The Instructions of Avila, in 1498, were issued in his name as inquisitor-general, and the assertion that he resigned two years before his death, September 16, 1498, is evidently incorrect.[495] In some respects, however, the Bishop of Avila had special functions which distinguished him from his colleagues, for he was appointed by Alexander VI, November 4, 1494, judge of appeals in all matters of faith and March 30, 1495, he received special faculties to degrade ecclesiastics condemned by the Inquisition, or to appoint other bishops for that function.[496] So long as they were in orders clerics were exempt from secular jurisdiction and it was necessary to degrade them before they could be delivered to the civil authorities for burning. Under the canons, this had to be done by their own bishops, who were not always at hand for the purpose, and who apparently, when present, sometimes refused or delayed to perform the office, which was a serious impediment to the business of the Inquisition, as many Judaizing Conversos were found among clerics.
This multiform headship of the Inquisition continued for some years until the various incumbents successively died or resigned. Iñigo Manrique was the first to disappear, dying in 1496, and had no successor. Then, in 1498, followed the Bishop of Avila, who had been transferred to Córdova in 1496. In the same year, as we have seen, Torquemada died, and this time the vacancy was filled by the appointment as his successor of Diego Deza, then Bishop of Jaen (subsequently, in 1500, of Palencia, and in 1505 Archbishop of Seville) who was commissioned, November 24, 1498, for Castile, Leon and Granada, and on September 1, 1499, for all the Spanish kingdoms.[497] In 1500 died Martin Archbishop of Messina—apparently a defaulter, for, on October 26th of the same year, Ferdinand orders his auditor of the confiscations to pass in the accounts of Luis de Riva Martin, receiver of Cadiz, 18,000 maravedís due by the archbishop for wheat, hay, etc., which he forgives to the heirs.[498] From this time forward Deza is reckoned as the sole inquisitor-general and direct successor of Torquemada, but Fuentelsaz, Bishop of Jaen, remained in office, for, as late as January 13, 1503, an order for the payment of salaries is signed by Deza and contains the name of the Bishop of Jaen as also inquisitor-general.[499] He relinquished the position in 1504 and Deza remained as sole chief of the Inquisition until, in 1507, he was forced to resign as we shall see hereafter.
IT FRAMES ITS OWN RULES
At the time of his retirement the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon had been separated by the death of Isabella, November 26, 1504. Ferdinand’s experience with his son-in-law, Philip I, and his hope of issue from his marriage in March, 1506, with Germaine de Foix, in which case the kingdoms would have remained separate, warned him of the danger of having his ancestral dominions spiritually subordinated to a Castilian subject. Before Deza’s resignation, therefore, he applied to Julius II to commission Juan Enguera, Bishop of Vich, with the powers for Aragon which Deza was exercising. Julius seems to have made some difficulty about this, for a letter of Ferdinand, from Naples, February 6, 1507, to his ambassador at Rome, Francisco de Rojas, instructs him to explain that, since he had abandoned the title of King of Castile, the jurisdiction was separated and it was necessary and convenient that there should be an Inquisition for each kingdom.[500] He prevailed and the appointments of Cardinal Ximenes for Castile and of Bishop Enguera for Aragon were issued respectively on June 6 and 5, 1507.[501] During the lifetime of Ximenes the Inquisitions remained disunited, but in 1518, after his death, Charles V caused his former tutor, Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, Bishop of Tortosa, who in 1516 had been made Inquisitor-general of Aragon, to be commissioned also for Castile, after which there was no further division. During the interval Ferdinand had acquired Navarre and had annexed it to the crown of Castile, so that the whole of the Peninsula, with the exception of Portugal, was united under one organization.[502]
Among other powers granted to Torquemada was that of modifying the rules of the Inquisition to adapt them to the requirements of Spain.[503] The importance of this concession it would be difficult to exaggerate, as it rendered the institution virtually self-governing. Thus the Spanish Inquisition acquired a character of its own, distinguishing it from the moribund tribunals of the period in other lands. The men who fashioned it knew perfectly what they wanted and in their hands it assumed the shape in which it dominated the conscience of every man and was an object of terror to the whole population. In the exercise of this power Torquemada assembled the inquisitors in Seville, November 29, 1484, where, in conjunction with his colleagues of the Suprema, a series of regulations was agreed upon, known as the Instruciones de Sevilla, to which, in December of the same year and in January, 1485, he added further rules, issued in his own name under the authority of the sovereigns. In 1488 another assembly was held, under the supervision of Ferdinand and Isabella, which issued the Instruciones de Valladolid.[504] In 1498 came the Instruciones de Avila—the last in which Torquemada took part—designed principally to check the abuses which were rapidly developing, and, for the same purpose, a brief addition was made at Seville in 1500, by Diego Deza. All these became known in the tribunals as the Instruciones Antiguas.[505] As the institution became thoroughly organized under the control of the Suprema, consultation with the subordinate inquisitors was no longer requisite and regulations were promulgated by it in cartas acordadas. It was difficult, however, to keep the inquisitors strictly in line, and variations of practice sprang up which, in 1561, the Inquisitor-general Fernando Valdés endeavored to check by issuing the Instruciones Nuevas. Subsequent regulations were required from time to time, forming a considerable and somewhat intricate body of jurisprudence, which we shall have to consider hereafter. At present it is sufficient to indicate how the Inquisition became an autonomous body—an imperium in imperio—framing its own laws and subject only to the rarely-exercised authority of the Holy See and the more or less hesitating control of the crown.
FLIGHT OF NEW CHRISTIANS
At the same time all the resources of the State were placed at its disposal. When an inquisitor came to assume his functions the officials took an oath to assist him, to exterminate all whom he might designate as heretics and to observe and compel the observance by all of the decretals Ad abolendum, Excommunicamus, Ut officium Inquisitionis and Ut Inquisitionis negotium—the papal legislation of the thirteenth century which made the state wholly subservient to the Holy Office and rendered incapable of official position any one suspect in the faith or who favored heretics.[506] Besides this, all the population was assembled to listen to a sermon by the inquisitor, after which all were required to swear on the cross and the gospels to help the Holy Office and not to impede it in any manner or on any pretext.[507]
GENERAL SUBMISSION
It is no wonder that, as this portentous institution spread its wings of terror over the land, all who felt themselves liable to its animadversion were disposed to seek safety in flight, no matter at what sacrifice. That numbers succeeded in this is shown by the statistics of the early autos de fe, in which the living victims are far outnumbered by the effigies of the absent. Thus in Ciudad-Real, during the first two years, fifty-two obstinate heretics were burnt and two hundred and twenty absentees were condemned.[508] In Barcelona, where the Inquisition was not established until 1487, the first auto de fe, celebrated January 25, 1488, showed a list of four living victims to twelve effigies of fugitives; in a subsequent one of May 23d, the proportions were three to forty-two; in one of February 9, 1489, three to thirty-nine; in one of March 24, 1490, they were two to one hundred and fifty-nine, and in another of June 10, 1491, they were three to one hundred and thirty-nine.[509] If the object had simply been to purify the land of heresy and apostasy this would have been accomplished as well by expatriation as by burning or reconciling, but such was not the policy which governed the sovereigns, and edicts were issued forbidding all of Jewish lineage from leaving Spain and imposing a fine of five hundred florins on ship-masters conveying them away.[510] This was not, as it might seem to us, wanton cruelty, although it was harsh, inasmuch as it assumed guilt on mere suspicion. To say nothing of the confiscations, which were defrauded of the portable property carried away by the fugitives, we must bear in mind that, to the orthodox of the period, heresy was a positive crime, nay the greatest of crimes, punishable as such by laws in force for centuries, and the heretic was to be prevented from escaping its penalties as much as a murderer or a thief. The royal edicts were supplemented by the Inquisition, and it is an illustration of the extension of its jurisdiction
