Chapter VII Peru
When, on January 9, 1570, Servan de Cerezuela arrived at Lima to open a tribunal of the Inquisition, the condition of Spanish South America was such as to call for energetic action if the colony was to respond to the hopes of those who had so earnestly urged the Christianization of the New World. The establishment there of the Holy Office had been asked for by many who viewed with dismay the prevailing demoralization, and we shall see whether its influence proved to be for good or for evil. Peru had been conquered by adventurers inflamed with the thirst of gold, who in the eager search for wealth had thrown off the restraints of civilized life. The Church exercised little or no moral power for, as the existing Viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, reported, he found on his arrival that the clerics and frailes, bishops and prelates, were lords of the spiritual and acknowledged no superior in the temporal. The king was exposed to constant outlay in granting free passage by every fleet to great numbers of clerics and frailes who came under the pretext of converting and teaching the Indians, but, in reality, many devoted themselves to accumulating wealth, plucking the Indians in the endeavor to return to Spain with fortunes. These priests kept prisons, alguaziles and chains, seizing and punishing all who offended them and there was no one to call them to account. The bishops pretended to have royal licences to return to Spain, laden with the silver which they had not already gathered and despatched in advance, and it was the same with the frailes.579 This deplorable statement is confirmed and strengthened by Toledo’s successor in the vice-royalty, the Count del Villar, in 1588. The secular clergy, he says, from the bishops to the lower grades, have come to Peru, not to save the souls of the Indians but to gain money in any manner and return to Spain, while those who are ordained in the country are mostly soldiers discharged for ill-conduct or men of bad character. The regular Orders are no better, except to some extent, the Franciscans and more especially the Jesuits. The royal officials use their positions to make money and oppress the people. Few immigrants seem to come with the intention of honest labor, but are mostly vagrants living on the hospitality of those who will receive them. The descendants of the conquistadores claim positions in virtue of the services of their ancestors and, as they increase in number with each generation, it is impossible to satisfy them or the impostors who pretend to be descendants. With all this the Christianization of the Indians makes little or no progress. Altogether he assumes that the immigration, both lay and clerical, is thoroughly vicious, while the creoles, or native whites, are no better.580 It is a community living in idle self-indulgence on the Indians and the Government.
As regards matters of faith, in the absence of the Inquisition, the jurisdiction over heresy, inherent in the episcopal office, had reasserted itself and was exercised by the bishops. As early as May 15, 1539, the Dominican Provincial, Gaspar de Carvajal, is found acting as inquisitor for the Bishop Fray Vicente de Valverde and, on October 23 of the same year, the secular magistrates honored a demand from the bishop for the process against Captain Mercadillo, in order that, as inquisitor, he should take cognizance of certain ebullitions of blasphemy. This inquisitorial power was exercised to its highest expression, for, in 1548, the first Archbishop, Gerónimo de Loaisa, held an auto de fe in Lima, wherein Jan Millar, a Fleming, was burnt for Protestantism. In 1560 the episcopal Provisor of Cuzco held an auto in which were relaxed the Morisco Alvaro González and the mulatto Luis Solano as dogmatizing Mahometans; in 1564 he celebrated another in which Vasco Suárez, Antonio Hernández and Alonso de Cieza were penanced, while Lope de la Peña was reconciled for Islam. In 1565 the Dean of la Plata reconciled Juan Bautista for Protestantism and condemned him to confiscation and perpetual prison and sanbenito.581 Evidently the episcopal Inquisition was active; in 1567 the synod of Lima adopted regulations to govern its functions and when, in 1583, the provincial council, under St. Toribio, confirmed the acts of that synod, it was obliged, doubtless on representation by the tribunal, to except those regulations as matters which had passed beyond its control.582 The bishops, however, did not surrender their jurisdiction without impulsion, for, as we have seen (Mexico, p. 199), the Suprema was obliged to order them, in 1570, to transfer all cases to the tribunal and it was found necessary to repeat this in 1586.
When the transfer was made there were four cases pending in Lima and ninety-seven in Cuzco, concerning which the fiscal reported that the Ordinaries had prosecuted many that were not matters of faith and were habitually settled for a trivial payment in oil. Inquisitor Cerezuela set a good example by suspending three and ordering the rest to be filed for reference in case of relapse.583 One of the cases thus inherited by the tribunal may be briefly sketched as affording a vivid picture of the methods in vogue and the use made of the Inquisition, whether episcopal or Spanish.
Francisco de Aguirre was one of the prominent conquistadores. He had come well equipped to Peru in 1533, he had borne an active share in the conquest of Chile and then in that of the extensive interior province known as Tucuman, of which he became governor. Of this he was deprived, but about 1566 he was reappointed on the occasion of an Indian revolt, in which the Spaniards were murdered and only a handful of soldiers held out in the town of Santiago del Estero. With his customary energy Aguirre collected a force, defeated the Indians in a battle, in which he lost one of his sons, and re-established the Spanish dominion. Then he headed an expedition in search of a port on the Atlantic to afford easier access to the territory, but when near his destination his troops mutinied and carried him back as a prisoner to Santiago del Estero. To justify this the mutineers claimed to have acted under orders of the Inquisition of the Bishop of la Plata, with whom Aguirre had quarrelled on the subject of tithes. There were witnesses in plenty to hasty and irreverent speeches by the veteran soldier; for two or three years he was kept in prison, at a cost to him, as he declared, of thirty thousand pesos, and on October 15, 1568, by judges acting under commission of Bishop Navarrete “inquisidor ordinario y general” he was sentenced. His imprisonment was accepted as a punishment; he was fined in fifteen hundred pesos and costs and was required to appear as a penitent in the church of Santiago del Estero and make formal abjuration of his objectionable speeches. This he performed, but on the pretext of informality he was obliged to undergo the humiliation a second time, April 1, 1569, in la Plata. Of this a notarial act was sent to the Council of Indies to show that he was unfitted to be Governor of Tucuman, but it was too late, for in August of that year he received the royal confirmation of his appointment with orders to proceed at once to his seat of government. On the march a cleric with an order from the bishop sought to stop him, but he disobeyed and paralyzed the unfortunate messenger by sternly asking him “If I should kill a cleric, what would be the penalty?”
So far he had had to deal with the episcopal Inquisition in the hands of an opposing faction; even severer experiences were in store for him from the Holy Office, used as an instrument by the Viceroy Toledo who desired to get rid of him. One of the earliest acts of the Lima tribunal was to entertain a denunciation of him, in which his intemperate utterances were again brought forward, together with the further accusation that he had banished from Tucuman all who had been concerned in his prosecution and that he had said that he had been forced to confess to what he had not done. March 14, 1570, Cerezuela ordered his arrest with sequestration of property; Toledo undertook to execute the mandate and in reporting to the king stated that Aguirre’s government was such that most of the inhabitants were leaving the province. To arrest such a man was not an easy matter, but it was effected and he was brought three hundred leagues to Lima. Delays were unavoidable in obtaining and ratifying testimony at such a distance, through a hostile Indian country which, as the tribunal stated, was entered only once a year. Aguirre offered to waive the formality of ratifying the testimony in order to expedite the process, but the fiscal insisted on regularity and the trial dragged wearily on, as new evidence came in, mostly as to his arbitrary government and other matters with which the tribunal properly had no concern. Aguirre fell dangerously ill and was transferred, July 19, 1572, to the house of a familiar, where he was kept strictly incomunicado and from which he was brought back, April 24, 1574, to listen to the publication of evidence. It was not until late in 1575 or early in 1576 that sentence was rendered condemning him to hear mass as a penitent on a feast-day when no services were allowed in any other church; he abjured de vehementi, was cast in all costs, was recluded for four months in a convent and was banished perpetually from Tucuman. The trivial character of the charges is seen in the special stress laid on his having used charms to cure wounds and toothache, which he was forbidden to do in future—innocent charms, as he explained, employed only because no physician was at hand and surely pardonable in the wild warfare in which he had worn out his life. He retired to the city of Serena which he had founded, old, sick and penniless. He had spent thirty-six years and some three hundred thousand pesos in the king’s service; three of his sons, his brother and three nephews had died in the same service, and he was too poor and oppressed with debts to make his way to court and ask reward for his labors. To complete the destruction of his influence his two remaining sons were prosecuted on frivolous charges, but the cases seem to have been suspended after the desired result had been attained. His son-in-law, Francisco de Matienzo, who had endeavored to prevent his arrest, was prosecuted and fined in three hundred pesos. There were also seven other prosecutions against his followers, resulting in the imposition of fines.584 Had all viceroys, like Francisco de Toledo, known how to control the Inquisition it might have been made a useful political instrument but, as we shall see, succeeding inquisitors preferred to follow their own ends and it became a perpetually disturbing influence.
The bishops did not willingly acquiesce in the surrender of a jurisdiction which could be so profitably employed. That Archbishop Loaiza showed a recalcitrating temper is manifested by a letter of the Suprema directing that he should not style himself “inquisidor ordinario” in his pastorals and edicts. Another letter permits him to inspect the commissions of the inquisitors and their instructions if he desires, but it must be in the audience-chamber as they are not to be removed from there, except the printed instructions, of which a copy may be given to him on condition of his allowing no one to see it. There was evident friction despite the injunctions of the Suprema that a good understanding should be maintained.585 This was increased when, in 1574, a royal cédula addressed to the bishops ordered them to exercise special vigilance and make secret inquiry about disguised Lutheran preachers who were said to be on their way to Peru. The prelates assumed this to be a grant of renewed inquisitorial power and undertook to exercise it, giving rise to no little trouble. Sebastian de Lartaun, Bishop of Cuzco, not only published edicts trespassing on inquisitorial jurisdiction but boasted that, if the inquisitors came into his diocese, he could punish them, and he arrested and imprisoned in chains their commissioner Pedro de Quiroga, a canon of his cathedral, publicly and under circumstances creating great scandal. The tribunal retaliated by summoning to Lima the bishop’s provisor Albornoz and throwing him in the secret prison; furthermore it imprisoned the priest Luis de Arma, who had assisted in chaining Quiroga, as well as the episcopal fiscal Alonso Duran and a cleric named Bejerano for the same offence, to which the bishop responded by seizing Quiroga’s temporalities and forbidding him to enter the church. The tribunal, in 1581, reported the situation to the Suprema, which replied that nothing was to be conceded to the Ordinaries save what was allowed by the laws and the royal cédulas; from the Bishop of Cuzco’s edict the matter pertaining to the Inquisition was to be struck out and he was to be duly warned. A second notice was to be given to the Bishop of Panamá of the cédulas forbidding his interference in matters of faith and, if he continued to disobey, the Suprema was to be advised. The same was to be done with other bishops similarly offending, and special attention was directed to the acts of the Bishops of Popayan and Tucuman. If we may believe the reports made by the tribunal to the Suprema the episcopate was filled with most unworthy wearers of the mitre and the Archbishop of New Granada was the only one who had fully obeyed the orders to hand over all inquisitorial cases. The officials of the Inquisition, it said, were hated equally by the bishops and by the royal judges, who lost no opportunity of oppressing and humiliating them.586
Thus early commenced the antagonism between the Inquisition and the episcopate which continued during its whole career to be a disturbing element in the Spanish possessions. In 1584 we find Inquisitor Ulloa complaining to the Suprema of the action of the recent provincial council of Lima in secretly writing to the king about the evil character of the commissioners selected. This, he asserts, arose from his refusal of the request of the Bishops of Cuzco, la Plata and Tucuman to make them commissioners in their respective dioceses. The bishops, he adds, were opposed to the introduction of the Inquisition, because it limited their jurisdiction, and they and the royal courts were constantly causing trouble in spite of the extreme modesty and deference shown by his officials.587
Such was the soil in which the Inquisition was to be planted when Philip II resolved to confer upon the New World the blessing of the institution. Its inception bore a marked resemblance to that of Mexico. January 28, 1569, Inquisitor-general Espinosa wrote to the Licentiate Servan de Cerezuela, in Oropesa, that the king proposed to establish a tribunal in Peru and that he was selected as an inquisitor, with a salary of three thousand pesos, each of four hundred maravedís, a part of which would be drawn from the fruits of a prebend in Lima. He was ordered to start without delay for Seville, whence he would sail with a colleague, a fiscal and a notary, in the fleet carrying the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who would deliver to him his commission and instructions. Similar orders were sent to the other inquisitor, Dr. Andrés de Bustamente, and five hundred ducats were given to each to defray their expenses. Commands were issued to the bishops to surrender all cases pertaining to the tribunal; to the courts not to interfere with the confiscations; to the viceroy to render it all favor and support and to provide a proper building for its occupancy and prisons; to all officials to take the oath of obedience and to lend whatever aid might be required.588
The fleet sailed March 19, 1569; Dominica was reached April 28th, Cartagena May 8th and Nombre de Dios, June 1st. There their funds ran out and no one would lend them a real without interest until Judge Barros of Panamá furnished them two thousand pesos out of moneys deposited in his court. While thus delayed they heard several cases and rendered sentences. Bustamente with the notary Arrieta left Nombre de Dios on June 23d, but he was so affected by the escape of two of his slaves, as we are told, that he fell sick and died on June 30th. Cerezuela and the fiscal Alcedo remained to attend to a case which developed itself on the day fixed for their departure. Six witnesses testified that a Portuguese named Salvador Méndez Hernández had been burnt in effigy in Seville; they arrested him and wrote to Seville for the process, but as they had no arrangements for detaining him, he was released under oath, which he naturally forfeited. Cerezuela reached Panamá on July 18th, when he summoned the viceroy and the judges of the Audiencia to take the oath of obedience to the Inquisition. On the 22d there was a solemn ceremony, with a procession to the church of San Francisco, where his commission was read, he issued a mandate and the viceroy and officials and the people all took the oath. Sail was made from Panamá, August 15th, and Lima was reached November 28th. A house was selected and the viceroy was called upon to give it to them; another adjoining was rented for the officials and, on January 29, 1570, there was a solemn function in the cathedral, such as we have seen in Mexico, when the tribunal was officially acknowledged, its authority asserted and the Edict of Faith was published, calling upon every one to denounce all offenders of whom he was cognizant, directly or indirectly.589
Although Cerezuela was accused to the Suprema, by his notary Arrieta, as wholly ignorant of inquisitorial practice, of allowing himself to be easily influenced, and of neglecting to appoint familiars, he speedily manifested an energy inspiring all classes with fear of a tribunal which was superior to all distinctions of station, and whose jurisdiction was limited only by its own definitions. Scarce had the edict been published when arrests began of bigamists, blasphemers and persons whose utterances were not cautiously restrained—Alcedo, the fiscal, reports three in one day. Two canons of the cathedral and their advocate were prosecuted for some false swearing before the ecclesiastical court, which the theologians managed to find heretical, and, in spite of the intervention of the archbishop, Cerezuela tried them and amerced them in eight hundred pesos for the benefit of the tribunal. Then he prosecuted two royal officials, for raising difficulties in supplying his demands for the maintenance of poor prisoners, and fined them in eighty ducats.590 Presumably he desired to produce a profound impression upon the public and for this the solemnity of a public auto de fe was essential. This rendered inadvisable the customary prolonged delays of inquisitorial action and already, on November 15, 1573, it was held in the principal plaza, with the usual oaths administered to all present and the preaching of a sermon. The different bodies of dignitaries of course quarreled as to the places assigned to them, but Cerezuela settled their conflicting pretensions and the awful ceremony was performed effectively. The penitents were not numerous. The Corsican, Joan Bautista, had been penanced for Protestantism by the archbishop and again had been sentenced to perpetual prison by the Bishop of los Charcas; now as an impenitent, he was condemned to two hundred lashes through the streets and to lifelong galley-service. The Frenchman, Jean de Lion, for the same heresy abjured de vehementi, was confined for ten years to the city of Lima, and contributed a thousand pesos towards the cost of erecting the staging at the auto. Ynes de los Angeles received a hundred lashes for bigamy, and Andrés de Campos the same for violating the secrecy of the Inquisition. The crowning attraction of the spectacle, however, was another Frenchman, Mathieu Salado, who was generally reputed to be insane. He had been denounced for “Lutheranism” in May, 1570, but after arrest and examination had been discharged as irresponsible. New evidence was received however and, in November, 1571, he was again put on trial. He held that Erasmus and Luther were saints enlightened by God; he denounced the popes, the clergy and the whole establishment; he denied purgatory and indulgences, images and the mass. He was decided to be of sound mind and, as he was pertinacious, he was sentenced to relaxation after a preliminary torture in caput alienum, all of which was duly executed, but whether he was burnt alive or after strangulation we are not informed.591
The tribunal which had thus asserted its power was necessarily organized on the Castilian pattern, with normally two inquisitors, a fiscal (or, as he was termed in later times, an inquisitor-fiscal), a notary or secretary, a receiver of confiscations or treasurer, an ornamental alguazil mayor and another for work, an alcaide or gaoler with assistants, a nuncio, a portero or apparitor, an advocate of prisoners, a barber, a physician and a surgeon. These were the salaried officials and in addition there were commissioners at distant points, familiars, consultores and calificadores. There seems to have been an effort from the first to restrict the lists of unsalaried officials, whose overgrown numbers in Spain were the source of constant trouble, owing to their exemption from the secular courts and being justiciable only by the tribunal. Thus the consultores were limited to six and the familiars to twelve in the city of Lima, four in each cathedral city and one in each town inhabited by Spaniards, and their fuero was defined, as in Mexico, to be that of the Castilian concordia of 1553, which limited, to a considerable extent, their exemption in criminal cases.592
Distance and delay in communication necessarily rendered the tribunal more independent in action than was permitted in Spain at this time, but the Suprema endeavored to maintain supervision and subordination as far as it could. It was unavoidable that the tribunal should be allowed to appoint to the minor and unsalaried positions, but its appointments were reported to the Suprema, which thereupon issued the commissions and sometimes, at least, made appointments itself. In the original instructions of 1570 power was granted to create commissioners and familiars; in 1576 this was extended to notaries and other officials, while in 1589 it appears to be restricted to cases of necessity in the city of Lima.593 Yet when the Suprema chose to exercise the appointing power it had no hesitation, as when, in 1615, it ordered Don Gil de Amoraga to be received as commissioner of Panamá and Don Fernando Francisco de Ribadeneira as commissioner of Tucuman, if the place was vacant, and if not, as soon as it should become so. As time went on, cases of this kind became more frequent. As regards commissions, a letter of May 26, 1620, orders that the physician, the barber and the surgeon are to furnish their proofs of limpieza, or purity of blood, when their names can be forwarded and the inquisitor-general will issue their commissions. When, in 1584, the tribunal granted to a familiar of Panamá the title of alguazil, with a vara alta de justicia, or the privilege of carrying a tall wand as the symbol of his office, the audiencia of Panamá complained to the king and the Suprema called upon the tribunal for an explanation, pending which the vara was not to be carried.594
The provisions for cases which in Spain were referred to or appealed to the Suprema and inquisitor-general have already been detailed in the chapter on Mexico and need not be repeated here. It will be recalled that they conferred on the colonial tribunals almost complete independence, so that they escaped the encroachments which at home eventually rendered the provincial Inquisitions scarce more than bureaus for the collection of evidence and for the execution of the decrees of the Council. The Suprema, it is true, occasionally made its power felt by sending out a visitador or inspector, with faculties more or less extensive and by removing or transferring an inquisitor against whom complaints were too vigorous to be disregarded, but the only regular supervision that could be exercised lay in the requirement of full semi-annual reports of the business of the tribunal and the condition of pending cases. It may be questioned, however, whether this could have been performed with regularity during the earlier periods for, as late as 1680, the tribunal was notified that an arrangement had been made with the king by the consulado of Seville whereby despatches could be sent twice a year.595
The Edict of Faith was ordered to be published regularly in all parish and conventual churches, a command which was doubtless obeyed with reasonable regularity, but there was a curious ignorance displayed of the vastness of South America and its lack of means of intercommunication, when the inquisitors were required to perform an annual visitation of their district. Of course this instruction received no attention; indeed the only attempt recorded is that of Inquisitor Ulloa, who found it convenient, in 1594, to be absent from Lima and employed his time, until his death in 1597, in wandering over the land and harassing the people.596
As in Mexico, Indians were excepted from inquisitorial jurisdiction and, in matters of faith, were subject to the bishops. This was not relished. Fray Juan de Vivero wrote to Philip that the Inquisition should punish them, though not as severely as Spaniards. The notary Arrieta advised Cerezuela to disregard the instructions and to prosecute them, just as he had seen in Seville unbaptized slaves punished for perverting their Christian comrades. Cerezuela reported that baptized Indians publicly persuaded their fellows that what the missionaries told them was false, but the Suprema was firm and ordered him not to interfere even with dogmatizers who told their people not to believe the missionaries.597
Cerezuela’s zeal was also rebuked when he represented that foreigners who came to Peru usually sought at once to penetrate into the interior, wherefore he proposed that the commissioners at Cartagena and Panamá should turn them back and not permit them to enter, but the Suprema replied that their entrance was not to be impeded nor were they to be prosecuted unless they committed offences coming within the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, or were detected in bringing prohibited books. At the same time it ordered a careful inquest as to all strangers scattered through the land and, when this should be verified with due secrecy, the commissioners were to be instructed to admit to reconciliation those found transgressing and, if they refused conversion, they were to be prosecuted with the full severity of the canons.598 If the tribunal thus was prevented from regulating ingress, it assumed full control over egress, for in June, 1584, it issued a proclamation that no one should leave the kingdom without its licence, under pain of excommunication and fines, and shipmasters were ordered to take no passengers without it—an assumption of power which won the approbation of the Suprema, with the suggestive warning that the licences must be issued without charge. This arbitrary exercise of authority was even extended to prohibiting any vessel from leaving port without a licence, and the abuse became so intolerable that, as we have seen (Mexico, p. 252), its removal formed part of the Concordia of 1610. The tribunal chafed under this and, when it was busy in arresting nearly all the Portuguese merchants in 1636, it complained to the Suprema that its hands had been tied; to prevent the escape of those who might be guilty it had applied to the Viceroy Chinchon who, as a governmental act, ordered that for a year no one should be given passage without a licence from the Inquisition; he would willingly have done more, but he had to pay some regard to the Concordia. The Suprema was impressively asked to see that this matter should be corrected, as otherwise the faith and the fisc would suffer. It was probably on this occasion that occurred a detention of the fleet when ready to sail, to which I have met with an allusion, because licences had not been procured for the passengers.599
The chief obstacle to the thorough organization of the Inquisition was the immense extent of the territory subjected to a single tribunal. Until the kingdom of New Granada was cut off, in 1610, by the establishment of a tribunal at Cartagena, this comprised the West India Islands and the whole of South America, save the undefined limits of Portuguese Brazil.600 The three centres of Lima, Santiago de Chile and Buenos Ayres were far apart in distance and still farther in the character of the intervening territory, much of as yet scarce explored, the Indians but partially subdued and the Spanish settlements few and far between. Chile, indeed, could be reached by sea, in a voyage usually of two or three weeks, but the difficulties of communication with the interior provinces and those of the River Plate were embarrassing. When the tribunal consulted the Suprema about them it could only reply that cases arising in Paraguay and la Plata must be dealt with as best they could; the accused at a distance should be ordered to present themselves to the tribunal and not be arrested unless there were manifest heresy or evidence justifying sequestration601—a suggestion dictated rather by thrift than mercy.
The device which was effective in Spain, of commissioners in all centres of population and familiars scattered everywhere, was only a partial remedy for the difficulty. The power of the commissioner, as we have seen, was jealously limited; he could execute orders, take testimony and report, but he was forbidden to arrest unless there was imminent danger that a culprit might fly; in no case could he conduct a trial; his functions were purely executive and in no sense judicial. A vast proportion of the cases tried by the Inquisition were for offences comparatively trivial—blasphemy, careless or irreverent remarks, or the more or less harmful superstitions classed as sorcery—and the transmission of denunciations for such matters, over hundreds of leagues of forest and mountain, and awaiting a reply with instructions, was manifestly too cumbrous a process to be practical; the half-breed crone, the vagrant soldier or the wandering pedlar, who were the usual culprits in such cases, would be dead or vanished before an order of arrest could be received.
Peru was no more exempt than Mexico from the troubles caused by these outlying officials who felt themselves virtually independent and became intolerable pests in their districts. The object of acquiring the position was to obtain exemption from justice. They were answerable only to the tribunal, hundreds of leagues away; if laymen, the secular courts, and if ecclesiastics, the spiritual judges, could not touch them. They were above all local law; they could indulge with impunity all evil passions, they could tyrannize at will over their neighbors, and even in civil matters they could set justice at defiance. It was idle for the Suprema to urge great care in their selection and strict investigation into their conduct when visitations were made, with rigorous punishment for their excesses. The material to select from was not abundant and was mostly evil; visitations never took place as planned, and punishment was rare. The repeated orders not to appoint frailes except in case of necessity and, when it was obligatory, to prefer Dominicans, is not to be regarded as a reflection on the regular Orders, but as arising from the desire to maintain discipline in the Orders, because, when a fraile obtained a position in the Inquisition, he threw off subjection to his prelate, and the injunction not to support them in disobedience was rarely observed.602
A memorial presented, in 1592, to the inquisitor-general, in the name of the clergy of Peru, complains of the appointment as commissioners of vicious, dishonest and turbulent persons, and confirms it by statements in detail concerning those of Cuzco, Potosí, Popayan, Camana, Arequipa, Guaymanga and Payta, while the familiars were no better. Successive inquisitors, from Cerezuela to Juan de Mañozca, admitted the fact but justified themselves by the argument that they had to take what they could get; the material to select from was too scarce to admit of selection, with the result that the officials abused their power in innumerable ways.603 The only serious effort made to repress these evils was when Juan Ruiz de Prado was sent, in 1587, to Lima as visitador, clothed with full power to correct the abuses which had excited general complaint. He reported that much of his time was occupied in prosecuting commissioners and their notaries, who had committed the gravest excesses; the tribunal, while cognizant of their evil ways, had only taken action in so far as to deprive two of them of their commissions, giving as an excuse that if it punished them it could find no others to take their places. Among those whom Prado disciplined was the priest Martin Barco de Centinera, commissioner of Cochachamba, well known as the author of La Argentina. The charges against him were grave but Prado did not wish to bring him three hundred leagues to answer them, so they were sent to him with orders to return them with his defence. It was proved that he treated the people of his district like Jews and Moors, that he revenged himself on all who offended him, and that he usurped the royal jurisdiction. At public banquets he drank to intoxication, he talked openly of his successful amours, he kept a married woman as a mistress and was generally scandalous in conversation and mode of life. Prado fined him in two hundred and fifty pesos and incapacitated him from holding office in the Inquisition.604
A single spasmodic effort such as that of Prado could effect no permanent result and, if it was difficult for the people, oppressed by these petty local despots, to make their wrongs known, it was equally difficult for the Lima tribunal to exercise its authority over such vast distances. The cruelty and injustice to which this exposed the accused were also extreme. On a simple denunciation, possibly for a trivial offence, and without proper preliminary investigation, he might be sent, perhaps in chains, from Buenos Ayres to Lima, exhausting in expenses whatever fortune he possessed. A practical illustration is furnished by the case of Francisco de Benavente, denounced in 1582, to the Commissioner of Tucuman because, when some one remarked that the Church was permanent, he had replied that it was not well said. The commissioner commenced to take testimony which so alarmed Benavente that he travelled six hundred leagues to present himself to the tribunal in Lima, which suspended the case and he travelled home again.605 To a great extent this explains the inordinate procrastination in many of the trials, while the victim languished in his cell, for the evidence might have to be sent back for ratification, or fresh testimony might be sought and when, after years had been consumed in these preliminaries, he put in his defence, the interrogatories for his witnesses would be despatched over the same distance and their return would be awaited. These causes of delay were aggravated by the habitual negligence and indifference of all the officials concerned, so that a large portion of a man’s life was often consumed in prison for an offence which ultimately might only merit a reprimand, or for which he might be acquitted.
Some relief was afforded when, in 1611, the tribunal of Cartagena was founded for the northern coastal territory and the islands. This was probably intended as the commencement of a systematic subdivision of the vast district for, a few years later, in anticipation of the erection of the bishopric of Buenos Ayres in 1620, the Suprema presented to Philip III an elaborate consulta strongly urging the establishment there of a tribunal. It pointed out that the arrests made in Lima showed the country to be full of Portuguese Judaizers, who had every facility of entrance and departure at Buenos Ayres. From there to Lima there were seven hundred leagues; the roads were good, the country populous and the Portuguese drove a thriving trade, enriching themselves and perverting the Indian converts. A commissioner would not answer, for he had to send seven hundred leagues to Lima, with as many in return, before he could act, while a tribunal could take note of every passenger landing or departing, and not only defend the faith but avert the political dangers threatened by the correspondence of these foreigners with the enemy. Besides, it was a great hardship when a man, for a slight offence such as blasphemy, had to be taken under guard for seven hundred leagues, at great cost, to be sentenced perhaps to abjure de levi and to hear a mass. If the projected cathedral were founded a prebend could be taken to diminish the expense and a single inquisitor would suffice, as in Majorca.606
Given the necessity for the Inquisition, the arguments were unanswerable, but they elicited no response for the crown was impoverished and shrank from having to support another tribunal. About 1620 another effort was made by the procurator of the Atlantic provinces, in a memorial repeating the same arguments and suggesting that a district be formed of Rio de la Plata, Paraguay and Tucuman up to the boundaries of los Charcas, thus extending some three hundred leagues and leaving four hundred for the Lima tribunal.607 This was referred to the Suprema which presented a consulta urging favorable action February 1, 1621, but the illness and speedy death of Philip III intervened and on March 31, 1623, it applied again to Philip IV, supporting its arguments with letters from the tribunal of Lima and the commissioner at Buenos Ayres, but to no effect. The next move came from the king, who, on April 12, 1630, communicated to the Suprema a paper describing how the Dutch lost no opportunity of introducing heretical books and perverting the natives of those regions. He thought it would be well to found an Inquisition in Buenos Ayres and, if the expenses were too great, there might be an inquisitor and a fiscal, while the other offices could be filled by wealthy men who would gladly serve gratuitously. Or, if this were too costly, a Dominican fraile could fill the post of inquisitor as in Naples and other parts of Italy, and he ordered the Suprema to arrange the matter accordingly. We shall see that in Peru, as in Mexico, the tribunal and Suprema evaded all efforts to relieve the royal treasury of the burden and can scarce wonder that Philip, with all his fanaticism, was economically disposed, but this did not suit the ideas of the Suprema. It replied in a consulta of April 17th, insisting that an inquisitor, fiscal, notary, alcaide and portero, with salaries and expenses aggregating at least six thousand ducats a year, were indispensable. The other officials, whose time would not be exclusively occupied, might be selected from among opulent persons, and that by aiding to suppress the contraband trade of the Dutch the royal revenues could be correspondingly increased. The prospect of this outlay refrigerated Philip’s zeal, and he returned the consulta with the endorsement that the disadvantages prevented the execution of the project; the Lima tribunal must appoint a commissioner of special ability and the governor would be ordered to assist him.608
This rebuff silenced the Suprema for the time but, on September 19, 1630, it returned to the charge. The Lima tribunal, in a letter of June 28, 1629, had related how a soldier in the port of Buenos Ayres, on the look-out for a vessel, had picked up on the shore a sealed package addressed “A las justicias del Perú” and on opening found it full of attacks on the papal and monarchical authority. This showed, it said, the audacity with which the heretics were disseminating their doctrines in those regions. They were also circulating tracts which had been seized, one of which was enclosed to prove to the king the necessity of ordering efficacious support to the Inquisition by the royal officials, and how desirable ii would be to establish a tribunal at Buenos Ayres.609 This appeal likewise fell on deaf ears and, on November 26, 1636, the Suprema forwarded to Lima the king’s reply with corresponding instructions.610
The suggestion was renewed, March 1, 1636, by the fiscal of the Audiencia of la Plata, but this time the proposed seat of the tribunal was in Tucuman. This led the king, November 2, 1638, to ask for information from the audiencia, the viceroy and other authorities. To this the President of Charcas replied, warmly approving of the project, but for a wholly different reason, saying that during his years of service he had observed the great oppression of the people by the commissioners, maltreating them on trivial pretexts, ordering them to appear at Lima with excessive cost and irreparable disgrace and molesting them in many ways, for which they dared not seek redress, for it lay at such a distance and the remedy was to them so horrible. The audiencia answered, March 10, 1640, recommending Córdoba de Tucuman as the most desirable seat. Two inquisitors and a fiscal, with salaries of two thousand pesos and a secretary with one thousand would suffice and would be largely defrayed by the fines and confiscations. Viceroy Chinchon delayed responding until September 29, 1641, when he said that it would be advantageous but costly; the salaries would have to be large, for living was dear, and the confiscations would be insufficient; in the last auto, although the culprits were many and of much reputed wealth, the property had almost wholly disappeared. Chinchon’s successor, the Marquis of Mancera, had already written, June 8, 1641, that Chinchon had handed the matter over to him; he had referred it to the President of Chuquisaca, whose report he enclosed, and he dwelt upon the evil of the Portuguese who entered Paraguay by San Pablo and spread over the land.611
By this time the Portuguese and Catalan revolts gave Philip ample occupation, and the absolute exhaustion of the treasury forbade all thoughts of incurring avoidable expenses. When these pressing necessities diminished, the suggestion was renewed in 1662; the erection of an audiencia in the growing city of Buenos Ayres led the Lima tribunal to urge the establishment of an Inquisition there or in Córdoba de Tucuman. Communication with Spain was easy from there and two inquisitors would suffice, or one and a fiscal. The Suprema warmly advocated the measure, but favored Córdoba, which was only eight days’ journey, or even only five, from Buenos Ayres. The failure of this effort seems to have discouraged further official attempts and we hear nothing more of the matter for nearly a century. In 1754 the Jesuit Pedro de Arroyo wrote to the procurador of his province in Spain, calling attention to the necessities of an additional tribunal. That of Lima was so far off—a thousand leagues, he said—that it was of no use to them. In the twenty years spent in those provinces, he had never heard of an arrest by the Inquisition except one in Buenos Ayres, and then the prisoner escaped before reaching Lima; there was, however, a case of a cleric of Paraguay who spontaneously obeyed a summons to Lima. A commissioner had told him that, in ten or eleven years, he had had ten or eleven cases, which he had investigated and reported to Lima, but had never had a reply, except in the first case and this was not until two years had elapsed, by which time the culprit had disappeared. A second tribunal was now more necessary than ever, as the Portuguese were inundating the land. In the jurisdiction of Buenos Ayres they were said to number six thousand, and there was the same proportion in other districts; in that of Córdoba, the audiencia banished them some years ago, but they merely moved their residence and their places were taken by other Portuguese. About the same time Pedro de Logu, a calificador in Buenos Ayres, called attention to the mischief to religion arising from the scum collected there and subjected to no supervision; the powers of the commissioner were limited, he had no profit from his work and the introduction of prohibited books was frequent. These unofficial representations seem to have elicited no attention, but more authoritative was the memorial, in 1765, of Pedro Miguel, Archbishop of la Plata, whose residence there for twenty years had shown to him the necessity of a tribunal in Buenos Ayres. To this the fiscal of the Council of Indies replied, December 13, 1766, with an indifference which forms the measure of inquisitorial decadence. The rarity, he says, of cases of faith, attributable to the care exercised in preventing the immigration of descendants of infected persons, rendered it unnecessary to burden the fisc with the expenses of another tribunal; besides, the difficulty of reaching Lima restored to the bishops their inherent jurisdiction in such matters and they could sufficiently protect the faith.612 It may be hoped, for the good archbishop’s peace of mind, that he did not avail himself of this unofficial authorization to set up an episcopal Inquisition.
It may be gathered from these ineffectual efforts to multiply tribunals that the financial question was as important in South America as we have seen it in Mexico. The experiences of the two Inquisitions were similar. When Cerezuela and his colleague went to Lima, they bore instructions to the royal officials to disburse to the receiver of confiscations ten thousand pesos a year for the salaries of the two inquisitors, the fiscal and the notary.613 This made no provision for other inevitable expenses. The theory on which the Holy Office was based was that it should be self-sustaining—supported by the fines and confiscations which it inflicted—and that when these were in excess the surplus should enure to the royal fisc. In Lima, more clearly than in Mexico, Philip defined repeatedly that this royal subvention should continue only as long as there was deficiency from other sources of income. In the quarrels which speedily arose between the tribunal and the viceroy, Toledo kept it in some sort of subjection by making the inquisitors apply to him personally for their salaries. This was highly distasteful, and they seem to have endeavored to escape from it by excommunicating the royal officials who declined to honor their demands, for cédulas of July 17 and 27, 1572, addressed to the viceroy and inquisitors, prohibited them from drawing on the royal treasury and enforcing payment with censures; they were to hand in their accounts which were to be promptly paid, until the fines and penances and confiscations should suffice. If this meant that they should render accounts of these other sources of income, it received no attention. In Lima as in Mexico no effort on the part of the government could obtain an insight into the finances of the tribunal and the royal subvention was indefinitely prolonged.614
Still this did not provide for the salaries of the minor officials and the other unavoidable expenses. For awhile doubtless the tribunal felt the pinch of poverty. We find the Suprema suggesting that, if the prisons are insufficient, they can be made good out of the fines and penances; the alguacil is to be dismissed and, if another is appointed, he must serve without salary; possibly the viceroy may be induced to grant pensions on some of the vacant repartimientos of Indians. The tribunal astutely raised the question of the ayuda de costa, or supplementary payment to meet the expenses of the visitations, which it had no intention of making, and it was told to consult the viceroy and report, after which the Suprema would consult the king. In this it doubtless failed, but we chance to hear of an ayuda de costa paid as a reward for the auto de fe of 1578. Philip was by no means disposed to be liberal. In 1593 a question arose as to the salary of a fiscal ad interim and he rather grudgingly, by a cédula of February 7, 1594, ordered that one-half might be paid, until the confiscations should suffice.615
Meanwhile the activity of the tribunal was rapidly enabling it to emerge from its penury. Its correspondence with the Suprema between 1570 and 1594 shows that confiscations were continually decreed and were apparently profitable. Frequent references occur to the estate of a Dr. Quiñones, who owned a mine which was to be rented until sentence was pronounced and then was to be sold; he also had a library which seems to have been of value and was to be disposed of either in bulk or at retail. Up to 1583 the total receipts from confiscations amounted to thirty-eight thousand pesos, or an average of nearly three thousand per annum.616 Fines were also lucrative. Between 1571 and 1573 there were twenty-seven cases sentenced in the audience-chamber, yielding in all twenty-six hundred pesos of which a thousand were levied on Rodrigo de Arcas, parish priest of Ribera, for solicitation in the confessional. Between 1581 and 1585 fifty-seven cases, similarly sentenced in private, furnished eighty-three hundred pesos. In 1583 there came a piece of good fortune in a legacy of Pedro de la Peña, Bishop of Quito, who left to the tribunal twenty thousand pesos to build a chapel for his interment. The house and prison thus far occupied were unfitted for the growing activity of the tribunal; with the legacy and the proceeds of sale of the existing building, a much finer structure was erected, including a prison with twelve cells. With increasing business came increasing income and, while the pretext of poverty continued to be put forward to the king, the tribunal soon began to accumulate capital and place it at interest. In 1596, Inquisitor Ordoñez, while blaming the receiver Juan de Saracho, admitted that he had succeeded in amassing twenty thousand pesos, part of which sum was invested in censos or ground-rents. To this Ordoñez, by a happy stroke, added seven thousand more from the estate of Pedro González de Montalban, whose property had been sequestrated. He was very sick and obtained his liberation by making a will in favor of the tribunal.617 The Portuguese Judaizers now began to occupy a constantly increasing share of the tribunal’s attention, opening up a most prosperous field of operations. The time had come when the temporary subvention should be withdrawn, but the tribunal continued quietly to demand and receive it.
It was impossible to keep wholly secret the absorption of large estates and the investments of accumulating capital. The attention of Philip III was called to the matter and, in a letter of June 4, 1614, to the viceroy, he recited the conditions on which the grant had been made; he had learned that the salaries continued to be paid by the treasury, in spite of the receipt from these sources of amounts sufficient to defray them in whole or in part, and he therefore ordered that, when the salaries were paid, the viceroy should inform himself of the receipts from other sources and deduct them from the charge on the treasury, making full reports to the king. This was evaded by the receiver giving a certificate such as he saw fit, of what moneys he had on hand, which naturally was found to be a worthless safe-guard, and the viceroy was ordered to require from the receiver a statement of all receipts every year. It was found impossible to procure this and Philip, in a letter to the Viceroy Squillace, April 26, 1618, after recalling all the previous attempts, ordered him to appoint from the treasury two experienced accountants to audit the receiver’s accounts and report the result to the king. The accountants were duly appointed, but the receiver refused absolutely to exhibit his accounts—he had sent them to the inquisitor-general as he was required to do by his instructions. This exhausted the royal patience and one of the first acts of Philip IV was a letter to the viceroy, June 11, 1621, ordering the suspension of payments until the inquisitors should furnish authentic evidence that the confiscations had not sufficed to meet them. This went on for two years, the inquisitors preferring to forego the subvention rather than to expose the flourishing condition of their finances. They brought incessant pressure to bear, however, and finally induced Viceroy Guadalsacar, under a resolution of the treasury officials, to resume payments on the presentation of certain certificates of the contador, the scrivener of sequestrations and the receiver. On learning this the Council of Indies made a thorough investigation of the whole matter and reported that, in view of the exhaustion of the royal treasury, and that since the foundation of the tribunal, up to 1625, it had consumed six hundred and sixty-two thousand ducats without having returned anything from the fines and confiscations, it was wholly wrong that the money should have been used by the officials in buying lands and censos which they were now enjoying. To put an end to this the king, April 20, 1629, issued a cédula ordering that the conditions expressed in 1621 should be inviolably observed, no matter what might be the exigency, under pain not only of the royal displeasure but that all such disbursements should be charged to the viceroy and be deducted from his salary. To insure observance this cédula was to be entered on the books of the treasury and all auditors were to be governed by it.618
These were brave words but it is probable that the Inquisition found means to render them nugatory, while an apparent compromise was sought at the expense of a third party—the Church. We have seen (Mexico, p. 216) how a prebend in each cathedral was suppressed at the first vacancy and the fruits were paid to the tribunal. The process was necessarily slow, commencing with the brief of Urban VIII, March 10, 1627, and delayed by waiting for the successive vacancies and also by resistance, in some cases, of the cathedral chapters.[619] It was virtually completed in 1635, when Philip wrote to the treasury officials, September 26th, that the senior Inquisitor, Juan de Mañozca, had advised him that the suppression of the prebends for the payment of salaries had been effected. The orders with regard to this are to be executed and, as he supposes that the arrearages of salaries have been paid, he writes to Mañozca that in future the prebends are to be applied to the salaries as the treasury is in urgent need of relief—which shows that up to that time the king had continued to pay them and even to make good the arrearages, in spite of the decisive provisions of 1629.620 The prebends thus obtained were eight in number, in the cathedrals of Lima, Quito, Trugillo, Arequipa, Cuzco, Paz, Chuquisaca and Santiago de Chile. They produced, as we have seen, eleven thousand pesos a year, thus more than replacing the subvention. Further documents fail us here but, from the experience of Mexico and Cartagena, it is fairly to be assumed that, in spite of the prebends and of the large confiscations now coming in, the tribunal managed to continue drawing the subvention and, in 1677, there was still discussion of the subject.621
The time, in fact, had come when the finances of the tribunal were to be placed on an enduring foundation. We shall see hereafter the details of the complicidad grande, when nearly all the leading merchants in Lima, of Portuguese extraction, were arrested on charges of Judaism and their property was sequestrated. Arrests had commenced in 1634 and the tragedy culminated in the great auto of January 23, 1639. What was the amount acquired by the tribunal can never be known, but popular report estimated it as a million of pesos, and we have seen that Viceroy Chinchon reported that it virtually disappeared without any one knowing where it went. Philip IV, whose necessities were daily becoming greater, was led by the report of the enormous sequestrations to seek an explanation of the Suprema, which replied to him, December 19, 1636, that the sequestrations had been large but they shrank to almost nothing from the claims of creditors, some of which came from Spain.622 Disappointed in this he wrote, March 30, 1637, congratulating the inquisitors on their zeal and suggesting that it appeared to him just that out of them the fisc should be reimbursed for its outlays on their salaries, and that enough should be set aside to provide for the future in case the prebends did not suffice. The inquisitors replied, with outward demonstrations of respect, that they would report to the Suprema to which the funds belonged; that as yet there had only been sequestrations, while innumerable claims on the property had been presented, and that many prisoners had been found innocent and their estates had been restored to them—to five of these, Pedro de Soria, Andrés Muñoz, Francisco Sotelo, Antonio de los Santos and Jorje Danila there had thus been returned a hundred and seventy-four thousand pesos. Philip made an attempt to investigate the matter by appointing, in 1643, with the assent of the Suprema, Dr. Martin Real as visitador to examine into the finances of the tribunals of Lima and Cartagena, but, as we shall see, he was baffled in Cartagena and, after stormy experiences, returned to Spain without reaching Lima.623 Repulsed thus at every point, Philip resorted to somewhat arbitrary measures. In 1644 we find the Suprema complaining of the seizure at Seville of two or three large sequestrations sent there from Lima for settlement with creditors, and again of twenty thousand ducats’ worth of wool taken by him, of which Alfonso Cardosso & Co. were demanding the surrender as owners.624
What share of the spoils the Suprema obtained it would be impossible to say. We happen to hear, in 1640, of twelve thousand pesos brought to it from Lima by Juan de Arostegui, which is doubtless only a portion of the amount doled out to it by the tribunal.625 The latter, in fact, in its reports habitually belittled the results obtained or anticipated; it treated the Suprema as the Suprema treated the king. In reporting the arrests, in 1636, it was careful to point out that, although the prisoners were reputed to be wealthy and lived with ostentation, it was a deception, for in reality they were trading on borrowed money and had little of their own. This was a repetition of what it had said in 1631, when persecution of the Portuguese had already been going on for some years—the sequestrations made much show but with slender results; the real estate of the accused was held in order to gain the reputation of wealth, while in reality it was so encumbered as to be valueless, and the personal property was so concealed as to be undiscoverable.626
There were other productive sources of income besides the confiscations. One of these which was especially profitable was the “quebrantamientos de escrituras de juego.” Gambling was almost universal and disgusted gamesters would frequently swear off under a penalty, attested by a notarial act; the pledge would inevitably be broken and the forfeit was usually contributed to the pious uses of the Inquisition. A statement of the deposits in the arca de tres llaves, or money-chest of the tribunal, from May 4, 1630, to August 31, 1634, shows 1449 pesos from fines, 4909 from donations and 35,829 from the quebrantamientos, or in all 42,187, representing an annual income of nearly nine thousand pesos from these sources alone.627 When to this we add the confiscations, the prebends and the constantly increasing returns from accumulating investments, it will be seen that the tribunal was rapidly growing in wealth and how factitious were the pleas on which it maintained its grip on the royal subvention.
When, in 1631, the office of alguazil was made saleable considerable sums were collected from this source. In 1641 the position of alguazil mayor of Santiago de Chile—a purely ornamental office, unsalaried but with contingent privileges—was bid up to 6500 pesos.628 As these commissions, however, were issued by the inquisitor-general it is probable that they were duly accounted for. Indeed, we have seen (p. 224) that the Suprema endeavored in this way to explain the remittances which it could not conceal.
Increasing wealth naturally led to multiplication of offices and generally careless expenditure. In 1674 the receiver or treasurer lamented that he had striven in vain to reduce the affairs of the tribunal to order. The revenues had fallen to 35,951 pesos and the expenses exceeded them. Still, he held that, in spite of the considerable remittances to the Suprema and the overgrown payroll, the income could be made to suffice if it were not for the expenditures of the inquisitors on their houses and their frequent elevation to bishoprics, after which they persisted in drawing their salaries.629
The investments of the tribunal were principally in censos—rent-charges on real estate. When these fell into arrears the property was put up and sold at auction, apparently still subject to the rent, the arrearages being collected from the purchase-money, and the numerous references to these transactions show that they were by no means infrequent. Still, the Inquisition assumed that it was an indulgent creditor. When, about 1705, several successive bad harvests had rendered the farmers unable to pay their rents, they petitioned the viceroy for a reduction of the principal. In transmitting this request to the king, the viceroy asked the opinion of the various tribunals, to which the Inquisition replied that the principal should remain intact as the deficient harvests were temporary and the land retained its value: that it was different in Chile, where the censos on urban property were reduced in principal after the earthquake which ruined the buildings. The tribunal therefore recommended a postponement of arrears and reduction of interest until the bad season should pass; this was what it had done with its debtors; it had not thrown them in prison or put up the farms at auction, even though the arrears were large, proceeding with benignity and equity and treating each case on its merits.630
Under a succession of venal and unprincipled inquisitors, the finances of the tribunal became involved in confusion and the magnitude of the amounts at stake shows how successful it had been in accumulation. In 1733 the two inquisitors were Gaspar Ibañez de Peralta and Christóbal Sánchez Calderon. The former was old and failing and the latter was engaged, under the name of his chaplain, in mercantile operations with the funds of the tribunal with such success that, in 1739, he remitted eighty thousand pesos to Spain and had purchased a valuable property near Lima. He also spent five thousand in decorating his house, and when the security of the temporary receiver Juan Estéban Peña expired he opposed its renewal, resulting in heavy loss when Peña became bankrupt. The new receiver, Manuel de Ilarduy speedily fell into default for more than two hundred and thirty thousand pesos and there were other deficiencies. In 1735 Diego de Unda was sent from Spain as fiscal with special orders to investigate the finances. In 1736 he reported that he found everything right except that when Calderon insisted that Ilarduy should render his accounts and deposit all funds in the chest and on the receiver’s refusal, had embargoed his property, Ibañez verbally suspended the embargo, so that when, on the next day, the embargo was renewed, it was found that large amounts of silver and merchandise had been removed and there only remained a little silver dish and some vessels in his oratory. Still Ilarduy was forced to pay fifty thousand pesos and furnish securities amounting to a hundred and ten thousand more.
It seemed impossible to secure honest officials. Unda had brought with him as secretary of the tribunal Ignacio de Irazábal, who was made auditor. He was detected in passing false accounts for Ilarduy and was dismissed, as likewise was another secretary, Gerónimo de la Torre. The struggle between Calderon and Ilarduy became mortal, and the amounts at stake must have been large for the latter sent emissaries to Spain with a hundred thousand pesos with which to bribe the Suprema to dismiss the inquisitor. He succeeded in having a visitador sent with full powers to investigate and punish, with results that we shall see hereafter. It is only necessary here to say that Calderon’s and Unda’s property was sequestrated, to be released in 1747 by orders of the Suprema. A new factor had appeared on the scene when, in 1737, Mateo de Amusquíbar came as fiscal, to be not long afterwards promoted to the inquisitorship. He formed an alliance with Ilarduy; they were both Biscayans and the Biscayan faction became supreme. Unda died, May 27, 1748, and Calderon was living in retirement on his plantation. The vacancy was filled, in 1751 by Diego Rodríguez Delgado who came with special orders to investigate the finances. He promptly reported that it was impossible to examine the accounts of the receiver, which were in a state too confused to admit of verification. He had learned that the cost of maintaining the prisoners did not amount to more than a thousand pesos per annum, while it was charged at four thousand. There were seventy thousand due on the rents of farms and fruits of prebends and, by the reduction of exorbitant salaries this amount when collected could readily be increased to a hundred thousand, more than enough to rebuild the inquisition and its chapel, which had lain in ruins since the earthquake of 1746. Under the preceding receiver, the confiscation of Pedro Uban, condemned in 1736, had amounted to more than sixty thousand pesos, but no trace could be found of the existence or the expenditure of this sum. No reform however was possible in view of the alliance between Amusquíbar and Ilarduy. No reform, in fact, followed, although after all the actors had passed away, Calderon’s property was seized to make good the deficit of Antonio Morante, an administrador whom he had appointed and kept in office without requiring security and, in 1773, a suit was in progress with the executor of his estate for over thirty thousand pesos, the outcome of which the records fail to inform us. Altogether, through these quarrels we obtain an inside view of venality and corruption which probably were not confined to this period. In 1751 we learn that Amusquíbar, on entering office in 1744, had remitted nineteen thousand pesos to the Suprema, since when nothing had been sent. The income had fallen to thirty thousand and there was little more than forty thousand in the chest.631
The inevitable results of dishonesty and disorder were heightened by external causes and, in 1777, we find the resources of the tribunal materially reduced. After the earthquake of 1746 the rate of interest on the censos had been lowered from five per cent. to three. There were few profitable confiscations to make good the deficit, the fruits of the prebends were falling off and their collection was becoming difficult. In 1777 that of Quito owed about ten thousand pesos, that of Trujillo eleven thousand, that of Arequipa, owing to the decline in prices was greatly diminished in value. Salaries were in arrears to the extent of twenty thousand pesos and the efforts of the receiver to make collections were fruitless. The houses of the inquisitors were unfinished and Inquisitor Lopez Grillo was obliged to rent one, at the distance of a block from the tribunal. In 1784 the earthquake in Cuzco caused a further decline in the canonries of la Paz, Arequipa and Cuzco; an urgent request was made for the suppression of the office of the third inquisitor, and authority was asked to sell property in order to pay salaries.632 All this betokens real distress and yet, although the administration of affairs can scarce be thought to have improved in the following years, when, in 1813, the decree of suppression was received in Lima and the property of the tribunal was inventoried for the benefit of the royal treasury, there were found in its chests ready money to the amount of 68,834 pesos, 3¼ reales, besides 2400 pesos of jewels confiscated on Inquisitor Unda and 2500, the valuation of the furniture of the chapel. From the statement of the auditor it appeared that the capital of the censos and value of the plantations belonging to the tribunal amounted to 1,508,518 pesos. A portion of this, however, was not its property but was held in trust for special purposes. Of the money on hand, 47,433 pesos were funds of the tribunal, while 13,325 pesos, 2 reales appertained to the Colegio de Santa Cruz, founded by Mateo Pastor de Velasco and Bernardino Olave for female foundlings, and placed under the charge of the Inquisition, also 8076 pesos, 1¼ reales was the balance on hand of a foundation known as of Zelayeta and Nuñez de Santiago. The capital of the Colegio de Santa Cruz amounted to 394,502 pesos, 6½ reales; that of the other foundation is not stated but, assuming them together to be 500,000 pesos, it would leave about a million for the accumulations of the tribunal.633
The men who were at the head of the tribunal, whatever may have been their reputation at home, were not, as a rule, able to resist the demoralizing influences around them, intensified by the irresponsible autocratic power conferred by their position. The only effective control possible to the Suprema lay in the appointment of a visitador or inspector, clothed with superior authority, and this was an expedient rarely resorted to, especially as the inspector was exposed to the same temptations and was apt to yield to them. The Suprema was not kept in ignorance of the derelictions of its appointees, for the inquisitors rarely worked in harmony. Deadly quarrels arose between them and they abused each other without stint in their communications to headquarters, while their subordinates were equally free in exposing the malfeasance of their superiors. The publication of much of this secret correspondence and of complaints of aggrieved parties by Señor Medina thus gives us an exceptional opportunity to gain an insight into the interior life of a tribunal and into its use of the enormous power which it enjoyed.
We have seen that the second inquisitor, Bustamente, died at Panamá, and that Cerezuela was alone in opening the tribunal. The fiscal, Alcedo, and the notary, Arrieta, were quarrelling mortally with each other, and both were writing to the Suprema, criticizing Cerezuela’s inexperience and lack of self-assertion, and asking that the new inquisitor to be sent should be a man of greater force. Their wishes were gratified when Antonio Gutiérrez de Ulloa arrived, March 31, 1571. It was not long before his arbitrary and scandalous conduct aroused indignation, but those who dared to complain were made to suffer. Secret information, however, was conveyed to the Suprema and the viceroy, the Count del Villar, was unreserved in his communications to the king, representing that Ulloa kept spies in the viceregal palace, who carried off papers and documents and that he had indirectly farmed the quicksilver mines of Guancavelica, making large sums to the detriment of the royal interests. A cleric named Gaspar Zapata de Mendoza, as representative of the clergy of Peru, after several vain attempts, managed to escape to Brazil; he was captured by the French and carried to Dieppe, whence he made his way to Spain, but it was not until 1592 that he was able to present in Toledo a memorial to Inquisitor-general Quiroga in which the conduct of Ulloa was set forth in detail. His promiscuous amours with maids and married women were notorious; he publicly kept as a concubine Catalina Morejon, a married woman, who used her influence to dictate appointments and modify sentences until, after repeated efforts, Villar succeeded in banishing her. On one occasion a husband found him in bed with his wife; Ulloa threatened him as inquisitor and he slunk away; another husband was less timid, he killed the wife and chased the adulterer through the streets. He was in the habit of walking the streets at night dressed as a cavalier, brawling and fighting, and on one Holy Thursday he supped with a number of strumpets. He and the Dominican Provincial, Fray Francisco de Valderrama, each had as mistress a relative of the other; when the three years of the provincialate ended, Valderrama aspired to be prior of the Lima convent, but the new Provincial, Agustin Montes, refused to appoint him because he was a bastard, whereupon Ulloa went to the convent, thrust a dagger to the provincial’s breast and swore he would kill him, when Montes yielded. He was involved in perpetual contests with the judges and royal officials, whom he treated without ceremony or justice, interfering with their functions, of which a number of cases were given which, if not exaggerated, show that the land was at the mercy of the inquisitorial officials, who murdered, robbed and took women at their pleasure, and any who complained were fined or kept chained in prison. The limitations of the fuero enjoyed by the ministers of the Holy Office were disregarded and no one could obtain justice against them.634
Before this black catalogue of crime reached the Suprema, the complaints had shown that some interference was necessary, and it had sent as visitador Juan Ruiz de Prado, who reached Lima February 11, 1587. He had full authority to prosecute any members of the tribunal and to send them with the evidence to Spain for judgement, but those who anticipated relief were disappointed. As Villar writes, he took up his residence with Ulloa, and his officials were lodged with those of the tribunal, who made much of them. He made no secret that he came to take care of Ulloa’s honor, so that all complainants were frightened off. Villar had his special grievances which show how impossible was efficient government, when a power existed within the state superior to the state itself. News was received that two ships had sailed from England for the Pacific; two Englishmen, John Drake, cousin of the famous Sir Francis, and Richard Farrel, who had been wrecked in the River Plate, had been sent to the Inquisition, as was the fashion with heretic prisoners; the viceroy desired to examine them to learn, if possible, something about the threatened corsairs and he asked the inquisitors to send the men to him or, if that was not possible, to allow one of his officers to examine them, or again, if that was impossible, to examine them themselves and communicate to him what they could learn; Ulloa was willing but Prado refused, saying that he would communicate with the Suprema who could inform the king, thus postponing for a year the information wanted at the moment. Then there came an alarm about some English ships on the coast, and Villar ordered all who were liable to military service to be in readiness to defend Callao. Ulloa and Prado assumed that their officials and familiars would fulfil their duty by guarding the buildings of the Inquisition, and gave instructions not to obey the viceroy’s orders, who vainly pointed out to them that, in defending the city, their men would be defending the Inquisition. At the auto of 1587 they virtually took possession of the city, treated the viceroy as a private person subject to their orders, and grossly humiliated him, to all of which he submitted for the sake of peace. They meddled in everything, and with their unlimited power of excommunication and fines, no one dared to resist them. They summoned his secretaries before them and forced them to reveal everything, even of the most confidential character, and to produce official papers, of which they retained copies. They appointed royal officials as familiars, thus releasing them from all responsibility to the viceroy, to the courts and to their superiors. Villar declared himself helpless to remedy all this unless the king would interfere.635
The memorial of Mendoza tells the same story of the alliance between the visitador and the inquisitor, and mentions a case of a priest named Hernan Gutiérrez de Ulloa, who had lent a considerable sum to Inquisitor Ulloa and being unable to obtain repayment had procured a papal brief against him. Prado took the brief from him, fined him heavily, suspended him for a year from his benefice and sentenced him to four years’ reclusion, the result being that he died under the persecution.636
The evil friendship between these men did not last long and, in January, 1588, Prado commenced the real duties of his office. He overhauled all the proceedings of the tribunal since its foundation, examining 1265 documents, his notes on which covered 1650 pages and fully substantiated his conclusions as to its irregular methods, its cruel delays, and its inflicting public penances for matters not of faith and beyond its jurisdiction. He reported that he had drawn up 216 charges against Ulloa, many of them applicable also to Cerezuela. There were six about his relations with women, involving much publicity and scandal, and there would have been more had he cared to investigate further in this direction. He said that Ulloa had accumulated considerable sums which he sent to Spain; he was virtually the farmer of the quicksilver mines of Guancavelica, for when bids were invited he frightened off all bidders except his brother and an accomplice, who obtained the contract for twenty or thirty thousand pesos less than others were ready to offer. He kept around him a band of disreputable creatures, who ministered to his vices and were above the law. No one could collect debts of them, for when suit was brought he would order it discontinued and he was obeyed. When he was sole inquisitor he used to go hunting for a fortnight at a time, leaving the accused in prison and delaying their cases. Sometimes he took with him a certain mestizo who had a quarrel with another mestizo and was prosecuted in the royal court. Ulloa demanded the case, claiming that the defendant was his servant; the court demurred as the man was not de familia but only an occasional employee, whereupon he excommunicated the judge and all the alcaldes; they surrendered the case which was settled before him for eight pesos.637
When Prado presented the 216 charges, Ulloa quietly allowed a year to elapse before undertaking to answer them. Prado seems to have been in no hurry. Four years had been spent in the visit and the Suprema had repeatedly ordered his return, which he answered by alleging Ulloa’s repeated absences, sometimes for months together, during which he could not leave the tribunal; then he gave sickness as an excuse, or that he had not a real with which to pay for the voyage. Finally he sent the papers by the secretary, Martínez de Marcolaeta, who started from Callao May 6, 1592, and reached Spain the same year. After this Ulloa no longer kept terms with him and ordered him to leave the tribunal, which he refused to do. Ulloa then denounced him to the Suprema, pointing out that he could have sailed at any departure of the fleets but that he desired to remain because he was in partnership with an Augustinian fraile, Francisco de Figueroa, whom he appointed commissioner at Trujillo and then at Potosí, where they made twenty-five thousand pesos. Ulloa publicly spoke of him in terms too opprobrious for any lackey to endure, and the fiscal, Arpide, joined in accusing him of unlawful gains, in granting licences to leave the country, and of protecting unworthy persons by appointing them as familiars. The Suprema attributed the quarrel to the close friendship which Prado had formed for a Dr. Salinas, a man of notoriously bad character, whom he had made advocate of prisoners and then of the fisc, in which capacity he had his suits brought before the tribunal, to the wronging of third parties.638
Finally the orders of the Suprema became so pressing that Prado was obliged to leave Lima, April 14, 1594, Ulloa managing so that he received no salary for his return. From Havana he sent a report of his visit, which was approved, not without some rebuke. Of the 216 charges against Ulloa, 118 were accepted and, by sentence of December 15, 1594, he was suspended for five years, fined and ordered to present himself before the inquisitor-general for reprimand—a sentence suggestive of the customary indulgence shown to official malfeasance. Prado also proposed thirty-one articles of reform, the most important of which was the deprivation of the fuero, in criminal cases, of familiars and servants of commissioners; subordinates of the tribunal were to have regular salaries so as to remove the temptation of accepting bribes, and there were many other suggestions for improving the operation of the tribunal, diminishing injustice and relieving the people from abusive extortions. The Suprema approved of all this and directed Prado to return to Lima and put the reform into execution, but, when these orders reached Havana, Prado had sailed for Spain; he did not get back to Lima until 1596, by which time Ulloa had escaped his sentence by dying and there is little trace of any reform by Prado, who died January 18, 1599.639
Meanwhile the vacant inquisitorship had been filled by the arrival, February 4, 1594, of the Licentiate Antonio Ordóñez y Flóres. Ulloa at once announced his intention of visiting the district, which he carried out in spite of his colleague’s protest to delay until he should have familiarized himself with the business of the tribunal. Ulloa traversed the land spreading terror wherever he went by the indulgence of his passions. A memorial to the inquisitor-general, from a gentleman named Diego Vanegas, son of a judge of the Contratacion of Seville, affords an illustration of the reckless abuses possible under such institutions. When Ulloa, on his way to Charcas, stopped at Cuzco and lodged in the house of Francisco de Loaysa, a servant of the latter came where Vanegas and some friends were talking in the public square, and began boasting of the powers of the inquisitor which were the greatest on earth; there was, he said, the Licentiate Parra who had some words with a servant of Ulloa, in consequence of which he was arrested; Ulloa called him a dog of a Jew, an ensambenitado, with other insults and threw him in prison. Vanegas remarked that they did not wish to hear anything more about it, and for this he was seized and carried before Ulloa who called him a scoundrel, an Indian, a dog and other opprobrious epithets. Then summoning his servants, about twenty persons rushed in whom he told to kill the rascal. One of them gave him a severe cut on the head while the rest pummelled him. Doña Mariana, wife of the host, entered and interceded for him; Ulloa declared that he was going to give him five hundred lashes, but on her entreaty he diminished it to three hundred, then to two hundred and finally consented to send him to the corregidor with orders to banish him. Ulloa left Cuzco the next day but, hearing on the road that Vanegas had said that he would go to Spain to complain, he sent back orders to seize him. Vanegas was taken from his bed where he was recovering from his wounds, was thrown in prison in chains and the next day was carried to Siguana where Ulloa swore him on the cross, made him sign a paper without reading it and carried him to Potosí, where he lay chained in prison for four months. Thence he was sent two hundred leagues to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, as a soldier condemned to serve for three years on the frontier or in the galleys. Then he was returned in chains through Potosí to Misque, being wounded in an attempt to escape. Carried fifty leagues farther, still in chains, he effected his escape and, after many perils in four hundred leagues of travel, he reached Lima, where he reported to the viceroy and with his permission and that of Ordóñez he was allowed to sail for Spain to present his complaint.640
Ulloa continued his so-called visitation in this fashion until orders came in October, 1596, to Cepeda, President of the Audiencia of la Plata, to notify him that his commission would terminate in four months. He appealed to the viceroy who told him that he must obey it, and Cepeda ordered him to leave Potosí. He refused, alleging his health, but the corregidor, Alonso Osorio, communicated to him a further order of the Audiencia, requiring him to do so in ten days. He still pleaded sickness, but Osorio arrested him and all his servants and, after three days, ejected him from the city. He reached Lima, July 7, 1597, and died six days later at the age of 63. He attributed his disgrace to the report of a visitador of the Audiencia of Lima that he and his brother, whom he had made alguazil of the tribunal, had embezzled some three hundred thousand pesos.641 If there were even partial truth in the statement the plea of the poverty of the tribunal can be understood.
Meanwhile Ordóñez had commenced his official career by letting it be known that all who had claims to collect within the district of the Inquisition could assign them to him, and they would divide the proceeds. This was an open invitation to the commission of fraud, resulting, as the secretary reported, in converting the Holy Office into a business office. He also took money from the chest—at one time as much as ten thousand pesos—which he confided to a merchant to trade for him in Mexico. Before the year was out, the receiver and the secretary were making bitter complaints of him to the Suprema—he was young, inexperienced, violent tempered and abusive. Those who came voluntarily to the tribunal to discharge their consciences were so ill-treated that they declared they would rather go to hell. He would order the secretary to alter the evidence and, if a witness remonstrated, he would be abused and threatened. On his part he wrote equally unfavorable accounts of his subordinates; he knew that they assailed him but he ascribed this to the friends of Ulloa and Prado.642
Whether the Suprema believed these accusations or not, Ordóñez was not disturbed and continued to be sole inquisitor, with the exception of the brief second term of Prado from 1596 to 1599, until the arrival of Francisco Verdugo, a new inquisitor, towards the close of 1601. He was a man of different type, who had been advocate in the tribunal of Seville and fiscal in that of Murcia. While a strenuous persecutor of heresy, he was not inclined to abuse his office and he shortly reported to the Suprema that they had suspended a hundred informaciones—cases in preparation—which were without sufficient proof or were matters that did not concern the Holy Office. Ordóñez continued in office until 1612, when he became Archbishop of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, a promotion that was not to his taste, as he complained that the revenues of the see were insufficient for his decent support. Doubtless it afforded fewer opportunities than the inquisitorship.643
His successor, Andrés Juan Gaitan reached Lima, October 12, 1611; he had been fiscal of the tribunals of Cuenca and Seville and was therefore experienced in the work. About the same time Panamá, New Granada and the Antilles were detached from the tribunal of Lima on the founding of that of Cartagena.644 In October, 1623, Verdugo left Lima to occupy the see of Guamanga, to which he had been promoted. For several years he and Gaitan had been on such bad terms that they would not speak to each other, and Gaitan had moreover quarrelled with the Viceroy Guadalcázar, who had resumed a certain repartimiento of Indians that he had granted to the inquisitor. His enforcement, moreover, of the royal orders about the payment of salaries was bitterly resented by the officials and intensified the embroilment. The vacancy left by Verdugo was soon filled by Juan de Mañozca who, after founding the tribunal of Cartagena, was sent as visitador of the Audiencia of Quito and, in place of going there directly, came to Lima and occupied the position of inquisitor ad interim much to Gaitan’s disgust. He reported to the Suprema that the condition of the tribunal was deplorable; unless some action was taken there would be no Inquisition, but only a gang of men obeying a will the most obdurate and most terrible that he had ever met, under which the tribunal was diverted from its proper functions to serve Gaitan’s interest or caprices, for good or for ill. There was nothing with which he did not interfere, and that with such violence that he offended all good men, and even his own faction followed him rather through force than willingly. The fiscal was a coward; it was a pity to pay their salaries for they did nothing but impair the authority of the Holy Office.645
In October, 1625, Juan Gutiérrez Flóres arrived to take Verdugo’s place. In consequence of Mañozca’s representations he was ordered to make a secret report, which was equally unfavorable. Gaitan, he said, controlled the tribunal absolutely and supported all the claims of the officials without regard to justice. This was thoroughly understood by the people, and we can readily imagine the oppression and terrorism which afflicted the community. Flóres died, September 22, 1631; and the tribunal was reinforced by the appointment of Juan de Mañozca and Antonio de Castro y del Castillo. Gaitan continued to serve for some years, though infirm with age and sickness, accused to the last of abusing his position for gain.646 There soon followed the Portuguese complicidad grande, of which more hereafter, and this, with the complications of the resultant confiscations, for years afforded the tribunal abundant occupation more or less legitimate. With its consequent enrichment there came torpidity and for many years it did little work and its annals are bare. In June, 1688, there came as inquisitor Francisco de Valera, transferred from the tribunal of Cartagena, in order to restore peace to that city, disturbed, as we shall see hereafter, by a prolonged conflict between him and the bishop, Benavides y Piedrola. This transfer [Greek:]had been arranged for 1685, but he had delayed obedience, awaiting the arrival of a successor and, on reaching Lima, he was met with a command from the Suprema to return to Spain, which he evaded on the ground that this would leave but a single inquisitor. He paid no attention to a royal cédula of April 1, 1691, ordering Viceroy Monclova to send him at once to Spain without listening to excuses, but this was to be expected, for royal commands were not obeyed by inquisitors unless they were transmitted by the Suprema. Finally the latter ordered his jubilation or retirement on half-pay—the usual punishment of inquisitors whose offences were too flagrant to be overlooked. This reached Lima in 1703, when the tribunal submissively answered that it would obey the command with due exactitude, but that Valera had died on the previous second day of August.647
Valera had imparted some vigor to the tribunal and had held public autos in 1693 and 1694, but there was not another until 1733. His death had seriously crippled the tribunal, for his colleague Burrelo had died in 1701, the third inquisitor Suárez was old and disabled by asthma, and the fiscal, Ponte y Andrade, was so prostrated with gout that, for twenty-two months prior to November, 1704, he could not venture out of doors. By this time the civil business of the tribunal was greater than that of the royal Audiencia and it necessarily fell into confusion, while matters of faith were neglected. Suárez asked the Suprema for help and it was rendered after the customary fashion, for the fiscal Ponte was appointed inquisitor and an old professor of law, who had sought the priesthood, Gaspar Ibañez, was made fiscal. Quarrels arose immediately, for Ibañez received his commission by private hand and was sworn in immediately, while that of Ponte came by the galleons. Suárez, who was a friend of Ibañez, endeavored to enforce the latter’s seniority, which carried with it considerable emoluments, and this was resisted by Ponte. By this time there was no distinction of grade between inquisitor and fiscal; the latter had the title of inquisitor-fiscal, and the functions were interchangeable, although no one could perform both—that is of prosecutor and judge—in any given case. Ponte, in 1707, exhaled his griefs to the Suprema; his colleagues, he said, acted irregularly; Ibañez assumed to be both fiscal and inquisitor in the same case; the situation was desperate and the civil business was at a standstill.648
For more than a quarter of a century there was no improvement. Slender as was the business of the tribunal in matters of faith, it was greatly in arrears. Ibañez, who had become senior inquisitor, was sometimes unable to sit for three months at a time. Holidays, beyond those on the register, were taken until they amounted to half the days in the year. Gutiérrez de Cevallos, one of the inquisitors, on being made Bishop of Tucuman, in 1730, reported to the Suprema that he had been unable to expedite matters; there were prisoners who had been confined for thirteen years, of which eleven had passed since he had, as fiscal, presented the formal accusations—and we shall see that six more were to elapse before these dreary trials came to an end in the quemadero.649
Ibañez finally fell into dotage. Sánchez Calderon had become his colleague and Diego de Unda came as fiscal in 1735, to be rated as inquisitor when Mateo de Amusquíbar, in 1737, assumed the former position, to be in turn made inquisitor, in 1744, when he had attained the age of thirty, which was the minimum for that office. Allusion has been made above to the quarrels over the mismanagement of the finances by the receiver Ilarduy, with whom Amusquíbar formed an alliance. Amusquíbar wrote to the Suprema most damaging reports as to his colleagues; the irregularities committed in serious trials for heresy and the monstrous contradictions in civil cases. Unda, he said, acceded to all that Calderon did, and Calderon followed his own whims in opposition to the precise orders of the Suprema, while the same disregard of instructions was shown in appointments and in dismissals from office. There had, indeed, been gross irregularities in the trial culminating in the great auto of December 23, 1736, in which a woman and two effigies had been relaxed. One of the effigies was that of a Jesuit Padre, Juan Francisco de Ulloa, who had died in 1710 with a reputation of sanctity; the Jesuits had made great efforts to avert it and were deeply incensed at the disgrace inflicted on the Society. This may perhaps aid to explain why, when Calderon and Unda sent their official relation of the cases, the Suprema had replied that it felt the greatest sorrow and scandal in seeing how the affairs of religion were treated, in offence both of religion and justice, and of the honor of the Holy Office, with the threat that, if in future the laws were not observed, the inquisitors would be dismissed. Calderon and Unda, moreover, were greatly discredited by their amours. They kept as concubines two sisters, Magdalena and Bartola Romo, the daughters of the alcaide of the prison. Magdalena had three daughters whom Calderon educated in the monastery of las Catalinas, where they were known as las inquisidoras. Romo was an accomplice of Ilarduy, but when Calderon and Unda dismissed others who were compromised, they retained him on account of their relations with his daughters.650
These scandals and Calderon’s commercial enterprises were weapons used by Ilarduy who, as we have seen, sent to Spain emissaries with a hundred thousand pesos to accomplish Calderon’s downfall. One of these, Felipe de Altolaguirre, Ilarduy’s son-in-law, before his departure, openly boasted that he would not return without securing Calderon’s dismissal, and after he came back he publicly spoke of having bribed the inquisitor-general and Suprema, while Ilarduy said that it had cost him forty thousand pesos.651 What was attained was the appointment of a visitador, armed with supreme powers. The person selected was Pedro Antonio de Arenaza, inquisitor of Valencia, who was promised a salary of fourteen thousand pesos and perquisites. If Calderon is to be believed, Altolaguirre, the envoy of Ilarduy, told him that there were rich pickings to be had from the fines to be imposed on the inquisitors; that he could make large profits from merchandise which he could carry with him; that he would have the appointment of corregidores in Piura and el Cercado, yielding him thirty-six thousand pesos; that his travelling expenses would be paid and that, on his return to Spain, he could not get a seat in the Suprema unless he took with him a hundred thousand pesos.652 His experience in Madrid had evidently familiarized him with the depth of corruption existing there.
The impression conveyed by this is confirmed by the commercial aspect of the visitador’s voyage, strangely at variance with its object of reforming abuses. To escape the risk of English cruisers, Altolaguirre and Arenaza sailed from Lisbon to Rio, the visitador taking with him a large assortment of goods and some negro slaves for sale. Rio was reached in the middle of 1744 and Buenos Ayres in November, whence they passed to Santiago and arrived in Lima early in March, 1745. On March 15th Arenaza presented his credentials and at once examined the funds in the chest. Two weeks later, when Unda went to the chapel as usual to hear mass, Arenaza’s notary told him to go to Amusquíbar’s house. As he was about to enter, the notary made him get into a carriage standing at the door, when, accompanied by a secretary, he was carried to the Franciscan convent in the neighboring village of la Magdalena, with orders to speak to no one. His property was at once embargoed, his house locked up and placed under guard.
Calderon was arrested in even more unceremonious fashion. He had been sick in bed for three days when Yrazabal, the alguazil mayor, who had been reinstated, penetrated to his apartments. His physician and chaplain, who were with him, were dismissed and an order was read suspending him from office, embargoing his property and ordering his departure for Limatamba. Yrazabal collected all the keys, and at once commenced an inventory which consumed two days. Calderon remained in bed under guard, with orders to speak to no one and no one was allowed to leave the premises. The next day he was sent, in Amusquíbar’s coach, to Limatamba, where two Dominicans were ready to guard him and, on May 3, he was carried to Guaura. For a month there was busy search for the sequestrated property. Calderon declared that it consisted mostly of deposits confided to him, and he says that he was offered reinstatement and the withdrawal of the visitation, if he would give security for fifty thousand pesos and Unda for twenty thousand.653
Meanwhile Arenaza was openly retailing his negroes and his goods, through his secretary Gabiria, in rooms obligingly placed at his disposal by the Jesuits in their college. Ilarduy collected for him the proceeds and the traffic was so successful that Arenaza was speedily able to remit to Spain forty thousand four hundred pesos. The friendly assistance of the Jesuits was due not only to their rancor against Calderon, but also to their desire to shield one of their members, whose arrest had been ordered and evaded by hurrying him away and procuring the arrest of another party in his place. They were Arenaza’s advisers and Calderon’s transfer to the secret prison had been determined when an unlooked-for event changed the aspect of affairs. The Inquisitor-general, Manrique de Lara, died January 10, 1746, and was succeeded, July 26th, by Pardo y Cuesta. Calderon received the news by way of Potosí and claimed that Arenaza’s commission expired with the grantor. He hastened to Lima where he recused Arenaza as his judge, threatened to shoot him and asked the Count of Superunda, then viceroy, to give him no support. Superunda was strongly in favor of Arenaza and ordered Calderon to leave the city within ten hours, nor does it need Calderon’s accusation that he was bribed to this by the Jesuits. Arenaza, in a letter to his brother, asserts that Calderon attempted to buy him off and, when this failed, threatened him, but he would gain nothing by this “for I am resolved rather to be fried in a frying-pan in the public plaza.”654
Calderon’s faction in the city had been active in discrediting Arenaza with pamphlets, lampoons and caricatures. The viceroy stood by him, holding that his commission emanated from the Suprema and had not lapsed, but still he sought to effect a settlement. At one time it was agreed that the inquisitors should resume their offices and the sequestrations be lifted, on their giving security in fifty thousand pesos to answer judicially to the charges but, from some cause, the arrangement fell through. Then came the great earthquake of October 28, 1746, followed by pestilence, which, for a time, suspended all action. Calderon had his agents at work with the Suprema, which resolved, in April, 1747, that the inquisitors should be restored and the sequestration be lifted; that Arenaza’s functions should be limited to the subordinate officials, and that the viceroy should select some one to replace him as respected the inquisitors. It was nearly a year before these orders reached Peru, but, on March 4, 1748, Calderon and Unda entered the city triumphantly, in coaches escorted by a crowd of negroes and mulattos, with bands of music and scattering of flowers, while the bells of the convents of which they were patrons sounded a joyous peal, the demonstration continuing for two days.
Arenaza was humiliated and, when Superunda received a commission in blank for a new visitador, the warning was quite sufficient to deter any competent person from accepting the perilous position. All to whom it was offered declined, pointing out the fate of Arenaza and the danger of arousing enmities that would blast their honor and reputation. Superunda therefore brought Arenaza and the inquisitors together and, after a long conference, it was agreed that the sequestration should be lifted and that they would sit with Arenaza in the tribunal, but they failed to comply with their promise and the business was carried on by Arenaza and Amusquíbar. Unda died, May 27, 1748, of apoplexy following a visit paid to a house where he had illicit relations with the daughters. His funeral was dismal, even Calderon refusing to be present, saying that he had died as he had lived.
Superunda reported to the inquisitor-general that affairs were beyond remedy by a continuance of the visitation, and Arenaza was ordered to return to Spain. This order reached Lima at the close of 1750 and he sailed from Callao August 11, 1751, complaining bitterly that his salary of fourteen thousand pesos had been cut down to fifty-nine hundred. Amusquíbar, however, states that he was paid in addition eighteen thousand five hundred for his outward expenses and living and eight thousand for those of his return, which conflicts with the statement of Viceroy Superunda that he embarked wholly destitute of money. He died on the passage at Cartagena, but his secretary went on to Spain with the papers of the visitation.
The decision of the Suprema had suspended Calderon until he should answer judicially the charges made against him, and he consequently lived in retirement, while the tribunal was carried on by Amusquíbar and Rodríguez Delgado, who had been sent out to replace Unda. As usual they quarrelled and, in 1754, Amusquíbar formally demanded that his colleague should be removed by promotion to the episcopate, for he was inquisitor only in name, being utterly inefficient and incapable. Rodríguez, on his side, described Amusquíbar as arbitrary and impenetrably obstinate; a case had been ready for final sentence for a year, yet he could not be brought to agree as to its settlement. The sudden death of Rodríguez, however, October 31, 1756, restored peace and José de Salazar y Cevallos, who was appointed in his place, died in November, 1757, before he could assume possession, so that Amusquíbar remained sole inquisitor. He paid so little attention to his duties that in five months he was only three times in the audience-chamber and, on the plea of illness, he absented himself from Lima and appointed as his representative the fiscal, Bartolomé Lopez Grillo, an act which excited much adverse comment.
Meanwhile nothing was heard as to the dealings of the Suprema with the papers of the visitation. They seem to have been gone over with even more than customary deliberation and we chance to learn that, in 1762, Calderon was charged with improper conduct of the cases of Bartolomé Cortez de Umansoro and Andrés de Muguruza. In 1763 the Suprema adopted the expedient of sending to the Viceroy Armat y Yuniant blank commissions by which to appoint two competent ecclesiastics who with Amusquíbar should form the court to try the charges. The instructions reached Lima in 1764, by which time both Calderon and Amusquíbar had passed away and thus, some twenty years after its inception, the visitation died a natural death, every one concerned in it having passed to a higher jurisdiction.655
A paralysis had fallen on the tribunal and from this time its functions almost ceased, although its organization was kept complete and its pay-roll suffered no diminution. One of its last autos was held in 1773, in which only eight penitents appeared. Possibly this torpidity only rendered its official positions more attractive, for they came to be a matter of almost open bargain and sale. In 1789, Cristóbal de Cos, chief clerk in the secretariat of the Suprema, commenced to traffic in them through his agent, Fernando Piélago, one of the secretaries of the Lima tribunal. To save the expense of transportation, the Suprema had for some time adopted the practice of appointing natives or residents of Peru, which may have given rise to the sale of offices or may, perhaps, only have rendered it notorious, for Cos could not have transacted the business without the connivance and participation of his superiors. Piélago himself had paid three thousand pesos for his position, and Manuel de Vado Calderon the same, for the office of secretary of sequestrations. Narciso de Aragon gave six hundred for a minor position and three cases are mentioned in which sums were paid for jubilation, or retirement on half-pay, with the privilege of appointing a successor. The culmination was reached in the career of Pedro Zalduegui, who commenced as sweeper and sacristan of the chapel of the tribunal. He was wholly illiterate, but he was a shrewd trader and he paid the capellan mayor of the tribunal a thousand pesos to surrender his place to him. Finally, through Piélago and Cos, he bought the position of inquisitor for the sum of fourteen thousand ducats; there was little concealment in the transaction and the scandal was great. The Suprema was obliged to order an investigation which it confided to the Inquisitors Abarca and Matienzo. In a letter of November 8, 1794, they confirmed the reports as to the sale of offices and the incompetence of those who bought them. Against this Zalduegui, in 1796, defended himself, by asserting that the trouble arose from his refusal to join with his colleagues in their mismanagement of the affairs of the tribunal for their private interests. At length he manifested his gross ignorance in a controversy with Bartolomé Guerrero on the intricate question of sanctifying grace; they obliged him to define his position and, on the strength of the doctrinal error involved, they prosecuted him and suspended him from office. That the Suprema restored him is fairly suggestive of another payment and he retained his office till the last.656
Inquisitors of the character thus indicated, owning no superior save the distant inquisitor-general and Suprema, armed with the terrible power of excommunication which none but themselves could remove, judging all and judged by none, could not fail to be a disturbing element in the colonial administration. They were at the head of a body of officials and familiars, scattered over the land, who enjoyed exemption from all other jurisdiction, secular and ecclesiastical, and who were sure, whatever crimes they might commit, to find protection and mercy in the tribunal. Even their servants and slaves had the benefit of this fuero and formed a peculiarly obnoxious class in the community. The maintenance and extension of these privileges involved the tribunal in constant strife with the authorities, lay and spiritual, quarrels which were carried on with a violence frequently destructive to the public peace. The governmental officials, however high-placed, who sought to curb inquisitorial arrogance, could have slender hope of support from their royal master. As we have seen in the chapter on Mexico, there was preserved in the Madrid archives the formula of a letter addressed to viceroys, insisting on their subservience to the Inquisition. This in 1603 was duly sent to the Marquis of Monterey, Viceroy of Peru.657 How often this was repeated it would be impossible to say, but in 1655, at least, it was sent to the Count of Alba by Philip IV, as a warning in consequence of some squabbles in which he came to be involved with the tribunal.658 When the colonial Inquisitions were founded, Philip II, by a cédula of August 16, 1570, took the inquisitors and all the officials under the royal protection and decreed that any one, no matter of what rank, who disturbed or injured them should incur the penalty of violating the safeguard, and this was repeated by Philip III in 1610.659
Francisco de Toledo, the first viceroy who had to deal with the Inquisition, was a man of decided character who, by holding the purse-strings, managed to keep within bounds Cerezuela, who was of a yielding disposition. There was dissension however, for which Alonso de Arceo, canon of la Plata, decried him as a heretic and a forger, whom the tribunal dared not accuse, but when Toledo asked it to prosecute him, it evaded the request.660 The next viceroy, the Count del Villar, was weaker, while Ulloa, as we have seen, enforced the prerogatives of the Holy Office with a masterful hand. The quarrels which arose were long and intricate and were conducted in a way to abase thoroughly the vice-regal authority. We have seen that Villar banished Catalina Morejon to put an end to the scandal of her relations with Inquisitor Ulloa; this may have been either the cause or a result of the ill-feeling between them, but motives for dissension could not be lacking, when the domineering spirit of the tribunal refused obedience to all constituted authority, and could always frame some excuse for asserting its superior jurisdiction.
May 30, 1587, the English made a descent on Payta, where they burnt some churches and convents and desecrated some images. They had been piloted into the port by Gerónimo de Rivas, an inhabitant of Payta, whom they had captured at sea and who remained after their departure. The deputy corregidor naturally arrested him and Villar ordered him to be sent by land to Lima for examination. In some way the inquisitorial commissioner, the Mercenarian Fray Pedro Martínez, was interested in him and to save him claimed and obtained him from the corregidor as a fautor of heretics, justiciable by the Inquisition. He was forwarded by sea to Lima and was withheld from the viceroy. In August Fray Martínez came to Lima to attend a chapter of his Order, which made him comendador of his ruined convent so that he could rebuild it. Villar, who felt much aggrieved, forbade the Provincial, Fray Thomas de Valdez, to issue the commission, but the tribunal interposed and by threats of excommunication compelled its delivery. Soon after this, at the auto of November 30, 1587, there arose a quarrel, probably about the distribution of seats, which resulted in the excommunication of the viceroy, who was compelled to seek absolution.
Villar sustained an even more humiliating defeat in another encounter which exhibits the elasticity of inquisitorial jurisdiction. A young man named Antonio de Arpide y Ulloa (possibly of kin to Inquisitor Ulloa) came to Lima, with orders to admit him to a “lance” in the lancers of the guard, which was accordingly done. Ulloa appointed him fiscal of the tribunal, although, according to the Visitador Prado, he was naturally ill-conditioned, a youth in all things, careless in his office, and it was a scandal to see a fiscal wearing the garments of a layman. Villar thereupon discharged him from the guard, replacing him with Don Luis de Nevares, for the sufficient reason that the two positions were incompatible and that no one could enjoy two salaries. Arpide petitioned the tribunal for relief; as its official he was entitled to its fuero and the viceroy had no authority over him. The tribunal confirmed this view; the viceroy had no right to dismiss him, and it ordered, under a penalty of a thousand pesos, the officers of the guard to strike from the rolls the name of Nevares and replace that of Arpide, to whom the salary must be paid. The officers represented that they were under the viceroy’s orders, when they were told that they had thus incurred excommunication and the penalty. The affair was put into the shape of a suit between Arpide and Nevares, in which the tribunal of course gave a decision in favor of the former and, when the latter appealed the Suprema, it refused to allow the appeal.
There was another source of trouble in the case of Dr. Salinas, a man of evil reputation, who was appointed advocate of prisoners. Previous to this appointment he had uttered disparaging remarks about the viceroy, and had a quarrel with his secretary Juan Bello. Villar procured the assent of Ruiz de Prado and arrested Salinas, prosecuted him and subjected him to severe torture in the course of the trial. Then the tribunal interfered and Villar surrendered him and all the papers. This did not satisfy Ulloa and Prado, who forgot their mutual strife and united to give the viceroy a final blow, as his five years’ term of service was drawing to an end. Formal proceedings were commenced against him. September 26, 1589, Arpide as fiscal presented his clamosa or indictment, representing that Villar had always been disaffected to the Inquisition, had talked against it, had impeded it and had diminished its authority as far as he could. In the case of his secretary, Juan Bello, he had sent a threatening message; at the auto of November 30, 1587, he had invented means to deprive it of the services of its officials; as soon as Dr. Salinas received an appointment, he had prosecuted him for trifling words uttered long before; in the case of Gabriel Martínez de Esquivel, familiar in Huanuco, he had ordered him to report forthwith in Spain to the Council of Indies and, when asked by the tribunal for his reasons, he had made an offensive reply; he had even made investigations against the persons and reputations of the inquisitors themselves. From all this, which was notorious, it followed that he had incurred the pains and censures provided by the bull Si de protegendis of Pius V (April 1, 1569), against all who offend or despise the officials of the Inquisition, wherefore the tribunal was asked to declare him to have incurred these censures, notwithstanding any absolution ad cautelam which he might have obtained, so that he might serve as an example to all Christian people of their obligation to respect and reverence everything connected with the Holy Office.
Without going through the prescribed formalities of submitting the matter to calificadores and assembling consultores and, without hearing the accused, the tribunal that same morning decreed that Villar had incurred the censures of the bull of Pius V, while for the other penalties prescribed in it he was remitted to the Suprema. To this the viceroy replied, October 3d, that he had only sought to perform the duties of his office, but seeing that they had declared him to be under the excommunication of the bull, as an obedient son of the Church he begged for absolution and asked that it be speedy, as he was under orders to sail for Spain. For an answer to this he waited until the 16th, when he sent a judge and alcalde de corte, both consultors of the Inquisition, to the tribunal to enquire about his petition. There was read to them a reply, dated on the 14th, to the effect that the inquisitors had repeatedly intimated to him that he had incurred these censures and, in fact, it was so self-evident that every one could have known it, for every one knows that all incur them who impede the Inquisition directly or indirectly, or who ill-treat, in word or deed, the inquisitors or officials to the injury of their reputation and authority, and that good intentions are powerless to avert it. The viceroy’s acts had been so notorious that it was needless to recite them and, before absolution could be granted, condign satisfaction must be rendered for them, especially to Dr. Diego de Salinas, while, as regarded the injuries to the Holy Office, he was referred to the Suprema. As it had long been evident that he was under these censures, without seeking their removal, and as he was about to undertake a long and perilous voyage, the inquisitors had been moved by loving charity to bring him to a recognition of the condition of his soul. They were ready to absolve him as soon as he should do what was requisite and, in consideration of his station, he should be spared the solemnities required by law.
After some parleying this portentous document was delivered to Villar on the 19th and on the 27th he replied at much length. He had never been told that he was under excommunication, or he would at once have applied for absolution. He had always favored and enriched the Inquisition; he had not proceeded against Dr. Salinas till assured by Prado that he could do so, and he had surrendered him and the papers, January 11, 1589, as soon as he was summoned. Then Prado, after consulting Ulloa, had given to Fray Pedro de Molina a commission to absolve him ad cautelam, in case he had incurred excommunication for that or anything else, and he had received the absolution with great satisfaction, but the certificate had been withdrawn more than a month ago, and since then he had abstained from hearing mass or taking the sacraments, except on the feast of San Francisco (October 4th) when he had special licence from the inquisitors. He did not know how he was to give satisfaction to Dr. Salinas, as the matter had been remitted to the Suprema which, with the king, would do as they might see fit. Meanwhile, as a gentleman and an humble and obedient son of the Church, he again prayed for absolution.
The victory of the tribunal and the humiliation of the viceroy were complete. When the inquisitors read his petition, October 27th, they issued to Antonio de Balcázar, provisor of the archdiocese, a commission to absolve him, at the same time admonishing him to present himself to the Suprema as early as possible. They also gave him the papers of the suit brought against him by Dr. Salinas, in order to enable him to make his defence before the Suprema. Villar received the absolution with much humility and satisfaction, as a great favor from the inquisitors, and on the 28th the provisor was summoned, who solemnly absolved him in the chapel of the palace.661
Yet Villar was so little reassured that, on his voyage home, he wrote from Havana to implore the protection of the king from the enmity of Salinas. He rehearsed the services of his ancestors to the monarchy, while of his children five sons had been killed and one crippled in the king’s wars with heretics and infidels, two more were then serving and two were in training for service, while two had died in the priesthood. His fears were probably groundless for the Suprema, in a letter to Prado, blamed him for the dissensions in the tribunal which it attributed to his favor for Salinas, a man of such evil life and tortuous methods that he alone would throw any republic into discord. Apparently it did not as yet know that the secret of the influence of Salinas was the relations of his sister-in-law with Prado, a scandal which continued until Prado’s recall.662
It has seemed worth while to give somewhat in detail the particulars of this obscure quarrel to illustrate the position adopted by the tribunal towards the highest authorities, its arrogant assumption of superiority, and the readiness with which its jurisdiction could be extended in any desired direction. It can easily be perceived how difficult was the task of the viceroys to maintain an efficient government, and to keep the peace with so independent and so unruly a factor in the land. But few of them escaped collisions, although it does not appear that in any subsequent case the quarrel went so far as the institution of a formal prosecution against the personal representative of the king. It is not surprising therefore that, however pious were the viceroys, they were almost unanimous in deprecating the acts and the influence of the Holy Office. The Count del Villar naturally exhaled his woes in long and lugubrious epistles to the king. His successor, the Count of Cañete, as early in his term as 1589, complained bitterly of the exemptions through which all connected with the Holy Office admitted responsibility to no one. This gave rise to endless trouble, for every one who was summoned to have his accounts examined, or who refused to pay his dues to the royal treasury, procured a familiarship or some office and with it secured exemption. Even Alvaro Ruiz de Navamuel, the government secretary, had himself made a familiar and auditor, and assumed that he was not subject to investigation. The royal officials were familiars-one of them at Arequipa, when called upon for his accounts, refused because he was a familiar.663 Government conducted after this fashion seems like opéra bouffe.
In like manner the Viceroy Luis de Velasco, in 1604, represented strongly to Philip III the intrusion of the tribunal on other jurisdictions and its overbearing methods, so that the superior royal officials, on whom rested the peace and quiet of the land, had to abandon their rights to avoid scandals. As for himself, sometimes he temporized, sometimes he yielded, and sometimes he pretended not to see, in order to avoid dissension, for, when the tribunal was opposed, it made public demonstrations, which degraded the authority of the vice-regal office and of the Royal Audiencia. So, in 1609, the Viceroy Marquis of Montesclaros, in representing some scandalous ill-treatment of the alcaldes of the city, declared that the inquisitors were arbitrary and assumed that there was no power superior to them to restrain or even to resist them.664 It was probably representations such as these which led to the concordias of 1610 and 1633. In these some of the more flagrant usurpations of authority were forbidden, but the underlying principles were unchanged and we have seen how, in Mexico, the attempted reform was frustrated.
The Viceroy Count of Alba de Aliste was involved in many encounters with the tribunal, for which, as noted above, in 1655, Philip IV sent him a copy of the circular letter of 1603 commanding respect and obedience. This did not prevent him, in 1657, from writing that the reiteration and multiplication of its excesses of jurisdiction might render it necessary for him to break with it altogether, as the only way of maintaining the authority of the Government.665 With the advent of the Bourbon dynasty, the consequent infusion of Gallicanism in Spain, and the resolute assertion of the regalías, the authority of the viceroys was more fully recognized, and we hear less, in the eighteenth century, of their struggles to maintain it against the tribunal. Yet the latter did not cease to assert the superiority of its jurisdiction and to extend it as far as possible, giving rise to a perpetual succession of embittered contests with the other judicial organizations, to the detriment of the public peace and the weakening of the functions of government. Even after its decadence had fairly set in, as late as 1773, the Viceroy Manuel Amat y Yunient writes that the Inquisition, so necessary for the purity of the faith, would be more useful and respected if it would confine itself to its proper functions, for its cognizance of civil cases has always led to collisions with the royal courts, which are particularly prejudicial at this distance from the king and, though there have been concordias and royal cédulas to prevent them, there are never lacking occasions to revive the contention to the great disquiet of the people.666
The eighteenth century, in fact, presents an almost continuous series of quarrels with all the different jurisdictions, the existence of which so greatly weakened the organization of the Spanish colonial system, and these quarrels were fought out with a persistent bitterness, sometimes degenerating into violence, which taxed to the utmost the efforts of the viceroys as peacemakers. Into the trivial details of these dreary conflicts it is not worth while to enter at length, but a single case may be briefly described, to illustrate the ferocity displayed by all parties and the confusion arising from the complexity of the multiplied judicial systems which influenced Spanish development so unfortunately.
On November 11, 1723, two brothers, the Licentiates Juan and Martin Lobaton, presented themselves before the tribunal to claim its protection. Juan was cura or parish priest of Soras and commissioner of the Inquisition in Guancabelica; Martin was cura of Viñao and “persona honesta” or cleric called in to be present when witnesses ratified their evidence. Both parishes were in the see of Guamanga, then sede vacante and governed by the chapter, which had required Juan to account for the property of an Indian woman, a parishioner who had died some two years previous, and it had ordered him not to leave Guamanga, under penalty of excommunication, whereupon he had promptly fled to Lima. In his case, the fiscal reported that the matter did not concern the Inquisition and the papers were returned to the episcopal Ordinary. Martin had assisted his brother’s flight and for this he was confined to his house by the episcopal authorities and a coadjutor appointed, to the great scandal and destruction, we are told, of the parish. In this case the tribunal assumed jurisdiction; it ordered him, June 2, 1724, to be restored and his property released, on his giving security, and the chapter was ordered to prosecute before the Inquisition whatever charges it had to bring against him.
Martin meanwhile had the town of Guamanga as a prison. On the afternoon of April 30th, as he was standing in the street, the dean of the chapter, who was also commissioner of the Inquisition, passed in his carriage, then got out and scolded him roundly for not taking off his hat. Martin withdrew, but the dean, still unsatisfied, went to his house with the alcalde, broke open the door and embargoed all his goods—even to his clothes and breviary—then summoned the chapter and by 5 o’clock had him excommunicated and fined twenty pesos, as the papers stated, for not removing his hat to the dean an hour before, and notices of the excommunication were duly affixed to the doors of the churches.
When the inquisitorial sentence of June 2d was served upon the chapter it said that it had nothing against Martin, but when his embargoed property came to be restored much of it was found to have been stolen by the depositaries to whom it had been confided. The tribunal held the chapter responsible and ordered the loss to be made good, under threat of excommunication. The chapter replied, September 29th, that the case belonged to the bishop and chapter and its previous surrender of the papers had been without prejudice. Then Fray Luis de Cabrera, prior of the Augustinian convent, to whom the sentence had been sent as executor, excommunicated the chapter. The archdeacon as Commissioner of the Cruzada, declared the excommunication void, ordered the notices to be removed, and replaced them with others excommunicating Cabrera as a disturber of the Bull of the Cruzada. Cabrera responded by excommunicating the alguazil and notary of the Cruzada and, on October 2d, the archdeacon pronounced these excommunications to be null.
When the tribunal heard of this, by orders of October 18th and 27th it declared the excommunications on both sides to be null; it put the matter of the chapter in the hands of Luis de Mendoza, rector of the Jesuit college, and it ordered Cabrera to push the restitution of Martin’s property, but not to employ censures without instructions. This was the situation when the new bishop, Alfonso Roldan, arrived at Lima and, on its being stated to him, he expressed himself as satisfied. Then Martin came before the tribunal asserting that one of the depositaries, Juan Joseph Lasco, who had stolen most of the goods, had pawned some silverware of his with a merchant named Joseph de Villanueva, and asking their restoration on his proving property. Consequently on March 14, 1725, orders were sent to Cabrera that, if the silver were proved to be Martin’s, it should be deposited in safe hands. This was done on April 5th, when Villanueva deposed that Lasco had pawned with him ninety-three marks of silver plate. He was ordered to deposit it and promised to do so but, on the 7th, he testified that the day before the bishop had ordered him not to surrender the silver but to tell Cabrera to throw up the commission of the Inquisition and any other that he might hold. This was followed by the archdeacon notifying Martin to go to his parish in sixteen hours and, on his representing the impossibility of this, as he had been a prisoner for a year and was deprived of his property, he was posted as an excommunicate. After considerable delay he was absolved and was told to stay in the city, but on falling sick and unable to assist in the church, he was excommunicated again and recluded in his house.
All this is a one-sided relation, furnished by the tribunal to the Suprema. It evidently omits much that would show the tribunal in a less favorable light, as the outcome indicates, for in it there is nothing to justify the intervention of the viceroy and Audiencia. Yet we learn from another source that Cabrera had arbitrarily excommunicated and fined the alcalde of Guamanga who complained to the Audiencia, and on October 30, 1724, the viceroy notified the tribunal that the Audiencia, after considering the evidence, had resolved that the Inquisition should restrain its officials. A correspondence ensued, continued until the summer of 1725, in which the tribunal complained that the viceroy and Audiencia were assuming to be the superiors of the Inquisition, in violation of the laws and the royal cédulas. The affair finally took the shape of a competencia referred for settlement to the Suprema and the Council of Indies. The Suprema took high ground; it alone could review the acts of the tribunal or entertain appeals, and no other authority had power to intervene. This might have answered under Philip IV, but times had changed. A decree of Philip V, February 1, 1729, ordered it to correct the excesses of the tribunal by such means as it deemed requisite, and to this it replied, April 16th, that it had revoked the acts of the tribunal in the affair of Martin Lobaton, ordering the surrender of all papers to the Ordinary and judge of Cruzada before whom he must plead; that it had entirely disapproved the proceedings of the tribunal and that it had instructed the inquisitors hereafter to observe the provisions of the law.667
The Cruzada jurisdiction which emerges in this case was another of the subdivisions of judicial authority, which so fatally complicated the administration of justice in the Spanish dominions and furnished an abundant source of quarrels. The indulgence known as the Santa Cruzada supplied a large revenue to the crown and the organization for its sale was elaborate. At its head was a chief commissioner who held exclusive jurisdiction, civil and criminal, over his subordinates and, although this was by law confined to their official acts, yet it was, as we have just seen, extended to protect them in every way.668 While the case just mentioned was in progress, another prolonged quarrel arose, similarly involving all three jurisdictions. Don Antonio de Marcategui, the priest of Quiquixana, was also a commissioner of the Inquisition. As such he was already engaged in a contest with the episcopal provisor of Cuzco, in which the Suprema decided against him and ordered all his acts to be revoked. While this was pending he celebrated mass in the chapter’s chapel of the Virgin, on a feast-day, without first settling with the Cruzada for the indulgences gained there by the worshippers under some old concessions. For this Don Juan de Ugarte, commissioner of the Cruzada in Cuzco, on January 8, 1724, notified him that he was fined in three hundred pesos, and also excommunicated him without trial. Marcategui went to Cuzco and laid the matter before Bishop Arregui, who sided with Ugarte. After some further trouble the corregidor was sent to arrest him and sequestrate his property; he gathered together some Indians and Spaniards for resistance but thought better of it and escaped to Lima when, on appealing to the Inquisition, it declared all the proceedings to be invalid and ordered the surrender to it of all the papers. The bishop however sent his papers to the viceroy and Ugarte his to the Cruzada tribunal of Lima. The inquisitors demanded the former from the viceroy and asked him to compel the Cruzada to surrender the latter, but the viceroy refused, alleging that what he held concerned the royal patronato and that he had no control over the Cruzada, whose jurisdiction was ecclesiastical, exempt and privileged. To a second demand, he expressed the wise determination not to get entangled in ecclesiastical matters and jurisdictions, and he further claimed cognizance of the case of the corregidor, whom the Inquisition was prosecuting for sequestrating Marcategui’s property and attempting his arrest. He stubbornly rejected repeated requests and he finally ordered the tribunal to suspend its summons to Ugarte to appear before it. The case was carried to Spain to vex the souls of the Suprema, the Council of Indies and the Commissioner of the Cruzada. In 1729 the king decided against the Inquisition and ordered the case to be surrendered to the Cruzada and the episcopal court, but it still dragged on and, in 1733, a royal decree ordered the Inquisition to obey the Concordias and the laws, but even this was not the end, how it was finally settled matters little; its only interest lies in illustrating the hopelessly impracticable character of Spanish colonial organization and administration.669
These defeats of the Inquisition were followed soon afterwards by a still greater invasion of the privileges of the inquisitorial employees. A citizen of Lima pursued a slave into the house of a salaried official, whereupon the tribunal forthwith ordered his arrest. The royal Audiencia intervened, representing to the viceroy, the Marquis of Castel-Fuerte, that the officials enjoyed only the passive and not the active fuero; that the pretensions of the Inquisition, if admitted, would destroy the royal jurisdiction, and that an order should be issued requiring the aggrieved party to plead in the Audiencia. This opinion the viceroy sent to the tribunal with a request that it should abstain. It replied that the official had withdrawn his complaint on account of the apologies made to him, but that the tribunal could not assent to the position of the Audiencia without committing the grave fault of crippling its powers. A considerable correspondence ensued in which the Audiencia asserted decisively that, in matters not connected with faith, the officials of the Inquisition did not enjoy the fuero and much less the active fuero; that there were no laws or customs to contravene the settled principle that the plaintiff or prosecutor must seek the court of the defendant. To this the tribunal replied that the Audiencia had no authority to frame general rules in contravention of laws and customs, and that the matter must be settled by the Suprema. Castel-Fuerte rejoined that the competence of the royal court was not to be impugned, that the Suprema had cognizance only of matters of faith and that to admit the contrary was to place the whole administration of justice at the mercy of the tribunal.670
These were brave words which a century earlier would have consigned the utterer to disgrace. They were the denial of the privileges and exemptions which the Inquisition had enjoyed for nearly two centuries and a half, and their significance lies in their expression of the tendencies of the period. In time those tendencies brought about their inevitable development. In 1744 there was a contest over the will of D. Felix Antonio de Vargas, in the consulado or commercial court. A secretary of the tribunal claimed to have an interest in the estate, and it consequently asserted jurisdiction over the whole affair. This was resisted by the consulado, and Viceroy Villagarcia ordered a sala de competencia to decide between the conflicting claims, according to established rule. The tribunal refused, on the ground that its rights were too clear to be called in question. While this was pending, Superunda succeeded to Villagarcia and, after no little trouble, he induced the visitador Arenaza to agree to a sala reflexa, to determine whether a sala de competencia should be held. Then there came fresh trouble on the side of the senior judge of the Consulado, but finally the decision was reached that the officials of the Inquisition were entitled to the active fuero. When Superunda reported the matter to Fernando VI there resulted the royal cédula of June 20, 1751, declaring that the officials should enjoy only the passive fuero, and this in both civil cases and those criminal ones not excepted by the concordias, while their servants and the familiars were wholly deprived of it. In the case in question, the papers were to be surrendered to the Consulado; in future no sala reflexa was to be held and, when the matter was so clear as in this one, the viceroy should decide it, as the effort was manifestly an assault on the regalías.
By this time Arenaza had departed and the inquisitors were Amusquíbar and Rodríguez. The latter was disposed to accept the royal cédula without dispute, but Amusquíbar refused to obey it on the ground that it had not come with the confirmation of the Suprema. A long wrangle ensued, but at length another cédula of February 29, 1760, was received, ordering the observance of the previous one, and this time it was accompanied by a corresponding decree of the Suprema. These were communicated to the tribunal, March 24, 1761, which, seeing that further resistance was useless, promptly promised obedience. This was followed by a demand for the papers of the estate of Vargas, which, after an interval of seventeen years, was at length placed in train for adjudication.671
This settled the question as to the civil jurisdiction of the tribunal and simultaneously another case put an end to conflicts over criminal matters. A negro slave of the alguazil mayor had been arrested for some offence; the tribunal demanded the prisoner with its customary threats of fines and excommunications. The affair was pending when the cédula of 1760 was received; the Audiencia thereupon served on the tribunal an inhibition to issue letters of excommunication and fine against the alcaldes del crimen and proceeded to try the slave. The cédula was sent to all the judicial officers of the vice-royalty and they were ordered to defend the royal jurisdiction in all cases covered by it. To the arrogant temper of Amusquíbar this limitation of the traditional jurisdiction of the Inquisition must have been gall and wormwood, but it was worth much to the peace of the land. In 1796, the Viceroy, Frey Francisco Gil de Taboado y Lemos, tells us that it had put an end to the former conflicts between the jurisdictions.672
We have seen how neglectful was Amusquíbar of the real duties of his office, but he found time and energy to keep Barroeta y Angel, the Archbishop of Lima, in a condition of exasperation for years, and in this he seems to have had the support not only of the Suprema but of Fernando VI. What was the origin of the dissension between them does not appear, but Barroeta lost no opportunity of exercising his authority for Amusquíbar’s annoyance and always to his own discomfiture. The rupture must already have been pronounced when, October 4, 1752, Barroeta wrote calling his attention to the fact that his licence as confessor had not been renewed, while in spite of this he continued his visits to the nunneries of the Recollects, which was unfitting his position and was prohibited; his ceasing these visits would relieve the Archbishop from further proceedings. This sharp provocation was disarmed by cool insolence. Amusquíbar delayed a reply until November 14th, when he simply said that he had postponed acknowledging the note in order to be temperate, and he now omitted answering it in order not to fail in the respect due to his own office and the dignity of the archbishop. Barroeta transmitted the correspondence to the Suprema for redress and obtained none. Amusquíbar, however, ceased his visits but kept up a correspondence. So it was, in 1756, when Barroeta called upon Amusquíbar and Rodríguez for a statement of settlements with creditors and sales of farms belonging to chaplaincies, in order that he might see that the souls of the founders were reaping the benefits designed in the foundations. The inquisitors replied that it was impossible and, on his asking why, replied that it was on account of the mode of his demand; the archbishop could send his fiscal and any special question about any special foundation would be answered. Again he forwarded the letters to the Suprema but its only action was to file them away. He had equal ill-luck in all the questions that he raised. In 1751 the Suprema sent to Amusquíbar its approval and that of the king, as to his conduct in an encounter with Barroeta over jubilee faculties for absolving for heresy. Then Barroeta claimed that the inquisitors should submit to him their licences to celebrate and hear confessions, but the king decided against him. Barroeta transferred the delegation of his inquisitorial jurisdiction from his Ordinary to another person; the tribunal disputed it and the king decided in its favor. He undertook to deprive the inquisitors of their faculties as confessors, and only provoked fresh rebukes from Spain. He issued an edict on fasting which the tribunal prohibited; then he printed it at the end of his Synodal Constitutions only to have the prohibition confirmed and the decision approved by the Suprema. There was a question about the notary of the episcopal court going to the tribunal to report certain acts, in which the Suprema sustained its action, and the visits of ceremony between them was a fruitful source of controversy.673 Barroeta died, December 10, 1757, his whole episcopate marred with these little squabbles. It is all very petty, but it illustrates how the relations of the Inquisition with the spiritual authorities were as unfriendly as with the temporal.
Thus far we have considered the activity of the tribunal in matters foreign to its original purpose, which, indeed, were the most important portion of its record. As regards its proper function, that of maintaining the purity of the faith, its chief business in Peru, as in Spain, was with a class of cases which could only by forced construction be considered as heretical. Bigamists furnished a large proportion of penitents—the adventurer who left a wife in Andalusian Córdoba was apt to take a new one in Córdova de Tucuman and chance might at any time bring detection, while, even in Peru itself, distances were so great and intercommunication so difficult, that the seeker after fortune was easily tempted in his wanderings to duplicate the sacrament of matrimony. Blasphemy was another prolific source of prosecution, for the gambling habit was universal and lost none of its provocative character in crossing the ocean. Sorcery moreover, including the innumerable superstitions for creating love or hatred, curing or causing disease, bringing fortune or averting misfortune, and foretelling the future, which were technically held to include implicit or explicit pact with the demon, brought an ample store of culprits before the tribunal. To the mass of superstitious beliefs carried from home by the Spaniards were speedily superadded those of the native wise-women and a sprinkling taught by Guinea negro slaves. We find but few whites among these offenders, but every other caste is represented—negro, mulatto, quadroon, mestizo and sambo and sometimes Indian, for in this crime the jurisdiction of the Inquisition over the Indians seems to have been admitted. One feature of Indian sorcery which constantly meets us is the use of the drug coca, owing to the marvellous properties attributed to it, akin to the peyote which, in Mexico, was employed to produce fatidical dreams and revelations. Both of these were strictly prohibited by the respective Inquisitions.674
No specific cases of witchcraft occur in the autos de fe, but, in 1629, a special Edict of Faith directed against the occult arts and sorcery was published, enumerating all the forbidden practices in minute detail and forming a curious body of superstitions and folk-lore, much more extensive than anything of the kind issued in Spain. It brought in, we are told, numerous denunciations, but the practices were ineradicable and continued to flourish until the end. The virtual paralysis of the tribunal in the later years of Amusquíbar caused many complaints, among which was one from Córdova de Tucuman to the Suprema, representing that, in the interior provinces, sorcery was universal; there was no case of sickness that was not attributed to it, but denunciations and testimony sent to the tribunal received no attention and, as the civil magistrates were precluded from acting, it flourished unrepressed.675
Propositions, which furnished so large a portion of the work of the Spanish tribunals, afforded a much smaller percentage in Peru. This is probably attributable to lack of intellectual activity, for some of the cases tried indicate that the susceptibility of the Inquisition was as delicate as in Spain, and that there was the same readiness to denounce any careless speech or ill-sounding remark uttered in vexation or anger. Thus, in 1592, Felipe de Lujan was tried because, when looking at a picture of the Last Judgement, he said it was not well painted, for Christ was not with the Apostles. Juan de Arianza had the indelible disgrace of appearing in the auto of February 27, 1631, because, when reading the Scriptures, he exclaimed “Ea! there is nothing but living and dying,” which sounded ill to those who heard it. A case, which came near to ending in tragedy, was that of Antonio de Campos who, for uttering certain heretical propositions and adhering to them pertinaciously, was condemned to relaxation. Fortunately for him the expense of a public auto was too great to be incurred for him and the Suprema was consulted, in 1672. During the delay thus caused it was found that his real name was Fray Teodoro de Ribera and that his brain had been turned by a potion given to him by a woman. This afforded a solution and he was handed over as insane to his Provincial. A case in 1721 is noteworthy as illustrating the dangers which environed all speculations connected with the Church. A Frenchman, known as Juan de Ullos, was denounced for saying that neither the pope nor a general council was the head of the Church. In due course this proposition was submitted to two calificadores, Padre Luis de Andrade, S. J., and the Mercenarian Fray Francisco Galiano. It was probably through some vague reference to Gallicanism that they reported that the qualification was difficult because the accused was a Frenchman, and for this they were imprisoned, with sequestration of their property.676
As we have already seen in Mexico (p. 241), one of the most frequent offences, not strictly heretical, with which the Inquisition had to deal, was that of so-called solicitation—the seduction of women by priests in the confessional, but as these offenders never appear in the relations of the autos, they are only to be gathered from more or less imperfect records. Prior to 1578 there had been various cases, about one of which, that of Antonio Hernández de Villaroel, the tribunal reported that it could not diminish the penalty of perpetual deprivation of confessing women, because this had been ordered by the Suprema in the case of Rodrigo de Arcos, and this was construed as a general law. If so, it was not long in force for, about 1580, we find Juan de Alarcon deprived for only three years. In a collection of cases between 1578 and 1581 there are seven of solicitation and between 1581 and 1585 there are eight. Thus they are constantly appearing and, in 1595, we are told that there were twenty-four priests in prison awaiting sentence, one of whom, Juan de Figueroa, was testified against by forty-three women. In 1597 seven priests were prosecuted from the province of Tucuman alone, where, among the Indian converts, few confessors seem to have had scruples.677
In view of the heinousness of the offence the treatment of culprits in Spain was remarkably lenient, but this was surpassed by the tenderness shown to them in Peru. Another fraile from Tucuman, the Dominican Francisco Vázquez, was sentenced, in 1599, for this and for twenty-four scandalous propositions, but for this cumulation of offences he escaped with deprivation of confessing women and reclusion for a year in a convent. At the same time the Franciscan Bartolomé de la Cruz, Guardian of the convent at Santiago de Estero, against whom fifteen women testified, was deprived of confessing and had some spiritual penances. Fray Andrés Corral, Guardian of the convent at las Juntas, testified against by twenty-eight women, had aggravated the offence by committing rape in the church and for this he was banished from Tucuman and subjected to a discipline. On the other hand Rodrigo Ortiz Melgarejo, the only priest in Asuncion, denounced himself to the commissioner in 1594, to the delegate in Asuncion and to the tribunal in 1596, for guilt with seven women. He was obliged to go to Lima, where he presented himself in 1600. He was regarded as excessively scrupulous, he had performed a journey of over a thousand miles and this seems to have been thought an ample punishment. The fact that there was no evidence against him shows that the commissioner and his delegate regarded the matter as too trivial to gather testimony about it.678
In some of these cases the customary reading of the sentences before colleagues of the culprits was omitted because, as the tribunal explained, there were so many of them of various Orders that the omission seemed best to spare the honor of the religious bodies; the character of the Indian female witnesses was doubtful, but experience showed that they spoke truth, for most of the accused confessed and this was confirmed by the evil lives and example of all the frailes summoned from Tucuman. This had led the tribunal to deprive them perpetually of confessing women, even when the witnesses were Indians and few in number, especially as all those priests and frailes were very ignorant and profligate.679
Inquisitor Ordóñez, as we have seen, was not especially sensitive or straight-laced, but he felt compelled, in a letter of April 20, 1599, to call the attention of the Suprema to the frequency of solicitation, especially in Tucuman, where, as he said, it appeared that there was scarce a priest not guilty of it, and the worst feature was that some of them told the Indian women that the sin was no sin when committed with them, and it was consummated in the churches. He therefore asked authority to increase the punishment indicated in the Instructions and the Suprema accordingly gave permission to add service in the galleys—a permission, however, of which the tribunal seems never to have availed itself. So far from there being an improvement, the tribunal was led to issue, in 1630, a special edict to the effect that, notwithstanding the clauses in the annual Edict of Faith, the crime continued to prevail; that confessors ignored that it was strictly reserved to the Inquisition, and absolved the guilty as well as the penitents, without requiring the latter to denounce their seducers as prescribed by the papal decrees; further, that learned persons when consulted furnished opinions that these cases did not come within inquisitorial jurisdiction; wherefore all persons were required, within six days after notice, to denounce these offenders under pain of excommunication latæ sententiæ.680
It was all in vain and solicitation continued until the end to furnish a notable portion of the dwindling business of the tribunal. As late as 1806 the fiscal Sobrino reported to the Suprema that the worst criminals were to be found in the vice-royalty of Buenos Ayres, which was hastening to its ruin, especially through irreligious propositions and solicitation. Possibly wholesome severity might have placed some check on the persistency of the crime, but the same inexplicable tenderness continued to be shown to culprits. In 1737, Pedro de Zubieta, canon of Lima, denounced himself for soliciting Doña Lorenza de Fuentes, a nun in the convent of la Concepcion—a confession which she confirmed to some extent. Then Sor Eugenia Evangelista, of the convent del Prado, denounced him with details of the filthiest and most corrupting talk. As, however, he was a person of consideration, the tribunal, before taking action, consulted the Suprema, with the result that, in 1743, he was merely reprimanded and advised to give up hearing confessions. Almost equal leniency was shown, in 1793, to the priest Fermin de Aguirre, whose sentence was read in the presence of twelve priests, when he abjured de levi and had some spiritual penances.681
More nearly akin to the real business of the Inquisition was its dealing with the class known as beatas revelanderas—women professing a holy life, specially favored by heaven with trances, revelations and visions, and gifted with spiritual attributes and powers. Popular superstition rendered this a profitable trade in Spain, where the Holy Office was perpetually engaged in exposing and punishing their impostures; Peru was equally afflicted; indeed, the boldness and grossness of their demands upon the credulity of the people exceeded even that displayed in the mother country.
Almost the first occupation of the new tribunal was a case of this kind. About 1568, in Lima, a young endemoniada, named María Pizarro, had visitations from the angel Gabriel, in which many things were revealed to her, including the Immaculate Conception. She was exorcised by numerous frailes, who accepted these revelations and carried them out to their ultimate conclusions. Conspicuous among these were the Padres Luis López and Gerónimo Ruiz Portillo, two of the three Jesuits selected by S. Francisco de Borja as the first missionaries of the Society sent to Peru, where they were received as angels of light. There were also several Dominicans—Fray Francisco de la Cruz, professor of theology and a man of such high repute that the Archbishop of Lima had proposed him as coadjutor—Fray Pedro de Toro, Fray Alonso Gasco, prior of the convent of Quito, and others of minor importance. Early in 1571 Gasco denounced himself to the Bishop of Quito and surrendered sundry objects which had been blessed by the demon, among them a copy-book of blank paper, two pens and a cloth. The paper had the faculty that whatever was written on it was true, even in doubtful matters, and the cloth was a cure for disease. The bishop sent Gasco to the tribunal, where he was imprisoned, May 8, 1572; the others and María Pizarro were arrested at different times.
None of them seem to have denied their belief in the revelations. María fell sick, after making a full confession, in which she accused herself of having served as a succubus to the demon, and Padre Luis López of having corrupted her, of which she gave full details. She was several times thought to be dying, when her confessions were read over to her, which she altered several times, finally disculpating López and asserting herself to be a virgin—all of which was disproved. She died, December 11, 1573, and was secretly interred in the convent of la Merced.
The most conspicuous figure in the affair was Francisco de la Cruz; he stoutly maintained his belief that the revelations came from the angel, and he persistently asserted the doctrines deduced from them. The calificadores pronounced them to be heretical in the highest degree and him to be a heretic more dangerous than Luther, for under his teachings priests would be permitted to marry, laymen to practise polygamy, confession would be abolished and excommunication be disregarded, duels be allowed and soldiers permitted to enslave the Indians. Such a man teaching such principles could cause a revolution and overthrow the Spanish sovereignty. Moreover, by Doña Leonor de Valenzuela, a married woman, he had a child named Gravelico who was to be another Job and John the Baptist; he was now beginning to talk and to say that God was his father and the Virgin his mother. He was too dangerous an imp to be at large; the tribunal prudently seized him, secretly shipped him to Panamá and had him forwarded to Trujillo and placed with Don Juan de Sandoval. The fraile himself on trial was stubbornly pertinacious; his advocate and a patron theológico abandoned his defence, whereat he expressed his satisfaction; his sanity was called in question, but he defended his opinions with such dexterity that this excuse was abandoned; four theologians were let loose upon him to strive for his conversion, but his convictions were unalterable. There was no alternative but to condemn him to relaxation as a pertinacious and impenitent heretic, which was duly agreed to, July 14, 1576, after his trial had lasted for nearly five years. Then, on May 18, 1577, he was tortured without success to discover his intention in his heresies, and he waited for nearly a year more until the final act of the tragedy in the auto of April 1, 1578. As he was said to have repented at the last, he was probably strangled before burning.
The trial of Fray Pedro de Toro was approaching its conclusion, after more than three years of incarceration, when, in September, 1575, he was reported to be dangerously ill. A sentence of reconciliation was adopted and he was allowed to be sacramentally absolved. Early in January, 1576, he was nearing his end and on the 13th he was transferred to the house of a familiar, where he died on the 16th. He was secretly buried in the church of San Domingo and was reconciled in effigy in the auto of 1578.
Fray Alonso Gasco, although self-denounced, was moderately tortured on intention. He was sentenced to appear in the auto, to abjure de vehementi, to six years’ reclusion in a monastery, he was deprived of celebrating for one year and perpetually of active and passive voice, teaching, preaching and confessing, and was to be sent to Spain to perform his penance. After the auto he was duly shipped by the fleet, April 20th, but on the voyage he talked about his case, which was forbidden by the Inquisition, and the tribunal asked the Suprema to prosecute him again. His place of reclusion was the convent of Jerez de la Frontera.
The Mercenarian, Fray Gaspar de la Huerta, was the profeta oculto of the revelations, and was mixed up in the affair; besides, he had administered sacraments without being in full orders and had managed communications in prison between the accomplices. He appeared in the auto, was degraded from his orders, received two hundred lashes and was sent to the galleys for life.
Then there was a poor man named Diego Vaca, who could neither read nor write, but who had some dreams which Cruz and Toro regarded as revelations. He was put on trial, but acknowledged his errors and the case was dropped. The Dominican Provincial, Fray Andres Velez, was brought into the affair because the prisoners had written to him and he had replied that efforts were making in Spain, with influence and money, to obtain relief from the tyranny of the inquisitors. Proceedings were commenced against him but he got wind of them and escaped to Spain early in 1575. The tribunal asked the Suprema to have him returned but he succeeded in averting this.
In all this affair some mysterious influence protected the Jesuits, who escaped prosecution with their accomplices. After the auto, however, Padre López was imprudent enough to say that Cruz had been insane, in spite of which the inquisitors had made a heretic of him and that he would not wish to have Cerezuela’s conscience. The tribunal thereupon referred to its records which proved him to have been the principal exorciser of María Pizarro and to have corrupted her. It further gathered testimony showing him to be an habitual solicitor in confession and among his papers was found a tract impugning the rightful possession of Peru by Philip II—a document so treasonable that the viceroy sent a copy of it to the king, for such action as he might deem fit, seeing that López was one of the most prominent and influential of the Jesuits. On his trial, López admitted the evidence as to solicitation and confessed to other cases, although he argued that they were not technically in actu confessionis. He was spared appearance in an auto. His sentence was privately read in presence of eight Jesuit confessors and then again in the Jesuit college in presence of all the Jesuits, where a discipline was administered lasting the space of two Misereres. It bore that he was to be sent to Spain by the first fleet, being strictly, during the interval, confined in the college, incomunicado. In Spain he was to be recluded for two years in the Jesuit house of Triguera, after which for four years he was to be confined in some designated place and ten leagues around it; he was deprived perpetually of confessing women and for two years of confessing men. He was duly forwarded in the next fleet.682
Doña Luisa Melgarejo was a bolder practitioner than María Pizarro. She had been the mistress of Dr. Juan de Soto, who had been compelled to marry her. For twelve years she carried on a profitable trade in ecstasies, revelations and other manifestations, and was largely consulted about marriages, undertaking voyages, obtaining positions and other similar matters, which brought in corresponding fees. Unbelievers compared her to the image of a saint and Dr. Soto to the basin under it for receiving offerings. When she was arrested, November 14, 1623, her writings, consisting of fifty-seven cuadernos, were seized in the hands of two Jesuits, Padres Contreras and Torres, and were found to be full of alterations and erasures by them to eliminate numerous heresies. Apparently the collusion of Jesuits indicated caution, and Inquisitor Gaitan, May 1, 1624, reported the matter to the Suprema and asked for instructions, with what result the records fail to inform us.683 She did not appear in the auto of December 21, 1625, in which there figured four similar embusteras, who had traded on ecstasies and revelations. Three of these, María de Santo Domingo of Trujillo, Isabel de Ormaza and Isabel de Jesus of Lima, had given proof of exuberant imaginations in speculating upon the inexhaustible appetite for marvels.684
In the auto of March 16, 1693, there appeared Angela de Olivitos y Esquivel as an embustera hipocrita. She was a sempstress by trade and had not lived a moral life, as she had borne a child to one of her devotees. She was sentenced to reclusion for five years in a designated place and not to talk or write about revelations.685 She was probably an humble imitator of the queen of impostors, Angela Carranza. This remarkable woman was born in Tucuman about 1638. In 1665 she came to Lima and commenced to have trances which she took care to be in public and mostly in the churches. In 1673 she began to write out her revelations, and learned men became her amanuenses till the product amounted to fifteen volumes of a thousand pages each, in a small and close handwriting. Her only qualifications were an exhaustless imagination and amazing audacity. In her youth her unchastity had been notorious and she confessed it in her trial; she was self-indulgent in eating and sleeping, foul and indecent in her talk and had no shame in exposing her person. Such was the impostor who for fifteen years, by mere dint of self-assertion, made herself feared and revered not only in Lima but throughout Peru. As Inquisitor Valera says, in his report of the case, “She, who was the common sewer of errors, was regarded as a paradise of perfections. In the mistaken apprehensions of men she was the saint of the age, the wonder of the world, the mistress of mysticism, the advocate of the people; so frequent were the accepted miracles, ecstasies, trances, intelligences and revelations that heaven was regarded as condensed in her.... Rosaries and beads were taken to her house not one by one but in whole chests and they passed to Spain and even to Rome with her renown.... In the common belief of the kingdom, naught was lacking to her but canonization and the altar. Fragments of what she had touched were cherished with the belief that they would soon become relics.... She deceived the human race in this kingdom—viceroys, archbishops, bishops and prelates.” She threatened and prophesied death to those who displeased her, and few there were who could resist the superstitious terror that came over them when she uttered her evil forecasts. Those who did not believe in her she maligned, and we are told that it greatly injured their prospects on account of her repute, not only among the vulgar but among the learned and wise, who regarded her words as oracles from heaven. The profound faith which she inspired is illustrated by the incident that when, after the earthquake of 1687, there was an inundation, and at night the report was spread that the sea was engulfing the land, there was a panic in which all who could fled to the mountains. A man in charge of the chest in which her writings were kept said to his assistant that there was no danger of the sea rising to the writings of the angel, even if it covered the whole earth, so the two mounted the chest and stood there until the terror passed.686
It argues a surprisingly low level of intelligence that men of the highest station in State and Church, of presumable culture in the learned professions, and of common-sense in the business walks of life, should have accepted without question the vulgar absurdities, poured forth in a constant stream, which reduced the awful mysteries of the spiritual world to the basest condition of common life, and represented the vituperative, coarse, grasping, self-indulgent woman, whom they saw leading an animal existence, as the one human being selected by God to be the repository of his powers over heaven, purgatory and hell, so that the Holy Ghost had told her that she was the daughter of the Father, the mother of the Son, the spouse of the Holy Ghost and the sagrario of the Trinity, and once, in presence of the Trinity, the Son made her take his seat for he wished her to form the Trinity with the Father and Holy Ghost. She threatened that she would wake up the pope and cardinals and knock them on the head to make them define the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. Once on entering the church of the Incarnation she met the Virgin, who offered her the breast; on sucking she complained that the milk was salt, and the Virgin replied that it had become so in waiting for her. Christ, with the Virgin, angels and saints, once entered her chamber; he asked for a chair and wanted to know whether he had to sit on the bench with the rest, after which the bench was greatly prized by her devotees as a relic. It would be endless to repeat all these absurdities which met with such devout credence and a single one of her stories will suffice. In a field of straw she saw Christ walking hand in hand with a young girl dressed as a beata. Filled with jealousy she set fire to the straw and left Christ burning, and when the angels remonstrated she said she was going to purgatory to release souls and then to hell to do the same. She went to purgatory and released many souls, but some would not go, among them her father, who said that his time would not come until she was dead, when she replied that he would have to wait, for she was still a young girl.687
She did a thriving business in many ways. She carried to heaven beads, rosaries, candles, bells, swords and rosemary, which were blessed on various saints’ days and possessed special virtues accordingly. They were brought to her for the purpose by the basketful and, on one occasion, Christ was vexed and said “This is a huckster business.” When she was condemned and they were brought in they filled a room in the Inquisition. Once she lent her shoes to the Virgin, whereupon Christ gave to her shoes the same virtue as that of the rosaries, which made a great demand for her old shoes. This kept her in foot-gear, for new shoes were constantly brought to exchange for her old ones. Her intervention was continually invoked in cases of sickness and difficulty, and her prophetic power was sought in marriages, voyages and enterprises of all kinds. These she sold at a round price and she had a cashier who kept an itemized account of her receipts—so much for a case of mumps, so much for fever, so much for the miracle of the ingots—and some of the entries were of one and two thousand pesos.688
After fifteen years of success, there would seem no reason why this career might not have continued until her death, to be followed with a demand for her canonization supported by ample store of miracles. Possibly there may be truth in the story that, on a rainy day in the calle del Rastro, she disputed the sidewalk with a Franciscan fraile, who rudely elbowed her into the mud. This caused such indignation that the offender expiated his clownishness with two months in the convent prison, when, to satisfy his rancor, he kept close watch on her and obtained proof that she was a sinner, whereupon he denounced her to the Inquisition.689 If so, the denunciation came to one ready to act upon it in spite of the shock given to public opinion. Inquisitor Valera, whose resolute aggressiveness had rendered his career in Cartagena one of perpetual turbulence, had just been transferred to Lima, and doubtless eagerly seized the occasion to make an impression in his new post. Angela de Dios, as she called herself, was arrested December 21, 1688. The trial lasted for six years, owing doubtless to the immense mass of her writings to be examined, and her numerous heresies to be characterized and condemned, for she had ventured upon dangerous theological ground and had constructed a grotesque theogony to prove the Immaculate Conception. In her prolonged incarceration she professed to be still comforted by visits from Christ and the Virgin; she bore her confinement cheerfully, was eager for her three meals a day, and was generally found snoring when her cell was entered.690
Her system of defence was shrewd. She denied having given assent or belief to what was expressed in her writings; she had merely recited what she had seen and heard in her trances and submitted it to the learned men who were her confessors. Finally on June 2, 1694, she asked for an audience in which she said that, enlightened by God through this holy tribunal, she had been illuminated to detest the doctrines and propositions in her writings, which she now saw were heretical and blasphemous and defamatory. There had been, she said, no deception on her part as to her visions, and she had referred them to those whose virtue and religion enabled them to counsel her. Under their command she had reduced them to writing; she had wanted to burn the writings, but had been forbidden to do so and had never seen them after they left her hands. Now that the tribunal had condemned them she asked pardon of God and of his judges and ministers, for she saw that she had been deceived. Nothing more could be required and her sentence soon followed, which bore that she was to appear in a public auto, to abjure de vehementi, to be confined in a monastery for four years, to be deprived of pen and ink, and never to treat of revelations, together with sundry spiritual exercises and ten years’ exile from Lima and Tucuman, while a public edict ordered the surrender of all beads, rosaries, nail-parings and other objects treasured as relics.691
A public auto was arranged for December 20, 1694, but, so great was the popular revulsion of feeling against her, that it was not deemed safe to let her appear in the procession from the Inquisition to the church of San Domingo. She was secretly conveyed thither in a closed carriage two hours before day-break, and after the ceremonies she was not returned to the tribunal with the other penitents. She was kept until late in the afternoon and then, by a back door, was placed in the carriage with two persons of rank. In spite of these precautions some boys divined the truth and commenced stoning the carriage. Crowds gathered and a guard of soldiers was brought, but to little purpose, for the stones flew thicker and thicker; one of the occupants was seriously injured and it was as though by miracle that the carriage reached the Inquisition without being wrecked. Similar caution was observed in keeping her there for a month and conveying her to her place of reclusion. Meanwhile all over Lima boys were celebrating mock autos, carrying her effigies in procession and scourging and burning them.692 It was probably the number and high station of her devotees that prevented a general prosecution, for only her three confessors, Ignacio Ixar, priest of San Marcelo, and the Augustinians, Fray José de Prado and Fray Agustin Roman, were arrested and tried.693
Among her revelations were some concerning an Indian tailor, Nicolás de Aillon known as Nicolás de Dios, who died November 7, 1677, with the reputation of a servant of God, and was represented as having been carried immediately to heaven by Christ, taking with him a crowd of souls from purgatory. His widow sought to establish his sanctity and the Jesuit, Bernardo Sartolo, wrote a book, published in Madrid in 1684, in which he accepted Angela’s story as true and praised without stint the tailor’s confessor, Fray Pedro de Avila Tamayo, who had been punished by the Inquisition as a scandalous corrupter of women in the confessional. When the book reached Lima it excited a lively discussion and was prohibited by the tribunal. The efforts to canonize Aillon, however, were not relinquished, for, in 1711, papal letters were received by the archbishop, ordering him to collect information as to the life and virtues of the candidate. What was done is not recorded, but we may assume that the response caused the affair to be dropped.694
The popular detestation excited by Angela Carranza seems to have served as a deterrent on impostures of the kind, for no other cases are on record until about 1720, when a quadroon named María Josepha de la Encarnacion was prosecuted for visions and revelations. She was not treated as leniently as Angela for, although she was perfectly harmless and had attempted no speculations on her devotees, and although, during her trial, she was so ill that she had to be transferred to a hospital, she was visited with the cruel punishment of two hundred lashes through the streets of Lima.695 If subsequent cases occurred, their records have failed to reach us.
Mystic Illuminism and Quietism, which called for such energetic repression by the Spanish tribunals, seem to have had little currency in the more stagnant spiritual life of Peru. There is only one group of cases in the records, but these cast so much light on inquisitorial methods that they deserve treatment in some detail.
In November, 1709, there died at Santiago de Chile the Jesuit Padre Francisco de Ulloa, a man of little education but of high spiritual gifts, nourished on the mysticism of Tauler. He had devoted himself to the direction of consciences and had a circle of about thirty devotees, many of them nuns, who reverenced him as a saint. On his death-bed he committed his flock to another Jesuit, Padre Manuel de Ovalle, who found on assuming charge that, although they confessed freely, he could not penetrate into the spiritual recesses of their souls. Suspecting that there lay concealed the doctrines forbidden in Molinos, Madame Guyon and Fénelon, he pretended to be himself in search of the higher spiritual experiences; he drew up a series of propositions, among which were some of those condemned, and submitted it to a few of the leading spirits who accepted it, thus committing themselves to the dangerous doctrines of the absolute abandonment of the soul to God, the non-resistance to temptation, the idleness of exterior observances, and the impeccability of the confirmed adept. After six months spent in this pious treachery, and having secured written evidence of these heresies as entertained by José Solis and Pedro Ubau, he denounced them, June 14, 1710, to the tribunal of Lima, with all others whose names he had ascertained. He admitted that Solis and Ubau, Doña Petronilla Covarrúbias, José González, Doña Josefa Maturano and others, who were leaders among them, were persons of pure life, and that some whose careers had been evil, after practising the exercises prescribed by Ulloa, became virtuous and deeply religious, but this had no bearing on their heresy. At Concepcion there was another proselyte, Fray Felipe Chavarri, whose errors were shown by a letter which he enclosed. Still another leading spirit was Juan Francisco Velazco, an expelled Jesuit, who resisted Ovalle’s advances. Some extravagances on his part attracted public attention and finally became so marked that he was confined in the public prison.
Anything akin to Molinism was regarded as dangerous in the highest degree, but the Lima tribunal was so inert that it was not until December 10, 1712, that the Commissioner Manuel de Barona summoned Ovalle to confirm his denunciation. On this same December 10th, another Jesuit, Antonio María Fanelli, wrote to the tribunal enclosing some writings of Solis and reciting the obstructions placed in the way of his attempts to have the affair investigated at Santiago, where all were connected by intermarriages and friendships. The writings of Solis were submitted to a calificador, Maestro Dionisio Granado, who reported, December 22d, that they contained the heresies of Molinos, Luther and Calvin. After this there was a pause until February, 1714, when Commissioner Barona received further denunciations of Solis from the Jesuit Claudio Cruzat and the Mercenarian Nicolás Nolasco. These were soon followed by a deposition of Mariana González showing that Solis’s teachings were pure Illuminism of the Quietist school. She had been under Ulloa’s direction for two years before his death, and he taught the same doctrines. Altogether her testimony was of the most damaging character, and she added the names of eighteen of Ulloa’s disciples. Stirred by this Barona procured evidence from others of the group and sent the whole to the tribunal. On the strength of it the fiscal, August 27th, presented a clamosa against Solis as a follower of Molinos and demanded his arrest with sequestration. Ibañez, who was sole inquisitor at the time, on September 1st signed a decree for the prosecution of all the disciples of Ulloa, but on November 9th, in view of the importance of the case, he ordered a fresh calificacion and inquiries to be made as to the standing of Ovalle. Fray Antonio Urraca was sent as a special commissioner ad hoc to Santiago to verify the evidence and gather fresh testimony.
Urraca lost no time in proceeding to Santiago where he remained until 1718 employed on the work, and it was not until February 10, 1719, that he presented himself to the tribunal to report. Solis, Ubau and Velazco had already been received as prisoners in November, 1718. In sending them, Commissioner Barona stated that Solis, through poverty, had gone to the mines, where he had been arrested. Velazco had been crazy for two years and was found on a ranch with no property but a poor bed. Ubau had four thousand pesos in his possession; his arrest had caused great excitement, for he was accountant for nuns and frailes, for the cabildo of the city and for merchants, universally respected for uprightness and punctual in his religious duties.
Thus far, although dilatory in action, the proceedings of the tribunal had been unexceptionable. Molinism was an aberration that had excited too much abhorrence for any substantial accusation of it to be neglected. All reasonable effort had been made to obtain and to verify evidence; there seems to have been no desire to persecute the bulk of the disciples of Ulloa and attention was concentrated on three who were regarded as leaders and dogmatizers. After this, however, there is much to criticize in the prosecutions. Ubau, who was perfectly sane when incarcerated, began to manifest symptoms of mental alienation which developed into complete insanity. In February, 1733, he was transferred to the convent of the Recollects and finally to the insane department of the hospital of San Andrés. Velazco pleaded that he had been insane for nine years, with lucid intervals; his health speedily broke down, consumption set in and he was transferred, March 15, 1719, to the hospital of San Andrés where he died on the 19th and his body was returned to the tribunal to be thrust into the ground. Proceedings were continued against his memory and fame, the advocate of prisoners arguing that irresponsibility precluded his condemnation for formal heresy. As for Solis, the accusation against him consisted of eighty articles and assumed that he was wholly an apostate from the faith. He protested that he had persuaded himself that God had revealed to him the spiritual way; this had been his fault, for which he begged mercy and was ready to accept any penance that might be imposed. His advocate defended him by pointing out the deceitful way in which Ovalle had beguiled him into error, by submitting to him propositions of Molinos which he had admitted under examination that he did not understand. He had never even heard the name of Miguel de Molinos, so he could not be termed his disciple and, if he had erred, it had been in following his confessor Ulloa. As for Ulloa, the prosecution of his memory and fame was carried through its regular course. The accusation represented him as a dogmatizer of the heresies of Luther, Calvin, Molinos and Ubicler (Wickliffe). There were a hundred and sixty articles and twenty witnesses to prove them. When a defender was called for, by command of the Jesuit Provincial the procurador-general of the province of Chile presented himself and the most strenuous efforts were made to protect the honor of the Society. Padre Firmin de Irisarri, who conducted the defence, says that there was no proof that Ulloa had ever taught the worst of the propositions ascribed to him, and he throws the whole blame on the artifice of Ovalle betraying three unlettered laymen into accepting doctrines which they were led to believe were entertained by him to whom the dying Ulloa had entrusted them.
As far as the living were concerned, the cases were concluded and ready for sentence in 1725. Then ensued an inexplicable delay until 1736, when Calderon and Unda were in control of the tribunal. The last auto general celebrated in Peru was announced for December 23d and was solemnized in the public plaza, with exceptionally imposing ceremonies, in the presence of the viceroy, the Marquis of Villagarcía, and of all the magnates. The effigies of Ulloa and Velazco were brought forward, condemned and burnt; that of Solis was reconciled in view of his submission. The unfortunate Ubau, in spite of his insanity, had been condemned, December 1st, to be relaxed as an impenitent heretic who denied his guilt, and, as his mental condition would have precluded repentance, he would have been burnt alive, but for some reason he was not brought forward and was allowed to linger in the hospital until he died in 1747. The sentence, however, confiscated his property which, as we have seen (p. 353) amounted to more than sixty thousand pesos and disappeared without leaving a trace. It would scarce be doing injustice to Calderon and Unda to suggest that the taking up of these cases, after ten years’ interval, may have been to conceal the abstraction of the sequestration.696
When the Visitador Arenaza and the Inquisitor Amusquíbar, in 1746, arraigned their predecessors they laid special stress on the irregularities and excesses which characterized the conduct of these cases. In that of Ulloa, the consulta de fe voted in discordia; another consulta was called, from which the two consultors who had voted in favor of the accused were excluded; another Ordinary, who had as consultor condemned Ulloa’s papers, was substituted for the previous one, and two new consultors were summoned, who were only allowed a morning in which to examine the voluminous documents, and the consulta was held on a feast-day when Ibañez refused to act.
Even before this, however, the Suprema had commenced action. The Jesuits had been profoundly stirred by the condemnation of Ulloa and the suspension in the churches of the sanbenito of a member of their Order. It was doubtless owing to their influence that the Suprema, March 10, 1738, ordered all the papers in the case of the Molinists to be sent to Spain and the sanbenitos of Ulloa to be removed from the churches of Lima and Santiago. This last command was unwillingly obeyed and, in reporting its execution, January 10, 1739, the tribunal remonstrated bitterly as to the disastrous results to the authority of the Inquisition and to the faith. The papers were duly forwarded, but were detained in Panamá until 1746, when they were despatched by way of Brazil. It was not, however, until 1762 that the Suprema delivered its judgement. It called attention to the many irregularities and inexcusable delays in the case of Solis, but did not modify the judgement. In that of Velazco, it revoked the sentence as unjust, absolved his memory and fame, ordered his property to be restored to his heirs, less the expenses of maintenance, and that a certificate rehabilitating them be given and the sanbenitos be removed from the churches. The review of the trial of Ulloa was long and minute, pointing out its innumerable irregularities and denials of justice; there was no proof that he ever held the doctrines imputed to him and no effort to ascertain the truth; a false and imperfect report of the case, moreover, had been made to the Suprema.697
There were six other disciples of Ulloa who were treated in the same inexcusable fashion. Two or three of them had appeared before the Santiago commissioner, in 1710 and 1718. Nothing more was done with them until the affair was revived for the auto of 1736, when they were arrested and brought to Lima and tried. It is scarce worth while to detail the cases. It suffices to say that two of them died in consequence, and that in at least two of the cases the Suprema, in 1762, set aside the sentences as unjustifiable. The auto of 1736 had not escaped severe criticism in Lima, which the tribunal repressed by trying two of the critics and fining them in five hundred pesos each. A third was a Jesuit, Padre Gabriel de Orduña, whom Calderon and Unda apparently were afraid to handle. The evidence was sent to the Suprema, which replied that Ibañez should summon him and warn him to treat the Holy Office with due respect. This became known in Lima to the mortification of the inquisitors who suspended the case.698
In the chief matter for which the tribunal was founded—the protection of the colony from the presumable missionary efforts of the Protestants—it found little to do. No case of proselytism has been found among the records thus far and those of voluntary Protestant residents are few and far between. The archbishop, as we have seen, had disposed of Jan Miller in 1548, and in the first auto de fe, in 1573, there appeared Joan Bautista and Mateo Salado. In 1581 there was a courageous martyr in the person of Jan Bernal, a Flemish tailor who had been arrested and forwarded by the Commissioner of Panamá. At first he professed conversion and begged mercy, but he regained his fortitude and declared that it was better to burn in this world than the next. To this he adhered in spite of strenuous efforts to convert him. He was tortured in caput alienum without success and was sentenced to relaxation. He was pertinacious to the last and must therefore undoubtedly have been burnt alive. In the auto of November 30, 1587, there appeared Miguel del Pilar, a Fleming, whose constancy was punished by relaxation and burning.699 Then a long interval occurs until 1625, when a man called Adrian Rodríguez of Leyden was induced to profess conversion and was reconciled with eight years of galleys and a sanbenito for life. A century elapses when, in 1730, there was an autillo for Robert Shaw, a Nova Scotian, who deserted from Clipperton’s expedition and penetrated to Cuzco, where he was arrested as a heretic and sent to Lima. He professed readiness for conversion and was confided for instruction to Dr. Thomas Correy but soon ran away, carrying with him 160 pesos and some jewels. He took service with a butcher in Puno, was discovered and taken back to Lima, where he escaped with some spiritual penances. About ten years later, James Haden of Boston was prosecuted as a heretic and was converted.700 The extreme sensitiveness which would not permit Spanish soil to be polluted by a Protestant foot is seen in the case of Pierre Fos, a French Protestant of Protestant descent, who was cook to Viceroy Superunda. He attended mass and passed for a Catholic, but betrayed himself and was arrested in 1758. He confessed at once and said he would become a Catholic if he could obtain his parents’ consent; then, after three days of prison, he announced his conversion to save his soul. Instructors were given to him and his trial dragged on through all its cumbrous forms until his sentence was read in an auto of May 18, 1763. It condemned him to abjure de vehementi, to be paraded in virgüenza through the streets, to confiscation of half his property, reclusion for instruction during two years, after which he was to be shipped to Spain, consigned to the commissioner at Cádiz. The last papers in the case are the receipt for his person by the captain of the good ship los Placeres, Callao, April 2, 1765, and the receipt from the receiver, April 22d, for the documents concerning his property. It was doubtless his pretended Catholicism that justified this severity.701
It is a curious illustration of the Spanish theories concerning heresy and its cognizance by the Inquisition that even heretics, whose presence was involuntary as prisoners of war, were held to come within its jurisdiction, and the Lima tribunal had much more to do with such subjects than with those who ventured intentionally within its grasp. In 1578 it wrote to Juan Constantino, its commissioner at Panamá, that it understood that the English corsairs who appeared there were heretics and that it would proceed as such against any who were captured. They robbed the commissioner and left him in his shirt, they broke the chalice and patena and cast into the sea the altar and missal. The commissioner on his part denounced the General of the armada del Mar de Norte for keeping in his service two or three Englishmen as trumpeters and an artilleryman, whom he ought to have delivered to the Inquisition of Seville.702 Sometimes the secular authorities maintained a cumulative jurisdiction with a result grotesquely horrible. Thus, in 1581 there were four English prisoners surrendered to the tribunal which tortured them severely for intention and sentenced John Oxenham, “captain of the robbers at Ballano,” to reconciliation, confiscation and the galleys for life; Thomas Xervel (Harvey?), master of the ship, to reconciliation, ten years of galleys and subsequent perpetual prison; John Butler, pilot of the ship, to abjure de vehementi and six years of galleys; the fourth, Henry Butler, a young brother of the last, was not tried. It sounds like a ghastly jest to learn that the alcaldes had already sentenced the first three to be hanged and the last one to perpetual galleys; they were all returned to the secular court and the sentences were duly executed. As they had evidently all been converted, the tribunal at least had the pious satisfaction of saving their souls.703 About 1585 there is a brief entry of a dozen or so of Englishmen captured at Guayaquil and taken to Lima. The Viceroy Count del Villar asked them whether they were baptized and on learning that they were thus answerable to the Inquisition, he handed them over to the tribunal. What were their sentences and whether the secular court reclaimed them does not appear.704
The next adventurers who suffered appeared in the auto of November 30, 1587. John Drake, a cousin of Sir Francis, passed the Straits of Magellan and was lost on the Pacific coast. Thirteen of the crew saved themselves and fell among cannibal Indians with whom they lived for about a year. Drake and two others fled in a canoe down the River Plate to Buenos Ayres, one of them being lost in the Paraguay. Drake and his comrade Richard Ferrel were seized, sent across the continent to Arica and thence to Lima, where they were tried by the tribunal. They professed conversion; Drake was sentenced to reconciliation and seclusion for three years in a monastery with prohibition to leave the country. Ferrel must have been somewhat more stubborn, for he was tortured and condemned to reconciliation, four years of galleys and perpetual prison.705
The auto of April 5, 1592, was graced with two groups of English prisoners. Four of these had been captured on the island of Puná and had lain in prison for five years. The secular authorities seem to have abandoned jurisdiction by this time and left them wholly to the Inquisition. Walter and Edward Tillert, brothers, were relaxed as persistent heretics, but weakened at the last moment and were strangled before burning. Henry Axli (Oxley?) was pertinacious to the end and was burnt alive. The fourth, Andrew Marle (Morley?), a youth of eighteen, professed conversion and was reconciled, with two years reclusion among the Jesuits for instruction.706
The other group consisted of three “pirates,” from the expedition of Thomas Cavendish, who sailed from Plymouth July 21, 1586. He reached the Straits of Magellan January 3, 1587, emerged March 15th and on April 9th anchored in the roadstead of Quintero, a little north of Valparaiso. At Santiago a force had been raised in anticipation of their coming, and when the English, in need of wood and water, had landed a party, they surrounded twelve men, who had straggled to a ravine, and carried them to Santiago. There nine of them were summarily hanged, to the great benefit of their souls, for they professed conversion. The other three were shipped to Lima, and delivered to the Inquisition where their trials lasted for three years. Of these William Stephens said his parents were both Catholics, and his mother had died in gaol for possessing beads and images; he had observed the religion of his country but was in heart a Catholic; he was reconciled with four years prison and sanbenito. Thomas Lucas had a Protestant father and Catholic mother; he had always been a Protestant but was now a Catholic; he was reconciled, with four years of galleys, six years of prison and sanbenito, and was never to leave Lima. William Hilles was but 17 years old; he had been a Protestant but was now a Catholic; he was reconciled, with six years of galleys and perpetual prison and sanbenito.707 Cavendish, it may be added, captured a treasure-ship, imitated Drake in circumnavigating the globe and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
More disastrous was the expedition under Richard Hawkins, which sailed from Plymouth in July, 1593, with three vessels, of which one was wrecked and one returned. Hawkins cast anchor at Valparaiso, April 24, 1594, where he captured four little vessels and ransomed a larger one. When he sailed, the corregidor manned one of the abandoned barks and despatched it to Callao with news of the corsairs. It made the voyage in fifteen days, enabling the Viceroy, Hurtado de Mendoza, to fit out a squadron under his nephew Beltran de Castro, who encountered Hawkins, July 2, in the Bay of Atacames, near Quito. After a desperate fight, Hawkins surrendered under promise of treatment as prisoners of war, and the extraordinary rejoicings with which the news of the victory were received in Lima are a measure of the terror excited by these dauntless sea-rovers. The terms of capitulation were scandalously violated; of the seventy-five prisoners taken, sixty-two were sent to the galleys at Cartagena, and thirteen were brought to Lima, where the Inquisition claimed them, on information that they were heretics, and they entered the secret prison, December 4, 1594. Possibly it may have been the irregularity attaching to the infraction of the terms of surrender that hastened the trials, for eight of the prisoners appeared in the auto of December 17, 1595, together with seven other Englishmen, captured at la Yaguana and forwarded from Santo Domingo. There were no martyrs among them. All professed conversion and were reconciled with various terms of reclusion except one, William Leigh, who was sentenced to six years of galleys and perpetual irremissible prison.708
Richard Hawkins, whose trial ended July 17, 1595, was too sick to appear in the auto and was transferred to the Jesuit college. His chivalrous bearing won for him general good will, and on his recovery he was placed at the disposition of the viceroy who was earnestly desirous that the terms of surrender should be observed. There was correspondence on the subject. The Suprema wrote, October 5, 1595, to suspend the sequestrations of the Englishmen, and in future not to sequestrate in such cases, for soldiers ought not to be deprived of the spoils won from their enemies. The tribunal, it said, was not to interfere in the cases of those sent to the galleys at Cartagena, but, as to Hawkins and his comrades, they were to be delivered to the viceroy, without proceeding further in their cases and, when they were fully instructed in the faith, it was to do justice, proceeding in their cases with much care and consideration. These instructions were of course too late, and in reply the tribunal asked whether their sanbenitos should be removed from the churches and whether, in case they relapsed, they should be subject to relaxation. The conclusion reached was that the sanbenitos were to be removed, the reclusion revoked, the sequestrations restored and that they were not subject to the penalties of relapse for reincidence. The succeeding viceroy, Velasco, desired to send them all to Spain, but this was opposed by the tribunal because their penances had not been completed; Hawkins ought also to be kept on account of his knowledge of the navigation of those seas. The last information concerning them occurs in a letter of the Royal Audiencia, May 21, 1607, showing that they had passed out of the hands of the tribunal. It says that the Viceroys Cañete and Velasco had sent to Spain all those captured in 1594 except Richard Hawkins, Captain John Ellis, Hugh Carnix (Charnock?) and Richard Davis, who were kept because they were experienced seamen and Davis was useful in the position assigned to him. Now permission has been given to them to sail in the outgoing fleet, consigned to the Contratacion of Seville.709 We know that Hawkins eventually reached England and was knighted.
In time there came a recognition of the rights of prisoners of war, even though they were heretics and were claimed by the Inquisition. In the auto of December 21, 1625, there appeared Pieter Jan of Delft, who had been captured and condemned to death as a pirate, though the sentence was not executed. He refused to be converted and was sent to the galleys, but was subsequently liberated under a royal cédula as a prisoner of war. Fanaticism, however, was difficult to extinguish. When, about 1650, the Dutch endeavored to establish themselves at Valdivia, Viceroy Mancera sent a well-equipped fleet and army to drive them out. The captain of the first vessel that reached there, on learning that the Dutch commander had died and been buried, caused the corpse to be dug up and burnt. From the absence in the subsequent records of cases of prisoners of war, however, it is safe to assume that by this time the barbarity of giving them the alternative of conversion or the stake had been abandoned. There was, it is true, an intervention of the tribunal in the case of the Dutch ship St. Louis, captured at Coquimbo in 1725, but it was not unreasonable. The fiscal Calderon, learning that among the prisoners there were French Huguenots and Dutch heretics and Jews, and that the Viceroy Castelfuerte thought of utilizing the sailors on his own ships, represented to the tribunal the grave dangers of such a course, when the Inquisitor Gutiérrez de Cevallos, induced the viceroy to abandon the plan and to bring to Lima about a hundred who had been left sick at Coquimbo.710 As none of them appeared in the succeeding auto it is inferable that they were not subjected to prosecution for heresy.
The most serious business of the tribunal, in the line of its proper functions, was with the apostasy of the Jewish New Christians. From the very foundation of the colonies, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, restrictions were laid on the emigration of Conversos and a law of 1543, preserved in the Recopilacion, orders that search be made for all descendants of Jews who were to be rigorously expelled.711 In spite, however, of the jealous care observed to preserve the colonies from all danger of Jewish infection, the commercial attractions were so powerful that the New Christians eluded all precautions. At first, however, they occupied but a small portion of the energies of the tribunal. It is true that among the earliest denunciations received, in 1570, were those of the Licenciate Juan Alvarez, a physician, and of his brother-in-law Alonso Alvarez with his wife, children and servants, for Judaism, but as their names are absent from the subsequent auto it is presumable that they were found innocent.712 The first appearance of Jews is in the auto of October 29, 1581, when Manuel López, a Portuguese, was reconciled with confiscation and perpetual prison, and Diego de la Rosa, described as a native of Quito, was required to abjure de levi and was exiled—showing that the evidence against him was very dubious.713 After this there are none until the great auto of April 5, 1592, in which there were two, Nicholas Morin, a Frenchman, and Francisco Díaz, a Portuguese, the former required to abjure de levi and the latter reconciled.714
The conquest of Portugal, in 1580, had led to a large emigration to Castile, where Portuguese soon became synonymous with Judaizer, and this was beginning to make itself manifest in the colonies. The auto of December 17, 1595, gave impressive evidence of this. Five Portuguese—Juan Méndez, Antonio Núñez, Juan López, Francisco Báez and Manuel Rodríguez—were reconciled. Another, Herman Jorje, had died during trial and his memory was not prosecuted. There were also four martyrs. Jorje Núñez denied until he was tied upon the rack; he then confessed and refused to be converted, but after his sentence of relaxation was read he weakened and was strangled before burning. Francisco Rodríguez endured torture without confessing; when threatened with repetition he endeavored unsuccessfully to commit suicide; he was voted to relaxation with torture in caput alienum, and under it he accused several persons but revoked at ratification. He was pertinacious to the last and was burnt alive. Juan Fernández was relaxed, although insane; the Suprema expressed doubts whether he had intelligence enough to render him responsible. Pedro de Contreras had been tortured for confession and again in caput alienum; he denied Judaism throughout and was relaxed as a negativo; at the auto he manifested great devotion to a crucifix and presumably was strangled; in all probability he was really a Christian.715
This bloody work affords a foretaste of what was to come. At the auto of December 10, 1600, there were fourteen Portuguese Judaizers. Twelve of them had professed conversion and were reconciled; with two, convictions were too strong and they were burnt alive—Duarte Núñez de Cea and Baltasar Lucena, whose last words were that he denied Christ.716 The auto of March 13, 1605, exhibited sixteen Judaizers reconciled in person and one in effigy. Six who had fled were burnt in effigy and three less fortunate were burnt in person. Besides these was Antonio Corrca who, during his trial, was converted by the inspiration of God; he was reconciled with three years in prison, which he served in the convent of la Merced and then was sent to Spain, dying, in 1622, as a fraile in Ossuna, in the odor of sanctity, which has rendered him the subject of several biographies.717
The auto of June 1, 1608, afforded but one case, and that an unusual one—Domingo López, tried for Judaism and acquitted. This may be explained by the fact that the Portuguese New Christians had purchased, in 1604, a general pardon in Spain, which reached Peru in 1605 and for a time repressed inquisitorial activity in this direction. In 1610 there was a noteworthy case of Manuel Ramos, one of the fugitives who had been burnt in effigy in 1605. He had been captured and on being tried was now acquitted.718 In an auto of June 17, 1612, there were five reconciliations for Judaism.719 From this time for some years there were only scattering cases. Possibly the terrible energy manifested by the tribunal had served as a deterrent and checked the Portuguese influx, but if so the impression was but temporary. We have seen (p. 337) the complaints that arose about this time concerning the Portuguese immigration by way of Brazil and Buenos Ayres. This increased greatly when, in 1618, a Portuguese inquisitor came to Rio de Janeiro, published an Edict of Faith and then in a few days made many arrests and sequestrated property to the amount of more than 200,000 pesos. The frightened Judaizers sought refuge in Spanish territory and kept the commissioner at Buenos Ayres, Francisco de Trejo, in a state of continual anxiety. He reported, January 15, 1619, that since the new governor, Diego Martin, had come the visitas de navíos had been interrupted and he asked for such positive instructions that the authorities should understand that no foreigners could land until he had inspected the ship. His protests were unavailing. By the middle of April there had arrived eight ships bringing Portuguese passengers, who had paid Castilians to take them as servants so that they might enter. Governor Martin was alert and threw them in prison, in order to send them back, but many managed to get through. Some of them were married in prison to Buenos Ayres women, so as to give them a standing in the community; others broke gaol and took refuge in convents, when the frailes refused to surrender them, giving security to the governor that they would prove themselves to be not of the prohibited class, whereupon they scattered to the interior and the man who had furnished the security calmly paid the forfeit. It is true that forty of them were sent back, but it was evidently impossible to exclude these proscribed and hunted beings who were so persistent and resourceful. The tribunal, in fact, was apparently not averse to obtaining fresh material for condemnation and confiscation, for it did not authorize the commissioner to arrest suspects and send them back, but only to compile information about them and forward it to Lima, keeping advised as to their destinations so that they could be seized when wanted.720 The immigration continued and, in 1623, the tribunal called the attention of the Suprema to the increasing numbers of Portuguese, who were spreading throughout the interior provinces. This continued and, in 1635, the fiscal of the Audiencia of Charcas represented forcibly to the king the evil of the innumerable Jews who had entered and were constantly coming.721
The tribunal resumed its labors and, by December 21, 1625, it was ready with an auto in which ten Judaizers were reconciled. Two had committed suicide in prison and were burnt with their bones. Two more were relaxed—Juan Acuña de Noroña, who was described as impenitent and must have been burnt alive, and Diego de Andrada who gave signs of repentance at the last and was probably strangled before burning.722
In 1626 there commenced a trial which illustrates forcibly the inexorable discipline of the Church, rendering it the supreme duty of the Christian to persecute and destroy all heresy. Francisco Maldonado de Silva was a surgeon of high repute in Concepcion de Chile. He was of Portuguese descent. His father had suffered in the Inquisition, had been reconciled and brought up his children, two girls and a boy, as Christians. Francisco was a good Catholic until, at the age of 18, he chanced to read the Scrutinium Scripturarum of Pablo de Santa María, Bishop of Búrgos—a controversial work written for the conversion of Jews.723 So far from confirming him in the faith it raised doubts leading him to consult his father, who told him to study the Bible and instructed him in the Law of Moses. He became an ardent convert to Judaism, but kept his secret from his mother and two sisters and from his wife, for he was married and had a child, and his wife was pregnant when he was arrested. During her absence, a year or two before, he had circumcised himself. At the age of 35, considering that his sister Isabel who was about 33, was mature enough for religious independence, he revealed his secret to her and endeavored to convert her, but in vain, and he was impervious to her entreaties to abandon his faith. They seem to have been tenderly attached to each other; he was her sole support as well as that of her mother and sister, but she could not escape the necessity of communicating the facts in confession to her confessor. The prescriptions of the Church were absolute; no family ties relieved one from the obligation of denouncing heresy, and she could not hope for sacramental absolution without discharging the duty. We can picture to ourselves the torment of that agonized soul as she nerved herself to the awful duty which would cost her a lifetime of remorse and misery when she obeyed her confessor’s commands and denounced her brother to the Inquisition.
The warrant for his arrest was issued December 12, 1626, and executed at Concepcion April 29, 1627. His friend, the Dominican Fray Diego de Ureña, visited him in his place of confinement, May 2, and sought to convert him, but he was resolved to die in the faith in which his father had died. So when transferred to Santiago, the Augustinian Fray Alonso de Almeida made similar efforts with like ill-success; he knew that he should die for the faith, he had never spoken to any one but his sister and she had betrayed him. He was received in Lima July 23d and was admitted to an audience the same day. When required to swear on the cross he refused, saying that he was a Jew and would live and die as such; if he had to swear it would be by the living God, the God of Israel. His trial went on through all the customary formalities, protracted by the repeated conferences held with theologians who endeavored to convince him of his errors. Eleven of these were held without weakening his pertinacity until, on January 26, 1633, the consulta de fe unanimously condemned him to relaxation.
A long sickness followed, caused by a fast of eighty days which had reduced him almost to a skeleton covered with sores. On convalescing, he asked for another conference, to solve the doubts which he had drawn up in writing. It was held June 26, 1634, and left him as pertinacious as ever. Meanwhile the prison was filling with Judaizers, of whom a number had been discovered in Lima. He asked for maize husks in place of his ration of bread, and with them made a rope by which he escaped through a window and visited two neighboring cells, urging the prisoners to be steadfast in their law; they denounced him and he made no secret of it, confessing freely what he had done. It was a mercy of God, we are told, that his prolonged fast had rendered him deaf, or he would have learned much from them of what had been going on.
The tribunal was so preoccupied, with the numerous trials on foot at the time, that Maldonado was left undisturbed, awaiting the general auto that was to follow. We hear nothing more until, after an interval of four years, a thirteenth conference was held at his request, November 12, 1638. It was as fruitless as its predecessors and, at its conclusion, he produced two books (each of them of more than a hundred leaves), made with marvellous ingenuity out of scraps of paper and written with ink made of charcoal and pens cut out of egg-shells with a knife fashioned from a nail, which he said he delivered up for the discharge of his conscience. Then on December 9th and 10th were held two more conferences in which his pertinacity remained unshaken. The long tragedy was now drawing to an end after an imprisonment which had lasted for nearly thirteen years. He was brought out in the great auto of January 23, 1639, where, when the sentences of relaxation were read, a sudden whirlwind tore away the awning and, looking up, he exclaimed “The God of Israel does this to look upon me face to face!” He was unshrinking to the last and was burnt alive a true martyr to his faith. His two paper books were hung around his neck to burn with him and assist in burning him.724
This auto of 1639, the greatest that had as yet been held in the New World, was the culmination of the “complicidad grande”—the name given by the inquisitors to a number of Judaizers whom they had discovered. As they described the situation, in a report of 1636, large numbers of Portuguese had entered the kingdom by way of Buenos Ayres, Brazil, Mexico, Granada and Puerto Bello, thus increasing the already numerous bands of their compatriots. They became masters of the commerce of the kingdom; from brocade to sack-cloth, from diamonds to cumin-seed, everything passed through their hands; the Castilian who had not a Portuguese partner could look for no success in trade. They would buy the cargoes of whole fleets with the fictitious credits which they exchanged, thus rendering capital unnecessary, and would distribute the merchandise throughout the land by their agents, who were likewise Portuguese, and their capacity developed until, in 1634, they negotiated for the farming of the royal customs.
In August, 1634, Joan de Salazar, a merchant, denounced to the Inquisition Antonio Cordero, clerk of a trader from Seville, because he refused to make a sale on a Saturday. On another occasion, going to his store on a Friday morning, he found Cordero breakfasting on a piece of bread and an apple and, on asking him whether he had not better take a rasher of bacon, Cordero replied “Must I eat what my father and grandfather never ate?” The evidence was weak and no immediate action was taken, but, in October, the commissioners were instructed secretly to ascertain and report the number of Portuguese in their several districts. The matter rested and, as nothing new was developed, in March, 1635, the evidence against Cordero was laid before a consulta de fe and it was resolved to arrest him secretly, without sequestration, so that the hand of the Inquisition might not be apparent. Bartolomé de Larrea, a familiar, called on him, April 2d, under pretence of settling an account, and locked him in a room; a sedan-chair was brought, and he was conveyed to the secret prison. His disappearance excited much talk and he was supposed to have fled, for the supposition of arrest by the Inquisition was scouted, seeing that there had not been sequestration.
Cordero confessed at once that he was a Jew and, under torture, implicated his employer and two others. These were arrested on May 11th and the free employment of torture obtained the names of numerous accomplices. The prisons were full and to empty them an auto in the chapel was hurriedly arranged and preparations were made for the hasty construction of additional cells. On August 11th, between 12.30 and 2 o’clock, seventeen arrests were made, so quietly and simultaneously that it was all effected before the people were conscious of it. These were among the most prominent citizens and greatest merchants of Lima, and we are told that the impression produced on the community was like the Day of Judgement. Torture and inquisitorial methods elicited further information resulting in additional arrests; the affrighted Portuguese began to scatter and, at the request of the tribunal, the Viceroy Chinchon prohibited for a year any one to leave Peru without its licence.
Up to May 16, 1636, the date of a report made to the Suprema, there had been eighty-one arrests; there was evidence against eighty more but, for lack of prison accommodation, their seizure was postponed. The old prison had sixteen cells, nineteen new ones had been constructed, then an adjoining house was bought and seventeen more were fitted up in it. This influx of wealthy prisoners put the fidelity of the gaolers to a strain which it could not stand. The old alcaide, Bartolomé de Pradeda, excited suspicion by buying property beyond his legitimate means; he was investigated and found to be selling favors to those under his charge, revealing secrets, permitting communications and the like. He deserved severe punishment but, in view of his twenty years of service, his seven children and his infirm health, he was allowed to ask permission to retire to his country place. He was replaced by Diego de Vargas, who soon had to be dismissed for the same reasons. Joseph Freile was appointed assistant, but was soon found guilty of similar offences and was sent to the galleys. His successor was Benito Rodríguez, who likewise succumbed to temptation, but he was a familiar and was only dropped. Another was Francisco Hurtado de Valcázar, who subsequently appeared in an auto for the same reasons.
One matter which vexed the souls of the inquisitors was the effort made by the threatened Portuguese to hide their property from sequestration. A proclamation was issued, ordering all who knew of such matters to reveal them within nine days under pain of excommunication and other penalties. This was successful to some extent, but the difficulties in the way were illustrated in the case of Enrique de Paz, for whom Melchor de los Reies secreted much silver, jewels and merchandise. Among other things he deposited with his friend Don Dionisio Manrique, Knight of Santiago, senior alcalde de corte and a consultor of the tribunal, a quantity of silver and some fifty or sixty pieces of rich silks. Manrique did not deny receiving them, but said that the same night Melchor ordered them taken away by a young man who was a stranger to him. The inquisitors evidently disbelieved the story; they reported that they had unsuccessfully tried friendly methods with Manrique and asked the Suprema for instructions.
The sequestration of so much property brought all trade to a stand-still and produced indescribable confusion, aggravated, in 1635, by the consequent failure of the bank. The men arrested had nearly all the trade of the colony in their hands; they were involved in an infinity of complicated transactions and suits sprang up on all sides. Creditors and suitors pressed their claims desperately, fearing that with delay witnesses might disappear, in the widening circle of arrests. There were many suits pending already in the Audiencia which were claimed by the tribunal and surrendered to it. It was puzzled by the new business thus thrown upon it; to a suit there had to be two parties, but the prisoners could not plead, so it appointed Manuel de Monte Alegre as their “defensor” to appear for them, and it went on hearing and deciding complicated civil suits while conducting the prosecutions for heresy. Mondays and Thursdays were assigned for civil business, and every afternoon, from 3 P.M. until dark, was devoted to examination of documents. The inquisitors claimed that they pushed forward strenuously in settling accounts and paying debts, for otherwise all commerce would be destroyed to the irreparable damage of the Republic, which was already exhausted in so many ways. This did not suit the Suprema, which, by letters of October 22d and November 9, 1635, forbade the surrender of any sequestrated or confiscated property, no matter what evidence was produced of ownership or claims, without first consulting it. This exacting payment of all debts and postponing payment of claims threatened general bankruptcy when the rich merchants were arrested, for their aggregate liabilities amounted to eight hundred thousand pesos, which was estimated as equal to the whole capital of Lima. To avert this, some payments were made, but only on the strength of competent security being furnished.
In the excitement of the hour and the mad rush for arresting everybody who might be an apostate, much injustice was committed which aggravated the confusion. Thus on May 8, 1636, Santiago del Castillo, was arrested, a merchant whose licence to sail for Spain was to be signed that afternoon. With him were seized fifty-five bars of silver and ten thousand pesos in coin; he was administrator of customs and it was reckoned fortunate that over thirty thousand pesos belonging to the king had been handed over so that it could be sent by the fleet. He was receiver in the bankruptcy of Joan de la Queba, and as such held about seven thousand pesos which were given to Judge Martin de Arriola to be apportioned among eight hundred creditors. Castillo’s estate was large but he was involved in suits, besides holding considerable property belonging to others, and claims began at once to be presented. All this was wholly superfluous, for on October 23, 1637, he was discharged as innocent and the sequestration was lifted. Alonso Sánchez Chaparro was liberated, February 9, 1637, and more than sixty thousand pesos were returned to him. There were several other acquittals, and a number of cases were suspended involving the release of large sums which ought never to have been tied up.
Meanwhile the trials of the accused were pushed forward as rapidly as the perplexities of the situation admitted. Torture was not spared. Murcia de Luna, a woman of 27, died under it. Antonio de Acuña was subjected to it for three hours and, when he was carried out, Alcaide Pradeda described his arms as being torn to pieces. Progress was impeded, however, by the devices of the prisoners, who were in hopes that influences at work in Spain would secure a general pardon like that of 1604. With this object they revoked their confessions and their accusations of each other, giving rise to endless complications. Some of the latter revocations, however, were genuine and were adhered to, even through the torture which was freely used in these cases. Besides this, to cast doubt on the whole affair, they accused the innocent and even Old Christians, which accounts for the acquittals mentioned above. The inquisitors add that they abstained in many cases from making arrests, when the testimony was insufficient and the parties were not Portuguese.
The tribunal was manned with four inquisitors, who struggled resolutely through this complicated mass of business, and at length were ready to make public the results of their labors in the auto of January 23, 1639. This was celebrated with unexampled pomp and ostentation, for now money was abundant and the opportunity of making an impression on the popular mind was not to be lost. During the previous night, when their sentences were made known to those who were to be relaxed, two of them, Enrique de Paz and Manuel de Espinosa, professed conversion; the inquisitors came and examined them, a consulta was assembled and they were admitted to reconciliation. There was great rivalry among men of position for the honor of accompanying the penitents and Don Salvadoro Velázquez, one of the principal Indians, sargento mayor of the Indian militia, begged to be allowed to carry one of the effigies, which he did in resplendent uniform. Conspicuous in a place of honor in the procession were the seven who had been acquitted, richly dressed, mounted on white horses and carrying palms of victory.
Besides the Judaizers there were a bigamist and five women penanced for sorcery. There was also the alcaide’s assistant Valcázar, who was deprived of his familiarship and was exiled for four years. Juan de Canelas Albarran, the occupant of a house adjoining the prison, who had permitted an opening through the walls for communications, received a hundred lashes and five years of exile, and Ana María González, who was concerned in the matter, had also a hundred lashes and four years of exile.
Of the Judaizers there were seven who escaped with abjuration de vehementi, various penalties and fines aggregating eight hundred pesos. There were forty-four reconciled with punishments varied according to their deserts. Those who had confessed readily as to themselves and others were let off with confiscation and deportation to Spain. Those who prevaricated or gave trouble had, in addition, lashes or galleys or both. Of these there were twenty-one, the aggregate lashes amounting to four thousand and the years of galleys to a hundred and six, besides two condemnations for life. In addition to these were the mother of the Murcia de Luna who died under torture, Doña Mayor de Luna, a woman of high social position, and her daughter Doña Isabel de Luna, a girl of 18, who, for endeavoring to communicate with each other in prison, were sentenced to a hundred lashes through the streets, naked from the waist up. There was also one reconciliation in effigy of a culprit who had died in prison.
There were eleven relaxations in person and the effigy of one who had committed suicide during trial. Of the eleven, seven are said to have died pertinacious and impenitent and therefore presumably were burnt alive, true martyrs to their belief. Of these there were two especially notable—Maldonado whose case has been mentioned above, and Manuel Bautista Pérez. The latter was the leader and chief among the Portuguese, who styled him the capitan grande. He was the greatest merchant in Lima and his fortune was popularly estimated at half a million pesos. It was in his house that were held the secret meetings in which he joined in the learned theological discussions, but outwardly he was a zealous Christian and had priests to educate his children; he was greatly esteemed by the clergy who dedicated to him their literary effusions in terms of the warmest adulation. He owned rich silver mines in Huarochiri and two extensive plantations; his confiscated house has since been known as the casa de Pilatos, and his ostentatious mode of life may be judged by the fact that when his carriage was sold by the tribunal it fetched thirty-four hundred pesos. He had endeavored to commit suicide by stabbing himself, but he never faltered at the end. He listened proudly to his sentence and died impenitent, telling the executioner to do his duty. There was one other prisoner who did not appear. Enrique Jorje Tavares, a youth of 18, was among those arrested in August, 1635. He denied under torture and after various alternations became permanently insane, for which reason his case was suspended in 1639.
The next day the mob of Lima enjoyed the further sensation of the scourging through the streets. These exhibitions always attracted a large crowd, in which there were many horsemen who thus had a better view, while boys commonly pelted the bigamists and sorceresses who were the usual patients. On this occasion the tribunal issued a proclamation forbidding horses or carriages in the streets through which the procession passed, and any pelting of the penitents under pain, for Spaniards, of banishment to Chile, and for Indians and negroes, of a hundred lashes. There were twenty-nine sufferers in all; they were marched in squads of ten, guarded by soldiers and familiars, while the executioners plied the scourges, and the brutalizing spectacle passed off without disturbance, and with the pious wish of the tribunal that it would please God to make it serve as a warning.725
The holocaust had been duly offered to a Savior of love and mercy; the martyrs had sealed in flame and torment their adherence to the Ancient Faith, and the mob had had its spectacle. Satisfied with the results of their pious labors for the greater glory of God, the inquisitors calmly went forward to gather in the gleanings from the ruined commerce and industry of the kingdom, to retain what they could for themselves and to account for as little as they might to their superiors. The process was long and complex and it was years before all the tangled skeins were ravelled out, and the clamorous creditors of the victims had their claims satisfied or rejected.
There were still some remnants of the hated Portuguese to be dealt with. After the auto, seven cases, which had been pending for three years or more, were suspended, followed, in 1639 and 1640, by others of reconciliation or suspension. In 1641 there was an auto, November 17th, in which three Judaizers were reconciled and seven others sentenced to confiscation and a hundred lashes apiece. There still remained of the “complicidad grande” Manuel Henríquez, who had been arrested in December, 1635, and had confessed under torture, after which he revoked, and several extravagances led to his being thought crazy, but in 1647 he was condemned to the stake. The tribunal however waited for other victims to justify the expense of an auto and, in 1656, he was still lingering in prison; he was not burnt until 1664 in company with the effigy of Murcia de Luna, the victim of torture. The Inquisition, in fact, had passed its apogee and had become inert as its wealth increased. In 1648 it reported that its only prisoner was Manuel Henríquez, who was awaiting the execution of his sentence.726
This was not because the Portuguese had been exterminated. They were still numerous, although the revolt of Portugal, in 1640, had rendered them, if not as yet foreigners, at least citizens whose loyalty might well be suspect. Political as well as religious motives may therefore be ascribed to the action of the Viceroy Pedro de Toledo, Marquis of Mancera, at the instance of the Audiencia, under impulsion of the tribunal, when, in 1646, he issued an edict that all Portuguese should present themselves with their arms and should leave the country. More than six thousand are said to have come forward and by payment of a large sum to have obtained a revocation of the measure—a venal transaction which formed the basis of one of the accusations brought against Mancera in the residencia or customary investigation at the close of his term of office.727
Either the tribunal had become too indolent for active work, or the Portuguese population had been cowed into sincere acceptance of Catholicism, for we hear little subsequently of Judaism. It was not that sensitiveness to Jewish observances had decreased, for in 1666 Juan Leon Cisneros was accused of buying scaleless fish on Fridays and of not sending his children to school on the Sabbath, for which suspicious actions he was sentenced to abjuration.728 From that time there is a long interval and even the ferocious recrudescence of persecution in Spain, during the first third of the eighteenth century, awoke but a feeble echo in Peru.
The next two cases that present themselves are highly significant of inquisitorial methods. About 1720 Alvaro Rodríguez was prosecuted for Judaism but died in prison and his case was never concluded. Still his sequestrated property, amounting to fourteen thousand pesos, was remitted to the Suprema, although the Inquisition had no claim on it, for he had left no relatives in Peru and Philip V had ordered the seizure of all Portuguese property as a measure of retaliation in the relations between the two countries. The other case was that of Don Teodoro Candioti, a Levantine Christian, who had married in Lima. He was arrested, probably somewhat before 1722, on suspicion of Judaism arising from his keeping the day before Christmas as a fast, according to the custom of his country. He had also said that St. Moses was a great saint and as such was venerated in his land. There was some talk of his being circumcised, but this was unfounded. He died in prison, May 19, 1726, making a most Christian end and saying that salvation was to be had by keeping the law of God, through the grace of Jesus Christ. His body was thrust into one of the graves of the tribunal but the Suprema ordered, November 24, 1728, that his bones should be secretly transferred and buried with Christian rites in the parish church and that an entry be made in the parish register of his burial as of the day of his death, without stating that he had died in prison, and further that a certificate of no disability be given to his widow and children, including capacity to hold offices in the Inquisition. Evidently the falsification of church records was a matter of course when the injustice of the Inquisition was to be concealed. The tribunal itself had still less scruple. It replied, August 26, 1729, that it had already, on December 23, 1727, reported the translation of the remains to the church of the Dominican college of St. Thomas; another exhumation seemed unnecessary, but it had had the required entry made in the parish register. The widow had presented the genealogies of her two sons, Don Antonio and Don Juan Candioti, asking that they be made familiars and, as the viceroy was much interested in the family, the request had been granted.729 This case brings before us one of the deplorable results of the system of secrecy; a husband and father disappears into the prison; he dies, and his family only learn his fate after seven years of suspense.
A more flagrant case was that of Doña Ana de Castro, a married woman of good social position but of dubious character, as she was reported to have sold her favors to one of the viceroys and to many of the rich colonial nobles. Accused of Judaism, she persistently denied; when, in 1731, her case was reported to the Suprema, she had been voted to relaxation with preliminary torture, to which the Suprema replied, February 4, 1732, that if the torture and efforts of the theologians did not bring repentance, the sentence was to be executed, but, if she confessed and gave signs of repentance, she was to be reconciled. She was held until the solemn public auto of December 23, 1736, when she was relaxed to the secular arm as a Judaizing Jew, convicted, negative and pertinacious. On her way to the brasero she is said to have shed tears, but the alguazil mayor paid no attention to them and she was duly burnt—probably without preliminary strangulation. All, apparently, was in accordance with routine procedure but, when the records came to be investigated in the visitation of Arenaza, Amusquíbar reported that the day before the auto she sought two audiences; no record was made of what occurred, but there could be no doubt that she confessed more than enough to entitle her to reconciliation; even if she did not entirely satisfy the evidence, what more could be expected of a poor woman in such agitation of mind and ignorant of the trap laid for her by Calderon, who acted as fiscal? The printed official account of the auto rather superfluously recites how she was notified of her sentence at ten o’clock of December 21st, after which two theologians, relieved every hour until 6 A.M. of December 23d, labored vainly to induce her to confess and to return to the faith. Amusquíbar, on the contrary, states that there was no record that she was notified of the sentence; that the book of votes did not contain such a sentence and that, even if there was one, it was invalid in consequence of the absence of the Ordinary; moreover that, in spite of her confessions, no new consulta de fe was summoned to consider them. Altogether, if Amusquíbar is to be believed, it was a cold-blooded judicial murder contrived, like the burning of Ulloa in effigy, for the purpose of rendering more impressive the spectacle of the auto de fe. In the same auto there was a reconciliation in effigy of Pedro Núñez de la Haba, a Judaizer of Valdivia, who had escaped from prison after his case was finished. If recaptured he was to be confined in the castle of Chagre, until he could be sent to the penitential prison of Seville, and was to have two hundred lashes for his flight. A small auto particular followed, November 11, 1737, in which Juan Antonio Pereyra, a Portuguese, was sentenced to abjure de vehementi, two hundred lashes, ten years of presidio at Valdivia and half confiscation.730
These are the only cases of Judaism recorded at this period and if the number is so scanty this must be attributed to the lack of Judaizers and not to indifference of the tribunal. How ready it was to prosecute is exhibited in the next case, that of Don Juan de Loyola y Haro, a scion of the family of St. Ignatius and an elderly gentleman of high consideration. He was arrested, July 9, 1743, on a charge of Judaism based on the flimsiest testimony of a negro slave. Other evidence was gathered, but with it the commissioner of Ica wrote that the current belief regarded it as a conspiracy on the part of his slaves, and that this had been confessed by one of the witnesses when dying. In spite of this his trial continued, nor was he released when, in February, 1745, the four false witnesses were arrested. He fell sick; in July he was transferred to a convent, where he died, December 27th of the same year, and was secretly buried in the chapel of S. María Magdalena. Evidently his family were kept in ignorance until an auto was held October 19, 1749, when the witnesses were punished and a great parade was made of the equity of the tribunal. His effigy was carried in procession, bearing in one hand a palm-branch and in the other a gold baton symbolical of his military rank as maestre de campo. His acquittal was read, empowering his brothers to carry the effigy around the town on a white horse, to exhume the remains and bury them where he had indicated on his death-bed, and certificates were granted to them that his imprisonment inflicted no disabilities on his kindred. On the next day the procession of the white horse took place with much pomp and circumstance. The Suprema, on reviewing the report, pronounced the whole proceedings to be vicious from the start and destitute of all the safeguards provided against injustice.731 It is perhaps worth noting that most of it occurred after Calderon and Unda had been superseded by Arenaza and Amusquíbar. With this the formal persecution of Judaism in Peru comes to an end, except that, in 1774, the tribunal wrote to the Suprema that the only cases then pending were thirteen for Judaizing, but that they had no basis.732
With regard to the general character of the punishments inflicted it may be remarked that they vary capriciously, in accordance doubtless with the temper of the inquisitors, whose discretion had few limits. In the earlier days there would seem to be a tendency to greater rigor than that customary in Spain. In the auto of 1578 the sentences, as a rule, are exceedingly severe.733 When Judaism came to be conspicuous, the penalties which we have seen inflicted were very similar to those imposed for the same offence by the home tribunals. As the galleys went out of fashion and were replaced by forced labor in the presidios, the principal destination to which culprits were sent was Valdivia, though occasionally they were assigned to Callao, Chagre or other ports where fortifications were under construction. Scourging, as in Spain, was a favorite resort, without distinction of sex. We have seen how ruthlessly it was employed in the great auto of 1639 and this continued as long as the tribunal was active. In the auto of 1736 there were sixteen sentences of two hundred lashes, half of them on women, for bigamy, sorcery and other similar offences. In that of 1737 there were only nine penitents, five of them being women; all of them were sentenced to two hundred lashes apiece, but this was remitted in the case of one of the men.734 In addition to the suffering, there was the severest of humiliations for those sensitive to shame. The so-called penitents were marched in procession through the streets, naked from the waist up, with insignia or inscriptions denoting their offences, while the executioner plied the lash. The assembled mob was in the habit of manifesting its piety by stoning the poor wretches, to repress which the tribunal occasionally issued a proclamation, such as we have seen in 1639. Similarly, before the auto of October 19, 1749, it forbade the throwing of stones, apples, oranges or other missiles at the penitents, under pain of a hundred pesos for Spaniards and ten pesos with four days of prison for others.735 Although there are frequent sentences to imprisonment for longer or shorter terms, there is no allusion anywhere to a casa de la misericordia or de la penitencia, as it was called in Spain, in which the penitents could perform their penance. Occasional instances in which they are ordered to be shipped to the home country renders it probable that this was the usual recourse in such cases. Exile was a frequent penalty, sometimes to a designated place, but more frequently from certain cities or districts, where the culprit had committed offences; when this happened to be his native home, where his trade or profession was established, it might be a most severe infliction, depriving him of his means of livelihood; when the culprit was a vagrant or an old sorceress it mattered little.
The inexplicable inconsistency in the adjudgement of penalties, when gauged by any rational standard, can best be understood by the contrast in a few cases. The tenderness displayed towards the abuse of the confessional has already been alluded to. The same is seen in some of the sentences for crimes of a still more serious character. Thus in the auto of July 12, 1733, Sebastiana de Figueroa, a mestiza aged 60, for sorceries including adoration of the demon and causing sickness and deaths, offences for which in a secular tribunal she would have been executed without mercy, yet escaped with abjuration de vehementi, half confiscation, two hundred lashes (which were remitted) and four years of exile to a designated place.736 In the auto of 1736, María Josepha Canga, a free negress, who had made her husband insane with sorceries and herbs, so as to have freedom for adultery, merely abjured de levi, with four years’ service in the hospital of San Bartolomé. In the same auto, Juan González de Ribera, a mestizo, had gone to the Indians, adopted their ways, professed their religion and, worst of all, had induced several Spaniards to do the same, in addition to which he had taken three wives. He was thus a dogmatizer and was condemned as a bigamist, idolater, sorcerer and diviner, and yet he merely abjured de vehementi and had three years hard labor on an island off Callao.737
With this ill-judged mercy may be contrasted the case of François Moyen, a Frenchman of varied talents and wide culture, skilled as an artist and musician, whose evil fortune threw him upon the tender mercies of Amusquíbar. Born in 1720, he led a somewhat adventurous life; that he was a believing Catholic is seen in a vow of pilgrimage to Compostela, made during danger in a voyage—a vow which he duly performed in 1739, during a residence in Lisbon. In 1746 he sailed from there to Rio de Janeiro, with the Count de las Torres, who had important business in Chile. At Buenos Ayres they parted, the count hastening across the Pampas, while Moyen tarried there for awhile, his vivacity and his accomplishments rendering him a general favorite. During his stay he again manifested his devoutness by performing the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius. About the middle of 1748, at the request of the count, who had gone to Lima, he started to rejoin him by way of Potosí, in company of a band of traders. With light-hearted carelessness, he talked freely, in the confidence of the road and the bivouac; as a Frenchman of the Gallican school and accustomed to the freedom of speech in Paris, he said much that he had better have left unsaid, with a singular imprudence in view of his acquaintance with the methods of the Portuguese Inquisition, his criticism of which formed one of the counts in his indictment.
He became an object of suspicion to his companions, especially to a Gallego named José Antonio Soto. Potosí was reached March 27, 1749, where a considerable stay was made, during which Moyen expended four pesos in masses. Two days after arrival, Soto denounced him to the commissioner José de Ligaraza Beaumont y Navarra, who secretly summoned the other travellers and muleteers, and gathered testimony swelling the sumaria to some two hundred pages. It was loose and thoughtless talk capable in the hands of the inquisitorial theologians of deductions most damaging—predestination in its most absolute form, polygamy justifiable, marriage not a sacrament; masses, prayers and indulgences were useless to souls in purgatory; limbo and purgatory were doubtful; the pope was not the head of the Church and had no power to bind or to loose; councils were superior to popes; it was wrong to condemn people for lack of knowledge of the son of a carpenter, and much more of the same kind. The ingenuity of the calificadores, in fact, injected heresy into the simplest remarks. When he reproved a muleteer for abusing a mule and said that it was a creature of God, this was held to prove that he was a Manichean. One brilliant night, looking at the stars, he observed that their multitude was superfluous, thus assuming that God had erred in creation, which was heretical blasphemy, constituting him an heretical blasphemer. A criticism of the luxury of the clergy, with a reference to the poverty of the Apostles, showed him to be a Wickliffite.
Commissioner Ligaraza assembled a consulta, which voted for the arrest of so dangerous a heretic. It was executed May 14th and he was imprisoned in chains. At first he was kept incomunicado, but subsequently visitors were admitted who provoked him to risky discussions and then gave evidence against him, in which, among other matters, a debate on the Eucharist told heavily against him. He became an epileptic and suffered frightfully from his chains and the cold climate. The commissioner had no funds for his maintenance; he endeavored to support himself by painting, but this was insufficient and his only solace, his violin, was taken and sold, reducing him to such despair that he attempted suicide. The commissioner was in no haste and did not report the arrest until June 9th nor transmit the evidence until December. On May 9, 11 and 12, 1750, the tribunal extracted from it forty-four heretical propositions and ordered Moyen’s transfer to Lima.
This journey, which commenced July 12th, consumed two years. Moyen’s health had been wrecked in his confinement and his epileptic fits recurred almost daily. Several times he nearly died; at Chuquito he received the viaticum. It was not until April, 1751, that Cuzco was reached, when he chanced to interest a lawyer named Tomas de Lecaros, who entered security for him and carried him to Arequipa, in vain search for improvement. There he met an English hatter named William—a good Catholic who attended mass daily—who counselled hypocrisy and silence about religious matters in a land where there was an Inquisition. Moyen chanced to mention this in his examinations; the Englishman was arrested and ruined.
On the return to Cuzco; a halt was made at Urcos, eight leagues distant. Amusquíbar, on September 14, 1751, called for his appearance within two months; the commissioner of Cuzco sent his notary, when Moyen drew a dagger and attempted resistance but was overpowered. Some three months later Fray Juan de San Miguel wrote to the tribunal that Moyen was hardened in his heresies and scattered them freely around Cuzco. That place was left, January 29, 1752, fortunately prior to the reception of an order from Amusquíbar to forward him in chains. March 26th he was delivered to the tribunal, broken and prematurely old with the sufferings of these three preliminary years of his trial.
Proceedings dragged on with the customary delays. The accusation, presented October 13th, represented him as a formal and pertinacious heretic and a follower of the sects of Luther, Calvin, Jansen, Quesnel, Manichee and Mahomet, besides being strongly suspect of Judaism. Discussion over these articles lasted until May 18, 1753, when he professed profound repentance for having discussed religious matters and begged for mercy. During the prolonged delays which ensued his sufferings in the prison were severe—in themselves an excessive punishment for reckless speech. Besides his continual epileptic fits, his feet were eaten up by chigoes; his chains chafed his ankles into sores, which threatened gangrene of one leg, and when, to avert this, on November 13th, the alcaide was directed to remove one of the shackles, the other was left on. In spite of this he made several attempts to escape—once by endeavoring to set fire to the door of his cell with the candle allowed to him at night, whereupon he was deprived of it. Again he succeeded in reaching the house of the Count of las Torres, only to be remanded, and on a third effort his plans were betrayed by a prisoner in an adjoining cell.
Two years were consumed in sending the evidence to Potosí for ratification and awaiting its return, although at first it had been ratified ad perpetuam. It was not received until April, 1755, and then its publication was delayed until September 3d. After this followed the customary examinations on the evidence, which were prolonged until March 14, 1758—a delay largely caused by Moyen’s constant epileptic attacks. His counsel did not present the defence until November 8, 1759, and then the consulta de fe was not assembled until January 15, 1761. It considered the case until February 14th, when the definitive vote was taken, under a protest that torture was not ordered in view of the weakened condition of the accused. The sentence finally was published in the auto of the following April 5th. It condemned him to abjure de vehementi, to ten years’ forced labor in an African presidio (Oran, Ceuta or Melilla), or in the penitential prison of Seville, as the inquisitor-general might prefer, and to two hundred lashes, which were commuted to vergüenza in consideration of his infirmities. The humiliating parade of the vergüenza through the streets of Lima was duly performed the next day; on the 11th he was shipped in irons by the galleon San Juan Bautista, reaching Cádiz in November; in December he was sent to Seville to which the African presidio was commuted. No consideration seems to have been given to the sufferings of the thirteen years of imprisonment since his arrest, nor to the wreck of a joyous and promising life for a few inconsiderate utterances.
Amusquíbar sought to justify the excessive delays of the trial by the quarrels in which he was involved, by his own sickness and that of the accused, but the Suprema did not accept these excuses and replied that the ten years intervening between the receipt of the prisoner and the sentence was an excessive delay and grave omission of the tribunal.738 There was in all this no special malignity; it was simply the habitual application of the system with callous indifference as to the results to the accused.
Not the least important function of the Inquisition was the censorship of the press. Although in Spain this was reserved to the Suprema, and the tribunals could only refer to it books which they regarded as suspect, distance rendered independent action necessary in the colonies. From an early period the Lima tribunal examined books and prohibited such as it saw fit. The importation of printed matter was also, as in Spain, subject to its supervision. The original instructions, borne by Cerezuela, enjoined special watchfulness by the commissioners at the seaports, to prevent the introduction of all works that were on the Index. To insure this, at first no books were admitted except through Callao, and the commissioner at Panamá was required to keep a close watch on everything destined for that point. Nothing could be shipped from there without his licence, nor could any package be opened except in his presence. The same vigilance was exercised at Callao, and all books were sent to Fray Juan de Almaraz, Prior of San Agustin, for examination. As the settlement and commerce of Buenos Ayres developed, similar precautions were observed there. There was always a haunting dread of the efforts attributed to the Protestants to smuggle heretic books into the land. In 1605 there was a scare of this kind, based on rumors that ships from Lisbon manned by Flemings were bringing such works in casks purporting to contain wine or salt, and special orders were issued to the commissioner to be doubly watchful.739 As in Spain, this system was a serious impediment to trade, and led not infrequently to collisions with the secular authorities. It required that all ships on arrival should be visited by the commissioner before any passenger or merchandise was landed, and that the latter, when brought on shore, should be opened in his presence and be minutely inspected.
Even so high an ecclesiastical dignitary as the Archbishop of Lima was not exempt from the censorship of the tribunal. We have seen how Amusquíbar used this power for the humiliation of Archbishop Barroeta, nor was this the only instance. Juan de Almoguera, who was archbishop from 1674 to 1676, while yet Bishop of Arequipa, had been strongly impressed with the dissolute lives of the priests among the Indians and, in 1671, he published in Madrid a series of Instructions, which the inquisitors held to be not only defamatory to the priests, but to contain propositions adverse to the Holy See. The archbishop defended himself by asserting that his doctrines were approved by the most learned men of Peru, and that the facts which he cited were perfectly true, for which he appealed to the testimony of the inquisitors themselves. They admitted this, but nevertheless they caused the edict of prohibition to be published everywhere.740
The reformatory legislation of Carlos III, from 1762 to 1768, limiting the unrestricted control of the Inquisition over the prohibition of books, was long in reaching Peru. In 1773 Viceroy Amat y Yunient says that although he had not yet received the cédula of 1768 officially through the Council of Indies, yet he defines its provisions as a guide. It put in force the Constitution Sollicita ac provida of Benedict XIV, entitling authors to be heard in defence of their books; it prevented the prohibition of books ad interim until a final decision was reached; where expurgations were ordered they were to be made known so that owners could delete the objectionable passages, and all edicts were to be submitted to the viceroy before publication.741 The demand for literature must have been greater than would be anticipated, for, in 1772, there was a discussion between the viceroy and the tribunal over the proceedings in opening and examining 165 cases of books.742
At this period the censorship was exercised largely through the civil authorities. February 28, 1787, the Viceroy Count de Croix reported to the king the execution of his orders of 1785 in the suppression and burning of certain books, the seizure of all copies that could be traced to the possession of booksellers or of individuals, and the issue of an edict prohibiting the printing of anything without a licence, even the University not being permitted to publish the eulogies and addresses customary on the arrival of a viceroy, or the Latin orations with which the studies were annually opened. The Inquisition is only alluded to in connection with the examination of importations, none being delivered from the custom-house without preliminary inspection by the commissioner of the tribunal, in connection with an appointee of the government.743 As in Spain, this censorship extended over morals as well as over religion and politics. In 1796, Antonio Ortiz, the commissioner at Buenos Ayres, was much exercised over certain wall-papers received from Barcelona. Some of them had mythological figures, such as Hercules, Venus and the like, which he considered intolerable. There was another one representing the globe adorned with flowers and presided over by Cupid with a lighted torch, as though to burn it with his impure fires, all of which he was impelled to cut up into small pieces.744 As we have seen in Mexico, even ill-advised symbols of devotion were prohibited. When, at the suppression in 1813, the building of the Inquisition was entered, Stevenson describes seeing there among the mass of prohibited books, a quantity of cotton handkerchiefs on which was printed a figure of Religion with a chalice in one hand and a cross in the other—a device which the manufacturer had fondly believed would render them popular, without reflecting upon the desecration inseparable from their use.745
From this time the principal work of the tribunal was in the enforcement of the prohibition of literature regarded as dangerous to State or Church. Camilo Henríquez, priest of the Padres Crucíferos de la Buena Muerte, was a prominent object of persecution. In 1809 he was denounced for reading prohibited books; his cell was searched without success, but the accuser insisted and on a more minute investigation his mattress was found to be stuffed with the dangerous material. He was arrested and, in 1810, was banished to Quito, but instead of obeying he joined the insurgents of Chile and distinguished himself by supporting the revolution in La Aurora, the periodical which he founded. Under the Restoration, the tribunal had little real work to do except to issue edicts prohibiting European periodicals, political pamphlets and other productions in which it could discover opinions inimical to the established order in politics and religion.746
In the turbulent atmosphere of the early nineteenth century, the authority of the Inquisition naturally declined, especially as the character of the inquisitors was so unfitted to inspire respect. Its suppression by the decree of the Córtes of Cádiz, February 22, 1813, was evidently seen in advance to be inevitable and was fatal to its influence. Shortly before that decree was received Stevenson relates that he was summoned before the tribunal, in consequence of a discussion in a coffee-house with a Fray Bustamante, respecting the image of the Madonna of the Rosary. If we may believe his story of the audience, he treated the inquisitors with slender reverence and escaped with an admonition to avoid religious disputes, and to bear in mind that in the dominions of his Catholic Majesty all men were subject to the Inquisition.747 When the decree of suppression was published, he had an opportunity of accompanying the first party that entered the building, so long an object of universal dread. The prison cells were all open and empty; he describes them as small but not uncomfortable. In the audience-chamber, back of the judges’ dais, there hung on high a life-sized image of Christ; its head was so arranged as to be movable by a person secreted behind, on a signal from the inquisitor, producing a profound impression on the awestruck culprit, who was denying his guilt. From his description of the torture-room it would seem that the tortures employed, though cruel enough, were less severe than those formerly in use—the cordeles and jarras de agua, the mancuerda, the trampazo and the garrucha. There was a rack on which the arms and legs could be stretched; a kind of pillory for scourging with scourges, some of which were of wire chains with sharp points; “tormentors” of netted wire with points, arranged to fit the wrists or waists, the legs or arms, and thumb-screws—a grisly collection, but less likely to endanger life and limb than the older atrocities. The crowd which found admittance carried off some of these as mementos and also some of the records, but the archbishop the next day published an excommunication against all who should not return what they had taken, and most of the documents were restored.748
We have seen that the money found in the chest was taken by the authorities and this of course was retained, but the salaries of the officials were continued. The suspension was short-lived, ending with the decree of July 21, 1814, re-establishing the Inquisition, when the three inquisitors, Abarca, Zalduegui and Sobrino, resumed their places, but the old awful authority could not be revived. They complained bitterly of the viceroy, who showed himself, they said, hostile to the re-establishment. He delayed issuing the decree, treated them with discourtesy and refused to refund the money. They depicted the deplorable condition of the tribunal, destitute of means to pay salaries in arrears, or even to make arrests that had been resolved upon prior to the suppression, while the buildings were dirty and out of repair.749 We can readily imagine that the progress of the War of Independence left little leisure or disposition on the part of the authorities to listen to their complaints. How completely decadent was their authority, is seen in a letter from the Suprema ordering them to summon an Englishman named John Robinson and point out to him that he had been admitted to residence on condition of not talking about religion, or dogmatizing against Catholicism, and they were moreover to seek an interview with the viceroy, to ask his aid in restraining the man and to report the result.750 Times had changed since François Moyen was so inhumanly persecuted for his loquacity.
Still, they were not without some remnants of authority. The University of Lima had sent an address to the Córtes of Cádiz, congratulating it on the decree of suppression. This was an offence not to be overlooked and, April 7, 1815, the Suprema sent an order to dismiss all the signers of the paper who held office under the tribunal. Accordingly, on October 29th, Fray Josef Recalde was summoned to surrender his vestment and badge as a calificador. To this he replied, November 3d, with a supplication not to expose him to such a dishonor; the paper had been presented to him for signature by the beadle of the University, saying that it was an act of obedience to the Córtes and he, being busy, had signed it without reading it, as he was accustomed to do with the numerous papers requiring his signature. On this Inquisitor-fiscal Sobrino reported that Recalde only intensified his offence, and he proceeded to accuse the University of misleading youth and allowing them to read prohibited books, while Recalde’s statement only showed how recklessly its members joined in anything resolved upon by the leaders. Both papers were forwarded, December 13th, to the Suprema for its judgement, but whether Recalde was reinstated does not appear from the documents at hand.751
The officials continued to draw their salaries, but there is little trace of their activity. The latest indication I have met of their performance of duty is a letter from the Suprema, July 11, 1817, to the tribunal of Logroño, asking for information to guide the tribunal of Lima in a case of alleged bigamy on the part of Don Fernando Díaz, then a resident of Cuzco.752 In that same year a “voluntary” subscription in aid of the government was organized, to which the contribution of Inquisitor-fiscal Sobrino was niggardly, leading to his being reprimanded from Madrid.753 In 1819 the tribunal was reorganized. The senior inquisitor Abarca was dead and Zalduegui was dean; he and Sobrino were jubilated on one-quarter of their salaries and the tribunal consisted of Cristóval de Ortegon as senior, Anselmo Pérez de la Canal as junior and José Mariano de Larrea as fiscal.
Their term of office was short. The final decree of suppression, March 9, 1820, was long in reaching Peru, where it was not promulgated until September 9th, with orders to communicate it to all the archbishops of the district and to take the necessary steps for assuming possession of the property. This was done decently and in order. On September 18th Viceroy Pezuela ordered the intendant of the province, in concert with the two regidores of Lima, to proceed in accordance with the decree of February 22, 1813, to occupy the property, including its patronage and pious foundations, and to make an exact inventory. This was followed, September 20th, with instructions that at 8.30 A.M. of Friday, September 22d, possession should be taken, and the ex-dean was notified to be ready in order that it should be executed with promptitude. At nine o’clock on Saturday the intendant and the regidores met in the Inquisition and made an inventory of all property found there. In pursuance of Article 10 of the decree of 1813, the commission of three, on September 28th, issued an order calling on the ex-receiver-general, Carlos Lizon, for an authentic list of all the officials with their salaries, so that the latter might be paid. This was superfluous; from time immemorial the custom had been to pay all salaries in advance, in instalments of four months. The inquisitors had providently taken care of themselves and their subordinates and, on August 29th and September 1st, had issued orders on Receiver Lizon for the tercio adelantado, commencing September 1st, so that he was able to exhibit the corresponding receipts, amounting to 9472 pesos and a fraction, indicating on annual pay-roll of 28,417 pesos.
That the inventory only showed a few items of volumes of records is testimony of the completeness with which everything had been appropriated. Although the work of the tribunal had shrunk almost to nothingness, all the offices had been kept filled and the roster was as complete as it had been in the period of the greatest activity.754 It is presumable that, as in Mexico, they went to Spain and were provided for there.
The total amount of work accomplished is estimated by Medina as three thousand cases tried, but this is probably too liberal an allowance. His exhaustive researches have resulted only in an enumeration of 1474 cases.
These consist of—
| Laymen | 1126 |
| Women | 180 |
| Secular clergy | 101 |
| Franciscans | 49 |
| Dominicans | 34 |
| Mercenarians | 36 |
| Augustinians | 26 |
| Jesuits | 12 |
The offences prosecuted were
| Propositions | 140 |
| Judaism | 243 |
| Moors | 5 |
| Protestants | 65 |
| Solicitation | 109 |
| Blasphemy | 97 |
| Sexual errors | 40 |
| Bigamy | 297 |
| Sorcery | 172 |
| Miscellaneous and not specified | 306 |
For the 250 years of existence, the estimate of a total of 3000 cases would make 12 per annum, or 1 per month, but in the first 20 years of the tribunal the cases amounted to 1265, which would reduce the average of the other 230 years to about 7½, and it would be safe to assume for the last century an average of not more than 3 or 4 a year.755
For this slender result, to say nothing of the large expenditure, the colony was kept in a constant state of disquiet, the orderly course of government was well-nigh impossible, intellectual, commercial and industrial development were impeded, universal distrust of one’s neighbor was commanded by ordinary prudence, and the population lived with the sense of evil ever impending over the head of every one. That there was any real danger to the faith in Peru is absurd. Possibly the tribunal may have been of some service in repressing the prevalence of bigamy among laymen and of solicitation among the clergy, but the fact that these two offences remained to the last so prominent in its calendar would show that it accomplished little. As regards sorcery and superstitions, which pervaded all classes, in the mixed population of Europeans, Indians, negroes and half-breeds, with an accumulation of superstitious beliefs drawn from so many sources, the number of cases is surprisingly small, especially as the exemption of Indians from inquisitorial jurisdiction seems to have been disregarded in this offence. In the repression of the practices which were regarded as implying pact with the demon the Inquisition may be said to have virtually accomplished nothing. It would be difficult to find, in the annals of human misgovernment, a parallel case in which so little was accomplished at so great a cost as by the Inquisition under Spanish institutions.