AlthoughtheNuevo Reino de Granadaoriginally formed part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, it was the earliest settlement on the continent of South America. When Balboa, in 1514, reported his rich discoveries in Darien, no time was lost in sending out Pedro Arias Dávila as governor, who landed at Santa Marta. He took with him as bishop Fray Juan de Quevedo, who formed one of his council with a right to vote, thus founding at the start that curious complication of jurisdictions which exercised so unhappy an influence on the development of the Spanish colonies. The see of Santa Marta, however, was not founded until 1531 and, as settlements were pushed into the interior, Santa Fe de Bogotá was established as the capital, where the Audiencia, or high court, was organized in 1547 and governed the colony until 1564, when Andrés Díaz Venero de Leiva was sent out as president.[756]It was not erected into a viceroyalty until 1719, from which it was reduced to its former state in a few years, to be restored again in 1740.[757]
In 1532 the see of Cartagena was founded and, in 1547, that of Popayan. In 1553 came the Franciscan Fray Juan Barrios with a bull of Julius III by which the see of Santa Marta was transferred to Santa Fe and erected into an archbishopric, thus sundering it from the metropolis of Lima. Santa Marta was reduced to an abbacy, to be subsequently re-erected. Cartagenawas dismembered from Santo Domingo and the archiepiscopal province included it with Popayan and Santa Marta. In the absence of the Inquisition, Archbishop Barrios exercised its functions and, in a series of Synodal Constitutions, issued in 1556, he ordered that no books should be possessed or sold without being first examined by the bishop or his deputies, under the penalty of fifty pesos.[758]
When, in 1570, the tribunal of Lima was established, its authority extended over all the Spanish possessions from Panamá to the south. The organization of so extended a territory was a work of time and the material at hand for it was of the worst description, as we have seen in the preceding chapter. It was not until 1577 that Inquisitor Cerezuela appointed a commissioner for Santa Fe, when his choice fell upon D. Lope Clavijo, dean of the metropolitan chapter. In the exercise of his new authority, Clavijo naturally became involved in bitter quarrels with the archbishop, Luis Zapata de Cardenas. His character reflected no credit on the Holy Office, if it be true as reported that his official apartments became a receptacle for women, on some of whom he committed violence, and that the nuns of Tunja were obliged to forbid his entrance into their parlor, in order to escape his licentious conversation. The Commissioner of Popayan, Gonzalo de Torres, was no better and was the source of infinite trouble to the bishop, until the visitador, Juan Ruiz de Prado, summoned him to trial in Lima, on a prosecution containing twenty charges. He seems, in 1589, to have been deprived of his office, which, as Archbishop Lobo Guerrero said to the Suprema, he used only as a means of committing offences against God. We hear also of Juan García, Commissioner of Cumaná, appointed by Inquisitor Ulloa, as a reward for committing perjury against an enemy of the latter. His adulteries and incests with maids, wives and widows, mothers, daughters and sisters, were notorious and he had caused the death of more than a hundred Indian laborers without baptism or confession. Like the others, he onlysought the place for the protection afforded from punishment for his crimes.[759]
Under worthies such as these, it is easy to understand that little attention was paid to the purification of the faith among the colonists. The cases sent to Lima for trial were few and unimportant. There were no Protestants among them; the only accusation of Judaism was that of Juan de Herrera, in 1592, of which he was absolved in 1595, after undergoing torture; the rest were the ordinary run of inquisitorial business—sorcery, bigamy, blasphemy and propositions, more or less innocent. That the commissioners, however, did not neglect opportunities that presented themselves may be assumed from the case of Juan Fernández, a merchant who, in 1588, denounced himself to the Commissioner of Cartagena because, on hearing that a man had hanged himself he had exclaimed “May God forgive him!” This proposition was decided to be heretical; Fernández was arrested, with sequestration of property, and was sentenced to abjurede levi, to hear mass as a penitent, and to pay a fine of a hundred pesos.[760]
It was evident that, if the faith was to be properly guarded, some authoritative tribunal nearer than Lima or Mexico was necessary for the vast territory which included the whole sweep of the Antilles and the coast of Tierra Firme from Panamá to Guiana. As early as April 8, 1580, Inquisitor Cerezuela wrote that the people of New Granada were asking for one, in view of their distance from Lima; this was great—fully six hundred leagues—and there would be no inconvenience in such a step except that he has understood that there were no suitable persons there to serve as consultors and calificadores.[761]Again, in 1600, Inquisitor Ordóñez y Flores represented to the Suprema the enormous extent of the territory assigned to the Lima tribunal and suggested two new ones—one at La Plata and the other atSanta Fe. The latter should include the sees of Popayan, Cartagena, Santa Marta and Venezuela, making a district four hundred leagues in length, in which it was impossible to provide commissioners; at present there was but one, with whom communication was so difficult that sometimes two years passed without hearing from him. A year earlier, in 1599, Archbishop Lobo Guerrero had written to the king to the same effect. He described the land as the most vicious and sinful in the Spanish dominions, and the faith as on the point of destruction; the distance to Lima was so great that offenders either died or escaped on the road and there was no money to meet the cost of sending them.[762]
The same cry went up from the islands. In 1594 the Council of Indies suggested to the king that, in view of the failure of all efforts to suppress the dealings of the people of Santo Domingo with the English and French corsairs, and with pirates of all nations, the inquisitor-general should commission the Archbishop of Santo Domingo as an inquisitor. On this being submitted to the Suprema it replied that there were disadvantages in the plan and the true remedy would be to establish a tribunal on the island, which could be done on the most economical basis. Philip II ordered a junta of a member of each council to consider a grant of inquisitorial power to the archbishop for a term of three or four years.[763]Nothing was done. The king shrank from the expense of a new tribunal and the Suprema was too jealous of the episcopate to delegate its power to the archbishop. A similar fate awaited a complaint of Bishop Martin of Puerto Rico, in 1606, as to the influx of heretic traders and sailors with their books, to remedy which he urged that a tribunal be established in Santo Domingo, or that delegated power be granted to the bishops, including authority to appoint alguaziles and familiars with the recognized privileges and exemptions.[764]
There can be no doubt that many representations of the same import poured in upon the court and finally, in 1608, the Council of Indies formally urged the erection of a tribunal in Santo Domingo. After due discussion, it was resolved to include in the district all the lands surrounding the Caribbean, except Central America, and, as its inquisitors subsequently boasted, it enjoyed the most extensive territories of any tribunal, embracing the archbishoprics of both Santa Fe and Santo Domingo and the bishoprics of Cartagena, Panamá, Santa Marta, Popayan, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Santiago de Cuba.[765]Its seat was fixed at Cartagena, as a central point and leading port of entry, which had had time to recover from its devastation by Drake in 1585. Its position and its safe and capacious harbor, easily defensible by fortifications, rendered it the entrepôt of the trade with the Pacific, and the place where the treasures of the colonies were gathered for transhipment to Spain, while the pearl fishery of Margarita and the productions of a province rich in mineral and agricultural wealth gave it a large and lucrative commerce. As the seat of a tribunal it had the advantage that, unlike Lima and Mexico, it was not a capital where the humors of inquisitors could be in some slight degree controlled by a viceroy and a royal Audiencia. They had only to deal directly with a local governor and municipal authorities on the one side, and with a simple bishop on the other; there was little to restrain them, short of the Suprema beyond the Atlantic, and we shall see that they took full advantage of their position in the endless embroilments which formed their chief occupation. The history of the tribunal is to be found not so much in its autos de fe as in the guerrilla war which for a century it maintained with the authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, rendering decent and orderly government impossible and going far to explain the decadence and decrepitude of the colony.
Extensive as was the district of the tribunal, it sought to extend its authority still farther over Florida. As early as 1606 thereis a curious letter from Fray Juan Cabezas, Bishop of Cuba, reciting that the tribunal of Mexico had appointed Fray Francisco Carranco as commissioner in Havana—under what authority does not appear. On the news of his coming the good bishop fled from Havana and took refuge in St. Augustine, whence he despatched his provisor to Spain to protest against the announced intentions of Carranco to include Florida within his jurisdiction. This had caused lively anxiety among the garrison, some three hundred in number, who with the friars were the only Spaniards there. The Indians as yet were so little rooted in the faith that recently in the missions they had slain four or five of the missionaries. There were, he adds, many women and children, for most of the soldiers were married and the effort was made to induce all to marry, for the hardships of the place were such that, without these ties, the governor would not venture to send any one away with the expectation of his return.[766]In 1621 there was some discussion as to sending a commissioner there, but nothing was done. Then, in 1630, Inquisitor Agustin Ugarte y Saravia reported from Cartagena that he had sent to the Governor of St. Augustine, Luis de Rojas y Borja, commissions in blank for a commissioner and familiar, fearing that, if appointees were sent, he would not receive them, as the settlement was wholly military, even the Franciscan missionaries being rated as soldiers.[767]It is not likely that the governor filled out the commissions, for Florida remained deprived of the blessing of the Holy Office. In 1692 another attempt was made. The Cartagena tribunal appointed Fray Pedro de Lima as commissioner with power to nominate subordinates, without requiring proofs of limpieza. Of this he availed himself to create a notary, an alguazil mayor and four familiars, thus establishing a tribunal of his own. The governor, Don Diego de Quiroga y Lanada, took the alarm and wrote earnestly to the Council of Indies. All this, he said, was simply to escape the royal jurisdiction; Fray Pedro, as a friar, was ineligible to the post of commissioner; thetribunal of Cartagena had no jurisdiction over Florida, where, by the Concordias, there was to be no Inquisition and, if cases of faith arose, they were to be treated by the cura or the ecclesiastical Vicariate. The Council of Indies, December 9, 1695, reported this to the king, asking that the Suprema be told to order the Cartagena tribunal to desist; to this Carlos II assented and the attempt to establish an Inquisition in Florida seems to have ended here.[768]
On June 29, 1610, Mateo de Salcedo and Juan de Mañozca—the latter a name of evil import to the Spanish colonies—the newly appointed inquisitors for Cartagena, set sail from Cádiz, with a fiscal, alguazil, notary and messenger, and power to appoint all necessary subordinates, whose commissions would be issued by the Suprema. On August 9th they arrived at Santo Domingo, where they were received with all honor and published the Edict of Faith; they received some self-denunciations, they appointed the Dominican Provincial as temporary commissioner, and the archbishop surrendered the papers of all cases heard by him and his predecessors. Sailing on September 4th, they reached Cartagena on the 21st, where their reception by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities was conducted with great pomp. On the 26th the royal letters were read and the oaths of obedience taken; three houses were rented for their occupation until a suitable building could be rented. The king allowed them 8000 pesos for their installation, with which they bought the houses in which they were lodged, paying half in cash and, with the remainder of the money, building a prison with thirteen cells.[769]For the support of the officials, as in the case of Mexico and Lima, the king provided a subvention of 8400 ducats a year, until the fines and confiscations should suffice to defray expenses; but, profiting by experience, he endeavored to guard against the habitual deceit of the tribunals. In his cédula of March 8, 1610, to the treasury officials of Cartagena, he ordered that sum to be paid out of any funds in the treasury or, if those were not sufficient, then out of what came in from the province, but, in order to know how much of this subvention should be paid, the receiver of the tribunal was required to furnish every year a statement of the confiscations and of all moneys applicable to the salaries, which were to be duly deducted from the treasury payments.[770]We shall see, as in Mexico and Peru, how fruitless was the precaution against audacious inquisitorial mendacity.
The tribunal found little to do in justification of its existence. It was not until February 2, 1614, that it held its first auto de fe, in which it presented about thirty penitents, whose offences consisted of trivial propositions, blasphemies, superstitious arts and the like. Nevertheless the ceremonies were conducted with all solemnity to impress the population, and a long and grandiloquent report was sent to the Suprema. Four readers of the sentences were employed, so that the reading could be continuous, yet such was the verbosity that the ceremonies lasted from half-past nine in the morning until after sunset and the auto had to be finished by torch-light. There were about a dozen sentences of scourging through the streets and when, on the next afternoon, the infliction was to commence, a motley crowd of negroes, mestizos, mulattos and Spaniards, estimated at four thousand, assembled, armed with oranges and other fruits wherewith to pelt the victims. The escort provided for them was afraid to venture forth until the inquisitors made proclamation threatening a hundred lashes for any such manifestation of pious zeal, when every one dropped his missile and the punishment was carried out in peace.[771]
Besides these there had been despatched in the audience-chamber sixteen cases, one of which is worth mentioning as an example of the spirit in which the inquisitors commenced their duties. For some matter of slight importance, Doña Lorenza de Acereto, a noble married woman, had been penanced by the episcopal provisor Almanso, prior to the founding of the tribunal. Probably stimulated by the Edict of Faith she was impelled to denounce herself to it and Mañozca, who had some private grudge to satisfy, imprisoned her for eight months and then sentenced her to a fine of 4000 ducats and exile for two years. When the sentence was read, she appealed to the inquisitor-general but, as she was leaving the room, she was warned that she would be immured for life in the secret prison and, in dread of this, she withdrew the appeal. It chanced that Almanso was soon afterwards sent to Madrid by his bishop to complain of the tribunal; he represented this matter to the Suprema, which sent for the papers of the trial and, on examining them, suspended the case as groundless.[772]
It was in unimportant routine work of this kind that the inquisitors employed the intervals of their quarrels with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Cartagena numbered a population of only five hundred Spaniards; the rest were negro slaves, Indians and the half-castes so numerous in the Spanish colonies. The Indians were not subject to inquisitorial jurisdiction and among the whites there was not intellectual energy sufficient to produce serious heresy. Mañozca, in fact, in a letter of March 17, 1622, to the Suprema describes them as wholly devoted to the pursuit of gain and utterly regardless of honor and reputation, from the Governor down. There is no one, he says, who will trouble himself with useful works, and virtue and honor are contraband, for they are only prized where there are virtuous and honorable men.[773]There were left the negroes and mixed races, ignorant and superstitious. The slaves had brought from the Guinea coast the mysteries of Obeah and dark practices of sorcery. The native Indians had ample store of superstitions, to cure or to injure, to provoke love or hatred; the colonists had their own credulous beliefs, to which they added implicit faith in those of the inferior races. The land was overrun with this combination of the occult arts of three continents, all of which were regarded by the Inquisition, not as idle fancies, but as the exercise of supernatural powers, involving express or implicit pact with the demon. Had the tribunal seriously labored to eradicate them, it would have had ample work for its energies, but the offenders were slaves or paupers; there was neither honor nor profit in their prosecution, and consequently no energy. Indeed Mañozca, in the letter just quoted, endeavored to be released from the task—perhaps the only instance on record of an inquisitor desiringto abandon a portion of the jurisdiction for which the Holy Office was wont to struggle so desperately.
He gives a fearful account of the witchcraft practised by the negro slaves in the mines of Saragossa, in Antioquia, who kill, cripple and maim men and women and suffocate children and destroy the fruits of the earth. There are about four thousand of them, brought from Guinea, who, though baptized, are wholly untaught in the faith, and are more like brutes than men. The missionaries among them pay no heed to their instruction but are wholly absorbed in the search for gold. The district is remote and mountainous and only to be reached by footpaths; the smallest coin there is gold and to arrest a culprit costs more than his value as a slave. The tribunal has no funds to bring them hither for trial and their maintenance in gaol is a heavy burden on the owners. Four have been tried and condemned to reconciliation and perpetual prison, but the Inquisition has no penitential prison and, if there was one, they would starve to death, as they could not earn their support and the alms of the pious would not reach so miserable a set of beings. They have therefore been put into the Hospital General, where they can be employed and hear mass and perform their penance. As for the great mass of the culprits, it would be impossible for the tribunal to arrest and try them—the cost would be enormous and the result, according to law, would be to set them free, which would fill the land with demons, nor would the owners permit their capture, in the certainty of losing them. To meet these difficulties Mañozca therefore suggests a general pardon, after which the civil authorities shall have cognizance of their crimes and punish them otherwise than with the benignity habitual with the Inquisition. The Suprema was hardly prepared thus to surrender even so unprofitable a portion of its jurisdiction and, in forwarding this letter to the king, urged that an Edict of Grace should be proclaimed; that he should assist the tribunal with the funds necessary for the support of the officials and the expense of its functions, and that the Council of Indies should order the royal officials to inflict severe punishment, in so far as they had jurisdiction, and should assist the Inquisition in making arrests and other acts. To this Philip IV drily replied that the Council of Indies would order the governors to apply such remedies as they deemed advisable.[774]All parties thus sought to wash their hands of this troublesome and costly affair, and witchcraft and sorcery continued to flourish.
They were not confined to the slaves in the mines of Antioquia and, some ten years later, there was an outburst which offered fairer inducements to repay prosecution. A great assembly of witches was discovered among the negroes of the town of Tolú—an accessible sea-port, about sixty-five miles from Cartagena—where the witnesses testified to all the classical features of the Sabbat—flying through the air, dancing around a goat, kissing himretroand all the customary performances. Since the great auto de fe of witches at Logroño in 1610, the Suprema had grown skeptical and cautious as to these superstitions, and had impressed on the tribunals the necessity of acting with great reserve in all such cases. In reporting this matter therefore, September 25, 1632, the inquisitors said that they had observed these instructions and had arrested only a mulatto woman and a mestiza, who had persistently denied the charges. Still the testimony continued to pour in, spreading the epidemic to Cartagena and implicating Spaniards of consideration and property, for witnesses who confessed to having been at the Sabbat were free to designate whomsoever they chose as having been present—a fact which explains the rapid multiplication of accomplices, whenever a persecution commenced. Animated by the prospect thus opened, the inquisitors threw aside their caution; they accepted the most absurd stories and attributed to witchcraft many cases of ordinary sickness occurring in the town. They erected additional prisons to receive the culprits and sentenced to burning two of those accused as leaders—negresses named Elena de Vitoria and Paula de Eguiluz, but the sentence of the former was revoked by the Suprema and, when that of the latter was received, itsent orders that no sentence of relaxation should be executed until a copy of the process was submitted to it.
Torture was freely employed, resulting in an auto de fe held, March 26, 1634, where twenty-one witches were exhibited, whose punishment mostly consisted of scourging, although one, Ana de Avila, a mestiza widow, who had overcome seven turns of themancuerdain her torture, was fined 1000 pesos. A sentence of absolution was read of Ana Beltran, who had been tortured without confession for an hour and a half and had died of its effects. This was followed, June 1, 1636, by another auto with sixteen penitents, among whom was Elena de Vitoria. Another was Guiomar de Anaya, who had overcome the torture and was sentenced to exile and a fine of 200 ducats. Paula de Eguiluz was reconciled in an auto of March 25, 1638, after six years of imprisonment, and was condemned to two hundred lashes and irremissible prison. It seems that she enjoyed a high reputation as a physician and was allowed to leave the prison in the practice of her profession, numbering among her patients even the inquisitors and the bishop, Cristóbal de Lazárraga. She was permitted to cast off the sanbenito and appeared in a mantle bordered with gold and in a sedan chair; she earned much money and was charitable in relieving the necessities of her fellow-prisoners.[775]
In the other chief source of inquisitorial business—blasphemy—the mercifulness of the Suprema brought about a curious and unexpected result. The most usual expletive,reniego á Dios—I renounce God—was reckoned as heretical and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but it was so frequent that the Suprema ordered it to be punished only with a reprimand. As the inquisitors complained, in a letter of June 28, 1619, the effect of this was that, when a master flogged a slave, at the first lash the latter promptly renounced God; he thus became, on the spot, subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the tribunal; the flogging ceased and he was handed over to it, to go through the formality of a trial, at the end of which he was dischargedwith a scolding. This was a process which might be repeated indefinitely, to the manifest detriment of the discipline indispensable to slavery.[776]
It was not till the tribunal had been established for more than ten years that it had any serious business in vindicating the faith. In an auto de fe celebrated March 16, 1622, there were four negro witches reconciled, two negro sorceresses punished and one bigamist banished from the Indies. In addition to these there was a Protestant burnt alive—an Englishman named Adam Edon (Haydon?). He had been sent, in 1618, by an English merchant, to purchase tobacco in Cumaná, where he was arrested in 1619 and sent to Cartagena. For two years the most earnest endeavors to wean him from his errors were fruitless, and his fate was inevitable. Mañozca, in his report, described him as a most engaging person; at thequemaderohe was not chained as usual to the stake, but he calmly sat on a faggot and remained motionless till life was extinct, a veritable martyr to his convictions.[777]
After this auspicious beginning there opened a prospect of greater usefulness. At an auto de fe of June 17, 1626, solemnized with great magnificence, there were twenty-two penitents, of whom one was a Calvinist and seven were Judaizers. Of the latter, Juan Vicente had already been reconciled in Coimbra and again in Lima. Under the canon law, a single relapse entailed relaxation; this he had been spared in Lima, and his persistent backsliding left no hope of ultimate conversion, so he was duly consigned to the flames.[778]After this there was an interval during which inquisitorial energy had to be content with witches, blasphemers and the like, until the raid made on the Portuguese merchants in Lima gave occasion for similar action in Cartagena. One of the accused, in the former city, gave evidence against a compatriot in the latter; it was duly forwarded and the arrest was made March 15, 1636. The circle spread until there were twenty-one in prison. Torture was savagely employed and one of the prisoners, Paz Pinto, a man widely esteemed, died from its effects.Most of the cases were ready for an auto held March 25, 1638, at which eight were reconciled and nine were absolved. There were no relaxations, but the confiscations, as we shall see, put the tribunal in possession of ample funds.[779]
Little remains to be said as to the activity of the tribunal in its appropriate sphere, although its contributions from time to time to the Suprema show that it occasionally obtained some wealthy penitent to strip, among the inconspicuous mass of blasphemers, bigamists and sorceresses. Its energies became more and more devoted, during the remainder of the century, to internal dissensions and quarrels with the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, leaving small leisure for its proper functions. Such was its inertia in this respect that we are told that there was no publication of the annual Edict of Faith between 1656 and 1818.[780]Then it was dealt a heavy blow in the capture of Cartagena, in 1697, by the French adventurers under the Baron de Pointis and his buccaneer allies, after which it was sacked by the latter. A few days after the commencement of the bombardment April 10th, the tribunal abandoned the city, carrying some of its prisoners to Majates, about fourteen leagues distant, where an auto de fe was held, with three penitents, and those whose cases were not ready were sent further inland to Mompox. When the fort of Bocachica was taken, the French found there nine prisoners accused of bigamy; eight of these joined the enemy and the ninth, Pedro Sarmiento, voluntarily went to Mompox and surrendered himself. The town capitulated May 6th and, when the French entered, they promptly sought the Inquisition, where they took the vestments of the officials and the sanbenitos and mitres of the penitents and held in the plaza a mock auto de fe, reading sentences and parodying the solemnities. Inquisitor Lazaeta was anxious to obtainpossession of certain papers and employed the good offices of Don Sancho Jimeno, the castellan of Bocachica, whose gallant defence had earned the respect of the enemy. He had been rereleased but returned to Cartagena to defend himself against certain charges, after which he requested of the leaders permission to get the papers; the mere mention of the Inquisition provoked a tempest of passion, but after it had cooled off he asked leave to get some papers of his own and, while collecting them, he succeeded in including those desired by the inquisitor. After the invaders had sailed, Lazaeta returned to Cartagena, June 22d. He found the building much damaged by the bombardment; it had been sacked and the chests broken open and left empty, but the records were untouched. With a donation which he begged and 12,000 pesos obtained from the governor, he had everything in order by the end of August, but this proved the turning-point of the tribunal which thenceforth declined rapidly.[781]
Repairs to its habitation became necessary in 1704, but these were inefficiently performed and, in 1715, the tribunal was obliged to shift its quarters to the house of the senior inquisitor and even this had been so maltreated in the bombardment that it threatened to fall. The trouble culminated in 1741 when Admiral Vernon bombarded Cartagena; a bomb dismantled the Inquisition and it had to be torn down, though the records escaped as they had prudently been transferred in advance to Tenerife, near Santa Marta. It was a quarter of a century before Carlos III, in 1766, granted for the rebuilding 12,600 pesos from the revenues of the vacant archbishopric.[782]
All this was but a symptom of the general decadence of the tribunal. In 1747 the Inquisitor, Francisco Antonio de Ilarduy, wrote that the only consultor he had was also the advocate of the fisc and of the accused; for three years there had been but one calificador, and the provincial at Seville had been vainly urged to send out frailes; there were but two familiars, who wereengrossed in earning their living and no one cared to accept the position; for seven years the Suprema had not taken the trouble to reply to the applications for advice and instructions. Ilarduy vainly tendered his resignation, but it was not accepted until at length he obtained a transfer to Córdova and left Cartagena in 1754. Under such conditions there was little done and the Inquisition lost its terrors. The royal permission to draw articles of necessity from foreign sources brought to Cartagena Danish, Dutch and other heretic ships, in which there came Jews whom the governor, in spite of the reclamations of the tribunal, allowed to establish themselves and to walk the streets like natives. The tribunal appealed to the Archbishop-viceroy, Antonio Caballero y Góngora, who contented himself with ordering that the limitation of importations to articles of necessity should be enforced.[783]
A typical case was that of Don David de la Mota, who came in 1783, and who made no secret of being a Jew. The tribunal summoned him and swore him in the Jewish fashion, when he said that he was born in Velez-Malaga; his parents had been penanced and his grandfather had been burnt by the tribunal of Granada; he had married a Jewess in the Danish island of Santa Cruz and had been circumcised fifty years before in Santa Eustacia. It indicates the altered situation when this case, which formerly would have been treated with little ceremony, was the subject of doubt and discussion. The inquisitors forbore to arrest him, for he represented foreign interests, which would have complained to the consul and he to the ambassador. They accordingly shrank from the responsibility and let him go. In Spain the exclusion of Jews was still rigidly enforced and, when they reported their action to the Suprema, it censured their timidity and ordered them always to arrest such parties when the evidence sufficed. It was the same in other parts of the district. In Santo Domingo the governor was liberally inclined and, in 1783, the Archbishop complained to the Suprema that, during the previous year, a Jew named José Obediente had come andwas allowed to go about freely, to entertain persons of distinction and even to be present in the solemnities of Holy Week. The commissioner had vainly appealed to the authorities, and the archbishop was afraid to say anything, for fear of public disturbance. This year he had come again, bringing six or seven others, who kept house and lived like any other residents.[784]It was not the Jews alone whom the tribunal, in its weakened state, was afraid to attack. In 1784, the royal auditor at Mompox, Don Francisco Antonio Antona, was denounced for having, at a banquet given by a priest, proposed for discussion some manifestly heretical propositions. In place of prosecuting him, the inquisitors consulted the Suprema alleging, as a reason for their timidity, the character of the accused, the relations of his wife with the best families, and the protection given to him by the viceroys in the conduct of his office.[785]A tribunal thus shorn of its audacity could only be an object of contempt.
There was, however, a little recrudescence of activity as the progress of free-thought and the approach of the Revolution called for the exercise of the functions of censorship. This has been well-nigh in abeyance. The edicts prohibiting books, as sent out by the Suprema, were regularly published as matters of routine, but they were regarded by no one. In fact, the intellectual torpor of the colony was so profound that there was little danger of the spread of dangerous literature. In 1777 Cartagena could not even support a small printing-office, and the inquisitors complained that they had to copy the edicts by hand; there had been a printer, but the poor man had sold his stock elsewhere and no one had ventured to replace him.[786]Seizures of prohibited books had been exceedingly rare. In 1661 some copies had been suppressed of “Horas y oraciones devotas,” printed in Paris in 1664. In 1668 there was a little flurry when, on one of the affluents of the Orinoco, a Dutchman was found in possession of copies of a work in Spanish, apparently printed in Holland, entitled “Epistola á los Peruleros,” consisting of a Calvinisticcatechism and exhorting the colonists to withdraw their allegiance from Spain and ally themselves with the Dutch, whose colony of Guiana was dangerously near. In 1732 a little book called “Paraiso del alma” was seized in Santa Fe and, in 1757, some copies of Bishop Palafox’s “Ejercicios devotos.” The moral phase of censorship had manifested itself in 1736, when the commissioner at Panamá took from the French astronomers, on their way to the equator to measure an arc of the earth’s surface, an engraving of a woman which he regarded as indecent, but when he sought to get possession of another, said to be even worse, they assured him that it had been burnt and threatened to complain to the king of the insult offered to them. So, in 1807, there were denounced to the tribunal some watches brought by a Danish vessel, of which the cases were enamelled with indecent pictures; the enamels were destroyed and the watches were restored to the owner.[787]
In 1774 a more difficult question was forced upon the tribunal. José Celestino Mutis, distinguished both as priest and physician and professor in the Colegio Mayor of Santa Fe, in 1773, presided over some conclusions in which the Copernican theory of the solar system was defended. In June, 1774, the Dominicans of the Universidad Tomistica resolved to celebrate other conclusions to prove the contrary by Scripture and St. Augustin and St. Thomas, and that the Copernican theory was intolerable for Catholics, indefensible and prohibited by the Inquisition. Mutis addressed a defence of Copernicus to the viceroy, who sent a copy to the commissioner; he transmitted it to the tribunal, which submitted it to two calificadores. One of these reported that the propositions were not subject to theological censure; the other held that the Copernican system was opposed to Scripture and no Catholic could defend it. The matter then passed into the hands of the inquisitor-fiscal, who argued that all authors of greatest repute detested the system as absolutely contrary to Scripture, repeatedly condemned by the Roman Inquisition and,as some say, by Urban VIII. He was especially shocked by an assertion of Mutis that the king had ordered all Spanish universities to teach the works of Newton which were based on Copernicus. Dr. Mutis, he added, was the first and only one who, in this kingdom and perhaps in all America, had publicly declared himself in favor of this system. Thereupon the tribunal, at a loss what to do in a matter beyond its comprehension, sent all the papers to the Suprema for instructions, and the latter discreetly filed them away without answering.[788]
Of more practical importance was the manifesto of the French Constituent Assembly on the rights of man, of which a Spanish version appeared under the title ofDerechos del Hombre. This was condemned in Cartagena by edict published December 13, 1789. Then, in 1794, there was a sudden command for its vigorous suppression. In almost identical phrase the Viceroys of New Granada and Peru wrote to their respective tribunals, describing it as a work destructive of social order and advocating toleration. Every pains, they said, must be taken to hunt up every copy and to ascertain when and how and from whom they came. The tribunals accordingly exerted their utmost diligence, but were not rewarded by finding a single copy.[789]Probably equal ill-success attended their efforts to obey the orders of the Suprema to suppressGli Animali parlantiof Giambattista Casti and to spare no pains in ascertaining the possessors of the poem which, as a clever satire directed against the vices and follies of kings and courts, was especially distasteful to an autocratic monarch. The work had appeared in Paris in 1802 and these orders came from the Suprema under date of May 23, 1803, although the formal decree suppressing it was not issued until June 23, 1805, to be followed, August 6th, by a similar papal prohibition.[790]
If the results of the labors of the tribunal in defence of the faith were thus meagre, it was far more successful in its true vocation of creating scandal, by incessant quarrels with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and by its internal discords. Hardly had it been organized when the Easter solemnities of 1611 offered occasion for dissension, over questions of etiquette and precedence, with the secular and spiritual powers, giving rise to antagonism throughout the district, especially on the part of the bishops, who grudged the deprivation of the jurisdiction which they had been accustomed to exercise in matters of faith. They continued to disregard the exclusive functions of the inquisitors, who complained bitterly of them as ignorant prelates, with officials whose ignorance was equalled by their turbulence; they had few duties to occupy them and they desired to retain this jurisdiction because of the hold which it gave them over their subjects. It probably would be unjust to estimate them by one of their number, Fray Juan González de Mendoza, Bishop of Popayan, who, on his arrival at Cartagena in 1610, introduced the practice of divination with sticks, which he asserted to be allowed by the Inquisition and to be used by the queen and the Duke of Lerma. It spread rapidly among all classes and, as all divination was held to imply pact with the demon, the inquisitors were greatly exercised and inquired anxiously of the Suprema, January 31, 1611, what they should do about it, to which apparently they received no answer.[791]
Mañozca, arrogant, unscrupulous and ambitious, was the leading spirit of the tribunal. He speedily made it apparent that, under his guidance, it was to be the dominant power in the community, and that its awful authority was to be restrained by no considerations of law or justice. The governor, Diego Fernández de Velasco, was good-natured and made every effort to keep on good terms with the inquisitors, but his moderation only encouraged their insolence and at length, in a letter of July 4, 1613, to the king, he poured forth his grievances. The tribunal, hesaid, sought to render itself the supreme master and had become so feared that the whole province was terrorized, so that, not only for the inquisitors but for their servants and slaves, there was no law but their own will. They were accustomed to arrest butchers, fishermen, bakers and other dealers in provisions; to seize with violence the goods of merchants and to summon and scold them for objecting. In two cases Mañozca forced parties who imported cargoes of slaves to give him some of them, whom he sold. They took, without notice, prisoners from the public prisons and, on one occasion, when the gaoler asked for a voucher, as requisite for his justification, the messenger wounded him on the head with his sword and was not punished. The governor added numerous instances of outrages on all classes, winding up with himself, as having been publicly proclaimed as excommunicated in all the churches.[792]
The regular Orders had equal cause of complaint and managed, with some trouble, to send to Spain a procurator to represent that everything in the convents was regulated by Mañozca’s powerful hand, whence it resulted that many estimable frailes were unjustly punished, while those were untouched who deserved to be castigated and reformed. This brought upon Mañozca, from the Suprema, a severe reprimand with orders to abstain from such interference.[793]Apparently the warning was disregarded if we may believe a memorial addressed by a fraile, May 12, 1619, to the king, representing that to leave Mañozca at his post was to keep a monster in the seat of an angel of light. This was substantiated with ample details of his scandalous mode of life, his nocturnal sallies in disguise and the general terror which he inspired, for terrorism was the means by which he had become the ruler of all. When the secular authorities sought to banish the courtezans and concubines he prevented it and, when the preachers preached against them, he issued what he called aninstruccion de predicadoresin which he called them dishonoring names and covered them with ridicule. The writer relates anumber of cases by which it appears that Mañozca controlled the local courts and officials, dictating sentences and procuring that his supporters escaped justice and won their suits, however unrighteous. Moreover he gave occasion for an indefinite amount of smuggling; arrivals were reported to him in advance of the custom officials, and he received bribes—negro slaves and other things of value—to enable the owners to defraud the customs—a matter presumably easy of accomplishment through the supervision of all arrivals, by which the Inquisition was empowered to prevent the intrusion of heretics and the importation of heretic books.[794]
Quarrels with the bishops were incessant and only the bishop of Cuba, Alfonso Henríquez de Almendáriz, who was old and self-willed and prompt in quarrel, held his own, leading to numerous complaints of him by the tribunal.[795]Then, towards the middle of 1619, there came a new governor, García Giron, with whom there was speedily trouble. A negro slave of Inquisitor Salcedo was refused meat by a negro in the market; he complained to his master who gave him a paper requiring the dealer to supply it. Armed with this, he struck the negro several times with the flat of amachete, took what meat he wanted and told the man that, if he wanted pay, he could send for the money. Thereupon Giron ordered a prosecution; the inquisitors sent for the notary employed in it and ordered him to surrender the papers under the customary threat of fine and excommunication; the governor ordered him not to obey, but he was finally obliged to pay the fine and deliver the papers.[796]
Complaints against Mañozca came pouring in upon the Suprema, especially from members of the regular Orders, including whole convents, until it found itself obliged to have an investigation made into his life and morals. The result justified the accusations and it ordered him to present himself in Madrid. He had no trouble in gathering certificates—which no one dared to refuse—as to his good character and conduct, with which he sailed forSpain, towards the end of July, 1620. There he succeeded so completely in exonerating himself that, in April, 1621, the inquisitor-general wrote that his presence in the court being no longer necessary, for the business on which he had been summoned, he had been ordered to return to his post. Thus, after a year’s absence, he reoccupied his seat in the tribunal, but only for a short time. With the customary policy of the Holy Office, he was promoted to the more important tribunal of Lima, to be elevated, in 1643, as we have seen, to the archbishopric of Mexico. He remained, however, in Cartagena, until the arrival of his successor, Agustin de Ugarte y Saravia, in the middle of 1623.[797]
During his absence at the court, his colleague Salcedo had become involved in a furious quarrel with the bishop, Diego de Torris Altamirano, by forcibly taking from his prison a priest named Pedro de Quesada, condemned to degradation and death for robbery and murder. Quesada, through his confessor, informed the tribunal that he had a deposition to make; Salcedo sent a message informally to the provisor to send the culprit, who would be returned, but when the messenger went for him, he was found fast in the stocks and the key carried off. The bishop declared that he should not be delivered without a written demand, but Salcedo sent a party of familiars, who carried him off by force and then returned him within an hour—the object being simply to humiliate the bishop and demonstrate the superior authority of the Inquisition.[798]Salcedo and Altamirano both died in 1621, but the new bishop, Francisco de Sotomayor, who arrived in 1622, became immediately involved in a serious quarrel with Mañozca, which had to be referred to Spain for settlement.[799]
In 1630 the Council of Indies presented to Philip IV a formal complaint in thirty-four articles against the tribunal of Cartagena, which very probably contributed to the enactment of the Concordia of 1633.[800]Meanwhile a new governor, Francisco de Murga,had resolutely undertaken to abate the insolence of the inquisitors and had become involved in specially bitter quarrels with the inquisitor Vélez de Asas y Argos, who had been promoted, in 1626, from the position of fiscal. In a letter of December 12, 1632, the inquisitors describe him as the most dangerous man on earth, for he daily framed a thousand devices to trip them up and, if this could not be stopped, there would be no living in the city. He was certainly audacious for one day he took from the executioner a negro who was being scourged through the streets for heresy. For this they excommunicated him, but when they sent officials and familiars to notify him, he clapped them all into gaol and held them there under heavy guard for twenty-four hours. Then he called a junta in the house of the bishop and, by its advice, asked for absolution, which was administered in a manner so humiliating that the Council of Indies presented a formal complaint to the king. This did not tend to harmony and the quarrel went on, to the discomfiture of the tribunal, showing what a determined man could do, when supported by the universal detestation in which the Inquisition was held. In fact, as the inquisitors complained, in a letter of August 8, 1633, the mass of the people held them in mortal hatred, which they could explain only by the wiles of the devil seeking to obstruct their pious work.[801]
Meanwhile the home authorities were leisurely engaged in endeavoring to reconcile the irreconcileable. A consulta of the Suprema, March 23, 1633, suggested measures to that effect but in vain. Philip IV adopted a more practical course in ordering the Suprema to summon Vélez to Spain, but it disobeyed and, when he repeated the order, it replied, May 3, 1635, that it was ready to obey but had deferred in expectation of his replying to its consulta of May 26, 1634; besides, it had not yet received the papers containing the inquisitors’ side of the matter. To this the king replied by curtly commanding immediate compliance, but it still dallied and it was not until 1636 that Vélez was compelled to sail for Spain. At the same time the Suprema admitted the fault of the tribunal by ordering the inquisitors, March 15, 1636, not to plot and conspire against Murga nor, after his retirement, against his deputy and officials. The sincerity of this was soon put to the test. Murga had died before Vélez left Cartagena and, in April, 1636, the tribunal was delighted to receive orders to arrest his deputy, Francisco de Llano Valdés, who was asserted to be the cause of all the troubles. The order was joyfully obeyed, but to little effect. In prison Llano Valdés became intimate with Inquisitor Cortázar, for both were Biscayans; a false certificate of illness was procured from the physician and he was given his house as a prison; he was soon seen on the streets again and was even called in frequently to administer torture, as the tribunal had no official skilled in the art.[802]
The death of Murga did not end the debate, which was transferred to Spain, where Vélez arrived in December, 1636. It dragged on with customary procrastination. The Suprema urged his return to Cartagena, declaring that his service had been most satisfactory, and that he had been dishonored by being summoned to Spain without cause, which could only be repaired by his restoration. The Council of Indies insisted that he had exposed Cartagena to destruction and that he should be provided for with a post in Spain. Philip IV sought to compromise the matter by deciding against his return and that he should have one of the best Spanish tribunals—it being the ordinary policy of the Inquisition that when a man had proved his unfitness in one position, he should be promoted to a higher station in which to exercise his powers of evil. Finally it was settled that he should have the great tribunal of Mexico, but the commander of the fleet, Don Carlos de Ibarra, ordered him to take ship direct to Honduras and made public proclamation that no one should receive him on board or carry him to Cartagena, under pain of treason and confiscation. Then the Suprema, September 30, 1639, made afinal effort to obtain his restoration to Cartagena, but this failed and he at last took his seat in the Mexican tribunal.[803]
Vélez had been on terms not much better with his colleague, Martin de Cortázar y Ascarate, who accused him of endeavoring to encompass the death of Llano Valdés in prison and of seeking to rule the tribunal with a faction of the officials, consisting of the fiscal Juan Ortiz, his son, the secretary Luis Blanco and the other secretary, Juan de Uriarte, father-in-law of Blanco. As for Cortázar himself, two of the consultors, Juan de Cuadros Peña and Rodrigo de Oviedo, wrote to the Suprema, August 10, 1635, representing his utter ignorance; he knew no Latin and his Castilian was so imperfect as to be unintelligible; he was proud and haughty and his cruelty was evinced by the savage tortures which he inflicted on the accused. Then, on November 16, 1640, Ortiz was promoted to the inquisitorship and his family had complete control.[804]
They used their power for their own enrichment, dividing among themselves the moneys in the coffer and paying no debts unless they were bribed. That they should soon be involved in strife with the municipality, was inevitable. In 1641 an excessive scarcity caused by the ravages of locusts led the cabildo, or city authorities, to prescribe maximum prices for provisions and to order an examination into the quantities of produce in the several plantations, so as to prevent exportation. Ortiz and his officials claimed exemption from these regulations; he ordered the secretary of the cabildo to furnish him with its proceedings, that he might see which of the regidores voted for them, so that he might imprison them, as was done with Don Cristóval de Bermúdez and Don Baltasar de Escovar, on complaint of the servants of the officials, for distributing provisions equally—arbitrary imprisonment without observing any formalities or opportunity for defence. Then, as the secretary did not comply with the demand, he was similarly thrown in prison. When meat was brought intothe city for distribution the servants of the officials claimed whole carcasses, which they cut up and retailed at excessive prices. Driven to extremities, the city complained to the king of the violence of the tribunal and the excesses of its officials, when Ortiz again demanded a copy of the proceedings of the cabildo, leading to further intolerable vexations, which caused it to send the regidor, Nicolás Heras Pantoja as procurator to ask for a visitador.[805]
This imprisonment in the secret prison, we may remark, was an inveterate abuse; it was in itself the severest punishment, as it implied heresy and inflicted indelible infamy on the individual and his posterity. It was the subject of repeated complaints and, at last, a consulta of the Council of Indies, June 14, 1646, led the king to order the Suprema to instruct the Cartagena tribunal not to molest the people; when any one was arrested for matters not of faith, he must be placed in a decent prison, outside of the Inquisition. The Suprema had already taken such action in letters of April 28, 1645, and it repeated this July 28, 1646. Yet a letter from Cartagena of June 10, 1649, represented that, in spite of these orders, the inquisitors continued to throw many people into the secret prison, for causes not of faith, till at length three citizens who had been thus dishonored supplicated the king to remedy the great injuries thus inflicted. The Council of Indies, in a consulta of February 21, 1650, represented strongly to the king the disorders arising from the disregard of his commands and urged that positive orders to obey be given to the inquisitors. This he sent with his endorsement to the Suprema, which, on April 8th, wrote to the tribunal to observe its previous instructions—but without producing permanent effect.[806]
Meanwhile the prayer of the city for a visitador had been answered after a fashion, though not in consequence of its supplication. According to a statement of the Suprema in 1646, it had, at the close of 1642, determined to send an inspector to Limaand Cartagena, as those tribunals had not been visited since their foundation. There had recently been great sequestrations and confiscations, giving rise in Lima to over two thousand lawsuits, while in Cartagena it was necessary to investigate the settlements made with the claimants and the net collections secured. There were no charges, it said, against the inquisitors and it was only the financial matters that were concerned. There was hesitation as to the selection of a visitor; he had to be an old inquisitor and no one would accept the position without the assurance of a good benefice in the Indies or of a place in the Suprema itself. To give him more authority it was resolved to make him a member of the Suprema and to swear him in before his departure. Unfortunately the choice fell upon Dr. Martin Real, then serving in the tribunal of Toledo, a man of learning and imbued with the highest conceptions of inquisitorial authority, who had acted as visitor in Sicily, where he earned the reputation of a breeder of troubles, through his ungovernable temper and headstrong character. This was known to the Suprema, but it was thought that what he had suffered in consequence of it and the warnings that would be given would render him cautious. Philip IV objected, in view of what had occurred in Sicily, and suggested other names, but yielded on condition that he should not take the oath as councillor until the day of his departure. Then the Council of Indies protested against the appointment as dangerous to the peace of the colonies, but the Suprema represented that the matter had gone too far to be reconsidered without disgracing Real; that the opposition came from those who desired to prevent the visitation and that it did not concern the inquisitors but only the confiscations. The king made no further objection and Real was duly commissioned and departed early in 1643.[807]
The result justified fully the apprehensions of Philip and the Council of Indies, but it may be doubted whether the most even-tempered visitor, honestly bent on performing his duty, could have averted an explosion. The object of the mission was theinvestigation of the finances; there can be little question that, as in the other tribunals, false reports had been made as to the results of the enormous confiscations accruing from the prosecution of the Judaizing New Christians, and an inspection of the accounts was to be prevented at all hazards. The city was in a state of combustion with the chronic quarrels between the tribunal and the civil and military authorities. Real’s temper would not allow him to be neutral and it was easy to create a situation which should preclude the dreaded investigation. Such, at least, is the most rational explanation of the events as they can be disentangled from the somewhat conflicting accounts that have reached us.
Towards the end of July, 1643, Real arrived in Cartagena and with him came a new inquisitor, Juan Bautista de Villadiego, a man nearly seventy years of age, and a fiscal, Pedro Triunfo de Socaya. Real’s first act was to forbid Ortiz and Uriarte from entrance to the secreto, evidently with a view of examinating their accounts without interference, at the same time handing them appointments to equivalent positions in Llerena and Logroño—the favorite method used by the Suprema when officials had destroyed their usefulness where they were. Villadiego however refused to let Real have the keys of the money-chest, so the object of his visitation was frustrated and he revenged himself by exceeding the powers of his commission and assuming control of the tribunal. To obtain the keys of the coffer he led a disorderly crowd to Villadiego’s house, broke it open, personally assaulted him, seized the furniture and sold it at auction to pay the fine which he had imposed on him. Real further espoused the cause of the governor and cabildo and interfered by liberating a secretary whom Villadiego had arrested in order to learn who had voted against him. Then Villadiego endeavored to establish a rival tribunal in his own house and appointed officials to run it, a schism which lasted for two months, until Real judicially sentenced him to consider his house as a prison. Villadiego thereupon, on the night of February 11, 1644, with his own hands,posted notices that Real was excommunicated and Real retorted by arresting him.
He was replaced by Juan Pereira Castro, who took possession as inquisitor, August 22, 1644, and lost no time in organizing a faction among the officials and the clergy against Real and was concerned in libels upon him which were posted on the night of September 3d. For this, on insufficient evidence, Real arrested Ortiz de la Masa, an ecclesiastic of high standing, and proposed to torture him, which created an immense scandal among both clergy and laity. Pereira in vain endeavored to release him and, on January 25, 1645, he and Real exchanged excommunications, resulting in an interdict under which the city lay for many months. A few days later, on January 28th, Pereira, the fiscal Socaya and the notary, Tomás de Vega, locked themselves up in the tribunal for fear of arrest, and there they remained for seven months, solacing their self-inflicted captivity with feasting and gambling, while Real could neither get his salary nor the papers which were necessary for the business of his visitation. Many of those whom he had treated harshly hurried to Spain and brought suits against him in the Suprema, and we hear of Socaya sending with them forty bars of silver to substantiate their complaints.
The Suprema was not a little perplexed by the turn which affairs had taken. It ordered Villadiego to be restored to his place in the tribunal, an order received February 17, 1645, but it was accompanied with a summons to present himself at court within four months. This he disobeyed and recommenced to hold a tribunal in his own house, with the object, as Pereira wrote in February, 1646, of diverting attention from the scandals of his licentious life. To this Villadiego retorted by accusing Pereira of defending the gaoler in his crimes with female prisoners and of holding indecent banquets with him and the fiscal. The only immediate solution to the troubles seemed to lie in the recall of Real; he was ordered home and left Cartagena at the end of October, 1645. As the time of his arrival in Spain approached,the Suprema grew uneasy at the prospect of receiving him as a member and, February 16, 1646, it presented a consulta to Philip IV containing a condensed narrative of his doings and representing that his seat in the Council was intended, not as a reward for past services but as an incentive to those he was to render; his visitation had cost 20,000 pesos and had brought no results, nor was it held advisable that he should be allowed to repeat his performances in Lima. Besides, it would be indecent for him to sit in judgement on the numerous suits brought against him in the Suprema so that, all things being considered, it was suggested that his membership should be suspended until those suits were settled—a suggestion to which the king cordially assented.[808]
The inquisitors were not so busy quarrelling among themselves but that they had leisure to keep up dissensions with the secular authorities. A bitter struggle with the governor was occupying the court in 1644 and 1645, leading the Junta de Guerra de Indias, on November 9th of the latter year, to urge that instructions be sent to the tribunal not to excommunicate the governor and captain-general on account of the evils that would result.[809]Then a consulta of the Council of Indies, March 7, 1647, complained of the invasions of secular jurisdiction, in violation of the Concordia of 1610, causing regrettable disturbances. It alluded especially to a competencia with the royal Audiencia of Santa Fe over a civil case of the familiar Rodrigo de Oviedo y Luron, in which 1500 pesos were deposited with Capitan Francisco Beltran de Cairedo to await the adjudication of the claims of his creditors, when the tribunal stepped in and seized the money, although it had no jurisdiction over the civil cases of familiars. The Council therefore asked that the tribunal be ordered to abstain from civil cases and that its competencias with the Audiencias of Santa Fe, Panamá and Santo Domingo be settled—an appeal to which theking returned no answer, as he doubtless transmitted it to the Suprema, where it probably lay buried.[810]
As long as Real was on the ground, Villadiego and Pereira united in efforts to destroy him, but as soon as he departed they quarrelled and, in February 1646, Pereira commenced a prosecution against his colleague for holding a tribunal in his own house. The only hope of restoring the Inquisition to decency and usefulness seemed to lie in another visitation. This time the choice fell upon Pedro de Medina Rico, Inquisitor of Seville, whom we have already met in his subsequent discharge of similar duties in Mexico. He arrived in Cartagena, December 11, 1648, and found everything in disorder. As he wrote, May 19, 1649, the prisoners were rotting in the dungeons, some of whom had been lying there for eight years. He set vigorously at work with the cases, but it was difficult to make progress. There was no clock in the city; the hours were announced by the soldiers of the guard in the streets with a bell, but they were irregular and little attention was paid to them. The officials came late to their duties and left early; Pereira was especially brief in his attendance and, when he came, thought of nothing but getting away. Medina Rico therefore begged the Suprema to send out a fitting person to serve as secretary and also two inquisitors of learning and probity; Pereira was worthy of severe punishment and ought on no account to be allowed to remain.[811]
Medina Rico of course was at once involved in bitter antagonism with the officials whom he had come to reform; his powers however were limited and he was unable to use censures or arrest, which put him at a disadvantage, and there were no such exhibitions of violence as characterized the visitation of his predecessor. The Governor Pedro Zapata, moreover, took sides with the incumbents and wrote to the Council of Indies complaining that the city had been kept in a turmoil for ten years, attributable to the delay of the visitadors in completing their visitations. Real had been there for two years and returned, leaving the task incomplete andnow Medina Rico has been at work for a year, with no prospect of completion, on account of which the city is in great affliction, dreading a renewal of former disturbances. Philip transmitted this to the Suprema, March 13, 1649, ordering, for the sake of peace, that Medina Rico be instructed to finish as speedily as possible. To this the Suprema replied that the illness of Pereira had thrown the unfinished business of the tribunal on Medina Rico, but that orders had already been despatched to him to complete his task without loss of time. Zapata continued his complaints and the Marquis of Miranda de Auta, President of the Audiencia of Santa Fe, joined in condemning his arbitrary acts; in civil cases he had arrested the procurators of pleaders and he had issued letters to the judges of the Audiencia threatening that in three days they would be posted as excommunicates.[812]
Medina Rico’s task was difficult for the abuses of the tribunal were so inveterate that the sharpest measures were necessary. Real’s report, based on 231 witnesses, brought sixty-eight charges against Villadiego and a hundred and thirteen against Pereira, but his hurried departure had prevented his submitting it to the accused for their defence and it therefore could not be acted upon. Fresh evidence was naturally hard to obtain. The people knew the power of Pereira and Uriarte and that they were favored by the governor and the Bishop of Santa Marta; they had seen the failure of Real’s visitation and anticipated the same result from the present one, when vengeance would follow on all who deposed against them. Medina Rico was therefore obliged to proceed cautiously. He states that he had to take precautions against attempts on his life by Uriarte and that such fears were not groundless for there was evidence in his hands that the former notary, Luis Blanco del Salcedo, was poisoned by his wife and the Inquisitor Juan Ortiz, then receiver, who subsequently married her; Inquisitor Cortázar was poisoned by Ortiz and Uriarte, who intercepted his letters accusing them to the Suprema. Rodrigo de Oviedo was killed by order of Uriarte, whose accomplice he had been. There was, he said, every facility for such crimes in this land filled with evil negroes; it was held for certain that in this way perished Bishop Cristóbal de Lazárraga and all his family; to poison was attributable the death of Juan de Lorrigui, acting fiscal, and also that of the governor who was in office at the time of his arrival.[813]