God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (20 page)

In the end, Menocchio formally recanted his views and, as a first-time offender, accepted a relatively modest punishment. Although he was condemned to prison—“where you will remain for the entire duration of your life”—his sentence was commuted after two years, a typical practice.
(The reason for such leniency may have been cultural, or even architectural: unlike Spain, Italy had few large prisons.)
Menocchio returned to Montereale and resumed his work as a miller, though he had to wear a penitential garment called the
habitello,
emblazoned with a red cross, and for a time was not permitted to venture outside the town.

But Menocchio was not the kind of man who would go quietly. He eventually stopped wearing the
habitello
because it was bad for business: “I was losing many earnings,” he would say when arrested again, years later.
And he continued to develop his views and speak his mind. “Can’t you understand,” he would say, “the Inquisitors don’t want us to know what they know.”
A neighbor had once said of Menocchio, “He will argue with anyone.”
Another man testified, “He said many times, and I heard this from several people, that if he were not afraid of certain persons in this world, he would say things that would astonish.”
In his interrogation testimony he comes across like one of those vocal autodidacts so common in New York City, with a two-day stubble and the
Daily Worker
in a jacket pocket.

His opinions caught up with him. In 1599, Menocchio found himself standing before a tribunal. This time he was tortured, by means of the
strappado
—“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh poor me, oh poor me”—and yet this time he refused to recant his views. Because he was found to have relapsed—a far more serious matter than a first offense—Menocchio was condemned to death. There is some evidence that the inquisitors in Friuli were reluctant to carry out the sentence, but word of Menocchio’s case had reached Rome, which proved insistent. The sentence was confirmed by none other than Cardinal Santori, deeply involved in the Bruno matter, who wrote to the local inquisitor, “Your reverence must not fail to proceed in the case of the peasant of the diocese of Concordia. . . . The jurisdiction of the Holy Office over a case of such importance can in no way be doubted. Therefore, manfully perform everything that is required.”

The case was reviewed personally by Pope Clement VIII. Clement was a man who on some matters could be open-minded. He has been credited, for instance, with promoting the introduction of coffee in Europe; it had widely been considered a Muslim beverage, and therefore intolerable for Christian purposes, but the pope relished the taste and is said to have baptized a cup and pronounced it acceptable.
He was not so open-minded when it came to Menocchio. Domenico Scandella was burned at the stake in 1599, at the age of sixty-seven.

In Montereale today, you will find in the graveyards tombstones that bear the name Scandella. The small white Church of San Rocco, the parish church that Menocchio attended, still stands at the center of town. Menocchio would have been familiar with the Calderari frescoes inside. The fountain outside the Menocchio cultural center is relatively new: water pours from holes in a very large wheel of cheese, fashioned out of concrete. The water is meant to represent the worms of the miller’s imagination.
In 1999, on the 400th anniversary of Menocchio’s execution, a symposium of scholars was convened at Montereale. Carlo Ginzburg was made an honorary citizen of the town.

“There Must Be Some Mistake”

More than anything else, it was the power of ideas—ideas like “reason” and “freedom of conscience”—that began to limit and then to undermine the Roman Inquisition. One can point to this or that factor—the declining influence of the papacy, the rise of mighty nation-states, the proliferation of new technology, the advance of science—but ultimately the Inquisition was at odds with the spirit of an ascending age. As Francisco Bethencourt has written, “The Inquisition provided the prime example of what European civilization was rejecting.”

Bethencourt elaborated on this one afternoon in an office overlooking the Inns of Court. He is a professor now at King’s College London, but is Portuguese by birth; he was drawn to the Inquisition as a subject in part by the experience of his native country under authoritarian rule. The point Bethencourt made was a simple one: The Inquisition was a disciplinary institution, operated by an entity—the Church—whose claim to authority was based on values. More than anything else, an organization based on values must beware a challenge made on the very same basis. Ideas have no corporeality. They are slow to take hold. We often discount their significance in our material world. How inefficient they appear to be alongside brute force. But in the long run, they are often the most powerful actors of all. One of those actors was the idea of tolerance. John Locke put it like this in 1689:

Nobody, therefore, in fine, neither single persons nor churches, nay, nor even commonwealths, have any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon pretence of religion . . . The sum of all we drive at is that every man may enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.

“The Inquisition was extinguished,” Bethencourt said, “because it couldn’t cope with the profound change of values in Europe throughout the eighteenth century. It started in Protestant countries, mainly in the Netherlands, then in England. It was in these two countries that the issue of tolerance was raised—not for the first time, but as a new value, a new
positive
value. Toleration in the sixteenth century had been a negative value—it was something you ‘suffered.’ It was something
done
to you under certain circumstances. By the late seventeenth century, tolerance had become a positive value in itself, something that you praised and you were proud of. This idea spread. And the Inquisition collapsed.”

It was a development for which there was no cure—the intellectual equivalent of habitat destruction. The Inquisition carried on, as bureaucracies do. It disciplined priests. It condemned heresies. It issued lists of forbidden books. Occasionally it conducted an execution. In terms of authority over life and limb, its writ eventually extended no farther than the shrinking realm of the Papal States in central Italy. The Inquisition was abolished during the Napoleonic Era, when the Papal States were annexed by France, and then reestablished when sovereignty was restored. The emergence of a unified Kingdom of Italy brought an end to the Papal States altogether. Rome was captured by Italian forces in 1870, and Pope Pius IX took refuge in the enclave that would eventually become a sovereign city-state, his temporal powers henceforward restricted to those few acres.

But even in its dying days, the Roman Inquisition could act when it thought it must. In 1858, the city of Bologna was still part of the Papal States, and on a summer night that year, under orders from the Inquisition, the police came to the home of a Jewish couple, Salomone (known as Momolo) and Marianna Mortara, and took away one of their children, Edgardo, who was six years old. Like many Jewish families, the Mortaras had employed a Christian girl as a servant, because Christians were able to perform chores on the Sabbath. While in her care one day, young Edgardo had fallen ill, and the servant, fearing for his life, had taken it upon herself to baptize him.

Edgardo recovered, but in time word of her act began to circulate in Bologna, and then by degrees found its way to the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio, in Rome. The rules were clear: Jews were not permitted to raise Christian children. Edgardo was now a Christian—had he not been baptized? And so there came a knock at the door:

“There must be some mistake,” Momolo said. “My son was never baptized. . . . Who says Edgardo was baptized? Who says he has to be taken?”

“I am only acting according to orders,” pleaded the Marshal. “I’m just following the Inquisitor’s orders.”

The boy was brought to Rome.
The pleas of the family proved unavailing. On occasion, the Mortaras were permitted to visit Edgardo, but never alone. The case provoked an international outcry—Napoleon III weighed in, along with the Rothschilds and Sir Moses Montefiore—but Pope Pius IX paid no heed. He raised Edgardo as if he were his own son. When Rome fell to the Italian forces, Edgardo was nineteen, and legally free to make his own decisions. By then he had been living in Rome for thirteen years. He chose to remain with the pope, who endowed him with a trust fund.

The historian David Kertzer recounts the story, which was long forgotten, in his book
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.
Eventually Edgardo became a priest, and made a specialty of preaching to communities of Jews throughout Europe. He died in Belgium in 1940, shortly after the outbreak of World War II. Four years later, when Rome was liberated, Kertzer’s father, a rabbi and an army chaplain who had landed with American forces at Anzio, conducted the first Sabbath service to be held in Rome’s liberated central synagogue.

Kertzer writes that half a century later, “I sat outside the Chief Rabbi’s office there, in the adjacent reading room, poring through the 1858 correspondence between the Secretary of Rome’s Jewish community and Momolo Mortara, the desperate father of a boy taken from him and his religion.”

Where
is
the stairway to heaven? The Sandia
Mountains seem to be as close as you can get.
—
A BLASPHEMER IN NEW MEXICO,
1729

This is the man who would like to
see me burned at the stake.
—
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN,
1948

Coming to America

T
HE CITY OF SANTA FE
, New Mexico, likes to project an image of rich and harmonic diversity. Glance for a moment at the tourist literature, and you will read that this is a place where three cultures thrive—Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo. Up to a point, the public image captures something true. Without a doubt, the ingredients in restaurant kitchens, and in kitchens at home, mingle democratically. Spanish is spoken widely in the city, and even more widely on the outskirts and up in the mountains. Pueblo Indians sell jewelry under the eaves of the Palace of the Governors, and Indian reservations occupy the countryside to the north and west. Anglo money is everywhere. The people who have it tend to be educated and to think of themselves as open-minded, drawn to the city for the very mystique it prizes. The official self-portrait—the “City Different”—is easy to recognize. It lies visibly on the surface.

The things below—sharp divergences in class, ethnicity, outlook, and power—have not disappeared, even as they’ve changed. Anglos, mostly newcomers, have made up a majority of Santa Fe’s population since 1990. The city center, restored to a condition that in reality it never knew, is unaffordable to longtime natives. The old Hispanic community has been altered and divided by an influx of immigrants from Mexico. The plaza, once the city’s living heart, is now a tourist zone.
At Mass on Sunday, in the cathedral memorialized by Willa Cather, the archbishop sometimes asks how many people are visitors from elsewhere. Often it’s a majority.

These days, Americans of every kind are acutely sensitive to historical grievance, and Santa Fe has more than its share. From time to time, events bring that sense of grievance unexpectedly into public view. Several years ago, workers excavating ground for a new parking garage to serve the Santa Fe convention center, which stands a block from the plaza, started turning up human bones. They had stumbled on an ancient burial site. But whose bones were they? The area had been continuously occupied since prehistoric times, so it could well have been an ordinary burying ground for the Indians who inhabited Santa Fe before the conquistadors arrived. It might also have been used by the early colonists. One theory momentarily caused a stir: maybe it was a mass grave for Indians the Spanish had killed.

The notion was not far-fetched. The first Spanish settlers had made their way north from Mexico in the late 1590s. In 1680, Indians throughout the New Mexico territory, acting with great coordination, rose up and expelled the Spanish, who fled south to the safety of El Paso. The Indians destroyed mission churches and burned the invaders’ records. They moved into the Palace of the Governors. The Spanish returned in force in 1693 and retook the territory. As the story is commonly told, the reconquest of Santa Fe was accomplished without bloodshed. But in his account of the episode, translated into English in the early 1990s, the leader of the expedition wrote frankly of ordering the execution of seventy Indian prisoners in Santa Fe for the crime of apostasy from the Catholic faith.
Their bodies would most likely have been buried somewhere nearby. Had the workers at the convention center just found them?

As it turned out, no. After a brief investigation, archaeologists determined that the bones were those of Indians who had lived around the year 1200. The remains of a few Spaniards were mixed in among them. The city scaled back the size of the garage, out of respect, and construction went on.
But an embarrassing question had been raised—all the more embarrassing because every summer for three hundred years the city has commemorated the “peaceful reconquest” with the Fiesta de Santa Fe. A statue of the Virgin Mary that the Spanish carried with them, known as La Conquistadora, is paraded through the streets. Now there sprang up a group called Santa Feans for Truth and Reconciliation to protest the fiesta.

And there have been incidents. The Cross of the Martyrs, near the center of town, honors twenty-one priests, all of them Franciscans, who were killed during the Pueblo Revolt; someone has begun painting it red every year in time for the Indian Market art bazaar.
In the plaza, an inscription on an obelisk commemorates the “heroes who have fallen in various battles with savage Indians”; some years ago, a man with a chisel calmly went up to the obelisk and removed the word “savage.” It has not been restored.