Heretics and Heroes Read online

  Columbus’s task was therefore a tricky one, but it seems from the scanty evidence that it was the queen, a woman of exquisite composure and silky speech, whose blue eyes and long gold tresses betrayed her high Castilian and Lancastrian origins, who was especially receptive to Columbus’s charm. Though the dark, jowly Ferdinand, whose stubbly beard was incapable of a close shave, would one day boast that he was “the principal cause why those islands were discovered,” it was Isabella who actually found the way forward for Spain to finance Columbus’s expedition. Columbus had already raised about half the needed cash from his Genoese contacts; and Spain, at the end of a long and draining military campaign, was out of cash. So Isabella donated her jewels (or at least some of them), knowing full well that her act of public generosity would necessarily drive all the nobles of Castile (and perhaps even of Aragon and of Ferdinand’s other territories)2 to follow suit in their effort to show themselves at least as generous.

  The year 1492 was a busy one for the Catholic Monarchs. Besides their conquest of the Moorish Kingdom of Granada, they had begun to take considerable interest in the religious observances of their subjects. Like Doctor Johnson in the stagecoach, they felt that false doctrines should be checked and that those who dared espouse such doctrines should be punished by the civil power in union with the church of the realm. Venturing a bit further than Johnson might have done, they issued—within days of their having situated themselves in the Alhambra—the Alhambra Decree, expelling all unconverted Jews from Spain.

  As we have already seen in the case of the Black Death, communities of Jews made convenient scapegoats in difficult times. But by this point, Jews had lived among European Christians for the better part of a millennium and a half—often uneasily, sometimes (as in papal Rome) appreciated for their special skills, sometimes targeted for elimination. In general, insofar as Christians thought about them at all, Jews tended to be considered flawed or partial Christians, believers in the Old Testament but not the New, people who—inexplicably—failed to see that Jesus was the fulfillment of all their prophecies. They were not universally hated, as were the Muslims (called Moors or, more ominously, Saracens), those who had cooked up a new religion—really, a heresy—and stolen the Holy Places from their rightful owners, the Christians. The fast friendship Boccaccio describes between the two Parisian merchants, one Christian, the other Jewish, is a bit harder to imagine occurring between a Christian and a Muslim (at least in a Christian country).

  Selectively admired or merely tolerated, Jews were an expected part of the European social scene. The expulsion from Spain, however, was not their first. On several prior occasions, Jews had been ordered to move en masse from a European country. In 1182 the teenage King Philip II Augustus of France, whose treasury was empty, had seized all Jewish property and forgiven all debts owed to Jews, provided only the debtors pay to the king 20 percent of what they owed. (Sixteen years later, Philip, feeling the adverse effects on French commerce of the departure of the Jews, would allow them to return.) In 1290, Edward I banished all Jews from his kingdom of England, a ban that remained in effect into the 1600s. In 1306, King Philip IV the Fair (who was not) expelled the Jews of France once again. Though readmitted in 1315, they were expelled once more in 1322, readmitted in 1359, and re-expelled in 1394. If the Spanish expulsion seems particularly harsh on account of the huge numbers involved and the efficiency with which results were pursued, it only signaled more execrable banishments to come: by the end of the Second World War, Ireland would stand out as the only European nation that had never expelled (and/or attempted to eliminate) its Jews nor subjected them to pogroms nor confined them to ghettos.

  Parenthetically, we must lay at Spain’s door what was almost certainly the earliest of these European persecutions (and a characteristically Spanish one): the offer, laid out by the primatial archbishop of Toledo in 694, that all Spanish Jews choose between baptism and perpetual enslavement. Nor should we forget that in 1391 the newly crowned Spanish king, Henry III, encouraged the massacres of Jews in Seville, Córdoba, Toledo, and other cities of his realm.

  Spanish Jews were given exactly four months from the date of the Alhambra Decree to clear out of the extensive realms of the Catholic Monarchs, not an easy feat for most to perform. Moreover, though departing Jews were graciously allowed to take their belongings with them, they were not permitted to take any “gold or silver or minted money.” (Remember: the Monarchs were experiencing an extreme cash flow crisis.) The punishment for failing to depart (or convert) was death. The punishment for Christians who attempted to hide Jews was confiscation of all property and cancellation of all hereditary privileges. So it is hardly surprising that not a few Jews publicly converted to Christianity and were baptized. These conversos, as they were called, elicited suspicion from their Christian neighbors. Were their conversions sincere or merely convenient? As many were subsequently discovered to have continued their practice of Jewish religious customs, Spaniards found themselves devising bizarre tests of Christian orthodoxy, such as forcing suspects to eat pork.3 (If you refused or gagged, you must be an insincere convert. Converts from Islam would soon be subjected to the same test—which did have a certain twisted logic behind it: prized Spanish ham, jamón ibérico de bellota, from well-bred pigs fed on the acorns of ancient oaks is the best in the world.)

  The decree did not, however, produce the first conversos. Thanks to the efforts of Toledo’s archbishop nearly eight hundred years earlier, there was an ancient tradition of Jewish conversos within Spanish society. More than this, the pogroms of 1341, centered on Seville, had greatly expanded the class of converted Jews, many of whom had subsequently achieved high status in southern Spanish society. Two of these conversos, the bankers Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sánchez, would be numbered among the financiers of Columbus.

  Many unconverted Sephardim (as the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula were called, in contrast to the Ashkenazim, the Jews of France, Germany, and eastern Europe) found refuge in the Islamic countries of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire and were able to remain there and even to thrive.4 The establishment of the State of Israel, however, on land that had previously been controlled by Muslims, as well as the grave diminishment of its prior inhabitants, has in our time provoked Muslim rage and a hostility toward Jews that had never before been characteristic of the relationship between the two communities of faith. Indeed, in the centuries during which Muslim rulers had held sway over the Iberian Peninsula, Jews could breathe much more freely there than they could in most Christian countries. They, like Christians living under Muslim rule, had to pay a special tax, but for these designated “Peoples of the Book” there was no specifically religious persecution.

  The expulsion of unconverted Jews from Spanish territory was, however, but one prong of a campaign of increasingly cruel exactions on the part of the Catholic Monarchs. Though the terms of the treaty that followed their successful war against the Kingdom of Granada guaranteed religious freedom to their Muslim subjects, the Monarchs soon discarded that provision and began to hound unconverted Muslims, as well as those (Moriscos or little Moors) who only outwardly accepted Christianity, in a fashion similar to their persecution of Jews, if somewhat less vigorously. The marginally greater toleration of Muslims lay in the fact that they were even more intricately threaded through Spanish, and especially through Aragonian, society (though certainly not through other European societies) than were Jews, many Muslims even gaining positions of trust at the courts of various Spanish noble families, who valued their contributions and would not cooperate willingly in their persecution or banishment.

  As early as 1478 the Monarchs had set up a new institution to ensure unity of faith throughout their realms. Even today, its name, the Spanish Inquisition, is capable of sending a shiver through many a breast. In recent decades, scholars have revised their historical judgments, now informing us that this Inquisition wasn’t as bad as its reputation. But it was a grim business for anyone who incurred its interest. And
despite the inspired humor of the famous Monty Python sketches, featuring madcap English comedians galumphing into view in the getup of Roman cardinals and shouting “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” there was nothing bumbling, antic, or remotely silly about the men who staffed this merciless ecclesiastical tribunal.

  Throughout the Middle Ages there had been inquisitions, arranged by the papacy in concert with local bishops. These had had, however, only a very occasional impact on medieval life, functioning locally, operating seldom and with some highly specified object, that is, the rooting out of a particular Christian heresy in a particular place. The most important inquisitions of the Middle Ages were directed against the Albigensians, who held an extreme Platonic conviction that God’s world was entirely spiritual and that all matter was evil, having been created by Satan. It is impossible to determine now how many Albigensians there were, centered primarily in the regions of Languedoc in France, the Rhine Valley, and (perhaps) Verona in Italy, but the extreme unattractiveness of their doctrine would seem necessarily to have limited their numbers. The popes, who directed inquiries into heresy from afar, were normally more interested in convincing the heretics of the error of their ways than in burning them alive. Only unrepentant holdouts were put to the torch.

  The burning of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance stands as a sinister exception to the normal course of events and was enabled because the Council was in the hands of the voting bishops rather than of a pope, who would almost certainly have proved more irenic. There were then three popes striding about in different jurisdictions, each demanding universal obedience, and the Council’s main job was to put an end to this embarrassing state of affairs. Hus dared to question the claim of the conciliar fathers that they held their authority over the universal church “immediately from Christ,” which questioning the fathers could not abide, especially as they were themselves a tad uncertain about who in fact did hold such power. We should also not underestimate the impact that nationalism was already beginning to exert on the bishops (as on everyone else). Hus’s Czech movement was seen by many as an illegal nationalistic challenge to imperial German sovereignty. Many of the bishops were either German or at least in sympathy with the jurisdictional claims of the Holy Roman Emperor.

  The Spanish Inquisition—that is, an inquiry answerable to the Spanish Monarchs, rather than to Rome—was an innovation and a devolution from relatively humane papal standards. The scariest thing about it was its omnicompetence, the broadness of its mandate, its freedom to look into anything and anyone for any reason. The Monarchs had been encouraged to set up their own national inquiry into heresy among their subjects by Isabella’s personal confessor, Tomás de Torquemada, whose name is a stain on their reign despite the famous description of him by his contemporary Sebastián de Olmedo as “the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order” (the Dominicans, in case you were wondering).

  Torquemada, a heavyset, brutal-looking man with an anxious brow, beady eyes, and a long, thick, bent nose, became an essential figure in the Monarchs’ self-conscious Reconquista, the reconquest of Spain, culturally reclaiming it from its centuries of Muslim rule during which Muslims, Jews, and Christians had lived side by side in a fondly remembered convivencia and had even collaborated with one another in preserving and translating seminally important religious and philosophical texts. Torquemada, hostile to any text from which he thought he could sniff a whiff of heresy, enthusiastically promoted the burning of Hebrew and Arabic books. But what he became most famous for was his enthusiastic burning of human beings, probably close to two thousand individuals in the course of his fifteen-year tenure (1483–1498) as Spain’s Grand Inquisitor.

  Besides the public burnings, carried out with great solemnity and grand panoply as autos de fe (acts of faith),5 the numbers of those he ordered tortured were, according to even The Catholic Encyclopedia, “vast” and “on an unprecedented scale.”6 “Exceptionally intolerant even for his times,” the entry continues, he established an exceedingly efficient “spiritual police system” that would continue to terrorize Spain for centuries, to be abolished only in 1834. Its official work was to investigate heresy among Christians, but it marched far beyond that mandate, investigating and punishing a wide variety of “spiritual offenders,” from so-called “crypto-Jews” to supposed witches to those accused of such sexual crimes as sodomy and bestiality. Even Spain’s most outsized (and orthodox) Catholic saints—Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross—would in the next century fall under suspicion and be shadowed for a time by the Spanish Inquisition, Loyola even cast into prison as a possible heretic on two separate occasions, experiences that convinced him to quit Spain altogether.

  In the atmosphere of fear and hysteria that Torquemada encouraged, he himself could have been tried as a crypto-Jew. (Given how thoroughly Jews were threaded through Spanish society, this accusation could probably have been leveled against a great many Spaniards.) There were at least two Jewish conversos in his family line, one of them a grandmother. But Torquemada quickly achieved such control over Spanish society that no one would have dared question his antecedents for fear of attracting his attention. So hated did he become that he had to travel surrounded by fifty mounted guards and an additional 250 armed men.7

  It would be dismayingly reductive, however, if we were to attribute Torquemada’s success only to the craven fear he struck in the hearts of men and women. As Fyodor Dostoevsky would so awesomely dramatize the reasoning of Torquemada and his ilk in “The Grand Inquisitor,” the great story-within-a-story to be found in The Brothers Karamazov, the inquisitor’s insistence on shared universal belief expresses a yearning that may also be found in the human heart—a desire “to be united unequivocally in a communal and harmonious ant heap.” This “need for universal unity of mankind” against dissenters certainly appears and reappears throughout history, and its impact on human affairs, as in Dostoevsky’s vivid accounting, should never be underestimated.

  But besides this profound reality of hidden motivation—this infernal, usually unspoken quest for universality of belief—it must be said that many participants in witch hunts are simply disgruntled, jealous partisans in search of retribution against their betters. This is the motivation that Arthur Miller would bring to the fore in The Crucible, his remarkable play about the American witch trials of seventeenth-century Salem—which is also a play about Miller’s judgment on the tawdry machinations of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era.

  Sensing the dark underside of the enthusiastic persecution of “heretics,” successive popes tried in vain to rein in the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. According to a bull of Pope Sixtus IV, “many true and faithful Christians, because of the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves, and other low people, and—still less appropriate—without tests of any kind, have been locked up in state prisons, tortured, and condemned as if they were relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and properties, and turned over to the secular arm to be executed, at great danger to their souls, giving a pernicious example and causing scandal to many.”

  Despite this nice rhetorical flourish, Sixtus quickly backed off his resolve to inhibit Torquemada’s incursions once the pope found himself opposed by King Ferdinand, who was solidly in the rabid Dominican’s corner. Sixtus was one of a series of popes in this period who could have stepped right out of the pages of the Decameron. A lover of art, music, and literature, he built the Sistine Chapel (which is named for him), founded its famous choir, established the Vatican Archives, greatly enlarged the Vatican Library, and opened it to scholars. But he also made six of his feckless young nephews into cardinals, blocked all church reform, and was drawn into the huge Pazzi conspiracy, which resulted in the murder of Giuliano de’ Medici, the wounding of his brother Lorenzo, and a scandalous war between Rome and Florence. (See this page.) He then got Venice to attack Ferrara, switched sides, imposed papal penalties on Venice, and em
ptied the papal treasury, after which he sold indulgences and curial offices in order to refill his empty coffers.

  His successor, who took the inappropriate name of Innocent VIII, was just a little worse. It was he who conferred upon Ferdinand and Isabella the title los Reyes católicos. He ordered a bloodthirsty inquisitorial witch hunt throughout Germany. He fathered several bastards, made his thirteen-year-old grandson a cardinal, created new church offices just so he could auction them off to the highest bidders, and interfered disastrously in international affairs, alienating kings unnecessarily and leaving the much-reduced Papal States in anarchy by the close of his reign. On his deathbed in the summer of 1492, in a last tremor of self-knowledge, he begged the cardinal electors to choose a successor who would be an improvement on him.

  Thanks to a spectacular series of bribes and promises of future rewards by the winning candidate, the cardinals chose the Catholic Monarchs’ fellow Spaniard Rodrigo de Borja y Borja, the worst pope in history, father of several children (born both before and after his election to the papacy), including dear Lucrezia of the poisoned ring and Cesare Borgia (as the family name was Italianized), the model for Machiavelli’s prince. That the thrice-married and much-bedded Lucrezia actually poisoned the food of husbands and others she wished to be rid of, or that she slept with her father and her brother and had children by them, cannot now be proven conclusively. That the Borgias were vicious and implacable and threw howlingly good parties is indisputable.

  Rodrigo took the papal name, forever infamous, of Alexander VI. His election on August 11, 1492, came but a week and a day after Columbus’s departure from the coast of Spain in three ships—the caravels Niña and Pinta and the larger carrack Santa María—headed for the unknown. We shall have reason to return to Rodrigo-Alexander. But for now let’s follow Columbus.