Authors: James Michener
But the more I listened to Spanish music the more I began to
suspect that it failed because it lacked inherent seriousness; it did
not direct itself to the major themes of life and thereby condemned
itself to a secondary accomplishment. It could produce zarzuelas
but not operas or symphonies. The fault could not lie with the
composers, for they give ample evidence of their competence; it
must have lain with the society in which they worked. Something
quite stifling happened to Spanish intellectual life following the
death of Victoria and it is reflected in the decline of Spanish music,
as it would have to be. The melodies remain, the rhythms, the
technical competence and the brilliant orchestration, but the heart
has gone dry.
I once asked an international conductor about this, and he
said, ‘I love to conduct Falla. So colorful, so inventive. But
whenever I touch his music he reminds me that what Spain needed
in his day was not Spanish themes but the full explosion of world
ideas. Falla of course understood this, for he had worked in Paris,
but his audiences did not, and they would not have supported a
composer of international stature. When you cut a nation off
from world intercourse dreadful things happen.’ He had recently
conducted in four Spanish cities and was disturbed to find that
even in 1966 Spain did not import or know the work that was
being done by contemporary composers. ‘It’s a closed society.
Falla and Albéniz, Mozart and Beethoven.’
Why had silence replaced the song? It was not any aridity in
Spain as such, for her daily life provided a lyricism used to good
effect by alien composers as diverse as Mozart, Verdi, Bizet and
Rossini. Of course, they wrote opera, which is a complex form
that may or may not be congenial to a given group of composers,
but even in simpler forms Spanish musicians had at their disposal
thematic material much richer than that used by Brahms, Smetana
and Bartók, but they did little with it, abandoning their subject
matter to foreigners like Strauss, Rimski-Korsakov, Chabrier,
Ravel and Lalo. Now, we know that Spanish composers had the
training and the technique, so their failure to create must have
been caused by some force outside themselves. And the more I
contemplated this problem, the more I was driven to that central
question of Spanish intellectual history: Was it the Inquisition
that crushed Spain’s creative life?
The Black Legend would have us think so. It says that the
Inquisition so terrorized Spanish society that anyone with an
inquiring mind was silenced, that science and invention were
impeded and that the speculation which is necessary alike for
progress and great works of art was impossible. Much evidence
of philosophers imprisoned and theologians burned can be cited
to support these charges, and years ago when I first studied the
matter there was no adequate rebuttal.
In recent decades, however, Spanish intellectuals have begun
to fight back and some of the arguments they have developed
have been startling. For me the most representative came in a
book where I did not expect them, César Silió Cortés’
Dr. Silió’s arguments are unequivocal. 1. The Inquisition was
not a Spanish invention but was of Italian origin, was centuries
old and was introduced into Spain rather later than elsewhere. 2.
It was not introduced by Isabel, for it had operated in Spain under
her predecessors as early as 1232. 3. Compared to the earlier
versions, the Isabel Inquisition was only one-fifth as harsh in the
number of persons condemned to death. 4. It actually saved lives,
for because of it the religious wars which seared the rest of Europe
were avoided. 5. Far from inhibiting Spanish intellectual life, it
in a sense encouraged it; on the Spanish index one can find not
a single book of philosophical merit, whether written by a
foreigner or by a Spaniard. 6. Nor did it deter science, for it never
proscribed a single line of Copernicus, Galileo or Newton. 7. The
punishments it did administer were far less severe in kind and
number than those exercised in other countries at the same time,
a fact conspicuously true when one considers the large number
of half-mad people who were burned as witches in Germany and
England, a practice which the Inquisition did not tolerate, because
only a brief questioning by the Inquisitors was needed to prove
that the accused was mentally incompetent.
Silió makes three additional defenses which must be considered
in further detail. 8. He points out that the period of Spain’s
greatest intellectual achievement coincided with the apex of
Inquisition power, and no inhibition deterred the artists, writers
and musicians. Cervantes wrote
9. Furthermore, the Inquisition was necessary because Jews
had infiltrated national life and had to be eradicated. In fact, the
ordinary people of Spain were more insistent upon this than were
the rulers, for as Silió says, ‘The massacres of Jews were the work
of popular wrath, of people faced by the infiltration of a tenacious
race, astute and industrious, who, even though they suffered death
and cruel exploitation, bent before the hurricanes in order to
surge forth anew, like some evil weed, monopolizing the riches,
exploiting usury and gathering together everything.’ Silió also
points out that it was impossible to accept Jews within the society
because they stole little Christian children and crucified them,
thus making a mockery of Good Friday. In proof of this charge
he cites the case of Yucé Franco, who during the last days of June,
1490, assembled a group of Jews to perform just such a crucifixion.
Franco, whose name was typically Jewish, was captured on July
1, 1490, and it was not until sixteen months later, after the most
careful legal investigations by the Inquisition, that he was
condemned. Even then all evidence was turned over to the
university faculty at Salamanca for them to assure themselves that
the trial had been properly conducted, and when Salamanca
approved, the dossier was forwarded to a jury of educated men
here in Avila, and they too concurred. The public burning took
place in this city on November 16, 1491, as a result of which wild
popular riots broke out against all Jews, even though Fernando
and Isabel had forbidden such outbursts. Silió contends that it
was only this hideous Jewish crime, one of many, that forced the
Spanish sovereigns to decree the general expulsion of Jews from
Spain. Silió points out that the facts of the Yucé Franco case and
the justice of the decision cannot be questioned, even though
there was no visual proof of the crime, because the investigation
was carried out under the personal supervision of a wise and just
judge, Tomás de Torquemada, who is proved to have been a
humble man, lacking ostentation, desiring only justice, and far
from the ‘new Nero’ that popular writers have tried to make him.
When the old lies against the inquisitor general are removed one
by one, Torquemada stands forth as ‘an agreeable, lovable,
hard-working, able and modest man whose only ambition was
to imitate Jesus Christ.’ Such a man, Silió argues, would never
have let the Inquisition get out of hand.
Silió’s final point is brief and powerful: ‘The Spanish Inquisition
as established by the Catholic Kings was adequate to its time and
necessary in that time.’
Some years ago I was obliged to read everything in print in the
languages I could handle regarding the Spanish Inquisition, and
I reached these conclusions, which in certain limited areas
coincide with Silió’s. 1. In the beginning Spain’s Inquisition was
no more cruel than similar inquisitorial bodies operating in other
European countries. 2. The number of persons executed in Spain
at the height of the European movement, say from 1492-1550,
did not exceed records established in other countries. 3. The
operation of the Spanish Index in proscribing books was more
lenient than the Italian. 4. No one can deny that Spanish culture
achieved its Golden Age coincident with the Inquisition. 5. So far
as I was able to ascertain, no Jew was ever executed by the
Inquisition. If a man under investigation could say simply, ‘Yes,
I’m a Jew and have never been otherwise,’ his gold and silver were
confiscated and he was banished from Spain, but he was in no
way subject to the Inquisition and certainly he was never burned.
6. The Jews who did suffer, and in the thousands, were those who
had at one time been baptized as Catholics, had been legal
Catholics and had committed apostasy by reverting to Jewish
practices. These were rooted out with great severity, but when
they were burned, it was as Catholics, not as Jews. 7. Particularly
sad were the cases of shipwrecked English sailors in the middle
years of the sixteenth century, for if they swam to Spanish soil
they were in real danger of being burned. The Inquisition
maintained that any Englishmen who was then a Protestant must
have been born and baptized a Catholic and was ipso facto a
heretic deserving death. The frequency with which such sailors
were condemned on this theological technicality was appalling.
8. The persecution of Protestants in Spain, more especially the
hated Lutherans, may have been more severe in numbers than
the similar persecution of Catholics in Protestant countries, but
it was not more vicious. The falsity of the Black Legend was
obvious. 9. But the more I studied this problem the more apparent
it became that something fundamental had happened in Spain
that had not happened in the rest of Europe, and I began to think
that the differential must be this: That whereas all European
nations had originally sponsored some form of Inquisition, with
Spain’s less cruel than others, it was only in Spain that the
institution lingered on, so that the last public burning occurred
in 1781, when an old woman was hauled to the stake after
witnesses had sworn that ‘she had conducted carnal converse with
the Devil, after which she laid eggs with prophecies written on
them.’ On February 22, 1813, the Cortes abolished the Inquisition
by a vote of ninety to sixty, but on July 21 of the following year,
King Fernando VII having regained the throne, it was restored.
In 1820, when the nation turned more liberal, the king again had
to order the abolishment of the Inquisition, but as soon as he felt
himself strong enough to do so, he revoked his decree. It was not
until July 15, 1834, that the tribunal was finally suppressed, its
properties being applied to a reduction of the national debt, but
even then strong movements arose throughout Spain demanding
‘the restoration of our beloved Inquisition,’ and for years the issue
remained lively. The last public execution which could be charged
against the spirit of the Inquisition took place on June 26, 1826,
in Valencia, the victim being a school-teacher whose crime was
that in public prayer he used ‘Praise be to God’ rather than ‘Ave
Maria.’ It was the terrible prolongation that constituted the
difference, as if Spain had found in this bizarre social weapon a
ritual that satisfied some deep national appetite. I therefore
answered my rhetorical question affirmatively: The Inquisition,
through its persistence, had been the cause of Spain’s decline.
Then in 1965, when I had finished my study, a book called
On basic facts about the Inquisition he differs little from Silió,
except of course regarding the Yucé Franco ritual murder which
modern scholars know to have been an invention, and he also
confirms my conclusions with an important exception, which I
shall note in the next paragraph. The facts he cites are sometimes
startling. ‘The total number of so-called witches executed in the
seventeenth century in Germany alone has been put as high as a
hundred thousand, a figure which is probably four times as great
as the number of people burned by the Spanish Inquisition in all
its history.’ The Bishop of Bamberg during the period 1622-1633
caused six hundred witches to be burned and in the same period
the Bishop of Würzburg nine hundred.