Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

(Yes, I know I got carried away on this… and tried to cram too much in. Think of it as a draft for something more formal and scholarly).

History” with a capital “H” … that is, the serious stories we’re meant to believe as “true”, and from which we are expected to draw a guidepost to correct actions (“Those who do not remember history…)… changes over time, as new “discoveries” are made, or new and presumably better (or at least more plausible) intrepretations of what happened or why it happened are put forward. In other words, it’s true.. until it’s not. Or…more commonly… true-ish — factually accurate in some respects, but “spun” or leaving out some details.

True-ish History might be simply harmless… Paul Revere DID ride a horse to warn Lexington militia of an intended British Army incursion. Along with many others, though Revere’s name fit the Longfellow poem better. The “Boy Heroes” of Chapultepec … who allegedly lept to their death clutching the Mexican flag rather than surrender the Castle/Miliary Academy to overwhelming US Marine attackers in 1847 … did die in a battle for the castle, the teenage boys fending off professional soldiers, and some may have fallen from the ramparts. But, while we know the source is a poem by a survivor of the engagement, the poet (and grandson of Mexico’s “founding father”, Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon), Vicente Rivas Palacios, who mentioned the four in a commemorative address.

Whether the actual facts are correct, the story-teller means to present a small moral lesson. Even when we know the story is a fable, no more true than Aesop’s stories about talking animals… we get it… patriotism, or even giving one’s life for one’s country, is a moral good, Whether it is or not is another issue.

More commonly, history “conveniently” will leave some parts out… not that they’re messy so much as they would undermine the “lesson”. Think of US history, which neglects not just the entire histories of the peoples living on the land to begin with (or rather lumps them all in one broad group as “natives”), presenting a narrative of their existence as just one more incovenience to be dealt with in “conquering” the wilderness.

When this happens, the counter-narrative is often simplified as well… One thinks of Mexico’s own history, where once it was historial “fact” that the Spanish Conquistadors, for all their faults, were “saving” opressed people from the murderous, tyrannical Aztecs. There is some truth in that, although one can easily talk of the “murderous, tyranical Spanish” destroying the ethical and sophisticated Aztec state as well.

AND… finally… there are those “Histories” that seek to both to suggest a right course of action, while simultenously justifying biases. How the Spanish Inqusition has been spun … and its own history… the history of its history… is a History worth examination.

The Inquisition itself ran from the 1480s to the 1820s, Simple enough? That is, until you consider that “Spain” was not a country, but a geographical designation, and not necessarily a European one … the meeting point of Africa, the Arab world (and beyond that Asia) and Europe, though a period as the unrivaled European and world power, to a minor has-been dangly-bit of Europe. Reading Spanish history as if it those 350 or so years was one long story misses how much everything, especially in Europe, changed over that time period.

Inquisions ¹, and just not on the Iberian Peninsula had existed several years before 1475 when the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabela created the joint crown of Castille and Aragón. While… in theory… minor affairs, usually under a local Bishop meant to ferret out heresy and deviations from the “official” teachings of the Church. Simultanously, as had been going on for centuries, Jews thoughout Europe… largely tolerated in Iberia since the Romans (as opposed to, say, England, where the Jews were massacred and expelled in 1290, or France, a century earlier) and… depending on the source… Spain had either been more tolerant, or simply late to the game when it came to enforcing religious hegemony on its people. Certainly there were pograms and forcing minorities to submit or die was not anything new in European history, but with the sudden eruption of Spain beginning in 1492 as the European super-power would color perceptions of that state and its satellites for the next several centuries.

It also might be noted that in 1492, there were something less an a half million Muslims and close to one million Jews out of a Spanish population of about ten million. With exceptions, especially among the Jews who who often were employed as “neutral go-betweens” by Christian and Islamic states, and promient in the learned professions (and in banking, where Christians and Muslims both had to find workarounds for religious proscritions on charging interest on loans). Peasants were of less concern to the Inquisitons, and following the mandated conversion to Chrisitianity in 1492, it was the Jews who would bear the most scrutiny. Whether or nor 3000 Jews were consigned to the flames in a single year, or… more realistically (although possibly over-estimated) 3000 between the first Inquisitions in 1478 and 1520 (as Inquisition scholar Paula Tarkoff claims²). At any rate, a large number, if they were all burned (more on that later). And, while unfortunately, Christian oppression, and mass murder, of Jews was not viewed as the barbarism it is, nor much condemned at the time. On the other hand, while those promient Muslims who were persecuted or wrote about persecution tended to write in Arabic (and not much read by later western scholars), Jews would find refuge in a few European states, where their writings would be more accessable to future western historians.

1492 was a momentous year not just in Spain, — joining the crowns of Castille and Aragón to create a “unitary state” (with an official language… Castillian) that would dominate western Europe over the next few centuries, expelling the last Muslim kingdom from western Europe, and…. of yes… “discovering the New World… but it was 1521 when the Inquisition became a political and cultural football as the “Black Legend” began to take shape.

Hernan Cortés was uncovering… i.e. stealing… a massive new revenue source for Spanish crown. What he was sending back as tribute (i.e a bribe for overlooking his illegal “adventure capitalist” march to Tenochtitlan) would at least have doubled the Spanish treasury (if it wasn’t taken by pirates, but that’s another story), but his letters to the regent Carlos ³(or Holy Roman Emperor Charles V… take your pick) were slow in reaching him. Thanks to the vaguries of royal inbreeding and the sorry state of medical knowlege of the time, he was the ultimate winner in the lucky sperm lottery, ruler of Castile and the Argonian Empire⁴ (including most of southern Italy), the Duchy of Burgandy, and Holy Roman Emperor. Carlos, in his Charles V role, was 1700 kilometers away from the then seat of the Spanish Crown in Valladolid, in the small town of Worms (modern Germany) to arbitrate a dispute between theologans, notably that upstart monk, Martin Luther.

That “Diet of Worms” would start a chain of events that convulsed western and central Europe for the next 150 plus years, with hardening ideological wars, one side financed by the incredible weath of the Spanish Empire. As with any ideological battle, it becomes less a matter of “we’re right” than “you’re wrong”. But where Spain and its satellites, allies, proxies, counted on the wealth and military power they enjoyed, their oppenents mastered the art of propaganda. And, as counters to Spanish power began to emerge (England and the Netherlands, as well as France, they kept the faith, while looking out for their own interests) that propaganda… for various reasons… was much more effective than anything the Spanish could muster… proof, perhaps, that the pen (and printing press) is mightier than the sword.

It’s not like Spain didn’t give their enemies plenty to work with. Althought the crown, and the Church, both issued decrees against abusive practices, there were those like rouge bishop Diego de Landa (shoe had been self-appointed as Bishop of Yucatan) who launched his own Inquisition into the Mayans, notoriously burning 40 what he called “wizards” for “sodomy”⁵. Never mind that Landa was sent back to Spain in chains (he wrote his “An Account of the Things of the Yucatan⁶“.. our best resource for pre-Conquest Mayan cultural norms, Landa having destroyed most of the Mayan records as part of his Inquisition. And, the “defender of the Indians”, Bartolomé de las Casas rightly condemned the abuses in his 1552 “Short History of the Destruction of the Indies”… which was soon translated int English with the longer subtitle “Or, a Faithful Narrative of the Horrid and Unexampled Massacres Committed by the Popish Spanish”.⁷ While both fed the image of Spain, and the Inquisition as unnaturally cruel (at a time when English and Dutch colonists in the Americas were engaged in genocide, defended by their clergy), while the pen is mightly, a picture is worth a thousand words… and Theodore de Bry, a Flemish Protestant engraver who never visited the Americas, would cement the image of Spanish horrors.

Dutchman Theodore de Bry’s work titled America which became a major purveyor of images of the New World for Europeans. ¨[. . .] Bry’s book is generally assumed to be a major source of the Black Legend because it offered visual proof that Spain had profoundly abrogated its human responsibilities in the conquest of the Americas.⁸

Not to deny the Inquisition was used for more than just enforcing religious hegemony. Somewhat amusingly, following an attempted pro-Cortés coup in New Spain aganst the imposition of crown control, Cortés supporters were continually being dragged before the Inquisition for the most minor of offenses… like taking the Lord’s name in vain (something old soldiers are prone to do) to be given rather light, but annoying, fines or penances (like buying candles for the church, or forced to stand barefoot outside a church and “repent”). While the Protestant/Catholic wars marked the era, ideology often as not masked — or rather added to — the much less esoteric, but perhaps more understandable, economic and power struggles of the time. England, especially, with its confusing Tudor dynasty whipsawing thru breal-away Catholicism under Henry VIII, thru radical Protestantism during Edward VI’s regin, back to ctholicsim under Mary, and Anglicanism under Elizabeth (which executed both Catholics and hard-core Protestants)⁹. As it was, the estimated number of people “relaxed” by the Inquisition¹⁰ during it’s long sordid history included a much larger population including the vast colonail empire, while Tudor England’s executions were limited to England and Wales.

But… England and Spain having become bitter rivals, both ideologically and economically during the period, the “black legend” of the Inquisition, with a healthy assist from De Bry and others who had discovered the value of “fake news”…

The energetic Carlos III (reigned 1759-1788) controlled the largest single territory any Empire ever had¹¹ but, like Empires before and since, claiming ownership, and administering it are very different matters. Carlos tried, his reforms mostly revolving around means to keep the money rolling in to “metropolitan” Spain, but it was wel-recognized that even Spain itself needed to change.

Carlos III was very much in the mold of his grand-father, Louis XIV of France, who set the model for 18th century “enlightened despots”… creating a highly centralized state, but one receptive to the “new thinking” and scientific inquiry… the “Enlightenment”.

While there was much in his radical reforms that would, ironically hasten the end of the empire (consolidating power in Madrid meant colonial elites… the criollos… lost much of their control and ability to conduct business and run their plantations howerver they wanted; the Enlightenment obsession with classification of the natural world led to the absurd “casta” system — and modern racism — with its anywhere from eight to thirty-two distinct, if often fluidly applied, social hierachies) there was also a new “spirit of inquiry” at work. While economic changes led Carlos’s administration to open markets in the colonies to all comers, it also mean accepting the new idea of “liberalism” … basically coming down to gold is gold, whether the buyer and seller are Catholics, Protestants, or “free-thinkers”, as long as they paid. Making anticlericalism inevitable, the church being seen as economically unproductive.

In short, while the Inquisition might have been of use when it came to enforcing hegomeny of belief — or when it was a handy tool to silence political dissidents¹², it wasn’t all that relevant to anything more than resolving thorny theological isses¹³, and occassionally slapping down a dissident cleric, or…. with clerics only able to be tried by their own courts, when a cleric commited a serious crime (like rape, murder, theft) and needed to be stripped of their status before they could be prosecuted (as, in last Inuisition trial in Mexico, that of José Maria Morelos¹⁴, who was executed for treason, after the Inquistion stripped him of his clerical status for the “heresy” of denying that the King’s rule was ordained by God”.

According to Henry Kamen¹⁵ less than ten percent of Spaniards had ever had been any contract.. or even had heard of the Inquistion (and I expect in the colonies that figure might have even been lower). The elites, most likely to be aware of its existence (or possibly affected by it), in the spirit of the Enlightenment, saw it as nothing more than a ridiculous holdover from the past, staffed by time-serving bureaucrats serving no real purpose. Francisco Goya’s “Inquisition Tribunal” mercilessly captures the elite “liberal” view of the institution in its last years.

Ironically, although the Spanish Empire was at its geographically most expansive in the late 18th century, it was on the verge of collapse. Between the Enlightenment thinking, its attempts… along with France.. to weaken the British Empire with massive financial and military support to the United States during the American Revolution¹⁶ providing assistance to the massive hit its treasury took supporting the American Revolution. And… it goes without saying… the example set by that revolution and the French Revolution for the colonials.

It might only have taken a slight push to bring about the Empire’s collapse, but Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, and the ensuing turmoil not just by those opposed to the French occupation, but within Spain itself as the liberals fought as much with the conservatives who favored a more absolutist monarchy, and the regionalists who had never accepted Castillian hegemony, and other factions just within Spain itself, while in the colonies went their own ways, full of their own intermural fights, only agreeing that they, and not the dying and useless Madrid government, were the legitimate rulers of their various countries.

Between the declining imperial power, the liberalism and anti-clericalism of the enlightenment elites and it’s own irrelevance, the Inquistion was doomed.

Although a vestigal Spanish Empire would last through the end of the 19th century, Spain… what had once been a scary superpower was, in the eyes of the new world powers just a dangly bit of the European continent… as either Napoleon Bonaparte, or Alexandre Dumas is said to have sniffed, “Africa starts at the Pyrenees”) — the heart of darkness to European (and the English-speaking North Americans) and whatever Spaniards, or their colonials might say about themselves, it might as well be the Congo (“… with their sin, and their savagery, and their stupor and their wrong!¹⁷”

Especially when the “sin and savagery” of something like the Inquistion, no matter what the facts might have been, could be “Exhibit A” of Spanish “savagery”… and… perhaps, a way of distancing other imperialist powers and various regimes from any close questioning of their own forms of repressing dissent. From the gothic novels, to horror movies, to pop culture history videos on youtube, the Inquisition has been presented as unusually monstrous, and perverted.

The liberal, “modern” view being a backwards Spain and all its institutions, it fell to conservatives to defend Spanish honor, and… by extention… justify even its less savory elements. The so-called “Black Legend” grew up that Spain was unsually cruel, its conquistadors somehow much more bloodthirsty than other late medieval greedheads, its institutions light-years more oppresive than those of later oppressive regimes and colonialists. If Henry VIII eliminated up to 10,000 “heretics” (a number sometimes given) then the Inquisition must have killed milliones. If the “justice” system of the era included torture, then the Inquistion had the most painful and elaborate forms of torture. If such common forms of execution in the era as breaking a person on the wheel (basically tying the criminal to a big wheel and beating him to death as it was spun around) or drawing and quartering (don’t ask!), then the Inquistion must have regularly lit up the skies with burning bodies.

Late 19th century Spanish reactionaries, seeking to reframe Spanish glory, not in terms of its territorial control, or its economic power, but as a great culture, heirs to the Roman Empire, and a bastion of the “true Church” pushed back. No one outside Spain paid much attention, although in the 20th century, there were apologists for the Inquistion both in Spain and in its former colonies, notably the Mexican fascist Alfono Junco¹⁸ …. who defended the Inquistion on the grounds that you’d expect from a Fascist… that it served to eliminate enemies of the state.

Of ccourse, there is no reason to think of the Inquisition as anything other than it was. Perhaps it was intended to just correct misunderstandings of church teachings, but it was too tempting a tool to emply against dissidents of any kind, and what were abuses became too often the raison d’etre. But the reactionaries… even odious figures like Junco… did their research, and — while largely ignored outside the Spanish speaking world — and, especially since Inquisition records were open to scholars and researchers in the late 20th century — less ideologically inclined scholars have been able to make some sense out of the whole problem of the various ways regimes seek to control dissent.

Very few scholars would deny egregious abuses, such as the persecution of the Carvajal family in the late 16th century (Luis de Carvajal, a “converso” conquistador and his family, including relatives in Spain, ended up before the Inquisition, and some died in prison, while a few were “relaxed to the state”… i.e. burned at the stake… for his alleged “judiazing” or “secret” Jewish practices (although the persecution may have been payback by political rivals)¹⁹ which stands as “proof” of rampant anti-semetism in colonial Mexico, when, as Skip Lenchek, in his “Jews in Mexico²⁰“, refers to the era as a “golden age” of tolerance… which does not mean Jews, like Carvajal and more innocent people, were not persecuted (they were).

While the “black legend” is still with us… often as not mixing in other, unrelated persecutions (like the witch hysteria of the 17th century… something found mostly in Protestant northern Europe and ignored by the Inquisition as mere folk superstitions, of no real theat to the state) and pop history will still try to tittilate (or, on “youtube” history videos, at least get clicks) and there are a few apolgists for the inquistion … notably by the “rad-trad” Catholics (who seem to seek a return to a medieval church)²¹, although other Catholics have sought, not to justify it, but accept that “mistakes were made”.²²

The Inquistions are still with us in one form or another. With scholars uncovering what “really happned”, while excessive by our standards, it would have been unknown to the vast majority of the people it supposedly oppressed.. unless you were writing theology, or had powerful enemies of course. As it was, the average punishment was more in the way of public shaming (what today we’d call “cancel culture”, although being canceled in a community where everyone knew everyone else, it might mean having to move, or emigrate to the colonies) and obviously had its biases (one case in very early Mexico was looking for “sodomy” in the indigenous bathhouses –and yes, bathhouses then as now weren’t just for good clean fun — but the inquistors lost interest in pursuing the matter when it became clear some Spaniards where also going to those bathhouses)²³.

English language writers like Richard Greenleaf (The Inqusition in New Spain)²⁴ and, especially Henry Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision)²⁵ have led to a more nuanced view … not as bad as we think, with even a few bright spots (the first courts to have published rules of evidence), but as Karl Marx²⁶ wrote:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

1. Properly, an “Inqusition” was simply an investigation into religious matters. Local Bishops often held their own Inqusitions , and the “Spanish Inquisition”, under royal and papal seal, was at least two separate bodies, with different rules and separate bureacracies in Aragón and Castille until 1715. ︎
2. Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391 (University of Pennsyvania Press, 2012) ︎
3. “Cartas de la Relación” (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 2015) ︎
4. Technically, he was not the king at this point, his mother, “Juana la loca” locked away, and presumably incurably insane, but was addressed by Cortés and everyone else as the king, ︎
5. We tend to think sodomy refers to gay anal sex, although at the time, it could have referred to almost any “outside the (European) norm” sexual acts, or to even eating human flesh (something done in Mayan religious practice). See Alice Row, ‘Unspeakable vices’: Cannibalism, Sodomy, and Other Unnatural Acts” (Torch Oxford) ︎
6. David Castledine, translator, Mexico: Monoclem Editiones, 2000. ︎
7. Penguin, 1999 for a recent, easy to find, English language edition. ︎
8. Patricia Gravett, “Twelve Rereading Theodore De Bry’s Black Legend” Chicago Online Scholarship ︎
9. “Tudor Heretics“, Sparticus Educational; also: “The killer king: How many people did Henry VIII execute?“, Sky History. ︎
10. Estimated at 3000 by Henry Kamen, based on the records. This does not include pograms or genocides perpetrated by the Spanish at home or in the colonies, which are sometimes added to inflate the Inquistion numbers, and even then are wildly exaggerated. ︎
11. Possibly, the Mongols controlled a larger landmass, but considering his holdings included claims to most of North America (from Alaska to the straits of Darien), about half of South America, most of the islands in the Pacific (including Philippines and half of what is now Taiwan) and Caribbean… as well as Spain, and various chunks of Italy, and a few spots on the African coast, it was the Carlos’ Empire about which it was said that the sun never sets. ︎
12. “The Holy Office [Inquisition] was powerful, but because the king wanted it to be. It’s mission was to persecute political rebels as well as religious innovators. The weapon was in the hands of the king, not the pope, and the king wielded it as much in his own, as in the church’s interest” José Carlos Mariátegui, (Marjory Urquidi, translator) Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, University of Texas Press, 1971 quoting Julian Lechaire, “L’eglise et le seizieme siecle” (And this is the most complicated footnote I’ve ever written!) ︎
13. In 1758, Inquisitors looked into the case of Mariano Aguilera, born intersex with both underdeveloped male and female sexual organs. Raised male, Mariano’s family, and those of his intended bride, were aware of this, but the village priest saw a problem and asked inquistors for advice. Religious law (and only the Church could legalize a marriage) did not recognize a marriage that was not consumated, and the inquisitors had to call in experts to consider whether Mariano’s vestigal penis was developed enough to even allow for the “final act” to occur. The Inqusitors … while agreeing that a religious marriage was not possible, and the “scandal” surrounding the hearing would make life difficult, with a wink and a nod, recommended Mariano and his would-be bride simply move somewhere, and hold themselves out as married. see “Sex and the Colonial Archive: The Case of ‘Mariano’ Aguilera“(Hispanic American Historical Review, Volume 95, Number 3, pages 421-443). DOI: 1.1215800182168-3601634. ︎
14. Morelos of Mexico, Wilbert H Timmons (Texas Western Press, 1963) ︎
15. “The Spanish Inquisition“, 4th edition, Yale University Press, 4025 (Kindel Edition) ︎
16. “The Role of Spain in the American Revolution” José I. Yanez (Major). United States Marine Corp Command and Staff College. Masters in Military Studies thesis, (2009) ︎
17. Vachel Lindsay, “The Congo” ︎
18. Inquisicion sobre la Inquisicion, Editorial Jus, 1967. ︎
19. Carvajal was a successful businessman and held political office, probably no more corrupt than any other colonial politician, but he was also traded in Indigenous slaves, which in his frontier town not only was likely to invite retribution by local tribes (and was illegal), but bad for business, much of the local economy depending on trade with the indigenous communities. ︎
20. MexConnect, 2000. ︎
21. “Why The Inquistion Was Awesome Actually” (Paxtube) , ︎
22. “A New Perspective on the Spanish Inquistion” (“Fr. Casey”, Patheos) ︎
23. Zeb Tortorici, “Against nature: Sodomy and Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America” History Compass v 10, no 12 (2012) ︎
24. John Hopkins University, 2012 ︎
25. Yale 2014 ︎
26. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” ︎