Fields of Blood (45 page)

Gentili also quoted
Aristotle’s opinion that some men were natural slaves and that waging war against primitive peoples “who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit,” was as necessary as hunting wild animals.
¹⁹
Gentili argued that the
Mesoamericans clearly fell into this category because of their abominable lewdness and
cannibalism. Where churchmen frequently condemned the violent subjugation of the New World, the Renaissance humanists who were trying to create an alternative to the cruelties committed by people of faith endorsed it.

Spain had, however, embarked on a policy that would come to epitomize the fanatical violence inherent in religion. In 1480, with the Ottoman threat at its height, Ferdinand and
Isabella had established the Spanish
Inquisition. It is significant that, even though the Catholic monarchs remained the pope’s obedient servants, they insisted that it remain separate from the papal inquisition. Ferdinand may have hoped thereby to mitigate the cruelty of his own inquisition and almost certainly never intended it to be a permanent institution.
²⁰
The Spanish Inquisition did not target Christian
heretics but focused on
Jews who had converted to
Christianity and were believed to have lapsed. In Muslim Spain, Jews had never been subjected to the persecution that was now habitual in the rest of Europe,
²¹
but as the Crusading armies of the Reconquista advanced down the peninsula in the late fourteenth century, Jews in
Aragon and
Castile had been dragged to the baptismal font; others had tried to save themselves by voluntary conversion, and some of these
conversos
(“converts”) became extremely successful in Christian society and inspired considerable resentment. There were riots, and converso property was seized, the violence caused by financial and social jealousy as much as by religious allegiance.
²²
The monarchs were not personally
anti-Semitic but simply wanted to pacify their kingdom, which had been shaken by civil war and now faced the Ottoman threat. Yet the Inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to achieve stability. As often happens when a nation is menaced by an external power, there were paranoid fears of enemies within, in this case of a “fifth column” of lapsed conversos working secretly to undermine the kingdom’s security. The Spanish Inquisition has become a byword for excessive “religious” intolerance, but its violence was caused less by theological than by political considerations.

Such interference with the religious practice of their subjects was entirely new in Spain, where confessional uniformity had never been a possibility. After centuries of Christians, Jews, and Muslims “living together” (
convivencia
), the monarchs’ initiative met with strong opposition. Yet while there was no public appetite for targeting observant Jews, there was considerable anxiety about the so-called lapsed “secret Jews,” known as New Christians. When the Inquisitors arrived in a district, “apostates” were promised a pardon if they confessed voluntarily, and “Old Christians” were ordered to report neighbors who refused to eat pork or work on Saturday, the emphasis always on practice and social custom rather than “belief.” Many conversos who were loyal Catholics felt it wise to seize the opportunity of amnesty while the going was good, and this flood of “confessions” convinced both the Inquisitors and the public that the society of clandestine “Judaizers” really existed.
²³
Seeking out dissidents in this way would not infrequently become a feature of modern states, secular as well as religious, in times of national crisis.

After the conquest of 1492, the monarchs inherited Granada’s large Jewish community. The fervid patriotism unleashed by the Christian triumph led to more hysterical
conspiracy fears.
²⁴
Some remembered old tales of Jews helping the Muslim armies when they had arrived in Spain eight hundred years earlier and pressured the monarchs to deport all practicing Jews from Spain. After initial hesitation, on March 31, 1492, the monarchs signed the edict of expulsion, which gave Jews the choice
of baptism or deportation. Most chose baptism and, as conversos, were now harassed by the Inquisition, but about eighty thousand crossed the border into
Portugal, and fifty thousand took refuge in the Ottoman Empire.
²⁵
Under papal pressure. Ferdinand and
Isabella now turned their attention to
Spain’s Muslims. In 1499 Granada was split into Christian and Muslim zones, Muslims were required to convert, and by 1501 Granada was officially a kingdom of “New Christians.” But the Muslim converts (
Moriscos
) were given no instruction in their new faith, and everybody knew that they continued to live, pray, and fast according to the laws of Islam. Indeed, a mufti in
Oran in
North Africa issued a
fatwa permitting Spanish Muslims to conform outwardly to Christianity, and most Spaniards turned a blind eye to Muslim observance. A practical convivencia had been restored.

The first twenty years of the Spanish Inquisition were undoubtedly the most violent in its long history. There is no reliable documentation of the actual numbers of people killed. Historians once believed that about thirteen thousand conversos were burned during this early period.
²⁶
More recent estimates suggest, however, that most of those who came forward were never brought to trial; that in most cases the death penalty was pronounced in absentia over conversos who had fled and were symbolically burned in effigy; and that from 1480 to 1530 only between 1,500 and 2,000 people were actually executed.
²⁷
Nevertheless, this was a tragic and shocking development that broke with centuries of peaceful coexistence. The experience was devastating for the conversos and proved lamentably counterproductive. Many conversos who had been faithful Catholics when they were detained were so disgusted by their treatment that they reverted to Judaism and became the “secret Jews” that the Inquisition had set out to eliminate.
²⁸

Spain was not a modern centralized state, but in the late fifteenth century it was the most powerful kingdom in the world. Besides its colonial possessions in the Americas, Spain had holdings in the
Netherlands, and the monarchs had married their children to the heirs of Portugal, England, and the
Austrian
Habsburg dynasty. To counter the ambitions of its archrival
France, Ferdinand had campaigned in
Italy against France and
Venice and seized control of Upper Navarre and Naples. Spain was, therefore, feared and resented, and exaggerated tales of the Inquisition spread through the rest of Europe, which was itself in the violent throes of a major transformation.

By the sixteenth century a different kind of civilization was slowly emerging in Europe, based on new technologies and the constant reinvestment of capital. This would ultimately free the continent from many of the restrictions of agrarian society. Instead of focusing on the preservation of past achievements, Western people were acquiring the confidence to look to the future. Where older cultures had required people to remain within carefully defined limits, pioneers like Columbus were encouraging them to venture beyond the known world, where they discovered that they not only survived but prospered. Inventions were occurring simultaneously in many different fields; none of them seemed particularly momentous at the time, but their cumulative effect was decisive.
²⁹
Specialists in one discipline found that they benefited from discoveries made in others. By 1600 innovations were occurring on such a scale and in so many areas at once that progress had become irreversible. Religion would either have to adapt to these developments or become irrelevant.

By the early seventeenth century, the Dutch had created the building blocks of Western
capitalism.
³⁰
In the joint-stock company, members pooled their capital contributions and placed them on a permanent basis under common management, which gave a colonial or trading venture abroad resources and security far greater than one person could provide. The first municipal bank in
Amsterdam offered efficient, inexpensive, and safe access to deposits, money transfers, and payment services both at home and in the growing international market. Finally, the stock exchange gave merchants a center where they could
trade in all kinds of commodities. These institutions, over which the church had no control, would acquire a dynamic of their own and, as the market economy developed, would increasingly undermine old agrarian structures and enable the commercial classes to develop their own power base. Successful merchants, artisans, and manufacturers would become powerful enough to participate in the politics that had formerly been the preserve of the
aristocracy, even to the point of playing off one noble faction against another. They tended to ally themselves with those kings who were trying to build strong centralized monarchies, since this would facilitate trade. With the emergence of the
absolute monarchy and the sovereign state in England and
France, the commercial classes, or
bourgeoisie, became increasingly influential as market forces gradually made the state independent of the
restrictions imposed upon it by a wholly agrarian economy.
³¹
But would it be less structurally or militarily violent than the agrarian state?

In
Germany there were no strong, centralizing monarchies, only a welter of forty-one small principalities that the
Holy Roman emperor was unable to control. But in 1506
Charles V, the grandson of Ferdinand and
Isabella and of the
Holy Roman emperor Maximilian, inherited the Habsburg lands in
Austria and on the death of Ferdinand in 1516 he also became king of
Aragon and
Castile; in 1519 he was elected Holy Roman emperor. By an adroit series of marriage alliances, skillful diplomacy, and warfare, the
Habsburgs had brought more territories under their rule than any previous European monarchs. Charles’s ambition was to create a pan-European empire similar to the
Ottoman Empire, but he found that he could not control the German princes who wanted to make their principalities strong monarchies on the model of
France and England. Moreover, the towns of central and southern Germany had become the most vital commercial centers in northern Europe.
³²
Economic changes there led to class conflict, and as usual, discontent focused on Jewish “usurers” and venal Catholic priests who were said to leech off the poor.