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Clerical Violence in a Catholic Society: The Hispanic World 1450–1720
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Few countries have been more notorious for having a militant clergy than Spain: the experience of the Carlist wars and Franco’s war gives sufficient evidence of this. Unfortunately, these are examples of state conflicts in which the Church happened to participate, and the present paper is concerned less with the institutional violence of the state than with the inherent violence of the Church itself. War as such does not enter into the discussion, since war can be declared only by the state, not by the Church. Interestingly, however, though much ink has been spent discussing whether Christians and the Christian state may go to war, there has been less debate over whether the clergy may legitimately resort to force. In what follows I propose to suggest that the participation of the Hispanic Church in violence arose not simply from identification with the institutional violence of the state but from the peculiar development of the Church itself. Violence in this context will be seen to be not dysfunctional but normal, a logical relationship between the Church and society. Participation in violence became a recognisable feature of the Hispanic Church: the problem is to understand how and why this occurred and seemed acceptable.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1983
References
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3 [Tarsicio de] Azcona, La Elección y Reforma [del Episcopado español en tiempo de los Reyes Católicos (Madrid 1960)] p 42.
4 Tarsicio de Azcona, in Ricardo García-Villoslada, ed Historia de la Iglesia en España 5 vols (Madrid 1980) vol IV, i p 132.
5 These, oddly, have never been adequately studied. The most informative source, both on revenue and organisation, is [Antonio] Domínguez Ortiz, La Sociedad española [en el siglo XVI I. Volli: El Estamento eclesiástico (Madrid 1970)].
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11 Quoted in [J. A.] Fernández-Santamaría, The State, War and Peace. [Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance 1516-1559 (Cambridge 1977)] esp pp 130-44.
12 Ibid pp 220-1.
13 Hanke, Lewis, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia 1949)Google Scholar is a useful guide to the extensive literature. Mario Góngora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America (Cambridge 1975) p 57, notes that ‘the “military mission’/i.e. the idea that Spain had a duty to subjugate barbarians/began to lose ground as early as 1526’.
14 It is interesting that the debate was carried on as far afield as London, by Las Casas’ fellow Dominican and friend, the ill-fated Carranza: see J. L Tellechea Idigoras, Tiempos Recios. Inquisición y Heterodoxias (Salamanca 1977).
15 These and other references to the wars in Flanders are set in their context in Henry Kamen, Spain 1469-1714: a Society of Conflict (London 1983) ch 3.
16 Fernández-Santamaría, The State, War and Peace p 215.
17 Royal supremacy over the American Church rested on papal bulls of Nov 1501 and July 1508; these gave the crown the right to control all finance, nominate all clergy from bishops down to parish priests, licence all ecclesiastical buildings, and exclude all papal jurisdiction: see Haring, C.H., The Spanish Empire in America (New York 1947) ch X.Google Scholar In Sicily the king himself exercised papal jurisdiction, following a medieval privilege (the Monarchia Sicula) by which he could act as papal legate.
18 Charles V was granted absolute control over all clerical appointments in Spain in 1523, and appeals to Rome against the Inquisition became impossible because the Inquisitor General exercised appellate jurisdiction in place of the pope. There is a useful discussion of the integration of Church with state in José Antonio Maravall, Estado Moderno y Mentalidad Social, siglos XV a XVII, 2 vols (Madrid 1972) vol I, part 2, ch IV.
19 For the sale of Church lands under Philip II, see Isabel López Díaz, ‘Las desmembraciones eclesiásticas de 1574 a 1579’ Moneda y Crédito (June 1974).
20 The boost to a clerical bureaucracy was given by Ferdinand and Isabella, who made university degrees essential for employment in higher administration. Recent studies of the bureaucracy include [Richard L.] Kagan, Students and Society [in Early Modem Spain (Baltimore 1974)] and J.M. Pelorson, Les letrados: juristes castillans sous Philippe III (Poitiers 1980).
21 Kagan, Students and Society p 132.
22 Ibid p 131 n 49.
23 Prescott, W.H., History of the Conquest of Peru (London 1901) pp 360 ffGoogle Scholar. Clergy also staffed the councils of state, acted as governors, diplomats and at virtually all levels of the bureaucracy: see Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española, vol 2 ch X.
24 The archbishop is cited in ibid p 196. The concept of ‘Tibetisation’ apparently originated with Americo Castro but has been repeated by others.
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31 Citied in part in Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II 2 vols (London 1973) 2 p 788 Google Scholar. For Christian-Morisco tensions, see Cardaillac, Louis, Morisques et Chrétiens: un affrontement polémique (1492-1640) (Paris 1977).Google Scholar
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33 ‘Le commerce des Indes a restably en ce pays le droit de servitude, tellement qu’en Andalousie l’on ne voit presque point d’autres valets que des serfs. Ils sont la plupart maures, ou tout a fait noirs’, testified Antoine de Brunei in 1655: cited in Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, ‘La esclavitud en Castilla durante la edad moderna’ Estudios de Historia Social de España vol II (1952) p 380.
34 The arrogance was of course not only clerical but also lay. In the Netherlands, for example, Benito Arias Montano in 1573 commented to Philip II that ‘the arrogance of our Spanish nation is intolerable’: Luis Morales Oliver, Arias Montano y la poľtttca de Felipe II en Flandes (Madrid 1927).
35 Rounded off from data by Felipe Ruiz Martin, as summarised in Garcia-Villoslada, ed Historia de la Iglesia vol 4 pp 18-19.
36 By, for example, Charles Journet, L’Eglise du Verbe Incarné (Paris 1941) and Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (London 1954) pp 143-5.
37 Nicolas López Martínez, ‘El cardenal Mendoza y la reforma tridentina en Burgos’ Hispánia Sacra XVI (1963) p 88.
38 Quoted in Pedro Herrera Puga, Sociedad γ Delincuencia en el Siglo de Oro (Granada 1971) p 387. v
39 Jose Deleito y Piñuela, La vida religiosa españok bajo el cuarto Felipe (Madrid 1963) pp 101-5.
40 Records of the Sala de Alcaldes for the years 1665 to 1700, in A[rchivo] Histórico] N[acional], Madrid, section Sala de Alcaldes, Inventarios de causas criminales, vols 2786-8.
41 AHN, section Inquisition, bundle 123, document 16.
42 AHN, section Clero, vol 6374, fol 15.
43 José Sánchez Herrero, Concilios Provinciales γ Sínodos Toledanos de los siglos XIV γ XV (La Laguna 1976).
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47 Typical of such confrontations were those in Granada in 1623 and 1682, and in Barcelona in 1696: Kamen, Henry, La España de Carlos II (Barcelona 1981) pp 364–7.Google Scholar
48 Recent studies that touch on the relationship between priest and parishioner include Christian, William A. Jr, Person and Cod in a Spanish Valley (New York 1972)Google Scholar, and Pitt-Rivers, Julian, The People of the Sierra (Chicago 1971)Google Scholar; but in general the religious sociology of the western Mediterranean remains curiously unexplored.
49 Both cases documented in reports of Aug and Nov 1684 to the council of Finance in Madrid, Archivo Generai de Simancas, section Consejo y Juntas de Hacienda, bundle 1075.
50 The theme of banditry is covered in Regla, J., El bandolerisme cátala del Bárrac (Barcelona 1962)Google Scholar; José Deleito y Piñuela, La mala vida en la España de Felipe IV (Madrid 1967) pp 98- 105; and Kamen, Later Seventeenth Century pp 207-12.
51 Kamen, Later Seventeenth Century p 221, and The War of Succession pp 264-5.
52 The active stand of the Spanish clergy against witchcraft persecution, and the very low execution rate of the Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (some two a year), are matters often forgotten when the record of the Hispanic Church is discussed.