God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World Read online

  These days the words “burned at the stake” are thrown around as a rhetorical flourish, the reality lost in a fog of metaphor. “They’d have me burned at the stake,” the right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter writes of her left-wing enemies, “if Cambridge weren’t a ‘smoke-free zone.’” Burning at the stake was the Inquisition’s preferred method of execution, in part because it enjoyed the positive reinforcement of scripture, specifically a verse from the Gospel of John (15:6): “If a man not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”

  The forensic literature devoted to the mechanism of death at the stake is not large. One amateur investigator has made a specialty of Joan of Arc, arguing that her end may have been relatively painless, brought on by heat stroke. It’s a theory. By chance or design, some of those burned were luckier than others. If particular mercy was to be shown, the condemned might be strangled before the pyre was lit. If the prisoner was to burn alive, the end could be quick or slow. In a typical execution, the condemned did not always surmount a woodpile, as many illustrations would have it, but often stood within a cylinder of combustible material piled high all around. When a large group of people—dozens or scores—were bound together as one, and the surrounding fire was large and relatively distant, some might die from smoke inhalation—carbon monoxide poisoning. Given the alternative, this, too, might count as a blessing. The intense heat would take some people before any lick of flame: the simple act of breathing, often reflexively in gulps, could sear the trachea, causing edema and asphyxiation. Asphyxiation might also occur because combustion had exhausted the available oxygen at the core of the blaze.

  On the other hand, if the fire burned slowly, the victim would experience the fullest possible torment, the flames causing catastrophic damage to nerves and tissue. In these instances, death occurred when loss of blood and fluids brought on hypovolemic shock and pulmonary failure. Michael Servetus, a Spaniard who first described the functioning of the pulmonary system, endured a lingering death at the stake. His execution, in 1553, came at the hands not of the Inquisition but of John Calvin, though the technique employed was a common one—the use of green wood, which burned at a moderate pace and thereby extracted the maximum suffering. Sometimes the authorities allowed a bag of gunpowder—saccus pulverarius—to be hung around the waist or neck of the condemned, bringing sudden and definitive closure when the fire reached a certain point.

  The six men and women who died on February 6, 1481, were followed a few days later by three more, and then, over the course of the next two decades, by several thousand. The Inquisition came to Spain quickly and with particular virulence. Like earlier inquisitions, the Spanish one claimed jurisdiction over people who were ostensibly Christians. As noted, its primary targets were converted Jews and Muslims whose sincerity as converts was questioned. Later, after the Reformation, it turned some attention to Protestants, though there were never very many in Spain, and to a variety of specific transgressions, such as the solicitation of sex by clergy in the confessional. Jews had lived on the peninsula since the days of the Roman Empire, and perhaps even earlier. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Jews of Iberia, constituting perhaps 2 percent of the population, were an educated and wealthy class. But a program of persecution and forcible conversion had undermined the Jewish community’s identity, and Jews who had accepted Christianity—New Christians—were regarded by many Old Christians with suspicion as judaizers or “crypto-Jews” who secretly held fast to their faith. Another term used for them was marranos, sometimes said to derive from a Spanish word for swine, though the etymology is not certain. Muslims had likewise been in Spain for many centuries—indeed, had ruled Iberia after overrunning the Visigothic kingdoms there. But as the Christian reconquest advanced, the Muslims, too, were subjected to persecution and forcible conversion. And like the Jewish conversos, the converted Muslims, known as moriscos, came to be regarded with suspicion.

  The pogroms and conversions had begun long before any centralized, official inquisition was put into place. When the Spanish Inquisition was formally established, in 1478, it built on the previous inquisitions in other places. It used the same interrogation methods that the Medieval Inquisition had, and the same manuals, at least at first. It relied on the same established codes of canon law. It employed the same kinds of record-keeping; indeed, the record-keeping was even better. The records are so voluminous that scholars in recent years have been able to compile a vast computerized database—names, dates, charges, trials, punishments. But the Spanish Inquisition also went down new paths. For one thing, as time went on, it attempted to be more systematic about censorship than the Medieval Inquisition had ever been, drawing up lists of books to be kept out of Spain or destroyed if they found their way in. Many other books were expurgated, as censors wielding inkpots took aim at offensive passages.

  The Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C., preserves a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio, from 1632, which was originally in the possession of a Jesuit seminary in Spain. The book bears the official stamp of the Inquisition and reveals the hand of a Spanish censor at work on Henry VIII. The last pages of the play hold flattering passages about Henry’s daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth, Spain’s longtime nemesis, and the censor in heavy ink has crossed out such admiring lines as “Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn.”

  More important, unlike earlier inquisitions, the Spanish Inquisition was bound up not only with religion but with an ideology of ethnicity—the notion of limpieza de sangre, or “purity of blood.” It was about classes of people rather than just categories of belief. And unlike earlier inquisitions, the Spanish Inquisition was a wholly owned subsidiary of the state. Previous inquisitions had of course had their political uses—and they depended upon, and employed, secular power—but the Spanish Inquisition was created by the monarchy and was under the monarchy’s control. In our own age there is no shortage of polities in which religion or ideology is joined to the state in complicit and complicated ways. The Spanish Inquisition represents an early experiment.

  “A Very Busy Year”

  The city of Granada, in southern Spain, never experienced the Inquisition on the scale witnessed by Toledo or Seville, but Granada played a special role in the story nonetheless. Here, on a rugged spur of the Sierra Nevada, stands the Alhambra, the palace of the last Muslim dynasty to rule in Iberia. Walking up the escarpment, among olive trees and cactus, one can understand how the romantic Orientalism of the nineteenth century got its start. Washington Irving, the American minister to Spain in the 1840s, occupied a room in the palace when he wrote his Tales of the Alhambra. Below his window, Moorish gateways breach the ruddy walls.

  The flag of Spain today flies over the Alhambra. So does that of the European Union. And so does the flag of Andalusia, the region of Spain where Muslim rule held on the longest, and one that is again home to growing numbers of Muslims, perhaps half a million, for the most part recent arrivals from North Africa. After decades of local opposition, a new Grand Mosque of Granada has been built in the steep hillside quarter known as the Albaicin. It is one of more than 600 mosques now active in Spain. From its promontory, the Grand Mosque offers a view directly onto the Alhambra, across the wide ravine of the Rio Darro. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups frequently call for the reconquest of Al-Andalus—the ancient Muslim name for Iberia as a whole. Members of the Al Qaeda cell that plotted the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which claimed the lives of some 200 people, were discovered to have kept a safe house in Granada.

  As in other parts of Europe, the Muslim presence in Spain has elicited strong reactions. “They have a grander vision, which is an obsession with the demise of Al-Andalus,” said a member of Spain’s parliament after the train bombings. “We hear this in the sermons of the militant Islamic sheikhs.” In 2007, Spanish bishops turned down a request by Muslims that they be allowed to pray within the precincts of what was once Córdoba’s Gr
eat Mosque, the Mezquita, a sprawling place of worship that Christians took over at the time of the Reconquista, embedding an ornate cathedral in its heart. “Muslims,” the bishops decided, “cannot in any way pray in Córdoba cathedral.” In 2010, the bishop of Córdoba went further, launching a campaign to remove the word “mosque” from signs throughout the city that indicate the way to the “mosque-cathedral.” Seeds from another age continue to sprout.

  Muslim warriors invaded Iberia early in the eighth century, scarcely a century after the emergence of Islam, a continent away. Before long, Islamic forces had surged beyond the peninsula and deep into France, until they were turned back by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, in 732. Had this battle gone differently, Edward Gibbon observed, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and the truth of the revelation of Mohammed.” The Muslims retreated across the Pyrenees, firmly entrenching themselves in what is now Spain. They did not disappear entirely from France, however. The Inquisition register of Jacques Fournier records that an itinerant cobbler from Montaillou, Arnaud Sicre, visited a local Muslim soothsayer on Christmas Day, 1318.

  In its golden age, Islamic Spain was among the most civilized places on the planet—renowned for its scientists and philosophers, artists and architects, poets and musicians. The Muslim scholars of Spain helped restore the writings of antiquity to the Christian world. In the matter of religion, Islamic sultans generally tolerated and protected Jews and Christians. Though he later emigrated, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides was born in Islamic Córdoba (and wrote largely in Arabic). Scholars today disagree on just how cordial this so-called convivencia, or “living together,” actually was. The historian Henry Kamen cautions that whatever the degree of tolerance, the arrangement “was always a relationship between unequals.”

  The convivencia idea is under stress even now, but the modern tourist industry understands that it is good for business. In Córdoba and Seville, you’ll hear the claim made that the Spanish exclamation “Ole!” is a corrupted form of “Allah,” though this is not true. Hawkers on street corners sell T-shirts bearing a trio of symbols—the Crescent, the Cross, and the Star of David—above the words “The secret is in the mixture.” Exaggerations aside, it is generally true that the Muslim sultans behaved better toward Christians and Jews than their Christian successors would behave toward Jews and Muslims. Among other things, they allowed Christians to pray in the very mosque from which Muslim prayer is now prohibited. Passing a newsstand after leaving the Mezquita one day, I saw a photograph of Josef Ratzinger on the cover of the magazine El Semanal. Inside was a quotation from Ratzinger that took up half a page: “Dios tiene un agudo sentido del humor”—“God has a sharp sense of humor.”

  Islamic rule, though fragmented, extended over the bulk of Iberia for centuries, even as Christian warlords, pushing south, chipped away at Muslim territory. It finally came to an end in 1492, when King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile expelled the last sultan and brought all of Spain under a unified Catholic monarchy. The final chapter took place at the Alhambra, in the Hall of the Ambassadors. The room is three stories high, every inch of its walls etched with passages from the Koran. Latticework covers the windows, dappling the interior with sunlight. In this chamber, the sultan capitulated to Ferdinand and Isabella, who promptly moved into his palace. A few months later, at a meeting in the Alhambra, the monarchs told Christopher Columbus to go ahead with the speculative voyage he had been pestering them about (which would be underwritten by a loan from the converso financiers Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez). Not long afterward, in this same room, Ferdinand and Isabella signed the order to expel from Spain all Jews who would not convert to Christianity. I once overheard a guide at the Alhambra capping his account of all this activity with the bright summary “It was a very busy year,” which elicited guarded laughter.

  The original copy of the Edict of Expulsion is held (with other documents) at the Archivo General, a fortress in Simancas, near Valladolid. The parchment has yellowed, and the ink has browned. It begins: “In our land there is no inconsiderable number of judaizing and wicked Christians who have deviated from our Holy Catholic Faith.” It goes on: “We have, therefore, decreed to order all Jews of both sexes to leave the confines of our lands forever.” With a calligraphic flourish in their own hands, Ferdinand and Isabella concluded the edict with the words, “Yo, el Rey,” and “Yo, la Reina”—“I, the King,” and “I, the Queen.”

  Spain was not the first kingdom to expel its Jews. In England, Jews were considered royal property, and it was in England that the anti-Semitic “blood libel”—the false accusation that Jews slaughtered Christian children and used their blood for ritual purposes—seems to have originated. England expelled its Jews in 1290. France followed suit in 1306. But the Jewish population of Spain was by far the largest in Europe. Nor would expulsion stop with the Jews: in 1609, Spain began to expel large numbers of moriscos. (Some of them would be shunned as “Christians” in the Muslim countries to which they fled, and a number were executed as a result.) Expulsion was not a policy invented by Spain, and it has never gone out of use. For more than a century, it was the declared policy of the U.S. government with respect to Native Americans, and a very successful one from Washington’s point of view. Greece and Turkey, by mutual agreement, expelled Turks and Greeks from their respective countries in the 1920s. As a result of the Partition, in 1947, Hindus by the millions were displaced from Pakistan, and Muslims by the millions from India. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were both sparked and fanned by policies of expulsion on all sides—ethnic cleansing, as it was then called. The reality of expulsion is that it is brutally effective and invariably swift. These qualities never lack for champions.

  A number of accounts describe the scene in the Hall of the Ambassadors as the king and queen prepared to promulgate the Edict of Expulsion. The proposition was a simple one: Any Jew who converted to Christianity could stay. (Of course, living in Spain as a converso had its perils; there was the Inquisition to contend with.) Those Jews who did not convert would have to leave. The Jewish leaders Isaac Abravanel and Abraham Senor on three occasions sought to dissuade Ferdinand. “Please, O King, what is it that you want from your subjects?” said Abravenal, according to his own account. “Ask us anything: presents of gold and silver and whatever you want from the house of Israel that we can give to your native land.” The story is told that Abravanel offered the king 300,000 ducats if he would reverse his decision. Tomás de Torquemada, the powerful inquisitor general, got wind of the offer and angrily confronted Ferdinand and Isabella at the Alhambra, holding a crucifix before them and saying, “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Your Highness would sell him anew for three hundred thousand.”

  The exodus from Spain began. Abravenal managed to wring a single concession: the expulsion would be delayed until August 2, which in 1492 coincided with the ninth of Av in the Jewish calendar—a day that marks the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Ferdinand and Isabella were unaware of the symbolism.

  It is impossible to get an accurate fix on the number of Jews who refused to be baptized and were forced to leave Spain—estimates run to more than 100,000, at the high end, and to as low as 40,000. Certainly the trauma was immense. Most went to Portugal, which accepted them for the time being, though its own ferocious inquisition was not far away, and Jews living there would have to move on once more. Others fled north to the kingdom of Navarre, in the elbow of southwestern Europe, where the Pyrenees meet the Atlantic. The rest found their way primarily to North Africa and Italy. In time, large numbers would settle within the empire of the Ottomans. Many would also venture to Iberia’s overseas colonies in Asia and America. One converso wrote to a Jewish friend who was embarking: “Do not grieve over your departure, for you have to drink down your death in one gulp, whereas we have to stay behind among these wicked peopl
e, receiving death from them every day.”

  Poisoned Hearts

  There had been inquisitions, on the medieval model, in parts of Spain during the previous two centuries. These were intermittent and mainly desultory affairs, and organizationally similar to the inquisitions in southern France and elsewhere in Europe—that is, highly decentralized. The Spanish Inquisition, as brought to life by Ferdinand and Isabella, would be different. There is no simple way to describe the society out of which it grew.

  Romantic notions of convivencia may touch on something that once was true, but they also hide the bitter reality of divisions within divisions in a land both troubled and poor. Power was dispersed among competing jurisdictions and fractious rulers, even as the frontiers of faith shifted over time. Religious distinctions were deeply important, but distinctions based on class and status cut across them, and religious communities were themselves divided. The occasional tactical expulsion of one group or another—Christians from Muslim territories, Jews and Muslims from Christian territories—created a social regime of displaced loyalties and burning resentments.

  “Religious distinctions,” “class and status,” “tactical expulsions,” “burning resentments”—the terms are bloodless in their abstraction, the abstraction further bleached of passion by the remove of half a millennium. Perhaps some perspective on the dynamic at play—how easily animosities can be stirred—may be gained from looking at a happier place: a society that is not poor but rich, one that guarantees religious freedom and individual equality in its Constitution, and one whose national mythology is pretty well summed up in those T-shirts from Córdoba: “The secret is in the mixture.”