History Horrors

 Horrors revealed by author Chaz Wood

They may have worn nice red uniforms, but the Inquisitors of medieval Spain were not an amusing lot. Having railed slightly against the trend for revising history in my earlier “Bloody Eagle” article, I’m now going to redress the balance and offer a few documented facts why Tomas de Torquemada’s notorious gang of rampaging heretic-bashers ought not to be coloured quite so red…however, the origins of the institution are very dark indeed, and this is in no way an apology for what was in some ways a blueprint for the origins of latter-day atrocities.

For centuries following the Crusades, Spain had become one of the more racially-tolerant and civilised nations in Europe. The Moorish Arab influence in the South granted the Alhambra, and Jews mixed freely with the indiginous Catholic population enjoying the benefits brought by occuptaions such as jewellery merchants, doctors and lawyers. However, Good King Ferdinand and Isabella came along and when they weren’t paying Christopher Columbus to “fail to discover” India, they decided that this cultural melting pot was far from being a Good Thing for their Good Catholic subjects.

Growing religious intolerance led to forced conversion of thousands of Muslims and Jews, creating new sub-cultures thus: Moriscos, who were ex-Muslims, and Conversos, who were ex-Jews, but now ostensibly practicing Catholics. But this wasn’t enough for Ferdinand, who decided to believe that these erstwhile heathens could not possibly be true to the True Faith, and were continuing to practice their loathsome pagan rites in secret, undermining both Church and State.

So a body was set up to weed out these subversive pseuds, who could only be working for a religious revolution from the inside. The myth of a Grand Jewish Conspiracy to overthrow Christendom was enthusiastically spread from the late 1400s, a myth which later begat the nauseating forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the 19th Century, and helps to show that the seeds of 20th-Century genocide were sown centuries before (incidentally, without the finance of Jewish conversos, Columbus’ first trip in 1492 would never have happened).

Thus, the Spanish Inquisition was born, from social unrest and chronic paranoia - to persecute Jews and Muslims. Its remit was soon extended, however, to include heretics, and this is what the Inquisition is most notorious for, since the nature of religious persecution is, at best, a thorny one.

Fear certainly became the Inquisition’s main weapon. A culture of paranoia was created, with neighbours and even families torn by doubt, terror and insecurity. Fathers lived in fear of their children, siblings betrayed one another to the authorities, and scores between relations, former friends and neighbours were soon settled by running to the offices of the Inquisition with a fanciful charge of heresy on one’s lips. False witness was found to be one of the most common complaints across many of the regional offices of the Inquisition. One was never formally charged with a specific crime. The accused was removed to an Inquisitorial gaol, and told to confess. If you were innocent, you were in for a hard time of it - to what, exactly, should I confess? The fact that I don’t like to eat pork, or that I dared to wash my linen on a Sunday?

Under the guidelines of the Holy Inquisition torture alone was never often used to elicit a final confession - the accused was usually granted twenty-four hours to recover, and then interrogated again, without torture, to confirm the statement. Confessions could also be obtained from leaving the accused in conspectu tormentorum - which involved simply holding the individual in a cell overnight in the company of the proposed torture instruments, presumably granting plenty of nightmares (assuming sleep came at all) and much reflection upon the forthcoming day’s events. Physical torture was usually a last resort (but that was little comfort in itself if, in the final verdict, you were found guilty and sentenced to a public humiliation followed by burning at the stake).

Torture was most vigorously applied to cases of suspected “Judaizing” (practicing the Jewish faith in secret), or just as heinous, Protestantism. One doctor from Seville, in 1702, submitted a claim for expenses for his presence at “434 sessions of torture”.

In practice, both male and female prisoners were stripped of clothing before being subjected to one of the three main forms of bloodless and non-fatal procedures stipulated by Church law, as follows:

i) the Garrucha, in which the accused was hung by the wrists from a pulley in the ceiling, with weights attached to the feet or ankles (some illustrations depict the weights attached to the toes, and the ropes binding the thumbs). The prisoner was raised slowly upward, then dropped sharply toward the floor again. Dislocation of joints was the usual result;

ii) the Toca, in which the accused was bound to a rack and a linen cloth stuffed down his throat. Water was then poured into the forcibly-opened mouth, slowly, from a number of jars;

iii) and the Potro, which became the staple for the Inquisition after the 1500s, involved being bound around the body by cords or garottes which were then tightened by the torturer. By twisting the ends of the cords, they bit tighter into the flesh of the accused, the number of turns therefore increasing the severity. The actual words of prisoners subjected to the potro, as recorded by secretaries present at the scene, make for disturbing and graphic reading: “…Senores, for God’s sake have mercy on me…take these things from my arms - Senor, release me, they are killing me!…do you not see how these people are killing me? I did it - for God’s sake let me go!” And in that instance, all because she didn’t eat pork, and changed her linen on a Sunday.

No set limit was imposed on grounds of sex, age, or health, with cases reported of female victims aged between 70 and 90 as having been subjected to the potro, and in Valencia in 1607, it is recorded that a thirteen-year old female was also tortured.

Not all torture was physical. Prison life was harsh in the extreme (though seemingly much improved over secular gaols of the time - reports exist of common prisoners confessing to heretical charges in order to be transferred to the “relative luxury” of an Inquisitorial gaol!). Given that most Inquisitorial prisons for common people involved stale bread, lack of water and daylight, the presence of rats, fleas, and being deprived of clothing, one can only imagine the state of their secular counterparts.

Imprisonment was not intended as a punishment, though given the above nuisances and the fact that a prisoner could remain there for years pending their trial, meant that they often became so. Insanity and suicide became regular occurrences, as did death by fever and plague. Whole families could be cast into prison together, as in the case of a 40-year old seamstress and her four sons, two of whom died after six months in a Valladolid prison. Prisoners sometimes died in gaol before their trials even began, in which case they were often tried in absentia and then burned in effigy.

The Inquisition also ran the best witness protection scheme ever seen. After being accused, a prisoner was presented with all the evidence that had been compiled against him, except that, following the instructions of Valdés in 1561, “any evidence liable to betray a witness could be omitted”. The accused was not made aware of who was bringing the charges and was unable to access the full facts of the case, unlike his Inquisitors, and sometimes was recorded as having argued his innocence on what he believed to be the accusation, when in truth the actual case consisted of another incident entirely.

The real horror of the Inquisition is not just the living bodies which were broken and burned over the centuries, but the many more innocent individuals who lived their lives in fear and in isolation; who were fingered by jealous neighbours or wrathful family members out of spite, who watched their children taken away from them, their hard-earned riches sold to pay for their time in prison (sometimes as much as five or ten years, depending when the trial finally came to pass) and who died in misery and penury for no reason. For “heresy”, we would now substitute “the right to freedom of speech”. A classic sketch by Goya, “For Opening His Mouth in Dissent”, shows a penitent hunched miserably in a dark gloomy cell, chained and bound beneath a barred window, a depiction of human misery as complete as it can be.

Post Script: In the Year of Our Lord 1994, the Vatican finally publicly denounced the workings of the Holy Office as having violated Human Rights. Better late than never, I guess.

Principle reference: “The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision” Henry Kamen, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997.