The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies

Chapter VIII New Granada

Although the Nuevo Reino de Granada originally formed part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, it was the earliest settlement on the continent of South America. When Balboa, in 1514, reported his rich discoveries in Darien, no time was lost in sending out Pedro Arias Dávila as governor, who landed at Santa Marta. He took with him as bishop Fray Juan de Quevedo, who formed one of his council with a right to vote, thus founding at the start that curious complication of jurisdictions which exercised so unhappy an influence on the development of the Spanish colonies. The see of Santa Marta, however, was not founded until 1531 and, as settlements were pushed into the interior, Santa Fe de Bogotá was established as the capital, where the Audiencia, or high court, was organized in 1547 and governed the colony until 1564, when Andrés Díaz Venero de Leiva was sent out as president.756 It was not erected into a viceroyalty until 1719, from which it was reduced to its former state in a few years, to be restored again in 1740.757

In 1532 the see of Cartagena was founded and, in 1547, that of Popayan. In 1553 came the Franciscan Fray Juan Barrios with a bull of Julius III by which the see of Santa Marta was transferred to Santa Fe and erected into an archbishopric, thus sundering it from the metropolis of Lima. Santa Marta was reduced to an abbacy, to be subsequently re-erected. Cartagena was dismembered from Santo Domingo and the archiepiscopal province included it with Popayan and Santa Marta. In the absence of the Inquisition, Archbishop Barrios exercised its functions and, in a series of Synodal Constitutions, issued in 1556, he ordered that no books should be possessed or sold without being first examined by the bishop or his deputies, under the penalty of fifty pesos.758

When, in 1570, the tribunal of Lima was established, its authority extended over all the Spanish possessions from Panamá to the south. The organization of so extended a territory was a work of time and the material at hand for it was of the worst description, as we have seen in the preceding chapter. It was not until 1577 that Inquisitor Cerezuela appointed a commissioner for Santa Fe, when his choice fell upon D. Lope Clavijo, dean of the metropolitan chapter. In the exercise of his new authority, Clavijo naturally became involved in bitter quarrels with the archbishop, Luis Zapata de Cardenas. His character reflected no credit on the Holy Office, if it be true as reported that his official apartments became a receptacle for women, on some of whom he committed violence, and that the nuns of Tunja were obliged to forbid his entrance into their parlor, in order to escape his licentious conversation. The Commissioner of Popayan, Gonzalo de Torres, was no better and was the source of infinite trouble to the bishop, until the visitador, Juan Ruiz de Prado, summoned him to trial in Lima, on a prosecution containing twenty charges. He seems, in 1589, to have been deprived of his office, which, as Archbishop Lobo Guerrero said to the Suprema, he used only as a means of committing offences against God. We hear also of Juan García, Commissioner of Cumaná, appointed by Inquisitor Ulloa, as a reward for committing perjury against an enemy of the latter. His adulteries and incests with maids, wives and widows, mothers, daughters and sisters, were notorious and he had caused the death of more than a hundred Indian laborers without baptism or confession. Like the others, he only sought the place for the protection afforded from punishment for his crimes.759

Under worthies such as these, it is easy to understand that little attention was paid to the purification of the faith among the colonists. The cases sent to Lima for trial were few and unimportant. There were no Protestants among them; the only accusation of Judaism was that of Juan de Herrera, in 1592, of which he was absolved in 1595, after undergoing torture; the rest were the ordinary run of inquisitorial business—sorcery, bigamy, blasphemy and propositions, more or less innocent. That the commissioners, however, did not neglect opportunities that presented themselves may be assumed from the case of Juan Fernández, a merchant who, in 1588, denounced himself to the Commissioner of Cartagena because, on hearing that a man had hanged himself he had exclaimed “May God forgive him!” This proposition was decided to be heretical; Fernández was arrested, with sequestration of property, and was sentenced to abjure de levi, to hear mass as a penitent, and to pay a fine of a hundred pesos.760

It was evident that, if the faith was to be properly guarded, some authoritative tribunal nearer than Lima or Mexico was necessary for the vast territory which included the whole sweep of the Antilles and the coast of Tierra Firme from Panamá to Guiana. As early as April 8, 1580, Inquisitor Cerezuela wrote that the people of New Granada were asking for one, in view of their distance from Lima; this was great—fully six hundred leagues—and there would be no inconvenience in such a step except that he has understood that there were no suitable persons there to serve as consultors and calificadores.761 Again, in 1600, Inquisitor Ordóñez y Flores represented to the Suprema the enormous extent of the territory assigned to the Lima tribunal and suggested two new ones—one at La Plata and the other at Santa Fe. The latter should include the sees of Popayan, Cartagena, Santa Marta and Venezuela, making a district four hundred leagues in length, in which it was impossible to provide commissioners; at present there was but one, with whom communication was so difficult that sometimes two years passed without hearing from him. A year earlier, in 1599, Archbishop Lobo Guerrero had written to the king to the same effect. He described the land as the most vicious and sinful in the Spanish dominions, and the faith as on the point of destruction; the distance to Lima was so great that offenders either died or escaped on the road and there was no money to meet the cost of sending them.762

The same cry went up from the islands. In 1594 the Council of Indies suggested to the king that, in view of the failure of all efforts to suppress the dealings of the people of Santo Domingo with the English and French corsairs, and with pirates of all nations, the inquisitor-general should commission the Archbishop of Santo Domingo as an inquisitor. On this being submitted to the Suprema it replied that there were disadvantages in the plan and the true remedy would be to establish a tribunal on the island, which could be done on the most economical basis. Philip II ordered a junta of a member of each council to consider a grant of inquisitorial power to the archbishop for a term of three or four years.763 Nothing was done. The king shrank from the expense of a new tribunal and the Suprema was too jealous of the episcopate to delegate its power to the archbishop. A similar fate awaited a complaint of Bishop Martin of Puerto Rico, in 1606, as to the influx of heretic traders and sailors with their books, to remedy which he urged that a tribunal be established in Santo Domingo, or that delegated power be granted to the bishops, including authority to appoint alguaziles and familiars with the recognized privileges and exemptions.764

There can be no doubt that many representations of the same import poured in upon the court and finally, in 1608, the Council of Indies formally urged the erection of a tribunal in Santo Domingo. After due discussion, it was resolved to include in the district all the lands surrounding the Caribbean, except Central America, and, as its inquisitors subsequently boasted, it enjoyed the most extensive territories of any tribunal, embracing the archbishoprics of both Santa Fe and Santo Domingo and the bishoprics of Cartagena, Panamá, Santa Marta, Popayan, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Santiago de Cuba.765 Its seat was fixed at Cartagena, as a central point and leading port of entry, which had had time to recover from its devastation by Drake in 1585. Its position and its safe and capacious harbor, easily defensible by fortifications, rendered it the entrepôt of the trade with the Pacific, and the place where the treasures of the colonies were gathered for transhipment to Spain, while the pearl fishery of Margarita and the productions of a province rich in mineral and agricultural wealth gave it a large and lucrative commerce. As the seat of a tribunal it had the advantage that, unlike Lima and Mexico, it was not a capital where the humors of inquisitors could be in some slight degree controlled by a viceroy and a royal Audiencia. They had only to deal directly with a local governor and municipal authorities on the one side, and with a simple bishop on the other; there was little to restrain them, short of the Suprema beyond the Atlantic, and we shall see that they took full advantage of their position in the endless embroilments which formed their chief occupation. The history of the tribunal is to be found not so much in its autos de fe as in the guerrilla war which for a century it maintained with the authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, rendering decent and orderly government impossible and going far to explain the decadence and decrepitude of the colony.

Extensive as was the district of the tribunal, it sought to extend its authority still farther over Florida. As early as 1606 there is a curious letter from Fray Juan Cabezas, Bishop of Cuba, reciting that the tribunal of Mexico had appointed Fray Francisco Carranco as commissioner in Havana—under what authority does not appear. On the news of his coming the good bishop fled from Havana and took refuge in St. Augustine, whence he despatched his provisor to Spain to protest against the announced intentions of Carranco to include Florida within his jurisdiction. This had caused lively anxiety among the garrison, some three hundred in number, who with the friars were the only Spaniards there. The Indians as yet were so little rooted in the faith that recently in the missions they had slain four or five of the missionaries. There were, he adds, many women and children, for most of the soldiers were married and the effort was made to induce all to marry, for the hardships of the place were such that, without these ties, the governor would not venture to send any one away with the expectation of his return.766 In 1621 there was some discussion as to sending a commissioner there, but nothing was done. Then, in 1630, Inquisitor Agustin Ugarte y Saravia reported from Cartagena that he had sent to the Governor of St. Augustine, Luis de Rojas y Borja, commissions in blank for a commissioner and familiar, fearing that, if appointees were sent, he would not receive them, as the settlement was wholly military, even the Franciscan missionaries being rated as soldiers.767 It is not likely that the governor filled out the commissions, for Florida remained deprived of the blessing of the Holy Office. In 1692 another attempt was made. The Cartagena tribunal appointed Fray Pedro de Lima as commissioner with power to nominate subordinates, without requiring proofs of limpieza. Of this he availed himself to create a notary, an alguazil mayor and four familiars, thus establishing a tribunal of his own. The governor, Don Diego de Quiroga y Lanada, took the alarm and wrote earnestly to the Council of Indies. All this, he said, was simply to escape the royal jurisdiction; Fray Pedro, as a friar, was ineligible to the post of commissioner; the tribunal of Cartagena had no jurisdiction over Florida, where, by the Concordias, there was to be no Inquisition and, if cases of faith arose, they were to be treated by the cura or the ecclesiastical Vicariate. The Council of Indies, December 9, 1695, reported this to the king, asking that the Suprema be told to order the Cartagena tribunal to desist; to this Carlos II assented and the attempt to establish an Inquisition in Florida seems to have ended here.768

On June 29, 1610, Mateo de Salcedo and Juan de Mañozca—the latter a name of evil import to the Spanish colonies—the newly appointed inquisitors for Cartagena, set sail from Cádiz, with a fiscal, alguazil, notary and messenger, and power to appoint all necessary subordinates, whose commissions would be issued by the Suprema. On August 9th they arrived at Santo Domingo, where they were received with all honor and published the Edict of Faith; they received some self-denunciations, they appointed the Dominican Provincial as temporary commissioner, and the archbishop surrendered the papers of all cases heard by him and his predecessors. Sailing on September 4th, they reached Cartagena on the 21st, where their reception by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities was conducted with great pomp. On the 26th the royal letters were read and the oaths of obedience taken; three houses were rented for their occupation until a suitable building could be rented. The king allowed them 8000 pesos for their installation, with which they bought the houses in which they were lodged, paying half in cash and, with the remainder of the money, building a prison with thirteen cells.769 For the support of the officials, as in the case of Mexico and Lima, the king provided a subvention of 8400 ducats a year, until the fines and confiscations should suffice to defray expenses; but, profiting by experience, he endeavored to guard against the habitual deceit of the tribunals. In his cédula of March 8, 1610, to the treasury officials of Cartagena, he ordered that sum to be paid out of any funds in the treasury or, if those were not sufficient, then out of what came in from the province, but, in order to know how much of this subvention should be paid, the receiver of the tribunal was required to furnish every year a statement of the confiscations and of all moneys applicable to the salaries, which were to be duly deducted from the treasury payments.770 We shall see, as in Mexico and Peru, how fruitless was the precaution against audacious inquisitorial mendacity.

The tribunal found little to do in justification of its existence. It was not until February 2, 1614, that it held its first auto de fe, in which it presented about thirty penitents, whose offences consisted of trivial propositions, blasphemies, superstitious arts and the like. Nevertheless the ceremonies were conducted with all solemnity to impress the population, and a long and grandiloquent report was sent to the Suprema. Four readers of the sentences were employed, so that the reading could be continuous, yet such was the verbosity that the ceremonies lasted from half-past nine in the morning until after sunset and the auto had to be finished by torch-light. There were about a dozen sentences of scourging through the streets and when, on the next afternoon, the infliction was to commence, a motley crowd of negroes, mestizos, mulattos and Spaniards, estimated at four thousand, assembled, armed with oranges and other fruits wherewith to pelt the victims. The escort provided for them was afraid to venture forth until the inquisitors made proclamation threatening a hundred lashes for any such manifestation of pious zeal, when every one dropped his missile and the punishment was carried out in peace.771

Besides these there had been despatched in the audience-chamber sixteen cases, one of which is worth mentioning as an example of the spirit in which the inquisitors commenced their duties. For some matter of slight importance, Doña Lorenza de Acereto, a noble married woman, had been penanced by the episcopal provisor Almanso, prior to the founding of the tribunal. Probably stimulated by the Edict of Faith she was impelled to denounce herself to it and Mañozca, who had some private grudge to satisfy, imprisoned her for eight months and then sentenced her to a fine of 4000 ducats and exile for two years. When the sentence was read, she appealed to the inquisitor-general but, as she was leaving the room, she was warned that she would be immured for life in the secret prison and, in dread of this, she withdrew the appeal. It chanced that Almanso was soon afterwards sent to Madrid by his bishop to complain of the tribunal; he represented this matter to the Suprema, which sent for the papers of the trial and, on examining them, suspended the case as groundless.772

It was in unimportant routine work of this kind that the inquisitors employed the intervals of their quarrels with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Cartagena numbered a population of only five hundred Spaniards; the rest were negro slaves, Indians and the half-castes so numerous in the Spanish colonies. The Indians were not subject to inquisitorial jurisdiction and among the whites there was not intellectual energy sufficient to produce serious heresy. Mañozca, in fact, in a letter of March 17, 1622, to the Suprema describes them as wholly devoted to the pursuit of gain and utterly regardless of honor and reputation, from the Governor down. There is no one, he says, who will trouble himself with useful works, and virtue and honor are contraband, for they are only prized where there are virtuous and honorable men.773 There were left the negroes and mixed races, ignorant and superstitious. The slaves had brought from the Guinea coast the mysteries of Obeah and dark practices of sorcery. The native Indians had ample store of superstitions, to cure or to injure, to provoke love or hatred; the colonists had their own credulous beliefs, to which they added implicit faith in those of the inferior races. The land was overrun with this combination of the occult arts of three continents, all of which were regarded by the Inquisition, not as idle fancies, but as the exercise of supernatural powers, involving express or implicit pact with the demon. Had the tribunal seriously labored to eradicate them, it would have had ample work for its energies, but the offenders were slaves or paupers; there was neither honor nor profit in their prosecution, and consequently no energy. Indeed Mañozca, in the letter just quoted, endeavored to be released from the task—perhaps the only instance on record of an inquisitor desiring to abandon a portion of the jurisdiction for which the Holy Office was wont to struggle so desperately.

He gives a fearful account of the witchcraft practised by the negro slaves in the mines of Saragossa, in Antioquia, who kill, cripple and maim men and women and suffocate children and destroy the fruits of the earth. There are about four thousand of them, brought from Guinea, who, though baptized, are wholly untaught in the faith, and are more like brutes than men. The missionaries among them pay no heed to their instruction but are wholly absorbed in the search for gold. The district is remote and mountainous and only to be reached by footpaths; the smallest coin there is gold and to arrest a culprit costs more than his value as a slave. The tribunal has no funds to bring them hither for trial and their maintenance in gaol is a heavy burden on the owners. Four have been tried and condemned to reconciliation and perpetual prison, but the Inquisition has no penitential prison and, if there was one, they would starve to death, as they could not earn their support and the alms of the pious would not reach so miserable a set of beings. They have therefore been put into the Hospital General, where they can be employed and hear mass and perform their penance. As for the great mass of the culprits, it would be impossible for the tribunal to arrest and try them—the cost would be enormous and the result, according to law, would be to set them free, which would fill the land with demons, nor would the owners permit their capture, in the certainty of losing them. To meet these difficulties Mañozca therefore suggests a general pardon, after which the civil authorities shall have cognizance of their crimes and punish them otherwise than with the benignity habitual with the Inquisition. The Suprema was hardly prepared thus to surrender even so unprofitable a portion of its jurisdiction and, in forwarding this letter to the king, urged that an Edict of Grace should be proclaimed; that he should assist the tribunal with the funds necessary for the support of the officials and the expense of its functions, and that the Council of Indies should order the royal officials to inflict severe punishment, in so far as they had jurisdiction, and should assist the Inquisition in making arrests and other acts. To this Philip IV drily replied that the Council of Indies would order the governors to apply such remedies as they deemed advisable.774 All parties thus sought to wash their hands of this troublesome and costly affair, and witchcraft and sorcery continued to flourish.

They were not confined to the slaves in the mines of Antioquia and, some ten years later, there was an outburst which offered fairer inducements to repay prosecution. A great assembly of witches was discovered among the negroes of the town of Tolú—an accessible sea-port, about sixty-five miles from Cartagena—where the witnesses testified to all the classical features of the Sabbat—flying through the air, dancing around a goat, kissing him retro and all the customary performances. Since the great auto de fe of witches at Logroño in 1610, the Suprema had grown skeptical and cautious as to these superstitions, and had impressed on the tribunals the necessity of acting with great reserve in all such cases. In reporting this matter therefore, September 25, 1632, the inquisitors said that they had observed these instructions and had arrested only a mulatto woman and a mestiza, who had persistently denied the charges. Still the testimony continued to pour in, spreading the epidemic to Cartagena and implicating Spaniards of consideration and property, for witnesses who confessed to having been at the Sabbat were free to designate whomsoever they chose as having been present—a fact which explains the rapid multiplication of accomplices, whenever a persecution commenced. Animated by the prospect thus opened, the inquisitors threw aside their caution; they accepted the most absurd stories and attributed to witchcraft many cases of ordinary sickness occurring in the town. They erected additional prisons to receive the culprits and sentenced to burning two of those accused as leaders—negresses named Elena de Vitoria and Paula de Eguiluz, but the sentence of the former was revoked by the Suprema and, when that of the latter was received, it sent orders that no sentence of relaxation should be executed until a copy of the process was submitted to it.

Torture was freely employed, resulting in an auto de fe held, March 26, 1634, where twenty-one witches were exhibited, whose punishment mostly consisted of scourging, although one, Ana de Avila, a mestiza widow, who had overcome seven turns of the mancuerda in her torture, was fined 1000 pesos. A sentence of absolution was read of Ana Beltran, who had been tortured without confession for an hour and a half and had died of its effects. This was followed, June 1, 1636, by another auto with sixteen penitents, among whom was Elena de Vitoria. Another was Guiomar de Anaya, who had overcome the torture and was sentenced to exile and a fine of 200 ducats. Paula de Eguiluz was reconciled in an auto of March 25, 1638, after six years of imprisonment, and was condemned to two hundred lashes and irremissible prison. It seems that she enjoyed a high reputation as a physician and was allowed to leave the prison in the practice of her profession, numbering among her patients even the inquisitors and the bishop, Cristóbal de Lazárraga. She was permitted to cast off the sanbenito and appeared in a mantle bordered with gold and in a sedan chair; she earned much money and was charitable in relieving the necessities of her fellow-prisoners.775

In the other chief source of inquisitorial business—blasphemy—the mercifulness of the Suprema brought about a curious and unexpected result. The most usual expletive, reniego á Dios—I renounce God—was reckoned as heretical and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but it was so frequent that the Suprema ordered it to be punished only with a reprimand. As the inquisitors complained, in a letter of June 28, 1619, the effect of this was that, when a master flogged a slave, at the first lash the latter promptly renounced God; he thus became, on the spot, subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the tribunal; the flogging ceased and he was handed over to it, to go through the formality of a trial, at the end of which he was discharged with a scolding. This was a process which might be repeated indefinitely, to the manifest detriment of the discipline indispensable to slavery.776

It was not till the tribunal had been established for more than ten years that it had any serious business in vindicating the faith. In an auto de fe celebrated March 16, 1622, there were four negro witches reconciled, two negro sorceresses punished and one bigamist banished from the Indies. In addition to these there was a Protestant burnt alive—an Englishman named Adam Edon (Haydon?). He had been sent, in 1618, by an English merchant, to purchase tobacco in Cumaná, where he was arrested in 1619 and sent to Cartagena. For two years the most earnest endeavors to wean him from his errors were fruitless, and his fate was inevitable. Mañozca, in his report, described him as a most engaging person; at the quemadero he was not chained as usual to the stake, but he calmly sat on a faggot and remained motionless till life was extinct, a veritable martyr to his convictions.777

After this auspicious beginning there opened a prospect of greater usefulness. At an auto de fe of June 17, 1626, solemnized with great magnificence, there were twenty-two penitents, of whom one was a Calvinist and seven were Judaizers. Of the latter, Juan Vicente had already been reconciled in Coimbra and again in Lima. Under the canon law, a single relapse entailed relaxation; this he had been spared in Lima, and his persistent backsliding left no hope of ultimate conversion, so he was duly consigned to the flames.778 After this there was an interval during which inquisitorial energy had to be content with witches, blasphemers and the like, until the raid made on the Portuguese merchants in Lima gave occasion for similar action in Cartagena. One of the accused, in the former city, gave evidence against a compatriot in the latter; it was duly forwarded and the arrest was made March 15, 1636. The circle spread until there were twenty-one in prison. Torture was savagely employed and one of the prisoners, Paz Pinto, a man widely esteemed, died from its effects. Most of the cases were ready for an auto held March 25, 1638, at which eight were reconciled and nine were absolved. There were no relaxations, but the confiscations, as we shall see, put the tribunal in possession of ample funds.779

Little remains to be said as to the activity of the tribunal in its appropriate sphere, although its contributions from time to time to the Suprema show that it occasionally obtained some wealthy penitent to strip, among the inconspicuous mass of blasphemers, bigamists and sorceresses. Its energies became more and more devoted, during the remainder of the century, to internal dissensions and quarrels with the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, leaving small leisure for its proper functions. Such was its inertia in this respect that we are told that there was no publication of the annual Edict of Faith between 1656 and 1818.780 Then it was dealt a heavy blow in the capture of Cartagena, in 1697, by the French adventurers under the Baron de Pointis and his buccaneer allies, after which it was sacked by the latter. A few days after the commencement of the bombardment April 10th, the tribunal abandoned the city, carrying some of its prisoners to Majates, about fourteen leagues distant, where an auto de fe was held, with three penitents, and those whose cases were not ready were sent further inland to Mompox. When the fort of Bocachica was taken, the French found there nine prisoners accused of bigamy; eight of these joined the enemy and the ninth, Pedro Sarmiento, voluntarily went to Mompox and surrendered himself. The town capitulated May 6th and, when the French entered, they promptly sought the Inquisition, where they took the vestments of the officials and the sanbenitos and mitres of the penitents and held in the plaza a mock auto de fe, reading sentences and parodying the solemnities. Inquisitor Lazaeta was anxious to obtain possession of certain papers and employed the good offices of Don Sancho Jimeno, the castellan of Bocachica, whose gallant defence had earned the respect of the enemy. He had been rereleased but returned to Cartagena to defend himself against certain charges, after which he requested of the leaders permission to get the papers; the mere mention of the Inquisition provoked a tempest of passion, but after it had cooled off he asked leave to get some papers of his own and, while collecting them, he succeeded in including those desired by the inquisitor. After the invaders had sailed, Lazaeta returned to Cartagena, June 22d. He found the building much damaged by the bombardment; it had been sacked and the chests broken open and left empty, but the records were untouched. With a donation which he begged and 12,000 pesos obtained from the governor, he had everything in order by the end of August, but this proved the turning-point of the tribunal which thenceforth declined rapidly.781

Repairs to its habitation became necessary in 1704, but these were inefficiently performed and, in 1715, the tribunal was obliged to shift its quarters to the house of the senior inquisitor and even this had been so maltreated in the bombardment that it threatened to fall. The trouble culminated in 1741 when Admiral Vernon bombarded Cartagena; a bomb dismantled the Inquisition and it had to be torn down, though the records escaped as they had prudently been transferred in advance to Tenerife, near Santa Marta. It was a quarter of a century before Carlos III, in 1766, granted for the rebuilding 12,600 pesos from the revenues of the vacant archbishopric.782

All this was but a symptom of the general decadence of the tribunal. In 1747 the Inquisitor, Francisco Antonio de Ilarduy, wrote that the only consultor he had was also the advocate of the fisc and of the accused; for three years there had been but one calificador, and the provincial at Seville had been vainly urged to send out frailes; there were but two familiars, who were engrossed in earning their living and no one cared to accept the position; for seven years the Suprema had not taken the trouble to reply to the applications for advice and instructions. Ilarduy vainly tendered his resignation, but it was not accepted until at length he obtained a transfer to Córdova and left Cartagena in 1754. Under such conditions there was little done and the Inquisition lost its terrors. The royal permission to draw articles of necessity from foreign sources brought to Cartagena Danish, Dutch and other heretic ships, in which there came Jews whom the governor, in spite of the reclamations of the tribunal, allowed to establish themselves and to walk the streets like natives. The tribunal appealed to the Archbishop-viceroy, Antonio Caballero y Góngora, who contented himself with ordering that the limitation of importations to articles of necessity should be enforced.783

A typical case was that of Don David de la Mota, who came in 1783, and who made no secret of being a Jew. The tribunal summoned him and swore him in the Jewish fashion, when he said that he was born in Velez-Malaga; his parents had been penanced and his grandfather had been burnt by the tribunal of Granada; he had married a Jewess in the Danish island of Santa Cruz and had been circumcised fifty years before in Santa Eustacia. It indicates the altered situation when this case, which formerly would have been treated with little ceremony, was the subject of doubt and discussion. The inquisitors forbore to arrest him, for he represented foreign interests, which would have complained to the consul and he to the ambassador. They accordingly shrank from the responsibility and let him go. In Spain the exclusion of Jews was still rigidly enforced and, when they reported their action to the Suprema, it censured their timidity and ordered them always to arrest such parties when the evidence sufficed. It was the same in other parts of the district. In Santo Domingo the governor was liberally inclined and, in 1783, the Archbishop complained to the Suprema that, during the previous year, a Jew named José Obediente had come and was allowed to go about freely, to entertain persons of distinction and even to be present in the solemnities of Holy Week. The commissioner had vainly appealed to the authorities, and the archbishop was afraid to say anything, for fear of public disturbance. This year he had come again, bringing six or seven others, who kept house and lived like any other residents.784 It was not the Jews alone whom the tribunal, in its weakened state, was afraid to attack. In 1784, the royal auditor at Mompox, Don Francisco Antonio Antona, was denounced for having, at a banquet given by a priest, proposed for discussion some manifestly heretical propositions. In place of prosecuting him, the inquisitors consulted the Suprema alleging, as a reason for their timidity, the character of the accused, the relations of his wife with the best families, and the protection given to him by the viceroys in the conduct of his office.785 A tribunal thus shorn of its audacity could only be an object of contempt.

There was, however, a little recrudescence of activity as the progress of free-thought and the approach of the Revolution called for the exercise of the functions of censorship. This has been well-nigh in abeyance. The edicts prohibiting books, as sent out by the Suprema, were regularly published as matters of routine, but they were regarded by no one. In fact, the intellectual torpor of the colony was so profound that there was little danger of the spread of dangerous literature. In 1777 Cartagena could not even support a small printing-office, and the inquisitors complained that they had to copy the edicts by hand; there had been a printer, but the poor man had sold his stock elsewhere and no one had ventured to replace him.786 Seizures of prohibited books had been exceedingly rare. In 1661 some copies had been suppressed of “Horas y oraciones devotas,” printed in Paris in 1664. In 1668 there was a little flurry when, on one of the affluents of the Orinoco, a Dutchman was found in possession of copies of a work in Spanish, apparently printed in Holland, entitled “Epistola á los Peruleros,” consisting of a Calvinistic catechism and exhorting the colonists to withdraw their allegiance from Spain and ally themselves with the Dutch, whose colony of Guiana was dangerously near. In 1732 a little book called “Paraiso del alma” was seized in Santa Fe and, in 1757, some copies of Bishop Palafox’s “Ejercicios devotos.” The moral phase of censorship had manifested itself in 1736, when the commissioner at Panamá took from the French astronomers, on their way to the equator to measure an arc of the earth’s surface, an engraving of a woman which he regarded as indecent, but when he sought to get possession of another, said to be even worse, they assured him that it had been burnt and threatened to complain to the king of the insult offered to them. So, in 1807, there were denounced to the tribunal some watches brought by a Danish vessel, of which the cases were enamelled with indecent pictures; the enamels were destroyed and the watches were restored to the owner.787

In 1774 a more difficult question was forced upon the tribunal. José Celestino Mutis, distinguished both as priest and physician and professor in the Colegio Mayor of Santa Fe, in 1773, presided over some conclusions in which the Copernican theory of the solar system was defended. In June, 1774, the Dominicans of the Universidad Tomistica resolved to celebrate other conclusions to prove the contrary by Scripture and St. Augustin and St. Thomas, and that the Copernican theory was intolerable for Catholics, indefensible and prohibited by the Inquisition. Mutis addressed a defence of Copernicus to the viceroy, who sent a copy to the commissioner; he transmitted it to the tribunal, which submitted it to two calificadores. One of these reported that the propositions were not subject to theological censure; the other held that the Copernican system was opposed to Scripture and no Catholic could defend it. The matter then passed into the hands of the inquisitor-fiscal, who argued that all authors of greatest repute detested the system as absolutely contrary to Scripture, repeatedly condemned by the Roman Inquisition and, as some say, by Urban VIII. He was especially shocked by an assertion of Mutis that the king had ordered all Spanish universities to teach the works of Newton which were based on Copernicus. Dr. Mutis, he added, was the first and only one who, in this kingdom and perhaps in all America, had publicly declared himself in favor of this system. Thereupon the tribunal, at a loss what to do in a matter beyond its comprehension, sent all the papers to the Suprema for instructions, and the latter discreetly filed them away without answering.788

Of more practical importance was the manifesto of the French Constituent Assembly on the rights of man, of which a Spanish version appeared under the title of Derechos del Hombre. This was condemned in Cartagena by edict published December 13, 1789. Then, in 1794, there was a sudden command for its vigorous suppression. In almost identical phrase the Viceroys of New Granada and Peru wrote to their respective tribunals, describing it as a work destructive of social order and advocating toleration. Every pains, they said, must be taken to hunt up every copy and to ascertain when and how and from whom they came. The tribunals accordingly exerted their utmost diligence, but were not rewarded by finding a single copy.789 Probably equal ill-success attended their efforts to obey the orders of the Suprema to suppress Gli Animali parlanti of Giambattista Casti and to spare no pains in ascertaining the possessors of the poem which, as a clever satire directed against the vices and follies of kings and courts, was especially distasteful to an autocratic monarch. The work had appeared in Paris in 1802 and these orders came from the Suprema under date of May 23, 1803, although the formal decree suppressing it was not issued until June 23, 1805, to be followed, August 6th, by a similar papal prohibition.790

If the results of the labors of the tribunal in defence of the faith were thus meagre, it was far more successful in its true vocation of creating scandal, by incessant quarrels with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and by its internal discords. Hardly had it been organized when the Easter solemnities of 1611 offered occasion for dissension, over questions of etiquette and precedence, with the secular and spiritual powers, giving rise to antagonism throughout the district, especially on the part of the bishops, who grudged the deprivation of the jurisdiction which they had been accustomed to exercise in matters of faith. They continued to disregard the exclusive functions of the inquisitors, who complained bitterly of them as ignorant prelates, with officials whose ignorance was equalled by their turbulence; they had few duties to occupy them and they desired to retain this jurisdiction because of the hold which it gave them over their subjects. It probably would be unjust to estimate them by one of their number, Fray Juan González de Mendoza, Bishop of Popayan, who, on his arrival at Cartagena in 1610, introduced the practice of divination with sticks, which he asserted to be allowed by the Inquisition and to be used by the queen and the Duke of Lerma. It spread rapidly among all classes and, as all divination was held to imply pact with the demon, the inquisitors were greatly exercised and inquired anxiously of the Suprema, January 31, 1611, what they should do about it, to which apparently they received no answer.791

Mañozca, arrogant, unscrupulous and ambitious, was the leading spirit of the tribunal. He speedily made it apparent that, under his guidance, it was to be the dominant power in the community, and that its awful authority was to be restrained by no considerations of law or justice. The governor, Diego Fernández de Velasco, was good-natured and made every effort to keep on good terms with the inquisitors, but his moderation only encouraged their insolence and at length, in a letter of July 4, 1613, to the king, he poured forth his grievances. The tribunal, he said, sought to render itself the supreme master and had become so feared that the whole province was terrorized, so that, not only for the inquisitors but for their servants and slaves, there was no law but their own will. They were accustomed to arrest butchers, fishermen, bakers and other dealers in provisions; to seize with violence the goods of merchants and to summon and scold them for objecting. In two cases Mañozca forced parties who imported cargoes of slaves to give him some of them, whom he sold. They took, without notice, prisoners from the public prisons and, on one occasion, when the gaoler asked for a voucher, as requisite for his justification, the messenger wounded him on the head with his sword and was not punished. The governor added numerous instances of outrages on all classes, winding up with himself, as having been publicly proclaimed as excommunicated in all the churches.792

The regular Orders had equal cause of complaint and managed, with some trouble, to send to Spain a procurator to represent that everything in the convents was regulated by Mañozca’s powerful hand, whence it resulted that many estimable frailes were unjustly punished, while those were untouched who deserved to be castigated and reformed. This brought upon Mañozca, from the Suprema, a severe reprimand with orders to abstain from such interference.793 Apparently the warning was disregarded if we may believe a memorial addressed by a fraile, May 12, 1619, to the king, representing that to leave Mañozca at his post was to keep a monster in the seat of an angel of light. This was substantiated with ample details of his scandalous mode of life, his nocturnal sallies in disguise and the general terror which he inspired, for terrorism was the means by which he had become the ruler of all. When the secular authorities sought to banish the courtezans and concubines he prevented it and, when the preachers preached against them, he issued what he called an instruccion de predicadores in which he called them dishonoring names and covered them with ridicule. The writer relates a number of cases by which it appears that Mañozca controlled the local courts and officials, dictating sentences and procuring that his supporters escaped justice and won their suits, however unrighteous. Moreover he gave occasion for an indefinite amount of smuggling; arrivals were reported to him in advance of the custom officials, and he received bribes—negro slaves and other things of value—to enable the owners to defraud the customs—a matter presumably easy of accomplishment through the supervision of all arrivals, by which the Inquisition was empowered to prevent the intrusion of heretics and the importation of heretic books.794

Quarrels with the bishops were incessant and only the bishop of Cuba, Alfonso Henríquez de Almendáriz, who was old and self-willed and prompt in quarrel, held his own, leading to numerous complaints of him by the tribunal.795 Then, towards the middle of 1619, there came a new governor, García Giron, with whom there was speedily trouble. A negro slave of Inquisitor Salcedo was refused meat by a negro in the market; he complained to his master who gave him a paper requiring the dealer to supply it. Armed with this, he struck the negro several times with the flat of a machete, took what meat he wanted and told the man that, if he wanted pay, he could send for the money. Thereupon Giron ordered a prosecution; the inquisitors sent for the notary employed in it and ordered him to surrender the papers under the customary threat of fine and excommunication; the governor ordered him not to obey, but he was finally obliged to pay the fine and deliver the papers.796

Complaints against Mañozca came pouring in upon the Suprema, especially from members of the regular Orders, including whole convents, until it found itself obliged to have an investigation made into his life and morals. The result justified the accusations and it ordered him to present himself in Madrid. He had no trouble in gathering certificates—which no one dared to refuse—as to his good character and conduct, with which he sailed for Spain, towards the end of July, 1620. There he succeeded so completely in exonerating himself that, in April, 1621, the inquisitor-general wrote that his presence in the court being no longer necessary, for the business on which he had been summoned, he had been ordered to return to his post. Thus, after a year’s absence, he reoccupied his seat in the tribunal, but only for a short time. With the customary policy of the Holy Office, he was promoted to the more important tribunal of Lima, to be elevated, in 1643, as we have seen, to the archbishopric of Mexico. He remained, however, in Cartagena, until the arrival of his successor, Agustin de Ugarte y Saravia, in the middle of 1623.797

During his absence at the court, his colleague Salcedo had become involved in a furious quarrel with the bishop, Diego de Torris Altamirano, by forcibly taking from his prison a priest named Pedro de Quesada, condemned to degradation and death for robbery and murder. Quesada, through his confessor, informed the tribunal that he had a deposition to make; Salcedo sent a message informally to the provisor to send the culprit, who would be returned, but when the messenger went for him, he was found fast in the stocks and the key carried off. The bishop declared that he should not be delivered without a written demand, but Salcedo sent a party of familiars, who carried him off by force and then returned him within an hour—the object being simply to humiliate the bishop and demonstrate the superior authority of the Inquisition.798 Salcedo and Altamirano both died in 1621, but the new bishop, Francisco de Sotomayor, who arrived in 1622, became immediately involved in a serious quarrel with Mañozca, which had to be referred to Spain for settlement.799

In 1630 the Council of Indies presented to Philip IV a formal complaint in thirty-four articles against the tribunal of Cartagena, which very probably contributed to the enactment of the Concordia of 1633.800 Meanwhile a new governor, Francisco de Murga, had resolutely undertaken to abate the insolence of the inquisitors and had become involved in specially bitter quarrels with the inquisitor Vélez de Asas y Argos, who had been promoted, in 1626, from the position of fiscal. In a letter of December 12, 1632, the inquisitors describe him as the most dangerous man on earth, for he daily framed a thousand devices to trip them up and, if this could not be stopped, there would be no living in the city. He was certainly audacious for one day he took from the executioner a negro who was being scourged through the streets for heresy. For this they excommunicated him, but when they sent officials and familiars to notify him, he clapped them all into gaol and held them there under heavy guard for twenty-four hours. Then he called a junta in the house of the bishop and, by its advice, asked for absolution, which was administered in a manner so humiliating that the Council of Indies presented a formal complaint to the king. This did not tend to harmony and the quarrel went on, to the discomfiture of the tribunal, showing what a determined man could do, when supported by the universal detestation in which the Inquisition was held. In fact, as the inquisitors complained, in a letter of August 8, 1633, the mass of the people held them in mortal hatred, which they could explain only by the wiles of the devil seeking to obstruct their pious work.801

Meanwhile the home authorities were leisurely engaged in endeavoring to reconcile the irreconcileable. A consulta of the Suprema, March 23, 1633, suggested measures to that effect but in vain. Philip IV adopted a more practical course in ordering the Suprema to summon Vélez to Spain, but it disobeyed and, when he repeated the order, it replied, May 3, 1635, that it was ready to obey but had deferred in expectation of his replying to its consulta of May 26, 1634; besides, it had not yet received the papers containing the inquisitors’ side of the matter. To this the king replied by curtly commanding immediate compliance, but it still dallied and it was not until 1636 that Vélez was compelled to sail for Spain. At the same time the Suprema admitted the fault of the tribunal by ordering the inquisitors, March 15, 1636, not to plot and conspire against Murga nor, after his retirement, against his deputy and officials. The sincerity of this was soon put to the test. Murga had died before Vélez left Cartagena and, in April, 1636, the tribunal was delighted to receive orders to arrest his deputy, Francisco de Llano Valdés, who was asserted to be the cause of all the troubles. The order was joyfully obeyed, but to little effect. In prison Llano Valdés became intimate with Inquisitor Cortázar, for both were Biscayans; a false certificate of illness was procured from the physician and he was given his house as a prison; he was soon seen on the streets again and was even called in frequently to administer torture, as the tribunal had no official skilled in the art.[802]

The death of Murga did not end the debate, which was transferred to Spain, where Vélez arrived in December, 1636. It dragged on with customary procrastination. The Suprema urged his return to Cartagena, declaring that his service had been most satisfactory, and that he had been dishonored by being summoned to Spain without cause, which could only be repaired by his restoration. The Council of Indies insisted that he had exposed Cartagena to destruction and that he should be provided for with a post in Spain. Philip IV sought to compromise the matter by deciding against his return and that he should have one of the best Spanish tribunals—it being the ordinary policy of the Inquisition that when a man had proved his unfitness in one position, he should be promoted to a higher station in which to exercise his powers of evil. Finally it was settled that he should have the great tribunal of Mexico, but the commander of the fleet, Don Carlos de Ibarra, ordered him to take ship direct to Honduras and made public proclamation that no one should receive him on board or carry him to Cartagena, under pain of treason and confiscation. Then the Suprema, September 30, 1639, made a final effort to obtain his restoration to Cartagena, but this failed and he at last took his seat in the Mexican tribunal.803

Vélez had been on terms not much better with his colleague, Martin de Cortázar y Ascarate, who accused him of endeavoring to encompass the death of Llano Valdés in prison and of seeking to rule the tribunal with a faction of the officials, consisting of the fiscal Juan Ortiz, his son, the secretary Luis Blanco and the other secretary, Juan de Uriarte, father-in-law of Blanco. As for Cortázar himself, two of the consultors, Juan de Cuadros Peña and Rodrigo de Oviedo, wrote to the Suprema, August 10, 1635, representing his utter ignorance; he knew no Latin and his Castilian was so imperfect as to be unintelligible; he was proud and haughty and his cruelty was evinced by the savage tortures which he inflicted on the accused. Then, on November 16, 1640, Ortiz was promoted to the inquisitorship and his family had complete control.804

They used their power for their own enrichment, dividing among themselves the moneys in the coffer and paying no debts unless they were bribed. That they should soon be involved in strife with the municipality, was inevitable. In 1641 an excessive scarcity caused by the ravages of locusts led the cabildo, or city authorities, to prescribe maximum prices for provisions and to order an examination into the quantities of produce in the several plantations, so as to prevent exportation. Ortiz and his officials claimed exemption from these regulations; he ordered the secretary of the cabildo to furnish him with its proceedings, that he might see which of the regidores voted for them, so that he might imprison them, as was done with Don Cristóval de Bermúdez and Don Baltasar de Escovar, on complaint of the servants of the officials, for distributing provisions equally—arbitrary imprisonment without observing any formalities or opportunity for defence. Then, as the secretary did not comply with the demand, he was similarly thrown in prison. When meat was brought into the city for distribution the servants of the officials claimed whole carcasses, which they cut up and retailed at excessive prices. Driven to extremities, the city complained to the king of the violence of the tribunal and the excesses of its officials, when Ortiz again demanded a copy of the proceedings of the cabildo, leading to further intolerable vexations, which caused it to send the regidor, Nicolás Heras Pantoja as procurator to ask for a visitador.805

This imprisonment in the secret prison, we may remark, was an inveterate abuse; it was in itself the severest punishment, as it implied heresy and inflicted indelible infamy on the individual and his posterity. It was the subject of repeated complaints and, at last, a consulta of the Council of Indies, June 14, 1646, led the king to order the Suprema to instruct the Cartagena tribunal not to molest the people; when any one was arrested for matters not of faith, he must be placed in a decent prison, outside of the Inquisition. The Suprema had already taken such action in letters of April 28, 1645, and it repeated this July 28, 1646. Yet a letter from Cartagena of June 10, 1649, represented that, in spite of these orders, the inquisitors continued to throw many people into the secret prison, for causes not of faith, till at length three citizens who had been thus dishonored supplicated the king to remedy the great injuries thus inflicted. The Council of Indies, in a consulta of February 21, 1650, represented strongly to the king the disorders arising from the disregard of his commands and urged that positive orders to obey be given to the inquisitors. This he sent with his endorsement to the Suprema, which, on April 8th, wrote to the tribunal to observe its previous instructions—but without producing permanent effect.806

Meanwhile the prayer of the city for a visitador had been answered after a fashion, though not in consequence of its supplication. According to a statement of the Suprema in 1646, it had, at the close of 1642, determined to send an inspector to Lima and Cartagena, as those tribunals had not been visited since their foundation. There had recently been great sequestrations and confiscations, giving rise in Lima to over two thousand lawsuits, while in Cartagena it was necessary to investigate the settlements made with the claimants and the net collections secured. There were no charges, it said, against the inquisitors and it was only the financial matters that were concerned. There was hesitation as to the selection of a visitor; he had to be an old inquisitor and no one would accept the position without the assurance of a good benefice in the Indies or of a place in the Suprema itself. To give him more authority it was resolved to make him a member of the Suprema and to swear him in before his departure. Unfortunately the choice fell upon Dr. Martin Real, then serving in the tribunal of Toledo, a man of learning and imbued with the highest conceptions of inquisitorial authority, who had acted as visitor in Sicily, where he earned the reputation of a breeder of troubles, through his ungovernable temper and headstrong character. This was known to the Suprema, but it was thought that what he had suffered in consequence of it and the warnings that would be given would render him cautious. Philip IV objected, in view of what had occurred in Sicily, and suggested other names, but yielded on condition that he should not take the oath as councillor until the day of his departure. Then the Council of Indies protested against the appointment as dangerous to the peace of the colonies, but the Suprema represented that the matter had gone too far to be reconsidered without disgracing Real; that the opposition came from those who desired to prevent the visitation and that it did not concern the inquisitors but only the confiscations. The king made no further objection and Real was duly commissioned and departed early in 1643.807

The result justified fully the apprehensions of Philip and the Council of Indies, but it may be doubted whether the most even-tempered visitor, honestly bent on performing his duty, could have averted an explosion. The object of the mission was the investigation of the finances; there can be little question that, as in the other tribunals, false reports had been made as to the results of the enormous confiscations accruing from the prosecution of the Judaizing New Christians, and an inspection of the accounts was to be prevented at all hazards. The city was in a state of combustion with the chronic quarrels between the tribunal and the civil and military authorities. Real’s temper would not allow him to be neutral and it was easy to create a situation which should preclude the dreaded investigation. Such, at least, is the most rational explanation of the events as they can be disentangled from the somewhat conflicting accounts that have reached us.

Towards the end of July, 1643, Real arrived in Cartagena and with him came a new inquisitor, Juan Bautista de Villadiego, a man nearly seventy years of age, and a fiscal, Pedro Triunfo de Socaya. Real’s first act was to forbid Ortiz and Uriarte from entrance to the secreto, evidently with a view of examinating their accounts without interference, at the same time handing them appointments to equivalent positions in Llerena and Logroño—the favorite method used by the Suprema when officials had destroyed their usefulness where they were. Villadiego however refused to let Real have the keys of the money-chest, so the object of his visitation was frustrated and he revenged himself by exceeding the powers of his commission and assuming control of the tribunal. To obtain the keys of the coffer he led a disorderly crowd to Villadiego’s house, broke it open, personally assaulted him, seized the furniture and sold it at auction to pay the fine which he had imposed on him. Real further espoused the cause of the governor and cabildo and interfered by liberating a secretary whom Villadiego had arrested in order to learn who had voted against him. Then Villadiego endeavored to establish a rival tribunal in his own house and appointed officials to run it, a schism which lasted for two months, until Real judicially sentenced him to consider his house as a prison. Villadiego thereupon, on the night of February 11, 1644, with his own hands, posted notices that Real was excommunicated and Real retorted by arresting him.

He was replaced by Juan Pereira Castro, who took possession as inquisitor, August 22, 1644, and lost no time in organizing a faction among the officials and the clergy against Real and was concerned in libels upon him which were posted on the night of September 3d. For this, on insufficient evidence, Real arrested Ortiz de la Masa, an ecclesiastic of high standing, and proposed to torture him, which created an immense scandal among both clergy and laity. Pereira in vain endeavored to release him and, on January 25, 1645, he and Real exchanged excommunications, resulting in an interdict under which the city lay for many months. A few days later, on January 28th, Pereira, the fiscal Socaya and the notary, Tomás de Vega, locked themselves up in the tribunal for fear of arrest, and there they remained for seven months, solacing their self-inflicted captivity with feasting and gambling, while Real could neither get his salary nor the papers which were necessary for the business of his visitation. Many of those whom he had treated harshly hurried to Spain and brought suits against him in the Suprema, and we hear of Socaya sending with them forty bars of silver to substantiate their complaints.

The Suprema was not a little perplexed by the turn which affairs had taken. It ordered Villadiego to be restored to his place in the tribunal, an order received February 17, 1645, but it was accompanied with a summons to present himself at court within four months. This he disobeyed and recommenced to hold a tribunal in his own house, with the object, as Pereira wrote in February, 1646, of diverting attention from the scandals of his licentious life. To this Villadiego retorted by accusing Pereira of defending the gaoler in his crimes with female prisoners and of holding indecent banquets with him and the fiscal. The only immediate solution to the troubles seemed to lie in the recall of Real; he was ordered home and left Cartagena at the end of October, 1645. As the time of his arrival in Spain approached, the Suprema grew uneasy at the prospect of receiving him as a member and, February 16, 1646, it presented a consulta to Philip IV containing a condensed narrative of his doings and representing that his seat in the Council was intended, not as a reward for past services but as an incentive to those he was to render; his visitation had cost 20,000 pesos and had brought no results, nor was it held advisable that he should be allowed to repeat his performances in Lima. Besides, it would be indecent for him to sit in judgement on the numerous suits brought against him in the Suprema so that, all things being considered, it was suggested that his membership should be suspended until those suits were settled—a suggestion to which the king cordially assented.808

The inquisitors were not so busy quarrelling among themselves but that they had leisure to keep up dissensions with the secular authorities. A bitter struggle with the governor was occupying the court in 1644 and 1645, leading the Junta de Guerra de Indias, on November 9th of the latter year, to urge that instructions be sent to the tribunal not to excommunicate the governor and captain-general on account of the evils that would result.809 Then a consulta of the Council of Indies, March 7, 1647, complained of the invasions of secular jurisdiction, in violation of the Concordia of 1610, causing regrettable disturbances. It alluded especially to a competencia with the royal Audiencia of Santa Fe over a civil case of the familiar Rodrigo de Oviedo y Luron, in which 1500 pesos were deposited with Capitan Francisco Beltran de Cairedo to await the adjudication of the claims of his creditors, when the tribunal stepped in and seized the money, although it had no jurisdiction over the civil cases of familiars. The Council therefore asked that the tribunal be ordered to abstain from civil cases and that its competencias with the Audiencias of Santa Fe, Panamá and Santo Domingo be settled—an appeal to which the king returned no answer, as he doubtless transmitted it to the Suprema, where it probably lay buried.810

As long as Real was on the ground, Villadiego and Pereira united in efforts to destroy him, but as soon as he departed they quarrelled and, in February 1646, Pereira commenced a prosecution against his colleague for holding a tribunal in his own house. The only hope of restoring the Inquisition to decency and usefulness seemed to lie in another visitation. This time the choice fell upon Pedro de Medina Rico, Inquisitor of Seville, whom we have already met in his subsequent discharge of similar duties in Mexico. He arrived in Cartagena, December 11, 1648, and found everything in disorder. As he wrote, May 19, 1649, the prisoners were rotting in the dungeons, some of whom had been lying there for eight years. He set vigorously at work with the cases, but it was difficult to make progress. There was no clock in the city; the hours were announced by the soldiers of the guard in the streets with a bell, but they were irregular and little attention was paid to them. The officials came late to their duties and left early; Pereira was especially brief in his attendance and, when he came, thought of nothing but getting away. Medina Rico therefore begged the Suprema to send out a fitting person to serve as secretary and also two inquisitors of learning and probity; Pereira was worthy of severe punishment and ought on no account to be allowed to remain.811

Medina Rico of course was at once involved in bitter antagonism with the officials whom he had come to reform; his powers however were limited and he was unable to use censures or arrest, which put him at a disadvantage, and there were no such exhibitions of violence as characterized the visitation of his predecessor. The Governor Pedro Zapata, moreover, took sides with the incumbents and wrote to the Council of Indies complaining that the city had been kept in a turmoil for ten years, attributable to the delay of the visitadors in completing their visitations. Real had been there for two years and returned, leaving the task incomplete and now Medina Rico has been at work for a year, with no prospect of completion, on account of which the city is in great affliction, dreading a renewal of former disturbances. Philip transmitted this to the Suprema, March 13, 1649, ordering, for the sake of peace, that Medina Rico be instructed to finish as speedily as possible. To this the Suprema replied that the illness of Pereira had thrown the unfinished business of the tribunal on Medina Rico, but that orders had already been despatched to him to complete his task without loss of time. Zapata continued his complaints and the Marquis of Miranda de Auta, President of the Audiencia of Santa Fe, joined in condemning his arbitrary acts; in civil cases he had arrested the procurators of pleaders and he had issued letters to the judges of the Audiencia threatening that in three days they would be posted as excommunicates.812

Medina Rico’s task was difficult for the abuses of the tribunal were so inveterate that the sharpest measures were necessary. Real’s report, based on 231 witnesses, brought sixty-eight charges against Villadiego and a hundred and thirteen against Pereira, but his hurried departure had prevented his submitting it to the accused for their defence and it therefore could not be acted upon. Fresh evidence was naturally hard to obtain. The people knew the power of Pereira and Uriarte and that they were favored by the governor and the Bishop of Santa Marta; they had seen the failure of Real’s visitation and anticipated the same result from the present one, when vengeance would follow on all who deposed against them. Medina Rico was therefore obliged to proceed cautiously. He states that he had to take precautions against attempts on his life by Uriarte and that such fears were not groundless for there was evidence in his hands that the former notary, Luis Blanco del Salcedo, was poisoned by his wife and the Inquisitor Juan Ortiz, then receiver, who subsequently married her; Inquisitor Cortázar was poisoned by Ortiz and Uriarte, who intercepted his letters accusing them to the Suprema. Rodrigo de Oviedo was killed by order of Uriarte, whose accomplice he had been. There was, he said, every facility for such crimes in this land filled with evil negroes; it was held for certain that in this way perished Bishop Cristóbal de Lazárraga and all his family; to poison was attributable the death of Juan de Lorrigui, acting fiscal, and also that of the governor who was in office at the time of his arrival.813

In spite of these apprehensions he gathered evidence, confirmatory of Real’s charges and of subsequent misdeeds and, under pressing orders to betake himself to Mexico, towards the summer of 1650 he drew up accusations against the inquisitors and the chief officials. Those against Pereira were virtually the same as Martin Real’s. Villadiego he accused of friendship with Jews who had been penanced, of receiving gifts and loans from them and using them as agents to sell goods for him; he was continually exacting gifts and abused those who refused them and there was also his general licentiousness with women. The fiscal, Bernardo de Eyzaguirre, was charged with embezzling the money of the prisoners. Secretary Uriarte he accused of selling his influence to the kindred of those on trial, giving them information and advice and arranging to bribe the consultors and episcopal Ordinary; of encompassing the death of his accomplice Rodrigo de Oviedo, who threatened to denounce him; of falsifying the accounts and robbing the tribunal to the amount of 200,000 pesos; after the death of Cortázar, he had a secret door made by which he entered the secreto to commit these thefts and he embezzled the property of the accused by bribing those in charge of it, in addition to all which his life was scandalously incontinent. Against Juan Ortiz he reproduced the sixty general charges made by Real and added seventy-nine special ones of the same character—bribery, receiving presents, appropriating the property of prisoners, falsified accounts, subornation and violence—when a butcher did not give him the best meat, he summoned him to the tribunal and struck him a blow on the head that left him senseless.814

In July, 1650, there arrived a new fiscal, Juan de Mesa, who was to be associated with Medina Rico, in case Uriarte recused him, as in fact he did. Pereira had become so apprehensive as to the results of the visitation that Mesa, on August 4th, in handing him the charges, told him that they would kill him. It so turned out. Pereira took them and pondered over them until midnight. In the morning he sent for a physician who at once told him that his case was hopeless and, on the 13th, he was dead. Uriarte followed him to the grave, on February 1, 1651, and Medina Rico’s task was accomplished. He was under orders to start for Mexico, but was detained by prolonged illness and did not leave Cartagena until June 8, 1654.815

The perennial quarrels with the authorities continued, of which the Council of Indies complained in a consulta to Philip IV, May 14, 1652.816 Matters were not improved when, about this time, there came a new inquisitor, Diego del Corro Carrascal, followed shortly by Pedro de Salas y Pedroso as fiscal, who was soon promoted to the inquisitorship. He was so completely dominated by his senior that the Suprema took him to task, after which he manifested his independence by perpetual discordias, which left the accused perishing in the prison, awaiting the slow decisions in Spain. Corro Carrascal moreover was rebuked by the Suprema for cruelty and for speculating on the operations of the tribunal by having the confiscations bought in for him at the auctions at low prices. His dissolute life was so notorious that Governor Zapata said that his going out at night in disguise and having amours with married women passed into a proverb.817 The dissension between the inquisitors grew bitterer until, in 1658, they had a common object of dislike in a new fiscal, Guerra de Latrás, a man who had had a somewhat distinguished career as doctor of laws, professor and author, and who had served in various important positions. The Suprema had often reproved the tribunal for its disregard of established procedure and Guerra sought to reduce it to order, bringing upon himself the hostility of the inquisitors, who characterized his representations as childish. Early in 1660 he had a fall from his mule and broke his arm, which incapacitated him from writing; the inquisitors refused to allow him to employ an assistant and the business of the tribunal was paralyzed. In 1665 Corro Carrascal was made President of New Granada, Salas fell sick and was absent for weeks at a time and, in this atrophy, the Inquisition ceased to inspire awe or even respect. The opportunity was propitious for the secular power to reassert itself, and the Governor, Benito de Figueroa y Barrantes, availed himself of it. August 23, 1666, meeting the executioner who was scourging two penitents through the accustomed streets, he sent three of his soldiers to release them. The tribunal prosecuted the soldiers and, on the 29th, had two of them arrested by its secretary, Gonzalo de Carvajal, who, in the process, fired a shot and had a struggle with one of the soldiers. Figueroa thereupon surrounded the Inquisition with guards to starve out the inmates; Guerra sought an interview and agreed to surrender the prisoners but, four days later, the governor arrested Carvajal, threw him fettered into the public prison, sequestrating his property and taking his confession in the torture-chamber. Guerra and Salas proceeded to prosecute the governor and proclaimed a cessatio a divinis. The bishop intervened and Carvajal was relieved of his chains, but remained in prison. The affair completely discredited the Inquisition; as the new fiscal, Montoyo y Angulo, reported, April 16, 1669, there was no petty official who did not think himself able to give orders to those of the tribunal.818

It had not, however, as yet reached the depth of its degradation. Salas had died, December 28, 1667; Guerra had been promoted some months earlier to the inquisitorship and he too died March 21, 1671, leaving the fiscal Luis de Bruna Rico alone. Then, August 19, 1673, there came a new inquisitor, Juan Gómez de Mier, followed, in 1674, by a colleague, Alvaro Bernardo de Quirós, and a new fiscal, José de Padilla, Bruna Rico having been transferred to Lima. The colleagues speedily quarrelled and Padilla joined Mier to oppose Quirós. The latter, on his arrival, had observed the abuses current in the importation of merchandise and slaves and wrote on the subject to the Council of Indies. The governor, who was compromised, succeeded in winning him over, so that he spent most of his time in the governor’s house card-playing and wrote to the Council, withdrawing his charges. It was too late, however, for Juan de Mier y Salinas, a judge at Santa Fe, was commissioned to investigate and came to Cartagena, where he lodged in the house of his uncle, the Inquisitor Mier. The two commenced making arrests and the inculpated took asylum in the churches. Among them was a friend of Quirós, who exerted himself in vain to protect him, and in failing to do so broke definitely with his colleague. He allied himself closely with the governor, for whom he drew up edicts, notably one in 1678 which, under pretext of a threatened attack by the French, discharged all the prisoners and put an end to the prosecutions. He is described as wandering around at all hours of the day and night, mingling with every body, even dancing in public and universally despised. Mier’s association with his nephew the judge brought upon him a shower of denunciations; he held relations with the English of Jamaica, who sent him negroes; these he entered at night as prisoners of the Inquisition, guarded by the alguazil mayor, through whom, moreover, he sold positions—commissionerships and the like—to all who would pay for them. The fiscal Padilla shut himself up in his house and would see no one. The master spirit of the tribunal was the secretary, Miguel de Echarri, to whom were attributed all the evil deeds of Mier. Every one went to him for the distribution of favors; his anteroom was like that of a viceroy and presents were showered upon him; he was assiduous in the gambling-houses and, as Fray Juan Cabeza de Vaca had written, January 30, 1670, “while he is in this city there will neither be peace in the tribunal nor will the people be without a demon to disturb everybody and keep them in open war.”819

This state of affairs continued for years. Mier was transferred to Mexico and Quirós to Lima in December, 1681, leaving as sole inquisitor Padilla, who died March 31, 1682, appointing as successor ad interim the Archdeacon Andrés de Torres. Matters took a new aspect with the arrival, March 27, 1683, of a new inquisitor, Francisco Valera, who had filled important offices in Lima. He dismissed Torres and made Echarri fiscal; he gave five hours a day, in the tribunal, to cases of faith and three hours in his house to affairs of property. He pushed the pending trials to conclusion and in five months, August 29th, he celebrated an auto de fe.820 Under such a man the tribunal was speedily lifted from its degradation, but he had the defects of his qualities, and his imperious temper speedily involved him in a struggle of which the scandal was greater than that of any previous one.821

In 1681, two years before Valera’s arrival, there had come to Cartagena a new bishop, Manuel de Benavides y Piedrola, who seems to have been impulsive and inconsiderate. Almost at once he fell into trouble by listening to the prayer of the nuns of Santa Clara, who desired to transfer their obedience from the Franciscans to the episcopal provisor, leading to a contest which was envenomed by the bishop’s endeavor to restrain the disorderly intercourse between friars and nuns. Castillo de la Concha, the President of New Granada, ranged himself against the bishop, on whom a sentence of banishment was pronounced, to which he replied by casting an interdict on the city and leaving it. The populace took sides with a vehemence which led to frequent riots and almost to civil war, during which the nuns sustained a siege of six months.

Valera, on seeing the condition of affairs, endeavored to make peace and sought the bishop in his retreat, but was unsuccessful and his disappointment was aggravated by the bishop’s refusal to allow him to celebrate mass in his own house during the interdict. On his return to Cartagena he boldly celebrated mass, which greatly encouraged the anti-episcopal faction. Matters however seemed to be settling down, when, by order of President Castillo, Diego de Baños, Bishop of Santa Marta, came to Cartagena and removed the interdict. The two bishops exchanged excommunications and the quarrel became fiercer and more intricate than ever. Castillo ordered Benavides to leave the diocese, but he refused and excommunicated the governor and all the authorities; in fact, his enemies said that he had a mania for such censures and once excommunicated an object which he saw through the blinds of a balcony, without knowing whether it was a bag of cocoa or a sack of wool.

Valera was not long in being involved in the conflict. The authorities had armed the citizens and broke by force into the cathedral, seizing three ecclesiastics, whom the governor threw into the fort of Bocachica; one of them, Baltasar de la Fuente, was a commissioner of the tribunal and claimed the fuero, but Valera refused to come to his assistance. When, however, the governor ordered Benavides to withdraw the censures, the latter excommunicated Gerónimo Isabal, the advocate who signed the letter, and it chanced that he was also acting advocate of prisoners in the tribunal, though without a commission, and Valera sprang to his assistance and demanded the papers. Benavides retorted with an edict declaring that Isabal was not entitled to the fuero for defect of title, that Valera had incurred censures for not protecting la Fuente and that he, as episcopal inquisitor, would supply any deficiencies in the tribunal. One account states that as Valera kept himself housed, the bishop went there personally and affixed the edict to his door; another asserts that he led a mob of negroes and mulattos to seize the inquisitor, who barely escaped by a back door and took refuge in the tribunal.

The edict was printed and posted throughout the town, when the alguazil mayor of the Inquisition tore it down and arrested the ecclesiastics who were concerned in it. Benavides went to the tribunal to rescue them and was contumeliously refused admittance; the governor came and a scene ensued, the accounts of which are irreconcileable, but which served still further to scandalize the people and inflame the passions of both sides. The unlucky clerics, after two years of prison, were fined and exiled. Benavides meanwhile had the cathedral bells tolled for an interdict, when all the other bells in the city were rung to drown them—a brazen warfare to which the people had become accustomed. Then he ordered a cessatio a divinis, but the convents refused to observe it; the Bishop of Santa Marta pronounced it null and Valera posted a declaration that he raised it. The Audiencia of Santa Fe had ordered the expulsion of Benavides and now it fined him 4000 pesos for delay in executing the decree. The cathedral was surrounded with guards; the chapter fortified it, but the Bishop of Santa Marta had the doors broken open and ordered the chapter, to declare the see vacant. On their refusal, the provisor, treasurer and maestre-escuela were arrested and the cathedral was handed over to priests of his faction. A certain Don Gómez de Atienza declared that he wished Benavides had come forward to resist this desecration, for he would have finished him. The vengeance of heaven was not long delayed, for that night a tempest of unexampled violence burst over Cartagena; the lightning sought out Atienza in the midst of his family and slew him, while another bolt struck his farm in the country, burnt his granaries and killed his mules. He was buried with much pomp by the Bishop of Santa Marta and his dead mules were hidden, to keep the people in ignorance.

A new governor, Juan Martínez Pando, on his arrival was ordered by the Audiencia to remove Benavides, but it was impossible to ship him away, for the buccaneers commanded the sea. He was confined in his house under strict guard and his temporalities were seized. The clergy and people who were faithful to him were arrested, banished and their properties confiscated. The nuns of Santa Clara refused to recognize the confessors appointed for them, when the convent was broken open and in spite of their resistance they were beaten and confined on bread and water, while some of them were put in irons. The Archbishop of Santa Fe had ordered the Bishop of Santa Marta to retire and leave Benavides in possession, but the mandate was taken from the messenger, was pronounced to be forged, and prosecutions were brought against all who professed obedience to it.

Matters took a sudden turn when there came a royal cédula of May 16, 1683, addressed to Valera ordering him to replace Benavides in his see, which he accordingly did with extraordinary pomp. That he was master of the situation was generally recognized and peace for a time was restored, although he refused the bishop’s demand for the return of the clergy and domestics whom he had exiled. Then Benavides’ position was further strengthened by a papal brief of November 3, 1683, based wholly on the adverse representations of the Audiencia, ordering the nuns of Santa Clara to be remitted to his care. Thus the original cause of quarrel was settled and the troubles which followed were a simple trial of strength between the episcopacy and the Inquisition.

Passions had not yet exhausted themselves and the struggle for supremacy had not been decided. A new element of discord came with the arrival in November, 1684, of another inquisitor, Juan Ortiz de Zárate, who regarded Valera as having been timid and irresolute in the quarrel and boasted of his own unyielding firmness. Causes of dissension were not lacking and open war broke out when Benavides removed, perhaps with unnecessary violence, seats which the inquisitors had placed in the church, giving as a reason the “tertulia” or talkative crowd thus attracted. Thereupon they excommunicated the bishop and ordered his name to be omitted from the mass, to enforce which they excommunicated, fined and banished the dean and the Prior of San Agustin for including it. The bishop had torn down the edicts of his excommunication, had ostentatiously celebrated mass and had ordered the arrest of the clergy who would not assist him, which led the tribunal to order him to keep his house as a prison, an order enforced by obtaining from the governor a guard which rendered him practically a prisoner. During this turmoil it is easy to imagine the condition of the community, terrorized by the Inquisition. The majority of the people, we are told, favored the bishop, but were afraid of the absolute power exercised by the tribunal, with the support of the governor. The better part of the clergy saved themselves by flight and there was general demoralization. To render their victory complete the inquisitors assembled the chapter in order to have the see declared vacant. All but two voted in the negative and left the room, when the remaining two declared the vacancy and elected provisors to govern the diocese.

Then three vessels arrived from Spain which it was hoped would bring despatches putting an end to the troubles. Nothing was given out as to their nature, but it was observed that each night the guard at the bishop’s palace was reduced until it was entirely withdrawn and Benavides was released after a confinement that had lasted from April 13 to August 22, 1687. At the same time there arrived Gómez Suárez de Figueroa as inquisitor to replace Valera, who had been transferred to Lima early in 1685 but who had awaited the arrival of his successor; he sailed September 2, 1687, reaching Panamá on the 23d and Lima in June, 1688.

Suárez at first seemed inclined to deprecate the excesses of his predecessor, but the traditions and interest of the Inquisition were too strong and he soon yielded to them. The tribunal still held the bishop to be excommunicated. The news of the terrible earthquake of Lima, March 9, 1687, improved by the preachers, caused a wave of religious fervor in which many persons abandoned their scandalous lives and applied to Benavides for licences to marry but, when the banns were published, the inquisitors excommunicated the officiating priests. They also gave notice that all who communicated with the bishop must seek absolution at their hands—an absolution which they ostentatiously administered. Seeing them thus determined to carry on war to the knife, he resolved to publish a papal brief of January 15, 1687, which he had received. This treated the matter as exclusively a quarrel between him and Valera; it recognized fully the justice of his side and stated that the nuncio at Madrid had been ordered to prevail with the king that all his rights should be restored to him and that he should have public satisfaction for injuries endured. Although this brief had passed the Royal Council, when he applied to the civil authorities for aid in its publication this was refused and when he circulated copies the inquisitors stigmatized it as a forgery. They filled their prison with the bishop’s supporters and they garrotted in the plaza a Franciscan named Francisco Ramírez, without observing any formalities or even degrading him from holy orders—a tragedy in which the governor, Francisco de Castro, acted the part of executioner.

A new governor, Don Martin de Ceballos y la Cerda, brought with him a royal cédula, ordering the restitution of the bishop to his full rights and jurisdiction. This was received with rejoicings, which showed how few had been really opposed to him, although terrorism had forced men to dissemble. One article of the cédula, however, commanding the restitution of all fines and confiscated property, was not obeyed, because the judge commissioned to enforce it belonged to the inquisitorial faction and had the support of Ceballos, with whom the bishop had speedily quarrelled. This encouraged the tribunal to a renewal of molestation. When the bishop ordered the prosecution of Doctor Francisco Javier de Cárdenas, for abuses committed in a visitation, the inquisitors threatened the provisor that, if he did not release Cárdenas, he should be imprisoned as the bishop had been. During the troubles the tribunal had been conducted without the necessary concurrence of an episcopal Ordinary. To remedy this, Benavides appointed Don José Pedro Medrano to act, but the inquisitors took away his commission and refused to allow him to serve. Seeing that the contest was endless, the bishop resolved to present himself at the court and embarked in an English vessel for London, but hearing in Jamaica of the expulsion of James II, he returned to Cartagena to await the arrival of the Spanish galleons. When they came, they brought a despatch calling him to Madrid and he accompanied them on their return.

At this point the narrative in both Groot and Medina fails us and we know nothing of his reception at court, except that it was not wholly to his satisfaction. We learn from a consulta of the Council of Indies, in 1696, that Innocent XI had rendered a decision invalidating the excommunications uttered by the inquisitors and affirming those proclaimed by the bishop and that all comprised under the latter must obtain absolution. To do this would be so unexampled a humiliation that the Suprema had not enforced it, and Benavides had, without asking the royal permission, gone to Rome to accomplish its execution. This placed him in antagonism with all Spanish traditions and, in 1695, the ambassador was endeavoring to obtain papal authority to carry him back to Spain, but apparently without success, for in 1696 he was still there. The indomitable old man died in Cádiz, but in what year is not known and the see remained vacant until 1713.822

However the Suprema may have interposed to prevent the humiliation of the inquisitors, it set its seal of disapprobation on Valera. His transfer to Lima indicates that it considered, early in the quarrel, that his usefulness in Cartagena was ended. His action during the interval between 1685 and 1688 evidently confirmed the unfavorable impression and, as we have seen, he was met, on his arrival at Lima, with orders from the Suprema to return to Spain—orders which he evaded—and in 1691 the Viceroy Moncada was instructed by the king to ship him home. As this was merely a royal command, it received no attention, and he continued to exercise his functions; apparently he had profited by experience for we hear of no controversies with either the spiritual or temporal power. With the advent of the Bourbon dynasty, however, there came a determination to curb inquisitorial exuberance and his Cartagena performances were not forgotten. In 1703 there came orders from both the king and inquisitor-general to jubilate him on half his salary, the other half being applied to the Church of Cartagena, in consideration of the controversy which he had with it, thus condemning him to make to it such reparation as he could. The sentence came too late, however, as he had died on August 2, 1702.823

Governor Ceballos had no reason to congratulate himself on siding with the tribunal against Bishop Benavides. Its excesses had convinced the court that some thorough change was necessary if peace and harmony were to be restored in the colony and a Junta of two members each, of the Suprema and of the Council of Indies, was ordered to carry it into effect, but these intentions were balked by the members of the Suprema never meeting their colleagues.824 Nothing was done and the absence of the bishop left the tribunal in absolute command of the city. How despotically it exercised its authority is shown in a plaintive despatch of Governor Ceballos, January, 1693, reciting how the butcher of the public shambles having refused to give the preference to a negro of Inquisitor Suárez, the latter sent the gaoler of the secret prison to bring the butcher bound to the prison or, if he could not be found, then one of the regidores of the city in his place. The butcher was found and thrown into the prison, where he was still lying. The governor says that he was afraid to take the proper steps and contented himself with addressing a civil request to Suárez, which was disregarded. He found it impossible to get legal evidence as to the affair, for witnesses were in such terror that they would make no formal depositions. On January 13th, after drawing up a despatch on the subject, he went to his residence, whither came Secretary Luna of the tribunal, accompanied by a mob of followers and, with much disturbance, required him under threat of major excommunication and other censures to sign letters declaring that the case belonged to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition and that he abandoned it; also that all references to the matter be erased from the books of the municipality and all the papers be delivered to the tribunal. In this strait he consulted with Don Francisco Gorrechategui, President of the Royal Audiencia of Santa Fe, and Don Fernando de la Riva Aguero, Judge of the Audiencia of Panamá, but they could render him no assistance; he was helpless and, for the sake of peace, he submitted to the demands of the Inquisition.825 When such was the condition to which the tribunal had reduced the civil and military power in Cartagena, we need no further explanation of the ease with which the French adventurers captured it in 1697.

That catastrophe, as we have seen, was the turning-point in the history of the tribunal, which thenceforth rapidly declined. In 1705, Pablo de Ozaeta took possession as fiscal and found himself alone, in consequence of the severe illness of Inquisitor Lazaeta, until the arrival of Manuel de Verdeja y Cosio as his colleague. There was a lively quarrel on foot with the governor, Juan Díaz Pimienta, to whom the tribunal had imputed the concealment of the property of a person deceased. The two secretaries, Echarri and Ventura de Urtecho, took his part and were excommunicated and arrested, Urtecho being banished for eight years and Echarri ordered to leave the city within twenty-four hours, while his son was thrown into the secret prison. On the other hand, Pimienta seized Luis de Cabrera, the notary of sequestrations, and threw him into the fort of Bocachica, where he died in the course of eight months, and, on another occasion, acting on a royal order, he took, from Lazaeta’s house, Julian Antonio de Tejada, who had been sent out to report on the capture. To avenge these insults, the tribunal commenced twenty-four prosecutions against the governor, but it was in no position to assert itself. In a letter of February 27, 1706, it exhaled its griefs. Ozaeta and Verdeja were ailing—one wanted to go to Spain and the other to be transferred to Mexico. Everything was in ruin; the money coffer was empty; for ten years no galleons had arrived; Pimienta slighted Lazaeta at every turn, so that for eighteen months he had been obliged to shut himself up in his house. As for Ozaeta, Verdeja, in a letter of September 13th, accused him of devoting himself wholly to trade. He had brought merchandise with him and was the agent of foreign merchants, whose goods he introduced without paying duties, and there was no business of this kind, throughout the extensive district of the tribunal, that was not under his control. He was allowed to enjoy this profitable commerce until 1716, when he returned to Spain and was rewarded with an appointment to the tribunal of Llerena.826

He was replaced in Cartagena by Tomás Gutiérrez Escalante who did as little honor as his predecessor to the Holy Office, though he retained his position until his death, in 1738. He was involved in bitter quarrels with the governor, Francisco Baloco, of which the details are lacking, though we may assume that he was in fault, for constant complaints of him were sent to the Suprema, and the Bishop Molleda y Clerque (1734-41) accused him of interfering in matters beyond his jurisdiction and that in his house there was nothing but banquets and gambling. One of these feasts was given in honor of the saint’s day of a young mulatto girl whom he kept and whom his guests had to honor.827 After this we cease to hear of troubles with the civil authorities, but the dissensions between the officials of the tribunal continued to the end of the century and the exhortations and commands of the Suprema were fruitless in maintaining harmony.828

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The financial history of the tribunal, at least during the seventeenth century, is similar to that which we have already traced in Mexico and Peru. As we have seen, when Philip III established it in 1610 he was careful to specify that the royal subvention of 8400 ducats was to continue only as long as the confiscations and fines and penalties were insufficient; the receiver was ordered to furnish a yearly statement of his receipts which were to be deducted from the payments to be made by the treasury. Clearly as this program was laid out, it is perhaps needless to say that it never received the slightest attention from the tribunal. It had not been long in operation when the fruits of its industry began to pour in. A letter of July 22, 1621, conveyed the pleasing information that it had secured the handsome sum of 149,000 pesos from the confiscated estate of the Judaizer Francisco Gómez de Leon.829 Windfalls such as this were of course exceptional, but a more or less steady stream of smaller amounts can scarce have failed to reward its activity. Still this brought no relief to the royal treasury, which was regularly called upon for the subvention and, in 1630, we chance to hear of the complaints of the treasury officials, who were summoned before the tribunal and scolded when they had not funds wherewith to meet the demands promptly.830 In 1633 there duly came the suppression of a canonry in every cathedral of the district for the benefit of the tribunal—a measure designed for the relief of the royal treasury—but the revenues of the prebends were quietly absorbed without relaxing hold on the subvention.

Wealth flowed in with the discovery of Judaizers in 1636, whose confiscations were announced in the auto de fe of March 25, 1638. That of Juan Rodriguez Mesa amounted to 65,000 pesos; that of Blas de Paz Pinto to 50,000; of Francisco Rodríguez Pinto to 40,000, while the smaller ones brought the aggregate up to 200,000, as reported, June, 1638, by Andrés de Castro the receiver who assuredly did not exaggerate, and besides this there were confiscations in Havana amounting to 150,000.831 In 1639 there came orders to sell at auction three varas of alguaziles, one each in Santa Fe, Caracas and Popayan, but competition was not eager and we do not know the amount realized.832 The tribunal was evidently accumulating abundant capital, although it was obliged to contribute a part of its gains to the Suprema. In 1644 the latter alludes to a remittance shortly expected from Cartagena of about 10,000 ducats; by a letter of September 24, 1650, it appears that the tribunal admitted to having on hand 187,677 pesos; according to a certificate of June 30, 1659, there had been deposited in the money coffer 430,414 pesos and, although there had been more than 100,000 remitted to the Suprema, there was ample left. In addition there were houses and lands; there were 95,332 invested in censos, yielding about 4000 a year but the royal subvention was still regularly collected, the 8400 ducats being reckoned at 11,500 pesos.833

The subvention continued to be paid though, with the increasing penury of the Spanish treasury, it was apt to be in arrears. In 1670 we find the Suprema ordering the tribunal to use gentle methods; it learns that the garrison is unpaid and therefore the fault may be with the governor; the last payment collected was for the tercio (four months) of November, 1668, and the annual amount alluded to is 8400 ducats. The tribunal was not satisfied and, in its replies of May 6 and October 8, 1671, it asks for permission to apply pressure; the governor excuses himself by the expenditures necessary to provide for the safety of the place, but these pretexts will never be lacking, the civil salaries are regularly paid and the garrison is partially so. Yet the arrearage to the tribunal had been diminished and was reduced to only three tercios, showing that at least two years’ subvention had been collected during the past twelvemonth.834 Then the arrearage increased and on April 17, 1674, the tribunal reported it at nearly eighteen months, whereupon the Suprema, February 3, 1675, addressed a strong remonstrance to the queen-regent, threatening that if the officials were not paid regularly they would be obliged to desert their posts; it recapitulated the financial history of the tribunal; the royal grant, in 1610, of 8400 ducats per annum, until the confiscations and fines and penances should suffice, followed by the suppression of the prebends in 1633, and it had the effrontery to assert that since then the prebends and fines and penances had been deducted from the subvention; the royal officials asserted that there were no moneys appropriated for the purpose, and that they could not pay without special orders, wherefore the queen was asked to make the subvention a first charge on the treasury. Against this the Council of Indies protested vigorously on March 9th, going over the whole history of the matter and pointing out that whatever was paid to the Inquisition must be withdrawn from the protection of the coasts, ravaged constantly by the buccaneers, and especially of Cartagena, which was the object of their special cupidity. In fact, large expenditures were made on the defences of the city, which was the entrepôt of the shipments of the precious metals to Spain; as the Council stated, the royal treasuries of Santa Fe and Quito had already been drawn upon to the amount of 17,390,300 mrs. for that purpose.835

The debate went on, without either side abandoning its position. The Suprema, on May 11, 1676, insisted that the subvention was a necessity for the tribunal. Five of the canonries produced a total of only 2535 pesos and the sixth, of Puerto Rico, only about 100; the revenues from investments were 5491 pesos while the expenses were 18,770, so that even with the subvention there was a deficit. It is evident that not much faith was felt in these figures, for the Count of Peñaranda, in a consulta of December 10, 1677, pointed out that there never had been any statement furnished as to the amount of the confiscations and fines and penances, nor had any effort been made to obtain from Cartagena and Peru, as there had been from Mexico, restitution of the sums improperly obtained from the treasury, to which they were evidently large enough to afford sensible relief.836

In some Cartagena documents of 1684 we find the first evidence that the treasury had the benefit of other receipts of the tribunal. On June 2d the receiver presented to Inquisitor Valera a dolorous complaint as to the financial condition. In the failure to collect the royal subvention it had been impossible to pay the salaries and other expenses without drawing upon the funds held for creditors of confiscated estates awaiting settlement. The buildings of the Inquisition and its houses were out of repair and threatening ruin; the last payment obtained from the treasury was up to the end of October, 1678, since when there had accrued 61,764 pesos, 5 reales, 22 mrs. from which was to be deducted, of collections from the canonries, 8221 pesos, 3 quartellos, leaving a balance due of 53,543 pesos, 4 reales, 31 mrs., which Valera was urged to collect in order that the fund held for creditors might be reimbursed and the necessary repairs made to the buildings. Thereupon Valera addressed to the governor, Don Juan Pando de Estrada, a vigorous appeal, embodying the receiver’s statement of the account and asking at least for a partial payment. The governor submitted this to the treasury officials, who admitted the correctness of the statement, and from their figures it appears that in the settlements from November 1, 1675, to October 31, 1678, due allowance had been made for receipts from the canonries—but they add that in 1680 a royal cédula had ordered the archbishop and bishops to report to them all payments to the tribunal on account of the canonries, an order which had been obeyed only by the Bishop of Cartagena. They professed the utmost desire to pay the Inquisition and deplored their inability, in view of the demands of the home government for remittances and the indispensable outlays for the maintenance and safety of the city.

This the governor transmitted to the tribunal with the assurance of his deep regret and a request for a statement of its other receipts, in order that an accurate balance could be reached. Valera met this last demand by procuring from the receiver and his predecessor sworn statements that nothing had been received from confiscations, fines and penances, the truth of which may be doubted in view of the receiver’s previous complaint as to the use made of the sums in litigation with creditors of confiscated penitents—but he added that, if there had been receipts from these sources, they were especially appropriated to the secret and necessary expenses of the Inquisition, which was a manifest falsehood. Moreover, as the tribunal was a creditor of the treasury, and it appeared that there were no funds applicable to the discharge of the debt, it had a right to have a detailed statement of receipts and expenditures, to lay before the king, with a request for relief. What reply the governor made to this impudent demand, we have no means of knowing, but we may assume that the tribunal fared no better in the future. It had appealed, October 1, 1683, to the Suprema, setting forth its deplorable condition; as it was forbidden to use pressure, it was at the mercy of the officials and it asked that the treasurers of Santa Fe and Quito be instructed to remit directly to its receiver. For some reason this appeal was not considered by the Suprema until April 10, 1685, and then it was simply ordered to be filed away with the other papers.837

We may reasonably assume that much of the distress, thus movingly represented, was fictitious, to parry the demands of the Suprema for the contributions which it was accustomed to exact. Notwithstanding the recalcitrancy of the royal officials, the tribunal by diligent siege managed to extract an occasional payment and, though it unquestionably suffered heavily at the capture of Cartagena, in 1697, what with the prebends and the occasional fortunate capture of a wealthy penitent, it would seem not to have suffered from the lack of means. At least so the Suprema thought when, in a letter of June 15, 1705, it ordered the tribunal to be prompt in remitting the contribution demanded of it. Thus spurred, on February 27, 1706, it sent 6000 pesos, which it stated it had been obliged to borrow, as it had no resources save to pledge repayment out of the first moneys it should receive, and it expected to do this out of the estate of Don Juan de Zavaleta, the settlement of which was hourly expected. It went on to give a dolorous account of its condition. The capture of the city had left it in a miserable state—all the money in its coffers was taken and all its buildings and houses were damaged. Its chief means of support, it says, is the royal subvention, but for six years it had failed to receive any important assistance from this; arrearages due amount to more than 140,000 pesos and its applications to the treasury are met with enmity and ill-will. The suppressed canonries produce less than 5000 pesos a year; as for the houses, they have declined greatly in value; for more than ten years the galleons have ceased to visit the port and commerce has so decreased that the houses are generally untenanted and repairs consume most of the rentals received.838

In this sombre description there is doubtless a large element of truth. The kingdom of New Granada, though less than two centuries old, was already decaying and the Inquisition necessarily suffered with the rest of the community. Its poverty became so pressing that, in 1739, the houses held by it were sold on ground-rents. To add to its misfortunes, as we have seen, in 1741, during the bombardment by Admiral Vernon, a bomb dismantled the Inquisition so that it had to be torn down and it was not rebuilt until 1766. Still the tribunal managed to exist and when, in 1811, it was expelled from Cartagena, it had 4000 pesos in its coffer.839

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When came the Revolution the Inquisition evidently had lost all claim on the respect of the people and was one of the early objects against which popular detestation was directed, rendering its career in those turbulent times different from that of its sister tribunals. Before Hidalgo raised the banner of revolt, in September, 1810, already in July insurrection had broken out in Santa Fe and, on August 13th, a revolutionary Junta was established in Cartagena, although complete independence of the Spanish crown was not yet contemplated. Matters remained for a year in this uncertain condition, during which the tribunal sought to ingratiate itself with the rising forces of Revolution by acquitting and discharging a patriotic priest, Juan A. Estévez sent to it by the Santa Fe Government to be imprisoned and punished for a sermon characterized as seditious; and it furthermore dismissed its commissioner, Doctor Lasso, who had started the prosecution—a service warmly recognized by the Supreme Junta in a manifesto of September 25, 1810.840

As in Spain, the Liberals were careful to proclaim their adhesion to the principle of intolerance. The Constitution of Cádiz in 1812 declared that the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman faith was the religion of the State and that no other worship, public or private, would be permitted, while the Articles of Federation of the Provinces of New Granada enumerated among their duties that of maintaining the Catholic religion in its purity and integrity.841 Yet when the Revolution culminated for the time in Cartagena, November 11, 1811, by an armed rising of the people, one of the demands made on the Junta was that the Inquisition be suppressed and the inquisitors be handed their passports. The Junta was prompt in executing the popular wishes. The same day it issued a decree that all who did not favor independence should leave the country within eight days, and it summoned the various corporations to come forward and take the oath of independence.842 The next day, notice was sent to the tribunal that its existence was incompatible with the new order of affairs, and that the inquisitors, with such officials as desired to follow them, must sail for Spain within fifteen days, while those who remained must forthwith take the oath; all papers were to be transferred to the bishops of the dioceses to which they referred and the property was to be made over to the public treasury. To this the inquisitors replied, on the following day, that the decision had been extorted by an armed mob and, as soon as popular agitation should subside, they expected to resume the august functions confided to them by Divine Providence. Insistence, however, brought compliance and, on November 28th, they announced their readiness to go, though not to Spain; the authorities took possession of all their property and the papers connected therewith, but it was not until December 17th that their passports were sent, and further delays postponed their departure until January 1, 1812, when they sailed for Santa Marta. There they erected their tribunal and remained for about a year, when the occupation of the place by the revolutionary forces caused their transfer to Puertobelo. When Santa Marta was regained by the royalists they returned there and soon afterwards they received news of the suppression of the Inquisition by the Córtes of Cádiz in February, 1813. This rendered their condition more precarious than ever. In a report of July 8, 1815, they state that on their ejection from Cartagena, they notified the various chapters to preserve the fruits of their prebends for them; those of Santiago de Cuba, Havana and Panamá came regularly, but were paid into the royal treasury; those of Puertobelo and Santo Domingo were held back through fear of pirates; that of Caracas by the revolution, so that they were in arrears of their salaries by five tercios and had been living on borrowed money.843 If their salaries were but twenty months in arrears, in July, 1815, it indicates that the previous complaints of poverty had been exaggerated and it suggests that, in spite of the seizure of property, they had succeeded in carrying from Cartagena a fair supply of funds.

The triumph of the Spanish War of Independence and the restoration of Fernando VII in the Spring of 1814 changed the face of affairs. The whole power of the monarchy could be directed to the subjugation of the revolted colonies and, in 1815, a heavy force was sent, under Don Pablo Morillo, to effect that of New Granada. Although the Inquisition had been revived in Spain by royal decree of July 21, 1814, it was not until March 31, 1815, that the joyful news reached Santa Marta, where the inquisitors celebrated it with a solemn mass and Te Deum and the announcement that they resumed their duties, although, to keep up the semblance of a tribunal, they had appointed as fiscal the alcaide of the secret prison and as secretary the alcaide of the penitential prison. Morillo reached Santa Marta on July 24th and on August 15th he advanced to reduce Cartagena, accompanied by the senior inquisitor, José Oderiz, whom he appointed as teniente vicario general of his army. After a siege of a hundred days, in which the inhabitants were almost destroyed by famine and pestilence, Cartagena fell on December 6th and Oderiz at once took measures to seize prohibited books and resume his authority. The other inquisitor, Prudencio de Castro, deferred the transfer of the tribunal until May, 1816, awaiting the restoration of sanitary conditions in the unhappy city, and it could not fully commence operations until January 21, 1817, the date at which the two secretaries, who had remained behind, were reinstated in office, after undergoing the process of “purification,” to remove all taint of liberalism. Morillo himself had accepted the position of honorary alguazil.844

On April 29, 1818, there was a solemn publication of the Edict of Faith and of the Edict of Grace of the Suprema for heresies occasioned by the war. This was followed in the afternoon by a procession through the streets carrying the banner of the Inquisition; the standard-bearer was Colonel Jiminez, accompanied by the principal officers of the army, to whom the ceremonial was a farce, for we are told that they were nearly all Free-Masons.845 It was not until near the end of the year, however, that the organization of the tribunal was completed, by the arrival of the new fiscal, José Antonio de Aguirrezabal. Although thus ready for business, it had little to do, in the disturbed condition of the land, and it was in no condition to render active service. As it reported, September 25, 1819, it was suffering acutely from poverty, without means to repair its building which threatened ruin; it was unable to imprison offenders because they could not be fed; the salaries were unpaid and the officials had no means of livelihood, for there were no charitable hands to solace their misery. In fact, its last case was that of Don Rafael Barragan of Santa Fe, for propositions. His accusation dated back to 1813; after infinite trouble he was thrown into the secret prison and, in September, 1818, his sentence was read in the audience chamber with closed doors; he abjured de levi and was absolved ad cautelam.846

The Revolution of 1820 in Spain revived the energies of the patriots who felt that they had little to fear from further efforts of subjugation. The suppression of the Inquisition by the royal decree of March 9, 1820, seems to have attracted little attention in New Granada and, if the tribunal continued to exist, it must have disappeared when Cartagena was captured by the revolutionists in October, 1821. Still, on September 3d of that year the Vice-president of the United States of Colombia, Doctor José María Castillo, deemed it necessary to issue a decree declaring the Inquisition abolished. No traces of it should be allowed to exist and therefore the authorities of Cundinamarca were ordered not to permit the commissioner in Santa Fe to exercise his office. In future no inquisitorial edicts should be published, no books should be suppressed except by the Government and no ecclesiastical authority should supervise their importation. As the commissioner at Santa Fe, Doctor Santiago Torres, had previously died in exile, the zeal of the vice-president was somewhat superfluous except in so far as the edict deprived the bishops of censorship.847

Shortly after this the Congress of the United States of Colombia adopted a law declaring the Inquisition extinguished forever and never to be re-established. All its properties were appropriated to the State. The bishops were restored to their ancient jurisdiction over matters of faith, but appeal from their decisions lay to the civil courts. This however applied exclusively to Catholics. Foreigners of other faiths were assured against molestation on account of religion, so long as they observed due respect to the national one, and finally the civil power assumed to regulate the external discipline of the Church, such as the prohibition of books and similar matters.848 As the United States of Colombia then embraced the whole of the Spanish South American possessions, north of Peru, these liberal principles were effective over a wide expanse of territory and, when the victory of Ayacucho, December 10, 1824, finally destroyed the Spanish power in Peru and liberated the colonies, the last chance disappeared that the reactionary government of Spain might attempt to revive the Inquisition.

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Many causes contributed to the decay of the Spanish colonies, but among them not the least was the impossibility of settled and orderly administration occasioned by the multiplicity of rival jurisdictions, inherited from the medieval conceptions of the relations of Church and State. There were the military represented by the viceroy, and the civil by the Audiencia; the spiritual, exercised by the bishops over the secular clergy; the numerous Regular Orders, exempt from the bishops and subjected each to its own provincial; the Cruzada, whose numerous officials owed obedience only to the Commissioner General or his representative, and finally the Inquisition which claimed supremacy over all, in a sphere of action the limits of which it defined practically at its pleasure. Of these the most disturbing element was the Inquisition, armed with the irresistible weapon of excommunication, by which it could paralyze its antagonists at will, and the arbitrary power of arrest, which inspired general terror. We have seen what manner of men it was that Spain habitually sent to the colonies to wield this irresponsible authority, the use which they made of it and, when their abuse of it became unbearable, how they were rewarded by transfer to better tribunals or to episcopal seats. The commissioners whom they distributed through the provinces aped their masters and carried oppression and discord to every corner of the land, while the ægis of protection was extended over every criminal who could claim any connection, however illusory or fraudulent, with the tribunals.

Complaints to the Council of Indies came pouring in by every fleet from bishops, governors, officials and individuals. These were duly laid before the king, who referred them to the Suprema; it would promise to call for a report from the tribunals and this would be the last of the matter, for however severely it might berate its subordinates in secret, it steadfastly defended them in public. In 1696 the Council submitted an elaborate consulta to Carlos II, recapitulating a number of flagrant cases, occurring from Mexico to Cumaná, and its fruitless efforts to obtain redress; it pointed out how completely the tribunals disregarded the provisions of the Concordias and the impossibility of securing their observance; it suggested various reforms, the most radical of which was depriving the Inquisition of its temporal jurisdiction; it declared the matter to be of greater importance than any other that could arise in the monarchy, and it concluded with an earnest and eloquent appeal for immediate action. The Inquisition, it said, was founding a supreme monarchy, superior to all others in the State. It was regarded with universal hatred in all the regions of the Indies and with servile fear by all, from the lowest to the greatest.849

Of course nothing was done and the condition of the colonies went on steadily deteriorating. To this the Inquisition contributed not only as a leading factor in internal misgovernment, but also by its hideous system under which the affluence of the tribunals depended upon the confiscations which they could levy. We have seen how large a part this played in their financial vicissitudes and how it was regarded on all hands with eager expectation, and it is doing no injustice to the kind of men sent out as inquisitors to assume that it was a motive far more potent than the desire to maintain the faith with exact justice. To say nothing of the cruel wrongs inflicted on countless victims, commerce could not flourish when the gains of the trader only served to render him a tempting prey to such men, armed with irresponsible power exercised through the inquisitorial process and shielded from criticism by the secrecy of procedure and the stern punishment administered for complaint. The Suprema was constantly calling for remittances and, to satisfy its exigencies and their own wants, there could be small hesitation in prosecuting any merchant whose success might excite cupidity, especially when trade was so largely in the hands of descendants of New Christians. The benumbing effect of this on the withering prosperity of the colonies is self-evident.

How it fared with New Granada, under all the various depressing influences of Spanish policy, is described in a report, made in 1772, by Francisco Antonio Moreno y Escandon. The condition of the colony is represented as most deplorable and the tone of the report is that of utter hopelessness, in view of the universal decay and dilapidation. The local officials everywhere were indifferent and neglectful of duty; the people steeped in poverty; trade almost extinct; capital lacking and no opportunities of its employment, for the only source of support was the cultivation of little patches of land and the mining of the precious metals. There were no manufactures and no means of retaining money in the country, for, though it was bountiful in products, it was unable to cultivate for export in consequence of the restrictions imposed by the home Government; if freedom of export could be had for its cocoa, tobacco, precious woods, etc., it would flourish. The mines were still as rich as ever, but their product was greatly decreased; the province of Chico, which had large mineral wealth, was approachable by the river Atrato but, since 1730, the navigation of that stream was forbidden under pain of death. It is true that, in 1772, Viceroy Mexia obtained permission to send two vessels a year up the river, but the permits for this were held at a prohibitory price. The commerce with Spain consisted in one or two ships, with registered cargoes, annually from Cádiz to Cartagena, whence the goods were conveyed into the interior, but so burdened with duties and expenses that there was no profit in the trade. In the consequent absence of all industry every one sought to obtain support from the Government by procuring some little office. The frontier territories were “Missions,” under charge of frailes, the different Orders having charge of the various stations, while the Government defrayed the expenses and furnished guards of soldiers, which entailed heavy outlays with little result. They had all been established for at least a century but had failed to advance the propagation of the faith, for the Indians, when apparently converted and brought into pueblos or villages, would run away and take to the mountains. This Moreno explains by the absence of the apostolic spirit on the part of the missionaries, who undertook the career only to enjoy a life of ease and sloth.850 The spirit of the secular clergy was even more reprehensible, if we may believe the relation drawn up by Viceroy Manuel de Guirior, in 1776, for the guidance of his successor. The deplorable condition of the Church he ascribes to its subordinating its spiritual duties to the exaction of taxes and tithes, in illustration of which he states that the parish priests omitted from their registers the records of marriages, baptisms and interments, in order to evade payment of the excessive fees levied by the bishops on their official functions.851 To appreciate the full import of this we must bear in mind that on the completeness and accuracy of the parish registers depended the position in the community of every individual.

This degrading secularization of the Church was not confined to New Granada. When, in 1735, Don Jorje Juan and Don Antonio de Ulloa were sent to Quito, in company of the French men of science, to measure an equatorial degree of the earth’s surface, they were commissioned to investigate and report as to the condition of the colony in all its various aspects. The voluminous and detailed report which they presented, some ten years later, to the Marquis of la Ensenada, under Fernando VI, gives a vivid picture of the disorders of clerical life. Public prostitutes were scarce known in the cities, for licence and concubinage were so universal that there was no call for professionals. Dissolute as were the laity the clergy were worse, and of the clergy the regular Orders bore the palm for the effrontery of their scandalous mode of life—excepting, indeed, the Jesuits who are highly praised for their assiduity in their duties and the strictness with which the regulations of the Society were enforced, by the expulsion of all unworthy members. The disorders of the others are attributed to their wealth and idleness. The position of a provincial of any of the larger Orders, for the regular term of three years, was worth from 300,000 to 400,000 pesos, derived from the patronage of guardianships, priories, parish churches and plantations, which were distributed to those of his faction who would pay proportionately for them—payments for which they recouped themselves by grinding exactions on their parishioners and subjects. The convents were dens of prostitution, occupied only by those who could not afford separate establishments. The wealthier ones lived in their own houses with the concubines whom they changed at will and the children in whom they took no shame, and these houses were the scenes of gambling, dancing and drinking, causing frequent scandalous disorders which the police were unable to check, as the civil power had no jurisdiction over the clergy. Notwithstanding this extravagance, their revenues were so large that all the best lands in the colony were rapidly passing into their possession, and this was especially the case with the Jesuits, who husbanded their resources and managed their extensive properties with businesslike precision. What plantations were left to the laity were mostly burdened with heavy ground-rents and there was danger, if the process were not checked, that eventually the whole land would pass into mainmorte. As regards the missions, the report bears the same testimony as we have seen in New Granada. With the exceptions of the Jesuits, the Religious Orders, whose presence in the colony was based on the pretext of spreading the faith, were too worldly and indolent to devote themselves to that duty and the Jesuits were apt to find that when they sought to civilize their converts, these interesting neophytes would murder them and take to the mountains.852

All this frightful demoralization was beneath the attention of the Inquisition. Its business was the salvation of souls by enforcing unity of faith, and its duties as to morals were confined to destroying such works of art as it considered to be improper. Yet Ensenada, if he took the trouble to read the report so laboriously prepared, might reasonably ask himself whether a system which led to such results was fitted either for the spiritual or the material benefit of the populations subjected to the Spanish monarchy.