VIII
The Inquisition in the Post-Tridentine Era

Within the vast reform movement that swept over Europe between 1450 and 1650, the Council of Trent (1545-1563) occupied a very special place. On the one hand, by setting forth a statement of orthodox Catholic belief on such key issues as justification, it represented the final collapse of any hope of reconciling the Catholic and Protestant religious positions.^[1] On the other hand, it was responsible for establishing the guidelines for a broad program of church reform that drew its inspiration from Erasmus, Johann Geiler of Kaisersberg, and Savonarola, among others, and was supported at the council by such figures as Cardinals Pole and Morone and Juan Bernal Díaz de Luco, bishop of Galahorra.^[2]

As outlined by the council and implemented by the church, the Tridentine reform attempted to change both popular religious culture and the role of the priesthood itself. Within the context of this movement, the Inquisition played an important if ancillary role alongside bishops, provincial councils and synods, parish priests, and even laymen like Philip II who made the council's decrees the law of the land on July 12, 1564.^[3] The Inquisition's alignment with the effort to implement the Tridentine decrees determined much of its activity right down to the time of its abolition in the early nineteenth century and shifted its focus away from the ethnic minorities and religious heretics who had taken up most of its attention in the first period of its history and toward the mass of the Old Christian population whose religious orthodoxy was never seriously in doubt.

Blasphemy was certainly one area of inquisitorial activity that greatly increased as a result of the Tridentine concern with reasserting the separation between the sacred and profane.^[4] Of course, blasphemy defined as expletives showing disrespect for the sacred had long been punishable under secular law. In 1462, Henry IV prescribed severe penalties for this offense, including scourging and cutting out the tongue, while Ferdinand and Isabella, in their laws of 1492 and 1502, detailed a whole list of commonly used expletives for which penalties were provided, ranging from a brief period of imprisonment for first offenders to piercing the tongue for the third offense.^[5] In 1532, Charles V reflected the concern of secular jurisprudence with offenses against public morality by urging his corregidores to show special zeal in the punishment of blasphemy, usury, concubinage, and other "public sins."^[6] The ecclesiastical courts also claimed jurisdiction over blasphemy, and at the Council of Seville of 1512, the bishops imposed fines and imprisonment on clerics and laymen convicted of this offense before their tribunals.^[7]

Given all this legislation and the established role of secular and ecclesiastical courts in the repression of this offense, it is logical that the Inquisition would show some reluctance to become involved in such a well-worked area of judicial activity. The tradition of the medieval Inquisition as expressed by Eymerich limited inquisitorial jurisdiction only to those expressions that smacked of heresy, such as a statement implying doubt about God's omnipotence or an expletive calling the Virgin Mary a "whore," which implied disrespect for the Virgin Birth. These expletives, which were termed "heretical blasphemy," were seen as distinct from those that in no way denied the articles of the faith and should therefore be judged by other tribunals.^[8] Internal legislation by the Suprema also reflected this tradition, and as late as 1547, it insisted that a whole series of expressions commonly uttered in the heat of anger or frustration such as "I renounce God" or "May it spite God" fell outside inquisitorial jurisdiction.^[9]

Apparently, the cautious approach adopted by the Suprema was not followed by the regional tribunals. Complaints voiced by delegates to both the Aragonese and Castilian Cortes in 1510, 1530, and 1534 indicated that inquisitors were routinely imprisoning orthodox persons for words uttered in the heat of passion or frustration.^[10]

Nevertheless, given the amount of competition and the small profit that could be wrung out of such cases, the Inquisition had little interest in them, and they comprised a very small part of its overall activity. The Valencia tribunal only tried six individuals for blasphemy before 1530.^[11] It was only after 1560, when the Inquisition was enlisted in the struggle to remodel popular culture and enforce respect for the sacred, that its activity in this area began to increase. Between 1540 and 1614, the tribunal heard 227 cases, with 29 in 1587 alone.^[12]

Analysis of the social origins of those accused of blasphemy before the Valencia tribunal leaves no doubt that this offense was committed by individuals from every social group. The nobility was represented by 2.3 percent of the accused, while 65.2 percent came from the popular classes including artisans, peasants, soldiers, and servants. The offense was also overwhelmingly male: men comprised more than 91 percent of the offenders.

In spite of the well-established principle that the Inquisition's jurisdiction over blasphemy extended only to statements of a heretical nature, the vast majority cited in the cases were expletives in common use to which no heretical intention could be imputed. Over 50 percent of the cases involved statements renouncing God or the saints, usually in a moment of rage and frustration. A typical case was that of Jerónimo Merin, an illiterate velvet worker who came to the tribunal in 1612 to denounce himself for having renounced God and his saints after losing his ball during a game of pelota.^[13] The Inquisition recognized the comparative mildness of such expletives and their insignificance from a religious standpoint by treating the accused with comparative leniency. Only six individuals were tortured in the course of their trials, and only 3.5 percent were sentenced de vehementi.

Blasphemers also received the mildest punishments of any group of offenders appearing before the bar of the Holy Office. Only 1.3 percent were sentenced to death and 7.9 percent given terms of galley service. Almost half (48%) of the cases ended in suspension, and almost 31 percent were merely admonished in the audience chamber and sent on their way.

Offenders who received the severest sentences were usually found guilty of uttering expletives of a more serious nature. In the case of Miguel Ferrer, who was sentenced to spend ten years in the

galleys on May 3, 1647, the more common expressions were combined with violent ones like "Christ the cuckold" and "the Virgin Mary was a whore and Saint Christopher her pimp." In addition, Ferrer was a repeat offender (he had been convicted of a similar offense in 1643) and a prisoner of the crown. Interestingly, the Suprema went along with the harsh sentence handed down by the tribunal but downgraded its recommendation of a de vehementi abjuration to abjuration de levi, clearly recognizing that even such violent expletives as those uttered by Ferrer had little religious significance.^[14]

One important indicator of the Inquisition's success in remolding popular attitudes is the number of people who were coming forward by the seventeenth century to denounce themselves or their friends for expletives that they would never have paid the slightest attention to a generation earlier. In the Spain of the seventeenth century, every man (and woman) became his own inquisitor, having been taught through the Inquisition's "pedagogy of fear" to scrutinize his own words and actions and those of his neighbors for any sign of nonconformity. So it was that when Maria de la Bresa, a tailor's wife from Valencia, heard Catalina Rico, her neighbor, declare bitterly that "God laughs at her misery," she came directly to the tribunal to report her.^[15] An entire society had now learned to move in lockstep with the demands of the baroque cultural, religious, and political monolith.^[16]

A second major objective of both Catholic and Protestant reformers was to impose an ethic of decency, modesty, and self-control onto the moral life of the laity.^[17] The concern for public morality is what prompted the repression of concubinage by the Inquisition as well as the secular courts. Typical of this sort of ease was the Valencia tribunal's prosecution of Nicolás Flores, a familiar of the Holy Office and a wealthy labrador of Las Useras, for living openly with a married woman of the village. Evidently, Flores was an incorrigible offender who had been tried for the same offense on three previous occasions and had scandalized the entire village by his conduct. The rather mild punishment handed down by the tribunal in his ease—a 30 lliure fine and ten days of spiritual exercises in a local monastery—could hardly have had much impact on such a personality.^[18] Interestingly, the Inquisition's sentence in this ease appears to have been considerably milder than that handed down by the Coun-

cil of the Military Orders in a similar ease that it tried in 1700. In this instance, a notary of the village of Almonacid was accused of having sexual relations with a series of married women. The council sentenced him to four years of exile from the village.^[19]

Closely related to the effort to reform popular morality was the inquisitorial campaign against the proposition that simple fornication was not a mortal sin. Eymerieh's Directorium is silent on this subject, and it appears that the Inquisition did not even begin to deal with eases of this kind until 1559-60. By the cartas acordadas of November 20, 1573, and November 20, 1574, the Suprema ordered the local tribunals to treat simple fornication as if it were a heresy and include it in the Edict of Faith.^[20] On December 14 of that year, the Valencia tribunal, on orders from the Suprema, published a special edict declaring that it was heretical to assert that simple fornication was not a mortal sin.^[21] From the mid-1550s, inquisitorial prosecution of these eases began to increase markedly, and from 1554 to 1820, over 25 percent of the Valencia tribunal's eases of propositions involved simple fornication.^[22]

Bigamy was another sphere of activity that was closely related to the Inquisition's role as enforcer of post-Tridentine sexual morality. From the twelfth century, the church had declared marriage a sacrament that could be enjoyed only once during the lifetime of both partners while the other partner is still alive.^[23] Since neither priest nor witnesses were required to be at the ceremony, however, church authorities could exercise little control over marriage and there were frequent clandestine marriages of a bigamous character. In response to this lamentable state of affairs, the church fathers at the Council of Trent reinforced the sacrament of marriage by stipulating that banns had to be published three separate times before the ceremony and that it would be valid only if performed before a priest and two or three witnesses. The marriage would then have to be recorded in the parish register.^[24]

It was against this background that the Inquisition began to increase its activity in this area. As early as 1563, the tribunal wrote the Suprema to demand a crackdown on bigamists because of their disrespect for the sacrament.^[25] Doubtless, the Inquisition was called on to play the major role in the repression of bigamy because, as an empirewide institution with a well-developed tradition of exchanging information among the several tribunals, it was best

suited to enforce the law, especially since the offense frequently involved movement from one region to another. The jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts over all marital eases was given proper recognition by providing that after the conclusion of inquisitorial proceedings, the ordinary would decide which of the women was actually married to the accused.^[26]

An example of cooperation among the several inquisitorial tribunals is provided by the ease of Miguel Romero, a Valencian who had emigrated to the New World and settled in Havana. The ease was instigated by the Cartagena tribunal, which had received information leading it to believe that Romero had been married forty years earlier in the village of El Grao just outside Valencia city. In response to the Cartagena tribunal's request for information, the Valencia tribunal sent a Holy Office notary to El Grao to investigate. The notary was successful in finding Josefa María Días, Romero's first wife, as well as the original marriage record, which had been noted in the parish register. After a copy of this information was forwarded to America, Romero was arrested and sentenced to four years in an African presidio.^[27]

Bigamists coming before the Valencia tribunal were overwhelmingly male (85.5%) and largely young (79% were age 40 or less). Analysis of status and occupational categories reveals bigamy to be an offense that involved all classes, from cavaliers (7.6%) to beggars (2.1%), but with a heavy concentration among those whose occupations either required them to have a high degree of mobility or permitted them to pick up employment almost anywhere. It should not, therefore, be surprising to learn that almost 11 percent of bigamists were soldiers or that artisans comprised almost 42 percent of the accused.

Penalties handed down by the tribunal were relatively mild. First of all, in spite of the fact that the Inquisition's claim to jurisdiction was based on the idea that the bigamist had impiously abused the sacrament of matrimony, all of those accused before the Valencia tribunal were only judged "lightly suspect" of heresy, which clearly indicates how little concern there really was with the religious implications of the offense.^[28] The harshest penalties handed down were periods of galley service (23%), but no one received the ten-year term prescribed in Philip II's ordinance of 1566.^[29]

It is undeniable that there were a goodly number of scoundrels

and frauds who used multiple marriages as a way of gaining a livelihood or improving their position. One of the bigamists who appeared in the Valladolid auto de fé of October 4, 1579, admitted to having married fifteen times in the space of ten years and then disappearing with whatever property he could obtain.^[30] In the ease of Pedro Pérez de Novella, who was brought to trial by the Valencia tribunal, the motivation for his second marriage was clearly the hope of social and professional advancement. His first wife was the daughter of a labrador, and he was the son of a notary. After living with his first wife for nine years, Pérez de Novella deserted her and his two children and went to Castellón de la Plana, where he pretended his wife had died, and married Antonia Amiguet, the daughter of the local alguacil mayor. Since the office was venal and Antonia was the alguacil's only child, she brought this office with her in her dowry. At her father's death, which occurred shortly after the marriage, Pérez de Novella took his place as alguacil mayor, thereby fulfilling his long-standing goal of occupying an honorable position, an ambition that his first wife's lowly origins would have made nearly impossible in the status-conscious eighteenth century.^[31]

The relative leniency of the Inquisition with regard to eases of bigamy and the way it made every allowance for extenuating circumstances may have amounted to tacit recognition by the Holy Office of the cost in human terms of the church's attitude toward marriage. The indissolubility of the marriage bond simply made it impossible for people to resolve problems of infidelity or incompatibility except through illicit means such as contracting a second marriage. Juan Bastit, a French stonecutter, was forced by the lack of economic opportunity in his home province to journey to Spain to seek employment. On returning from one of these journeys, he found that his wife had had an illegitimate child by a man who had once had an affair with her mother. Disgusted by his wife's behavior, Bastit took the road to Spain once more and eventually settled in Rubielos, where there appears to have been a small colony of French artisans. He was able to persuade two of these men to swear that his first wife had died so that he could marry a local girl.^[32]

Parental control over marriages and arranged marriages was another fertile source of dissatisfaction and marital instability. María la Jaqueta, the illegitimate daughter of a high-ranking benefice holder

in the town of Tours, was forced by her mother to marry one Pierre Verdier whom she described as a "drunkard and misogynist." He treated her so badly that she fled in the company of a young Frenchman who then forced her to marry him by threatening to place her in a bordello if she refused. Destitute and entirely dependent on her paramour, María had little choice but to agree, even though she was well aware that she was breaking the rules of the church. Unfortunately for María, the village where the pair settled contained a small group of French immigrants, several of whom had known her previously. Denounced to the tribunal, she was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to 100 lashes. It is difficult not to have a certain compassion for this 23-year-old girl who had so little control over her own life and who was the victim, successively, of mother, husband, lover, and Inquisition.^[33]

Apart from heresy itself, sodomy and bestiality were the crimes that inspired the greatest repugnance in the hearts of princes, jurists, and legislators during the entire early modern period. These were the crimes "committed against the natural order," the "abominable sin," the crime that was so disgusting that it was "horrid even to pronounce it aloud" according to a public prosecutor who was responsible for a sodomy ease in 1740.^[34] Harsh penalties were prescribed for both crimes in civil legislation. In the medieval Partidas, both were punishable by death, while in their edicts of August 22 and 27, 1497, the Catholic Kings declared that those found guilty of such crimes were to be burned alive in the place where the crime had been committed. The criminal code of Valencia also contained ferocious penalties mandating death by fire for those over twenty years of age and scourging and galleys for minors.^[35]

Evidently, the early Inquisition had demonstrated a certain interest in these offenses, but by its decree of October 18, 1509, the Suprema ordered the Castilian tribunals to leave them in the hands of the secular and ecclesiastical courts. In Aragon, however, popular hostility toward sodomites as expressed in the Valencian rioting of 1519 and the presumed connection between sodomy and the Islamic minority resulted in a request to Pope Clement VII for a brief placing it under inquisitorial jurisdiction.^[36]

The papal brief was issued on February 24, 1524, but the Aragonese tribunals seem to have made little use of their new powers

until after 1560, when the Inquisition began its campaign in support of post-Tridentine sexual morality and Christian marriage.^[37] In Valencia, the tribunal appears to have been virtually inactive against sodomy before 1570.^[38] From 1571 to 1700, however, there were 283 cases of sodomy and bestiality and another 226 between 1701 and 1820.^[39]

In this as in other areas of its growing jurisdiction, local inquisitors rather than the Suprema took the lead. As early as March 1554, Valencia's inquisitors wrote to request permission to proceed aggressively against sodomites. In 1572, the tribunal wrote that it had eight men in prison awaiting trial on charges of sodomy and that many more could be indicted "if the public could be assured that the Holy Office had jurisdiction over such cases."^[40] Just a few months later, on January 28, 1573, the tribunal wrote again, this time to ask that the Suprema allow it to place the offense in the Edict of Faith.^[41] In the following year, the Suprema bowed to this pressure and permitted the Aragonese tribunals to include sodomy in the edict.^[42]

In spite of its special powers, the tribunal had difficulty asserting its jurisdiction over certain offenders, particularly those whose position allowed them to enjoy the protection of their own "fuero." In 1572, we find the Suprema ordering the tribunal to refuse to surrender the Minim Friar Pedro Picasso to the provincial of his order who was demanding custody, and between 1571 and 1573, the tribunal struggled to assert its jurisdiction over Pedro Luis Galcerán de Borja, the grand-master of the Order of Montesa.^[43] In these cases and many others, the Inquisition was successful in defending its jurisdiction, but we must assume that other courts did continue to hear a certain percentage of the sodomy cases.

In spite of its inclusion in the Edict of Faith, inquisitorial procedures in these cases belie any connection between sodomy and heresy. The original papal brief had specified that local law was to be followed, and, in 1572, the Suprema refused to consider a request by the tribunal that would have allowed it to treat such cases as procesos de fé.^[44] As a result, in accordance with Valencian criminal procedure, the names of witnesses were not kept secret and there was even open confrontation between witnesses and the accused. During his long trial, Melchor Armengol was permitted to draw up special lists of questions to be put to the two chief wit-

nesses against him and was allowed to confront them in open court where he was able to reveal certain discrepancies in matters of detail through cross-examination.^[45] Sometimes the use of ordinary judicial procedures with the right of cross-examination would be of considerable help to an accused. In the case of Fray Manuel Sánchez del Castellar y Arbustan, who was accused of sodomy before the Valencia tribunal in 1681, cross-examination revealed that the accusation was little more than an elaborate plot hatched by other friars jealous of his position in the order.^[46]

The Suprema also took a considerable interest in these cases, probably because they frequently involved harsh punishment of Old Christians and insisted that proper judicial procedures be followed. In 1624, for example, the Suprema sharply rebuked the tribunal for the sodomy cases included in the relaciones de causas of the previous year because the accusations were poorly substantiated.^[47]

Statistical analysis of the data taken from the relaciones de causas reveals that both sodomy and bestiality were crimes committed largely by unmarried young men. Some 98.7 percent of those accused of sodomy were males, although five women were accused of lesbianism. The figures for bestiality yield remarkably similar re-suits, with 98.9 percent of the accused being males. The age profile of the two groups was also quite similar: 74.9 percent of the sodomites and 77 percent of those accused of bestiality were under 40 years of age. These two crimes also exhibit the highest percentage of unmarried offenders of any dealt with by the tribunal—70. 2 and 90 percent, respectively.

Analysis of the information abut occupation and status, however, reveals some sharp differences in the sociology of those accused of these crimes. Sodomites were widely distributed across the occupation/status range, with small groups of cavaliers and ciutadans (2.9%), professionals and merchants (5.5%), and clergy (18.9%). In contrast, persons of higher social status are almost entirely absent among those accused of bestiality: there was a complete absence of knights and ciutadans and only one cleric. For both offenses, the largest proportion of offenders were artisans and peasants, but while the percentage of artisans was remarkably similar (27.5% for sodomites and 30.6% for bestiality), the percentage of peasants (34.6%) was much higher for bestiality than it was for sodomy (10%), reflecting the rural nature of that

crime. As one would expect, both offenses had a high percentage of accused from marginal groups or occupations where there was a high degree of mobility and consequently little opportunity to develop a settled family life. Thus, both offenses have similar percentages of slaves and vagrants, 7.0 and 10.2 percent and 7.0 and 6.1 percent, respectively.

Without doubt, the most politically powerful individual ever arrested on charges of sodomy by the Valencia tribunal was Pedro Luis Galcerán de Borja. Not only was the grand-master the son of the third duke of Gandía and related to most of the leading nobles of the kingdom but he was also the leader of one of the most powerful and violent of the aristocratic "bandos" that had so disrupted Valencian society during the 1550s.^[48] Arrested in 1571 on testimony from several of the order's commanders, he was given exceptional treatment and permitted to run the affairs of the order from comfortable apartments that had been set aside for him.^[49] Ignoring Borja's persistent refusal to recognize the Inquisition's jurisdiction and the considerable political pressure that was brought to bear by members of his family, the tribunal and the Suprema pressed the case.^[50] Direct evidence was provided by three of his servants, one of whom, Gaspar Granulles, had fled to Rome where a warrant was issued for his arrest in November 1572.^[51] Given the strong political influence being exerted on the accused's behalf, especially by Archbishop Ribera, and the fact that Martin de Castro, the principal witness against him, revoked his testimony, a split verdict on the tribunal is not surprising.^[52] The Suprema chose to accept the view of hard-liner Juan de Rojas who had voted for a heavy fine and four years of exile, although it modified exile to ten years of reclusion in the castle of Montesa and a fine of 6,000 ducats.^[53] Even this sentence could hardly have been expected in such a ease but for the fact that the Valencian nobility, in general, had become somewhat discredited in the eyes of the king because of their support of the religion and customs of their Morisco vassals and that many of them had been, or were about to be, punished by the Inquisition.^[54] In the end, of course, the crown's need for the political support of the Borja family outweighed its desire to punish sodomites, and, in 1591, Borja was absolved and rehabilitated politically by being granted the post of viceroy of Catalonia.^[55]

If political influence and social prominence saved Borja from the

harsh punishment that many a lesser man had to suffer for similar offenses, the lack of such influence may well have condemned Melchor Armengol to harsher punishment than he might have otherwise received. Armengol was rector of Bot, located in the Sierra de Montenegrelo in the extreme northern part of the district. Unlike many other parish priests, he was scrupulous in carrying out his duties; but, since the income from his benefice was barely sufficient to meet expenses, Armengol was eager to take advantage of any opportunity to increase it by asserting control over church property and acting to farm the ecclesiastical tithe. His efforts to do this, however, made him a number of enemies among the village elite, including his former sacristan and the leader of the village council, Juan Altadill. Armengol also alienated his parishioners by evicting mothers with young children from church if their infants cried during services. Furthermore, this remote region, like other parts of the sprawling inquisitorial district, was afflicted with serious clan rivalries and banditry. Armengol had close ties with one of the bandit leaders, while his enemies were linked to the leader of the opposing group. In spite of his general unpopularity, however, he employed the son and nephew of two of his principal enemies as servants and sodomized them and another boy in his bedroom in the rectory, in a hut outside of the village, and in a lodging house in the city of Tortosa.

These activities, which apparently went on for some time, eventually became known to one of Armengol's bitterest enemies, Juan Çabater, the rector of neighboring Gandesa, with whom Armengol had significant disagreements and a pending lawsuit. Seeking to destroy his enemy, Çabater denounced Armengol before Jerónimo Terca, canon of Tortosa cathedral and the Holy Office commissioner for the region. After receiving this initial testimony, Terca was told to follow up his investigations by calling in other witnesses, and within a few weeks an impressive body of evidence had emerged concerning Armengol's sexual relations with the boys, including Agustín Villavert's assertion that he had been repeatedly raped on the rector's bed and that the sexual act had always been consummated.

In his long and brilliant defense, which included face-to-face confrontations with the boys, Armengol was able to establish what to a modern mind would appear to be reasonable doubt, especially with regard to the incidents in Tortosa, chiefly by pointing out

inconsistencies in prosecution testimony. However, he was unable to shake the testimony of the third boy, José Prat, who declared that Armengol had kissed him and touched his genitals, and in this instance he was reduced to lamely asserting that Prat must have been induced to testify by one of his enemies. In the end, the tribunal, which was chary of offending local elites and wanted to extend its system of familiares into the Bot region, sentenced Armengol to be degraded from clerical orders, deprived of his office and benefice, and given three years of galley service.^[56] The ease of Melchor Armengol, like many cases of superstition and others that we have referred to, is a good illustration of the role that reputation and the whole context of personal relationships can play in inspiring judicial denunciations. Although the allegations against him were probably largely true, Armengol was himself a victim not only of his own bad temper but of the tragic condition of many of Valencia's country parishes where the priest was forced into poverty, absenteeism, or worse because powerful village elites controlled parish business and finances.

As stated above, both sodomy and bestiality were committed primarily by unmarried men whose occupation or circumstances made it difficult or impossible for them to live a normal family life even if they had been disposed to do so. Typical of this group were individuals like Ali, the black slave of the viceroy's mayordomo, who was accused of having sexual relations with two young men, one of whom was a part-time agricultural worker and the other a vagrant some 15 or 16 years of age.^[57]

Another marginal individual who paid with his life for the social prejudice against bestiality was Pedro Juan, a watchman in the village of Montesa. There was only one witness to this act, which occurred in broad daylight just outside the town walls in March 1621. The witness, Gracia Navarro, was out gathering herbs when she saw Juan having sexual relations with a mule whose legs were tied apart. She ran immediately to tell several labradores whose farms were close, and these men apprehended Juan and held him while they summoned the local familiar. Juan escaped but was recaptured the following day by the familiar and one of the labradores and eventually brought before the tribunal. In his defense, Juan alleged that he drank heavily and was habitually drunk and that he had only entered the mule's privates "a little way." His

habitual drunkenness was partially contradicted by the testimony of several witnesses who also declared that semen had been streaming out of the mule's backside shortly after the alarm had first been given. Even though the tribunal was able to verify Juan's claim to be a devout Catholic, this did him little good. He was given a sentence of death, which was carried out along with the senseless execution of the perfectly innocent animal after the auto of July 4, 1621.^[58] It is interesting to note that the verdict in this case was unanimous and that one of the members of the tribunal at this time was Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar y Frías, the savior of the witches of Navarre and Guipúzcoa a decade earlier. It would be many generations before the enlightened attitude that Inquisitor Salazar y Frías showed in the case of the witches would be extended to those convicted of bestiality.

Curiously, the working legal definition of the sin/crime of sod-omy that was used by both the secular courts and the Inquisition included certain forms of "unnatural" sexual relations between men and women. As late as 1780, Antonio Gómez included any form of sexual relations that made use of any artificial methods in his definition of sodomy, and on November 29, 1644, a man was burnt to death in Madrid after having been accused by his wife of having anal intercourse.^[59]

The Valencia tribunal also tried a certain number of persons (5.6% of sodomy eases) for this offense, which was termed "imperfact sodomy" by the canonists.^[60] Use of confessors to force their penitents to bring cases of solicitation before the Holy Office was evidently extended to instances of anal sex as well, and the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw an increasing number of women coming to the tribunal to denounce their husbands and lovers. Evidently, some of these relationships were extremely unhappy, so the Holy Office in this instance provided an outlet for the frustrations and anger of women who had been battered emotionally, physically, and sexually by their partners. Isabel Juan Ramirez, for example, who came to the Holy Office on February 6, 1609, on the advice of her confessor, testified that her husband, a baker, had attempted anal sex with her on numerous occasions and beat her when she refused.^[61] Some women were unable to avoid engaging in this form of sex in spite of being aware of its illicit nature. Esperanza Agut, the wife of a labrador from the village of

Artana, came to testify that her husband had forced her to have anal sex with him even though she begged him not to because she knew it was a grave sin.^[62]

The majority of the sodomy cases tried by the Valencia tribunal involved a relatively small number of sexual acts with few partners.^[63] In fact, the tragic case of Juan Ximénez, who became despondent after his arrest on sodomy charges and committed suicide in his cell, involved repeated homosexual acts committed over a ten-year period with just one partner.^[64] About 20 percent of the cases involved multiple sexual acts committed with numerous partners. One of the most remarkable cases of this kind involved Jesualdo Felizes, the brother-in-law of the count of Albalat. Felizes not only forced a succession of servant boys to have sexual relations with him but also paid for sex with the boy musicians of the chapel of San Andrés and sodomized his two nephews on twenty-two separate occasions. Felizes would usually act as the aggressor in these trysts, but sometimes, as with Domingo Meris, the lovers "sodomized each other mutually." Evidently, Felizes's family, consisting of his mother, Jerónima Arazil, and brother, Fray Vicente Felizes, were quite complaisant about his sexual preferences. On one occasion, Fray Vicente even persuaded the mother of one of Felizes's boy servants to coax her son to return to the house after he had fled these sexual advances. Felizes habitually slept in the same room as his mother, along with one of his boy lovers. He even went so far as to perform his sexual acts in her bed and in one instance scourged one of his lovers there after sodomizing him. Felizes was eventually denounced to the Holy Office by Dr. Juan Val, rector of the Colegio de San Jorge in Valencia, who had heard rumors about his activities while on a visit to Meliana where the family resided after it left Valencia.

The fact that Jesualdo Felizes could carry on his extraordinary sexual career for more than a decade without ever being denounced to the Holy Office is only partially attributable to his high social standing. Of course, his rank made his servant lovers unwilling to denounce him as they probably felt it would be futile. As José Bermudez, who had been sodomized by Felizes twice a day for seven years, put it when asked why he had not denounced his master, "What good would that have done, he would only have beaten me." But Felizes was also able to exploit the existence in

Valencia of networks of young homosexuals and the apparent acceptance among young men, even in this land with a tradition of lynching sodomites, of a certain amount of homosexual behavior among friends. Certainly his sexual relations with the boy musicians of San Andrés, several of whom admitted during his trial that they had sexual relations with one another, attest to the existence of such groups.^[65] In 1796, just eleven years after Felizes was sentenced, we learn of another such group from the spontaneous confession of Benito Campany. The previous year, Campany, who was an art student, went with several of his friends to the harvest at Játiva. After buying a watermelon for refreshment, they all climbed up on a pile of hay and proceeded to pull off their pants and sodomize each other in turn. The casual and spontaneous nature of this episode and the youth of those involved, ranging from 8 to 16 years of age, indicates that we are not dealing with a group with definite sexual preferences but rather with boys who accepted homosexual activity as part of their relationship with one another regardless of their ultimate sexual choices.^[66]

The attitude of many inquisitorial officials toward sodomy and bestiality was best summed up by Dr. Pérez, the tribunal's prosecuting attorney in the case of the master of Montesa, who demanded the death sentence on the grounds that failure to punish such a "heinous" crime would bring divine retribution in the form of "famine, plague and earthquakes."^[67] In reality, as the sentence of the master himself was to indicate, the punishments handed down by the Inquisition for sodomy and bestiality were considerably milder than the violent antagonism expressed by its prosecuting attorney would seem to imply. According to a memorial analyzing the tribunal's policy toward these offenders presented to the Suprema in 1687, the harsh laws of the Valencian criminal code had been followed in many cases until 1628, when the tribunal executed its last sodomite. Since the memorial speaks of "the lack of conclusive proof" in certain of these cases, it is safe to assume that one reason for this apparent leniency was the Suprema's strictures on the inadequacy of proof in certain cases that had been presented to it some years earlier.^[68] The suspicion that the Suprema was behind this change of heart by the tribunal is confirmed later in the memorial when the inquisitors comment on the case of Carlos Charmarino, a sailor whose sentence of death by burning and confis-

cation of property by the tribunal was reduced by the Suprema to 200 lashes and ten years of galley service. By 1656, the Suprema's more lenient policy was beginning to make itself felt on the tribunal. In the ease of Juan Antonio Jirado, the consulta de fé divided with several votes for the death penalty, but Inquisitor Antonio de Ayala Verganza and the ordinary of the Archbishop opted for 200 lashes and ten years of galley service "because in similar eases sentences had been reduced by the Council." As it turned out, Inquisitor Ayala Verganza had interpreted the Suprema's mood correctly, as it sentenced Jirado to only five years of galley service followed by eight years of exile. Finally, the authors of the memorial, Inquisitors Jiménez Navarro and Francisco Espadaña, commented on their own policy in sentencing certain slaves whose eases had presented themselves that year. Following the "lenient policy ordered by your Eminences for these many years," they said, it had been decided to punish them with scourging and order their master to sell them outside the kingdom rather than sentence them to death or a term of galley service.^[69]

Analysis of sentences handed down for sodomy and bestiality appears to substantiate the impression of leniency conveyed in the 1687 memorial. Contrary to Valencian criminal law, only 6.7 percent of sodomites and 5.8 percent of those convicted of bestiality were given death sentences, and confiscation was mandated in only 1.7 percent and 1.1 percent of these cases, respectively. Instead, as indicated in the memorial, a high percentage of sentences for these offenses involved galley service (13.8% and 19.7%), scourging (14.1% and 24.4%), and exile (18.8% and 32.5%). But there were many even milder punishments like reclusion in monasteries for clerical sodomites or fines. Interestingly, especially given the seriousness with which these offenses were treated in the criminal code, the percentage of suspensions was extremely high: some 63.2 percent of sodomizers and 44 percent of eases of bestiality. This was especially true in the eighteenth century when the high percentage of suspensions merely confirms the long-term trend toward leniency in these eases that was the subject of the 1687 memorial.^[70]

The moderation with which the Inquisition treated those accused of sodomy and bestiality seems all the more remarkable considering the profound social prejudice against such offenders. But the law, as E. P. Thompson has pointed out, must be seen both

as "particular rules and sanctions which stand in a definite and active relationship (often a field of conflict) to social norms" and "in terms of its own logic, rules and procedures."^[71] Like the judges of the Paris Parlement with regard to another class of offenders equally abhorred by popular opinion, witches and sorcerers, the members of the Suprema were concerned to protect the integrity of the procedures and legal traditions that gave expression to inquisitorial law and prevent lesser tribunals from abusing them.^[72] Like their counterparts in Paris, the members of the Suprema became more and more concerned about the procedural irregularities and difficulties of proof that characterized such eases as time went on. This concern led them not only to insist on more effective procedural guarantees but to a pattern of reducing the sentences that local inquisitorial tribunals in imitation of local law had handed down in these eases. A new "style" or tradition was in the process of formation, and, within a few years, the local tribunals, whose judges were after all dependent on the Suprema for preferment, adopted it as their own. In its leniency toward sodomites, as in many other respects, the Inquisition was more enlightened than the secular courts, which were still handing down death sentences for sodomy and bestiality in the middle of the seventeenth century. Before 1750, however, the secular courts with jurisdiction over these offenses had adopted the style of the Inquisition, and centuries of violent persecution and brutal punishment for homosexuality were drawing to a close.^[73]

An even more striking example of the Spanish Inquisition's progressive approach to an offense that was treated with great severity elsewhere is provided by its treatment of those accused of sorcery. The Spanish Inquisition's cautious and moderate attitude stands in sharp contrast to the witch hysteria that gripped much of northern Europe, and it is all the more remarkable because its jurisdiction over crimes involving sorcery depended on the medieval scholastic definition of all forms of magic as demonic and heretical.^[74] In spite of this, most Spanish inquisitors were able to resist popular pressure for harsh and summary punishment of persons popularly reputed as witches and refrain from systematically imposing learned notions of diabolism (with which they were quite familiar from their knowledge of works like the Malleus Maleficarum ) on the popular magical traditions that provided the

raw material for the trials. In the end, what counted for the Spanish Inquisition was not the formal scholastic notion of pacts with the devil and apostasy from the faith but the concept that the church's monopoly on supernatural remedies was being undermined and its rituals and prayers misused by magicians.^[75] This approach, which emphasized the post-Tridentine effort to enforce respect for the sacred rather than a desire to extirpate a dangerous new cult of devil-worshiping heretics, provided the basis for inquisitorial activity in this field and prevented Spain from becoming the scene of the massive witch persecutions that caused so much suffering in the rest of Europe.

In a country where the traditions of scholasticism dominated intellectual life throughout the early modern period, the Spanish Inquisition's attitude toward sorcery could hardly have been the result of an "enlightened" rationalist negation of the power of the devil or the ability of witches to harm men and animals with his assistance. In fact, fifteenth-century Spain saw the publication of some of Europe's earliest witchcraft treatises, and as late as 1631, in a work that was warmly approved by Dr. Baltasar de Cisneros, calificador of the Zaragoza tribunal, Gaspar Navarro fully accepts the reality of the Sabbath, diabolical pacts, and maleficia and called for the exemplary punishment of witches.^[76] The scholastic link between sorcery, diabolism, and heresy also received support from Inquisitors like Arnaldo Alvertín, who in 1535 proclaimed himself a firm believer in all the horrors that witches were accused of.^[77] In fact, Dr. Alonso Becerra and licentiate Juan del Valle, who voted death sentences for the witches condemned at the famous auto de fé of November 7, 1610, in Logroño, represented a respectable minority view in a tribunal that had never explicitly denied the reality of witchcraft.^[78]

In matters of judicial procedure, what really counted, however, was the climate of opinion on the Suprema itself. In 1562, Inquisitor-General Manrique convened a junta of judicial experts (including future Inquisitor-General Valdés) and theologians to discuss the issues raised by an outbreak of witch persecution in Navarre.^[79] As a result of the discussions held by the members of this assembly, the Suprema issued a series of instructions that set the tone for the Spanish Inquisition's future attitude toward witchcraft. Essentially, these instructions instituted procedural safeguards that made it im-

possible for Spain to experience the massive witchcraft persecutions soon to become common in much of the rest of Europe.^[80]

That the Valencia tribunal followed the majority of Spain's provincial tribunals in adopting a moderate policy toward the kinds of sorcery cases that could easily have resulted in accusations of de-monizing and triggered witch panics elsewhere in Europe is illustrated by several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cases. Vicenta Malpel, a fourteen-year-old servant girl who had become widely known in Valencia for her visions of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus as well as her ability to predict the future and find missing or stolen objects, also claimed that the devil visited her in the shape of a "gentleman" dressed in black silk. Arrested by the Holy Office after she had been denounced by five witnesses, she admitted the charges, but the consulta voted for torture because she was "suspected of a pact with the devil." After being brought to the torture chamber (but not actually tortured), she confessed that the devil had appeared to her the first time after she had received a brutal beating from her mistress and told her that if she wanted to secure better treatment, achieve fame, and become known as a saint, she should pretend that she had visions of holy figures and that when people came to question her about them he would tell her what to say. She also testified that she had had sexual relations with the devil on numerous occasions during the last two years even though she had remained a virgin. Although Vicenta denied that she had surrendered her soul to the devil or signed any agreements with him, it would have been quite easy for her interrogators to have gotten her to admit diabolical pacts and virtually any other form of diabolism had they been so inclined, since she was a highly suggestible person who was described as frequently contradicting herself during her testimony. Evidently, there was no disposition to do this, and this adolescent, whose resemblance to the child witches of Germany or Salem must strike anyone familiar with the history of witchcraft, was merely sentenced to appear in the following auto de fé with the insignia of an invoker of the devil, public shame, and a period of reclusion in a monastery to be determined by the tribunal.^[81]

Isabel Patris was another individual who would certainly have been given the death penalty if her trial had been held before a tribunal in northern Europe. Patris, who evidently practiced both amatory and curative magic, sometimes in direct competition with

local physicians and exorcists, was widely reputed to be a witch and was accused of killing many persons with her evil spells, especially those who refused her alms. In spite of this local reputation and several specific accusations of maleficia, including the death of a woman shortly after Patris had visited her, the tribunal resisted any temptation to turn a case of popular magic into diabolism and instead sentenced Isabel to abjuration in the audience chamber and eight years exile from the district.^[82]

In another case in which the tribunal might easily have crossed the line from amatory magic to diabolism, the sentence was harsher but probably because of the sacrilegious activities that emerged from the testimony rather than any fear that it had encountered a member of a real witch cult. Teresa Agustí, who admitted having made a pact with the devil and removed her cross and rosary for fifteen days so as to find out if her lover was coming to see her, had also been heard to threaten her lover with retribution after he left her "even if she had to give her soul to the devil." After his death, which occurred shortly after this threat was uttered, Dr. Morales, the physician who attended him, commented that his symptoms were so irregular that they could not have come from natural causes and must have been the result of some witchcraft. Rather ominously, these charges influenced the tone of the prosecuting attorney's accusation in which Agustí was charged with "passing to the side of God's enemies" for setting aside her rosary and cross, with "diabolical witchcraft" for casting the spell that caused her lover's demise, and with an explicit pact with the devil. In spite of this overheated rhetoric, which might easily have led to a charge of diabolism, the tribunal continued to act with the moderation that had long characterized the Inquisition's response to witchcraft accusations by absolving de levi and making her appear in church wearing the insignia of one convicted of superstition and imposture (embustería ). She was sentenced to verguenza, exile from Valencia, and four years in the women's prison where she was to have a calificador to govern her spiritual welfare. After generations of moderation, the Valencia tribunal was not going to allow itself to be stampeded into accusations of diabolism or accepting vague and unsubstantiated testimony about murder by magic.^[83]

Living before the advent of modern medicine, sanitation, organized fire brigades, and emergency services, early modern Europe-

ans, like their ancient and medieval predecessors, were vulnerable to a variety of diseases and misfortunes whose catastrophic consequences have been prevented or limited in the highly sophisticated European societies of today. Early modern Valencia was no exception to this rule, and a brief glance at Porcar's chronicle of the early seventeenth century reveals a full range of catastrophic events, including outbreaks of plague, numerous fires, severe thunderstorms, and long periods of drought.^[84] Like the primitive religions that it replaced, Catholicism sought to help afflicted humanity by propitiating the supernatural forces (the wrath of God) that were believed to have caused these problems.^[85] The church was commonly regarded as a vast repository of supernatural power and sometimes directly encouraged this view by accepting and supporting certain miraculous events if they appeared to lend support to the faith and by creating a litany of usages designed to draw down God's blessing on the tiny struggles of everyday life.^[86]

Thus, it is hardly surprising that in spite of the careful attempt made by at least some clergy to indicate that the effectiveness of specific prayers or any other observances depended ultimately on the will of God, it became widely accepted that, with the proper formula and devices, man could manipulate the supernatural. It was this belief, encouraged directly or indirectly by the church, that provided the basis for the activity of the early modern magician who frequently incorporated cult objects or Christian prayers in his charms and incantations.

Since the prestige of the church itself was so heavily dependent on its ability to mobilize supernatural forces on man's behalf, its attitude toward popular superstitions was highly ambivalent. If the intercession of the supernatural was sought through observances approved by the church, such as rogations or exorcism, this could only increase devotion, especially if the believer demonstrated a genuine trust in God and did not seek any specific material gain. However, the post-Tridentine church's desire to reassert respect for the sacred made it sensitive to any attempt to invoke the supernatural for illicit or materialistic purposes, especially when officially sanctioned forms of intercession were used in unacceptable ways.^[87] This new sensitivity led to Sixtus V's bull of 1585 against magic and brought the Inquisition into the struggle against popular superstition.

The three most important kinds of superstitious error prosecuted by the Valencia tribunal were divination (51.8% of all eases), love magic (25.9%), and curative magic (17.7%). Divination in-eluded such practices as attempts to predict the future or affect the outcome of future events. In 1604, for example, the Valencia tribunal sentenced Alonso Verlango to a reprimand and two years of exile for, among other superstitious practices, hiring a woman to bring about the resolution of a lawsuit by performing several conjurations that combined the invocation of saints and demons.^[88]

The most common form of divination, however, was the effort to free enchanted treasure. This form of divination provided the tribunal with 34.5 percent of its eases of superstition and had become so common in the kingdom by the early eighteenth century that the Suprema wrote to ask that the archbishop order parish priests to denounce it from the pulpits.^[89] The time, trouble, and expense involved in hunting for enchanted treasure frequently meant that such "expeditions" were organized like business partnerships and involved men with a certain amount of wealth.

One group of intrepid treasure hunters, which included such luminaries as Melchor Gamir, a jurat of Valencia city, and Melchor Moscardo, an official of the criminal chamber of the Audiencia, began by purchasing a Moorish slave who enjoyed some reputation as a magician and who promised to find them an enchanted treasure. After making several fruitless attempts, the slave finally admitted that he had only made the claim to avoid work. The partners then sold the slave but without abandoning their belief in the possibility of liberating enchanted treasure, although it did make them a bit more cautious about investing any more money. This time, they simply came to an agreement with the owner of another Moorish slave who claimed to be a master of "natural magic" which would provide him with a share of any treasure that was discovered. After this slave also failed to deliver on his promises, the members of the group, who were well aware of the Inquisition's attitude toward this sort of activity, felt it necessary to denounce themselves to the Holy Office for "any trace of superstition that might have become involved in these things."^[90] Confronted with the evidence of such practices in late-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Valencia, the historian can only lament that the energy and persistence shown by these groups in the pursuit of

imaginary treasure could not have been turned to the creation of real wealth in a region where enterprising businessmen were in short supply.

At a time when the church continued to claim that prayers and even sacraments could have curative power, the Inquisition's attack on those practicing healing magic must be seen as a way of protecting the church monopoly against unwelcome interlopers. In the ease of Anna Bodríguez, a curandera who was accused of witchcraft by her neighbors, the tribunal entirely ignored the charge of sorcery and simply ordered her not to engage in any more healing.^[91] Less easy to decide was the ease of Blas Olaria, the parish priest of El Castillo, who, for a fee of three sueldos, provided sick people with special amulets and said prayers for their recovery. At his second trial in 1651, he argued that the saints themselves had given charms to those who had become ill through enchantment and that "many" other priests did exactly as he was doing. This forceful and effective argument was enough to produce dissension among the calificadores, and the Suprema had to step in to insist that the ease be prosecuted.^[92]

Evidence that the campaign against magical healing was having some impact on the practitioners themselves comes from the fact that known healers were becoming more reluctant to perform their functions. In 1642, it took the intervention of the governor of Castellón de la Plana himself to persuade Juana Font to cure a woman who claimed that she became ill after quarreling with her.^[93]

Love magic, which comprised more than one quarter of the eases of superstition tried by the Valencia tribunal, was largely carried out by women in an effort to cope with a world that had dictated their extreme powerlessness and subjugated them to husbands and lovers. In their pathetic and ineffective attempts to assert some measure of control over the men in their lives or to attract the attention and affection of the men they desired, Valencia's women could draw on a rich popular tradition of incantations, rituals, and magical concoctions and on the support of networks of other women with similar concerns. Knowledge of magical practices and contacts with well-known practitioners of the magical arts were shared among the women comprising these networks, but jealousy, competition for lovers among some of the women, and bitterness over the failure of amatory magic to produce any positive

results tended to make these networks highly unstable and productive of multiple denunciations to the Holy Office. Once they were brought before the bar of the Holy Office, their tendency to mix Christian prayers with superstitious incantations and frequent if perfunctory invocation of the devil left these women open to charges of "irreverence" for the sacred, "profane observance," and "sacrilege" even though it was agreed that formal heresy was never an issue.^[94]

The ease of Esperanza Badía, who was incarcerated by the Valencia tribunal on November 26, 1653, provides an excellent example of the kind of woman most likely to become involved in amatory magic on what might almost be termed a "professional" basis as well as the shifting and unstable personal relations that eventually re-suited in denunciations to the Holy Office. Orphaned at nine when both her parents died, she was married at age thirteen to Francisco Mayner, a bookseller who deserted her shortly after the birth of their only daughter. Badía then moved to Valencia city where she became a nursemaid in several homes and attracted the attention of a prosperous labrador. It was on this individual, Andrés Berenger, that she first used amatory magic to "tie" him more closely to her and induce him to keep his promise to marry her. In the end, the marriage never took place, since Badía's husband was known to be still alive and she lacked sufficient funds for the expenses involved in the annulment process. Poverty stricken, deserted by her lover, and with her last hope of marriage now gone, Badía began to supplement her meager income by practicing amatory magic (reciting magical incantations, mixing up potions) as part of a network of women much like herself. Within this group, Badía was among the most active practitioners of love magic, frequently working for women like Celedonia Lazero, with whom she lived for a time and from whom she received money on three separate occasions for mixing a magic potion that would cause her lover to return. Badía also taught other women incantations and was herself taught by others like María la Catalana, who evidently enjoyed considerable prestige as a practitioner of amatory magic, in part because she had once been convicted of superstition by the Inquisition. At the time of Badía's arrest, María was living in Valencia in violation of the four years of exile to which she had been sentenced. This did little damage to her business, however, and she kept busy casting spells,

reciting amatory incantations, and mixing potions for a large number of clients including Esperanza Badía herself.

In the end, this group came to grief after Badía was denounced by her erstwhile friend and client, Esperanza Coll, with whom she had quarreled over a man. With Coll's testimony, of course, the relative anonymity that had protected the network was breached, and the tribunal reaped a rich harvest of denunciation and arrests.^[95]

The widespread practice of amatory magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and the persecution of its practitioners may well be two sides of the same coin. The "European marriage pattern," which was well in place by the early sixteenth century, entailed later marriage and was characterized by a large percentage of women who never married.^[96] The competition for any available men must have been ferocious, and those women without dowries or special physical attractiveness utilized every means, licit or illicit, in the struggle. The persecution of such women by the Inquisition and secular criminal courts of Europe may tell us more about society's inability to assimilate the large number of women who were no longer under masculine rule than about any new and dangerous heresies or diabolism involved in amatory magic.

In his sermon preached at the opening of the second session of the Council of Trent on January 7, 1546, the bishop of San Marco in Calabria laid stress on the theme of the internal reform of the church that was to become one of the principal objectives of conciliar legislation. According to the bishop, the "decay in church morality had provided the dissidents with the weapons with which to attack us," and while few believed that, the mere reform of abuses would lead to a reconciliation with the Protestants, there could be little doubt that a reformed church would be in a better position to hold the line against further Protestant advances.^[97] The primary thrust of this reform, as Bishop Del Monte declared before the session of February 8, 1547, was "the revival of the pastoral ministry—the cure of souls."^[98] The new post-Tridentine church, unlike its medieval predecessor, was to be a parochially grounded institution with priests thoroughly trained in theology, preaching in accordance with Catholic dogma, administering the sacraments in a proper and respectful manner, and setting a high moral standard for the laity.^[99]

Unfortunately, as many at the council were aware, the mid-

sixteenth-century priesthood fell far short of this clerical ideal. Ease of access to clerical orders and the lack of any uniform theological education led to the creation of a priesthood deficient in theology, incapable of preaching, and prone to doctrinal error.^[100] Bishops' frequent absenteeism and their inability to exercise control over the priests and benefice holders in their dioceses resulted in a scandalous laxity of morals and an undisguised disdain for ecclesiastical responsibilities. Of course, the fathers of the council recognized these shortcomings and in Sessions XX and XXII passed decrees reforming the moral lives of the clergy and establishing the principle that clerics should be educated in theology in seminaries. But passing a series of decrees, however well intended, was not the same as actually achieving the reform of clerical life. It would take generations to finally achieve the goal of establishing diocesan seminaries, for example, and meanwhile there were a great many pulpits from which indifferent, bad, or even dangerous ideas were pouring forth each Sunday. Regardless of the decrees at Trent, episcopal authority remained weak and many bishops continued the absenteeism that had frustrated earlier efforts to reform the moral behavior of the diocesan clergy.^[101] The attainment of a genuinely reformed priesthood would take time, possibly generations, but time was what the mid-sixteenth-century church did not have. Faced with the Protestant threat and with the Protestant rejection of such critical Catholic institutions as clerical celibacy and confession, the Catholic church had to curb the worst abuses and doctrinal errors of the clergy even though the institutions of genuine reform were not in place. It was this realization of the urgency of finding at least a partial solution to the problem of the clergy that led Pope Paul III to issue a bull specifically prohibiting the preaching of scandalous or erroneous propositions and Pius IV to grant the Spanish Inquisition jurisdiction over the disrespect for the sacrament of penance implied in solicitation in the confessional.^[102]

Given the low level of theological instruction among the clergy and the importance of preaching as a form of propaganda, it was to be expected that the Holy Office would find a great many preachers who made foolish or theologically unsound statements from the pulpit.^[103] Of course, the excesses that the new post-Tridentine religious sensibility detected in many popular sermons were often little more than the result of a preacher's attempts to entertain or

captivate his flock.^[104] In other cases, however, popular sermons revealed a depth of ignorance and misinformation that must have been profoundly troubling to the Holy Office. An excellent example of this is provided by the case of Dr. Gaspar Livera, a respected benefice holder in the parish church of San Andrés of Valencia whose degree in theology seems to have been little more than a license to preach doctrinal errors. Among the propositions that the Holy Office was later to qualify as "heretical" and "erroneous" were Livera's assertions that the Virgin Mary had been ordained in both major and minor orders and that she was a true pope with the power of the keys like Saint Peter.^[105] On one occasion, Livera, who was evidently something of a Valencian patriot, preached a sermon in honor of Valencia's patron saint, Vicente Ferrer, in which he asserted that since he was the most virtuous and perfect of all the saints, he was the only one who could rightfully be called the "saint of God." Evidently, the tribunal and the Suprema felt that Livera's case was serious enough to merit exceptional punishment, so that in addition to the customary obligation to retract his errors in the same pulpits in which they had been uttered, he was sentenced to be perpetually deprived of the right to preach.^[106]

The fact that Livera was able to demonstrate at his trial that many of the propositions that formed part of the accusation were taken from printed sermons written by others is an indication of just how deep seated doctrinal error was in the post-Tridentine Valencian church. In fact, as the Valencia tribunal was to find out for itself, the presence of a doctrinal eccentricity within the tradition of a particular ecclesiastical institution would make the leaders of that institution close ranks around any of their number who was brought before the Holy Office for making statements consistent with that tradition. On December 6, 1628, Fray Jerónimo Navarro, a prominent Jeronimite preacher, was brought before the tribunal after having been denounced by several of his fellow monks for propositions that he had uttered during sermons in the chapel of the Jeronimite monastery in Gandía where he resided. Among these were the statements that when the church beheld Christ beaten and disfigured after the passion, it neither recognized nor wanted him for its savior and that the fathers of the Old Testament had a faith that was "formless, irregular and unpleasing." A search of Navarro's papers revealed another thirty-six propositions, many

of which were qualified as heretical, which were drawn from the writings of a number of different monks of the order, including a very well-respected master of theology since deceased. As this meant that "false doctrine" was fairly widespread at the monastery, the Suprema intervened to toughen the provisions of the sentence first handed down by the tribunal, and, in addition to forcing Fray Jerónimo to retract his statements, he was not to be permitted to preach without the permission of the inquisitor-general.^[107]

Punishment of a monk for maintaining theological ideas that were widespread and accepted as orthodox within the Jeronimite Order stirred up a hornet's nest of opposition among the superiors of the order which was quickly felt by the monks who had denounced Navarro before the tribunal. Testifying before the Inquisition was a violation of the rule passed on May 24, 1612, which prevented any monk from going before the Inquisition to denounce a fellow monk without the express permission of his superiors.^[108] A visitation to the Gandía monastery by officials of the order resulted in charges being lodged against the monks who had testified against Navarro, and they were all removed in disgrace to other monasteries. As one of the monks commented in a letter to the Suprema some years later, not only had his own once-flourishing career in the order been ruined by his decision to testify before the Holy Office but, in light of the punishment that he and the others had received from his superiors, it was extremely unlikely that any monks would be willing to come forward in the future.^[109]

Within the context of the reform of the church that was set in motion at the Council of Trent, the Spanish Inquisition's attempts to repress the worst excesses of erroneous doctrine were appropriate and laudable. The profound dissensions within monasteries and the animosities among the religious orders whose members dominated Spanish education, however, meant that the Inquisition came to be seen as the ideal instrument for destroying personal and intellectual enemies and punishing those whose ideas appeared to conflict with established orthodoxy. This, combined with book censorship, contributed to the decline of Spanish institutions of higher education, which in their heyday during the middle years of the sixteenth century had contributed so much to European intellectual life.^[110]

It was the tension between reformers and conservatives in the

Franciscan monastery of San Antonio of Mora, of which he was the superior, which brought Fray Anselmo de Gracia to the tribunal on November 22, 1680, to denounce himself for uttering a potentially heretical proposition. Fray Anselmo admitted that during a moment of intense frustration he had declared in the hearing of several monks who were most strongly opposed to the reform that if some were given crowns in heaven for their travail on earth then he would receive several. Evidently, Fray Anselmo was afraid that his enemies in the monastery would denounce him and distort his words to make them seem worse than they were and had come before the Holy Office to forestall them.^[111]

The strong rivalries among the orders that were based in part on differing theological traditions were highly productive of denunciations. In November 1698, for example, Augustinian Fray Ignacio Soso was denounced by the Oratorian, Dr. Tomás Tosea, for certain propositions that he was planning to defend publicly to gain the degree of doctor of theology at the University of Valencia. The case was eventually suspended after Soso testified that the propositions that he intended to defend were considered orthodox within the theological traditions of the Augustinian Order and offered to formally submit himself to the authority of the Holy Office. Even so, the fact that immediately on receiving this complaint the Inquisition imperiously ordered the suspension of proceedings at the university was a chilling example of the power that it had assumed over Spanish academic life.^[112]

In the struggle between the "novatores" and the supporters of traditional scholasticism, the traditionalists had a powerful ally in the Inquisition. The latter, except for a brief period during the 1520s and 1530s, had never been a friend of innovation, and by the early seventeenth century with the publication of the restrictive index of 1583-84, it had clearly ranged itself on the side of the traditionalists.^[113] The sure knowledge that he could count on the Inquisition's support against his intellectual opponents is what brought Dominican Fray Pedro Juan Imperial to the tribunal to roundly denounce the antischolasticism of certain members of the faculty of the University of Valencia which had been made especially obvious at an oral disputation that he had recently attended.^[114] It was pressure from reactionaries like Fray Pedro Juan and the ever-present threat of intervention by the Holy Office that

transformed the University of Valencia from the intellectually avant-garde institution that it was during the early and middle years of the sixteenth century to the bastion of intransigent scholasticism that it became by the end of the seventeenth century.^[115]

So pervasive was the atmosphere of fear and conformity in intellectual circles that by the end of the seventeenth century, Spain's theologians had become their own inquisitors and denounced themselves whenever they suspected that they had made a statement of doubtful orthodoxy. In June 1691, for example, Fray Silverio Garcerán, reader in philosophy at the monastery of La Merced in Elche, came to denounce himself for certain propositions that he had stated during an oral examination for the post of reader in theology.^[116] Some months later, a Carmelite, Fray José Marti, denounced himself for what he felt might have been a heretical proposition that he had uttered during a sermon.^[117]

In seminaries and monastic colleges, in universities and from the pulpit, the intellectual leaders of early modern Spain were the secular and regular clergy. The fact that more than 30 percent of those brought before the Valencia tribunal on charges of uttering heretical or dangerous propositions were clerics indicates that the Inquisition was deeply committed to creating and maintaining the impression among this influential body of men that safety and preferment lay in treading the well-worn path of orthodoxy, however imprecise its definitions.

The centerpiece of the Council of Trent's definition of specifically Catholic doctrine was its clear statement of the centrality of the sacraments in the practice of Christianity.^[118] At the same time, there was an uncomfortable awareness, fed by the personal experience of many who attended the council, that under present conditions, the sacraments were being administered badly and without proper reverence.^[119]

One of the most glaring examples of the irreverence that concerned the fathers at Trent was solicitation, by which clerics appeared to demonstrate their disdain for the sanctity of the sacrament of penance by attempting to seduce their penitents while hearing their confessions.^[120] The opportunities for such illicit behavior were considerable given the fact that the confessional, which provided a physical separation between priest and penitent, did not exist before the mid-sixteenth century and was probably not

widely used in the Kingdom of Valencia until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. An edict issued by the tribunal on November 3, 1781, complains of the disregard of many previous orders to employ confessionals and speaks of confessions being heard in oratories and private chapels in much the same terms as a similar decree issued 156 years earlier by the Suprema.^[121]

Alarm over the discovery of proto-Protestant conventicles in Seville and Valladolid in the late 1550s and the critical need to reassert the validity of the sacrament of penance in the face of Protestant rejection led to a growing concern over solicitation in reformist circles. Since the episcopal courts were notorious for taking a lenient view of this offense, Pope Pius IV, in 1561, granted the Inquisition jurisdiction over the heresy implied by such obvious abuse of the sacrament.^[122] By 1563, a letter from the Suprema recorded approvingly that several tribunals already had cases pending, although it was decided provisionally not to include the offense in the Edict of Faith.^[123] In 1622, Gregory XV widened the definition of the offense to include what was said before and after confession, even if it had only been a sham confession.^[124]

In spite of papal fulminations and the repeated denunciation of solicitation by theologians and moralists, however, auricular confession presented many dangers and temptations for both priest and penitent. The role of the confessor as spiritual and moral adviser encouraged a certain intimacy, while the confessor's obligation to ask searching questions about the sexual lives of his penitents provided him with the opportunity to bring his own sexual needs and experiences into the discussion. Since the institution of celibacy inevitably posed a series of grave psychological problems for many priests, such topics could easily lead to the verbalizing or acting out of sexual frustrations.^[125]

For some of the women who were victims of sexual solicitation, the experience of a confessor breaking his sacred trust was profoundly shocking. Mariana Llorens, a young woman from just outside Valencia city, was so upset by a series of improper questions put to her by her confessor that she felt suffocated and had to run out of the church without even receiving absolution. This incident disturbed her so much that it caused intermittent bouts of depression that were only relieved after she testified about the incident before a calificador of the Holy Office four years later.^[126]

Certain women were more than willing to listen to the indecent language and illicit proposals of their confessors, however. Marital relationships that were inadequate emotionally and physically left many women unfulfilled and eager for the attentions of the priests they saw for confession. Such a relationship promised the fulfillment of sexual and emotional needs while offering a greater degree of safety from a jealous and brutal husband than would a relationship with a male friend or neighbor. María Palomino, who enjoyed a series of relationships with a number of her confessors over about a ten-year period, had a husband who frequently beat her and forced her to have anal sex. Needless to say, Maria came before the Holy Office only because her new confessor had refused to absolve her until she had done so.^[127]

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Inquisition's persecution of this offense was the extreme difficulty of obtaining enough evidence to bring an accused to trial. The gradual acceptance, by the end of the sixteenth century, of the requirement of two independent witnesses to initiate prosecution created a significant obstacle and allowed some individuals to continue their profligate careers with virtual impunity.^[128] Of course, there were many reasons women might be reluctant to come forward to present their charges. The parish priest was a powerful individual, especially on a village level, and had many ways of revenging himself on those who had testified against him if the courts did not remove him from the scene. In the case of nuns, who were entirely subordinate to male spiritual directors, sheer ignorance played an important role in limiting the number of denunciations. In 1750, Dr. Domingo Campillo, special commissioner for the investigation of charges that had been brought against Padre Esteban Hespanique, found that even though Hespanique had been pouring filthy words and suggestions into their ears for four years, his penitents in the convent of Santa Teresa of Teruel failed to denounce him because they were unaware of the nature of the offense.^[129] Other women, like Maria Palomino, who was tied to a brutal and unsatisfying marriage, would have little reason to come forward unless forced to do so.

In the last analysis, it was the reputation of the individual in his monastery or among his parishioners that determined his fate. Padre Hespanique's practices had simply become too widely known in the convent to escape notice. In the case of Juan Bautista Catalá,

the rector of Yátova, the eight denunciations that had been received against him before he came to denounce himself to the tribunal in October 1763 were as much a product of the village's rejection of him as their priest as with his illicit sexual activity. The evidence even suggests that his activities during and after confession were regarded with a certain tolerance until he had alienated enough people in the community by the way he performed his office to leave himself defenseless. Witnesses described his frequent absences from his church, slipshod celebration of mass, and misuse of funds earmarked for masses for the dead. At one point, he was even said to have cut the communion loaf in pieces at the altar in full view of the congregation. In another instance, he simply went too far with his sexual activity. Catalá's friendship with Miguel Lisarde remained close in spite of the fact that he had engaged in sexual foreplay with his 21-year-old daughter during and after confession, made off-color remarks to her in public, and "spent many nights" with her in the rectory. Their relationship was destroyed when Catalá's lust for Antonia Lisarde became so great that he got her to promise that she would marry the brother of one of his servants. This agreement, which would have allowed Catalá to enjoy her sexual favors while her complaisant husband looked the other way, was contested by Miguel Lisarde, who went to court and got a judgment freeing his daughter from this unwanted entanglement. As a result, Catalá no longer visited the Lisarde household as he had frequently done before the lawsuit, and Antonia Lisarde no longer came to confession with him and later denounced him for solicitation.^[130]

A sociological analysis of solicitantes coming before the Valencia tribunal reveals a considerable preponderance of the regular clergy over the seculars, with the former accounting for 67.5 percent of the accused. Furthermore, among the regulares, the various orders of Franciscans accounted for fully 46.8 percent of the cases as opposed to only 6.3 percent for the Dominicans and 3.9 percent for the Jesuits. The age profile indicates a heavy concentration of so-licitantes (76.3%) among ages 31 to 50, when the discipline of seminary or monastic college was over and priests and monks acquired the greater freedom of movement that came with taking charge of a rectory or preaching and confessing at several locations. As far as punishment was concerned, since there was no actual

suspicion of heresy involved in any of these cases, all accused were sentenced to abjuration de levi. The graver corporal penalties such as relaxation or galley service or scourging were entirely omitted (although some monks were "disciplined" with a whip when they arrived at the monastery chosen for their reclusion). For the regulars, there was reclusion in a monastery selected by the tribunal, deprivation of the right to confess, and sometimes deprivation of other sacramental functions. For the seculars, there was reclusion, deprivation of benefice, fines, disciplines, spiritual exercises, and suspension from confessing and other spiritual functions.^[131]

Although Lea asserts that "the penalties inflicted were singularly disproportionate to the gravity of the offense," it should be borne in mind that these were grave penalties to inflict on a priest or monk as they involved disgrace, loss of benefice or career, and long periods of exile.^[132]

During the last and longest phase of its history, roughly from 1560 to 1820, the Spanish Inquisition joined the official church and the baroque state in a gigantic effort to remodel popular culture and the priesthood along the lines demanded by the Tridentine reformers. But if the repression of such offenses as blasphemy and propositions served to enforce respect for the sacred and helped rid pulpits and classrooms of unsound theology, it also had the effect of promoting a stultifying conformity that robbed both popular and elite culture of their creative spontaneity. Punishment of bigamy and solicitation may have helped to promote public respect for the sacraments of holy matrimony and penance but did nothing to resolve their root causes. By the late seventeenth century, even its once-innovative position on witchcraft accusations was beginning to appear less novel as other European judicial institutions ended or significantly reduced witchcraft trials. Like most of the other institutions of Hapsburg Spain, the Inquisition had become profoundly conservative, willingly sacrificing genuine reform to stability and demanding explicit acceptance of a set of obsolete intellectual concepts and moral standards.