A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 3Lea, Henry Charles
History
A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 3
Lea, Henry Charles
Inquisition -- Spain
the descendants secured delay until the pressing orders came of 1548,
when, on November 9th the sanbenitos of the women were hung in the
church of Belmonte.[473]
This policy of distribution cannot have been universal for, when the
Toledo cathedral desired to be relieved of the great accumulation of
sanbenitos, the Suprema forbade it, adding that if it was desired to
have them in the parish churches it must be done with new ones, leaving
the originals in the cathedral. At length, in 1538, the inquisitors
Yáñez and Loaysa distributed them among the parish churches, when
Sebastian de Orozco tells us that it caused infinite misery to the
descendants, leading them all or nearly all to change their family
names, so that in Toledo the names actually borne by the Conversos
disappeared.[474]
Change of name was not the only device resorted to by the descendants,
for they were constantly at work removing surreptitiously the evidence
of their infamy. As early as 1518, the Saragossa tribunal was ordered to
prosecute with rigor those who had abstracted them from the Dominican
church.[475] Their zeal was stimulated by the fact that the inquisitors,
in making up the records, included all who had been reconciled under
Edicts of Grace, thus affording legitimate ground of complaint, as shown
by a long-continued struggle at Frejenal. In 1556, Doctor Ramírez,
Inquisitor of Llerena, protested to the Suprema against the efforts of
the people of Frejenal for the removal of the names of those reconciled
in Time of Grace; it would leave but few for, in 1491, there had been
three hundred and fifty-seven reconciliations there, of which three
hundred and fifty-four had been under the Edict. To render ancestral
infamy more accessible to the public, besides the sanbenitos, the names
and details were inscribed on a tablet of parchment. This became torn
and nearly illegible and, on August 23, 1563, it was solemnly replaced
by another, written in large letters, with printer's ink, and varnished
to insure its preservation. The secret warfare waged against this
perpetuation of infamy is described, in 1572, in a deposition of the
familiar Rodrigo Carvajo. The people of the town, he said, were mostly
descendants of Conversos, resorting to perjury and every other means to
conceal their origin. The sacristans were generally Conversos, who
connived at the methods employed to destroy the evidence, and the
sanbenitos were stolen; there used to be five hundred and ninety-nine,
and now there were only ten or a dozen, worn and torn and so placed that
they could not be read, while the tablet with the names was gradually
being defaced and rendered illegible. Thus it continued until 1576, when
Inquisitor Montoyo brought to Frejenal a new set of sanbenitos prepared
from the records, which were duly suspended, and a tablet containing
names and details was placed where all could read it. This list shows
the obstinate persistence with which the names of the spontaneously
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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