There was another provision which rendered it even more formidable as an antagonist. In matters of faith and all pertaining directly or indirectly thereto, its jurisdiction was exclusive. In the extensive field of civil and criminal business, of which it obtained cognizance through the immunities of its officials and, in the frequent quarrels arising from questions of ceremony and precedence, no court, whether secular or spiritual, had power to inhibit any action which it might see fit to take. By special papal favor, however, it had power to inhibit their action and thus to cripple them on the spot. This extraordinary privilege, with power to subdelegate, appears to have been first granted in the commissions issued, in 1507, to Ximenes and Enguera as inquisitors-general respectively of Castile and Aragon and was repeated in those of Luis Mercader and Pedro Juan Poul in 1513.[880] For a considerable time this clause disappears from the commissions, but, towards the close of the century, it again finds place, in a more detailed and absolute form in that granted to Manrique de Lara, after which it continued in those of his successors to the end. It confers the power of inhibiting all judges, even of archiepiscopal dignity, under pecuniary penalties and censures to be enforced by the invocation of the secular arm and of absolving them after they shall have submitted and obeyed.[881] This proclaimed to the world that the Inquisition outranked all other authorities in Church and State and the power was too often exercised for its existence to be ignored or forgotten. This superiority found practical expression in the rule that, in the innumerable conflicts of jurisdiction, all secular and ecclesiastical judges must answer communications from inquisitors in the form of petition and not by letter. If they replied to commands and comminations by letter they were to be fined and proceedings were to be commenced against them and their messengers, and they were required to withdraw and erase from their records all such letters which were held to be disrespectful to the superiority of the Holy Office.[882]
ASSERTION OF SUPERIORITY
It was an inevitable inference from this that there was no direct appeal from whatever a tribunal might do except to the Suprema, which, though it might in secret chide its subordinates for their excesses, customarily upheld them before the world. The sovereign, it is true, was the ultimate judge and, in occasional cases, he interposed his authority with more or less effect, but the ordinary process was through a competencia, a cumbrous procedure through which, as we shall see, the Inquisition could wrangle for years and virtually, in most cases, deny all practical relief to the sufferers.
Another weapon of tremendous efficacy was the power of arrest, possessed at will by inquisitors during the greater portion of the career of the Inquisition. Even to gratify mere vindictiveness, by simply asserting that there was a matter of faith, the inquisitor could throw any one into the secret prison. The civil magistrate might thus abuse his authority with little damage to the victim, but it was otherwise with the Inquisition. In the insane estimate placed on limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, the career of a man and of his descendants was fatally narrowed by such a stain on his orthodoxy; it mattered little what was the outcome of the case, the fact of imprisonment was remembered and handed down through generations while the fact of its being causeless was forgotten. In the later period, when the Suprema supervised every act of the tribunals, the opportunities for this were greatly restricted, but during the more active times the ill-will of an inquisitor could at any moment inflict this most serious injury and the power was often recklessly abused in the perpetual conflicts with the secular authorities. The ability thus to destroy at a word the prospects in life of any man was a terrible weapon which goes far to explain the awe with which the inquisitor was regarded by the community.
That the inquisitor should assume to be superior to all other dignitaries was the natural result of the powers thus concentrated in him. Páramo asserts that he is the individual of highest authority in his district, as he represents both pope and king; and the Suprema, in a consulta addressed to Philip V, in 1713, boasted that its jurisdiction was so superior that there was not a person in the kingdom exempt from it.[883] The haughty supremacy which it affected is seen in instructions issued in 1578 that inquisitors, when the tribunal is sitting, are not to go forth to receive any one, save the king, the queen or a royal prince and are not, in an official capacity, to appear in receptions of prelates or other public assemblies, and this was virtually repeated in 1645, when they were told not to visit the viceroy or the archbishop or accept their invitations, for such demonstrations were due only to the person of the king.[884] Exception however, was probably taken to this for a carta acordada of March 17, 1648, lays down less stringent rules and specifies for each tribunal, according to the varying customs of different places, the high officials whom the inquisitor is permitted to visit on induction into office and on occasions of condolence or congratulation.[885]
In the social hierarchy the viceroys and captains-general stood next to the king as representing, in their respective governments, the royal person. To outrank these exalted personages was not beyond inquisitorial ambition. In 1588 there was great scandal in Lima, when the inquisitors claimed precedence over the Count of Villar, the Viceroy of Peru, and carried their point by excommunicating him, but Philip II, in a cédula of March 8, 1589, took them severely to task for their arrogance and added that the viceroy was equally to blame for yielding, as he represented the royal power. This lesson was ineffectual and some years later another method was tried of asserting superiority. In 1596, the Captain-general of Aragon complained to the king that, in the recent auto de fe, the inquisitors had refused to give him the title of Excellency. To this Philip replied, February 6, 1597, that it was unreasonable for them thus to affect equality with his personal representative; they must either concede to him the title of Excellency or themselves be treated as vuestra merced, in place of muy ilustres or señoria, and therefore he could attend the next auto.[886]
ASSERTION OF SUPERIORITY
This asserted superiority of the Inquisition was very galling to the bishops, who argued that the Holy Office had been founded only four hundred years before, as an aid to their jurisdiction, and they resented bitterly the efforts of the resolute upstarts to claim higher privileges and precedence. The Inquisition, however, was an organized whole, with sharp and unsparing methods of enforcing its claims and protected in every way from assault, while the episcopate was a scattered and unwieldy body, acting individually and, for the most part, powerless to defend the officials, through whom it acted, from those who claimed that everything concerning themselves was a matter of faith of which they had exclusive cognizance. The serious conflicts over jurisdiction will be considered in a subsequent chapter; here we are concerned merely with questions of etiquette and ceremonial. Seen through the perspective of the centuries, these quarrels, which were conducted with frantic eagerness, seem trivialities unworthy of record, but their significance was momentous to the parties concerned, as they involved superiority and inferiority. The hundred years’ quarrel over precedence in Rome, between the ambassadors of France and Spain, which was not settled until 1661 by the triumph of France, had a meaning beyond a mere question of ceremony. In Spain these debates often filled the land with confusion. All parties were tenacious of what they conceived to be their rights and were ready to explode in violence on the smallest provocation. The enormous mass of letters and papers concerning the seats and positions of the inquisitors and their officials at all public functions—whether seats should be chairs or benches and whether they were to have canopies, or cushions, or carpets, shows that these were regarded as matters of the highest moment, giving rise to envenomed quarrels with the ecclesiastical and secular dignitaries, requiring for their settlement the interposition of the royal authority. The inquisitors were constantly arrogating to themselves external marks of superiority and the others were disputing it with a vehemence that elevated the most trivial affairs into matters of national importance, and the attention of the king and the highest ministers was diverted from affairs of state to pacify obscure quarrels in every corner of the land.
It would be futile to enter into the details of these multitudinous squabbles, but one or two subjects in dispute may be mentioned to illustrate the ingenuity with which the Inquisition pushed its claims to superiority. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century it demanded that, when there was an episcopal letter or mandate to be published in the churches and also an edict or letter of the Inquisition,