God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (15 page)

Under Sail

In August 1492, at the port of Palos de la Frontera, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, Christopher Columbus prepared to embark on his voyage west across the ocean. As noted, his expedition had been financed by
conversos.
There were
conversos
among his crew. From his caravel he watched as Jewish refugees on other ships—those who had refused to be baptized—took leave of their country. He described the scene in his log as a “fleet of misery and woe.”

As Columbus set sail, the Inquisition in Spain was at a peak of severity. Statistics on most aspects of the Inquisition are contested, but a widely accepted estimate for the number of people put to death in the Spanish Inquisition’s first two decades is 2,000, with the total rising to about 12,000 during the full course of its history. The corresponding total for Portugal, whose inquisition began somewhat later, is about 3,000. To put this in perspective, in 1450, the combined population of Spain and Portugal was only about 7 million. The pool of potential victims was smaller, given that only a few specific groups constituted the chief targets of the Inquisition.

But focusing on executions does not convey the extent of the Inquisition’s penetration. Francisco Bethencourt, trying to get a handle on the number of people who were drawn, one way or another, into inquisitorial procedures in Iberia over the institution’s lifetime— not just those actually hauled before a tribunal but all those who were denounced, along with informers and witnesses—puts the overall number at 1.5 million. Perhaps 300,000 of those people stood trial.

Those are the figures for Iberia. But the Inquisition was not confined to the peninsula. The Medieval Inquisition had been primarily a localized affair. The Spanish, like the Portuguese, traveled vast distances and planted inquisitions all around the world. Columbus helped open the way.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of the living God.
—
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS,
10:31

I myself hardly ever read a book without feeling
in the mood to give it a good censoring.
—
ROBERT BELLARMINE, CARDINAL-INQUISITOR,
1598

The Emergency

T
HE BASILICA OF
Santa Maria sopra Minerva lies a few paces beyond the Pantheon in Rome, facing a small piazza where a modest Egyptian obelisk rises from the back of a marble elephant, in accordance with a design by Bernini. It’s hard to miss. On the church’s exterior wall, plaques in Latin with pointing fingers indicate how high the Tiber’s floodwaters reached on epochal occasions. “Up to here grew the Tiber,” reads one of them, from 1530, “and Rome would already have been completely flooded, had the Virgin not performed here her swift action.”

Santa Maria sopra Minerva is something of an oddity—the only Gothic church in Rome. Near the altar stands a statue of Christ, sculpted by Michelangelo. Saint Catherine of Siena is buried here. So is the painter Fra Angelico. Like Catherine, he was a Dominican, and Santa Maria was for a long time the order’s headquarters in Rome. The Dominican connection points to an Inquisition connection, and in fact there are many. To begin with, the roof above the nave was built and paid for by Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, the uncle of the inquisitor Tomás.

I asked a Dominican priest if I could visit the adjoining cloister. He took out a set of keys, unlocked a wooden door, and led the way. “Only a dozen of us live here now,” he said. “There used to be hundreds.” The walls and ceilings of the cloister are covered with frescoes. In the open square, cats doze among fallen columns from an ancient building. Palm trees rise high enough above the tiled rooftops to catch a breeze. Here, in 1633, in a second-floor room, Galileo Galilei was made to face an Inquisition tribunal for advancing the view that Earth revolves around the Sun.
When the tribunal’s work was done, Galileo formally abjured his beliefs. Santa Maria has not invested heavily in publicizing this aspect of its story. The basilica’s Web site does not mention it. The literature at the front door is silent. “Pay no attention to 1633,” the church might as well be saying. “But look! Over there! The tomb of Fra Angelico! And look—a Michelangelo!”

Galileo is only the most prominent person to have been caught up in what is now called the Roman Inquisition. The successor to the Medieval Inquisition, and separate from the Spanish Inquisition, it was created at a moment of crisis—an existential emergency for the Church. Its purpose was to blunt the rise of Protestantism and to spearhead the Counter-Reformation, and it was run in a coordinated way directly from Rome. Eventually it would expand the range of its targets—to heretics and freethinkers of various kinds, to magic and superstition, to aspects of science and rationalism. Of course, it always had an eye on the Jews.

The Roman Inquisition was established in 1542, by Pope Paul III. Paul himself was more of a humanist than a prosecutor. He was painted by Raphael when young and by Titian when old. He issued a bull confirming that the Indians of North America were human beings. The true architect of the Roman Inquisition was Giovanni Pietro Carafa, who as a cardinal pressed for its creation, and who in 1555 was elevated to the papacy as Pope Paul IV. In many of its procedures, the Roman Inquisition resembled the medieval one, but it was centralized and bureaucratized as never before. Its inquisitors were not itinerant agents but functionaries of an apparat
.
They answered to a committee of cardinals overseen by an inquisitor general. The Roman Inquisition established permanent offices in cities throughout Italy.

The accomplishments of Paul IV, the sternest of the Inquisition popes, were from his perspective considerable. He created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the Index of Forbidden Books. He sent hundreds of convicted heretics to the stake, placing the idea of due process, as one historian writes, “under an almost unbearable strain.”
He forced the Jews of Rome to wear distinctive clothing and confine themselves to a ghetto. Nor did he neglect the arts. Paul IV discontinued Michelangelo’s pension and ordered that the nude figures in
The Last Judgment,
in the Sistine Chapel, be draped in veils and loincloths. The painted garments, the work of Daniele da Volterra—known ever afterward as Il Braghettone, “the breeches-maker”—are still there to be seen. They were unaffected by the restorations of the 1980s and 1990s.

The historian Leopold von Ranke rendered his own last judgment on Paul IV, directing attention to Paul’s sense of utter certainty: “From time to time characters like that of Paul re-appear on the theater of the world. Their conceptions of the world and of life are formed from a single point of view; their individual bent of mind is so strong that their opinions are absolutely governed by it.”
Ranke went on:

He favoured, above all other institutions, the inquisition, which indeed he had himself reestablished. He often let the days pass by which were set apart for the
segnatura
and the consistory; but he never missed the meetings of the congregation of the inquisition, which took place every Thursday. He wished its powers to be exercised in the severest manner.

At Paul’s death, in 1559, a Roman mob sacked the original headquarters of the Inquisition, which had been located on the banks of the Tiber, near the Mausoleum of Augustus. They set free more than seventy prisoners and then put the place to the torch, destroying most of the Inquisition’s books and files. The mob then moved on, threatening to burn down Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Atop the Campidoglio, the old Roman capitol, they attacked a marble statue of the late pope, dragging its head through the streets and then throwing it into the river.

With the Inquisition’s palazzo in ashes, the new pope, Pius V, set about building an even more imposing central headquarters. This work was deemed so urgent that every other task took a lower priority. Rome at the time was still a half-dead city. Islands of Renaissance grandeur rose from among sprawling slums and malarial marshes. Over the centuries, only one of the eleven ancient aqueducts had functioned continuously.
The Basilica of St. Peter’s was as yet unfinished—the circular drum that now supports the dome was not complete—but the pope pulled away the stonecutters and masons for the Inquisition project. The cannons at Castel Sant’Angelo saluted as the first stone was laid. A diplomat reported to the Holy Roman Emperor that the work was proceeding
gagliardamente
—“spiritedly.” An inscription would be placed over the main entrance, declaring that the palazzo had been erected as a “bulwark” in the war against the “adherents of heretical depravity.”

The new headquarters was a vast, fortresslike structure, with high barred windows and stout towers on the corners. Prisoners were held in the eastern wing. Slits for muskets bracketed an iron door. A renovation and a calmer ocher façade would one day soften the palazzo’s appearance, but not until the 1920s.
“In the interior of the building,” a nineteenth-century British visitor reported, “is a lofty hall with gloomy frescoes of Dominican saints, and many terrible dungeons and cells, in which the visitor is unable to stand upright, having their vaulted ceilings lined with reeds to deaden sound.”
An American visitor, a few years later, described a “gloomy and forbidding pile of massive masonry” with “deaf stone ears and voiceless walls.” In his own moral taxonomy, this visitor placed the palace within “the Rome of Caligula and Nero and the Borgias.”

As for Paul IV, you can find him in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. An imposing statue sits above his remains in a side chapel off the nave. Paul glowers at the world, tiara upon his head, an arm raised imperiously. The funeral monument lies in deep shadow, but a few coins in a meter will buy a moment of illumination. The lights click on with a sharp metallic sound, and with the same sound, seconds later, they are abruptly extinguished.

What Do You Mean by This?

That the story of the Roman Inquisition can be known at all in many of its details is something of a historical accident.
The documents that tell the story are lodged in a number of locations. Some can be found here and there in the Vatican’s Archivio Segreto. A portion of this archive occupies a complex of elaborately frescoed rooms adjacent to the Vatican Library. The rest spills over onto fifty miles of shelves in the Vatican bunker. These are the day-to-day papers of the popes and the papal bureaucracy, and they run back to the end of the eighth century, dwindling in volume as they recede in time. Henry VIII’s request for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon can be found in these files, the wax seals of the king’s legion of co-petitioners hanging from the document on red ribbons. Papal absolution for the Knights Templar—too late to help their cause—can also be found here, and original works by Galileo.

A second group of documents make up the Inquisition archives per se—minutes of meetings, official correspondence, the personal papers of the inquisitors, and much else. These are preserved at the headquarters of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the Inquisition’s old palazzo.

A third group lies outside the Vatican: Inquisition records can be found in the archives of Bologna and Modena, Venice and Naples and other places where intense Inquisition activity took place. The documents in these locations include the records of thousands of trials.

In 1809, Napoleon, whose armies controlled most of continental Europe, and who had effectively annexed the Papal States, gave the order to transport as many documents as possible from the first two groups—that is, everything at the Vatican—to Paris. The pope himself, Pius VII, was already in French custody. The Vatican had not been singled out for special treatment: Napoleon was taking control of archives everywhere, and planned to create a vast pan-European repository in his imperial capital. Over a period of three years, at enormous expense, more than 3,000 chests of papal documents were hauled by wagon across the Alps. Along the way, some disappeared forever, sliding by accident into rivers and canals. At last they arrived at the Palais Soubise, where the French national archives are kept even today. The Palais Soubise holds the records of the trial of Joan of Arc. In the margin of one page is a sketch of Joan, apparently drawn not long after her death.

No sooner had the last of the archives arrived in Paris than Napoleon fell from power; the archives could now be returned. But the French government wouldn’t pay for shipment, and the pope was nearly penniless. Gone were the days when a Renaissance pontiff like Sixtus IV could spend a third of the papacy’s annual income on a coronation tiara.
To reduce the cost of transportation—and perhaps also to get rid of unwelcome evidence pertaining to the Inquisition—the Holy See ordered its commissioners in Paris to destroy many of the documents.
Some were shredded and sold as pulp for cardboard. Some were bought by victuallers and other merchants for use as wrapping paper, the individual sheets inadvertently becoming public fodder, brandished by propagandists of anticlerical bent. (A monograph should be written on the role of food vendors in the transmission or destruction of historical evidence.) Some documents were stolen or quietly acquired by private parties, in transactions that remain shrouded. A substantial trove of records somehow made its way to Trinity College, Dublin, where it remains to this day. Smaller caches turned up here and there—at the Royal Library in Belgium, for instance. Until the end of the twentieth century, these stray collections were the only Inquisition records originating in the Vatican itself that scholars could consult.

In the end, only about two thirds of what had gone to Paris made its way back to Rome. Among the documents destroyed were many that concerned the trial and suppression of the Knights Templar, and all the arguments for the defense in the case of Giordano Bruno. The records of the trial of Galileo were lost for decades, inspiring dark theories, but they eventually surfaced in Prague and found their way back to Rome.