Letters from the Inquisition

By W. R. Maxwell

There are new stories and there are old stories. We gravitate to the new ones because we think they are fresh - we think we have not heard them before. They are not a re-make of a Hollywood film or a tired gag in a sit-com re-run . We are of the belief that if a story is old, it will not be interesting, because we have heard before. To be honest, this is an old story nearly 500 years but I assure you, you have never heard it before. It has been cloistered, locked away for centuries. Part of it was literally dug-up. If you think youve heard it all, seen it all, and read it all, you will be amazed at the story in these old letters.

I am not a writer; I am a researcher a digger a finder of facts and of tales, many of which were lost years ago, and most of which are completely unrelated to each other. But I am also a collector of facts, of these old stories, and every once in a while, they all fit together. I present to you 5 items from my collection on the Spanish Inquisition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456809409

Book preview

Letters from the Inquisition

W. R. Maxwell

Copyright © 2010 by W. R. Maxwell.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2010916520

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4568-0939-3

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4568-0938-6

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4568-0940-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

FINDING THE LETTERS

CHAPTER 2

SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE FIRST LETTER

CHAPTER 3

THE FIRST LETTER

JOSHUA’S FIRST VISIT TO TALAVERA

CHAPTER 4

THE FIRST LETTER

JOSHUA’S SECOND VISIT TO TALAVERA

CHAPTER 5

THE FIRST LETTER

JOSHUA’S THIRD VISIT TO TALAVERA

CHAPTER 6

THE FIRST LETTER

THE THREE WITCHES

CHAPTER 7

THE TALAVERA INQUISITION, 1519 to 1520

ACCOUNTS FROM THE VATICAN’S

SECRET ARCHIVES

CHAPTER 8

THE SECOND LETTER

THE NATURE OF WITCHES

CHAPTER 9

THE SECOND LETTER

THE WITCH’S PENANCE AND RELEASE

CHAPTER 10

THE THIRD LETTER

THE SURVIVORS OF THE

TALAVERA INQUISITION OF 1519-1520

CHAPTER 11

THE INQUISITOR

CHAPTER 12

THE CONFESSION OF RAIMUNDO DE TOLEDO

IDOYA’S ABDUCTION

CHAPTER 13

THE CONFESSION OF RAIMUNDO DE TOLEDO

THE JOURNEY TO FRANCE

CHAPTER 14

THE CONFESSION OF RAIMUNDO DE TOLEDO

THE BORDELLO IN FRANCE

EPILOGUE

Dedicated to

(in no particular order)

My source of inspiration, Nora,

My overloaded cut-and-paste buffer,

The fictional character, the Marquis de Sade,

The Internet and Wikipedia, for their help with research,

My soul mate, best friend, lover, and understanding wife, Nora,

The inventors of the personal computer and of spell check,

My high school English teachers, for not flunking me,

The Catholic Church, for the setting of this story,

My editors and the inventor of the red pencil,

My best and harshest critique, Nora,

and

My loving wife, Nora

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

This book presents three recently discovered letters written by sixteenth-century priests and covers a particular aspect of the Spanish Inquisition. However, the letters themselves comprise less than 50 percent of the book—the rest being the story behind the letters and explanations of this period in human history. By today’s standards, the writings of the sixteenth-century authors are quite sadistic in nature, and not for the faint of heart. If the torture of innocent victims, graphic nudity, brutality, senseless maiming and mutilation, especially of helpless women, is your sole interest, then you may want to skip ahead to chapter 4. For some readers, these passages may be their aphrodisiac of choice and the only reason they are reading this book. However, if the historical provenance of the letters, or their sociological ramification, is important to you, then you may want to stop reading at chapter 4 and resume at chapter 11. The story behind the discovery of the letters is fascinating in its own right; however, this book is not intended to be a mass-market, pulp mystery with a trendy archaeological twist, but it is far from a boring historical novel. Admittedly, the first three chapters may resemble both of these literary clichés, but the balance of the book is on a completely different plane.

The book is divided into chapters; however, each of the three letters spans several chapters. The breaks are at natural divisions within the letters themselves. The letters are presented in chronological order, and the chapter titles indicate which letter is contained in that particular chapter.

The letters, as they were penned, do not contain quotation marks, and this book is true to this earlier style of writing. After all, quotation marks, as a form of punctuation, were not widely used before 1860, and the earliest known usage is from 1647. There are passages within the letters that normally would be inside the quotes, such as verses from the Bible and passages that are clearly dialogues; however, in this translation, they are absent. This may be a point of confusion for some analytical readers, but most of you will adapt to their absence. Also, as the letters were written, the authors capitalized the title of Inquisitor. This may have been out of respect for the office of inquisitor, or out of fear of the inquisitor himself. In any case, this book uses the capitalized form in the translations of the letters.

Observations by the editor [me] are contained within square brackets. I have tried to place these notes where they will not interfere with the flow of the letter; therefore, they are scattered throughout the text. Usually, these notes are explanations of archaic implements or historical facts and have been added for the reader’s edification. They are usually one or two sentences, but occasionally the notes are whole paragraphs. If you prefer to read just the translation, then skip the notes in the brackets.

INTRODUCTION

History is recorded by the victors.

—Julius Caesar

After a few generations, the past exists only in records . . . he who controls the present, controls the records, and thus history itself.

History has to be moved in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed.

—George Orwell, 1984, paraphrased

History is nothing more than a tableau of crimes.

—Voltaire

In 1995, historian and university professor Ricardo Garcia Carcel estimated the total death toll for the Spanish Inquisition to be approximately three thousand persons. This estimates, he said, is based on statistics compiled from Church records in the Spanish archives by Gustav Henningsen for the period between 1540 and 1700. In 1997, the author Henry Kamen, a noted négationnisme historique, cited a figure of about 2,000 deaths and contends the Inquisition was not nearly as cruel as commonly believed. Both Carcel and Kamen are often quoted by the Vatican in their latest efforts to rewrite history and put a favorable spin on the Church’s past atrocities.

There are older estimates of the death toll made by others and made during the Inquisition itself. The last general secretary of the Inquisition, Juan Antonio Llorente, after becoming a Bonapartist and from his exile in France, reported that his official tally of the death toll from the Spanish Inquisition for the period from its inception [1479] to the present day [1817] was 323,362 persons were executed by burning. In addition, the bodies of 17,654 other persons who died during questioning were also burned. Llorente also estimates that 200,000 to 400,000 persons emigrated from Spain to avoid prosecution. So why should we believe Llorente? Because he had at his disposal all the Spanish records, plus the records from the Vatican libraries, which had been stolen by Napoleon in 1804 and which were not available to Henningsen. Also there is the account made by Hernando de Pulgar, a royal courtier and contemporary of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who had begun the Spanish Inquisition. Hernando writes that over 2,000 heretics were executed by fire in the first decade of the Inquisition.

So who are we to believe? The men who were actually there during the period, or the historians who only know what the Church has allowed them to see? Quite by accident, we have another source.

This book contains the translations of three very long letters dating from the sixteenth century. In these letters, there are references to sixteen inquisitions at Talavera in 1519, of which six people were executed and one person died during questioning. This is a conviction rate of nearly 50 percent. And this is just for a single year, in one small town of about 1,500 residents. Imagine how high the death toll would be if these ratios were applied to all of Spain for over three hundred years. While Carcel and Kamen claim very small death tolls, even they acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of people were questioned during the inquisitional period.

In addition to illuminating the issue of the Spanish Inquisition’s death toll, the book also follows three particular cases of persecution of witches by the Inquisition, but the letters themselves contain much more than the horrors experienced by these particular women. The book contains brief explanations of the historical context of the letters, detailed explanations of the devices mentioned in the letters, and also provides fact-checking and cross-referencing with other sources where possible. This editor’s observations are far more than rhetorical footnotes in tiny type at the bottom of the page. They convert the book from a dry translation set in a long-forgotten era into so much more. When the commentary and the translations are considered together, as a single work, the book becomes an exposé of the heinous methods and practices of the inquisitors and of the Catholic Church; but you are to be the judge of that.

CHAPTER 1

FINDING THE LETTERS

FINDING THE FIRST LETTER

The first letter, which is thirty-two pages and more like a small book than a letter, is the most recent of the three (1523). It was found in the Vatican Library in Rome in late 1998 after Pope John Paul II decreed that the Library be opened to scholars for an Examination of Conscience concerning the Roman Inquisition. The letter was never really lost, just hidden among the sixty-five kilometers of shelves which had been off-limits to all but a few trusted Church researchers and historians. The discovery of the first letter was quite by accident, as it was misfiled on a shelf containing much newer volumes of recorded vital statistics in central Spain between 1820 and 1849. In the early days of the Examination of Conscience, it seemed that just about anyone could walk into the Vatican Library, pull a volume from shelf, and start reading. The only rules were visitors could not take anything with them; the Library’s own archivists had to make all copies and that researchers wear clean cotton gloves when handling the volumes. The Vatican Library even provided the gloves. Researchers could take as many notes as they liked, even to the point of copying entire pages. The Library’s reading room was small and could only accommodate twelve people at a time, but it was open from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., five days a week. Finding a specific volume in the Library was a daunting task since there was no card catalogue and the Library staff was resentful of their private domain being thrown open to the masses.

But even the Vatican Library has its secrets; these included the Stanza Storica, the Congregatonia Indexia, the Inquisition di Siena, and the more generalized Vatican Secret Archives. The first three collections (Storica, Indexia, and I. di Siena) remain off-limits to this day. Their contents are believed to be writings and manuscripts by various popes and cardinals, which have been deemed too religiously controversial by the Church and could easily be misinterpreted by the secular world. One day these too may be revealed, but only after the Vatican has sanitized them and spun them in the most favorable manner possible.

FINDING THE THIRD LETTER

The third letter is from 1520 and was also found late in 1996, in Rome, in the Vatican Secret Archives by a group of Church historical scholars; however, it remained hidden until 1999. Prior to 1996, the Secret Archives had not been open to anyone, other than the Pope himself, since 1894. The Secret Archives were kept in boxes in storage and contained thousands of records concerning very sensitive matters, including the molestation of altar boys, the Church’s role in the campaign of Jewish extermination by the Nazis in WWII, the excommunication of Galileo and 10 centuries of the Catholic Church’s Holy Inquisition. As a group, these records covered the most heinous crimes in the Church’s history, and for this reason, they had remained unavailable for inspection for over a century. However, as part of the Examination of Conscience Project instituted by Pope John Paul II, these documents were catalogued and made available to secular researchers in 1999, but only by request and only in un-translated versions.

Like so many of the records discovered and released at this time, these two letters went unnoticed. In hindsight, this is largely due to their rambling discourse and lack of context. The original official Church catalogue of documents offers no explanation as to their subject matter and described them simply as letter to Br. Phillip (Dom.), by Br. Joshua (Dom.), 1523, 32 pages, Latin and letter to Br. Phillip, by Br. Joshua, 1520, 52 pages, Latin. At the time of their discovery, the letters and their author were deemed to not have a historical significance and were initially released in their raw, un-translated forms. Now that their significance has been discovered, both letters have been removed from the public catalogue.

The Examination of Conscience Project released all their records at a flat rate cost of $24.50 per page plus postage and handling, and three different reproduction methods were available: visible light, infrared light, and x-ray. The latter two methods are necessary, since the paper and the iron gall ink used at this time had become stained and faded to nearly the same color and are practically indistinguishable in normal light. If the researcher needed an x-ray copy of a document, it would cost another $24.50. To get a complete set of photographs of the 1520 letter, which is fifty-two pages, the cost is over $3,800. To obtain copies of any of the documents, a researcher had to submit his credentials to a committee for scrutiny, state his purpose for wanting the items, and wait. The duration depended on whether the documents requested were in the less sensitive Vatican Library or in the Secret Archives. If the researcher was judged as academically worthy, and after six to fifteen months delay, he would receive a very large envelope in the mail containing 16 x 20 inch photographic prints of the pages requested, plus a statement of authenticity. He also received a solicitation for donations to the Examination of Conscience Project for the continuation of their work. Since the death of Pope John Paul II, researchers are not allowed to view the original documents under any circumstances, regardless of the quality of the photographs.

This non-sequenced order of discovery of the first and third letters is probably due to the poor document management practices by the Examination of Conscience Project researchers. This seems to have contributed to the misunderstanding of the importance of the letters as a group. However, it is the second letter that makes all three a series of correspondences, and therefore more of a dialogue between the two authors. If there are other letters in this series, and there may well be others, then they are in all likelihood buried in yet another dusty box in the Vatican. Due to the nature of the subject matter and the degree of inappropriate behavior described in the three letters discovered so far, any additional or similar letters found by the Church will undoubtedly remain unreleased.

Over the years, the Vatican Library and the Vatican Secret Archives were more like a leaky sieve than a locked file cabinet. A lot of valuable content has been lost. Three factors have lead to these losses: the sack, looting, and burning of the palace of the Inquisition in 1559; the theft by Napoleon’s army in 1804; and the self-censorship by the archivists themselves. The 1559 fire was hardly all-consuming, and Napoleon did return most of the documents in 1810, however it is rumored that large quantities of Church papers were sold as scrap and ended up being used for butcher paper. But the degree of self-censorship will never be known. It’s like trying to measure the amount of water that has evaporated from a lake without knowing the size of the lake, the water temperature, or the relative humidity of the air around the lake. Everything is mere speculation. There is a faint glimmer of hope for the recovery of lost documents, that being the peripheral archives at the document’s source, assuming the source is not in Rome or is not the Church itself. In fact, before the declared the Examination of Conscience, the peripheral depositories were the only source for unfiltered research. Several regional libraries have been identified, including the Archivio de Udine, the Libra di Stato Modena, and Archivio della Curia. Of course, there is always the slim chance that some laborer will literally dig up something when working on an old church or monastery site.

FINDING THE SECOND LETTER

Unlike the first and third letters, the second letter was actually found, in the truest sense of the word, fifty years earlier in an excavation under an old church building in Spain. It was discovered under the floor of the Isabella de Castile transept of the old Santa Maria Church in Talavera de la Reina, Spain. The old Santa Maria Church has a gothic architectural style and was originally constructed in the early 1200s after the Moors were defeated in this part of Spain. A transept is the part of a cross-shaped church which is at a right angle to the primary axis of the building which runs between the main doors and the altar. Transepts usually occur in pairs, one on each side of the building. In the middle ages, construction of a transept was the primary means used to increase the capacity of a church building. If the original building had a very long central axis, then four transepts could be added for expansion. If a transept itself was fairly long, it would often have a small chapel at its terminal end. This is the case with the Santa Maria Church in Talavera.

The architectural plan for the Santa Maria Church are in the Spanish national archives in Madrid, and they do not show any transepts to the central building. Therefore, the Isabella transept is an add-on, necessitated by a growing population in the town and region. Also, the Isabella transept may have been built over a smaller, earlier transept as evident by the strange configuration of the foundation walls discovered during restoration. In fact, the transept’s foundation is completely separate from the main church and supports the floor at a level six inches lower than the main building. Records show that the Isabella transept was built between 1489 and 1492 to honor Queen Isabella de Castile, who probably paid for the construction. Prior to the Spanish conquests in Mexico, money for such building projects was usually not available. The construction plan, which consists of a single sheet of parchment, was found in the royal family’s personal archives. The original plan showed the church with a wood plank floor and not the slate floor found in the church today. In the late 1580s, the old church was essentially supplanted by the much larger Basilica de Santa Maria, which was constructed across the piazza. However, the old church building was never torn down. Over the centuries, it had been used as a school, as church office space, and as a storage warehouse. During the Spanish Civil War, it was briefly used as a military command post, but due to its indefensible location, the command post was moved to a more secure building in the town business district. After the civil war, the restoration work of 1948 constructed extensive emergency repairs to the foundation of the old church building, including both transepts. These repairs required that the stone floor be removed to access the foundation walls. It was at this time that a series of small rooms, or cellars, under the church were discovered. It appears these rooms had been excavated within the church in the early 1500s and the original floor beams and oak planks, shown on the construction parchment, became the ceiling in the cellar.

The cellar was used for a period of time, possibly as long as fifty to seventy years, then buried, and the stone floor placed over the top of the fill material. The existence of this cellar was previously unknown, and it is not shown on the architectural plans for the church or the transepts. The refilling of the space under the church appears to have saved the structure from its weak foundation until recently. However, due to the urgency of the 1948 repairs, which required the complete replacement of the foundation walls beneath the entire church and transepts, a proper and systematic archaeological excavation of the buried chamber was never performed.

In 1948 and 1949, the unskilled laborers excavating in the cellar room under the transept found many artifacts, most of which were saved, although some may have been taken as souvenirs by the workers. Very few artifacts were found under the main church building. The artifacts from the cellar include a large quantity of common, utilitarian pottery, mostly drinking tankards; several small glass vials; and six large metal basins. Talavera de la Reina is known for its high-quality clays and early pottery industry. Except for the metal object, most of the recovered artifacts were damaged or in fragments. The workers also found 112 metal iron rings embedded into the foundation walls, the remains of peculiar pieces of furniture with attached iron and bronze rings, lengths of iron chain, and small bits of copper, silver, and lead. Deposits of charcoal were scattered about the rooms, but not enough to indicate a building fire. Had there been a serious fire, there would be written records of the event and reconstruction afterward. The laborers also found a small locked wooden chest, which the construction company kept for a time in their site office. The local Church authorities seized the chest, since it was thought to contain property of value (coins, relics, etc.), which would rightfully belong to the Church. They were greatly disappointed when the chest was opened and found to contain fragments of countless documents and books and also a crumbling leather bag. When the contents of the box and of the bag were deemed worthless, the Church gave the chest, and its contents, to the Spanish government.

The bag was conserved, like everything else in the box, and forgotten, until 1972, when a researcher from the University of Toledo obtained a grant to reconstruct the centuries-old papers. The chest was found to contain eight hand-bound books recording births, christenings, marriages, and deaths for the families in Talavera and the surrounding region dating back to the thirteenth century. These records were composed like an accountant’s ledger, with a person’s entire life condensed to a single line entry.

The chest also contained two portfolios of unbound pages with more detailed entries concerning the trials and executions of heretics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These pages included a great many notes from the Holy Inquisition’s interviews, which would be classified as prisoner interrogations and tortures by todays standards. But these notes are not the official Inquisition Records, which are probably in Rome, if they still exist at all. Also, Madrid’s archives do not contain Inquisition Records from Talavera for this time period. The papers may be the rough notes taken by the scribes during the actual tortures. Later, after the inquest and often after the execution, the notes would be rewritten into the official account and sent off to Rome. The notes in the portfolio included mundane accounts, such as the amount of money paid for furnishings, wood for the execution fires, food and wine for the Inquisitor and his staff, candles, oil and animal fat used to light the prisoner’s cell. They also contained more personal accounts, such as the days of imprisonment, names of relatives, visitors, witnesses, and of course of the prisoners themselves.

The notes in the portfolio also included truly gruesome statistics, such as how many times a man would scream while the thumbscrews were breaking the fingers in his hands, or how many needles were plunged into a girl’s breasts, or how soon a peasant woman would beg for death after the pear-of-anguish was expanded inside her vagina or anus or both. It was as if this particular inquisitor was experimenting with torture techniques to define the limits of human endurance and he wanted the scribes to record every detail of his painful tests for future reference. On one of the pages found in the portfolio, the scribe’s writing was badly smeared, as if the page had been in a flood. Forensic analysis of this page revealed that it was damaged within minutes after being penned and that the causative liquid was not water, but vomit.

The one common denominator in all the notations concerning all the prisoners was the method of execution and the disposition of the heretic’s personal property. Often, this property was quite valuable, and there are records in Madrid, from other Inquisitions, of disputes among the Church, the local noblemen, and the Spanish monarchy as to who would get the property, especially land. For each heretic’s execution, lengthy passages were written concerning the time needed for the sinner to die, the amount of pain suffered during the execution, and if the condemned was repentant or not. According to the records, oftentimes they were not and professed their innocence to the very moment of death. The notes concerning a single person’s trial for heresy would fill four or five large-sized pages.

The leather bag and its contents were examined last. It was discovered to contain a neatly rolled quantity of pages, written on ordinary paper, and several small objects made of tarnished silver wires. The silver was returned to Talavera, since the Catholic Church laid claim to all things of value found in the old Santa Maria building. The paper had been flattened, by the weight of the eight volumes and two portfolios stacked on top of it, into a nearly solid mass, more like cardboard than individual pages. Abandoning proper conservatory techniques, the researcher let his curiosity get the better of him. Since his funding was