Robert S. Stone
Previous articleNext article FreeAutos-da-fé: The Roles of a Saint in Spanish SicilyRobert S. StoneRobert S. StoneUS Naval Academy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTambién, vemos que las imágines cristianas no sólo miran a Dios, mas a nosotros y al próximo.1(Francisco Pacheco, 1649)In a recent essay on Africans in Renaissance Europe, Kate Lowe notes that “the first black European saint, San Benedetto (St. Benedict, known as ‘il moro’ or the Moor), lived in Sicily in the sixteenth century, although he was not canonized until 1807.”2 He is seen here in an eighteenth-century Spanish sculpture (fig. 1). Several versions of his life (1526–89) are to be found, ranging from a hagiographical sketch by Antonio Daza in 1611,3 to Antonino de Randazzo’s longer Italian account of 1623,4 to another short life by the Jesuit Sandoval in his 1627 treatise on slavery.5 Soon after the saint’s beatification in 1747, Joaquín Benegasi’s narrative poem was published,6 and on the two-hundredth anniversary of his canonization, in 2007, a booklet was published for pilgrims to the Santa María di Gesú monastery in Palermo where Benito, as the Spanish called him, entered as a lay brother to work in the kitchen and eventually, despite his illiteracy, was chosen to become the superior.7Figure 1. Anonymous, San Benito de Palermo, 1700–1725. No. Inv: CE0570. (© Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid.)The trajectory of Benito’s life is quasi-picaresque. Born in Sicily to converted Ethiopian slaves, this mendicant Franciscan friar was forced by papal decree to abandon the wandering life and join a cloistered order in which he thrived by virtue of his pious humility, intelligence, and character. It is not hard to see why he was fervently embraced by the Spanish crown as a model for the conversion of slaves, freedmen, and indigenes throughout the empire: “he represented the ideal, illiterate slave (Daza calls him a ‘santo idiota’), a docile and loyal laborer, pastor, and cook.”8 Today, churches dedicated to St. Benedict the Moor are found throughout the Americas and in the Philippines, with the greatest number by far in Brazil.In selecting Benito as a subject for Spanish comedias, the well-known Golden Age playwrights Lope de Vega and Luis Vélez de Guevara exploited his popularity in both high and mass culture. Furthermore, both dramatists had indirect contact with Sicily. Three of Lope’s patrons were either viceroys or sons of viceroys of the Two Sicilies;9 Vélez de Guevara, meanwhile, took part as a young soldier in turn-of-the-century campaigns in Savoy, Milan, and Naples. It is likely, therefore, that these authors knew something of Sicilian society under Spanish rule and that this awareness found its way into their plays, as will be argued below.A century ago, Benedetto Croce noted a lack of historical and literary studies on relations between Spain and Italy, a gap that remains today, although it is narrowing.10 In the pages of this journal, for example, Edward Muir surveyed contemporary Italian Renaissance scholarship and found its focus shifting forward from the fifteenth to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and southward from Florence toward the Mezzogiorno, stopping short of Sicily, however, with Peter Mazur’s New Christians of Spanish Naples.11 In modern Sicily there is a tendency to downplay the years of Spanish dominion by the Habsburgs and their Bourbon successors in favor of a more remote, more easily romanticized heritage of Hohenstaufen, Norman, Arab, Byzantine, Roman, and Greek rulers. This is an understandable and persistent postcolonial attitude—after all, rancor against the half-Spanish king Ferdinand II was a driving force behind Garibaldi’s revolt launched from Sicily in 1860. I will try to address the Sicilian-Spanish literary lacuna by viewing history through the prism of two seventeenth-century comedias de santo set in Palermo, Lope de Vega’s El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo (ca. 1607) and Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El negro del serafín (ca. 1643). Cognizant of Terry Eagleton’s formulation that one purpose of “fictionalizing history is to reconfigure the facts in order to throw into relief their underlying significance,” I will juxtapose situations in the dramas with aspects of Sicily’s sociohistorical reality at the time of their production.12In Sicily, the dominant institution of the age was the Spanish Inquisition, a presence characterized by William Monter as “overtly colonial and resented as such.”13 Another historian, Denis Mack Smith, describes the situation as follows: “From 1487 onwards the notorious Torquemada was sending Inquisitors to Sicily, and soon a permanent institution was properly organized with its headquarters in the royal palace at Palermo. Naples successfully resisted the introduction of the Holy office; but in Sicily, though there was some initial opposition to it, to be enrolled as an Inquisition official was soon regarded as a great privilege by the Sicilian nobility. The chief Inquisitors were always, or almost always, Spaniards.”14 That the Inquisition, consciously or not, found its way onto the Spanish stage is not surprising, given that the Holy Office’s power was predicated on a well-attended ritual, the auto-da-fé. Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer define this as “a public gathering in which the ‘penitents,’ as the Inquisition called them, paraded before a gathered crowd, wearing garments known as sanbenitos (smocks bearing an insignia symbolizing the prisoner’s crime) and corozas (similar to dunce caps) symbolizing shame.”15 The highly spectacular aspect of the auto-da-fé has been remarked on by historians, even when noting its modest execution rate as compared to other European juridical systems. Monter, for example, writes that “none pronounced its judgments more theatrically,” while Kamen is at pains “not to see the Inquisition as the only player in the dramas in which it participated.”16 Mack Smith points out that in Sicilian autos-da-fé “the choreography was always carefully devised to make each occasion entertaining and instructive for as many spectators as possible,” and Nadia Zeldes observes that in Palermo the “spectacle began with a procession, which made its way from the Inquisitor’s house … to the square beneath the Viceroy’s palace … [and] usually included the appareance [sic] of the inquisitors, the alguacil and other officials as well as armed familiars of the Inquisition.”17 In other words, the auto-da-fé was a cautionary sort of Grand Guignol avant la lettre, helping to explain its effectiveness as a tool for the enforcement of orthodoxy meant to instill a “salutary fear; as the Castilian glossator of Eymeric’s ancient handbook for Inquisitors remarked in 1578, ‘there is no doubt that to instruct and terrify the people by proclaiming the sentences and imposing the sanbenitos is a good method.’”18 The following analysis holds that the plays dramatizing the life of San Benito for a seventeenth-century public implicitly portrayed the implementation of this “salutary fear” even as they interrogated social behaviors deemed proper in the age.Of the black saints before and during the sixteenth century, Benito is the most historically verifiable. The others are most commonly North African early martyrs such as St. Victor, St. Perpetua, and St. Felicity, while the fourth-century ascetic St. Anthony of Egypt is considered to be the patriarch of all monks. Benito’s most renowned predecessor—the first black of any nation to be canonized—is St. Maurice, the individual composite of a legendary Egyptian battalion that refused to bow down before Roman gods. Yet his “historical existence is so doubtful that more than once the legitimacy of his cult has been vigorously contested.”19 Although Maurice’s very name resonates with North African Moorish-ness, artistic depictions regularly portrayed him as a black, and as such he became the patron for the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperors in the Middle Ages. From this perspective, Benito was the early modern Habsburg heir apparent to Maurice, who was emblematic of “the Holy Roman Emperor’s right to rule nothing less than all the earth.”20 Depictions of St. Maurice diminished during the fifteenth century as the Atlantic slave trade developed; there are even late sixteenth-century paintings of a white St. Maurice by El Greco and the Italian artist Rómulo Cincinnato.21 Thus, the Spanish crown’s promotion of Benito seems to have been an attempt to find a “homegrown” saint whose reach would surpass that of St. Maurice. The Felipes of Spain, after all, headed “a global empire of which Italy was a central part,”22 and their patronage of Benito evinces a desire to be recognized on their own terms as rulers over people of all nations and races.23 Just after the appearance of Lope de Vega’s play in 1607, a direct link between the monarchy and Benito was established: “In 1608 King Felipe III contributed twelve-hundred ducados for the construction of a silver casket that would hold the remains of the future saint” (El rey Felipe III colaboró en 1608 con una limosna de mil doscientos ducados para la elaboración de un ataúd de plata donde reposasen los restos del futuro santo).24 The royal donor is alluded to in Vélez’s play when it is prophesied that “el monarca mayor del orbe todo / se nombrará tu dueño,” lines that equate the Spanish king with the Lord of all creation while predicting the slave’s service to both.25 The prophecy (an encomiastic trope) also seems to acknowledge Benito’s evangelical (and Spain’s political) power when it says that his “deeds will astound many nations, and tame lands across the sea.”26Contemporaneously, the Inquisition’s desire to place its imprimatur on Benito is asserted in the last sentence of the first hagiography, which grants permission for the future saint to be depicted with signs of celestial splendor: “And the holy Inquisition of Sicily, aware of his great holiness and many legally proven miracles, gave license for him to be painted with rays of light and a halo on his head as signs of his heavenly reward” (Y la santa Inquisición de Sicilia, atenta a su gran santidad y muchos Milagros jurídicamente comprobados, dio licencia para que se pintase con rayos de resplandor y diadema en la cabeza en señal de la que goza en la bienaventuranza).27 Does Benito’s path from a slave of man to a slave of God simply reflect his usefulness for the purposes of propagating orthodoxy? This is the interpretation foregrounded in the hagiographies. However, the dramatizations of his life would also have resonated with anyone living under the Spanish Inquisition as a critique of that institution and its officers. Although the Spanish Inquisition was the creation of the Catholic Kings, this did not mean that the Holy Office felt obliged to bend to the monarchy’s will at all times, and some of the conflict in the plays is attributable to discord of this nature. Furthermore, from a postcolonial, globalized, and “postracial” point of view, the substratum of honor disputes in both plays proves as interesting as the primary (if counterfactual) conversion tale, because it shows Benito cast in the role of mediator between Sicilian and Spanish nobles, pointing up sociopolitical tension on the island.Historically, one focal point for resentment of the Inquisition was the Holy Office’s familiars: “It was in the Italian provinces of the Spanish crown that the greatest and most successful revolts against the Inquisition occurred. There were risings in 1511 and 1526 in Sicily, caused partly by popular hatred of the tribunal’s familiars.”28 Familiars, men with written proof of a bloodline untainted by Jew or Muslim (a prerequisite to holding office in the Spanish bureaucracy), numbered at times in the thousands in Sicily. Even Lope trumpeted his status as a familiar on the frontispiece of several works, including El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, possibly as a way of immunizing himself against potential accusations of blasphemy. In any event, Sicilians “from all classes of society tried to become familiars and thus escape liability in proceedings which gave little chance to the accused. … In order to increase its authority throughout the island where it was deeply mistrusted as part of Iberian imperialism, the Holy Office adopted a policy of making rural noblemen into familiars; they eagerly grasped at a title which guaranteed immunity from arrest by royal officials and punishment by royal courts.”29These circumstances led to “guerrilla warfare” between viceroys and inquisitors in Sicily in the late sixteenth century.30 For example, when in 1589 the viceroy Alba tried and executed a familiar before the Inquisition’s tribunal could claim jurisdiction, “both parties appealed to Philip II who, after examining all the documents, wrote to Alva [Alba], March 29, 1590, strongly reproving him for bringing such scandal and discredit on an institution so necessary for the peace and quiet of the land.”31 The king “was firmly convinced that the Inquisition was essential to keep Sicily in subjection, which accounts for his upholding it against his own representatives.”32 Viceroy Alba, in addition to challenging the authority of the Inquisition during his tenure in Sicily, favored and consulted with Benito on occasion. Daza’s hagiography mentions this, and indeed, it is Alba whose daughter is exorcised by the saint in Lope’s play, an incident suggestive of the viceroy’s untenable situation, his near “possession” by an office more powerful than his. At the center of strife among Sicilians, Spaniards and their king, then, stands the Inquisition, which competed with the viceroy for the king’s favor, although in practice the two Sicilian Inquisitors were only answerable to the Suprema, the Holy Office’s high council in Madrid.33Historian Helmut G. Koenigsberger surmises that “nothing could show more clearly the confused and undeveloped state of Spanish ideas in imperial administration than [the] struggle between the civil government and the Inquisition in Sicily.”34 This state of affairs is in effect reproduced onstage alongside more imaginative scenes from the saint’s life. The two San Benito dramas gloss over Mediterranean history and more discreetly gloss Sicilian circumstances of the day in order to broach controversial topics without drawing the ire of the censor, paradoxically bringing us closer to the truth of the times. Beyond evincing the zeal of the newly converted, the dramatic role of Benito is that of a reconciler who curtails potentially disastrous clashes between representatives of the Spanish crown and officers of the local government, as well as between “honorable” men and women, all the while raising questions about the Inquisition.The Names of a SaintLope’s protagonist Rosambuco (Benito’s prebaptismal name in both plays) is at first blush a stereotype, as indicated by this name that signifies the blossom of the elderberry bush, a white flower emerging from a black-fruited plant. After a series of divine interventions, he is convinced that he should abandon his “natural” faith, Islam, for Catholicism. Although the historical Benito was as Sicilian as any first-generation child of immigrant parents, the plays foreground his purported Ottoman otherness, in spite of the Castilian Spanish he in to the of the African when one of is Beyond the of his life for a Spanish Benito’s is by his to a with legendary by in North while the name Rosambuco it also resonates with a Sicilian that was from a to a during Benito’s in the plays with and and commonly in popular with its in order to the his a for the through the of his with and the and by with However, the in the plays is so to modern that easily be from other such as that link Benito to the by its in either play is the of the name San In the alguacil when he calls Rosambuco him from the by Rosambuco to him as gran In the saint is to as the between Benito and the Inquisition is as as in in of The first the of the Saint Benedict order first the in the Middle this is by of or as “the insignia of the holy Inquisition, on the and of the insignia de la santa que y del terms and in the of the Holy Office to the saint’s a of which could have been a “a black on which were painted and other to wearing the had to it on he out of a practice by no popular in the first of the Monter notes that when to the had or to their sanbenitos be over an but from in order to be in churches as a of bringing on and for became practice to and sanbenitos with bearing the of the this caused “In the against the Spanish government in Sicily in the sanbenitos in the churches were down and In that in his in Palermo, as the wearing of on the sanbenitos of the who were very and he the people to the of from the Sicilian to Spanish rule was to the for at a before the saint of the name was as be from the were one to either was the would be the is felt from the in Lope’s El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, which with a from great an (and on the part of a good man into an life. The of a he to himself down from its but and he the slave of the In the of an honor an in a between the and who his of In an the first of several to Benito’s as a but this when his into a In as noted the future saint a from the viceroy’s to the Benito, but when the the of the over the it in calls an of a Benito his own life for that of who after to in a house the so of his that he is to he his is clearly that of an en a la then, did not out to the this He says he is with the of and as well as the of the Inquisition when a is to the / de a familiar of the Holy is the Inquisition, with while under the authority of Sicily’s are out in the name of honor and and when the Spanish him he the alguacil as “the man Sicily has al / que that and his in the even though his in the play place in the is and his near to Sicilian of the times. In 1590, for example, the made a of the of the up the house in which and his officials and were and would have … Soon when the to arrest some he was for a in Palermo that to the auto-da-fé. The first great auto-da-fé was in following for the first time in the of … It was that be on so as to public … The also on the promotion of the Inquisition’s own a that led to with officials of both and who were to of to the to the of Benito’s his cloistered years in an took on in an he would before the incident in Lope’s play his African for a thus his of has his to him by at the viceroy’s up and Spanish to each other as to a that is on the of the of in his raising about his Rosambuco to his for is only by the divine of a of the St. these not only the many autos-da-fé in Palermo in the sixteenth and seventeenth but also the of authority by the of in the Vélez play will be but more the with the that him from Lope’s to down house with the in as will be the African is and although not however, Lope’s slave a closer in the black “natural” for a for and as a critique of honor and the virtue of their in the of in these would have the who but not the that seems at first to be the black of the a to of the that make Rosambuco are in … The at even though they make an for the (and African slave for an Roman is the of the play is simply of the Spanish attempt to the for not only because it is a but because that are of will the in the Vélez Spanish popular in a that in Lope would into one of his most renowned El de The they the the of the flower of al a la de la de is by as / a la / de / la de is a of to but the a out of the the that a is very a of another for for calls to the place from which for the of This the that the de will for Golden Age Spain, the of honor that Lope as one to popular in his de comedias en is and but his in the and the to and the only punishment that seems to is that of with mentions it This to is by of the que to to a from a Benito, a in order to who this, Rosambuco of one of several by the it is who in the of Lope’s play to us that has an by the out the to the house from It is not the to as the seems to with some that the of Spanish is on a of and under the of the In that with all of the and in Palermo, will found a in honor of the saint, an that points the of the play to link Benito to Catholic play with the in Palermo of a de such as the one that had in the of popular an of orthodoxy in the of to the and of a such as the Holy the of an aspect of the or a each other in times of and most the Holy of the and in Spain to be of and to their purpose was that of a which and could be including “the struggle for in the creation of that were more than of the of the dominant of Spanish of any is the a by in This is from the that a of the Inquisition when over to the and led to the Lope’s play the with a of the saint, with a of from the a a and a of to Vélez de Guevara’s play, El negro del serafín with a of an on