The Goa Inquisition

I. The Portuguese Inquisition

The Inquisition of Goa was an extension of the Portuguese Inquisition, which had been established in Portugal in 1536 at the request of King John III after years of negotiation with the papacy. Its origins lay in the forced conversion of the Jews of Portugal in 1497. Many of the Jews who had fled Spain after the expulsion of 1492, described in The Expulsion of 1492, had taken refuge in Portugal, and when Manuel I agreed to expel the Jews as a condition of his marriage to the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, he instead had most of them baptised by force in 1497 to keep them in the kingdom.

The converted Jews and their descendants were known as New Christians, cristãos-novos. Manuel promised that they would not be investigated for their beliefs for twenty years, a promise later extended. Many New Christians continued to practise Jewish customs in secret, and they were regarded with suspicion by the Old Christians. A massacre of New Christians took place in Lisbon in 1506, in which hundreds or perhaps thousands were killed by a mob incited by Dominican friars.

The Portuguese Inquisition was modelled on the Spanish Inquisition, founded in 1478, and had tribunals at Lisbon, Évora and Coimbra. It was governed by the General Council of the Holy Office, presided over by the inquisitor general, who was usually a member of the royal family or a senior bishop. Its main targets were New Christians accused of Judaism, but it also prosecuted Protestants, bigamists, sodomites, blasphemers, sorcerers and priests who solicited sexual favours in the confessional. The Inquisition's activity in Lisbon and Coimbra formed part of the background of the scholarship described in Bible Scholarship in Lisbon and Bible Scholarship in Coimbra.

II. New Christians in Asia

The New Christians played a large part in the Portuguese expansion in Asia. Many of them were merchants, physicians and officials, and they sought in the Estado da Índia a refuge from the suspicion they faced in Portugal. They traded in spices, precious stones and textiles, and some of them had commercial links with the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire and the Malabar coast. Their presence in Goa, Cochin and other Portuguese settlements aroused the suspicion of the clergy, who accused them of returning to Judaism in contact with the Jews of Asia.

The best-known New Christian in sixteenth-century Goa was the physician and naturalist Garcia de Orta, who came to India in 1534 and lived in Goa until his death in 1568. His Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia, printed in Goa in 1563, was one of the first European works on the medicinal plants of Asia and one of the first books printed in India. Orta's sister Catarina was arrested by the Goa Inquisition, convicted of Judaism and burned in 1569. In 1580 Orta's remains were exhumed, condemned posthumously and burned.

The case of the Orta family illustrates the situation of New Christians in Goa. They were integrated into Portuguese society and held positions of trust, yet they remained under suspicion and could be denounced by neighbours, rivals or servants. The Inquisition sought to uncover secret Judaism through denunciation, interrogation and the confiscation of property, and its procedures made it difficult for the accused to defend themselves.

III. Goa in the Sixteenth Century

The city of Goa, which the Portuguese took in 1510, stood on an island at the mouth of the Mandovi river, on the western coast of India between the territories of Bijapur and Vijayanagara. Under Portuguese rule it grew rapidly and by the late sixteenth century had a population estimated at between sixty thousand and two hundred thousand, including Portuguese settlers, people of mixed descent, Indian Christians, Hindus, Muslims, African slaves and merchants from across Asia. Travellers called it Golden Goa, Goa Dourada, and compared it with Lisbon.

The city was the seat of the viceroy, the archbishop, who held the title of primate of the East from 1572, the high court and the treasury. Its churches and convents, built by the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and Jesuits, made it one of the great religious centres of the Catholic world. The cathedral of Santa Catarina, dedicated to the saint on whose feast day the city had been taken, was begun in 1562 and completed in the seventeenth century. The Jesuit college of Saint Paul trained missionaries and local clergy and sent them throughout Asia.

The Dutch traveller Jan Huygen van Linschoten, who lived in Goa between 1583 and 1589 as the secretary of the archbishop, described the city, its markets and its people in his Itinerario, published in 1596. His account, which included maps and sailing directions, helped the Dutch and English to break into the Asian trade. Linschoten also described the Inquisition and the fear it inspired among the inhabitants.

IV. Francis Xavier's Request

The establishment of an Inquisition in Goa was requested by the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier. Xavier arrived in Goa in 1542 and spent the next decade travelling between India, the Moluccas and Japan. In a letter to John III dated 16 May 1546 he urged the king to send the Inquisition to India, because, he wrote, there were many who lived according to the law of Moses and the sect of Muhammad without fear of God or shame before men. The letter is often cited as the origin of the Goa tribunal, though the decision was taken only after his death in 1552.

Xavier's letter reflected a broader concern of the Portuguese clergy in Asia about the religious life of the converts and the settlers. The missionaries complained that the New Christians, the newly baptised Indians and the Portuguese settlers who lived with local women did not observe Catholic practices, and that Hindu and Muslim rites continued in the Portuguese territories. The Council of Trent, which met between 1545 and 1563, encouraged the enforcement of orthodoxy throughout the Catholic world.

In 1560 the cardinal Henry, inquisitor general and brother of John III, sent two inquisitors to Goa, Aleixo Dias Falcão and Francisco Marques Botelho. They installed the tribunal in the palace that had belonged to the sultan of Bijapur, Yusuf Adil Shah, known as the Sabaio, near the cathedral. The tribunal had jurisdiction over all Portuguese possessions east of the Cape of Good Hope, from Mozambique to Macau, and it remained in operation, with an interruption between 1774 and 1778, until 1812.

V. The Laws against Hindu Worship

The Inquisition was part of a wider programme of religious policy in Portuguese India. From the 1540s the Portuguese authorities in Goa issued laws restricting Hindu and Muslim religious practice. In 1541 the temples of the island of Goa were ordered to be destroyed, and their lands and revenues were transferred to the church. In the following decades the governors and viceroys, encouraged by the clergy, issued a series of decrees forbidding the public celebration of Hindu festivals, the performance of Hindu marriages and funeral rites, and the presence of Brahmin priests in Portuguese territory.

The first Provincial Council of Goa, held in 1567 under Archbishop Gaspar de Leão Pereira, confirmed and extended these measures. It decreed that Hindu temples should be destroyed and not rebuilt, that Hindu sacred books should be confiscated and burned, that Hindu orphans should be handed over to Christian guardians and baptised, and that Hindus should be compelled to attend sermons. Converts to Christianity received privileges, including exemption from certain taxes and preference for public office. A law of 1559 had already provided that orphans of Hindu parents should be taken into the care of the Father of Christians, an official responsible for converts.

These laws were enforced with varying severity. In the territories of Bardez and Salcete, acquired by Portugal in 1543, hundreds of temples were destroyed in the 1560s and 1570s, especially under the viceroy Constantino de Bragança. Many Hindu families moved their temples and images across the borders into the territories of Bijapur and later the Maratha state, where some of the temples of Goa still stand. Others accepted baptism, and by the end of the sixteenth century much of the population of the Old Conquests was Catholic.

The Inquisition itself had jurisdiction only over baptised Christians, not over Hindus and Muslims who had never been baptised. In practice, however, it prosecuted Hindus who were accused of hindering conversions or of persuading converts to return to their former religion, and it enforced the laws against public Hindu rites. Its main activity among the local population was directed against converts accused of continuing Hindu practices, which were classified as gentilidade, paganism.

Several of the most important temples of modern Goa owe their location to this movement. The image of the god Manguesh is said to have been carried from Cortalim in Salcete to Priol, in the territory of Ponda, which was then outside Portuguese control, and the temple of Shantadurga was moved from Quelossim to Kavlem. The New Conquests, the territories added to Portuguese Goa in the eighteenth century, including Ponda, were not subjected to the same religious laws, and their population remained largely Hindu. The religious geography of Goa today, with a Catholic majority in the coastal Old Conquests and a Hindu majority in the inland New Conquests, reflects these events.

VI. The Edict of 1736 and Local Customs

The suspicion of Hindu practices among converts continued throughout the history of the tribunal. In 1736 the Inquisition issued an edict listing forty-two Hindu customs that were forbidden to Christians. They included the use of the sacred thread, the tulsi plant, betel leaves and coconuts in ceremonies, the celebration of the birth of a child on the sixth day, the shaving of the head of widows, the payment of dowries in certain forms and the cooking of rice without salt. The list shows how deeply Hindu customs had persisted among the Catholic population after nearly two centuries.

The Inquisition also attempted to suppress the use of Konkani, the local language, in favour of Portuguese. In 1684 the viceroy, Francisco de Távora, ordered that the local people should speak Portuguese within three years and that Konkani should not be used. The Jesuits, however, had studied Konkani and produced a grammar and a catechism. The Jesuit Thomas Stephens, an Englishman who came to Goa in 1579, wrote the Kristapurana, an epic poem in Marathi and Konkani retelling the Biblical history from creation to the life of Jesus, published in 1616.

VII. Procedure of the Tribunal

The procedure of the Goa Inquisition followed that of the tribunals of Portugal, set out in the regulations, the Regimentos, of 1552, 1613, 1640 and 1774. An investigation began with a denunciation, often anonymous, or with a period of grace announced by an edict, during which those who confessed voluntarily would receive lighter penalties. The accused was arrested and imprisoned in the cells of the palace, often for months or years, and his property was sequestered.

The accused was not told the names of his accusers or the precise charges against him. He was urged to confess and to denounce others, especially members of his family. If he did not confess, the tribunal could use torture, usually the pulley or the rack, under strict rules about its duration and supervision. The accused was assigned a defence advocate, but the advocate was an official of the tribunal. The trial ended with a sentence, which could range from penance and a fine to imprisonment, galley service, exile or, for those who refused to confess or who relapsed, relaxation to the secular arm for execution.

The sentences were read in public ceremonies, the autos-da-fé. The condemned walked in procession from the palace of the Inquisition to the church of São Francisco or the cathedral square, wearing the sanbenito, a penitential tunic painted with crosses or with flames and devils for those condemned to death. Mass was celebrated, a sermon was preached, and the sentences were read. Those relaxed to the secular arm were then taken to the field of São Lázaro and burned. Those who repented at the last moment were strangled before burning.

VIII. The Numbers of the Accused

The records of the Goa Inquisition were largely destroyed after its abolition, and the exact number of trials and executions is not known. A list of the autos-da-fé and of the persons sentenced, preserved in Lisbon and studied by António Baião and later by José Pedro Paiva and Giuseppe Marcocci, provides the best estimate. According to the figure most often cited, between 1561 and 1774 the tribunal tried about sixteen thousand people. Of these, only a small proportion were relaxed to the secular arm and executed. Estimates of the number executed in person range from fewer than a hundred to a few hundred, depending on the sources used, and others were burned in effigy.

The composition of the accused changed over time. In the sixteenth century New Christians accused of Judaism formed the largest group, and most of the executions took place in the decades after 1560. From the seventeenth century the majority of the accused were local converts charged with gentilidade, and the punishments were mostly penances, fines and public humiliation rather than death. The tribunal also tried Portuguese soldiers and settlers for bigamy, blasphemy and other offences, and Protestants captured from Dutch and English ships.

Historians have warned against exaggerating the numbers. Some nineteenth-century writers gave figures of tens of thousands of executions, which are not supported by the evidence. At the same time historians such as Anant Kakba Priolkar, whose study The Goa Inquisition was published in 1961, emphasised the suffering caused by the tribunal and by the laws against Hindu worship. Recent studies by Ines Županov, Ângela Barreto Xavier and Délio de Mendonça have placed the tribunal in the context of Portuguese colonial society and the missionary enterprise.

IX. The Trials of New Christians

The first decades of the Goa Inquisition were dominated by trials of New Christians. In 1565 and later years the inquisitors uncovered networks of New Christian merchants who were accused of practising Judaism and of having links with the Jews of Cochin and the Ottoman Empire. Many were arrested, and their property was confiscated. In the autos-da-fé of the 1560s and 1570s dozens of New Christians were sentenced, and several were burned.

The New Christians accused of Judaism were charged with observing the Sabbath, fasting on the Day of Atonement, avoiding pork, saying Jewish prayers and reading the Hebrew Scriptures. The inquisitors questioned the accused about their knowledge of the law of Moses and their observance of the precepts of Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the Shema. The persistence of such practices among people who had been baptised by force two or three generations earlier shows the strength of family tradition and the role of the Hebrew Scriptures in preserving the memory of Judaism.

The Jews of Cochin, who were outside Portuguese jurisdiction, were nonetheless affected by the tribunal. The inquisitors regarded them as a source of contagion for the New Christians, and the Portuguese authorities sought to restrict contact between them. The Cochin community preserved Hebrew manuscripts and printed books, and it received books from Amsterdam and Venice after the Dutch conquest. Its history is told in The Jews of Cochin. The Bene Israel of the Konkan coast, described in The Bene Israel, lived outside the Portuguese territories and were not affected directly.

X. Penalties and Their Consequences

The penalties imposed by the tribunal had consequences beyond the individual. The confiscation of property ruined families and transferred wealth to the treasury of the Inquisition, which used it to pay its officials. Those sentenced to wear the sanbenito were obliged to wear it in public for a fixed period, and after their release the garments were hung in the parish church with the name of the condemned, a permanent mark of infamy for their descendants. The children and grandchildren of those condemned were barred from public office, the priesthood and membership of the military orders.

These penalties applied in Goa as in Portugal, and they contributed to the anxiety about purity of blood, limpeza de sangue, that pervaded Portuguese society. Families sought certificates showing that they had no Jewish, Muslim or condemned ancestors, and accusations of impure descent were used in disputes over property and office. In Goa the concept was extended to the descendants of converts from Hinduism, though Catholic Brahmins argued that their high caste made them equal to Old Christians.

XI. Muslims and the Inquisition

The Inquisition also prosecuted converts from Islam accused of returning to their former religion, and Portuguese renegades who had converted to Islam in the service of Muslim rulers and then returned. The Muslims of Goa had been massacred or driven out by Albuquerque in 1510, and the Muslim population of the Portuguese territories was small. Muslim merchants continued to trade in Goa, however, and the laws restricted the building of mosques and the public practice of Islam.

The relationship between the Portuguese and Muslim powers was complex. The Portuguese had treaties with the sultans of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar and Gujarat and with the Mughal emperors, and they could not afford to provoke them unnecessarily. The Mughal emperor Akbar received Jesuit missionaries from Goa at his court in 1580, 1591 and 1595, and discussed religion with them. These diplomatic needs limited the action of the Inquisition against Muslims who were not baptised.

XII. Charles Dellon's Relation

The most famous account of the Goa Inquisition was written by a French physician, Charles Dellon, who was arrested in Daman in 1673, apparently because of remarks he made about baptism and the images of saints and because of a rivalry with a local official. He was imprisoned in Goa for nearly two years, appeared in an auto-da-fé in 1676, and was sentenced to five years in the galleys in Portugal. Released through the intervention of French friends, he returned to France and published his Relation de l'Inquisition de Goa in 1687.

Dellon described the palace of the Inquisition, the cells, the interrogations and the auto-da-fé in detail. His book was translated into English, Dutch and German and became one of the main sources of the image of the Inquisition in Protestant Europe. Historians regard it as broadly reliable on the procedure of the tribunal, though Dellon's account of his own case is naturally one-sided. It was used by Voltaire and other Enlightenment writers in their attacks on religious intolerance.

XIII. The Inquisition and Books

The Goa Inquisition enforced the Index of Prohibited Books in Portuguese Asia. It inspected the cargoes of ships arriving in Goa for forbidden books, and it censored books printed in Goa. The printing press had been introduced to Goa by the Jesuits in 1556, the first press in India, and it produced catechisms, devotional works and grammars. The tribunal controlled the production of books in Indian languages and ordered the confiscation of Hindu religious texts and of Bibles in the vernacular that had not been approved.

The Inquisition's attitude to Bible translation reflected the rules of the Index of 1559 and the Council of Trent, which restricted the reading of vernacular Bibles. The Catholic missions in India produced translations of catechisms and lives of Christ but no complete Bible in an Indian language. The first complete Bible translations in Indian languages were made by Protestant missionaries, beginning with Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg's Tamil translation of the Greek Scriptures, published in 1714 at Tranquebar, a Danish settlement on the east coast.

XIV. Converts and Caste

The religious policy of Portuguese Goa interacted with the caste structure of Goan society. The Brahmins and the Chardos, a caste of landholders and warriors, were among the first to be baptised in large numbers, and they retained their caste identities within the Catholic community. Catholic Brahmins entered the clergy and became an influential group in the church of Goa. The Portuguese clergy at first resisted the ordination of Indians, but by the seventeenth century the majority of parish priests in Goa were of Indian origin.

The persistence of caste among Catholics was a source of conflict. Some missionaries regarded caste distinctions as pagan and sought to abolish them, while others, notably the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili in Madurai, adopted the dress and customs of Brahmin ascetics in order to win converts among the higher castes. Nobili's methods, which became the subject of the controversy over the Malabar rites, were examined by the archbishop of Goa and the Inquisition and eventually approved with conditions by Gregory XV in 1623. The question was reopened in the eighteenth century and the rites were condemned in 1744.

The Goan Catholic community that emerged from these processes combined Catholic faith with Indian customs, the Konkani language and Portuguese culture. Its identity was shaped both by the pressure of the Inquisition and by the creativity of the converts, who produced devotional songs, the vovios and the ovi, and adapted Hindu forms to Christian use.

XV. The Reach of the Tribunal

The jurisdiction of the Goa Inquisition covered a vast area. It received denunciations and prisoners from the Portuguese settlements of East Africa, such as Mozambique and Sofala, from the fortresses of Hormuz and Muscat, from Ceylon, Malacca, the Moluccas, Macau and the Portuguese communities in Japan and Bengal. Commissioners of the Holy Office, usually clergy, were appointed in these places to receive denunciations and conduct preliminary investigations, and the accused were sent to Goa for trial, sometimes after voyages of months.

In Ceylon, where the Portuguese controlled the coastal regions from the late sixteenth century until the Dutch conquest of the 1650s, the laws against Buddhist and Hindu worship were applied as in Goa, and temples were destroyed. In Macau the Inquisition prosecuted Portuguese and Chinese Christians, and the commissioner there reported on the activities of New Christian merchants in the China trade. The tribunal also investigated Portuguese who had settled outside the Estado da Índia and lived among the local population, the so-called lançados, many of whom had abandoned Christian practice.

The breadth of this jurisdiction made the Goa Inquisition one of the most extensive tribunals of the early modern world in geographical terms, even though the number of its officials was small and its capacity to act at a distance limited. Its correspondence with Lisbon shows the inquisitors struggling with the difficulties of distance, climate and the scarcity of qualified personnel.

XVI. Pombal's Suspension and the Restoration

In the eighteenth century the Inquisition declined in Portugal and its colonies. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, the chief minister of King Joseph I from 1750 to 1777, reformed the Portuguese state according to the principles of enlightened absolutism. He expelled the Jesuits from Portugal and its empire in 1759, abolished the legal distinction between Old and New Christians in 1773, and brought the Inquisition under the control of the state.

In 1774 Pombal suspended the Goa Inquisition, apparently because of complaints about its abuses and because he wished to reduce the power of the church in the colonies. After the death of Joseph I and the fall of Pombal in 1777, Queen Maria I restored the tribunal in 1778, but with reduced powers. It no longer held public autos-da-fé, and its activity was mainly directed against the residual practices of Hinduism among Catholics and against freemasons.

The tribunal was finally abolished in 1812, during the Peninsular War, when Portugal was dependent on its British ally. The British, who occupied Goa between 1797 and 1813 to protect it from the French, pressed for the abolition, and the Portuguese government, which had moved to Brazil, agreed. The Portuguese Inquisition itself was abolished in 1821.

In the last decades of its existence the tribunal handled few cases, and the documents that survive from this period show an institution preoccupied with routine matters, the supervision of books and the discipline of the clergy. The intellectual climate of the late eighteenth century, shaped by the reforms of Pombal and the influence of the Enlightenment, had removed much of the support it had once enjoyed.

XVII. The Destruction of the Archive

After the abolition of the tribunal, most of its records were destroyed. According to accounts from the period, the papers were burned in Goa on the orders of the authorities, and only a portion was sent to Lisbon. What survived includes the lists of the autos-da-fé, some trial records, the correspondence between the Goa tribunal and the General Council in Lisbon, and the reports of inquisitors. These are preserved in the National Archive of the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon and in the Biblioteca Nacional.

The loss of the archive has made the history of the tribunal difficult to write and has left room for both exaggeration and minimisation. The Scottish clergyman Claudius Buchanan, who visited Goa in 1808, published an account of the tribunal, based on his conversations with the inquisitor, which contributed to the British pressure for its abolition. Nineteenth-century writers, both Protestant and Hindu, presented the Inquisition as a symbol of Portuguese tyranny, and Portuguese Catholic writers sought to defend it. Modern historians have tried to reconstruct its activity from the surviving documents.

XVIII. The Inquisition and the Mission

The relationship between the Inquisition and the missionaries was complex. The Jesuits and the Franciscans had asked for the Inquisition to protect their converts from relapse and to discipline the Portuguese settlers, and many of the inquisitors were Dominicans. Yet the missionaries also complained that the fear of the Inquisition deterred conversion and that its procedures were harsh. Some Jesuits, such as Alessandro Valignano, who visited India and Japan in the 1570s and 1580s, recommended a policy of adaptation to local cultures, which contrasted with the rigour of the tribunal.

The Biblical texts cited by the defenders of the Inquisition included the parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13:24-30, which had been debated since late antiquity as a guide to the treatment of heretics, and the instruction to warn a sectarian person and then reject him in Titus 3:10. Critics of compulsion in religion, both in the sixteenth century and later, cited the same parable, in which the owner forbids the uprooting of the weeds until the harvest, as an argument against the use of force.

The Inquisition's prosecutions also drew on the language of the Hebrew Scriptures against idolatry. The decrees for the destruction of temples cited the commands to break down altars and smash sacred pillars, as in Deuteronomy 7:5, and the example of the kings of Judah who removed the high places. Critics of the policy, then and later, pointed instead to the method described in the Greek Scriptures, in which Paul reasoned from the Scriptures in the synagogue at Thessalonica, as recorded in Acts 17:2-3.

XIX. Comparisons with Spain and the Americas

The Goa Inquisition was one of several tribunals established outside the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish Inquisition founded tribunals in Lima in 1570, Mexico City in 1571 and Cartagena de Indias in 1610. Unlike the Goa tribunal, the Spanish American tribunals were forbidden to try the indigenous peoples, who were considered new to the faith and placed under the jurisdiction of the bishops. The Goa tribunal, by contrast, tried local converts from the beginning.

The difference reflects the circumstances of Portuguese Asia, where the converts lived among Hindu, Muslim and Jewish neighbours and the risk of relapse seemed greater to the authorities. It also reflects the role of the Goa tribunal as the defender of a small Portuguese settlement surrounded by non-Christian states. The Spanish encounter with the peoples of the Americas, and the legal debates it provoked, are discussed in The Conquest of Mexico and the Requerimiento.

XX. Legacy

The Goa Inquisition remains one of the most controversial episodes of the history of Portuguese India. In modern Goa its memory is part of debates about the colonial past, the relationship between Catholics and Hindus, and the identity of the state, which was annexed by India in 1961. The palace of the Inquisition was demolished in the nineteenth century, and its site in Old Goa is now an open space near the cathedral of Santa Catarina and the basilica of Bom Jesus, where the body of Francis Xavier is preserved.

For historians the tribunal offers evidence for the religious life of Portuguese Asia, the persistence of Jewish and Hindu traditions among converts, and the methods by which the Portuguese sought to impose religious uniformity. It belongs to the wider history of the Iberian Inquisitions and of the forced conversions that began with the Jews of Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, and to the history of the encounter between Europe and Asia described in Portugal against the Mamluks and Ottomans in the Indian Ocean.

XXI. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.