Inquisitorial Ideology at Work

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INQUISITORIAL IDEOLOGY AT WORK IN

AN AUTO DE FE, 1680: RELIGION IN THE CONTEXT
OF PROTO-RACISM
DAVID GRAIZBORD
The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies
The University of Arizona
Abstract
The article explores inquisitorial ideology as functionaries of the Spanish Inquisition represented and understood it in the late seventeenth century. My analysis focuses on the
ocial account of and sermon delivered at a monumental auto de fe celebrated in Madrid
in 1680. I contend that in the process of demonizing Jews and Judaism, the auto articulated a religious worldview with deep roots in a society not yet disenchanted by
modernity. My attempt, here, however, is also to anchor an interpretation of the auto
in its unique historical contexta context of anti-Portuguese persecution in late seventeenth-century Spainand thus to historicize more sweeping, anthropological readings
of auto ceremonies as forms of religious representation (for instance, in recent work by
Maureen Flynn), while deepening interpretations of inquisitorial Judeophobia (such as
that of Marvin Lunenfeld) that emphasize the socio-political dynamics of scapegoating
rather than anti-Judaisms preponderant religious dimension.
I. Introduction
On the thirtieth of June, 1680, Madrids Plaza Mayor was the site of a
spectacular ceremony called an auto general de fe in which 117 prisoners
were formally sentenced to suer for their alleged crimes against the
Catholic faith. Of the defendants, sixty-ve received penal sentences in
person that involved lashing, incarceration, hard labor, banishment, destitution, or a combination of these punishments. Thirty-one of the subjects received their penalties in egy because they were fugitives or had
perished. One prisoner, who also appeared in egy, was posthumously
reconciled to the Church. The remaining twenty-one prisoners were
sentenced to burn at the stake.1 Over half of the detainees, including
1 Josef Vicente Del Olmo, Relacin histrica del Auto General de Fe que se celebr en Madrid
este ao de 1680, in Miguel J. de Montesern, ed. Introduccin a la Inquisicin Espaola
(Madrid, 1980), 688. Please note that to complete this study I have utilized two printed
versions of Del Olmos relacin. The rst is listed above. The second is Josef Vicente Del
Olmo, Relacin histrica (Madrid, 1680). This older version includes a full text of the
inquisitorial sermon allegedly delivered on the occasion of the auto, and an illustration
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006

Also available online www.brill.nl
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a majority of those who would be executed, were Christians of Jewish

ancestry, so-called conversos, who had been accused of Judaizing.
Joseph Vicente del Olmo (1611-1696), a lay functionary of the Spanish
Inquisition and Master of the Royal Chamber of the Habsburg monarch,
Charles II, was the man responsible for transferring the twenty-one prisoners sentenced to die to the custody of executioners at the conclusion
of the rst day of the auto de fe. Del Olmo watched as throngs of spectators surrounded the quemadero, a platform on which the convicts were
to be incinerated. It was, he noted, impossible for soldiers to maintain
order owning to the enormous size of the crowd. As the prisoners were
led to the platform, Del Olmo observed that those convicts who had
shown signs of repentance appeared to suer less than those who had
refused to acknowledge their criminality:
It was with universal admiration that a very great dierence was noticed between
the penitent and the obdurate, as between the chosen and the reprobate. The latter went with a horrible color on their countenances, with disturbed eyes [which
almost seemed] to gush ames, and with the entire facial physiognomy [of people]
of such fate, so that they seemed possessed by the devil. But the converts went
with such humility, conformity, and spiritual cheerfulness, that it seemed that Gods
grace was almost revealed to them. One may believe that they were already in
heaven, because of the many prayers and penances that the merciful had made
for their souls.2
To the modern reader in the West, it may not seem unusual that an
authoritarian regime such as the government of early modern Spain
should execute its religious criminals in public ceremonies complete with
mobs of enthusiastic witnesses. At a time when various governments
had legitimized the public torture of criminals, such excitement was
common.3 That many of the criminals in question were alleged Judaizers
of the site of the sermon, with apparatus. Monteserns edited version includes neither,
but is otherwise identical to the 1680 document. All my citations of the relacin will
reect the pagination of Monteserns newer, visually clearer, and more widely accessible text, except for the citations pertaining to the sermon, which will reect Del Olmos
original text. A third edition of the Relacin, which came to my attention after the present work was completed, was published as part of the popular CD-ROM series,
Siglo XXI, Coleccin Clsicos Tavera, Historia de Espaa, Serie III, vol. 8 (1998). The
only monographic treatment ostensibly devoted to the auto is Jess M. Vegazo Palacios,
El Auto General de Fe de 1680 (Mlaga, 1995). However, Vegazo Palacios devotes only
one of ve chapters to an analysis of the auto (yet another consists of excerpts from Del
Olmos relacin). The rest of the work consists of historical background on the Spanish
Inquisition.
2 Del Olmo in Montesern, 747.
3 Maureen Flynn, Mimesis of the Last Judgment: The Spanish Auto de Fe, Sixteenth
Century Journal 22. 2 (1991): 281-97. Here, 294.
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is itself probably unsurprising to the educated reader. Inquisitorial

Judeophobia, deservedly or otherwise, is nothing if not infamous. What
is perhaps less familiar is something that Del Olmos comments articulate with clarity, namely, a religious understanding of penal justice that
focused on the spiritual solace of the convicts, and on the transcendent
ecacy of prayer on these victims behalf.
The purpose of this paper is to explore aspects of the auto de fe of
1680, especially the sermon delivered on the occasion, as an instance
of the articulation of inquisitorial ideology at a fateful crossroads of religious and ethnic persecution in early modern Spain. My reading of
inquisitorial culture will explicate that ideologys preponderantly religious
dimension with a special emphasis on the Judeophobic messages that
inquisitorial rhetoric formulated and conveyed. My reading will thereby
combine and further two approaches: First, Maureen Flynns more
sweeping, anthropological reading of auto ceremonies as forms of religious representation, which has already shed considerable light on the
religious premises of inquisitorial ceremonies, yet not on the Judeophobic
content of those ceremonies.4 Second, the approach of Marvin Lunenfeld,
who has recently analyzed autos incisively as means of socio-political
scapegoating of Jewish-identied subjects. Lunenfelds treatment, however, pays relatively little attention to religious ideation, religious rhetoric,
and their signicance for an understanding of the Holy Oce and its
persecutory practices.5 Here, in contrast, I will contend that the Spanish
Inquisitions representation of the enemies of Ibero-Catholicism in the
auto of 1680 both reected and interpreted in religious terms an inescapable
tension that beset seventeenth-century Spanish society between purely
religious and proto-racist6 explanations of Judaic deviance.
II. General Background
In order to begin a discussion of an auto de fe it is helpful to delineate
some general facts concerning the persecutory culture that produced it.
4
Ibid.
Marvin Lunenfeld, Pedagogy of Fear: Making the Secret-Jew Visible at the Public
Autos de Fe of the Spanish Royal Inquisition, Shofar 18.3 (2000): 77-92.
6 I rst used the term proto-racist in 1996 in a very early version of the present work.
The term has since entered scholarly discourse, though in connection to a historical context very dierent to the one I will examine here. See Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of
Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton and Oxford, 2004). By proto-racism I mean a
way of imagining human dierences on the basis of pre-modern (which is to say, nonscientic and/or non-pseudoscientic) notions of race.
5
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The unied Spanish Inquisition or Holy Oce (Santo Ocio) was established in 1478-1483 as a result of the unication of the formerly independent Castilian and Aragonese Inquisitions. In contrast to its institutional
predecessor and counterpart, the papal Inquisition, and although the
new body was nominally under papal control, the unied Spanish
Inquisition was in reality directly responsible to the Spanish crowns
rather than the church, and hence an artifact of state power. Nonetheless,
the Spanish Holy Oce was at its core a religious institution. Its chief
ocers were canon lawyers drawn largely from the Dominican order,
with subordinate lay functionaries or familiars ( familiares) recruited
from the ranks of laymen, including government ocials, among others.7
The Spanish Inquisition was founded as the Ibero-Christian crowns
consolidated their re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. At that time,
and throughout its history, the main, stated goal of the Holy Oce was
to uncover, prosecute, and punish religious heresy across Spanish realms,
especially the heresy of Judaizing allegedly practiced by relapsed converts from Judaism and their baptized progeny. These latter groups
wereand lamentably still arecalled judeoconversos ( Judeo-converts), conversos (converts), or cristianos nuevos (in Portuguese, cristos-novos, meaning
New Christians, as distinct from cristianos viejos/cristos-velhos or Old
Christians, that is to say, Christians of non-Jewish and non-Moorish
ancestry).8 As applied to the baptized children and other descendants
of converts, these terms are obviously inaccurate.9
By the era of the Counter-Reformation, the Inquisitions targets
included alleged Protestants, increasing numbers of former Muslims and
their descendants, Portuguese immigrants of judeoconverso origin, as we
will see, and a seemingly ever widening host of moral oenders (alleged
sodomites, bigamists, blasphemers, witches, etc.). It is important to
keep in mind, however, that the Santo Ocio was devoted solely to the
prosecution of wayward Christians. Professing Muslims and Jews were
See Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley, ), 81-86.

Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants were also known by the derogatory term marrano(s), meaning swine or, according to Carlos Carrete Parrondo, errants
allegedly from the old Castilian verb marrar. See Carretes explanation in El Judaismo
Espaol y la Inquisicin (Madrid, 1992). From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, descendants of Portuguese converts immigrated to Spain in large numbers. New euphemisms
developed or simply migrated from Portugal, including hombres de la nacin (homens da
naco: Men of the Nation), which in Spain became Portugueses de la Nacin.
9 This is a fact to which historical scholarship has been lamentably inattentive, in my
view.
8
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prosecuted very seldom, and then only under special circumstances.10

As is well known, Jewsnot conversoswere expelled from Spanish
domains in 1492.
Autos de fe (Acts of Faith) took place at the discretion of inquisitorial tribunals, usually when the latter deemed that an appropriate number of cases requiring sentences had accumulated.11 All autos were rituals
in which ocers of the Inquisition recited the prisoners crimes, read
the Holy Oces verdicts, and released prisoners to lay authorities so
that the latter would carry out the sentences.12 According to Miguel
viles, Spanish autos de fe were an institutional outgrowth of the sermo
generalis of the medieval (papal) Inquisition. The latter was a ceremony
of public sentencing, usually held on Sundays, in which a friar delivered
a sermon in the presence of lay dignitaries, clerics, and members of the
public at large. After the sentences were read, he administered absolution
to repentant heretics; nally, he released (or relaxed) recalcitrant
prisoners to secular authorities for punishment.13 The grandiose auto general of 1680 followed this medieval model in all its basic procedures.
As ritual performances, seventeenth-century autos de fe were lengthy
and decidedly theatrical. Unlike autillos (lesser autos reserved for minor
religious criminals and held at cathedrals and private venues), most autos
generales entailed massive public processions and compulsory attendance
by members of the clergy, the religious orders, the nobility, and the
high urban classes. Depending on the size and location of an auto, monarchs might also appear with their entourage and other royal ocials.
Of course, plebeian spectators were expected to participate in autos generales for the sake of their own edication, chiey as vociferous witnesses to the proceedings.
10 For example, Jews and Muslims could be tried if they were suspected of attempting to lure so-called Old Christians and/or converts to Christianity to Islam or Judaism.
A case in point is Yue (Yosef ?) Franco, convicted in 1491 of (among other things) having induced some Christians and attracted them to his Law. Excerpts of the trial
records from Avila appear in John Edwards, ed. and trans., The Jews in Western Europe,
1400-1600 (Manchester, 1994), 104-09.
11 Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, 4 vols. (New York, 1922)
3:209. The auto of 1680 brought together cases from various jurisdictions. Chief among
them was the tribunal of Toledo. Because of its location and large size the auto had to
be approved by the king.
12 On the timing of autos, and the rationale that undergirded it, see Miguel viles,
The Auto de Fe and the Social Model of Counter-Reformation Spain in Angel Alcal,
ed., The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind (New York, 1983), 253.
13 Ibid., 250.
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Like most exercises in religious and political representation, the autos

generales of the Early Modern Period were in part responses to the historical conditions in which they were rooted. The auto of 1680 was not
exceptional in this respect. As I will explain, a central and immediate
cause of that auto was the widespread fear that Portuguese New Christians
were contaminating the socio-religious fabric of Catholic Spain. The circumstance that triggered that fear was a massive immigration of Lusitanian
conversos that peaked in mid-century but whose repercussions would not
become manifest in inquisitorial activity until the 1730s. To be sure,
the auto owed its form and substance to other, less immediate historical factors as well. These included far-reaching social and economic
changes, as well as geopolitical and military disasters, that resulted in
what Jos Antonio Maravall has called the triumph of Spanish behaviorism or dirigismo, namely the conviction that the Spanish monarchical state had an obligation to intervene in the behavior of its subjects
in order to alter it, and in so doing reintegrate an increasingly fragmented society along rigidly hierarchical, conservative lines.14 Among
the social and economic changes in question were the rapid and destabilizing growth of Madrid in the 1600s; the chronic economic, and to
some extent political instability that beset the Habsburg Empire throughout that century; and a concomitant and rather pervasive feeling at the
Habsburg court that Spain was in a deep crisis.15 It is also worth noting that by 1680 the political power of the Holy Oce, like that of
Spain, was in decline.16 At that time, the Spanish Inquisition still nanced
its operations largely through the expropriation of suspects property.
Not only had the number of potential inquisitorial victims among prominent judeoconversos dwindled by 1680, but the era of the great judeoconverso asentistas itself had passed. This meant that the inquisitors could
14 Jos Antonio Maravall, La Cultura del Barroco (Barcelona, 1975 and 1980). See especially Chapters 2 (Una cultura dirigida), 5 (Una cultura conservadora), and the
Appendix (Objetivos sociopolticos del empleo de medios visuales).
15 On instability and later cultural stagnation see for instance Kamen, Spain 1469-1714,
196-275, although Kamen argues that by 1690 a process of stabilization and renewal
had begun. On the perception of crisis, particularly in relation to New Christians, see
for instance Ignacio Pulido Serrano, Injurias a Cristo: Religin, poltica y antijudasmo en el
siglo XVII (Alcal de Henares, 2002), 21-36.
16 By 1700, with the accession of Philip V of Bourbon, the Holy Oce could no
longer net prized suspects such as the great judeoconverso asentistas it had tried in the
early to mid-seventeenth century. Meanwhile, open calls for the reform, curtailment, or
abolition of the Holy Oce had become commonplace in high political circles. In 1703,
the crown gained new powers of supervision over the tribunals. See for instance Peters,
102-03, and Joseph Prez, Crnica de la Inquisicin en Espaa (Barcelona, 2002), 233-52.
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no longer count on the wealth of powerful converso families to replenish

the Holy Oces coers. Meanwhile, the Habsburg crown had heard
numerous calls for the relaxation of inquisitorial persecution since the
rst decades of the seventeenth century. The most notable among the
earliest (though largely unsuccessful) of these calls was perhaps that of
Philip IVs Prime Minister, Olivares, who was instrumental in recruiting Portuguese bankers and administrators to the service of the Spanish
court.17 By 1680 such calls had intensied and increased in number.
The overall decline of Spanish power would be most evident in the
reign of Charles II (1665-1700), when France political and military
might surpassed that of Spain. Hence, one may perhaps interpret the
massive auto of 1680 as an attempt by inquisitors to reclaim the social
and institutional importance they had enjoyed in earlier decades. My
focus here, however, is on Judeophobia as a central element in the articulation of what was, at base, a religious ideology: the discourse of inquisitorial justice. To understand that central element and its operation
within that ideology, it is helpful to survey a few key facts concerning
the Holy Oces pursuit of secret Jews among conversos throughout
the institutions long history.
Inquisitorial action against judeoconversos in Spain may be divided into
three main periods. The rst period was by far the most destructive for
the New Christian cohort and probably for whatever crypto-Jewish culture survived within its ranks. Although extant data are scarce, we know
that the Holy Oce tried thousands of conversos and surrendered many
of them to lay authorities for execution. The Tribunal of Toledo alone
carried out 2,507 prosecutions against alleged crypto-Jews from 1483 to
1530 (out of a total of 2,807 prosecutions),18 of which several hundreds
resulted in executions. The second period spanned much of the sixteenth century, yet saw a dramatic shift of emphasis away from the
prosecution of alleged crypto-Jews among the New Christians, and toward
lesser moral criminals of Old Christian stock, as I mentioned above.
The third period, which interests us here, began during the late sixteenth century and continued well into the seventeenth.19 Its catalyst
17 On Olivares complex views, see Pulido Serrano, 37-51. Here the author pursues
a revisionist view of Olivares supposed philosemitism.
18 Jean-Pierre Dedieu, LAdministration de la foi: LInquisition de Tolde, XVI e-XVIII e sicle
(Madrid, 1989), 240.
19 I present merely a general periodization scheme. Cf. Dedieus more detailed approach
to the same question, 347-52.
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was the immigration into Spain of large numbers of Portuguese judeoconversosnot converts, rather baptized persons of Jewish ancestryafter
the Spanish king, Philip II, assumed the Crown of Portugal in 1580.
The Lusitanian newcomers were drawn to Spain in part because
Philip, in a bid to stimulate the Spanish economy, decreed that the
Spanish Inquisition would not prosecute them for religious oenses committed in Portugal.20 It is not coincidental that the immigrant group
included a vast number of people who had been investigated (or were
in danger of being investigated) by the Portuguese Holy Oce (est. 1536).
Among the refugees were several people whose Spanish-Jewish ancestors had tenaciously resisted conversionist pressure while in Spain, had
ed to Portugal upon the proclamation of the expulsion decree of 1492,
and had been forcibly converted there in 1497, along with the rest of
Lusitanian Jewry, in a series of presumably cursory baptisms, the largest
of which were organized by the Portuguese crown.21 The irony of these
conversions is that they had merely stigmatized Portuguese New Christians
and their progeny as insincere Christians irrespective of their actual
beliefs and behavior. Stigma led to persecution, and persecution to the
descendants emigration, especially after the Portuguese Inquisition gathered momentum and Spain gained political control of Portugal itself.22
Did the Portuguese immigrants to Spain actually practice a secret
Judaism? Scholars do not agree on this question. But whatever the
answer, it is not arbitrary to suppose that a number of Luso-conversos
had not forgotten their ethnic origins and may have experienced some
ambivalence in their relationship(s) to the persecuting society that had
formally absorbed them.23
Once in Spain, Portuguese conversos and their Spanish-born progeny
played a variety of roles in the Habsburg economy. Anecdotal data suggest that large numbers of them participated in trade, customs and tax
collection, and various administrative and nancial services. Dierences
20 On this subject, see for instance Antonio Domnguez Ortiz, Los Judeoconversos en
Espaa y Amrica (Madrid, 1971), 62-63, 66 and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish
Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish
Apologetics (New York, 1971), 8-9.
21 Yerushalmi, 8-11. According to Mara Jos Pimenta Ferro Tavares, the commonly
accepted image of mass baptisms is accurate in the case of Lisbon. The implication
seems to be that this is not the case for other areas of Portugal. Id., Los Judos en Portugal
(Madrid, 1992), 163-69.
22 David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora,
1580-1700 (Philadelphia, 2004), 21-22, 51-53.
23 See Yerushalmi, 16.
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in economic status and occupational diversity were nonetheless extensive among conversos in Spain. Thus I believe it is inaccurate to characterize Luso-conversos as a city-bound, capitalist bourgeoisie without
serious qualication. All the same, scholars know well that to the extent
that Luso-conversos became part of public consciousness in Spain, they
did so because of the activities and inuence, both real and alleged, of
a few Portuguese bankers and government contractors (asentistas) on
whom the Spanish crown relied extensively, especially during the rst
three decades of Philip IVs reign (1621-1665), as the Habsburg state
struggled to curb its own chronic insolvency and meet the crushing
demands of an overextended empire.24
Educated pamphleteers and bureaucrats expressed some of the fear
and loathing that Luso-conversos actual and imagined economic activities in Spain tended to inspire. For instance, Cardinal Antonio Zapata,
who was Spains Inquisitor General from 1627 to 1632, wrote Philip IV
with alarm that large numbers of Portuguese of the [Hebrew] Nation
who move to these [Spanish] Kingdoms from that of Portugal . . . insinuate themselves into the administration of the Royal Treasury of Your
Majesty, making themselves owners of the border-crossing points [entradas]
and ports pathways . . . so as to be able to secure the undeclared earnings of their business.25 Another complainant argued in a shriller vein
that conversos had become Lords of [Spanish] Commerce whose sole
aim was to bleed the Habsburg Kingdoms dry, and thereby aid Spains
geopolitical and religious enemies.26
Signicantly, the Portuguese inux aroused Spanish suspicions of rampant Judaizing among the immigrants. As Zapata indicated in his letter to Philip IV, vehement presumptions of [the] Judaism of the
immigrants were cause for sleeplessness.27 Such suspicions ultimately
resulted in the intensication of inquisitorial activity against New Christians.
The concomitant enforcement of Statutes of Purity of Bloodpiecemeal
regulations introduced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to
24 On the role of Luso-converso grandees, see for instance James C. Boyajian, Portuguese
Bankers at the Court of Spain, 1626-1650. On the crisis of the seventeenth century, see for
instance, Henry Kamen, Spain, 1469-1714: A Society of Conict, 2nd. ed. (New York, 1991),
196-257.
25 Quoted in Pulido Serrano, 98. The translation is mine.
26 Anonymous author of a Memorial to Philip IV, quoted in Bernardo Lpez Belinchn,
Honra, libertad y hacienda: Hombres de negocios y judos sefardes (Alcal de Henares, 2001),
306.
27 Quoted in Pulido Serrano, 98.
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exclude people of Jewish and/or Muslim ancestry from private associations, religious orders, cathedral chapters, and the likeunderscored
the recrudescence of anti-converso persecution in Spain.28 These conditions betrayed a fateful evolution in the character of Iberian Judeophobia
that had begun with the expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492 and the
conversion of Portuguese Jews in 1496-7, but crested much later.
III. The Evolution of Iberian Judeophobia in The Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries
By the 1550s, a time when crypto-Judaism had virtually ceased to preoccupy the Holy Oce, at least in Castile, conversos had become culturally Ibericized and Christianized, and hence outwardly indistinguishable
from their Old Christian counterparts. The same was largely true among
Portuguese cristos-novos, irrespective of their private beliefs and behavior, not to mention their well-known preference for endogamy.29 Persons
reared as Christians who, unlike converts, had never professed normative Judaism now comprised the majority of the converso population. As
a consequence, ways of identifying (or purporting to identify) secret
Jews according to their supposed religious behavior lost much plausibility and social appeal. An underlying Judeophobia evidently persisted
among Old Christians nonetheless. The new realities posed a perceptual challenge for those who harbored such bigotry: How to identify
the Jewish danger? A popular answer to this question developed relatively swiftly. Lingering anti-Jewish sentiment in Spain and Portugal
now found expression in an old, yet increasingly widespread notion that
New Christians comprised a threatening nation, caste, and/or race
rather than a group identiable primarily according to religious criteria. Even the Holy Oce itself institutionalized ethnic prejudice. To
cite but one example, inquisitors (who were themselves required by royal
decree to prove their limpieza as of 1562),30 demanded that suspects state
their stock and origin as a matter of course. The suspects answers
did not constitute admissible evidence of religious wrongdoing, to be
sure, and even within the Holy Oce there were those who opposed
28
See note 47, below.

On Luso-converso endogamy and economic cooperation, see for instance the
articles comprising the section Redes comerciales y nancieras in Jaime Contreras,
Bernardo J. Garca Garca, and Ignacio Pulido, eds., Familia, religin y negocio (Madrid,
2002), 343-422.
30 Lea, 2:296.
29
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the Statutes of Purity of Blood.31 All the same, suspects who declared
that they were New Christians did so at their peril, since the inquisitors thinly-veiled, working assumption was that people of Jewish ancestry were prone to Judaize.32
In Castile the number of trials of alleged crypto-Jews had diminished
dramatically after 1520, but this did not ultimately aect the overall
shift to ethnic prejudicein fact, the decline is probably indicative of
the conversos acculturation, itself a main cause of the shift. Religious persecution and ethnic prejudice would again coincide and reinforce each
other, however. From the 1580s, when Spain gained control of Portugal,
to the end of the seventeenth century, when France eclipsed the Habsburg
kingdom as Europes hegemon, the presence of Luso-converso immigrants
and their descendants in Spain complicated and magnied the social
signicance of what we might call the ideological turn to (proto-) racism.
In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, nativist Spanish reactions to Portuguese secessionism compounded this latter phenomenon
(Spain would eventually lose the war of Portuguese Independence, in
1640-1668). A fateful result of these developments was that by the middle of the seventeenth century, heresy, apostasy, Judaism (real and/or
imagined), political treason, mercantile occupations, economic rapaciousness, and most importantly, Portuguese descent, had become
virtually synonymous in the minds of many Spanish Old Christians.
Members of the Royal Chancellery of Castile wrote to Philip IV that
the Crown should prevent Portuguese New Christians, most of whom
are of Hebrew origin, who were busy avoiding inquisitorial scrutiny,
and who were helping foreign princes undermine Spain, from having
contact with (true) Catholics lest contagion occur and the stain of
impure blood sully noble families.33 It is not surprising that alleged
Portuguese subversives, chiey conversos, abounded in the jails of the
Spanish Holy Oce throughout the 1600s.34 The auto of 1680 corroborates
these phenomena. At least sixty-three of the detainees were immigrants
31 Trenchant debates within the Holy Oce regarding the use and application of the
statutes of limpieza intensied in the seventeenth century. On the subject of Spanish opposition to the statutes, see for instance Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical
Revision (London, 1997), 230-54.
32 Graizbord, 108. See also 121. On inquisitorial procedures of interrogation there
exists an enormous body of scholarly literature. A brief, recent treatment is Prez,
307-29.
33 Cited and discussed in Pulido Serrano, 271.
34 Yerushalmi, 11.
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from Portugal or children of Portuguese immigrants. All sixty-three were

accused of Judaizing.35
How, then, did ocers of the Inquisition articulate their mission and
justify inquisitorial activities at a time when ethnic animus became deeply
implicatedperhaps more than everin the Holy Oces activities,
values, and world-view?
IV. Inquisitorial Justice as Salvific Mercy and Vengeance
Josef del Olmos relacin (account) of the auto of 1680, the only comprehensive, surviving record of the events of June 30, provides a partial answer to this question.36
Throughout his narrative, Del Olmo makes few references to the
nature and purpose of his role as a chronicler. Yet his introductory
dedication to the king leaves no doubt as to the authors main interest, which was (unsurprisingly) to pay tribute to the cause of Catholic
orthodoxy in its struggles against Protestantism and Judaic obstinacy
not against deviants of any particular ethnicity:37
Among all the children of the Church, the . . . kings of Spain always excelled in
their steadfastness and zeal. . . . [B]ecause of their vigilance [and their support of
the Inquisition] there burned in Spain the torch of the faith, whose pure light is
due to the Catholic doctrine, and whose purpose is to purify truths by consuming
[that is, burning] errors.38
35 Vegazo Palacios, 87, notes that seventeen of the accused (13.9% of the total) were
linen merchants, ve (6.9%) were tobacco stall-keepersin other words, people occupied in trades that were typical of Portuguese conversos in seventeenth-century Spain.
Besides the estanqueros de tabaco and mercaderes de lienzos, the accused included various other
subjects, all of them rather ordinary, for instance, the caretaker or administrator of a
salt warehouse (alfolinero de la sal ), a cobbler, a silversmith, a market-broker (corredor de
lonja), a silk-worker (labrante de sedas), a cowhand, a swindler (estafador), and the like. In
addition, three accused were spice-sellers (especieros), three were vagabonds, and three
were physicians. The relacin does not indicate the occupations of the rest. Clearly, the
days when the Inquisition could capture and display several great New Christian asentistas (royal contractors) at its principal autos were gone. On the livesand persecution
of such prominent businessmen, see Bernardo Lpez Belinchn, Honra, libertad, y hacienda:
Hombres de negocios y judos sefardes (Alcal de Henares, 2001).
36 However, Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 208-10, cites An authentick Narrative of the
origin, establishment and progress of the Inquisition (London, 1748), an English eyewitness interesting and quite detailed account of the auto. In the Relacin itself, del Olmo does not
indicate how or when he was commissioned to write the work, although it is possible
that he was instructed to produce it by his immediate superior, the head of the Royal
Commission for the Publication of the Auto.
37 Del Olmo in Montesern, ed., 638.
38 Ibid.
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This passage introduced a theme to which Del Olmo would return

throughout the rest of his account, namely the idea that Spanish
Catholicism sought not merely to destroy, but to correct its enemies.
In other words, the Catholic vanguard, led by the crowns and the
Inquisition, endeavored to create a more perfect society by reducing
heresy to ashes; the vanguard did not seek to physically annihilate the
heretics in all cases.
The seventh chapter of the relacin reiterates this theme. The section
begins with the authors detailed description of the inaugural processions of the green and white crosses.39 The symbol [of the green cross],
Del Olmo wrote, is consonant with the popular conception that the
color green signies hope.40 That was why the green cross was thought
to assure the prisoners of [divine] forgiveness.41 Once placed in the
altar of the theater at the Plaza Mayor, he elaborated, [the cross] may
encourage the prisoners to expect . . . divine mercy to produce . . . the
dignied fruit of penitence.42
To the obdurate belonged a dierent cross:
. . . [T]hose who abuse divine clemency, disdaining the apology which is begged
of them, are left exposed to the indignation of justice, which is armed, in vengeance,
with the faith; attending to the fact that [vengeance] is represented by the candid
splendor or whiteness, a cross of this color is also taken out [in procession], so
that, placed at the site of torment [meaning the quemadero], the cause of the death
of the accused will be evident. . . .
Del Olmo continued that the white cross could well have been red, the
color of blood. This would have conformed to its more bellicose
signication. However, he added,
it was found more appropriate that the cross should be white, so that all hope of
forgiveness might not be dismayed, and so that the prisoners may understand that,
just as that which is white is ready to incorporate anything of another color, so too the cross of
39 Laden with inquisitorial tradition, the procession of the green cross was a main
feature of most, if not all autos generales celebrated in Spain during the Early Modern
Era. As Miguel Aviles points out, the green standard was probably an allusion to the
central symbol of the inquisitorial seal, but may also have had its iconographic roots in
older processional practices, especially those associated with Palm Sunday. Another possibility is that the cross was inspired by Jesus implicit self-description as green wood
or a green tree while he was on his way to Calvary (Luke, 23:31). In turn, the white
cross appears to have been a Spanish invention. However, not all inquisitorial parades
featured this symbol. In some cities the white cross was not used at all. viles, 257-59.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
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the faith is amenable on its part to receive the tint that their love would lend it.43 (Emphasis
added.)
Clearly, Del Olmo was loath to abandon the theme of divine leniency
even when trying to underline the Inquisitions punitive strength. Here
Del Olmos words clearly reveal that the auto, like the Inquisitorial enterprise as a whole, was at least ostensibly designed to induce repentance.
As the content of the inquisitorial sermon would conrm later on, from
this understanding followed the notion that the Holy Oce celebrated
autos de fe primarily in order to eect a reconciliation between sinners
and Christ. According to the discourse of their planners, autos were
about salvation and the care of souls, and only then about burning and
ideological control per se.
None of this is to deny that the autos blatant display of royal and
inquisitorial powerespecially the public humiliation of the prisoners
was intended to magnify the coercive power of the Inquisition. Bartolom
Benassar has argued convincingly that the mere threat of dishonor was
one of the Inquisitions most eective weapons in the war against social
and ideological dissent.44 However, the inquisitors will to intimidate
does not explain why they and their lay assistants dramatized the inquisitorial process in such a way that the themes of punishment and discipline
Gods vengeancewere always coupled symbolically with the theme of
reconciliationGods mercy. For instance, if the processions had been
intended to publicize the eectiveness of punishment and nothing else,
then perhaps the prisoners would not have been accompanied by friars who, in Del Olmos words, ministered like angels among them,
trying to reduce the obstinate and console the reduced in other
words, trying to persuade the unrepentant and assure the repentant that
their troubled souls would benet a from remorseful, public acknowledgment of their crimes.45 The point is that the Inquisitions will to
destroy heresy, discourage dissent, and isolate political, economic, and
social scapegoats does not account for its desire to heal, console and
welcome the souls of the heretics back into the socio-religious fold of
Spanish Catholicism. In a meticulously ritualistic manner, the ceremonies
comprising the auto conveyed that the crown and the Inquisition
did not demand mere conformity with a model of social and religious
43
Ibid.
See the discussion in Bartolom Benassar, LInquisition Espagnole, XV e-XIX Siecle (Paris,
1979), 105-41.
45 Del Olmo in Montesern, ed., 705-06.
44
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behavior, but demandedand promisedlove. As I shall discuss, the

main, overt function of the inquisitorial sermon of June 30 was to articulate this demand and this promise.
For all the emphasis on piety, however, Del Olmos account and the
processional drama he described also betray the fact that faith was
but one of the criteria by which rectitude was measured in Spanish
society. In an early section of his account, Del Olmo presents a list of
elite familiares who had been designated to play prominent roles in the
auto, either as witnesses or as organizers of the celebration. All of these
familiars were members of the nobility. With typical obsequiousness,
Del Olmo counts them among the zealous defenders of the Christian
faith. More importantly, he notes that as a condition of their appointment, these great men had been obligated to provide genealogical proof
that they were not descendants of conversos. This was in accordance with
Spains statutes of Purity of Blood (Limpieza de Sangre), a host of prohibitions enacted in various Spanish cities, provinces, institutions, and
ecclesiastical jurisdictions as early as 1482, and annulled as late as the
nineteenth century.46 The statutes were designed to keep conversos and
their descendants from lling several public posts, from entering prestigious professions and institutions (medicine, government, notarial occupations, the army, universities, religious orders, etc.), and from marrying
into the ranks of the Old Christians, especially the nobility.47 The theme
of clean blood would return in later chapters of the Relacin, casting
a shadow over Del Olmos otherwise consistent assertions that faith
could cure any persons soul of error and malice. I now turn to the
way in which the autos preacher revealed the unresolved conundrum
of blood and faith.
V. The Sermon
Father Thomas Navarro, a member of the Dominican Order and the
Kings ocial preacher, composed and delivered the sermon. At the
46 The Colegio Mayor of San Bartolom in Salamanca was, according to Kamen,

233, the rst institution in Spain to adopt a statute of this type (1482). Scholars of the
phenomenon of limpieza frequently cite the sentencia-estatuto of Toledo (1449), which, among
other things, excluded conversos from municipal service. Strictly speaking, however, this
legal instrument was not a statute of Purity of Blood.
47 For a general discussion of the phenomenon of limpieza statutes see Kamen, 115-33.
The most complete monographic treatment is still Albert A. Sicro, Les controverses des
statuts de purete de sang en Espagne du XV e au XVII sicle (Paris, 1960).
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ceremonial apex of the auto, the friar addressed his listeners from the
main pulpit of an enormous stage that workers had erected for the occasion at Madrids Plaza Mayor. Surrounding him on that day was a vast
audience of commoners, inquisitors, soldiers, ocers of the state, fellow
churchmen and friars, nuns, foreign dignitaries, and members of the
Spanish nobility. Present among the listeners were the King, Charles II,
and the Inquisitor General, Father Diego Sarmiento de Valladares.48
The sermon consisted of six main parts. The rst was a salutation
whose content is reminiscent of Del Olmos own simile between the auto
de fe and Gods nal judgment in an earlier chapter of the relacin.49
Making recourse to what was by his time an inquisitorial clich, though
a crucial one, Navarro described the autos theater as an adjusted copy
of the heavenly auditorium that all souls would encounter at the end
of days.50 He noted that the autos inquisitorial contingent was an earthly
counterpart of the heavenly tribunal that would assist the divine
monarch in deciding the fate of souls.51
In the second section of the sermon, Navarro introduced the thematic axis of his argument, namely the idea of Gods long-suering
mercy and its pivotal role in human aairs. First and foremost, Navarro
underlined that God had shown enormous generosity and aection in
creating the world for a sinful humanity. He also stressed Gods astonishing hesitance to take revenge against the faithless, who had insulted
him throughout history and continued to injure him today, in their
homes [and] in the synagogues. . . .52 According to Navarro, God was
48 Del Olmo, Relacin, 144. Navarro recited his lecture from the theaters main pulpit in a voice that Del Olmo qualied as suciently audible (literally, intelligible)
yet the speaker could not be heard by most of the commoners at the Plaza Mayor. After
all, no voice [was] valiant enough to hold such an invincible auditorium. Ibid.
49 In fact, it is tempting to speculate that Del Olmo was inspired by Navarros simile.
50 Del Olmo, Relacin, 145-46. On the subject of autos de fe as conscious representations of the end of the world, ones rooted in early modern eschatological conceptions,
see Flynn. Lest the monarchical analogy extend to the Inquisitor General and not to
the Spanish king, Navarro hastened to note that God had willed the confederation of
earthly kingship and the priesthood. And indeed, he noted, Spain was fortunate that its
kings had always been like priests in their devotion to God. Del Olmo, Relacin, 148.
51 Del Olmo, Relacin, 148. Here Navarro oered none other than king Ferdinand of
Aragon, the co-founder of the unied Spanish kingdom, who had authorized the rst
auto de fe of the unied Spanish Inquisition and had allegedly carried rewood to the
rst brasero, as an example of royal zeal.
52 Ibid., 157. This was another well-worn theme articulated in the propagandistic relaciones of autos de fe. See for instance Edward Glaser, Invitation to Intolerance: A Study
of the Portuguese Sermons Preached at Autos-da-f, Hebrew Union College Annual 27, 1
(1956): 327-85.
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by his very nature slow to anger; he had always pitied the sordid moral
state of humankind. Consequently, God had refrained from exacting
retribution even when the Jews persecuted and crucied him. Indeed,
Gods abundant love for humanity was so tolerant of sin that he had
suered the crucixion as lightly as [any persons esh] would feel the
prick of a sewing needle.53
But, the orator continued, the time for a redress of injustice had
come. Navarro called upon God to awaken from the slumber of his
patient love and reclaim his honor by striking down the three principal enemies of Christianity: Jews, pagans (including Muslims) and
heretics.54 In the following passage, Navarro proposed that the third
group was by far the worst enemy of all:
. . . more than everybody else, heretics cause horrors [against God]. . . . [because]
while confessing some articles of [His] faith, [they] deny others with temerity and
obstinacy. . . .
. . . With good reason [God] calls this nation stubborn: because in some articles it venerates and believes the true God and in others believes in and venerates an idol;
such that [in reality the nation] believes in none, and does not venerate the true
God. (Emphasis added.)55
At rst glance, Navarros image of a quasi-Christian class of heretics

appears to be nothing more than a tendentious allusion to Christian
dissidents who deviated from the ocial dogmas and practices of the
Catholic Church, but who did not reject Christianity in toto. Only two
of the prisoners who appeared at the auto belonged in this category
at least according to the relacin. The rst was Marcos de Segura, who
denied the existence of purgatory.56 The second was Antonia Hernndez,
an alleged alumbrada.57
On closer inspection, Navarros portrayal of heresy as a melange of
Christian and non-Christian beliefs suggests that the real targets of his
censure were not Christian malcontents, but semi-Christianized conversos. The notion that New Christians practiced a debased, hybrid religion was not new. As early as the fteenth century an anonymous
53
Del Olmo, Relacin, 152.

Ibid., 158-59. Navarro did not specically call Muslims pagans, yet he included
them in the second group nonethelessand without explanation.
55 Ibid., 158.
57 Ibid. The Alumbrados (Illuminated) were pietists who believed that internal inspiration took precedence over adherence to established doctrine. On the history and religious phenomenology of this group see for example, Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism
in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados. (Toronto, 1992).
54
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Castilian author had caricatured the religion of conversos as a corrupt

admixture of Judaic, Islamic and Christian elements.58 So too, Navarro
castigated heretics for the supposed heterogeneity of their convictions.
But the most telling clue to Navarros conception of the renegades is
his claim that God considered them a stubborn nation. Throughout the
rest of the sermon, Navarrolike his Patristic predecessorsapplied
this term exclusively to the Jews. Thus it appears that his invective was
ultimately aimed at conversos of Jewish stock, and by extension, at the
Jewish nation itself, even though Jews could not be considered heretics
of Christianity at all, for obvious reasons.
Most of the preachers pejorative references to the Jews occurred in
the third section of the discourse. Here Navarro reiterated elements of
a traditional anti-Jewish polemic, the gist of which was that Jews deserved
the full force of Gods wrath because they had not recognized Jesus as
the Messiah.59 The rst pillar of Navarros argument was that the Old
Testament (especially the books of Daniel and First Isaiah) foretold the
coming of Jesus, predicted his cruel rejection by the Jews, and envisioned the Jews subsequent punishment at the hands of God. This punishment entailed the Jews dispersion, their enslavement by the Romans,
their misery among the nations, and the perpetuation of their blindness to the truth. In this view, the sorry condition and obdurate character of the Jews were necessary, permanent, and ultimate evidence that
Jesus was the savior.60
The second pillar of Navarros attack was a notion developed most
thoroughly by Christian polemicists during the High Middle Ages. They
held that the Jews were not only impervious, but were actively hostile
and dangerous to Christianity.61 Even the rabbis, Navarro said, had
known and understood the Jews failure to heed the true meaning of
their holy scriptures. Hiding their embarrassment, the rabbis continued
to oppose Christianity through Talmudic blasphemy; at the same time,
they encouraged other Jews to follow the erroneous, destructive path of
the Talmud and of Judaism as a whole.62 Thus, the paradoxical impli-
58 See David M. Gitlitz, Hybrid Conversos in the Libro Llamado el Alboraique, Hispanic
Review 60 (Winter 1992): 1-17.
59 Del Olmo, Relacin, 160. See also Glaser, especially 328-35.
60 Ibid., 166. On this theme in inquisitorial sermons see also Glaser, 327-36.
61 An important and in some ways inaugural discussion of the evolution of Judeophobia,
from Augustinian toleration to high medieval Anti-Judaism, is Jeremy Cohen, The
Friars and the Jews (Ithaca, 1982).
62 Del Olmo, Relacin, 167. See also Glaser, 338-45.
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cation of Navarros two-pillar argument was that the Jews very existence both validated and subverted the Christian faith.
The fourth section began with the orator paraphrasing St. Augustine
to the eect that heretics were the worst enemies of God, because they
make war disguised as friends.63 Citing a vision of St. Peter Martyr, a
hero in the struggle against the Arian heresy (and the eponymous hero
of the lay confraternity of familiars that assisted the Inquisition in its
tasks), Navarro visualized the heretics of his own day ripping Jesus garment, which symbolized Christendom. In eect, Navarro argued, heretics
were like angels of Satan because they oered the world nothing more
than a faith without faith based on absurd and capricious interpretations of the Holy Scriptures.64
Who were the heretics, and what were their teachings? The preacher
began his answer by stating that all heresies were born of the refusal
to recognize the pope as Gods vicar. He continued that several nefarious sects had come into existence only a little over 150 years ago
whose members denied the popes spiritual preeminence. These sectarians believed that the Holy Spirit had been absent from Gods wife,
the (Latin) church, and consequently that the time-honored doctrines
of the church were false.65
According to Navarro, the heretics failed to understand that the mystical body of Christ was like the human body, inasmuch as the head
alone could rule the limbs of both. Because they did not have a high
priest, the heretics formed a monstrous, headless bodya disorderly
multitude of competing groups that could never represent the one and
only truth, but merely spurt monstrous [doctrinal] errors. These errors
included such nonsense as Calvins views on predestination and the
scandalously misguided belief that since Gods grace was bountiful,
Christians could hasten Gods pardon by indulging in sin.66
By now it should be obvious to the reader that Navarro had restricted
his denition of heresy to the Protestants, thereby completely ignoring the judeoconversos to whom he had alluded in the second part of the
discourse.
Navarros sudden focus on Protestantism is not entirely surprising,
given that the Spanish church was at the forefront of the CounterReformation at the time of the auto, as it had been since the opening
63
64
65
66
Del Olmo, Relacin, 168.

Ibid., 170, 173.
Ibid., 170.
Ibid., 173.
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of the Council of Trent. Jaime Contreras has explained that the antiProtestant component of the Tridentine program formed a pivotal part
of the political ideology of the Spanish state and church in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.67 The prominence of this ideology in the sermon reveals that the auto of 1680 was a quintessentially Counter-Reformist
event. What is startling, however, is that Navarros section on heresy
did not include a discussion of the Inquisitions suspects par excellence,
the conversos, whose image Navarro had conjured in the second section
of the speech. The puzzle is compounded by the fact that a majority
of the prisoners at the auto de fe had been convicted of crypto-Judaism.
In contrast, only two of the reosSegura and Hernndezwere accused
of holding beliefs that the inquisitorial imagination often construed as
Lutheran.68 Navarros total avoidance of the subject of pagans and
Muslims throughout the rest of the sermon is equally unexpected, since
these groups comprised the second of the three foremost enemies of
the faith. Notably, one of the reos, Lazaro Fernndez, was an alleged
crypto-Muslim.69
A close analysis of the remainder of the sermon conrms the impression that Navarro did not care to acknowledge pagans such as
Fernndez, much less describe their beliefs; yet this latter portion of the
lecture also reveals that the orator had not forgotten the judeoconversos
after all. On the contrary, the implicit connection Navarro had drawn
between heresy, judeoconversos, and Judaism in the second part of his discourse returned to cast a shadow over his explicit arguments concerning the nature of heresy and the benets of repentance.
In response to the heretics intolerable notion of grace, Navarro
returned to the central question of divine kindness in the fth section
of his sermon. Until that point, he had directed the lecture primarily
to his orthodox listeners. Now he turned toward the prisoners and
addressed them with a climactic appeal:
So that you would know your errors, [the Holy Tribunal] has lovingly reprimanded
you with its mercy, and now attempts to heal you with the bitter collyrium of punishment. . . . See that your happiness is not true happiness, but insanity, your furor
is cruelty, and your certainty [is] ignorance, blindness and confusion. . . . If you
should prove irremediable, this holy tribunal will surely throw you to the res of
hell . . . you will burn and others will be fearfully elated, you death teaching them
67 See Jaime Contreras, The Impact of Protestantism in Spain, 1520-1600 in Stephen

Haliczer, ed. Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987), 53.
68 See Ibid., 50-51.
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to fear [God]. . . . Place your eyes upon crucied Jesus, regard him incarnated,
condemned like a prisoner to a thief s death [condenado como reo a muerte de ladrn],
all bloody among the thorns, all confusion in his nakedness, and all pain on the
cross, [then] you will see how he is the same one that Isaiah paints in chapters 52 and 53
of his prophecy, and [you will see] that the son of God, who traveled such a long
journey, spanning such distant destinations as heaven and Calvary, did so only to
save your souls . . . do not lose them!70 (Emphasis added.)
This vivid admonition was followed by the epilogue, an homage to the

Inquisition and the Catholic monarchs of Spain. Navarro emphasized
that the Spanish crowns had always wielded Gods sword to decapitate
the enemies of the Christian faith, for the kings recognized that Gods
divine love always grows and is not satised with [mere] reverence
towards the dear faith, but obliges everyone to love the faith through education or by force (emphasis added).71 For its part, he added, the Inquisition
had proven itself worthy of its mission by acting as Gods pious avenger.
And just as Alexander the Great had reached the inaccessible peak of
the mountains of Arnon by paying homage to the olive trees of the
goddess Minerva, the symbols of mercy, so too the Catholic kings and
the Inquisition had allowed Spain to reach astonishing prosperity by
serving Mary, the mother of misericordia.72 Navarro was condent that
the conquest and conversion of the Indies were signs of the singular
fondness with which God regarded the Spanish kingdom and its zealous and merciful leaders.73
A striking indication of the persuasive power of inquisitorial compassion occurred shortly after Navarro nished speaking, when two of
the impenitent prisoners made it known through the religiosos (the friars) that they wished to abjure their sins. Both were taken underneath
the stage, where an inquisitor heard their confessions. He subsequently
recommended to the Inquisitor General that the two be granted clemency.
Sarmiento accepted this advice, liberating [the two prisoners] from
death and declaring them reconciled with the church, to the spectators
great delight and relief. Del Olmo suggested that everyone in the audience clapped very much in the happy knowledge that [Gods] mercy
was greater than his rigor.74 Whatever the spectators true motivation,
70
Del Olmo, Relacin, 178-80.

Ibid., 184.
72 Ibid.,188. So lackadaisical was Navarros attitude towards indels that the parallel
he drew was between a Catholic empire and a pagan one, notwithstanding his earlier
warning that pagans were enemies of God.
73 Ibid., 189, see also 182-86.
74 Ibid., 198-99.
71
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Del Olmos impression was that the solemnity and tension of the auto
had started to give way to a climate of triumphant expectation.
VI. The Meanings of the Sermon
The explicit message of the last portion of the sermon was simple: the
world-wide success of Spanish Catholicism, including its impending triumph over heresy at the auto de fe, was the well-deserved product of
Christian mercy. From the beginning, Navarros argument had laid the
groundwork for this optimistic nale by positing Gods inexhaustible
love, and by describing it as the sine qua non of human redemption,
indeed, of the very existence of the world. The epilogue merely verbalized what the processions had conveyed in symbolic terms, and the
kings oath had rearmed, namely that the Inquisition and the crown
were the terrestrial agents of Gods mercy. Furthermore, the sermon
communicated that in order to receive Gods love, one must love God.
Or as Navarro put it, Gods divine love always grows and is not satised
with [mere] reverence towards the dear faith, but obliges everyone to love
the faith. . . . (Emphasis added.)
Navarros equally signicant, implicit message centered on his understanding of the Jews role in history. According to Navarro, the Jews
did not, and could not accept the Christian messiah, because God had
decreed that their miserable existence would serve as evidence of the
truth of revelation. At the same time, Navarro argued that Jews were
perennially subversive of the Christian truth. In other words, the detestable
Jews never changed, and would therefore remain dangerous enemies of Christianity.75
The momentous implication of this two-sided view was that the
Judaizers who appeared at the auto, and Judaizers in general, were
not really heretics at all, but were, had always been, and would always
remain Jews, despite their ancestors conversion to Christianity.
Two inconsistencies embedded in the rhetorical structure of the sermon indicate that Navarro regarded conversos of Jewish descent as nothing more than perdious Jews.76 First, even though the orator had let
his audience know that heretics were the ones who would be sentenced
at the auto, he did not make any open or direct reference to the major-
75 This view challenges the Pauline notion that a remnant of the Jewish People
would convert and become a genuine constituent of the Christian community of faith.
See for instance Romans 11:1-10.
76 Del Olmo, 160.
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ity of Judaizers who sat a few meters from his pulpit, in the prisoners
grada. By the same token, he did not make a single, explicit mention
of the alleged problem of insincere conversion, the Inquisitions raison
dtre. Instead, he intimated that heretics were a stubborn nation, and
proceeded to speak at length about the obstinate Jews and their pernicious yet necessary function in the world.
Second, in his nal admonition to the reos, Navarro did not advise
them to renounce the very beliefs that he had characterized as typical
of heretics in the fourth section of his address. For instance, he did not
call upon the prisoners to recognize the primacy of the Pope; he did
not speak to them about the real presence of Jesus in the consecrated
host, about Marian devotion, about ecclesiology, or about any other
doctrinal bone-of-contention between Catholics and Protestants. What
he did urge the prisoners to do is recognize that Isaiahs prophecy was
a conclusive prediction of Jesus. This is precisely what Christian conversionists had demanded of Jews throughout the Middle Ages.77
It is quite revealing of the Judeophobic mind-frame of the inquisitor
that he spent approximately one fourth of his sermon discussing the
Jews, when there were no Jews in Spain at the time of the auto (at least
no Jews who professed their religion openly, save for a handful of foreign merchants and diplomats who enjoyed special status). Again, the
duty of the Holy Oce had never been to persecute Jews, but rather
to root out Christians who Judaized. Yet here was Navarro, centuries
after the expulsion of Spanish Jews, excoriating them for the crucixion,
and calling them one of the three foremost enemies of God.
When it came to reconstructing the image of judeoconversos in light of
their purportedly Jewish character, the orator proceeded with greater
circumspectionand with good reason. Had Navarro equated conversos
with Jews openly, he would have called into question the ecacy of
conversion and repentance as antidotes to error and moral corruption.
He would also have challenged the value of inquisitorial (and by extension divine) mercy, the supposed catalyst and guarantor of spiritual
renewal. In short, the preacher would have agrantly challenged not
only the necessity of performing autos de fe, but the religious basis of
77 Obviously, Protestants and Catholics had no quarrel as to the basic Christological

interpretation of Isaiah. Specialists have produced an immense body of scholarly literature on Christian, anti-Jewish polemics in the Middle Ages, including arguments concerning the proper interpretation of Isaiah. For an annotated, general bibliography,
see http://www.icjs.org/bibliog.html#Anchor-I.
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Inquisitorial justice as a whole, namely the Holy Oces supposed ability to extinguish error and transform the souls of sinners.78
Although the preacher did not speak of Jewish blood as the source
of Jewish perdy, the substance of his message did lean in an essentialist direction: It was the Jews immutable national character that
explained their evil. Hence Navarros use of the biblical phrase stubborn nation. Near the end of the relacin, Del Olmo articulated a more
patently ethnicist version of this view as he witnessed the last of the
prisoners being burned at the stake:79
. . . [T]he means that the Holy Tribunal applies to disabuse [these prisoners] of
their errors are sacred, and the proofs that it oers to convince them are so
many . . . that none of [the prisoners] can have a pretext other than their voluntary obstinacy for not embracing the Christian religion. The inclination of blood [el
empeo de la sangre] dominates the men of this nation, as does [their] arrogance in placing the blindness of their elders in front of the wisdom of the Christian doctors. . . .
Fomented by sensuality and greed, [this arrogance] makes their eyes blind to reason;
and therefore praises must be given to the innite clemency of God, who, in view
of such ingratitude, gives such powerful succor to some of them that they are subjugated to the loving guild of our mother, the church. . . . (Emphasis added.)80
Like the preacher, Del Olmo did not entirely abandon the possibility
that Gods benevolence could cure at least some hardened souls. Still,
the impression is unavoidable that an undercurrent of (proto-)racism
ran through the ideological core of his relacin, and that Del Olmos
sense of ethnic dierence conicted with his avowed trust in the curative power of divine mercy. The chroniclers essentialist bent was also
compounded by a rather crass and quite ancient Judeophobia: for him,
the Jews were not only implacable, but also indulgent and rapacious.81
Del Olmos outlook engendered the same logical quandary as Navarros
sermon in that it pursued two mutually exclusive interpretations of evil
78 This paragraph reworks part of a general discussion of inquisitorial views of religious enlightenment in Graizbord, 116.
79 I prefer the term ethnicist, not racist, because of the latters association with
modern, pseudo-scientic notions of race. Such notions did not exist in the seventeenth
century, although the creeping idea that blood carried immutable moral traits had made
its appearance in Spain before that time. Del Olmos prejudice was, at base, against an
ethnic group that was reputed to profess a particular religion and not against a race in
the modern sense of the word; the chimera of blood, it seems, merely allowed Del
Olmo to explain his prejudice to himself and to his contemporaries.
81 See a parallel discussion in Graizbord, 119. The imputation of an insatiable sexual appetite to Jews can be traced to early Christian writers such as John Chrysostom.
See for example his homilies against the Jews, reproduced electronically in http://www.
fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.html. It is unfortunate that the original
translator of the sermons is unknown in this instance.
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one religious and explicit, the other ethnicist or proto-racist and (in
Navarros case) implicit. The rst interpretation dened evil chiey in
terms of ideological deviance. This view posited that impurity of faith
could only be cured by repentance under the auspices of inquisitorial
mercy, the conduit and earthly guarantor of Gods grace. The second
interpretation explained immoralityspecically, Jewish immorality
as a natural, blood-borne attribute; according to this view, impurity of
blood was irreversible.82
Navarro and Del Olmo were not alone in creating and maintaining
this ideological muddle. Navarro had already revealed his societys simultaneous concern with purity of faith ( pureza de fe) and purity of blood
(limpieza de sangre) in the earlier part of the work, when he listed religious orthodoxy and clean lineage as two of the merits of prominent
familiares. In his nal summary of the prisoners crimes and sentences,
Del Olmo revealed his preoccupation with questions of blood once again.
Here, he took pains to identify the genealogical origin of the Judaizers.
Often he employed euphemisms for jew that were widely accepted in
his day. For instance,
Juan de Espaa Sotomayor, born in Lucena . . . Portuguese of the nation and cloth
merchant . . . was relaxed in egy. . . .83
Gaspar de Robles . . . son of Portuguese parents of the nation . . . tobacconist . . .
38 years of age; [convicted] for being a persistent Judaizer; appeared at the auto
with the insignia of those who are to be relaxed,84 and [he was] gagged; his sentence was read . . . and he was released to justice and the secular arm [of the law,
and] his property was conscated.85
Needless to say, by the nation Del Olmo meant the Jewish nation
including, in this understanding, judeoconversos. The terms Portuguese
and of the Portuguese nation connoted Jewishness as well, for reasons related to the peculiar historical context of their occurrence, namely,
the period immediately following the migrations of Portuguese conversos
into Spain, and the war of Portuguese Independence (1640-1668)
that many Old Christians in that country accused conversos of having
supported.86
82
Graizbord, 117.
Del Olmo in Montesern, 731.
84 That is to say, released to secular authorities for execution.
85 Ibid., 735.
86 On this subject see for example Antonio Domnguez Ortiz, Los extranjeros en la vida
espaola durante el siglo XVII y otros artculos (Seville, 1996), especially 99.
83
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david graizbord
VII. On the AUTOS Religious Dimension
As Del Olmo and Navarro presented it, the auto was a religious ceremony the purpose of which was to heal the aicted souls of the prisoners, and thus to rid society of the spiritual illness of heresy. As the
chronicler put it, the illness had to be consumed, if necessary by physically destroying its human agents, the heretics. In that sense, the auto
served to perform a kind of exorcism. Moreover, the auto t the prole
of what the anthropologist I. M. Lewis has called a shamanic seance,
in that it not only served to purge social illness but to explain it.87 The
autos protagonists instructed their audience on the nature of the illness,
and assigned blame for it. Like the cure itself, the explanation was necessary in order for the sick society to regain its sense of stability in
a prolonged and disquieting period of rapid urbanization, nancial crisis, war, and the unprecedented agglomeration of state authority. In
short, the auto attempted to make sense of a changing world that had
lost much of its traditional meaning. Navarros sermon and the reading of crimes and sentences were the principal means by which the
Inquisition explained the societys malady (i.e., Jews and Protestants were
tearing the fabric of Christendom apart), dened its remedy (repentance
and/or death), and prepared the audience and the prisoners for the
imposition of the cure (reconciliation or relaxation).
Notably, Navarros description of the social malady allowed the elite
and the plebeian audience to imagine judeoconversos as duplicitous predators, and thus to express an intense Judeophobia that had been part
and parcel of Christian religious militancy at least since the High Middle
Ages.88 If Navarros references to Jewish evil stirred the emotions of residents of Madrid, it was partly because Christian accusations that the
Jews were brutal enemies of the truth were familiar.
Furthermore, the sermon, and the auto as a whole, helped a hegemonic Spanish State-Catholicism (a central cult in Lewis denition)
fulll one of its primary functions, namely to maintain its power by stigmatizing outsiders. In this case, the main victims of defamation were
the socially peripheral Luso-conversos, whose formal inclusion by IberoCatholicism centuries earlier, and whose entry into the Spanish fray
87 See I.M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (London,
1971 and 1989) 151, 169-170. Lunenfelds treatment explains how autos accomplished
the scapegoating of conversos.
88 See Cohen, 242-51. This point is oddly missing from Lunenfelds otherwise admirable
(if limited) argument.
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from the sixteenth century to the independence of Portugal in 1640, only

presented Spanish Old Christians with the more dicult and unwelcome
challenge of integrating them into the social and cultural mainstream.89
Following the classic approaches of the medievalist R. I. Moore90 and
the anthropologist Mary Douglas,91 one may also assert that the auto
expressed Christian anxieties about the breaking of formerly rigid social
boundaries by the parvenu judeoconversos. In this understanding, the autos
attack on conversos as a social group appears as a reactionary attempt
to counter the sudden re-entry of Jews (in fact, Jewish-identied subjects) into an imagined Christian mainstream by reiterating or reconguring
religious notions of social purity and pollution. The image of a widespread Judaic heresy among Portuguese conversos served to (re-)draw
the line between Old Christians and members of a mobile minority
population. In a sense, the auto transformed judeoconversos into living
taboos by warning the faithful that Portuguese New Christians (and their
Spanish brethren) were as evil as the Jews of old. Del Olmos ultimate
preoccupation with blood purity was an example of his compatriots
veritable obsession with social border-setting, but even his form of ethnic or proto-racist prejudice sought to reimpose social distinctions by
linking infected blood (sangre infecta) to the real or imagined religious
beliefs and practices of the conversos. As I have argued elsewhere, the
point is that even in Iberian racism, the idea that social dierence
implied religious dierence was never far below the surface.92
The autos proposed way of restoring individual and social health centered on the religious concept of misericordia. Navarro and Del Olmo
were keen to portray divine mercy as the facilitator and guarantor of
eternal justice, and to depict the Inquisition and the Iberian crowns as
the agents of Gods love. In this respect, neither the orator nor the
chronicler departed from early modern trends in Catholic thought. As
is well known, the idea that the Catholic Church was the legitimate
mediator between God and humanity was one of the central tenets of
Tridentine political philosophy.93 The notion that a royal-ecclesiastical
apparatus was the one responsible for ensuring the spiritual integrity of
society had roots in the militant era of the reconquista. Now the question
89
90
91
92
93
See Lewis, 149-53.

See R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, 1966).
This last sentence reworks one in Graizbord, 117.
See Barnes-Karol, 63.
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remains: what was the origin of the Navarro and Del Olmos all-important concept of justice?
I believe, as Maureen Flynn does, that the answer lies in the religious matrix of the auto, namely Christianity itself. Of course, a skeptical observer might object that religion was merely a cover for the Spanish
elites political and economic domination; furthermore, that the inquisitors knew the auto was only a theatrical device for protecting their (class)
interests, an opiate to keep the urban masses pliant and stupeed.94
From the historians point of view, it is unfortunate that no one can
really know whether the inquisitors (let alone an entire governing elite)
were or were not genuinely convinced that love was an eective way
of combating evil, or that a soul could be reprimanded with mercy and
healed with punishment, to paraphrase Navarros admonition to the
prisoners. What is clear, however, is that early modern Spaniards lived
in a world not yet dominated by a distinctively secular understanding
of human behavior. For Del Olmo and his contemporaries, religion still
suusedor at least ought to suusethe totality of human experience.
Religion, at any rate, provided the primary conceptual tools and building blocks with which to fashion and describe the edice of justice.95
One may certainly call Del Olmo, Navarro, and their fellows bona
de Christians inasmuch as they were products of a conservative
Christian cultureregardless of their private convictions or respective
levels of piety, about which the relacin is silent. It is quite plausible, I
wager, that Navarro and Del Olmo did not conceive of the auto as a
coercive exercise. At least we know that they did not want to be perceived as endorsing coercion for its own sake. In their respective discourses, both men approached the auto as a religious fable in which the
redeeming power of faith and penance would be conrmed. Thus, for
example, Del Olmos penchant for reading events through the rosecolored glasses of his avowed religiosity was not necessarily a pious
aectation, or a mere stylistic device to convince his readers. Del Olmo
94 Although Lunenfelds argument, 77-78, is nuanced, his interpretation does seem to
me to lean in this direction: The issue I chose to confront is . . . what I designate a
pedagogy of fear, that is to say, one of the ways in which the powerful turn other
humans into scapegoats to insure the continuation of their realm. It is not clear to me,
however, that persecuting conversos per se allowed the Spanish monarchy to survive, or
was even necessary to ensure that outcome, especially as both it and the French monarchy did the opposite at timesin other words, they favored conversosin order to capitalize on conversos economic activities.
95 A reworked version of this phrase appears as part of a broader discussion of inquisitorial motives in Graizbord, 115.
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spoke in the language of the inquisitorial world-view, quite apart from

the obvious fact that the relacin was a work of propaganda. That both
he and Navarro pursued very similar (if internally conicting) interpretations of evil suggests that their approach was not exceptional, but was
well within the mainstream of inquisitorial thinking.
Because it stemmed from a religious word-view, the ideology of the
inquisitors and their allies was not a political ideology in the modern
sense, just as the auto of 1680 was not an exercise in political repression or socio-political scapegoating alone.96 The inquisitorial enterprise
was a product of religious priorities and understandings, and therefore
sought something beyond the utilitarian end of social control. In a word,
the Inquisition was interested in salvation, not in domination alone, or
in domination per se. From this it follows that the ideological basis of
inquisitorial justice was the quintessentially Christian idea that salvation
is attained though suering penance, and that such suering encompasses mercy. In inquisitorial culture, the chief model of penitence was,
unsurprisingly, none other than Jesus, whose sacrice the Gospels depict
as a merciful and magnanimous atonement on behalf of humanity.
Navarro projected this model when he intimated an anity between
the saviors sacrice and the condition of the prisoners: the crucied
Jesus, he told the convicts, was like a prisoner, condemned to a thiefs
death. . . . Thus the Inquisitions Orwellian insistence that the prisoners love their oppressor, Our Mother, the Church, meant not merely
that they should obey the church, but that they should identify with
Christ and heed his example in atoning for their sins. The time-honored Franciscan principle of Imitatio Christi (imitating Christ) may well
have been one of the main sources of this insistence. After all, the
Spanish branch of the Dominican orderthe same order that spearheaded the Inquisition and counted Navarro as one of its members
had propagated Imitatio since the fteenth century, when it organized
confraternities of penitents in the belief that public atonement (specically,
self-agellation) was good for the souls of penitents and onlookers alike.97
Regardless of its doctrinal source, it is worthwhile considering that
in order to understand inquisitorial mentalities, one may approach the
inquisitors and their allies on their own cultural terms. The present
work has been an attempt to do that. The auto de fe of 1680, then, was
96 Cf. Lunenfeld, who in my view articulates correctly, but leans too heavily, on the
scapegoating explanation.
97 Timothy Mitchell, Passional Culture: Emotion, Religion and Society in Southern Spain
(Philadelphia, 1990), 42.
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an instance of inquisitorial thinking about human behavior and human

destiny quite apart from any purely political consideration. Not that the
Inquisition did not have political needs and wants, or that Del Olmos
relacin and the ceremonies it depicted were not forms of propaganda,
far from it. But if there is anything that the relacin suggests, it is that
the people who undertook the inquisitorial project may well have understood, and certainly explained, those needs and wants in accordance
with the magical thinking that characterized their religious culture. In
the Early Modern Period, as we have seen, essentialist notions of
Jewishness were a grave complicating factor, but nonetheless part and
parcel, of that thinking.

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INQUISITORIAL IDEOLOGY AT WORK IN

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006

a majority of those who would be executed, were Christians of Jewish

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

is itself probably unsurprising to the educated reader. Inquisitorial

See Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley, ), 81-86.

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

prosecuted very seldom, and then only under special circumstances.10

Like most exercises in religious and political representation, the autos

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

no longer count on the wealth of powerful converso families to replenish

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

See note 47, below.

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

from Portugal or children of Portuguese immigrants. All sixty-three were

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

This passage introduced a theme to which Del Olmo would return

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

behavior, but demandedand promisedlove. As I shall discuss, the

46 The Colegio Mayor of San Bartolom in Salamanca was, according to Kamen,

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

At rst glance, Navarros image of a quasi-Christian class of heretics

Del Olmo, Relacin, 152.

Castilian author had caricatured the religion of conversos as a corrupt

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

Del Olmo, Relacin, 168.

67 See Jaime Contreras, The Impact of Protestantism in Spain, 1520-1600 in Stephen

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

This vivid admonition was followed by the epilogue, an homage to the

Del Olmo, Relacin, 178-80.

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

77 Obviously, Protestants and Catholics had no quarrel as to the basic Christological

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

from the sixteenth century to the independence of Portugal in 1640, only

See Lewis, 149-53.

inquisitorial ideology at work in an

spoke in the language of the inquisitorial world-view, quite apart from

an instance of inquisitorial thinking about human behavior and human

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