveness was a key tenet of his faith. “I pardon you,” Enrique said, “so that God may pardon my soul when my time comes to part with this life.”45
In that case, King Enrique showed forgiveness to someone who had actually done wrong. But now Isabella unleashed cruelty on people who had done little or no harm. She must have been conflicted about it herself, for she permitted people close to her to raise far-reaching questions about the justice and morality of the Inquisition, though she expressed no doubts herself. She permitted her chronicler Pulgar to write, in a court-financed publication, that the “ecclesiastical Inquisitors and the secular executors behaved cruelly and showed great enmity, not only toward those they punished and tormented, but also toward all [New Christians].”46
It is unlikely that the unprincipled Ferdinand would have found in any of this much of a moral dilemma. In fact, the historian Benzion Netanyahu believed that Ferdinand was “the real architect of the Inquisition.”47 Ferdinand, he wrote,
sought to appear ethical and religious; for he accurately assessed the crucial part played by ethics and religion in human affairs. Instead of openly defying morality, he sought to employ it for his own ends. He knew how to evaluate mass feelings as a factor in social life, and used the force of popular passions… as steam to move his ship of state. Thus he harnessed the hatred of the conversos and the laws of the Church concerning heresy to advance his political interests, all the while trying to appear as Holy Mother Church’s true son, whose eagerness to guard religious law even exceeded his desire to guard the civil one.… Accordingly he refrained from formally inquiring into the Inquisition’s judicial proceedings, so as to avoid responsibility for its verdicts and prevent anyone from disputing his claim that he had full confidence in the Inquisitors’ judgments. But he often intervened in the gathering and division of the Inquisition’s spoils.48
What then about Queen Isabella, who in many other aspects of her life was described as humane and a student of the life and teachings of Christ? How could she justify this cruelty, these murders?
The short answer is that Isabella was a complex personality, in which diverging elements were all present. While she was beneficent in many ways, she also seems to have had an unforgiving streak that made her harsh, punitive, and unbending in punishing people she saw as evildoers and in seeking to accomplish her goals. Perhaps she rationalized that the Inquisition was a means to a worthy and justifying end, that she needed wholehearted support from the Old Christians of Andalusia, particularly those of Seville andCórdoba, to win the war with Granada, and that these people were deeply antagonistic to the conversos. Perhaps she believed that her whole way of life was at risk and that only the most ruthless tactics would permit survival for Christian Spain against the Turks. Or she might have been motivated by a sincere, if misguided, concern for the spiritual well-being of her subjects. For the zealous of each faith, only their own specific practice holds the keys to the universe. In any case, Isabella was entirely able to rationalize establishing and supporting the Inquisition. Successful rulers are usually willing to sacrifice others in pursuit of something they see as a greater good. For Isabella, wrote Netanyahu, “safe control of Andalusia obviously depended on finding a way to reduce the unrest.”49
After the war against Granada was over, however, her attitude did not change. If anything, the targets of her rigor expanded. In March 1492, after secret deliberations, she and Ferdinand ordered the Jews—who had previously been spared the brunt of theInquisition—to convert to Christianity immediately or be expelled. They had decided that the presence of Jews in Spain was tempting conversos to abandon their Christian faith, thereby risking their salvation. When Jews came to her to plead their case, she told them that the decision had come to Ferdinand in a dream and was God’s will. “Do you believe that this comes upon you from us?” she told the Jewish representatives begging her to change her mind. “The Lord hath put this thing into the heart of the King.” Pressed further, she refused to make a protest to her husband. “The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord, as the rivers of water,” she told them. “He turns it whithersoever He will.”50 And from this point, Isabella’s Jewish subjects knew that the matter was set in stone.
This new, hardened position had been foreshadowed by a provision in the surrender treaty between Castile and the Muslims. It said that Jews in the conquered lands who did not convert to Christianity within three years would have to move to North Africa. But amid the excitement of ending the long war, this provision had gone unnoticed.
So the majority of Jews were shocked, even dumbfounded, when the order was announced. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had not signaled in any way that they were angry at Jews. They had shown them respect and friendship. Ferdinand was believed to be of Jewish descent himself. Isaac Abravanel, a trusted counselor and financial adviser to Isabella and her family for much of his adult life, later said he could hardly believe his ears. “I was at court when the royal decree was announced,” he recalled. “I wearied myself to distraction in imploring compassion. Thrice on my knees I besought the king: ‘Regard us, O king, use not thy subjects so cruelly. Why do thus to thy servants? Rather exact from us our gold and silver, even all the house of Israel possess, if he may remain in his country.’ ”
The offer of a large bribe, not surprisingly, intrigued Ferdinand and he visibly hesitated, pondering it. But his confessor, Tomás de Torquemada, physically recoiled and, gesticulating angrily, he accused Ferdinand of being tempted into betrayal of his faith for thirty pieces of silver, the reward Judas was believed to have received for delivering his friend Jesus into the hands of the Romans for execution. Ferdinand decided not to relent. Abravanel then begged his friends to intervene to block the edict,
but as the adder closes its ears with dust against the voice of the charmer, so the king hardened his heart against the entreaties of his suppliants, and declared he would not revoke the edict for all the wealth of the Jews. The queen at his right hand opposed it, and urged him to continue what he had begun. We exhausted all our power for the repeal of the king’s sentence; but there was neither wisdom nor help remaining. Wherever the evil decree was proclaimed, or the report of it had spread, our nation bewailed their condition with great lamentations; for there had never been such a banishment since Judah had been driven from his land.51
Some, like Isabella’s childhood ally Rabbi Abraham Senior, reluctantly decided to convert. He was baptized at the monastery of Guadalupe with the queen beaming at his elbow. “Thousands and tens of thousands” also regretfully accepted baptism.52
Others departed, knowing that the risks of the road were so great that some of their family members would not survive. Don Isaac Abravanel exhorted and encouraged people to keep firm to Jewish law, even at the risk of life and property. His faith was paramount to him. He and his family fled to Naples and later to Venice. Others went to Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, or elsewhere in Europe.
Chroniclers said the Jewish exodus from Spain was a pitiable sight. “Within the term fixed by the edict the Jews sold and disposed of their property for a mere nothing; they went about begging Christians to buy, but found no purchasers; fine houses and estates were sold for trifles; a house was exchanged for an ass; and a vineyard given for a little cloth or linen,” the Castilian chronicler Andrés Bernáldez wrote.
Although prohibited carrying away gold and silver, they secretly took large quantities in their saddles, and in the halters and harness of their loaded beasts. Some swallowed as many as thirty ducats to avoid the rigorous search made at the frontier towns and seaports, by the officers appointed for the purpose. The rich Jews defrayed the expenses of the departure of the poor, practicing toward each other the greatest charity, so that except very few of the most necessitous, they would not become converts. In the first week of July they took the route for quitting their native land, great and small, old and young; on foot, on horses, asses, and in carts; each continuing his journey to his destined port. They experienced great trouble and suffered indescribable misfortunes on the roads and country they traveled; some falling, others rising; some dying, others coming into the world; some fainting, others being attacked with illness; that there was not a Christian but what felt for them and persuaded them to be baptized. Some from misery were converted; but they were very few. The rabbis encouraged them, and made the young people and women sing, and play on pipes and tabors to enliven them, and keep up their spirits.53
The Jews of Segovia spent their last three days in the cemetery “watering with their tears the ashes of their fathers; their lamentations excited the pity of all who heard them.”54 Many left carrying little more than precious Hebrew manuscripts they removed from the synagogues before departing.
The first to leave were a large group of Jewish families who had been living in Granada, and others followed soon after. They made their way to ports, where Ferdinand had arranged for ships to transport them. Some drowned at sea or narrowly survived shipwrecks. Some died of exposure to cold. Many fell ill. They were attacked by robbers, who stole their possessions, even their clothing, and sold them into slavery. Some were dumped on distant shores. One group traveled to Fez, which was suffering a drought, and they were turned away. They were forced to pitch camp in an arid plain and soon began starving to death themselves. Reports that they had swallowed gold to smuggle it out of Spain circulated widely; Muslims in Africa “murdered a number, and then ripped them open to search for it.”55
The exiled Jews found a mixed reception in Christian lands. Many went to Portugal, where they were given admission for a limited time, as long as they paid a hefty entry tax. In Genoa, they were greeted by priests carrying bread in one hand and crucifixes in the other; conversion was the price to be paid for the relief of their hunger.56 The notorious Pope Alexander VI, reviled by so many other people, was kinder and granted them asylum and protection in the Papal States.
The Spanish Inquisition was vicious and tragic. But from Isabella’s perspective, it unified Spain and allowed it to quell internal religious dissension and look outward. It was one of the largest and, from Isabella’s point of view, one of the most successful forced conversions in Spanish history. Eliminating outsiders has had its advantages; religious tolerance is not a universal concept. Spain was now on the verge, ready and sufficiently ruthless, of becoming the greatest world power ever known.