Inquisition
Roman Catholicism
Main
a judicial procedure and later an institution that was established by
the papacy and, sometimes, by secular governments to combat heresy.
Derived from the Latin verb inquiro (“inquire into”), the name was
applied to commissions in the 13th century and subsequently to similar
structures in early modern Europe.
An image frequently misinterpreted as the Spanish Inquisition burning
prohibited books.
This is actually Pedro Berruguete's La Prueba del Fuego (1400s).
It depicts a legend of St Dominic's dispute with the Cathars:
they both consign their writings into the flames, and while the Cathars'
text burns,
St Dominic's miraculously leaps from the flames.
The Middle Ages » History
In 1184 Pope Lucius III required bishops to make a judicial inquiry, or
inquisition, for heresy in their dioceses, a provision renewed by the
fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Episcopal inquisitions, however, proved
ineffective because of the regional nature of the bishop’s power and
because not all bishops introduced inquisitions in their dioceses; the
papacy gradually assumed authority over the process, though bishops
never lost the right to lead inquisitions. In 1227 Pope Gregory IX
appointed the first judges delegate as inquisitors for heretical
depravity—many, though not all, of whom were Dominican and Franciscan
friars. Papal inquisitors had authority over everyone except bishops and
their officials. There was no central authority to coordinate their
activities, but after 1248 or 1249, when the first handbook of
inquisitorial practice was written, inquisitors adopted common
procedures.
Lucius III
pope
original name Ubaldo Allucingoli
born 1097?, Lucca, Tuscany [Italy]
died Nov. 25, 1185, Verona
Main
pope from 1181 to 1185.
A Cistercian monk whom Pope Innocent II had made cardinal
in 1141, Lucius was bishop of Ostia (consecrated 1159) and
papal counsellor when elected on Sept. 1, 1181, to succeed
Alexander III. As pope, Lucius was forced to leave Rome
because the Romans had earlier declared their city a
republic free from papal interference.
At the Synod of Verona in 1184, Lucius, in agreement with
the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, decreed the
excommunication of heretics and their protectors; after
ecclesiastical trial, heretics who refused to recant were
transferred to civil authorities for punishment—usually
death by burning. Lucius’ synod activated the strict decrees
of the third Lateran Council (1179); founded the medieval
Inquisition to repress and punish heretics; and instigated
the church’s attack against the Cathari, a heretical sect
that held that good and evil had separate creators. Apart
from Frederick’s promise to renew the Crusades, relations
between Emperor and Pope were strained.
Lateran Council
Roman Catholicism
Main
any of the five ecumenical councils of the Roman Catholic
Church held in the Lateran Palace in Rome.
The first Lateran Council, the ninth ecumenical council
(1123), was held during the reign of Pope Calixtus II; no
acts or contemporary accounts survive. The council
promulgated a number of canons (probably 22), many of which
merely reiterated decrees of earlier councils. Much of the
discussion was occupied with disciplinary or quasi-political
decisions relating to the Investiture Controversy settled
the previous year by the Concordat of Worms; simony was
condemned, laymen were prohibited from disposing of church
property, clerics in major orders were forbidden to marry,
and uncanonical consecration of bishops was forbidden. There
were no specific dogmatic decrees.
The second Lateran Council, the 10th ecumenical council
(1139), was convoked by Pope Innocent II to condemn as
schismatics the followers of Arnold of Brescia, a vigorous
reformer and opponent of the temporal power of the pope, and
to end the schism created by the election of Anacletus II, a
rival pope. Supported by St. Bernard of Clairvaux and later
by Emperor Lothar II, Innocent was eventually acknowledged
as the legitimate pope. Besides reaffirming previous
conciliar decrees, the second Lateran Council declared
invalid all marriages of those in major orders and of
professed monks, canons, lay brothers, and nuns. The council
repudiated the heresies of the 12th century concerning holy
orders, matrimony, infant Baptism, and the Eucharist.
The third Lateran Council, the 11th ecumenical council,
was convoked in 1179 by Pope Alexander III and attended by
291 bishops who studied the Peace of Venice (1177), by which
the Holy Roman emperor, Frederick I Barbarossa, agreed to
withdraw support from his antipope and to restore the church
property he had seized. This council also established a
two-thirds majority of the College of Cardinals as a
requirement for papal election and stipulated that
candidates for bishop must be 30 years old and of legitimate
birth. The heretical Cathari (or Albigenses) were condemned,
and Christians were authorized to take up arms against
vagabond robbers. The council marked an important stage in
the development of papal legislative authority.
The fourth Lateran Council, the 12th ecumenical council
(1215), generally considered the greatest council before
Trent, was years in preparation. Pope Innocent III desired
the widest possible representation, and more than 400
bishops, 800 abbots and priors, envoys of many European
kings, and personal representatives of Frederick II
(confirmed by the council as emperor of the West) took part.
The purpose of the council was twofold: reform of the church
and the recovery of the Holy Land. Many of the conciliar
decrees touching on church reform and organization remained
in effect for centuries. The council ruled on such vexing
problems as the use of church property, tithes, judicial
procedures, and patriarchal precedence. It ordered Jews and
Saracens to wear distinctive dress and obliged Catholics to
make a yearly confession and to receive Communion during the
Easter season. The council sanctioned the word
transubstantiation as a correct expression of eucharistic
doctrine. The teachings of the Cathari and Waldenses were
condemned. Innocent also ordered a four-year truce among
Christian rulers so that a new crusade could be launched.
The fifth Lateran Council, the 18th ecumenical council
(1512–17), was convoked by Pope Julius II in response to a
council summoned at Pisa by a group of cardinals who were
hostile to the Pope. The Pope’s council had reform as its
chief concern. It restored peace among warring Christian
rulers and sanctioned a new concordat with France to
supersede the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438. In
dogmatic decrees the council affirmed the immortality of the
soul and repudiated declarations of the councils of
Constance and Basel that made church councils superior to
the pope. The Orthodox churches do not accept these councils
as truly ecumenical.
Gregory IX
pope
original name Ugo, or Ugolino, Di Segni
born before 1170
died Aug. 22, 1241, Rome
Main
one of the most vigorous of the 13th-century popes (reigned
1227–41), a canon lawyer, theologian, defender of papal
prerogatives, and founder of the papal Inquisition. Gregory
promulgated the Decretals in 1234, a code of canon law that
remained the fundamental source of ecclesiastical law for
the Catholic Church until after World War I.
Ugo, nephew of Pope Innocent III, studied theology at the
University of Paris, but his early ecclesiastical career
marked him as a diplomat. Shortly after his creation as a
cardinal-deacon by his uncle in 1198, he was involved in
peace negotiations with Markwald of Anweiler in southern
Italy. Twice before 1210 he served Innocent as a papal
legate in Germany. In 1206 Innocent promoted him to the
cardinal bishopric of Ostia, the port city of Rome. During
the pontificate of Pope Honorius III (1216–27), Ugo
continued to play a leading role. He enjoyed not only the
support of the Pope but also that of the youthful
emperor-elect, Frederick II, king of Sicily, whose cause he
had supported during the reign of Innocent III. Ugo was a
deeply religious man, closely attuned to the great spiritual
movements of his time. He was friend to both St. Dominic and
St. Francis of Assisi, founders of the first mendicant
orders. He served as cardinal-protector of the Franciscans
and adviser to St. Clare of Assisi, the founder of the Poor
Clares. Like his predecessors, Ugo firmly supported the
crusading movement, and it was from his hands that Frederick
II took the cross as a symbol of his intention to lead a
crusade. Ugo was an austere man of decisive mind and
somewhat harsh personality. Even those he loved and admired
most sometimes felt the strength of his convictions and the
force of his will. But there can be no doubt about his moral
integrity and dedication to the church. Still, it was his
quickness to anger and his impatience with opposition that
marked the character of his pontificate.
When Ugo ascended the papal throne as successor to
Honorius III on March 19, 1227, he had already lost patience
with the moderate policies of his predecessor. In
particular, he had grown increasingly disenchanted with
Emperor Frederick II. Frederick’s delays in embarking on his
promised crusade and his efforts to hold both the imperial
throne and the crown of Sicily aroused opposition to him in
the Roman Curia. The rupture broke into the open shortly
after Gregory’s election, when Frederick, who had finally
launched his crusade, was forced to return to Brindisi
because of an outbreak of plague. Already suspicious of
Frederick’s sincerity, the Pope excommunicated him on Sept.
29, 1227, and issued a pained and angry encyclical to
justify his action. Frederick responded by an attack on the
excommunication as unjustified and a denunciation of the
Roman Curia.
Nevertheless, Frederick embarked for the East, where he
conquered Cyprus and negotiated with the Sultan of Egypt for
Jerusalem. Gregory was incensed at Frederick’s presumption
in leading a crusade while under ban of excommunication.
Claiming provocation by Frederick’s vicar in the Kingdom of
Sicily, Gregory raised an army and launched an attack on the
kingdom. This war marked the end of the policy of
negotiation. Though Frederick’s return witnessed the defeat
of the papal forces, the deep fears aroused by his policies
remained unsettled by the Treaty of San Germano (1230). In
1231 Gregory sharply protested Frederick’s issuance of the
Liber Augustalis, or Constitutions of Melfi, a code of laws
for the Kingdom of Sicily. Though there was little in these
laws that was actually objectionable, their thrust in the
direction of a strong monarchy contained a threat to the
church.
During the early 1230s Gregory took advantage of the
respite in his struggle with the Emperor to turn his
attention more to the internal and spiritual problems of the
church. He ordered the canonist Raymond of Peñafort to
compile the Decretals, a code of canon law based both on
conciliar decisions and on papal letters, which he
promulgated in 1234. He also entered into negotiations with
the Greek Orthodox Church that resulted in a series of
conferences at Nicaea in January 1234 but proved abortive.
Gregory continued the policies of his predecessors against
heresy in southern France and northern Italy. He
strengthened the Inquisition and entrusted its operations to
the Dominicans. One of these inquisitors, Bernardo Gui,
wrote the principal contemporary biography of Gregory IX.
The truce between Gregory and Frederick II was severely
strained in 1235 by imperial accusations that the Pope had
been working with the Lombards of northern Italy to
undermine imperial influence. While Gregory denied the
charge, the work of the Dominicans among heretics in
northern Italy, many of whom were leagued with Frederick’s
supporters, did provide a foundation for imperial fears.
Frederick’s invasion of Sardinia, a papal fief, on behalf of
the candidacy of his son Enzio for the Sardinian crown, led
to a renewal of the excommunication on March 20, 1239, and
caused Gregory to seek supporters in northern Italy. The
propaganda war that accompanied the renewed hostilities is
noted more for vitriolic than for reasoned argumentation.
Gregory accused Frederick of crimes against the church in
the Kingdom of Sicily and labelled him a blasphemer. The
effort to find a settlement between the secular and the
spiritual powers of medieval society received a decisive
blow in this struggle. No definitions of separate spheres of
authority would ever again overcome the reality of the fears
that dominated both the papal Curia and secular powers.
With Frederick’s army invading the Papal States, Gregory
summoned a general council of the church, which met in Rome
on Easter Sunday 1241. The capture of a large number of
prelates on their way to the council by Frederick’s Pisan
allies put an end to this project, at least during Gregory’s
pontificate. Gregory IX died soon after, his work
unfinished. He had attempted to carry on the work of
Innocent III and was successful in many of his efforts.
Historians have judged him harshly because of his conflict
with Frederick II, but too often their judgments have turned
on the defects of his personality rather than the objectives
of his policy.
James M. Powell
Dominican
religious order
byname Black Friar, member of Order of Friars Preachers,
also called Order of Preachers (O.P.)
Main
one of the four great mendicant orders of the Roman Catholic
church, was founded by St. Dominic in 1215. Dominic, a
priest of the Spanish diocese of Osma, accompanied his
bishop on a preaching mission among the Albigensian heretics
of southern France, where he founded a convent at Prouille
in 1206, partly for his converts, which was served by a
community of preachers. From this developed the conception
of an institute of preachers to convert the Albigensians,
which received provisional approval from Pope Innocent III
in 1215. Dominic gave his followers a rule of life based on
that of St. Augustine and made his first settlement at
Toulouse; on Dec. 22, 1216, Pope Honorius III gave formal
sanction. The novelty of the institute was the commission to
preach Christian doctrine, a task previously regarded as the
prerogative and monopoly of bishops and their delegates; a
corollary was the obligation of theological study, and, as
early as 1218, Dominic sent seven of his followers to the
University of Paris.
From the beginning the order has been a synthesis of the
contemplative life and the active ministry. The members live
a community life; and a careful balance is maintained
between democratically constituted chapters, or legislative
assemblies, and strong but elected superiors. In contrast to
the monastic orders that predated it, the Dominican order
was not a collection of autonomous houses; it was an army of
priests, organized in provinces under a master general and
ready to go wherever they were needed. The individual
belonged to the order, not to any one house, and could be
sent anywhere at any time about its business; this
innovation has served as a model for many subsequent bodies.
Within 40 years of the order’s foundation, talented
members were concentrated in the schools at Paris, Bologna,
Cologne, and Oxford; many eminent masters of the
universities took the Dominican habit and became in time
regents in the friaries. Originally students of theology
only, and with no distinguishing philosophical opinions,
they were led by Albertus Magnus and his pupil Thomas
Aquinas to a study of the newly available works of Aristotle
that had been transmitted to Europe by Muslim scholars and
to the integration of philosophy and theology. After a short
initial opposition, the system of St. Thomas Aquinas was
adopted as official (1278). Meanwhile, the Dominicans
pursued their vocation to preaching. In southern France they
spoke out against the Albigensians and, in Spain and
elsewhere, against the Moors and Jews. They evangelized the
non-Christians in northern and eastern Europe, in the lands
of the eastern Mediterranean, and in India. When the
Inquisition was established, Dominicans were entrusted with
its execution. They were among the first and most energetic
missionaries in the “expansion of Europe” under the Spanish
and Portuguese explorers and later under the French. In
modern times they have broadened their preaching apostolate
to include work in the fields of radio, television, films,
and stage.
The Dominican order has continued to be noted for an
unswerving orthodoxy, based upon the philosophical and
theological teaching of Aquinas, and has steadfastly opposed
novelty or accommodation in theology. The 19th and 20th
centuries have witnessed a tremendous development of
congregations of Dominican sisters engaged in teaching,
nursing, and a wide variety of charitable works. Some of
these congregations, such as the Maryknoll Sisters, are
devoted to work in foreign missions.
Franciscan
religious order
Main
any member of a Christian religious order founded in the
early 13th century by St. Francis of Assisi. The members of
the order strive to cultivate the ideals of the order’s
founder. The Franciscans actually consist of three orders.
The First Order comprises priests and lay brothers who have
sworn to lead a life of prayer, preaching, and penance. This
First Order is divided into three independent branches: the
Friars Minor (O.F.M.), the Friars Minor Conventual (O.F.M.
Conv.), and the Friars Minor Capuchin (O.F.M. Cap.). The
Second Order consists of cloistered nuns who belong to the
Order of St. Clare (O.S.C.) and are known as Poor Clares
(P.C.). The Third Order consists of religious and lay men
and women who try to emulate Saint Francis’ spirit by
performing works of teaching, charity, and social service.
Strictly speaking, the latter order consists of the Third
Order Secular, whose lay members live in the world without
vows; and the Third Order Regular, whose members live in
religious communities under vow. Congregations of these
religious men and women are numerous all over the Roman
Catholic world. The Franciscans are the largest religious
order in the Roman Catholic church. They have contributed
six popes to the church.
It was probably in 1207 that Francis felt the call to a
life of preaching, penance, and total poverty. He was soon
joined by his first followers, to whom he gave a short and
simple rule of life. In 1209 he and 11 of his followers
journeyed to Rome, where Francis received approval of his
rule from Pope Innocent III. Under this rule, Franciscan
friars could own no possessions of any kind, either
individually or communally (i.e., as the property of the
order as a whole). The friars wandered and preached among
the people, helping the poor and the sick. They supported
themselves by working and by begging food, but they were
forbidden to accept money either as payment for work or as
alms. The Franciscans worked at first in Umbria and then in
the rest of Italy and abroad. The impact of these street
preachers and especially of their founder was immense, so
that within 10 years they numbered 5,000. Affiliated with
them were the Franciscan nuns, whose order was founded at
Assisi in 1212, by St. Clare, who was under the guidance of
St. Francis. Clare and her followers were lodged by Francis
in the Church of San Damiano, where they lived a severe life
of total poverty. They later became known as the Poor Clares
or the Order of St. Clare.
During the first years of the Franciscans, the example of
Francis provided their real rule of life, but, as the order
grew, it became clear that a revised rule was necessary.
After preparing a rule in 1221 that was found too strict,
Francis, with the help of several legal scholars,
unwillingly composed the more restrained final rule in 1223.
This rule was approved by Pope Honorius III.
Even before the death of Francis in 1226, conflicts had
developed within the order over the observance of the vow of
complete poverty. The rapid expansion of the order’s
membership had created a need for settled monastic houses,
but it was impossible to justify these if Francis’ rule of
complete poverty was followed strictly. Three parties
gradually appeared: the Zealots, who insisted on a literal
observance of the primitive rule of poverty affecting
communal as well as personal poverty; the Laxists, who
favoured many mitigations; and the Moderates, or the
Community, who wanted a legal structure that would permit
some form of communal possessions. Something of an
equilibrium was reached between these different schools of
thought while St. Bonaventure was minister general
(1257–74). Sometimes called the second founder of the order,
he provided a wise, moderate interpretation of the rule.
During this period the friars spread throughout Europe,
while missionaries penetrated Syria and Africa.
Simultaneously, the friars’ houses in university towns such
as Paris and Oxford were transformed into schools of
theology that rapidly became among the most celebrated in
Europe.
With the death of Bonaventure, the internal dissensions
of the order flared up anew. The Zealots, who now became
known as the Spirituals, demanded absolute poverty. Opposed
to them were the Community, or the Conventuals, who stood
for a more moderate community life adapted to the needs of
study and preaching. Papal decisions favoured the
Conventuals, and the Spirituals ceased to be a faction of
importance in the order after 1325.
The latter part of the 14th century saw a great decline
in the religious life of the friars. But throughout that
century a series of reformers initiated groups of friars,
known as Observants, living an austere life apart from the
main body of Conventuals. Under the leadership of St.
Bernardino of Siena and St. John of Capistrano, the
Observants spread across Europe. Though several attempts
were made to reconcile them with the Conventuals, the
outcome was in fact a complete separation in 1517, when all
the reform communities were united in one order with the
name Friars Minor of the Observance, and this order was
granted a completely independent and autonomous existence.
It is estimated that in 1517 the Observants numbered about
30,000, the Conventuals about 25,000.
The union of the Observants was short-lived as several
stricter groups arose. One of these reform groups, the
Capuchins, founded in 1525, was separated as the third
branch of the Franciscan Order in 1619. The other groups
were finally reunited to the Observants by Pope Leo XIII in
1897 with new constitutions and the official title Order of
Friars Minor. All three branches of the Franciscans suffered
in the French Revolution, but they revived during the 19th
century.
The Franciscans have popularized several devotional
practices in the Roman Catholic church. Among the best known
are the Christmas crib, the Stations of the Cross, and the
Angelus. Besides their traditional role of preaching,
Franciscans have been active in the work of foreign missions
and have made many contributions to the field of education
and scholarship.
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In 1252 Pope Innocent IV licensed inquisitors to allow obdurate
heretics to be tortured by lay henchmen. It is difficult to determine
how common this practice was in the 13th century, but the inquisition
certainly acquiesced in the use of torture in the trial of the Knights
Templar, a military-religious order, in 1307. Persecution by the
inquisition also contributed to the collapse of Catharism, a dualist
heresy that had great influence in southern France and northern Italy,
by about 1325; although established to defeat that heresy, the
inquisition was assisted by the pastoral work of the mendicant orders in
its triumph over the Cathars.
The inquisition declined in importance in the late Middle Ages,
though it continued to try cases of heresy—e.g., the Waldenses, the
Spiritual Franciscans, and the alleged heresy of the Free Spirit, a
supposed sect of mystics who advocated antinomianism—and cases of
sorcery. The most vigorous dissenting movements of the 15th century,
Lollardy in England and Hussitism in Bohemia, were not subject to its
jurisdiction.
Innocent IV
pope
original name Sinibaldo Fieschi
born 12th century, Genoa
died Dec. 7, 1254, Naples
Main
one of the great pontiffs of the Middle Ages (reigned
1243–54), whose clash with Holy Roman emperor Frederick II
formed an important chapter in the conflict between papacy
and empire. His belief in universal responsibility of the
papacy led him to attempt the evangelization of the East and
the unification of the Christian churches.
Early life and early career
Sinibaldo Fieschi’s father, Hugo, called Fliscus, was the
count of Lavagna and member of a rising family in both the
economic and ecclesiastical realms. Sinibaldo, the 6th of 10
children, studied at Parma under the direction of one of
three uncles who were bishops and then at Bologna in the
school of the most illustrious canonists of the age, where
he himself became a master of canon law. He was a canon of
the cathedral of Genoa and later of Parma. He was
consecrated bishop of Albenga, Italy, in 1225; in 1227 he
was made vice chancellor of the Roman Church and cardinal
priest of St. Lawrence in Lucina by Pope Gregory IX. He
continued the work and, in great part, the spirit of Gregory
IX, first as rector to the March of Ancona (1235–40), where
he took up the side of the Guelphs at Camerino and at
Ravenna, and later during his own reign as pope.
His study and experience in the field of law (testimony
of his expertise exists in his celebrated commentary on
canon law, Apparatus in quinque libros Decretalium) prepared
him to enter as one of the key figures into the conflict
between the church and the empire. The emperor Frederick II
sought to restructure the imperial authority, with a strong
state in Italy as the basis; he was convinced that he had
the right to exercise autocratically his imperial power, the
imperialis potestas. He thus came into head-on collision
with the church’s claim to universal power, the universalis
potestas, theoretically elaborated by the canonists of that
time, including Sinibaldo Fieschi. According to their
theory, the pope possessed universal dominion, which in the
abstract juridical order extended to all kingdoms, although
in the practical order he had to leave the temporal rule to
the emperor and to the kings. On the basis of these two
antithetical conceptions, the interests of different parties
came into conflict time after time. The last phase of his
conflict, which began under Gregory IX, reached its zenith
under Innocent IV.
Pontificate
Frederick II was encouraged by the election of Cardinal
Fieschi on June 25, 1243, after the see of Rome had been
vacant for 18 months following the brief reign of Celestine
IV. He immediately entered into negotiations with the new
pope, who took the name Innocent IV, to have the
excommunication imposed on him by Gregory IX lifted. The
Pope, however, did not trust Frederick, despite an agreement
reached on March 31, 1244. He felt unsafe in Rome and
secretly fled the city, interrupting the negotiations with
the Emperor. Genoese galleys prepared by his relatives were
waiting for him at the port of Civitavecchia to take him to
Genoa and then to Lyon. Although Lyon was nominally subject
to the empire, Innocent IV was under the protection of Louis
IX of France.
Late in 1244 the Pope called a general council to meet in
Lyon the following summer. Gregory IX had earlier announced
such a council, but Frederick II had impeded it by holding
as prisoners more than 100 bishops who had fallen into the
hands of the Pisans in the naval battle of Meloria. Three
themes were to be treated in the council: the question of
the Emperor, the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre, and the
defense of Christianity against the advance of the Mongols.
Thaddeus of Suessa tried in vain to defend the Emperor
before the council. Frederick II was solemnly condemned, his
subjects were freed from their bond of loyalty to him, and
he was deposed on the basis of the triple charge of perjury,
sacrilege, and suspicion of heresy. The Pope himself
admonished the German princes to elect a new emperor. They
named Henry Raspe, landgrave of Thuringia, and, at his death
in 1247, William of Holland. The condemnation of Frederick
II did not obtain the desired political effects in Germany,
but it did show the effectiveness of the network of ties
that the papal family had succeeded in tightening in
northern Italy, which contributed to the Emperor’s defeat at
Parma (1247).
Frederick II died on Dec. 13, 1250. The Pope left Lyon
and triumphantly returned to Rome in 1253. Meanwhile, he had
to continue the struggle against Frederick II’s son Conrad
IV and also to find a king to whom he could entrust the
Kingdom of Sicily as a fief. The Pope offered Sicily first
to Richard of Cornwall, then to Charles of Anjou, both of
whom refused, and later to Henry III of England, who
accepted for his son Edmund. After the death of Conrad IV in
May 1254, the papal army was defeated by Manfred, Frederick
II’s illegitimate son, who had become regent for Conradin,
the infant son of Conrad IV. The Pope died soon after at
Naples in December 1254.
Assessment
The struggle against Frederick II brings to light a striking
characteristic of Innocent’s pontificate and of the period
as a whole. A close relationship existed between the
political activity and the personal and family fortunes of
the Pope and the cardinals. Only relatives and those who
received benefices could be counted upon to maintain their
political loyalty beyond ideological motivations. That
explains the constant presence of Innocent’s family in his
ecclesiastical, political, and military affairs and his
frequent recourse to the distribution of ecclesiastical
benefices in their behalf. He took steps to return the
expenses incurred by his nephews in their combat with
Frederick II, distributed the bishoprics of England and the
East to cousins, and supported the creation of a strong
family estate at the foot of the Ligurian Apennines,
provoking opposition from bishops and lay lords in that
area.
In this policy of giving church offices to his relatives,
Innocent went far beyond what his predecessors had done and
established a pattern of nepotism that came to be recognized
as a normal papal prerogative as time went on. In addition,
it was his habit to systematically intervene in the affairs
of local churches, disposing of ecclesiastical posts in
order to settle disputes, to help university students, to
reward devout persons, or to help needy clergy. This
long-distance intervention often made situations worse,
because the Pope ended up promising people more benefices
than were available. Innocent’s successor, Alexander IV,
condemned the practice.
Innocent IV’s attention to all parts of Christendom and
his interventions carried him beyond his conflict with the
Emperor to a vivid awareness of other problems that agitated
Europe even to its borders. Echoing the appeals of the
Christians in Palestine, he induced Louis IX to undertake a
crusade, which ended dramatically with the King’s
imprisonment (1250); he sent a mission (1245–47) to the
Grand Khan of the Mongols, led by Giovanni Carpini, in the
hope of arresting the advance of the Mongols on eastern
Europe; he established contacts with the Eastern Church to
prepare for ecumenical union with Russia and the Ukraine.
None of these missions attained its desired success, yet he
deserves credit for ferreting out the problems in the church
and establishing the bases for resolving future conflicts.
The judgment of historians about Innocent IV has been
conditioned by their opinion about his struggle against
Frederick II. Those who see in Frederick the forerunner of
the modern lay state (Jacob Burckhardt and Hermann
Kantorowicz) condemn the universalistic claims of the Pope.
In general, it is still difficult for German
historiographers to form a dispassionate judgment. On the
part of ecclesiastics, the tendency is to emphasize Innocent
IV’s missionary projects and his indisputable qualities as a
canonist—his acuteness, openness, and solicitude for human
dignity.
Templar
religious military order
also called Knight Templar
Main
member of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of
Solomon, a religious military order of knighthood
established at the time of the Crusades that became a model
and inspiration for other military orders. Originally
founded to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, the
order assumed greater military duties during the 12th
century. Its prominence and growing wealth, however,
provoked opposition from rival orders. Falsely accused of
blasphemy and blamed for Crusader failures in the Holy Land,
the order was destroyed by King Philip IV of France.
Following the success of the First Crusade (1095–99), a
number of Crusader states were established in the Holy Land,
but these kingdoms lacked the necessary military force to
maintain more than a tenuous hold over their territories.
Most Crusaders returned home after fulfilling their vows,
and Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem suffered attacks from
Muslim raiders. Pitying the plight of these Christians,
eight or nine French knights led by Hugh de Payns vowed in
late 1119 or early 1120 to devote themselves to the
pilgrims’ protection and to form a religious community for
that purpose. Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem, gave them
quarters in a wing of the royal palace in the area of the
former Temple of Solomon, and from this they derived their
name.
Although the Templars were opposed by those who rejected
the idea of a religious military order and later by those
who criticized their wealth and influence, they were
supported by many secular and religious leaders. Beginning
in 1127, Hugh undertook a tour of Europe and was well
received by many nobles, who made significant donations to
the knights. The Templars obtained further sanction at the
Council of Troyes in 1128, which may have requested that
Bernard of Clairvaux compose the new rule. Bernard also
wrote In Praise of the New Knighthood (c. 1136), which
defended the order against its critics and contributed to
its growth. In 1139 Pope Innocent II issued a bull that
granted the order special privileges: the Templars were
allowed to build their own oratories and were not required
to pay the tithe; they were also exempt from episcopal
jurisdiction, being subject to the pope alone.
The rule of the order was modeled after the Benedictine
Rule, especially as understood and implemented by the
Cistercians. The Knights Templar swore an oath of poverty,
chastity, and obedience and renounced the world, just as the
Cistercians and other monks did. Like the monks, the
Templars heard the divine office during each of the
canonical hours of the day and were expected to honour the
fasts and vigils of the monastic calendar. They were
frequently found in prayer and expressed particular
veneration to the Virgin Mary. They were not allowed to
gamble, swear, or become drunk and were required to live in
community, sleeping in a common dormitory and eating meals
together. They were not, however, strictly cloistered, as
were the monks, nor were they expected to perform devotional
reading (most Templars were uneducated and unable to read
Latin). The knights’ primary duty was to fight. The Templars
gradually expanded their duties from protecting pilgrims to
mounting a broader defense of the Crusader states in the
Holy Land. They built castles, garrisoned important towns,
and participated in battles, fielding significant
contingents against Muslim armies until the fall of Acre,
the last remaining Crusader stronghold in the Holy Land, in
1291. Their great effectiveness was attested by the sultan
Saladin following the devastating defeat of Crusader forces
at the Battle of Ḥaṭṭīn; he bought the Templars who were
taken prisoner and later had each of them executed.
By the mid-12th century the constitution of the order and
its basic structure were established. It was headed by a
grand master, who was elected for life and served in
Jerusalem. Templar territories were divided into provinces,
which were governed by provincial commanders, and each
individual house, called a preceptory, was headed by a
preceptor. General chapter meetings of all members of the
order were held to address important matters affecting the
Templars and to elect a new master when necessary. Similar
meetings were held at the provincial level and on a weekly
basis in each house.
The Templars were originally divided into two classes:
knights and sergeants. The knight-brothers came from the
military aristocracy and were trained in the arts of war.
They assumed elite leadership positions in the order and
served at royal and papal courts. Only the knights wore the
Templars’ distinctive regalia, a white surcoat marked with a
red cross. The sergeants, or serving-brothers, who were
usually from lower social classes, made up the majority of
members. They dressed in black habits and served as both
warriors and servants. The Templars eventually added a third
class, the chaplains, who were responsible for holding
religious services, administering the sacraments, and
addressing the spiritual needs of the other members.
Although women were not allowed to join the order, there
seems to have been at least one Templar nunnery.
The Templars eventually acquired great wealth. The kings
and great nobles of Spain, France, and England gave
lordships, castles, seigniories, and estates to the order,
so that by the mid-12th century the Templars owned
properties scattered throughout western Europe, the
Mediterranean, and the Holy Land. The Templars’ military
strength enabled them to safely collect, store, and
transport bullion to and from Europe and the Holy Land, and
their network of treasure storehouses and their efficient
transport organization made them attractive as bankers to
kings as well as to pilgrims to the Holy Land.
The Templars were not without enemies, however. They had
long engaged in a bitter rivalry with the other great
military order of Europe, the Hospitallers, and, by the late
13th century, proposals were being made to merge the two
contentious orders into one. The fall of Acre to the Muslims
in 1291 removed much of the Templars’ reason for being, and
their great wealth, extensive landholdings in Europe, and
power inspired resentment toward them. Although an
ex-Templar had accused the order of blasphemy and immorality
as early as 1304 (though more likely 1305), it was only
later—after Philip IV ordered the arrest on October 13,
1307, of every Templar in France and sequestered all the
Templars’ property in the country—that most of the people of
Europe became aware of the extent of the alleged crimes of
the order. Philip accused the Templars of heresy and
immorality; specific charges against them included idol
worship (of a bearded male head said to have great powers),
worship of a cat, homosexuality, and numerous other errors
of belief and practice. At the order’s secret initiation
rite, it was claimed, the new member denied Christ three
times, spat on the crucifix, and was kissed on the base of
the spine, on the navel, and on the mouth by the knight
presiding over the ceremony. The charges, now recognized to
be without foundation, were calculated to stoke contemporary
fears of heretics, witches, and demons and were similar to
allegations Philip had used against Pope Boniface VIII.
The reasons why Philip sought to destroy the Templars are
unclear; he may have genuinely feared their power and been
motivated by his own piety to destroy a heretical group, or
he may have simply seen an opportunity to seize their
immense wealth, being chronically short of money himself. At
any rate, Philip mercilessly pursued the order and had many
of its members tortured to secure false confessions.
Although Pope Clement V, himself a Frenchman, ordered the
arrest of all the Templars in November 1307, a church
council in 1311 voted overwhelmingly against suppression,
and Templars in countries other than France were found
innocent of the charges. Clement, however, under strong
pressure from Philip, suppressed the order on March 22,
1312, and the Templars’ property throughout Europe was
transferred to the Hospitallers or confiscated by secular
rulers. Knights who confessed and were reconciled to the
church were sent into retirement in the order’s former
houses or in monasteries, but those who failed to confess or
who relapsed were put on trial. Among those judged guilty
was the order’s last grand master, Jacques de Molay. Brought
before a commission established by the pope, de Molay and
other leaders were judged relapsed heretics and sentenced to
life in prison. The master protested and repudiated his
confession and was burned at the stake, the last victim of a
highly unjust and opportunistic persecution.
At the time of its destruction, the order was an
important institution in both Europe and the Holy Land and
already an object of myth and legend. The Templars were
associated with the Grail legend and were identified as
defenders of the Grail castle through the remainder of the
Middle Ages. In the 18th century the Freemasons claimed to
have received in a secret line of succession esoteric
knowledge that the Templars had possessed. The Templars were
also identified as Gnostics and were accused of involvement
in a number of conspiracies, including one that was
allegedly behind the French Revolution. In the 20th century
the image of Christ on the Shroud of Turin was identified as
the head allegedly worshipped by the Templars. Resurrecting
a vein of pseudohistory and Grail legends, authors in the
20th century, claiming to assert historical fact but writing
what most scholars regard as fantasy, implicated the
Templars in a vast conspiracy dedicated to preserving the
blood line of Jesus. Similar occult conspiracy theories were
also used by writers of fiction in the 20th and 21st
centuries.
Cathari
Christian sect
Main
(from Greek katharos, “pure”), also spelled Cathars,
heretical Christian sect that flourished in western Europe
in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Cathari professed a
neo-Manichaean dualism—that there are two principles, one
good and the other evil, and that the material world is
evil. Similar views were held in the Balkans and the Middle
East by the medieval religious sects of the Paulicians and
the Bogomils; the Cathari were closely connected with these
sects.
In the first half of the 11th century isolated groups of
such heretics appeared in western Germany, Flanders, and
northern Italy. In the late 11th century no more was heard
of them; then in the 12th century they reappeared. A period
of rapid growth came in the 30 years following 1140. At
about this time the Bogomil Church was reorganizing itself,
and Bogomil missionaries, as well as Western dualists
returning from the Second Crusade (1147–49), were at work in
the West in the middle of the century. From the 1140s the
Cathari were an organized church with a hierarchy, a
liturgy, and a system of doctrine. About 1149 the first
bishop established himself in the north of France; a few
years later he established colleagues at Albi and in
Lombardy. The status of these bishops was confirmed and the
prestige of the Cathar Church enhanced by the visit of the
Bogomil bishop Nicetas in 1167. In the following years more
bishops were set up, until by the turn of the century there
were 11 bishoprics in all, 1 in the north of France, 4 in
the south, and 6 in Italy.
Although the various groups emphasized different
doctrines, they all agreed that matter was evil. Man was an
alien and a sojourner in an evil world; his aim must be to
free his spirit, which was in its nature good, and restore
it to communion with God. There were strict rules for
fasting, including the total prohibition of meat. Sexual
intercourse was forbidden; complete ascetic renunciation of
the world was called for.
The extreme asceticism made the Cathari a church of the
elect, and yet in France and northern Italy it became a
popular religion. This success was achieved by the division
of the faithful into two bodies: the “perfect” and the
“believers.” The perfect were set apart from the mass of
believers by a ceremony of initiation, the consolamentum.
They devoted themselves to contemplation and were expected
to maintain the highest moral standards. The believers were
not expected to attain the standards of the perfect.
The Cathar doctrines of creation led them to rewrite the
biblical story; they devised an elaborate mythology to
replace it. They viewed much of the Old Testament with
reserve; some of them rejected it altogether. The orthodox
doctrine of the Incarnation was rejected. Jesus was merely
an angel; his human sufferings and death were an illusion.
They also severely criticized the worldliness and corruption
of the Catholic Church.
The Cathar doctrines struck at the roots of orthodox
Christianity and of the political institutions of
Christendom, and the authorities of church and state united
to attack them. Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) attempted to
force Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, to join him in putting
down the heresy, but this ended in disaster; the papal
legate was murdered in January 1208, and the Count was
generally thought to have been an accessory to the crime. A
crusade—the Albigensian Crusade—was proclaimed against the
heretics, and an army led by a group of barons from northern
France proceeded to ravage Toulouse and Provence and
massacre the inhabitants, both Cathar and Catholic (see
Albigenses). A more orderly persecution sanctioned by St.
Louis IX, in alliance with the nascent Inquisition, was more
effective in breaking the power of the Cathari. In 1244 the
great fortress of Montségur near the Pyrenees, a stronghold
of the perfect, was captured and destroyed. The Cathari had
to go underground, and many of the French Cathari fled to
Italy, where persecution was more intermittent. The
hierarchy faded out in the 1270s; the heresy lingered
through the 14th century and finally disappeared early in
the 15th.
Waldenses
religious movement
also spelled Valdenses, French Vaudois, Italian Valdesi,
Main
members of a Christian movement that originated in
12th-century France, the devotees of which sought to follow
Christ in poverty and simplicity. In modern times the name
has been applied to members of a Protestant church (centred
on the Franco-Italian border) that formed when remnants of
the earlier movement became Swiss Protestant Reformers.
Early Roman Catholic and Waldensian sources are few and
unreliable, and little is known with certainty about the
reputed founder, Valdes (also called Peter Waldo, or Valdo).
As a layman, Valdes preached in Lyon (1170–76), but
ecclesiastical authorities were disturbed by his lack of
theological training and by his use of a non-Latin version
of the Bible. Valdes attended the third Lateran Council
(1179) in Rome and was confirmed in his vow of poverty by
Pope Alexander III. Probably during this council Valdes made
his Profession of Faith (which still survives); it is a
statement of orthodox beliefs such as accused heretics were
required to sign. Valdes, however, did not receive the
ecclesiastical recognition that he sought. Undeterred, he
and his followers (Pauperes: “Poor”) continued to preach;
the archbishop of Lyon condemned him, and Pope Lucius III
placed the Waldenses under ban with his bull Ad Abolendam
(1184), issued during the Synod of Verona.
Thereafter, the Waldenses departed from the teaching of
the Roman Catholic church by rejecting some of the seven
sacraments and the notion of purgatory. Their views were
based on a simplified biblicism, moral rigour, and criticism
of abuses in the contemporary church. Their movement, often
joined to and influenced by other sects, spread rapidly to
Spain, northern France, Flanders, Germany, and southern
Italy and even reached Poland and Hungary. Rome responded
vigorously, turning from excommunication to active
persecution and execution. Though the Waldenses confessed
regularly, celebrated communion once a year, fasted, and
preached poverty, they repudiated such Roman practices as
prayers for the dead and the veneration of saints, and they
refused to recognize secular courts because they did not
believe in taking oaths.
In the early 13th century a number of Waldenses returned
to orthodoxy; by the end of the century persecution had
virtually eliminated the sect in some areas, and for safety
the survivors abandoned their distinctive dress. By the end
of the 15th century they were confined mostly to the French
and Italian valleys of the Cottian Alps.
A second period in their history began when the French
reformer Guillaume Farel introduced Reformation theology to
the Waldensian ministers (barbes) in 1526. The Waldenses
raised questions concerning the number of sacraments, the
relationship between free will and predestination, and the
problem of reconciling justification by faith with the
scriptural emphasis on the necessity of good works. At a
conference at Cianforan in 1532 most Waldenses accepted
secular law courts and celibacy for their barbes and agreed
to accept only two sacraments (baptism and Holy Communion)
and the doctrine of predestination as presented by the
Protestants in attendance. By further adapting themselves to
Genevan forms of worship and church organization, they
became in effect a Swiss Protestant church. Years of
persecution continued, however, before they received full
civil rights in 1848.
During the second half of the 19th century, Waldensian
emigrants arrived in Uruguay and later moved from there to
the United States. There, strengthened by arrivals from
France and Switzerland, they established small communities
in Missouri, Texas, and Utah and, most importantly, around
Valdese, in Burke county, N.C., now a thriving industrial
town whose population of about 3,000 is still largely
Waldensian.
Today the Waldenses are governed by a seven-member board,
called the Tavola (“Table”), elected annually by a general
synod that convenes in Torre Pellice, Italy.
Spiritual
religious order
also called Spiritual Franciscan
Main
member of an extreme group within the Franciscans, a
mendicant religious order founded by St. Francis of Assisi
in 1209; the Spirituals firmly espoused the austerity and
poverty prescribed in the original Rule of St. Francis.
Called the Fraticelli, they were opposed, to some extent, by
St. Bonaventure, a leading Franciscan theologian, and some
were condemned and executed as heretics. Among the Spiritual
Franciscans, the works of the late 12th-century mystic
Joachim of Fiore were influential, and because of their
ideals the Spirituals became sources of inspiration to
Protestant mystics of the 16th-century Reformation.
Antinomianism
religion
Main
(Greek anti, “against”; nomos, “law”), doctrine according to
which Christians are freed by grace from the necessity of
obeying the Mosaic Law. The antinomians rejected the very
notion of obedience as legalistic; to them the good life
flowed from the inner working of the Holy Spirit. In this
circumstance they appealed not only to Martin Luther but
also to Paul and Augustine.
The ideas of antinomianism had been present in the early
church, and some Gnostic heretics believed that freedom from
law meant freedom for license. The doctrine of
antinomianism, however, grew out of the Protestant
controversies on the law and the gospel and was first
attributed to Luther’s collaborator, Johann Agricola. It
also appeared in the Reformed branch of Protestantism. The
left-wing Anabaptists were accused of antinomianism, both
for theological reasons and also because they opposed the
cooperation of church and state, which was considered
necessary for law and order. For similar reasons, in the
17th century, Separatists, Familists, Ranters, and
Independents in England were called antinomians by the
established churches. In New England, Anne Hutchinson was
accused of the doctrine when she said that the churches were
preaching “the covenant of works.” The Evangelical movement
at the end of the 18th century produced its own antinomians
who claimed an inner experience and a “new life,” which they
considered the true source of good works.
Lollard
English religious history
Main
in late medieval England, a follower, after about 1382, of
John Wycliffe, a University of Oxford philosopher and
theologian whose unorthodox religious and social doctrines
in some ways anticipated those of the 16th-century
Protestant Reformation. The name, used pejoratively, derived
from the Middle Dutch lollaert (“mumbler”), which had been
applied earlier to certain European continental groups
suspected of combining pious pretensions with heretical
belief.
At Oxford in the 1370s, Wycliffe came to advocate
increasingly radical religious views. He denied the doctrine
of transubstantiation and stressed the importance of
preaching and the primacy of Scripture as the source of
Christian doctrine. Claiming that the office of the papacy
lacked scriptural justification, he equated the pope with
Antichrist and welcomed the 14th-century schism in the
papacy as a prelude to its destruction. Wycliffe was charged
with heresy and retired from Oxford in 1378. Nevertheless,
he was never brought to trial, and he continued to write and
preach until his death in 1384.
The first Lollard group centred (c. 1382) on some of
Wycliffe’s colleagues at Oxford led by Nicholas of Hereford.
The movement gained followers outside of Oxford, and the
anticlerical undercurrents of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
were ascribed, probably unfairly, to the influence of
Wycliffe and the Lollards. In 1382 William Courtenay,
archbishop of Canterbury, forced some of the Oxford Lollards
to renounce their views and conform to Roman Catholic
doctrine. The sect continued to multiply, however, among
townspeople, merchants, gentry, and even the lower clergy.
Several knights of the royal household gave their support,
as well as a few members of the House of Commons.
The accession of Henry IV in 1399 signaled a wave of
repression against heresy. In 1401 the first English statute
was passed for the burning of heretics. The Lollards’ first
martyr, William Sawtrey, was actually burned a few days
before the act was passed. In 1414 a Lollard rising led by
Sir John Oldcastle was quickly defeated by Henry V. The
rebellion brought severe reprisals and marked the end of the
Lollards’ overt political influence.
Driven underground, the movement operated henceforth
chiefly among tradespeople and artisans, supported by a few
clerical adherents. About 1500 a Lollard revival began, and
before 1530 the old Lollard and the new Protestant forces
had begun to merge. The Lollard tradition facilitated the
spread of Protestantism and predisposed opinion in favour of
King Henry VIII’s anticlerical legislation during the
English Reformation.
From its early days the Lollard movement tended to
discard the scholastic subtleties of Wycliffe, who probably
wrote few or none of the popular tracts in English formerly
attributed to him. The most complete statement of early
Lollard teaching appeared in the Twelve Conclusions, drawn
up to be presented to the Parliament of 1395. They began by
stating that the church in England had become subservient to
her “stepmother the great church of Rome.” The present
priesthood was not the one ordained by Christ, while the
Roman ritual of ordination had no warrant in Scripture.
Clerical celibacy occasioned unnatural lust, while the
“feigned miracle” of transubstantiation led men into
idolatry. The hallowing of wine, bread, altars, vestments,
and so forth was related to necromancy. Prelates should not
be temporal judges and rulers, for no man can serve two
masters. The Conclusions also condemned special prayers for
the dead, pilgrimages, and offerings to images, and they
declared confession to a priest unnecessary for salvation.
Warfare was contrary to the New Testament, and vows of
chastity by nuns led to the horrors of abortion and child
murder. Finally, the multitude of unnecessary arts and
crafts pursued in the church encouraged “waste, curiosity,
and disguising.” The Twelve Conclusions covered all the main
Lollard doctrines except two: that the prime duty of priests
is to preach and that all men should have free access to the
Scriptures in their own language. The Lollards were
responsible for a translation of the Bible into English, by
Nicholas of Hereford, and later revised by Wycliffe’s
secretary, John Purvey.
Hussite
religious movement
Main
any of the followers of the Bohemian religious reformer Jan
Hus, who was condemned by the Council of Constance (1414–18)
and burned at the stake. After his death in 1415 many
Bohemian knights and nobles published a formal protest and
offered protection to those who were persecuted for their
faith. The movement’s chief supporters were Jakoubek of
Stříbro (died 1429), Hus’s successor as preacher at the
Bethlehem chapel in Prague; Václav Koranda, leader of the
Taborites (extreme Hussites named for Tábor, their
stronghold, south of Prague); and Jan Želivský, who
organized the extreme reform party in Prague.
The Hussites broke with Rome in using a Czech liturgy and
in administering Holy Communion to the laity under the forms
of both bread and wine. (The doctrine supporting this was
called Utraquism and the more moderate Hussites were called
Utraquists.)
Under King Wenceslas (Václav) IV of Bohemia, the movement
spread widely. In 1419, however, he died and was succeeded
by a bitter enemy of the Hussites, his half brother
Sigismund, king of the Romans and of Hungary. The Hussites
would have acknowledged Sigismund had he accepted the Four
Articles of Prague that Jakoubek had formulated: (1) freedom
of preaching; (2) communion in both kinds; (3) poverty of
the clergy and expropriation of church property; (4)
punishment of notorious sinners. In 1420, however, Sigismund,
who had failed to get possession of Prague, published a bull
of Pope Martin V proclaiming a crusade against the Hussites.
The Hussite union, which included the municipalities of
Prague and other cities and the chief military power of
Bohemia, deposed Sigismund and repelled two crusading
attacks against Prague. Various crusades and battles against
the Hussites failed for the next several years. In 1427 the
Hussites, led by Prokop Holý, began a more revolutionary,
rather than defensive, political program. Pope Martin V
organized another crusade against them but did not live to
see it decisively beaten by the Hussites in 1431.
Peace negotiations began in 1431, when the Council of
Basel of the Roman Catholic Church agreed to negotiate with
the Hussites on an equal basis, which Pope Martin V had
refused to do. A Hussite delegation spent three months in
Basel in 1433 discussing the Four Articles of Prague. The
Council then sent a mission to Prague, which granted
communion in both kinds to the Hussites. This grant split
the Hussites, since the Utraquists were willing to make
peace on these terms, but the Taborites were not. Utraquists
and Catholics then joined forces to defeat the Taborites in
a battle at Lipany in 1434, which ended the Taborites’
influence.
The Utraquist Hussites then resumed peace negotiations,
and in July 1436 they obtained a peace treaty (the Compact
of Iglau) that ensured all the principal gains of the war:
communion in both kinds, the expropriation of church lands
(which broke the economic power of the Roman Catholic Church
in Bohemia), and an independent Bohemian Catholic church
under Jan Rokycana as its elected archbishop. Although
association with the Roman Catholic Church continued, the
church of the Utraquist Hussites survived schisms and
periodic persecutions until c. 1620, when it was finally
absorbed by the Roman Catholics.
In the mid-15th century the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of
Brethren) movement began in Bohemia among some of the
Hussites, and it established its own independent
organization in 1467. During the Reformation, the Unitas
Fratrum was in contact with Lutheran and Reformed
Protestants. Eventually, however, Bohemian and Moravian
Protestantism was suppressed, and the Roman Catholic
Counter-Reformation was victorious after 1620, when the
Protestant barons were defeated at the Battle of the White
Mountain during the Thirty Years’ War.
Remnants of the Unitas Fratrum remained, however, and in
1722 a group of them fled Moravia and settled on the estate
of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf in Saxony. A number
of exiles from Moravia and Bohemia followed, and they formed
the community of Herrnhut, where they were organized as the
Moravian Church . There is also some continuity with
20th-century Czech Protestantism.
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The Middle Ages » Procedures and organization
When instituting an inquiry in a district, an inquisitor would normally
declare a period of grace during which those who voluntarily confessed
their own involvement in heresy and that of others would be given only
light penances. The inquisitor used these confessions to compile a list
of suspects whom he summoned to his tribunal. Failure to appear was
considered evidence of guilt. The trial was often a battle of wits
between the inquisitor and the accused. The only other people present
were a notary, who kept a record of the proceedings, and sworn
witnesses, who attested the record’s accuracy. No lawyer would defend a
suspect for fear of being accused of abetting heresy, and suspects were
not normally told what charges had been made against them or by whom.
The accused might appeal to the pope before proceedings began, but this
involved considerable expense.
After consulting with canon lawyers, the inquisitor would sentence
those found guilty at a sermo generalis, or public homily. Judicial
penances were imposed on those who had been convicted of heresy and had
recanted. The most common punishments were penitential pilgrimages, the
wearing of yellow crosses on clothing (which was feared because it led
to ostracism), and imprisonment.
The inquisition employed two kinds of prisons, both staffed by
laymen. One type was the murus largus, or open prison, which consisted
of cells built around a courtyard in which the inmates enjoyed
considerable freedom. The other type was the murus strictus, a
high-security prison, where inmates were kept in solitary confinement,
often in chains. Heretics who admitted their errors but refused to
recant were handed over to the secular authorities and burned at the
stake. There were usually not many cases of this kind, because the chief
aim of the inquisitors was to reconcile heretics to the church. On rare
occasions, however, large public executions did take place, as at Verona
in 1278, when some 200 Cathars were burned.
Although heresy was a capital offense in virtually all the states of
western Europe, some rulers—for example, the kings of Castile and
England—refused to license the inquisition. Even where it did operate—in
much of Italy and in kingdoms such as France and Aragon—the inquisition
relied entirely on the secular authorities to arrest and execute those
whom it named and to defray all its expenses. The money came partly from
the sale of the confiscated property of convicted heretics.
Although some scholars have denied that the medieval inquisition was
an institution, others maintain that it is the best way to describe a
group of men who enjoyed the same powers, were directly responsible to
the pope, employed servants and officials, and had absolute control over
a number of large prisons and their inmates. Nevertheless, its power was
very limited, and, arguably, it was important chiefly because it
established a tradition of religious coercion in the late medieval
Western church that was inherited by both Catholics and Protestants in
the 16th century.
Bernard Hamilton
Torture
Burning at the stake
punishment
Main
a method of execution practiced in Babylonia and ancient
Israel and later adopted in Europe and North America.
Spanish heretics suffered this penalty during the
Inquisition, as did French disbelievers and heretics such as
Joan of Arc, who was condemned and burned in 1431 in Rouen,
France. In 1555 the Protestant bishops Hugh Latimer,
Nicholas Ridley, and John Hooper were condemned as heretics
and burned at the stake in Oxford, England. Burning at the
stake was a traditional form of execution for women found
guilty of witchcraft. Most accusations of witchcraft,
however, did not originate in the church but resulted from
personal rivalries and disputes in small towns and villages.
In some cases of burning at the stake, mechanisms were
provided to shorten the victim’s suffering. These included
attaching a container of gunpowder to the victim, which
would explode and kill him instantly when heated by the
fire, and placing the victim in a noose, often made of
chain, so that death occurred by hanging. In England, the
burning of heretics ended in 1612 with the death of Edward
Wightman; the country’s last execution for heresy (by
hanging) occurred in 1697. Burning at the stake for crimes
other than heresy continued into the 18th century.
Geoffrey Abbott
Torture
Capital punishment
Historical considerations
law
also called death penalty
Main
execution of an offender sentenced to death after conviction
by a court of law of a criminal offense. Capital punishment
should be distinguished from extrajudicial executions
carried out without due process of law. The term death
penalty is sometimes used interchangeably with capital
punishment, though imposition of the penalty is not always
followed by execution (even when it is upheld on appeal),
because of the possibility of commutation to life
imprisonment.
Historical considerations
Capital punishment for murder, treason, arson, and rape was
widely employed in ancient Greece under the laws of Draco
(fl. 7th century bc), though Plato argued that it should be
used only for the incorrigible. The Romans also used it for
a wide range of offenses, though citizens were exempted for
a short time during the republic. It also has been
sanctioned at one time or another by most of the world’s
major religions. Followers of Judaism and Christianity, for
example, have claimed to find justification for capital
punishment in the Old Testament passage “Whosoever sheddeth
man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6).
Yet capital punishment has been prescribed for many crimes
not involving loss of life, including adultery and
blasphemy. The ancient legal principle Lex talionis (talion)—“an
eye-for-an-eye, a tooth-for-a-tooth, a
life-for-a-life”—which appears in the Babylonian Code of
Hammurabi, was invoked in some societies to ensure that
capital punishment was not disproportionately applied.
The prevalence of capital punishment in ancient times is
difficult to ascertain precisely, but it seems likely that
it was often avoided, sometimes by the alternative of
banishment and sometimes by payment of compensation. For
example, it was customary during Japan’s peaceful Heian
period (794–1185) for the emperor to commute every death
sentence and replace it with deportation to a remote area,
though executions were reinstated once civil war broke out
in the mid-11th century.
In Islamic law, as expressed in the Qurʾān, capital
punishment is condoned. Although the Qurʾān prescribes the
death penalty for several ḥadd (fixed) crimes—including
robbery, adultery, and apostasy of Islam—murder is not among
them. Instead, murder is treated as a civil crime and is
covered by the law of qișās (retaliation), whereby the
relatives of the victim decide whether the offender is
punished with death by the authorities or made to pay diyah
(wergild) as compensation.
Death was formerly the penalty for a large number of
offenses in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, but
it was never applied as widely as the law provided. As in
other countries, many offenders who committed capital crimes
escaped the death penalty, either because juries or courts
would not convict them or because they were pardoned,
usually on condition that they agreed to banishment; some
were sentenced to the lesser punishment of transportation to
the then American colonies and later to Australia. Beginning
in the Middle Ages, it was possible for offenders guilty of
capital offenses to receive benefit of clergy, by which
those who could prove that they were ordained priests
(clerks in Holy Orders) as well as secular clerks who
assisted in divine service (or, from 1547, a peer of the
realm) were allowed to go free, though it remained within
the judge’s power to sentence them to prison for up to a
year, or from 1717 onward to transportation for seven years.
Because during medieval times the only proof of ordination
was literacy, it became customary between the 15th and 18th
centuries to allow anyone convicted of a felony to escape
the death sentence by proving that he (the privilege was
extended to women in 1629) could read. Until 1705, all he
had to do was read (or recite) the first verse from Psalm 51
of the Bible—“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your
steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my
transgressions”—which came to be known as the “neck verse”
(for its power to save one’s neck). To ensure that an
offender could escape death only once through benefit of
clergy, he was branded on the brawn of the thumb (“M” for
murder or “T” for theft). Branding was abolished in 1779,
and benefit of clergy ceased in 1827.
From ancient times until well into the 19th century, many
societies administered exceptionally cruel forms of capital
punishment. In Rome the condemned were hurled from the
Tarpeian Rock (see Tarpeia); for parricide they were drowned
in a sealed bag with a dog, cock, ape, and viper; and still
others were executed by forced gladiatorial combat or by
crucifixion. Executions in ancient China were carried out by
many painful methods, such as sawing the condemned in half,
flaying him while still alive, and boiling. Cruel forms of
execution in Europe included “breaking” on the wheel,
boiling in oil, burning at the stake, decapitation by the
guillotine or an axe, hanging, drawing and quartering, and
drowning. Although by the end of the 20th century many
jurisdictions (e.g., nearly every U.S. state that employs
the death penalty, Guatemala, the Philippines, Taiwan, and
some Chinese provinces) had adopted lethal injection,
offenders continued to be beheaded in Saudi Arabia and
occasionally stoned to death (for adultery) in Iran and The
Sudan. Other methods of execution were electrocution,
gassing, and the firing squad.
Historically, executions were public events, attended by
large crowds, and the mutilated bodies were often displayed
until they rotted. Public executions were banned in England
in 1868, though they continued to take place in parts of the
United States until the 1930s. In the last half of the 20th
century, there was considerable debate regarding whether
executions should be broadcast on television, as has
occurred in Guatemala. Since the mid-1990s public executions
have taken place in some 20 countries, including Iran, Saudi
Arabia, and Nigeria, though the practice has been condemned
by the United Nations Human Rights Committee as
“incompatible with human dignity.”
In many countries death sentences are not carried out
immediately after they are imposed; there is often a long
period of uncertainty for the convicted while their cases
are appealed. Inmates awaiting execution live on what has
been called “death row”; in the United States and Japan,
some prisoners have been executed more than 15 years after
their convictions. The European Union regards this
phenomenon as so inhumane that, on the basis of a binding
ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (1989), EU
countries may extradite an offender accused of a capital
crime to a country that practices capital punishment only if
a guarantee is given that the death penalty will not be
sought.
Arguments for and against capital punishment
Capital punishment has long engendered considerable debate
about both its morality and its effect on criminal behaviour.
Contemporary arguments for and against capital punishment
fall under three general headings: moral, utilitarian, and
practical.
Arguments for and against capital punishment » Moral
arguments
Supporters of the death penalty believe that those who
commit murder, because they have taken the life of another,
have forfeited their own right to life. Furthermore, they
believe, capital punishment is a just form of retribution,
expressing and reinforcing the moral indignation not only of
the victim’s relatives but of law-abiding citizens in
general. By contrast, opponents of capital punishment,
following the writings of Cesare Beccaria (in particular On
Crimes and Punishments [1764]), argue that, by legitimizing
the very behaviour that the law seeks to
repress—killing—capital punishment is counterproductive in
the moral message it conveys. Moreover, they urge, when it
is used for lesser crimes, capital punishment is immoral
because it is wholly disproportionate to the harm done.
Abolitionists also claim that capital punishment violates
the condemned person’s right to life and is fundamentally
inhuman and degrading.
Although death was prescribed for crimes in many sacred
religious documents and historically was practiced widely
with the support of religious hierarchies, today there is no
agreement among religious faiths, or among denominations or
sects within them, on the morality of capital punishment.
Beginning in the last half of the 20th century, increasing
numbers of religious leaders—particularly within Judaism and
Roman Catholicism—campaigned against it. Capital punishment
was abolished by the state of Israel for all offenses except
treason and crimes against humanity, and Pope John Paul II
condemned it as “cruel and unnecessary.”
Arguments for and against capital punishment » Utilitarian
arguments
Supporters of capital punishment also claim that it has a
uniquely potent deterrent effect on potentially violent
offenders for whom the threat of imprisonment is not a
sufficient restraint. Opponents, however, point to research
that generally has demonstrated that the death penalty is
not a more effective deterrent than the alternative sanction
of life or long-term imprisonment.
Arguments for and against capital punishment » Practical
arguments
There also are disputes about whether capital punishment can
be administered in a manner consistent with justice. Those
who support capital punishment believe that it is possible
to fashion laws and procedures that ensure that only those
who are really deserving of death are executed. By contrast,
opponents maintain that the historical application of
capital punishment shows that any attempt to single out
certain kinds of crime as deserving of death will inevitably
be arbitrary and discriminatory. They also point to other
factors that they think preclude the possibility that
capital punishment can be fairly applied, arguing that the
poor and ethnic and religious minorities often do not have
access to good legal assistance, that racial prejudice
motivates predominantly white juries in capital cases to
convict black and other nonwhite defendants in
disproportionate numbers, and that, because errors are
inevitable even in a well-run criminal justice system, some
people will be executed for crimes they did not commit.
Finally, they argue that, because the appeals process for
death sentences is protracted, those condemned to death are
often cruelly forced to endure long periods of uncertainty
about their fate.
The abolition movement
Under the influence of the European Enlightenment, in the
latter part of the 18th century there began a movement to
limit the scope of capital punishment. Until that time a
very wide range of offenses, including even common theft,
were punishable by death—though the punishment was not
always enforced, in part because juries tended to acquit
defendants against the evidence in minor cases. In 1794 the
U.S. state of Pennsylvania became the first jurisdiction to
restrict the death penalty to first-degree murder, and in
1846 the state of Michigan abolished capital punishment for
all murders and other common crimes. In 1863 Venezuela
became the first country to abolish capital punishment for
all crimes, including serious offenses against the state
(e.g., treason and military offenses in time of war).
Portugal was the first European country to abolish the death
penalty, doing so in 1867; by the early 20th century several
other countries, including The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden,
Denmark, and Italy, had followed suit (though it was
reintroduced in Italy under the fascist regime of Benito
Mussolini). By the mid-1960s some 25 countries had abolished
the death penalty for murder, though only about half of them
also had abolished it for offenses against the state or the
military code. For example, Britain abolished capital
punishment for murder in 1965, but treason, piracy, and
military crimes remained capital offenses until 1998.
During the last third of the 20th century, the number of
abolitionist countries increased more than threefold. These
countries, together with those that are “de facto”
abolitionist—i.e., those in which capital punishment is
legal but not exercised—now represent more than half the
countries of the world. One reason for the significant
increase in the number of abolitionist states was that the
abolition movement was successful in making capital
punishment an international human rights issue, whereas
formerly it had been regarded as solely an internal matter
for the countries concerned. In 1971 the United Nations
General Assembly passed a resolution that, “in order fully
to guarantee the right to life, provided for in…the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” called for
restricting the number of offenses for which the death
penalty could be imposed, with a view toward abolishing it
altogether. This resolution was reaffirmed by the General
Assembly in 1977. Optional protocols to the European
Convention on Human Rights (1983) and to the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1989) have been
established, under which countries party to the convention
and the covenant undertake not to carry out executions. The
Council of Europe (1994) and the EU (1998) established as a
condition of membership in their organizations the
requirement that prospective member countries suspend
executions and commit themselves to abolition. This decision
had a remarkable impact on the countries of central and
eastern Europe, prompting several of them—e.g., the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—to
abolish capital punishment. In the 1990s many African
countries—including Angola, Djibouti, Mozambique, and
Namibia—abolished capital punishment, though most African
countries retained it. In South Africa, which formerly had
one of the world’s highest execution rates, capital
punishment was outlawed in 1995 by the Constitutional Court,
which declared that it was incompatible with the prohibition
against cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment and with “a
human rights culture.”
Capital punishment at the start of the 21st century
Despite the movement toward abolition, many countries have
retained capital punishment, and, in fact, some have
extended its scope. More than 30 countries have made the
importation and possession for sale of certain drugs a
capital offense. Iran, Singapore, Malaysia, and the
Philippines impose a mandatory death sentence for the
possession of relatively small amounts of illegal drugs. In
Singapore, which has by far the highest rate of execution
per capita of any country, about three-fourths of persons
executed in 2000 had been sentenced for drug offenses. Some
20 countries impose the death penalty for various economic
crimes, including bribery and corruption of public
officials, embezzlement of public funds, currency
speculation, and the theft of large sums of money. Sexual
offenses of various kinds are punishable by death in about
two dozen countries, including most Islamic states. In China
there are some 60 capital offenses, including all those
listed above.
Despite the large number of capital offenses in some
countries, in most years only about 30 countries carry out
executions. In the United States, where roughly
three-fourths of the states and the federal government have
retained the death penalty, about two-thirds of all
executions since 1976 (when new death penalty laws were
affirmed by the Supreme Court) have occurred in just six
states—Texas, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, and
Oklahoma. China, which executes about 1,000 people annually
(though no reliable statistics are published), regularly
accounts for some four-fifths of all judicially sanctioned
executions in the world. Although the number of executions
worldwide varies from year to year, some countries—including
Belarus, Congo (Kinshasa), Iran, Jordan, Nigeria, Saudi
Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Yemen—execute
criminals regularly. Japan and India also have retained the
death penalty and carry out executions from time to time.
In only a few countries does the law allow for the
execution of persons who were minors (under the age of 18)
at the time they committed their crime. Most such
executions, which are prohibited by the Convention on the
Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights, have occurred in the United States,
which has not ratified the convention and which ratified the
covenant with reservations regarding the death penalty.
Beginning in the late 1990s, there was considerable debate
about whether the death penalty should be imposed on the
mentally impaired; much of the controversy concerned
practices in the United States, where more than a dozen such
executions took place from 1990 to 2001 despite a UN
injunction against the practice in 1989. In 2002 and 2005,
respectively, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the
execution of the mentally impaired and those under age 18
was unconstitutional. The court banned the imposition of the
death penalty for rape in 1977 and specifically for child
rape in 2008.
In the late 1990s, following a series of cases in which
persons convicted of capital crimes and awaiting execution
on death row were exonerated on the basis of new
evidence—including evidence based on new DNA-testing
technology—some U.S. states began to consider moratoriums on
the death penalty. In 2000 Illinois Governor George Ryan
ordered such a moratorium, noting that the state had
executed 12 people from 1977 to 2000 but that the death
sentences of 13 other people had been overturned in the same
period. In 2003, on the eve of leaving office, Ryan emptied
the state’s death row by pardoning 4 people and commuting
the death sentences of 167 others. In 2007 the state of New
Jersey abolished capital punishment and commuted the
sentences of 8 inmates who faced the death penalty.
Roger Hood
Torture
Cathari
Christian sect
Main
(from Greek katharos, “pure”), also spelled Cathars,
heretical Christian sect that flourished in western Europe
in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Cathari professed a
neo-Manichaean dualism—that there are two principles, one
good and the other evil, and that the material world is
evil. Similar views were held in the Balkans and the Middle
East by the medieval religious sects of the Paulicians and
the Bogomils; the Cathari were closely connected with these
sects.
In the first half of the 11th century isolated groups of
such heretics appeared in western Germany, Flanders, and
northern Italy. In the late 11th century no more was heard
of them; then in the 12th century they reappeared. A period
of rapid growth came in the 30 years following 1140. At
about this time the Bogomil Church was reorganizing itself,
and Bogomil missionaries, as well as Western dualists
returning from the Second Crusade (1147–49), were at work in
the West in the middle of the century. From the 1140s the
Cathari were an organized church with a hierarchy, a
liturgy, and a system of doctrine. About 1149 the first
bishop established himself in the north of France; a few
years later he established colleagues at Albi and in
Lombardy. The status of these bishops was confirmed and the
prestige of the Cathar Church enhanced by the visit of the
Bogomil bishop Nicetas in 1167. In the following years more
bishops were set up, until by the turn of the century there
were 11 bishoprics in all, 1 in the north of France, 4 in
the south, and 6 in Italy.
Although the various groups emphasized different
doctrines, they all agreed that matter was evil. Man was an
alien and a sojourner in an evil world; his aim must be to
free his spirit, which was in its nature good, and restore
it to communion with God. There were strict rules for
fasting, including the total prohibition of meat. Sexual
intercourse was forbidden; complete ascetic renunciation of
the world was called for.
The extreme asceticism made the Cathari a church of the
elect, and yet in France and northern Italy it became a
popular religion. This success was achieved by the division
of the faithful into two bodies: the “perfect” and the
“believers.” The perfect were set apart from the mass of
believers by a ceremony of initiation, the consolamentum.
They devoted themselves to contemplation and were expected
to maintain the highest moral standards. The believers were
not expected to attain the standards of the perfect.
The Cathar doctrines of creation led them to rewrite the
biblical story; they devised an elaborate mythology to
replace it. They viewed much of the Old Testament with
reserve; some of them rejected it altogether. The orthodox
doctrine of the Incarnation was rejected. Jesus was merely
an angel; his human sufferings and death were an illusion.
They also severely criticized the worldliness and corruption
of the Catholic Church.
The Cathar doctrines struck at the roots of orthodox
Christianity and of the political institutions of
Christendom, and the authorities of church and state united
to attack them. Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) attempted to
force Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, to join him in putting
down the heresy, but this ended in disaster; the papal
legate was murdered in January 1208, and the Count was
generally thought to have been an accessory to the crime. A
crusade—the Albigensian Crusade—was proclaimed against the
heretics, and an army led by a group of barons from northern
France proceeded to ravage Toulouse and Provence and
massacre the inhabitants, both Cathar and Catholic (see
Albigenses). A more orderly persecution sanctioned by St.
Louis IX, in alliance with the nascent Inquisition, was more
effective in breaking the power of the Cathari. In 1244 the
great fortress of Montségur near the Pyrenees, a stronghold
of the perfect, was captured and destroyed. The Cathari had
to go underground, and many of the French Cathari fled to
Italy, where persecution was more intermittent. The
hierarchy faded out in the 1270s; the heresy lingered
through the 14th century and finally disappeared early in
the 15th.
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Torture
Early modern Europe » History
From the 15th to the 19th century, inquisitions were permanently
established, bureaucratically organized, appointed, and supervised
tribunals of clergy (and occasionally laymen). They were charged with
the discovery and extirpation of heterodox religious opinion and
practice in Christian Europe. The institutional inquisitions were
similar to other institutions of government and discipline in early
modern Europe. The earliest, largest, and best-known of these was the
Spanish Inquisition, established by Pope Sixtus IV at the petition of
Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of Aragon and Castile, in a papal
bull of Nov. 1, 1478. It was eventually extended throughout the Spanish
empire in Europe and the Americas through a system of subordinate
regional tribunals. It was formally abolished by the Spanish government
in 1834. Later institutional inquisitions were established in Portugal
in 1540 (abolished in 1821) and in Rome (for the Papal States and some
other parts of Italy) in 1542; the latter was erected into the
Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, or Holy
Office, one of the 15 secretariats into which the administrative reforms
of Sixtus V (1585–90) divided papal government. (In 1965 the Holy Office
was reorganized by Pope Paul VI and renamed the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith.) In 1547 the government of Venice established a
tribunal of laymen, which was converted into a tribunal of clergy by
1551 but closely monitored by the Venetian government. The Venetian
inquisition lasted until 1797. Another institutional inquisition, that
of the city of Lucca, established in 1545, was also originally staffed
by laymen but then clericalized after a few years.
The Spanish and Portuguese tribunals were departments of state intended
initially to detect crypto-Judaism among Jewish converts to Christianity
and their descendants and later to detect and eradicate Protestant
Christianity. The Roman and other inquisitions were also departments of
state, designed chiefly to combat Protestantism, which was conceived and
defined as heresy in Catholic territories. All inquisitions had the
power to supervise and discipline the moral failings of both clergy and
laity.
These institutional inquisitions, some scholars have argued, differed
from earlier inquisitorial tribunals established by papal delegation in
various parts of western Europe in the 13th century and intermittently
thereafter, because the earlier tribunals were either those of
individual bishops acting in their ordinary judicial capacity or those
of individuals commissioned by the pope to extirpate heresy in specific
places or for specific periods. They used similar procedures, sometimes
communicating with each other, and were instructed by the same handbooks
of doctrine and procedure, but possessed no common organization or other
institutional features. Although early inquisitorial practices in some
instances moved toward institutionalization, only those of the 16th
century displayed full institutional characteristics.
Torture
Sixtus IV
pope
original name Francesco della Rovere
born July 21, 1414, Cella Ligure, near Savona, Republic of
Genoa
died Aug. 12, 1484, Rome
Main
pope from 1471 to 1484 who effectively made the papacy an
Italian principality.
Becoming a Franciscan, he subsequently taught and was
chosen minister general of his order in 1464. He was made
cardinal in 1467 by Pope Paul II, whom he succeeded on Aug.
9, 1471.
Neither a crusader nor curial politician, Sixtus aimed at
the aggrandizement of his family and of the Papal States,
subordinating his duties as the church’s spiritual head in a
manner characteristic of his era. Concurrently, the ideal of
the crusade against the Turks was dying. In 1472, under
Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, he sent a fleet that participated
in the landing at the important Muslim stronghold of Smyrna,
but a new expedition in 1473 failed. Sixtus IV’s relations
were strained with France, whose king Louis XI firmly upheld
the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), which had
established the liberties of the French Church. His efforts
in 1474 and 1476 to reunite the Russian Church with Rome and
to gain Russian support against the Turks were unsuccessful.
Sixtus IV soon abandoned universal interests,
concentrating on Italian politics and revealing his
confirmed nepotism. His beneficiaries were members of his
own family, whom he greatly enriched and who involved him in
messy disputes, perhaps the worst of which was a conspiracy
against Lorenzo (the Magnificent) de’ Medici. On April 26,
1478, during mass at Florence cathedral, the agents of
Girolamo Riario, Sixtus IV’s nephew, wounded Lorenzo and
killed his brother, Giuliano, in a plot to overthrow the
Medici. Although Sixtus endorsed the plot, he did not
approve of assassination. Out of this scandal and its
counteraction, he justifiably managed to excommunicate
Lorenzo, to put Florence under interdict, and to induce King
Ferdinand I of Naples, the papacy’s ally, to declare a
fruitless and inglorious war that kept Italy confused for
two years. In 1480 Lorenzo boldly made peace with Ferdinand,
despite Sixtus, who maintained war between the papacy and
Florence. He finally absolved Lorenzo and removed the
interdict.
Apart from meddling in feuds between the great Roman
families, Sixtus IV committed himself rather scandalously to
Venice’s aggression against the duchy of Ferrara, which he
incited the Venetians to attack (1482); their combined
assault was opposed by Milan, Florence, and Naples. For
refusing to desist from the hostilities that he had
instigated and for appearing to be a dangerous rival to the
Papal States, Sixtus placed Venice under interdict in 1483.
In ecclesiastical affairs, Sixtus IV instituted for the
Roman Church the feast (December 8) of the Immaculate
Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He formally annulled
(1478) the decrees of the Council of Constance and condemned
(1482) abuses in the Spanish Inquisition. He granted many
privileges to the mendicant orders, particularly to his own
Franciscans.
Above all, he was a founder or restorer of important
institutions and a patron of arts and letters. He
established and richly endowed the first foundling hospital
and repaired and built numerous Roman churches (including
Sta. Maria del Popolo and Sta. Maria della Pace); the
Sistine Chapel is his principal monument. He commissioned
such great artists as Sandro Botticelli and Antonio del
Pollaiuolo and pensioned such eminent men of learning as
Bartolomeo Platina. From 1471 he was the second founder of
the Vatican Library, which he opened for scholars. During
his pontificate Rome was transformed from a medieval to a
Renaissance city. These outstanding achievements, however,
were accomplished with heavy taxation and simony.
Ferdinand II
king of Spain
byname Ferdinand the Catholic, Spanish Fernando el Católico
born March 10, 1452, Sos, Aragon
died Jan. 23, 1516, Madrigalejo, Spain
Main
king of Aragon and king of Castile (as Ferdinand V) from
1479, joint sovereign with Queen Isabella I. (As Spanish
ruler of southern Italy, he was also known as Ferdinand III
of Naples and Ferdinand II of Sicily.) He united the Spanish
kingdoms into the nation of Spain and began Spain’s entry
into the modern period of imperial expansion.
Ferdinand was the son of John II of Aragon and Juana
Enríquez, both of Castilian origin. In 1461, in the midst of
a bitterly contested succession, John II named him heir
apparent and governor of all his kingdoms and lands.
Ferdinand’s future was assured when he came of age, in 1466,
and when he was named king of Sicily, in 1468, in order to
impress the court of Castile, where his father ultimately
wished to place him. In addition to participating in court
life, the young prince saw battle during the Catalonian
wars.
John II was careful about Ferdinand’s education and took
personal charge of it, making sure that Ferdinand learned as
much as possible from experience. He also provided him with
teachers who taught him humanistic attitudes and wrote him
treatises on the art of government. Ferdinand had no
apparent bent for formal studies, but he was a patron of the
arts and a devotee of vocal and instrumental music.
Ferdinand had an imposing personality but was never very
genial. From his father he acquired sagacity, integrity,
courage, and a calculated reserve; from his mother, an
impulsive emotionality, which he generally repressed. Under
the responsibility of kingship he had to conceal his
stronger passions and adopt a cold, impenetrable mask.
He married the princess Isabella of Castile in Valladolid
in October 1469. This was a marriage of political
opportunism, not romance. The court of Aragon dreamed of a
return to Castile, and Isabella needed help to gain
succession to the throne. The marriage initiated a dark and
troubled life, in which Ferdinand fought on the Castilian
and Aragonese fronts in order to impose his authority over
the noble oligarchies, shifting his basis of support from
one kingdom to the other according to the intensity of the
danger. Despite the political nature of the union, he loved
Isabella sincerely. She quickly bore him children: the
infanta Isabella was born in 1470; the heir apparent, Juan,
in 1478; and the infantas Juana (called Juana la Loca—Joan
the Mad), Catalina (later called—as the first wife of Henry
VIII of England—Catherine of Aragon), and María followed.
The marriage began, however, with almost continual
separation. Ferdinand, often away in the Castilian towns or
on journeys to Aragon, reproached his wife for the comfort
of her life. At the same time, the restlessness of his 20
years drove him into other women’s arms, by whom he sired at
least two female children, whose birth dates are not
recorded. His extramarital affairs caused Isabella jealousy
for several years.
Between the ages of 20 and 30, Ferdinand performed a
series of heroic deeds. These began when Henry IV of Castile
died on Dec. 11, 1474, leaving his succession in dispute.
Ferdinand rushed from Zaragoza to Segovia, where Isabella
had herself proclaimed queen of Castile on December 13.
Ferdinand remained there as king consort, an uneasy,
marginal figure, until Isabella’s war of succession against
Afonso V of Portugal gained his acceptance in 1479 as king
in every sense of the word. That same year John II died, and
Ferdinand succeeded to the Aragonese throne. This initiated
a confederation of kingdoms, which was the institutional
basis for modern Spain.
The events of this period bring out the young king’s
character more clearly. In portraits he appears with soft,
well-proportioned features, a small, sensual mouth, and
pensive eyes. His literary descriptions are more
complicated, although they agree in presenting him as
good-looking, of medium height, and a good rider, devoted to
games and to the hunt. He had a clear, strong voice.
From 1475 to 1479 Ferdinand struggled to take a firm seat
in Castile with his young wife and to transform the kingdom
politically, using new institutional molds partly inspired
by those of Aragon. This policy of modernization included a
ban against all religions other than Roman Catholicism. The
establishment of the Spanish Inquisition (1478) to enforce
religious uniformity and the expulsion of the Jews (1492)
were both part of a deliberate policy designed to strengthen
the church, which would in turn support the crown.
The years 1482–92 were frantic for Ferdinand. In the
spring months he directed the campaign against the kingdom
of Granada, showing his military talent to good effect, and
he conquered the kingdom inch by inch, winning its final
capitulation on Jan. 2, 1492. During the months of rest from
war, he visited his kingdoms, learning their geography and
problems firsthand.
The conquest of Granada made it possible to support
Christopher Columbus’ voyages of exploration across the
Atlantic. It is not known what Ferdinand thought of Columbus
or how he judged his plans, nor can it be stated that the
first trip was financed from Aragon; the sum of 1,157,000
maravedis came from the funds of the Santa Hermandad (“Holy
Brotherhood”). Nevertheless, Ferdinand was present in the
development of plans for the enterprise, in the negotiations
to obtain the pope’s backing for it, and in the organization
of the resulting American colonies.
At the age of 50 Ferdinand was an incarnation of royalty,
and fortune smiled on him. For various reasons, particularly
for his intervention in Italy, Pope Alexander VI gave him
the honorary title of “the Catholic” on Dec. 2, 1496. But he
also suffered a succession of tragedies: the heir apparent
and his eldest daughter both died, and the first symptoms of
insanity appeared in his daughter Juana. He was wounded in
Barcelona in 1493, but this was unimportant compared with
the family injuries he suffered, which culminated in the
death of Isabella in 1504, “the best and most excellent wife
king ever had.”
In 1505, to secure his position in Castile, Ferdinand
signed a contract to marry Germaine de Foix, niece of the
king of France. This, too, was a political marriage,
although he always showed her the highest regard. A stay in
Italy (1506–07) demonstrated how badly he was needed by the
Spanish kingdoms. Once more in Castile, he managed his
European policy so as to obtain a hegemony that would serve
his expansionary ends in the Mediterranean and in Africa. In
1512, immediately after the schism in the church in which
the kings of Navarre participated, he occupied their kingdom
and incorporated it into Castile—one of the most
controversial acts of his reign.
In 1513 Ferdinand’s health began to decay, although he
was still able to direct his international policy and to
prepare the succession of his grandson, the future emperor
Charles V. In early 1516 he began a trip to Granada; he
stopped in Madrigalejo, the little site of the sanctuary of
Guadalupe, where he died. The day before his death, he had
signed his last will and testament, an excellent picture of
the monarch and of the political situation at his death.
Many considered Ferdinand the saviour of his kingdoms, a
bringer of unity. Others despised him for having oppressed
them. Machiavelli attributed to him the objectionable
qualities of the Renaissance prince. The German traveler
Thomas Müntzer and the Italian diplomat Francesco
Guicciardini, who knew him personally, compared him with
Charlemagne. His will indicates that he died with a clear
conscience, ordering that his body be moved to Granada and
buried next to that of his wife Isabella, so that they might
be reunited for eternity. He died convinced that the crown
of Spain had not been so powerful for 700 years, “and all,
after God, because of my work and my labour.”
The Rev. Tarsicio de Azcona
Sixtus V
pope
original name Felice Peretti
born Dec. 13, 1520, Grottammare, Ancona, Papal States
died Aug. 27, 1590, Rome
Main
pope from 1585 to 1590, who reformed the Curia.
He entered the Franciscan order in 1533 and was ordained
at Siena, Republic of Florence, in 1547. He served twice
(1557–60) as inquisitor general in Venice, his severity
there causing his recall. Pope Pius V made him vicar general
of the Franciscans and bishop (1566), later elevating him to
the cardinalate on May 17, 1570. He retired during the
pontificate (1572–85) of Pope Gregory XIII and edited the
works of Bishop Ambrose of Milan (1st vol., 1580). On April
24, 1585, he was unanimously elected successor to Gregory,
who had left the Papal States in chaos. The Papal States had
been financially drained to satisfy the multifarious needs
of the Counter-Reformation, and lawlessness, particularly
banditry, was widespread.
Sixtus swiftly restored peace and safety by harsh and
repressive means, but his extreme measures in dealing with
bandits created many enemies. His financial policies, which
were intended to strengthen the church’s reserves, included
the sale of offices, the creation of new monti (loans), the
imposition of new taxes, and the regulation of prices.
Immense sums were spent on his huge building program,
including the completion of St. Peter’s dome, the rebuilding
of the Lateran Palace and the Vatican, revision of street
plans, and the general embellishment of Rome that
transformed it from a medieval to a Baroque city. Yet he was
able to end his reign as one of Europe’s richest princes.
Sixtus’ greatness is founded on his achievements in
reforming the central administration of the church. By a
bull of 1586 he defined the Sacred College of Cardinals,
setting the number of cardinals at no more than 70, a limit
that was not exceeded until the pontificate of John XXIII
(1958–63). The secretariat of state was reorganized, and in
January 1588 the Curia’s entire administrative system was
overhauled. He established 15 congregations (the principal
departments), specifying the form and function that remained
substantially unchanged until the reforms after the second
Vatican Council (1962–65). He is considered one of the
founders of the Counter-Reformation because it was through
his new curial machinery that the decrees of the ecumenical
Council of Trent (1545–63) were effectively enforced.
Sixtus V was faced with a dilemma in international
relations. He desired to stop the spread of Protestantism,
especially in France, which was being torn by the complex
civil Wars of Religion (1562–98) between the Huguenots and
the Roman Catholics. During the War of the Three Henrys, in
1585, Sixtus excommunicated the Protestant Henry of Navarre
(the future Henry IV of France) and promised subsidies in
return for a Spanish invasion of England.
His attitude toward Henry changed, however, when Henry
began considering conversion to Roman Catholicism. Sixtus
died while negotiating with Henry over the kingship of
France.
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Torture
Early modern Europe » Procedures and organization
The institutional inquisitions bore a number of common features. Their
officials were systematically recruited, appointed, and replaced, and
they used well-defined and distinctive legal procedures. The inquisition
possessed a vertical command-and-review structure, which required
regular reports from subordinate branches, visitations and review of the
activities of subordinate and regional branches, operational
instructions, and preservation and regular consultation of archives. The
inquisitions were also characterized by signs and insignia of membership
and autonomous control of institutional finances and public activities
(in Spain, the well-known autos-da-fé).
In some cases the institutional inquisitions themselves exerted
considerable control over the prosecution of offenses that other courts
treated with less consistency. In 1610 the Spanish inquisitor Alonso
Salazar de Frias was sent by his superiors to review the evidence in a
series of trials for witchcraft in northern Spain. When Salazar de Frias
reported that he found insufficient evidence for conviction, and in
spite of protests from two other fellow inquisitors, his program for the
reform of witchcraft trials by the Spanish Inquisition was accepted and
made official by the Supreme Council in 1614. In this case the
institutional structure of the inquisition virtually eliminated
accusations of and trials for witchcraft throughout the range of its
jurisdiction.
All of the institutional inquisitions worked in secrecy, except for
closely regulated public appearances. Their secrecy permitted those who
opposed them to speculate about and often fictionalize dramatically
their secret activities, producing many of the myths about inquisitions
that are found in European literature from the 16th century to the
present.
Edward Peters
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History » United Spain under the Catholic Monarchs »
The Spanish Inquisition
With its large Muslim and Jewish populations, medieval Spain was
the only multiracial and multireligious country in western Europe, and
much of the development of Spanish civilization in religion, literature,
art, and architecture during the later Middle Ages stemmed from this
fact. The Jews had served Spain and its monarchs well, providing an
active commercial class and an educated elite for many administrative
posts.
By the late 14th century, however, the status of the Jews in
Christian Spain began to change. Their former protectors, the monarchs
in Spain, began to restrict the rights and privileges of the Jews, and
the devastation caused by the Black Death led to increased popular
hostility, as many believed that the plague was a plot devised by Jews
to destroy Christianity. Animosity toward the Jews was stimulated
further by Jewish converts to Christianity who issued polemics against
their former coreligionists. Calls for the expulsion or persecution of
the Jews were answered by anti-Jewish riots in 1348 and 1391. The
pogroms of 1391 were especially significant because of the subsequent
mass conversion of Jews to Christianity in response to the violence
perpetrated against them.
The conversos and Marranos—the “new Christians”—became a highly
controversial group throughout Spain. Many of these converted Jews and
their descendants assumed important positions in government and society
and associated themselves with powerful noble families. They also
achieved economic power and prosperity, which inspired increasing hatred
of them by the “old Christians,” who already questioned the sincerity of
their conversions. Indeed, although there were many devout Christians
among the conversos, there were also those who were at most agnostic
converts, and the Marranos secretly continued to practice Judaism.
The wealth of the conversos created jealousy and their uncertain
conversions hatred in a population that traditionally saw itself as the
defender of Christianity against the infidel. The Catholic Monarchs,
ever good tacticians, profited from this feeling. In 1478 they first
obtained a papal bull from Sixtus IV setting up the Inquisition to deal
with the conversos whose conversions were thought to be insincere. Since
the Spanish Inquisition was constituted as a royal court, all
appointments were made by the crown. Sixtus IV realized too late the
enormous ecclesiastical powers that he had given away and the moral
dangers inherent in an institution the proceedings of which were secret
and that did not allow appeals to Rome.
With its army of lay familiars, who were exempt from normal
jurisdiction and who acted both as bodyguards and as informers for the
inquisitors, and with its combination of civil and ecclesiastical
powers, the Spanish Inquisition became a formidable weapon in the armory
of royal absolutism. The Supreme Council of the Inquisition (or Suprema)
was the only formal institution established by the Catholic Monarchs for
all their kingdoms together. Nevertheless, they thought of it primarily
in religious and not in political terms. The Inquisition’s secret
procedures, its eagerness to accept denunciations, its use of torture,
the absence of counsel for the accused, the lack of any right to
confront hostile witnesses, and the practice of confiscating the
property of those who were condemned and sharing it between the
Inquisition, the crown, and the accusers—all this inspired great terror,
as indeed it was meant to do. The number of those condemned for heresy
was never very large and has often been exaggerated by Protestant
writers. But during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs several thousand
conversos were condemned and burned for Judaizing practices. The whole
family of the philosopher and humanist Juan Luis Vives was wiped out in
this way. Many more thousands of conversos escaped similar fates only by
fleeing the country. Many Roman Catholics in Spain opposed the
introduction of the Inquisition, and the Neapolitans and Milanese (who
prided themselves on their Catholicism and who were supported by the
popes) later successfully resisted the attempts by their Spanish rulers
to impose the Spanish Inquisition on them. Even in Spain itself, it was
the sumptuous autos-da-fé, the ceremonial sentencings and executions of
heretics, rather than the institution and its members, that seem to have
been popular. But most Spaniards seem never to have understood the
horror and revulsion that this institution aroused in the rest of
Europe.
The first inquisitor general, Tomás de Torquemada, himself from a
converso family, at once started a propaganda campaign against the Jews.
In 1492 he persuaded the Catholic Monarchs to expel all Jews who refused
to be baptized. Isabella and most of her contemporaries looked upon this
expulsion of more than 160,000 of her subjects as a pious duty. At the
moment when the country needed all its economic resources to sustain its
new European position and its overseas empire, however, it was deprived
of many of its most economically active citizens and was laid open to
exploitation by German and Italian financiers.
Torture
Black Death
pandemic
Main
pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, taking a
proportionately greater toll of life than any other known
epidemic or war up to that time. The Black Death is widely
believed to have been the result of plague, caused by
infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis; however,
modern scientific evidence has indicated that the pandemic
may have been viral in origin.
Originating in China and Inner Asia, the plague was
transmitted to Europeans (1347) when a Kipchak army,
besieging a Genoese trading post in the Crimea, catapulted
plague-infested corpses into the town. The disease spread
from the Mediterranean ports (see Map), affecting Sicily
(1347); North Africa, mainland Italy, Spain, England, and
France (1348); Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, and
the Low Countries (1349); and Scandinavia and the Baltic
lands (1350). There were recurrences of the plague in
1361–63, 1369–71, 1374–75, 1390, and 1400.
The rate of mortality from the Black Death varied from
place to place: whereas some districts, such as the duchy of
Milan, Flanders, and Béarn, seem to have escaped
comparatively lightly, others, such as Tuscany, Aragon,
Catalonia, and Languedoc, were very hard hit. Towns, where
the danger of contagion was greater, were more affected than
the countryside; and within the towns the monastic
communities provided the highest incidence of victims. Even
the great and powerful, who were more capable of flight,
were struck down: among royalty, Eleanor, queen of Peter IV
of Aragon, and King Alfonso XI of Castile succumbed, and
Joan, daughter of the English king Edward III, died at
Bordeaux on the way to her wedding with Alfonso’s son.
Canterbury lost two successive archbishops, John de
Stratford and Thomas Bradwardine; Petrarch lost not only
Laura, who inspired so many of his poems, but also his
patron, Giovanni Cardinal Colonna. The papal court at
Avignon was reduced by one-fourth. Whole communities and
families were sometimes annihilated.
The study of contemporary archives suggests a mortality
varying in the different regions between one-eighth and
two-thirds of the population, and the French chronicler Jean
Froissart’s statement that about one-third of Europe’s
population died in the epidemic may be fairly accurate. The
population in England in 1400 was perhaps half what it had
been 100 years earlier; in that country alone, the Black
Death certainly caused the depopulation or total
disappearance of about 1,000 villages. A rough estimate is
that 25 million people in Europe died from plague during the
Black Death. The population of western Europe did not again
reach its pre-1348 level until the beginning of the 16th
century.
The consequences of this violent catastrophe were many. A
cessation of wars and a sudden slump in trade immediately
followed but were only of short duration. A more lasting and
serious consequence was the drastic reduction of the amount
of land under cultivation due to the deaths of so many
labourers. This proved to be the ruin of many landowners.
The shortage of labour compelled them to substitute wages or
money rents in place of labour services in an effort to keep
their tenants. There was also a general rise in wages for
artisans and peasants. These changes brought a new fluidity
to the hitherto rigid stratification of society. The
psychological effects of the Black Death were reflected
north of the Alps (not in Italy) by a preoccupation with
death and the afterlife evinced in poetry, sculpture, and
painting; the Roman Catholic church lost some of its
monopoly over the salvation of souls as people turned to
mysticism and sometimes to excesses.
Public humiliation of man condemned
by the Inquisition
Converso
Spanish history
Main
(Spanish: “converted”), one of the Spanish Jews who adopted
the Christian religion after a severe persecution in the
late 14th and early 15th centuries and the expulsion of
religious Jews from Spain in the 1490s. In the minds of many
Roman Catholic churchmen the conversos were still identified
as Jews, partly because they remained within the Jewish
communities in the cities and partly because their
occupations (merchants, doctors, tailors) had been
monopolized by the Spanish Jewish people. Such
identification caused many Christians to regard conversos as
a subversive force within the church.
In 1499 a staunch and somewhat fanatical Roman Catholic,
Pedro Sarmiento, wrote the anti-Semitic Sentencia-Estatuto,
which prohibited conversos from holding public or
ecclesiastical offices and from testifying against Spanish
Christians in courts of law. That statute was followed by
the 16th-century laws of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre)
which further strengthened the laws against anyone of Jewish
ancestry and were more racial than religious in nature. It
was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that
some of the legalized prejudice against Jews in Spain was
modified.
Marrano
people
Main
in Spanish history, a Jew who converted to the Christian
faith to escape persecution but who continued to practice
Judaism secretly. It was a term of abuse and also applies to
any descendants of Marranos. The origin of the word marrano
is uncertain.
In the late 14th century, Spanish Jewry was threatened
with extinction at the hands of mobs of fanatical
Christians. Thousands of Jews accepted death, but tens of
thousands found safety by ostensibly converting to
Christianity. The number of converts is moderately estimated
at more than 100,000. By the mid-15th century the persons
who had been baptized but continued to practice Judaism in
secret—Marranos—formed a compact society. The Marranos began
to grow rich and to rise to high positions in the state, the
royal court, and the church hierarchy. They intermarried
with the noblest families of the land. The hatred directed
against them by the old Christians, ostensibly because they
were suspected of being untrue to their converted faith, was
in fact directed indiscriminately against all conversos, or
Jewish converts.
In March 1473, riots against Marranos broke out in
Córdoba, with pillage and carnage lasting for three days.
The massacres spread from city to city, carried out by
fanatical mobs. In 1480 the Inquisition was introduced to
provide institutional control over the persecution of the
Marranos. In the Inquisition’s first year, more than 300
Marranos were burned, their estates reverting to the crown.
The number of victims grew into tens of thousands.
To the Jews, the Marranos were pitiful martyrs. The Jews
maintained religious bonds with the Marranos and kept strong
their faith in the God of Israel. The Inquisition finally
became convinced, however, that only the total expulsion of
the Jews from Spain could end Jewish influence in the
national life. Purity of faith became the national policy of
the Catholic sovereigns, and thus came about the final
tragedy, the edict of expulsion of all the Jews from Spain
on March 31, 1492. Portugal promulgated an edict of
expulsion in 1497 and Navarre in 1498.
A considerable minority of Jews saved themselves from
expulsion by baptism, thus adding strength and numbers to
the Marranos, but the mass of Spanish Jews refused
conversion and went into exile. The physical separation of
the Marranos from their spiritual sympathizers, however, did
not make them more amenable to inquisitorial discipline. The
Jewish religion remained deeply rooted in their hearts, and
they continued to transmit their beliefs to the succeeding
generations. Many Marranos did eventually choose emigration,
however, principally to North Africa and to other western
European countries. Marranism had disappeared in Spain by
the 18th century owing to this emigration and to gradual
assimilation within Spain.
Sixtus IV
pope
original name Francesco della Rovere
born July 21, 1414, Cella Ligure, near Savona, Republic of
Genoa
died Aug. 12, 1484, Rome
Main
pope from 1471 to 1484 who effectively made the papacy an
Italian principality.
Becoming a Franciscan, he subsequently taught and was
chosen minister general of his order in 1464. He was made
cardinal in 1467 by Pope Paul II, whom he succeeded on Aug.
9, 1471.
Neither a crusader nor curial politician, Sixtus aimed at
the aggrandizement of his family and of the Papal States,
subordinating his duties as the church’s spiritual head in a
manner characteristic of his era. Concurrently, the ideal of
the crusade against the Turks was dying. In 1472, under
Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, he sent a fleet that participated
in the landing at the important Muslim stronghold of Smyrna,
but a new expedition in 1473 failed. Sixtus IV’s relations
were strained with France, whose king Louis XI firmly upheld
the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), which had
established the liberties of the French Church. His efforts
in 1474 and 1476 to reunite the Russian Church with Rome and
to gain Russian support against the Turks were unsuccessful.
Sixtus IV soon abandoned universal interests,
concentrating on Italian politics and revealing his
confirmed nepotism. His beneficiaries were members of his
own family, whom he greatly enriched and who involved him in
messy disputes, perhaps the worst of which was a conspiracy
against Lorenzo (the Magnificent) de’ Medici. On April 26,
1478, during mass at Florence cathedral, the agents of
Girolamo Riario, Sixtus IV’s nephew, wounded Lorenzo and
killed his brother, Giuliano, in a plot to overthrow the
Medici. Although Sixtus endorsed the plot, he did not
approve of assassination. Out of this scandal and its
counteraction, he justifiably managed to excommunicate
Lorenzo, to put Florence under interdict, and to induce King
Ferdinand I of Naples, the papacy’s ally, to declare a
fruitless and inglorious war that kept Italy confused for
two years. In 1480 Lorenzo boldly made peace with Ferdinand,
despite Sixtus, who maintained war between the papacy and
Florence. He finally absolved Lorenzo and removed the
interdict.
Apart from meddling in feuds between the great Roman
families, Sixtus IV committed himself rather scandalously to
Venice’s aggression against the duchy of Ferrara, which he
incited the Venetians to attack (1482); their combined
assault was opposed by Milan, Florence, and Naples. For
refusing to desist from the hostilities that he had
instigated and for appearing to be a dangerous rival to the
Papal States, Sixtus placed Venice under interdict in 1483.
In ecclesiastical affairs, Sixtus IV instituted for the
Roman Church the feast (December 8) of the Immaculate
Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He formally annulled
(1478) the decrees of the Council of Constance and condemned
(1482) abuses in the Spanish Inquisition. He granted many
privileges to the mendicant orders, particularly to his own
Franciscans.
Above all, he was a founder or restorer of important
institutions and a patron of arts and letters. He
established and richly endowed the first foundling hospital
and repaired and built numerous Roman churches (including
Sta. Maria del Popolo and Sta. Maria della Pace); the
Sistine Chapel is his principal monument. He commissioned
such great artists as Sandro Botticelli and Antonio del
Pollaiuolo and pensioned such eminent men of learning as
Bartolomeo Platina. From 1471 he was the second founder of
the Vatican Library, which he opened for scholars. During
his pontificate Rome was transformed from a medieval to a
Renaissance city. These outstanding achievements, however,
were accomplished with heavy taxation and simony.
Juan Luis Vives
Spanish humanist
born March 6, 1492, Valencia, Aragon
died May 6, 1540, Bruges
Main
Spanish Humanist and student of Erasmus, eminent in
education, philosophy, and psychology, who strongly opposed
Scholasticism and emphasized induction as a method of
inquiry.
Vives left Spain at the age of 17 to avoid the
Inquisition. After studies at Paris (1509–12), he was
appointed professor of the humanities at Leuven (Louvain
[1519]). Having dedicated his commentary (1522) on St.
Augustine’s De civitate Dei to Henry VIII of England, he
went in 1523 to England, where he was appointed preceptor to
Mary, princess of Wales, and lectured on philosophy at
Oxford. In 1527 he forfeited Henry’s favour by opposing the
royal divorce from Catherine of Aragon and was imprisoned
for six weeks, after which he left England for The
Netherlands to devote himself to writing.
In education Vives achieved renown through such works as
De ratione studii puerilis (completed 1523; “On the Right
Method of Instruction for Children”) and De disciplinis
libri xx (1531; “Twenty Books on Disciplines”), in which he
advocated the use of the vernacular in schools, argued for
the building of academies, and supported the education of
women. Perhaps his greatest innovation was to recommend the
study of nature for boys, applying the principle of
induction from personal inquiry and experience that Erasmus
had advocated for the study of Scripture and languages.
Vives’ claim to eminence in psychology and philosophical
method rests on his De anima et vita libri tres (1538;
“Three Books on the Soul and on Life”), in which he
discusses the association of ideas, the nature of memory,
and even animal psychology. The work somewhat anticipates
the ideas of the great thinkers of the century following his
death by its emphasis on induction as a method of
psychological and philosophical discovery.
Tomas de Torquemada
(1420 – September 16, 1498) was a fifteenth century Spanish
Dominican, first Inquisitor General of Spain, and confessor
to Isabella I of Castile. He was famously described by the
Spanish chronicler Sebastián de Olmedo as "The hammer of
heretics, the light of Spain, the saviour of his country,
the honour of his order". He is known for his zealous
campaign against the crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims of
Spain. He was one of the chief supporters of the Alhambra
Decree, which expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. The
number of autos-de-fé during Torquemada's tenure as
Inquisitor General have been hotly debated over the years.
Today, there is a general consensus that about 2000 people
were burned by the Inquisition in the whole Spain between
1480 and 1530[1], while Torquemada was Grand Inquisitor from
1483 until his death in 1498.
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Two priests demand a heretic to repent as he is tortured
(Tomás de Torquemada) .
History » United Spain under the Catholic Monarchs »
The Spanish Inquisition » The conversos
The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 did not signify the end of
Jewish influence on Spanish history, as was long thought. It is not,
however, easy to establish a clear-cut direction or pattern of this
influence. At the end of the 15th century there may have been up to
300,000 conversos in Spain, and the majority of these remained. They had
constituted the educated urban bourgeoisie of Spain, and the richer
families had frequently intermarried with the Spanish aristocracy and
even with the royal family itself. After 1492 their position remained
precarious. Some reacted by stressing their Christian orthodoxy and
denouncing other conversos to the Inquisition for Judaizing practices.
Others embraced some form of less conventional, more spiritualized
Christianity. Thus the followers of Sister Isabel de la Cruz, a
Franciscan, organized the centres of the Illuminists (Alumbrados),
mystics who believed that through inner purification their souls should
submit to God’s will and thus enter into direct communication with him.
While they counted some of the high aristocracy among their number, most
of the Illuminists seem to have been conversos. Again, it was among the
conversos that Erasmianism (named after the famous humanist Desiderius
Erasmus), a more intellectual form of spiritualized Christianity, had
its greatest successes in Spain. The Erasmians had powerful supporters
at court in the early years of Charles I as emperor, when his policy was
directed toward the healing of the religious schism by a general reform
of the church. But in the 1530s and ’40s the enemies of the Erasmians,
especially the Dominican order, launched a systematic campaign against
them. The Inquisition annihilated them or forced them to flee the
country, just as it had done in the case of the Illuminists as early as
the 1520s. Nevertheless, the influence of Erasmus did not completely
disappear from Spanish intellectual life, and it has been traced into
the latter part of the 16th century.
But the majority of the conversos and their descendants probably
became and remained orthodox Roman Catholics, playing a prominent part
in every aspect of Spanish religious and intellectual life. They range
from such saints as Teresa of Ávila and St. John of God, one a mystical
writer and founder of convents, the other an organizer of care for the
sick, to Diego Laínez, a friend of St. Ignatius of Loyola and second
general of the Jesuit order. They include Fernando de Rojas, author of
La Celestina, the first great literary work of the Spanish Renaissance,
and, two generations later, Mateo Alemán, who wrote a picaresque novel,
Guzmán de Alfarache; Luis de León, a humanist and poet; a Dominican,
Francisco de Vitoria, perhaps the greatest jurist of any country in the
16th century; and another famous Dominican, the defender of the American
Indians and historian of the Indies, Bartolomé de Las Casas.
Along with Luis Vives (mentioned earlier), these are only the most
famous among the many distinguished conversos who played such a central
and varied role in creating the cultural splendours of Spain’s “Golden
Age.” This extraordinary phenomenon had no parallel anywhere else in
Europe before the 19th or even 20th century. Although any attempt at
explanation is bound to be speculative, the following may be suggested.
The Spanish Jews and conversos formed a comparatively large section of
the relatively small educated elite of Spain who were primarily
responsible for the cultural achievements of the period. Moreover,
having deliberately broken with the Jewish tradition of Talmudic
scholarship (from the Talmud, the body of Jewish civil and canonical
law), the conversos found the glittering Renaissance world of Christian
Spain ambivalently attractive and repellent but always stimulating.
Their response to this stimulus was probably sharpened by the hostility
that they continued to meet from the “old Christians,” who were bitterly
resentful and aware of the ubiquity of the conversos, however much the
conversos assimilated into Spanish culture.
Torture
Fernando de Rojas
Spanish writer
born c. 1465, La Puebla de Montalbán, Castile
died April 1541, Talavera de la Reina, Spain
Main
Spanish author whose single work is La Celestina, an
extended prose drama in dialogue that marked an important
stage in the development of prose fiction in Spain and in
Europe.
Of Jewish parentage, Rojas received a bachelor’s degree
in law from the University of Salamanca about 1490. He later
moved to Talavera, married, practiced law, and served
briefly as lord mayor. The first version of La Celestina
appeared under the title Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (1499)
and contained 16 acts. A later version, Tragicomedia de
Calisto y Melibea (1502), is in 21 acts or chapters. The
custom of referring to the work as La Celestina began with
the Italian (1519) and French (1527) translations. La
Celestina was one of the first works to present romance in
everyday life. It combines a tragic love story with bawdy
and picaresque scenes enacted between a cast of secondary
characters.
Mateo Alemán
Spanish author
baptized September 28, 1547, Sevilla, Spain
died c. 1614, Mexico
Main
novelist, a master stylist best known for his early, highly
popular picaresque novel, Guzmán de Alfarache.
Descended from Jews who had been forcibly converted to
Catholicism, Alemán expressed many aspects of the
experiences and feelings of the New Christians in
16th-century Spain. His most important literary work, Guzmán
de Alfarache (1599; a second part, 1604; Eng. trans., The
Spanish Rogue, 1622, 1924), which brought him fame
throughout Europe but little profit, is one of the earliest
picaresque novels. The first part ran through many editions,
almost all pirated; even before he could finish the second
part, a spurious sequel had appeared. Alemán’s life, in many
ways like that of his protagonist, Guzmán, was afflicted
with severe economic and personal reverses. He was the son
of a prison doctor and studied medicine at Salamanca and
Alcalá for four years after graduating from the University
of Sevilla (Seville) in 1564, but he never practiced. In
1580 he was imprisoned for debt. Only after he emigrated to
Mexico in 1608 did his fortunes become settled and his life
stable.
Francisco de Vitoria
Spanish theologian
born probably 1486, Vitoria, Álava, Castile
died August 12, 1546
Main
Spanish theologian best remembered for his defense of the
rights of the Indians of the New World against Spanish
colonists and for his ideas of the limitations of
justifiable warfare.
Early life and education
Vitoria was born in the Basque province of Álava. He entered
the Dominican order and was sent to the University of Paris,
where he was to remain as student and then lecturer for
nearly 16 years. He returned to Spain in 1523 to lecture in
Valladolid, and he had already begun his investigation of
the morality of colonization when he was elected in 1526, by
an enthusiastic majority of students, to the prime chair of
theology at Salamanca.
The aim of Salamanca University was to present the then
new Renaissance scholarship in a framework of scholastic
reasoning in the medieval style. At Salamanca Vitoria
addressed himself to most of the critical debates of his
time. In lecturing on the wars between France and Spain, he
did not adopt the common Spanish view that the French king
must be guilty because he refused to take either heresy or
the Turkish menace seriously. Instead, he saw faults on both
sides and warned that the Franco-Spanish feud would be the
ruin of Christendom. He strongly condemned the behaviour of
councillors, courtiers, and governors; he also criticized
the clergy for failure to take up residence in their
parishes, for holding more than one office at a time, and
for their indifference to the poor.
Vitoria’s anticolonial views
Vitoria was doubtful of the justice of the Spanish conquest
of the New World. As a friar, he refused to agree that war
might be made on people simply because they were pagans or
because they refused conversion—for belief was an act of the
will and could not be forced. Nor could pagans be punished
for offenses against God, because Christians committed just
as many such offenses as pagans. The pope had no right to
give European rulers dominion over primitive peoples; the
most he could do was to allocate spheres for missionary
work. Pagans had a right to their property and to their own
rulers; they were not irrational. One could not speak of
discovery as if the lands had been previously uninhabited;
thus the only possible justification for conquest might be
the protection of the innocent from cannibalism and human
sacrifice. If a Christian ruler presumed to rule over a
colony, it was his duty to give it benefits equal to those
of the home country and to send efficient ministers to see
just laws observed. The Indians were as much subjects of the
king of Spain “as any man in Sevilla.”
At Salamanca, Vitoria revived the study of the works of
St. Thomas Aquinas. None of his lectures survives except in
students’ notes, but his recapitulations—mandatory summaries
of the year’s course—survive in unusual numbers. He rewrote
his lectures annually, even after 26 years of lecturing,
telling his students that lecture notes from the previous
year would not be useful. He answered questions both during
and after class, and his style is said to have been lively
and witty.
Vitoria’s writings on war were addressed to the
possibility of limiting the horrors of contemporary warfare.
In principle, war was not justified except as defense
against aggression or to right a very great wrong. In any
case, the declaration of war should be preceded by efforts
at conciliation and arbitration. A ruler should also
consider whether the war might not do more harm than good.
Innocent persons might be killed only if it was absolutely
impossible to distinguish them from participants. Finally,
if a subject’s conscience told him a war was wrong, he must
not take part in it.
Vitoria’s arguments, involving the application of moral
principles, led to his being often consulted by the emperor
Charles V. In 1530 the empress wrote to ask him about the
divorce of King Henry VIII of England, and this led him to
give a course of lectures on matrimony. In 1539 the emperor
himself wrote to inquire about the possibility of sending 12
“learned and pious friars” to Mexico to found a university,
and a second time to ask for some of Vitoria’s pupils.
Vitoria’s open criticism did not affect Charles’s friendly
attitude; in 1541 he wrote to Vitoria twice on the subject
of the Indians. In 1545 Prince Philip (later Philip II of
Spain) wrote in his father’s behalf to invite Vitoria to the
Council of Trent. Vitoria declined, saying he was “more
likely to go to the other world.” He died in the following
year at age 60.
Influence
Vitoria’s influence was widespread; it swept the
universities and even affected the royal councils. About
5,000 students passed through his classrooms; 24 of his
pupils held chairs of arts or theology at Salamanca; and in
1548 two also held chairs of St. Thomas Aquinas at Alcalá,
the rival university.
Vitoria and some of his contemporaries are sometimes
credited with being the founders of international law. But,
while it is true that their sense of living in an expanding
world made them more aware than their predecessors of the
unity of mankind and more anxious to assert it, their theory
contained no pacts or covenants, only good and useful
universal custom, which might be expected to change as
nations developed. This position is much closer to the
traditional law of nations, or jus gentium, than to modern
international law.
Bernice Margaret Hamilton
Bartolomé de Las Casas
Spanish historian and missionary
born August 1474, Sevilla?
died July 17, 1566, Madrid
Main
early Spanish historian and Dominican missionary in the
Americas, who was the first to expose the oppression of the
Indian by the European and to call for the abolition of
Indian slavery. His several works include Historia de las
Indias (first printed in 1875). A prolific writer and in his
later years an influential figure of the Spanish court, Las
Casas nonetheless failed to stay the progressive enslavement
of the indigenous races of Latin America.
The son of a small merchant, Las Casas is believed to
have gone to Granada as a soldier in 1497 and to have
enrolled to study Latin in the academy at the cathedral in
Sevilla (Seville). In 1502 he left for Hispaniola, in the
West Indies, with the governor, Nicolás de Ovando. As a
reward for his participation in various expeditions, he was
given an encomienda (a royal land grant including Indian
inhabitants), and he soon began to evangelize the Indians,
serving as doctrinero, or lay teacher of catechism. Perhaps
the first person in America to receive holy orders, he was
ordained priest in either 1512 or 1513. In 1513 he took part
in the bloody conquest of Cuba and, as priest-encomendero
(land grantee), received an allotment of Indian serfs.
Although during his first 12 years in America Las Casas
was a willing participant in the conquest of the Caribbean,
he did not indefinitely remain indifferent to the fate of
the natives. In a famous sermon on August 15, 1514, he
announced that he was returning his Indian serfs to the
governor. Realizing that it was useless to attempt to defend
the Indians at long distance in America, he returned to
Spain in 1515 to plead for their better treatment. The most
influential person to take up his cause was Francisco
Jiménez de Cisneros, the archbishop of Toledo and future
co-regent of Spain. With the help of the archbishop, the
Plan para la reformación de las Indias was conceived, and
Las Casas, named priest-procurator of the Indies, was
appointed to a commission to investigate the status of the
Indians. He sailed for America in November 1516.
Las Casas returned to Spain the next year. In addition to
studying the juridical problems of the Indies, he began to
work out a plan for their peaceful colonization by
recruiting farmers as colonists. His stirring defense of the
Indians before the Spanish Parliament in Barcelona in
December 1519 persuaded King Charles I (the emperor Charles
V), who was in attendance, to accept Las Casas’s project of
founding “towns of free Indians”—i.e., communities of both
Spaniards and Indians who would jointly create a new
civilization in America. The location selected for the new
colony was on the Gulf of Paria in the northern part of
present-day Venezuela. Las Casas and a group of farm
labourers departed for America in December 1520. The failure
to recruit a sufficient number of farmers, the opposition of
the encomenderos of Santo Domingo, and, finally, an attack
by the Indians themselves all were factors that brought
disaster to the experiment in January 1522.
Upon his return to Santo Domingo, the unsuccessful priest
and political reformer abandoned his reforming activities to
take refuge in religious life; he joined the Dominican order
in 1523. Four years later, while serving as prior of the
convent of Puerto de Plata, a town in northern Santo
Domingo, he began to write the Historia apologética. One of
his major works, the Apologética was to serve as the
introduction to his masterpiece, the Historia de las Indias.
The Historia, which by his request was not published until
after his death, is an account of all that had happened in
the Indies just as he had seen or heard of it. But, rather
than a chronicle, it is a prophetic interpretation of
events. The purpose of all the facts he sets forth is the
exposure of the “sin” of domination, oppression, and
injustice that the European was inflicting upon the newly
discovered colonial peoples. It was Las Casas’s intention to
reveal to Spain the reason for the misfortune that would
inevitably befall her when she became the object of God’s
punishment.
Las Casas interrupted work on the book only to send to
the Council of the Indies in Madrid three long letters (in
1531, 1534, and 1535), in which he accused persons and
institutions of the sin of oppressing the Indian,
particularly through the encomienda system. After various
adventures in Central America, where his ideas on the
treatment of the natives invariably brought him into
conflict with the Spanish authorities, Las Casas wrote De
único modo (1537; “Concerning the Only Way of Drawing All
Peoples to the True Religion”), in which he set forth the
doctrine of peaceful evangelization of the Indian. Together
with the Dominicans, he then employed this new type of
evangelization in a “land of war” (a territory of
still-unconquered Indians)—Tuzutlan, near the Golfo Dulce
(Sweet Gulf) in present-day Costa Rica. Encouraged by the
favourable outcome of this experiment, Las Casas set out for
Spain late in 1539, arriving there in 1540.
While awaiting an audience with Charles V, Las Casas
conceived the idea of still another work, the Brevísima
relación de la destrucción de las Indias (“A Short Account
of the Destruction of the Indies”), which he wrote in 1542
and in which the historical events described are in
themselves of less importance than their theological
interpretation: “The reason why the Christians have killed
and destroyed such an infinite number of souls is that they
have been moved by their wish for gold and their desire to
enrich themselves in a very short time.”
Las Casas’s work finally seemed to be crowned with
success when King Charles signed the so-called New Laws (Leyes
Nuevas). According to these laws, the encomienda was not to
be considered a hereditary grant; instead, the owners had to
set free their Indians after the span of a single
generation. To ensure enforcement of the laws, Las Casas was
named bishop of Chiapas in Guatemala, and in July 1544 he
set sail for America, together with 44 Dominicans. Upon his
arrival in January 1545, he immediately issued Avisos y
reglas para confesores de españoles (“Admonitions and
Regulations for the Confessors of Spaniards”), the famous
Confesionario, in which he forbade absolution to be given to
those who held Indians in encomienda. The rigorous
enforcement of his regulations led to vehement opposition on
the part of the Spanish faithful during Lent of 1545 and
forced Las Casas to establish a council of bishops to assist
him in his task. But soon his uncompromisingly pro-Indian
position alienated his colleagues, and in 1547 he returned
to Spain.
Las Casas then entered upon the most fruitful period of
his life. He became an influential figure at court and at
the Council of the Indies. In addition to writing numerous
memoriales (petitions), he came into direct confrontation
with the learned Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, an increasingly
important figure at court by reason of his Democrates II
(“Concerning the Just Cause of the War Against the
Indians”), in which he maintained, theoretically in
accordance with Aristotelian principles, that the Indians
“are inferior to the Spaniards just as children are to
adults, women to men, and, indeed, one might even say, as
apes are to men.” Las Casas finally confronted him in 1550
at the Council of Valladolid, which was presided over by
famous theologians. The argument was continued in 1551, and
its repercussions were enormous.
The servitude of the Indians was already irreversibly
established, and, despite the fact that Sepúlveda’s
teachings had not been officially approved, they were, in
effect, those that were followed in the Indies. But Las
Casas continued to write books, tracts, and petitions,
testimony to his unwavering determination to leave in
written form his principal arguments in defense of the
American Indian.
During his final years Las Casas came to be the
indispensable adviser both to the Council of the Indies and
to the king on many of the problems relating to the Indies.
In 1562 he had the final form of the Prólogo to the Historia
de las Indias published, although in 1559 he had left
written instructions that the work itself should be
published only “after forty years have passed, so that, if
God determines to destroy Spain, it may be seen that it is
because of the destruction that we have wrought in the
Indies and His just reason for it may be clearly evident.”
At the age of 90 Las Casas completed two more works on the
Spanish conquest in the Americas. Two years later he died in
the Dominican convent of Nuestra Señora de Atocha de Madrid,
having continued to the end his defense of his beloved
Indians, oppressed by the colonial system that Europe was
organizing.
At the suggestion of Francisco de Toledo, the viceroy of
Peru, the king ordered all the works, both published and
unpublished, of Las Casas to be collected. Although his
influence with Spain and the Indies declined sharply, his
name became well known in other parts of Europe, thanks to
the translations of the Destrucción that soon appeared in
various countries. In the early 19th century the Latin
American revolutionary Simón Bolívar himself was inspired by
some of the letters of Las Casas in his struggle against
Spain, as were some of the heroes of Mexican independence.
His name came into prominence again in the latter half of
the 20th century, in connection with the so-called
Indigenistas movements in Peru and Mexico. The modern
significance of Las Casas lies in the fact that he was the
first European to perceive the economic, political, and
cultural injustice of the colonial or neocolonial system
maintained by the North Atlantic powers since the 16th
century for the control of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
The most complete edition of Las Casas’s works is Juan
Antonio Llorente (ed.), Colección de las obras del venerable
obispo de Chiapas don Bartolomé de Las Casas (1822,
reprinted 1981).
Enrique Dussel
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History » United Spain under the Catholic Monarchs » The Spanish
Inquisition » The statutes of limpieza
Religious, racial, and even anti-aristocratic class prejudices combined
to create the obsession with “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre)
which became characteristic of the Spaniards in the 16th and 17th
centuries. It first crystallized with a statute of limpieza, imposed in
1547 on the cathedral chapter of Toledo, by which purity of ancestry
both from the “taint” of converso blood and from any accusations of
heresy by the Inquisition was made a condition of all future
ecclesiastical appointments. The author of this statute was Juan
Martínez Siliceo, archbishop of Toledo, a man of humble and, hence, by
definition, untainted origins who had found himself despised by the
aristocratic canons, many of whom were of converso ancestry. In 1556
Philip II gave his royal approval to the statute on the grounds that
“all the heresies in Germany, France, and Spain have been sown by
descendants of Jews.” This remark was sheer fantasy with regard to
Germany and France, and it is especially ironic that Pope Paul IV, then
at war with Spain, quite correctly described Philip II himself as a Marrano, or a descendant of Jews who had converted to Christianity.
Statutes of limpieza spread rapidly throughout Spain. The statutes
helped to perpetuate a set of values that equated pure ancestry,
orthodoxy, and personal honour. Although this certainly helped to
prevent the spread of heresies in Spain, in the long run it had a
blighting effect on Spanish society, especially because the statutes
were linked so closely with the basically corrupt institution of the
Inquisition and its encouragement of the inevitably corrupting and
divisive practice of spying on and denouncing one’s neighbours.
By the middle of the 16th century the Inquisition had largely run out
of suspected heretics and Judaizers. Apart from its continued concern
with the Moriscos, the Inquisition began to concentrate its efforts on
the censorship of books and on enforcing correct religious beliefs and
moral (i.e., mainly sexual) behaviour among the “old” Christians. As
religious conflicts in Europe became sharper in the second half of the
16th century, such supervision came to be practiced in Protestant as
well as in Catholic countries. It was in this respect that the Spanish
Inquisition, spreading its network of courts and familiars from the
towns to the countryside, could surpass even the strictest
Calvinist-Puritan communities, even though the use of torture was no
longer deemed necessary and death sentences had become rare. Taken
together with a royal prohibition against students studying at foreign
universities, even Catholic ones, the Inquisition tended to isolate
Spanish intellectual life from that of the rest of Europe.
On the positive side there was the Inquisition’s general
unwillingness to join in the widespread mania of witch hunting that led
to thousands of executions in other European countries, especially
Protestant ones. Most Spanish theologians did not believe in the
existence of witchcraft and held that spells and sorceries were only
female vapourings that could be safely ignored or dealt with by shutting
the witch-women up in convents.
The Water Torture
Philip II
king of Spain and Portugal
born , May 21, 1527, Valladolid, Spain
died Sept. 13, 1598, El Escorial, Spain
Main
king of the Spaniards (1556–98) and king of the Portuguese
(as Philip I, 1580–98), champion of the Roman Catholic
Counter-Reformation. During his reign the Spanish Empire
attained its greatest power, extent, and influence, though
he failed to suppress the revolt of the Netherlands
(beginning in 1566) and lost the “Invincible Armada” in the
attempted invasion of England (1588).
Early life and marriages
Philip was the son of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V and
Isabella of Portugal. From time to time, the emperor wrote
Philip secret memoranda, impressing on him the high duties
to which God had called him and warning him against trusting
any of his advisers too much. Philip, a very dutiful son,
took this advice to heart. From 1543 Charles conferred on
his son the regency of Spain whenever he himself was abroad.
From 1548 until 1551, Philip traveled in Italy, Germany, and
the Netherlands, but his great reserve and his inability to
speak fluently any language except Castilian made him
unpopular with the German and Flemish nobility.
Philip contracted four marriages. The first was with his
cousin Maria of Portugal in 1543. She died in 1545, giving
birth to the ill-fated Don Carlos. In 1554 Philip married
Mary I of England and became joint sovereign of England
until Mary’s death, without issue, in 1558. Philip’s third
marriage, with Elizabeth of Valois, daughter of Henry II of
France, in 1559, was the result of the Peace of
Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), which, for a generation, ended the
open wars between Spain and France. Elizabeth bore Philip
two daughters, Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566–1633) and
Catherine Micaela (1567–97). Elizabeth died in 1568, and in
1570 Philip married Anna of Austria, daughter of his first
cousin the emperor Maximilian II. She died in 1580, her only
surviving son being the later Philip III.
King of Spain
Philip had received the Duchy of Milan from Charles V in
1540 and the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily in 1554 on the
occasion of his marriage to Mary of England. On October 25,
1555, Charles resigned the Netherlands in Philip’s favour
and, on January 16, 1556, the kingdoms of Spain and the
Spanish overseas empire. Shortly afterward Philip also
received the Franche-Comté. The Habsburg dominions in
Germany and the imperial title went to his uncle Ferdinand
I. At this time Philip was in the Netherlands. After the
victory over the French at St. Quentin (1557), the sight of
the battlefield gave him a permanent distaste for war,
though he did not shrink from it when he judged it
necessary.
After his return to Spain from the Netherlands in 1559,
Philip never again left the Iberian Peninsula. From Madrid
he ruled his empire through his personal control of official
appointments and all forms of patronage. Philip’s subjects
outside Castile, thus, never saw him, and they gradually
turned not only against his ministers but also against him.
This happened particularly in the Netherlands, in Granada,
and in Aragon.
Method of government
By sheer hard work Philip tried to overcome the defects of
this system. His methods have become famous. All work was
done on paper, on the basis of consultas (that is,
memoranda, reports, and advice presented him by his
ministers). In Madrid, or in the gloomy magnificence of his
monastic palace of El Escorial, which he built (1563–84) on
the slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, the king worked
alone in his small office, giving his decisions or, as
often, deferring them. Nothing is known of his order of
work, but all his contemporaries agreed that his methods
dangerously, and sometimes fatally, slowed down a system of
government already notorious for its dilatoriness. Philip
was painstaking and conscientious in his cravings for ever
more information, hiding an inability to distinguish between
the important and the trivial and a temperamental
unwillingness to make decisions.
This was coupled with an almost pathological suspicion of
even his most able and faithful servants. Margaret of Parma;
the Duke of Alba; Don John of Austria; Antonio Pérez; and
Alessandro Farnese—to name only the most
distinguished—suffered disgrace. “His smile and his dagger
were very close,” wrote his official court historian,
Cabrera de Córdoba. It was no exaggeration, for, in the case
of Juan de Escobedo, the secretary of Don John of Austria,
Philip even consented to murder. As a result, Philip’s court
became notorious for the bitterness of its faction fights.
The atmosphere of the Spanish court did much to poison the
whole Spanish system of government, and this played no small
part in causing the rebellions of the Netherlanders
(1568–1609), of the Moriscos of Granada (1568–70), and of
the Aragonese (1591–92).
Yet the “black legend” that, in Protestant countries,
represented Philip II as a monster of bigotry, ambition,
lust, and cruelty is certainly false. Philip’s spare and
elegant appearance is known from the famous portraits by
Titian and by Anthonis Mor (Sir Anthony More). He was a
lover of books and pictures, and Spain’s literary Golden Age
began in his reign. An affectionate father to his daughters,
he lived an austere and dedicated life. “You may assure His
Holiness,” Philip wrote to his ambassador in Rome, in 1566,
“that rather than suffer the least damage to religion and
the service of God, I would lose all my states and an
hundred lives, if I had them; for I do not propose nor
desire to be the ruler of heretics.” This remark may be
regarded as the motto of his reign. To accomplish the task
set him by God of preserving his subjects in the true
Catholic religion, Philip felt in duty bound to use his
royal powers, if need be, to the point of the most ruthless
political tyranny, as he did in the Netherlands. Even the
popes found it sometimes difficult to distinguish between
Philip’s views as to what was the service of God and what
the service of the Spanish monarchy.
Foreign policy
For the first 20 years of his reign, Philip sought to
preserve peace with his neighbours in western Europe. He was
fighting a major naval war with the Ottoman Empire in the
Mediterranean and, from 1568, he was faced with rebellion
and war in the Netherlands. From the late 1570s, his policy
gradually changed. The death (August 1578) without heirs of
his nephew, King Sebastian of Portugal, opened up the
prospect of Philip’s succession to Portugal. He had to
conquer (1580) by force what he regarded as his just,
hereditary rights, but the rest of Europe was alarmed at
this growth in Spanish power.
Both England and France gave increasing support to the
rebellious provinces of the Netherlands. Gradually, in the
1580s, Philip became convinced that the Catholic religion in
western Europe, and his own authority in the Netherlands,
could be saved only by open intervention against England and
France. To this end he fitted out the Armada that, with the
help of the Spanish Army in the Netherlands, was intended to
conquer England (1588). He sent money and troops to support
the League, the ultra-Catholic party in France, against
Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots. He even claimed the
throne of France for his daughter, Isabella Clara Eugenia,
after the murder of Henry III in 1589. Again, even his
Catholic allies found it difficult to distinguish between
Philip’s championship of the Catholic church and the
interests of Spain.
All these plans failed. Henry of Navarre became a
Catholic (1593) and Philip had to accept (Peace of Vervins,
1598) his succession as Henry IV of France. England and the
northern Netherlands remained Protestant and unconquered.
Yet Philip’s reign as a whole was not a failure. He had
defeated the great Ottoman offensive in the Mediterranean at
the Battle of Lepanto (1571). In the Iberian Peninsula he
had completed the work of unification begun by the “Catholic
Monarchs,” Ferdinand and Isabella. Most important of all, in
his own eyes, he had won great victories for the Catholic
church. If England, Scotland, and the northern Netherlands
were lost, the southern Netherlands (modern Belgium) had
been preserved. In Spain and Italy he had prevented the
spread of heresy, and his intervention in France was one of
the factors that forced Henry IV to become a Catholic.
When Philip II died of cancer at El Escorial in 1598,
Spain was still at the height of its power; it took almost
50 years before it was clear that the Counter-Reformation
would make no further major conquests.
Helmut Georg Koenigsberger
Torture
Paul IV
pope
original name Gian Pietro Carafa
born June 28, 1476, near Benevento
died Aug. 18, 1559, Rome
Main
Italian Counter-Reformation pope from 1555 to 1559, whose
anti-Spanish policy renewed the war between France and the
Habsburgs.
Of noble birth, he owed his ecclesiastical advancement to
the influence of his uncle Cardinal Oliviero Carafa. As
bishop of Chieti, Carafa served Pope Leo X as envoy to
England and Spain. He resigned his benefices and, with St.
Cajetan of Thiene (Gaetano da Thiene), founded the order of
the Theatines (Congregation of Clerics Regular) in 1524 to
promote clerical reform through asceticism and apostolic
work. Having advised Leo’s successors in matters of heresy
and reform, he was appointed to Pope Paul III’s commission
for ecclesiastical reform, was made cardinal in 1536, and
was responsible for a reorganization of the Roman
Inquisition.
Despite his violent antipathies, austerity,
uncompromising reformism, and exalted concept of papal
authority, Carafa was elected pope on May 23, 1555, through
the influence of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Even the veto
of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V was ignored. When Paul’s
excessive violence in orthodoxy and reform was carried over
into politics, his pontificate was destined to be strife
ridden. He succumbed to the counsels of his nephews, whom he
elevated, and to his hatred of the Habsburgs and of the
Spaniards, whom he attempted to drive from Naples by allying
with France in December 1555. Thus, he provoked war against
Charles and King Philip II of Spain. The Spanish victory in
August 1557 at Saint-Quentin, Fr., and the advance upon Rome
by the Duke of Alba forced Paul to come to terms with Spain;
peace was made on Sept. 12, 1557. He continued his animosity
toward Spain and the Habsburgs, however, by refusing to
recognize the abdication of Charles and the election of his
brother Ferdinand I (1558) as successor on grounds that the
imperial transaction was effected without papal approval.
Paul’s handling of the Protestant question was as
disastrous as his politics. He denounced as a pact with
heresy the Peace of Augsburg, the first permanent legal
basis for the existence of Lutheranism and Catholicism in
Germany. In England he ruined Cardinal Reginald Pole,
archbishop of Canterbury, who had infuriated Paul by trying
to prevent the conflict between France and the Habsburgs. In
April 1557 Paul deprived Pole of his authority and in the
following June, after England’s declaration of war on
France, summoned him to Rome on protests of heresy. Queen
Mary I of England intervened, saving Pole from the fate
suffered by his friend Cardinal Giovanni Morone, whom Paul
imprisoned on illegitimate charges of unorthodoxy. He
facilitated the ultimate victory of Protestantism in England
by insisting upon the restitution of monastic lands that had
been sold and by requiring Elizabeth I to submit her claims
to the English throne to him.
An enemy to conciliar methods, Paul did not reassemble
the Council of Trent (which had been suspended since 1552),
preferring instead to work through commissions or
congregations. Without a council he stopped many
ecclesiastical abuses in Rome, disciplined vagrant clergy,
and introduced firmer asceticism in the papal court, but his
approach was harsh and severe.
Under him, the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542,
launched a reign of terror. Following the trend in the Roman
Catholic Church that wrongly suspected Jews of influencing
the Reformation to some degree, Paul in 1555 established the
ghetto at Rome. He enforced perpetual wearing of the Jewish
badge and drastic separation of Jews from Christians. The
antagonisms he aroused proved fatal to his reforming cause.
Morisco
Spanish Muslim
Main
(Spanish: “Little Moor”), one of the Spanish Muslims (or
their descendants) who became baptized Christians.
During the Christian reconquest of Muslim Spain,
surrendering Muslim (Mudejar) communities in Aragon (1118),
Valencia (1238), and Granada (1492) were usually guaranteed
freedom of religion by treaty. This tolerant policy was
abandoned in the late 15th century, when Christian
authorities began to make conversions and ordered the
destruction of Islāmic theological books. The Muslims of
Granada rebelled. In 1502, offered the choice of baptism or
exile, many of them were baptized and continued to practice
Islām secretly; in 1526 the Muslims of Valencia and Aragon
were similarly forced to convert. Thereafter, Islām was
officially prohibited in Spain.
The Moriscos, however, did not prove to be assimilable.
Though they were racially indistinguishable from their Old
Christian neighbours (Christians who had retained their
faith under Muslim rule), they continued to speak, write,
and dress like Muslims. The Old Christians suspected the
Moriscos of abetting the Algerians and the Turks, both
enemies of Spain, and were fearful of their holy wars
(jihāds), which terrorized whole districts. Subjected to
discriminative taxation while their staple industry, the
silk trade, was reduced by a misguided fiscal policy,
ill-taught in their new faith, yet punished for ignorance by
church and Inquisition, the Moriscos turned outside Spain
for Muslim support. They obtained legal opinions (fatwās)
that assured them that it was permissible to practice Islām
in secret (taqīyah), then produced books known as
aljamiados, written in Spanish, using the Arabic alphabet,
to instruct fellow Moriscos in Islām.
In 1566 Philip II issued an edict forbidding the Granada
Moriscos their language, customs, and costume. They revolted
in 1569; after two years of war they were removed en masse
from Granada and scattered throughout northern Spain.
Evidence of their continued political and religious
infidelity led to a royal order for deportation on Sept. 22,
1609; their expulsion was completed some five years later.
An estimated 300,000 Moriscos relocated mainly in Algeria,
Tunisia, and Morocco, where again they found themselves an
alien element. They were assimilated after several
generations, but something of their Spanish heritage has
survived into modern times.
Witchcraft
Main
the exercise or invocation of alleged supernatural powers to
control people or events, practices typically involving
sorcery or magic. Although defined differently in disparate
historical and cultural contexts, witchcraft has often been
seen, especially in the West, as the work of crones who meet
secretly at night, indulge in cannibalism and orgiastic
rites with the Devil, and perform black magic. Witchcraft
thus defined exists more in the imagination of
contemporaries than in any objective reality. Yet this
stereotype has a long history and has constituted for many
cultures a viable explanation of evil in the world. The
intensity of these beliefs is best represented by the
European witch-hunts of the 14th to 18th century, but
witchcraft and its associated ideas are never far from the
surface of popular consciousness and—sustained by folk
tales—find explicit focus from time to time in popular
television and films and in fiction.
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