[205] The age of expansion has sometimes been called a period of Glory, Gold, and God, the precise order of priority varying from writer to writer. This assumption that religion was one of the main driving forces of Hispanic life during the imperial period is undeniably accurate. The expansion of Castile was accompanied by transformation of certain aspects of Castilian Catholicism, as the reforms carried out under the Catholic Kings brought to a climax some of the efforts for renewal that had been underway since the end of the fourteenth century.
 
Reform of the clergy was part of the general program of Fernando and Isabel to unify and reorganize the main institutions of the realm. The Catholic Kings objected strongly to large payments to Rome and to the appointment of foreign prelates, mainly Italian, to Hispanic posts. During their reign they won from the papacy the right of patronato, complete patronage, over the newly conquered territory of Granada (bull of 1486), a right subsequently extended to all of Spanish America. The more limited right of nomination to all dioceses within Spain was granted to the crown only in 1523, however.
 
The position of the Catholic Kings was not that which in the eighteenth century came to be called regalism. They recognized papal authority and did not insist on full royal domination, but they constantly [206] petitioned and protested to the papacy concerning aspects of policy and administration affecting the church of Spain, and occasionally even used force to contravene specific papal acts. The question of royal authority and right of nomination was closely linked with spiritual reform, as well, for the religious zeal and rigor of the Catholic Kings was greater than that of most Renaissance popes. Fernando and Isabel were determined to bring in model prelates who would improve the quality of church life, and consequently royal authority was supported by the most zealous and reformist elements in the Spanish church. The greatest resistance to change came not so much from the hierarchy itself, but from routinists and bureaucrats in the middle administration of the clergy.
 
The first major reforms of clerical conduct and organization in Castile were carried out in the l480s by the Franciscan provincial of the kingdom, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, who became the outstanding figure in the Hispanic church of the imperial age. Learned, intensely pious, severely ascetic, and full of endless zeal and energy, Cisneros was elevated to the archbishopric of Toledo (the primal position of the Castilian hierarchy) in 1495 when he was nearly sixty years of age. His leadership was crucial in six important activities during the next twenty-two years: a) Catholic reform; b) furthering religious unity when he became inquisitor-general; c) encouragement of learning; d) advancing the anti-Muslim crusade; e) maintaining political unity under the crown, especially in the last year of his life when he served as regent of Castile (1516-1517) following the death of Fernando; and f) helping to establish the beginning of a regular Spanish army during that same year. These great tasks were accomplished for the most part when he was between sixty and eighty years of age.
 
Permission was obtained from the pope to extend to others in the clergy the reforms first carried out within the Franciscan order. In this enterprise, Cisneros used a wide broom. Concubinage, often a form of common-law marriage, was so taken for granted that its abolition led to physical violence by the clergy in some towns; nearly four hundred friars in Andalusia emigrated to Morocco and converted to Islam rather than give up their women. The Cisnerian reforms had a strong effect, but it is misleading to represent them as having transformed the conduct of the Castilian clergy overnight. Nearly two decades later, at a church council in Seville, in 1512, the presiding archbishop Deza recommended that local clergy at least try to give an outward appearance of chastity and virtue, abstaining from attending the marriages of their grown children or officially deeding their personal property to concubines. In Portugal the situation may have been worse, and the record of sexual promiscuity and slave [207] running by the Portuguese clergy in the tropics later became one of the major scandals of the time. Indeed, nearly a century was required before the reforms in conduct and education began to be generally effective in Castile.

The importance of Catholicism in Castile actually increased at the close of the Middle Ages as a result of new social and cultural problems. The new political principles of the fifteenth century were unity and security, cornerstones of the "modernization" of that period. For the Catholic Kings and most of their subjects, it had become inconceivable that political unity should not be reflected in the religious realm, for the two were inextricably intertwined and reinforced each other. Thus the united Spanish monarchy became the first major state in Europe to impose the principle of both political and religious unity that became the standard of governments throughout the continent in the century that followed.
 
The Muslim question was temporarily settled by the conquest of Granada, but the issue of Hispanic Jewry was qualitatively entirely different. Jews played a more important role in Castilian affairs than they had in any other kingdom of western Europe. They were the major single group, though by no means the whole, of the Castilian financial class. Jewish intellectuals, physicians, and specialists had composed a large part of the Castilian intelligentsia of the late Middle Ages. Jews also performed major functions in royal administration, particularly in tax collecting, an activity much hated by the people. The upper class of Castilian Jewry had become extraordinarily wealthy by the late fourteenth century, while popular hatred of the Jewish community grew. That Jews were protected by the crown in the peninsula for a century and more after they had been expelled from other kingdoms in western Europe is explained by the weakness of Hispanic society (save for Catalonia) in conducting its own financial operations and the importance of Jews to royal administration.
 
Though there were a number of anti-Jewish riots during the course of the fourteenth century, the first great outburst against Hispanic Jewry was the great pogrom of 1391, precipitated by a combination of financial pressure and religious revival in southern Castile that preached puritanism, strict observance, ultra-orthodoxy, and segregation of Jews and Muslims (the last point having first been demanded by the Castilian Cortes in 1387). The lead in suppressing Jewish communities and placing heavy pressure on Jews to convert was actually taken in Catalonia, where Jews were proportionately much less numerous and important than in Castile. Practically the entire [208] Jewish community in Barcelona was converted or forced to leave, and by 1435 the same was true in Palma de Mallorca. Almost equally heavy pressures for conversion were felt in Castile in the 1390s, and a second wave of semi-voluntary conversions followed between 1411 and 1415, prompted in part by the evangelism of the Dominican Vicente Ferrer and some anti-Jewish legislation by the crown. (It might be noted that Jews also held a dominant and usurious financial position in the emirate of Granada, where they suffered a number of pogroms in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.)
 
In the 1390s, the Jewish population of the peninsula was probably more than 200,000. During the next generation over half formally converted to Catholicism. The step was all the easier because of the position of so many Hispanic Jews among the elite, and the opportunity for further gain that conversion brought. Conversely, in the case of Aragonese Jews with more modest resources, conversion made it possible to escape heavy taxes. To this must be added the fact that linguistically, and in some aspects culturally, Hispanic Jews had become quite Hispanized.
 
The paradox of the history of Castilian Jewry was that mass conversion was not a step toward solving the religious problem but only made it more intense. The Conversos, as the converts were termed, usually advanced further in wealth and status in their new situation as Christians. Intermarriage of wealthy Conversos with the aristocracy became increasingly common, and the number of descendants of formerly Jewish families placed in influential positions in or out of government was impressive. Suspicion and hatred of Conversos grew more intense as their wealth and influence increased.
 
The first major riots against Conversos occurred at Toledo in 1449. During the next quarter-century feeling against them spread among the zealots in church leadership, among their rivals in the upper and middle classes, and among lower-class people inflamed against "false Christians" and genuine or supposed oppressors. The most common charge against Conversos was that of Judaizing, that is, of falsely pretending conversion and secretly practicing Jewish rites. Their enemies insisted that Conversos constituted an insidious force of subversion within Spanish Catholicism, corrupting the faith and conspiring with the enemies of a united Catholic state and society. By the 1460s this antipathy led to major riots and outbursts in many towns, where conditions verged on local civil war. The Jewish question had become the main source of internal discord in the kingdom.
 
Traditionally, Castilian Jews had relied upon the support of the crown, and most Conversos supported the cause of Enrique IV and later of Juana in the Castilian civil struggles of the 1460s and 1470s. Thus they found themselves on the losing side when the Catholic [209] Kings ascended the throne. Two centuries earlier, Fernando III el Santo had broadly termed himself "king of the three religions," but in the l470s Isabel and Fernando could not conceive of unity and security in anything other than a staunchly, ultimately monolithic, Catholic society. The strong, expanding Castile of the late fifteenth century had destroyed the Muslim menace and no longer needed the Jews as it had a century or two earlier. The existence of a powerful financial caste closely associated with influential (and potentially antagonistic) groups in the aristocracy, all the while vaguely identified with an alien religion, stood as a theoretical menace to political and spiritual unity. Conversos were also a major part of the urban oligarchy--another special power group--and were on good terms with certain wealthy prelates. They constituted a sort of state within a state, but Isabel and Fernando would permit no more than one state and no more than one conceivable religious identification. After a ten-year campaign by the head of the Jeronymite order in Castile against Judaizing, and a new series of anti-Converso riots in Andalusian towns in 1473, the crown applied to Rome for approval of a special ecclesiastical inquisition under the patronage of the monarchy.
 
The Spanish Inquisition was conceived as part of the process of building a united state as well as a defense and purification of religion. Hence the insistence on royal patronage in naming the tribunal of a separate Castilian institution, rather than merely reviving a branch of the medieval papal inquisition in Castile. In the l470s, most of the Castilian hierarchy were too corrupt and too political to be trusted with resolute action on their own. Moreover, a royal-ecclesiastical institution would identify royal initiative more closely with the common people, whose antipathy to the Jewish and Converso oligarchies was intense.
 
Pope Sixtus IV was extremely reluctant to approve an inquisition under state rather than ecclesiastical control, but at the opening of the modern age, heresy was the worst of all political and religious crimes. Since it was held to require organized detection and correction methods rather than mob rioting, a Castilian inquisition was authorized by papal bull in 1478 and went into operation two years later. It was extended into the kingdom of Aragón in 1484, and subsequently, against great opposition from protectors of local constitutional rights, into Catalonia in 1487, becoming the only politico-administrative institution common to all the principalities of the united crown. The work of the Inquisition got under way in Seville, a major center of Conversos, in 1480. Seven hundred Conversos were, after execution, burned there during the next eight years, and many more received lesser punishment. Though the Inquisition was nominally [210] on the lookout for "Judaizers," all Conversos, whether remaining crypto-Jews or not, were immediately suspect. Altogether, under the direction of the first major inquisitor-general, Tomás de Torquemada (1483-1498), approximately 2,000 Conversos were burned and some 15,000 subjected to lesser punishment. Moreover it was soon being alleged that operations against Conversos could never be fully successful unless the remaining Jewish community was gotten rid of as well. The first orders for expulsion of Jews from selected areas came in the mid-l480s, but were not fully enforced.
 
The thesis has been advanced, most notably by Américo Castro, that the Inquisition itself was to a large degree created and prosecuted by lesser Conversos in the Spanish clergy, eager to prove their orthodoxy and zeal in an outburst of Jewish anti-Semitism which has found echoes in modern times. It is true that a number of Spanish clergy of Converso background were prominently associated with the Inquisition, a prime example being Torquemada himself. No doubt some Converso clergy were motivated especially to persecute Judaizers. Castro is also correct in pointing out the particularly Jewish identity of the malsines, or informers, of late medieval Spanish history. Yet the Inquisition was scarcely a Jewish institution, as this line of reasoning would have it. The institutionalized inquisition was a special feature almost unique to the Roman Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages. In constructing their own special tribunal, Spanish clerical and government leaders were merely reemphasizing their ultra-Catholic heritage. The reason why the Hispanic peninsula was the only part of western Christendom to develop a separate inquisition in the fifteenth century is clear: it was the only part of western Christendom that did not have a religiously and ethnically homogeneous society. So long as the peninsula was divided between four Christian states and fairly powerful Muslim domains, some degree of toleration was necessary both in the interest of Christians living under Muslim control and to prevent wealthy Jews from passing over the border into the domains of royal competitors. By the fifteenth century, Hispanic society was coming of age and having to identify itself as a unique and independent entity in the world, free of the restraints of the Middle Ages. The latent tendencies of five centuries then clearly won out, resulting in absolute insistence on religious conformity.
 
More recently it has been pointed out that the motivations for the Inquisition were as much social and economic as religious. It is difficult to weigh the exact force of various motivations in the elimination of the Hispanic religio-ethnic minorities, for this was a process that began in 1391 and was not completed for a quarter-millenium, until 1613. It has been seen that the religious and cultural ideals of [211] Castilian, and to some extent Portuguese, society had direct social and economic consequences, in that they tended to discourage financial and economic activity, encouraging a peasant-aristocratic continuum. Insofar as the Jews were a bourgeois elite and especially hated and envied for this, their elimination can be seen as a process of social and economic repression. There is evidence in the documents to indicate that desire to expropriate Jewish wealth was indeed a motive in the establishment of the Holy Office. But of course religion, culture, and social and economic ambition were not separate or exclusive ideals or spheres of activity. They were intimately associated and to a considerable degree responsible for each other.
 
The establishment of an inquisition to purge suspect Conversos was a prelude to the elimination of the regular Jewish communities in the Hispanic kingdoms. Because of their financial importance, this was delayed until the ten-year Granada campaign was finally concluded. The final decree for the expulsion from the kingdoms of the united monarchy of Jews who refused to convert was issued in 1492. It is not possible to know exactly how many people were affected. Both the Jewish and Converso populations increased even more rapidly than that of Castile as a whole in the fifteenth century. By 1492 there may have been nearly 150,000 Conversos and 150,000 unconverted Jews in the kingdom of Castile, which had a total population of nearly 7,000,000. This would mean that people of Jewish background made up about 4 percent of the whole. There were only about 30,000 Jews in the Aragonese principalities, but perhaps 40,000 Conversos there, since more poor Jews had converted in the eastern kingdoms. Under pressure of the 1492 decree, approximately 50,000 more chose conversion, but well over 100,000 made the best arrangements they could to leave the country. Subsequent expulsions and flights from persecution probably resulted in the departure of at least 150,000 Jews from the peninsula over a period of several decades.
 
Most of those expelled accepted their fate passively, though there were a few minor attempts at fomenting an aristocratic revolt against the crown. The expulsion and accompanying persecution struck a major blow against the financial elite of Castile, and though it can hardly be said to have had crippling effects, it did reduce the pool of resources and skills that could meet the economic challenges of the sixteenth century. In some regions Jews and Conversos had in the past two hundred years acquired dominion over land, and most of these territories were apparently gobbled up by the aristocracy, further increasing the socioeconomic imbalance of Castile.
 
The Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions had a variety of functions, for they were widely used for enforcing morality, particularly among the ranks of the clergy. They also combatted sorcery, witchcraft, and [212] blasphemy, sins which elicited similar repression in many other parts of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their focus, however, was on the descendants of formerly Jewish families, for there never emerged an Hispanic Protestant minority of any size to be repressed.
 
The ability of the Converso community to endure was remarkable. Though perhaps only a minority remained crypto-Jews, a large proportion continued to marry only within their own circles and so preserved their identity for five or six generations or even longer. It has been argued that the great bulk of Conversos had originally been sincere in accepting Christianity, and that protracted persecution actually encouraged rather than discouraged Judaizing. In certain places, such as Palma de Mallorca, the entire ghetto area of converts was ostracized, and despite its militant formalistic Catholicism, the community was forced to continue its separate existence for centuries. Segments of the Converso community thus survived as identifiable units into the eighteenth century and beyond.
 
The Holy Office inspired fear and terror because of the secrecy of its operations. Those arrested were not allowed to communicate with the outside world and seemed temporarily swallowed up. The fact that the names of informers and accusers were not divulged made it all the harder to disprove charges. Servants and lower-class people, however, were less troubled by the Inquisition than were the wealthy and powerful, particularly in the sixteenth century. This was because of the Holy Office's concern for influence and example, and possibly also because of venal interest behind some of the prosecutions.
 
During the first century of the Inquisition's activity approximately 50,000 Conversos were condemned in one manner or other. Altogether, the Inquisition executed a grand total of some 3,000 (including a small number of Protestants) over a span of three hundred years, the last handful of executions taking place in the eighteenth century, ending with one final execution in 1826.
 
It is worth pointing out that the number of executions for heresy in Spain was less than the number of people destroyed in Germany by Protestants and Catholics alike during the witchcraft craze of the seventeenth century. Between 1562 and 1684, 3,200 were executed in southwest Germany alone. ⁽¹⁾ On those occasions when witchcraft mania did break out in Spain--as in Navarre and Catalonia in 1527-1528 and in Navarre in 1610--the Inquisition acted to calm the hysteria and accurately diagnosed the tendency to mass psychosis.
 
[213] The Inquisition clearly reinforced an increasingly narrow and rigid concept of Catholicism. Yet its own Index of Prohibited Books was operated with greater restraint than the Papal Index in Rome. The Spanish Index often did not suppress books in their entirety but published lists of excisions and corrections.
 
Ignorant twentieth-century commentators have likened the secret police terror of modern totalitarian regimes to the Spanish Inquisition. Such comparisons have at best very little foundation. Most of the lurid publicity about the Inquisition is greatly exaggerated. Most of those arrested were not tortured; the tortures that were employed were rather mild and sometimes were successfully resisted, and scarcely anyone was burned alive. The Holy Office did not operate as a modern totalitarian police system, but had to abide by a series of rules as a legal institution. Those accused were permitted to name advocates and sometimes managed to mount a successful defense. The worst excesses were the result of greed and corruption among the inquisitors themselves during the sixteenth century, for the Holy Office was entitled to a proportion of all goods confiscated from heretics. During the reign of Isabel, the Inquisition operated under fairly strict royal supervision, but became more independent and temporarily more corrupt during the early and middle decades of the sixteenth century.
 
The destructive effects of the Inquisition on Spanish society and culture are obvious. It reinforced narrow ethnocentric, caste-oriented, and anti-intellectual values. It also strengthened the united monarchy and the subsequent Habsburg state, and was probably the most popular single institution in Castile (if not in Aragón and Catalonia, where it was viewed with greater suspicion) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Jurisdiction of the Inquisition included only heretics; it did not cover those who were recognized followers of another, non-Christian religion. There were already a quarter-million Muslims in Valencia and Aragón; conquest of Granada added as many more to the population of southeast Castile. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Muslim and quasi-Jewish minorities numbered nearly 10 percent of the population of Castile and Aragón. The eastern principalities, with their mixed social and constitutional structures, were accustomed to a degree of diversity. For Castile this was a comparatively new experience. Though the terms of 1492 guaranteed the Muslims of Granada [214] freedom of religion and some security of property in the traditional medieval pattern, this had become very difficult for the zealots in the Castilian church to accept. A campaign for the conversion of the Granada Muslims was launched, yet according to the agreement this could only be carried on by educational and evangelistic means. Some Castilian missionaries, led by the new archbishop of Granada, Fray Hernando de Talavera, made a sincere effort, but these modes of activity were only beginning to be developed by the Hispanic clergy. The obdurate resistance of Muslim society maddened the zealots, and Cardinal Archbishop Cisneros decided to speed up the conversion process. High-handed acts provoked military revolt in part of the Muslim region near Granada. This in turn raised the question of security, finally solved to the satisfaction of the zealots by a decree of 1502 which required the conversion to Christianity of all Muslims within the kingdom of Castile. Many thousands left, but the large Muslim minority remaining became Moriscos, or Christianized Moors, and as such, subject to the rigors of the Inquisition.
 
For more than half a century, the Morisco population was bothered comparatively little. The Moriscos were a compact and exclusive group, limited to a corner of the kingdom and not at all associated with Christian society to the extent of the Conversos. Whereas the latter had been a financial elite, with sometimes important social and political associations, the Moriscos were almost all peasants and artisans. They threatened Christian society only in the sense that they inhabited a certain territory, but they were in no position to subvert that society, as many feared the Conversos would do. The Moriscos were thrifty, productive, and hard-working. The Inquisition, on its part, was like other sixteenth-century Spanish institutions in that it was agreeable to at least a certain degree of corruption. Periodic payments to high officials and members of the crown's Council of the Inquisition preserved Morisco society from direct persecution for more than six decades.
 
The traditional system of tolerance in the eastern principalities was altered by the revolt of the Valencian Germania in 1520. The violence and enforced conversions carried out by the militia of the Germania reflected the intensity of feeling of Levantine Christians against Muslims. Of all the revolutionary changes attempted by the Germania, the only one that was subsequently adopted by the crown was the official Christianization of Muslims, as extended to all principalities of the crown of Aragón by a decree of 1526. Henceforth the peninsula's entire Muslim population were catagorized as Moriscos, or converts. The religious uniformity of the Spanish kingdoms had theoretically been made complete. It was not merely a negative process of eliminating diversity, but also a part of the broad expansion of Hispanic [215] society and religion, an expansion carried out on the cultural and spiritual plane at home and on a continental territorial plane abroad. Yet, in fact, the decrees of nominal conversion changed very little; with very few exceptions, the Moriscos preserved their traditional religion and culture.

The age of the elimination of religious diversity in the peninsula was also the age of the greatest expansion of Catholic education and learning in Hispanic history to that time, another expression of the vitality of Catholic culture in the early imperial period. The first printing presses in the peninsula appeared in the major eastern towns--Valencia, Zaragoza, Barcelona--that were closer to the mainstream of west European commerce and culture than most parts of Castile and Portugal. In most of the peninsula the towns were so small and weak that urban secular humanism on the Italian (or even Valencian) pattern failed to develop, and church leaders, with large incomes at their disposal, became the major patrons of learning. During the era of Cisneros, schools of higher education were begun at Valladolid, Avila, and most important at Cisneros's new University of Alcalá de Henares (1508), not far from Madrid. Cisneros was especially concerned with developing theological studies, but Alcalá also stressed the humanities, languages, and medicines. Cisneros also patronized translations into the vernacular of some of the most important new foreign works of Catholic devotion, in the vein of the Imitatio Christi literature. A main feature of the new spiritual learning in Spain was Bible study, the principle achievement of which was the massive Polyglot Bible, which published original and complete texts of both Old and New Testaments in all the classic languages in which they had been rendered, complete with a vocabulary and an analysis of grammar. The first volume of this work, the most complete comparative study of the scriptures ever made in Christendom, was published, paradoxically, in 1517, the same year that Luther nailed his ninety-five Bible-inferred theses on the church door in Wittenburg, starting the Protestant Reformation.
 
The expansion of religious learning within the Castilian church paralleled the expansion of Castilian vernacular literature in the early sixteenth century. During this era the Castilian language established itself as the dominant tongue for cultural expression throughout the principalities of the united monarchy. Castilian cultural hegemony marched pan passu with the political and military hegemony of the Castilian crown. Castilian thus came to be the main Spanish language [216], known among foreigners as Spanish, pure and simple. By the mid-sixteenth century it had become the dominant vernacular cultural tongue in western Europe, and retained that position for one hundred years and more until replaced by French in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Within the peninsula, it remained the dominant literary vehicle until the coming of nineteenth-century romanticism gave new impetus to Portuguese literature and revived, the vernacular literatures of Catalonia, Valencia, and Galicia.

During the l520s, the Catholic humanism and moderate reformism of the Dutch scholar Erasmus enjoyed great vogue among Spanish intellectuals and religious thinkers, and inspired the major new current in the Spanish Catholic thought of the decade. The centers of Spanish Erasmianism were Barcelona, Zaragoza, and above all Valencia and the new University of Alcalá de Henares. The chief of Spanish humanists, Juan Luis Vives, son of a Valencian Converso family, proved to be one of the most profound disciples of Erasmus in Europe. At one point Cisneros had offered Erasmus a chair at Alcalá, and whereas the Sorbonne combatted Erasmian tenets, a Castilian theological conference at Valladolid upheld them. At that time Spain was probably the center of European Erasmianism, particularly between 1527 and 1532 when Erasmian humanists were the chief religious advisers of the crown and Carlos V hoped to encourage Catholic and papal reform in a moderate humanist direction. His failure to accomplish this, together with the radicalization and polarization of religious positions in Europe by 1532, led to a reaction in Castile and an erosion of the influence of such Erasmian counsellors as Juan and Alfonso de Valdés. In an intensification of this reaction, Erasmian doctrines were repressed under the weight of the Inquisition.

The Catholic humanism of several thousand clerics and university sophisticates had scant effect upon a united kingdom of nearly ten million people, most of them illiterate peasants. Confrontation with Judaism and Islam had already led the great majority of Spanish people to take a stand for absolute Catholic orthodoxy and homogeneity. The split that developed in European Christendom after 1517 was absolutely inacceptable for Spaniards, whose institutions and culture were totally identified with Hispanic Catholicism. The fact [217] that Protestantism was adopted by societies and states that were enemies of the Spanish crown and sometimes rivals of the Spanish themselves accentuated the rejection of religious alternatives. The only non-Catholics whom peninsular people had known were Muslims and Jews, perceived either as mortal enemies or exploiters. The same attitude was easily transferred to Protestants. Few of the religious, cultural, social, economic, or political features that encouraged Protestantism in northern Europe were present in Spain. Before 1558, the Inquisition could discover only 105 potential exemplars of Lutheranism in the united kingdom, and two-thirds of these were foreigners.
 
By the late 1550s, however, two small groups of Protestants were discovered, one in Valladolid in the north and the other in Seville. The news of this, along with many other rumors from home and abroad, was enough, after the experiences of the last three generations, to accelerate what was already emerging as a sort of collective paranoia. A royal decree of 1559 forebade Spaniards to study in foreign universities--even Catholic ones, for foreign Catholicism was considered flaccid and untrustworthy. The process of turning the Hispanic peninsula into the cultural Tibet of western Europe was by this time under way. During the next year or so, the inquisition tried some 800 persons suspected of Protestantism, including many "Old Christians" of high social standing never suspected of Jewish background. The Holy Office reached so far as to purge one archbishop of Toledo, holding the primate of the Spanish church in jail for seven years before he was finally cleared and released.
 
From this time on, the cloak of orthodoxy became increasingly heavy. In the reign of Felipe II, which was just beginning, Spain would emerge as the champion of the Counter-Reformation and the sword arm of international Catholicism. Many historical commentators have interpreted Spanish policy in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as having been dictated mainly by religious motives, with the result that the practical interests of the Spanish crown were often sacrificed in the crusading fervor of the Counter-Reformation. This impression is strengthened by the central role of the Spanish delegates to the Council of Trent in maintaining the authority of the papacy.
 
Such an interpretation, frequent among Hispanic Catholic zealots and foreign anti-Catholic commentators, is quite wide of the mark in a number of respects. The coincidence of royal policy with Catholic objectives is in most cases at least as easily explicable by political motivations, because the religious split between portions of European society during the sixteenth century coincided with a political and military antagonism that found most of the enemies of the Spanish [218] crown identified with Protestantism or the anti-Christian Turk. Carlos V did not move to crush Protestantism in Germany when it emerged, and took military action only after political and military tensions had built up over a quarter-century. Felipe II was rigorous against Dutch and Flemish Protestants, but would not have acted so severely had they not been political rebels against his crown. The Protestant Elizabeth was left unmolested for nearly three decades, and the great Armada was attempted only after severe military and political rivalry had developed. Both kings let operations against the Turk slip more often than not in order to prosecute their intra-Catholic imperial rivalry with the crown of France.
 
Relations between the papacy and the crown of Spain were bad throughout the century and sometimes violent. Rebel mercenaries of Carlos's forces sacked Rome in 1527. Several times popes joined or even led anti-Spanish coalitions. Paul IV (1555-1559) was the bitterest foe of the Spanish crown, whose subjects he called "those dregs of the earth, that breed of Moors and Jews." During his reign the crown found itself for a short time in the embarrassing position of operating a royal army in Italy against the forces of the papacy itself, though the piety of Felipe II was ultimately expressed in his orders to the Duke of Alba to kneel before the Spanish-hating pope to ask forgiveness.
 
Felipe II followed what might be termed not inaccurately a dynastic policy of orthodox Catholic nationalism. Locked in a struggle for the hegemony of western Europe, he saw religious orthodoxy as a mainstay of Spain and the empire, and the Spanish crown as the mainstay of orthodoxy within its realms. Foreign prelates, even the pope himself, were not to be trusted in political, administrative, and financial matters, where they might be representing other interests. Even more than the Catholic Kings, he tried to Hispanize the church in Spain. Foreign appointments became even rarer, and he asked that Aragonese Franciscans and Cistercians be freed from French control, because of the suspected heterodoxy and divided loyalties of the leaders of those orders. Later he endeavored to establish a completely separate Spanish section of the Jesuits. He delayed publishing the Trentine decisions in Spain for fear that they might endanger the royal control of church appointments. Ecclesiastical affairs were more fully dominated by the crown in Spain than in any other contemporary Catholic kingdom of Europe. In turn, the papacy sometimes looked upon the Spanish crown's frequent expressions of concern about church affairs and the repression of heresy as pretexts for the extension of Spanish royal power.
 
Though there was little reason to doubt the sincerity of the Spanish desire to avoid or eliminate heresy, the papacy was rarely able to [219] identify its political interests with those of the Spanish crown. Spain was simply too powerful: having won hegemony in Italy, it was sometimes in a position to coerce the papacy politically, and the papacy was not always disappointed when Protestant or other Catholic interests managed to check the might of the Spanish crown. Clement VII, for example, might have been able to head off the English schism had he not been under the coercion of Hispanic dynastic interests. This purely political tension between the papacy and the Spanish crown lasted throughout the century, and resulted in another breakdown of relations in the early 1590s over the question of the French royal succession. Rome preferred an ex-Protestant Frenchman to a hyper-orthodox member of the Spanish ruling family, for reasons of political balance in Europe.
 
Whatever the reasoning or motivation of the Spanish crown, the situation was much simpler from the viewpoint of its subjects. The Spanish popular mind of the sixteenth century did not distinguish sharply between religious and secular activities in the modern sense. Ordinary Spaniards continued to confound their cause with that of God; much of the time they did indeed believe that they were engaged in a crusade when making war against non-Catholic powers. Through the sixteenth century, the notion was sustained that the Hispanic cause enjoyed the special favor and protection of God. Hence the corresponding depression and disillusion that set in after 1588, when evidence started to accumulate that this was not exactly the case.
 
The most important institutional development of Spanish Catholicism during the Counter-Reformation was the creation and expansion of the Jesuit order. Its founder, the ex-soldier San Ignacio Loyola, was rooted not in Hispanic orthodoxy alone but also in the introspective trend of sixteenth-century Basque religiosity, which differed somewhat from that of most of Spain. He was also influenced by the methodic, systematized spirituality of the Devotio moderna as practiced in the peninsula especially by the monks of Montserrat in Catalonia. The Jesuit order became, as is well known, the sword arm of allegiance to the papacy, emphasizing religious teaching and proselytizing among non-Christians and in the second half of the century the Counter-Reformation's prosecution of heresy.
 
The imperial age was also a great era of Hispanic missionary activity. The best-known figure in this was the Basque Jesuit San Francisco Javier, but his nominal conversions of great masses of Asians in southern Asia and the Far East were perhaps less important than the work of many hundreds of obscure Spanish (and Portuguese) monks and priests who accompanied seamen and conquerors. The work of the Spanish clergy among American Indians, particularly in [220] parts of Mexico, was extensive and did more than anything to build the uniquely symbiotic culture of Hispano-Indian America.

During the sixteenth century, the peninsula became the center of Catholic thought. The intellectual life of the Spanish universities and cultural elite did not merely freeze into a negative, reactionary pattern before the new ideas of the sixteenth century, as has sometimes been suggested. In the first half of the century, particularly, there was a sense of newness and the development of culture, in which the discovery and conquest of America played a major role. The word progreso was first employed in Castilian in the 1520s and the term moderno was first used at about the same time. The sense of cultural unity with the ancients persisted, but with a feeling of continuity and of surpassing their achievements both in the arts and in practical affairs. Among writers and scientists there was a new emphasis on observation, and the experience of America provided one of the first examples in Europe of a sense of the comparative history of civilizations, as it developed among church writers and thinkers in sixteenth-century Spain and Mexico. Among these same elements was first expressed the early modern myth of the "noble savage," as applied to some of the American Indians.
 
Spanish theologians and philosophers recognized the breakup of the medieval cultural and philosophical unity, but they strove to avoid the complete secularization of culture by stressing the primacy of religious thought, not merely on the basis of authority, but as accepted by individual minds and consciences. The imperfections of Rome were recognized, while the religious values and authority of Catholicism were affirmed. The idea of the overarching imperial unity of the Middle Ages was abandoned for new norms of natural law and, in the political sphere, of international law. The Spanish theorists and moralists of international relations, led by Francisco de Vitoria, have thus been frequently given credit for initiating modern concepts of international law.
 
The thrust of sixteenth-century Spanish theology lay in the elaboration of neo-scholastic thought, culminating in the work of Francisco Suárez, the outstanding European neo-scholastic of the age. While endeavoring to reconcile freedom and law, modernity and tradition, Spanish neo-scholasticism recognized that the modern principle lay in a stress upon the role of conscience as well as authority. Emphases varied: whereas the Dominican Domingo Báñez tended to be a full [221] fledged predestinationist, Luis de Molina in his Concordia attempted to harmonize individual freedom and God's will.
 
Though there was nowhere any foreshadowing of modern representative political theory in the thought of sixteenth-century Spanish philosophers and theologians, a key work such as Suárez's Defensa de la fe (1613) was explicitly anti-absolutist, emphasizing the authority of the laws of the kingdom and the function of delegation of power by the crown. It was held in theory that power and legitimacy lay only in the community, though the ideal of direct community representation was not advanced. Suárez did not go beyond advocating greater participation in the royal government, under which the civil power could be altered and mediated by the administration of laws and juridical institutions.
 
In the doctrines of natural law that formed the basis of social theory, private property was not held to be an inherent part of natural law, but to be a logical consequence of it. The most radical of Spanish civil theorists, Juan de Mariana, who advocated tyrannicide in dealing with cases of severe oppression, suggested that property holdings should be redistributed if they became excessively or unjustly concentrated.
 
This period was also one in which clerical historians laid the foundations of modern Spanish historiography, particularly in the use of original documents, as in Jeronomo de Zurita's Anales de Aragón, and in the scope of their study, as in Mariana's Historia general de España (1601).

Church missionaries and theorists also led the struggle for social justice for the American Indians. Some Spanish jurists sustained a rather primitive theory of the "right of conquest" over the Indian population, but this was not accepted by the best minds in Spain. Francisco de Vitoria carried out an independent and penetrating analysis of the moral and legal problems of empire and of dominion over alien, non-Christian peoples. For Vitoria and his colleagues, Spanish dominion in the Indies could not be founded on mere conquest or assumption of superiority or divine right, but required a complex of historical, religious, and legal factors, and only as restricted and mediated by the tutelage of natural law under a moral restraint.
 
Missionaries of the regular clergy carried on intensive struggles to protect the Indians from exploitation by Spanish colonists. The most [222] famous of them, Bartolomé de las Casas, the Apostle to the Indies, was so outspoken in his denunciation of Spanish treatment of the Indians that he has even been accused of having founded the "black legend." During the reign of Carlos V, the arguments of church moralists were written into imperial policy when the New Laws of 1542-1543 forbade further enslavement of Indians and made provision for eventual liberation of all those held in peonage. However, the New Laws could not be enforced, and it became ultimately impossible to control many of the ravages of the colonists. Church advocates of the Indians' rights had a significant mitigating effect on conditions in Spanish America, but they were unable to dominate the mores of colonial society.

Just as the church did not rule a theocracy, so the monarchy did not enjoy caesaropapist domination over the church. The crown controlled major appointments, but it could not fully dominate the ecclesiastical hierarchy or all important church institutions. The sixteenth-century Spanish church bore within it resources for many spontaneous initiatives. The church was not a monolithic institution but one divided by considerable internal strife. Rivalry between orders, struggles for preferment, appointment, and jurisdiction, the administration or use of church properties and income--all provoked considerable dispute. Wealthier orders like the Benedictines tended to identify with the aristocracy, whereas the Franciscans and Dominicans were closer to the common people. The foundation of the Jesuit order provoked a good deal of hostility. Animosity toward hierarchs was keenly felt, leading in one case to the fraudulent imprisonment of an archbishop by the Inquisition. Within the universities there were bitter contests for chairs, which involved extremes of slander and intellectual distortion.
 
It is undeniable that Felipe II's effort to seal off Spain from regions of heresy and heterodoxy had a somewhat traumatic effect on Spanish culture, closing up many of the avenues of thought pursued by the much more open pro-Erasmian culture of the early decades of the century. Yet the prohibition of foreign study for Spaniards never became fully effective, and ties always remained with Italy and Flanders. The flowering of Spanish culture in the latter part of the century actually led to a growing cultural influence of Spain on most of the rest of western Europe, at least in literature and the arts.
 
The repression of outside ideas that reigned in the 1560s and 1570s was eased after the more moderate Cardinal Quiroga became inquisitor [223] general in 1577. During the last two decades of the century there was greater liberty for a more critical vein of scholarship, and many of the new foreign scientific concepts were accepted and taught in the Spanish schools. For example, Copernican doctrine was well established at Salamanca, the queen of Spanish universities, by the 1590s.
 
During the reign of Felipe II there developed a great intensification of religious feeling whose most direct literary expression was found in the writings of the Spanish mystics, led by Santa Teresa de Avila and San Juan de la Cruz. Though in 1559 a number of mystical works had been placed on the Index, this persecution later ceased.
 
There was also an increase in practical religious work and in charitable activity. The most important order established for such ends was the Hermanos de San Juan de Dios, but reforms of this sort were carried out in some of the older orders, and further efforts were made to improve the educational level of the clergy. Though the new Jesuit order was not favored by the crown, it increased its influence considerably in the 1580s and l590s, particularly in education.
 
The end of the sixteenth century witnessed the neo-scholastic movement at its height at Salamanca and other schools, a revival of a Spanish Christian humanism which emphasized reason and natural law. The influence of religiosity was keenly felt in the great Spanish literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which was saturated with a sense of human sin, themes of moral psychology, and expressions of mysticism. Never in the history of the West has the culture and art of a people been so thoroughly identified with its religion.

[344] The principal study of the reform of the Spanish episcopate is P. Tarsicio de Azcona, La elección y reforma del episcopado español en tiempo de los reyes Católicos (Madrid, 1960). On the reform of the Dominicans, see V. Beltrán de Heredia, Historia de la reforma de la Provincia de España, 1450-1550 (Rome, 1939). Further material may be gleaned from the relevant sections of Vicente de la Fuente's Historia eclesiástica de España, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1855-59). Robert Ricard, La Conquéte spirituelle du Mexique (Paris, 1933), is the best study of the main missionary enterprise of the Castilian Church during the sixteenth century. J. Bada, Situació religiosa de Barcelona en el segle XVI (Barcelona, 1970), is an excellent local religious study.
 
The fundamental study of the Inquisition remains Henry C. Lea's The Spanish Inquisition, 4 vols. (New York, 1906-1907). The best Spanish Catholic work is B. Llorca, S.J., La Inquisición en España (Madrid, 1936). Juan Antonio Llorente's classic work has recently appeared in an American edition as A Critical History of the Inquisition of Spain (Williamstown, Mass., 1971). Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (London, 1965), presents a lively monocausal interpretation. There are also useful works by Miguel de la Pinta Llorente, O.S.A.: La Inquisición española (Madrid. 1948); La Inquisición española y íos problemas de la cultura y de la intolerancia, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1953, 1958); and Aspectos históricos del sentimiento religioso en España (Madrid, 1961).
 
The major account of Spanish Jews and Conversos after 1492 is Julio Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la España moderna y con temporánea, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1961), while the best brief treatment is A. Domínguez Ortiz, Los Judeoconversos en España y América (Madrid, 1971). B. Netanyahu, The Marranos of Spain from the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century (New York, 1966), provides material to refute the charge of crypto-Judaism.
 
[345] General aspects of Christian heresy and heterodoxy are considered in Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo's Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 8 vols. (Santander, 1946-48), and in E. Schäfer, Beiträge zur Geschichte des spanischen Protestan tismus, 3 vols. (Gütersloh, 1902). The historian of Spanish Erasmianism is Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Mexico City, 1950). J. E. Longhurst, Luther's Ghost in Spain (Lawrence, 1969), treats manifestations of Christian heterodoxy and their repression during this period. See also Domingo de Santa Teresa, Juan de Valdés (Rome, 1957).
 
Curiously enough, there are no major works on the Spanish Counter-Reformation. Among the more useful titles are R. Burgos, España en Trento (Madrid, 1941); C. Gutiérrez, Españoles en Trento (Valladolid, 1951); V. D. Carro, Pedro de Soto y las controversias político-teológicas en el siglo XVI (Salamanca, 1931); F. Cereceda, Diego Laínez en la Europa religiosa de su tiempo, 1512-1565, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1945-46); A. Astrain, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús, 7 vols. (Madrid, 1912-25); and J. Brodrick, S.J., The Origin of the Jesuits (London, 1948). The only study of censorship is A. Rumeu de Armas, Historia de la censura literaria gubernativa en España (Madrid, 1940).

There are two multivolume histories of higher education in Spain: C. Ma. Ajo G. y Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas (1957-), whose five volumes to date reach to the eighteenth century, and Vicente de la Fuente, Historia de las universidades, colegios y demás establecimientos de enseñanza en España, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1884-85). See also G. Reynier, La Vie universitaire dans l'ancienne Espagne (Paris, 1902). On the concepts of progress and modernity in sixteenth-century Spain, there are two pioneering works by José Antonio Maravall, Los factores de la idea de progreso en el renacimiento español (Madrid, 1963), and Antiguos y modernos: La idea de progreso en el desarrollo inicial de una sociedad (Madrid, 1966). Very little exists in the way of critical, analytical study of sixteenth-century Spanish thought. One of the best books is Bernice Hamilton, Spanish Political Thought of the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1963). Two studies of Spanish scholasticism that might be consulted are José M. Gallegos Rocafull, El hombre y el mundo de íos teólogos españoles del Siglo de Oro (Mexico City, 1946), and Marcial Solana's less imaginative Los grandes escolásticos españoles de los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid, 1928). On two key figures, see Guenther Lewy, Constitutionalism and Statecraft during the Golden Age of Spain: A Study of the Political Philosophy of Juan de Mariana, S.J. (Geneva, 1960), and V. Beltrán de Heredia, Francisco de Vitoria (Madrid, 1939). Lewis Hanke's The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia, 1949), is a classic study of the effort to apply enlightened moral and juridical norms to Spanish America.
 
For the development of Spanish science, the basic study is Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo's La ciencia española, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1887-89). See also the symposium of Estudios sobre la ciencia española del siglo XVI (Madrid, 1935); J. Rey Pastor, Los matemáticos españoles: Siglo XVI (Toledo, 1926); and, on economic thought, M. Grice-Hutchinson, The School of Salamanca. Readings in Spanish Economic Theory, 1544-1605 (Oxford, 1952).

1. H. C. E. Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684 (Stanford, 1972).