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Autos-da-fé: The Roles of a Saint in Spanish Sicily

También, 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.7

Figure 1.
Figure 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.12

In 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.”26

Contemporaneously, 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.”29

These 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.33

Historian 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 Saint

Lope’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 perfect Castilian Spanish he speaks, in contrast to the laughable farrago of the plays’ female African characters (except, notably, when one of them is possessed).35 Beyond the exigencies of staging his exemplary life for a Spanish audience, Benito’s fluency is explained by his ties to Ethiopia, a land associated with Prester John’s legendary Christian kingdom located somewhere beyond countries ruled by Muslims in North Africa.36 Nevertheless, while the name Rosambuco may sound vaguely African, it also resonates with Sambuca, a Sicilian municipality that was elevated from a barony to a marquisate during Benito’s lifetime. Rosambuco/Benito’s corporeal blackness (synonymous in the plays with turco, moro, perro, and diablo, and commonly associated in popular culture with servility) must emulate its opposite in order to reveal the purity within his soul,37 exercising a fascination for the spectator through the association of his complexion with “death, sin and the demonic, and by extension with Islam.”38 However, the inescapable racism in the plays is so riveting to modern readers that we can easily be deflected from pursuing other compelling undercurrents, such as those that link Benito to the Inquisition.39

Conspicuous by its absence in either play is the utterance of the name San Benito. In Lope, the alguacil (sheriff) Lesbio comes closest when he calls Rosambuco “Santo bendito” upon freeing him from servitude. Similarly, the captain cured by Rosambuco refers to him as “Santo negro, gran Benito.” In Vélez, the saint is consistently referred to as Fray Benito. While never explicit, the bond between Benito and the Inquisition is as close as those entries listed consecutively, in reverse alphabetical order, in Covarrubias’s famous dictionary of 1611.40 The first entry, “san benito,” outlines the import of the original Saint Benedict (whose order first donned the sanbenito-like scapular in the Middle Ages); this is followed by “sambenito”—an abbreviation of “saco bandito,” or blessed jacket—and defined as “the insignia of the holy Inquisition, worn on the chest and back of the reconciled penitent” (la insignia de la santa Inquisicion, que hecha sobre el pecho y espaldas del penitente reconciliado). These aurally indistinguishable terms conflate and invert in Covarrubias, joining the symbol of the Holy Office to the saint’s name, a linkage of which Spanish-speaking audiences could hardly have been unaware.

In autos-da-fé, penitents wore a particular garment, “a black sanbenito on which were painted flames, demons and other decorative matter. Anyone condemned to wearing the ordinary sanbenito had to put it on whenever he went out of doors, a practice by no means popular in the first decades of the Inquisition.”41 Monter notes that when penitents condemned to the flames had already died or managed to escape, their sanbenitos might be draped over an effigy but saved from burning in order to be later displayed in churches as a badge of shame, bringing disrepute on families and communities for generations.42 Indeed, “it became general practice to replace old and decaying sanbenitos with new ones bearing the names of the same offenders.”43 Unsurprisingly, this caused unrest: “In the rising against the Spanish government in Sicily in 1516, the sanbenitos in the churches were torn down and never replaced.”44 In inciting that revolt, “Fra Hieronimo da Verona, in his lenten sermons in Palermo, denounced as sacrilegious the wearing of red crosses on the green penitential sanbenitos of the reconciled heretics, who were very numerous, and he urged the people to tear off the symbol of Christ from the heretical penitents.”45 Evidently, Sicilian resistance to Spanish rule was connected to the sanbenito for at least a decade before the saint of the same name was born, as may be inferred from the plays’ slightly enigmatic titles: were one to ask what either was about, the simple answer would be the never-uttered “San Benito.”

Rosambuco’s Roles

The miraculous is felt from the start in Lope’s El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, which opens with a fall from great heights, an attempted (and markedly un-Catholic) suicide on the part of Rosambuco, a good man born into an unfortunate life. The defeated leader of a Turkish galleon, he prepares to fling himself down from atop its mast, but Heaven intervenes, and he instead becomes the slave of the Spaniard Don Pedro Portocarrero.46 In the play’s secondary plot of an honor dispute, Rosambuco/Benito’s sombrero heals an infected wound suffered in a duel between the gallant Spaniard Captain Molina and Don Pedro, who wrongly suspects his fiancée of infidelity.47 In Act II, an envious monk named Pedrisco makes the first of several attempts to sabotage Benito’s rising reputation as a miracle worker, but this goes comically awry when his guitar turns into a lizard. In Act III, as noted above, the future saint exorcises a demon from the viceroy’s daughter; Pedrisco tries to poison the now-sickly Benito, but when the intended victim makes the sign of the cross over the venom-containing glass, it breaks.48 Ultimately, in what Fra Molinero calls an act of “auto-inmolación,” a moribund Benito trades his own life for that of Palermo’s alguacil/sheriff Lesbio, who revives after seeming to perish in a house fire.49

In the opening act, Lesbio becomes so suspicious of his wife’s infidelity that he is prepared to kill her.50 When he confronts her, his tone is clearly that of an interrogator: “Qué, en fin, ¿no habéis salido a la marina esta tarde, señora?” (So, then, my lady, you did not go out to the marina this afternoon?).51 He says he is burning with “infernal” suspicion, conjuring the flames of passion and hell, as well as the earthly justice of the Inquisition when a penitent is “relaxed” to the secular authorities: “Un infierno llevo / de sospechos dentro el pecho.”52 Lesbio, undoubtedly a familiar of the Holy Office, is like the Inquisition, acting with impunity while technically under the authority of Sicily’s viceroy. His despicable actions are carried out in the name of honor and piety, and so, when the Spanish officer Don Pedro thinks him dead, he eulogizes the alguacil as “the best man Sicily has ever had” (Murió al fin el mejor hombre / que tuvo Sicilia).53 Canónica believes that Lesbio’s death “in flames and unconfessed” signals his destination in the afterlife, even though his repentance in the play may ring true.54 Lesbio’s place in the drama is therefore ambiguous, and his near death may allude to certain Sicilian events of the times. In 1590, for example, “when the Inquisitor Bartolomé Sebastián made a visitation of the town of Jaca, the inhabitants piled up wood around the house in which [he and his officials and servants] were lodged and would have burnt them all. … Soon afterwards, when the alguazil went [there] to arrest some heretics, he was left for dead.”55 Regardless, a “staged” fire in Palermo that claims lives brings to mind the auto-da-fé. The city’s first great auto-da-fé was held in 1573, following rules “enshrined for the first time in the inquisitorial Instructions of 1561. … It was now determined that autos be held on feast days, so as to ensure maximum public participation. … The rules also laid special emphasis on the promotion of the Inquisition’s own status, a fact that immediately led to conflicts with officials of both Church and state, who were asked to take oaths of loyalty to the Inquisition.”56 These measures correspond to the monastic period of Benito’s life, his cloistered years in Palermo.

Sometimes, if an executioner took pity on penitents in an auto-da-fé, he would strangle them before lighting the pyre. A parallel incident in Lope’s play finds Lesbio punishing his African servant girl Lucrecia for a dalliance, thus sublimating his fear of cuckoldry. Lesbio has his servant Rosambuco/Benito (given to him by Don Pedro at the viceroy’s request) tie up Lucrecia and her elderly Spanish lover Ribera, binding them to each other as if to a stake. Fra Molinero maintains that Lesbio’s erotic pleasure is dependent on the suppression of the sexuality of those in his household, raising doubts about his rectitude, and, sure enough, Lesbio now orders Rosambuco to strangle his wife Laura for her perceived indiscretions. She is only saved by the divine intervention of a statue of the original St. Benedict. Cumulatively, these acts conjure not only the many autos-da-fé celebrated in Palermo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also the abuses of authority committed by the likes of Lesbio. Their corollary in the Vélez play will be briefer but more explicit: the unconverted Rosambuco, brimming with the bravado that sets him apart from Lope’s humbler servant, threatens to burn down César’s house with the count still in it. Later, as will be discussed below, the African servant Catalina is imprisoned, whipped, and tortured, although not onstage. First, however, Lope’s slave girl Lucrecia warrants a closer look.

Encoded in her argot, the black servant Lucrecia—a “natural” target for racist gibes—becomes a mouthpiece for subtlety and wit as she mounts a critique of honor and the Inquisition. By virtue of their aural nature, hidden in the midst of burlesque speeches in nonstandard Spanish, these barbs would perhaps have bypassed the censor who read them but probably not the audience that heard them. Lucrecia seems at first glance to be the conventionalized black of the comedia, a foil to Rosambuco/Benito’s refined mien. “All of the virtues that make Rosambuco exceptional are missing in Lucrecia. … The audience can still laugh at blacks, even though they might make an exception for Rosambuco.”57 But the sub-Saharan (and markedly non-Ethiopian) African slave named for an archetypally chaste Roman woman is perhaps the true graciosa of the play (the clownish Pedrisco is simply too odious). First she makes fun of the Spanish Captain Molina’s attempt to woo the veiled Laura. Lucrecia’s often-repeated word for caballero—cagayera—sounds cheekily insulting not only because it is a feminized noun but because cagar means defecation, hinting that gentlemen are full of it. (Catalina will repeat the epithet in the Vélez play.) Then Lucrecia parodies Spanish popular culture when, in her inimitable slang, she quotes a famous ballad (romance) that in 1620 Lope would transform into one of his most renowned dramas, El caballero de Olmedo. The original refrain, “Tonight they killed the Caballero, the pride of Medina, the flower of Olmedo” (Esta noche le mataron al Caballero, a la gala de Medina, la flor de Olmedo), is rendered by Lucrecia as “Y esta noche le mantaron / a la cagayera / quen lan galan de Mieldina / la flor de Omiela.”58 Mantar is a corruption of matar, meaning to kill, but the malapropism makes a verb out of the noun manto, the shawl that cloaks a woman’s honor. Mieldina is very nearly a diminutive of another common word for excrement, whereas Lucrecia’s vulgarized word for heart, culazón, calls attention to the place from which excrement emanates—so much for the “flower of Olmedo.” This picaresque wordplay subverts the concept that the Caballero de Olmedo will incarnate for Golden Age Spain, the code of honor that Lope famously claims as one key to popular drama in his verse manifesto Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo.59 Like Rosambuco, Lucrecia is dealt blows and insults, but she lacks his obsequiousness; in the crusty Spaniard Ribera and the saintly Rosambuco, she aspires to love (carnal and spiritual) supposedly above her station. Interestingly, the only punishment that she seems to fear is that of being scalded with grease (she mentions it three times). This reference to fire is further compounded by her use of the common idiom que me abraso (“I’m burning up”) to express her desire. When she tries to steal a kiss from a sleeping Benito, a fire-breathing serpent appears in order to frighten her away. Lesbio, who witnesses this, accuses Rosambuco of sorcery, one of several practices prosecuted by the Inquisition.60 Crucially, it is Lucrecia who appears in the final scene of Lope’s play to inform us that she has just witnessed an impossible deed performed by the “sancto neglo Benito,” whom she saw within Lesbio’s burning hacienda, casting out the flames to save the house from destruction. It is not overstating the case to suggest, as the drama seems to do with some insistence, that the edifice of Spanish hegemony is built on a partnership of slavery and piety under the aegis of the Inquisition.61 In her final speech, Lucrecia announces that she, along with all of the slaves and blacks in Palermo, will found a confraternity in honor of the saint, an act that points beyond the bounds of the play to link Benito to nonthreatening, noncoercive Catholic practices.

The play ends with the establishment in Palermo of a penitent cofradía de negros (black confraternity), such as the famous one that had formally existed in the city of Seville since 1554. These popular religious associations presented an alternative mode of orthodoxy in the form of charitable organizations devoted to the exaltation and commemoration of a sacred image such as the Holy Sacrament, the Passion of Christ, an aspect of the Virgin, or a particular saint.62 Members helped each other in times of need and planned activities, most famously the Holy Week processions of Seville. Interestingly, the biggest and oldest confraternities in Spain tended to be those formed of slaves and former slaves.63 Added to their explicit religious purpose was that of providing a symbol around which collective identity and ethnic self-esteem could be constructed, including “the struggle for preeminence in the creation of religious spectacles that were more splendid than those of the fraternities of the dominant classes.”64 Typical of Spanish confraternities of any stripe is the capirote, a conical hat worn by penitents in processions. This headgear is indistinguishable from the coroza that a penitent of the Inquisition wore when handed over to the secular authorities and led to the pyre. Thus Lope’s play leaves the viewer with a memorable portrait of the saint, complete with a virtual predella of iconic images from the auto-da-fé: a sanbenito, a coroza, and a human conflagration.

An Etymology of Omertà

Turning now to Vélez de Guevara’s play, El negro del serafín begins with a recapitulation of an ongoing dispute between (another) Spanish captain Don Pedro Portocarrero and the Sicilian Count César. Each has killed at least one member of the other’s family, and the air is rife with revenge. To complicate matters, while establishing the symmetry at which Vélez excels, Don Pedro loves Laura, who is the sister of César, and César loves Estrella, who is the sister of Don Pedro. The forastero (foreigner) Don Pedro hopes to elope with Laura back to the safety of Spain. Laura believes that Don Pedro’s love for her will dissuade him from taking vengeance on her brother César, but she is wrong: it is only Rosambuco/Benito’s intercession that avoids disaster on this and other occasions. The seemingly personal rivalry between the count and the captain comes to embody the potentially violent political relationship between native Sicilians and the Spaniards who occupy the island.

When Don Pedro’s suspicions about his sister’s forbidden love for César are aroused, Rosambuco defends her honor against his Spanish master, insolently raising a sword to him. Benito tells his owner, “In cases of such doubt, it is always only fitting and proper to think the best” (En casos de tanta duda, / es discreción y es acierto / pensar siempre lo mejor; I.880).65 Don Pedro, taken aback, retorts “I am not asking you for advice” (Yo no te pido consejo; I.883). The slave can be defiant because he is “ignorant of the laws of honor” (Las leyes del honor ignoro; I.888) and therefore is able to see things more clearly than the Spaniard, whose eyes are clouded by passion: “You see passionately what I see without it, and you should therefore assume that my decision [to protect Estrella] is truer” (Tú miras apasionado / lo que yo sin pasión veo / y así debes presumir / de mi eleción más acierto; I.892–93). The saint’s innocent-until-proven-guilty approach challenges the legal and social norms of the age.

In the second act, Don Pedro seeks asylum in a Palermo monastery, but Count César finds him there and they fight. The Sicilian has the upper hand until the intervention of a Holy Child and St. Francis of Assisi, patron of the mendicant order joined by the historical Benito. From offstage an unnamed viceroy is heard to order both César and Don Pedro to jail.66 Turning Lope’s opening scene (in which Rosambuco had attempted suicide by leaping down from the mast of his Muslim pirate ship) on its head, Vélez’s final act finds Benito mortally wounded in a surprise attack by Turkish pirates on the monastery. In death, the saint has the feuding parties set aside differences and pledge loyalty to one another, saying, “God has been served on this day of my death by bringing you together” (Dios en mi muerte este día / se ha servido de juntaros; III.3537–38). The play ends harmoniously as the rival brothers-in-law-to-be echo each other with imagery that calls attention to divine rays of light that are signs of Benito’s sanctity:

Don Pedro:

What strange harmony! (¡Qué armonía tan estranjera!)

Conde:

What unusual rays of the sun! (¡Qué rayos tan forasteros del sol!)

(III.3595–98)
Despite this exalted moment in which peace is established and the saint’s heavenly reward revealed, the words estranjera and forasteros (here meaning strange, but more commonly associated with foreignness) underscore the fraught nature of the relationship between these in-laws-to-be. In effect these feuding families are already wedded to each other, a fact that might

account for the warm reception afforded Spanish Golden Age plays in Italy. Spain’s dominion of southern Italy, which had begun with the Aragonese presence in Sicily as early as 1282, was a fait accompli by the final decade of the sixteenth century. In those areas not directly under Spanish rule (i.e., everything north of the Papal States), the crown had secured the support of powerful nobles through concessions of land and privileges or through dynastic marriages. … All was not rosy for long, however, in this political marriage of cultures. By the end of the sixteenth century, many Italians had begun to resent not only the Spanish presence on home soil, but also what they perceived to be the arrogance and pretensions of their political masters.67

In Sicily, a code of silence and resistance to all official forms of authority took root during the period of Spanish occupation, probably in response to the cultivation of those informants on whom institutions such as the Inquisition depended. The origin of the word to describe this code, omertà, has been traced to two possible sources. One is a Sicilian variant of the Italian word umiltà, meaning humility, a defining characteristic of Lope’s Benito. The other is the Old Spanish word hombredad, meaning manliness, a prominent trait of Vélez’s swordsman saint.

In both plays it is Benito, the enslaved colonial subject, who refuses to divulge to his owner the identities of women who have technically transgressed but are otherwise blameless. Similarly, in Vélez the slave girl Catalina and her mistress Laura undergo a parallel character development, each initially bowing to the brute authority of César but defying him in the end. Catalina, furthermore, refuses to reveal under torture the whereabouts of the lovers Laura and Don Pedro, who have broken out of jail. As the gracioso Montero says of her, “honra ha de ser de Guinea” (she must be the honor of Guinea; III.2514). The words drip with ironic intent but lose their bite in the face of Catalina’s stoicism, which contrasts with Montero’s constant whining. Catalina’s brand of omertà is all the more striking because, despite her voluble nature, she embodies the abject character who chooses to remain voiceless in order to protect her mistress; even Benito is unable to learn anything from her about Laura’s whereabouts. The viceroy eventually takes pity on Catalina and orders her release from an unspecified jail. It would be only natural for Vélez to portray a potential patron such as the viceroy as munificent while casting implicit doubt on his nemeses in the Holy Office.

Catalina’s character is clearly based on Lucrecia from the Lope play. When she is tied up by Benito, however, it is not for sexual misconduct but because she has become possessed. Acting in ways reminiscent of the Inquisition, Benito rids Catalina of the demon by binding her with chains and purifying her with holy water kept in a caldero, or boiling pot. While possessed, she speaks perfect Spanish, accusing Benito of false humility and calling him a “bailiff of [the Virgin’s] criminal court” (alguacil de su corte criminal; III.3153–54), while reminding Mortero of the ways in which he, in the guise of a friar, has stolen alms from the needy in Palermo (a picaresque trope).

Another remarkable feature in Vélez is the setting of much of Act II in a jail where Don Pedro—“el español arrogante” (II.1230–31), “capitán … de la infantería española” (II.2386–87)—and César, “el Conde siciliano” (II.1454) have been remanded by the viceroy. The sister of each rival tries to dissuade her suitor from open battle, but it is only Benito’s daring swordplay and snuffing out of a torch that avoids a bloodbath. Literally and figuratively, this is the darkest part of the drama, conceivably calling to mind the Palazzo Steri, which served as both the Inquisition’s headquarters and its prison. The palace was (and is) located on Palermo’s Piazza Marina, the scene of many autos-da-fé.68 If Vélez is venturing a veiled critique of state-sponsored abuse, he is also wondering whether the authorities would serve their subjects better by attempting to quell the honor killings endemic to both Spanish and Sicilian societies.

Vélez’s play, more carefully crafted than Lope’s, establishes linguistic, imagistic, and thematic parallels that see the honor conflict through from beginning to end. The two plays share some of the same characters, the burlesque speech of a black female servant, the idea that Benito and Portocarrero first met in battle, and thwarted attempts to belittle the saint. In terms of plot, beyond Turkish corsair attacks, the only shared events are third-act exorcisms and first-act doubts about women’s fidelity, as symbolized by their mantos, or shawls. Indeed, the potential for tragedy in both plays is driven by incidents involving veiled women known as tapadas, or “covered-up ones.” As stated, the theme of honor in both plays turns on the question of a woman’s identity that is simultaneously shielded and revealed by her shawl. Lope’s Lesbio thinks he spies his wife in the street, where the gallant Spaniard Captain Molina is flirting with her. Supposedly out of loyalty to the viceroy, who has decreed that tapadas found roaming the streets are to have their shawls taken from them, thus revealing their identity and dissolute nature, the alguacil tries but fails to uncover his wife’s face.69 The manto, a long black cloak worn by women in all walks of life, is intended to protect a woman’s—and her family’s—honor.70 But the shawls that initiate cloak-and-dagger questions of honor in the dramas are also like sanbenitos: both serve the purpose of concealing a sinful body even as they broadcast its fallen condition, blurring the difference between “virtue and disrepute.”71 With the assistance of Benito, the dramas’ bold women challenge the validity of the honor code as surely as heretics threaten Tridentine orthodoxy. Violence in Lope results when, in an attempt to avoid recognition by her husband, Laura exchanges her saya with Niseya, the beloved of Don Pedro, leading to the near-fatal duel between Spanish officers. This garment, a short-sleeve overdress, resembles a sanbenito even more closely than a manto does, and Niseya’s description of it as bright red (encarnada) and bewitched reinforces just such a connection: “Heavens! What spells or enchantments are found in this dress?” (¡Cielos! ¿Qué hechizos o encanto / Dentro en sí esta saya admite?).72

Compelling in this regard is Denise DiPuccio’s obvious but critical point that comedias such as the Rosambuco plays “coincided with the contemporary audience’s reality.”73 Or in Stroud’s formulation, they “both represented and distorted society,” engaging the public in a way that dramas set in the remote past usually do not, inciting a response that is more reactive than reflective and possibly more subconscious than conscious.74 These are not history plays, but they can shape opinion and in effect make history. Indeed, Lope’s play may have resulted in at least one such effort. The Duke of Osuna (to whom Lope had dedicated his pastoral La Arcadia) was named viceroy of Sicily in 1611, where he attempted “to set up a special confraternity to reconcile families and stop the endless vendettas which were clearly one of the main problems of this society. He refused to respect the rights of criminal asylum in churches.”75 As if to acknowledge these frustrated attempts at reform, asylum and honor are fundamental to Vélez’s reworking of Lope’s plot for El negro del serafín in 1643.

The Lives of a Saint

In the first official biography of Benito, Daza’s Crónica general de nuestro Padre San Francisco, the following miracles are attributed to him: “he revived a child, restored sight to two blind men, and cured a number of other illnesses by making the sign of the cross” (resucitó a un niño, y dio vista a dos ciegos, y a otros muchos de diversas enfermedades sanó con la señal de la Cruz).76 It is remarkable that supernatural acts deemed miraculous by the church might in other contexts—outside of the cloister, for example—be construed as evidence of sorcery. In fact, Lesbio does exactly that in Lope’s play, while in Vélez a skeptical squire refers to the divine assistance received by Benito in battle as nothing more than “encantos y … hechizos” (enchantments and spells [II.1829], the same words used to describe the unlucky saya that proved Laura’s guilt in Lope). These dramas afford the frisson of transgression, testing the limits of religious and secular authority with little risk of consequences. DiPuccio proposes precisely this sort of reading: “Ideological slips … in the saint play may be absorbed by the overriding orthodox [sic] of the piece. Religious and aesthetic options, then, can be introduced without overtly threatening the ideological base.”77

The ideological base in Sicily is clearly the Inquisition, the crown’s instrument for enforcing orthodoxy in Spain’s ultramar colonies and, less comfortably, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which was, like it or not, part of a global empire. Indeed, one sixteenth-century Spanish viceroy, Don Juan de Vega, in a letter to Felipe II, characterizes his Sicilian subjects in terms easily applicable to natives of the New World: “The Sicilians destroy their liberty and maintain their own servitude, without doubt an odd thing, making it hard not to believe that their nature is different from not only that of their fellow humans, but from beasts as well. … They are never still or content, nor is it possible to get from them any fruit of labor if it be not by force or harsh treatment” (A los sicilianos los destruye la libertad y los conserba la servidumbre y sin duda es cosa extrana y dificil de creher que no solamente sean diferentes de la natura humana de los hombres, mas aun de las fieras. … Jamas quedan quietos ni contentos, ni se puede dellos sacar ningun fruto de buena obra, si no es haziendoselo hazer por fuerza, y tratandoles con severidad).78 Sicily was part of Europe, true enough, but it was in some ways just another Spanish colony. This is what lies beneath the shimmering surface of these plays, as the spectacle of an ahistorical San Benito unfolds alongside more worldly drama in Palermo. Throughout the Spanish Golden Age, Sicily is de facto an Iberian colony, albeit one very close to home, and for this reason must be ruled rigidly lest it fall into the hands of one of Spain’s real or imagined heretical enemies.

In the last book of his five-volume History of the Inquisition, Lea devotes a chapter to each of what he calls the Spanish dependencies. He begins with the closest one, Sicily, where Spain established a tribunal of the Inquisition early in the sixteenth century. Italy had had its own Inquisition since the fourteenth century (when it was brought to bear against the Waldensians in the north), but “accustomed as the people had been to the Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition was a very different affair, not only as to activity and severity but still more from the privileges and immunities claimed and enforced by its officials and their servants and familiars, … giving rise to perpetual irritation through the oppression and injustice this rendered possible.”79 Spain received from Italy the prototypes for both its own national theater (via the commedia dell’arte) and its Inquisition, but these spectacles were reintroduced into Italy by the expanding empire as comedias and autos-da-fé, especially in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where a confluence of cultures produced tensions that could only be addressed obliquely by artists living in an age of proscription.80 When it finally abandoned Sicily in 1782, the Inquisition left little for historians to work with, because all of its documents were ordered to be burned, meaning that other sources must be looked to in order to gain insight into Spanish hegemony in the region. To be sure, the home bureaucracy was meticulous in its record keeping, enabling scholars to consult ample correspondence between the king in Madrid and his viceroys, and between the Inquisitor General in Madrid and his deputies throughout the empire. Yet these records are undoubtedly limited in perspective, despite modern efforts to tease out multiple voices from them.81 For this reason, I have turned to popular comedia for a broader view, attempting to reconfigure the literary life of a saint in order to wrest it from hagiographic and hegemonic depictions, and to shed light on some of the underlying realities of Spanish-Sicilian relations in the early seventeenth century.

In the hagiographies, as is to be expected, the saint toed the evangelical and inquisitorial line: “Benito always worked within the ecclesiastical institutions, remaining in the monastery even at the end of his life; he had a spiritual father; was constantly examined by the Inquisitors who went to converse with him; and possessed in the highest degree all of the cardinal and theological virtues.”82 In contrast, the Spanish comedias that reimagined his life opted to tell conversion tales of spectacular epiphanies and subtle subversions. Compellingly, Lope’s play preceded the first hagiography and thus preempted competing versions in the popular consciousness,83 a phenomenon soon exploited by Vélez and still being contested by Benegasi’s devotional poem over a century later: “San Benito was a slave of Christ alone; but though free, not free of the comedias that would enslave him” (San Benito / Fué esclavo solamente /De Jesucristo; / Pero aunque libre, / No libre de comedias / que le esclavicen).84

Notes

Contact Robert S. Stone at the US Naval Academy, 589 McNair Rd., Annapolis, MD 21402 ().

1. “We see that Christian images look not only to God, but to us, and to our neighbor”: El arte de la pintura. (All translations by author.) The painter Pacheco was recruited by the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Seville in order to “comment on the suitability of public imagery.” Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Bloomington, IN, 1985), 204.

2. Kate Lowe, “The Lives of African Slaves and People of African Descent in Renaissance Europe,” in Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, ed. Joaneath Spicer (Baltimore, 2013), 13–33, 14.

3. Reproduced entirely in Luis Vélez de Guevara, El negro del serafín, ed. George Peale and Javier González Martínez (Newark, DE, 2012), 34–35.

4. In Giovanna Fiume and Marilena Modica, eds., San Benedetto il Moro: Santità, agiografia e primi processi di canonizzazione (Palermo, 1998), 133–39.

5. In Alonso de Sandoval, De instauranda Aethiopum salute: Un tratado sobre la esclavitud (Madrid, 1987), 227–30.

6. José Joaquín Benegasi y Luján, “Vida del portentoso negro San Benito de Palermo” (Madrid, 1750).

7. P. Ludovico María Mariani, Breve vita di S. Benedetto da S. Fratello detto il Moro (Palermo, 2007).

8. Giovanna Fiume, Il santo moro: I processi di canonizzazione di Benedetto da Palermo (1594–1807) (Milan, 2002), 191. As stated in The Image of the Black in Western Art, “Benedict was in no sense a missionary, although his veneration was mostly promoted to draw Africans and African Americans into the Church. However, the Franciscan order to which he belonged was active in proselytizing campaigns in various parts of the early modern world.” David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 3, pt. 1:170.

9. Charles Henry Stevens, Lope de Vega’s El palacio confuso (New York, 1939), li.

10. Benedetto Croce, La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la Rinascenza (1917; repr., Bari, 1949).

11. Edward Muir, “Italy in the No Longer Forgotten Centuries,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16 (2013): 5–11; Peter Mazur, The New Christians of Spanish Naples, 1528–1671: A Fragile Elite (London, 2013).

12. Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven, CT, 2012), 16.

13. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge, 1990), 52.

14. Denis Mack Smith, Medieval Sicily, 800–1713 (New York, 1968), 107.

15. Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer, eds., Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics (Baltimore, 2011), 17.

16. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, xiii. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, CT, 2014), x.

17. Mack Smith, Medieval Sicily, 165. Nadia Zeldes, “Auto de Fe in Palermo, 1511: The First Executions of Judaizers in Sicily,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 219 (2002): 193–226, 201.

18. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 57–58. Eymeric’s gloss is cited in Bartolomé Bennassar, L’Inquisition espagnole (Paris, 1979), 105–6.

19. Jean Devisse, “The Black and His Color: From Symbols to Realities,” in Bindman and Gates, Image, 2, pt. 1:139.

20. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Introduction to the New Edition,” in Bindman and Gates, Image, 2, pt. 1:12.

21. Maryan Ainsworth, Sandra Hindriks, and Pierre Terjanian, Lucas Cranach’s Saint Maurice (New York, 2015), 41.

22. Thomas James Dandelet, The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2014), 147.

23. Ainsworth, Hindriks, and Terjanian, Lucas Cranach’s Saint Maurice, 37. Furthermore, after 1450, according to Devisse and Mollat, almost half of the slaves in Sicily and southern Italy were black farm laborers, meaning that the island economy had much in common with more far-flung parts of the empire (Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, “The Frontiers in 1460,” in Bindman and Gates, Image, 2, pt. 2:183).

24. Peale and González Martín, in Vélez, El negro del serafín, 33. After his death in 1589, Benito’s body was found to be incorruptible and may be viewed to this day in the casket displayed in the chapel of the Santa María di Gesú monastery.

25. “The greatest monarch of the entire globe will call himself your patron” (Vélez, El negro del serafín, I.263–64). Any delusions that the Church is unworldly are demolished by the Vélez play—it depicts the ascetic St. Francis buying the freedom of Rosambuco from his Spanish master for a thousand escudos (approximately the amount donated by Felipe III), enabling the future saint to become a lay brother in the monastery of his own “free will.” Even in Lope, in order to placate Lesbio for his failure to secure a woman’s shawl, the viceroy takes Rosambuco from Don Pedro Portocarrero and gives him to the sheriff, establishing a disquieting equivalency: the shawl, the black slave, and the gold chain given to Portocarrero to compensate for the loss of his captive. This implies a critique of the commodification and monetization of human worth, one that Lesbio later tries to redress. Having repented for his suspicions of his wife and having observed the holiness of his slave, Lesbio offers the novice monk half of his hacienda, or assets. The Tridentine concept of free will notwithstanding, attempts to buy good grace permeate the society of the era, as does the elaboration of lavish spaces for the depiction and worship of holy figures. Kamen states that “many ordinary Spaniards came to the conclusion that the Inquisition was devised simply to rob people” (Spanish Inquisition, 197), and there is at the very least a suggestion of greed in the guise of holiness here (a picaresque trope), compounded by the fact that St. Francis himself, the very picture of austerity, literally buys Benito’s freedom. Inquisitors were particularly unpopular throughout this period in Sicily because they “despoiled the native Christians of their property” (Kamen, Inquisition and Society, 21; see also Mack Smith, Medieval Sicily, 109–10).

26. “Entre varias naciones / han de causar asombro tus acciones, / y, por tierras estrañas, / del mar han de domar con tus hazañas” (Vélez, El negro del serafín, I.250–53).

27. Cited in ibid., 35.

28. Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 308.

29. Helmut G. Koenigsberger, The Government of Sicily under Philip II of Spain: A Study in the Practice of Empire (London, 1951), 163.

30. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 62.

31. Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, and the Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies (1907; repr., New York, 2011), 5:29.

32. Ibid., 30.

33. Koenigsberger, Government, 161.

34. Ibid., 170.

35. For a study on the effects of demonic possession on speech, see Hilaire Kallendorf, “Exorcisms and the Interstices of Language: Ruggle’s Ignoramus and the Demonization of Renaissance English Neo-Latin,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Cantabrigiensis: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, ed. Rhoda Schnur and Jean-Louis Charlet (Tempe, AZ, 2003), 303–10.

36. Elvezio Canónica, “La figura del negro santo y su contrapunto burlesco en El santo negro Rosambuco de Lope de Vega,” in Pratiques hagiographiques dans l’Espagne du Moyen Âge et du Siècle d’Or, ed. Françoise Cazal, Claude Chauchadis, and Carine Herzig (Toulouse, 2005), 301–15, 305. Only as a result of his Ethiopian origins, it is reasoned, can the black man be better than not only the other Africans onstage but his European cohorts as well. Similarly, the Jesuit Sandoval’s brief biography posits Benito as the last in a line of Ethiopian saints (extending from the Old Testament Queen of Sheba to Gaspar, from the Gospel of Matthew, and then to the fourth-century St. Serapion, companion to the aforementioned St. Anthony of Egypt) whose examples may aid in the catechism of enslaved peoples in the New World, whom he refers to throughout four volumes as “Etiopes.” Under the mentorship of Sandoval, a Catalan Jesuit tended to the needs of slaves arriving at the port of Cartagena de Indias. When canonized in 1888, this man, St. Peter Claver, was declared to be the “Apostle of the Negroes.” Sandoval also includes a contemporary of Benito’s named Antonio, a converted slave sold to a Sicilian owner who was the son of “padres Moros; pero Negros” (Moorish parents, but black; Sandoval, De instauranda, 228). In other words, there had been other black saints before Benito, but none born Christian in lands under Habsburg control. His example would be carried across the sea by saints such as Martín de Porres, the mulatto born in 1579 in Lima to a Spanish grandee and a freed slave.

37. John Beusterien, An Eye on Race: Perspectives from Theater in Imperial Spain (Lewisburg, PA, 2006), 127.

38. Kaplan, “Introduction,” 12. See also Devisse, “The Black and His Color.” William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603) represents a comparable set of circumstances for Elizabethan tragedy and is also susceptible to a reading that aligns it with England’s historical fears of the era.

39. Along such color lines is one of the most complete analyses of Lope’s play to date, found in Baltasar Fra Molinero’s La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1995). He argues that since Rosambuco is presented (ahistorically) as a mercenary for the Turks, he is “the anti-Spain who will become part of Spain and its empire,” as well as “a spokesman for the racial ideology of a white author, Lope” (80). In this reading, it is not so much black inferiority that is affirmed as the exceptional virtue of one of them, thereby annulling the virtues of the rest. A comparable if somewhat more optimistic approach is that of Enrique Martínez López in Tablero de ajedrez: Imágenes del negro heroico en la comedia española y en la literatura e iconografía sacra del Brasil esclavista (Paris, 1998). He believes that the Benito dramas “came to serve as a cathartic border between an initial piratical violence that terrorizes white people, and an angelic ending for a humble, miracle-working Franciscan” (62). The saint, in this scheme, “served as an example of the ideal slave: an illiterate, peaceable worker who was so pious that he could be entrusted to care for the children of the aristocracy just as African wet-nurses gave them their milk” (123). Thus did a nonthreatening slave become the patron of New World blacks, and the drama’s purpose, beyond promoting the saint’s evangelical role, was to aid the cause of slaves by humanizing one of them—as well as his owners—without directly confronting the powers that be: “It is significant that the elevation of the black slave demands a parallel moral development of the white man” (155).

40. Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, edición integral e ilustrada de Ignacio Arellano y Rafael Zafra (Pamplona, 2006).

41. Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 200. Pedro Berruguete’s late fifteenth-century painting of an auto-da-fé that hangs in the Prado and appears on the cover of Kamen’s book clearly depicts three figures wearing the sanbenito as they are led to the scaffold on which two nearly nude figures are about to be engulfed in flames.

42. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 289.

43. Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 316.

44. Ibid.; see also Lea, History, 5:23–24.

45. Lea, History, 5:15.

46. Interestingly, among the records of the Spanish surprise royal inspections (visitas) to Italy is one that lists charges filed against one Pedro Puertocarrero, “maestre de campo y veedor general de la gente de armas” (chief of staff and inspector general of the armed forces) in late sixteenth-century Naples, a period when both playwrights were associated with that city. Angel de la Plaza y Bores and Ascención de la Plaza Santiago, Inventario: Visitas de Italia (siglos XVI y XVII) (Valladolid, 1982), 226. According to Peale and González Martínez, there were at least six Spanish noblemen by the name of Pedro Portocarrero in Sicily in the latter half of the sixteenth century (Vélez, El negro del serafín, 187).

47. Fiume reports instances in which Benito’s relics brought about miraculous cures (Santo moro, 97), also noting that in 1606 the saint’s relics were sent to Spain, possibly providing the impetus for Lope to compose his drama (ibid., 92).

48. This is a direct allusion to a medieval legend of the original San Benedetto di Nursia, the patron of exorcism.

49. Fra Molinero, Imagen, 78. Victor Stoichita’s assertions that in the end even Benito’s enemies “cover themselves with soot to imitate him” and that the “finale is a great vivat, sung in chorus by the entire cast of this comedia famosa,” are not supported by the texts researched for this essay. Stoichita, “The Image of the Black in Spanish Art: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Bindman and Gates, Image, 3, pt. 1:213. Perhaps these conclusions are drawn from a production that has tried to make the play more palatable to modern audiences.

50. Wife-murder plays form a subgenre in Spanish Golden Age comedia. By one account there are at least “thirty-one comedias [extant] in which a husband kills his wife or has her killed” from 1575 to 1675. Matthew D. Stroud, Fatal Union: A Pluralistic Approach to the Spanish Wife-Murder Comedias (Lewisburg, PA, 1990), 19. By contrast, however, there are nearly three hundred comedias de santos in the same period. Of these, eleven have a black or Moorish protagonist (Beusterien, Eye on Race, 123).

51. Lope de Vega y Carpio, El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, in Obras (Madrid, 1894), 4:370.

52. “I carry an inferno of suspicions in my heart” (ibid., 365). Historically, when accusations against transgressors were deemed credible by the Holy Office, “inquisitors dispatched their bailiffs [alguaciles] to make an arrest and imprison the accused in a secret Inquisition jail” (Kagan and Dyer, Inquisitorial Inquiries, 16).

53. Lope de Vega, Santo negro, 389.

54. Canónica, “Figura,” 314.

55. Lea, History, 5:23. On another occasion in the late sixteenth century the Inquisitor Páramo’s house was burned to the ground: “The fact that Páramo had been warned of this beforehand showed that it had not been an accident” (Koenigsberger, Government, 169).

56. Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 205.

57. “Todas las virtudes que hacen excepcional a Rosambuco están ausentes en Lucrecia. … El público podrá seguirse riendo de los negros, aunque con Rosambuco haga una excepción” (Fra Molinero, Imagen, 82).

58. Lope de Vega, Santo negro, 375.

59. “Los casos de la honra son mejores, / porque mueven con fuerza a toda gente” (Honor plots are the best because they strongly move everyone). Lope de Vega, Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo: Dirigido a la Academia de Madrid (1609; repr., Alicante, 2002), 7.

60. Along with the Inquisition’s accusations of heresy “came not only the scapegoats of Tridentine morality, but also a variety of nonheretical offenses which the Inquisitors disputed with secular or episcopal courts: bigamy, blasphemy, sodomy, witchcraft, usury” (Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 53). In this regard, there is an interesting case in the New World’s Cartagena de Indias: “In the 1630s the inquisition court accused a surgeon called Diego López, whom the Spanish authorities described as a mulatto, of witchcraft. The inquisition also accused several African and mulatta women of involvement in López’s supposed coven”; Nicole von Germeten, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from “De instauranda Aethiuopum salute” (Indianapolis, 2008), xi. The Inquisition of the day also took an interest in beatas, holy women operating outside the bounds of conventional convents in Palermo: “The Holy Office concerned itself with these women with some frequency because many such tertiaries offered themselves as healers practicing spells and divinations, and also because their religious ideas were taken to be suspicious or scandalous, when not downright blasphemous, offensive, rash, subversive, and seditious.” For example, “Sister Benedicta Caronia was tried by the Sicilian Holy Office because she used a marble chip from the column upon which Jesus was flagellated—given to her by some religious men—in order to cure quatrain fever and bites from rabid dogs, as well as for protection from temptations of the devil, and for the purposes of matchmaking. In this last instance we are familiar with the complex ritual and and the punishment of the pillory and expulsion for the crime of magic ad amorem imposed in the course of the auto-da-fé celebrated on July 2, 1625.” (Fiume, Santo moro, 111).

61. “The tacit alliance between secular and religious authority in the Iberian sphere explains the lack of direct attack on the slave-based status quo for as long as the Ancient Regime could depend on the support of the Holy Office” (Martínez López, Tablero de ajedrez, 144; cf. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 27).

62. Isidoro Moreno Navarro, Cofradías y hermandades andaluzas: Estructura, simbolismo e identidad (Granada, 1985), 20.

63. Ibid., 47.

64. Ibid., 48. Moreno Navarro’s thesis is that the black confraternity model was adopted in the New World as a Lascasian alternative to forced conversions.

65. Here and following, in-text parenthetical numerical citations are to Vélez’s El negro del serafín.

66. In reality, the viceroy “could not legally override ecclesiastical rights of asylum, despite the fact that in Palermo alone there were as many as three hundred churches where criminals could take refuge” (Mack Smith, Medieval Sicily, 163).

67. Nancy L. D’Antuono, “Lope’s Bastardo Mudarra as Scenario and Opera Tragicomica,” in The Golden Age Comedia: Text, Theory, and Performance, ed. Charles Ganelin and Howard Mancing (West Lafayette, IN, 1994), 178–200, 179.

68. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 18. Along with the paintings recently uncovered on the dungeon walls of the Palazzo Steri, these plays are perhaps the only creative testaments to the Inquisition’s presence in Palermo. See John Hooper, “Art of the Inquisition’s Victims Revealed in Sicily,” Guardian, January 13, 2006.

69. Lesbio describes the edict in Act I as follows: “A la justicia / Ha mandado, por su ley, / Que la mujer tapada / Por alguna calle fuere, / Pierda el manto que trajere / Porque quede escarmentada” (The law mandates that a woman who is covered up and in the street shall give up her shawl and thus be taught a lesson; Lope de Vega, Santo negro, 364).

70. Laura R. Bass and Amanda Wunder, “The Veiled Ladies of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima,” Hispanic Review 77 (2009): 97–144, 107.

71. Ibid., 118.

72. Lope de Vega, Santo negro, 369.

73. Denise DiPuccio, “Saints Meet Sinners: The Hagiographic and Mythological Traditions in the Comedia,” Hispanic Journal 22 (2001): 383–99, 398.

74. Stroud, Fatal Union, 15.

75. Mack Smith, Medieval Sicily, 201–2.

76. In Vélez, El negro del serafín, 35.

77. DiPuccio, “Saints Meet Sinners,” 398.

78. In José Ramón Soraluce Blond, “Las fortificaciones españolas de Palermo en el Renacimiento,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando 87 (1998): 141–52, 144.

79. Lea, History, 5:10.

80. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition began to publish and regularly revise its Index of Prohibited Books (Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 40).

81. See, e.g., Alison Weber, “Between Ecstasy and Exorcism: Religious Negotiation in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 221–34. See also Kagan and Dyer, Inquisitorial Inquiries.

82. Fiume, Santo moro, 118.

83. Stoichita, “Image,” 202.

84. Benegasi, “Vida.”