Cum ad nihil magis: the papal bull that founded the Portuguese Inquisition

In October 1536 the court of King João III was living in Évora, in the Alentejo, and on the 22nd the cathedral filled for a ceremony. Before the king, a cardinal, the canons, the clergy and people from the city and the country around, a papal bull was read out. It created the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Portugal, a church tribunal to judge heresy, under an inquisitor-general, the friar Diogo da Silva, bishop of Ceuta.2 sources2 sources

The reading opened an edict of grace. For 30 days, anyone who had fallen into heresy could come forward, confess and be treated mildly. When the time ran out, the inquisitor-general published a monitório, a detailed list of the offences people were now bound to denounce. On 22 November the tribunal began work in his lodgings, hearing witnesses against a New Christian woman, Madalena de Oliveira. The first trials followed in January 1537.1 source1 source

Paul III had signed the bull in Rome five months earlier, on 23 May 1536. It is known by its opening words, Cum ad nihil magis, “since to nothing more”. Winning it had taken the Portuguese crown more than twenty years, the help of the Holy Roman Emperor and a great deal of money, spent by both sides.3 sources3 sources

The tribunal it founded lasted until 1821. Its main target from the first day was the New Christians, Portuguese subjects accused of secretly keeping the Jewish faith of their forebears.1 source1 source

In December 1496 King Manuel I ordered the Jews and Muslims of Portugal to leave, a condition of his marriage to a daughter of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. When the deadline ran out at the end of October 1497, Jews waiting to sail were told they were now the king's slaves. The order was withdrawn, and they were baptised by force instead. Lisboeta tells that story in a separate article.1 source1 source

Manuel protected the converts with laws, but he also asked Rome for an inquisition. In 1515 he told his ambassador, Miguel da Silva, to request one from Pope Leo X on the Spanish model, partly to keep the inquisitors of Castile out of Portuguese affairs. Nothing came of it.2 sources2 sources

His son João III became king in December 1521, not yet 20. Castile and Aragon already had a permanent Inquisition with an inquisitor-general and a supreme council, and João III wanted the same: a tribunal on the Castilian model, able to keep witnesses' names secret and to seize the property of those it condemned.3 sources3 sources

The first attempt nearly worked. On 17 December 1531 Pope Clement VII issued a bull naming the king's confessor, the friar Diogo da Silva, inquisitor for Portugal and its lands. It began with the same words, Cum ad nihil magis, and gave him wide powers against converts who went back to Jewish rites, against Lutherans and against sorcerers.2 sources2 sources

Then the crown overplayed its hand. A law of 14 June 1532 barred New Christians from selling their property or taking their wealth out of the kingdom. Proclaimed at Setúbal, it reached Elvas on the border within two days and the Minho within three. To the converts, Herculano wrote, Portugal suddenly looked like a vast prison.1 source1 source

They sent an agent to Rome with money behind him: Duarte da Paz, a New Christian whom the king had used on difficult missions before. His arguments about the forced baptisms of 1497 weighed with Clement VII, and on 17 October 1532 the pope suspended the Inquisition. On 7 April 1533 he granted the New Christians a general pardon for past offences against the faith.2 sources2 sources

For three more years the two sides bid against each other. Clement VII died in 1534, and his successor, Paul III, issued a further pardon on 12 October 1535. The converts' leaders offered money in proportion to the favours Rome granted them. On the king's side, the ambassador Álvaro Mendes and Cardinal Pucci, Portugal's protector at the papal court, went as far as promising money to the pope himself, a promise not kept once the Inquisition was won. Herculano, who rebuilt the negotiations from the envoys' letters in the nineteenth century, judged that in the Rome of the day only gold poured out by the handful could outweigh what the emperor wanted.1 source1 source

The emperor settled it. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and João III's brother-in-law, met Portuguese envoys in Naples at the start of 1536 and promised to press the pope for an inquisition on the Castilian model. He was in Rome from 5 to 18 April. Paul III, who depended on him, gave way, against his own judgement in Herculano's reading.1 source1 source

Duarte da Paz was in no state to fight the last round. Early in 1536, just after an audience with the pope, an unknown attacker stabbed him fourteen times. He survived because he wore armour under his clothes, and he accused João III, who denied it. In Lisbon, meanwhile, the departing papal nuncio pressed the New Christians to pay what Paz had promised in Rome. They refused, said their agent had acted without authority and accused him of robbing them.1 source1 source

The bull named three inquisitors-general, the bishops of Coimbra, Lamego and Ceuta, and let the king add a fourth churchman. Cardinal Antonio Pucci, Portugal's protector at the papal court, explained to João III that the pope meant only the bishop of Ceuta, Diogo da Silva, to act. The other names were a formality.2 sources2 sources

Rome also built in brakes. For the first three years, trials were to follow the ordinary procedure of the royal courts for theft and murder, in which the accused learned the witnesses' names. For ten years there would be no confiscations; the property of anyone executed would go to the heirs. Bishops could take part in the trials of their own flock. A general council would hear appeals.2 sources2 sources

The brakes did not hold. In 1539 the king made his brother Henrique, archbishop of Braga, inquisitor-general, over protests the New Christians lodged in Rome; he took office on 3 July. In July 1547 the bull Meditatio cordis gave the Portuguese Inquisition what the crown had wanted from the start: more independence from Rome, secret trials, and all the inquisitors' powers gathered in Henrique.2 sources2 sources

Henrique, made a cardinal in 1545, went on to be papal legate from 1553, regent from 1562 to 1568 and, from 1578 until his death in January 1580, king.3 sources3 sources

The tribunal did not stay in Évora. Between late August and early September 1537 it moved to Lisbon, where a single inquisitor, João de Melo, heard cases until two more joined him in November 1540, and by early 1538 it was using the Estaus palace on the Rossio. Later Inquisition records said the Lisbon tribunal was founded in July 1539; the historian Daniel Giebels has shown it was working there from 1537.1 source1 source

In 1541 the king had tribunals set up at Coimbra, Porto and Lamego, and Évora got its own again; Tomar followed. All but Évora closed between 1543 and 1547, leaving Lisbon and Évora. Coimbra's tribunal reopened in 1565, and from then until 1821 the kingdom had three: Lisbon, Évora and Coimbra. Lisbon's district also took in Brazil, the Atlantic islands and West Africa. Brazil never had a tribunal of its own; it received visiting inquisitors and sent suspects to Lisbon.4 sources4 sources

The Inquisition's public face was the auto-da-fé, the “act of faith”: a procession, a sermon and the reading of sentences, with penitents abjuring their errors before a crowd. Those condemned to die were handed, or relaxed, to the secular justice, because canon law did not allow the Church to sentence anyone to death. In Lisbon the burnings took place apart from the ceremony, at the Terreiro do Trigo.1 source1 source

Portugal's first auto-da-fé was held on the Ribeira, the riverside square in front of the royal palace in Lisbon, in September 1540, before João III, prelates and nobles. Twenty-three people were sentenced, and none is recorded as relaxed. Sources differ on the day: Isaías da Rosa Pereira's calendar of autos gives 20 September, while Giebels, drawing on later Inquisition records, gives the 26th.2 sources2 sources

The burnings were not long in coming. At Évora's auto of 23 September 1543, six people were relaxed in person. At Lisbon's of 14 October 1544, twenty were sentenced to be relaxed, and one woman was allowed to repent and be reconciled at the last moment.1 source1 source

Overseas, Henrique ordered a tribunal for Goa on 2 March 1560, and its first two inquisitors, Aleixo Dias Falcão and Francisco Marques Botelho, arrived that December. It was the first Inquisition tribunal outside Europe, with a district from Sofala in East Africa to Macau and Timor. The largest group of those it convicted, 44 per cent, were accused of keeping Hindu practices; crypto-Islam and crypto-Judaism came next. Lisboeta's article on Francis Xavier covers how it came about.2 sources2 sources

No one knows exactly. Files were lost, and some autos left no list. What survives in the Torre do Tombo, Portugal's national archive, is still enormous: Pereira put it at about 40,000 trial files in 1978. Historians also count different things, trials opened, people sentenced or names on the lists of autos, so their totals differ.2 sources2 sources

The most widely used count is Francisco Bethencourt's: 45,317 sentenced trials in the four tribunals, 10,017 of them in Lisbon, 10,388 in Coimbra, 11,245 in Évora and 13,667 in Goa. Counts for Goa differ: an inventory compiled in 1774 listed 16,176 trials, while José Pedro Paiva, citing a later book by Bethencourt, gives about 15,000 trials between 1561 and 1812 and more than 200 death sentences.3 sources3 sources

The pace rose and fell. On Bethencourt's yearly averages per tribunal, each sentenced about 37 people a year before 1605 and 81 a year between 1606 and 1674, then fewer, down to 23 a year in the 1750s and 1760s. He found the Portuguese averages higher than the Spanish and Italian ones in every period, while warning that the Spanish and Italian records have large gaps.1 source1 source

Deaths are harder still. Pereira and his students went through every surviving list of sixteenth-century autos for the mainland tribunals. They counted 83 autos, 5,323 people sentenced, 325 relaxed in person and 132 relaxed in effigy, burned as a figure in their absence. Bethencourt's figures for the four tribunals give 755 people relaxed between 1536 and 1605, about one in thirteen of those sentenced, and 863 between 1606 and 1674, a count that leaves out Goa, whose relaxations for those years he could not establish.2 sources2 sources

Most of the accused were New Christians charged with Judaising. Torture, by the rope or the rack, was used in about 11 per cent of trials, and 83 per cent of those tortured were New Christians accused of Judaism.2 sources2 sources

The New Christians kept appealing to Rome, and sometimes won. In 1605 Pope Clement VIII granted a general pardon that freed 155 prisoners, 70 men and 85 women, from the Inquisition's cells. In 1674 Clement X suspended the Portuguese Inquisition's trials outright, and its powers were not restored until 1681, under Innocent XI. Giuseppe Marcocci and José Pedro Paiva, authors of the standard modern history, call the suspension its greatest defeat after the pardon of 1604–1605.1 source1 source

Under the Marquis of Pombal, chief minister of King José I, the tribunal survived but was made subordinate to the crown. A law of 25 May 1773 ended the legal distinction between Old and New Christians. New rules in force from 14 August 1774 ended secret procedure and restricted torture, and banned public and private autos-da-fé except in special cases. People who insisted they had cast spells were to be judged mad and sent to the cells for the insane in Lisbon's Royal Hospital of All Saints.2 sources2 sources

Goa's tribunal was closed in 1774, reopened in 1778 and abolished for good in 1812. At home, the liberal revolution of August 1820 sealed the Inquisition's fate. In February 1821 a deputy in the new Cortes, Francisco Simões Margiocchi, proposed a decree to abolish it. On 31 March the Cortes approved it unanimously, on the grounds that the tribunal was incompatible with constitutional government, and the decree was published on 5 April.2 sources2 sources

The same decree sent the tribunal's books, manuscripts and finished trials to the Public Library of Lisbon. The last inquisitor-general, José Joaquim da Cunha de Azeredo Coutinho, appointed in 1818, had to leave the Estaus palace on the Rossio, which had been the Inquisition's official seat since 1584.1 source1 source

The paper the Inquisition kept is now one of the richest sources on Portugal and its empire. In 2007 the Torre do Tombo began putting the Lisbon tribunal's records online, more than 19,000 documents, nine in ten of them trials, and from 2011 it added the General Council's files on the people who applied to serve the tribunal.1 source1 source

Apology came late. In 2000 the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, José Policarpo, took on the Church's shame for the Inquisition's persecution in front of the church of São Domingos, beside the Rossio, where many autos had been held; a monument marks the spot. One of the tribunal's best-known victims, the playwright António José da Silva, “o Judeu”, executed in Lisbon in 1739, has his own Lisboeta article.3 sources3 sources

Historians are still studying how it began. For the 490th anniversary, an international seminar on the founding of the inquisitions met in Évora from 21 to 23 October 2026, in the building where the Inquisition of Évora once sat.2 sources2 sources