Death and Dying in Colonial Spanish America

5. Exemplary Punishment in Colonial Lima: The 1639 Auto de Fe

121 5 Exemplary Punishment in Colonial Lima The 1639 Auto de Fe ana e. schaposchnik as with the broader picture of Spanish colonial expansion, the literature devoted to the study of the Spanish Inquisition has, on many occasions, emphasized the violence and terror exerted by this repressive institution. As it emerges in depictions that can be labeled part of the so-called Black Legend,1 the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition appears as the deplorable outcome of Spanish cruelty and insatiable thirst for blood. Nowadays, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, after intense decades of Inquisition studies, we can state that this depiction is questionable, exaggerated, and simplistic. Furthermore, it leads to the construction of stereotypes, rather than to an understanding of the complexities of an institution that was active for over three hundred years in both Spain and the Spanish American colonies. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a revision of our knowledge of the Inquisition helped to improve our understanding of several topics.2 Such topics include the specific characteristics of the Inquisition and the peculiarities of the Inquisition trial,3 the relationship between the Inquisition and political power,4 the changes 122 ana schaposchnik that affected the Inquisition in different places and epochs,5 the overall concept of inquisitorial mentality,6 and more recently the relationship between the Inquisition and modernity.7 Zooming into a more detailed scale of analysis, scholars explored, for instance, the strict regulations that controlled the procedures of the Inquisition and the use of torture,8 and the peculiar profile of those who actually held the office of inquisitor.9 This scholarship also allowed room for nuances and variation. For instance, scholars tried to understand whether the regulations were respected, or if the mechanics of the tribunals varied according to particular historical contexts.10 Within this line of research, a crucial question, in terms of both theoretical perspective and methodological approach, was the quantitative analysis of Inquisition cases, and the determination of the number of people who actually died as a result of Inquisition trials.11 For the specific case of Peru, Teodoro Hampe Martínez explains that during two and a half centuries of activity, around three thousand people endured trials under the Lima Tribunal and around forty autos de fe were performed.12 Of these three thousand people, forty-eight died at the stake.13 Indeed, a vast amount of literature validates the estimative numbers of Hampe Martínez,14 and such numbers as presented did not make the Lima tribunal exceptional. In Lima, few people died as a result of an Inquisition trial, and similar findings have been established for all the tribunals of the Inquisition in peninsular Spain.15 Even though the sources are problematic for the construction of numerical series, the similarity of these numbers is highly consistent. The overall trend is, in general, uniform; and the tribunals of the Spanish American colonies are no exception to this trend.16 What do these numbers mean? With these numbers, we can infer, in the big picture, that the Spanish Inquisition was neither intensively active nor extensively violent. In the specific example of the Lima tribunal, scholars now consider that it was an inactive and inefficient tribunal, worried about issues of morality and social control, with more awareness of and interest in the commercial and financial interests of its members than in the persecution and prosecution of religious deviants and heinous heterodoxy.17 As a scholar interested in the study of the Spanish and Spanish American Inquisition, my quest is not about contesting the numbers themselves, but rather Exemplary Punishment in Colonial Lima 123 about reconsidering their interpretation. These deaths occurred in a particular ceremonial setting. Therefore, the impact of the activities of a tribunal like the Holy Office of the Inquisition is not related to the number of prisoners condemned to death at the stake, but to the characteristics and the overall magnitude of the auto de fe, the ceremony in which the authorities applied such punishment. In an effort to understand these low numbers of deaths within their own context, I will discuss here the conditions in which eleven people died in Lima as a result of Inquisition trials. This chapter is part of a larger project in which I study the Lima tribunal and its activities against the community of Portuguese merchants of CryptoJewish descent. However, in the...