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and Turkey helped the insurgents, there was little doubt about the
outcome. In 1609 14 the Spanish government carried out a mas-
sive expulsion of virtually the entire Islamic population of Spain,
nearly 300 000 people [178]. It was the biggest act of deportation
carried out till that time in Europe s history. This time the conse-
quences were clearly negative, especially in provinces (such as
Valencia) where the Moriscos had been a majority. But in no way
did the expulsions cause any serious or long-range harm to Spain s
economy, since the Moriscos (like the Jews before them) did not
form an integral part of the country s systems of production.
The two famous expulsions have left the permanent stamp of
religious intolerance on Spain, and have consequently given rise to
widely differing explanations of why they happened. The conser-
vative school has tried to defend Spain s position, arguing that the
conversos were a danger to the purity of the Catholic faith, and
that the Moriscos were a permanent threat to national security.
Others, such as Fernand Braudel, have seen in the expulsions a
profound clash between civilizations . Braudel s study on The
Mediterranean is essentially the narrative of a struggle between
59
Golden Age Spain
Christians and Muslims that came to a head at the naval battle of
Lepanto in 1571. The expulsions left Christianity as the only offi-
cially recognised religion in Spain, a situation that brought the
country into line with the rest of western Europe.
Why was there no Reformation in Spain? The spiritual and Church
history of the Golden Age is heavily affected by the absence of any
development in Spain along the lines of the Protestant
Reformation [179]. It is sometimes suggested that there was no
Reformation because there was no need for one, since Ferdinand
and Isabella reformed the Church. The claim is wholly untrue.
The Catholic Monarchs tried to reform a couple of religious
orders in central Castile, and appointed a handful of pious bish-
ops; but they left untouched every aspect of the institutions, ritual,
clergy and religious life of the people throughout Spain. The
Church remained as unreformed as anywhere else in Europe.
No effective moves for change were made until the 1560s, when
Philip II personally took an interest in the question and Spain
became the first European country to impose the decrees of the
Council of Trent [180].
In elite circles, of course, there had long been reformist ideas.
From the Netherlands some clergy received the influence of spiri-
tual movements (the devotio moderna ) and of Erasmus. Erasmian
humanism did not enjoy wide support in Spain [181]; it was essen-
tially a court movement, and its high tide (1520 30) coincided
almost exactly with Charles V s first stay in Spain. Meanwhile the
Spaniards who accompanied Charles V to Germany in 1520 had
met Luther and admired him. But most of them eventually
rejected the new tendencies, which failed to penetrate Spain. The
government issued one decree against Luther s works in 1525, yet
no other was deemed necessary for a quarter of a century. The
failure of heresy to penetrate the peninsula at a time when it was
spreading all over western Europe remains a puzzle. Why did
Protestantism strike no roots in Spain for a generation? Why was it
easy to eliminate when discovered? One suggestion made is that
Spaniards were (unlike other Europeans) solidly Catholic and
could not be subverted. The testimony of missionaries in the
peninsula in the late sixteenth century, however, demonstrates that
Spaniards were by no means solid in their religious grounding.
Another suggestion is that fear of the Inquisition froze Spain into
60
Why was there no Reformation?
orthodoxy (the phrase was coined by J. L. Motley) [113]. In fact,
there was very little cause for fear. In the thirty years that followed
the decree of 1525, the Inquisition took no special measures
against foreign heresy, burnt perhaps one alleged Lutheran , and
the famous auto de fe virtually disappeared from sight. In those
thirty years foreign books entered the peninsula with impunity,
and no censorship controls were applied.
It is hence not easy to give a convincing answer to the puzzle.
One must certainly reject the picture of a wholly Catholic nation
that refused to countenance error. The most likely explanation for
the failure of Lutheranism to penetrate, is that the multicultural
scenario of convivencia offered so much confrontation with
Judaism and Islam that it allowed little scope for dissent within
the Christian body. In the Middle Ages Castile had been, for the
same reason, virtually free of identifiable heresy. The absence of
native dissent offered no basis for heterodoxy to build on, unlike
England where the Reformation could build on Lollardy. When
dissent did arise, it was among those who were the principal heirs
to a multicultural background: the conversos of Jewish origin. Quite
significantly, in the 1530s the Inquisition in Castile was absorbed
not with Germanic heresy but with the religious groups known as
alumbrados , most of them of converso origin [182], who in some
measure prepared the way for neo-Protestant groups that sprang
up in Castile and Andalusia. Not until 1558 were Protestant cells
discovered in Castile [183]. However, few heretics were identified,
and Spain strangely enough executed fewer religious dissidents in
the era of the Reformation than any other country of western
Europe.
What was the role of the Counter-Reformation? Spaniards have tradi-
tionally believed that the Counter-Reformation (the sixteenth-
century reform movement inspired from within the Catholic
Church and directed in part against the Reformation) happened
only outside Spain, not inside it. It has consequently been easy to
accept the image of a firmly Catholic country where nothing
changed over the centuries. Church history written by Spaniards
limited itself to what happened inside the religious orders.
Historians in France and Italy, however, were discovering a gener-
ation ago that the study of pastoral visits made by bishops could
throw light on the real state of everyday religion. From the 1980s,
61
Golden Age Spain
historians of Spain began to use diocesan papers, testaments and
Inquisition documents to arrive at an understanding of peninsular
Catholicism. There is now no doubt that a substantial Counter
Reformation occurred in Spain [184]. From at least the 1480s,
some Church leaders were anxious to improve the state of reli-
gious knowledge and practice among their people, and around
1510 Dominican friars were active as missionaries in northern
Spain. However, no significant push for reform occurred before
1565, when Philip II formally received the decrees of the Council
of Trent and supervised the holding of provincial councils of the
clergy. The date marks the beginning of the Counter-Reformation
in Spain. The king, who insisted that all aspects of the programme
should be under Spanish control, had two main objectives: to
improve the quality of the clergy and convert the people to true
religion. To help him in his goal he enlisted the Inquisition (which
from this date began to look closely at the day-to-day religious and
moral practice of Spaniards) and invited new religious orders from [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]