Authors: James Michener
Iberia (76 page)
Kamen reaches three main conclusions. The ordinary people
of Spain applauded the Inquisition and did not think of it as
oppressive. My argument, that the Inquisition caused Spain’s
decline, he holds to be inaccurate, in that he finds no substantial
evidence to support it. He believes that the real tragedy of the
Inquisition was that it helped create a closed society from which
alien elements were expelled and into which no new ideas were
allowed to enter. It is in the analysis of this third proposition that
he provides much new material.
He contends that although the Inquisition may have begun as
a solution to a religious problem, it quickly became an instrument
for enforcing a pernicious theory regarding ‘purity of blood,’
which meant that any family whose ancestors had been either
Moorish or Jewish was contaminated. Since Moors had married
in Spain for seven hundred years and Jews for eleven hundred,
and since there had been forced conversions of both, there had
to be much impure blood in Spain, and its eradication provided
a chance for informers to appropriate jobs, money and titles now
belonging to the impure. Researchers who hoped to overthrow
great families drew up a black list entitled
Aragón
, which identified families in that kingdom having impure
blood, involving hundreds in catastrophe. It was so successful
that in 1560 a disgruntled cardinal, irritated beause two relatives
had been refused admittance to a military order, compiled
Blot
on the Nobility of Spain
, identifying by name those families with
impure blood.
It is difficult to imagine what such a charge entailed. The family
could have been practicing Christians for three hundred years
and without blemish so far as their Catholicism was concerned,
but merely because they had a touch of Moorish or Jewish blood
they could not send their sons to a university, or work in certain
jobs, or hold office in a cathedral, or become officers in the army,
or dignitaries in the Church. Military orders like that of Santiago
had strict requirements of racial purity and became instruments
of reaction and oppression. All Spanish life was corrupted by this
mania and thousands were drawn into the net of the Inquisition
principally because friends reported that they had hidden their
Jewishness. Before a man could apply for any important job he
had to present a genealogy going back numerous generations,
and the compiling of such records provided a fruitful source of
bribery and blackmail. Incredible as it seems, laws policing purity
of blood continued in force until January 31, 1835; in the army
the application of the principle continued to 1859 and in the
obtaining of marriage licenses to 1865.
It was this continuing battle for conformity that punished Spain
so severely; although the role played by the Inquisition in religion
could be matched in other countries, its part in eradicating those
social variations which interact to build strong nations was here
unique. Spain was driven by a mania for homogeneity, not
realizing that no one group of people can generate all the concepts
necessary for its survival. The country insisted upon a closed
society and succeeded in getting it, but what it excluded was more
significant than what it enclosed
In 1770 the University of Salamanca forbade Descartes to be
taught because he was dangerous to Catholic principles, Thomas
Hobbes because he was too compendious and John Locke because
he was obscure and must be read with extreme care. As late as
1645 a university professor in Logroño was sentenced to four
years’ imprisonment and perpetual deprivation of the right to
teach because he had referred to the contents of a prohibited
book. At one point the Inquisition of a northern city issued the
blanket directive that no university should teach from any book
that had been published within forty years. Even the great
professors who had worked at Alcalá de Hernares with Cardinal
Cisneros building the
were intimidated and efforts were
made to prohibit the study of Greek on grounds that devout men
knew that the true Bible existed only in Latin. For me the insanity
is best exemplified in the case of a man who was overheard
wagering his word against God’s nose. A learned gloss was issued
proving that such a statement identified the blasphemer as a
member of the Badian heresy, which treated God as a corporeal
being with human attributes, and for believing this a man should
be burned. Word crept across Spain that it was prudent to remain
silent, and speculation ceased, but as Kamen points out, it was
not the Inquisition that should be blamed but the total drift of
society.
However, we must not explain away too much. There is today
in Spain a strong spirit of revisionism in historical scholarship
which says, ‘Since the excesses charged against Spain by the Black
Legend have been proved false, their contraries must be true.
Thus Felipe II was a king without blemish. The Inquisition was
good rather than bad. Tómas de Torquemada was a gentle
Christian. And, as a matter of fact, Spain never suffered a decline.’
A frontal attack is also mounted against any criticism of
contemporary Spain, however mild, by charging that the author
is once more purveying the errors of the Black Legend. In recent
reading I have collected eighteen examples of newspaper articles
attacking books, plays, paintings, motion pictures and general
news stories as contaminated by the Black Legend. Honest and
fair comment supported by historical research on the one hand
or by contemporary observation on the other is thus condemned,
and it is even popular to deny that Spain ever suffered
post-Golden Age reversals, but to refute this tempting thesis one
needs only quote the experts. Sometime around 1640, when Spain
ached from defeats in all fields, King Felipe IV said, ‘These evil
events have been caused by your sins and mine in particular…I
believe that God our Lord is angry and irate with me and my
realms on account of many sins and particularly on account of
mine.’ In 1957 Generalísimo Franco said of a later period, ‘While
other world powers were able to marshal their strength, Spain
sank into a hundred-year sleep.’
The decline was real and I believe, in spite of Kamen’s argument
to the contrary, that the Inquisition was largely to blame. For
almost four centuries it enforced an intellectual conformity and
rejected all minorities. The Moors, the Jews, the Illuminati, the
Jesuits and the Protestants were expelled and their ideas with
them. Spain thus became the next nation in a tragic series who
decided to fence out new ideas rather than welcome them and
she suffered the inescapable penalty. An oyster can live to itself,
but without grains of sand for agitation it cannot produce pearls.
Walking one night along the ramparts of Avila, I reasoned, ‘If
Spain had kept her Moors, her agriculture and manufacturing
would have prospered. If she had kept her Jews, her commercial
management would have kept pace with England’s. If she had
retained a few inquiring Protestant professors, her universities
might have remained vital. And if she had held onto her
Illuminati, her spiritual life would have been renewed.’ But then
I had to face the greater reality. ‘If she had done these things, she’d
now be a better Spain. But she wouldn’t be Spain.’
After my wide excursions afield—to the fair at Medina del
Campo, to the dark Virgin of Gaudalupe, to the Avila of
Victoria—I returned to Salamanca to visit for the last time those
two rooms at the university, almost side by side, which were
converted into shrines by the heroism of two philosopher-poets.
The first was a stone-arched class- room left pretty much as it
must have been on that day in December, 1578, when Fray Luis
de León returned after an absence of some years. The rude benches
without backs remain the same and the small windows in the
outer walls. The lectern with its canopy is the same as the one at
which the professor stood that eventful day. The room was
crowded, not only because Fray Luis was the most famous of the
Salamanca lecturers, a wise, gentle elderly man of sweet
understanding and compassion, but because he had accomplished
something that few men of his day could parallel.
In 1572, at the height of a brilliant career as Spain’s leading
theologian and humanist, he was attacked by jealous persons in
the university, who whispered to the Inquisition, ‘We all know
that Fray Luis is half Jewish, so he’s suspect to begin with. But he
has now translated King Solomon’s Song of Songs into the
vernacular. He invites even the most ordinary man in Salamanca
to read it. And that is heresy.’ Especially serious was the additional
charge that often, after studying the original Hebrew version of
the Bible, he would question the accuracy of the Latin. Fray Luis
was apprehended and for several months was under interrogation,
after which he was thrown into jail at Valladolid, where he heard
only silence. At the end of a year he pleaded to be told what the
charges against him were and who his accusers, but he heard
nothing. His trial was intermittent and clandestine; all he knew
was that he had committed some serious crime bordering on
heresy, but its definition he never knew. Finally, after nearly five
years of this, he was set free and, what was the more miraculous,
allowed to return to his post in Salamanca. Of his experience in
jail he wrote:
Here envy and lies have kept me imprisoned.
house in the pleasant countryside passes his life alone;
he serves only God, neither envied nor envious.
This was the morning of his reappearance, and notable persons
came to the university to hear his reaction to his long persecution.
As he made his way from his rooms, his gown slightly askew in
his usual careless manner, the university plaza was crowded with
silent students. Fray Luis walked with eyes straight forward, not
daring to acknowledge the furtive glances of approbation which
greeted him. As he entered the cloisters and elbowed his way
through the crowd he came at last to the room in which he had
taught for so many years, and when he saw its familiar outlines,
with his friends perched on the narrow benches, and when he
knew that among them must be those whose rumors had caused
his imprisonment and who would surrender him again to the
Inquisition within a few years (he was to die in disgrace at
Madrigal de las Altas Torres), he must have wanted to lash out
against the injustice he had suffered and would continue to suffer
as a Jew and a humanist. Instead he stepped to the rostrum, took
his place behind the lectern, grasped the lapels of his robe and
smiled at the crowd with the compassion that marked all he did,
and said in a low, clear voice, ‘As we were saying yesterday…’
And he resumed his lecture at the precise point of its interruption
five years before.
Down the cloister from Fray Luis’ austere classroom is another
of much different character, the Lecture Hall, dating from the
fifteenth century. Its principal adornment is a group of four
handsome stone arches that support the ceiling and a grisaille of
Fernando and Isabel done sometime in the eighteenth century.
Lists of men who have brought honor to Salamanca appear, but
one of the greatest is missing and will probably remain so until
the passions of this age are past, after which he will occupy the
place of honor. To understand why, we must see this hall as it
was on October 12, 1936, the Day of the Race.
At one end of the hall rose a three-stepped dais, done in red
carpeting. It was lighted by two intricate chandeliers and
ornamented with a large portrait of Francisco Franco. The dais
contained ten long old-fashioned benches on which sat the
dignitaries of the university and seven high-backed red-plush
chairs occupied by the rector, the local bishop, generals from the
victorious Franco army which had recently captured Salamanca
and an extraordinary fire-eater type of man so common in Spanish
history and so incomprehensible to outsiders. He was General
José Millán Astray, leader of the Foreign Legion and the only hero
to come out of Spain’s disastrous military adventures in Africa.
He was a psychotic man, preternaturally thin, blind in one eye.
lacking one arm and scarred across his entire body with mementos
of defeat in desert battles. A major reason why he was a popular
hero was the battle cry he had sponsored, ‘Long live Death!’ What
this meant no one understood, but it had a rich fifteenth-century
ring, and Spain echoed Millán Astray’s challenge, ‘Long live
Death!’
On this day the general had the pleasure of addressing a
university gathering, and universities had long been his anathema
because scholars were alien to his Legion and learning refuted his
cry of ‘Long live Death!’ So with choice, sardonic words the mad
general ripped into Salamancan life, excoriated people who
bothered with books, cursed regional areas like Cataluña and the
Basque country, and promised that when Fascism triumphed, all
such aberrations would be cauterized with a flaming sword.
Fascists planted in the audience cheered. Intelligence was
condemned and students were summoned to an unending war
of extermination. The cadaverous general sat down and the crowd
roared its approval of the new world a-coming.
Then the rector of the university rose, the distinguished
philosopher-poet Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), author of
the widely read
, and, with José Ortega y
Gasset (1883-1955), Spain’s leading intellectual. He knew that he
ought not let this nihilistic challenge go unanswered, but he was
an old man; police forces of the new Spain surrounded him; and
in the chair to his right sat Franco’s wife. If ever silence could
have been condoned, this was the time, but Unamuno adjusted
his robes of office, like Fray Luis before him, and began speaking
in a soft voice: ‘I, as you know, am a Basque, born in Bilbao. And
the bishop, whether he likes it or not, is a Catalan, born in
Barcelona.’ He said that to speak of liquidating such men was
silly. He then turned his attention to General Millán Astray and
said a few simple things that some, at least, in the audience had
been thinking but which fear had kept muffled. He said that the
emaciated general was a cripple, a heroic one to be sure, but a
cripple in both body and mind, and that because of his own
withered nature he was determined to enforce on healthy Spain
his sickly philosophy. Specifically, Unamuno said, there could be
no sense in a rallying cry such as ‘Long live Death.’ Exactly the
opposite spirit was required.
