Chapter 6 - The Library of Iberian Resources Online

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anticlericalism is implicit in their word for clergyman, farfare, a term suggesting thin skin or halfbaked. (21) The language of religion was useful to the underworld in a more serious sense also. For example, when the hero of one of their ballads was wounded, his friends gathered around him: Some promised him Masses, Others fingered their Rosaries; Others lit candles Others sang Psalms. (22) In another ballad, a contrite young ruffian entered town and asked to talk things over with another he had wronged. The second ruffian conducted himself with dignity and bravado and casually threw out his "benediction" to the younger man. (23) [127] Religion provided not only the words but the procedures of some underworld characters. A basic theological attitude is apparent in underworld words for God, man, and woman. Ballads often referred to a man as coyme, a word now used for gambling-house owner or keeper. Women in these ballads were coymas, usually meaning prostitutes. God was el coyme del alto, literally "the man from above." (24) The close similarity between the words for man, woman, and God suggests that these people sensed much less difference between God and themselves than conventionally religious people like the ancient Jews, who for a long time were forbidden to name God. Underworld people might have mocked the Church as intermediary because they felt more similarity with God and less need for an intermediary. They knew the words and procedures of religion, and they broke their holy spell by using them for their own purposes. The Church wanted to bolster its authority as the only agency capable of using the language of religion, but the underworld showed that anyone could use this language. THE CHURCH AS REFUGE Traditionally, the Church provided asylum for people whose lives were in danger, but after 1520 this role was limited. As more and more ruffians ran into churches to escape hotly pursuing sheriffs, the Church and secular authorities agreed that churches should not be allowed to become havens for unlawful thugs. The Count of Puñoenrostro took a hard line when he became head of the city government in 1597. He ordered his lawmen to enter churches and forcibly remove any fugitives. (25) Though churches were no longer to be used for asylum from secular authorities, they were still considered sanctified buildings, places that should provide sanctuary from nonauthorized violence. One of the most shocking incidents in seventeenth-century Seville, for example, involved a murder in a church, committed by the gang called the "Esquiveles." A fight over a woman [128] erupted between this gang and another man. Trying to escape, the man dashed into the Church of San Pedro and hid behind the priest. The gang killed him before the altar even though the priest tried to shield him with his chasuble. Leaving the dying man, a horrified priest, and the shocked congregation, the killers fled the city. The ecclesiastical chroniclers reported with some satisfaction that the killers soon died in other skirmishes, implying that Divine Justice had the last word. (26) Although people could look less to the Church as an asylum during this period, they looked to it more as a refuge from need. The population of Seville grew rapidly in the sixteenth century, but many of the people who came to the famous port seeking their fortunes found only poverty. Monks and priests distributed food to the hungry and helped many homeless people find shelter. The Archbishopric provided charity from its own wealth and also administered many charitable bequests made by wealthy individuals. In addition, the Church encouraged less wealthy people to provide charity. One ecclesiastical report described a system by which people wanting indulgences from the Church went to
a particular chapel in the Cathedral. There they left alms to buy bread for the poor, and in return they received the indulgences. (27) As a refuge, the Church became a central meeting place for the down-and-out people of the city. Often the only buildings open to penniless vagrants were the churches and the houses of religious orders. In Quevedo's novel El Buscón, the picaresque hero and his roguish friends sought refuge in Seville's Cathedral, where they found some pretty prostitutes to keep them company. (28) The monasteries and hermitages in the countryside around the city were even more likely to be used as refuges for nonreligious purposes. Because of their geographic isolation, they were remote [129] from city lawmen and were sometimes poorly disciplined. In addition, the monks and priests who traveled the countryside from one monastery or hermitage to another resembled the vagabonds of the underworld. They depended on begging to get food and seemed to evade all legal jurisdiction. Underworld people recognized the close relationship and called highwaymen "hermits of the road" (emitaño de camino). (29) Murillo's painting of these traveling monks suggests their isolation and the ease with which they could escape the law. After a 1632 robbery in the Church of San Roque in Seville, a youth was hanged and his hand cut off, a girl accomplice was whipped, but the clergyman involved escaped as a traveling monk. (30) Not surprisingly, hermits and monks found in the countryside were commonly suspected of crime. In one seventeenth-century picaresque novel, La Garduña de Sevilla, a monk acted as the front for a gang of robbers, who hid their loot in his hermitage and marked houses in the city where he got alms so that they would know the best places for robberies. (31) This fictional account of crime and remote religious houses is supported by many actual cases reported in histories and ecclesiastical records of Seville: the 1536 killing of an Augustinian provincial by four of his religious brothers; a 1597 scandal in a local convent that resulted in two maids whipped and one hanged; the 1639 murder of a Portuguese monk in his cell by two Augustinian brothers, who escaped; the 1640 discovery of the bones of a missing monk walled up in the monastery cell of a brother who had stolen the money that the victim had previously taken from his own order. (32) One reason why monks and hermits were associated with crime is that the economic position of many religious orders deteriorated in the seventeenth century. Although the Arch-bishopric of Seville was reported to be very wealthy in the early [130] part of this century, many monasteries appeared to be far more wealthy than they actually were. Their huge art-filled churches were an expense rather than a source of income. Many new religious foundations had been funded by people eager for the esteem but unable to endow them adequately. As one commentator wrote, There is scarcely a pharmacist who has not been carried by his vanity to pass himself patron of a monastery and lord (señor) of its major chapel. And so, not having a strong endowment, if there is money for the building of the monastery, there is none for the officials of it; so that if they are nuns they eat from their dowries, and if they are monks they look for food from door to door. (33) The proliferation of religious foundations meant that many more had to share in the generosity of religious supporters, and many supporters could give less as the cost of living continued to rise. Unable to feed all their members, religious orders turned them out to beg. In 1597 the Monastery of Santa Maria la Real in Seville wrote to the king that it could neither repair its buildings nor feed its members. The monastery had mortgaged its land in order to buy wheat and still could not feed its members on four days of each week. In a similar plea from the Jesuits of Seville in 1598, they declared that their economic position was falling rapidly with the continuing increase in the cost of living. (34) The
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Chapter 6 - The Library of Iberian Resources Online

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