How Long Was an Inquisitor’s Lunch Break?

The answer is an hour and a half. I stumbled across this intriguing fact as I was researching the society and economy of 16^th-century Taxco, a colonial silver mining town in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. Taxco’s narrow cobbled streets and superb Church of Santa Prisca attract tourists, but in the 16^th century the town was far from picturesque.

 

Hacienda de San Juan Bautista Amalucan, founded by the wealthy miner Luis de Castilla in Taxco, 1555, to process silver ore

 

Interior of the hacienda of San Juan Bautista Amalucan. Castilla was a relative of the Spanish royal family

About 1530, less than a decade after the defeat of the Aztecs, a rich vein of silver was discovered. Spaniards, eager for a share of fabulous wealth, descended on a small indigenous village, Tlachco el Viejo (“Old Taxco”). They quickly turned the tiny settlement into a polluted town of greedy miners; speculative merchants eager for a quick profit; mule drivers who transported supplies in and silver out, while leaving behind great dollops of mule faeces on the tracks that passed for roads at that time; the priests who offered confession, while sometimes supplementing their salaries with a little commerce or mining on the side; royal officials, supposed to collect the King’s taxes and keep order, but who often were hucksters making money from illegal enterprises.

 

Crushed silver ore is mixed with mercury, using the patio method

Of course, none of these Europeans did any of the hard work. That was done by Indian and African slaves, and indigenous forced labour brought in from towns up to 400km or more distant. The technology was basic and mine work was dangerous. Just as dangerous was the processing of the ore, which contained lead and mercury. Silver was extracted by means of repeated heating, which gave off noxious fumes. Mine workers (inspired to theft by the example of greedy bosses and a general air of lawlessness) stole ore to process at home for sale to Spaniards eager to get a slice of the action. Fumes from ore processing poisoned the miner workers’ families and polluted the water. The demand for charcoal and wood to heat the ore soon striped surrounding hills of trees.

 

The palace of the Inquisition in Mexico City

Lawless Taxco was a good place to escape the long arm of the law, and the even longer arm of the Inquisition. Among those who found a degree of sanctuary and economic opportunities there were a number of Messianic Portuguese Jews. In 1497 King Manuel of Portugal forced all Jews to convert to Christianity. Jews responded, broadly speaking, in three ways: sincere conversion, pretending to be Christians while practising their faith in secret, or fleeing to remote parts, such as Spain’s new American colonies, to practice their religion discretely with as little compromise as possible. One such was Jorge de Almeida, who became quite rich from mining and commerce by the 1580s. Jorge married the 12-year old daughter, Leonor de Carvajal,  of a Portuguese Jew who had fled to New Spain (as Mexico was then known) with his large extended family. It would not be long before the Carvajal family fell foul of the Inquisition, along with Jorge and various of his cousins and other relatives.

 

Artist's impression of the torture of Francisca de Carvajal

Problems began with the arrest of Jorge’s brother-in-law and Leonor’s brother, Luis de Carvajal. Luis clung stubbornly to his ancestral faith. He practiced many of the things that the Inquisition looked out for to indicate that somebody was a crypto-Jew: avoiding pork and lard, fasting on the wrong days, keeping the Sabbath on Saturdays, and, most suspicious, bathing. Cleanliness was decidedly un-Christian. Luis was first arrested and tried by the Inquisition from 1589-1590. The result of this trial was not too serious. He was required to renounce the Law of Moses, to wear a penitent’s vestments, and consigned to a sort of house arrest in a monastery where he taught Latin to sons of members of the indigenous nobility of Mexico City, while secretively consulting Jewish tomes in the convent library. Several members of his family were sentenced to imprisonment, including his sister Leonor, wife of Jorge de Almeida who evaded capture and fled to Spain. In Madrid, Jorge used his influence and money to have the sentences of his wife, mother-in-law and sisters-in-law reduced. He also negotiated a government licence to trade in African slaves. His mining enterprises in Taxco would have depended on the labour of slaves or forced indigenous labour, so Jorge the victim, was not averse to exploiting people still less fortunate than a crypto-Jew.

The Zócalo (main square) in Mexico City where the procession of convicted heretics would begin. The cathedral is to the left. The market is in the foreground.

Luis’ second trial was in 1594-1596. This was a more serious affair with more drastic results. We know a good deal about this and the first trial because the Spanish in general, and the Inquisition in particular, kept voluminous records. The published transcription of the records of Luis’ trials covers some 498 printed pages. The testimony of witnesses is recorded, as is the interrogation of Luis. On 15 December 1595 Luis declared that “He does not believe in the Law of Jesus Christ because he considers it false”. On 8 December at 09:30 Luis was brought for his first session in the Torture Chamber. He was stripped naked except for a pair of linen underpants. The record details each turn of the rope used to inflict pain, and what Luis did or did not say after each twist. At the fourth turn the record states: “Admonished to tell the truth, the order was given to turn the rope for a fourth time, and he complained very much indeed. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! I will tell the truth, I will, Mr Inquisitor”. Luis started to denounce as Jews more than 100 family members and acquaintances. Then, “since it was late and 2pm had struck, the Inquisitors and the Ordinary thought it was a good time to go to lunch for an hour and a half. And with that they left the Torture Chamber, leaving Luis de Carvajal there. “They ordered that he be dressed to cover his nakedness and so that he did not catch cold”, but not, apparently, offered lunch. The Inquisitors seem to be concerned for the decorum and well-being of the man they had just tortured for five hours. They returned at 3:30pm from lunch and resumed the session.

 

An artist's impression of the burning of heretics

There followed further sessions: 8:30am-11am and 3:00pm-5:30pm on 10 February, 9:30-11:30am and 3pm-5:30pm on 12 February. At the end of that session Luis asked for pen and paper. Two days later, at 8:30am Luis presented two pages of written denunciations. This excused him from the rope torture, since the record shows that he was returned to his cell at 9:30.

However, on 14 February, the trial took a surprising turn. Luis withdrew all his denunciations. Asked by the astonished Inquisitors why he had previously accused a large number of people, Luis replied: “to avoid being tortured”. Nevertheless, Luis did denounce two of his cousins, who were miners in Taxco, and another Portuguese, in a nearby town, but he declared that he had no knowledge that a mule driver by name of Marco Antonio was a Jew.

The Inquisitors then sentenced Luis, first condemning him for abjuring all he had promised at his first trial “with the natural ingratitude, stubbornness and perversity of the Jews, forgetting the mercy and generosity that he had received”.

On 8 December, Luis was led out in procession with other members of his family to be burned alive “until he is reduced to ashes, and not even a memory of him remains”. However, Luis was in luck. A Dominican friar, declared that Luis had handed him a notebook, in which he stated that he had converted to Christianity and had withdrawn his testimony against all those he had accused of being Jews. Therefore, “having arrived at the brazier which is in the market of Saint Hipólito, he was garrotted until he died a natural death, so it seemed, and then his body was burned in live flames so that it was reduced to ashes”. So, by the standards of the Inquisition, Luis got off lightly.

Although Jorge de Almeida had evaded justice thus far, he was tried in his absence in 1607. After hearing testimony from witnesses, including Jorge’s sister-in-law Mariana de Carvajal, the Inquisitors decided that an order should be posted on the door of Mexico City’s cathedral. The summons, posted on 18 March 1607, invited Almeida to appear within 60 days before the Inquisition because the Inquisitors “wished him to enjoy health in our Lord Jesus Christ”. The deadline was extended several times. It does not surprise me that Jorge does not answer the summons. The final judgement waited until 3 April 1609, when the Inquisitors ordered the confiscation of all Almeida’s property. They further prohibited any of his children from holding public office. Almeida’s effigy was dressed in penitential robes, a rosary and all other garments and insignia of a convicted and condemned criminal. The effigy was taken in procession, as Almeida’s in-laws had been thirteen years earlier, to be burned and reduced to ashes.

 

The monastery of San Diego, opposite which burnings took place

Jews were not the only targets of the Inquisition. A number of Englishmen, accused of being Lutheran heretics, also appear in the records, some of them in Taxco. In 1564 William Collins, a Welshman, born in Bristol about 1541-1544, was arrested there and sentenced to confiscation of his goods, wearing penitential robes, 200 lashes in public and ten years in the royal galleons. However, he may have been treated more lightly, since one judge voted that he be confined to a monastery to be instructed in “our Christian religion”. In 1574 John Grey, an Englishman born c.1552, who was also in Taxco, confessed to Lutheran beliefs under torture. However, Licenciado Bonilla, one of the Inquisitors, was concerned that Grey may not have fully understood the charges. He was sentenced to be tortured for a second time with the same interpreter.

 

The plaque reads: Opposite this place was the place where the burnings of the Inquisition took place from 1596 to 1771.

Robert Tomson, who was born in Andover, Hampshire, went to Seville in 1553, where he was employed by an English merchant John Fields, with whom he sailed to New Spain. However, their ship was caught in a great storm and the two Englishmen survived only because they were rescued by another ship and landed at the port of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Both became sick and Fields died. Tomson found employment in Mexico City with the Taxco miner Gonzalo Cerezo, “a man of great wealth, and one of the first conquerors of the said Citie”. Over dinner, Tomson was asked if it were true “that in England they had overthrown all their Churches and houses of Religion, and that all the images of the Saints of heaven that were in them were throwne down, broken and burned”. Cerezo testified that Tomson had uttered the heresy that one can pray direct to God and need not pray to the statues of the saints for intercession. The Inquisition expelled Tomson from New Spain to Seville, where he landed on his feet, marrying the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who made an enormous fortune in Mexico, which he left to his daughter.

We know from the documents of these cases, that the Inquisitors worked long days, from 8:30 o 9:30am to 5:30pm, that they took an hour and a half for lunch, and that they spent a lot of time in the Torture Chamber. In fact, there must have been quite a few people in the chamber: three Inquisitors, an Ordinary, a scribe to record the testimony and cries of pain, sometimes an interpreter, and a suspect stripped to underwear. The many hours spent by very important people seeking out and persecuting heretics was an enormous diversion of resources. The sheer expense in paper (imported at great cost from Europe) must have been considerable. A 21^st-century European asks: why? Partly, I think because the Spanish monarchy’s legal right to own the Americas as private property was given by the Pope in exchange for propagating the Catholic faith. The church had to evangelize en masse the native population and suppress indigenous heresies, the previous beliefs of the great mass of the population. (The indigenous population, by the way, was safe from the Inquisition since the Indians were considered not to be fully capable and therefore unable to be liable for heresy.) Other heresies were, therefore, serious threats to the entire colonial enterprise. Further, in a country where the Spanish were vastly outnumbered, and where many Spaniards had scant regard for the law, the maintenance of social order, the collection of taxes on which the monarchy depended, and the exclusion of rival, especially Protestant (Lutheran), powers was a strategic imperative. One has only to read the extensive and detailed reports that bishops sent to the King, naming remote humble priests and indigenous villages of which the King would never had heard, to sense the importance of the church as an instrument of rule and control. The church, and therefore the Inquisition, were important tools for the maintenance of order and empire.

 

The manuscripts of Luis de Carvajal

Reading the trial documents, I was rather depressed by the cruelty of which humans are capable, but also moved by the resolution and affection of which the human spirit is capable, even in appalling adversity. In May 1595, a few months before he was tortured, Luis de Carvajal, alias Joseph el Lumbroso (Joseph the Light), got hold of some paper and wrote a number of letters to his family. One letter begins thus:

“Loves of my soul, by a miracle I received today an ink well and pen to write to you this letter to the souls of my heart, which, as soon as you receive, it you can send, with much secrecy, wrapped inside something, to my other blessed ones. They arrested me by the rightful will and judgement of the most high, and because of the accusation of our good Lucena [a prosecution witness already convicted of being a Jew]. They arrested me alone because I did not bear witness against anybody, and because I confessed the truth. And I confess it hoping for the true reward from God, and that I be given in my prison certain important possessions. They arrested you, my souls, my angels, my blessed ones, only on suspicion. I defended your innocence as I would defend my soul from Satan and his assistants, as I swear by the angel of my Lord God.”