The Unhappy Medium, page 31
There was a pause. ‘I don’t think it worked,’ said Ascot McCauley, raising a single eyebrow. ‘I think you just killed him.’ They peered at the seemingly lifeless form, purple vapours still rising up like steam from a hot bath.
‘Wait!’ said Gunter Van Loop, suddenly. ‘Look!’
What had once been the body belonging to Christopher Baxter was tensing. Gradually, it began to sit upright. A very slight movement, like an inflating beach toy, its ghastly slowness made it all the more alarming to behold. Instinctively, in the total silence, the Van Loops and the McCauleys began to back cautiously away as fear began to replace fanaticism. The restraining bonds were creaking loudly as the twine became horribly taut, and then ...
Crack, snap, twang !
The ropes burst, whipping back in a blur. La Senza’s gathered loyalists jumped back as one in sudden shock.
Now, at last, the figure began to raise its head. It was still sort of Christopher Baxter, only it wasn’t. The empty vessel was filled with something that twisted those once self-satisfied, gormless features into something even less palatable. The transformed eyes had a hyena’s laughing indifference, an eagle’s focused malice and the heartlessness of a parasitic wasp. His bowed head became level, turning slowly to each side to look with a mixture of pity and hostility at those gathered around him. The air seemed to have a static charge; as one, they felt their hair prickle. La Senza cast his darkening eyes down to his new body and flexed the manicured fingers before raising a hand and smearing it across the pronounced six-pack and pecs that Baxter had so lovingly built over the past 150 weekends. What had been Christopher Baxter looked into his palm then rolled his fist in and out of a ball. Gradually, he turned to look at Van Loop senior, who he fixed with two terrifying eyes. There was utter silence.
The newly arrived La Senza then opened his mouth for a moment before snapping it violently shut, the teeth clicking together like colliding billiard balls as Van Loop gazed on in stupefied adoration.
‘What are you looking at?’ said Cardinal La Senza.
CHAPTER 26 – Cardinal La Senz a
Dr Newton Barlow arrived back at his flat after yet another triumph on the frontline of good versus evil. He’d used a series of algorithms to crack a Tudor code, the puzzle intended to maintain the dark souls of twin brothers with a liking for entombing Catholics, Protestants and anyone they met with freckles. A 500-year-old mystery had been laid to rest by Newton with the help of Wikipedia and an iPhone in the space of an afternoon, and consequently, he was somewhat buoyant as he parked the Citroën and ran up the stairs.
His flat was not empty.
‘Ah Newton, there you are,’ said Alex Sixsmith, also buoyant, floating as he was just above the sofa. ‘Thank goodness you’ve got here.’ Mr Jameson was standing with a concerned face at the fireplace and Eric the Greek was fussing about by the bookcase, anxiously nibbling his fingernails. On the armchair, the spectral figure of a 15th-century Spanish clergyman sat awkwardly, complete with Shakespearean beard and ruff. He rose slowly to his feet as Newton closed the door behind him.
‘No, please, I insist, let yourselves in,’ said Newton sarcastically, the unexpected home visits from the dead now starting to get a bit old.
‘Sorry Newton, old boy,’ said Alex. ‘Hate to show up like this, all mob handed, but I’m afraid it’s an emergency.’
‘Emergency? Like what?’ said Newton, throwing his keys onto the table with a clatter. ‘I’ve got quite a lot on already, frankly. Got to go to Oslo to hunt for a sociopath’s self-portrait next week. Then there’s another Roman puzzle in Chelmsford ... and then ...’
Jameson stepped in. ‘You’re going to have to drop all that, Dr Barlow – we have a crisis that takes precedent over everything. There’s been an escape, a really bad one, probably the worst.’
‘Escape?’ asked Newton. ‘From where to where?’
‘From Purgatory to here,’ said Eric, looking pale. ‘He’s on the earth again! Oh dear me, oh dear me!’
‘Now, now Eric,’ said Sixsmith soothingly. ‘Try to stay calm. Let’s give Dr Barlow here the full story.’
‘I’m listening,’ said Newton. ‘Who is it? Stalin? The Ripper?’
‘You won’t have heard of him, Dr Barlow,’ said Jameson. ‘The team in Purgatory has spent 500 years trying to remove him from the historical record so that you wouldn’t have to. However, trust me, he’s a bloody nightmare.’
‘Name?’ asked Newton, opening his notepad.
‘His full name is Cardinal Balthazar De La Senza. An Inquisitor, Spanish. Early years of the Inquisition.’
‘He’s terrible, really terrible!’ said Eric, his head in his hands. ‘And we let him escape! It’s all my fault.’
‘Now now, Eric, please! There’s no point in torturing yourself about it,’ said Alex. ‘There probably wasn’t much you could have done – it was clearly a professional job with outside help. All that matters is that we find him.’
‘And find him you must, Señor Barlow,’ said the ecclesiastical Spanish spook from the armchair. His face was ashen, even for a man who had been dead since 1508; his expression was as grave as an expression can be without falling off the face and running under a table.
‘Sorry, I should have introduced you,’ said Alex. ‘This is Chaplain Diego Hernández de Macanaz. Chaplain, Dr Newton Barlow.’ They nodded respectfully to each other. ‘Diego here is our specialist on Cardinal La Senza. He knew him when he was living and there is no one else alive, or dead, who can give us a better insight into this monster.’
‘Nice to meet you Diego,’ said Newton. ‘So what are we dealing with here? I mean just how bad can a man be?’
‘He is the very devil, Dr Barlow,’ said the Chaplain. ‘Not literally, of course, but that would be only marginally worse, for he is as near to the Lord of the Flies as it is possible to get without horns and red skin. He is motivated by urges and desires that would make a demon violently sick. He kills, he maims and he destroys. To La Senza, human life is as inconsequential as a gust of wind or a mote of dust. The thought of him back here amongst the living – it is chilling. He must be stopped. And stopped fast!’
‘OK OK, so he’s a bad boy,’ said Newton, somewhat impatiently. ‘But I’m going to need some background here. Is there a report?’
‘I’m sorry Dr Barlow,’ said Eric, wringing his hands with self- disgust. ‘There simply hasn’t been time. We came straight here. It’s an emergency!’
‘I will tell Dr Barlow the story,’ said Diego. ‘After all, I was there was I not? I suggest you make yourself a drink and sit down Señor, it is not a short narrative.’
‘OK,’ said Newton. He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle. ‘So this guy got out today?’
‘Yes Dr Barlow,’ said Eric, close to tears. ‘It was awful, he simply couldn’t be stopped! He will be the ruin of us all, I tell you.’
‘It’s OK Eric, please,’ said Alex. ‘Relax if you can – we’ll fill Dr Barlow in on the details.’ Newton sat down on the sofa, sipped his coffee and opened his notebook.
‘OK Chaplain, fire away.’
******
Balthazar De La Senza was born in 1463 in Guadalajara, Spain.
Back then, the Iberian Peninsula was still a collection of separate Kingdoms, among them Castilla, Aragón and Portugal. The south was unique in medieval Europe for the manner in which its religious groups lived in perfect harmony with each other, brought together by Moorish expansionism and the presence of a thriving Jewish community. Together with the local Christians, there was a tolerant interaction between these different faiths and cultures that brought mutual support to a country that, in many respects, was something of a backwater.
Outside of the cities, medieval Spain was dirt-poor. The landscape was barren and unforgiving, and the climate uncompromising. But the cities contained a heady mix of Arabic and Christian architecture, their mosques and churches rubbing shoulders with synagogues and culturally diverse markets.
However, it was not all love and roses. Tolerance soon took second place to resentment as bitter fighting erupted, the Spanish Catholics fighting south to regain territory from the Moors. As ground fell to the Christians, the resident Muslims and Jews decided to play things safe. They converted, quick as you like, to Christianity. It was a smart move; something nasty was brewing. There were riots against Jews in Toledo and laws began to creep in that forbade the converted Jews – the Conversos – from holding any official positions .
In the 1470s, when Catholic Isabella and her husband Ferdinand took the thrones in Castilla and Aragón, things were already unpleasant, but they were about to get a lot worse. Like all zealots, the royal couple believed their faith was the one true faith, and with this in mind they boosted the existing medieval Inquisition up to a new intensity. So began a period of religious paranoia and mindless intolerance. Terrified that the Jewish Conversos and the converted Muslims – the Moriscos – represented a form of fifth column, waiting to destroy the re-established Christian Spain, the establishment let loose a storm of crazed Inquisitors. These charming individuals scoured the land for whatever feeble evidence they could fabricate, proof that no one had converted at all. As with the denunciations under Stalin, the McCarthy witch hunts in 1950s America and season seven of Big Brother, human nature is such that ruthless opportunism will inevitably creep into these nauseating investigations. Before the change, many of the Moriscos and Conversos had thrived, building a good honest fortune from their own endeavours, inevitably inducing some jealousy amongst their more feckless neighbours. It didn’t take much to switch the attention of the Inquisition onto a rival and soon, bogus denunciations were like rats in a sewer.
The self-styled investigators were hardly Sherlock Holmes in their approach. They were just as happy with a half-baked lie as they would have been with a hard-bitten fact. Many of the charges were laughable, and it would all have been just as comical as Monty Python would have us believe, had it not been for the sheer scale of what happened next.
Torture, burnings and the appropriation of goods were just a part of it. La Santa Inquisición provided a playground for the sadist, the vengeful and the petty. Religious justifications masked a wave of base mistrust, sexual predation and common bloodlust, and soon there was no person in the whole of the Iberian Peninsula who did not fear the knock at their door. When the Inquisition came to town, the only person to benefit was the one selling toilet paper. Paranoia spread like wildfire and in medieval Spain there seemed to be no one willing to step back, take a deep breath, and say: ‘Hold on a sec – this is bonkers!’
In fact, there were some heroic stands. Some communities, perfectly happy with the multicultural nature of their towns or villages, reacted badly as the Inquisition crept nearer. For instance, in 1484 in Aragón, there were rational people who decided to stand up for themselves in the face of institutional intolerance.
In the small regional town of Teruel, the arrival of a new Inquisitor didn’t go down too well. In fact, they didn’t even bother to put on a welcome party for the nasty little man. News of resistance to the Inquisition in Castilla had recently reached them and here, far from the cities, they felt bold enough to treat the Inquisition with the contempt it deserved. The town boasted a substantial population of both Conversos and Moriscos, all quite happy with the benefits their tolerance and understanding gave them. The idea of outsiders coming in and messing things up went down like a lead balloon. The Inquisitor met a wall of mistrust, defiance and official obstruction.
Used to inducing fear-inspired toadiness in all he encountered, the Inquisitor had come to expect five-star treatment from those he was about to oppress. However, he instead found himself bundled into a nearby monastery, where he was prevented from preaching his hateful nonsense to the locals. Spitting holy blood, he threatened all and sundry with excommunication until, thanks to the mean-spirited double-dealing of an opportunistic local, he was equipped with an armed militia. Thus emboldened, he swanned back into town and arrested everyone.
An auto de fe was soon arranged and the first burnings began. An auto de fe was a nasty invention if ever there was one. In a mix of pantomime and ritualised murder, suspects were interrogated with a clownish amateurism. It inevitably resulted in conviction, the due process being about as just as a school bully on the hunt for lunchboxes. Those that the Inquisitors could get their hands on were tried and burnt. Those who had read the runes and fled were burnt in effigy, a bizarre act of madness where a representation of the culprit would be tied to a post and burnt because the real thing had sensibly bolted. To the addled mind of the Spanish clergy, all this seemed quite normal, sensible even.
Sitting behind the Inquisitor was a priest merely 20 years old – Balthazar De La Senza.
Balthazar’s father had been a close ally to the ruling Mendoza family and had thrived under their patronage, giving the family not unsubstantial wealth and influence. Balthazar’s eldest brother had followed their father into the military at a high rank while the second son had been assigned to the office of a senior diplomat. Both young men were soon enjoying adventures around the kingdom and beyond .
Not the young Balthazar. His father used the young boy as a mere bargaining chip in his dealings with the Church, and to win approval with Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, the father heaved the reluctant young boy into the priesthood.
He wasn’t happy.
The young La Senza had dreamed of conquest, power and warfare, not prayer and contemplation. He was already a nasty piece of work who dreamt of sacking towns and pillaging victims. So much so that his caustic personality may well have been the driving force behind his father’s decision. After all, wasn’t it Balthazar who had been caught drowning kittens at the water mill? Wasn’t it Balthazar who had saturated the dovecot with burning oil? It was Balthazar who had ruined every Christmas and feast day, upset the neighbours and generally been a ghastly foretaste of We Need to Talk about Kevin whenever the mood took him.
However, when he was exiled to the priesthood, La Senza was pleasantly surprised to find that far from blocking him from warfare, intrigue and power, it actually did the opposite. He met an environment laced with hypocrisy and corruption, and using his own natural talents for backstabbing self-advancement, he soon won patronage from his seniors. In no time, La Senza became deeply involved in a sinister world of power struggles and persecution, and he enjoyed every foul minute. In 1485, fatefully, he was sent to Teruel to assist with the first autos de fe.
It was to be the beginning of a love affair with fear, terror and intolerance that would last as long as his brutish, malevolent life ... and beyond.
The poor convicted penitents were taken out before the seated officials of the court, and even though they’d already suffered torture by the rack and the wheel, they were then subjected to huge lengthy trials in which they were dressed in all kinds of humiliating costumes, their garish tabards and clownish hats intended to make them feel utterly subjugated. Bored into listlessness, they sat for hours under the beating sun and the haranguing judges. Then, to the delight of the mob, they were burnt. Those who confessed were granted mercy, this sadly only extending so far as a kindly garrotting before the flames kicked in. Defiance could result in other charming derivatives such as slow cooking inside purpose-built metal statues or boiling in vats of oil .
If you were creative, psychotic and a dab hand with a box of matches, this was your time in the sun.
Balthazar De La Senza loved it.
His dedicated enthusiasm in Teruel was duly noted by the Inquisitorial management. With blood and smoke still fresh in his nostrils, he was sent to work with one Pedro de Arbués, a favourite of Tomás de Torquemada, the most infamous of the Spanish Inquisitors and a thoroughly nasty piece of work in his own right. Pedro welcomed the enthusiastic young priest into his hit squad and together they set out to impose authority on Aragón, a region with a serious attitude problem as far as the Church was concerned. Recalcitrant locals were to be confronted, judged and burnt. Resistance was futile.
Arbués gathered his team of torturers and zealots then set out in force for the capital of the region, the old city of Zaragoza.
Fear gripped the population. They watched through shuttered windows as Arbués and La Senza trotted their horses into the town centre and made camp. Soon the newcomers began to preach and edict away like there was no tomorrow. A happy, tolerant atmosphere that had persisted for centuries began to implode and soon the locals, especially the poor Conversos and Moriscos, began to whisper about a fight-back.
Arbués may have been as intolerant and as unforgiving as a cholera outbreak, but he was no fool, and he sensed the trouble stirring downtown. Assassination in the air, he decided to back up his defensive prayers with a steel helmet and chain mail – just in case the Lord wasn’t on side. On the night of 14th September 1486, as La Senza watched from the cathedral shadows where he was heroically hiding, the Grand Inquisitor was ambushed at prayer. His armoured hat and underwear offered little protection as the assassins punctured his body with their blades. Bleeding like a stuck pig, he was taken back to his lodgings where he lingered painfully for a few hours before dying.
La Senza sensed an opportunity and felt a thrill of excitement course through his body like a spicy paella, for even as the Grand Inquisitor lay dying, the first fires were being lit.
The Inquisitorial reaction was instant and savage. There was no shortage of jealous enemies ready to shop their Converso neighbours and soon the culprits, anyone who might have been a culprit, and anyone who even looked slightly culprity in certain light conditions were dragged before the Inquisition and subjected to a barbaric reckoning. There were hangings, drawings and quarterings, and, of course, burnings. At a series of fourteen grand autos de fe, some forty two Conversos were put to the flame and another fourteen were burnt in effigy, their targets having wisely thrown everything they could grab onto the back of the family donkey then headed for the hills. Under the orders of Torquemada himself, these grand autos were something new altogether, a mix of show business, revenge and Catholic kitsch. For the hapless Conversos and Moriscos, the epic show trials must have been mind-bendingly scary. The last serious attempt to resist this growing nightmare had merely increased its tyranny exponentially. Torquemada’s power was now near absolute.
‘Wait!’ said Gunter Van Loop, suddenly. ‘Look!’
What had once been the body belonging to Christopher Baxter was tensing. Gradually, it began to sit upright. A very slight movement, like an inflating beach toy, its ghastly slowness made it all the more alarming to behold. Instinctively, in the total silence, the Van Loops and the McCauleys began to back cautiously away as fear began to replace fanaticism. The restraining bonds were creaking loudly as the twine became horribly taut, and then ...
Crack, snap, twang !
The ropes burst, whipping back in a blur. La Senza’s gathered loyalists jumped back as one in sudden shock.
Now, at last, the figure began to raise its head. It was still sort of Christopher Baxter, only it wasn’t. The empty vessel was filled with something that twisted those once self-satisfied, gormless features into something even less palatable. The transformed eyes had a hyena’s laughing indifference, an eagle’s focused malice and the heartlessness of a parasitic wasp. His bowed head became level, turning slowly to each side to look with a mixture of pity and hostility at those gathered around him. The air seemed to have a static charge; as one, they felt their hair prickle. La Senza cast his darkening eyes down to his new body and flexed the manicured fingers before raising a hand and smearing it across the pronounced six-pack and pecs that Baxter had so lovingly built over the past 150 weekends. What had been Christopher Baxter looked into his palm then rolled his fist in and out of a ball. Gradually, he turned to look at Van Loop senior, who he fixed with two terrifying eyes. There was utter silence.
The newly arrived La Senza then opened his mouth for a moment before snapping it violently shut, the teeth clicking together like colliding billiard balls as Van Loop gazed on in stupefied adoration.
‘What are you looking at?’ said Cardinal La Senza.
CHAPTER 26 – Cardinal La Senz a
Dr Newton Barlow arrived back at his flat after yet another triumph on the frontline of good versus evil. He’d used a series of algorithms to crack a Tudor code, the puzzle intended to maintain the dark souls of twin brothers with a liking for entombing Catholics, Protestants and anyone they met with freckles. A 500-year-old mystery had been laid to rest by Newton with the help of Wikipedia and an iPhone in the space of an afternoon, and consequently, he was somewhat buoyant as he parked the Citroën and ran up the stairs.
His flat was not empty.
‘Ah Newton, there you are,’ said Alex Sixsmith, also buoyant, floating as he was just above the sofa. ‘Thank goodness you’ve got here.’ Mr Jameson was standing with a concerned face at the fireplace and Eric the Greek was fussing about by the bookcase, anxiously nibbling his fingernails. On the armchair, the spectral figure of a 15th-century Spanish clergyman sat awkwardly, complete with Shakespearean beard and ruff. He rose slowly to his feet as Newton closed the door behind him.
‘No, please, I insist, let yourselves in,’ said Newton sarcastically, the unexpected home visits from the dead now starting to get a bit old.
‘Sorry Newton, old boy,’ said Alex. ‘Hate to show up like this, all mob handed, but I’m afraid it’s an emergency.’
‘Emergency? Like what?’ said Newton, throwing his keys onto the table with a clatter. ‘I’ve got quite a lot on already, frankly. Got to go to Oslo to hunt for a sociopath’s self-portrait next week. Then there’s another Roman puzzle in Chelmsford ... and then ...’
Jameson stepped in. ‘You’re going to have to drop all that, Dr Barlow – we have a crisis that takes precedent over everything. There’s been an escape, a really bad one, probably the worst.’
‘Escape?’ asked Newton. ‘From where to where?’
‘From Purgatory to here,’ said Eric, looking pale. ‘He’s on the earth again! Oh dear me, oh dear me!’
‘Now, now Eric,’ said Sixsmith soothingly. ‘Try to stay calm. Let’s give Dr Barlow here the full story.’
‘I’m listening,’ said Newton. ‘Who is it? Stalin? The Ripper?’
‘You won’t have heard of him, Dr Barlow,’ said Jameson. ‘The team in Purgatory has spent 500 years trying to remove him from the historical record so that you wouldn’t have to. However, trust me, he’s a bloody nightmare.’
‘Name?’ asked Newton, opening his notepad.
‘His full name is Cardinal Balthazar De La Senza. An Inquisitor, Spanish. Early years of the Inquisition.’
‘He’s terrible, really terrible!’ said Eric, his head in his hands. ‘And we let him escape! It’s all my fault.’
‘Now now, Eric, please! There’s no point in torturing yourself about it,’ said Alex. ‘There probably wasn’t much you could have done – it was clearly a professional job with outside help. All that matters is that we find him.’
‘And find him you must, Señor Barlow,’ said the ecclesiastical Spanish spook from the armchair. His face was ashen, even for a man who had been dead since 1508; his expression was as grave as an expression can be without falling off the face and running under a table.
‘Sorry, I should have introduced you,’ said Alex. ‘This is Chaplain Diego Hernández de Macanaz. Chaplain, Dr Newton Barlow.’ They nodded respectfully to each other. ‘Diego here is our specialist on Cardinal La Senza. He knew him when he was living and there is no one else alive, or dead, who can give us a better insight into this monster.’
‘Nice to meet you Diego,’ said Newton. ‘So what are we dealing with here? I mean just how bad can a man be?’
‘He is the very devil, Dr Barlow,’ said the Chaplain. ‘Not literally, of course, but that would be only marginally worse, for he is as near to the Lord of the Flies as it is possible to get without horns and red skin. He is motivated by urges and desires that would make a demon violently sick. He kills, he maims and he destroys. To La Senza, human life is as inconsequential as a gust of wind or a mote of dust. The thought of him back here amongst the living – it is chilling. He must be stopped. And stopped fast!’
‘OK OK, so he’s a bad boy,’ said Newton, somewhat impatiently. ‘But I’m going to need some background here. Is there a report?’
‘I’m sorry Dr Barlow,’ said Eric, wringing his hands with self- disgust. ‘There simply hasn’t been time. We came straight here. It’s an emergency!’
‘I will tell Dr Barlow the story,’ said Diego. ‘After all, I was there was I not? I suggest you make yourself a drink and sit down Señor, it is not a short narrative.’
‘OK,’ said Newton. He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle. ‘So this guy got out today?’
‘Yes Dr Barlow,’ said Eric, close to tears. ‘It was awful, he simply couldn’t be stopped! He will be the ruin of us all, I tell you.’
‘It’s OK Eric, please,’ said Alex. ‘Relax if you can – we’ll fill Dr Barlow in on the details.’ Newton sat down on the sofa, sipped his coffee and opened his notebook.
‘OK Chaplain, fire away.’
******
Balthazar De La Senza was born in 1463 in Guadalajara, Spain.
Back then, the Iberian Peninsula was still a collection of separate Kingdoms, among them Castilla, Aragón and Portugal. The south was unique in medieval Europe for the manner in which its religious groups lived in perfect harmony with each other, brought together by Moorish expansionism and the presence of a thriving Jewish community. Together with the local Christians, there was a tolerant interaction between these different faiths and cultures that brought mutual support to a country that, in many respects, was something of a backwater.
Outside of the cities, medieval Spain was dirt-poor. The landscape was barren and unforgiving, and the climate uncompromising. But the cities contained a heady mix of Arabic and Christian architecture, their mosques and churches rubbing shoulders with synagogues and culturally diverse markets.
However, it was not all love and roses. Tolerance soon took second place to resentment as bitter fighting erupted, the Spanish Catholics fighting south to regain territory from the Moors. As ground fell to the Christians, the resident Muslims and Jews decided to play things safe. They converted, quick as you like, to Christianity. It was a smart move; something nasty was brewing. There were riots against Jews in Toledo and laws began to creep in that forbade the converted Jews – the Conversos – from holding any official positions .
In the 1470s, when Catholic Isabella and her husband Ferdinand took the thrones in Castilla and Aragón, things were already unpleasant, but they were about to get a lot worse. Like all zealots, the royal couple believed their faith was the one true faith, and with this in mind they boosted the existing medieval Inquisition up to a new intensity. So began a period of religious paranoia and mindless intolerance. Terrified that the Jewish Conversos and the converted Muslims – the Moriscos – represented a form of fifth column, waiting to destroy the re-established Christian Spain, the establishment let loose a storm of crazed Inquisitors. These charming individuals scoured the land for whatever feeble evidence they could fabricate, proof that no one had converted at all. As with the denunciations under Stalin, the McCarthy witch hunts in 1950s America and season seven of Big Brother, human nature is such that ruthless opportunism will inevitably creep into these nauseating investigations. Before the change, many of the Moriscos and Conversos had thrived, building a good honest fortune from their own endeavours, inevitably inducing some jealousy amongst their more feckless neighbours. It didn’t take much to switch the attention of the Inquisition onto a rival and soon, bogus denunciations were like rats in a sewer.
The self-styled investigators were hardly Sherlock Holmes in their approach. They were just as happy with a half-baked lie as they would have been with a hard-bitten fact. Many of the charges were laughable, and it would all have been just as comical as Monty Python would have us believe, had it not been for the sheer scale of what happened next.
Torture, burnings and the appropriation of goods were just a part of it. La Santa Inquisición provided a playground for the sadist, the vengeful and the petty. Religious justifications masked a wave of base mistrust, sexual predation and common bloodlust, and soon there was no person in the whole of the Iberian Peninsula who did not fear the knock at their door. When the Inquisition came to town, the only person to benefit was the one selling toilet paper. Paranoia spread like wildfire and in medieval Spain there seemed to be no one willing to step back, take a deep breath, and say: ‘Hold on a sec – this is bonkers!’
In fact, there were some heroic stands. Some communities, perfectly happy with the multicultural nature of their towns or villages, reacted badly as the Inquisition crept nearer. For instance, in 1484 in Aragón, there were rational people who decided to stand up for themselves in the face of institutional intolerance.
In the small regional town of Teruel, the arrival of a new Inquisitor didn’t go down too well. In fact, they didn’t even bother to put on a welcome party for the nasty little man. News of resistance to the Inquisition in Castilla had recently reached them and here, far from the cities, they felt bold enough to treat the Inquisition with the contempt it deserved. The town boasted a substantial population of both Conversos and Moriscos, all quite happy with the benefits their tolerance and understanding gave them. The idea of outsiders coming in and messing things up went down like a lead balloon. The Inquisitor met a wall of mistrust, defiance and official obstruction.
Used to inducing fear-inspired toadiness in all he encountered, the Inquisitor had come to expect five-star treatment from those he was about to oppress. However, he instead found himself bundled into a nearby monastery, where he was prevented from preaching his hateful nonsense to the locals. Spitting holy blood, he threatened all and sundry with excommunication until, thanks to the mean-spirited double-dealing of an opportunistic local, he was equipped with an armed militia. Thus emboldened, he swanned back into town and arrested everyone.
An auto de fe was soon arranged and the first burnings began. An auto de fe was a nasty invention if ever there was one. In a mix of pantomime and ritualised murder, suspects were interrogated with a clownish amateurism. It inevitably resulted in conviction, the due process being about as just as a school bully on the hunt for lunchboxes. Those that the Inquisitors could get their hands on were tried and burnt. Those who had read the runes and fled were burnt in effigy, a bizarre act of madness where a representation of the culprit would be tied to a post and burnt because the real thing had sensibly bolted. To the addled mind of the Spanish clergy, all this seemed quite normal, sensible even.
Sitting behind the Inquisitor was a priest merely 20 years old – Balthazar De La Senza.
Balthazar’s father had been a close ally to the ruling Mendoza family and had thrived under their patronage, giving the family not unsubstantial wealth and influence. Balthazar’s eldest brother had followed their father into the military at a high rank while the second son had been assigned to the office of a senior diplomat. Both young men were soon enjoying adventures around the kingdom and beyond .
Not the young Balthazar. His father used the young boy as a mere bargaining chip in his dealings with the Church, and to win approval with Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, the father heaved the reluctant young boy into the priesthood.
He wasn’t happy.
The young La Senza had dreamed of conquest, power and warfare, not prayer and contemplation. He was already a nasty piece of work who dreamt of sacking towns and pillaging victims. So much so that his caustic personality may well have been the driving force behind his father’s decision. After all, wasn’t it Balthazar who had been caught drowning kittens at the water mill? Wasn’t it Balthazar who had saturated the dovecot with burning oil? It was Balthazar who had ruined every Christmas and feast day, upset the neighbours and generally been a ghastly foretaste of We Need to Talk about Kevin whenever the mood took him.
However, when he was exiled to the priesthood, La Senza was pleasantly surprised to find that far from blocking him from warfare, intrigue and power, it actually did the opposite. He met an environment laced with hypocrisy and corruption, and using his own natural talents for backstabbing self-advancement, he soon won patronage from his seniors. In no time, La Senza became deeply involved in a sinister world of power struggles and persecution, and he enjoyed every foul minute. In 1485, fatefully, he was sent to Teruel to assist with the first autos de fe.
It was to be the beginning of a love affair with fear, terror and intolerance that would last as long as his brutish, malevolent life ... and beyond.
The poor convicted penitents were taken out before the seated officials of the court, and even though they’d already suffered torture by the rack and the wheel, they were then subjected to huge lengthy trials in which they were dressed in all kinds of humiliating costumes, their garish tabards and clownish hats intended to make them feel utterly subjugated. Bored into listlessness, they sat for hours under the beating sun and the haranguing judges. Then, to the delight of the mob, they were burnt. Those who confessed were granted mercy, this sadly only extending so far as a kindly garrotting before the flames kicked in. Defiance could result in other charming derivatives such as slow cooking inside purpose-built metal statues or boiling in vats of oil .
If you were creative, psychotic and a dab hand with a box of matches, this was your time in the sun.
Balthazar De La Senza loved it.
His dedicated enthusiasm in Teruel was duly noted by the Inquisitorial management. With blood and smoke still fresh in his nostrils, he was sent to work with one Pedro de Arbués, a favourite of Tomás de Torquemada, the most infamous of the Spanish Inquisitors and a thoroughly nasty piece of work in his own right. Pedro welcomed the enthusiastic young priest into his hit squad and together they set out to impose authority on Aragón, a region with a serious attitude problem as far as the Church was concerned. Recalcitrant locals were to be confronted, judged and burnt. Resistance was futile.
Arbués gathered his team of torturers and zealots then set out in force for the capital of the region, the old city of Zaragoza.
Fear gripped the population. They watched through shuttered windows as Arbués and La Senza trotted their horses into the town centre and made camp. Soon the newcomers began to preach and edict away like there was no tomorrow. A happy, tolerant atmosphere that had persisted for centuries began to implode and soon the locals, especially the poor Conversos and Moriscos, began to whisper about a fight-back.
Arbués may have been as intolerant and as unforgiving as a cholera outbreak, but he was no fool, and he sensed the trouble stirring downtown. Assassination in the air, he decided to back up his defensive prayers with a steel helmet and chain mail – just in case the Lord wasn’t on side. On the night of 14th September 1486, as La Senza watched from the cathedral shadows where he was heroically hiding, the Grand Inquisitor was ambushed at prayer. His armoured hat and underwear offered little protection as the assassins punctured his body with their blades. Bleeding like a stuck pig, he was taken back to his lodgings where he lingered painfully for a few hours before dying.
La Senza sensed an opportunity and felt a thrill of excitement course through his body like a spicy paella, for even as the Grand Inquisitor lay dying, the first fires were being lit.
The Inquisitorial reaction was instant and savage. There was no shortage of jealous enemies ready to shop their Converso neighbours and soon the culprits, anyone who might have been a culprit, and anyone who even looked slightly culprity in certain light conditions were dragged before the Inquisition and subjected to a barbaric reckoning. There were hangings, drawings and quarterings, and, of course, burnings. At a series of fourteen grand autos de fe, some forty two Conversos were put to the flame and another fourteen were burnt in effigy, their targets having wisely thrown everything they could grab onto the back of the family donkey then headed for the hills. Under the orders of Torquemada himself, these grand autos were something new altogether, a mix of show business, revenge and Catholic kitsch. For the hapless Conversos and Moriscos, the epic show trials must have been mind-bendingly scary. The last serious attempt to resist this growing nightmare had merely increased its tyranny exponentially. Torquemada’s power was now near absolute.
