[32] In Trent they had a council, and in Toledo another council, and now in Cuenca, another little council. How are there going to be any priests or anyone who'd want to say mass?"⁽¹⁾ So asked a conquense, Andrés de Valdés, half in jest, the summer of 1566. Three times in as many years, news of momentous events reached his world and caused the young man to take notice. In December 1563 the Council of Trent completed its business, and all that officially remained to be done was to proclaim the council's authority, prepare the Tridentine texts, and set up the special courts. From September 1565 to March 1566, the suffragan churches of Toledo, including Cuenca, met in a provincial council to receive the Tridentine decrees. Now, in July 1566, Bishop Fresneda had convoked the diocese's own reform council. Anticipating opposition, Andrés continued, "Seven hundred and sixty legions of devils are lying in wait for the Bishop of Cuenca when he is at the synod." The devils would turn out to be the bishop's own clergy.

In the 1550s, the twin issues of Catholic reform and the spread of Protestantism came to dominate the nation's imagination. In 1552, the second session at Trent broke off in failure, and it was clear that reconciliation with the Protestants was now impossible. In reaction to such news, Castilians became defensive. Even at popular levels of society, Castilians came to realize that the survival of the church as they knew it was hanging in the balance. Beatriz Caseda, from the town of Molina de Aragón in Sigüenza, did not know exactly who Charles V was, but she did have a crude understanding of the importance of his attempts to aid in the reform of the church, which at times placed him at loggerheads with the papacy. In 1551 Beatriz explained to a friend that "she had heard tell that a Charles V, emperor, had to defeat the Holy [33] House [the papacy]. If King Charles did not win, then to save any human being, Christ would have to be born and die all over again, because they would not be able to save themselves any other way."⁽²⁾

Meanwhile, knowledge of Protestantism was slowly spreading and gaining a few sympathizers in high places. In popular circles, Protestant ideas were being confused with notions of primitive communism, egalitarian justice, and anti-clericalism. In 1551, Johan Gómez Herrero, a beekeeper in the town of Herrera del Duque (Toledo), got into an argument with a priest about a tithe he owed. Gómez demanded to know "why the flowers in the fields could not be held in common since God had created the countryside and flowers for mankind." The priest warned Gómez that that was one of Luther's opinions, to which Gómez retorted, "If that were the case they could convert him, because he believed everything should be held in common."⁽³⁾ In an opposite corner of New Castile several years later, a tavernkeeper was denounced for arguing that "the Lutherans have a good law, because they take property away from the rich and redistribute it among the poor, and this way everyone is equal."⁽⁴⁾ Although the woolcarder Bartolomé Sánchez thought Luther was an evil person, his beliefs concerning confession, images, and the priesthood were substantially the same as Luther's. Very unlike Luther, however, in his prayers Sánchez also called on God to cast down the rich and exalt the humble.⁽⁵⁾ While discussion of garbled Lutheran ideas was common enough, real knowledge and approval of the new religion were rare -- or at least it seemed so until 1557. The discovery in 1557--58 of Protestant circles in Seville and Valladolid shook the country into fearful awareness that not even Castile, the heart of the empire, was secure from the spread of Protestantism. Implicated in the heresy were two former royal chaplains, Constantino Ponce de la Fuente (a conquense) and Agustín Cazalla, along with many members of the royal court. One year later the Inquisition arrested Bartolomé de Carranza, the archbishop of Toledo and the highest ranking prelate in Spain, on charges of Lutheranism. It was a scandal without precedent in the history of the Spanish church.⁽⁶⁾

The disturbing news of these events spread quickly through Castile and reached the diocese of Cuenca. One day in 1558, two priests, each with a letter from Valladolid, met on the street in Huete and discussed the news that "some, even many, noblemen had played false and fallen into the Lutheran heresy." Maestro Rodríguez, listening to the discussion, interjected, "Please Christ Our Lord the kingdom doesn't get stirred up by this business, because they tell me that in Germany the heresy [34] entered by way of the nobility!"⁽⁷⁾ A few months later, when Cazalla and several others were burnt at the stake in Valladolid, an eyewitness from the small town of Socuéllamos sent to his friends at home several letters about the auto de fe together with a summary of the heretics' beliefs.⁽⁸⁾ Carranza's arrest in 1559 and subsequent trial caused just as much commotion. In 1560 the villagers of Campillo de Altobuey asked the Archbishop of Tarragona, stopping there to say mass, what he thought of Carranza's case. In great wonder, he reportedly said, "If the archbishop [of Toledo] is a heretic or Lutheran, then we are all heretics or Lutherans." The village priest, scandalized by the Archbishop of Tarragona's suggestion, relayed his remarks to the Inquisition of Cuenca.⁽⁹⁾

The news of heretics in Castile put conquenses on their guard. An unseemly joke or innocent comment now easily aroused suspicion and brought a stiff fine from the Inquisition, courtesy of one's superiors or neighbors. In 1559 the prior of Uclés denounced a preacher for levity in the pulpit. Prejudice against the conversos, distrust of unconventional behavior, and fear of heresy all come together in the prior's letter to Cuenca.

Because of our sins, during these times in this Spain, God has allowed that there exist people so shameless and daring that, in the place for the utmost gravity in the world, where the evangelical word is preached -- that is, the pulpit -- there could be someone who would use coarse jokes in it.... In the town of Uclés, a converso...does this, and in a place where the majority are converts. I say this to discharge my conscience...in times, as Your Grace well knows, so dangerous because of the evil doctrine that has entered this corner of Castile.⁽¹⁰⁾

If preoccupation with the "Protestant menace" was noticeable on the popular level in Cuenca, it had become the primary policy concern of members of the government and the church hierarchy. Charles V and Philip II both believed that only a thorough reform of the entire church could save the Spanish kingdoms from the fate that had overtaken [35] Germany.⁽¹²⁾ Drawing on several decades of domestic experimentation with reform, Spanish collaboration in the Council of Trent was intense and fruitful. On royal orders, from 1545 to 1563, many Spanish prelates attended the sessions at Trent, and filled with enthusiasm, they returned to their sees to undertake the difficult task of reform even before Trent's decisions had become the law of the church and the country.⁽¹³⁾ In Pamplona, for example, bishops Alvaro de Moscoso (1550-61) and Diego Ramírez de Sedeño (1561-73) both began efforts to reform the diocese on their return from Trent.⁽¹⁴⁾ The famous cardinal of Coria, Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla, after playing a prominent role at Trent, vigorously pushed his archbishopric of Burgos towards compliance during the years from 1557-66.⁽¹⁵⁾ In Oviedo and Mallorca as well, bishops who had taken part in the council embarked their dioceses on programs of reform before 1563.⁽¹⁶⁾ Other bishops, watching the council's progress at a distance, may have been encouraged to initiate reform programs of their own.

Miguel Muñoz, bishop of Cuenca from 1547 to 1553, appears as one of those prelates. From the rural nobility of Cuenca, Muñoz had risen high in the royal service, serving first as a judge at the royal appellate court in Granada, then as bishop of Tuy, and finally as president of the appellate court in Valladolid.⁽¹⁷⁾ When the cardinal of Coria heard of Muñoz's elevation to Cuenca, he immediately hailed the appointment, writing to Charles V that the new bishop was the most virtuous and intelligent prelate in Spain.⁽¹⁸⁾

Despite Muñoz's burdens as president of the chancillería, each year from Lent to Pentecost he returned to Cuenca to fulfill his obligation of residence and execute his episcopal functions. He also found time to revise the cathedral's ordinances in 1548, 1549, and 1551 and ordered his diocesan inspectors Carrasco and Brizeño to increase their rounds of the parishes. The nearly identical instructions that the two officials carried with them reveal that someone, perhaps Muñoz himself, had drawn up a single policy for the administration of the diocese.⁽¹⁹⁾

Muñoz's program combined concern for the spiritual well-being of his charges with the typically Tridentine attitude that only an efficiently administered bishopric could become a reformed diocese. First on the agenda was Christian education for all conquenses. With more insistence than ever before, the diocesan inspectors reiterated the need to teach the population the main points of Catholic doctrine. Sacristans were required to teach the catechism every afternoon, and curas, on the pain of a large ten-ducat fine, were ordered to explain Christian doctrine on [36] the Sundays and feast days when they did not preach. To encourage people to learn doctrine, curas were not to marry or absolve from sin anyone who did not know the Ten Commandments, the Credo, Hail Mary, and Lord's Prayer.⁽²⁰⁾

Inspired by a new Catholic puritanism, the inspectors also attempted to segregate the sexes in church. In 1551 the Council of Trent declared that sins of thought, particularly those involving lust, were just as reprehensible as those sins that were committed in deed.⁽²¹⁾ Thus, flirting and courtship, acts of temptation that commonly took place during mass, had to be expelled from church. Forcing all of the men in the congregation to sit in the chancel, under the watchful eye of the priest, would help to ensure that parishioners at least behaved themselves in the sight of God. However, the priests themselves could not be trusted to keep their thoughts pure, either. Therefore, priests were prohibited to walk in the women's section or toconsecrate the Host in female company. By preventing the priests from mingling with the women, perhaps they would be less likely to commit a mortal sin in thought while celebrating mass.⁽²²⁾

In 1553, the last year of Muñoz's episcopate, the instructions for the parishes became even more demanding. In Altarejos, Inspector Sánchez first issued a series of directives designed to bring up to date the parish's records of its land-holdings and to eliminate tithe fraud. Other orders made the administration of faith more aggressive. Sánchez commanded that during Lent and Easter, the cura and his assistant were to enforce paschal observance not only among their own parishioners but also among any beggars, vagabonds, and pilgrims who might have slipped past their Easter duty. If a hapless transient could not produce a certificate of confession proving that he had been shriven that Easter season, the cura was ordered to confess him on the spot. Anyone who resisted could be imprisoned and whipped. To combat blasphemy, Sánchez gave local law officials the right to jail first offenders for one day without having to draw up formal charges. Repeat offenders faced a fine of ten ducats, five times the penalty usually imposed by the Inquisition.⁽²³⁾

Finally, Inspector Sánchez taught the inhabitants of Altarejos their religious duty as subjects of the king, Emperor Charles V. In a command that perhaps reveals Bishop Muñoz's concerns as a leading official in Charles's government, Sánchez attempted to harness the spiritual resources of Altarejos to the needs of the early modern state. Every day at high mass, the town's priests were to offer up a prayer for the emperor. Together, the priests and laymen were to organize forthwith three processions [37] in which they would devoutly pray to God to grant the emperor victory over his and their enemies of the holy Catholic faith. Orders such as these could not fail to make conquenses aware of the fact that their monarch was involved in a great struggle to preserve one of the fundamental bases of their lives.⁽²⁴⁾

After Muñoz's death in Valladolid in 1553, Cuenca returned to another period of episcopal absenteeism. The new prelate, Don Pedro de Castro, was chief chaplain at Prince Philip's court during his journey to England and Flanders from 1554 to 1559. The polemical Castro contrasted sharply in style with Muñoz, who liked to end his sermons by apologizing for his ignorance.⁽²⁵⁾ Castro belonged to the faction of militant and ruthless Catholics at court, which included his half-brother, Don Rodrigo de Castro, Fr. Melchor Cano, and Fr. Bernardo de Fresneda, all of whom brooked no opposition or criticism from other members of the church. Castro's quarrels with the less dogmatic Fr. Bartolomé de Carranza while they were abroad were well known to other members of the court. When he returned to Spain in 1558, Castro, whose own archepiscopal ambitions were stifled by the commoner Carranza's elevation to Toledo, willingly participated in the Dominican's trial.⁽²⁶⁾

Although while he was abroad Castro issued a few directives concerning the reform of his diocese,the city council of Cuenca was not impressed by Castro's performance as bishop.⁽²⁷⁾ Times certainly had changed from the days of Riario, when the council objected to the Italian's twenty-five year absence only after it had begun to harm the city's economy. Even only a scant ten years before, no one had noticed when Cardinal Cesarini and Bishop Sebastián de Ramírez had failed to reside in Cuenca or visit the city. Now, municipal authorities at Cuenca were sensitive to the issue of residence, and they openly expressed their impatience with a bishop who neglected for more than one year the duties that only he could perform. In 1556 they wrote to Castro to complain that he still had not issued provisions for confirmation in the diocese during his absence, with the result that many persons were in need of the sacrament.⁽²⁸⁾ Castro ignored the city's entreaties, so in 1560 the city councilors lectured the bishop about his obligations:

Your Lordship knows of the need there is in this city and bishopric to confirm children and other things pertaining to Your Illustrious Lordship's pastoral office. All [of these things] would be remedied either by Your Illustrious Lordship's presence in this city, by your visitation of the bishopric, or by [38] keeping here a coadjutor. With your commission, he would fulfill this office, and in doing so, Your Illustrious Lordship would discharge your conscience, and would do great good and a favor to this city and bishopric.⁽²⁹⁾

With Castro's death, the bishopric of Cuenca fell vacant at a critical period in both the history of the diocese and that of Spain itself. In two years' time the Council of Trent would be completed, and to ensure the council's success, men sympathetic to its goals would have to be at the head of Spanish bishoprics. Philip, now king, selected his confessor, Fray Bernardo de Fresneda, to lead the prestigious see of Cuenca. An Observant Franciscan, Fresneda had earned a name for himself as an implacable reformer of his own religious order.⁽³²⁾ Until Fresneda's fall from royal favor in the early 1570s, Philip appointed him to one position after another: councilor of state, bishop of Cuenca, commissioner general of the indulgence known as the Cruzada, provisioner of the galleys, and member of the little-known Junta de la Reforma, which was responsible for reform of the religious orders.⁽³³⁾

Philip made a wise choice in elevating his confessor. During the 1560s, Fresneda emerged as a regalist religious reformer, a familiar personage in the Spanish Monarchy since the days of the Catholic Monarchs. For the ambitious confessor, Tridentine and royal policies (and perquisites) were perfectly consonant. Again and again, Fresneda would prove his loyalty and keep his influence with Philip by championing the Tridentine cause in Spain. Indeed, the role he played at court and in Cuenca is central to understanding how the Tridentine decrees were brought rapidly and successfully to Spain and Cuenca.

As the Council of Trent neared completion of its work in the summer of 1563, discussion in Rome and Madrid turned to the best means of applying the reforms in Catholic lands. The papacy, then at odds with Philip, needed someone on whom it could depend to plead its case with the prudent king. Even though Fresneda had made enemies in the Roman curia, Pius IV had once granted him a large loan of ten thousand ducats and favored the Franciscan.⁽³⁴⁾ With the king's own confessor in debt to [39] him, Pius decided to channel his Tridentine diplomacy through Fresneda. In July 1563, Rome instructed the papal nuncio Crivelli that "in all things, and above all else, on the subject of the council, you should confidently avail yourself of the bishop of Cuenca, adopting him as the means of making the king give the orders when it is time."⁽³⁵⁾

Fresneda's moment came after Pius IV officially approved the council's work in his bull Benedictus Deus, issued on 13 June 1564. As soon as the news of the bull arrived in Spain, on 12 July 1564, in a move that perhaps reflects Fresneda's influence with Philip, the monarch unconditionally accepted the council's authority, both in its dogmatic and disciplinary decrees, as the law of his kingdoms.⁽³⁶⁾ Once Philip had approved the council's decrees for Spain, his government would have to help guide them through the constitutional structure of the Spanish church. In all of these proceedings, Fresneda played an important part.

As soon as Philip had issued his royal cédula, Fresneda's work on the implementation of the Tridentine program began. The council itself had determined the method by which its decrees would be introduced to the churches of Latin Christendom. First, each nation would hold provincial councils. Then the individual dioceses would convoke synods wherein the clergy would swear allegiance to the council and would adopt new diocesan constitutions in conformity with those of the metropolitan church and Trent.⁽³⁷⁾ Fresneda, however, feared that this strategy would not work. In a letter dated 10 October 1564, Fresneda advised Philip that the diocesan synods should be organized as soon as possible, even before the provincial councils. Otherwise, he warned, anti-Tridentine forces within the church would successfully undermine Trent's work. Citing his own bishopric to illustrate the danger, Fresneda reported that fourteen of the canons in Cuenca were already plotting to bribe high officials in the papal curia in an effort to retain benefices that would become incompatible once the Tridentine decrees became diocesan law. He also reported that those archdeacons who had the power to assign benefices were "providing them at a furious rate to incapable and idiotic persons" in order to rush through the appointments before Trent raised the standards.⁽³⁸⁾

Philip ignored Fresneda's warnings and went ahead with plans to hold provincial synods across Spain. The most important of these was the provincial council of Toledo, which, because of the difficulties caused by the imprisonment of Archbishop Carranza, could not convene until September 1565.⁽³⁹⁾ On account of the Council of Toledo's importance, Philip had to ensure that he was completely in control of its proceedings. [40] He chose as his personal representative Don Francisco de Toledo, former viceroy of Peru, who would keep close tabs on the council's meetings. But even the king of Spain, no matter how powerful he was, could not directly order the churchmen to do his bidding. It was imperative to have one of the bishops attending the council completely ready to work the king's will. Just before the opening of the Council of Toledo's first session, Philip instructed Don Francisco to rely on Bernardo de Fresneda to get his policies approved: "With the bishop of Cuenca, who will participate in the council...you must have particular dealings so as to communicate business to him and everything else that ought to be dealt with, so that he may procure to guide and set [the council] on the right road, just as we wrote you."⁽⁴⁰⁾ Then Philip wrote to Fresneda,

I have ordered [Francisco de Toledo] to keep in close contact with you. He should communicate to you everything that comes up and has to be done and dealt with.... You should take the same care with the Bishop of Cordova [president of the council] and other prelates, since your prudence and authority will be of crucial importance if this holy affair is to have the progress and outcome we desire.⁽⁴¹⁾

Fresneda faced a thorny undertaking. Although some progress had been made in the administration of Cuenca since Bishop Ramírez's day, in 1566 many aspects of religious life in the diocese were still unreformed. To aid him in his work, Fresneda solicited reports on abuses and ideas about reform from all of the bishopric's towns and clergy. Three of these reports survive: one from the town of Requena, another from the village of Ribatajada, and a third from the clergy of Uclés. [41] The reports gave Fresneda a clear indication of the status of the bishopric and of the practices and abuses that provoked the most dissatisfaction among some of his subjects. From them, Fresneda must have realized that reform was no longer an issue just for bishops but also concerned local elites such as members of town councils and the parish clergy, and he could therefore count on their support in overcoming centuries of custom and privilege.

The town council of Requena, a community of one thousand households located on the frontier with Valencia, returned a report that confirmed the picture of local religious life that Bishop Ramírez had condemned in broad terms thirty-five years before. The report was prepared by a certain Dr. Hernández, a reform-minded priest who organized his observations and recommendations according to the table of contents of the bishopric's synodal constitutions. When he was done, he had filled twenty-eight pages with his neat, italic script.

Although at the time of the report's composition the Council of Trent had been the law of Spain for two years, Hernández noted that Trent's influence had yet to be felt in Requena. Most of the beneficed clergy did not reside in the town, and their substitutes were so poorly trained that Hernández believed they should not be allowed to hear confessions. He reported that when Trent increased the requirements for ordination, priests had just resorted to more subterfuges to pass their examinations. Some of the clergy, particularly those who did not administer sacraments, could barely read Spanish, and did not continue to study after ordination. The town's three curas, when they chose to reside, would neither teach doctrine nor explain the meaning of the sacraments when they administered them, and the assistants they hired to take their places were worse. Hernández accused the clergy of committing a variety of civil and ecclesiastical crimes, for example, hunting, smuggling contraband and taxed merchandise, and speculating in cereal and other foodstuffs. As in Ramírez's day, the clergy still wore prohibited clothing, bore arms, and illegally claimed fees for their services, which they often performed incorrectly.⁽⁴⁵⁾

The town's laymen also were guilty of many of the same errors for which the bishopric as a whole had been condemned thirty-five years before. Marriage laws were flaunted and widows continued the practice [42] of shunning mass for one year after their husband's decease. Few kept the Sabbath and holy days, while the confraternities spent their dues on feasts and vulgar entertainment rather than on pious works. Even the town council spent one hundred and fifty ducats a year on a masquerade involving a "bird king" and court of buffoons, which disrupted religious services on every major holiday. And despite the Tridentine decree against them, duels reportedly often took place, even on holy ground. People were living inside the churches. Finally, because of their smuggling activities, Hernández accused the townspeople of being particularly guilty of perjury and bearing false witness.⁽⁴⁶⁾

The doctor's report also highlighted the rivalry between the town's secular and regular clergy for the patronage of Requena's faithful. Hernández charged the local Carmelite monastery with relying on questionable practices to entice alms and souls away from the parish clergy. According to Hernández, the basis for the Carmelites' popularity in Requena was not their good works, but the false belief that whoever chose to be buried wearing the order's habit (sold for an outrageously inflated price) would be released from purgatory on the first Saturday after his or her death. This belief, deliberately nurtured by the entire order, was told in a large retable inside the monastery in a way that even rustics would understand. Hernández believed that the Carmelites' success in attracting large numbers of parishioners was undeserved; the friars were neither more saintly nor better educated than the town's secular clergy. Instead, the friars' popularity appeared to rest solely on the promise of a quick passage through purgatory.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Requena's report reflected the concerns of a zealous member of the clergy who resided in a fair-sized town. By comparison, the letter sent by the village council of Ribatajada (one hundred households in 1569) was extremely limited in scope. The council began by apologizing for not being able to attend the synod because all the residents were occupied with the harvest. The council only had four points to make, but they were volatile ones, since they all involved the burden imposed by the cult of the dead. First, there were so many memorial masses to be said that the village's one priest did not have enough time to say them and celebrate Sunday and holiday masses as well. Next, although by tradition one could be buried in the same grave as one's spouse or close relative, in order to raise money the church was forcing people to buy separate graves. Third, the price of memorial masses had risen, while the endowments for perpetual masses remained the same. Finally, because one could pay for the priest to say a Pater Noster in memory of one's [43] dead during divine services all year long, services had become much too long. Anyway, the village council asked, why should the priest be paid for the Pater Nosters when it was the people who actually said them?⁽⁴⁸⁾

A different sort of memorandum was a petition sent to Bishop Fresneda by the clergy of the Arciprestazgo de Uclés, on the opposite side of the diocese from Requena. Understandably, the priests were reluctant to bring to the bishop's attention problems associated with their own conduct and qualifications. Instead, they concentrated on what might be done to improve the administration of faith in the archipresbyterate. Not surprisingly, laymen in Uclés came under familiar fire from their priests. They were accused of breaking canon laws involving marriage, not observing religious holidays, failing to confess at Easter, and participating in brotherhoods whose only purpose seemed to be feasting.⁽⁴⁹⁾

The clergy of Uclés detailed point by point how their parishioners' bad habits could be changed. The most urgent problem was the faithful's failure to perform their Easter duties. To make people confess in the first place, the clergy of Uclés recommended increasing the fines assessed against those who did not confess by the end of the Easter period. At Easter, in order to handle the heavy load of confessions, curas should be empowered to hire temporary assistants. These measures the clergy hoped would facilitate the laity's execution of the most basic precept of Catholicism, annual confession and communion.⁽⁵⁰⁾

In addition, the clergy of Uclés worried about the quality of the confessions they heard. To their credit, they acknowledged that they themselves were partly to blame for their parishioners' poor performance at Easter, because some priests did not use the Lenten period to prepare their charges for confession. Instead, they would "discourse" on "impertinent" subjects of no use in persuading people to look to their consciences. Tacitly accepting another of their own shortcomings, the priests admitted that so few of their parishioners knew the Ten Commandments that when Easter arrived, it was doubtful that they were able to examine their consciences well enough to make a good confession. The quality of confessions would improve if the priests could refuse to absolve anyone who could not first prove his or her knowledge of the Ten Commandments. The priests wrote that they kept the required records of those who confessed at Easter, but their parishioners were so wiley and such bad Christians that they would do anything to avoid actually admitting to their sins and doing penance for them. Some even managed to take communion without first going to confession! Servants, [44] both male and female, usually put off confessing to the very last moment during Easter week. Because all laymen had to confess with the parish priest or his assistant unless one had bought the special indulgence, the Bula de la Cruzada, each year the clergy were overwhelmed by the last-minute confessions, a situation that necessarily also lowered their quality.⁽⁵¹⁾

The clergy of Uclés wanted more than proper yearly confessions from their parishioners, however. A far superior course of action would be to persuade laymen not to sin in the first place. Worst were public sins, particularly cohabitation. The common practice in Cuenca was for couples to cohabit immediately following their engagement, instead of waiting until they had been married in church. Since many people neglected to follow through with the ceremony, they were living in sin. If priests could just perform the engagement and marriage ceremonies at the same time, instead of a few months apart as was customary, many of the illegal unions could be avoided. Bigamy and wife abandonment could also be prevented by having wives give their notarized consent to separations from their husbands that would last longer than a year. On another front, there was the age-old problem of getting people to keep the Sabbath, particularly during plowing and harvest seasons. The priests were sure that if they could send an informant out to the fields to find out who broke the Sabbath, and then denounce the delinquents by name in church, most of their parishioners would be shamed into observance. The bishop could help with this problem by reducing the number of required holidays, especially during the harvest season in August. The clergymen were also confident that if they could lead the religious brotherhoods, which at that time were autonomous lay organizations hiring their own priests and keeping separate chapels, the cofradías' secular activities would be put to an end. Finally, if the diocesan inspectors inspected parishes more slowly, and had their orders written down and also read aloud in public, the parishes would obey their commands more faithfully.⁽⁵²⁾

Independently of one another and the bishop, the town council of Requena and the clergy of the Arciprestazgo of Uclés came to solutions for local problems that were consistent with Tridentine goals. Of paramount importance was professional training for the clergy and Christian education for the laity. Without either, the blind simply would continue to lead the blind -- priests would not be able to motivate their parishioners, and laymen would not know the information that was necessary for their salvation. Thus Requena suggested founding in the [45] town a seminary, or at the very least a primary school.⁽⁵³⁾ A fierce strand of Catholic puritanism spared no part of society from criticism of its lax morals. Although clerical concubinage no longer seemed to be such an issue, Dr. Hernández, speaking for the town council of Requena, lashed out against priests, friars, and laymen for not behaving as they ought, and even the priests of Uclés could not conceal some of their dissatisfaction with their own brethren. To correct these problems, both communities looked to a strong, central authority. Uclés and Requena urged the bishop to take stiffer measures to combat the corruption of morals that plagued their communities. Surprisingly, they were ready to allow him and his representatives more power in order to bring lasting change to Cuenca. The priests in Uclés even recommended doing away with the office of archpriest, which interfered with the smooth functioning of the arciprestazgo.⁽⁵⁴⁾ For Requena and Uclés, the moment had come for a true reformation.

From reports such as these, Bishop Fresneda knew that his programs would have the support of certain elements in the bishopric. Episcopal officials poured over all three reports and marked the complaints that cried out for immediate attention from the diocesan inspector or at the synod itself. However, the cooperation of a few communities did not mean that Fresneda's path was free of obstacles. Opposing the bishop were the cathedral canons, archpriests, and beneficed clergy who directly benefited from the old order. Thus, at the synod to be held that July, Fresneda would have to fight with his clergy in order to pass Tridentine constitutions that were designed to deprive them of many of their privileges and would require them to undertake more pastoral responsibilities.

In the spring of 1566, disquieting rumors about the recently completed Council of Toledo spread to Cuenca and quickly caused alarm among the clergy. Hoping to escape compliance with both the Tridentine and Toledan council, the cathedral chapter in Cuenca initiated an appeal to Pius V and Philip II. By the time the synod opened with full pomp in the cathedral's audience room on 25 July 1566, the entire diocesan clergy had become hostile to the idea of reform. The first session was barely underway when the cathedral chapter presented a list of grievances and refused to swear obedience to the Council of Toledo on [46] the grounds that the chapter had not been invited to participate at the provincial council. Tactfully, the chapter hastened to add that it would obey and uphold the Council of Trent. While Fresneda and the chapter's representative argued over the oath of obedience, the chapter's secretary asked the delegates from the parish clergy to join in its protest. Although those in the rear of the audience room could not hear or see what was happening, many of the delegates, caught up in the swelling resentment for the unknown reforms to come, voiced their support for the chapter.

Fresneda, a veteran of the recent Council of Toledo and of many disputes concerning the reform of the Conventual Franciscans, was not so easily shaken from his purpose. Seeking time to maneuver, he decided not to ask the delegates for their oath of obedience until the next session, which would be held in a few days. In the meantime, he worked on gaining control of his recalcitrant parish clergy. He summoned the delegates to his quarters one by one and challenged each to defend his support of the chapter. He asked them whether they had objections to any specific article of the Council of Toledo, whether they had actually read the text of the council, and finally, why they supported the chapter's appeal. Nearly all of the delegates were forced to concede that they had no real knowledge of the Council of Toledo and had supported the cathedral chapter merely because other delegates were doing so, or because they had heard a rumor that the Toledan council's decrees were prejudicial towards all of the clergy. Probably with a smile of satisfaction, Fresneda ordered the delegates to submit a report of their objections to the Council of Toledo within three days.⁽⁵⁵⁾ In this way, Fresneda prevented the parish clergy from uniting with the chapter to undermine the work of the synod.

From the grievances submitted by the parish clergy and the cathedral chapter, Fresneda could pinpoint the areas in which the threat of reform posed by the Council of Toledo caused the most anxiety. The delegates of the parish clergy, after reading the Council of Toledo, drew up a ten-point memorandum that reflected legitimate concerns. They considered annual synods of the entire clergy to be much too costly. If the council's article on residence were approved, parish priests would not be able to leave their posts for even one day without permission from Cuenca. The priests felt that the measures designed to improve celibacy were positively draconian: if such measures were passed, they would not even be allowed the courtesy of accompanying their mothers, sisters, or housekeepers by the hand or horse's stirrup (all provisions ordered by Trent). The parish clergy also were hostile to changes in the inheritance laws [47] for priests who died intestate, and they alleged that prohibitions against priests' volunteering their services in some capacities, for example, as notaries, went against diocesan custom. Then too, they thought the proposed competitions for parish benefices were unfair because last-minute entrants would be considered, possibly to the disadvantage of those who entered on time. Finally, the delegates totally rejected the proposed requirement that priests help to pay for the upkeep of poor parish churches out of their own pockets.⁽⁵⁶⁾

The cathedral canons, on the other hand, hoped to prevent the Council of Trent from stripping the chapter of its authority and financial independence and giving the advantage to the bishop. The chapter complained bitterly that the Council of Toledo had overstepped its bounds. The chapter claimed that traditionally it had held jurisdiction jointly with the bishop over criminal cases involving its own members, and together they determined to what pious use the punitive fines from these cases would be put. The Council of Trent, however, transferred control over the fines to the bishop, opening the door, as they saw it, to "fraudulent" misappropriation of the fines for the bishop's own use.⁽⁵⁷⁾ To censure canons, the bishop traditionally had used the power of the purse; for example, he could prevent canons from receiving certain monies and could put financial pressure on them. The Council of Toledo enhanced this power by forbidding the chapter to come to the financial rescue of any one of its members whom the bishop had censured. On another issue, the chapter found that its authority to review episcopal officials sede vacante had been reduced, a measure that cut deeply into the chapter's ability to undo a bishop's policies once he died or left the diocese. Prior to the Council of Toledo, the chapter was responsible for the bishop's archive, but a decree that ordered the bishop to deposit his papers with some other entity--a monastery for example--would deprive the chapter of control over vital documents. Finally, the canons complained that other portions of the Council of Toledo aimed at improving the canons' performance of their duties were far stricter than what the Council of Trent had ordered; for example, the fine for not attending canonical hours became steeper than what Trent had stipulated.⁽⁵⁸⁾

While these petitions were being considered, Fresneda's secretary, Pedro Ochoa, began the task of presenting the new synodal constitutions for Cuenca. This relatively brief document reflected little immediate knowledge of the diocese for which the constitutions were intended, but such knowledge was unnecessary. Many of the Tridentine reforms [48] were intended to standardize religious practises and bring them under strict hierarchical control. Consequently, Fresneda's only real innovation in the constitutions was to include the words of the church's prayers from the Pater Noster to the Eight Blessings. Henceforward, all conquenses would learn how to pray with the same words that Catholics used around the world. As for the remainder of the constitutions, Fresneda only saw fit to modify them in accordance with Tridentine law. Since many of Bishop Ramírez's statutes had anticipated Trent's work, Fresneda's job was made that much easier.

In a matter of two weeks, the authoritarian Fresneda forced his clergy to accept the new constitutions. He was able to do so by intimidating the delegates and adopting arbitrary tactics. At the opening of the synod, Fresneda had his secretary draw the synod's attention to royal and papal commands to obey the Councils of Trent and Toledo. In addition, Ochoa listed the eighteen Tridentine articles on reform to remind the clergy that reform was divinely mandated and thus could not be escaped. In the days that followed, the clergy were not allowed to debate the constitutions, probably because Fresneda knew that discussions would be lengthy and certain to modify the rigor of the original text. To forestall discussion, Fresneda even went so far as to prevent the delegates from obtaining a transcript of the constitutions before they voted on them.⁽⁵⁹⁾

When, after several days, Secretary Ochoa finally finished reading the new statutes aloud, the parish clergy's delegates insisted on presenting their own point of view. They found plenty to criticize, beginning with Fresneda's conduct during the synod. They complained that although Fresneda had ordered them to attend the synod, he had discussed nothing with them nor had they been able to inform him of the diocese's customs.⁽⁶⁰⁾ The delegates refused to approve the new constitutions until Fresneda had considered their point of view, which they presented in a lengthy document detailing forty-one grievances based on their interpretation of the new constitutions.

The delegates understood that it was useless to oppose outright the new Tridentine order. To a certain extent, the reforms of the previous twenty years had prepared the clergy to accept in principle many of the changes that the constitutions made ecumenically binding. For example, the delegates did not protest their obligation to keep detailed parish records, something which many of them had been doing since the 1540s. The delegates also conceded that priests should be expected to reside in their parishes year-round, preach and explain doctrine, accept competitions [49] for parish livings, and undergo periodic examinations and licensing. But on the other hand, the delegates were loath to see their age-old privileges abrogated, and what was most important, they wanted to lessen the rigor of the new rules.

Accordingly, they resisted the imposition of constitutions that were essentially designed to increase the bishop's power at their expense. They objected to Fresneda's had adopting statutes that did away with the foremost challenge to his authority in rural areas, the archpriests.⁽⁶¹⁾ They also opposed several other of Fresneda's reforms that were designed to improve the quality of the persons who entered the priesthood, cut down on absenteeism, and change the priests' day-to-day behavior. Following Trent's canons, Fresneda planned to do away with mercenary priests, who were the cause of many financial irregularities, by requiring that prospective ordinands have an independent income of no less than forty ducats a year. The parish clergy protested that because of the low productivity of conquense land holdings, only an estate valued at over one thousand ducats would generate such an income.⁽⁶²⁾ Fresneda closed one loophole that had allowed priests not to reside in their parishes for long periods of time. Henceforward, when bishops gave priests permission to study at the university, they were required to return at the end of their leave of absence of else forfeit the income from their parish benefices. Finally, stiff new fines for old abuses would make priests take seriously their obligations to reside, visit the sick, and conduct a life of exemplary virtue. The priests' reaction to a statute that concerned watching bullfights illustrates their confusion regarding the new role that they were expected to play. While the priests understood that they personally should not watch bullfights, they objected to the statute because it ordered them not to allow relatives and friends to watch from their houses either. They asked how could they possibly be expected to deny a favor that these persons naturally would want of them.⁽⁶³⁾ The priests simply missed the point. The purpose of the Tridentine reforms went beyond correcting mere abuses. The intention was to create a priesthood that in every way was isolated from the demands of the secular world, and above all, from the every-day favors expected by kin and friends.

In the face of his clergy's opposition, Fresneda conceded a few points in order to gain quick approval of the constitutions. On 20 August 1566 the delegates agreed to accept Fresneda's constitutions and withdrew all of their pending lawsuits.⁽⁶⁴⁾ With the approval of the Tridentine laws, the bishopric of Cuenca left one age and entered another. Nearly one hundred years of struggle by Cuenca's bishops had resulted in scant [50] change. At mid-century, however, with the diocese roused by Charles V's crusades and the knowledge that Spanish Protestants had been discovered high in the royal court, conquenses were prepared to accept the strong measures Fresneda envisioned for the diocese. The next step was to formulate concrete policies and tighten up the legal institutions that could enforce the bishop's will. While the bishop's strength came from the law, his sinews would be the courts.

The Tridentine reforms were canonically binding and so were meant to be enforced in ecclesiastical courts of law. The council's decrees provoked so much discussion, however, that at least one conquense went as far as to challenge the council's authority to govern Christians. In 1566 two priests in the village of Palomares argued heatedly over why they should accept the authority of a distant council in the first place. Theirs was a classic confrontation involving a fundamental debate within the church. Without alluding to Protestant thought, Francisco López, who held a bachelor's degree, argued that "more authority should be given to the Gospel than to the council because the Gospel is divine law, and the council is human law." The village cura, Fernando de Hermosa, who had only studied Latin grammar, knew better: "neither he nor López understood the Gospel that well, and the council was not against the Gospel. On the contrary, [the council] could explain it, and they had to believe it." Hermosa used the example that if the council were to allow a married man to take a second wife, even though he was an adulterer, they would have to believe what the council said. To prove his point, he cited Saint Augustine in Latin as best he could: "I would not believe the Gospel unless the church taught me so." Carried away by his argument, Hermosa continued, "If the church had not approved the Evangelists, then I wouldn't know them from couplets by King Don Alfonso or the cows [and] I would wipe my rear-end with them!"⁽⁶⁵⁾

Fortunately, very few people really doubted the council's authority or the bishop's right to enforce Tridentine law; the question was how would bishops provide the judicial forum so that Trent would be observed in practice and conquenses would take advantage of the new laws. Slowly, the bishops found the answer in two courts, one old, and the other new. By the end of the sixteenth century, the episcopal curia and [51] the Congregation of the Council would be transformed into bishops' chief tool for enforcing their Tridentine policies. Until such time when the bishops could use the ecclesiastical courts efficiently, however, a third tribunal stood ready to promote the Tridentine ideals in Cuenca -- the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

In broad terms, the Council of Trent's solution to corruption in the church was to endow the bishop with sufficient legal authority to gain command of the cathedral chapter and to lead his parish clergy and the laity. Before the Council of Trent, two factors contributed to weakening the bishop's authority. Historically, bishops' control over ecclesiastical justice in their dioceses had been challenged by the institution of the archpriest. During the medieval expansion of the church into rural areas, it had been necessary to divide bishoprics into large parishes under the supervision of archpriests, who were the bishops' personal representatives in these areas. As the population in the original districts grew, the areas were subdivided into smaller parishes, while the archpriest remained in charge of the entire district, called an archipresbyterate or deaconry.⁽⁶⁶⁾ The bishopric of Cuenca was divided into eight archipresbyterates: Cuenca, Alarcón, Uclés, Pareja, Moya, Requena, Huete, and El Castillo de Garci Muñoz, all towns that had been important frontier outposts during the medieval period. There were in addition two vicarages, Utiel and Iniesta, whose administrators seemed to have functioned on the same level as the archpriests. In their districts, the archpriests exercised both civil and ecclesiastical powers. Bishop Fresneda complained that because of the archpriests' remoteness from centers of episcopal or royal justice, in Cuenca, their authority had come to equal that of the bishop himself.⁽⁶⁷⁾

Even if the debilitating competition from the archpriests were overcome, a second factor put the bishop at a disadvantage in enforcing his law. No network of officials existed to funnel cases to the bishop's court. Although parish priests were quick to exploit the episcopal curia to obtain justice and advantages for themselves, they were not particularly inclined to report to it their colleagues' crimes, let alone their own. It was up to the bishop, therefore, to devise ways to achieve more surveillance of the outlying parts of the bishopric. Together, the archpriests' rival authority and the bishops' lack of direct communication with the hinterland were universal problems in the church which Trent attempted to address. In an effort to strengthen the bishops' position, the council stripped the archpriests of their judicial powers. Henceforward, the [52] bishops' tribunal would serve as the sole court of the first instance in the diocese.⁽⁶⁸⁾

This reform was not easily put into effect in Cuenca. The very size of the bishopric worked against it. Because Requena was so far from the capital, there the archpriest was allowed to continue trying civil cases valued at less than four ducats.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Fresneda's constitutions of 1571 and subsequent versions reveal the tenacity with which the other archpriests clung to their former privileges. While stating that according to Trent "these rural [archpriests] have no right to any jurisdiction," Fresneda conceded that the priests in fact were still exercising judicial authority. Tradition, which conferred quasi-legal rights, prevented Fresneda and his successors from completely revoking the power of archpriests who already held jurisdiction over their districts. The Franciscan stipulated, however, that every effort should be taken to prevent archpriests from staging trials. If an emergency required the use of an archpriest as a judge or auditor (comisario), he was to be made to realize the temporary nature of the commission that granted him competency.⁽⁷⁰⁾

In addition to defining the episcopal curia's authority, Fresneda attempted to improve justice by setting forth clearly the structure of the curia and how much its officials could charge for the court's expenses. The bishop's vicar-general or ordinary (variously called the vicario general, provisor, or ordinario), whose primary function was to discipline the parish clergy, presided over the court in the bishop's name. The tribunal met daily for morning and afternoon sessions. Six attorneys served the court. To avoid abuses, all the attorneys were on salary and were required to present their cases in person. The fiscal promoter (a prosecuting lawyer similar to a public prosecutor) handled criminal cases either in the bishop's name or on behalf of plaintiffs who appealed to the bishop's justice. In addition, the curia had the usual complement of ushers, notaries, court messengers, and one bailiff.⁽⁷¹⁾

The episcopal curia was a sedentary court; it still remained to link the tribunal effectively with the countryside. Trent's emphasis on the importance of the diocesan visitation (CTrid.24.Decr.2.3), the purpose of which was "to introduce healthy and Catholic doctrine...[and] promote good habits and punish bad ones," pointed the way. Beginning with Fresneda, the diocesan inspector became responsible for bringing rural religious crimes to the curia's attention. Beyond inspecting churches' physical condition and finances and delivering the bishop's orders, the inspector was required to gather information about the religious misconduct of priests and parishioners alike. While in the field, [53] he was empowered to levy fines for minor infractions of the law; more serious cases, for example, an accusation of concubinage, were remanded to the curia, which would appoint an auditor and initiate prosecution.⁽⁷²⁾ Soon after Fresneda began using the diocesan inspector in this way, Bishop Quiroga made it easier for conquenses to know which crimes demanded the curia's attention by asking inspectors to read special visitation edicts that listed what parishioners should look for in their priests' conduct and their own.⁽⁷³⁾

Coupled with Tridentine law, the episcopal curia provided a forum for constructive, reforming litigation. Slowly, the number of cases adjudicated by the curia began to rise, particularly in the years when pastoral visitations were conducted (see graph 2.1).⁽⁷⁴⁾ At the same time, parishioners and the bishop's fiscal promoter began to use the court to prosecute cases that would reform customs in the diocese. In 1574 the [54] town council of Santa María del Campo took the local Trinitarian friars to court for founding a religious housefor "four young, beautiful and honorable women" and then entering the beaterio freely, contrary to what the "Holy Council of Trent" had ordered.⁽⁷⁵⁾ Town councils were particularly interested in using the curia to enforce laws that required priests to serve their communities better. In 1574, by using the curia, the town council of Salmerón forced the parish cura, Alonso Gómez, to hire a preacher for the town of 600 households because Trent had laid down that curas had to preach or else supply at their own expense a priest who was qualified to do so. Similar cases were tried by the curia in 1584 and 1589; in the latter, the village of Millana also invoked Trent when it tried to require the cura to retain an additional priest to help serve the community of 124 households.⁽⁷⁶⁾

By using the curia's fiscal promoter wisely, Cuenca's bishops could set the pace of reform in the diocese. The bishops tentatively came to use the fiscal to defend their rights in court. The first post-Tridentine bishops, Bernardo de Fresneda, Gaspar de Quiroga, and Rodrigo de Castro, employed the fiscal on occasion to collect tithes, and more rarely to discipline clergy. Gómez Zapata (1583-87) was the first bishop to rely extensively on the fiscal promoter to assert his authority in Cuenca. In 1585 alone, the fiscal initiated no less than twenty-one cases to recover lost tithe revenues from corrupt curas. These bishops used the fiscal primarily for collecting tithes. Bishop Juan Fernández Vadillo (1587-95) envisioned a wider role for the fiscal promoter. In addition to prosecuting evasion of tithes, under Vadillo the fiscal began to sue priests and laymen for keeping concubines, failing to do their Easter duty, defying orders of excommunication and breaking the laws of religious sanctuary.⁽⁷⁷⁾ With Vadillo, after twenty-five years of visitations and reading of edicts, a Conquense bishop was finally bringing the religious transgressions of his subjects to court on a regular basis.
 

The episcopal curia was not the only court in which a bishop or others could enforce Tridentine law. Early in 1563, Pius IV had foreseen the need for a body that would act to interpret and promote the Council of Trent's decrees. The original intent of the Congregation of the Council, a college of judges, was to preserve uniformity while the Council of Trent's final text was prepared and published. Because Trent was in reality the blueprint for a new church, the congregation became responsible for the actual form that the Tridentine plans would take. Almost immediately, the congregation's eight cardinals were supervising [55] the application of Trent across Europe. To facilitate their work, Pius V and later Sixtus V granted the congregation the authority that had been reserved by the pope to interpret Trent's meaning, and in 1587 the tribunal gained the right to decide cases in the pope's name. With this right, the congregation became responsible for discipline in the entire church. It could investigate dioceses, review the diocesan visita ad limina reports, enforce clerical residence, and levy tithe payments. The court also could intervene to adjust the number of memorial masses to be said when a perpetual legacy's value changed, and it could approve changes in the status of benefices. In short, the congregation's authority was as all-encompassing as was that of Trent itself.⁽⁷⁸⁾

The congregation was a useful tool for pushing Trent to the furthest limits of its interpretation. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Cuenca sent more cases to the Congregation than any other Spanish diocese.⁽⁷⁹⁾ The suits were initiated by many different parties--the bishop, priests, and laymen. The very first case, dating from 1568, dealt with the question of propertyless priests, which had been an issue at the 1566 synod. In order to provide for themselves, around 1525 the mercenary priests of the city of Cuenca had founded a work cooperative and set up bylaws, the legality of which was now under consideration by the court.⁽⁸⁰⁾ After 1568, no more cases came to the court until the episcopacy of Fernández Vadillo, who, as seen above, was also active in pushing his policies through the local courts. The bishop sent two cases to the congregation for decision, while five others came from the diocese at large during his episcopate.⁽⁸¹⁾

In a vain attempt to reform the cathedral chapter, Vadillo appealed to the Tridentine decree that the canons and dignitaries of a cathedral, no matter what their rank, had to say mass in person in the church on Sundays and feast days. The canons had been shirking their duties in the cathedral by appointing coadjutors, who would say the masses for them. If successful, Vadillo's suit would make the canons serve the cathedral in person, as was their original purpose. The congregation agreed with Vadillo, and the pope issued a brief ordering the canons of Cuenca to say the masses, which they ignored.⁽⁸²⁾

Because the congregation tried any case that touched on the Council of Trent's interpretation, Cuenca's bishops were not the only ones to seek the congregation's help. In a trial dating from 1587, Pascual Sayz challenged the Tridentine decree that prohibited an individual from marrying if he or she was guilty of adultery.⁽⁸³⁾ In a very different case from 1604, the parish priests of Iniesta decided that they could no longer [56] bear the competition from the town's Franciscan monastery, and so they sued the order in an effort to regain the allegiance of their parishioners. The Franciscans were so popular in town that the Iniestans were going to the extreme of confessing twice at Easter. They confessed first on Maundy Thursday with their priests to satisfy the church's requirement that everyone be shriven at Easter by the parish cura. Then on Easter Sunday, the most important day of the Christian year, the Iniestans confessed with the friars. The priests apparently could not stand the insult to their prestige and attempted to put an end to the business. They argued that because Trent had ordered that everyone had to confess with his or her parish priest at Easter, the Franciscans should be excluded from hearing confessions for the entire Holy Week and eight days thereafter. Despite their well-laid plans, the priests' case backfired: the congregation ruled that Iniestans could confess at Resurrection with whomever they chose, provided they met the Easter precept. The priests of Iniesta would have to find other ways than a lawsuit to win their parishioners' trust.⁽⁸⁴⁾

Through these two courts, the episcopal curia and the Congregation of the Council, some of the drama of Trent was played out. Gradually, the tribunals came to be used for more than settling disputes over dowries and benefices. Bishop Vadillo was so efficient in his use of the curia that his officials issued summonses for not confessing at Easter in much the same way that latter-day policemen would issue parking citations.⁽⁸⁵⁾ At mid-sixteenth century, however, when strong courts were needed, the curia, let alone the embryonic congregation in Rome, could never be expected to do the job that officials envisioned for the courts if the Catholic Reformation were to be successful. The curia did not have the network of officials, expertise, the respect, or even the kind of jurisdiction that was needed to implement the Tridentine reform of customs. On the other hand, unlike any other court in the Catholic church, the Inquisition did possess these advantages, and its leaders were eager to shoulder the responsibility for supervising the religious and moral lives of conquenses.

Since 1510 the Spanish Inquisition had been a court in search of a mission.⁽⁸⁶⁾ The institution's original purpose, to punish Judaizers, had [57] run its course, and fewer cases of Judaizing came to its attention every year. Luther's split from the church in 1520 gave the Inquisition a new focus, the destruction of Protestant ideas. Even this, however, proved to be an elusive goal, as there were virtually no Lutherans in Spain during the 1520s. The inquisitors settled for discrediting the numerous followers of Erasmus and his ideas, which were perceived as having inspired Luther, destroying the tiny cells of mystics known as alumbrados, and going after the moriscos. These campaigns were quickly executed, and once again, after 1532 the Inquisition's level of activity fell. In fact, the tribunals, which relied primarily on court fines to pay their expenses, were perpetually in a state of financial crisis.⁽⁸⁷⁾ Given what was to follow, the appointment in 1547 of Fernando de Valdés as inquisitor-general might almost be viewed as an act of divine providence.

The Asturian Fernando de Valdés's long career in the church began in 1517 when he entered the household of Cardinal Cisneros. Although unlike his patron in that he bore a lifelong animadversion to Erasmian ideas, Valdés shared with Cisneros his passion for administrative reform. He is an excellent example of the skilled administrator turned inquisitor. Prior to his appointment as inquisitor-general, Valdés had been in succession bishop of Oviedo, bishop of Sigüenza, and archbishop of Seville. His episcopacies were characterized by the zealous administration of church affairs that was to become one of the hallmarks of the Catholic Reformation.⁽⁸⁸⁾

Valdés brought to the Holy Office his administrative genius and an obsessive fear of Protestantism. He was convinced that it was just a matter of time before Protestant ideas infiltrated Spain. Accordingly, he quietly prepared for that crisis by completely overhauling the middle-aged, bankrupt institution. Nothing was left untouched--not court procedure, finances, personnel,nor administration.⁽⁸⁹⁾ Two areas in which Valdés's influence was critical were visitations and nonsalaried officials such as the familiars and commissioners. Together, the visitation and the comisario gave the Inquisition its major advantages over other courts in the sixteenth century.

The visitation was a means of taking the court to the people, announcing its intentions, and swiftly bringing the accused to justice. Since 1517, inquisitors had been under orders to go on circuit in their districts four times each year, but the record suggests that this order had been ignored. Valdés changed the requirement to four months of visitations [58] each year by one of the tribunal's two inquisitors.⁽⁹⁰⁾ The Inquisition of Cuenca at least partially fulfilled Valdés's orders. In the eleven-year period 1565--75, which encompasses the final years of Valdés's generalship and those of Espinosa and Quiroga, inquisitors from Cuenca visited some part of their district at least once a year, if not more frequently. The officials made a point of covering the entire large district by visiting Sigüenza one year, La Mancha the next, the city of Cuenca another, and so on.⁽⁹¹⁾

The use of nonsalaried officials, the familiars and comisarios, complemented the visitations. Through such auxiliary officials, the Inquisition's presence could be extended year-round into the countryside. Familiars were Old Christian laymen who performed certain duties in exchange for privileges such as the right to bear arms and exemption from royal taxation and justice. They were supposed to denounce religious crimes, carry messages, escort prisoners, and in other ways assist the inquisitors with their work.⁽⁹²⁾

Familiars had existed long before Valdés became inquisitor-general, but at the time of his appointment, they were gaining rapidly in numbers and in notoriety for their freewheeling ways. To be an effective aid to the Inquisition, and not an embarrassment to it, the office had to be rehabilitated. Valdés issued two important circulars in 1553 and 1555 that initiated the process of reforming the familiars by setting new standards of behavior and limits on the number of familiars each tribunal could commission.⁽⁹³⁾ In 1552 the conquense inquisitors began to keep records of all the familiars and other persons who held commissions from the Holy Office. If the tribunal followed the Suprema's guidelines as set forth above, at any given time in the sixteenth century the bishopric of Cuenca supported a network of about two hundred familiars.⁽⁹⁴⁾

The familiars' sinister image calls for a clarification of the real function of this official. The Inquisition never intended the familiars to serve as an omnipresent "secret police," an image of them that still persists in the popular imagination. Since their identity was not secret, they hardly could "spy" on anyone. They could not even report the rumors that circulated about their neighbors because the tribunal would not accept hearsay as evidence. Familiars rarely appeared as witnesses in the hundreds of trials that the inquisitors prosecuted.⁽⁹⁵⁾ In reality, the inquisitors of Cuenca used familiars to create an inexpensive network of officials who, when needed, could be trusted to carry out the Inquisition's confidential errands in the countryside. Modest as this function seems to the twentieth-century observer, it was a disturbing innovation [59] to a population that rarely saw any representatives of the authorities who ruled them.

The lesser-known comisarios were quite different in nature from the familiars, and far more crucial to the success of the Inquisition's activities. While familiars merely ran errands, comisarios served as representatives of the inquisitors themselves. The comisario was a local priest who was empowered to publish the Inquisition's edicts, take denunciations and depositions, and ratify witnesses. When there seemed to be a probable case against an offender in his parish, it was the comisario who sent a denunciation, together with supporting testimony, to the inquisitors in Cuenca. Like the familiar, the comisario served without pay, apparently for the prestige and privileges of his post.

In Cuenca, the comisario's influence was greatly enhanced by the fact that the position was often awarded to village curas. The Inquisition relied on curas primarily because the comisario's legal duties required a high degree of education, which was not found in many priests other than curas. Nonetheless, there were added benefits to preferring parish priests over other well-educated priests for the position of comisario. The cura could draw upon his hired lieutenant priests and his other contacts in the area to aid him in gathering information about offenders. By using the cura, the Inquisition effectively latched onto an already existing network of secular priests to extend its own presence outside the city of Cuenca.⁽⁹⁶⁾

The first comisario in Cuenca was one Dr. Gonzalo López, a theologian who was appointed in 1559 to serve in his parish of Tebar.⁽⁹⁷⁾ The conquense inquisitors appointed comisarios at a steady rate, one to a town, until by 1600 sixty to sixty-five localities in the district could be expected to support the official. As in the case of the familiars, the comisarios were appointed only in the more important and distant towns of the district. As the comisarios grew in number, the Inquisition came to rely on them to take over the legwork of the tribunal. Indeed, with responsible comisarios, the inquisitors had no need to visit their district on a regular basis. As a result, the traditional visita became less common in the seventeenth century.

Valdés's institutional reforms worked in Cuenca. Beginning in the 1550s, the increased number of visitations and of local officials led to far more trial activity than usual. The tribunal's annual case load rose from a pre-Valdésian average of about thirty trials to nearly sixty.⁽⁹⁸⁾ In fact, the networks functioned so well that in 1568 the tribunal had to work overtime to keep up with its docket.⁽⁹⁹⁾ More trials, however, was [60] not Valdés's sole objective. In keeping with the inquisitor-general's policies, the kinds of offenses tried by the conquense Inquisition changed as well.

Valdés attempted to head off the spread of Protestant ideas by controlling the flow of possibly dangerous information into Spain and restricting access to the Scriptures in the vernacular.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ Late in 1551 the tribunal in Cuenca received Valdés's announcement that the Inquisition would publish a catalog of prohibited books, the famous Index, which was based on a list prepared by the University of Louvain. Cuenca was ordered to cooperate in collecting all Bibles, missals, and diurnals in the Spanish language, in addition to specific books mentioned by title. In the summer of 1552 the inquisitors wrote that they had found some diurnals and asked for further instructions concerning book collection.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Censorship became more organized in the 1560s when the Suprema began to send out notices to Cuenca of new works as they were added to the Index. Occasionally, the inquisitors inspected the district's bookshops for prohibited works. They also enlisted the booksellers' aid to control the circulation of broadsheets, primers, and playing cards, popular literature which sometimes contained scandalous or heretical material. Once someone turned in some playing cards he had picked up from some sailors in Alicante, showing the pope with a woman. On another occasion, a French print warning against prostitution was mistaken for an ecce homo and was cause for argument and scandal in a local shop.⁽¹⁰²⁾

In addition to heretical literature, inquisitors in Cuenca were on the lookout for heretics themselves. Trials for heresy were a direct consequence of the growing fear of the spread of Protestant ideas to Cuenca from abroad or other parts of Spain. Foreigners, primarily French, Flemings, and Italians, passing through or residing in Cuenca, suddenly were liable to face the tribunal on charges of "Lutheranism."⁽¹⁰³⁾ Inquisitors inspecting the countryside uncovered conquenses who read prohibited books or spoke ill of the church, its officials, and its doctrine. These were difficult years for priests and friars, who discovered that their colleagues and parishioners were scrutinizing their casual statements or poorly written sermons for echoes of Protestant thought.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾

The Inquisition classified most suspicious statements as cases of either palabras escandalosas (scandalous words) or proposiciones (propositions), the latter usually being the more serious of the two charges. While there was enormous variety in the statements heard by the Inquisition, most fell within certain patterns. Some were popular sayings [61] about religion that openly contradicted the church's dogma. Others, especially comments about specific practices of the church, may have been inspired by Christian humanism or Protestantism. Still others were simply incredulous or crudely speculative remarks.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾

Very common among the popular sayings were "In this world you won't see me have a bad time, because in the next one I won't suffer," and "there's nothing more [to life] than being born, living, and dying" (today's "life's a bitch and then you die"). The sixteenth-century cases heard in Cuenca, rather than being defiant challenges to Catholic doctrine, seem to have been said in the context of justifying reckless living.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ Other people liked to say, "each man is saved according to his own religion," a provocative statement that grew out of Spain's still multi-religious society but contradicted the church's teaching that there was no salvation outside the Christian faith.

Over the years, the inquisitors in Cuenca tried several cases reminiscent of Christian humanist or Protestant thought. Every year, someone would voice the opinion that masses and offerings for the souls in purgatory obtained no advantages for the dead. The eighty-year-old farmer Martín García turned himself in for saying that "the things people do here so that the dead will go to glory don't do any good."⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ On more than one occasion, the tribunal encountered the sentiment that processions to shrines, because of their merrymaking, did less good than pious prayer at home, or similarly, that praying to a "stick of wood" was less efficacious than directing one's prayers to the saint in heaven.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ Others found some aspects of Christian dogma hard to believe, particularly the doctrine of the virgin birth and the resurrection of the dead. Twenty-one-year-old María de Cardenas, the daughter of a shepherd in Villanueva de Alcardete, in 1568 maintained that "God did it to Our Lady like her father [did] to her mother" and "persisted in believing that God had known Our Lady carnally."⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ The woolcomber Pedro de Valera, after thinking about Judgment Day and how the bones of the dead had to join together, concluded that "he didn't understand how it could be and it was not a believable thing." Valera, who knew his prayers exceptionally well and also had an inflated opinion of himself, boasted that "if he wasn't going to heaven, he didn't know who would."⁽¹¹⁰⁾

Under Valdés's leadership, bigamy and blasphemy also became subject to vigorous prosecution. The campaign against bigamists was the first move in a series designed to make Spaniards' sexual behavior and attitudes conform more closely to Catholic teaching. Fully half of all [62] bigamy cases recorded in Cuenca between 1521 and 1650 were tried in the fifteen-year period from 1556 to 1570.⁽¹¹¹⁾ On the other hand, trials for blasphemous oaths became the staple diet of the conquense Inquisition until well into the seventeenth century.

The campaign against blasphemy was part of a wider church effort to control foul-mouthed abuse of God. A pragmatic reason for blasphemy trials was the revenue they afforded the financially strapped tribunals; however, this was not the only reason.⁽¹¹²⁾ Blasphemy, a mortal sin and a serious civil offense, which often occurred in conjunction with the so-called public sins of gambling and prostitution, was taken as a sign of irreligion. Typically, a gambler would start to lose at cards or dice and in frustration swear, "God doesn't have power if...[he doesn't turn things around]" which of course challenged God's omnipotence. Most blasphemous oaths were said in anger or haste and reflected the popular attitude that religion consisted of a series of fair exchanges between God and the believer: if God did not help one in one's purpose (regardless of the legitimacy of the request), then so much for God. Except among the most sophisticated, such an attitude was typical of Christians in late-medieval Europe, who could not distinguish between magic (in which the supernatural force is bound by conjuration to perform) and religion (in which God may or may not choose to respond to prayers for succor).⁽¹¹³⁾

Sometimes the oath-taker had no conscious intention at all of offending religion. Young Andrés de Cuevas, a tailor in Cuenca, in 1579 took himself to tell the inquisitors that he had blasphemed, "I renounce God." The inquisitors asked Andrés whether it had been his intention to renounce God. He replied, "Not at all -- in fact, as I said it, I trembled and felt bad and sorry for saying it, and I went to a corner and recited three or four Hail Mary's, and kissed the ground, and asked God to let me do penance [for it]." In 1573, the painter Diego de Segovia, also from Cuenca, confessed voluntarily to the inquisitors that he and some companions had been commissioned to polychrome the statue of a female saint. One day in the workshop, when someone was just about to take the figurine down from its shelf, Diego hastily warned the man, "Get out of there -- don't fuck with it, it's old!" He realized too late the literal meaning of his words. Diego explained to the inquisitors that he had blasphemed unintentionally by using the manner of speech that was common among "dirty men."⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Diego received a penance, but the inquisitors did not bother to interview him carefully. Indeed, most blasphemers were not subjected to close scrutiny because of the essentially [63] trivial nature of their cases. Only when an oath was deemed very scandalous or heretical, that is, when it denied doctrine, did the inquisitors take more notice of phrases like "I don't believe in God!" or "I renounce the chrism!", or "God isn't able to...!"⁽¹¹⁵⁾

Despite its best efforts, the Inquisition of Cuenca was unable to discover any significant concentration of heretics in the diocese. Between 1556 and 1585, out of a grand total of more than 2,500 cases, there were seventy-one trials for "Lutheranism" in Cuenca. The majority of the defendants were foreigners, and all of the accused were of humble social and intellectual backgrounds. Virtually none of the supposed heretics had very sophisticated knowledge of any Protestant sect. During this period of stiff treatment for heterodox thinkers, just one Lutheran in Cuenca was actually relaxed, and only a minority of offenders received the second most severe sentence, reconciliation.⁽¹¹⁶⁾

Towards 1568-70, conquense inquisitors began to realize that the campaign against the Protestants, bigamists, and blasphemers was not yielding many culprits of great consequence; indeed, they were running out of real heretics other than the old converso and morisco standbys. In March 1568, since there was little going on in the tribunal at Cuenca, Inquisitor Ayanz wrote to the Suprema for permission to visit the city of Cuenca and read the Edict of Faith there and in neighboring villages "to occupy the time." In January 1570, Inquisitor Madriz planned to visit La Mancha, "where it is believed by the goodness of God there are no heretics." When Madriz subsequently wrote up his report of that visitation, he apologized for having accomplished so little of importance.⁽¹¹⁷⁾

Yet, if inquisitors were not uncovering hidden cells of heretics in Cuenca, they were discovering that their institution could be put to a different use. Inquisitor Madriz did not believe that his fruitless visita to La Mancha had been a complete waste of his time. He continued in his report to the Suprema, "Although little [has been accomplished] because the towns are Old Christian, one hears that a great good is done to make [people] cleave closer to the service of Our Lord, and thereafter some things are corrected. I understand that we should visit more often." A year later, concerning his visit to Ayllón, Madriz wrote again: "Although Your Lordship will see from the report that there has been little business, I understand that Our Lord has been served because these farmers were very superstitious, but with what they have been admonished I believe that from here on out they will not be fooled and they will all be more cautious."⁽¹¹⁸⁾ In Madriz's mind, the purpose of the [64] inquisitorial visitation had radically changed. Instead of uncovering heretics and punishing them, the Inquisition's visitas could fulfill a pastoral mission, similar to that of the bishop's Tridentine inspection. If the Inquisition could not catch heretics, it could at least help to make good Christians out of ordinary Spaniards.

Madriz's conclusion presaged an important change in the Suprema's policy. Fernando de Valdés had honed the Inquisition into the efficient organization remembered today and gave it its classic legal procedure. Valdés's intention had been to prevent Protestantism from taking root in Spanish soil by attacking the schismatics directly. Such tactics produced scant results and no guarantee that new heretics might not take the place of the old. In 1573 the new inquisitor-general, Gaspar de Quiroga, shifted policies. Under Quiroga's direction, the Inquisition, including Cuenca's tribunal, was enlisted in the Tridentine church's efforts to instill higher standards of morality among Christians. When the orders that expressed the new policy began to arrive from Madrid, Cuenca's inquisitors promptly put them into practice.

Quiroga's new policy was directed towards Old Christians, lay or tonsured. In addition to punishing the bigamists, the Inquisition launched a major attack on contemporary standards of sexual behavior. Under Quiroga, the Inquisition increased prosecution of the particularly heinous offence of clerical "solicitation" -- confessors soliciting sexual favors from their female penitents. The Holy Office also attempted to suppress the widespread beliefs that sexual relations between unmarried persons and commerce with prostitutes were not sinful. Among the moriscos, the Inquisition wanted to put an end to homosexual practices.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ Finally, the inquisitors punished such assertions that it was better to be married than celibate or that in certain situations, even incest was permissible.

Although the elimination of solicitation was vital to clerical reform, the episcopal courts had been unable to eliminate the abuse, partially because of female witnesses' reluctance to come forward in a court that was not sworn to secrecy. Contemporaries hoped that if the Inquisition was given competence over the crime, it could be eradicated. Solicitation in itself, however, was not heretical, and therefore, as H.C. Lea writes, "it required some ingenuity to bring the crime within the purview of the Inquisition." Valdés had managed to gain jurisdiction over solicitation in 1561 by using an argument that would have far wider consequences during Quiroga's generalship. The Inquisition claimed that no one truly sound in his faith could commit such a depraved act; [65] therefore, while someone who committed solicitation was not an heretic, he was capable of harboring heretical thoughts. Such an argument left the field wide open for the Inquisition to intervene in a number of moral issues that the Catholic Reformation sought to address.⁽¹²⁰⁾

The crime of solicitation challenged even the prosecuting genius of the Inquisition. Once having acquired jurisdiction, under Valdés and Espinosa, the Suprema was not sure how to proceed without admitting publicly that the crime could take place. In 1564, the inquisitors in Cuenca were ordered not to proceed against solicitantes until the correct procedure had been adopted. Then in 1571 the Suprema ordered the inquisitors in Cuenca not to include the crime of solicitation in their public edicts because the council was afraid that parishioners, frightened by the public admission that such seductions did take place, might refuse to go to confession. In 1572 the Suprema repeated its orders that episcopal officials had to review solicitation cases before they were sent to the Suprema.⁽¹²¹⁾

Policy continued to fluctuate until matters came to a head in 1576. In that year, Padre Salazar, rector of the Jesuit college in Cuenca, wrote to Bishop and Inquisitor-General Quiroga that "for some days I have been going about preaching and hearing confessions in the Infantado.... It is a region in great need of doctrine. I believe that the best thing would be for all the priests to know that solicitation is tried by the Inquisition -- I mean, the clergy from this bishopric and all the others because many do know it, and in some, the outcome is pretty bad."⁽¹²²⁾ This letter drew a reply from Quiroga directed to the Holy Office's prosecutor in Cuenca. After reviewing inquisitorial policy for the past six years, Quiroga concluded that Salazar was right. Henceforward, solicitation would be condemned publicly from the pulpit. The general order to that effect went out to all of the tribunals a few months later.⁽¹²³⁾ Immediately, denunciations poured in, and the inquisitors culled from them their best cases. Whereas there were only six cases of solicitation in Cuenca in 1561-75, in 1576-85 twenty cases were prosecuted (see graph 2.2). To enhance the court's ability to try the cases, the customary requirement of two witnesses was dropped.⁽¹²⁴⁾ While convictions remained few and far between, public awareness that solicitation was a crime perhaps made it harder for unscrupulous priests to take advantage of their female penitents.

In 1574 the Suprema further broadened its position to declare an all-out war against fornicarios, as people who believed that simple fornication was not sinful were called. The Suprema conceded that the "heresy" generally was not intentional but was the product of ignorance of church teaching compounded by the toleration of prostitution. Therefore, the Inquisition would institute a campaign that would teach the population that the fornicarios were wrong. Officials were to post special [67] edicts on the subject in every part of Spain. Preachers and confessors were also asked to cooperate with the Holy Office in its efforts to inform the population about the erroneous belief.⁽¹²⁶⁾

The publicity campaign denouncing fornicarios worked in Cuenca. The virtue of calling a belief heretical was that those guilty of holding it could only obtain absolution via the Inquisition. Fornicarios flocked to the tribunal to confess their sinful error. Cases against fornicarios, 90 percent of whom were male, became a regular occurrence in the late 1560s and reached their peak around 1580. During the early part of the campaign, before 1581, the majority of delinquents came forward to denounce themselves. Their action confirms the Suprema's remark that most fornicarios simply had not realized that premarital or extramarital sex was sinful.⁽¹²⁷⁾ Indeed, many of the defendants would later claim as much in their trials.

The actual trials, however, illustrate how difficult it was for the church to change a widely held belief, even when the campaign had all the appearances of being a successful one. Time and again in court, after admitting their error, like their neighbors in Toledo, conquenses still found it hard to believe that the church unconditionally condemned sexual relations between single men and prostitutes. Common sense led Pedro Garrido, a day laborer, to protest to the last, "But I know that men have to go to women, not to donkeys!" Martín Lázaro de Hoyo, an old farmer with some education, held the same view, and understood the consequent need for prostitutes. And that could not be a mortal sin because "if it were a mortal sin, the king and the pope would not permit [brothels] and make sinners out of men every day." Or if prostitution were sinful, nineteen-year-old Martín de Villagarcía reasoned, it could only be a venial sin because "it seems to him that [sex] between a single boy and a single girl is not such a bad affair as between persons married [not to themselves] or clerics." Others knew perfectly well the church's teaching, but lacked the self-control it required. Alonso Yañez, a young soldier, confessed that one night he was sharing a bed with another man and started to masturbate. The other told him it was a sin. Alonso replied, "Yes, I know, God forgive me, but I can't help myself." This led naturally to the topic of prostitutes, and the other man told him that was a mortal sin as well.⁽¹²⁸⁾

Other statements went far beyond asserting that simple fornication was not sinful. One that circulated -- apparently as a joke -- even condoned incest. In 1579 a forty-year-old farmer, Juan de Gonzalo, who lived in Huerta, came to the Holy Office "to unload his conscience [68] because he had heard read aloud one of His Grace's edicts. He was about seventeen when he had said that it was not a sin to ride one's own mother once if one needed to."⁽¹²⁹⁾ None of the many who were tried for making this incestuous statement actually admitted to believing that it was true; some men alleged that they had said it to make their companions laugh. One French woodcutter swore that incest was beastly and a mortal sin, but he had been fooled into saying that it was not.⁽¹³⁰⁾

A second highly offensive statement took the form of a vulgar parable about Jesus and Saint Peter, again apparently as a crude joke that circulated throughout New Castile. One version ran:

When Jesus Christ walked through the world with His disciples, Saint Peter stayed behind in a house with a woman. And the Lord came to the door and asked him, "What are you doing, Peter?" And Peter replied, "I'm multiplying the world." So God said, "Well, do it and come along!"⁽¹³¹⁾

A final scandalous statement attacked the value of celibacy, which the church held in highest esteem even between married persons. Women particularly liked to say that marriage was better than celibate single life or holy orders. No doubt for most of these people, saying that marriage was better was just another way of saying that the celibate life was not for them, but the statement belittled those who did take chastity vows. Moreover, to counter the Protestants' attack on celibacy, the Council of Trent had declared anathema the belief that marriage was best.⁽¹³²⁾ Thus, in 1582, the Inquisition of Cuenca opened yet another campaign, this time against estados (inquisitorial shorthand for the belief that the state of marriage was best), to teach the people the error of this attitude.⁽¹³³⁾

The drive against estados was the last of the Inquisition's Tridentine-inspired policies to take effect in Cuenca.⁽¹³⁴⁾ In all, Catholic Reformation politics formed the basis of the Inquisition's existence for the better part of half a century. Inquisitors endeavored to modify sexual behavior, speech and religious beliefs by means of frequent visitations, copious trials, and autos-de-fe in the city of Cuenca. Between 1550 and 1600, thousands of ordinary Spaniards appeared before the inquisitors to account for their lax speech and loose morals. While it is difficult to [69] show that people's behavior changed as a result of such visitations, one can assume that thanks to the publicity and punishments, the new standards became common knowledge.⁽¹³⁵⁾

By 1600, however, the Inquisition's Tridentine phase was drawing to a close. The rejuvenated episcopal administrations of Vadillo and Pacheco began to challenge the de facto jurisdiction of the Inquisition over affairs that properly belonged in the bishop's court.⁽¹³⁶⁾

The fact that the Inquisition could uncover but scant evidence of heresy in Cuenca made it difficult for the tribunal to maintain its position that it should correct the moral as well as the doctrinal shortcomings of conquenses. In the seventeenth century, the Inquisition gradually retreated from its Tridentine stance while the bishops took over more of the responsibility for watching over the diocese. From the person of the bishop himself, representing the ideals of the Catholic Reformation, to courts and regulations governing the conduct of the least important priest and parishioner, Cuenca officially had embraced the Council of Trent. Would the parish priests and the people follow?

1. ADC, Inq., leg. 704, exp. 413.

2. Ibid., L-317, fol. 284v.

3. AHN, Inq. de Toledo, leg. 203, exp. 18.

4. ADC, Inq., leg. 217, exp. 2644 (1560).  Both Herrera del Duque and Cardenete, where the tavern-keeper lived, were seignorial towns.  Cardenete was one of the conquense towns to rebel against its lord during the Comunero Revolt.

5. ADC, Inq., leg. 196, exp. 2216 (1553-60).  For more on Sánchez, see my article, "Popular Religion in Cuenca on the Eve of the Catholic Reformation," in Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe, ed. S. Haliczer, 67-87.  The ideas expressed above are in keeping with those found generally in late medieval Europe (see N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium).  On millenarian ideas in late-medieval Spain see esp. A. Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica...; and H. Lee, Western Mediterranean Prophecy: the School of Joachim of Fiore and the Fourteenth-Century Breviloquium (Toronto, 1989).   On the spread of Protestant ideas in sixteenth-century Spain, see C. Larquié, "Le protestantisme en Espagne au XVIe siècle."  On Protestantism in Cuenca, see M. Jiménez Monteserín, "Los luteranos ante el tribunal de la Inquisición de Cuenca, 1525-1600" in La Inquisición española, ed. J. Pérez Villanueva; and J.-L. Flecniakoska, "La propagation des idées protestantes par les français en Espagne....î

6. For a narrative of these events, see H. Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain...; and J.I. Tellechea Idigoras, Tiempos recios.

7. ADC, Inq., leg. 228, exp. 2869.  On news reports reaching Toledo, see J.-P. Dedieu, L'administration de la foi, 291-92.

8. ADC, Inq., leg. 216, exp. 2626.  The recipient of the letters, a priest, turned himself in for accidentally calling the heretics "martyrs."  He said he had misspoken because a few days earlier he had heard that some placards calling the group "martyrs" had been found on the spot where the Valladolid group had been executed.

9. Ibid., leg. 225, exp. 3809.

10. Ibid., leg. 240, exp. 3138.  "Evil doctrine"  evidently refers to an unknown case of heresy in the region.  It is interesting that the prior refers not to Castile, but to the abstraction, "España."

11. Ibid., leg. 229, exp. 2888.  Pedro, from Pou, told the inquisitors that in France "they had beheaded Lutheran [more likely, Calvinist] youths like roses from an arbor and [the youths] went so firmly and steadily [to their death] it was like they were being taken to Paradise."

12. For the most recent summary of Spanish participation in the Council of Trent, see the chapters by B. Llorca in HIE, 3, pt. I: 385-503.

13. C. Gutiérrez, Españoles en Trento (Valladolid, 1951).  This is the best checklist available of the names of those who actually attended the sessions.

14. J. Goñi Gaztambide, Los Navarros en el Concilio de Trento....  Goñi concluded that Pamplona was on its way towards reform before 1563, "but the most lively push came from outside -- from the Tridentine Council.  The council removed the obstacles that were placed in the way of reform" (179).

15. N. López Martínez, "El Cardenal Mendoza y la reforma tridentina en Burgos."

16. J.L. González Novalín, "Historia de la Reforma Tridentina en la diócesis de Oviedo"; G. Pons, La reforma eclesiástica en Mallorca...; idem, "La cura de almas y la vida cristiana del pueblo de Mallorca...." Vich's predecessors, Juan Bautista Campeggio (1532-58) and Diego de Arnedo (1561-72), were both enthusiasts for reform.  Arnedo, however, apparently alienated his clergy, who "began sordid opposition to him" (Pons, La reforma eclesiástica en Mallorca..., 14).  See also J. Bada, Situació religiosa de Barcelona en el segle XVI.

17. J. P. Mártir Rizo, Historia...de Cuenca, 183-85.

18. Archivo Histórico Español, Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España y de sus Indias, 6 vols. (Madrid, 1928-34), 1:124.

19. On Muñoz's activities, see Mártir Rizo, Historia...de Cuenca, 184. See also ADC, P-1790, fols. 77r-82r (Albalate de las Nogueras); P-278, fols. 80r-83r (Altarejos); P-149, fols. 94r-100v (San Martín, Cuenca); and P-224, fols. 8v-9r (Santa Cruz, Cuenca).

20. ADC, P-278, fol. 91v (Altarejos, 1550).  This order is in accordance with Cardinal Tavera's synodal constitution for the archbishopric of Toledo, drafted in 1536 (see J.-P. Dedieu, ìëChristianisationí en Castille,î 264--65).  Both Cuenca and Toledo required more teaching of doctrine than did Pamplona, where in 1540 Bishop Pedro Pacheco merely ordered that doctrine should be taught on Sundays from Advent to early May.  Visitors were still requiring no more than that in 1564 (J.I. Tellechea Idigoras, La reforma Ttidentina en San Sebastián: el libro de "Mandatos de Visita" de la Parroquía de San Vicente [1540-1670], 2nd. ed., [San Sebastián, 1972], 28).

21. C.Trid.14.Dec.1.5.

22. ADC, P-278, fols. 59r, 80r-v.

23. Ibid., fols. 96r-108r.

24. Ibid.  This is the only instance I have encountered of politics entering so directly at the parish level.  Charles V himself may have had something to do with the order, since in San Sebastián, one city parish was given a very similar command in 1547 (Tellechea Idigoras, La Reforma Tridentina en San Sebastián, 31).

25. Mártir Rizo, Historia de...Cuenca, 184.

26. J.I. Tellechea Idigoras, El arzobispo Carranza y su tiempo, I: 72-73. Castro and Carranza had words over reading prohibited books and enslaving the Indians who were held in encomienda in the New World (ibid.,  2: 27-28; idem, "La biblioteca del arzobispo Carranza," in Miscelánea..., 463).

27. In 1557, Castro issued new rules in conformance with the Council of Trent on the manner in which vicars were to appointed to parishes (ADC, L-343, fol. 62r-v [20 May 1557]).  He also encouraged the parish clergy to teach the church's prayers by sending them pamphlets which they could read aloud to their congregations  (ADC, Inq., leg. 213, exp. 2563).

28. AMC, leg. 837, exp. 1, fol. 30r [2 July 1556].  Until September 1555 the city council was not even sure that Castro had been provided to Cuenca (ibid., fol. 15v [4 Sept. 1555]).

29. Ibid., fo. 84v (19 March 1560).

30. AMC, leg. 1496, exp. 36 (23 March 1560).

31. Mártir Rizo, Historia...de Cuenca, 188; RAH, M-92, fol. 200r, "Memorial de la casa de los Condes de Lemos."  Castro's will, made out on 1 August 1561, revealed that the bishop had reserved nearly the whole of his fortune of 144,000 ducats for the benefit of the noble house of Lemos, of which he was a ranking member.  The only pious donation was six thousand ducats buy masses for the repose of his own soul.  In Cuenca, that sum would buy roughly 66,000 requiem masses, a truly astronomical figure for the time.

32. J.M. Pou y Martí, "Fr. Bernardo de Fresneda.î

33. For a list of Fresneda's honors, see Mártir Rizo, Historia de... Cuenca, 189-90. On Fresneda's fall, see E. Albèri,  Relazione degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato: 5:181-82; and J. García Mercadal, Viajes de extranjeros por España y Portugal (Madrid, 1952) I:1182.  Philip proposed the Junta de Reforma on 15 November 1563 (HIE,  3, pt. 1: 320).

34. ASV, S.S., Spagna, scat. 39, fol. 86v.

35. Ibid., fol. 142v (n.d. [12 July] 1563), deciphered.

36. HIE, 3, pt. I: 494-500.

37. Trent called for provincial councils to be held within one year of the council's official promulgation (CTrid.24.Decr.2.2).

38. AGS, P.R., leg. 21, exp. 174.  Cardinal Mendoza did not wait for the Council of Toledo and convoked Burgos's synod for 25 April 1565 (N. López Martínez, ìEl cardenal Mendoza y la reforma tridentina en Burgos,î 53).

39. For the council's proceedings, see J. Luis Santos Diez, "Política conciliar postridentina en España."  This article publishes many unedited documents related to the provincial councils of 1565-66.

40. AGS, E.C., leg. 146, exp. 3, fol. 2r, Philip II to Francisco de Toledo, from the Bosque de Segovia, 29 August 1565.

41. Ibid., exp. 6, Philip II to the bishop of Cuenca, from the Bosque de Segovia, 29 August 1565.

42. This would be the occasion for his denial that he set a poor example for the clergy (L. Serrano, Correspondencia diplomática entre España y la Santa Sede, I: 176, n. 2).

43. ADC, L-150, "Registros del secretario Pedro Ochoa que empiezan en el año de 1566," fol. 12r-v.  Fresneda's secretary kept a register of all of Fresneda's official acts as bishop of Cuenca.  If similar registers were kept by later secretaries, unfortunately they have been lost.

44. ADC, C.E., leg. 737, exp. 150.

45. ADC, Sec., leg. 34, exp. 35, "De clericis non residentibus in ecclesia vel prebenda:" fol. 7v; "De suma [sic] trinitate et fide chatolica [sic]:" fol. 1r; "De officio vicarii:" fol. 5r; on the criminal activities of the clergy: fo. 2v; "De vita et honestate clericorum:" fol. 7r.

46. Ibid., "De consuetudine:" fol. 3v; on cohabition: fol. 13v; on holidays: fol. 6r; on masquerades: fol. 1r-v; on indigents inside churches: fol. 13v; on perjury:  fol. 2r.

47. Ibid., fol. 8v.  The retable, which depicted many souls dressed in the order's habit being led out of purgatory by the Virgin, was left untouched, and in 1584-85, the Inquisition investigated it (ADC, Inq. L-221, fol. 99r, the Suprema to Cuenca, 18 Jan. 1585).

48. ADC, Sec., leg. 34. n. 24, "Ribatajada. Capitulos para el Santo Sinodo."

49. ADC, C.E., leg. 743, exp. 245. On laymen's sins: nos. 11, 12, 13, 28.

50. Ibid., on making people confess: nos. 2 and 25.

51. Ibid., nos. 3-5, 25.

52. Ibid., nos. 9, 11-13, 28, 15, 17.

53. ADC, Sec., leg. 34, exp. 35, fol. 1r-v.  Hernández suggested using the money for the bird king and his court of buffoons to pay for two school masters and putting together the rent from various benefices in the town for a Tridentine seminary.

54. On the archpriest in Uclés, see ADC, C.E., leg. 743, exp. 245, nos. 19 and 21-23.

55. ADC, Sec., leg. 12, exp. 63, fols. 1r-12r.

56. ADC, C.E., leg. 739, exp. 190.

57. In February 1566, Bishop Fresneda reported to Philip II concerning the bishop's criminal jurisdiction over the chapter.  Fresneda had begun to arrest and charge canons without the chapter's cooperation, which, predictably, had precipitated a lawsuit.  Fresneda commented that if the suit were successful, "we never would be able to arrest anyone, because the guilty ones would be informed and they would absent themselves, and crimes would thus always remain unpunished."  Fresneda continued, "If Your Majesty does not order in our favor on these things...there will be even more insolence and serious crimes in our churches than ever" (AGS, P.R. 22, exp. 35 [25 Feb. 1566]).

58. ADC, Sec., leg. 12, exp. 63, fols. 27r-31r.

59. Ibid.,  exp. 64, fols. 12v-15r; exp. 63, fol. 24r.  The same authoritarian tactics were used by Bishop La Fuente to introduce the new Tridentine constitutions to Pamplona.  Trent authorized bishops to dispense with the clergy's express approval of all of the constitutions  (J. Goñi Gastambide, Los navarros en el Concilio de Trento, 186).

60. ADC, Sec., leg 12., exp. 64, fol. 29r-v.

61. Ibid., nos. 6, 7, 13.  Apparently, the clergy of Uclés were in the minority about abolishing the archpriest's office.

62. Although this reform was intended to improve the clergy, it did so by excluding the lower classes and encouraging those with property to see the church as a tax shelter.  This became more of a problem as time went on, in other parts of Europe as well.  See R. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 382.

63. ADC, Sec., leg. 12, exp. 64, nos. 4-5, 10, 14-17, 20.

64. Ibid., fol. 37r.

65. ADC, Inq., leg. 243, exp. 3242, 1568 (suspended). Hermosa may have been thinking of the passage from Contra Epistolam Manichaei, chap. 5, "eso vero evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae Ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas" (Patrologiae Latinae, 42: col. 176).  Priests were not the only ones who objected to the new order brought by Trent.  Twenty years after Trent, a farmer named Pedro Saz was still complaining that "the council ordered nothing but whoremongery. God be my witness, they didn't know what they were doing in the council any more than [does] my donkey's tail, because they created nothing but obscenities.  The old system was better!" (ADC, Inq., leg. 290, exp. 4084).

66. Dictionnaire de droit canonique (Paris, 1935), 1: 1004-26.

67. Fresneda, CS, fols. 9v-10v.

68. Dictionnaire de droit canonique, 1: 1014-16.

69. ADC, Sec., leg. 34, no. 35, fol. 4v.

70. Fresneda, CS, fols. 9v-10v; E. Pimentel, CS, (1626), 146.

71. Fresneda, CS, fols. 14r-15v.

72. In 1569, for example, the inspector general commented that Diego de la Gruesa, a cura in Torrubia, had been made the subject of an investigation (ADC, C.E., leg. 1, exp. 1, fol. 16v).  In 1580, the inspector noted that Pedro García, a priest in Fuente de Pedro Naharro, was being investigated concerning his relations with a certain woman and the results had been sent to Cuenca (L-202, fol. 90v).

73. ADC, P-224, fol. 133v.

74. So few cases predate 1550 that one suspects that the court's proceedings were lost.  After Trent, preservation of records appears to be consistent.

75. ADC, C.E., leg. 748, exp. 322. The ordinary found in favor of the town council.

76. Ibid., leg. 747, exp. 312; leg. 764-A, exp. 595;  leg. 766, exp. 656.  According to Bishop Pacheco, the ideal ratio was one parish priest per one hundred households (ASV, Cong. Con., Visitationes, scat. 249A, fo. 431 [1612]).  The same ratio was followed in Toledo.

77. Some examples are ADC, C.E., leg. 771, exp. 747 (1592), "La Alberca.  The fiscal vs. two laymen over concubinage"; leg. 772, exp. 754 (1592), "Salmerón. The fiscal vs. a prebendary living with a married woman"; leg. 772, exp. 779 (1592), "Honrubia. The fiscal vs. some citizens of Honrubia for not fulfilling their Easter duty of confession and communion";  leg. 768, exp. 697 (1591), "Tarazona.  The fiscal vs. Martín de Oñate and Pedro de Ruipérez for being excommunicated and scandalizing the community for not seeking absolution"; and leg. 772, exp. 775 (1592), "Huete.  The fiscal vs. the mayor for not respecting the immunity of the church, Santa María de Lara."

78. G. Moroni Romano, Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica  (Venice, 1842), 16:170-76.

79. The congregation's cases have been catalogued by diocese.  Each entry lists the Tridentine canon being tested, summarizes the case, and gives the date of decision.

80. ASV, Fondo storico, 10: 161. The statutes of the Cabildo de los Clérigos Mercenarios de Santa Catalina de Siena were approved by Bishop Ramírez sometime before 1525 (AMC, leg. 1493, exp. 32).

81. ASV, Fondo storico, 1:146, 160, 171, 174; 2: 248, 275; 5: 134.

82. Ibid., 2: 275; and BNM, ms. 13071, Compulsa de instrumentos..., fol. 80v. Despite the congregation's ruling, Bishop Pacheco later sued the canons over the same issue (ASV, S.S., Spagna, scat. 60B, fol. 215v).  Pacheco complained to Rome about the coadjutors in each of his reports ad limina.  He was finally reduced to writing to the pope in 1618 that since His Holiness paid no attention to his reports, he would repeat himself just to ease his own conscience (ASV, Cong. Con., Visitationes, scat. 249A, fol. 613 and passim).

83. ASV, Fondo storico, 1: 146.

84. Ibid., 2: 356--57.  At stake were not just the confessions; the Franciscans figured prominently in Iniestans' pious bequests (AHPC P-2164).  The monastery was of recent foundation in the town.

85. For example, the parish priest of Honrubia sent to Cuenca a report that had on one side a list of those who had confessed that year and on the other side a summons, which he filled in with the names of five parishioners who had not confessed that Easter.  The guilty ones were called to Cuenca and ordered not to leave the city until after the trials.  Only one actually seems to have been tried:  Juan de Reillo was condemned to pay the court's expenses and go to confession (ADC, C.E., leg. 772, exp. 779).

86. J. Contreras, "The Impact of Protestantism in Spain 1520-1600," in Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe, ed. S. Haliczer, 47--63.  The Inquisition as an instrument of the Counter Reformation has been studied in detailed local context by J. Contreras (El Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de Galicia); J.-P. Dedieu (L'administration de la foi); R. García Carcel (Herejía y sociedad en el siglo XVI); and S. Haliczer (Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia).  Each study contains sections on the topics covered here below for Cuenca: personnel, anti-Protestant activities, and control over language and sexuality.

87. J. Martínez Millán, La hacienda de la Inquisición, xxii.

88. J.L. González Novalín, El inquisidor general Fernando de Valdés.

89. For a recent appraisal of Valdés's reforms, see J.L. González Novalín, "Reorganización valdesiana de la Inquisición española" in Historia de la Inquisición, ed. J. Pérez Villanueva and B. Escandel Bonet, 613-48.  The complete text of Valdés's instructions is available in M. Jiménez Monteserín, Introducción a la Inquisición española.

90. H.C. Lea,  A History of the Inquisition in Spain, 2:238-41.  See also D. Peyre, "L'Inquisition ou la politique de la présence," in  L'Inquisition espagnole, ed. B. Bennassar et al., 43-64.

91. ADC, L-322 to 327 and L-221-311, "Libros de testificaciones" and "Cartas."  In 1581, the visitation requirement was reduced to once a year (Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain. 2: 238-41).

92. The most complete description of the Holy Office's unsalaried officials may be found in Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain, 2:263-84. For detailed studies of how the familiars, comisarios and  notaries meshed together to form a wide net of officials  covering an entire district, see J. Contreras, El Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de Galicia, 76-143; and J.-P. Dedieu, L'Administration de la foi,. 175-212.

93. Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain, 2:277.

94. ADC, Inq., L-238, fol. 72v (1552). The register is Ibid., Inq., L-124.

95. S. Nalle, "Inquisitors, Priests and the People," 568--87.

96. Ibid., 567.

97. ADC, Inq., L-337, fol. 92v.

98. See Pérez Ramírez, Catálogo.

99. Nalle, "Inquisitors, Priests, and the People," 562.

100. This topic, of course, has received extensive treatment. For an introduction, see Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain..., ch. 5.

101. ADC, Inq., L-224, fols. 154r, 160r.

102. Ibid., Inq., L-225, fols. 494r (17 Sept. 1569), 543, 372r (24 Oct. 1566),  554r (3 Oct. 1571); AHN, Inq., leg. 2544, exp. 82 (Cuenca, 27 July 1568); ADC, Inq. leg. 242 bis, exp. 2230 (1567, Requena). See also Chapter 5.

103. Flecniakoska, "La propagation des idées protestantes par les français en Espagne....î

104. For example, Pedro Ruiz de Alarcón, from Sisante, denounced Bllr. Ruiz de Xaba in 1563 because Ruiz, a preacher, never said the Agnus Dei in mass (ADC, Inq., leg. 228, exp. 2863b).  Lcdo. Torres, assistant priest in Cervera, was denounced for saying in a sermon one day in 1563 that "a good priest's mass is for his salvation and that of his audience, and the bad priest's mass is for his condemnation and that of his audience" (ibid., leg. 231, exp. 2914).

105. J.-P. Dedieu breaks propositions down by specific themes: God and Jesus Christ; the clergy and the pope; the church, and so on (L'administration de la foi,  305).

106. For a different treatment of these sayings in late-medieval Soria, see J. Edwards, "Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain."

107. ADC., Inq., leg. 245, exp. 3275.

108. Bartolomé Sánchez (no relation to the other), aged fifty, said in 1561 that processions were a joke  (ibid., leg. 225, exp. 2804).  See Chapter 6.

109. Ibid., Inq. leg. 238, exp. 3086.  Attacks on the doctrine of the virgin birth typically were made by moriscos.

110. Ibid., leg. 316, exp. 4570.

111. J.-P. Dedieu, ìLe modèle sexuel: la défense du marriage chrétien,î in  L'Inquisition espagnole, ed. Bennassar et al.,  318.

112. J.-P. Dedieu, "Le modèle religieux: les disciplines du langage et d'action," in L'Inquisition espagnole, ed. Bennassar et al., 240--67; G. Llompart, "Blasfemías y juramentos cristológicos en la Baja Edad Media catalana," Hispania Sacra 26 (1973): 137--64; and M.G. Lefranc, ìMémoire sur les blasphèmes et blasphémateurs dans le Royaume de Valence aux XVIe et XVIIe sièclesî (Paris, 1976, microform).

113. See K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 25-50.  Dedieu, on the other hand, argues that blasphemy  "constituted a linguistic custom that did not involve the religious faith of the persons who uttered it" ("The Archive of the Holy Office of Toledo," in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe, ed. G. Henningsen and J. Tedeschi, 163).

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