IV
The Familiares and Unsalaried Officials

The unpaid lay and clerical assistants—familiares, notarios, and comisarios—spread the influence of the tribunals throughout their sprawling districts, but the role they played in the repression of heresy or other offenses has frequently been misunderstood, and their political importance to an institution that was in constant conflict with powerful enemies has been largely overlooked. The origins of the familiares, like many of the other institutions characteristic of the "modern" Inquisition established by Ferdinand and Isabella, lay with the medieval Inquisition, which permitted its inquisitors to surround themselves with armed guards as they traveled from place to place.^[1] During the High Middle Ages, when the Inquisition became established in Aragon, the priors and senior members of the Dominican order who acted as inquisitors made use of young professed monks of the Third Dominican order to assist them in a variety of tasks involving the arrest and transportation of prisoners. As a consequence of their close personal association with the inquisitors, these individuals became known as familiares.^[2] In the late fifteenth century, when the modern Spanish Inquisition was established, this title continued to be used even though the group was now composed almost entirely of secular individuals, many of whom never came in direct contact with an inquisitor because they lived in remote areas of one of the inquisitorial districts.

The transformation of the familiares from a small group of young

Dominican monks who were occasionally called on to assist their superiors to a much larger group composed primarily of laymen distributed in hundreds of towns and villages throughout the country involved the beginning of important new social and political responsibilities. But exactly what this new role entailed and how it changed during the course of the Old Regime remains a subject of considerable confusion among Inquisition scholars. Even the number of familiares in a given district cannot easily be established because of the notorious unwillingness of provincial inquisitors to furnish the Suprema, or local authorities, with lists of the familiares.^[3] Typical of this obstructionism was the Valencia tribunal's reply to the Suprema's demand for a list of familiares to be drawn up by the district's comisarios in 1630. After claiming that appointments were being made strictly in accordance with regulations, the tribunal declared that complying with the Suprema's request would be a time-consuming and difficult task for only seven commissioners to handle and that an accurate assessment of the tribunal's corps of familiares could only be gained if the commissioners were also charged with providing information about the population of all the places in their area, even those that did not contain familiares.^[4] As a result, it was not until 1697, some sixty-seven years later, that the Suprema finally received the comprehensive list it had demanded.

The tribunal's extreme reticence about divulging information concerning the number and distribution of familiares combined with the rudimentary nature of its own record keeping during the first eighty years of its existence make it virtually impossible to estimate the numbers of familiares in the district before the visitation of 1567. What is evident from other sources is that contemporary observers, especially the representatives of the royal administration in the kingdom, felt that the total was too high. As early as February 1551, the president of the royal Audiencia sent a stinging letter to court demanding that the number of familiares be reduced sharply. This letter might well have been ignored, but the atmosphere at court had undergone profound changes since Prince Philip had taken charge of the government of the kingdom, and even Inquisitor-General Valdés could no longer ignore the demand for reform.^[5] On March 12, 1551, Valdés brusquely ordered the tribunal to reduce the number of familiares to 100 in Valencia city, with corresponding reductions and limitations in the towns and villages

of the district. All commissions were revoked, reappointments were to be made with great care, and new commissions were to carry the signature of both inquisitors and were to be limited in duration with the names to be sent to the Suprema.^[6]

Several weeks later, the tribunal vigorously protested Valdés's order, claiming that because of the large number of Moriscos in the kingdom and the protection that was being afforded them by powerful nobles, even 500 would be too few for Valencia city "since without numerous familiares the alguacil would be unable to carry out his orders."^[7] Under increasing pressure from Philip, who had taken a personal interest in the wave of complaints about familiares, Valdés could not retreat (much as he might have wanted to), and he insisted that the provisions of his March 12 letter be put into effect without delay. This appears to have been ignored; but finally on March 10, 1552, Valdés wrote again, this time offering to compromise on a figure of 200 familiares for Valencia city.^[8] Evidently this was acceptable to the tribunal, because it was the figure agreed on in discussions that were held between Inquisitors Miranda and Arteaga and acting Viceroy Juan Lorenzo de Villarrasa in spring 1552. In his letter to the Suprema informing it of these negotiations (which had been undertaken without its knowledge or permission), Inquisitor Arteaga indicated that the problem of excessive or unmanageable numbers was being taken care of by the two inquisitors themselves on their visitations to the district. His colleague, Gregorio de Miranda, had already regulated the number of familiares in the important Játiva/Alcira area, while Arteaga himself proposed to do the same thing on his upcoming visit to Tortosa.^[9] Two hundred appears to have been the number actually serving in Valencia city at this period, since in a letter commenting on a criminal assault in which familiar Antonio Pastor was badly wounded, he was termed "one of those names in the list of 200" that presumably had been furnished the viceroy at the conclusion of the earlier negotiations.^[10]

In spite of the evident willingness of Inquisitors Arteaga and Miranda to accommodate themselves to the increasing pressure from court, the situation was still far from satisfactory, and the matter was taken out of their hands when the Suprema and the Council of Aragon together ratified the Concordia of May 11, 1554.^[11] According to this agreement, the number of familiares in Valencia city was to be reduced from 200 to a maximum of 180;

towns of more than 1,000 households were to have eight; those of 500 to 1,000 were to have six; and in those of 200 to 500, there could be no more than four unless they were located on the border or had ports, in which ease, they could have two additional familiares. Villages with less than 200 households could have a maximum of two familiares.

After 1554, concern over the actual number of familiares in the district seems to have given way to a preoccupation with abuse of the special fuero or jurisdiction that the Holy Office exercised over them. While complaining long and loud about abuses of the fuero, the Cortes of 1563-64 said nothing about the question of numbers, and the Concordia of July 10, 1568, merely called on the tribunal to observe the provisions of the 1544 document, in spite of the fact that the visitation of 1567 had revealed substantial violations.^[12] From now on, the number of familiares would depend primarily on demand for the office, and that, in turn, was a function of the economy, the family tradition, the prestige of the tribunal, and the benefits, whether pecuniary or otherwise, that membership in the corps could bring.

Inquisitor Soto-Salazar's 1567 visitation of the district revealed a total of 1,638 familiares, of which some 183 corresponded to the city of Valencia itself.^[13] As far as Valencia city is concerned, numbers throughout the latter part of the sixteenth century were at or close to those permitted in the Concordia. In 1575, the account book of the familiares confraternity revealed 178 familiares.^[14] In 1591, according to a letter sent to the Suprema some twelve years later, the tribunal could boast 173, with 12 additional applicants making a total of 185, or 5 more than that permitted in the Concordia.^[15]

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, official lists are scarce. Thus, to draw any meaningful conclusions about the size of Valencia's corps of familiares, we must rely on a combination of official lists that are available and the names that can be gleaned from the genealogical examinations that were required for new entrants. During the seventeenth century, the picture is one of gradual decline in both the city and the district. I was able to find a total of 1,522 names of familiares serving in the district for the entire century plus some 275 for Valencia city. This is considerably lower than the number serving in the year 1567, but it is only an estimate and probably understates the actual totals by a substantial

margin.^[16] It would also appear that the number serving during the first half of the century was considerably greater than the number serving at the end. The official list of 1602, which covered only the dioceses of Segorbe and Tortosa in the northern part of the district, indicated that out of 66 places registered, all but 14 had lost familiares, but 9 of the 14 had actually increased their number.^[17] In fact, some five years earlier, the governor of one of these places, Castellón de la Plana, had written to the Suprema to complain that there were 15 familiares in his town instead of the 8 permitted by the Concordia.^[18] In the city of Valencia, the 1619 list that was furnished to the viceroy contained the names of 161 serving familiares, while the list presented in 1623 had 168 names—only 15 fewer than the census of 1567.^[19] As late as 1651, there were still 389 familiares, with 111 in Valencia city, but by the end of the century, numbers had declined substantially, and the official list that the tribunal furnished the Suprema in 1697 indicated a total of only 162 familiares for the entire district with 29 serving in Valencia city.^[20]

During the first half of the eighteenth century, there appears to have been a sharp recovery in the numbers of serving familiares, reaching a peak in 1748 with 356. By 1806, however, the number of familiares had fallen to only 157.^[21] The tribunal could also rely on a network of priests, who served as notaries, and commissioners who were in many ways more useful to the tribunal because they could interview witnesses and informants. Furthermore, of the 386 notaries in the sample, 201 belong to the eighteenth century, indicating an upswing in interest and support for the Holy Office among the clergy precisely at the time when the corps of familiares was static or declining. This trend is also mirrored in the figures for Valencia city—64 out of 86 notaries served in the eighteenth century. The evolution of the commissioners tended to follow that of the familiares. Of the total of 177, 128 served during the seventeenth century and only 49 during the eighteenth.^[22]

One principal goal the architects of the Concordias of 1553-54 attempted to achieve was to create a balanced network of familiares that should cover the entire territory of a district and provide the basis for the policy of "christianization" that was to consume so much of the Inquisition's time and attention during the latter half of the sixteenth century.^[23] In reality, however, the geographic distribution of Valencia's familiares corresponded much more to the

accidents of geography and climate and the distribution of wealth in the kingdom, since the costs of the genealogical investigations that became a requirement for admission to the corps excluded those without a certain amount of discretionary income.

Taking these factors into account, it is hardly surprising that our map (fig. 1) reveals Valencia's familiares thickly clustered along the coastal lowlands and spread thinly in the interior, especially in the areas that had been the heartland of Morisco Valencia (Sierra de Espadán, Vall de Uxó, Muela de Cortes, Cofrentes), regardless of the ideal distribution pattern as set forth in the Concordia. Concentration in the huerta zone even appears to have increased in the eighteenth century (fig. 2). The nine largest huerta towns, Cast-ellón, Villareal, Burriana, Sagunto, Puzol, Catarroja, Rusafa, Gandía, and Valldigna, had 137 familiares in the seventeenth century sample, or 9 percent of the total, and 125 familiares, or 16.5 percent in the eighteenth century.

Apart from a favored location on the coastal plain, the participation of a town or region in the production and sale of a commercial crop could spell prosperity, even as in the case of Morella, which was located deep in the interior. Morella was called the "granary of the kingdom" in the seventeenth century, and even though the falling prices at the end of the century resulted in a crisis for local landowners, it still had enough wealthy labrador families to provide the tribunal with a total of seventeen familiares.^[24] Sagunto, a port town located between Valencia and Castellón de la Plana, was another place that benefited from handling a commercial crop grown in its immediate environs. During the early seventeenth century, wine accounted for almost 50 percent of the value of the harvest.^[25] The forty-one familiares, four notaries, and two commissioners in-eluded in my sample are much more an indication of the prosperity of the town and its district than of any decision by the tribunal to reinforce its position against the dangers posed by the few foreign ships that touched at the port.

As important as wine was in certain areas, it was silk that took pride of place among the kingdom's commercial crops. Silk cultivation was largely concentrated around several towns in the Júcar Valley, and it is in these towns with their rentiers, merchants, and wealthy peasants that we find another heavy concentration of familiares. The six towns that dominated the zone, Játiva, Alcira,

Figure 1.
Distribution of Familiares in the Seventeenth Century

Figure 2.
Distribution of Familiares in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Algemesí, Guadasuar, Carcagente, and Alberique, proved an excellent recruiting ground for the tribunal and account for slightly more than 11 percent of the familiares that I have counted for the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, the process of concentration that we have seen above increased the silk towns' share of the corps to well over 14 percent.

But, as a recent study has amply demonstrated, most of the seventeenth century was a period of economic stagnation or decline for the Valencian economy.^[26] Periods of economic depression do not, however, spell disaster for everyone as those who already have sufficient capital may be able to benefit from the troubles of the less fortunate. It was precisely this phenomenon, the ability of a relatively few to take advantage of the opportunities offered by hard times, that sustained recruitment into the corps of familiares during the seventeenth century and provided a group of new families that continued to support the Holy Office until well into the next century. In this connection, it is noteworthy that the ten communities whose landholding patterns were surveyed by Casey for the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries all had a high degree of social and economic inequality, with landholding heavily concentrated in the top 20 percent of the population. Játiva, Gandía, and Castellón, the communities with the greatest concentration of wealth and the worst social inequality, were also places with high concentrations of familiares.^[27] Across the two centuries, these communities could boast 259 familiares in my sample, with Castellón de la Plana accounting for 80 and Játiva for 150.

Apart from economic factors, the fact that Valencia's inquisitorial district straddled the borders of the Kingdom of Aragon and the Principality of Catalonia created political problems that affected the number of familiares that could be recruited in those areas. Certainly, the tribunal's punishment of several familiares from the Aragonese town of Teruel for aiding Aragonese authorities in releasing a prisoner from the custody of an alcalde of the Inquisition soured relations between the tribunal and the local elite and sharply reduced the size of the city's once-flourishing corps of familiares.^[28]

In spite of the obvious correlation between the concentration of wealth and the distribution of familiares, they were also present in areas devoid of the economic opportunities of the huerta or silkproducing zones. Since these remote villages could hardly be con-

sidered hotbeds of heresy, the presence of familiares in them can be explained more by the activity of individual inquisitors or the relationship that the tribunal had with certain nobles than by any plan to cover the kingdom with a dense network of informers.

Sometimes, as in the ease of a group of villages in the extreme northern part of the district near Mora de Ebro, the appearance of a large number of familiares where there were few previously can be accounted for by the zeal of an inquisitor. In this ease, it was an inquisitorial visitation to the Tortosa/Mora de Ebro region in 1601-02 which resulted in the appointment of familiares in forty-one villages, some as small as twelve households.^[29] But the Holy Office could not expect to put down roots in such unpropitious soil, and during the following century, when the corps of familiares tended to be recruited primarily from places with a strong inquisitorial tradition, most of these villages dropped out.

In other remote areas, the Holy Office benefited from the friendship of the local lord who might have encouraged his vassals when they sought titles. It should not be forgotten that most of rural Valencia was under seigneurial jurisdiction and that the majority of the Valencian nobility were far from hostile to the Holy Office. In fact, of the 350 towns where one or more unsalaried officials were present, 133 were seigneurial and only 72 belonged directly to the crown. Certain lords, like the mid-sixteenth-century duke of Segorbe, might have had personal experience of the way familiares could act to defend the social order. In testimony before the tribunal on March 27, 1553, Benito Marco, the alguacil of the Holy Office, recalled how some years earlier he had taken a posse of eighty familiares from Valencia city to certain of the duke's estates to guard against a possible Moorish seaborne assault designed to carry off his Morisco vassals. Ever since that time, the duke had favored the Holy Office and assisted it in carrying out arrests on his estates.^[30]

Juan Boil de Arenos, baron of Boil and lord of the village of Alfafar near Montesa, and Jerónimo Girón de Rebolledo, lord of Andilla in the rugged Sierra de Javalambre, were two members of the kingdom's lesser territorial nobility whose strong support of the tribunal translated itself into the consistent recruitment of unpaid officials among their vassals. In 1587, Boil, who was already a familiar in Valencia city, had occasion to learn just how useful his special

fuero could be when one of his vassals insulted and threatened him. Boil promptly hauled the man before the bar of the Holy Office, which condemned him to two years exile from Alfafar and a 30 ducat fine.^[31] Boil's gratitude to the Holy Office for this and other favors (like maintaining him as a familiar even though he was a baron and therefore ineligible) translated itself into support for the presence of familiares and notaries in Alfafar, a tradition that was maintained by his successors.

The Valencia tribunal also had a firm friend and supporter in Jerónimo Girón de Rebolledo, a familiar who was already acting as lieutenant alguacil of the Holy Office in Liria when he won a court case and became baron of Andilla.^[32] In spite of this change in his status, the tribunal insisted on keeping him as a familiar, thereby maintaining good relations with this important gentry family: As a result, he and his successors encouraged certain of their vassals to become associated with the Holy Office, and the tiny and remote village could boast two commissioners and a notary as well as at least four familiares between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth century. Without the firm support of the nobility, which controlled most of rural Valencia as well as many important towns (Denia, Sueca, Segorbe), the tribunal would have had much greater difficulty in establishing and maintaining a numerous and widely distributed corps of unpaid officials.^[33]

Initially, the formal qualifications that every candidate had to have to become a familiar were relatively straightforward. Candidates had to be of pure Old Christian stock, married or a widower, at least 25 years of age, peaceable and of good moral character, legitimate and of native, not foreign, birth.^[34] In addition, after the Concordia of July 10, 1568, familiares could not be drawn from among the powerful (barons and cavaliers) but instead had to be plain, ordinary individuals without social pretensions.^[35] In practice, however, whenever it seemed financially rewarding or politically expedient, the Valencia tribunal ignored or circumvented these requirements.

It is ironic that during the same period that it unleashed its most ferocious persecution of the converted Jews, the Valencia tribunal should have allowed numerous conversos to become members of the corps of familiares. Although "purity of blood" investigations were apparently being carried on from the 1550s, testimony re-

ceived during the 1566 visitation indicated that the tribunal routinely permitted applicants to present their own list of witnesses, a practice that was apparently accepted without a murmur by its official investigators.^[36] Such procedural laxity was the cause of a growing rumor among the public at large that successful candidates did not have the proper personal and racial qualities.^[37]

It would have been difficult, however, for the Holy Office or the Valencia tribunal to resist the growing pressure for the exclusion of Judeo-Christians from honorable positions in Spanish society. In the paranoid atmosphere that prevailed among Spanish ruling circles during the mid-sixteenth century, the hand of Jewry was seen behind every threat to Catholic Orthodoxy, and more and more of Spain's premier institutions were adopting statutes excluding those of Judaic origin. Finally, in the Concordia of July 10, 1568, the Valencia tribunal was ordered to revoke all the licenses it had issued and to only reissue them after an official inquiry had been performed which would encompass not only racial factors but also the candidate's personal conduct. From these, the tribunal was supposed to choose the members of a numerically limited but racially pure corps of familiares comprised of individuals who were "Old Christians of untarnished lineage."^[38] Even though the tribunal was apparently willing to carry out the requisite genealogical investigations, it balked at actually calling in all its licenses, as this would make it appear that its critics were right in claiming that there were many conversos in the corps. Furthermore, the obloquy that would result might bring the entire corps into ill repute and could damage the reputations of many families whose members held titles, even those of the "purest" Old Christian stock. The stalemate was broken only by the direct intervention of the viceroy who bluntly refused to recognize the validity of any titles unless they had first been collected and reexamined as provided in the Concordia.^[39] In the face of pressure from the viceroy and the Suprema, the tribunal had to abandon its resistance and undertake the first official series of genealogical investigations in its history, which were carried out between 1569 and 1571. The results, which demonstrated that forty-three of Valencia city's familiares and a large number of their wives lacked the requisite racial qualities, appeared to underscore the need for rigorous genealogical investigations even though the number of familiares who actually lost

their licenses was rather small because of the danger that massive dismissals would pose to the reputation of the corps as a whole.^[40]

The genealogical investigation of familiares and other unpaid officials began when the applicant for a position gave the tribunal a copy of his genealogy and that of his wife, including the names of parents and paternal and maternal grandparents. The tribunal's records would then be searched, and if this failed to turn up any evidence that would disqualify the applicant, then one of the tribunal's secretaries or a commissioner was sent to the places where the family lived to interview witnesses in accordance with a printed questionnaire.^[41] Both secretaries and commissioners would normally be accompanied by a notary as witnesses' testimony was taken under oath. In practice, however, the requisite commissioners were frequently not available or were unwilling to undertake journeys far from their homes, and the tribunal would frequently use notaries or even parish priests to carry out all or part of the investigations.^[42]

The veracity of the investigations was to be ensured not only by the fact that they were to be "tomados de oficio y no ministrados de parte," that is, using information obtained independently by an official of the Holy Office and not simply furnished by the applicant as formerly, but also because all the officials concerned were supposed to have themselves undergone genealogical examinations. It could be assumed that individuals who had successfully surmounted the genealogical barrier would have a vested interest in maintaining the purity of the corps to which they belonged and that this would outweigh the appeal of any financial advantages offered to them by nervous applicants. In 1630, the Suprema admonished Inquisitor Roche for using a number of commissioners whose own genealogical investigations were not yet complete. His explanation was that they were all the brothers of familiares or the relatives of officials so there seemed to be no harm in the practice.^[43]

The actual number of witnesses to be questioned varied substantially. During the late sixteenth and very early seventeenth centuries, when the form that the genealogical investigation was later to follow was not firmly established, the investigators used only six witnesses per location. A change seems to have occurred in 1607, however, when the number "6" is crossed out on the form that was used to investigate one Jaime Amaros and replaced by "12," which

was to be the norm in future investigations.^[44] However, the investigator's instructions encouraged him to exceed the prescribed number of witnesses whenever there was any doubt or contradiction and to examine as many as he thought necessary. Those carrying out the investigations were well aware of their superiors' bias toward more rather than fewer witnesses, especially in difficult eases. When the Suprema wrote questioning secretary Juan del Olmo's decision to interview only five witnesses in Traiguera, the birthplace of candidate Frances Vidal, where three had testified that the family had Jewish blood, Olmo replied that instead of remaining in Traiguera, he had gone directly on to the birthplace of Vidal's maternal grandmother since the rumors concerned her. There, he had interviewed sixteen witnesses, including three priests and two familiares, all "among the oldest and most honorable in the village."^[45] The number of witnesses could mount quickly, lengthening the time of the investigation and sharply increasing its cost. Pedro García Pons, who applied to become a familiar in 1623, had the misfortune to have his parents and grandparents come from three separate towns (Olerida, Flix, and La Granadella), while his wife's maternal grandmother came from the village of Fatarella. In all, the intrepid investigators took testimony from fifty-nine witnesses, and the tribunal ended by rejecting Pons's application anyway, but not before collecting 390 reales in costs.^[46]

The instructions gave the investigating official certain minimal but very specific standards for the sort of person that he was to choose to examine. Of course, witnesses were to be natives of the place and of impeccable Old Christian stock. But, more specifically, they were to be chosen from among the oldest inhabitants, were not to have any direct relationship to the candidate (neither relatives, friends, nor enemies), and the local unpaid officials were to be included among them. In practice, investigating officials used their own discretiou in deciding when it was appropriate to vary the official format. In my survey of the witnesses called in fifty genealogies of familiares from 1575 to 1801, the average age was just over 60 years old, but the mandate to seek out the oldest inhabitants was frequently not followed by investigating officials. In some places, older people may simply not have been available to interview. This problem was especially acute during the first half of the seventeenth century when disease and economic crises combined to pro-

duce sharply higher death rates among the elderly^[47] Moreover, the most important thing about a witness was not age but what that individual knew about the applicant and his family. In the ease of Diego Angel, a merchant living in Valencia, secretary Jerónimo Sans, who was carrying out his genealogical investigation, clearly decided that it would be more useful to interview Angel's associates among the other merchants of the city than to seek out the elderly. As a result, the average age of witnesses interviewed in Valencia city was only 44.^[48] Investigating officials only made a special point of interviewing the very oldest inhabitants of a place when rumors of some impurity in the applicant's background had surfaced. In such a ease, only the testimony of a person whose knowledge of local events went back several generations would suffice. During the investigation that was carried on into the background of Pedro Badía prior to admitting him to the corps of familiares, testimony came from several witnesses that his maternal grandmother, Violante Batallar, was of impure blood. To test the veracity of this testimony, the investigating official turned to what was undoubtedly the oldest inhabitant of the village, a 105-year-old peasant. This individual acknowledged the existence of the rumor but claimed that it was without foundation; that apparently sufficed, as Badía's application was approved without further difficulty.^[49]

According to their critics, one of the most deplorable aspects of the purity of blood statutes was their marked egalitarianism. In a society where the statutes were becoming the indispensable passageway to social distinction, the reputations of the wealthy and powerful were being held hostage to the opinions of mere plebeians. In a country where a single ancestor of impure blood could invalidate the purity and orthodoxy of dozens of others, critics charged that the son of the vilest miller or blacksmith could use his status as an Old Christian to hold in contempt the scions of the noblest families in Spain.^[50]

Certainly, the results of breaking down the sample of witnesses by social status appears to support the claims made by the critics of the purity of blood examinations. In general, witnesses were drawn from among persons of lower social standing, while there is a striking contrast between the social composition of the corps of familiares and the witnesses in their genealogical examinations. More than 72 percent of witnesses were drawn from the ranks of the

peasantry and artisans, while gentry (cavaliers) and "citizens" (ciutadà) together comprised only 2.3 percent. Furthermore, there seemed to be little disposition on the part of investigating officials to select members of the local oligarchy, with only a minuscule 0.79 percent (18 individuals) identifying themselves as jurats or other officials of local government. Even the injunction to always interview local familiares or other officials of the Holy Office was seldom obeyed. Only 110 familiares (4.8% of witnesses) were interviewed by investigating officials in spite of the fact that they were ordered to compile a list of the names of local familiares for the tribunal and could, therefore, hardly be unaware of their existence. Even parish priests, who presumably could have given the investigating official a good deal of valuable information about the life and customs of the applicant as well as the frequency of his religious observances, were only represented by 95 individuals (4.1%).

In marked contrast to the procedural laxity of genealogical investigations carried out before the 1570s, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century investigations tended to be characterized by punctilious attention to detail and a willingness to follow up every rumor of impurity of blood no matter how shaky its foundation. Of course, there can be no doubt that the enthusiasm with which the various officials in charge carried out their responsibilities was greatly spurred by the knowledge that their further exertions would be amply rewarded out of the funds the applicant had deposited with the tribunal to cover the costs of his investigation. Miguel José Alapont, who applied to become a familiar in 1726, was unfortunate enough to have maternal grandparents who were both born in different places in Castile, while his mother had been born in Murcia. This unusual situation required investigations to be carried on not only in the Kingdom of Valencia (Valencia city and Alcudia de Carlet, his father's birthplace) but also by the officials of the tribunals of Cuenca, Toledo, and Murcia.^[51]

Foreign birth, which was supposed to automatically disqualify a candidate from admission, could be overlooked for exceptional individuals, but the tribunal did feel itself obliged to obtain information about the applicant's family in his country of origin. To do this, it was necessary to obtain the cooperation of foreign ecclesiastical officials who normally proved themselves so eager to help the Spaniards that they carried out their instructions more strictly than they were fol-

lowed in Spain itself. In the case of Juan Abadia, a merchant who came from the French province of Béarn, the tribunal received authorization from Inquisitor-General Manuel Bonifaz to write to the bishop of Oléron and ask him to carry out a genealogical investigation in the family's native villages. Working from the standard set of instructions given to all officials charged with carrying out such investigations, which told them to find twelve witnesses from among the oldest and most honorable inhabitants, the bishop's agents selected witnesses with an average age of 76 (as opposed to the Spanish Inquisition's norm of 60), including four 80-year-olds and one peasant who claimed to be 95.^[52] The tribunal's concern with fulfilling its instructions to the letter was demonstrated when José Ignacio Alama applied to enter the corps in 1740. In this case, the applicant himself was of pure Spanish stock since his family came from Valencia city and the diocese of Tortosa. But his wife's paternal grandfather, Julio Capuz, had come to the kingdom from Genoa, so, inevitably, the Genoese authorities had to be consulted. By the time permission was obtained from the inquisitor-general, letters were dispatched to Genoa and a reply incorporating the results of the Genoese investigation was received; an investigation that should have taken a few months had stretched to three years.^[53]

Of course, if the tribunal was prepared to go to such a lot of trouble over the relatively trivial matter of foreign origin, it could be expected to take infinite pains to establish the truth of any allegations of impurity of blood. The fate of Antonio Albert's application to become a familiar in La Ollería is a typical example of the way such rumors could delay the conclusion of an investigation by imposing a need to carry on fresh inquiries in places not originally scheduled. The investigation of Albert's family in La Ollería having been successfully concluded, Commissioner Agustín Vicente López turned his attention to Benigánim, the birthplace of his maternal grandmother, Catalina Moscardó. Here the investigation ran into trouble as several witnesses repeated a rumor that the Moscardós were of Morisco origin. This rumor was strenuously denied by Eugenio Tudela, one of the local familiares, who attributed it to petty jealousy arising from the time when the village of Moscardón (from which the family had come originally) had turned out en masse to repel a Morisco attack, and all the members of the family, even the youngest, had gone on horse-

back, while many who belonged to the village oligarchy had to go on foot. Even though the testimony of such an important witness as Tudela (just the sort of witness that the commissioner was instructed to seek out) should have ended the matter, the fact that these allegations were being made just at the time of the expulsion of the Moriscos turned a routine investigation into one that would require a great deal more painstaking work before it could be concluded.

After carefully considering the report of its commissioner, the tribunal drew up a special series of instructions designed to track down the ancestors of the original Moscardó who had migrated from that village to Benigánim. The tribunal then appointed canon Martín Rodrigo, its commissioner in Albarracín, to carry out the investigation in Moscardón, which lay a few miles to the south, sending José del Olmo from Valencia to accompany him. Of course, del Olmo's presence was entirely superfluous since the commissioner was perfectly competent to carry out the investigation and could have used a local ecclesiastical notary if he needed one, but the del Olmos were being favored in these matters, and the inquisitors no doubt saw this ease as a good opportunity for him to earn a substantial fee. On May 4, 1612, seventeen months after Albert's application had first been received, the two investigators arrived in Moscardón and began to interview witnesses.

In spite of the care that the tribunal took to investigate the origins of the rumors about the family's Morisco origins, however, the outside observer cannot help wondering whether a decision had already been taken in his ease even before Rodrigo and del Olmo were dispatched to Moscardón. The majority of the witnesses they interviewed there were probably distant relatives of the candidate, and a subsequent inquiry in Benigánim seemed almost designed to produce a favorable result since it was carried on using a different official and an entirely different set of witnesses. Armed with the "favorable results" of these two investigations, the tribunal felt free to award Albert his title on November 24, 1612, twenty-eight months after Albert had first applied for admission to the corps of familiares.^[54] In the ease of Albert, as in so many others who applied for familiaturas after the genealogical investigation had been formalized, scrupulous attention to the regulations governing such investigations and a willingness to pursue any rumor of "im-

pure" blood, however farfetched, masked the fact that a decision to admit the candidate had already been taken at a higher level.

Given all the concern over the impact of the purity of blood statutes on Spanish society, it is somewhat surprising to note that only 19, or just 2.6 percent of the 728 applicants whose genealogies I studied, were actually rejected. Below the level of the judges who sat on the tribunal, the imperatives of racial purity gave way to political and financial considerations, so that for essentially honorific positions, such as familiar, there was a built-in predisposition to favor paying applicants—especially those who had some local political power in spite of a family background that should have counted heavily against them. The corps of familiares, therefore, provided a channel for the somewhat grudging integration of the conversos into Old Christian society. Even in this very small sample, however, the fundamental anti-Semitism of the tribunal is revealed as thirteen candidates were rejected because of objections to their Judaic background or that of their wives, but only one was rejected because of his Moorish descent.

Curiously enough, several of the individuals whose applications were rejected came from families that could boast of one or more members serving the tribunal as familiares. Pedro Fargues, for example, who applied in 1639, was rejected by the tribunal after numerous witnesses had denounced both his and his wife's Jewish ancestry. But, at the same time, testimony revealed that the couple was related to no fewer than four individuals who had served or were presently serving as familiares, including two from the Muñoz family, one of those denounced by the witnesses.^[55]

In certain eases, the failure of a particular individual to obtain a familiatura should be seen as an isolated misfortune, interrupting but not preventing the process of assimilation. The rejection of Felipe Gaspar Capero of Traiguera in 1603 was one such ease, all the more peculiar because his father, Luis, had been a familiar. Gaspar's failure, which can be attributed to the previous removal of his wife's uncle from the corps and to the fact that there were already enough familiares in the town, did not prevent the family from entering the Inquisition as familiares, calificadores, and notaries during the last decades of the seventeenth century:^[56]

Finally, a comparison of the social composition of our sample of rejected candidates with the social composition of the familiatura as

a whole indicates once again the justice of the charges made by critics of the purity of blood investigations. If the overwhelming majority of familiares in Valencia's district came from the plebeian ranks of the peasantry, presumably less contaminated with Jewish blood than the residents of towns and the upper classes, labradores were underrepresented in the ranks of the rejected, which included such notables as the ciutada Luis Alexandre and Antonio de Cardona, a noble relative of the admirals of Aragon, the Borjas, and other distinguished Valencian families.^[57]

Certainly, as far as their marital status was concerned, Valencia's familiares largely conformed to the ideal set forth in the qualifications for admission. Out of the 709 successful applicants in my sample, 615, or 86.7 percent, were married at the time of application, while 10 others were widowers. Moreover, of the 32 bachelors, fully 23 were called "youths" or "minore" in the text of their genealogy, and, with one exception, they were all under 25 years of age. Of course, in these cases, it was virtually certain that most, if not all, of these young bachelors would marry since the social and religious pressure in favor of marriage was so strong. Indeed, even widowers felt obliged to remarry, sometimes with almost indecent haste after the death of their first wife. When Miguel Corachan applied to enter the corps on February 23, 1639, he was married to Madalena Voltes, but less than a year after his title was conferred, his wife died, and he had requested permission from the tribunal to remarry, this time to Esperanza Pujades, a widow whose brother, Miguel Pujades, was a familiar in Campanar.^[58]

The fact that the overwhelming majority of Valencia's familiares were married men or were expected to marry within a relatively short time after they joined the corps meant that Valencia's familiares were in substantial conformity with the ideal as set forth in the regulations for admission. The middle-aged man who had never been married or the widower who preferred to remain single so as to carry on freer, less inhibited sexual activity became an object of suspicion and distrust who could even find himself harassed by the local alcaldes if his behavior came to public notice. Confirmed bachelors were rare indeed among Valencia's familiares, but some were clearly acceptable regardless of the prevailing social prejudice. José Juan de Centelles, Marquis of Centelles, was one of these. When the marquis applied for a license in 1699, at the age of

42, the Inquisitor-General was only too happy to dispense with the marital requirement, and in less than three months he was admitted to the corps, in spite of the fact that one of his ancestors had been executed as a Protestant heretic.^[59]

In the matter of the age of those accepted into the corps, the Valencia tribunal achieved substantial if not entire compliance with the twenty-five-year rule, with only twenty-two successful applicants under 25 years of age. But, with an average age of 37, the corps of familiares was relatively youthful; fully 62.5 percent of the sample was aged 40 or younger, and only 8.7 percent was between 51 and 60.

Of course, there were exceptions. Twelve applicants out of the sample of 216 were 20 and younger, with the youngest, Agustín Fabregat, only 17 when he was accepted into the corps in 1740.^[60] But the Valencian inquisitors had definite reasons for wanting to bend the rules to admit these young men. In some eases, like that of Fabregat, the tribunal wished to reclaim the support of a family whose service had taken place in the distant past.^[61] Confronted by an eager youngster who declared that he wanted to "imitate my ancestors," the tribunal could hardly have refused to consider him. In return, Fabregat demonstrated his gratitude by long and faithful service and even married his daughter, Francisca, to Vicente Perciva, another of the familiares of the town.^[62]

The ease of Dr. Félix Breva illustrates the tribunal's desire to maintain its connections to families with strong and recent ties to the tribunal. Breva's paternal grandfather, Jaime, had served the tribunal as a familiar in the 1630s and 1640s, while his cousin, Luis Breva, had served as inquisitorial notary in Castellón de la Plana since 1682.^[63] Later, when Breva went on to become abogado de presos of the Holy Office, two other members of the family, Bautista and Vicente Breva, joined the ranks of Castellón's familiares.^[64]

In spite of the fact that both Fabregat and Breva were underaged when appointed to the tribunal, it is difficult to criticize their appointments. They, along with the other underaged candidates, met, and even exceeded, all the other formal requirements, and they and their families were very much the sort of people the tribunal wished to recruit and retain.

Valencia's corps of familiares was almost completely in compliance with the requirement that applicants be natives of Spain. In

fact, the corps was not only overwhelmingly Spanish but Valencian, with only eleven individuals identified as being born outside the kingdom and, of these, only six outside Spain. Moreover, several of the Spanish applicants born outside Valencia came of families with long traditions of service to the Holy Office in their home province. One of these men was Juan Diego Aztira, who was born in Zaragoza. In a note attached to his application, Aztira boasted that he was following the footsteps of "many of his relatives and ancestors who have served as officials and familiares." On his father's side, he was distantly related to Dr. Domingo de Aztira, a canon of Zaragoza's cathedral and a former inquisitor, while his uncle, Juan Calvo, had been a familiar in his native village.^[65]

Given the generally paranoid atmosphere that gripped Spanish ruling circles during much of the sixteenth century and the fact that most of the Protestant sympathizers arrested in Spain after 1560 were Frenchmen, it is not surprising that the tribunal admitted few foreigners to the corps. In 1575, as if to underscore the importance of caution in this respect, the Suprema even issued a carta acordada requiring that no one of foreign birth should be given a title without express permission from the inquisitor-general and that the tribunals were to send a list of those foreigners already serving as familiares.^[66]

Certain individuals of foreign birth made excellent candidates, however, and it would have been foolish and counterproductive not to admit them. Once again, quality and not mechanical compliance with the formal regulations was the norm. Applicants like the prosperous Milanese-born merchant Marco Antonio Muceffi, who had lived in Valencia city for twenty-eight years, or Juan Abadia, who was born in Verdetes (Beaune) and whose Valencian wife Mariana Mulet came of a family with a long tradition of service to the Holy Office, were already so well integrated that no suspicion could attach to them in spite of their foreign birth.^[67]

A recent analysis of the social composition of the familiares of Córdoba during the mid-sixteenth century indicates that it was dominated largely by artisans in the leatherworking and textile trades.^[68] What is known about the social structure of Valencia's familiares for the same period seems to confirm the existence of a large number of artisans within the corps. Of the 1,219 familiares serving in 1567 whose occupations are known to us, 31 percent

were artisans (mainly tailors and textile workers), while only 5.6 percent came from lesser nobility and 4.4 percent from the ranks of the ciutadans. In Valencia city, the predominance of the artisans was even more pronounced, with 46 percent coming from their ranks.^[69]

A very different picture, however, is revealed by my sample of 533 familiares drawn from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here, the percentage of artisans falls to only 2.4 percent, the second lowest of any of the major status/occupation categories. The decline was even more telling in the city of Valencia. My survey of several lists of familiares furnished the viceroy between 1623 and 1628 indicates that of the 186 for whom status/occupation data is available, only 17 individuals (7.5%) can be classed as artisans.

The large number of artisans among Valencia's familiares in the mid-sixteenth century is all the more surprising in light of the massive participation of that group in the Germanía movement of 1519-1521.^[70] Given Charles V's general policy of attempting to pacify and coopt the urban classes that fought the crown during the Comunero Revolution in Castile, however, it is tempting to view the social composition of Valencia's mid-sixteenth-century familiares in the same light.^[71] By enlisting large numbers of urban artisans in an honorable corporation where they served alongside their social superiors to defend a loyal Catholic Valencia, the Inquisition was providing the government with a way of moderating the social tensions that led to a bloody civil war and imperiled royal authority. This interpretation seems even more convincing when we add to it the fact that at the Cortes of 1528-29, Charles made a deliberate effort to appeal to the disaffected popular masses by accepting a series of proposals that reflected certain of the long-standing complaints of the popular classes of the towns. In Castile, as I have already noted elsewhere, Charles followed a similar policy at the Cortes of 1523, where he attempted to deal with some of the most important proposals for reform that were voiced by rebel leaders during the Comunero Revolution.^[72]

The process that would result in considerably reducing the number of artisans in the corps of familiares began as earl), as the 1550s when changes in the structure of Valencia's textile industry led to the elimination or impoverishment of many small master artisans: this resulted in a market for familiaturas in which certain poor artisans

who held them made them available to wealthy merchants and entrepreneurs. This process appears to have operated through a series of intermediaries who were in touch with familiares who wished to sell and merchants and other wealthy individuals who wished to purchase titles. Testimony taken during the visitation of 1566, for example, reveals that several individuals, including a tavern-keeper and a familiar, received fees for arranging the transfer of titles. In one instance, Juan Bautista Miniu, a wealthy merchant, is reported to have purchased a title from one Armengol, a velvet worker who is described as "old and poor." In another ease, Gabriel Gimeno, a dyer, called "hombre necesitado" by one witness, sold his title to another merchant, Antonio Misines. Both of these deals were accomplished through the good offices of one Alejo Botero, a familiar who received a substantial fee for his services.^[73]

The exclusion of artisans from Valencia's corps of familiares, therefore, was well under way long before the Suprema made it official policy by issuing its carta acordada of May 9, 1602, which introduced the requirement of "purity of office" and barred most artisans from admission.^[74] In spite of this ordinance, small numbers of artisans did apply and were accepted into the corps during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the apologetic tone adopted in certain instances by the applicants and their supporters indicates an awareness that their applications were unlikely to be received favorably. Vicente Beltrán, who incautiously listed himself as a locksmith/labrador on his application, hastened to write the tribunal again to declare that he only practiced the locksmith's trade "for his own amusement and not because it is his profession."^[75] In 1643, when Jaime Esteve, a pottery maker, applied to the corps from Traiguera, Dr. Felicio Pellicer, the local inquisitorial notary, wrote on his behalf to point out that in Traiguera potters were no ordinary artisans and that they had even been elected to the town council.^[76]

Having established itself in the kingdom despite opposition from the local elite, the Inquisition was perfectly situated to play a social role that would allow it to make the corps of familiares into a bridge between royal government and the popular masses of the towns. Three well-attended autos de fé were held during the Germanías, and after the war, the tribunal did not hesitate to appoint Bernardino Arviso, a prominent former agermanado, lieu-

tenant alcalde, much to the disgust of the cavaliers and ciutadans in Valencia city.^[77]

By the 1560s, however, the radical, popular phase of the tribunal's activity was at an end. Sustained persecution of the converted Jews had given way to occasional trials, and the tribunal was acquiring its own fixed sources of income, thereby converting itself into just another one of Spain's conservative ecclesiastical/bureaucratic corporations. No longer living precariously on the money from confiscations but dependent on income from censals and tithes like Valencia's elite of nobles and rentiers, the tribunal could no longer afford to identify itself with a class that had once threatened to overturn the established order. After the visitation of 1528, Bernardino de Arviso was removed, and during the 1560s and 1570s, Valencia's inquisitors watched complacently as licenses were transferred from poor artisans to wealthy merchants even if some of them had Jewish blood. By the turn of the century, when the Suprema issued its ukase instituting "purity of office" as a new requirement for admission, the process by which the familiatura was transformed into a monied elite was largely complete, and the corps was taking on the shape that it was to retain for the next two centuries. In the larger towns, it was recruited from a wealthy and conservative rentier class of cavaliers and ciutadans solidly entrenched in local politics through the system of insaculació, while in the villages, the familiatura rested firmly on wealthy peasants, the "coqs du village" who dominated village affairs.

Indeed, it may be argued that by forcing the tribunal to perform formal genealogical investigations after the visitation of 1567, the Suprema accelerated the process that was making wealth the sole universal prerequisite for admission to the corps. Genealogical investigations were expensive. The average cost of the investigations in the 206 cases where information is available amounted to 775 reales, or 51.6 Valencian pounds (lliures), in an age when the lower third of the peasantry earned less than 20 lliures per year from the agricultural sector.^[78] In fact, many of these investigations were far more expensive, with forty-five (21.8%) costing over 1,000 reales, ten over 2,000 reales, and one a total of 3,306 reales, or 220 lliures, which was more than eleven times the income of a poor peasant in the early eighteenth century.

The wealth barrier became even more difficult to surmount

when, in 1600, the Suprema insisted on substantial sums, usually fixed at 300 reales, that had to be deposited before the investigation could begin.^[79] Actually, in ninety-five eases, witnesses even went out of their way to comment approvingly about an applicant's wealth or ability to live off his rents. Given the sharp reduction in the demand for manufactured goods after 1609 and the consequent high unemployment rate among artisans, the cost of the genealogical investigation alone would have been enough to reduce their numbers if social prejudice had not already done so.

Paradoxically enough, the aristocratization of the corps of familiares gained momentum during the late sixteenth century precisely at a time when the Suprema, under heavy pressure from the crown and the Council of Aragon, had agreed to the Concordia of 1568 that specifically excluded caballeros and barons. The goal that was sought by the Council of Aragon as well as by Viceroy Herrera and the delegates to the Cortes of Monzón was to prevent the privileges and special jurisdiction that were granted to familiares from becoming a shield behind which powerful men could defy royal justice. For its part, the tribunal was determined to avoid carrying out this part of the Concordia, because, in an increasingly status-conscious society, the fact that it could no longer enroll the nobility would greatly undermine its prestige. In this effort, it found that it could count on support from the Suprema, which had only agreed to the Concordia under duress and with grave reservations.

The Suprema began by intervening directly with the viceroy and the regent of the Audiencia to reach a compromise by which the tribunal would be allowed to appoint caballeros who were lords of vassals but not titleholders.^[80] Accepting even this, however, would have meant that the tribunal would have been cut off from recruiting among Valencia's most influential gentry families. To circumvent this agreement, the tribunal adopted the practice of enrolling the eldest son of titleholders as familiares, with the assurance that these men would eventually inherit their father's title and with the convietion that they would not actually be forced later to renounce their membership in the corps.^[81] The most that the Suprema was prepared to do was to make a tactical retreat by ordering the tribunal not to take cognizance of the civil and criminal cases of the count of Buñol, a familiar since 1587. But, as he reminded the tribunal in 1607, his license had never been removed and he re-

mained a familiar in good standing.^[82] In fact, as it admitted in 1660, the tribunal had ignored this provision of the Concordia since it could not do without the political support of powerful nobles with votes and influence in the Cortes.^[83]

Use of these expedients permitted the tribunal to enroll a respectable number of nobles. Of the 533 men whose occupation/status is listed in their genealogies, 34, or 6.3%, were noble. But most of these men were clearly not drawn from the very top ranks of the Valencian aristocracy. The one exception was the marquis of Centelles, who obtained his license in 1699.^[84] At best, the tribunal could expect to enlist certain members of the twenty or so intermediate families who held a lesser title, lived in the kingdom (frequently in Valencia city), and sought a title to enhance their social prestige or to give them added protection from the royal courts. Guillén Carroz y de Artes, who applied in 1639, came of just such a family. His father, Francisco Carroz, was count of Cirat and a holder of one of the thirteen encomiendas of the Order of Montesa. His mother, Teodora Artes de Albanell, was linked to the gentry through her second cousin, Gaspar Artes, who was a familiar and lord of the village of Almàssera, while her brother was a member of the Order of Santiago.^[85] Another good example of this group is José Boil, whose father was the marquis of Boil and whose mother, María Figuerola, was related to the former inquisitor of Valencia, Dr. Honorato Figuerola.^[86] In certain instances, these men could demonstrate such singular devotion to the Holy Office that membership in the corps of familiares must have meant more to them than the privileges or exemptions that it could provide. The count of Buñol was one of these, and, in a letter begging the tribunal to take cognizance of a particularly delicate civil suit in which he had become involved, he declared that "next to salvation, what he most wanted in this life was the opportunity to employ his person, life and treasure in the service of the Holy Office." That this was not mere rhetoric is indicated by a cover letter written by Valencia's inquisitors when they sent the count's request on to the Suprema. In their letter, the inquisitors attested to the fact that the count had always served the tribunal with "great willingness" and had frequently held one of the ropes attached to the standard that was borne before the inquisitors when they marched in religious processions.^[87]

Of course, many of the caballeros who became members of the

corps during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries belonged to the 129 or so gentry families who held one or two villages and had a relatively modest income from feudal dues which they supplemented with rent from land and houses that they owned.^[88] Typical of this group was Carlos de Calatayud, who was lord of the village of Agres with its 200 families.^[89]

A far larger number of caballeros were not even lords of vassals but simply held the title of caballeros and derived their income entirely from rent. These were really almost indistinguishable from the citizen rentiers (ciutadans) who were just below them in the social scale. Their presence among Valencia's petty nobility must be accounted for by the fact that in the 1630s it became possible to purchase the status of cavaller for between 250 and 700 lliures, well within the range of the wealthiest 20 percent of Valencia's property-owning class.^[90] Typically, these men would also belong to the restricted political elite of the larger towns, which, through the insaculació system, had become virtually self-perpetuating. The insaculats comprised the group of citizens who were eligible to hold municipal offices and were selected for life by their fellows among the officeholding class.^[91]

One family that almost perfectly illustrates the combination of rentier and politician so characteristic of the majority of the cavalier families in our sample is the Barberán of Onteniente. Gaspar Barberán and his son Gaspar Jerónimo served together as familiares, the first receiving his title in 1585 and the second in 1629, while Gaspar's nephew José obtained his title in 1632. None of the Barberáns were fiefholders, but Gaspar Jerónimo was reckoned as having more than 12,000 ducats in property. At the same time, they were active in local politics; Gaspar served as justicia of the town at the time of his application, and his nephew was insaculat and had served as justicia and jurat on several occasions. In addition to obtaining titles as familiares, the family was tied in with the Inquisition in other ways. Onofre Barberán, the comisario who served in Onteniente at the time of Gaspar Jerónimo's genealogical investigation, was a relative; Gaspar Barberán's aunt was first cousin to Dr. Miguel Jerónimo Blaseo, canon and dean of the cathedral chapter of Valencia and inquisitor of Barcelona.^[92]

Rentiers or small fiefholders, politicians and urban dwellers, the petty nobles who entered the ranks of Valencia's familiares repre-

sented a very different group from those responsible for the "aristocratization" of the corps in Galicia studied by Contreras.^[93] Rather than a sturdy feudal class residing on their estates, Valencia's noble familiares formed part of the burgeoning rentier class that took over more and more of the kingdom's wealth after the expulsion of the Moriscos.

Far more representative of this growing rentier class, however, were the ciutadans. Urban based, tied closely to municipal government through the system of insaculació, this group accounted for 24.7 percent of the familiares for whom occupation/status information is available.

Some of these men were very clearly the sons of peasants who had made good and had used their wealth and local political power to propel themselves into the lower ranks of the petty nobility. Bautista Badía, from the village of Sueca, listed himself proudly as a ciutadà on his application but was the descendant of labradores from Sueca and nearby Cullera on both sides of the family.^[94] Joaquín Albuixech, who applied from Almusafes in 1762, studiously avoided any reference to his family's social standing in his application, but a letter by the tribunal's special commissioner, Dr. Juan Zapata, reveals that they were wealthy peasants who now had sufficient income so that they no longer needed to cultivate their own land. Apparently, the family had quite a stranglehold on the familiatura in this village of two hundred families, since Joaquín's father and his two grandfathers were all familiares, as were his cousin and several other relatives.^[95] At the other extreme were certain individuals who could have fitted easily into the ranks of the cavaliers. José Bonet, whose father was lord of the tiny village of Palau, was one of these, and his presence among the ciutadans illustrates the difficulties of making hard and fast distinctions between ciutadans and cavaliers.^[96]

It is particularly interesting to chart the evolution of the Carbonell family from the important silk-harvesting town of Alcoy since their connection with the Holy Office was maintained throughout their rise to greater social prominence. Ginés Carbonell, the first applicant from the family, was a humble labrador whose application was approved around 1595.^[97] By the time his grandson Roque's application was approved in 1631, the family had already achieved ciutadan status. In his application, Roque referred proudly to "the services

that his ancestors had rendered to the Holy Office" as his chief reason for applying. His wife, Inés Mayor, came of another family with strong traditions of service on both sides of her family.^[98]

In the case of the Feliu family of Benisa and nearby Teulada, the tribunal not only recruited a ciutadan family of exceptional loyalty but also of growing local political importance. By the mid-seventeenth century, when cousins Juan and Miguel Feliu gained entry to the corps, the family had already gained ciutadan status and become very wealthy, with Juan's holdings estimated at more than 9,000 ducats. His cousin, who mentioned the services of his father and grandfather, was related directly or by marriage to no less than thirteen familiares.^[99] By the mid-eighteenth century, when Pedro Feliu and his son José applied for entry, the family had attained significant political power, having served as alcaldes, regidores, and governors of both Teulada and Benisa.^[100]

The rise of the petty nobility and distinguished citizens in the Valencia of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries exactly parallels their increasing presence in the corps of familiares, where the tribunal was only too happy to welcome them. But the cavaliers and ciutadans who entered the corps, like their counterparts outside it, could hardly be called wealthy. Only 400 lliures in rent was necessary for an individual to become eligible for municipal office in Valencia city during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.^[101] The average income of the fourteen nobles and citizens who can be positively identified as familiares or relatives of familiares and who gained insaculó status between 1660 and 1691 was only 582½liures. Even this unimpressive total was inflated by just a few individuals—like Felipe Gregorio Alfonso with his two large and prosperous farms in the huerta—who earned far more than most.^[102] Of the fourteen, eleven earned less than 500 lliures and two just barely made the minimum of 400. Far more typical was the ciutadan and later familiar, Francisco Ferris, who pieced together his barely qualifying 405 lliures out of the rent of two tiny farms in the huerta, a house in the city, and a butcher stall in the municipal meat market.^[103]

Lawyers, notaries, and other professionals constituted the other wing of the nonpeasant sector that had concentrated so much of the kingdom's landed wealth in its hands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.^[104] In my sample of genealogies, fifty-six indi-

viduals comprising 10.5 percent of those with occupation/status information can be classed as professionals, primarily lawyers and notaries but including a number of distinguished and highly paid physicians. A glimpse at the life-style and activities of familiar Bartolomé Molner, a notary from Castellón de la Plana, where a good deal of litigation was carried on, reveals a busy, prosperous individual with many business interests. Active in both the ecclesiastical and secular courts, Molner was popular with clients and was able to obtain a substantial income from fees. In addition, he did an extensive and lucrative wholesale trade in silk and other textiles. Described at the time of his application as an exceptionally vigorous man of fifty, Molner supported a wife and seven children and had two fine horses, two maids, and several hunting dogs. Unfortunately, he also had enemies, and one day in 1610, three of them crushed his head with a stone when he intervened in a struggle between them and his brother.^[105]

Given the increasing importance of lawyers to the life of early modern Spain, incorporating a goodly number of them among the familiares meant, at least in theory, that the tribunal could benefit from their political support. In the always politically difficult city of Teruel, for example, the tribunal enjoyed the firm support of the Ambel family. Jerónimo Ambel was an attorney and a familiar, while his son, Dionisio Ambel, another attorney, had attained ciutadan rank by the time he applied in 1639. Not only did the family connection with the Inquisition go all the way back to the 1560s when Dionisio Ambel's grandfather, Juan, acted as lieutenant receiver to the local inquisitorial subtribunal but he was related to two inquisitors, Jerónimo Gregorio of Barcelona and Francisco Gregorio of Mallorca.^[106]

Merchants, who were so poorly represented among the parents of Valencia's inquisitors, accounted for 11 percent of the successful applicants. Having largely excluded themselves from the highly lucrative international export/import trade, Valencian merchants tended to concentrate on local or regional commerce, on exchange with other parts of Spain, or on tax farming, which appeared to offer greater and more secure profits than any commercial endeavor.

Unfortunately, bankruptcy was all too often the fate of Valencia's merchant-familiares, especially in the difficult years around the turn of the sixteenth century. In 1596, Pedro Romero, Juan Lazaro,

Jerónimo Salvador, and Mateo Salvador, all merchants in Valencia city and all familiares, went bankrupt and registered their property with the Holy Office, which had jurisdiction over the suits filed by their creditors.^[107] It is little wonder, then, that given the protection that the special inquisitorial fuero offered to familiares, so many merchants sought to obtain titles.

It is reassuring that the percentage of familiares who claimed to be simple labradores is almost the same—43 percent among the familiares whose genealogies I analyzed as in the comprehensive survey of 1567. Indeed, there is little reason to believe that the percentage should have fallen, given the Suprema's marked preference for labradores.^[108] Arguably, this preference may be ascribed to the widely held view that peasants were least likely of any social group to have Jewish blood and therefore least likely to contaminate the corps. A far more cogent explanation, however, lies in the sheer economic and political importance of the wealthiest segment of the peasantry—from which our familiares were drawn. With as much right to be called "rentiers" as those with fashionable titles, the wealthy peasants who formed the backbone of the familiatura were frequently ambitious and enterprising men of business.^[109] Agustín Balaguer, for example, whose father and grandfather were both familiares, did a substantial trade in silk from the important Júear Valley town of Carcagente.^[110]

Even more important to the tribunal, however, was the fact that wealthy labradores held the key to political power in many of the villages and towns of an overwhelmingly rural kingdom. In a letter that was written by his parish priest at the time of his application, labrador Francisco Pascual Angles was called "regidor primo," while one of the witnesses in his genealogical investigation testified that he was not only one of the heaviest taxpayers in the town but also that he had charge of apportioning taxes among his fellow citizens.^[111] Carlos Alabart, who applied from the tiny village of Flix in the diocese of Tortosa, came of a family that had long served as bailiffs and regidores and was able to obtain an impressive series of letters from local notables, including the bishop of Tortosa, in support of his candidacy.^[112] One of the most extraordinary examples of the local authority of a labrador was the ease of Luis Barrachina who applied from the tiny mountain village of Villamalur. Coming from a family that had long dominated both Villamalur and neigh-

boring Jérica, Barrachina appeared personally—with a notary in tow—to welcome the tribunal's commissioner. Properly impressed by this visit from the local cacique, Ximénez referred to him respectfully as "his honor" in the letter he wrote to the tribunal relating this incident and proceeded to carry out his investigation by concentrating his interviews on witnesses who were related to the applicant.^[113]

Politically dominant across much of the kingdom and in a good position to benefit from such economic opportunities as presented themselves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Valencia's wealthy peasants formed a steady and vital element among the familiares. In return, they received a position of honor and a certification of "purity of blood," which could help them gain higher social standing. Above all, by entering the corps, they had identified themselves with an institution that appeared as the staunchest defender of traditional Catholic Spain, the Spain that had afforded certain members of the peasantry an opportunity to prosper.

The tendency toward endogamy that was such a marked feature of Mediterranean society during the Old Regime was also quite marked among Valencia's familiares. Information contained in the genealogies of the familiares of Valencia reveals that 348 out of the 709 applicants, or 49 percent, had a relative or family member who had served or was serving the Holy Office. In fact, the connection with the corps of familiares was even closer, with fully 26.6 percent having a close family member in the corps, 33.2 percent having one or more relatives, and only 82 applicants, or 11.5 percent, having anyone from their family serving as an official.

The Suprema left the tribunal in little doubt about its preference for applicants from families that already had served in the corps. Sometimes the mere fact that someone from the family was serving would induce the Suprema to waive some particularly onerous and expensive requirement of the genealogical investigation.^[114] In other cases, the Suprema would intervene directly to recommend someone to fill a vacant post on the grounds that it had been in the family. As a result, certain families had truly impressive traditions of service. José Barberán, the cavalier who applied in 1633 from the town of Onteniente, could boast a total of eleven familiares in his family in addition to a commissioner.^[115] Francisco de Benavent

brought his family's tradition of membership in the corps of familiares with him when he moved to Valencia city from Murcia. When he applied in 1641, he could boast of a total of thirteen familiares and four commissioners who had served or were presently serving the Holy Office in the districts of Murcia and Valencia.^[116]

The tendency toward endogamy already prevalent among Valencia's familiares was further reinforced by marital choices. Familiares themselves would tend to choose women who came from families with traditions of service to the Holy Office. In the ease of Jacinto José Agullo, this choice was made twice as both his first wife, María Cebria, and his second wife, Luisa Aracil, came from families with members serving as familiares, commissioners, and alguaciles.^[117]

The inevitable result of this process of intermarriage was to promote the creation of a network of allied families who might dominate the familiatura of a certain region for several generations. In the village of Benisa, near the Costa Blanca south of Valencia city, matrimonial alliances between two sets of cousins brought together the Feliu and Gavila families, who together were to dominate the local familiatura throughout much of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.^[118] Similarly, the marriage between Tomás de Borja, ciutadan and familiar of Játiva, and Anna Gil, of the nearby village of Canals, linked a family that had enjoyed familiaturas for several generations in that town with the Climent family, which had virtually dominated the corps in Canals through Anna Gil's mother, Anna Climent.^[119]

One of the features of early modern Spanish society which earned the constant opprobrium of theologians, moralists, and reformers was the effort by the more ambitious and capable members of the popular classes to enter the ranks of the privileged orders. Of course, obtaining a license as a familiar was not the same as becoming a petty noble or ciutada, but with the cost of purchasing such status, never less than 250 lliures, it must have seemed like quite a bargain to pay for a genealogical investigation, the cost of which was 51 lliures. Once that investigation had been successfully con-eluded, one had achieved formal recognition of "purity of blood," which was the indispensable quality required for attaining noble rank. Such recognition would greatly assist in obtaining membership in one of Spain's prestigious military orders or in helping one's

son enter a Colegio Mayor. More important, perhaps, in a land where nobility depended on the ability to successfully assert the right to the privileges accorded to those with noble status, the corps of familiares enjoyed privileges less than but not unlike that of the nobility. It could therefore provide a platform from which to successfully assert noble status in one of the innumerable hidalguía lawsuits by which such claims were frequently decided.

Among Valencia's familiares, this process of using membership in the corps to improve social standing becomes evident if we compare the relative rank of fathers and sons, especially for certain social categories. While the percentage of cavaliers does not tend to change very much between the generations, social advancement can be seen in the marked increase in the percentage of ciutadans (11.2% of the fathers as opposed to 24.7% of the sons) and in the dramatic decline of artisans (13.3% to 2.4%) and labradores (49.2% to 43%).

Two of the men whose advancement to the rank of ciutada was clearly bound up with membership in the corps of familiares in-eluded Bautista Badía from the village of Sueca and Francisco Bone of Onteniente. The Badía family's involvement with the corps of familiares began when Bautista's father and uncle, who were both wealthy peasants, entered the corps during the early years of the seventeenth century. By the 1630s, his brother and his first cousin Miguel had joined the corps, while his sister had married another familiar from the village. Finally, in 1653, Bautista himself applied, having previously obtained the title of ciutada.^[120] In the ease of Bone, social advancement was connected not only with his own family's membership in the corps of familiares—both his father and uncle were labradores and familiares—but also with that of his wife, Jesualda Ruescas. Jesualda's father was a merchant, and her maternal grandmother was related to several familiares. In addition, her brother, Melchor Çapata, acted as alcalde of the Valencia tribunal during the visitation of 1566.^[121]

Apart from the desire to gain social prestige, which was perhaps best expressed by a peasant from Traiguera who declared that he had applied to the corps to "embellish his person and house with the honorable title of minister of the Holy Office," there were several other personal motives that inspired men to seek the of-flee.^[122] The desire to demonstrate a fervent Roman Catholicism was

certainly the motive for many who joined the corps in the sixteenth century. Even as late as 1747, a letter concerning Agustín Barrachina, a wealthy peasant from the huerta, attested to his piety and devotion to the church.^[123] In many other eases, an application to the corps was simply the result of family tradition. In a society where the family was of overriding importance, and where so many young people were named after their fathers or uncles, we should not be surprised to find many applicants simply declaring that they wanted to "carry on the services rendered by my ancestors."^[124]

But, there were other, more tangible advantages to membership in the corps. One of the most important and jealously guarded of the privileges enjoyed by familiares was an exemption from the obligation to quarter the king's soldiers. Although the Kingdom of Valencia was not the scene of major military activities until the War of Succession, and then only briefly, troops did move through the kingdom on their way to Catalonia or occasionally on bandit-hunting expeditions so that the privilege of exemption from quartering was a significant one. Moreover, the very fact that the kingdom was not a theater of war meant that there was less direct pressure from viceroys and quartermasters on the exemption. The privilege, therefore, was much easier to maintain than in a place like Galicia, for example, where the poverty of the region and the exigencies of war forced the crown to suspend it on more than one occasion.^[125]

Even so, maintaining the familiares' blanket exemption from quartering was far from easy, especially as most of them were commoners and not normally exempt. A letter to the Suprema, written to obtain its support against the Count of Aytona's attempt to billet troops in familiares' homes in 1583, reveals that both the tribunal and the Suprema had intervened strenuously before Viceroy Vespasiano Gonzaga to prevent him from violating the exemption in the 1570s.^[126] Vigilance and a willingness to react quickly when the privilege seemed threatened, however, meant that the exemption privilege was maintained virtually intact through much of the Old Regime.^[127]

Less easy to maintain, especially in the critical years of the mid-seventeenth century, was a blanket exemption from military service. The fact that a specific article had to be inserted in the Concordia of 1568 prohibiting the inquisitors from defending familiares who refused to serve their turn guarding the coasts demonstrates

that they had been able to lay claim to at least a partial exemption. But by the late 1630s, with the French invasion of Catalonia, Valencia was suddenly thrust closer to the front. As a result, the familiares' military exemptions were suspended, and they were told to be ready for military service whenever called on by the viceroy.^[128] During the Catalan Revolt, moreover, when the count of Albalat was put in charge of recruiting soldiers from Valencia, even familiares who were awaiting trial on criminal charges were given inducements to serve.^[129]

In the Concordia of 1568, inquisitors were specifically prohibited from attempting to secure tax exemptions for familiares, who were to pay their taxes like any ordinary pechero.^[130] In spite of this prohibition, the tribunal and the Suprema were prepared to struggle to protect familiares from the increasing weight of fiscal obligations that bore down on all citizens of the monarchy during the seventeenth century.^[131] Given the extent of the financial exigencies facing the monarchy, such efforts could have but limited success. All unsalaried officials, for example, had to pay the new tax on wine that was imposed to fund the donativo general of 1626.^[132] In 1639, the Suprema thought it had won a significant victory when it was able to persuade the king to exclude unsalaried officials from the massive forced loan of that year; but pressure on a local level, from corregidores and other officials responsible for raising the money, forced their inclusion.^[133] All officials, including inquisitors, were also forced to pay the media anata, a tax of one-half year's salary paid on appointment to office. For familiares and others who collected no salaries, the media anata became an additional fee paid when they received their office.^[134] In 1646, however, Philip IV did grant the familiares a small but significant concession by exempting from all special war-related contributions the oldest familiar in each village, the two oldest in towns over 1,000 families, and the four oldest in places over 2,000 families.^[135]

Once an individual was accepted into the corps of familiares, the Inquisition exercised jurisdiction over him and would try any civil or criminal offenses he had been accused of. Special statutes that granted certain groups exemption from ordinary royal courts and the right to be tried by judges belonging to that same corporation were an important feature of early modern Spain. The Council of War exercised jurisdiction over cases involving soldiers, ecclesias-

tics were protected by the ecclesiastical statute, and the Council of the Military Orders was given the right to try criminal cases involving knights in the first instance.^[136] Even Valencia's own military order of Montesa maintained its own jail and tried criminal offenses committed by the knights.^[137]

Placed within the context of the patchwork of statutes comprising the Spanish legal system, the inquisitorial fuero could hardly be described as unusual. And the actual degree of advantage conferred by being subject to inquisitorial rather than royal jurisdiction would depend on the exigencies of the moment and the degree of competition between the two legal systems. Certainly, as far as familiares living on seigneurial estates was concerned, the fuero could provide them with a precious measure of protection from the arbitrary and abusive behavior of their lords.^[138] Indeed, at least in some instances, use of the fuero may have worked to eliminate or reduce already existing social inequalities, thereby creating the basis for a measure of greater social justice. In one instance, Bartolomé de Oviedo, a candlemaker and familiar in Valencia city, went to the home of cavaller Jaime Boca to collect for some wax that Boca had purchased. This was not the first time that Oviedo had come to collect, and almost as soon as the servant had shown him into the house, Boca began to shout at him, calling him a "Jew," "swindler," and "dirty pig." Then, before Oviedo could say anything, Boca picked up the chair he had been sitting on and hurled it at Oviedo, injuring him slightly in the arm. In the criminal case that resulted, the tribunal's decision was favorable to Oviedo, and Boca was forced to pay his debt and sentenced to two months' exile from the city.^[139]

In the case of Oviedo vs Roca , the social distance between an artisan and a petty noble had been narrowed substantially by the fact that the former was a familiar and could appeal successfully to his own jurisdiction to protect his rights. But the fuero could not be used in such a way as to overtly challenge existing social hierarchies, no matter how just the cause. In 1583, Francisco Sanz was a knight of the Order of Montesa and a commander of Benicarló, but he was also a gangster whose band of armed thugs terrorized the village and the surrounding area. Some of these men were captured and imprisoned by local citizens under the leadership of Pedro Pellicer, a familiar and village councillor. Sanz came to the

village and demanded their immediate release, and, when Pellicer refused, he arranged for a high official of the order to come out from Montesa to brow-beat the villagers. When even this failed and three hundred villagers turned out with their arms to drive the official from the village, Sanz decided to appeal to the Holy Office. Denouncing Pellicer as a rebel, Sanz demanded that the tribunal punish him for persuading the villagers that he could "free them" from the legitimate authority of the order. Memories of the Germanía made any rural uprising, no matter how justified, the terror of Valencia's governing authorities, so the tribunal moved quickly, stripping Pellicer of his title and sentencing him to six years of exile from the village and a 50-ducat fine.^[140]

One of the charges most often levied at the Valencia tribunal by viceroys and Audiencia judges alike was that it exercised its criminal jurisdiction in such a way as to shield familiares who had committed crimes from the rigors of royal justice.^[141] Even though the source of this view should have invited a certain skepticism, it has been routinely endorsed by modern scholars. Lea, for example, when referring to the Concordia of 1568, which limited the use of the criminal fuero, implies that it was a dead letter as far as the tribunal was concerned, as "the tribunal was not accustomed to be bound by law."^[142]

Lea's most glaring error of interpretation has to do with the Suprema's reply to a consulta sent to Philip IV by the Council of Aragon after the murder of Martin Sentis by four familiares in 1632. This consulta incorporated a memorial by the viceroy, the marquis de los Vélez, which repeats many of the traditional charges levied by the enemies of the criminal fuero. Peace and security were impossible to secure because inquisitors never punished familiares harshly enough to deter them from committing crimes. As a result, familiares were the leaders of the criminal gangs that plagued the kingdom, and there was no major crime in which they were not involved.^[143] In replying to these charges, the Suprema first ordered the tribunal to work up statistics on the relative severity of the sentences handed down by the criminal chamber of the Audiencia so as to specifically compare the way in which the tribunal dealt with familiares who were guilty of criminal offenses and the way in which the Audiencia dealt with their accomplices. The Suprema then replied formally to the council's memorial denying the charges of exces-

sive leniency and accusing the representatives of royal justice of manifest hostility to familiares. Determined as always to demonstrate the Inquisition's stubborn refusal to accept any limit on its authority, Lea informs us that the statistics gathered by the tribunal "were unsatisfactory" because they were not referred to in the Suprema's reply and that the reply itself was little more than a "passionate outburst, precluding all hope of amendment."^[144] But any attempt to assess the relative leniency of the Inquisition in criminal cases involving its familiares must be placed within the context of the operations of the Spanish and Valencian criminal court system. Once this is done, the Suprema's reply and the figures that the tribunal developed for it appear to demonstrate not that the Inquisition was aberrant or unusual for a criminal court of the period but that its procedures and sentencing were, if anything, typical of Spanish criminal justice as a whole.

As the trials and spectacular public executions of bandits and criminals indicate, Valencian criminal justice could be extremely harsh. The marquis of Castelrodrigo (viceroy, 1690-1696), for example, had the executions of several important bandit leaders to his credit.^[145] However, as diarist Ignacio Benavent lamented, "pardoning thieves is nothing new in Valencia."^[146] Hampered by the constitutional privileges of the kingdom and by the lack of effective police forces, many viceroys found it more expedient to induce bandits to leave, by offering them a pardon in return for a period of military service abroad, than to attempt to hunt them down.^[147] In a survey that they carried out on the Suprema's orders, Valencia's inquisitors found that the marquis de los Vélez, the very man who had been complaining so bitterly about the tribunal's excessive leniency, had recently issued twenty-seven pardons for all classes of offenders.^[148] The death penalty, which was almost automatically decreed whenever a serious crime had been committed and the offender had fled, was not actually imposed very often. Between January and December 1679, the Audiencia condemned forty-three persons to death, but not one execution actually took place.^[149]

As far as any comparison between the Audiencia and the tribunal is concerned, the strong competition for judicial business that characterized the Spanish court system would have made it difficult for one court to be noticeably harsher than another where jurisdictions

overlapped. During the seventeenth century, the decline in the number of litigants and the increasing demands on official salaries (media anata, forced loans) sharpened this competition and made both tribunals eager to profit from criminal cases by reducing corporal punishment or imprisonment in favor of fines. The tribunal's increasing dependence on the income from fines in criminal cases is graphically revealed in its reply to one of the many demands for war contributions that were relayed to it by the Suprema. After deploring the fact that some officials were several months behind in their salaries, the inquisitors pointed out that the only way they were able to maintain the financial health of the tribunal was through fines from criminal cases. In the case of this most recent demand—the salaries of four soldiers serving six years—the tribunal declared that the money would only be forthcoming if the Suprema interceded with the king to resolve favorably several jurisdictional disputes in potentially lucrative criminal cases involving familiares.^[150]

The military and financial crisis of the seventeenth century also made for delayed salary payments and fiscal difficulties at the top levels of the Spanish administration. In its search for additional revenues, the Suprema made quite a lucrative business out of selling reductions in sentences. The case of Jerónimo Torrelles, who was convicted of attempted murder in 1632, illustrates the way in which both the tribunal and the Suprema were able to profit from a single criminal prosecution. In 1633, after he had been imprisoned for thirteen months, the tribunal sentenced Torrelles to four years exile and a 200-ducat fine. A few months later, on application of Torrelles's attorney, the Suprema agreed to lift his exile in return for a consideration of 50 ducats.^[151]

Since, the financial pressures on the Bailía General, which paid a large percentage of the salaries of Audiencia judges, were also increasing, the Audiencia also tended to reduce or eliminate corporal punishments in favor of monetary fines. The tribunal was able to turn up several interesting examples of this in its survey of the sentences the Audiencia handed down when it tried the accomplices of familiares whom the tribunal had convicted of murder. Antonio Caballer, who was deeply implicated in the murder of Martin Sentis, was tried by the Audiencia and fined 500 ducats. Caballer's accomplice, familiar Jaime Blau, meanwhile, was tried

by the tribunal and sentenced to both a prison term and a fine. Agustín Vidal was sentenced to two years' imprisonment by the Holy Office, but his three accomplices were only given a 70-lliures fine by the Audiencia.

The ease of Jerónimo Pitart is a perfect example of the way the representatives of royal justice were willing to trade corporal punishments for heavier monetary fines at the very time they were denouncing the tribunal for excessive leniency in criminal prosecutions. Arrested in 1629 for his complicity in a murder, Pitart was first sentenced to a substantial term in the galleys and a 500-lliures fine. The Audiencia then revoked the galley sentence on appeal, and the viceroy subsequently pardoned Pitart altogether after increasing his fine to 500 ducats.^[152]

If competition in the judicial marketplace and the financial difficulties experienced by the entire court system tended to place limits on the severity of judgments in criminal eases, the interest taken in criminal matters by high royal officials worked to prevent the tribunal from being excessively lenient. The struggle between Audiencia and tribunal most often expressed itself in the ubiquitous jurisdictional disputes (competencias) in which the failure of the senior inquisitor and the regent of the Audiencia to agree as to which tribunal should have jurisdiction over a particular ease would mean that each would send their version to their respective royal councils. Final decisions would then be made by the king after consultation with councillor representatives. As decisions were taken at the very highest level, they were the subject of intense lobbying. If the tribunal came to be perceived as being excessively lenient, thereby imperiling the maintenance of public order in the kingdom, its entire jurisdiction over familiares would have been in jeopardy. It was this struggle for influence at a higher level that led the marquis de los Vélez to write and send his 1632 memorial to the Council of Aragon, which was then involved in numerous jurisdictional disputes with the Suprema over Valencian familiares.

The impact of this competitive atmosphere on limiting the tribunal's options can be seen quite clearly in the ease of Vicente St. German. St. German, a cavaller and familiar in Valencia city, was tried and found guilty of murdering Pedro Jaime and, having fled, was sentenced to death by the Audiencia. Then, after negotiating with the tribunal, which was doubtless eager to have the "business"

of such a wealthy criminal, St. German surrendered himself and was placed in the familiares' prison, after having been promised that he would be given only a moderate sentence of three years service in the presidio of Oran.^[153]

During the course of his trial, St. German's attorney wrote to the Suprema on his client's behalf asking that he be released on bail. The Suprema then wrote to the tribunal asking for its opinion about this request. In its reply we catch a glimpse of the pressures the tribunal was operating under. Advising the Suprema that it would be best to refuse the request, the tribunal noted the "extreme interest with which the viceroy and the Audiencia are following this ease because of their resentment over losing the jurisdictional dispute to the Holy Office." If they saw him let out on bail, the tribunal went on, they would very likely conclude that the "sentence against him would not be carried out and we believe that they would draw up complaints against this tribunal and our mode of procedure."^[154] The Audiencia's extreme watchfulness, the possibility that a lenient sentence might provoke a complaint to the crown and weaken the Inquisition's ease in future jurisdictional disputes, and greed on the part of both the Suprema and the tribunal all combined to dictate a final sentence far severer than the one St. German was promised when he surrendered. Instead of three years in the presidio of Oran, the tribunal sentenced him to eight years exile from the kingdom, the first six of which were to be served in the presidio of El Peñol, and a 200-lliures fine. Even St. German's appeal to the Suprema misfired since that body sentenced him to ten years forced service in Oran and increased his fine to 300 lliures.^[155] Evidently, this sentence was considered at least as severe as any that would have been handed down by the Audiencia in similar eases as it was chosen by the tribunal to substantiate the Suprema's claim, in its response to the Council of Aragon's memorial, that promises of leniency given to familiares so as to induce them to choose the fuero were not always carried out.^[156]

One of the most complicated and difficult tasks that the historian faces in discussing the familiares is to evaluate their role in the repression of heterodoxy. We have Lea's dictum that familiares were an obedient army of servants eager to carry out arrests on their own initiative and willing to act as "spies upon their neigh-

bors."^[157] More recently, Henry Kamen has challenged this view, denouncing the "exaggerated representation of familiares as a species of secret police" and pointing out that "the majority of denunciations ... were made by ordinary people."^[158] In fact, at least in the Valencia district, the familiar's role in the system of repression appears more complex than it is depicted in either of these interpretations. Spy and arresting officer the familiar certainly was, but more significantly, he could also act as a conduit for vital information that was brought to him because his connection with the Holy Office was known to his neighbors, while the oath that he had sworn and the fact that he was normally a person of some local prominence made him the informant of choice whenever the tribunal needed to find out about local conditions.^[159]

If the familiar's role as spy is defined as active information gathering about a certain person or persons which might lead to their conviction on heresy charges, then we must conclude that this role was only occasional and limited primarily to the relatively closed ethnic and religious minorities (Jews, Moriscos, Protestants) whose activities were not likely to become common knowledge. In 1567, for example, after the tribunal had received a report about the existence of a Protestant cell in Teruel, a familiar was sent ahead of Inquisitor Jerónimo Manrique, who was making a visitation in the region, with orders to insinuate himself into the same group of French artisans whose utterances had formed the basis of the report. Earlier that year, the familiares of Teruel were ordered to gather information about a group of men who were suspected of spreading Protestant propaganda while traveling the region disguised as monks.^[160]

But it was much less common for familiares to actively gather information than it was for them to relay information they had received through their contacts in the community. Thus, in 1603, when Pedro Linares, a familiar of Villajoyosa, came to the tribunal to report Jaime Lucas de Miguel for harboring Morisco renegades, he was merely passing along information he had been given by the village rector.^[161]

In the ease of Juan Sala, familiar of Pego, we can catch a glimpse of the activities of a true intermediary between the Holy Office and the community. As a longtime familiar and wealthy labrador, Sala was so well known to his neighbors that they would come to him

with information about matters that they felt might pertain to the Inquisition. When Marcos Torres, a young laborer who boarded at Elizabeth Sastre's farm, was observed by Elizabeth's son Jaime having sexual relations with a mule, she went to inform Sala of the incident that very morning.^[162] On another occasion, information about an attempt to locate buried treasure by supernatural means was given to Sala by two of the participants in the hope that he would act as their intermediary during the forthcoming visitation by Inquisitor licentiate Hermengildo Jiménez Navarro. With the approval of the two men, therefore, a few days after Jiménez Navarro arrived in the village, Sala came to testify about what he had heard, and the inquisitor then began taking testimony from those implicated in the plot.^[163]

If the seemingly effortless accumulation of information by Sala appears to demonstrate the truth of Contreras's assertion that by 1560 familiares and commissioners formed "small and efficient cells" that allowed the Holy Office to enter easily into contact with the population while keeping a close watch over any heterodox tendencies, the way he actually handled the information should warn us against any such generalizations.^[164] In the first place, both incidents had occurred from four to five years previously, but Sala made no effort to report them to a nearby commissioner or to inform the tribunal until an inquisitor actually came to Pego on a visitation. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that the plan to discover buried treasure had long been common knowledge in Pego—and, therefore, could hardly have been unknown to Sala— but he took no official notice of it until it came up directly in a casual conversation with Juan José Ribera, one of the men involved in the scheme, about the general subject of finding hidden treasure. Since this conversation took place in public only one month before the visitation began, the circumstances strongly suggest that it might never have been reported by Sala at all if an inquisitor had not come to the village in person. After all, schemes to locate buried treasure were extremely common in cash-starved rural Valencia during the late seventeenth century, and they involved not only respectable, even distinguished citizens but close relatives of familiares.^[165]

As Carlo Ginzburg has already pointed out, the intermediary always plays an active role that "can take different forms, depend-

ing on his own social position, attitude towards the culture of his social group, etc." Clearly, an intermediary like the familiar can act entirely in the interest of the elite institution he represents on a local level or he can "attenuate the cultural contents which he transmits."^[166]

The fact that it took the tribunal four years to learn about the bestiality incident even though Sala had heard of it the morning after it happened hardly reveals him to be an "efficient" link between the tribunal and the local community. That Ribera could speak openly with Sala about his experiences as a treasure hunter reveals either a complete lack of awareness of Sala's role as familiar or, what is more likely, a feeling that Sala would not report him to the Holy Office because their views on searching for treasure were essentially similar. If an intermediary, may be compared to a filter, then, as Ginzburg has stated, "there are no neutral filters."^[167] As the example of Sala reveals, the extent and rapidity of the transmission of information by a familiar would depend very much on his own attitudes toward the type of information and the individuals concerned. In the ease of ethnic minorities (Moriscos, conversos), information might be transmitted rapidly and without scruple, but in the ease of a neighbor and fellow Old Christian like Ribera, the information might be transmitted only under certain special circumstances—like an upcoming visitation—or not at all.

Fortunately for the Holy Office, it did not have to rely exclusively on its familiares for information about what was going on in local communities. Parish priests like Gabriel Riutort of Castell des Castells, who wrote to Inquisitor Jiménez Navarro to report that one of his parishioners had declared that hell did not exist, had a definite interest in maintaining orthodoxy and enforcing the provisions of the Council of Trent regarding respect for sacraments. The ease of Barbara Avargues, an ailing spinster who wrote to the inquisitor from Calpe to inform him that Jacinto Balaguer, a labrador of her village, had declared that purgatory was a myth appears to demonstrate the truth of Kamen's dictum that "there was no need to rely on a secret police system because the population as a whole had been taught to recognize the enemy within the gates."^[168]

Another and perhaps less ambiguous side of the familiar's role as informant was the tribunal's reliance on him for general information on local conditions. This reliance no doubt reflected the view

that his loyalty to the Holy Office would to some degree transcend self-interest and produce more reliable information than any that could be obtained from an ordinary citizen. Thus, in 1575, at a time of increasing concern about possible attempts by Protestants to smuggle quantities of heretical books into Spain, the tribunal called on Miguel Palao, a familiar in Denia, to testify about the activities of the French and British sailors in that port and about what measures could be used to exert greater control over cargoes.^[169] Before the expulsion of the Moriscos, familiares living in heavily Morisco areas were the preferred informants when the inquisitors wished to learn about conditions in those places.^[170]

Familiares were also used rather extensively to carry out arrests and to convey prisoners to the cells of the Inquisition when they were arrested outside Valencia city. Most often these arrests were carried out at the request of commissioners or officials of the tribunal. As Alcalde Francisco de Hermosa explained when he was asked about this practice during the visitation of 1566, he preferred to use familiares to make arrests even in Valencia city because he was so well known that suspects easily became aware of his approach, while familiares could do the job "con menos escandalo y con mas secreto."^[171] During the tribunal's early years, moreover, the frequent use of familiares to carry out arrests of suspected Judaizers had the effect of actively involving them in the tribunal's anti-Semitic campaign. In hearings held in 1553, familiar Juan Pé-rez de Pandilla recalled that his house stood on the same street as the famous synagogue that had been run secretly by the Vives family and that in 1501, when the tribunal decided to arrest those suspected of attending services, the familiares who carried out the arrests were hidden in his house.^[172]

Sometimes carrying out arrests could prove to be extremely dangerous. This was especially true when the tribunal directed most of its activity against the Moriscos, who were armed and could count on a certain amount of protection from their lords. In 1599, several familiares sent by the tribunal to arrest certain Moriscos in the neighborhood of Albarracín were met with armed resistance that had been encouraged by the lord of the village, the count of Fuentes.^[173]

At times, familiares acted quite independently, without even waiting for permission from a commissioner or without receiving

direct orders from the tribunal. When Francisco Pisa, a merchant and familiar of Grau, received a report from a local citizen who had seen two men engaged in homosexual activity on a nearby beach, he immediately arrested one of the men and had him placed in the local jail. He then went to Valencia to report to the tribunal, which ordered him to bring in the culprit.^[174] Pisa's alacrity in responding to a report of sodomy should not be misconstrued. His response no doubt reinforced the tribunal's authority in the town, but it is legitimate to wonder if he would have been quite so eager if the Inquisition's willingness to punish sodomites had not been so perfectly in accordance with communal rejection of homosexual behavior. In moving quickly to arrest a suspected sodomite, Pisa was acting as an official of the Holy Office but equally as a leading member of the community engaged in upholding and enforcing its sexual norms.

Since the role played by familiares in maintaining the Inquisition's network of control was ambiguous at best, we may well ask ourselves why it was necessary for the tribunal to maintain such a large number of familiares even when its activity had substantially declined after the expulsion of the Moriscos. One obvious answer to this question has been alluded to in our earlier discussion of the inquisitorial fuero: familiares were a lucrative source of fines and legal fees.^[175] Moreover, the genealogical investigation itself generated considerable fee income that helped support the entire infrastructure of the tribunal, from the secretaries who would usually carry out at least part of it to local commissioners and notaries who would be used in more remote areas. The Suprema also saw that it had some claim to the financial support of the familiares since they were, at least nominally, officials of the Holy Office. Just as the crown levied special taxes on officeholders (media anata), the Suprema required each familiar to contribute to the fabricá de Sevilla (funds earmarked for the Seville tribunal) as part of the costs of his genealogical investigation.^[176] In good years, when there were a fair number of applicants, revenues from this source could be substantial. On December 9, 1631, the tribunal reported to the Suprema that between November 18, 1627, and September 16, 1632, the depositario de pretendientes had collected 8,492 reales for this account.^[177]

Even more important than their financial contribution, however,

was the political support that familiares could provide. The increasingly aristocratic composition of the corps from the early years of the seventeenth century and the insaculación of many of its members meant that the familiares were a far more socially prominent and politically influential group than they had been in the mid-sixteenth century. Faced with the increasing hostility of the Audiencia and the suspicious attitudes of several seventeenth-century viceroys, not to mention strained relations with the canons of the kingdom's collegiate churches and cathedrals, it became vitally necessary for the tribunal to mobilize this support. As the Suprema itself declared in a letter advising the tribunal to turn out all the caballeros who were familiares to escort the officials of the court when they were called on to march in public processions, "such measures are all the more valuable now when the other tribunals are attempting to reduce your authority in every possible way."^[178]

Within Valencia city, the most visible way of capitalizing on this political support was through the organization of a chapter of the San Pedro Mártir confraternity. Named for Saint Peter, Martyr, a Dominican inquisitor who was murdered by Cathars in 1252, chapters of the confraternity eventually spread throughout the Spanish tribunals.^[179] The ordinances of the Valencian chapter, which were drawn up in 1610, reveal an organization that combined ceremonial, religious, and charitable functions. Theoretically open to all familiares in the district, as each of them paid a fee to the confraternity on receipt of their titles, meetings were comprised almost entirely of familiares from Valencia city and its immediate environs. For the purpose of electing officers, the confraternity was divided into two groups, cavaliers and ciutadans, with the prior always belonging to the cavaliers and the other posts being equally divided between the two. The organization also had a receiver whose responsibility it was to collect and disburse the fee that the confraternity received from each applicant to the corps for the expenses of the confraternity.^[180] Aside from the Procession of the Faith, the most important event that the members of the confraternity participated in was the annual ceremony commemorating the death of their patron saint. Marching in procession behind the inquisitors and officials, the familiares must have been an impressive sight in their special habits and the crosses they wore as insignia of Saint Dominic.^[181]

The remaining ordinances reveal that the members of the familiares' confraternity had many of the same concerns as other devout individuals who founded such organizations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The confraternity had a chapter house with a chapel where the special feast of the Cruz Nueva was to be held and where masses were to be said for the souls of the deceased. Members were to accompany the body of a deceased familiar to its final resting place, and the confraternity was expected to provide a payment of 10 lliures out of its treasury to aid members who found themselves in financial difficulties. By the middle of the eighteenth century, these ordinances had fallen into desuetude, but in 1749, new ones were drawn up by an energetic military officer, José Manrique de la Romana, familiar and colonel of Dragoons, in collaboration with the inquisitors.^[182]

By marching with the inquisitors and officials in public processions, the confraternity demonstrated that the tribunal enjoyed the open and explicit support of numerous influential members of Valencia's political elite. But the confraternity had even more direct ways of making its presence felt on the side of the tribunal when it was engaged in a struggle with the Audiencia or another competing agency of government. Since the prestige of the tribunal was closely linked to its ability to defend the fuero and the other privileges of the familiares, the confraternity would occasionally send one of its more distinguished members to court at its own expense to lobby in favor of the tribunal. In 1630, for example, Alexandre Vidal de Blanes, the prior of the confraternity, received permission from the inquisitors to send an ambassador to court to protest certain recent actions by the Audiencia constables. Luis Sorell, a knight of Calatrava, was eventually sent, and the Suprema ordered the tribunal to furnish him with the information that he needed to make his embassy more successful.^[183] An analysis of the accounts of the confraternity reveals that it, too, provided a steady source of extra funds for the inquisitors and certain officials. The inquisitors, for example, received 300 reales for attending the feasts of San Pedro Mártir and Cruz Nueva, while the tribunal's nuncio received 200 reales for convening the familiares when the confraternity held a meeting.^[184]

Outside of Valencia city, where the tribunal encountered serious difficulties with the canons' council, which continued to resent the

fact that the Inquisition enjoyed the fruits of one of their benefices, with city councils eager to seize any opportunity to enhance their prestige, and with bishops for whom the coming of the Inquisition represented a loss of authority, it used the visitation as a way of mobilizing the political support of its familiares. These "political visitations," which really came into their own in the first half of the seventeenth century, had as their ostensible purpose the repression of religious and moral deviance, but their extremely limited geographic range and the small number of eases that they actually turned up versus the time and energy that the visiting inquisitor spent in ceremonial and political activities clearly indicates their real purpose. At the same time, the political visitation was anything but a one-way street. Touring the district's larger towns and organizing bodies of familiares to march in the processions that were such a conspicuous part of every visitation were an excellent way of demonstrating the continued political importance of the Holy Office. But the local familiares also benefited from the presence of the inquisitor. His visitation, with its religious processions and special church services, was an opportunity for them to demonstrate their link with an important national institution, while the special role they played in ceremonies that involved the entire local power elite could hardly fail to enhance their social prestige and political importance.

Perhaps the best example of this reciprocity is provided by the visitation of Inquisitor Ambrosio Roche carried out in 1632. Gandía, Denia, Játiva, and Alcira were the principal stopping places along his route, which was the most frequently visited part of the district during the seventeenth century. These towns, along with Oliva and Carcagente where the inquisitor stopped briefly to rest and obtain a fresh team, were in the heart of the heaviest concentration of familiares outside the immediate area of Valencia city itself. In this region, it was not likely that Inquisitor Roche would find, as he did on his visit to the northern part of the district in 1645, towns refusing to pay the costs of his lodging and transportation.^[185] However, even here, where familiares were numerous and politically influential, towns were jealous of their authority, and city councils would seize every opportunity to gain advantage by suddenly refusing to participate fully in certain ceremonies or by insisting on styles of address or marks of courtesy that had not been customary

in the past. During the 1632 visitation, Roche experienced difficulties in Alcira, where the city council at first refused to march in the procession that preceded the reading of the Edict of Faith.^[186] Such problems made it all the more important for the visiting inquisitor to surround himself with a large following of familiares, since this would indicate that the Holy Office still enjoyed significant local support. To ensure the presence of as large a number of familiares as possible for the twin processions of the Edict and Anathema, Roche sent letters ordering all the familiares of the area to assemble in front of his lodgings before the procession of the Edict.^[187] But the visitation was so popular among the region's familiares that orders were unnecessary.

On the outskirts of Denia, for example, Roche was met by the local commissioner, Francisco Rico, the notary, Antonio Mulet, and a large number of familiares drawn from the entire area around the city. After effusive greetings, commissioner and notary entered Roche's coach, while the familiares, their servants, and relations ranged themselves behind it and followed it into the city, firing their muskets all the way. This boisterous welcome was atypical, but the inquisitor was usually met outside town by a delegation that would include the commissioner and one or more priests as well as a delegation of familiares.^[188] In Denia, where six out of the eight city officials were either familiares themselves or related to a familiar, Roche had no difficulty in obtaining the eager participation of the city council in the processions of the Edict and the Anathema.^[189]

A large and impressive retinue of familiares was a signal to jealous city councils and to the public at large that the Holy Office had the political support and the manpower to maintain a strong presence in a given area, while the familiares themselves were prepared to provide lodgings and even transportation to a visiting inquisitor. In Játiva, Roche stayed in the home of Jerónimo Sanz de la Llosa, a familiar and knight of Calatrava. On his visit to the northern part of the district in 1645, the familiares of San Mateo offered to pay the costs of transporting him to his next destination after the city had reneged on its promise to pay.^[190]

At the same time, local familiares derived considerable benefits from the visitation. Obviously, their social prestige would be enhanced by close association with a high royal official whose visit was a rare event. Not only did they play a leading role in the proces-

sions of the Edict and Anathema but they were given a special place in church during the ceremonies that marked the reading of these two documents. Local clergy would sometimes protest these arrangements, and, when he was visiting Segorbe in 1649, Roche intervened to prevent the cabildo of the cathedral from removing the bench that had been set up for familiares in the principal chapel.^[191] Furthermore, group participation by all the familiares in ceremonies where they rubbed shoulders with the social and political elite of the town tended to obliterate the social distinctions within the group, elevating the labrador and merchant to the level of the cavalier and ciutadà.

The exchange of political and material support for group recognition and social prestige that characterized the relationship between the inquisitor on visitation and local familiares was never more evident than during Roche's sojourn in Játiva from April 22 to May 12, 1632. Met outside the city by a delegation led by Francisco Milán de Aragón, familiar and royal governor of the town, and including the commissioner and several leading familiares, Roche was brought back into the city to lodgings at the home of Jerónimo Sanz de la Llosa.^[192] Two familiares also accompanied secretary Julian de Palomares when he went to the city council to ask that it march in the procession of the Edict. (The city council ultimately refused this request, but since three out of the five principal officials were familiares, the city was quite well represented.)

In return for this hospitality and support, Inquisitor Roche was only too pleased to accept an invitation from Milán de Aragón to attend the ceremonies marking the festival of San Pedro Mártir. It is in the phrase that he used to accept this invitation that Roche unconsciously reveals the radical change that had taken place in the underlying purpose of the visitation to the district. He declared that he would attend the festival "with the greatest pleasure, since apart from carrying out a visitation I have come to this city to make myself useful to all those who wish to employ me."^[193] As very few actual prosecutions resulted from this or from any other seventeenth-century visitation, it may be inferred that the search for heresy had become little more than window dressing for the real (political) purpose of the visitation.^[194]

Apart from its familiares, the Valencia tribunal enjoyed the services of a network of notaries and commissioners (fig. 3). In the

Figure 3.
Distribution of Commissioners and Notaries Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Valencia district, the commissioner replaced the obnoxious lieutenant inquisitors whose activities had given rise to so many excesses.^[195] During much of the first half of the sixteenth century, these subtribunals were established in every major town beginning about thirty miles from Valencia, but the Concordia of 1568 substituted commissioners and allowed them to be appointed only in the principal towns of Tortosa, Segorbe, Teruel, Gandía, Castellón de la Plana, Denia, Játiva, and Valencia city itself. In fact, this regulation was bent to accommodate certain individuals, and the record reveals commissioners from Onteniente, Mora, Morella, and Jijona, none of which had been included in the original group.^[196] Unlike the lieutenant inquisitors, commissioners were not permitted to try cases themselves but merely to collect information and send it back to the tribunal. They could not even arrest a suspect unless they felt that he was likely to flee.^[197] Commissioners also carried out genealogical investigations, made arrangements to lodge inquisitors making a visitation in their locality, and were used to interview suspects and administer reprimands in cases of lesser importance. Given the fact that commissioners were primarily from towns with cathedrals or collegiate churches, it is not surprising to find that more than 63 percent of my sample were provosts, canons, or benefice holders in these institutions.^[198] In spite of their relatively exalted rank in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, however, the curriculum vitae of applicants reveal them to be the products of an educational system for priests that had long since lapsed into a dull and plodding conformity. José Monterde de Azpeytia, for example, who was a canon in the collegiate church of Morajust outside Teruel, had spent his entire educational career, from grammar school to monastic college in Teruel, only leaving that city to take up residence in Mora where he served for seventeen years before applying for the post of commissioner in the Teruel district.^[199]

Since commissioners were confined to relatively few towns outside of Valencia city, it became necessary for the tribunal to recruit ecclesiastical notaries to supplement their activities. Reflecting, perhaps, the new importance of the parish priests in the post-Tridentine era and the Inquisition's desire to align itself more closely with that group even while it attempted its moral regeneration, almost 67 percent of the district's notaries were either parish priests or benefice holders in parish churches or rectories. The

parish clergy of Valencia city were particularly well represented, especially those from the wealthier parishes in the center.^[200]

Although they were not empowered to carry out arrests, in many other respects the powers and responsibilities of notaries and commissioners overlapped. Where a commissioner was unavailable, notaries would step in to make the arrangements for lodging a visiting inquisitor. Furthermore, notaries, like commissioners, were used to take testimony from witnesses and suspects. Some of these men proved to be as effective and zealous as any inquisitor. During the 1672 visitation, for example, Inquisitor Hermenigildo Jiménez Navarro ordered the inquisitorial notary in Gandía, Francisco Tosca, to follow up on information that had come to him regarding an attempt to find treasure using magic spells and other superstitious means. Tosca not only followed the instructions that he had received but exceeded them as skillful examination of the original two suspects turned up more accomplices, whom he proceeded to interview on his own initiative.^[201]

Apart from carrying out these important functions, notaries and commissioners occupied a special place in the network of control. Like the familiares, commissioners and notaries were prominent and visible representatives of the Holy Office so they were likely to be the recipients of information that would lead to eases being formulated by the tribunal. In one example, the commissioner of Teruel received information from several weavers about certain statements of a Protestant character that were made by a certain Anton Gache. The commissioner acted quickly to carry out the arrest and did the initial interrogations of witnesses.^[202] But it was precisely in their capacity as clergy that they were uniquely valuable to the tribunal, not only because of the information that they received from their flock but because of their ties to the ecclesiastical network itself. As in any other closed professional group, priests gossip with other priests and tend to have an intense interest in the behavior of their colleagues. It was this interest that led licentiate Pedro Mártir Mateo, one of the tribunal's Valencian notaries, to denounce the activities of Fray Vicente Oriente, a Franciscan whose public ecstasies and relationship with beata Juana Asensio were arousing considerable comment in the city.^[203] In another instance, the commissioner of Tortosa, Jerónimo Terca, heard about the flagrant homosexual activities of Melchor Armengol, rector of

the tiny village of Bot, from the rector of the neighboring village of Gandesa. After writing the tribunal for instructions, Terca was authorized to examine witnesses and accomplices and accumulate evidence to be used by the tribunal when it formulated its case.^[204]

In the light of the preceding discussion of family ties among the familiares of the district and the strong tendency toward endogamy throughout the Spanish bureaucracy, it is not surprising to find that, very frequently, notaries, commissioners, and familiares came from the same or related families. Among the commissioners, six out of the ten in my sample had at least one member of his immediate family in the corps. This group included such men as Dr. Juan Fababuix, a canon in the cathedral of Segorbe who applied to become a commissioner in 1616. At the time of his application, his father, Francisco, was serving as familiar in Vivel where both his paternal and maternal grandfathers and his uncle on his mother's side had served before him.^[205]

The relationship is even clearer and more direct in the case of the notaries. Here, a comparison of the overall figures for the social origins of parents suggests the possibility of close family relationships as over 60 percent of both the familiares and notaries were drawn from among artisans and labradores. This indication of broadly similar social origins is strengthened by the fact that notaries and familiares tended to be concentrated in the same geographic areas, with some 57.6 percent of the notaries drawn from the rich silk-producing towns stretching from Alcoy to Almusafes. Not surprisingly, therefore, 29 out of my sample of 55 notaries had one or more familiares in their immediate family, while 40, or 71.7 percent, had one or more among their relatives. An outstanding example of a notary related to a number of families closely tied to the corps of familiares was Mosén Bernardo Calduch, a benefice holder in the tiny village of Chert located deep in the Maestrazgo. Calduch's father and paternal grandfather both served as familiares in Chert, and he was related to no fewer than eight other individuals whose families dominated the corps in Chert and in the nearby villages of Salsadella, Mas des Estellers, and Traiguera.^[206] In certain cases, like that of Dr. Francisco Alexandre who applied from Rusafa in 1752, family traditions of service in the corps of familiares provided the inspiration for service as a notary. In his letter of application, Alexandre made a point of declaring that he was apply-

ing in order to "emulate" his father and several relatives who had served the Holy Office as familiares from Rusafa.^[207]

If, as Kamen has insisted, those who opposed the Spanish Inquisition were a tiny minority of intellectuals and conversos while the Holy Office was overwhelmingly popular with Spaniards of all classes, it was not only because "it helped to institutionalize the prejudices and attitudes that had previously been commonplace in society."^[208] By recruiting a large corps of unpaid officials, the Inquisition was able to associate itself with representatives of a broad cross section of Valencian society. The corps of familiares, in particular, was unique among Spain's honorable corporations in containing a majority drawn from the nonprivileged. As a result, an important segment of the population were not merely passive observers of an institution whose aim was to protect and enhance Spanish Catholicism but were participants in its operations and beneficiaries of the social prestige it could bestow.

At the same time as the Valencia tribunal began to lose ground in its struggle with other powerful local institutions, the large and influential corps of familiares, notaries, and commissioners bolstered its political power by providing it with a network of supporters in the most important towns and villages of the district. In this way, a body of men originally formed to combat a perceived threat from religious heresy began to resemble more and more the gangs, clientage networks, or mafiosi that flourished so remarkably in seventeenth-century Valencia.