INQUISITION, THE. 



INQUISITION, THE. 



832 



to contain them, the court was removed to the castle of Triana, in 

 suburb of Seville. The inquisitors issued another edict, by which the 

 ordered every person, under pain of mortal sin and excommunicatioi 

 to inform against those who had relapsed into the Jewish faith o 

 irites, or who gave reason for suspecting them of being relapsed, spec 

 fying numerous indications by which they might be known. Sentence 

 of death soon followed ; and in the course of that year (1481) 298 new 

 Christians were burnt alive in the city of Seville, 2000 in other parts 

 of Andalusia, and 1 7,000 were subjected to various penalties. Th 

 property of those who were executed, which was considerable, was con 

 fiscated. (Mariana, 'Hist, de Espana,' b. 24, ch. 17.) The terro 

 excited by these executions caused a vast number of new Christian 

 to emigrate ; several who were condemned as contumacious repairec 

 to Rome, and appealed to Pope Sixtus IV. against the inquisitors 

 The pope wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella, in January, 1482, com 

 plaining of the arbitrary conduct of the two inquisitors appointed b; 

 them, revoking the authority which he had given to their majesties tt 

 appoint other inquisitors, and reserving that right to himself, which hi 

 exercised by a brief in the following February. Among these new 

 appointments was that of the afterwards famous Torquemada. Queen 

 Isabella now wrote to the pope, requesting him to give a permanent 

 and fixed form to the new tribunal, and to make its judgment definite 

 without appeal to Home, complaining at the same time that she was 

 accused of doing all that she had done in favour of the Catholic faith 

 for the sake of the confiscations which follow the condemnations. The 

 pope laid the proposal of Isabella before a committee of Spanish cardi- 

 nals and bishops who were then at Rome, and among whom was 

 Bodrigo de Borja, afterwards Pope Alexander VI. By their advice, 

 Sixtus IV. despatched a brief to Isabella, appointing Manrique, arch- 

 bishop of Seville, to be apostolic judge of appeal for all Spain, with 

 power to decide on all appeals from the judgments of the Inquisition. 

 By several other briefs, directed to the various archbishops of Spain, 

 the pope gave them the power and regulated the manner of appoint- 

 ing the ordinary inquisitors in the various dioceses. Notwithstanding 

 these measures, appeals from Spain 'continued to be received at 

 Rome; and the pope again wrote, in August of the same year, to 

 the Archbishop of Seville, ordering the proceedings against several 

 individuals to be quashed, and recommending mildness and moderation. 

 This recommendation however had no. effect. Soon after, the pope 

 appointed Thomas de Torquemada, prior of the Dominican convent of 

 Segovia, to the new dignity of inquisitor-general of the kingdom of 

 Castile ; and by another brief, dated 1 7th October, 1 483, he made him 

 likewise inquisitor-general of the kingdom of Aragon, with full juris- 

 diction over all other inquisitors in Spain and its dependencies. His 

 powers were confirmed by Innocent VIII., in February, 1486. Tor- 

 quemada chose for his assessors and councillors two jurists, J. Gutierrez 

 and Tristan de Medina : he created four subordinate courts, at Seville, 

 Cordoba, Jaen, and Villa Real ; the last was soon after transferred to 

 Toledo. The Dominican monks, who had been appointed inquisitors 

 by the pope in February, 1482, at first refused to submit to the autho- 

 rity of Torquemada, but they finally yielded. Ferdinand at the same 

 time appointed a royal council of the supreme Inquisition, " Consejo 

 de la Suprema Inquisicion,' of which the grand-inquisitor was president 

 of right and for life, and a bishop and two doctors-at-law were coun- 

 cillors. The councillors had a deliberative vote in all matters of civil 

 law, but the president alone judged in matters which concerned the 

 canon or ecclesiastical law. 



Torquemada and his two assessors framed the organic laws of the 

 new tribunal, which were styled ' Instructions,' and were partly based 

 on the older ' Directorium Inquisitorum ' of Eymeric. Being sanc- 

 tioned by a junta of the inquisitors of the four courts which he had 

 established and of the royal councillors, the instructions, consisting of 

 28 articles, were promulgated at Seville, the 29th October, 1484. 

 They are given at length by Llorente, in the sixth chapter of his 

 History. New articles were added to them in 1488 and 1498 ; and, 

 lastly, the inquisitor-general Valdcz, in 1561, compiled a new series of 

 ordinances in 81 articles, which regulated ever after the practice and 

 proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition. They are also given by 

 Llorente, in the 22nd chapter of his work. They are substantially 

 the same as those already noticed as being in practice by the old 

 Inquisition, but are more minute, and rather more unfavourable to 

 the accused. By the old practice, for instance, the names of the wit- 

 nesses for the prosecution were in many cases communicated to the 

 accused, to whom they were of great use for his defence. Confiscation 

 of the property of those who were condemned was not generally en- 

 forced under the old practice, and this was more particularly the case 

 in the kingdom of Aragon, a circumstance which explains the resistance 

 of the Aragonese, among whom the old or delegate Inquisition had 

 been established for centuries, to the introduction of the new Inquisi- 

 tion as instituted by Torquemada. 



Another important characteristic of the new Spanish Inquisition 

 was its compact organisation and independence of all other authorities. 

 The inquisitor-general was appointed for life ; he was proposed by the 

 king and approved by the pope. He appointed all other inquisitors 

 under him, as well as visitors and other agents. He had full and dis- 

 cretionary power by the papal bulls in all matters of heresy. The 

 grand-inquisitor, being thus placed as a distinct power between the 

 king and the pope, wag in reality independent of both. Ho coulrl 

 ARTS AND BCT. DIV. Vol.. IV. 



refuse to submit to those papal decretals and bulls which he did not 

 approve, by alleging that they infringed upon the rights of the Spanish 

 monarchy ; and he could likewise evade the king's ordinances, by 

 alleging the papal bulls which forbade the inquisitors to tamper with 

 the secular power under pain of excommunication. Among other 

 proofs of this assumed irresponsibilily, one of the strongest is the 

 famous trial of Carranza, archbishop of Toledo, in the reign of Philip 

 II., who had attended Charles V. at St. Yusto in his last moments, 

 and whom neither the briefs of the pope Pius IV., nor the remon- 

 strances of the prelates assembled at the council of Trent could save 

 from being confined in the prisons of the Spanish Inquisition for more 

 than seven years, without a termination of his trial ; and when at last 

 pope Pius V. demanded of the Spanish inquisitor and of the king, 

 under pain of excommunication, that the archbishop and the papers 

 of his trial should be sent to Rome, all sorts of obstacles were thrown 

 in the way of his departure and his final acquittal by the pope. After 

 the death of Pius V. new proceedings were commenced in Spain to 

 prove the archbishop guilty of heresy, and on the information being 

 transmitted to Rome, Gregory XIII., who had succeeded Pius V., was, 

 though with evident reluctance, induced to declare, on the 14th April, 

 1576, that the archbishop of Toledo was strongly suspected of believing 

 sixteen propositions qualified as Lutheran, and which had been de- 

 duced from the context of his writings by the casuists of the Inquisition. 

 He was then sentenced to five years' con6 nement in a Dominican convent 

 and other canonical penances. A few days after this sentence, the arch- 

 bishop, who was then seventy-two years of age, was taken dangerously 

 ill, and before receiving the sacrament, on the 30th of April, he so- 

 lemnly declared in presence of several witnesses " that he had never 

 fallen into the errors with which he had been charged ; that his expres- 

 sions had been distorted into a meaning totally different from his ; that 

 le however humbly submitted to the judgment pronounced by the 

 sovereign pontiff, and heartily forgave all those who had taken part 

 against him in the trial, and would pray for them before the throne of 

 Grace." On the 2nd of the following May the archbishop died in the 

 convent of La Minerva at Rome, in which he was detained, and where 

 was buried. An inscription was placed over his tomb by order of 

 Gregory XIII., in which he was described as a prelate " illustrious for 

 us birth, his life, his doctrine, his preaching, and his charity," Llorente 

 ;ives a copious abstract of this celebrated trial in chapters 32, 33, and 

 14 of his ' History of the Inquisition.' 



Pope Paul III., alarmed at the progress of the doctrines of the 

 leformation, with the consent of Charles V. sent inquisitorial com- 

 missioners to the various states and provinces of Italy to try heretics ; 

 >ut they were instructed to proceed according to the usual form of the 

 ecclesiastical courts, the depositions and names of the witnesses were 

 o be communicated to the accused, and sentence of condemnation was 

 iot accompanied by confiscation; in short their powers were very 

 ifferent from those of the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish viceroy 

 f Naples, Don Pedro de Toledo, applied to the pope for an inquisito- 

 rial commissioner with a brief to proceed against persons suspected of 

 leresy, but the Neapolitans, who were acquainted with the severities 

 f the Spanish Inquisition, revolted, and, after much bloodshed, 

 !harles V. promised that no Inquisition should be established in the 

 ingdom of Naples, and that cases of heresy should be tried, as before, 

 y the ordinary episcopal courts. These occurrences took place in 

 546-7, and the Neapolitans, the better to secure themselves against 

 he dreaded tribunal, established a court whose office it was to watch 

 gainst any attempt to introduce the same under any shape a kind of 

 nquisition against the Inquisition. This court, which continued to 

 xist till the French invasion of 1799, was styled " Tribunale contro 

 uello del Saiit Uffizio," and was composed of deputies, chiefly noble- 

 men chosen by the different Seggi into which the Neapolitan nobility 

 was classed. To the Neapolitan character, mercurial and coinmunica- 

 ive, the secret and mysterious proceedings of the Inquisition were 

 leculiarly obnoxious. 



Philip II. wished to introduce the Spanish Inquisition into the duchy 

 E Milan, but the towns of Lombardy sent deputies to the council of 

 rent to remonstrate against it, and the Milanese and other Italian 

 ishops wrote to the pope and to Cardinal Borromeo, representing that 

 le Inquisition of Spain acted in the dark, in an arbitrary manner, 

 ud with strange and fearful forms of proceeding, that it took away the 

 urisdiction from the bishops, that it showed itself more a rival than a 

 ubject to the papal see, that it had repeatedly refused to send a copy 

 : its trials to Rome, and that if it were introduced into Italy, the 

 alian prelates, having its terrors before then- eyes, would become 

 stranged from the holy see. The pope, being easily persuaded by 

 lese reasons, interposed with King Philip, saying that if required he 

 ould, after consulting with the bishops of Lombardy, himself send 

 iquisitorial commissioners from Rome, who should proceed not accord- 

 ig to the Spanish form, but according to the canon law, and without 

 rejudice to the episcopal authority. Thus the Spanish Inquisition 

 as not introduced into Milan or into any other Italian state, with 

 10 exception of Sicily, which was an old dependency of the crown of 

 ragon. 



The court of the Inquisition, as it was established in the 16th 

 ntury, in Tuscany, Venice, Milan, Parma, and other Italian states, 

 onsisted of one inquisitor, sent from Koine, with assessors approved by 

 le sovereign of the respective states, who appointed deputies or com- 



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