Account For The Differences Between The Roman And Spanish Inquisitions During The Period 1542-1700

The early modern Roman and Spanish Inquisitions, founded in 1542 and 1478, were both based on the medieval Inquisition and shared broad similarities in their practices. The Roman Inquisition was an attempt to centralise and consolidate Church power over several disparate kingdoms at a time when it was being questioned the Holy Office a political machine designed to enforce orthodoxy.` However, in Christopher Black s view, the Spanish was more successful in its efforts: [the Inquisition] could never exercise within Italy the kind of central leadership that the Suprema did in Spain and its empire. The existence of local tribunals and their exact form and local operation had to be negotiated with the rulers of each state. The targets of the Inquisitions varied, with emphasis changing over time Jean-Pierre Dedieu characterises the Spanish Inquisition as encompassing four seasons. The Spanish, motivated by a desire to promote Catholic conformity after centuries of Muslim domination prior to the Reconquista, were initially concerned with the threat of converted Jews and Muslims and later moved to counter established Christians who were misinterpreting Church teachings. To achieve this, the Suprema worked alongside the state, whereas the Roman Inquisition generally operated with popular consent. The Roman Inquisitors became obsessed with superstitious practices, far beyond anything in the Spanish system, which grew sceptical about the existence of witchcraft in the early seventeenth century. This essay will not discuss the Portuguese Inquisition due to its many similarities with the Spanish, made more indistinct by the Spanish annexation of Portugal from 1580-1640.

The Spanish Inquisition was criticised by both contemporary Catholic and Protestant writers and, later, Enlightenment historians, but in the twentieth century was viewed less harshly. The Black Legend , which highlighted Inquisition barbarity and cruelty, was propagated by Protestant European nations to discredit Spain and its Inquisition and further entrenched by criticism from Spanish writers. The White Legend , which arose to exonerate the Spanish from any wrongdoing, has instead been decried as overzealous, and modern historians such as Henry Kamen have portrayed the Spanish Inquisition as a forum for religious discussion which was open to reform. However, notions of the Inquisition s theocratic despotism described by nineteenth-century historian Henry Lea still remain in present-day scholarship, such as the views of Francisco Bethencourt, Irene Silverblatt and Helen Rawlings that the Spanish Inquisition was different [to the Italian] in one fundamental respect: it was responsible to the Crown rather than the Pope and used to consolidate state interest. Alejandro Ca eque however has argued that this is erroneous because it projects the `political order of our time on the political formations existing before the liberal revolution.` The historian must strive to understand each age in its own terms, to take on its own values and priorities, instead of imposing their own.

The treatment of the Roman Inquisition by Anglo-American historians has been framed in the Whig interpretation of history, in which history is the story of progress. In this view, the Catholic Church was the antithesis of modernity and liberalism. Likewise, some of the most prominent Italian historians, including Adriano Prosperi and Massimo Firpo, have identified it as a major cause of Italy s cultural and political stagnation before unification. Italian historiography also portrayed a close working relationship between the Inquisition and the papacy, which from the mid-sixteenth century constituted a protracted conflict, not only against non-Catholics, but also those who proposed compromise with reformers. Disagreement between historians lies not in the Inquisition s effect on Italy, but rather in defining the Inquisition, its purpose and its function alongside the established Church and other centres of state power. The Inquisition owed its success more to its fearsome reputation than its actual influence. Simon Ditchfield shows that the Inquisition was, from its very beginning, its own historian and created the Black Legend to establish itself in the face of fierce opposition particularly from [ ] the bishops. The Inquisitors influence would eventually surpass that of the bishops and they became saviours of orthodoxy. By contrast in Spain the Inquisition was often a path into the episcopate. In Italy the equitable system of procedure borrowed from Roman law was cast aside, and the bishops were instructed to follow the inquisitorial system, a standing mockery of justice.` This is also why the model of confessionalisation, the idea that early modern societies were recast on the basis of a firm alliance between Church and State, adapted from German historiography and implemented in an Italian Catholic context, has not enjoyed historiographical consensus. In Italy, Jean-Pierre Dedieu writes, states were intermediaries, filters, brakes laid on the inquisition, very rarely dynamic motors of the action of the court.` Anne Schutte similarly argues that confessionalisation and social discipline look too far forward and present history as "success" or "failure" where cultural change only moves from top to bottom. To understand the Roman Inquisition, historians must discard the Whig interpretation and view it as distinct from the Spanish, especially regarding the idea of a Roman centre and regional peripheries . Stefania Pastore offers a more cohesive interpretation the second half of the sixteenth century saw the victory of an inquisitorial party in both Spain and Italy, which advocated uniformity, discipline and a collective-minded Christianity.

The Roman Inquisition was planned primarily to confront various forms of Protestant heresy, when local responses had been inadequate or nonexistent. Its foundation in 1542 was a direct response to the rising threat of Protestantism caused by the popularity of Spanish exile Juan de Vald s alumbradismo and English Protestant Cardinal Pole s works among nobles and preachers alike, including Bernardino Ochino and Giovanni Morone. The Italian Reformation was a non-event, partly because of Protestantism s failure to garner popular support (Silvana Menchi argues that Juan de Vald s concept of reform was so subtle that it failed to have institutional consequences ), but also due to the scale of repression perpetrated by the Roman Inquisition against it. The Council of Trent (1545 63) convened to promote Catholic uniformity and stop Protestant influence. However, in the 1560s alumbradismo was still espoused at an elite level by Florentine nobleman Pietro Carnesecchi and his social circle. His trial and execution in 1567 marked an inquisitorial turn in Italy, signifying that Nicodemism were no longer to be treated with sympathy, even if the perpetrator had powerful political supporters. This was an exceptional case, not only because Carnesecchi had previously survived numerous trials against him with help from his friends in high places, but also due to the fact that he was publicly executed in an auto de fe, rarer in Italy than Spain, in a deliberate effort to provoke fear among the populace and show the Inquisition s intolerance of religious deviance. The Inquisitors offered Carnesecchi life imprisonment after his sentencing if he confessed, hoping to obtain information with which they could incriminate Cardinal Morone, who had been imprisoned for Lutheran heresy that same year. Although Carnesecchi refused, with his death the flame of Protestant revolt was extinguished in Italy and the Inquisition could focus on other heresies.

In Spain, Protestantism never posed such a threat. In the sixteenth century Lutheranism amounted to nothing more than a careless religious statement rather than a calculated attack on the Catholic Church. However, it was in the Inquisition s interest to prosecute Protestants by actively seeking new sources of contagion, it substantially expanded its power base that had been considerably diminished since the end of the period of intense anti-converso persecutions. Simon Ditchfield characterises this period as the highpoint of the power and influence of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, which could `imprison and make official heretics out of figures who until their arrest occupied the highest positions of prestige and influence in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.` The Spanish Inquisition was clearly less reliant on hard evidence than the Roman, imprisoning Bartolom Carranza, former Archbishop of Toledo, for eighteen years despite no proof of heresy. Juan de Vergara, a purported friend of Erasmus himself, was arrested in 1533 and convicted following the death of his patron. Forced to repent at an auto, he was sentenced to a fine and a year of monastic seclusion. The discrepancy between his and Carnesecchi s punishments further illustrates the priorities of both Inquisitions regarding Protestantism. As in Italy, there was a culmination of anti-Protestant activity the decade 1555 65, which reached its climax in the Valladolid and Seville autos of 1559 60. Whereas the Italian response to Protestantism was initially repressive due to its considerable currency there, it soon petered out following its reduced threat, whereas the Spanish Inquisition first exacted harsh sentences and later warned of Protestantism s residual influence to justify further expanding its jurisdiction.

Both Inquisitions were intolerant of Jews and Judaizers , but the Spanish particularly so. In the first century of the Spanish Inquisition, Jews accounted for as much as forty per cent of all Inquisitorial activity. Following a massacre in 1391 many Spanish Jews chose to convert and become New Christians (conversos). Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer decried them as neither Jews nor Christians, since they were baptised but were heretics. Many felt them insincere Christians and thus the Inquisition was founded to investigate these claims. Geoffrey Parker has argued that the conversos adapted to this threat well by instead directing the Inquisition against those who remained Jews and as such by the 1540s the converso problem was largely solved. However, there was still widespread concern surrounding conversos it was because they were so well-integrated into Spanish society and of the general concern over limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) that the Spanish Inquisition remained preoccupied with them throughout its existence. David Nirenberg argues Spain`s success in `converting and expelling all its Jews` resulted in `the thorough Judaization of Spain` from a foreign perspective. Giovanni Florio s Italian-English 1598 dictionary defined marrano (Spanish for pig , used by Old Christians to insult conversos) as a Jew, an infidel, a renegado, a nickname for a Spaniard. A desire to clear its name further justified continued anti-converso activity in Spain, a nation which aspired to be the most Catholic in Europe. The legitimacy of the Inquisition in this undertaking was uncontested Francisco Bethencourt has shown that converso discontent was focused on denouncing discriminatory laws rather than attacking the Inquisition as a legal practice. Furthermore, the Spanish Inquisition was extended to the New World despite no pressure from Rome to do so, with the ostensible object the propagation of the faith. While the indigenous population was not subject to it, Spanish-born immigrants were. The prominent de Carabajal family of New Spain were accused of relapsing into Judaism and imprisoned or killed by the Inquisition. Well into the seventeenth century, fear of clandestine Judaizing gripped the New World, with over a hundred convicted of a Great Jewish Conspiracy in Peru between 1635-39. In Italy, the Jews were not expelled outright, but instead confined to ghettoes, from which they could undertake important roles in society. In the Italian case, it fell to inquisitors to regulate the lives of Jews , but their integration into the system and higher degree of societal cohesion meant that they were seen as a necessary evil rather than a fifth column. In Spain, concerns about the continued existence of well-integrated conversos who retained and spread Jewish beliefs and customs meant they remained the Inquisition s greatest concern throughout the period.

In Italy, Muslims were not seen as such a great threat as in Spain. There were few in the nation, mostly trading in port cities or indentured as galley slaves. There had been fears of an Ottoman invasion, but victory at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 helped assuage them. In Spain, moriscos were viewed with much greater suspicion due to the history of Umayyad domination, the experience of the Reconquista and its resultant notion of militant Christianity in Spain, and the worrying prospect of a renewed Moorish invasion from the south. Moriscos formed a vital labour force in Spain, living and working separately from Old Christians in conditions they would not have accepted and for that they were resented. During the sixteenth century, church authorities alternated between arguing for rigorous measures against the moriscos and for their toleration. Louis Cardaillac has shown that moriscos seldom protested against the Inquisition as a consequence of their tendency to reside in lower-class, rural communities where literacy was rare. This did not however stop a war of words from developing around them. Like conversos, they were disproportionately targeted due to scepticism surrounding the sincerity of their new-found beliefs the Aragonese Inquisition wrote in 1565 that: All of them live as Muslims, and no one doubts this. Although contemporary writers were concerned about their population growth, James Casey has shown that such concerns were unfounded and were thus likely motivated by bigotry and concerns surrounding integration. The situation escalated with the Alpujarras Revolt of 1568-70 near Granada, which Philip II successfully repressed. Many of the rebels were dispersed throughout Castile to facilitate integration. However, John Lynch argues that instead the contagion spread. Moriscos remained of great concern to the Inquisition. Over a decade later, the Archbishop of Toledo, Gaspar de Quiroga, reported the failure of integration within his own archdiocese. As Fernand Braudel has acknowledged: The Morisco after one, two or even three centuries, remained still the Moor of old. He had refused to accept western civilization and this was his fundamental crime. Inquisition activity was thus increased dramatically in this period, which culminated with the expulsion of the moriscos from Spain entirely in 1609. Both Inquisitions were motivated by fear of the Muslim other , but in Italy such fears were removed by the defeat of the Ottomans, whereas in Spain centuries of Moorish domination and a perception of failed integration, culminating in the Alpujarras revolt, led to increased repression and eventual expulsion.

In early modern Europe, witchcraft came under the remit of the Inquisition as it encompassed heretical pacts with demons which undermined baptismal vows, whereas harmful magic was addressed by the secular courts. In most of Italy, the Inquisition seldom pursued witch sects, demonstrating scepticism and incredulity in regard to witchcraft, shown in tracts such as Cardinal Millino s 1624 Instructio pro formnadis processibus in causis strigum, sortilegorium, et maleficiorum. In Spain, there was a long-standing tradition of witchcraft prosecution due to the influence of the 1486 tract Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), as well as the tribunal of Zaragoza, which encouraged prosecution in Arag n. In the early seventeenth century, the writings of French judge Pierre de Lancre provoked a witch hunt which spread into the Basque lands, drawing in the Logro o inquisitors. While the Spanish Inquisitors, who mostly had legal backgrounds, hoped to hammer dissenting witches, the Italians, who were mostly theologically trained, sought to control rather than persecute . However, after 1612 the Spanish Inquisition moved away from witchcraft prosecution for two reasons. Firstly, the Logro o witch trials were denounced by senior inquisitors as unfounded, unproven hearsay and deemed the most regrettable affair in the history of the Inquisition. The second reason was the influx of Jews to Spain at this time, who were trading the Portuguese Inquisition s brutality for a seemingly newly moderate Spanish Inquisition. They were again persecuted, comprising over twenty per cent of the 15,000 Inquisition cases between 1615-1700. Compared to the importance of these new conversos to the Inquisition, magic was an inefficacious distraction. Geoffrey Parker has shown that from the 1580s Inquisitors in Venice, Naples, and the Friuli shifted their focus from heresy to superstition, magic, and sorcery , which soon accounted for almost half of cases. Those who could not be defined by the Inquisition, like the Benandanti, were labelled as witches. Despite scepticism, in sixteenth-century Italy witchcraft lived on in the national imagination and continued to be prosecuted, having not been disparaged or displaced as a priority as in Spain.

Having dealt with their most severe threats, the seventeenth century Inquisitions turned their attention to religious deviance among Old Christian populations, attempting to educate and coerce with what Bartolom Bennassar termed a pedagogy of fear . In Spain, there had always been an emphasis on public shame heretics were paraded publicly and their descendants termed inh biles, excluding them from many aspects of public life. By contrast, in Italy most sentencing was carried out in private. The auto, a concomitant didactic theater of final judgement was a specifically Hispanic phenomenon. This was in part caused by ideology. Spanish jurist Francisco Pe a clarified in 1578 that the main purpose of the trials and condemnations to death is not to save souls but the public good, and to instil terror in others. The Inquisition s domination of the public and private spheres was designed to effect conformity and control, its ideals delicately poised between belief in the fallen nature of humankind and in human perfectibility. Spain was a champion of Catholic conformity following Tridentine recommendations it took a firm stand against bigamous practice and sexual promiscuity, which had hitherto been accepted forms of behaviour. Censorship, essential to societal control because it codified what was permitted , was directly overseen by the Inquisition, which often visited private libraries.

The Spanish Inquisition was fundamentally a State inquisition it worked to ensure the supremacy of the Catholic monarchy , a un ion of royal authority and state religion forged by Ferdinand and Isabella. Jean-Pierre Dedieu argues that although the Church supplied the juridical matter, it quickly lost any true control over an institution whose agents were designated by the king and which the sovereign used in function of his own needs, including the unification of the various autonomous kingdoms scattered over the Peninsula. There was indeed regional resistance in 1485 the inquisitor Pedro Arbu s had been murdered in Zaragoza s cathedral, an act of symbolic violence designed to prevent the growth of inquisitorial roots on Aragonese soil. Naples too had revolted to protest an attempt to extend the Inquisition there in 1510, but the increasingly martial law exercised by Spain meant that it became ever more reasonable for the Spanish to wield control over all aspects of institutional power. The Inquisition became increasingly entrenched in public life a useful weapon for the nascent Spanish state, not only in bringing rebellious subjects to heel but also in taming fractious regional nobles. By 1547, its power was so great that revolting Neapolitan aristocrats had no qualms with its aims, but wanted to ensure that it would be forced to operate under constitutional limits and its decisions subject to appeal. Through its emerging sense of nationalism, forged in the name of militant Catholicism, Spain sought to purify both itself and its colonial possessions. Allyson Poska argues that by focusing on the Spanish population of the Americas, the Inquisition was attempting to assert control over Hern n Cort s and his supporters. The conquistadores, despite their personal agency, were ultimately subject to the Crown and punished for over-reaching. The Spanish Inquisition not only ensured uniformity of worship through terror and public shame, which pervaded both the public and private spheres, but also proved an essential tool for the Crown to exercise power over wider society, both in Spain and its colonies.

Although Italy did not have an comparable empire, some historians have, inspired by the Spanish experience, viewed the Roman Inquisition through the lens of Gramscian hegemony, as an attempt by the ruling bourgeoise class to establish and maintain its control. However, as Geoffrey Parker argues, in Italy the victims were all people who either refused to repent or who, having repented, relapsed. As such, the Inquisition was concerned with disobedience rather than error Venetian Jew Abraham Righetto s trial concerned whether he had been born in Ferrara, where Jews were permitted, or Lisbon, where they were not. If he was Portuguese, he must have lapsed into Judaism from Christianity, and should be punished accordingly. The Council of Trent, which took place just after the refoundation of the Roman Inquisition, saw that the best way to counter the Protestant threat was to work with the people to forge a new, popular Catholicism. Society as a whole perceived the necessity and usefulness of the Inquisition s disciplining and the Post-Tridentine period constituted a protracted process of negotiations and renegotiations over access to the sacred (and to power) among disparate social groups. It was a two-way street. People adopted new ideas, practices, and symbols from the church, but adapted them to their own purposes. The church adopted the innovations of religious creativity from below and adapted them to its aims. Although Adriano Prosperi characterises Roman efforts as the conquering of the consciousness through Inquisition, confessional and missions, William Hudon has noted that recent attempts by postmodernist historians to cast the Roman Inquisition in the new disciplining category have encountered considerable problems. In Italy, there was not such a desire for uniformity through discipline once obvious dissenters such as conversos had been dealt with. Those who deviated from religious norms, such as the Friulian miller Menocchio, were generally not executed by Rome but by a local inquisitor. Similarly, rather than autos, Rome s pubic ceremonial framing was conducted by lay confraternities which focused on bringing comfort to the condemned before their execution. The Roman Inquisition showed a clear preference for a didactic rather than a punitive role. Unlike Spain, the Roman Inquisition rarely enforced social discipline Luigi di Biasio`s compilation of 2,129 cases in the Friuli between 1557-1786 shows that less than one per cent concerned sex, whereas in Spain moral offences constituted 40 per cent of cases. The case of Paolo Veronese, who managed to escape prosecution for his inaccurate depiction of the Last Supper simply by renaming it The Feast in the House of Levi , is indicative of this trend. The Roman Inquisition, after successfully ridding the country of non-Christian heresy , exercised a pedagogy of fear to ensure conformity while also adapting its practices to retain the general support of the populace.

The differences between the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions can be located largely in the reasons behind their foundations, historical context and wider objectives. In Italy, Jews were mostly tolerated as important economic actors provided that they did not try to convert Catholics, and the low number of Muslims and military defeat of the Ottomans meant that Islam was never perceived as a significant threat. In Spain, the principal target initially was the Jews due to fears of both Judaizing and relapsed conversos. Following their expulsion and a greater integration of the conversos into society, the Inquisition began to also persecute moriscos, who had in many cases retained their customs and were prone to revolt, so they too were expelled. Protestants never formed a major threat to the Spanish state, but the climate of fear surrounding them allowed the Inquisition to justify expanding its reach. Despite being a well-established practice, witchcraft prosecution was phased out in Spain following the farcical Logro o witch trials and large influx of Portuguese conversos in the early seventeenth century, whereas the reduction in the prosecutions of other forms of heresy in Italy saw increased interest in witchcraft around the same time. The Roman Inquisition was refounded principally by the Roman Catholic Church to counter the threat of the Reformation, informed by concern that Protestant innovations were permeating into the Italian states. The non-event of the Italian Reformation is a testament to its success. It constituted an attempt by the Roman centre of the Catholic Church to control religious observance within the peripheral Italian states, with the Inquisition itself successfully contending for power over both the papacy and bishops. Notions of its considerable jurisdiction and authority, which nineteenth-century historians argued greatly contributed to Italian backwardness , were in fact inventions of the Inquisition in order to increase the effectiveness of its own pedagogy of fear . It was however relatively receptive to change and reform and generally operated with popular consent. Although many of the supposed excesses of the Spanish Inquisition have been rightly discredited as fabrication, it is certainly true that its drive for religious uniformity was far more extreme than the Roman, regularly employing public shame and execution in the form of the auto. It worked successfully alongside the Crown to impose centralised, unadulterated Catholicism on Spaniards both in Spain and the New World.