The Triumph of Christianity (38 page)

If anything, the Spanish crown had even greater power over the church. It had long held the right to nominate archbishops and bishops, to fine the clergy, and to receive a substantial share of the tithes. Then in 1486, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella gained the right to make all major ecclesiastical appointments, to prohibit appeals from Spanish courts to Rome, to impose taxes on the clergy, and to make it illegal to publish papal bulls and decrees in Spain or its possessions without prior royal consent.
⁴²
Of course, as Spain became the center of the Holy Roman Empire, these policies were extended to many portions of Italy, to Portugal, the Netherlands, Austria, and southeastern Germany.

In contrast, in Denmark in 1500 from a third to half of all tillable land was owned by the church, and all lay people (including the nobility) were required to pay tithes. None of this income was shared with the crown and much of it went directly to Rome. The pope also had sole authority to make all ecclesiastical appointments in Denmark. Thus, in contrast to the king of France and the Spanish Holy Roman Emperor, when Christian III became king of Denmark in 1534, he faced an immense opportunity for gain by declaring for Lutheranism and confiscating all church properties and income in his realm. He did so and ushered in “an era of prosperity.”
⁴³

Meanwhile Sweden had successfully rebelled against Danish rule and crowned King Gustavus I in 1528. Of course, the new king was desperate for funds while here too the church possessed unchallenged authority and immense wealth. So Gustavus also opted for Protestantism and confiscated all church “possessions and revenues.”
⁴⁴
To gain support among the nobility, Gustavus sold them appropriated church property at bargain prices—even so, the church possessions Gustavus kept increased the crown lands fourfold.
⁴⁵

The same principle of self-interest accounts for the decisions of the other rulers. German princes with much to gain from becoming Lutheran did so; others, such as prince bishops who already possessed control of church offices and income, remained Catholic. And did any king gain more from stripping the church of its wealth and power than did England’s Henry VIII? Consider that from the shrine dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket alone, Henry’s agents confiscated 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 ounces of silver gilt, 5,286 ounces of silver, and twenty-six cartloads of other treasure—and this was regarded as a trivial portion of the wealth confiscated from the church.
⁴⁶

It should be noted too that in many instances it was very much in the self-interest of the urban bourgeoisie that local church property be confiscated and church authority curtailed. The Free Imperial Cities were greatly burdened by the extensive and
untaxed
local holdings of the church and by the very substantial number of clergy and members of religious orders resident in their city and exempt from all taxes (including tithes to the church) and all duties of citizenship (such as taking their turn as sentries on the walls, as all able-bodied nonclerical males were required to do). In most of these cities, about a third of all property belonged to the church and as many as 10 percent of the residents were clergy, monks, or nuns. Here too there was much to be gained by expelling the church.

It is all well and good to note the widespread appeal of the doctrine that we are saved by faith alone, but it also must be recognized that Protestantism prevailed only where the local rulers or councils had not already imposed their rule over the church.

The Catholic Reformation

T
HERE IS AN IMMENSE
irony about Luther’s Reformation as well as the other Protestant Reformations that gained a secure footing in Europe at this time. Their “reforms” were not lasting as each soon exhibited many of the defects of a worldly religious monopoly, while the church against which they had rebelled was dramatically and lastingly reformed as the Protestant challenge enabled the Church of Piety to return to power, never again to be thwarted.

The Catholic Reformation (also known as the Counter-Reformation) was launched at the Council of Trent (1551–1552, 1562–1563). Simony—the sale of church offices—was ended. Priestly celibacy was enforced. Official, inexpensive Bibles in local languages (vulgates) were made available. But perhaps the most important decision taken at Trent was the establishment of a network of seminaries to train men for the local priesthood. No longer would there be priests who did not know the Seven Deadly Sins or were unable to indentify who preached the Sermon on the Mount. By the eighteenth century, in most places the church was staffed by literate men well versed in theology. Even more important, the seminaries produced priests whose vocations had been shaped and tested in a formal, institutional setting.
⁴⁷

But there also was a dark side to the Catholic Reformation. The new spirit of strictness shifted the economic and intellectual outlook of the church. A reemphasis on asceticism set the church against business and banking to such an extent that it could mistakenly be argued that Protestantism gave birth to capitalism, despite the fact that capitalism was fully developed in Europe many centuries before Luther was born.
⁴⁸
The same sort of thing happened vis-à-vis science. As was seen in chapter 16, Western science is rooted in Christian theology and arose in the medieval universities. Unfortunately, the Catholic Reformation imposed increasingly severe intellectual restrictions so that Catholic Universities rapidly declined in scientific significance to such a degree that it came to be widely but mistakenly believed that, as with capitalism, the Reformation also gave birth to the Scientific Revolution.

Conclusion

I
N THE OVERALL SENSE,
the various Reformations reintroduced stable religious diversity within European Christianity, but few individuals actually had multiple options available to them. In most of northern Europe, not only was Roman Catholicism illegal, but so too were all varieties of Protestantism other than the one represented by the monopoly state church, to which everyone was required to belong. Thus Calvinists were prohibited from the Lutheran Scandinavian nations, and Lutherans were burned in Henry VIII’s “Protestant” England. Meanwhile, Catholic monopolies persisted in Southern Europe (non-Catholics were not allowed to hold services in Spain until 1970). Consequently, the low level of Christian commitment among the general population was little improved by the rise of Protestantism. The Catholic Reformation may have resulted in some gains in popular piety among Southern Europeans, although the higher levels of participation that existed there may only have reflected that this area had originally been more vigorously Christianized in the days of the early church. In any event, when all was said and done, because the various Reformations also resulted in lazy and lax monopoly churches, Europe’s splendid cathedrals and picturesque chapels continued to be rather empty on Sunday mornings.

Chapter Nineteen
The Shocking Truth About the Spanish Inquisition

L
UTHERANS WERE PERSECUTED IN MANY
Catholic nations and even in “Protestant” England. In Spain, of course, they became targets of the Inquisition.

The term
Spanish Inquisition
brings to mind what is remembered as one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history. According to the standard account, the Inquisition was created in 1478 by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, and was charged with ridding Spain of heretics, especially Jews and Muslims who were pretending to be Christians. But the Inquisition also set its sights on all Protestants, witches, homosexuals, scientists, and other doctrinal and moral offenders.

For the first several years, the Inquisition was rather inactive, but after the fanatical Dominican monk Tomás de Torquemada was appointed grand inquisitor in 1483, this hideous Catholic institution tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people. Nearly every Saturday in every major Spanish city there was an
auto-de-fe
and the air was filled with ashes as screaming victims were burned at the stake, usually after having been mercilessly tortured. On many Saturdays, piles of offensive books, especially scientific treatises, also were burned during the
autos-de-fe
.

The Inquisition did not even pretend to observe any semblance of legal procedure, seizing people right and left on the flimsiest accusations as the inquisitors grew rich from confiscating the wealth of the accused. Writing in 1554, the English Protestant John Foxe reported on “the extreme dealing and cruel ravening of these Catholic Inquisitors of Spain, who, under the pretended visor of religion, do nothing but seek their private gain and spoiling of other men’s goods.”
¹
Thirteen years later came the truly devastating exposé, written in Latin by Reginaldus Montanus:
A Discovery and Plaine Declaration of Sundry Subtill Practices of the Holy Inquisition of Spain
. Translated into English, French, Dutch, and German, it was widely circulated. Montanus’s account “emphasize[d] the deviousness and trickery of the interrogation techniques, the variety of horrors in its torture chambers, and the appalling behavior of its familiars, prison keepers, and torturers.”
²
The main part of the book follows an innocent victim through the entire ordeal, ending at the stake, and the book concludes with twelve case histories of Lutherans martyred for their faith.

Montanus’s volume became the standard account. According to a recent edition of
The
Columbia Encyclopedia,
“Torture of the accused... soon became customary and notorious.... Most trials resulted in a verdict of guilty.”
³
On these grounds the popular historian Will Durant (1885–1981) informed several generations of readers that “we must rank the Inquisition... as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.”
⁴

Not only historians, but novelists, painters, and screenwriters have repeatedly recreated scenes of brutal inquisitorial sadism—Edgar Allen Poe’s story of “The Pit and the Pendulum” being a classic among them. Another is Dostoyevsky’s passage in
The Brothers Karamazov
wherein the grand inquisitor encounters Christ as he raises a child from the dead, whereupon he has Jesus seized and informs him that: “Tomorrow I shall condemn thee and burn thee at the stake as the worst of heretics.”

How many victims were there? Microsoft’s
Encarta
says that Torquemada “executed thousands.” Jonathan Kirsch placed the Inquisition’s casualty list as “countless thousands.”
⁵
The
Encyclopedia of Religious Freedom
puts Torquemada’s total at ten thousand as does Edmond Paris,
⁶
who also claims that another 125,000 died of torture and privation in Torquemada’s prisons. Many historians have accepted the “conservative” estimate that during the effective lifetime of the Inquisition more than thirty-five thousand people were burned at the stake,
⁷
but one very recent author claims that well over a hundred thousand died during Torquemada’s tenure alone.
⁸
Another historian has proposed that the Inquisition burned “nearly two hundred thousand... in thirty-six years.”
⁹
Yet another claims that overall the Inquisition condemned more than three million, “with about 300,000 burned at the stake.”
¹⁰

Despite these immense variations in estimated fatalities, everyone agrees that the Inquisition was a blood bath perpetrated by sadistic fanatics. In his recent exposé,
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God
(2008), Jonathan Kirsch devoted the second paragraph of the book to invoking the image of “hooded men in dungeons lit only by torches... plying instruments of torture to the naked bodies of men and women whose only crime is to have entertained some thought that the Church regarded as heretical.... [T]he torturers are wholly without pity, and they work in the sure conviction that the odor of the charred flesh of humans is ‘delectable to the Holy Trinity and the Virgin.’ ”

But the most shocking truth about the Spanish Inquisition is that everything above
is either an outright lie or a wild exaggeration
!

Creating the “Black Legend”

T
HE STANDARD ACCOUNT OF
the Spanish Inquisition was invented and spread by English and Dutch propagandists in the sixteenth century during their wars with Spain and repeated ever after by malicious or misled historians eager to sustain “an image of Spain as a nation of fanatical bigots.”
¹¹
This image of Spain is now referred to by fair-minded historians as the “Black Legend,” which the American historian Charles Gibson (1920–1985) defined as “the accumulated tradition of propaganda and Hispanophobia according to which [the Spanish are]... regarded as cruel, bigoted, exploitative, and self- righteous.”
¹²
Although these tales of Spanish brutality originated in the days of Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada, they refused to die, being sustained by generations of “respectable” British historians who also openly expressed their contempt and antagonism toward Roman Catholicism—attitudes reflected in the fact that Catholic students were denied admission to Oxford and Cambridge until 1871.

However, the wildest exaggerations about the Spanish Inquisition originated with and were repeatedly fueled by Spanish “defectors.” Consider that “Montanus” (see above) was the pen name used by a renegade Spanish monk who became a Lutheran and fled to the Netherlands where he wrote his infamous book. As the distinguished Edward Peters noted, “Part of Montanus’ appeal lay in the base of accuracy upon which he erected an otherwise extremely misleading description of the Inquisition to an audience prepared to believe the worst.... Montanus portrays every victim of the Inquisition as innocent, every Inquisition official as venal and deceitful, every step in the procedure as a violation of natural and rational law.”
¹³
Again, early in the nineteenth century a sensational attack on the Inquisition was written by a Spanish émigré living in London, D. Antonio Puigblanch (1775–1840):
The Inquisition Unmasked: Being an Historical and Philosophical Account of the Tremendous Tribunal
(1816). This widely read two-volume work ran to nearly a thousand pages devoted to recounting the “enormous crimes... committed by this tribunal [that]... rendered its name so odious—crimes so much more revolting and abominable, because they have been committed under the sanction of religion.”
¹⁴
Recently, Kessinger Publishing chose to include this work in its series of “rare reprints.”

The Real Inquisition

T
HAT SUCH BIGOTRY FLOURISHED
during Europe’s era of religious wars is not surprising. Nor is it so surprising that this hateful nonsense was sustained during the era of intense anti-Catholicism that continued in England (and the United States) well into the twentieth century.
¹⁵
But there is no such excuse for those irresponsible contemporary “scholars” who continue to support such claims while ignoring or dismissing the remarkable research on the Inquisition that has been accomplished in the past generation.
¹⁶
Astonishing as it may seem, the new historians of the Inquisition have revealed that, in contrast with the secular courts all across Europe, the Spanish Inquisition was a consistent force for justice, restraint, due process, and enlightenment.
¹⁷

These historians (many of them being neither Spanish nor Catholic) base their dissenting views on having gained full access to the complete archives of the Inquisitions of both Aragon and Castile, which together constituted the Spanish Inquisition. Subsequently, they have read the careful records made of each of the 44,701 cases heard by these two Inquisitions between 1540 and 1700. At the time they were written these records were secret so there is no reason for the clerks to have misrepresented the actual proceedings. Not only are these cases a goldmine of historical detail; each has been entered into a database in order to facilitate statistical analysis.
¹⁸
In addition, these historians have done an immense amount of more traditional research, pouring over diaries, letters, decrees, and other old documents. The results are solidly undeniable. The remainder of this chapter offers a summary of the major discoveries.

Deaths

T
HE TERM
AUTO-DE-FE
DOES
not mean execution, let alone burning at the stake, but is best translated as “act of faith.” The inquisitors were far more concerned with repentance than with punishment and therefore an
auto-de-fe
consisted of a public appearance by persons convicted of various offenses who offered public confessions of their guilt and were thereby reconciled to the church. Only very rarely did an
auto-de-fe
end with an offender being surrendered to the civil authorities for execution (the Inquisition did not ever conduct an actual execution). Even so,
autos-de-fe
were not frequent. In the city of Toledo, between 1575 and 1610, only twelve
autos-de-fe
were held, “at which 386 culprits appeared.”
¹⁹
Obviously, then, the tales of weekly mass burnings all across Spain are malicious fantasies. So, how many did die?

The first decades of the Inquisition’s operations were not as fully documented as they were after 1540, but historians now agree that these were its bloodiest days and that perhaps as many as fifteen hundred people may have been executed, or about thirty a year.
²⁰
Turning to the fully recorded period, of the 44,701 cases tried, only 826 people were executed, which amounts to 1.8 percent of those brought to trial.
²¹
Together, this adds up to a total of about 2,300 deaths spread over more than two centuries, a total that is a far cry from the “conservative” estimates that more than thirty thousand were burned by the Inquisition. In fact, fewer people were executed by order of the Spanish Inquisition over more than two centuries than the three thousand French Calvinists who were killed in Paris alone during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
²²
Or compare this with the thousands of English Lutherans, Lollards, and Catholics (in addition to two of his wives) that Henry VIII is credited with having boiled, burned, beheaded, or hanged.
²³
The fact is that during the entire period 1480 through 1700, only about ten deaths
per year
were meted out by the Inquisition all across Spain—and usually to repeat offenders! By modern Western standards, of course, even ten executions a year for various acts of religious nonconformity seem a dreadful excess. But during the time in question there was no religious toleration anywhere in Europe and capital punishment was the norm for all offenses, religious or otherwise. In context, then, the Spanish Inquisition was remarkably restrained.

Torture

I
N POPULAR CULTURE, THE
term
Inquisition
is nearly a synonym for torture. As John Dowling (1808–1878) explained, “Of all the inventions of popish cruelty the Holy Inquisition is the masterpiece.... It was impossible for even Satan himself to conceive a more horrible contrivance of torture and blood.”
²⁴
Thus, as noted above, it has been taken for granted that many more poor souls died in the Inquisition’s prisons and torture chambers than survived long enough to go to the stake.

This may be the biggest lie of all! Every court in Europe used torture, but the Inquisition did so
far less
than other courts. For one thing, church law limited torture to one session lasting no more than fifteen minutes, and there could be no danger to life or limb. Nor could blood be shed!
²⁵
There are, of course, very painful techniques that can be applied within these rules. But even so, torture was rarely used, perhaps because the “inquisitors themselves were sceptical of the efficacy and validity of torture as a method of conviction.”
²⁶
If torture was used, its progress was carefully recorded by a clerk and this material was included with the record of the case.
²⁷
Based on these data, Thomas Madden has estimated that the inquisitors resorted to torture in only about 2 percent of all the cases that came before them.
²⁸
Moreover, it is widely agreed that prisons operated by the Inquisition were by far the most comfortable and humane in Europe; instances have been reported of “criminals in Spain purposely blaspheming so as to be transferred to the Inquisition’s prisons.”
²⁹