At first sight, the terms agreed for the surrender of Granada back in 1492, while Catherine as a child was staying with her parents in the stone-built camp-cum-city of Santa Fé from which the siege was directed, were fair, even generous. The Moorish inhabitants were granted freedom of worship, language and dress. They were to retain their property, including most mosques, and, after a three years’ exemption from imposts, they were to be taxed as they had been under their own rulers.1
All this amounted effectively to a guarantee of autonomy. It is certain that Ferdinand and Isabella never intended to keep the bargain. For their goal was not simply to restore the territorial integrity of Spain; they were determined also to unify it ethnically and religiously: to make it purely Spanish and purely Catholic.
The obstacles were overwhelming. Seven hundred years of Moorish occupation and five hundred years of creeping Reconquest had left Spain the most culturally rich and diverse of European societies. There were four main groups: the Catholic Spaniards; the Islamic Moors; the large Jewish minority, which had flourished under the tolerant rule of the Caliphs; and lastly, and most controversially, there were the New Christians or Conversos. These were former Moors or Jews who had converted, more or less sincerely and more or less completely, to the now dominant Christian religion. To fuse so diverse a mass into a unity required a formidable force. Ferdinand and Isabella acquired it in the Spanish Inquisition.
The Inquisition was not a Spanish invention, any more than twentieth-century concentration camps were a German one. But the Spanish, like the Germans, perfected what they had borrowed.
Heresy–that is, sustained, large-scale dissent from the teachings of the Church–had first appeared in western Europe, in southern France and northern Italy, in the thirteenth century. Heresy was seen as a menace to Church, State and society and to combat it special tribunals were established to enforce uniformity of Christian belief and practice. They were called Inquisitions (from the Latin verb inquiro, ‘inquire into’) because they were able to take the initiative in investigating and prosecuting, without waiting for complaints. The judges, known as inquisitors, were appointed directly by the Pope and were answerable only to him. They were usually drawn from either the Dominican or the Franciscan Order of Friars, who were often fanatical in their fervour and intolerance. The inquisitors were authorised to use torture in their investigations, and they could impose a formidable range of penalties, ranging from the confiscation of property, through life imprisonment, to death by burning. In theory, the last, ultimate penalty was not inflicted by the Church, which was forbidden to shed blood; instead, the condemned were ‘handed over to the secular arm’ (that is, the State) to be burned alive.
In the mid-thirteenth century the Inquisition was introduced into Aragon, which had strong trading and political links with southern France and shared something of the problem of heresy. But the Aragonese Inquisition suffered from the weakness common to most forms of authority in that chaotic kingdom: one inquisitor was poisoned and the heretics even managed to strike back and avenge themselves by martyring a prominent Catholic, Bernardo Travasser.
Ferdinand and Isabella resolved on a fresh start and in 1478 they got papal authority to establish the Inquisition in Castile. Under their direct patronage, it started work in Seville. Its proceedings were so harsh and extra-legal that the Pope threatened to revoke its powers and imprison the inquisitors. Ferdinand and Isabella managed to save it. But they made one concession by agreeing to replace the discredited inquisitors. In their place the Pope appointed another royal nominee, the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, who in 1483 was made Grand Inquisitor of both Castile and Aragon.
Torquemada’s appointment was decisive. Not only was he a man of passionate Faith (not without reason is such conviction described as ‘burning’), he was also an organisational genius. He created a network of provincial tribunals, all answerable to himself and his other creation, the High Council, which acted as a Court of Appeal. He issued statutes to guide investigations and refine procedure. And he supplied energy and leadership. There were, in short, three monarchs in Spain: Ferdinand and Isabella and Torquemada. And there is no doubt whose powers were the more absolute. The Catholic Kings exercised their authority through a patchwork of different kingdoms and principalities. The powers of Torquemada’s Inquisition, on the other hand, stretched without interruption from the Bay of Biscay to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. It was the one national Spanish institution and it created a nation in its own image.
Torquemada’s influence reached a peak in 1492 with the expulsion of the Jews. Torquemada and others of his ilk had long found the presence in Spain of a large Jewish population an offence against God and man. Had not Jews cried ‘Crucify Him’, when Pilate offered them a choice of the life of Jesus Christ or the life of the robber Barabas? Many Jews in Spain in the fifteenth century were also sufficiently rich and well placed to protect their Conversos brethren from Torquemada’s officers. So, like those other persecutors, the Nazis, Torquemada persuaded himself of a Jewish conspiracy to Hebraize Spain; and he managed to persuade Isabella, who was only too willing to be convinced, that her victory over Granada required a thank-offering to God. The chosen sacrifice was the Jews, who were offered a choice between conversion and exile. Most opted for the latter, to the inestimable benefit of Spain’s neighbours and rivals, from Venice to Ottoman Turkey. The comparative few who remained became easy pickings for the Spanish Inquisition.
By the time of Torquemada’s death in 1498, the Inquisition had burned some two thousand men and women. Nowadays, the Spanish talent for turning sadism into spectacle finds its expression in the bullfight. Then, its manifestation was the auto da fé (act of faith). This was the name given to the grand public ceremonies in which the victims of the Inquisition were condemned and executed. They were held at more or less frequent intervals in every city and substantial town of Spain, and each was a theatrical triumph of the Church Militant. Choirs and clergy processed, carrying the banners and relics of saints and wearing their finest vestments. The heretics were specially clothed, too, in a bizarre, humiliating parody of clerical dress. Sermons were preached and sentence pronounced. Then, before ecstatic crowds, the condemned were stripped, chained to stakes and incinerated.2
It was to avoid this awful fate that the Moors rose in rebellion in 1500–thus, incidentally, delaying Catherine’s departure for England. We have no idea of Catherine’s thoughts on the events which led to the Revolt. But she is most unlikely to have disapproved. She was a conventional, fervently pious Catholic–in this, as in so much else, her mother’s daughter. She had been with her parents in Granada when they had promulgated the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. She was at her mother’s side when Isabella boasted that, in her eagerness to root out Unbelief: ‘I have caused great calamities, and depopulated towns, lands, provinces and kingdoms.’ Finally, it is clear that Ferdinand and Isabella hoped that the English alliance, of which Catherine was the pledge, would lead to England adopting the policies of the Inquisition. Prodded by the Spanish ambassador’s denunciation of refugees in England, ‘who have fled from the Inquisition [and] who speak ill of Spain and wish to excite hatred against her’, Henry VII had made extravagant protestations. ‘By the faith of his heart’ he swore that the enemies of Spain were his enemies and that ‘he would punish soundly any Jew or heretic to be found in his realm’.3
In the event, nothing much was done. But Catherine would have been an effective ambassadress for a policy of aggressive persecution, for she undoubtedly embraced the dogmatic attitude to Truth which underpinned it. Like all good Catholics, she understood ‘religious belief as something objective, as the gift of God and therefore outside the realm of free private judgement’. She also understood that Holy Church was the exclusive custodian and repository of this objective and divine Truth–and also its appointed protector and defender.
The Church established by Christ, as a perfect society, is empowered to make laws and inflict penalties. Heresy not only violates her law but strikes at her very life, unity of belief.
The penalties must therefore be appropriate: a life for a life. So Catherine believed. And so the best of her contemporaries, including Sir Thomas More, believed also.
But life was to play a cruel trick on Catherine (and indeed on More). For England, where her destiny lay, came to reject the fundamental principles of Catholic dogma. The conscience of her husband and King was to be put above the consensus of the Church. The English nation, not the Universal Church, was to be made the vehicle of God’s purpose on earth. The new dogma was as aggressive and intolerant as the old. It also created a new nation. But Catherine was to stick to the old ways of her native Spain. The result was that the daughter of the unimpeachably orthodox Isabella became a dissenter in her adoptive country, and the persecutrix (at least by complicity) found herself a victim.